Mass Effect 3: The “I-Don’t-Know” Guy

Bioware recently posted a new image of a new character for the up and coming grand finale of the Mass Effect series.

James Vega is a Human Alliance soldier and will be joining  Commander Shepard on his last ditch attempt to stop the Reapers once and for all.

Now a good few of you won’t know who the hell Commander Shepard is, nor will you know about the Reapers. To fully understand the situation in Mass Effect 3, you will have had to play both Mass Effect 1 and 2 (which both me and Tim have). However if you have only played one of them, or if you haven’t played either then there is a good chance that you wouldn’t entirely understand the situation in Mass Effect 3. That’s where Mr. Vega comes in.

He is a new addition to Shepard’s team and as such has absolutely no fucking clue what’s going on with Intergalactic politics, he doesn’t know about the Reapers and he probably only knows that Shepard is a hero. As such he is a clever tool that Bioware is going to use to, by a round about way, fill in new players on the story of Mass Effect.

In Mass Effect (assuming you don’t know) you can talk to the various characters and team-mates whenever you please, and as such there is a lot of dialogue. Plus, naturally, the character Shepard DOES know the story even if the player doesn’t. So I imagine that you will have the opportunity to talk to Vega and then Vega will ask a question along the lines of “What in god’s name are we doing?” which allows you, as Shepard, to answer.

This is pretty smart as Shepard will now be not only informing the oblivious Mr. Vega but any listening players about the history of Mass Effect.

So for those of you put off Mass Effect because you don’y want to play a game with a huge back-story you don’t know, there is now a solution to your problem.

Check out the glorious trailer for Mass Effect 3 here!

As a postscript I will say this: Mass Effect 3 is one of the games I am most looking forward to in the next year or so, and the story is a truly fantastic one (even if the gameplay has never been overwhelming). If you don’t know about it, one of the unique things of Mass Effect is that you can carry saves from the first game into the second and from there into the third. This means that decisions from previous games can cause unknown effects in the following games, resulting in over 1000 variables that can change in Mass Effect 3 based on previous decisions.

This gives the game such a wealth of depth and story that I would thoroughly recommend that anyone even considering buying Mass Effect 3 should definitely play through the first two games first.