The Siskel and Ebert Effect

Happy February!  I took last week off from posting to this blog since it was midterms week were at OIT and I couldn't get a minute in edgewise between writing a 5-page paper and writing several more.

Today, I observed an interesting phenomenon in the comments section of a YouTube video about Mass Effect 2.  The game, which came out for the Xbox 360 last year and was just recently released for the PlayStation 3, is an RPG with third-person shooter trappings, or the other way around.  This really bothered some people, but didn't really phase others.

What I observed was what I call the Siskel and Ebert Effect.  There are two kinds of people in these kinds of arguments: Siskels and Eberts.  Siskels are all about details, focusing on all the little pieces which, to them, make or break an experience.  Eberts, however, are more about the big picture, viewing the experience as a whole and judging it based on whether it lived up to what it was trying to do.

To the Eberts, Mass Effect 2 was nothing to bitch about.  It had a decent amount of flexibility in the gameplay and forced to player to make very tough decisions that shaped the entire game.  The Siskels railed on about how it was a "shooter with plot choices" that didn't offer the complex skill selection or strategic combat they were looking for.

Neither of them are wrong, they are just coming at it from different perspectives.  This game was the perfect one to put these two perspectives at odds with each other: An RPG at heart, but a shooter by design.  

As for me, I enjoyed the game from both of these angles.  It feels very much like an RPG, including the initial struggle of finding the "right class."  This is something I have to do for pretty much every RPG I've played that has pre-set classes: play a selection of them to find the one that feels right for how I play the game.  For example, the "right class" for me in WoW is a Paladin, a Rogue in Dragon Age, and a Vanguard in Mass Effect 2.

The shooter aspects are refined and solid, with no major hiccups, and the RPG aspects are naturally flawless. This is Bioware, after all.  Judging by the experimentation the games has gone through from 1 to 2, it's not quite clear how the series will progress gameplay-wise.  Hopefully it will be another one of those genre contradictions, because it's just too damn fun to watch people bitch about those.