Hello, folks. Yes, I’m still thinking about Mass Effect. In case you missed it, here are my first impressions and here is my review.  I hadn’t gotten around to the game’s sex scene when I wrote my early impressions and I only sort of talked about it in my review. Now that those are out of the way I’m going to talk about the sex exclusively. So let’s get to it!

Why The Sex Was Great

As I said I my review, it took me around 17 hours of gameplay to reach the sex scene. By the time my hero, CathyJones Shepard, got around to making sweet love to the blue Asari alien, Liara, I’d felt like the two characters had made a real emotional connection. The dialogue was exceptionally well-written for a game. In the course of conversation the various dialogue choices I was given leading up to the women’s mating felt natural as well as strategic (myself purposefully aiming for sex between the two).

Through the dialogue the women expressed how they cared for one another and how they didn’t want their lives to end before physically expressing their feelings. The sex scene was tame and even a little short. Much shorter than what you’d see in a film with similar content. But having it short made the affair feel like it was done more for the emotional context of the story and less for titillation (which is probably completely unrealistic from a sales and marketing perspective, but that’s the way I felt after watching it).

I can’t stress enough how great a decision I think it was that Bioware made getting to the sex a long process. If Mass Effect had made it easy to sleep with any number of characters quickly and easily, the sex would have lost all emotional resonance. As it was, the game made the player not only work toward the sex through lengthy dialogue sequences, but also made the player choose which specific character they wanted to pursue. Having choices made the outcome feel that much more important.

Why The Sex Was Not Great

I admit it: By the end of Mass Effect’s story I had come to really care about Liara. I wanted CathyJones Shepard to fight for the woman she loved, save the galaxy, and run off with her to make blue babies. Unfortunately, it was not to be.

Sure, Shepard fought and saved the galaxy, but in my game she was never reunited with Liara. I specifically left Liara behind, out of the final battle, to make sure she survived the story. I had no idea that this decision would cause me to never see her again. Why didn’t she appear during, or after, the final dialogue sequence, running into Shepard’s arms? Why was there no victory kiss? Why was there no “We saved the universe together, babe” speech? I felt ripped-off that Liara had mysteriously vanished.

I wasn’t just mad that Shepard didn’t get to see her lover again. I was especially peeved that I was awarded an Achievement directly after the sex scene was over. The Achievement is called “Paramour” and it is awarded when you “complete any romance subplot.” This is very disturbing to me.

Having the sex be the culmination of the a romance subplot very says to me that Bioware was not as interested in giving the game an emotional center as they were with titillation. Shouldn’t someone there have known that the end of intercourse is not the same as the end of romance?

There’s only a couple reasons why you would fuck someone once and then no longer have any romantic interest in them. For one, the sex could have been so awful you’d never want to see them again. Or two, you’re an addict who never feels any emotional connection to sex. I can confidently say that neither one of these reasons fit CathyJones Shepard.

I can only assume that Mass Effect’s designers were more focused on gaining publicity from having sex in their game than they were on fleshing out any real emotion. If the Paramour Achievement was awarded, say, after the lovers decided to spend their lives together, or conversely, after breaking up, I could see either of those options as legitimate ends to a romance subplot. But getting to the sex and then having the game say “Well, glad that’s over with,” felt like a slap in the face.

For The Future

Bioware has stated that some of the decisions players made in Mass Effect will carry over to the upcoming sequel. I can only hope this will include the romance subplots. It would be quite sad if I had spent all this time building love between Shepard and Liara, only to have it never spoken of again. If that were to happen, Mass Effect 2 would be little more than a James Bond-style story, where the sexual encounters in one episode are rarely (if ever) remembered in future entries. Let’s hope Bioware doesn’t take Mass Effect down this route.

I do think Bioware should be commended for their efforts. Gaming in general will benefit because Mass Effect brought sexuality in games to mainstream audiences in a big way. More people will now be more accepting of sex and romance in games. Mass Effect isn’t the first game to put such a focus on sex and romance, but it may turn out to be one of the most important.