Too many clouds
The latest tech buzzword seems to be “Cloud.” Everyone’s got a cloud, everyone wants a cloud, everyone is putting stuff on the cloud and taking it back off. Microsoft really hammered cloud into the public lexicon, and now Apple has just moved that way too as Google gets theirs up and running. Even Steam has opened their own cloud, albeit only for games that want to use it, and with other programs like Dropbox that let you sync to anywhere, it’s becoming increasingly easy to store all your data online. But one thing I’ve seen recently is a new type of cloud that is fantastically interesting to me, as a game developer. Warning: Cloudy with a chance of nerd.
Mass Effect 3 has announced their Galaxy at War feature that seems rather fantastic, the more I think about it. Mass Effect, for those that don’t know, is a single-player RPG series where you play the game, alone, and things you do in the world affect the story and your ability to progress through it. In many cases, it’s possible to skip a lot of content and simply blaze right on through to the end, but you won’t get as good of an ending that way. Mass Effect 2 had you go on a suicide mission, and if you’d done the bare minimum of things, you’d probably end up with most of your squad dead. However, if you took the time to go through every character’s loyalty quests, you’d make them more powerful, and when you got to the end, it was possible to get your entire squad through the suicide mission without any problems at all.
However, in order to get the benefit from this, you have to be playing the game. Now, normally this would elicit a “duh,” but games like these aren’t exactly something you can play while you’re riding in a car or during your lunch break at work. (Mostly…when you work for the company that makes the game there are a few exceptions 
) What this means is that you can only progress through the game if you’re willing to devote a lot of your time to it and only it, and there’s no way to progress if you’re not able to devote that amount of time. It’s something that’s pretty widely accepted as “the way things are,” mostly because technology was limiting you from doing anything else. However, now that the cloud data structure has become so easy to use and widespread, Mass Effect 3 has taken a rather bold leap into the future with a new feature they are calling Galaxy at War.
Now, you can continue to play Mass Effect 3 just like you played Mass Effect 2, and beat every mission and do every possible thing and come out on top at the end with the best possible victory. However, they’re also going to be releasing a number of other ways to influence your game – Mass Effect 3 will have multiplayer missions, where you can team up with other people and beat different levels, or there might be a facebook game that you can play while you’re on your lunch break at work, and a mobile application you can play around with while you’re sitting on the Metro. All of these things will affect the Galaxy at War cloud, where you can see the galactic readiness to the threat you’ll be facing, and as you complete missions or puzzles or whatever they come up with in different “areas” of the galaxy, you’ll raise your galactic readiness. Then, when you’re playing through the single-player campaign, your individual readiness is multiplied against your galactic readiness to get your overall score. High individual score and low galactic readiness would work out to be the same as low individual score and high galactic readiness, so if you can’t play single-player as much but you can play the facebook game all day, you’ll have just as good of a chance at the best victory as the guy who completed every mission in the single-player game.
It’s a very interesting concept, but one that makes a lot of sense. I’m thoroughly interested to see how people react to it, but it’s fantastic to think about the possibilities this could open up if it works. You might eventually have games where you can either kill monsters with a sword or play a facebook game where you craft armor and weapons, and both make it easier to beat the enemies you fight, which really opens up the market to a lot more people. Let’s hope Mass Effect 3 pulls it off – if they do, then it’s a brave new…cloudy world ahead of us.
