The announcement of the legendary edition of Mass Effect last November may not have had as much impact as the revelation of a new game in the BioWare sci-fi series, but it raised all sorts of questions. Will they add any enlightening Easter eggs? Will I be able to create the same Shepard from 14 years ago? Are they going to make Kaiden romantic from the start? These are all valuable questions, but right after the revelation, a supreme debate reigned over the Mass Effect subreddit: Should they do Mako better or leave it exactly as it was, in all its clumsy glory?
You remember Mako, right? The first Mass Effect game introduced a sturdy six-wheeled tank that Commander Shepard used whenever he landed on any of the arid, boring planets on the galaxy map. It was a new enough idea in theory – no one wants to cross a barren spaceship on foot, so why not give the player a taste of the lunar rover fantasy? Mako seemed like an organized solution to this problem – if only he had managed a little better. Most people today regard Mako as one of the hilariously sloppy eccentricities in the Mass Effect series. At the time, BioWare was still resolving the vehicle’s design twists, and the Mako seemed to deal as if it were simultaneously 1,000 tons of futuristic steel, but also light as a feather. Even the softest of the intergalactic bumps were enough to make it fly. BioWare (especially the BioWare of the ME1 era) was not exactly known for its skillful mechanical ingenuity – grenades have already been mapped to the Back button (you must remember it as ‘Select’, now it’s Share / View) – but Mako was still a deep outlier. Here was this pulpy sci-fi odyssey full of iconic characters and a world-class story, with this awkward excuse for a Humvee stuck in it. It is difficult to take Tali, Liara and Ashley seriously while they are rolling across the moon. “Is the Mako the worst-designed game vehicle of all time?” asks a prospective GameFAQs forum topic. It probably isn’t, but it may be at the top of the list.
And yet, even now, some people are willing to defend Mako to the ends of the earth – either Therum or Ilos – and return. No slander can break them, and they will reject all the antagonistic topics on the forum without being intimidated. For them, Mako is a positive net gain for the series and (as far as they are concerned) BioWare better not to mess with the formula.
“Mako was clumsy and God knows that physics was complicated as hell. But it also allowed players to explore worlds in a way that we wouldn’t otherwise, and I will still consider Mako as a better alternative for exploring Mass Effect planets. 2 and Mass Effect 3, “an apologist for Mako, who posts as Kanguran on Reddit, told IGN. “Driving across a plain on mach five to a point on the map to blow up more invaders was fun. In addition, high-powered cannons are always good at easy targets.”
Kanguran told me that when they first played Mass Effect, they were too young to be active participants on the internet. It was only when the sequel rolled in 2009, after they became a little more experienced on the net, that they discovered a dense faction of players who asked BioWare to purge the Milky Way Mako entirely. The studio moved on, and Mako was nowhere in Mass Effect 2 or 3.
“It was a strange feeling, I agreed with their complaints, but I saw them as more fun than broken,” said Kanguran. “I think time has changed the balance a bit, where the pro-Mako faction has a considerable following, although it is still a minority by a wide margin.”
In general, Mako is still the victim of a lot of scorn in the Mass Effect community, but if you do a lot of research, you will find many people who, at the very least, are feeding the idea that Mako’s rubberized controls should be preserved in the next remaster. One fan, Jon (who goes by the nickname TheQuarrelsomeEmu), argues that Mako is significantly less functional in the Legendary Edition. “The left bumper should trigger a random Joker joke,” says his post. “Button B ejects a random squad mate.”
“Mako was a drug, but it’s one of those things that sucked in a way that was fun to watch,” he said in an interview with IGN. “Like a bad movie, you couldn’t take your eyes off it. I think there’s a lot of nostalgia for things like that in the first game, the improvements they made to certain systems in later games didn’t allow you to have that kind of weird experience.”There is some truth to this. Mako may have been a failure, but compared to the many other endless debates about the subreddit – 3,000 days have passed and you still can’t agree on what the end of the Synthesis entails for the rest of the universe – the grudge for that clumsy truck faded. Nowadays, Mako is essentially an internal meme capable of evoking the purity of youth, when Commander Shepard’s slack tire suspension was one of our biggest concerns about the series. It’s easy to get annoyed with some of the other choices BioWare has made with Mass Effect over the years, but disputes with Mako are always very light.
“I think a lot of things have become a touchstone like this. Mako is one, but you see the same thing with his interaction with Wrex, where eventually all he says back to you in the conversation is his name, or the clumsy combat that was actually fixed in later games, “says Jon. “Mako is just one more example of how some of the gaming subsystems worked poorly and how good the story and characters had to be to make up for it.”
He told me that he would like to see EA about some of Mako’s shortcomings in the relaunch. In particular, he would like some upgraded weapon capabilities, instead of that defective cannon strapped to the top of the roof. But, of course, other diehards still believe that Mako was perfectly fine as he is, evoking an attitude of “You are going to get my broken space truck out of my cold, dead hands.”
“Mako is a mess, but damn it, it’s a beautiful mess. Jumping across the map, climbing hillsides that put Skyrim’s horses to shame, destroying enemies in one shot, everything came together to make a fundamental part of the experience,” concludes Kanguran. “In a perfect world, there would be an alternation between old and new physics. But, I would settle for even more awkward handling and an extra kick behind the jump jets.”
Bioware, meanwhile, has already confirmed that it will adjust Mako’s physics and lend the player more control of the camera. The studio has not formally ruled out a “Mako Classic” option, but this is likely to be just another case of gaming purists disappointed by the change – look at any remastering and you will encounter similar tensions. How about Final Fantasy VII from last year throwing your story in a blender? Or the people who are developing mods to give Resident Evil 2 a remake of a prehistoric and objectively strange fixed camera angle? There is no telling how a game’s legacy – or its peculiarities – can be remembered a decade later. Although you can hastily declare that a mechanic makes a “junk” game, it could easily become someone else’s treasure.
Luke Winkie is a writer and ex-pizzaiolo from Brooklyn. Follow him on Twitter.