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Mass Effect's Interactive Comic walkthrough

Choose your own adventure video by video.

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Image credit: Eurogamer
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Feature by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry
Published on

The Mass Effect franchise has gone cross-platform, but for licensing reasons it's unlikely that PlayStation 3 owners will ever get a version of the original game for their console. This is something of a problem, because BioWare envisaged the series as an interlinked story where decisions you make in the first game have ramifications in both the sequel and this year's concluding chapter.

Commander Shepard's key decisions in Mass Effect 1 have implications for his love life and his career as a Spectre, not to mention the make-up of the ruling intergalactic council and even the existence of one or more lifeforms in the galaxy. Heavy stuff, then, and clearly of importance to the PS3 sequel. While the game can be enjoyed solus, it's clear that a mechanism is required to appreciate the full scope of the Mass Effect sequels regardless of which platform you're on.

BioWare's solution has been to team up with Dark Horse to produce a semi-interactive comic that covers off the major plot points of the original Mass Effect. The Comic, available with every copy of the game on PS3, gives new players the opportunity to make those crucial decisions that are so important to the storyline, which they otherwise might have missed out on forever.

There are six decisions in all, and we thought it would be interesting to explore the comic in the form of a "choose your own adventure" book embedded in our pages. The idea is that you watch a sequence from the Comic, then make a decision by clicking on a particular link, which then takes you on to the next sequence that you would be shown if you made that choice in-game, and so on.

Ignore the page links at the bottom of the page when navigating this article, and instead concentrate on the hyperlinks directly below the video in order to make your way through the original Mass Effect narrative according to the decisions you make.

"Ashley was a little concerned about the connection I shared with Liara. As Commander, I knew that either relationship had the potential to interfere with the mission..."

Choose: