Mass Effect: Legendary Edition will be released May 14. With it, we will get better graphics, access to all of the DLC from the original trilogy, and ill-advised changes to the Mako. I was at my gaming prime—16 years-old—in 2007 when Mass Effect 1 was released. I remember the commercials as if they had interrupted a YouTube video yesterday. We see Shephard on a ship, flying over the surface of a planet, light from the local star dancing across the bridge. A button is pressed, and down comes the Mako, ready to take you into action. It was awe-inspiring. It lit the imagination ablaze with possibilities of what you’d find on the surface. The Mako truly set the stage for everything Mass Effect.
You’ll find no love for the Mako today, though. Fourteen years after the game was first released, people have a (faulty) memory of the Mako as one of the worst vehicles in gaming history. You’ll see myriad complaints about the handling of the invisible tank that you drive around on various planets. I’ve even seen someone compare it to a bouncy castle on wheels. The thing that everyone is missing, though, is that the “broken” feel of the Mako actually reminded you that you’re playing a futuristic space game. Without the Mako—and its low gravity physics—the entire Mass Effect universe’s atmosphere is broken.
The ability to drive around the maps of Mass Effect was part of what set the stage for the epic space opera that nearly every RPG fan has come to know and love. The towering mountains that ringed the play area gave you a sense of scale that, I would argue, has been missing in every game since. You truly felt like you were on another planet when you were driving around. That’s to say nothing of the hellscape of one of the missions, where it was possible to drive into lava and die.
It was just fun to drive almost vertically up the side of a mountain and jumping off of it, if nothing else. I distinctly remember driving as fast as I could at one of the many little bumps in the terrain just so that I could see how much air I could catch, for example. If you haven’t experienced it, please do yourself a favor and pick up the 2007 version of Mass Effect before the Legendary Edition ruins it for you. Because if I’m honest, I remember more about driving around in ME:1 than any other part of the game.
This is why I was disappointed to hear that the Mako would become a watered-down version of itself in Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. Yes, it will appease the vocal majority of people who remember all of the bad parts of driving the Mako. However, I doubt that anyone would say that using the franchise’s one other vehicle, the Nomad, is actually fun. The Nomad is fine for getting from place to place, but it feels sluggish and heavy. You don’t use it for the sake of using it. You use it because it’s the only way to get to a fast-travel point.
From what I’ve gathered, the updated Mako is going to handle more like the Nomad. It’ll be less bouncy. It’ll be slower. It’ll feel more like a tank than a weightless space truck on a low-gravity planet with a canon strapped to its roof. I sincerely believe—and I’ve been saying this for weeks—that everyone is going to miss the Mako when they get their hands on this new version. That is unless you enjoy scanning planets rather than actually exploring them.
Here’s hoping the outcry is loud enough that the Mako is returned to its whimsical, physics-defying glory.
The Wolf's Gameboard 