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BioWare’s next Mass Effect game should build on the special feature that Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series introduced: the Discovery Tour.
Late last year, BioWare teased that it is developing a new entry in the Mass Effect franchise, one that will be more closely tied to the original trilogy. Fans are undoubtedly excited to return to the Milky Way and explore it with some of the old crew. However, BioWare should take advantage of its space-faring video game by building on a feature that Ubisoft’s more recent Assassin’s Creed games introduced.
Assassin’s Creed Origins was released in 2017 and brought the franchise into a new era. The game was heavily focused on bringing history to life and, despite its flaws, got a lot right down to the tiniest set of hieroglyphs decorating half-buried monuments. So right, in fact, that a Discovery Tour feature was released a year later, boasting a collection of academic information curated by historians and Egyptologists.
Discovery Tour removed all combat from the game and allowed players to explore the entirety of Origins‘ Egypt in peace, purely to satisfy curiosity about life back in during the end of the Ptolemaic period. It’s accurate enough that has actually been used by some teachers to teach students about ancient Egyptian history and culture. Discovery Tour was then added to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey so players could learn about ancient Greece during the Peloponnesian War, and it will eventually be added to Valhalla.
Ubisoft should be commended for bridging the gap between entertainment and education with the Assassin’s Creed series, and it’s something that BioWare can adapt for Mass Effect. Where Ubisoft has all of human history to play with, BioWare has the vast expanse of space to explore, with countless planets and billions of stars. It wouldn’t be a completely foreign or random addition. The team behind the original trilogy included astronomy buffs, and they even consulted biomedical engineers and physicists for codex entires in later games. They all helped the game stay the course on its realism-based approach to science fiction.
There were a few liberties taken, and many of the planets and nebulas present throughout the Mass Effect trilogy aren’t actually real. In an interview with NASA’s Blueshift, Mass Effect creator Casey Hudson explained, “The sheer number of planets we would need to create for the Mass Effect universe and its various exploration systems required us to develop a more automated means of generating them. To get us started, I made an excel file that would spit out random planets.”
There is an obvious issue there — a Discovery Tour-like feature for Mass Effect would potentially require a team far larger than Ubisoft’s 1000-strong Assassin’s Creed: Origins team, no matter how small a sector of space it might explore. Still, it would be a worthwhile endeavor. What Ubisoft gave to players with Origins was an accessible way to learn about history and culture.
Discovery Tour does what textbooks can’t — it brings history to life and makes it seem less abstract. Mass Effect can harness that and introduce astronomy and science to students in ways nothing ever has before. Of course, it doesn’t have to be BioWare that builds on Discovery Tour. Every major developer should strive to provide gamers with similar features, turning games into educational tools that encourage players to keep learning.
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