Pinnacle Station: Missing the Point

Mass Effect is one of my favourite video games. It was the reason I got an XBox 360, and it's one of the few games I've completed multiple times. In my opinion it's the closest any game has come to getting the computer RPG just right.

The first downloadable content for the game, Bring Down the Sky, was a decent new section of the story, so when I saw that there was a new DLC I downloaded it at once expecting more of the same.

Instead, it's a set of combat training missions. There's a new space station to go to, and while there, you get to go into a holodeck and fight simulated enemies. Your objectives are along the lines of 'kill as many enemies as you can before the time runs out' or 'capture all the checkpoints'.

Your score goes on a scoreboard, and your goal is to move up the board. At first I thought I'd be competing against scores logged by other Mass Effect players, as a kind of very basic multiplayer content. The instructor's dialogue even seems to hint at this. But no, they're NPCs.

And the high-scoring NPCs don't even appear. There are very few actual new characters, and they don't do more than explain the rules of the combat simulator and its minimal backstory. Even the good lines they have are spoiled by repetition, since as far as I can tell you go through the same dialogue every time you start a simulation.

Either I'm badly missing the point of Pinnacle Station, or Pinnacle Station is missing the point of Mass Effect. Mass Effect's combat is decent, but it's nothing special. Games that are all about combat generally do combat better, but that's no big deal because Mass Effect isn't all about combat; it's an action RPG. What Pinnacle Station does is take the combat and present it on its own, without any of the context that normally makes it fun.

It leaves me wondering why this DLC was made. Possibly they had wanted to do something different (from the main Mass Effect and from Bring down the Sky, which was basically more of the same), and it turned out not to work as well in practice as it did on paper. (A wild guess: perhaps the scoreboards were meant to be multiplayer, but that was cut for some reason.) Eventually it was clear it wasn't going to work, or at least wasn't going to work within a dev time budget the company could spend, so they decided to cut their losses and release something rather than nothing. After all, they knew there'd be thousands of suckers like me who would snap up a new DLC as soon as they saw it. Possibly they've hurt themselves in the long run there, because players might look more carefully at any new DLC. But then again I'm still going to buy Mass Effect 2 the moment it comes out.