Mass Effect

[toblix]

So I'm playing this on the PC. It looks great, and the dialogue is awesome. I like how they don't have sucky dialogue sequences like Dreamfall had.

Anyway, what's up with the combat? Is it true what I heard, that there's more of it in the beginning than is representative of most of the game? I remember KOTOR being like that, too.

I'm having a bit of trouble with ordering my guys around and finding out what the abilities do, and when to use them. The tutorial... "stuff" is pretty crap, so there's some dying for me to do before I figure things out. Thankfully, quicksaving is easy as shit.

[Nachimir]

IIRC there's much less combat at the start of the game than at the end. The last levels involve a shitload of it. The first level has quite a bit, but after that you're wandering around the Citadel for quite a while before you get into another fight.

[Noyb]

It's more like the combat is harder at the beginning. Around the middle of the game, you'll outclass the enemies so much that they won't pose any challenge at all, at least on the default difficulty.

[miffy495]

Yeah, combat doesn't decline in frequency, just difficulty. I actually quite liked the combat system though, so I didn't mind. I'm actually meaning to replay this once I've finished MGS4. How're you finding the PC conversion?

[twmac]

Much against (what I thought was) my better judgement I picked this game up for the first time a few days ago as I need something that I could put on and flow through whilst hungover.

The action seems to ramp up in the middle (about 20hrs in) but my guys are all fairly immune to biotics and tech abilities so I rarely die and the game actually became more fun.

I remember people complaining about the menu system when the original thread was open and I totally agree that it becomes bewildering and you spend waaay too much time just trying figure out who does what. Toblix I would recommend putting on full assist with your teammates (so that they use their abilities for offensive as well as defensive measures) until you get to to grips with what is going on.

Edit: I'm really enjoying despite not really having a clue what is going on in the story. I was only partly paying attention to the story tree yesterday and it transpires that I have inadvertently caused a love triangle. I was only chatting to them for XP!

[toblix]

Toblix I would recommend putting on full assist with your teammates (so that they use their abilities for offensive as well as defensive measures) until you get to to grips with what is going on.

What, they don't do that by default? Interesting stuff.

Also, I'm doing what I also did in the KOTORs -- playing a mean bastard. It's awesome to knock people out and threaten to kill everyone.

I'm currently having problems with the part at the beginning where you've just taken the train and have to do some timed stuff, and there's this white guy with a turret, and I cannot kill his ass.

[toblix]

So I've been playing this some more, and I love it, although I still think it feels a bit more sparse than the KOTORs. The way I remember it, there were more quests to do in each location in those games, while in the Citadel there are, what, ten?

Anyway, I still don't get the combat. I've mastered the cover system, and think it feels awesome. However, I don't know what equipment to give my teammates. Do I have to watch them fight to see what weapon type they actually use, or is there some other way to know? Also, why do I have to have one kind of each weapon? That's just stupid.

Also, it just crashed, so I probably lost a huge chunk of progress. I always felt the game ran a bit close to acting unstable, and in one crash all my fears were confirmed!

Oh, and I had this awesome idea for dialogue. I like how in Mass Effect the flow of speech is more natural since you can choose your reply before the other guy finishes speaking. Even so, I feel there's usually too much delay and pauses. Could this be loading issues, or is it just bad tuning? Anyway, to further improve the naturalistic feeling of dialogue, they really should record at least two different versions of most sentences. For example, when the other guy says "Chief Wakaka just passed by here with his bodyguards. He was carrying a mysterious package." you get two options, right? Ask about the bodyguards and ask about the package, and here's the thing, if you ask about the bodyguards right away, your guy could go "What bodyguards? How many were they?" in direct response to the other guy. But, if he had asked about the package instead, the dialogue could change to reflect this, like "You mentioned the chief had bodyguards,"etc. The way it is now, all the dialogue sounds weird, because every sentence is constructed in a way that it makes sense by itself, not taking the previous sentence into account.

Do you even understand what I'm talking about?

[brkl]

Yeah, I understand what you're talking about. Interactive dialogue is the only interesting idea I've had for a thesis and you're thinking along the same lines I have been. I won't have to think about it for a couple of years though.

I'm playing my little brothers copy and have liked it a lot so far. The combat is not up to action game standards, but it's more fun than the usual RPG fare. I really liked the first bit, and Citadel was nice, although a bit talky, but Noveria was a tad boring. I'll see how things develop.

toblix, the game autosaves pretty regularly so don't worry too much about that. Also, if you press space for a while the tactical screen opens up. You can choose which weapons your teammates use there. You have to have one of each type of weapon, but if your character only knows pistols you won't have to get better shotguns etc. for that character, so it doesn't matter.

[toblix]

Oh, and what's up with the roof fight on the ice station? A bunch of monsters rush at us and kill us instantaneously. Is the guy I started with (Raiden or whatever) really as useless as he seems? He always dies right away and only uses the pistol.

[toblix]

Yeah, I understand what you're talking about. Interactive dialogue is the only interesting idea I've had for a thesis and you're thinking along the same lines I have been. I won't have to think about it for a couple of years though.

I'm playing my little brothers copy and have liked it a lot so far. The combat is not up to action game standards, but it's more fun than the usual RPG fare. I really liked the first bit, and Citadel was nice, although a bit talky, but Noveria was a tad boring. I'll see how things develop.

toblix, the game autosaves pretty regularly so don't worry too much about that. Also, if you press space for a while the tactical screen opens up. You can choose which weapons your teammates use there. You have to have one of each type of weapon, but if your character only knows pistols you won't have to get better shotguns etc. for that character, so it doesn't matter.

Ah, Noveria is the one I'm at right now. By the looks of it, I'll never get any further. Those scorpion thingies rape through my team like we're scorpion snacks or something.

How do I know what weapons they're especially good at?

[ThunderPeel2001]

So I've been playing this some more, and I love it, although I still think it feels a bit more sparse than the KOTORs. The way I remember it, there were more quests to do in each location in those games, while in the Citadel there are, what, ten?

Yeah, I agree. I think there were going for "epic", but all they ended up with was "sparse" (and unnecessarily so). I kind of expected the PC version to populate everything a bit more, but it sounds like they haven't done that.

Did you get to the mission on the Citadel where you meet the respected Geisha style woman (straight out of Firefly, anyone?) but when you finally meet this exotic, beautiful, intelligent, powerful woman... she's in an empty room and looks and dresses exactly like the character on the door....... Kind of took me out of the moment in the 360 version. Did they fix it for the PC one?

[toblix]

Nope.

[Nachimir]

They all have corresponding weapon skills IIRC. I think they start with certain biases too:

Kaiden is not a gunfighter - take him for his late stage biotic abilities. They can really fuck your enemies up in fights, i.e. they're floating around on the ceiling while you fill them up with nutritious bullets.

Wrex = shotgun + biotics and tough as fuck.

Ashley = assault rifles, can lay down accurate firepower at a decent range.

Liara = biotic. A very good one.

I ended up using Ashley and Liara because their abilities are so undiluted. All rounders like that Turian fellow just kept getting killed for me.

As well as that, you need to add augmentations to the weapons, which make them much deadlier. My main character just used a pistol (+ sniper) for the whole game, but with the right mods it did a fuckload of damage.

Are you doing any side missions? Boosting my stats with them made the rest of the game considerably easier, and the difficulty doesn't scale like Oblivion or something. There were even side missions that opened before my team was good enough to do them.

Also: cultivate the special powers and use them in fights. Playing this game like an FPS will just lead to buckets of FAIL.

[toblix]

Yeah, I'm really doing the FPS thing, as the combat feels to frenetic for me to bother with the skills. I've turned on the full auto control for my teammates (actually, it was on by default), so I shouldn't have to worry about them, right? They also seem to upgrade on their own, too. I guess I should go back and try some more. It seems pretty difficult, though. It takes about five seconds for both my guys to die. I wonder what magic I'll be able to pull off in that time.

I really wish they'd have some "wits path" in the game. I always max out the conversation skills because I'm such an adventure game whore. I'm starting to think I've failed at that, too. I'm maxing out both charm and the other one (threaten, or something), but it seems that, when one can be used, the other can, too, and since I'm playing the hugest asshole ever, which I always do in these games, because they make it so fun, I always choose intimidation. So, basically, I've spent, what, maybe eight points in charm for nothing.

[Nachimir]

Combat largely swings on the abilities. I couldn't be bothered with them at first, but kept dying a lot until I'd learned to use them.

The interface of the game has a lot of flaws, but once you find a few abilities that are useful to you it's easy enough to snap them out quickly.

Make sure to use the cover system a lot too; you really can't Rambo a lot of this game.

[toblix]

No, the cover system I'm comfortable with. However, I feel a lot of times a couple of the guys run directly at us, making the cover system useless because all of a suddenly there are guys behind us.

Anyway...

I DID IT! BOOSH!

I finally managed to kick all the enemy asses. (Also, I turned the combat difficulty to casual.) After leveling, I put two points into pistols, which is an infinite percentage increase. I thought I'd just use the sniper rifle, but I've discovered a lot of time the pistol is just the thing. For example, most of the time.

[miffy495]

I played through mostly using shotguns, myself. Found that most of the time I'd be in close enough that the range problems didn't matter and when they did I'd bust out a pistol and go all old-west on 'em. As for biotic abilities, the ones that can toss your opponents and paralyze machines were by far the most useful. Level them, use them, love them.

[twmac]

I would recommend Lift on the biotic side and Sabotage and Hack on the Tech side. Teh amoun tof damage you can do to superior odds with three people that have one of each of those abilities is ridiculous.

I also recommend doing a few of the side quests first. Noveria was such a pain that I actually retraced all my steps when I got to the boss and levelled up a ton before attempting it.

[toblix]

So, on the huge map, can I just go to any old planet and run around on it? Do I "unlock" them as I go, or what?

[Nachimir]

Yeah, missions and planets unlock as you go along. There are plenty of little things you can do on the non-story planets to level up, but they get very samey.

[toblix]

Right, so there are like generic planets with just a bunch of bad guys on them? How do I tell the good ones apart from the combat ones?

[Nachimir]

You can scan the planets from the solar system view, and the map will show anomalies.

Some anomalies can be recognised by their shapes, and as long as you're cruising around carefully in the Mako you can generally avoid getting fired on. You can even pop over hills and snipe stuff with the big cannon.

There are a whole load of ambushes on some planets and there's no real way to tell, but if you get fired on you can generally run away faster than whatever's firing on you and they won't chase beyond a certain range. A lot of the non-story and non-subplot missions have random mercs to waste, using a scope you can often see them standing around an installation from miles away.

Look out for large flat areas in the middle of hills and avoid them. Some of them conceal nasty giant burrowing worms that hurl acid, and can nuke the Mako in one shot. Sometimes the glitch and keep firing acid to one side of you, in which case you can sit perfectly still and pound the shit out of them, but if they don't you have to keep moving, hope one doesn't come up right underneath you, and get cannon shots off at it whenever you can.

The random planet missions are pretty disappointing after a while, as they're just heightmaps with a few randomly distributed events that quickly get quite repetitive.

[toblix]

Wow. I thought the driving sequence (on the ice planet, along the ridges) was some unique thing. So there's a whole driving game in there?

[Nachimir]

Yeah, the non-story planets, you get dropped in the Mako and wander around a square heightmap looking for stuff to collect and blow away.

There are crashed space probes, ships and artefacts around, which tend not to let you in until you have pretty high hacking skills. This is really annoying early in the game, I spent a while just leveling Shepherd up in that respect.

There are also installations around, usually full of one flavour of bad guy or other and often surrounded by gun turrets that require cannon shells from the Mako.

Just take some time to scan all the planets in a solar system, there's usually one that gives the option to land.

[toblix]

Is there a level limit, or is it possible to become maximensch?