toblix

Mass Effect 2

Recommended Posts

Haven't had any pop in at all, also no elevators like the original thus far. This is the PC version, but I expect the 360 version runs the same, someone who has played it on the 360 should chime in too.

I'm playing on 360, and it's been really good. As said earlier, long elevators are replaced by loading screens. I've only seen pop-in at one spot, for about half a second. And, with a couple exceptions, the framerate is pretty solid.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Alright, spent some more time in it and the game has grown on me, I still feel I favor the first alot more due to the characters, lighting, tone; but this still feels like Mass Effect and I'm starting to get a bit sad it will end.

I've sat around ports listening to NPC chatter and have onlyreceived one side quest; so I pretty sure that info I read about that system is totally bunk. I found some star charts to expand the galaxy and I've been to every planet available, there were some side missions on there, but I wouldn't necessarily call them quests except that one miffy mentioned.

Loyalty Quests: These have been the most interesting to me so far, some really neat things going on there. I like some of the new characters, others seem like throw backs, and I'm infinetly dissapointed in the two main sidekicks. Dragon Age did the same thing; like you have two people along for the ride from start to finish(I assume), only I think Jacob and Mirander are probably the most boring people on that ship.

Relationships: Getting mildly annoyed at Biowares recent fascination with Tits and Ass. The women in Mass Effect 1 were fairly normal in sex appeal, I really gave them credit for that. Furthermore, you got to know them like any other character and would only enter into the flirting crap diliberty or could brush their advances off and still continue talking as friends.

ME2 seems to funnel those conversations into that, so you can't really just get to know either Mirander or Jack before it turns to sex; seems weird and honestly have no interest in that, I just wanted to know the characters.

Elevators/Party talk:After Dragon Age I really expected some of those enhancements to make their way to Mass Effect 2; with the team mates chatting while you move around the world. I found out last night, that it is there, it just might only happen once.

I was walking on the Citedal with two characters from ME1 and in an awesomely self aware line they mentioned the talks they had in elevators and how one of them missed it and the other didn't.

So yeah, it's there, but I've only had it happen once and it was a diliberate line addresses that game feature... so interesting to that and sad they didn't do this everywhere.

I'm near the end, I expect, and will most likely finish it up tonight; I'm around 50 hours which my friend calls insane because he's further then me and nearing 20 hours.... I really need to stop getting lost in Bioware games, I check everything, I read everything, I soak up everything.

Regardless of where the game-play goes as I do miss more/expanded dialog trees, if they can keep the game as fresh as ME2, I will be pleased. I have an grocery list of desires for the third game which I'll probably summarized after finishing it.

In short, I hope they continue ME3 on the next consol platform because theres so many little things I would like to see improved with a significant tech overhaul that would only be finacially sound on another platform, but understand if they wanted to finish the current trilogy on the 360.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Actually, I've found another one of those quests already, which branches around a lot and takes you to a load of different planets.

When you finished up on Omega, did that Asari ruler give you any tips about a crashed freighter? I believe that was what started that chain for me.

I didn't get to put any more time in this weekend, so now I'm really looking forward to Wednesday night when I'll get my next crack at it.

Those loading screens piss me off to no end. Really break the immersion. I don't really remember being irritated by the elevators in the 360 version of ME1, and in my recent playthrough on PC they were completely innocuous. The loading screens are way damn worse. You're doing a wireframe animation of my lander going down to the planet or docking or whatever while the loading screen happens anyway, why not just turn that into a bink video or something and let the game load behind it without showing the giant flashing LOADING over it. I don't need that, especially when I'm really into the world right up until that moment, thank you.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The only elevator I had an issue with in the first one was the stupid one in the Normandy to get to the lower deck. It travelled 10 feet at most but took an age to do so, it made me wonder what the hell they would do if there was an emergency in engineering.

I'm enjoying this sequel quite a lot so far, but as everyone has already said it is a very different game. I've basically done everything I can find on Omega so far, and the atmosphere and feeling of that station was great! Felt a lot like Down Below in Babylon 5.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Those loading screens piss me off to no end. Really break the immersion. I don't really remember being irritated by the elevators in the 360 version of ME1, and in my recent playthrough on PC they were completely innocuous. The loading screens are way damn worse. You're doing a wireframe animation of my lander going down to the planet or docking or whatever while the loading screen happens anyway, why not just turn that into a bink video or something and let the game load behind it without showing the giant flashing LOADING over it. I don't need that, especially when I'm really into the world right up until that moment, thank you.

Is it the LOADING message that breaks it for you? I found that those kind of kept me in the experience. Instead of it being a generic background or even blank screen with the icon, it maintained continuity with what I was doing. I transition to a planet, and it shows the shuttle landing there. I dock at a spaceport, and it shows the airlock decontamination process. I take a truck out to the wastes of Tuchanka, and it shows the path taken to get there. It's a lot less jarring than a black screen with a small, animated icon in the corner to let me know that something's still going on.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Seriously, what's the loading lag like? Are there still tons of lifts everywhere? Do things slowly pop in existence as you're looking at them, etc?

On my PC loading goes quite well. Also, the incremental loading is barely noticeable. In some cases when you open a door it takes a fraction of a second.

But loading on the normady is horrible, it takes ages.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

What pisses me off about the loading screens is that the loading itself may be done but the game won't continue until the loading screen FMV is over. At first it wasn't a big deal, but now in my 2nd playthrough I'm TIRED of seeing those 4 engine meters go green.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Yeah, the whole transition is so jarring. It's not just the "LOADING" bit, but the whole thing. In the first game, it was obvious when the Mako dropped onto a planet over the course of a fairly lengthy FMV seqence that what was really happening was a load, but I didn't care because it was still in-world and kept me in the experience. Now they still have all the transitional stuff, but it's done in a wireframe mode that doesn't click at all with the rest of the art design and seems completely artificial and gamey copared to the rest of the universe. Really, all of the downsides of the game come from it feeling too artificial and gamey in spots. The obviously meticulously placed pieces of cover when you enter a combat area, for example, also feel way too contrived. Pretty much any negative thing I have to say about this game comes from unnecessary immersion-breaking elements. Everything else is amazing, and being pulled out of it so abruptly is infuriating.

Goddamn I want to play more of this game. Why isn't it Wednesday yet?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Just once, I would like a conversation in this game to go like this:

"Hi, I'd like such and such."

"No, asshole, we don't do that."

"Sorry, perhaps I didn't explain. I'm Commander Shepard."

"Who?"

"You know, Commander Shepard. Saved the galaxy a few years back from an invasion by a huge alien ship..."

"Yeah, sorry, I don't really follow politics. You can wait in line like everyone else."

"You didn't hear about the first human spectre? About humans on the council? About the citadel being destroyed? About how this awesome human single-handedly saved everything?"

"Listen, buddy, I run a shop. I don't get off-world much, and I certainly don't follow galactic politics. Now get in in line like everyone else or shove off."

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Instead it's more like:

"Hey, endorse this shop and you get a fat discount"

"I am Comm. Shepard and this is my favorite shop in the Citadel"

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
What pisses me off about the loading screens is that the loading itself may be done but the game won't continue until the loading screen FMV is over. At first it wasn't a big deal, but now in my 2nd playthrough I'm TIRED of seeing those 4 engine meters go green.

Is that so? I hadn't noticed, but that is just stupid. I'm sure someone will patch them out, at some point. I hope!

Instead it's more like:

"Hey, endorse this shop and you get a fat discount"

"I am Comm. Shepard and this is my favorite shop in the Citadel"

For every shop in the Citadel. :hah:

Haha, lobotomy42, that'd be great. It kind of reminds me Eddie Izzards bit on the

.

Agree with Miffy as well. Every time you see the bits of cover, you know there is going to be a firefight there at some point. They really stick out at you too.

By the way, I think I'm not the only one that finds Jack's character absolutely horrid? All whiny bullshit. I tried to talk to her again and she was like "You need to break up with whoever you're with, before we continue talking". What the fuck. I just want to talk; I don't even like you. It's weird that after your "romance" it all just ends. It's like the people at Bioware went "Well, you got to fuck him/her, so what more do you want?"

Anyone else find the intercom in your room? You can call your chosen man/lady up to your personal quarters. You can sit and lie down together. It's very... Weird and awkward. :blink:

One funny thing I discovered:

Legion does the robot if you stand still for a while

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Anyone else find the intercom in your room? You can call your chosen man/lady up to your personal quarters. You can sit and lie down together. It's very... ]

Seriously, this exists? Shit, I missed out on that... also sounds weird. edit: wait, by lie down do you mean, literally, because that sounds odd. If you mean six, thats very weird... that's a sex button and kind of disagrees with me a bit.

It's like the people at Bioware went "Well, you got to fuck him/her, so what more do you want?"

That is my main problem from above. In the first one it seemed like the relationship tree was a side dialog option, not the main one. I'd like to get to know Jack more, because aside from being a cliche, it is one that isn't normally presented outside of a gta or something, but I can't get to know her unless I imply I want to sleep with her.

Same with Miranda, she's a cliche, an utterly boring one, but again it goes straight to sex talk if you try to learn more. So I come to a barrier with those two simply because the game is saying is deliberately forcing that on me; which is odd, because, again, ME-1 seemed like it had a separate tree for relationships and getting to know someone.

***

Still not done, I didn't get a chance to play tonight and I don't want to try to cram in the end.

Edited by Murdoc

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
What pisses me off about the loading screens is that the loading itself may be done but the game won't continue until the loading screen FMV is over. At first it wasn't a big deal, but now in my 2nd playthrough I'm TIRED of seeing those 4 engine meters go green.

Are you sure about that? When I'm changing decks on the Normandy the load screen videos barely have any time to play let alone finish. The loads take 0-2 seconds max there. Elsewhere I haven't had a load longer than 15 seconds or so at the most. Usually around 10. I haven't checked the length of the videos but it doesn't seem like they are "finishing" before the game loads here.

edit: Wow, you were right. Seems like the elevator vids are a few of the ones that are skipped when once you are done loading. In the game's /Movies directory I switched the load_f01.bik which is the common save game load video with the much shorter load_f99.bik which is the Mass Effect 2 title video by copying and renaming it, and my save games load as soon as it is done playing which is only a couple of seconds.

You can't just rename the extension or delete the video that plays during the load like you can the startup / splash screen logos, the game seems to crash when you try loading a save. With the "Rad Video Tools" you can make a bink video out of anything, even a blank black jpg. I changed loading video to a screenshot I took, since it's only 1 frame long it loops continually and stays up on screen until the save is loaded seconds later. So you can try to do something like that or just copy and rename load_f99.bik to load_f01.bik and you should be good.

Edited by pyide

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

wtf...

chaning the loading movie and setting process affinity to 1 reduces the load time like ten fold :(

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Oops, I must have deleted that part of my post about that. Yeah, what a strange issue that is, and I can't believe it hasn't been fixed or patched if people are seriously getting 30-60 second loads on the Normandy. Saw it mentioned the other day in the shacknews comments. Crazy!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Oops, I must have deleted that part of my post about that. Yeah, what a strange issue that is, and I can't believe it hasn't been fixed or patched if people are seriously getting 30-60 second loads on the Normandy. Saw it mentioned the other day in the shacknews comments. Crazy!

Yeah It´s a known issue with the unreal 3 engine. This bug exist in pretty much every unreal3 game out there.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Interesting to see people blame the UnrealEngine3 for this. Maybe it was a bug in the engine for a short while, or Bioware simply screwed up. Because I haven't had this issue in any UnrealEngine3 version I messed around with.

It's really a weird bug, considering you just disable and then enable cores for a processor during the game, and it goes away. Must be some weird combination between UE3's loading mechanism and Bink playback considering the streamed loading within levels is pretty much instantly for me.

Anyway, this workaround is very welcome as I became quite frustrated yesterday because I had to reload a save game quite often in a short period because I was at a difficult point in the game and died too often.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Seriously, this exists? Shit, I missed out on that... also sounds weird. edit: wait, by lie down do you mean, literally, because that sounds odd. If you mean six, thats very weird... that's a sex button and kind of disagrees with me a bit.

I meant literally, yes. You just... Lie there. :blink:

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
I meant literally, yes. You just... Lie there. :blink:

I think that's awesomely weird/quirkly. I'm glad it isn't a sex button.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Holy shit pyide, you just got me more minutes in my life... thanks a bunch man.

On another note, I'm in my second playthrough and I am pretty convinced that there's a HUGE bug related to that. During the second time around, you get +25% XP for everything. This means that once in a while, you will finish a main quest and get 1250XP and this will push you not one level but two. Shepard gets 4 skill points as he/she should, but the other NPCs will get only 2. Has anyone else noticed that? Or am I having hallucinations and during the 1st playthrough the NPCs got less skill points than Shepard anyway?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Holy shit pyide, you just got me more minutes in my life... thanks a bunch man.

On another note, I'm in my second playthrough and I am pretty convinced that there's a HUGE bug related to that. During the second time around, you get +25% XP for everything. This means that once in a while, you will finish a main quest and get 1250XP and this will push you not one level but two. Shepard gets 4 skill points as he/she should, but the other NPCs will get only 2. Has anyone else noticed that? Or am I having hallucinations and during the 1st playthrough the NPCs got less skill points than Shepard anyway?

I feel like Shepard does gain more skill points, because in my first playthrough there'd be times where I have points to spend on Shepard but as I flipped through my party members, they were still stuck at zero. And before you ask, I'm sure that I didn't just forget to assign them. I liked to master skills rather than spread my points around, so I was pretty aware of how many points I had at any given time.

Also, I just finished this game last night. Stayed up until 5 AM to do it, something I didn't think I was capable nor willing to do with a video game at this point in my life. I love this goddamn game. Easily propelled to my top 5 of all time.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm still on my first run through and have only noticed squad mates not getting skill points when I level up outside of a main mission. It happened to me for example while doing tiny side quests for small amounts of XP on the Citadel. I got 2 points going from 7 to 8 this way but my squad mates got nothing. I want to say something similar happens on the character specific missions. Yesterday I was doing Miranda's mission along with Mordin rounding out the squad, afterward she got points but he did not. I could have imagined that one though.

I'm not sure how that works into your dilemma with the new game+, but like JonCole says Shepard gets more because s/he has more options on how to distribute them, likely a balance thing.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I haven't read this thread at all, but I just bought this on Direct2Drive for 32£. I actually thought they wouldn't let me buy it on the UK site, but no problems. I probably shouldn't have bought it either, since I've been spending more than I've been making. I was planning to pilfer it and buy it when it's a bit cheaper, but warezing is just too annoying to deal with these days. I haven't warezed a game since... maybe the first Mass Effect which I bought later.

So here's hoping it's good.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/26955/Analysis_Mass_Effect_2s_Surprising_Genre_Experiment.php

Chris did a good write up on the changes of Mass Effect 2; I found it interesting.

I was desperately trying to finish the game this weekend because I knew this week was brutal, i am just wayy too busy to finish this thing off. I expect I only have like 45 minutes left, I really have no way of telling since my play time is so astronomically off from how long my friends said it took them to finish it.

But man, do I want to finish this up to talk about it as a whole, but I'm going to talk about something on length anyway.

Listening to the thumbs at work and combining my own personal wants out of the game, and capping it off with Remo's article gave way to this idea.

DLC: Aside from Lost and the Damned I don't think there has ever been a satisfying DlC or downloadable expansion that I've played. From the looks of Dragon Age and what I expect Mass Effect 2 to do is more fight missions, with minimal character or story development (because it's expensive).

But DLC is relatively new, cheap, and offers a lot of opportunity to experiment a bit with your content and not overly upset any part of the market.

I refer back to a blog post Chris did (Not to be a super fan boy) about Portal and how it was like the equilent of a short film, a highly polished proof of concept for games.

So why not experiment with different content drops for both types of players? The systems in Mass Effect 2 are all there to achieve what I would want out of these games.

I think it would be amazing to take one location (Citedal, Omega, Illios) and create a complete interactive story in these. Sprinkle combat in here if you want, but honestly I just love dialog trees and mysteries, so I think it would just be incrediable to have a hard-boiled detective story in one of these places.

Basically introduce a main plot (Investigating a murder for example) where you have to go around questing people, taking people in for interogation, and picking up side missions along the way. The locations are confined, the characters many; the entire thing would only be 1-3 hours. Aside from the cost of voice acting and possible animation requirements, everything you need is already in the game, it's just directing a controlled experience within the game they already have.

I'd just love to see them take a risk on seeing if something like this would sell, because it would be amazing to get these little stories between ME2-3 to further the universe and weave new details that doesn't concern the fate of the galaxy.

If they offered mod tools for the PC, I'd be working on it right now... I just think something like this would be cool.

Edited by Murdoc

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now