toblix

Mass Effect 2

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It's definitely a Role-playing game, it's not much of a Roll-playing game. The fact is you customize a character, decide how they interact with people, have a diverse way of playing the game, and finishing the game. And by stripping out a lot of the dice rolling and stat sheet elements, they were able to create a diverse yet well produced experience that I felt more personally invested in than pretty much any other RPG I've played in years.

I cared more about my Sheppard in ME2 than I did about my Grey Warden in DA:O, which to me is a success.

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<words>.

That makes me want to try it out simply because it's more RPG than ME2.

I'll wait until ME2 is as fresh as it is now in my mind, so I can give it a fair shake.

That may be a while, since I'm going through ME2 a 2nd time as much as a Renegade as I can. It seems a little more humorous this time around. I should stop playing 'me' in games like this and just go crazy from here on out.

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Is it too early to open up a Mass Effect 3 thread?

VG247 doesn't think so!

Earth is burning. Striking from beyond known space, a race of terrifying machines have begun their destruction of the human race. As Commander Shepard, an Alliance Marine, your only hope for saving mankind is to rally the civilizations of the galaxy and launch one final mission to take back the Earth.

Yeah, I guess that's Mass Effect.

The only problem with that plot is that makes it more difficult to do "Let's fly around the galaxy and waste time building our team and shopping and doing sidequests." Because, um, this sounds more urgent.

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"EA is going to make a mass affect in some employee's life today." -IGN.com (reporting on the leak)

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One of the things that I thought was lost with the second Mass Effect was that wandering across the stars and planets feeling. It felt too structured, too uniform. I hope this third game manages to loosen the stucture up a bit. Otherwise, I'm ready to go! I love that universe and I can't wait to actually land on Earth.

I loved landing on the moon in the first game.

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despite average dullness of the mako landings ME1, it was much better than the planet scanning in ME2

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The only real problem with the Mako, in my opinion, was the almost computer generated landscapes of each world. There was never a flat path, you always had to drive up some ridiculously steep mountains. And it's not that some of the planets were like that, every single one was super mountainous, except when you fight the Thresher Maw. It made every planet feel too similar. They should've broke it up with some caves/underground sections, planet hazards you have to jump over like chasms or loose earth, or just some earlier civilizations' ruins. At least it still felt like a part of a video game.

On the other hand, scanning is terrible, I can't believe it made it in. You are literally moving a cursor until a graph maxes out, and then pressing a button.* It's not fun, or challenging. It's just a time waster. I guess it's relaxing, because I definitely fell asleep scanning during long play sessions. Disappointingly I never found any anomalies that I wasn't already aware of on my quest list by just scanning, so there weren't even any quest hooks attached to the ordeal. It also doesn't make sense from a fiction standpoint. Here we have Shepard, hero of the Citadel, reborn Spectre, a person with shit to do, sitting at the science console and scanning for minerals? There's no dude you could ask to do that while you feed your fish or something? In fact that would be better. Whenever you pull up to a planet you want to scan, Shepard says "I'll be in my quarters", and you have to waste time. Feed your fish, read a book, dance to your awesome stereo music, paint your ship models, feed your hamster, talk to crew members, participate in team building exercises, train your men, check if you have enough fuel or maybe just take a 15 minute nap, you are a busy guy.

I reallize they're trying to simulate a space world, but they should've made it a skill based game. You pull up to a planet, EDI says "We've found 4 mineral deposits." You're given a cross sectional view of the first source in the planet, with all the mineral striation and lodes, as well as the Normandy's position in orbit. You are given use of your stock of 30 probes with inertial extractors. Controlling the thrusters, you have to shoot down a probe with enough speed for it's extractor to burrow down to the centre of the lode. The closer you get the more ore you receive. You can send down multiple probes to one lode, but you must be careful that their extractors don't intersect previous ones. How much force you need is altered by the geological composition of the planet, anomalies of more or less dense unwanted materials, planet radius and planet gravity. Here you still have the problem of doing something that should just be an automated function in the fiction, but at least you're doing something that resembles a game. Maybe they could take that into account by having a minimum automated yield.

*I guess that is the same as what you do in a shooter, just with more facade.

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Holy shit you made me remember the various evenings that I did in actuality fall asleep while scanning planets. Man, those were good evenings. I wish that happened more often, I'm not even joking.

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Yeah, the scanning was quite dull and pointless but it didn't bother me that much. On the other hand, the Mako sections could have been interesting but they were so poorly implemented that they made the overall game seem of less quality. I hope they can find some kind of compromise.

Mass Effect 3 trailer.

The idea of wandering round the galaxy, looking for best weapons deals and palladium and helping your crew members clear their difficult father-daughter relationships while the Earth is burning, somehow made me giggle.

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I am up for this. Go Shepard!*

* Aren't stories like this always still better when you don't know what's happening and the bad guys are still scheming behind the curtain?

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This never happened.

Unfortunately it did, the plot is repetitive and just plays out like the first one so far. The new characters are all annoying (in combat I enjoy letting them die). The combat has shifted violently in to a cover shooter with all of the interesting skills my character used to be able to do now removed (RE: streamlined) there isn't even the compulsion to level up and see your stats improve as I really don't care about the cut down list of abilities.

The much touted carry over of the character's choices from the first one is underwhleming at best and copy/paste jobbies at worst.

I got as far as meeting Tali, then had to turn it off as she no longer even seems like the same character now. Turned it back on played for a bit longer. Told Tali to fuck off back with her buddy, got into the ship wandered around, got bored, turned it off again.

Waste of my time and money.

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Oh, my comment was referring to how I ninja edited out my Mass Effect 3 post.

I should've just deleted it...

I agree that the game is very RPG lite, especially compared to the first. Don't like the lack of powers, don't like the ammo system, don't like losing ammo and weapon mods.

I don't mind the choice stuff that much, but to each his own.

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Well, despite my negative reaction I went and finished Mass Effect 2 in a marathon over two weekends.

I have to say that ending was actually really affecting. I was surprised by how much I did care in the end.

The previous 20 hours had mostly been filler with occasional moments of interest in some of the characters back story (Thane and Mordin were interesting).

So yeah, not really all that excited about Mass Effect 3 but ME2 redeemed itself, sort of, in the last 2-3 hours.

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Damn, I'm LOVING this game. So much better than ME in almost every way. Not finished it yet, but I'm super excited about playing ME3.

Is the DLC any good?

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All three story DLCs are worth playing. (Zheed, Kumi and Shadowbroker.)

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I think Mass Effect 2 was a big improvement on the original as well. Shadowbroker DLC is definitely worth buying; Overlord not so much.

Mass Effect 3 is quite similar to Mass Effect 2, at least in terms of gameplay and, to some extent pacing. If you liked ME2, chances are you will not hate ME3.

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Just as a heads up, I played ME1 and 2 back to back in January - March of this year in preparation for ME3. While ME3 was fine for what I played, I think I burned myself out. Only now I'm starting to think about going back to finish ME3 after I wrap up Darksiders 2 sometime in the next few weeks. It's a good game, from what I've seen, but man that was a lot of Mass Effect all at once.

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