Those meaningless tropes like "ranged damage" and "waist-high cover" are holding back the cover-based shooter genre. It's time someone with bold ideas took the reins.
Edit: I agree with almost everything Jafisob said.
Last edited by Spam; 02-01-2010 at 09:17 PM.
Do you mean his story, the romance (is there one?), or character design? I like Thane's face quite a bit. It conveys a quiet sadness, yet resolve. Samara's face is really good too, equal parts wisdom and self-righteousness. I could live without the blue cleavage though.Originally Posted by Angie Gallant
I haven't followed Thane's story enough yet to say if I feel one way or another about him as a character.
Yeah, the planetscapes are awesome. Sometimes in the middle of a mission I'll just stop and look around to see what everything looks like which I can't do while under fire. They did a great job with the environments.
Watching Garrus flounder around when Shepard comes on strong to him is HILARIOUS.
You don't need to wait until after the endgame, just after his loyalty mission. He's great.
very funny song, but I can't help wincing when he ends one line way off key- since he closes strong I suppose it was deliberate but it still rubs me the wrong way.
A time and place, though. I mean, you went into a thread literally called "I heart Mass Effect 2" and posted about how the bars were shit because they had tables. How much more of a clue do you need that people are really enjoying this game and would like a chance to gush about it without you popping up every few posts to add some inane criticism?
No, that was you and hong rehashing an old and predictable argument that's been had at least half a dozen times on this board. Nevertheless, the RPG genre thanks you.*And most of that was not me attacking ME2, but rather defending the rest of the RPG genre.
Interesting. I think we're playing a similar build (Vanguard/Charge) and I tend to avoid the Krogan because I figured that his strengths (tough guy that puts a shotgun in your face) just duplicated my own. What am I missing?
Overall, I think I've been a bit too safe with my squad choices. I've stuck with Garrus and Miranda 90% of the time. Having both of them gives me 2x Overload plus Warp and Garrus' AP ammo to take down armor. Plus, "Pull -> Concussive Shot" is always fun. Now that I'm more comfortable with the combat I think I'll branch out and try some of the others more.
I'm having a blast with the combat now. I played a soldier in ME1 and at first I was trying to play my Vanguard the same way and not really getting it. Now that I've maxed out Charge and gotten used to firing off powers in real time, it's become a whole new game. Playing on Normal lets me sacrifice nerd-cred for the privilege of spending less time worrying about dying and more time trying to figure out the badass-est way to take out that next group of bad guys.
Romance. It's supremely terrible. I don't care much for his story outside the romance either.
Man this thread took me forever to wade through. I wish that even half of it had been talk about the game, not what kind of game it is. For the record though...I like RPGs. I dont like Shooters. I like ME2. Therefore, its an RPG.
Love the game. Commentary in no particular order:
I am playing the 360 version. I installed both disks on my tiny 20gb drive...quite a feat, had to clear tons of shit off. Why the fuck do I still have to swap disks? Why did I bother with the install?
Mini-games. I am in the extreme minority I enjoy them all. Certainly better than the simon-says of the first one. Maybe the hacking in FO3 is better, but this is still ok. Also, they are less common so that helps, I mean you arent hacking shit every other room like the first game. The planet scanning even, I dont mind it. I do think it should have been streamlined somehow, but I liked the mechanic and the feedback upon success, the rumbling gamepad, the noise and the visual spike are all cool with me. But you should be able to get a planet from Rich to Depleted in 5 minutes or so. Not 15.
Lack of party banter. Coming off of DA, this is a downer. There is almost none. To get to know your crew you have to hit them up every mission, and most only have new stuff to say every other mission. First game was the same way though so, no biggie. Its definitely something they can improve for ME3 though.
Inventory/item changes. LOVE. Inventory in ME1 was fucking AWFUL. Man, nothing was good about it. Way too many items, all nearly pointless. The Master/Specter stuff was the best guns, and you could predictably buy it from 2 vendors once you hit a credit/level threshold. For Ammo/Mods/Armor, it was just a crap shoot trying to get upgrades. Hard cap on the item limit meant you had to aggressively sell (maxed out credits way before the end game though) or gel (no use for all that omni-gel...I would just use it to bypass the mini games and still had plenty) after every mission. Because of the sort order, having to scroll to the bottom of the list to gel lesser stuff, only to have the cursor come back to the top after each gel! Aaargh! I dont know that ME2 nailed it, you almost never find an upgrade, you pretty much buy or research everything, but its better.
Mixed on skills change, mostly negative. Not really a fan of less skills, who is? I do like that higher ranks cost more than lower ranks...but the progression is too generic, 1-2-3 is just an incremental increase, and they cost too much more given the amount of points you get per level. I like the 4 rank evolving the skill into either one or the other, but the choices are too predictable. Its either more defense or more offense if its a passive skill and for actives its a choice between a better version of what you have been using or a group/AE version.
Story line. I really just love the universe here. I never really considered myself a scifi guy, I dont read it much compared to sword and sorcery stuff. I hate Star Trek. Never got into Battlestar. Like Star Wars, the first 3 they made at least, and KOTOR, but its never been a religion for me. Etc. But I love the setting they have created and I think they did a good job of working the experience of the first game into the atmosphere of the second. It feels like the same world. I did kind of expect a little more from my former party members...they didnt seem that excited to see me, considering what we went through together and the fact that everyone thought I was dead for two years.
The lack of a working map (greyed out on the mission computer) during missions fucks with me. I have to know if I am missing something and the ME1 map helped me decide if I wanted to run in whatever direction. The maps in the hubs/non-combat places are much better now, though.
Cut scene interupts. I like them. So far there have not been any real surprises but its still fun to hit the trigger and punch someone in the face or grab a gun, etc.
10/10 and better than DA, which I liked a lot. Too early to say if I will like it better than the first one though.
So that you and your friend don't install the game, then you keep disc one and he takes disc two and you both play it despite only having paid for one copy.
To spare the 360's questionable drive mechanism the stress of running the disc and to spare your ears the stress of listening to the 360's questionable drive mechanism as it stresses to run the disc.
You talk too much.
You're working too hard.
Requiring just Disk 1 in the drive would prevent that, too. Let Olaf write what he wants. It was definitely more well thought out then what you wrote. Take a pill, man.
Do you have to do a lot of disk swapping later in the game? I just started putting together my squad.
Maybe you should make that suggestion to Microsoft. I was just answering the question, pally.
Psst. I was quoting one of the scenes he was talking about. One of the better ones. I was agreeing with him!
There are two disk swaps in the game. The first is fairly early on, and the second is right before the end.
I got a 5-minute technique down last night for this, which is basically:
- Research the Miranda-suggested upgrade that doubles the scanning speed.
- When scanning a new world, first pick a random spot and put a flag at the northernmost point. This is your starting spot.
- Scan the world in vertical slices, top to bottom, then rotate two lines of longitude with the shoulder buttons, then bottom to top. This keeps your reticle right in front of the world, which is where it's most controllable.
- Don't hold down the left trigger! Instead, "pulse" it -- pull it and release it repeatedly. This basically "strobes" the scanner. Keep your eyes looking at the globe so you keep the scanner in its vertical "slice". If you are doing it right, you'll be pulsing it about once every other line of "latitude". This still gives more than enough scanner overlap.
- Any hits you see will show up in the scrolling graph, and your peripheral vision will catch them. You see a big spike, go back and find it.
- Get back to your starting flag, and you're done.
Your overall scanning speed is doubled when you do this, and you miss nothing.
Using this style I can clear a world in under five minutes. It also demands a lot more attention, which reduces boredom, somewhat.
Also, amusingly, my wife loves the mining minigame. I had to promise her that she could mine for a full half hour tonight :-D I have a subcontractor!!! Who works for kisses!!!!!
Last edited by RepoMan; 02-02-2010 at 10:42 AM. Reason: every OTHER line of latitude
YES! The bar conversation was hilarious! Each time you walked by, the Turian would go a little further to making his real motives known. Won't spoil it, but it was my most memorable scene so far! It was awesome!
Game, set, match! Well played sir! Brilliant!
I haven't tried it much but I believe that horizontal scanning is faster. Or it could be my imagination. If you push to the right with both sticks (to scroll the planet and move the scanner) then it seems to go faster than usual. Just go all the way around then move it down a little and repeat. Again, could be imagining that it's faster but I'll check it out further.
There are vastly more resources in the map than you need for all the research projects.
My approach was this. I scanned only rich worlds. I skipped vertically up and down the planet while making it rotate by rhythmically tapping the scan button. It made something like a sine wave shape around the planet, giving reasonable coverage fairly quickly because of the faster cursor movement between taps. If I happened to click on a reasonable graph bump, I hillclimbed it for the probe. If not, what the hell; so I missed half the nodes between clicks, big deal. I also quit if I brought the planet down to moderate from rich (actually I quit before then when I had a surplus of most things). The only exception was for worlds that were obviously rich in something I needed, which was hardly ever the case.
This way I didn't bother sending probes to half the worlds at all, and only scanned at most half the resources on any given one. I left some vast amount of stuff behind, but so what. It's not like it would do me any good to have 500k palladium sitting around. (500k what, by the way? kilos?) I still hated every minute I wasted scanning, but at least I tried to optimize the time, since there are so many rich planets in every system, and I did want to get those 100% markers, though I can't explain why I wanted that either.
rowe33, that's definitely not faster than what I'm suggesting.
That reminds me. I'm also not a big fan of the lack of maps. I mean, okay, the levels are really linear so getting lost isn't an issue, but I don't like missing side areas and they do exist.
I'm digging Mordin. And Zaeed. And I'd probably like the others if I played with them more. I suppose I should, really. My experience on Normal is that the NPCs are entirely interchangeable combat-wise (they have different powers, sure, but it makes no real difference in effectiveness), and there's no influence system.
Thank you.
I think so too. They are all pretty capable, and it doesn't matter that much who you pick so far as I can tell, at least on normal. They all seem about the same on most missions, with a few exceptions for survivability based on defense and health. There is some slight convenience to having overload vs. shields or fire vs armor or whatever, but pretty much all the NPCs have some power or ammo or whatever that works against various types of foes.
I actually don't mind the scanning on the PC version. I have a G500 mouse, so whenever the time comes to scan I jack the mouse sensitivity way up and go to town. It typically takes me no longer than 3 minutes to deplete a planet. Free upgrade!
Also, I'm just loving the pure amount of content in this game. To speak to the shooter/RPG debate, I tend to see ME2 primarily as a squad based shooter with strong RPG elements. Seeing as shooters are typically quite short, this makes the breadth of the game all the more impressive to me. It's amazing that some planets seem to be just one-off set pieces, yet they still have completely unique (and, typically, completely awesome) art filling them. It's impressive and it makes every mission a joy to play.
I played Mass Effect for maybe 2 hours before growing bored with it, the shooting mechanics just weren't good enough. Mass Effect 2, on the other hand, has its biotic claws in me deep.
Anyone know why the game handles Omega differently then other locations? One of my early annoyances was how when I would finish a mission on Omega the game would throw me back into the ship and launch it. Meaning I'd have to go back and land to do the next thing on my list. What's strange is that other locations where there are multiple things to do don't make you do that. There are at least three other locations I've visited where I had multiple things to do and the game simply returned me to the main area on that location.
I think it's conditional. The end cinematic for recruiting The Assassin took place on the Normandy, so the mission ended with me standing in the room. I had to "redock" at [redacted] to finish the other quests there.
By that standard, isn't he loves the afterlife bar an inane compliment? Isn't gushing over the game inane? Seriously, are threads here turning into the equivalent of the similar-speech zones? Thread A is only for compliments, thread B is only for criticism, thread C is only for discussing the mechanics in an entirely neutral manner, etc.
How wonderful.
But I get it, everyone thinks whatever I have to say is inane. Too bad.
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