In ME1, you couldn't shoot the limbs off robots and make them crawl around like the Black Knight. in ME2, you can!Originally Posted by Shmtur
In ME1, you couldn't shoot the limbs off robots and make them crawl around like the Black Knight. in ME2, you can!
No, he meant Ilium. Anyway, "ITYM" is a stupid abbreviation!
Illium has two l's.
And what's up with that? Seems unlikely some alien race would call their planet by an obviously terrestrial-style name, but on the other hand, Illium is just wrong.
Unless maybe it's named after http://www.springerlink.com/content/vm361l3775q7g782/
The actual name iswhich is an Asari word that means 'the groin of the Terminus systems'. The automatic translators translate that as 'ilium' which was misspelled as Illium by Alliance astrocartographers.
Yeah I'm sure the world's Asari name is different.
Yeah, what is the Asari word for lower intestine, I wonder.
I'm only 10 hours in or so, I can't see the universal praise for this game. Then again I didn't like Borderlands, even in co-op. I loved the first Mass Effect; while the game mechanics were wonky sometimes (moon patrol, inventory), I felt, especially in the hardcore and insanity difficulties, that the core 3rd person cover-based shooter mechanic was well implemented and required situational and tactical awareness to be successful. And rolling an adept :).
I started on Veteran difficulty, and while they've really reinforced that you NEED to be behind cover to survive, the fights I've been in have seemed more like minigames than the epic space battles of the first one. You go from set piece room to set piece room, it really reminds me of the generic side mission battles of the first game rather than stuff like the assault on Virmire which I would describe as near perfect in terms of pacing, variance, and difficulty. Maybe it has to do with more of a prelude to the combat, all of the storyline planets you visited had a gradual build up to the boss. You were investigating rather than getting into a firefight within 5 minutes of landing.
So far I'm not really impressed. It's still Mass Effect and I like it, but I'm not sure it is a better game over the first one despite the improvements in interface.
I'm at around 31 hours now and just recruited the second to last party member. I don't know how some people are finishing this game in less than 30 hours!
1. It has a great main character. I hate the main character in 85-90 percent of games that focus on a very strong of specific central character, because the way the video game industry conceives of "heroism" or "cool" or "badassery" is mostly horrible. I mean, I liked Gears of War as a game, but Marcus Fenix as a hero? Max Payne? Fucking Duke Nukem?
Because of the RPG aspects with all the dialogue, the Mass Effect games take the opposite tack from say, Half Life, where the strength of Gordon Freeman is in how silent and blank he is, a vessel you can pour your projections into, Sheperd is definitely a specific person, even if you can steer him or her somewhat within the Renegade/Paragon personality range (and I recommend playing a female Sheperd, Jennifer Hale does a fantastic job). If you don't like your Sheperd after a few hours of play, heck if you don' tlike your Sheperd after the opening sequence of Mass Effect 1, there's a level where the game is lost to you.
(And yes, I agree that not playing ME1 first is nuts.)
2. It's the best Space Opera universe in the history of video gaming. Yeah, of all time, is what I'm saying. The music, the visual design, the homages and shout-outs, the fact that it is recognizably derivative of so many other things (A little Babylon 5 here, some Star Wars there, some Fred Saberhagen the other place), it's a love letter to the genre, the cumulative genre-awareness the game bathes you in is just amazing. There's a revelation about the Asari in ME2 that had me literally clapping with delight, it's funny, it's creepy, it's a great shout out, and it makes perfect sense. Some of the PA announcements and NPC chatter are genius.
3. I realize that for some they went too far, but Bioware has to be commended for the brutally ruthless way that they went about fixing or excising pretty much everything people didn't like about ME1, to focus on 3 things only: Atmosphere, narrative/character, and combat. Crappy inventory in ME1? Boom, essentially no inventory at all in ME2. Boring side planets with goofy Mako controls? Fine, gone. Folks may disagree with specific choices (I miss the Mako), but please admire that Bioware is not fucking around here in "Oh well we fixed the texture pop in problem and called it a day." mode.
4. I honestly think the combat is better than a lot of people are giving it credit for. One thing I notice in particular is that the set-piece fight environments give you a lot more opportunities to play with movement and range than the previous game, if you're a sniper or a close in-fighter. In the first game I could do pretty much anything I wanted just with my pistol, here the need to change weapons tactically is much stronger.
If anyone still has their Amazon Inferno armor code, may as well sell it on ebay. I didn't realize they were going for around 1/3 of the game's full price. Kind of crazy...
I don't agree with this. I played Mass Effect 1 right before settling into ME2, and so I have a very clear memory of what Virmire was. And it is exactly the same as the missions in ME2: set piece battle after set piece battle, first in the Mako (where you're funnelled into one enemy encounter after another, first in canyons and then on foot to open gates to proceed), and then in the main base where you move from room to room, fighting Geth and Krogan and having the occasional Renegade/Paragon decision. It's slightly more open from ME2 in the sense that there are few doglegs you can investigate, but it's a far, far cry from some sort of varied experience.
And don't get me wrong - I think that Virmire is the strongest mission in Mass Effect 1: the environment is fantastic (I'll never forget those storm clouds off on the horizon), the music is fantastic, the pacing is fantastic, but it's also pretty much an exact template for a Mass Effect 2 mission, sans Mako.
I finished it with a male Paragon Soldier, so I'm trying a female Renegade Adept for my second game, but her biotics seem wonky sometimes. When Shepherd uses Singularity, she actually has to throw a glowing blue ball at the enemy (though it has some ability to follow them around corners, which is amusing). She also throws that same glowing blue ball at the target when she uses Warp, but when another party member uses Warp, it just happens instantly on target.
Is my Singularity or Warp bugged when Shepherd uses them, or are Shepherd's biotics supposed to look different from other biotic team members?
I'm going to try to pay attention to this as much as I can. I barely remember a lasting moment from ME1 unlike everyone else talking about their favorite parts. That's a shame. Maybe I just don't care for space opera in my RPG but I'm going to try.
I think for the versus thread, it's probably going to come down to this aspect of ME vs. old fashioned tactical combat in DA, which is my first love. My bet is all the other bland stuff in each game will end up a wash.
Your game is fine. That's just how it is. Shepherd throws a ball to use most of his biotics, everyone else's just work instantly. Which is good and bad. Garrus using a concussing shot that works instantly is a little weird, since he doesn't actually fire a shot to do it.
It might seem bad, but I believe that there are balancing factors to it. I think Shepherd's cooldowns are a little shorter, for instance.
I think ME1 did a better job of hiding its linearity in plain site. An elevated highway on Feros, a road carved into the side of a mountain on Noveria, or following the path of a river (or some kind of moving water) carved through rock on Virmir, etc. Those things can only be linear, whereas ME2 has many linear paths through environments that don't inherently need to be linear, making their linearity more obviously a design choice.
ME1 often followed a linear crawl with a hub-spoke area, and let you choose how to clear it. Example: The mountain road crawl on Noveria leads to the computer reactivation hub, with spokes leading to the roof (communications fixing task), the reactor (reactivate), and another thing (I'm drawing a blank, but I know there were 3 tasks here). The hub-spoke structure is just another way to organize linear map sections, but when you link them to a common hub, and let the player freely wander around within the entire hub-spoke setup at will, it makes the setting feel real and open, even it if is just a collection of linear maps.
ME2 mostly uses non-branching linear maps, and the linearity isn't hidden well. Also, you usually know where fights are going to happen, because you'll see things like concrete highway barricades helpfully arranged in the lobby of an (evil) office or (evil) warehouse. ME1 had man-made or Geth-made barricades too, but they actually had enemies standing behind, because they'd made those barricades for their use, not yours. In ME1, environmental cover wasn't so obviously placed by a designer looking at the map and clicking on all the spots where it would fun to have a protected firing position.
Just to be clear, I think ME2 is a lot of fun, and I'm on my second playthru, but it is a weird collection of polished and sloppy design elements. Example: Every groundside location is unique and looks awesome, but also linear and littered with firefight cover in a way that pulls you right out of the (beautiful) environment and screams "this is a fake game location."
I guess it'll take until next gen at the earliest for people stop using the word "linear" as shorthand for "bad."
Thank you.
I was wondering about that, because they seemed short to me too.
I don't think linear is bad if it seems natural and fits comfortably in the environment. It becomes bad when the linear path is in conflict with the environment, forcing the player to notice the gamey-ness of the map. Its like seeing the boom mike in a movie - I already know its there, but I don't want them to force me to think about it, because that hurts suspension of disbelief.
When do we get waist-high cover that is less blatant? I'm actually kind of curious what promising game design efforts are being made there or if it's already been done in this generation.
I disagree, Star Control 2 still wins, you know why? All those 'homages' and 'shout-outs', to me are pathetic ripoffs, the ME universe has very little originality of its own, its like someone decided to swipe all these different parts from different sci-fi shows and sources and then put them together in an unoriginal way, with the original content being the Asari, which was horribly pathetic attempt that felt like an excuse for having a do-able blue chick. I haven't played ME2 yet, hopefully its better about it, but I'm not holding my breath.
I REALLY want to pilot the ship.
I know I'm not the only one who wants a game similar to ME2 combined with something like Privateer. Sure it's two different games, I'll gladly pay double the price for it.
Pleeeaaassseee.
Whenever I have to travel through space in ME2 I think of what could be.
I don't think 'linear' on its own is the problem. I think it is that ME2 is so obviously linear and this was accentuated by a lot of the non-essential tasks being stripped out. ME1 was just as linear, but broke the fights up more often with jaunts around in the Mako or conversations. In ME2 it was often blatantly a case of Cut-scene, Room, Fight, Room, Fight, Room, Fight, Cut-scene.
I don't want to criticize them too much for this, because this was a MASSIVE improvement over the combat of ME1 but I think working on the variety of the combat scenarios a little more would help.
If they can apply the same creativity to the combat scenarios as they did to the art direction and world design then they would be set.
Every time I think 'I disgaree with that statement so much', I then read the next thing you say and I disagree with it so much more!
No argument here. Any parts of the world that you fight in don't feel real, and I think the Mako (as hated as it's handling was) went a long way toward making the world feel "real" by getting you out of the corridors and into more free-form areas. (Of course, the fact that you drove it to one of three building layouts made it feel "fake").
I think that the artificiality of ME2's combat spaces has a lot to do with how they pipeline their content. They use scrum, they have some mystical way to churn out a lot of content quickly, but I think that there's some guidelines in place that make it all feel kind of samey/similar. You have to make unsafe choices sometimes and see how they turn out, but that's the antithesis of rapid content development.
One thing that I am excited about is the Hammerhead Tank (aka return of the Mako) and how they implement it. With the Hammerhead, they could return to the more "real-feeling" two-stage missions of driving to the objective, and then getting out of the vehicle and rocking faces.
That little toy spaceship isn't moving itself around the galaxy map...that's you, Ace Pilot Jazar! But yeah Privateer + all the space opera of ME2 would be pretty insane.
There's a great revelation about the Asari in ME2. It could itself be taken as a shout out, but it's still awesome and very fitting.
Look, As soon as I said what I said I knew the Star Control, Wing Commander and Descent Freespace partisans would come out, that's fine, those were great games. I see the Mass Effect series as a love letter to Space Opera, with great homages. I think the game is way, way too smart and deliberate in these choices to be taken as a "pathetic ripoff". But I can't tell you how to feel about it.
That's been one of my pipe dream game ideas for something like 15 years now.
Star Control rocks, Mass Effect rocks, I'm going to do a "Shipyard Refit" from Star Control 2 mash-up with "New Worlds" from Mass Effect one of these days.
Derek Smart would like to have a word with you.
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