On the PC I can't imagine getting this many resources without developing RSI.Originally Posted by Brian Seiler
Yeah I'm one of the weirdos because I didn't let the minigames bother me (I will randomly not get annoyed by tedious things in certain games), but after blasting through planets for a few hours using a mouse, I had to take a break for most of the weekend.
There's no need to deplete any planets beyond Good, there are rich planets galore for every element.
Indeed. about half way in to the game, even good planets i would take about 20 seconds quickly scanning for anything special, not really caring if i missed anything. Only rich planets made me pay a bit of attention.
Cash will be the limiting factor in what upgrades you can do, not resources (except for the start of the game).
Or you could deplete a few Rich planets and not even bother with the vast majority of planets in the galaxy. I'm out of things to research now, having completed all the loyalty quests. (<3 Samara's.)
I'll maybe go scan a couple more planets if I have more research to do before endgame, but I think I'm done with that stuff for now.
you need to open up the scan interface of planets to see if there is an anomaly on them anyway...
Doesn't she tell you as soon as you enter orbit?
Yes. I just grinded through the galaxy over the course of the last couple of nights doing these. Gave me an excuse to use other party members on those throwaway missions.
Also I changed to hardcore difficulty for these side quests and having a much better time. A few hours ago the combat got ludicrously easy on veteran. This actually gives time for minor enemies to try to flank you a little and made me switch ammo types a few times as a soldier to kill enemies as efficiently as possible. It creates a minimum of thinking in the battles at least.
Flamethrower!
Last edited by Hammet; 02-17-2010 at 02:56 AM. Reason: Posted in the wrong thread.
The husks have a feature (bug?) where any kind of damaging power seems to kill them instantly. Throw, warp, incinerate, concussion shot, etc.
Last edited by hong; 02-17-2010 at 02:55 AM.
I haven't noticed that! I have noticed that aiming for the legs tends to take husks down very, very quickly, though.
Miranda's Slam power is very effective at breaking their legs, once you bring down their armor (higher difficulties)
With my adept on Hardcore, a single-shot from my heavy pistol is sufficient to strip off a Husk's armour. If a group of them rush me I shoot them all once and drop a wide singularity at my feet. It's a remarkably effective way to avoid being swarmed.
I'm playing on the next level down from hardcore (veteran?) and Husks aren't armored. Though I still haven't recovered the *** from the derelict ******.
I did this on the 360. I have crazy brains. Don't be like me. I also utterly ruined Brutal Legend for myself trying to find all those freaking stupid dragon statues. That hasn't happened yet with ME TOO, though - I'm hoping that I've grown as a person in the past month and a half.
It would be nice if I got a marketplace where I could turn this stuff into cash, though, even at, like, 1000-1 rate.
Agreed. All of the Privateer style space pirate/trader games have trained me to think of raw materials in the cargo hold of a ship as income waiting to happen, if I can just find the market that needs them.
It took me a little while to get into this game but now I'm hooked. At first I hated all of the changes from ME1 (which is the perfect console RPG for me) but then I started to warm up to the changes and I admired the realism and simplicity. At first I thought of the changes as dumbing down but I have grown to respect them and I applaud the new direction Bioware took with ME2. I also LOVE the mission approach to this game. Instead of the usual Bioware convention of 4 main missions followed by the last big mission, they break the gameplay down into a great variety of story, recruitment, loyalty, and random missions. Best of all, they are not too long and I never feel like I'm slogging through something and waiting to get to the last room (I must admit I felt this way in ME1 and especially in Dragon Age). I love the fact that I can fire it up and get through a random mission in 20 minutes, or just chill out and scan planets for a while. I also really like the non-linear exploration, the new mini-games (hated them at first), and scanning planets for resources. Heck, I even like flying my little ship around. I also love the fact that you can buy maps which open up even more places to explore. All in all, this feels more like a spiritual successor to Sentinel Worlds and Starflight than the first one did. There's tons more I could go into (great characters, upgrading, voice acting, etc.) but I just wanted to pop in and say how much I love this one.
Yeah, I really didn't expect to be cash constrained when I went around at the beginning and just bought everything in sight. I admire ME and Dragon Age for designing the economy so money is still valuable at the end game, but I wish I had known about it going in.
Wow, you must be the first person to say that they really like the mini-games. I liked the scanning at first but grew to hate it.
I wouldn't even mind it so much if everything wasn't so expensive (except for the few things that, inexplicably, are not). Buying a new Skin Weave upgrade so that I can do the Muscle Weave upgrade that's been sitting in my queue forever costs 90,000. That's more than I can earn on any one mission, and it feels like one whole hell of a lot of money when compared to other stuff. I'll freely admit that I cheated my way to riches in Dragon Age (not coincidentally, I liked the game a whole lot better after that), but at least in Dragon Age you could do things that were vaguely skill related that would earn you cash. If you wanted to farm wolves until you had enough money to buy the Blood Dragon Helmet, I mean, you'd be running back and forth between towns for a while, but it was theoretically possible. In this case, the money feels more like the upgrade points that you earn every time you go up a level. You can spend them on whatever you want, but you have a limited amount and the intent is that you can't buy everything, so there are tradeoffs. My expectation in RPGs is for money to be an unlimited resource, and starting me off at 150,000 credits because I was so awesome at the last game led me to believe that it was basically the same deal in this one, too. Add to that the fact that I could basically clean out all the hubs that I hit until Illium with the cash I had on hand at the time, and by the time I figured out that I should be directing my upgrade buys down specific lines and deliberately neglecting at least one weapon to maximize my benefit, it was too late. Letting me sell my resources at a slim profit would let me do something tedious and theoretically skill-based (or at least action based, and not coming with an email of a one legged man's ass in a space chair) and earn myself some bank. I might not do it, because, seriously, scanning planets would be terrible if I didn't play this game in two hour bursts (my current strategy is to hit every system connected to a relay, initially scan all the planets quickly for materials I need, and then either do the mission or park there and pick up the next night), but at least the money would feel like money.
Don't get me wrong; I wouldn't go out of my way to play them at an arcade or anything, but the more I play them the more I "like" them (I hated them at first). Plus they come in a nice wrapper of face validity in that they make sense in the game world.
They're okay, but again: there are lots of out-of-work developers out there. Fire that team and hire someone who can design minigames that don't make a joke out of your excellent AAA title.
The thing that gets me the most about planet scanning isn't that it's boring. It's that...why would intergalactic badass Commander Shepard spend his time scanning planets for minerals...when he has a whole ship, full of people, who would do it for him? I mean...get those guys who sit in the Crew Quarter to do it. They never work...
I never felt this way. I wound up being able to buy almost everything in the game. I might have missed maybe a couple items, but I pretty much maxed everything.
are you 100% sure you bought every upgrade? I still vote it is impossible just with the credits you receive from playing the game once. Likely still impossible with a rich 60 me1 import. Maybe possible if you imported a rich 60 me1 and have the bonus from beating me2. Very possible if you do a new game+ with a me2 character who already beat the game.
Cash isn't so short that you can only buy upgrades for a couple times, but you can't just max out everything fully either.
At some point the Illium shops get a second tier of upgrades, but I have no idea what triggers it (maybe story progress, or % of upgrades owned?). IIRC, there's one for each of the three non-toy selling stores, and they cost $75k each if you have a store discount. I think I missed them on my first game because no other stores get new inventory, so eventually I stopped checking once I'd cleaned a place out.
Perhaps the "probe" is actually one of those lazy crewmembers in a pod (complete with cot, pick-axe, and shovel) fired down to the surface to mine minerals in the hellish bowels of the Shepard Palladium Mine!
Combine this with the most requested gameplay feature at QT3 - the airlock - and you've got gameplay gold for ME3
"Out you go fecking Jacob. Don't come back until you've got all the Element Zero you can carry. We'll airlock you a drill next time we're in the system."
*Nice cut scene of Jacob clawing at the sheer rock with his bare hands for a time before inelegantly expiring*
"JAAAACCK! Report to the Hangar Bay."
I really like the way you think...
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