Mass Effect I Like Mass Effect 1

[Iucounu]

I forgot how terrible the enemy and companion AI was in mass effect 1. it's the most frustrating thing ever

I'm replaying it right now and it's so bad it's almost impressive. I watched Ashley shoot into a wall for a full fight. If I could tell her to even take one step to the right like in the older Bioware games it wouldn't be a issue.

You can, but there's no guarantee she'll obey.

 

[Drakortha]

The correct way to play through ME1 is to set the combat difficulty to Casual and just play through it for the story and important decision making so you'll have a save to import into ME2. The combat is the weakest part of ME1 so you're not missing out on anything by speeding through the battle sections. Then put the difficulty back up to Veteran or Insanity or whatever for ME2-ME3.

 

[tritosine2k]

The correct way to play

Import maps to blender, set up hemisphere lighting etc.

 

[Qarthadqart]

The correct way to play through ME1 is to set the combat difficulty to Casual and just play through it for the story and important decision making so you'll have a save to import into ME2. The combat is the weakest part of ME1 so you're not missing out on anything by speeding through the battle sections. Then put the difficulty back up to Veteran or Insanity or whatever

ME1 combat allowed for frequent and varied ability use, which is the interesting part of combat and was greatly simplified in ME2.

 

[Drakortha]

The correct way to play through ME1 is to set the combat difficulty to Casual and just play through it for the story and important decision making so you'll have a save to import into ME2. The combat is the weakest part of ME1 so you're not missing out on anything by speeding through the battle sections. Then put the difficulty back up to Veteran or Insanity or whatever

ME1 combat allowed for frequent and varied ability use, which is the interesting part of combat and was greatly simplified in ME2.

I agree, they dumbed down the combat in ME2 and ME3 but at least it feels more kinetic moment to moment. They committed to making the games lean more towards action, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. Unless they include a tactical camera like DA:O there's no point in adding more depth. Without it, that kind of variation in abilities just feels too cumbersome and clunky with 3rd person controls.

Still, the pacing in ME1 is perfect so long as you can breeze through the combat sections. There's actually too much repetitive combat in ME2 & ME3 which drags those games down as well IMO, and so the gains they made by making combat more fluid and dynamic gets overshadowed by beating the player over the head with endless waves of enemies. I'd argue that combat is not great in any of these games. Just for different reasons.

This has been my consensus after just having beat 1,2,3, and then went through the 1st one again in the past few weeks.

 

[Qarthadqart]

The correct way to play through ME1 is to set the combat difficulty to Casual and just play through it for the story and important decision making so you'll have a save to import into ME2. The combat is the weakest part of ME1 so you're not missing out on anything by speeding through the battle sections. Then put the difficulty back up to Veteran or Insanity or whatever

ME1 combat allowed for frequent and varied ability use, which is the interesting part of combat and was greatly simplified in ME2.

I agree, they dumbed down the combat in ME2 and ME3 but at least it feels more kinetic moment to moment. They committed to making the games lean more towards action, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. Unless they include a tactical camera like DA:O there's no point in adding more depth. Without it, that kind of variation in abilities just feels too cumbersome and clunky with 3rd person controls.

Still, the pacing in ME1 is perfect so long as you can breeze through the combat sections. There's actually too much repetitive combat in ME2 & ME3 which drags those games down as well IMO, and so the gains they made by making combat more fluid and dynamic gets overshadowed by beating the player over the head with endless waves of enemies. I'd argue that combat is not great in any of these games. Just for different reasons.

This has been my consensus after just having beat 1,2,3, and then went through the 1st one again in the past few weeks.

I do think the ME games would benefit from a freer camera. There's a mod that allows that for ME2 and 3, and I wish it existed for the first one. That said, the real advantage of free cam is that it's easier to position teammates. Abilities feel the same since they travel instantly anyway. In any case I never thought using abilities was particularly troublesome. The real-time hotkeys are clunky, but if you're pausing like a civlized man is it really different from KOTOR?

Overally I think combat in ME1 is better paced than 2, because the talent system (and bad AI aim) lets you advance and stay out of cover, which is far more necessary in the second game. I think ME2 is probably the best one to lower the difficulty, since enemies are hyper accurate on insanity so you'll spend even more time in cover, while in ME1 they're never as dangerous, but still need to be tough enough for talents to matter.

 

[tritosine2k]

The correct way to play

Import maps to blender, set up hemisphere lighting etc.

Do this:

 

[Iucounu]

The correct way to play through ME1 is to set the combat difficulty to Casual and just play through it for the story and important decision making so you'll have a save to import into ME2. The combat is the weakest part of ME1 so you're not missing out on anything by speeding through the battle sections. Then put the difficulty back up to Veteran or Insanity or whatever

ME1 combat allowed for frequent and varied ability use, which is the interesting part of combat and was greatly simplified in ME2.

I'm currently playing ME2 on highest difficulty, which frequently requires the use of different combat mechanics (weapons, ammo types, biotics), both your own and your squad mates, often in combination. Level designs in ME2 also often result in varied combat (advance forward, do tactical retreats, take cover, stay mobile).

In my recent ME1 run as Vanguard class I was supposed to engage enemies at close range with shotguns, but the hopeless movement mechanics didn't make that fun; especially when the game glued your character behind cover, and then took forever to unglue again, and your squad mates constantly getting in your way. Using the pistol at range with Marksman talent was much more effective most of the time. That said I wasn't allowed to set a higher difficulty than medium, so the comparison might be unfair.

 

[tritosine2k]

Just outdo this in blender bro

Pew-pew part won't be hard and no need for characters as much.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Does talking Saren into offing himself alter the subsequent fight at all? I might be wrong but I remember being supremely pissed off that you're forced into the crap fight with Cyborg Zombie Saren regardless of how you deal with him, seemed like yet another totally fake choice.

It doesn't, but it makes little difference, since the "true" final boss is just a pushover. I'm just speculating here, but I wouldn't be surprised if forcing the player into a fight was something implemented due to external meddling. It is so poorly-made that it feels like they nerfed the guy just to make sure it was still a diplomatic victory in spirit.

I doubt it. If it was external meddling then it was most likely coming internally from BioWare but external from the Mass Effect team. But I doubt that’s the case, Mass Effect is a third person shooter, they were making a third person shooter action game and probably wanted their action game to end with action. Mass Effect isn’t Fallout, Fallout 2, or Arcanum where the linguistic side of things is just as valid a way out of a situation as combat; it’s an action game where dialogue options are more there for flavoring and maybe change some detail about how some combat situation will play out. But they want you shooting stuff.

 

[MakenBro]

I still remember when an Asari commando used a biotic power and caused my Shepard to get stuck and die under a platform during the fight with Benezia.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

ME1 is a case of the whole being more than the sum of its parts.

It’s more the opposite. It’s got interesting parts, but the parts don’t come together to make a good whole. Mass Effect 1 is good in the abstract, I like the idea of it more than the reality of the finished game they made. The memory of the game is much better than the actuality of playing it, since the memory of it is all the cool aesthetic stuff it’s doing divorced for the actual gameplay, or the many all too samey drab looking location, or the fairly bad level layout of some location.

Also, part of what was interesting about playing the first game when it came out was knowing the idea of what the Mass Effect series was meant to be and wondered how the next game would play with this very easy to spot through line moments that you were meant to be able to effect throughout the trilogy. But then you play Mass Effect 2 and it becomes clear they’ve completely abandoned the last remaining idea the series was meant to be build around. Mass Effect is a very frustrating series, because when it was in-development they were laying out all these really cool sounding idea, and none of them made it in, and the one thing that did make it in (the continuing threads) ultimately only looked like it made it in. And you know what, it really sucks how they dropped the ball on all their cool ideas for the game, but if the gameplay had been good none of that would matter since at least you still got a good game, a different kind of good game than they seemingly originally set out to make, but good none the less...but that didn’t happen.

 

[Vorark]

The series potential was squashed by Bioware's ineptitude but, to this day, I still enjoy playing ME1, flaws and all and in spite of ME2/3 making it retroactively worse. After all these years, I still come back. That, to me, is being more than the sum of its parts.