Review One of the best games Bioware has ever crafted

[easychord]

Sorry; but the 'see no eveil, hear no evil, plugging the ears and closing the eyes strategy like a 3 year old' should not be a viable option in a RPG.

Because RPGs are all about removing options from the player in order to force them to act heroically?

 

[RK47]

uh wtf? I'm using a mouse, what is this lock on thing you speak of? I wasn't even talking about the missions , some random encounters are truly fun affairs like driving past a bunch of rival gangs and do a drive by with 3 taggers. Then we bail from the car, hide in an alley as a gang war triggered, as the first wave entered the alley, I aimed my SMG at the fuel tank. Boom. And any police chase > mako shit that ME kept dishing out.

 

[RK47]

Sorry; but the 'see no eveil, hear no evil, plugging the ears and closing the eyes strategy like a 3 year old' should not be a viable option in a RPG.

Because RPGs are all about removing options from the player in order to force them to act heroically?

I think what volourn and most defenders of bioware trying to say is that Bioware wanted to avoid a KOTOR issue that created an illusion of two endings but one canon for the sequel. Just looked at how KOTOR 2 came out confused over the Exile's gender, motivations and his reputation at the end of KOTOR 1.

I only hope they take the final decision (at the very least) into account when booting up ME2 story though. Make a 2 version starter or something. Opening vignettes like TOEE is nice. A 'The Story so Far' intro would be great.

"My name is Shepard. I am the first Human Specter. The one responsible for stopping Geth's return a few months back...etc. In the war I had to make a hard choice etc" The tone differed depending on the Paragon vs Renegade scale. I'm 100% sure they won't take into account of ALL the decisions you took, but definitely it'd be a binary introduction. If you're Paragon you'd be treated to how you saved everyone you could, while a Renegade sacrificed anything to get the mission done.

 

[easychord]

What they can do is limited by the fact that they have two more sequels. RPG developers can get away with avoiding the expense of branching story by saving the branching until the end of the game but doing a three part epic sage takes that fig leaf away. Defending the mostly superficial choices that you were allowed in the game with narrative reasons is weak when all they are doing is setting up the scene for ME2 so it can start with a cut scene saying, "My name is Shepard, saviour of the galaxy. I had to make some hard choices but somehow it seems like none of that matters now."

 

[RK47]

Uh huh, they can have either Anderson & Udina giving the briefing or the Council & Udina for intro in relation with your Paragon/Renegade ultimate decision in the previous game (Save/Let Council Die)

 

[easychord]

It doesn't seem likely that they would duplicate voice acting and animation and plot for the whole of the game. A brief skit, if anything, to explain why whatever choice you made leads to the same point. Honestly, the potential bugs support costs of including a feature where you load your old save game lead me to think that they won't even bother to do that.

 

[Badgermaster]

If the sequel doesn't bother to put Locational damage in combat, I'd just set difficulty to easy and not give a fuck. There's no need for levelling up in Mass Effect. The level up mechanics are unnecessary, but seeing that labelling something as RPG makes it sell more and makes great excuse for 'slightly weak combat' , why not eh?

Eh...Mass Effect's combat system isn't where the improvements in the overall combat experience needs to be, it's more in the enemy and encounter design fields where they need to raise the bar. Mass Effect was rather blah in combat because you basically fought the same things over and over again; bipedal mooks with laser guns, with an occasional other type of robot, or acid spitting zombie/bug. And the encounters were rather poor as well. Hardly ever were you placed in a tense or interesting situation. It was mostly the "5 enemies in a 10 by 10 room" crap. Where were the desperate fights back to back against unrelenting foes? Where was the rush out of the base with the charges set to blow at any moment? Where was the alien menace picking off your allies one by one if you don't tread lightly? Where's the fight in the midst of an artillery barrage? Or where's the good old fashion giant clusterfuck battle? All Mass Effect had was the cool trench fight on the Citadel towards the end and the Mako driving through Illios to get to the portal in time.

Agreed. Any or all of those scenarios would have been good to see.

I also never got the sense that the Geth were in any way dangerous, as an AI killing machine would be - An opponent that has superhuman physical and mental speed, strength, senses, and accuracy, with none of the drawbacks of a fragile meatbody.

Instead, my squad of 3 baseline humans, two of whom spent most of their time firing into walls, plowed through hordes of them like they were kobolds.

It should have been an "Oh shit!" moment the second a single Geth showed up on the battlefield.

They could have been established as a much more frightening opponent right from the start if you had landed on Eden Prime to find that the force that wiped out the entire colony consisted of Saren, and maybe 5 or so Geth.

And if an explanation was needed as to why Shepard and crew even had a chance against a foe like that, it's simple - Bleeding-edge military-grade bio- and nano-tech enhancements. We're already using nanotech to construct artificial retroviruses, after all. I can only imagine what we'll be doing with it over 200 years from now.

And if a weaker opponent were still needed for padding out the game with combat, they could simply have increased the amount of brainwashed organics working with Saren.

There's a lot of dramatic potential that went unrealized.

 

[Andyman Messiah]

uh wtf? I'm using a mouse, what is this lock on thing you speak of?

I think he means that you have to hold the right mouse button to make the crosshairs pop out. Don't really get what's so difficult about that. Shooting stuff in San Andreas was easy.

Oh, and Paragon ending: Lawful Good. Renegade ending: Dick ending. You punch out civilians and let species die just because you're a dick? Maybe it's not evil but it's damn sure like being a fucking dick.

Also the renegade meter is colored Sith red!!!

 

[Volourn]

"Understood. Although I did feel, with the story presented to me as it was, that humanity would do a much better job in the leadership role. There was never any point in the story where the Council was presented as intelligent and competent.

I took that final route, choosing humanity to lead, as the "hardball politics/harsh pragmatism for the greater good" one. If the former Council had to die and humanity had to fill the power vacuum in order to ensure the survival of sentient life in the galaxy, so be it. What's killing a few hundred to save a few quadrillion, after all."

Yeah, but that decision is still racist. Even if one were to deem the Council as incompetents (and, I'm willing to agree here), it's pretty extreme racism to then claim that all non humans races are incompetents so only humans can be Council members. That's where the racism/'evil' comes in.

It be like if Obama becomes Presdident, and he does a horrible job... That makes him a poor president... it doens't mean all balcks would be poor presidents.. Just like Bush (if you hate him) being a bad president means all white presidents are horrible either..

 

[sportforredneck]

Yeah, but that decision is still racist.

Boo hoo. Racism is good.

 

[Desmodus Rotundus]

Well then the game itself is racist if it depicts aliens as useless compared to humans.

Or actually it's speciesist not racist

 

[Chefe]

Fuck I could not finish this game. It bored me to tears. I didn't even get to have sex with Ashley...

I can't take all these shitty modern RPGs anymore!!!