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LTTP: Mass Effect 2- The Benefits of Good Pacing.

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I just pretty much lost a whole weekend into playing Mass Effect 2 and this game really hit home for me how important pacing is as a way to combat gaming fatigue. There wasn't a single point this weekend where I felt like I wanted to stop playing b/c I was just tired or bored. The moment to moment encounters this time around are much more varied than in the first Mass Effect and the streamlined stats/item system dangles just enough of a carrot to keep you going.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the minimal character building you get this time around makes sense from a story perspective as your Shepard is already galactic badass and that there would be a bit of disconnect if you had to rebuild character stats again. It also serves as a good way to balance the encounters without having to adjust the levels of enemies accordingly. At the same time, I do wish though that there was a bit more customization in gear (it seems like Bioware games have a trend of loot tables becoming worse). At least the combat forces you to use all the weapons (most of the time) given the limited ammo and how certain guns are better for damaging certain bars.

As someone who just recently finished Mass Effect, the combat itself is a breath of fresh air. The gunplay, abilities and the cover system working together being the highlight. It all just works a lot better and I don't find myself having to pause the game at all. I also really liked that they assigned a waypoint button for each party member this time around as it makes directing them to flank or provide cover fire that much easier (or maybe I didn't use it in the first?).

My biggest gripe with this game is the lack of AA and the "consolized" user interface as I'm playing this on PC. This is especially disappointing since Demiurge did a fairly good job on the interface for the PC version first Mass Effect and I feel in that aspect, it's a downgrade. This game also doesn't feel like a RPG anymore but really the former isn't as broken as Borderlands and the latter is a borderline complaint (better itemization would fix it IMO). Overall this is definitely one of my GOTY of 2010.
 
You can force AA through the videocard control panels. This is nothing new with the Unreal Engine 3. Game runs great with 8x AA on a 5850 (60 fps lock).
 
Be prepared for a retread of the items/no-items RPG/shooter debates.

Glad you enjoyed it. As for the AA, you can force it on PC if you really want it.
 
Mass Effect 2 is a game I wish actually had a 40 of content in it's main quest. I feel like I could of played that game for over a 100 hours if I could.
 
I enjoyed the hell out of Mass Effect 2, but at the same time.I found that there were elements from the first game I.missed immensely. The biggest being that I felt I had way more influence over my decisions as Shepard and what I did in 1 versus being led around by the constricted options in 2.
 
Mass Effect 2 is leagues better than the first one ONLY if you're a shooter fan. Pretty much everything outside of the shooting mechanics kinda blows in comparison. The story, the villains, the scale, all suffer.
 
Mifune said:
Mass Effect 2 is leagues better than the first one ONLY if you're a shooter fan. Pretty much everything outside of the shooting mechanics kinda blows in comparison. The story, the villains, the scale, all suffer.
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I was disappointed with ME2. Where were the reapers?
 
My only issue with the game was the tedious mining...

What would have made a nice replacement is to have a button on the survey screen to "survey the planet" and then have the planet change color on its surface depending on the mineral layout...High concentrations of ore would shine red and poor concentrations would shine blue. You get the idea...

Finding radio broadcasts can be handled in the same way as it was done or allow it to appear during the survey.

I'm surprised that after the first one and it's tedious surveys, they didn't streamline it further. Perhaps they are too concerned with extending the gameplay?

Other than that, I thought it was perfect and after searching Youtube for videos, it's clear I missed a ton of stuff. I must replay it someday...
 
Exciting when you are playing it, but when you look back at what (if anything) actually happened in the story it is kind of disappointing.

The game is still really fun.
 
The end boss alone makes 2 worse than 1.


And, good on your for enjoying it. I wish I could have.
 
&#8704 said:
Who gives a shit what Mass Effect 2 is? It's leagues better than Mass Effect 1, which is more than enough.
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I suppose I deserve this after making the Zelda Timeline thread.

Oh look its already started.
 
Pterion said:
I was disappointed with ME2. Where were the reapers?
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Not close to a spoiler, but just in case:
Yeah, the Collectors were no Reapers, that's for sure. Hell, the Geth were more interesting than the Collectors.

I stil haven't beaten ME2 so maybe I'm speaking too soon. Problem is I have little desire to play through it at the moment.

It's a very good game but a lousy sequel.
 
I'm replaying ME1 right now, and ME2 (which I haven't played yet) will be here tomorrow!

ME1 is one of my favorite games ever, so I have high hopes.
 
ME2 was awesome; stellar in pretty much every way, as far as I'm concerned (including most of the elements where the design decision was "That's dumb. Let's just leave it out"). It's definitely my favourite western RPG, at least. I'm looking forward to the couple months leading up to ME3, just so I'll have had enough time since my last ME2 playthrough for everything to feel fresh for a 'final, complete' run to import into the next game.

Lost Planet 2 unseated it as my favourite game this year, but other than that, I think it edges out MH3, SMG2, etc as my second favourite so far.
 
My biggest gripe were the lack of exploration, replaced by a shitty boring minigame to boot, and the fact that the game is little more than an elaborate setup for the third one, in retrospect.



That said, it's still one of the best games of this year, easily.
 
Mifune said:
Mass Effect 2 is leagues better than the first one ONLY if you're a shooter fan. Pretty much everything outside of the shooting mechanics kinda blows in comparison. The story, the villains, the scale, all suffer.
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But see, to me the shooting mechanics were just so bad in the first game and feel so good in the second game that I can look past the flaws. I guess it's the old thing of gameplay versus story... I'm gonna go for the first in this case. Mass Effect was just such a chore to play that everything else just got bogged down, and the pacing and combat in the second is just so much better that even the mediocre still feels better than the fantastic in the first, if that makes sense.

Put another way, shitty gameplay and great everything else is worse for me than great gameplay and just good everything else. I can understand why others would feel differently though.
 
0OoO0 said:
Was wondering...will Mass Effect 3 still be released on xbox 360 or will it be next gen?
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Planned for this gen.

On another note, I have no idea why there is no PS3 version of the game. Well, I do, but I wish they'd port it so more people could have fun.
 
Mister_Bubbles said:
Even with an ATI? Please, do tell :)
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Get the Catalyst program that usually comes bundled with the drivers. Open it. Go to the AA section. Remove the check from the "use application settings" box. Then choose the type of AA you want to use and the amount. This will force most games to use the AA settings that you selected.
 
Parts said:
But see, to me the shooting mechanics were just so bad in the first game and feel so good in the second game that I can look past the flaws. I guess it's the old thing of gameplay versus story... I'm gonna go for the first in this case. Mass Effect was just such a chore to play that everything else just got bogged down, and the pacing and combat in the second is just so much better that even the mediocre still feels better than the fantastic in the first, if that makes sense.

Put another way, shitty gameplay and great everything else is worse for me than great gameplay and just good everything else. I can understand why others would feel differently though.
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I would have agreed with you for the first five hours or so but when EVERYTHING (every mission, side mission, character mission) turns into shooting at robots or pirates or bug things while crouched behind packing crates, I start to feel the fatigue.
 
"Yo Sheppard, so these guys called the Collectors are an IMMINENT threat as they are abducting humans all over the galaxy"

"So should I go and stop them?"

"Actually, you should mine the fuck out of every planet in the entire galaxy, do some pointless errands for your teammates and make some bland black-and-white moral decisions before you go"

"Oh ok, makes sense"
 
I need to replay this 2 more times to form a concrete opinion. But ME2 is one of the best games this gen. But slightly under ME1.

ME1 story is my favorite story in a game, beat out KOTOR.
 
Mifune said:
Mass Effect 2 is leagues better than the first one ONLY if you're a shooter fan. Pretty much everything outside of the shooting mechanics kinda blows in comparison. The story, the villains, the scale, all suffer.
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I agree. ME1 with the mechanics of ME2 = perfection.
 
I guess I don't have any complaints with the dialogue system b/c I never thought Bioware was all that great with dialogue in the first place (at least the games that I've played this gen- DA is probably the best out of all of them). The original ME didn't exactly blow me away with its dialogue so my expectations were lowered for ME2. I mean the fact is that multiple dialogue choice lead to the same answer (and same response by Shepard for that matter) and they do a piss poor job of hiding it in both games.

Forgot to add that point blank shotgun kills are so satisfying in this game...
 
Coxswain said:
stellar in pretty much every way, as far as I'm concerned (including most of the elements where the design decision was "That's dumb. Let's just leave it out")
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Mass Effect 2 is definitely the more fun of the two.

But in terms of customization I'd rather go with ME: Min/Maxing Til the Break of Dawn than ME2: Galaxy Wide Stripmine.
 
I just beat ME1 and ME2 back to back, I prefer the first game in almost every regard. My biggest problem with 2 is how lazy BioWare got with the mission design. 90% of the missions are walk down linear corridor, shoot things. What happened to the missions like Noveria? The way they mixed exploration, dialogue, combat and story into one mission was great. You just don't get that in 2. And don't remind me of the music :[
 
The pacing in ME2 was awful IMO. I spent the first few hours playing, waiting for the game to start and the intro to end and then I had this moment when I realized I WAS playing the game.

It wasnt a great moment.

The first felt so much more epic. I felt like there was a lot at stake and there was a clear villain. In part 2, you encountered the main villain so infrequently that I often stopped caring about the story so much. The sense of urgency was non-existent. And the final suicide mission didnt feel like a suicide mission at all. It was the same as any other mission. All of the encounters felt exactly the same as well. It felt like gears of war where you could see an fight coming because everything was waist high. I remember in the first game there was this multi-tiered mission where some of your team went one way, some went another. There was coordination, and it felt like this giant battle. There was non of that here. Just corridor encounters all game.

And dont get me started on planet scanning.

I did like the side missions more though. Felt like there was a point to them as they had their on little story. Shooting was better as well obviously. All in all, Id say they did a better job of crafting a better "game" but they somehow lost the key components that made the first game so great. I never understand people saying 2 vastly better. They replaced this great chase through space and a damn epic finale with some "make friends" simulation.

Good game but not better than the first IMO.
 
dralla said:
I just beat ME1 and ME2 back to back, I prefer the first game in almost every regard. My biggest problem with 2 is how lazy BioWare got with the mission design. 90% of the missions are walk down linear corridor, shoot things. What happened to the missions like Noveria? The way they mixed exploration, dialogue, combat and story into one mission was great. You just don't get that in 2. And don't remind me of the music :[
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Yep, this is my biggest gripe with ME2. I loved Noveria and Feros in ME1: few shooting sections, dialogue here, fetch quest there, some backtrack and Mako driving, and then the final boss. Variety. The mission structure in ME2 was mostly just a shooting corridor after shooting corridor with very few dialogues in-between.

And what .GqueB. said: thanks to all those chest-height "walls", every time you entered a room you could instantly notice whether or not there will be an encounter. While people complained about level design in ME1, ME2 was no better in that aspect. Actually, it was worse thanks to all those useless chest-height items and boxes.
 
I want Presidium back in ME3, absence of the place was so disappointing, they could just change it a bit and add more areas to it, Citadel is a very interesting place, I was really looking forward to spend more time in there, it wasn't the same in ME2, none of hubs were as good as ME1. ME2 has better side quests but main quest is much stronger in ME1.
 
OP, I couldn't agree more with your pacing comments...it's one of the rare games this gen that i could have played non-stop if it weren't for food, sleep, work, family etc.
 
ME2 does have a number of positive qualities. Good pacing definitely isn't one of them. The combat was poor in the original, and the mako was difficult to control, but how it paced these elements out with the story was very well done. The sequel doesn't come close to living up to that. Far too much repetitive combat.
 
I was disappointed with the story and the plot holes became more evident on each subsequent playthrough. Everything else was top-notch and I've completed the game 10+ times in the last 5 months. It's definitely atop my 2010 GOTY list and I'm hoping we start getting some snippets of information on ME3 soon.
 
I totally agree with you, OP. Mass Effect 2 was the first game in years that I could play all day without stopping. I loved every minute of it.

Except the mining, which was just horrendous on PC... so I ended up using a save game editor to give myself like 999,999 of all minerals.
 
george_us said:
Mass Effect 2 is a game I wish actually had a 40 of content in it's main quest. I feel like I could of played that game for over a 100 hours if I could.
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When you say 40 to you mean forté?
 
great game, though maybe a little too much shooting. I found that the story was very lacking when compared to ME1. ME1 had gave me the feeling like I took down a bad ass, but it ain't over yet. Whereas ME2 seemed like a side story. The faster game play sort of made up for it. Even though I think ME1 is a tiny bit better than ME2, I couldn't stop playing ME2. I'd go on for hours.

and yes I miss a lot of the RPG elements from ME1, except for the tedious vehicle exploration. Hopefully ME3 will incorporate both 1 and 2.
 
Fimbulvetr said:
But in terms of customization I'd rather go with ME: Min/Maxing Til the Break of Dawn than ME2: Galaxy Wide Stripmine.
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I don't think anybody is going to defend probe-mining as the means of resource acquisition, but the general model ME2 used of spending resources on a small number of very meaningful, player-directed upgrades is, to my mind, infinitely preferable to ME1's item-drop/worthless-money model where growth largely fell to the dice (both in terms of what you could upgrade, and by how much) and consisted of literally hundreds of new weapon/module drops, 98%+ of which are either completely useless to you, or such a small incremental upgrade as to not even be noticeable.

As far as the actual gameplay goes, I think the disconnect between people who strongly prefer one game over the other doesn't stem from any obnoxious "Mass Effect 2 is for shooter fans and Mass Effect 1 is for real dudez who like real RPGs *chestthump*" (Note: At this point, not really replying specifically to Fimbulvetr) as it is between people who prefer RPG gameplay for the qualitative versus quantitative mechanics.

Qualitatively, ME2 is pretty inarguably a much richer gameplay experience than ME1. The four defense types respond differently to almost every skill, from crumbling easily (Lift versus Health, Reave versus Barrier) to only suffering secondary effects (Throw can adequately stunlock pretty much any standard-sized enemy regardless of defense type) to almost nothing (Overload versus a Heavy enemy's Armour), on top of certain skills having more particular synergy, like Singularity, Warp, Reave, etc. Each of the five standard weapon types is specifically made to be better and worse at particular tasks in a way that the player is making use of each one depending on the situation, and within each weapon type you have further variation that rarely boils down to an unqualified A > B scenario - on top of that are the Heavy Weapons, which are for the most part pretty much completely unique. Shooting an enemy can have different results depending on whether you hit the head, the leg, the body, etc. On the other hand, ME2 is a very boring game in a quantitative sense. There aren't many weapons, weapon upgrades are mostly along a very fixed path, each skill has four different break points rather than 12, your health and shields are largely fixed, etc.

ME1 is much better quantitatively. There are 60 levels instead of 30, about a half a dozen more skills available, both for Shepard and for every party member, there are literally hundreds of different pieces of equipment, and each character can effectively make use of anywhere from about 3-5 base pieces of equipment, plus 6-10 upgrade modules slotted into each one. You can micromanage all of that stuff at any time, on the fly, and how well you do so is by far the single largest contributing factor to how well you do in combat, since everything is handled by dice rolls behind the scene, with no locational damage, etc. The other side of that, obviously, is that from a qualitative standpoint, it's a very simple game. With only minor exceptions, every enemy reacts the same way to the same skills and attacks; the outcome of any given action doesn't often change depending on the situation it's used in.


Personally, while I love the shit out of RPGs, it's almost entirely for the qualitative aspects of the gameplay, and the qualitative min-maxing and leveling up stuff is, at best, a minor headache I can ignore. From my point of view, ME2 was brilliant. Most people I've seen who preferred the first game are the opposite, and from that perspective, I can kind of see what they mean (even if I will never understand the appeal myself). Either way, I don't think framing the debate as RPG vs not-RPG is particularly accurate, or constructive.
 
3rdman said:
My only issue with the game was the tedious mining...
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Quote selected for point of emphasis

Mining was the only drag. I know a lot of people did not like the overall plot for ME2, but I liked the more streamlined plot, there was depth there if you branched out a bit from the loyalty missions. I don't think ME3's plot will be as immediate as 2, but I don't think it will meadner as much as 1. I think the game will be huge. It took me 47 hours to beat ME2, and I never did the legion loyalty mission and most of the dl'd missions. ME2, GOTY, you know it to be true.
 
some spoilers:

I felt the dialogue system is the main reason to play the game. Early on it seems like there will be lots of interesting options but later on in the game every dialogue is "investigate" heavy, not much like the game early on where multiple speakers will be interjecting with a sense of different options. It seems like they polished the early game then later missions fall back into the tired old design. The few missions designed around dialogue like Kasumi and Samara loyalty missions come off really awkward esp. the dialogue in the Samara mission, doesn't even sound like conversation. They seem to afraid to allow the player to make difference making choices until the last mission in the game when it can cause the death of members of the team (I took it as an opportunity to kill off Jacob)

The combat is behind other games and AI doesn't do much other than run out in the open waiting to get shot in the face. I started to tire later on considering how simple the combat is.

A perfect mass effect would have at least three excellent pillars. Dialogue, Story, Combat. The dialogue is good enough. The episodic stories in missions are OK but it leads to a hollow feeling as there isn't much to the greater story and not many missions tying into it. The first game did this a little better.. And combat doesn't have to be so mediocre. They did a good job thinking up environmental effects like solar flare or blowing wind but it doesn't affect gameplay enough.
 
This game will share it's place among the likes of Deus Ex 2 as one of the worst sequels ever. Just utterly unfulfilling in every respect. About the only positive thing they added was locational damage, everything else was regressive.
 
Confidence Man said:
This game will share it's place among the likes of Deus Ex 2 as one of the worst sequels ever. Just utterly unfulfilling in every respect. About the only positive thing they added was locational damage, everything else was regressive.
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Graphically it looked better and I felt the mechanics were A LOT better...which aspects did you think were regressive (besides maybe lack of RPG elements if you aren't really into shooters)?
 
Coxswain said:
I don't think anybody is going to defend probe-mining as the means of resource acquisition, but the general model ME2 used of spending resources on a small number of very meaningful, player-directed upgrades is, to my mind, infinitely preferable to ME1's item-drop/worthless-money model where growth largely fell to the dice (both in terms of what you could upgrade, and by how much) and consisted of literally hundreds of new weapon/module drops, 98%+ of which are either completely useless to you, or such a small incremental upgrade as to not even be noticeable.
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I just didn't like spending a huge percentage of my cash only to have to go out and earn even more stuff just to upgrade one measly gun type.
 
BumRush said:
Graphically it looked better and I felt the mechanics were A LOT better...which aspects did you think were regressive (besides maybe lack of RPG elements if you aren't really into shooters)?
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You're right on the graphics, actually. That makes two things. I mean I could make a list but I don't want to derail the topic completely as it's all been said in the ME2 thread.
 
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