Mass Effect 2

[Melodic]

Just replay the game one more time and do all the sidemissions. It's hardly a chore.

I actually remember that Wrex thing now that you mention it. I think I completed almost all of the sidemissions, and then I ground all the way up to 60, full spec-ops X weapons. Yeah, I'm definitely gonna go play through it again.

[hack]

i replayed the ever-lovin' crap outta ME. i have about a dozen high-level toons saved. hopefully, that will translate into an interesting ME2 experience.

[Coward]

Just replay the game one more time and do all the sidemissions. It's hardly a chore.

Yes, thank you...

[Melodic]

YOU ARE SO MUCH MORE THAN WELCOME, MY FRIEND.

[Coward]

Hugs and kisses.

[Alex C]

I liked Mass Effect a lot, but I think playing through every sidequest again would be fairly terrible. A lot of them are pretty vanilla and they throw the game's pacing to hell. It's actually a pretty tightly paced game by rpg standards if you just pretend like all the emergency requests never actually happened. I love Bioware to pieces, but it actually is kind of a chore to go through again.

[KvP]

It can't be stressed how dull and variety-free so many of the planetary exploration quests turned out to be, especially given how apparent the template was after you scoured your second or third planet and how that template was never strayed from (some planets had extra quest-related things to explore, but all planets had 2 artifacts and 2-3 taggable resources you drove through empty terrain to get to, without fail). If you ignore the sidequest stuff then Mass Effect turns out to be a very short and tightly paced game. It plays smooth and doesn't dwell on any one thing. I've replayed it through maybe 4 or 5 times, which makes it the second least-played Bioware game I have, behind Neverwinter Nights (which blew) and just ahead of Jade Empire. Compare that to the 25+ times I've gotten through Shadows of Amn. I've got two games of that one going right now.

[LTK]

I thought it was only me. It really was a chore to go through all those side missions, especially the Turian insignias and mineral deposits and stuff that you had to plow that damn Mako to every time. That was the one complaint of Yahtzee in his review that was justified: It does control like a fat man on a unicycle. Not to mention the thrusters that are completely useless. I was glad to see that they paid more attention to the space exploration in ME2. In the first game every planet was essentially the same except for the color palette, and some enviromental effects (doing nothing but make you die in x seconds) thrown in for good measure. Just like the mines and the bases; You'd think every mining company and merc gang hires the same architect.

That was also why I didn't replay the game. The prospect of combing out those star systems for side quests looked like just that: A chore. Not to mention the gazillion weapons and armor and upgrades for all of them you have to haul around. That was absolute madness. One thing I would have liked is to be able to play the same level 50 character, but as a different class. I was getting pretty tired of using the pistol and sniper rifle all the time, so I figured I could play a Sentinel to get the other medals for using x weapon/skill y times, as well as the multiple playthrough medals. Guess not, and I had to start with grade one weapons all over again. The enjoyment won't weigh up to the effort, I think.

I'll definitely play through the main quest one more time before starting ME2, though. How much do you think the side quests matter in the events in ME2?

[KvP]

Some of them probably matter a bit. The majority of sidequests not taking place on mission planets are linear except insofar as the reward you get is concerned (using skills to increase payout) One that a lot of people point to is a quest you complete and when you get on your ship you're contacted by an agent of the Shadow Broker who wants what you have. If you agree to give it to him you gain credit with the Shadow Broker that isn't apparently useful in ME1. If you refuse he says that you shouldn't count on the Shadow Broker's assistance in the future. One that the ME2 developers have specifically alluded to is the "superfan" quest wherein you were beset by a deranged fan who wants to join your party. There are a couple of ways you can get him off your back and presumably they each lead to different situations in ME2.

Beyond that I would assume that most C&C from the first game will draw from plot-critical missions. Whether or not you let the Raachni queen live on Noveria is an obvious one, but there are also things like how you get to the Matriarch (there's a path by which you fight everyone in the Noveria lab, and there's one by which you just kill one person and a bunch of Geth), or whether you tranqed / killed all the mind-controlled survivors on that other planet.

[Storm Rider]

Bioware has specifically mentioned a few side quests that factor in, though obviously not as much as the major choices (which are according to them: whether the Council survived, who died on Virmire, and your romance option). For instance, in the E3 video that introduced Thane, the asari woman he kills is actually a quest giver in the first game. Depending on how you handled that quest, presumably your interaction with her before he ices her will be at least somewhat different. Hudson also mentioned Conrad Verner, the stalkerish fan that was a minor sidequest on the Citadel, will play into ME2 somehow, and that how you behaved towards him would also change things.

[Alex C]

The fat man on a unicycle issue is hardly the only thing that was valid about Yahtzee's review. There was a ton of a equipment in that game and the menus actually are kind of shitty, although it never gave me as much trouble as it apparently did Yahtzee. But what really sucked was how such a clunky system actually amounted to so little. There's tons of items and they accumulate in your inventory faster than horny tribbles. Unfortunately, they all pretty much behave the same and many of the "brands" are fit only for being pawned off (in exchange for credits that I never really needed) or for breaking down into omnigel (which I never really used). I mean, really what's the point of having 3 different versions of the Banshee Assault Rifle in your inventory when none of them are remotely capable of besting the Avenger III that was basically just handed to you an hour ago? If you actually had to purposely work for your items or make decisions like "Do I keep saving for that uber-rifle or do I break down and buy something might save my ass in the next half hour?", I could understand why the system is in place; hell, that question is the very essence of Dragon Quest 1. Likewise I could understand it if some items had unique capabilities that changed the way you approached combat. Unfortunately, that never really happens in ME; the game mostly tosses a steady stream of junk your way and then leaves you to pick out the crap that has the highest numbers. I love fiddling with equipment as much as the next guy (I'm a god damned WoW player, for fuck's sake), but I can't help but feel that ME's gear & inventory system was almost entirely vestigial; as long as you remembered to swap from anti-personnel to anti-synthetic ammo when the Geth show up, you were good to go.

[a pack of wolves]

I kept forgetting to do that so I'd just use something like the poison ammo (which worked mysteriously well against the Geth) instead.

Personally the thing that irritated me the most about the equipment was that when I was buying it would compare with what Shepard had equipped and I couldn't seem to select a different party member to use as comparison (let alone someone I hadn't brought with me that time), which made the process of doing even that basic number comparing incredibly tedious. That and the fact that a well-equipped military ship that was receiving constant arms shipments could never seem to have any grenades in stock.

[Zombiedude]

I never felt the need to buy from the shop guy inside my ship.

[LTK]

Well, he did have the only Spectre gear outside of the Citadel quartermaster, but for the rest he didn't have much to be interested in.

I read somewhere that the inventory system for ME on the PC was refined with tabs or something, but that didn't really fix the problem. What would have been a big improvement was to make the new versions of weapons replace the older you have, such as picking up an Edge V when you have four Edge IV replaces one of them with the improved version.

Although I have to admit I liked the addition of weapon manufacturer licences. It was fun collecting them. One thing I didn't get: How the hell did a salesman in the Citadel get his hands on a Geth Armory licence? Now that I bought it, will the Geth supply me, their arch-nemesis, with top of the line weaponry because I paid for it?

[Blue Kitty]

So, the DLC is out now.  Anyone have it?

[KvP]

I haven't gotten it yet but apparently it's a arena-type addition wherein you test your battle prowess in any number of multiplayer-style skirmish modes and see if you can zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

[Blue Kitty]

Also......NOW YOUR AVATAR CAN WEAR MASS EFFECT ARMOR


In other news, some games cost about as much as a complete set of the armor does.

[Storm Rider]

I... I kind of want the N7 armor. I was really hoping that sort of thing would be using the new avatar 'awards' system for ME2, considering they were one of the first developers to really get achievements right, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised EA took the chance to make an easy buck. I know I'm a complete idiot for even considering spending 4 dollars on a suit of armor for my virtual Xbox man, but I can't help myself. If I end up buying it, I'll make sure to post about it so you guys can supply the justly-deserved mockery.

[Blue Kitty]

The crazy bitch, Subject Zero

[FIXDIX]

I hope we get to see her bare ass cheek.

[ackblom12]

She seems like she'll be a fun character to have around.

[KvP]

Funny, and it's nice that they've added profanity, but we'll see if Bioware is over the sentimentality-as-depth hump w/r/t to their romanceable characters. I suspect that they haven't.

I guess they're trotting out all their evil NPCs first. I suspect that this Subject Zero will be a replacement for Ashley in the same way that Grunt looks like a Wrex replacement.

[Zombiedude]

Kveep I think you are a little jaded

[Storm Rider]

Her voice actually sounds like Ashley's, although that may be in my imagination. I don't think her combat role is going to be anything like Ashley's, though, since she's supposed to be some uber-powerful biotic. My only beef is that I hope they're not so fixated on the tattoos-and-scars thing that they won't let you change her armor, because I'm going to be annoyed if she's running around in those straps for the entire game.

So the brief opening of that video shows 10 spots for party members. We have the three revealed already: Grunt, Thane, and now Subject Zero. We also know that both of the characters from the iPhone game, Jacob and Miranda, are in ME2 as party members. I've also seen that Bioware has more or less confirmed that Tali is going to be a party member, but it's not clear if she counts as one of those 10 because she's not a new character. Which means we have at least 4 and possibly as many as 7 (if Tali doesn't count as one of the 10 and the initial Bioware estimate of 13 party members was accurate) characters left to be revealed, including characters from the first game.

[KvP]

As far as I'm aware this is the rundown:

1.Tali
2.Jacob
3.Miranda
4.Thane
5.Grunt
6.Subject Zero
7.Salarian Scientist (?)
8.Geth (?)
9.
10.


Bioware dev Jerret Lee said this on their forums: 'Yep, there are 10 potential squad mates to recruit from around the galaxy to take on your mission. The more you take, and the more loyal you make them, the better your odds of survival.'

[Zombiedude]

Are they increasing the squad size?

[snalin]

"Now who's the bad-ass biotic, bitch?"

[Storm Rider]

Are they increasing the squad size?

Nope, it's definitely still 3 people in a squad.

What I don't get is how you would communicate with a geth party member if that rumor is in fact true. The geth don't talk in the first Mass Effect, they just have weird garbled noises that presumably serve as communication to each other. I guess they'd have to give it speech, but do they record voice acting or just make it computerized?

[maxusy3k]

Maybe that will be the Geth thing. The plot device is you can interact with it because of some kind of addition to the omni-tool or whatever, but it's always just effectively silent.

So, you know, you have no idea what it's doing or what it's thinking or when it will turn on you when it achieves a higher level of consciousness in the middle of a geth firefight.

Or I guess some kind of implant that effectively works as a telepathic link?

[Reed]

They might do it like KOTOR, where the character understood alien dialects and they just provided subtitles for the player. I thought Saren talked to the Geth in the first one?

[Damnable Fiend]

apparently I can't use spoiler tags for some reason....

oh well, the only thing that I disliked about the first Mass Effect game was that you could only get the best gameplay scenarios ie. getting Saren to kill himself, if you were either a saint or a complete asshole.

[LTK]

They might do it like KOTOR, where the character understood alien dialects and they just provided subtitles for the player. I thought Saren talked to the Geth in the first one?

He did, but in plain English. Give the bots some credit, if they overthrew the race that created them, they can at least learn an organic language or two. Or maybe just one, since there is effectively no other language spoken in the galaxy.

[Reed]

My point was simply that the guy could communicate with them before receiving any of the crazy implants, which was something maxusy3k was asking about.

[KvP]

apparently I can't use spoiler tags for some reason....

oh well, the only thing that I disliked about the first Mass Effect game was that you could only get the best gameplay scenarios ie. getting Saren to kill himself, if you were either a saint or a complete asshole.

Actually it has nothing to with your "karma" or whatever. It's got everything to do with your dialogue skills. It was actually kind of dumb that persuade and intimidate were "good" and "evil" 100% of the time.

[Alex C]

Amen to that. It annoys me how it's never considered OK to threaten a dude with violence in such games despite the fact that you likely just got done violencing the hell out of their minions. Poor redshirts.

[Bastardous Bassist]

Games have always had ridiculous black and white morality.  I liked how parts of KotOR II addressed that with Kreia.  Unfortunately, Obsidian have no idea what "technology" or "quality voice acting" are.  The second I especially can't understand because Fallout and Fallout 2 had fantastic voice acting.  Obsidian just needs to get back together with Bioware and start Black Isle II.

[Alex C]

I thought most of the voice acting in Kotor II was pretty OK. Not great or anything, but it didn't really bother me any more than the voice acting in Kotor 1, although admittedly there weren't really any standout characters besides Kreia, which rather hurts.

[Reed]

You can't really hold KOTOR II to the same rubric as KOTOR I. When Obsidian was developing the second one Lucas Arts decided that they absolutely needed to release the game by christmas, despite the fact that it was far from complete. That's why there are huge chunks of the story (like the droid factory) that are completely missing from the game.

[Bastardous Bassist]

True, but Obsidian has a history of terrible voice actors, so I don't find it to be a one-off thing.

[Alex C]

I guess that's your opinion. They've developed exactly 2 games and 2 expansion packs and I'm not a fan of Jennifer Hale, so it's hard for me to really sit here and buy into the idea that KotorII's voice acting was so much worse than KotorI's that you're willing to write off their voice acting in the future. About the only character whose voice I remember bothering me a bit was that of the Handmaiden, which is sort of odd since it's not like they went with an unknown for that part. I've never played NWN's single player campaigns because frankly that's a really dumb ass reason to buy a NWN title.

[Alex C]

Oh, wait, Bao Dur was annoying too. Whatever.

[KvP]

Yeah, Bao Dur was pretty aggravating.

Obsidz' D&D games have consistent voice acting with all other D&D games which is to say, they're largely ridiculous.

[Bastardous Bassist]

Point taken.  I'll still buy every Obsidian game that they ever produce, and Bioware, too.  Well, except MMOs, because I just can't get into them.

[Alex C]

Yeah, see, I think the fact that you can so easily marginalize annoying npcs from your party is one of the reasons I tend to be fairly forgiving of voice acting in Bioware and Black Isle/obsidian canon. It's not even an intentional bias, I just say "Oh, well, fuck  that guy," and move on. Bao Dur may as well have never existed.

[Bastardous Bassist]

I actually played through once and got everybody to be a jedi.  I was light, so I had Mira instead of...wookie dude.  I'd say I spent much more time playing as light side than dark, specifically because of Mira.  Redheads.  Man.  Anyways Bao Dur was so incredibly badass it hurt.  I kept pumping up his strength so he did so much damage and had just as high a "to hit" as the dex-based characters.  Anybody who looked at him scored a hit, though.

[KvP]

Yeah they sort of dropped the ball on his armor capabilities.

[Bastardous Bassist]

Well, when he was a jedi, it didn't matter that much.  The biggest hit was that I kept pumping points into strength instead of dex.

[Zombiedude]

Mass Effect 2 is sorta like The Empire Strikes Back

[Bastardous Bassist]

I'll file that under "least surprising news ever."  Isn't the second episode of a trilogy usually the darkest?  Or, to extrapolate further, isn't the middle of a story usually when things are the worst?

[Storm Rider]

It finally has a release date! Pencil in January 26th (or the 29th if you're in Europe) because that is when Shepard is gonna fuck up some more aliens, robots, and alien robots.