Mass Effect 2 - thoughts, opinions?

WabeWalker said:
So you guys who like it - is it owning you right now? I went for four hours straight tonight after coming home from work. ME 2 has surpassed my expectations completely.

(If Assassin's Creed 2 ends up doing likewise then I'll be really, really happy.)
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Had a ton of fun playing it, the quick time events for paragon/renegade are a nice touch. I can somewhat see the viewpoints of the gripes that I've seen posted so far, but IMHO they're just minor annoyances at worst; the game has been very enjoyable.

Oh wait, never mind. I'll probably be slaughtered for playing it on a 360....guess I'm a "console kiddie" now. :(
 
The first quick time event kind of caught me off guard - Shepard held the gun straight up to that person's head... or was that the second quick time event... in any case, I panicked... and did nothing.

It's too bad you can't pause the quick time event, but I guess that would kind of defeat the purpose.
 
I was only able to play a bit last night, but I am disappointed in the controls. I found it was difficult to get used to the new control scheme, as I had been playing ME1 right up until 2 was released. The one button for enter cover, run, basically everything is frustrating. The use of Ammo ... er I mean thermal clips ... is a questionable design decision as well.

The little I did play was fun, and very cinematic, and the graphics are great ... hopefully I can get used to the controls.
 
Draax said:
I was only able to play a bit last night, but I am disappointed in the controls. I found it was difficult to get used to the new control scheme, as I had been playing ME1 right up until 2 was released. The one button for enter cover, run, basically everything is frustrating. The use of Ammo ... er I mean thermal clips ... is a questionable design decision as well.
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I don't think you have a melee weapon either.
So if you run out of ammo and there's no ammo around, you have no choice but to commit suicide. It only happened to me once in ME2, I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what to do, but eventually just ran into the enemies and let them kill me.

Super lame.
 
If I had a designer of this game strapped to a chair with his life hanging between me and my hand flipping the light switch(Taken) I would ask him a few question

1st- where is my battle armor? An rpg should never end with the same armor you started with. ---> Smacks.

2nd - where is my weapons? did all those weapon shops close?(was there a recession?) and why can't I buy specter gear no more?--> flips switch for a few secs

3rd- upgrades in this game are pretty cool, but why can’t I find the blue prints to say the scram rail and then upgrade it with research? --> Flips switch

4th- and most disappointing, why in god’s name is there no running around the citadel? I was really looking forward to seeing the presidium again, citadel tower, and a couple of other places. Why can’t I go there and see it being repaired? Why is there some stupid taxi driving my ass around?

I would let the guy live in the end because the game was awesome and Miranda's black lace. But these problems need to be fixed.

Am I alone in this?
 
Folks, please be careful about posting any spoilers.

Yes, the game is owning me completely.
 
Not quicktime events...arg. Like RE4 (PC) where you have those long seqences? God I hate quicktime. I wanted a shooter/RPG hybrid not high tech simon says.

I only just started the game and haven't had one yet so...guess I will see.
 
JayteeBates said:
Not quicktime events...arg. Like RE4 (PC) where you have those long seqences? God I hate quicktime. I wanted a shooter/RPG hybrid not high tech simon says.

I only just started the game and haven't had one yet so...guess I will see.
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One thing I'll say that I'm not the biggest fan of in this, minor quibble, is the hacking/ decrypting/unlocking safes. etc. and such.

I'm pretty early into the game so maybe this changes, but I notice that so far there are a lot less options in the squad profiles to build the characters up with. A lot less.

For example, I can't build up a "decryption" or "hacking" skill on a character (so far) like I could in part 1. I wish I could because I was pretty good in the first game with all of that and I've done fairly miserably so far in part 2 with these sorts of things.

I'm not surprised to see someone mention certain areas from the first game being more limited in some respects but as large as this game is and as many new places and more of them are there are in total vs. the first game I suspect it's more than a fair trade off.
 
to all the people who are whining about the consolization. I feel like they trimmed a bunch of fat out and made the game easier to digest? It's more straight to the point and even being a "hardcore rpg gamer" I still like it
 
Nate_MachV said:
to all the people who are whining about the consolization. I feel like they trimmed a bunch of fat out and made the game easier to digest? It's more straight to the point and even being a "hardcore rpg gamer" I still like it
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They did trim some fat which I don't mind but they have trimmed a little too much in a few areas like what I mentioned in my previous post. ;)
 
I think the combat is way better for mouse aiming this time around.
ME1 suffered from "giant-crosshair-itis", the crosshair was half the size of your screen, making the game mostly a spray-and-pray, at least for Soldiers. The new aiming system in ME2 is fantastic, I feel like I can actually SHOOT AT stuff this time, and not just rely on my spray bullets to hit something.

I don't know if I would call the simplified inventory/item system "consolitis". Are you saying console players don't like complex RPG elements? I guess you could argue that ME2 is geared towards the Gears of War crowd. But c'mon, GoW people don't like storyline-driven Sci-Fi shooters in the first place. ME2 doesn't have enough chainsaws to satisfy that crowd.

GoW = Gore, intense combat, no story whatsoever, pure testosterone overload.
ME is much more... Nerdy. I was surprised they chose to advertise ME at a football game. HAHA! What a joke. How many ME players even know anything about football?

Jocks play GoW.
Nerds play ME.

I'm generalizing, but the game itself has to generalize to its audience.
Removing the RPG elements might have satisfied somebody, mostly the GoW crowd, but for the true ME crowd it's a slap in the face.

Let's just call ME2 a third-person shooter and exempt the word "RPG" from the title, it makes things a lot simpler.

One thing I'll say that I'm not the biggest fan of in this, minor quibble, is the hacking/ decrypting/unlocking safes. etc. and such.
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It's the worst hacking/decrypting method I've seen in a game in my life, I think.
ME1's was incredible. It was like a mini-game of 360 degree Frogger.

Text-code matching? Man, that's painful. Is it supposed to be FUN? It's certainly not fun, it's just annoying. I found myself color matching the code: For example, 2 lines of green, blank space, 3 lines of purple (etc).
And the match-two game? Come on, are we 5 years old? Be a little more creative. At least the text-matching is something 'new'.

Even Bioshock's plumber hacking was better than that...
 
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UtopiA said:
It's the worst hacking/decrypting method I've seen in a game in my life, I think.
ME1's was incredible. It was like a mini-game of 360 degree Frogger.

Text-code matching? Man, that's painful. Is it supposed to be FUN? It's certainly not fun, it's just annoying. I found myself color matching the code: For example, 2 lines of green, blank space, 3 lines of purple (etc).
And the match-two game? Come on, are we 5 years old? Be a little more creative. At least the text-matching is something 'new'.

Even Bioshock's plumber hacking was better than that...
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Agreed.
 
hacking makes you think, and all i want is free stuff on the ground lol.... stupid thinking game...

only other complaint i had was the stupid spacebar does everything. seriously???? let me use E like every other game to open the door. space is for JUMP fuckers.

other then that im only about 5 hours in, but its pretty epic so far.
 
The majority of the textures in the game are still pretty aged and rancid looking. Did they spend too much budget on the acting talent and skimp on engine improvements? Everytime a conversation zooms in one someones outfit or uniform I cringe, hard.

The missions are also pretty short, all of them so far. Hope there's more to do. I really don't see how they can DLC this game up apart from just adding characters and cosmetic stuff like armor. Once it's over it's over, did Bioware ever say they had big DLC plans for this game?
 
UtopiA said:
You can rebind the Space key for everything except the code hacking.
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Yeah, I basically made the controls as close to ME1 as I could and that helped me.

I'd be interested to see what kind of control remapping some folks have done and see what they think or if they liked the defaults.

FWIW: I'm not on the "they dumbed this down/consolitis" bandwagon with this game at all. It's definitely going to be on my GOTY short list when all is said and done.
 
Riddleofsteel said:
The majority of the textures in the game are still pretty aged and rancid looking. Did they spend too much budget on the acting talent and skimp on engine improvements? Everytime a conversation zooms in one someones outfit or uniform I cringe, hard.
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What kind of rig are you running and what kind of settings are you using?

The missions are also pretty short, all of them so far. Hope there's more to do. I really don't see how they can DLC this game up apart from just adding characters and cosmetic stuff like armor. Once it's over it's over, did Bioware ever say they had big DLC plans for this game?
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Yes.

http://www.tweakguides.com/ME_1.html

^^ I might carefully match this up logically with ME2 and see what's what.
 
I'm hoping Fallout New Vegas (2010) will destroy this game in terms of GOTY.
I'm not a fan of linear gameplay, and no matter how hard BioWare tries to hide it, ME is linear.
 
UtopiA said:
I'm hoping Fallout New Vegas (2010) will destroy this game in terms of GOTY.
I'm not a fan of linear gameplay, and no matter how hard BioWare tries to hide it, ME is linear.
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ME certainly was linear and the side quests weren't diverting either. So much so that they weren't worth doing.

ME2 is still linear, so I guess you won't be a fan of it either.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to rambling the Wasteland once more with FNV, should be good. It's more my sort of game too.
 
I had a few "wow!" moments with the graphics as well, I'm not an expert about texture quality, but overall I thought the game was quite stunning. Though I'm not sure if there's much improvement over ME1. I think they actually look mostly similar.
 
Q-BZ said:
What kind of rig are you running and what kind of settings are you using?



Yes.

http://www.tweakguides.com/ME_1.html

^^ I might carefully match this up logically with ME2 and see what's what.
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Q9550 @ 3.6ghz, 8gb DDR2 1066, GTX 285 SSC. It isn't my rig. Everything as high as I can turn it. It was the same exact way in ME1 and I ran the tweakguides guide several times over. It seems to be unavoidable. Just feels sloppy to me.
 
So far, the game is really good. I haven't been this stoked for a game since Dragon Age.
 
So far so good. My only gripe is the mouse-look / camera-pan feels a bit wonky. Reminds me of the Bioshock mouse acceleration problem. I do really like the option of being able to drag your squad members powers to your own 1-8 hotkeys.
 
UtopiA said:
It's the worst hacking/decrypting method I've seen in a game in my life, I think.
ME1's was incredible. It was like a mini-game of 360 degree Frogger.

Text-code matching? Man, that's painful. Is it supposed to be FUN? It's certainly not fun, it's just annoying. I found myself color matching the code: For example, 2 lines of green, blank space, 3 lines of purple (etc).
And the match-two game? Come on, are we 5 years old? Be a little more creative. At least the text-matching is something 'new'.

Even Bioshock's plumber hacking was better than that...
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I disagree - by the end of the game I HATED HATED HATED the plumbing and I don't think I ever needed to use a hack tool or any "Hack perks" to hack either.

The Text code matching actually feels better - the code looks like something out of Visual Studio (which I spend all day in) so I can relate. The matching game feels like your using jumpers on the circuit board, so that's cool. IMHO

Has anybody noticed it appears to be easier to pick up renegade points now? Just seems to me like it's harder to be pure paragon.... I picked some text that I didn't think was renegade several times and ended up getting renegade points.... And what the heck is up with how many people you can end up getting "Involved" with? Seems to me there's at least 3 right off the bat.
 
I can't get anti aliasing to work damn it. I tried forcing it on the nvidia control panel 8x, super sampling and I even tried manually adding the exe. Using latest drivers too, 196.21
 
AA for Nvidia:
http://meforums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=633048&forum=127

You have to use nHancer and one of the special AA options. You can't just force it normally.

I disagree - by the end of the game I HATED HATED HATED the plumbing and I don't think I ever needed to use a hack tool or any "Hack perks" to hack either.
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I didn't say I liked the plumber hack, I just said ME2's is worse.

The Text code matching actually feels better - the code looks like something out of Visual Studio (which I spend all day in) so I can relate. The matching game feels like your using jumpers on the circuit board, so that's cool. IMHO
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Well at least you can use your imagination.
Next time I play ME2, I will imagine that I'm enjoying their hack/decrypt mini-games.
 
fornarmr said:
So is mirror's edge and batman AA but they have different settings for me.
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I'm sorry, let me clarify: It's confirmed working.
If you won't bother to test it first, then don't bother replying to me about it.
 
I don't know why, but I really enjoy the hacking minigame with the code matching. The memory match I can take or leave.
 
Nate_MachV said:
to all the people who are whining about the consolization. I feel like they trimmed a bunch of fat out and made the game easier to digest? It's more straight to the point and even being a "hardcore rpg gamer" I still like it
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The problem is, instead expanding on the sub-par RPG aspects of the first game like people expected, they removed them entirely. Oh and put sprint/cover/use on the same button. WTF were they thinking there?
 
UtopiA said:
I'm hoping Fallout New Vegas (2010) will destroy this game in terms of GOTY.
I'm not a fan of linear gameplay, and no matter how hard BioWare tries to hide it, ME is linear.
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This is the type of taste that prefers a mile wide and an inch deep. That was morrowind and oblivion.


Depth? Who needs depth and immersion. Lets just maintain the capacity to walk for miles and do more stuff. At least there are lesser games out there (opinion, if a superior one!) to cater to those who prefer quantity over quality.


Now maybe TOR will be both a mile wide and far deeper than an inch, we'll see.
 
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