Havok wrote:First... The Elevator load screens were replaced, with... animated technical diagrams of elevators moving between floors. AWESOME!
Second... I miss the Mako.
-snip ranting about the awesomeness of this game-
OH MAN!! I LOVE the planet scanning now too! As well as the way I get to 'fly' around on the galaxy map!
So far, the thing that has massively impressed me about this game, far above and beyond what BioWare has done in other RPGs where they build their own world, is the insane level of depth they sunk into some of the NPCs. Spoiler
For example, you have a party member who was part of the recalibration of the genophage that makes 999/1000 krogans stillborn so the rapidly-producing highly resiliant krogan don't 'evolve' around the plague's sterility mechanism. It's fascinating to interact with the "lesser evil" argument that is used to justify the development and deployment of the atomic bomb from the position of a skeptic. I've never seen a game that tries to engage moral arguments on a plausible level that doesn't manage to get preachy in the process.
Oh, and it was hilarious to hear the Mass Effect version of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" from the musical "The Pirates of Penzance."
I also enjoy that it allows you to earn the ability to get extra abilities like armor-piercing bullets or super-armor or instant-shield from making buddies with the team. I regret the demise of the achievement award system, though... I totally dug the "you went through the game with the krogan, +10% to your health!" and "you killed 150 people with a shotgun, now your 'magic user' can roll around with a bigass scattergun" aspect.
"Freedom is not an external truth. It exists within men, and those who wish to be free are free." - Paul Ernst
The world is black and white. People, however, are grey.
When man has no choice but to do good, there's no point in calling him moral.
Gramzamber wrote:So conversley, anyone who chose to let the Council blow up know how the Great Emperor of the Galaxy Anderson/Udina deals with this situation?
I'm guessing it's not much different, but wonder what excuses they use.
Am I only the person who started off by importing my renegade character?
Stark wrote:Surely there's something in the awesome codex about it?
every time you say this adds more and more time i will avoid playing gears on live :v
And why are people complaining about the holograms not being super-high resolution? Shouldn't you be complaining about how they have no information on them at all? In the future we won't need writing.
Gramzamber wrote:
As an aside, what's with the hologram technology in ME2? Sure in ME1 they were beige but at least you got a good image.
Now they're in colour but with scan lines and a resolution that would make users of 1990's 640x480 VGA displays point and laugh.
If you're talking about the one to the Illusive Man then that's due to the comm method. The Quantum Entanglement system that you use to conference with him is low bandwidth, or at least that's what I assume the reason for all the scan lines there is.
I wanted to add that I love how someone decided to take a chainsaw to the whole 'Full warrior race' thing the Krogans seemed to have and let us get a look at some people who aren't soldiers.
Hell we get a bunch of extra information on pretty much every other major species from the first game that isn't the Turians.
Also it's nice to see that both the various alien species share humanity's tendency to make silly crap as entertainment.. seriously, an all Elcor version of Hamlet? A TV show about a Hanar Spectre? that's just.. off.
SylasGaunt wrote:I wanted to add that I love how someone decided to take a chainsaw to the whole 'Full warrior race' thing the Krogans seemed to have and let us get a look at some people who aren't soldiers.
Did you run into the poetry reading Krogan on Ilium?
Hell we get a bunch of extra information on pretty much every other major species from the first game that isn't the Turians.
Well there was Garrus' mentioning of premission sparring and the tie breaker he had against a female Turian later in his room. He had the reach, but she was flexible.
Also it's nice to see that both the various alien species share humanity's tendency to make silly crap as entertainment.. seriously, an all Elcor version of Hamlet? A TV show about a Hanar Spectre? that's just.. off.
The all Elcor Hamlet was mentioned in ME1 just ride the elevators in the Citadel.
Stark wrote:If Bioware ever made one of their games support coop play (which would be fucking trivial) I might actually buy one again. DA would be cool coop, and nobody except the fattest nerds would care that only Player One affects anything plotwise. It's all about the pew pew and the zap zap.
If you think an MMO is anything like what Hav and I are after you're retarded. Hilariously an MMO is also inappropriate for Bioware's standard 'railroad players and have titty chicks tell them how amazing they are' writing, but who reads fluff in MMOs anyway?
Gramzamber wrote:So uh... I had fish in my room on the Normandy.. and now they're dead.
You mean I totally had to feed them?
Yes. You also have to do it damn regularly. I forgot to do it and went off on 2 missions, then when I went back up to feed them instead of "feed fish" the option was "clean out dead fish". Isn't that what my secretary person is for? I guess she's just far too busy standing in one spot hitting F5 on my webmail.
--------------------------------------------
Warning to anybody doing Tali's loyalty quest:
Spoiler
Make sure that if you want her loyalty, you do what she tells you to, not what's best for her.
Despite the game telling me that it unlocked her power/new outfit, neither happened, and I also didn't get the achievement for gaining her loyalty, apparently because although I completed the quest, she didn't like the decision I made.
D:
Loving the game overall, but many minor things that bug me. For instance, on Jacob's loyalty quest: Spoiler
The man who has been stranded on a planet with no outside contact for 8 years has soldiers armed with guns that drop thermal clips... which according to the codex is only sported on new, state of the art weapons, and they weren't even in existence 2 years ago, let alone 8.
Oh and he has the brand spankin' new Mech soldiers that Merc groups have only recently begun to field.
And things like how you can see the design template they followed very easily. Like how all the characters have exactly one side quest to gain their loyalty, or how all the minor normandy characters have 1 minor quest. They all need something. The engineering duo needs the rare part, the cook needs better food, the doctor needs brandy to numb the pain of being a character that nobody gives a shit about, and Yeoman Chambers needs a root.
I now see what the IGN review meant when it said the game was "overly referential". Somewhere in the vicinity of 50% of every character you can talk to in this game is someone you just happened to bump into in Mass 1. It's beyond "wow that's cool" and into "this is a series of suspension of disbelief shattering coincidences".
Also, although I appreciate the hair styles changing from what they are today, am I the only person who's noticing that every character whose name isn't Miranda has one of two minor variations on "short hair" in pretty much the same style? I guess there was some kind of hair stylist plague that wiped out everybody but barbers and the world was forced to adapt.
A scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'
'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'
SylasGaunt wrote:Also it's nice to see that both the various alien species share humanity's tendency to make silly crap as entertainment.. seriously, an all Elcor version of Hamlet? A TV show about a Hanar Spectre? that's just.. off.
Elcor Hamlet was actually conceived and directed by a human. Elcor Hamlet was my favourite elevator soundbite from the first game (after Wrex's 'who would win in fight between you and Shepard' conversations), so I have to admit I laughed when they played part of the 'Alas! poor Yorick.' speech.
adam_grif wrote:the doctor needs brandy to numb the pain of being a character that nobody gives a shit about
Fuck off man, getting drunk with Doctor Chakwas was awesome.
General Schatten wrote:Also, hey Frod, did you enjoy Grunt's mission on Tuchanka as much as I did?
I probably will (I didn't expect to like Grunt, but he grew on me really quickly), but I'm not up to it yet. I've just reached Horizon.
General Schatten wrote: Did you run into the poetry reading Krogan on Ilium?
Yeah, and with the order I did things I ran into him again on Tuchanka.
There's also the grouchy Mechanic krogan, the shopkeeper, and the scientist krogran (although he admittedly is kind of pissed Wrex is making him work on stuff to build up infrastructure instead of new ways to make things go boom).
Like I said though it's refreshing to run into krogran who aren't warriors, and the mechanic even bitches about the issues you'd expect from an 'all warrior' race.
Elcor Hamlet was actually conceived and directed by a human. Elcor Hamlet was my favourite elevator soundbite from the first game (after Wrex's 'who would win in fight between you and Shepard' conversations), so I have to admit I laughed when they played part of the 'Alas! poor Yorick.' speech.
Huh, never got that clip.
Oh well that still leaves Hanar-Spectre for silly entertainment.
A scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'
'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'
Xon wrote:
[*]Even installing onto an G SKILL 128gb FALCON ssd w/ a q6600 and a hd4870x2, load times are still in the plus 10-25 second timeframe. On worse hardware they appear to be over +45 seconds to almost a minute.
Is this the startup load, or every location-change? That's totally absurd.
Huh? I think there is some configuration conflict in Xon's case, on my laptop with the regular laptop craptastic performance drive, load times are in the 30s range only on most complex maps - Normandy interior transitions are in the 5s range.
On that note, holy shit is the game more optimised for Windows 7 then ME1. On my Turion X2 2.2Ghz, ATi Mobility Radeon 3650 laptop, ME1 dragged - to make it playable, I had to kill all post-processing effect. Mass Effect 2, on the other hand, plays smooth as silk with them enabled while being graphically more advanced.
Anyhow, for a quick rundown compared to ME1:
Better:
- almost everything (better pacing, non-generic side missions, characters aren't mannequins in conversations, inventory almost non-existent but overall equipment improvement system is much better, interrupts are interesting and rarely twitchy, etc.)
Worse:
- idiotic ammo system - one of the strengths of Mass Effect's otherwise rather shallow shooter aspects was the elimination of idiotic field ammo pickups, but obviously, Bioware buckled under the Halo drooling retard brigade's criticism and now, like in most shooters, you can't use your favorite weapon all the time, because, you know, its not like this is a game that I play to have fun or anything
- the mining can get tedious
The Citadel is basically one giant gag zone. There's the turian with the racist persecution complex, the fish krogan, the Shepard endorsements, all the ads, the cook claiming ramen is a Terran delicacy, and, of course, asari-hanar porn games. Mmm.
Agitated asshole | (Ex)40K Nut | Metalhead The vision never dies; life's a never-ending wheel
1337 posts as of 16:34 GMT-7 June 2nd, 2003
"'He or she' is an agenderphobic microaggression, Sharon. You are a bigot." ― Randy Marsh
The ads are fucking creepy, the way they address Shep by name and try to provide content relevant to Shep (I especially liked the "We heard you died, how about a funeral robe?").
Especially since I can totally see ads in real life going this way, a lot of internet spam already does this to an extent.
"No it's just Anacrap coming to whine and do nothing." -Mike Nelson on Anakin Skywalker
I don't plan on visiting the Citadel until my team is complete (at least the ones I've been suggested by TIM, in any event).
I love the little touches here and there - protesters trying to put out the eternal flame at the Shepard memorial on Torfan (i.e. if your background is Ruthless), email from Finch (if you're Earthborn and let him live ...) - the level of detail is so freaking cool.
Mordin + Legion died in my first playthrough. Oh well, it's not like that'll be the one I'm importing into ME3 anyway. Zero Sex Appeal died too, but I was hoping she would anyway. Tali died, don't have any strong feelings one way or another towards her.
So 4 / 12 went down.
Apparently there's 12 recruitable chartacters total, you can get Samara's daughter or something too.
Spoiler time. Spoiler
I wanted to get everybody's loyalty and shit, but you're forced between doing the last few missions you have on your To Do list and saving your crew. Apparently if you do other missions after they get abducted, your whole crew gets "processed".
Spoiler
The "ending twist" with the human reaper had me in fits of uncontrollable laughter. First of all, it looked like a giant husk, which is to say it looked stupid. I kept thinking it looked like the SciFi equivelant of the dungeon grail building from HoMM3. The justification for why it was shaped like a human made no sense. It's shaped like a human and built out of humans because why exactly? It's taking human "essence"? What does that even mean? If they're just breaking humans down into raw materials anyway then why bother harvesting humans? You could build a million of the bastards from the raw materials in any random rocky planetoid. It's not like carbon and water are in short supply.
On someone's earlier recommendation in this thread, I bit the bullet and expended all gazillion resources it takes to build, but forgot to use it until right at the end, during the stupid baby reaper fight. It was on 60% Health, and I was getting tired of drilling it's eyes (and I had half a magazine blocked by Miranda's ass when she decided to hop on top of the cover I was behind), and I decided to give it a shot. The damn thing wouldn't stay still, but by pure chance it's head spazzed back into the line of fire from my shot and hit it square in it's right terminator eyeball. Mushroom cloud ahoy, killed it.
I am NOT looking forward to another play-through unless my upgrades transfer across in NewGame+ format. If they do, then I'll probably launch straight into play-through number 2. If not, I'll cry for a while and do something productive with my free time instead.
Yesterday I spent three solid hours mining. I eventually got this technique down where you rapidly press and release the left trigger to scan more quickly, then I did planets by quarters. Scan one face, turn it 90 degrees. Rinse repeat. Despite all that, I still had to do another 30 minutes of mining today to get the final resources necessary to get all of my new upgrades.
There's something fundamentally broken about your system when it costs 15,000 Platinum to purchase my advanced, reaper tech cannons, but 50,000 to get scars removed from my face so I don't look like I just walked in from a Terminator themed Halloween party. In addition, since the purchase was reportedly for "getting the best surgical equipment and most up to date medical files" or something, why couldn't I also fix Garrus' face? I was scared to take him on missions for a while after I got him because it looked like it was about to fall apart if I looked at it funny.
All in all, I'd give it about a 9.5/10.
Negatives:
Still some minor technical issues (sound cut out multiple times), the mining is fucking annoying on 360 (I've had people report that it's significantly easier and faster on PC), I missed looting, some of the plot elements were quite silly. Dumbed down RPG elements not appreciated. Also, while the ammo mechanic is functional and acceptable, I still would have preferred a hybrid system or just not had it at all. It's totally out of place in the lore and their attempt to justify it essentially amounted to "whaddaya mean we didn't have ammo in ME1?".
It took me several hours to go from "insert disc into drive" to "playing game". Firstly I installed it so it would go easier on my 360, then they released a day-one-DLC that was 400 megabytes in size. This is in addition to the 3x 15 MB downloads for my exclusive content. Most of which I didn't end up using because...
YOU CAN'T REMOVE YOUR FUCKING HELMET FROM THE PREORDER ARMORS.
Positives:
Compared to most games, great voice acting + story (plot-wise, not necessarily the universe itself). Huge number of in-jokes that I appreciated, related to ME1 and otherwise. Combat improved drastically. Boring side missions minimized. Ending mission was pretty cool in execution, although far easier than I was anticipating. The only thing that seemed off was the seemingly random fashion in which people would die, and the ever-present "Phoenix Down Syndrome" where getting hit in the chest in a cutscene is fatal despite the ridiculous amount of medigel I was carrying.
Hacking is a bit iffy, but I love the bypassing minigame. It's not hard enough to be difficult in any way but it's got enough skill involved that you have to concentrate a little bit to do it (unlike shittacular Simon-says lockpicking in the first game).
A scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'
'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'
Vympel wrote:
Am I only the person who started off by importing my renegade character?
Will let you know.
Spoiler
If you killed the Council last game, they refuse to talk to you. You get reinstated back into the Navy.
If you saved them, they reinstate you as as a Spectre but provide no aid or anything else.
Both of the excuse they use to avoid helping you are pretty much the same. "The Reaper was really a Geth ship." And Udina is to busy being a fucking asshole to bother helping you.
adam_grif: You get items on your next play through based on your achievements. So I got a crapload of credits, 50K of each resource and a bunch of bonus powers to choose from.
M1891/30: A bad day on the range is better then a good day at work.
Vympel wrote:
Am I only the person who started off by importing my renegade character?
Will let you know.
Spoiler
If you killed the Council last game, they refuse to talk to you. You get reinstated back into the Navy.
If you saved them, they reinstate you as as a Spectre but provide no aid or anything else.
Both of the excuse they use to avoid helping you are pretty much the same. "The Reaper was really a Geth ship." And Udina is to busy being a fucking asshole to bother helping you.
adam_grif: You get items on your next play through based on your achievements. So I got a crapload of credits, 50K of each resource and a bunch of bonus powers to choose from.
Hm, better than nothing I suppose.
Also, looks like I was right about the whole "nothing *really* changes", as expected. I can't wait till I do my pure paragon play-through, so it can totally shatter my illusions of freedom and choice, just like my second play-through of the first game.
A scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'
'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'
I'm amused by the fact that the general "Humans are smarter and more imaginative" thing of the first game has now been replaced by outright saying that humans are genetically superior.
Wow, just wow.
.. then again maybe they're just lampshading the mono-race/culture alien trope of virtually all sci-fi.
"No it's just Anacrap coming to whine and do nothing." -Mike Nelson on Anakin Skywalker
I don't know how any of you can be through the whole game. I have played for literally, almost 32 hours and I am only level 12 and don't even have all my squad yet.
Granted, I am not a pussy and playing it on 'casual' or 'normal' or even 'hardcore', but on INSANE!!!, so my playthrough is probably taking a bit longer story wise.
I also spend a bit of time* scanning and playing dress up so that could contribute as well.
*hours.
It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark... and we're wearing sunglasses.
Hit it. Blank Yellow (NSFW)
I was wondering why people were complaining about the planet scanning, I found it slightly boring but hardly gamebreaking.
Then I found a video of the scanning on the 360, and holy fuck, the upgraded 360 scanner is like half the speed of the basic pc scanner. Yeah, I can see myself screaming at the screen over that...
Gramzamber wrote:The ads are fucking creepy, the way they address Shep by name and try to provide content relevant to Shep (I especially liked the "We heard you died, how about a funeral robe?").
Especially since I can totally see ads in real life going this way, a lot of internet spam already does this to an extent.
"We know times are tough, records show you made ZERO credits last year!"
Mayabird is my girlfriend
Justice League:BotM:MM:SDnet City Watch:Cybertron's Finest "Well then, science is bullshit. "
-revprez, with yet another brilliant rebuttal.
It's the same way ads were represented in Minority Report.
It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark... and we're wearing sunglasses.
Hit it. Blank Yellow (NSFW)
Gramzamber wrote:I'm amused by the fact that the general "Humans are smarter and more imaginative" thing of the first game has now been replaced by outright saying that humans are genetically superior.
Wow, just wow.
.. then again maybe they're just lampshading the mono-race/culture alien trope of virtually all sci-fi.
I seem to recall hearing or reading that human genetic diversity is minimal compared to most animal species on Earth due to a fairly recent population bottleneck. If this is true it would fly directly in the face of their "humans are exceptionally genetically variable", unless we're expected to believe that Aliens are even less so.
Havok wrote:
I don't know how any of you can be through the whole game. I have played for literally, almost 32 hours and I am only level 12 and don't even have all my squad yet.
Granted, I am not a pussy and playing it on 'casual' or 'normal' or even 'hardcore', but on INSANE!!!, so my playthrough is probably taking a bit longer story wise.
I also spend a bit of time* scanning and playing dress up so that could contribute as well.
*hours.
Somewhere around 25 hours for my first playthrough on "Normal". Got to level 24.
A scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'
'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'
You know I hope someone puts out a mod where you can keep Shep's scars but lose the terminator eyes. I actually quite like the scars and hell, if you died and got bootstrapped back to life you shouldn't come out looking perfect. But the eyes are a bit cheesy, though I do appreciate the tech continuity with the Illusive Man's eye implants (they have a similar set of 3 circles around the pupil).
Also I got a kick out of the migrant flotilla, it's Dragon Age in Spaaaaace. I spotted 3 Dragon Age VAs in a row.
"No it's just Anacrap coming to whine and do nothing." -Mike Nelson on Anakin Skywalker
AWESOME!
