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I'd like to know what they're doing with the exploration angle. Are there still a hundred featureless rocks with one or two generic bunkers that you have to visit in your improbable mountain-climbing APC? Though I'm actually sad that the Mako is being replaced by something 'easier to control' i.e. utterly generic FPS vehicle that behaves like you're still on foot.

You enjoyed the Mako sequences? I hated them. I hated them so much.

adam_grif wrote:You enjoyed the Mako sequences? I hated them. I hated them so much.

The mountain climbing was frustrating and horribly unrealistic. The actual Mako combat showed promise, but it was hindered by three crippling flaws; the controls were camera relative rather than vehicle relative (like every shitty FPS ever), the gun had almost no depression but the sights did not show you this (leading to wildly shooting over the target if you were on any kind of uphill slope), and all the enemies were stationary or nearly so. However I did like the fact that maneuvering the APC in close quarters was tricky, because it made it feel more like a substantial piece of military hardware. I saw some reviewers ragging on about the jump thrusters being 'unrealistic' and I thought 'WTF, that's the most unrealistic thing you could think of?'. The amazing jumping APC is actually a pretty logical application of the universe's tech base.

I found the opposite; towards the end when I was just fucking around, I started doing stupid stuff like 'put HE mod on shotgun', which maxed the heat bar pretty quickly (often one shot). But yeah, playing like a normal person it's not an issue given the damage/durability relationship with the badguys.

The negatives you just described are why I hated it so much.

It doesn't help that I didn't discover that you could fire the cannon until my second playthrough.

adam_grif wrote:The negatives you just described are why I hated it so much.

It doesn't help that I didn't discover that you could fire the cannon until my second playthrough.

Your game not come with a manual?

I'd like to know what they're doing with the exploration angle. Are there still a hundred featureless rocks with one or two generic bunkers that you have to visit in your improbable mountain-climbing APC? Though I'm actually sad that the Mako is being replaced by something 'easier to control' i.e. utterly generic FPS vehicle that behaves like you're still on foot.

Last I heard they were changing it so there are different places on the planets you can access from the planet screen. The example I saw was that you could zoom in on different areas with salvageable resources and choose to land. I'm hoping for some actual foliage though, the previous games lack of anything but basic colours was pretty boring. The generic bunkers wasn't to big a deal for me but I wouldn't object to a change.

Starglider wrote:the controls were camera relative rather than vehicle relative (like every shitty FPS ever),

This is a really annoying console trend. Blame Halo; games like GTA use proper controls just fine. That the game had a third-person perspective but didn't account for the difference in gun and eye position with aimpoints was pretty inexcusable. The jumping was fine; the jumping + the no mass + the no traction was retarded.

Cpl Kendall wrote: Your game not come with a manual?

Of course, but I didn't read it. Then one day I just hit RB by accident and the cannon fires. My mind was blown.

I loved the Mako. The game didn't really come alive for me until I left the Citadel and started exploring worlds. The intro on Eden Prime was fun enough and going at a decent pace but the Citadel sort of felt like someone hit the brakes and went 5ks through a school zone or something.

Lol at adam_grif. Jesus christ, the fucking thing has a cannon on top of it and you didn't realise it could fire until your second playthrough? Holy shit.

That's because the whole Citadel sequence at the start was mindblowingly boring and poorly paced. Driving around in the Mako might have been primitive, but it was way more fun than 'talk to these three guys LEVEL UP'. I nearly stopped playing the game after it went from 'fun intro shooting' to snoozefest OMG BEWBS nonsense. The side-quest locations were lazy as hell (all those identical freighters!) but the combat was fun if unbalanced.

I'm really looking forward to this game, but not as much as I'm looking forward to Stark's hatred of it.

Stofsk wrote:Lol at adam_grif. Jesus christ, the fucking thing has a cannon on top of it and you didn't realise it could fire until your second playthrough? Holy shit.

That's nothing. For some reason, I didn't know the color green existed until I saw an episode of Power Rangers when I was like 5 or 6, and they had the green ranger. You have no idea how much of a mindfuck that was for me. I don't know how it happened, but I'd gone for that long and nobody had ever told me about the color green. Sure, I'd seen grass and shit, but I must have thought about it in terms of other colors, because I'd never asked anybody what it was.

Anyway, the Mako. I never looked at it very closely. From behind you can't really tell that the MG is firing from a tiny little secondary barrel instead of the main one, I assumed it was some kind of new fandangle space AFV that for some reason had an exceptionally large barreled MG. Even that's probably more than I thought about it - I just tried to breeze through the Mako levels because I found them so unsatisfying.

Even when I could use the cannon I didn't enjoy it at all.

Stofsk wrote:I loved the Mako.

When I did my APOLLO SHEPARD playthrough and actually finished the game, I found that I was more favourable towards the game after fucking around with the Mako, driving it up huge vertical cliffs and then flinging myself across the map. I found rock climbing to be weirdly enjoyable.

Cpl Kendall wrote:I'm hoping for some actual foliage though, the previous games lack of anything but basic colours was pretty boring. The generic bunkers wasn't to big a deal for me but I wouldn't object to a change.

There's this strangely tight lid on what planetary exploration is like once you reach the ground, but the very brief glimpse of an apparently random planet actually had plants.

I found the opposite; towards the end when I was just fucking around, I started doing stupid stuff like 'put HE mod on shotgun', which maxed the heat bar pretty quickly (often one shot). But yeah, playing like a normal person it's not an issue given the damage/durability relationship with the badguys.

The HE ammo mod is hilarious. There's basically no way to make it combat useful, though that is true of a lot of the ammo types.

Ford Prefect wrote:The HE ammo mod is hilarious. There's basically no way to make it combat useful

I found HE to be one of the more useful ammo types, because it made sniping more worthwhile. There were lots of other mods (snowblind, polonium etc) that had virtually no effect on gameplay.

I hate to admit it, but I eventually completed the game three times and got every achievement except a couple of the 'use biotics a lot' ones (since I prefer combat/tech characters).

In the original THE ammo to have was Shredder VII, as organic enemies scaled their hitpoints and damage reduction far higher than mechanicals did, and the 40% damage boost for negligible heat effect was killer against them.

Except in shotguns, where Jackhammer X could juggle lock even the final boss.

I liked Inferno rounds, and the ones which bypassed shields. Both were pretty.

Sniper rifle + 2 rail extensions + HE ammo.

Stark wrote:A harmless joke at someone else's expense as part of a normal relationship? +10 renegade!

OMG lol, yeah, things like that really are stupid. There was some of that in KOTOR too IIRC, when playing "light side" while trying to not be a gummy bear you got dark side hits for things no one could seriously see as anything other than harmless picking at people you're supposedly friends with. This is one thing Dragon Age did better actually, especially with Alistair you can engage in harmless poking at each other without him crying over your evilness.

Dragon Age was pretty much a massive improvement when it comes to Bioware's hard-on for moral decision making: they didn't track it at all, except thorugh how opinions of you shifted as a result. As far as Ic an see there are still Paragon and Renegade points, but I haven't seen nearly the sort of hype about it that existed back when the first game was coming out. Also apparently party members have the same sort of 'opinion meter' that they have in Dragon Age mean that, for better or worse, it's a more involved process than in Mass Effect. I'm kind of interested to see what parts of the team ME2 shares with DA:O, actually. Dragon Age marks a fairly significant improvement in Bioware's writing, and it makes me want to be hopeful for ME2 as a result. It wasn't exactly The Witcher or anything but it was kindo f impressive how decisions were not necessarily as clear cut or polarised as in other Bioware games, where they ultimately come to a good and a bad option. Choosing who to support for the leadership of the dwarves is a good one: I won't go into detail for the sake of spoilers, but the options are kind of grey.

charlemagne wrote:

Stark wrote:A harmless joke at someone else's expense as part of a normal relationship? +10 renegade!

OMG lol, yeah, things like that really are stupid. There was some of that in KOTOR too IIRC, when playing "light side" while trying to not be a gummy bear you got dark side hits for things no one could seriously see as anything other than harmless picking at people you're supposedly friends with. This is one thing Dragon Age did better actually, especially with Alistair you can engage in harmless poking at each other without him crying over your evilness.

Mass Effect's ethics system failed for the same reason virtually every other game with an ethics system fail. The writers don't seem to have any kind of grasp on ethics outside of high-school level "Us vs. Them" mindsets. You either come off as a complete dick for making an evil choice, a total sissy for making a good choice or an indecisive twit for making a neutral choice. I guess subtlety just doesn't exist.

Ford Prefect wrote:Dragon Age was pretty much a massive improvement when it comes to Bioware's hard-on for moral decision making: they didn't track it at all, except thorugh how opinions of you shifted as a result. As far as Ic an see there are still Paragon and Renegade points, but I haven't seen nearly the sort of hype about it that existed back when the first game was coming out. Also apparently party members have the same sort of 'opinion meter' that they have in Dragon Age mean that, for better or worse, it's a more involved process than in Mass Effect. I'm kind of interested to see what parts of the team ME2 shares with DA:O, actually. Dragon Age marks a fairly significant improvement in Bioware's writing, and it makes me want to be hopeful for ME2 as a result. It wasn't exactly The Witcher or anything but it was kindo f impressive how decisions were not necessarily as clear cut or polarised as in other Bioware games, where they ultimately come to a good and a bad option. Choosing who to support for the leadership of the dwarves is a good one: I won't go into detail for the sake of spoilers, but the options are kind of grey.

I think what's more important is Bioware were too stupid to realise that it's not the 'morality points' that matter to make the choices hard; it's consequences. NONE of the big decisions in ME have any ingame consequences at all besides Wrex (and arguably the finale but it's irrelevant for ME itself). With DA at least you have to think about what your decisions will do and how that will affect you later, and not 'you let the Rachni go and got a hurtful video message'.

Stark wrote:I think what's more important is Bioware were too stupid to realise that it's not the 'morality points' that matter to make the choices hard; it's consequences. NONE of the big decisions in ME have any ingame consequences at all besides Wrex (and arguably the finale but it's irrelevant for ME itself). With DA at least you have to think about what your decisions will do and how that will affect you later, and not 'you let the Rachni go and got a hurtful video message'.

This is totally right. Very few decisions really have any effect on you, apart from the character deaths on Virmire. The idea of course is that your decisions have outcomes in ME2, but that harms ME as a self contained game. Given DA:O, here's hoping that they've picked up the 'decisions should have consequences' idea as being positive. If so then no matter what the silliness of the plot, it will be much more satisfying to interact with. I'm not really convinced that this will be the case, though.

Does anyone know who the lead writer for Dragon Age was?

Even on Virmire, you could make Wrex live as Paragon OR Renegade. So long as you had sufficient Charm or Intimidate points. And the ending, does it even matter what you are? It's "council lives / council dies", and you choose one or the other. Even if you've played Renegade up until that point for the whole game, you can let them live, and vice versa.

Ford Prefect wrote:Dragon Age was pretty much a massive improvement when it comes to Bioware's hard-on for moral decision making: they didn't track it at all, except thorugh how opinions of you shifted as a result. As far as Ic an see there are still Paragon and Renegade points, but I haven't seen nearly the sort of hype about it that existed back when the first game was coming out. Also apparently party members have the same sort of 'opinion meter' that they have in Dragon Age mean that, for better or worse, it's a more involved process than in Mass Effect. I'm kind of interested to see what parts of the team ME2 shares with DA:O, actually. Dragon Age marks a fairly significant improvement in Bioware's writing, and it makes me want to be hopeful for ME2 as a result. It wasn't exactly The Witcher or anything but it was kindo f impressive how decisions were not necessarily as clear cut or polarised as in other Bioware games, where they ultimately come to a good and a bad option. Choosing who to support for the leadership of the dwarves is a good one: I won't go into detail for the sake of spoilers, but the options are kind of grey.

It's massive for Bioware, true. As the RPGs or choices, it's kinda meh, with the point of why I disliked the gifts in this particular. Basically you could in one moment go "Yeah, so I her die for her worthless bastard child...and? Oh here's a bouquet of flowers. Let's fuck.". It is a better step but I wish Bioware would actually have it truly have some effect rather then letting you fuck them over but as long as you can bribe them they love you as much as the dog does. Really, gifts broke DA more for me, but the dialogue/choices and what it affected were better.

Another note is your point of it was less BAD or GOOD is a forward point. You made choices on what you believed were good or bad but they were not black and white and at times very brutal even for what some could call the good choice. As you said about the Dwarven ascension. Neither of them are really good choices and in fact one choice is slightly better for their future, but isn't the one you think it is. With ME, it didn't matter a whit if you went around "FUCK ALIENS!!!" and let the council get turned into Reaper chow.

I am hoping perhaps some future game they will have you stand behind your dialogue, and no backroads to have your characters all love your avatar. I know...how dare a party not all love you and each other. But hey, I can dream .

I actually found ME's renegade/paragon system better than DA's gift system. I mean c'mon, Sten bags the shit out of you, questions your leadership and so on, then you give him a couple paintings and suddenly you're best of buddies and he's telling you about his goddamn honour blade or whatever. At least ME's system doesn't affect Shepherd acting like a hero, unlike say KotOR where the choice is literally between being good or evil. True, none of the choices you make in ME have any effect outside of their particular plot climax, however that's what the sequel is for, so I'm hoping things like saving the Rachni Queen, or killing her, or saving the colony on Feros or killing the Batarian slavers on BDTS or letting them go - and of course, whether Wrex lives or dies or who you choose to save between Ash or Kaidan, as well as the Council - I hope things like this are addressed in ME2.