wallwalker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wallwalker) wrote2010-11-02 08:57 am
wallwalker) wrote2010-11-02 08:57 am
Entry tags:
Mass Effect and thoughts on changes between games
I haven't actually finished Mass Effect - I have all of the party members and I've finished the plot-important events in Feros and Noveria. I'm stalling before I go to Virmire, because since I played ME2 first, I know what happens there. So I'm finishing sidequests and helping out my crew before I go there.
So these thoughts are less about plot, so far, and more about gameplay. There are things in each game that I like, and there are things that I wish had been in both games. Overall I like the series; most of these are fairly small things. (I should read the novels at some point... I'd play the cell phone game too, just for the plot, if I had a phone that could actually play games. :p)
---
Things I prefer about Mass Effect 1:
- The idea of having a vehicle to drive around on planets with. I like being able to explore more of a planet than we get on the few planets we can explore in ME2, although I would like there to be more to find on said planets than the small handful of things there typically are in ME1. (However, see the first entry in my next list.)
- The way the game deals with Charm/Intimidate as compared to the Paragon/Renegade score. Just because I typically try to make the "right" or "noble" decisions, or whatever, doesn't mean that I might not want to intimidate people sometimes. I could do that in the first game - even with practically no Renegade points, I could get up to six points in Intimidate at this point, if I wanted to spend the points. In ME2, if you want to be able to convince people in difficult situations - and you very nearly have to be able to do that if you want everyone to survive to the end, because otherwise you lose loyalty and that usually ends to squad members dying - you have to always go one way or the other. I'd rather have the option to change my mind as the situation changes.
- The way the first game deals with Paragon/Renegade in general. As I said above, I like the fact that I can play a mixed game if I want to - there are more than enough Paragon and Renegade points to get a lot of both if I want. (I'm not going to try it in this playthrough, but in a later playthrough I might see if I can max them both out. The main point of this playthrough is to see what the Paragon decisions do to ME2, since I've seen the results of the Renegade decisions. Oh, and to save Wrex.) The second game requires you to ALWAYS choose to be a Paragon or a Renegade to fill up your gauge, and the gameplay highly rewards you for filling up one gauge or the other, so if you want the best results, your hands are tied.
- The fact that there is no hours-long planetary scanning. (But I think that we can all agree on this!)
- The fact that there is no global cooldown. The global cooldown in ME2 didn't make much sense to me, especially in terms of what my abilities actually were. Why did, say, hitting a few buttons to activate my Incendaries stop me from using my biotics? (Yes, my first ME2 character was a vanguard. I like biotics.)
Things I prefer about Mass Effect 2:
- The fact that there is no Mako. Yes, I like the vehicle system, in theory. In practice, the physics of the thing annoyed the hell out of me. I still remember having to fight off a small army of robots while stuck on some kind of antenna thing, and only managing to get down to kill the last two at the last possible second before they blew me up; I couldn't kill them while stuck because my gun wouldn't move that way. I think that there's a vehicle in one of the ME2 DLC missions. I'm going to have to look for it sometime when I have money again, see if it's any better.
- The simplified inventory system. It's not perfect, maybe, but it's an improvement over the limited stuff you can carry in the first game and the hours of comparing numbers that it entails. I've been perpetually at the item limit for ages now, and I can't seem to sell or get rid of enough stuff to do anything about it.
- The way the game handles your weapons while in combat. I've been wondering for the whole game - why does Shepard the biotic adept bother to even carry a shotgun, assault rifle or sniper rifle with him, if he never gets the option to learn to use them? I'd really much rather just be able to worry about the weapons and accessories I'm actually going to use. (For the hell of it, I once decided to use my assault rifle to blow up a piece of scenery that needed to be destroyed. I thought it might go faster than using my pistol. I fired until my rifle overheated - and it was a pretty good rifle, on par with the best equipment I had. I didn't hit the stupid thing ONCE. I've never tried to use anything but a pistol since.)
- The new minigames for hacking and decryption. I like them better than doing the same thing over and over and over for everything.
- Powers didn't take freakin' forever to recharge the way they did in the first game. It took me a while to get the hang of that after playing ME2 first. There were long periods of time during which I, as an adept, wouldn't really be able to do anything but shoot my pistol at people because all of my biotics were still on cooldown (thank goodness for Chemical/Polodium Rounds!) It got better as I went on - I found ways to reduce the cooldown and got more powers to choose from - but still, shorter cooldowns in the second game were a good thing.
- Better auto-saving. But then, ME2 had spoiled me and left me unprepared for the near-complete lack of autosave in ME1. I suppose it made me lazy, really.
- More interactivity with skills, although it was limited. You got the option to pick up a new weapon skill in one area, and you could train Shepard to learn a new skill from your loyal crewmates. (I didn't find out - could a non-biotic class learn one of the biotic abilities from a crewmate? Could, say, a soldier learn Barrier or, um, whatever Samara's ability was? Doesn't make much sense in terms of setting if they can, but... eh.) I liked that better than the first game, in which you pretty much get what you started with, in terms of combat abilities.
Things I wish would've been in both games:
- More interactivity between crew members. Yes, I'm always a fan of being able to interact with your party members, romantically or otherwise, but why don't your crew members ever talk to each other? I mean, that was the one advantage of the elevators in ME1. Your crew mates would talk to each other, so you actually got to find out what some of these people thought of each other (and that Tali didn't take anyone's crap. Go Tali!) Shepard might be the main character, but that doesn't mean (s)he's the center of the universe; what about everyone else?
To be fair, though, this is a fairly common wish with me. And very few games have even come close to satisfying this particular wish. Star Ocean: The Second Story is probably the closest one I've ever seen, and even that wasn't exactly what I would've asked for. But I digress.
- Skill customization to a greater degree. Maybe have some skills that are considered Core for a class and that can't be changed or taught to anyone else, but allow Shepard (or another crew member, to a more limited degree) to spend training points and whatnot to earn others. Sacrifice, say, the ability to use a pistol well for the ability to use a different weapon, or swap out one kind of special ammo for another. There would have to be limits - you couldn't just swap skills willy-nilly without any cost. But I'd like the option to substitute some skills for the ones that I will never, ever use.
- A greater sense of urgency. While I'm fine with doing lots of sidequests for experience and to meet new and interesting people, it does tend to erode the urgency of what we're doing, which is basically a "race against time" to save the galaxy. (They even call it that outright in the first game.) While I'm not a huge fan of having to cut out huge quantities of gameplay just to finish the game, or having a largely arbitrary list of objectives that you have to complete in your limited time to get the BEST ending when you have no way of knowing what they are beforehand, it would be nice to buck the genre a bit, and have a limited amount of time to do sidequests and the like before plot happens.
It would also make the options that you have in ME2 to restart the game with your accumulated XP more meaningful, in my opinion. I didn't do that - frankly, I'd finished just about everything before I went and finished the game. Of course, that's partially because I'd watched someone else play for a while before I could start and was spoiled for the fact that the Derelict Reaper mission was essentially a Point of No Return with a delayed trigger, and I wanted to get the No Man Left Behind achievement, which translates to "Get as high a Paragon or Renegade score as possible so that you can settle conflicts among your crew peacefully and keep their loyalty," and the only way to do that is to do sidequests.
The second game was better about this, by the way. I liked the fact that NOT going to the Collectors' Base when the option became available had real consequences, and if I hadn't known about the Derelict Reaper mission, I probably would've waltzed right into it and ended up either getting half my squad slaughtered, or losing my crew. Maybe something like that, but without the option to ignore the trigger mission? Or have different chains of side missions, each of which unlock different characters/events/items? I don't know; the game's probably already planned out, and I have no way of knowing if it's going to follow these lines at all. I guess I'll have to see.
So these thoughts are less about plot, so far, and more about gameplay. There are things in each game that I like, and there are things that I wish had been in both games. Overall I like the series; most of these are fairly small things. (I should read the novels at some point... I'd play the cell phone game too, just for the plot, if I had a phone that could actually play games. :p)
---
Things I prefer about Mass Effect 1:
- The idea of having a vehicle to drive around on planets with. I like being able to explore more of a planet than we get on the few planets we can explore in ME2, although I would like there to be more to find on said planets than the small handful of things there typically are in ME1. (However, see the first entry in my next list.)
- The way the game deals with Charm/Intimidate as compared to the Paragon/Renegade score. Just because I typically try to make the "right" or "noble" decisions, or whatever, doesn't mean that I might not want to intimidate people sometimes. I could do that in the first game - even with practically no Renegade points, I could get up to six points in Intimidate at this point, if I wanted to spend the points. In ME2, if you want to be able to convince people in difficult situations - and you very nearly have to be able to do that if you want everyone to survive to the end, because otherwise you lose loyalty and that usually ends to squad members dying - you have to always go one way or the other. I'd rather have the option to change my mind as the situation changes.
- The way the first game deals with Paragon/Renegade in general. As I said above, I like the fact that I can play a mixed game if I want to - there are more than enough Paragon and Renegade points to get a lot of both if I want. (I'm not going to try it in this playthrough, but in a later playthrough I might see if I can max them both out. The main point of this playthrough is to see what the Paragon decisions do to ME2, since I've seen the results of the Renegade decisions. Oh, and to save Wrex.) The second game requires you to ALWAYS choose to be a Paragon or a Renegade to fill up your gauge, and the gameplay highly rewards you for filling up one gauge or the other, so if you want the best results, your hands are tied.
- The fact that there is no hours-long planetary scanning. (But I think that we can all agree on this!)
- The fact that there is no global cooldown. The global cooldown in ME2 didn't make much sense to me, especially in terms of what my abilities actually were. Why did, say, hitting a few buttons to activate my Incendaries stop me from using my biotics? (Yes, my first ME2 character was a vanguard. I like biotics.)
Things I prefer about Mass Effect 2:
- The fact that there is no Mako. Yes, I like the vehicle system, in theory. In practice, the physics of the thing annoyed the hell out of me. I still remember having to fight off a small army of robots while stuck on some kind of antenna thing, and only managing to get down to kill the last two at the last possible second before they blew me up; I couldn't kill them while stuck because my gun wouldn't move that way. I think that there's a vehicle in one of the ME2 DLC missions. I'm going to have to look for it sometime when I have money again, see if it's any better.
- The simplified inventory system. It's not perfect, maybe, but it's an improvement over the limited stuff you can carry in the first game and the hours of comparing numbers that it entails. I've been perpetually at the item limit for ages now, and I can't seem to sell or get rid of enough stuff to do anything about it.
- The way the game handles your weapons while in combat. I've been wondering for the whole game - why does Shepard the biotic adept bother to even carry a shotgun, assault rifle or sniper rifle with him, if he never gets the option to learn to use them? I'd really much rather just be able to worry about the weapons and accessories I'm actually going to use. (For the hell of it, I once decided to use my assault rifle to blow up a piece of scenery that needed to be destroyed. I thought it might go faster than using my pistol. I fired until my rifle overheated - and it was a pretty good rifle, on par with the best equipment I had. I didn't hit the stupid thing ONCE. I've never tried to use anything but a pistol since.)
- The new minigames for hacking and decryption. I like them better than doing the same thing over and over and over for everything.
- Powers didn't take freakin' forever to recharge the way they did in the first game. It took me a while to get the hang of that after playing ME2 first. There were long periods of time during which I, as an adept, wouldn't really be able to do anything but shoot my pistol at people because all of my biotics were still on cooldown (thank goodness for Chemical/Polodium Rounds!) It got better as I went on - I found ways to reduce the cooldown and got more powers to choose from - but still, shorter cooldowns in the second game were a good thing.
- Better auto-saving. But then, ME2 had spoiled me and left me unprepared for the near-complete lack of autosave in ME1. I suppose it made me lazy, really.
- More interactivity with skills, although it was limited. You got the option to pick up a new weapon skill in one area, and you could train Shepard to learn a new skill from your loyal crewmates. (I didn't find out - could a non-biotic class learn one of the biotic abilities from a crewmate? Could, say, a soldier learn Barrier or, um, whatever Samara's ability was? Doesn't make much sense in terms of setting if they can, but... eh.) I liked that better than the first game, in which you pretty much get what you started with, in terms of combat abilities.
Things I wish would've been in both games:
- More interactivity between crew members. Yes, I'm always a fan of being able to interact with your party members, romantically or otherwise, but why don't your crew members ever talk to each other? I mean, that was the one advantage of the elevators in ME1. Your crew mates would talk to each other, so you actually got to find out what some of these people thought of each other (and that Tali didn't take anyone's crap. Go Tali!) Shepard might be the main character, but that doesn't mean (s)he's the center of the universe; what about everyone else?
To be fair, though, this is a fairly common wish with me. And very few games have even come close to satisfying this particular wish. Star Ocean: The Second Story is probably the closest one I've ever seen, and even that wasn't exactly what I would've asked for. But I digress.
- Skill customization to a greater degree. Maybe have some skills that are considered Core for a class and that can't be changed or taught to anyone else, but allow Shepard (or another crew member, to a more limited degree) to spend training points and whatnot to earn others. Sacrifice, say, the ability to use a pistol well for the ability to use a different weapon, or swap out one kind of special ammo for another. There would have to be limits - you couldn't just swap skills willy-nilly without any cost. But I'd like the option to substitute some skills for the ones that I will never, ever use.
- A greater sense of urgency. While I'm fine with doing lots of sidequests for experience and to meet new and interesting people, it does tend to erode the urgency of what we're doing, which is basically a "race against time" to save the galaxy. (They even call it that outright in the first game.) While I'm not a huge fan of having to cut out huge quantities of gameplay just to finish the game, or having a largely arbitrary list of objectives that you have to complete in your limited time to get the BEST ending when you have no way of knowing what they are beforehand, it would be nice to buck the genre a bit, and have a limited amount of time to do sidequests and the like before plot happens.
It would also make the options that you have in ME2 to restart the game with your accumulated XP more meaningful, in my opinion. I didn't do that - frankly, I'd finished just about everything before I went and finished the game. Of course, that's partially because I'd watched someone else play for a while before I could start and was spoiled for the fact that the Derelict Reaper mission was essentially a Point of No Return with a delayed trigger, and I wanted to get the No Man Left Behind achievement, which translates to "Get as high a Paragon or Renegade score as possible so that you can settle conflicts among your crew peacefully and keep their loyalty," and the only way to do that is to do sidequests.
The second game was better about this, by the way. I liked the fact that NOT going to the Collectors' Base when the option became available had real consequences, and if I hadn't known about the Derelict Reaper mission, I probably would've waltzed right into it and ended up either getting half my squad slaughtered, or losing my crew. Maybe something like that, but without the option to ignore the trigger mission? Or have different chains of side missions, each of which unlock different characters/events/items? I don't know; the game's probably already planned out, and I have no way of knowing if it's going to follow these lines at all. I guess I'll have to see.
no subject
I didn't know assault rifles were that bad in ME1. I used a shotgun (untrained) with high explosive rounds on my Adept and it was a great panic button. Sure, it'd overheat after one shot, but that one shot would get a creeper from "in my face, spitting acid" to "raining down the neighbourhood in bite sized chunks, and the chunks are also on fire". Saved my life several times during those levels where I couldn't stay far, far away from the creepy plant zombies and snipe them in the head...
There's a "hovertank" in ME2 and you get five small missions in the original dlc, which is free if you have the Cerberus network thingy, and it makes an appearance in Overlord as well. It's very fast, very agile, has homing rockets and catches on fire if enemies so much as look at it funny. The combat is either A, being sane and rational and shooting rockets at things while staying so far away that they can't shoot back, or B, being insane and ramming everything while hoping they don't hit you too many times. I strongly prefer option B, but that may be because I'm a complete moron.
...I'm hoping ME3 will combine all the best stuff from the first two. Not expecting it to happen, but hoping.
no subject
It might not have been so bad if I'd been aiming at a person. I was aiming at a CPU, and the hit box on those seems fairly small. There was just so much bullet scatter that I couldn't do it. It just seemed easier to stick with Marksman and my trusty pistol with Chem rounds.
no subject
Shockwave was a lot of fun. I miss all that biotic juggling on the higher difficulties.