Bay 12 Games Forum

Love the series, love that episode. You have good taste, ChairmanPoo.

There are some things duct tape cannot fix. You must use WD-40 for those things.

Hmm, this looks interesting. I do hope that getting this deal means you have all future versions of the games. That makes the most sense, after all.

Hey people:


Stick to the election discussion, plskthnxbai.

Plus its been so long since I've experienced either game that my memory isn't exactly fresh as a spring breeze.

No shit 
Let's go through this bit by bit, shall we?

I never said ME1 was a perfect game. I said it was promising. It had flaws. Some big ones even, but they were fixable.

It would help if you would mention which flaws you're thinking of, though I can guess that the inventory system is one of them. It's also important to note that many such "flaws" are personal preferences, and some people genuinely enjoyed the complex modification system. I'm personally guilty of this, having spent plenty of time making sure every team member had effective weapons, armor, and useful mods for them.

But instead of taking it, looking at it, and fixing it, they just ripped everything out until we had generic shooter #502 with dialogue trees.

Right here, you're guilty of "it's popular, so it sucks" syndrome. Shooters are a popular genre of game, and make lots of money. That doesn't mean that they're all terrible or carbon-copy clones of each other. This is also overlooking the fact that ME2's combat system is much more highly regarded in many circles than the original.

As for the characters in 2. They are one or two dimensional. Everything about them either revolves around one issue that you are forced to resolve FOR THEM, or fucking Shepard.

Now this is a statement I hear often, and it never makes any more sense. The character development for your party members, especially Garrus (which I will address in my next point) is far deeper than in the original, and for more characters. Take Miranda, for instance. When you first meet her, she's all to happy to talk about how she is "perfect". Start stripping away the layers, however (pun not intended), and you find that deep down she's far more insecure than she lets on, partly due to being forced to live up to her perceived "perfection" and also because despite all of her genetic modification, she's just as human and vulnerable to fear and doubt as anyone else. And she's typically used as an example of shallow characterization.
The reason behind Shepard helping his/her team with their problems is quite simple: the characters have mental baggage. We all know the feeling, those niggling doubts and worries in the backs of our heads. They'd like nothing more than to take care of those problems, but they're stuck on Shepard's ship. To continue using Miranda as an example, how well do you think she'd do if she went on a suicide mission while still worrying about her sister possibly being kidnapped? Pretty damn badly, in all likelihood. Shepard knows this, and so goes out of his/her way to assist (assuming you're trying to keep everyone alive).
Oh, and you can easily beat the game without having sex with anyone.

And speaking of characters what the fuck happened to Garrus. He went from a young, inexperienced cop; to this badass jaded vigilante who's got half the underworld scared of him in what, two years? The hell? That's a pretty drastic change for me to swallow.

Actually, Garrus was hand-picked as a Spectre candidate. He tells you this in the first game. Add in the Turian's militaristic culture and the fact that C-Sec operatives are selected out of various armed forces, and he's hardly some cop fresh from the academy.

Also what the FUCK, is up with Samara's loyalty mission and the choice at the end? Why is there even a choice? WHY WOULD YOU PICK THE MASS MURDERING SUCCUBUS GIRL WHO FUCKS PEOPLE TO DEATH AND REFUSES TO EVER STOP?! For any other reason than to be an evil prick? Why would any Shepard EVER do that? That's not even remotely heroic, at all, why would even a renegade do that?! That's not pragmatic, Samara is SWORN TO DO WHAT YOU TELL HER. HER EVIL DAUGHTER IS NOT. Sorry, but that scene just stuck in my head as so monumentally stupid and badly done.

Also quite simple. See, Samara may be following you, but she is not your "crew". She has her own oath to follow, and if you're playing a Renegade Shepard she'll flat-out tell you that after the mission is over, she'll try to kill you. Morinth may be crazy, but she knows that you can take her in a fight if she attempts to betray you. It can therefore be argued that Shepard is merely thinking ahead, killing a woman who is guaranteed to turn on him/her and going with someone who only "might" betray him/her.

Also, by plot missions aside from your quote... what? Plot missions ARE THE GAME. ME1 had generic side content? Yes, yes it did, and that could have used some work. But it was side content. Almost all of it was completely and utterly skippable and had no bearing on the main plot whatsoever. And the plot missions were varied, had you taking the fight to your foes in large, colorful, and varied areas. With fun setpieces and tension. Big shit was going down, and you had to save the day. Wheres the tension in two? You're just chilling in your ship, tooling around the galaxy. Waiting for something to happen so you can continue. You're not trying to progress things or solve the problem. You're letting other people call the shots and point you where to go, doing your investigating and tracking down your leads.

Four words: Noveria. Therum. Feros. Virmire.
Don't recognize them? Those are the plot missions from Mass Effect 1. Four. Each of them assigned to you by the Council, to track down clues for hunting down Saren. The exact same thing you accuse ME2 of doing.

The entire point of the second game is to build a team strong enough to fight the Collectors. You can't do it with just Jacob and Miranda. You must also gather intelligence on the Collectors and their connection to the Reapers, and find a way to get through the relay to fight them.

There's barely any plot. It go down corridor, shoot mercenaries/geth/krogan , get teammate. Repeat until game says you can do some more plot. And then there's the loyalty missions Which are basically go down the corridor, shoot mercenaries/geth/krogan, talk out problem. Or kill your teammate, and trust the evil succubus daughter to not just disappear on you. (Can you tell how much that really REALLY got to me?)

Again, that's pretty much exactly how the first game was. ME1 had very well disguised corridors, but they were corridors nonetheless. Are you really not getting this?

And the mining mini-game. Yeah, that's sooo much better then the Mako. That's definitely an approach that garnered more positive feedback.

You'd be surprised how many people loathed the Mako and were glad that it was gone. And at least the stuff you found in the mining game was actually useful, unlike those deposits of gold or cobalt that were in the middle of nowhere.

And I didn't notice that many more different ways to play your personality in 2 then 1. You're given 3 options, nice, dick, and neutral, to varying degrees. With occasional special dick or nice moves. I suppose you could pick paragon options in conversations with teammates, and dick options to get things done. But that's not really intentional character depth on the developers part.

You never tried that, did you? Character dialog changes depending on what you say and to who. This is especially notable if you pull a 180 from game to game, with friends and enemies commenting on how you changed from a dick to a nice person.

And meaningful squad choice? When was it ever meaningful? Your teammates were useless 80% of the time unless you take an inordinate amount of time to baby them. And even then, They'll almost never use their powers, and if they do, they don't do it intelligently. The only use they ever had was having their powers in my hotbar. Not like they ever use em.

I'm starting to question if you ever played more than around 15 minutes of ME2, because that is patently false. Your allies will use their powers, use them frequently, and not waste them on enemies that are immune or low-priority. The only real exceptions are the ammo powers, and that's because they can potentially have more than one.

...aaaand it's after midnight, I have school in the morning, and I was planning on playing some Morrowind. Oh well.

Edited: How the hell did I mix up Samara and Morinth's names? 

Quote from: Vector on February 22, 2012, 08:36:47 pm

Oh, and would anyone like a job?  His Twitter feed is buzzing with this stuff, seriously.  So exciting.

Why does the GDC have to be all the way out in California? I want to visit that booth! D:

I would absolutely love to be an underling in Game/Level Design or Mission Scripting for the project... I really dig their general design philosophy and attitude as a company. Pity I'm all the way on the other side of the country.

Level design? Scripting? I'd love to be a coffee maker or errand boy! Earn some income, work in a field I'm interested in, if only peripherally, get the inside scoop on a soon-to-be-blockbuster...sounds like a dream job.

Quote from: New Guy on February 23, 2012, 12:13:31 am

Quote from: SalmonGod on February 22, 2012, 06:44:01 pm

Quote from: Levi on February 22, 2012, 11:28:37 am

Could be worse, they could have kept updating the game haphazardly until the game was nothing more than a sad shadow of its former self. 

_{*grumble grumble tf2 grumble*}

Oh god... agree with this so much.

One of the reasons I don't play TF2, despite having bought it before it became Free to Play. People say TF2 is an easy to pick up game? Not if you're 1 year late from all the new stuff that's in.

I began playing it in beta and loved it deeply for the first couple years.

I've got well over 200 hours on TF2, all of it from before the free-to-play thing. I was never really good at it, I just had fun.

Your airship never gets off the ground, as the physics don't work right in this universe. You are the laughingstock of the entire world.

I wish I had a neverending supply of electricity.