Mass Effect 2 is coming out for the PS3 later this month. I didn’t play Mass Effect, but from what I understand ME2 for the PS3 includes an interactive comic that gives you the details of the first game’s plot. I’m interested in the game, but, as always, the 60 dollar price tag gives me pause.
As far as Bioware goes, I loved Knights of the Old Republic. It’s one of my favorite games of all time. I thought they were able to create a game set in the Star Wars universe that was able to emphasize things I liked about he movies, while still creating a setting that was seemed uniquely Bioware. The only other Bioware game I played was Dragon Age: Orgins. I enjoyed the game, but I think life (and probably Red Dead Redemption) got in the way and I never finished it. I thought it was a fun game, but I somehow got myself stuck in a place were I kept dying. So, that might be as much my fault as the game’s. But, if that had happened in KOTR, I probably would have worked hard to keep going with the plot. So, that’s a strike against it.
Outside of the Bioware games. Other recent games that come to mind immediately as ones I loved are: the previously mentioned Red Dead Redemption- great gameplay and an immersive interesting story, Portal- fun puzzles and a plot that slowly ramped up to awesome, Batman:Arkham Asylum, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.
Knowing what I have liked in the past, does it seem like I would enjoy ME2? I am going to download the demo, but that doesn’t always give you a full picture of what you are getting.
You will definitely like it. It’s more actiony than Oblivion, about as much as Batman. Features great cinematic moments, and the RPG elements that are there are excellent. Of course production values are very high. It’s a top notch game that fits your taste.
That being said, no friggin comic is going to compete with playing Mass Effect 1 and carrying over that experience to 2. You need to play that game. Is there no way you can get your hands on a copy? Maybe borrow a 360, or (better yet) play it on your PC?
Unlike Kinthalis, I would NOT recommend playing ME1 unless you plan on carrying over that save to #2. A friend of mine loves both games but when ME2 first came out he discovered his ME1 save had corrupted and he couldn’t carry it over. It sucks playing through the second game and seeing people who died in your game, etc. Even if it’s minor stuff I’ve heard it can be somewhat jarring. So if you’re not going to be able to transfer your save, just go straight to ME2- that’s my suggestion.
You may or may not care about that kind of thing, though.
There’s no way you’re going to fit in all of the references and jokes of ME 1 into a comic. Nevermind the experience. This is a trilogy after all. Missing a entire chapter, the first even, would suck, IMHO.
True, without the ability to carry over your save, you might experience issues in continuity, but that’s preferable to being clueless about the world and all that has transpired. Nevermind experiencing it first hand.
Really Bioware did PS3 gamers a disservice by not porting over Me1.
Personally, I think the OP is more likely to enjoy ME2 having not played ME1. All the worst aspects of the game* are only really going to irk someone who has an emotional attachment to what came before.
Killing Shepard off at the start of the game and bringing her back to life, the railroaded alliance with Cerberus, getting the cold shoulder from your allies from the first game, replacing the heat sinks and upgrades with a more generic ammunition system, the treatment of the Reapers…
My tastes seem to mirror yours pretty closely (except with more love for Dragon Age and less for Batman) and I really enjoyed it. I had played ME 1 before, but it was so long ago that I didn’t quite remember much of what happened other than the big points and it was not a problem at all. Definitely give it a shot!
The simplest way to describe ME2 would be : it’s just like Dragon Age, only you replace the MMORPG combat with a cover shooter. Other than that, one’s more or less a remake of the other : a search for allies to form a team of fully fleshed out characters with backgrounds you get to progressively explore throughout the length of the game, a desperate end-of-the-world scenario you face alone because no one else believes it, and an explosive finale. Lotsa talking in between, although ME2 is more on the “action movie” side of things where Dragon Age is more of a generic fantasy epic.
So, if you liked Dragon Age and you like cover shooters, you’re good to go - the experience is worth it IMO.
As for playing ME1, well, on the one hand you will miss on quite a bit of ME2’s subtext and, well, it is a great game in and of itself too. On the other hand, having played both, in retrospect ME1’s actual gameplay (the combat & sidequests) are awful. And don’t get me started on the goddamn tank. ME1 is saved by its story, deep setting and all in all immersiveness IN SPITE of its gameplay. ME2 solves a lot of issues on that front - as long as you don’t get me started on the goddamn probing that is :]
I would highly recommend Mass Effect 2. Mass Effect was the best game I ever played when I got it three years ago, and Mass Effect 2 was even better. The storyline was what intrigued me the most, far more than any of the new game mechanics the comany was touting in the months before its release. I admit, I’ve become a bit obsesive with the game, but I don’t have much else going on with my life, and it takes up the spare time.
It’s a shame you can’t play the original, since it provides the foundation for ME2, though if you have a PC I keep hearing that the game palys great on it. That way, you can have the whole experience. I visit the Bioware forums, however, and I talk to a lot of people that didn’t play the first game(both XBox and PC gamers). In the end, a lot of them enjoyed ME2 anyway. So go ahead and get it on PS3 if you prefer that system. If you like KOTOR and Dragon Age, I can’t see why you wouldn’t enjoy Mass Effect 2, at least from a story standpoint, with or without playing ME1. Gameplay-wise, it is more of a shooter/RPG hybrid, and if you are comfortable with that, get the game.
Be sure to tell me how it is on PS3 if you do get it, since I don’t trust the people on the Bioware forums to stay out of the consol wars!
I’d recommend going ahead and playing through Mass Effect 1. I found the gameplay pretty tolerable, and got through it with four characters to get my achievements. I even played through all the sidequests-in-slightly-different-buildings each time. Even in the last play-through, when I had stretched its re-playability to the breaking point, I was having fun.
Anyway, how much could it cost now to get the original?
Another big fan of Mass Effect here (in fact just finished my second play through of Mass Effect 2 last weekend).
Both 1 & 2 are excellent games. I seem to recall being disappointed that the options available in ME1 for customizing your characters’ development was dumbed down for ME2. IIRC this was to pander to the console crowd (but it has been awhile so I may have not remember the details correctly). Admittedly I think Bioware games should be played on a PC (see the new user-created update to Morrowind I just posted in this forum…something you cannot do on a console).
That said ME2 is great fun and from what the OP wrote I think s/he’d enjoy it a lot. Personally I like it better than Dragon Age but that is just me (I liked Dragon Age too).
Nothing you do in ME1 matters… at all. Other then a few brief e-mails on the console or the occasional cameo appearance with a minor side quest it makes no difference. Kill or save the council? who cares, the dialogs for a few small parts are trivially different. Save the rachni queen instead of killing her? you get one short cameo and a different random news broadcast. Hell, you can even play ME1 without ever accepting garrus into your team but when you meet him in ME2 he acts like you’ve been best friends forever anyway. I sort of understand why it’s this way (can’t really afford to ship 2 - 3 games in one to accommodate everything) but it’s still a little sad that my full paragon and full rengade imports are essentially identical.
Anyway it’s a pretty good game if you liked gears of war style shooters since that’s how the combat is and there’s a LOT of combat.
I do wish it was more tactical too. Anyone remember the early footage of ME1? Where they showed you panning the camera out and creating complex tactical scenarios by moving your team around and planning lines of attack?
It was sweet. Still, the compromise they came up with was pretty good (at least on PC) and the shooter elements improved in ME2.
I haven’t tried but have been led to believe that playing on Hardcore or Insane difficulty levels forces you to be a lot more tactical if you want to get through (including making full use of your squad both in placing them certain places and using their powers).
On “normal” difficulty the combat was mostly a breeze. I almost never worried about my squad and they made only a little difference in how a mission would play out. If you picked the right squad for the mission I thought it was falling off a fence easy.
Been thinking about trying a Hardcore game…not sure if I want to replay all of ME2 just yet though.
Indeed I fired up a game of Crysis last night and approached combat like I did in ME2 (having just played it) and got my ass handed to me.
My first playthrough was infiltrator on hardcore and it was not tactical at all - I could pretty much 1-hit any normal enemy even without an ammo power, and with the proper ammo power 1-hit anything besides bosses. Since you get slowdown when you scope, it makes headshots super easy too. Cover makes you basically immortal so I’d just pick off anyone trying to flank then pick the enemies off one by one.
I’m replaying on insane as adept and it’s still not really very tactical. Since you can’t use most of your powers till the enemy is in health (vs having shields and/or armor up) and once they hit health they are 2 - 3 shots from being dead anyway it’s mostly just spam warp on everything and hide all the time because you die absurdly fast. There’s no picking the right power for the situation since warp is pretty much always the right power. AoE crowd control powers are basically useless because you’d have to strip all the enemy’s defenses before you used them and that sort of defeats the point.
In both cases your teammates are basically worthless except as mobile power dispensers. I really wish I could take their guns away so they would just hide, not only are they bad at picking targets and often shoot walls (not as bad as ME1 but still…) but they get a damage penalty (around half what you do) so when they do hit, it does almost nothing. They looooove to pop up to shoot just in time to eat a rocket, too. At least you can hotkey their powers this time around so till they commit suicide they are good for that.
The balance is better then ME1 (in which by about 25% of the way through the game you were an untouchable god with most any class) but it still leave alot to be desired and is more twitch based shooter then tactical anything.
Thanks for all the information! Now, I am sure it’s game I want to get.
I don’t have an XBox360 and don’t really want to play games on my laptop, so I am out of luck as far as the first game goes. It’s too bad, too. Because, at this point buying both games would be cheaper on the other platforms than just ME2 on the PS3.
I didn’t realize the game had so much action involved. In Oblivion, and Dragon Age there was action, but I felt like the level of the characters and or the placement of your team made a lot more difference than your arcade skills. From the demo and what people have said here it’s a combination of RPG elements and shooter action. I think that is really cool.
Also, from the demo, it looks like Mass Effect has the very awesome and annoying facet of a ton of backstory you can read about. I think it is awesome and makes the game’s universe infinitely richer and real. But, at the same time it is annoying because, there is so much stuff to read it gets overwhelming - that’s a good annoying.
Krinthis. It’s good to hear someone else who has tastes similar to mine. Please let me know of any other games that you really love, and I will try them out.
Frankly it’s more action than RPG, gameplay wise - sure, you’ve got points to distribute to unlock special abilities and such, but mostly it’s a shooter and while using the right specials against the right enemies of course make things go more smoothly, you can just plod along shooting everything that moves right in the face for good enough results. ME1 was more of an RPG disguised as a shooter because all your shooting on screen was decided by stats and dice rolls behind the curtains. ME1 is the opposite : a shooter disguised as an RPG
RE: the reading stuff, well, it’s true that the ingame encyclopedia is, well, an encyclopedia. But really, it’s just like the one in Dragon Age : massive, detailed, and utterly unnecessary to understand what’s going on. It’s purely a “nice !” factor - digging through it is interesting, but nowhere near mandatory.
**badlyburnedtoast **: yeah, they kinda dicked biotics over in ME2, didn’t they ? Then again, they were overpowered in ME1, so I guess it evens out Still, it’s painfully obvious that forcing you to strip armor and shields before your magic can affect anyone is stupid, for the reason you give : if you’ve got enough firepower to do that in the first place, then you’ve got enough to kill people without biotic powers.
It’s even more silly for powers that should have tactical impact, shields or no shields (i.e. the ones that push enemies back or send them flying) are useless too - again, if you can nuke the protections, then by definition you don’t need to flush the mobs out of cover…
So, yeah, long story short : biotics are useless in ME2 beyond their ammo power. Which is too bad, because the biotic NPCs are all kinds of awesome.
