LaserBuddha
Member
race is an antiquated term in this context but is still viable.
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Mass Effect |OT| Alien love in an elevator
- Thread starter Mr. Spinnington
- Start date
GenericPseudonym
Banned
WrikaWrek said:
I would argue that using the term "race" for an alien lifeform is totally scientifically inaccurate. They are a different species, they have no biological relation to us at all, in any way. Now I know in the context of Mass Effect, in which nearly every species has two arms and two legs, with a clearly defined face and human features lends itself to that, but its still wrong.
LaserBuddha
Member
GenericPseudonym said:
Race means a group united by common heredity, culture, and history. Look it up in a dictionary, it has broader meaning than just the genetic variances within a single species. Since they are differentiating between different groups that are united under one government, the term race is also correct.
GenericPseudonym
Banned
LaserBuddha said:
A definition that infers humanity.
Lostconfused
Member
GenericPseudonym said:
not from those three words.
LaserBuddha
Member
GenericPseudonym said:
Not to put too much stock in inference, but the reason it usually refers to humans is because we are the only intellegent species on the planet. The definition refers to people that are related in some way. When you have other intellegent species, you then have the concept that there are people who arent necessarily humans. The term is appropriate. This is a work of drama, and the term is used in a literary sense, for which it is correct. Approaching it in a scientific sense is misguided.
JMPovoa said:
Sorry, I'm getting mixed up. I mean dialogue, writing, the way the whole galaxy is shaped.
The races (or species) themselves are just fantastic, they are so individual, not just in appearance but in character traits. The Elcor are utterly compelling, they are so well done.
Wow this game was the best RPG I've played in a long, long time. Easily tops Oblivion.
Since I'm late to the discussion I probably don't have much to add, except "holy fuck". Especially the last planet, I think that is the most amazingly beautiful place I've ever been in a video game.
I didn't mind the elevators, better than loading screens and the elevator conversations/radiocasts added to the story, and I wanted ever detail I could get.
Replaying now as a male tech guy, don't remember the class name. Trying to be as bad a mutherfucker as possible.
Since I'm late to the discussion I probably don't have much to add, except "holy fuck". Especially the last planet, I think that is the most amazingly beautiful place I've ever been in a video game.
I didn't mind the elevators, better than loading screens and the elevator conversations/radiocasts added to the story, and I wanted ever detail I could get.
Replaying now as a male tech guy, don't remember the class name. Trying to be as bad a mutherfucker as possible.
I am starting a fresh game on hardcore using a soldier. I am out of the citadel now and I am finding that assault rifles seem to be a lot weaker than shotguns. I have about 6 talent points in rifles and none in shotguns yet it seems my shotgun is doing a far better job. Should I be concentrating on the assault riffles or should I just use the shotgun indefinitely.
MMaRsu
Member
I want a handar in the sequel 
.
Anyway does anybody know that if you dont pick up wrex, can you pick up the krogan in the bar on that iceplanet? There's a krogan on the top level of the bar, and you can always click on his name. It doesn't do anything except he keeps telling you to fuck off basically, but it's funny what he says though :lol
I used shotgun and I was soldier. Shotgun with venom bullets = fast death for geth
. Anyway does anybody know that if you dont pick up wrex, can you pick up the krogan in the bar on that iceplanet? There's a krogan on the top level of the bar, and you can always click on his name. It doesn't do anything except he keeps telling you to fuck off basically, but it's funny what he says though :lol
Big-E said:
I used shotgun and I was soldier. Shotgun with venom bullets = fast death for geth
MMaRsu said:
I used AR the entire game as a soldier. Shotgun was good, but it was good like in Doom: When guys were right up in your face. You don't get that many shots off before overheat and it doesn't work good on distant enemies.
I just used AR with +15-40%dmg against synth/org depending on who I was fighting with a damage + 20% and heat reduction + 14% upgrades. Killed everything in under a second outside the bosses.
Gamer @ Heart
Member
I just beat that planet
and I simply breezed through it with my solder. I dont think i was ever in danger.
Why is it that around 24 hours, good items just stop appearing? I dont think I've switched weapons or armor in almost 5 hours. Stores suck to. I have no where to spend my 10 million credits.
you first fight saren
Why is it that around 24 hours, good items just stop appearing? I dont think I've switched weapons or armor in almost 5 hours. Stores suck to. I have no where to spend my 10 million credits.
I think it is important to understand what Mass Effect brings to the table. I think we have lost track of what a RPG is supposed to be when we think of RPGs as 40+ hour dungeon crawlers, where you watch pretty cutcenes at some point.
RPG isn't about that, role playing to me isn't about levelling up, killing tons of monsters for loot, etc....it's about role-playing. And i think MASS effect has finally brought the next gen to role playing. Oblivion was close, but here we are in mass effect...create your character, a character that has a voice, a character that actually exists in the world (you're called by name). This is very important, and not only does it bring RPG to the next level, as it brings RPG to other genres, here we have a 3rd person shooter, that finally shows that RPG isn't bound to overly long and boring games where you have to invest a great deal of time, where the RPG elements are focused on the combat and not on the characters.
I think Mass Effect has brought an evolution to the RPG genre. No i haven't played BG2, nor did i play planescape torment, not my cup of tea...but i did play Neverwinter nights 2, and i played NWN2 Mask of the betrayer, which was awesome btw, and while those were great games, specially the expansion, they are still in the old school design of RPGs.
And it was about time that an RPG showed the world that RPGs can be any kind of game, they can even be like Gears of War, and they can be as cinematic as any other action game, and they can have the pace of an action game.
I think Bioware deserves props for it, and i certainly hope ME enjoys great success and shows the world of roleplaying to new gamers.
RPG isn't about that, role playing to me isn't about levelling up, killing tons of monsters for loot, etc....it's about role-playing. And i think MASS effect has finally brought the next gen to role playing. Oblivion was close, but here we are in mass effect...create your character, a character that has a voice, a character that actually exists in the world (you're called by name). This is very important, and not only does it bring RPG to the next level, as it brings RPG to other genres, here we have a 3rd person shooter, that finally shows that RPG isn't bound to overly long and boring games where you have to invest a great deal of time, where the RPG elements are focused on the combat and not on the characters.
I think Mass Effect has brought an evolution to the RPG genre. No i haven't played BG2, nor did i play planescape torment, not my cup of tea...but i did play Neverwinter nights 2, and i played NWN2 Mask of the betrayer, which was awesome btw, and while those were great games, specially the expansion, they are still in the old school design of RPGs.
And it was about time that an RPG showed the world that RPGs can be any kind of game, they can even be like Gears of War, and they can be as cinematic as any other action game, and they can have the pace of an action game.
I think Bioware deserves props for it, and i certainly hope ME enjoys great success and shows the world of roleplaying to new gamers.
Vyse The Legend
Member
Havok said:
It's Colossus, for sure. I've only been able to find one. It was a Medium armor for Krogans, and its defense rating was 74! The shields were in the 300s also. I can only imagine what the stats of the Heavy variant would be.
My latest armor is Predator H IX I believe and I think the shields are around 430 on it. I just finished my second playthrough though and I'm level 56. I'm not sure how far the items go before you can no longer find upgrades but I think I've gotten pretty much the best stuff available since it's been a long while since I've upgraded. Not sure when the drops stop scaling. The level X stuff from C-Sec is the best weaponry I've found by the way.
Anyone have any gear higher than this? I'm working as a third playthrough on this character now, hoping there's some new stuff that will drop when I hit level 60, which I believe is the cap if I'm not mistaken.
Anyone have any gear higher than this? I'm working as a third playthrough on this character now, hoping there's some new stuff that will drop when I hit level 60, which I believe is the cap if I'm not mistaken.
MaizeRage25
Member
Geez, I feel like I'm way behind everyone.
Just hit level 28, and have only done Feros and rescued Liara as far as story progression.
I'm really enjoying doing sidequests/exploring/leveling up.
Also, I was really retarded for turning my equipment into omni-gel, its much better to sell it back.
Just hit level 28, and have only done Feros and rescued Liara as far as story progression.
I'm really enjoying doing sidequests/exploring/leveling up.
Also, I was really retarded for turning my equipment into omni-gel, its much better to sell it back.
PepsimanVsJoe
Member
I actually stopped to talk to Jenkins on my last playthrough and it was kind of depressing.
Now I feel bad every time his dumb ass gets shot up.
Now I feel bad every time his dumb ass gets shot up.
Quick questions, loving this game:
1. Can other characters in the squad use First Aid, and if not, WTF am I doing levelling them up in it for??
2. Can I move one squad member to one place and the other to another, as sometimes I have one with a shotty, one with a sniper.
3. Why is Ashley's accuracy rating with any assault rifle at 1 even though I've invested in her Assault Rifle talent?
Cheers.
1. Can other characters in the squad use First Aid, and if not, WTF am I doing levelling them up in it for??
2. Can I move one squad member to one place and the other to another, as sometimes I have one with a shotty, one with a sniper.
3. Why is Ashley's accuracy rating with any assault rifle at 1 even though I've invested in her Assault Rifle talent?
Cheers.
PepsimanVsJoe
Member
Saiyu said:
1. Personally I skip on First Aid for team-mates. Since when you heal it covers everyone there's no real need for everyone to have it(Never seen them use it either, usually they just use immunity/barrier when they get in trouble).
2. I'm assuming you already read the manual(I didn't) so I'll go ahead and say No.
3. Don't worry about it. The better guns have much higher accuracy ratings.
If I wanted to I could probably pick this game apart over a bunch of little things involving the gameplay but I'm in a good mood so I'll leave it alone for now.
MaizeRage25
Member
PepsimanVsJoe said:
I haven't found a way to do it, and thats the dumbest thing ever.
arhra
Member
Finally finished tonight, managed to get Completionist and Power Gamer on my first playthrough (somehow missed out on all of the Ally achievements, though, despite having Liara and Tali as party members for almost everything)
) in about 6 seconds, before he could even get a single power off. With the upgrades i was using (Scram Rail IX and Frictionless Materials IX), it was like having Overkill permanently on.
(you can get two sets of each rank, i think, one from the C-Sec requisitions officer, one from the guy on your ship - i got two sets of VIIs, and then two sets of Xs later on, but didn't check for intermediate levels).
(somehow missed out on all of the Ally achievements, though, despite having Liara and Tali as party members for almost everything)I got some Colossus (VIII, i think) armor for Tali (which was a freaking godsend, as she was my regular 3rd party member for tech skills, and it was the first armor upgrade i'd seen for her through the entire game :lol ). That was the only one i saw, though. Finished the game with Shepard in Mercenary IX heavy, and Liara in Predator L XVyse The Legend said:
He's there for a sidequest (from the Hanar shopkeeper)MMaRsu said:
Same here (except sniping in some outdoors areas). The Spectre X AR with maxed AR talents is just ludicrously overpowered. I literally gunned down the penultimate boss (Bebpo said:
Saren in his "normal" form
Kitting your entire team out in Spectre weapons for every concievable situation costs a pretty pennyNot really. Money has no use in the game once you pass 1 million for the achievement. Omni-gel on the other hand lets you skip doing that hack mini-game a million times to open every crate
(you can get two sets of each rank, i think, one from the C-Sec requisitions officer, one from the guy on your ship - i got two sets of VIIs, and then two sets of Xs later on, but didn't check for intermediate levels).Personally, i skipped First Aid entirely on Shepard, and just kept Liara around as healbitch all the time (in the latter half of the game you rarely have to use it, though, as your shields absorb most of the damage, plus you can get talents/upgrades for minor health regen - the only time i used it really was for getting everyone topped up again after ressing them with Unity).Saiyu said:
No. Generally i find it best to just let them handle their own movement, as they're generally reasonably competent (well, apart from Liara repeatedly standing in front of rockets or energy bolts when i was trying to snipe turrets/rocket geth/colossi/armatures, anyway...) and basically impossible to micromanage anyway.
That's the rating of the weapon, not the character (the endgame Spectre X AR has an accuracy of 80 or 90ish, iirc).
WrikaWrek said:
As someone who used to really like JRPGs (which in a lot of ways were really just highly evolved versions of Wizardry and Ultima) from back in the late '90s and early 2000's, Mass Effect's take on the genre was the perfect game to get me back into playing a 40 hour RPG again.
It could have used just a little more depth in the character stats dept., sure, but at no time during the game did I feel like I was really dungeon crawling for the sake of a grind. It was just a really compelling adventure game and I didn't want it to end.
Also, the expressiveness of the characters and the dialogue system made this the first game where I was actually "role playing". As my character grew more and more badass into a hardened assault-rifle of death soldier, the more arrogant and confident and confrontational my responses were during conversations.
Really, no RPG has given me that feeling before.
Masta_Killah
Member
chespace said:
QFMFT! I completely agree. ME seems to be a true evolution of the RPG genre. This is the first time in an rpg where I felt like I was apart of the story, actually having some control of my destiny. I really do feel that Bioware has captured the role playing aspect of an rpg.
On another note, I am currently on Ilos and I just got done talking to the
watcher.
So after hearing about how Sovereign might have manipulated history to benefit him, does that mean that the Shadow Broker was Sovereign all along?!?
Barla Von said about the power the Shadow Broker has over nations
Vyse The Legend
Member
jet1911 said:
Nope, can't be done. Reaching 60 cannot be done prior to your third runthrough.
Yeah, it would be nice if the Shadow Broker was that person, but they aren't. When you talk to Barla Von, he gives you the information for free
because Saren betrayed the Shadow Broker. Obviously, no such betrayal occurred between Saren and Sovereign.
I'm not sure it needed more depth in the stats really - it feels to me like they did have an in-depth stats screen that was taken away at the last minute because they didn't want it feeling too much like a regular RPG. The reason I think this is because of the weapon stats they have now.chespace said:
It makes no sense whatsoever to have all the weapons using the same numbers for damage values when they're not equivalent. What I mean is that having a sniper rifle with a damage of 180 and a pistol with a damage of 230 makes no sense to the player - that tells them the pistol is more powerful, which is obviously wrong. It feels like it was supposed to be something along the lines of: this sniper rifle is +180, and your base damage with one is 500, with a pistol being +230, but your base damage only being 50, but that this was taken out to "simplify" things.
What they should have done if they were going to do that was change the weapon values. The pistol could still be 230 dmg, but a sniper rifle would then be listed as 680 dmg.
Same thing applies to accuracy - an accuracy of 1 with the early assault rifles tells me I shouldn't be able to hit anything. If the game told me my base accuracy was 50 then +1 would make sense. When levelling I'm also getting percentage bonuses, but percentages of what? Same goes for weapon mods.
You wouldn't need an extra stats page at all, just a slight rewrite of what's already there. Instead of my rifle being 180, list it as whatever its equipped damage is, taking into account all mods and level bonuses, and then list its base stats. So
DMG: 180
SPD: 1.5
HIT: 68
Becomes:
DMG: 680 (180)
SPD: 1.7 (1.5)
HIT: 88 (68)
That way you can directly compare all your weapons against each other, and still see what the weapon's stats are for swapping out with other characters.
When equipping a new weapon, say I get another rifle, the stats should be listed as:
DMG: +23 (203)
SPD: -0.3 (1.2)
HIT: +7 (75)
Hmm, I'm not too sure about that. I've had a couple of friends pick this up and they've ended up very disappointed as it wasn't what they were expecting. They thought it was going to be something like Gears and got an RPG. The more you get into the game, the more it does play like a shooter (in places, at least) I think they should have done more at the start to get those kind of people hooked before all the RPG stuff took over. One of them hasn't even bothered to finish Eden Prime, and he's planning on selling it.clashfan said:
Wait, what? I have to play the same character three times to hit level 60? The game is so tailored to being a soldier it's not funny. I've already got the sniping achievement, and am well on my way to get the pistol one and then what? At least a soldier has the option of training all four base weapons, which I imagine will completely change how the game plays each time, rather than just hanging back with a rifle picking things off.Vyse The Legend said:
WrikaWrek said:
I don't agree with this much at all. I think the rpg genre is a pretty wide genre and it's good to have rpgs all across the board in terms of what "type of rpg" they are.
Mass Effect is fantastic, and it's true that it's better than all the j-rpgs this year save Persona and maybe Lost Odyssey/Tales of Innocence, but at the same time after finishing ME this morning I started playing DQIVr which is pretty much a 180 from the ME style of rpg and I'm liking it about as much as ME. There's plenty of room for both types of rpgs and considering most Japanese gamers dislike the ME type and most Western gamers dislike the DQ type, it looks likely will get plenty of both in the future instead of everything just going one way.
ME really has re-ignited my love for both w and j RPGs, which has been lying between dead and dormant for the last few years. Seeing a story so well executed as in ME and feeling a part of it, and that feeling of accomplishment when you start making sense of the game's mechanics and finally master them, reminds me why I used to like the genre so much.
Vyse The Legend
Member
andrewfee said:
Work on other achievements at the same time. I'm doing the Hardcore one now myself. I doubt I'll go for Insanity, though. Keep in mind that in order to reach 60 by your third runthrough you need to do as many quests (ideally 80%-90%) in both your first and second one. In other words, you can't simply run through the game each time.
PepsimanVsJoe
Member
Honestly between me and Wrex with ARs(I used Inferno rounds, he used Knockdown?) and Ashley playing sniper we pretty much laid waste to insanity. Switched to all ARs for the final boss and it was even easier than on Hardcore.
Soldiers are beasts in this game. Most of our kills came from knocking an enemy down and just teabagging them to death.
If Mass Effect 2 allows you to carry over your Shepard from the last game I'm going to have to play through ME1 again so I can re-roll my stats. =(
Soldiers are beasts in this game. Most of our kills came from knocking an enemy down and just teabagging them to death.
If Mass Effect 2 allows you to carry over your Shepard from the last game I'm going to have to play through ME1 again so I can re-roll my stats. =(
And there was me thinking Mass Effect might be the first game I try to get 1000 points for in ages due to the replayability of it - I assumed finishing the game 3x would be enough to get pretty much everything (different team-mates each time) but I don't want to be using the same character when doing that - what's the point in all these different classes if they expect you to use the same one three times through it?Vyse The Legend said:
Something I forgot to mention in my above post - I'm surprised people are saying there isn't any grinding in the game. So far, pretty much everything I've done
other than save Liara
The only "city" I've come across so far has been the Citadel and pretty much everything there is just running from A to B and perhaps back again.
The main story is enjoyable, and the shooting is decent, but I'm surprised people don't think of it as grinding. (as Che mentioned it was a grind-free 40 hours, I assume he didn't just do the story and skip the pointless sidequests)
PepsimanVsJoe
Member
andrewfee said:
If you consider the sidequests grinding I'd hate to see you play a standard rpg or worse...an MMORPG.
Masta_Killah
Member
Vyse The Legend said:
Think star wars and the chancellor.
Just beat the game! Holy shit what an ending! EPIC! The closing music was fucking awesome. Best use of orchestrated music I've heard in a long time. And the end credits song is sooo good.
Oni Link 666
Member
andrewfee said:
I don't think you understand what grinding is. When I run around and fight enemies in other RPGs just to level up or get money or a certain item, that's grinding.