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[DOWN]

There's a lot of things I miss from the first game, but honestly the loot and inventory thing didn't make much sense. Finding random armor and weapons out in little skirmishes and crates that were suitable for you to use as the highest ranking agent there is... seems a bit bizarre. Inventory can't exist as it did in ME1, IMO. Despite the fact that I did appreciate the greater depth it added.

 

[Dennis]

My fear is they will continue on the lame grim dark brown mud visual design path rather than return to the glorious Technicolor 70's Space Opera visuals of the first game.

Go boldly exploration route or make it a smaller slice but much more fleshed out than before.

 

[shinobi602]

 

[Hyperzephyrian]

Dice aiming.

Not to get too nitpicky, but ME1 didn't have dice roll aiming. I only say this because I see a lot of people talking about "Mass Effect's dice roll combat," but it's just not true. If a target was in your crosshairs, you'd hit it, end of story. There was no RNG to determine whether you actually hit it or not, like there was in Morrowind, for example. I'd like this misconception to die.

 

[Caboose]

The problem with the sequels is they straight up removed the things people didn't like instead of... improving them.

Mako too annoying to use? Gone!
Planets too barren and samey? No more uncharted planets!
Inventory too clumsy? No inventory at all anymore!

 

[Dennis]

There are few things in RPGs that I hate more than simplified, dumbed-down equipment and inventory.

Fuck universal ammo and loot that scales perfectly with progress. Boring.

And inventory manangement is part of the pleasure of RPGs. Don't like it? Maybe CoD is more your thing.

 

[DOWN]

My fear is they will continue on the lame grim dark brown mud visual design path rather than return to the glorious Technicolor 70's Space Opera visuals of the first game.

Go boldly exploration route or make it a smaller slice but much more fleshed out than before.

I miss the neon colors and metallic flares so bad. It used to be all over that sleek looking game. That was part of the vision and they killed it because of that standard shooter appeal.

The problem with the sequels is they straight up removed the things people didn't like instead of... improving them.

Mako too annoying to use? Gone!
Planets too barren and samey? No more uncharted planets!
Inventory too clumsy? No inventory at all anymore!

The three biggest wild omissions. I don't know how they thought it was a good move to throw these away. Clearly they have some sense of their mistake because the ambition of the first game deserved improvement.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

Not to get too nitpicky, but ME1 didn't have dice roll aiming. I only say this because I see a lot of people talking about "Mass Effect's dice roll combat," but it's just not true. If a target was in your crosshairs, you'd hit it, end of story. There was no RNG to determine whether you actually hit it or not, like there was in Morrowind, for example. I'd like this misconception to die.

The game gave you auto aim based on your skills which I believe included dice rolls. If you had points in a weapon and they were at some point in your crosshairs you were likely to land a lot of hits on them, far more than statistically is possible if it was a normal random distribution inside the cone. You could even get hits on enemies outside your crosshairs at high skill. If the entire enemy was covered by the aiming reticule you did indeed hit it but that's only half the story.

The gun mechanics were atrocious.

 

[hydruxo]

The problem with the sequels is they straight up removed the things people didn't like instead of... improving them.

Mako too annoying to use? Gone!
Planets too barren and samey? No more uncharted planets!
Inventory too clumsy? No inventory at all anymore!

Yeah that was something I never understood either. Dragon Age Inquisition gives me hope for exploration in the new Mass Effect.

 

[prag16]

Not to get too nitpicky, but ME1 didn't have dice roll aiming. I only say this because I see a lot of people talking about "Mass Effect's dice roll combat," but it's just not true. If a target was in your crosshairs, you'd hit it, end of story. There was no RNG to determine whether you actually hit it or not, like there was in Morrowind, for example. I'd like this misconception to die.

Nope, there was definitely something going on there with the aiming. There was a relatively large spray radius especially when at lower levels. There was no guarantee you'd hit what you were aiming at even if you were on it dead center. They completely got rid of this in 2/3.

 

[Hyperzephyrian]

I miss the neon colors and metallic flares so bad. It used to be all over that sleek looking game. That was part of the vision and they killed it because of that standard shooter appeal.

Mass Effect's art wasn't completely shiny and optimistic. I think it was more about grandeur than optimism. Even the run-down parts of ME1 were sprawling and majestic.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

Yeah that was something I never understood either. Dragon Age Inquisition gives me hope for exploration in the new Mass Effect.

Dragon Age Inquisition gives me hope that we can finally experience endless auto-generated resource gathering fetch quests, get given Ubisoft-style collectathons and task lists to do as soon as we show up in every area, and have the map automatically tell you where all the quest givers are with a fucking diamond on the map.

Such great design 11/10 GOTY. It would be 12/10 except for the constant bugs that make it almost unbearable to play on my computer.

 

[Hyperzephyrian]

There was no guarantee you'd hit what you were aiming at even if you were on it dead center. They completely got rid of this in 2/3.

I'm not saying otherwise. I'm saying that if your target took up the entirety of your reticule (i.e., if every part of your reticule overlapped with the target), you were guaranteed to hit it. The paths of a bullet were random, but only within the reticule. This is not like true dice-roll aiming, where, even if you were literally inches from a target, whether or not you hit it was determined by a dice roll.

 

[crazy monkey]

hello i have been playing these games for first time. i have finished me 1 i think it is a classic. i am pn act 2 of me 2 and it is garbage so far. story did 180 turn. all the good things about me 1 are gone. no customization . it feels like any other shooter but worse. wtf happened.
where is planet exploration, customization and grand scale?

 

[Lakitu]

I cannot emphasize enough just how much I want to see the game.

 

[DOWN]

hello i have been playing these games for first time. i have finished me 1 i think it is a classic. i am pn act 2 of me 2 and it is garbage so far. story did 180 turn. all the good things about me 1 are gone. no customization . it feels like any other shooter but worse. wtf happened.
where is planet exploration, customization and grand scale?

Grand scale is coming back in the next one I guess.

We kinda got a shrug and handed a shooter with ME2 and ME3. I'd say stick with it, but yeah, ME2 is artistically a dingy, tight, orange mess IMO. Ilium and Thane are strong.

The Collector's premise was just hella dirty and ugly as a whole theme. Can't believe they went from ME1's dazzling vastness to tons of that brown, orange, and yellow in a bug nest ugh.

 

[Lethe82]

Mass Effect's art wasn't completely shiny and optimistic. I think it was more about grandeur than optimism. Even the run-down parts of ME1 were sprawling and majestic.

There was very little in ME1 that wasn't completely shiny (aside from the frontier planets, which as you say showed grandeur, the final planet, and the endgame at the citadel). The game was very clean optimistic early sci fi, which I loved. It degenerated somewhat into fetishism of grit and grim and from an industrial design standpoint, the armor and weapons all because more modern militaristic generic. I hope the new game goes back to the style of ME1.

 

[crazy monkey]

Grand scale is coming back in the next one I guess.

We kinda got a shrug and handed a shooter with ME2 and ME3. I'd say stick with it, but yeah, ME2 is artistically a dingy, tight, orange mess IMO. Ilium and Thane are strong.

The Collector's premise was just hella dirty and ugly as a whole theme. Can't believe they went from ME1's dazzling vastness to tons of that brown, orange, and yellow in a bug nest ugh.

thing is i do not like to play for the villan guy. i was freaking hero and let me be one. do not force me. give me choice. i feel like i went from galaxy saving hero to a thug. there are bullets now just like other shooters. the scifiness is so gone. how did this got reviewed so high?

 

[Lakitu]

I can attribute Mass Effect 2's slightly darker look to the fact it takes place in the Terminus Systems.

 

[DOWN]

I can attribute Mass Effect 2's slightly darker look to the fact it takes place in the Terminus Systems.

There's sexy dark and then there's bug nest, 8th-level of Halo 3, gross dark. ME2 leaned towards the latter. Even the cover of the game is a dusty brown city in Tuchanka.

Lair of the Shadow Broker was sexy dark.

 

[TC McQueen]

It made enough sense to be present in the first game. I know that the in-game lore justification is that the Normandy SR-2 has facilities to "minifacture" items. But this is a flimsy justification for a design change. I'm saying that I prefer the previous design choice of having a traditional, limited inventory; how they justify it in the lore matters much less to me.

And inventory manangement is part of the pleasure of RPGs. Don't like it? Maybe CoD is more your thing.

I'm fine with having a limited inventory... it just has to make sense in terms of the context and what it adds to the game and for ME1, that boiled down to "tons of useless shit you can sell for money that people with four gun slots on their armor somehow stuff into hammerspace." Having an old school inventory added nothing to the overall design of ME1 besides tedious menus and redundant items that should've been automatically replaced when you got the higher level versions (ME3 style). I get the whole appeal of managing an inventory, but when the player character and squadmates only have four/five slots for guns, I don't think the usual rules of inventory systems apply and something different needs to be used.

 

[DOWN]

thing is i do not like to play for the villan guy. i was freaking hero and let me be one. do not force me. give me choice. i feel like i went from galaxy saving hero to a thug. there are bullets now just like other shooters. the scifiness is so gone. how did this got reviewed so high?

ME2 is a great game. I would say it is way more polished than ME1, but with worse and more limited ideas. I love ME1, but ME2 lacks the magic.

ME2 has some very cool cultural concepts of the future and an overall bad boy fix it is trying to fulfill. It was easily worth my time and the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC is great.

I guess I'd just say it's a grimy mixed bag creatively, but definitely a good game with scale overall.

 

[Asbear]

The more time passes the more I look back at Inquisition feeling that it will ultimately be forgettable. I'm not gonna beat around the bush. I need to flat out say it as it is. The plot just doesn't cut it at all. It has a really good cinematic moment that send shivers down my spine in In Your Heart Shall Burn but the plot never picked up for me at any point. There was some teasers that ultimately led to nowhere, and all the subplots were just... subplots that were way too short and not a part of a larger coherent thread.

I used to think David Gaider was a good writer with Origins, at least a much better writer than Mac Walters being Lead Writer and all, and I thought DA2 was probably just a misstep. But Inquisition, while it has some clear themes and the premise works very well, just seems so unfocused.

I'm still very skeptical about Chris Schlerf coming from Halo 4 which was mediocre and has to write Mass Effect, but the more I think about Inquisition, and Mass Effect 3, the more I realize it's probably a good thing to have a completely new set of eyes look upon the franchise and give it a breath of fresh air, because ever since the original games the persistent Bioware writers have really lost all their steam it seems (don't give me ME3 was 95% perfect. No, it has extremely many problems)

One thing that is alarming though is that Schlerf, like so many other writers seem to want to distinguish between plot and characters. This shows a level of ignorance about narrative from his side since plot comes from characters. Plot is the why of storytelling and it is the motivations and actions of characters that form the logical thread in a story that forms the plot. You can't just write a lot of good characters with their separate stories and call it a good story, if none of those character-driven subplots have something to do with one another. This was a big mistake in Mass Effect 2 and also a big mistake in Dragon Age Inquisition if you wanna look at those games as works of art or simply from a literary perspective.

I hope Chris Schlerf being new to this makes it better than most of the remaining Bioware writers could've done. I'll be surprised if Chris does worse than Mac (because Mac is just a terrible writer. there's no way around it). If Halo 4 is anything to judge from then there will be lots of problems to come, but I hope that was just an outtake and this will be the real deal.

 

[Poodlestrike]

I miss the neon colors and metallic flares so bad. It used to be all over that sleek looking game. That was part of the vision and they killed it because of that standard shooter appeal.

The three biggest wild omissions. I don't know how they thought it was a good move to throw these away. Clearly they have some sense of their mistake because the ambition of the first game deserved improvement.

I always sort of attributed the change in style to moving from a 70's/80's style sci-fi in the first game, to a 90's style in the second, to a 00's in the third.

 

[TheUnsunghero26]

I miss the neon colors and metallic flares so bad. It used to be all over that sleek looking game. That was part of the vision and they killed it because of that standard shooter appeal.

The three biggest wild omissions. I don't know how they thought it was a good move to throw these away. Clearly they have some sense of their mistake because the ambition of the first game deserved improvement.

Yeah, I loved this. Another area that was really good in this regard was Flux. It originally had different lighting, but it was changed for the release. The quality of this video is really shitty, but you can really see how different the lighting really was.

 

[Asbear]

Yeah, I was sorta okay with the artistic style revisions up to Mass Effect 2. A few game-design changes were jarring at first but I ended up preferring Mass Effect 2 in everything but the actual plot, but Mass Effect 3 felt too different right from the start. Bioware seems to be doing this to every single sequel they make, also Dragon Age now. What's so wrong with consistency? Admittedly it's okay with Dragon Age since each game has its own timeline sort of, but Mass Effect was a sequel that was meant to feel like 3 acts that fit together. They just don't at all. The tone and style radically changed between the games. If they'd just kept the artstyle the same with each game it wouldn't have been as jarring.

 

[Turdburger]

Dragon Age Inquisition gives me hope that we can finally experience endless auto-generated resource gathering fetch quests, get given Ubisoft-style collectathons and task lists to do as soon as we show up in every area, and have the map automatically tell you where all the quest givers are with a fucking diamond on the map.

Such great design 11/10 GOTY. It would be 12/10 except for the constant bugs that make it almost unbearable to play on my computer.

go play divinity or something then, holy shit.

 

[Mindlog]

I miss the neon colors and metallic flares so bad. It used to be all over that sleek looking game. That was part of the vision and they killed it because of that standard shooter appeal.

http://img7.gram.pl/20071209161856.jpg

The three biggest wild omissions. I don't know how they thought it was a good move to throw these away. Clearly they have some sense of their mistake because the ambition of the first game deserved improvement.

The closest they ever came to matching that colorful sci-fi look was with the Silversun Strip in Mass Effect 3. It made most of the other locations (ME1 included) look like a dead lifeless closet.

 

[rdrr gnr]

Dragon Age Inquisition gives me hope that we can finally experience endless auto-generated resource gathering fetch quests, get given Ubisoft-style collectathons and task lists to do as soon as we show up in every area, and have the map automatically tell you where all the quest givers are with a fucking diamond on the map.

Such great design 11/10 GOTY. It would be 12/10 except for the constant bugs that make it almost unbearable to play on my computer.

Requisition quests are totally skippable (I did almost none of them) with few consequences (i.e. power points). And they are finite. The map does not automatically tell you where all quest givers are as you first have to explore the area and get within the range of the quest itself. And some quests only appear via dialogue options and can be missed otherwise.

 

[Hyperzephyrian]

I'm fine with having a limited inventory... it just has to make sense in terms of the context and what it adds to the game and for ME1, that boiled down to "tons of useless shit you can sell for money that people with four gun slots on their armor somehow stuff into hammerspace." Having an old school inventory added nothing to the overall design of ME1 besides tedious menus and redundant items that should've been automatically replaced when you got the higher level versions (ME3 style). I get the whole appeal of managing an inventory, but when the player character and squadmates only have four/five slots for guns, I don't think the usual rules of inventory systems apply and something different needs to be used.

Again, I'm all for refinement, which the inventory system clearly needed. But instead of refinements, BioWare threw the baby out with the bathwater.

 

[texhnolyze]

I love side quests.
I always wanted to play Mass Effect 2 & 3 longer but I can't due to limited side quests.

 

[denx]

I find the "dull brown" comments about ME2 art design/ color palatte baffling. Yes, there are a couple of places that go for that aesthetic (most notably Omega), but dull is not a word I would use for them. There really isn't washed out colors in ME2, in fact it is the most color saturated (in a good way imo) game in the trilogy. There are a lot of places where the colors really pop out, which makes ME2 feel more lively than the other two games, although I agree that the blue filter for the first game nailed better the sci-fi look.

The only game I don't really like in terms of visuals is ME3 since it has a grey/blue filter that makes everything look dull and boring.

I love side quests.
I always wanted to play Mass Effect 2 & 3 longer but I can't due to limited side quests.

They nailed the sidequests in ME2. In ME1 it was just the same three dungeons repeating over and over, and ME3 replaced most sidequest with fetch quests which you couldn't properly keep track of since the mission log sucked.

 

[texhnolyze]

They nailed the sidequests in ME2. In ME1 it was just the same three dungeons repeating over and over, and ME3 replaced most sidequest with fetch quests which you couldn't properly keep track of since the mission log sucked.

Yes, the sidequests in ME2 are great, but I always wanted more!
I always wanted to do more quests before the point of no return.

 

[wolfhowwl]

Do optional missions like Grissom Academy and the Monastery not count as sidequests?

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

Requisition quests are totally skippable (I did almost none of them) with few consequences (i.e. power points). And they are finite. The map does not automatically tell you where all quest givers are as you first have to explore the area and get within the range of the quest itself. And some quests only appear via dialogue options and can be missed otherwise.

My main complaint is that so many of the quests available are extremely shallow / vapid and standardized. It's the same quest repeated 30 times. Since I'm ignoring probably 80% of the useless busywork ones, my quest log is inflating at an alarming rate. For every main-line quest there has been thus far (20ish hours) there's probably 15-20 side quests. But not like in a Baldur's gate 2 way where there's tons of interesting things that happen (although IMO there is still too much content there and I can't walk around a corner in a city without tripping over a sidequest), mostly it's "collect X mineral", "close X rifts", "collect 15 shards", "find all camp sites" and so on. The Inquisitor doesn't really have any business doing all the grunt work, but whatever, it's a cRPG. They could have cut 30-40% of these "standard quests found in every area", had a tighter experience for it and the game would STILL be really long.

 

[denx]

Do optional missions like Grissom Academy and the Monastery not count as sidequests?

They do, but there were fewer of them than in the other games.

 

[behroozbadboy]

So, Q1 2015 gameinformer reveal then? right guys? right? :/

 

[Bisnic]

They do, but there were fewer of them than in the other games.

They were much better than ME1/ME2 sidequests though. Too bad there wasn't enough.

 

[j0hnny_385]

So, Q1 2015 gameinformer reveal then? right guys? right? :/

My money's on that.

 

[Asbear]

So, Q1 2015 gameinformer reveal then? right guys? right? :/

The pattern is there. Gameinformer is loyal to Bioware and always seems to get the world exclusive debut reveal. Probably gonna happen.

 

[PFD]

I cannot emphasize enough just how much I want to see the game.

I cannot emphasize enough how dumb these tweets are

"guise I know something really cool, but I can't tell you what it is!"

 

[Dany]

At least we know there's no ME stuff today

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

I cannot emphasize enough how dumb these tweets are

"guise I know something really cool, but I can't tell you what it is!"

We literally ban people on GAF for doing stuff like that, lol.

 

[prag16]

We literally ban people on GAF for doing stuff like that, lol.

Yeah, I know they're probably just excited, but the end result is (inadvertent?) massive and brutal trolling to those of us sitting here overflowing with anticipation. It's really obnoxious.

 

[SliChillax]

They better show it at E3 with a Q4 2015 release after all these infuriating teases

 

[Lakitu]

They better show it at E3 with a Q4 2015 release after all these infuriating teases

I'd like to hope we'd get a teaser before E3 and an actual gameplay blowout at E3.

Listening to the ME 2 OST right now, so good . Really want to play it on PS4.

 

[shinobi602]

They better show it at E3 with a Q4 2015 release after all these infuriating teases

Nah.

 

[DOWN]

They better show it at E3 with a Q4 2015 release after all these infuriating teases

That's too short. Hopefully people are right that they'll do a Game Informer reveal in Spring and then repeat the release dates again too by releasing Q1 2016.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

I could believe Q4 2015 but my money is on Q1 2016, possibly with a later delay to Q2.

 

[SliChillax]

Nah.

Oh come on