Anyone Play Mass Effect 2 Yet? Impressions?

[Spikey00]

A bunch of questions regarding ME2! 

How is the music?  I know that they kept/remixed the same galaxy menu song (which again, I adored), but how is the rest of the music?  Better or for worse?

I can assume most people here know how awful the AI was in the original one--I've heard that most people find the AI better [by a mile] than the first one, but is it truly self-manageable and consistent throughout the game?  All I have heard regarding about your squad AI is it usually is able to take care of itself but fails when you attempt to provide orders for it--and occasional stumps.  I'm curious to see if they move and engage properly, and if they don't try the "stand still and eat their rockets" tactic.  Beyond that, how is the AI of the enemy--does it do anything else than its basic tactics seen in ME1 (as told by others, "dry humping" your teammates to death and running around relatively spontaneously)?

Is there any silliness with the voicing in ME2 that was obvious in ME1?  Namely:

<Doors open.>
Hold the line!
I will destroy you!
You must die!
Enemies are everywhere!
Engaging hostiles!
Not now, Shepard!
I'm a little busy here!
Not in the middle of a fight!
I'm on it!
Take cover!
Watch out!
Kill them all!
Shields down!
Shields disabled!
I've lost shields!
Go, go go!
All targets down!
That's it, bag em' and tag em'.
I think we're good commander.
Remember to stay hydrated.

Lastly, if anyone knows, what do you gain from past save profiles?  I am told that you can purchase better items from a shop if you, for example, were level 50+?  If that is true, does it go by major intervals (ie. 30, 40, 50, 60 instead of 31, 32, ...)?  If not, that's not good for me, since I reached 49, and I am too lazy to redo my whole completion run through the second playthrough.

--

Hope everyone is enjoying ME2 [if they have it]!

[Echo35]

I can assume most people here know how awful the AI was in the original one--I've heard that most people find the AI better [by a mile] than the first one, but is it truly self-manageable and consistent throughout the game?  All I have heard regarding about your squad AI is it usually is able to take care of itself but fails when you attempt to provide orders for it--and occasional stumps.  I'm curious to see if they move and engage properly, and if they don't try the "stand still and eat their rockets" tactic.  Beyond that, how is the AI of the enemy--does it do anything else than its basic tactics seen in ME1 (as told by others, "dry humping" your teammates to death and running around relatively spontaneously)?

On occasion, I issue them orders and move them around, but I've gunned my way through plenty of battles without ever giving my squad a single order and they behaved perfectly. Especially now that all the classes are combat oriented, I've had no trouble at all. As far as the rest of the game goes, leaps and bounds better than the first.

[Spikey00]

So far, that sounds great!

Haha, too bad I can't fool around and watch the bots battle each other anymore by sending them to obscene fights and hiding/reviving them.  rofl.

[freykin]

I just beat this last night on normal difficulty.  The game is imo vastly improved from the previous one in pretty much every area.  I played through as an engineer and a had a blast using all my tech powers and such.  The dialogue animations are better and more natural, the ai for your team mates is leaps and bounds above the old one (I only had to res maybe 10 times the whole game), and your opponents actually make good use of cover/flanking for once.  I liked the flow of the story more as well, and the ending was pretty damn awesome, with an end fight that felt appropriate.

I'm probably going to be starting a new game of it soon just to see how the renegade side of things goes, as I went through straight paragoning everything.  Speaking of which, everything you did in Mass Effect 1 affects things in 2, even the smallest side quest.  Judging by the ending of 2, Some of the choices you make will drastically change 3.

I would've given the first one a 7 out of 10, this one gets a 9.

[eRe4s3r]

Also the music is excellent, sounds to me like the hired the Alien 1 music guys because some parts lend heavily from the alien atmosphere, hell the first mission is basically 1:1 to the first mission (squad entering colony) music wise - in Alien 1. Too bad they didn't continue it beyond the 2nd door (the gameplay and suspense, that is) ;P

If theres one thing i don't like is that the missions are too short. The game has a very systemic rhytm with each NPC having 2 missions, you basically only have like 3 actual story missions and thats really sad. I'd have wished for more than that. Though i am guessing this is because the crew of ME2 will go straight over into ME3 so they needed to establish backgrounds for all characters...

Overall this is easily the best game this year though because its just one mind-blowing experience to play through it. The characters and dialog is great, and it just shows that bioware really knows how to do dialog properly. Also, i really like the choice pie, i wish all games would use that because i don't want to read walls of text before choosing my reply/action - not only is that boring (you already read the text, now you hear it again?) but its also very slow. Pie choice ftw. Pie FTW ;p

Overall, i'd rate it 9.6/10 simply because this is pretty much the peak where sci-fi rpg's are. This is the top, all others are inferior. The lack of sci-fi rpg's besides Mass Effect 2 makes this a very easy choice too ,p

[Chimpster]

The fact that Bioware call it a RPG makes me laugh, but if you like Gears of War "cover style" games you'll probably love it.

For me, it paled in comparison to the vast majority of releases Bioware have made (and pales further when compared to Obsidians efforts) but I'm in a very small minority!  Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's a bad game, I just don't think it's deserving of unilateral praise it's getting accross the board.

KOTOR2 is most certainly a better Scifi RPG despite it's many flaws.

There are virtually NO interesting NPC's at all in Mass effect, including party members . The only characters that I found remotely engaging were Wrex (because of the Krogan cloning planet) and the human ambassador to the council (mainly because of the ending that I chose).

There was just so little depth to the characters that it was unreal, KOTOR 2, despite it's faults, did the characters very well.
You had a force user wanting to destroy the force, a droid that wanted to bring order to the galaxy via the republic, but was willing to be as evil as hell to do so, an apprentice to one of the main baddies you need to fight, an old solider you were responsible for in a past war that both hates and admires you at the same time, a wookie tormented by life oaths so in order to be an evil git you subject him via saving his life etc... The list goes on. In Mass Effect, it doesn't. The characters are so one dimensional it's almost scary.

With this in mind, you very rarely feel attached to any of the characters so when the game asks you to choose someone to sacrifice for the cause, the game may as well ask you to flip a coin - you probably don't care, as they're all the same generic "grizzled" solider character you've been made familiar with through most RPG's
The baddies are the same deal really, Saren just doesn't cut the mustard, you convince him on several occasions what an idiot he is, I managed to convince him to blow his brains out at the end and at no point did I really feel like he was a convincing evil so and so. His reasoning for what he was doing was so flawed and generic that you could probably finish his lines for him. On top of that, how many times are we gonna get the race of beings that only desire to destroy all life "just for the hell of it."

ME2 suffers from exactly the same problems.

Characters are ultimately the way in which a story is told, if you don't give them flesh on their bones then the story won't be portrayed in an interesting way.


Bioware games, much like Bethesda games, don't seem to get a fair review until the hype dies down 6 months later (Ie Oblivion went from being "wow it's perfect" to "actually no, it's nowhere near.")

7.5/10 for me.

If you enjoyed ME2 as an RPG then I'd advise you to look at System Shock 2, Deus Ex, KOTOR2 and Fallout 3.

If you're after a "proper" RPG, I'd look at Planescape Torment, Vampire Bloodlines, Arcanum, Mask of the Betrayer, Baldurs Gate 2, Fallout 1 + 2 and The Witcher

[eRe4s3r]

Actually my top rpgs list looks like something like this - So i am in no way a ME fanboy. But to say that Kotor 2 with that horrible combat, horrible black and white decisions and the actual IMPOSSIBILITY to roleplay properly (due to like half of the game missing) is somehow better than any on that list makes me giggle.

- BG2
- Gothic 2
- The Witcher
- Mass-Effect 2
- Dragon Age
- Deus EX
- Arcanum


To me Bioware is in no way the god of rpgs, but Obsidian has never made a good rpg in their life. NWN2 and the addons were a train wreck of horrible writing and absurdly annoying characters and extreme cliché and Kotor 2 while it was a ok rpg, had characters that you could attach to about as much as you could to a stone. None of them were like able except maybe T3-M4 and the hand-maiden. And those 2 were the most under-developed characters in the game. Most of Kotor 2 is like an afterthought too, so many things never explained and built upon, it was like only 40% of the game were made.

Also, i am assuming you are sarcastic about the reapers being like all other killing machines and doing it just for fun... that explains why you didn't like ME2, you didn't play it while being awake (it was clearly explained what the reapers are = cultural storage devices for entire species, every personality is a nation independent within a reaper. The 50k year cycle is to prevent any species from threatening their immortality. They don't do for fun, to the reapers the cycle is salvation for organic life which is a possible logical thought for an immortal AI trying to preserve life in some form (albeit a really weird form..)

So yeah, bottom Line, i disagree with your assessments 100% Only thing i don't disagree with is your list of what rpgs are good with the exception of Kotor 2.

Though, i don't intend to start a flame-war or something, just saying

[Chimpster]

You've never clearly played MOTB or P:T otherwise you'd never say that Obsidian games were crap, go play those and then we'll talk (though I concede that the vanilla NWN2 campaign was pretty bad)

Not quite sure how you can argue that KOTOR 2 had horrible black and white decisions and an inability to role play.  Granted that the last 10% of the game (tops) was a rush job but the 90% before it is full of moral ambiguity.  The game is all about choices and consequences rather than right and wrong unlike every Bioware game in history

The ME series has no real choice, it's a game on the rails.  Yes you can choose which planet to visit first or whether you hack off NPC's by being uber threatening etc but ultimately your experience of the game will be largely identical to everyone else.

Again, don't get me wrong, nothing wrong that necessary, Deus Ex was a fine example of a shooter with Role playing elements that told a cohesive and involving story.  Never in a million years was Deus Ex a RPG though  Equally, never in a million years is ME a RPG.  The original certainly wasn't, and ME2 stripped 3/4's of the role playing elements out from the 1st one to make Biowares transition to making story based shooters complete.

Anyways, it's enjoyable, but all these reviewers saying that it's depth and scope is unparalleled, or that it's the franchise to take the RPG genre to the next level clearly haven't played any RPG's properly in their entire lives It's an action game, nothing more, nothing less. Yeah, you're character levels up and you choose which weapons to use, but I would consider this game as being less RPG than say, System Shock 2, which has a far more compelling notion, better baddies (vote SHODAN for best villain of all time!) and a far more interesting game world.

Oh and don't worry, I love a good debate

[eRe4s3r]

Ehm Obsidian did not make P:T that was Black Isle (and the same BI that made BG2 and BG1) - Obsidian is not Black Isle. Only the leadership went there, which were clearly not the ones responsible for making BG2 a great rpg - ie the Writers clearly went elsewhere ,p

Actually though, Kotor 2 is not about moral ambiguity. Have to make choices which bring you closer to the dark side or not. But the problem with such a system is that once you have chosen skills in the darkside you are stuck with it and can no longer role play at all. Any choice that is not evil (or even remotely good) removes dark force points. Most (side) situations you can not even solve without a certain focus on dark or light. This means playing how you (personally) would play punishes you and can even rob you of force powers entirely.

In ME2 paragon and renegade is not exclusive and that is good. No human is all good or all evil. Consequently ME2 doesn't reward or punish renegade or paragon at all. You can sole ALL situations without paragon or renegade (albeit in different ways) this is vastly different and better from Kotor 2.

And speaking of moral, DnD has about the worst moral system ever 

As for Nwn 2, i refuse to play that.
- Broken Combat (due to crap AI) even worse than in NwN1 and thats saying something ^^
- OC = About the worst RPG start, middle, and end i have ever seen.
- MOTB = Timed campaign, linear and not how Rashemen is described in DnD Lore. No useful characters and way to high levels for a interesting DnD Experience. If you play an evil mage in MOTB you are SOL. Suppression is the only viable choice, and it moves your alignment making it hard to win the game without doing it. Also i really, really hate the entire story of MOTB, i don't know why.. i could barely stomach playing through it once.
- Zehyr = not even an rpg

I loved NwN1 (the OC is an exception) and the mod campaigns for that. a Dance with Rogues etc. But nothing official for NwN2 ever caught my fancy. Maybe its because of these slight delays between every action in NwN2 - it feels like its a sluggish unresponsive game. This is also why i really dislike semi turn based rpgs, when i attack i want to attack, not wait for my turn.

[Kordy]

Lastly, if anyone knows, what do you gain from past save profiles?  I am told that you can purchase better items from a shop if you, for example, were level 50+?  If that is true, does it go by major intervals (ie. 30, 40, 50, 60 instead of 31, 32, ...)?  If not, that's not good for me, since I reached 49, and I am too lazy to redo my whole completion run through the second playthrough.

Well, I'm sure almost everyone knows it by now, but still.

Your few choices in ME1 affect ME2 gameplay. There are a few others that are guessed to affect ME3, and are noted in ME2 a bit. Major ones are Wrex's demise, the council's fate and the team member you left to die in Virmire. (Or was it Ilos? Meh). Possible ME3 references are the rachni queen and some sidequests, but we don't know anything yet.

And about levels - Anyone above level 50 gets a bonus level at start in ME2, and anyone at level 60 gets another bonus level, starting at level 3. The 'Rich' achievement also gives increased resources at start, I think. Lastly, your previous paragon/renegade gives a slight bonus (10% or so, I guess) at the start. You gain no equipment from an imported save.

The game is balanced for veteran difficulty - going over that requires you to have a good amount of patience. Especially as a vanguard. At least the combat calls aren't THAT repetitive. I want Steve Blum to yell "I AM KROGAN" all the time.

You've never clearly played MOTB or P:T otherwise you'd never say that Obsidian games were crap, go play those and then we'll talk (though I concede that the vanilla NWN2 campaign was pretty bad)

PlaneScape: Torment doesn't deserve being put in the same sentence as MotB. The artists and the writers are indeed different, and while there's at least 5 years between two games, I'd still prefer PS:T. At least the UI doesn't remind me of WoW that much in PS:T

The ME series has no real choice, it's a game on the rails.  Yes you can choose which planet to visit first or whether you hack off NPC's by being uber threatening etc but ultimately your experience of the game will be largely identical to everyone else.

Any game is on the rails except for true sandbox games. Any game that has a story that needs the player to advance forward in that story is 'on the rails'. To a varying degree, perhaps. Uplink, for example, doesn't need the player to advance forward in the story. ME2 is heavily tied to the story and indeed it has problems with the freedom of player, but being 'on the rails' isn't a bad sign for a game - the amount of leeway into the story and the player mucking around is important and ME2 badly lacks on the freedom. And due to being a streamlined, consolized trilogy, what you did in ME1 doesn't affect ME2 that much, but any token change is still better than what Shadows of Undrentide did for NWN:OC.

Again, don't get me wrong, nothing wrong that necessary, Deus Ex was a fine example of a shooter with Role playing elements that told a cohesive and involving story.  Never in a million years was Deus Ex a RPG though

Uh huh. No. The game industry counts almost all games with a level-up screen an RPG though, and they won't be wrong in that regard with ME2. And unlike the JRPG's or the non-RPG's that are called RPG's (Why hello there, Borderlands!), ME2 does allow you to make your choices with regards to story or non-story stuff. So did Deus Ex and System Shock 2, with varying amounts.

All in all: ME2 is a good, fun game. It's not BioWare's best in gameplay, nor the best concerning the writing and plot, but still, the detail and polishing on the game is sadly a rarity these days. Now, excuse me. I'm going to watch Elcors play the Hamlet.

[eRe4s3r]

Badly Hidden Happyness - I hope the Elcor Hamlet will be done by bioware via DLC ,p

[Kordy]

Badly Hidden Happyness - I hope the Elcor Hamlet will be done by bioware via DLC ,p

Deadpan Snark - A fourteen hour cutscene? I'd love to play that. It'd be better than NeverWinter Nights, anyway.

[Echo35]

Badly Hidden Happyness - I hope the Elcor Hamlet will be done by bioware via DLC ,p

I would LOVE to see the Elcor Shakespeare plays they were advertising in the Citadel.

[Spikey00]

Well, I finally had my hands on Mass Effect 2; completed it after 37 (?) hours on hardcore--I also found it an invigorating experience.  While finishing all the missions, I found that, as Ereaser said,


"If theres one thing i don't like is that the missions are too short. The game has a very systemic rhytm with each NPC having 2 missions, you basically only have like 3 actual story missions and thats really sad. I'd have wished for more than that. Though i am guessing this is because the crew of ME2 will go straight over into ME3 so they needed to establish backgrounds for all characters..."

This was the main disappointment for my experience with the game--as in comparison with Mass Effect 1, it had far more less missions apart from the main storyline.

There were some issues I was frustrated with:  spacebar for sprint/cover, where I needed to retreat and accidentally took cover and :sarenthemeandrotatingcamera:, and at times, accidentally mounted at times where enemy projectiles knock you back (which was gay).  Particular missions were also infuriating--especially the ones with the mechs, as the friendly AI doesn't seem to be helpful at all.  Lastly, the resource harvesting was annoying.

Apart from that, I found it a great experience--I would do it again, but I don't feel as though there is much option as in ME1.

--

Say, did any of you see a part where the Rachni queen (if you allowed it to survive) reappears in "person", or are they having that doen in ME3+ (since I heard it isn't going to be restricted to a trilogy).

--

Yes, Elcor Shakespeare.  rofl; and that Hanar commando-thing.

[eRe4s3r]

If you let the queen live you meet one of her asari mind links on the asari homeworld, she doesn't know where the queen is though... but the queen "left a message" and basically lets you know that she loves you and wants to cuddle you.. oh and she wants to send a rachni fleet into the fray should the need ever arise. According to that dialog she is doing everything she can do avoid hostilities and moved to a different planet in the terminus system, though where i do not know

If shes dead then there are no rachni in the ME3 universe.