Zarent six months ago:

Spoiler

Every single one of those choices could have been made differently. Meaning that there's going to be *very* little plot and dialogue based around the decisions you made in ME1, or anything that affects the game besides its overall end.

Bioware always take the easy way out, amirite? No way they'd actually put any real amount of effort into making the decisions of the first two games at all matter in ME3.

 

waitwut

I think you just proved my point.

Spoilers of Mass Effect 1 and a little bit of ME2 forthcoming.

The only characters you could use in ME2 were ones that were in ME1 were Garrus and Tali. Your original characters barely show up in ME2. The 'main' decisions of the first game, such as if you killed off Wrex, and if Ash/Kaiden was killed off, only leads to brief cameos that have little to no effect past that one scene. The FINAL BATTLE SCENE, where you decide to kill off the council or the humans, has literally no gameplay application past a few passing lines of dialogue.

Furthermore, notice how anyone you romanced in ME1 wasn't available in ME2 to talk about your romance? Too many lines of dialogue to be recorded for too small of an audience. Instead, all you get is a picture on your desk of the romance interest [that I bet almost none of you noticed].

I'm not meaning to be a cynical dick or anything, its just not feasible to do. Due to the large amount of variables in terms of who can live or die / whose loyalty missions you did / what choices you made DURING said missions... there's just too much for one game to encompass.

Character spoilers ahead

Spoiler

Similarly, I also highly doubt that many characters from ME2 will carry over as squadmates into ME3, besides Garrus and Tali, as they're fan favorites. Otherwise, again, there's too much potential wasted dialogue and effort put into modeling.

Now, I'm all for hoping that ME3 will be freakin' amazing and work in all of the decisions you made. I'm just trying to be realistic though.

But that's like, just my opinion, bro.

 

I was going to write a serious response to you...

But the palpably smug sense of I'm-more-perspective-than-you in this phrase has made me lose any respect for you.

 

But they're very different stories. ME1 was much more of a standalone. ME2 only makes sense if it's building up a team and story for ME3, which the developers have implied is the case. Otherwise it's

Spoiler

30 missions to build a team and then two missions to actually use it? Plus the end of the game is basically just your whole team watching you get the blueprints to a Reaper, pretty obvious setup for the next game

I don't think they'll ALL be back, but there is pretty wide spread agreement on who's cool and who isn't (sorry Jacob) so they could easily bring back the good half of the crew.

 

You're joking, right? Choosing to kill Wrex in the first one, insures that he is dead in the second one. Which means that the Krogans aren't uniting, and, in fact, have reverted to traditional, clan-based government. If you killed the council then humans wind up running everything and all the aliens hate humans.

I was amazed at how customizable the game's backstory was. I had assumed that they would choose a backstory to force onto the player as canon.

Also: Am I the only one who followed the Tali romance option purely out of the hope that I would get to see what the hell she looks like?

Spoiler

I was so pissed that they purposely neglected to show her face after her mask came off.

 

Relax. I didn't notice it either until it was pointed out to me, and I was just stating that the majority of the playerbase was alike in this. It's a *very* small addition to the game.

If you kill Wrex in the first one, you get a different clan leader who tells you to do the exact same quests as if Wrex is alive on Tuchanka. The only thing missing is the voice actor.

And if you killed the council? A few of the aliens on Citadel bad mouth you in dialogue. No changes to any actually interactive gameplay, which is kind of my entire point.

 

Your point appears to be 'who gives a shit if the story changes, if the gameplay's the same then nothing's changed.'

 

I think you have to acknowledge that having a ME save file doesn't really effect the story of ME2. It changes the context of certain missions, who you fight and why – but you're always going to the same places, doing similar things for similar people. Occasionally you meet a character from the previous game, but they never have more than a few lines of dialogue to explore. Lesser characters send you emails (which takes no effort on Bioware to make - they just write a paragraph from the perspective of the character). The major changes (Udina vs Anderson, Council vs No Council) have absolutely no effect on the game's missions itself, though they do change a few NPC reactions.

I don't fault Bioware for this, it's obvious they had to do this – for an action RPG with actual gameplay, there simply isn't enough development time or money to spend, making branching paths. Off the top of my head, I can't even think of a game which has been less than 95% linear.

In ME3, we'll count ourselves lucky if the characters we like return as playable. We'll count ourselves lucky if we see some wild Rachni, or meet that Asari from New Eden again. We'll count ourselves lucky if we have a choice to stay with Cerberus or not (likely, no matter what choice you made in ME2, you'll be leaving them). Look at Dragon Age's sequel, from what I've read, the whole game's universe basically resets (no romance, characters you spoke with before don't matter).

 

It's more of
'Who gives a shit if 5 lines of dialogue change, if everything else stays exactly the same.'

Maybe ME3 will fix that.

 

I never noticed this. But this is the credits song to ME1.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gISlB1IdUjI&feature=related

Perhaps the story was influenced by this? Or the designers are Bioware acknowledged the similarities or something?

 

fucking old thread warning ate my multiple page disection of the game, so fuck it.

Could of been better, graphics still suffer popin from hell and jaggyness that makes my eyes bleed. Combat system is fucking fail, ammo system is fail. Story is epic.

 

I'm about to throw my controller through the wall. The squadmates are fucking useless. Give Garrus a sniper rifle, and the son of a bitch will stand in the middle of the fucking hallway, out of cover, and get wtfpwned.

I can't get over how fast I can die, even on casual. This Shepard feels like a fucking pussy compared to my guy from the first game. A soldier shep doesn't have the powers to drop shields and armor worth a damn without using a ton of bullets, which I almost always seem to be low on once I switched to the second assault rifle.

 

What difficulty are you playing on? I never had that problem with anything but hardcore and up. The computer pretty much saps out your squads IQ and gives it to the enemy the higher up you go.

Also really? I never had that problem even on hardcore, what power sets are you using and how did you spend your points?

 

I always used the D-pad to order my squadmates to places if they were being stupid. I also never gave them a sniper rifle. I just left them with various assault weapons and smgs, depending on class.

I didn't die a lot and I played on Hardcore on my first play-through, so I don't know what's going on with you and casual.

As for shields, I used Disruptor ammo. Shielded enemies are best to be fought by Garrus's Overload. That'll take down the shield. Armor is pure Incendiary Ammo. Overload and Warp can hurt big armor targets as well.

Once you can get a new ability, Warp Ammo is a good choice for a soldier class. This will damage all of the protection types well.

Ammo wise, I only had issues with ammo using the Vindicator. This assault weapon, which I always used, is a burst fire with high attack, low ammo. There were many times that I had to use my sniper rifle, or shotgun or pistol after I ran out of ammo.

How are you spreading your stats? Are you buying health upgrades? Those are good. Farming for minerals is a must if you wanna be stronger. I'd focus on Armor and Shield upgrades, along with anything Assault Rifle related.

-Myst

 

I stuck it on casual since it seemed like they were doing nothing but standing there getting shot. I stick Garrus with the sniper rifle, seems like he did better with it then the assault. Other teammate floats, trying to find one I like.

My Sol shep has lvl 2 in pretty much everything. The adrenaline burst I expected to be much better, seems too weak.

Farming I'm at like 200K on everything but eezo, got all the upgrades I can. Maybe I'm trying to play more like I'm used to, run and gun. I hate this cover dependancy shit.

 

Ah yeah, ME2 is definitely a cover game. I couldn't do a lot of run-and-gunning in the game. Only happened on the husk-levels. Garrus and Miranda were my usual squadmates. I enjoyed using Overload and Warp combos all the time from them. Myself mostly stuck to damage dealing. My squadmates were just support. If they died, they died. Didnt care much, I could do the job on my own.

 

What platform are you playing it on? I've beaten it three times now on my 360. I've only ever noticed pop-in a few times, and it was cleared up within a second or two. Not anywhere near as bad as the first game.

My main criticisms are with the amount of guns and armor available to you (not enough, and with no Xbox Live I can't get any of the bonus stuff they offer, which makes it twice as bad), and with how the biotic powers are handled. All the abilities being disabled after using one is fail. I can see where they were coming from, since my Adept was nigh-unstoppable in the first game when she could endlessly lay down the telekinetic heat, but I think they could have found some other way to fix that.

Plus there's an aesthetic issue I have with a biotic throw now looking like those Shadow Balls that Mewtwo used in the Pokemon movies. I preferred it when it was more like a Force Push from KotOR.

Also, I had a problem with the Paragon/Renegade system directly unlocking dialogue options. I preferred the Charm and Intimidate bars in the level-up screen. I can again understand that they didn't want you having to use the more limited points they gave you in this game on them, but I think you could have just made the bars shorter than they were instead.

Other than that, fucking fantastic game.

 

Look for the extra ammo holder thing you can equip to the shoulder of your armor. It boosts the vindicator ammo from eighty something to 105 i think maybe one twenty something.

My three chosen were Miranda, me and Kasumi, once I got her. Before that I used Jacob. Once you finish Jacob's loyalty mission you can train his barrier ability and use it for yourself, which is rather sweet.

Tip: Do all loyalty missions and upgrades BEFORE you go to the

Spoiler

dead reaper

otherwise you'll probably end up regretting it.

I liked the game. I played both games on PC, beat both on Veteran first play through, and didn't notice any graphics problems. I guess I'm also one of the few who liked the changes they made to the stat system in the second game.

And thank God for the new armor system! I fucking hate the standard one they used in ME 1. I find it tedious and boring having to hunt for good armors, when I'd rather be playing.

Tali's loyalty mission, along with Kasumis, was awesome.

 

Really? Thats very odd then, you should not be having that problem on casual, they were actually quite smart on my casual run through but I never gave anyone but me a sniper rifle on any setting so that might have something to do with it.

So your just throwing points to everything? Try to specialize instead of diffusing to everything, buy the retraining thing from the upgrade station and max yourself out on a couple of things and I think that will really help you out. Maximum Adrenaline Burst for me with the sniper rifle was ridiculous, I could make three headshots with my sniper rifle in a row and still have enough time to get up, walk around the incoming rocket and stroll over to some new cover.

That's probably a large part if not your biggest problem right there, you can't do that on anything but casual even then its limited success at best and the tougher enemies will still fuck your shit sideways for doing it.

 

As far as team mates were concerned, I just stuck with Mordin and Miranda. Put all points into Warp, Incinarate and Cryo and nothing would stand for long. Honestly, using them pretty much made Insane a walk in the park. Only difficulty I ever came across is the Scions.