Even if ME1 played like total ass, the world the game is set in is nearly perfectly crafted in from a lore concept. Then ME2 comes along and tons of stuff just doesn't really make sense, but it's still worth it big time. Replaying through ME2 now on the PC, using a downloaded ME1 savefile, so ME3 will have the choices I want on my PC, since I played it on my xbox =/

 

It has been over a year since I played Mass Effect 1 but I really don't recall having any problems with cover. You run behind a wall, crouching if necessary. Move out from the wall to shoot, then move back when needed. Simple enough. What was wrong with it?

The gun accuracy bit is pretty standard RPG fare. You suck with a weapon you've just picked up. You need to put points into to before you become good with it. It's way better than being an expert at any weapon instantly and the only thing to put points in are ammo capacity, rate of fire or reload speed, ala Dead Space. That's FPS style. But ME1 was more RPG than its follow ups (or so I've heard).

I haven't gotten around to playing ME2 yet, partly from lack of time and partly fear of ruining ME1 for me, so ME2 might be a cover based shooter and you may be an expert with all weapons from the get go. That's a shame though. There are enough standard FPS around.

 

No, there's an actual cover SYSTEM, you're supposed to be able to enter cover. It's not well done, I would have been fine if there'd been no cover system and you just needed to crouch, etc. Instead we got an attempt to make it an actual mechanic and it ended up horribly.

The idea of starting out terrible with your weapons is fine in fantasy, because most of the time you're Joe Farmer Nobody from fuckall-whocares and you're trying to swing a great big honking sword for the first time in your life. It's beyond retarded when you are meant to be a special-ops commando who has seen actual combat, and yet you cannot hit shit. Don't get me started on the stupid inventory system, which has even less place.

I'm sorry, but those things do not make a game an RPG.

As for ME2, it improves the actual combat mechanics greatly, takes the other extreme in terms of inventory (which was disappointing), does a better job fleshing out individual character stories, but more poorly with regards to larger story mostly due to being the middle of trilogy. Biotics are also much less useful (except for Vanguards, Warp, Reave, and Stasis) on anything above normal difficulty, but weapons, and weapon powers have actually differences and effects.

 

I never had trouble aiming when I started a new save in Mass Effect, and I played all the way up to Insanity difficulty. I will admit that guns did get more accurate as the game progressed, but if I recall correctly, you were getting new, more advanced weapons as you progressed, also.

The cover system was a somewhat glitchy, but I preferred it to the way cover was handled in ME2, which caused far more problems for me.

 

As said above, the accuracy thing is standard fare for an RPG. Though to be honest, I never even really noticed it in ME1. I played a soldier first, way back when the game came out. Ever since then, my other playthroughs have been as biotics and sentinels. I had no trouble with guns or cover during the game.

I'm not doubting that you did, but to be honest, I enjoyed it the way it was. Cover systems never mattered much to me, I despised Gears Of War.

Guns were better, I guess, in the second... But they destroyed my favorite method of combat, which was biotics.

I really agree with Mid, the story was incredible. And in my opinion combat is less important.

Because no matter how perfect the combat is in ME3, if the story is fucked I will rage at Bioware forever. lol

 

But it has to be said that as I'm now remembering from playing and reading, going into cover in ME2, as in standing behind a WIDE pillar, and still taking a shitload of bullets that seem to pass through the pillar is annoying as all hell, lol.

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=7004

^This series, all 3 parts does a good job summing up my problems with ME2, ESPECIALLY the parts about the collectors. No, it's not just the fact that it's the middle child of the trilogy, they really just did a piss poor job stringing 1 and 2 together. BUT, with as low as story standards have fallen, and as high as ME1 set the bar, almost no matter what it did, it was going to be inferior to ME1 story wise. The character stories were mostly well done, but that's pretty much what the entire game was, hide and seek for partners with a half ass attempt to string them all together, but they really did pull some stupid shit out.

-Allying with Cerberus. Okay, but you just spent an entire game showing us how batshit insane they were. Even if that was the military arm, it was still under the directive of TIM. Never once, other then Shepard's direct actions, are we shown them helping humanity, they're space racists and mad scientist level whackjobs in ME1.

I love this quote, lol

Sure they got reassigned and broken up after their commander made a big fuss. That really meant they should almost all commit treason and sign on with a bunch of loonies?

The Reaper human... that whole bit just hurt my brain. Read part 3 of the series I linked, it's comments on the hybrid and the final choice over giving the base to Cerberus or just straight blowing it up echo my own thoughts.

This all day long. The only explanation I can come up with for fighting Cerberus in ME3 is it uses the ending of the collector base going to Cerberus and it corrupts them or something, but then it'd invalidate your choice to blow it up. Meh, anyway I just hope ME3, even with it's fault, wraps up what started off as an amazing story on every level, with an ending worth what the beginning was.

 

Everything Midknight said above is true. Mass Effect 2 had a pretty disappointing story in my opinion. Not outright terrible, but definitely not what I expected after ME1's amazing story.

One of the biggest problems I had with the story was that the enemy didn't really have a "face". In the first game, Saren was an awesome villain that you really wanted to hunt down and stop. ME2's closest equivalent was Harbinger, who isn't fleshed out or shown much at all. You routinely kick his ass and then he there is no resolution with him at all at the end of the game.

Also, I actually really disliked ME2's cover system. Every time enemies were about to ambush you it was immediately obvious by the amount of chest high walls that suddenly appeared.

 

^ That's more a problem with stupid level design than with the actual cover system.

I preferred the gunplay in ME2 over ME1, though it did have its kinks. I'm glad that ME3 has improved on it.

 

Not to mention suddenly having an armory worth of heat clips in the room right before the fight in some spots, lol.

Going by their current curve of improving the gunplay while downgrading the story and simplifying the RPG element, I'm getting worried about the series =(

 

I also just read on the Escapist that the ending details of ME3 just got leaked and the Bioware forums are in chaos with the amount of people raging about it. I don't know what the spoilers are, so I can't comment on this but it probably isn't a good sign.

Of course, the Bioware forums seem to be full of weirdos (threads with tens of thousands of posts about Tali, doing stuff like analyzing what her sweat would be like, etc.) so it might be okay.

I'd usually link to an article or something, but I think it's best to keep spoilers well away from this thread.

 

I remember running into Ashley in ME2 and feeling like yelling at my Shepard to ask her to get him back to the alliance and away from the ship EDI(TIM) could control. The only way Shepard working with Cerberus ever made sense to me is that I finally decided they must have fucked with some of his memories while they were restoring him.

 

I'm honestly a little angry at this, they basically ripped the ending from the backstory of a well known IP and copy pasted it on there. I also have to rage because essentially, the game says I played my character wrong through ME1 and 2.

I'm waiting for the "Happy Ending" DLC that will inevitably make them millions.

 

Yes, allying with Cerberus was utterly stupid in a million different ways. But the fact is that all of the Cerberus Missions in ME1 could easily have been missed (except the Kohaku one, you could still miss it but it's a little mroe difficult). For teh first game Cerberus is nothing but two-bit thugs and a couple of background mentions.

I suppose I was always less disappointed in the direction the story went because I didn't see anyway in which they could go RIGHT after ME1, not because it was perfect mind you but just I didn't see a direction that really screamed "GREAT STORY" to me.

 

How about something like they scavenged the wreckage of Sovereign, found out info about the reapers which advanced their tech WAY forward, and then you spent all ME2 building alliances, playing political games, and the end of ME2 you're about to jump through a newly discovered Relay, where you run into surviving Protheans/new race who've been hiding out next galaxy over from the Milky Way.

ME3 you come back with new friends who've evolved different tech not based off element zero/reaper tech like all Citadel race tech is, and start to take the fight to the Reapers, who've started harvesting planets. Each planet you do a ton of shit on, eventually killing off the Reaper who's leading that planet's invasion force. Shepard dies at the end of ME3 with most of humanity's planets cleared, the Krogan rebelling, the Rachni back, etc, etc. ME4 starts a new trilogy with a new hero.

I mean really anything would have been an improvement. They wrote themselves into a corner imho. A single Reaper can take out hundreds of ships with little damage, but there's countless Reaper's sitting in the dark space between galaxys. You can't really combat that. By the time you've killed 10 of them, you've exhausted almost every ship in the known galaxy, with countless more out there harvesting stuff that hasn't been explored yet, and more pouring in from the Citadel nonstop. Not to mention the speed they'd have to be moving to harvest anything smart that's using the Relay's, but hasn't hooked into Citadel yet. The Milky Way's something like 100,000 light years across right? If they're sitting a distance considered "way outside" the galaxy when you're talking local is considered 100K LIGHT years, how long is it going to take them to get us without a relay jump in? Edit: But somehow right after we stopped Harbinger, them sumbitches show up at the doorstep?

 

I think it would've been a better idea to do the Collectors story first, then the story of ME1 and 3. Lead into the Reapers through the Collectors. Maybe introduce Saren better before making him the villain. Remove the "working for Cerberus" angle and just have them be antagonists.

That's been the vague outline for my Mass Effect AU fic if it ever sees the light of day, at least. Subject to change.

 

The only trouble with fighting the Collectors in the first game is that (as far as I remember) they were only harvesting humans because Shepard beat Sovereign. Easy enough to find another motivation for them though. Apart from that, you're right. The trilogy really would seem to flow better if the first two games were switched around and edited a bit. Ending the second game with Sovereign and the battle for the Citadel would've been a much better lead in to the third game.

 

Have to agree that the Collectors would've worked better as a first act. One of ME 2's problems when it comes to the plot is that the stakes seem lower in ME 2 than they did in 1; swapping them around fixes that nicely.

So, have ME 1 start off with the Collectors starting to grab people, with Shepard being assigned to investigate the matter by the Alliance, while Saren's handling the investigation for the Spectres. Saren would still be loyal to the Citadel, but would still have a very Renegade outlook on things, with Anderson serving as the Paragon counterbalance. Saren and Shepard start off not getting along very well, but over the course of the game develop a sort of grudging respect for each other.

Over the course of the game, you find a few hints that there might be some larger force working behind the Collectors, but nothing definite. The first game ends with the Collector base being destroyed, and a very brief glimpse of Harbinger/Soveriegn releasing direct control.

Saren and Shepard both suspect that there's more going on and that the Collectors were working for someone else, but they don't have any evidence to support their suspicions. The Council being the Council, They're quite content to believe the situation is solved, case closed.

The end of ME 1 has Shepard becoming the first human Spectre thanks in part to a strong recommendation for Saren, since Shepard is the only other person who agrees that they need to keep investigating and find out who was pulling the strings behind the Collectors.

ME 2 opens up with the attack on Eden Prime. Saren's betrayal comes as a real nasty surprise to Shepard/the player (if you really, really want to twist the knife, maybe even make Saren a romance option in ME 1). The conflict between Saren and Shepard was already a great part of the original ME 1; if the series spent an entire game establishing the characters before Saren's heel turn, it would've been epic.

Plus, this way the reveal of Sovereign is even bigger, since it happens at the end of the second act, and really sets the stage for the finale.

 

The cover system is the most obnoxious element of the game in my opinion. I'm terrified out of my mind and trying to roll back away from three incoming Phantoms on Gold (just beat it for the first time two nights ago. Yay!), but suddenly I'm stuck against the wall beside me. Then when I quickly try to get off the wall, it just rolls me over to the one parallel!

The same thing happens in just about every clutch situation I encounter. Come around a corner, meet a surprise Guardian, and in the process of rolling away I somehow get caught in cover. Shotgun to the face, kthxbai. It's incredibly irritating.

 

@Chendar. That would have even better because in the ME2 you set-up the characters, their backstory and recruiting, with a backdrop of figuring out what is happening instead of a suicide mission to keep the player's interest.

And come to think of it, your idea would actually make a pretty epic fanfic.

 

That seems similar to what I had in mind.

I was going to have the Collectors abduct members of all species, not just humans (though humans are included). This brings Saren and Shepard together at the start, when they both meet up on a planet whose entire population has disappeared -- similar to how you meet Tali on Freedom's Progress. Then, you know, things proceed.

... Thing is, I was considering merging this with my idea for a Code Geass rewrite-and-eventual-crossover. But I'm wondering now if that's too ambitious for me.