[360] Mass Effect 2 - Skills would do a romance sub-plot but he has work in the morning

Is there any chance that the game will actually play like the game they show off in the developer interviews this time?

I mean, waxing lyrical about how you'll be able to talk to nearly everyone in the universe you meet, interupt conversations mid-speech and switch to different characters during battle is great, unless you actually drop every single one of those things before you release the game.

I liked Mass Effect, despite the massively repetitive side-quests, but I'm not going to believe any of the hype about the sequel until I've seen it running on the final build myself.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Qwarky

You could interrupt conversations and walk away, but it didn't really have that much of an effect. Anything else probably stems from how the game wasn't quite as vast as it appeared to be and Shin is just being bitter.

=P

The only video I really watched was an interview from E3 where some dude went into pretty great depth about the combat system (Including character switching) and the fact that inter-personal relationships were really important, showing a demonstration of how the Turian dude was being a bit bolshy so you could just tell him to shut up and do what he was told mid-sentence, with the heavy implication that your relationship with the other characters would have a big effect on the game.

What they actually gave you was a combat system where your team mates spend a lot of time standing in the open right next to some nice cover, getting killed while you just spam the shoulder button commands for the achievement points and kill all the bad guys with pop-up and shoot tactics not unlike Rainbow's but with all the risk of getting killed with a headshot or being outflanked by the clever enemy AI removed. The other members of your party had opinions but rarely voiced them unless you went looking for them and their opinions didn't make the slightest bit of difference to the story, with each major decision (All three of them) being blindingly obvious and being made at that point, bollocks to how you acted all game.

Like I said, I liked the game but after KOTOR 2 with it's depth of characters, an affinity system that actually affected the plot and a combat system than had some semblance of tactics to it (Even if it was incredibly easy to build a broken, over-powered character), one could be forgiven for expecting a little more from Mass Effect, especially after they said there would be a lot more in an interview no more than three months before the thing was launched.

Really, they shouldn't have bothered with Mass Effect at all and spent the time finishing KOTOR 2 and making a third one of those.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Tentacle Rapist

You guys can't seriously believe Shepherd is fucking dead, can you? They would just kill him/her off in the blank area between Mass Effect and the sequel, despite talking repeatedly about how Shepherd will be in ALL THREE GAMES?

I mean it's one thing to remove character switching or interrupting conversations, but to just go back on something like that would be fucking ridiculous.

Of course he's alive. If that trailer's not just an obvious fanboy hype generator then I'll be eternally surprised. Safe money says he's on some top secret mission and they're telling everyone he's dead as some kind of cover-up. The game will probably start with some kind of gay as all fuck MGS2 effort where you play "A mysterious man in a space suit" who surprise surprise turns out to be Shepherd.

I'd suggest though that while you might be able to carry over the character, they won't be carrying over the plot nuances, seeing as how they mentioned Wrex in the trailer as a companion and it's quite easy to finish the game up without him. I mean, KOTOR 2 assumes you didn't leave Carth behind to die on the last planet or kill Bastilla or Jolee Bindu if memory serves.

Pang, I think we're all talking about KOTOR 2 as Bioware are widely associated with the franchise and still are. I forgot they didn't actually do the second game. Still, they could have learned a lot if they'd played it...

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

My second playthrough character looks like a female Heinrich Himmler.

How ya doing, buddy?

I think it's been common knowledge for a while that EA were shedding jobs and restructuring their studios. I'm sure I read something in Edge before christmas about Bioware being one of the ones getting the chop but I can't find the article now.

The story you linked to is them trying to put a positive spin on the fact they've made a load of people redundant and are cost cutting in terms of locations too. Essentially they've taken two or three studios, sacked a bunch of people and then put those left together and probably decided Bioware was the best name to keep.

One would hope this is a good thing though as new people will bring new ideas and you'd think that the ones who kept their jobs would be the most talented (As opposed to the cheapest, which would be bad news). EA have also said they're concentrating on quality over quantity these days and a rushed out ME2 would do them no favours.

It all depends how far into development they are. If the engine is built, the systems are all in place and they're just scripting the thing, new talent would definitely be a good thing. If they're pretty much starting from scratch then they're fucked, as the release of trailers implies a sooner-rather-than-later time frame for release.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Dark Nation

From the looks of the trailer, we might be exploring more Cities and not just Ice_Planet_A, Lava_World_2 and Underground_Bunker_Gamma, which would be a welcome mix-up. Not that I minded traveling and uncovering alien worlds, but there wasn't quite enough variety. It seemed like the only cities you visited were direct story-line related. Ah well, probably a minor complaint of just my own.

That was perhaps the biggest of several let-downs for me in the first game. All the publicity crap before it came out banged on about how rather than just visiting five planets all game (Like KOTOR), there were whole galaxies to explore. What they didn't mention was that each one had about three visitable planets in and those were all basically featureless wastelands with cut and paste bunkers dropped in from time to time and the bulk of the game would actually take place on no more than about seven planets.

There was also the whole switching characters in combat thing, the interupting conversations, the being able to have a conversation with every single npc, the decisions you make actually effecting the story and it not looking like Quake 3 running on a 486 with the graphics setting turned up to max. I liked Mass Effect well enough but god damn was it nothing at all like what they promised. One would hope that this time round they'll either actually put in one or two of the features they promise or they'll just shut the fuck up rather than making shit up constantly. I honestly think that Mass Effect was a contender for Fable's crown of "Most lies told about a computer game by the developers prior to release".

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If memory serves, there's a reference to Jolee Bindo surviving KOTOR 1 in the descriptin of the weapon named after him (A pistol I think), although it's been a year or so since I last played it. I agree though that the handling of the previous game was well done in KOTOR 2, essentially giving you the choice as to what happened in the first one during your first conversation with Atton.

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So are the bits of the game where you're not holding hands with aliens any good?

All this talk of digital romance has helped me settle on a thread title at least.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?