More on the Subject of Mass Effect 2

Let's not beat around the bush.



The Bennett Cross
"... most conspicuous gameplay, or some daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice, or extreme devotion to entertainment in the presence of the enemy"

Mass Effect 2

I will be shocked if a better game is released this year, so I'm quite confident in awarding ME2 the top gong for 2010 even though it's only February.

Essentially it's like a big-budget Hollywood remake of Mass Effect, but without straying into Chris Roberts "I'm a proper director, me" pretension. Everything that was good about Mass Effect is cranked up to 11, mostly the characterisation, dialogue and storyline. The combat is more involved, and more fun, and "bigger". You're still stuck with only a couple of squad mates at any given time, and you can always see a firefight coming when you enter a region populated with convenient crates to take cover behind. But the action seems somehow better integrated with the cutscenes, maybe because the game has had an impressive visual makeover which can look quite stunning. Talking of cutscenes, there are lots and lots of them. Even the side-missions will feature a handful, even if the mission itself is no more involved than they were in the first game. It's all the more incentive to go exploring, because there are a lot of systems to visit which aren't touched by the primary storyline.
The paragon/renegade tracks are back, and have the amusing side-effect of being reflected in the state of Shepard's facial scars. Which just made me want to see how fucked-up she would look if I pushed her as far into renegade as possible. Unfortunately it seems to be difficult to minimise the paragon points because sometimes you get loads just for completing a mission, and as the paragon points increase they (visually) cancel out the renegade ones. Still, with glowing red terminator eyes which even seem to get reflected in the eyes of other cutscene characters, she ended up looking like a satisfyingly nasty piece of work. Plus the renegade dialogue tracks involve a lot of dark humour, not just Shepard being a bitch/bastard.

What's not to like? Well, some of the guis are more console-friendly than they ought to be in the PC version. No double-clicking to select options? Drilling down page after page just to change a quad member's weapons? Having to drop out to the main menu in order to get to the mission journal? Over-simplified RPG elements? Well, that last one is debatable. Yes, it is a shame to have to rely on drip-fed research to unlock new weapons and upgrades, and the armour selection is very limited compared with the first game. Is it a problem? Probably not. It's ultimately less micro-management, something which was somewhat painful in Dragon Age. The lack of variety and the reduced potential to customise your Shepard, both in terms of appearance and abilities, does grate occasionally. And as I already suspected in the preview, the Illusive Man is a pretty lazy, cliched addition which you could imagine the Half-Life "writers" coming up with.
I'm also not convinced that the repetitive and mindless planet scanning is an improvement over the repetitive and mindless Mako driving from the previous game. Scanning planets feels like something one of the Normandy's junior minions ought to be doing, not galactic savior and double-hard bastard Shepard.

Most importantly the game's too short, but only in the sense that it doesn't continue forever. Still, maybe they'll knock out a few DLC expansions to tide us over until ME3. Some Shepard back-story adventures would be nice. (S)he is "The Butcher of Torfan" after all, something you only learn about through some minor dialogue (and less so in ME2).

Anyway, enough talking about it, back to playing it. Meanwhile, pretty pictures ("Take pictures!"), including a disproportionate number featuring Miranda's impressive rack.

On the Subject of Mass Effect 2

Perla/Simi

I didn't really pay much attention to Mass Effect when it was originally released. I think eventually I picked it up cheap in Steam sale, and it really grew on me. To date I've completed it three times, most recently immediately prior to the release of the sequel. I'm still impressed by the storytelling, the dialogue, and the well-designed universe. It's interesting, reading back on my original thoughts on the game, that I had doubts about replay potential. It is true that there are sections which can be a bit tiresome, relying on simply skipping through some dialogue to complete an assignment. And the side-missions are still mind-numbingly repetitive and bland.

I'm not that far into ME2, so these will be more initial thoughts than a comprehensive review. Firstly, and mostly importantly, collectors' edition!


Thanks to the continued rise of digital distribution, a physical collectors' edition is becoming a rare thing of beauty. Fortunately the ME2 CE isn't too disappointing. At first it looks like a simple UT3-style tin box, but it turns out the tin is relatively slim, and accompanied by a separate package for the art book, comic and "Cerberus Network" card.


There could have been a bit more included, especially a figurine or similar. Instead the add-ons are complemented by some additional DLC, which is of questionable value.


Still, it could have been worse, and in general it's nicely presented. The biggest disappointment is that for some reason only the digital CE comes with a copy of the soundtrack, which is a bit cheap. Still, that's what bittorrent's for. I expect.

So, what about the game? Well so far I have some very mixed feelings, although on balance they're ultimately positive. First things first, being able to import a character from ME1 (assuming it completed the game) is a nice touch, and is well handled. Having played the games back-to-back it was very satisfying to see my familiar Shepard appear in ME2. The game does a good job of translating the character appearance, probably because if you look closely they haven't really changed any of the design options, just updated the textures and shaders.

Commander Shepard completes Mass Effect 1

Commander Shepard, the 2010 edition

And that's the big improvement in ME2. It does look very pretty, in the same slightly clinical style, while remaining pretty speedy. Thanks, no doubt, to being primarily developed for shitty old consoles. The characters look better, the environments look better. There's some quite subtle but impressive lighting trickery going on, and the shadowing in particular is a big improvement over the original.


But it can't be all good, right? Right. I think I read somewhere that the PC version of ME1 was outsourced, and it actually turned out surprisingly well. The inventory system often comes in for criticism, but I found it pretty workable. The mouse controls were painless and consistent. Unfortunately ME2, which was handled by Bioware as far as I can tell, is a major and frustrating step backwards in that regard. The game suffers from the same piss-poor mouse implementation as many other recent AAA titles, in particular Bioshock and Fallout 3. Turn down the mouse sensitivity enough to make your character controllable (and you have all of 3 settings to choose from. Seriously) and it's way too slow in 2D interfaces, including the time-critical hacking sections. So I'm forever switching my mouse's hardware sensitivity on-the-fly to compensate. It's shit like that which makes you wonder if anyone at Bioware even tested the game with a mouse. It's stupid, stupid crap which would take virtually no effort to correct, if they could just be bothered. Fingers crossed for a patch in the near future.
What almost certainly won't be patched, unfortunately, is the fucking awful inventory, or rather "loadout" interface. Because the looting of the original game appears to have been deprecated in favour of a convoluted, spoon-fed system of pickups and research which appears to offer a much smaller scope for customising your team.
Then there's the ship navigation. Instead of the relatively basic, but reasonable star maps with all the zooming in and out of star systems and driving around (very boring and repetitive) planets, there's some ridiculous micro-machines interface where you "fly" a mini ship around the map and... well there's not much to do. You can pick story locations to visit, or there's a bizarre resource gathering system which involves scanning planets for the materials you need to research weapons and upgrades. It seems very out-of-place, because at least driving around in the mako and shooting things felt like something Shepard ought to be doing.

The whole thing, along with the combined use/sprint/cover system has "console" written all over it, because obviously some drooling console monkey can't cope with having more than one button to press, or more than one thing being listed on a screen at any given time. It's very sad that the game has taken such an enormous step backwards in that regard, and it's a poor reflection on Bioware who are supposed to be the PC gamer's friend when it comes to this sort of stuff.
I mean, you can't even double-click on a menu item, you have to click the separate "confirm" or whatever button. Pathetic.
It's all the more frustrating because everything else is so good. The dialogue system is unchanged, which is a good thing, including the paragon/renegade options. The dialogue itself is first-rate, again, with some genuinely impressive voice acting. Even if you do end up with Fifty Cent as one of your first team members. The "Illusive Man" is a somewhat less impressive addition, reeking as he does of "G-Man"-style narrative stupidity.
The firefights are much improved, however, incorporating much greater numbers of enemies, and more variety.

So, like I said, a mixed bag. I'm really enjoying it from a story and action perspective, but pissed off that some elements of this game are absolutely worse than in its predecessor. It's both annoying and sad, because even if they hadn't changed those aspects at all, it would still be better than what they've become. It's like Bioware wanted to make changes for the sake of making them, or else they were simply too lazy to get the PC version right.
Anyway, because I'm not one of those cunts who thinks they have to "beat" a single player game as quickly as possible, I'm going to take my time and see what there is to see. I hope there aren't too many more disappointments in store.