Pumping Irony

As in the previous article, beware traveler! Beyond this point be spoilers!

I completed Mass Effect 2 last week, and it was glorious! I wanted to check a single part of the UI in Mass Effect to compare to Mass Effect 2 and ended up getting so engrossed in the game that I completed an entire second play-through of Mass Effect in 3 days! My first ME (and ME2) play-throughs were as a male Soldier class who took the Paragon path. So this time I played the exact opposite: a female Adept (biotic) Renegade. Boy, was that some devilish fun being no-nonsense, shooting important NPC’s in the head and slinging biotic powers all over the place. It was almost like playing a Sith, sans the red lightsaber. I’m looking forward to taking her through ME2 doing all the Renegade actions and seeing her glowing facial scars from the Lazarus Project become more pronounced. (See? Spoiler!)

On a positive note, playing both games back-to-back has brought the stark contrast between the two games into clearer light.

Every technical aspect has been dramatically improved upon for Mass Effect 2. Character models, animations, world design and architecture, textures, lighting and particle effects, controls, UI… you name it, it’s better in ME2 and with much better performance!

From an overall story perspective, I would without hesitation recommend playing ME before going into ME2. There are too many mentions of events that occurred in ME and several brief appearances of characters that Shepard interacted with in the first game that wouldn’t make sense or have meaning to players who skipped ME. Do yourself a favor and play them both for the full effect.

In addition to the other positive aspects I’ve already mentioned both here and in the previous article, I’ll add the new cover mechanic as well. There was a cover mechanic to ME as well, but it only worked by running into a large object like a wall. Anything smaller than Shepard would not work. ME2 improves by not only making Shepard crouch behind smaller objects but also adds more direct interaction to enter/leave cover by pressing the A button. Also, once covered behind a smaller barrier, moving forward and pressing A tells Shepard to jump over the barrier, and the game uses this new mechanic to move from cover point to cover point as well as for climbing. As I said in the first article, ME2 is very derivative of the Gears of War series in several areas, cover mechanic being just one.

ME2 has an improved auto-save as well, should you choose to use it (it’s on by default). There are frequent auto-save points, and all saves are completely seamless whereas in ME the game would freeze during the save process. First, the save points are a tremendous boon, and I became so accustomed to this that it cost me over an hour of playtime I had to repeat during my replay of ME a few days ago when I hit a snag and wanted to reload. I also noticed that ME does not allow you to manually reload an auto-save; you have to exit the game then resume to do that. ME2 lets us re-load an auto-save from the Load menu, which is a huge convenience.

Another positive in ME2 is that each mission has its own cinematic, in contrast to ME which re-used the same scene constantly. For example, in ME every time you land on a planet, it’s the exact same scene of the Normandy sweeping down and dropping off the Mako rover, the only change being the sky and terrain graphics are unique for each planet. ME2 has extremely well-rendered cinematics for every single mission which are not only enjoyable to watch on their own but also serve to improve the overall sense of immersion in the game’s universe.

To avoid being a drooling Mass Effect fanboy, I’ll give some negatives and things that I am still undecided how I feel about in ME2. Nothing’s perfect, after all.

The Mission Complete screen. This is a minor — indeed, a shallow — thing, and on the one hand I suppose it’s convenient to have one screen that shows all the XP, credits, etc. I gained during that mission. On a negative side, it makes an already streamlined RPG feel more like “merely” a game, like Peggle or something where you see the “Level Complete!” screen.

The XP Table. Mass Effect 2 does not use a gradually increasing XP curve, like we’ve become accustomed to over the years in every single RPG. Each level in Mass Effect 2 requires 1,000 XP and never changes from that. Unlike ME, no XP is earned for kills, hacking, resource recovery, etc. Completing a Story Mission rewards 1,000 XP so automatically completing a Story Mission means you gain a level. Completing a Loyalty Quest for your crew members rewards 750 XP each. Anomaly Detected missions discovered while scanning a planet for resources reward 125 XP upon completion and then side missions acquired from dialogue with NPC award 40 XP. I am undecided how I feel about this change. It is convenient knowing exactly what is required to level up, and many (not all) RPG’s, including MMORPG’s, have a leveling curve where it requires exponentially more XP to gain each new level, but kills also reward more XP so it works out that the curve is barely noticeable in practice.

Some story elements were questionable. One that stands out is during the mission to recruit Mordin, you encounter people looting the dead bodies. This apparently offends Shepard, for there is a dialogue scene to dissuade them (or probably threaten them if you’re playing renegade) from looting the corpses and offices. Meanwhile what is Shepard doing the entire game? Looting corpses and offices. The few areas of “exploration” in ME2 is solely for the purpose of looting. Practice what you preach, Shepard.

I was not a fan of ME2′s particular method of content gating. Similar to ME, each NPC crew member has a particular area of the Normandy they can be found. It’s the same in ME2 but now the door to the NPC’s area is locked until you recruit them. Uh, sorry, but Shepard is the commanding officer and there is no reason he would be locked out of part of his ship. Maybe it’s just close to home since I’m a captain at work and there is no part of the jet I’m “locked out” of for any reason. Regardless, next time I’d prefer a more logical and story-based means of content gating.

The audio mixing was poor during dialogue scenes. BioWare is hardly the only game developer guilty of this, but it just amazes me that audio engineering and production has been around for how long now? And games still don’t lower the volume of the background music and ambient sounds during dialogue so that we can, you know, hear what is being said? Bargain basement radio shows know how to do this; there is no excuse for development studios with multi-million dollar budgets to be this clueless.

Finally, I did encounter two glitches during the game that required re-loading. At the Normandy crash site, I walked too close to a cliff while exploring and triggered a z-axis glitch which elevated Shepard a few pixels in the air. Suddenly he could walk on air out over the cliff but couldn’t get back down onto the actual terrain. Also on Tuchanka during Grunt’s loyalty quest, at one point we’re fighting waves of klixen and one large flying klixen. Once we’d killed all the smaller klixen, the big flying one disappeared. My AI squadmates continued shooting into the air where the klixen was supposed to be, but it never reappeared so we could kill it and continue the mission.

I’ve read a few reviews that complained about the mission structure, saying they were all similar. Um, duh? Every mission will have some exploration, some dialogue, some story, and some combat. It was the same in ME, and it’s the same in every single RPG I’ve ever heard of. I’m a little confused why ME2 is being singled out for the same act all RPG’s (or any game with a story) are guilty of? The one thing during missions that became somewhat predictable was that if you ran into an area and suddenly notice low walls or other short barriers, you know you’re about to enter combat because those low barriers are to take cover behind or jump over. If you’re paying attention to that, you have a heads-up that combat is coming but there are also other clues. But the actual maps for each mission is unique each time, unlike ME with its horrid planet design and only a handful of building layouts which were repeated ad nauseum.

I will agree, to an extent, with the complaints over the length of the actual story arc itself compared to the number of recruitment missions. ME2 is a much more focused and tighter experience, and while the actual story arc defeating the Collectors is condensed to a few missions, what the game did from an overall perspective was to drastically improve the lore to Mass Effect in an immersive and visual manner. In ME we learned about the Quarion flotilla in dialogue and from reading the Codex (You did read the Codex right? No? Me either.) but in ME2 we actually get to see that migrant fleet and board two of its ships. So much of what we only heard of in the first game we actually experience, to varied degrees, in the second. ME2 spends a lot of time letting us expand our experience and knowledge within the Mass Effect universe. Instead of just reading the Codex for lore (and there’s plenty of that, too, unfortunately) ME2 also gives us the chance to live out little bits of it. Mass Effect 2 had record-setting sales of over two million units its first week, and the most January sales to date, no small feat considering ME2 launched on January 26th. Mass Effect is becoming a big-name IP, right up there with the Star Trek’s and Star Wars of yesteryear, and you can officially count me among those who firmly believe without a doubt that BioWare fully intends on expanding the Mass Effect IP into the massively multiplayer realm within the next decade. ME2 serves to further that goal by showing us more of that universe and letting us play in it, in addition to merely reading about it, which not only improves the “immersion” of ME2 but also draws us into the concept of the IP as a whole so we yearn for more. The lore already has everything we’d possibly need for an awesome space adventure MMORPG: multiple races, multiple opposing factions to support PvP, governing bodies, galactic threats, law enforcement, criminals, mercenary groups, etc. The potential is there for either the greatest sandbox-with-a-story MMO or the greatest sci-fi themepark MMO. I’m hoping for the former, myself…

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 14th, 2010 at 8:59 pm and is filed under Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.