My Mass Effect 2 Complaints and Observations

Let me preface this by saying the obvious: I love Mass Effect. I love the franchise, I love the universe, and I can't wait until they MMO the shit out of it. I played (and still play) Mass Effect 2 feverishly. As of right now I have one character of every class, spanning just about every romantic decision you can make (including being faithful to your love interests in the first game). With this IP, I'm probably the kind of gamer you think of when the word "tragicomic" comes to mind. You know this, I know this, and I don't get this way with most games. However, I was sold on this franchise before the first game even came out. I preordered all the books the day they were announced, AND the games. If memory serves, I actually preordered Mass Effect, then went out and bought a physical copy because my (collector edition, of course :3) version was late in the mail and didn't show up on release day. I loved Mass Effect and I love Mass Effect 2.

And that's why, with all the affection in my heart, I have to rape it with a blowtorch.

There's a lot about Mass Effect 2 that fucking SUCKS. Just plain irritating, counter-intuitive, unnecessary, and aggravating. So many things. And a lot of this for me stems from one theory: that Bioware decided that EVERYTHING needed to be changed. I'm not kidding, as you'll see below. This resulted in a lot of positive changes that I won't really cover (or may in another article, but don't count on it) and a lot of negative ones as detailed below. And what makes them even more irritating is that in many cases, they did it right the first time. Follow me as I try to cover each aspect of the game so that I can get every observation that I've made over the past couple months. Some will be ideas for how I think it could be better, some will be things that I think just shouldn't have been altered. Some will be discrepancies that I noticed. To be clear, I don't know that my suggestions would make for a better game.

I just think they would, fervently.


The Normandy


The Galaxy Map

Let's start small at the galaxy map, so I can show you exactly what I mean when I say everything is different. In Mass Effect, the Galaxy Map is how you fly your starship, the Normandy. It has three map views: The entire Milky Way, the nebulae and clusters, and individual systems. If you want to go to Earth, for example, you go to the Local cluster, then to the Sol system, and you navigate the planets within. Nondynamic? Sure. Easy? Absolutely. So how is it different in Mass Effect 2?

- Let's get to what for me is the microcosm for what is wrong with this game: they switched to buttons for zooming out and exiting the map altogether. In ME, you press X to zoom out of systems, to clusters, and then to the whole Milky Way. You press B to step away from the Galaxy Map and continue moving about the ship. In Mass Effect 2, these buttons are reversed.

Whyyyyy?

I have lost count of how times that I've exited the map by accident because of this completely unnecessary switch. Minor? Absolutely. Annoying? Yes.

- You now have to manually navigate your ship to Mass Relays to leave a system. Is this to make the game more engaging, and less automatic? Maybe, but I'll shoot that down in a big way later, so remember this.

- Traveling between nebulae now expends fuel, which is something your less sophisticated ship in the first game didn't even have. You burn about half your tank of gas going to a new cluster and back. What happens if you don't have enough fuel to fly back to a fuel depot? Your upgrade resources get used instead. You use these resources to improve your character's damage with weapons and biotics, your health, the effectiveness of your party, and so on. By having this system, you effectively discourage exploration. I don't want to wander, because the cost for doing so is too high. I have to CONSTANTLY fly back and forth between the intergalactic gas station and the areas that I have yet to explore. As a result of this, I have NEVER done more than one side mission (technically a set of 3 [which you have to find with planet scanning, more on that fucking idiocy later]), and I've beaten this game over 10 times.

- I've noticed there's now a percentage in the upper corner for each system. This percentage reaches 100% when you've examined every planet in a system. Why do they do this? If you ask me, it's to let you know that you have no reason to return here once you've been by once. It's a helpful reminder so that you don't waste fuel.

- The new minigame for character advancement involves mining planets now. This means you fly to a planet, select it, select "Scan", and then move a circular cursor very slowly for resources, until you get a strong reading on your scanner. Then you shoot one of 30 probes (you get 60 later, but this is not the point) into the surface when you get a strong reading.



This is the most boring thing I've ever done in this entire series, maybe in all of gaming.
Instead of dealing with this Collector threat, I'm a fucking miner. I understand working for advancement is a cornerstone of any RPG. But here's what else I know: fun and enjoyment are supposed to be the cornerstones of every game. Not to mention that it doesn't even make any sense that we're wasting the heroes' time with this. Cerberus is a giant, ultrarich organization. How about you just give me the resources I need? You gave me a ship, and a crew, and armor, and guns. Fuck that, you gave me my entire life back. How about you give me resources too, so I can focus on saving the galaxy, and not strip mining some shithole in the middle of nowhere?

-This is minor, but the tags on the Milky Way screen that tell you points of interest (i.e. Recruit The Convict, Help Jacob) are so big that they often cover other systems. Easy design flaw to correct and it shouldn't even exist.


Moving About The Ship


In Mass Effect, the Normandy was a good sized, multi-level walking area. The upper half of the ship and only two members of the crew were on the upper level, and the rest were in the cargo bay, only accessible by the slowest elevator ever conceived by man. This was easily, without a doubt, the most irritating problem of the first game. EVERYONE complained about it. In order to develop a relationship with that portion of the crew (including one love interest, Ashley Williams), you had to take this stupid fucking elevator up and down on a regular basis. So how's it different in Mass Effect 2?

- Knowing that the infamous Normandy elevator was a major sticking point for everyone who played, Bioware graciously decided to make the new Normandy a 4-level starship, each only accessible by, you guessed it, a fucking ELEVATOR. Now, granted, this elevator is faster. But it's not fast. And the characters are now splayed out over 3 levels instead of 2. AND with the exception of two (2) characters, none of them are on the same level as the Galaxy Map.

- They've also spaced out the characters to be as annoying to reach as possible. Whereas before, they were all basically standing in one room together, now you have Garrus at the end of a long hall, Jack down a double flight of stairs, Legion behind two sets of doors. I understand that we want more personality for these characters, but the accessibility cost is really irritating. Especially since a good Shepard is expected to speak with all of his new friends on a regular basis.

- Half the doors on the new Normandy open automatically. Half of them don't. Why? Well, I'll be fair on this one, Mass Effect had the exact same peculiarity.

- My next complaint is one of immersion, and this will come up again. In Mass Effect, you entered and exited your ship through the airlock near the cockpit, every time you landed. You'd go through a waiting process, the ship VI would inform you that XO Pressly has the deck in your absence, or that he stands relieved upon re-entry. Was this a conceit to help load times? Most likely. But it also made the universe a little more real. This felt like it was legitimately my ship. I flew it here, I landed it here, I left it here, I came back to it here. In ME2, you never pass through the airlock once in the game. You just get an airlock load screen. You never actually pass any kind of visible threshold to and from the ship. No VI, no decontamination, no nothing. You don't even approach the nose of the ship once, save for in the beginning to talk to Joker right after you receive the ship. You leave through the Galaxy Map, and you return to the Galaxy Map. And the load time is about the same. So why the change? Because in this case, the only effect it has had is that it has broken immersion. The Normandy no longer feels like a ship that I'm flying around the galaxy. It feels more like a central location, that I teleport to new places from and back.

- In the cutscenes in which the new and supposedly improved Normandy appears, the ship seems to lack all the agility that the first one had. The Normandy I remember was quick and quiet, the crew knew me, and it did an awesomely unnecessary flip maneuver to take down Sovereign.


In your FACE Sovereign, in your DEAD FACE

Compare that to this Normandy, which moves like an ill-maintained carnival ride, just sort of arching up and down and around. It couldn't look more boring in motion. I understand it's a larger ship now. I also understand that it's not entertaining to watch.


Yawn.

- The Kodiak drop shuttle might be the best idea on paper that turned out the worst result. Everyone who played Mass Effect remembers the horrid handling of the Mako tank. I fucking despised that thing. So let's scrap that piece of shit, right? Well, the result is you have a shuttle that takes you right to where you need to be, again totally breaking immersion. You could make an argument for dropping the Mako closer to your intended goal, but regardless, you are dropped on the surface of a planet and you pick a direction and move. In ME2, you're just immediately on the ground, hundreds of feet away (if that) from your goal, which is dull. Space games are supposed to feel huge. ME2's problem is it shows pictures of hugeness but no actual size. Sure, the Galaxy Map is enormous, but if I can't land on any planets, and the planets I do land on, I land right at my tiny destination, where is the epic scale here? I'm not saying Mass Effect's iteration was perfect. But I saw more of Noveria than I did the Citadel, Omega, and Illium combined, and that's a major problem. Here's a novel idea: how about fix the tank instead?



Oh...you did that. Well, perfect, we'll just use this and it will be awesome. Wait, what do you mean you can only use it for 5 specially designed maps? I'm now officially confused. So you took the Mako, made it bad ass, and then took it away from us? Who made this decision?


Commander Shepard

Morality System

You're going to have to indulge me here, because this *might* be my biggest heartbreak/disappointment of the entire game. If I already made that statement above to emphasize a point, I was wrong, because this is the single worst/most unnecessary alteration by a long, long shot.

In Mass Effect, your moral choices affected your Paragon/Renegade score, but aside from obtaining a mission at a certain percentage, that in and of itself didn't mean much. Basically, you were free to be the nuanced Shepard of your choice. Say you're a generally a nice guy but want to make a tough/heartless choice because you agree with it the most. You could, with no penalty besides the consequences of your choice itself. For example, even the most liberal Shepard may not want to give the Rachni a second chance. Alternatively, even the most hardened Shepard might feel that exterminating a race that could prove to be a useful ally against the Reapers to be foolish. You could commit both of these actions based on how YOU felt about the situation. If you wanted to persuade someone or intimidate someone, those were both skills you invested in separately, which paid off big time later if you maxed either of them out. Why did they do it this way? Because being a good man and being a persuasive man are not the same thing.

Not so in Mass Effect 2. Now, all of your choices swing the pendulum towards good or evil. And since they revamped the skill point system to not include persuade/intimidate, instead those skills are meshed into the morality system. Which translates into one of three options: you can either be an overly naive peace lover, an unrepentant and completely over the top asshole, or you can lose party members in the end of the game because your morality points aren't high enough to maintain loyalty. At many points in the game, I refused to take on loyalty missions or progress further because my paragon score wasn't high enough. Why? I'll give you an example.


Listen, you're both hot, but of course I'm gonna back the one that got her throat cut and survived.

The first time Jack and Miranda fought, I didn't have enough good points to persuade them to both back down like you see in this video. The option was blacked out. So I lost Miranda's loyalty by siding with Jack. Over the course of the game, I never earned a sufficient amount of points to win her loyalty back, so in the finale she died. And in the case of Legion and Tali, the system for me has glitched (I am not exaggerating) 60% of the time. What does this mean? It means that even though my paragon score is as high as it can possibly go, my option to persuade them is still blacked out, for no reason. And even if it weren't, I have no way of knowing as a player how much gas I need in the 'justice tank' to convince people.



Do I need 75% full? Do I need 94%? When trying to talk to Quarian Council out of exiling Tali, how many points do I need exactly to make my impassioned plea? See, in addition to hammering you down into being just one type of person, all the time, it's also an imprecise system. So I have to worry prior to every major persuade-related choice, whether I'm going to have enough lovesauce or murdersauce in me to make it work. The Mass Effect Wiki even has a guide for this, because it's so crucial to how the game plays out. This is stressful, unnecessary, and worst of all, it hinders me from making the choices I want to make. I love Mordin Solus, and I completely agree that the genophage was the right choice. But if I want to keep my friends from dying, I have no choice but to lecture him on what a huge mistake it was to be a part of the project and how much of a monster he is. I can't tell him what I believe as a person because it's counter to the game mechanics. I much prefer Samara to Morinth. Yet as an evil character, I have to worry whether choosing her over her evil daughter is going to prevent me from convincing Tali not to kill Legion later on, losing one of their loyalties in the process. Which means I'm no longer playing a Shepard that I can identify with. That is the sin of this game in my eyes.


Movement

Mass Effect has always had F.E.A.R. flashlight logic when it comes to moving and running in particular [for the uninitiated, the flashlight dies after about ten seconds of use and has to be recharged. The fucking special forces flashlight]. In the first game, your character could run for about four seconds at very fast speed before tiring out whilst in combat. Does this make sense? Uhh, no. No, it does not. Here we have a man in the prime of physical condition in the space future and he has about 15 steps worth of oomph in him before he has to take a rest break. How strong are future cigarettes? In addition, I personally felt the aiming controls were a little stiff and sluggish. Also, lots of clipping glitches. In ME2, these latter two are almost totally corrected. But what else did they do new?


The scariest part of this clip is the future energy implications.

- Shepard now runs twice as far, but half as fast. Uh...okay? That's a step in the right direction, but I'd still like to run more than 30 feet. How's this for an idea: let me run for as long as I want to out of combat, at the very least. If I'm getting around my ship, does it really hurt to just let me run constantly? He doesn't even run that fast. Let alone at larger locales like the Citadel.

- The sniper aiming controls are now officially enraging. Why? Because the reticule snaps to a target automatically. Sounds handy, right? Wrong. It doesn't always snap to the target that you are already essentially aiming the gun at. Quite often, it will snap left or right, which in addition to totally fucking up your shot, leaves you sticking out of cover while you try to correct or improvise. On Insanity, this is a major pain in the ass.

- Stop. Cuing. My party. In front of me. When I'm firing. A fucking NUKE. I've died around five times because Garrus ran in front of me while I was aiming the thing. Your teammate NPCs do not respect fields of fire like they do in any decent FPS. Which is understandable, because Bioware makes RPGs, but these kind of design flaws undermine every aspect of the shooter portion of this game. Aiming controls are tighter but are nowhere near comparable to a shooter like Call of Duty.

- Let me fucking CROUCH! You did in the first game. Why take it away now, when cover is more important and (over)emphasized than ever? Maybe I don't want to back up against cover, I just want to duck to minimize a forward threat while handling one who is attempting to flank me.

- Let Shepard take cover while switching weapons. Seriously, the biggest badass of the galaxy can't walk and chew gum? What ends up happening is I'm standing in front of cover but not actually covered by it while I do the prolonged weapon swap and hammering the A button. I can't bend my knees during this exchange?


Ash could.

- Let me take cover against everything, not just pieces that are "designed to be cover." I'm talking high walls, the arches underneath walkways, things like that. There's an outpost early on in Grunt's recruitment mission, the first group you fight. You turn the corner and they are straight ahead in an elevated position. Why can't I lean against the wall of the turn? Even if I'm not using it for shooting, I can at least use it to get a view of my opponents.

- Speaking of non-functioning cover, I notice often times that I snap to cover that I don't want to, and also that I don't snap to cover that I do want to. Fix that.

- Stunlock knockback: the effect that occurs when I'm ducking in cover and I'm magically knocked backwards out of it and standing up again. Remove that completely.

- Stop making my aim worse arbitrarily through lack of cover. If I'm standing still and aiming my rifle, why is my accuracy better if I happen to be 'leaning out of cover', which is the exact same physical stance except boxes are in front of me? I get that you want me to use cover, but don't punish me for doing what any soldier should be able to. Sometimes amazingly there isn't actually any cover to utilize, so why is my aim worse even though all other conditions are the same? This mostly affects the Revenant LMG, which needs all the accuracy it can get.


Weapons and Powers


In Mass Effect, all party members carried all weapons, whether they were proficient with it or not. This made for kind of a cluttered look, which was removed in ME2. Weapons did not go by ammunition but rather by heat build-up, as the actual ammunition the guns are firing is very small as compared to current ammunition (bullets are described in the book as closer to super high velocity grains of sand). The effect of this system is that guns never need to be reloaded and can fire hundreds of rounds under the right circumstances, all you have to do is wait for the heat bar to go down if it was close to maxing out. Also, every character had a clear class and specific strength types. Adepts were all biotic strength, soldiers all combat strength, engineers all tech strength, and of course the hybrid classes mixing two of each. This helped to know at a glance what kind of threat your selected party would be weakest or strongest against, and allowed you to alter accordingly. In this case, I won't complain about the removal of that in ME2 because it actually forces you to be a smarter player and to think about your teammates on a deeper level, which I think is a good thing. So what else is so different about ME2?

- Weapons have now been retconned into having ammunition by way of insertable heat sinks, and this is my second biggest complaint of the entire game, for two primary reasons that end up going hand-in-hand in many circumstances:

First, weapons carry an extremely small amount of 'ammo', and as a result you need to scour the battlefield for ammo constantly. The shotguns carry around 15 shots or less, total. The standard pistol carries 72, but that's not near enough, and the Magnum pistol carries a whopping 18 rounds total. For comparison, look at the most recent COD, where your company outfitted you with over 600 rounds of ammunition in your primary weapon alone. If these are just little heat cards, why can't Shepard carry a ton of them? Soldiers on the battlefield are not supposed to rely on enemy munitions or weapons specifically because the quality of such is a total unknown. So why is it different in the future? Note that I don't actually care that you pick up the majority of your upgrade weapons basically off the ground in random areas. Even though that's kind of dumb.

Second, hardly anyone carries any heat sinks on them. Why, if EVERYONE I fight is shooting at me, do my enemies not carry a shitload of ammo themselves? If they have enough ammo to shoot at me until I kill them, which could take minutes if I play hard to get, why then when I kill them do they only have 1 clip on them, if they have any at all? For a sniper rifle, that's 1-2 shots. Did I kill them just before they ran out of bullets, every time?

These two traits make for a consistently frustrating combat experience.

- Additionally, this wrecks another new aspect of the game: unique weapons. See, in the first Mass Effect, you found 800,000 guns that were only slightly different in appearance and damage. New to ME2 are unique subweapon types. For example, the standard assault rifle shoots like the old assault rifle more or less, but they also have a three shot, more powerful and more accurate variant that requires more skill to wield properly. This would be great, except that this gun has 120 shots total. Which means I kill maybe 9 or 10 people before I'm in trouble, assuming that they are only moderately armored/shielded. Result: unusable weapon. Could I stick with it and do well? Yes, but it's simply not worth the frustration. Same story with the Magnum pistol, 18 shots total. And this is the case with EVERY shotgun. They all carry almost no ammunition. The shotgun is already a niche weapon in that it has no range, is slow, and can only be used in certain situations effectively. Ignoring that I'd have to switch to it beforehand, the fact that it carries almost no ammo is really inexcusable. Low ammo on a heavy weapon, I totally understand. So how about you make those guns the only ones who need 'heat sink' ammunition?

- Powers are now on a universal cooldown, rather than individual cooldowns as in the first game. What does this mean? This means if I put on Tech Armor, I have to wait 12 fucking seconds before I can use any other powers. This is an eternity when you get flanked or are out of cover. Or a YMIR mech is breathing down your neck. Or you have too many enemies focused on you and you need to lighten up the pressure.

- Biotic powers are now thrown like Krillen's destructo disk. In the first game, if I used Throw, the enemy would just fly across the room like I had Jedi powers. Now I have to angle a frisbee around cover to hit him? It looks great in concept, but in execution, I'm now missing enemies with powers that I should be hitting, no problem, every time. Add the cooldown and this gets old, really fast. Apparently Bioware knows this system kind of sucks, because everyone else in your party still works by the old system. I used to be very good at knocking people off platforms when given the opportunity. 90% of that opportunity is now removed.

- Speaking of biotics, don't even bother trying to beat the game on Insanity now if you're an Adept or another biotic-reliant class. The new revamp of the old shield system works out something like this: in addition to having an extra health bar of shields (or armor, or barrier), opponents are now invulnerable to all biotics as long as that shield/barrier/armor is active. Used to be that Adepts were expert crowd controllers, which was a MUST in beating Mass Effect on Insanity. Now, you are basically worthless on the battlefield. You have the two weakest guns, the vast majority of your powers are totally ineffectual on every enemy, and you have the lowest armor and health of any class. Explain to me how this is supposed to be fun, because I'm having a hard time seeing it.

- Why is the radar now gone, unless the powers or weapon swap screen is up? That's not very tactical. Why make it more of a pain in the ass to see? If you don't want us to have it, just take it away like everything else that didn't make it to the sequel.

- In the original, Unity was a Spectre power used to revive party members, and medigel was used to heal you and your teammates quickly in a pinch. Now, Unity uses medigel to revive allies and you have no means of healing yourself in a pinch, except to hide behind cover and magically wish the bulletholes away. Why? And why is mutant regeneration such a staple in shooters now? Can we change it back to how it was?


Level & Character Design


Planets and Locations


In Mass Effect, most extraneous missions went a little something like this: you drop out of the Normandy in the Mako on some backwater planet, and then start exploring, looking for the entrance to whatever building/complex/bunker you were attacking. The landscapes were all identical save for a color palette swap, and there were maybe 5 different types of building altogether. The Mako's handling was shit, and most people agree this is probably the weakest part of the game. Unfortunately, instead of improving the execution, Bioware again went for the axe. But that seems like a good thing, so how is it a problem?

- Everything feels over-designed and false. While the scenery is now quite often amazing, it's also completely inaccessible and closed in. Every level feels like that - a level. Not a living, breathing world, but a funnel with one entrance and one exit. Take Zaeed's loyalty mission on Zorya. Beautiful lush foliage, semi-mountainous terrain...and it's forward forward forward. It's a beautiful train ride, essentially. Same goes with Jacob's loyalty mission on Aeia. In fact, just about every mission in the game is like this.

- Speaking of over-designed, the cover is so obvious, it breaks realism. Jack's prison level is a perfect example of this:


Wow, this prison sure has a lot of dangerous shit in it.

Supposedly, you work your way through the prison 'yard' area on your way out of the complex. So why are there stacked metal crates and blast barriers sitting around everywhere? Nevermind that, why are there explosive canisters scattered at regular intervals, or enormous fuel tanks side-by-side around all over the place? And why later on does flip up cover pop up? What kind of fucking prison is this? You see, all of these little things take you right out of the game, because no one could believe any prisoners actually coexist here regularly. Same with the factory on Zorya. I've never seen a factory that doesn't seem to have any actual place to work.


This cliche's valve is not going to turn itself!

This is the whole level. It goes from conveniently-shaped jungle to just more boxes and rails and cover. I remember the last chamber prior to beating the mission, I couldn't see any purpose to actually being in the room normally. What do people make here? Everything just feels too perfectly arranged for a gun fight, all of the time.

- Major cities are miniscule. Here's ANOTHER thing that breaks believability: showing me a bunch of places I can't go. I've complained about this before and it's still annoying to me. On Illium, you can see a ton of lower walkways with people, just out of reach. In the Citadel, there are catwalks overhead, with no visible means of accessing them. On Omega, in the vast distance you can see huge buildings, all sadly out of reach. I understand this isn't an MMO and that you can't make an area too big, or it will confuse people. But I'm gonna go into the wayback machine and reference one of my favorite aspects of my favorite RPG, Summoner. Wasn't great, had a lot of flaws, but one thing it did right was cities. Lenele was a living, breathing city. Was it overwhelming? Yes - at first. But Lenele was a place I actually felt was legitimately a place. Anywhere you could see, you could reach, the city had large districts with people constantly going about their business. Iona Monastery felt like a legitimate religious/magic community. Wolong felt like a real town. All of these places were large and spacious, but real and rewarding to explore. In Mass Effect 2, you get the vast majority of side missions by flying into random systems and scanning planets for signals. Not only is that basically the definition of anti-social, it's actively discouraged by the fuel system. How about you make the Citadel bigger, and force me to interact with the people who actually work there? Take for example when Captain Bailey complains about Joram Talid, the anti-human political candidate, saying, "You might not care, but the people who live here do."


"Kiss my ass."
"I'm a Spectre."
"I have a family!"



There's a disconnect, because the Citadel doesn't feel like a lived-in community. The first time I heard that line, I thought, "What people?" When you shortchange something as important as an intergalactic hub of commerce and culture, you're really robbing the player of a legitimate connection to the fictional world.

- This is perhaps most noticeable in the Migrant Fleet, which should be its own major city but is relegated to a five minute mini-tour. The Quarian culture is so well realized in the novels that to see it given the blink of an eye treatment is really a shame. Not to mention their stuff hardly looks different from any other locale in the game, save for some foggy windows and a spray painted tag that repeats on a few walls. With such a unique personal look, you'd really think their entire world would be comparably interesting.


Character & Clothing/Armor Design


In Mass Effect, characters all wore whatever you had them equipped to wear. In this way, they were somewhat lacking in personality, especially if you had three people wearing identical armor. Additionally, it seemed like they were still trying to figure out how to do hair. Kaiden Alenko has a weird sort of mullet thing going on, and Ashley William's hair was...odd (I thought, anyway).



How did they change this for Mass Effect 2? Well, with the exception of Miranda, who is modeled entirely after Yvonne Strahovski, all of the romance interests are basically bald. Hey, works for me. Also, they decided to remove armor from companions, which is an awesome deviation from the original if you ask me. It keeps the characters as just that: characters. Not just another person in space armor, but a person with all of the personality that their wardrobe implies. This section is going to be short because artistically, Mass Effect 2 does so much right. The Illusive Man in his room in HD alone would almost be worth sitting through a total dud of a game, which despite the length of this article, ME2 most assuredly is not.



- I want to see the female variants of species. Turians, krogan, volus, elcor, etc. And don't tell me that maybe we already have, because that's a dumb cop out and you know it. You brought in quarian males, and that was a good move. More, please.

- More variety in the quarian looks. You have a culture that has to express itself without using facial expressions. I'm going to pretend like clear face masks are impractical, because I understand the design choice adds mystique, and I get that. But how about more variation in suits? It looks like you have one pattern for male and one for female, and it's a color palette swap for everyone else. Tali's change from ME to ME2 is fucking great. So keep going.

- Someone needs to tell the character design department that you have enough three-fingered species already. Don't know what I mean? Well, let's cover it: Turians, krogan, quarians, volus (technically), salarians, and even the geth are ALL three-fingered species. That's almost every fictional race in the game.

-
No.

- In Mass Effect, Shiala was purple, not blue.



- Please, please get more customization options for Shepard, physically as well as armor. There are more eye color types than hair styles or colors. Some NPCs have hair that you can't use, inexplicably, like the lovely Jentha:



You can't have that hair. Why?

- Samara's breasts hang a bit low:



This may be a visual trick because of her neckpiece and her open top. Or they could just be, you know, low. This is an observation, not a complaint, because to be honest, I dig it in a way I won't bother to try and understand. Or explain.

- Why, why, WHY did you decide to tame the romance scenes in this game? Is this in response to Kevin McCullough's idiotic criticism? Because believe it or not, that probably helped your sales. And besides, you shouldn't legitimize that fucktard or the minuscule amount of people who actually listen to him. He's a fucking blogger for Chrissakes. They're the scum of the earth as far as society goes, if you couldn't tell by now. As for sexuality, you obviously have no problem sexualizing your characters:

You have Miranda, the femme fatale/dominatrix, with leather and high heels. She's got the Aussie accent to make it a little more exotic.


You have Jack, who is practically an alt-porn icon, what with the tattoos, basically a cord wrapped around her breasts, and a shaved head. And such a dirty mouth (and I mean that in the best possible way).


Then there's Samara who is about as dominatrix as you can get, with again, what amounts to a leather catsuit, open in the front, and heels, which she steps on people with. I mean, the fight between her and her more or less identical daughter is basically a porn premise in and of itself.


Just to switch it up a bit, you've got Tali, who's wearing a full form-fitting bodysuit (I'm starting to notice a trend) and kinda has the gasmask fetish thing going on in a way. She's also got this somewhat Middle Eastern accent going for her.


And no porn fantasy would be complete without the cute, innocent girl next door, Kelly. She's got kind of a tomboyish look going on too.


My point is not that there's anything wrong with these characters. If you ask me, everything about these characters is right as far as I'm concerned. Except for the part where the romance encounter is totally lame. Jack has freak written all over her. So imagine my surprise when not a stitch of clothing is removed. I know it's hard to defend this point without looking kind of perverted. So be it. I was disappointed by this. I'm an adult, I can handle adult things, more so I desire adult things, which occasionally are sexual. You did it tastefully in the first game, what went wrong this time? You were afraid some lunatic douche writer would call this another rape simulator and get another million copies sold? Don't fuck this up in 3, please. I want to see what kind of tattoos Jack has on her legs.

- Show us Tali's fucking face, you goddamn cockteases. I'm serious.

FUCK YOU


Dialogue

- Ashley Williams is established as one of a minority of Christians in the series. And yet, in Mass Effect 2 she describes Shepard as "a god."



This is something that she specifically would never believably say.

- On Illium, you find a shipping manifest that shows that Pitne For authorized the shipment of 600 units of red sand, which proves he's a criminal. However, on Illium, red sand is legal. Just ask the bartender:


A better place to start your red sand investigation would be your foot. OH!


So at the most, he's going to what, be fined for not having a license? And they call Minagen X3 illegal weapons tech, yet it's mentioned that Minagen X3 kills you if you use it too much, meaning that it's basically worthless. Yes worthless, because if it had a legitimate use in any capacity, Eclipse wouldn't be gunning for Pitne. It certainly doesn't do anything meaningful for you when you're accidentally using it. So I'm not sure exactly what he did wrong besides engender bad feelings with the Eclipse mercenary band.

I'm starting to run out of steam, because I've gotten my biggest beefs out on the table so I'm going to leave with a final thought. The dialogue in Mass Effect I would say was pretty good. Not spectacular, certainly there were a couple of lines that made me sigh (Matriarch Benezia had a couple of duds.) Granted, Shepard had some great comebacks for said duds usually ("You won't look so smug with a hole in your head.") This time around, Shepard's still got some great dialogue.


In your FACE, cunt

And they certainly decided to pull out all the stops as far as voice actors go, from Martin Sheen to Michael Hogan, it's a sci-fi masturbation fantasy. And all of the big names turn in great performances. The Illusive Man is probably my favorite character in the series, and that is due in equal parts to great dialogue and great acting. He actually talked me into not blowing up the Collector Base, a majorly evil choice, on my first playthrough, which was paragon.


They were gonna make me a Major for this, and I wasn't even in their fuckin' terrorist organization anymore.


If it's not the Illusive Man, then it's definitely Legion. What a great fucking character. Joker is a lot funnier this time around, it actually sounds like Seth Green is more comfortable in the role. Everyone famous is on the top of their game, and their dialogue more or less is set to match.

I have to tell you though, I'm not as big of fan as Jack as I want to be, and I blame that utterly on the script. Now I'm not the kind of person who dislikes a character for playing to an archetype, necessarily. Thane plays to an archetype. So does Zaeed. All of the characters do to a lesser or greater extent. Okay, so I've heard the all powerful, foul mouthed female with a shitty life experience before. I'm okay with that. What I don't like is that no one seems to know how to write her. Of all the characters, her clichés are without a doubt the most obvious and hard to get over. For every good line she has, she has three bad ones. Her whole arc, from beginning to end, is fraught full of ideas that I've seen done before and better. For example?


How about the character she seems to be based on, Jack from Pitch Black? Okay, so their story is not exactly the same, but it's very similar, and she never had any dialogue that made me roll my eyes as hard as

basically EVERYTHING SHE SAYS IN THIS ENTIRE LEVEL.

The only saving grace she really has is that Courtenay Taylor is a pretty good voice actress. To make a highly flattering comparison, her entire arc is similar to this one scene from Blood Diamond:


If you saw this movie, you probably forgot this line existed, and that's only because Leonardo DiCaprio delivered it. This is such a bad piece of dialogue that he can't even say it with a straight face. Watch again. He immediately bites his lip after saying it so that he doesn't laugh on camera.



Imagine if a bad B-movie actor delivered this very same line whilst trying to put on the accent. It would be un-fucking-bearable. And that's just 8 seconds. Jack is like taking that clip and making it 2 hours long. Except acted out by a character that I want to fuck badly.

Comments

Travis said…
This was an awesome update.

I have the hugest crush on Tali. I think as far as character designing goes she is a masterstroke because how on else on earth can I be so charmed by a character without the "barbie body", showing no skin, and no real face.
Bryan said…
Exactly. I have such a crush on Tali. One of my favorite romance interests in a game ever.
UCDBrizzle said…
i'm right there with you on a lot of this stuff. I;ve been bitching about Jack for ages...

I think the way to play this game was to load a finished game from Mass effect so you get the bonuses to paragon and renegade as well.

I also didn't like how the closed off the citadel and restricted you to like 4 levels of the MASSIVE ship.
Anonymous said…
You play too many video games.
Bryan said…
I really look at judging games on par with reviewing movies at this point. The greatest games are almost on par with the best films and television shows. Not quite there I don't think but so goddamn close, and Bioware is one of the companies pushing to close the gap with their writing.

Wong, I agree on the para/rene, but that still doesn't forgive the system. And you lose that bonus if you do an additional playthrough on your imported character.
matt said…
the galaxy map didn't bug me, i feel like they got it wrong in the first game, and so did they apparently.and i really don't understand your beef with the fuel, they're trying to make it more realistic cause ships need fuel. i explored the entire galaxy and never had a problem with the fuel, not once. could have been done better, but i certainly wont consider it a negative point. The mining was pretty lame though, i think your a winy bitch about it, but it was pretty lame.

I thought the permanent costumes were a big downside, i hated that. The first game had it right, let the characters wear whatever they want inside the ship, but when they leave, they need a fucking space suit/battle armor. i was furious when i saw jack walking around space in a fucking air mask. that's sloppy bullshit. i like giving my party gear and actually seeing them wear it. they're soldiers! i don't want to see their personality in a fire fight! really though, Miranda would be dead, jack would be dead, Jacob would be dead, Mordin, Samara, thane, they'd all be dead cause not one of them would be able to take a bullet, let alone go out into space. so i 100% disagree on that one. the blow to realism far outweighed the little boost to personality it had.

at first i liked how biotics couldn't throw people with shields or armor, i thought it helped tone them down a little. its just disappointing to hear how much that sucks at higher difficulties. and i liked the biotic missile stuff, you could hit people that were hiding behind things. for me that was more of an even trade, it was different, but not worse or better.

i don't want to see talis face. no matter what face they give her i wont be satisfied. its like, if thy make her pretty, shes just another hot alien, and if the make her ugly, then shes ugly. i wish i could explain it better than that, cause that doesn't properly convey my point. but i really don't want to see her face.

otherwise i cant really disagree with the rest of your points, a lot of them are really good too.
UCDBrizzle said…
I liked ME's playability a lot more. That and the XP system which came from kills and not missions. I think overall they removed a lot of variety in character playability, after like maybe 5-6 play troughs the game has become some what stale for me and I leave it untouched like the ugly wife that use to be hot when you first married her.

You should try Dragon Age if you have the time, it has a great story and superb game play. Imagine DnD + Mass Effect (in medieval times)
Bryan said…
I like DA:O but it also has its problems. Granted, they are different, but that one has got some issues too.
UCDBrizzle said…
please do make a post =D
Travis said…
I guess I should briefly weigh in on a few things.

I really didn't have a huge problem with the fuel as well. It's really not that big of an issue, and you've made it a huge game breaker when it's absolutely not. I've never run out of fuel, even one single time. This isn't an important game detail, but I think it's interesting how it bothered you but never came up once for me. Every single person on earth can agree mining for fuel is probably the dumbest way to spend a players time in this kind of game. I mean, I DID it, I'm used to grinding for what I want in an RPG, but for god's sakes, how could they have green lighted the idea. Did they try for themselves at least to find out how boring it is?

I was particularly bothered by the end-mission reports. I'm shaking my head even now thinking about how I collect my fixed amount of experience points at the end of the levels. Ugh, "levels". Why were there levels in this game?

I really hate how everyone has the same bodies. Everyone shares the same models and that drives me really crazy. I understand it makes things easier during production but that is a real blow to immersion for someone like me. Take the old(ish) man from the Ashley Reunion video. He has the exact same body as Kaiden, Joker, and every other soldier. Look at his biceps, his height, his shoulders. His faggot Jupitor-soldier baseball cap. What is with the hats? Okay but anways, this guy has the same body as Joker, Joker can barely get out of his chair! Another big thing for me- the Asari are all very similar as well. I've seen the concept art for what Asari are really supposed to look like, the game models for one are not nearly as interesting looking. Their tentacles are supposed to be more sweeping and unique to their heads. They could have given them different bodies from human women at least. The aesthetics of this game for the most part make me so mad.

I don't mind so much the characters now have their own unique outfits. I do agree that they should be able to change out of them more. They all should have more combat appropriate attire to choose from. Especially in environments where they can't breath/the gravity is way different. They should all have their own functional and unique sets, or types, of armors they can utilize. Since they are different people and handle combat differently. In general I don't mid some characters wearing less armor because I like to believe they divert more fire away from there bodies using biotics.
matt said…
i felt the same way about the asari until i overheard a conversation in the game. three guys (human, turian and...the bug guys) were having a bachelor party and watching an asari stripper. if you listen long enough you hear them mention that the asari look like blue, tentacle headed versions of their females. that's why they look like human women to use. turians see blue tentacle headed turians and so on. im really curious to see how and if this is pursued.
Travis said…
That's why I feel they should look less like humans, but I see what you mean in saying that AS human players, they seem very similar to us. I was simply trying to say that they should use different character models than the ones they use for human characters. Like make them more lithe, or taller, or shorter, or just something feminine but not sort of more ASARI, and not a head swap from human models. I was really impressed with the art for the game before the first one came out. A lot was lost in translation minus the Turians maybe. Actually all the other aliens are pretty striking and cool looking. Asari are bleh when they should be totally beautiful.
Mike said…
I really liked this rant. Read the whole thing through. Addressed a lot of my gripes about the game and even introduced me to some new ones, but like you, I fucking love Mass Effect nonetheless. One thing though, I'm assuming your not a Liara fanboy like me, cause that was one of my biggest complaints about the game. They really fucked up her character, and importing a character where I romanced her in the first game, her whole segment of the game just felt wrong on so many levels. Like, oh hey, your back from the dead, that's nice. And Shepard's reactions to her? I'm pretty sure he was happier to see Garrus. Granted, LOTSB sorta fixed this problem for me, but again with the romance scene. It was EVEN WORSE than the ones in the game. She goes to your cabin, it blacks out, then she leaves...WTF?!?!?!?! Great job though, I enjoyed reading this.

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