Mass Effect 2 - It was good, but not that great

[Ghengis John]

To be fair, you didn't mention some of the unique games released on the PS3, such as Demon's Souls,

I ahve to suppose you're in Europe. He probably didn't mention them because for us, awesome though they may be Demon's Souls and Infamous came out in 2009 over here.

 

[Mikeyfell]

Snip

Exactly. A lot of people said 2010 was a great year for gaming, but I wasn't quite as enthused. Most games were just disappointing sequels. 2011 I think will be a much better year for both original IPs and sequels.

To be fair, you didn't mention some of the unique games released on the PS3, such as Demon's Souls, Heavy Rain, or inFamous. That said, I don't think any of those were particularly groundbreaking, either. Except for maybe Heavy Rain, and again, I think GOTY should be more interactive.

So while people give Mass Effect 2 flak for being unoriginal, most of 2010's other releases were even more cookie-cutter.

my problem is that I don't own a PS3
but I watched somebody play Demon's souls and thought it would be pretty fun
and I loved Indigo Prophecy a little more than is healthy so I almost bought a PS3 for Heavy Rain

 

[OniaPL]

There's no other game like it. In what other shooting game has the depth of story and number of choices, well acted characters, great visuals and length of gameplay?

Is the combat a little lacking sometimes? Sure but there's no competition to Mass Effect. No Sci-fi game does what it does, hell most fantasy RPGs don't cover some of the things it does.

Does it deserve the hype it gets? Yes I think so. I've yet to play a game like it that's come out in recent years.

I would say that Origins had more choices and it was a lot longer than ME 2. Visuals are completely subjective, and I liked RDR's more and I thought it's characters were better, too.

 

[seditary]

I'm confused, were you playing Mass Effect or Mass Effect 2? Mass Effect's missions weren't nearly as linear, but in Mass Effect 2 you DID have ammo limitations. Normal was a bit simple, but turning up the difficulty one notch seemed to even it out for me.

As far as I remember, only the special hevy weapons had ammo, other weapons just overheated

Nope, all weapons had ammo in Mass Effect 2. Mass Effect had the overheating. I think you need to replay it to get your games straight.

Ah, then excuse me. This is rather embarrassing. >.<

But still, I don't remember running out of ammo, so the spray and pray pretty much applies.

Depends on which class you played. Pistols almost never ran out of ammo, and assault rifles did only on occasion, but sniper rifles and shotguns ran out all the time for me.

And what difficulty, on insanity many fights had me use up all ammo on every weapon except one and required almost constant ability use to all those other people who decried them.

Fighting the Shadowbroker left me killing him with 3 rounds left in my last weapon and no barriers remaining, it was quite intense and a lot of fun.

PC btw, I don't know if there's difficulty and balance differences between 360 and PC, but I thought I should mention that.

 

[Sinclair Solutions]

It's just a matter of opinion really. I have the same exact views as you do. But you got to remember that there are different tastes in the world. You and I love RDR and think ME2 was just good, but some people here think RDR is the worst game they have ever played and that ME2 is a moving space opera. There is no way someone is just going to convince you it's a great game, or you convince them that RDR is better.

 

[Thunderhorse31]

I completed the game twice, once as a soldier, then as an adept. On hard and insanity. I also searched every corner and completed every single mission I could find and scanned all the planets, but I might have missed a couple of side quests.

Linearity wouldn't be that bad if it wasn't as linear as it can be. Corridoors with occasional rooms, just mow everything down and reach the next story point. While you can choose what missions to complete and when, it doesnt change the fact that they are completely linear.

At times I got immersed, but often I was brought down when Shepard didn't act the way I wanted him to with the dialogue options. And I felt that the enemy cariety was husks, enemy mercs, and krogans which use both melee and ranged. Every single enemy was one of these three, maybe just with a different look.

Kudos for trying to get as much out of the game as possible, it sucks that you didn't enjoy it that much but no one can fault you for not trying.

Still, I'm not quite sure what you were hoping for as far as mission variety is concerned. The variety mostly comes from your class and how you go about tackling the enemies, plus the little choices you make on the way from point A to point B. You can persuade a guy or throw him out a window, rescue captives or leave them to rot, help authorities or sabotage their efforts, etc. You can help your party members or override their wishes, hell, you can even leave one in a tank and sell another for credits. The game still has a story to tell and a direction you're supposed to move, so again I'm not sure what the alternative is supposed to be.

I can see how the enemies might blend together at times, but even husks had Abominations, mercs had engineers, vanguards, snipers, rocket troopers and commandos, and Krogans have battlemasters. Not to mention the droids, heavy mechs, varren, collector drones, assassins, scions, Praetorians, and Harbinger. All of these had a unique skill set and different ranges, and most battles mixed these up liberally (husks and scions, mechs and krogans, etc.). Again, to me it seemed like the variety was there, and I'm not sure what you would have liked instead.

And yeah, I understand how Shepard might not "feel" like he was acting the way your wanted. Some of the paragon choices seemed dickish, while some of the renegade choices seemed more diplomatic. I guess I just took it as Shepard is his/her own character, and not ME personally. I wouldn't be charging headfirst into a suicide mission, that's for sure.

 

[Mikeyfell]

snip.

Actually I bought Blade Kitten. Good game, and cheap. Sadly, the studio has shut down though so the second half will never arrive. But on Fallout New Vegas, I disagree. As somebody who played fallout one and two in the day and loved them both this felt like coming home again. Gone were the people mysteriously eating 200 year old food, the focus on violence over story and the roulette wheel speech skill. Even Shamus Young, editor who initially panned the game went on to say it's twice the game fallout 3 was. I could go on and on but sufficed to say we'll probably just have to agree to disagree.

And also Dead Rising 2 was totally robbed. I was pretty disappointed to see it didn't get a nod anywhere. Some editors were probably just bad at slicecycles.

what?!?!?!? the second half of Blade Kitten isn't coming out?
that fucking sucks

I never played Fallout 1 or 2 but I loved 3
it had an epic open world that let me play through 5 times with out hardly ever experiencing repeat content

now in New Vegas I have to do the first half of the missions in the same order every fucking time....
Fallout New Vegas felt like the bastard child of Fallout 3 and Final Fantasy 13
and it's buggy as hell and the difficulty is broken, that makes it feel like unfinished DLC for Fallout 3

 

[beniki]

Edit: @Beniki

I felt like a spectator throughout the game, as I couldnt see myself in Shepard. Often none of the dialogue options he had felt like something I would say.

Well okay, but I thought we were discussing combat mechanics

 

[Vicarious Vangaurd]

Mass Effect 2 could have been a truly great game, but they ripped out everything that was RPG about it (except the choice system). But what they ended up doing was making it a mediocre third person shooter that had a good story. A third person shooter that definitely did not deserve as many rewards as it received. Somehow it just held on for dear life to the coat tails of it's predecessor.

 

[Nieroshai]

I wouldn't call it game of the year either, but this might be on the level of Uncharted 2 winning Game of the Year when there were many better and more original games. This year was kind of bland for games, but I can't really name anything that I actually liked aside from Halo Reach and ME2. So if some other game wins than one of those, I'm going to headdesk. Hard.

 

[Jimbo1212]

It got so many awards because:
a) It was fairly good.
b) Nothing good came out that year, especially in terms of rpgs

I do agree that a game that is a sequel and set a new record for being incomplete with filler dlc should have never been given so many awards, but as games on a whole are becoming far worse, these awards had to go to someone.

 

[Caligulove]

To each his own, I guess.

Can't expect everyone to be as elated about a game as you are.

 

[Athinira]

The only RPG elements that Mass Effect 2 had was the dialog options. It was a good game, but slapping one or two RPG elements onto an action game doesn't make it an RPG.
(I'm not counting the story because a good story isn't an RPG element.)

Saying that Mass Effect 2 isn't an RPG because it made up with many of the boring/annoying RPG game TENDENCIES is like saying running isn't transportation because we have cars and airplanes.

Most people seem to define stat-tweaking as well as combat rolls (dices) as being a core part of RPG's just because thats how old-school RPG's were played. Short answer: No.

Hell the name itself, "Role Playing Game", doesn't in any way suggest that those can or should be a part of the game. If RPG's were about putting as many character customization options in the game as possible, then they would have named the genre "Character Customization Game".

As to the OP: I'd rather say that Dragon Age - Origins fits the description of a game that is good, but not great. The list of terrible gameplay mechanics/decisions in Dragon Age is damned long. Fortunatly the devs seem to have fixed about 25-30% of them in Dragon Age 2 from the looks of it, hopefully more.

 

[Ghengis John]

what?!?!?!? the second half of Blade Kitten isn't coming out?
that fucking sucks

http://www.industrygamers.com/news/krome-studios-closes-doors-on-monday/

I never played Fallout 1 or 2 but I loved 3
it had an epic open world that let me play through 5 times with out hardly ever experiencing repeat content

now in New Vegas I have to do the first half of the missions in the same order every fucking time....
Fallout New Vegas felt like the bastard child of Fallout 3 and Final Fantasy 13
and it's buggy as hell and the difficulty is broken, that makes it feel like unfinished DLC for Fallout 3

Most of the bugs are fixed as of patch 1.02 I can tell ya that much. Might be worth a spin if you haven't checked that out already. Difficulty is broken? My friend died three times before completing the first town. I had no problem even in hardcore mode. It's not for everybody I suppose.

Final Fantasy 13? No. I mean you couldn't have loved the 40 minute sewer crawl to GNR studios could you? That long corridor was more like final fantasy 13 than anything new vegas dished up.

As for never playing fallout one and two you probably know there's a divide between a lot of the fans of the old games and fallout 3. NMA is very obnoxious about it for instance. I for one thought this was a great compromise but different strokes for different folks. I know a lot of the old fallout fans were still unhappy but they're unrealistic idiots and some of the new ones of 3 were unhappy as well. When you change things you upset people. Can't be avoided.

 

[D_987]

To quote myself from another thread:

Oh, that wasn't my explanation as to why the game is bad, that was just as to why the game is dumbed down.

The game is bad because it has a terrible main plot line. [The story goes side-ways not forwards and if you choose certain choices you literally end the game having gained absolutely nothing from it. Furthermore there're a number of plot holes and really poor story-telling mechanics [the introduction of The Illusive Man, for example, but there're absolutely tons of issues with plot points in the game].

The combat is dull, uninspired and tries way to hard to be Gears of War, it also removes a lot of the tactics due to small corridors and dumbed down gameplay.

The choices within the game and the morality system have been touched upon - they're both poorly implemented and offer as much choice in all bar a few situations as any Fable game.

The character were bland and boring if you've played any previous Bioware game; they're using the same character archetypes over and over again...

Lack of grand scale; the universe feels like it's very small and filled with corridors in Mass Effect 2, not so in the first.

Ties to the first game were poor, in fact, the fact your choices had such little impact hurt the franchise, as there was always a great deal of curiosity regarding Mass Effect 2 as to how the experience would change. Now we know how little they actually matter my interest in the final game is low.

There's more, mostly to do with the horrendous main storyline and how it butchers established lore from the first game, but you get the idea - it was a bad game.

Hell the name itself, "Role Playing Game", doesn't in any way suggest that those can or should be a part of the game. If RPG's were about putting as many character customization options in the game as possible, then they would have named the genre "Character Customization Game".

Ok, its been said many, many times before so I'll make it brief. If you define an RPG literally by the term Role-playing game then absolutely every game every made is an RPG because of gaming's interactive form of entertainment. A genre has its staples, and that's show you fit games into a specific genre. RPG's have character customization options beyond the norm, and varying styles of play depending on your preference. Mass Effect fails to deliver on either of these fronts, and both are so poorly done they're more like RPG elements than core RPG mechanics.

 

[The Lost Big Boss]

The thing I was pissed about was how easy it was to keep my team alive on the "suicide mission". No one died, not one person. It honestly made me pissed because I was expecting a saluter house, making quick choices that either killed one person or another, or if I fucked up bad enough killed both. I didn't feel desperate at all, and that killed a large part of the game for me.

Also, they need to fix the conversation wheel and replace it with the one from Alpha Protocol. No good or bad side, just reactions that are timed, that give different reactions based off of the NPC's personality. And if not, just add in a timer so I get some urgentsy in my choices, having the ability to think about an importance choice in the middle of combat for two minutes kills all drama, because it takes me out of the experience.

 

[Twilight_guy]

Meh, fanboys will say anything. Everyone has there own opinion. I really hate this whole GotY bullshit mostly because its applying a number and "winrawr!" status on something that should be quantified with arbitrary numbers. Mass effect 2 has strengths and weaknesses and we should try to emulate the good parts and improve on the bad parts and that's all there is to it.

 

[TheDrunkNinja]

Congratulations! You have an opinion!

You thought it was only good. Most other people thought it was great. Saying that you didn't doesn't make anything finite, it just puts you in either the majority or the minority.