Mass Effect: Thermal Clips vs Overheating

[Canadamus Prime]

Clips, the overheating system was a huge fucking annoyance.

So pausing for 5 seconds so your gun could cooldown was more of an annoyance for you than running out of clips and having to switch from the gun you were comfortable with to a gun you were uncomfortable with until you found some more f*ing clips. o_0

Yeah, combat pacing was fucked up. With the clips, it's frantic, and also requires you to think and prioritise a little - especially if you're sniping. Presumably you don't play many shooters if you find running out of ammo annoying.

Well no I don't play many shooters, but I can't imagine it being any less annoying even if I did; it would just be a matter of getting used to it. And I would still think that any opportunity to avoid that annoyance, even if it meant pausing for 5 seconds while your gun cooled down, would be welcome. ...or is it more a matter of "It's different so therefor I hate it." Come on, be honest.

I enjoy hectic gunfights, a sense of scrappiness and desperation. The overheating side-steps that and dives straight into annoying. It also ruins any real sense of rhythm which reloading gets you in to.

It just sounds like you don't want to think about what you're doing or move about.

*shrug* If you say so. It's not like I hate the clip system, it just seemed to me that the overheating thing was far less of an annoyance. No, my biggest issues with the clip system have to do with implementation and consistency, not the system itself or how it worked. You see if they'd started with the clip thing in ME1 and stuck with it through out, then I wouldn't really have an issue, but they didn't; they started with the overheating thing in ME1 and then for ME2/3 (I'm guessing, I haven't played 3) they threw that out the window and brought in this clip thing without any in-game explanation for where it came from or anything and all the characters, including Shepard who was supposed to have been out of the loop for 2 yrs., just acts like everything is completely normal as if it had always been that way. And then there's the matter of consistency. With this clip system, the guns are now useless if you don't have any clips, but that doesn't make any sense considering how it was established that the guns worked in ME1. It's like, Ok these clips prevent the gun from overheating, but why can't I fire the gun without one? or simply put, there was no explanation given as to why the guns absolutely needed the damn clips in order to function. Sorry, went on a bit of a rant there.

 

[The Genius]

Overheating. ME1 pistol x 2 frictionless materials and high explosive ammo = a true heavy pistol. Made you be conservative with shots but I found that just made me make each shot count. I used infiltrator however. Never used an assault rifle in any mass effect game.

 

[miketehmage]

I liked the overheat system. Finding ammo is a pain. I'd rather be forced to fire in bursts.

 

[Claptrap]

How about both, We have thermal clips that insantly remove all overheating, But when you run out you go back to the normal overheat system.

 

[Quesa]

It's always jarring to go from ME to ME2 and go from using one weapon type from start to finish to having to swap them constantly because of some idiotic mechanic designed to give mobs something to drop and to force me into switching guns constantly.

 

[katsumoto03]

Thermal clips meant the combat had a better flow. You could reload in a second instead of having to sit behind cover with my dick hanging out, waiting for my stupid gun to cool down.

 

[octafish]

I do prefer the overheating mechanic, however what really killed the gameplay for me in ME2 was the universal cooldown timer for Biotic, Tech, and Weapon abilities. I loved using something like lift followed by marksman or warp (oh how I loved to abuse lift). ME2 was just Dullsville just sitting in cover waiting for my powers to cooldown.

 

[DTWolfwood]

i'll take infinite ammo any day.

on the other hand, you can fully upgrade your weapon to the point where they don't overheat. Kinda takes the challenge out of the fight when you can hose a room indefinitely.

 

[Samurai Silhouette]

From having unlimited ammo to finite ammo is called a technological advancement? Whatever, Reaper Particle Beam please.

 

[Saulkar]

I was wondering what peoples thoughts were on Thermal clips vs ME1s overheat system.

I heard that the reason they changed the system was due to complaints from gamers, but I personally much prefered ME1 with a cooldown for wepons and was somewhat irritated by the introduction of thermal clips but now I guess I dont notice much.


I also liked the fact that the speed of cooldown was an important factor when modding weapons. I was interested in what you guys thought though

I vastly preferred ME-1's cooling system. It was already effing established that the effing guns have thousands of effing rounds in them that effing heat the gun up that an effing heat-sink dissipates but you can still effing use the gun perpetually. Compare that to ME-2. Who in their fucking right mind would fucking limit a weapon that fucking could be perpetually fired for a fucking analogue to ammunition that would fucking lock up the gun because you fucking ran out of the fucking same shit different name ammo, thermal clip?! I did not enjoy ME-2's gun fights whatsoever due to this single gameplay alteration that left me with no ammo in the first few minutes of a fight playing on the hardest difficulty.

 

[funcooker11811]

Overheating a thousand times.

To me, ME1 catered to the RPG crowd, while ME2 catered more towards the shooter crowd. Pretty much from the first mission on, I felt like I was playing a different game in ME2. Combat flow changed, going from something slower paced but more thought out, to a fast-paced shooting gallery. I very rarely used abilities outside of the ones that upgrade your ammo in ME2. A whole lot of things I really liked about ME1 didn't make it to the sequel, actually. The only exploration I ever did was around the place I just fought in, looking for ammo. The whole exploration thing became pointless, and i'm still kinda upset about the loss of my beloved Mako.

 

[Saulkar]

How about both, We have thermal clips that insantly remove all overheating, But when you run out you go back to the normal overheat system.

I have often wondered why they never incorporated something like that. In Gears of War when a turret overheats you press a button to quickly cool it down. A good compromise would be that a thermal clip is represented by a diagram the shows how much that unique thermal clip has worn down, as you press a button to use the thermal clip to rapidly cool your gun down it wears out (each thermal clip lasts a little bit differently) but at the same time you can jettison it altogether to instantly cool your gun in the thick of things and continue firing despite rapid overheating before replacing it after things have died down.

Adds some dynamic complexity and depth to handling your gun and makes it so you can always fire it but have to balance both heat and thermal clips as a comprise for unlimited ammo.

 

[RatRace123]

Overheating. It was explained very well, and the introduction of thermal clips just felt like a cop-out.
Yes, I hate thermal clips purely for story reasons and not any gameplay reasons.

 

[PirateRose]

I prefer the clips. I didn't like the overheating because it made the game too easy. Stick the right upgrades in certain guns and you didn't have to worry about it overheating. It was a neat idea with cool lore behind it, but it didn't execute very well with gameplay. The clips make the game more challenging and make the player think critically.

 

[DarthSka]

I don't prefer one over the other. Though in the first game, I found a combination of weapon mods that made it so none of my Spectre gear would ever overheat. I miss those days sometimes.

 

[Netrigan]

Didn't dislike either, but preferred Thermal Clips.

The problem with the cooldown system was that it threw the difficulty curve way out of whack. At the start of the game, where you should be getting eased into the experience, it's grind you teeth frustrating how quickly your guns overheat, but then at some point about 2/3 of the way through, when the challenge should really be starting to pick up, the game just gets pathetically easy because it becomes almost impossible to overheat even in the most frantic of firefights.

That's not to say there wouldn't have been ways to improve this system and make it more balanced, rather than just scrapping it completely. But yeah, in ME1 it's execution was kinda poor.

That's pretty much my problem with the overheating system. Once you upgraded a bit, it removed the vast majority of the tactics from the weapon systems. Even selecting the right ammo for the job didn't matter much because you could spam any enemy with whatever you happened to be using.

I was swapping out ammo types a lot more on the higher difficulties of ME2, since you had to make your shots count.

But they probably should have put in some lower powered weapons with the overheating system to avoid the moments when you're hiding behind cover and you've only got your powers left.

 

[DudeistBelieve]

Overheat.

I just got into a rthym after a while that I didn't that I rarely overheated. :/

I never did understand how they went from that system to the clips... Really, thematically, the clips seem like a step backwards. Before the gun overheated, you just took cover till it cooled down... Now you actually had to stop and manually reload, one more thing to do in the heat of battle.

 

[flying_whimsy]

I much preferred overheating; it added just the right amount of strain to my sniping build. I really liked how different the approach to combat became between modding and overheating concerns.

Also, when I hit the end boss for the second game I used up the ammo for all my useful guns way early in the fight and had to spend a lot of time hiding. NOT FUN.

 

[mrdude2010]

I preferred overheating. It meant you had to put thought into how you modded your gun, and it's really annoying to run out of widowmaker ammo halfway through a huge battle on insanity difficulty. 13 shots just isn't enough.

 

[Kurt Horsting]

It would have been cool if they combined them for the third. Just have a heat clip count as 1 unit that would have the cooldown bar from the first one. If you overheat, you could quickly pop it out with a spare. Best of both worlds.