AntiChri5 said:
When i try to think of the game with the cheapest, most blatant padding i have ever played ME1 comes to mind. After i got sick of clearing out the same bases filled with the same enemies over and over, on the same world just painted a different color i decided to do a few playthroughs of ME1 wihout doing sidequests.
ME1 With sidequests took me on average about 20 hours. ME1 without sidequests takes me 5.
ME2 generally takes me over 40 hours (and i have finished an Insanity NG+ with every class more then once, so the gameplay doesn't slow me down). I am not going to try to distinguish what is and isn't a sidequest in ME2, since they blurred the lines on that.
Eh, it takes me about the same amount of time for both, and both have a fair amount of padding. ME1's tends to get picked on a little more because... I don't know to be honest.
As much as the re-used rooms were annoying, they did have different feels sometimes, and often had more atmosphere than a lot of ME2 side missions IMO as well. For example, the lost ship with all the Husks everywhere, or the one with the brain-dead guy and his crazy girlfriend.
It takes me about the same amount of time to finish both games when I do everything in them. Gameplay doesn't slow me down much in ME2, thanks to it being rediculously easy, but it does slow me down more than ME1s combat thanks to the rediculous reliance on cover in ME2. In ME1 combat only took me a lot of time 'cause I'd jump out of the Mako to fight a Geth Colossus for the extra XP. In ME2 I have to start every battle by sitting in cover for 5 seconds, then kill 2-3 enemies, back in cover for another 5 seconds - unless I'm playing on easy-normal with the Vanguard and can just charge spam enemies. Additionally ME2 has that terrible padding known as planet scanning. Most boring thing ever invented, honestly should have just kept the ME1 system IMO; planets with things on them that you don't explore just give you those items upon a survey, other planets you can explore and they always have a mission on them.
Going into the more technical side of things, both ME1 and ME2 have about the same install size. ME2 obviously has the higher resolution textures, which take up more of its install size and thus make up a larger portion of its content. On the flipside, however, a large portion of that extra space likely would have come from the planets you could explore, many of which were largely just empty space [Though every planet had a minimum of 6 things to find on it in total if memory serves, and a number of easter eggs on many planets too].
A quick online search reveals that both ME1 and ME2 had a total of 73 quests of varying types and importance in each. IMO the quests in Mass Effect 1 were longer - less effort was spent on making the level highly detailed and distinct, and more was put into the level itself - which is rather apparent in the design side of things too, as most of ME2s missions were simply "Shoot until you reach the end", whilst in the ME1 missions there were, at times, other ways through things using less violent means.
Really, they're both about equal in how much content they have, IMO ME1 felt like it had more whilst ME2 relied too much on its slow ass combat, planet scanning and system "Exploration" and such for length, as opposed to non-linear or longer levels.
