ME2 vs ME1

[nitnit]

So.

I just finished Mass Effect 2 right after finishing Mass Effect 1. No nostalgia, no faded memories, here's my thoughts on the two.


The Story - Arguably Mass Effect 1+2's strongest aspect. How does 2 stack up to 1?


- Randomly dying and being resurrected between the two games? How can I care when I didn't really experience the death beyond an opening cutscene?

- The collectors? Lame. Saren was cool because he was originally an elite agent of the council, and even though he was under the influence of Sovreign, when you hear him explain his actions, you can almost understand why he did what he did. Also, Sovreign itself was pretty cool. It actually had a personality, unlike the (spoiler) human embyro reaper thing..

- The crew members? Mostly forgettable. Jacob and Miranda? Snooze inducing. Grunt? Nowhere near as awesome as Wrex. Jack? Made me laugh nonstop. In a bad way. Kasumi? Made me regret dropping $7 on DLC.

Samara and Thane were decent, and Legion and Mordin was really cool. Garrus and Tali were nice to see again, but both didn't feel as memorable as they were in ME1.

Having said this, the crew members are better fleshed out in terms of backstory and reasons for fighting. While the concept of making your crew members "loyal" is kind of silly, the missions themselves mostly offered pretty good character development. (Though, it seems to me that Bioware has MASSIVE daddy issues, lol)

- Your imported decisions from ME1... Did they really matter? Sure, certain people email you with different messages, and the news may talk about humans taking over the galaxy slowly (if you killed the council)... But either way you still have the same major plot points and pretty much the same ending in ME2 regardless of your actions in 1.

- Mass Effect 2's ending was boring IMO. You kill an "embryo" reaper (not really sure why it was even able to attack you after you disconnect the supports... guess bioware was pressed for a final boss), and then you either let humanity use a collector base, or destroy it. WHOOPTY DOO. As long as you do everyone's loyalty mission, and you aren't retarded in your choices, everyone will live. Compare this to the literally epic race against time to save the Citadel and stop the Mass Relay from calling in all the reapers... plus your decision to save or kill the council, and the cool ability to make Saren kill himself with diplomacy? Mass Effect 1's ending was so much better. (and that song in the credits by the Faunts (M4 part 2, I think) was a very nice touch)

All in all... the first Mass Effect's story was better in almost every department, except for character development.


Roleplaying - This is an RPG. For some reason this very important aspect is oft looked over.

- Morality. Sucked in ME1. Still sucks in ME2. Seriously Bioware, what is your point with the renegade/paragon system? I will avoid the full rant and just say that the lines between Paragon and Renegade are very loosely defined, and since the Paragon and Renegade options are literally braindead to choose, there's no sense of surprise.

While I liked ME1's system for your special dialogue choices better, that falls more under gameplay, and the paragon/renegade actions were kinda cool. (even though it's really just heal/hug/stop someone from killing for paragon or punch/shoot someone for renegade)

- Choices. Have a bit more consequence. People can actually die in the final mission. We'll see if this actually matters in ME3.

Oh. That's all the actual roleplaying you get to do, other than the romances which are pretty much lol in both games. Guess ME2 is a slight improvement.


Gameplay - While not as important as in, say a pure action game, Mass Effect is still heavily entrenched in action, so it does matter.

- Combat was boring and repetitive in Mass Effect 1. Combat gets boring and repetitive in Mass Effect 2. The difference is that ME2 actually has different levels for all the side quests, so you're not just running through literally the same buildings over and over. Unfortunately, Bioware decided it would "balance" the game by giving players fewer powers and only letting you use 1 at a time (more or less). This doesn't really make the game any more balanced since Soldiers can just blow through the game with Bullet Time (adrenaline) + ammo of choice... Also the cover system really makes the game "popamole", as in, similar to the arcade game pop a mole since you just jump out and shoot people and hide again.

I guess overall ME2 is an improvement in the combat department, but not that big of one.


- The hacking minigame is more stimulating in ME2 and there's two of them now. I still highly doubt that anyone was actually looking forward to doing any of the hacking minigames...

- Character customization. Way to take 2 steps back Bioware... Seriously, what is this s**t? You have far fewer talents to choose from, and if you want to upgrade your equipment you have to go through the redundant system of buying/acquiring the upgrade, then scanning planets (huge snoozefest) for the materials... Evolving powers? Cool idea, but it ends up punishing the player for not specializing into 2 or 3 talents.

And weapon/armor selection? Sure, in ME1 we had way too many useless weapons/armor. But in ME2 there's like 2 or 3 choices for each weapon, and it's either very clear cut which is better, or it's a matter of if you're fighting shields/synthetic or armor/organic enemies. ME1's character customization/upgrade system was better. "Simpler" =/= better.

- Sidequests/Exploration. The mako is gone, thank god. Actually getting to the sidequests is less of a hassle. The sidequests are more varied and funner.

The starmap doesnt make you load 50 times to get somewhere, which is nice, and the planet scanning is better than running around on foot collecting minerals... but it still sucks. The gas system is very odd. You have to use gas to get between systems within a cluster, but not between planets/systems? If Bioware wanted us to explore this giant universe they made, why randomly throw in gas for going between systems?

All in all ME2 is an improvement in this section, but still has some strange additions that detract from the game.


Other - wasn't sure where to put these other points of random minutia.

- ME2 takes itself too seriously. Everything is grim and dark in an effort to be cooler. ME1 had a very certain charm in that while the story was serious, the world had humor to it. While there are bits of this in ME2, they've been cut big time.

- EA has also kind of ruined ME2 to an extent. They intentionally require a 15$ download for some of the content unless you buy the game new. Also, you can literally buy fairly overpowered weapons/armor (similar to dead space) - not sure if that was Bioware's idea, but I certainly hope not. The other DLC, "Kasumi" is a waste of money. $7 for a mission that lasts like 45 minutes to an hour and a half, a very boring/underwhelming character, and a dress. Woohoo.


Final Verdict

ME2 is better overall than ME1, but the original still has some advantages.

Here's what I'd like to see in ME3


- Better defined/rewarding morality+dialogue (for god's sake, stop putting all the paragon answers in the top right and the renegade in the bottom right). And no stupid Fable scars.

- The ability to fail the game. Seriously. Something that Bioware has talked about from before ME1 even came out was how you could "fail to save the galaxy". Then they changed it to "Well, in the final game you can fail to save the galaxy". Stop holding our hands. Let us be accountable for making retarded decisions. If we have to replay the game, so what? If Mass Effect is about the effects of your decisions, then let them have effect.

- ME1's talent system. idc which game's equipment system is used, but for the love of god if it's ME1's, give us less useless s**t, and if it's ME2's then give us more than 2 choices.

- No planet scanning (or make planet scanning more rewarding or funner). No mako. More sidequests on planets (and a reason for doing them).

- Something really, really expensive. Seriously. At the end of ME1 I had like 3 mil credits, and nothing to buy. At the end of 2 I had like 400-500k, but nothing worth buying.

- More ship upgrades! It was a cool idea to upgrade the ship, but it ended up just being very basic stuff, and I'm not really sure how much it mattered.






Ok. There ends my rant/review/comparison for now. I might update sometime, but probably not. If you managed to read this, or skim through it, what do you agree/disagree on? Do you like ME1 or 2 better? Why? And what would you like to see in 3?  

[Haratio TaFotter]

I agreed with you/disagreed with you on many different points. So I guess here goes.

The Story
The whole dying at the beginning was a stupid idea. I thought it was kinda funny how everyone's like "OMG SHEPARD, YOU'RE DEAD!" but it lacked a lot of...well, anything that would have made Shepard's death interesting.

Collectors were also kinda boring. They were slightly more interesting when you find out what they really were, but not by much. Saren was a much more interesting foe.

The biggest difference between us seems to be with the crew members. I thought that most of the squad members from ME1 were boring (with the exception of Garrus and Wrex) while the ME2 characters were slightly more varied and slightly more interesting. Jacob and Miranda were fairly boring, but I thought they were just a little better than Kaiden and Ashley. Grunt was interesting, being a Krogan who could be free from the effects of the genophage, but he did lack Wrex's general badassness. I really liked Samara, Thane, Legion, and Mordin (especially Legion), but I would have liked two completely new characters instead of Garrus and Tali returning as squadmates.

Yes, most of your decisions didn't seem to matter, but I guess nothing is supposed to matter that much until the very end of the game, though I don't really see how.

I agreed with everything you said in the roleplaying section, so I'll just move on.

Gameplay
I didn't really think having less powers was such a bad thing, since there were a lot of powers I never used in ME1. I also felt like powers were kinda improved. Fully upgrade throw in ME1 had to recharge for a whole 30-40 seconds, which seemed like a really long time in some of the large fights. Given that most powers had much shorter recharge time, and considering a lot of the biotics now curve around cover, I thought the "use one power at a time" thing kept the biotics from being ridiculously overpowered. Soldiers are still overpowered, but I felt there was such a huge gap between them and the other classes anymore.

Things I'd like to see in ME3

1) some of the things you've done actually mattering.

2) More equipment and weapons. I'd still like to be able to customize my armor, but having more choices, or more noticeable armor effects, would be nice.

3) I feel that several of your squadmates are going to die. Thane might be dead by the time ME3 continues the story, and we never found out how old Mordin was, so I fear he might not make it. Other than that, I'd say Legion needs to play a bigger part in ME3.  

[nitnit]

Seems we are mostly in agreement. We just like different things in our characters, and disagree on the number of powers and which classes are overpowered.

I'm fairly sure that vanguard was the most overpowered class in ME1. Decent armor, lots of resistances from the vanguard class, shotgun (best gun in ME1 imo), throw/lift/barrier (3 best powers imo).

The thing I prefer about multiple powers are the tactical options. Sure, you have to wait 20-30 seconds to use throw/lift, but you have to choose when to save or use them. Plus, with adrenaline rush your not on cooldown for that long.

Also, thinking back, going with the now generic FPS armor/health system detracted from the game's strategy as well. No longer do you have to consider medigel cooldowns, when to use barrier, and when to use shield recharge. Now you just have to hide after you get hit. I'm not saying the combat should be super complex, but sometimes dumbing down isn't a good thing...



The only crew member I truly disliked in ME1 was Kaiden. He was just so awfully boring. I thought Ashley was interesting with all the stories she told you. Tali's home world and people were cool to hear about, and the romance with Liara seemed a bit more genuine than the romances in ME2.

Thinking back, I think Legion was the coolest squadmate in ME2. Unfortunately, you get him fairly close to the end of the game.

As for Grunt, this is a bit nitpicky, but I thought there were a fair amount of fertile male Krogans, just a big lack of fertile females?


edit - as for your number 3, I highly doubt Thane will die. for some reason that I do not understand, he is apparently popular with the female player base? (as in, they are romantically inclined towards him?!). Plus, I have a feeling that ME3 will be 1 or 2 years after ME2, which should give him enough time for one last crazy mission.  

[Haratio TaFotter]

Yeah, vanguards were pretty overpowered. Once you get the right heat sinc upgrade, you can pretty much fire them infinitely, and with a good Sledgehammer ammo upgrade there was no stopping you. I was actually a little disappointed with the ME2 shotguns. Few games do shotguns right nowadays, making them much weaker then they were meant to be. I guess it did even out the vanguard, but I still miss those close up blasts that would send people flying.

In many ways I don't consider Kaiden to be an actual character in the game. All I really remember about him was the he had a weird 1950's haircut, could only use a pistol, and bot migranes from his biotics. Not to mention the few times I used him he said some awfully stupid things ("Hey, those tiles in that Prothean containment cell remind me of a bathroom!"). Yeah, Ashley's stories were good, but she just felt too much like that stereotypical female tomboy archetype that I feel gets overused a lot, especially in sci-fi stories. The quarians were probably one of my favorite races, and I used Tali alot, but not being able to go see the Migrant Fleet in the first game kinda made her lose her appeal for me. I guess that was a good reason to bring her back that made me happy (that and sleeping with her). Legion was very awesome, I just wish he had a different weapon loadout: you do get him very close to the end, and by that point you have a lot of assault rifle/sniper characters.

As for Grunt and the Krogans, I forgot it affect the females, not the males, Still, that makes me wonder what Okeer was talking about when he said Grunt could "ignore" the genophange. I guess we'll find out (or not) in ME3.  

[nitnit]

Maybe it does effect the males too? I assumed it didn't since I remember "fertile females" as being a huge deal to clan relations, and fertile males not being mentioned at all.

It's possible Okeer was saying that this "perfect" Krogan could be created despite the genophage. This is opposed to Saren's tankbred (they were, right?) Krogan slaves who were not "true" Krogan.  

[Haratio TaFotter]

Yeah, if I'm remembering this right, Saren was cloning krogans and breeding them in tanks. I think the difference being Saren's krogan's wouldn't have to go through the krogan rite of passage like Grunt had to, so yeah, they wouldn't have been true krogan.  

[nitnit]

Plus something about them being inferior as well. I was under the impression that Grunt was genetically "perfect" and Saren's Krogen were below average (or lower)  

[Haratio TaFotter]

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Also, I thought of something else I'd like to see in ME3: armor for your squad members. I realized how much I wanted something like this the other day when I started a new ME1 play through. As I was choosing armor for my party members I began to realize that very few of the squad members actually wear what I consider to be armor. Now some characters, mainly Kasumi and Thane, lack of armor seemed more practical to their combat styles, but other characters just didn't seem like they would be as protected (Miranda, Jacob, and Jack). Different characters having different armor choices, like the characters in ME1, would help to differentiate characters with similar loadouts (Garrus, Thane, Zaeed, and Legion).