i wasn't being sarcastic, i like it.

okay, well, thanks and i am sorry for assuming!

don't let that fancy star map fool you. most of the planets are completely worthless. the biggest problem with mass effect i thought was that it's like...almost completely focused around combat. most of the sidequests are boring as hell. the story's pacing is very very strange too i thought. they hyped up being a SPECTRE for the entire intro and once you actually become one (about an hour in?) it's uh..... very underwhelming to say the least. there's also little to no character development. i didn't mind the dialogue too much, but i think that's because i'd rather Sheperd say stupid recycled action movie lines than the same anime lines i've heard in every jRPG ever.

this is all true

i'm kinda enjoying the star map, but that's only because i have been REALLY EAGER to play something like it. it's not particularly well done, and there's a ridiculous amounts of visibly recycled shit, but i think the game is probably slightly better for including it. i don't think the game is really interesting enough to be completely linear, and it'd probably be a much better game if there was a lot more emphasis on how much you can roam around space and randomly bump into interesting shit. in general i kinda feel like they were onto something there, but didn't take the non-linearity of the game all that seriously.

also yeah i really dislike how bioware handles the player character being some BIG IMPORTANT PERSON. i've played this and kotor and in both games your character is supposed to be some TREMENDOUSLY IMPORTANT DUDE, but they invariably do so in a way that you honestly can't give a shit about it. this is problematic because in both games this is a major part of the story that never gets justified whatsoever. you never do anything in the game to earn it, and it gets tiresome quickly hearing everybody shower you with praise for no apparent reason. they always fucking do this and it's really goddamn annoying. you kinda need to talk to everybody in the game to get anywhere in it, but everyone you talk to goes out of their way to kiss your ass and they never really make you FEEL like the character is any more important than the other idiots with guns, outside of them just passively telling you that a spectre/jedi is a big deal. and yeah, once you do become a spectre there is literally no difference in the game outside of that worthless set of skills you can learn. i made the mistake of making my shepard an engineer, and he's actually my worst character. if i had my choice i'd leave him behind on all the missions and just take all the other characters along.

and the dialogue isn't terrible, but it's really not any good. it's staggeringly plain and uninventive. it felt like the writers were REALLY short on time and probably just had to write as much stuff as possible in short amounts of time. what definitely saves it is the quality of the voice actors, which is unusually consistent for a videogame. guys like keith david have the ability to make the most unimportant words RIVETING and CRITICAL. there are a bunch of people in the mass effect cast that can legitimately do something with nothing(dwight schultz and raphael sbarge are others) and i'm inclined to think that these guys are primarily what is FOOLING PEOPLE here. either way, my main beef is that people actually keep coming up and telling me PLAY MASS EFFECT; GREAT STORY when this is not the case at all.


is the mass effect sequel any better? there are a lot of problems in the first one i think, but it's more a matter of bad execution and stupid design rather than it being an intrinsically worthless experience. it's the sort of series i could see becoming rather good if bioware ever realized that they aren't particularly good at making videogames or if the series got handed off to somebody with better design abilities(namely obsidian).

Not really! most of the stuff thats fixed in mass effect 2 is not pertaining to what hundley was talking about. they made the combat system way better and removed mako which was pretty awesome but its still painfully linear and everyone in the universe is still like holy fucking shit its shep! also i really dont like how they pretend you can profoundly change the story through dialogue but really its all superficial and doesnt change anything.  I was really hoping in the second one they would make it so you could actually explore, nope but you can play a really boring minigame that excavates minerals from planets.

I bought the first ME and was like... urgh. It's just so boring!

I am glad to see that my impressions of mass effect from ten minutes in an internet cafe were entirely accurate.

I have been looking for a space game to play on linux because I have good memories for playing with the demo of freelancer as a kid. Found something called vega strike that looks like what I might want except it crashes with a libpng missing error (i.e. was compiled for an old version of libpng) and I do not think I have the patience to watch the svn version try to compile boost (and then fail in the middle of the process mysteriously.)

yes, absolutely. to be honest i think i just want some kind of space themed Bethesda game because completely linear space rpgs tend to have really terrible stories. ancient killer zerg-robots and knockoff jedis are not interesting enough to keep me interested in mass effects story.

yes!! i have been saying this for a while.

bethesda had always been making star trek space shooters alongside all their rpg stuff, and i always hoped that they'd elect to go ahead and make a star trek rpg, since that makes a lot of logical sense. there's actually no established story out there that i'm aware of that's as naturally conducive to the kinds of rpgs bethesda makes as star trek would be. even if you're not totally crazy about star trek, i think it would be cool neat having control of this massive ship that you can just fly around the galaxy doing whatever the hell you wanted.

and yeah, i was thinking the same thing in regards to how Bioware handles the PC in pretty much all of their games. In Dragon Age: Origins it's the same way, although DA:O is lightyears better than Mass Effect. pretty much every Bioware game has the same premise, which revolves around a user created main character joining some kind of EXCLUSIVE DEADLY WARRIOR. jedis, spectres, wardens, same thing.

i don't understand who out there has a NEED, as a player of videogames, to play as BIG IMPORTANT MAN. like every bioware game has that like it's some VITALLY IMPORTANT PART OF MAKING GAMES. i personally prefer playing as totally inconsequential people that nobody in the world gives half of a shit about. it's such a goddamn pain in the ass having to drag myself through one fucking ass-kissing npc after another to propel the fucking story.

Also pretty much everyone i know prefers KOTOR 1 to KOTOR 2, but with that new restored content mod that just came out I think 2 is easily better than the original.

you are the first person i've talked to who has ever acknowledged the possibility of kotor 2 being better.

but yeah, i like kotor 2 a lot more. it's far from perfect, since development got rushed when lucasarts or somebody made them release it real early, but i think it does a lot of things right.

Since when was linearity a problem?

it's not! but you kinda need the ability to create quality drama or generally engaging scenarios, or there's really no reason why you're going so far out of your way to structure what the player is doing. i'm not really convinced that bioware can effectively do this. all of the storytelling in mass effect has the feel of storytelling that you'd expect in non-linear games, if that comparison makes any sense. in non-linear games you can naturally expect a degree of separation from the narrative and what is physically happening to the player, if only because it's profoundly difficult to juggle quality storytelling with something open-ended and catered to the player. so much is inherently lost in game storytelling while aiming for non-linearity, since the priority is allowing the player to do what they want. i think something like fallout 3 is a good example, as the storytelling is not particularly great, and rarely ever particularly engaging, but it's definitely passable since it generally works with the way the game world works. you're playing this hollow avatar and not a real person, so it's impossible to really expect quality dramatic situations or really engaging storytelling. basically the story in non-linear games is just random people occasionally blabbering at you, almost entirely independent of the things you're physically doing in the game. that WORKS for non-linear games, but it feels like a big waste of time for games that are not particularly non-linear, like mass effect.

the writers of mass effect spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to give the world this extensive backstory and pseudo-star wars flavor, but they elected against really spending much time writing or designing THINGS ACTUALLY HAPPENING. it gets kinda exciting for about 10 seconds when lance henriksen comes through the radio and tells you HEY GO TO PLANET, SHIT IS HAPPENING but then that's really it and you go there and just kinda wander around surveying minerals and shit before shooting three guys and getting more copies of weapons you've had for half the game. maybe if you're lucky you'll get some generic evil/misguided character to talk to you at the end of the quest. i don't really think this is an over-simplification; this is how the game really does approach storytelling. it's like mass effect tries to be both nonlinear and linear at the same time, but manages to fail at both. wandering around doing random shit is kinda fun for the first hour before the lack of diversity makes it boring, and the main storyline is very passively written and without much intrigue, drama, or interesting ideas. a couple of the party members are kinda cool, but they get featured for about three minutes and then join THE ENTOURAGE at which point they basically become another one of shepard's weapons, occasionally dropping some totally innocuous stock line during cutscenes or talking about their DIFFICULT PAST if you go through the trouble of hunting them down on the ship.

actually i think the only story drama i remember in the game was when alenko accidentally said something racist to wrex in the elevator and he got mildly upset. i would expect hope there is a good deal more later on in the game, but i'm pretty far in the game, and it's pretty bad that this is all that i can really remember.

Not really! most of the stuff thats fixed in mass effect 2 is not pertaining to what hundley was talking about. they made the combat system way better and removed mako which was pretty awesome but its still painfully linear and everyone in the universe is still like holy fucking shit its shep! also i really dont like how they pretend you can profoundly change the story through dialogue but really its all superficial and doesnt change anything.  I was really hoping in the second one they would make it so you could actually explore, nope but you can play a really boring minigame that excavates minerals from planets.

ah, bummer. i was kinda hoping they'd improve on it. i guess there's really nothing out there that would make bioware do anything different from the same shit they've always done though! the sales are great and all the people out there reviewing games are mindless fucking sheep and will pretty much rate any game bioware makes 10/10.