PREVIEW: MASS EFFECT 2

XGC Yoda

New member
Title: Mass Effect 2
Developer: BioWare
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Release Date: January 2010
Genre: RPG
Credits: XGC Yoda

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In the beginning of February Bioware announced that Mass Effect 2 was in the works. Unfortunately they also announced that the game was still a year out from completion. With that said, Bioware gave a rough estimate to when the game could be released. January 2010 is a long way out, and there is still so much Bioware won't tell us. Bioware did however release a teaser trailer to the long awaited sequel. With that trailer they left us with many questions and no answers.

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The Story:

With John Sheppard presumed dead, does this mean a new character? With the lack of current information on the time and the means of his death we are left wondering how the game will change in the sequel. If anything, I would hope for more interaction with the residents of the planets. More exploration of the universe would be a huge plus. More alien races, and a choice of factions you could join. Making a character should give the gamer a more creative edge, and it wouldn't hurt to give us a choice of battle armor. The farther into the game you get, the more awesome your armor could become. In the first game you could have relations in the game with your crew members. In the sequel, the player should have the option to pursue relationships with the residents. Taking the concept of the first game and expanding on it will make the fans of Mass Effect excited.

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The Gameplay:

So what can we expect to change in the second game. With a new storyline in the works does this also mean new weapons, new crew, and a new style of gameplay? I would have to say no to the new weapons. With a new character in the works it will mean a new crew and some changes to the gameplay. We can hope for an easier shooting system, especially with the sniper. I found the sniper to be a little irritating especially when the enemy is running at you. The overall style of combat was fun, and you were never short of a crew member taking your kill. Expect changes in the sequel, but nothing will impact the game more than a new main character and a new story.

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From the Words of a Fan:
Written by: Gabe, Sterling, Will, Gerald (Gamespy)

Gabe: As soon as I could leave the Citadel I was out among the stars, traveling from planet to planet exploring what each had to offer. Unfortunately, this was a terrible way to play Mass Effect and I quickly grew bored of the same-y surfaces, minimal unique content and monotonously mapped outposts. One of the things that I love to do, and one of the things that I felt had been promised by Mass Effect, is explore the environment when presented with a sprawling, more or less open-world design. In Fallout 3 I just struck out in a direction and took things as they came, but when I tried to do this with Mass Effect, I found that breaking out of the prescribed plot path meant that I had a whole lot of nothin' laying ahead.

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In Mass Effect 2, I'm hoping to see a richer galaxy with more variety in both inhabitants and activities. As some of the comments on yesterday's news story point out, NPCs outside of the Citadel don't offer much in the way of conversation. Sure, sure, we're a long way from the classic Final Fantasy "talk to everyone in town" dynamics, but I'd still like there to be someone with something to say out in the big black... even if it is some random dancer NPC spouting, "Hey, don't I have great legs?"

Honestly, I found that commenter "discardedcheese" had one of the best suggestions: "It would be nice if you could create something with the raw materials you gather. Or something like that to add an incentive to collecting." Amen to that, my friend, let's get some crafting up in this piece to make exploration worthwhile and lucrative!

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Sterling: Of the things that would make non-RPG players stick with Mass Effect 2, fixing the vehicle handling wouldn't just go a long way, it'd go roughly from here to Jupiter. This was the element of Mass Effect that singlehandedly destroyed the experience for me. Out of everyone on staff, I'm the least likely to play RPGs. Mass Effect was my first attempt in years to quit being so narrow-minded and try out a highly rated game within a genre that I'm not particularly conversant in. At first I found the combat to be a bit weird, but I grew accustomed to it and began to adjust to the idea of spending hours questing around.

And then, I reached a breaking point. A few planets in, I became so aggravated by the Mako that I decided to take a breather and put the game back on the shelf. As a result, I played a lot more Call of Duty 4. I never touched Mass Effect again. I'm hoping that Bioware will remedy the moments that might make some gamers turn away. Driving the Mako was the "brick wall" for me, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

That's not the only grievance I had with Mass Effect's idea of transportation. With this hardware cycle, all we've heard about is HD, arguments about resolutions, and hyperbole about processing power. I just want to see sections of the game load without the superficiality of, say, putting a group of characters in elevators while the area fires up. In the time since Mass Effect wrapped, I'm hoping that BioWare has found ways to fill in these gaps with something a little more substantive. Even if we don't get anything as cool as the ability to chit-chat with our party members, I just want something a little more clever and interactive to conceal the fact that the stage is loading and I can't do much until it's queued up to play.

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Will: I sank a lot of hours into Mass Effect on the Xbox 360, so the feature I'd like to see more than any other is the ability to import my character into Mass Effect 2. Not only was my Commander Shepard a dashing ne'er-do-well cast from the same mold as Han Solo, but he was also a complete badass. I hit level 50 sometime during my second playthrough of the game, so I'd love nothing more than to continue making my character the most dangerous dude in the galaxy. Of course, I'd also like to bring my sweet weapons and gear with me into the sequel, but I'll understand if that's not possible.

In addition to being able to bring your character into the game, I'd love to see the choices I made in the first Mass Effect carry over. After all, there were a number of major decisions to make, including (beware, spoilers ahead!) whether or not to let Wrex live, which crewmember to let die during the assault on Virmire, as well as minor choices like whether to let the Rachni queen go free. These choices could all be tied into the sequel, especially if it picks up right after the end of the first game. I just feel like it would be a shame to let all of my hard work go to waste.

Of course, there's a pretty good chance that the game will take place a while after the events of the first game, as many videogame sequels tend to.

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Gerald: There's no sense in griping over Mass Effect's technical issues like my whiny coworkers. Bioware is well aware of the problems with the Mako handling (which was fixed to some degree in the PC version) and the load times disguised as elevator rides. I expect that the console versions of Mass Effect 2 will take these improvements and expand upon them to a great degree.

So what do I want out of Mass Effect 2? It's time for BioWare to expand the universe. Yes, the galaxy map was very cool, both in terms of interface and in allowing for a sense of free-roaming exploration. But all the pretty stars were mostly window dressing, as you only had a handful of planetary systems worth exploring. Of those systems, you'd have a couple planets here and there that you could roll around in to gather minerals. You couldn't even visit Earth, relegated instead to a single mission on the moon. I'd like to see many more star systems and planets to explore. I'd like those explorations to be more meaningful, to get more out of my travels through space than a block of text and some space dust.
I'd also like to encounter new alien races, because a vision of the future dominated by a small handful of (mostly) humanoid alien species will always lose to the ambitious creature designs that sci-fi fans have been dreaming of since that first vision of the Mos Eisley cantina in "Star Wars." This is space we're talking about here, the possibilities are absolutely limitless. Let's see all-new alien visitors who are ready to shake things up, and take inspiration from the Hanar and the Elcor. These races were masterfully designed: not just in terms of their appearance, but also their culture, how they communicate, and so on. While they didn't play major roles in the first Mass Effect, they were a large part of what made me love the game. The Asari love interest was a great angle, not because she was a hot blue-skinned alien, but because of her culture's unique views on mating and interspecies relationships. While her bare blue bottom got all of the news coverage, it's the creative story angles behind these characters that players really cared about.

So that's my dream for Mass Effect 2. Content is king, and I want more of it. More aliens, more planets, more missions, just more.

Oh yeah, space combat could be fun, too.
 
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