Mass Effect 2 was NOT "dumbed-down"

[Agayek]

Okay, fair point. But wouldn't they need a reaper to open the relay? Even Saren didn't have the ability to actually open it, he had to hand control of the citadel to Sovereign in order to get the relay open.

Considering they could have had the Keepers open the relay, I don't think that's the issue. There's not enough detail about it for a conclusive statement, but I'd be willing to bet you don't need a Reaper's physical presence to activate it.

1b) T thought he was communicating with the Collectors from a distance (presumably from dark space).

True, but see above. Plus, you do not need physical closeness to transfer electronic data, as evidenced by what we are doing now. If Harbinger could communicate (And even take control of individuals), he could have transferred/copied his consciousness into an empty shell somewhere.

Actually organics are extremely energy efficient compared to machines. A PC consumes several hundred joules per second, whereas a human uses only a handful of joules per minute. Of course, the reapers should be a lot more advanced than a PC, but still, Sovereign didn't look like he was designed with efficiency in mind, what with all that firepower.

Very true, but organics require relatively specific forms of energy that are not easily stored or moved. Keeping organics alive requires food, air, water and the various mechanisms by which to transfer/move it all. That's far more wasteful in just about every regard than a few thousand batteries keeping a couple dozen probes active.

Yeah, I guess they should have had a plan C. But we (organics) have to have some sort of chance or there is no story.

Spoiler: Spoilers for the Arrival DLC

Better yet, the Reapers had a plan C, but we had a way to stop it, then we'd have a baller game. For example, the latest DLC for ME2. If you haven't played it, basic premise is "Reapers are almost here, blow that relay up to delay them". Why couldn't we get something like that as the main game? Maybe you stumble across that derelict Reaper while patrolling for Geth, and it turns out to contain decomposed fragments of the coordinates for another extra-galactic relay, and you'd have to run around gathering the rest of the information before the Reapers arrived through it. Then in ME3, we'd be well placed for the "explosive finale" where the Reapers actually attack.

I'd be ecstatic if the game followed a similar plot. As it stands, the Reapers just do a complete 180, character-wise, and it just doesn't work.

 

[Epic Fail 1977]

Thank you for using spoiler tags on the Arrival DLC. I've bought it, but haven't had chance to play it yet. Too muuuuch woooork

 

[boag]

Care to explain? I know the story was filler but they didn't ruin the reapers and it wasn't THAT bad

Yes they did. They remade the Reapers from one of the most effective and genuinely intimidating forces I've ever seen into a Scooby Doo villain.

Every single move they make in ME2 makes no logical sense, and that's what computers do.

errr, I thought the whole deal with the Reapers making a Human ship was because they wanted to incurr insult and injury at the same time to the one creature that actually managed to kill one of their bretheren.

Think about it, if they have peeps there that they use for menial tasks, why not use them to do some recon and mini skirmishes.

I think they reapers only mistake was underestamating the plot armor of the Main character.

 

[gbemery]

Stop

This

Shit.

If there ever were three words to summarize what needs to happen with the majority of the things that take place on the internet those would be them.

 

[Nazgual]

Why bother arguing with it. They are either being a fail troll or just understand nothing about when game play mechanics work and when they don't. Even if you explain that ME 1 had a poorly implemented loot system and just clogged up the game they won't understand.

 

[Rusty pumpkin]

Mass effect 2 was dumbed down, but after playing 1 I appreciated it so I didn't spend a few hours managing 4 peoples weapons, armor, weapon mods, and armor mods.

 

[Judgement101]

Yes, it was. Less skills, less startegy, less abilites (shut up, I know I already said it), less weapons, and less exploration.

 

[Netrigan]

I think the problem with ME1 is that it didn't realize how important the "action" part of an Action RPG is. Basic shooting mechanics are not a skill action players want to develop. If their character is a war hero, then the fucker better be able to demonstrate effective skill with a gun from the jump. ME1 was just too complex for the type of game it was trying to be. They're playing to a more casual RPG fan, who don't want to look at menus trying to figure out what every last little thing does, who don't want to spend hours selling off the useless bits of equipment he collects during missions, but who do want to have a much greater freedom than is offered up in traditional action games.

And ME2 comes damn close to pulling off the hybrid amazingly well. It may be "dumbed down" from the standard of a hardcore RPG, but one placed among other games of its type (Deus Ex springs to mind), it's got quite a bit of depth and complexity... and it's generally in the right places. It can certainly expand its options, but it's a much better starting point than ME1 overly complicated mess of useless and annoying options.

But I do think the game does too good of a job of hiding this complexity. I would have liked to have had access to more detailed information on the squad and weapon load-out screens. It shouldn't be cluttering up the display, but should be available at the push of a button. This is a pretty smart shooter and shouldn't be afraid to show it off a bit.

 

[Lonan]

It wasn't dumbed down at all in gameplay mechanics. I quite liked the gameplay and there was absolutely nothing wrong with it.

The problem with ME2 is that they shat all over the story and took one of the best villains in any piece of media I've ever seen and made them pants-on-head retarded.

What villians are those? The Geth? Who do you think they were made pants on head retarded?

 

[Agayek]

What villians are those? The Geth? Who do you think they were made pants on head retarded?

The Reapers. In ME1 they were this vast, mysterious, unknowable and unstoppable force. A single Reaper took on the entire Citadel and would have won if Shepard didn't have Vigil's Deus Ex Machina handy.

In ME2, they are the equivalent of a Scooby Doo villain. All of their "brilliant plans" make no fucking sense, take the most inefficient route (the fact that they are machines and are thus optimally efficient just makes it worse), or rely on people being unreasonably stupid.

Long story short, Sovereign and the Reapers were one of the most effective and potent bad guys in any medium, ever. Then they swiftly became a joke.

 

[Booze Zombie]

The mistake was gutting the problems, dropping the arms as if they were vestigal limbs, as opposed to working out and getting bigger arms, pardon the clumsy metaphor.

 

[Hyper-space]

ME1's less meaningful but larger variety of choice gave it fifty-billion times more replayability than ME2's barely existent choice. ME1's item system was broken, but at least it existed, and flawed as it was gave you at least a SENSE of progression and variety; ME2 had a starter weapon, a second one that was universally better than the stater, and a specialist one universally better than either.

Oh yeah, great replayability when you choose the same weapons and armor over and over and over.

And no, there is no weapon that is "universally" better than the other in ME2. For example, the handguns were like this: the first was fast, little to no recoil, quick to reload, but did not have much stopping power (which was great if you needed to quickly hit multiple targets for combos). The second one had much more stopping power, but was slower, lots of recoil and took long to reload, this made it good for penetrating armor.

Both had uses, and the same applies to the sniper rifles and assault rifles. The only weapons that might be plain better were the DLC weapons (even then, you had to know how to use them for it to work), but hey, at least you got something for your money.

the exact same concept with the exact same results, but simplified to the extreme.

thats dumbing down. whether you think thats a good thing or not, and you are quite welcome to think so, is irrelevant; its the definition of dumbing down. stop feeling like you have to defend it. some things are overly complicated and should be dumbed downed, but the definition of 'overly complicated' seems to be quite different for shooter fans than RPG fans. ME1 didnt really fulfill the purpose of inventory, but ME2 didnt even try; it was like replacing an idiot with the mentally-deficient. all it did was change what kind of stupid there was without fixing any of it.

Why is having an inventory a necessity? do you feel any smarter by going through heaps of unorganized shit? you can still upgrade your weapons, armor and abilities by going to a vendor or scanning for useful technologies. ME1 inventory wasn't the stuff of geniuses, you didn't need intelligence to spend half an hour selling and equipping all of the stuff you got, it was simply clunky and a time-waster. That's neither difficulty or something that requires intelligence to complete.

for me ME2 got old quick because of the extreme lack of variety of choice compared to ME1; it felt like a step backwards and i didnt enjoy it as much or as long.

THERE WAS NO FUCKING CHOICE, there was only the illusion of choice.

You start the post by admitting that ME1 had less meaningful choices (read: less depth and actual fucking choice), so you don't want meaningful choices, but just the illusion of such and faux-depth.

So no, it was not "mutilated", it just got rid of the fucking 5000 pointless items that were in the game that added NO depth and NO actual choice.

 

[Lonan]

What villians are those? The Geth? Who do you think they were made pants on head retarded?

The Reapers. In ME1 they were this vast, mysterious, unknowable and unstoppable force. A single Reaper took on the entire Citadel and would have won if Shepard didn't have Vigil's Deus Ex Machina handy.

In ME2, they are the equivalent of a Scooby Doo villain. All of their "brilliant plans" make no fucking sense, take the most inefficient route (the fact that they are machines and are thus optimally efficient just makes it worse), or rely on people being unreasonably stupid.

Long story short, Sovereign and the Reapers were one of the most effective and potent bad guys in any medium, ever. Then they swiftly became a joke.

How were they inefficient? What were their "brilliant plans?"

 

[Agayek]

How were they inefficient? What were their "brilliant plans?"

1) Use the Collectors

2) Build a human Reaper

Both of these are utterly asinine moves that make no sense.

The very existence of the Collectors means a few things. First, that the Reapers put forth the time, space and effort into cultivating a food source for the Collectors, as they were completely mindless drones and thus incapable of doing it themselves. Second, that they also went through the time, effort and waste of resources to create a habitable environment for the Collectors, as they cannot survive in space. And third, all of this was done for no discernible advantage. Replace the Collectors with a handful of probes, ala Star Wars Ep. 5, and you would get everything the Collectors did for the Reapers, for a fraction of the cost.

The plan to build a Reaper, at that particular point in time, by harvesting as many humans as possible and turning them into a slushy, was a very bad move. All it did was draw attention to the Collectors. You cannot expect someone to not notice when hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people suddenly vanish with no warning or sign. And if anyone noticed before the Reaper larva was finished, the whole plan was doomed.

There's a number of ways ME2 could have gone and left the Reapers as a genuine threat, but the route it chose was not one of them.

 

[MetallicaRulez0]

THERE WAS NO FUCKING CHOICE, there was only the illusion of choice.

The illusion of choice, even if it is completely trivial and pointless choice, is better than no choice at all. Of course you were going to end up wearing Colossus X armor, Savant X amps, and Spectre X weapons. That doesn't mean the items you equip and the mods you apply to those items on the way to the end-game stuff is meaningless. I play RPGs for that type of thing. Having ALL of that stripped away entirely in favor of some half-assed retarded upgrade system was a bad design decision.

If they had replaced it with an actual working upgrade system, with choices and a functioning inventory and loot system, I'd have been happy. But instead of fixing the broken loot system, they just said "Well, that's too much work. Fuck it." and threw together one of the worst progression systems I've ever seen in an RPG.

 

[Hyper-space]

THERE WAS NO FUCKING CHOICE, there was only the illusion of choice.

The illusion of choice, even if it is completely trivial and pointless choice, is better than no choice at all. Of course you were going to end up wearing Colossus X armor, Savant X amps, and Spectre X weapons. That doesn't mean the items you equip and the mods you apply to those items on the way to the end-game stuff is meaningless. I play RPGs for that type of thing. Having ALL of that stripped away entirely in favor of some half-assed retarded upgrade system was a bad design decision.

If they had replaced it with an actual working upgrade system, with choices and a functioning inventory and loot system, I'd have been happy. But instead of fixing the broken loot system, they just said "Well, that's too much work. Fuck it." and threw together one of the worst progression systems I've ever seen in an RPG.

There was choice in ME2 as all the weapons were equal when it came to use and utilities. You are complaining that they threw all the upgrading and progression out of the item systems, which is simply not true.

First, how did you upgrade your weapons in ME1? well, you either bought it or looted it off your enemies or hacked/salvaged it. Now, in ME2 its the exact same: you can either buy them of loot it off your enemies or hack/salvage them. Nothing changed in that regard, NOTHING. Hell, in ME2 you can salvage technologies and hack terminals to get credits, which is the same thing you did in ME1 (find items to sell or hack terminals to get credits).

So saying that its "retarded" would be like saying that the entire concept of item progression through completing certain objectives is retarded (which is what EVERY RPG has).

 

[Lonan]

How were they inefficient? What were their "brilliant plans?"

1) Use the Collectors

2) Build a human Reaper

Both of these are utterly asinine moves that make no sense.

The very existence of the Collectors means a few things. First, that the Reapers put forth the time, space and effort into cultivating a food source for the Collectors, as they were completely mindless drones and thus incapable of doing it themselves. Second, that they also went through the time, effort and waste of resources to create a habitable environment for the Collectors, as they cannot survive in space. And third, all of this was done for no discernible advantage. Replace the Collectors with a handful of probes, ala Star Wars Ep. 5, and you would get everything the Collectors did for the Reapers, for a fraction of the cost.

The plan to build a Reaper, at that particular point in time, by harvesting as many humans as possible and turning them into a slushy, was a very bad move. All it did was draw attention to the Collectors. You cannot expect someone to not notice when hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people suddenly vanish with no warning or sign. And if anyone noticed before the Reaper larva was finished, the whole plan was doomed.

There's a number of ways ME2 could have gone and left the Reapers as a genuine threat, but the route it chose was not one of them.

I was thinking entirely the same thing when I played through the game "why do these powerful machines go through all the trouble of making organic servants when they could just use machines?" However, it said that Reapers are a mix of organic and synthetic matter. It EDI talks about it being some form of reproduction. In other words, the Reapers need to create new Reapers. As for why they would use Protheans, they probably needed Prothean cells to regenerate or replace their organic cells. Remember what Saren said? "Reapers need organics." As for bringing attention to the Collectors, that doesn't really matter. The Reapers needed to harvest humans, and thought they could never be attacked at their base. The Council thought the Reapers were a myth anyway, so the Collectors doing their thing is irrelevant.

 

[Netrigan]

ME2 is such a curious case.

I agree with the OP that most of the inventory was just so much meaningless noise. There was no real depth to the armor and weaponry, since the higher number was always better... and there was rarely any major strength/weakness of a particular tier of weaponry. One was almost always better than the rest, although sometimes it had +20 damage in exchange for -2 accuracy over the second best weapon of that tier.

But ME2 got rid of the upgrades that forced the player to make decisions and I think that's a shame. On the plus side, the standard weapons had different strengths and weaknesses, so it took me a few missions before I made up my mind if I liked the assault rifle with less stopping power and a lot of ammo or the AR with better stopping power but far less ammo.

ME1 had a better mix of enemy types, giving combat a bit more diversity... then sticking the player into a bottle-neck so the same basic tactics are used in pretty much every encounter. The larger levels of ME2 made combat a much more interesting experience for me, but I wish the game hadn't been so cover-based centric.

One day, I think an Action RPG is going to get this right. Give us a fairly simple weapon set-up, give us lots of upgrades to customize the weapons, make the levels and complex enough to support multiple approaches to the same goal. I'm an action player, but I enjoy using stealth to recon enemy positions and plot out an attack strategy. Then I break cover and blast away. Other people enjoy being tanks. Others love using the environment to take out opponents (works well with powers). There are the snipers and cover-based fans. You don't need every level to conform to every play style (making a player play against his type can be fun and challenging), but I would love to see a game where every level has a minimum of three tactical approaches.

Neither of the Mass Effects are that game, but ME2 was a much more entertaining shooter.

 

[Netrigan]

Decided to take my Paragon character from ME1 and bring it over to ME2 and play it on Insanity.

I actually find it a bit of an improvement on the tactics of the first game. Having to really think about what kind of ammo you're going to use instead of being able to just spam them with whatever you have loaded up really makes a difference for me. And the larger levels gives me the freedom to find the better shot. Many, many times I found myself holding my fire because I didn't have the shot... whereas in ME1 I would have just fired away hoping to get lucky.

Really, really, really like the easy changing of ammo types. Even if ME1 had included ammo conservation as an element (and I really think this is the most important part of tactics in any shooter, regardless of whether its an RPG hybrid or not), I think I would have been annoyed with having to dig into a menu to do something so basic.

 

[Netrigan]

Am thinking a bit about the starting states of both games right now and the ability to continue playing the character you created in the first game... and the rather obvious problem this created (hence the death of Sheppard in the first mission).

In the first game, you're told that you're an experienced war hero (or whatever), your skills are so amazing that you become the first human Specter... yet you can't shoot a gun straight at the start of the game. And at some level, you just have to run with this.

But imagine if they had replicated that in the second game. You've spent the entire first game killing enemies just by looking at them, and now you're expected to level up your sniper rifle skills again? And if they make the game a challenge for your massively over-powered character from the first game, then anyone playing the second game first would be at a massive disadvantage. Two very different difficulty curves would have to be created for the game.

Their solution isn't perfect, but I think starting you off with top-notch shooting skills and access to proper guns from the start is a fairly good compromise. Your character earned all these things in the first game and it would have been a dick move to take them away just because that's how an RPG is supposed to work... damn the internal logic of the story.

Mind you, you're still a bit of a godlike character on the lower difficulty settings