Mass Effect for PC is...

D

DirtyDreamDesigner

Venerable Relic of the Wastes
Moderator
... a supremely entertaining romp through a lore-rich galaxy rife with adventure, interesting worlds and <s>lesbian alien sex</s> stunning visuals. It's KOTOR minus the midichlorians.

No, rly.

I've been playing it a lot and I like it. Sure, it's no Fallout, and sure, it's much more of a third person shooter than an RPG, but the atmosphere is good, the characters are pretty interesting and the story, a solid if simple space-opera fits it perfectly. <s>Also, lesbian alien sex</s>.

Although the game is really good there are some weak points. The planet explorations get repetitive fast, as does driving the Mako. As often ridiculed the dialogs are simple black and white affairs, but they are still about a bajillion times better than Oblivion. Shorter loads and smaller system requirements wouldn't hurt either. <s>Also, lesbian alien sex</s>.

All in all, I like it, a lot, and would gladly recommend it. <s>Also, lesbian alien sex</s>.
 
I've been playing it for the past few days as well, it is definitely a fun game.

My biggest gripe has to be with how buggy it is. Seriously: this rivals HG:L for buggiest release ever. Game-stopping GPF errors are commonplace whenever talking to another character on the normandy, not to mention the UE3 is a crappy engine built for consoles, and that "streaming" level/texture nonsense is horrendously inefficient compared to a 2 second load screen.

I suppose I should count myself lucky though, it seems that many users can't even get past the main menu.



Pros

- Great graphics(although the pixelated self-shadowing is gross, not to mention the bugs with low quality textures mixed in with the high quality ones)

- Good voice acting, I thought of hk47 when I first heard an Elcor.

- Besides being a completely generic sci-fi plot, it manages to suck you in quite well.

- Cool character creator (its a lot easier than oblivion as far as making a character that doesn't look like a putty-faced freak)


Cons

- MOTHERFCKING ELEVATORS.

- Terrain on explorable worlds, combined with how terrible the mako handles makes for a frustrating experience.

- Too easy. This is my first playthrough (Veteran/Shock Trooper), and it really isn't challenging. Sure Spectres are supposed to be badass, but you can run headlong into pretty much every enemy and demolish them without taking a scratch... and for the ones you can't (colossus/armature), you can just circle-strafe and again kill them effortlessly. This takes me out of the experience.

- Grenades are incredibly weak, and useless after the prologue.

- BAD weapon sounds. Seriously.

- Severe lack of variety in weapons.




Great game, but it could use quite a few tweaks.
 
Yeah...During my first hours I thought I was dealing with a great game too. After a few hours it turned out that I was deceived and that Mass Effect was nothing more than a shallow rpg, better than most rpgs out there but still rather bad by 1998-2002 standards. Just hate the fact that dialogs, even though they are rather well written and pretty well voice-acted do not correspond whatsoever to the dialog option you chose in the first place and that most choices and consequences are pretty hollow and illusory. First two thirds of the game are ok until you discover Saren's plan as regards the citadel. Also, the final battle was laughable...I guess that we are so angry for a decent rpg that Mass Effect might eventually be considered a good one but, it's really not. However, as you said, if you don't consider it more than a magnified third person shooter it's rather enjoyable ( but in that case, I really prefer playing Gears of War coop, even though it's pretty brainless ).
 
I've bought it yesterday and just had few ours to check it out.
My first impression is... KotOR. Like I've spawned at the Imperial starship.

Then I took out my gun. Oh, this is nice, I can take out my gun at a peaceful territory. But WTF? I can't shoot people there! Oh man.

Running pisses me off a bit. The camera is shaking and that annoys me well. Does anyone know if it can be switched off?

Graphics are... I don't know, but I've expected far better graphics from the system requirements I've seen. It plays rather smoothly on my Radeon X1650Pro 512Mb on 1280x1024. Character models are nicely done, but what the hell is with the illumination? It is really pixelated on the Normandy. Is it supposed to look like this? Or it's smth with my graphics card?
The Witcher looked far better with it's outdated Aurora for the first impression.

Also I checked a first combat. Man, I really don't understand the combat system. Can anyone explain it to me? Can I queue the actions somehow like in KotOR? Or I have to shoot in real time always? Can I use the tactics screen without holding that fucking spacebar for the whole time?

I agree with MrBumble on "Just hate the fact that dialogs, even though they are rather well written and pretty well voice-acted do not correspond whatsoever to the dialog option you chose in the first place and that most choices and consequences are pretty hollow and illusory".

Yes, It is very very KotORish. It even has it's own 'Force'. It looks quite pretty and I will dig into it for sure. It is a nice NewGen RPG, not an old-school for sure.

Ah, forgot to say: music is really good.
 
I can deal with the lack of KOTOR turn-based combat, but they really should increase the enemy AI's damage by about 300%, give them better aim, and teach them how to use cover.

I'm enjoying ME more the farther I progress with the main story (did every sidequest besides 'The Fan', explored every planet). I just got to Noveria and damn the Geth plasma rifle is fun.
 
I'm enjoying it too, although I agree with a lot of what has been said in this thread.

I don't agree that the story or dialogue are particularly well written, though. The story is very standard, in my opinion, without any surprises whatsoever, and the dialogue makes me cringe a lot of the time.

Still, it's good fun, if your expectations aren't too high.
 
i haven't seen it on the computer yet, but i own it on an xbox and found many of the same problems. it's buggy, the side quests are essentially color palette swaps, and the main quest is roughly 10 hours long. the only thing i know of that's different in the PC version is that the UI has been completely redone, and i believe it comes with the downloadable content that was originally separate.

i expected quite a bit more, but it is an enjoyable game. there are more installments planned, and i hope that they will have more of the depth that RPG fans were expecting. i found the game's universe to be interesting, with a lot of room for storytelling (although i wasn't expecting anything seriously original), but sadly a lot of this is condensed to an encyclopedia and nothing else. how they used that much background content to make one of the shortest games i've seen in years is bewildering.
 
What angers me most is the fucking dialogues. Cosmetic and meaningless choices galore. It's like they were actually trying to create the illusion of choice, hoping the console kiddies wouldn't notice when two or three seemingly different choices lead to one simple "yes/no" reply. The given choices are usually different from what the character actually says when you click them. Sometimes you end up really surprised when your character says something completely different from what the line you chose seemed to imply. How much more retarded can it get???

The U3 engine, while able to give some eye candy, is bloated and performs like shit. Loading times are short, but loading occurs, particularly on the Normandy, too often and in inconvenient places.

What I liked was the planet exploration, reminiscent of Star Control 2. But it gets somewhat repetitive, since the stuff you can do and find on planets is quite limited. The handling of the Mako is just silly.

I'm not particularly impressed with the story or the characters, but it's not bad. Voice acting is indeed good.

Overall, a decent TPS with added interactivity in the form of RPG elements. I'd give it 7.8/10
 
The illusion of choice in dialogue is one major thing I dont like about BioWare games. I don't know of any RPG's with voice acted dialogue that does not have it though. Vampire Bloodlines had it too, although to a lesser extent.

The other thing I hated both about ME and KOTOR was the tedium of getting from point A to point B. Not so much on the planets but rather in the NPC populated areas or hubs. The actual act of exploring those places is a tortue. There is so much loading, elevator riding, and simply boring long distance running required for simple quests that they become boring chores real fast. Even though every house in Oblivion had to load, I didn't find that as annoying for some reason. I don't know what it is. it could be level design or it could be the way characters move and run.

I liked the game overall from the beginning though. The story is great and so is the atmosphere. It's not without its flaws and the combat is sucky for how much of it there is (at least on 360) but I'd easily recommend this game to anyone.
 
In my opinion, KOTOR handled travel extremely well.

You could instantly teleport to the ebon hawk and back, or you could flick on burst of speed to run twice as fast.


I really don't think it can be compared with constant 45 second elevator rides, and no out of combat sprint.
 
Bummer, I did not manage to get it to work. Configured all setting ran the game and black screen nothing happens. Guess Ill wait for patch or some such.
 
Phil the Nuka-Cola Dude said:
I'm currently juggling ash/liara and wondering if there is going to be a human vs alien bitch-deathmatch sometime in the future.
Click to expand...

you only get to bag one of them before the end :|
 
Some things I forgot:

The music is great, fits perfectly.

The interface is a bit uncomfortable. Typical of a console port.
 
fedaykin said:
The interface is a bit uncomfortable. Typical of a console port.
Click to expand...

the interface is still awkward? i've only seen one picture of it, but that's pretty much the only thing that they worked on changing in the PC port.
 
fedaykin said:
The interface is a bit uncomfortable. Typical of a console port.
Click to expand...

Wha? Have you even seen the original? The game was delayed for soo long partly because they had to redesign the UI from scratch. It is a massive improvement over the console version.

930279_20071119_embed003.jpg



*edit*

Just took this pic, shitty dark room, but the UI is as good as any other shooter out there.

 
I also enjoyed the start of this game quite a lot, in a light-hearted way. The intro bit and sidequesting on Citadel station was all-right, and pretty fun in some places.

However, it quickly turned to shit when I went out to explore the galaxy. Driving the Mako really fucking sucks (seriously, terrible design decision) and the sidequests themselves are shit.

After trying some of those out, I'm now back into the storyline instead. But I think my perception of this game was wounded or something, I'm not enjoying it as much anymore. Still, I'll keep playing. I heard that the main quest is not that long, so hopefully it'll be fun.

But yeah Bioware... Cut the goddamn sidequest/planetary shit out for the next Mass Effect, it's bloody awful.
 
Well that part's obviously better. I don't know what the inventory looks like in the xbux version, but I didn't like how it was done on the PC.
 
fedaykin said:
Well that part's obviously better. I don't know what the inventory looks like in the xbux version, but I didn't like how it was done on the PC.
Click to expand...

oh jesus, the inventory system was horrible and very cumbersome on the xbox. i don't know if it's any different in the PC version.
 
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