wasnt the mako originally suposed to be upgradable? im sure that was one of their original ideas. wonder why it was canned?

I'm still on my launch console and i got pretty rubbish frame rates here and then, though i never had anything as bad as 5FPS, i did get around 10-15 at certain times, Pretty awful for a console title, but we'll live :)

I remember KOTOR got crazy slow at times, like, it was bad. There were some huge important battles where I just had to reload cause the framerate got so bad. But that game was so damn long and so good, I didn't really care. I have to say, Mass Effects few problems shine through a bit more due to its length.

And ye, there was an idea for it to be upgradeable. But apparently there was something like 200 planets to visit originally (I actually mean visit), which totally would have been possible with the way they did the planets (repetitive skins, though I still enjoyed it all).

Now that I look back at Mass Effect, I think I'd rank it low in comparison to other Bioware games. I loved KOTOR so much, and it just kept going, and Jade Empire was pretty freaking amazing too, and was about 30 hours with absolutely no repition. But I'd still rank it high among most of the games I've played ever. It's an amazing but flawed game, and after having played it for a good period of time, I have to say the potential for it to have been my favourite Bioware game (vast potential, combat, dialogue and story presentation were all phenomenal) is what disappoints me the most. I hope nothing happens due to EA.

I'm going to say something possibly controversial here, it didn't deserve the crazy high reviews it received. I think I would put it at an 8.

I agree, my playthroughs are smooth as ice? i guess my Mass Effect loves me :)

i dropped to about 1 frame every 10 seconds, but it had loaded wrong (exited a building and it went haywire) but after the reload it was fine

but yeah it goes slow at times lol

i just wish the story planets where a little more like KOTOR's where each one had an almost citidel like HUB where you could talk to people and get quests (some down to earth, some combat focused) and then you could leave the safety of the "HUB" and do some combat/quest based stuff (remember the planet in KOTOR with the murder and you had to find out who did it....mass effect never really reached that level of "wow, so much to do". practically all the story planets where combat focused and while they had very small HUB's they never felt big enough imo, they certainly didnt put across a feeling that the place was far bigger then what you could explore like the citidel did. it felt rushed.

as for the planets i prefare they way they did it in the final then their initial idea of having 200+ explorable planets. mainly becasue there was a small amount of narative that went with each planet, from meeting up with a survivor from that planet shepard was the 'sole survivor' of, to coming across a ship that was empty apart from a guy on life suport. they wern't the most interesting of places to look at since every mine looked the same, every underground complex looked the same, and every above ground building looked the same. but im glad they added in that narative for each one, becasue i have a feeling if we where given 200+ planets to explore freely, the extent of the side quests would have been collecting stuff and killing stuff with no real reasoning behind it except EXP.

and while i agree is may not have deserved the super high marks its been getting. its definately my GOTY. but thats becasue im a sucker for a great story. take that away from mass effect tho and you end up with a pretty shoddy game imo.

also. back to the KOTOR comparison. i didnt feel anything really matched that big twist in the story that was in KOTOR. although it sort of made up for it in the fact it was all consistantly amazing.

What you all have to realize is that as much i love KOTOR, Mass Effect is a trilogy and as such a lot of stuff has to be left for the other 2 parts and with this level of presentation and graphics, if it had as much content as kotor, we would not be seeing this game for another few years! and i for one would have died waiting :(, also this game is more like playing a fast paced action movie, this was very deliberate as Bioware are most certainly trying to satisfy its RPG fans, whilst bringing onboard a whole new legion of fans who would never have touched this game if it was the next KOTOR, all you have to do is head over to other Mass Effect forums, hell even this one to see how many shooter fans or action adventure fans have decided to give mass effect a try, because the whole package is more appealing to them. I loved KOTOR but for me Mass Effect aced it, the whole ride was adrenaline fulled from begining to end.

But thats part of my quarrel with Mass Effect DC. When a developer makes a game more accessible to a wider audience, some depth has to be left out, and you lose something that was in previous games. It happened with Oblivion too. I loved Morrowind, but it was crazy complex, way to daunting for most regular gamers (most people couldn't even figure out how to start the main quest), but Oblivion shed away a lot of its depth and complexity to make it more accessible. It was still a great game, but there was a piece of its...I dunno, soul (I guess) that was missing, and I fealt that in Mass Effect as well. Seriously, I think Mass Effect should have been a duology at the lenth that it is. Actually, it didn't even need that, they easily could have expanded the game's length to twice what it was. O well...

It depends what your looking for, i knew from following this game from its conception it would not be another KOTOR, hell the developers mentioned it nearly all the time, so i was not surprised and disappointed, when i got to play it, as i knew it was not another Kotor, which for me was cool as i wanted a fresh new experience and thats what i got, and i loved it, depth wise i think this game is very deep , the lack of true turn based combat will always upset some or make it seem less of a true RPG, hell i was upset when i heard shooter mechanics were being implemented in this as i loved the KOTOR turnbased combat, then i played mass effect and now i can't imagine going back to turnbased only RPG games.

Could this game have used a few more Citadel like planets to visit and explore?, hell yeah!, but thats down to $$ and release dates schedules, something that we as gamers have had to get used too over time, but did this take away from a great gaming experience? for me hell to the NO!

Come on DC, you know I wasn't talking about Mass Effect being a sequel to KOTOR. I'm talking about the depth and size of the game, which was severely missing. I think I've expressed, and the basics are absolutely perfected. The combat was challenging and fun, the story was told better than its been told in any game, the dialogue system was fun (though not quite as crazy as it was supposed to be, but still better than any other before it), and the difficulty was at just the right level. Everything was there for the game to be amazing, but the depth I've experienced in other Bioware games, and have come to expect from any great RPG, was simply missing. I don't particularly care for the turn based system, but I care about depth.

Now i'm confused when you say DEPTH is missing, exactly what do you mean?

Come now, how can you be confused. The worlds were barren, the sidequests were all basically the same (though I still had a ton of fun doing them) and the main questline was bare bones for an rpg. The game was...well it was easy for an rpg, I finished almost everything on my first playthrough, which was around 30 hours, and I did a lot of meandering too.

Im with you DC, what do you mean by "Depth"? As in a back story? If thats the case it has depth for days!

The game stands alone by itself quite easily, thats one thing i can't deny, its not one of those games you pay full price for and at the end of it feel its incomplete or something was missing *cough*assassins creed*cough*. I can't wait for the next downloadable episodic content while i wait for the next big installment.

The story had everything a good story should have :

A beginning - The backstory you get to choose and sarens betrayal of the council

A Middle - Your battles on Noveria, your rescue of the asari scientist , your destruction of the lab ect ect

And most importantly an Ending - Your defeat of the reaper ship, becoming the savior of the citadel And all this is open ended enough for a new part of the story to be added on, Although i don't expect any of the next main story until ME2, but i should expect just little side missions, and hopefully a new populated world in downloadable content.


It took me weeks to get to the end of KOTOR (i never actually finished it, it got too hard!) but it only took me two days to complete ME, sort of a problem, but its ALOT longer then most games out today, played it 14 hours the day i got it, i could have completed COD4 numerous times in that amount of time.

Tbh ME is .2 on my greatest games of all time, only second to Half Life.

Edit :

Ahh i see what you mean, be fair, they did make alot of planets, I've said numerous times the other planets were lame and made the game feel crap, but there was alot of content there, every one of those lil sideline games had its own story, voice acting and environment, you know how long, like it was said before, they had time and money constraints, you cant make a masterpiece on your first try, this being a new console , new technology and a new story. ME2 will undoubtedly blow your socks off.

he means what he said earlier, the simple fact bioware have tried and succeeded in making the game more accessible to shooter fans or adventure fans alike had caused the depth of combat etc to suffer as a result. its a case of deus ex invisible war for me. the devs have tried to bring in a larger crowd, but in doing so have sacrifised not only a lot of what made the previous game so good, but 50% of the depth as well.

To be fair, the Game Industry is as much of a 100% money making as any other job.

They make good games, people buy them, fair play on them if they want to attract more people, at the end of the day they want as many people to buy the game as possible, can you blame them? Just because they try to make it accessible to a wider audience doesn't mean they aren't working hard as hell :(

Plus, now they can hear what the audience says and correctly adjust to the second game, hopefully, im kind of doubtful about that as EA are involved!

its not that they've worked any less, or not as hard. its just the game itself has suffered becasue they're trying to appeal to a wider audience. and granted its all about the money so you cant blame them. but when you compare mass effect to deus ex (both action RPG's) the fact a game like mass effect is dumbed down to appeal to the shooter junkies becomes painfully obvious.

Well we were playing two very different games as for me it was the exact opposite!! and as i said earlier i agree there could have been a few more main planets to equal kotors amount, but its the way all these next-gen games are being made bigger presentations and less game length, yeah it sucks, but its the nature of the beast.What!! the combat is an in depth as you want it to be, IMO even more so than KOTOR only without the turnbased elements, i have played the hell out of both and each has a very deep combat systems.

For anyone that is confused, Sheps worded it perfectly here. It took me weeks to beat KOTOR as well, and a lot of parts were tough (and because of it tons of people didn't finish it). But you see, that is what I love, the insane length, and the difficulty, its all the depth. KOTOR was actually pretty easy once you figured out how to do everything, but it was tough to get to that point. I mean, the game was freaking huge, which I love.

So basically, yes, we have accessibility but at the loss of depth. And I agree with DC on one point, the combat is excellent, it still has depth (tactics, weapons, levelling, biotics and tech, along with managing your team), and its a ton of fun.

I think this is were i am being misunderstood, length and depth are two different things, as i said before if this game had another 3/4 main planets (around +10/15hrs) i dont think we would be having this conversation , as for KOTOR being hard? i only died about 4 times on hard through the whole game, it took me more attempts just to get past the first mini boss fight on Therum in Mass Effect, but i guess different people have different ways of going about combat in RPG's.

Well thats pretty selfish if you ask me. I'm one of the guys how even found Oblivion way too complex in terms of diffrents weapons and armors and the previous one I didn't even play through the first main quest. I want to pop the game into my console and have instant fun and there are VERY few RPGs that allow that gameplay.

On the other side the main quest and even some of the sidequests, altho the sidequests could be a bit longer at times, were soo deep in terms of story and player-npc interaction. Bioware did it in their previous games like Jade Empire, too. The focus was on a deep story and gameplay and they nailed it. I always found usual RPG combat to be stale and not fun at all.

So in the end I have to strongly disagree, Bioware focused on quality not on massive amount of complexity and this is a good thing. It's an R-P-G, and in my mind it stands for a strong story and player driven game, where you can interact with other characters. I doubt that the definition of an RPG includes mad complexity. So basicaly Bioware got back to what RPG initially was standing for.

Edit: Combatwise the game for me had a lot of depht. Mind you I played a pure biotic on my first playthrough and had a hard time when I started the game on hard, but I got the hang out of it after the first main quest and it was a ton of fun thinking of stratagys like lifting enemys and throwing them alltogether away or use abilitys of my tech character. Now I'm playing as a soldier and i have to say it's nowhere near as fun as a biotic. It's very easy even on hard and you basicaly can run through without tactics, I feel sorry for everyone who experianced the game that way. After that I'm going to play as a tech, this time on insane. I hope it's at aleast as much fun as biotics. :D

Dude, rpgs are complex, it just doesn't sound like you're a big rpg person. And, now that I think about it, Mass Effect is kinda bridging the gap, noooo!!! But depth, that includes length, complexity, and the amount to discover. Mass Effect was lacking length, complexity, and it was really only information to discover, nothing more. Now, the galactic codex is cool, but it in no way signifies depth.

No way is Mass Effect less complex than KOTOR, and as for exploring if you followed the game from concept it was never going to be very deep on the exploration side, well not to KOTOR levels anyway, and i've already talked about the length issue.

But hey we both think its a great game, so its all good.

dont worry guys, mass effect 2 will be much better

i saw this interview, cant remember where, but alot of time they spent making mass effect wasnt even building the worlds and missions onto a disk

first they had to come up with the idea, the story, the characters the goals of the game, plenty of research.which took them about a year. then they said the technolagy took them about a year to build up which left them just under 2 years to actually put the ideas into reality and make the game. the same time spent on COD4 which is alot shorter and less ambitious then ME, (but utterly brillient of course)

something the main men at ME said stook in my head, they said,
again,cant remember what interview this was, and this isnt EXACLY what they said i dont have super memory, but it was very much along the lines of:

'i hope this console lifecycle is much longer (then ps2/360/cube), because we spent a long time building this tech,a whole year, and now its made we would be able to make something that would have taken a year before in literally minutes.'

so there you have it.now they have all the tech and practice with it i think ME2 will take 2 years to make (rather then ME1s 4 years!!) so christmas 2009 sounds like it could be possible. but only time will tell...