Mass Effect 2 Announced For Early 2010

Bioware has confirmed rumors that development for the sequel to Mass Effect is well under way, and they're planning on a release in early 2010. They mentioned PC and Xbox 360 versions of the game, but no information was given about a possible PS3 version. CVG has a write-up of what we know about Mass Effect 2 so far. Quoting: "In the shooting department the developer's official announcement promises 'intensified combat' and 'expanded weapon options.' We're hoping some of the work goes on improving the game's shooting mechanics, which were solid enough but could certainly do with some polishing to meet 2010 standards — especially in the cover system department. As for 'expanded weapon options,' we can only assume this refers to the in-depth gun tweaking and customisation options available in Mass Effect 1."

Comments

Re:Sequels

[theArtificial]

Or trilogy in this case...

How about more variety?

[g0del]

I guess a new cover system might be nice, but I'd much rather they spent time designing side-quests that didn't all take place on identical ships/outposts etc.

Re:How about more variety?

[NeutronCowboy]

True. After a while, I knew where the mobs would be and where the target would be without ever having set foot in that particular facility. All it took was identifying what the first room looked like, and everything was identical after that.

Other than that, the game was damn near perfect.

Re:How about more variety?

[Doctor_Jest]

I'd like if they decide to use the Mako again, they'll patch the console version with the updated and less twitchy controls they put in the PC version of the first one. I'd also like there to be more sidequests than "outpost X is overrun" or "no one's heard from outpost Y" as well.

But fix the bloody Mako controls. :) That was the only part of the game that frustrated the hell out of me. The rest was pretty good.

Re:How about more variety?

[Gulthek]

The mako controls were awesome. I could make that thing turn on a dime and run circles around those giant serpents. I've never felt more connected to a game vehicle except for the warthogs from Halo. I explored so much of each planet it's just not even funny. I spent literally hours navigating mountain ridges just for the hell of it. It's like they took lunar lander and made it 3d and awesome.

Thank goodness they didn't borrow control schemes from Half-Life 2 eh?

Re:How about more variety?

[hansamurai]

They hired 30 more artists and designers back in February pretty much for this point I'm guessing. I agree with you though.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22530

Re:How about more variety?

[skeletor935]

PREPARE TO DIE!

Re:How about more variety?

[Zemrec]

The landing and Mako driving parts always reminded me of Star Control 2 and driving around searching for minerals and biological samples and such. God I loved that game! I wish they'd make something similiar with Mass Effect.

How about instead of buying your gear and upgrades, you only got the blueprints, and you needed to gather the raw materials on the planets you land on? That'd give me incentive to explore, and there'd be more valuable or rare materials on the dangerous worlds.

Re:How about more variety?

[Doctor_Jest]

Exactly! when the controls weren't sluggish enough, the Normandy ALWAYS put us down on the planet on the OTHER HEMISPHERE from where we needed to be. :) It's like a cheesy version of Star Trek's "away" team, without the green alien chick to bang. And forget the hot lava navigation or the rock spires that reached out of the atmosphere (meaning there was usually only one or two ways to get to each location, and depending upon which you chose, you would be stuck with a certain amount of Geth or Maws to contend with It was a crapshoot to determine which way wasn't more treacherous). To each his own, I suppose. I am glad to know the Mako wasn't universally panned. :) Of course that means we're more than likely going to get the original control scheme back "because of user requests"... all 3 of them.

Re:Sequels

[zombietangelo]

Agree with your sentiment, generally, but Mass Effect has been planned to be a trilogy since its conception.

Re:Sequels

[JB19000]

Mass Effect was a game I enjoyed enough to deserve a sequel. So the fighting was mediocre. The dialog system was incredible. If anything I want more talking missions.

Re:Sequels

[celnick]

Wow, props for the immediately ignorant first post.

Mass Effect was ALWAYS planned as the first in a trilogy telling a larger story.

Good to know that you actually pay attention before spouting off ignorance.

It was always supposed to be a trilogy

[grapeape]

Bioware announced Mass Effect as the first part of a Trilogy at the 2006 E3.

Re:Sequels

[broken_chaos]

...Uh. So your reasoning is that anything that isn't stand-alone is automatically crap, even if it was planned out as a trilogy in the beginning? That sounds very flawed to me.

Personally, I'm looking forward to it. Perhaps the combat wasn't amazing in Mass Effect, but the story and overall *fun* made up for it, to me.

Re:Sequels

[Trahloc]

I wish I had mod points to bring you up from -1. The game is part of a story arch, it wasn't artificially expanded because sales were good, it was designed that way.

Re:Sequels

[Trahloc]

Don't play then. The rest of us are looking forward to part 2 and 3.

Re:Sequels

[enderjsv]

True, but sometimes the sequel get's it even more right. Can you imagine a world without Zelda: Ocarina of time? Or Half life 2?

I'm not opposed to well thought out sequels. It's the Electronic-Arts-sequel-every-year-regardless-of-need-or-quality that I'm opposed to.

(To EA - Keep developing games like Dead Space and Mirror's Edge and I'll stop making you the brunt of all my gripes)

Re:Sequels

[im_thatoneguy]

For instance:

Maybe this time around we can get an inventory screen that actually works.

Sorts by Name.
Groups identical items.
Allows easy comparison of items.
Generally makes it possible to open your inventory and not feel like dieing.

-

I love sequels. If it's a game I like I want 100 more of them. Another fallout game? Yes please. Another star trek movie? Hell yes.

Down with sequels! Down with adaptations! George Lucas should have stopped at a new hope! Peter Jackson should never have made LOTR! Hamlet should never be performed again! It was good enough in 1590 why make another production of it!? Why oh why did valve ever make Team Fortress 2!

Re:Sequels

[Kagura]

Mass Effect 2 will be a great success if they only do one thing differently:

FIX THE DUNGEONS. That's all they need to do to make their blockbuster even more bockblustery.

Weapon variety please!

[Elrond, Duke of URL]

One of my biggest complaints with the first game were the entirely generic weapons and mods. There were differences between types of weapons, but that was it. The routine eventually comes down to:

1. Kill and collect everything until inventory is full.
2. Equip best X for each party member.
3. Sell entire inventory except for best anti-personnel and anti-armor mods.
4. Repeat.

There was never any reason to break from this pattern and this essentially made the weapons generic "loot" to collect. If that was all they were intended to be, just automatically give the player credits instead.

Named and unique weapons would go a long way towards fixing this. I think only few times during the whole game did I actually scavenge a useful weapon. All of the others were bought in stores. The situation is almost identical for mods, except that I did acquire more useful mods via scavenging.

The weapon mods also had the addition problem of being almost entirely useless. All enemies fit into two categories: organic or mechanical. Simply equip the appropriate mod to boost your organic or mechanical damage bonus and fire away. I rarely had to stray from this model. When you get the ability to equip two weapon mods things open a little, but that happens rather late in the game.

Armor mods fared slightly better, but only a little. In general, I found the best way to operate was to equip most part members with the best shield boosting mods available. Makes everybody much harder to kill.

Re:Weapon variety please!

[viperblades]

the higher level guns (and higher quality) equip 2 weapon mods and an ammo mod. the lower level ones equip an ammo mod what you described and a weapon mod (no idea how you cant count more accuracy as not useful.

example setups ive used

shotgun
heatsink to prevent overheat
knockback rounds

rifle
heatsink to fire longer
stability to stay more accurate
poison rounds (they arent called that but its basically what they do. they lower enemies abilites.)

sniper rifle
accuracy mod
explosive rounds

Re:Weapon variety please!

[Elrond, Duke of URL]

Yes, I'm aware of the mod amounts. When I said 2, I meant the ability to equip two weapon mods instead of just one. And more accuracy *is* useful, I simply meant that once you find a useful setup there is almost no need to change it ever.

I suppose variety is good in that it gives different players different load outs, but it would be much more useful if any given player had reason to occasionally change mods. But, in the end, there are just too many mods of dubious value which most players will almost never have need to equip. So they become generic "baubles" whose only purpose is to be collected and sold for cash.

Re:Weapon variety please!

[Tuidjy]

Mods were useless? Heh. I remember my sister taking a look at me
playing, and wondering "Where did you get a rocket launcher, I never
saw one!" It was just a sniper rifle with two damage mods and
some explosive bullets that had splash damage. One shot would
overheat it (three or four times over) but the damage was enough
to take out everything but the big walking tanks in one shot.

Re:Weapon variety please!

[Aladrin]

Indeed. I spent a lot of time turning mediocre weapons into fearsome tools of destruction. There were definitely combinations that were a lot better than others.

Re:Weapon variety please!

[hansamurai]

For the first two thirds of the game, the best weapons were typically found in the field, after that, you usually had enough money to start buying Spectre class weapons and then that was pretty much over with.

There were also a lot more mods then just organic/geth, but those are extremely helpful once you start getting them.

Re:Sequels

[Yaur]

The real question in my mind is do we get a typical EA sequel or a typical Bioware sequel.

So, elevators again?

[Anenome]

We can only pray that ME2 is blissfully elevator free (and therefore without 20 min. of load-time between scenes) ;P

Piloting

[jlebrech]

Would love to be able to pilot the ship.

Maybe some turret missions would be great, asteroid dodging too.

And would like more choice when it comes to planetary drops, the mako got boring.
would like planets you finished quests on to be revisited and maybe more quest done for that planet.

Re:Piloting

[TheDarkMaster]

I agree. And if possible, the option to command space battles between spaceships too

Re:Piloting

[JSBiff]

I would like to see a smaller 'aerial/space fighter' type ship which can be launched from the main ship, a la the Mako, and some missions/maps which bring an element of an old school 'shoot-em-up' to the game. The mako missions, to some extent, did that a little bit, but I have an immersion problem with a deep future, high-tech game where any time you are on a planet, you are moving in a slow tank - that makes no sense most of the time; I can see that certain missions could require a tank (like a mission where you have to go into some sort of cave/tunnel system, or there are too many SAM turrets guarding an area so it would be suicide to fly through) - but the simple truth is that almost all of the maps in the original Mass Effect would have made sense to use a small fighter craft to fly to one of the bases, shoot the small number of rocket launchers with your air craft, then land (I'm assuming VTOL capabilities here - not unreasonable since we already have VTOL in real life) and enter the building.

But, as with you, I would also like to see your main ship actually become part of the gameplay as well. I was rather disappointed it never was. Would even be cool if the Mako, Fighter, and Main Ship were upgradeable over the course of the game (for example - the Mako had some vertical thrusters, but there were many times I wish it had some horizontal thrusters which would give you a small 'forward' boost (where 'forward' is the direction along the axis from the rear of the mako to the nose of the mako, so for example, if you are climbing a steep hill and the mako 'stalls' it's upward/forward motion, you could get a little boost to help you finish climbing; the downward boosters were almost useless most of the time because they would just launch you off of the mountain and you'd proceed to fall all the way down to the bottom).

The final few couple of things I would have liked to have changed in the game are, 1) inventory management: it would be nice if I could quickly find and turn all the true low-value junk into gel quickly; 2) Sell off all the medium-value stuff quickly without much hassle, and spend my inventory management time considering which higher-value stuff I want to keep, and which stuff I want to sell. Inventory management is the one thing that just *killed* my enjoyment of that game. I had fun, until I had to stop playing for 1/2 an hour at a time to deal with inventory.

Re:Piloting

[flitty]

Piloting the ship would also make sense for the exploration/barren planet garbage of the first game. If you give me a destination planet, it damn well better have more than a single outpost with 20 people in it. However, if I'm flying though space and find an uncharted planet in some backwater galaxy, having a few people there makes sense in the lore.

I played it on my 360 (then sold both)

[AbRASiON]

I enjoyed Mass Effect, I would give it a comfortable 7.5/10 and 3 of that is for the amazing, moody music.
(Admitedly I was 'emo' at that time of my life myself)
None the less, lovely music, incredible graphics, not a bad story and gameplay, well... I don't know, people seem to rave about Biowares stuff but Kotor and Mass Effect did not do it for me, they sit in the action RPG area but the action is a bit well lame for choice of a better word and the RPG elements just didn't feel fully fleshed out.

Oblivion is a 'proper' RPG I would say (although they are dying out) and Fable makes for a good action RPG, heavy on the action (not a Fable 2 fan though)

I'd buy Mass Effect 2 but I will say, I would not buy another 360 for it, if it's not available for my PS3 or PC, well, no sale.

Re:I played it on my 360 (then sold both)

[timftbf]

Oblivion is an FPS with RPG trappings. If success in combat depends more on *my* ability to manipulate twin thumb-sticks and buttons quickly than *my character's* supposed combat abilities (driven by my decision-making), the game is a shooter, not an RPG.

I've just picked up Mass Effect cheaply, but haven't played yet. I'm hoping it's better in this regard; some previous forum trawling suggests that I'll be able to steer the gameplay in the direction of tactical combat decisions over twitch shooting.

Re:I played it on my 360 (then sold both)

[elrous0]

You should play Fallout 3. IMHO, it's even more RPG-like than Oblivion (thanks the the V.A.T.S. system, which gives it more of a turn-based feel--though this is optional for the player). The only thing it's missing is a "magic" or "biotics" type equivalent.

Re:I played it on my 360 (then sold both)

[TrekkieTechie]

I acquired Mass Effect and Coldplay's Viva la Vida within a few days of each other. I desperately wanted to play the game and listen to the album, but didn't want to give up one for the other... so I muted Mass Effect's music and put Viva la Vida on the stereo.

Long after getting my fill of Viva la Vida, I was still playing Mass Effect. It took a few months to realize that I'd been playing the whole time with the in-game music still muted.

Re:Sequels

[nothing2seehere]

If people modded your post as a troll simply because they disagreed with you, I sympathize with you - that would make Slashdot no better than (shudder) Digg.

However, if people modded you down because the quality of your post was poor, which it was, then more power to them.

Love the original

[hansamurai]

Mass Effect is definitely my favorite game of the current generation. Beat it three times in February alone.

The only thing I think that really needs fixing is the Mako. It just drove so crappily. Or maybe it was the way they designed the worlds. 75% of them had gigantic mountains and crags every five feet.

Anyways, can't wait for the game, but yet I will patiently wait. Bring it on.

let's hope it's a simultaneous release

[DragonTHC]

they waited a good year and a half to release on PC.

I bought it for PC. It kicked much ass. I played it in full 1080p. Ran like butter.

The only thing I didn't like was the fact that to play "bring down the sky", you had to play through the whole game again. I had already finished it before BDTS came out for PC.

anyway, it was a true masterpiece and I look forward to seeing what bioware comes up with.

Re:let's hope it's a simultaneous release

[whiplashx]

Lol dude... the game only came out 15 months ago.

Re:let's hope it's a simultaneous release

[DragonTHC]

it feels like a year and a half then!

The MACO

[elrous0]

And for God's sake, make that damn thing easier to drive! I played that game through three times (incl. on insanity) and after all those many hours, I still couldn't drive that thing worth a damn by the end.

Re:The MACO

[Fishbulb]

That's "Mako" - it's a type of shark.
(and a concept car that influenced the Corvette)

And I thought the Mako was fun to drive! It was like a little R/C dune buggy with jets. You just never flipped it. :)

Re:The MACO

[MemoryDragon]

depends on the platform the thing was pretty easy to drive on the PC...
The entire game was way better on the PC than on the xbox, and cheaper as well

REALLY Looking Forward to This

[Logical Zebra]

I already owned a PS3, but I bought an XBOX 360 pretty much just so I could play the original Mass Effect.

I'm a die-hard RPG fan, and I'm actually looking forward to Mass Effect 2 more than Final Fantasy XIII. (Which is probably a good thing, since I'm pretty sure Duke Nukem Forever will come out before FF13 does.

Re:Sequels

[elrous0]

A modern game as complex as Mass Effect (ME) costs a *LOT* of money to develop (the time and effort it took just to write such a complex backstory and create such an in-depth "world" of ME must have been staggering). If a developer is going to put that kind of money and effort into a game (not to mention the incredible *risk* that it might fail or have mediocre sales), they need to know that they're not just doing it as a "one off" game. If ME had no possibility of a sequel and no further possibility for using its intellectual property (IP) in anything else, it would never have justified the development money that was put into it. No one is going to make a videogame that can cost $30-$50 million just to develop and market if they can't at least hope for an ongoing valuable IP.

I get what you're saying, especially in regards to modern movies. But, unlike with movies, it's a lot more difficult to make a truly great modern videogame "on the cheap." Sure, you can do some minigame or something cool like "Braid" without too much cost. But a full-fledged modern game like ME, that costs big bucks--no getting around it.

Re:Sequels

[ControversialMatt]

They could do a best (or worst) of both worlds: Madden Effect 2010

Re:Sequels

[Dr. Hellno]

Actually the dialogue system kind of bothered me. I appreciate that they wanted to save screen real-estate, but I like to be in control of what my character is going to say, or at least to know it before hand. In Mass Effect, I often found myself misreading the tone of the 2 or 3 word summaries of dialogue choices. It made it much harder for me to relate to Sheppard, since he was always adding emotions or inferences to the dialogue that I didn't expect or see as appropriate.

Re:Sequels

[jgtg32a]

I thought that the Dialog system was nice I just hated the dialog in the game, I'm not sure I just had the feeling that everyone was acting like they were 15 y/o.

That's been my impression so far, I was about 7-9 hours in and then I upgraded to Vista and didn't backup my save. So I need to start over again.

Re:Sequels

[Hellpop]

This Troll also shows that they know absolutely nothing about the game, since when ME was first announced BioWare stated that it was intended to be a trilogy. Way to impress us, d00d!