Slashdot Mirror
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."
Or trilogy in this case...
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
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.
Agree with your sentiment, generally, but Mass Effect has been planned to be a trilogy since its conception.
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.
"Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble."
Bioware announced Mass Effect as the first part of a Trilogy at the 2006 E3.
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.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
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)
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:
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.
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
We can only pray that ME2 is blissfully elevator free (and therefore without 20 min. of load-time between scenes) ;P
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
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.