Mass Effect 2

I last finished the original Mass Effect in January and recently started Mass Effect 2 again. This is the first time I've played these games in such close proximity and it's like warping to a parallel universe. This post will focus on the differences between the two games and how they affect the overall experience.

Design by Subtraction

Many of ME1's systems simply didn't work. The inventory system was a clunky mess, planetary exploration felt like a tech demo, and gunplay could be anemic. BioWare's solution to most of these problems was "if it doesn't work, remove it entirely."

Inventory is totally gone. The closest analogue is the equipment screen that lets you customize your party's weapon loadout. Using this screen is almost completely pointless, however, because there are now only 2-3 guns in each category and each new gun is strictly better than the one it replaces. Once you acquire the Carnifex heavy pistol, there is no reason to use the Predator ever again. The only reason to bother is to change Shepard's selected heavy weapon. (Heavy weapons are now a separate category; no more upgrading your ordinary guns into rocket launchers. Indeed, weapon customization itself was also left on the cutting-room floor.) To be fair, ME1's inventory was really bad. To equip each party member, you needed to walk over to and interact with their locker in the cargo bay. No access from the pause menu, no way to cycle through your party efficiently. Each party member also needed to have one gun of each type equipped at all times, even if they had no training with it. (In order for two characters to swap guns, you needed a third placeholder gun.)

On the other hand, BioWare proved that they were capable of competently designing an inventory system with Dragon Age: Origins, which released almost three months prior to ME2. The fact that the lessons learned from Dragon Age weren't incorporated into Mass Effect's design suggests to me that there was a worrying lack of cross-pollination between the Dragon Age and Mass Effect teams. (From what I've heard, Mass Effect: Andromeda is extremely similar to Dragon Age: Inquisition. I haven't played either game, but it sounds like that problem has been solved, for better or for worse.)

Overall, the new system works...OK. Anything is better than ME1's dumpster fire, and the simplified system allowed for new options like customizing Shepard's armor to suit your tastes without having to worry about its stats. This does impact the moment-to-moment gameplay, which I'll get into later.

My Shepard is wearing hot pink space armor, because why not?

The removal of planetary exploration fared less well. ME1 tantalized players with the opportunity to explore strange new worlds by landing on and exploring their surfaces. Unfortunately, that game promised more than it could deliver in this area. The Mako controlled oddly, vehicular combat was simplistic, every building looked the same, thresher maws were a colossal pain in the ass, and the planets had beautiful skyboxes but muddily-textured procedurally generated terrain that wasn't much fun to traverse. ME2 replaced this experience with...scanning from orbit.

Who convinced BioWare that this was a good idea?

This is one of the most tedious things a game has ever asked me to do. You hold down a button to scan, sloooowly move your reticle around the planet, then press another button to launch a probe whenever you pick something up. Periodically you will run out of probes and will need to buy more. You don't technically have to do this to complete the game, but the resources you gather are needed to build upgrades for your squad and your ship, and party members will die if certain upgrades aren't completed before the final mission.

Even the UI here is a mess. Those green bars at the bottom mean absolutely nothing. They "fill up" once you've accumulated 25,000 units of a given resource, but you can still collect more. You'll need to, since there are plenty of upgrades that cost more than that arbitrary number. What was the intention there? More damningly, the way the resources (Element Zero, Iridium, Platinum, and Palladium) are displayed on this screen suggests that they are of equal importance. This is a filthy lie. It contradicts the game lore, in which Element Zero (the Applied Phlebotinum of the Mass Effect universe) is by far the most valuable resource, which itself contradicts the gameplay, in which the player will desperately scour every planet they find for the tiniest scrap of platinum while carrying around cargo holds filled to the brim with the other three resources.

Why, BioWare, why?

Hotter! Sexier! More Explosions!

It's hard to escape the conclusion that BioWare saw Mass Effect 2 as an opportunity to grow their audience beyond the dweeby nerds that bought ME1 and break into the action game market. The word "streamlining" was no doubt written on every whiteboard at every developer meeting. This would be done even if it meant streamlining elements beloved by the aforementioned RPG nerds out of existence. Not only is character equipment gone, but so are all enemy loot drops. Omni-gel as a concept has been totally abandoned. In general, enemies are no longer "RPG enemies" that function as source of items, money, and experience points, but are now "shooter enemies" that actually use up your resources. This was done by the introduction of "thermal clips." In-universe, they are result of every weapon manufacturer receiving brain damage at the same time and deciding to make less effective guns. In real life, BioWare saw that action gamers liked Call of Duty, decided that they wanted in on some of that Call of Duty money, and concluded that since you need to reload your gun in Call of Duty, you should have to do the same thing in Mass Effect 2. Since this contradicted the lore that the guns in this setting almost never need to be reloaded, "ammunition" became "single-use disposable heat sinks."

This image encapsulates everything I find jarring about this game.

The end-of-mission report screen gives me mental whiplash every time I see it. Is this supposed to be what Shepard sees in-universe? How does the Illusive Man know what level I am or what a "Squad Point" is? It's also completely redundant; everything you need to know will pop up as a notification in the bottom-right corner of the screen when you receive something important. My favorite element, however, is the "Close Report" tab that occurs at the bottom of the list every time this screen appears. Clicking on it does not close the report; only the Exit button will do that. It's just there, with no justification for its existence. Is this screen for players who can't be bothered to remember the things they just did and need them spelled out in painfully explicit detail, down to informing them that it is possible to close the report they are currently reading? I challenge anyone who denies that games have been dumbed down in recent years to come up with a better explanation for this.

I've been pretty down on Mass Effect 2 in this post, but my experience with the game was certainly not a negative one overall. Next up, I'll be judging the game on its own merits rather than concentrating on what its older brother did better.

Taking screenshots in Origin can be a pain. Protip: install Greenshot, bind full-screen capture to a single key, set captures to save without prompting, and run the game in borderless window mode.