I finally finished Mass Effect. Wow.

[madman25]

twesterm said:

naznatips said:

twesterm said:

Whatever the case, I'm 20-ish hours into Mass Effect 2 and it's fantastic (my gamertag doesn't reflect that since my 360 has been unplugged since I was using that cord for something lese >_>).  The only thing, I feel, it didn't improve from the first is that closed off feeling and minor HUD complaints.

HUD is signifficantly better on PC (in both games). I also didn't feel like there was less exploration, because there were more cities and more to do in them, unlike ME1 which literally had nothing but the Citadel for non-linear environments.

I know at least one thing console owners have better-- the planet scanning mini game.  haha!

I know one guy that *loves* resource scanning and has it down to a science and he's playing it on the console.  It's easy for him because he just holds a direction on the analog stick and goes.  One of the guys I know playing it on PC despises scanning planets because doing it with your mouse is such a pain in the ass apparently.

And yeah, it's odd that there's more in Mass Effect 2 but the world just feels so much smaller to me.  Even removing the Mako (I hated that damn vehicle, or more specifically, shooting with it) made those planets feel smaller.

As for the HUD, I don't have a big problem with the text size like some people (know someone else that is playing it on the standard TV, sucks to be him), I mainly hate the indicator that you're looking at something important.  I'll see the little icon pop up saying there's some refined element zero or whatever somewhere and it takes me five minutes to find it because I can't see the little box around it.  I don't think they could have done a better job at hiding that.

The best example of the failings of that thing is trying to find the dog tags at the Normandy crash site.  Ugh.  I got down to one left and I spent 30 minutes looking for that thing.  I knew it was somewhere close because it would occassionally pop up and tell me it was near, I just couldn't see where it was.

I think the main reason they removed a lot of the exploration elements was to make it more fun when doing multiple playthroughs. I got through the first game 4 times but navigating somewhere like the citadel or a planet surface became a bit of a slog at times. I get the feeling  ME2 will last me even longer than ME1. It's a stunning improvement over the first game.