Mass Effect, Should you buy? Reasons

[shio]

mrstickball said:

shio said:
@mrstickball
Are you sure you played many RPGs? Mass Effect doesn't even come close to being a great RPG. Story-wise it's good, but it's shit compared to the masterpiece stories of Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1&2 and Baldur's Gate 2.

My main complaint of Mass Effect is the length. I finished it on my first time well below 15h, around 12h (very very short). The game's replay value is decent, but when you compare to games to other wRPGs it also comes short.

'The Witcher' IMO is a better game, which also was released last year, and beats Mass Effect to the throne of best RPG of 2007. Even 'NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer' would have beaten ME if it wasn't for the fact that it's an expansion pack.

shio -

If you beat ME in 12 hours, and are complaining about length and story, I believe the problem is with you and not the game. Although I don't doubt you beat it that quickly, it's very appearent at that sort of speed, you skipped either alot of dialogue, alot of crew interactions, and/or alot of side missions. So I don't see how it's possible to complain, again, when you didn't take the time to go through it fully.

For most owners of the game that play through the story, the first trip to the Citadel + it's available side missions alone take 4+hrs if you actually read the dialogue, and explore the game. So again, I don't see how you can judge the game when you took no time to actually enjoy the game.

And just wondering, why is the Witcher better when the critic scores are about 15% in favor of Mass Effect, on average? I'm not doubting the Witcher is good (because I'd love to buy it for my 360), but...Just from user/critic reviews...It seems that the Witcher wasn't anywhere near the RPG GOTY like ME was.

I did not rush ME, I went at my own pace and I would never skip dialogue (my fave RPG is Planescape: Torment). Mass Effect is just short and has lackluster boring side-quests.

The Witcher was never hyped. It came from an unknown polish dev, CDProjekt, and many reviewers just gave it a could shoulder thinking it was just another boring RPG. But many people that have played both games seem to prefer the Witcher.

user reviews wise, The Witcher is ahead of Mass Effect. On metacritic:

Mass Effect - 8.7, from 464 votes

The Witcher - 9.4, from 348 votes 

The enhanced edition of The Witcher (out in may/june) is going to make it even better, by fixing it's 2 main problems (loading times and fighting precision), adding content worth 5 hours of gameplay, while also rewriting 5000 dialogues and redoing some voicework, 100 new animations and facial expressions, and a whole lot of tweaking.