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SvennoJ on 16 February 2012
yo_john117 said:
SvennoJ said:
lilc64 said:
Is it just me, i thought mass effect 1 was way better than mass effect 2. ME2 felt too focused on the shooter element while ME1 gave me that old KOTOR rpg feel(i play adapt of course). It also felt as they limited powers per character too much like samara in ME2, she was this biotic power house but only had throw and pull i was like WTF. After playing the demo i see liara and shepard have alot of botic options which gives me hope tali will have overload and dampering again instead of just drone and ai hack. Sorry went off on a rant, just replayed both games preparing for ME3.

I feel the same way, and this demo did nothing to convince me otherwise. I like exploration, diplomacy, solving puzzles and mysteries. All the demo showed was 2 long corridor sections with a lot of combat with some cut scenes in between with only few minor dialog choices that have no impact at all.
At least the ME2 demo had you explore a space station for a while and allowed you to talk to some people before the long corridor section. This demo could have just as well been a demo for Halo 4.

If you would have ever played a Halo game in your life you would know just how wrong that statement is. Halo is more open than most other FPS's out there. It is somewhat linear but not anywhere near a corridor shooter (not to mention it's not a TPS).  And on top of all that nobody knows exactly what Halo 4 is going to be like.

BTW I've never played a demo that's even 1/50 as good as the actual game.

True, Halo reach demo was much better. I just meant a scifi shooter in general. Killzone 3 comes a bit closer with the huge mech killing machines. Anyway I didn't see much of an RPG in there, compared to for example the Kingdoms of Amalur demo. Demos are all over the place, I've played demos that were better then the actual game as well.



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Khuutra on 16 February 2012
d21lewis said:
Khuutra said:

The way that the "Hold the Line" section works is that every person who holds the line has a point value assigned to them in terms of strength. Let's say a non-loyal Mordin, Kasumi, and Tali are the weakest and have a rating of zero. There are three tiers of characters stronger than them, so let's say the strongest ones - Grunt and Zaeed - when loyal, have values of 4. If they were disloyal, they would have values of 3.

What the game does is it takes the mean average value of every single person that you leave to hold the line. If that mean average value is above a certain threshhold - say, 2 - then nobody dies holding the line. If it's between, say, 1 and 2, then one person will die, with priority given first to disloyal people and then to people with the lowest defense threshhold (Mordin will die first in most cases, but Miranda is disloyal in your file so she bites it here).

Since Miranda is disloyal, the only way for her to survive is to leave her behind and pad out the strength of the line as best you can. Send Mordin to escort the ship, bring Kasumi and Tali with you, and the average value of the defenders will be as high as possible. Taking Jack and Jacob could make all the difference. Jack's almost as weak as the bottom four, but Jacob is in the second-highest tier, a certifiable bad-ass.

In order ot make Miranda survive, here is what you need to do:

1. Make sure Mordin is the one who escorts Dr. Chakwas and the rest of the crew back to the ship.

2. Bring Tali and Kasumi with you to fight the Baby Reaper.

If everyone else is loyal, Miranda will survive. If you want, I can go find the actual formula for you, and I'll do the math just to be sure.

Just found out that Zaed isn't loyal --the hard way!  Neither is Miranda.  I just finished the game.  Zaed took a bullet to the chest (shields failed).  Miranda died right after the baby reaper battle (you said not to bring her but I didn't listen!).  Mordin died trying to hold the line.  Grunt and the prisoners all made it back to the ship alive.

I have one save where all of my team survived but since I was dicking around, my ship crew all died.  I have another save with a not loyal Zaed and a formerly loyal Miranda.  My whole crew is safe, though. 

I tried it my way, and it totally failed.  Now, oh brave and handsome Khuutra, I come to you.  I'm going to restart that whole final mission.  Tell me who to bring and which role each member should play.  I'll follow your advice to the letter.  Also, I'd like for him to live but, if Zaed dies, I don't care.  He was kinda annoying.

Garrus leads all fire teams (if you get anyone but Garrus, Jacob, or Miranda to do this, they will die - that's why Zaeed bit it), Legion goes down the pipe to hack the securities, Jack handles shield duties when it's time for a biotic to show up.

Mordin escorts Chakwas and crew back to the ship.

Tali and Kasumi come with you to the finale.

Everyone else holds the line.

That way, the only way anyone is going to die is if you have some more disloyal members you forgot about. This should get them all through clear, no questions asked.

If Legion isn't loyal, get Tali or Kasumi to go down the pipes. Never send a disloyal person to do any of these jobs.

In fact, here

People who can get through the pipe: Kasumi, Tali, Legion (any of these have to be loyal)

People who can lead fireteams: Garrus, Jacob, Miranda (they have to be loyal)

If the person who you pick for either of those jobs is wrong, the tech specialist will be shot while trying to shut the door.

People who can hold the biotic barrier: Jack, Samara/Morinth

They are the only ones. If you choose someone else (or your biotic is disloyal) then one of your squadmates in your party will die when the barrier fairs.

People who should escort Chakwas back to base: Mordin, Tali, Kasumi, Jack (priority given to Mordin, whoever you send on this HAS to be loyal)

People who should come with you to fight the baby Reaper: Whoever from the previous list didn't take Chakwas back to the ship (these two HAVE to be loyal)

Grunt, Zaeed, and Garrus should always hold the line, no matter what. Everyone else should too, if possible.



Khuutra on 16 February 2012
SvennoJ said:
lilc64 said:
Is it just me, i thought mass effect 1 was way better than mass effect 2. ME2 felt too focused on the shooter element while ME1 gave me that old KOTOR rpg feel(i play adapt of course). It also felt as they limited powers per character too much like samara in ME2, she was this biotic power house but only had throw and pull i was like WTF. After playing the demo i see liara and shepard have alot of botic options which gives me hope tali will have overload and dampering again instead of just drone and ai hack. Sorry went off on a rant, just replayed both games preparing for ME3.

I feel the same way, and this demo did nothing to convince me otherwise. I like exploration, diplomacy, solving puzzles and mysteries. All the demo showed was 2 long corridor sections with a lot of combat with some cut scenes in between with only few minor dialog choices that have no impact at all.
At least the ME2 demo had you explore a space station for a while and allowed you to talk to some people before the long corridor section. This demo could have just as well been a demo for Halo 4.

The ME2 demo had no exploring whatsoever, you are remembering incorrectly. More, it had only slightly more conversation than ME3's demo did - the only character you spoke to for any length of time was Jacob at the start and Miranda near the end, and neither of them involve any dialogue choices that can actually affect anything.

In terms of content, the ME3 demo is about on par with the ME2 demo, just that the ME2 demo had somewhat more talking with a little more interactivity.

Get excited about the character growth options in this game. Playing through Insanity is going to be a trip.



Jexy on 16 February 2012
NotStan said:
I must say on me2 I've always played soldier - three playthroughs as it seemed like a "noob" class to use, and I got used to it. Tried out vanguard in the demo, and instantly found it a much better experience!


yeah it pretty much is.  soldier is super noob.  never even bothered with it.  it's the class for people who only know how to play CoD and other shooters would use.  Everything else though is great.  And all different styles of play.  In ME1, Infiltrator was the way to go as they could open and unlock everything, with no aid from the party.  It's still the character i use for my main playthru



BOOM!  FACE KICK!

ishiki on 16 February 2012

I never played the mass effect 2 single player demo.

But man, that single player isn't going to convince anyone that wasn't going to get it anyways imo. It's like crysis 2 only uglier, clunkier, with better powers (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, I liked crysis enough to think it was a good game)...  I only played the demo once,  Obviously the biotic powers get better. And hopefully everything else.

haven't tried multiplayer aspect. Still excited for this, as a lot of demo's are up to the quality of the final product.



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SecondWar on 16 February 2012
Khuutra said:
NotStan said:
I must say on me2 I've always played soldier - three playthroughs as it seemed like a "noob" class to use, and I got used to it. Tried out vanguard in the demo, and instantly found it a much better experience!

That's it, brother. Now... now the healing can begin.

Try playing it in ME2, too. Or just wait for ME3, so you can set up your own weapon loadout that doesn't completely bog down your cooldown.

Or let's just keep playing multiplayer!

Do you know if I can change the class on my save files when I import them to ME3. Normally stuck with it as it seemed the best way to get through the game, especially on ME1 but I didn't like the lack of variety. Having tried Adept in the demo want to see if I can use that without starting my game from scratch.

Think I read somewhere that you can when you first import it over.



lestatdark on 16 February 2012
SecondWar said:
Khuutra said:
NotStan said:
I must say on me2 I've always played soldier - three playthroughs as it seemed like a "noob" class to use, and I got used to it. Tried out vanguard in the demo, and instantly found it a much better experience!

That's it, brother. Now... now the healing can begin.

Try playing it in ME2, too. Or just wait for ME3, so you can set up your own weapon loadout that doesn't completely bog down your cooldown.

Or let's just keep playing multiplayer!

Do you know if I can change the class on my save files when I import them to ME3. Normally stuck with it as it seemed the best way to get through the game, especially on ME1 but I didn't like the lack of variety. Having tried Adept in the demo want to see if I can use that without starting my game from scratch.

Think I read somewhere that you can when you first import it over.

Yes you can. At least you could on ME2, as you had to go through all that procedure to re-construct shepard from the dead, you could choose to keep all the customization made on Shepard on ME1 or change it's appearance and class again. I don't think they'll change that in this game.



Current PC Build

CPU - i7 8700K 3.7 GHz (4.7 GHz turbo) 6 cores OC'd to 5.2 GHz with Watercooling (Hydro Series H110i) | MB - Gigabyte Z370 HD3P ATX | Gigabyte GTX 1080ti Gaming OC BLACK 11G (1657 MHz Boost Core / 11010 MHz Memory) | RAM - Corsair DIMM 32GB DDR4, 2400 MHz | PSU - Corsair CX650M (80+ Bronze) 650W | Audio - Asus Essence STX II 7.1 | Monitor - Samsung U28E590D 4K UHD, Freesync, 1 ms, 60 Hz, 28"

Darth Tigris on 16 February 2012
SvennoJ said:
yo_john117 said:
SvennoJ said:
lilc64 said:
Is it just me, i thought mass effect 1 was way better than mass effect 2. ME2 felt too focused on the shooter element while ME1 gave me that old KOTOR rpg feel(i play adapt of course). It also felt as they limited powers per character too much like samara in ME2, she was this biotic power house but only had throw and pull i was like WTF. After playing the demo i see liara and shepard have alot of botic options which gives me hope tali will have overload and dampering again instead of just drone and ai hack. Sorry went off on a rant, just replayed both games preparing for ME3.

I feel the same way, and this demo did nothing to convince me otherwise. I like exploration, diplomacy, solving puzzles and mysteries. All the demo showed was 2 long corridor sections with a lot of combat with some cut scenes in between with only few minor dialog choices that have no impact at all.
At least the ME2 demo had you explore a space station for a while and allowed you to talk to some people before the long corridor section. This demo could have just as well been a demo for Halo 4.

If you would have ever played a Halo game in your life you would know just how wrong that statement is. Halo is more open than most other FPS's out there. It is somewhat linear but not anywhere near a corridor shooter (not to mention it's not a TPS).  And on top of all that nobody knows exactly what Halo 4 is going to be like.

BTW I've never played a demo that's even 1/50 as good as the actual game.

True, Halo reach demo was much better. I just meant a scifi shooter in general. Killzone 3 comes a bit closer with the huge mech killing machines. Anyway I didn't see much of an RPG in there, compared to for example the Kingdoms of Amalur demo. Demos are all over the place, I've played demos that were better then the actual game as well.

So did you choose a class other than Soldier?  On the 2nd part of the demo, did you go in and spec out yourself and companions?  You have 23 experience points that you apply in so many different ways to Shepherd that I was immediately overwhelmed.  You only get 11 for the other two, but at least you can choose to load up on one ability or spread out the points so you can use a variety of abilities during the combat.  In fact, even loading up on one led to numerous different paths just within that one ability.

Oh, speaking of the combat (though I only played it once), did you set up opportune times to use Overload on shielded enemies so they would be easier to take down?  Did you maintain manual control of your character's abilities to set up different strategies to take on the various tactics and enemies you face?  Or did you just leave everything to the AI and play it like your average cover shooter?  Did you amp up the difficulty so that typical TPS gameplay only leads to death, thus forcing you to actually USE the RPG elements?

For the record, these are things I noticed after ONE playthrough with ONE class (Vanguard aka MANguard), so I'd imagine there would be a number of things that I missed.  How about you?



SvennoJ on 17 February 2012
Darth Tigris said:
SvennoJ said:
yo_john117 said:
SvennoJ said:
lilc64 said:
Is it just me, i thought mass effect 1 was way better than mass effect 2. ME2 felt too focused on the shooter element while ME1 gave me that old KOTOR rpg feel(i play adapt of course). It also felt as they limited powers per character too much like samara in ME2, she was this biotic power house but only had throw and pull i was like WTF. After playing the demo i see liara and shepard have alot of botic options which gives me hope tali will have overload and dampering again instead of just drone and ai hack. Sorry went off on a rant, just replayed both games preparing for ME3.

I feel the same way, and this demo did nothing to convince me otherwise. I like exploration, diplomacy, solving puzzles and mysteries. All the demo showed was 2 long corridor sections with a lot of combat with some cut scenes in between with only few minor dialog choices that have no impact at all.
At least the ME2 demo had you explore a space station for a while and allowed you to talk to some people before the long corridor section. This demo could have just as well been a demo for Halo 4.

If you would have ever played a Halo game in your life you would know just how wrong that statement is. Halo is more open than most other FPS's out there. It is somewhat linear but not anywhere near a corridor shooter (not to mention it's not a TPS).  And on top of all that nobody knows exactly what Halo 4 is going to be like.

BTW I've never played a demo that's even 1/50 as good as the actual game.

True, Halo reach demo was much better. I just meant a scifi shooter in general. Killzone 3 comes a bit closer with the huge mech killing machines. Anyway I didn't see much of an RPG in there, compared to for example the Kingdoms of Amalur demo. Demos are all over the place, I've played demos that were better then the actual game as well.

So did you choose a class other than Soldier?  On the 2nd part of the demo, did you go in and spec out yourself and companions?  You have 23 experience points that you apply in so many different ways to Shepherd that I was immediately overwhelmed.  You only get 11 for the other two, but at least you can choose to load up on one ability or spread out the points so you can use a variety of abilities during the combat.  In fact, even loading up on one led to numerous different paths just within that one ability.

Oh, speaking of the combat (though I only played it once), did you set up opportune times to use Overload on shielded enemies so they would be easier to take down?  Did you maintain manual control of your character's abilities to set up different strategies to take on the various tactics and enemies you face?  Or did you just leave everything to the AI and play it like your average cover shooter?  Did you amp up the difficulty so that typical TPS gameplay only leads to death, thus forcing you to actually USE the RPG elements?

For the record, these are things I noticed after ONE playthrough with ONE class (Vanguard aka MANguard), so I'd imagine there would be a number of things that I missed.  How about you?

I played Sentinel I think. Anyway everything you describe is not what I'm looking for. Combat is the thing that's on the bottom of my list for RPGs. Exploration, dialog, diplomacy, mysteries, puzzles are all more important to me then whatever combat has to offer.

What the demo showed me was a very straight forward A to B slog through combat. I guess my definition of RPG is different then Mass Effect's definition. Combat gets repetitive very soon to me, same set of bad guys around every corner. I had hoped story mode would cut back on the combat encounters, while leaving a few key battles, and let me ramp of the difficulty of those. But all it does is make it more boring by making you almost invincible.



Darth Tigris on 17 February 2012
SvennoJ said:

Darth Tigris said:


So did you choose a class other than Soldier?  On the 2nd part of the demo, did you go in and spec out yourself and companions?  You have 23 experience points that you apply in so many different ways to Shepherd that I was immediately overwhelmed.  You only get 11 for the other two, but at least you can choose to load up on one ability or spread out the points so you can use a variety of abilities during the combat.  In fact, even loading up on one led to numerous different paths just within that one ability.

Oh, speaking of the combat (though I only played it once), did you set up opportune times to use Overload on shielded enemies so they would be easier to take down?  Did you maintain manual control of your character's abilities to set up different strategies to take on the various tactics and enemies you face?  Or did you just leave everything to the AI and play it like your average cover shooter?  Did you amp up the difficulty so that typical TPS gameplay only leads to death, thus forcing you to actually USE the RPG elements?

For the record, these are things I noticed after ONE playthrough with ONE class (Vanguard aka MANguard), so I'd imagine there would be a number of things that I missed.  How about you?

I played Sentinel I think. Anyway everything you describe is not what I'm looking for. Combat is the thing that's on the bottom of my list for RPGs. Exploration, dialog, diplomacy, mysteries, puzzles are all more important to me then whatever combat has to offer.

What the demo showed me was a very straight forward A to B slog through combat. I guess my definition of RPG is different then Mass Effect's definition. Combat gets repetitive very soon to me, same set of bad guys around every corner. I had hoped story mode would cut back on the combat encounters, while leaving a few key battles, and let me ramp of the difficulty of those. But all it does is make it more boring by making you almost invincible.

Well those aspects are done to varying degrees in different RPG's, so it sounds more like this is not the TYPE of RPG that appeals to you more than it not being an RPG.  In many ways, the things that I described ARE classic RPG puzzle solving wrapped up in character customization and a real time TPS combat engine.

But since neither of us has played the full game, let me say this:  it would be irresponsible for Bioware to include the types of things you listed for the most part in a DEMO.  Those are plot points and long reaching elements that would serve them well to keep as close to the vest as possible for as long as possible.  There is only so much that a demo for an RPG could give us, as it's most representative elements are evident only with long term play.