366 réponses à ce sujet

[dreamgazer]

Any 'Best Picture' Oscar winner ever made would fit the bill.

Crash and Slumdog Millionaire make the symbolism and social allegory in ME2 and ME3 look subtle in comparison.

[Steppenwolf]

Crash and Slumdog Millionaire make the symbolism and social allegory in ME2 and ME3 look subtle in comparison.

Lazarus Project. You lose.

[dreamgazer]

Lazarus Project. You lose.

I'd disagree, but I'm not in the business of defending Lazarus under any circumstances

[wolfhowwl]

Whichever game you like more is entirely your business, but ME2 is not that bad. It's objectively not that bad. It is most certainly not this crime against humanity that you think it is. 

 

ME2 isn't the sequel a very vocal minority of ME1 fans imagined and for that it will never be forgiven. It is still the better game.

 

Sure there can be a discussion over wherever ME2 should have improved some of the many bad systems present in ME1 instead of cutting them but that's not a defense for how bad they were in that game. It is better to not have them at all than have them return as what they were in ME1 (****). It's not like the systems cut had much meaningful depth anyways and this time the most important system of all, the combat, was at least halfway decent.

 

ME1's so-called vast setting was almost entirely devoid of anything worthwhile to do. The Uncharted Worlds were lifeless boring wastelands with the occasional copy-paste dungeon. The hub world, the Citadel, was a giant, empty, gray warehouse dotted with occasional NPCs. ME2 thankfully understood its budget limitations, abandoned the pretense, and focused on delivering smaller higher-quality slices with Zakera Ward, Illium, and Omega and side-missions in small but unique environments.

 

If we want to talk about writing, ME1 obviously has a stronger overarching plot but ME2 has a better party, dialogue, and scenarios (Mordin and Legion are clear standouts here). There was an attempt at thematic consistency with the writing and while they could have been more imaginative (lol daddy issues) it is still better than ME1's boring shells of characters and walking codexes.

 

It's not like writing in ME1 was all that good anyways once you get down to it. The vaunted overaching plot is actually quite simple, has its own plotholes, and the first chapter on the Citadel has horrid pacing. If ME2's dialogue was the subject of jokes I am not sure what that would make ME1's stilted, clumsy lines. The game even tries to ruin its standout moment with Sovereign with its terrible dialogue, "You're just a machine and machines can broken!" Time has not been kind to Saren and Benezia, the latter in particular is downright embarrassing on Noveria. I already covered the boring party above.

 

The game is also far more polished, has better graphics, and if you're a console gamer it doesn't have ME1's severe technical problems.

 

ME2 has its mistakes and the various plot ****-ups are fun to hate on but ME1 has far more faults.

[RoboticWater]

They went from a spec ops unit to the most well-funded and well-maintained force in the galaxy in a few years. The entire organization is nonsensical. They're completely different from what we encountered in ME1.

We knew next to nothing about Cerberus until ME2. It's perfectly reasonable that teh forces we encountered in ME1 were in contact with a larger organization. I'll agree that ME3 went ridiculous when Cerberus suddenly became a massive army, but ME2's interpretation follows with ME1's.
 

Pure nonsense. Getting a message from the past isn't Christlike at all. ME2 introduced the Christ allegory and beat you over the head with it.

Shepard was always the chosen one. I would have preferred it if (s)he weren't but BioWare's pretty insistent your character being special. I know Shepard is also the name of an astronaut, but I'll bet that BioWare were going with the biblical references from the beginning
 

It was a weak plot device designed purely to ingratiate you to Cerberus. Without it there would be no good reason to work with them and with there's still hardly any good reason to work with them. And they didn't even have the conviction to stick with the shoddy plot device. Just a few hours into the game they change it from "Shepard died" to "Shepard almost died."

OK, that doesn't make it less cool in my opinion. I never said it wasn't absurd, but it was an interesting way to start a videogame.
 

Recruiting squadmates. 1/3
Earning their "loyalty." 1/3
Uncovering and destroying the Collectors. 1/3
Pretty simple maths.

What exactly do you consider story? Because story encompasses everything. If you meant main plot, then you're right; however, ME2 wasn't trying to be about the main plot. It was an excursion into the cultures and emotions of your squadmates. It's OK not to like that, but it doesn't make ME2's story 1/3 of ME1's
 

No it isn't. That's demonstrably false.

I guess that depends on what we consider a Dirty Dozen trope, but BioWare games have always been about going to different locales collecting a squad. Granted, ME2 focused more on the actual people than the others, but the main trope is still there. 
 

Every combat level is designed around waist-level boxes and walls. You know immediately what areas are designed for combat and areas are not.

And ME1's weren't? At least ME2 had chest high walls as well as boxes. ME1 just had the latter, and didn't even bother to texture them very differently.
 

I'm not talking about being outside. I'm talking about a big, bold, bright universe that felt inviting. They took that and reduced it such a narrow, ugly place.

ME2 never reduced anything. We were told in ME1 that we weren't going far outside the safe zone of the galaxy, and we never did. That's the difference between the two games. ME1 set up a vast universe with a wealth of history and culture, but stayed mostly within exposition. ME2 brought you through the mud and showed you the problems in the universe beyond the simple good vs. evil battle on the horizon.

In ME2 the Genophage and the Geth/Quarian conflict are no longer distant concepts afflicting an unknown people, they're up in your face. You finally see the true nature of the crime syndicates hinted at in ME1 and the nature of Cerberus. ME2 proves that there's more gritty facets to the sterile universe we're introduced to.

[RoboticWater]

What are the Reapers? Are they sentient ships or they robots made out of people-goo inside big ships? ME2 says the latter, but when we're actually in the core of a Reaper it's just a sentient ship with no people-goo robot inside.
ME2 cared nothing for the lore of the franchise.

Of all the things to things to worry about, you choose this? Yes, ME2 was a bit lenient with the lore, but it did care for the majority of it.

And as I said, ME2 maintained the spirit of ME1, which is far more important than any single factoid.

Taking away systems because they're complex means you dumbed the game down.

Not too complex, too numerous. ME1 was the definition of wide and not deep, crumbling under its own breadth. It did too many things without really fleshing any of them out.

Complexity does not equal better, nor does simplicity, but it's easier to make a fun game when you're not scrambling to make every bell and whistle work as it should. The core mechanics in Mass Effect were never an inventory or Mako driving; they were powers, shooting, and dialog. Everything else is merely dressing. ME2 cut out a lot of the dressing to make room for a better core, and profited from it.
 

Did you never romance anyone? Or talk to Garrus? Or Tali? Or Aria? Half of the character interactions are cringe-worthy because of the dialog and delivery. Watch the Jacob romance on YouTube if you want to facepalm yourself into last week.

Jacob's lines were pretty cringe-worthy, but the game wasn't mired in poor dialog as you seem to think. What exactly is it about ME1's dialog that makes it so infinitely superior?
 

Learn2Read.

Sorry, I read "hadn't" as "had." I'm not wearing my glasses right now.
 

DA2 was universally praised as amazing by mainstream gaming and media outlets. I rest my case.

That the mainstream media is wrong about things with 2 in the title? Sometimes with mainstream media are right, and sometimes they're wrong. I'm Fairly certain ME1 was praised for it's story as well. That doesn't really prove either of our points.
 

As a game it is better than most. Better than 95% of games I would say. But it's very stupid. The story is trash. If we were to compare it to great films it would seem laughably bad.

ME1 doesn't hold up very well to great cinema either. In fact, it's pretty difficult to find any videogame story that can directly compete with those of the best movies.
 
I'll never argue that ME2 had a better plot, but I thought it was more fun and more insightful than the first.

[SNascimento]

DA2 was universally praised as amazing by mainstream gaming and media outlets. I rest my case.

If you are going to be all arrogant and such, at least be right (or cool as Javik). 

DA2 was NOT "universally praised as amazing by mainstream gaming and media outlets". It has 79 metacritic score, a very low score for a game of a top tier studio. Just for reference, Mass Effect 2 has 96. 

Anyway, scores, sales, awards... they won't make anyone like a game. You play it, you like it or you don't and there is nothing wrong with that. But one got to wonder, if a game gets hugely positive reception by both critics and the gamer community, wins tons of award by critics, the game industry and almost every voted game of the year award and already has a lasting legacy then maybe it's not a bad game. Maybe there are good things about it. Good things that one might not like, yet good things nonetheless. 

[Hanako Ikezawa]

And yet the derelict Reaper in ME2 is just a sentient ship, no people-goo robot. And where was the human-Reaper's ship? Was it going to just wander around the Collector base while they made the ship out of even more people-goo? Where were the millions of humans to make that going to come from?
ME2 did not care about lore and the story is stupid.

Reaper Dreadnoughts are absolutely massive, over two kilometers tall and several hundred meters wide and long. We only explored a small bit of the Derelict Reaper. It's quite possible we didn't see where it was stored since that would spoil the endgame revelation. Plus who knows what the race that it was made from looked like. They could very well have looked like what we saw and yet we don't realize it at the time.

 

As for the second part, the Collectors were going to hit Earth remember? The Collector ship could hold millions and millions of people. And the Proto-Reaper just enters a sleep cycle until its body is ready, like it was when we first see it. 

[Lord Snow]

What's a vision if you don't stick to it?

 

By vision I mean the mass effect world as it is, the lore, the characters, the art-style. I think he got it just fine and stuck with it the whole time.

 

 

 

Maybe that's because of part of the team which played a part in that, maybe these visions are just from certain folk at a certain point in their lives, but either way I don't think Casey would add anything I'd enjoy after seeing how the series went.

 

I disagree with that. A lot of good things in the game are Casey's doing, from big design decisions (he was the project director for 10 years) to small details. Remember that cool scene Shep gets from the beacon? The vision about reapers, and the horrible merging of synthetic and organic life? Hudson made that. As in literally created it himself (you can read about that, and more, in The Final Hours). That's some serious involvement from someone who is the boss and can just have other people do the small tasks.

[Cameron Star]

By vision I mean the mass effect world as it is, the lore, the characters, the art-style. I think he got it just fine and stuck with it the whole time.

 

 

I disagree with that. A lot of good things in the game are Casey's doing, from big design decisions (he was the project director for 10 years) to small details. Remember that cool scene Shep gets from the beacon? The vision about reapers, and the horrible merging of synthetic and organic life? Hudson made that. As in literally created it himself (you can read about that, and more, in The Final Hours). That's some serious involvement from someone who is the boss and can just have other people do the small tasks.

I always thought the "beacon vision" was rather tacky. Now I know why.

[Cameron Star]

Spoiler

ME2 isn't the sequel a very vocal minority of ME1 fans imagined and for that it will never be forgiven. It is still the better game.

 

Sure there can be a discussion over wherever ME2 should have improved some of the many bad systems present in ME1 instead of cutting them but that's not a defense for how bad they were in that game. It is better to not have them at all than have them return as what they were in ME1 (****). It's not like the systems cut had much meaningful depth anyways and this time the most important system of all, the combat, was at least halfway decent.

 

ME1's so-called vast setting was almost entirely devoid of anything worthwhile to do. The Uncharted Worlds were lifeless boring wastelands with the occasional copy-paste dungeon. The hub world, the Citadel, was a giant, empty, gray warehouse dotted with occasional NPCs. ME2 thankfully understood its budget limitations, abandoned the pretense, and focused on delivering smaller higher-quality slices with Zakera Ward, Illium, and Omega and side-missions in small but unique environments.

 

If we want to talk about writing, ME1 obviously has a stronger overarching plot but ME2 has a better party, dialogue, and scenarios (Mordin and Legion are clear standouts here). There was an attempt at thematic consistency with the writing and while they could have been more imaginative (lol daddy issues) it is still better than ME1's boring shells of characters and walking codexes.

 

It's not like writing in ME1 was all that good anyways once you get down to it. The vaunted overaching plot is actually quite simple, has its own plotholes, and the first chapter on the Citadel has horrid pacing. If ME2's dialogue was the subject of jokes I am not sure what that would make ME1's stilted, clumsy lines. The game even tries to ruin its standout moment with Sovereign with its terrible dialogue, "You're just a machine and machines can broken!" Time has not been kind to Saren and Benezia, the latter in particular is downright embarrassing on Noveria. I already covered the boring party above.

 

The game is also far more polished, has better graphics, and if you're a console gamer it doesn't have ME1's severe technical problems.

 

ME2 has its mistakes and the various plot ****-ups are fun to hate on but ME1 has far more faults.

 

You seem to have hit the nail on the head. Personally I think the only two things wrong with ME2's plot was Project Lazarus and the whole "working for Cerberus" thing.

It's a much more fun game than ME1, better environments, characters, gameplay, missions. When I play the first one it just feels a bit hollow and empty.

[Heimdall]

You seem to have hit the nail on the head. Personally I think the only two things wrong with ME2's plot was Project Lazarus and the whole "working for Cerberus" thing.

And the baby terminator Reaper thing

[Torgette]

And the baby terminator Reaper thing

 

Baby terminator was my only real issue with ME2 (actually liked that shep died, liked that we were forced to work for cerberus - made TIM a greater character). You're always wondering what any of this has to do with the reapers and you finally get there and... then you fight it and kill it and move on. Missed opportunity for an Empire-style dark middle chapter lore dump, oh well.

[Iakus]

Baby terminator was my only real issue with ME2 (actually liked that shep died, liked that we were forced to work for cerberus - made TIM a greater character). You're always wondering what any of this has to do with the reapers and you finally get there and... then you fight it and kill it and move on. Missed opportunity for an Empire-style dark middle chapter lore dump, oh well.

I didn't mind that we had to work for Cerberus, I just wish it had been established in a more logical manner.  And that we had more of an opportunity to resist him (I spent most of the game feeling like Shepard was TIM's b*tch)

[Torgette]

I didn't mind that we had to work for Cerberus, I just wish it had been established in a more logical manner.  And that we had more of an opportunity to resist him (I spent most of the game feeling like Shepard was TIM's b*tch)

 

I'm not sure if there was a logical way for Shepard to ever work for Cerberus, and yes you are TIM's favorite pet. 

[themikefest]

I never worked for Cerberus. I worked with Cerberus to stop the collectors

[Iakus]

I'm not sure if there was a logical way for Shepard to ever work for Cerberus, and yes you are TIM's favorite pet. 

It could have been done.  But it would have taken more setup than "Cerberus?  Sign me up"  

[AlanC9]

And yet the derelict Reaper in ME2 is just a sentient ship, no people-goo robot. And where was the human-Reaper's ship? Was it going to just wander around the Collector base while they made the ship out of even more people-goo? Where were the millions of humans to make that going to come from?ME2 did not care about lore and the story is stupid.

How do you know there wasn't a robot in that ship? We didn't see the whole ship, or recover much data from the science team.

The latter part of that post is a bit confused. There's no reason to think that the "shell" part of the Reaper -- that is, the ship -- would require goo at all. I agree that there's a problem with not having enough goo to finish the human-Reaper, but don't muddle stuff up.

Though I'm certainly not defending the humanoid form of the Reaper core. We get it, it's made out of people. And that bossfight, like a lot of Bio bossfights, should have been cut.

[Steppenwolf]

How do you know there wasn't a robot in that ship? We didn't see the whole ship, or recover much data from the science team.

We went through a lot of that Reaper. We were even in the core. Where would the giant robot be? How would no one from Cerberus or our team have come across it? Reapers are big but not so big that numerous teams of people traipsing through them, looking for stuff could have missed a giant robot controlling the ship's remaining functions. And if the people-goo robots were required for Reapers then how to pieces of destroyed Reaper ships still have will and the ability to indoctrinate people? Or Reaper artifacts for that matter?

The latter part of that post is a bit confused. There's no reason to think that the "shell" part of the Reaper -- that is, the ship -- would require goo at all. I agree that there's a problem with not having enough goo to finish the human-Reaper, but don't muddle stuff up.

So what were the Collectors going to make the Reaper ship with? And again, was the human-Reaper just going to wait around their base while it's ship is being built? It's all stupid.

Though I'm certainly not defending the humanoid form of the Reaper core. We get it, it's made out of people. And that bossfight, like a lot of Bio bossfights, should have been cut.

It's more than a silly boss fight. It's pure nonsense that they didn't think through and chucked in the bin the first chance they got.

[AlanC9]

We went through a lot of that Reaper. We were even in the core. Where would the giant robot be? How would no one from Cerberus or our team have come across it?

In order: we didn't, so what, and they did but Shepard didn't recover that data. All you come away with from the Reaper IFF mission is the IFF, Legion, and some Cerberus tech (which Shepard should have had anyway, but that's true for all the techs in the shops too.)

Reapers are big but not so big that numerous teams of people traipsing through them, looking for stuff could have missed a giant robot controlling the ship's remaining functions. And if the people-goo robots were required for Reapers then how to pieces of destroyed Reaper ships still have will and the ability to indoctrinate people?

I do agree that the way Reaper bits indoctrinate doesn't make much sense, but I don't see how the goo thing makes this worse.

So what were the Collectors going to make the Reaper ship with? And again, was the human-Reaper just going to wait around their base while it's ship is being built?

Metal, mostly, and maybe. Alternatively, the human-Reaper was just proof-of-concept, and isn't really a production model

[Steppenwolf]

You have to shut off your brain for the Reapers to make any sense. The "ships" are sentient and seemingly immortal but the actual Reapers inside them are just vulnerable robots with no point in existing?
Once you concede that there's no reason for the people-goo robots to exist then you concede that Reapers make no sense and that ME2 is stupid.

[felipejiraya]

Sooooooooooooooooooo, about that E3 thing...

[aoibhealfae]

.....I only have one advice about hypes. Don't get your hopes up and prepare to be disappointed. 

[Helios969]

The glass is half-empty.  No, damnit, I'm telling you it's half-full.  You're wrong.  No you are...

[Cameron Star]

I'm not sure if there was a logical way for Shepard to ever work for Cerberus, and yes you are TIM's favorite pet. 

While I do hate being forced to work for Cerberus and TIM, I think it does make an interesting part of the story.

I can think of a decent logical way for Shep to work for Cerberus and TIM, you never died, just in a coma and "rumoured" to be dead. Cerberus never got their hands on you.

Shep still works for the Alliance, but is fed up with the Council's BS so forms an uneasy and secret partnership with TIM. Jacob and Miri are undercover aboard the Normandy to keep things in check, and since Shep is a Spectre, he/she can travel anywhere in the Terminus systems to do stuff.

New and old squadmates are still recruited for the same reason.