Arwyl wrote...
But somehow, the story failed to grip me from the very beginning. I never took the mech attacks on the Cerberus facility seriously. In all honesty, I thought it was a drill to check whether I had regained full use of all my faculties and skills and was ready to resume fighting, a mere evaluation run to test extensively whether the Lazarus project had been a success. Only towards the end of that opening level did it hit me that the attack had been real. Why hadn’t it felt real?
And speaking of skills… Why did I have so few? Where had all my old skills gone? And why couldn’t I access them by pressing “U” any more? Wait, the “J” key wasn’t working either, and neither were “I” or “M”… Wait a minute… Where was my inventory? And why didn’t I have a map to help me explore? But this was the opening level, with the tutorial stuff going on… Maybe the inventory and the map would be available later on, after they had been explained by the tutorial.
Speaking of which… had there ever been a tutorial in ME? Hmm… couldn’t remember, but if it had been there, it certainly hadn’t been as present and immersion-breaking as this stuff flashing on my screen and the constant reminders by Miranda and Jacob of what I was supposed to do next. After the opening scene of ME, I had been free to explore the Normandy at will, before and after talking to Captain Anderson. Only a discrete note in my journal reminded me that, sooner or later, I was supposed to meet the Captain in the comms room, and talk to Joker to set course to the Citadel after that. But nobody and nothing had been pushing me to do so. Back to ME 2: What was that deck of bright orange vignettes popping up on the right side of my screen and making distracting sounds? Oh, right… they had the same function as the pleasantly discrete HUD notifications in ME. But wait… what the heck…? Loading screens? And later… Mission Complete screens??? “Press F to end the mission”????? Right, I was playing a game, and I was to be reminded of that fact all the time. Good-bye immersion.
But all this has been discussed at length before by others. I’ve read through the first 60 pages of this thread before starting to post and I’ve seen these issues brought up by many over and over again. I agree with those who feel that elevator rides were vastly preferable to loading screens in that they didn’t violently pull you out of the world and the story the way that loading screens do. The same holds true for walking in and out of the Normandy while docked. The “decontamination in progress” or “equalizing pressure” messages, and the military-protocol-ish ones like: “Logged: the Commanding Officer is ashore, XO Presley has the deck” felt very realistic and kept you in character and in the world. It all felt right. My huge thanks to Bioware for their great attention to detail!
I eventually got over the loading and mission complete screens. I even accepted the lack of an inventory. By reading through many posts here I’ve realised that I belong to a minority of people who actually enjoy managing inventories and finding, equipping, buying and selling stuff. To me, it definitely added to the game. I was genuinely thrilled when I first saw that Stiletto (IV or V, I’ve forgotten) in the salarian vendor’s assortment on Feros. Feros was the first planet I visited and me and my party still had our Kesslers and other very mediocre weapons at the time. We had to leave Feros without the Stiletto for lack of credits, but I promised Kaidan I’d buy him that pistol as soon as I could afford it… and I kept my promise! (I was using mainly my assault rifle, so the fancy pistol had to be for him.) Kaidan stuck to that pistol for a long time, even long after we had found and bought better weapons. This is just one way in which the inventory helped me role-play and get immersed. I never felt the same thrill about the upgrades I found or bought in ME 2, but I eventually learned to live with the new system, and got over it. I even bought a few fish for my excessively luxurious cabin on the SR2.
But there were a few things I never got over, and those were the things that kept reminding me that ME 2 was just a game. I’ll start a new post for those, this one has gotten long enough!
Arwyl,
I absolutely agree with you on the opening level. It has a incomplete feenling to it. Who started the attack? Was it really that Cereberus employee Miranda killed? If so, why? Was it perhaps Miranda?
I thought it would have been a great idea for Miranda to have started the whole attack. Kill all the witnesses to the Lazarus project and destroy all the evidence. It sounds like some ruthless thing Cerberus would do. Perhaps they wanted to keep Shepard's survival as a secret weapon.
But instead, it has this whoel, "huh? what the hell is going on?" feeling that never gets explained or even considered somewhat satisfyingly.
And as for getting used to the layout of ME2, every game has that learning curve. It's been a factor of every video game in history. It's nothing to really complain about. So it's different from ME1. It's a new game; It should be.
As for the loading screens and mission complete screens, I think everyone agress with you. I personally didn't understand why everyone was complaining about the loading times in the elevator. I thought they were a great idea and I didn't think they were particularly long.
and the inventory of ME2 is an example of a great idea that wasn't executed so well. I liked the fact that you couldn't change weapons during a mission. After all, do soldiers bring with them plethoras of weapons and armors into battle? But there was a noticeable lack of variety. Which was dissapointing. Especially in the armor department.
But the ME1 inventory system wasn't perfect. Omni gel was a useless concept. I hated having 20 of the same weapons and then having to throw out all the weapons I picked up because my inventory was full. It definitely got a little messy at times. ME2 is more clean but less exciting I would say.
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