Quote: Original post by SymLinked

Quote: Original post by Kwizatz
[Mild SPOILERS]

No, what dictates who survives is whether you did the crew member loyalty missions, whether you properly upgraded the ship and whether or not you go into the suicide mission right away after "the joker mission" [smile].

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Not really. You can have all the upgrades in the game, and have all members loyal but still lose them if you assign them to the wrong tasks at the end. Same thing if you decide to leave a squishy non-defensive crew member at the door with not enough defensive crew there to protect them.
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Really? I got zero casualties, didn't have any "task deaths" (didn't replay the tasks part, which I do when things don't go the way I liked), I must be one hell of a strategist [lol]

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Quote: Original post by oliii
hmm, I lost two unloyal crew members, which was down to not having enough paragon points to trigger the right dialog. Maybe I didn't get enough upgrades for the third one...

[SPOILERS]

Yeah, you can lose loyalty and hence the crew member in the end if you don't have enough points of either kind when two of them fight for some reason, the kind of points doesn't matter though, just the amount.

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The more I reflect on ME2 the more I realize in retrospect how much it does upset me that 90% of ME2 was spent recruiting teammates and only 10% was spent advancing the story.

Mostly I'm worried about ME3. How exactly is BioWare going to handle your squad in ME3 since any combination of teammates from ME2 could live or die at the end? If they are going to actually record enough dialog so that you can continue in ME3 using only those squadmates that survived in ME2, then that's great, but I find it implausible that even BioWare and EA would pull that huge stunt off.

But if you have to spend a lot of time in ME3 building another squad, then I'll be pretty upset. Not to mention BioWare has a lot of open questions that they will need to delicately address in ME3, mainly because they spent so little time addressing them in ME2.

You can't effectively build a compelling series if you reinvent the whole cast except one or two people in every installment. The more I think about it the more the story about Shepard dying in the beginning of ME2 seems like nothing more than a ploy to enable BioWare to force you to build a new squad, thereby making the game accessible to people who didn't play the first.

I never completed ME1 on the first time through, not sure why - didn't really feel involved enough to want to play it. I got ME2 on a whim about 2 weeks after the release date and I played it pretty much compulsively for the 40 hours it took me to finish it (about a week of elapsed time). I was pulled in by the story and the overall cinematic production of the game. I felt like I wanted to do the Loyalty missions because I was interested in the backstories of the characters and I felt like I wanted to earn their loyalty (even though I was playing Renegade). After ME2 was done, I felt like I needed to go back and play through the main quest of ME1 just to fill me in. That took about 15 hours and wasn't as enjoyable (although the story in ME was arguably more involving).

Gameplay wise, ME2's combat was more fluid and felt more playable and gears of war-like. ME2 felt more honed, more polished and got rid of the filler crap from the first game. I'm glad they cut the size of the citadel, for example. The upgrades in ME2 was handled well; the mining of resources encouraged you to explore planets and wasn't a grind. ME1 was stronger in the actual narrative, but ME2 told its story better, if you know what I mean. ME2 made more use of the paragon/renegade choices, but as ever you really had to stick to one path to get any true benefit from either.

I am looking forward to ME3.

Quote: Original post by oliii
hmm, I lost two unloyal crew members, which was down to not having enough paragon points to trigger the right dialog. Maybe I didn't get enough upgrades for the third one...

I went full Renegade and got all people Loyal. I think you only "suffer" if you constantly choose the mod ground, which in reality means the game becomes one of having to play to extremes.

Quote: Original post by nilkn
The more I reflect on ME2 the more I realize in retrospect how much it does upset me that 90% of ME2 was spent recruiting teammates and only 10% was spent advancing the story.

Odd. Y'see for me I found that advancing the story was that of recruiting teammates and doing their loyalty missions to see their stories. Maybe you weren't engaged in the stories and backgrounds of the NPCs?


But yeah, I agree with your point about the ME3 idea - it'd be extremely interesting to see how they pull off the recruitment of a new crew. I mean, that story has been strung out for 2 games now - having to yet again pull in another crew will get pretty tedious.

I recently finished the first one and i don't feel compelled to play the second one. I bought it, started it and just didnt get my head in to it. Although the story is quite in depth, it just didnt have me wanting more, other than just to finished the game so i had done so. I guess i didnt get emotionally attached to the characters.

My pet hate in games is the dumbing down of features. I don't like inventories getting more simple. I don't like skills getting simpler, i like having tough choices about what to upgrade. I didn't like the combat style of the Gears games, ME2 seems even more like that than the first.

I may finish it some day :).

Quote: Original post by Dave
My pet hate in games is the dumbing down of features. I don't like inventories getting more simple. I don't like skills getting simpler, i like having tough choices about what to upgrade. I didn't like the combat style of the Gears games, ME2 seems even more like that than the first.

The term 'dumbing down' is a very loaded one, and I think in a way unjust. It's loaded because the idea behind it is 'oh, we made it simpler because people couldn't work it out/understand'.

With ME2 I feel they didn't so much 'dumb down' as 'streamline' away things. I spent far far too much time in ME1 just dicking about figuring out what guns to give who and seeing if one was slightly better than the other and trying to do the maths in my head to get the best score. Then there was the 'I have 12 of these guns, guess I should melt them down for omni-gel then' thing which was also annoying.

More granularity on skills might have been nice but ultimately not needed; each skill level gave you a decent jump instead of a slow increase which brings it to the final point;

ME2 is an action rpg; this is not Neverwinter Nights, or even Dragon Age; this is an action game with some rpg elements thrown in to drive the story a bit.

And I liked the improvements they made there as well, where during conversations paragon or renegade options would pop up and you could adjust the flow. They didn't appear too often so as to become common, but they did appear at the right moments to keep things intresting.

So, while ME2 might move (further) away from the 'rpg' bit I feel that it was a good choice; the fact the game completely sucked me in for a weekend when it first came out is testimate to that. I hope ME3 doesn't change too much, bit of refinement here and there (as much as the planet scanning forces you to explore it is ultimately tedious; even having some sort of visual clue as to the location of resources would have made it 100x better) and a story which is just as strong would be great.

As others have said the 'releasing control' segment was, for me, an awesome crown on the story which ultimately capped off 42h of game play I wish I could experiance as new again. I liken ME2 to a good book; you enjoy it, you want to see how it ends yet at the same time while the ending is good you are sad because you know it'll never be quite that good again.

Quote: Original post by nilkn
The more I reflect on ME2 the more I realize in retrospect how much it does upset me that 90% of ME2 was spent recruiting teammates and only 10% was spent advancing the story.

I guess I agree. I haven't played the first one yet (just got it on Steam) but if it has more story than ME2 then I'm sure I'll love it as that's what I felt could have been more detailed in ME2. I would have loved to have had more story and background, more choices and interesting side plots. It ended way too early, and without advancing anywhere as far as the main story goes.

The boarding of the Normandy was one of the two climaxes for me in the game, as well as the scene where the Harbringer releases control of the General. Seeing the crew survive was also very rewarding for me. But other than that, I didn't feel the story advanced much.

Quote: Original post by phantom
I liken ME2 to a good book; you enjoy it, you want to see how it ends yet at the same time while the ending is good you are sad because you know it'll never be quite that good again.

This is exactly how I felt. I do think that replaying the game after a while will be some nice nostalgia, though.

Quote: Original post by evolutional

Quote: Original post by nilkn
The more I reflect on ME2 the more I realize in retrospect how much it does upset me that 90% of ME2 was spent recruiting teammates and only 10% was spent advancing the story.

Odd. Y'see for me I found that advancing the story was that of recruiting teammates and doing their loyalty missions to see their stories. Maybe you weren't engaged in the stories and backgrounds of the NPCs?

Well, I actually really enjoyed all the loyalty missions and thought they were done very, very well. So it's not that I didn't enjoy them or wasn't engaged in them.

More than anything I'm just concerned about how BioWare is going to do ME3. ME3 is going to have to solve two "issues" at once: (1) it's not clear how they're going to handle your squad, and unless they record a ridiculous amount of dialog I don't see a good solution; (2) there are a lot of questions about the main plot that I think ME3 should answer, and it definitely won't be able to give satisfactory answers if it focuses as much on squad development as ME2 did.

In connection with (1), it just seems that BioWare has an "excuse" for nearly every character you've teamed up with to not team up with you again in ME3: either they got mad about your involvement with Cerberus or there was the possibility that they died in either ME1 or ME2.

But BioWare has done such a good job with both games so far I think I'll put my worries aside and just trust that they'll work it all out. If they don't, then I'll just get upset when the time comes. [smile]

For what it's worth, I think phantom also hit the nail on the head with the changes BioWare made to the "RPG elements" of the game.