Twas worth a try .. probably need to work on my "am being sarcastic" smilies heh...

Only game i planned to buy this year though so i don't care what it costs... The comic by the way, does explain how shepard came to be re-assembled (and found!) by Cerberus + how that blue alien turned out to be hunting the shadow broker, so while it'll be for giggles, at least it does explain that plot hole.

or I'll just get a refund, buy a cheaper copy of the game and let other people fund the total fuckup that continues to be Bioware's DLC. The comic though, whoa boy you almost had me there. Thought you were being serious for a moment, well played sir.

Hah, i just bought it to reward a good RPG i don't care for stupid armor.... ^^

What you forget however, is that the DD version includes the Comic story thats referenced with liara t'soni in-game story (or whatever.. ,p) the OST and the Making Of

And if you are really put of by the armor, use it on your 3rd+ playthrough or when you designed some ugly as hell face, accidently ;p

For anyone thinking of getting the Digital Deluxe or Collector's Editions - don't bother. Most of the items are useless - they didn't include a helmet toggle so your character literally wears a huge face blocking helmet in every cutscene. Even the scenes where your character takes a drink or when people somehow see him and recognize him amusingly enough. Get the cheaper copy of the game or buy it used.

NicklePop wrote on Jan 26, 2010, 16:35:
Can anyone speak to the alleged "dumbing" down of the game systems?

I hear they removed all of the RPG'ish stuff, and left us with Gears of War in space.

They removed some of the tedious and useless stuff. No, you no longer pick up various loots lying around. But remember all those loots used two different models anyway, and 99.999% of people just used the Spectre weapons, which were storebought, since they were the best. There was no viable reason to use any of the other loot. It might as well have just all been omnigel and credits.

But nope, in ME1 you had to fucking melt all that stuff down yourself in a cumbersome UI. So if removing utter stupidity is "dumbing down", then yes, they've dumbed the loot system down.

Let's see what else.. there are fewer skills you have to tinker with, and fewer steps in each one. For example your Charm/Intimidate are no longer distinct skills, but are rather based directly on your Paragon and Renegade standings respectively.

I guess this could be perceived as "dumbing down" but I see it as a "quality over quantity" issue. Each power is far more interesting and way more balanced than in the first game. There are no power combinations where you become invincible I.e. a Bastion Adept in ME1 with its permanent Barrier or a Commando with permanent Immunity.

Mass Effect 2, to me, feels like what they intended to do from the beginning, but they failed to accomplish in the first one. Mass Effect is not Dragon Age in Space, nor should they attempt to make it such. Yes, the RPG elements have been streamlined, but I still find them to be superior to the RPG elements of ME1.

Anything someone says has been "dumbed down" actually gives you the same or more choice in the end. They've just removed some of the tedious crap that only gave the illusion of choice.

The pie is not retarded, if anything choosing between predefined answers that are written out in length is more so. And the reason is so simple and obvious, it should have hit you with a iron bar while writing your post. Its not fun to read pre-defined dialog and then deciding what the "intention" of that dialog line is and repeat that for all choices and every single dialog line.

Example - Of a dialog choice

Good system [I want a Bargain (evil)] + Dialog plays out to do that.
Bad System, [Give me a Bargain, because otherwise i am going to run your head down your spine and have your legs walk out the store without your body attached.] + You hear the same line being spoken by your character, sleep inducing. You already read it if *BEFORE* you chose it, after all.

Maybe you see why the pie is the better choice now (though i guess you are now going to post how the pie makes that 1 in a billion choice so much harder to specify ;p). While it makes some situations a bit "edgy" thats better than having to read all the dialog in advance and then having to HEAR it all over again to boot.

Yeah, KOTOR2 alert to the extreme here. The crapbox360 can't handle a decent resolution, so the PC gets shafted with ugly, blurry cutscenes as well. Maybe Bio will do the right thing and release high-resolution cutscenes at some point. Shit, even Lucasarts did that for KOTOR2, albeit after like 3 years.

Interesting. I was wondering why the cutscenes run so poorly. I have 8XAA enabled so I didn't notice any resolution issues but the framerate takes a nosedive (60 FPS in gameplay to less than 30 FPS during cutscenes). I thought it might have something to do with AA mixed with depth of field.

"Mostly" since their is a metric fuck ton of dialog. It makes Dragon Age look like Diablo in that regard. (For the record though: I like it that way)

Eh? From what I've played thus far, DAO has tons more dialogue than ME2. Remember, ME2 uses the retarded dialogue pie which greatly limits how many options you're given.

This comment was edited on Jan 27, 2010, 03:04.

Frijoles wrote on Jan 26, 2010, 22:56:
Annnnd.. "failed to connect to key server". Bang up job.

Are you running a firewall? Apparently one particular port needs to be opened to be able to connect to the Cerberus server. There's a post about it in the PC Tech Support forum.

Creston

Annnnd.. "failed to connect to key server". Bang up job.

Ray Marden wrote on Jan 26, 2010, 22:26:
Boo @ pre-rendered cutscenes.

Nothing like having a cinematic run at a lower resolution and with a lower framerate than the actual game!

The intro is completely blurry, beautiful, blurry, beautiful, etc.

Going to hell; loading ME2, but still counting down the 14 days...,
Ray I suspect B2 will be lackluster, but I so enjoy that world.

Yeah, KOTOR2 alert to the extreme here. The crapbox360 can't handle a decent resolution, so the PC gets shafted with ugly, blurry cutscenes as well. Maybe Bio will do the right thing and release high-resolution cutscenes at some point. Shit, even Lucasarts did that for KOTOR2, albeit after like 3 years.

Creston

Boo @ pre-rendered cutscenes.

Nothing like having a cinematic run at a lower resolution and with a lower framerate than the actual game!

The intro is completely blurry, beautiful, blurry, beautiful, etc.

Going to hell; loading ME2, but still counting down the 14 days...,
Ray I suspect B2 will be lackluster, but I so enjoy that world.

PiG wrote on Jan 26, 2010, 17:26:
Creston, if you exit the steam client and start it up again it should work. The decryption is only partially complete so you have to wait that out too. If you set the steam.exe to high priority in the task manager it speeds up the decrypt substantially, for me it went from 10mbps to 100mbps.

Hope that helps its what worked for me.

Yeah I had figured that out later too. Thanks though, I appreciate it.

Creston

The Hanar have no access to spaceships or other technology, unless they buy them. So their existence in council space is promoted by the council itself, not by the reapers and their gate network.

http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Hanar

Also, the codex is not clear on whether Rachni had access to the mass relay network, if they had, it would not have been 1000year long long war imo - they could have simply jumped to the citadel and to all species homeworlds in one go.

Mhhh, i guess i read too much codex

Edit: The Codex about Hawking Eta claims Rachni could use Mass Relays.. but others say they couldn't.. ah well ;p

This comment was edited on Jan 26, 2010, 20:18.

eRe4s3r wrote on Jan 26, 2010, 19:52:
Its not illogical to see humanoids everywhere. You'll need 2 arms and 2 legs for any kind of technological development, which is mandatory to use the Mass Relays.

Flawed. Hanar the floating jellyfish. And rachni used them in the rachni wars. Mass relays force any and all civilizations to develop along specific technological paths. Those paths aren't bipedal and evolutionary, but technological.

Anyway, I'll leave the insanity at that.

Its not illogical to see humanoids everywhere. You'll need 2 arms and 2 legs for any kind of technological development, which is mandatory to use the Mass Relays. Remember, you are exploring points of interest that are connected via mass relays. Which is one of the main reasons you can't "jump" to the rachni homeworld for example Insects can't use mass relays.

The Mass relays and species that use it, can use it because they were supposed to. In a way, the mass relays are a species filter. Hence why you don't see many odd species around. Especially inside council space

It's apparently coming later this week. So it's not the first free DLC afterall.

im looking at it right now. its even sitting in a directory on the ea web servers. xbox 360 version was delayed, not pc.

"Mostly" since their is a metric fuck ton of dialog. It makes Dragon Age look like Diablo in that regard. (For the record though: I like it that way)

You no longer buy and equip weapons or armor, you just merely find the upgrades or materials. Plus, the armor just adds certain bonuses to skills, which makes changing it wholly unnecessary.

You also have significantly less skills it seems, which results in less tactical battles. Combat feels very much like a third person shooter now. In a way, this is nice, since I never really enjoyed the combat in ME1 due to the shitty AI of your teammates, which it seems so far they have done a good job fixing.

Agree with the combat, but I wouldn't say there's more dialog than Dragon Age. A lot of the dialog is non mission critical fluff and doesn't expand ME lore or drive the plot.

And the charm of the Codex is almost lost because so much of it is copy/pasted from ME1. They added a few new technologies and stuff, but overall I think the new aliens are boring and feel rather tacked on. And for some reason they are all humanoid (Sci Fi really bugs me when aliens always end up being so human. The designers have literally a clean slate to design any manner of crazy alien species and they come out with face-painted humans with maybe a couple extra eyes?)

The new characters are all right even if I find myself still frequently using a certain badass Turian...

Akuinnen wrote on Jan 26, 2010, 17:57:
Can't log in to EA to play the game. I enter my account info and it just hangs at the "please wait"

You don't need to login to play, its just to get the DLC. Cancel the EA login and play! Thats what I did and played for about an hour with no issues.

This comment was edited on Jan 26, 2010, 18:14.

Can't log in to EA to play the game. I enter my account info and it just hangs at the "please wait"

Seems there's a bug with dual cores and long loading times. If you're having that problem, tab out, goto task manager. Set core affinity to 1 core. Apply. Then reset affinity to 2 cores or more. Loading times are about 1/4 as long.