Why keep away from the third? It's an awesome game, like the previous ones. Only the ending is a bit... poor, but the game itself is gold.

Ya this is one of those series that needs to be played from beginning to end to get the most out of it. It is a great experience with some of the best characters created for a video game series.

A lot of people like to complain about the ending of ME3 but honestly the extended Cut DLC helps fix most of what people were complaining about offering more diversity to each ending and showing the consequences of the action you took through the series.

Still playing it now honestly, ME3 multiplayer is actually quite good which was surprising, I was in the camp of not wanting it but once I gave it a chance I found a rather enjoyable experience.

I'm reasonably sure this has been patched.

Yeah. I'm not sure I would call any of them that, actually. Then you get into the whole WHAT IS AN RPG debate though.

It's not about the ending (I was just glad the game was over), it's the overall story in it. And the set pieces and just...stuff. I probably prefer it over DA2, but that's faint praise. :p

Start with the first one or don't start at all imho. The best part of the series are the characters, if you don't get to know them you'll hardly understand or care about anything that happens in the sequels.
If you want to get only one, take ME3 because multiplayer is fun and who knows for how long EA will keep the servers active.

That said, ME2>ME3>ME1 for me. The first felt like an american b-movie, the second was a breath of fresh air, the third was kind of a mixed bag. It had some of the best moments in the trilogy, but it also killed my interest in replaying the campaign ever again. Although I got my money's worth just with co-op, I put over 200 hours in it and I'm still loving it.

Of the two Mass Effects I've played, the first one was the better game. It was also the only good one. I will probably never play ME3 for reasons I'll come to now.

I'm not going to defend the combat system of ME1. That said, I really don't think ME2 improved it at all. I was already bored of cover-based shooters thanks to two Gears of War games, and Mass Effect 2 was nothing if not cover-based shooting. Slow-paced, boring as hell, zero thinking involved. Also, I didn't miss the inventory system of ME1 in particular, but it would have been nice to have a proper choice in weaponry.

The planet-scanning mechanics of ME2 were complete and utter bollocks, so much so that if I hadn't had a save to import (to get a resource boost), I would have played through ME1 all over again to avoid the iridium scanning. The Mako did have wayward handling characteristics and most of the planets/moons/whatever lacked character, but the fact that I could explore them in general gave the world a sense of bigness that ME2 lacks. ME1 felt like cycling through a busy, if fairly uniform city; ME2 felt like being allowed to explore the city however I liked so long as I remained in a bus or within ten feet of a bus stop.

ME1 has a story. ME2 has Commander Shepard fucking around the world, picking up semi-random people so that s/he could do them favours - the "bundle of DLC stuck together and sold as a game" analogy fits perfectly, I think. Then they had the nerve to sell DLC to stack on top of the DLC bundle. No thanks. ME2 is well-written, though, if you care. You shouldn't.

I played both games on PC. From this experience I learned that you should avoid the PC version of ME2 like crotch rot. Here's a short rundown of things that pissed me off:
1) The loading times were atrociously long and frequent - a minute or two to ride the elevator from one deck of the Normandy to another. These weren't disguised as elevators because, presumably, the Normandy isn't very high. Better have a book or a beer or porn nearby.
2) The controls felt sticky, probably because they were programmed with controllers in mind. Fiddling with the options improved nothing. The settings menu is a submenu of "Extras" if my memory serves correctly. Some extras, yeah.
3) The intro cutscene is as close as makes no difference twenty minutes long and it cannot be skipped. Imagine the game crashing thirty seconds into the game, forcing you to restart the game and go do whatever the hell else you have to do for twenty minutes, all the while hoping it was a freak occurrence rather than something the game pulls every time.
4) Remember all those hotkeys in ME1? You know, the ones for the journal, crew members and all that? Poof. Gone. You have to trawl through the root menu every single time, which made me avoid the need to explore all menus for whatever reason. Since this includes the codex, I wound up not knowing half as much about the world of ME2 as ME1.
5) I know I keep banging on about this, but you cannot use double-click. It may not sound like much, but I can tell that double-clicking is a massive convenience that you only begin to appreciate once it's taken away from your life, even briefly, after twenty-three years of happy life and shared memories.

The bullshit that is ME2 made me lose interest in EA in general and BioWare in particular. Don't know, maybe it would have happened sooner or later anyway, but there we go. Well done, lads.

Why does cover-based mean zero thinking? I played ME2 through on insane and it was very tactical and fast-paced, I had to constantly change cover positions, prioritize targets, place my team correctly and manage powers to win. It is not a dumb ass auto-pilot experience just because it uses cover mechanics.

Now was normal mode too easy? Yes, way too easy, I agree with that.

No, it hasn't been. I followed that issue for months. Only thing they did was that they replaced the error message and BW claimed it's fixed. And fan modes aren't able to fix everything too because of changed face structure. It's still 50/50.

By the way, I'd like to hear some arguments here. Because tons of people say that ME1 has a story and the others are shit.

And I'm asking - what story is that? The boring hunt after Saren? THIS is that epic story? I recently tried to replay ME1 but I got tired of that "story" after 10 hours.

Ok, then it's still hit and miss. What I'm pretty sure about is that on my first game the import was slightly messed up but on a later replay with the latest patch it was fine.


My guess is when a lot of people say "story" they really mean the setting, the atmosphere, the quality of writing etc, or perhaps the mini-stories that are subquests and sidequests. I'm one who feels ME1 did very well in those departments even if the main story was kind of unmotivating for a significant part of the game.

Also, replays always diminish the story immensely because you already know it. The feeling of "what happens next" is gone, unless the plot has lots of significant branching points.

Mass Effect 1 is a bit like a summer blockbuster: the story is clichéd, there are jumps of logic everywhere, there's a bit of mysticism that makes no sense - and you love it because the production values are good enough to keep you invested in the story. There are certain forms in storytelling which pull you in, no matter how many times you've seen it before. Just let go and enjoy the ride.

I think I extended the above analogy to the other games in the series at some point, but I'll be darned if I know when and where I put that post on the forums.

I always play games either on normal or hard difficulty (can't remember which I had in ME2's case), but it's a crapshoot because some developers seem to think normal should be a fair challenge (The Witcher 2, FTL) and others think that should be hard mode's job. So yeah, could've been my inability to pick the correct difficulty, I concede to that. The game failed to entertain me enough to warrant another playthrough regardless of difficulty setting, though.

I liked the Reaper part of the story, but pretty much forgot everything about Saren.

Earlier you mentioned ME2 having an epic story. As far as I could tell, it didn't really have a story at all. Care to elaborate your perspective?

I haven't played the third yet but...

ME1:
+Better main plot, more satisfying ending
+Better RPG elements (this can be a negative too though as it's not always handled very well)

ME2:
+Better combat
+MUCH better sidequests
+More interesting characters
+Better voice acting from male Shep.


You should def play the first, first.