Well, if you ask me, ME is a great game only because of its non-combat parts.
True. Even with the improvements from ME3, it still wouldn’t stand a chance against a pure third person shooter.
Max Payne 3 shall provide that in its purest form.
so, am I like the only one who liked the ME1 combat better? IMO it was better in just about every way they differed.
and I don’t want more freedom of movement, if you leave cover in a fight, you should be dead in a couple seconds tops
I always considered ME1’s combat to be a bit clunky and unfocused, even before Bioware started marketing ME2 at all, so all the improvements in that area that ME2 introduced were welcomed by me.
That said, I don’t hate ME1’s combat, I just thought it was far from perfect, even back in the day.
By the way, in which ways, specifically, do you think ME1’s combat is better than ME2’s?
in and out of cover without hitting space
all the key mapping
crouching for accuracy
no “heat clips”, could use your favorite weapon indefinitely
the armor and weapon upgrading/modifying, tedious though it could be at times
every power having it’s own cool down
weapon training
… well that’s what I can remember anyways, not all strictly combat, but combat related anyways
Honestly I was only referring to the cover/movement part of the combat, which I much prefer in ME2/3. ME1 would sometimes put me in cover even though I didn’t mean to. ME2’s system gives me more control over that.
I agree. Interactions with your crew or other characters makes the game and it´s plot more lively. With multiple types of response it makes you live as you were the main character of the game. It´s a shame that my brother doesn´t share the same opinion 
Some of the side quests were interesting, but hard to find from time to time. Took me a while to find every anomaly in the galaxy map.
In ME3 it would be far more difficult…because of the plot, the player won´t have chance to make all of the quests …making a choice = next step forward = no way back
Finally played the ME3 beta, I have to say, the combat feels so much better than even in ME2, and the multiplayer horde mode is very fun.
I love bioware but I hate EA and with whole Origin req thing kind of makes me sad.
Its like bioware is like that wife who is being abused by her husband EA and doesn’t do anything about it. I am just sitting here saying “NO BIOWARE, EA ISN’T GOOD FOR YOU!”.
But Bioware stays and gets abused.
I holding out hope Mass effect 3 goes on steam at least.
Origin doesn’t really make any difference at all, it’s a SP game. I don’t really like Origin, but I really dislike the “lets hate on Origin” bandwagon that everybody hops right onto.
My main problem with Origin is, I already have Steam. I don’t want to have both programs running, just to make sure all of my games are up to date.
Steam wins out because I like Valve more, I have many more games on Steam, and had a Steam account years before EA even thought of Origin.
On topic: Just finished playing through it, it’s pretty decent. I am disappointed with the “official” femshep. She looks significantly worse than the concept art that everyone voted on, and I liked the one that won the most. Did anyone else think Ashley didn’t look or sound like Ashley anymore? I haven’t seen Kaiden yet, but I know that between ME1 and 2, he picked up smoking 10 packs a day, but was otherwise unchanged.
Even with those complaints about characters, the demo was pretty fun, which makes me want to finish playing ME1 and 2 again to have a new character ready.
The great part about default Shepard is that you only have to use them if you for some reason are incapable of creating your own.
Ashley was wonky as hell in the other games. I’m elated that they bothered to teach her how to use makeup.
The new Anderson is top notch
I loved the first two games but I’ve been feeling really…unhyped for ME3. The most recent gameplay trailers just look kinda like generic action sci-fi more than ME. Keep talking about how the beta went though, it sounds like you had fun with it and I’m really hoping the game is better than I’m expecting.
EDIT: Oh snap I forgot there was a demo, brb gonna go play
EDIT 2: Ok so that was a pretty awesome demo, I’m definitely gonna get it.
In regards to the demo… Did they nerf biotics even more, just in a different way this time??
I’m not sure how biotics interact with protection, but they are just pretty damn weak overall and feel like they have an insanely long cooldown duration.
During the prologue I could spam singularity+warp with my adept pretty often, didn’t do too much damage but didn’t mind it since I was lvl1. When I got to play the second part of the demo, I put several ranks into them, and tried out shockwave in hopes it’s less useless now. I noticed that the cooldown on all three of these powers is several times the duration than during the prologue, add to that that they didn’t get much more powerful. I’ve finished ME2 with Adept about 3 times on insanity, and never relied on raw gun power as much as I did in the demo.
The sound effects of singularity and warp are also like flushing a toilet. Tough I like the changes to shockwave and stasis, but with the heavy melee attack of the Adept (and I assume other biotics get that version too), shockwave kinda gets redundant. Also don’t get why they gave a grenade power to adept but not vanguard… All in all, I feel I’ll have to do some heavy coalesced editing to give some sense to the class+power makeup.
Shockwave could be incredibly useful depending on who it was you were throwing it at. Husks/abominations it was great against, anything else though was kinda meh, more useful for getting people out of cover than actually doing damage.
The only reasoning i can think of why they would give the grenade to the adept and not vanguard (which makes me sad cause i play as vanguard mostly) is that traditionally vanguard is a super close range fighting, so not so much conducive for grenades. whereas adepts, i always hung back a bit more so the added range makes grenades more useful.
I also notice that biotic powers seemed pretty weak and acted more as a debuf than an actual attack. I did notice however that they improved the reliability of the vanguard’s smashing ability, ME2 at times (mostly when you realllly needed it to save your life) it just wouldn’t work and all of the sudden your dead. I also like the new sounds of biotics, they sound more… “biotic-y” than bouncy explosions… if that makes senseredg
did anyone else feel like the “improvements” were more like “same as ME2 with a new coat of paint”?
From what I can tell, husks don’t seem to instantly die when lifted anymore in ME3, but it might be just that the ones in the demo are specially scripted for the cinematics.
Since then, I’ve found out that power recharge time is affected by carry weight, which is pretty much all the guns you carry around, so that explains my complaint. Some powers are also confirmed to be bugged in the demo and get no cooldown on occasion.
I tried out the vanguard too, and it seems to be much more viable and fun to play with Nova and Heavy Melee, it might just be the first class I’ll finish this game with.
that’s not what I want to hear, I thought they were going to make it more RPG-ey again
so after playing the multiplayer, its not nearly as bad as what i was expecting. there are still bugs that i ran into and its not without its problems, but i did actually enjoy it. If the single player has as much customization as what the multiplayer does, i’d be ok with that.
The whole conversation paragon/renegade system is still in place. There’ll be more customization for your weapons in this game. There’s more options for your powers now when you level up. Overall, it looks like ME3 ought to blend the extensive RPG customization of ME1 with the simplified options and improved combat of ME2 pretty well. I was happy with what the demo showed.
In regards to classes, I’ve always felt that the soldier class was the most heavily favored because of the reasons you guys mentioned - the biotics often seem weak or ineffectual, and you usually have to use quite a bit of gunplay to finish off your foes anyway, so you might as well have a lot of awesome guns. Not that biotics and such aren’t useful, but some powers seem to be a lot more useful than others, at least to me anyway. Warp, Reave, and Barrier were my favorites and saw tons of use, particularly Barrier - cools down really quick so I often never ran out of shields. Singularity, Throw, and pull are ok. Stasis I never used because I didn’t want a frozen, immune enemy, I wanted a dead enemy, and with all the other options at my disposal, it never really came down to me absolutely needing that extra power. Shockwave I never used because enemies didn’t seem to line up enough to make it useful. Charge is basically a death sentence at higher difficulties.
Its interesting that you feel the soldier is the favored class cause I’ve always felt it was the one that got the least amount of attention from Bioware. All boils down to play style i guess. I just felt the powers were kinda dull and boring and the only real plus was that you got to use all the different guns.
Biotics did get significantly stronger as they go up in level ive notices, they are extremely weak in the early stages but in the later half of their level tree, they can be really strong.
Again i guess it boils down to play style cause i used both shockwave and the biotic charge a ton in ME2 and so far in the ME3 multiplayer as well. The nice thing about the charge is that regardless of being attacked, it automatically brings your shields up to half. that saved me on so many occasions. Shockwave on the other hand is just a great way to stagger enemies and get them to stop shooting.
One of the bugs i was talking about is that every now and then when i go into a round as a vanguard, only the shockwave hotkey is available (very lame) but even still it’s great against those shield guys. May not be powerful as an attack but it does have plenty of uses regardless of if there is a line of enemies or just one.