Bugs in Mass Effect 1

Let's talk about a game that should be one of my favorite games of all time. Poor inventory management systems aside, I really like the story and most of the gameplay in ME1.

But I am playing the PS3 version (and looking at various forums some of these were present on 360 as well) and goddamn, is this game riddled with bugs from start to finish.

Minor bugs:

Camera during cutscenes not on right character or sometimes even looks at empty space

During the scene on Eden Prime with Nihlus and Saren, sometimes the cutscene will just be a mostly red screen with no characters or environment visible at all

On one playthrough the geth transmitter on Feros just disappeared and I got no credit for destroying it

Incredibly poor AI programming in the tunnels on Feros, including squadmates sometimes not following you at all

Sometimes random lines of dialogue will not play (subtitles still work but no audio)

EDIT: New bugs on a new playthrough! Sometimes enemies will be facing one direction and not turn (their weapons still point to you however.) I didn't pay it much mind 'til it happened to Shepard though; she kept facing one direction but I could still move the reticule and fire at enemies she was not facing. This lasted until I switched weapons.

Sometimes the fire button will just randomly stop working (pausing and unpausing seemed to work)

Major bugs:

I saved near the elevator at the top of the Citadel docking bay and when I loaded, I was on the other side of the elevator door, inside the lift shaft, with no way to summon the elevator or open the door (i.e. that save was essentially corrupted)

I once fell through the world on Virmire into an infinite void and died (if you remember Virmire, there are no cliffs you can drive the Mako off of so the Mako must have clipped through an invisible hole in the level geometry or something)

Game sometimes hard locks the console (protip, always save before the meeting on the Citadel where you get grounded, as that cutscene was particularly problematic for this)

My first playthrough, the entire cutscene that should have played after Feros (my last plot world) where your crew puts the pieces together and discovers the location of the Conduit did not play. I would never have even known that cutscene existed if I didn't have to play that same character again (I didn't know about the squadmate-specific achievements the first time). Essentially for that playthrough there was a minor plot hole not because of poor writing, but because a scripting error ate five minutes worth of dialogue.

EDIT: Aha! The bug is reproducible and I'm not crazy! I went back to that old save to find out what was going on and if you go straight to the Normandy without talking to too many people (I think it's the shopkeeper Ledra but I'm not sure) then you can get the cutscene to play as intended, then go back to Feros afterwards and talk to people if you want to see the aftermath. Which is still NOT IDEAL but better than nothing.

I'm sure there are more, those are just the ones I could think of. I admire Bioware's ambition but I can sorta see why games are becoming more linear if open ended games are this much of a problem.

Don't forget about these bugs. They are the worst.

Jokes aside, I played Mass Effect on the PC and never encountered any of those issues. The most glaring bugs I encountered where minor glitches like once my weapon kept firing even though I had it unequipped making it look like a jetpack on Shepard's back.

Those issues sound like a real bummer. I played through the PC version 3 times and don't remember encountering any significant bugs at all.

The biggest issue I remember from playing the 360 version was the frequent single-digit frame-rate drops, especially on Feros. I didn't experience any of the major bugs you listed but ME1 was definitely sketchy on the technical side.

It's hard to believe that game is over 7 years old now...

Can the Mako controls be considered a bug? :p

@probablytuna said:

Don't forget about these bugs. They are the worst.

Jokes aside, I played Mass Effect on the PC and never encountered any of those issues. The most glaring bugs I encountered where minor glitches like once my weapon kept firing even though I had it unequipped making it look like a jetpack on Shepard's back.

See, that sounds cool! I've encountered interesting bugs in games before (I fell through a "Desmond's Journey" level in Assassin's Creed Revelations but instead of dying I got to the bottom of a box where I could see the geometry of the level itself from the outside and it looked way cooler and more Animus-y than anything else in the game) but these ones in ME1 just broke the immersion for me.

I've had the game hard lock on me, fallen through the world on the moon, seen the camera bug out during dialogue,and watched the A.I. get stuck on geometry more times than I care to count, but I still really like ME1. I guess to really put it's charm on me with everything it does great that I've overlooked the glitches regardless.

I've had Ashley's model freak out once. It was...strange...

I have played through Mass Effect ten times. I never had any of those problems. I played it on the 360, but still that seems like bad luck.

Yeah, the PS3 version is not the optimal version. I noticed the audio cutting out and not being in sync more often compared to my experience with the 360 version, it crashed on me every once in a while, and the save and loading times seem longer.

But I played through it three times and going for four since getting it in June last year so I'm not necessarily complaining.

i played on 360 and had characters stuck in walls all the time. sometimes they'd get stuck in combat as well, which was a real bummer.

Yes, it is to the game's credit that even after all this I still intend on doing my three planned playthroughs of the game. Perhaps gamers, myself included, are too forgiving (I think of all the games from this year's hottest mess category and that companies can take advantage of forgiveness given too easily) but I still really enjoy ME1.

I played Mass Effect 1 on PS3 recently and had no such issues, lucky me I guess.

Bugs are good for you, they develop character.

Stay strong.

Keep multiple save files.

Games 101.

Yes, the PS3 version was more unstable than the 360 and PC versions, because it was not made by Bioware, but by a company that specializes in porting games to other platforms (in a pretty impressive time, to be fair, I think it took them less than 6 months to have the game on PS3) years after the game release.

I had audio during cutscenes cutting off (tried reloading and got the same results), some cameras looking at empty space during dialogues, etc... I even had some positives like biotics that didn't cooldown, but those were the less often. I let most of it slide since I was happy to be able to play it on the PS3, at last, but it sure is not the best version of the game.

Also on PS3, the game sometimes freezes if you use powers on the final boss battle. As an Adept, it seems really, really ridiculous.

Mass Effect 1 on the PC was a buggy ass game for me. My favorite was when my Shepard turned into a stretch Armstrong or when all of his arms broke in different directions. Besides that I never had many game breaking issues besides the fucking Benezia fight.

Yeah, I encountered several major bugs playing it on PC. There was a cutscene on the Citadel which consistently would turn the entire game black and make me unable to progress. Took me several months of looking through forums until I found a hack to get past that part.

I played the PS3 version last year and it was probably the buggiest game I've ever played. I lost count of the times I got stuck on geometry and had to reload (one occasion forced me to re-fight Benezia), and numerous times Garrus and Wrex (mainly Wrex) would block me into a corner I couldn't escape from. Party members also tended to crowd me and I would have to send them off somewhere to reset them. On a number of occasions while driving the Mako I would hit a piece of geometry and instantly die, this happened twice on Virmire, both times causing me to lose a good chunk of progress. The game crashed upwards of 5 times on loading screens, the most egregious of which was the load for the final cutscene after defeating the final boss which I, of course, had to do all over again.

I had zero problems in 2 and only had one crash and one occasion of geometry stickage in 3, so yeah, Mass Effect 1 is a broken-ass game on PS3.

While this does sound pretty bad, I also played the game 3 times so this is over 3 playthroughs.

If he got around to playing it, lemme know if he encountered any of these issues himself. Some people in the thread had no issues even on PS3 and my current playthrough is going more smoothly, and I made this thread partially because I'm curious whether these problems are that common or not.

I might need some help here. Every time I beat this game (I'm at the last boss fight it gives me the last choice of the game between Udina and Anderson) the credits roll and then takes me straight back to the main menu. Can I not get back to the Normandy and get back to searching galaxies? My worry is if I transfer my ME1 save over to ME2 it won't cover my last choices or even acknowledge I beat the game.

This is my first time playing this series through so just looking to make sure I'm doing the right thing before I jump into ME2.