Surprised to see someone else was disappointed in ME2, though it was still a great game. Bioware are killing the RPG!

To me, it's one of the greatest games ever released. So I disagree.

I didn't read this entire thread so this might have been mentioned but ME1 didn't have loot either.
 
Nothing you collected was ever meaningful, it was simply the illusion of loot...and good riddance to that. ME2 is the perfect RPG...and defines the genre.

I actually agree to some extent, but ME2 is better on so many other levels that it doesn't bother me. I would love to see more customisation in ME3 though.

I thought the leveling up/RPG system in ME2 was atrocious. In ME1 I was able to have many different skills and I could put a bunch of points into one, some points in another, max out one bar, some more in another, etc. In ME2 it's basically just me hitting auto level for everything because there's only 4 skills and four slots (for teammates). It's stupid in my opinion.

Mass Effect 2 is the future of games.  Its the game that all games will be compared to for the foreseeable future.  It is a masterpiece. I just can't see your point.  
 
Sure it had its flaws but It is a truly a game that will be remembered as one of the greatest of this generation and probably the next.   
 
I love Mass Effect 1 and 2.

" Mass Effect was boring, and the story was shit. Mass Effect 2 was worse. "

I also preferred the original Mass Effect over its sequel. But was Mass Effect 2 a disappointment, no.

" @Pinworm45: I wasn't being 100% serious when I said that, but I do think there are better stories.   I'm mostly entertained by japanese games though like Metal Gear Solid (like you can see from my pic) or my two favorite games Nocturne and Persona 3. My favorite "western" game is Deus Ex, and if you get a chance you should pick it up. The story is fantastic. Another good story-based game is Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines.   I respect your opinion and I understand if you don't like the games I listed, but that's just how I feel. "

" @SpiralStairs said:

" @Pinworm45: I wasn't being 100% serious when I said that, but I do think there are better stories.   I'm mostly entertained by japanese games though like Metal Gear Solid (like you can see from my pic) or my two favorite games Nocturne and Persona 3. My favorite "western" game is Deus Ex, and if you get a chance you should pick it up. The story is fantastic. Another good story-based game is Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines.   I respect your opinion and I understand if you don't like the games I listed, but that's just how I feel. "

So you like Japanese stuff huh? so basicaly what you're saying is you like stories that are carbon copies of every western sci fi/horror film, which is basicaly what games like MGS and Resident Evil are. "

" @iKANNIBAL said:

" @SpiralStairs said:

" @Pinworm45: I wasn't being 100% serious when I said that, but I do think there are better stories.   I'm mostly entertained by japanese games though like Metal Gear Solid (like you can see from my pic) or my two favorite games Nocturne and Persona 3. My favorite "western" game is Deus Ex, and if you get a chance you should pick it up. The story is fantastic. Another good story-based game is Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines.   I respect your opinion and I understand if you don't like the games I listed, but that's just how I feel. "

So you like Japanese stuff huh? so basicaly what you're saying is you like stories that are carbon copies of every western sci fi/horror film, which is basicaly what games like MGS and Resident Evil are. "

If you say so. Also what does a blue username mean. I have no idea tbh. "

"Mass Effect 2 wasn't a bad game at all ,It was fun and exciting game . But it was good for the wrong reasons, the first mass effect was a true RPG with a expansive ability chart and assortment of different weapons and loot."

Silly boy, Mass Effect 2 wasn't a disappointment.

I don't have ME2, I played the demo, but one thing that I find weird in ME2 is that you "purchase" rank. I don't understand that. I find issue with the term purchase being used there.  Trying to get the players into the habit of "purchasing" ... 'hey purchase this dlc' ... what the heck.

Ain't nothing disappointing about Mass Effect 2
 
ROSES ARE RED 
VIOLETS ARE BLUE
ASSUMING  CONTROL
THIS HURTS YOU

"    Mass Effect 2 wasn't a bad game at all ,It was fun and exciting game . But it was good for the wrong reasons, the first mass effect was a true RPG with a expansive ability chart and assortment of different weapons and loot .However Mass Effect  did have below average shooting mechanics  and  item management was frustrating .You would think the second would be amazing  because all they had to do was tweak a  few flawed  parts of the game.Which they did in mass effect 2, the shooting mechanics are phenomenal. So why is the first one better than? they stripped that game into a another third person shooter, they solved item management by removing items all together so theres no longer a loot system. Bioware also  decide to dumb down the ability tree  so theres almost  no in depth character customization           "

Mass effect 2 was definitely showing signs of rushed development it was released in 2 years when the first mass effect had a 3 and a half year production time and me3 was a little over 2 years so 1 and a half year different between me1 and me2 and probably a quarter of a year between me2 and me3 development time while there was definitely advancement in the gaming industry to account for a shorter development time it definitely would have helped them if they kept the 3 and a half year development time until they could reliability do development in a shorter period of time which definitely showed with me2 cutting a lot of me1 features while the armor and animation quality looked better in me2 everything else suffered because they didn't take into account how these changes would push their development time out to the normal 3 and a half year development time on top of most likely executives expecting it to be done in a shorter time kind of like how they showed in the free guy movie when the ceo had them rush the character d.u.d.e as a example.

@alimator145: you’ve got an empty lane to fill. Film Crit Hulk went mainstream, Big Ghost (to my knowledge) disappeared and ZODIACMOTHERFUCKER remains more machine than man. Focus, I believe in you.

12 yeras later, the answer remains the same: Because "complexity" is often conflated with, and mistaken for, "depth."

I love ME1, but the systems were all pools a mile wide and an inch deep. Mass Effect: Legendary Edition really helped recontextualize and give a better showing of intent.

All 3 games are goddamn classics in retrospect.

As a game, mass effect 2 is probably one of the greatest of all time.

Its moment to moment gameplay is so much beyond ME1 its not really even that comparable.

The only thing ME2 did worse then ME1 in my opinion is a relatively "short" main story path thats really only 3 or 4 missions when you think about it. Also the climax of the game is probably the weakest of the whole trilogy and to this day I dont understand why we fought a human reaper baby thing.

ME1 is tough to beat narratively largely due to some absolutely stellar scenes like Virmire and Vigil. Everything else ME2 wins top to bottom. I play through ME1 once a year because I love it so much, but its always a new game plus where I just mainline story content and its finished in 12 hours. The other 30+ hours of "content" in that game are trash outside of the odd unique premise or mission conversation.

ME2 on the other hand I 100% every time I play it because nearly all the content is great and if its not great its at most an inoffensive 5-10 minutes of your time. I laud ME2 for that. Its mission structure is the pinnacle of open world design. Don't send me out into a boring empty universe, direct me right to the action at the click of a button. Its distilled content with minimal bloat - some of it amazing, and at its worse inoffensive and skippable (I'm looking at you mission where you have to walk on the left over Grunt recruitment assets while it teeters on a cliff).

*As a side note, I remember seeing the E3 gameplay for ME2 and being blown away at how much nicer that gameplay is. Mechs you could shoot limbs off of, Gears of War style cover, fun new power system. In retrospect those feelings are diminished year after year as time goes on. I cant remember the last time a game "wow'd" me. Its just an expectation that everything should have RDR2 levels of polish these days. Maybe thats on me though as a 30 year old dude with a family and far less time on my hands then the college student who had time to play games AND crush every season of Xfiles in a semester haha

Because ammo was limited and they took away open exploration. Plus, the overwhelming feeling of potential the first game had was stripped away.

@eccentrix: The ammo thing made me irrationally annoyed. Or I should say, it annoyed be in ways that were both rational and irrational. I decided to switch things up with my character class and played a sniper. For the first dozen hours of the game, I only had access to one sniper rifle. It held a total of twelve rounds, and only could do a single shot before reloading/chambering a round. It made many early combat scenes feel terrible to play. I literally would run circles around the battlefield after a fight just to make sure I picked up all the ammo. That is a rational complaint, IMO.

My rather irrational complaint was that the switch to traditional ammunition made absolutely no sense in the context of the established fiction. Technically it's not ammunition, but "thermal clips" that you put into your gun to keep it from overheating. Of course, they function identical to ammunition in a thousand other games. The in-universe explanation for this states that it was based on captured geth technology. This is funny, because you can get a geth assault rifle late in ME1. It functions like every other weapon in that game with overheating. Next, they suggest that in the two-and-a-half years since ME1, the Alliance has completely switched to using weapons with these heat sinks. I find this spectacularly unbelievable. The Alliance is not currently in a state of war; rapid adoption of new military technology simply does not occur at that pace. Look at the real world: even with multiple wars, the primary delivery systems for two types of small arms have remained virtually the same for decades. And if this was such a new military technology, why does every single gun you can pick up in the game use it?

Whew. I know that paragraph reads like it was written by a madman. It's just that I loved the world building, and then the sequel directly shits on one of the most interesting parts of the world building. Don't even get me started on removing the Mako!

And yes, I still love this series.

You're preaching to the choir.

I love that an incomprehensible wall of text with no punctuation or capitalization has reignited a decade-old thread.

This magic happening right here is one of the many examples that shows why various companies deleting their forums in favor of Discord chats is a very bad thing for the Internet.

ME2 is very good. I always thought the shooting was mediocre, though. It doesn't feel impactful when you shoot a dude and just see a health/shield bar go down a tiny bit.

@stealydan said:

It's just one sentence, it doesn't need punctuation!

I definitely agree on the forum thing. I don't believe in necroposting as a bad thing and I think that if you have something relevant to say, you should feel free to add your input. That's why I like Youtube comments; there it's the norm for threads to have years between replies. Something I usually say in a joking way but actually sincerely believe is that good conversations don't have an expiration date. There's no need to abandon a discussion just because it's been going on for a while.

I'm also in favor of natural thread derailment that follows the natural course of the conversation, but that's another matter.

I played all three games around 2013 or 2014, and FrostedDolphin's post generally reflects how I felt. ME1 wasn't perfect, but ME2 moved the gameplay in a direction I didn't really want it to go.

I remember a lot of people complaining about ME3 being too much of an action-focused shooter, which I thought was strange because ME2 was already that.

Second game was better than the first, nuff said.

To add-on to the trashing of the world building established in ME1, weapons don't even use ammunition in the modern sense. Double-checking the ME Wiki, under the Small Arms section (Have to scroll to it) on the Weapons, Armor and Equipment page, weapons are basically throwing tiny bits of whatever metal has been slotted and this makes ammo capacity a foregone concern. Which makes the change to thermal clips bewildering. I chalk it up to the EA pressured trend of not enough relatable gunplay in the game series that EA was backing during that time period.

I mean, they saw some things they wanted to sift away from Mass Effect. I thought controlling the Mako was cool but there's a lot of empty planets. I don't think probing planets is a good alternative.

Ammo is better than overheating, though. I don't want to be restricted in combat by a hot gun. We lost the loot, though. Mass Effect was a loot game and there was always things to open. A lot of it wound up in the omnigel pile but whatever.

What Mass Effect 2 did really well was character development and the loyalty missions.

So, you created an account to necro an 11 year old thread and attempt to win the award for longest run-on sentence.