When Earth begins to fall in an ancient cycle of destruction, Commander Shepard must unite the forces of the galaxy to stop the Reapers in the final chapter of the original Mass Effect trilogy.
I think it's crazy that seemingly everyone hated the Mako then, and seemingly everyone loves it now. You internet people are all nuts.
Yep, my feelings too. I did not like the Mako and still do not like it, yet felt like that was how most people felt. Now suddenly in Mass Effect 3, everyone is saying they loved the Mako? WHA' HAPPEN!?
I will say this, though. The Mako actually wasn't as bad as the Hammerhead in my opinion.
It was fun cruising across the planet surfaces and most importantly: these game portions gave the game a massive sense of scope - something that the other ME2 are severely lacking.
I thought I was the only one who liked that stuff, it felt so much more meaningful being able to land on a planet and actually experience it's atmosphere and fauna. Sure there were some sketchy parts, like the same underground bases all the time, but it was miles better than the soulless side missions in 2 and the lack of anything substantial in 3.
Still Mass Effect 1 is my favourite of the three, largely because of this and the fact it's more of a traditional RPG.
The Mako is the reason I've only played through Mass Effect twice. Not only does that thing control like garbage, but if a thresher maw decides to spawn under you it is instant game over. And of course there's the conceit that you are doing literally the exact same thing for every single uncharted world going to the same bunker and killing the same terrible enemies.
The idea behind the Mako and planet landing was cool the execution was just flawed. I would have rather had them try and do it better then remove it completely in Mass Effect 2 and 3.
As somebody who loved the Mako when I first played the game and have recently played through again I think I'm qualified to tell you, you are so so wrong. Its awful. The controls are crap, the aiming crosshairs are useless, seriously I couldn't believe that I enjoyed it before. Its infuriating.
The turret doesn't pivot up or down but the main cannon is dead accurate. Just make sure you're not on an incline... Yeah, dumb design decision, but totally not an issue once you worked out the kinks.
So my last 3 playthroughs I got out of the Mako for pretty much every fight so I could get more EXP. On the hardest difficulty no less. It was rediculous how many assault rifle shots some enemies took. Luckily adepts can just make enemies into ragdolls.
@ShaggE said:
^ Yup. The Mako was fine. It was the endless desert planets that I took issue with.
Yeah, if the Mako had more interesting things to shoot I'd be fine with it, maybe it could control less wonky and have better aiming.
Glad to see the hate isn't universal. People always say "am I the only one who" but in this case I really thought I was one of the FEW who actually liked it
Isn't a reoccurring "theme" to Mass Effect is that some game play elements end up iffy but Bioware hastily abandons them? The Mako is just a reflection of that. It wasn't all bad but there were some really poor parts to driving. That doesn't mean we hate driving but that we simply wanted better handling.
Frankly the Mako and planet scanning are both okay ideas for a game about interstellar exploration but the way Bioware implemented them was not great. Instead of trying to tweak and improve them, they junked them. The best situation would be including both: Sometimes you need to land and scope out the situation in the Mako while sometimes you can just scan the planet from orbit. They could have just tweaked how the driving handled and how scanning worked and covered a lot of the elements of exploring (an element of 4X) but it wasn't bothered with.
The mako was pretty shit. My biggest issue though was that they introduced the hammerhead DLC, and that thing was fucking awesome. It controlled perfectly, it was fun to use, the only problem with it was most of its missions (aside from the one big one that was like a smallish open world) were prototypes. I was expecting it to be expanded upon in ME3, especially when someone immediately mentions the Hammerhead in the shuttle bay on the Normandy. I was pretty disappointed about that, it had a lot of potential. Another area that they were rushed in and unable to fulfil upon, I guess.
I never had as much problem with it as people seemed to have, but then I never had much problem with ME1 in general. At least not until I played ME2, now It's hard to go back.
It needed about double the active thrust time. Other than that and the annoying way the aiming worked when you're on a ridge I liked it a lot. I'm actually farting around in the first game right now and using the Mako really made the galaxy feel like a bigger place. If it ever came back I wouldn't be sad about it.
I liked it and wish they keep it and just refined it a bit. Take some part of the firewalker DLC and combine the two and i think it would have been cool.
I hated the mako I went into mass effect 3 not expecting planet scanning but hammerhead based missions instead. I was entirely disappointed when cortez started giving me some lame excuse as to why it wasn't there.
Actually using the Mako and exploring planets was great.. But yeah, there was literally nothing on any of the planets, except the same copy and pasted warehouse and annoying enemy mobs. If you're a completionist, it was one of the most tedious things ever.
It's something I would have liked to see them try and improve upon though, rather than just axe.
The game needed to improve its exploration (and Mako controls), not ditch it. I feel like this could be said about every mechanic in ME1 except sticky cover and pointing and shooting.
The Mako was conceptually great and did a lot to expand the space of the game. It was a vital part of what made the game seem as if there was a whole universe out there to explore and be effected by your actions. Stumbling across the Rachni singing while on the far reaches of Luna was such a mysterious and incredible experience (that also filled me with dread and had me wondering if perhaps I shouldn't have let them live) that was only an easter egg but a vital one. It was the little details that populated the worlds that filled them.
It, however, played like shit and and unfortunately there was rarely anything tying those details together. It was definitely missed by me, but the execution was largely awful. I really wish they had figured out a way to make it work, however.
I played Mass Effect 1 last week and I thought it was bullshit. It controlled like a drunken bunny rabbit more than a car. The environments you explored were completely vacant of anything interesting. It felt like they were just thrown in to make the mission longer than actually be fun. I do wish they fixed the actual problems with it rather than just scrapping it for good
On the 360 the controls were not the best, but it is easily overlooked. The planet design and sense of investigating a planet whose only inhabitants were its' secrets was awesome. Some people may not enjoy a desolate planet where you can only hear the wind blowing across the fallow plains, but dammit I did. Plus it was more realistic, there are far more desolate planets in our galaxy than ones populated with intelligent life.
The worst thing about the Mako was the fact that you had to use it every time you wanted to explore a planet. If it was only used in one or two of the main quest sequences, then it would be fine. I don't have any interest in exploring a planet that is approximately 95% nothing interesting whatsoever. Ships have sensors. Let me fly straight to the action! (Which they obviously did, in ME2.)
On the 360 the controls were not the best, but it is easily overlooked. The planet design and sense of investigating a planet whose only inhabitants were its' secrets was awesome. Some people may not enjoy a desolate planet where you can only hear the wind blowing across the fallow plains, but dammit I did. Plus it was more realistic, there are far more desolate planets in our galaxy than ones populated with intelligent life.
There was nothing realistic about the way that fucking thing drove.
At the very least every ME game should have had vehicle sections. It was a great way to mix up the gameplay formula. What I liked about the Mako was that it allowed for free-form exploration. I was given an area, a map, and the opportunity to just drive around and do whatever I wanted. Plus jumping off of a huge mountain with the Mako and messing around with the jet-propulsion under the vehicle was a lot of fun.
Like people have said, it wasn't so much the Mako that was the problem, but the endless cookie-cutter planets with huge maps to drive around in. They should have condensed the maps down to smaller areas and made them look more diverse. The whole scanning system should have been performed by the Mako at surface level. That way there would be an active method to find the items / resources without having it on your map from the start.
It was no worse than mining or reaper pacman. So essentially all the extra planet stuff was kinda bad.
Except for the Hammerhead stuff. That actually had potential. I don't know why people don't talk about it or why they ditched it for ME3 after releasing it as a prototype in ME2 DLC. Its even referenced right off the bat by someone in your shuttle bay, as if they intended to utilize it. No time I guess.
The Mako and planet exploration were both flawed, but I liked them. I wish they would have improved those aspects instead of cutting them outright, though I can understand why they did.
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