@Brendan said:

I think it's crazy that seemingly everyone hated the Mako then, and seemingly everyone loves it now. You internet people are all nuts.

Yeah, this is ridiculous.

I played on PC so the Mako was fine.

Personally i never had issues with Mako controls people keep bringing up.
On the PC it controlled perfectly for me.
Once you got the hang of some of the mroe fun aspects of the Mako, like how far you could push it in terms of inclines, speed, and jumps you could do some pretty wild stuff with it.
 
Conceptually Mako exploration still remains my most favourite part of the series.
Finally a game about space actually allowed you to explore shit. It's a gem that later ME games lost.
For me it actually felt like i was out there traveling through space seeing new stuff, exploring planets.
People are also saying that there was never anything worth finding, but that could not be more wrong, you could find some quite interesting things/artifacts/places on certain planets. These things weren't frequent, but they were there and it felt all the more great when you did find them.
It was an absolutely fucking incredible feeling of roaming around and then actually finding something, an actual sense of discovery and exploration.
I felt like i was finally a part of sci-fi. In it.
 
Mako was also imo an incredible device that dramatically increased the games immersiveness.
You were flyung around space and OMFG you could actually physically land on a planet!
That one thing made the whle world of ME feel much bigger and more cohesive. Actually made it feel like you were going around the galaxy.
Secondly the great thing was that Mako worked as part of the world. It was not a some seperate section. It was part of the system. You could roll around and fight in the Mako and then you could just get out of it and start walking/fighting on foot right next to it.
Mako represented freedom.
 
What do we get in ME2 and ME3?
Fucking loading screens between narrow corridor crawls. Normandy. Small level. Normandy. Awesome...
Sure makes me feel like i'm in a huge galaxy.
Sorry but that felt both extremely gamey and restrictive to the extreme.
And mining, ugh. UGH!

The mako was good, but there were too much of it.

From reading through this thread I get the impression that half the problem are the worlds and the other half is the Mako controls itself. So theoretically, more detailed worlds and better Mako controls would make those sequences a whole lot better? Who can say. I thought it controlled pretty well on the PC and the vast worlds did give off a good exploration vibe if it is a little too barren. It works both ways it seems.

The mako was great in concept. The problem was that I never wanted to explore the planets because they looked so boring and similar. If they look distinct the mako would be great. As it was it just showcased the limited resources Bioware had. I understand that to make each planet unique would not be worth the time and money, so It's no wonder it never came back.

Mako was good for one thing and one thing only. Blasting those stupid space monkeys that stole the tracking device I needed!

people looked at it like this at the time "WTF IS THIS SHIT DOING IN MY RPG BIOWARE GAME THIS ISNT ACTION GAME TANK GAME!!!! THIS STORY DIALOG GAME I HAFTA DRIVE THIS AND AIM AND STEER?!?! HATE THIS" but then the series got all action and shootery and time passed and people forgot how weird it was to have that stuff in a bioware game

I liked the Mako just b/c it allowed me to explore. Samey, re-skinned planets and boxy research facilities? Whatever? I enjoyed all of it.

No, just no. The Mako sucked then, and it sucks now.

The problem was it made exploring a pain because it was so "realistic" with its reliance on thrusters and gravity and such. What you explored were barren lands with nothing in them except that one tiny bit containing a resource or the crashed probes or the generic hideout with some items you'd simply sell as soon as you were back on the ship. Forcing you to slowly drive around mountains that were too steep to drive up only to find a probe you couldn't yet hack or whatnot was not fun.

The Mako itself was okay - what you did with it was the real issue.

Mako is way better than scanning planets.

I did almost all the mako stuff everytime I played through ME. I played it 3 times.

Am I crazy?

Hammerhead was so much better!

Parking it on top of one of those small White round buildings then not being able to get back to it kinda sucked.

But exploring the planet was fun.

Played ME1 on the PC, and the Mako was awesome. That thing handled sheer cliffs better than a horse in Skyrim!

Except in that one story mission (I think on Feros), where they put invisible walls fucking everywhere.

Still, sniping Geth colossi and then finishing them on foot was dope.

I didn't mind the Mako when I first played but going back to it made me like it less. The Firewalker in ME2 was great but was way too weak.

Dude, the side mission stuff was best in ME2, but even that, as well as the rest of all the side mission stuff in the entire series, just feel like filler. The only reason to do them was to get the best stuff for your character, but in the end, none of it really mattered. Aside from most of the side stuff, Mass Effect is largely amazing.

I liked the Mako, but I also liked the Hammerhead.  For planetary exploration, something that flies
over the the planet (but low to the ground, in atmosphere) makes more sense.  With ME 3, they seemed to
have removed all the mini-games & put in a full-fledged multi-player game with a random M:tG 
trading card style system, also more detailed combat.  They prop the game up to its plot.  ME 1
was exploration & discovery, ME 2 was a seven samurai adventure, & ME 3 is galactic war; each
game gearing its pieces to the plot, as I understand it.

I've never abandon my love for the Mako.
The Hammerhead? That thing should rot in a grave somewhere.

The Mako wouldn't have been so bad if one weren't driving over impossible geometry 75% of the time, which only serves to highlight just how shit the controls are. And after all that frustration, you are rewarded with some minerals to scan. Yay.

Easily the low point of the series.

I didn't think the Mako was that bad. My first impressions of it were terrible, but once I got to grips with how it controlled it was fine. Not anything more than fine though.

I hated the Mako. Every single fight, I felt like I was just cheesing the system. "How can I kill these guys without getting shot?" Roll forward... fire, roll back behind a hill before you can get hit. But then there are the guys who fire beam weapons you can't really evade, and slowly but surely your shield runs down. And then the shields take *forever* to regenerate. Not to mention the possibility every time you fought a thresher maw that it could randomly come up under you and totally wreck your shit, and not to mention how you had no idea where the resources were on a planet, so you had to roll up mountains at impossible angles to see if they'd hidden a goodie in some crevice. And not to mention how the gun couldn't aim below a parallel line to the ground, but the reticule would travel anywhere, so it didn't fire where you aimed unless you made sure the angle of the vehicle was correct.

Did I like the idea of planetary exploration? Sure. Did it make the galaxy feel bigger? Yes. But all of my approval of the idea ended there.

@ShaggE said:

^ Yup. The Mako was fine. It was the endless desert planets that I took issue with.

Exactly.

Massive empty environments, populated only with small bunkers that are remarkably similar to bunkers on planets many solar systems away. If they could find a happy medium, openness without emptiness, that would have been perfect.

I only read the first page of this thread, I just have to say that calling driving around a perfectly square map through random fractal landscapes between 3-4 POI's to find one of 3-4 types of buildings with randomly placed crates inside, "exploration", is high-larious. Mass Effect was never about exploration.