Just from reading Eddy’s post, I’d have to agree with Griever. Sounds like they took out all the stuff that made the first one ‘hardcore’ and made it more accessible to kids – as in me. If the story is great and I don’t have to worry about crazy RPG stuff cloggin up my life, maybe I’ll give this one a chance. Then again I only got an hour into the first and threw it away… Meh, hope it’s fun!

Haha well, if the definition of hardcore is a cumbersome inventory system full of barely distinguished items that is a pain in the ass to manage, then “hardcore” can get bent.

The new weapon and armor upgrade system is light years better. You’re automatically given the best possible weapon in your artillery (although you can obviously swap them out once you have more), and you can actually distinguish between the upgrades you are given.

As for not getting exp for killing enemies, it’s a non-issue for me. Enemies that give you exp just promote level grinding, and ME2 seems to be designed so that you don’t need to run around beefing up your character so your ass doesn’t get whipped on the next mission.

Anyone who played ME1 and went to Noveria first because they didn’t know any better understands why this is a good thing. I got four hours into ME1 and got owned by Benezia so many times that I had to re-roll and play differently before the game clicked for me. That’s just bad design, IMHO.

Bioware games typically don’t have respawning enemies, so level grinding usually is not an option. In fact, one of the things that makes the games tough is utilizing the skills with the limited amount of EXP you can get.

I hate when games change your weapon automatically. I am a big boy, if I want to change weapons, I will do so myself.

I was up till 1 in the morning yesterday (today, technically) because I felt so compelled to keep going.

If it makes you feel better I played until 3am… and was at work at 8am. Probably a bad idea to start playing at midnight.

And, yeah, I remember the biotic cop, too, I think I had problems with that as well.

The funniest thing about Noveria was that when I took my second Shepard there (after doing basically everything else in the game that I could), I steamrolled over all the enemies there. It was almost TOO easy.

Man, that world was the gauntlet.

As for Mass Effect 2, one thing I notice is that the longer I play the less I want to stop. I was up till 1 in the morning yesterday (today, technically) because I felt so compelled to keep going.

Just from reading Eddy’s post, I’d have to agree with Griever. Sounds like they took out all the stuff that made the first one ‘hardcore’ and made it more accessible to kids – as in me. If the story is great and I don’t have to worry about crazy RPG stuff cloggin up my life, maybe I’ll give this one a chance. Then again I only got an hour into the first and threw it away… Meh, hope it’s fun!

Haha well, if the definition of hardcore is a cumbersome inventory system full of barely distinguished items that is a pain in the ass to manage, then “hardcore” can get bent.

The new weapon and armor upgrade system is light years better. You’re automatically given the best possible weapon in your artillery (although you can obviously swap them out once you have more), and you can actually distinguish between the upgrades you are given.

As for not getting exp for killing enemies, it’s a non-issue for me. Enemies that give you exp just promote level grinding, and ME2 seems to be designed so that you don’t need to run around beefing up your character so your ass doesn’t get whipped on the next mission.

Anyone who played ME1 and went to Noveria first because they didn’t know any better understands why this is a good thing. I got four hours into ME1 and got owned by Benezia so many times that I had to re-roll and play differently before the game clicked for me. That’s just bad design, IMHO.

are you saying that you never got to the citadel? or that you do not like the way it looked. if the first that wow that means the game really does change on each play through I got to the citadel early on in my game. if you mean that you don’t like the new look I agree that it would have been nice to revisit the same stuff/people that you had in the first game (like how the Volus that works for the shadow broker is affected by Liara T’Soni). However it makes since because the citadel was sort of destroyed. I mean you walk through that part of the citadel in the end of the first game after Saren, Sovereign, and you have gone through the mass effect portal at Ilos and it looked pretty much trashed to me. I still would like to see the old citadel but I understand the change.