Mass Effect 3 demo is out.

[Blue-Hawk]

And all I can say is color me unimpressed. Single player story isn't a story. Multiplayer is severely lacking. Looks like they learned nothing from the ME2 debacle of dumbing down a game and turning an RPG into another mindless shooter.

Say what you will, but I didn't like it.

[McLaughlin]

Were you expecting the entire campaign in the demo? They cut most of the dialogue options from the missions to avoid spoilers and they added back some of the stuff they cut from ME1 (namely, the weapon customization, which you can't access in the demo, and the varied power bonuses).

As far as ME2 being a "debacle"... that's your opinion. ME has a 91 on Metacritic, ME2 has a 96. If you loved collecting six thousand copies of the same worthless armor and weapons and turning them all into omni-gel (that you couldn't carry because you were perpetually at capacity even though you burned it on every lock in the game just because you could) after every firefight, that's your prerogative. ME2 was head and shoulders above ME1, in my humble opinion.

The only thing I wasn't in love with was the new shield/health look. Couldn't be assed to check out the multiplayer.

[Randomness]

Were you expecting the entire campaign in the demo? They cut most of the dialogue options from the missions to avoid spoilers and they added back some of the stuff they cut from ME1 (namely, the weapon customization, which you can't access in the demo, and the varied power bonuses).

As far as ME2 being a "debacle"... that's your opinion. ME has a 91 on Metacritic, ME2 has a 96. If you loved collecting six thousand copies of the same worthless armor and weapons and turning them all into omni-gel (that you couldn't carry because you were perpetually at capacity even though you burned it on every lock in the game just because you could) after every firefight, that's your prerogative. ME2 was head and shoulders above ME1, in my humble opinion.

The only thing I wasn't in love with was the new shield/health look. Couldn't be assed to check out the multiplayer.

My main gripe with ME2? All classes became nothing more than run and gun with the occasional skill shot out. It dumbed down combat to where you basically had one skill you ever fired off, because it wasn't worth using the others. (Adept: Use warp, because once their barrier and shield and armor is down and you can singularity or something fun, they're two bullets from dying anyways!, etc. Adept in ME1 was fun because you could go to town throwing your enemies around like ragdolls. None of this 70+% of enemies have magic anti-grav devices!)

If it wasn't for the asinine cooldown system that removed all class distinctions (I'm not joking, all classes basically play as set ammo at start of level, use your nuke when it's up, and then fire bullets at stuff while it cools down. The occasional case where you have Miranda warp your singularity or something to clear trash.) In Mass Effect 1, Soldier played like an invincible tank (literal tank. Moving armored gun platform!), Adept dealt most of their damage with Warp while locking down enemies in fields, and engineers spammed damage skills and opened locks. I dunno, but in ME2 nothing felt special about most of the classes. Especially when the best option in 90% of sequential playthroughs is Reave, so... all gameplay becomes Reave, shoot, reave, shoot.

If ME1 had ME2's handling of weapons (except still with the mods, just you find one instance of each mod, and then upgrades, which means by the end of the game you have maybe... 12 things in each slot? No need to sell crap!), it would be perfect.

Yeah, I hate ME2's handling of skills to death.

[McLaughlin]

My main gripe with ME2 was that it oversimplified skills and leveling. Leveling was stupid. Kill that other enemy? Why bother? It's worthless, and burns ammo! (Of course, the levels were designed so you practically HAD to kill everything, which kind of killed exploration)

I consider both games to have their merits in the end, since ME2 changed some things for the better and some for the worse.

There wasn't much you could skip in ME1 either. The incentive for killing the "optional" enemies in ME2 is that they'll eat you alive on Insanity. There was only one way through any area to begin with in either game. Exploration amounts to scrounging around after everything is dead in either game (or driving the Mako... *shudder*).

Streamlining of the skills made sense to me. They got rid of the redundant ones and made the upgrades to the remaining ones more meaningful. What's the difference between getting to +100% Overload damage in four upgrades as opposed to ten?

I mean, if we're talking about simple gameplay, how about the infinitely firing Assault Rifle of doom, and the Immunity cooldown that was shorter than its duration? I loved ME1, but ME2 was just so much better to me. I can't even play ME1 now, it feels so archaic. I just mod new saves with the choices I want.

Edit: The one thing I will potentially give you is that having all powers on the same cooldown is a little lame. I can still get through most levels on Adept on Insanity without firing my weapon though.

[Randomness]

There wasn't much you could skip in ME1 either. The incentive for killing the "optional" enemies in ME2 is that they'll eat you alive on Insanity. There was only one way through any area to begin with in either game. Exploration amounts to scrounging around after everything is dead in either game (or driving the Mako... *shudder*).

Streamlining of the skills made sense to me. They got rid of the redundant ones and made the upgrades to the remaining ones more meaningful. What's the difference between getting to +100% Overload damage in four upgrades as opposed to ten?

I mean, if we're talking about simple gameplay, how about the infinitely firing Assault Rifle of doom, and the Immunity cooldown that was shorter than its duration? I loved ME1, but ME2 was just so much better to me. I can't even play ME1 now, it feels so archaic. I just mod new saves with the choices I want.

Edit: The one thing I will potentially give you is that having all powers on the same cooldown is a little lame. I can still get through most levels on Adept on Insanity without firing my weapon though.

Virmire had a ton of stuff you could skip in the assault phase, actually. I actually had to search for how to enter each of the ways into the base. I'll grant you that much of the game IS linear, but it's still less so than 2.

And personally, one aspect I like of RPGs is putting together skillsets that lead to absurd shenanigans. (This is in part why I love the Etrian Odyssey series, which encourages all sorts of combo stupidity... there's some truly ridiculous things you can do, one of which is a truly insane build in 2 that revolves around raising max HP as much as possible and then sitting on 1 HP, with basically zero defense.) So the way that Soldier can be nearly invincible nearly all the time at max level... I LOVE it. It's not like a max level Adept can't lock the final boss down... (It's by far the easiest way to kill him, as opposed to suffering hits while waiting for him to stop). In Mass Effect 2, the game offers basically no room for such exploration of skills...

[McLaughlin]

The problem is that it wasn't hard to do either of those things, and they both broke the game, for every class. Two Frictionless Materials were all you needed to make anything fire indefinitely. Maxed out Shock Trooper was all you needed to keep Immunity on indefinitely.

In theory there was more room for specialized builds. In practice all any class ever boiled down to was was AR spam. I would say they do a better job in ME2 of differentiating classes with their defining abilities (Adrenaline Rush, Cloak, Tech Armor, ect.). All I ever had to do in ME1 was walk around on any class with my Spectre Rifle with the trigger taped down. In ME2 I tank though everything on Soldier with the Revenant and Adrenaline Rush. I hang back with Cloak and dome people with the Widow on Infiltrator. Shared cooldowns are kind of lame, but most have a short enough cool down that it's not really a hindrance.

[Heskett]

Virmire had a ton of stuff you could skip in the assault phase, actually. I actually had to search for how to enter each of the ways into the base. I'll grant you that much of the game IS linear, but it's still less so than 2.

Seeing that Kirrahe was alive in the demo and then reading this had me wonder... I've played through ME1 about a dozen times and never knew that Kirrahe could survive. I always thought it was a scripted event. haha.

[McLaughlin]

Seeing that Kirrahe was alive in the demo and then reading this had me wonder... I've played through ME1 about a dozen times and never knew that Kirrahe could survive. I always thought it was a scripted event. haha.

I think Kirrahe dies if you don't do enough of the sidequests to hinder the Geth. I've actually never had him die on me. It might also be tied to who you save. I think Kirrahe is stationed with the bomb, so if you go to the tower he might die without whoever you left to arm the bomb. In the ten or so times I've gone through ME1, I've always gone back to save whoever is arming the bomb.

[Heskett]

I think Kirrahe dies if you don't do enough of the sidequests to hinder the Geth. I've actually never had him die on me. It might also be tied to who you save. I think Kirrahe is stationed with the bomb, so if you go to the tower he might die without whoever you left to arm the bomb. In the ten or so times I've gone through ME1, I've always gone back to save whoever is arming the bomb.

Kirrahe goes with the person that gets trapped in the tower. Everyone of my games ends up with Kirrahe being dead. I must be missing something, somewhere. I also go back to save the person arming the bomb, minus the one time I went to the tower to see how it was different. He still died anyway.

[Slidikins]

I think Kirrahe dies if you don't do enough of the sidequests to hinder the Geth. I've actually never had him die on me. It might also be tied to who you save. I think Kirrahe is stationed with the bomb, so if you go to the tower he might die without whoever you left to arm the bomb. In the ten or so times I've gone through ME1, I've always gone back to save whoever is arming the bomb.

Kirrahe's survival is directly tied to the number of "sidequests" you do while approaching the base on Virmire afair.