Mass Effect PC - First Impressions

Post by **deject** » June 2nd, 2008, 4:12

Right, I've played about 5 hours of Mass Effect so far. I'll just go through some of the initial impressions I had.

Character Creation:

You can customize quite a lot about your character's appearance. Pretty much any kind of face can be made. You can easily recreate any nationality/race of human. I named my Infiltrator Archibald Shepard. He is bald and has no eyebrows. Then you choose your class, there's 3 base types and 3 hybrid types that are a mix of two of the base types. I went for an Infiltrator, which combines the Soldier and Engineer classes. You also get to choose your background, which doesn't have a big impact on gameplay per se, just the way other humans talk to you if they know about you..

Graphics:

In general the graphics are pretty nice. In particular, character faces are incredibly detailed. Facial animations are not quite HL2:Ep2 good, but they're decent. There is a slight problem with the shadows on my rig, though apparently this is ATI-specific, so you 8800 cunts shouldn't see any problems with that. Also it's worth noting that to get fluid gameplay on my rig (Athlon64 X2 5000+, Radeon HD 3870, 2GB DDR2-800) I have to run at 1280x1024 with medium particle effects and texture detail, and film grain off. Still, apart from some occasional blurry textures and the aforementioned shadows issue, it does look quite good. The vistas you see and details of all the random humans and aliens inhabiting the environments are quite impressive. I think I'd give the graphics an 8 or 9 out of 10.

The upcoming Catalyst 8.6 drivers should solve the nasty shadows problem, so I'm looking forward to those.

Gameplay:

Mass Effect is really heavy on dialog and investigating. I'd say so far in the first few hours I've had maybe 1 hour of combat and 3 of exploration and conversation. This isn't entirely bad, the voice acting it excellent and the NPCs are generally interesting. The combat is pretty good. It will feel somewhat familiar to anyone who's played KOTOR, but it is very much a third person shooter. Thus your twitch aiming skills have a direct impact on how well you do. You can issue commands to your squadmates without having to switch to them, which is a nice improvement over KOTOR. The conversation system is also well thought out and is pretty intuitive.

Mass Effect is a lot like KOTOR in many ways. If you liked KOTOR you should probably pick it up. I am enjoying it so far. I haven't gotten all that far yet though. Once I finish it though I'll probably write up a full review.

Post by **deject** » June 2nd, 2008, 4:13

oh, I should mention, it is somewhat worth talking to all the NPCs you find, as you do get XP bonuses for learning new info.

Post by **Dog Pants** » June 2nd, 2008, 7:14

How does it cope with being a console conversion? The fact that you haven't complained about it makes me think they've put some effort into the port.

Also, just how intrusive is the copy protection that's caused so much controversy?

Hehulk · Post by **Hehulk** » June 2nd, 2008, 7:49

Mostly what I've heard is that it's what deject said. Floorware version breaks about 5 hours into the game though and it's not the best console port ever made

Post by **deject** » June 2nd, 2008, 7:53

As a console port it's about as good as you could possibly expect. They've upped the detail in the graphics and updated the interface to account for a mouse & keyboard. This is no half-assed rushed out port, they really worked pretty hard to give a satisfactory PC experience.

As for the anti-piracy stuff, it's 100% completely transparent. The first time I loaded it up it took a bit longer than it has since, but other than that there's nothing at all to indicate it's even there. I suspect if they had left the every 10 days activation in there it wouldn't have changed the experience at all. Avoiding Mass Effect because of the anti-piracy software (unless you're one of those lamestains who do it "for the principle") is just dumb. I mean if you're actually buying it, the Securom won't affect you at all as far as I can tell.

Post by **Dog Pants** » June 2nd, 2008, 8:57

Fair enough, I'd got that impression from your post but I figured it was worth clarifying. I never planned on buying the game - I hardly know anything about it and I've other things to do at the moment, but the copy protection is a big issue for me so I'm curious to see how it panned out.

With respect to not buying the game on principle, if I was to do that it would be in order to try to prevent other publishers thinking it was okay to alienate the proportion of gamers without internet access in order to try (probably unsuccessfully) to combat piracy.

Post by **FatherJack** » June 2nd, 2008, 9:34

I'll probably grab it again, despite having the 360 version. The controls in that were kind of annoying - in that I could never remember them and always had to start the game over again and do the tutorial, so I never got that far in it.

Then it said disk unreadable and crashed out. I did borrow a friends version, but I don't think I can be arsed and will get this one, as the UI just looks more memorisable.

Post by **deject** » June 2nd, 2008, 13:24

One of the complaints I heard a lot about the 360 version is that the Mako controls were shit, but with the keyboard and mouse they're fixed that problem pretty well. now it handles a lot like the APCs in BF2, only faster and it has jump jets.

spoodie · Post by **spoodie** » June 2nd, 2008, 16:00

deject wrote:One of the complaints I heard a lot about the 360 version is that the Mako controls were shit, but with the keyboard and mouse they're fixed that problem pretty well. now it handles a lot like the APCs in BF2, only faster and it has jump jets.

The Mako controls were a bit odd to begin with but made sense once you got on to planets with steep terrain. Still very floating/bouncy for a large vehicle.