Mass Effect 2 gameplay thread

[frogbeastegg]

The game is now officially out in America so it's time for the gameplay thread. As requested by arena patrons, it's a zero spoiler tolerance thread. After precisely one month the thread will relax to the standard spoiler policy. Until that time:

All spoilers must go into spoiler tags!
However small you think the spoiler is, show consideration for your fellow org members and use the tags!
Mark the spoiler with a brief spoiler free description so people can tell whether they have seen that part of the game yet! Example below.

Spoiler for Mass Effect's setting:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

It's an intentional pastiche of 80's scifi

[Mailman653]

Ah, I was waiting for this thread. I've been glued to the game since I bought it, time sure flys. Still getting used to the controls a bit but so far it's all good. Saw some familiar faces, found out things that made me go wow.

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

Apparently there are massive issues with the Cerberus Network at each stage of registration, meaning DLC is unavailable for use. The main game is still playable, though.

[Wishazu]

Hopefully cerberus will be working by Friday. The game isn't out over here untill then.

[Monk]

Ahh ME2, how I longed to get this game and how I hated waiting every single day until it was released. It's been a long wait and thanks to the internet hype machine I don't think my expectations could have been any higher going in. Nothing short of being blown away would have satisfied me. I managed to get the game and have played through a sizable portion of it. I will not be discussing plot details, instead i'll be tackling structure, gameplay mechanics and feel. Bear in mind I am going to be generalizing a lot, as this is by and large a first impression

First off the structure of not only the story but the game. Bioware has been following the same formulea for years. Prologue, 4 plot missions, shock mission, final marathon stretch that reveals a huge surprise and leads you to your dramatic ending. That's present in ME2, but it feels as if its been expanded and improved upon somewhat. Yeah you read right - Bioware is actually begining refining the structure of the game. You will see familiarities between this game's mission set up and games like Dragon Age, Kotor, ect, but it was nice to reach what I thought was the end of the game only to find out it was the middle.

The combat in the first game was just terrible. I loved the first and yet I consider its combat to be horribly clunky and near broken. You couldn't depend on your squad mates to do anything so it lead to a lot of micro-managing, and the birth of my much talked about biotic jugglers.

Along comes ME2 and suddenly everything is different. Instead of being based around powers, the combat is now largely focused on cover mechanics.In the first it felt like cover was an after-thought but here it feels wonderfully implemented, cover combat feels very fluid but takes a LOT of getting used to. Once you do, though, don't be surprised if you're itching to get back into the action once you get to a story section. I read an interview that said Bioware spent all of the two years since ME1 working on the combat, and that's exactly what this feels like. The combat in ME2 is a huge plus but that doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement. It still needs a few more steps before it's perfect like the GoW series (yes i just compared ME2's combat system to Gears of War. That is a good thing.)

Mini-games are still a bust in the ME series. The first one introduced a "simon says" decoder with your controller to unlock something. That's gone and instead you get games where the goal is to find matches (match 2 of a kind to unlock a door, ect). It's still painfully simple and doesn't engage you. I felt that I was just having my time wasted by those games Planetary scanning is rather annoying at first. The resource gathering is actually relatively well developed but it can get rather tedious to literally grind out the amounts you need for upgrades. Thankfully most upgrades need reasonable amounts of resource, but some of the later ones take ungodly amounts. I think with a little refinement (less planets with only resources and more with special goodies hidden on them) the scanning could a top notch feature.

Finally the story. I was really worried about halfway through that this game was about to pull a MW2 and go bananas (B-A-N-A-N-A-S ) but, thankfully, merficully, it did not. However ! The talk that this game can stand on its own plotwise is a rather hurtful lie told by ME2's marketing. If you did not play the first your enjoyment will be seriously impacted here, the amount of character added from importing a save versus not is rather ridiculous. Not to mention the game assumes you know some things right off the bat that you might not if you never played the first. To use an analogy I'm sure will soon be overused, it's like popping in Empire Strikes Back without having ever seen A New Hope. Sure it's still a great movie, but you're gonna be lost on a lot of the smaller things.

If you import a save an amazing thing happens. The more you play with your Shepard the more invested you get. The further and further I got into the game with my canonical ME1 shep, the more this felt like my universe. Like I was the one shaping this galaxy and turning it toward prosperity or mere survival. That was an amazing feeling and why I highly recommend importing. Not only will it serve to help you with the smaller plot threads, but it gives the game a whole new feel.

Those are my first impressions of ME2. Summerized:

Structure: We've seen it before, but it's got a few shiny new twists and turns!
Combat: Vastly improved and fun to take part in.
Mini-games: Hit and miss. Scanning is okay, everything else is juvenile.
Story: It's a second act of a three act play, it can't hide it no matter how much it tries. But still very enjoyable.

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

Users reporting that the Cerberus Network is fixed. All DLC now available.