LogFAQs > #940022529

Okay, I stayed up all night playing ME1. Now that I don't feel so rushed, I'll talk about the game, and what I'm doing in it, with a little more detail.

I'm playing on Normal difficulty with the aim-assist off. I initially picked this because I'm really not confident about my skill in shooters. It is definitely a baby difficulty where a lot of the enemies will just stand still and fire, making themselves almost brain-dead easy to hit. I thought about bumping it up to hard, but have refrained so far because the long load times and need to repeat dialog makes the times I do lose really annoying, so I don't want it to happen any more often than it needs to.

I remember the second and third Mass Effect games having really simplistic level-up systems, but the first one isn't so bad and does give you some ability to make meaningful choices. I would rather struggle a bit more with the combat than be locked out of story content, so I made sure to level electronics and decryption to the point where I can do the hard difficulty skill checks, and then put as many points into Charm as I could, before leveling up my combat skills. I've managed to max out Shepard's Sniper Rifle skill despite that, as of now.

There's not much reason to vary up your party members. Most of the time I've gone with Garrus and Liara. I've built Garrus to be kind of tanky and maxed out his Assault Rifles, and as for Liara, I've focused on her offensive biotic skills. I haven't taught her Stasis or put many points into Barrier. This is one of two possible teams you can have with Infiltrator Shepard that's completely balanced. The other is Kaiden and Wrex. I don't think there's any special reason to go for high balance, though. There aren't any enemies I know of that badly need to be countered by tech or biotic skills specifically. Sometimes I bring Tali if I expect to fight a lot of Geth, because she has an AI Hacking ability that makes them attack each other.

I don't really like how the game makes you pick a class at the start and binds you to it. I think a system like Fallout's where you can freely select skills would be better. This system is unnecessarily restrictive. It would be nice to be able to play as a tech/weapons character but train in assault rifles and shotguns instead of sniper rifles, but there's no way to do that in this game.

I finished up what there was to do on the Citadel and then hurried to the story mission where you recruit Liara, and otherwise spent a really long time doing side quests. God knows why - at this point I feel qualified to report that ME1's side quests are almost all pretty lame. This is partially due to the heavy presence of the Mako, Shepard's seemingly weightless tank. The Mako is pretty widely reviled by Mass Effect fans, and after spending some more time with it I remember why. It's a huge part of the game, but nothing about it really works from a gameplay standpoint. Most of the non-essential planets you can go to are just 1 square kilometer of empty terrain with a couple points of interest scattered at the edges. You have to ride the Mako around lots of steep hills and cliffs to reach them. The Mako can scale most cliffs but if they're too steep it doesn't really work out, and there's no clear visual indication of which cliffs aren't worth the effort. So a lot of the time the mere act of traversal between these points of interest is kind of annoying, and the reward is usually playing a crappy version of Simon for a few seconds and then getting some useless gear dumped into your inventory. Mako combat doesn't really make sense either. Most enemies on these little planets stay in a single area and won't pursue you if you leave it, and the Mako's shields are powerful but slow to regenerate, so the most effective way to clear them is to fight until you're out of shields, kill a few enemies, and then back off and wait for several minutes on end until your shields recover, then rinse and repeat until all enemies are dead. I've only really needed this technique the once, so far, but in principle the Mako's design makes it impossible for the vehicle combat to be challenging, really. It can only be tedious.

A lot of the optional stuff is as dull as surveying minerals or picking up identical medals or old books that you can't even read. It definitely gave me the feeling of "why am I spending some of my finite hours on this Earth doing this inane bullshit?" The worst one yet was about retrieving a data cache from some monkeys. You have to drive around to multiple different monkey colonies and check each individual monkey one by one for the damn thing. Whoever designed that should have been fired.

One sidequest that I did like involved getting an old artifact from the Asari Consort on the Citadel and using it to unlock ancestral memories in a Prothean relic, about the Protheans messing with mankind's ancestors. That lore was interesting enough to justify the car ride. I also did a longer quest-line on an asteroid nearby a major human colony called Terra Nova, which had a decent payoff with some info about an old war between humans and a minor species called Batarians and an interesting choice between bringing down a terrorist and letting him go to save hostages. Naturally, I picked the latter option and raked in a nice windfall of sweet, sweet Paragon points. I'm almost halfway to the max value by now!

I notice that a lot of the time the dialog options you're given are just three different "flavors" of the same response, and likewise, although there are definitely times when this isn't the case, sometimes being a renegade means doing the same things as a Paragon, but just being a bit of a dick about it. Also, after having to re-try the fight against the Krogan Battlemaster when you first rescue Liara, I learned that sometimes you're presented with two dialog options that lead to Shepard saying the exact same thing!

This is something I never really realized until now, but when you're asked to look for a missing person in Bioware games, you almost invariably find his corpse instead of being able to rescue him alive. A weird amount of their storytelling is accomplished through data files found on dead bodies. I think that's too bad, really, because encountering a living person is usually both more interesting and more rewarding. Getting to meet and talk to a character I helped is somehow much more special to me than the millions of off-screen lives the game tells me I've saved.

The game's lore is definitely interesting and I found myself spending a while just reading through the journal entries about the major species and their history. That and talking to my crew members between missions are probably my favorite parts of the game.

This post has been mostly grousing, but I just sat down and played the game for like ten hours straight without really wanting to stop, so it's definitely doing something right. I think I'm side-quested out for now though. Mass Effect fans: Are there any sidequests in the first game that you think are particularly good, or that lead to interesting payoff in the later games?

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect