The retarded inventory system on the 360 (quite possibly the worst inventory system in any game ever – I seriously hope someone lost their job over that pile of shit) is reason alone for getting the PC version.
/shrug. Accounts of GfWL in Universe at War and those other two crazy games point to a convoluted, buggy mess that gets in the way of playing online, even if you do already have a free Live account. GfWL is a marked dis-incentive for me to buy a PC game.
Anyway are there any PC gamers who don’t already have Steam accounts? It’s the de-facto PC gaming friend list/DLC manager/achievement tracker. And, a magical place called the Internet is a PCs perfect content distribution system.
Yes they are. Even though we have asked them to update the details on the article.
ah yes, I’d read about that… worth considering. Maybe I’ll rent it on the 360 first.
Well, prior to the release of the Orange Box I know there were (i.e. me).
So anyway, has anyone played the DLC yet? How is it?
Played through it last night. It was actually pretty decent I thought. Good amount of new dialogue, a couple drastically changed interiors, and 1 completely new interior. I’d say that new game play was probably 1 - 1 1/2 hours on normal difficulty (I tried it out on my Insane difficulty character and it took me about 1 hour 45 minutes to complete).
I’d recommend it to anyone that enjoyed Mass Effect. And it’s an easy 50 point boost to your gamerscore :)
Are we still having this conversation? I’m pretty sure that nothing has changed between the timespan of a few posts regarding there not being ANY multiplayer in Mass Effect.
I dropped it yesterday. :) According to some posters on these boards, even w/ single player in UaW, etc, you can’t play until you link your GfWL account. That has seemingly not been without problems, but maybe reports of trouble were overblown?
The inventory system in mass effect isn’t that bad, and certainly isn’t worth refusing to play the game over.
Don’t get me wrong, it is bad, but not game-breaking. Once you figure out that some weapons are basically “gel trash,” managing inventory becomes a lot faster. You just turn crap into gel every time you see that you’ve acquired it. Makes it a lot less painful.
Really, the worst part of inventory management is the fucking weapon mods. Especially since you want to keep a bunch of them to mix and match for different situations. Makes deleting the obsolete ones a pain in the ass.
Sure it is. I refuse to deal with it a second time.
A friend of mine never finished the game because of the inventory system. He filled up his inventory and turned the game off for the night. Constantly knowing that the first thing he does when plays ME again is spend the first hour fighting with the inventory system to clear up space has been sufficient reason for him to … not play it again.
Why not just sell some shit? Damn pack-rats. ;)
It’s a common problem with many games, and I don’t think it’s the fault of pack-rat players. Rather, the game has done a poor job of teaching them what stuff is important to keep and what stuff they can throw away. It probably does this because many games start you out with almost nothing, so you start off keeping everything you can get. Then, they throw a myriad of different items of varying abilities at you, to give you the illusion of a big and complex world, and you don’t know which ones are going to be useful and which ones aren’t. Finally to top it off, if the game is generating items that are 99% likely to be useless to the player, perhaps we as designers shouldn’t be generating them and instead should just be giving them gold, or gel, or shards, or whatever.
Bruce
Well, with ME, it isn’t just determination of item quality and usefulness, but actually navigating the inventory effectively. It’s a huge list of items, and certain actions create different navigation behaviors, depending on what inventory screen you’re looking at. In the mods window, for example, gelling something bumps you to the top of the mods list. But in the general inventory window, it does not. If I recall correctly, at least.
There’s also no quick-swap of equipment, despite rapidly evolving tactical situations whose success is boosted greatly by choosing niche weapons and armor. This can be viewed as a rough approximation of the real-time difficulty of tactical adjustment, but only in the abstract. In practice, it’s just frustrating.
That’s part of the problem too; people min-max because they feel they have to. Designers could make the game easier and let players with suboptimal builds still kick ass, but then the min-maxers will complain the game is too easy. Sure, you can try to offer varying difficulty levels, but sometimes you’re just better off designing the game so players don’t fall into that level of minutae in the first place.
Bruce
Well, I think the problem there was that there were some sections of the game with a wide variation of enemy types, particularly the planet with the Benezia fight. That research complex had a revolving door of small packs of organic beasties, large roving organic beasties, mechanical enemies, and some packs of humanoids. I don’t think specificity is bad, but it can be troublesome when the player feels strongly compelled to go from one tactical extreme to another within a short period of time, but has no fast or intuitive way to adapt.
For those situations, I either put different mods in different guns - e.g., armor-piercing or phasing in my assault rifle, anti-personnel in my shotgun - and switch accordingly; or just use generic mods (e.g., +20% dmg). For the most part, though, ME isn’t hard enough that you need to worry about min-maxing combat.
I wasted (had fun with, whatever…) a ridiculous amount of time juggling inventory and selling it to Hans in Jagged Alliance 2. The 1.13 fan patch, which added instant sale for items is probably my favorite feature.
I hated it in the early game - you want to keep everything just in case, and when you’re on planets without merchants you don’t want to drop anything as you think you need the money.
It’s not so bad playing through it a second time. Later in the game you have such good weapons and so much money that you can just unload everything except what you’re using. So going in knowing that, you hoard less.
Eurogamer has more details on the PC version and an interview with Bioware’s Matt Atwood about ME and other stuff. The PC version will have…
[ul][li]Shorter loading times
[/li][li]Better textures and less pop-in
[/li][li]Weapons and abilities mapped to number keys
[/li][li]Can give orders to individual teammates
[/li][li]Inventory with a new list layout
[/li][li]New hacking minigame[/ul]
[/li]
Atwood says they started the conversion near the end of 360 development. No extra content, still no word on whether 360 DLC will come to the PC. Also, no demo.