Dude, spoilers. Someone brings up the best aspect in general of a game and you feel it necessary to mention specifics? It’d be fine if this was Mass Effect 3 thread, but its not, its the “ooh new Bioware game speculation thread”.
Sad that EA isn’t forcing BioWare to make a new Ultima game, heh.
Always interested in new BioWare games, although if it’s aiming for the CoD crowd then, for me at least, it’s probably the least interesting game they could possible make.
Oops, I didn’t even think about that. Sorry. I’m usually a spoiler nazi, but I’ve heard so many of the same Mass Effect stories I forgot not everyone has played it. You can edit your post if you want.
ER flashbacks incoming…
agreed.
That’s putting it lightly. Best PC game of all time.
I haven’t replayed Terra Nova this year, I should.
Planet scanning is in ME2, and it makes up a big part of the complaining about it, yes.
Long story short: You have to find mineral resources to upgrade your gear. You find these resources by moving a little scanner across the surface of the planets you orbit. This gets monotonous fairly quickly, hence the complaining. However:
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there are far more resources available than you actually need, so after a certain point you can stop scanning. You don’t need to carpet every planet with probes.
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the game has been patched post-release to significantly speed the scanner up and make its AoE bigger, so the time taken per planet is now much less.
Wow, that does sound annoying. In Starflight I didn’t mind landing on planets and driving around so much. One could NEVER cover an entire planet, but if one knew where to look one could find minerals or artifacts. Thankfully they weren’t needed to upgrade anything, just to add to the money pool. :)
It’s totally up there, yes.
Not it.
Also not it. Don’t have cable anyway.
It’s not too bad now that it’s been patched. Granted, every playthrough I’ve done has included some bonus resources from imported characters so I haven’t urgently needed them for upgrades, but I find doing a little scanning every now and again keeps me in top tier gear. I also tend to poke around in every corner of every level for mineral caches and that undoubtedly helps, too.
Yeah, the completist in me would likely poke around all over the place too.
A game that I was indirectly involved with is up for an award so I’ll be watching!
I kept scanning long after I had everything on the off chances that the resources would carry over to some kind of bonus in ME3.
Note that by “little”, I mean the scanner still takes up a big chunk of the planet’s surface. It’s not that annoying, it just tends to get to ppl who are more used to having RPGs indulge their obsessive tendencies rather than punish them.
There are also some tips to avoid needless scanning:
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Only scan rocky planets, not gas giants; and only if the planet is listed as “rich”.
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10 probes per planet is more than enough, although you could probably fit several dozen in the space available.
Just remember that in ME2 you no longer roleplay a backpack or a wallet, and you’ll be fine.
Thankfully they weren’t needed to upgrade anything, just to add to the money pool. :)
And did you need money in Starflight for anything…?
You forgot about the planetary anomalies. For Brian’s benefit: they’re basically scripted mini-encounters that you have to scan the planet to find; once you do, you beam down - err, hop a ride in your shuttle - to have your Away Team - sorry, “squad” - tackle it. The good news is they were more varied and interesting than similar encounters in ME1 (which I swear reused the same three warehouse / cave / outpost layouts every time); the bad news is you had to scan every planet to find all of them, though it would tell you right away if the planet had an anomaly.
- the game has been patched post-release to significantly speed the scanner up and make its AoE bigger, so the time taken per planet is now much less.
Less vicious dickpunching is still dickpunching, but I suppose be thankful for small mercies.
One other annoyance about ME2’s planetary scanning: you could only carry a set number of probes and fuel; and you could only resupply both at fuel depots and there was usually only one in each system. So if you wanted to strip-mine every planet by spamming probes - inefficient as hell and unnecessary, but I’m sure someone did it - you’d have to go back to resupply frequently.
Well of course you needed money to buy better equipment, but the stuff you found on planets wasn’t a prerequisite for anything, you know?
Wow, sounds like they made it more tedious than it needed to be.
Game is awesome - Best console game I ever played, side by side with Assasins Creed 2 - forget the “scanning is horrible” shouting- its not that bad , and go play the game…it is really worth it.
I’ll play it eventually once I have a newer PC. :)
That’s because they DID use the same three layouts. Some talk was that it was a consequence of trying to fit all the assets on a single XBox disk, but Bioware denied that.