Mass Effect 2 *spoilers around pg 29/30*

[eldaec]

It doesn't fly; Normandy lands and you drive into the cargo bay.  They just don't show the cutscene. 

If the Normandy can land wherever the fuck without a space dock, why do I need the passion wagon to get around in the first place?

And why do we make landfall by hurling the space-pinto off the ship from low orbit?

[Lakov_Sanite]

It doesn't fly; Normandy lands and you drive into the cargo bay.  They just don't show the cutscene. 

I suppose when Normandy drops off the Mako on a planet, it doesn't always have to toss it out midflight - it could actually land and let the Mako gently drive out of the cargo bay, but my guess is they didn't want to have two cutscenes for the same result.

Also it can be assumed that any landing spot for the mako is hostile to begin with so it's best to do a quick drop than try and land.  Then when an area is secure the normandy can take its sweet time picking you up.

[Riggswolfe]

Also it can be assumed that any landing spot for the mako is hostile to begin with so it's best to do a quick drop than try and land.  Then when an area is secure the normandy can take its sweet time picking you up.

Yeah, I always kind of imagined it as a scenario of "better to risk the SUV than the entire ship of a big Geth ambush is waiting."

Edit: IGN has reviewed the game and given it a 9.6/10.

[Stormwaltz]

Also it can be assumed that any landing spot for the mako is hostile to begin with so it's best to do a quick drop than try and land.  Then when an area is secure the normandy can take its sweet time picking you up.

Correct.

The Mako is dropped in hot LZs, because the Normandy can't land and drop a ramp with its kinetic barriers (shields) up. In the novel ME: Revelation, an Alliance frigate tries to land to pick up a vehicle, and gets one-shotted by a krogan merc with a man-portable hypervelocity missile launcher.

[NiX]

Correct.

The Mako is dropped in hot LZs, because the Normandy can't land and drop a ramp with its kinetic barriers (shields) up. In the novel ME: Revelation, an Alliance frigate tries to land to pick up a vehicle, and gets one-shotted by a krogan merc with a man-portable hypervelocity missile launcher.

[Reg]

Oh those wacky Krogans! Still sensitive about that whole genocide thing.

[Velorath]

ME2 preloading now on Steam (you might need to check for Steam client updates first).

[Fordel]

Also it can be assumed that any landing spot for the mako is hostile to begin with so it's best to do a quick drop than try and land.  Then when an area is secure the normandy can take its sweet time picking you up.

Correct.

The Mako is dropped in hot LZs, because the Normandy can't land and drop a ramp with its kinetic barriers (shields) up. In the novel ME: Revelation, an Alliance frigate tries to land to pick up a vehicle, and gets one-shotted by a krogan merc with a man-portable hypervelocity missile launcher.

That part of the Book bothered me a lot. You would think a warship would be a slight more durable!

[01101010]

That part of the Book bothered me a lot. You would think a warship would be a slight more durable!

Well it seemed to me the Normandy was more a quick strike recon ship, with the stealth drives and all, rather than and all out battle cruiser... esp from the Citadel cut-scenes of the space fighting.

[NiX]

Game is good. Needed tutorial tool tips for the new stuff, lots of muddling to get used to stuff.

[Trippy]

How are you playing ME2? If you are playing a pirated version stop talking about it until after it's officially released.

[schild]

Lots of stores broke release date.

[Nightblade]

Lots of stores broke release date.

Is it my imagination, or is this happening far more often than it used it?

Incidentally; the game has no option to adjust mouse sensitivity, or even to turn off mouse smoothing/acceleration. 

[Trippy]

Lots of stores broke release date.

[schild]

Lots of stores broke release date.

I could've bought it the other night if I didn't already have it on Steam actually.

[Stormwaltz]

That part of the Book bothered me a lot. You would think a warship would be a slight more durable!

Ships are constructed a certain way in the ME milieu. The mass effect technology makes it trivially easy to repel kinetic projectiles using "shields," but those mass-repelling shields have no effect whatsoever on incoming directed energy weapons (lasers). Starship armor is therefore optimized to repel lasers through an ablative design. It "boils away" into a mist that scatters the striking beam and reduces damage. Ablative armor does little to stop kinetics. It just shatters.

So when the ship dropped its kinetic barriers, it effectively had no armor against projectiles. If the krogan had used a laser, it wouldn't have done much damage. And to make this more complex, if the krogan had been further away, the ship's GARDIAN CIWS lasers could have intercepted his missile before it struck. But the krogan was very close and using a very fast missile. Canonically, despite the "cinematic liberties" the BioWare artists continually take, space combat occurs at ranges of hundreds or thousands of kilometers. Ships just aren't designed to defend against things less than a kilometer away. If they have to do so, the captain has fucked up.

tl;dr -- Shields work against projectiles, armor works against lasers. The shields were down and the krogan used a projectile from point-blank range.

Never ask a tech question around the guy who designed the IP's technical infrastructure. :P

[Kitsune]

Plus bear in mind that the whole 'mass effect' technology oogie-woogie hinges on playing with mass and velocity of things.  A missile with a mass drive wouldn't even need a warhead if it could propel itself to a sizable portion of the speed of light; the kinetic energy of the impact alone would exceed the power of a nuke.  Take something the size of an I-beam and shove it through one of those little frigates like a bullet going through an apple and yeah, you'll probably fuck it up.

But the hole in their defensive technology comes when you reach infantry combat.  Rather than trying to beat their way through kinetic barriers with kinetic projectiles that the kinetic barriers were explicitly designed to block, there should be a prevalence of energy weapons.  The grunts aren't running around with a meter of ablative armor on, so you should see people cooking each other with lasers, microwaves, anything that the shields can't block.

Instead everyone carries kinetic weapons that don't work for crap because everyone has anti-kinetic shields.  Not once but twice in ME do you see someone in a cutscene shoot Shepard point-blank, to absolutely no effect when the shot gets absorbed by his shield.  (Though whenever people need to conveniently die in one shot in cutscenes, their shields mysteriously vanish.  Hmm.)

I enjoyed Mass Effect.  It's not a timeless paragon of gaming, but it was fun and had a unique style.  My only fear for ME 2 is that they might be streamlining the game out of any unique features the first one had in the name of making the game simpler for people with short attention spans.  There's a fine line between elegant simplicity and too much simplicity, and a lot of game designers have crossed that line of late.

[ajax34i]

A missile with a mass drive wouldn't even need a warhead if it could propel itself to a sizable portion of the speed of light; the kinetic energy of the impact alone would exceed the power of a nuke. 

... If the energy is fully absorbed by the object.  People always forget that part.  Shoot a bullet at a car door, it just makes a hole:  handgun bullet or high velocity sniper / armor piercing bullet, still just a hole.  The door's thin sheet of metal doesn't absorb the extra kinetic energy, it just lets the bullet through.

[Ratman_tf]

I enjoyed Mass Effect.  It's not a timeless paragon of gaming, but it was fun and had a unique style.  My only fear for ME 2 is that they might be streamlining the game out of any unique features the first one had in the name of making the game simpler for people with short attention spans.  There's a fine line between elegant simplicity and too much simplicity, and a lot of game designers have crossed that line of late.

This is my big concern about ME2.They're pulling overheating and replacing it with an ammo mechanic. I'm like... mmmm. Ok. I didn't mind the overheat mechanic at all. And I rather liked the Mako, but I guess few other people did.  I'm hoping the 'Better ground missions' puts more gameplay and less pointless blah blah blah stuff in the game, and the 'fixes' won't dumb it down even more than it already is.

[schild]

Preloading is accessible on Steam now, you might have to restart Steam to make it work after doing that 3 window setup though.

[MournelitheCalix]

FYI for those who can't wait for this title like me, the final trailer has been released for it and as usual it rocks.  Looks like Bioware has done it again, God I can't wait for my copy.  Its so nice to be able to buy this product the very first day it comes out.  Many thanks to Biowarej/EA who turned away from the DRM 3 install crap.  I can already tell its going to be a wonderul way to spend my $65.  Stormwaltz not to be a boot licker or anything but I just wanted to thank you and the rest of Bioware.  Honestly with the exeception of course of Jade Empire, everything I have bought from Bioware has been pure gold.  I think Bioware is the only developer right now that I would be willing to take off of work for to play their game the very first day it comes out.  Bioware is the only developer where I expect the game to be just as good as the trailer without question.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2O-0-fQOOs

[schild]

Done what again? Released a spoiler-laden trailer?

[MournelitheCalix]

Done what again? Released a spoiler-laden trailer?

Honestly I didn't think there was anything in it that people didn't already know if they were paying any kind of attention to the game.

[schild]

Done what again? Released a spoiler-laden trailer?

Honestly I didn't think there was anything in it that people didn't already know if they were paying any kind of attention to the game.

I wouldn't know, I've yet to watch a trailer since the original teaser (which turned me off Bioware trailers forever). EA is hopeless about spoilers. They put fucking spoilers in the subject lines of their PR.

[MournelitheCalix]

Done what again? Released a spoiler-laden trailer?

Honestly I didn't think there was anything in it that people didn't already know if they were paying any kind of attention to the game.

I wouldn't know, I've yet to watch a trailer since the original teaser (which turned me off Bioware trailers forever). EA is hopeless about spoilers. They put fucking spoilers in the subject lines of their PR.

Gotcha, well you would know more about that then me.  You work in the games reporting industry if I am not mistaken, and i honestly made it a policy to ignore EA up until the time they bought out my favorite developer in Bioware.  I can tell you that the trailer that I posted probably will spoil alot of the game for you if you haven't kept up on the bioware trailers/forum stuff at Bioware's social site.

[Stormwaltz]

But the hole in their defensive technology comes when you reach infantry combat.  Rather than trying to beat their way through kinetic barriers with kinetic projectiles that the kinetic barriers were explicitly designed to block, there should be a prevalence of energy weapons.

That had a lot to do with aesthetic decisions made by art (they wanted the weapon sounds to have weight and impact rather than phaser sizzle), but the IP rationale (originally) was that weapons-grade DEW required an assload of power. A ship's fusion plant could provide that, but a man couldn't pack more than a few dozens shots' worth in battery packs. Meanwhile, the mass accelerator technology made infinite ammo possible.

Then they went off and broke that explanation by adding ammo, again mostly for aesthetic reasons ("We want to see people cock their weapons!" "We want to give people a resource to manage!") and it was no longer my responsibility to rationalize their decisions. :P

[Stormwaltz]

EA is hopeless about spoilers.

When the CEO accidentally reveals that you're working on a Star Wars MMG in a speech to investors, then accidentally reveals its release date in another speech to investors, you know its a problem that starts at the top.

[schild]

EA is hopeless about spoilers.

When the CEO accidentally reveals that you're working on a Star Wars MMG in a speech to investors, then accidentally reveals its release date in another speech to investors, you know its a problem that starts at the top.

Man, the leads (and slaves) on that project were yammering about that shit so long before that happened that I couldn't do anything but lol when people got in an uproar about that.

The only reason SWTOR was kept in the bag for so long was because people were being nice.

[tmp]

Honestly with the exeception of course of Jade Empire, everything I have bought from Bioware has been pure gold.

Hey now, i liked Jade Empire. It did away with lot of the "must have in RPG" bullshit, the combat was fun if you could refrain from abusing the cheese, the story was on the usual Bioware level and the music was to die for.

[Riggswolfe]

Honestly with the exeception of course of Jade Empire, everything I have bought from Bioware has been pure gold.

Hey now, i liked Jade Empire. It did away with lot of the "must have in RPG" bullshit, the combat was fun if you could refrain from abusing the cheese, the story was on the usual Bioware level and the music was to die for.

I liked Jade Empire. However, the party mechanics in it weren't up to Bioware standards. Only 1 party member (NWN era I guess) and very little interaction.

[tmp]

I liked Jade Empire. However, the party mechanics in it weren't up to Bioware standards. Only 1 party member (NWN era I guess) and very little interaction.

I didn't even remember that so guess it was non-issue for me; probably because both KotOR and ME had just 2 party members so that wasn't much of difference, and the game just felt better without the usual cast of the AI clowns constantly in the view. The interaction (as long as that means conversations with the followers) also seemed on par with the other games or at least decent enough it left me satisfied with what it had to offer.

[Riggswolfe]

I liked Jade Empire. However, the party mechanics in it weren't up to Bioware standards. Only 1 party member (NWN era I guess) and very little interaction.

I didn't even remember that so guess it was non-issue for me; probably because both KotOR and ME had just 2 party members so that wasn't much of difference, and the game just felt better without the usual cast of the AI clowns constantly in the view. The interaction (as long as that means conversations with the followers) also seemed on par with the other games or at least decent enough it left me satisfied with what it had to offer.

Well, I like to have a minimum of two AI party members. Partly for the gameplay but also because I dig the conversations they get into. Hell, in DA:O I'd say a big chunk of my fun in the first playthrough came from Alistair and Morrigan throwing insults at each other. In ME I actually liked the elevators because of some of the hilarious conversations you would sometimes get between AI cast members.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I know a lot of people <hate> spoilers but i dont think any of the trailers are overly guilty of it. you probably experience the extent of the trailers in the first couple hours.

[Xurtan]

All the more reason to experience it in said first few hours then.   I've been avoiding any and all spoilers so far.

[taolurker]

NSFW