Aw, I was kinda hoping for something along the lines of "I'M CHRISTOPHER GRANT BITCH, I CAN HAVE FIRST."

I think a moderator posting "first", however funny, would result in a new moderator. It's like browsing porn at work...instant joblessness.

My first love is PC, and aside from having dumbed down menus, it hasn't been bad getting sloppy seconds from the console. I like Mass Effect on the PC.

Er, I should choose my words with more care or get banned myself :-.) I meant doing that whole "First post" declaration. The lord and master of this thread state what he pleases.

Er, no ban yes?

I agree completely Chris, I also think it would have been great to get a DLC pack in time for the Fall Update.

I think Mass Effect will be one of the titles to benefit most from the Play from HDD feature. So I'm putting off my second play though till then.

And setting the last one to only 50G implies they left themselves room to do 4 more packs before they hit the 1250 Point limit, then ready to release ME2.

Umm.... I've beaten the game several times with the same character so I'm not sure that you're talking about....

In regards to the article, every developer needs to have their heads examined as to why they would release only one DLC package in a 10 month window? Someone please explain to me why a developer wants to wait until at least 6-8 months after the initial release to disseminate DLC, especially when a game's popularity has all but diminished by that time. This is the trend in the industry and it makes no sense whatsoever.

Logic dictates that one would want to release additional content while the game is still popular to keep people playing it. Who is going to want to play Mass Effect DLC this fall then Fallout 3, Fable 2 and The Force Unleashed released? Is it not safe to assume that more people would have played this DLC had it been released within 3-5 months of the games initial release data? Deductive logic concludes that the answer is yes but the developers say no..... go figure.

Ah, I don't mean starting back at square one, but continuing on from the last story mission. Kinda like how Oblivion or GTA let you keep playing after the final mission. I guess I'm asking for ME to be more of a next-gen, open-world, sand-box, Web 2.0 thing. Or something.

JW, what you're suggesting is having devs develop DLC while the game is still in development. The next step from that is saving effort by including it on the disc and making us pay to unlock it!

So no-- that's a terrible idea. The reason it takes a long time after the game is released is because-- guess what? They have to design it.

Haha, you can keep playing the game after beating it, you can even use the same character and keep all your gear.

Anticrawl and JW, he's not talking about starting the game over with the same character and going through all the Citadel nonsense again, etc.

He's talking about the following. Let's say you never did the side missions on the moon. Then you beat the game, and now you want to go to the moon. Too bad, you can't just up and keep traveling around as you please. You have to either start the game over and go through all the Citadel stuff over again and do the side missions again that unlock the Sol System, or you have to load up an old save from before you went past "the point of no return" in the story where you can just fly your ship around however you want again.

It's particularly annoying with the ally achievements, as if beating the game didn't complete enough missions to unlock the achievement, you'd have to load up an old save, do some extra missions, and then go through the whole end sequence again and hope that this time you did enough.

I understand your point now and I completely agree. An open-ended game would have been the best way to go, especially from a DLC perspective.

I do not agree with whomever spoke regarding DLC and the developers designing it after the fact. If one is naive enough to think that these developers go into the post-release gate without a plan, you're sorely mistaken and somewhat foolish. The point it this: if BioWare wanted to make DLC, they would have been pushing it out every few months with the amount of devs they have working for them on ME and ME related work. They simply do not wish to put resources towards that end since the game has all but exhausted its popularity by now (at least on the 360).

Don't think for a second that they work only on the game and then all of a sudden decide "Hey, lets make some DLC from scratch." That would be the poorest business decision in a long line of stupidity that plagues the game development industry. There is nothing that anyone can say to legitimize or substantiate the claim that developers need "more time" to make DLC packages from scratch. Thats just plain wrong and thinking in this way is why you're being taken advantage of on a yearly basis.

The simply fact is that DLC development is included in each and every game's budget. If you don't agree, then you should probably read some game development articles or take a class on finance. This "fact" ensures that there will be DLC for a certain game. Now why wait 6-8 months after the release date to provide these packages? Thats my question and I have yet to see a logical explanation. All i've heard are fanboys claims that have no basis in fact or reason. That is what I was alluding to.

Thank god, I thought I was going insane.

I think part of the problem with DLC for Mass Effect is (at least with Bring Down the Sky) that the DLC isn't game changing. Bring Down the Sky was a 90-minute instance which didn't add new equipment, populate the world of ME with Batarians, or have any effect on the rest of the game.

I agree. The side missions tended to get pretty old by the end of the game. I don't think only having 3 or 4 different settings helped anything. Bring Down the Sky was just more of the same, and this one probably will too.

I say this, yet I'll still probably get it. It'll give me an excuse to finish another playthrough.

If you knew what you were talking about, we'd be listening to you by now.

Have you played the game? It looked beautiful, there was a lot of story(a lot), but that is where the compliments stop. The quality of the story wasnt even decent, give any decent sci-fi writer and they can come up with a better plot. On top of that it makes no sense at times but well going into that would involve me actually brushing up on the game in detail and i cant bring myself to do that.

Graphics i will give you, you can say whatever you want about how beautiful it was and i wont argue one wink. But thats where that stops.

The story was touted as having some ridiculous number like a billion lines of dialogue. That sounds great at first, you think, "wow, lots of story, it must be good". But man do they need to learn how to present it. There is nothing more boring than sitting and clicking through questions to find something out and then it turns it was completly the wrong guy, or that actually you didnt need to talk to him. Tag onto this the fact that no matter what you say the reaction is the same.

Shepard: "I hate your guts alien scum."

Alien: "Well thats all right, ill still help you in whatever fashion you originally needed, even though clearly any character of more than one dimension would react differently to intimidation as to being asked nicely."

When i tell an annoying character to go fuck himself i want him to take a swing at me, or run off or something. Just because you have all this dialogue doesnt make it interesting, id rather read one line of Orwell than sit through that entire story. Quality over quantity, my friends.

Whats the point if you dont care for the characters, or the universe, i would have been just as happy going off and becoming a mercenary and killing randoms the entire time for all the story was worth. And by "just as happy" i mean not at all, as the gameplay was even worse than the story.


The shooting was both unintuitive and unexciting. The special moves all looked exactly the same and had about as much effect most of the time as trying to force push in real life. Finally add on the ridiculous vehicle they tagged on at the end because they suddenly realised we needed to get around the totally barren and empty planets that are mostly completly irrelevant and provide no new challenge or excitement. It suffers from Oblivionitus in this sense, so much content, but all meaning so little. Except Oblivion was fun, and when you got new weapons/armour you cared, looked cooler and noticed a difference.

Please try and refute me, change my mind if your capable.

That's actually a very succinct nega-review. The game is OK, but it seemed to get those great reviews on the BioWare name.

The combat was meh.
The driving was awful.
I'll disagree on the storyline, but yeah, the conversations blow.

Still waiting for a game like this with excellent CoD4/Halo 3 style shooting.

I agree John. I put the game aside for a long time to finish the orgy of games we had last Fall and recently picked it up and beat it 3 or 4 times.

I absolutely love it. I can agree that the Mako could be annoying and the missions weren't varied enough, but it was still a great RPG/FPS hybrid (I'm hoping Fallout 3 will be more of the same).

I'm anxious to see how the second game will open...

SPOILER ALERT

...and if it will vary depending on if you allowed the council to die or not.

I'm also looking forward to how my decisions in the first game effect the second (should I really have killed the Rachni??!?,etc.)

well us pc users did have to wait a it to play it. Due to this (and other distractions) I only actually finished it there last weekend.

Plus the DLC is free for the PC (and has only been released on the format recently) so more of it would be great. For me, it's not really a case of being more bothered about ME, just a nice addition that I'd enjoy.

The point in DLC is to inspire people to play the game some more after they have put it down. You seem to miss that idea.

I'm pretty sure the point of DLC is to wring a little bit more money out of gamers by asking them to pay for content that should have been included (for free!) in the game in the first place...
*coughMASSEFFECTcough*

I got the free DLC as a PC gamer.. but I've still not been arsed enough to replay the whole game to get at it. I guess you only appreciate things when you've paid for them.