is pretty much the poster child on how not to do it we move on to the exciting topic of environment design. OK, so maybe “exciting” was the wrong choice of words to precede “environment design”. I'm also tempted to go with “necessary” as the way that the games approached this was one of the most drastic changes from the first to the second installments. As in almost completely different. So very different.OK, time for a quick disclaimer. Outside of the vehicle issues none of the stuff I'm going to say about 'Mass Effect'
s environments and the ways in which you explore said environments applies to those that you encounter during the main story. That stuff is interesting, diverse, colorful, pretty much everything that the side questing environments aren't. This is kind of an issue for me as the side questing actually comprises the bulk of the games volume by playtime with much of it spent hopping between planets, finding strange life and new civilizations, running in terror from aforementioned strange life and murdering the hell out of the new civilizations. The problem is that all of this is done in “dungeons” that are about as generic as they get. It seems like someone thought that the keyword with regards to future living accommodations would be “modular”. Now that may very well turn out to be the case but from planet, to planet, group to group there is almost no variation. In fact as best as I can recall there are exactly two styles of dungeon. Number one is large open-ish room with smaller second floor and 2-4 accessible side rooms. The other option is corridor based environment with medium sized central room that is generally a sort of t-shape in its overall layout. This sort of thing becomes very tiresome and very predictable very quickly.'Mass Effect 2'
on the other hand solves this problem in a similar fashion that it solved the inventory issues. In this case there is a hell of a lot less random exploration. There is still side questing to be done but there isn't much in the way of “Oh, hey I think I just stumbled across something nifty let me see if it's safe”. The exploration in 'ME2' is more like mini side stories as they take place in small contained environments where you're usually simply going to go in, kill all the red dots that show up on your mini-map, hunt around for resources and upgrades and then leave. I'm not really saying that I miss the generic dungeon model found in the first game it's just that it made space feel larger and more open. Speaking of which.So in 'Mass Effect'
you could land on and explore at least one planet in every cluster in the game. I don't remember the exact number but it worked out to a lot of planets. Most of these planets had some resources (converted to money), maybe some crashed debris (upgrades and/or money) and probably some slavers/mercenaries/something that shot first and asked questions later for you to eliminate. Now aside from the generic dungeons this would have been all well and good except for the stupid vehicle that they stuck you with to explore the ~1 square mile of terrain that contained all of this. Yes, I spent many a hour cruising around the surfaces of alien planets in my M35 Mako. Actually maybe “cruising” is the wrong word. You see the Mako is a six wheeled vehicle that promotes itself as a 'infantry fighting vehicle' which would be great and all if it didn't handle like a shopping cart in a moon bounce when you drive over anything other than the smoothest of terrain. And the steering oh god the steering/lack thereof. About the only things I can say in favor of the Mako is that at least it's durable (highly relevant given its inability to avoid enemy fire) and that despite bouncing around a lot it is pretty much as all-terrain as it gets as one of my favorite thing to do with it was to see how close to a vertical cliff face the game engine would allow me to drive up.So in this case I can't fault Bioware from more or less axing vehicles from 'Mass Effect 2'
as the games fans weren't super happy about how the first game handled its vehicle sections. I say 'more or less' because there where a couple of semi-scripted vehicle sections in 'ME2' and there was a vehicle, the M-44 Hammerhead, in one of 'ME2' s DLCs that rivals the Mako for crappiness. But isn't all sunshine and roses in 'ME2' land. See you still need some way to gather resources and some vindictive human being at Bioware decided that probing would be the optimal way to do that. To gather resources you'll guide your ship into a planets orbit then hover your cursor over the planets surface periodically launching probes to retrieve the four different elements that get used in weapon and ship upgrades. I know right. That sounds like an incredibly riveting experience. Or not.The last thing I want to mention as a major upgrade from the first to the second game was your ship. More specifically your ships elevator. In the first game the game engine (apparently) used the transit time between the different levels of your ship to load your destination. This wasn't particularly well optimized and meant that the length of your elevator ride was basically dependent on how powerful a system you where running the game on with the X-Box 360 version being a ride nearly long enough to count as a snack break. Thankfully this got fixed in 'ME2'
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