Can anyone explain to me the huge shift in opinion for Mass Effect 2? Cred Forums used to fucking love this game

This is usually the case, but to be fair, even when ME2 first came out there was a vocal minority that was upset with how Bioware had continued its tradition of taking good ideas that needed improvement, and rather than improving them, just scrapped them entirely because improving them is too difficult. As much hate as the Mako and Uncharted Worlds got, they were a big part of what made the first ME memorable to a lot of people.

So scrapping those entirely for shitty little 2-minute side missions and fucking PROBES was something a lot of people didn't like. Combine that with the shitty Health/Shield/Armor system they shoehorned in to combat, the story that didn't actually go anywhere, and the lack of the bigger, interesting hub worlds of the first game, and it's not difficult to see why people weren't thrilled with the sequel even when it came out.

This. Mass Effect 1 was still before Bioware became the supposed "AAA" developer everyone knows them for now. ME1 and Dragon Age Origins would be the last game made before Bioware was completely taken over by EA. Not that the other games they have made aren't good.

I just played ME1 and 2 for the first time ever this year, so here's an opinion untainted by nostalgia:

ME1 is a great old-Bioware game. Awesome atmosphere, interesting story that has some parrelels with the story of KOTOR 1, RPG-lite combat mechanics, and team members that actually require leadership from the player. I'd say it has the perfect difficulty level too. However, the non-story planets are very repetitive and you always get dropped into the Himalayas. The Mako gets super old after a while.

ME2 has better graphics, feels more polished, and is overall better produced. However, I do feel that it was overrated. It's less open-ended than the first game, the combat mechanics ditch nearly all RPG elements, leveling up is much more simple, and the story is geared so that being a human supremacist is the "bad goy" path. I want to put humans first without being le ebil raycis.

Haven't played ME3 yet but I hear that everything negative about ME2 is amplified in that game.

I hated it when it came out, even got banned from forums because everyone were fanboys

Mass Effect was always popular

It feels like they plop you in a cage after the freedom of the original. It's still an alright game, but the whole exploration feel and visiting uncharted planets is what gave Mass Effect an allure for me. Finding an abandoned research base on a desolate planet and exploring it with music ripped straight out of a early 00's sci-fi horror movie was fucking great.

Mass Effect 2 & 3 felt more like a streamlined corridor shooter. That being said, Mass Effect 1's locations were still extremely repetitive with a lot of repeated corridors and assets.

Playing as a vanguard is more fun in 1. You don't get the rush, but you can become an absolute super massive tank.

Happened the same thing with Dark Souls, Skyrim and Witcher 3

>Witcher 3
If fangirls could go one thread without mentioning it, it probably wouldn't be an issue. Blame yourselves.

Spot on

Cred Forums generally still hates ME3, what is that image on about.

skyrim better that witcher
is this a meme?

It's just butthurt, nobody actually hates anything due to popularity. That's only ever stated in defense of something by people who can't accept that other people dislike what they like.

Basically this. I always found ME2 to be a disappointment (I wasn't on Cred Forums at the time) because it replaced a lot of the freedom of ME1 with corridors with convenient waist high walls. In ME1 I loved to park miles off from a geth base, climb a hill, and snipe them without them being able to do much in return. In ME2 sniping was basically useless because it was all in shooting ranges. And the upgrade system was basically nonexistent. I also found it totally inexplicable that they would think it a good plot idea to kill off Shepherd in between games too - what the fuck where they thinking?

Don't misunderstand me though, ME2 is still a very good game. Just not as good as ME1.

>the races were not influenced in any discernible way by the decisions made in 2
Decisions made in Tali and Legion's loyalty missions have an effect on the Quarian-Geth solution

I personally always preferred Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 2.

It's probably why i'm cautiously optimistic for Andromeda (Bioware have essentially said that Mass Effect 1 is the game they are looking at the most for inspiration. They want to bring Role Playing and true space exploration to the forefront of the game)

Mass Effect 1 just had an atmosphere that is unmatched in RPGs. It's pretty sad that for every Space RPG you get 20+ Tolkien tier high fantasy RPGs

The one thing that stayed consistently 10/10 throughout the games was its setting and music imo

youtube.com/watch?v=IitCQCaKi3E&list=RDP5GHQNnPUuo&index=3

>I also found it totally inexplicable that they would think it a good plot idea to kill off Shepherd in between games too - what the fuck where they thinking?
I always thought that was less about Shepard and more about everyone else. If Shep was dead for two years, that's two years of offscreen character development to conveniently transform squadmates/glorified codexes into actual characters. They needed a reason for Garrus to suddenly be a vigilante, Wrex to be a respected clan leader, Liara to be a threatening info broker, Tali to be a squad leader, etc etc etc.

It was actually smart writing. It allowed for extensive character development which lead to Garrus/Tali/Liara becoming much more fleshed out than their more naive counter parts in ME1.

I thought Shepard dying was a stroke of genius on Biowares part. It allowed the above to happen without much effort from Bioware

>without much effort from Bioware

Well I certainly see the appeal from their point of view. But it seems like lazy writing to me.

It is lazy writing but it's the kind of lazy writing that's actually, literally ok.

I am not on-board with skipping over actual character development because they can't be bothered to write it happening and just want to get to the end point.

I thought it was a really cool way to introduce Cerberus and reintroduce characters for people who hadn't played ME1

I really enjoyed seeing how the returning characters changed while Shepard was missing too

But they didn't skip over actual character development. You actually get to shape Garrus for example in ME2 and even to a certain extent ME1. Depending on whether or not you praise ruthless behavior or condemn it.

You're really reaching for straws to try and paint this as some sort of a negative when in actuality, it's one of the smarter writing decisions Bioware made.

good game but its shit at continuing the story from ME1

>But they didn't skip over actual character development

I think that's pretty hard to argue with characters like Liara.

>You're really reaching for straws

OK user, whatever you say. There's no such thing as disagreeing or different opinions, somebody is always totally right and somebody else is always totally wrong.

I guess this is what I get for trying to have a discussion with a child.

Nigga what. Bioware has always been a AAA RPG developer. KotOR, Jade Empire, fucking Baldur's Gate. They were known for pretty good production quality and decent writing. EA just made them corporate.

I don't know about what /v thinks, but I disliked it because
> Kayne
> didn't like the opening
> universal ammo that glitches to the floor
> gay fish
> The aforemention ruined my sniper character
> less armor
> didn't really like the red overlay
> mother fucking gay fish
> seemed like an RPG-lite
I dropped it after two or three character missions, for full disclosure. The weirdo alien dude and Garrus.

>I think that's pretty hard to argue with characters like Liara.

How? That's the entire point of her though and she benefited greatly from it. Shepard was surprised to see how much she changed as was the player, she gained a sense of respect and self dignitiy that most games seldom manage to do, it showed her as her own character, not just some character thrown in for the self insert Shepard to shape and create.

Oh feel free to disagree and trust me, i'm all for shitting on Bioware when they fuck up but I just don't see this as a fuck up and in fact, I see the reverse. I see it as a stroke of genius writing on their part, it not only allowed them to welcome in new players to the series by introducing a new squad but it also simultaneously allowed the characters from ME1 to develop and prove their independent nature outside of their "mindless Shepard slaves" representation in ME1.

Calling me a child is pretty ironic seeing as you go on to sarcastically quip about "people having different opinions", i've remained civil and refrained from insulting you throughout this entire back and fourth, grow up dude.

ME2 is Bioware's magnum opus. Everything else they made lacked in many areas pretty hard.

Doesn't matter. It goes like this, 1=2>3

The star bit was literally never going anywhere. Everyone who talks about it points to Drew Karpyshyn mentioning it as a potential motivation for the Reapers in ME2 fails to mention that in the very next next breath he says that it was one of several options on the table but was abandoned before ME2 was fully written rather than being a major plot point Mac Walters and Casey Hudson later decided to shit on.

It had some hiccups at the time, most notably the whole "you have to work for Cerberus" thing. Most of it was forgiven because the Suicide Mission was absolutely bad ass, and the DLC for it wasn't bad.

But ME3's ending is so bad it retroactively taints your memories of the whole franchise. It's so awful that all you can think of when you look back on or play ME2 is that the only place it's going is up Walters and Hudson's ass, just like their heads.

>liking "exploration" of photoshop cloud-generated terrain

You can't be serious. ME1 is the only "RPG" I can recall that has exploration done this badly.

We didn't know that at the time though, hence the rest of my post

Fuck hivemind

ME3 was good
ME2 is better
ME1 was bad apart from the story/universe

GET
REKT

>shift
No

>ME3's ending was so bad it retroactively taints your memories

THIS

I genuinely can't play ME1 2 or 3 without feeling sick to my stomach. Only reason I'm even considering giving Andromeda a chance, is because nothing from the original games matters now.

Fuck ME3 for making me feel these feels

>kayne
Who do you me-

Ohhhh, what's your beef with Jacob, he's aaaaa'ight

>le me3 ending xdddd

Better than 2's ending.

>ME3 was good
>ME2 is better
ME2 had nothing that was better than 3 though. The main thing 2 had going for it was combat and 3 improved it.

I started the trend of ditching what made ME1 stand out and turned the series into a mundane cover shooter with space theme. Story feels like a giant side mission and has various problems, even if you accept that premise.

So you confess to being a newfag? /vg/ was literally created because of Mass Effect 2 (primarily talifags) spamming Cred Forums with constant threads

The Haestrom/Dark Matter shit was literally only latched onto after ME3's release because that's when Karpyshyn made that comment.

It was also when people were looking for reasons their beloved trilogy had suddenly torpedoed, seemingly out of nowhere.

They were desperate to come up with something that had the corporate overlords screwing BioWare over at the last second, but it was just BioWare dropping the ball hard.

Having Karpyshyn still around *might* have helped things but realistically ME3 was always going to be a shit show due to reliance on the Crucible as the deus ex machina (literally and figuratively) that finishes things off. At best Drew might have been able to polish the turd a little more.

I loved 2 but my biggest gripe was the huge emphasis on too many companions. Most of them are boring and unmemorable. Like I literally cannot name the space aids green dude.

>ME3's ending is horribly written and managed to piss off almost every single Mass Effect fan on the planet

>Better then 2's

Nigga you ain't this dumb

>Cred Forums used to fucking love this game

lolwut

>tfw even that fucking dumbass indoctrination theory and the theory about reapers killing organics because they're afraid organics were gonna destroy the universe with biotics were more interesting than what we actually got

I was going to give ME: A a chance based on ME3's multiplayer (which was lightning in a bottle really, and with some updates and tweaks could be a fun diversion again) and being set in an entirely different galaxy, but the lack of news an updates on it has done little to inspire confidence.

I get the feeling BW know they've got another shit show on their hands and are just going for as big an early push as possible before people realise it's a dud. I think if they thought what they had was going to be great they'd have been showing it off, especially so close to release.

It's moved from my "probably buy if it doesn't get shat on" list to my "only buy if it attracts near universal praise" list.

For some reason he was a pretty dominant fan favorite for a while and I'll never understand it.

This.

As much shit people give ME3, it still continued and closed the narrative. ME2 did jackshit for the trilogy.

ME1 gameplay was cluncky but it didn't go full retard like ME2's. At least ME3 made 2's gameplay actually good.

t. ME3 lover.

Indoctrination theory is cool AF. Bioware faggots should have claimed it to be true

AIU he was literally shopped around to the female BioWare workers to make sure he was maximum husbando bait for female players.

The fuck it is. It doesn't follow any logic or symptoms established in lore.

Then again what do they or the fans care about the previously established lore?

Not him and I forget what the end point of Indoctrination Theory was but the idea Shepard could have been/was Indoctrinated makes sense to me.

After all everyone else who stands near a Dragon's Tooth for like a nanosecond gets Indoctrinated. Shepard and company wander around them multiple times over the years, and Shep's literally riddled with Reaper tech implants.

OTOH, consistency and Mass Effect. Pick one and only one.

It's supposed to make you want to support the reapers, not the opposite AS SEEN AND HEARD. Nothing SHOWN supports that.

Really. No matter what the thread they try to worm it in.

>Super Mario thread
>Better post about this unrelated game

Saren's dialogue until he got implants from Sovereign implies that he believed that he wasn't giving in to the Reapers, but rather being pragmatic and saving everyone from them.

No, I mean I know how Indoctrination works.

I just gave zero fucks about what Indoctrination Theory was trying to say either then and now.

In some respects an end sequence where the Crucible was deployed and then Shepard failed to activate it so the Reapers got the big win due to being Indoctrinated would have been less rage-inducing than what we got. At least that would have made more sense than "LOL, I heard you organics didn't like getting exterminated by synthetics you invented so I made some synthetics that will exterminate you before you invent synthetics that would exterminate you" and "pick one of three nonsensical colour-coded endings that will irretrievably fuck up the game universe, or choose to fail and lose because this is ART, you plebian."

And Oot and Bioshock Infinite.

Post a thread about either and it will bet flooded with how Fedora's Mask or Bioshock 2 are the best, even though both are the weakest of the series.

ME3 was so fucking bad it instantly made the other games worse because of it

Everyone played ME3 and realized that this series is meandering garbage that had a bunch of neat ideas and writers who had no fucking clue how to work with those ideas

Discuss games with people who actually have solid opinions and can provide arguments. Ignore shitposters.

probably mentally ill people from the generals on /vg/ started liking ME3 for the shitty-ass fan pandering with that retarded citadel DLC after playing that garbage for 3k hours

One thing they screwed up from ME1 was the visual aesthetics and music. ME1 had a very unique for today style where everything was sleek shiny and form-fitting like in pre-star wars classic sci-fi. ME2-3 turned everything into generic modern space marines. Look at the Normandy SR1 vs SR2. the first is a super curvy, smooth and silvery machine while the SR2 is made of flat colors, rigid angles and rectangular shapes like all other modern sic-fi. The armor went from perfectly molding to the body to bulky Halo stuff full of greebles. Finally the music went from a very unique soft electronic to more Hans Zimmer imitating orchestral pieces like everything else out of sci-fi these days.

Bioshock Infinite is legitimately bad.

>it's shorter
>it's the most linear
>the combat is simpler
>fewer weapons
>fewer plasmids
>easier

I'll give you that Bioshock 2's story is way below the original's, but the combat? HOLY FUCKING SHIT IF THAT ISN'T FUCKING AMAZING. Bio2's gameplay is easily the best in the series, there's a shit ton of plasmids and upgrades, build variety, decent freedom of movement, interesting sidequests, and you play as a fucking big daddy with a big ass drill.

This.

Undertale sucks tho

What happened in the DLC that landed Shepard in military jail for six months? I never played it so I never really understood why they're locked up at the beginning, I thought it was because of being with Cerberus but apparently Shepard blew up a bunch of Batarians or something?

ME2 made the series actually fucking playable instead of that retarded clunkfest that was ME.

You know I agree, I just liked ME2 more

You smash an asteroid into a relay which blows it up and destroys the entire system. The Reapers were heading to Bahak and from there would have been everywhere in the galaxy within moments. Taking out the system buys the galaxy another few months because the Reapers have to travel to the nearest relay at FTL speeds rather than teleporting everywhere.

If you do Arrival, you're on trial for that, high treason since you worked with Cerberus, and whatever other actions you took in ME2 the Alliance doesn't like.

If you don't do Arrival it's just high treason for working with Cerberusand whatever other actions you took in ME2 the Alliance doesn't like.

Same with Undertale.

No it wasn't a small minority of people who loved it.

ALL of Cred Forums loved it

Then it became popular
And now these fucking hipsters pretend to hate it.

Isn't the general opinion that Undertale is good, but its fanbase is cancer?

>Mass Effect got popular.
Why is this always the excuse?
>X got popular!

Because they are right that Cred Forums is all hipsters but they don't realize the main thing all hipsters do is shit on other hipsters.

These two are the biggest hipsters.
That is how it works.
I bet both of them are posting from starbucks right now.

>Because they are right
Explain why many popular games are loved here then.

If you want to enjoy the game you need to get invovled in the history, the gameplay is a little shitty

Hipsterdom

Liking popular games on Cred Forums is like liking unpopular games on facebook

Its about signaling that you are special.
Notice how they refer to Cred Forums. Despite posting on Cred Forums they usually refer to it as a separate entity.

>Haven't played ME3 yet but I hear that everything negative about ME2 is amplified in that game.

This is the biggest reason for the shift in opinion.

Some didn't like the changes ME2 had from ME1, but it was overall a good game and a memorable experience.

ME3 was such a steaming turd that ME2's flaws are no longer acceptable, and only stand to emphasize the direction ME3 took.

I still think its a good game on its own. the gameplay was good but the story was garbage and has no meaning in the third game.

>Cred Forums is one person with one opinion
Fuck off.

what was that black guys name again?

Jacob

...

never played it so, i cant form an opinion.

3 improved a lot about the gameplay, but it's still a worse experience. Levels, encounters, side missions and character interactions aren't anywhere near ME2. 2 might have been streamlined to hell for ME1 purists, but it had a ton of good really work put into it. 3 feels it was made by a team 1/3rd of the size of 2.

Mass Effect 2 was worthwhile when the assumption was that all the character development of your team mates and the building up of Cerberus was actually relevant to something Bioware had planned for ME3. When it turned out that nothing had been planned and pretty much everything remotely interesting about ME2 had been jettisoned from ME3, it hurt ME2 in retrospect. ME3 is so bad that its very existence makes other games worse.

you are fucking retarded, kill yourself

> Cred Forums used to fucking love this game.
Bullshit. The whole reason I started coming to this shit hole was that it was the only place I could find that wasn't sucking ME2's dick.
ME2 was shit.

see

So Cred Forums likes LoL now because it has a /vg/ thread?
Pretty sure the league threads were the reason for /vg/ anyway.

>/vg/ created for mass effect
>not the LoL, DotA, and SC2 generals that devoured the front page 24/7
Thank God the esports cancer was quarantined. It still flares up now and then but there's a lot less of it thanks to the containment board.

ME2 is more fun to play.

ME1 is the better experience.

Coming from someone who played ME2 first.

>got popular
>trying to imply that bioware-known for kotor, Dragon Age: Origins, Jade Empire, Baldur's Gate- is a niche company that couldn't sell based on company loyalty alone.

You do realize Jade Empire was a flop.

It still improved their image in the eyes of publications.

The Mako "exploration" segments were a fucking chore, and Mass Effect is as much of a corridor shooter as 2 and 3.

People don't hate the witcher 3. They hate the combat and want people to stop spamming every god damn thread on Cred Forums with their game so they overcompensate and say its shit. The game is over. Get the fuck over it and stop making a thread or seventeen every day about it.

1 was an rpg with shooter elements
2 became the shoot
3 is an arcade shooteroony

witcher 3 wasn't good to start with though

At this point, it could be the literal savior of video games and Cred Forums would still shit on it because the vocal crowd has already decided it's going to be shit. I like your approach, but you should probably find a more reliable criteria on which to base that approach.

I never understood the 'muh RPG' argument about ME1's gameplay. ME1 is as much a third-person shooter as the other two games, but the actual shooting is governed by 'skills' that don't make any sense in the context of Shepard's character.

Before the game even starts it's established that Shepard is an exceptionally good soldier. He's in the top-tier of top-tier of human special forces, tipped to join the toppest of top-tier special forces in the entire galaxy, one of his potential character backgrounds is 'single-handedly held of a giant attack on a city', but what is he like when you start playing?

He can't hit the broadside of a barn at five paces because he's level one. ME2 and ME3 got this bit right. Shepard is a very, very good soldier and should be able to shoot better than damn near every enemy in the game right out of the gate. Having skills for everything else makes sense (which the two sequels also kept), but applying RPG logic to the actual shooting simply does not make sense.

Also IMO ME3 had the best skill system. Levelling up in ME1 meant putting a dozen '+3% [number]' points onto your skills that didn't change at all throughout the game other than [number] getting bigger. ME2 went way too far in the other direction and massively oversimplified it, but introduced the concept of power customisation with the final point in each skill. ME3 got it just right, with a decent number of upgrades with significant changes to your powers and the choice between different 'styles' of upgrade at regular intervals, allowing you to customise your toolkit to be just how you like it.

>tfw one of those two or three people who would talk about how they hate 2 and loved 1 in Mass Effect threads years ago when 2 just came out

I never shifted my opinion. 3 was pretty good though ignoring the ending, which they sort of fixed anyway. Still disappointing ending but the actual game itself is 10/10, I'd put it at least equal with the first game. 2 alienated all the fans of 1 and had a completely pointless story. It was a gigantic waste of time, fuck EA and their forced action bullshit.

>Cred Forums used to fucking love this game.
*Newfags used to love this game

Fans of Bioware from when they were actually a good dev studio hated it

When ME2 released I thought it had some flaws but Bioware could learn from them.

Instead in ME3 they went all in on those bad parts after which it became apparent that ME2 was the game that ruined the series.

This is the correct answer.

ME3 put hings into perspective.

Plus giving ME3 shit for its story is disingenuous because it had to close out a trilogy and make up for an entire game's worth of wasted storytelling simultaneously. I mean really, there was no good way out of that corner and it's somewhat of a miracle that they managed to resolve any plot threads at all.