I don't think that it's the BEST GAME IN THE WORLD, but I really enjoyed the art direction, the acting, the conversation system, and the story. I liked the combat, though it was a bit clunky, but I hear that they really improved it in the sequel. Pretty much I am excited because it takes all of the good things in the game that worked and made them better while dropping the bad things (i.e. no generic planets and elevators).
Bought the first game on the cheep in on of the Steam sales back in November (not much more than a fiver as I recall) on a leap of faith and, while it has some notable flaws, I can see why it's gotten the praise it has. I didn't intend to but I caved and preordered #2 just last week. I don't think I'll regret it as from all the reports so far, all of the major problems from the first game have been addressed. No more cut/paste locations, dull pointless side missions, no more driving over emptry (if occasionally pretty) rocky worlds looking for minerals, no more elevators (though that one never bothered me as much) no more "back-flips-as-soon-as-it-hits-even-the-smallest-bump" Mako, a streamlined inventory system, better combat, more clearly defined classes, the ability to customise your armour (seriously, why were the iconic Onyx armours so hard to come by?) and to import your characters from ME1. So far I have a paragon female soldier and a renegade male sentinel with a paragon female vanguard still on the go. I'm actually quite proud of by female soldier face, basing her of what I imagined Honor Harrington might look like (green Asian eyes, very high cheek bones, slightly horse mouthed and dark red hair.) For the male I just stuck with the default "John" face while the second female is a weird mix of South American, African and Eastern European. Dark skin, light brown/dark blonde hair, blue eyes, thick lips and an almost Roman nose. I like to think that by that point in the future, today's ethnic groups have been put through the blender a bit and you get new "hybrid groups" emerging, so I tend to mix the features up a bit, while still trying to keep things balanced and attractive. At some point, just for kicks I might do an absolutely dog faced, pale and scared up female, just to buck the trend.
The first game wasn't perfect and had a few flaws, but for the most part I thought it was great and loved pretty much every minute of the plot and main missions(Sovereign is still in my personal top 10 list of villians). So yeah, I'm really looking forward to Mass Effect 2. It's looking like they've improved on pretty much every aspect of the first game.
I was just wondering when you create a new character in ME2, rather than importing one from ME, whether you have any effect on the history? I mean, I lost all my save games due to an OS crash just after I had finished a play-through with a female soldier (and therefore wasn't in the mood to start again), so I don't have any final game saves. At character generation, will you be able to have any say about what happened in ME (major events only?), a bit like creating your background in the first ME, or more/less? Any news on that?
From what I've read, I think that when you create a character from scratch it randomly chooses you "past decisions" for you. That or it makes an educated guess based on the traits you choose. A "ruthless" reputation for instance might be more prone to renegade choices. Though, to be honest I don't think they've full explained that side of things to date.
Even though I have my save game from ME1 I think I'll want to start from scratch. It's not like I'll remember the choices I made from two years ago... also my face was pretty ugly and that annoyed me the entire game.
Depending of how much of an impact your choices have, this might make for an extended play-through where you play through ME1 before doing ME2.
Yeah, it's clear that you basically have to do everything in ME1 again if you want to have the perfectly customized experience in ME2. The game seems to set some global values in the plot if you start a fresh ME2 character, but that's about it. It's funny though. If EA decided to charge for a "background creator" that let you make your own Shepard to import into ME2, I'd almost certainly pay for it just to save the time of playing through ME1 again. Oh well.
This contradicts what I've read - my understanding is that at certain points it will ask you what you would have done in certain situations. I'm just going to carry on my Evil Bastard Shepard save.
I've started an "Insane" playthrough now as an adept: should be interesting as the my last playthrough was as a soldier (and my first was a Vangaurd). But watching all of the ME2 class videos has made me want to try the other classes.
There are canon decisions (and a couple based on your gender) that have been made. It's kind of strange because the canon decisions definitely weigh more toward one side than the other.
I'm surprised BioWare didn't take a similar route Obsidian did in Knights of the Old Republic II, where the events of the prior game were decided by dialogue choices.
There are just too many to account for I guess. The game starts much like the first game though, with a prologue that explains everything before you even play the game... so in that sense, they just needed to pick something and stick with it.
Someone on GAF made some Scribblenaut Avatars: http://g.imagehost.org/view/0709/Scribble_Effect_Wallpaper_1280X1024 Actually, you probably shouldn't click on it if you're afraid of spoilers... hrm.
Okay, I gave up on that once I got stuck on the assasin's outside of Chora's Den. Even the bartenders kicked my butt.
Yeah, without leveling up before hand, I'm not sure how an adept could go through the game on insanity.
I'm glad they didn't. Obsidians approach forced the KOTOR1 player character to one extreme or the other and invalidated every other variation the first game offered. Besides that, most of the fans were too dumb to figure it out, despite the dialogue being as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face. The forums were flooded with threads asking why the game was talking about the KOTOR1 player character one way when they'd played him/her another.
This is why I wish BioWare would start doing developer commentaries - the system here is similar to KoTOR2, but not as specific. It'd be nice to understand what is effected by your choices.