Mass Effect General Discussion (spoilers)

It'd be a better system for a game with less encounter-based level design, I'd say. The clips don't make a lot of sense, but they encourage a familiar tug-of-war between ammo conservation and the need to suppress fire. I wouldn't have minded to a combination of overheat letting you wait for your ammo to tick back up vs clips letting you get back to firing right away, though.

Exactly! Imagine having a hideous cooldown on a sniper rifle... and the enemy are advancing. you need to knock them down fast. So you go thermal clip. Fast reload, but you only have a few chances at it.

You can fall back on the cool down if you're careful.

I miss ME 1 - you ever get that moment you want to re-experience the game with fresh eyes again?

Heavily disagree. The need to scrounge ammo, as non-sensical as it is in story, adds a whole level of dynamism to combat. Because you need to take risks. Either change weapon, or leave cover to get ammo, or both. The heat management system made combat far more static and less interesting because you could pick cover and just keep shooting. There was no incentive to take any risks.

The best combat moments in the trilogy for me are those moments where I run out of ammo, I know I gotta make a break for it. Make my partners use powers to cover me as I make a mad dash for another bit of cover with ammo and I can't be sure I'll make it. There was tension. Something combat in ME 1 never had. (Not helped by repetitive, boring enemy designs)

edited 29th Nov '17 7:40:40 AM by Ghilz

I disagree with that - the first had janky combat yes, but the mobility of the enemies countered the ability to just sit statically. And just using mods could backfire if your weapon was on cooldown.

Add to the fact that the powers were more buff related, you could still use your squad (especially on Insanity where you NEED to use their skills more) - I found in ME 2 with the universal cooldown, it was a pain to manage your squad.

ME 1 I found I could be a cool soldier and still have a good mix of abilities going down range. There was more flow to advancing as well. You could methodically move and clear - it felt more tactical to me, rather than the weird feeling of collecting battlefield scraps to maintain momentum.

I like the encounter design in 2 and 3 a lot, but I actually don't think recharging ammo would have necessarily damaged that rhythm all that much. Balanced accordingly, of course. You'd still be better off having clips, and trying to time your overheats or avoid going too far into the red, there's a tension in that, especially when an ill-timed overheat means getting swarmed or outflanked. "Krogan on the steps!" and all that.

I never really had that issue. In 1, you flow with the battlefield, but I think 2 and 3 give you a better ability to control that flow yourself. The enemies aren't really less mobile, you just have more options for locking them down or drawing their fire. Firing your gun is more meaningful when they don't just funnel in around the corners and get themselves shot.

edited 29th Nov '17 7:51:02 AM by Unsung

I will mention that 2 and 3 benefit from better enemy designs. The enemies are simple, but work togheter well. Robots will eschew cover but keep advancing and firing, essentially supressing you while threatening damage if they got too close. They are often accompanied by human/alien engineers who will use cover and try to flank you while the robots pin you down. The enemies are simple, but they synergize better. The collector general will tank a ton of shot and push you out of cover, allowing the other collectors to shoot you down and flank you. Etc...

ME 1 enemies often seem to behave without reason or logic. Just jumping out of cover and running towards you to get gunned down.

edited 29th Nov '17 8:55:33 AM by Ghilz

Agree there - lots of Deus Ex like circle strafing and just running at your position. Especially annoying in that "Rescue the drugged hostages" mission.

The enemy classes being substantially different beyond "ARGH FUCK KROGAN!" and "Oh, another geth" was good.

Taking on one Krogan was bad enough - can't imagine a galactic war against those buggers.

Incidently I think it's a failing of Andromeda. The player-side of the combat is REALLY good, but the enemies do not completement one another and render combat more stale.

Kett soldiers are basic shooty guys. Then you have "Bigger Shooty guys with shields" and "Smoke screen invisible shooty guy". The most you get is the rare time they deploy a fiend or an ascendant against you, which actually does force a change of strategy. Non-Kett enemies tend to be worst. The Remnants are likely the only enemy with anything approaching synergy between their various unit types, with both long range and close range units.

The wide open area nature of the game doesn't help as you can easily take on the AI from miles away with a sniper rifle and the AI struggles to deal with that. Combat does get better when the game puts you inside indoor environments, but those are few.

edited 29th Nov '17 9:01:43 AM by Ghilz

The open world elements really do take away more than they add, given how sparse they ended up being. The kett are just a worse version of ME 3's Cerberus in all respects, and the outlaws/Roekarr aren't even that. The Remnant are at least mildly interesting, though the the really good encounters where you get to face the full assortment of different units are few and far between. At least compared to the friggin' kett.

100% - And each of the factions are reskins of each other to some degree - sniper, engineer, infiltrator. The heavies vary, but are mainly AOE bullet sponges.

At least the Remnant had some (Initial) variety, but the combat wasn't as interesting. It was almost... too much? I think the open world should've been more developed as an exploration area, with entrenched pockets of enemies with more interesting combat encounters.

Also, the lack of real "control" of your squad members and their lack of interesting abilities hampered things there.

I enjoyed combat initially, due to the number of enemies and their initial combat capability and having to adapt; but the sheer AMOUNT of combat encounters dragged - t was as if the game didn't know how to make other things interesting - it rushed through the puzzle solving and went "MORE DUDES FOR YOU!"

ME 1 - 3 at least parcelled all that out with some interesting down time, fun hub areas and tight combat. In a horrible twist, the DEPTH of the crafting system and the sheer number of weapons made combat bland. Does that make sense? No weapon felt that unique - it just had a +1 to spread, or a -1 to impact. I ended up with a Remnant AR that never ran out and even that felt cheaty.

ME 1 - 3 showed a refinement of the combat around where it happened, with the encounters in set pieces that felt right. (regardless of the ammo system) - The weapons felt hefty and impactful. Andromeda I loved but it's the one ME game I haven't rushed to replay. And I think the combat encounters influenced that, especially later in the game - the powers were a plus at least, in terms of combos - much more interesting than most of the guns.

The heat clip thing wouldn't have been as bad had Mass Effect 1 not gone through the effort of demonstrating how futuristic guns are because they don't need ammo any more, just fire discipline, and then taking a step back with a nonsensical explanation about how marginal increases in rate of fire for the individual soldier (even on platforms for which it is unimportant, like sniper rifles or shotguns) is more important to military units than literal easy logistics.

The issue for me regarding 1's guns compared to 2 is primarily that 1's weapons seemed like these advanced pieces of technology that don't need ammo and can be upgraded and modded with all kinds of nifty tech, while 2's guns seemed no different from any 21st century shooter. Even the ammo mods, which should be literally plug and play technology, suddenly become powers exclusive to specific classes, resulting in fridge logic as to why gadgeteer genius Tali no longer knows how to slap a cryo mod on to her shotgun.

Also doesn't help that 3 proves, with Javik's gun, that ME 1 guns are still the more advanced technology. Seeing as how not even the more advanced protheans consider heat clips a good idea.

So all in all, the real issue is one of breaking verisimillitude. If 1's guns started on a "heat clip" system, That might have been fine. Just not the part where 2 decides make weapons technology worse as a solution for a mild-to-nonexistent problem. If there was any problems with 1's combat, it could probably have used a few more varied types of enemy and better AI tactics, along with some more varied maps.

I always figured the change to regular guns in 2 was due to making Mass Effect more of a third person shooter.

I hated the loss of the ability Immunity. With that, my shocktrooper Mark Shepard was damn near indestructable. Hell, I melee'd a Colossus to death with him. Took a while, but the bastard couldn't kill me, lol.

In 3's MP, clipless weapons were often considered to be super high tier with the notable exception of the Collector Sniper Rifle and its limited range. The M-7 Lancer in particular was SSS tier and pretty much considered like "easy mode" alongside the Cerberus Harrier.

I actually thought the increased focus on shooter mechanics made sense because Shepard and crew are getting more and more experience with fighting and the story eventually involving around it.

Except Shepard and crew are already super experienced with fighting, even before the events of ME 1.

That the clipless guns in ME 3's multiplayer are easy-mode just reinforces that weapons technology took a step back with heat clips, despite what the ME 2 codex attempts to sell.

Story-wise I can see why thermal clips could be seen as an upgrade over venting. As the Codex states, a trained soldier can swap an overheated thermal clip in less than a second, which is exponentially faster than waiting for an overheated gun to vent. It also allows soldiers to mitigate the potentially deadly effects of a Sabotage by popping a heat sink the moment they're hit by the Sabotage instead of waiting for the weapon to cool down, which is several seconds of non-action.

Gameplay-wise it just plays as a downgrade because it just makes the game play like an ammo system. What I'd always imagined was that thermal clips were an alternative way to cooling down your weapon, and that if left unpopped, would eventually vent its own heat similar to a standard heat sink. Basically a soldier would carry a limited number of thermal clips, and should they be needed to lay down continuous suppressive fire, they can just swap out thermal clips. But if the mission was more tactical and would only require burst fire instead of full-auto, the soldiers can just let their weapons vent in the meantime.

edited 29th Nov '17 2:54:27 PM by ITNW1989

I much prefer the clip system. If you run out of ammo with a clip, you actually do something about it (i.e. you reload, or you run to find more ammo). If your gun overheats you just have to do nothing. I'd rather do something than do nothing when I'm playing a video game. It's much more engaging.

edited 29th Nov '17 7:59:23 PM by shigmiya64

That's pretty much the design decision in a nutshell, but I still think there was room for both. Waiting out that overheat buildup when you're out of clips, that'd be a fine way of milking tension.

edited 29th Nov '17 8:11:51 PM by Unsung

Yeah, I feel the game would have benefited from keeping both systems in, at least in most guns. ARs, SMGs and some shotguns would have benefited from having the option to switch, while using universal thermal clips would also have made the realism better; it's stupid that I can't use the thermal clips on my pistols on my sniper rifle when they use universal clips.

Thermal clips, if they must be a thing, should have been a weapon mod that give you X times to vent heat immediately.

The idea in ME 1 is that you don't need to reload, ever, just have good fire discipline. The issue of being able to do something about it when you "run out" doesn't come up, because playing well means it doesn't come up. Story-wise, a marginal increase in rate of fire is nothing compared never having to worry about ammo logistics ever again. I will, however, accept that clips mean mitigation of Sabotage, as well as mitigate the negative effects of HE ammo, in which case aircooling should still be an option, rather than the portrayal of clips as this revolution in military affairs.

That, and they should actually be universal.

On a different note, I find that yes, the textures of ME 1 are a little dated...but does anyone else find Wrex and other krogan to be better animated in 1 compared to the sequels? I always found Wrex (and That One Krogan) to look ridiculously lifelike compared to everyone else in all three games, almost as if he was an actual creature rather than a CGI model.

Point of order, one of the best weapon builds in the entire game causes it to come up frequently.

The thing is, storywise ammo has never been a logistical problem: keeping your guns cool enough to keep firing is. It's never been established how long a thermal clip would take to cool down, or if the cooling process could be sped up by hitting it with a Cryo Blast or something. Also, one thing to note is that we're playing as a tactical insertion team, which is pretty highly specialized, so Shepard's team is pretty far from the standard baseline that would be used to determine whether thermal clips are more effective.

But yeah, I still find it stupid that universal clips aren't actually universal, nor were both methods implemented. The way thermal clips work in the game you'd think they were one-off use. It can't possibly be that wasteful.

It's implied that all the spare clips you find on battlefields are actually clips that have been sitting there for a couple hours and are now cool enough to use again, so there's that. But yes, it makes no sense to not have both air cooling and clips. Shepherd explains in 3 that they took out the air cooling system to make space for the clips, which is stupid.

edited 30th Nov '17 11:15:03 AM by Discar

Huh, I must have missed/forgotten Shepard explaining that. Then again, it's been ages since I last played the original trilogy.

edited 30th Nov '17 11:18:15 AM by ITNW1989