I just received the game tonight as a christmas gift from my roommate... Going to be playing through it. I doubt it will suck since it's from Bioware, but I was curious if anyone has had a go through with it and could share their thoughts on it.

Overall, I liked it, but there's a lot wrong with the game.

For starters, the graphics are ALWAYS being rendered. Everywhere you go, you see textures that aren't fully rendered, and only become so as you run around. Your characters armor whenever you get out of a loading screen is an example of this: You see this dull blocky thing surrounding them, but a little while afterwards, their armor becomes fully rendered. That REALLY pissed me off.

The dialogue system was pretty cool, I'll admit. You can be charming, intimidating, or neither, but it's more fun to be either charming or intimidating. You can talk people out of fights if you're charming, or force them into fights if you're intimidating. I really liked that aspect.

People complain about the AI that your team is on, but I never really had any problems with them. You can tell them where to stand, or where to hide, and they'll be fine. I guess a lot of people forget that (they tend to rush into battle if you don't give them commands), and say that the AI your team has sucks.

The story was decent, nothing amazing until the end. I guess for non-RPG fans, it's incredible. A few of my friends that hate RPGs say the game overall was life-changing.

Unfortunately, I think there's a lot wrong with the game, but it's worth a playthrough or two.

I've got the game but it's wrapped up under Christmas Tree so I'll be giving my verdict after that I have to admit I'm pretty damn excited to play it, hopefully whatever graphical issues there are they'll get them fixed in an update.

You ####### getting christmas presents. I hate you. All who gives to me is me.

Yeah we always go a bit mad for Christmas especially this year (my sons first Christmas), amongst other things I'm pretty sure my wifes got also me Eternal Sonata too well I hope she has I dropped enough hints

There's a good few technical issues with the game, but honestly it wouldn't be a Bioware game without them. Definitely keep the grain filter on, though, it looks nicer. ;D

Despite obviously suffering from quite a bit of cut backs, the game still manages to be fun and engaging. You never really know just what you're going to say, dialogue-wise, and often the descriptions are longer than the sentence itself... But still! It's definitely a lot of fun. You'll find yourself many a-times (depending on how you play) mumbling something like "No way, he isn't going to say tha... Oh snap!"

But yeah. Lots of fun, I just really dislike the character customization system. It just feels like it has a lack of options. Oh! Assault Rifle Vanguards = win.

Not much that can really be done about the rendering. It's a 360 title... What did you expect?

Also for saying the game has a lot wrong with it your complaints are all fairly minor from what I'm reading, Nokte. What makes it a total failure?

Based on my experience my only main complaint so far is that the framerate LOVES to drop during the action to nearly unplayable for brief moments. I'm always willing to sacrifice beauty for speed... If only more developers would catch on.

Otherwise I played for an hour, and despite the game seeming somewhat easy at this point ( I'm playing on hard ) I'm sure that will change as I'm still fairly early into the game.

I must say I love the game presentation though. The characters move with feeling and the voice acting is quite stellar. The camera angels and movement of characters during interacting really gives a very cinematic feel. I hope more RPG's follow suit with this style as it's very engrossing.

But yeah... So far, so good. I'm not overwhelmed... But as I said the presentation, dialog scenes, and interaction between characters is extremely top notch. ALL RPG's please follow suit.

Roomate getting you a christmas gift?!?! wow with the luck I've been having with roomates I'd be lucky if one of them even said happy birthday.

I had it reserved 2 weeks before it came out, and I surpose it was alright. Although it served as a short time distraction from Persona 3, and I do have some complains about the framerate, the drops to hell, the Mako that drives like the Warthog from Halo 3, and just too damn to breeze if you skip thought 3/4 of the sidequests.

P.S.: I kinda found Liara to be annoying enough to turn my love juice to Ashley. Even her VA sounds a little bored too.

Their biggest problem is they were not allowed to use the HDD to cache or store anything. (Saves aside). Everything had to be immediately streamed from the disc which, honestly, just doesn't work when you're working with images of such high resolution and in such short amounts of time. (This is, really, the PS3's biggest point over the 360).

I didn't go into the flaws of the game, and I never ever called Mass Effect a failure. Where'd ya get that?

I keep hearing complaints about frame rate drops but, honestly, I've never had that happen to me. The game stays silky smooth all the way through. Now I just wish the texture popping wasn't so bad.

I'm not that far into the game yet, but as of now I am absolutely loving it and it's easily heading toward being my favourite RPG on the 360 and my personal game of 2007.

I agree they need to do hard drive installs to keep things running smoothly and increasing loading times and such. It's a feature I do love about the PS3. Makes a nice difference.

I get framerate drops occasionally but not terribly often.. Don't see how you don't see it. Maybe my roommate and I have too high of expectations... It's kinda ala KOTOR... When battles get thick the framerate just likes to run all over the place. I dunno, it's been a few days since I've played... I'll play again tonight and see what happens. I'm always really baked and zoned on pills so maybe I was just high. I swear the framerate liked to hop during heated action though.



I guess I just misunderstood what you were trying to say. " Quite a bit of cut backs " after " despite obviously suffering " and then " the game still manages to be fun and engaging " read like " a lot of negatives but the game has redeeming values " when I originally viewed your post.

Mmm... Texture pops :: munches ::

I apologize, but what I ment by that was something more along the lines of "Although the remnants of gameplay elements which didn't quite make the cut exist (and occasionally glaringly so - finding an old and battered search probe on an old moon, filled to the brim with the latest weapons immediately springs to mind), they do not detract (at least much) from the overall game experience, which can easily be described as 'exceptional' and even 'great' when compared to its contemporaries."

Sound better for ya? ;D But yes, I do hope that Microsoft will retire the Core System and begin allowing developers to make a full install and just general better use of the hard drive supplied. We (the community) aren't even really asking for the ability to make a full install on the HDD, just the allowance of developers to make use of the HDD for caching and temporary storage of gameplay assets in an effort to avoid things like texture popping, load times, and frame rate drop. Obviously, this would be a downer for most Core owners but, honestly, why wouldn't you have already purchased a hard drive for your 360 by now anyways? And it's not like it wouldn't be TOO much a complex issue for developers to include a script which checks for a hard drive at boot and makes use of it throughout the game should one exist, or streams everything from a disk should one not. It would require a bit more testing to ensure both experiences are both playable and enjoyable, yes, but it's definitely the better alternative.

this is such a fun game!!! lol i played through it twice and i love it. well for people that played it already you can go renagade or the other one...lol whatever but its so much easier to play an ##### instead of trying to solve everything. haha or you can be neautral but...thats crazy. and yea....so this game is really good...and yea...pointlessness but yea. haha

I got this game for Christmas, and I must say that it is far better than I expected. I wasn't interested in this game at all until a couple weeks ago (I could never get into kotor, so I didn't think I would like this either) and I had a surprisingly good time just exploring the galaxy (I am a minimalist). The last few hours are really amazing, and even gave me the desire to play through the game again (this time not being a douche to everyone) and that changed the experience, as you can approach certain situations from different perspectives and then change the outcome. This game is easily in my top 5 games of the year.

Soo, uhh, is this game worth getting? Its getting alot more mixed reactions than I expected, since its made out to be the top rpg on 360. Especially the framerate thing. The textures thing, I could handle, but framerates arggh. I'm definetely going to pick up an rpg for the 360 (my bro tends to pick up everything else), but I might just wait for Lost Odyssey instead since it does look awesome.

I've only played about five hours of it. It's worth it for the dialog scenes alone. They're cinematically presented like a movie and all the characters move around and interact while talking... With various camera angles so it's thrown at you like a movie dialog.

Honestly I think that alone sells the game for me. There's few flaws outside of the said technical issues ( Which you can get past, trust me ) that I've noticed so far. I'd so go ahead and pick it up.