The atmosphere of the first Mass Effect was incredible. After more than a decade later, I still have fond memories of that game.

The second one though, didn't really click with me, and I stopped playing the series there.

Maybe with EA games being on Steam now, I could give the third one a try.

I have a different take here: ME1 I loved, it did some incredible world-building and the reveal of the true bad guy will stick with me. However, ME2 is my favourite. It’s an appreciably smaller story, but it’s all about the characters, and they’re engaging people. The first visit to the nightclub is cracking.

ME3? Failure from start to finish. The opening scene just basically says “the last two games were completely irrelevant”. The ending is not only unsatisfying, it relies on stuff that was barely established even in the first game and not even mentioned in the others. It’s a textbook case of failing to stick the landing.

(And the less said about “choose your favourite primary colour” as an ending the better. Should have just had one ending and made it a good one.)

ME1 was groundbreaking for the time but really has not stood the test of time all that well. The gameplay mechanics are significantly rougher than ME2, ME2 feels like a shooter with strong RPG elements and ME1 feels like KOTOR where you get to aim the guns, it is very much an old-school bioware RPG title. The mako planet exploration is excruciatingly bad. Droid scavenger hunt on the citadel is excruciatingly bad. Endless elevator rides are excruciatingly bad.

There are some sequences that felt tedious but the story is definitely the best part overall.

ME2 is definitely the apex of the series by modern standards.

Also you forgot to mention ME:A. Maybe your face was tired? ;)

> ME2 feels like a shooter with strong RPG elements and ME1 feels like KOTOR where you get to aim the guns, it is very much an old-school bioware RPG title.

Funny, that difference is exactly what I most disliked about ME2.

I haven’t bothered playing it. Hardly even seems canonical and the reviews described it as worse than DA:I, which... did not impress me.

Frostbite engine is such an unwieldy monster that it has killed the last 3 games that tried to use it, all of them top-tier AAA franchises no less (BFV, Anthem, ME:A).

It is optimized for two things, Battlefield and FIFA, and it is even cumbersome for that (see: BFV's lifecycle and the numerous long-standing bugs that plagued it). It was never designed for an RPG and things like inventory systems and facial animation did not exist and had to be invented (badly). But EA is all-in on the "everything has to run frostbite company-wide".

This characterization is inaccurate and misleading. A game engine is a basic framework with which to build a game - responsible for things like platform abstraction, memory management, and the basic rendering pipeline - but much of what is identifiably part of any specific game lives on top of that. Unreal Engine and Unity don’t ship with “inventory systems” and neither are “designed for an RPG”.

Having worked on multiple Frostbite and multiple Unreal games, both engines are capable of building a wide variety of games. The discrepancies in my experience aren’t technical but organizational. It is hard to compete with the scale of Epic’s developer support organization and the wider industry inertia around their technology.

Make sure to get all of the DLCs as it will make the third episode immensely more enjoyable

> I think that Mass Effect had pretty good writing in the first game but the later games are pretty bad.

I really enjoyed the first Mass Effect and its three-way balance between storytelling, exploration and combat.

I was really looking forward to playing Mass Effect 2, but its storytelling didn't seem as good as the first game and exploration was almost non-existent. ME2 is more focused on combat, which seems to be what most people want (ME2 gets fantastic reviews), but to me that's the least interesting part of a game.

I never played Mass Effect 3, but I hear it is even more combat-focused.

Mass Effect 1 spent a huge portion of its attention on world building. And I agree, it's an outstanding achievement. Mass Effect's world is a very compelling place.

But by the time you get to Mass Effect 2, that world is already built. So ME2 instead spends its time telling a more contained story in that world. It's a valid choice, even if not your cup of tea.

ME2's story works because it's a relatively well executed Seven Samurai-style plot. We've seen this story many times before. It's a classic. Sci-fi stuff threatens the galaxy, assemble the crew, watch them love/hate each other through tough challenges, some don't make it through the epic conclusion, etc. Standard. For a lot of people, it's fun to relive those story beats in an interesting new world (Mass Effect) in a novel format (video games).

I think of ME2 as a smart and enduring example of video game writing craft. They were juggling a lot of different requirements: player choices affecting the story (including from the first game); a huge, complicated new setting; making the story accessible to new players without needing to play the first game; developing interesting characters; supporting multiple protagonists (male/female, paragon/renegade) and varied character interactions based on those attributes; supporting high production values (all lines voiced by real actors); fast development timeline; on and on. Hanging all of that on a familiar plot structure probably brought a lot of structure to what was otherwise a pretty chaotic project. Furthermore, what ME2 does better than other games in the series is let characters drive the action, rather than dragging characters from event to event. The writers did an amazing job on ME2 in context.

> Mass Effect 1 spent a huge portion of its attention on world building. And I agree, it's an outstanding achievement. Mass Effect's world is a very compelling place.

It really is.

It's a tremendous shame that ME 3 ruins it.

I agree that there is a lot more world building in ME1, but in the last few days I've been playing it again, and I'm finding that it doesn't exactly hold up.

The game just feels like a chore. For one thing, the environments are too big. There's a lot of walking to get from one plot-point/action-sequence to the next. Second, the combat is bad. AI, controls, weapons that don't shoot where you point them until you level up several times to upgrade the skill. The conversation trees often feel like I'm just going through the paces of uncovering Codex entries for XP, and the long, pregnant pauses between dialog portions as the game loads up the animations for your responses is super annoying. It's an exercise in frustration and it really harms the storytelling aspect. I just never feel like I'm in any kind of flow of hearing the story. It feels dragged out (and I even have bug-fixing and fast-elevator mods installed).

I'm a fairly middling FPS player, and by that I mean I usually rank in the middle of online matches against humans, and I can usually finish single-player campaigns on "hard", if I have the patience for it on those days. But ME1 has been so consistently frustrating me that I've about decided to quit.

I think ME2's great reviews were mostly driven by the excellent cast of memorable characters you got to assemble throughout the game. Such an upgrade over the BioWare trademark mild soup of forgettables in ME1, and also the biggest reason ME3 was maligned after relegating most of those beloved characters to a 5-minute scene.

Also, the vastly upgraded combat system.

Everyone says ME2’s combat is much better than ME1’s, but as someone who rarely plays shooters, I didn’t really notice much difference.

What changes in ME2 made the combat vastly better than ME1?

I think the first game relied on weapon overheating to limit how fast you could fire.

The second game used ammo clips and that made combat far easier.

That’s right. I’ve seen arguments over which scheme is better, but the second game’s scheme is definitely more orthodox.

I also keep hearing ME1’s combat described as “clunky” and ME2’s as “smoother”. Without much experience with this type of game, I think I just don’t have the skills to feel the difference.

You're probably playing on a PC with mouse and keyboard. The Xbox 360 Mass Effect controls were not great, but that was the original release.

> Disco Elyseum

Thanks for reminding me of it! I loved it. I didn't finish it though and might come back to it.