[…] over the old one. For example, do you remember how I said the inventory management in Mass Effect was a train wreck? Well, they fixed that problem quite definitively. Inventory is no longer annoying because it is […]

@ faemir: The story is nothing new, it’s all pretty standard sci-fi, and it doesn’t even close at the end of the game. Great.

My take is that Mass Effect was designed with console in mind, and was mostly just a port on PC. Just look at the inventory screen : lots of tabs, tons of scrolling needed to get where you want, huge fonts, it’s obvious it’s been made to be read on a TV from a couch and not 15cm away on a 22” screen. The same can be said about the dialog wheel. How hard was it to actually think the UI for the PC ? Not very, but they didn’t bother.

Other than that, I do recall some armor or weapon being particularly stronger than the rest even though its “tier” (roman number) is lower. Manufacturer plays a big part in an item’s stats, and a rare manufacturer’s armor tier 1 is usually still significantly better than a common’s tier 6 or 7. Then again, I think I only saw them during my second playthrough on hard difficulty (advice : don’t replay the game, leave it thinking your choices made at least a little impact).

Is the ranting over? ‘Cause you haven’t mentioned the generic looking weapons, broken battles, uneven difficulty (especially on hard and above), boring sidequests and worst of all, the MAKO (vehicle) controls.

Haha, I had no idea there was a “+INVENTORY” message, and I’ve played through the game twice XD

And yeah, I agree with you, the different UI elements average at somewhere between “crap” and “oh my god, someone got paid for this?!”. I did quite like the story though.

I can’t say I agree with much of anything that you say, but what I will say is that it only overtook KotOR1 in my list of favourite games after I completed it and looked back on it – the story gets pretty damn kickass.

Yahtzee felt similarly.