Mass Effect 1

>Mass Effect 1
>All weaponry has the capacity to fire virtually limitless times without having to reload or acquire more ammunition as long as the user controls their rate of fire to reduce overheating risks

>Every Mass Effect game after
>Guns still have virtually limitless ammo but ability to shoot is held back by thermal clips which need to be replaced every dozen shots

Who the fuck thought that would be a good idea?

Even outside of the numerous problems it causes the player, most engagements take place at a range where most soldiers would be firing in controlled bursts to maintain accuracy so overheating from spraying would literally not be an issue. Why the fuck would someone decide that their army should suddenly start reloading again?

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Bioware hated the idea of taking something that was broken from the previous game and fixing it up in the sequel. See the Mako and weapon upgrades.
They couldn't be assed to fix heat sink shit everyone slapped in their guns to fire indefinitely so they revamped the gun mechanics and made shitty lore retcons to cover it up.

It's a video game, it doesn't have to make sense

>a game does laser guns right, as in that they operate just from "battery" and the only reasonable worry about using one is overheating
>sequels decide to go for typical FPS reloading instead
this pisses me off

I like how Halo kept a more believable laser weapon mechanic while having it balanced by making the charge low (with the justification that humans don't know how to shoot or something)

Are you implying the Mass Effect 1 guns were laser weapons?

Thermal clips are a blight, even by normal game design standards. I think it’s pretty universally agreed that the idea behind ammo mechanics is to force players to aim more carefully and be economic with their shooting, by tying shooting to an expendable resource. This rewards pre-planning and smart play; if a player stocks up on ammunition and aims well, they won’t run out in a time of need.
…but thermal clips are not expendable, and can’t be planned around. The damnable things are scripted not to appear unless the player is already low on ammo, and magically poof into the surrounding environment. Thanks to the small capacity for spares, they’re needed constantly.
So… the only time you can find more bullets is after you’ve run out of them, and must flail around awkwardly in the midst of battle looking for environmental cues. You cannot go exploring to stock up ahead of time. But rationing your shots is pointless, because once you’re spent the clips will reappear infinitely. We wouldn’t want you to actually run out of bullets, after all – just to experience the same annoyance over and over with no way to mitigate it.
This is a system designed specifically to capture the biggest downside of ammo-based shooting mechanics (having to dumpster-dive for bullets halfway through a boss battle), while eliminating all of the upsides with precision that borders on the immaculate.

youtu.be/GfsUgQjrgO0?t=873

>even fucking Conrad Verner thinks thermal clips are a mistake

Lasers, plasma, little balls of silicon, whatever.

>ME1 plays like shit and guns are no fun to use
>ME2 and 3 make guns fun to use
>This is somehow bad

>Why the fuck would someone decide that their army should suddenly start reloading again?
It is explained in the game that the Geth were using thermal clips because by their own calculations the one that fired the most rounds was always coming up as the winner in battles so they decided to cut down on waiting the guns to cool down and use disposable heat shells much like we use brass cases in todays guns because we need the heat out of the gun.
The rest of the galaxy followed.

Thermal clips can suck my dick.
keep the "reload" aspect by all means, but having to scrounge for ammo as a delta-squad-in-space operative takes me out of the game

It's pretty retarded. It basically means that the player will always have not quite enough ammo for any encounter, and that's if they aim properly.

I've been playing on insanity on ME2 recently and the Vorcha are a fucking blight. They have relatively decent health and their regeneration kicks in after about a two second delay.

Since you can't get close due to the fact you'll get shredded if you do, you can potentially waste an entire thermal clip on one, and if they so happen to duck into cover or your shots go too far wide, they'll regenerate to full health and you've basically blown your ammo.

The way you guys orgasm all over the way weapons worked in ME1 you'd think you guys would like Andromeda more since they brought them back for the Singleplayer and all remnant guns use the same method.

then you get the old lancer in me3 and it rapes all.

>scrounge
There is more than enough all around you at all times.

Even if Andromeda had a perfectly functioning weapons system, that wouldn't save that fucking wreck.

>I like how Halo kept a more believable laser weapon
Which is funny because it would work like how you hate it if covenant guns worked properly when playing as the Arbiter/Elites.

you run out after a fight, and oh look this old collector ship has some thermal clips just laying there. or you gotta go find some in the middle of a fight, as illustrated

"gamers"

my biggest gripe is that Shepard is killed like two months after the Citadel is saved then when he comes back from the dead the first goddamned thing he asks for is a thermal clip
just should've ignored it desu
Also you got Geth weapons in ME1 but whatever

I really enjoyed the weapon system in ME1. Mowing down ennemies with the machine gun felt good

The goddamn codex isn't even that hidden, goddamn.

Every gun has a big fat slab of metal inside it that is shredded a teeny tiny bit every time it's fired and that teeny tiny bit of metal is "Mass Effect" accelerated to ludicrous speeds to cause damage.

Nobody reads the codex, not even the devs.

I hated it too because I was a straight sniper in me1, it was impossible to do it in 2 and 3 because you had practically no ammo for it.

Heat sinks would have been more tolerable if they were just one big pool you used for every gun instead of being forced to only have 6 for one kind and 80 for another despite them all being the same shit.,

>the devs raping me1 everything
the beginning of me2 was the beginning of the end holy shit.
so many retcons were brute forced

Wrong. It was an advancement in shield techology that forced everyone to use more powerful guns which generated more heat. They just used recovered Geth tech to kickstart the R&D.

This.
PPR and lancer is the shit in ME 3.

The codex entries are right there you can read them.

...

Yeah, I did, and so can you instead of twisting the facts and spewing half right bullshit.

Fucking thermal clips retcons are the worse. I'm on a ship that crashed 30 years ago why the fuck am I finding tech that was created last week.

I did in all 3 games from start to finish and its a damn shame that people like to talk out of the ass and watching devs struggling to decide what the fuck to do in a trilogy when nobody does what the game is asking from them.

stupid hand wavy shit desu

Sad.

>Not listening to that soothing narrator's voice straight from PBS Frontline as he recites the codex
Fucking plebs

i listen to most of it and read the part that interest me

Sure bud whatever floats your boat.

Not to mention how you fucking know about them in the first place

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't whole fleets of Geth get their shit handed to them by three guys and a space buggy?

Considering how few classes in ME1 actually have access to assault rifles, most fights actually come down to you being severely outgunned but popping off targets with a pistol.

Also, if you went by their calculations, surely if there was an extended gunfight, the side with theoretically limitless ammunition would be capable of firing more shots than the side that are reliant on limited resources?

Thermal clips seem like a downgrade from just using standard magazines desu. I imagine that swapping out an integral part of a weapon every few shots is probably more effort then a standard reload. Also, I don't imagine it's very easy to create extendable magazines to increase capacity for a thermal clip.

In addition to that, you can't reuse a thermal clip after combat in the same way you can with an empty magazine, so that drives up costs.

Come to think of it, I imagine that a part of a weapon that moderates heat probably costs more than however many bullets plus a magazine and is probably a little harder to manufacture.

The UNSC of Halo had their shit together way more than the retards running the scene in Mass Effect.

The poster you're quoting is right. Dunno where you're getting this. The Geth rounds-down-range is the right explanation.

>Like Fellowship of the Ring, Mass Effect 1 set a tone and pushed the story in a very particular direction. It created a quest for knowledge, and put our heroes into a position where they were the best people to go on that quest. Not in a “chosen one as decreed by the gods / fate” sort of way, but in a practical way that the events of the first game gave them tools that nobody else had. They were explorers, searching for answers. The plot called for them to go out into that great big universe of mystery and danger, and find out how to break the cycle of destruction forever. They weren’t going to win because of their guns and biotics. They just needed the guns and biotics to get to the answers that would make victory possible.

The writers not only failed to make use of these plot elements, they took every single aspect of this setup and smashed it to pieces. The council is retconned to not believing in the Reapers and not caring about the massive attack that nearly wiped out their government. Shepard loses his status as both a Spectre and a member of the Alliance. Liara goes away and forgets all about Prothean archaeology. Shepard’s ability to understand Prothean is no longer an asset to their mission. Shepard’s relationship with the council reverts to the pre-Ilos status quo. Shepard is no longer the protagonist because his team is uniquely qualified to learn about Reapers, but instead he’s the protagonist because of his fame and combat prowess. As Miranda says, “He’s a hero. A bloody icon”. Most importantly, Shepard is no longer an explorer on a quest to uncover a mystery, but a badass trying to rouse an apathetic galaxy to action
what could have been

youtube.com/watch?v=cEnIQWXCgzQ

this entire topic

all thermal clip are compatible though so you can have 1 clip for all your weapons which is way more practical

>In addition to that, you can't reuse a thermal clip
You dont need to.
Geth do not work that way,using mass field manufacturing methods like the Omni tool but modified to suit their needs they are able to be better than commercial tech.
Geth have tech on their own they can produce them on the spot since they are machines.

And you know what's even better? Unlimited ammo.

sounds like every old school id shooter tbqhf

Don't forget, there's Thermal clips and shit in jacob's loyalty mission too despite them being stranded for 10 years

yeah sure
but it's till better than standard ammo

my gun-fu

They should have all just gone full Dune and swapped to slow projectile weapons that shields don't detect and swords.

Not that guy but I agree that was some serious oversight.

Surely one of the other races must have sat back and thought that when planning this change.

"Oh yeah, we're not able to do what Geth do."

But they did go with swords, user.

Shields in ME2 and after detect and block anything regardless of how slow it's moving. Yet another thing that was better in the first game where shields only served to block projectiles, made more sense in the lore also with the example of if you tried sitting down while the shield was active you would just slip out of the chair.

I might be wrong but I think it also happens in the Leviathan DLC where you go to ship that's even older. They even mention some of the ships on the crash site are thousands of years old.

Well they did but the commercial market pressed on because major weapons manufactures started using them and everything fell out of favor because the reason is solid as we see in todays guns thars why we dont have ceaseless ammo,the heat is great problem.

Holy shit you're right. I had never thought of that.

You may be correct but I dont know the dates when that ship crash landed,we should find the logs and check.

They basically hand-wave all this bullshit by saying the Protheans/those who came before followed the same paths as set by the Reapers so all used Thermal Clips or something equally retarded.

Couldn't you melee through shields though?

The weapons that used the thermal clips were more powerful. You had to switch it out because using all that raw power would ruin the heat sink in much the same way that real life rail guns have to have their whole barrels changed after a number of shots, iirc.

Focus groups.

In ME1 melee and certain projectiles like rachni spit I think would go through shields but in ME2 they blocked everything and I remember being severely disappointed in that change.

The ship you land in has a Triton ADS and Cortez says its old Alliance tech that was converted for deep sea diving. If the ship was carrying something that old, chances are it didn't have thermal clips.
There is also a mining facility that has been closed down for 10 years in the DLC, also has clips.

The Codex was literally the best thing about ME1.
It was so well thought out it almost made the game feel like hard sci-fi.

>Mass Effect 1
>Walking through Ilos as the main theme plays with a dull thrumming in the background
>Ancient pods full of dead Protheans all along the walls
>Liara remarking that most Prothean technology and architecture is proud but that this structure had a sense of dread and desperation
>50,000 year old recordings discussing the rapid end of their civilization

>Mass Effect 2
>Go into a long dead Reaper
>Take cover behind a wall and shoot shit

Man. Why did they fuck up the exploration of ancient shit.

I don't know why, but exploring archives of dead civilizations is my favourite thing in vidya.

The Ilos scene reminded me of Oelivert in FF9. It even did the same reference to the main theme (youtube.com/watch?v=7MEZE8qL8BY) and had that creepy as fuck face archive.

Bummer another overshight.
That said you can tell that they stopped giving a fuck by ME3 because all codex entries were copy pasted and nothing new was added.
Also Leviathan was probably the best part of the game,at least we cot closure how and why all this is happening.

where do you even get this shit

FUCK OFF

GODDAMN UNDERAGE HAVE NEVER READ SOMETHING LONGER THAN A FUCKING REDDIT ANECDOTE ON THEIR IPAD AND SO THEY BELIEVE NOONE ELSE HAS THE MENTAL CAPACITY TO EITHER

FUCK YOU AND FUCK EVERYTHING THAT YOU STAND FOR

which is weird because your omniblade and melee attacks don't bypass shields

Also had the perfect narrator voice.

change of feel and direction.
>exploration and dialogue is gay as hell, the series got good in 2 & 3
literally every shooterbabby

The joke is that the codex entries were just short paragraphs and the main ones were even voiced.

Personally i find reloading feels satisfying, particularly on big guns like sniper rifles.

>Also Leviathan was probably the best part of the game,at least we got closure how and why all this is happening.
That the exact reason why I think Leviathan was a piece of shit. It did the whole investigation and the mystery behind Leviathan ok, until the point where actually meet him and all the awesome space-Lovecraft stuff we had back in Mass Effect 1 is thrown out of the window and replaced with BioWare trying to explain and justify their shitty choice for the Reaper's purpose and creation which was originally presented in their even shittier ending.

i am still mad about this
especially starting out in mass effect 2 and constantly running out of ammo that shouldn't exist in the first place
mass effect 1 is the only great mass effect game, every game after is too dumbed down to be a decent rpg and too clunky to be a good shooter

Snipers already reloaded after every shot in the first game though.

Not to mention that.
That guy was GOAT.
A shame you couldn't just put on the entire Codex while playing.

God tier test user

Stopping to collect dropped clips after every firefight was far more annoying to me than any lore issues.

Really hurt the flow of the levels.

>talking with a normie coworker that dabbles in vidya
>discussing ftl
>suggest the captains edition mod to him
>ask him about it the next day
>"I looked it up and decided against it, it looks stupid and overpowered and talking with your crewmates is tedious and boring. That was always the worst part of the mass effect series"

>BioWare trying to explain and justify their shitty choice
But they did excellent job because I managed to calm relations between Quarians and Geth so they can live together which goes in the favor in the DLC and you manage to overthrow their reasons of why the reapers were created and why they should help you.
To me it makes sense but for those who wanted war between fractions I understand how this is a problem.
Basically they wrote themselves into a corner of not having a single outcome between those two fractions.

The problem with the first game is that exploration was relegated to finding mundane shit through similar terrain in a different color. But in their infinite wisdom, bioware thinks it should be removed instead of making the mechanic better.

What pissed me off was that the clips were universal, so they filled up any weapon. However if you ran out for one weapon, you could switch to a different weapon and have more, but you couldn't use that ammo for the first weapon.

And then there's the facts that
a) reloads took less than a second
b) you didn't lose the capacity left in the ejeted clip
so the requirement to reload your gun didn't add anything to the gameplay.

The only game changer is the ridiculously low ammo pool.

Thats a good point.
That said do these studio even have Q&A or its all bullshit.
They could post the game here and few guys will give them better feedback that the ones on a payroll.

all the good parts of me3 is the stuff set up in me1
literally

Though Mass Effect 1 has massive flaws which have become more glaring over time.

I finished it last night for the first time since it released and fucking hell, some of the features are awful.

The exploration sidequest planets are mostly horrible because you just drive across a dull, lifeless expanse to find whatever structure you need to go to kill some nameless NPCs.

The lack of a way to increase your character's movement speed during one of the many Citadel backtracks you do is painful.

The inventory system is pretty poorly handled since you just end up with a million different ammo types.

The lack of control you have over teammates is pretty horrible.

Hub areas (including Normandy) are an absolute chore to walk around because of the slow movement speed and dispersal of characters you can talk to.

It's still leaps and bounds better than any other Mass Effect game, but it has some really dodgy features in it.

To me, the sensible option would have been to have the cool-down system from before but with the option of switching thermal clips.
Have each level's thermal clip count make sense for the environment. Lots of them in places you'd find people using guns, and zero in places like the Collector ships.

>The lack of control you have over teammates is pretty horrible.

ME2 fixed all your complaints except this one.

I loved how you can dress up your buddies in the first one and it really hurt to see that feature go in the second game.

this a thousand times.
have it be a bonus, but limited. So you can absolutely shower the enemies in fire, but needs rationing.

I agree completely.
The biggest gripe I have with ME3 is sometimes they are unclear with the dialog choices in crucial moment,like I know what I want to happen next but because of half assed voice line I get shafted in crucial moment.

>play as Vanguard
>always run out of ammo for the shotgun in combat
>a not insignificant amount of enemies are placed on unreachable platfroms that you can't do anything against with you shothun or charge
>end up having to use the shitty inaccurate SMG all the time

>no DLC yet
>didn't realize you had to do Samara's mission to get the second shotgun
>play 60% of the game with the shitty starting shotgun

Remember to savour that last shot before popping the heat sink

biggest gripe i got is the constant jerking off of illusive man and aria t'loak whenever they're on screen. Shepard can't even retort.
At least you could argue with saren, but you need to kowtow to a low life gangster in a shitty asteroid for reasons?? who knows

Not him, but the item description for the M7 Lancer says something along the lines of it being "refurbished to fire today's higher velocity rounds" which still doesn't really change anything because it still uses oldschool cooldown, but there you go.

Making peace with Geth and Quarians was good (too bad you had to make the Geth real human beans for some reason but whatever). But when the ending comes and says that there won't ever be peace between organics and machines its still just bullshit. And when Shepard brings up Quarians/Geth the hologram kid just goes

>Oh, yeah. That. lol

You'd think it would happen at least once in a cycle that's been going on for probably millions of years, and yet he just dismisses it and even continues on with the Reapers if Shepard decides to just fuck off. The original proposed explanation for the Reapers involving dark energy could have much better.

youtube.com/watch?v=j5nSLsUlGzc