The Mass Effect franchise has a whole slew of Scrappy Mechanics, many infamous enough to have been addressed in the Mass Effect Legendary Edition re-release.
open/close all folders
General
- Door/system hacking, in all its formats, from the first two games. The first iteration had you playing Simon Says endlessly, or spending your hard-earned Omni-gel to break the lock. The sequel forced you to play a mini-game where you scroll through code segments to find the exact copy of a specific one. Liara lampshades the scrappy mechanic in the second game's "Lair of the Shadow Broker" DLC when she explains that the security upgrade "made a lot of people very unhappy". When the third game completely removed it, requiring characters to only pause for a few seconds in front of a lock while fiddling with their multi-tools, nobody complained much.
- In the PC version of the first game, they changed the minigame from Simon Says to a far more interesting one that looked like lockpicking proper. You still had to do it every single time you wanted to open a chest, though.
- Whose bright idea was it to make the "skip dialogue" button the same as the "select dialogue" button?
Mass Effect
- The Mako. Dear god, the Mako. Overly sensitive controls and a meaningless cross-hair (unless zoomed in) made it a nightmare to drive even in straightaways. It handled like it had the density of styrofoam, prompting many to speculate Shepard never found out how to adjust the mass effect fields, so it perpetually weighed about eight pounds. The PC version had revamped (and programmable) controls, but it was still considered the worst part of the gameplay. Plus, it steals your XP, and you can't upgrade it. By around level 30, your best course of action was usually to just step out of it and take out your foes with your Sniper Pistol. Heaven help you if you have a low engineering skill and try to repair the Mako. If you do, it stops for 30 seconds (meaning you can't fire your weapons or move it) and repairs itself for never quite as much as you'd like, stealing 15 Omni-gel just to spite you. And the shield takes forever to recharge and can't be repaired by Omni-gel. And the cannon's elevation was pathetic. Are you trying to fire at an enemy at the bottom of a 20-degree slope? Don't bother. In the Mass Effect 2 "Lair of the Shadow Broker" DLC, this is heavily lampshaded — Liara refers to a massively hectic taxi ride as "Still better than the Mako", and in the Normandy Crash Site DLC from the base game, you find it frozen in the ice at a 20-degree angle, trapped on the landscape one last time.
- The Legendary Edition would take steps to address or remove a number of these deficiencies, including the ability to repair the vehicle while moving, adding a boost button, removing the XP penalty, greater accuracy for the primary cannon and making the vehicle heavier (which makes some traversal more difficult due to the weight), which were generally praised by players.
- The Inventory Management Puzzle. You'll rarely pick up items better than what you already have, since what you find in a chest is randomly chosen, and their actual Level only increases when Shepard's does. You can only carry 150 loose items (each of your characters can carry twenty). They're wasted afterwards, even if you see one you like because there's no way to upgrade them to keep them viable. You're going to be making lots of Omni-gel that you can't keep because you can only carry 999 of it, and every one of the hundreds of items converts to 4. And if you picked up an item you wanted while your inventory was full? Too bad. You have to convert it into Omni-gel, you can't go into your actual inventory and convert a weaker item into Omni-gel instead.
- For Legendary Edition, the inventory cap was doubled to 300 items, meaning you can now go an entire Mission World without hitting the cap and being forced to retreat to / hope for a vendor. As well, you can now mark items as Junk, letting you either Sell them or convert them to Omni-gel in one fell swoop. That said, items still don't stack, meaning you'll be scrolling through seemingly endless amounts of Combat Optics and the like.
- Elevators also had this reaction, since they hid loading screens and would often have the characters standing around in uncomfortable silence (though this could also lead to humorous conversations between squadmates). The fans then complained when it was switched to a loading screen for the sequel. The cargo elevator on the Normandy takes a full minute to go down one goddamn floor. This is later lampshaded in the "Citadel" DLC from the third game — just before you face the final boss, you have to get into the Normandy's elevator and ride it down in real-time, with several of your companions (Liara chief among them) reminiscing over their memories of fond conversations in the elevator.
- Owing to faster computer processors in the decade-plus since the original game's release, elevator rides in the Legendary Edition re-release have been greatly sped up to the point of outpacing elevator conversations/radio chatter; A two-minute ride from C-Sec to the Presidium can now be cut down to less than 10 seconds!. While the player can still listen to these conversations in full, a button prompt has also been added to skip them once the next area has been loaded.
- The romance mechanics for Ashley/Kaiden in regards to the next game's Old Save Bonus, which is very sensitive about them. Simply choosing mostly Paragon responses in their interactions can cause the sequel to treat you as having romanced them even if you didn't (which can result in oddities such as them referencing an Optional Sexual Encounter that never happened). After a lot of testing, fans concluded that the only way to guarantee no romance with them in ME2 (if you don't romance Liara) is to always choose Jerkass responses when interacting with them, not interact with them at all, or let them die on Virmire.
Mass Effect 2
- In Mass Effect 2, planet scanning — schedule yourself for carpal tunnel surgery. You move a targeting reticle around to find mineral signatures, then blast a probe in to get the minerals. It's awful on the PC, and it's pretty mind-numbing on any other platform. This one was so noticeable that Bioware released a hotfix in Patch 1.02 on the Xbox 360 version that increased the size of the scanner and the scanning speed. The following title would alleviate it by eliminating resource collecting and limiting scanning to a "Search and Rescue" mechanic that conferred more noticeable benefits (gameplay boosts or War Assets), while the player received a War Asset boost based on how many resources they'd collected in the previous game. The Legendary Edition of 2 also increased the default scanning speed to make the mining experience more manageable for players.Zero Punctuation: Off-roading around random planets is now replaced by scanning the surface from orbit, launching probes to extract resources, which is as interesting as it sounds and it sounds like this: BWUUUUAAAAAHHHHH.
- The Mako was replaced by the (DLC-only) Hammerhead Hover Tank, which still gets insulted by some players for being a Replacement Scrappy. The game refuses to let you save when driving the tank (and you're only allowed to exit the vehicle when you arrive at your destination), and its levels seem like more of an arcade-based shoot-em-up. Nothing like having to restart a level because of a mistimed jump. Or because you dared to engage more than one or two enemies, as the Hammerhead is somehow even more fragile than the Mako ever was, and its auto-homing missiles are virtually guaranteed to lock onto the least-threatening enemy in view. The "Overlord" DLC partially addresses this, by having the Hammerhead "recover" to its last safe position, should you accidentally drive it off a cliff, into magma or whatever.
- Tellingly, if you import a save from 2 into the next game with either the "Overlord" or "Hammerhead" DLC installed, you will encounter James Vega and Steve Cortez arguing in the Normandy's shuttle bay at one point over which vehicle is better, with both criticizing the other's respective choice by pointing out the aforementioned flaws. This argument is briefly referenced in the Citadel DLC.
- For some, the new way Charm / Intimidate dialogue options were unlocked. In Mass Effect 1, this was done by increasing Shepard's Charm and/or Intimidate skills with Skill Points. In Mass Effect 2, the Charm / Intimidate dialogue options were unlocked purely on your Paragon / Renegade score, making it much harder to play a character with mixed morality. This was made even worse by how the game unlocked them in the back-end: not by how many Paragon/Renegade Points you have, but the "ratio" of how many you COULD HAVE if you focused just on that Morality.Explanation Making matters worse, the in-game Paragon / Renegade bars displayed your Points, not your "ratio", making them incredibly misleading.
- The Legendary Edition would reduce the requirements for some of the most notable choke points that resulted from this, in particular defusing Jack and Miranda's argument, since Miranda could be rendered Disloyal and thus put at risk to die either in the ending of Mass Effect 2 or the end of her storyline in Mass Effect 3.
- Mass Effect 3 would change this mechanic by introducing the Reputation system. Now both Paragon and Renegade Points were counted towards an overall Reputation score, which is what the Persuasion checks look at. Further, you could now earn Reputation Points that "stretched" your score, allowing for a neutral reward for talking to characters and generally going out of your way to complete content. This addressed the other curious problem in Mass Effect 2 where, in an attempt to be neutral, you'd get Paragon and Renegade Points for completing a Mission no matter what.
- "Investment Opportunities" from the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC. Building off an idea that was introduced in the first game (Shepard being able to buy major investments after completing Pinnacle Station, with the potential to unlock high-end "Spectre Master Gear" sets and other valuable loot), the investment setup for 2 is only unlocked after completing the DLC and has a much, much lower marginal value. You are given a set of up to four Investment Opportunities to complete, which will each succeed or fail the same way every time, and there are limited opportunities. Notably, only two of the four investment chains net a positive outcome when completed fully, with the other two siphoning credits away if you go to the trouble of investing in them. Even worse, the player will have to wait a day (or finish a mission first) before the opportunities they bought update, and given how low the payouts are in most cases, the player will only be funding their "gas money" on the trips to and from the base. Notably, said opportunities never returned in the following game.
- Despite being a popular character, Legion's presence is tied into a Race Against Time to save the kidnapped Normandy crew members. If you dawdle or try to perform more than one mission after the Collector attack on the Normandy, you will permanently lose half the staff of the SR2. This is despite Legion having unique dialogue tied in throughout the entire game, including entertaining conversations during Tali's recruitment/loyalty missions and more that very few players are aware of.note This also becomes a case of Complacent Gaming Syndrome, as most guides recommend that players finish everything else in the game before recruiting Legion, as by that point, the only thing left to do is its associated loyalty mission before the crew is kidnapped.
Mass Effect 3
- Due to almost every action being mapped to the spacebar/A-Button/X-Button, going into cover, storming, using an item, and reviving a squadmate are all mapped to one key. It is quite easy to go into cover when one meant to storm out of the way or to start reviving a squadmate when one was attempting to leap over a barricade.
- Basic human husks can now grab you, forcing you to go through a quick-time event to shake them off. This leaves you out in the open, vulnerable to enemy fire. Anyone who's played multiplayer against Reapers knows what this means. Oh and if that wasn't enough, Phantoms do this as well, except for them it's an Instakill.
- While the "Search and Rescue" mode (a simplified version of planet-scanning from the previous game) was looked at more favourably, the act of travelling around the galaxy and scanning for said planets got a lot of flak. Simply flying into a random area on the galaxy map and pressing the scanner button a couple of times causes a group of Reaper capital ships to appear from various corners of the map and start chasing you. There is no penalty for failure — if they do catch you, the game goes to a "Game Over" screen before dumping you back in the same map, now with the knowledge of where the planets you scanned (and couldn't land on) are. And some systems have more things to find than can be done in a single pass, requiring you to leave, complete a Mission, and then fly back to get the rest.
- Notably, the Expanded Galaxy Mod does a lot more with the mechanic, making Reaper ships much faster (forcing the player to seek out upgrades for the Normandy to not die as much), using them in Race Against the Clock scenarios or simply doing away with it altogether if a specific setting is chosen in the setup menu.
- The original unlock conditions for the Golden Endings:
- Up until the release of the Extended Cut DLC, the conditions to unlock the game's "best" ending (Shepard breathing in the rubble of the Citadel if you pick the Destroy ending) weren't fully known to players, with datamining eventually revealing that getting said ending was impossible in the course of normal gameplay, even with a character who has been routed through all of the games and picked the most optimal decisions across the trilogy (a total of 3,800 Effective Military Strength was needed, but only 3,750 EMS could be acquired purely offline). You also had to pick a specific option at the end of the game to get it.
- What complicated this was the Galactic Readiness mechanic, which cut into your TMS (Total Military Strength) to produce the final EMS (Effective Military Strength). This was influenced by the Galactic Readiness value, which could be raised by playing either the multiplayer mode, the Datapad app (later replaced with the N7 HQ web page) or the Infiltrator iOS game. The idea was that you were affecting the front lines of the war, and the Galactic Readiness cut into your TMS: if your Readiness was at its lowest of 50%, then a TMS of 6,000 would be converted to an EMS of 3,000. This made it impossible to get the Golden Endings without playing extraneous online content that, eventually, would all be decommissioned.note
- To address this, in the Extended Cut Bioware adjusted the EMS values required for the Golden Endings from 3,800 to 3,100 to account for someone not playing the online content. This proved to be a good move since eventually the Datapad App, N7 HQ page, Infiltrator games and even the core Bioware Account systems were taken offline, which would have made getting the best endings impossible!
- The Legendary Edition rebalanced them again to strike a middle-ground: since it's a collection that guarantees the player has access to all three games, more emphasis is placed on playing through the entire trilogy to get the best outcomes. Starting from 3 will mean you'll have to play all of that game's content if you don't want to incur the worst outcomes, while the best ones require playing through the complete trilogy. In addition, since the multiplayer mode was removed, Galactic Readiness was removed entirely so that you're always at 100%, which the new War Asset values also account for.
Mass Effect: Andromeda
- Damage Resistance, rather than reducing damage by a stated percentage like prior games and all other stats in Andromeda, works by using the following formula; Final Damage = Base Damage/(1+(Damage Resistance/100)), where higher Damage Resistance leads to higher defence. This formula is never revealed to the player in-game, the closest being a loading screen tip that states that 100 Damage Resistance gives a 50% damage reduction. This system also gives unstated diminishing returns, wherein 200 Damage Resistance doesn't give a 100% reduction, but merely 66.7%. This led to much confusion and uncertainty on how the system works, with "Is Damage Resistance worth investing in?" being one of, if not the most frequently asked questions online. Even with knowledge of the formula, it's still needlessly complicated to figure out the actual damage reduction value, making Damage Resistance less useful because of its diminishing returns for higher values.
- The crafting and research systems, so much so that even the official strategy guide isn't entirely clear about how it worked and what certain unlock conditions and effects were. Not only were crafting choices buried away within submenus (within submenus of their own), but it wasn't clear what the end product would actually do. Will that ammo change give you a badass gun capable of doing a ton more damage, or will it render your shiny new Widow VIII into a gun that might as well be shooting spitballs?
- Mining for resources on planets is imprecise and generally boring, but one of the less time-consuming ways to gather resources for crafting weapons and items. Planet scanning was found to be similarly boring.
- Some side quests don't update your nav points, which normally direct you to the next place to go to advance the quest. You are left to aimlessly drive around and hope for another random encounter that may spawn what you need to advance that quest. While some of these are enemy squads you can run into, making at least the combat somewhat enjoyable, other fetch quests don't even give you that. Those are nothing but needle-in-a-haystack searches.
- For many fans, the emotion-based choice system, which is similar to Horizon Zero Dawn's. In past games, you could select dialogue based on morality and unlock extreme good/bad choices if you were consistent. In Andromeda, choices were now determined by psychological outlooks: Emotional, Logical, Casual and Professional. While this offered up a great amount of roleplaying potential for how you wanted to play Ryder (and some context-only options made it clearer when, say, you were entering into a relationship), it severely limited the options for people who wanted to be outright Paragons or Renegades like in the old games, as these choices were now much less clear and often nowhere near as extreme. As well, this system often obfuscated less important conversations, making their options seem much more important than they were.
