So, did anyone else pick up Mass Effect?

Holy shit, they did downgrade it since then.

 

I've been repeatedly told to buy this one... Should I give it to myself as a Christmas present?

 

Same here. Too much dialog and not enough action :-(

 

Well, it's nine years later and I finally got around to trying this. I'm about 1.5h in, playing on PC, and have a few questions:

- Is it normal that the overall audio volume is SO FUCKING LOW that even after cranking up the volume on my monitor up to twice its normal setting (that sure is going to be fun when I forget to turn it back down at some point), I still have serious problems following the conversations for about a third of the time? Sure, I could enable subtitles to "fix" this, but this was supposed to be an AAA title, and a dialog heavy one at that...

- The default keybinds feel awkward. It's pretty obvious that consoles were the lead platform. Any tips on how to improve this? Or, since controls are slow as molasses, there's auto-aim, everything basically screams "console" anyways, should I just give up and go with a gamepad (edit: nope, not supported.) instead?

- I already stumbled across a "faster elevators" mod that definitely makes a lot of sense in an age of games running off SSDs. What other must-haves are there?

 

The game was NOT made to be a shooter. It was made more to be an RPG with a playstyle like KOTOR.
If you try to play it as a shooter, it will suck.

 

Should've just left out the shooter parts then, maybe? Actually I felt like the shooting parts were OK, since I wasn't missing much dialog (-> volume issue), and I ignored my squad most of the time (-> controls issue). Movement is just painfully slow though. Even just running around on Citadel feels like a chore. Now knowing where to go doesn't help either.

I've given up on the first one for the time being; will try ME2 (hoping it has less tech issues) for an hour or two to find out if the gameplay of this series is sth I like in the first place, and if it is I might go back to the first game, but then only on a console and/or with some kind of speedhack.