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Comment by xnorswap | Hacker News Reader

In terms of pure gameplay and mechanics, the first Mass Effect is incredibly rough, it's really hard to go back to.

That it was such a success and led to an incredibly successful franchise despite that, shows the power of its writing and strong characters and world-building.

A similar thing goes for another legendary series: Assassin's Creed. The first game is borderline unplayable, but it was still enough of a success to spawn AC2 which was a masterpiece of storytelling, although the fundamental mechanics weren't really smooth yet even at that point, and improvements were made all the way through brotherhood to AC3 and then black flag.

Over time, the story-telling and characters weakened, although there were some gems along the way such as odyssey.

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It's because of the Star Control II influence. The Gameplay is important, but it's missing so much QoL. That being said, sometimes the gameplay harmonizes with the storyline, especially escaping the Shofixti to talk to them, the Druuge, or playing around with the Utwig's Planet destroyer (which ends your game instantly if you press "use" on it).

>In terms of pure gameplay and mechanics, the first Mass Effect is incredibly rough, it's really hard to go back to.

Anyone who says this isn't the case needs to go back and play it. It's TOUGH gameplay wise.

Can you be more specific? I don’t generally play shooters, but tried Mass Effect a few years ago and didn’t find ME1 particularly rough?

Specifically, I didn’t find the gameplay of ME2 to be much better (and in some places, e.g. the Probing Uranus minigame, it was worse).

In no particular order: the early-game shooting mechanics that make you wonder how Shepard ever got out of basic training, the ludicrously overpowered biotics that, once leveled up, can basically be rotated to permastun enemies, the Mako driving controls and physics, RNG equipment upgrades that make it difficult to get meaningful late-game armor upgrades without save scumming, the fact that every indoor environment outside the main hubs uses one of three maps with different props all come immediately to mind.

Note that the Legendary Edition addressed a couple of these, specificially the shooter mechanics and Mako controls.

With that said, ME1 is one of my favorite games of all time, warts and all, and despite the fact that I didn't get into the series until after Andromeda released, it's probably one of my most-played, as well, with at least one 100% Insanity run on every character class (with at least one per class carried through ME2 and ME3).

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