Mass Effect LE chat thread.

I couldn't find a thread going for this one and as it's been a tangent on about every other thread I figured it was time for a home of its own. I'm not sure if there will be many that haven't played this game but just in case I'd like to respectfully request we keep the spoiler alerts up as needed when talking about plot points.

I don't have a great deal to start it off; I'm 15ish hours in and it's about what I expected. On the other hand I did forget how clunky the interface was in ME1; that came back to mind about 20 after I clicked the shortcut and started playing. Performance has been fine. I'm not noticing anything different about the new camera angles that are supposed to be protecting me from overexposure to female cartoon buttocks.

One other thing; the download is more than 90 gigs; took me almost 2 days.

 

Im still going to wait and see comparisons between LE and current texture mod packages from things like ALOM and ALOT + 144hz

Until then I have no real desire to purchase it, I suppose if they fixed shadows it would raise my level of interest.

 

looking like i will buy this soon as the series is the best series this side of crysis and witcher

 

I never modded this one, it does look good for what it is and it runs on the refresh. The only problems I've noted so far is my own expectations: The game world seems remarkably unpopulated compared to modern games, movements are clunky, lip-synching has come a long way, etc. One I started to get into it that sort of thing fell into the background but it's easy to imagine someone not making the hump.

 

Yeah its a bit odd because you have less citadel space to experience in the later titles compared to me1 or at least that was my impression of it at that time.

If the graphics settings have been overhauled that would be a huge draw for me personally.
The in game settings were terrible though I Think it was technically a port? Could be wrong.

The mod package that has since been integrated into ALOT did really good work for the titles, I remember garrus was really impressive compared to vanilla.

I'm mostly confined to controller titles for a while since I play only on my stationary bike now until I feel I'm in better health but I'll keep tabs on this for future reference

 

Runs shockingly well on this i5-7300HQ + GTX 1050 laptop I'm using. I'm only a couple of hours in (just got pooped on by the council post-Eden Prime), but it's doing 1080p/60fps pretty easily, with drops in a few areas around the Presidium.

Games looks great with all of the new textures and graphical enhancements.

 

kevin dont you find it amazing how hardware thats sub par can still basically run new games

 

Cyberpunk was the first game I had to drop back from the native QHD to HD with my previous 1080GTX desktop in the old Aorus. Of course there is play, and the more subjective, play well. The old one wasn't ever quite completely smooth in Cyberpunk, it would hitch here and there, but for me the overall experience was satisfactory. That is one way to look at it; the other way is that the new laptop is completely smooth in Cyberpunk and mo purty.

There is a contingent on this forum that isn't quite going to be happy without the ideal and they're not wrong if the goal is to attain an ideal. If the goal is sitting down and playing a game the old laptop still works fine; l replaced it primarily because I am getting screen glitches that my old overclocking self recalls are often seen when the gpu is going to fail. I work in remote locations and am not taking the chance. Looking at the new lappy with the 3080, yeah, it's way better but on this forum it isn't: The crappy 3080 is beaten about the head and shoulders by the desktop part and so it's junk, it's not attaining the ideal. I tend to disagree with that assessment; it plays games wonderfully.

Were I someone with older hardware that had been thinking about upgrading on this cycle I wouldn't let the negativity seen here dissuade me: You're going to be happy if you're where I was or on earlier stuff because it just plain chews through games with ease despite not matching the hopes and dreams of the idealist. On the other hand if what you have works for ya, it works for ya. Nuff said. Both the former and the latter seems to be a difficult concept to get across here at times.

 

i agree...its just that people here are elitists and think every year we should see 50 percent gains justifying a new laptop every year...however the irony is even the 10 percent gain was enough for people to dive into mirage

 

Moores law does tend to set expectations accordingly.

Expectations versus justification for a hobby are two different arguments with different results in spite of just one conclusion

 

I'm not dissing them, I used to chase the numbers myself and it really does become a hobby; for my part a fun hobby at that. I also don't disagree with the complaints about nVidia, AMD, etc. They deserve every bit of the condemnation they've received in recent years and I don't want to give the impression I'm in any way letting them off the hook: They should be beaten and then hung, revived by a squad of emergency responders, then beaten and hung again.

 

moores law only applies to a model of lowering profits and giving away gains.....by the same token if moores law applies their would only be a 3090mobile and 3090 desktop.

doubling of performance is a statistic...remember mark twain saying lies damn lies then statistics

 

Doubling transistors does not mean doubling performance but thanks to that misunderstanding of Moores law, you've demonstrated exactly my point.

Sets expectations.

Anyways from videos I have seen it seems like lighting was one thing they worked on, did you guys notice it? I could never find the happy middle ground for shadows in mass effect. Just went with the less jarring of the two options.

Also is there actually settings or just the same old?

 

I don't remember what was there before but the options for shadows now are on/off. They look significantly better than the originals; you can for instance see the details of individuals fingers and so on, and they move correctly in relation to light sources. Reflections are also sophisticated, more than I can remember from before.

 

grabbed from google

Moore's law, prediction made by American engineer Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors per silicon chip doubles every year. Moore's law. Gordon E. Moore observed that the number of transistors on a computer chip was doubling about every 18–24 months.

your right about the first thing but man its every year and a half right up to two years.....gpus are not coming out that slowly...sometimes but not always for arguments sake anything can be argued 1=0 0=1 ect iv'e seen it..but at the end of the day 3080 is disappointing

 

Yes, I giggle like a schoolgirl playing games with mine as a defense mechanism to overcome the pain of playing the latest and greatest with all the candy and good frames. I mean who would want to be forced to to say yes to all the eye candy? Or constantly stuck at high frame rates? It's awful I tell you; I'm so disappointed!

 

Ironically, even after my statement, I find this hardware completely unsatisfying after having been using stronger GPUs and CPUs for the prior years. I went from a 980M to a 1070 to a 2080, and only had this 1050 laptop as a back up on which I never intended to actually play any games.

This level of hardware just does not supply the level of performance I desire. To be frank 60fps isn't acceptable to me, and I'm not used to having to actually worry about how much setting are affecting performance.

Yeah this is pretty much me. I've been to the mountain top, I've seen the promised land, I've sipped from its rivers. I can't go backward in time.

 

It’s like being a homeowner for decades and then selling your house to rent an apartment. Feels like you’re regressing in life. Although given how real estate has shot up, that might not be such a bad choice.

 

lol yeah you guys are right....games going from medium to ultra look massively different....its not like theres 6 billion you tube videos showing the huge leap in fidelity.....after all we always get pc games built from the ground up for pc and never get ports.....lol its funny reading posts on nbr

 

Nice hyperbole, but going from a 2080 to a 1050 is the difference between 120Hz at ultra to sub-60Hz at low, at least in terms of recent AAA games. If you can’t appreciate the difference in fidelity and responsiveness between those, then consider yourself unspoiled.

 

You don't just go from ultra settings to medium settings, you also end up turning some stuff off, like shadows for instance, and there is also having to reduce resolution, etc. I did all of those and more to play Cyberpunk at what was a minimum frame rate I could take with my 1080GTX. With the 3080 I'm at native (QHD) with everything cranked to high or ultra depending on which is available in the settings, have everything turned on, have ray tracing enabled with DLSS also at ultra, and it's playing at almost double the frame rate measured, and vastly more smoothly, perceptually. I can tell the difference and am not displeased.

I've seen those videos and most are predicated on the idea that if you move a slider over in the settings everything will be all fixed and you won't notice the loss. That's not how it works in the real world though; to make headway with frame rate you often have to make some harder choices and you wouldn't have touched the slider in the first place if it wasn't a choice you had to make because you didn't have the power to pull an acceptable frame rate. I do get the concept these videos are trying to get across but they don't match what happens real world when your hardware is below your minimum bar and you're trying to make it work.

 

Anti-Aliasing being one of the first options that budget or older hardware would disable to free up some frames, pending its memory speed and bus.

Though I am confused, are we here to hate on the 3080 mobile or what? I thought this was a Mass Effect thread?

 

Speaking of AA, it's pretty bad in ME2. Back in the original release we used Nvidia Inspector to force SGSSAA and the IQ was incredible super sampled. but now the game is DX11 so that isn't an option.

That's my only complaint.

 

when one of you guys boot it up again can you take a screenshot of the graphics settings? curious to what it looks like

 

Well, we were talking about ME on lots of other thread so it only seems reasonable to talk about something else here! But... Yeah, you're right. Like any other game thread performance and how various hardware plays it seems like fair game but you can take it too far. As to AA I usually wont completely disable it because you can still get noticeably jaggy on straight lines even at HD and going 2 or 4X greatly reduces that without as much of a hit. That was one of the other things I referred to when I talked about turning various other things down or off.

To go back to what's going on in the game in terms of shadows and the like there is more detail in a number of areas, shadows, reflections, of course textures. This is all hit and miss in some respects :In conversation you have player characters with significantly more detailed models but occasionally they'll have missed something in view. An example would be in a convo between Shep and Joker the hat joker was wearing was extremely detailed right down to the weave and thread, yet his tunic was significantly less detailed in the same shot. It's a uniform made of the same material so they both should have looked the same but didn't. You see that from time to time but not so often that I find it detracting. You can also see that a lot of the work went into the characters but the stage everything is playing out on is not so detailed. It isn't just the sparsely populated areas as compared to the expectation now; various planets have fairly low environmental detail and the same for all the structures in and on them. I expected this as it would be making a new game to add stuff in that was never there but on occasion the characters appear to be more detailed than the surroundings they are in. It's enough that I notice they look out of place from time to time.

I started this one at the same time as Metro and I've pretty much kicked Metro to the curb despite the fact that it has massively better graphics. It's not all gravy but it's obviously working for me. Hard to guess how someone else will see it.

 

Modern games use postprocess forms of antialiasing like TAA, so disabling AA doesn’t do much in the way of improving performance on lesser hardware.

 

I was curious as to how these are like or not like Andromeda, it's the only one I've played and I actually thought it was pretty fun, but I did end up skipping a lot of the dialogue etc from what I remember from a couple years ago. I really like hands on playing and not an overwhelming amount of cutscenes and dialogue though, I think TW3 had about the right amount of pretty much everything if that's any clue.

 

From what I have seen of others who have played it, Andromeda is like ME1-3 but packed into one game for its basic story elements. ME trilogy obviously has the advantage of being fleshed out over multiple titles which for a story rich title matters quite a bit.

Its certainly not Kojima levels of cutscene, and the dialogue options I suppose similar in function to TW3. I think you would enjoy them. I didnt even know Mass Effect existed until 3 was almost released and oddly enough 1 was the last one I played lol

ME2 is always on sale for 5 USD or less on steam, if you want a demo of what its like you can try that to start, refund it and grab LE if it peaks your interest.

 

Andromeda had the best gameplay. Jump ability really added a lot to the combat dynamically. Unfortunately the rest of the game was very mediocre...

 

I played ME Andromed. Forced myself to finish it. The gameplay itself is nice though somewhat repetitive. The problem was the story and character development, which were both terrible.
It's like Dragon Age 2, you finish the game and you learn nothing new about the universe and its protagonists. I like single-player games for their story, I usually play them like reading a book.
At the end of the game, I want to sit back and say "Oh, wow, what a journey!" That's how Witcher was like, that's how ME1 and 3 were like. Personally, I didn't like ME2. I mean it was ok, but the whole game felt like a huge side-quest to the main story, with the main story being rather simple and predictive.
BTW, did you know that the initial writer of ME1 left after the game and ME2 and 3 were written by another team? Did you know that the story ME1 was trying to say was more complex and crazy not just about AI versus biological beings?

https://www.cbr.com/mass-effect-2-tali-haestrom-sun/

 

I personally enjoyed ME2 more over 1, but it was also my first entry into the game. That being said ME1 was much more willing to touch on certain taboo subjects and I still very much enjoyed it.

 

I thought the trilogy as a whole had a decent story although there were some parts I liked better than others. I don't know that it's possible to please at all points across such a long narrative: As an example I loved The Lord of the Rings but almost quit during Bilbo's birthday party which i found far too long.

 

Well I started ME1LE, seems more of the same but needs a few settings like FOV and the ability to turn off camera shake when running. I also feel like the default controller button layout is not the best at least for xbone controllers. I'm not too far into the story though just up to when you first get to the council meeting and a bit of exploring after that in that level.

 

me 2 might be one of the best games ever made

 

-Gateway(tongfang) Creators Series, i5-10300H, RTX 2060rf 90w, 8GB, 120hz, mux switch lol

nice laptop im looking at a 2060 laptop and another 3060 one

hows 120hz must be amazing....its just that not everyones rich...alot of members on nbr have alot of money....im not one of them

 

You can get by on a surprisingly low spec machine if you keep your expectations in check. I just feel lucky right now that I actually bought a 2070 a couple years ago and went eGPU. Enabled me to go desktop and not spend a fortune. Even though I easily could I refuse to pay these prices right now. No way, that's just dumb.

If you don't NEED a laptop, just build a low cost desktop when GPU prices go back to reality close to MSRP. I built a friend an $800 SFF desktop (he had a 21" 1080p monitor and keyb/mouse already) in spring 2019 .. AMD R5 2600 + Radeon 570, 512G SATA SSD, 16GB RAM... He still loves it to this day says it works fine for his gaming needs.

 

120hz isnt hard to accomplish on a game where originally could be played on a 8800gt and a core 2 duo

I often played ME2 on my M4600 with a 2670qm and a m5100 2GB at 90hz quite easily with ALOT and AA applied.

Hell could probably emulate it on your phone lol

 

I actually didn't pay more than about 400 bucks for it when you account for the component sales from my busted M6700 and just considered that original m6700 cost a sunk cost from when I had a lot more savings pre-covid times lol. Still the 769 including tax I paid isn't a bad price for it. ME1LE doesn't pose a problem and I've never been a maxultra graphics guy.

On topic I am NOT able to do 2k or 4k dsr on ME1, for some reason it never saves the selected resolution beyond my native 1080p when changing it to 2k/4k.

 

I have an m4600 backup may try it sometime just for kicks. Yeah old games like this usually pose no problem. Still if I could switch to 2k I might try that at 60 locked instead of 120 locked 1k, not possible for me though.

 

Hmm how odd, might be strictly LE related as I didn't have that issue. That being said i was using AMD at the time so it could've just been a good driver but I can't recall if I tried that on mass effect or not when I was using my 1070. I know I did 4k120hz on dead space 2 but it's not an apt comparison here.

 

Totally agree. I need a laptop since I'm a covid gypsy of a kind for a while now, my little xb came along at just the right time lol. If I was settled no question desktop makes more sense but I have seen how I can get by just fine with laptop only and I really like that, less clutter to it then a desktop, take it pretty much anywhere with a plug or get about 2hrs-4hrs battery depending on work load etc

 

This is DSR 2k/4k to native 1080p so it may be that, and yeah it's this game only so far that I've had that problem with. I kinda doubt it would look that much better though tbh so not a big deal.

 

I have 3 desktops running and about to build a 4th lol that all being said i have been working on making my p750fm my daily driver as the only title that my lappie can't max is probably cp2077. Somehow I Think I'll get on just fine