Mass Effect...

I want to rename Mass Effect to Massive Elevator Waiting...

Im 2 keepers short of all 21 and going around the the elevators is so freaking annoying. Why would they make elevator travel so long.

I hate to waist your time and forum space with just a rant so gonna post up some screen shots with the film grain effect off like I promised.


1920x1080 All Maxed out, NBR will downscale these significantly but you can still click them for a larger version.


























Enjoy the screen shots hopefully it helps resolve some of the conflict of PC vs 360 graphics. Also it was Iceman that said I think that you can force higher AA to the game via your video card control panel to make it look even better, but I didnt do that as I will forget about it and end up forcing 16x AA on crysis or something and watch a slide show and forget and think my computer broke.

Dual 4850's almost never drop below 60fps in this game maxed out 1920x1080 and I have Vsync on so thats why you dont see triple digits.

 

Great game, I've been having a lot of fun with it. I can understand why people wouldn't like the film grain, but I really like it, makes the game look different from any other game.

Do you also have Dynamic Shadows off? I assume so, I'm not seeing any ugly shadows on peoples faces, heh. I tried getting used to the blocky shadows on peoples faces, but after a while, I just couldn't take it, and no tweaks helped that much. Looks better with it off IMO, and frame rates are higher as well

 

I was stuck on the last keeper, but then after reading a forum realized that sometimes keepers are randomly not spawned. A few reloads made the last keeper finally appear. (I condone use of forum help in games if its a bug )

 

I do have the strange shadows on peoples faces! Just the screen shots dont show them, so turning off the dynamic shadows fixes that? Any other loss by turning it off?

I also have seen that same shadow effect on CoD4 in rare situations and yes it is very annoying and I wondered for awhile if it was a driver issue since the 4850's are so new.

 

Apparently it's just how the Unreal engine handles dynamic shadows.... looks fine everywhere else but on faces. Turning it off doesn't remove all shadows, just the "dynamic" ones. Go to tweakguides about half way down the page and it will show you the difference between dynamic shadows on and off. You do miss out on some shadows but the FPS increase and the amazingly ugly shadows removed are worth it to me.

 

Crank up the AF as well to 16X, just doing via the games CP will only get you 4xAF.

 

Vicious, are you playing ME on your C90 or a desktop? I can't even get that high of framerates with the C90 native resolution.

 

Elevators are simply a clever disguise for background loading. A 20-second elevator trip beats staring at a boring loading screen for 20 seconds, yeah?

 

Yeah, sort of like the pre-boss tunnels in the old Mega Man games.

 

Vicious Shepard? Any relation with Liz Vicious?

I wished it looked as sharp on my 8600m gt =/

 

Man, those screenies definitely DO NOT do justice to how beautiful the faces look in this game. I play downscaled to 1280X800 and not at maxed settings and my game looks prettier than those screen shots.

 

Those are maxed out 1920x1080 screen shots. NBR's image database downscales them tho so some quality is lost.

I used to put full res pics on my own photohost site but they take up all my space fast.

 

For me, I've found Mass Effect to be one of those games that really has to be seen in action. Still screenshots just fail to capture how beautiful the game is in motion.

 

Dot Gamn!, those graphics rock. That may very well be my next game purchase! Thanks for the screen shots!

 

I strongly recommend it, Dook.

 

Cool! I'll check it out. Awesome review. btw.

 

Give a wall of text warning next time won't you?

I have to admit that Vicious' SS make me a lot more interested in Mass Effect.
I've heard about the elevators taking forever, in fact there's a comic on Penny Arcade about that. Can't say I'm too excited about that part of the game.

 

Hahah, yeah.

It still amazes me how many people haven't caught on to background loading screens, yet. XD

 

Is there any way to bind your allies powers to your quickslots or anything else. I really hate going into that menu and telling them what to do.

 

Believe it or not but the PC version's elevators are short compared to the 360.

 

I gave up on those last two scanner robot thingys. Damn them!

 

How would a dv5 with Intel® Core™2 Duo-processor P8600, 4096 MB memory and NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT run Mass effect?

 

Haha! priceless!

I dont buy the elevators = loading deal. If thats the case how come I can use the travel terminals and I am in the new area almost instantly? Even when I load up the game. I can get into the game and load my save faster than some of those elivators. I think they made them long for some dialog but forgot to turn off long ride mode for the other 99% of the time you take them.

 

That's my theory as well. Some of the elevator dialogs are a lot longer than others, but they just allocated the same amount of time for each ride. You can get around the Citadel a lot faster by avoiding the elevators altogether (there are only two locations not accessible via Rapid Transit: the docking bay and the corridor to Wards Access) and the non-dialogue elevators outside the Citadel are quite fast as well so I don't think it's a problem with loading times.

 

Vicious,

http://xs.to

You should be able to keep even a 1920x1200 PNG under 2 MB.

 

Tried that site its not working so well. Tried it first without registering and it would not remember my files. So I registered and still I have no files in my list.

edit: it works with single file upload, multi file did not.

Here is some full size goodness.









So Much Better!

I'm gonna go play in abit maybe I will have more screen shots to share.

 

60FPS! OMG!

I want I want!

About the long elevator trips, this was a pain in the 360 version but I thought they were able to speed it up because they have more power to work with on PC? strange!

 

As soon as I get my new machine, I'll do a background memory monitor while on an elevator trip to confirm whether or not there's background loading going on.

 

You can use the instant transport and load into a new area in seconds, also anywhere in the game it loads fast. The elivator thing is definitly not due to loading I am 99.999% sure of that.

LoL 60FPS with Vsync on with it off Id have like probably 120+

That may be a good test. I'll brb

Test Done!

About 60-90fps running around it varys alot


In conversation 120-150


Note that turning off vsync was not enough I had to go into the gameengine.cfg file and turn off the frame limiter, just like UT3 since its the same engine it has a limit to prevent spikes in frame rate.

 

I was able to complete it all. I was stuck at 20, but for some reason it allowed me to rescan the keeper in the elcorn/volus embassy again and then I completed it. Weird stuff.

 

Vicious, your character is kind of cute...

Is she available?

 

Ha I dunno, you have to ask her. But she is busy killing people right now.

The amount of customization is crazy for the facial poly's but they were pretty lacking for hair styles, eye color, things of that nature and thats like a one step forward two steps back kind of thing since those are the most notable parts.

There is no long hair at all in this game, in the future I guess its not very popular, or more like in reality its a solid poly with no movement or collision detection so it would clip like hell into your weapons on your back and other things.

I just got the Normandy under my command and did 2 of the side missions, my char is getting better now that I have more points in my "force powers" but cast time is still too long to make them an effective weapon against a large number of enemies.

 

@Viscious
What are your rig specs? The C90S doesn't have the option of a 1920x1200...

 

My desktop

Q6600 @ 3.6ghz
4gb DDR2 800 @ 900
2x 4850 @ 710/1050

My C90S would probably only get 30-45fps in this game on 1280x800 thats my guess tho as I never tried but its the same engine as UT3 and it ran that game well. When I went into the engine.ini file to remove the frame limiter you even see a line in there that says engine=ut3.exe so it even uses the same exe....

 

Nah, I play it on that res on my C90 and I get 18 to 25 fps w/ vsync & shadows off, and medium particle & textures.

 

How is control? I played it on the X360 and I remember it controlled ok. Is the mouse/keyboard good or bad?

 

I haven't played it on x360 but the mouse/kb combo is excellent but I wished they included a "hold your breath" button somewhere for sniping....

 

Curse you, just love rubbing it in don't ya!

 

I had to update with my newest screen shot

 

Pretty freaky

 

This is such a great game. It took me about 30 hours to complete, like actually complete as I did every side quest. The Bringing Down the Sky DLC was only decent but they intend on releasing more DLC.

It's also crazy how easy it is to get the max amount of cash.

 

Im early in the game and cash is so low, my entire savings cant even get me half of one piece of good equipment.

 

Once you start traveling around the galaxy you'll start acquiring more items much more quickly, most of which you can sell off and make money on. Beginning part inside the Citadel is a little slow for cash, but it picks up pretty quickly after that.

Great game though. I haven't been able to play for almost two weeks though, been pretty busy... hopefully next week, I want to finish the game!

 

You don't need to buy very much anyway. Spectre gear is a must have though.

 

I just started on this game, I'm liking it so far!

 

How do you get it?

 

Spoiler of how to get Spectre Gear (highlight to read)

Get 1 million credits for level 7 Spectre Gear. After that, reach level 50 for level 10 Spectre Gear.

 

Since this is mass effect thread I want this for PC I should be able to run this on high settings right?

 

I completed this last night. I wish there were more ports that I could travel to. Good game overall, it took me 25 hours. Felt abit easy though, I'll try it on hard sometime. Also the fact that your team mates does go precisely where you wwant them to is annoying... If only they had the same amount of ports as Freelancer did......WOAH......and the team control of StarWars Republic Commando, then it would have been perfection of a game...hehehe

Johnny T

 

How the hell do you even get to level 50 anyway? I only got to 44 and I completed all but 1 sidequest(those keepers, dag nabbit!).