Aside: Bioware’s Bizarre New Approach To Sidequests

Thursday, April 15th, 2010 at 9:13 pm in Asides · Comments

In my last post, I mentioned lack of sidequests as one of Mass Effect 2’s downsides. At 60 hours in, I now realise there are in fact a ton of sidequests… It’s just that most of them are hidden.

Admittedly I shouldn’t have left scanning the planets for minerals until I was so close to the final mission, but I realised I needed to better upgrade my ship, and I had been holding off for so long because of the monotony of probing planets. Now I’ve spent many hours scanning the planets, I’ve come across many missions I would have otherwise missed.

I fail to understand why Bioware have tucked away many of their sidequests, and I simply can’t see how it’s beneficial to the game or the player. Hopefully this is something we won’t see with Mass Effect 3.

Tags: Aside, Asides, Bioware, Mass Effect 2

7 Responses to “Aside: Bioware’s Bizarre New Approach To Sidequests”

David

# April 15th, 2010 at 11:27 pm

Hey

I don’t think they were necessarily hidden away because they assumed you would do at least some of the mining/scanning, i did actually enjoy the mining up until a point and then the sound of probe away made me want to drink battery acid, but i do agree, it did shave a bit of the fun of exploration away, almost like you ‘had’ to do the mining sections…

Rhiannon

# April 16th, 2010 at 8:20 am

I’m not exactly sure what the problem is. If you’re talking about planetary side quests, the formula is the same in ME2 as it is in ME1; there’s pretty much only one planet to land on per star system. You don’t need to *search* for the quests either. As soon as you go to scan a planet, EDI will tell you she’s detected an anomaly, so you instantly know when there’s a side quest to complete. It makes sense to scan all planets for anomalies before you leave a system, in case there’s, y’know, people who need Shepard’s help!

By the way, have you tried probing Uranus? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-CDNLYZ0zA

Rockers Delight

# April 16th, 2010 at 9:30 am

@David I think my problem was not spreading the mining out. I spent a consecutive, solid 3 hours scanning planets. Boring.

@Rhiannon I remember the quests in Mass Effect being a lot more about who you talked to than probing planets. It seems they’ve switched it around this time, and it’s more of an emphasis on scanning planets. And yes, I probed Uranus

Rhiannon

# April 16th, 2010 at 9:42 am

@Rockers Delight: ME2 is the same; there are still plenty of side quests from talking to people in your environment. But you were talking about planetary side quests from probing planets, and both games are the same in that regard. In my opinion, walking around and having to search for people to talk to for side quests makes them more “hidden” than probing planets and knowing there’s going to be at least one side quest per star system. I don’t think there are any problems with side quest visibility in ME2 at all. For me, the problem is there isn’t enough of them. I wish I could play it all over again for the first time… *dreams*

Timothy

# April 16th, 2010 at 1:17 pm

I do agree that they were a bit hidden. Though I think I played through most of the sidequests, since I scanned every planet. The scanning a plant to find a quest was a bit straight-forward. But I think the problem in finding this was due to the fact that scanning seems to be the most disliked portion of the game, so I guess many people did the same as yourself and held off from doing it.

The really hard to find sidequests are the ones in cities / buildings, where you have to (by chance) talk to someone and start up a conversation. Then, after you go through the right path of dialog, you have the option to help the individual. Though, this is pretty much straight from ME1. And yet, these sidequests are far better than the probing ones, which tend to be short and not so sweet.

They probably should have thrown a few that are blatantly obvious near the beginning so that you see the opportunity for more.

Matt Brett

# April 16th, 2010 at 6:35 pm

I didn’t mind the probing so much, as I discovered the ship upgrade which makes probing faster and easier to detect minerals. Much of the pain was taken out of the process from that point on.

I prefer how they’ve approached side-quests in ME2. Do you remember how they were forced upon you in the first game? You would be about to jump into the galaxy map and Joker would say, “A call is coming in for you, Shephard.” I found that super annoying, and I often avoided side-quests as they seemed to disrupt the flow too much. In ME2, you find things as you’re scanning and can jump back to them easy enough at any point in time, or taken them on right then and there if you’re not already engaged.

This reminds me, that I still have my second play through to complete, and there’s no DLC. Back to ME2 I go!

Christoffer Radsby

# May 12th, 2010 at 7:15 am

Most of the gamers know that there are hidden sidequests and that you can find them by scanning the planets, to me it feels like a weak way to get players to go though the horrible scanning/probing process.

I’m not really looking forward to that in my next playthrough.

Rockers Delight