Opinions wildly differ, but I personally want to call it one of the greatest games in recent memory, with an actual, functional blend of RPG and Action, with an excellent story.

I'd hesitate to call it an action RPG, since I think that it adequately fullfills my own demands of an RPG, even with it's heavy action elements. Compare that to other, "classical" "action rpgs" that very rarely have any RPG elements whatsoever (Diablo 2, etc).

Have they removed the copy protection yet? If the Steam release has only the Steam DRM then I would consider buying it.

I was really expecting something with a little more teeth. But this is what us pc gamers have to expect from ports, because of console's limited memory levels are smaller than you expect in a pc rpg. Every time you get in an elevator for example it's really a load screen.

The Witcher would be a better choice.

The main story was well-done but far too short. The optional content was much richer in amounts, but completely generic. The entire game felt like a set-up for sequals.

I liked it a lot. The story is very good, the world is interesting and well fleshed out, and the combat is actually quite exciting.

There are some awful MMORPG style grind quests though. Thankfully they are optional, but still a horrible boredom trap for the compulsive completionists among us. And the floating tripods...oh God.

Thankyou to everyone for their nice input, i saw it on Steam, and looked on Impulse, but didnt see it yet.

The trailers and YouTube scenes look interesting, but wasnt quite sure. I wanted another sci-fi game, but wasnt

sure how it would play. I have an older computer, 5 year old e-machine with good memory (2gb) and a 2.2 ghtz AMD chip

and XP SP2. My graphics card is a 256mb Nvidia and it runs some modern games well, depending on what they are. And runs Sins very well, but only if i have the graphics on medium, but that is okie.

I played HomeWorld and HomeWorld 2 and 3, and tried Genesis, but gave Genesis away to a friend as i really didnt care for the blood sucking ships. Haha, oh my!! I played MOO many years ago and liked it alot, and the Old Star Trek and the Star Wars Galaxies, which was my favorite, but couldnt handle the fee every month. It got to the point after awhile where it just seemed like too much of a luxury with other things to take care of. And i havent had a job except in the summer. During school it is too hard to do both, so i just concentrate on school. Anyway, wanted to say thank you to everyone for the great input and to say thank you.

Im guessing at this point that it may be like SW KOTOR, and that it sounds very neat, but maybe im not running a powerful enough computer. I had hoped maybe a new computer after the first of the year, but well, family first, so that will probably not happen, too many things that are more important.

Anyway, thanks for the help, take care,

-Teal

Personally, I love both, for very different reasons. Mass Effect & The Witcher, that is. Not HL2 & CS. I hate those.

I have a 3ghz dual core and an 8800 gts 512. Would that be enough? It runs left 4 dead on maximum.

Steam DRM I have no problems with, once they get the DLC integrated I think I will give it a shot.

disagree on the first, agree on the second part

imo the main plot of mass effect is simply awesome, it´s just a really well made space opera with really cool characters, voice-overs, graphics (both how they look in-game and the general concept), atmosphere, etc....

somebody said dont expect a typical bioware rpg, but to some degree it is very bioware-ish.

also, i think the port to pc was, compared to the typical port, quite good. i.e. the whole interface was optimized to work with a mouse, so yeah, what do you want more ^^

the only real downside, or let´s call it let-down, are the side-quests (and thats where i agree with garrison). the non-plot planets and quests are so extremly boring and monotonous, i´d seems that they were made all within 10 minutes. so yeah, as long as you stay on the main story path (and thus might miss out on the high-level skills and items...) it is really a great game (oh and trust me about the side-quest stuff - i did them all -__-)

Mass Effect follows the Bioware formula to the letter, its not a bad thing but they could at least mix it up. I bought the PC version the graphics are pretty average most stuff past 30 feet from your character turns into a pixelated mess even with settings at max.  There are a few bugs which haven't been fixed ie proper AMD processor support I am still getting lower performance compared to a similar intel processor.

Complaints aside the main story is fairly good, the action is some what enjoyable when using crowdpleasers (shotguns), the dialogue is excellent.

First off, my online name is garion, not garrison, but I like the way that sounds. I stole garion from a series of fantasy books so I don't really take it personal.

I'd like to expand upon my comment about the story. I think the story is rather generic. Sure, most sci-fi or fantasy plots (or realistic drama) are going to be fairly derivative is somewhat of a given. I believe that is true of Mass Effect. The plot is nothing new, you more or les save the universe, but it's how you go about doing so that is importatant. It feels natural (obviously after suspeding disbelief, but you are playing a video game), but most of that comes from the fact that the choices you make actually influence the plot. And I don't mean that in the way Fallout 3 gives you merely shifts around it's relatively arbitrary end "cutscenes" about how and why you did things (this only means something to someone who has finished F3), but I mean that the player influences the outcome in the game in a significant way. Sure, you can play a badass the entire game and have a change of heart at the end, but it is your choices at the end that determine the outcome. And the choices feel meaningful, unlike my experience with Fallout 3 where I never really felt confronted with a choice so much as different paths. Again, I don't know if I can articulate that idea without someone having finished one or both games.

ME is a flawed experience. Battle is engaging, but limited. The plot existsd but isn't as intruiging as, say, a book, but games are interactive, which books aren't. In that sense, ME transcends reading as you become the author, you choose your own adventure. Games have yet to reach the storytelling level of books, but rarely have movies come close to that high watermark and books have been around much longer. Games tell their stories in a different manner, a different medium. ME for me is not the most original story ever conceived, but the execution still leaves me intruiged and engaged, which is something I can't say for 90% of the games I play, RPG or not. And for that reason alone I think anyone who is interested should try the game. It may not be for you, but if the game strikes just the right chord, it can be a very rewarding experience.

Got it off Steam today. The game runs dissapointingly bad. For one thing it maxes out both my CPU cores at 100%/100% even when I am standing idle outside of combat. This seems to cause problems resulting in random crashes and freezing, perhaps due to overheating? The graphics are hella choppy, even on low graphics and with vsync on. I have never had problems with my onboard sound but mass effect has a lot of choppy static, unexplained looping noises resulting in strange "brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrip" sounds. And in several conversations the sound shuts off momentarily right after people stop talking, cutting off 80% of whatever they were going to say.

I hope I can get it running better because I do enjoy the combat, once I figured it out.

I dunno the lockups are random. I just got a pretty severe one. I got rid of the sound stutter by tweaking a file. The default number of channels was only 28, I bumped it up to 64 and most of the problems went away. However in the casino all my sound shuts off and I only get random strange noises. Leaving the area solves the problem.

One lockup lasted for 4 seconds before the game resumed. The last one happened as I jumped to another planet for the first time. The normandy jumped into the system and the whole game froze solid as soon as Joker spoke his first line. Tabbing out wouldn't work. I tried Ctrl-alt-del and it brough up the system menu but it was also frozen. I had to keep tabbing between task manager and mass effect because my cursor would dissapear after a second. It took about 10 tries to finally kill the process.

I have no idea what the problem could be. I will turn off hardware sound to start with, I don't have a fancy sound card anyway so stereo is enough for me. What graphic settings I put on don't seem to affect the cpu at all with the exception of dynamic shadows (which appear bugged anyway) and motion blur and film grain which are waaaay too overdone.

Anything else I could try? Otherwise I will be limited to playing one hour at a time.

Edit: Went back to start the game up again and it wouldn't. Oh goodie. After I spent over 10 hours downloading it too. Verifying the Steam game cache didn't help.

Edit Edit: Things are getting stranger. I noticed that the computer was using 38% of its ram. Task manager quotes it as using over 500mbs. My computer when idle never uses more than 22-24% and on a fresh boot it starts at 18% A restart fixed the problem and Mass Effect will now boot up. But what the heck is causing this? Its like no other memory leak I have ever seen.