Mass Effect 2 bugs

I’m kind of baffled how a game which is simply an evolution of a former game, with such a huge budget and with the researches of EA at their disposal for testing can have quite as many bugs in it as Mass Effect 2 has. Here’s a non exhaustive list of them that I personally ran into…

• Drag power to hotbar goes crazy, wrong icon, dragged icon offset from mouse cursor – when it’s bad like this it can actually crash the game.
• Getting stick on geometry. It’s not once or twice, it’s all the goddamn time. You or your squad mates somehow ends up stuck hovering in thin air. Need to load autosave…
• Squad mates shields go randomly down with a plink, even with no enemy around
• Buggy pathing for squad mates: This is truly diabolical. You order them to a location but they wont move despite saying they will. Squad mate pathing means some missions with narrow pathways requires constant micro managing just to ensure they are behind you.
• Squad mates getting stuck behind doors. Unforgivable, happens on bosses all the time. The game seems to know how lame it is and it will cheat and teleport them in behind you occasionally so you never see them pop next to you. Likely as not they wont follow at all though, on harder difficulties this means you’re dead instantly.
• Incalculable number of scripting bugs where a trigger fails to activate which means you can’t achieve something and need to reload. A good example is the quarantine section in omega. Enemies will frequently just stand there and be shot, but this means you can’t talk to the batavian.
• Shooting enemies who have not aggroed often results in them just standing there until they die.
• Stupid squad AI means they often aggro on some unseen enemy and run around pointing their guns like compasses towards the enemy you haven’t even seen.
• Space skip in dialog is just plain bollocked. It skips only the sections of dialog which don’t have animation. It often auto selects a dialog option rather than pausing for a dialog option. Hit space at the end of a dialog ends up you triggering the dialog again. This is so frustrating it makes a farce of replayability. It’s *exactly* the same in DragonAge. Clearly no one at Bioware or any of the testers has replayed at all, ever.
• Scaling on insane difficulty is broken. Quite good experience on regular missions but bosses etc have far too much armour making them essentially impossible unless you’re playing soldier type classes with heavy sniping of heads and stuff. Forget being an adept or anything like that.

And here’s a list of basic behavior they couldn’t actually be arsed to implement at all:

• Squad mates will not switch between appropriate weapons. Ridiculous to watch one trying to snipe with a shotgun when they’ve got an assault rifle. The UI element for forcing them to switch weapons is retarded, drag mouse between squad mate weapons and you have to cross your own, making horrific mouse gestures necessary to try avoid mousing over yours.
• Squad mate AI is so diabolical, the game has been made extremely easy to compensate. To that end all enemies target Sheppard at all times. This completely destroys the whole tactical usefulness of your squad, destroys the usefulness of many of the classes since you will inevitably need to be the tank whether you like it or not.
• Higher difficulties gives everything shields, armour, barriers. No powers work on these which means guns are really the only feasible option. Even top rank warp etc will not deal with one enemy barrier before you can use any other power.
• Couldn’t be bothered to solve any LOS issues with AI hence most squad AI powers will activate on an enemy irrespective of LOS. Eg Mordin’s incinerate.
• General Bioware DLC lameness: Couldn’t be arsed with recruit mission for zaeed, Collector weapons and armour just ripped from the already existing enemies, couldn’t even be bothered to make different weapon icons. Couldn’t even be bothered having DLC download in game any more, presumably since all that was so broken in DragonAge (I still can’t play the DLC I bought in DragonAge).

Non exhaustive, just the ones I can remember. If the game was as dull and empty as ME1 then you wouldn’t bother but actually it’s a way better game overall so it’s worth putting up with it all. You really have to wonder how this stuff sneaks through though. These days I just wish people would make smaller, more complete, more polished games and add some variety and complexity to it to spice up the gameplay rather than having cut-and-paste identikit snippets of gameplay. Oh well, Bioshock 2 soon.