Mass Effect 2 (PS3) prediction

By David / January 13, 2011 / Blog, Opinion / 2 Comments

I’m going to channel my inner Michael Pachter here and make a bold prediction: Mass Effect 2 for the Playstation 3 will fail. It will move some copies, yes, but it’s unclear whether BioWare will even recoup the mild investment of porting ME2’s content onto the ME3 engine and optimizing things for the PS3.

Some of this is based on fact: the sales data I compile for indie news site Huliq includes pre-order data, and the PS3 version of Mass Effect 2 is barely on the radar blip. It is a year-old game by now, and some people (like myself) will pick it up once the price drops to get the “definitive” version because I have yet to spring for any of the DLC on my 360 copy, so we may have a ‘long tail’ situation as far as sales go. Still, I would be surprised to see 500,000 copies move by the time Mass Effect 3 comes out.

My other reason is much more subjective: for all of the “GOTY” praise the game is getting from last year, it’s becoming fashionable to bash the numerous design flaws of the game. BioWare would have won an instant pre-order from me, for example, if they had said “screw it, no-one liked the planet scanning, we’re taking it out”. Or if they’d found a more substantial way to integrate the Firewalker prototype vehicle into the main game. Or, well, more than simply putting the standard “GOTY” edition on a different system than the game released for initially.

Fanboys and girls out there, feel free to prove me wrong here.

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2 Comments

  1. Tom
    January 13, 2011 at 10:53 pm

    Yeah, it’ll “succeed” in the sense that nowadays for lots of games, it’s worthwhile buying the GotY edition separately to get all the DLC for cheap. For instance, I bought DA twice, but…I paid $75 for the game, Awakenings, and all the DLC. Which is pretty good, when you get down to it. ME2 has problems with this model because a.) there was one good piece of DLC, Shadow Broker and b.) there wasn’t a *lot* of it. I don’t see the need to buy the GotY, because…I’d get very little content besides Kasumi.

    Though yeah, I’d’ve loved for them to fix the planet scanning. Because that really, really puts me off to replaying it.

  2. David
    January 13, 2011 at 10:58 pm

    That’s what I might do–wait until it’s down to the $20 price that ME2 is currently selling for and pick it up for the DLC, the interactive comic, and to compare versions.

    One of these days, either MS or Sony has to take the first plunge in setting DLC prices to adjust for price drops in the retail game.

    On fixing the game, I’d even be content with an gamey “after you beat it the first time, planet scanning becomes automatic” type of option. That would get me interested in a second playthrough on my 360 version.