Everyone who reads this blog knows my configurations. It’s an old, single-core, Pentium 4 PC, 3.0Ghz Hyper Threading. It was cutting edge at the time I bought it. Five years later, it’s still kind of okay for playing games. I’m glad it’s not “minimum spec” yet, but naturally I’m not satisfied with the performance I’m getting on modern games.
The one piece of good news with Mass Effect is, I don’t need the disk to be in the drive when I play this. I don’t need to look for NOCD cracks for this game. Publishers of games should follow this trend. While putting the disk into the drive to play isn’t a big deal, it just makes it so much easier not to get the prompt to insert disk when you forget to do so.
Mass Effect is playable on my configuration. If I can live through Assassin’s Creed, I can put up with the portions of Mass Effect when it does slow down. Most of the time, I get slowdowns during firefights, and sometimes, while walking or running around inside the Citadel.
For now, I’ve made a video clip to demonstrate. Bear in mind that framerates dropped when I activated video capture, so it’s actually slightly more playable than what you see in the video.
The thing I love about Mass Effect is that it brings back my old “just 1 more quest” feeling. I just can’t seem to put it down. I need to just “complete one more quest” before I take a break from the game to do something else. I have not had that feeling in a long time, not since Neverwinter Nights and Gothic 3 I think.
You can see from the video, it’s infinitely better than Assassin’s Creed for sure. The game does crash occasionally on my PC, but it is tolerable. Not frequent like Crysis. However, I still save every few mins just in case, and I really don’t want to have to fight through all the enemies again just to get to a quest point. In a sense I am glad that this game does not restrict you to checkpoint saves only.
So far I have been thrilled by the story and the visuals. Currently my character, although just a tiny level 6, is “important” and is “renowned”. Stories of my character’s exploits have reached many ears and it makes the hero … well, heroic. This is a little bit unlike more traditional RPGs where the hero is just a farmer boy or some such and he has to prove himself.
Guess that’s enough rambling for now. Time to get back into the Citadel and finish my quests!
