Australia, February 5, 2009 - Space. The final frontier. Home to beings of all races, fleets of ships and countless alien worlds. It's also home to one Commander Shephard – male or female, pretty or ugly, saintly hero or a total jerkface. Mass Effect was the game that tied all these elements together under a glorious mock-action banner and some lavish graphics. It also boasted a robust story with a flexible dialogue system, stellar voice acting and plot that was incredibly well paced and compelling enough to play through multiple times. With a sequel finally officially confirmed (and presumably a third somewhere in the pipeline), now's the time to start the speculation and reflection on what has come before.

Mass Effect, as far as raw gameplay was concerned, was far from perfect – there were a few points that were almost universally held against Bioware's would-be masterpiece, and these are the five points we want to see addressed in the sequel. Expect to hear some official information by this year's GDC in March and by E3 in June, but until then, enjoy our list of demands.

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Bland Planets and Terrain
One of the best - and worst - elements of Mass Effect's design was its dedication to exploration on planets and moons. You could bring up your star map and choose a mapped planet, or you could 'feel' around for previously undiscovered planets to explore. On one hand, once you land on the often-gorgeous surfaces of these planets, you were free to drive around inside the lander or hop out and do it on foot. But the downside was that, outside of the occasional bandit camp or enemy outcrop, there was really nothing else to do. It was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with very little payoff.

Beautiful alien landscapes were marred with a lack of things to do in them.

In Mass Effect 2, we'd like to see more missions take place on these moons – missions of some degree of complexity, taking you across the surface of this open world and dealing with the NPC natives or intelligent fauna in much the same way you could in the key locations throughout Mass Effect. More environmental detail would also be amazing – as long as it's within the context of the missions. Like Mass Effect, the sequel really needs to retain the sense of surprise that you get when discovering downed satellites, alien technology and so on. We want to be wowed with the creative concepts that pop up in unexpected locations around the galaxy.


Clunkiness and Bugs
While Mass Effect's dialogue tree kick-started a trend of radial menus and circular interfaces in many genres of games, such refinements didn't quite extend to the background inventory menus in the console version of Mass Effect. The PC version, released about six months later, saw your HUD greatly expanded (to suit a keyboard and mouse), while refinements were made to the inventory system itself. The console version saw none of these updates – optional fixes or otherwise. Let's hope Mass Effect 2 gives players more control over HUD layouts and the presentation and position of the inventory menu system.

Further refining needs to be done to Mass Effect's interface and HUD on the console version.

Mass Effect was also a fairly buggy game. There were times when enemies would 'phase' through walls, passing and clipping through edges, crates and boundaries within the world. Your main character had a nasty habit of getting caught between the objects in the world, requiring either a lot of scrambling around and some luck, or a reset, to free yourself. Your AI team mates also erred on the useless side of things, taking more damage than they dealt, while enemies were rarely better, rarely displaying much in the way of tactical offense and defence. Again, we expect bugginess and clunkiness to be polished out by Mass Effect 2.