Mass Effect Sells A Million, Halo 3 Sells Five

Sales news is starting to trickle out for some of the big Fall games, with the Xbox 360 so far looking very strong. BioWare's Mass Effect has sold a million copies, while Bungie's blockbuster Halo 3 has already sold over five million copies since its September 25th release date. That last figure comes from a GameDaily interview with Xbox Marketing VP Jeff Bell. Aside from noting this week's release of Halo 3's first downloadable map pack, Bell also connected these sales back to the console itself: "The reaction has been very positive. In fact, we saw incredible sales of Xbox 360 for the week of November 18, including Black Friday of more than 310,000 Xbox 360 in the U.S. alone. This is really strong momentum for us given that we're already in our third year on the market."

What Is Wrong With 360 Graphics?

[Anonymous Coward]

My roommate has a 360 and he has spent the last two years babbling about how powerful the 360 is supposed to be and I think the guy has moved beyond fanboyism and straight into delusion.

Halo 3 looks like a last gen game. It's filled with jaggies all over the place. The framerate seems to drop into the low 20s often. I hear that the game isn't even running at 720p. I was shocked when I came home one day and didn't even realize he had gotten his copy of Halo 3 and I thought he was still playing Halo 2.

Mass Effect is a complete graphical basketcase. The problems with texture loading being delayed. The horrendous framerate in places. Outside of the closeups for dialog the game looks like a last gen game.

These were supposed to be the two 'big games' that would finally show that the 360 didn't deserve the Xbox 1.5 label.

Re:Just how much of that 5mil in sales...

[twistedsymphony]

Just how much of that 5mil in sales... ...is accounted to scratched disks?

probably none since MS offered free replacement of effected discs and that doesn't get counted in sales figures.

Re:The 360 has always had good sales

[Pojut]

I would have to disagree...uncovering some part of the game universe via the codex, going on varied side quests, and just simply discovering more of the main plotline kept it interesting for me from the start right up until the credits began to roll. If anything (other than the obvious technical issues), my biggest gripe is that the game wasn't LONGER...I was a little upset that I finished it as quickly as I did, even with all of the side quests and such that I did. Realistically, I could have completed the main storyline in under 15 hours...a game like this should have at LEAST a 30-40 hour storyline with 15-30 hours of sidequests...a bit suprised at how short it was.

Regardless of that, it was still an awesome game...fighting was intense, storyline was interesting, the choices were truly difficult at times, and the production values were sky high. Only the second game that I have started playing a second time as soon as I finished it (the first game I played back to back like that was Secret of Mana 2)

Re:The 360 has always had good sales

[vonPoonBurGer]

the gameplay can't even match Oblivion

Well, to each their own I suppose. Personally, I hated Oblivion, but I love Mass Effect. I didn't like the "use it to level it" system they use in the Elder Scrolls series. Mass Effect lets you level a skill into competency before you start using it. I didn't like the way quests were scattered all over the damn place right from the get-go in Oblivion. The quests you get introduced to in Mass Effect are always in the same system that you're currently in, or an adjoining system. I didn't like the travel time to get to new areas in Oblivion. Travel to areas both new and old is near-instant in Mass Effect. I didn't like the way that enemies scaled in Oblivion, making me feel like I was really on a pointless levelling treadmill. I really felt a sense of growing more powerful with Mass Effect. Oblivion's story never really grabbed me, the Mass Effect story was a lot more interesting and well-told, for my money.

But the thing I hated most about Oblivion was the impossibly wide scope of the world. It took too long to get anywhere initially, and it was too easy to get side-tracked. Seriously, in hour two of Oblivion I was being given quests on the complete opposite side of the game world, in the complete opposite direction from the main storyline. Why?? How does that add to the game?? Maybe it's just me, but it felt like the gameplay equivalent of waterboarding: here's a bucket full of choices, let's pour them all right up your nose. With Mass Effect, I can fully explore most uncharted jump points in about an hour, including exploring the planets, scanning everything, taking care of any side quests there, etc. Makes it a lot easier to just take bite-sized chunks of the game, and I never feel like I'm being drowned in choices.

Assassin's Creed has something similar with its viewpoint system. Each city is divided into quarters (well, thirds really, things like the Poor Quarter, the Merchant Quarter and the Rich Quarter). In each quarter are half a dozen or so tall vantage points which are premarked on your map. You can scale one of these towers and survey the area, which will put all mission objective in the vicinity of that tower on a map. While the cities are quite large and complex, you can easily break them down into smaller chunks, and clear out each chunk before moving on to the next one. Mass Effect uses the multiple layers of the galaxy map (Galaxy > Jump Node > System > Planet) to do the same thing. I think for a lot of gamers, this sort of thing is a really important feature to include in any game with a significant measure of openness and nonlinearity in the game world. Without it, people like me play the game for a couple hours, get overwhelmed with too many choices and not enough tools to track them, and then leave and never come back.

Too bad we can't mod Mass Effect, it has some very good potential.

I'd say it's a given that there will eventually be a PC port of Mass Effect, probably around the six month mark from Mass Effect's release. I'm sure enterprising PC users will find a way to tweak the game. There are certainly lots of issues that could use addressing (loading times, texture caching, the cover system, and oh god, the interface system), but I think it says a lot about the game that I am completely willing to tolerate its flaws in order to experience the core gameplay. Personally, the mod I'm looking forward to is called Mass Effect 2. If I were giving notes to Bioware, I'd say convince Microsoft to let you cache to disk on those systems that have a hard drive, make the cover system work like the one in RB6: Vegas, overhaul the inventory system, but otherwise just open up another 3rd of the galaxy for me to explore and fill it with new content.