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Mass Effect 2 Improvements You May Not Have Noticed

Unless you played the original Mass Effect shortly before the release of Mass Effect 2, or after playing the sequel, you may have missed the more subtle improvements that make this sequel one of the best games.

1. Pacing: In the original, you can get to the citadel and spend 3-4 hours just talking to people with minimal shooting of space weapons. It's not obvious that you should spread these citadel quests out over the course of the game. In the sequel, there are multiple cities. Each city only has a few side quests. This means that you don't spend more than maybe a couple hours in any 1 location. This really helps the game stay interesting from beginning to end.

2. Conversation animations: Watch carefully, characters are varied in their animation during conversations. Characters that are sitting get up an walk around, or adjust themselves in their seats when they become uncomfortable.

3. More fluid conversations. In the original if you pick a conversation choice before the other character finishes blabbing, there will still be an awkward pause between the end of their yapping and the start of yours. In the sequel this seems mostly nonexistent. Dialog flows between the characters nicely.

4. Menus are gone: When something is missing, you usually don't notice. Reviews usually discuss the additions. Bioware purposefully rearranged when you get experience, and when you can equip weapons and armor so that on mission you aren't taken out of the story so you can fiddle with stats, changing equipment, or switching ammo. Maybe you forget how often you went through 142 menus in the middle of a battle to get +3% damage bonus against synthetics.