In Defense of Thermal Clips

They make sense. I know we all like to bitch at ME2 for its questionable plot and aesthetics, and especially for retcons, but the Thermal Clips is one retcon I wholeheartedly support. It makes sense and it improved the gameplay at the same time. 

Let us think back to ME1 and the early-game, before you have weapons that can fire infinitely (or near enough) with mods and powers. In those early hours you squeeze off a few shots and then have to stand there and wait for your weapon to cool off. This takes several seconds and the wait increases if you accidentally overheat the gun. Was this fun? No, not really. The concept for the weapons in ME1 was creative but that doesn't mean it was fun. If you are going to reply to this post and tell me that you thought this concept was actually fun then I'm going to ignore you and assume you're are either a liar or have a bad memory. If the mechanic was so fun then why did everybody mod their weapons to never overheat? Don't tell me you didn't because EVERYONE did. The only exception was if you used explosive ammo, which you couldn't mod enough to not cause the guns to heat up after one shot (or a couple shots with the pistol/assault rifle). The fact that everyone ended the game with guns that fired infinitely is proof that as a gameplay concept the heat management system didn't work. Players got rid of it as soon as they could. It wasn't fun.

So ME2 replaces this with what is essentially ammo. Now guns have a magazine capacity and a finite number of reloads. They explained this change with the idea of Thermal Clips, which are heatsinks that you eject from a gun and then replace with a fresh one. The Thermal Clip is then discarded and as such ammo does not regenerate. Mind you, code in ME2, which you can activate, does allow your "ammo" to regenerate at a set rate. This makes sense since the ejected thermal clips should cool off and the heat sink in your gun should cool down like normal in ME1, right? True, but in play testing this resulted in players just standing around after each fight and waiting for all their ammo to regen. This was very bad for pacing and wasn't fun, so it got cut. Remember, these are games first. 

However, perhaps this makes sense anyway and perhaps Thermal Clips should have been in the first game? They've been using the heat system for decades in-universe after all. The explanation is that the geth invented this technique when they calculated that ejecting a loaded heat-sink and inserting a cool one increased the gun's over all fire rate. This is a matter of life and death, obviously. Why wouldn't it be true? If you train well enough you can surely eject and swap out the heat sink faster than you can wait for your gun to cool off. The faster you are back to firing your weapon the better.

So why don't the Thermal Clips cool off? Well, they are heat sinks. They are made to absorb heat, not radiate it to the surrounding environment. How this tech works is never really explained that well because in ME1 the heat sink cools off IN the gun somehow. This means that the heat is going somewhere that is not inside the gun even though the heat sink is still in the gun. How does it cool off? It's never explained because there isn't a real answer. This question holds true in ME2 onwards as well: when you eject the heat sink how does it cool off? It might radiate heat very slowly and so eventually cool off while it is laying there on the ground. How would long would this take? Probably quite a while; several minutes at least. Once more, it is designed to absorb heat, not radiate it. A heat sink that just puts heat back into the surrounding environment isn't very useful. Perhaps you could dunk the thermal clip in water or, more realistically, some super-cool liquid that cools it. That might work but you can only do this so many times because of-course you are now heating up or expending your cooling agent to cool the thermal clip. The heat leaves the thermal clip and goes into the super cool liquid and now the super cool liquid is not cool anymore. Granted, this setting does have cryonic ammo and so associated cryonic powers ought to be possible and I suppose that somehow you could use this cryonic technique to cool thermal clips. Otherwise, it makes sense that they'd just be discarded in the heat of battle and picked up for recycling later.

If your complaint here at the end is that running out of ammo in ME2 is even worse than waiting for your gun to cool in ME1, then I'm just going to laugh at you. ME2 is an easy game and if you are running out of ammo during fights then maybe you need to play on a lower difficulty. If that doesn't work then don't play shooters.