Cover vs mobility

To be honest, I wish ME:A went away from a hard coded cover system. I like cover, it's great to give your shields a moment to recharge, to take a bit to decide your next course of action, heal up, whatever. But a hard coded cover system means you need to put specific things around to use in that hard coded system. ME3 was a little better than ME2 in the diversity of objects...but neither did more than a passable job in the best instances. Uniform rock formations everywhere, stacks of crates that just HAPPENED to stick out into the traffic-zone of a warehouse, little walls that jutted out from pre-fab houses just to give you a place for cover...etc. It was terrible

Give me a crouch button, (and my preference would be to have a "hold crouch for prone") so that even knee-high objects could be used...but I do understand that this isn't a tactical ARMA type shooter, so I know they're gonna go with a hard coded cover system. Just please, for the love of god, make the cover just a little less...stupid

Haha I posted in the wrong thread. I'm tired.

wait did these threads merge as soon as I left my comment? Gosh that's confusing as all hell. Anyways.

Cover still seems like it's going to be a vital part of the gameplay, going by Ian Frazier's previous comments. It's just that A. they're trying to make moving from cover to cover seem more mobile and fun. And B. the gameplay shown so far is probably on easy mode and is just to show off basic movement and abilities, so it isn't totally representative of what the average player will experience.

I mean, in both TGA and CES footage, numerous pop ups directing the player to get in cover (as well as the player nearly dying due to ignoring said pop ups...) seemed indicative enough.

Yep. Even on insanity I rarely use cover. I like to bullrush the keystone cops and the uglies

yeah I use cover in ME1 and 2 a fair bit but not so much in 3 but that mostly because I find I need to stay relatively mobile in 3 especially when fighting Butes and Bansheews as if you stay in cover too long against them your dead as they'll corner you if you let them get too close. I stil do use cover in ME3 but generally only long enough to recharge my shields/barriers or something.

Ah that's true ME1 wasn't as cover based. and on a few occasions it made it harder to stay in one place behind cover. Like the geth hoppers or whatever they were called. But the combat wasn't nearly as good. If they can make the combat interesting and go a less take cover route. Although I would be fine either way as long as it's good.

Wait ME3 didn't hit the cover system too hard. The brutes and banshees made that incredibly hard. And if you stayed in one place to long it didn't end well if you were fighting multiple enemies.

True, ME3 was a little better than ME2, and there were a few enemy types that could flush you out depending on the mission.  However, much of the game was fighting Cerberus, and almost all of those missions were nearly as bad as ME2 in regards to repetitive cover and such.  So while ME3 was "better" in some ways, it was still too reliant on map design that bordered on ludicrously unrealistic "stuff" to use as cover.  

That's my main gripe with the cover system.  You hafta put stuff in that you can use as cover, and quite often that hinders level design.  I'm hoping that with the more open world thing ME:A is going for, there'll be more "soft" cover options (hills, trees, stuff like that) with fewer arbitrary crates and rock piles for "hard" cover.

Cerberus troops

Low crawl to avoid being detected and to avoid enemy fire. It would be interesting to see Drack do that especially if low crawling under an object that isn't high enough to only crouch.

You can do it without being twitchy. Think about it within the frame of Mass Effect.

You're out with your squad when you suddenly get attacked out in the open by a bunch of people and an Atlas mech. You have a biotic slap out a singularity to hold the mech in place and throw out some grenades; explosion then rips up some of the ground and the atlas explodes in its lower half. The legs fly out as shrapnel and hit some of the enemies and then the larger, upper portion drop to the ground.

The uprooted earth plus the remnants of the Atlas are now cover for you to utilize in a space where there was once none.

And every  shooter that has utilized these concepts in major or minor forms haven't been twitchy at all. Mass Effect in its current state can be twitchy because you can literally bounce around and mow things down without having to stop or care. With these types of things factored into the gameplay, you have to give time to think about how to take advantage of your environment in a beneficial way rather than just blowing something up and screwing yourself over because you collapsed a wall on your head or cut off your means of a tactical retreat while your health is low.

LOL so true. The cover system in ME2 made it my first and easiest platinum trophy. Love the game to death but that wack a mole combat they had was weak.