Hmm... Well, this game sure does look interesting enough, thou it's said to be 'darker and scarier' :D I'd welcome Witcher 2 more, but Mass Effect seems interesting enough as well (Bad thing about Mass Effect in my book are black and white choices - most of choices you make in the game are either obvoiusly good or bad, I've had enough of that. Sure, there are some in the shades of grey, not too much thou.). Mass Effect has fantastic presentation, so just for that, I have to play second one

Whu? I figured there are quite few of the definite black-or-white choices, most of them seem to be to to the same thing in a little more reckless/violent/impatient(renegade) or careful/diplomatic(paragon) way - both being shades of gray, not necessarily good/evil.

Exactly. -both-. That's the problem :D

The problem is that the choices should've had real and meaningful consequences in the first game already. The consequences remain to be seen, but knowing Bioware, none of them will be that interesting. They are masters at making hollow choices & consequences.

I'm interested in the second one too, i found the first one not to be that great but it sure had lots of potential.
biggest flaws in the first one were,imo, the lack of weapons (especially something like heavy weapons), and most dialogue always having the same three answers.
i hope they fix that in the second one, and add more facepunching (actually there should be a punch option for every NPC)

First you're complaining that most choices are black and white, now you're agreeing with me in that most are grey, and complaining about it too?

No, I'm agreeing with you that there are 2, read two, really important choices in the whole game, which yes, are in the shades of grey. Rest is pretty much good or evil, disguised in some clever way, that's true.
Why am I complaining that there are so few choices? Because I'm spoiled by Fallouts and Witcher :D

Ah, but then you're agreeing with a point I didn't make - I was suggesting that neither paragon nor renegade choices are often clearly black or white (read "both paragon and renegade are shades of grey").
At least we're both looking forward to the next instalment, even if it is on different grounds. ME1 was and still is one of the best gaming experiences I've had, and I expect no less from ME2.

Oh yes we are, I was just pointing out what's between Mass Effect and gaming Perfection :D
As an experience, Mass Effect sure is one of the best games EVER! :D ... Thou nearly not as good as it could have been

I've just thought about another fairly large decision that will hopefully come into play in ME2, the fate of the Rachni

Heh. Would be nice getting into trouble and then having an enormous swarm of giant space bugs coming in to devour your enemies... assuming, that is, you saved them in the first place.
Makes me wonder how much they can actually account for, though. I mean, you figure it's not too hard to actually figure out which quests the player has done and how they turned out. Likely all that data is stored as just a single variable in the save file or some such, but having to plot out quest trees, and put in the dialogue and all the other stuff required to support branches for all those possibilities would be a lot of work and add a lot of extra material that they just likely won't have room for.
Which is why they tend to just pick one of the many possible sequences of events that -could- have happened and say "That's canon," and go from there. I imagine they'll still have to do that to some degree, if not as much as in the sequels to other franchises.

To be honest, I figure the choices won't have too much of an impact, as in the choice of government won't radically alter the path of future history, just that you'll see a number of humans instead of non-humans deciding on what to do (decicions will mostly be the same), or that you'll get a mission where you'll get help by the rachni if you saved them (or even only radio talk about rachni rumors).
I think all changes will be there, but most will have a minor impact.