Mass Effect 2

What works

- Installation
- Game-play (see instructions)
- Audio (see instructions)
- Introduction & in-game videos
- Cerberus network
- Mass Effect 2 DLC
- 20Hrs+ into game atm

What does not

Game plays reasonably well with high-end system, however:
- Game currently crashes every hour or so (issue is assisted by patch, see below)
- Random slowdowns (many resolved by disabling high quality bloom & motion blur, see below)

Once the stability issues are resolved, this game would be an easy gold rating.

Workarounds

What was not tested

- Mass Effect 1 Character Import
- Full game playthrough (in-progress)

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Note: Thanks to this patch:http://bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=26032 the game runs more stable and on newer versions of wine. To install I created a new wineprefix. When completed, I used winetricks to install: - d3dx9 - d3dx10 - vcrun2005 - physx However when launching Mass Effect 2 I had no sound via "MassEffect2Config.exe". Instead I launch the game via MassEffect2.exe As there is allot of terminal output, I recommend disabling the winedebug output, e.g: env WINEDEBUG=-all WINEPREFIX="" wine "\MassEffect2.exe" Performance is reasonably good for a new game (and older wine version), here are the wine & application settings i use: In-Game video settings: [SystemSettings] Resolution=_1920x1200 ResX=1920 ResY=1200 BorderlessWindow=False Fullscreen=True QualityBloom=False DynamicShadows=False LightEnvironmentShadows=True MaxCharacterCinematicLightingPasses=3 EnableLightEnvSHLights=True MotionBlur=False FilmGrain=True MaxAnisotropy=1 Wine Registry: [Software\\Wine\\Direct3D] 1197163531 "OffscreenRenderingMode"="fbo" "PixelShaderMode"="enabled" "UseGLSL"="enabled" "VertexShaderMode"="hardware" "VideoMemorySize"="896" [Software\\Wine\\DirectInput] 1240428288 "MouseWarpOverride"="force" [Software\\Wine\\DirectSound] 1264809964 "DefaultSampleRate"="44100" "EmulDriver"="N" "HardwareAcceleration"="Full" The game really does require a mouse patch however if you just set the mousewarp to force you will have issues navigating the menus. I use the patch below as it forces a warp at the screen edges only (also, its also small and clean). http://bugs2.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=15638 At the time of this submission, I am running a Nvidia GTX 260 super-clocked with the 195.30 drivers. UPDATED: Moved to silver, updated wine version and added patch information

DLC for Mass Effect 2 seems to work okay. You need an EA account & Bioware account. You have to link your bioware account to your EA master account.

When done, you can login to http://social.bioware.com/user_entitlements.php  and download the  content manually.

I have tested the Inferno Armor, Blood Dragon Armor, Zaeed - The Price of Revenge (Cerberus Network), Normandy Crash Site (Cerberus Network).

Launch the installer in the wineprefix you have Mass Effect 2 installed, the installer will fail (for me) at cleaning up the install. It is safe to kill the install process.

Once you have started Mass Effect 2, login to the Cerberus Network with your EA account and the DLC will be authorised (you may get a warning the first time)

Please purge your previously wine installation before using that HowTo!

For patching and installing wine on Ubuntu:

apt-get build-dep wine
wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.5.9.tar.bz2
(This wine version is given as an example)
tar xjpf wine-1.5.9.tar.bz2
cd wine-1.5.9
wget dl.dropbox.com/u/6901628/raw3.patch
patch -p1 < raw3.patch
tools/./make_requests
tools/./wineinstall

For patching and installing wine on Gentoo:

mkdir -p /etc/portage/patches/app-emulation/wine-1.5.9
wget -O /etc/portage/patches/app-emulation/wine-1.5.9/raw_input.patch 'dl.dropbox.com/u/6901628/raw3.patch'
emerge =app-emulation/wine-1.5.9

Thanks to t800 for the tip ;-)

Increasing in-game performance

If you have experienced performance degradation please deactivate dynamic shadows and antialiasing from game graphic menu. Also set proprietary driver image settings to Maximum Performance. This helps for weak graphic cards like NVIDIA Geforce 120 GT.