Slycne said:
Therumancer said:
Lack of inventory and loot, was a big blow against the game.
Stop removing my choices!
What's more they stated that they ultimatly want to dumb down the game further by removing a big part of the game balance, by pretty much letting every character use any weapon, and simply having class determine how many slots they have.
Stop giving me choices! Wait what?
I see nothing wrong with opening up the weapon selection. For starters, it never made logical sense to me. Applying current conventions forward, modern militaries do not train their non-combatants with pistols and shotguns, they train with the assault rifle like everyone else. It's only the specialists that get into more role specific weapons. Heck, being an expert pistol marksmen is in many ways harder than with a rifle. At least in fantasy there was a better argument for "well the wizard just doesn't have time or probably the physique to train with something like a guisarme". I never found or saw a very good suspension of disbelief for why say an Sentinal only had skill enough to be specialized in Pistol, a ruling they were perfectly willing to break with the NPC characters. Garrus was essentially an Infiltrator who swapped Pistol for Assault Rifle.
From a gameplay stand point, I don't see why letting people play characters in less defined roles is a bad thing. Why should a Vanguard need to be pigeon holed into a close combat class, why does the Infiltrator practically necessitate being a sniper? I'd love to play an Infiltrator that uses cloak to close with enemies and then open up point blank with shotgun. As long as the "combat" classes are provided skills and buffs that maintain their advantage with firearms, I'm perfectly happy with that.
The entire point is to create signifigantly differant experiences and roles for specific types of characters. Your absolutly correct that any kind of true "class based" system is unrealistic by nature. There is no reason why a warrior couldn't learn to pick locks, or a mage couldn't learn to be an expert martial artist, there are plenty of examples throughout sword and sorcery fiction that violate the "rules" of D&D and games like it that were inspired by them.
Part of the whole idea of having a system with classes is to make one differant and fill a specific role, encouraging differant solutions to problems and adaption on the part of the player within what they can do. Compared to say having a "perfect" character that can pretty much do *anything*. Like say for example having a fighter or thief or mage in a fantasy RPG where someone like Fritz Leiber's Gray Mouser was one of the deadliest fighters in the world, THE pre-eminent thief of the world, and had also been apprenticed to a wizard so had learned some usage of magic.
The issue in the case of a game like Mass Effect is that it's being done to simplify and streamline the experience so people don't have to adapt to a specific playstyle, rather than to add any kind of actual depth to the game.
The give and take between "give me more choices" and "stop giving me choices" isn't contridictory as it entirely depends on the kinds of choices being given.
In some cases a truely free form character system DOES work for RPGs, however it typically involves a certain amount of give and take. It could be called progression if they were to say give you so many points with which to build Shepard and you could pick what skills you wanted him to have, but ultimatly couldn't wind up making a character who could do, or would be good at, everything. In such a case allowing you to say make a character with an assault rifle which is arguably the most powerful weapon class, it shouldn't leave much room to learn much in the way of special abillities.
Simply deciding "well, any character can now use any weapon, it's just about how many they can carry at once" is contrary to the whole idea of having character classes.
As far as the military goes, we're assuming of course that the military is run the same way that things are run in real life. For example I got the impression that Biotics were trained in special schools as opposed to sent to boot camp. There also seemed to be a degree of mistrust there, so it's likely that it had something to do with why their training and issue might have been fairly limited. When it comes to why a character would only use pistols and shotguns, I tend to look at things like the game "Traveller" where I seem to remember they had a set up very similar to that for actual marines. Simply put Marines being defined as troops who were trained specifically to board ships and space stations, and little else, and were their own corps since that was a service in paticular demand. They were trained with pistols, shotguns, and cutlasses, for close combat in hallways and tight enviroments, and also because the weapons they were using were developed to minimize the chance of wrecking sensitive equipment should a firefight take place in say engineering or the ship's bridge. I might be remembering the wrong RPG system where they set it up that way, but the "Army" which was based around land engagements employed differant weapons like assault rifles, missle launchers, and similar things. The "Navy" being a dedicated support team and learning to use little more than sidearms because they were pretty much dedicated to piloting, matinence, and tech, and would rely entirely on the marine compliment for defense. Is this "realistic" by the current order of battle, where we cross train all of our forces nowadays? No, but it's still a functional order of battle.
I'm not saying that this was what Mass Effect's writers were thinking originally in setting up the character classes, as they seem to have things organized differantyly (even going by name), however, specialized weapon training and limitations can be defended as much as they can be argued against.
The overall point here is that you seem to like the direction "Mass Effect" is going in, and that's fine. I personally do not. But then again as I've pointed out I'm an RPG player. I want my stats, my character classes, and my sweet, sweet loot. "Mass Effect" was supposed to be the successor to "Knights Of The Old Republic" as a space fantasy RPG series. It was even hyped this way to begin with. I don't think it's unreasonable to be miffed about it from that perspective.
I'll also be painfully blunt, I have no objection to Bioware producing a series of shooters and action games, as long as us RPG players still get our RPGs. If they wanted to make a third person shooter, they should have developed one as a seperate franchise, instead of trying to turn an RPG franchise that is supposed to be the spiritual successor to a line of RPGs, into "Gears Of Halo".
One of the reasons why there is such bad blood between "factions" of gamers is because the industry is increasingly unwilling to cater to people with differant interests, and instead wants to try and shoehorn everyone together, or create slapshod products that try and hit as many things as they can. Had Bioware continued to develop high quality RPGs, complete with stats, stat based combat, skill selections, inventory, and similar things within their properties, I don't think there would be any problem with them deciding to throw together a shooter or simplified customizable fantasy brawler. When they take an RPG series and make it so it isn't an RPG series anymore... yeah that annoys people.
