StormwaveUK said:
Just out of curiosity, what games to people believe have lost their way from their original intended audience?
In my opinion, some of the biggest culprits are:
Mass Effect (went from RPG to action)
To me, Mass Effect was always an action-RPG. While I do agree that more emphasis has been placed on shooting stuff rather than puzzles and roleplaying but, come ME3, a full-on Galactic War happens, which will always require weaponry. Yes you can talk the Geth and the Quarians to pack it in but that's not really going to work with the Reapers. Trying to reason with Reapers is like trying to reason with a devout religious person - it's a pointless exercise in futility - so you are going to need to shoot them. I noticed the lack of dialogue options in ME3 and, while the response "In war, there really aren't many grey areas." was reasonable, it also smacked of making excuses.
However the addition of "modes" irked me and neatly proves your point that, for the sake of gameplay and final polishing, it has been made to appeal to all comers and their lovely money.
At least for ME3 they beefed up the combat system so it flows better. ME1's combat was like Fallout 3 / Fallout: New Vegas' combat but with a half-arsed cover system and ME2's combat system was designed by someone with a fetish for sticking himself to walls with Araldite. At least with ME3 they made an effort - if they are going to place emphasis on action then they might as well try and get it right.
If I were to say how Mass Effect has lost it's way, it is not so much the swing towards shooting as the swing away from "traditional" RPG elements. In ME1, there was a lot of shooting but we also had the Mako and the planet exploration, which I liked. If you wanted the good shit, you had to earn it by putting in the work to earn them or the money to buy them. Sometimes the item you just scavenged and pawned half the guns in the Galaxy for was not in stock - well that's life! It happens and if they just dumped all the good shit on you right away then the game would be tediously easy. That said, the inventory system was a bit of a pain but at least you couldn't fill it with random crap like teddy-bears and spoons.
ME2 cut the inventory system and weapon mechanics right down to the bone and then threw all the challenging puzzles in the bin. Some hailed it as a relief but to me it was overkill. Yes by cutting down on the faffing around and selling half a million unwanted guns after each mission was all well and good but what's the point of doing that and then giving us that woefully boring planet-scanning mini-game? Yes the Mako could be a bit of a bugger to drive sometimes but it could also be insane amounts of fun when you got the hang of it. The only thing I had to get the hang of when plannet-scanning was making sure I didn't fall asleep - there was absolutely no challenge at all! Still, when you're trying to get as many people as possible to give you their money, who cares, right?
Also, why was access to the Citadel so limited in ME2? In ME1 we had a good slice of one of the Wards, C-Sec and The Presidium. In ME2 we got part of another Ward, which was fine, and a balcony on The Presidium - woo. Omega was pretty good but also very limited and so was Tuchanka. Also the stock didn't rotate / replenish, thus killing the need for exploration / repeated visits...because that stuff bores non-RPG fans and they will not give you their money again if they are bored!
The Paragon / Renegade interrupts were a fun addition, though!
ME3 sought to redress the balance a little bit with the better weapon-mod system and making the alternative armours for your crewmates have different bonuses and attributes. They also got rid of resource-mining, which was fine with me, but why leave in the planet-scanning mechanic for artefact / salvage operations? There's no point to it at all now! I like how you have to be careful when activating your scanner or the Reapers will come and see what's making all that noise, that is good, but why do they then utterly ignore you when you start to scan the planet for the artefact once you've identified which one it's on? It takes away all the urgency and renders it all pointless. How about they take a leaf from a great old game called Nomad in where you drop the probe and have to wait while it does it's thing. You can either leave it and come back later or wait, which would be dull but you can always upgrade them to make them faster / more efficient and, if the Reapers are around, waiting could be a tense affair if you didn't wimp out and run away!
Another utterly incomrehensible decision was to break the journal. It worked just fine for 2 games so why break it to the point to becomes useless to ME veterans and newbies alike? It says a lot when I have to have a pad of paper and a pen handy to track my mission progress in ME3!
They also binned all of the hubs, bar the Citadel. You'd think that in a war, there would be more need for them than ever! I'm not saying that they should be available from the get-go but the chance to unlock them would be nice! After you sort out the shroud on Tuchanka, why not have that open up as a hub? As the game shows, there are places the Reapers haven't touched or ignore that could be utilised as "secret" hubs or safe-zones. It's all very well cutting all this out to appeal to a broader audience but in breaking the side-quests and journal mechanics so comprehensively, all they did was get on everyone's nerves!
I still enjoy the games and each one has it's own reasons that make me want to play it again but, like many, it seems that more emphasis has been placed on a wider market than crossing the t's and dotting the i's. I'm not talking about the ending, although that was pretty bad, but there are other, more subtle things that irk me, most of which I have already mentioned.
Here's hoping that the proposed Mass Effect 4 returns to it's roots.
