EmperorSubcutaneous said:
Why are people so angry about this? They're giving us options. You can just choose RPG mode and play like normal. Chill out; it's exactly the same as setting difficulty (which you can also do elsewhere).
On one hand, you're not wrong. Trying to accommodate different kinds of players is not a bad thing. On the other hand, this feels like a very sorely misguided effort towards doing that, and telegraphs a very great deal of uncertainty about the game on Bioware's part. They feel that in as much as any of these can be selling points, they're also all potential deal-breakers, so they've gone out of their way to make sure they aren't integrated with one another and can be played separately.
What do I mean by integrated? Well, the idea is that whatever features are in your game, they have some inter-dependence on one another so as to feel like they're part of the same game. You feel like participating in one game mode, in other words, gives you an advantage in the others. It makes the experience cohesive and consistently rewarding, and how you integrate features together often is the essence of what makes a game unique.
A good example of a well-integrated game is Sly 2, the core concept of which is a mix between burglary and "Ocean's Eleven" style heists. It features combat, exploration, platforming and stealth. Exploring your surroundings reveals new opportunities, exploits, and rewards, whether it's a hiding place you can use to escape from pursuit, a vantage point that offers an ambush, a new shortcut, or a shiny ming vase that you can bring back to the hideout for a tidy lump of cash that can be used to buy upgrades. Enemies carry loot, and if you get the drop on them you can pick their pockets, which makes being stealthy rewarding. Offing an enemy means one less set of eyes to look at you. In general, pursuing each of these different styles of play offers an advantage in the others.
Mass Effect 2 is an example of a game that's not well-integrated. Exploring is confined to tedious mineral-scanning. The actual planet surfaces don't offer anything in the way of places to explore apart from small hubs that act as gateways into shooting segments and containers for NPCs to talk to. In fact, combat segments can't be re-visited at all. Meanwhile, apart from a few exceptions (notably the very last mission), actually making decisions has no bearing on the outcome of combat; in fact, dialogue is mainly confined to said hubs, where action never takes place.
"Confined" is a good way to describe the different modes of these games in general. They don't feel like they're part of the same set of interactions, and what rewards they offer to one another are very artificial, arbitrary things, like experience points that can be spent on combat abilities, or research gained as a result of arbitrary amounts of mineral farming. There's an indirect relationship between these modes, like they're all Facebook friends playing Farmville and sending each other points, but not a direct one.
Everybody says they want more RPG elements present in Mass Effect, but what they really want is better integration, I think. They want it to feel more organic than it does, and they want the different modes/features to feel more complete through their relationships with one another.
Unfortunately, Bioware doesn't seem to be getting the message, as this set of options would indicate. I honestly laughed out loud when I read "action mode," because dialogue isn't just a major selling point of the series--it's a major selling point of Bioware's games in general, period. Giving the player the option of cutting this out is kind of like offering the player the option to cut out cybernetic augmentations in Deus Ex, or withdrawing the ability to equip or customize your party in Dragon Age--oh, snap!
Point being, it's part of the core appeal of the game and doesn't make a lot of sense. Mass Effect's lead designer has stated that they have been looking into what people like about
other games like Gears of War and Call of Duty (IE: More successful games), but you get the feeling lately that they don't really understand what people like about
their games.
Spencer Petersen said:
The biggest problem I've had with Bioware is the complete story and gameplay segregation. The inclusion of these modes is a sign they are doing less to integrate the two together and more to make Shepard in combat and Shepard in talky mode 2 entirely separate entities. If each part is so meaningless to the other that it can be removed without detriment then there is a serious problem with your game.
I thought they would be doing more to include serious choices within the gameplay bits as well as ways to develop your character's combat skill from dialogue choices. But they seem to content to keep it as a railroaded, self-indulgent, empowerment fantasy that you occasionally interrupt to kill hundred of nameless assholes, which serves to remind you just how awesome you are.
To sum up, yeah, I'm with you on this one. My biggest complaint has been less the lack of integration of dialogue and combat, though, and more their lack of integration between their combat and exploration elements. Given that we haven't heard anything about what they plan to do in place of mining for minerals or driving the Mako so far and the relative urgency of the plot, it seems they're less interested in giving me the "Captain of the USS Enterprise" experience and more interested in making "Mass Effect: The Cinematic Railroad with Dialogue Bits Sometimes" experience.
