Mass Effect is not an RPG

[Athinira]

Oh you must be trolling, nothing is as bad as Fable's moral choices.

Ok, how exactly are they different?

In both ME2 and Fable you have a very clear "good" or "bad" choice, clearly displayed through colors [In Mass Effect "good" is blue, and "bad" is red...just so you don't have to think]. There's not a single decision in the game you make that isn't clear-cut, and even the end decision is so one-sided [as in literally every member of your team tells you the right thing to do is the paragon option, even Miranda the Cerburus Op tells you that it was the right thing to do...

In the first game you could decide who lived and who died - there was some moral complexity, in ME2 you can only really let people die if you're really bad at the game [since the game tells you out right who to choose in the final mission]. They even turned the moral choices into QTE's for crying out loud, that's how worthless the system has become...

First of all, the choices in ME2 isn't as much about good/bad as it is about "Badass" vs. "Diplomat". It's perfectly possible to make Renegade choices that can be considered good and vice versa.

Also, calling the QTE-system worthless is just idiotic. Like it or not, it's one of the most immersive parts of the game because it resembles real life. You come across a situation where you have a short time to think and act, and if you don't, it's too late. This happens in real life alot, and to me, this constitues one of the most pure forms of roleplaying. You see, RPG's all too often let you make choices, but gives you huge (if not infinite) amount of time to make that choice. Making moral choices under (time)pressure makes your actions reflect your real-life character more since you have less time to think.

Also calling the system bad because it has a clearly defined good/bad choices is just a terrible argument. How do you expect to roleplay if you don't know what a given dialogue line or choice makes your character do? Imagine if the ME2 QTE's didn't have a color, and you just had to press it out of panic, not knowing whether this would cause a good or evil action? How much roleplaying is that again? The problem isn't that the choices are clearly defined, the problem is that they have little consequence. This is one of the two bad things about ME2's RPG elements. It would be awesome if doing a good deed and letting a criminal go would have him come back to haunt you down later (perhaps join up with a later villain, making a later fight harder).

The other bad thing about Mass Effects RP is the Paragon/Renegade system, just like Yahtzee mentioned in his review. It discourages making roleplaying-choices in favor of making the choices that gives you the most points so you can use the right conversation options later.

 

[nuba km]

RPG stands for role playing game and in mass effect you role play and it's a game therefore mass effect is more of an RPG then final fantasy.

 

[Sephychu]

That guy Shepard? I'm totally playing his, or indeed her, role.
That should be enough, right? There are choices that have effects(one might even say Massive ones), and it's not just the same hammered out plotline as with many other games. I'd say it was an RPG, just not with the same level of depth as others.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Mass Effect 2s levelling system is "choose one power which you dont want to max out".

Mass Effect 1s levelling system is "choose from this list of powers where you want to specialise".

I already mentioned in a post above, I specialised in medical, tech, and minor biotic support for the rest of my squad.

In ME2 I maxed out all powers other than cryo blast and overload I believe (they are cloned as heavy weapons anyway), and spammed tech armour and used the assault rifle the game forced into my hands (or shotgun or sniper had I chosen them instead).

At end game in Mass Effect (level 60) a player has 102 points to spend. Each skill had 12 total tiers and there were 12 total skills per class for 144 points. A player thus had sufficient points to max 9 out of 12 total trees (3/4) which is the same ratio maintained in ME2. What's more, these included a pair of conversation skills (a feature maintained instead with the Paragon/Renegade system) and First Aid, a skill shared across the entire party at the highest level on a team. In ME1 a player was forced to eventually choose to specialize in charm or intimidate as the max level of either was determined by reaching certain thresholds in paragon or renegade anyhow. Given that first aid could be offset to a non player character easily enough, a player was thus only forced to choose to discard a single skill.

In other words, this argument falls flat not on the basis of interpretation but simple mathematical fact.

Im saying the characters in ME2 are poorly developed and are interchangeable.

Youve got Miranda reviving Shepard, and Mordin making the defense against the seeker swarms.

Other than that, you simply need a tech expert (Tali or Legion), a Biotic expert (Samara or Jack) and a loyal goon to escort any survivors. Bingo perfect ending.

All other characters occupy precisely NO unique role in the plot whatsoever. They hardly even acknowledge the suicide mission in the dialogue. Most of their character revolves around completing an option errand to get your squadmate working right.

From a plot perspective, you could swap most of the squad with specialised mechs and it would still pan out the same way. They are "objectives", not real characters occupying a unique role in a storyline, unlike in ME1, where Wrex is Wrex, Liara is Liara etc. The only time such banality occured is Ashley and Kaidan occupying the same role on Virmire, but even then it could force a unique outcome.

. This is entirely due to interpretation. I will not begrudge your interpretation of the cast of ME2 but will disagree nontheless.

Youre wasting your time here. Like ME2 all you want, but dont deny its dumbed down, streamlined, simplified, whatever, but the point is most of the game has been ripped out and replaced by cover shooting TPS combat.

I have not, even for a moment, denied that you lost granularity of choice (this is what you really mean when you say dumbed down incidentally). My argument has always been that the player lost no meaningful choice.

Regardless, the choice you lose is taking a weapon you have found, and gathering an assortment of upgrades and saying "right, I shall use this for this weapon". You could outfit an assault rifle for accuracy and synthetic killing. Outfit a shotgun for maximum power (using frictionless materials and explosive rounds was amazing). A pistol that negates radar jamming. A sniper that will massacre organics. Thats customisation in upgrading, and choice.

The choice assert exists is neither a choice nor is it meaningful. What you are doing is making a tactical assessment. Do you decided to use anti-organic rounds on a synthetic target? The rational answer is no. The one part (out of a possible 3) that changes this functionality is the ammunition and the only prohibition against swapping this as the situation dictates is one of convenience. The decision was given more weight in ME1 because it was more permanent but that permanency resulted in the player been less able to make the correct tactical decision.

The other upgrades I have covered at length anyhow. You even point out yourself that you favored maximum damage with the shotgun at the expense of everything else precisely because the game mechanics result in such a gambit being the favorable outcome.
In ME2 your choices are:

Do I use the shitty mining mini-game to gain an arbitrary incremental increase on said pistol/sniper/health, or do I ignore it and carry on just fine without it.

You interpret one minigame (the resource collection) as shitty but favor another (sorting through a menu and comparing integers). This is a problem of interpretation and you are perfectly free to disagree with me.

Dont bother denying it, those are the facts of ME1 and ME2. Flaws or no, those are the choices both games offer.

I will never deny a fact once it has been demonstrated to be fact. I will not begrudge an interpretation based solely on opinion. You have yet to demonstrate that your position is factual, and have yet to offer me evidence that your continued assertions are based on anything other than interpretation. You are free to not like the changes but to couch this in terms that say you lost meaningful and important choices continues to be silly in my eyes.

Absolutely. And that combat mechanic offered more freedom than "play me like Gears of War". Thats the issue here, and one that you should probably give up arguing against, because youre simply wrong.

I'm amazed by this point. You offer no explanation supporting your point and just outright say I'm wrong. I will bother with no further comment on this point until you at least do me the courtesy of supporting your point rather than arguing with all the skill and guile of a five year old.

No, neither games do this. Mass Effect 1 gives you agency over which unique characters will die. (3 of them to be precise)

Mass Effect 2 gives you agency over with interchangeable characters will die. (All but 2 of them if you want to survive, if not everyone is game)

. I seem to recall things differently. In ME1 the survival of an entire species weighs on your shoulders as does the structure of the galactic government. In ME2 you are given equivalent choices with the geth and the collector base.

These have as much impact on the narrative as anything I've ever seen a game do. That they might not impact the gameplay at any point is irrelevant in this regard.

Every single fucking game is defined by its mechanical elements. Its why we have genres in the first place. Its why there are romance films, action films, drama films.

Its why there are RTS games, FPS games, and RPG games. You can get all cosmopolitan and trendy with genres if you like, but that defeats the entire purpose. I was assured by the devs that their constant trumpeting about improving the shooter mechanics did not mean the rest of the game lost out on anything. They fucking lied.

This game completely failed to satisfy my RPG needs in what was sold to me, in 2007 and 2010 as a hybrid that has strong RPG leanings. What I got was little more than a TPS with minor RPG trappings thrown in as an afterthought.

I think this is a rather naive assertion. Yes, games are often classified by their mechanical elements but trying to assert that an RPG is defined solely by these things is a damn hard argument to make. To illustrate this point, here are four games universally recognized to be RPGs:
Morrowind
The Witcher
Fallout 2
Planescape: Torment

Fallout 2 relied on a turn based system at it's core and all actions were judged based upon dice rolls the computer made. Planescape Torment was semi real time (in that the game could be paused at any moment while actions were chosen) but maintained the dice rolls behind the scenes that determined the ultimate outcome of a given action. Morrowind give players a new perspective and was played in real time and offered the player the ability to directly influence the outcome of a scenario through personal skill but the ultimate outcome of an attack was still based largely on dice rolls. The Witcher discards the notion of dice rolls and places primary value upon the player's ability to execute an action.

These four games are dramatically different at a mechanical level and yet are all considered to be RPGs. This is precisely why I say that the RPG is not defined by it's mechanical elements but rather by granting a player agency over their character and the narrative. For the record, this can take the form of mechanical systems (as I pointed out in the post dealing with that point) but there are plenty of other ways available as well. Indeed, in the post dealing with that I even pointed out that though a game could be called an RPG if it met a single criteria, the more criteria it met the more often it would be judged to be an RPG.

 

[Warachia]

leveling up, inventory, and combat are NOT what makes an RPG, an RPG is theability to ROLE-PLAY, which the game does nicely.

I'm sorry but that is just plain wrong.

An RPG is not just about roleplay. Since you people like to go back to the DnD roots with this stuff, I'll explain it through that.

You can't just go through a RPG with just roleplaying alone, there are 2 major parts to a PnP RPG:

1) Character Roleplaying - you make your character and class, and you follow what he or she might do, even if it goes against the rest of a group. ie~ You being a paladin and having to go and save someone because of your background even though the rest of the group says no

2) Number Crunching - You CAN NOT have a RPG without the number crunching. It is an essential part of the RPG experience because it determines how well you can actually roleplay (ie. bluff checks, thievery checks, arcana checks, etc) as well as determining how well you do in battle.

So yes, Leveling up, inventory, and combat ARE an essential part of what makes an RPG an RPG, most JRPGs take that route while WRPGs take the Character Roleplaying route. So in this case, Mass Effect 2 is as much an RPG as Final Fantasy XIII is, allowing lots of RPG elements in one area but little in the other.

And that is where I strongly disagree, you CAN have an RPG without number crunching, I should have been clearer in specifying character Roleplaying, everything after your first point is an RPG ELEMENT, which you don't need to have an experience where you choose what you personally do in the game.

EDIT: also, everything after your first point only describes a certain type of RPG whereas there are many others out there.

 

[Daedalus1942]

Take a long time to think about the term RPG.Role playing Game.ME2 is a game and you play a role.A role you can choose.
Nowhere in this term does it say you need an inventory,stats,and a skill tree.
Don't get me wrong,I prefered the ME1 style of RPG than ME2,and I love RPGs in the traditional sense,but labeling ME2 NOT an RPG because it doesn't take the same approach as other games is stupid,especially since it stays true to the very name of RPG.

Mass effect 2 really is more of a 3rd person shooter with incredibly light rpg elements (there's like 3 of them and even one them, the levelling up is story based not experienced based).
Mass effect definately had several rpg elements and light 3ps shooting elements but it had some good ideas.
The Mako was a joy to ride, it just needed tweaking in terms of the planets exploration and maybe having more than only 3 or 4 important locations on a planet would have helped.
The inventory also just needed tweaking, but instead what do they do with these two ideas?
Completely junked them, and made the inventory impossible to go back and grab something if you fucked up, then they brought in this supposed "streamlined exploration system"... Yeah, streamlined, because we all enjoyed scanning for 3-4 hours right? -.-
-Tabs<3-

 

[GiantRaven]

Yep I was lack and white. I cant see how people can even struggle to choose when BW actually put them into catagories.
Paragons are the good idealistic guys, who are never punished, so you always get an outcome where everyone can hold hands and skip off into the sunset.
Renegades, are the racist, brute characters who just like explosions and killing things. ME2 scar system showed they get fucked, and thats a minor thing.

You say that Paragon choices are 'good' choices and Renegade choices are the 'bad' choices but, to me, the Renegade choice in the Legion loyalty mission is more right than the Paragon choice. Does that mean it is 100% the right thing to do? Of course not! Both solutions to the problem have their own moralistic pros and cons.

Yeah, streamlined, because we all enjoyed scanning for 3-4 hours right? -.-

People scanned that much? I probably only did planet scanning for an hour or so and I had enough resources to buy all of the ship upgrades or whatnot.

 

[Pillypill]

A lot of people say ME2 isn't an RPG but it is. All that ROLE PLAYING Mass Effect 2 has you do, makes it one.

It's just bare bones in the departments we've come to associate RPGs with, which is why i always think that the people who don't class ME2 as an RPG, have only ever played things like TES or Diablo in the past.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

After further consideration, I think I may have identified what the problem is here. The inventory clutter in Mass Effect helped disguise the simple fact that the decision facing the player was a simple calculation. While stripping away this clutter does not alter the fundamental nature of the decision being being made it does make it more obvious to the player that they are not making a choice but rather a caluclation.

 

[D_987]

First and foremost this is the last quote I'm responding to; as fun as this topic is to discuss being quoted twice every minute is getting boring, to the point I'm just deleting quotes without reading them...

First of all, the choices in ME2 isn't as much about good/bad as it is about "Badass" vs. "Diplomat". It's perfectly possible to make Renegade choices that can be considered good and vice versa.

Renegade choices could be considered good by your moral standards yes, but not by the games - hence the Paragon and Renegade system.

Making moral choices under (time)pressure makes your actions reflect your real-life character more since you have less time to think.

But you're not making decisions under a time limit, you're hitting a QTE to determine if your response will be good, bad or non-existent. You don't know what Shepard is going to say when you hit the button - it's not a reflection of reality, or even role-playing [other than I'm playing the good guy or the bad guy] it's just a poorly implemented system.

To quote yourself from the next paragraph "How do you expect to roleplay if you don't know what a given dialogue line or choice makes your character do?"

Also calling the system bad because it has a clearly defined good/bad choices is just a terrible argument.

Is it though? The Witcher had the same sort of system, only no choice was perceived to be "good" or "bad", players made their own minds up, and the system is far superior to Bioware's games for that reason alone.

This is one of the two bad things about ME2's RPG elements. It would be awesome if doing a good deed and letting a criminal go would have him come back to haunt you down later (perhaps join up with a later villain, making a later fight harder).

I agree.

The other bad thing about Mass Effects RP is the Paragon/Renegade system, just like Yahtzee mentioned in his review. It discourages making roleplaying-choices in favor of making the choices that gives you the most points so you can use the right conversation options later.

I also agree, though it's for this reason I believe your first comment to be inaccurate.

 

[KalosCast]

I would like someone to explain as to why whether or not Mass Effect deserves the RPG tag even matters. Both the Shooter and RPG genres are so isanely broad and ill-defined that even CoD multiplayer(the game RPG fanboys love to use to point out how dumb the unwashed shooter fans are) is pretty much the essence of an action RPG set in the first person. It's a stupidly broad and ill-defined genre that we really need to stop treating like a single group.

Honestly, the anti-RPG camp sounds like "I didn't like ME2, but I love RPGs. Therefore, ME2 is not an RPG."

From a Tabletop gamer perspective, there are probably less than 10 major-release games that have come out within the last decade that could be considered to have actual RPing in them.

 

[GiantRaven]

I would like someone to explain as to why whether or not Mass Effect deserves the RPG tag even matters.

Simple, it doesn't matter in the slightest. At this point the thread feels like argument for arguments sake (not that that is a bad thing, it can lead to some interesting points being made).

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

By your standards Half-Life 2 is an RPG then - since in ME you really don't get the kind of character freedom a lot of people claim [you're still clamped to the story after all and Shepard can't dot hings to out of chaarcter] whilst in Half Life the player is meant to project their own image onto Gordon Freemon. Hence the problem with this argument, and indeed any argument, that an RPG is a game you specifically "role play" a character in...

I really don't care about Half-Life. I really hate that mute character, I cannot project a character/story like I do with Morrowind, an equally mute character.

Shepard might be pre-determined and all that stuff, but I had fun shaping my own face and acting in a high/paragon manner, because that is me. For me, his lines represented me or the image I had 90% of the time. I sometimes love closed games/situations rather than open ones, makes me feel involved.

wow someone i actually completely agree with in both parts of the opinion.

OT: mass effect 2 might not be a traditional rpg, but it is an rpg nonetheless, and regardless of the label i loved both games (i think i liked the first one a bit moreso, but me2's characters were pretty polished and badass)

i hope for me3 they do somewhat of a hybrid of me1 and me2, i think that would be the perfect balance.

 

[meowchef]

It is an RPG. There is no debate against it.

 

[Imbechile]

As someone who has only recently completed both games, I would call Mass Effect2 a Shooter with some RPG elements, but i wouldn't call it an RPG.
Mass Effect 1, on the other hand, as poorly as those RPG elements were implemented, there is much more RPG in ME1.
My main question is why did they cut the RPG elements instead of improving them ?
I loved both games but IMO, ME1 is better. ME2 had too much fucking combat. In ME1 the mako riding was annoing at times, but it still beats the crap out of resource mining.

 

[GiantRaven]

I loved both games but IMO, ME1 is better. ME2 had too much fucking combat. In ME1 the mako riding was annoing at times, but it still beats the crap out of resource mining.

I'm on the other side of the coin here. There may be a lot more combat in Mass Effect 2 but at least it wasn't the ridiculously irritating combat of the first game. And the resource mining may be somewhat simple and tedious but at least it wasn't the godawful driving sections of the first game.

Opinions FTW! =D