No "Meaningless Stat Games" in Mass Effect 3

[LaughingJester]

A little curious how this will come off in the end product... I am not looking for a 'Gears 3 clone'

i quite like that I can get things done without having to blast my way through every cantina

 

[Jabberwock King]

Here's what I'm wondering

Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, whatever, we get it, combat is more fluid and smooth and whatever.

What about the non-combat aspects? I want to know where I'll be traveling, will vehicles return? Will these still be linear corridors? What customization options do I have? Who is on my side and who isn't? What is the state of the Citadel and the Council in the wake of Earth's invasion? C'mon, it's supposed to be a friggin' Space Opera, not another action-packed blockbuster as much as we may love those at times!

My thoughts exactly. All of these announcements about Mass Effect's combat are making me nervous. Gears of War and Call of Duty are where we go when we want mindless shooting, Bioware games are where we go when we want messy moral decisions and fantastic and creative environments.

Get that straight, Bioware.

How are messy moral decisions and fantastic and creative environments mutually exclusive with shooting from behind chest-high walls?

They're not, I just feel that BioWare have been unnecessarily pumping up the combat to their game when they've given us little information about anything else. It's great they have more stramlined combat, whatever, I don't care about that right now, I want the juicier bits to this.

I'm willing to guess the story's still going to be most of the content - their marketing team probably just figures that anyone who's likely to be into the game for the story doesn't need to be pitched to. Even if you look at something like DA2, which was widely considered "dumbed down," they focused mostly on the story (at the expense of the environments lol).

I believe I saw somewhere that Bioware was opting to keep major story points under wraps for development. If you look back on how much information from ME2's plot was revealed before release, you'd notice that it covered over half of the story. Admittedly, most of the story was wrapped up with squad recruitment and loyalty missions, and with the squad's co-operation in the suicide mission being one of the major selling points for the game, they had to focus on it. Judging from that, Bioware wants to spoil as little of ME3's story as possible for promotional purposes. So if they restrict that, they will have to focus on gameplay features instead.

Spoiler

I recall the only things I really didn't know until I played the game were the origins of the collectors and the space station at the center of the galaxy growing a 100 ft. tall Terminator

 

[pearcinator]

LOL Mass Effect 3 is getting a lot of hate recently...

Honestly, this thread is about getting rid of meaningless upgrades? Im happy with that!

I reckon E3 will get people more excited again, people just seem to find something to nit-pick about and recently its Mass Effect 3. Tune in next week and itll be about [blank] being less [blank] and more like [blank]

 

[uc.asc]

the whole stupid

Reapers are made from

Spoiler

PEOPLE!!1!!!oneone!!

thing is so scholcky it could easily come from a bad 80s 3d movie

It is sort of corny, and I have a nasty suspicion that it was retconned during the making of ME2 rather than being part of the idea from the beginning. I would have preferred that the reapers remain inscrutable, though after thinking about the idea for a bit I did concluded that it's an interesting mechanic. If you play with the idea for a while you can end up coming to some interesting conclusions, including that the reapers may actually be the good guys.

 

[Zhukov]

By the sounds of it it's basically going to be ME2's combat with some minor tweaks.

I completely approve. In my book, actual gameplay beats adding 1.5% to my open-a-bloody-box ability any day.

EDIT: Wow. The rage is still strong in this one. But I notice that it is slowing morphing from blind rage to slightly reasonable rage. That's nice to see.

 

[Lt. Vinciti]

TO THE ESCAPE PODS!

SS Mass Effect is coming out of orbit...


After watching Dragon Age II fall over...did you really expect ME3 to not take a deathdive?

Seems Bioware is so pumped on The Old Republic that they can fuck over their own games and can recover the loss they will take with this dead franchises...

 

[unacomn]

Here's the thing. If you take stats out of combat in a game with little to no non-combat usage for stats, you're left with a shooter combined with an adventure game.

 

[Jabberwock King]

I'm so glad that my love of leveling, looting, and tactics is now relegated to "meaningless stat games".

I understand how it is easy to interpret it that way, but I think that the point this statement was trying to make is quite the opposite from what you're thinking. I will concede my next statement as appearing optimistic, but I feel I have good reason to say it.

What Christina Norman is probably trying to say, is that all the things you already love are not "meaningless numbers", and that they will be implemented in a way that has a noticeable impact. For example, adding points into a biotic pull in ME2 had the useful effect of suspending the enemy in the air for a longer period of time as well as pulling them with more force, quickly changing the unit's position.

Maybe. She could have been more helpful. It seems that their goal is to make ME3 as vague and slightly threatening as possible.

Being this far away from launch, that is to be expected. I feel it safe to say that more favorable details will surface as the release date approaches, saving some exciting tidbits shortly before to boost attention for potential buyers.

 

[Drake_Dercon]

I mourn the loss of RPG elements in an RPG.

I bought a f**king ROLEPLAYING game. Where did this shooter come from?

That's what I'll say if they lied and their non-specific roleplaying elements never happened.

Personally, I liked the ME2 minigames, I don't think they should be left out, especially since they added to the game. But everything should be useful in combat. It really bothers me when I have to forego training a stat I like because I want to stay alive.

 

[Fr]anc[is]

Same rage, same keywords, same comments, same everything as every other Mass Effect 'discussion'. I don't even know why I keep reading them, they'll be getting my money.

 

[teknoarcanist]

Yeesh, people like to overreact up in here.

RPG's are great.

Shooters are great.

ME had a toe in each pool, and not in a way that worked particularly well. 2 was a step in the right direction -- and while I lamented the lack of depth for squad-oriented tactics (ie Dragon Age 2) I think it worked well for what it was aiming to be.

I honestly just read this as: "You will no longer miss what was clearly a well-aimed shot because the 'miss' randomizer triggered."

 

[Sniper Team 4]

Can I use more than one power at a time? If I can, I'm happy. If I can't, then I'm going to be annoyed with combat just like I was in Mass Effect 2. What's the point of having all this powers if when you use one, by the time it cools down and you can use another, the fight is already over? One of the things I LOVED about Mass Effect was that I could send legions (see what I did there?) if Geth flying because I could use many different powers at once. Mass Effect 2, not so much.

 

[Duskflamer]

RPG's are great.

Shooters are great.

I like RPGs.
I do not particularly like Shooters.
Were it up to me, ME3 would be much more toward the RPG side than the Shooter side. It seems they're going for the opposite. Thus I am upset.

 

[IceStar100]

I'll give it a chance but I won't fall to hype. I will how ever find it funny if both KOTOR and M3 fail. If for no other reason to see the I told you so and you know EA will disband Bioware afer a 3rd strike. Yes the numbers hw DA2 has not been doing well.

 

[Korolev]

Now that is a bit troubling. Taking away "meaningless" stats sound suspiciously like "we're taking away everything stat related". The thing is, they already mostly did that in Mass Effect 2. So..... what else could they take away? Accuracy stats? Already gone. Hit point stats? Pretty much gone as well - your HP just goes up with your character "rank" and level. Weapons stats? Again, ME2 already doesn't have that sort of stuff.

I've never been a very big fan of Stats and stuff, but taking it away would pretty much remove all sense of RPG. If you take away stats entirely and just have different "Classes", how is that much different than a COD load-out? I hope they're not going down that road.

Having said that - I haven't played Mass Effect 3. I'm not going to pass judgement on a game I haven't played. If they do remove stats entirely (and that's not what they said, but I have a suspicion that is what they are aiming for), they had better massively improve the shooting and character-action elements.

And combat mechanics are more or less directly separated from story mechanics. I have to be honest - I wasn't that much a fan of how ME1 played. I loved ME1 purely due to the story, universe, characters, choices and the feeling of immersion. In my opinion, ME1's combat was pretty awful (although towards the end of the game it became ridiculously easy - 2x Frictionless material X + Spectre Weapons + Soldier Class = always win at everything). ME2's combat was significantly better, but again, that's not why I played ME2 - I played it for the characters and the universe and the feeling of immersion.

So even if they mess up the combat and the combat mechanics and the levelling up mechanics and the loot mechanics and the invetory stuff - as long as they get the story right, that's all I really care about. I suffered gladly through ME1's atrocious controls and inventory system for its fantastic story. So long as they don't go "alpha-protocol-yeah-it's-broken" on us, I still think I'll enjoy Mass Effect 3.

 

[brodie21]

anybody wonder if they are talking about the collecting resources and scanning keepers? makes sense, if you are racing against time why the fuck do you have to collect resources?

 

[Eldarion]

Here's the thing. If you take stats out of combat in a game with little to no non-combat usage for stats, you're left with a shooter combined with an adventure game.

Thats what mass effect was from day one.

 

[Mxrz]

I'm all for it.

Give me a honest FPS game with Bioware storytelling. Mixing "stats" into FPS mechanics is almost always going to make for clunky combat. It's better to just drop the pretense and do things right.

 

[Thatkidnooneknows]

Oh look, more people complaining about this game before it comes out. At least wait until we're somewhere close to the release date before you get your panties all in a bunch

 

[Alpha Maeko]

Stop raging.

One major problem Bioware fixed from ME1 to ME2 was the fact that, since enemies scaled according to your level, you could never really get a distinct advantage by upgrading your weapons (unless you found something exceptionally higher than what enemies would drop, as with Spectre weapons). ME2 fixed this by not constantly upgrading from weapon to weapon within the same category.

Again, though, ME2 had this same unnecessary scaling with the "+X% damage" bonuses in ME2: enemies still scaled and scaled according to your approximate power, so instead of your base weapon actually getting any stronger, all of the other weapons would get weaker over time.

From the sounds of it ME3 is going to skip all of this and go for a Call of Duty-style talent and experience system, which - in all honesty - is probably going to be the best place to take it. Whats the point of a stat system when the entire difference is doing 10 hp against an enemy with 100 at the start of the game, and 100hp against an enemy with 1000 at the end of the game?

I agree, entirely.

The enemies-scaling-according-to-you factor removes the feeling of progress. In my opinion, easy, normal, and hard difficulties should only effect how enemies behave. Constantly raising the enemies health and defenses so that it still takes you 2 clips of ammo to kill them- regardless of how much you've progressed or upgraded your weapon- is almost pointless.