Thanatos5150 said:
spartan231490 said:
Between this and the continued "stream-lining" (read: dumbing down) of this series, I really don't think I will even play ME3.
Please explain, in detail, the nature of this complaint to me. Please. I Want to understand where you're coming from.
(On another note, bugs will always exist in programmes.)
The dumbing down argument? It's been covered pretty well elsewhere, but I will try to point out the specific things that bugged me.
The armor and weapon system. I thought that the organization of the ME1 menu was horrible, but the armor choices added a level of depth. Some people say that there was always one "best armor" and that choice was meaningless. This doesn't hold out with my experience. You usually had an armor that had high shields and high armor values, and almost no tech/biotic protection, and another that had high shields and high tech/biotic, and pretty often you had one that just had ridiculously high shields, and low everything else. I played the ridiculously high shield armor all the time, because it fit the style of my character. They should have revised the menu of the system, not taken the inventory system out entirely. Same with weapons, you usually had a choice of comparable weapons with one having the most shots before overheating, one having the most damage, and one having the most accuracy. These were choices that could complement or even define the combat style used by your character, which really added another layer of depth for me.
Thermal clips, completely defeats the idea of a weapon that needs no ammo but can overheat. It was so much cooler to have to control your overall rate of fire, then just to reload like in every other shooter ever.
My favorite part of ME1 was the way the retical expanded while firing. It made it more realistic and immersive, and less repetitive, than the traditional perfect aim you see in shooters, where recoil seems to have no effect whatsoever. This was taken out in ME2.
The smaller list of powers to choose from and the global cool-down took away a lot of options and combinations, and generally made your party weaker. Especially when you're in a tough fight with low cover, if you have to keep rezing party members, you basically can't use any of your main characters powers, because you need to be able to rez without waiting for a cool-down.
ME1 felt like an RPG, there were flaws but instead of addressing them and fixing for ME2, they just removed the systems entirely, pidgen-holeing the player into set styles of play. ME2 had really fun smooth combat, but it felt like a shooter, a limited shooter at that, not an RPG. As someone who loves the RPG feel of ME1, as well as the different ideas they tried like the expanding retical and the lack of a need to reload, I was very disappointed by the cowardly approach they took to ME2. Instead of expanding on the innovative ideas and fixing the unwieldy menu systems of ME1, they just took the easy way out and removed everything that made ME1 unique and fun, leaving behind a disappointing futuristic shooter. Even the level design in ME2 was more linear, leaving only one or at most 2 ways to move through the levels. In several ME1 levels, there were so many forks and interconnected paths that I would often get slightly lost, and I loved that about ME1.