Saelune said:
Its the direction the game took that bothers me. It became more of an action shooter. The addition of multiplayer also bugs me, and Andromeda seems to be really pushing it more.
When I praise ME1 and criticize the rest, it is not like I dont think ME1 cant be improved. Better exploration and environments, deeper interactions, etc. I wanted them to be improved not neglected. It became less an RPG and more a shooter.
I can understand disliking the multiplayer; the strange thing was that it was actually surprisingly good, and I hated that it was. That meant that EA was, of course, going to try to make lightning strike twice with subsequent games, and even games in different series (Dragon Age: Inquisition was guilty of this). To be fair, though, I would never have tried ME3's multiplayer if it didn't force me to play it in order to get the "best" ending after I first got it, and that was a cardinal sin that was way worse than the ending until Bioware fixed it. It was a shitty way to get me to experience a surprisingly good thing.
I still hated that it had multiplayer, though, even though I had way more fun playing it than I thought I would.
But anyway, personally I would argue that ME2 and 3 became more of
both a shooter and an RPG. I missed the exploration that the Mako provided, but I saw that mostly as a technical limitation; I don't think that Bioware simply axed it in order to make the game more user-friendly (correct me if I'm wrong here). They didn't get it right the first time, and they couldn't get it right with the engine and resources available to them, so they cut it. In exchange, you got smoother gunplay, those deeper interactions you talked about, and a better, more interesting story that expanded upon what happened in previous games.
The "RPG" part implies an emphasis on character interaction, story, and growth, and the next two games had that in spades (only to trip at the finish line, but that's a topic for another thread). A game being an RPG doesn't mean that it has to be slow-paced, tedious, and needlessly complicated, with things like a slowly-growing skill tree and horrible inventory management.
That's why I've always been baffled at the success of games like Pillars of Eternity and Torment: Tides of Numenera. On paper, I should really like those games, but playing them is such a slog of unnecessary micromanagement, I couldn't make it much farther than the first major dungeon. That was the chief problem that Mass Effect 1 had, and it blows my mind that people actually want that back.
To each their own, I suppose.
