Hit the nail on the head here; its the exploration. Zelda's main appeal is in its exploration, which it does relatively uniquely compared to most other exploration games.CritialGaming said:
Most exploration games give you a large area, and tell you to walk around it, and that's your "exploration". Games such as Skyrim, which are lauded for their exploration, are very much like this. The thing is, there's more to exploration than just walking around a big open area.
Enter Zelda. Zelda has layers on layers of exploration. The top level is obviously the 'walk around and see stuff' exploration, mapping out the world and the dungeons. With all areas being hand designed, unlike games like Skyrim where many are procedurally generated or cut and paste, it is often more engaging to come across a new area, as it is totally new.
After that we've got the puzzles and secrets in the game. The game encourages you to, and rewards you for, trying everything, going everywhere, and doing things that aren't always intuitive - like running into a solid wall. It'll also often give you some vague clue - like the sound of a golden spider, a comment about an item you need to unlock, or a picture of a part of an island, and let you figure out where you need to go to get the reward.
Then there's mechanical exploration. The bosses, the puzzles in dungeons, and outside of them, different enemy types - while all simple puzzles, as honestly they should be because making core parts of the game difficult will turn off a lot of people, they all encourage you to experiment with your equipment and gameplay mechanics, to explore the options available to you. In the newer games they've started dropping some pretty heavy hints as to what to do, but they're often somewhat optional, and in the older titles all you'd have is an unlit torch half the dungeon away, a lit one next to you, and a bow and arrow. Nobody tells you that you can light the torch with a flaming arrow by shooting through the first one. You just try it, and find out.
Then there's the pacing of locations. Locations are gated off by the requirement to get an item, or a skill, of some sort. However, often many of these locations are encounterable before you have that item, located around the are you should be exploring in small numbers. This gives the player something to look forward to, and stops dungeons from becoming 'just check another off the list' where you grind through them as quickly as possible. They're almost another puzzle as to the order you do them in, and being unable to do a dungeon now creates anticipation before acquiring the necessary item, and brings a sense of accomplishment once you have acquired it and remembered to go back to that location.
There's also more to go into such as their use of negative possibility space to give rewards, and a whole bunch else, but lets not go into a full breakdown.
A lot of this is pretty simple stuff, in all honesty, but that's also the beauty of it. It doesn't need to be complicated. Despite how simple it is, most 'exploration' games won't do the same, or to near the same extent. And that's probably half of the 'feel' that Zelda games have, and why many love them.
Of course this doesn't make them immune from criticism, but hey, that's another topic.
The problem with this is that most people, and including nearly all of the review audience, and often the reviewer themselves, actually lack a level of game design literacy required to appropriately critique the game. For example, 'if it is a fun gameplay loop' is again highly subjective, as is 'how easy they are to use, satisfying to use, and whether they add anything to the experience'.CritialGaming said:
These can all be properly talked about in a somewhat objective fashion through game design principles, however oftentimes the reviewer doesn't actually know these principles, and neither do their audience. Talking on that sort of level also has a bit of a stigma of being 'pretentious' at current time, with a more academic view of games being viewed as just 'reading too much into it', or 'focusing on unimportant details'.
Most can only talk vaguely, about whether they personally enjoyed it or found it fun, and that's where a lot of this problem comes from - if a reviewer finds the game really fucking good, then it'll receive a score based almost entirely on how the reviewer felt about the game [7/10, too much water], as opposed to any level of objective criticism from analysing the story, themes, and mechanics and how they interplay at a design level to create the experience.
ME3 is extremely controversial for a reason. For a huge number of people, it wasn't 89 hours of fun and 1 hour of disappointment. The entire game was disappointing.
Warning: Wall of text
Firstly, its important to establish Context. ME3 wasn't a singular game entity. It was a continuation of the Mass Effect series. Were the game to be a first installment in a new IP, it wouldn't be worthy of as much praise, or as much criticism, as it would not have the context backing it up to do so, and could be judged entirely on its own merits. As a continuation of the ME franchise, however, it must be judged on how it fits into the franchise, as well as its own individual merits.
First up, gameplay. Combat is the best in the series. That said, its far from perfect.
Enemy variety is a plus, with many different enemies, each with fairly unique methods of attack. Most of the time the way you'd engage them would come down to the same basic dodge -> turn -> shoot loop, but that is probably inevitable given the heavy focus on shooting, and lesser focus on the RPG side of mechanics, that the game pushed for.
Abilities are simultaneously improved from 2, yet they suffer from a new problem arising from the new enemy variety; lower utility. Each class having a second 'unique' ability that has its own separate cooldown was a good move, and these abilities usually synergise quite well with the original unique ability. However, where Mass Effect 2 had various robots, or drones, or other such enemies with a small amount of unique health that could quickly be wiped out by a small AoE 'discharge' or similar, the greater enemy variety in 3, and increased tankiness of many enemies, means that such abilities are more often simply part of a continual assault on an enemy, rather than a strategic boost to your abilities.
This is also exemplified by the new equipment system. While the best equipment system in the series, it is wholly unbalanced. Or, more to the point, balanced to encourage ability spam on caster classes, rather than strategic use of abilities. It is very simple to, by the end of the game, have your ability cooldown on a caster class be <1 second. The abilities are likewise balanced around being spammed like this, creating classes that rather than spamming bullets, spam abilities. Mixed classes benefit from this, with things like the Vanguard's charge being a unique and fun way to engage enemies, however caster classes feel like a missed opportunity to deliver a different feel to gameplay - which should be the entire point to having a caster class - where use of your abilities should be measured and strategic, rather than rapid fire, providing a contrast to the hectic run and gun normal gameplay.
Level design for combat is largely good, with verticality now being included more thoroughly, and levels being a mix of choke points and open areas that allow for different approaches to combat based on player preference, however it still lacks true range to engagements, or any meaningful pre-engagement period to allow for planning and preparation, instead focusing on simply dropping more and more enemies onto you and having you react. While this is similar to ME2s gameplay, ME1s longer distance engagements, and the pre-combat period they created, were a plus side to the game, despite the other faults of the combat system.
Gameplay outside of the combat, however, took a plunge. This is for two main reasons; Firstly, Bioware attempted to tell a cinematic story moreso than any of the previous games, at the cost of player agency and the player's own character, and secondly because the game is constantly stuck between wanting to be a hurried push to save Earth, and a slower paced experience where the player has the freedom to explore the game world.
First off, Bioware's hijacking of the player character. One of the core appeals of the Mass Effect franchise has always been its RPG nature, where the player gets to create their own Shepard, and play through the series as their character - making choices for them, justifying their thinking, and essentially being inserted into the role of Shepard fully. A major part of this is through the gameplay of the dialogue system, and the various choices available to Shepard. While often these choices are the same line when spoken, and very similar even when written, the very act of being able to choose engages the player more with Shepard, and helps identify him as their character - he won't do something unless they choose to do it. ME3 breaks this covenant, instead turning Shepard into Bioware's character. Almost all of Shepard's interactions run automatically, with no option in what to say. Occasionally, Shepard will run into one or two choices as to what he can say, however these moments are less to connect the player to their Shepard, and more to attempt to allow 'choices' so that the player can succeed or fail in the war score part of the game. Additionally, the thoughts of Shepard were hijacked by Bioware as well to attempt to force sympathy with a young child that dies at the start of the game, to try and add more weight to the ending scene and so called 'Star Child'. This backfires, however, as it is so heavy handed, and is forced upon players who's idea of their Shepard does not include such sympathy, that it simply disconnects players from the character, and causes them to innately dislike Star Child, making the ending even less enjoyable for them. While all of this may have worked in a non Mass Effect game, the fact that this game is part of the Mass Effect franchise, and a direct continuation of the story established in 1 and 2, as well as a continuation of the Shepard character, results in a conflict between the series and its core appeal, and ME3, and what it attempts to do differently.
Secondly, the constant struggle between hurried quest, and leisurely exploration. This appears in many areas, and is a running theme of the faults with the game. Its affects on gameplay are fairly myriad. Firstly, something minor. Sidequests. A number of sidequests in the game are acquired simply by standing around and eavesdropping on someone. This was likely done to create a flow where Shepard wouldn't need to stop and talk to every Joe standing around on the street, and could hurry on with saving the world. It succeeds at this. However, it also results in Shepard just standing around on the side of the street doing nothing for a few minutes so the player can figure out what on Earth they actually have to do, and it also wouldn't be something the player would expect to give them a quest without the popup telling them they have a new one to complete. It feels incongruous with the slow exploration side of things - which is largely the whole reason the sidequests even exist - in order to try and push the faster pace. On top of this, is the Citadel as the only hub. This is likely done in order to reduce time spent exploring hubs, and increase time spent fighting the enemy. This works. At the same time, however, there is a fair bit of exploring to be done on the Citadel, and you can waste a lot of time there doing small sidequests, which results in a conflict between the two goals. The spaceflight and exploration system also suffers from this. It attempts to maintain the exploration system from ME2, of manual flight and scanning around a system [Now in space rather than on a planet], however throws in the Reapers to try and add a sense of urgency to things. Sadly, however, the Reapers are easily exploitable - intentionally, to allow for exploration to be completed - and thus the urgency they attempt to provide in service of 'save the world quickly' simply turns into grind so that the exploration side isn't too heavily compromised. Many of these problems could simply be incompetence, however I'd rather give the designers more credit than that, and instead believe they were simply stuck between two conflicting drives in the game, and failed to reconcile them properly. While DA:I managed to take an open world game, and allow the player to explore and do sidequests without too much feeling like they were wasting time from the 'save the world' main quests, ME3 accomplished the opposite, and made the player feel like that in a mostly linear game.
On a side note, the War Score system was a bad idea. The appeal and promise of Mass Effect as a franchise was in seeing your choices have consequences. The War Score system was a way for Bioware not to track the choices you made and remind you of them, but to do away with the need to actually have consequences for your choices or impact the game in any way - it all simply comes down to a numerical abstraction. This was a failure to deliver on the core premise of Mass Effect, broke numerous statements made even after the game had 'gone gold', and honestly was probably the source of the biggest overall set of problems in the game. Additionally, it was balanced in such a way as to encourage players to play the multiplayer system, which reduced the amount that it added to the experience, and instead increased a sense of grind. I could go into more depth on this, but god damn this is going to be long enough already.
As another aside, boss fights were awful. Two words; Kai Leng. I think that's all the detail that's needed, everyone already understands that bullshit.
Writing wise the game oscillated between mediocre and downright terrible. Honestly, it read more like a teenage Fan Fiction than a professional installment in the Mass Effect Franchise.
Firstly, the good. Characters were written reasonably well. While they lacked the sheer weight of personality they had in Mass Effect 2, or the thematic symbolism and deep references afforded to them in ME1, they weren't badly written, and served their purpose reasonably well. Additionally, there were a number of good scenes with heavy references to the previous games that engaged the player, and offered resolution to a number of character arcs that were still open.
The bad though... For one, Kai Leng. Gameplay wise; horrible. Story wise; horrible. He really just should not have been a thing. Outside that, the plot on the whole is just unbelievably flawed. It relies on a magical macguffin that has never before been hinted at or introduced, that just happens by coincidence to be discovered at the exact moment its needed, in order to both drive the story, and resolve it. Everything to do with this thing makes no sense. Additionally, while the Reapers are the supposed big bad, Cerberus is the true main big bad that you encounter throughout 90% of the game. They make ridiculously stupid moves, and several characters act out of character in order to force this. Some of that can come down to indoctrination, however it isn't just a free pass. The number of retcons in the game in order to have no player miss out on any part of the experience is... painful. The story also ends on a deus ex machina, and fails to address any of its core themes. In fact, it tries to introduce 3 new themes in the last five minutes, and have you pick one, despite the themes not even really being related. People have gone into enough detail on this before, but even outside the ending the plot is all sorts of just bad.
Graphics wise the game was honestly a step down from ME2. Some of the special effects were improved, however models and animation and synchronisation between animation and voice were... Pretty bad.
First up, gameplay. Combat is the best in the series. That said, its far from perfect.
Enemy variety is a plus, with many different enemies, each with fairly unique methods of attack. Most of the time the way you'd engage them would come down to the same basic dodge -> turn -> shoot loop, but that is probably inevitable given the heavy focus on shooting, and lesser focus on the RPG side of mechanics, that the game pushed for.
Abilities are simultaneously improved from 2, yet they suffer from a new problem arising from the new enemy variety; lower utility. Each class having a second 'unique' ability that has its own separate cooldown was a good move, and these abilities usually synergise quite well with the original unique ability. However, where Mass Effect 2 had various robots, or drones, or other such enemies with a small amount of unique health that could quickly be wiped out by a small AoE 'discharge' or similar, the greater enemy variety in 3, and increased tankiness of many enemies, means that such abilities are more often simply part of a continual assault on an enemy, rather than a strategic boost to your abilities.
This is also exemplified by the new equipment system. While the best equipment system in the series, it is wholly unbalanced. Or, more to the point, balanced to encourage ability spam on caster classes, rather than strategic use of abilities. It is very simple to, by the end of the game, have your ability cooldown on a caster class be <1 second. The abilities are likewise balanced around being spammed like this, creating classes that rather than spamming bullets, spam abilities. Mixed classes benefit from this, with things like the Vanguard's charge being a unique and fun way to engage enemies, however caster classes feel like a missed opportunity to deliver a different feel to gameplay - which should be the entire point to having a caster class - where use of your abilities should be measured and strategic, rather than rapid fire, providing a contrast to the hectic run and gun normal gameplay.
Level design for combat is largely good, with verticality now being included more thoroughly, and levels being a mix of choke points and open areas that allow for different approaches to combat based on player preference, however it still lacks true range to engagements, or any meaningful pre-engagement period to allow for planning and preparation, instead focusing on simply dropping more and more enemies onto you and having you react. While this is similar to ME2s gameplay, ME1s longer distance engagements, and the pre-combat period they created, were a plus side to the game, despite the other faults of the combat system.
Gameplay outside of the combat, however, took a plunge. This is for two main reasons; Firstly, Bioware attempted to tell a cinematic story moreso than any of the previous games, at the cost of player agency and the player's own character, and secondly because the game is constantly stuck between wanting to be a hurried push to save Earth, and a slower paced experience where the player has the freedom to explore the game world.
First off, Bioware's hijacking of the player character. One of the core appeals of the Mass Effect franchise has always been its RPG nature, where the player gets to create their own Shepard, and play through the series as their character - making choices for them, justifying their thinking, and essentially being inserted into the role of Shepard fully. A major part of this is through the gameplay of the dialogue system, and the various choices available to Shepard. While often these choices are the same line when spoken, and very similar even when written, the very act of being able to choose engages the player more with Shepard, and helps identify him as their character - he won't do something unless they choose to do it. ME3 breaks this covenant, instead turning Shepard into Bioware's character. Almost all of Shepard's interactions run automatically, with no option in what to say. Occasionally, Shepard will run into one or two choices as to what he can say, however these moments are less to connect the player to their Shepard, and more to attempt to allow 'choices' so that the player can succeed or fail in the war score part of the game. Additionally, the thoughts of Shepard were hijacked by Bioware as well to attempt to force sympathy with a young child that dies at the start of the game, to try and add more weight to the ending scene and so called 'Star Child'. This backfires, however, as it is so heavy handed, and is forced upon players who's idea of their Shepard does not include such sympathy, that it simply disconnects players from the character, and causes them to innately dislike Star Child, making the ending even less enjoyable for them. While all of this may have worked in a non Mass Effect game, the fact that this game is part of the Mass Effect franchise, and a direct continuation of the story established in 1 and 2, as well as a continuation of the Shepard character, results in a conflict between the series and its core appeal, and ME3, and what it attempts to do differently.
Secondly, the constant struggle between hurried quest, and leisurely exploration. This appears in many areas, and is a running theme of the faults with the game. Its affects on gameplay are fairly myriad. Firstly, something minor. Sidequests. A number of sidequests in the game are acquired simply by standing around and eavesdropping on someone. This was likely done to create a flow where Shepard wouldn't need to stop and talk to every Joe standing around on the street, and could hurry on with saving the world. It succeeds at this. However, it also results in Shepard just standing around on the side of the street doing nothing for a few minutes so the player can figure out what on Earth they actually have to do, and it also wouldn't be something the player would expect to give them a quest without the popup telling them they have a new one to complete. It feels incongruous with the slow exploration side of things - which is largely the whole reason the sidequests even exist - in order to try and push the faster pace. On top of this, is the Citadel as the only hub. This is likely done in order to reduce time spent exploring hubs, and increase time spent fighting the enemy. This works. At the same time, however, there is a fair bit of exploring to be done on the Citadel, and you can waste a lot of time there doing small sidequests, which results in a conflict between the two goals. The spaceflight and exploration system also suffers from this. It attempts to maintain the exploration system from ME2, of manual flight and scanning around a system [Now in space rather than on a planet], however throws in the Reapers to try and add a sense of urgency to things. Sadly, however, the Reapers are easily exploitable - intentionally, to allow for exploration to be completed - and thus the urgency they attempt to provide in service of 'save the world quickly' simply turns into grind so that the exploration side isn't too heavily compromised. Many of these problems could simply be incompetence, however I'd rather give the designers more credit than that, and instead believe they were simply stuck between two conflicting drives in the game, and failed to reconcile them properly. While DA:I managed to take an open world game, and allow the player to explore and do sidequests without too much feeling like they were wasting time from the 'save the world' main quests, ME3 accomplished the opposite, and made the player feel like that in a mostly linear game.
On a side note, the War Score system was a bad idea. The appeal and promise of Mass Effect as a franchise was in seeing your choices have consequences. The War Score system was a way for Bioware not to track the choices you made and remind you of them, but to do away with the need to actually have consequences for your choices or impact the game in any way - it all simply comes down to a numerical abstraction. This was a failure to deliver on the core premise of Mass Effect, broke numerous statements made even after the game had 'gone gold', and honestly was probably the source of the biggest overall set of problems in the game. Additionally, it was balanced in such a way as to encourage players to play the multiplayer system, which reduced the amount that it added to the experience, and instead increased a sense of grind. I could go into more depth on this, but god damn this is going to be long enough already.
As another aside, boss fights were awful. Two words; Kai Leng. I think that's all the detail that's needed, everyone already understands that bullshit.
Writing wise the game oscillated between mediocre and downright terrible. Honestly, it read more like a teenage Fan Fiction than a professional installment in the Mass Effect Franchise.
Firstly, the good. Characters were written reasonably well. While they lacked the sheer weight of personality they had in Mass Effect 2, or the thematic symbolism and deep references afforded to them in ME1, they weren't badly written, and served their purpose reasonably well. Additionally, there were a number of good scenes with heavy references to the previous games that engaged the player, and offered resolution to a number of character arcs that were still open.
The bad though... For one, Kai Leng. Gameplay wise; horrible. Story wise; horrible. He really just should not have been a thing. Outside that, the plot on the whole is just unbelievably flawed. It relies on a magical macguffin that has never before been hinted at or introduced, that just happens by coincidence to be discovered at the exact moment its needed, in order to both drive the story, and resolve it. Everything to do with this thing makes no sense. Additionally, while the Reapers are the supposed big bad, Cerberus is the true main big bad that you encounter throughout 90% of the game. They make ridiculously stupid moves, and several characters act out of character in order to force this. Some of that can come down to indoctrination, however it isn't just a free pass. The number of retcons in the game in order to have no player miss out on any part of the experience is... painful. The story also ends on a deus ex machina, and fails to address any of its core themes. In fact, it tries to introduce 3 new themes in the last five minutes, and have you pick one, despite the themes not even really being related. People have gone into enough detail on this before, but even outside the ending the plot is all sorts of just bad.
Graphics wise the game was honestly a step down from ME2. Some of the special effects were improved, however models and animation and synchronisation between animation and voice were... Pretty bad.
There's almost definitely more to say, however ME3 was a deeply flawed game with a huge number of problems, most of which were simply overshadowed by the ending. It would have been merely a forgettable third person shooter release were it not a part of the Mass Effect series. Because it was, and how thoroughly it managed to debunk everything that drew people to the series, it came out as possibly the most hated game in recent memory. People reviewing it poorly wasn't just because of the 1% at the end, but because of how the experience as a whole was deeply flawed. The cracks appeared from the very first minute, the ending was simply the point where they grew large enough for the whole thing to shatter.
On the topic of Zelda; I don't entirely know what to make of it yet. A lot of what I've seen with the open world causes me concern, as that's always been the most boring part of 3D Zelda, however a lot of what I've heard, and the callbacks to 2D Zelda, brings me hope. It certainly has potential to be an amazing game, however I'm going to reserve judgement until I can actually play it. Not long now, and it'll definitely be an interesting game no matter what.
