How has Mass Effect 2 'dumbed down' the series?

[MelasZepheos_v1legacy]

There's no grind
There's no micro management of weapons and armour
There's no options for creating the character the way you want to

I've been over this before in other threads so I'll try and be briefer this time.

In ME1 it was entirely possible to go from start to end and only ever play the story missions and still be a high enough level to win and have experienced enough content to not make you feel like you'd been gypped out of a game. However if you wanted more then almost every world had at least 1 and often 2 or 3 sidequests so you could get to ridiculous levels and get more abilities, and experience a really rich and well crafted game world that sucked you in completely.

In ME2 the side missions were the main missions, if that makes any sense. You recruited members htrough sidemissions, made them loyal through sidemissions, then at the end all geared up for one of only three missions I would honestly call main plot missions. Any other side quests were disappointingly brief, like the little thing with patriarch that can literally be finished in two conversations. In fact almost every 'side quest' basically consists of 'talk to man a, then to man b, return to man a to receive reward.' That's not a side quests, in Mass Effect 1 that would have been the beginning of a side quest.

Micro Management of weapons and armour speaks for itself. In ME1 you got to outfit yourself and your squad any way you wanted, giving yourself the high power ammo that could shoot through schools while your squad all got the rapid fire stuff to help them bring down the enemy shields, or you could theoretically set up an assault rifle that would fire forever without ever overheating and basically make yourself into a human version of Halo's Warthog tank. In ME2 you have vun und precisely vun gun which is any damn good, and it can't be upgraded or personalised in any way. You don't get to choose to buy new gear, you don't get special armour with extra numbers of mod slots, you just get the same generic armour everyone player on the planet has. The game loses some of its individuality to make you play BioWare's Mass Effect, not your own.

This carries over into the levelling system. Dumbing it down to less than half the available options from the first game makes me sad. For example in ME1 I usually set up my character as a Paragon with skills in infiltration, stealth and stealing things. It was unique because I knew that other people might want a Renegade who stole and was an absolute tank on the battle field. Or a paragon soldier who soaked up bullets and didn't know how to decrypt even the simplest of doors. My Shepard felt like exactly that, mine. I spent the time and points upgrading her the way I wanted to, adding the skills and abilities I would use to play and ignoring those that I didn't need.

In ME2 I don't even have the option to ignore anything. If you play the main campaign you will level up at the rate that BioWare wanted you to, and with so few options for upgrading you will basically upgrade along the paths that they wanted you to. So you're using BioWare's conversation options, BioWare's weapons, and BioWare's upgrade path. I know that that's true of any game, but a good RPG like Mass Effect 1 or Fallout will make you fell like your characters is yours, and only you will have upgraded them in exactly the way that you have. Mass Effect 2 is not a good RPG, it is in fact barely an RPG at all. It is a shooter with the option to choose the order of your missions and an overly elaborate conversation wheel.

So yes, dumbed down. And the revelations about how they are focusing even more on shooter combat for ME3 makes me weep for a series I once loved.

 

[Duskflamer]

- the epic story, and richly detailed mythology behind it are still present

- there is still a strong emphasis on characterisation

- the Galaxy Map still makes the world feel appropriately huge

- the environments are varied and richly detailed

- the vast dialogue trees are still their and (most) are relevant and interesting

- the side missions still have a non-linear focus and vary greatly in length and importance

- your abilities and equipment still progress as you progress further in the story

Firstly, only the last two have anything to do with the video game genre "RPG." One of the things you have to understand here is that the video game term RPG Cannot actually be summed up as its abbreviation for "Role Playing Game," Otherwise every game where you take the role of a character would be considered an RPG. As such, the background of the game, the characters, the size of the world, the environments and the dialog, do not have anything to do with the RPG genre.

Equipment "Progresses" in the sense that you get some useful, though low impact, upgrades to weapon types as well as new weapons for that type placed sporatically throughout the game world, a vast majority of which are a trade-off instead of a straight upgrade (a sniper rifle with more bullets per clip but less damage per shot for example). Overall, this doesn't create a deep sense of progress. It's there, but it's not as obvious or fulfilling.

Which brings me to the abilities, which act the same way. You get some useful, if again low impact, upgrades to skills (and only to skills) which eventually leads to a more obvious upgrade, but aside from unlocking the skills to use in the first place do you ever notice this? do you ever care about it? Do you play a different way or use different skills because they were upgraded or do you mostly stick to the same strategy regardless of how you've been spending those upgrade points? It's a shallow system that doesn't have a very big impact on things.

And to elaborate on that earlier complaint, that you can only upgrade skills, I'll tell you what (to me at least) makes or breaks an RPG, progress of the character. In the first ME (which was hardly the deepest RPG in the world itself don't get me wrong) you could spend upgrade points on various combat skills, the ability to hack things or decrypt messages, the ability to persuade or intimidate people, or, and most importantly to my point, general statistics. How good you are at using a gun, how much protection that armor gives you, that is determined by the points you spent in the first ME. In ME2 Shepard is shooting just as well the moment he wakes up from being revived to the last where he's firing at a baby reaper, the player behind him may have gotten better with the gun but Shepard hasn't. Statistically, Shepard hasn't advanced in the slightest.

And that's where the problem is. All of the advancement and progress, admittedly baring the abilities, is going on around Shepard. He gets new guns or nondescriptly upgrades them, he buys a nominal new piece of armor, but Shepard himself does not feel like he's advancing at all, and that's where the issue is.

Admittedly yes, only the last two are closely connected with the genre of RPG. However, all the point before that are closely linked to story and setting; and as we all know, story and setting is kinda Bioware's 'thing'. It's the one area that Bioware has always done better than anybody else and having those things still there still makes for a deep and engaging experience imo.

I acknowledge that they streamlined the RPG elements from Mass Effect 1, but the original point I was making was 'what does that have to do with dumbing down?' Surely what separates a 'dumb and shallow' game from a 'smart and deep' game, is attaching the game mechanics (ie. The shooting of the dudes), to a well written, detailed and meaningful experience in interesting and engaging environments. And as far as I can see, all that stuff is still there in ME2

RPG fanatics tend to view RPGs as more complex and deeper than FPS games (which I am not qualified to pass judgement on because I am an RPG fan who dislikes FPS games). As such, the shift in focus from the RPG elements to FPS elements becomes interpreted as "dumbing down" the game overall. Face it, there's a lot less thought and chance in ME2 compared to ME. This may not be a bad thing, nobody's saying a game has to be deep to be good, or that a deep game is automatically better than a shallow one, but it's hard to deny that ME is a much deeper game than ME2, for better or worse.

But what do RPG element have to do with depth is what I'm asking??? Isn't depth measured by how immersed the player is in the narrative and the mythology that surrounds it, not by how many skill trees you can sink points into. I'm not saying the lack of RPG elements isn't a valid complaint, I'm just asking what it has to do with depth? And even though ME2 was streamlined, the story and game world still made it a much deeper experience than a 'go here and kill things' shooter.

Storywise, depth is based on immersion and mythology yes, but I'm more concerned with the gameplay. There's plenty of novels you can read if all you want is a deep story, when I talk about depth in a game I'm referring to the gameplay.

 

[Kahunaburger]

depth in this sense refers to complexity. You can't deny that the skill trees and equipment management of ME is far more complex than the equivalent systems in ME2, thus, ME2 has less depth. Again, this is not a quality judgement, I'm just explaining the term. I think ME2 was the better game personally.

I don't really agree with the complexity = depth thing. CoD is more complex than chess, but chess is a deeper game, for instance. It's more about how much depth each option actually adds to the system.

I don't mean technically, behind the scenes complex, I mean the complexity of what the player is asked to do. CoD may have a million things going on in the background but the player is mostly just asked to walk around and shoot enemies. Chess is a simple game, but every move must be thought out with care and there are thousands if not millions of possibilities for what could end up happening.

Yes, but there are orders of magnitude more possibilities for positions in CoD (and Quake, and Halo...) than there are in chess. (I.e., a CoD player is running around and shooting people in the same way a chess player is pushing pieces around. It's where you run to and where you push the piece that makes the game complex, and CoD gives you many more places to run to.) CoD also lets you customize your set-up before-hand and select game types, neither of which is an option in chess.

But chess is deeper because there's a bigger tactical difference between choosing which of its 20 initial moves you want to open up with than in choosing where in Highrise you want to run to first. So simplicity =/= shallowness, in other words.

 

[Duskflamer]

depth in this sense refers to complexity. You can't deny that the skill trees and equipment management of ME is far more complex than the equivalent systems in ME2, thus, ME2 has less depth. Again, this is not a quality judgement, I'm just explaining the term. I think ME2 was the better game personally.

I don't really agree with the complexity = depth thing. CoD is more complex than chess, but chess is a deeper game, for instance. It's more about how much depth each option actually adds to the system.

I don't mean technically, behind the scenes complex, I mean the complexity of what the player is asked to do. CoD may have a million things going on in the background but the player is mostly just asked to walk around and shoot enemies. Chess is a simple game, but every move must be thought out with care and there are thousands if not millions of possibilities for what could end up happening.

Yes, but there are orders of magnitude more possibilities for positions in CoD (and Quake, and Halo...) than there are in chess. (I.e., a CoD player is running around and shooting people in the same way a chess player is pushing pieces around. It's where you run to and where you push the piece that makes the game complex, and CoD gives you many more places to run to.) CoD also lets you customize your set-up before-hand and select game types, neither of which is an option in chess.

But chess is deeper because there's a bigger tactical difference between choosing which of its 20 initial moves you want to open up with than in choosing where in Highrise you want to run to first. So simplicity =/= shallowness, in other words.

Positioning is far more vital in Chess than in Cod though, in Cod, it doesn't matter if you're a few more feet to the right when you get shot. In chess, a rook being a space or two off from where it could be can make all the difference.

Also, just a little OCD from my end, there's 24 possible opening moves in Chess. 10 pawns each of which could move one or two spaces, as well as two possible moves for each of your two knights. 10X2 + 2X2 = 20+4 = 24.

 

[Therumancer]

Let me just make this clear from the outset, THIS IS NOT MEANT TO START A FLAME WAR! I personally love Mass Effect 2 but I respect the right for people to hold their own opinions. I just want to better understand a gripe I've had about the argument opposing how the series has changed.

People use the phrase 'dumbed down' to describe how the gameplay has become more action centric with less RPG elements. At first that seems easy enough to understand, but on closer inspection I really don't think that means it has dumbed down. All the things that make RPG's the deep and 'smart' experiences that they are are still present in Mass Effect 2, for example:

- the epic story, and richly detailed mythology behind it are still present

- there is still a strong emphasis on characterisation

- the Galaxy Map still makes the world feel appropriately huge

- the environments are varied and richly detailed

- the vast dialogue trees are still their and (most) are relevant and interesting

- the side missions still have a non-linear focus and vary greatly in length and importance

- your abilities and equipment still progress as you progress further in the story

As far as I can see the only significant aspects that were dropped from Mass Effect 1 were the endless equipment micro managing, and the vehicle sections which mostly involved roving around palette-swapped terrain that was 99% full of nothing; and in my opinion these were not so much adding depth as wasting time.

TL;DR... When did 'faffing about' become synonymous with 'smart gameplay and story', and when did 'trimming the fat' become 'dumbing down'?

The answer is complicated, and one that starts even more arguements.

At the core is the simple nature of what makes an RPG. Whether anyone LIKES it or not, RPGs are all about using numbers and stats to simulate actions, giving the player the abillity to control a character very much unlike himself. To begin with RPGs were very simple combat simulators and a game consisted of little more than a trip into a dungeon to see how deep you could get. The same basic fomula applies to early computer RPGs like "Rogue", or Wizardry: "Proving Ground Of The Mad Overlord". It's those stats that make an RPG an RPG. There is no doubt that having a good storyline improves something a thousandfold, but that can be said of anything from a Platformer to a Shooter, story is somehing that you add to a game not something that defines it's genere.

Now, there is some confusion about this among computer game players, largely because RPGs have generally had the best storylines of all game geners for so long. That's because people took huge amounts of time and effort to create these elaborate world settings. Looking at say "The Forgotten Realms" or "Grayhawk" you'd never guess that they basically build themselves up around what amounted to a giant money pit for simulated battles. They pretty much moved from guys going into dungeons to going "well, now that we have some treasure, what if we leave and go and spend it?" so someone built towns around the dungeons, which lead to kingdoms, and then eventually entire worlds. Some settings like The Forgotten Realms have been detailed don to local micro brews and cheeses and things. With all that detail of course comes all of the politics, personalities, and storylines. Even when not using an established RPG setting these kinds of things have gone with the territory when other games were not worrying about storyline. Today's computer gamers have little or no awareness of things like "Rogue" or the early "Wizardry" games, there just were not many gamers then.

At any rate, the point here is that you can have the most epic storyline in the world and that doesn't make something an RPG. All that does is make it like a book or movie, and to be honest it hardly takes a genius to listen to someone tell them a story. Mass Effect's storyline is decent, but no more intellectual than say "Star Wars" or "Battlestar Galactica" and you hardly need two brain cells to run together to get those shows, as drooling fanboys constantly demonstrate to us all.

The thing to understand is that Mass Effect is supposed to be an RPG series, and still bills itself as one. The problem is that all of those menus, stats, and other things are what RPG gamers play RPGs for. Any moron can aim a sight and hit a fire button, and really that's what RPGs are trying to get away from, especially seeing as it winds up relying on the player's reflexs rather than those possesed by the character being controlled, and once that happens any pretensions of something being an RPG go out the window.

The reason why Bioware has made the changes are twofold. For one, it's really hard to develop an RPG game and a consistant set of mechanics. For a lot of it's history Bioware has been doing it's products under liscence, usually with the Dungeons and Dragons engine of the time. Even "Knights Of The Old Republic" used the D20 engine, which is third edition Dungeons and Dragons. "Mass Effect" and "Dragon Age" are their first major projects without using someone else's engine. I think the work involved kind of hit them, especially seeing as they got bought out by EA, and can no longer focus on one project like they used to, they are expected to keep all these balls up in the air at once. It also doesn't help that they are working on an MMO which is the most expensive project in EA's history along with their other franchises and they doubtlessly are being told to make that their primary focus. Secondly, gaming on computers is no longer dominated by nerds or smart people, a lot of time and effort has gone into drawing the mainstream into gaming. Looking at all those charts, numbers, and stats tends to go over the head of the average person who just wants to watch things blow up. Basically despite wanting to be called smart, and associated with RPGs, your typical Joe does not want to have to learn a set of mechanics. Not to mention the idea of indirect control is a bit too over the head of your average gamer, and a bit abstract. Given that shooters are easier to produce, and that there is a larger audience of mainstream gamers than the more intelligent RPG gamers (who are still pretty numerous), it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why Bioware is dumbing everything down. It become easier for them, and draws in a bigger market. Of course when your looking at millions of actual RPG gamers who represent a pretty substantial market on their own (even if not as big a one), you have to understand there is going to be some noise. Especially seeing as Bioware made it's lumps as a producer of computer RPGs, being one of the best companies for telling a good story, while remaining true to, and consistant with, established game mechanics. Basically Bioware wouldn't be in the position they are now, if their fans hadn't supported them, the very same fans Bioware is increasingly unwilling to support with it's products, this leads to a lot of anger and bad blood, with Bioware acting like an indie rock group that simply used it's fans as a springboard to land a major record deal and now just wants to product bubblegum pop and spend money: insisting that they don't owe the people who made them what they are anything... and like every other time that happens, it slots people off.


The exact definition of RPGs can be difficult, but once you understand that distinction, the rest is pretty simple. From a regular Joe's perspective, an RPG *IS* defined by all that faffing about. He'd prefer to line up a dot and hit the "immediate gratification" button. The RPG gamer takes a satisfaction from arranging those stats and numbers and watching the results.

See at it's core the point of an RPG is that we, the nerds of the world, can't fight with swords, shoot guns, or bench press massive weights. Other than the physical, we also tend to be outcasts... you know as nerds, who have trouble talking to people and lack anything that could be called charisma.

The point of an RPG is that anything you do is represented by numbers, you can for example in an RPG have a conversation with an NPC, played by the GM, or in the computer, and it's not your actual dialogue that matters, so much as the intent. You might be an awkward studdering idiot in front of the live GM, but once your intent is clear the dice come out, and if your stats are high enough and bad luck does not occur you get the results of James Bond, because your character said something along the same lines, but much more persuasively, or whatever. In Combat, real world olympic fencers and regular Medieval Weapons Society fighters can't perform the feats of say D'artaneon or Conan, but a fantasy character can. The point here being that by having stats to represent your character's relative level of skill and abillities, the character can do things that a regular player cannot.

The problem with say "Mass Effect 2" is that it's no longer an intellectual exercise. In an RPG a guy like Steven Hawking should be able to play the greatest marksman to ever live. Admittedly ME1 had some issues here (and was critiqued for them, the whole "shooter RPG" is an oxymoron), all Steven Hawking should have to do is pretty much convey his attempt to shoot and let the numbers do the rest. Who Steven Hawking is in real life does not matter in an RPG (and conversely if his character is a Barbarian named "Bongo" with an IQ in the single digits, Steven Hawking's vast intellect will not apply, because skill rolls and intelligence checks will be forced if he tries to do something too smart fo the character... Bongo isn't exactly going to be writing essays on Astrophysics with an Intelligence stat of 5, but a character with an 18 intelligence on the D&D scale might very well do that, and if the guy playing that character IRL happens to be borderline retarded, all he has to do is say "I'm going to write an essay on Astophysics!"). With Mass Effect 2, that twitchy fingered kid has an advantage over an older person with slower fingers like me, never mind someone like Steven Hawking who would play the game with special controls to begin with in all likelyhood. That means it ceases to be an RPG, and that's why it, and the attempt to condense mutally exclusive generes like shooters and RPGs are slotting off the core RPG fan base.

 

[WanderingFool]

[misc sarcasm]

I like this . Although I don't want to sound like I'm hating on ME1. It's still definitely in my Top 10 best games I've played, it's just that ME2 is definitely in my Top 5.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I like ME1 as well.

I just like ME2 better.

It's like the difference between ice cream and ice cream with hot fudge on top.

I like your analogy, it allows me to make sense of my feelings towards ME 1 & 2 without listing everything I like and dislike between them (which I actually copy and past from a word doc on my main PC... always ready for these threads).

Mass Effect 1 - Ice cream sundae w/ chocolate sauce and peanuts
Mass Effect 2 - Ice cream sundae w/ sprinkles

Both are at heart the same, but both are different. What I want is all of it in one.

 

[Kahunaburger]

depth in this sense refers to complexity. You can't deny that the skill trees and equipment management of ME is far more complex than the equivalent systems in ME2, thus, ME2 has less depth. Again, this is not a quality judgement, I'm just explaining the term. I think ME2 was the better game personally.

I don't really agree with the complexity = depth thing. CoD is more complex than chess, but chess is a deeper game, for instance. It's more about how much depth each option actually adds to the system.

I don't mean technically, behind the scenes complex, I mean the complexity of what the player is asked to do. CoD may have a million things going on in the background but the player is mostly just asked to walk around and shoot enemies. Chess is a simple game, but every move must be thought out with care and there are thousands if not millions of possibilities for what could end up happening.

Yes, but there are orders of magnitude more possibilities for positions in CoD (and Quake, and Halo...) than there are in chess. (I.e., a CoD player is running around and shooting people in the same way a chess player is pushing pieces around. It's where you run to and where you push the piece that makes the game complex, and CoD gives you many more places to run to.) CoD also lets you customize your set-up before-hand and select game types, neither of which is an option in chess.

But chess is deeper because there's a bigger tactical difference between choosing which of its 20 initial moves you want to open up with than in choosing where in Highrise you want to run to first. So simplicity =/= shallowness, in other words.

Positioning is far more vital in Chess than in Cod though, in Cod, it doesn't matter if you're a few more feet to the right when you get shot. In chess, a rook being a space or two off from where it could be can make all the difference.

Also, just a little OCD from my end, there's 24 possible opening moves in Chess. 10 pawns each of which could move one or two spaces, as well as two possible moves for each of your two knights. 10X2 + 2X2 = 20+4 = 24.

8 files, actually, but yeah

That's kind of where I'm coming from with this. I have more options in CoD, but those options are not meaningful tactical choices. Similarly, swapping out my ME1 vanguard's gun and armor for slightly better versions of themselves is not a tactical choice, but choosing between the eviscerator, claymore, and geth shotguns completely changes the way my ME2 vanguard plays. I do agree that ME2 misses out on a lot of opportunities for genuine customization (one of the most glaring is when they roll the persuade/intimidate system into the paragon/renegade system) but I don't think it's as much of a dumbing down as people think it is or that it demonstrates that streamlining is bad for RPGs.

 

[Agayek]

What do you mean about the Reapers? The Reapers were barely in ME2. For the most part their involvement was just you gathering more information about what they actually are from souces like Legion. Why is that so bad?

In ME1, the Reapers were established as an unknowable, nigh-omniscient force of destruction.

ME2 made them the space equivalent of a Scooby Doo villain.

Everything they do in ME2 makes no sense. They either do things in the least direct and most inefficient manner, or they act illogically for goals that are, honestly, unimportant.

Every single involvement of the Reapers in ME2 is nothing more than a very bad joke. In order:

1) Why the fuck don't they have another extra-galactic relay? There's no reason to limit themselves to only the one in the citadel. If anything, there's every reason for there to be a dozen of the stupid things that they can use at will.

2) The Collectors. Why do they still exist? It takes a massive amount of resources to keep an organic race alive for 50,000 years, especially when they cannot take independent action. It would have been far more efficient and logical to let them die out and use some small robots to kidnap sentients and determine when the current galaxy is ripe for extermination.

3) Why are they kidnapping humans? They're trying to open the relay to destroy humanity. Why the fuck don't they just build a ship out of the overly abundant metal near the Collector base and throw a Reaper AI into it. Then send that ship at the Citadel. Or better yet, use the Normandy after the Collector's kidnap everyone off the ship.

Or even better, kidnap some Asari or something, indoctrinate them and have them unlock the Citadel relay.

Or even betterer, don't lock your only way in or out of the galaxy in the first place.

4) Why the fuck are they focusing on Shepard? If anything, they should be actively avoiding him. He's the only one to ever successfully combat the Reapers, and no one has any idea how or why. Until they can actually bring overwhelming firepower to bear, it's a much more strategic decision to avoid him wherever possible.

Literally, everything the Reapers did in ME2 was either illogical, emotionally driven or just plain insane. They were established as gods-made-real, living machines older than the human mind can possibly comprehend, driven by nothing more than the continuation of an infinite cycle and a disdain for all organics.

ME2 decided it was a good idea to shit all over it.

 

[Duskflamer]

depth in this sense refers to complexity. You can't deny that the skill trees and equipment management of ME is far more complex than the equivalent systems in ME2, thus, ME2 has less depth. Again, this is not a quality judgement, I'm just explaining the term. I think ME2 was the better game personally.

I don't really agree with the complexity = depth thing. CoD is more complex than chess, but chess is a deeper game, for instance. It's more about how much depth each option actually adds to the system.

I don't mean technically, behind the scenes complex, I mean the complexity of what the player is asked to do. CoD may have a million things going on in the background but the player is mostly just asked to walk around and shoot enemies. Chess is a simple game, but every move must be thought out with care and there are thousands if not millions of possibilities for what could end up happening.

Yes, but there are orders of magnitude more possibilities for positions in CoD (and Quake, and Halo...) than there are in chess. (I.e., a CoD player is running around and shooting people in the same way a chess player is pushing pieces around. It's where you run to and where you push the piece that makes the game complex, and CoD gives you many more places to run to.) CoD also lets you customize your set-up before-hand and select game types, neither of which is an option in chess.

But chess is deeper because there's a bigger tactical difference between choosing which of its 20 initial moves you want to open up with than in choosing where in Highrise you want to run to first. So simplicity =/= shallowness, in other words.

Positioning is far more vital in Chess than in Cod though, in Cod, it doesn't matter if you're a few more feet to the right when you get shot. In chess, a rook being a space or two off from where it could be can make all the difference.

Also, just a little OCD from my end, there's 24 possible opening moves in Chess. 10 pawns each of which could move one or two spaces, as well as two possible moves for each of your two knights. 10X2 + 2X2 = 20+4 = 24.

8 files, actually, but yeah

That's kind of where I'm coming from with this. I have more options in CoD, but those options are not meaningful tactical choices. Similarly, swapping out my ME1 vanguard's gun and armor for slightly better versions of themselves is not a tactical choice, but choosing between the eviscerator, claymore, and geth shotguns completely changes the way my ME2 vanguard plays. I do agree that ME2 misses out on a lot of opportunities for genuine customization (one of the most glaring is when they roll the persuade/intimidate system into the paragon/renegade system) but I don't think it's as much of a dumbing down as people think it is or that it demonstrates that streamlining is bad for RPGs.

I disagree on that point. A simple upgrade from one model of a weapon to the next is just common sense but there were dozens of models to choose from for each weapon on ME, not to mention the upgrades to tweak each weapon just perfectly. And getting away from equipment the abilities in ME were genuine investments for a significant payoff rather than just something you did. (think of what a maxed level (if you could even get to max level) character's skill tree looks like in ME compared to ME2, you have to make more actual choices about where to put the points in ME).

 

[Waaghpowa]

So here's my thing with Mass Effect 2, or just about any new Bioware game these days. Keep in mind that I love the Mass Effect series. I do agree that ME2 was a significant improvements from ME1, my problem is they took too much out.

When I play an RPG, I expect to have to weigh the pro's and con's when making decisions regarding my actions and equipment. Mainly what I hate about ME2 is that it takes away my ability to make such decisions. In other words I liked having weapons, mods and different armour to choose from.

For example: You have gun (A) equipped and stumbled upon gun (B). B has slightly better damage at the cost of accuracy and cooling, while A is less damage but better as far as accuracy and cooling go. Now is the increase in damage enough justification to lose the stats from A or do you work it out with mods?

Mass Effect 2 as far as weapons go was like this to me:
Armourer: Here's your gun.
Me: What's special about it?
Armourer: It has a slightly smaller clip and shoots slower.
Me: What else?
Armourer: That's it, it's basically the same as everything else. It doesn't make too much of a difference what you choose to use.
Me: .....o...k...

That and I didn't like the fact that all of the missions ended up occurring in a narrow corridor. It would've been nice to have kept some size as far as the scale of environments goes.

Edit: Just wanted to add that I don't believe that ME2 was "Dumbed down" just simplified, and maybe a little too much.

 

[loc978]

It's been said to death, but...
ME2's plot went all to hell, RPG elements were all but completely removed (instead of simply fixing their flaws), they revised the technology to put combat more in line with ordinary modern shooters (seriously, the heat sink weapons of the second game are a technological leap backwards), and the flexible, intuitive cover system was replaced with one that railroaded players into gallery shooting. It still had great dialog, and was entertaining as hell... but it wasn't up to par with the first game.

 

[PrinceOfShapeir]

Mass Effect 2 had a superior system, but it paid for it with a stupid, pointless plotline.

 

[sumanoskae]

From a purely gameplay standpoint, Mass Effect 2 hasn't dumbed anything down. The skill trees are smaller, but that's not really a problem, though I'd still like to see more options for customization, I prefer quality over quantity.

No, the problem ME2 has is that it never gave me a reason to utilize my powers in any meaningful way. You can more or less make your way through ME2 with pure shooter chops, it doesn't demand the same level of strategy or team orchestration that other RPG's do.

The other issue I have is with the equipment. Choosing who is best suited for which gear is a perfectly acceptable aspect of role playing, and it's removed in ME2 for no conceivable reason. Removing the massive clutter was a good idea, but it was taken to far. I feel that some individuality could be returned to the system by allowing for personal weapon mods, something like Metal Gear Solid 4.

So I say that the primary problems with ME2 are that it lacks customization and it doesn't employ it's RPG mechanics correctly.

 

[Archemetis]

I've seen a couple of mentions of 'They added the emphasis of chest-high walls in ME2 WAAAH!'

But I'm sitting here wondering, did they not notice the walls in ME1?
They're totally there... Shit, play up to the first few minutes of Eden Prime and you'll see chest-high walls.

It's almost like saying they ruined Mass Effect by keeping Commander Shepard in it...

Personally, I see nothing wrong with the changes they made.
And that's it really. Everyone else's opinions can go be what they are somewhere else while I enjoy myself.

 

[Schreck157]

My biggest gripe against ME2 is and shall always be that they gave the player limited ammunition through the addition of thermal clips and the change to the power wheel that made all abilities unavailable to use for a time after a single one had been used. I have accepted and even come to appreciate parts of ME2 more than the first, but this still chaps my ass.

 

[Ren3004]

Because it didn't have a terrible inventory like the first game.

To be fair, I did miss some of the RPG elements of the first game. As soon as I accepted it as a more action oriented title, I enjoyed it a lot more.

 

[Spencer Petersen]

It didn't dumb down the series, I'm guessing that sentiment came from the people who liked the first and found something about the second they didn't like, and attributed it to dumbing down. I found the first one a painfully depth-free and shallow exterior of cliche RPG and Space Opera tropes that prided itself on looking like a deep and smart game but lacked any real depth. So the 2nd isnt really dumbed down, its just the same, which was already stripped of common features.

Although you can make a case that the features removed didn't add any depth and in many ways simplified it even more.
Removed inventory
Smaller skill trees
Ammo instead of Heat calculation
Removal of all but 4 ammo types
Removal of Weapon Mods
Removal of all but 2-4 weapons from each class
Resource gathering reduced to scanning instead of exploring
Removed most of the free-roam element of the citadel and other locations
Made hacking and unlocking a minigame without any RPG element

Removing features rarely makes a game deeper, so you could make an argument that it is dumbed down. However, the opinion that the story is better and the combat is more fluid is not an excuse for feature removal. Bioware does this a bit by promising more depth in a sequel and then axing a list of features and then throwing their hands up and yelling "No, wait the story is good!", them people forgive them and argue on the internet.

 

[Kahunaburger]

depth in this sense refers to complexity. You can't deny that the skill trees and equipment management of ME is far more complex than the equivalent systems in ME2, thus, ME2 has less depth. Again, this is not a quality judgement, I'm just explaining the term. I think ME2 was the better game personally.

I don't really agree with the complexity = depth thing. CoD is more complex than chess, but chess is a deeper game, for instance. It's more about how much depth each option actually adds to the system.

I don't mean technically, behind the scenes complex, I mean the complexity of what the player is asked to do. CoD may have a million things going on in the background but the player is mostly just asked to walk around and shoot enemies. Chess is a simple game, but every move must be thought out with care and there are thousands if not millions of possibilities for what could end up happening.

Yes, but there are orders of magnitude more possibilities for positions in CoD (and Quake, and Halo...) than there are in chess. (I.e., a CoD player is running around and shooting people in the same way a chess player is pushing pieces around. It's where you run to and where you push the piece that makes the game complex, and CoD gives you many more places to run to.) CoD also lets you customize your set-up before-hand and select game types, neither of which is an option in chess.

But chess is deeper because there's a bigger tactical difference between choosing which of its 20 initial moves you want to open up with than in choosing where in Highrise you want to run to first. So simplicity =/= shallowness, in other words.

Positioning is far more vital in Chess than in Cod though, in Cod, it doesn't matter if you're a few more feet to the right when you get shot. In chess, a rook being a space or two off from where it could be can make all the difference.

Also, just a little OCD from my end, there's 24 possible opening moves in Chess. 10 pawns each of which could move one or two spaces, as well as two possible moves for each of your two knights. 10X2 + 2X2 = 20+4 = 24.

8 files, actually, but yeah

That's kind of where I'm coming from with this. I have more options in CoD, but those options are not meaningful tactical choices. Similarly, swapping out my ME1 vanguard's gun and armor for slightly better versions of themselves is not a tactical choice, but choosing between the eviscerator, claymore, and geth shotguns completely changes the way my ME2 vanguard plays. I do agree that ME2 misses out on a lot of opportunities for genuine customization (one of the most glaring is when they roll the persuade/intimidate system into the paragon/renegade system) but I don't think it's as much of a dumbing down as people think it is or that it demonstrates that streamlining is bad for RPGs.

I disagree on that point. A simple upgrade from one model of a weapon to the next is just common sense but there were dozens of models to choose from for each weapon on ME, not to mention the upgrades to tweak each weapon just perfectly. And getting away from equipment the abilities in ME were genuine investments for a significant payoff rather than just something you did. (think of what a maxed level (if you could even get to max level) character's skill tree looks like in ME compared to ME2, you have to make more actual choices about where to put the points in ME).

Yeah, I agree that ME1 had tactical choices you could make regarding weapon selection. I just think that ME2 had more significant choice in that particular area, especially since you're picking from several weapon classes rather than just the gun or two you specialize in. Take shotguns (you may have noticed I'm a vanguard player haha) - you have about the same number of choices, but there's a bigger array of difference in how the shotguns actually play in ME2 than in ME1, especially when you factor in the ammo types. But yeah, weapon and ammo mods should definitely still have been in the game - it's more an issue of the "not all streamlining is bad" thing.

 

[Inkidu]

It didn't; if you want a tactical and strategic masterpiece play ME2 on Insanity. You will care about how you and your squad level up. You will be bringing specialists in; you will have your fingers in so much of what they do it's not funny.

If you want even more challenge don't play as a soldier. Soldiers tend to round out insanity making it more doable.

 

[Snotnarok]

Mass Effect 1 was a garbled mess that was needlessly complicated. I mean seriously who the hell sat there and reequipped each team member before a fight/during a fight with different weapon and armor mods and whatever?

Besides the odd geth fight you probably just plugged in a mod that was a general perk. ME2 cleaned it up by just having ammo mods and that worked 100x better. I mean hell I beat ME1 on the hardest mode without using any of the specific synthetic/organic killing ammo or anything different than ammo that did more damage, so other ammo mods are pretty much moot.

I still don't get what people complain about. Was ME2 perfect? No but it sure was better than 1 in a lot of ways.