If you could improve any game by changing one thing, what would it be?

[bartholen_v1legacy]

Chrono Trigger. Bump up the difficulty, and you have the perfect game.

 

[Dalisclock]

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

I thought the story worked pretty well for it, at least until you find out that

Spoiler

Atlas runs concentration camps where the guards act like Nazis

Come on guys, you had some really nice moral ambiguity going there(Evil Kevin Spacey actually had some good points, despite his reaction going way over the line) and then you decided to just make them out and out evil. What? You didn't think people would get the message once you revealed what maticore was?

 

[sumanoskae]

I think the biggest problem wasn't so much the ending but rather that by making the reapers so powerful, alien and essentially avatars of universal death that had never been beaten in a billion years(like Lovecraftian mecha-cthulhu), the writers pretty much wrote themselves into a corner. With the threat they established, the only true ending should have been the one where everyone dies and the hologram of T'soni is telling the future people about the catalyst and the crucible, or figured out some kind of alternative that wasn't "We win because space magic/plot device".

But people would have been angry at that too, because then "All my choices were for nothing!".

I don't think it would have been remotely so difficult, they HAD a better conclusion to the story right under their noses, they just missed it.

I've always maintained that for all that is fantastic about Mass Effect 3, it's biggest flaws can be illustrated neatly by it's central plot device, the crucible. In essence, it's nothing more than a MacGuffin; it has no thematic purpose, no personal weight for any character, it's just a plot point that needed to exist to move the story along.

The problem this creates is that it takes up text and time; every line of exposition spent explaining it's nature is piss in wind for all the thematic tension it creates. But it wasn't necessary; this is the third game in an epic series, it has more than enough backstory and lore already established to make use of a heavier central conflict.

Generic MacGuffins like the Crucible serve a purpose when a writer wants to focus all their attention on setting or character introduction and development. The device worked fine in Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2, because neither of those games were meant to be resolutions of long running stories; their chief goal was exploration.

But Mass Effect 3 is an ending, a bookend to an epic saga; it's a far more linear experience, with specific dramatic goals. It can't afford to waste it's time, because it's trying to maintain dramatic tension.

This is why Bioware's standard issue MacGuffin story structure was so toxic to it. The Crucible feels almost like an elaborate distraction, because by comparison to the long running story beats of the series, which have had two other games worth of time to gain pathos and nuance, it's so simplistic and straight forward.

It seems almost totally disconnected from the rest of the game. We go from an intricate, politically and morally charged interaction with, for example, the Geth, in which everyone has a clear, human motivation for their actions, which will all accomplish some kind of comprehensive goal, to requesting that the various factions of the galaxy spend valuable time and resources doing unspecific work on a vaguely defined machine, whose function and purpose we are merely offhandedly informed of by other characters.

So given how much time was wasted on the weak central narrative, it's not at all surprising that when Bioware got the urge to add some dramatic weight to it, by way of giving the Reapers some kind of comprehensive motivation, the last 5 fucking minutes of the game wasn't quite comparable to the 90+ of development that was afforded to the rest of it. It's no wonder the whole thing felt like such an asspull.

So what would have been a better central plotline? Well, in a manner somewhat emblematic of everything wrong with this industry, they came up with one later and sold it for about $10. I'm talking about the Leviathan DLC.

Swapping this plot with the Crucible would have accomplished nearly all of Bioware's dramatic goals.

It satisfies the need for Shepard to be on the trail of a way to stop the Reapers, what better way to do that than a reputed Reaper killer?

It ties together the writer's desire to delve into the motivations of the reapers and the player's curiosity about them to the story's central goal, so that focus doesn't need to be split between them.

Defeating the Reapers by resurrecting the very thing they were based on offers a variable moral minefield of potential ending choices; it adds desperation to the story, because what Shepard would be doing by making deals with such an entity is almost a sci-fi equivalent of dark magic, a sort of Faustian bargain.

I think the importance of choice in the ending has been at least somewhat overstated by the community. Remember, people don't always know what they want, nor do they always say so even if they do; even more of them have a vague, abstract idea of what would satisfy them emotionally, but are unable to imagine the myriad of different ways that thing could be come about. There's a reason for the old saying that a writer's job is never to give the audience what they expressly desire.

Feedback should always be taken with a grain of salt, because it's always delivered through an unknown amount of filters, especially when it comes from people who are otherwise strangers; you only know what they decided to tell you, you don't know the process by which they came to that conclusion.

Had the ending of Mass Effect 3 been emotionally and intellectually satisfying, I'm willing to bet that people wouldn't have made such a big deal about "Choice". "Choice", was just a tool; the ending's lack of choice became a logical narrative to encase everyone's emotional distress over what began as a deeply depressing and disquieting ending. Most of them were not writers or designers; they don't necessarily have a real understanding of why certain fiction affects them the way it does.

The average consumer has a very gestalt relationship with media; the only part of the interaction they see in it's full form is the end result; a broad, unspecific summation of how the work made them feel. In order to express this to other people, they often cover it up with logical excuses, but those logical excused do not directly relate to why they feel the way they feel.

Mass Effect 3's ending wasn't panned because of the public's unrealistic expectations, it was panned because it was a poorly constructed piece of fiction.

 

[Randoman01]

Jak II should have had fast travel times.

 

[OneCatch]

Any Total War game ... GIVE US RAGDOLL PHYSICS!!

I'd settle for proper unit weight mechanics.
The Rome 1/Medieval II engine kind of emulated it by accident by having heavy infantry fight in tighter formations and stagger less, but lack of weight has got really noticeable in recent titles.



My own unrelated one - add better combat mechanics to Morrowind[/b[. Not Oblivion or Skyrim, but something where 'chance to hit' is changed to 'chance to deal varied higher damage', with a certain (low) baseline damage all but certain. Would make lower levels less frustrating without oversimplifying combat skills.

 

[pookie101]

armoured warfare pve mode.. not having spawns appear right on top of you. becomes annoying when someone steps into the cap circle by accident and you suddenly find yourself surrounded by 5 main battle tanks

 

[omega 616]

-Final Fantasy X. The voice acting in this game ranges from decent to "God, Tidus, just shut up!" and as far as I know, there's no way to turn off the voice acting. Give me a "Voices off" button and let me read the subtitles for the rest of the game.

I knew this would pop up but seriously, the OP? It's not like the voice acting is that bad.

The thing that needs fixing in this game is the combat, you have all kinds of spells and abilities to use most of them serve no purpose whatsoever! Like Doom, kills an enemy in 5 turns ... sounds freaking sweet, right? Nope. Use it against normal enemies and you will kill it before 5 turns and nearly all bosses are immune!