orannis62 said:
Therumancer said:
I tend to agree, I did not care for the massive reduction of RPG elements/skills, the more twitchy combat (no accuracy stats and such), the level/mission based design as opposed to a more open seeming world, no exps from killing enemies (just from quests), no more inventory or equipping of the squad (at all) and a ton of other things. The game was more like a slightly customizable shooter with a lot of dialogue and cut scenes when you get down to it.
I understand why they did this, trying to dumb the game down to make it less intimidating for the mainstream, but in the end I think it resulted in an overall inferior game to the original. It's still a good game, but not a real evolution of the first one as opposed to more of a mainstream rebooting of the franchise into far more of a shooter than it should have been.
Of course a lot of people feel exactly the opposite on all of this
When it comes to the planet scanning, I admit that was one of the biggest annoyances. I thought the vehicle sections were pretty dull in the first game, but at least had potential. I was somewhat miffed to see the entire system removed and replaced by probing which was even more boring. We're getting new vehicle sections in an upcoming free Cerberus Network download, but I still think that this is something they should have worked into the main game.
I'm going to let Daniel Floyd do most of my argument and say that Streamlining is not dumbing down. [http://videogamesand.blogspot.com/2010/02/streamlining-does-not-mean-dumbing-down.html] We can't hold everything up to the ideal of what a genre is "supposed" to be, because that stifles innovation and evolution. Personally, I feel that ME2 is still very much an RPG because...well, you play a role. More specifically (important in a WRPG), you play a role
you choose.
That is an incorrect assumption, although it also gets to the heart of a matter in PnP RPGs as well between storytellers and real RPers when you get down to it.
Strictly speaking in any game you more or less take on a role in a certain manner of speaking. Maybe not a good one, or a deep one, but you do it. The thing that makes something a role-playing game though is that the abillities of the character your playing influance the results rather than your abillities as a player. You make choices, however a desician to say shoot something depends on the attributes of your character more than YOUR abillity to aim a gun or twitch.
Things like so called action RPGs have caused people to lose sight of this. People wanting to have games move in real time rather than in a static turn based format. To begin with it sort of worked through things like "Diablo" where strictly speaking all you did was click and the numbers did everything. Your big influance being in deciding how to set the numbers and what abillities to use at any given time. Later games where you have to perform fighting moves based on complex timing/reflex based inputs, or aim a targeting recticul at opponents that move (like Mass Effect) have increasingly moved away from being RPGs. I tend to see them as being a new genere of "customizable action game" rather than simply real time RPGs.
In the original Mass Effect for example your skill with weapons had a great effect on the success of using them. Leading to a lot of people complaining that it wasn't "shooter enough" since the opponent AI was fairly minimal, and it really didn't matter how accurate the target box was, you could be perfect and skill miss if your skill blew chips, or be quite a bit off by shooter standards and still hit. Fallout 3 for example included similar elements where how accurate gunfire is depends on stats, and it also has a system to totally bypass manual aiming and resolve things totally in an RPG fashion based on die rolls (which I like, but a lot of people do not).
When it comes to PnP RPGs there is also a similar misconception. A lot of people think that what makes something a "good" RPG is the quality of the storyline. That is not really true, and shows diminishing standards. What makes something a good RPG experience is good storytelling, but also total freedom (of a sort computers cannot emulate) to do literally anything you want within the scenario. The primary element being that freeom, and the abillity to resolve things based entirely on a character's abillities. This occasionally leads to some interesting discussion based on how much someone should be favored for representation of a character and being charismatic at a gaming table since that favors personal abillity. Part of the point of an RPG being that your character can do things (like brutalize people with weapons, or cast spells) that a player cannot, by the same token someone with no social skills IRL at all should be able to take on the role of a charismatic and well liked person and have the game world react based on intent more than how glib the player is... a topic that has been debated for many years now in certain circles (and gets slightly off topic, but sort of makes a point about real abillity vs. character abillity simply by the debate existing).
At any rate, a good RPG is one with a very open scenario where the characters choose how to proceed and what they see and obtain depends entirely on their desicians. There is very little in the way of mandatory encounters or resolutions. A bad RPG or "Storytelling game" tends to have the players ferried from one encounter to another, with very little being actually missable as far as "major content" and the resolutions being pretty well fixed ahead of time with success or failure being dictated by how quickly the players move towards one of them. White Wolf is famous for this, with adventures and storylines involving characters getting involved in supernatural politics they really have minimal influance over within the scenario. One adventure for Aberrant (one of my favorite super games actually, despite the way the canon adventures have portrayed it) has the PCs show up during the resolution of a key element of the "metaplot" (having a metaplot built into PnP RPGs is usually bad ideal IMO) where basically it says that if they do anything signifigant that could alter a certain progression of events this Munchkin NPC character who is involved automatically slaps them down irregardless of pretty much everything. In the end you basically get to be present when the two most powerful super beings in the world go toe to toe (with one getting B@tch slapped) and that is the entire point, it's kind of their story and your there to cheerlead.
Things in games always have to be somewhat scripted, but to be honest in ME 2 it didn't even do a good job of creating the illusion that anything I decided really mattered all that much. What is going to happen is going to happen. If I pick a dialogue option that would steer things away from the intented resolution (some of which I suspect are there for show) what I pick usually has absolutly no similarity to what my character actually winds up saying or doing. I'm not really making any desicians for the role that have any major impact.
Even if they were lacking at least in ME1 things like Mako exploration added to the illusion that I had some control. In ME 2 I really felt like I was playing a shooter a lot of the time and the "role playing" was just a glorified cinematic. Heck, they even removed social skills from the game and tied it totally into alignment. No need for making tough desicians about balancing by abillities to be a suave charisma machine in proportion to my gunplay (especially early on when your playing for the first time, have limited points, and don't know what is coming next for sure).
