Mass Effect 2 was NOT "dumbed-down"

[Eldarion]

/snip

Thats a lot of insecurity over me thinking your bad at the Mako. Like, wow.

You find time to objectively prove that the mako was in fact, crap? No? Just had to get that rant out? Ok then.

 

[Epic Fail 1977]

No it was just "rub-bish"

I see what you did there.

 

[Spencer Petersen]

I would go so far as to say that I welcome the direction Bioware is taking its RPGs: streamlining combat while focusing more on characters and letting go of the whole "you're the only one who can save the world" thing.

If you say that, then I want to ask why Shepard was necessary to the events of ME2? The only reason hes there is because of his status, which I would argue as the exactly the same as "you're the only one who can save the world." Miranda or Jacob could have led the team fine, with only minor gameplay changes.

And as far as ME2 goes the combat was a shooter with the illusion of choices but no actual choices. Weapon upgrades were strictly linear without any decisions to be made, armor made only minor differences in combat, talents and skills upgraded linearly with only one branch at the end which made very little difference, and all the other parts of the game rarely impacted the combat besides money and minerals, which were never too hard to find. The damage you do never has any feedback, so when I upgrade my guns to do +50% dmg, I never see the results. Skills and powers were pitiful when compared to firearms so playing soldier or the 2 soldier hybrids made the game a cake walk.

Bioware needs to stop sucking up to EA and spouting PR crap about streamlining and "perfect combat." They need to focus on telling a story without text dumps or cutscenes and making that story actually impact the "game" part of "role playing game" in a meaningful way, but if the last 4 games are any standard to measure by, probably not.

 

[uc.asc]

[sarcastic rant snipped to save space]

Murrrrr makes me cry

I'm pretty sure most of this is facetious, but you remember in ME1 that planet with the spectacular binary star system, with a blue dwarf and a red giant?

No, I'm afraid I don't. All the planets just blurred together in my mind.

When I think of ME1 I think of characters, dialogue and some of the battles. I remember Wrex and Liara. I remember talking to the Rachni queen. I remember fighting my way up the outside of the council tower under the shadow of an immense sentient construct.

I definitely don't think of the long parade of mountainous palette swaps with no defining features.

That's a shame. So you probably don't remember the one with the meteor storm either?

I dig scenery, and the low-res skyboxes in ME2 were a serious downgrade, to the point that they actually broke immersion because I went WTF. Some of the ME3 screenshots are looking good in this department though, so I have some hope.

 

[uc.asc]

I can't be the only one who thought the rifle sway was the most annoying thing on the planet (or in the galaxy, whatever). ME2 sniping was great because I actually felt like a sniper and not someone who was waiting for another swing to come around so that I could try the same shot for the hundredth time.

Have you ever shot a rifle?

Talking as a sharpshooter, rifle sway is a real thing that you have to compensate for. Mostly, by timing your shots to when the rifle swayed over the target.

as an infiltrator I found I could just spam that fireball thing every time it came off cooldown. :/

This.

As far as ME2's rifles go, you have the choice of having moderate damage with only being able to hold 10 bullets, or shit damage with 50 bullets. So, it's no wonder the neutered Infiltrator would spend most of his time simply throwing fireballs.

You can pick up a pretty ridiculous AMR about halfway through.

 

[MercurySteam]

So the recoil might as well not have been there.

In comparison with another game (say, BF:BC2) bolt action sniper rifles tend to make the camera lurch suddenly when fired and by the time you've returned the firing bolt to its original position (roughly 2-3 seconds later) you'd expect the recoil to be all but dissipated. Faster firing semiautomatic snipers (such as the SVU Snaiperskaya in BC2 or the M-97 Viper from ME2) are affected to a greater degree as they both have more than one round per reload. This occurs in both BC2 and ME2 and plenty other games so perhaps I'm just not annoyed by it in the same way you are.

If you where trying "that same shot for the hundredth time" you just lacked the accuracy and patience to play the class in the first game.

To be honest, this is just my latest thing to get pissed off at. After returning to ME1 after awhile I'm reminded of how annoyed I was when I first tried sniping in ME1. I was able to eventually push past it but after sniping for so long in BC2 with rifles that don't do this, I just felt a little agitated. I can compensate for bullet drop easy, but sway just gets on my nerves. Games with a reasonable amount of sway like CoD and even Borderlands are fine with me, but I've never seen it in such a frustrating amount as it is in ME1.

 

[kuyo]

*sigh*
You know, judging by the insult at the top of your post, I assume your a moron assuming that all the hate towards the dumbing down of Bioware is being hurled by PC gamers.
I'd like to say I'm a pure console gamer, and I'm also pissed off.

Now, to briefly go over the basics of why Mass Effect to was dumbed down:

A fair few things were cut.
Mass Effect 1 skills:

Mass Effect 2 skills:

You mentioned that you never used all your skills at once.
I'll have to correct you and add that, yes you could.
Combining Biotic powers was great fun.
Lifting enemies into the air and then using a force push to send em flying.
Using singularity to draw them together and blasting a Shotgun rocket into the mass.
Or just lifting an entire room into the air with various Biotics, activating all your damage buffs and start blowing them all apart.

The new way the karma bars worked encouraged extremism in either Paragon or Renegade.
In the old game you had to focus your skill points into diplomacy, which allowed you to play a morally grey Shepard and still be effective.
In Mass Effect 2 you had to be either a Saint or Devil in order to be good at diplomacy.

The inventory was gone. Say it was crap all you like, I'd agree with you.
But Bioware just got rid of it, instead of making it more user friendly. That was not streamlined, that was tearing out a whole part of the RPG experience.
This also lead to the utter idiocy of having the female characters surviving the vacuum of space with nothing but a breather mask.
After all, players will get bored if the tits are covered up right brah?

Oh, and the weapon mods were gone because of this as well.
Which meant rather then having my own gun which suited my play style, I was forced to use standard issue cookie cutter ones. Again, less freedom, less variety, less RPG.

Combat was more focused on cover based shooting. It was much smoother, and I liked it...
But it lost the variety of the first game. That one had enemies that could crawl on the ceiling and snipe, the Krogan were lighting fast melee chargers, more large enemies like Geth Colossus, the environments were not all corridors but instead there were many open spaces and the Geth were just generally more interesting then the Blue Suns/Blood pack.
All the enemies in Mass Effect 2 operated the same.

There was a lack of quest variety. Almost all quests involved mass amounts of shooting corridors and killing. Not as bad as Dragon Age 2, but still more then Mass Effect 1.
The first game had quiet a few quests where you didn't shoot anyone at all and instead had to use your wits and silver tongue.

The Mako was cut in favor of Planet Scanning. Again, lack of gameplay variety. Sense of grandure and exploration lost, even if the Mako did handle like a toaster on wheels.
And planet scanning was boring.
They could have focused on improving the Mako, rather then just scraping it.

The main plot really didn't hold up under scrutiny. Go read Shamus Young's article for a full break down. It's a entertaining and interesting read.
Or watch his show "Spoiler Warning" if you'd rather watch a video.
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=7004
http://www.shamusyoung.com/spoilerwarning/

The collecters and Harbinger were failures and generated no threat.
Compared to Saren, a worthy rival, and Sovereign, famous for the chilling speech about the Reapers motivations. Which leads to...

The awful and silly tacked on final boss. Which also ruined the whole enigma the Reapers had built up. Worst of all, people were laughing, rather then chilled.

Those are some abridged notes on how it was dumbed down.
On the whole, Mass Effect 2 streamlined rather well. Better then Dragon Age 2 and some other titles. Much better actually, presentation and the shooting mechanics were slick.
But it lost alot of the other things that made it great, unique and epic in scope.

Arrgh a decent argument and I need to play "That internet guy" and be the other side to your coin.
So without further ado.
I'm just going to use headings and you can follow on from your post onto mine, saves me dicking around with quotes.

Powers
Let's be honest Mass Effect 1 did not need ALL those powers. Depending on your class depends on what you do.
I'll take my girlfriends class and character of fem shep infiltrator and here's the thing. As a total novice to playing a on a keyboard and mouse system she struggles with this kind of game play.
ME1 had notoriously silly AI and the enemies are no exception here, yet her choice of powers is limited to 2 things mostly.
Marksman and Singularity, she'll only ever stray from those if she needs something on the fly.
She doesn't need those extras, not saying ME should only have 2 powers but lets face it. It's a messy amount and half aren't required.
The tech ones just boggle me for the most part, I don't even know what they do.

ME2 all the powers had a purpose that was clearly definable and noticeable, biotic has a barrier up? No problem, warp him.
Engineer is running towards you guns blazing, sunlight glaring off his swanky tech armour? chuck an overload on him.
It works, it's streamlined and most of all it makes sense. Having 12 powers is great, less so when you only use 2 of them. (No, I didn't count the actual amount)

Karma
I'm not entirely certain what the kerfuffle is here. The points systems in both games are completely the same, well and truly.
Mass Effect one just has a little bar that you adjust yourself. If you go renegade you're just as much of an ass hole than in the second game.
So no, you're not making any point here other than "They removed my visual representation and I can't put points where I want"
*Hint: Make different choices when it comes to it, you can play morally grey Shepard by -being- morally grey and not by how many points you have.

Invent
I actually liked it but I don't see a problem with it disappearing either. Again it makes sense to do so, there was a tonne of useless crap in it.
They removed all the useless stuff and just kept the good parts, the guns. That's all you needed, in ME1 the only decent thing to do was to stick acid ammo in all your guns and burn holes in people.
Again, my girl is discovering this herself. She hasn't any need to swap anything over at all because she knows her team will just destroy stuff already.
The weapon mods are entirely pointless besides adding an instant death mechanic to shots.

Combat
I think it got smoother because of an improvement of AI, some of the enemies in ME1 just bumrushed you for no reason. They just ran.
At least in ME2 when a Krogan charges at you the shoes fits. That aside, I liked both sections of combat but no matter how we look at it combat in both games was repetitive.
Corridors and open spaces both of them, there's no real argument to "Just filling corridors" Mass Effect has always been so.

Quests
I agree but the side quests became a tool for more personal insight into our companions, the shooting just acted as filler.

The Mako
Yeah, Planet sweeping was dumb as balls. The mako was bad but sweeping for minerals was just painful.

I'm tired, some stuff may have gotten lost in all of that.Brain melting.
Bllaaaargh.

Just because your girlfriend didn't use all of the skills doesn't mean they're useless. I would much rather have the option to use different abilities and experiment to find my own play style than be limited to using one skill repeatedly every time the cooldown lets me and ducking behind cover taking potshots the rest of the time.

In the first game, negotiation was a skill that you had to increase. This makes much more sense than your karma directly determining your negotiating abilities. (Deny me a discount eh? Let me go murder some orphans and get back to you on that.) I didn't like the PR system at all, and would much rather be able to just make the choices I want regardless of previous decisions, but it makes more sense in ME1.

Guns in ME1 had different models and mods for guns such as snowblind rounds that would cool the gun. I don't see how taking mods and making them into skills is an improvement. (How the fuck is ammo power a skill? It only kinda makes sense for warp ammo. Really it's just a mod that you have to reequip every mission.)

An open area allows for more versatility in combat. In ME1, you could ram shit with the Mako, park it on top of guys and get out to shoot them while they're pinned, form a pincer, take the highground, hold your ground in cover, snipe shit with the Mako cannon, synchronize your skills for greater effect, run up and pistolwhip people, ect. In ME2, you sit in cover, wait for cooldowns, take potshots, elbow people in the face, and die because you decided not to use cover and elbow people in the face. Combat in ME1 was more hectic, but you could play it in different ways and compensate when enemies used different tactics. ME2 just screws the player when you're up against the charging enemies with a fuckton of health because Shepard's a cripple who apparently became Joker's sibling. (or Cerberus uses the same cloning technology as Metal Gear)

 

[crudus]

*sigh*
You know, judging by the insult at the top of your post, I assume your a moron assuming that all the hate towards the dumbing down of Bioware is being hurled by PC gamers.
I'd like to say I'm a pure console gamer, and I'm also pissed off.

Now, to briefly go over the basics of why Mass Effect to was dumbed down:

A fair few things were cut.
Mass Effect 1 skills:

Mass Effect 2 skills:

You mentioned that you never used all your skills at once.
I'll have to correct you and add that, yes you could.
Combining Biotic powers was great fun.
Lifting enemies into the air and then using a force push to send em flying.
Using singularity to draw them together and blasting a Shotgun rocket into the mass.
Or just lifting an entire room into the air with various Biotics, activating all your damage buffs and start blowing them all apart.

The new way the karma bars worked encouraged extremism in either Paragon or Renegade.
In the old game you had to focus your skill points into diplomacy, which allowed you to play a morally grey Shepard and still be effective.
In Mass Effect 2 you had to be either a Saint or Devil in order to be good at diplomacy.

The inventory was gone. Say it was crap all you like, I'd agree with you.
But Bioware just got rid of it, instead of making it more user friendly. That was not streamlined, that was tearing out a whole part of the RPG experience.
This also lead to the utter idiocy of having the female characters surviving the vacuum of space with nothing but a breather mask.
After all, players will get bored if the tits are covered up right brah?

Oh, and the weapon mods were gone because of this as well.
Which meant rather then having my own gun which suited my play style, I was forced to use standard issue cookie cutter ones. Again, less freedom, less variety, less RPG.

Combat was more focused on cover based shooting. It was much smoother, and I liked it...
But it lost the variety of the first game. That one had enemies that could crawl on the ceiling and snipe, the Krogan were lighting fast melee chargers, more large enemies like Geth Colossus, the environments were not all corridors but instead there were many open spaces and the Geth were just generally more interesting then the Blue Suns/Blood pack.
All the enemies in Mass Effect 2 operated the same.

There was a lack of quest variety. Almost all quests involved mass amounts of shooting corridors and killing. Not as bad as Dragon Age 2, but still more then Mass Effect 1.
The first game had quiet a few quests where you didn't shoot anyone at all and instead had to use your wits and silver tongue.

The Mako was cut in favor of Planet Scanning. Again, lack of gameplay variety. Sense of grandure and exploration lost, even if the Mako did handle like a toaster on wheels.
And planet scanning was boring.
They could have focused on improving the Mako, rather then just scraping it.

The main plot really didn't hold up under scrutiny. Go read Shamus Young's article for a full break down. It's a entertaining and interesting read.
Or watch his show "Spoiler Warning" if you'd rather watch a video.
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=7004
http://www.shamusyoung.com/spoilerwarning/

The collecters and Harbinger were failures and generated no threat.
Compared to Saren, a worthy rival, and Sovereign, famous for the chilling speech about the Reapers motivations. Which leads to...

The awful and silly tacked on final boss. Which also ruined the whole enigma the Reapers had built up. Worst of all, people were laughing, rather then chilled.

Those are some abridged notes on how it was dumbed down.
On the whole, Mass Effect 2 streamlined rather well. Better then Dragon Age 2 and some other titles. Much better actually, presentation and the shooting mechanics were slick.
But it lost alot of the other things that made it great, unique and epic in scope.

Well lets dive in.

Karma:
This was actually a change I hated. You really couldn't play a character. You had to just control a one dimensional person. I always had problems with missing dialogue options because I was playing LE, CG, etc. I wasn't even trying to play morally gray. I was just a hardass who cared for only people who earned her respect.

Powers:
Whenever I was going through the list of powers all of the classes were remarkably similar. It was more like every class was a slow spectrum from Soldier to Adept(sort of like looking at a gray scale) which didn't really give you variety between the classes. The only real difference being the highest tier abilities. There was also no need for that many powers. A lot of the powers themselves were incredibly similar.

Inventory/weapons:
This actually fits in with the same thing as the powers a little. Sure there was nice variety in weapons as well, but it didn't make any character different from another. Rather than the variety coming from the gun, it comes from what the player can do with the gun. Your picture actually shows that nicely. A wizard wouldn't be able to wield the biggest most powerful sword effectively. If he could then he makes the fighter obsolete which is exactly what was happening in ME1.

(P.S. no idea what you are talking about with the female character surviving with just a breather mask)

Combat:
There was still plenty of variety. People tried to charge you, shoot you, light you on fire, attack you with dogs, etc.

Quests:
It is really hard to have a quest where you don't shoot everyone when all of your dialogue options are chosen for you. They don't present a challenge if you can look at all the dialogue options and say "yeah, this is the best one". Now if you mean you get railroaded into fighting more in ME2, I found that more true if I was renegade rather than paragon. I still found plenty of fetch quests.

Mako
I found the Mako more tedious than the planet scanning. None of the planets really varied from each other. It was a square mile of terrain with the same things on them. A down satellite, minerals, geth encampment, and if you were lucky a Thresher Maw. I really didn't need to spend 20-30 minutes on a planet traveling to 6-8 different points to find that one thing I needed from the planet. Planet scanning took less time to get things more beneficial to me.

Plot
I really don't think this is an argument toward ME2 being "dumbed down". They needed a new story they could turn into a third installment. The second one is always the weakest for that. I really can't think of any trilogy where the second one wasn't the weakest of the three. It isn't something I get my knickers in a twist about.

The time dilation was silly and unnecessary. I didn't like it.

I never played an adept in Mass Effect 2, as an infiltrator I found I could just spam that fireball thing every time it came off cooldown. :/

That isn't the game being "dumbed down" then. That is just you own preference. Also, everyone had their own things they could just spam. Adepts had singularity, infiltrators had incinerate, soldiers had bullets.

 

[Joccaren]

1. ME1 had a cumbersome inventory system that added no depth whatsoever to the gameplay because there was never any choice. I've played ME1 a dozen times, and not once have I ever had a dilemma over whether to use this weapon or that weapon, or this armor vs that armor. Whenever I get new loot I just look to see if any of them are bigger and better than what I have and then swap out accordingly. In order for there to be a choice there has to be a situation such as this: you have two weapons to choose from, one with great range and the other with great damage, which do you choose? Or like this: one armor protects you from damage type A, the other from damage type B, which do you choose? This kind of choice never, ever happens in ME1. New armor is always better than old armor in every way, so there is no dilemma, no choice, no depth. Removing the inventory system did not strip the game of any depth, it just streamlined it.

2. ME1 had more skills than ME2, and the skills had independent cooldown timers. In ME2 there were fewer skills and they shared a single cooldown timer. Again, this was critised as "dumbing-down" but it's actually the opposite; by having a single cooldown timer ME2 actually introduced a new choice (which skill to use) that actually matters, thereby adding depth to the game (in comparison to ME1 where there was no reason not to use every skill at once).

ME2 also merged similar skills together. For example ME1's Sabotage, Overload and Decryption were merged in ME2 to form a single skill called Overload. This would equate to a lack of depth if there were times in ME1 when you would use one of those skills and not the others, but I for one never encountered such a situation. It was always a case of either spamming all three or spamming none of them, so again this is not a lack of depth, it's just streamlining.

Labelled parts of posts with numbers to clarify:
1. Agreed. I preferred ME2s armour system, but no so much the weapon system. I would have liked to have seen a weapon system were you could upgrade the weapon (Like is done in ME2) but also swap mods around, and possibly only have a limited number of each weapon. Possibly. The weapon system in ME2 is much like the one in ME1 except you can upgrade your weapons and you have unlimited copies of them all.

2. I like the fact that many of the useless skills were gone, and the merging of some of the skills, I would liked to have seen a few more skills. As it stands, I only found one skill that my character would use, and the others seemed pretty useless due to the shared cooldown. Yes, it supposedly adds choice of which ability to use, but I'd always use the same ones.
For Vanguard, I'd always use charge. It knocks enemies back, slows down time and regenerates my shield. No brainer there.
For the soldier, I'd always use adrenaline rush. Sure, he had ammo abilities, but other than that he just had concussive shot, which I found all but useless on any difficulty. The ammo powers had almost no cooldown, so no real time was wasted there, but concussive shot did nothing to enemies with armour or shield (every enemy on the higher difficulties) and on lower difficulties, I found it easier just to line up headshots with my sniper in slow-mo than keep waiting for cooldowns to knock something down.
For the Sentinal, I always used his armour. It was excellent crowd control and upped my survival chances by around 300% on the higher difficulty levels. It increases my current shields, then mini-stuns and damages all nearby enemies when it is destroyed. I found myself just walking into the line of fire to use this effect most of the time. It allowed my squadmates and I more time to gun down enemies due to the mini-stun, and allowed me to tank and stop them from constantly dying with the extra shield. The damage just came as a bonus.
I never actually played any of the other classes, but on the higher difficulties, I'd always have Miranda and Jack with me to just so they could use overload and warp, and I believe the Infiltrator strategy has been explained already.
Also, more a matter of personal preference than 'dumbing down', but I hated the greatly reduced health and the greater emphasis on cover. I preferred having enough health to run from cover to cover, and the majority of the cover being naturally occurring, not pop-up barricades all over the place.

 

[MercurySteam]

Have you ever shot a rifle?

Talking as a sharpshooter, rifle sway is a real thing that you have to compensate for. Mostly, by timing your shots to when the rifle swayed over the target.

I don't aim for large amounts of realism in my games. As I said in my above post, bullet drop, getting to a fairly good position with no obstructions, and waiting for a target to be in just the right position isn't an issue with me. Large amounts of bullet sway have just never agreed with me. It's that simple.

If you want to preach about realistic weapon mechanics, then sure but you may as well complain about every weapon that isn't as realistic as it should be while you're at it. Like pistols.

The only shooter that I really care about is Bad Company 2 and it has environment destruction, bullet drop and a whole truckload of other things that make realistic. Massive amounts of sway on sniper rifles just make it more frustrating but like I said above, I can get to the point were I can push past it.

Just not today, apparently.

 

[sora91111]

Yea ME1, all you really had to do was use overkill then rape everything in sight.

 

[KafkaOffTheBeach]

/snip

Thats a lot of insecurity over me thinking your bad at the Mako. Like, wow.

You find time to objectively prove that the mako was in fact, crap? No? Just had to get that rant out? Ok then.

I'm sorry, how can you not see that the Mako was broken, you cute little vocal minority?
The only way it 'worked' in the game was because a super secret government official of death having a mobile combat vehicle actually makes sense - and the acknowledgement of its existence does, in fact, make the game richer from a narrative standpoint. It provides perspective, a sense of scale, a humanised factor to the game - it serves as a reminder of the rules of the ME universe, making players move physically from point A to point B in a way that isn't a loading screen or a convenient quest hub.
However, as a gameplay mechanic, it sucks.
It handles horribly, the controls are floaty and unresponsive, and the collision detection is way off. If they had been bothered to fix it for ME2, then this wouldn't be happening. We'd all be delighted at the new Mako, reminiscing over a fine chianti about the tight gameplay mechanics and the almost 'real world' feel of its integration as a vehicle as opposed to a cheap way to ramp up the tempo.
Sadly, they didn't. They removed it completely and replaced it with something silly and dull.

Insecurities? Over being accused of being bad at a part of a game on the internet by someone who is, for all intents and purposes, completely anonymous?
I think you might have misread my post.

 

[ThrobbingEgo]

I loved Mass Effect 1, but after playing Mass Effect 2 I can't bring myself to play it. The combat's painfully bad in the worst Action RPG sense.

With action RPGs everything just feels like it's made of wet cardboard. Cardboard bullets slowly whittling away the HP of cardboard humans. Admittedly, ME1 wasn't the worst example of this I've seen. That would be Vampire Masquerade Bloodlines, another game I love despite itself. (Ah, VMB: When you're shooting normal humans in the face with guns, or slicing them with swords, they shouldn't get back up and keep shooting you. That goes doubly when they use the exact same flinch animation as when you punch them.)

Mass Effect 2 had substantially more action and less RPG, so the combat felt like it was made of substantially less wet cardboard.

 

[Epic Fail 1977]

1. ME1 had a cumbersome inventory system that added no depth whatsoever to the gameplay because there was never any choice. I've played ME1 a dozen times, and not once have I ever had a dilemma over whether to use this weapon or that weapon, or this armor vs that armor. Whenever I get new loot I just look to see if any of them are bigger and better than what I have and then swap out accordingly. In order for there to be a choice there has to be a situation such as this: you have two weapons to choose from, one with great range and the other with great damage, which do you choose? Or like this: one armor protects you from damage type A, the other from damage type B, which do you choose? This kind of choice never, ever happens in ME1. New armor is always better than old armor in every way, so there is no dilemma, no choice, no depth. Removing the inventory system did not strip the game of any depth, it just streamlined it.

2. ME1 had more skills than ME2, and the skills had independent cooldown timers. In ME2 there were fewer skills and they shared a single cooldown timer. Again, this was critised as "dumbing-down" but it's actually the opposite; by having a single cooldown timer ME2 actually introduced a new choice (which skill to use) that actually matters, thereby adding depth to the game (in comparison to ME1 where there was no reason not to use every skill at once).

ME2 also merged similar skills together. For example ME1's Sabotage, Overload and Decryption were merged in ME2 to form a single skill called Overload. This would equate to a lack of depth if there were times in ME1 when you would use one of those skills and not the others, but I for one never encountered such a situation. It was always a case of either spamming all three or spamming none of them, so again this is not a lack of depth, it's just streamlining.

Labelled parts of posts with numbers to clarify:
1. Agreed. I preferred ME2s armour system, but no so much the weapon system. I would have liked to have seen a weapon system were you could upgrade the weapon (Like is done in ME2) but also swap mods around, and possibly only have a limited number of each weapon. Possibly. The weapon system in ME2 is much like the one in ME1 except you can upgrade your weapons and you have unlimited copies of them all.

2. I like the fact that many of the useless skills were gone, and the merging of some of the skills, I would liked to have seen a few more skills. As it stands, I only found one skill that my character would use, and the others seemed pretty useless due to the shared cooldown. Yes, it supposedly adds choice of which ability to use, but I'd always use the same ones.
For Vanguard, I'd always use charge. It knocks enemies back, slows down time and regenerates my shield. No brainer there.
For the soldier, I'd always use adrenaline rush. Sure, he had ammo abilities, but other than that he just had concussive shot, which I found all but useless on any difficulty. The ammo powers had almost no cooldown, so no real time was wasted there, but concussive shot did nothing to enemies with armour or shield (every enemy on the higher difficulties) and on lower difficulties, I found it easier just to line up headshots with my sniper in slow-mo than keep waiting for cooldowns to knock something down.
For the Sentinal, I always used his armour. It was excellent crowd control and upped my survival chances by around 300% on the higher difficulty levels. It increases my current shields, then mini-stuns and damages all nearby enemies when it is destroyed. I found myself just walking into the line of fire to use this effect most of the time. It allowed my squadmates and I more time to gun down enemies due to the mini-stun, and allowed me to tank and stop them from constantly dying with the extra shield. The damage just came as a bonus.
I never actually played any of the other classes, but on the higher difficulties, I'd always have Miranda and Jack with me to just so they could use overload and warp, and I believe the Infiltrator strategy has been explained already.
Also, more a matter of personal preference than 'dumbing down', but I hated the greatly reduced health and the greater emphasis on cover. I preferred having enough health to run from cover to cover, and the majority of the cover being naturally occurring, not pop-up barricades all over the place.

I agree that in ME2 each class has a certain skill which is their main skill, but I disagree that it's the only skill to be used or even that it has to be used at all.

For example, my preferred soldier build in ME2 actually forgoes AR entirely (I use Retrain Powers to get back the 1 point that's in there by default) and focuses mainly on ammo powers. I'm not saying your way is wrong and my way is right, I'm saying that there's choice and therefore depth. Personally I find AR to be useless until it gets to the fourth rank, at which point you get some damage reduction (which is nice but not worth a 10-point investment IMO).

 

[Top35]

Personally when it comes to the "dumbing down" of ME2 I think that removing the charm/intimidate skills really put a damper on the role-playing of the game and made people have to play extremist to get the best endings (keeping loyalty, talking people down, etc.) Although, I did like the fact that they streamlined the inventory, except for the removal of the weapon mods.

 

[Verbage]

They had impact on difficulty and strat, for me this made the process of saving the universe much more emersive in ME1 compared to ME2 thus adding depth. That is why the dumbing down of ME2 was of importance to me.

 

[Imbechile]

Please explain to me how is COMPLETLY removing something not dumbing down?
Streamlining would be if they took something like the inventory system and made it more user frendly, but nooooo, they didn't even try. The went the easier route.
While we are at it can you please name a few sequels that were dumbed down compared to it's predecesor? I would like to see what games YOU think were dumbed down.

 

[RuralGamer]

snip

Yeah, I always found that a little weird as well; I'm already supposed to be an excellent infiltrator, but apparently I've always done it without sniper rifles, despite them kinda being what my class is about to a degree.

Same with armour; how can you be better with armour? More mobile perhaps, but that wasn't really what armour skills did back then.

 

[Squeaky]

I wouldn't say it was dumbed down, most of the RPG elements were streamlined out of the game. It changed from an RPG-Shooter to a Tactical-RPG.

ME2 is not even tactical in terms of what shooters do. Though that seems to be rare these days. Shame what happen to SOCOM 4. Though if they make the biotic, tech, and the cloak be more potent, and make the main team smaller to 6, and give full abilities while increasing the team AI and commands it could be useful. But they might have to do a whole engine to put in some things that can be done in the tactical side of shooters, along with the other skills.

Was ME2 dumb down? Yes in some areas, no in others. The Charm and intimidate being stuck in P/R skill was stupid, and reinforce my point that it was useless in ME1, or as close to it if you wanted to put increases in stats. Nerf the hell out of the caster classes, though the engineer drone skill made it seem like they were going somewhere with messing enemies, and disrupting the battle field. On the other hand guns are unique, need balance though as the Avenger is pretty much outclassed. The attributes increases were low though. Bad when the only difference between two specialization is base on the stat increase of paragon and renegade. The rest of the boost was meager outside of partymates. Defense was useless as you where a glass cannon, or Sentinel/ Vanguard a tank.

To many chest high walls, when will they just make a level be big and have natural cover? Seems better to many, and forces players to improvise.

Sorry for quoteing you but this is how i felt about ME2 dont get me wrong great game but it felt more of a shooter than an RPG in terms of its stats/skills managment the choices you made had little or no effect i played the hole game though by just selecting the first thing it landed on when it loaded up, and taking out the ability to add "buffs" to your guns and armour seemed like a stupid thing to take out when it was the only important thing in ME. Turning the ammuntion into a skill just was stupid when it was part of the law, weather its to do with the streamlining of the experince focusing less on plaing for a situation rather adapting to a threat that seems dumped down to me.