Lately I've seen a lot of positive reviews of and opinions on Mass Effect 2. To me it's just the last step in a trend which I've seen, and hated for a long time.
In order to make the game more 'accessible' and 'streamlined' the inventory management of Mass Effect 1 where you had to manage weapons and armor across teammates have been ripped out of the game entirely.
A similar example was the butchering of the Deus Ex franchise with Deus Ex 2 where lock picks and multi tools were combined into a single tool, all ammo types being discarded in favour of a uniform ammo resource and the skill system was done away with entirely.
( Ok, you can claim there's a minimal amount of management in the form of armor customization, but I completed the game just fine without *ever* concerning myself with this. I never even bought anything from a vendor, meaning it's reduced to a useless gimmick)
Similarly, one can look at Dragon's age which reduced the complex class-based systems seen in previous fantasy games from Bioware with 3 classes (was it ? I simply stopped playing this game before I was 10% done with the story).
This seemed even more simplistic than the original class system of the KOTOR series which also used a custom non-D&D set of rules.
It can also be seen in games such as the first Command & Conquer game versus C&C 3. In C&C 1 it made sense to combine different unit types to get a good well-rounded army whereas it's perfectly possible to steamroll people in C&C 3 using an army of Mammoth or scorpion tanks.
This, of course is seems even more shallow and awful when held up against the original Starcraft game in which there seems to be a counter to almost every unit and general strategy.
Sure, there are some counter-examples to offer such as CoD 1 to CoD 4 where perks and weapon upgrades have introduces a level of customization which was non-existent before. But to me it seems a pretty general trend that games get dumbed down nonetheless.
So, my question is, am I the only person who gets put off by this push towards "cinematic" experiences at the cost of core gameplay mechanics being dumbed down ?
In order to make the game more 'accessible' and 'streamlined' the inventory management of Mass Effect 1 where you had to manage weapons and armor across teammates have been ripped out of the game entirely.
A similar example was the butchering of the Deus Ex franchise with Deus Ex 2 where lock picks and multi tools were combined into a single tool, all ammo types being discarded in favour of a uniform ammo resource and the skill system was done away with entirely.
( Ok, you can claim there's a minimal amount of management in the form of armor customization, but I completed the game just fine without *ever* concerning myself with this. I never even bought anything from a vendor, meaning it's reduced to a useless gimmick)
Similarly, one can look at Dragon's age which reduced the complex class-based systems seen in previous fantasy games from Bioware with 3 classes (was it ? I simply stopped playing this game before I was 10% done with the story).
This seemed even more simplistic than the original class system of the KOTOR series which also used a custom non-D&D set of rules.
It can also be seen in games such as the first Command & Conquer game versus C&C 3. In C&C 1 it made sense to combine different unit types to get a good well-rounded army whereas it's perfectly possible to steamroll people in C&C 3 using an army of Mammoth or scorpion tanks.
This, of course is seems even more shallow and awful when held up against the original Starcraft game in which there seems to be a counter to almost every unit and general strategy.
Sure, there are some counter-examples to offer such as CoD 1 to CoD 4 where perks and weapon upgrades have introduces a level of customization which was non-existent before. But to me it seems a pretty general trend that games get dumbed down nonetheless.
So, my question is, am I the only person who gets put off by this push towards "cinematic" experiences at the cost of core gameplay mechanics being dumbed down ?
