tippy2k2 said:
I still don't understand why it would matter. The "talking wheel" setup gets skipped if you play the ACTION way. You don't skip the story, you skip all the middle stuff of setting up Shepard how you want him to be. If I like the story and game-play but don't like having to slough through the endless dialogue options to do it, why can't I? That's all Bioware is doing, giving the option to skip the dialogue options. I'm still going to get to see the story and I get to play the game, I just get to automatically skip the stuff that I was button mashing to get through anyway.
If you want to play the game where you get dialogue and shooter, you still have the option. Bioware hasn't decided to remove the stuff that made it your story.
It makes no sense to leave the game open for people to play without the dialogue. The game at it's core is an RPG. Yes the shooter stuff became more prominent in ME2, but it was still an RPG because it let the player chose how Shepard acted to things and what he said. If you remove having to chose dialogue, then you are just playing Halo or other shooters with a different wrapper. I love Halo, but I played the Mass Effects because I like RPGs. Now the diehard RPG fans would hit me upside the head for saying that the dialogue wheel is awesome, but I see the wheel as the new age of RPG dialogue choosing because it makes the dialogue choices clearer, but if you remove the dialogue all together, you aren't really playing a classic style RPG.
Another reason making the dialogue optional is really stupid, is that you get less of a story. Seriously, if you take out the dialogue, what are you left with, cut-scenes. How much of the full story is in those cut-scenes? I'm thinking about 15% of the full story, I'm being generous too. Without the dialogue, you lose all characterization and personality from the game. In order to get all the story from the dialogue without having the dialogue, BioWare would have to make cut-scenes three times as long and the game would have three times as many cut-scenes as all the Metal Gear Solid games combined, maybe more. I remember there is somebody that made youtube videos of the first Mass Effect game. He removed the dialogue HUD so it wouldn't show during conversations, and the HUD during battle. An hour in watching that and the viewer is barely out of the intro of the story. Just the first game could be turned into a television series broken up into at least 4 seasons. So no, cutting the dialogue is stupid, then you have a game where you play for about 5 minutes and then you have a half hour of cut-scenes.
There are some changes, that BioWare has done to their games, that I like. I like what they changed and did with Dragon Age 2. The weren't changes that harmed it in the RPG area, they "streamlined" it in the proper way. They wanted to make it that way and they did. It is still an awesome RPG.
The problem is that BioWare has a very uneven fanbase, and they listen to anybody and practically always comply. They listened to people that said they had problems with sections of DA:Origins, problems with combat, dialogue, and leveling and ability system. But, when they listened to those people and fixed the game(properly in my mind) with DA2, they upset the other half of the fanbase.
Then EA came along and got its hands in the mix, and BioWare had changed Mass Effect because of what EA wants it to be. They might act like it because EA is watching them, but I know that the multiplayer thing was not BioWare's idea. They just caved because they want to please people way to much, and of course they want to please the publisher. BioWare needs to stand up and say they are going to make the games they want to make. Not the games that they think the fans will like or be pleased with and not games that appease the big bad publisher.
Long story short:
BioWare did make a mistake by including the multiplayer and the ability to skip dialogue. In this respect, they are betraying what the game is about. They betrayed nothing when they made changes to make Dragon Age 2, because it was still an RPG. But, this is a betrayal because multiplayer makes no sense for the game, because it is a single player story RPG that happens to be a shooter as well. It is also a betrayal because making the dialogue skip-able for the people that just what a shooter with cut-scenes is stupid since the dialogue is what makes up the story and the real Mass Effect players will have people bumbling around talking about the story and get things wrong because they skipped the dialogue.
I'm still going to get ME3 because I want to know how the story turns out and want to play another BioWare RPG, but now that I think about it, if they make the dialogue skip-able then what is exactly in that dialogue. If people can skip it, then that must mean there are no important story elements in the dialogue, which for an RPG, that makes no sense.
This is big problem with gaming today. Publishers want their games to be open to a wider audience because they will make more money, but what they don't understand is that they lose money by alienating the fans of game series and genres. They need to understand that they shouldn't try and make games accessible to everybody. If the developer wants to make a single player RPG-Shooter let them, but don't try and appease people that don't particular style of game but like the story, by forcing the developer to make it accessible to them in the next game. Those people, if they are interested in the story, then they just have to play the game with the mechanics that were made for the genre. The other problem is those people, if those people want to experience the story but don't want to do certain things to get to it, tough, play the game or don't, or go to youtube and just watch the story, if they don't like the game style, they just have to accept that it wasn't made for them and stop whining to developers and publishers to make it more pleasing for them to play.
