With that said, I can't help but feel that BioWare really dumbed down ME2 as an RPG. It was pretty bad that the game's biggest feature (decisions carrying over) turned out to be a complete joke, and almost all of the deep rewards and consequences of your ME1 decisions show themselves in the form of e-mails and news casts. The fact that whether or not you let Fist live seems to have more presence in ME2 than whether or not the council survived is kind of a bad joke, in my honest opinion. And while I'm being honest this seems part of an unfortunate trend of people at BioWare over-exaggerating features of their games. (Dragon Age is a 100 hour game, eh?) But anyway, that's not really what I'm complaining about here.
ME2 is simply lacking many of the RPG elements that made the first Mass Effect so rich. For example, in the first game many of the main plot missions have their own full sub-plots which make them interesting. You're on the mission to help your Saren investigation, but you get caught up in something bigger along the way, and the characters you meet become involved. Feros has you storming in, helping some colonists fight of a Geth attack. Then you explore the colony for a bit and chat up the colonists. Then you continue on your mission, fighting through the Geth, meet the Exogeni employees, chat them up for a bit, and learn some more about what's going on. Eventually you find out about the Thorian, mind control, etc. Feros is like the perfect model of what the format of a main plot world should be.
Now let's look at pretty much every main plot mission in ME2. "Shepard, there's this bad dude out there that I think you should recruit for your team. Go and fight your way through a giant flood of mercenaries to find him."
And when that's not the case, it's "Shepard, the Collector's are up to no good. Go fight your way through dozens of collectors for an hour or so to show them who's the boss."
Almost all of the ME2 missions feel like something out of a generic shooter. It feels like there's a bare minimal plot there because even shooters are expected to have basic minimal plots these days. These aren't things I should be saying about an RPG. I don't understand how the scenario writers could have allowed this to happen. There was so much potential too. Like with Samara's mission there was a murder sub-plot for a whole 5 minutes. This should have been the main sub-plot of the entire mission. Ideally, it would have been explore, talk to people about the murder, go and fight the oblogatory giant swarm of mercs, explore the murder some more, rinse and repeat until it becomes clear that the murder must have been done by one of a few suspects. Then throw in a nice plot twist. That would have been a good mission. Instead it's talk about the murder and Samara for 5 minutes, fight the mercs for an hour, recruit Samara. It feels completely soulless.
The party members are also a problem. I like the new party members, but I don't like how they seem to be mindless dolls much of the time. The party members seem much more like accessories for Shepard than actual living characters, you know? Maybe I've been spoiled by Dragon Age because of how amazing the characters were in that game, but party members shouldn't be side dishes. They should have opinions of pretty much everything, and they should be true to their own values. Like in DA:O, there should be moral lines that the player can cross which will cause conflict within the party. Fatal conflict even. But noooo, in ME2 everyone is Shepard's obedient servent who would not dare to turn against the master outside of the Jack-Miranda, and Tali-Legion argument scenes.
In a lot of ways the game play side of things has also had the RPG aspects dumbed down. The armour system in ME2 is just plain awful. Granted, the ME1 system was also awful and needed to go, but this replacement is not an improvement. The armour effects are so minimal that I just pick them based on their looks. I also ended up wearing the visor for the entire game just so I could see my character's face. Please remember Gene Roddenberry's rules of science fiction: If you can't see the eyes, or mouth of a character, you lose the actor. That's what happens when you use a helmet in ME2. You can't see any emotion on your character's face and a lot of the effect of many lines are simply lost.
I sincerely hope that Mass Effect 3 brings back the RPG-goodness that made the first Mass Effect such a legendary game. That means sub-plots that matter within missions that consist of more than just fighting a giant horde of mercs. If BioWare takes the RPG aspects of ME1 and combines them with the improved shooter aspects of ME2, then ME3 will truly be the best game in the series.
Modifié par Indoctrination, 09 avril 2010 - 04:48 .
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