uberdowzen wrote...
Terror_K wrote...
So here they basically are, in no particular order:-
1) The oversimplification of the RPG elements in favour of TPS ones.
I'd say that breaks down into Inventory and Character Development.
Inventory:
What did the ME1 inventory add that ME2 lacked. There are a lot of weapons, but because of a lack of combat feedback (you can't tell how much damage you're inflicting etc) you mostly just choose the weapon that has the most green bars.
Many of the upgrades were vague at best. Cool, this upgrade increases my Physics Threshold by 15%. I wonder what that means...
Finally, I'd venture to say that the ammo system was completely broken. Having to click through several menus to change ammo (which it's often useful to do several times during combat) isn't good and you simply have too many ammo items to clear out.
Finally (although admittedly this could have been fixed) the interface was not up to the job of keeping the inventory tidy. Having to go into the equip screen to deal with items is not good.
Character Development:
I have long maintained that the character development system in ME2 actually allows for more variation in characters than ME1's did. ME1's talents increase in a linear fashion whereas ME2's branch out allowing you to choose 1 of 2 high end talents. This allows for a more personalised character.
It's more than both of these things. I'm going to be broad here again for the most part, since I've been over these arguments time and time again.
ME2's overall problem was that instead of tweaking or fixing ME1's issues it scrapped them and replaced them with far simpler versions, and that these far simpler versions failed to give me what the original one did, even if the original one was a little broken.
A classic example is the whole upgrade and research system. Now instead of being able to actually mod our weapons and armour and have omni-tools and biotic amps we can choose ourselves, we're given a linear little upgrade system that just does all the work for us and is all benefits with no downsides. Customisation has been completely removed for a system so simple that it pretty much does all the work for you and allows you to max out every aspect without any issues. The player doesn't even need to pay attention to what they're doing, they can simple go into the research station and click buttons until they're out of elements. For an RPG, this isn't a good thing IMO: you need to have trade-offs and need to be forced into making choices of this over that if you want the inventory to have any meaning. As it stands every player can just have their cake and eat it too.
To use an analogy as to why without repeating myself too much, if you're familiar with the Hank Scorpio episode of The Simpsons, "You Only Move Twice" where Homer goes to work for Scorpio. He and his family end up getting a really fancy house, and whenever Marge goes to do housework she finds the house doing everything for her automatically and ends up just sitting down and drinking wine every day, feeling miserable. ME2 as an RPG makes me feel like Marge Simpson in this case: it just too overly simplified to the point where aspects are either not there or they're done for you.
Was ME1 perfect at how it handled these things? No... far from it in fact. But as I said earlier, all the right ingredients were there, and there was room for improvement and much could have been fixed with some tweaking. Getting rid of junk was a good move, but BioWare threw the baby out with the bathwater here, as they did with many elements. They never fixed anything, their answer was always "tear down and replace" and the replacements were never as involved or good as the originals. Less flawed maybe, but in the same manner that a kids pedal car will have less mechanical issues than a real car. As I said earlier as well, BioWare didn't just cut the fat, they cut a good portion of decent meat away as well.
As for character development, I simply disagree with you there. For one thing, those branching talents only happen at the end of the tier, and are never actually
that different from each other, always basically being a variation on either "more damage vs. more defense" or "more damage vs. wider damage" so when it comes down to it they're basically the same thing, and I can't really tell that much of a difference between them personally. BioWare halved the level cap but also more than halved the amount of skills and talents, which was a good move in the first case (halving the cap that is) and a bad move in the second, especially when one factors in the fact that all non-combat skills have been eliminated now. There's no longer armour classes or first-aid, decryption or hacking, and the persuasion skills have been eliminated and merged with a combat one. All this does is reinforce that the game is all about combat now and beyond that the RPG elements are pretty much not present. You may as well change what's there for buyable combat powers and abilities if you're going to be as shallow as ME2's system.
Also, as a final note, XP earning is meaningless when you don't even know how you earned it and it's the same abritrary number with no real meaning or context flashed up at the end of a mission, and it doesn't matter how you went about doing the mission to get it. As far as I can tell XP doesn't exist at all, and all we have is a phantom number BioWare call XP being thrown at us to try and justify that this is still an RPG. I'm not saying XP must be earned through kills here, but it must be earned through actions. And simply throwing a number at you that has no meaning beyond the broad spectrum of "you completed this mission" just isn't enough. I don't
feel accomplishment at all, and it seems meaningless. Especially when I coveniently level up at the same point and time every time now, through every playthrough: it's always
right after a mission, never during one.
How far removed from the first game narrative wise ME2 is:
That's too broad for me to debate. You'll have to provide some examples.
Really? I mean... the whole game is completely removed from ME1. This was supposed to be a trilogy, and more like one big story in three parts, but ME2 is so completely isolated and almost anything that seemed to matter in ME1 is pushed aside or swept under the rug for all this new stuff that just comes out of nowhere. Every time something releated to ME1 comes up if feels like a small cameo easter egg rather than anything actually meaningful.
Choices don't really matter:
This is true, but which choices really mattered in ME1? In both games you make fairly big decsions (for example: Choosing the fate of the Rachni and Choosing what to do with the Krogan Genophage) and in both games neither of them have all that much impact. It doesn't matter what you do with the Rachni, the council might shout at you a bit but that doesn't affect you in anyway and it's not like the Rachni come and help you out later in the game.
Yeah, but the whole point was that with ME1 is where you made the choices, and that you'd see most of the outcomes through the later games. ME2 failed to deliver on this for the most part, by giving us little cameos and easter eggs and that's about it. Nothing that seemed like it would matter (like The Council choice) had any real impact, despite BioWare's claims that your choices were supposed to matter. Wrex and Ashley/Kaidan were done no justice by their circumstances just being cheap subtitutes and nothing more which was an insult not only to me as a player but to their characters.
In a sense ME2 has tainted ME1 now, simply because it squandered and wasted the potential. I did dozens of playthroughs with many variations in ME1 expecting to see many variations on what I did in ME2, but now that it's come out and I see how little meaning these decisions actually had, I don't really see the sense in importing even half of them now.
3) How the overall tone and style of the game has changed presentation wise.
Tone does not have to be set throughout an entire game series. I hate to use them as an example but look at the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Each movie has a progressively darker tone to coincide with Anakin's descent to the dark side. In Mass Effect, the cold blues created a futuristic feel while conveying the underlying darkness of the world. In ME2 you're fighting an evil unstoppable force so the red hues create a hellish warlike feel.
*sips brandy* 
I'm not just talking the tone of the narrative, but the style. To put it simply, ME1 felt more mature and aimed more at intelligent 25+ sci-fi fans who love stuff like Blade Runner, Aliens, Babylon 5, the early Star Trek movies, etc. while ME2 feels like it's gone all modern Hollywood and aimed more at teenagers instead who prefer Michael Bay'sploshuns! and the like. Narrative wise it feels like it's pushed its 1980's homage nature aside in favour of being gritty, edgy and modern all of a sudden. It tries to hard to be "mature" that it instead comes across as immature. It's like with ME1 they thought "let's make a really good, intelligent sci-fi that's in the style of the 1980's but as if made with the technology of today's films" while with ME2 they thought "let's make it all gritty, edgy and modern, and all badass with action and explosions and let's suck all senses of realism out just for the sake of things that look cool and badass!" It's like it's all style over substance now, and modern style instead of the more classic style they bad before.
And beyond that, the whole game is just presented differently: like instead of being aimed at people who know what an RPG is that it's aimed at shooter fanboys who may just be confused by things. I've often described it as coming across as "Fisher Price: My First RPG" in this sense. It's like the whole thing is just one massive tutorial to slowly wean mainstream gamers onto what minor RPG elements remain, with insultingly childish things like the "Mission Complete" screens and interfaces with big buttons and pictures. ME1 may not have been The Lord of the Rings of games compared to things like Baldur's Gate, the original Fallouts and even DAO, but ME2 feels like the equivalent of "Go Dog Go" here. I feel like at the end of each mission BioWare are going "Here comes the Mission Complete screen! Zooooom!" with a giant spoon into my mouth.
Modifié par Terror_K, 30 octobre 2010 - 02:32 .
Retour en haut
We know FO3 won GOTY at the 2009 Game Developer's Choice Awards, IGN, Games Radar, GameSpy, UGO, Gamasutra and the Golden Joystick Awards. We can’t say the same for ME2 yet.
