Fast Jimmy wrote...
Trying to head back to the original concept of the OP real quick...
...has anyone thought about the concept of "the game chooses my decisions for me" has for those of us who play with the RPG option? Does that hint at the possibility that almost every dialogue choice in the game is going to be cut and dry, black and white? I know people have complained about this before in ME games, but will ME3 be more of the same or, possibly, even more two dimensional?
Yes, but I'd say choices will be one-dimensional.
The introduction of Shooter-mode causes a serious problem. You can no longer have different paths to the same goal through choice and consequence, because one target group cannot make choices. You cannot have quests that have a major impact, in two different directions, like DAO's choices where you ended up with one army or the other (Werewolves or Elves IIRC), because one group would never get the choice.
You can't just say "Oh, all Shooter-boys get Elves", you'll get roasted for not letting them get Werewolves. So you have to give them both. Shooter-boys aren't interested in RPG's, they don't care about the concept of Choice & Consequence, they just want to know why they can't have bad*** elves shooting arrows over their army of werewolves.
So what do you do? Everyone gets elves and everyone gets werewolves. That's what will happen here, the incredibly superficial quests from ME2 that didn't actually do anything but give you different dialogue, will be even more superficial.
It'll be like those DA2 parodies that were on the DA2 board.
"I think I want to go to the forest"
"No, you want to go to Ostagar"
"No, we're going to the forest" (Walks off towards the forest)
(Enters Ostagar anyways)
"See, I told you this is where you wanted to go!"
Which, IMO, is going to end up the exact same way DA2 did. Struggling to sell 1 million copies and with a rating of less than 4 on Metacritic.
You can already see it coming, go look at the Gamespot article about the teaser image today and read the comments, it's trending negative towards Bioware. Remember, this is a site that cheered Fallout 3's conversion into a superficial shooter, and now even they're tired of "Streamlining" and making everything into a Shooter.