Seraphael wrote...
Vaeliorin wrote...
ME has removed the role-playing, therefore it's not an RPG.
Complete and utter nonsense! ME2 has more actual roleplaying than ME1 (apparently). You are confusing roleplaying with roleplaying game elements. Roleplaying has to do with story, character interaction and choices. You are talking about the worst elements of RPGs that has to do with unrealistic and slow combat system, insane amounts of loot and much too complex character development. All of these elements were incorporated from pen & paper RPG and MMORPGs at the time RPG developers made RPGs partly because they didn't have the skills to make decent graphics and animations. At a time they placed less emphasis on story, interaction and choice than Bioware does in all their games today and thus had to compensate with cheap window dressing.
I'm a roleplaying purist (notice I left out the 'game') and consider the Mass Effect series to be the evolution of the cRPG genre.
YOu completely misseed Vaeliorin's point.
His point (one with which I wholeheartedly agree) is that ME (and to an even greater extent, ME@) prevents roleplayuing by not granting the player control over what his character says or does.
In ME, the dialogue wheel prevented you from choosing what Shepard said. You could choose between the options on the wheel, but those options did not tell you what was going to happen next. There was no way to play Shepard as a coherent character because there was always the risk that the option you chose would produce behaviour that was inconsistent with your character concept, or even your character's past behaviour.
And even if they changed that and offered full dialogue text on the wheel, you'd still lack control over how Shepard delivered his lines (because of the voice-acting) and what he did as he delivered them (punching people, drawing a gun, walking away, etc.)
ME2 makes this problem
worse through the implementation of the interrupt system, so now we're required to choose actions based not even on an abfuscatory paraphrase, but a non-specific visual cue such that we can't possibly with any confidence what the result will be. And yet the whole of the game's dialogue is designed around them, so now we have even less information about what Shepard is going to do based on our inputs.
How is that roleplaying? That's like you playing a tabletop game and telling the GM your character leaves the room, only to have the GM tell you you left the room but threw a live grenade behind you as you did, killing everyone inside.
That's insane.