Great. I had taken the time to craft a response and then my network connection disconnected, causing me to lose my entire reply. Gaaah! Now I have to type everything again.
Anyway, I just want to disagree and say I thought ME2 was light-years better than ME1. I played the crap out of ME1, but ME2 just blew me away. I find it so hard to play ME1 now.
Where do I start? (Note the following is all in my opinion.)
1) Stat-levelling: ME2 was better than ME1 hands-down.
Power stat bonus increases were tiny -- fractions of a percent or fractions of a second in some cases -- and so were not noticeable, plus 12 points were needed to max out a power. Powers also had Basic-Advanced-Master levels, which were fine but only really necessary so you could decrease your cooldown in most cases.
In ME2, level increases were noticeable and significant, plus the choice of evolutions had the possibility of really making your build unique. Most of the evolutions were not that good, but it was a start of a really good idea. 10 points were needed to max out a power, only 2 less than powers in ME1.
2) Inventory (Weapons, armor, mods, and tools/amps)
Let's face it, ME1 had a three-tier system when it came to inventory: (1) Crap, (2) Soon to be crap, (3) Top of the line. By the end, it did not matter how many weapons, armor, mods, and inventory was programmed into the game, all Shepards ended up with Colossus armor, Medical Exoskeleton armor mods, Spectre weapons, and Serrice Council tools/amps. Only the weapon mods were diverse enough to be considered a choice, but even then there was a lot of filler.
In ME2, you had a diverse weapon set, and researching a weapon damage upgrade applied to all weapons in that category; no more levelling weapons separately. Plus weapon effectiveness no longer relied on a weapon skill power, so weapons were made useful from the start, except the Avenger which has been terrible in all three games.
3) Passive talents.
I think this was also done better in ME2. Sure, in ME1 you had a choice of class specializations, but at least half of the time the specialization was obvious. ME1 also had the Spectre training, but the stat bonuses were incredibly tiny and insignificant. Most players on these forums just stick 4 points into it for Basic Unity, 4 points which tend to be wasted by the end of the game once you are so overpowered.
And I hate how conversation skills (Charm/Intimidate) are their own separate trees. It sucks having to dump points into them instead of putting them into the combat talents were they should belong. I could play the same character 3 times to get all bonuses in either Charm/Intimidate for free, but that becomes too much of a time sink.
ME2 just distilled everything into one passive tree which is just fine by me. I would not mind having one passive tree with an evolution choice for 1 of two additional passive trees, but that is for another discussion.
4) Crouching: crouching was needed in ME1 to increase the stability and accuracy of weapons. This is not needed in ME2 and so crouching is not needed. Crouching would just get you killed in ME2 anyway.
As for ME3, I have a lot of issues with the general gameplay mechanics:
- weapon leveling system was too much like ME1, and worse since you had to buy your weapon upgrades and you could only level them up to V on a first playthrough
- too many unbalanced weapons in ME3; too much crap and too much overpowered especially with DLC
- multiple evolutions per power was interesting, but effectively made pointless with the combo system which relied on the rank of power
- too many weapons, too many weapons acquired too late in the game
- shieldgate mechanic rendered some of high-damage the single-shot sniper rifles useless
- ME3 had a half-assed version of ME2's protection mechanics. Only a few weapons had bonuses to defenses.Too few enemies had protections and they were mostly shields. Not enough barriers and armor was now a superkind of health for super elite enemies.
- combo system homogenized gameplay
- ME3 class structure resembles ME1 where the hybrids can outperform the other classes
- weapon weight system + power cooldown formulas just a bad mechanic
Who would have thought the ME3 multiplayer, which a lot of people thought would sucl, would turn out to be the best part of ME3?
Don't get me wrong, I think ME3 is a great game, but I think they ditched too much of what ME2 special and tried to add in some more "RPG mechanics" which actually hurt the gameplay.
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