<Long post is long, you've been warned, it also has typos and lacks punctuation in places, warned again.>By the gods you people are really pushing and restrecting the already broad RPG definition to include or exclude games you like respectivley don't like. Yes Deus Ex 1 is an rpg, Yes Borderlands is an rpg (if only because it has a skill system and character advancement), no Bioshock isn't an rpg (upgrades for ways to kill stuff doesn't make it an rpg), yes ME 2 IS an rpg, ME 1 was a better RPG.
For all of you who can't get over the fact that you may not be right stop reading now.
(here follows a copy pastes from the not so perfect wiki about RPG's, you can find the rest)
"A role-playing game (RPG) is a broad family of games in which players assume the roles of characters, or take control of one or more avatars, in a fictional setting. Actions taken within the game succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules and guidelines." You may notice that this can easily be applied to ANY GAME , meaning that if there was a game where you had a 2D purple blob representing Blamo floating around in a dark empty 2 d room, you would be role playing as blamo floating in a dark empty room.
Ideally an RPG should have all of these parts in them, some of them can be found in other game types as well:
-a story and setting (duh, no world no game)
-exploration and quests (going to places and doing stuff)
-items and inventory (a reason to go to places and do stuff)
-character actions and abilities (ways to do stuff in places)
-experiance and levels (also known as tangible progression, rewards for doing actions and ways to get new abilities)
-combat (punishing evil, being evil, stress reliver, and so on)
(note that i didn't include interface since you can implement an RPG in any form you can imagine)
The better each individual part is and the better they work in concert with the other parts (and with the gameplay mechanics) the better the RPG will be. However this does not mean you need all the parts to make an RPG, just some of them, and if those parts are great and work great with the other parts they use, then the RPG might just be great, if not quite a full RPG, and it would still lose the crown to the one that gets all the parts right. The goal of the best RPG is to get as many of those parts to be as close to perfection as posible and work with each other as perfect as posible.
Compared to Mass Effect 1, Mass Effect 2 ranks a bit lower in allmost all of those areas (
IN MY OPINION):
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story and setting: not as new as it was in ME1, the story isn't as epic as the chase of Saren was, there are some obvious ilogical things happening as well (garrus and his blown up armor, bikini + oxygen mask in the void of space), there is no clear reason why the Collectors are doing what they are doing, or why we should in fact stay with cerberus; ME 2 gets some extra points for letting us visit some exotic places but they end up way to short and unimportant to make up for the rest. ME 1 > ME 2
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exploration and quests: for exploration they are equal, ME 1 had more places to visit , ME 2 has fewer but better created places, for side quests ME 1 wins because even in some side mission (not the loyalty ones) you still could chose to talk or fight (even if the locals repeated them selves), ME 2 side missions have no such choice, you get to the side mission, you go through a gauntlet of stock enemies, kill something or press USE on something at the end of the map and press F to leave (unless it's a reverese gauntlet in which case you have to fight the stock enemies on the way out). ME 2 gets saved by the very nice loyalty missions but they make up the largest part of the game, meaning that the main quest loses what little importance it had, let alone the logic behind them. (so they are stealing humans, BUHU, Jack needs to blow up a station, it can't wait) ME 1 > ME 2
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items and inventory: well they end up equally here, ME1 had copies of copies of copies of copies of guns that felt the same and copies of copies of armor split up between armors with shield, armor with armor, armor with shield and armor; ME 2 has a few guns but they feal different (ignoring the fact that they are all guns and shoot bullets to kill), and only one FREE armour with some nice customizations options, draged down by the fact that everyone else in your squad seems to fine with clothes, at least they get a repaint (which doesn't differ regardless how you finish their loyalty quest). Inventory wise we have ME1's one clunky, ugly thing from the pits of doom ... or the illusion of no inventory because no one counts the armory (but me) which is exactly the same but since you don't have a trillion items to point out that it has allmost the same problems. (that and the fact you can't omnigel stuff anymore). so yeah ME 1 = ME 2 here, just note that they both fall flat on their face in this category.
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character actions and abilities: they are equal in character actions because the 1st has more and the 2nd has them better implemented but they both kinda fail in retrospect since any renage action turns out to be EVIL. At abilities ME 1 gets the cake because it has Charm and Intimidate as skills rather then force you to go renegade from start to finish only so you get the options to shoot some one later on (yes temporary insanity is cured in this future), also because it rewards you for using an ability a lot by allowing you to get the ability to every class you make on a new game. ME 2's abilities loses even more ground when you factor in the global cool down that forces you to chose team mates based on enemies you encounter rather then personal favorites, and the fact that some abilities only act as debuffs that remove some form of protection from the enemy (so you take the shield from the enemy with an engineer ability, then wait a while before you can throw em in the air with a biotic ability, unless you need more then 1 hit to take the shield down...). ME 1 > ME 2
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experiance and levels: ME 1 gave xp for most things you did (killing, talking, hacking, etc) ME 2 only gives a fix ammount of XP for each mission, unless you do some achievement which gets you 10% more of that fixed ammount, an achievement you also had in ME 1. 60 levels > 30 levels, hard to get in one play > not so hard (i got to 29 on my first playthrough and only did about 4 side missions) ... at lvl 60 your an uber spectre > at lvl 30 your still you , ME 1 > ME 2
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combat: ME 2 wins this one, combat is better, if buggy and still haunted by stupid AI(and some say ilogical difficulty scaling), however there is so much of it that it starts to drag down the hole game after a while.
Also the parts of ME 1 worked better togheter then they do in ME 2 (with the exception of the videos which still remained in violation of the science of the game). So overall ME 1 is a better RPG then ME 2, and in my opinion the better game.
Now if ME 2 wasn't supposed to be an RPG then yes Bioware/EA/God failed in it's marketing approach, the biggest fail beign the fact that they labled it Mass Effect 2 and not Mass Effect: Shepeard vs the Collector.
And after all this venting/ranting/what ever you wanna call it, i will also tell you why for us fans ME 2 is still good, because we've been starving for any Mass Effect experiance for years now and we're just pouncing like craving zombies on it, gorging our selves on the cream cake that ME 2 is for us... untill we realise we don't really like cream.
Modifié par Palora, 09 février 2010 - 01:10 .
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To read someone describe Borderlands' WoW-like tree of entirely passive upgrades as "taken from traditional RPGs" just makes me want to weep. Are people really that easily dazzled by plus signs and percentage marks?
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I've completed it and have to wait for DLC or ME 3 for more content 
