Here’s a few suggestions I’d like to toss out there to be debated, discussed, or ignored if you choose.
1) On the subject of elevators vs loading screens.
Some people prefer the elevator and the dialogue. Some people like the loading scenes. They are just two different methods of covering up a brief period of waiting while our PC/Xbox catches up to our hands and our minds. I do find the loading scenes to be interesting, a nice graphical touch, but they are jarring. Consider in ME1, where you got into an elevator on the Citadel with your squaddies, stood around while you listened to them talk or heard a news report, and then stepped out in a whole other place. This creates the illusion that the station is one long, continuous thing, rather than a bunch of separate rooms all fractured and broken up by loading screens. Likewise for the ship. I realise that standing in the elevator is tedious -- why not have Shepard inspect his/her gun whilst in there, or flick through some data on a pad? Taking the elevators out and replacing them with loading screens doesn’t remove the wait, only our perception of it.
Why not compromise? Say, show the characters in the elevator, and for some areas, have a small corner of the screen display the visual ascent/descent of the elevator?
Likewise, the “shuttle descending through atmosphere” scene. Know what would be really cool there? A short cinematic of Shepard and squad-mates gearing up, jumping into the shuttle and sharing “here we go again, I hope we survive this one too” looks instead of a loading screen showing the shuttle... doing whatever it’s doing with those weird leg things.
2) On the subject of resource gathering
We must be the stupidest Commander in the military. Why are we spending our valuable time and money exploring every individual world and launching 42,000 probes (and if launching over 30,000 isn’t an achievement on the Xbox, it should be) when we’re affiliated with the Alliance and the Council and Cerberus?
One word, Bioware; subcontractors.
Yes, that’s right. We send a single probe to a planet for prospecting purposes. We find something. Yay! We head to Illium, or the Citadel, or Omega. We set up a contract with a mining company. They mine the planet, giving us a finder’s divvy of the materials. Now we’re part of the galactic economy. You could even have several different companies and brokers vying for your attention, trying to give you the best deals. Here’s another place where your Paragon/Renegade score can come into effect. Don’t like the deal that the Salarian’s giving you? Threaten him, or use your Paragon charm on the Turian broker who’s courting your favour.
3) Mako vs Shuttle
I know that it’s no longer feasible to have the Mako, because the Normandy SR2 is too heavy to land on most planets to retrieve it. Why not have the best of both worlds? Redesign the shuttle so that the body of it is a detachable Mako (or other ATV) which can be reconnected to the main shuttle unit for atmospheric ascent. Then instead of dropping up off right outside the pirate bunker or whatever, we can actually do a little exploration of planets.
If Star Trek can make the Prometheus split apart during space-battles, I'm sure the Bioware bods can manage this with a small shuttle/ATV combination.
4) On the subject of squad interaction
Bioware, you got this so right in DA:O, and so wrong in ME2. The characters are good. Most of them have solid foundations. We even empathise with some of them. But we want them to talk to each other. What we have at the moment is a ship full of strangers who hardly ever interact unless they’re at each others’ throats, and most of the time barely even acknowledge each other. I, as a player, want to interact with my crew, and I want them to interact with each other, without needing me to hold their hands or choose sides. This would make things just so more realistic.
5) Shepard/squad interaction
The foundations are there, but they really, really, really need to be developed and refined. We need more conversation that isn’t dependent upon whether or not your squaddie is also your love-interest. Short and sweet only works when you have sweet, and mostly, we don’t. So much more needs to be done here. And we need better “I don’t want to talk right now” lines from the squaddies. Mordin had it best; he had a set of different “plesae leave me alone” responses, all of them wonderfully written and delivered. But seriously, if Tali tells me one more time that she’s busy cleaning up the engine, or Garrus tells me one more time that he’s busy calibrating weapons, or Jacob tells me one more time that we’re like... homies or something, I swear, I might actually kill them off.
Well, probably not. But I’d entertain the idea.
6) On the subject of new team members
I’ve heard a lot of suggestions in this area, some of them fanatical, some of them crazy. One of my favourite has been the volus team-mate suggestion. So I propose the following:
Umar Von, nephew of renowned financial advisor Barla Von, comes to study under his uncle. Caught up in a world of shady dealings and even shadier human noir crime vids, Umar makes the radical decision to join C-Sec, hoping to eventually establish himself as a private investigator. Barla Von pulls some strings, and Umar is admitted into C-Sec as the first volus to serve on the force. But the life of crime-fighting is more difficult than Umar first thought; nobody takes him seriously. Criminals laugh at him and so do his superiors.
Umar gets himself into serious trouble, only to be saved in a timely rescue by Our Hero. Following on from the complete failure of his first mission, Umar gives up his dream of become a crime-fighting detective. But help comes from an unlikely source -- Garrus takes pity on the young volus, and decides to help train him. Umar becomes space-Robin to Garrus’ space-Batman, and with his crew compliment increased by one, Shepard sets off to destroy the Reapers.
I did have some more ideas, but now I have the urge to go and write a story about a crime-fighting detective volus, so I’ll just leave it there for now.
Modifié par Llandaryn, 15 février 2010 - 09:10 .
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