Disclaimer:
I am not at any time deriding the greatness of the Mass Effect experience so far between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, they have been an absolute triumph of dramatic role play focused story telling in a futuristic atmosphere. But there are problems I have identified in a previous thread in regards to some development design decisions in Dragon Age: Origins that have made their way over into Mass Effect 2 that I find concerning so I feel I must bring them up in a logical and non-aggressive fashion.
I love Mass Effect, I love Mass Effect 2, I only offer these criticisms based on hopes for improvements.
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Multi-Linear Story Meets Linear Level Design:
In Dragon Age: Origins and now Mass Effect 2, we have seen something of the level design teams thrust and direction in regards to rendering the environment of the world the games are set in and I find some of these decisions and the design parameters to be extremely limiting and for a lack of a better word...extremely lazy.
In Mass Effect, the original game, all the areas of open play were gigantic wide open level affairs, like the Citadel for example, in Mass Effect itself, was gigantic, much of it being traversable (even though theoretically you were still only really seeing small percentage of such a behemoth structure. In Mass Effect 2, this gets cut down extremely to a few traversable areas thats in a single district or ward, and all the actual travel is done behind the scenes when moving to mission based areas. Even the Presidium, which was a large traversable area in Mass Effect, is cut down to the office of the Human Council/Ambassador and thats it. Then theres C-Sec itself, a large traveserable area in Mass Effect, cut down to the size of a large 2 bedroom apartment in Mass Effect 2. What happenend? Keepers decided C-Sec didn't need all that space any more? Traffic control being handled elsewhere?
This thrust of level design has pushed these new generation BioWare games into what I have coined as staged environments and shoebox encounters. And while I wouldn't expect the entirety of the Citadel to be explorable, the cut down from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2 shows the gigantic difference in level design modality between 2008 and 2010.
We also see a gigantic reduction in their level design focus in their removal of exploration capability (which returns, apparently, with the Hammerhead DLC, in a limited fashion) where exploratory missions are basically linear traversable areas moving from discovery location, shooting gallery, discovery location, shooting gallery, final objective/boss fight....which is rather trite and predictable. And again recalls to the shoebox encounters of Dragon Age:Origins which were to resolve major storyline issues in very minor and apparently meaningless ways.
Now granted I'm not complaining about the level design we have, its well done and its a jump in standard from Mass Effect always having one of three options, mine shaft, underground facility or adrift space ship which always had the same basic map with different parameters. The change of design approach has made the game seem more visually variant, but in the same time, made it feel smaller and almost as predictable.
I'd like to see Mass Effect 3 move back towards more large, sweeping and somewhat non-linear level design. For a story that has so many potential resolutions and decisions, your only decision really as far as moving around traversable levels is forward or back. There are no alternate routes, there are no interesting ways to flank your enemies. In many of what I call the "shooting gallery" parts of the mission levels, they're literally no more advanced than a carnival moving target game, you stand there, you shoot the targets as they move, its largely, well, not very next generation, its more like degenerative, going back to games like Doom where there was a start and and end and you just had to plow your way through the enemies as they threw themselves at you mindlessly.
Overall while the level design has taken many steps forward since Mass Effect, its shrinkage and linearity have made those forward steps more or less null factors in regards to the overall experience of the game itself...and this should be considered.
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(Im)Moral Choices - Every action will have an immaterial non-reaction:
I have to say that largely the story in Mass Effect/Mass Effect 2 is quite good. Its enough really to continue building different characters and exploring different builds and moral paths through the game in Mass Effect and porting them over to Mass Effect 2 to see how the situation has played out.
But even though these choices have "effects" as it were on what occurs in Mass Effect 2, there is very little real impact in regards to any choice you have made in regards to how things play out.
Kill Wrex on Virmire, he is simply replaced with his brother on Tuchanka. Kill the Council to gain Humanity's dominance in the galaxy, all you get is a few snotty aliens and a Citadel thats still full of Turian C-Sec officers. Even if you rescue the Council at the expense of the Alliance fleet, you still end up with a few snotty aliens because of humans "leveraging" themselves into the council through your "heroic" acts.
The only real difference in what occurs, based on your decisions in Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, are largely found in Galaxy News reports where the major difference is the apparent difference in political leanings due to your choices in Mass Effect, save the Council, everyones hunky dory and working together around the galaxy and the Council itself is still its same old useless bunch of do nothings that refuse to even acknowledge the Reaper threat. Kill the Council and apparently the Human led Council has ruffled Asari and Turian feathers a bit and the tours around the galaxy by the human fleet are seen as "gunboat diplomacy"...yawn. But theres no differences really in how that affects Mass Effect 2, its simply color information. You're still not being stopped by anyone, at no point are you chased down by Turian gunships looking to get some revenge, at no time do the Asari attempt to assasinate you for killing the Council, nothing really matters, your actions shook the galaxy, and everyone decided to vent their joy/displeasure through punditry and occasional insults/praise. How shallow.
Then theres the news reporter Khalisah Al-Jilani, play it paragon with her in 1, doesn't matter, nothing you say means anything except for a response from Admiral Hackitt who informs you of the results, Renegade her and punch her out..same thing. Whats even more ridiculous is you move on to Mass Effect 2, and even if you punched her out in Mass Effect 1, she still wants to talk to you, punch her out again...and again she makes threats that everyone will see it....really? Will they? How come I can't see it? I want it replayed on every holoscreen in the Citadel please, I mean thats pretty major news, a dead spectre shows up, punches out a reporter on camera....but you never hear about it from there.
Then theres other Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2 tie ins that make no sense. Emily Wong requests you come by and see her when next at the Citadel, via personal mail, but shes no where to be found anywhere in the explorable areas of Mass Effect 2, the closest you get to seeing her is the Galaxy News Net Vids, outside C-Sec, you also get a message from the doctor at the med clinic from Mass Effect, who asks that you and Garrus come by and see her when you're next at the Citadel, once again completely unavailable anywhere in the Citadel, making the requests for visits seem odd.
Also theres the simple fact that the Paragon and Renegade paths lead to the exact same resolutions. I've made several runs through Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, the Renegade path in Mass Effect has some fairly heavy ramifications on Mass Effect 2 but they're mostly just transitory changes. Character adjustments so minor that it just doesn't matter.
In Mass Effect 2, regardless of your leaning, Paragon or Renegade your Blue or Red marked conversation options illicit exactly the same end result, the only difference is in the delivery. The character resolutions between Tali and Legion or Miranda and Jack end with the same results as long as you have a high enough score on either side to use a Paragon or Renegade response. Tali and Legion come to the exact same agreement, Miranda and Jack come to the exact same agreement, there is no variance in how the resolutions affect the player or the story, regardless of whether you're the most ruthless hard-ass in the galaxy or the most noble paladin of the future.
The only decisions that mean anything in the pursuance of Mass Effect 2 are your decisions in regards to undertaking the loyalty missions of your crew mates and of course gaining their upgrades for the Normandy for the Suicide Mission. And even in these loyalty missions a paragon or renegade response illicits the same effect, you still gain the loyalty of the crew member regardless of who YOU are as a person. I had Jack murder Oresh, I had her spare him...the story goes on, its immaterial what you choose, I let Mordin kill Maelon, I stopped him from killing Maelon...it was immaterial, the results were the same. I brought Legion to the Migrant Fleet and still walked away from the trial with Tali exonerated regardless of throwing down every Renegade response I could....the results were immaterial, as long as you chose to respond with your characters alignment responses, the changes to the situation are immaterial.
These resolutions and choices of character are supposed to be extremely multi-linear and critical to the game but in reality they only have any effect on the game at all if you just flat out fail in them. Failure is near to impossible using alignment based responses, as any number of responses will occur in response to them to ensure the story goes on how it should go on regardless of how big a jerk you are or whether you should be canonized for sainthood.
So deep moral choices and all that. Great, but when the morality based choices illicit the same results...what exactly is the point of them in the first place?
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"People Hate Gear and Weapons"
I can imagine some EA liason probably said just this in a development meeting in the transition of Mass Effect into the NG+ mode of ME2. What they failed to consider, is the success of World of Warcraft and its all about the gear and weapons.
Coming out of Mass Effect where you had so many armor variants and weapons variants and weapon and armor mods, and coming into a highly simplified system of "Upgrading" a few weapons at best was rather a downturn in the Mass Effect 2 experience. While I find the addition of thermal clips a nice addition, making the game feel more like a shooter, the loss of the gear variances and the constant increases in performance various weapon finds and mod finds and armor finds in Mass Effect gave you, made the Mass Effect 2 experience seem rather too much like a shooter and a lot less like an RPG.
Now in perspective of that, since the NG+ experience has changed the way weapons and armor are dealt with, how come with our state of the art science lab that can make man portable nuke launchers, I can't research various assault rifle variants, or submachine gun variants, or sniper rifle variants? Why are there only the grand total of 2 heavy pistols, 2 submachine guns, 5 assault rifles(only 3 that are attainable standard), 4 sniper rifles, 4 shotguns and 5 heavy weapons?
We come out of Mass Effect where we live in a galaxy thats got multiple mega-corporations competing with each other for biotic/tech/weaponry markets, to land in Mass Effect 2, where The Illusive Man, for all his apparent resources, can't seem to get contract licenses with any of them and we're stuck with some basic weaponry and what we pick up in a level here and there, and instead of really actively improving these weapons based on personal tastes, we have to run all over the galaxy and buy upgrades (usually with an extremely limited budget at that even a second game start with a 300000 credit boost won't buy every valid upgrade on Omega, much less the Citadel and Illium) or find them in various levels, then apply them by researching them in the science lab.
Okay thats fine, we've got all these resources, I can make a man portable nuke launcher, but sorry boss we don't have any schematics for assault rifles...I guess everything 2 years after the attack on the Citadel is protected by FRM technology...its the only thing that makes sense to me. Cause when I have a hold full of 250,000+ of every resource, and the best I can do with it is "upgrade" things I've "found" somewhere, its all rather a let down compared to Mass Effect where I had the ability to pick up tons of variant weapons and upgrades and sell them if I didn't need them or keep them if I did.
Whats more, theres also the armor factor to consider, in Mass Effect while the armor models for the various armor strengths were all roughly the same there were variant skins for them, more mod slots, better stats, that kind of thing. In ME2 the only modifable armor is the N7 Armor set, which takes a step forward allowing you to alter model sections and even allows you to choose the color alpha mask that suits you, but, again, you have to run all over the galaxy to find these pieces, you can't research any of them yourself in your state of the art science lab. And even worse the DLC armors are all unmodifable entirely, making their total net benefit worthless once you've gained enough mods for the N7 set to make it superior to any of them. The Terminus and Hellfire Armor and Collectors and Cerberus Assault Armor are simply window dressing with fair stat boosts that really only apply to a certain point and all of them remove a large part of Shepards identity, as none of them have the N7 armor's design or even look back to it and say "lets make a N7 Heavy Assault Armor" they're all just...meaningless eye candy.
And in final statement on this whole reduction of the inventories of the multiple megacorporations of the galaxy, I'd have to point out that the frenzied nature of most fans of this game in their pursuit of gaining ever potential piece of DLC available armor pieces, such as the Sentry Interface and Recon Hood and what not should indicate that people wanted more gear options, not less gear options, and what we got was basically the equivalent of a slightly more advanced approach to the N7 armor set and thats it, and then a whole lot of other content pretty much cut out of the game leaving us to scrounge weapons and tech where we could find it. Hardly acceptable as a compromise in what is supposed to be an FPSRPG.
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I am a master of all weapons and arms:
Another serious departation of NG+ from the original Mass Effect experience is the fact that you're pretty much as good as your aim in Mass Effect 2, which is fine with me, I like that, but, your variance in damage has nothing to do with your character training...oh no, not at all, it has everything to do with research...which is just flat out odd.
The character development system for Mass Effect 2 was literally boiled down to simpleton levels. In Mass Effect, even as a soldier, if I wanted to specialize in shotguns, I could, or sniper rifles or pistols. I could train these things as I went to tune the performance I wanted out of them. In Mass Effect 2, I can't train really anything except my own abilities as a character which in secondary effect affect my capabilities with the weapons I use, which is further advanced by researching technology.
This really is a point of character development degradation that I find most discouraging. You cannot really develop a character nor your companions in any real diverse manner. Its all pretty 1 or 0, they are either this, or that, with no real difference between say, your Tali'Zhorah Vas Neema and my Tali'Zhorah Vas Neema except maybe a bit of health and shielding in comparison to weapons and tech damage.
And even that, being a soldier and having the option to carry so many guns (thankfully I can carry them all given their apparent limited availability as I pointed out in the last section if I didn't keep them on me at all times some other adventurer would probably find them and steal them) I also don't have the option to say "no I'm going to leave the shotgun behind this mission, I don't see a use for it given the targets and situations we'll be facing".
Limitations, can't carry load, make wheel, can't hunt food, make spear....limitations...apparently I can't find any other guns so I need to carry ALL of mine for fear that someone else might take them....and so we have limitations.
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Restricting Myself to the Terminus Systems:
Hi theres an entire quadrant of the galaxy I explored in Mass Effect, shouldn't those locations actually be available in Mass Effect 2? I'm not saying they all have to have content and missions in them but I DID have an apartment on Inta'sei after all, it had a nice view, can't even drop by and see the place, can't go back to Virimire, can't go back to Ilos, can't get to Hades Gamma or Gemin Sigma or the Voyager Cluster or anywhere down there any more. Now granted they've opened up pretty much the entire top two quadrants of the galaxy...given you go to the one place in the game that sells star charts and buy them all, theres lots of places to poke around and explore and (yawn) probe for resources, but it just seems a little dumb that I've got this nice new Normandy, all the capability in the world to go wherever I want but somehow that entire quadrant of the galaxy is just empty.
The only shared clusters between the two are the Widow Nebula, where the Citadel is Located, Hawking-Eta and the Local Cluster, which shows up mid game for....no reason I can truly ascertain other than to facilitate the "probing Uranus" gag.
Simple facts are, I'm commanding one of the most advanced vessels in space, there are mass relays all over, and theres no reason why the quadrant of the galaxy most of Mass Effect occured in should be empty, all those locations should be there, if anything for exploratory/resource content, but to just have them not there sort of makes you feel like that part of the galaxy disappeared in Mass Effect 2...to be replaced with these new places you must go on your new mission.
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Overall Though
Fantastic game, fantastic adaptation of the original to a new format presenting a familiar story, but, lots of little flaws, design issues, and overall oversights in what I feel could have been a better experience than what we ended up with.
I'm still going to keep playing it, I'm still going to be pounding the counter at my local gamestore for any news about ME3 release dates (I realize fourth quarter 2011 is the target date, we'll see there) and while I have criticisms in regards to the way the game was presented in ME2, I cannot fault its new gameplay too much, it is quite fun, and I cannot fault the epic and dramatic story telling that is being done here, but to paraphrase Ben Crosshaw, BioWare no longer gets points for that. So if you were to peel away the epic story and obscenely well done cinematics, what would you really have in Mass Effect 2 other than a rail shooter with some fairly weak and limited RPG options?
I'll be standing on the Cerberus Network daily in hopes for "regular DLC releases between now and ME3's release" but with SWTOR in the pipe for 2011, and given BioWare's total fubar with the Return to Ostagar DLC which never happened and was quickly damage controlled by the promise of a quickly released "expansion" Dragon Age: Awakenings....I'm not so sure how much faith I have in the Cerberus Network to keep the title fresh in the mind between now and the end of 2011.
Lets face it, I'm sure half the people that played Mass Effect 2 didn't even know about Bring Down the Sky or Pinnacle Station for Mass Effect. (And really all Pinnacle Station was was a 6 dollar DLC release that turned Mass Effect into a deathmatch simulator sans multiplayer component). The Cerberus Network is quite an advance on the previous methods of making sure the community was aware of DLC availabilities, but in the entire stretch between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 there were only two DLC releases for Mass Effect at all.
With SWTOR in development, Dragon Age: Awakenings slated for release soon and all the work I'm sure they're already pouring into Mass Effect 3, how much DLC content do you really think they're going to be able to produce? It is my prediction that the Hammerhead release will be the largest we'll see, I hope to be proved wrong, but BioWare has shown a serious inconsistency in keeping up with its DLC promises over the last several years and with EA now cracking the whip behind them, I'm near to sure that The Cerberus Network is only going to be marginally better than their prior DLC efforts, and will be a far cry away from allowing the Mass Effect 2 product to be modified like they have with Dragon Age.
Frankly I'd take a Mass Effect Toolset over the Cerberus Network any day, I'd be guaranteed a lot of quality content I could choose to add to my game on a fairly consistent basis that way. What I appear to be getting from the Cerberus Network so far is limited to a weapon and armor I don't use, Zaeed and the Normandy Crash Pack which are alright, and the promise of the Hammerhead, which brings back exploration capabilities, but...only with 5 exploration levels...a fair start, but still a far cry from 1 to 2 explorable planets per system in Mass Effect.
So anyways, I simply lift these criticisms up in a positive manner, in hopes that in some way my thoughts will help, I rather doubt they will, but it doesn't stop me from offering them up just the same.
Modifié par SLPr0, 02 mars 2010 - 09:53 .
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