Oh boy where do I begin.
“The mining?” asks BioWare dev Christina Norman, “everyone hates the mining.”
Does "everyone" include the Bioware staff? the testers? the developers? if so, why was it kept and made an important part of gameplay?
the mining was Mass Effect 2’s one mistake
How I wish.
and even then it was a small one, made worse by the sheer bloody amount of probing you had to do
Self-contradicting statement. There was nothing "small" about such a fundamentally stupid decision that you have to do in such amounts.
In every other way Mass Effect 2 was an improvement on its predecessor
In some ways? sure. Better writing, better voice acting, more interesting characters... I'll go with all these. Better gameplay? haha. Better combat system? you're a moron. Better inventory system? no, they just removed it. Better minigames? die in a fire.
it took a series of gutsy decisions to take it in its brand new direction
Copy-pasting the gameplay from hugely successful shooter is now a gutsy decision? What the fuck happened to this industry?
What do you generally expect in a sequel to a successful game? Usually, you’d expect polish and building on a lot of the features that were already there
Sure I do. I don't expect all the mediocre-but-possibly-promising features to be replaced with even worse variants, or to be removed outright and left with one massive gap.
Where Mass Effect was what Norman calls an ‘action RPG’, ME2 is an all-out shooter RPG
You mean an all-out shooter with RPG elements? Take that fanboys who kept claiming that ME2 is an action-RPG.
Norman’s team turned the RPG systems off completely and spent 81 calendar days tuning how combat would work in Mass Effect 2 using Gears of War as a foundation
Fixed. Which begs the question: why the fuck did it take them 81 days to produce a shitty ripoff of an already mediocre shooting system?
weapons had to be useful from the moment you picked them up without ever needing to level up
This is the key to understanding the RPG elements in ME2.
let’s take the RPG out of the shooter
Are you reading this Volly?
What’s really different is the overall feel and quality of combat, but that results from a series of small changes versus a wholesale, radical redesign
Why do you lie? ME2 combat has nothing in common with ME1's, except the name of the games.
In Mass Effect 1, bullets were ‘free’ which led to players running down corridors holding the trigger down in the hopes of scoring a single lucky hit – sure, they wouldn’t score many hits but they had nothing to lose by it either
Of course, the first thing you think of when you read such a scenario is "we need to add ammo". That the big problem is, in fact, that your player is running down a corridor without even looking at what is happening and NOT BEING KILLED is inconceivable.
Similarly, Mass Effect 2 abandons individual recharge times for biotic powers in favour of a unified system so players can’t spam lengthy chains of biotic powers – something which made the combat ridiculous and the endgame easy.
Of course, makes perfect sense. I'm sure this has absolutely nothing to do with the biotic powers themselves being horribly overpowered.
We needed to make a much better, much more awesome inventory but we needed to support up to twelve squad members plus Shepard. I spent a long time looking at various RPG inventory systems and I couldn’t find anything that would work
Isn't Bioware's creativity awesome? They run across a problem, try to copy other people's solutions, and when that doesn't work they get rid of the problem by removing the feature entirely. All hail the future of video gaming.
it’s always been a little weird that you’re Commander Shepard with the most advanced spaceship in the galaxy out to save the world but he has to go and haggle to get a rifle for his crew.
What's more than a little weird is that now you’re Commander Shepard with the most advanced spaceship in the galaxy out to save the world but you have to go waste hours scanning planets for minerals. Haggling to get a rifle is weird, I agree. Scanning isn't weird, it's FUCKING STUPID.
Mass Effect made you juggle hundreds of different pieces of equipment but did they really make any difference to the game?
Ah once again. Problem: Bioware sucks at designing items so they make no difference. Solution: design better items. What Bioware does: get rid of inventory. Makes perfect sense!
if you can’t make Halo’s Battle Rifle using your weapon modelling systems then the system needs work
Awesome. So now ME2 is a hybrid of GoW gameplay with the ability of Halo fanboys to recreate their favorite weapon from that game. I can see your RPG right there.
the best part of role-playing is being the character and that means never being pulled out of the immersion of the world
IMMERSHUN! PLAYING THE
ROLE OF SHEPARD!!!!111oneoneone
If this had been written by some Bethtard or Biotard, I would've laughed. But a supposedly grown up man? It saddens me. Oh wait, how old is the kid again?
In Mass Effect 2 we focused on what we love about RPGs – an awesome sense of exploration, intense combat, a deep and nonlinear story that’s affected by your actions
And this is the part where I get really, really pissed off at Bioware. They know exactly what they should be doing to make a good CRPG. That they ignore it all in favor of juvenile shooting, romances, a railroaded completely linear plot with zero choices is one thing. That they then take their streamlined piece of shit and claim with a straight face that it achieves all these RPG ideals deserves flaming them to a crisp. That millions of fanboys and the entirety of the gaming press swallows this like holy semen is ultimate proof that there is no hope for us because the majority of gamers are morons.
Going into Mass Effect 2, BioWare were tracking 700 decisions made by players of the original game which could impact on the events of the new game
If by "impact" you mean "got an email saying thanks", then yeah sure, although I am certain the figure is closer to 70 than 700, but whatever.
RPG elements were handled more carefully than before. Conversations are snappier and camera angles more dynamic
RPG elements = snappy conversations and dynamic camera angles? Where the fuck do they get these "journalists"?
if you ever wanted to kill someone in Mass Effect, chances are the option is there
Funny. Hilarious. I'm laughing. Ha. Ha. Ha.
And finally, it’s the player’s story, not BioWare’s – it’s this which differentiates BioWare’s approach from that of a Japanese RPG designer who is telling a story to the player
This shit again? Stop it Bioware. You want to make a linear railroaded shooter? fine. Do it, and I'll leave you alone, because I don't really care about linear railroaded shooters either way. But if you're going to present that linear railroaded shooter as something it is not (in this case, an RPG with real choices and nonlinear story determined by me the player) then I have only one thing to say: fuck off.
We’re already working on adjustments to those aspects
I can't wait for ME3. I'm genuinely looking forward to seeing how they will fuck up the already so badly fucked up elements of ME2. And then get praised for reinventing the wheel. Again.
