Yes, exactly. ME was loads of fun because its core, those things the game was all about, was what I liked the game for. OTOH, all the other RPGish things were nothing to write home about, on the contrary. Skill system, items, stats, tactical gameplay, non-combat gameplay — all of these were seriously lacking. But I happen to like these other things in my RPGs. And now I hear that they even removed the inventory while at the same time saying they listened to all the feedback? How is that an improvement? It is if you want your games completely streamlined, but I'd rather have a good, working inventory than none at all. Here's a quote from the gamasutra article:The plot, action, dialog and consequences were the core strengths.
I don't actually feel represented in that statement. Then again, it's probably because I'm not part of the press that they were really talking about.We wanted to make sure that absolutely every issue that was brought up was addressed… so the press had nowhere to go, and all the critics had nowhere to go, because we had made an attempt to hopefully address all those issues in some capacity.
Ah, I must sound jaded. Maybe it would help if I saw ME not as an RPG or even FPS-RPG hybrid (there are only three of those from what I know), because clearly (to me) it isn't one. I think DArtagnan has it right — it's an interactive movie more than anything else, and Bioware even said that's what they wanted to achieve (in different words I guess). So, how about using IM-RPG as a new sub-genre?
The main reason why I felt in one way disenchanted with ME1 before and with what I know of ME2 now is that I expected the ("non-core", see above) RPG elements to be very solid, when apparently they can't be in this type of RPG.
But I realize that you need to take a game for what it is, and there's still much to like in ME and probably more so in ME2. Dragon Age, by the way, seemed to have had IM-RPG tendencies.
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