- but ME is clearly the best of the bunch!
lol no
(except for that loyal Soldier black dude - he was pretty good and plausible)
The point of soldier black dude was that he was more-or-less the only "normal" character on your team and he worked well as such. The whole squad of such characters would be dull.
Oh, and the less said about Mordin Solus the better.
Yep. He´s the best Bioware character bar none, nuff said
.
It was even worse in DA2 and ME3.
If you dislike ME2´s characters for their "edginess" and "extremeness", I don´t see how ME3 is worse.
I found characters like Liara, Tali and Garrus much more well-rounded and more like ones you could actually encounter.
If you´re talking about ME1 iteration of these, you found wrong
.
These three have barely any personality whatsoever in the game, Tali especially is barely anything more than a walking codex entry. The best characters in ME1 are Wrex and Ashley.
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As for what I´m playing right now, I just finished
Dishonored, another game that is worse than Mass Effect 2.
The setting, characters, story and even art direction gradually dawned on me as boring and level design + gameplay mechanics, though competent, were not good enough to keep the game entertaining alone.
I´ve played the game ghosting + "no kill-ing" everything and the support for such play style was lacking - not enough variety in powers and not enough variety in challenges/scenarios. I´ve played the game only on hard, but I doubt playing on very hard would change anything (at least it didn´t for the one mission I´ve played through on that difficulty).
The powers included I´ve played with (blink, bend time, possession) were fun and fairly unique, but there was only that much I could do with these on a stealthy non-lethal run.
The game has better, a lot more varied support for lethal approach, which I consider a minus, especially in a game where general play style has major influence on the narrative. Should´ve been 50/50.
On a more positive note, I appreciated the general speed of "stealth-ing" in this game, that was a breath of fresh air.
A few more specific notes:
I think a game like this should really come with a more robust dialogue system, the interactions with NPCs made it feel like I´m playing a 5 year old and made connecting me + the player character + narrative difficult.
One of the first tooltips told me that killing stuff will lead to a darker ending. WTF.
Speaking of which, low/high chaos changing some hostile encounters and minor narrative bits was cool, but letting general play style affect the main narrative in a binary manner was not an ideal design choice in my opinion. I´d prefer some specific choices (like killing or sparing a target) to do the job instead, or in conjunction with the chaos system. As it is, taking full advantage of the available arsenal of powers and gadgets means getting a crap ending, which I consider an unwelcome design contradiction.
Level design was mostly good and I´ve felt it presented different "paths" generally in a somewhat more organic manner than DE:HR.
Quite a lot of stuff felt like it exists in the game "just because" - the Outsider, the "surprise" twist and, well, pretty much the whole setting
.
All in all, in some ways the game was a positively unique experience for a while, but overall I was not amused as much as I´ve expected.
In a sequel I´d mainly like to see a setting and narrative with more depth, more RPG elements and more symmetrical support for various play styles.