Posted October 10, 2024
F4LL0UT: Already Mass Effect 2 was an exercise in removing as much role-playing from role-playing games as possible. ME2 landed just barely on that very thin line where it's still kind of an RPG and certainly a good game. With ME3 the devs just blasted through that line, yelling "fuck RPGs, bro!" and throwing an empty beer can at the poor fellow guarding that line.
It continues ME2's pattern of not really leaving you with any choices whatsoever. Pick one of the two paths (which you probably already did two games ago) and just point in the corresponding direction during all dialogue choices through the rest of the game. Or even turn on automatic dialogue choices in the settings. Yeah, that's actually a thing here. Jesus.
One thing that is utterly gone now is the experience of exploring the universe. Again, already ME2 did that compared to ME1 but in ME3 they went as far as removing all hubs except the Citadel. Literally every other location throughout the game is either a scripted tunnel or just a small combat arena. You do get the occasional nice vista but it's all just a background for Gears-like cover shooter combat. You never get to breathe in such a place with its history and culture and mysteries, you never really navigate alien places, you just blindly follow that one path towards the objective. And most places are samey sci-fi corridors anyway.
I still remember when Mass Effect was originally being hyped, one of the main points was resurrecting the old concept of carrying forward what you created in the first game to its sequels, like how you could import your parties from Wizardry 1 to its sequels (or even to whole other franchises, because that's how loose things were back then). Then Mass Effect 2 immediately walked back on that, which greatly reduced my interest in the series. Instead of being a celebration of classic RPG design (however awkward and Biowared), it became a burial of it in favor of bog standard cover shooter mechanics.It continues ME2's pattern of not really leaving you with any choices whatsoever. Pick one of the two paths (which you probably already did two games ago) and just point in the corresponding direction during all dialogue choices through the rest of the game. Or even turn on automatic dialogue choices in the settings. Yeah, that's actually a thing here. Jesus.
One thing that is utterly gone now is the experience of exploring the universe. Again, already ME2 did that compared to ME1 but in ME3 they went as far as removing all hubs except the Citadel. Literally every other location throughout the game is either a scripted tunnel or just a small combat arena. You do get the occasional nice vista but it's all just a background for Gears-like cover shooter combat. You never get to breathe in such a place with its history and culture and mysteries, you never really navigate alien places, you just blindly follow that one path towards the objective. And most places are samey sci-fi corridors anyway.