And i hated them for that, because combat and loot, which directly impact characters build, was heavily simplified.
Mass Effect 1 systems werent amazing, but they were more tactical. Fighting Krogan or Geth Destroyers were actually challanging and You had to use skills to take them down.
Also You could build Your characters as tanks or supports in ME 1, when even though class skills were more varied in ME 2 and especially ME 3 [like MP], You couldnt.
I really hated global cooldowns for skills ;\, such a consoled design.
It depends a lot on your class, and chosen build. Playing as an infiltrator in ME1 was hardly tactical, as all you had to do was maximise shot damage and cheese through every encounter. And given I mained infiltrator, the difference between ME1 and the sequels was minor. I also don't think it's fair to write off the ME3 multiplayer, which probably has the most tactical variety of the three games, if just because of a greater pool of powers and class variations.
I think the main thing they were going for by "taking the RPG out of the shooter" is minimising the impact of dice rolls and largely arbitrary spreadsheet values in a system of mechanics that primarily operate on direct player interactivity. Number crunching works a whole lot better in a turn based game because the function of the player is to direct commands, and thus the effectiveness of individual commands and their probability of success relies on values and variables.
So in a twist/player driven combat system I do think dice rolls need to be reigned back as they don't serve much purpose other than to put up walls. But I also think they went too far when it came to stripping
everything in the combat of customisation and traditional RPGishness, when I instead would have liked them to keep many of the core ideas and refine them.
Like the armour/weapon/enhancement customisation. I wanted to see that stick around in a significant way (more significant than what we got), but finer tuned for the kind of game Mass Effect is. I maintain that the RPG aspect of loot in Mass Effect 1 is transparent, lazy role playing design and by and large fucking rubbish. Like they took a weapon, made a 100 variations with only a 0.1 stat difference between each, and drip fed you them incrementally over the game. It's super fucking lazy carrot-on-a-stick loot design that has a place in games like Diablo (where loot
is the focus of the game), but not in a game like Mass Effect. It's the kind of OCD pandering game design that makes MMORPGs so addictive. "Oh my god this weapon has 0.1 damage increase
man this RPG is so deep."
Just a reminder of how ME(3) was supposed to look like on current gen system but due to IQ and low texture resolution it was more miss than hit. I just we get to see high fidelity paired with consistency next gen so that visions of late current gen can be realized fully:
I don't think ME3 on PC looks far off those models, except for maybe texture resolution. Those models are still clearly built with the poly/texture ceiling of current generation console hardware. Next gen Mass Effect
should look a lot better still. EG: Buckles, chains, and straps are still all just textures. For ME4, they can be geometry.
