Mass Effect 2 *Possible Spoilers (starting page 6)*

[Vampyr]

Originally Posted by DarkMaster

The scanning is terrible, I'll admit. I'd much rather explore a near desolate planet than do this. Exploration in general seems to be toned down, and that's the main reason I play RPGs. And there's no real reward for exploring main areas either, pretty much everything you find just gives you a few credits, big deal. I also hate waiting til the end of a mission to get experience...

I know this is a great game for what it is, and a major improvement over the first game in many ways, but I'm really disappointed in the way they dumbed down things. The inventory/loot mechanics of the first game are pretty broken if you look at them now, but rather than improve upon those aspects they just decided to remove them entirely. Rather than make exploration more interesting and rewarding, they removed it.

We have enough third-person shooters out there already, the combat needed major improvements but not at the expense of reduced RPG elements, those are what should've been focused on. Having just played Uncharted 2, the third-person shooting controls aren't even anywhere near as streamlined or intuitive as that, so in turn we have a game that's trying to be as good as other games from a combat perspective, but in many ways is completely missing out on what made it different and much more special than those other games in the first place.

Still awesomely cinematic and highly enjoyable overall, though. Just breaks my role-playing gamers heart.

While I agree with you to some extent, isn't the entire point of a role playing game to "play a role"? To that end, Mass Effect 2 does this better than possibly any other game in existence, with all of the dialog trees and choices.

We've lost some of the typical RPG elements, but I don't feel like those elements are what define an RPG.