Follow Up On Mass Effect 3 Delay, This Might Be Bad

[drunkenmaster]

It's a staple of RPG's just because there is a lack of originality to everyone feels the need to copy everyone else.

Mass Effect is an epic space opera about the survival of life in the galaxy, why does it matter whether I can chose whether to wear a red helmet of +2 to melee or a blue helmet of +1 to pistol attacks? It's just not needed.

ME 1 had a very natural but workable upgrade system, you moved up weapons as you got the money or the pickups and they made a massive difference, it felt as you got closer to the end and facing tougher enemies like you had an effect on making yourself stronger.

THats pretty classic and I would say absolutely required. Its been a gameplay staple since day one, Doom 1 would give you ever increasingly strong weapons, almost every great game ever has done this well.

The few games that absolutely royally screwed up the difficulty increase coupled with increasingly powerful weapons has had major flaws in it.

Bioshock, the weapons increase in strength but the enemies remained the same almost the whole game through, to the point where you became invincible not half way through the game, with a boss fight that was laughable.

Stalker, invincible so early in the game the challenge, the difficulty and the boringness of the game dragged on while again the enemies didn't really get harder on the same scale you got tougher.

ME1 good scaling between difficulty and your own character growth in powers and equipment. ME2 horrible scaling, guns handed to you, money ridiculously easy to get, upgrades painfully easy to find and pay for, overall increase in effectiveness of weapons was pathetic, armour upgrades weren't noticeable, enemies really didn't get much harder and the game was FAR to easy FAR to quickly.

I think you'll find scaling difficulty of enemies coupled with a good scaling of equipment make a very very good game and are pretty essential to a good game almost every great game I can think of has followed that path.

The inventory was cumbersome but the mechanics you used the inventory to change were brilliant, the inventory was non existant on ME2, the mechanics were also completely missing.

Cleaner inventory coupled with the actual mechanics behind upgrades in ME1 would be easily the best option.