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Mass Effect 2
I've been replaying it and I'm reminded of all the reasons I didn't like it when I first played it.
* Way too linear. I get it got rid of many of its RPG elements, but I'd like a bit more than a line, please.
* Getting rid of weapon mods and armor. I get it, the Mass Effect UI made equipping mods and armor cumbersome, but did you really need to remove them entirely?
* The fact you need to go Paragon or Renegade to be successful at persuasion. This is a problem across all the Mass Effect games. To be able to persuade people you need to pretty much pigeonhole Shepard into one personality. In the first game, what if I was mostly Renegade but didn't want to kill that scientist in the Krogan labs? That means less Renegade points and less persuasion. There's no real benefits to choosing both dialogue options at different times.
* Renegade Shepard. It seems like in an effort to make him as "badass" as possible they pretty much made Renegade Shepard into a complete stereotype. This is something I felt Dragon Age 2 did much better; if you had a forceful personality in that game, you weren't made more badass than the other personalities, you were just more taciturn and straightforward. Since Paragon is a much more reasonable personality, it feels like you're forced to choose between "reasonable and idealistic" and "OMG SO BADASS". I tend to rolepay my characters as somewhat cynical but still kind, which pretty much means there's no middle ground for my role-playing style (see the above point for the reason).
* The story isn't "tight" enough. I feel that once it got off the ground, the story in this game was pretty epic, but it wasn't tight enough. Since you spend most of the game doing character missions (more on that later), there were a lot of moments where you weren't moving the storyline forward in any way. That made me lose interest in it. This would be alright if the character missions were optional, since you could just skip them and focus on the main story, but if you want your crewmmates to survive in the suicide mission, you need to do their missions.
* The companions. I felt the writing for the companions was better than the first game (the only well-written companion in the first one was Wrex, IMO), but there were too many. They should have focused on five, six in the most, and developed them. The original Dragon Age did this well. Every companion had long dialogue trees, lots of in-world interactions and ambient lines, interesting approval reactions to your actions, and most of all, almost all of them developed. I never felt the Mass Effect 2 companions developed unless you romanced them. For example, Morrigan in the original game develops even if you don't romance her. She learns to cherish friendship. Alistair and Leliana develop in different ways depending on how you do their personal quests. Oghren learns to get over himself and his remorse. Wynne learns to let go of the past. Zevran learns to care for people in more than a sexual way. Sten learns that there are good people even outside the qunari.
* I just don't find it fun to play. This is the crux of it. It's way too repetitive. Other than dealing with armor and shields, there was no real strategy either. Since most of the RPG elements were cut, and I didn't enjoy companion interactions that much, most of the game was spent slogging around straight lines while getting behind cover and shooting enemies, occasionally using a skill to deal with armor/shields. There are different types of enemies, but they were all just as easy to deal with in the same way. You didn't deal with Soldiers any different than an Infiltrator.
It seems like Mass Effect 3 is dealing with a lot of my complaints. I hope it strikes a good balance between ME1 and ME2.
Also, inb4 tl;dr.
Comments
DAMMIT
Linearity and fewer RPG elements seem like a good thing to me, as I don't care about nonlinear gameplay (particularly if a game is long enough that I won't play it more than once anyway), and I couldn't stand Mass Effect 1 largely because of the way it handled its RPG elements.
That said, the other things do seem like kind of a problem, for the most part.