Give Me Back My IDKFA
Spoilers ahead, but somehow I doubt you haven’t played Mass Effect 2 yet, given that you’re reading this article on a website about video games.
Bioware made the decision at some point during their design process for ME2 to drastically depart from the combat system of the first game, keeping little apart from the ability to duck behind cover and recharge your shields. Now, I’m not saying it was a bad decision (obviously it was in fact quite a good one, as thousands of people will tell you if you care to delve into the internet forums where such things are discussed) but rather that I, personally, don’t like it. Or rather, I suppose, that I don’t like it as much.
In fact, while I loved both games and am in no way trying to say that the second one was bad, I didn’t like the departure from a semi-complicated RPG gameplay mechanic scheme as a whole. Maybe it’s my natural power-gaming tendencies to search out the best (or best for me) combination of skills and items, but I really enjoyed the sense of progression I got from getting new marks and models of armor and weapons and shifting around my ammunition, armor and weapon modifications. I also enjoyed manually placing skill points to create the best team of alien super-agents I could — or rather, to create a few glorified scientists who could barely aim their pistols and a few unstoppable juggernaughts of ridiculous corrosive ammunition-packing might.
I also enjoyed the feeling of never having to conserve ammunition. Not many things are more frustrating than running out of “heat clips” for your weapon of choice midway through beating the human-genetic-material feces out of what is basically a cross between the T-1000 and uh… something big. Especially when two years prior in the same game world, everyone was running around with nonreplaceable heat sinks which, by the way, assuming you know how to vent your weapon properly actually allowed you a higher rate of fire than the new disposable heat clips do. That’s significant, because rate of fire was the only in-canon reason given for the switch to the new weapons design paradigm.
