Free Candy For Everyone

As promised, I’m following up on yesterday’s post about what I liked in Mass Effect with what drives me nuts about the game.

The Bad

Combat
Yes, combat. You know how chocolate and peanut butter are two great tastes that taste great together? Well first-person-shooter and talkie-talkie-role-playing-game are two great tastes that appeal to very different people. And they don’t taste great together. And to be honest, I’ve spoken to people at work who do like both those types of games and they still are not a fan of the combat.

Basically, combat is a shooter. You have 4 types of guns to choose from: pistol, assault rifle (machine gun), shotgun, and sniper rifle. When in combat mode you have a targeting reticule and you can hold down the left trigger to zoom in for more accuracy, right trigger to fire. There are elements of Gears of War. You take cover by getting close to obstacles, and you can duck to take ducking cover. When in cover, holding down the trigger will cause you to lean out so you can shoot. What’s all this tactical shooting doing in my RPG???

I have never had to save so frequently in my life. I save before and after every single military encounter. I clear a room of enemies, I save. I come upon a door with enemies behind it, I save. I die in almost every battle several times before I figure out how it works and get through it. Maybe other people find combat easy, those FPS playing people. But I don’t play those games for a reason.

Today I was playing and thought I was maybe finally getting the hang of combat. I cleared two bunkers for a quest with minimal difficulty. I was figuring things out! And I was even using the shotgun which is a little harder to handle than the assault rifle. But then I got to the third bunker and I think it must have taken me 10 or 15 tries to get through. It was just ridiculous. I actually exclaimed “I hate this game!” at one point. But I eventually got through.

The Mako
The Mako is the all-terrain vehicle you drive around whenever you’re on a planet surface. This dislike point encompasses two issues, actually. The first is the mechanics of driving the Mako. I mentioned it earlier, but realistic physics does not equal fun. Driving around trying to shoot things and move at the same time is maddening. I’ve definitely gotten better at it, but it’s still not fun. It’s just frustrating.

The other problem is the whole idea of the Mako. There are many planets you can land on and they all basically look the same. Different colors of bumpy, rocky terrain. A small map you drive around and pick up a few items scattered in the corner. Just give me the items and drop me into the combat, why do I have to drive through vast tracts of nothing?

The User Interface
Argh! Ok, let’s start with the inventory. Let’s see, what kinds of inventory items do we have? 4 weapons, weapon upgrade, bullet upgrade, armor, armor upgrade, biotic implant, tech implant, grenades = 11 types of items. Well, there’s only one place you can scroll through every single item you are carrying and that’s at a store when you go to sell them back. And there’s no way to sort them in this view at all. You can turn any item into omni-gel, a useful item that is used to repair the Mako and blast into safes and such. You cannot turn items into omni-gel from the store screen. A normal inventory usage pattern would be to try to find the cheapest, most useless things I’m carrying so I can sell them. To do this *not* at a store involves going to the equip screen, selecting a particular slot (pistol, shotgun, armor, etc) and then I can see only the items of that type. This is where I can turn it into omni-gel. I’m getting frustrated just trying to explain how it works. Let’s just leave it at the fact that I wish I could see all inventory items, sort by cost, sort by type, sort by rank.

Next UI issue is the minimap. This thing is entirely useless to me for navigation. It’s a circle where up is always the way you are facing. There is no indication of global directionality. You can see enemies on it, and that’s about the only thing it’s useful for. But there’s a fullscreen map in the pause menu where I can see a target location. But once I unpause and take two steps I have no idea if I’m going the right way anymore. If they just made up north, always, I’d be able to make sure I was going in the right direction. Sigh. When driving the Mako I have to pause and check the main map every 5 seconds to make sure I didn’t veer off course, which is easy to do in that bouncy-trouncy-un-fun-fun-fun vehicle.

Another map that could be improved is that galaxy map. This is the map on your ship that you use to navigate to other planets. Well, ok, this issue is really more about your quests than that map. Basically you have a quest log called the journal full of all you main and optional quests. Each entry tells you where to go, but there’s no easy way to figure out which quests are in the same area. I’d love for the quests to be called out on the galaxy map so that when I go to a system I see what I have to do there. One of my co-workers was telling me he was actually writing them all down on a piece of paper so he could plot where to go. Come on, are we really back to the time when they included a pad of paper with your RPG (yay, Might and Magic old-school!).

Striving to be un-gamey
Ultimately, a lot of the UI issues stem from this one, I think. This is something we talk about at work a lot. “That’s too gamey,” someone will say. Meaning it’s a mechanic that is purely something people do in games that, when you think about it, doesn’t make sense at all. It has no basis in reality, it’s just something you do in games because… well, people have been doing it in games. This is a good goal. But to give an example of where this is a problem, when you are on your spaceship you can choose to outfit your teammates with items. But they’re not in your party at the time, so you can’t cycle to their equipment in the normal squad UI. Instead, you outfit them by going down a (very very slow) elevator and getting to the crew lockers. These are all lined up, and you have to open each one individually to get to that person’s equipment page. This may be a cool way to do things in an un-gamey way, but it’s just added time for me, really. I want to be able to equip and deal with that stuff quickly, especially because that’s not really a fun part of the game. It should be easy and done with so I don’t dwell on mechanics too much anyways.

There were other things I was going to say about being un-gamey, but I’ve been rambling on for a while now and I’m losing steam. I’ll come back to the topic if I recall what I was going to say.

Anyways, I’m still playing, still intending to keep playing. So despite this lengthy diatribe, the love in this love-hate relationship seems to be stronger.