Inventory Management
RPGs are known for their loot and RPG players are known for their lust for new weapons, armor, and other items. As loved as these items are, though, developers are constantly looking for ways to streamline inventory management. An RPG can succeed or fail based on how well it is done, and in my opinion inventory management is actually an integral part of the role playing experience. But it's also one of the most controversial.
Typically during the course of playing an RPG, characters encounter loot in a few different ways. First of all, they can buy and sell items at stores. Secondly, when enemies die they often drop loot. And last but not least, items can often be found in the environment, either closed in a container, or out in the open.
As players direct their characters and find loot, they are forced to ask themselves many questions: Which items do I equip? Which do I sell? Which do I drop (dispose of)? Which do I buy? Is this item better than that item? Which class is this item for? Do I hang onto the item in case I later have a party member that might need it? Will this item that can't be equipped have a future use?
And as mentioned, developers try to greatly simplify loot management, but regardless of how simple it is, players are still usually forced to think about these issues, especially if the character or party can only hold so many items at once. And while some players find inventory management to be a chore and nothing else, it can add a layer of strategy to the game. It essentially becomes a very important aspect of game play.
Which brings us back to the Mass Effect series. In the original game inventory management was clunky at its best and a nightmare at its worst. The player had three party members at a time that they could equip items for and a global inventory where all items were stored.
This global inventory had a hard limit on how many items it could hold, which meant whether you wanted to or not, you had to at least occasionally manage it. To make matters worse, enemies almost never dropped any loot-worthy items, and those found in the environment weren't much better.
The best items were bought from vendors and were generally quite expensive. But regardless of how good or bad the loot was, it was still very important to manage your inventory so party members had the best items for their respective classes. If you neglected this aspect of the game, you could find your party ill-equipped in battle.
Reviewers complained endlessly about this, as did players, and Bioware took notice. For Mass Effect 2 they not only revised inventory management but they basically did away with it. Instead of forcing players to use a single screen to manage items, they freed them entirely from managing it at all. Mass Effect 2 still allows you to change weapon load outs and upgrade items, but you also never have to do it while in the middle of game play.
When you start a mission you are giving the option of changing weapons, for example, but the best weapons are always automatically equipped, so you don't have to change anything if you don't want to. And as far as the rest of the items are concerned, once you research them, they are automatically equipped on your party members or your space ship.
On the one hand this changes inventory management from being a necessity to just being user preference. Weapon load out in Mass Effect 2 is more like it might be in Battlefield Bad Company 2, for example, and the streamlined system just makes sure that you can only use weapons appropriate for your class, with the best equipped automatically.
And researching items, which is based on finding blueprints for them while questing and then mining planets for minerals that are used to build them, adds a nice, light strategic layer to the game. In other words, Bioware has replaced the tedium of the original game's inventory management with a streamlined system while adding in additional game play.
On paper this sounds fantastic, and again, reviewers and players loved the change. But for those of us who don't find inventory management tedious, and who learned over time how to use Mass Effect's inventory management without getting bogged down by its deficiencies, these changes make little sense. Why remove a staple of RPG gaming and replace it with something that would be better at home in an action game?
The reason of course is because the Mass Effect series is rapidly moving away from its RPG roots and is less an RPG now than an action game. By the third or fourth game in the series it may do away entirely with character development and inventory management, and instead of being considered an RPG it may instead be a story driven shooter. It's likely that future installments will even include multiplayer or coop modes, and the transition will be complete.
This is gonna be long and I apologize.
I'd think the bigger stumbling block to character development would be less the lack of options than the sheer pointlessness. I mean compare the two from a practical perspective. Sure you get more out of it early on, but those 2 points per level can't be coasted on for very long. In short order you reach a stage where you have no choice but to sit on points waiting till you can afford anything. How is that better than small but continuous upgrades.
Combat-wise I can't say I agree really. There may be less of a learning curve, but the act itself is more dynamic. I sucked hard my first time through ME1, in no small part because I believe I was expecting a shooter. However my later playthroughs didn't make the combat any more engaging. Practically every fight boiled down to the same rote pattern. Take cover, pick a target, shoot until your shield drains or your gun beeps. Repeat. There were variances of course, but that pattern could get you through the majority of the game. And the only outside consideration with any significant effect on combat was your ammo mod. Obviously you'd want your best gun equipped, but the mods were the only real "tactical" concern. Or you could just Sledgehammer everything.
I was actually just thinking about the inventory system switch up the other day. It seems to exemplify the overarching problem. I have the long term memory of a drop of water, so this is something I've been wondering if it actually happened. Am I the only one who remembers reading comments from Bioware about how they were aware of player grievances with certain parts of the first game; i.e. the inventory & Mako? And how they were sure players would be pleased with the changes/overhaul made to these problem areas? If I am then I guess its moot. Just go ahead and ignore me. If it actually happened then I don't really know what to think. Except that perhaps I've been underestimating the creative power of my keyboard "Delete" key. I understand that practically everything in the first game was worthless, but that seems more a fault of either: the random loot generation, the obvious and massive discrepancies between different pieces, or the very existance of SPECTRE gear.
I'm curious now. What about the story bothered you?
Robert, I'll address each of your points:
1) In ME2 character development for me seems dry and somewhat pointless. One skill seems just as good as another, and I personally don't feel a lot of differentiation between classes, skills, etc., which means one character, skill, etc, is as good as another. But maybe it just feels that way to me but isn't really that way. I have thought about this a lot though, so regardless, there is where I'm at about this.
2) Combat in ME1 felt really stragetic to me. Not every little battle necessarily, but the bigger battles took some effort in terms of character placement, skill selection, etc. Now I almost never changed ammo, and I didn't do that either in ME2 (selecting an ammo type in ME2 felt like just selecting another skill - again, it all had a certain sameness to it), but I did make sure that certain characters used certain weapons or skills, and it all took a certain amount of planning and skill to accomplish. Yes, AI of characters and enemies wasn't great, my party routinely killed itself, but that didn't stop me from enjoying it.
3) Yes, Bioware took player feedback and revised just about everything. I can't see that as a ringing endorsement for the changes. I also don't see the high review scores as an endorsement. There are plenty of games I see as crap that get high scores and vice-versa. My point isn't that the inventory system in ME1 was awesome, but instead that it gave the player flexibility and let them customize the party as they saw fit. ME2 just does it for you and the options you are given don't you me a lot of freedom.
4) You may have been kidding but I don't agree that everything in ME1 was worthless. To me it was a great game with some relatively minor graphical issues, some clunkiness, but I don't think it needed a complete overhaul.
5) The story in ME1 was about Shepard and his realization that a huge intergalactic crisis was in play. ME2 took a small segment of that and made a game about it. It took away an investigation and encounters where I as the player felt like I was in control and instead made Shepard the instrument of what we had assumed was a terrorist organization of some sort.
ME2 as an action adventurish side story to the main series would have been awesome. Something that played differently, was streamlined, but wasn't a true extension of the main story. Then it wouldn't matter that it's story centered on the party members instead of the true center of the ME universe. But to take a huge left turn and suddenly say, "Hey, remember ME1? Well, we don't. Instead let's give you an action game in hopes we can make more money this time around."
And I realize that Bioware can do whatever it wants. I'm not asking for anyone to agree with me. But I am really disturbed by this trend, and as I see Bioware look at Dragon Age and how they can make it more accessible to console gamers, it makes me realize that maybe it's time to return to the PC.
Absolutely brilliant piece Gary! I 100% agree with you, and this article very clearly enunciates my precise feelings about the ME1 vs ME2 debate. ME1 was pure genius and I played through it three times in a row non-stop! I've never done that before with any other game. And it wasn't until my fourth playthrough recently (right before ME2 came out) that I discovered a totally awesome weapon combination allowing infinite crazy powerful shots plus I finally found some very secret backstory I'd never found before.
Anyway, ME2 I completed and enjoyed like you did because ME2 definitely has incredible production values. But I too had zero interest in playing it again. I wanted to have interest, I really did, but it felt so hollow. I even tried starting over but I found myself getting very annoyed at the same repetitive combat. And understand, I'm a hardcore FPS player as well as hardcore RPG player.
As you point out, ME2’s RPG elements were really completely pointless. Stats, character levels, ect all meant almost nothing. I felt like I was playing Uncharted or something when playing ME2.
I also agree 100% that the ME2 story was so completely contrived and silly. ME1 was epic. How anyone can think ME2’s story was good is beyond me…
Anyway, your article nailed it. ME2 is just shallow and doesn't allow for any further inventiveness in subsequent playthroughs. And I actually preferred the combat in ME1, I never once got bored of fighting during my four playthroughs. And I really enjoyed the inventory system in ME1. Of course, I also adored the Mako exploration segments (exploring distant planets in hopes of finding rare and powerful artifacts=awesome!). And yes, I realize I'm in the 0.001% minority.
I agree that games like ME1, Oblivion, and Alpha Protocol give players true reasons to replay them because they are deep enough to allow gamers to express themselves over and over each time. Games like ME2 allow gamers to express almost nothing. ME2 didn't allow me to have my own ME2 experience but rather the prepackaged ME2 experience, just like so many others like Uncharted, BioShock, Singularity, ect. It's the "me creating my own world" vs "me visiting someone else's world" juxtaposition of ME1 vs ME2 that I found so striking.
To conclude, thanks again for the article. I also hope BioWare reconsiders and makes ME3 more like ME1 because the last thing we need is more 10 hour throw-away shooters!
@Gary
Regarding Item management, thats actually sorta what I meant. Between that and the Mako it seems like they spent so much time listening to people complain, they couldn't seem to hear anyone who actually enjoyed them. I for one was looking forward to any number of tweaks to the same basic formula. A more efficient equipment screen setup & maybe some sort of improvement to the Mako; make it faster or more dynamic to control for example. Or just give us stuff to do in it, generally speaking. Instead they just got axed completely, all the while we were hearing about all the "improvements" that had been made.
And the worthless comment was directed to the majority of the game's equipment/loot, not the game itself. Even if you ignored the SPECTRE gear completely, once you figure out each weapon's best "brand" you never have to switch again. A low level "good" weapon was almost always better than/equal to a mid-high level competitor weapon.
Of the two games, I hands down got far more replayability out of ME1. I havent touched ME2 since my initial playthrough, which is exactly what I did with Gears of War, so I guess thats another area Bioware expertly copied Epic.
I think this article did a very good job of breaking things down into different parts, but personally for me the main reason above all the smaller ones as to why ME2s replayability was so non-existent is because of how the game is built. It really is about 90% just one off shooting galleries completely disconneted from any sort of gameworld.
If Im to play ME3, that is probably the foremost thing Bioware would need to remedy: the lifeless shooting gallery gameworld. Oh sure, in terms of visuals and layout it beats those damn boring prefabs of ME1, but when the cost is spending most of your gametime behind cover in shooting galleries, and you see that the "hubs" have been turned into bland little shopping malls, I think the cost was too high.
Mind you, most shooter games, which is what ME2 really is, derive their replayability from multiplayer, and since it look set for ME3 to recieve that, Im left wondering if ME3 is going to be just like ME2, and built as a shooter.
I mean after all, this article is about RPG replayability, and RPG is something that Bioware look to perhaps be moving away from. "The future of RPGs" according to some is a Gears of War clone with dialogue system you can barely influence. Im not surprised some of us are finding the replayability takes a massive nosedive.
Thanks everyone. I appreciate the comments.
I see Bioware and Bethesda as the two big Western RPG developers. They have both been creating big, expansive RPGs with incredible worlds for quite some time now. But while Bethesda's RPGs used to be kind of flat experiences, they are now incredible. Morrowind for example was an excellent but to me still felt kind of one dimensional, while Bioware's RPGs have always felt more fully realized. But with Oblivion, Bethesda really knocked it out of the park, streamlining things where it counted but making the world more interesting. And with Fallout 3, they finally learned how to tell a better story, make quests much better, and further improved things like character customization and inventory management.
Conversely, Bioware has gone in the other direction. As they become more and more story driven, they appear to be turning themselves into an action game developer. Maybe that's more important to them? Maybe they don't really care about the RPG trappings and what they really want to do is create interactive movies. A modern day Cinemaware perhaps? And that's fine as far as creating experiences that probably sell well and are highly rated.
But as far as I'm concerned, those kinds of games are not replayable. For me they are diversions that help me wait for big Western RPGs. I guess my point is if Bioware continues this way, we'll lose yet another great RPG developer, and there aren't enough around for us to lose anymore.