One qol improvement I’d like to see is faster team roster selection. Like every time you leave camp, you should get to select which companions will go with you (similar to many other CRPGs). Right now I find myself not using certain companions as often, mostly because I don’t want to go run around my camp for a minute rearranging my squad. It should be a simple drag and drop interface.
The important caveat with EA is that the devs actually substantially expand on the early access experience. If they just spend a year or two doing minor bugfixes and then release the game it won’t go over super well. Especially if they reduced scope during early access. I’m thinking of something like Mount and Blade 2 Bannerlord, where the devs had described so many things they wanted to do with the game, but then didn’t realize many of those goals between when it went into EA and when it released.
The only bug I’ve encountered which bothers me is the one where a PC (normally Laezel for me) gets stuck in cinematic mode and their controls get locked out until I reload.
Right. The “wait to remain silent” thing can take some getting used to, especially in the sort of game where you feel like your character would have a lot of questions, but I much prefer it to a default choice being made. I recently replayed one of Telltale’s games and I really enjoyed the way I could use silence as a tool. The game was The Wolf Among Us, where you play a detective who interrogates people a lot, and I used the time-honored interrogation technique of just remaining silent to make someone talk more.
Yeah it sounds to me like OP could get on fine if they restricted themselves to games where you pay once and get the whole game. No subscriptions, no microtransactions, no DLC. Also it might have been a mistake for OP to ask a gaming community about this
I appreciate that they are continuing to improve the game. I hope they will add some new subclasses, spells, and races eventually. It would give the game some serious staying power.
Saren was such a fantastic villain. I originally played the Mass Effect games out of order, so I already knew what was supposed to happen with him when I played ME1, and yet I found myself trying to convince him to shake off the indoctrination anyway. It just felt so compelling to believe that he might be redeemable, or at least that I as Shepherd would want that for him. Sovereign and Harbinger were also fantastic villains in their own right.
And then the heroes, oh my god the heroes. It’s tragic that the BioWare that could write Liara, Wrex, Mordin, and Tali is dead.
The Mako sections in ME1 weren’t really “open world”, they were just bigger hallways in many cases. IMO none of the core Mass Effect games was particularly open world, since they were based on missions. They were all more of a “hub and spoke” design, where you travelled from one hub to another and then those hubs would have local missions you could go on.
At the end of the day, all of the ME games have pretty environments, but the pretty environments aren’t the thing that keeps me coming back to the series over a decade after its launch, the writing is.