Now, that's almost all been relegated to missions, which tend to be open-and-shut affairs consisting mainly of extended linear action sequences punctuated by conversation.
It was possible to level Shepard up a fair amount by simply exploring. In the first game, experience points were littered all around the world, conferred for examining items and locations and completing small standalone quest lines. Largely gone are the tapestries of overlapping and often interconnected minor quests set throughout the first game's enormous Citadel (there's no comparably rich and populated location in this game), and at least during my playthrough I came across nothing like the snaking bureaucracy- and law enforcement-tinged quest line of Mass Effect's Noveria. Quests (both main quests and most side quests) are more clearly initiated, and they even end with a "Mission Complete" review screen. The game's mission structure is now much more discretely demarcated. And in the PC version of the game, even many of the default key mappings were changed (I don't have an Xbox 360 version handy to compare).īut it's not just the up-front systems that have been altered. In some cases, systems were effectively removed, such as the standalone inventory system and grenades. They include the following: experience point gain and leveling, skill trees, mission resolution, combat and cover, squad combat control, equipment management, weapon upgrades, squadmate weapon choices, interplanetary travel, clothing and armor customization, hacking and decryption mini-games, resource management, minor planet exploration, and probably more. It's worth listing Mass Effect 2's noticeably altered mechanics, because direct sequels released two years later are rarely overhauled this comprehensively. Mass Effect 2 moves much farther in the action direction. The original Mass Effect was described as an action-RPG hybrid, thanks in large part to the inspiration it drew from the currently very fashionable third-person cover shooter genre. Nearly every major player-exposed gameplay system from the first game was considerably tweaked or completely redesigned by the BioWare development team, and nearly all of these changes work to streamline or simplify the game's overall flow and system management. Having now completed the game, I find myself wondering whether BioWare has managed to codify a genre whose relative rarity I have often found odd: the action-game-with-classes-and-dialogue, to coin a clumsy phrase. As I played the first few hours of Mass Effect 2, I found myself constantly surprised - not by the early twist which allows for a clean break between the plot of Mass Effect and its sequel, but by how much of the game had been heavily redesigned.
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