Pumping Irony

BioWare has been going crazy saying how much better the shooting part of the game, and how much better animations and cinematics will be. I’ll take them at their word for that.

My personal short wishlist is:

1. Make it fun from the start, don’t make me wait until the latter part of the game before it gets fun and interesting. They pulled it off with Dragon Age: Origins, but no other Western RPG is coming to mind as I write this that grabbed me from the get-go and kept up the pace the whole game.
2. We know there’s more in-game animations and better cinematic cameras, but I hope they also added some facial expressions this time. In the first game, characters were practically mannequins and depended on listening to the voice acting to convey the emotions. For the sequel, show us the emotions on their face and in their voice.
3. Unreal Engine 3 is being used again, so here’s hoping BioWare has a better grip on it this time than they did on the first game, which was pretty damn rough performance-wise. To make a comparison, look at how Gearbox improved from their first UE3 title, Brother’s in Arms: Hell’s Highway to their recent Borderlands.
4. No elevators. Worst case, if we must tolerate elevators again, at least make them equivalent in speed to the turbolifts from Star Trek.
5. Moral ambiguity. The first Mass Effect was right up there with every other RPG with “choices” in the dialogue that were very obvious in the “good; neutral; bad” morality scale. Again, Dragon Age: Origins played with more grey areas, and I hope that also carries over to Mass Effect 2.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 11:46 am and is filed under Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.