User blog comment:SanjayBeast/Mass Effect : where will we go now?/@comment-1441235-20120604215502/@comment-1441235-20120606011846

Don't misunderstand me: I have absolutely nothing against innnovation, in fact its something to be hoped for. What I have a serious problem with is "trying to appeal to a wider audience" to the detriment of what the game originally was. Mass Effect lost a lot of the character customization that is usually inherent to RPGs when they moved from 1 to 2. Any time you are removing options that worked just fine in previous titles instead of adding new features you are doing it wrong. And its not just Mass Effect. The Elder Scrolls is another good example. From Morrowind to Oblivion, you lost Short/Long blade as skills (condensed to Blade, because using a short sword is exactly the same as using a claymore...), you lost any access to spear-type weaponry, armor is all either Light or Heavy, and they removed the Teleportation and Levitation spells, which led to the loss of a lot of complexity in their dungeons because they lost the vertical element. Those are just examples off the top of my head. Were I to go back and compare the two, I'm quite sure I could come up with plenty more. What I'm saying is that oversimplifying everything to try to appeal to everyone is not what should be happening. Going from the grand amount of armor options and upgrades available in Mass Effect to what by comparison are purely cosmetic changes you have available for your armor in ME2 to try to appeal to Joe Shmoe who never had any interest in RPGs before is simply ridiculous in my opinion. If you want to blend genres, fine, but that means you take what defines them and blend them together, not make every game a shooter clone to the detriment of what the game's actual genre is supposed to be.