[360] Mass Effect

Originally Posted by Starwars

This game looks well made, but I'm not to big on the whole action+RPG thing they've got going. I hope the focus will be on the roleplaying side, because it's just awful when you have a so called RPG game, but you feel it doesn't give you the chance to really, well... roleplay.

One of the most outstanding things about KOTOR is that it gives you more of a chance to actually role play than pretty much every other console "rpg" ever made. In the overwhelming majority of console rpgs, your characters are shoe-horned into certain roles and there's generally a right and wrong way to do things and certainly a best way to play. I've played through both KOTOR games several times and you can be nice or nasty, develop a force user, a combat specialist or a sneaky fuck and still complete the game. I'm fairly confident that Bioware will play to their strengths in that respect in Mass Effect and make it a proper free choice rpg as opposed to say, Oblivion, which fucks you over if you don't have a basic level of several of the available skills.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Maybe they'll actually put in all the features they showed off in the pre-release videos for the first game this time too. Multiple conversation threads, being able to interupt people during lines, influence over your crew, full voice acting for almost everyone in the galaxy, switching between characters, using tactics to order about the AI and decent graphics throughout. It was all there in the trailers so they must have at least made a start on all those features, even though they were universally dropped from the finished game in a display of feature-lying that Lionhead Studios would be proud of.

There's nowhere I can't reach.