>>717723832
>ME2 feels extremely polished, but like it was influenced by committee and soulless wine aunts looking at graphs saying "2% more people want to see more of X story and Y game mechanics put those in and take your shit out!"
2 is definitely the midway compromise between like "Hey, we work for a dudebro corporation now, let's make it COOL, but still try to keep the story going".
And i don't begrudge anybody for picking up on that and calling it illegitimate.
but for me, I'm just in the camp that it still "worked" for me, but I just didn't expect it to continue so straightforwardly into the final game. I thought okay, now you've polished up your game with slick guns and all that crap. Now go BACK to that more expansive feeling of the first game, bring some of that "feeling" back again, but also make the game feel more technically competent, all with the improved cinematic shots and all of this.
but in some ways 2 already had more stiff looking face animation than 1 had, and 3 while it can look more "emotive" it kinda feels like even in just a detail like that, there is a constant regression from game to game, and you look through so many conversations that it kinda matters to the lasting impression. People start having dead stares in ME3 because something about the face tech got screwed up between the games.
And it's just that, along with the writing issues that bother me. It feels like there are superficial technical improvements, but under the hood each game only got more dumbed down from the previous one, but I genuinely thought at the time (because I didn't fucking get the industry) that you could go to have ME2, and then reverse-inspire yourself to make ME3 more like the first game but with some technical learnings of 2.
But we just got an iteration on the direction they were already taking, and that totally fucked the series to its completion.
