LogFAQs > #966359715

Veedrock- posted...

Terrible advice. For reasons different from OP my first playthrough was strictly doing story missions with little to no character interaction, not even romance. That experience cemented my fascination and enjoyment of the game enough to do multiple replays where I did do all the interactions and side missions.

It really isn't. If your opinion of the crew interactions is "boring talking", then there is literally no reason to play Mass Effect. The combat and action aren't appreciably better than other FPS games

There's a difference between "focusing on story missions" and "actively finding the core narrative aspects of gameplay boring".



Veedrock- posted...

Mass Effect has always been a squad based game, extending that from AI partners to multiplayer was natural.

It wasn't, because it requires a degree of re-balancing and design alteration beyond simply letting other players control other squadmates.

In the core single-player game the action is mostly centered on Shepard and the squad act as support. Designing tactical combat scenarios with multiple active players who should all be equally important requires different focus (and if you introduce full PvP you need to balance against opposing teams as well). While it may seem superficially similar, it's actually a different design philosophy.



Veedrock- posted...

The games would not be I inherently better without multiplayer, their problems were not a symptom of wasted resources.

It absolutely would, and you're objectively wrong.

Adding multiplayer alters design choices, requires diversion of studio resources (or bringing in an outside studio to essentially build off the initial framework), and otherwise adds development time to a game. Time spent integrating those features is potentially time spent working on other things. Publisher focus placed on multiplayer (because it's easier to monetize via microtransactions) de-emphasizes time spent on single-player. In a sense, it's similar to the shift from Shadow of Mordor to Shadow of War. Or the reasons why the Assassin's Creed teams stopped including multiplayer in spite of how popular those modes were.

Is it the source of every problem in ME3? No, Hudson and Walters thinking they were cleverer than they actually were was the root cause of a lot of issues there. But it definitely played a role in some of the issues of ME3, and a lot of the problems in ME:A.