I spent a while playing it last night, and I'm enjoying it, but I feel that Bioware went way too far in reigning everything in. There were many aspects of the original that I enjoyed which are now missing. It seems as if they didn't even attempt to fix the issues with the original, rather, they simply cut everything out. The game looks better, plays better, and runs smoother...but a lot of the details I loved about the original are MIA.
1) I feel as if the game world has been sliced up into compartments for convenience sake at the expense of atmosphere and scale. The citadel, once a massive and interesting environment, has been completely compartmentalized. I was expecting them to expand upon what they they had already created and deliver an even bigger environment. After talking to Anderson for the first time, I could not believe it when I found out that I could no longer leave that meeting room and explore the presidium. I also feel as if many of the new areas are smaller in scale in order to improve performance. Surely they could have delivered a larger environment while maintaining the fast travel stations for the less patient among us.
The game feels this way but if you look at it, it really isn't. For example, Omega/Ilium is probably just a bit larger, each, than Citadel Wards and C-Sec areas combined with less filler/more npcs. Presidium was large but mostly lots of walking and few areas of interest and interaction. ME1: go to Chora's Den, go see Fist and have a shootout in that small area. ME2: go find Archangel, teleport to a different area that is far more larger and much more tactically interesting. Sure, 'immersion' is lost by loading (even then, most of these have cutscene transitions) but what's there is definitely an improvement over the lackluster original.
2) The Mako is another loss for me. Yes, it had issues, but it also had potential and could have been improved. Mixing it up between Mako and on-foot combat created a much greater sense of scale on the planets while delivering more variety in gameplay. I'm sure some associate it with the cookie cutter planets of the original, but I'm thinking more of its usage during actual story missions. Rather than attempting to improve it, they cut it completely. The ice station in the original game, for instance, felt significantly more remote as a result of the Mako sections beforehand.
I loved the Mako and find planet scanning less resolving the problem and more taking out everything fun about Mako sections and leaving the boring collectathon aspect in. Mako was great for the vehicle/foot action and gorgeous vistas. What people hated were the 90 degree mountains, RC car handling and Simon Says collecting. Planet scanning is nothing but a variant of the latter.
3) Load screens galore. You know, the elevators WERE a bit too long, but let's not pretend we didn't know what was going on in the background. They were using them to hide loading screens and keep the player in the game world. What did they do here? They break the immersion and replaced those elevators with load screens. Talk about regressing. The loading screens aren't all that much shorter than the elevator rides and they pull you out of the world. The elevators definitely helped the world feel more cohesive despite their length. Prior to Mass 1, I was concerned about how they would present the environment due to the shortcomings of KOTOR (which had load screens around every corner). With the first game, it was clear that immersion was something they were striving for. With Mass 2, however, I feel as if they are returning to their old ways and that's disappointing.
The only elevator I've ever had a problem with was the Normandy one. That one didn't make any sense. The rest, especially all of Presidium were optional since there was always rapid transit with shorter load times, fit into the context of the game world. Agreed.
. Also really cool running into some blast from the past ME1 characters like
