Mass Effect 3: AtomicGamer’s Wishlist

While at this stage of development seeing significant changes in BioWare’s design for Mass Effect 3 is pretty unlikely, Atomic Gamer published their own wishlist for the sci-fi action-RPG. Here are two of their points:

Inventory

BioWare’s inventory system in ME1 was kind of a mess, because we had armor sets for all of the races, plus piles of guns, weapon mods, armor mods, grenade mods, and all of that – and none of it felt different from any of the rest when it was equipped. With ME2and its vastly increased pile of squad members to manage, BioWare simplified things by only having you choose their talent points and weapons, which were now looted or picked up in a way similar to how a first person shooter would do it.

Having weapons each with vastly unique firing patterns, speeds, and even histories is important, but we need to be able to customize them how we want. At the same time, it’d also be nice to still be able to deck out each of our squadmates with gear – but we don’t want to have to dig through hundreds of inventory items to make that happen. Perhaps the best choice is to have a wider range of outfits and special equipment for each squadmate, some of which are bought, some looted, and some even built from parts. Maybe by the end of the game, the player has made choices as to which character’s equipment has been upgraded. That way, Wrex can still get upgrades to his Biotic Amp, but we don’t necessarily have to manage a huge list of inventory items in order to do it. But for Shepard, though? If there’s one character that should have the depth, make it the one that’s playable. Give us tons of options and upgrades for the armor and weapons.

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PC Version

The first Mass Effect’s PC port came late, but it was generally pretty damn good. The interface worked right, the visual fidelity (aside from pop-up textures, which were fixed in the second game) was solid, and everything worked nicely with the controls. The performance was a bit iffy on slower PCs – and ME2 generally ran faster on low-end computers than the first – but it had a few issues. Menus often didn’t behave the way PC gamers expect, and the lack of tweaking options that the latest Unreal Engine is notorious for can be a drag. It’s probably too much to expect a ton of PC tweaks for ME3, but there are a few places that things could be improved.