Should We Be Worried About Mass Effect 3?

Noting that the series has set a “stupendously high standard” for itself, Raiding Party editorializes on whether or not Dragon Age II should be a cause of concern for Mass Effect fans.

‘˜Streamlining’ is the word of the moment in video game development, and in the eyes of many critics and gamers, it’s a dirty one. In an attempt to make their products more appealing to larger crowds, developers are constantly trimming, combining, omitting and simplifying game elements. But when does streamlining become dumbing down?

From Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2, many of the RPG elements of the series (open world exploration and inventory management, to name a couple) were stripped away in the name of streamlining; Mass Effect 2 is basically an action game with some RPG-esque features. Bioware actually tracked statistics of Mass Effect 2 playthroughs, noting everything from which character class was the most popular to which dialogue sections were skipped the most, the idea being their research would be used to ‘˜optimise’ Mass Effect 3 based on how people played the previous title. How much more can possibly get removed before the game really starts to suffer? After all, breadth of choice and a multitude of options are what make videogames such as Mass Effect so appealing in the first place.