But the worst part about the ME interface is that my friend worked at Bioware (but joined late in developement) and repeatedly requested to improve/fix the interface for them but was just told ‘no’ because it was already done.

Your article is great though. You nailed all the problems bang on!

Does ME2 fix that?

Really, there are a disturbing number of subtle signs of dumbing-down, or worse, perhaps designer inattention to detail, in ME2, despite certain other improvements.

The weird melding of controls didn’t bode well from the start, as if they imagined people had become too dumb since the last game to cope with more than two action buttons, “shoot” and “do something that isn’t shooting.”

The various volatile barrels and things that can be shot at, previously of several different types, now all seem to be generically labelled “explosive.” This, I cannot fathom; surely it took more effort to *remove* the different types of splodey barrel from the code and replace them with a generic one than simply to leave them the way they were.

Your companions can no longer be talked to outside of combat or major scripted events, which for some reason *really* ticks me off – I actually really miss their quite large number of relevant observations, coloured by their character, for just about every place you could take them, though there’s still the odd scripted one here or there.

The map no longer shows where things you need to do or people you need to talk to are, and you can’t mark them either, so there’s a lot more clueless stumbling around using the minimap’s old as the hills and still as annoying as ever “it’s somewhere over there, no idea how far” arrangement.

The skills, journal and upgrades menus can no longer be accessed quickly by keystroke; you’ve got to go into the escape menu and navigate to them every time.

The addition of “heatsink” magazines, while somewhat original in that it’s an inversion of the usual “energy magazine” concept for a waste energy sink, is flawed – the original game had overheating to force you to use strategy in a firefight, to make sure you couldn’t use superior firepower alone to force your way through, but without the disadvantage of making the game unwinnable if you suddenly got stuck with no ammo left and a boss room between you and the only remaining provisions. Regressing to the old finite-ammo model maintains the restriction on firepower, without improvement, but restores this infuriating design flaw, which was then presumably crudely fixed by having magically regenerating neat piles of new magazines in major battle areas, like Archangel’s HQ. That they could be spent magazines from the same battle that have had time to cool down, I can accept; that they’ve stacked themselves neatly back in the bookcase, I can’t. Which is all daft because there’s no reason whatsoever why they couldn’t have combined both, and kept it physically plausible; an overheated weapon should slowly cool down, and so should an ejected heatsink, so replacing it with a new cold heatsink could be useful mid-fight but more like another “power” option if you could only carry a few heatsinks with you, and you would still have the option to just wait for the gun to cool on its own, ME1 style, if you ran out.

To be fair, some things have improved. The planet scanning thing is way more sensible than landing on the surface and driving around randomly until you find apparently the one small chunk of minerals on the entire planet by sheer chance, though of course it also *removes* the fun of driving around exploring the planet (yes, the mako was about as wieldy as a scalextric car, and you’d seldom find anything except the odd boulder or crashed probe but dammit, you were *exploring an alien planet* – that’s what square-jawed space heroes *do* between battles!). Again, I would have preferred a compromise, which would also have been more realistic; scan for something from orbit, send down the probe, and then drive to the probe from the nearest suitable landing area. You could always send down another crewmember to do the driving and wait on the ship if you really couldn’t stomach all that offroading.

Oh, and the elevator now serves every floor on the ship, which is way more sensible than the half-elevator, half-stairs idea. Seriously, nobody would ever build that.