I also don’t like getting up in people’s faces in shooters, so shotguns are mostly out of the question, unless we’re playing DOOM of course. There is nothing I find more annoying in a shooter than having to reload while trying to kill the same enemy. I either want hundreds of bullets and no reload time while trying to get a single kill or one shot one man damage ratios. What this means is that I tend to use sniper rifles and auto rifles in a majority of shooting games I play. I’m better at third person shooters, but in general I’m a terrible shot. Whether first person or third person, my aim is often pretty shit. The second thing I have to address is specific to shooters.
I don’t want to have to go out of my way to use innate abilities to the class. This is how I want special abilities in games to work. You just attacked with magic like you would a sword, war hammer, or spear. The gameplay for mage class functioned like every other class, in a real time RPG. One of my favorite games to play the mage class is still Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning, because magic played smoothly. I just don’t want magic to be troublesome. Champion class for the win! Now it’s not that I don’t want to use magic. So I just didn’t use magic at all, save for a bit of healing magic. Having to manually target each spell mid-battle completely ruined the pacing for me. But it was terribly slow and annoying when using magic spells. That game was great when you played a non-magic class. I think about Dragon Age Origins, the best Dragon Age game, a lot when discussing this issue. RPGs that include the ability to use magic, but don’t require you to use magic, often make the gameplay slow and complicated. Over my many years of gaming, I’ve played very few games that weren’t games about magic that did magic gameplay well. The only time I would do that is if I’m desperate for a specific weapon to save myself from imminent doom, like a rocket launcher. I almost never change guns mid-encounter. I play one to two guns at a time and stick to them while trying to level them up. Even when I play a game like Ratchet & Clank, which I love, I don’t constantly change guns. Sometimes I will change weapons/approach in the middle of the fight when my current method isn’t working, but I do not want to have to bring up a hot wheel more than one time in a single encounter. I absolutely hate having to keep bringing up a wheel menu mid-fight to defeat an enemy. Because of this, I have a deep abhorrence for combat wheels. This “lazy” approach to gaming applies to most genres I play. I’m saying they need to be as simple and straight forward as possible.
I am not saying games need to be easy for me to enjoy them. What that means in simple terms is the less complicated a game is to play the better. I am a believer in the path of least resistance from the UI. The first thing I need to address is my general approach to games. The Rock Paper Shotgun article poses a valid question: Why in a game where you can use magic powers and hack technology would you choose the power of just having more guns? So I wanted to examine this question by explaining the reason I chose Soldier in my playthrough of Mass Effect.
Thinking back to my playthrough of the trilogy, I chose Solider as well. Meaning an overwhelming majority of players chose Soldier. Soon after the infographic was released, Rock Paper Shotgun posted an article questioning the fact that 40% of players chose the Solider class. Some weeks back, the Mass Effect Twitter account posted an infographic sharing data on the various choices people made in the Mass Effect Legendary Edition.