Mass Effect: General thread of Awesomeness

[Zevox]

Open-world games can work well. The problem is that they need to be focused on being, well, open-world games. I've never taken issue with the open-world design in the Elder Scrolls games, but those were designed from the ground up to be that way and even then they sometimes wind up feeling empty (Oblivion being the worst offender in recent years).

I never played enough of the couple of Elder Scrolls games I tried to say too much about them (few hours of Morrowind, maybe half an hour of Oblivion), but I did play Fallout 3 through the full main story, and I'd say it falls squarely into the category I described. It's big, but shallow, with a lot to do but none of it worth doing. Combined with how unimpressed I was with what I played of Morrowind, that's lead to me just avoiding anything made by Bethesda. (Oblivion I mostly played to see if using its third-person perspective would help my dislike of its first-person based gameplay at all - it did not.)

And open-world exploration isn't what I'm going into a Mass Effect game for. I'm there for the plot and the characters, and every minute that I'm driving the Mako around is time that I'm not taking part in an actual mission.

On that, I fully agree.