Odyssey Combat is bad.

[Rat Catcher]

Is Mass Effect just a FPS game? Or can you do the same things as in Odyssey?
I find it quite amusing that there are some here who continue to insist that EDO is a poor FPS game, when, crazy, I know, it isn't just a FPS game, it is part of ED, like it or lump it, and I'd trust FDev to 'improve' it as part of their game, rather than take suggestions to 'improve' the game from blinkered players...

 

[Elpapo]

Well, the trick here is you add new WAYS of playing, not just BETTER ways.

Did you ever play Mass Effect? They had a multiplayer mode and they added all sorts of options, essentially 'suit types', and while a few were probably OP, for the most part they did a remarkably good job of keeping things balanced because of the way they did the balancing.

Oh yes, I did, all of them, including Andromeda(wich if would be more polished, it would be not half as bad). ME3 is my favorite, and I am multiplayer headshot/melee pro with 3000 hrs online (I am always top in score, no matter with who I am playin), since its around, and even these days still playing sometimes gold or plat pugs. My most used classes are geths, all kinds. One of my signature is "hiding" rocket launcher, so it appear to invisble, with swap + melee trick, or ladder with characters that cant do that. Some maps dont have ladders, so I even go far as equip batglove, for characters that cant use swap trick.

I also fond of melee'ing cerberus ghosts, as I am also an expert when comes to game mechanics. I know very well every type of enemy, but cerberus is my favorite one, because they are most fun to melee with variety of classes. Especially dragoons and ghosts, wich unless youre exacly know what are you doing, you cant really go into melee with them, but I can. But more than I am blawler, I am more marksman, who goes for headshots, and often I do get gold headshot medal(20 heads), before getting bronze medal for wep kills(25 wep kills). I got killer bulids for every character, I think. And yes, I do also carve to end up 1st in board, so expect spawn nuking, when its time for that.

Take the basic Human Soldier, for example(the equivalent of a Dominator suit). It could carry more weapons than normal, and it also had Adrenaline Rush, which boosted your damage and durability temporarily, as well as frag grenades and Concussive Shot, which could knock down or stagger enemies in a small radius, or detonate damage over time effects from your weapons. Simple, yes, but really fun because it made your weapons hit like a truck and let you tank enemy fire to do it.

Frag nades, con shot + cryo ammo, and falcon. Cryo explosion everywhere, and high score guaranteed.

Then you had the Turian Soldier; instead of Adrenaline Rush, they had Marksman, which boosted accuracy, fire rate, and reload speed, and instead of frag grenades they had proximity mines, which served a similar role but could be used to preemptively block doors and such.

Turian solider with eagle pistol bulid, thanks to that power, wich causes auto-reload as well, in me3, its better than most AR bulids in game, even turian infitrator, with cloak and AR bonus for it, cant match it. Slap proxy mine and its more even ridiculus.

See? You don't need to be TOO different or overpowered to be interestingly different.

Except it would not work well with PVP in mind. More about that bellow.

Of course, you can go more and more interesting and unique too, as they did in ME3; You started with the basic differences, and then they released packs of new class variants, like the N7 Destroyer, which had Devastator Mode, a permanent mode which made you walk slowly but incredibly tanky and fire super fast. And it had an auto-firing rocket launcher on the shoulder that would synthesize and then fire a rocket at nearby enemies automatically. Or the Turian Havoc, which had stimpacks to give you on-demand super-healing paired with powerful melee abilities and high agility.

And that's all JUST inside the 'soldier' domain! You also had snipers and engineers just in the tech side of things, plus all the different biotic abilities that game had!

Yeah, I know all the classes, and all characters very, very well.

Thing is, while Oddy and me3 have some similarites, like shield gate mechanic, and shield/health system, yet oddy is oversimplified in comparison, and major point is that in oddy, you dont have classes with powers/tech/biotics, wich is kind big diffrence and ME does not PVP(unless enabled). Me3 have over 50 diffrent weapons, and as much more powers, you also got way more damage types, and combos as well. While its fun to play around, lets not forget its still stricte PVE only, as when it would had PVP (wich can be enabled with console btw, in online) its get hiralously broken.

For example, turian inflitrator, with overload, you can stun lock infintely another player with it, with some melee on top of that. Some biotic and most geths (javelin + phasing rounds one shots players by walls) are overpowered to the point, where weapons used dont matter as much, as power pool that specific class and character have. Once tried "PVP" in me3 online, one does truly realize how broken setups can be, and a lot of them a well.

Back to oddy topic, while it would be fun to have that much of depth for classes, loadouts and so on like Mass effect has, again, it would be not too good for PVP, and it would be impossible to properly balance it around, to make all those variety be not so ahead of each other, not to mention, many classes have very op combos of thier own powers, along with some broken weapons.

 

[Shurimal]

Is Mass Effect just a FPS game? Or can you do the same things as in Odyssey?

Not really an FPS; more like RPG with guns. Think Fallout in space. And of course an RPG needs stats, abilities and magic to make unique characters.

Ody is more of a "classic" FPS like Half-Life or Soldier of Fortune--no character sheets, special abilities or leveling up. Just a bloke with lots of guns. Well, there sort of are classes in Ody--the different NPC classes like Striker, Sharpshooter, Enforcer that use different guns and at least Enforcer has modified suit that makes them extra tanky. Problem is, for players these classes are nebulous and up to players to decide which "class" their loadouts and suit/weapon mods are. Eg, I have "rogue" class with Maverick that has quiet footsteps, damage resistance, night vision and improved battery; and three "rogue" subclass loadouts with that suit; all have Tormentor pistol, but different primary guns--Aphelion (the Gunslinger), Intimidator (the Operative) and Executioner (the Marksman).

It would have been much more interesting to have different suit types that have some of the mods "integrated", for example Dominator is the standard issue infantry space suit (the jack of all trades), but you also have a sniper suit with built-in Enhanced Tracking, but less armor, a tank suit with better armor resistances and ammo capacity but slower movement, a scout suit with better jetpack and combat movement speed but weaker shield etc--but all these combat suits would have two primary weapon slots like the Dominator. Then you can tweak these suits with 2 extra modifiers like night vision, battery or bigger backpack. That would mean you can't really specialize the Dominator, just make some aspects of it better, but with eg sniper suit you can either hyperspecialize it or try to plug the weaknesses.

Different abilities using already existing chems (Push, Lazarus, Synthetic Pathogen etc) would also be really cool. Like consuming Push making you faster, Lazarus giving health boost and throwing Synth. Pathogen at enemies would debuff their health or making guns more jittery.

 

[Rat Catcher]

Not really an FPS; more like RPG with guns. Think Fallout in space.

I may have to take a peek! Probably another of those games I missed because I was too busy working to play.
Thanks.

 

[Shurimal]

I may have to take a peek! Probably another of those games I missed because I was too busy working to play.
Thanks.

Certainly do! The Legendary Edition pack of all three games is frequently on -90% sale on Steam

 

[Cmdr. Numa]

I may have to take a peek! Probably another of those games I missed because I was too busy working to play.
Thanks.

You're in for a treat, especially with the remastered trilogy. This is from a time when Bioware was still up to form.

 

[DemiserofD]

Oh yes, I did, all of them, including Andromeda(wich if would be more polished, it would be not half as bad). ME3 is my favorite, and I am multiplayer headshot/melee pro with 3000 hrs online (I am always top in score, no matter with who I am playin), since its around, and even these days still playing sometimes gold or plat pugs. My most used classes are geths, all kinds. One of my signature is "hiding" rocket launcher, so it appear to invisble, with swap + melee trick, or ladder with characters that cant do that. Some maps dont have ladders, so I even go far as equip batglove, for characters that cant use swap trick.

I also fond of melee'ing cerberus ghosts, as I am also an expert when comes to game mechanics. I know very well every type of enemy, but cerberus is my favorite one, because they are most fun to melee with variety of classes. Especially dragoons and ghosts, wich unless youre exacly know what are you doing, you cant really go into melee with them, but I can. But more than I am blawler, I am more marksman, who goes for headshots, and often I do get gold headshot medal(20 heads), before getting bronze medal for wep kills(25 wep kills). I got killer bulids for every character, I think. And yes, I do also carve to end up 1st in board, so expect spawn nuking, when its time for that.


Frag nades, con shot + cryo ammo, and falcon. Cryo explosion everywhere, and high score guaranteed.


Turian solider with eagle pistol bulid, thanks to that power, wich causes auto-reload as well, in me3, its better than most AR bulids in game, even turian infitrator, with cloak and AR bonus for it, cant match it. Slap proxy mine and its more even ridiculus.


Except it would not work well with PVP in mind. More about that bellow.


Yeah, I know all the classes, and all characters very, very well.

Thing is, while Oddy and me3 have some similarites, like shield gate mechanic, and shield/health system, yet oddy is oversimplified in comparison, and major point is that in oddy, you dont have classes with powers/tech/biotics, wich is kind big diffrence and ME does not PVP(unless enabled). Me3 have over 50 diffrent weapons, and as much more powers, you also got way more damage types, and combos as well. While its fun to play around, lets not forget its still stricte PVE only, as when it would had PVP (wich can be enabled with console btw, in online) its get hiralously broken.

For example, turian inflitrator, with overload, you can stun lock infintely another player with it, with some melee on top of that. Some biotic and most geths (javelin + phasing rounds one shots players by walls) are overpowered to the point, where weapons used dont matter as much, as power pool that specific class and character have. Once tried "PVP" in me3 online, one does truly realize how broken setups can be, and a lot of them a well.

Back to oddy topic, while it would be fun to have that much of depth for classes, loadouts and so on like Mass effect has, again, it would be not too good for PVP, and it would be impossible to properly balance it around, to make all those variety be not so ahead of each other, not to mention, many classes have very op combos of thier own powers, along with some broken weapons.

The thing is, we already have an established precedent for PVP builds being different than PVE builds. I think it would be fairly reasonable to be able to have lots of different suits with lots of different abilities, and still be as balanced or more so than it was having the FDL be the only viable PVP ship for a couple years.

 

[DemiserofD]

Maybe I should do a bit of a deeper dive into how I could see things like this working, so people have a better idea of the possibilities?

First off, it's too limiting that the utility tools like the bioscanner lack a combat purpose. It's a decent start that the charging tool can also shock people, but by having an illegal utility for the other tools as well, you give them much greater utility by default. Give the bioscanner the ability to give wallhax in illegal mode, and give the cutting tool the ability to heal shields. That makes it a potent support tool.

Future suits could then have these tools or new ones and retain non-combat purpose as well as being decent at combat as well.

Then, rework grenades. Right now, they're too hard to use and far, far too limited. Make them easier to hit with, and change grenade boxes to give rockets instead, which now become the limited option, with grenades now being resupplied by ammo crates.

Then, more heavily limit what types of grenades are available to different suits. A dominator suit, for example, might get frags and shield bubbles, while a maverick might just get bubbles and the artemis might get the shield disruptors.

This opens the door to adding new suits with new grenade subtypes, all of which are reloaded with the same universal grenade ammo.

You could then add new unique tools and abilities to different suits, as well. For example, the Mav suit might be able to place a small automated turret, while the Artemis might have a lateral boost feature allowing it to rapidly cross the battlefield, or even a cloaking device, making it the ultimate stealth suit. Just imagine having wallhax AND being able to turn invisible briefly to freely copy someone's security status? Or run through a monitored room to get to an alarms console?

After that, you could start adding new suits as needed. For example, you might add a suit that has a permanent jetpack, powerful enough to keep you floating in place almost indefinitely so you can snipe from the air. Or you might have a suit that can expand its own shield out in a certain direction while increasing its overall strength, allowing you to press forward while shielded. That sort of thing.

Really, once you get to that point, the possibilities are endless. Literally whatever you can imagine.