Verno wrote on Nov 17, 2010, 16:16:

I don't know why everyone complains about losing ME1's inventory

There's a middle ground between cumbersome inventory with lots of nonsensical items and no inventory at all, that's what most peoples gripe was.

Some games use item management as a tension factor and no I don't mean mucking around with the interface, I mean making actual decisions that have an impact on the gameplay. Do I carry this weapon which is more situational or drop it to carry extra ammo/medigels/whatever? RPGs have usually done as well to some extent, you typically don't just have a bottomless bag that will carry everything in the universe. In ME and DA:O they ruined it by making the inventory too big and overloading the games with too many filler items that didn't really assist gameplay mechanics.

Inventories are only cumbersome and ineffective if design fails in that regard. I don't begrudge Bioware for trying something different there but that combined with the other streamlining really takes a lot of the depth out of the game. When stripped down, you have an awkward shooter of sorts along with a lot of (admittedly high quality) dialogue. Sometimes the quality of the filler makes the game in the same way that the journey can be more fulfilling than the destination.

It's not that ME2 wasn't a good game, it's that they went from one extreme to the other between titles instead of trying to find a happy medium. Empty, barren planets with endless terrain or tight corridors that play out more like traditional videogame levels instead of planets in a universe is another example of that same back and forth.