I agree, that's an improvement. I remember not looting lots of low-level bodies in the IE games because the effort of clicking wasn't worth the 2 gold you'd get as a reward. While infinite inventories are probably not suited to all games, it certainly works well in ME and I give two thumbs up to the auto-corpse-loot system.
I'll keep my eye on the dialogs as I continue my playthrough to give this more scrutiny. So far it often seems to me that the dialog options tend to be one of the following:Only if you consider them so diametrically opposed. As Froggy said in an earlier post, it's not about being an "Alien lover" or "crypto fascist" but about whether your character will bend over backwards/go out of their way to accomodate people or is so focused on the goal as to disregard the interests of all else around. I admit there are a few side quests that pull that distinction towards what you describe (notably the Human politician and reporter citadel side quests), but the impression i got from my various play throughs was more as I described -if not a simpler selfish/selfless choice.
1) I like aliens / I trust no one but humans
2) I like the rule of law / I do whatever it takes to get the job done
3) There's no need to reward me / Give me more loot!
In every case, the answers seem mutually exclusive. For example, with #2 responses, the game regularly rewards paragon points for liking law and order, and rewards renegade points for being an 'ends justify the means' type of guy. Since they're diametrically opposed answers and the give points into opposite areas, why aren't the conflicting with one another? Sure, there are some paragon answers that would mesh with other renegade answers, but in those scenarios it seems more like a 2-axis scale would be better. As it is now, ME has the same good/bad evaluation as the KOTOR games and Jade Empire, but it allows you to go both directions at the same time. I'm not inclined to think that makes a lot of sense. If they wanted to try and rate someone's alignment in that manner, they should have used a slightly more elaborate ranking system. A single axis with two poles just isn't cutting it as far as I can tell.
Ideally, they just should've scrapped the paragon/renegade stuff to begin with. If they wanted to let us be as morally ambiguous as we want, they shouldn't be rating us on our performance and rewarding/penalizing us for our answers.
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