Video games are complicated. They didn’t start that way, the rules of Pong should be obvious just by watching, but that simplicity can’t last. People demand more. Compare Doom to Battlefield 3: in one you can’t even look up, the other has more commands than there are buttons on a controller. This demand for increasing complexity is something that affects all entertainment (just compare Die Hard to Live Free or Die Hard), but it’s particularly troubling for games because keeping up with that demand can limit the audience. This is something other people have written about, and I’ve got no interest in repeating their points here. Instead, I’m interested in where a gaming genre goes once it’s reached that tipping point of complexity.

Regenerating health gets a lot of flack. I’ve heard plenty of gamers criticize such elements because they make shooters “easier” or “less intense” or “lazier,” but after playing Resistance 3, it seems to me that most of those criticisms are only exacerbated when a game uses a health pack based healing system.

The most common complaint about regenerating health is that it forces the player to spend lots of time hiding behind cover, staring at rock textures rather than actually playing the game. This is true to a certain extent, but I spent far more time hiding in Resistance 3 than I did in Modern Warfare 3.

The morality system of Mass Effect has always been a blessing and a curse. It’s just nuanced enough to allow players to create morally murky and interesting characters, but BioWare’s insistence on maintaining a binary morality means it could never be as complex as it wants to be. Last week, fellow Moving Pixels blogger Jorge Albor wrote about the troubles that Mass Effect has always faced with its morality system on a narrative level, but I think BioWare has had just as much trouble simply figuring out a way to present this system to players in a manner that is clear and understandable as a metric.

Some people don’t like the ending of Mass Effect 3. I’m not one of those people.

Mass Effect 3 reaches the peak of its climax when it asks Shepard to make one last choice. He has to choose to control the Reapers, destroy the Reapers, or merge all synthetic and organic life together. Of course, there’s more nuance to the choices than that, but it’s important how these choices are presented in their simplest form. They’re ostensibly plot points, and yet the similarity of the final cut scenes implies that the plot is not the most important aspect of this choice. The game seems to say that the consequences are interchangeable.

In Mass Effect 2, the Cerberus Daily News Network was an in-game news feed located on the title screen. It would update daily, offering players a glimpse of what was going on in the galaxy while Shepard was off doing his thing. Since Shepard’s mission was secretive by nature, taking him to places that existed far outside the scrutiny of the general galactic media, his view of the galaxy was too narrow to incorporate these other aspects of world building. For example, Shepard didn’t care about financial corruption on the Citadel or the latest box office blockbuster, but I did. As a player invested in this universe, I wanted to know more about it than what Shepard could see, and the Cerberus Daily News Network was a smart way to please fans like me while not filling the game with needless expository world building.