On Video Game Difficulty, Part 3, C, or three lower-case "i"s: Class

(I'm trying to clean out the "Vault," and this wasn't published back when I was discussing video game difficulty for some reason.  It's incomplete, but enjoy anyway.)

Something interesting happened to me when I played Mass Effect for the first time on my new laptop.  I didn't transfer over all the saved files, so I lost all the various buffs you get for fulfilling various achievements.  So I was playing the game with a "blank slate," although I had full functioning knowledge of how the game worked.



I had two Shepards tackling it more or less simultaneously, because I have Paragon days and I have Renegade days. Specifically, these Shepards were a Vanguard (I'll get into the six classes in a minute for the uninitiated, but Vanguard was the first class I ever played, so even though I consider it one of the more difficult frustrating ones, it has a special place in my heart) and the other was a Sentinel. And I discovered something that shocked me: Sentinel, at least in ME1, is considered something of a useless class because it doesn't have the high-end biotic (magic) powers, but suffers the same combat limitations (light armor and only pistols) as the fully-biotic Adept class. And yet, I found playing the game on Veteran much easier as a Sentinel than as a Vanguard, at least until about 2/3rds of the way through (when the Vanguard's scaling finally kicked in and it became a viable class).

So this post is going to be a huge mess about the various classes, and their difficulty across all three games. So, basic overview. In a lot of RPGs, (e.g. Dragon Age: Origins), you have the classic three classes: Fighter, Thief, Mage. The Fighter wears the best armor and has access to better weapons than the Thief, who uses cunning and lockpicking/trap-setting. And the Mage of course is the squishy wizard who wears robes instead of armor but can nuke whole armies.

Well, what Mass Effect does is screw with this mechanic a little bit. Soldiers are Fighters, Engineers are Thieves, and Adepts are Magi, but then there are mixed classes as well. Vanguards are a mix of Fighters and Magi; they can wear medium armor and can use shotguns (and in the second and third games, two of the three ammo powers), whereas Engineers and Adepts can only use light armor and pistols. Infiltrators are a mix of Fighters and Thieves, having medium armor and sniper rifles, as well as half of the Engineer's tech tree. And Sentinels are a mix of Thieves and Magi; they're stuck with light armor and only pistols, but they have the most diverse set of abilities. (This means a lot more in the second game, where every type of defense needs a specific counter.)

Diablo III has a similar issue in that certain classes are simply better than others (and with the incessant patching it may be hard to figure out which ones are which, but the Demon Hunter's been getting hosed recently).