SW 1 was great. SW 2 was different and often times worse in some areas (mostly stemming from the partial focus on co-op, so level design, story and overall playthrough structure) but the gunplay was one of the best in any FPS to date.
I have my doubts regarding SW 3. Firstly because of what I've seen of the game so far. It seems to be HEAVILY going in the route of the nu-Dooms, which I frankly did not like that much. The overly cartoony style doesn't help either. And next, there is the questionable "political" decisions surrounding the game as has been pointed out in this thread.
As for SW 2, some notes.
- Comparing the game to Diablo or Borderlands is simply not valid. In those games, you have to rely on RNG to get a couple usable guns among millions of trash drops. All the weapons in SW 2 are in static locations. And the gems drop in such a quantity, it is absolutely not necessary to grind for anything ever.
- The gems or "loot" is numerous but not complex. Due to the very small size of the pool of possible affixes that can spawn on a gem, it is really not difficult to pick the correct ones. Once you learn which affixes are the important ones, going over the gems once an hour takes a couple of minutes at most.
- If you feel the enemies are too tough, the game has like 10 difficulty options. I always play it in the style of playing on the highest one I have unlocked at the moment, but you can lower it at any time to suit your needs. Also, you just have to conform to the game's resistance/vulnerability system. Shooting everything willy nilly with a random gun is not going to work. You have to make yourself a specialized weapon for every occasion, which is where the game excels, as you can make any weapon into any element or tune it as you see fit. You have 8 weapon slots for a reason.
NuffCatnip: I admit, that comparison was a rather odd one. :)
What I was trying to say was that in my oppinion bullet sponges have no place in an FPS, a headshot should kill, not a dozen. I can get behind loot (admittedly I'd rather not have it) and skills if they are implemented well, but health scaling is something I dislike in a shooter.
The health has to scale because player power scales. Otherwise, you would just end up one shotting everything with even the most basic peashooter. Which you can still do, just select the lowest difficulty.
And it is really not that difficult to reach the state where even on Insanity 7, everything melts within seconds.
