Limited resources are a huge friggin pain in the ass if they truly are limited in some sort of long-term way. Prime example: the Resident Evil games prior to number 4. Another example: Homeworld 2, where the stress of needing to worry about long-term resource management with the potential of utterly destroying an entire campaign made me stop playing the game.

If the resource in question is limited for a short period of time, it's less stressful, more easily controlled by the designers. So in Mass Effect: the ammo isn't really limited. You get enough to pretty much refill all your ammo at the end of every battle, and if you somehow do run out 100%, your squadmates will just hand ammo over to you. At most, your ammo is limited on an battle per battle basis, which eliminates most of the stress but preserves the pressure to conserve, switch weapons, and move around to grab ammo.

In my experience so far, of course. I'm roughly halfway through the game (I think... just finished Horizon), so some of this might change.


And for me, I really am switching weapons a lot more than I ever did in the first game. ME1: I used the battle rifle or whatever it was called, pretty much exclusively. This time, I'm using every weapon in my arsenal. And one of the reasons for this is because I actually do run out of ammo in one of my guns in many battles.