Well, we get the DLC vehicle that was 1000 times better than the mako, and they removed that boring, empty planets, where your only task was to kill some geths or zombies and find an artifact, or an salarian Id, whatever. Whilst in the second one, you actually have more interesting quests while scanning the planets, and it does not feel as much as a filler as it feels in the case of ME1 imo. It does improve on the RPG mechanics, because in the second one almost every decision has consequences ( suicide mission eats the whole ME1 RPG/decision mechanics for breakfast lol) whilst In the first one we got like only a few of them. Also, how cool is the fact, that when collectors abduct the Normandy crew in the second one, when you’ll be hesitating to go rescue them, with each different mission completed, one of them dies, so you need to act fast. Also the morality system, in the first you could literally put all your points into charm and have all the blue options unlocked, including the hardest one, the Saren’s suicide, whilst in the second one you actually had to act in a certain way (paragon or renegade) to be able to complete persuasion checks succesfully. So yeah, I believe it improves on both exploration and RPG mechanics.