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DarkHorse posted:I've literally not touched ME since I finished the third game. Is the updated ending worth a play-through, and is Leviathan worth a download? You can watch pretty much all the new content for the EC on YouTube -- most of it comes in the form of cutscenes and slides. Opinions vary on its quality. I think it turned an inexcusable ending into one that's merely kind of bad. Leviathan's decent. Well-crafted, fun set-pieces, but with a lack of any serious moral choices and a story that goes a bit nonsensical at the end.
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Sep 12, 2012 03:33
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ME3 was mostly a Good Game, and though the ending was awful I think its effect is a bit overstated, but you have to admit it's not good optics to have "absolutely blew it at the finish line and provoked a half-year screaming match" as the biggest story attached to your game. It could have been the Game With The Choices, now it's the Game With The Bad Ending. I have no idea what the long-term effect will be on the series' popularity, but it's not the idea launching point.
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Nov 9, 2013 00:28
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Milky Moor posted:I know half a dozen people who all attended the Mass Effect 3 midnight launch in Melbourne. I can only speak from what I know -- the people I convinced to buy the series are pretty down on it. For me, Mass Effect games have gone from a sight-unseen preorder to waiting until they're played by sources I trust. BioWare games are generally p. flawed, but I like the feel of them so I'm usually confident that I'll enjoy the overall experience. The idea that they considered what they came up with for the ME3 ending to be somehow not only acceptable but actually artistically worthy is a huge blow to that confidence. I don't wanna get invested in another trilogy only to have them blow it again. EDIT: someone mentioned hiring a cosplay person for their PR department to be an issue, but here's the bigger issue: that cosplay person was generally the most reasonable and least condescending PR person they had during the whole epilogue debacle. Pattonesque fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Nov 9, 2013 |
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Nov 9, 2013 01:48
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Milky Moor posted:Out of curiosity, did they buy teh series before or after the ending debacle? I think people who went into it, knowing that it wasn't a good ending, would be fine with more games. I think it's the long-term fans - like the half dozen I mentioned - who aren't interested. Before. Leading up to ME3 I'd convinced four or five of my friends to give it a shot, and they loved it. One of them usually played Madden and the like prior to it -- I think this was his first big RPG. I finished the game first, and spent the next week getting my friends' reactions. One of them texted me at two in the morning to ask what the hell had happened -- he seriously thought he'd done something wrong to get the ending he got. I was in the room when my Madden friend finished it. He said he thought it was OK, and then he started thinking about it, and then an hour later had completely turned on it and joined one of the "change the ending" groups on Facebook. None of them downloaded the Extended Cut. Again, small sample size caveat. EDIT: Also, this http://stickskills.com/2013/11/08/new-mass-effect-announcement-vga-2013/ But they're saying early 2014 which seems impossible. Pattonesque fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Nov 9, 2013 |
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Nov 9, 2013 02:21
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Loving Life Partner posted:Doing a full replay of the series for the first time, this time as paragon femshep (first play was renegade dudeshep). ME2 is my favorite of the series. Everything after Freedom's Progress just hauls on like a freight train, and the Suicide Mission (particularly the first time around) is probably the best ending to any game I've ever played. It made what happened with ME3's ending all the more perplexing. The class thing comes up exactly twice during the entire series -- once if you're an engineer during Omega, and once during Citadel. It doesn't detract from things exactly, but it is a strange thing not to take into account. Shoot, Dragon Age II even does it.
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Nov 11, 2013 03:26
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Here's a report from a guy who supposedly attended a Mass Effect 4 presentation, with news on new races and when it'll be set: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Next-Mass-Effect-Acts-as-Sequel-to-Main-Trilogy-New-Races-Get-Details-Report-403068.shtml
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Nov 25, 2013 17:43
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2house2fly posted:"Please Grandpa, just one more story." "And then the Shepard banged the emotionally-damaged convict in the basement of his magic ship, for he had been long in space without some strange."
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Nov 25, 2013 19:07
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hampig posted:Fair enough, that would be lovely. Shame they couldn't get it together for release because the 'big picture' mythology behind the reapers is alright as it stands right now. I'm personally more disappointed by what the protheans turned out to be than the reapers, although I guess that's the whole point! Pre-release, they also straight-up lied about the actual content of the endings. Hudson hyped some features literally a week before the game came out that were completely absent from the base game. EDIT: There's also the issue of the lack of reactivity in the final mission. I'll give you an example: were you a bit weirded out that at no point in Priority: Earth was there, say (if you saved them), a bunch of geth primes dropping in to assist you, or thousands of rachni swarming over banshees? Pattonesque fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Nov 29, 2013 |
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Nov 29, 2013 16:23
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Fojar38 posted:Isn't the impact from that supposed to be visible in multiplayer? What do you mean? Multiplayer's supposed to represent special forces battles around the galaxy, but it's not reflective of decisions you've made in any of the games. You can play as a geth even if you murdered the hell out of them in the campaign. I'm talking about something similar to Dragon Age: Origins' final mission, where you can call in different reinforcements that you've acquired over the course of the game.
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Nov 29, 2013 17:33
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2house2fly posted:Well... yeah? Pre-release hype is the absolute last place to look for factual information about the game. They don't want to he honest about their budget and time limitations, they want you to buy a copy of the game. They can say what they want about the ending especially, because most players will never see it. Pre-release hype is usually something less than the company straight-up lying to you.
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Nov 30, 2013 17:44
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Lightning Knight posted:But I dunno, I didn't play ME3 until more than a year after launch and the ending didn't disappoint me that much. I mean, I acknowledge that it's bad and such, but it didn't offend me or make me mad like I expected it to. It was bad, but it was ok enough to suffice. I don't know how else to explain it. Hey man that's cool. I'd probably hate it less if I hadn't completed it a few days post-release.
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Nov 30, 2013 18:43
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2house2fly posted:Hah, tell that to Peter Molyneux. Haha, fair enough. At least Molyneux makes his ridiculous broken promises early on -- ME3's devs insisted right up through the release that they had implemented big differences in each ending.
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Nov 30, 2013 20:46
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BexGu posted:And the Synthesis ending was just soooooooooooo lazzzyyyyyyyyy done. I kind of get the glowing green to represents bio-circuits (which should have looked like the main robot character on Almost Human blue glowing) but they just slapped it on the models and called it a day. The joke at the time was that Jokers hat had the green circuity flowing through it along with Joker, did it suddenly become self aware as well? The Extended Cut makes it worse. Are husks sentient now? What about Praetorians -- are they thirty sentient minds? Is the human gun-arm on a cannibal sentient? On top of that, Synthesis is the Reapers letting you live because you changed everyone's clothes like a galaxy-wide Sandy-at-the-end-of-Grease-makeover, and everyone is apparently fine with the evil starships who attempted galactic genocide like, sticking around to help rebuild and poo poo.
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Dec 1, 2013 02:15
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Lightning Knight posted:Pretty much. If Destroy hadn't had the caveat that it kills the Geth and to a lesser extent EDI I wouldn't have given the other two options a second thought. None of the Destroy ending slides actually shows the geth and EDI dying (aside from her name on the wall in the final scene with the crew) so you can easily just pretend this dumb thing never happened!
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Dec 2, 2013 00:43
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GenericOverusedName posted:Shotguns would be a better example of what Dan Didio is talking about, I think! Scimitar Sentinel is great fun in ME2. Never take cover, never stop firing your automatic shotgun, save galaxy.
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Dec 2, 2013 14:52
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I remember when people were super-excited to see how they planned on topping the Suicide Mission. Because with so many variables, they'd be able to create a lengthy and unique final missiohahahahahaha
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Dec 10, 2013 19:54
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Lightning Knight posted:This is all well and good to laugh at but I find it to be very Do you remember in Priority: Earth, when you saw that little glimpse of the armies you gathered listening to Hackett's speech, and you were all excited to see how'd they'd be used in the actual battle, and you kept waiting and waiting for a geth juggernaut to drop in or for a group of STG to save you, and then you realized that said glimpse was all you were gonna get?
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Dec 10, 2013 21:28
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Doctor Reynolds posted:Yeah I kept expecting during that "defend the missiles" bit that, like, a Geth Juggernaught was going to land on top of a Cannibal and start blastin' Banshees with me and poo poo. Or seeing a swarm of Rachni wash over a group of banshees. Instead, they go "we'll help you move some panels on the Crucible, I guess, whatever" and then merrily disappear from the narrative. Really this ended up being the main issue with the ending for me. Don't imply that all these things are going to matter and then act surprised when people got snitty when they didn't, you guys 
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Dec 10, 2013 23:41
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TheSpiritFox posted:I think I remember reading somewhere that like less than 10% of the galaxy was even explored, just the areas immediately around the relays. I could swear it was in a codex entry somewhere or some flavor text or something, maybe some random small side conversation. One of the cooler ideas I heard come from that is the idea that there could be a totally separate relay network that simply never intersects with the one all the council species use -- you'd have two huge civilizations in the same galaxy that were totally unaware of the other's presence, just because their respective set of relays were too far away to reasonably reach by FTL.
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Dec 12, 2013 23:31
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Kibayasu posted:I think that line come up for nearly every possible couple. James got shut down fast when I was going through ME3 anyways. Lola? Uh, no, Commander. They make you flirt with James a lot in ME3, which is kind of strange. Vega is p. cool but why is Shepard dropping all these innuendos all of a sudden
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Dec 14, 2013 22:21
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MisterBibs posted:I looked at the Extended Cut DLC page on the fan wiki, and it says that it "The required Effective Military Strength rating to achieve all possible endings is lowered from 4,000 to 3,100." Yup. Hilariously, they eventually figured out that you did have to play multiplayer in order to get the "best" ending, and their previous statement saying that you didn't was because they got the math wrong.
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Dec 23, 2013 20:54
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Lycus posted:I really don't know why someone would go to that much trouble, though. Shepard taking a breath is just not that special or interesting to see. Did you not enjoy the speculation? Perhaps you are playing the game wrong!
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Dec 23, 2013 22:38
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DrNutt posted:They didn't get the math wrong, they considered Synthesis the 'best' ending. Shepard breathing was just an Easter egg. BioWare is usually p. good about knowing what their audience wants (for better or for worse), but I will never understand why they thought everyone would have wanted some horseshit Philosophy 101 version of the Singularity over "destroy the Reapers, high-five Garrus, go home".
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Dec 24, 2013 04:48
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Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:ill be real with you guys You should play it because it's like a masterclass in What Not To Do. Classes should be taught on it.
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Dec 25, 2013 17:04
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CaptainCarrot posted:Nerts to all of you. Standard BioWare initial companion protocol is to give you a warrior and a wizard at some point midway through the first chapter. Miranda's the wizard, Jacob's the warrior (with a bit of wizard thrown in).
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Dec 26, 2013 18:40
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n4 posted:Wait a second, what was the original ending that the internet apparently guessed correctly? Broadly, it had to do with the Reapers preventing the galaxy from being consumed by out-of-control dark energy. I don't think the specifics were ever nailed down.
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Dec 27, 2013 19:54
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Man, the thing that bugs me the most about Synthesis is that the Reapers are just still around, hanging out. Just because everyone is suddenly part of a weird synthorganic utopia doesn't mean that they should be OK with the Reapers murdering like several billion people. At least you're literally controlling them in Control -- Synthesis is like galactic permission to sit at the cool kids' table, only all the cool kids are genocidaires.
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Dec 29, 2013 05:05
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Jerusalem posted:They should of gotten this guy to explain why Synthesis was the best option: No, no, you see, Synthesis is beautiful, so beautiful, almost like a poem really, certainly one of the most meaningful choices in gaming and really the only way this series could have ended.
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Dec 30, 2013 04:26
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Lt. Danger posted:I think Mass Effect, Jade Empire and Dragon Age were part of a drive to build up their own portfolio of stuff so they weren't beholden to external interests for all their business. Star Wars is pretty straightforward, but apparently between Hasbro and Atari the D&D license was always a bit of a minefield... I'm honestly interested to see how the actual setting does in terms of awful EU stuff. Pre-ME3, you had people writing unironically that Mass Effect was the most important sci-fi series of this generation, but the ending (fairly or unfairly) seemed to slow that momentum.
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Dec 31, 2013 00:44
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Milky Moor posted:Seriously, when you release a novel that has these sorts of errors, it's going to piss off the primary readership for these novels (the fans who know every little bit of canon like the back of their hand). It says 'blatant cash grab'. "While this list may seem nit-picky considering some of the errors, there are a handful worth mentioning that have very legitimate reasons for being upset over. This includes a character ‘growing up’ from being autistic, turning Mass Effect’s only gay male character straight and then killing him, and being literally impossible to reconcile with the timeline made by the games, comics and other books." Welp. EDIT: Man, stuff like Battletech seems to have a million short stories, but I've never really seen any for Mass Effect
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Dec 31, 2013 01:11
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Cheston posted:Fun fact, the person who wrote that "Why Mass Effect is the most important sci-fi of our generation" article literally took it back afterwards. Can't find it right now, though. http://doycetesterman.com/index.php/2012/03/mass-effect-tolkein-and-your-bullshit-artistic-process/ That guy?
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Dec 31, 2013 01:16
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Veotax posted:Speaking of EU bullshit, anyone remember that lovely iPhone game that introduced Jacob and Miranda? Bioware/EA pitched it by saying "Complete this game and tie it to your EA account and you'll get an awesome reward in Mass Effect 2"! Galaxy. It was like maybe a half-hour of gametime with a morality system that did nothing. Then they had a twitchy iPhone cover shooter called Infiltrator with a morality system that did nothing. Most of their stuff outside the core trilogy has been low-effort and deeply weird.
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Dec 31, 2013 02:28
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Geostomp posted:I was a little disappointed about that. Not because the game was at all good or worth the space on your iPhone, but because that main character could have fleshed out Cerberus as more than just plain mindless bad guys and, more importantly, could have been the much-needed Sentinel squadmate. Instead, he was a gruff mercenary who fought a 20-foot-tall krogan clone thing
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Dec 31, 2013 03:16
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Geostomp posted:I was a little disappointed about that. Not because the game was at all good or worth the space on your iPhone, but because that main character could have fleshed out Cerberus as more than just plain mindless bad guys and, more importantly, could have been the much-needed Sentinel squadmate. I played it off and on when I had a free five minutes or so and eventually beat it. It sucked. They released another campaign, with a turian. I didn't play that bit. Pattonesque fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Dec 31, 2013 |
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Dec 31, 2013 05:05
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Milky Moor posted:Similar to Iseeyouseemeseeyou, In the lead up to ME3, I thought you'd get the chance to talk to a few more Reapers. Like, sure, Harbinger is obviously big on the idea of keeping the cycle going, but it'd be fascinating if there were some Reapers who - upon seeing their brethren getting blown up and this Cycle being a bloody slog - might've said 'Hey, you know what, Shepard? We don't want to die and have all our culture and knowledge go extinct, so, you don't mind if we gently caress off back to dark space, right? Or we'll help you fight Harbinger and then we can go?' I thought we'd face one named Reaper for each "Hub" -- so, one for the Tuchanka segment, one for Rannoch, etc. Nope, only Sovereign and Harbinger get names. Oh well.
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Jan 1, 2014 00:26
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It's unrealistic to expect them to have planned out an ending years in advance, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect them to have one in mind midway through the development of the third game in the trilogy.
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Jan 2, 2014 02:55
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DrNutt posted:Drew Karpyshyn isn't a great scribe or anything, but I kind of want to see what ME2 and 3 look like in the universe where he stayed on the Mass Effect series. Hopefully it's also the universe where Mac Walters is a fedora salesman. Nah, you can let Mac write individual characters. He's not bad at that if it's his focus. Maybe go back in time and promote Patrick Weekes or Jon Dombrow to head writer instead of Mac.
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Jan 2, 2014 05:32
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Lycus posted:Instead of that, it probably would've been better to not make the entirety of the Batarian race so unsympathetic. That one guy you gank in the back in Archangel's recruitment seemed p. decent.
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Jan 3, 2014 01:25
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MisterBibs posted:My roommate has been watching me play the series, and has decided that while she's not really a gamer, she wants to play the series. That's how my roommate got into it. He plays lots of FIFA and occasionally Assassin's Creed, but something about debating space racism with Ashley caught his attention.
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Jan 3, 2014 21:45
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Lycus posted:I had a slightly hard time believing that humans founded one of the most successful mercenary organizations in the galaxy when they were brand new on the galactic scene, so Zaeed being batarian would've probably worked better for me. I don't know if his voice would've been as cool, though. That'd be like the first thing we'd found. What else are we good at?
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Jan 4, 2014 16:30
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