A Humble Emperor posted:

Still very disappointed by the lack of awesome squad members. Garrus is always great but why no Wrex? Why, if I did all the genophage stuff perfectly (keep Maelon's data, Eve in good health, cure dispersed) could Wrex not join up with me and headbutt the galaxy? Same deal with Legion. Surely he could have used one of the geth primes nearby to upload the data to everyone.

Not to mention the characters who really have no decent reason not to team up with you. Samara, Jack, Miranda (she can't do research from your ship?), Jacob, Kasumi and Zaeed. Most of them have a shitload of lines in game too so it isn't like they were just trying to save money on the VA budget. I just expected that, for the finale of the game where all the poo poo finally hits the fan, you'd get to team up with all the allies and spacebros you made along the way.

Complaints aside I did like the squad interaction a lot more this time around. The conversations in the shuttle thing, squad members interacting on the ship and being able to talk to them on the Citadel were all pretty great.

Zzulu posted:

I didn't know Destroy left the citadel intact. Either way, Control also leaves the citadel intact

Thwomp posted:

He's basically Latino-Shepard. He eventually gets into the same N7 program Shepard was in. You get to be a mentor and help guide him down your same path (or not).

What I don't know is if his squad dying background is the same if you don't choose a Sole Survivor Shepard character. Probably not, I assume.

sassassin posted:

Her name didn't appear on the wall, though, so maybe she got out okay...

Valle posted:

I've done all 3 endings, and the citadel blew up in all 3. Maybe I just hadn't done well enough at some bit. But for me it blew up all the time.

Nordick posted:

Alright, I assure you I'm most certainly not of the "MUST HAVE HAPPY SAPPY RAINBOW CANDY ENDING" group of people, but goddamn this picture is just so .

Or it would be if it didn't make me sad because you know, all dead.

Party Plane Jones posted:

It does, though. It appears as 'Jacqueline Nought" if she dies in ME2, so presumably it would also do the same for ME3.

r1ngwthszzors posted:

The game just doesn't give you an alternative to the Crucible and maybe that's the real flaw for people. Everyone wants weapons with destruction capabilities orders of magnitude higher, but that's not this story. This story is about Reapers attacking and desperate times calls for desperate measures.

Nordick posted:

Zzulu posted:

ME3 is one of the best games I've ever played, minus 5 minutes. DA2 was bad from the start.

Darko posted:

Outside of the shooting mechanics, what about the gameplay is better than 1 or 2? You know, those games where every choice didn't lead to the same basic option, there were multiple towns and quests within the towns, you had varied missions and varied locales on different planets (in 2, mainly), more story segments with more branching choices, actual funny segments and much more incidental dialogue, 4X the dialogue in the news network, a lot of it funny, etc.?

ImpAtom posted:

The problem there is that it still isn't a satisfying enough answer. In order for the ending to work, you have to make the players believe two things.

A) That the Organic/Synthetic thing is inevitable. They didn't. They, in fact, implied the opposite by spending a long time on making the Geth and EDI prove they were not going to Kill All Humans.

B) That the risk of losing outweighs the price paid for using the Crucible. Bioware did a pretty poor job of that, to the point where now you have the Twitter account backing up people's feeling that the galaxy is hosed.

At this point, you could have offered people a chance to fight and go down fighting and they would have chosen it over the endings provided. Frankly, I am not entirely sure that "another 50,000 year cycle, maybe with Liara's beacon providing a hint to the next cycle how to prepare better," is actually a worse outcome than what we got.

Saying "Well, you can't win, the odds are impossible," doesn't work when that is what you spend the entire rest of the franchise doing. If you want the players to accept a bad answer you can't just tell them it is a bad answer, you have to make them believe it, and Bioware utterly fails at doing that for a large chunk of players.

Darko posted:

Outside of the shooting mechanics, what about the gameplay is better than 1 or 2? You know, those games where every choice didn't lead to the same basic option, there were multiple towns and quests within the towns, you had varied missions and varied locales on different planets (in 2, mainly), more story segments with more branching choices, actual funny segments and much more incidental dialogue, 4X the dialogue in the news network, a lot of it funny, etc.?

Charlie Mopps posted:

You really must have played a different ME1 and 2 than i have.

Darko posted:

Outside of the shooting mechanics, what about the gameplay is better than 1 or 2? You know, those games where every choice didn't lead to the same basic option, there were multiple towns and quests within the towns, you had varied missions and varied locales on different planets (in 2, mainly), more story segments with more branching choices, actual funny segments and much more incidental dialogue, 4X the dialogue in the news network, a lot of it funny, etc.?

Thwomp posted:

Personally, I felt 3 was much more focused than the other two games. That may just come from being the end story and really not having the narrative that allowed for anything other than FIGHT THE REAPERS. However, kinda wished we had more to fight than just Cerberus and the Reapers. It got a little old after a while which is one of my legitimate complaints about 3 outside the ending.

ME2 did feel a little lost at times. Maybe that's the whole middle chapter thing going on since your major plotlines aren't going to be resolved until the following game. The ending, though, was as tight as any I'd ever experienced. You could tell a lot of thought and effort went into making ME2 go out on a high note.

ME1, after playing ME2 and ME3, can feel kinda boring at times. You have to manage an inventory. It's much more of an RPG (which some people like, I didn't mind the change to more action in ME2). It's more world building and setting up the story so it takes its time. I played it three times so it's not a bad game. It's great but I felt ME2 and then ME3 took it even higher.

r1ngwthszzors posted:

As for why you need to go through all the trouble with the Crucible just to talk to the AI child and convince him he's an idiot, I have absolutely no clue. Someone must've been watching too much Stargate.

Party Plane Jones posted:

It does, though. It appears as 'Jacqueline Nought" if she dies in ME2, so presumably it would also do the same for ME3.

Darko posted:

I agree that ME1 is flawed in (shooting) gameplay (understandable, due to it being a first). ME3 has better shooting mechanics than both and feels more "epic." However, it has less branches and customization in dialogue, and thus game progression by half, than even KOTOR2. It's so ridiculously truncated that it doesn't feel like the same game series as the first two almost; it's like a normal RPG where your dialogue choices don't really do anything and there's very little real sidequesting.

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

You know, I've come to a conclusion about people defending the ending. I don't think it's as simple as many "journalists" are being bribed or threatened to praise it. I think that they are just plain stupid. Why else would they go on and on about the ending unless they actually thought it was good?

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

You know, I've come to a conclusion about people defending the ending. I don't think it's as simple as many "journalists" are being bribed or threatened to praise it. I think that they are just plain stupid. Why else would they go on and on about the ending unless they actually thought it was good?

Jarmel posted:

Honest to god I can't understand how anyone woul like this ending barring trolls and sadists. It's poo poo writing and poorly executed emotional drama. I can understand why people like the ending of LOST and Sopranos as both of those were well executed and the producers knew what they were doing. This is a bunch of amateurs trying to emulate what their betters have already done.

Nelson Mandingo posted:

I'd say the amateurs did a really outstanding job in ME2. Mac Walters is the one who wrote the ending and happens to be in the lead writing chair, so if there is anyone to blame it's him and yes-men.

Jarmel posted:

Honest to god I can't understand how anyone woul like this ending barring trolls and sadists. It's poo poo writing and poorly executed emotional drama. I can understand why people like the ending of LOST and Sopranos as both of those were well executed and the producers knew what they were doing. This is a bunch of amateurs trying to emulate what their betters have already done.

Thwomp posted:

As a closing chapter, ME3 shouldn't be opening too many new plot threads. We got Crucible construction and Cerberus' plan to beat the Reapers. Everything else is conclusions to threads going back to ME1 and ME2. ME3 is where your branching choices start coming back together. It's not a bad thing but I wouldn't hold it against the game as it's a structural problem all trilogies face.

Decius posted:

Why do people still cling to the Indoctrination theory? You meet the Prothean VI, which cried "Indoctrination" when Kai Leng was even looking at it. Since it happily talked with Shepard it throws all those "clues" about Indoctrination before London out of the window.

Nelson Mandingo posted:

I disagree. He wrote Garrus in ME1 and 2. He did an outstanding job of Garrus in 2.

I think it was more he just didn't understand Shepard's journey.

Decius posted:

Why do people still cling to the Indoctrination theory? You meet the Prothean VI, which cried "Indoctrination" when Kai Leng was even looking at it. Since it happily talked with Shepard it throws all those "clues" about Indoctrination before London out of the window.

Darko posted:

I agree that ME1 is flawed in (shooting) gameplay (understandable, due to it being a first). ME3 has better shooting mechanics than both and feels more "epic." However, it has less branches and customization in dialogue, and thus game progression by half, than even KOTOR2. It's so ridiculously truncated that it doesn't feel like the same game series as the first two almost; it's like a normal RPG where your dialogue choices don't really do anything and there's very little real sidequesting.

Decius posted:

Why do people still cling to the Indoctrination theory? You meet the Prothean VI, which cried "Indoctrination" when Kai Leng was even looking at it. Since it happily talked with Shepard it throws all those "clues" about Indoctrination before London out of the window.

Red Crown posted:

This was also a rather gaping plot hole. If Kai Leng was indoctrinated then the VI would have never helped TIM, who I guess was indoctrinated at some point? Frankly, I don't understand how he contributes to the story. So, he's indoctrinated throughout the game, and tries to stop you? Or is he only indoctrinated at the very end?

Darko posted:

Yeah, but it's still a video game first and foremost; and the branching gameplay is the main reason I play Bioware games. This game is too busy trying to be an epic story, and not enough focusing on variety in what was mentioned earlier, which every other Bioware game had.

You can have just as many plot threads; the plot threads I mentioned came from NPCs, planet searching, or one-off loyalty quests, and were mostly bottle quests; barely affecting the main storyline.

By not including as much as any of the other games, they saved possibly half of the dev time or more, saving half of the money, so it makes sense. And given that they hid a lot of that under being MORE EPIC or having stuff happen to previously established characters that people "care" about; by and large, a good percentage of the gaming community doesn't even notice this, which actually means they succeeded. People complain about the replay value being ruined by a 5 minute ending; what about the fact that your choices barely even do anything different at all, so you're essentially playing the same exact thing on replay?