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Pro-click. Mind if I add it to the Earth update? quote:I do this thing with movies and the better TV episodes/series where I watch them all twice, once to get the plot beats and enjoy it viscerally along with the normal hu-mans, and then wait a while for my initial impressions and hype/disappointment to clear up, and then watch it a second time deconstructing the gently caress out of its formal parts to create My Actual Opinion. That's sorta what I'm doing here. There is no way I'm playing this game a second time since the Citadel DLC was funny but not that funny, yet you seem like a smart dude who earnestly likes this game and your posts elsewhere are pretty legit so I'm trying to leave myself open to maybe having overlooked some stuff the first time through. Later I'm going to do an update where I tell everyone how they should like things and deliberately come across as a bit of an arse. In reality I can't do that, but hopefully I can explain what ME3 is trying to do and how it's supposed to work as a piece. I may have exaggerated when I said I was going to re-sell everyone on ME3.
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Aug 1, 2014 21:33
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It would helped the feeling of scale if they had an extra year or so to add in some vehicle missions with an improved Hammerhead. It was just mean-spirited to have that thing destroyed off-screen instead of adding anything when we're finally in a situation where it'd do its job best.
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Aug 1, 2014 21:41
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Lt. Danger posted:Pro-click. Mind if I add it to the Earth update? Isn't even mine, do what you feel bro. Property is theft. quote:Later I'm going to do an update where I tell everyone how they should like things and deliberately come across as a bit of an arse. In reality I can't do that, but hopefully I can explain what ME3 is trying to do and how it's supposed to work as a piece. More people who are anxious about that sort of thing should be more eager to do exactly that sort of thing, because IME the kind of person aware enough to feel contrition about stating their opinions too hard have the most well-considered ones. See also: literally every MrBTongue video, because he only got better and better after dissecting the crap out of the ME3 ending. Seriously click any or all of these, they're fantastic and y'all gonna learn some stuff, that's a promise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6TmTv6deTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrjHaDwev5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT3PElHuxCY
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Aug 1, 2014 21:42
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I wouldn't lose hope yet; you managed to do an amazing job on reselling everyone on NWN2 and that's probably a worse game. Of course, ME3's DLCs doesn't seem to make it all right the way MotB did but still - this LP got me playing ME2 after hating the hell out of the first game just so I can follow the plot better. I imagine I'm not the only one eagerly awaiting some reinterpretation of what seems to be the most generic SF plot possible.
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Aug 1, 2014 21:43
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Willie Tomg posted:
Bingo. The points where I felt I was actually having fun and not just trying to finish the game were either direct callbacks to the previous games OR included the type of gameplay/story integration that was more prevalent in the previous titles. There's one planet in particular (and for the life of me I can't remember which one, I think it's Thessia but may be the Cerberus base assault) which consists mainly of the "high-time, gung-ho adventure with pithy quotes from party members" prevalent in ME2 rather than doom and gloom all the time. The tonal shift was jarring but extremely welcome. Then you get to the end and space ninja goes "neener neener neener" and wins in a cutscene. Which is my largest gripe with the game. e: Now that I think about it a bit more, that planet made it seem like the player was actually granted agency to affect the immediate crisis, rather than going down a corridor and waiting for a cutscene to tell you what happened. A little illusion is better than none I think...certainly made all the difference there, at least for me. A Curvy Goonette fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Aug 1, 2014 |
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Aug 1, 2014 21:58
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I really enjoyed one of the Reaper fights as it gave me the only moment of the game where I felt the need to go invisible and run away like a giant baby yelling "gently caress gently caress gently caress" while everything exploded around me.
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Aug 1, 2014 22:25
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A Curvy Goonette posted:e: Now that I think about it a bit more, that planet made it seem like the player was actually granted agency to affect the immediate crisis, rather than going down a corridor and waiting for a cutscene to tell you what happened. A little illusion is better than none I think...certainly made all the difference there, at least for me. I don't mean this as a counterpoint to anything you said, but: When, in formal aesthetic terms, your first level is a six-foot wide hallway whose walls are painted the color of a futuristic city being destroyed by colossal cyborg cuttlefish with death lasers, you may recuse yourself from qualifiers like "a little" illusion. gently caress it. Give me all the illusion and then some. If only there were a character digetic to the series whose entire ~thing~ is appearing as and embodying illusion just to highlight and then obliterate--Reaperlike--any existing subtext regarding the discrepancy between form and content. I don't think he I mean that exists though.
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Aug 1, 2014 22:44
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I think part of the problem with the scale of the ME games is the graphic level and hardware limitations; they're going for a fairly graphically intensive game with high detail mocapped actors that have complex facial animations (that all look like various flavours of dull surprise) and I don't think that they could have done massive 100+ dude fights and still been able to make the game run smoothly on consoles. I suspect it stems from a conflict between some of the devs who wanted to do a sprawling space opera story about the Reapers and some of the devs who wanted to make the next Gears of War so the end result is that ME3 tries to be massive scale space opera but is unable to do so because the game only has the tools to be Gears of War. As a result you end up with these scenes where you are supposedly engaging massive battles that actually involve you and two friends fighting off six waves of twelve husks because that is literally the best the engine can do. All of the ME games have had some noticable gameplay and story dissonance, but ME3 is definitely the worst for it. The visuals and the actual gameplay that ME3 presents you with are often completely and totally at odds with what the characters are saying; Palavan is the first time this becomes really noticable because if you look at Palavan it looks like a good chunk of the planet is just on fire and from a visual standpoint Palavan seems to be significantly worse off than Earth. Awhile after ME3 came out someone made a post on the bioware forums where they'd extracted a bunch of the game's texture data and gotten the textures used for the various planets under reaper attack. He posted them in a comparison image and looking at them side by side it is ovbious that Earth is the least affected by the Reaper attack. All the other planets have massive scars and huge chunks of ovbious devestation visible from orbit, but not earth. Earth has some spots of fire here and there and a couple of major cities are visibly being destroyed, but there are no hundreds of kilometers of coastline on fire like there are on Palavan. It makes me wonder how much actual communication there was between the art team and the story team, because those textures really seemed to imply that the art team thought that Earth was the least affected by the Reaper invasion. Perhaps the initial plan was to have Earth be relatively unaffected and thus become the ovbious staging point because they were the only people with any kind of industry or organized military left intact but we will probably never know. Get used to the game telling us that Earth is The Worst Off and then showing us massive swathes of devestation on other worlds that are way worse than anything on Earth. This will keep happening for the rest of the game.
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Aug 2, 2014 12:00
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Without pictures, this doesn't really mean anything. Thessia is fine until its invasion at the end of the game. Sur'Kesh isn't shown to be invaded at all. The only relevant comparison is Palaven and Earth. Palaven is invaded and fighting a ground war. Earth has lost the ground war and is now being harvested. Both have it bad, but Earth is worse off because the majority of Reapers are at Earth e: and the population is being forcibly converted into goo. ME3 Earth : ME3 Palaven :: WW2 France :: WW2 UK Lt. Danger fucked around with this message at 13:06 on Aug 2, 2014 |
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Aug 2, 2014 12:53
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Willie Tomg posted:Are we in the "good" part of the game yet? Because so far our two introductions to the galaxy destroying menace hyped for the last two games has been I think I described it in a previous post as "a zombie-shooter set in a range of differently-coloured rubble environments", or something to that effect, and it's one of my big issues with the game. Mass Effect 1, cut-and-paste dungeons and balance issues aside, really gave the player the idea of exploring a huge, open universe where all of the plot locations you visit feel unique and interesting. Mass Effect 2 cut down the physical size of the explorable universe, but you instead had a lot of focus on new character interactions, and the locations you visit still feel significant and relevant to developing the plot. Mass Effect 3 has neither. For saying that the game was built with the intention of having you finally visit Palaven and Thessia and all these great and ancient homeworlds that are discussed in the first two games, you never get the sense that you're actually somewhere interesting or memorable, which they try to hide with an occasional 'Press B to look at the skybox' pop-up. Plus, instead of introducing new characters as in ME2, you instead get pretty much every character from the first two games coming back for no real reason in sidequests, which makes the universe feel tiny. It creates the sense where it's neither fish nor fowl, where ME3 doesn't do particularly well as a space exploration game, and it does pretty horribly at creating the impression of being part of a great and all-consuming war. So instead you're just being told repeatedly in cutscenes how bad things are and how pointless it all is before being ordered off on a glorified fetch-quest, which all again goes back to the player's sense of agency and ability to actually influence the story being told.
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Aug 2, 2014 12:57
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FullLeatherJacket posted:I think I described it in a previous post as "a zombie-shooter set in a range of differently-coloured rubble environments", or something to that effect, and it's one of my big issues with the game. Agreed! The only thing I'd say to that is my usual protest of how ME3 isn't ~really~ about either of those two things, but that's content for another update.
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Aug 2, 2014 13:05
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FullLeatherJacket posted:It creates the sense where it's neither fish nor fowl, where ME3 doesn't do particularly well as a space exploration game, and it does pretty horribly at creating the impression of being part of a great and all-consuming war. So instead you're just being told repeatedly in cutscenes how bad things are and how pointless it all is before being ordered off on a glorified fetch-quest, which all again goes back to the player's sense of agency and ability to actually influence the story being told. Pretty much, text-wise the game does an excellent job of telling you all about how bad things are but the visuals don't hold up, or hold up in the wrong way. I really do think there was a severe communications gap between the art team and the story team, or else the story changed significantly two thirds of the way in.
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Aug 2, 2014 13:08
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The LP videos so far have been very interesting to listen to. I love the analytical bent you are taking to the commentary. I've never been able to actually play any of the Mass Effect games myself, but they've always held a satellite interest for me through other LPs, especially when it comes to its characteristically flexible story. I'm left wondering if the reason Mass Effect 3 was so terribly received is, as a result, something I cannot quite yet grasp. Despite my interest in watching LPs of it, I cannot actually imagine playing a Mass Effect game in full, because the mostly-gunning combat sequences in the later two games didn't appeal to me much. That happens sometimes when I can recognize a game for having an interesting story but otherwise having unappealing gameplay. On the surface, the game looks fine, but I suppose the general feeling of dislike comes from something within actually playing the game out. A lot of other people here are saying that the major source of dissonance is that the story isn't saying the same thing that the art direction is suggesting. That is only something one can notice when they are fully oriented within the game space. I wouldn't have been able to tell that from video alone.
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Aug 2, 2014 13:12
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Neruz posted:Pretty much, text-wise the game does an excellent job of telling you all about how bad things are but the visuals don't hold up, or hold up in the wrong way. I really do think there was a severe communications gap between the art team and the story team, or else the story changed significantly two thirds of the way in. There was definitely a script rewrite at some point, which to be honest is par for the course with any decent-sized project. However it was mostly stuff to do with Udina, the Virmire Survivor, Thessia and the Catalyst that was affected.
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Aug 2, 2014 13:21
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I think there's a good reason for Palaven looking and being worse off. According to the codex, only one Sovereign-type Reaper is made each cycle (though how anyone could possibly know that is beyond me) and every other species is made into destroyer-types. Presumably, the big ones take a lot more "material" to put together. So the Reapers captured Earth, devastated its cities but left the population relatively intact so they could be harvested, which I believe takes place at a rate of several million a day. Over the course of the game, that's a pretty impressive death toll, but surely nothing compared to the devastation seen on worlds where the Reapers don't have to hold back. Now, as for what the game says, I don't recall anyone specifically saying that Earth is worse off than other planets, only that it's taking the brunt of the attack. The majority of the Reaper fleet is there, so I guess in a certain way that's true, if very easy to take the wrong way. It has to do with their strategy with the Crucible. They don't know what it will do, but they know they have absolutely no chance without it, so winning battles to temporarily save individual planets is ultimately pointless. With most of the Reapers at Earth, that's the first place to try to use it. If you have to use it more than once, an enemy as intelligent as the Reapers will start to adapt. So the presumption goes. This is my explanation for the apparent discrepancy.
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Aug 2, 2014 16:07
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Waltzing Along is confused when he says Shepard convinces Victus not to care about Palaven because Earth is somehow more important. Shepard gets Victus off Menae at the request of the turian councillor so that Victus can attend the war summit because Victus is the new primarch. That's the only reason Victus needs to go. He's nervous because he's not good at diplomacy, but he knows his duty. The reason Shepard mentions Earth is to explain that this is bigger than one world - Earth is also under attack, we need a galactic solution to this galactic problem, we need your fleets for the Crucible - and as a reminder that Shepard had the exact same decision and made the exact same choice - to abandon the fight on his homeworld to pursue a united response. It's the "I need an alliance. I need the turian fleet," that confuses people, I think, because they think Shepard is speaking as a soldier for Earth (he's not, Anderson took that choice) when he's a soldier for the Crucible, for the galaxy.
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Aug 2, 2014 16:36
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Montegoraon posted:I think there's a good reason for Palaven looking and being worse off. According to the codex, only one Sovereign-type Reaper is made each cycle (though how anyone could possibly know that is beyond me) and every other species is made into destroyer-types. Presumably, the big ones take a lot more "material" to put together. So the Reapers captured Earth, devastated its cities but left the population relatively intact so they could be harvested, which I believe takes place at a rate of several million a day. Over the course of the game, that's a pretty impressive death toll, but surely nothing compared to the devastation seen on worlds where the Reapers don't have to hold back. iirc the way it is explained is that 'major' species like the Council members become Sovereign types while 'minor' species become the lesser destroyer types. Normally a cycle only has one species that is viable for Sovereign types (last cycle that would have been the Protheans but something went wrong and they were unable to be Reaperized) but presumably that isn't always the case. Also worth noting that because the cycle takes 50,000 years and can only generate one or two full sized reapers per cycle the actual number of Reapers around can't be much more than a few thousand. Neruz fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Aug 2, 2014 |
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Aug 2, 2014 16:53
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Neruz posted:iirc the way it is explained is that 'major' species like the Council members become Sovereign types while 'minor' species become the lesser destroyer types. Normally a cycle only has one species that is viable for Sovereign types (last cycle that would have been the Protheans but something went wrong and they were unable to be Reaperized) but presumably that isn't always the case. From the codex: * CAPITAL SHIPS are Sovereign-class Reapers two kilometers in length. They typically target the dreadnoughts, defense installations, and industrial cities of organic civilizations. Experts believe the Reapers harvest a single species of organics during each cycle of extinction to create these massive ships. Some capital ships are capable of launching small drones equivalent to fighters. As to their numbers, the Reapers have been at this for at least a billion years. Possibly a lot more. That's a minimum of 20,000 cycles, and given how multi-layered their strategy is, with isolating individual sectors by turning off the mass relays, compromising defenses through indoctrinated infiltrators, and bolstering their ground forces with the enemy's dead, I think it's safe to say that barring the occasional extremely strong species, like the Protheans, it was probably very rare for them to lose any ships at all.
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Aug 2, 2014 17:48
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Lt. Danger posted:Waltzing Along is confused when he says Shepard convinces Victus not to care about Palaven because Earth is somehow more important. Since you brought me up directly... I am not confused by it at all. You are the one who says this is a good game. I was pointing out something that was really bad. Even a renegade Shep from the first two games wouldn't be so utterly crass as to act like Earth was more important. But here, even a full Paragon Shep, comes off like the other worlds are secondary to Earth. It's not consistent writing. And as has been written before, we are shown one thing and sort of told another. I want you to convince me it is a good game. I felt it was a good game the first time I played it but one with a terrible ending. By the third time I had played it I thought it was a terrible game with a few really well done bits.
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Aug 2, 2014 18:26
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Yeah, all this fan theorizing about why taking the battle to Earth is a great strategy for everyone involved is nice and all. It'd be even nicer if there was some of it in the actual game, because that's not actually how Shepard is selling the plan to everyone.
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Aug 2, 2014 18:41
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Waltzing Along posted:Since you brought me up directly... Emphasis mine. quote:SHEPARD: General Victus? Shepard actually says nothing about going to Earth, or fighting for Earth, or abandoning Palaven. Shepard brings up Earth to tell Victus that he's not alone, that he can't fight alone. Remember that after this sequence Victus says that if the turians are going to help the rest of the galaxy, the rest of the galaxy (the krogan) have to help the turians (and fight in the ground war on Palaven). Palaven is very definitely not being abandoned or left to fend for itself. After all, Shepard is asking Victus to make the exact same decision he did at the end of Earth - leave the day-to-day ground fight for one homeworld in favour of rallying the galaxy to save all homeworlds. If you've already decided that ME3 is awful, there's not a lot I can or should do to convince you. That's your opinion, that's fine. And if I'm missing something, then show me where in the text above. I have provided you with convenient videos of Mass Effect 3 in case you ever want to make a point substantiated by the actual game. But I can't persuade closed minds. e: the reason I belabour this point is that it's really important that we see how ME3 shows the asari approach (each race should just worry about their own thing, thanks) is wrong and Shepard's approach (let's try a whole new way of doing things together) is right. reeeeally important. Lt. Danger fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Aug 2, 2014 |
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Aug 2, 2014 19:15
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In the next update, we'll be going to Earth with the turian fleet, since apparently that's what we unrealistically convinced the primarch to do.
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Aug 2, 2014 19:20
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I was referring to his conversation with Corinthian? The first guy who tells him to find Victus.
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Aug 2, 2014 19:25
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quote:CORINTHUS: Commander Shepard. Heard you were coming, but I didn't believe it. General Corinthus. Again, already the primarch's/Hierarchy's idea to leave Menae and attend the war summit - not Shepard's. quote:Shepard returns from the comms tower. quote:Corinthus explains that the new primarch is General Adrien Victus. Garrus and Liara provide background information - Victus is a bit of a maverick. There's one line there that's a bit cold-blooded ("I need someone - I don't care who..."), but it comes to me as Shepard asking Corinthus to get to the point already.
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Aug 2, 2014 19:40
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Neruz posted:I think part of the problem with the scale of the ME games is the graphic level and hardware limitations; they're going for a fairly graphically intensive game with high detail mocapped actors that have complex facial animations (that all look like various flavours of dull surprise) and I don't think that they could have done massive 100+ dude fights and still been able to make the game run smoothly on consoles. First off, throughout the series Shepard's always cast as a nigh-mythological hero (one who actually dies and then rises from the dead again, no less), being seemingly invincible and proving to be absolutely pivotal in securing astonishing victories on behalf of entire species. However, Shepard is not altogether a one-man army, and very heavily relies on infiltration to achieve success again and again - fighting small groups of enemies to gain access to very difficult-to-reach locations, where a single decisive action will suffice to solve the problem at hand. Shepard, or at least the Shepard the player has seen in the first two games, would be out of their element if dropped into the middle of a major battle like an average grunt. For the purposes of Shepard's character, it seems more appropriate to display the enormity of the war primarily in the background, and reserve the foreground for smaller fights that centre specifically on Shepard and co. Put differently: the portrayal of open warfare in ME3 that is more consistent with Shepard's character isn't the beach-landing scene from Saving Private Ryan, it's the one(s) from Edge of Tomorrow. Which is essentially what happens at the end of the game, in London, right up to the point where Shepard joins the other Alliance soldiers for a mad dash towards the transporter device - at which point it becomes sensible for Shepard's role to be (momentarily) put on a level equal to that of anyone else still standing. Secondly, I imagine that it would be highly challenging to create both a satisfying and convincing open and large-scale battle in a game like ME3. As already pointed out by Lt. Danger, ME2 and ME3's fighting arenas are carefully constructed with the games' cover and power mechanics in mind. This is also the case in ME3's MP maps, which may feature many more enemies simultaneously gunning for the player than the single player campaign ever does, but which tend to contain lots of narrow passages and blind spots (from which, conveniently enough, more enemies may spawn unseen). Even in MP, where remaining behind cover rarely if ever is an option for very long, the player is usually punished for remaining longer than is absolutely necessary in a spot where they can be shot at from any angle. Another issue is that MP, even on Bronze difficulty, is typically much more taxing than ME3's SP. Short of erecting big obstacles everywhere and turning the battleground into something of a series of open-sky corridors, and/or allowing enemies to only approach from the front, it'd probably be quite difficult to balance the combat difficulty and tactical requirements. There's also the question of pacing: how do you prevent a great big battle from becoming a sloggish exercise in patience? Will there be opportunities to save the game at regular intervals? If so, what sort of interruptions in the combat can you introduce that won't feel too artificial and detract from the intended effect of this massive fight? And then you have to consider what to do with all the other combatants. Allowing Shepard to approach friendly AI units and engage enemies they're fighting (or even allow friendly AI units to engage enemies Shepard's fighting) will feel more natural, but this will likely make it even harder to get the balance right. You could prevent those AI units and enemies from doing anything alongside/to Shepard at all, but such obliviousness on their part would be detrimental to the overall experience. Erecting artificial barriers so Shepard can only observe everone else fighting from a safe distance would avoid such problems, yet I'd think that would be missing the point of the entire exercise. The real trouble with the ME series, you might say, is that by its very nature it's highly focused on small-scale combat encounters. This works very well when Shepard's just up against manageable groups of infantry, but breaks down when there's a threat that requires the intervention of a proper army or fleet. Though it's perfectly possible to show it (by way of pre-rendered sequences, if necessary - see also the space battles at the end of ME1 and ME3), the series' setup and mechanics aren't very well-suited to directly involving Shepard beyond black-ops-type missions or having Shepard dictate how others should fight. That's not to say that ME3 couldn't have benefited from some more scenes that at least depict the actual war going on, of course.
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Aug 2, 2014 20:43
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While I generally agree with what you say I think it would have been nice to have one single major battle set piece involving more than Shepard + 2 friends vs X waves of 6 - 12 enemies, if only to hammer home just how serious the scale is. But I suspect that even had the designers wanted to do something like that the engine wouldn't allow for it anyway which I feel is a pity.
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Aug 2, 2014 20:57
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Sombrerotron posted:The real trouble with the ME series, you might say, is that by its very nature it's highly focused on small-scale combat encounters. This works very well when Shepard's just up against manageable groups of infantry, but breaks down when there's a threat that requires the intervention of a proper army or fleet. Though it's perfectly possible to show it (by way of pre-rendered sequences, if necessary - see also the space battles at the end of ME1 and ME3), the series' setup and mechanics aren't very well-suited to directly involving Shepard beyond black-ops-type missions or having Shepard dictate how others should fight. That's not to say that ME3 couldn't have benefited from some more scenes that at least depict the actual war going on, of course. This really nails it as to where some of the largest story vs. setting problems come from. It's very difficult to have a character who's essentially a top Spec Ops operative who specializes in discreet operations with small teams in a game about all-out, mass scale galactic warfare. About all you can do as a writer is to incorporate the overall conflict into the background as much as possible while keeping it separate, both thematically and visually in order to not have it overwhelm everything. I'm not saying it was necessarily the right decision with the writing and storytelling they went with, but I feel as though it was the "safest" one.
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Aug 2, 2014 21:04
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Neruz posted:While I generally agree with what you say I think it would have been nice to have one single major battle set piece involving more than Shepard + 2 friends vs X waves of 6 - 12 enemies, if only to hammer home just how serious the scale is. But I suspect that even had the designers wanted to do something like that the engine wouldn't allow for it anyway which I feel is a pity.
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Aug 2, 2014 22:10
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 Part 5: Form Further Reading KTR Artificial Voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qobhDJ_vEOc Faith: http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/11/25/mirrors-edge-producer-depressed-by-sexy-fan-verision-of-faith/ Jack and Miranda: http://www.uwbnext.com/editorials/jack-and-miranda-female-constructs-in-mass-effect Eclipse Phase: http://eclipsephase.com/ Here's a meaty topic: women. What do we think about the depiction of women in games? I call out Jack and Miranda in the video, but see the link above for a different perspective.
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Aug 3, 2014 09:40
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The problem of the depiction of women in video games is twofold; the first part is that the majority of people who work on the majority of video games are male and thus all the characters are depicted from a male view point. The second problem is that characters get divided up between 'normal' people who are male and female humans with the physiques of olympian gods and 'ideal' personalities and 'ugly' people who are usually borderline caricatures of some physical deformity; from an artistic perspective there is little value in making things that look 'normal' because normal usually means boring. Unfortunately these two problems combine together in a really nasty way; because most female characters are going to be 'normal' the artists will thus design them like olympian gods and because the artists are male that means that they are going to have exxagurated sexual characteristics because the unfortunate reality is that men do in fact tend to think with their dicks. Then when it comes time to write the personalities the male characters get a reasonable breadth of character because men are writing them, but most men have no loving clue how to write from a female perspective so female characterisation tends to be shallow. The problem of characterisation will naturally solve itself as more women enter the field; it will probably take decades still before we reach any real equality but it is slowly happening. The problem of everyone looking like olympian gods or caricatures isn't so much a problem as it is a result of games being fictional and artists wanting to art things that they like and are visually distinct for gameplay purposes (aka not boring plain old normal people). Whether you think that this problem is actually a problem that needs to be fixed or just a reality of the media (movies do the same thing) depends on your own personal viewpoint. e: Also worth noting that it turns out that female artists will tend to art women in surprisingly similar 'olympian god' physique as men will. I do not pretend to understand why this is beyond everyone having similar ideas as to what a 'perfect' human looks like. Neruz fucked around with this message at 11:15 on Aug 3, 2014 |
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Aug 3, 2014 10:52
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Lt. Danger posted:Here's a meaty topic: women. What do we think about the depiction of women in games? I call out Jack and Miranda in the video, but see the link above for a different perspective. Yeah, the whole subject pretty much invites ten pages of inane bickering, and a lot of that is that there's now this brand of "video game feminism" which begins with, "fe fi fo fum, someone somewhere is having fun". I mean, yes, you could put everyone in the game into three inches of football armour and that would be more realistic conceptually, but at some point you have to admit that you're just taking a hammer to the idea of people having nice things in their messianic James Bond space opera. That's not to say that I don't have the same issues with EDI that you do. Jack and Miranda didn't feel like major problems, because their character design fit the actual concepts for the characters. Miranda was written as this femme fatale character that's effectively the Illusive Man's primary agent. She feels very much like she's modelled on someone like Emma Peel, and she only really looks underdressed compared to Shepard and because of the amount of rear end-cam. Jack, on the other hand, wears a completely ridiculous costume in ME2, but it's somewhat necessary to show off the idea that she's got the full body tattoo. She doesn't ever really get the same, "we spent four days designing her butt, put it in all the cutscenes" treatment that Miranda does. EDI, and the whole romance plotline that follows, feels incredibly forced and bland in comparison. None of which is helped by the writing for the whole bit turning Joker into Sid James, to the extent that you feel he should be leaning out of the cockpit window yelling, "ayyy baby, let me tongue that exhaust port" at passing ships. The body she's given doesn't particularly fit the character and the game makes a weird effort of pointing at it and winking at you, as if it's public knowledge that you have a fetish for chrome space mannequins. It's weird, it's jarring, it's awkward, and it's one of about twenty things in the game that feels like it was written in a silo with no reference to anything else going on.
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Aug 3, 2014 11:52
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Honestly the biggest problem I have with EDI is that body does not make any thematic sense given EDI's personality, instead of an avatar that matches the person we get what I can only describe as a sexbot. Why is literally the smartest person on the ship a goddamn sexbot Bioware? WHY?
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Aug 3, 2014 11:55
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I thought Jack's model was pretty well designed, honestly. It leaned more towards full punk/not giving a poo poo about what you do or don't show, than any kind of artificial sexualisation.
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Aug 3, 2014 12:06
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Cryohazard posted:I thought Jack's model was pretty well designed, honestly. It leaned more towards full punk/not giving a poo poo about what you do or don't show, than any kind of artificial sexualisation. I know I would have liked her a lot more in ME2 if that were her original design instead of looking like something out of a bad trip. It's hard not to improve from the belt-bra.
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Aug 3, 2014 12:17
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Questionable art design aside, I've always considered it a bit of a pity that EDI was humanised at all. Although I'm not the sort to dismissively refer to character developments such as this as "Pinocchio syndrome", I can't help but wonder if an opportunity was lost to explore a road that's probably a little less commonly traversed in popular sci-fi. It makes sense, I believe, for EDI to strive to continue improving upon herself (itself, if you will), but given EDI's role as a life-supporting, guardian-type AI with a powerful sense of right and wrong, the arguably more logical direction for that pursuit would've been towards a kind of godhood. I feel that would've tied in well themetically, and could've provided a good source of conflict for Shepard and co. throughout ME3 - and possibly a good reason to destroy all Reaper tech, and therefore also EDI, at the end. EDIT: The pursuit of achieving godlike qualities is of course quite common in sci-fi, but I'd say that usually it's humans (or possibly other humanoid, but at least organic, beings) who attempt this; AI's goals tend to amount to either A) kill all non-AI or B) be more like non-AI. Sombrerotron fucked around with this message at 12:26 on Aug 3, 2014 |
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Aug 3, 2014 12:21
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Geostomp posted:I know I would have liked her a lot more in ME2 if that were her original design instead of looking like something out of a bad trip. It's hard not to improve from the belt-bra. Agreed. I like that she dresses very aggressively - using her nakedness as a weapon, almost - and I wouldn't want her to cover up that much, but the belts do look uncomfortable.
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Aug 3, 2014 12:27
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Sombrerotron posted:Questionable art design aside, I've always considered it a bit of a pity that EDI was humanised at all. Although I'm not the sort to dismissively refer to character developments such as this as "Pinocchio syndrome", I can't help but wonder if an opportunity was lost to explore a road that's probably a little less commonly traversed in popular sci-fi. It makes sense, I believe, for EDI to strive to continue improving upon herself (itself, if you will), but given EDI's role as a life-supporting, guardian-type AI with a powerful sense of right and wrong, the arguably more logical direction for that pursuit would've been towards a kind of godhood. I feel that would've tied in well themetically, and could've provided a good source of conflict for Shepard and co. throughout ME3 - and possibly a good reason to destroy all Reaper tech, and therefore also EDI, at the end. This is something that will come up again with Legion and the geth. One of ME2's strongest ideas was its treatment of the geth - unfortunately hidden away behind character dialogue right at the end of the game.
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Aug 3, 2014 12:31
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On a positive note, I do appreciate the fact that EDI does not seem very concerned about being more human-like for the sake of being more human-like. Instead, she appears to be primarily driven by the wish to define herself: who do I want to be as an individual? What values do I want to support, and how do I want to treat other individuals? Compare this to Data, who desires human qualities for no clearly defined reason, other than that he apparently considers himself incomplete or inferior in some way if he cannot experience emotions and such. Data is comparable to a child wanting to be an adult because being an adult is in itself meaningful; EDI, on the other hand, is quite literally a former slave, discovering what it means to be free and striving for further emancipation.
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Aug 3, 2014 12:46
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Sombrerotron posted:On a positive note, I do appreciate the fact that EDI does not seem very concerned about being more human-like for the sake of being more human-like. Instead, she appears to be primarily driven by the wish to define herself: who do I want to be as an individual? What values do I want to support, and how do I want to treat other individuals? Compare this to Data, who desires human qualities for no clearly defined reason, other than that he apparently considers himself incomplete or inferior in some way if he cannot experience the full extent of the human condition. Data is comparable to a child wanting to be an adult because being an adult is meaningful; EDI, on the other hand, is quite literally a former slave, discovering what it means to be free and striving for further emancipation. The difference between Data and EDI really highlights the difference in cognitive abilities of a VI and an AI, it also explains why everyone is so frightened of AI's because to be perfectly honest EDI is a little scary sometimes even though she is one of the most reliable characters in the story.
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Aug 3, 2014 12:48
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 15:10 |
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I think the thing that makes the bad aspects of Mass Effect 3 so jarring (in this video, that means EDI) is that the good aspects are so good. Not even including the incredibly fun gameplay with enjoyable balance between gunplay and power usage, the good story aspects Tuchanka's climax, the Geth/Quarian climax, etc are amazing. This is even present in this video with how natural and enjoyable the banter between Shepard and Garrus.
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Aug 3, 2014 12:57
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