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Lt. Danger posted:This is canon. Fail Shep is canon Shep? Man that's super depressing  However glad to see an LP being done, it'll bring another place to talk about Mass Effect instead of the Games threads  edit: wait you don't have From Ashes? Aww we're gonna miss out on one of the good characters introduced in ME3 Aces High fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Jul 21, 2014 |
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Jul 21, 2014 01:05
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I want to go into a bit of detail about something you talked about towards the end of the video, talking about the choice of Vancouver as the place where Shepard's tribunal is taking place. You talk about how it doesn't have the same emotional effect nor does it communicate that Earth is under attack the way Independence Day does or the mention of other more publicly known major cities in the Quake 2 intro. I can understand how if Shepard is in Washington DC and the White House is destroyed that the player would think "holy poo poo, they're really here on Earth, it's actually happening" but I feel that I prefer the decor and background to be a little more unknown for a few reasons. 1) I actually would've rolled my eyes if this scene were taking place in New York or Washington DC or London or Paris and there was a slight bit of time devoted to, say watching the Eiffel Tower be destroyed or Buckingham Palace because that is more emotionally manipulative. In fact I would go so far as to say that the inclusion of a scene like that is deliberately emotionally manipulative and I feel that the Mass Effect series is above that. 2) One of the main points about Mass Effect as a series is that you are a human but you are never on Earth. You always hear about things going on back there and you can visit Sol and check out little blurbs written for all the planets (also scan and probe Uranus for shits and giggles) but you never visit Earth proper in Mass Effect 1 and 2 because there are bigger problems in the galaxy. Mass Effect can be played in a way that communicates that in the years following First Contact humanity has learned that there is a whole wide galaxy to explore, new planets to colonize, new races to communicate with and try to get along with, or butt heads with. The main focus of these games has been about how Earth is not the centre of the galaxy and that humanity is new to it. To show landmarks would take away that feeling of being a small fish in a big pond. Again, I understand how maybe having this opening scene take place in a more known city may have more emotion but you should already be pretty freaked out by the mentions such as that the council lost contact with the moon. Considering we are in a setting where you can travel from one side of a solar system to another within minutes, the idea that an armada of genocidal killbots are at our doorstep should instill the fear of God in everyone regardless of what city or village you happen to be in at that exact time.
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Jul 21, 2014 02:19
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aidenyx posted:Except that is exactly what they do with the little kid and the shuttles that get shot down. That one scene is in my opinion one of the worst parts of this game, because it feels so insanely forced, like the destruction that goes on around it wasn't enough already to make the player realize that poo poo is going real bad, real fast. hey I didn't say that Bioware doesn't still make stupid decisions and I will also agree that when I first played I was like "oh God please tell me this loving kid is just a one off" and then his shuttle went and got shot down, then *spoilers* Alls I was trying to say was that I didn't even know until OP pointed it out that the opening took place in Vancouver, I thought it just took place in some Future MegaCity and I didn't think that, thematically, any more information was required for the player to know that they were on Earth, I thought that the dialogue more than handled that. But that kid, that loving kid. I probably wouldn't mind it as much if the kid didn't look gently caress ugly, and not in an endearing way that all of the characters and models in this series always have. In a series with broken dialogue scenes and  this kid stands out like a giant mole on someone's face
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Jul 21, 2014 04:16
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another question that I suppose may get answered in the next update but are you playing the game using the "action-oriented" option? It was either that or you were very good at editing out the dialogue boxes. Heck for all I know you just did that for the prologue to show it as a more dynamic video instead of getting stopped every couple of minutes for dialogue prompts It wouldn't be much of a Bioware game (or a Mass Effect game) if we don't get to see those lovely dialogue wheels
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Jul 21, 2014 21:53
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or in the case of Virmire I think most people just chose their "lesser of two evils" from two fairly lame characters and moved on. Yes it is meant to be a "big deal" that you have to sacrifice Kaiden or Ashley but man consensus I have seen is that both of them kinda suck when compared to Wrex or Garrus (or in my case Tali but I'm not one of those Tali fans, let's keep this place clean of that poo poo)
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Jul 22, 2014 18:23
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Section Z posted:Good luck with your trip through space story time. I always found it funny that, outside of Shepard, pretty much every Human party member gets outclassed pretty quickly. I always laugh at Miranda in ME2 when she goes on about how she is perfect and makes special note that her biotics are "top notch", yeah, sure, that's why Jack can maintain the bubble and you can't 
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Jul 23, 2014 07:22
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well it's not like timeline missions haven't been used in this series before, most of the decisions for side quests in Mass Effect 2 revolved around whether or not you liked your squadmates enough to do their loyalty missions, lest you risk them dying in the final mission. Likewise if you don't immediately go to the final mission after your ship is attacked then you risk your captured crew members being killed. However I think it is unfair so say that the game neuters the threat of the Reapers since it takes them forever to really do anything on Earth but going further in this discussion constitutes massive spoilers and we're going to be covering some of it within an update or two any ways 
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Jul 24, 2014 01:40
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Waltzing Along posted:No Allers? True, you have the choice to not bring her along, but she is part of the game. As the game makes plenty of allusions to later on Liara is VERY bad at not giving herself away as the Shadow Broker. It honestly wouldn't surprise me if before this game The Illusive Man leaked her identity on the extranet but because this is a time of crisis no one is trying to dethrone her since she's still as competent as the previous Broker at the whole information gathering thing. Also I thiink if we want to show off the "good" aspects of this game we should keep Allers as far out of the picture as we can
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Jul 27, 2014 23:21
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MartianAgitator posted:Lieutenant, was it the Pillars of Eternity thread where the idea that RPGs don't need self-insert main characters came up, and that it would be just as cool and far more interesting if instead the player was the invisible hand guiding the PC group, watching there dramatic scenes play out and then making the critical decision for that scene? You, the player, didn't have an avatar but you still made all the interesting story decisions, so that all the main characters actually got some characterization and personality. Didn't Jennifer Hale say that that was how she voiced Shepard? She specifically voiced the different reactionary quotes so that they sounded more "realistic", as in if you really were a huge rear end in a top hat in real life you would actually sound like this spiteful person? To counter Mark Meer stated that his motivation WAS to sound as blank-slate as possible so that his Shepard would be viewed more as an avatar for the person playing the game? I mean, that's not exactly what you are going for but Hale was at least trying to be a little bit more personal, leading to a lot of people saying that switching between paragon and renegade choices frequently made her sound more manic-depressive. As for Traynor, you know I didn't mind her but that was mainly because much like Engineer Donnelly in ME2 I was just happy to hear a human with a non-North American accent for a change. As for personality and lines and poo poo, most of the enjoyment came from the Citadel DLC. Really I was mostly bummed out that Kelly wasn't returning
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Jul 28, 2014 08:04
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Not having Wrex around is one thing, it's the fact that Mordin isn't with us that is truly depressing even though his replacement does have some entertaining dialogue
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Aug 5, 2014 21:44
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probably around the time you have to fight a human-looking proto-reaper as a final boss? Sure the parts where you have to choose who lives or dies leading up to the final boss is tense and kinda epic in nature but that boss just sucks
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Aug 6, 2014 06:57
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I still find it funny that that is the first thing you see Saren do (besides shoot Nihlus) and it just always seemed so silly to me
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Aug 7, 2014 21:33
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Jesus at this point Lt. Danger's not gonna get to Grissom in time. This is truly the darkest timeline for ME3
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Aug 15, 2014 03:25
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emphasis on the live
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Aug 15, 2014 05:24
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Yes as much as I enjoy sitting here listening to you ramble I also felt a little chastised by your remarks, especially when talking about how people become too attached to fictional characters. What the gently caress is wrong with liking a character? Yes they aren't real but why the gently caress are you playing a video game that is built upon the premise of you making a connection with the cast?! For gently caress's sake you yourself explained that you liked Mordin in an earlier video so where do you actually stand? When I was growing up I wasn't too involved in RPGs but that started to change when I started playing D&D and other pen and paper types because I felt compelled to put effort into the process of making a character because that way everyone would have fun. I've played some campaigns with people put the least amount of effort possible and it drags down the story and the fun for everyone involved. When I started playing games like Mass Effect I felt the same way about the characters in the game as well. Kaiden and Ashley were boring as poo poo so they just stayed on the ship most of the time but I still spoke with them to find out what else there was that the writers had come up with for those two. We fast forward to ME2 and upon finding out that these characters that I had been spending time getting to know in the game, that they could die and that I, as the player, could keep them alive then yeah I felt compelled to keep them alive. Do I consider these characters my friends or anything like that? No because I understand that they are fictional characters but I do go around and say to fans of the series that "yeah, I romanced Tali because I thought it was cute" or "yeah I felt bad and ended up restarting certain missions so that no one would die in the suicide mission" because I did feel a little upset that I had the power as the player to keep certain characters alive and that I had failed. Sure there are some people in the world that get attracted to these fictional characters and again as other people have pointed out these people are kind of weird but they are not the majority either. But whatever, gently caress it, that's just my opinion too
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Aug 18, 2014 20:09
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I didn't like her because I got a distinct dev  vibe from her character. In fact considering that the first shots of her in ME2 were rear end shots I was pretty miffed and benched her as soon as I could. That and Jack's whiny BS was far more entertaining than Miranda's I am perfect at everything  and that's why my face looks like pudding
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Aug 25, 2014 08:24
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Arglebargle III posted:I just finished ME2 and I spent a solid 10 seconds laughing at this prompt. When I discovered that I pretty much fell out of my chair laughing. I mean it doesn't look any better with any other romance character and I feel that's mainly because Shepard is just so  while your LI is way into it. But you have to admit, Tali just going at you with her mask still on is pretty funny.However the next scene where the two of you are just lying on your bed looks infinitely better but the whole premise is still kinda silly
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Aug 25, 2014 19:26
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TheCosmicMuffet posted:Edit: \/\/ Ah yeah. Then Crew. If it's what I think you're talking about, they all deserve to die. And if Tali can't see how cool legion is, then she *should* fall off a cliff. What a drama queen. You do realise that Legion will die no matter what decision is chosen right? By the flip of a coin it looks like: Samara will live Miranda will live The Admiral will die Also we should romance Steve just cause
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Aug 26, 2014 00:30
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Arglebargle III posted:Man I just realized Liara sits down and plays the Mass Effect title screen music on the piano in the Citadel DLC. I knew it sounded vaguely familiar. I think that was one of the only things that I  at during this game. Well actually I did that pretty much every time that piece came up because it's such a nice, somber piece and when you hear it in this game you sit there thinking "I done good  " even though you just saw Mordin blow up
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Aug 31, 2014 19:36
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I will just say that discussions about "daddy issues" and how "I think Kai Leng is a funny character because he's a huge goon" are what got me in to this LP and why I continued on even though I was put off by your "you people are stupid for liking these characters you have spent countless hours listening to and becoming space bros with". What I am saying is give us more of these focused lectures that are about the game and less about the community because that's a rabbit hole that everyone understands will lead to a bad place for everyone involved. Regarding Kai Leng, when he first showed up my reaction was "who's this dummy? Miranda's gone and this dweeb is the best you've got TIM?" and then when he actually showed up on the Citadel I was sitting there going "we just got cutscene punked by some mall ninja, what the gently caress is this poo poo Bioware?". Needless to say I took great pleasure in finally seeing him die more because I was just tired of him running away like a little bitch and Shepard never actually doing anything to stop him because plot, or some other dumb reason. Can someone who knows more actually shed light on him, was he a writer's baby or something?
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Sep 2, 2014 20:18
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Arglebargle III posted:The war room scanner is like 1.5 seconds. not on the PS3 it isn't However that does bring up one big problem I had playing all three of these games back-to-back, the loading times got better in certain areas but overall were still terrible. In ME1 whenever you saved something you would have to wait 3 or 4 seconds while the game saved and would freeze everything, so you couldn't actually do anything. They fixed this in 2 and 3, thankfully, so now you could continue doing stuff while the game was auto-saving or you were initiating a save. However if there was ever a loading screen for anything else (any time you load a save or go to a new planet or jump systems or really ANYTHING in ME1) then you are loving parked for a good 15 or 20 seconds. The same thing happens in ME2 and 3 if you are going from floor to floor on the Normandy, or if you're loading a save again or if you're going to a new planet. I don't know if it's a console hardware problem but jeeeeeeeeesus gently caress is it annoying, way more than the elevators
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Sep 6, 2014 08:16
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Kurieg posted:They couldn't do that because of the save glitch in ME1. oh Bioware, what would we do without you
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Sep 6, 2014 23:37
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Arglebargle III posted:The Ilos music takes the cake for the most oppressively creepy though. It's got this basso beat that's somehow designed to be exactly the wrong interval. It's like a heartbeat played at 1/20 speed. It's the only video game track where I recall anticipating the next measure with something like dread. Usually music barely rates notice. I'm about to get there in my current playthrough. It's an emphasis on off-beats that is probably what is doing it (I think they actually composed it in a mixed metre like 7/8 or an equivalent so if you were counting even beats it would gently caress you up pretty quickly), because the arpeggiating is not actually very dissonant, you would probably notice it even more if they had tried for a more dissonant interval. However I do agree that the Ilos theme is one of my favourite tracks of the series, when I first got to Ilos and that music kicked in I was like "hoooooooly gently caress, poo poo is about to get real" and of course then I find out that I still had another 30 minutes of play time after that planet.
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Sep 18, 2014 04:20
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that honk was around long before Inception 
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Sep 18, 2014 06:15
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while not a "honk" I do believe that the Martian's call in War of the Worlds is described as mechanical in nature in the book, so I guess that brings us back about 125 years
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Sep 18, 2014 08:44
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You know, if I didn't find Tali so amusing I wouldn't have been as inclined to let the Quarians live either considering what you learn about the build up to the conflict, and everything you learn in ME 1 and 2. Although I am kind of curious, in ME 1 Tali tells us that the Geth don't take kindly to visitors and are very territorial, yet in ME3 if you get everyone to play together immediately a bunch of Primes show up and are like "how may we assist you, Creators?". Does that mean Tali was just being incredulous or that our good friend Legion is THAT good at changing his family's mind on organics?
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Oct 2, 2014 17:43
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you mention the Tali picture and one thing that annoyed me about that picture wasn't that Bioware decided to just put zero effort into the final product. The annoying part to me was that I was shown a bunch of different concepts for that same photo and there was one that, while it looked like it still took cues from that stock photo with the lighting but it still actually showed a Tali that looked unique and like someone actually spent time thinking about what a Quarian might potentially look like under the mask. So it is one thing for people to take for granted and feel entitled to something but let's be honest here, that photo deserves all the criticism and bile directed towards it that it does because it is a huge slap in the face to the fans and it hurts Bioware's credibility since the fans know how lovely a job that was done. I don't care much for the other arguments and points brought up in this video but I just want to say that Bioware deserves everything they get for that photo because it's a microcosm of other problems that occurred.
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Oct 12, 2014 03:00
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but that's what I mean, they could have done anything and I remember reading some notes about one concept of her that showed her as something more akin to a skeleton and the explanation was that showing Tali like this would be a testament to how much your conversations with her meant to the player. The guy said that Tali is more like a pen pal that we can actually directly engage, we don't know what is under the mask and we might not like it. Of course when you go and do what they did then nobody likes it. This was what I meant that I preferred the concepts more, because they actually thought about making Tali look like something that wouldn't be "pretty" like any of the other romance-able characters were. To me the appealing aspect for her was always her conversations, she was easily one of the more interesting squadmates to talk to in ME1, but that's not really saying a whole lot But sure, us "Tali fans" deserve all the crap we get we're not all sick fucks who think about how an imaginary character's sweat tastes
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Oct 12, 2014 08:59
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it's called a FailShep run, son, which is kinda tricky to pull off if you want to survive to ME3
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Nov 4, 2014 20:58
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well I remember in the early days of ME3 there was someone in the Games thread that had completed something like 50 different playthroughs of both ME1 and 2 and he kept talking about how much fun he honestly had going back and finding different things. I know when I first played through the trilogy I did all Paragon (with occasional Renegade interrupts in 2 and 3 because shooting assholes is fun) as default male Shep because, well that's the "right way" to play it yeah? The "right" LI is shacking up with Liara, but then I went back through to start a few other characters with different styles, like a more pragmatic, no-nonsense Shep, or a Space Racist Shep. I would definitely say that the idea of playing the trilogy 40 times in 40 different ways may not appeal to everybody but it sounds like fun to me
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Nov 4, 2014 21:10
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Even if the Migrant Fleet is the biggest fleet in the galaxy, you still have to agree with the one Admiral that you don't just send your life ships in on the first wave. Like holy poo poo I know the Quarians want their home back badly but I'm pretty drat sure most of those people living on those ships (likely children or other non-combatants) are none to pleased about being on the frontline.
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Nov 5, 2014 08:25
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