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Lt. Danger, I just wanted to mention that I'm finding this LP very interesting so far. I'm not sure I agree with you 100% of the time but this is a (to me) fresh perspective on the game and one that is greatly appreciated. On "Cerberus is more fun to fight than the Reapers": - If the Reapers weren't so much of a pain to fight between husk rushs and tough-to-kill long range artillery and other tough enemies, then the gameplay would be incongruous with what we are directly told, that Reaperized forces have been wiping things out for however-many-cycles. - All of this is also necessary for the player to understand that conventional forces aren't enough, and that while defeating Cerberus seems all but certain, the defeat of the Reapers is much less so. - Reaper forces tend to be much more efficient at getting you out of cover. Cerberus may be able to lock something down with a turret, but the roughly equivalent Ravagers are marching towards you and trying to flank you. This takes the concept of "cover", a safe place where you can pick at enemies for a few minutes, and turns it on its side - cover is temporary, cover is illusory, and what happens is the feelings of safety that you get with cover in (say) ME2 or most cover shooters is replaced with unease, that even if you ran to the back of the battlefield and tried to hide in the best cover possible it would only be a matter of time. There's no cover, anywhere, not on this battlefield or any other. Cover is, like the Relays and the Citadel, a trap. This may counteract your point about ME3 not being about the Reapers per se, but I nevertheless think it is good gameplay-and-story integration. monster on a stick fucked around with this message at 08:33 on Aug 23, 2014 |
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Aug 23, 2014 08:31
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Covok posted:I'm fairly certain that only Wrex notices the sabotage. I believe Wreav remains in the dark about it for the rest of the game. So, the krogans never pull their support if you screw Wreav over. Garrus notices it too.
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Aug 26, 2014 08:56
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Sombrerotron posted:The dilemma, then, is deciding between two kinds of moral choices: that of loyalty and justice in the here and now, or that of safety for future generations. It's about high ideals versus minimising risks. Faith versus logic. And it is present even when Wrex and Eve live - perhaps especially so, because they make it so tempting to believe that this dilemma doesn't exist anymore. After all, deciding to sabotage the cure seems to be considerably easier for players when only Wreav is left standing. If the player considers that Wrex and Eve may well be succeeded by another Wreav, betraying them and sabotaging the cure may not seem like such a bad decision anymore. The dilemma is there either way, but Wrex and Eve serve as a foil for what is arguably the more sensible choice. Mordin as well. I wouldn't even say it's about faith versus logic; when all three are dead, then it's purely about the morality of the genophage. (Perhaps some players betray for the extra "war assets" but the game all but tells you that the Salarian military isn't made up for a straight-up fight.) Only Wreav alive makes the decision to cure the genophage closer to the ME1 decision on what to do with the Rachni queen. As someone else mentioned earlier, the game does punish you for sabotaging the genophage with Wrex in charge and Mordin alive - you have to actively shoot Mordin with a QTE, later you have a confrontation with Wrex where either you kill him or let someone else do it, and you lose a significant number of war assets. Wrex even taunts you by telling you what you should have done to successfully sabotage the genophage and not have the Krogan find out.
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Aug 26, 2014 21:33
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I thought we weren't doing ending chat.CPFortest posted:I'm curious because while I ended up liking it as an alternate capstone to Mordin's story, convincing him to prioritize the galaxy's stability over his personal redemption ala his ME2 philosophy, but I also feel that the concept ultimately was as a larger cop out than the traditional Tuchanka ending. There's something worth mentioning but I'm not sure if this is violating no-ending-chat since it's an alternate bit that we definitely won't see - Lt.? EDIT: As a side note, this LP inspired me to replay ME1 on NG+, as a Vanguard with Singularity as a bonus power. I'm rolling with Kaidan/Wrex who make a nice team. The most annoying things are vendor scrap (easy enough to deal with since there is rarely anything worth keeping) and the random nature of good items (I needed to complete Bring Down The Sky to get a decent omnitool for Kaidan.) Overall the game has held up pretty well. monster on a stick fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Sep 2, 2014 |
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Sep 2, 2014 18:41
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Aces High posted: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? The answer to that question is partially "when did you start hating him"? I didn't think his character was that obnoxious during Cerberus Coup. I think his next appearance is when the hatred really started for reasons we'll get into then.
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Sep 2, 2014 20:31
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FullLeatherJacket posted:I said earlier that the "daddy issues" theme of ME2 was likely unintentional and a consequence of needing to write backstories for these characters that would allow them a way to create an emotionally meaningful challenge for Shepard to overcome (contrast this to Garrus' uniquely boring mission where you say boring things to a man and then he gets shot), and I stand by this. It's very easy to ascribe purpose to something after the fact (see: Jesus' crucifixion), but I don't get the sense from ME2 that it was a game made where they had a clear idea of what they wanted to do in ME3. I'd argue Garrus' arc in ME2 did have daddy issues of a sort - in ME1, when you talk with him, he mentions that his father was pro-C-Sec/anti-Spectre, and wanted things to be very much done in the line with the law which Garrus disagrees with. He instead becomes a vigilante in ME2, taking the law into his own hands and rebelling against his father. Dealing with the member of his squad who got everyone else killed was in essence Garrus dealing with a child who turned against his parent (if you think of Garrus as not just being leader of his squad, but a father to his men of sorts.) TheCosmicMuffet posted:But anyway, then at the end you have a confrontation in your spaceship basement with a giant floating eye. So I took Brock Samson and Legion with me, because that's just what makes sense to do, and while I'm down there, my reactor core pours salt on Tali and she shrivels up. Not because I didn't shield it well--I had that quest/dialog thing figured out. It's because the game thinks I like legion better than her. If you reconciled the Tali/Legion fight using the power of Paragon/Renegade points, and upgraded the shielding, Tali should survive regardless of who you liked most. She should at least have survived the approach to the Collector base.
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Sep 2, 2014 23:49
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Pattonesque posted:Not just that -- in ME3, the ambient sounds for the Normandy war room are a very, very subtle version of Vigil's theme, which is basically the unofficial "theme" of the series There's tons of stuff like that - for instance, part of the ME2 track "Samara" is used during the Suicide Mission's biotic bubble sequence.
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Sep 17, 2014 18:29
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Willie Tomg posted:ME isn't "not-fascist" because of anything its digetic Is digetic even a word?
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Sep 27, 2014 17:23
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Willie Tomg posted:As long as it pertains to elements which compose a diegesis, then yes. Then you mean diegetic, in which case: 1. How are the political and social structures in ME1 "diegetic"; and 2. If you are going to pull words out of a hat to make your argument seem more academic, at least spell them right.
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Sep 27, 2014 17:46
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Willie Tomg posted:I'm sorry but for a second it sounded like you asked, like, for serious, why elements as presented in the game are elements that are present in the game, and then got lovely over me dropping an E. Is this a fair assessment of your post? Is there a punchline coming up I should be aware of? Per the wikipedia definition of diegesis, it also consists of the characters in the story telling/narrating versus showing/enacting; I always thought ME did more of the latter except when it came to something like a codex entry or basic universe background stuff like "oh yeah there was a genophage a while back."
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Sep 27, 2014 17:53
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Soricidus posted:I was disappointed that they didn't do more with darkness in this game. They introduce the whole mechanic, and then there's that short bit on Mars, and this section, and ... are there even any others? I feel like there are but gently caress if I can remember them. The underground ruins on Tuchanka as previously mentioned. I'm speculating that playtesters may have thought the darkness was a cool concept in small batches. I've watched Geop's Dark Souls LP, which has large areas of darkness - at first it was "whoa this is cool" and it didn't take all that long to get old, even as an observer. Xander77 posted:Can we agree that that the game is militaristic to the point of fetishizing military service? Can we also agree that a counterpoint to that worship of big manly men of action is a disdain for short-sighted politicians and their petty concerns about stuff like "what people want/need"? The funny part is that mostly Shepard fights to get people to stop fighting (each other.)
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Sep 27, 2014 18:37
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The reason the liveships are there is to force the choice at Rannoch: if you choose the Geth, the Quarians are wiped out. Also so the pacifist Quarian admiral plays a stronger role (otherwise he'd be somewhere else and nobody would really care what he'd say during the choice bit.) Otherwise there'd have to be some choice where you'd get to save the Geth and most Quarians (except the militants who decided to start a war during a Reaper invasion) which I dare say most people would take if they didn't have the golden choice of saving both, and even then they may tell Xen/Han'Gerrel to enjoy being spaced. Of course the Geth were equally stupid in trying to build a Dyson sphere around Rannoch which they knew would provoke the Quarians, instead of some other star system, not to mention asking the drat Reapers for help.
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Nov 5, 2014 21:37
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Neruz posted:294 years to build a dyson sphere is nothing. Given that it was finished during that time it must have been pretty goddamn small. It wasn't finished, and where in the game did they say they had been working on it for 294 years? Also geth are software, you don't have to move hardware, just build new servers and FTP them over.
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Nov 5, 2014 22:40
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Geostomp posted:Since when have any government officials in this series who aren't promoted military types been shown as people with more than one dimension? The series, like many similar ones with military focus, has a hard time giving proper value to people who aren't either fighting or supporting those who do fight. Anybody else comes off as either a helpless victim, naive fool, or impediment. The admirals happened to end up on "impediment" so we could be forced to "finish" the quarian/geth conflict (with quarians coming off as worse because the writers weren't sure that we'd support the geth without more hamfisted nonsense). It's lazy writing with unfortunate semi-fascist overtones, but that's the genre convention. It's not fascist at all. The leadership may not really listen to Shepard all that much about the impending invasion, but that goes whether they are civilian or military. The Turian Hierarchy is basically a military-run government and they only listened to Garrus because he had connections and even then gave him a token task force. The Quarians are similarly run by admirals who (except for Zaal'Koris and maybe Tali) are all about attacking the Geth. Wreav is much more hardcore than Wrex and he is portrayed as a clown who will get his species into even more trouble. Even the Earth military higher-ups are all "what do we do  " at the beginning of ME3. And of course, there's Cerberus which is paramilitary, not to mention all the mercenary Blackwater-types in ME2.It's actually the more diplomatic types that are portrayed well, especially in ME3 - Wrex/Baraka who want to not repeat the mistakes of the past by going  on the galaxy, Mordin for abandoning his governments anti-Krogan position, Tali and Legion working together to bring the Geth and Quarians together, etc.It's really more anti-establishment.
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Nov 6, 2014 04:21
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