Milkfred E. Moore posted:

Honest to God, I saw someone discussing that Shamus retrospective today. I kept thinking about cheap narrative devices and how element zero is hard sci-fi for thematically-rich blue space babes and whatever. Real greatest hits moment.

neonchameleon posted:

I believe Mark Meer was given far more direction than Jennifer Hale at first - and was told to play Shep as a blank stoic badass (my description). Meanwhile Hale was more or less left on her own - the female option they didn't expect many people to use but was at least cheap advertising so why bother worrying what she does? So she was able to give her interpretation of Shep a personality and a smirk in her voice some of the time, raw intensity at other points. And as the series went on Meer was told more and more to model his performance on Hale's.

Whorelord posted:

Nah, Hale's English-accent voices are very obviously a non-English person doing an English accent to me at least. She (along with many, many others) sound like someone doing an impression of a posh English person, rather than an actual posh English person.

1stGear posted:

Bioware (and a lot of other video games writers to be fair) are completely incapable of writing a main plot that doesn't involve a Big Bad. Its one of the many reasons I'm hesitant to be hyped about a new Mass Effect game. It ought to be a story about rebuilding galactic society in the drat-near-post-apocalypse. Something more along the lines of Fallout: New Vegas where you have these different competing ideologies and belief systems fighting to create a world in their image. The races and their interactions were the most interesting parts of Mass Effect.

Instead, I just know that Bioware is going to have SPACE HITLER trying to STEAL/CREATE A POWERFUL SUPER WEAPON and only a PLUCKY HERO and their BAND OF FRIENDS can stop them.

Ulio posted:

I really do enjoy the combat in ME games and I have heard people say the core gameplay/combat of Andomeda is good. I definitely want to try it out. I got it on Steam a while back when EA started putting back their catalogue. Maybe I'll try it before the trilogy collection comes out. I had tried it on Origin's gamepass thingy a while back just to see the online it was fine but I just fell off it incredibly quickly.

nine-gear crow posted:

People have noticed that Pinnacle Station was absent from the DLC bundle list for Legendary Edition and that’s because the source code for it is corrupt.

BioWare farmed it out to Demirgue Studios back in the day, so when they asked for the code from them for the remaster, they found it was completely unreadable. And according to Mac Walters, he of the “pick your favourite colour” ending, it would take them another six months just to rebuild the DLC from scratch. Which doesn’t exactly sound right, but whatever, BioWare is lazy as poo poo and has a long track record of being lazy as poo poo.

I don’t think many people actually liked Pinnacle Station anyway, so it’s probably not a big loss. I just liked the apartment you could win for Shepard at the end of it, even if getting there was a miserable slog.

Feels Villeneuve posted:

jacob shouldn't have had a loyalty mission because his gimmick should have been that he's the only guy on your squad with his poo poo together

nine-gear crow posted:

Also Shep shattering his dumb Hiro Protagonist sword and stabbing him with an omniblade is fantastic.

"This is for Thane, you son of a bitch!"

marshmallow creep posted:

Saw that Mass Effect Andromeda was on Game Pass. Downloaded it for Xbox One. The shooting controls can't really be this poo poo, can they?

Aiming is a god drat nightmare. Getting into cover and trying to shoot out, the cover itself blocks my own shots half the time, and the feedback so you know what's going on around you is terrible. Even with aim assist turned on, it's infuriating actually trying to hit anything with the starter guns.

I remember I tried it on the PC during their demo period before it launched and I was underwhelmed, but this is my first time trying it on console and it's absolutely dreadful.

TheCenturion posted:

You know, I've played through the series multiple times, on multiple platforms, and I've never done a renegade playthrough.

I tried one, once. I got as far as lying to some Krogan tourists about fish on the Citadel, felt like a monster, and went right back to being Commander Shepard, Intergalactic Hall Monitor.

Scandalous posted:

I played the whole trilogy as a Boy Scout paragon and I loved it all and when I achieved the synthesis ending I felt vindicated because sacrificing himself to end all conflict seemed completely in character and was a fitting send off

I’m aware that this makes me The Worst

Edit: I also thought Vega was a boring lunkhead, hated the Miranda buttshots and I never pushed the guy out of the window, come at me

Ethiser posted:

I have to assume the remaster is coming out because if BioWare doesn’t actually make some sort of money EA is going to can everyone in charge.

pentyne posted:

Making the "ending" be a single series of choices was always a mistake. They got it right with Dragon Age and managed to realize how to make Inquisition 10x more accessible by building DA Keep and having the endings occur as mostly the outcome of the various choices rather then the R/G/B.

Blastedhellscape posted:

Looking back, Dragon Age: Inquisition had an absolutely terrible ending, though I don't remember there being much outrage over it. The game felt like it was just sort of meandering along, then abruptly it told you that the bad guy was about to win, threw you into a set-piece boss fight where you beat him, and then ended with a little ambiguous epilogue/sequel-hook moment.

Apparently DA:I also did that thing where the *real* ending that explained everything happened in a DLC that I never bought. Which Dragon Age 2 also did, come to think of it. I feel like Dragon Age is a much more worthless series than Mass Effect at this point.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

yeah. i might do that in the legendary edition. i like liara but the whole "she will outlive you by like 1000 years" sucks. prefer tali because i get my loving malibu stacy dream house with her.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

yeah. thats my issue with her. there is some genuinely interesting ideas and layers there. her being a self hating elf mixed possibly with her being a self hating mage i do like that she claims to be the big rebel/revolutionary but she is too caught up in her own dumb bullshit to actually do anything useful.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

oh me too. its why i hate her. she isnt the worst character ever but she is too real to be likable for me.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

what is his character anyway. he got hosed up from biotic school?

Rogue AI Goddess posted:

SirPhoebos posted:

I think I'm the only person that liked the Mako sections in ME1.

nine-gear crow posted:

I just wish that it turned out that Exaltation was something that could be done to any species, not just the Angaara. It would have really sold the threat better that the Kett were a menace to ALL life in Andromeda now, not just your new newt friends because they could just assimilate you and make you one of them and emphasizing the fact that there's a limited number of people you can call friends, a vast number of enemies out there, and they can make more of themselves infinitely faster than you can.

They kinda teased something like that with the hosed up Krogan on the Archon's ship at the mid-point of the game, but it never went anywhere, like a lot of Andromeda's better ideas.

Gorn Myson posted:

My favourite thing about sci-fi as a whole is when it gives you the same feeling you get when you stare up at stars. That moment of calm and awe has been captured a lot in media but rarely in games and for reasons I can't explain the Mako sections of ME1 nailed that perfectly for me.

I dunno, I've been up too long, I'm a pretty lovely poster and its been a decade since I last played it but no other game has given me that vibe at that level since. No Man Sky should be perfect for it, but once you've played that for a bit you can already feel what the algorithms that do its proc-gen are doing and it becomes predictable so its not the same. Its not even like the Mako sections were even fun. There was a ton of tedium and poor writing in there because it was meant to be filler.

Yet here I am thinking "I can't wait to get a quiet moment on the Moon and shoot at Earth with my lovely gun again".

DoubleNegative posted:

The sky boxes where a huge section of the view was dominated by a way-too-close star were my favorite ones. Just looking up and seeing an endless, roiling sea of blue or red plasma was cool as hell.

exquisite tea posted:

And get this, you can put a contained more interesting world beneath that skybox instead of filling it with featureless hills. It's a win-win.

Strategic Tea posted:

Here's another Andromeda head scratcher.

So SAM is supposed to be a game changing illegal AI, fully sapient but symbiotic with its human host, a genuine friend, and maybe an answer to the first game's question of whether intelligent AI can ever cooperate sustainably with meatbags.

So why did the voice director gave him act flat, monotone and servile for the entire game? Beep boop Ryder, minerals located. Bloop borp, you died but I reactivated your heart.