Mass Effect Megathread: "I'm sorry, my face is tired from dealing with everything." - Games

also i dont remember harbringer ever have been explained as being a reaper in dialogue in me2, I remember it just being in the codex at one point.

[QUOTE=bdd458;52162366]also i dont remember harbringer ever have been explained as being a reaper in dialogue in me2, I remember it just being in the codex at one point.[/QUOTE] It was revealed during the escape from the Collector Base

[QUOTE=Snoberry Tea;52161993]I just had my heart broken by that Angaran Astronomer, Maariko. [sp]When I completed his quest and was honest with him and told him Exiles scrapped his satellites instead of lying and saying it was the Roekkar, he flipped out and claimed we were all no better than the Kett. I'm sad now. He was so friendly.[/sp][/QUOTE] I honestly thought he acted like a bit of a cunt at that point, like don't fucking bundle us with those dick heads.

I just started playing Andromeda like 3 days ago (I think I clocked in at least 25 hours already), and...... the game isn't as bad as it seems? The menu interface needs a lot of work but so far it feels like a standard AAA production "open-world" RPG to me. Story doesn't have a good hook yet, but it currently is enough to keep me going.

I enjoyed it and sunk about 180 hours according to Origin. All the same though... it does definitely feel like a 7/10 game. It's mostly constant QoL issues, pointless sidequests and shallow writing Which funnily enough is exactly why I sunk the exact same amount of time in FO4 and felt exactly the same way at the end of it

[QUOTE=bdd458;52161645]so I just finished 3. I honestly feel insulted, and not just because of that ending. But because of 2, how disconnected from 1 and 3 it is - tonally and story-wise, and other things in 3 like Kai-Leng. Quite frankly, the only good game in the series is 1. And even then 1 is marred by its own problems, but the story was definitely the tightest and that's what I look for in an RPG. 2 started to lose me and by 3 I just felt insulted. Everything in 1 felt connected, part of a larger and greater universe. They completely eliminated that in 2, taking me out of the experience at every opportunity they could (mission end screens, loading screens, etc...). At least 3 got rid of the mission end screens?[/QUOTE] I started the series with 2 and I loved it. So when I went back to 1, I was disappointed at how unrefined and downright boring in some places the game was. The story felt very different to ME2, and it took me a long time to accept it since it felt like a spin-off prequel to me.

[QUOTE=SekritJay;52164147]I enjoyed it and sunk about 180 hours according to Origin. All the same though... it does definitely feel like a 7/10 game. It's mostly constant QoL issues, pointless sidequests and shallow writing[/QUOTE] I concur, nothing about this game is memorable (on AAA-scale expectations) so far, however I do enjoy occasionally hopping off Nomad to shoot at some Halo 5 enemies to clear off a checklist which is the only gameplay loop that keeps me going at the moment. [QUOTE=Loadingue;52164484]I started the series with 2 and I loved it. So when I went back to 1, I was disappointed at how unrefined and downright boring in some places the game was. The story felt very different to ME2, and it took me a long time to accept it since it felt like a spin-off prequel to me.[/QUOTE] Mass Effect 1 kickstarted and promised a space epic, Mass Effect 2 didn't expand upon that, but instead chose to reinforce it. It is as if a hero rose to free the new world from an ancient tyranny (ME1), but spent the whole game running around town to get to know the locals (ME2). Both are great games in their own right IMO, although i did prefer ME2 as a whole package.

[QUOTE=GHOST!!!!;52162398]I honestly thought he acted like a bit of a cunt at that point, like don't fucking bundle us with those dick heads.[/QUOTE] Right? Like when I chose the option for Ryder to say "The exiles abandoned us just like your deserters did" and his response was "Yeah well we hate them too" ?? Like seriously? You recognize the Roekkar as an independent entity and direct your hatred at them, so why the fuck can't you do that with the exiles? [editline]29th April 2017[/editline] Anyway, does anyone know what the giant pit behind the colony on [sp]Elaaden[/sp] is supposed to be for? Before the colony was founded it was just a hole, but after, they built these weird rings around it going down about halfway with sets of what look like tanks, conduits, and emitters or some shit. Also be careful around it, I fell in on accident and the game bugged out, threw me under the map like a kilometer away, and I kept falling perpetually until I 'died' and respawned and fell again. Had to fast travel to get out.

[QUOTE=bdd458;52161645]so I just finished 3. I honestly feel insulted, and not just because of that ending. But because of 2, how disconnected from 1 and 3 it is - tonally and story-wise, and other things in 3 like Kai-Leng. Quite frankly, the only good game in the series is 1. And even then 1 is marred by its own problems, but the story was definitely the tightest and that's what I look for in an RPG. 2 started to lose me and by 3 I just felt insulted. Everything in 1 felt connected, part of a larger and greater universe. They completely eliminated that in 2, taking me out of the experience at every opportunity they could (mission end screens, loading screens, etc...). At least 3 got rid of the mission end screens?[/QUOTE] I'm gonna step up to bat for ME2 here; The game has been criticized (and in some ways, justifiably so) for not progressing the Reaper narrative, and because of that it is dismissed as unnecessary. The way I see it, the only reason ME3 wasn't a total loss is [B]because[/B] of ME2. Without taking all that time building personal connections and loyalties/rivalries with Mordin, Grunt, Wrex, Tali, and Legion, as well as going in depth with the Genophage and Geth/Quarian war story arcs, there wouldn't have been any emotional impact in ME3 whatsoever. I'll grant that in an ideal world ME2 would have done the above AND progressed the Reaper story arc (more than the story in the Arrival DLC did anyway), but even with the game as it is I consider it just as essential as the other two for the complete story. That said, the loading screens and mission end screens were abominations and I'm glad the latter was tossed in a pit for ME3, so I'll agree with you there.

[QUOTE=Loadingue;52164484]I started the series with 2 and I loved it. So when I went back to 1, I was disappointed at how unrefined and downright boring in some places the game was. The story felt very different to ME2, and it took me a long time to accept it since it felt like a spin-off prequel to me.[/QUOTE] well thats because ME1, in the words of Shamus Young, was "Details First" game. There was ample world building, the plot went places, Shepard wasn't this big bad space hero, but another cog in a machine much like Humanity. Its priorities were different, ME2 shifted this completely and as a result that's when the story started to stray. As Shamus says in the last entry of his Mass Effect Trilogy retrospective (which I just finished reading, well worth it) [quote]The ending isn’t where the Mass Effect 3 writer faltered. The ending is where all of their ongoing, widespread, long-running failures finally came to a head. Failure to establish a theme. Failure to build up a proper villain. Failure to give the various factions ideas. Failure to characterize. Failure to construct a natural sequence of cause and effect. Failure to establish and adhere to the rules of the world. The writer constantly wrote IOUs to the audience: This will all be explained later. It’ll make sense in retrospect. This is building up to a larger payoff. This is a setup for a later reveal. The writer never explicitly promised those things, mind you. We just sort of assumed those promises were being made. When the writer kills and resurrects the main character, re-writes major details of the world, radically changes the focus of the story, and imposes decisions of the player character that seem unreasonable or poorly justified, it’s natural to assume that it’s all in pursuit of some larger goal. Surely all these compromises now are in service of some satisfying payoff later, right? The writer wouldn’t bring us all this way for nothing, would they? Once Shepard steps into that beam, all those implied or inferred IOUs came due, and the writer had nothing for us. It’s natural then to say the ending failed us. But I think the story was doomed long before we meet the Star Child. When Mass Effect 2 wasted the second act on a side-plot, it kicked all the duties of a second act into the third. When The Arrival introduced huge ideas that couldn’t feed directly into the main plot because they were DLC, the writer tied their own hands with regards to what they could and couldn’t do in the third game. They couldn’t contradict The Arrival, but neither could they build on it. When the writer made Cerberus such a central element of Mass Effect 3, they created a foe that would devour screen time and clutter up an already-busy story. When the writer built the emotional core of the story around a child we neither knew or cared about, they tied their final confrontation to a character that was fundamentally uninteresting and thematically wrong. When they dropped a contrived and unexplained deus ex machina into the story to solve the Reaper problem, they made it so that Shepard would never be anything more than a witness to the ending, not an active participant in it.[/quote] and something else he says too, is why I love the fist game [quote]The irony is that the original Mass Effect – the nerdy, talky, details-first game that began with the premise of space Cthulhu coming to devour all civilization – was a pretty good setup for a sad ending.[/quote] like, that's why I wanted to keep playing once I started 1, and kept being more and more disappointed as I kept playing 2 and 3. The dialogue and choices were minimized (hell, didn't even fucking matter in some cases. What was the point of Sparing/Killing the Rachni Queen in 1 if in either case there's a Rachni Queen making Reaper Rachni in 3???), there was far less world building, what was built up in 1 was thrown out or ignored in many cases. ME2 worked as a game, but the story and details were lacking and the result of that is 3.

The dipship MP devs basically revealed that balancing of weapons and powers isn't really a concern literally because, and I'm not joking "But you have jetpacks"

[quote] devs [/quote] EA knocking the price down 30% and already promoting Dylan pretty much says it all, along with failing to hit either me2 or 3 sales numbers and MP imploding in under a month.

The latest dev stream was pathetic too, they had nothing to talk about, and none of them seemed to know what anyone else was doing

[QUOTE=bdd458;52165780]well thats because ME1, in the words of Shamus Young, was "Details First" game. There was ample world building, the plot went places, Shepard wasn't this big bad space hero, but another cog in a machine much like Humanity. Its priorities were different, ME2 shifted this completely and as a result that's when the story started to stray. As Shamus says in the last entry of his Mass Effect Trilogy retrospective (which I just finished reading, well worth it) and something else he says too, is why I love the fist game like, that's why I wanted to keep playing once I started 1, and kept being more and more disappointed as I kept playing. The dialogue and choices were minimized (hell, didn't even fucking matter in some cases. What was the point of Sparing/Killing the Rachni Queen in 1 if in either case there's a Rachni Queen making Reaper Rachni in 3???), there was far less world building, what was built up in 1 was thrown out or ignored in many cases. ME2 worked as a game, but the story and details were lacking and the result of that is 3.[/QUOTE] Wasn't mostly due to Drew leaving Bioware and the other lead writer not continuing on with what he had originally planned

[QUOTE=27X;52166346]EA knocking the price down 30% and already promoting Dylan pretty much says it all, along with [B]failing to hit either me2 or 3 sales numbers[/B] and MP imploding in under a month.[/QUOTE] Not that surprising, given how hard 3 in general dropped the ball. I think it soured the franchise for too many, I know I'd be more willing to overlook the railroading of 3 if the conclusion itself had been satisfying. ME:A doesn't seem to impress all that much either, there's almost more discussion of the OT in this thread. MP [I]always[/I] felt tacked on, tbh, only there for not so micro micro-transactions. I played it in 3 for the story-bonuses, and it didn't keep my attention for long. On another note, I haven't heard much of any difficult choices in ME:A, or major differences in being nice/a dick, or story-divergence, which was kind of core elements in ME. The open world feels like it's there for its own sake, not because it would add to the game. I'd much rather have an amazing 20 hour game, than a 60 hour "average AAA open world" one. They could at least have brought more originality to the table, taken a few more risks. Instead of the Ghost Rider trailer frontier, it seems more like a repaint of the OT. [I](Citadel 2.0, Normandy 4.0, turian w/scouter, grizzled krogan, asari researcher, new alien (Jaal/Javik), two humans not used past first mission, etc.)[/I] ME also had that dark undertone, and changing it to a [URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbWpMigIaMA"]light-hearted one[/URL] doesn't really fit the series, imo. The writing and characters were of bigger concern to me than the wonky animation ever was. And in the (inevitable) comparison to the OT, it falls flat. I'm not saying you can't enjoy the game for what it is, but it misses [I]too[/I] many "Mass Effect" marks for me to pick it up. If they didn't want it to be compared to the OT, they should have dropped the ME name. I know it is detached from the OT, I was well aware that it wouldn't be the old games, but that isn't the problem. To me, gameplay, combat and graphics (which gets most of what praise I'm seeing) isn't enough to carry what I regard as a character/story-driven series. And given that it's already on sale, I'm not alone.

[QUOTE=Zeos;52166382]The latest dev stream was pathetic too, they had nothing to talk about, and none of them seemed to know what anyone else was doing[/QUOTE] I liked the writer they had who didn't know who she actually wrote. :rolleyes: [QUOTE=RG4ORDR;52166598]Wasn't mostly due to Drew leaving Bioware and the other lead writer not continuing on with what he had originally planned[/QUOTE] Chris LE'toile left because of Mac Walters. Little did anyone know he would just be the first.

So I just beat the main story. [sp]Boy was it disappointing that the last boss fight was just a wave of enemies. It reminded me of Bioshock Infinite's ending and how much I hated the concept of enemy spam. Mass 1 and 2 IMO had good last fights/endings and I was hoping Andromeda would follow the same with the Archon. But no, it was just press a few buttons and pull the plug. Didn't even show what happen to his body afterwards. It felt so rushed and anticlimactic.[/sp] Also, is it just me or is [sp]the Archon the most disappointing villain in the Mass Effect universe. At first it seemed as if he was the type of villain where he saw his actions justified and not actually evil because exaltation was a good thing. But then later towards the end he goes full Zant and become this big dumb villain where even his allies left him because he went full retard. Very disappointing. [/sp]

Since we are talking about Mass Effect 3's ending, I feel this video has become relevant again [video=youtube;Hy0kAfzKA8I]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy0kAfzKA8I[/video]

Wasn't there a proposal somebody wrote (it might have been here on facepunch) about how the original trilogy would have been better if Mass Effect 2's story had come [I]before[/I] the original? So the threat of Mass Effect would have been the Collectors, then they were revealed to be part of a bigger plot and hints of Reapers, then in Mass Effect 2 the Reapers were revealed, and near the end the Reaper invasion started and it was continued in Mass Effect 3. I can't remember [I]where[/I] I saw it though.

[QUOTE=AlienCreature;52168309]Wasn't there a proposal somebody wrote (it might have been here on facepunch) about how the original trilogy would have been better if Mass Effect 2's story had come [I]before[/I] the original? So the threat of Mass Effect would have been the Collectors, then they were revealed to be part of a bigger plot and hints of Reapers, then in Mass Effect 2 the Reapers were revealed, and near the end the Reaper invasion started and it was continued in Mass Effect 3. I can't remember [I]where[/I] I saw it though.[/QUOTE] Think I found it? [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/mIe7GBW.png[/IMG]

[QUOTE=torres;52168596]Think I found it? [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/mIe7GBW.png[/IMG][/QUOTE] It's not exactly it, the one I remember seeing had a lot more detail and prose, but yeah, it gets the basics down. It would have been much better storytelling in my opinion.

They probably could have circumvented this whole argument if they established a Reaper-Collector connection much earlier in ME2.

And you know, had more story missions, not have killed the normandy/shepard in the first 10 minutes (only to get them back right away again), kept the details focus, not have shepard be working for cerberus (or at the least actually flesh them out and give you actual roleplaying options). But, life doesn't work out always sadly.

I always thought it would have been more interesting if the Collectors were not just another Reaper plot but were the Protheans who survived on Ilos then corrupted themselves in their quest to defeat the Reapers. Being a third faction or something along those lines.

I just love how Shepard gets blown up immediately after Benjamin Willard and Miranda talk about not letting Shepard die.

[QUOTE=The_J_Hat;52169157]They probably could have circumvented this whole argument if they established a Reaper-Collector connection much earlier in ME2.[/QUOTE] But they did? During Shepard and TIM's first conversation, he tells them that they must be connected somehow. [editline]1st May 2017[/editline] Even that "the Collectors are servants of the Reapers" to be precise.

Well there we go. Why is this still a problem?

Because the Reapers were a cool evil entity. Fighting and/or investigating their servants instead of the big baddies themselves for a whole game is a bit of a let down.

Raising the stakes at the end of the first game and then lowering them for the whole second game is kind of lame

Still lazy that they sacked off the unique designs for the Reapers at the end of 2 and instead gave them generic classes in 3, like come on, it would've added so much more to them if they didn't all look exactly the same, but nah, too much effort for them, clearly.