Mass Effect 3

[Sjofn]

I took it the way Merusk and Ingmar did, but I wouldn't be horrified to discover they're subtle shapeshifters or something. Subtle shapeshifters with no way to get into the pants of people who prefer dudes.

[Merusk]

Well that's just clearly subtext reinforcing the idea that gay is bad while faux lesbian is hot, of course.

 

[Lantyssa]

I don't think it's shapeshifting so much as a subtle psychological effect.  Asari almost all display some level of biotic abilities.

[tmp]

Subtle shapeshifters with no way to get into the pants of people who prefer dudes.

I dunno; they could always play a double trap, and since they only mind fuck it's not like the balls touching or lack thereof would ever come into the picture

[Stormwaltz]

Subtle shapeshifters with no way to get into the pants of people who prefer dudes.

If they decided to spin it that way (and I have no idea if the writers are taking the idea seriously; Patrick Weekes wrote all the stuff on Ilium, and he often writes cute/funny scenes just to be cute/funny), I would imagine an asari trying to appeal to someone who "prefers dudes" could affect an androgynous appearance, flattening out their curves and altering their facial structure to appear more boyish.

Actually, I think this is an interesting idea, and not without precedent. There's a species in David Brin's Uplift universe that does the same. (/googles) The Tymbrimi. One of the main characters in "The Uplift War" novel is a Tymbrimi ambassasdor's daughter named Athaclena. She spent months (years?) consciously altering her physiology to appear more human.

[tmp]

(and I have no idea if the writers are taking the idea seriously; Patrick Weekes wrote all the stuff on Ilium, and he often writes cute/funny scenes just to be cute/funny)

Got impression the whole bar area (if not most of the entire planet) was supposed to be a collection of light jokes without any intention for it to be something more. It had friendzoned turian and a quarian talking about the creepy fetish humans seem to have regarding the latter, too

[Sir Fodder]

Hmm,"the cancer that is killing Bioware" reviled writer is the top post on Reddit. The thing that cracks me up is I agree strongly with her statement about wanting a button to fast forward through the combat in order to get to the dialog in ME, I actually mentioned that on a post in the thread here a while ago. The combat in ME just sucks so bad, no tactics whatsoever, still fun games to run through, annoying combat though.

[tmp]

So funny how out of shape some people can get over the idea someone could enjoy different experience they personally do.

[Merusk]

(and I have no idea if the writers are taking the idea seriously; Patrick Weekes wrote all the stuff on Ilium, and he often writes cute/funny scenes just to be cute/funny)

Got impression the whole bar area (if not most of the entire planet) was supposed to be a collection of light jokes without any intention for it to be something more. It had friendzoned turian and a quarian talking about the creepy fetish humans seem to have regarding the latter, too

Which is only made funnier by the fact that he and other Turians have their own creepy obsessions with Quarians.

However, it will all depend on how the current & future writing staff takes that area.  You can point to numerous other properties that a one-off joke was turned into something more serious by an obsessive fan-turned-writer or a writer who was inspired by the joke and took it more seriously, turning it into something it was never intended to be.  Comics,  Star Trek & Star Wars being the most frequent victims of such.

Ed: As to "the cancer" image... she apparently fails to understand that's why we have movies, not games.  While I enjoy the story aspect of the games, that's not the central reason to experience them.  Trying to make it the focus only puts you in the wrong space for what you're trying to do.  From that viewpoint I can agree with the sentiment of, "why the hell are you involved here, again?"

What she's looking to be involved with is really more of a J-date game than a combat game with a story.  Something that's really a choose-your-own adventure on the computer.

[tmp]

However, it will all depend on how the current & future writing staff takes that area.  You can point to numerous other properties that a one-off joke was turned into something more serious by an obsessive fan-turned-writer or a writer who was inspired by the joke and took it more seriously, turning it into something it was never intended to be.  Comics,  Star Trek & Star Wars being the most frequent victims of such.

Hmm that's true. I hope if they take one thing out of it, it's Blasto.

edit: re "she's missing the point, that's what the movies are for, not games" -- i think that counter-argument misses the point itself. The "choose your own adventure" aspects of BioWare games are quite unlike the fixed story the movies present you with. And while for you personally this might not be the central reason why you choose to play the game, it can very well be for someone else. Neither of these preferences is any more valid than the other, imo.

[Merusk]

Wow that sentence.. I should have read it before hitting post.

[HaemishM]

The "cancer's" postings and interview questions about not liking to play games... just WOW. That sounds like the distressed warbling of someone who wasn't a good enough writer to actually get into movies trying to make game into barely interactive movie experiences and yes, absolutely missing the point of the game she was writing for. This isn't even about "different experiences" within the same game - it's two totally separate game spaces. She really does need to be writing J-date sims. I'm sure she's a nice person and may actually be a good writer but wow.

The "cancer, vermin, plague" thing was way over the top, though, even for the Internet.

[tmp]

She really does need to be writing J-date sims.

Why? Are the J-date sims the only game genre that's allowed to have coherent, interesting story shaped through player's choices and consequences?

[Merusk]

Of course not, but that's the main thrust of them.

RPGs have been about story AND game.  Wanting to diminish one in favor of the other turns them in to something else entirely.  I have the same objections to wanting to remove or diminish the storyin ME3 in favor of making it a shooter experience.

Of course this is what EA is making them do. You've got Story Mode and Shooter mode now.  They'll be providing two different forms of entertainment in the same package.  If it works, great, they've innovated the genre!   If it works and saves them money they'll do it again and again (Which is their ultimate goal here. Saving cash by having one dev team and expanding the revenue base by providing a very broad experience that will be picked up by more than just RPG players.) 

That said, the best outcomes are one of these two scenarios as I see it: 
1) The end product will be ultimately dissatisfying to those looking for one or the other but not the blend of both. 
2) The end product will provide acceptable but shallow experiences for the story and shooter gamers but will alienate the RPG gamer who didn't get enough of the blend to make it satisfying.

[tmp]

RPGs have been about story AND game.  Wanting to diminish one in favor of the other turns them in to something else entirely.  I have the same objections to wanting to remove or diminish the storyin ME3 in favor of making it a shooter experience.

Sure; i just don't think allowing the player to skip the part(s) which don't interest them actually diminishes anything -- these parts have to be good for the benefit of these who don't skip them, after all. As verification, consider how the quality and 'importance' of the cutscenes in the game isn't being diminished by the ability to skip through them.

[tmp]

In more practical news the Mass Effect 3 PC demo went live. EA Origin download, sadly.

[Simond]

Hmm,"the cancer that is killing Bioware" reviled writer is the top post on Reddit. The thing that cracks me up is I agree strongly with her statement about wanting a button to fast forward through the combat in order to get to the dialog in ME, I actually mentioned that on a post in the thread here a while ago. The combat in ME just sucks so bad, no tactics whatsoever, still fun games to run through, annoying combat though.

Solution one: Make the gameplay better
Solution two: Make the gameplay optional.

Gosh, I wonder which one makes more sense in a game? But then again we went over this five or six pages ago anyway and it's probably way too late for Bioware to remember that they're a game studio and not a film studio (both for ME3 and, you know, in general). Who knows - maybe Obsidian will play "Enix" to Bioware's "Squaresoft" at some point.

[Khaldun]

There's a big difference between giving players tools to reshape a game experience (as in Elder Scrolls modding) and trying to deliver two fundamentally different aesthetic concepts in the same game. That reflects an incoherency of vision, which usually leads to two under-designed, unsatisfying modes or forms within a game that make neither potential audience very happy. You can have your mini-games in an open-world environment; you can have your combat engine inside of an RPG. Or you can have RPG elements in an FPS. Trying to do both equally--or let players choose a 'pure' form of either element--is almost never going to be a good idea.

[tmp]

Solution one: Make the gameplay better
Solution two: Make the gameplay optional.

Gosh, I wonder which one makes more sense in a game?

Solution two, given the "better" is largely subjective. How many people complained the Tower of Hanoi was actually removed from BioWare games instead of being made better, e.g.?

[Stormwaltz]

I don't play games to crush, I play them to bake bread.

[tmp]

I play them to dance in cantinas to inflict mind wounds.

[Ingmar]

RPGs have been about story AND game.  Wanting to diminish one in favor of the other turns them in to something else entirely.  I have the same objections to wanting to remove or diminish the storyin ME3 in favor of making it a shooter experience.

Sure; i just don't think allowing the player to skip the part(s) which don't interest them actually diminishes anything -- these parts have to be good for the benefit of these who don't skip them, after all. As verification, consider how the quality and 'importance' of the cutscenes in the game isn't being diminished by the ability to skip through them.

Yeah absolutely 100% with you on this.

[ffc]

In more practical news the Mass Effect 3 PC demo went live. EA Origin download, sadly.

Twice the resource hog as Steam, twice as laggy as Steam, uglier interface than Steam (which is quite a feat), and slower download speeds than Steam. What's to be sad about?    

[Simond]

RPGs have been about story AND game.  Wanting to diminish one in favor of the other turns them in to something else entirely.  I have the same objections to wanting to remove or diminish the storyin ME3 in favor of making it a shooter experience.

Sure; i just don't think allowing the player to skip the part(s) which don't interest them actually diminishes anything -- these parts have to be good for the benefit of these who don't skip them, after all. As verification, consider how the quality and 'importance' of the cutscenes in the game isn't being diminished by the ability to skip through them.

Yeah absolutely 100% with you on this.

Which is the best Final Fantasy game?

[Ingmar]

You'll have to ask someone else, I've hated every JRPG I've ever tried. Because I can't stand the gameplay. If I could skip the retarded JRPG combat I'd maybe be able to give you an answer. 

[HaemishM]

She really does need to be writing J-date sims.

Why? Are the J-date sims the only game genre that's allowed to have coherent, interesting story shaped through player's choices and consequences?

They certainly don't have long stretches of gameplay that center around SHOOTING THINGS IN THE FACE. Which, you know, Mass Effect kind of does.

[Ingmar]

She really does need to be writing J-date sims.

Why? Are the J-date sims the only game genre that's allowed to have coherent, interesting story shaped through player's choices and consequences?

They certainly don't have long stretches of gameplay that center around SHOOTING THINGS IN THE FACE. Which, you know, Mass Effect kind of does.

Yeah but why would a dialogue writer need to be concerned with those? And what precisely is the harm of letting someone skip things they're not interested in to get to things they are?

LA Noire gave you the option to skip action sequences if you failed a couple times and I don't recall rending of garments and tearing of hair over that feature.

EDIT: And let me expand on this a little bit more. The "Skip the Fade" mod for Dragon Age: Origins was immensely popular for people on their 2nd playthroughs of DA:O. Should we scorn people for not playing the game "right" because they wanted to skip sections of gameplay they didn't like? How is letting someone skip a sequence of story-free gunplay any different?

[HaemishM]

Again, if you're skipping all the gunplay to get to the story dialogue trees, why are you playing the game exactly? Writers need to be concerned about how players are getting to their dialogue, because it should be giving them context for what they are writing.

[Ingmar]

You're playing it because you love renegade interrupts, or space opera alien geek chick romances, or flying around in your ship scanning planets (ok probably not), or soaking in ads on the Presidium, or figuring out puzzles, or any of the other things that are part of the game that aren't 'use gun on mans'.

Shit, I like the shooty parts, but I'd still be all for the option to let people skip parts just so I have the option of skipping a particular section I don't like on my 4th playthrough - a la Skip the Fade. It's fucking win/win, we don't lose anything if they allow other people to do it. Imagine if ME1 had an option to let you skip the 'drive Mako to mission location' parts.

[Velorath]

Again, if you're skipping all the gunplay to get to the story dialogue trees, why are you playing the game exactly? Writers need to be concerned about how players are getting to their dialogue, because it should be giving them context for what they are writing.

I kinda wish they had the option on the earlier games just so I could do speed run-throughs on characters rather than having to play through the entirety of the games to see how things change between paragon and renegade, or what happens if this character or that character died, or if you didn't rescue the Normandy crew in time, etc... (I've got a lot of those set up anyway, but still).

[Venkman]

You're playing it because you love renegade interrupts, or space opera alien geek chick romances, or flying around in your ship scanning planets (ok probably not), or soaking in ads on the Presidium, or figuring out puzzles, or any of the other things that are part of the game that aren't 'use gun on mans'.

Shit, I like the shooty parts, but I'd still be all for the option to let people skip parts just so I have the option of skipping a particular section I don't like on my 4th playthrough - a la Skip the Fade. It's fucking win/win, we don't lose anything if they allow other people to do it. Imagine if ME1 had an option to let you skip the 'drive Mako to mission location' parts.

I can appreciate where you're coming from, but ME is not Skyrim. It's sort of the old "world vs game", redux.

You could skip 75% of the Skyrim's content accidentally, complete the whole main narrative, avoid combat through most of it, and still play 75 hours, resulting in a character completely unique to you. You probably couldn't even the game exactly the same way twice, if forced. It's the very essence of replayable.

ME is squad combat game with a strong story, some good amount of options, and various minigames. You can play different classes and make different choices. But like Dragon Age or SWTOR, your decision trees are cast in stone with predefined outcomes. It makes the game easier to game, but it also makes it more of a game :)

I think this is where save files help. Think of it like respeccing. You don't want to reroll entirely, just make some different decisions, so load an early save file and go to town.

[Ingmar]

Actually I think you've got it *exactly* backwards. Skyrim is a terrible game to try something like 'let me skip all the combat' because there are no boundaries between the different gameplay elements. Mass Effect on the other hand is not a blobbly hybrid world experience, it is a hard combination of "Bioware talky game" and "shooty action sequence". Because there's a hard shift between gameplay types all the time, a game like that would really suffer very little at all from letting people minimize the time they spend on the parts they don't like.

[Stormwaltz]

Again, if you're skipping all the gunplay to get to the story dialogue trees, why are you playing the game exactly? Writers need to be concerned about how players are getting to their dialogue, because it should be giving them context for what they are writing.

Let me be more direct than my last post.

I could not complete Mass Effect 1 without turning the difficulty down. The boss fights - in particular Saren and the Matriarch (the latter an encounter I wrote) were wall-punchingly hard for me.

I am a writer. I play RPGs and turn-based strategy games. I play for the story. I'm not particularly good at shooters and other twitch games. Our tech designers? Most of them were really good at shooters - especially the new crop we hired for ME2. As I said somewhere upthread, I was hardly the only person in the company with this problem. It was a recognized issue that the better we got at designing combat to satisfy our new audience, the more frustrated and alienated our old audience of die-rolling arr-peers became.

BioWare would probably prefer to sell games to both the old and the new audiences. I don't think that's an unreasonable desire.

[Kail]

Actually I think you've got it *exactly* backwards. Skyrim is a terrible game to try something like 'let me skip all the combat' because there are no boundaries between the different gameplay elements. Mass Effect on the other hand is not a blobbly hybrid world experience, it is a hard combination of "Bioware talky game" and "shooty action sequence". Because there's a hard shift between gameplay types all the time, a game like that would really suffer very little at all from letting people minimize the time they spend on the parts they don't like.

That's basically the problem I have with it.  Ideally, I'd like to see a story integrated into the game, not five minutes of story and a five minute cutscene.  This is tricky to do, but generally developers at least make some token efforts to reinforce the idea that my playing the game is driving the story, rather than there being some parallel narrative that has nothing to do with it.  By giving me a "fast forward through combat" button, you're telling me that the gameplay is essentially completely divorced from the story, not because of technical difficulties or funding issues but because the designer deliberately wanted to do it that way.  To me, it's worse than just a step backwards, it's an INTENTIONAL step backwards, and the sort of thing that makes me look at a game company and go "I guess we aren't after the same thing after all" and stop buying their products because someone forgot that a game is fundamentally about gameplay.

If someone wanted to make Mass Effect the choose your own adventure game or dating sim or whatever, I wouldn't object (though obviously it would be a pretty huge departure for the series), but this half assed "it's like a shoter, but you can skip all the boring shooting bits and go right to the least interactive part of the game" approach is telling me that they're developing a game they essentially don't like or understand, which does not suggest to me a quality product.

[Ingmar]

I don't personally buy the assumption that making a section skippable means that they'll half-ass it and make those sections suck. You can skip past all the voice acting in these games, and yet they still put a tremendous amount of effort into making that stuff good.