f13.net

Searched and didn't see a thread, figured I'd start one up with all the new info about multiplayer. Stolen from Bioware forums (http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/323/index/8481789/1):


So basically - four player co-op missions, persistent duder you create yourself and unlock and level and such. It contributes to your 'Galactic Readiness' level, which is some stat that also affects single player? But it's not required to get the best ending in single player, as you can increase the 'Galactic Readiness' there as well, along with "other platforms" (guessing Facebook or mobile games).

I don't see this hurting the core game at all in my eyes. I enjoy some good co-op shootin'.

Yeah a lot of our ME3 blather happened in the ME2 thread.

I am utterly indifferent to the multiplayer part. It's sort of funny, really.

I think the fact that it's a PC franchise as well helps me be more interested in multiplayer offerings.

For Uncharted, I was (and continue to be) perfectly happy not playing the multiplayer, just because I'm not a fan of the console shooter control schemes. It's a single-player game in my eyes, which I'm sure mirrors how people feel about Mass Effect.

The multi seems.. I dunno. We'll see how it turns out.

But if they fucked up combat from ME2.. HEAVEN HELP THEM.

Non, your avatar  :ye_gods:

(http://i.imgur.com/q6Stj.jpg)

No, it really doesn't.

It's a co-op mode featuring characters other than Shepard and co., forming " an elite Special Forces squad, and combine their weapons, powers and abilities to devastating effect as they fight together to liberate key territories from enemy control".  Seems to make sense in the context of the setting and what's going on in the time frame of this game, and while I'm not a huge fan of Vs. multiplayer getting shoehorned into a game, I don't really have an issue with more games having some form of co-op.

Why not just close out the trilogy without wasting resources on a dumb niche idea?

Then add the dumb niche idea to the next franchise/trilogy/thing.

Fucking bullet points.

If multiplayer doesn't involve the characters and story of ME, aren't you just left with a terrible third person cover based shooter?

I'm not against it as a novelty but seems a bit of a wasted effort.

Also, 'not required for best ending' is one thing, but there are a number of people IN THIS THREAD who will be psychologically compelled to achieve maximum readiness before completing the game just in case it unlocks an extra line of dialog.

Developers never consider their impact on the mentally disturbed.

I'm pretty sure someone will come up with a mod or something that will allow us to completely bypass the multiplayer thing if we want to, and still achieve maximum readiness.  But if it's done in an interesting manner, the multiplayer might be worthwhile, even speaking as someone who historically has almost never played multiplayer outside an MMO.

It sounded to me like you could achieve maximum readiness without using the co-op.

Supposedly you can play a krogan, though.

(or a Salarian. just imagine the number of assholes yelling to hold the line)

If it's fun and adds to the product, I'm all for that.

You are making me seriously consider an exception to my usual policy of 'fuck games not on steam' just so I can do this.

We call those people cloacas.

You create a custom character and pick race and class for multiplayer.

Races are Human, Krogan, Asari, Drell, Salarian and Turian. Classes are same as single-player.

Salarians better fucking have the option to sing "Scientist Salarian."

Fairly sure there will be plenty salarians singing it whether there's a button for it or not. :ye_gods:

Also, expecting the asari to come with zipper level customization option -- half down, navel gazing, embrace the eternity.

I've been practicing already!

Why stop there, Laidlaw, time for another DA2 DLC!

Rogues, Warriors, Mages, which is better and why!
Choose from between five races and multiple character specs to determine the very best in Dragon Age 2: Battlefield DLC!
Order now and play as a Mabari Hound.

I think they're saving it for DA3. Mages vs Templars in Thedas at War.

Hmm some multiplayer details (http://stickskills.com/2011/10/11/mass-effect-3-multiplayer-details-revealed/)


well, so much for that.

So literally holding the line!

Yup. Too bad it's against faction which, if i never saw it again, it would be too soon.

They can't do deep multi-player on just box sale revenues. But if they combine this approach with DLC multi-player content it could be pretty lucrative considering most of the expensive resources are funded by the single-player box sales. Effectively approaching something like SWTOR from a different direction (the story is single-player, but some of the fights are multi-player).

Holy hell, you've just struck GOLD.

Single player ME3...but to get the good gear and finish story lines you need to RAID in multiplayer (DLC)!

GOLD.

So I guess that's a bit of a fucking spoiler, eh?

I'm pretty sure they've mentioned in multiple interviews that Cerberus hates you again. They just haven't said why that would be (paragon ending seems obvious, renegade not so much).

Illusive Man has been buying his cigarettes from Tobacco Reapers Inc. and was indoctrinated over the course of ME2, of course.

That's not a problem. If you had the renegade ending last time around, Cerberus does something retarded and over-the-top evil in the first ten minutes of the game (which wouldn't be the least bit surprising given their background) and your dialogue options include three different shades of "I hate you guys now and am going it on my own."

Just like the way that even paragon Shep was suddenly so willing to forgive Cerberus at the beginning of ME2.

Yeah, Cerberus fucking up is almost certainly going to be it, because Cerberus is all about fucking up.

They're like WoW's trolls.

"This sounds like a horrible idea and could backfire really bad.  Didn't we try something like this before and have it really bite us in the ass?  LET'S DO IT!"

Even easier, since the renegade ending has you keep the reaper base, it can be the Indoctrination ex machina.

The first 10 minutes of the game is going to be different and tied to that last DLC, from what they've announced.

Any indication if they will have some way to input your decisions from the last two games? I don't have saves from either available. Or will I just be going to masseffectsaves.com again?

As long as Bartlet is in it, I'm sold.

I never got why keeping the reaper base was a paragon/renegade decision. It felt much more natural for my renegade shep to say "fuck you martin sheen" and just blow the thing to hell and be done with it.  The whole game I'm kicking ass and taking names and then suddenly the choice is "oh no lets be cautious and preserve this base for science!" seemed off.

It's about who you are giving it to.

For me it was more about using something that had liquefied people in it. Yeah. Not cool. I nuked that shit.

Same here. I took the "Fuck you, we aren't using Reaper Tech" as the paragon ending. It seemed morally... questionable, to say the least.

My reasoning even for my less paragon-y Shepards was "You guys fuck everything up. Even bringing me back from the dead ended up with your stupid base being taken over by robots."

My lone Renegade playthrough kept the base, but she knows in her heart it is a terrible idea. She had a momentary lapse of reason.

It's almost like Sjofn and I get completely different copies of BioWare games.

I don't remember that much of either game. I'm going to try it again. I hated the last story though - if you can call it a story. The first was less.. linear and straightforward. I thought Jack was kind of hot, but I was a Paragon, and I didn't like where it was going. Next time I'll be a Renegade. I made the mistake of romancing Tali. I can't believe she didn't take her mask off for me. What a tease.

She does take her mask off, the cameraman was just coy.

I was really hoping she'd be some hot Arab girl, found a cure, and the game suddenly became Prince of Persia.

Oh well.

I've played both 1 and 2 in the last few days. I never got why you all thought 2 was so great. Then I played 1. If they improve again at that rate 3 might be an actually good game.  :why_so_serious:

She's a frog.

Now I keep seeing the Oglaf Arabian Nights.

Dammit.

;D

I don't understand the problem.  :oh_i_see:

Sorry...did you say "mustache"?

http://oglaf.com/2arabian/

NSFW

Yes, I know what it was referring to. I still don't see the problem.  :why_so_serious:

 :oh_i_see:

 :drillf:

Oglaf, you make everything terrible. And boners.

Friggin' animated semen.

As opposed to you avatar of an animated seaman?

Ehhh... It was a sunk cost.

I blew up the base because I didn't want Cerebus defiling my dead crewmen.  That and IM's a rogue AI.

I hope increasing "galactic readiness" using "other platforms" is also entirely optional. I don't want my ability to finish a game a certain way to be affected by how much people I spammed Mass Effect promos to on Facebook.

It won't. They've explicitly stated that you can achieve the best ending without doing anything outside single player in the game.

Clicking "I like" on Facebook is totally single player, though :why_so_serious:

edit: in other news, a hands-on for the forthcoming multiplayer mode at RPS (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/27/hands-on-mass-effect-3-galaxy-at-war/#more-79594).

(http://i.imgur.com/UN8EX.jpg)
(http://i.imgur.com/IcVoOl.jpg)

Do you want to play / watch this game / agonize over the numbers?

I am amused hide helmet is an option. Which is good. This is one of the only games I like having one on, though!

If the "action mode" automatically picks the dialogue responses and lets you kill people manually, does the "story mode" automatically kill people and let you pick dialogue responses?  :why_so_serious:

edit: ah, close but no banana


and the "rpg mode" is apparently a cute name for how previous ME games were played already.

Apologies for the size.

The texture or whatever it's called on her hood is really really good.

Horde mode is in ME3 and it's brutally hard. I wasn't considering this game at all, but I would just for the teamwork it takes to get through each wave of that mode... unless they make it easier so it appeals to everyone.

I was amazed by it, too. ;D

Not really hard with a decent 3d renderer, i'd imagine. Fabric patterns are pretty easy for procedural shaders.

Let's see it live.

Looks the advert campaing/streak of bad luck continues for BioWare


"hey guys, there is pr0n on the intrewebs. We urge you not to seek it, and avert your virgin eyes if you encounter it"

"Psst, kid, wanna come over here? I got some hot BioWare story action for ya..."

Pre-emptive plea: please, please, please do not post any of that stuff in this thread. Even under a spoiler tag. Please?

Shepard is a Grey Warden, and the Spectres comes in Dragon form.

Bobby isn't dead. Mass Effect 2 was all a dream.

Garrus is Shepard's father.

Man, wouldn't it be a hoot if the Reapers won, and the cycle began again?

That already happens when you stayed till the timer runs down to 0 in the Arrival DLC. 

"A popular console game tricks unsuspecting players into incest with aliens."

Shepherd is arrested and treated for his xenophilia. He settles down with a nice, plain human woman called Margaret.

Shepard convinces the Reapers to leave everyone alone (through expert use of the convo wheel) via an epic array of separate-yet-related conversations.  Reapers just up and leave, logically and emotionally defeated, at the end.

Alternately, Shepard reprograms the Reapers with a virus (through expert use of various hacking and lockpicking minigames), turning them into the guardians of the galaxy.

Or, the entirety of the action happens on Earth, with Shepard using the Mako to drive around over the surface of the planet and shoot down Reaper ships one by one.

Don't worry. I won't spoil the fan-fiction level of writing for you.

Story, RPG and action modes, hey?

Oh that vehicle game would be amazing. I can just see myself driving the mako right up one side of a skyscraper and down the other while pursuing the reapers.

Yeah, but  that's a kind of easter egg for a DLC mission.

I mean, Reapers win, credits roll. That's how it goes, kiddos.

That's hardly a spoiler; it could be one if the series didn't stay faithful to its blue lesbian roots.

Essentially reminding me why I hate a lot of the people involved with NeoGaf...

So the story behind this (and some of the information at the end of the previous page) is that MS put up some sort of dashboard update beta, which mistakenly included a ME3 beta download.  This was noticed by a Gaf poster who made a thread, which got other peoples' attention, some of whom also ended up downloading the ME3 beta and datamining it for all kinds of spoilers and game information, which were then posted in the thread on Gaf. 

This is all understandable, and I don't blame people for taking advantage of a huge fuckup on MS's part.  Where the problem comes in, is that MS hit NeoGaf with a C&D asking them to take down the thread (which they did).  Posters on Gaf made a thread mistakenly blaming EA/Bioware for the C&D.  Gaffers have a pretty big hate-on for Bioware, so the thread got a lot of posts, and threads starting popping up on pretty much every other major website.  It wasn't until after a couple hours of this that NeoGaf's owner (who goes by Evilore on Gaf), who had previously posted a number of passive-aggressive comments that anybody reading would have assumed where directed at Bioware (having been the subject of the thread title, and everybody elses' posts) decided to mention 24 pages into the thread that, btw the Bioware had nothing to do with the C&D and it was MS all along.  There was no apology for the confusion, or for taking so long to release a critical detail that a massive thread on the site he owns was getting wrong.  Subsequent complaints from the handful of posters that actually seemed upset that he let the wrong party take the blame at first were met with the response:


A couple of the people who complained (in a completely reasonable fashion) were also banned, some posters still found ways to blame Bioware or somehow come up with reasons to boycott the game over this, and many fully support the way Evilore handled the situation and don't see how people can find fault with it.

OH NOES BIOWARE.

I got the files. Hum de dum....this is sweet....I don't have to play the game now. :)

Does Shepherd finally get a laser sword?

Didn't one of the trailers already show him using some energy wristblade thing? Close enough.

Yeah, a holographic blade from the omni tool or something like that. It seemed pretty clumsy on the reviews they showed, though -- there's a couple seconds of windup before use, and it seems to do less damage than just shooting the guy in the same time would. Also, it stabs rather than slices and as such a number of times it'd plain miss the target standing right next to Shepard. Hopefully they''ll tweak it for the final game.

Maybe its supposed to be this way to show people that attacking people with a melee weapon when you have ranged energy weapons at your disposal is kind of dumb. Star Wars notwithstanding.

I think it's supposed to be a bullet point on the Gears of War Lite feature list they're chasing. Just implemented with the usual prowess.

A few years ago Bioware was a darling of NeoGaf. It's true that these days a lot of Gaf has a "hate-on" for Bioware but that's not entirely without reason.

That said it is a little scummy to conveniently fail to correct the misinformation that MS sent the C&D rather than Bioware.

All publicity is good publicity. No matter how much these meat-heads say they will boycott ME3, they know they'll buy it on release day or pirate it.
It can't fail. Dragon Age II delivered sub-par storyline with barely updated graphic engine, yet people still lapped it up. EA will continue to churn it out, pretty soon, ME will make the leap to Battlefield with DICE at its helm. Rage on, Bio-fans. It's progress. The disintegration of RPG genre...

Don't hate on dialogue wheel time.

Maybe it's because MMO's have sorta cheapened the feeling of leveling up and getting loot, or maybe it's my feeling that there are more sophisticated ways to create RPG experiences on computers and consoles these days than just heavily borrowing mechanics from P&P RPG's (complex mathematical systems designed to set up rules and bounds to define the world and characters, something that's already inherent in making a video game), but I'm not really upset about "the disintegration of the RPG genre".  I think Mass Effect, Fallout 3/New Vegas, Vampire: Bloodlines, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution all strike a good mix between action and RPG, and I'd much prefer to play more of those kinds of games than stuff like Dragon Age or anything else trying to recapture the glory days of CRPG's.

Yeah I definitely agree with you there, the Battlefield Unlocks is akin to level up model I can get behind. Aside from Armor unlocks, additional weapons and options per class, my reaction skill is still the same, a head shot is always deadly, regardless if I'm level 1 or 20.  If this is what it means by Action Mode in Mass Effect 3, count me in.

Which is a problem if your reaction skill is shitty.

Fallout 3/New Vegas had optional turn based combat, the combat in Mass Effect, Bloodlines and Deus Ex was so easy you being a spaz was no issue.

You called VATS in Fallout turn based combat?  :uhrr: Can't be serious man. It was an 'I Win' button if anything.

Sadly, that is what passes for Turn based these days. If you like you can group it with the "so easy you being a spaz was no issue" column.

Except for Nightstalkers, fucking Nightstalkers.

Funny thing is, I liked Fallout 3 overall package more than Borderlands. OK maybe I haven't got the driving parts, but I really am not enjoying myself much in Borderlands compared to the first time I exited Vault 101. It was so dull just looting shot gun ammos and money from boxes over and over that I regretted buying the whole GOTY for $7.50

As did I. I think I clocked over 250 hours in both Fallouts, while I finished Borderlands once and never looked back.

Lining up Headshots in VATS-Mode and seeing three heads explode in Slow Motion was certainly part of its charm. So I am not hating on VATS, I am hating the fact that turn- and squad-based RPG combat is on a hastry retreat because RPG developers want to broaden their base by including FPS gamers. What you usually get is a mediocre dumbed down RPG and a mediocre shooter with too much talky stuff mixed into one.

People have spent the last 8 years or so talking about how Bioware is the savior of the western CRPG. (While completely ignoring the fact that CRPGs made in Europe and even Japan are more like the traditional CRPGs of old...)

The reason NeoGaf turned on Bioware is mostly because of Dragon Age 2 and to a much lesser extent ME2. Bioware's problem now is the problem bands have when they transition from one sound to another, maybe the new one is as good but existing fans *like* the old one.

There are people who want to play games like Dragon Age and that market generally is not served very well (especially if you like most of the press ignore European stuff), whereas the market for actiony games with light RPG elements is served to a much higher degree. Basically every game these days has "RPG elements."

http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/The-Cool-Cam.aspx

I used to love old school crpgs (and jrpgs).  I'm just no longer of the mindset that they're the best way to represent what I loved about P&P RPG's.  I'm not going to say that Bioware is the savior of RPG's, but in my mind, all the devs who are moving away from the D&D school of mechanics are going in the right direction.  I also think that even some European stuff like the Witcher takes some cues from Bioware.

I understand people being upset over DA2, nevermind the fact that the first game spent an unreasonably long time in development, and there was no way any follow-up was going to match it.  The backlash towards ME2 is a little more petty given that it was GAF's GOTY, and it was only long after the fact that the groupthink there now says that it sucks.

Can anyone summarise the problems with ME2 ?  I played it and thought it was sublime.

I was too much more fun than ME1.

It wasn't "Fiddly" enough and "Dumbed-down" too many things for the grognards.

Removal of armor types, removal of extra weapons (even though you never fucking used 90% of them) and streamlining of ability leveling.   

Complaints about story revolve around "the entire game is focused on the endgame."  There's not enough (or any) side-quests or missions that let you wander for hours and hours while ignoring the main storyline.

Huh, I thought it was too much side quest, allowing you to ignore the main storyline long enough for everyone to be prepared which removed any sort of tension in the storyline.
Goddamn biowhores. They don't know what they want.

Ok, I'm up to date and onboard now :

Those are fucking retarded complaints.  They need to shut the fuck up.

I still think the in terms of actual *roleplaying* ME2 is one of the best RPGs made after Torment. It does a better job than practically any other game of putting in you the role of Commander Sepherd and allowing you to act out that role. Just re-reading that thread and the way people talk about 'their sherpherd' goes well beyond characterisations of most other games.

Age old problem of expectations exceeding the actual execution. The hype train does it every time, but it sells shit loads of copies, so it'll never change.

I think the amount of characterization people manage to invent/put into the character has little to do with the quality of the game, and much more with people's ability to come up with stuff that fleshes out what's otherwise largely still just making choices between "do you gently pet the kitten, or give it an assfuck".

As for the changes in RPGs... while the ones that put stress on the action component can be ok, i'm not too fond of it quickly becoming the only way these games (the AAA titles, at least) are being made, which seems to be the case. Because getting the focus moved from skills od character i'm supposed to roleplay to my own, that sometimes feels too much like it really misses the point of entire experience.

Yeah, this. I had some minor irritation with the streamlined weapons and character progression systems, but it still blew ME1 out of the water. It was also miles far and away better than something like Final Fantasy XIII. Persona 3 may be the only JRPG I've played that was better than ME2.

The only legitimate complaint I have where ME2 was a step-backwards vs ME1 was the removal of the Mako exploration in favor of fucking surveying.

I actually enjoyed the Mako and wandering the planets. It was at least entertaining even if the vehicle had a tendency to control like an oil tanker filled with lead.   It also didn't consist of hours of holding right-click and staring at a sine wave as you ponderously swept your mouse over a globe.

I hated both the Mako and the surveying stuff, but neither was so bad that it diminished the game in my eyes.

I found surveying so dreary that I used a save game editor to cheat myself all the resources I needed.

Compared to ME1 ME2 was better in nearly every way.

Compared to RPGs are a genre? Yeah nah.

The main reason ME2 left me lukewarm was how most of the game revolved around playing the babysitter-slash-shrink for the supposed most speshial speshialists in the entire galaxy half of them you've only just met; the activity which was entirely optional and yet if you did choose to skip it you're left with few shooty bits that could be probably completed in under couple hours. Combine that with second-grade villains filling in for the absent main threat, and the whole thing felt just... shallow and hollow, i guess.

The inane minigames and shit they added to fill the holes left after the "streamlining" done with a hacksaw didn't help, too.

That's mostly my stance as well. Although sometimes the Mako was so terrible, it wrapped around to hilarious and became sort of fun. Surveying was just weird busywork.


EDIT: Also I just ... don't get the complaints about the whole "do shit for your crew so they're super loyal and utterly commited to the cause" thing. It makes more goddamn sense than "I'm going to drive around in the Mako doing nothing whatsoever," or "do shit for people not even on your crew, just because they asked."

(http://www.geardiary.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/fps-design.gif)

I liked ME2, but it was linear as fuck. I'm honestley  :why_so_serious: expecting ME3 to resemble a rail shooter with rpg "elements".

The Mako sequences reminded me of Starflight. I was sadf when, instead of fixing, expanding and improving the Mako style exploration, they replaced it with the lame scanning minigame. The only good thing about the scanning was this little easter egg.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-CDNLYZ0zA

I completely appreciated ME2 replacing the hacking minigame versus ME1's button pressing thing.

I also appreciated less equipment in ME2, because ME1 was hilariously bad for not only giving the character hundreds of guns, but the naming system saw guns that sounded more advanced actually be horribly weaker.

However, ME1 did have a tighter storyline. ME2 was very much a, "We have to rush to save the galaxy! ... but first, let's sort out my father issues." And surveying sucked.

To me it makes no goddamn sense that people who #1 can't be loyal and commited to begin with and #2 become utterly loyal and commited to a total stranger who spends half an hour dealing with their little mental hangup ... are presented as "the best the entire galaxy has to offer", and that it's, like, major part of the game.

Yes, ME too had pointless side stuff where you could drive around and shoot kittens down from trees, but those were secondary and relatively brief if you chose to bother with them at all (and you really didn't have to) Hence putting that sort of activities in the spotlight in the sequel and telling me "there will be dramatic consequences if you don't participate." (and having these 'dramatic consequences' translate to "there isn't really much of game for you to play") is not an improvement to me, but the opposite.

Just think of it as 'Magnificent Seven' in space.  Would you doubt Charles Bronson's loyalty?  Hell no, he's fucking Charles Bronson!  So you shouldn't question Jack's as well.

Charles Bronson.

I don't really get the grief the loyalty missions seem to cause... For one, if they bother you, you can save the galaxy just fine without them. The only difference is that you'll get a few heroic deaths in the final showdown, which to me is acceptable for the end of a story. (OK, you need 1 guy loyal if you want to have Shepard survive but I think that's it)

As for the gameplay being so very short without them, you still have the recruitment missions which as I remember are usually quite a bit longer than the corresponding loyalty ones and should be justified from an in-character perspective even if you feel you are in a hurry. So at most a third of the game's length is in those loyalty missions which you can do or skip. That doesn't seem too much of an imbalance in the main-content/sidequests ratio to me.

Also, ME2 is far from the only RPG that allows/encourages you to screw around at times when there should be time pressure from a story perspective. (Gee, I know I'm supposed to storm Sarevok's hideout right now, but as a player I know he's not going anywhere and there are still dungeons to loot and werewolves to fight.)

What bothered me about the loyalty mechanics was Shep having to run around the ship and ASK EVERY SINGLE PERSON EVERY SINGLE THING.  Makes no sense.

Here is any idea, give me an office.  They want to talk?  COME TO OFFICE.  Save me the trouble of careening around the ship.  Exploring the ship is great, but wtf. 

Captain and Ship's Counsellor  :why_so_serious:

True, but the ME universe is one without any kind of recording software, so that Shepherd can't just play all the evidence that Reapers exist / are a problem to the Council based on what he's experienced.

It's also the universe where the Captain is responsible for scanning for mineral deposits one by one.

How useful is recording in a world where all recordings can be undetectably Photoshopped?



That doesn't excuse the council of course, since they are still pulling fucking chunks of the reaper out of the damn station there still.

I think you mean chunks of "Reaper".

"Ah yes, the 'Reaper.' You've been reading too many Von Danikenite tracts, Shepard. Think for a moment - is it more likely that Sovereign was an artifact of an ancient, quasi-mythical race of sapient starships... or that it was an unusually large geth dreadnought?"

And an unusually large geth dreadnaout attacking the Citadel, smashing the fleet, (possibly) killing the council and taking out the flagship is somehow less of an issue?  :uhrr: Must not be, since no one mentions it after the attack.

When the Normandy was destroyed, it was looking for and mopping up what was thought to be the last geth forces in Citadel space. It wasn't the only ship doing so. And remember all the heightened security you deal with on the Citadel.

EDIT: The Council thinks of Sovereign as a one-off superweapon like the Destiny Ascension, and considers the military threat contained. They're more worried about infiltration and cyberwarfare by the time of ME2.

While anything can be rationalized (mole people!) I find that kinda limp from a storytelling angle.

Makes sense. After all if you made a devastating super weapon the last thing you'd do is build another one.  :awesome_for_real:

It wasn't my decision to make, but the (non-)logic of the Council makes sense from my cynical worldview. The political leadership persuaded themselves that the problem had gone away, so they could return to the much more pressing issues of the next election and dealing with those arrogant humans.

"Mission Accomplished!"

I'm just busting your balls, I barely even know what we're talking about.  :oh_i_see:

No it doesn't. It's poor ret-conning. Especially as they all go "oh Shepard! You saved us from the Reapers!" at the end of ME1.

Shepherd: "As the person who has done the investigation, collected the evidence and can now understand the dead language of the Proteans, I'm going with 'sapient star ship, who has friends that decimated all sentient life in the galaxy last time they were here'. Come with me to Ilos where I will show you how it all went down."

I recognise the narrative purpose / vanity of not having Shepherd believed by the Council, but equally the Council could have said, "We believe you and are working out a plan of approach, but not one that we can tell you about right now" instead of "LALALALA NO SUCH THING AS REAPERS LALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU WITH OUR FINGERS IN OUR EARS" that they currently get.

Plus if they think Shepherd is dangerously deluded - and "we're all gonna die when a super-race of machines invade our galaxy from beyond space as we know it" probably qualifies - they probably shouldn't let him be a Spectre any more. But they do, so it raises some interesting questions about their intelligence.

I believe it is stated in ME2 that people went to investigate Ilos and the VI was not there (lost power, wore out, whatever) and so Shepherd is the only one who ever talked to it.

They just want to fit in with the Quarians and the Geth... and the Krogan and... It's the 'sentient species that are all stupid' universe.

... and two of his crew, one of who might have specialised in Protean archaeology.

Again, I recognise the narrative vanity, but think it could be better handled. It doesn't help (for me) making the universe more believable by making the Council look incompetently stupid, nor am I fully comfortable with ME's very clear portrayal of "all politicians are bad people".

Wasn't Shepherd the only one who could actually understand it due to the beacon thing?

This is why the reapers have to kill everyone and let evolution take another stab at making a sentient species that doesn't have its head up its ass.

Liara with the mind-meld.  Though she got a little obsessed after Shepherd's first death.

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/62906/Garrus-Will-Calibrate-Your-Voicemail-For-A-Price

I'll just leave that here.

Of course, then in one of the ME2 side-quests you find fully working, intact Prothean artifact/beacon thingie, and rather than being given an option to bring it as the proof --sorry, "proof"-- it is placed on your coffee table so it can cutely shrink and expand when you touch it.

No facepalm big enough.

Bioware games become a lot more interesting once you come to accept that the Department of Main Plots is staffed by idiots and the actual talent is all working in Sideplot Division.

It also helps to reconcile yourself to the fact that bioware feel 'continuity' is just superstitious nonsense.

You know, one area of ME2 that disappointed me was the level design of the Citadel. It felt TINY. Yes, there was less walking and more directed experience on the Citadel, but it felt smaller than the prison Jack was held in. That's one thing the whole game's level design missed - most of the places didn't have anywhere near the sense of sweeping grandeur that the levels in the first one did. I realize that wasn't your fault, but your comment reminded me of it.

Vigil is deactivated. Even if it was still around, Shepard is the only one who could understand it - through some peculiar pseudo-scientific means that even an asari with intimate knowledge of Prothean tech couldn't grok. Only people personally loyal to Shepard were present when he spoke to Sovereign - their objectivity is suspect. There are digital records from their hardsuits, but as someone pointed out, it's generally assumed that anyone with enough resources and skill can create a flawless "Photoshop" (this has massive repercussions on the justice system that I don't think are ever explored). And it's implied, at least in the planet descriptions I had time to do before I left, that while there are plenty of Reaper-devastated worlds around the galaxy, they are not recognized as any sort of systemic, galaxy-wide phenomenon. In some cases, "indistinguishable from magic" applies, and the xenoarcheologists assume they're looking at the effects of natural processes.

In short, there's no evidence that Sovereign was anything more than a particularly impressive geth ship. The more Shepard insists that it's really a super-advanced and implacably hostile super-intelligence, the more he looks like the sort of kook that insists there are UFOs in the Bible and aliens built the pyramids.


I completely agree.

If you don't trust a person to deliver facts rather than photoshopped evidence, why would you grant them Spectre status?

For all intent and purposes, what difference does it make? I mean, if it's believed that the geth can build such advanced starships *and* given the stated in the game more than once common belief/fear that the AIs are bound to try to eliminate the organics, shouldn't there be focused effort to prepare for further attacks of such advanced AI-driven starship(s) since their believed makers have proven themselves to be actively aggressive? Effectively boiling down to the same preparations that would need to be done against the "real" Reapers?

It's like after the Pearl Harbor bombing the US government went "welp, that sucked but we shot down their planes. Now, back to business as usual."

They also carefully swept a 100 mile radius around Hawaii, defeating any enemies in there. That should do the trick against an enemy that you well know is based some distance off. (From what's said in ME2 it seemed to me that the big anti-geth operation in-between the games never even bothered to go past the Perseus Veil)

I don't think the council didn't trust Shepard and thought he would make up evidence.  They thought that the evidence Shepard found was just an elaborate hoax by Saren, which was done to manipulate the Geth into following him.  With Saren dead, presumably the Geth wouldn't be as big a threat.

It's also possible that the Council's response is denial, similarly to how current governments would react to claims of UFO's and aliens.  BUT, a short while later, an unofficial agency (Cerberus?) does pay you a visit, writes down what you're saying, and generally tries to at least consider an actual threat response plan, however ineffective it may be.  I guess it'll all depend on everyone's reaction to the arrival of the Reapers - will they be completely surprised, or does Shepard get a call asking him to take charge of an already-prepared team, ship, fleet, intel on Reapers, etc.

But how is the giant spaceship that's part of machine master race supposed to work as hoax to trick the geth into doing Saren's biddings, when it's at the same time also supposed to be the product of the geth? If it's built by the geth then they know it's not a machine god and have no reason to follow it/Saren. If they believe it's a machine god they should follow then it couldn't be built by them... and 2km long starship with completely unknown technology goes way beyond photoshopping as far as forging evidence goes.

edit: another thing re: lack of evidence that i just remembered... does the game ever provide reason not to give you option to just page the council about location of the derelict Reaper you visit in ME2, so they can see it for themselves? It's been a while so i just can't remember.

No, we didn't think of it at the time. The Reaper mission was originally designed to be something of a "red alert" mission - TIM calls you up and says, "I just lost contact with my team - go there NOW and rectify the situation." That changed when the IFF was bundled into the mission, and I didn't have the presence of mind to consider all the spin-off effects.


I treated it as a 9/11 metaphor. Bad guys from far away pull off an devastating attack of surprising technical sophistication in the middle of our territory. Well, that's over - now let's redouble our efforts to keep the dirty foreign synthetics where they live. Patrols along their border to prevent them from entering our territory. Aggressive sweeps in areas we've seen them. Inside our own territory, let's pass a bunch of ineffective, privacy destroying laws to keep the robots from getting into sensitive places. Hm. We don't see any more geth coming out of the Veil, so we must have won. Back to planning the next election and restoring consumer confidence!

I'm not going to claim the logic is airtight. It requires you to assume a level of smug complacence on the part of the Council that ill-suits the leadership of the most powerful alliance in the galaxy. I have an extremely cynical view of the leadership of the most powerful nation on Earth, so to me its plausible enough to get a bye.

I don't remember that one.

I did consider that analogy but thought it'd be too risky/bad taste to bring it up :why_so_serious:

Using this metaphor though, i'd say it also shows the game council logic fails pretty badly -- the US declared "war on terrorism" in response and actually went to kick what they considered to be the source on their own territory. To mix the metaphors a bit, i'd consider the appearance of the "reaper" an equivalent of your enemy demonstrating they are capable of building WMDs *and* actually using one on you. And in our own world the governments who feel they could just become potential targets of such attack... do their darndest to track down potential factories and blow them up sky-high if they are capable of pulling that off (like Israel is currently declaring they'd do)

So to instead let such enemy sit unpestered, allowing them to freely cook however many more such weapons they feel like cooking for the next attack, rather than enter their territory in force to locate and blow up the docks where the next "geth superstarhips" could be built... that's not just dumb, that's insane. And there's no amount of "well, governments *are* that dumb hurrhurr" that can make it plausible for me -- if just because it'd require such stupidity to extend over entire species, so they don't notice and question the stupidity of their glorious leaders, and/or demand actions to be taken.

I had to look up the details, turns out i mixed up two missions. The coffee table sphere thingie is in the Firewalker DLC. The beacon is found in Rose Nebula side mission of the core game. A video of it is here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDZFnLEW75E)

(it doesn't blow up or anything after you're done watching. You get the "mission complete" screen which says "Recovered Prothean relic.")

I don't have the best memory but from what I can recall right after 9/11 people were like "well, this was probably just a one-off thing, no way they have the inclination and resources to do something like this again." Certainly the possibility that terrorists would try further shenanigans involving planes was quickly dismissed.

Again, I don't have the greatest memory though.   :oh_i_see:

...

In all seriousness, the explanation is that it's a plot contrivance.

No one would know you worked on the game from your comments Stormwaltz, no one!  :why_so_serious:

Easy enough to fix:
Alien Council
Shepard:  You've not taken me seriously, we have to deal with the threat from the Reapers
Turian Councilor: Ah yes, the "Reapers".  You really seem to have bought into Saren's gambit.  We're not so easily fooled, we've been preparing our counterattack against the Geth beyond the Perseus Veil over the last 2 years.  Our plans are almost ready to be launched.
Salarian Councilor: Yes, our STGs have been monitoring them closely looking for weaknesses within their patrol routes and actions, we are quite prepared Shepard.
Asari Councilor: Additionally, we've provided the Batarians with ships which are easily converted to warships to launch a "deniable" suprise attack against the Geth to draw their attention.  Using back route channels, we've supplied them sufficiently and begun negotiations for them to rejoin the Council races on a purely probationary status.
Shepard: But the Batarians have a grudge against humanity.
Turian Councilor: Hmm, we hadn't considered that possibility.  We'll have to form a committee to consider the implications of that, but of course it's much too late to stop our plans now.
Asari Councilor: And then there was the regrettable incident which occurred in the Batarian system which almost ruined everything.  What did you think you were....what is that?
Turian Councilor:  What do you mean the fleet was destroyed in dock by giant dreadnaughts of Geth design, where did they come from?
Salarain Councilor: The entire armada is gone, but...no time, tell my assistant "I hear my mother calling", he'll understand and take the appropriate measures...

Human Council
Shepard: You've not taken me seriously, we have to deal with the threat from the Reapers
Human Councilor 1: Ah yes, the Reapers, what a load of bullshit the Turians fed you through Saren.  How did you ever come to believe that?
Human Councilor 2: Yes, Shepard, it was obvious that the Turians were behind this all, we know how they operate.  And Saren, their top Spectre at the helm of the "sneak attack" on the Citadel...
Human COuncilor 3: It almost worked, they would've been able to step in a seize control, but we beat them to it.  But we needed the time to build up, they've been arming up as well, building dreadnaughts and the like.
Human Councilor 1: Yes, our fleets are almost ready, and we were going to use the Batarians to launch a second front, we've reached a compromise with them which will settle old debts between us.
Human Councilor 3: Yes, they were never to the true threat to humanity, not like the Turians have been since the beginning of our journey into the cosmos.
Human Councilor 1: And that whole problem in the Batarian system, you could've ruined it all Shepard, what were you....what do you mean the fleet was taken out in port, how did this happen?  But those bases are secret, how?
Human Councilor 3: Geth ships leading the charge, those Turian bastards, they were working with the Geth all along.  Just as we suspected.

I should have spent more time describing a sort of Maginot Line-ification along the Perseus Veil. Maybe I would have if I'd been on the project into the side quest stage.

The 9/11 analogy only takes it so far. The geth in this case were less like al-Qaeda and more like a rogue section of the Chinese army. The US can roll over small mideast countries looking for the people who screwed them, but they couldn't roll over China. The best they could do would be to surround them with a military cordon, attempt to diplomatically isolate them (inapplicable in the case of the geth; they've already diplomatically isolated themselves), and watch them reaaaal close.

Vigil spoke English (and was offline following ME1, which was convenient). And Shepherd theoretically still understands Protean, which means that Ilos becomes a massive tech cache of incredible value that s/he can personally unlock. Some of the info on the planet would probably relate to the Reapers.

I'm aware I'm picking holes in a space opera narrative, but it generally stems from the disconnect I get every time the Council acts like morons.

Uhh... okay, i'm sorry in this case, but the idea that the geth are China-sized force capable of giving the council races combined a run for money (which is what i'm getting from this analogy) ... well, the thought that there isn't any furious military buildup to prepare for further attacks from such powerful threat and/or people screaming bloody murder to get one going, that makes it even more impossible to accept, not less :ye_gods:

I mean, it's not like the council guys actually know it's a 'rogue section of the army' that have attacked them, because as you point out the geth don't return diplomatic calls and don't make their own. So as far as the council is aware, they got their Washington DC nuked out of the blue by the regular geth, and maybe managed to beat the attacking force but the active war with the geth is present and ongoing, with no way to tell how soon the next attack is coming, how big it will be and what's going to be the target.

With a prospect like that --"the Reds Chinese are coming!"-- there srsly should be lot of preparations going for it in the game background, very much of the sort they'd be doing for the "reaper" attack, i imagine. And really, it's not like the entire plot of ME2 wouldn't fit well together with that, with Shepard doing the same stuff but as regular Spectre work, investigating suspected 'geth attacks' on the colonies. With the bonus it'd avoid making the entire galaxy act like a bunch of morons just to accomodate the plot, which is how it unfortunately feels now ;/

(and like Triax said, it's not like such setting couldn't be neutralized easily enough at the start of ME3, to whatever degree was deemed suitable)

I'm raging as fuck at this, too when I realized all the killed party members in DAO came back to life in the second one because the devs 'wants it that way.' Also, the TOR lore rape 'No, Revan was mindwiped. *TWICE* by the JEDI, and now by the Sith Artifact. This shit is just a bad fanfic. Oh let's not forget Kreia, the only woman in Star Wars galaxy who hated the force for what it is...SHE WAS CONTROLLED BY A SITH ARTIFACT TOO. GAHHHH, I hope ME3 doesn't allow this sort of dumbfuckery. It's the last game in the trilogy. Let Shepard go out with dignity.

Tmp,

In ME2, there are several news items about Council military buildups -- the Turians are effectively getting a ton more power, building far more dreadnoughts, etc. Two years isn't a lot of time to even rebuild what they lost, much less expand.

I think there's an item about the Asari rebuilding the Destiny Whatmakecallit to twice it's former size.

By that logic, he should still be fighting an uphill battle in ME3, since I didn't see anything at the end of ME2 nor its DLC, that suggests the council or Citadel races are meanwhile thinking otherwise. And since
It conveniently loses orbit and gets lost in the thick planet's atmosphere after you shot up its core.

Yeah the ambient news broadcast things are full of stuff like that. Pretty sure there was also mention of such things in the daily news delivered via the Cerberus network at the launch screen.

I've said it before, but BioWare don't do good stories / narratives, they do good characters. This is possibly because (as Stormwaltz has shown) that the stories might undergo sudden, wide ranging revisions that have to be done quickly to meet development timelines. This doesn't leave much time for the continuity police to go through it and check that the new narrative doesn't leave a lot of dangling threads that players can pick at.

The other issue is that BioWare gives players some freedom within games, but catering to that freedom over several games is just too difficult / expensive. It's probably one of the reasons that BioWare track online stats so closely - they want to make story options / ramifications that cover 80% of the base rather than spending the money to develop content less than 5% will ever see. I still have to play through ME2 with my xenophobic renegade, but I'm interested to see how Wrex reacts to her given that she never let him on the ship.

I was actually pretty interested in the gift system -- and the conversation options -- with the characters in DA. They did a really good job with the characters, and they were pretty consistent on what would give and lose rep (or whatever it was called) in conversations.

Morrigan took me a bit to get ahold of, until I realized she was so sensitive about her personal freedom that even hinting at something that sounded like you making a choice for her (or limiting her choices) would piss her the fuck off. Any time where I have to sit down and actually think about the characters personalities -- and they're consistent enough to actually understand -- is a pretty good job, you know?

Not a lot of games offer that.

Except that still does not make a whole lot of sense. If a hostile nation launches a huge warship at the center of your civilization in basically a weapon of mass destruction type attack you don't just sit their guarding the borders going we shall watch them close. That would pretty much be world war 3 time no matter how big they are they have already demonstrated their hostility in a massive way letting them sit and gather forces rebuild said death ship again is stupidity of an epic nature.

Yeah, except for the plot device of "the geth are being controlled / have been reprogrammed by the Reapers, so it's not their fault, so they shouldn't be annihilated."

Well, there's also the fact that:

1) The Geth came out of fucking nowhere (they'd been doing jack shit for 200 years)
2) The Geth blew apart the Citadel fleet, the biggest in the Galaxy.
3) Only the mass human fleet coming through + Normandy meant anything was left.

Which means that in the two years since ME1, they'd be lucky to gear back up to pre-Sovereign levels. The game kinda hinted around that the Citadel races fleets were stretched thinly as it was, even without the Geth as an enemy. There was that whole weird-ass shit about the relative fleet sizes, which meant everyone was restricted to whatever the Asari decided to build....

And humans were given the colonization rights they had because the Citadel wanted humans to handle watching the Geth and dealing with Batarians and basically the whole thing was a ploy to take pressure off the Citadel races and let the humans deal with the headaches.

I don't find it all that jarring that the Council would decide that the problem was just the Geth, and that other than rebuilding they didn't need to do anything else. Because other than trying to rebuild, they didn't have the time or money for much else. Not without slamming down every panic button they had, and what politician wants to admit to Armageddon?

Especially if you have to admit the humans prevented it. Even replacing the Council with humans, you'd have the same problem -- Humanity would be stretched just as damn thin and couldn't do anything more without full mobilization, and politically -- the Council got offed, Humans took over, and now they want to claim war is coming?

Good luck getting the Turians, Asari, and Salarians to buy that.

Yeah the whole "Ah yes, 'Reapers'" thing was like. The least of my issues with some of the story stuff in ME2.

I didn't really get such impression, at least not in the sense any of that was tied to the expected geth/"reapers" invasion -- perhaps because i had the Council explicitly insist both in my face and to general public that there's absolutely no need for such a buildup, so i interpreted these news pieces as simple act of restoring what was lost in the Citadel attack (i don't remember hearing about the Turian bit, is that maybe something that happens if you establish the earth as new power in ME, and in reaction to that?) Plus, Stormwaltz also didn't mention such buildup specifically for the geth/"reapers" was actually taking place? Just the border patrols etc.

Yeah, but it's not something you know is going to happen in advance, when you learn about its existence and/or location. So when that bit of revelation happens you'd imagine at least some Shepards would be very eager to pass that info to the Council (in fact, i'd expect that option even for the originally planned version of that mission because srsly, just because TIM says "Shepard, my shit broke again, go and fix it nao" doesn't mean Shepard is actually willing to blindly obey)

The derelict reaper mission - and the side-mission with the perfectly functional prothean beacon - are the two parts of ME2's plot that I have the hardest time buying.  I can't understand any reason why a Shepard that is only going along with TIM because she HAS to and no one else will help would do anything other than page the Council, the Alliance, and anyone else she can damn well get the attention of as soon as she learns the location of the derelict reaper - all before even considering landing on the thing.  Granted, it may not have helped (it goes down anyway, the short time studying it was 'inconclusive' or something) but not even trying to inform anyone is one of the biggest moments in the game where it just doesn't make sense to me.

Of course, Shepard has ever been very rational when it comes to dealing with the Council as far as the reaper thing is concerned.  From Shepard's side, the Council's viewpoint should appear pretty rational - they want more proof, and you haven't been able to give them much, at least during ME1.  All the times in ME1 where Shepard insists that "reapers are real, TRUST ME!" make me roll my eyes at Shepard because really, you don't expect a government that rules over trillions or quadrillions of sentients to mobilize their entire military on the word of anyone, even the most trusted person ever, much less the rookie.  Of course, some people on the council *cough* Turian *cough* have continually tried to antagonize Shepard intentionally, but the Asari has always been the rational one, and so has the Salarian to a considerable degree.

Besides, I'm not exactly sure what people would expect the council to do even if they fully supported Shepard and believed in the reapers.  Ok, yeah, they're out there.  Now what?  Unless they're going to send the whole galaxy into wartime mode where as much production is converted to military purposes as possible - which the public simply wouldn't understand or accept without an obvious enemy - the only thing they can do is rebuild reasonable levels of military and stock up resources for the impending battle.  Nothing that happened in ME2 seemed to call for action from the Council, because any such action would be unproductive.  Sending even a few ships to investigate the Terminus Systems may have caused political trouble and war that they simply could not afford if they wanted to prepare their fleet for the real threat. 

Additionally, I have never seen one hint of evidence that anyone, even Shepard, has seen, to suggest the Reapers are going to be a threat within a few years, much less a human lifetime.  Why?  Because as far as we know, we shut down their way back into the galaxy and now they have to travel here slowly from who knows how far away, a journey that could reasonably take decades or centuries without the Citadel mass relay being open for them to arrive in.  Imagine if they did go into full military mobilization, churning out thousands of warships, and then...nothing.  For half a millenium.  Nothing.  Finally, five hundred years later, the reaper fleet arrives.  From the point of view of Shepard and the Council, that is not only possible, but it seems to be logical and probable.

In ME3, I would really love to learn that the Council has taken the reaper issue seriously since the attack on the Citadel, they've just been doing it in secret and in the background, shoring up the military and doing whatever research they have been able to in order to build weapons to combat this threat.  And they didn't tell Shepard because, well, Shepard has shown herself to be pretty unstable even when she's right, so it might be a good idea to keep her a little distant from this.  There's plenty of ways to still make them seem like reasonable, intelligent leaders that show some caution rather than abject stupidity (by ignoring even the possibility of a threat) or utter recklessness (by going into full mobilization mode with no further information on what the threat is or when it's going to happen).

Well if you're thinking in terms of rational decisions, the Reapers make a huge tactical mistake:  they all pile into the Solar System to kill the Earth.  Supernova the Sun and the rest of the galaxy wins the war.

If someone has a weapon that can make suns go supernova, the rest of the universe is screwed anyway.

Plot Shield > supernova, though.

Will probably take Shepard going up the individual Reapers' rectum exhaust port and navigating the maze linear twisty passages all way to the self-destruct button.

Nah, Shephard's going to do it Kirk style, and defeat the cold logic of the reaper AI with earnest human emotion.

Hmm, so the Reaper AI as the next love interest?

I KNOW YOU FEEL THIS. :why_so_serious:

ASSUMING CONTROL

<funk music starts playing>

This has been thought of.  Be afraid, be very afraid  :ye_gods:

http://lordess-alicia.deviantart.com/art/Diplomacy-251297727?q=boost%3Apopular+mass+effect+wrex+shepard&qo=123

This.

I'd really appreciate it to see the Council say, "Our own independent investigations found out evidence of the Reapers as well, and we've been preparing contingency plans ever since. We didn't tell you because, well, why the hell would we tell a Cerebus-linked operative anything and because it is above your pay grade anyway."

However, such an approach removes some player agency, so I expect Shepherd to get a big "I TOLD YOU SO" scene, just to prove that Shepherd is always right.

I haven't played The Arrival, so don't know how that changes things.

Not at all. It sets the background for an event referenced in the beginning of ME3, but does remove any choice or ambiguity about it at its end. At most, the player choice in that mission will gather a casual mention in ME3.

Well, I sure know what world I won't save in ME3.  :why_so_serious:

The Collector's Edition: lots and lots of stuff.

Honest. An amazing amount of sheer STUFF, both in-game and out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXMzRLI9yrg

Or.... usual mix of real world tat and in game cheat mode gear, plus it seems to imply an extra companion, which I would have been mildly irritated by in the past.

I wonder if they're overhauling the reload system again this time.

That art book looks neat :heart:

Hastrom.

(http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20091014202723/andromeda/images/8/8c/Novabombe.jpg)

http://andromeda.wikia.com/wiki/Nova_bomb

Great show until it turned into The Kevin Sorbo Hour, Starring Kevin Sorbo!

Mass Effect Marathon 2, a fund raiser for Child's Play, begins at 12:01 AM. They'll be playing the games until midnight Sunday - repeatedly if they finish early.

If you were planning to donate to Child's Play, please considering doing so through them. And if you donate to ME Marathon, please consider sponsoring Legion (purely as a gesture in support of equal rights for all sapients, regardless of their biology or lack thereof).

www.memarathon.com

Causing a supernova would eradicate all life in a radius of several thousand lightyears, due to such intense gamma radiation.

Eh.  Gamma ray bursts are supposedly created as beams, so not all planets in a radius would be affected (only those above / below the poles of the star).  And, they are created by stars massive enough to go supernova naturally and collapse into black holes or neutron stars, so it's possible that aiming this weapon at a regular-sized sun would collapse the sun but not produce the gamma ray burst.

And it would create a planet of hulk monsters!  :drill:

Umm.  Only massive stars or binary star systems can go nova or supernova.

Also, you may rest assured that a star going supernova will emit all sorts of radiation in all directions, the gamma emmisions from the remnant following after might be directional, but by then nobody would give a fuck.

Haestrom is prematurely aging into a red giant. It's not going to explode.

Excessive simplification: a star is a sustained fusion explosion that exists in balance with an "implosive" force of gravity. Dark energy effectively reduces mass, and hence gravity. The explosive force starts to "win," and the star swells.

I'm sure that in real life there would be other repercussions I didn't think of, but this was as far as I was interested in pursuing the matter.

This was me trying to logic out someone else's extremely boneheaded idea.

Dark energy has mass, it's why people think it probably exists. :awesome_for_real:

I think you're confusing Mass Effect universe dark energy http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Element_Zero (http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Element_Zero) with real world dark matter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter) Sheepster.

I'm just being a smartass, ignore me.

Is this out yet?


It isn't out yet, is it.  :heartbreak:

You'll have to get your fix somewhere else Sjofn!

God dammit don't make me play DA:O again.

Is DA:O so much better than DA2?

Nah, I like them both, it's just been longer since I've played DA:O and I had an odd twinge of "maybe I should play that again" the other day. It's also the Bioware game I have spent the most time with.


It ... it was a lot.

 :oh_i_see:

I see the part of Rasix is being played by Fordel today.  :why_so_serious:

It's his day off.

Totally different games in my opinion. DA2 I finished in a couple of weeks, and quite enjoyed it. Probably put around 40 hours in. Never really touched it again though.

DAO, I've restarted about seven times, made it through three of the first four "planets" three times, never completed the Dwarven area. Probably put close to 100 hours in, yet never finished the game. I attribute that to mostly loving the origin stories, but finding things slogged down the farther I got.

new trailer out (http://www.gametrailers.com/video/vga-2011-mass-effect/724831)

(see a boogeyman of the series failing to cope with an oversized bug a single human had murdered single-handedly and repeatedly both on foot and in vehicle with awful handling)

That was probably 10x the size of the ones we've seen before.

That reaper is way than 10x bigger than Shepard or Mako, too  :why_so_serious:

(hard to say how big the older bugs really are. They seem to spring up 3-4 stories high, but look like most is still underground when they do that)

That's a terrible trailer. Most of it is a barrage of images that make no sense out of context. The rest reduces Mass Effect from it's own unique bird to a cheeseball-SF version of Modern Warfare.

WTH, guys? WTH?

Mass Effect has always been cheeseball SF with strong FPS elements...

FPS are hot and focus-test better with the 16-24 demographic?   :awesome_for_real: :heartbreak:

Blowing those things up was the best part of Halo 3.

From that video I've learned that the Reapers aren't that big a threat when a thresher maw can take one of their world killers.

I don't understand what Bioware was trying to do.  If they are trying to do CoD: ME then why show the thresher?  Show up close combat, not Shepard running for his life while fighters and a monster fight for him.

In short, it really cheapens the Reapers.

(http://www.abload.de/img/megif54ejio.gif)

BioWare's trailers are always shitty in that way, though. DA:O and DA2 both had X-TREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEME marketing, which for DA:O in particular was sort of hilarious once you actually played the game.

Mass Effect 3: the "Reapers"

Also

(http://www.abload.de/img/megifagain2y9lvo.gif)

What disturbs me about what was shown is it seemed to dramatically increase the Modern Warfare / Uncharted 3 element of "this level is a scripted sequence set up to show off our level art and effects, please keep your avatar on the rail at all times." I hope that's an illusion based on editing choices.

And when I left it, Mass Effect still had a underpinning of what I called "drywall" SF. It seemed hard, so long as you didn't lean on it to heavily. I spent six months hashing out the technical base of the IP with the leads and the other writers to balance realism, game mechanical needs, and cinematic opportunities.

We knew it was headed that way with ME2. Much as I loved it, the rails were very visible.

There's still a way to save it (http://youtubedoubler.com/?video1=q10u2SIQ4pw&start1=14&video2=2LnK8b_jk8w&start2=0).

I'm nearly certain that's going to turn out to be some singular super thresher maw.

That Wrex raised from a pup. He orphaned it when he killed its mother during his Rite.

Another attempt at a bot?

Newegg is allowing you to preorder for $48 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?SID=u0t0f0fp66914dd0c0s701&AID=10440897&PID=1225267&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-cables-_-na-_-na&Item=N82E16874105715) using the promocode EMCYTZT1034

*edit* I believe that works for the console versions too.

I was about to say "Steam or Nothing" then I remembered EA is being derpy and this will probably be Origin-only.   Guess it's "or nothing" then.   Thanks for the link anywho.

I suspect that was all discarded. Unless you're sitting in the meetings, beating people over the head with it, no one cares.

Which is a real shame, since a consistent world is critical for any other media spinoffs such as books/side games in the game world.

Ran across some news items about ME3 requiring Origin, for activation and runtime. Well, how fucking surprising. And apparently, it messes with Windows permissions and scans your shit.

Well, cue me being fucking surprised.

Not that I was going to play this (didn't play two, I just don't seem to click with Bioware games); but that Origin stuff is bullshit.

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/323/index/8975536 (http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/323/index/8975536)

So basically it seems that ME3 is going to require Origin exactly the same way Skyrim requires Steam.  A one time online activation, no install limiit and no need for an internet connection unless you're playing the multi-player part.

I don't see much to be indignant about here.

I don't care.  Origin can DIAF. 

Buy it. And download a torrent.  :awesome_for_real:

I would rather have my money go to a company that actually cares:

A) About it's employees
B) About it's customers
C) About the PC gaming industry

...than a leeching corporate slob that EA is.  I don't care how much they 'claim' to clean up or polish Origin.  It's not just about how EA has a history of pants-on-head antics with electronic distribution.  It's about EA and their drive for money.  By buying through Steam, at least some of that money goes to Valve to keep things afloat.


FTFY   :grin:

Other than Origin being a buggy piece of shit that does everything Steam does only worse, yeah, nothing worth worrying about.  :why_so_serious:

I bought BF3, run it fine at home, but for some reason, cannot get Origin to download or patch jack and shit on my work machine. Attempts to get help on their official help me forums have so far run into the great wall of fucking silence. In short, the Origin people are cunts who are pissed off at paying Steam for providing a good service, so want to punish their fans with a shittastic service that they get all the revenue from. Fuckers.

I would be sort of surprised if your workplace had the ports open that Origin needs, being as it is a workplace. But, then again, I don't know anything about where you work.

Well, the weirdest part is that the BF3 beta worked just fine with Origin, no changes required, no ports needed opening. Then I get the retail game and zip. I can't even download Dragon Age 1 or 2 that I bought during the Christmas sale. I've tried with and without the firewall, nada.

That is one long thread... 221 pages.

I guess I should thank EA for making it easier for me to boycott them without having to do anything about it, since I only really buy games through steam.

Because EA is the sort of entity I trust to keep their word or honesty.

From reading some of that thread the main reasons, that have some basis in a reality I recognise, are:

1. The Origin client is willing to have a look around your system for information not directly relevant to its purpose. They've already been dinged for this in Germany and no one really trusts EA not to do it again or control their use of the information.

2. They're not a relatively neutral vendor in the way that steam is and a multitude of producer specific on-line shops fragments and weakens the PC platform.

3. They're exclusive in that they will not allow their product to be sold on steam as well as their own shop allowing purchasers to make their own decision. They could certainly come to an agreement with steam if they cared to.

None of this is illegal (where the first point is they will adhere to the letter of the law), EA is well within their rights to do it, but none of it works in the consumers favor. 2-3 applies to Blizzard's shop as well though. I would expect it to continue though, for these companies the cost of setting up a web-shop is almost certainly less than the lure of keeping every cent for themselves.

I was also wrong about the thread length. It got to 221 pages before they locked it and started another thread to continue the argument.

It only just occurred to me tonight in conversation about ME that most of the characters have fairly big daddy problems.  Miranda, Jacob, Jack, Tali, Liara, Garrus, Wrex, and Grunt all have fathers (or mother/fathers in Liara's case) who are estranged, insane, dickbags, dead, or all of the above.  Thane is a walking daddy issue for his idiot kid.  And Shepard is daddyless.

Hm, the spacer background Shepards may only talk to Mom, but I don't think it indicated either way about his/her dad being dead or whatever?

I'm not sure I'd say Jacob has daddy issues exactly. I mean yes, his mission revolved around his father but it mostly seemed to stress that even though his dad HAD issues, and indeed is a giant douchebag now, that Jacob isn't messed up by it. So I'm not sure it counts? Basically, Jacob is too boring to have daddy issues.

What daddy issues does Liara have?

Liara's dad isn't an off-worlder and that's considered weird and perverted, right?

Liara has two mommies.

But that doesn't make it a specific daddy issues sort of thing. "Daddy issues" generally invokes the stupid "I have to be super perfect so my aloof father will love me and/or wish he loved me BEFORE" thing, not "any problem, ever, that vaguely might involve someone's father." Tali has daddy issues. Miranda has daddy issues. Thane caused daddy issues for his son. Liara has weird asari racism issues.

And Grunt doesn't have daddy issues. He could not possibly give less of a fuck about what his "father" would think about him.

Liara's mommy/daddy tried to help genocide the galaxy?  I figured that would probably count.  And as long as I'm thinking about Asari mommy/daddies, Samara and her relationship with her kid is pretty twisted too.  For his part, most every bit of dialogue where Jacob is talking about his life involves bringing up his dad.  And Grunt's doing his utmost to live up to that whole 'ultimate Krogan' thing that the scientist was making him for, though whether he's doing so for motives other than the typical Krogan desire to be a badass is unclear.

Yes, Liara's mom (the bartender was the 'father'  :why_so_serious:) was a bad guy in ME1, but Liara doesn't have issues from it. She isn't driven to be perfectly perfect so her mother's sins are forgiven, or so her absentee father would be proud of her, or whatever. She just had a shitty mom (who was reaper'd, which mitigates it somewhat), that doesn't automatically equal "daddy issues."

Miranda or Tali are much more typical "daddy issues" characters. Miranda has her perfection hang ups, but she seems pretty driven to get to a point where her daddy will be SO SORRY he didn't love her, take that you bastard! Tali also tries to be the perfect admiral's daughter, in the hopes daddy will love her. Those are major driving forces in why those two do the things they do, act the way they do. Jacob, on the other hand, will bring up his father, but nothing he does is to prove himself to daddy or anything like that. His arc with his father is more "Shit, he's alive? He IS my father, I should. Like. Check this out." Then he turns out to be a cock, and the whole thing is basically dropped, because Jacob was over any potential father issues he had ages ago. The deepest thing he has to say about it is essentially "Yeah, that kinda sucked. Oh well." A far cry from Miranda's EVERYTHING I DO IS TAINTED BY DADDY thing.

And as for Grunt, like I said, he didn't give a fuck about Okeer. At all. He didn't give a shit about being the perfect krogan, either, until he actually had a clan or anything worth fighting for. His motivations don't have much to do with Okeer. He exists because of Okeer, but that's about where it ends for Grunt.

ME2 has an issue in that the personal story arcs happen, then they are barely mentioned again. I know that the idea was those arcs help rid the characters of some kind of baggage, but in a lot of cases you'd suggest it would add to them (e.g. Jacob's dad has set up a rape camp).


Liara can help you kill her mother and then gets over it relatively quickly. (I know, I know - mind control - but a little more emotion would have been appropriate.)

But yes, now that you mention it, there are a lot of ME2 characters who have parent / child issues.

It's deep and meaningful adult writing, duh.

Grunt? What are you guys talking about?





OH! You mean that piece of Krogan trash I never took out of storage and if I had I would have jettisoned into space? That thing is called Grunt? Who knew!

Man I love my version of Shepard. :heart:

You actively hate fun.  :why_so_serious:

I played ME1 with my actively-alien-intolerant Shepherd and Wrex was the only character I could actually keep off my ship.

Keep meaning to start ME2 with the same character. Grunt stays in the box, Legion is shipped off as parts and no non-human will get a loyalty mission completed (and even the human loyalty missions will be done under extreme sufferance).

How could you hate Grunt? you could've taught him many things. Many good, sweet things.

(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lIEH5DIpA0Q/TvCuHNRdOfI/AAAAAAAAAXM/bzBI5KZ0tYs/s1600/wrexsheppard.jpg)

Edit by Trippy: View at your own risk, NSFW

 :ye_gods:

Oh Dear God.

I may need to scrub the memory centers of my brain after that one.

I'll swim against the stream and say I like the possibility shown in the artful drawing. It invokes confusing but pleasant feelings!

That particular artist had done more drawings on that subject, incidentally.

The more you know...

(and yeah, when playing ME2 my general impression was that majority of those personal quests revolved around dealing with family members in one way or another. To the point in started to feel repetitive, in a way)

In other news, there's a set of Mass Effect Skylanders figures (http://www.bigbadtoystore.com/bbts/product.aspx?product=DCC11280&mode=retail) rolling out this summer.

The catch?

Each one contains a code for Mass Effect 3 DLC, exclusive to North America, and only for the PC and 360. It will cost somewhere in the $130 range to obtain this DLC. Have fun!

Every announcement seems to make it easier to ignore this game.
Who'd have thought EA would overreach on the DLC grab-bag! I'm shocked!  :why_so_serious:

I'm always surprised at the amount of sleep you guys apparently lose over DLC.

Because new announcements for this game have almost no upside.  (The notable exception would be patching in the gay.)

It's ME3.  It'll probably be brilliant and we knew that much before it was even officially announced.

E: Less fanboyishly, if you didn't like the first two very much, announcing a radical departure from those two games would be a good thing.

I'll buy the Miranda figure.

(http://www.halolz.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/halolz-dot-com-masseffect2-datasseffect.jpg)

This will almost certainly be cheat mode gear DLC, not actual content DLC that you might care about.

It depends on what it is and if anyone outside of the specified areas can get it.

pirate bay will fix it.

Because it reminds me that I'm poor and a 2nd class player who simply has to trudge through shit tuned for DLC items rather than paying to win.

Luckily up to now it was tuned for normal players and DLC items were a "put coins here to win" option.

But yes, the possibility for it to be the other way round is certainly here.

ME2 felt fine to me without DLC weapons...shit, the most broken weapon in the game to me was the awesome assault rifle you get from the Collector ship. Hits hard, has a mile-deep clip, tons of ammo capacity.

Wait, was the nuke gun a DLC item? I know the arc gun and freeze gun were "DLC" items but they sucked generally.

Nuke gun was not DLC I am pretty sure.

Useless trivia: The Cain was not (as many assume) named after the biblical figure. It was named for Fallout designer Tim Cain.

<--- Guy who named the Cain

I don't think I used any DLC weapon for more than lulz.  I picked up the machinegun and never looked back.

Ignoring the ridiculous leaked plot spoilers (that Joker storyline? Really?) it seems that BiowarEA has actually made some radical departures. For example, the RPG side is now basically Babby's First Cover-Based Shooter with minimal actual RPG mechanics, and there is an alternative mode: Story mode. This means your combat is one fraction away from being unloseable just so people can get to the *gigglesquee* parts quicker.

I don't really see the issue with storymode, frankly. You don't have to use it, so who gives a shit?

"Story mode" was discussed at least as far back as ME2. As the game required increasing FPS skills to complete, the employees who liked playing RPGs and not shooters got increasingly vocal about how they (and by extension BioWare's core audience of non-twitch gamers) were being marginalized. Many, many complaints along the lines of, "I want to play our game, but I can't."

One of the editors - an enthusiastic gamer but a complete novice with shooters - was used to test ME2's difficulty for casual players. When she died multiple times in the tutorial (a feat the designers had convinced themselves was impossible), she attracted a crowd of very unhappy looking senior designers behind her, jotting down notes on all the things that tripped her up.

From all those changes one reads about in ME3, story mode is the only good one. I don't see what anybodies problem could be with it since its entirely optional. Its like being annoyed that a game has different difficulty levels.

How did they respond? Did they change anything?

I don't remember what specifically changed, but yes - it underwent another round of redesign. I think the design assumptions of the "Easy" difficulty were also reviewed.

You should write a book of anecdotes.  It'd sell to about three people, but we'd enjoy it immensely.

Because when I want to play a game, I want to play a game. As opposed to, you know, trudging through a linear corridor of plot while the game plays itself between the cutscenes and dialog trees. If Bioware are so certain that their story is that good that the gameplay itself doesn't actually matter, why haven't they turned it into a TV series or a film or a novel or a comic book or whatever?

Hell, it's Squaresoft all over again. Does anyone really want FFXIII IN SPACE?

You didn't answer Sjofn's question.  Storymode is optional.  You don't have to use it. So why do you care?

Or is it just your usual "I hate everything with Bioware's name on it" routine?

I can't speak for Simond, but I was someone who really enjoyed ME1, warts and all. It could've done with some reduction in the absurd amount of loot and better area design, but it was pretty great. ME2 I enjoyed far more than I expected to, but that was entirely luck of the draw for the class I happened to pick (Vanguard) and less on the strength of the gameplay itself, as every other class I've played the game with couldn't get more than halfway through the story before I got sick of how clunky everything felt. The story I've enjoyed regardless, but in ME2 it became one of those "in spite of..." kinda deals. All I know is that if I'd paid $60 for ME2 instead of the $20 I paid four months later, I would have been incensed.

I was hoping ME3 was going to mark a return to some of the RPG mechanics from ME1 combined with the tighter area design and flow of gameplay from ME2, but instead it seems like they've been pared down even further and the bone thrown to the crowd who liked those RPG mechanics is Story Mode which, to me, feels patronizing and almost insulting in a way. No, I don't have to play Story Mode, but the other modes don't give me what I bought into Mass Effect for in the first place!

The problem with Story Mode is that it looks like trying to be all things to all people, which typically does not end well. I would also argue that if you have a mode where certain parts of the game are minimized or removed entirely it isn't clear what game you are trying to make and can show a lack of confidence in the overall design. (Which it sounds like is actually the case here)

At some point you have to say "Mass Effect is now a game for people who like shooting, and if you don't you should probably buy something else." Sure, you don't have to play it, but people at Bioware have to invest time into it, time that could be spent making the "real" game instead.

In theory having a mode where the action parts are minimized is not a terrible idea, but it does point to underlying issues and has a good potential to go wrong. And I don't think people who like ME's story but want the combat to be more RPG rather than twitch based are going to get that in "story mode." How many people want ME3 without combat rather than ME3 with different, more traditional CPRG combat? I'm guessing not many.

I think the ME series is a rather mediocre FPS, but a decent RPG. I'd rather they kept and elaborated on the sandboxy elements (Exploring the galaxy in the Normandy, exploring planets in the Mako, finding stuff and side missions.) But ME2 went all linear FPS with cutscenes.  :sad:
It doesn't help that more diffuclty usually just means moar HPs and damage, which I find to be grindy and unfun.
At this point, I just want to see how the story turns out, and I'm going to buy ME3 out of momentum, and not any excitment at the game aspect of it.

Having clicked on this thread for the first time today, I am now full of regret.

Yeah I've been avoiding this thread so can someone just bottom line this for me, is it going to suck?  Is it going to be as bad as the "Dragon Age 1 is awesome" to "wtf is this mess Dragon Age 2" transition?  Is bioware EA a confirmed lost cause now?

I cannot fathom how this could be possible unless the editor was someone's grandmother.

Careful; pointing out that DA2 isn't actually a very good game gets you yelled at here.

I wonder if it was Sheryl Chee?
(http://i.imgur.com/EXjJw.jpg)

Bitch, please.



So basically the objection to story mode is "I don't like it exists, because I don't see the point." Clearly all games should come with one difficulty setting, tuned precisely to me, and that's it. Because that's all story mode is.

Designing three gameplay modes means that by definition each will receive less work and polish than if they'd just picked out and run with it.

Ohh, this again.  Yay.  SWTOR's release is emboldening the anti-Bioware trolls.

..

Merril is adorable.

Really. You're really going to argue about difficulty modes? That's some pretty desperate trolling.

So reading more up-to-date stuff apparently "story mode" is just lower difficulty and "action mode" just flips an automatic dialog option that can be flipped at any time via in game menus. Seems like awkward obfuscation if that is really all there is to them. Like people find the idea of difficulty levels confusing but "story mode" is somehow more understandable?

 :headscratch: 

 :headscratch:

 :facepalm:

I think it's less "more understandable" and more "you feel like less of a lame-o playing 'story mode' than 'easy mode.'"

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1143749/Deus%20Ex%20Story%20Mode.jpg)

But it doesn't sound like "action mode" maps to "harder."

A lot of games have started replacing "easy mode" with nicer-sounding things. I believe Catherine was another that did that. What's weird here is that "story mode" maps to easy difficulty but "action mode", rather than mapping to hard, maps to "pick dialog options for me" which has nothing at all to do with difficulty.

It sounds like they have a lot of options you can futz with and the three modes are just three different initial sets - except that the sets only differ from the baseline by one setting, but a different setting in each case...

It's pretty weird.

I also find it hard to believe that "pick dialog options for me" is important and popular enough to be promoted as one of three game modes.

IIRC the thought process behind that was covered earlier.  They're including it to try and draw-in more shooter fans who just want to blow shit up, ignoring that the word is already out there that ME is a "lame" RPG license.

Who knows, though.  I've got a co-worker who strongly dislikes things that aren't FPS and said Baldur's Gate bored him when he tried it. Maybe that mode would draw him in.

Which is why it was smart of them to do it.

Members of the gaming press are often terrible at video games. It's kind of weird. Like if you watch the quick looks at Giant Bomb you quickly realize that they are awful at most genres. Not only that but they often have very low understanding of most genres - in fighting games they are "button mashers" who don't understand the game mechanics at all for example.

You might figure that if you play enough games you would get pretty good at them and also understand them but I guess they play so many that none of it sinks it? I dunno. Seems a bit counter-intuitive.

Maybe if it rolled for a random one.  Commander Shepard is off her Aripiprazole.

Not mentioning the details (and don't mention the details btw), but is that leaked script of ME3 seriously true? Because goddamn it's fucking bad.

They might be an RTSer, or puzzle gamer, or simwargamer, or beat'em up player, or whatever.

Or they may not like FPSs, so have avoided them as titles.

It's good that BioWare used that kind of person in a user experience situation, because (and as Stormwaltz also mentions) a lot of designers aren't able to see where people can fail within the things they've built. That kind of user experience testing is probably the exception, not the rule though.

Most of yea have heard of the Yogscast by now right? Funny Minecraft videos and all that.


Ever watch them play a non-minecraft game? They're pretty bad at Minecraft itself, but they are god damned TERRIBLE at everything else. Painfully so.



Most of the gaming population is closer to their end of the spectrum of gaming skill/style then any game designer wants to face or admit.  :why_so_serious:

It's not like games are niche anymore.  They're something that many 'average' people play and their skillz are not to the level of ours.

I couldn't even finish DA1 myself

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85916/katawa_game_tester.png)

 :awesome_for_real: I thought TOR had good rep amongst disabled gamers (http://api.viglink.com/api/click?format=go&key=d26aa463ebba8cc5ad2f5d735aae0dae&loc=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rpgcodex.net%2Fforums%2Findex.php%3Fthreads%2Fbest-thread-ever-part-3.57009%2Fpage-215&v=1&libid=1327513269010&out=http%3A%2F%2Fkotaku.com%2F5878178%2Fdisabled-gamers-laud-the-old-republic-as-2011s-most-accessible-title&ref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rpgcodex.net%2Fforums%2Findex.php%3Fthreads%2Fbest-thread-ever-part-3.57009%2Fpage-216&title=Best%20Thread%20ever%20(Part%203)%20%7C%20Page%20215%20%7C%20rpg%20codex%20%3E%20still%20under%20development&txt=http%3A%2F%2Fkotaku.com%2F5878178%2Fdisabled-gamers-laud-the-old-republic-as-2011s-most-accessible-title&jsonp=vglnk_jsonp_13275374103501) or something?

I am living proof this is not the case in the slightest.  :why_so_serious:

Given the speed and viciousness which EA cracked down on it plus the frantic denials from Bioware saying "It's an early draft! Honest..." then all signs point to yes.

Hahahah, wow. Are you sure you weren't the only writer at Bioware that wasn't a hack Stormwaltz? Did they start putting something in the water?

Something I find fascinating is the number of people still differentiating between EA and bioware, as if bioware's output didn't change dramatically (for better or worse) after DAO and ME1, and as if they in some way operate as separate body corporates.

All the studios of the past I can think of received the same treatment until fully assimilated and dissolved into the different hierarchies of EA along with the retirement of the company logo.

Possibly I wasn't paying as much attention.

Bioware is doomed of course but it won't really be gone until the founders leave their positions at EA and they're forced to release a couple of truly awful games.  If they're lucky they'll last as long as Maxis did.

Not sure if green.  :|

Hah, no it wasn't green. I really do think that the worst effects of being taken over by EA haven't been felt yet at Bioware.  There are too many of the original staff still around. When EA makes itself obnoxious enough Zeschuk and Muzyka will take their millions of dollars and leave and that'll be the end.

I'm sure some would argue that EA has already forced them to release crappy, unfinished games.  I disagree.  I didn't like DA2 as much as DA1 but I still got like 3 playthroughs out of it.

I don't think the quality of the writing changed between DA:O and DA2 or ME1 and ME2 either. Remains to be seen with ME3 of course.

It's a knee-jerk reaction to say that's all EA's doing.  I'd say a bigger factor was Ohlen moving to the Austin team to do SWTOR given that he was the lead on most of Bioware's earlier stuff.  Beyond that, how many studios have had a consistently high quality output over a long period of time?  These things just change naturally as people come and go.

There seems to be some shift of focus between these respective titles, which resulted in more lukewarm final experience, to me -- if i had to dare a guess (based on various lead devs comments and whatnot) it's like they've convinced themselves (in part as result of feedback) that "companions is something we do really well, that's what our fans love so that's what they want/need more of first and foremost", and --combined with tighter schedules-- there's less attention paid to to how overall plot plays out as the result, which leaves said plot lacking. And their companions even with that extra attention aren't really that interesting to carry the game themselves.

The backchatter I was privy to suggested that some parts were reasonably current (at the time of the leak), and other parts were long-superseded drafts. I have no idea what was what. I didn't read the leaks myself, so I can't even venture a guess.

BioWare's development processes are collaborative and iterative. Nothing is good the first time. Nothing. Not the combat, not the dialogue, not the UI, not the plot. Over the weekend I found an ancient synopsis of Mass Effect 1 on my hard drive. I was one of the first 15 or so people on the team, it dated from when I got there. It was two pages, and while the basic shape of the final game was there, it was cheesy as hell. A lot more melodrama, a lot more Star Warsy prophesy and magic nonsense.

You sketch it out on paper, throw it into the shark tank of peer and lead review, and you knit the shreds back into something better, stronger, and faster. Repeat as necessary. And these days, I guess, you hope the internets don't dig up the corpses in your backyard.

In two months we can see how close the final product is. Personally I still hope to see the geth show up in a godawful powerful, singularity-chucking Dyson Sphere and save the Migrant Fleet from a Reaper attack. "The creators are under our protection. You will withdraw." (I too have urges to create melodrama...)


There might be something to that. I remember James as the harshest critic of my work. He definitely had a style he preferred, and he was more amenable to excessively complicated plots (there's a legend about him sealing himself in his office for a week with a sign on the door saying something to the effect of, "Yes, Jaheira's romance is broken. Don't bother me, I'm fixing it"). When my early DA stuff went to him for review I'd be sweating, and when he liked it I didn't quite believe it.

Of course, this may have just been tough love to quickly break me into the house style.

Well we all know how that one ended up!  :awesome_for_real:

I think there was a definite change in tone. If I had to describe it, ME1 was sci-fi with some action in it, and ME2 was action with some sci-fi in it.

I think that's just a matter of them having gotten all the universe background exposition out of the way in 1.

(http://i.imgur.com/EpJ95.gif)

Whatever, Spelljammer-lover.

I just saw some pictures from the ME3 artbook and it confirmed something I heard. Ahahahahah, it's so bad. It's so, so bad. Literally execute the writers or the executives or whatever responsible.

(http://i.imgur.com/QCGXz.jpg)

E: I would pay real money for Obsidian to make a Spelljammer RPG.

There is possibly an issue with BioWare diluting the main story with too many companions. Especially companions with storylines that don't quite fit with the main narrative.

There's also perhaps a problem of BioWare adhering too much to a house style and not enough in the way of 'new voices' coming through.

But we'll see when ME3 comes out how well BioWare finishes what they started.

Can someone link to said "terrible plot" because while I loved 1 and 2, 2 started going in a direction I wasn't happyt with so 3 is a bargain purchase months away from release, so I don't mind spoiling myself.

http://forums.gamertheory.com/general-gaming-discussion/mass-effect-3-plot-details-leaked-(massive-spoilers-you-have-been-warned)/ (http://forums.gamertheory.com/general-gaming-discussion/mass-effect-3-plot-details-leaked-(massive-spoilers-you-have-been-warned)/)

Without you even saying it, I know exactly what it is. It is the worst.

Match made in heaven, I guess.

Black Isle/Obsidian games: Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale series, KOTOR2, Alpha Protocol, Fallout: New Vegas. So yeah, it'd be awesome.

E: http://kotaku.com/5878284/mass-effect-will-set-a-record-for-most-expensive-dlc
I wonder how many people will buy these, use the code and throw the doll action figure away?

The best part of these figures is, supposedly the codes that come with them give randomized results. So even if you "catch them all" you aren't actually guaranteed to get all the DLC.

They've effectively attempted to implement RPG loot drops in RL, that you pay for with real money.

Wonder if it doesn't fall under lottery laws in some manner.

Not yet. Get your money now, then buy a senator to extend the haul.

Assuming you could get it to run for more than 45 seconds :heartbreak:.

KotOR2 was not awesome.  Black Isle, sure, but Obsidian not as much.

KOTOR2 was like 98% awesome. (And 2% non existent unfortunately.)

What he said. I was really pleased with K2 until the ending that didn't happen. Friday must have come early.

I remember Ingmar and I (I was watching him play through it, this was before I was capable of finishing that sort of RPG myself) both being completely baffled at how the whole thing completely came apart at the end. Very weird.

Oddly enough i found the broken ending quite fitting, given the nature of the protagonist and where the final actions take place (and what leads to them) It's like some sort of surreal "they're all dead or getting there and it's no longer real world" sequences that aren't too out of place for "epic story" finale.

Essentially, EA rolled up said "Yeah, you know how we said 'end of Q2 next year' for KOTOR2? Change of plan. Have it done by the holidays. Yes, I know that's only two months away".

EA wasn't involved.  You mean LucasArts.

Oops, yeah, I was thinking of everything Bioware's released in the last few years instead.  :awesome_for_real:

Bioware hasn't released anything even close to Obsidian levels of rushed out the door shittiness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hfvo5ueKJY8

Video 'revealing' the voice actors for Mass Effect 3.

Jessica fucking Chobot is a character on your ship. They even modeled her character after her.

I'm... FUCK. FUCK HER. WHY.

Who is Jessica Chobot and why should I care?

The nerds like her because of things like this:


I think she works/worked at IGN or something. I dunno.

ah, yes, per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Chobot

"Jessica Chobot (born Jessica Lynn Horn) is an American on-camera host and staff writer for IGN. She is best known for hosting the IGN shows IGN Strategize and Weekly Wood, which also runs on Xbox Live and used to present the IGN Daily Fix."

It isn't so much Jessica Chobot, as that Bioware/EA/whoever is trying to pander to nerds. Because as of now, she has the skankiest NPC in the game. All NPCs up until now where fully covered, including the table dancers in the bars. At most uncovered arms. With the exception of those romance scenes I guess. But then she comes along and gets to run around in a thin-strap minidress. So not obvious.

That picture of her licking a PSP went viral and she got into the industry because of it. Y'know, proper credentials.

Can we take a moment to admire Keith David's shirt?

She is simply dressed all proper to take care of your fish.

Firstly, it can't be worse than creepy-square-faced Felicia Day.  Secondly, that Vega guy doesn't seem so bad now.

Thirdly, all Non's raging reminded me of is the kit car episode of Top Gear where Clarkson says something along the lines of, "We three are extremely well qualified for this as I trained as a local newspaper reporter, Hammond as a local radio DJ, and James as a pianist."

Supposedly her character is some sort of news reporter.

as seen on the official forums:


 :grin:

IGN. Really. An IGN show host is somehow a voice actor for a video game. Really? REALLY? I weep.

Emily Wong already escaped!

Well, shit. That calls for a DLC.

Licking things *is* one of the job requirements:

Site NSFW

Jack.

Oh right, forgot. Intentionally.

Anyway, here's another fun one, which I somehow missed back when the story leaked:
  :uhrr:

Beyond Jack this is just taking the Body Paint pandering of ME2 at E3 and tossing it in game.  Gamers like to be pandered to, we pay money for all sort of jiggly bits and ridiculous outfits.  You just happen to take offense to this one because for some reason this woman triggers nerd rage in large portions of the internet populous.

I don't know who she is and don't care.

I've always found the sselective geek obsession with Liara annoying.

Comments:

You make it sound like they actualy feel a need to stick within the canoniacal/technological framework you helped create. You don't really believe that do you?

"Let's give Edi boobs!"
"We can't sir, it would break all the rules established by canon in the first two games!"
"Screw that - boobs! Nerds love boobs!"

Ok, maybe its not that bad. And we do actualy love boobs.

RE: EDI

RE: EDI

RE: EDI

She is, fully functional.

RE: EDI

Back to shameless nerd baiting for a moment, looks it goes a step further, too

Chobot's character one of the romance options (http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/720362/mass-effect-3-jessica-chobot-talks-romance/)

have to say finding it personally a step right into the "ugh" zone.

I've never heard of this chick, so I guess I don't really see why I should get all pissed off. I'll judge it on execution.

I'm not familiar with her either, so similar to how Felicia Day's lookalike was put in Dragon Age DLC this mostly makes me wonder what's the developers' opinion on the strength of their game, if they feel the need for such marketing gimmick. To some extent there's also  :uhrr: at the Blizzard-like A POP CULTURE REFERENCE SO WE CAN HAVE A POP CULTURE REFERENCE that i feel dillutes the focus/writing.

Making such lookalike of actual person though when they're virtually fuckable by the player's AV, can't help but /facepalm and go "Really, BioWare?" at it. Although i suppose that ship has already sailed with Yvonne Strahowski in ME2...

Making the character look like the voice actor isn't really tremendously odd, I don't think. They've definitely done it with ones where you wouldn't really call it pandering as well - the Illusive Man, for example. Some others I'm less sure about but seem possible.

I think it's practiced (though not too frequently, yet) but odd to me since it's willingly giving up on one of the advantages games have over movies -- being able to fully control/customize appearance of the cast. And because these characters could just as easily look entirely different, it feels like it's done pretty much for the sake of having a constant 4th wall breaking reminder, "hey look! hey look! hey look! it's this famous person you know from those movies, that provides the voice!"

... i'm just not a fan.

She probably licks the new EDI  :ye_gods:

I wonder if it provides some shortcuts for the animators?

She's got that Jersey look I hate. Also, her face in the game is...not attractive.

Welcome to pretty much all faces in ME?

Yeah, ME is a fucking hideous universe.

Exactly what I was thinking when watching that video and they covered Capt. Mohawk and Anderson. "Fuck, these faces are TERRIBLE.  I don't remember them all being this just.. godawful.."

Then I remembered so many of the folks you interact with is are alien and slip past the UV because of it.

I don't notice it so much on my first playthroughs because they're always on the Xbox and on my tv a decent distance away from me, but when they go on sale on Steam and I mess around with them on the PC the faces (Anderson is like Prime Example #1) are really pretty  :ye_gods:.

Well I mean Shepherd the dude doesn't look abnormal. Granted, pretty much everything about Miranda's facial model was terrible, and the hair was just...I mean it's like they intentionally made it terrible so you'd be forced to check out that body.

I used to think Anderson was THE ugliest man in the galaxy, but then we met Admiral Hackett.  :ye_gods: :ye_gods:

It appears Sergeant Brohawk is continuing the tradition too.

He's pretty fucking ugly too, yes.

(http://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/www.ign.com/17096/2011/03/Mass_effect_smile-255x300.jpg)

That picture gets me every time.  :why_so_serious:

Thing is, horrible, terrifying, serial killer-ish looking MANSHEP is still probably the best looking guy in the Mass Effect universe. My PigShep is ... not horrifying to look at, but still. And aside from Sally Shepard, my LadySheps are pretty painful too.

Ugly, ugly, ugly universe. No wonder the ladies swoon for Garrus, he's not that much weirder looking than the humans.  :why_so_serious:

Yup, the candy van frigate driver expression aside, Shepard ain't actually bad looking -- which is probably to be expected when he's face scanned professional model. But there's something in the combination of lighting, face animations (or sometimes lack thereof) and the materials used to render characters, that makes them feel off for the most part. Aliens don't trigger that uncanny valley with their lack of real world reference to compare them with, so they have easier time, i believe.

They got Kelly right. ;D

Considering that it's not a spoiler about Ashley/Kaidan being back (they're on some of the fucking promotional art), good god I'm glad I always killed Ashley. She looks awful this time around.

I disagree, she has weird fishlips and has Unfortunate Plastic Hair paired with Dead Eyes, just like everyone else. I mean, compared to everyone else, I guess she's about as pretty as they get in the ME universe, but she's not escaping the blanket "Mass Effect's Universe is Goddamn Ugly" statement.  :oh_i_see:

I also second the "good thing Ashley's dead in all my saves but one" sentiment. I hate what they did to her hair. Kaidan looks derpy, but that's our Kaidan.

In regards to ugly, I sure hope you guys are going to like new default female Shep. Given that she's all animu.

I don't know what the new default female Shepard is going to look like, because after all the facebook voting hoopla BioWare still has yet to make and release the trailer featuring her that they'd promised :why_so_serious:

The choices they put up during the vote all had the Final Fantasy look, except for the afro-american one. So yeah, fuck that.

--edit: Well, look here:

http://www.vg247.com/2011/08/18/femshep-fan-feedback-sought-again/

They bleached her skin.

I could not possibly care less about default Lady Shepard, just because I will never USE default Lady Shepard. Lady Shepard is a nice black lady FOREVER.

Not seeing it, myself.

To be mean: she looks like she's suffering chromosomal damage. That is not hot.

BioWare appears to be falling into the Dreamworks trap - thinking that we want the character model and the voice actor looking the same. They need to be following the Pixar model - use the best voice actor available and make the character model suit the character.

So use the voice of Lance Henriksen, but you can make his character look like whatever you want.

(http://i.imgur.com/b9Ayo.jpg)

Or making a callous business estimate that having "virtual celebrities" will widen the mass market appeal of the game and bring in more cash. In which case they'll also simplify the game and make it more adrenal / twitchy.

When they were working our Ash's design for ME1, I'd really wanted the character to be Hispanic. Casey put an image of Ash's model up his monitor next to a picture Salma Hayek, and pointed out to me that their skin tones were identical.

Yeah, and now she looks like a slightly mongoloid Helena Bonham-Carter.  :facepalm:

If that's the case then they need to aim higher than Jessica Chobot and Felicia Day. I can't imagine there are that many nerds out there going, "Well, I wasn't going to get ME3, but now that I hear I can keep Jessica Chobot on my ship and make her talk to me and pretend that she touches my wang, it's a definite buy!".

... and the nerds that do say that should not be allowed to buy the game on principle.

Bioware has gone to a weird place in a hurry. Virtual Felicia Day, Chobot fuck buddy, overpriced toys with DLC in them. It's like some cartoonish 80s caricature is driving the decisions. Like that ep of Futurama with the unfrozen 80s lawyer guy.

Or EA.

As long as they've not started branding totally unrelated studios as "Bioware wherever" I'm sure it'll be all right.  :why_so_serious:

Someone posted this on the SA forums, it involves what endings you'll be able to get.


Hope that's a lot of bullshit. I know that Bioware said otherwise in the past, but you know, promises are there to be broken.

I could actually see them thinking that's an innovative and exciting advance in integrating the game with the dynamic world of social media.

Hopefully that's a fake rumor though, or they have an attack of reason, because it sounds terrible.

If that stuff is true I'm not buying the game.  I have to assume that's bullshit, it's too stupid.

Note to people who haven't looked at that spoiler: it doesn't actually contain any info on the endings just a stupid (hopefully false) mechanic to unlock them.

On a completely different note, when Ashley's new ME3 face got revealed, I joked with friends that they were going to be making her the new Miranda with her whole makeover. Well, I guess they went for the total package:

Wow.

I'd say "stay classy, Bioware" but lifting the 'good' endings wholesale from another game sort of rules that out anyway.  :thumbs_up:

Alt: "Stay assy, Bioware!".

Regarding the Multiplayer requirement for the Galactic Readiness
From the ME3 forums

When you think about it, their explanation goes along the lines of "that penetration thing? It is just an alternative way to get to the orgasm, while our single player game includes the reach-around which allows you to achieve levels of satisfaction just as well".

You've got to be shitting me. Mass Effect is one of the franchises that had at least somewhat of a semblance to make games look less like nerd shit. I guess not.

I... have some trouble agreeing with that i guess, between Tali and the concept of Asari on the whole :why_so_serious:

(although that's possibly a different interpretation of the "nerd shit" so, well)

I dunno, the nerdy, mousey alien with the schoolgirl crush on Shepard and big birthin' hips kinda shoots that right through the heart. Nevermind the blue female-only race of aliens that have a bad reputation for promiscuity, and the "ugh, I'm so perfect and pretty, that sucks!" genetic uberwench.

Yes, the asari backstory of going through phases, one of which is blantant whore phase. Mmmmm.

I was hoping the asari would come off as like witch coven - wise, powerful, a bit scary, and - when called for - sensual rather than slutty. I don't think they ever recovered from Matriarch Benezia's Biotic Lift and Separate dress. -_-

I will say in their defense that they are but one incarnation in a tradition of "blue-skinned space babe" races - the Syreens of Star Control and the Elerians of Master of Orion.

Asari struck me more like faux-lesbian space elves than anything. If it makes you feel better, ME2 took the asari (to me) from fanfic nerd wankery and more into just a quirky race. Ilum helped a ton, because the whole planet seemed to have a sense of humor of how goofy a race like the asari sounds.

It really didn't help that the sensual/sexual was accentuated in almost every serious interaction with them.  ME2 made it worse by portraying them as galactic cougars.

Yeah, polyamorous, poly-gendered space cougars is a perfect description of how they were portrayed. Making every Asari built like a brickhouse didn't help one bit either.

They may have started out as something else, but the Asari devolved into space slut race pretty quick.

Benezia's dress, by the way, barely registered with me at all. That was certainly not why I saw them as the Fanservice Species. That impression was pretty well solidified well before I even met her.

Definitely disagree about ME2 making it worse; I think it ameliorated (but didn't solve obviously) the issue. You get a lot more stories about what asari relationships are like, etc., that help offset the spaceskank thing a bit. Morinth doesn't help though for sure.

To me it was mostly the "twi'lek effect" -- i.e. seeing what felt like majority of the species work in some sort of sex-related business or presented in some other sex-related context. ME2 did address that somewhat, but by that time the first impression (and damage) was already done. It's like putting stuff like gungans in your first installment of the series, there's no real chance of recovery from that  :oh_i_see:

And ME2 had its own share of issues with reinforcing the shallow species stereotypes, imo... it's just mostly the other, "secondary" species though, not the asari.

Yeah, I mean the first asari I can remember talking to was the receptionist for the Consort. That is the first impression you present to me for this race?


Basically, I hated the asari in ME1. ME2, they were funny enough about it (and I really liked Samara's deal, in spite of her fucking stupid clothing), it made them much more tolerable. Liara suddenly becoming remotely interesting in LotSB probably helped too.

Same with me. When she was introduced, I barely saw her dress at all.

My point, shot to bits immediately.  :ye_gods:

I guess I mentally blended out these things and only remembered the praise ME2 started getting outside of shitty gaming blogs and sites.

Yes, you learn tons about what asari relationships are like.  That's just about all we're told about their culture.  Asari are defined by their relationships instead of their accomplishments.  Those are just footnotes.

The conversation in that bar somewhere in ME2 that all males see the Asari as looking like particularly attractive versions of their race, just with head tentacles, was an interesting bit.

I don't think it makes the Asari look particularly trustworthy, however.

The helpful thing was seeing the asari performing wider range of (often mundane) jobs, i think. Wasn't just HOOKERS, HOOKERS EVERYWHERE.

edit: the mental manipulation bit was just a joke on three drunk guys talking shit, i thought. Since whatever they were discusing could be promptly verified (false) by watching any picture with asari on it, rather than actual specimen.

I may have been skimming the relationships part, but the Asari world painted them more as completely ruthless businessmen, and the rest of it being a phase they go through in college.

I will admit I tended to roll my eyes when Asari showed up in ME2, just because of my experiences in ME1. But if anything the horrible fanservice shit was entirely built into Tali in ME2. And Miranda's LeerCam.

Gotta keep in mind that college phase lasts something like 300 years.

(plus the very idea of having "species-wide slut phase" in the first place, but that's already mentioned)

Nah, there's lots more than just the relationship stuff, I was just mentioning it because that's what specifically offsets the spaceskank thing. There's plenty of development that has nothing to do with that in, for example, Samara's recruitment mission, the ads on Ilum, etc.

I get what they were trying to do with the 'set up the stereotypes in the first game, then broaden/play around with stuff in the second', the core of the issue to me is how they set it all up in the first game was just too ridiculous.

That's what I got from it. It also makes some sense from a species-perpetuity standpoint, I guess.

Some people have issues with promiscuity.

And a lot of people read a LOT MORE into games than I'd have ever imagined. The Mass Effect threads are some of the most bizarrely disturbing threads on these forums.

Nothing to do with promiscuity specifically, more about portrayal of women in general given that Asari are like 98% of the female characters in ME.

EDIT: I don't see any female writers credited on either game. I think that goes a long ways for me towards explaining why DA:O/DA2 do a better job on that front.

Yeah. Sorry I mentioned it, I don't want to get involved with this thread right now.

*backs out slowly*

Even more specifically, how the concept of 100% female race composed entirely of specimens looking like young, hot human females who will sleep with anything no matter its gender and/or species, and who just happen to go through few hundred years long "experimenting phase" ... is hard to be viewed as anything but a silly nerd wank fantasy.

And not an actual issue, just an observation. Although combined with /facepalm, true.

Pretty much.  I checked in this thread to see if anyone mentioned the iOS game that just got announced (http://wireless.ign.com/articles/121/1218153p1.html), or that none of the achievements require mutiplayer (http://www.shacknews.com/article/72338/mass-effect-3-achievements-wont-require-multiplayer).

Nope.  Instead we're on day 3 of the "Asari are space sluts" debate.

I have an idea, maybe you could just talk about those things without passive-aggressively whining that you don't like the current topic?

I think I'd rather follow Sky's example of slowly backing out of the thread.

Alright, don't get any splinters from that cross then.

On the achievement thing, hopefully that means the earlier rumor about the "readiness" meter is bullshit.

EDIT: Also, no Android version of their tie-in game, yet again.  :x

They obviously need to release a Symbian version.  :why_so_serious:

They might be able to get Towers of Hanoi working on Symbian.

After all the Asari talk I thought you typed Sybian.

Sorry, it's just bit difficult to post about how you might win early access to ME3 demo and moar if you spam on Facebook hard enough (http://www.shacknews.com/article/72281/mass-effect-3-offering-unlocks-via-facebook-missions) with all the eyerolling it induces.

(http://images.eurogamer.net/2012/articles//a/1/4/4/4/6/7/4/c11_me3_xbox_front_white.jpg.jpg/EG11/resize/600x-1)

You have got to be kidding me. NOBODY wants this shit.

But this...

(http://i40.tinypic.com/do6nip.jpg)

The second one would have to be a cross-partnership with Real Doll.com.

Which, shit, for the price of the DLC Dolls, why not just go for broke and do it.  Assari, Miranda and Tali Love-Dolls with super special DLC content!

Well, there's already anime Liara figurine out there, so next logical step would be hug pillows.

Garrus pillow would've to be made from some rough cloth to provide genuine chafing experience, obv.

The phrase "Tap the X button on your controller" would take on a whole new meaning.

FemShep trailer is supposed to be up later today.  They also released 5 new short trailers today.  You can see them all on the Mass Effect home page, but I think the only ones worth watching are:

Customizable Arsenal (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L8NOHSC9ww&feature=youtu.be) (The Terminus, Inferno, and Collector's armor are show, suggesting you might carry over some of the bonus stuff from ME2).

Multiplayer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iTLFlkycGM&feature=youtu.be) (Dibs on Salarian Infiltrator!)

Gameplay (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_STuujNowGg&feature=youtu.be)


The other two are Story (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJu-u3zFMyk&feature=youtu.be) (uses what looks like a fairly minor choice to show how results vary based on your dialog) and Enemies (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szIkBoj1G7s&feature=youtu.be) (which has possible spoilers in it as well as using a lot of footage from the other trailers I think).

Couple more hours till the femshep trailer, according to the devs.

edit: or not. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47RCBRv6m8U

Incidentally, at 0:45 in the gear customization trailer there's odd looking paragon/renegade meter on the left side of stat screen. Wonder if they tweaked that mechanics in some way, or what.

None of them were as good as the Mass Effect II Trailer. :(

Femshep was the best of the bunch.

It's the Reputation Bar.  Supposedly it makes it more viable to be a mix of Paragon and Renegade so you don't have to go all the way with one or the other, but I haven't heard exact details of how it works.  Hopefully when the demo drops in four days we'll get an understanding of all the new systems.

No playing as the Reapers in multiplayer? Whatta crock.

Some people got the demo a few days early apparently and one of the things that's been pointed out is that Ashley's character model has been improved quite a bit from the early screenshots (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=35030812&postcount=595).

Hmm the "interactive storytelling" trailer thingie shows something i've first spotted in the leaked earth level video -- they seem to have "streamlined" the dialogue system down to just two choices now, and there's no trace of the middle ground option.

I was hoping that was maybe just because the leaked level wasn't finished, but seeing it still present... that's starting to look like permanent change. And if that's the case, it sucks.

Middle ground meant no gains in old ME. You either go red or blue, or gain nothing at all. Yeah, I know it sucked not being to roleplay an indecisive Shepard. But meh, I hate Renegade/Paragons requirements too, seeing that Red option grayed just because I'm not a jerk enough pisses me off in Virmire when dealing with Wrex.

I'd say that was issue with the alignment system, not the dialogue -- it may seem obvious in hindsight, but it's still mind boggling they'd went with rewarding only some of the dialogue paths when it's quite more sensible to say, colour the middle option green and call that dunno, "Mastermind Shepard" (as the middle options tend to be based on cold reasoning) and then treat it just like the other two.

Would also argue calling the middle "indecisive" couldn't be farther from the truth, as using that route causes Shepard to perform actions just decisively as the other two routes, and advances the plot as result just the same. It's not like when you have the options it's either "kiss them" "kill them" and "i dunno, lol" and the last one makes the game hang up when you pick it.

Just a heads up they're giving out demo codes for the 360 version of this on twitter; follow @RPGSite and @Nova_Crystallis if you're so inclined.

Yeah the early xbox demo seems to be out, shared and accessible through different means. relevant neogaf thread (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=462682), also with pictures, reactions, youtube videos and spoilers, obv.

(apparently the first casualty of "different animations for Shepard depending on gender" is female Shepard running. Hillariously bad)

They more or less did that with Dragon Age 2, but I think at this point Mass Effect is kinda locked into the Paragon/Renegade thing.  Looks like they've changed how it works slightly, but I wouldn't expect anything too drastic until the next game.

Yeah, I think they probably felt like they had to stick with the paragon/renegade stuff even though they had figured out a way to make it work a little better in DA2. I'm sure there's an even better way to do it that doesn't make you sound like a crazy person occassionally (Hawke would go really schizo sometimes, especially if you were an "aggressive" Hawke) that they'll figure out. :P

I had a cautious look at the Bioware social forum, and there was supposedly a post from one of the devs regarding that:


extremely vague and i can't say the bits from the demo gave me a matching impression (Shepard having dialogue choice(s) of "let's discuss this diplomatically" and "bow to mah authority OR ELSE" doesn't strike me as something "much fine tuned" in comparison to previous installments) ... but i suppose will have to wait for the full game to get a better idea of that 'much bigger system' and see how it works in practice.

You've brought up my main issue with Bioware RPGs. The tabula rasa methodology of RPG writing just doesn't work for me. I can't sympathize with a character that is only characterized through plot points.

I say character, eventhough it's "me", because I can't actually roleplay a character that's consistent. I get to pick between starkly contrasting options which, put together, are supposed to make some sort of character, but characters and people aren't the average of all the opposing choices they've made. People behave rather predictably and it's the subtle changes in attitude/behaviour that give them depth. Choosing to eat the cat twice and saving the cat once doesn't make me 33% good, but 100% a cunt. "Well, he didn't eat ALL the cats..." isn't a redemptive argument.

My counter-example is Witcher (2, haven't played the first), where the character already exists and the choices you make are more practical. Side with these guys or those guys, help this guy or that guy or neither guy and so on. You don't have to pretend to have reason to do so, because let's face it, the in-character reasons are fuck-stupid in almost every RPG. Geralt (the Witcher) rather has reasons to do all the things in the game that are largely consistent with his own character (in the game, I doubt it's very consistent with the books) rather than one you're trying to impose on him.

Also, the character not trying to reflect my choices, and vice versa, gives me a lot stronger sympathy for his/her story. Trying to save Triss and their messed-up relationship is far more engaging than any romance plot I've ever had in a BW RPG, because I never really care shit about any of those people. They cease to exist when I leave the scene because they're only there to stroke my ego and appear to have no lives of their own. Geralt? He fucks shit up no matter what I think of it. I can't stop him even if I liked to. (But who'd want to?)

I think that the bottom line is that roleplaying doesn't really work the way BW generally tries to do it. The games have decent storylines (cliché as they are) but have never engaged me much on an emotional level. It feels more like your first D&D adventure than anything character-driven, complete with overelaborate NPCs written by an equally overzealous GM. There's so much dissonance between the characterization of the protagonist versus the supporting cast and how they respectively seem to relate to the game world. The main character can act but not feel, while the secondary characters can feel but not act. It feels inherently flawed to structure a narrative like this.

Maybe it would be better if you got to pick your characteristics at game start and the game could adapt the dialogue options. Two points in Narcissism, two points in Greed, one point in Cowardice.

Systems where you are strongly materially rewarded for dialog choices rarely also work as role-playing systems. Especially systems like Bioware uses where you are awarded for cumulative similar choices. Although the game may present you with 200 choices over the course of it realistically you make one binary choice at the start.

FemShep running is hilarious. It's like she's an awkward NFL running back.

I haven't played an ME recently, but I remember plenty of choices that weren't Paragon/Renegade.  Moreover, in the case of ME2, you had room to pick the other choices at times, especially with the interrupts.

As for Tarami's points, I disagree that it's inherently flawed for the medium.  The strength of a modern BioWare title is that it's constantly prompting me with choices.  Those choices often don't have any game mechanical impact, but they define what my character is like.  And because they're full voiced and hide the full responses I don't pick, the only version of that character I'm seeing is my own.  How far they are down one bar or another is just one aspect of them, along with how they respond to this or that group or how diplomatic or flirtatious they are in general.

The binary "eat puppy"/"save puppy" choices are still important.  They're often a fun payoff for whatever you've been working on and as you frequently see them opposite each other, the contrast heightens the stakes.  But judging a game just through them is like watching a condensed game on League Pass or MLB.tv, you're only getting the broad and important strokes.

Each conversation or interrupt prompt lets me shape my character and thus reaffirm my connection to it.  Yes, I'm going to be respectful to this Sith.  No, I'm not going to stop Garrus from shooting this witness.  Over and over again until I don't have the concept that I started out with.  I just have "my" Shepard (or Agent or Warden).

I'll never have my Geralt or my Dovahkiin or my Vaan, even though I like all of those games quite a bit.  There's just a different relationship with those games.  They're not asking me what I think about what's going on the vast majority of the time, just if I want to keep going (in general or down one of many paths).

Wait, seriously?  That, if true, would make them quite a bit cooler in my estimation.  It'd go a long way towards explaining why other species seem happy to hook up with them, and why they're so very human-looking.

Yeah, it's the bachelor party dudes in the Ilium bar, you have to click on ... something, probably the dancer, to keep triggering their conversation.

Yes - it is obviously a bucks' party between some guys who aren't really friends and they get to talking about the Asari.

It raises an interesting idea about Asari being psychic manipulators... who then apparently exist solely as eye candy for the males of the universe.

Not really, unless these psychic manipulation powers get somehow transferred to any and each mechanic/electronic system which happens to take a picture of some Asari (as well as the individual pictures that get printed out, video feeds transmitted across half of the galaxy to the viewers said Asari isn't even aware of, etc)

You're overthinking it.  It could have simply being that one asari manipulating the table to get better tips.  In fact, it's probably what a lot of their dancers do, or possibly when looking to find a mate.

"Hey you look different than most asari I've seen"
"That's because my father was krogan tee-hee"

It doesn't have to be a lasting lie, just long enough to get whatever they want.

"Wait, didn't you look completely different just a moment ago, when you were serving the other tables?"

It just isn't something that has a chance to last at all without becoming public knowledge. At which point it becomes part of the codex and something other species are aware/afraid of, rather than idle speculation of drunks at the bar.

If you buy the mystery drink, the bartender's appearance changes.  You can go through three or four changes this way.

The entire subtext of that bar scene is to make you wonder if there is something odd going on with the Asari.

I think it's a safe bet that the general body shape of Asari is constant; otherwise things like fitting into 'Asari-sized' vacuum suits would provide an immediate problem.  But I could believe that they're faceless, Protoss-looking things, and you see a face on them that corresponds with your species.  A lot of personality and beauty is perceived in the face and expression, after all.

What I took away from it was they were all focusing on features common to an assari that happened to parallel their own species.

The Turian Mentions her 'head fringe'  The salarian .. well he just appreciates her limberness..  The Human mentions her belly button but you know it's all about the T&A.

The scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ7r80IOxtE

Yeah it isn't any more complicated than this IMO.

Given the change involves sudden acquisition of whorish makeup and such, i took it as just another joke -- the "beer effect" as they tend to put it.

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.

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

 :grin:

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

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 :why_so_serious:

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.

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 :grin:

Hmm,"the cancer that is killing Bioware" reviled writer is the top post (http://i.imgur.com/295Cx.png) 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.?

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

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

Yeah absolutely 100% with you on this.

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?   :why_so_serious: 

Which is the best Final Fantasy game?

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.  :oh_i_see:

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?

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.

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 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is what I was getting at.



Of course skipping them diminishes their importance, how could it be anything else?  Skipping them is the very apex of, "I don't care about this shit, why is it here?"  It's a barrier in your way, thus why you're skipping it.

If you're playing for the story and not a game, is it still a game or is it an interactive novel and something entirely different from "a game?"  I'll argue the latter.
Ditto if you're playing a J-date and skipping all the choices to get to the mini games.  You're not in it for the story.

Also, to illustrate where I'm coming from, I hate "world" games and want more gamey elements.  Worlds are a setting for me, not the purpose for playing.  Thus why I can hop from DIKU to DIKU or TBS to TBS game.  It's about the mechanics, NOT the story for me.   If I want a pure story there's much better mediums for it out there.

Which just adds to the spiral of, "fuck these things are expensive.. broaden their appeal!"   It's a lack of focus and thoughtful design that's going to fuck everyone over in the end.

I agree completely.  I have friends who are spacebar heroes in SWTOR.  I wouldn't want to do missions with them, but they're enjoying the parts of the game they like and ignoring the rest.

I'm all for taking games on their own terms and accepting that some games might not be "for me", but if a developer is taking the stance that you can just play the parts you care about without the need for subterfuge, that's progress.  It also shows a confidence that both parts of the game can relatively stand on their own for different people.

That sounds to me like the techie guys didn't design enough granularity in difficulty, not that they should be bolting on these weird ass game modes that invalidate entire swaths of gameplay. I have no problem with "make shooty easy gud" design. I do have a problem with "Make shooty go away" design.

The second paragraph you quoted is certainly reasonable from a profit standpoint. It's also what's wrong with this industry.

This links been burning a hole in my pocket...

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/narrative-mechanics

That just goes back to the story about someone dying in the tutorial.  Do you want to draw a line at some point and say, "I've made it easy enough, if you can't do it now, get lost."?

Further, 'shooter mode' and 'story mode' don't actually do what we've been discussing as the logical extreme here. They don't just utterly cut the other sections out outright.

Well, at least in the case of Story, it is just the new Easy.  Action does actually automate the conversation stuff (but doesn't auto-skip).

Yes. I do, because I think at some point you DO have to draw a line and say "This isn't for you. Sorry." Otherwise, you get watered-down games that waste their potential.

If you're skipping the gunplay and want to focus strictly on the story in combination with pretty CGI and some puzzles, there's an entire genre just for you and the other people that want to play that way. It's even having something of a comeback, lately (http://doublefine.com/).

--Dave

Yeah, that's my point. Removing the shooty bits of Mass Effect (or rendering them so inert they may as well not happen) is essentially changing what type of game you're making.

I don't understand how you could think that unless you accept arguments of the form "The time they spent making the game 'more X' could have instead been spent making it 'more Y'." which in my opinion are a horrible, unknowable morass.

This is what I was getting at in my last post.

ME is a squad combat game with decision trees that can affect some outcomes. You can't "skip the combat" and have the same game. You make that kind of thing at the design/funding stage. You don't sit down to make a choose your own adventure game then years into development tack on a combat engine. The design drives where you spend your development resources. You have flexibility in how you achieve the goals, but tossing out entire premises generally means going back to the design stage.

That's why "ME combat mechanic" and "SWTOR voice acting" are completely false equivalencies. Removing the voiceovers from SWTOR makes it the exact same game just without voice overs. Removing the combat from Mass Effect changes its genre.

What's Mass Effect's genre?

People aren't coming to Mass Effect for the gun play mechanics or the the driving sections or the resource management bits. All of these elements are well below best of breed in the market.

They come for the story and characters. So a ME title that lets you drop combat entirely and focuses just on story is arguably what BioWare should be doing because that is their strength.

In many ways the combat is the barrier to getting through more of the story - you have to gun down 80 mooks and 1 boss in order to get the next bit of dialogue.

If ME is a 'squad management game' then it is a very poor one. The squad AI is exceptionally limited and the instructions you can give squad mates pretty much involves you taking control of the character (or at least I do, because I got tired of characters using their extra abilities in less than optimal way).

So it's a dating game?  :awesome_for_real:

Again, it's the gestalt not the parts.

If I wanted one or the other, there's better options. It's the blend that makes it an RPG and a good over-all game.  Give me just the story? Why would I pay you instead of watching it on youtube?

Bring on the fast forward. I don't give a fuck if people rush through the dialogue sections (it's THEIR playthrough, not mine), they shouldn't give a fuck if I want to just faceroll through the fighting parts of the Deep Roads on my fifth playthrough because I'VE ALREADY FUCKING DONE IT FOUR TIMES, JESUS CHRIST. People play Bioware games for the story, or they play it for the combat, or they play it for both, I don't see a problem with letting people focus on the part they like, even if it's the very part I would skip. I personally play Bioware games for both (I enjoyed ME2's combat in particular), but on my nth time though, I have shot all the people that really need shooting, and would not mind at all having an option to speed through, say, Horizon. And then switch it back to normal for a fighting section I particularly enjoyed. Or whatever. Options are good.

I say this as someone who actually likes the fighting parts almost as much as the talky parts (especially in ME2). But how many people would LIKE to play through ME1 again, or DA:O, or whatever, to see how the story changes as you pick different things, but just cannot be arsed to do all the fighting bullshit again because while it's fun the first time, it gets boring wading through darkspawn or driving the fucking Mako or whatever?

Everything UnSub said can be seen in the demo:  combat is a chore, sprinting through an area without slipping into cover against an object is a miracle, squad just serves as an extended hotkey bar, etc.  This is not a good blending of combat and story; the non-story parts are detracting from the story parts.


Regardless, it can look cool.

The counter point to this is, a part of playerbase simply couldn't care less what the design doc and the Vision of the game is. They enjoy certain elements of the full offering but if you force them to also suffer through the parts they don't like, that will diminish the entertainment they get out of it rather than help. It may even prevent them from getting that entertainment, if some of these forced elements they plain can't stomach or physically handle.

As long as the design actually allows these people to get their fun in such manner (and BioWare games do) this should be imo accommodated. Because the game itself doesn't care how it's played and won't quit itself in disgust or out of boredom. While the player does, and may, and that won't be a benefit to anyone.

I found ME2's combat to be a lot of fun, but I don't see how it would diminish my enjoyment if someone else said "I'd rather not do this, but I dig the story"

edit: in a single player game, I guess I just don't give two shits about what other people get their enjoyment out of, as long as my fun part stays fun.

The thing is, if i have a desire to skip some elements then that's because to me individually they are shit i don't care about based on their own merit, not on the ability to skip them. Their importance is to me already precisely null, whether i can skip them or not.

But it should be kept in mind that this skipping and not caring is just something that happens in my own house, with my personal copy of the game, during my own time i spend with it, out of individual preferences. So if i don't think these elements i'm skipping are important... what do you care? It doesn't diminish how much you personally value these elements when you play your own copy of the game in your own house, does it?

The details of combat (gameplay) are completely divorced and separable from the outcome (story).  It isn't something that someone wants deliberately but rather something that can't be avoided. It's there no matter if there's a button which acknowledges it, or not.

The series of motions, actions and swings that go into individual act of killing can always be summarized with "Colonel Mustard in the Kitchen with the Lead Pipe" for someone who is interested in the outcome, rather than the minutiae.

edit: this is mainly due to the fact that games --much like the mocked movies and books-- are generally made with only single allowed outcome for each combat encounter in mind -- the player wins, or it's game over (and reload until the player does manage to win)   It's different case when the story changes but is continued even through the defeats.

Single player seems awesome from the demo. If you're sticking to cover 24/7, you're trying to hold down Storm/Run, which is also the "stick to cover" button. A bit silly, but I think similar to ME2?

Multiplayer needs about 3 months of work on the lobby interface, but looks like fun after that. Basically, it tosses groups together which promptly all quit and dump you into a mission that will kill you in about 5 seconds solo.

If you like the story, side quests and exploring you will level faster, gain more xp and skill points, get more money to buy gear with and find unique gear - all of which quickly makes the combat fairly trivial.  It's a self correcting problem.  Your first missions could have difficult combat but by midway through the game you just point at things and they die.  Or at least that has been my experience with the mass effect games.

Exactly. There aren't even very many grey area combats, where the story can be affected by how you kill some dudezors. Not even something as simple as an FPS map with two exits instead of one. ME2 kinda sorta walks up to that idea with Zaed's loyalty mission. But that's dwarfed by the amount of linear FPS in the game.

To a degree, yeah, but it's something which developers can attempt to avoid, to a degree at least.  I'm not concerned about outcomes being fixed by the plot, but about how the plot is delivered.  You can tell a static story through gameplay rather than cutscenes, if you want to, and there's some movement towards that, but it's countered by games which are trying to deliver a "cinematic" experience, meaning everything happens in cutscene, which is boring and uncreative and done better elsewhere (see: movies).  This kind of "gameplay skipping" thing seems to be the apex of that philosophy, because now you HAVE to deliver the story through cutscenes or it won't make any sense to a player who skips the gameplay section.

I tend to view it in reverse, sort of -- that is, if your game is already built in certain way (plot relies on fixed outcomes of encounters, exposition generally through cutscenes or mission screens, etc) then there's no harm in adding the skip button there. It's just an extension of the difficulty slider by one notch rather than some radical design changer in itself that someone would make the cornerstone of their design.

For what's worth, even the games which do deliver the story through cutscenes still allow the player to skip through them, so the worry how the player can become confused about the plot seems at best secondary to these developers.

People joke about it or mock it and shit, but if Bioware actually made a westernized "Dating Sim" that shit would make BANK and sell a billion copies.


A BILLION!

i'd buy two copies of Hatoful Turian Boyfriend.

Hell, make it three.

edit: on second thought, the uncanny valley could make the whole dating thing pretty scary. Here's a high res Ashley screenshot from the demo:

It's essentially their most rabid and vocal fanbase too. So they're being catered and happy. Hamburger helper can be the director of that particular dev dept.
The rest can go back to making RPGs sans romance.

What RPGs has bioware made in recent history that lack romance, exactly?

I am so glad she's dead in my playthroughs. Not that I really expect Kaidan to be any less creepy.

Did BG1 have a romance?

As big a deal as some people like to make about romances in Bioware games, each one usually takes up what, about 5-10 minutes of game time in a playthrough?

Yes, but it's yucky girl stuff. Cooties everywhere!

It's worth noting these 5-10 minutes experiences still manage to generate roughly 50% of bioware forums traffic :why_so_serious:

The only Bioware RPGs I can think of that did not include romances were BG1, NWN1, and Sonic Chronicles. I'm not even 100% certain on NWN.

That said, I'd love for Bioware to make a story-heavy RPG without the baggage that romances add, but at this point it's kind of expected of them.

If gameplay is separate from story in that the gameplay doesn't effect the story then really most story is separate from story as well for the same reason.

"This thing doesn't effect the story, therefore it's not part of the story" makes very little sense and completely disqualifies all books and movies from being stories - a hard position to defend I would think.

A lot of games do a good job of delivering story bits, atmosphere, characterization and such during the actual game.

Playing through story mode in the demo feels like one or two steps above playing with cheat codes on basically.  The enemies do little enough damage that you never need to take cover, and even the mini-boss at the end couldn't kill me with me just standing there (my teammates eventually gunned it down).  It did eventually get through my shields though and took off two bars of health (shields regenerate but the health didn't so it's possibly that over time I could have gotten myself killed maybe).  My squads skill points were automatically distributed as well.

Man, are we sure Ashley didn't get secretly reconstructed like Shepard did? I only knew it was her because whoever posted the picture said so. Sorry you can't put a plain-looking female character in the game Bioware.

Thats not the Ashley I romanced, so I certainly want an "Nah, we are breaking up since you obviously blew all of Earths Defense budget on your plastic surgeries to look like that retarded woman Cerberus forced me to endure on my ship" option.

I'm kinda convinced at this point that Mass Effect 3 is going to be Dragon Age 2 all over again only the actual gameplay won't be terrible.

My PS3 demo ran like utter crap.  Cinematics had maybe 10-20 fps and was headache inducing.  Once it got to the gameplay, there seemed to be too much hud and not enough fun.  The story appears to be light years ahead of what was in the first two, but the game itself is disappointing. 

I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with ME3 graphically. I mean, it was nice and fine back when it ME1 came out, but considering most over AAA games that came out, and that it's UE3, it's kind of lacking. If I had to guess, they're skimping on baking indirect light into the textures, or not doing it properly. These dumb orange glow ME terminals are especially out of place in that regard.

Ashley, even if she looks completely different, is like the only non creepy looking face in the Mass Effect Universe I've seen. Well that and new Roid Rage dude.

I love the series, but god damn if humans don't have terrible faces in ME.

That is the future that humanity is doomed to.

And I'll be damned but I dig the shit out of the multiplayer right now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ye0Rl16elKo

(early part of demo so spoiler warning)

Sonic Chronicles.

The lobby is terrible, but the multi itself is surprisingly fun. I may need to migrate away from my beloved vanguard though, since damage seems to be far higher and crazy charge antics seem like bad ideas now.

Incinerate, though.. that's a skill that will never go out of style.

edit: I'm also digging the new skill evolution system. Instead of just "pick one at the end", about halfway through the tree you get to pick one of two options for every tier. Much love.

I've seen that playing the demo. Even some if MaleShep's animations right at the beginning of the demo are also weird as fuck. That better be a bug and gone in the final build.

But I mean the graphics itself. The environmental lighting is just so damn weird.

No seriously though, like a Droid/Iphone game, that is nothing but dialogue trees and character interactions and story with Biowares writers. Tell me that shit wouldn't sell a jillion copies? Tell me there isn't a huge demand for that?


I'd play it.

Yeah, i just posted that because it seems like a good symptom of broader problem -- it's hard to figure out how stuff this bad made it pretty much to the final game; it's like some combination of either plain not seeing such issues (and/or thinking that's good enough) or not being able to do any better.

Oddly, her run animation changes in the second part of the demo.

That doesn't actually look all that horrible to me. Not meme-generation bad, certainly. I'm pretty sure I look like a retard when I'm running at full sprint.

Well, i'm watching a football match as it happens; 20 guys running back and forth at various speeds and no one looks like a retard or draws any attention from the brain because their movements look absolutely natural (duh). In contrast, these ME animations have me sitting in perpetual 'wtf, it's all off' state. It's not fault of the medium in general because there's enough games out there which do manage to have natural looking walk/run cycles, and it's actually rare for me to have this kind of reaction to character animations in games. So i'd have to conclude this one just is particularly bad.

I do suspect that swinging a loaded gun around like that is probably not the safest way to run with a weapon, certainly.

Never mind all the other stuff, what the crap is wrong with the sound mix? It's like half the environmental sounds are missing and sound levels are all wonky.

If you mean Lt. Bro, he is ugly as fuck and you are high. Even my PigShep is looking at that dude's nose and going "that man has a pig mother, it is the only explanation."

Feh, easy and non-controversial :) Action RPG. Gives them broad latitude to mix together a bunch of things. It's also required. If it was just RPG where we could negotiate our way all the way through telling the Reapers to go home, then sure, skip the combat. Heck, skip everything but the dialog options. If it's just an Action game, skip all that stupid dialog and story crap, just barrel your way through cover/combat until the boss at the end, and then rinse repeat to min/max glory. Downside is mixing all this means you'll probably not be able to do it as well as Skyrim or Modern Warfare. But it also means getting to be somewhat unique.

Besides, this is Mass Effect 3. The whole series has always had all this mixture of stuff.

I thought it interesting that the demo effectively let you make that choice though. They let ya choose mostly combat, mostly dialog, or middle of the road. They did call middle of the road "normal" though.

Felt like Mass Effect. That's good enough for me. Love this series, and combat seemed a bit more fluid this time.

Awesome, the opening city (which promptly gets anhiliated by Reapers it seems) is Vancouver.
http://www.vancitybuzz.com/2012/02/mass-effect-3-vancouver-screen-shots/ (http://www.vancitybuzz.com/2012/02/mass-effect-3-vancouver-screen-shots/)

Ton of clear landmarks in those shots, heavily futurified.

Reapers are bruins fans.

That explains a lot, actually.

They couldn't put together a split screen?  I have little idea what Vancouver looks like.  I always just visualize a field full of hippies with mountains on the right and ocean on the left.  Because I'm looking North.

Not fully relevent, since Drew hasn't worked on ME since I did, but I didn't know where else to put it:

Drew Karpyshyn retires from BioWare after 12 years as a staff writer. (http://drewkarpyshyn.com/c/?p=369)

But he still winds up looking better than the others.


edit: also, still totally digging the multiplayer. Though Sents got mauled with a nerfbat from hell for some reason. Here's your shield buff! Also, it makes all your powers regen 80% slower because fuck you.

I like the story mode. Can't be assed with all the shooting every single playthrough beyond the first one.

BTW, I blame you leaving for the ME story going off the rails. Him too, now. I guess you can both share the blame.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2012/02/mass-effect-3-becomes-true-space-oddity-/1

I'm not sure what to make of this marketing gimmick.

They're all going to end up in those floating trash things in the center of the ocean.

This game is worth buying for the multiplayer alone. 
Its so good it makes me think a vs mode could be incredibly fun.

I'm just imagining the person who rents an airplane and a long pole with a hook on it to grab the copy before it lands.

Am I really the only one who finds the audio horrible? Everything sounds super muted and if you crank up the volume, the ambient sound still stays quiet as fuck. The big ass lasers at the beginning were barely audible and the collapsing buildings are practically silent.

Under options -> Sound try setting Dynamic Range to low and see if that helps.

There was a slight difference, but not nearly enough. To make it extra weird, turning away from ambient sound sources makes them significantly more silent, yet turning sideways doesn't make them come louder from one speaker.

I hit a bug after a grenade went off in multi where everything was muted as all hell for about 5 minutes, then returned to normal volume levels. Normally it was fine with explosions, so it wasn't just some fancy effect.

Tell me more. You're making me wet.

I'm sure this can't be true, everyone knows Bioware was going to RUIN the game by including multiplayer.

He's not wrong.

The multiplayer is very good.

The carrot-on-a-stick of getting random unlocks and consumables out of supply crates keeps you playing, and it gets fucking HARD.

Think the presumption was the multiplayer part was going to be inferior and unneeded as it's not done by the main ME team, iirc :oh_i_see:

(that said, personally kinda got bored of watching ~15 min long video of it. It was constant repetition of shooting DA2-like "another waves" with occasional "now stand in this circle or else")

The multi is indeed kick you in the nuts hard if you don't work as a team. It's awesome as all hell though, even if I can't seem to unlock the things I want.

Managed to finish a few silvers and felt like a badass, but teamwork is an absolute necessity. Got a little big for our britches, went for the gold and got our asses handed to us.

The multiplayer unlocked. It didn't have any of the sound issues of the sp demo so I'm just going to chalk it up to Bioware using a shitty old build.

No no -- everyone knows that Story Mode was going to ruin the game (for those who don't use Story Mode).

So is the multiplayer some kind of co-op PVE mode or is it actually PVP?

co-op PVE.  It plays like horde for GoW (or any other sort of survive waves of enemies game of your choice).  The demo allows you to pick a class, and then as you play you get XP to level up class skills like Lift, biotic charge, etc based on your chosen class.

Every 3 or so levels, you get an extra objective than just survive, be it killing specific enemies or hacking/decrypting nodes.  Finishing a whole game, or at least able to complete the extra objective parts gives you credits.  You can use the credits to buy Recruit or Veteran boxes, which then can unlock one time use gifts like a free revive or warp ammo, or you can get weapon unlocks, or it can unlock specific race/class groups like the Quarian Engineer.  These special classes are useful, as they have different special skills.

I'd imagine tuning this stuff for PVP would be hell on earth, so doing 4 player co-op seems like an enjoyable way to do things.  I've only played a few times, but it's been a lot of fun.

I was playing the multi all last night, the demo unlocked multi for everyone a day early. It was funny watching people rapidly learn that Phantoms are not to be fucked with.

Ran a gold level mission this morning, second wave they throw three phantoms and two atlases at us at the same fucking time.

It seems to me like Gold difficulty missions are mainly going to be attempted by a group of 4 who all know each other, and using those one-shot mission consumables (IE the weapon ammos and suck).

Yeah, gold is where you use medi-gels, missiles and all those weapon damage mods and shield upgrades.


The semi random objectives also suck. Having the "hold this ground" objective be in the middle of the open LZ area on both maps is a freaking death trap.

Demo was choppy as shit on my PS3.

It was never about "Story Mode."  It was about the "We need more story and less game" quote.  Story mode is fine. Removing guts is not.

Ah, so the thing she never actually said, as far as I can tell?

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/ppbt6/lets_have_a_discussion_about_jennifer_brandes/c3r6hi9

It's all in the context of letting you skip things, not removing them from the game.

Bah. Co-Op story is where it's at. Horde modes and PvP get old after a few tries.

God, your avatar is hypnotic!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gayz4s82LHs&feature=g-all-s&context=G2a22631FAAAAAAAAAAA

This.

It was her, wasn't it?

Great, you crushed my spirit.

Look, dudes, she clearly wants to fag up Bioware games by turning them into visual novel dating sims, why can't you see that?!

They based the multiplayer around Killing Floor concept. Waves and waves of enemies come with some variety with specific loadouts and specific counters. Guess being in a noob team made taking on the Titan nearly impossible. We're just not equipped to deal with that thing.

I unlocked grenades and found out I can just sit by crates and spam it all day long. Wonderful.  :why_so_serious:

I'm fine with dating sims provided you can kill aliens in between the talky bits.

If the multiplayer had been PvP you probebly wouldn't see a single reply. f13's don't do that kind of thing unless there's NPC's involved. :-D

Apparently, you missed the entire Planetside 2 thread.

"Shepard, I can't...I need...I need to return to the Migrant Fleet."

"Tali, don't go..."

"Goodbye, Shepard."

RENEGADE INTERRUPT. DUN DUN DUN.

BLAM!

"Take one more step, Miss Vas Normandy, and the bullet goes through your filtered mask."
"I LOVE YOU SHEPARD, I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU!"

The mask and M9 Heavy Pistol fall as the couple embraces.

"I know."

Apparently it's now called a "Roleplaying shooter"? So EA dumbing it down in order to appeal to the broadest console demographic, gameplay being considered an "optional" part of the experience and a mistaken focus on story as having game-play value.

Good thing this one's not showing up on steam to tempt me, because it sounds like time to part ways.

So even though they improved the shooting and the character building RPG elements, and are still putting an emphasis on story, they're somehow dumbing things down?

Not to mention:

Brought back weapon mods instead of a pure upgrade system
Expanded the evolution tree concept on powers
Took probing out back and shot it (not RPG related, but seriously, fuck that minigame)
Added a reputation system apparently to attempt to solve the "you must be full paragon or renegade to enjoy the story" issues

The game isn't dumbed down in any way except maybe the Space Bar doing pretty much everything. But.. I really don't mind it after playing with it a bit. The only time it annoys me is when I try to revive someone near cover. 90% of the time it figures out I want to revive them. 10% of the time it goes "you want to crouch next to them and sift through their pockets for change"

Called where? I went both to Origin page and Bioware's ME3 page to look for it, and there's no sign of that phrase that i could spot...

edit: the Origin page has it listed with note "Genre: Action, Role Playing" just like both previous installments.

Best I've done on multiplayer so far is get to the last wave on Silver with only three people and two of us were fairly low level (I had just unlocked Drell Vanguard a few rounds previous).  Definitely one of those "one more round" games where all of a sudden it's 5am.

Heh, that video of the undead turkey sprinting animations is awesome.

This. I can't mention the number of people that have died while the game is trying to figure out whether I want to revive them or teabag them.

Finished Demo. Pre-ordered Deluxe Edition for Digital Hoodie.  :why_so_serious: Go with a bang, yo! EA! ITS IN THE GAYM!

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/829607/MX3/04/ggbro.jpg)
Went to Origin store and saw SIMS 3 SHOWTIME KATY PERRY EDITION!  :drillf:

No, Jenny's a writer, not an editor. That was Cookie.


I used to do that in BF42. Ah, memories.

Is the demo no longer available? When you click on the link to get it you get taken to another site that doesn't say anything about it at all...

I'm downloading origin to see if I have to get it that way, but it's pretty piss-poor information.

You have to get it through Origin.

Liking the demo.  I'm interested in the multiplayer, but I don't really want to play publically. :sad:

Since they opened the beta to everyone, you get a lot more asshats sitting in the lobby and not clicking ready and a whole lot of others that drop as soon as the match starts.

There's a bug floating around when someone's desynced, and has the box checked and everyone else sees them as unchecked as well.

Interesting. That sucks.

Shepherd is a bipolar schizoid moody prone to violent rages complex character.

Cinematic ME3 trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heEqAwQ5phI) is out.

"Rated H for hamfisted"

I'm really starting to be sorry this game got popular.

Because all the other trailers for Mass Effect (or Dragon Age, for that matter) were totally restrained and tasteful.

I just accept that EA's marketing will be totally retarded and have nothing to do in particular with the quality of the game at this point.

I have no real recollection of the earlier ME trailers, but this one just struck me as really weak in both the editing (holy 180 degree rule breaking batman) and the 'writing' being similarly subpar. The DA (cgi) trailers didn't give me reaction like that, they're technically competent if nothing else. So it creates impression of relative drop in quality that's bizarre.

Guess they couldn't get Blur this time around?

It's done by another company but then so was the DA2 trailer.

Just looked it up.  Apparently it was Digic, who also did the VGA announcement trailer for ME3, and trailers for DA2, The Secret World,  and Assassin's Creed: Revelations among other things.

FUCK YEAH, MAKO!

 :woot:

Yeah, I know it probably won't be driveable in the game.