Mass Effect 3 Spoiler Thread [Spoiler tag free, beware]

[Venkman]

"Realistically". In other words, large ships sitting hundreds or thousands of km apart, shooting at each other. No dogfighting, etc.

Well they do that too in SWTOR. You just happen to be dog fighting in your single-person craft going between all of that

In all seriousness though, as Lantyssa said, whatever is implied dies in the face of cut scenes. In a real capital-ship battle in space, if you're waiting to visually see the enemy, you're already dead. And that's not neckbearding sci-fi. It's just extrapolating how naval engagements would be waged today

Or: Eve.

[Fordel]

Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space   

[Bunk]

I wonder if we could actually have Honor Harrington-esq space battles in a game like this that would still somehow be "fun"?

[Stormwaltz]

"Realistically". In other words, large ships sitting hundreds or thousands of km apart, shooting at each other. No dogfighting, etc.

A good summary. There is some dogfighting, but rarely outside the context of trans-relay assaults or someone making a tactical error.

If you want more detail, check the Codex.

[Lantyssa]

Yes, but how many people read the codex?  (Cool as it was.)  Every cut-scene of combat in ME1, ME2, and ME3 showed seriously close engagements.  That is what sticks with people.

How many times were we shown the perspective of a ship where all we saw was a tiny pinpoint explosion due to interstellar distances?

[Ingmar]

There really aren't very many cutscenes of space combat in ME, and those that there are all almost all involve fighting over a fixed point in space (a relay, a planet) or a boarding action which is necessarily close range. Most of the trappings of Star Wars-y space combat are still not present, in particular fighter-sized craft.

[kildorn]

The cutscene space combat in ME also tends to revolve around the Normandy, which behaves in an entirely odd way given the game universe's rules.

When you watch the normal fleets and such in action it's a lot of slug fests with turrets. The Normandy is more movie-actiony than space opera.

[Venkman]

Also, it's hard to make realistic space battles look entertaining to the masses. Hence the Star Wars/Star Trek effect. Real space battles are fought with spreadsheets of probabilities

Iain M. Banks books do kind of a good job of describing futuristic space battles in my opinion. Trying to make a movie out of that though, booooring. Meanwhile David Drake's RCN series uses a universe with rules tailored for close engagements that'd be more fun to watch. Even if his writing style is kind First Time Reader level

But this is where I ask Freespace 2 again. In case Chris Roberts cockpit falls apart...

[tmp]

All this space combat talk is silly. Obviously, what ME needs next is Princess Maker clone where you carefully raise offspring of Shepard and Garrus.

Obviously.

[Ratman_tf]

"Realistically"

Whenever someone mentions "realistic" space combat, I want to punch a kitten.
When Mass Effect stomps all over science with it's FTL travel, Element Zero  , and space magic powers, I think making space combat some pathetic last bastion of realism is just stupid.

[Ingmar]

I put quotes around it for a reason. I disagree with your premise in general, though. Internal consistency is what is important, there's not some magical point where everything becomes so unrealistic that you just throw in whatever you want and it's fine.

[Sjofn]

All this space combat talk is silly. Obviously, what ME needs next is Princess Maker clone where you carefully raise offspring of Shepard and Garrus.

Obviously.

YES

even though I never romance Garrus because no lips

MAKE IT HAPPEN BIOWARE

[Venkman]

I put quotes around it for a reason. I disagree with your premise in general, though. Internal consistency is what is important, there's not some magical point where everything becomes so unrealistic that you just throw in whatever you want and it's fine.

Exactly. Self consistency > "realistic". Especially in a game about aliens and spaceships 

[Ratman_tf]

I put quotes around it for a reason. I disagree with your premise in general, though. Internal consistency is what is important, there's not some magical point where everything becomes so unrealistic that you just throw in whatever you want and it's fine.

So just say ships have enough stealth to make long-long range combat ineffective, (The Normandy already has stealth as a major feature, so that's consistent.) And the tantalus drive uses a gravity well, which is pretty much space magic anyway, so just say that makes spaceships handle like aeroplanes in an atmosphere.
Done. Internally consistent, and more importantly, allows for fun space fighter combat sequences.

[Stormwaltz]

Whenever someone mentions "realistic" space combat, I want to punch a kitten.
When Mass Effect stomps all over science with it's FTL travel, Element Zero  , and space magic powers, I think making space combat some pathetic last bastion of realism is just stupid.

FTL is always a handwave, because there are only a handful of ways to theoretically make it work, and they all require godlike technology and/or the energy output of entire galaxies. But FTL is also a necessary handwave because people want to see starships and aliens in their science fiction. The only way to get that is cheap, convenient FTL.

And yes, the mass effect and the way ME says dark energy works are BS. I've never shied away from admitting that. What I felt kept them a step above was that we made sure they followed consistent rules. and we considered the potential ramifications and spin-off effects of the technology.

As in everything, you pick your battles. Violate reality where you need to, not wherever it's convenient. Making up contradictory rules as you go along is lazy worldbuilding and writing.

[Tannhauser]

But enough about religion.   

I don't think Ratman is attacking ME; I think he's attacking making sure space combat is 'realistic'.

[Venkman]

I think he's reacting to how "realiistic" is being used. BS:G TV show was pretty good about both dogrighting and the need for fighters (smartest missile interceptors) while having a an acceptably un-God-like FTL (followed the Star Wars model of calculate - jump - calculate again - all in straight lines).

ME does much the same, for the same reason, and uses it consistently which means to me, doing it well. Self consistent > can't-possibly-be-"realistic"-anyway.

[Ratman_tf]

But enough about religion.   

I don't think Ratman is attacking ME; I think he's attacking making sure space combat is 'realistic'.

Well, duh!  Mass Effect is/was a game. Story is great, consistency is great, but if the game isn't fun, none of that other shit matters.

[jakonovski]

I've always wondered at how sci-fi game designers end up so conservative. ME3 had it really bad in the beginning, where you just had some random Reapers doing random things on the screen, occasionally shooting a sad little laser beam at a building. Why not do stuff on the level of having the entire screen turn white from a Reaper projectile shot down from orbit, then have Shepard run for cover as the pressure wave tears down the city around him. After that, make Shepard exit whatever bunker he is in, and have him see the shadows of impossibly large Reapers barely visible in the dust of a destroyed city.

[Ingmar]

I've always wondered at how sci-fi game designers end up so conservative. ME3 had it really bad in the beginning, where you just had some random Reapers doing random things on the screen, occasionally shooting a sad little laser beam at a building. Why not do stuff on the level of having the entire screen turn white from a Reaper projectile shot down from orbit, then have Shepard run for cover as the pressure wave tears down the city around him. After that, make Shepard exit whatever bunker he is in, and have him see the shadows of impossibly large Reapers barely visible in the dust of a destroyed city.

Because narratively, Earth has to be able to hold out long enough for the rest of the game to actually be able to happen. If you make the Reapers able to process a planet that fast, you need a different story entirely, and I think the reaction to 'welp, Earth is 100% dead right off the bat, and there's nothing you can do about it' would have made the ending complaints look tame.

[jakonovski]

I've always wondered at how sci-fi game designers end up so conservative. ME3 had it really bad in the beginning, where you just had some random Reapers doing random things on the screen, occasionally shooting a sad little laser beam at a building. Why not do stuff on the level of having the entire screen turn white from a Reaper projectile shot down from orbit, then have Shepard run for cover as the pressure wave tears down the city around him. After that, make Shepard exit whatever bunker he is in, and have him see the shadows of impossibly large Reapers barely visible in the dust of a destroyed city.

Because narratively, Earth has to be able to hold out long enough for the rest of the game to actually be able to happen. If you make the Reapers able to process a planet that fast, you need a different story entirely, and I think the reaction to 'welp, Earth is 100% dead right off the bat, and there's nothing you can do about it' would have made the ending complaints look tame.

Nah, that's just nuclear bomb level destruction, something the Reapers IMO should have been shown to unleash, if for no other reason than to remain convincing bad guys (I thought they were a joke considering all the foreshadowing). Just have them restrict their attacks to military targets, leaving the bulk of Earth's population untouched for processing.

This also brings up another video game annoyance of mine: inability to work with scale. Things got really cringeworthy when Shepard had that dumb bossfight with a Reaper on the Quarian homeworld.

[Margalis]

I took it as "we're getting pressure from upstairs over that fucking ending to 3. So what do you people want? Tell us so that way when you rage we can say 'we gave them what they wanted, not our fault!"

This is a disturbing trend. There are elements of this thinking in Steam Greenlight, the design of Mass Effect 2, 3, Dragon Age 3, Final Fantasy XIII-2, etc.

When Mass Effect 2 came out there was a puff-piece from Bioware on Gamasutra about how it fixed every fan complaint with ME2. Same thing with FFXIII-2. At that point it was "give us all your complaints and we will address them (often in ways that don't make holistic sense)". Now it's almost to the point of "why don't you just tell us the design of the game you want us to make?"

This seems to happen with companies that lose the pulse of their customers and don't know how to find it again.

Often times people don't really know what they want, what they ask for is obvious stuff that is easy to articulate, and almost never are their ideas bold. Like Henry Ford said, people want a faster horse. A lot of the best things are things people didn't know they wanted until they were presented with them.

Ultimately what people want is a good game and as a game developer your job is to know what that means.

[Merusk]

Boldness and innovation require risk and bravery.  We're a nation of capital cowards.

[Margalis]

Boldness and innovation require risk and bravery.  We're a nation of capital cowards.

Bioware is Canadian and Square-Enix is Japanese.   

[Venkman]

This seems to happen with companies that lose the pulse of their customers and don't know how to find it again.

Often times people don't really know what they want, what they ask for is obvious stuff that is easy to articulate, and almost never are their ideas bold. Like Henry Ford said, people want a faster horse. A lot of the best things are things people didn't know they wanted until they were presented with them.

Ultimately what people want is a good game and as a game developer your job is to know what that means.

Can't remember where this came up recently, but we had some discussion here about how this comes down the the structure of large companies.

Most large ones bifurcate between the people doing work and the people who hold onto and dispense the resources needed to do that work. Over time these large organizations evolve this way because of some assumption that business people only understand business-y things while developers only know how to build things. They're expected to "work it out", but it rarely does, especially after an independent smaller company where it did work gets absorbed into a larger company where it doesn't work but which hides this fact by continually purchasing smaller companies.

The business folks often have no real clue what the end user wants. They know salespeople, retail buyers, planograming, and so on. Their usual sources for inspiration are press releases, presentations by research companies, focus groups and surveys. Not a single actual inspirational thing there. But just how much intellectual thought leadership do you need to make the next sequel in a series that stretches back decades? And because they have their incremental success to the Finance folks, they get even more resources to dispense at pleasure on the next project.

This is from where all of the "like X but with Y" thinking derives.

Those developers who actually had the original idea and do all the work? If lucky, some will be media-trained to carry PR messages to GDC and the like. But they aren't likely to hit the levels of leadership that lets them command what is done in a large organization. Too many people at that level who don't actually understand their value add. Too much "oh they're just going to bore us with the thing in the box we're trying to sell".

Which of course is why so many established companies are having problems a) having a service-level relationship with their users; and, b) can't figure out how to monetize in a way that offsets all the losses in AAA sales that'll probably never come back.

Truly innovative things can only happen in small companies, or ones set up like a monarchy with a particularly narrow focus (Steve Jobs' Apple, which is quickly evolving into just-another-large-company).

[rk47]

Well, they haven't lost me throughout Mass effect 3.
I actually enjoyed a lot of parts of what it is.

 

Until they made Indoctrination a dumb plot device.
Illusive Man turned into a complete blind retard with no gradual shift in character, he's flipped 100% from the start. What a waste of a good character. He was meant to be the opposite of Anderson - willing to cross the line to get the job done, except Bioware got lazy and just paint him all black from the start - with a huge sign 'He's indoctrinated here' and the whole universe is clueless about it till the last 10% of the game where the whole finale was about convincing Illusive dude that he's... like, indoctrinated, man.

How stupid do you want to treat your fans who actually predicted this at ME2 ending?

Then Udina, it was one derp after another.

I also love how in the London finale where Shepard was charging in at the pillar of light, he did it on foot and the only game play element was - hold space bar to run forward - you can't even die at this point, you took random laser blast, Shep would grunt, but his shield is unaffected. Why? Why even give player input when it doesn't even matter?
Then came the Michael Bay climax , everyone's DEAD! DEAD!!!!! GAME OVER MAN!  and lo and behold - Shepard lives. What a twist!

Five minutes later, Star Child Casey Hudson showed his face, telling us how he wrote an epic end to the trilogy.
I shot him on the face and got a shit ending. Well trolled.

[Ratman_tf]

Well, they haven't lost me throughout Mass effect 3.
I actually enjoyed a lot of parts of what it is.

 

Until they made Indoctrination a dumb plot device.
Illusive Man turned into a complete blind retard with no gradual shift in character, he's flipped 100% from the start. What a waste of a good character. He was meant to be the opposite of Anderson - willing to cross the line to get the job done, except Bioware got lazy and just paint him all black from the start - with a huge sign 'He's indoctrinated here' and the whole universe is clueless about it till the last 10% of the game where the whole finale was about convincing Illusive dude that he's... like, indoctrinated, man.

How stupid do you want to treat your fans who actually predicted this at ME2 ending?

Then Udina, it was one derp after another.

I also love how in the London finale where Shepard was charging in at the pillar of light, he did it on foot and the only game play element was - hold space bar to run forward - you can't even die at this point, you took random laser blast, Shep would grunt, but his shield is unaffected. Why? Why even give player input when it doesn't even matter?
Then came the Michael Bay climax , everyone's DEAD! DEAD!!!!! GAME OVER MAN!  and lo and behold - Shepard lives. What a twist!

Five minutes later, Star Child Casey Hudson showed his face, telling us how he wrote an epic end to the trilogy.
I shot him on the face and got a shit ending. Well trolled.

 

Udina was pretty derpy. Some of ME3 felt like a goofy action film version of the 'real' ME universe. Like, Garrus and Shepard would be playing this video game and laughing at the stuff they 'got wrong'.

Also: Losing the film grain effect shows when Bioware started to lose touch with their own project.

[rk47]

Oh yeah, Ashley too... how the fuck. 
I almost shot her too.
It was one of those 'you're too stupid to live' moments, but I held off and gave her another chance.

[Minvaren]

Loved double-socking the reporter in ME3. 

Going straight from ME2 to ME3, the latter feels less epic somehow...

[Nayr]

First post, yay.....


Mass Effect team Edmonton had it's last meeting yesterday. So safe to assume that the next Story DLC will be the last.


I dunno if quoting a post that's arguably a year old is allowed. But I have opinions, and a discussion is the place to voice them!

The thing I talked about:

Well there's more than one way to look at it, Mr. L'Etoile.

To adress my opinion of your opinions. . .

1. To be fair, gruesomely harvesting thousands of civilizations and countless numbers of lives, even for a good reason, does not make them the good guys. A bad guy with good motivations is still a bad guy.

1.2. As for not asking the civilizations. I would think they probably had tried that before. I mean, really, jumping straight to mass harvesting doesn't seem smart for any reasoning. It feels like more of a last resort because all of their past attempts failed.

1.3. Also I don't see where the Krogan and Rachni were ever eviled or de-eviled. The Rachni Wars and Krogan Rebellions happened thousands of years ago and were perpetrated by different people than the ones we know. An entire race cant be eternally defined because of one or two moments in history.
    Dunno if you've played ME3 yet, but the Krogan can go bad if you cure the genophage and have Urdnot Wreav as their sole leader(no Eve) and restart the rebellions. Wheras Wrex plays reformer and brings the Krogan into the new age. The Rachni were provoked by the sole survivors of the race that created the Reapers, they attempted to condition them as a weapon to fight for them.
    Same with the Geth. They weren't redeemed to me because they weren't the ones who committed the crimes, dissenters who were no longer with them did. Showing that A.I are not inherently evil prevents people from assuming that Mass Effect is a black and white story. And amounts to plot progression.

1.4. I don't see how Cerberus was ever redeemed. At all. The Illusive Man is a liar with a horde of deceptive bastards. Drew Karpyshyn's novels only highlighted that. And ME3 confirmed it when you run into a terminal with data on Project Lazarus that shows the Illusive Man scheming - hiring sympathetic faces(Ken Donelly and Gabby Daniels) and familiar faces(Joker and Dr Chakwas) to make Shepard THINK Cerberus was good and to be comfortable. Miranda and Jacob turn because the Illusive Man was just too disgusting for them to tolerate.

2. To be fair again. The problem at hand required being able to affect the very fabric of the entire universe instantaneously. Something of godlike proportions. It seems unlikely that the Reapers would ever be able to figure it out. At least not without pouring ungodly amounts of time and power into researching it.

2.2. As far as humans being special, I don't think it was meant for humans to be the key to the solution, but rather the last piece of a puzzle they've been assembling for billions of years. Each race they harvest added a piece by expanding the Reapers' group intelligence. Humans were just the last that they needed because their genetic diversity was worth a dozen other races.

3. Well if you consider the overall size of the universe, the goings on of a single galaxy would arguably be like a single raindrop falling into the ocean. Doesn't make a difference. The problem is there, whether they do anything or they don't do anything. But what they do contributes to finding the overall solution.

Also as a writer, you should know that fiction is reliant on coincidence and reason. Look at early ME1. Tali, of all of the things she could save from a Geth heretic's data banks, found the direct confession about Eden Prime in Saren's own voice, and and got to the Citadel at the exact time when Shepard needed that specific evidence most. Two coincidences joined by the reasoning that the Citadel is the place to go. And without that, the entirety of Mass Effect's trilogy wouldn't have happened. Shepard would have been stonewalled, Saren would have found the conduit with no opposition, and the Reapers would have won.

As for leaps of logic, if you guys spin it the right way, anything can be perfectly believable by a science fiction standard.


My opinions. . .

1. Giving the Reapers a purpose, any purpose, to explain why they are annihilating thousands if not millions of civilizations and absorbing uncountable numbers of innocent people is a lot better than leaving them as some generic Cthulhu that does evil for the sake of doing evil. It's also better than going the Skynet route and blaming the destruction of everything on a single software malfunction.
     The way the Reapers are, whether its Dark Energy or Singularity, they are preventing the complete and utter annihilation of all life. Which just justifies their reason to exist at all.


2. The dark energy ending would have been shocking, which would make it something to remember. You fight the entire game believing one side of the story, and in the end, you finally hear the other side. Then you make the decision about whether or not to continue down the path you've followed and hope there's another way, or you join with your enemy and hope you're making the right decision.
     The weight of that moment, that one choice, is what would have made the ending true to the game. As every choice is a risk no matter what path you take, Paragon or Renegade.

3. Using dark energy to stop dark energy is not unlike Dragon Age where the Templars use blood magic to prevent blood magic. "A little hypocrisy for the greater good," as David Gaider's Asunder novel put it.

[Lantyssa]

3. Using dark energy to stop dark energy is not unlike Dragon Age where the Templars use blood magic to prevent blood magic. "A little hypocrisy for the greater good," as David Gaider's Asunder novel put it.

I loathed the Templars...

[Nayr]

3. Using dark energy to stop dark energy is not unlike Dragon Age where the Templars use blood magic to prevent blood magic. "A little hypocrisy for the greater good," as David Gaider's Asunder novel put it.

I loathed the Templars...

And the Templars are portrayed as villains. Just like the Reapers.

Phylacteries = Mass Relays, FTL, Reapers, Mass Effect Phenomenon in general.

But yeah, like I said in last post, one galaxy using FTL, compared to the overall scale of the universe, should not contribute much to the actual problem. Another reason I like the Dark Energy idea is because it taps on a real world theory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip

I suppose a way the writers could have spun it is that the Dark Energy created by use of mass effect tech is not the same as the phantom dark energy which expands the universe and causes the problem. Solving the problem however, would be another matter entirely.

One curiosity I have that I'd like to hear Stormwaltz/L'Etoile's opinion on is the Reapers' creators. If the whole Leviathan thing was planned from the get go or if they had something different in mind before. It's obvious Sovereign was lying when he said "we have no beginning or end" because Machines don't just create themselves, well at least not the first generation of machines.
      One particular reason to be curious is because, if I read correctly, he wrote all of the planet descriptions in ME1, including Jartar, which first mentioned the "Leviathan of Dis," which was revealed in ME3 to have been killed by the real Leviathan.

[Trippy]

Don't indent your paragraphs, just put a blank line between them.

[tmp]

And the Templars are portrayed as villains. Just like the Reapers.

I'd argue that's more of individual viewer interpretation, than a fact -- David Gaider took part in quite a few arguments on the official BioWare forums, and his stance generally seems to be the Templars attempt to carry out a difficult (both morally and practically) task to the best of their ability. So i don't think he views them as the villains, nor that he actively tried to portray them as such.

[Lantyssa]

Yeah.  I never viewed the Templars portrayed as bad guys.  I can see a need for them in the world in which they are set, it's just that they have a mindset that is offensive to my personal beliefs, and were I in charge, they would operate in a very different fashion.