Mass Effect

[october_midnight]

If I bought another console, my fiancee would leave me lol.

Just started in on ME2. It's good, still the series is no Dead Space which does certain things this series tries to achieve in terms of fluid combat, only miles better. Loving the new things in this compared to ME, but hating others. Just met up with Garrus for the first time, you have to defend against waves of mercs running up the bridge. I'm still primarily sticking with an assault rifle. I stumble across another rifle that only shoots in like, 5 round bursts, and now that it's equipped I can't change back to the old weapon? Dumb.

Oh, and so far up to this point (which isn't that far in the game I assume), I've already got stuck to 2 walls unable to shoot or move...sweet.

[Space Suicide]

I stumble across another rifle that only shoots in like, 5 round bursts, and now that it's equipped I can't change back to the old weapon? Dumb.

Oh, and so far up to this point (which isn't that far in the game I assume), I've already got stuck to 2 walls unable to shoot or move...sweet.

I never had or heard of that glitch. Odd!

While I was in Garrus recruitment mission my Shep glitched on a box and couldn't move. I had to reload most of the mission. I know your pain on those claims.

[october_midnight]

Maybe I just haven't figured out how to change weapons in battle, who knows.

[Space Suicide]

Maybe I just haven't figured out how to change weapons in battle, who knows.

It's just like the other games, click LB to bring up the Weapons Wheel. RB is the Power Wheel. Doing that will toggle what weapon or biotic power you want.

I think I know what you're talking about...

If you have the rifle you don't like equipped and want to equip another rifle then the only way to do that is at a weapons terminal or in the Armory on the Normandy. You can't switch rifles in the middle of a mission by click start and going to equipment like the first game allows.

[Hula]

Played multiplayer for the first time last night. It's awesome, but it's kind of annoying that high level people drop into matches with low level ones and steal all the frags at the last minute (like that frickin' banshee I was whittling down without any problems >:|). I know there's no rule against it, and I know it's gone on in games since time immemorial, but it takes the fun out of it for people just starting out. Drop out of the match, find some equal squadmates and earn your kills like the rest of us.

Also does anyone else think it's a shame you can't use the Kinect during multiplayer? It'd speed things up a lot in the heat of battle.

[xmd 5a]

Oh, and so far up to this point (which isn't that far in the game I assume), I've already got stuck to 2 walls unable to shoot or move...sweet.

That happened to me so often. On Jacob's loyalty mission the game actually auto-saved while I was stuck in a rock. I was near the end of the mission too.

ME3 seems to be getting a lot of flak for glitches, but I had nowhere near as many problems as I did in ME2. Hell, I think I experienced more annoying glitches in ME2 than in New Vegas and Skyrim combined...

[Space Suicide]

I never had any glitches in Mass Effect 3, minus the one Menae Brute that got stuck in a corner but it wasn't a glitch really.

As for Mass Effect 2, I only had two glitches really - getting stuck on a box during Garrus' recruitment mission and one other time getting stuck on a balcony on Horizon.

[Hula]

WARNING: UNTAGGED TEXT CONTAINS IMPLIED SPOILERS.

I finished the game last night. I didn't expect it to hit me as hard as it did—I teared up when Kaidan said his goodbyes, then I all-out cried when it came to the ending. It felt like the only fair resolution to the series at the time; it's only now, in the cold light of morning and without my emotions colouring my opinion, that I can see why fans were so annoyed about what happened.

It wasn't the fact that all the possible choices were bad ones in the sense that things turned out badly whatever you picked. It wasn't even that the ending was poorly written, because it wasn't—as I said, at the time it happened it felt like the only way the series could be resolved. The problem is that after every decision we've made over the years, after every person we've agonised over killing, after every civilisation we've struggled to save, it didn't amount for a whole lot when push came to shove. True, the decisions we had to make over the course of the three games shaped the journey itself, but the entirety of the third game was spent mustering up forces for the final conflict only for the same thing to happen no matter what. If there'd been an epilogue showing everybody's fate, fine. It just felt like all the hours I invested in the third game (and my brief foray into multiplayer) were for naught. I could've just waltzed through the main storyline without even bothering with the side missions, right? All they did was unlock a few achievements.

That, and Spoiler: the Catalyst taking the form of the little boy felt stupid. Why him? Where the hell did that even come out of? Why, after three years of plot development, did the ending feel completely disconnected from the universe of the series?

Apparently when the first game was being written, the dude at the helm of the writing team had intended for it all to turn out that the mass effect relays were generating dark energy in the galaxy and that the Reapers were sent to fix that. It'd make a lot more sense than them being a race of synthetics sent to destroy organic life so that organic life wouldn't create synthetics that destroyed organic life. That, and it'd be true to the series. I mean look at the fricking name of the series itself—when does the mass effect ever actually come into the storyline again outside of travelling between planets? ETA—just noticed playwithfire posted this already. I was trying not to spoiler myself so I skimmed over it, heh.

I'm not saying it was a bad game. Last night, when I set down my controller and turned off the Xbox, I was inconsolable because I felt like my favourite game had come to an end in the most brutal way possible, and while I was upset I was okay with it playing out that way. It was a well-written, emotional ending (even though the cutscene is largely the same no matter what you choose, but that came down to laziness). It just felt like a bit of a cheap ending to something that meant so much to so many people, considering that all of our hard work really amounted to nothing in the end.

If BioWare brings out a new ending, I won't know how to feel. My hope is that they had a plan all along and that they're going to somehow flesh things out and lend some weight to all the decisions we made, rather than changing the ending itself. I just want to feel like all the hours I've clocked on this game, all the emotion I've invested in it, counts for something.

[Demogorgon]

there wont be any "new endings". the co-founder of Bioware was pretty clear in his statement that, while he respects the opinions of the fans, he also he respects the decisions of his creative team. there may be new content helping add details to the endings, but there will not be new endings. sometimes i think i'm the only one one who read the blog about it.

[Hula]

sometimes i think i'm the only one one who read the blog about it.

You must not have seen all the conflicting information in just about every other corner of the internet.

[Space Suicide]

there wont be any "new endings". the co-founder of Bioware was pretty clear in his statement that, while he respects the opinions of the fans, he also he respects the decisions of his creative team. there may be new content helping add details to the endings, but there will not be new endings. sometimes i think i'm the only one one who read the blog about it.

I actually mentioned that on the last page.

[Piko]

I actually mentioned that on the last page.

As did I. Wonder if anything's coming out this month. All they said was that we would know something in April.

[Wretchedest]

I'm surprised anybody thinks the dark matter thing is any better... its fundamentally similar to the current ending and adresses only one of many problems....

[BasicCable]

I finished ME3 last week and decided I'd like to play through the first two games, then import my character. I didn't do it on my initial playthrough of ME3 due to my playing ME1+2 on PC, but playing ME3 on 360. A few hours into ME1, I was reminded just how awful the mako driving is, and how my will was nearly broken by it the first time through.

[Hula]

I'm surprised anybody thinks the dark matter thing is any better... its fundamentally similar to the current ending and adresses only one of many problems....

Dunno about anyone else, but it feels more true to the series. The Reaper's entire purpose in the third game seems a bit corny (and overdone, although that's probably moot since sci-fi as a genre is pretty much a rehash of everything that's been done before). I would've liked to see all that foreshadowing in the first game about dark energy and whatnot actually come to fruition, if only so the series had a bit more cohesion. As things stand, the games feel a bit disjointed—it's very easy to tell they took a different path during production of the later games. That's usually where sci-fi series go wrong, by losing touch with the original plan and coming up with the ending after the series has come into being. You can see it in how Battlestar Galactica turned out in the end (which, incidentally, is thematically incredibly similar to the ME series—Spoiler: just compare the idea of cycles, and of synthetics rising up to destroy organics only for the cycle to begin again.. Note that I'm not dissing BioWare here, just pointing out parallels). Very different from the 'vibe' set forth at the start of the series, as though they had an idea at the beginning, realised it wouldn't really work after they'd already committed to it and decided to change things on the fly.

Mostly, though, I think fans are just dissatisfied with the ending and to them, the grass is greener on the other side. I'll be happy if BioWare brings out anything that enhances and adds to the ending (that's what I meant by 'new ending'), which seems to be the direction they're headed what with the quotes we've seen about them seeking to 'clarify' things with future DLC.

It would've been cool to see the dark energy idea come into being and I think it could've opened up a lot of doors in terms of how the organics would deal with that conflict, whether or not they'd choose to try to fix that problem or just ignore it (sort of a 'who cares if fossil fuels run out in the next generation' situation), and so on. Fact of the matter is, though, that ending was tied to a game that Mass Effect 3 never turned out to be. The series has diverged a lot from its beginnings in 2007, which is cool. Maybe ME3 as we know it today is different than the one that might have been made by the production team back at the beginning, but it's still a great game.

[Wretchedest]

Again, I think that only fixes one very small problem with the ending.... and not really... And I'm glad they took a different path with ME2. The gameplay in ME1 is so frustrating to me that it's virtually unplayable, and the characters and choices lack the depth they have in ME2. ME3 has some of those benefits too, despite its obvious shortcomings.

[Hula]

Gameplay and story are two different beasts, though—they did a great job of making it more user-friendly with each incarnation, sure, but that had nothing to do with the plot. I think they intended for it to be a little more lighthearted when they made the first game; it reads so often like a cheesy (in a good way!) 80's space-opera when compared to the darker settings/themes of the second game. With that shift came the opportunity to explore things from a different perspective and, as you said, delve a little more deeply into the characters and subplots. As I said myself, I don't think it's a bad thing that the series changed so much. It's just different.

Anyway, I wasn't saying it would've fixed the ending, I was just saying I can see why it might have been a nice way to wrap up the series. I don't really know that there's a whole lot that could've been done differently with the actual premise of the ending without completely altering everything they'd built the series up to be with the second and third games. It was the lack of variety in the endings that was ME3's biggest flaw, not so much the endgame scenario itself.

[Piko]

Personally, if they had gone with indoctrination, it would've been so much better. The current ending just felt like a giant waste of time. Spoiler: The Reapers claimed to represent order. And they went with that and hit a massive roadblock. That, or they got lazy. Bioware got lazy with Dragon Age II, so maybe I was a little naive to think it could carry over to Mass Effect.

[Space Suicide]

Well to be fair, the main man that wrote most of the lore, novels and story, Drew Karpyshyn, has been out of the fold for quite some time.

[ltrandazzo]

That article has taken a lot of liberties with Drew Karpyshyn's exit, especially since Drew has made it clear on his own Twitter account that Mac Walters has been the head writer since the BEGINNING of Mass Effect 2 and that Drew's collaboration ended about halfway through the development of the second game. Anyone who hasn't seen the Final Hours of ME 3 publication for the iPad needs to download or find a copy of it to get their facts straight.

[twilight explosion]

pretty cool review from Toonami last night. Lots of spoilers tho

[Space Suicide]

Only nearly a month too late.

On topic, I remember Toonami on cartoon network in the 90's when they used to review video games. I clearly remember the Jak and Daxter: Precursor Legacy review they gave. Good times...

[Piko]

How the game should've ended. Warning: there's spoilers. Beware!

[twilight explosion]

Only nearly a month too late.

On topic, I remember Toonami on cartoon network in the 90's when they used to review video games. I clearly remember the Jak and Daxter: Precursor Legacy review they gave. Good times...

well, they only brought toonami back that night as an april fools joke. they didn't even announce it. was pretty stoked they had most of the lineup from 12 years ago on there. and the things he said about it were pretty spot on rofl

[ltrandazzo]

http://kotaku.com/5899441/there-will...a-extended-one

It'll be fun to see and it's nice that it's free, but ultimately, I feel that it's unnecessary.

[Space Suicide]

http://kotaku.com/5899441/there-will...a-extended-one

It'll be fun to see and it's nice that it's free, but ultimately, I feel that it's unnecessary.

Whiners usually win.

[dpeters]

Am I the only one who liked that there were no happy endings?

Before people hop on the hate to train, I'm not saying the endings didn't have similarities but that I really liked the problem ending where there's no perfect solution to a problem.

[playwithfire]

This guy basically sums it up: Needless to say, spoilers.

[sentient02970]

Free DLC ending might end up like:


"Note: Poochie died on the way back to his home planet."

[Hula]

Whiners usually win.

Dude, come on.

People's problems with this were pretty legitimate. That's not to say that some gamers' approaches to this (notably the ones where they thought it was a good idea to attack BioWare) were entirely legitimate themselves, but all of the coverage on the endings didn't come up just because a handful of vocal fans were cheesed off.

Anyway. At this point I'm just interested to see what comes of this. Anything that expands upon things is good in my books, even if it doesn't change the ending, which BioWare have made it pretty clear will be the case. Of course, if this 'clarification' involves cutscenes showing all of Shepard's friends and allies dying in a fiery inferno... Well :P