Mass Effect 3

[Cube]

We Really Need These At This Point?

 

Well, it's out in January for people who only own a PS3.

[heroicjanitor]

Yeah I am probably getting ME2 next month. Bioware are on a roll since Dragon Age 2 is out in March I think

[The Bard]

I actually think the multiplayer would work well. Just off the top of my head I can imagine it being a decent class based team shooter. asymmetrical teams of, say, Krogan soldiers vs Asari Commandos or Geth tech specialists could be excellent.

 

Assuming it comes at no detriment to the singleplayer game, I hardly see any kind of reason not to give it a shot.

 

Well, it might detract from the amount of time they spend on the single player. It will be a real bummer if the game doesn't match up to Mass Effect 2. That game was near perfect.

 

Multiplayer in the sense of drop in/ drop out co-op would be a neat little extra, but I don't feel as if the powers and shooting mechanics in the second game were really honed for multiplayer combat.

[drahkon]

That game was near perfect.

 

Are you serious?

 

I can't be bothered with Mass Effect 3 right now. The story of the second game ruined my hype for the third installment.

 

Edit: I have to rephrase: The second game's ending, particularly the final boss, ruined my hype for the third installment.

Edited December 13, 2010 by drahkon

[Daft]

That game was near perfect.

 

I'm going to pretend you don't think that.

[LegoMan1031]

Mass Effect 2 was amazing!!!

 

What r u saying!? <holds back the tears>

[Cube]

Mass Effect 2 was amazing!!!

 

What r u saying!? <holds back the tears>

 

He must mean that The Bard needed to remove the word "near" from his post.

[Daft]

Mass Effect 2 was amazing!!!

 

What r u saying!? <holds back the tears>

 

I'm just saying it was a poorly paced, by the numbers, farce for the most part. The lack of imagination required to enjoy it as much as some people do? ...I can't even fathom.

 

I judge people who love Mass Effect. lol

[gaggle64]

I love Mass Effect.

 

I very much enjoyed the first game in spite of it's many flaws, including needlessly drawn out skill system and ridiculous item management. ME2 was an improvement in every single way. The character customisation is superb and the available powers are varied, useful and sometimes fun to play with. The combat was also greatly improved in ME2, creating a much smoother and greatly satisfying game play experience.

 

It's diverse cast of characters are by turns funny, interesting and sympathetic and actually lend to the re-playability of the game as you see how their stories might have unfolded. Mordin springs to mind -

an upbeat and charitable personality who loves Gilbert & Sullivan, who is also prepared to murder in cold blood his own student as he wrestles with the grim morality of his past.

There's also Tali -

successfully embodying the plight of her people, her eventual conclusion of peace or war monger based on your actions.

It was even almost gut wrenching at points as you pushed through multiple dialogue choices to force each character down one route or the other, protesting and arguing bitterly with you as you drove the action on. It also helps that the voice acting for each is rarely less then above average, the closest thing to a bum note being the slightly dry but still adequate performance for "Male" Shepard.

 

I enjoy the overall design of the universe, a sort of sweaty & greasy collage of various sci-fi influences presented in gorgeous graphics package, well ahead most of the pack. I think the alien design is strong and I love the inclusion of "biotics" which is essentially the Force without the cod-philosophy. It's like Star Wars hit puberty and a had a sweaty fumble with an Ian M Banks novel.

 

All in all, I love the Mass Effect series and I look forward not only to the conclusion of the trilogy but also to further games set in the universe, as mentioned numerous times by Bioware.

 

Whooo!

 

Dictated but not read.

Edited December 14, 2010 by gaggle64

[Daft]

Everything that is wrong with Mass Effect 2.

[Deathjam]

Everything that is wrong with Mass Effect 2.

 

[Cube]

Everything that is wrong with Mass Effect 2.

 

The biggest thing I got from the review was that the person who wrote it clearly knows it's a lot better than what he's saying it is.

 

Random fact: 85% of players didn't skip any dialogue.

[Aimless]

The Mass Effect games are easy to rag on — I could list their flaws all day if I had the inclination/need to appear superior — but to get hung up on the foibles is to miss the fundamental appeal of the series.

 

All games are fairly shoddy in some regards, that's the nature of dealing with the youngest, most complex form of media on the planet. If you don't approach things with some degree of context, an eye on the status quo, you'll never be able to enjoy anything because it will always fall short of the ideal.

 

Anyway, if there is a multiplayer component to Mass Effect 3 I'm guessing it'll take place entirely on Earth during the Reaper invasion; the singleplayer campaign will have you flee the planet at the start, not returning until near the end once you've gathered up an army. My personal take would be a co-operative hybrid of Left4Dead crossed with PSO, with players rolling different classes and combining their powers against AI foes across procedurally tweaked missions.

[Daft]

The Mass Effect games are easy to rag on — I could list their flaws all day if I had the inclination/need to appear superior — but to get hung up on the foibles is to miss the fundamental appeal of the series.

 

I love plenty of games that are flawed. Not really sure why anyone would equate perfectly valid criticisms to wanting to appear 'superior' (not sure why I should have to contextualise it in its medium, it has no qualms about feeding off others). I'm honestly not sure what the appeal of the series is. It's not original, it rifts off plenty of plenty (From the laughably 'sub-Vangelis' score to even more that just a whiff of Tron), it has very little to inspire.

 

But if you think I'm trying to be superior... Actually, just why? What a bizarre way to undermine what I'm saying. Are you being defensive? I can't tell.

 

I'm glad y'all enjoyed it. You happy now?

[Aimless]

I'm not being defensive, simply judging the reviewers intentions based on the tone of the piece: constant allusions to other media, needless attacks against BioWare and the abilities of its staff, plus the constant undertone that the writer thinks they could design a better game. What else am I to think?

 

Clearly the reviewer is intelligent and educated, but I see no point in judging videogames on the terms of more established mediums that are far easier to make. That's not to say games are immune to criticism, far from it, but the only thing to be gained from such a diatribe is to come out the other side looking like an arse; it's akin to walking into a secondary school art class and saying, "Well, none of this shit measures up to Michaelangelo, does it?"

 

Personally I view videogames in relation to their peers with one eye on the future. The rate at which the bar is being raised for them is scary — you need only look how far we've come in the 5 years since the 360's launch — so I find it very easy to not be too harsh on a medium that's already growing up faster than any other despite the obvious challenges it faces.

[Shorty]

Mass Effect 2 was a lot of fun, with an interesting story and great voice acting. You can throw people off rooftops and bridges with your mind.

 

Why does it have to be more complicated than this?

 

It's a video game. Maybe the reason people pick on little flaws in these kind of games is because necessities related to being a video game (such as streamlined, empty hallways or magic life-refuling health packs or inexplicable lumps of cover) take them out of the narrative experience.

[Daft]

Mass Effect 2 was a lot of fun, with an interesting story and great voice acting. You can throw people off rooftops and bridges with your mind.

 

Why does it have to be more complicated than this?

 

Because it is more complicated than that; all those things could be said of more than a few Star Wars games.

 

It's a video game. Maybe the reason people pick on little flaws in these kind of games is because necessities related to being a video game (such as streamlined, empty hallways or magic life-refuling health packs or inexplicable lumps of cover) take them out of the narrative experience.

 

I think you're definitely right with this. It's why I hold Uncharted 2 in such high esteem - it's absolutely seamless in those regards. Yes, I know it's heavily scripted and a completely different type of game but there are merits to it that aren't exclusive to the type of game it is.

 

 

When it comes down to it, I don't like Mass Effect's story. It's epic but it's got no personality, no soul, and whereas in other games there might be other things to make up for that, ME doesn't. The whole streamlined upgrading in ME2 was unforgivable too, imo. I don't think it's a bad game, I think it's the equivalent of a trash novel (Incidentally, I really enjoyed the first Mass Effect novel). It would be a guilty pleasure in any other medium - it didn't have to be, though.

 

Anyway, this is the ME3 thread.

 

I liked the trailer. More games need London. I hope it's in the final game. I'm tired of being in American cities all the time (I think AC kept me sane in this respect).

[The Bard]

Daft, while I respect your opinion on things, there are times...

 

 

I find the fact that review cited Assassins Creed as a counter to the contrivance of Mass Effect 2's story an instance of the most bizarre stupidity imaginable. Yeah, let’s basically make the Matrix, as an absurdly convenient excuse to let you run around in renaissance Italy with minimum exigency, because that's not the lowest hanging narrative fruit imaginable, right? The fact that Mass Effect harvests practically every cliche in the Sci-Fi book is not beyond my understanding, from the Protheans to the Mass Relays being essentially adaptations from the Ancients and Gates in Stargate, to the Geth which are reminiscent of the replicators. The thing is, Mass Effect is just another Sci Fi world, but having said that, it is well contained and fairly holistic. There is always an explanation for everything that is consistent with the Meta logic and world of the game.

 

 

Nevertheless, the idea that the game has no soul is both narrow minded and ignoring the very element that gives its story shape; the fact that it is the game at the forefront of my mind when I think of player agency and impact on the way the narrative unveils itself. This is why we play games; collaborative storytelling. You cite Uncharted 2, which is heavily scripted and essentially linear. Any capacity the player has for self expression in the narrative comes from the mechanics themselves, and these have little consequence in the world, other than the way in which your proficiency affects your progression. Hell, there is more capacity for expression in something like Team Fortress 2, which, in the absence of story is abstract enough that you can create your own mini narratives within the microcosm of every death match, just because of the emergence of it all. You’re familiar with the theory of emergence right? The idea that a small set of simple rules can lead to a greatly complex set of possibilities. Still, Mass Effect was fantastic in this regard; you could approach every combat encounter from a multitude of different angles, depending on your character class, the skills you’ve chosen and upgraded, and the weapons you’re holding. On top of this is the fact that you could also choose from a fairly sizeable host of characters to take with you on missions, all of whom have their own peculiarities and traits that affect their attributes, and by extension, the attributes of your group in a combat situation. Even though this is the case, this is not even close to the main reason why Mass Effect 2 holds so much esteem in my eyes:

 

 

You are the very thing that gives it soul. Unlike a film, you can’t just sit there and let it happen at you, you have to participate, and the more you invest, the better you’re rewarded. Mass Effect 2 is a huge progression within the sub genre of what I like to call “morality games,” that Bioware seem to have something of a monopoly on. When you talk to people about how they played Fallout 3, or Dragon Age or even the original Mass Effect, it was always set of categorical imperatives in mind. I will play this as a saint, or I will play this as fuckin’ Hitler, and this was because the mechanisms by which the morality system work weren’t nuanced enough to reward weighing every decision on its own merits, and your progression was only really accelerated by consciously choosing to act on the extreme ends of the moral spectrum. You never really played as “yourself,” or a projection of yourself into the game world, because there was no real means to do so.

 

 

This was completely overhauled for Mass Effect 2, partly by virtue of the fact that neither the combat, nor your moral alignment had much of an impact of your stats, and levelling was staggered so that it only occurred at the end of each chapter. In this way Mass Effect 2 is a true RPG, because you are actually playing a role, instead of ramping up a series of abstract statistics and declaring that these constitute your character, and letting these be what drives your play. What was even better is the fact that within the cut-scenes that detailed parts of the story, you were given the ability to make quick split second decisions regarding the course of action your character would take. Just the very fact that these have to be made on the fly means that you don’t have time to sit there and hypothesise on values alien to you, you act on your gut, and it is these split decisions that most greatly characterise you as a person (at least if you believe Malcolm Gladwell’s theories in Blink). And finally, because in most games, your considerations are usually tied to what the immediate reward of an action is going to be, as well as how it affects the usually binary outcome in the ending. This is not the case with this series of games, since even what you did in the first Mass Effect had extensive reverberations in the second game, and these are only amplified by the additional agency you are given in Mass Effect 2. Everyone whom I have talked to has taken completely diverging paths throughout the game in terms of their reactions to events, and their inevitable outcomes, especially the ending which I’m sure will have huge implications for the following game.

 

 

Not only this, but the character interactions can be fucking fascinating. For example (and this may seem far-fetched initially, but stick with me) I was reading as part of my course, some Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his theories on epistemology, which is essentially like objectivist epistemology, wherein he believes that the world is like the Rosetta Stone, and we as humans have an innate ability (as long as this isn’t hampered by too much social and cultural nurture that distorts this ability) to correlate our understanding with the natural world, and therefore come to the same conclusions, and fill in a directly correlative understanding of the world, piece by piece. Personally, I call this bullshit, because every human has a different interpretive paradigm built in, but imagine my surprise, when Legion, a machine comes and tells you this very thing about the way in which his race interpret phenomena, and have a collective consciousness with which to piece it together. What is even more exciting (to me...I’m not sure that everyone else is riveted by this so far...) is how he asks you, a human, to make a crucial decision on the fate of a divergent sect of his race... well...my mind was a bit blown, but I may just be insane...

 

 

The beef that guy had with the elevators being replaced by loading screens is absurd. This is a videogame – one that is incredibly impressive in terms of visuals, sound and presentation – what does that guy expect, gold, frankincense and myrrh on a platter? On top of this, the presentation of the loading screens only serves to distract you from the fairly minuscule loading times as it is, since they’re always blueprints or diagrams detailing things from the way that your ship docks, to, the external structure of the Citadel, combining to create a sense of the game world being one that isn’t fragmented and poorly glued together, but one that is very cogent.

 

 

The final point about the Asari who kills by mating, well, that is entirely consistent with the race in question. Come on, their sexual morphology shifts to accommodate any gender and race, their elders are call “Matriarchs.” Yes. Feminine over sexualisation is fairly explicit in these creatures, but then again, every Sci-Fi universe in existence has some equivalent, from the Twileks in Star Wars to the fact that every green ass puke coloured alien in Star Trek had a humanoid supermodel physique. It’s just a trope, and I thought that Mass Effect did something pretty inventive with it. And hey, I’m no xenobiologist, but I thought the games internal encyclopaedia provided some sustainable explanations. I think that guys reference to “mother issues” was totally redolent of the reflexive nature of vulgar Freudians wherein everything has to have some implications within their insipid discourse of understanding. Fuck off you utter twats.

 

 

In conclusion; if you don’t like Mass Effect 2, that’s all fine and good, but don’t come and present utterly philistine arguments, that are nothing if not petty reductions, for why that may be the case.

 

Edit: Urr...shit. Didn't realise the post was that long...

Edited December 14, 2010 by The Bard

[drahkon]

But Mass Effect 2 sucks.

[spirited away]

That was the best post I've read all year. Bravo sir.

[drahkon]

Thank you I know...You meant The Bard's post.

[Daft]

In conclusion; if you don’t like Mass Effect 2, that’s all fine and good, but don’t come and present utterly philistine arguments, that are nothing if not petty reductions, for why that may be the case.

 

Edit: Urr...shit. Didn't realise the post was that long...

 

My point to do with Uncharted has nothing to do with the story beyond its quality of the implementation.

 

My point about the game having no soul is because its scope is so epic it has no intimacy whatsoever to it. Not is small part due to the absolutely fucking awful characters - it's a travesty of scales. Ultimately I don't care if the whole universe is slaughtered because the game's universe is a completely abstract space - and not in a 'holy fuck' hyperspace sense, but in 'a million deaths is a statistic' sense. I spent the whole of the first game getting to know my team only to have to spend pretty much the entirety of ME2 recruiting a whole bunch of vapid troglodytes to replace them - before earning their loyalty in the most flaccidly obligatory, but not really, follow up missions. Thank God Tali and Garrus came back otherwise I'd have been completely at a loss. This is all compounded by the fact you end up recruiting, how many? Ten team mates? And yet are still restricted to only taking two with you? I understand one of the reasons, different people play with different team mates blah blah blah, experience different things. You know what? When I'm alienated from half the people I've recruited (not to mention the 20+ ship's crew), useless people who I wasted a lot of time getting, well that's just shockingly tired and bad game design. It's not like they do anything on the ship to humanise themselves, they don't interact. Hell, they don't even move from where they're standing. The rigidity is painful (I only bring Uncharted up because it nails that Holy Grail of game design, 'flow'. Of course different games have to find different ways to achieve this flow but ME does not have it, nor to it ever strive for it. For a universe that is so 'holistic' it is violently mechanical). They utterly betray this extra dimension so many people clamour to praise by locking themselves in their rooms like a stormy teenager. If the player is the one who instils soul in the game it's no surprise the final outcome is so atrocious - it's like BioWare took their cues from Smallville's banal character fodder.

 

I was only going to write a couple lines, and I (and I'm sure you, too) could go on and on, so lets just move on. This is the ME3 thread, there's no need to get sidetracked. I was just surprised that it suckered you so much.

 

Edit: Forgot to say, ME2 was looking so promising. The opening was amazing. Genuinely stunning. Then Shepard died killing a helluva lot of the investment I'd made in the first game.

Edited December 14, 2010 by Daft

[The Bard]

That last paragraph wasn't addressed to you, but to whoever wrote that set of impressions. Which I hope wasn't you, because you're better than that

 

As for the point regarding intimacy, I find it to be the opposite of that, since a great deal of the game is spent getting to know your team. From direct interactions, to the way in which your decisions are interpreted by each member, and the fact that you spend a large majority of the game actually developing your relationships with these people, and your need to weigh the need to gain their loyalty being against your moral considerations.

 

I did enjoy it a great deal. I understand your point on the "rigidity," of some of its elements, but the rest of the game drew me in so completely that I completely didn't register this. And this small shortcoming only serves to show how comparitively well designed the rest of the game is.

 

Anywho, I got a bit carried away, but I kinda found it funny that you thought the fact that I liked the game reflected poorly on me as a person . I just think that there was nothing substantial to that guys review, and that it was reductive to the extreme.

 

Also: Vapid Troglodyte. Stealing that for future use.

 

That was the best post I've read all year. Bravo sir.

 

I do what I can

[Daft]

Anywho, I got a bit carried away, but I kinda found it funny that you thought the fact that I liked the game reflected poorly on me as a person

 

Although I do like implying that, I meant it completely flippantly.

[Aimless]

It's all a bit heavy in here. Let's see what Mordin prescribes: