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Oblarg

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Posts posted by Oblarg

  1. Fractional reserve banking works fine - there's no compelling evidence that it's the cause of our recent economic problems (I think the utter lack of governmental oversight is a big problem there, and Paul certainly won't fix that).

  2. As regards sales the show is over by the time word of mouth from people who have actually played it starts getting around and you can start taking stock of the game as a whole. So it all ends up with marketing. If you can drum up enough exitement you can probably peddle that day one DLC as well. People are stupid, they only want what's new and hot. Tried and tested is so much more preferable.

     

    That didn't work for DA2, what makes you think it'll work for ME3? What makes you think a game can be wholly successful on nothing but week-1 sales? I'd argue most of those are guaranteed no matter what sort of product you put out - fanboys are fanboys.

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  3. Normandy breaks Sovereign's back with some torpedo or something after the fleet pounded on it and it's shields failed. Plot weapon I guess, heh.

     

    Yeah, I always thought of that as a cinematic touch more than anything - I thought it was made pretty clear that the fleet destroyed Sovereign, not the Normandy.

  4.  

    Have you PLAYED MASS EFFECT 3 (Thought I'd bold it so that you could have the obviousness for yourself). They define that Anderson wanted it for his flagship there. It's not because it's a frigate, but because of all the upgrades. It indicates that it could be one of the most powerful ships around...and on top of that it has instant communcation abilities making it the prime ship for Anderson's Admirality ship. It's also implied the Normandy is the most advanced ship in the fleet (at least at the beginning of ME3).

     

    The upgrades are entirely irrelevant - you win the fight against the Collector ship without them. It is not "one of the most powerful ships" in the alliance navy - certainly not in terms of combat, at any rate. It's chicken**** compared to a dreadnaught. The ship was not designed for pitched combat. That is not what frigates are for. And yes, it is a frigate (even upgraded).

  5. In ME3 it was going to be the personal ship of Admiral Anderson, and indications seem to have that it would have been a flagship.

     

    AS I said before, flagships are NOT your weakest ships of the fleet, in fact typically they are the strongest.

     

    Have you read the codex? It's a frigate. Frigates are not built for pitched combat. In large battles they never directly engage a larger ship alone. The Normandy is not a particularly powerful warship - it's stealthy and quick, yes, but nothing special in a battle (especially un-upgraded). It certainly shouldn't be able to fight a heavy cruiser head-on, (unless you've upgraded the weapons, but that's irrelevant as it's not needed to win the fight) and it's absolutely negligible compared to a dreadnaught. This indicates that the only Collector ship was fairly weak in direct combat, and would not make any sort of meaningful impact on the outcome of a large battle.

  6.  

    Not to get too outrightly finnicky, but the SR2 is based off of the original Normandy, but has a whole bunch of upgrades compared to it. That's why it's about twice the size of the original Normandy, and that's before you do any of the character driven upgrades available.

     

    It's still spec'd to the original normandy, and it's still a frigate whose primary purpose is not combat.

     

    Do you really think the Collectors would be able to avoid all detection and bypass entire fleets in order to do any sort of damage in a large war? Nah, not by a long shot. They encounter one bulk cruiser and they're done for.

  7. Well, the Normandy Mrk 2 had a few significant upgrades beyond a standard frigate.

     

    You win the fight even with an un-upgraded SR2, which is spec'd to the original Normandy (which wasn't even built for pitched combat, mind you).

     

    The **** are the Collectors going to do with a single weak cruiser and a pack of floating eyeballs? They'd be destroyed before they could get close enough to do anything meaningful at all.

  8. However the thing with the collectors was still kind of important because it removed them from the equation. If we hadn't eliminated the collectors, we'd have half the fleet being wiped out by the collectors and a giant human reaper striding around earth like a Titan of Greek myths

     

    No, we wouldn't. The collectors had negligible military force (one cruiser, which loses in a pitched fight to a frigate), and thus they never could have really competed that human reaper. They were a non-threat.

  9. so it's not about the ending without a proper boss then, but an ending to a trilogy? hmmm, I wonder if that's how people had reacted when they saw Return of the Jedi for the first time back in the day

     

    RotJ's ending was satisfying - ewoks notwithstanding, it provided closure for all the major plot threads and felt reasonably complete.

  10.  

    And, your chocies were reflected throughout ME3. Nothing done during the series was 'meaningless'. That's just more over dramatics.

     

    Reflected throughout the game, yes. But then the ending comes along and takes a big dump over all of them - with the mass relays destroyed, pretty much none of what you've done matters. The effective state of the galaxy at the end of the game is virtually unchanged by any of your decisions throughout the trilogy. On top of that, it simply offers no closure - all those characters which they've spent so long building and making you care about? **** knows what happened to them. It's just intensely dissatisfying, given the scope of the game before it.

  11. Volourn, the problem people have is that the game touted reactivity to all your previous choices throughout the series, and what we got instead was reactivity to one choice made at the very end of the game. Not only that, but the endings not only lacked reactivity to your previous choices but also, to a large extent, invalidated them - with the state of the galaxy at the end of ME3, much of what you've done over the entire trilogy is rendered completely meaningless.

  12. Guard Dog, you'd really vote for Santorum over Obama? Obama has shown himself to be little more than what, 50 years ago, would have been centrist republican. Santorum has all but called for open theocracy and is, essentially, bigotry incarnate.

  13. Ah yes, mass effect 1 combat, HMWA X was the originator of the awesome button... or trigger in that case. "Hold this down indefinitely and everything dies". While ME2 might not be exactly the pinnacle of combat design, it certainly blows ME1 out of the water and the Sol system.

     

    ME1 had balance problems, but I'd argue the base mechanics for powers and ammo were easily superior to those of ME2. ME2 was better in the cover department, no doubt, and in overal fluidity, but a lot of it felt repetetive and underdeveloped.

     

    Also, major spoiler onslaught at Bioware Social. Kind of a bummer, since I've been writing all day and need to read more insipid video game rambling than this forum can currently provide.

     

    You actually read the bioware boards? That can't be pleasant, if memory serves they give a new meaning to the term "fanboy" over there. Oh, and creepy romance threads...

  14. It encourages movement over "cover camping" I can't really see how that is a bad thing.

     

    Because encounter design based on moving forward through enemies is largely less tactical and more reflex-based than encounter design based on defeating a set number of enemies in a certain environment. It's boring and repetitive, and requires no thought. "Cover-camping" isn't a problem in either system if your encounter design isn't ****ty, and I find nothing satisfying about having to run around looking for little red cylinders after every fight.

     

    I've also experimented with making shields no longer effective at blocking powers, and it's a welcome change of pace on Insanity. Especially for Adepts. It does tend to break the game a bit, though. I remember a certain boss fight that became trivial due to the fact that I could simply charge-push said boss over a balcony and win the encounter without firing a single shot...

     

    ME2 gameplay, while a general improvement over ME1's, felt kind of clunky, unrefined and unforgiving.

     

    I agree with pretty much all of this. Biotic powers felt completely neutered due to the combination of shield restrictions and the global cooldown - essentially, for 90% of the game your biotic powers were little more than "press this button to damage this type of shield," and it felt really, really lame. It's frustrating as hell not being able to push an enemy until he's already almost dead; one of the most enjoyable things about playing a biotic in ME1 was being able to open a fight by throwing a group of enemies against a wall. The global cooldown just compounded on this, because it prevented pretty much all the useful combos (e.g. lift+throw) from being executed without two biotics on your team. Powers in general just felt a lot less special and unique in ME2.

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