Mass Effect 3

[Nepenthe]

Why, Bio? WHY?

Bad doggy, you're supposed to crap on the lawn, not in the thread.

[Orogun01]

Wasn't that great to begin with, hard to get worked up over.

Mass Effect confirmed for the Melrose Place of video games.

[Zoraptor]

Given the similarity of ending style we could probably look at Deux Ex Invisible War to get an idea of what any future ME titles may do to deal with the ending choice- pick whatever they think makes sense for the new story and continuity with the old can go hang. It's (to an extent) what they already did with ME2.

 

If TOR had been more successful I think an MMO would have been inevitable, but now only if it could be done on the cheap.

[Gorgon]

I keep wanting to replay DXIW with DLCs and then I remember that it's standalone and you start lv0 no augs.

 

Mass Effect MMO. luls.

[Nepenthe]

I keep wanting to replay DXIW with DLCs and then I remember that it's standalone and you start lv0 no augs.

Invisible War had DLC?

[213374U]

Mass Effect MMO. luls.

Not necessarily a "traditional" MMO like WoW or TOR, but something like Planetside. I'd buy that.

 

Err... maybe I wouldn't, right away, considering how bad EABIO are at solving basic problems of the online genre such as connectivity issues. But yeah.

[Humanoid]

I can see it now.... two bitter foes engaged in a duel to the death, each waiting for the other to pop their head out first from behind the chest high wall.

 

And waiting.

 

 

And waiting.

[Nepenthe]

I can see it now.... two bitter foes engaged in a duel to the death, each waiting for the other to pop their head out first from behind the chest high wall.

 

And waiting.

 

 

And waiting.

You need to update your jokes for ME3.

[Humanoid]

It's still on my desk, waiting to be installed, someday. Probably after my holiday and after the Tour de France. Then I'll have a wholly new, fresh batch of dad jokes to relate.

 

 

But yeah, in all seriousness I probably should get it done before X-COM is out or I might not end up playing it at all this year.

Edited June 29, 2012 by Humanoid

[213374U]

I can see it now.... two bitter foes engaged in a duel to the death, each waiting for the other to pop their head out first from behind the chest high wall.

 

And waiting.

 

 

And waiting.

Well, I was thinking something more along these lines. Edited June 29, 2012 by 213374U

[GhostofAnakin]

While I'm still not a fan of the ending (stupid Starchild was such an unnecessary add-on at the last minute, lazy writing IMO), I can't help but wonder whether there would have been the same backlash if they'd included the extra scenes from the EC in the original game release. People still might not have liked the ending, but there'd likely be a lot less of the "WTF JUST HAPPENED?!" reactions.

[Tale]

I think that if the EC endings are what we originally got, there'd be grumblings sure, but not nearly what we saw. They might have even have been a generally positive attitude.

 

Sad thing is that it's still too little too late here. The original ending killed it. They would have had to have gone beyond exceptional for the new endings to get people over that. The magic is gone. But not the space magic. That's here to stay.

[GhostofAnakin]

The decision to include the Starchild baffles me. I don't know whether they just ran out of time and came up with an easy way to end things (in their mind), or whether they actually believed it to be a genius way to end the series. Whatever the reason behind his inclusion, I just don't know how they could believe fans would react positively to it.

 

The Starchild has to be universally regarded as the one thing that if asked, "if you could remove or change one thing from ME3, what would you choose?", would be that feature.

[WorstUsernameEver]

Given the similarity of ending style we could probably look at Deux Ex Invisible War to get an idea of what any future ME titles may do to deal with the ending choice- pick whatever they think makes sense for the new story and continuity with the old can go hang. It's (to an extent) what they already did with ME2.

 

Shepard is a reaper, but also destroyed all the reapers and left a human form behind to help Ashley in bed, while Tali became a brothel (no, she doesn't work there, she's literally a brothel) and the Illusive Man was resurrected as a talking car? Best Mass Effect game.

[Zoraptor]

The decision to include the Starchild baffles me. I don't know whether they just ran out of time and came up with an easy way to end things (in their mind), or whether they actually believed it to be a genius way to end the series. Whatever the reason behind his inclusion, I just don't know how they could believe fans would react positively to it.

Wrote themselves into a corner, probably, knew where they were going (in a general sense) but didn't know what to do when they arrived. The starchild- and the whole superweapon/ catalyst, for that matter- would not be anywhere near so bad if they'd done a proper job of foreshadowing it and it hadn't just popped up out of the blue part way through the last game in the trilogy. Hokey dream sequences and maudlin "OMG think of the children!!!" prologue sequences in the same game don't really cut it. It's marginally better than ending with "it was all a dream!", at least.

 

But I'd still say that while the ending was not good the worse part was the overlong turgid gameplay slog preceding it.

[GhostofAnakin]

I re-watched the Synthesis ending on Youtube. My God is it creepy. It's the one ending that makes absolutely no sense to choose.

[Nepenthe]

The superweapon was foreshadowed in Lair of the Shadow Broker.

The "Starchild", being either the collective consciousness of the reapers, the first reaper or just Harbinger isn't as left-field as it used to be, and thus doesn't really need that much extra "foreshadowing"

[Zoraptor]

How many people actually played LotS though? There's nothing I can recall in either game they could be relatively sure everyone would have played.

 

The only thing that makes sense for me foreshadowing wise is that the starchild is a VI of the reapers' creator race, since there are a fair few VIs around and the Prothean ones serve much the same purpose.

 

I'm not keen on cutting much slack for Bioware here in particular. When they had a chance to explain and expand motivations and the like in the first game they copped out with "your tiny mind cannot comprehend our motivations", and the Prothean VI in the first game would have been an excellent point to foreshadow (or outright mention) the superweapon. That would also have given some much needed story ccontinuity between the three installments.

[Orogun01]

For the Prothean VI to actually do foreshadowing the games would have had to be planned as a trilogy from the beginning instead of just them planning to do three games.

BW wrote themselves into too many corners and at the end they cut their losses leaving many subplots, hints and themes unresolved. Quite frankly I wish they would just kill the series and worked on something new, I need something else to obsess and make fun off.

[GhostofAnakin]

For the Prothean VI to actually do foreshadowing the games would have had to be planned as a trilogy from the beginning instead of just them planning to do three games.

BW wrote themselves into too many corners and at the end they cut their losses leaving many subplots, hints and themes unresolved. Quite frankly I wish they would just kill the series and worked on something new, I need something else to obsess and make fun off.

 

Wasn't it always their intent to plan this out as a trilogy?

[Tale]

BW wrote themselves into too many corners and at the end they cut their losses leaving many subplots, hints and themes unresolved.

They didn't write themselves into any corners. The events of the first two games could have tied together if they'd just chosen to do so.

 

Two-thirds of the endings of Mass Effect 3 could have easily followed from already established elements. The only one that's not is Synthesis, which makes me think it is the entire reason the Crucible plot device was created. Reverse engineered Reaper weapons (Thanix cannons) and programming (EDI) would have been easily conducive to Destroy or Control resolutions without it. Mass Effect 2's ending could have been used as a reveal of an internal weakness just waiting for rifle wielding yahoos to pluck at to defeat the Reaper menace. They even had a central antagonist to focus the narrative on with Harbinger. They actively chose to abandon and forget what happened in the last two games. They weren't forced to.

 

The abandoned Dark Energy subplot could also have been salvaged as a Reaper motivation. As much as I hate the previously planned resolutions that went with it, the motivation was still something that they could have worked with. It just can't be resolved by making everyone part robot.

[Oblarg]

I was personally hoping that the Crucible would be something capable of causing a dark-energy-based star explosion (like what was happening on Haestrom), on a rapid timescale. Thus, the end could involve winning the war by sacrificing Earth and all its inhabitants by essentially blowing up our Sun (and most of the Reapers, with it). Now *that* is a bittersweet ending. No need to elaborate on the Reapers' motivations or history. Leaving them nebulous makes them a far more convincing antagonist than bringing them down to "the tools of some ancient AI whose logic falls apart under any sort of scrutiny."

Edited July 1, 2012 by Oblarg

[Calax]

For the Prothean VI to actually do foreshadowing the games would have had to be planned as a trilogy from the beginning instead of just them planning to do three games.

BW wrote themselves into too many corners and at the end they cut their losses leaving many subplots, hints and themes unresolved. Quite frankly I wish they would just kill the series and worked on something new, I need something else to obsess and make fun off.

 

Wasn't it always their intent to plan this out as a trilogy?

There were hints way back when ME first came out that it was planned as a trilogy. It's just, judging by the end product, they hadn't sat down and actually said "this is the beginning, middle, and end of our piece", and only had the vaguest of plots planned out along the lines of "Reapers show up, reapers get defeated".

 

Wasn't ME2 touted as the continuation of the Plot from mass effect, but in the end that plot was just an excuse to do character study pieces?

[GhostofAnakin]

Wasn't Karpyshyn the lead writer for the first game, but then moved onto the TOR team either before or in the middle of ME2's development? That could explain the disconnect between the games. The new writers maybe decided to put their own stamp on things, but the result was a disconnected jumble.

[Nepenthe]

How many people actually played LotS though? There's nothing I can recall in either game they could be relatively sure everyone would have played.

Everybody who cares enough about the games to analyse their respective plots and how they connect, I'd hope.

 

 

 

I was personally hoping that the Crucible would be something capable of causing a dark-energy-based star explosion (like what was happening on Haestrom), on a rapid timescale. Thus, the end could involve winning the war by sacrificing Earth and all its inhabitants by essentially blowing up our Sun (and most of the Reapers, with it). Now *that* is a bittersweet ending. No need to elaborate on the Reapers' motivations or history. Leaving them nebulous makes them a far more convincing antagonist than bringing them down to "the tools of some ancient AI whose logic falls apart under any sort of scrutiny."

You're just assuming that the flawed logic of the Reaper AI is supposed to be ignored. I listened to it, decided it was crazy, and proceeded to destroy all synthetics (even with the hope that the non-Reaper synthetics could be recovered one day by an unified galaxy).