I still stand by the dorkiness is part of the point, he's a Shepard wannabe who misunderstands what actually makes Shepard a badass
The back and forth between Shepard and Leng in TIM's office cements this. Like he/she points out, he's constantly pissing his pants and running away with his army of phantoms and gunships behind him while Shepard goes toe-to-toe with like, 2 battle buddies and nothing else
They glossed over the coolest aspect of the Crucible, that every cycle added to the design and ensured it would be found again.
Countless civilizations, spread across billions of years, all came to realize that they were doomed—but they could give someone else a chance. That's heartbreakingly beautiful. I hated that the Reapers knew about it the whole time; it should've been the ghost in the machine, the infinitesimal error they couldn't account for. That way, when Shepard uses it, they're acting in the name of every life that has ever existed and every life that ever will exist. That's epic.
Instead, they just left it all on the table in favor of Starkid.
It was also a mistake that we never saw it outside of cutscenes. They should've made it a hub world, let you see it grow over the course of the game, and give War Assets more direct impact on gameplay. Like unlocking powerful items or something like that.
Kai Leng is a joke. We're told that he's a Shepard-level badass but then he almost loses to a dying man. He's Great Value Tela Vasir.
This is the way the Crucible works in my head canon. It’s a massive subspace EMP for reaper tech, refined over countless cycles. With the massive installation the Reapers used as their anvil, against which to crush civilizations, ultimately turned against them. Without their knowledge, perhaps due to their lack of interest in the affairs of species they merely harvested and destroyed.
Because as a literary work, the story can only end with villains the likes of the vastly arrogant Reapers, with which Shepard converses at various points in the series, being undone by their own hubris. Not as an expected outcome of their own grand design.
"Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." - Bertolt Brecht
Countless civilizations, spread across billions of years, all came to realize that they were doomed—but they could give someone else a chance. That's heartbreakingly beautiful. I hated that the Reapers knew about it the whole time; it should've been the ghost in the machine, the infinitesimal error they couldn't account for. That way, when Shepard uses it, they're acting in the name of every life that has ever existed and every life that ever will exist. That's epic.
Yeah, it's been too long since my last playthrough, but I remember thinking that the reveal on Thessia was a great example of the Bioware Turn, where some profound revelation recasts the story, but maybe they thought it was too similar to ME1 so they had to Turn Again with the starkid.
I think it works even being thematically similar to ME1, for what it's worth. The Protheans did it for you and it didn't work out maybe, but it turns out someone did it for them, and over and over, so maybe it actually does this time.
+3
Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
edited December 2020
I'm still shocked Bioware hasn't released a standalone multiplayer game based and expanding on the mode from ME2/3.
Does anybody play Andromeda's or is it pretty much just dead as hell?
With Andromeda, they made gameplay and maps to emphasize movement and then made MP characters even weaker than ME3, necessitating you hug cover even harder.
Sometimes things are lighting in a bottle. I think the technological restrictions actually helped ME3MP. The increased movement, while fun, made maps harder to design and lowered the surprise/fear element.
Never once in MEAMP did I have the same feeling of turning around when I heard a banshee scream, only to see it right behind me and I have to quickly dodge away or get sync killed. Same with Phantoms; those are some heart pounding moments. MEAMP also made recovery a lot easier. It was much easier to get to a team mate to revive them. Where as with ME3MP, I had to weigh, could I survive the run in and back out. Which ties in to map design as well. You had to figure out where ladders and ramps were in ME3MP. In Andromeda, you could just jet pack over anything, making traversal way too easy.
My experience with MEA multiplayer was starting with a character horribly weaker than any starting person you would have in ME3. I played in a 2 player match on Easy. First of all, I was open to having the other two slots filled, the lobby was public, but they never gave us even one other player. Ever. Second, I went into combat and did my jetpack... instantly skeet shot out of the air with hit scan weapons. Okay, fine, I'll stick to cover then... it was like Normandy beach the amount of fire going to my cover piece. And my guns were pathetic because level 1 character naturally. Tried for about 45 min and didn't even come CLOSE to having a successful round.
That combined with my horrible experience with the campaign meant I spent about 2 days with a game I'd anticipated for like 2 years. And have never gone back to it since, just awful.
I still stand by the dorkiness is part of the point, he's a Shepard wannabe who misunderstands what actually makes Shepard a badass
The back and forth between Shepard and Leng in TIM's office cements this. Like he/she points out, he's constantly pissing his pants and running away with his army of phantoms and gunships behind him while Shepard goes toe-to-toe with like, 2 battle buddies and nothing else
I still wish he had signed off this way:
you know what, when the Legendary Whatever Bundle Complete Thinger comes out, I bet you could make a really darn simple mod that changes all his communication to sign off that way
With Andromeda, they made gameplay and maps to emphasize movement and then made MP characters even weaker than ME3, necessitating you hug cover even harder.
Man I will never forget the talk about the jetpack and mobility and then one of the first patch notes was like "snipers draw on you 2x faster and deal +50% damage if you're not in cover."
No one knew what they were doing on that game or talked to the people in the next cubicle about what they were doing.
+9
DeadfallI don't think you realize just how rich he is.In fact, I should put on a monocle.Registered Userregular
edited December 2020
The only thing I appreciated about MEAMP was it was 6 rounds instead of 10.
Yeah they needed some kind of game changer to beat an unbeatable enemy but I was really expecting something...better than the Crucible. Going into 3 I was expecting it to be something like "we found a way to lure every reaper in the galaxy back to the Citadel" and then destroying the entire system. Or the same with the Omega-4 relay except oops we changed the IFF, have fun with that.
TBH, I wanted the Catalyst to be a giant, kilometers long Gatling gun and the last 30 minutes of the game just Shepard gleefully daka-ing the fuck out out of the entire Reaper fleet.
I still stand by the dorkiness is part of the point, he's a Shepard wannabe who misunderstands what actually makes Shepard a badass
The back and forth between Shepard and Leng in TIM's office cements this. Like he/she points out, he's constantly pissing his pants and running away with his army of phantoms and gunships behind him while Shepard goes toe-to-toe with like, 2 battle buddies and nothing else
They should have introduced him right at the start. Of Mass Effect.
Secondary antagonist in ME1 because you're hunting Cerberus in a side questline.
Forced to work with him in ME2. You hate each other because he's a grade A fuckwit. Maybe he tries to indirectly sabotage you?
Back to being the secondary antagonist in ME3 but this time there is actual history between you two so you give a shit about kicking his teeth in.
I only gave a fuck about fucking Kai Leng up after he did that very bad thing.
Oh God no. I did a ME1 direct to ME2 playthrough to get the setting all sorted for my ME3 run and having chosen the Sole Survivor origin I was very disappointed that I was unable to renegade interrupt Jacob with a bullet to the face when he said he was Cerberus. I can only imagine the rage if they'd provided an actual nemesis in ME1 and then forced me to work with him in 2.
Plus, one of the great strengths of Bioware is creating companions you want to spend time with. Putting an unrepentant git on your team (and likely forcing you to take him on key missions) really hurts that. Liam was annoying enough in Andromeda, I'd really hate to consider having a straight antagonist as a companion.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
Yeah they needed some kind of game changer to beat an unbeatable enemy but I was really expecting something...better than the Crucible. Going into 3 I was expecting it to be something like "we found a way to lure every reaper in the galaxy back to the Citadel" and then destroying the entire system. Or the same with the Omega-4 relay except oops we changed the IFF, have fun with that.
TBH, I wanted the Catalyst to be a giant, kilometers long Gatling gun and the last 30 minutes of the game just Shepard gleefully daka-ing the fuck out out of the entire Reaper fleet.
Or just a Gatling gun that shoots... antimatter or something. Shepard promptly mounts it on the Mako. “Time to finish this fight,” intones the Commander.
Bum bum ba BUM, bum bum ba BUM...
Zoku Gojira on
"Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." - Bertolt Brecht
+1
Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
They should have introduced him right at the start. Of Mass Effect.
Secondary antagonist in ME1 because you're hunting Cerberus in a side questline.
Forced to work with him in ME2. You hate each other because he's a grade A fuckwit. Maybe he tries to indirectly sabotage you?
Back to being the secondary antagonist in ME3 but this time there is actual history between you two so you give a shit about kicking his teeth in.
I only gave a fuck about fucking Kai Leng up after he did that very bad thing.
Oh God no. I did a ME1 direct to ME2 playthrough to get the setting all sorted for my ME3 run and having chosen the Sole Survivor origin I was very disappointed that I was unable to renegade interrupt Jacob with a bullet to the face when he said he was Cerberus. I can only imagine the rage if they'd provided an actual nemesis in ME1 and then forced me to work with him in 2.
Plus, one of the great strengths of Bioware is creating companions you want to spend time with. Putting an unrepentant git on your team (and likely forcing you to take him on key missions) really hurts that. Liam was annoying enough in Andromeda, I'd really hate to consider having a straight antagonist as a companion.
That would be the point.
He's there to hate. You're meant to hate him. And Cerberus forces you to take him because that's a condition of their support. You're not meant to like any of this.
He wouldn't need to be a squadmate, he could just be TIM's bodyguard and come "help out" (read: be an annoying dick and kill Collectors) on a few of the important story missions. Maybe in one of them he gets blown up, either because he does something stupid or Shepherd is sick of his crap, and loses his arms or legs or whatever, so he gets the robot ones for 3.
The only thing I appreciated about MEAMP was it was 6 rounds instead of 10.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one that liked MEAMP. Like it wasn't ME3MP by any stretch but I still had a lot of fun with it. It definitely rewarded playing it as a cover shooter more than running around murder hobo style but that was largely how I played ME3MP so it didn't bother me a whole lot.
I was actually looking forward to it being expanded upon down the line but whomp whomp.
But then you run into having to change a big part of the narrative of ME2; TIM at least was smart enough to put none of the always-evil members in Cerberus on Shepard's team.
Now I'm thinking about the potential of what they could have done with Kai Leng. What about:
-Paragon Shep butts heads with Kai Leng in ME2 to the point where you actually fight him at the end of 2. When you deplete his health bar, a cutscene explosion launches him out of frame. Then we see him as a cyborg who desperately wants revenge in 3.
Vs
-Renegade Shep butts heads with Kai Leng in ME2 but it's clear that Kai is starting to respect Shepard's way of doing things more and more. At the end of 2, Leng chooses Shepard over ILM and ILM springs a squad of assassins on them both in retaliation. Shep and Leng win, but Leng gets exploded out of frame in the conclusion, then turns up acting WAY out of recognizable character in 3, giving a huge hint to Cerberus being Indoctrinated. Renegade Sheps have the option of mercy killing a Leng who remembers that he switched sides at the end vs the Paragon path of being enemies without nuance the entire time.
All of this would rely on Mass Effect games having their story plotted more cohesively over the entire trilogy. Which is to say, it's neat to entertain the idea of, but considering they didn't even stick with the Dark Energy plot beats...
So, started Andromeda again, going to try to finish it this time.
I forgot how bad of a first impression this game leaves. Those weird faces, animation, bad dialog/attempts at being witty or funny.
I also restarted Andromeda after the announcement. I had played through the EOS outpost a couple months ago, so I didn't have to slog through the opening again.
I've passed the point where the characters start to have some charm, I have enough levels that the gameplay loop is fun and I have plenty of access to quests. It's fun now and I'm really enjoying it.
Romance Spoiler
My Sara Ryder hit on Suvi awkwardly last night and Kallo was in the pilot seat muttering 'Kill Me Now' and I burst out laughing.
I did take the step to mod out certain elements that I found annoying. I made it so switching profile doesn't issue a global cooldown, because in my first playthrough I never switched because if a fight was hard enough to want a different power set I didn't want to pay the cost of actually switching. I made it so lab technicians dump a boatload of research data every 45 minutes so I can just explore the available items and experiment instead of having to invest in very specific things and hope I like them. I got new textures for Peebee and Lexi so they don't have the Asari sameface thing going on and feel more like individual characters.
I still stand by the dorkiness is part of the point, he's a Shepard wannabe who misunderstands what actually makes Shepard a badass
The back and forth between Shepard and Leng in TIM's office cements this. Like he/she points out, he's constantly pissing his pants and running away with his army of phantoms and gunships behind him while Shepard goes toe-to-toe with like, 2 battle buddies and nothing else
I still wish he had signed off this way:
xXx_BongLord_Kai_Leng_69_xXx
And as soon as you close the e-mail, Shepard chuckles just a little and says, "Nice."
Am I understanding it correctly, that the Steam versions of the ME games still require Origin to play? So if I've already got them on Origin, there isn't really any benefit to having them again on Steam?
They should have introduced him right at the start. Of Mass Effect.
Secondary antagonist in ME1 because you're hunting Cerberus in a side questline.
Forced to work with him in ME2. You hate each other because he's a grade A fuckwit. Maybe he tries to indirectly sabotage you?
Back to being the secondary antagonist in ME3 but this time there is actual history between you two so you give a shit about kicking his teeth in.
I only gave a fuck about fucking Kai Leng up after he did that very bad thing.
Yeah he lost me forever after eating Anderson's cereal as well. I mean who does that? Sneaks onto the normandy, does a bunch of evil shit and then eats your cereal before he departs. Simply heinous.
They should have introduced him right at the start. Of Mass Effect.
Secondary antagonist in ME1 because you're hunting Cerberus in a side questline.
Forced to work with him in ME2. You hate each other because he's a grade A fuckwit. Maybe he tries to indirectly sabotage you?
Back to being the secondary antagonist in ME3 but this time there is actual history between you two so you give a shit about kicking his teeth in.
I only gave a fuck about fucking Kai Leng up after he did that very bad thing.
Yeah he lost me forever after eating Anderson's cereal as well. I mean who does that? Sneaks onto the normandy, does a bunch of evil shit and then eats your cereal before he departs. Simply heinous.
Am I understanding it correctly, that the Steam versions of the ME games still require Origin to play? So if I've already got them on Origin, there isn't really any benefit to having them again on Steam?
ME1 and 2 don't, primarily by virtue of age, but 3 does, it wasn't recoded at all for the eventual Steam release so the Origin requirement is still baked in to it. Having 1 & 2 on both can get a bit weird; if you have the Steam version installed, Origin will see them, think something's off, and try to "repair" them, and that can get a bit screwy. Couple with the availability of the DLC, ultimately Origin is the better platform for them, just add them to Steam as non-Steam games and call it good.
Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
I want them to bring back Renegade/Paragon.
Miss those moments where I would see that red trigger pop up and get excited at getting to see Shepard live out her dirty cop fantasies and then effortlessly pop off a one liner.
I'd like to see more types of prompts than just the two.
Intervene heroically. Ask a question. Extortion, theft, and assassination. Act impulsively. Fuck this shit; I'm out!
+4
surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
yeah they have struggled a bit. something between the dragon age 2 "good / bad / troll" + renegade / paragon + stat/history checks would be good but i am unsure how they view that kind of choice on a protagonist these days
yeah they have struggled a bit. something between the dragon age 2 "good / bad / troll" + renegade / paragon + stat/history checks would be good but i am unsure how they view that kind of choice on a protagonist these days
Yeah, if you look at something like KotoR you open up additional dialogue options based on stats, but I don’t know if that translates to the kind of stats you can get in Mass Effect. Would be fun if, for example, when you’re trying to corporate espionage that guy on Noveria the prompts weren’t Paragon/Renegade but instead based on Biotics or Weapon stats being indicative of the applicable knowledge your character has.
Of course my favorite idea was always having the Paragon and Renegade options invisible unless you could do them, so they would be surprising in subsequent play through.
Posts
I still wish he had signed off this way:
This is the way the Crucible works in my head canon. It’s a massive subspace EMP for reaper tech, refined over countless cycles. With the massive installation the Reapers used as their anvil, against which to crush civilizations, ultimately turned against them. Without their knowledge, perhaps due to their lack of interest in the affairs of species they merely harvested and destroyed.
Because as a literary work, the story can only end with villains the likes of the vastly arrogant Reapers, with which Shepard converses at various points in the series, being undone by their own hubris. Not as an expected outcome of their own grand design.
Yeah, it's been too long since my last playthrough, but I remember thinking that the reveal on Thessia was a great example of the Bioware Turn, where some profound revelation recasts the story, but maybe they thought it was too similar to ME1 so they had to Turn Again with the starkid.
I think it works even being thematically similar to ME1, for what it's worth. The Protheans did it for you and it didn't work out maybe, but it turns out someone did it for them, and over and over, so maybe it actually does this time.
Does anybody play Andromeda's or is it pretty much just dead as hell?
They took out a lot of cool stuff and then added even more grind.
Gamertag: PrimusD | Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Never once in MEAMP did I have the same feeling of turning around when I heard a banshee scream, only to see it right behind me and I have to quickly dodge away or get sync killed. Same with Phantoms; those are some heart pounding moments. MEAMP also made recovery a lot easier. It was much easier to get to a team mate to revive them. Where as with ME3MP, I had to weigh, could I survive the run in and back out. Which ties in to map design as well. You had to figure out where ladders and ramps were in ME3MP. In Andromeda, you could just jet pack over anything, making traversal way too easy.
That combined with my horrible experience with the campaign meant I spent about 2 days with a game I'd anticipated for like 2 years. And have never gone back to it since, just awful.
you know what, when the Legendary Whatever Bundle Complete Thinger comes out, I bet you could make a really darn simple mod that changes all his communication to sign off that way
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
Man I will never forget the talk about the jetpack and mobility and then one of the first patch notes was like "snipers draw on you 2x faster and deal +50% damage if you're not in cover."
No one knew what they were doing on that game or talked to the people in the next cubicle about what they were doing.
xbl - HowYouGetAnts
steam - WeAreAllGeth
If there was one thing missing its I needed more conversation options to troll him with.
Paragon should've been that just straight insulting him, renegade should've been paraphrasing Sovereign.
TBH, I wanted the Catalyst to be a giant, kilometers long Gatling gun and the last 30 minutes of the game just Shepard gleefully daka-ing the fuck out out of the entire Reaper fleet.
xXx_BongLord_Kai_Leng_69_xXx
They should have introduced him right at the start. Of Mass Effect.
I only gave a fuck about fucking Kai Leng up after he did that very bad thing.
Oh God no. I did a ME1 direct to ME2 playthrough to get the setting all sorted for my ME3 run and having chosen the Sole Survivor origin I was very disappointed that I was unable to renegade interrupt Jacob with a bullet to the face when he said he was Cerberus. I can only imagine the rage if they'd provided an actual nemesis in ME1 and then forced me to work with him in 2.
Plus, one of the great strengths of Bioware is creating companions you want to spend time with. Putting an unrepentant git on your team (and likely forcing you to take him on key missions) really hurts that. Liam was annoying enough in Andromeda, I'd really hate to consider having a straight antagonist as a companion.
Or just a Gatling gun that shoots... antimatter or something. Shepard promptly mounts it on the Mako. “Time to finish this fight,” intones the Commander.
Bum bum ba BUM, bum bum ba BUM...
A lot of people seemed to have soured on Inquisition since it's release, I still think its great though. Awkward battle system aside.
That would be the point.
He's there to hate. You're meant to hate him. And Cerberus forces you to take him because that's a condition of their support. You're not meant to like any of this.
It would make the pay off so much better in ME3.
Now if you replaced one of them with Kai Leng (Jacob, probably), that'd be different. Especially if you kept the former romance with Miranda.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one that liked MEAMP. Like it wasn't ME3MP by any stretch but I still had a lot of fun with it. It definitely rewarded playing it as a cover shooter more than running around murder hobo style but that was largely how I played ME3MP so it didn't bother me a whole lot.
I was actually looking forward to it being expanded upon down the line but whomp whomp.
-Paragon Shep butts heads with Kai Leng in ME2 to the point where you actually fight him at the end of 2. When you deplete his health bar, a cutscene explosion launches him out of frame. Then we see him as a cyborg who desperately wants revenge in 3.
Vs
-Renegade Shep butts heads with Kai Leng in ME2 but it's clear that Kai is starting to respect Shepard's way of doing things more and more. At the end of 2, Leng chooses Shepard over ILM and ILM springs a squad of assassins on them both in retaliation. Shep and Leng win, but Leng gets exploded out of frame in the conclusion, then turns up acting WAY out of recognizable character in 3, giving a huge hint to Cerberus being Indoctrinated. Renegade Sheps have the option of mercy killing a Leng who remembers that he switched sides at the end vs the Paragon path of being enemies without nuance the entire time.
Gamertag: PrimusD | Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I forgot how bad of a first impression this game leaves. Those weird faces, animation, bad dialog/attempts at being witty or funny.
I also restarted Andromeda after the announcement. I had played through the EOS outpost a couple months ago, so I didn't have to slog through the opening again.
I've passed the point where the characters start to have some charm, I have enough levels that the gameplay loop is fun and I have plenty of access to quests. It's fun now and I'm really enjoying it.
Romance Spoiler
I did take the step to mod out certain elements that I found annoying. I made it so switching profile doesn't issue a global cooldown, because in my first playthrough I never switched because if a fight was hard enough to want a different power set I didn't want to pay the cost of actually switching. I made it so lab technicians dump a boatload of research data every 45 minutes so I can just explore the available items and experiment instead of having to invest in very specific things and hope I like them. I got new textures for Peebee and Lexi so they don't have the Asari sameface thing going on and feel more like individual characters.
And as soon as you close the e-mail, Shepard chuckles just a little and says, "Nice."
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Yeah he lost me forever after eating Anderson's cereal as well. I mean who does that? Sneaks onto the normandy, does a bunch of evil shit and then eats your cereal before he departs. Simply heinous.
don't forget pissing in Anderson's potted plants.
ME1 and 2 don't, primarily by virtue of age, but 3 does, it wasn't recoded at all for the eventual Steam release so the Origin requirement is still baked in to it. Having 1 & 2 on both can get a bit weird; if you have the Steam version installed, Origin will see them, think something's off, and try to "repair" them, and that can get a bit screwy. Couple with the availability of the DLC, ultimately Origin is the better platform for them, just add them to Steam as non-Steam games and call it good.
Steam | XBL
Miss those moments where I would see that red trigger pop up and get excited at getting to see Shepard live out her dirty cop fantasies and then effortlessly pop off a one liner.
Intervene heroically.
Ask a question.
Extortion, theft, and assassination.
Act impulsively.
Fuck this shit; I'm out!
Yeah, if you look at something like KotoR you open up additional dialogue options based on stats, but I don’t know if that translates to the kind of stats you can get in Mass Effect. Would be fun if, for example, when you’re trying to corporate espionage that guy on Noveria the prompts weren’t Paragon/Renegade but instead based on Biotics or Weapon stats being indicative of the applicable knowledge your character has.
Of course my favorite idea was always having the Paragon and Renegade options invisible unless you could do them, so they would be surprising in subsequent play through.
twitch.tv/Taramoor
@TaramoorPlays
Taramoor on Youtube
"Commander, we're outnumbered, what do we do?!"
*runs to take the last escape pod before the sentence is finished*
They can call it the Zapp Brannigan Maneuver.