Personally, I'm not demanding another multi-game series with a shared protagonist or a story with massive scope that changes the entire setting forever. I think both of those aspects actually hurt the series more than they helped it. ME2 and ME3 were severely hampered in what they could do by the fact that decisions from previous games needed to carry over. The scope of ME3's ending left the setting with nowhere to grow, which is why the next game relocated to a different setting entirely.
ME2 and ME3 succeeded on the charm of their characters and their seamless marriage of CRPG-like combat customization with rock solid corridor shooter fundamentals. Those are the aspects I want to see carried over into any spiritual successor, from BioWare or otherwise.
Andromeda provided a valiant but flawed attempt on both fronts. Characters, especially squadmates, felt indistinct and unmemorable. Exploration of character was constantly being undermined by the game's technical incompetence (the aforementioned temperature updates cutting off dialog, for example). Gameplay was oversimplified to push people into playing multiplayer (the profile system). Weapon balance was a joke, gutting the feeling of customization because only a small handful of options were viable.
Nobody needs to reinvent the wheel here. The core formula is what matters, not the trappings around it.
The Andromeda Initiative needs to be revealed to have been inspired by the Ark in Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy; someone in charge looked at this list of people and figured they'd just be a liability when the Reapers showed up, best to get them out of the way before shit hit the fan.
I'm surprised there's never been an attempt to make a Mass Effect knock off from a different studio. Adolescents who grew up with the trilogy are old enough to be working in the industry now. With BioWare dropping the ball over and over again, you'd think someone would see the consumer demand that isn't being met and try to supply it.
Yeah, nothing that I can think off that really maps to it completely. At least Dragon Age had its Greedfall, but I can't think of anything that fits in the Mass Effect square hole.
I'm surprised there's never been an attempt to make a Mass Effect knock off from a different studio. Adolescents who grew up with the trilogy are old enough to be working in the industry now. With BioWare dropping the ball over and over again, you'd think someone would see the consumer demand that isn't being met and try to supply it.
I think it also speaks to how much of a logistical and conceptual behemoth it actually is for a series like the Mass Effect trilogy to be made that basically no other developer (not even BioWare) have tried to replicate its scope and scale in the modern era of games
Very true.
With dev times and production costs and whatnot as they are in the present, it makes me feel like the 360/PS3 era was arguably the sweet spot in terms of balancing amount of and quality of content, development time, development cost, scope and scale, all that stuff, with games that have also been able to age at least somewhat gracefully. I forget how long ME1 took to develop, but four years maximum after KOTOR; ME2 & 3 were knocked out in two years apiece, the latter as ME2's DLC was also being made. Which considering the scope and ambition of each title just feels flabbergastingly fast by modern standards.
Added to that, visually the original games haven't aged too badly and ME:LE was able to give them an extra coat of polish without costing too much time or money to do it (another two years by a quite small team as I recall, it certainly didn't have the entirety of Bioware behind it).
But the very idea of three games like that from the same studio with minimal development overlap (DLC notwithstanding) coming out in the span of less than four and a half years seems almost impossible to comprehend in the current era of games.
At least at AAA visual quality.
You could make a Mass Effect trilogy but in a world with less visual fidelity than the audience currently expects.
But nobody probably wants to spend 9 figures on a game that will only be derided as last gen. You could make up for it with awesome visual direction, but probably take it away from expectations of AAA visuals.
I'm surprised there's never been an attempt to make a Mass Effect knock off from a different studio. Adolescents who grew up with the trilogy are old enough to be working in the industry now. With BioWare dropping the ball over and over again, you'd think someone would see the consumer demand that isn't being met and try to supply it.
I think it also speaks to how much of a logistical and conceptual behemoth it actually is for a series like the Mass Effect trilogy to be made that basically no other developer (not even BioWare) have tried to replicate its scope and scale in the modern era of games
Very true.
With dev times and production costs and whatnot as they are in the present, it makes me feel like the 360/PS3 era was arguably the sweet spot in terms of balancing amount of and quality of content, development time, development cost, scope and scale, all that stuff, with games that have also been able to age at least somewhat gracefully. I forget how long ME1 took to develop, but four years maximum after KOTOR; ME2 & 3 were knocked out in two years apiece, the latter as ME2's DLC was also being made. Which considering the scope and ambition of each title just feels flabbergastingly fast by modern standards.
Added to that, visually the original games haven't aged too badly and ME:LE was able to give them an extra coat of polish without costing too much time or money to do it (another two years by a quite small team as I recall, it certainly didn't have the entirety of Bioware behind it).
But the very idea of three games like that from the same studio with minimal development overlap (DLC notwithstanding) coming out in the span of less than four and a half years seems almost impossible to comprehend in the current era of games.
Yeah. I was about to say, BG3 exists and I feel is on the same scope as the Mass Effect games in terms of excellent companions, choices that matter, etc, but it's one game, it had six years of development time and three years of early access, and was built on an existing engine. Meaning: the design and writing chops still exist, but I think the bloat in everything else in game systems, plus corporate demand that EVERY release be a huge hit and released RIGHT NOW, is a problem.
I mean I again say that what actually killed Andromeda is that it was released half baked in *all* respects. Characters feeling unmemorable means the writing, art, and animation teams didn't have enough time and feedback to really make them land.
I liked Andromeda, but Bioware abandoning it killed my interest in the game. I was really looking forward to DLC story stuff. Especially because you can play Ryder as an adorable space dork.
That being said, the Kett and fucking boring. At least the Reapers were mysterious monsters from the darkness of space. Kett are just assholes who can’t reproduce anymore so they went space Roman. They’re just mustache twirling dickheads with nothing interesting going on.
I think if they continued the story Kett were not going to be the final big bad. They were a problem but they were more opportunistic type bad guys where the true cosmic level threat was whatever caused the stuff that was wrecking the planets to begin with which from what I recall predated the kett significantly and technologically way beyond them. I strongly suspect had they gotten more DLC/expansions this would have been fleshed out more.
I liked Andromeda, but Bioware abandoning it killed my interest in the game. I was really looking forward to DLC story stuff. Especially because you can play Ryder as an adorable space dork.
That being said, the Kett and fucking boring. At least the Reapers were mysterious monsters from the darkness of space. Kett are just assholes who can’t reproduce anymore so they went space Roman. They’re just mustache twirling dickheads with nothing interesting going on.
I think if they continued the story Kett were not going to be the final big bad. They were a problem but they were more opportunistic type bad guys where the true cosmic level threat was whatever caused the stuff that was wrecking the planets to begin with which from what I recall predated the kett significantly and technologically way beyond them. I strongly suspect had they gotten more DLC/expansions this would have been fleshed out more.
100%. The actual problem was that something had gone horribly wrong with the Remnant tech due to an unknown party setting off a superweapon to hurt the Jardaan (the people who made the Remnant tech). the Kett were just taking advantage of that problem. Frankly, I was REALLY interested in the Remnant as a complete inversion of the Reapers, being benevolent machines seemingly dedicated to preserving life and probably symbiotic with the Jardaan. Also yes the writers said that the Scourge had nothing to do with the Reapers. I don't think the writing team could have stuck the landing, but if they had, having a giant further "fuck you" to Starkid & the entire notion that organics and machines must always be in conflict would have been cool. I actually imagine that the Kett would indeed have ended up like the Geth -- allies with us against a much bigger threat, with at least one sympathetic party member representative (they do start down this path of making individual Kett more sympathetic if you actually read their logs; a lot of Kett remembering their previous lives...)
Similarly, I REALLY wanted the DLC about the Quarian/Volus/everybody else ship, since apparently things went SUUUUPER badly for them re: one of the novels.
Like, there's so much in the background and worldbuilding of Andromeda that's incredibly cool, but then... yeah. And sadly I don't think corporate will even allow the ME4 team to actually pick those threads up, because Andromeda flopped SO badly. My bet is that we're going to get a Rise of Skywalker situation where corporate listens too hard to the stupidest parts of the fan backlash and we get a dripping, incoherent mess.
My Kett headcanon is that they were originally an extremely frail species. They required very specific environmental conditions to live, which made it prohibitively expensive to run colonies on other planets, even ones that were very similar to their homeworld. They would frequently develop genetic disabilities that made it impossible to perform manual labor and could even cause early death. Even the healthiest Kett would age quickly, with natural lifespans comparable to Vorcha.
Everything changed for the Kett when they discovered technology abandoned by the Jardaan. This tech changed them on a fundamental level. They could now survive in almost any atmosphere, regardless of barometric pressure or chemical composition. They became immune to all disease. Their lifespans now stretched in the thousands. The Kett considered the discovery of this tech to be nothing short of a divine miracle, and so they came to refer to the transformation process as "exaltation".
With their new, robust bodies, the Kett became a great spacefaring faction. In time, they encountered many alien species. And to the individuals of every species, the Kett made the same offer. Accept the gift of exaltation and become one of the chosen. This offer held great appeal to some. Not just the terminally ill and elderly, but also outcasts and criminals who saw the abandonment of their current identities as a chance for a fresh start.
The Kett swelled their ranks, but with this population explosion came more radical ideologies. Many of the newly exalted Kett held the position that their species had a moral obligation to force exaltation upon all individuals, regardless of consent. Those who refused exaltation did so out of ignorance. No one can fully understand how amazing the gift is until after they have experienced it firsthand. In time, this way of thinking became the consensus among the Kett, although there are still many, especially among those exalted from the original Kett species, who oppose it.
Like, there's so much in the background and worldbuilding of Andromeda that's incredibly cool, but then... yeah. And sadly I don't think corporate will even allow the ME4 team to actually pick those threads up, because Andromeda flopped SO badly. My bet is that we're going to get a Rise of Skywalker situation where corporate listens too hard to the stupidest parts of the fan backlash and we get a dripping, incoherent mess.
We are absolutely, absolutely going to get an incoherent mess full of nothing but memberberries and nostalgia tweaks. This unfortunately seems to be what the (loud) internet wants.
"You know that time when you had a party on the Citadel, and then you and Garrus went shooting? Yeah that was awesome." </Farley> Nothing but. No new characters, no new plot, no new setting; just run the old shit into the ground.
Yeah. I was about to say, BG3 exists and I feel is on the same scope as the Mass Effect games in terms of excellent companions, choices that matter, etc, but it's one game, it had six years of development time and three years of early access, and was built on an existing engine.
I mean, scope-wise, BG3 is bigger than the entire original trilogy combined. It's honkin' big and there's tons of reactivity and paths that most people will never see. Their previous title, Divinity Original Sin 2, was also excellent and still rather large and that only had 2 years of development.
I don't think a new Mass Effect is going to be compared to the entire trilogy, or that Andromeda was, but it's going to be compared to the peak. You can't follow the trilogy with a game that's like a less memorable ME1 after having released 2 and 3, because you're going to be compared to 2 and 3 which were widely seen as improvements to the original. Doing less than meeting those standards is going to be a step backward.
All said though, it's been at least a decade since Bioware released a game widely regarded as good, and after all the senior talent that's jumped ship over the past five years and the surprising layoffs of old hands to appease the financial statements just recently, I think you're basically dealing with a new, untested studio. Might just be Anthems all the way down.
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GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
Damn, all this Mass Effect talk is makin' me wanna play Mass Effect.
"You're working to hard."
*eletrocuted batarian noises*
It's about time for my annual trilogy run. I like that mods these days allow ME1 to be visually consistent with 2 and 3—Shepard wears Heavy Onyx armor regardless of stats, the Alliance uniforms match what we see later, that sort of thing.
If only we could add a bathroom and crew quarters to the SR-1.
My Kett headcanon is that they were originally an extremely frail species. They required very specific environmental conditions to live, which made it prohibitively expensive to run colonies on other planets, even ones that were very similar to their homeworld. They would frequently develop genetic disabilities that made it impossible to perform manual labor and could even cause early death. Even the healthiest Kett would age quickly, with natural lifespans comparable to Vorcha.
Everything changed for the Kett when they discovered technology abandoned by the Jardaan. This tech changed them on a fundamental level. They could now survive in almost any atmosphere, regardless of barometric pressure or chemical composition. They became immune to all disease. Their lifespans now stretched in the thousands. The Kett considered the discovery of this tech to be nothing short of a divine miracle, and so they came to refer to the transformation process as "exaltation".
With their new, robust bodies, the Kett became a great spacefaring faction. In time, they encountered many alien species. And to the individuals of every species, the Kett made the same offer. Accept the gift of exaltation and become one of the chosen. This offer held great appeal to some. Not just the terminally ill and elderly, but also outcasts and criminals who saw the abandonment of their current identities as a chance for a fresh start.
The Kett swelled their ranks, but with this population explosion came more radical ideologies. Many of the newly exalted Kett held the position that their species had a moral obligation to force exaltation upon all individuals, regardless of consent. Those who refused exaltation did so out of ignorance. No one can fully understand how amazing the gift is until after they have experienced it firsthand. In time, this way of thinking became the consensus among the Kett, although there are still many, especially among those exalted from the original Kett species, who oppose it.
I love this idea, and not only do I think it's consistent with what we've seen of the Kett so far, I think it would make them fascinating foils / an excellent contrast to the Quarians (and by extension the Geth). In much the same way that the Remnant were an inversion of expectations from the Reapers.
I just. God damn. The underlying themes are *there* in Andromeda, there's *so much* in the lore and background that plays with and inverts (maybe even everts???) the narrative we saw in the original. It started asking genuine questions about things like the Reapers and the Geth, but I think most people just didn't even realize that because they couldn't see past the rest of the poor execution (and also I kinda did go to school for literary analysis so what to me stands out a lot is probably invisible to a lot of people).
And again, the thing I'm angriest about is that ME4 is just going to throw the baby out with the bathwater in favor of "HEY LOOK LIARA IS IN THE TRAILER! THERES GETH PROBABLY!!!!!"
On the topic of Andromeda; I was super excited about it at the time. The opening music is spectacular, I was eager to get back into a new facet of the setting.
Unfortunately, I also got suuuuper busy for a month when it came out. This had the side effect of meaning I was aware of The Internet Outrage Machine, and also gave it enough time to patch much of the most egregious stuff.
Yes, a bunch of it was blown out of proportion or done intentionally for laughs, but you also don't get a second chance to make a first impression. Expecting perfection is a bit much, but my game shat itself and died near the end of the tutorial. Twice. So it's not like that was helping either.
The fact that crew members would have new conversation options added but not indicate as much (at release at least, I have no idea if this has been fixed) meant it became a somewhat tedious trip chasing them all down to see if they had something new to say every so often.
The relationships were a mixed bag, in part related to the above, and linked to my next point on the more open ended/open world approach. I started trying to romance one character, things progressed, and then... like, 5-10+ hours went by without any hints or advances otherwise. Then Peebee cornered me in a pod and we made out and I guess the other woman just wasn't that into me, I have no idea what trigger the game was expecting me to pass, but hey, at least I got blindsided by an Asari. Hooray.
The 'open world' wasn't something I enjoyed. It was too much space with too little going on in it. I don't hate open worlds, I fucking love Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, but on many of the worlds you could drive around sightseeing, but mostly it was just wasting time between missions, at least in my experience.
There was the one guy who thought HE was the main character of the game that I found a little grating, though I also seem to recall his loyalty mission being an ongoing series of clusterfucks that got a few laughs. Peebee's as well?
I barely recall either of the new races. Like, I know they're there, but despite putting dozens of hours into the game, it was only through reading the last couple of pages that I really remembered much about them at all. Not like I expect to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the game's lore half a decade later, but they really didn't manage to make a solid lasting impression all the same.
EA claims I played... 106 hours? Oh, that's definitely not the case. I'm pretty sure I let a friend play through it using the account at the time, but it was easily 30+ hours.
The PVP was not remotely as good as the ME3 MP mode. I easily put dozens of hours into that, maybe hundreds? (Edit: 252 hours!) I wasn't chasing the Legendary banner or anything, but that was fun as fuck and I had a blast with it. Sure, playing GethWhiteGold endlessly wasn't necessarily the pinnacle of gaming, but running with a quality PA crew was a damned fine evening.
One thing I do recall really liking was that they clearly listened to the playerbase's frustrations with ME3's ending. Again, it wasn't perfect, but they made it clear that those alliances I formed, those efforts I put in to get us ready, had an impact. Little one off lines, characters and races showing up, it was what I wanted the end run of ME3 to be at launch (and I'm one who was disappointed initially, and generally content with the updated ending we got, even if things did get a bit out of hand for some folks along the way).
I'm intrigued by and looking forward to ME4. I hope it's not just "we went too far away, now just NOSTALGIA YOUR ASSES OFF", but I would appreciate a finely crafted single player experience in that setting again.
Until then, I guess I'll just have to see if I can't shed some weight in preparation for my wedding, and also maybe see if the old N7 armour fits a little better.
If anyone's interested, I'm selling off some ME odds and ends to help put a wee dent in said wedding.
- The Normandy courier satchel
- Cards Against Humanity: Mass Effect Pack
- 4 Bioware challenge coins (Honor the Fallen, First Contact War, Systems Alliance, Commander Shepherd
- A bunch of challenge coins I made in conjunction with the N7 Elite cosplay/costuming group. (72 total, between a glittery ("starfield") and non-glittery versions of both the ME2 and ME3 10th anniversaries)
Feel free to PM me if anyone is interested.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
So apparently I've been bitten by the Mass Effect bug again, especially when I realised a while back that I never actually got to finish ME3.
I was playing through ME2 and remembering how much fun it actually was...which led to doing some googling about mods...which led to installing various mods (nothing too fancy: just the three unofficial patches for each game + the LE1 and LE2 same sex romance mods) and now....
Say hello to Bear, about to start his ME1 experience, as a Vanguard this time (having also realised that every time I've played ME1 I've always gone Soldier).
It's all saltwater these days:
Ocean, tears and heartbreak soup
Half alive in a whitecap foam
Half in love with a white half moon
So, I was at Megacon in Orlando yesterday and picked up a Luca Designs N7 leather jacket. Which is crazy for someone living in South Florida, but it looks great, lol.
So, I was at Megacon in Orlando yesterday and picked up a Luca Designs N7 leather jacket. Which is crazy for someone living in South Florida, but it looks great, lol.
Well, you have a nice jacket to wear if you ever go to uhh PAX East or Unplugged or something.
ShadowenSnores in the morningLoserdomRegistered Userregular
edited April 19
I never played the games when they came out. On Steam last year, basically Bioware's entire oeuvre between 2007 and 2017 was on sale for $20. Even considering I already own all the Dragon Age stuff, that's a fucking steal. I installed the game and made a couple of test Shepards, though I was not impressed by the customization (mainly in the form of hair options or lack thereof), so I just went with the default look.
And then I did other things for eight months.
This January, I finally started playing Mass Effect. Yesterday I finished it.
I'd seen a fair amount of media discussion about it over the years, mostly about the endings (so I was already braced for that) and romance partners (and porn, let's be honest), but a lot of the actual story and characters I knew surprisingly little about. I'd heard about the debate around Mordin, and that the genophage was something that was done to the krogan, and I knew that Grunt and Wrex were different characters, and that everyone wanted Jack and Miranda to just admit it and fuck already, but a lot of other stuff, like how Quarian names include their home ship and what exactly the deal with the Geth was and what was the difference between Saren and Sovereign and what "Assuming direct control" actually meant, etc., were beyond me. It was very satisfying to finally have the points between A and Z filled in.
I have a lot of thoughts, most of which are probably redundant to everyone else's at this point. I will say I'm one of those weirdos who thinks the ending to 3 could have worked, and would in any case have been much better received, if a. the Extended Cut ending had been part of the initial release and 2. the writing for the Catalyst's dialog was more interesting. Accidentally or otherwise, I think the ending of ME3 says something useful, if it's not exactly a universal ancient human theme. But I also know about the behind the scenes stuff and I wonder how what Karpashyn was working on would have panned out.
But, once I was finished (and I arranged things so I was finished, including all DLC--the only thing I hadn't done at the end was go out to the casino with Miranda, because I left Citadel to very late in the game so everyone could be there and there just wasn't enough stuff left for me to do in order to get the invites to spawn in time before the end; I made 60 before even hitting Cerberus HQ), I had that bittersweet feeling of "this was a piece of media that I am disheartened I will never get to experience for the first time ever again." I generally only have that feeling when I really, really enjoyed something.
The only other thing of note was the reminder that pay to win DLC was apparently quite common thirteen years ago, it just wasn't in loot boxes. Especially in ME3. Even beyond the extra XP and money, there's war assets, weapon mods, and bonus powers. I think I gained five levels and a dozen free weapon mods just from Leviathan and that is not a particularly long DLC.
Oh, and if anyone's curious:
Normal difficulty
Femshep
Earthborn, Sole Survivor
Mostly Paragon
Romanced Liara
Saved Ashley (largely by accident--sent Kaidan with the STG because they're not really front-line types, so Ashley had to look after the nuke, and making sure the nuke went off was the important part so I had to make sure Saren and his Geth didn't manage to deactivate it...)
Saved the Council, left it up to the politicos to pick the human councilor
Soldier/Shock Trooper->Vanguard in ME2 (TIM lies, even to his own people, kind of a lot, e.g. even though he goes on about keeping her exactly as is, he gave her cybernetics that didn't just keep her alive but made her superhumanly strong and tough. Why not experiment with adding biotics to people who never had them before while he's at it? That's my excuse, at least, and then I mostly ended up playing her like a Soldier with extra powers anyway.)
Kinda accidentally did the thing where you can romance both Liara and Thane without it making anyone mad in 2
Got everyone out of the suicide mission, destroyed the Collector base
Managed to keep both romantic relationships in 3 (Liara doesn't mind emotional unfaithfulness as long as you don't sleep with anyone, it seems? Or maybe Thane's a special case since he's dying)
Saved everyone who can be saved (see you on the beach, Thane, Legion, and Mordin)
Synthesis ending
I only managed to make level 56 in ME1, plus Legendary Edition didn't have Pinnacle Station because the source code was apparently lost but there's a mod for it, so I might do that and other ME1 things until I make max level there. But Andromeda didn't grab me at the start in the way even ME1 did, so I'll probably not do that for a while.
Also I realized partway through 3 that "EDI And The Geth" would be a good name for an Elton John vaporwave cover band.
Hitting max level in ME1 is a mammoth task, I think the last two levels have hugely inflated XP requirements just to give people doing multiple playthroughs something to aim for (aside from the fact that getting all achievements in the original game more or less required you to play it at least three times with different companions, something that was thankfully removed for the LE).
Achievements were still in their (relative) infancy when ME1 came out, too. I was glad to see those ones rejigged for ME:LE.
A friend of mine's wife played through ME:LE a few months ago, also for the first time. Naturally I had all sorts of questions as to how it went and never really heard much back - @Shadowen , your post was exactly the kind of tale I'd hoped for! So thank you, reading how people go through the trilogy - especially the first time - is always a treat.
I usually had new game + to max out in ME1. Or whatever they called it.
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ShadowenSnores in the morningLoserdomRegistered Userregular
edited April 16
Also, I laughed--I genuinely laughed, a lot--at The Citadel.
(I had literally everyone available both for the missions and the party)
Shadowen on
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
edited April 16
there was a long period where Citadel was people's headcanon ending, for people like me who like their escapist media to have unambiguously happy endings
Dhalphir on
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ShadowenSnores in the morningLoserdomRegistered Userregular
Firewalker would be infinitely better if the vehicle's armor wasn't made of paper. I thought the vehicle itself was fun to use and I liked its inclusion in Overlord.
Firewalker would be infinitely better if the vehicle's armor wasn't made of paper. I thought the vehicle itself was fun to use and I liked its inclusion in Overlord.
One issue I have with ME:LE is where some of the DLC opens up, since it didn't get to introduce them in order of release like the original games did - and some thought was given to some of it, like the DLC weapons and armor in ME2 getting relocated to some of the shops, but seemingly that though was not applied to all. I think some of it perhaps should've been gated (or at least had the option to gate it) until slightly later in the respective games, until such a point where it makes sense for it to become available. This is particularly true of ME2's sizeable DLC suite, for plot reasons.
Given that Firewalker introduces the vehicle, indeed the acquisition of it too, it would have made sense to gate Overlord until after Firewalker was completed - or at least the first part of it where the Hammerhead is acquired. Otherwise Overlord just drops you into this unknown vehicle with no idea how it works or what it does.
Another that comes to mind is where Lair of the Shadow Broker becomes available, because doing that early can lock you out of a Liara questline on Illium and doesn't give her a chance to introduce the idea of the LotSB mission properly.
Firewalker would be infinitely better if the vehicle's armor wasn't made of paper. I thought the vehicle itself was fun to use and I liked its inclusion in Overlord.
And if it had a health indicator other than catching fire and blaring alarms at you. Which is realistic, I guess, but we’re still playing a video game.
I’d have also liked to have seen it integrated with other parts of the game beside Shadow Broker. It’s easy to imagine how vehicle sections could’ve fit into the Suicide Mission or Arrival.
Related, because I’m always ready to talk about Mass Effect: we should’ve had vehicle sections in ME3 and the vehicle in question should’ve been the Normandy. Just straight up space battle side quests and space arenas entwined with main quest lines. Imagine flying the Normandy through the Citadel during the coup or actually fighting your way to Earth at the end of the game.
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ShadowenSnores in the morningLoserdomRegistered Userregular
It would be an interesting reversal, too. For most of the series, you're controlling Shepard at the top of their game. Then at the end, they're a broken, limping mess.
But there's one point in ME2 where you're controlling Joker...who's a limping mess with easily-breakable bones.
So at some point near ME3, maybe near the end, you're controlling Joker...at the top of his game, while Shepard's getting their ass beat to hell.
I have a lot of thoughts, most of which are probably redundant to everyone else's at this point. I will say I'm one of those weirdos who thinks the ending to 3 could have worked, and would in any case have been much better received, if a. the Extended Cut ending had been part of the initial release and 2. the writing for the Catalyst's dialog was more interesting. Accidentally or otherwise, I think the ending of ME3 says something useful, if it's not exactly a universal ancient human theme. But I also know about the behind the scenes stuff and I wonder how what Karpashyn was working on would have panned out.
I always thought the offered endings could've worked fine if they just tweaked the presentation slightly
like, shepard arrives at the top of the citadel, meets starchild, and is offered the choice of control or synthesis: these are the two ways that peace/order can be brought to the galaxy, and you can pick one and see the relevant ending
but there is also a secret (but not really secret) way to get the 'destroy' ending, probably involving shepard shooting a series of nodes around the platform or something. If you do this the starchild protests, and their voice slowly morphs into harbinger. Then you get the destroy ending.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
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ShadowenSnores in the morningLoserdomRegistered Userregular
edited April 18
Speaking of alternate endings, I think there should have been a super-double-secret best ending where an Engineer in Arrival can recalculate the trajectory of the Project asteroid so instead of like half an hour it hits like three seconds before the Reapers drop out of FTL around it and they get a face full of supernova at point blank range. Possibly with a one-liner: "Indoctrinate this!" The end! Reapers all dead, galaxy safe.
They could also break the comm jamming and warn the batarian colony while giving them an extra half-hour or so of time so not everyone dies (though the prisoners would probably be left behind, at the least).
I say this, as I mentioned, as someone who played a Soldier/Shock Trooper->Vanguard and who was really annoyed that basically the only class-specific thing in the entire series was one (1) bonus interrupt in Omega, which was only for Engineers.
You can have those if Vanguards get to Charge to the light beam at the end of Priority London, arriving in seconds and completely dodging the near fatal laser hit (the target of the Charge is, of course, Marauder Shields). Imagine arriving to the Citadel in full health and just killing the Illusive Man in seconds, with no effort at all.
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GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
Goddamn y'all makin me want to play LE again. My backlog is crying.
I guess on the alternate endings subject, there are two (iirc) potential, proper end-of-story alternate endings in ME2.
I'm sure most know them but I'll spoiler them anyway:
The conclusion of romancing Morinth. The effect of doing so has been explicitly forewarned, and is not exaggerated. RIP Shepard.
Later, losing literally everyone in the suicide mission. I'm pretty sure this is nearly impossible to do by accident, but it's certainly possible in an intentional fail run because I've done it (and it takes a bit of effort). Even though Shepard ultimately destroys the Human Reaper larva, there's no-one left to help them get onto the Normandy on their final jump to escape, and they fall to their doom. RIP Shepard, again.
Honestly, now I think about it, I'm not even 100% sure if it's possible to do the latter with the DLC installed or in ME:LE; because, if I'm remembering right, Zaeed always joins the team after the first automatically-triggered conversation with him, and I don't recall if there are enough potential squad deaths available to account for him... or indeed Kasumi but I think it may be possible not to recruit her if you don't talk to the "ad" on the Citadel? Someone else can probably answer this. Maybe not recruiting Kasumi and not thawing out Grunt leaves the squad small enough to account for everyone. I might have to attempt this again...
You can recruit Zaheed and then leave him to die when he disobeys orders in his loyalty mission. (though I think that might only be possible if you do it after the Suicide Mission?)
Grunt can be left in the tank, and Legion can be sold to Cerberus.
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ME2 and ME3 succeeded on the charm of their characters and their seamless marriage of CRPG-like combat customization with rock solid corridor shooter fundamentals. Those are the aspects I want to see carried over into any spiritual successor, from BioWare or otherwise.
Andromeda provided a valiant but flawed attempt on both fronts. Characters, especially squadmates, felt indistinct and unmemorable. Exploration of character was constantly being undermined by the game's technical incompetence (the aforementioned temperature updates cutting off dialog, for example). Gameplay was oversimplified to push people into playing multiplayer (the profile system). Weapon balance was a joke, gutting the feeling of customization because only a small handful of options were viable.
Nobody needs to reinvent the wheel here. The core formula is what matters, not the trappings around it.
Yeah, nothing that I can think off that really maps to it completely. At least Dragon Age had its Greedfall, but I can't think of anything that fits in the Mass Effect square hole.
Very true.
With dev times and production costs and whatnot as they are in the present, it makes me feel like the 360/PS3 era was arguably the sweet spot in terms of balancing amount of and quality of content, development time, development cost, scope and scale, all that stuff, with games that have also been able to age at least somewhat gracefully. I forget how long ME1 took to develop, but four years maximum after KOTOR; ME2 & 3 were knocked out in two years apiece, the latter as ME2's DLC was also being made. Which considering the scope and ambition of each title just feels flabbergastingly fast by modern standards.
Added to that, visually the original games haven't aged too badly and ME:LE was able to give them an extra coat of polish without costing too much time or money to do it (another two years by a quite small team as I recall, it certainly didn't have the entirety of Bioware behind it).
But the very idea of three games like that from the same studio with minimal development overlap (DLC notwithstanding) coming out in the span of less than four and a half years seems almost impossible to comprehend in the current era of games.
Steam | XBL
You could make a Mass Effect trilogy but in a world with less visual fidelity than the audience currently expects.
But nobody probably wants to spend 9 figures on a game that will only be derided as last gen. You could make up for it with awesome visual direction, but probably take it away from expectations of AAA visuals.
Yeah. I was about to say, BG3 exists and I feel is on the same scope as the Mass Effect games in terms of excellent companions, choices that matter, etc, but it's one game, it had six years of development time and three years of early access, and was built on an existing engine. Meaning: the design and writing chops still exist, but I think the bloat in everything else in game systems, plus corporate demand that EVERY release be a huge hit and released RIGHT NOW, is a problem.
I mean I again say that what actually killed Andromeda is that it was released half baked in *all* respects. Characters feeling unmemorable means the writing, art, and animation teams didn't have enough time and feedback to really make them land.
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
I think if they continued the story Kett were not going to be the final big bad. They were a problem but they were more opportunistic type bad guys where the true cosmic level threat was whatever caused the stuff that was wrecking the planets to begin with which from what I recall predated the kett significantly and technologically way beyond them. I strongly suspect had they gotten more DLC/expansions this would have been fleshed out more.
100%. The actual problem was that something had gone horribly wrong with the Remnant tech due to an unknown party setting off a superweapon to hurt the Jardaan (the people who made the Remnant tech). the Kett were just taking advantage of that problem. Frankly, I was REALLY interested in the Remnant as a complete inversion of the Reapers, being benevolent machines seemingly dedicated to preserving life and probably symbiotic with the Jardaan. Also yes the writers said that the Scourge had nothing to do with the Reapers. I don't think the writing team could have stuck the landing, but if they had, having a giant further "fuck you" to Starkid & the entire notion that organics and machines must always be in conflict would have been cool. I actually imagine that the Kett would indeed have ended up like the Geth -- allies with us against a much bigger threat, with at least one sympathetic party member representative (they do start down this path of making individual Kett more sympathetic if you actually read their logs; a lot of Kett remembering their previous lives...)
Similarly, I REALLY wanted the DLC about the Quarian/Volus/everybody else ship, since apparently things went SUUUUPER badly for them re: one of the novels.
Like, there's so much in the background and worldbuilding of Andromeda that's incredibly cool, but then... yeah. And sadly I don't think corporate will even allow the ME4 team to actually pick those threads up, because Andromeda flopped SO badly. My bet is that we're going to get a Rise of Skywalker situation where corporate listens too hard to the stupidest parts of the fan backlash and we get a dripping, incoherent mess.
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
Everything changed for the Kett when they discovered technology abandoned by the Jardaan. This tech changed them on a fundamental level. They could now survive in almost any atmosphere, regardless of barometric pressure or chemical composition. They became immune to all disease. Their lifespans now stretched in the thousands. The Kett considered the discovery of this tech to be nothing short of a divine miracle, and so they came to refer to the transformation process as "exaltation".
With their new, robust bodies, the Kett became a great spacefaring faction. In time, they encountered many alien species. And to the individuals of every species, the Kett made the same offer. Accept the gift of exaltation and become one of the chosen. This offer held great appeal to some. Not just the terminally ill and elderly, but also outcasts and criminals who saw the abandonment of their current identities as a chance for a fresh start.
The Kett swelled their ranks, but with this population explosion came more radical ideologies. Many of the newly exalted Kett held the position that their species had a moral obligation to force exaltation upon all individuals, regardless of consent. Those who refused exaltation did so out of ignorance. No one can fully understand how amazing the gift is until after they have experienced it firsthand. In time, this way of thinking became the consensus among the Kett, although there are still many, especially among those exalted from the original Kett species, who oppose it.
We are absolutely, absolutely going to get an incoherent mess full of nothing but memberberries and nostalgia tweaks. This unfortunately seems to be what the (loud) internet wants.
"You know that time when you had a party on the Citadel, and then you and Garrus went shooting? Yeah that was awesome." </Farley> Nothing but. No new characters, no new plot, no new setting; just run the old shit into the ground.
I mean, scope-wise, BG3 is bigger than the entire original trilogy combined. It's honkin' big and there's tons of reactivity and paths that most people will never see. Their previous title, Divinity Original Sin 2, was also excellent and still rather large and that only had 2 years of development.
I don't think a new Mass Effect is going to be compared to the entire trilogy, or that Andromeda was, but it's going to be compared to the peak. You can't follow the trilogy with a game that's like a less memorable ME1 after having released 2 and 3, because you're going to be compared to 2 and 3 which were widely seen as improvements to the original. Doing less than meeting those standards is going to be a step backward.
All said though, it's been at least a decade since Bioware released a game widely regarded as good, and after all the senior talent that's jumped ship over the past five years and the surprising layoffs of old hands to appease the financial statements just recently, I think you're basically dealing with a new, untested studio. Might just be Anthems all the way down.
"You're working to hard."
*eletrocuted batarian noises*
If only we could add a bathroom and crew quarters to the SR-1.
I love this idea, and not only do I think it's consistent with what we've seen of the Kett so far, I think it would make them fascinating foils / an excellent contrast to the Quarians (and by extension the Geth). In much the same way that the Remnant were an inversion of expectations from the Reapers.
I just. God damn. The underlying themes are *there* in Andromeda, there's *so much* in the lore and background that plays with and inverts (maybe even everts???) the narrative we saw in the original. It started asking genuine questions about things like the Reapers and the Geth, but I think most people just didn't even realize that because they couldn't see past the rest of the poor execution (and also I kinda did go to school for literary analysis so what to me stands out a lot is probably invisible to a lot of people).
And again, the thing I'm angriest about is that ME4 is just going to throw the baby out with the bathwater in favor of "HEY LOOK LIARA IS IN THE TRAILER! THERES GETH PROBABLY!!!!!"
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
Unfortunately, I also got suuuuper busy for a month when it came out. This had the side effect of meaning I was aware of The Internet Outrage Machine, and also gave it enough time to patch much of the most egregious stuff.
Yes, a bunch of it was blown out of proportion or done intentionally for laughs, but you also don't get a second chance to make a first impression. Expecting perfection is a bit much, but my game shat itself and died near the end of the tutorial. Twice. So it's not like that was helping either.
The fact that crew members would have new conversation options added but not indicate as much (at release at least, I have no idea if this has been fixed) meant it became a somewhat tedious trip chasing them all down to see if they had something new to say every so often.
The relationships were a mixed bag, in part related to the above, and linked to my next point on the more open ended/open world approach. I started trying to romance one character, things progressed, and then... like, 5-10+ hours went by without any hints or advances otherwise. Then Peebee cornered me in a pod and we made out and I guess the other woman just wasn't that into me, I have no idea what trigger the game was expecting me to pass, but hey, at least I got blindsided by an Asari. Hooray.
The 'open world' wasn't something I enjoyed. It was too much space with too little going on in it. I don't hate open worlds, I fucking love Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, but on many of the worlds you could drive around sightseeing, but mostly it was just wasting time between missions, at least in my experience.
There was the one guy who thought HE was the main character of the game that I found a little grating, though I also seem to recall his loyalty mission being an ongoing series of clusterfucks that got a few laughs. Peebee's as well?
I barely recall either of the new races. Like, I know they're there, but despite putting dozens of hours into the game, it was only through reading the last couple of pages that I really remembered much about them at all. Not like I expect to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the game's lore half a decade later, but they really didn't manage to make a solid lasting impression all the same.
EA claims I played... 106 hours? Oh, that's definitely not the case. I'm pretty sure I let a friend play through it using the account at the time, but it was easily 30+ hours.
The PVP was not remotely as good as the ME3 MP mode. I easily put dozens of hours into that, maybe hundreds? (Edit: 252 hours!) I wasn't chasing the Legendary banner or anything, but that was fun as fuck and I had a blast with it. Sure, playing GethWhiteGold endlessly wasn't necessarily the pinnacle of gaming, but running with a quality PA crew was a damned fine evening.
One thing I do recall really liking was that they clearly listened to the playerbase's frustrations with ME3's ending. Again, it wasn't perfect, but they made it clear that those alliances I formed, those efforts I put in to get us ready, had an impact. Little one off lines, characters and races showing up, it was what I wanted the end run of ME3 to be at launch (and I'm one who was disappointed initially, and generally content with the updated ending we got, even if things did get a bit out of hand for some folks along the way).
I'm intrigued by and looking forward to ME4. I hope it's not just "we went too far away, now just NOSTALGIA YOUR ASSES OFF", but I would appreciate a finely crafted single player experience in that setting again.
Until then, I guess I'll just have to see if I can't shed some weight in preparation for my wedding, and also maybe see if the old N7 armour fits a little better.
If anyone's interested, I'm selling off some ME odds and ends to help put a wee dent in said wedding.
- Cards Against Humanity: Mass Effect Pack
- 4 Bioware challenge coins (Honor the Fallen, First Contact War, Systems Alliance, Commander Shepherd
- A bunch of challenge coins I made in conjunction with the N7 Elite cosplay/costuming group. (72 total, between a glittery ("starfield") and non-glittery versions of both the ME2 and ME3 10th anniversaries)
Feel free to PM me if anyone is interested.
I was playing through ME2 and remembering how much fun it actually was...which led to doing some googling about mods...which led to installing various mods (nothing too fancy: just the three unofficial patches for each game + the LE1 and LE2 same sex romance mods) and now....
Say hello to Bear, about to start his ME1 experience, as a Vanguard this time (having also realised that every time I've played ME1 I've always gone Soldier).
Ocean, tears and heartbreak soup
Half alive in a whitecap foam
Half in love with a white half moon
Well, you have a nice jacket to wear if you ever go to uhh PAX East or Unplugged or something.
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
And then I did other things for eight months.
This January, I finally started playing Mass Effect. Yesterday I finished it.
I'd seen a fair amount of media discussion about it over the years, mostly about the endings (so I was already braced for that) and romance partners (and porn, let's be honest), but a lot of the actual story and characters I knew surprisingly little about. I'd heard about the debate around Mordin, and that the genophage was something that was done to the krogan, and I knew that Grunt and Wrex were different characters, and that everyone wanted Jack and Miranda to just admit it and fuck already, but a lot of other stuff, like how Quarian names include their home ship and what exactly the deal with the Geth was and what was the difference between Saren and Sovereign and what "Assuming direct control" actually meant, etc., were beyond me. It was very satisfying to finally have the points between A and Z filled in.
I have a lot of thoughts, most of which are probably redundant to everyone else's at this point. I will say I'm one of those weirdos who thinks the ending to 3 could have worked, and would in any case have been much better received, if a. the Extended Cut ending had been part of the initial release and 2. the writing for the Catalyst's dialog was more interesting. Accidentally or otherwise, I think the ending of ME3 says something useful, if it's not exactly a universal ancient human theme. But I also know about the behind the scenes stuff and I wonder how what Karpashyn was working on would have panned out.
But, once I was finished (and I arranged things so I was finished, including all DLC--the only thing I hadn't done at the end was go out to the casino with Miranda, because I left Citadel to very late in the game so everyone could be there and there just wasn't enough stuff left for me to do in order to get the invites to spawn in time before the end; I made 60 before even hitting Cerberus HQ), I had that bittersweet feeling of "this was a piece of media that I am disheartened I will never get to experience for the first time ever again." I generally only have that feeling when I really, really enjoyed something.
The only other thing of note was the reminder that pay to win DLC was apparently quite common thirteen years ago, it just wasn't in loot boxes. Especially in ME3. Even beyond the extra XP and money, there's war assets, weapon mods, and bonus powers. I think I gained five levels and a dozen free weapon mods just from Leviathan and that is not a particularly long DLC.
Oh, and if anyone's curious:
Normal difficulty
Femshep
Earthborn, Sole Survivor
Mostly Paragon
Romanced Liara
Saved Ashley (largely by accident--sent Kaidan with the STG because they're not really front-line types, so Ashley had to look after the nuke, and making sure the nuke went off was the important part so I had to make sure Saren and his Geth didn't manage to deactivate it...)
Saved the Council, left it up to the politicos to pick the human councilor
Soldier/Shock Trooper->Vanguard in ME2 (TIM lies, even to his own people, kind of a lot, e.g. even though he goes on about keeping her exactly as is, he gave her cybernetics that didn't just keep her alive but made her superhumanly strong and tough. Why not experiment with adding biotics to people who never had them before while he's at it? That's my excuse, at least, and then I mostly ended up playing her like a Soldier with extra powers anyway.)
Kinda accidentally did the thing where you can romance both Liara and Thane without it making anyone mad in 2
Got everyone out of the suicide mission, destroyed the Collector base
Managed to keep both romantic relationships in 3 (Liara doesn't mind emotional unfaithfulness as long as you don't sleep with anyone, it seems? Or maybe Thane's a special case since he's dying)
Saved everyone who can be saved (see you on the beach, Thane, Legion, and Mordin)
Synthesis ending
I only managed to make level 56 in ME1, plus Legendary Edition didn't have Pinnacle Station because the source code was apparently lost but there's a mod for it, so I might do that and other ME1 things until I make max level there. But Andromeda didn't grab me at the start in the way even ME1 did, so I'll probably not do that for a while.
Also I realized partway through 3 that "EDI And The Geth" would be a good name for an Elton John vaporwave cover band.
A friend of mine's wife played through ME:LE a few months ago, also for the first time. Naturally I had all sorts of questions as to how it went and never really heard much back - @Shadowen , your post was exactly the kind of tale I'd hoped for! So thank you, reading how people go through the trilogy - especially the first time - is always a treat.
Steam | XBL
(I had literally everyone available both for the missions and the party)
"Badassfully: dammit."
The trilogy had really strong DLC overall. Even the weaker ones, like Firewalker, weren’t bad—they just didn’t play to the trilogy’s strengths.
Also, the antagonists' scheme just makes more sense in a post-Reaper galaxy where Shepard has earned a messianic reputation.
If you're going to commit a crime of stolen valor, you do it after the war has been won, not while it still might be lost.
One issue I have with ME:LE is where some of the DLC opens up, since it didn't get to introduce them in order of release like the original games did - and some thought was given to some of it, like the DLC weapons and armor in ME2 getting relocated to some of the shops, but seemingly that though was not applied to all. I think some of it perhaps should've been gated (or at least had the option to gate it) until slightly later in the respective games, until such a point where it makes sense for it to become available. This is particularly true of ME2's sizeable DLC suite, for plot reasons.
Given that Firewalker introduces the vehicle, indeed the acquisition of it too, it would have made sense to gate Overlord until after Firewalker was completed - or at least the first part of it where the Hammerhead is acquired. Otherwise Overlord just drops you into this unknown vehicle with no idea how it works or what it does.
Another that comes to mind is where Lair of the Shadow Broker becomes available, because doing that early can lock you out of a Liara questline on Illium and doesn't give her a chance to introduce the idea of the LotSB mission properly.
Steam | XBL
And if it had a health indicator other than catching fire and blaring alarms at you. Which is realistic, I guess, but we’re still playing a video game.
I’d have also liked to have seen it integrated with other parts of the game beside Shadow Broker. It’s easy to imagine how vehicle sections could’ve fit into the Suicide Mission or Arrival.
Related, because I’m always ready to talk about Mass Effect: we should’ve had vehicle sections in ME3 and the vehicle in question should’ve been the Normandy. Just straight up space battle side quests and space arenas entwined with main quest lines. Imagine flying the Normandy through the Citadel during the coup or actually fighting your way to Earth at the end of the game.
But there's one point in ME2 where you're controlling Joker...who's a limping mess with easily-breakable bones.
So at some point near ME3, maybe near the end, you're controlling Joker...at the top of his game, while Shepard's getting their ass beat to hell.
I always thought the offered endings could've worked fine if they just tweaked the presentation slightly
like, shepard arrives at the top of the citadel, meets starchild, and is offered the choice of control or synthesis: these are the two ways that peace/order can be brought to the galaxy, and you can pick one and see the relevant ending
but there is also a secret (but not really secret) way to get the 'destroy' ending, probably involving shepard shooting a series of nodes around the platform or something. If you do this the starchild protests, and their voice slowly morphs into harbinger. Then you get the destroy ending.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
They could also break the comm jamming and warn the batarian colony while giving them an extra half-hour or so of time so not everyone dies (though the prisoners would probably be left behind, at the least).
I say this, as I mentioned, as someone who played a Soldier/Shock Trooper->Vanguard and who was really annoyed that basically the only class-specific thing in the entire series was one (1) bonus interrupt in Omega, which was only for Engineers.
I'm sure most know them but I'll spoiler them anyway:
Later, losing literally everyone in the suicide mission. I'm pretty sure this is nearly impossible to do by accident, but it's certainly possible in an intentional fail run because I've done it (and it takes a bit of effort). Even though Shepard ultimately destroys the Human Reaper larva, there's no-one left to help them get onto the Normandy on their final jump to escape, and they fall to their doom. RIP Shepard, again.
Honestly, now I think about it, I'm not even 100% sure if it's possible to do the latter with the DLC installed or in ME:LE; because, if I'm remembering right, Zaeed always joins the team after the first automatically-triggered conversation with him, and I don't recall if there are enough potential squad deaths available to account for him... or indeed Kasumi but I think it may be possible not to recruit her if you don't talk to the "ad" on the Citadel? Someone else can probably answer this. Maybe not recruiting Kasumi and not thawing out Grunt leaves the squad small enough to account for everyone. I might have to attempt this again...
Steam | XBL
Grunt can be left in the tank, and Legion can be sold to Cerberus.