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2014-05-31, 07:17 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
Even if that's the case, the Oculi still cut through the cargo hold like butter. And the Normandy's advancements, quite apart from being top-secret, were also extremely expensive, and bankrolled/developed by TIM's generous coffers. There are practical limits on how far entire fleets can advance in only 6 months.
Plague Doctor by Crimmy
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2014-05-31, 07:26 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
I don't know how many times I can say "actually look at the space battle". The Occuli fly out in a straight line with no maneuvering in most cases, or else move in simple, predictable patterns at a low speed. They also have a visibly slower firing rate when you actually observe how many red bolts are going out vs how many blue bolts.
This isn't a complex idea. It's literally looking at a few bits of color and what direction shapes are moving in. You don't need a codex entry to show you what you're already being shown.
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2014-05-31, 08:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
In this thread: Sweeping generalizations about the result of a galaxy wide conflict that could potentially go on for 50+ years based on seeing 20 seconds of a single battle.
Miko is apparently not unique in picking a certain feat.
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2014-05-31, 09:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
It's possible that a lot of time passed between the start and end of mass effect 3. Unfortunately, it cannot serve the story to define how much so we get conflicting intimations.
Expensive though, yes. Shepard already cleaned out the galaxy in the last two games.
Except... What makes this set of occuli more canon than the last games' more mobile ones? What makes this background radiation battle representative of expected outputs? What makes this scene representative of firing power and rate?
To establish that the game sends mixed signals the scenes of battle work. To establish numerical values for ships it's not all that valuable at all.
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2014-05-31, 11:27 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
Because that's how they're acting in this battle, which is make or break for both factions. It doesn't matter how good they're supposed to be if all they do is drift lazily and fire maybe once every few seconds.
Though I must reiterate, this entire stupid argument is Bioware's lack of planning. It's their fault for not having a clear idea of how things are supposed to work and making a series of arbitrary changes. Or obviously making up the ending on the spot and making it a snarl that contradicts everything not in the DLC. Bioware doesn't really care enough to sell the idea clearly, and at the end of the day we really shouldn't care enough to argue if they don't care enough for clarity.
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2014-06-01, 07:01 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
Grrr. Came back from holiday, yesterday, and immediately had to go out and get a new monitor, because my HP vs 19 had finally given up the ghost, and of course you just can't BUY non-widescreen monitors anymore (much less as an emergancy replacement, since the PC is now a mission-critical peice of household hardware - we literally cannot run the house without it nowadays). So I've been going through random programs which I can't be arsed to dig the disks out for), trying to work out what's suffering (ironically, so far C&C Generals seems to have fared worse than C&C 1...) and made the mistake of trying to launch ME 3 and finding there appears to be a 10-gig update.
The frag?
And it's ALL going to be stuff I don't get, isn't it, multiplayer stuff no doubt that you get in the random cards - all of which is pretty moot as I haven't played ME 3 in ages and was just trying to see what stuff looked like with the new monitor and not actually play it (as I'm really four planets awayfrom completing a Sword of the Stars 2 game)...
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2014-06-01, 08:05 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
Boy howdy.
Honestly, if you're this determined to find "lack of clarity" in the cutscenes and ignore what the narrative is telling you then no amount of additional effort on their part would have convinced you. If they had doubled the length and budget of every cutscene you'd still be complaining since you still wouldn't be getting your precious conventional victory, so why should they have bothered? It would be a colossal waste of time and money on their part.Plague Doctor by Crimmy
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2014-06-01, 09:54 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
Now see, that's not accurate. It's an unfortunate situation for everyone involved, but we can't say BIoware doesn't care.
The problem is that, as a business, BIoware cannot say "yep, these two guys messed up, we are going to fire them and apologize for what happened" because the fallout from that would be nigh-apocalyptic. The combination of business requirements, angry consumers getting what they can, and other things means that there was no good answer. There was no way, once things went bad, to make them right again. If BIoware did acknowledge their mistake, they would have to pay out reparations for something that's not all that damaged. They might have been in violation of contracts. They would definitely have compromised their future prospects.
Certainly, things could have been better. But a little understanding goes a long way. BIoware was over a barrel because two guys didn't think to get an outside opinion when they were down to the wire. Disgust and hatred? Those are extreme and, frankly, ridiculous reactions.
Oh geeze man, that sucks. I'm sorry.
Knock that off. It's childish. At no point was 'we should have won' an argument. Only that the story should have been spun better so how bad off we are is clear. This isn't indoctrination theory whining, it's a legitimate issue with a rushed story missing some details and being sloppy, backed by emotion.
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2014-06-01, 02:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
And again I say, if the authoritative military voices in the narrative being explicit about our chances is somehow not clear enough, then throwing good money after bad via cutscenes is not going to do the trick either. To paraphrase the Giant - "if you accept the basic premise of the story that X loses the fight, then we are just haggling over price; and if not, no amount of additional panels and dialogue will get you there."
You yourself said the guys in charge were over a barrel. If that is truly the case, then beefing up the presentation of humanity's hopelessness would have meant cutting corners somewhere else. Far cheaper to just Word of God it through an authoritative mouthpiece, which is literally Hackett's sole purpose in the game.Plague Doctor by Crimmy
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2014-06-01, 03:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
The Giant's words are not applicable here. He was talking about a battle between two side characters. What we're talking about is the premise of the whole game. It's one thing to screw up a scene that affects a facet of a plotline. It's a completely different thing to screw up the presentation of your main plot.
I'm not saying I agree with SiuiS or Jayngfet on that matter. I never felt the mixed signals. I guess neither did you. But I also don't think that they belong to the unpleasable 1% either. I guess there is a lot more people having this issue (whether they're a minority or not I don't know), so yes, this is a problem. There BioWare screwed up. Not completely so but enough for it to matter.Last edited by Bit Fiend; 2014-06-01 at 03:38 PM.
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2014-06-01, 03:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
(Nale is/was a primary antagonist, not a "side character," but anyway...)
The fact that it was the premise of the whole game is why they had so many characters reiterate it.
I'm not saying that SiuS and Jayngfet are unpleasable at all. (This is, in fact, the point behind the "haggling over price" segment of the earlier quote.) What I am saying, however, is that the additional lengths required to please may simply not have been economically feasible/justifiable. Worse, even trying may have just raised further objections without convincing anyone.
If I were able to go back in time and somehow get them to include more/longer cinematics, for me a much higher priority would be showcasing our war assets on Earth - Krogan riding Kakliosaurs through the streets, Rachni slaughtering Ravagers, Geth Primes bombarding a city block full of husks etc. The most important part of the space battle was shown - namely, all the various racial fleet captains checking in during Hackett's speech, showcasing the effect of your choices. The battle itself was much less important.Plague Doctor by Crimmy
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2014-06-01, 04:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
I think that may be the exact wrong thing to do. There had to be more cutscenes showing just how grim things are. Thessia tried but even I have to admit that failed. Maybe a Batarian survivor who actually has an important role in the narrative. (Not necessarily a full squadmate but more than the refugees we get to see.) Throw in some cutscenes of the Batarian military getting curbstomped, their fallen transformed into cannibals, their capital being picked apart, their homeworld in flames, the surviovor being able to escape because he's one of the very few who are really damn lucky. That would have been something.
Last edited by Bit Fiend; 2014-06-01 at 04:22 PM.
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2014-06-01, 04:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
Indeed.
As I'm here for a moment, I shall just observe on the ending (aside from the fact I still hold it to the worst ending of any game/film/show/thing I've ever seen with POSSIBLY the only exception of Neon Genesis Evangelion) - it was never going to have been a good (in terms of qualityending, because Bioware wrote themselves into the corner. They overplayed the Reapers so much that there was no other option other than a literal deus ex machina to defeat them - and to some extent that is also a construct of the videogame/movie hero syndrome, in that you have to have a climax. And from there, it was a short step into the ridiculousness that we got - something as inherently silly as Doctor Who (so not something that is inherently bad in and of itself) but without any of the redeeming features of that show with it. You cannot combine magic win buttons with gritty universes1 and expect to achieve an especially tonally coherent result EVEN IF you had an execution that wasn't so utterly and iredeemable dire as what we got.
I really ought to stop myself there, else I could go on and rant about the various shades of awful that ending was (as yes, I still loathe it as much two years later as I did at the time) all night, and that would serve no useful purpose.
1Things simply Do Not Work That Way - one of the things Star Wars got right was killing the Emporer left them still fighting the war fifteen years later.
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2014-06-01, 04:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
I agree it sounds counterproductive at first - how can portraying the strength and unity of our forces do anything to convince people that the war is unwinnable? But remember that my stance has always been that sinking more resources into trying to prove that point is a waste of time and money. Rather, I think that human nature is that we're more apt to pick at dangling threads in a work we're generally disappointed with than one that we're not.
Look at the latest X-Men movie. It's packed with plotholes from start to finish, but currently it's sitting on a lofty 95% audience satisfaction according to RT. People are willing to overlook a lot of issues for something they enjoy overall.
I would confidently wager that, had the Extended Cut endings been part of the original release, half of the problems we're hashing out over the game to this day would not even have been brought up. No one would be poring over cutscenes, analyzing Oculi flight patterns, or hotly debating the fine differences between Destroy Reapers and Hades Cannons. Therefore, I think those + more war assets on Earth would have quieted a lot of dissent before it even began.Plague Doctor by Crimmy
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2014-06-01, 04:54 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
War assets were kind of a bad idea to begin with if refuse didn't win anything.
I mean it kind of assumes that Shepard's gathering armies can change the outcome, when it all comes down to an arbitrary choice anyway. All it is is a way to trick you into doing a bunch of fetch quests nobody would have cared about otherwise and trying to stop everyone from immediately siding with wrex.
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2014-06-01, 04:58 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
This... is actually a really good point. Haven't seen it from that perspective. I think the HULK (the movie/story critic one) had some really good points on supposed "plot holes" that somewhat boiled down to this. (Incidentially his take on the ME3 ending is pretty interesting too.)
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2014-06-01, 05:04 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
This is just wrong. Look at high EMS destroy. Then have a look at low EMS destroy. It's a very different outcome. Control is a different matter since the backfire is far less severe - if you have that option. Have your EMS low enough and the Collector base destroyed and the Crucible is too damaged to give you that. Or even worse: have the Collector base intact and low enough EMS and you can kiss your plan to destroy the Reapers goodbye. Synthesis is high EMS only anyway.
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2014-06-01, 05:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
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2014-06-01, 05:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
Unfortunately it kind of doesn't jell right. Now this is just me thinking through the mechanics, I didn't really have a problem with them in the game. But how does getting an additional asari warship for instance effect the outcome of the Crucible? It really shouldn't. Now I can see getting Rachni to help build the thing having an effect, or getting Mordin Solus to work on it, but all the military assets are only really only going to have an effect on outcomes if things boil down to a fight.
Now I will be the first to admit, the assets themselves don't really make sense and are really just rough points given for plot purposes. But in terms of mechanics reflecting gameplay, if they really wanted to emphasize that the Crucible was all that mattered then war assets should really have been just called Crucible completeness rating or something and only really focused on assets that would effect the readiness of the Crucible.
Or they could have put 2 different categories, Crucible completeness and Army readiness, and if the army readiness isn't high enough at the end you get a non-standard game over. Ending with Shepard leading survivors away from a destroyed Crucible to fight a long protracted war ending with Liara's message.
Of course, this is pretty much all nitpicking.
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2014-06-01, 05:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
So what you would have preferred are far fewer war assets that each have a very specific effect in the battle cutscene? Doable, yes, but not necessarily better. That would cut down the feeling that the war is going on on all fronts imaginable and put even more focus on the battle over Earth, which IMHO is the exct wrong direction to go. Many war assets don't even affect that battle directly to begin with. Instead they relive the pressure on other fronts so more forces can be deployed to Earth.
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2014-06-01, 05:32 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
I don't think it's "completeness". The Crucible is complete either way. It's just that they have more time to run tests, install failsaves, improve protections etc. and this would roughly have the same effect as better military in that the purpose of both is to protect the Crucible from damage. Of course this is just me trying to justify the arbitrary values for fun. I'm fine with the mechanics as they are.
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2014-06-01, 05:58 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
The key is to think big picture. All is One and One is All - the galaxy is pretty interconnected. That Volus bombing fleet? Probably won't do crap in the final battle, but could do a lot of good taking out a nest of husks over on Palaven, which frees you up a Turian Fighter Squad who can now guard the Crucible. Or maybe it's a more abstract benefit, e.g. that bombing fleet saved a Turian school that was about to be swiss-cheesed by Ravagers massing on an overlooking hill, and the Turian fighter pilots whose kids attended that school have one less immediate worry on their minds and now they can fight better.
The bottom line is that not everything you gather has to be part of the big battle directly - but they can still have an impact on how intact your Crucible is even so..Plague Doctor by Crimmy
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2014-06-01, 08:05 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
Twenty weeks.
Twenty weeks later we are STILL arguing about this.
Well, this is the internet, what else should I have expected?LPs that I like to think I will get back to some day.
To Make a Fan: Let's Play Final Fantasy
Let's Play Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
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2014-06-01, 08:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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2014-06-02, 12:08 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
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2014-06-02, 01:31 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
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2014-06-02, 02:07 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
I have always viewed it like this. Bioware truly shot themselves in the foot with the shoddy first release. I mean even from a technical standpoint the original ending is a mess. The cutscenes doesn't line up, you have no explanation for vital parts, leading to initial speculations of Endor Holocausts, and worse. It is just badly done. Again, I am not even talking about the writing, I am ONLY talking about the skill they glued it together with.
On top of the people who would never have liked this ending, no matter the writing (becaue "I want to kill Harbringer personally, dammit! Oh and Little Blue Babies or Bioware shall BURRRRRN!") all the ones that normally would have accepted this got so ticked off by the shoddy handiwork and the arrogance (the whole "We deliberately took away the closure for you, since we want you to speculate about what happened! *Trollface* thing) they automatically fell into the same camp as the unpleasable ones. The fact that they then tried to defend actual bad (or lazy?) handiwork with the "artistic integrity" deflection only ticked off more people.
Anyway, it is obvious that the EC is what should have been. They should have never released the game without it. Leviathan too, to a lesser degree. It is so integral to the ending and the setup of the reveal and the final decision that even I would argue it is almost a plot-essential DLC (unlike Ashes, which I will never accept as such. I do find it confusing that people still argue that Ashes is plot essential and Leviathan isn't).
Had the game shipped with the EC as the Origian Ending and the Leviathan included, the angry crowd demanding a rewrite would have been a fringe group, because the rest of us would have loved the game, concluded the ending was So Okay It's Average, and started over with our other ME2 import files.
...of course I am a grumpy old man who also consider Baldur's Gate 2 to be Bioware's "Thriller Album", their early peak and everything they have done since is quality wise on a slow decline. But again, I am old.Blizzard Battletag: UnderDog#21677
Shepard: "Wrex! Do we have mawsign?"
Wrex: "Shepard, we have mawsign the likes of which even Reapers have never seen!"
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2014-06-02, 05:18 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
I think one reason why I'm more forgiving of the ending is that I didn't experience the whole controversy about it. I mean, I knew the controversy was "a thing", but having not played any of the Mass Effect games at the time I paid it no attention. It was only a year later that a co-worker who convinced me that my bad experience with the first game (which I still haven't played to completion, and don't particularly intend to - I've watched most of the significant cutscenes independently of the gameplay retro-actively) shouldn't turn me off the series as a whole. By the time I played the third game, all the DLC was out and I played it with EC already in place.
I looked at the ending, went "Where's the controversy??", went and watched the non-EC videos and said "Oh, I guess I can see that."
And that's the full extent of it. I never saw Bioware's defense of the original ending, never argued on the forums over it - I never built up that rage.
That said, I find it very difficult to build up a massive hatred for any gaming company if I enjoyed playing their game. I can get a good rage going against the likes of King for puppy-kicking business practices, or Ubisoft's continued determination to make it difficult for me to play games I own. I can get quite annoyed at companies that make a good game followed by a genuinely terrible one that I feel like I wasted my money on.
But if I've spent 20+ hours on a game enjoying every minute, and then have it end on a less than positive note? I can't bring myself to get more than slightly annoyed about that, and will likely go back and play the game again - after all, the ending doesn't prevent me from enjoying the rest of the game. (Note: I did not feel annoyed by the ME3 ending at the time - it's only endless forum debates that brought up the weaknesses. At the time, I thoroughly enjoyed it).
At worst, for a game series I've stopped enjoying, I just stop playing it. I put hundreds of hours into the Total War games. I eventually stopped playing them due to systemic problems that the developers repeatedly failed to address. However, I don't go around the Creative Assembly forums saying that they're liars or cheaters or lazy programmers or the worst company ever. I just stopped buying their product.
I'll stop buying Bioware games when I stop enjoying them. The Dragon Age series is on it's third strike, gameplay-wise. If the gameplay hasn't improved, I'll have to make a decision. For Mass Effect though, they're on an upwards curve in gameplay and, to a lesser extent, from a plot point of view. So I'll be there for the next one, and them having a snafu with the ending matters very little to that decision.
...Also oddly, I didn't like Baldur's Gate 2 very much, but then that could be due to a combination of youth and (as a non D&D player) finding THAC0 utterly impenetrable. Minsc was awesome though.Last edited by Rodin; 2014-06-02 at 05:19 AM.
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2014-06-02, 07:05 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
I had basically the same experience as Rodin. I had only recently developed a liking for Sci-Fi and so played the ME series as a whole only from the end of last year. I also had EC and Leviathan installed from the start. When it came to the ending and I picked Synthesis I recognized why there could be so much controversy about it. But for me there was none. I just thought it was beautifully done - in fact EDI's narration almost had me in tears. And as there are only two other endings that ever managed to do that (Illusion of Gaia (of Time here in Germany) and Madoka) this means it is one of my favorites so far.
Also, since everyone throws their opinion in: Baldur's Gate II is my most played BioWare game to date. But I deem Mass Effect a more than worthy successor. More than Dragon Age could ever hope to be.
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2014-06-02, 07:16 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Mass Effect 3 - 13: Bet you could really go for a bottle of cool, refreshing Tupa
I'm not, and if I'm coming across that way I apologize. What I am bashing are beliefs like Refuse being able to "win" when it is clearly just a Shepard whose ego triumphs over sense, similar in my eyes to one who believes Morinth's lies about being special.
Pretty much
Yes, exactly.
I never finished Baldur's Gate 2 - Jade Empire was their Thriller album to me. Great plot, great gameplay, truly visible impacts of your decision making (it was breathtaking to follow an Open Palm playthrough and literally watch the world around you coming back to life, like the dam in Tien's Landing) and truly neat innovations for the console era like being able to save anywhere. Before ME and DA, JE was my first Bioware game to result in what I calll "Bioware Syndrome," i.e. replaying their titles over and over until I got the perfect playthrough. If I were more of a Star Wars fan KOTOR would have been up there with it too I imagine.
My one fault with JE was how badly some of the Closed Fist options were written. While there were a few that truly embodied the philosophy, most were simply thuggish and Stupid Evil.Plague Doctor by Crimmy
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