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Mass Effect 3 Discussion Thread
- Thread starter heatthegreat
- Start date
Yeah, pretty much. Though it gets a lot easier when you have all the upgrades and best weapons. Your hit rate improves and it plays a bit more like ME2 does. Though the cover system is difficult to deal with. This is something that has improved dramatically with each game.
A guy with badass prototype reaper tech. Maybe it makes sense that it would take another Shepard to beat Shepard. I don't know, all I know is that was a fun freaking fight.
I hear you on the 3 geth Primes though, on insanity as an infiltrator that kicked my ass. My eventual strategy was to immediately engage the cloak, grab the spitfire, and high-tailed it to the Prime on the left. I buried all the rounds into him until he was dead. After you kill one it becomes reasonable. Still, by the time I killed the last prime, both my squadmates were dead and I was low on ammo. Great fucking fight. Not enough battles like that.
If it isn't obvious to you all by now, the sole cause of the current ending was lack of time/money, there was no artistic vision to be compromised by fixing the game.
The only real message EA/Bioware understands is money, if you can return it for a refund, return it, if not sell it used, hopefully flooding the used gaming market so that they can't sell new copies anywhere near the full price.
My biggest complaint on all 3 games is that they weren't challenging enough, and it's not because I'm so great at games or anything. Anytime I play any game online I get my ass whooped. You had areas with sharp difficulty spikes, like the 3 geth primes. But 'boss' battles like that should be difficult. If you're not dying at least a few times it's too easy imo.
I started the game on hardcore. I even used the save importer thingy to start the game at level 1, with no talent points to make sure I had no advantages. The difficulty was moderate initially. Had a hard time at the last battle where you un-freeze Javik. After that the upgrades started to roll in and the game got too easy. Turned it up to insanity expecting, if anything, that it would be on the too-hard side but it just wasn't. That's why I relish those few battles that kick your ass and refused to turn down the difficulty for them. Part of it also may well be that infiltrators are over-powered? Dunno, but it seems like a good sniper rifle with the maxed out time dilation spoils you and you never end up doing anything else.
I'm gonna do a 2nd playthrough with a different class. What would you guys reccomend as being the 'hardest' (worst) class to play?
I started the game on hardcore. I even used the save importer thingy to start the game at level 1, with no talent points to make sure I had no advantages. The difficulty was moderate initially. Had a hard time at the last battle where you un-freeze Javik. After that the upgrades started to roll in and the game got too easy. Turned it up to insanity expecting, if anything, that it would be on the too-hard side but it just wasn't. That's why I relish those few battles that kick your ass and refused to turn down the difficulty for them. Part of it also may well be that infiltrators are over-powered? Dunno, but it seems like a good sniper rifle with the maxed out time dilation spoils you and you never end up doing anything else.
I'm gonna do a 2nd playthrough with a different class. What would you guys reccomend as being the 'hardest' (worst) class to play?
Even if the ending is as crappy as everyone says (I'm almost there), the game leading up to it is better than damn near anything else out there. People are really sounding spoiled on this.
I think Adept would be quite challenging early on. The only thing I hate about male adept is that he looks fruity when he melees.
Oh come on, only "spoiled", you missed the proper spin 101 keyword, you meant to say "entitled". The ME trilogy was not free, it cost a good chunk of money to play. People who pay money for things are entitled to satisfaction, there is no satisfaction with ME3's ending, in fact it is so bad, that it makes most rational people dis-satisfied with the entire franchise.
This has been gone over 200 different ways in 200 different places, but suffice to say, you can analyzed story structure objectively and by almost every objective measure, Mass Effect's ending is a total and complete failure.
So entitled actually is a relevant word, as in entitled to a refund.
terrible and lazy with zero effort put into it, as if they just balanced for easy/normal and called it a day. also many mob spawns that dump you straight into a firefight right after a convo/elevator/return (parts of the map that force a drop into areas you can't retreat from), where you just get pummeled before you can even find cover. and even when you do manage to duck in time, it's possible to get grenades lobbed at you with no route of escape.
who might we have to blame for these tiny maps, and airtight situations that just really wouldn't make sense, unless resources were very limited in some way, so limited that we can't even have proper animations or weapon models...
the ravager/harvester swarm on thessia is another one that comes to mind, depending on your squad position at the moment they appear, could be possible to get instakilled without any time to react at all. just brutal on insane since you get demolished in 1 or 2 volleys or a single nade, until you learn to abuse ai and class perks.
I'm not gonna defend a truly horrid ending, I'm sure it bothers me the same way it would bother anyone. I just don't see how a 30 second ending cancels out the previous 40 hours of enjoyment & quality that only a handful of other games come close to providing. You're really making the case that a great game with a crap ending renders the entire thing a failure? Would you rather pay the same $50 for an average game and a great ending?
I'd rather pay $100 for a great game with a great ending, and $5 or less for anything less. And that's pretty much what I do, when it comes to buying games. I only bought ME3 sight unseen based on my experience with the previous installments, ME3 as it currently exists is at best incomplete, at worst it's poisonous. And boy does it demonstrate the corruption and cluelessness of almost the entire game reviewing industry...
I think the analogy of the cockroach in the last bite of the dessert of an otherwise excellent meal, is a very close fit. I can't speak for everyone, but what little investment/interest/love I once had for Mass Effect has been pretty much totally destroyed by this debacle.
I don't really subscribe to rating games by a single number. A good game is far too complex to represent with a single number. And I would lay at least some of the blame, for the dumbing down of pretty much all high production value games over the last 10-15 years, on this obsession people have with single number ratings...
However, I'll play along. I'd give it about a 6, worth the time to play, but only if purchased at bargain bin pricing, and with low expectations going into it. For comparison ME1, was probably a 9, and ME2 was probably and 8.5 or so. Both worth buying on release day, at release day pricing, and both mostly living up to high expectations, and both being very replayable.
But now having played ME3, I have to downgrade the whole series to a 6. A bad ending destroys a good story, period. And an ending that was so obviously tacked onto the end, so that they could shove an incomplete game out the door ASAP is even worse. And then on top of that they go into spin and lie mode, touting their "artistic integrity", instead of even daring to admit anything is wrong with it...
And of course in reality no game rated a 6 is worth playing, all of the "ratings" are so compressed toward the high end by the payola, that anything below a 7.5 or so is shovelware garbage...
I just don't understand how a bad ending changes the experience you had up until that point. A bad ending can't retroactively undo 40 hours of enjoyment and render them null...lol it just doesn't work that way. How do you enjoy the hell out of a game for (say) 39:50, only to determine you didn't really enjoy it based on the last :10? Were you indoctrinated the whole time?
The very fact that the ending has had such an impact on you and left you so invested in its outcome proves that it couldn't possibly have been a 6/10, not even to you.
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I just finished the game, literally right before starting this post. I admit I'm a bit perplexed by the ending, I don't think it they did it right. Certainly they left out an obvious possibility:
Still, I don't get the outrage. We may not like or understand what they gave us, but at least they gave us something, a nice long beautifully rendered/scored cut scene. It's not even close to the way, say, Borderlands or Dark Souls bailed out giving us nothing but a wall of text.
However the ending fell short, it certainly didn't change the fact that I had an absolute blast up until the last 10 minutes. Heck I even enjoyed the last 10 minutes. It wasn't until I had some time to dwell on the events that I determined it wasn't sufficient. I feel like I got my money's worth more with ME3 than all but a handful of games I've ever bought in over 30 years of gaming. Certainly all time top 10.
that the reapers flat out win. They kill Shepard, all organic life, and start all over. How is that not one of the possibilities? You should also have the flip side of that coin. And wtf is with Joker crash landing on a planet with squadmates who were just with you and in all likelihood getting killed? That one's a head scratcher. So's the old man talking with his kid. In fact, that just gets a big "......." from me.
Still, I don't get the outrage. We may not like or understand what they gave us, but at least they gave us something, a nice long beautifully rendered/scored cut scene. It's not even close to the way, say, Borderlands or Dark Souls bailed out giving us nothing but a wall of text.
However the ending fell short, it certainly didn't change the fact that I had an absolute blast up until the last 10 minutes. Heck I even enjoyed the last 10 minutes. It wasn't until I had some time to dwell on the events that I determined it wasn't sufficient. I feel like I got my money's worth more with ME3 than all but a handful of games I've ever bought in over 30 years of gaming. Certainly all time top 10.
I just don't understand how a bad ending changes the experience you had up until that point. A bad ending can't retroactively undo 40 hours of enjoyment and render them null...lol it just doesn't work that way. How do you enjoy the hell out of a game for (say) 39:50, only to determine you didn't really enjoy it based on the last :10? Were you indoctrinated the whole time?
I think you said that you haven't finished it yet, so I won't spoil it. But if you can get through the ending without feeling that "it was all for nothing", then you and I have virtually no common ground in our experience with fiction, and further conversation on this subject is pointless.
Different strokes, I guess. ME3 felt hugely empty compared to the first two, for me. The ending just compounded the feeling of dissatisfaction that'd been growing since I first entered the galaxy map and realised exactly how much there wasn't to do.
Definately, though I'd say the emptiness started with ME2, but it made up for the lack by polishing up the gameplay and cinematics. It's basically flash vs substance. ME3 pushed the flash up even a notch higher than 2, but it lost too much substance, and then the ending unraveled everything.
Colonel Sanders
Supreme [H]ardness
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edit: huge whoopsies, wrong thread
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- Joined
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I agree with you. I played through ME1 and 2 multiple times but I'm struggling just to get through 3 (I still haven't finished it and have had it for 3 weeks or so now). For some reason where I was attached to the characters in the first two games I find that I don't even care what happens to the characters in this one. The story/dialogue hasn't been that great and while the combat is more action packed it just feels like you're running from waist-high wall to waist-high wall for 90% of the game.
Ok, you look like yet another troll, but I'll bite.
And that's just one of dozens of critiques of the ending, plenty of which alone can demolish any claims of "artistic vision".
No, Shepard did not stop the reapers, the weird ass star child deus ex machina allowed Shepard to stop the reapers because somehow Shepard passed some test that she/he was completely unaware of until the last 5 minutes of the game. And the damage done in the process of stopping the reapers was almost as bad, possibly worse than allowing the reapers to complete this cycle's cull.
And that's just one of dozens of critiques of the ending, plenty of which alone can demolish any claims of "artistic vision".
So if I shit on two pieces of bread and serve it to you as lunch you won't be outraged because I gave you something? I realize that video games usually have crappy stories and crappier endings, but this is not acceptable. We hold Mass Effect to a higher standard because BioWare has always delivered better up to this point.
This is going to be amusing to watch.
I want to see how in the hell they can take that existing ending...and let's face it it's basically the same ending for 95 percent of the content...but take all of that mess and suddenly "flesh it out and fix it" and make it actually worth a damn. Good luck with that.
I want to see how in the hell they can take that existing ending...and let's face it it's basically the same ending for 95 percent of the content...but take all of that mess and suddenly "flesh it out and fix it" and make it actually worth a damn. Good luck with that.
It's going to be amusing seeing how the squadmates get onto the Normandy.
Let me see...
Yep, its retarded even with more explanation.
Let me see...
They wake up at the foot of the portal thing that leads to the Citadel. Instead of going inside and completing the mission, or radioing Shep, they call for an extraction. The Normandy or a shuttle scoops them up, again no reinforcements go into the Citadel, and instead everyone goes back to fighting the giant space battle. Once the Citadel fires at the Relays, EDI goes into self-preservation mode and takes the ship into FTL towards the nearest habitable planet. But they are caught up in the Relay explosion that inexplicably also travels FTL, frying the systems enough to force a landing but without harming the crew.
Yep, its retarded even with more explanation.
Mass Effect 3 patch next week...
http://blog.bioware.com/2012/04/06/4270/
good to see they fixed the facial import bug
http://blog.bioware.com/2012/04/06/4270/
good to see they fixed the facial import bug
With regard to what? Single player or multiplayer? MP guns have to be unlocked. Just as every other online game does these days. In the single player game they are scattered throughout the levels. Priority missions tend to have the most. If you miss weapons during the game you can buy them from the ship's stores, or at the various shops on the Citadel.
Yeah, not sure what your beef is. There's lots of guns in this game, my last count was well over 30. Towards the end game, I ended up with several guns that I never even got around to trying. You can also hit the shuttle bay and upgrade each and every gun 4 times apiece. It's a good system. Maybe scattering them about the occasional level isn't the best way to do it, I would in fact prefer they simply sell guns in various stores. But however you acquire them, there are lots of great guns in this game spanning the very beginning of the game right through the end.
Yeah sorry. Referring to MP obviously. No they're not unlocked. You get them only when you buy the Recruit, Veteran, Spectre, etc Packs and it's only a CHANCE to drop.
It's retarded. I've opened a shit ton of these packs and no weapons.
I've really only received good weapons from Spectre and Premium Spectre packs. In fact I've received a ton of weapons unlocks:
Geth Plasma Rifle II
Geth Plasma Shotgun II
M-8 Avenger VII
M-15 Vindicator I
M-37 Falcon III
M-76 Revenant III
Phaeston I
M-29 Incisor II
M-92 Mantis III
M-98 Widow IV
Black Widow II
Javelin II
M-3 Predator III
Arc Pistol I
M-6 Carnifex II
M-77 Paladin II
Scorpion I
Graal Spike Thrower III
M-300 Claymore III
M-23 Katana III
M-27 Scimitar I
Disciple II
M-12 Locust II
M-25 Hornet III
I dropped a 20 on BioWare points for unlocks and got one with my Normandy SR-2 statue. The rest and in fact the bulk of these were purchased with in game credits. And last night I actually got really lucky and unlocked the new Asari Justicar Adept and the Geth Plasma SMG. One thing I am short on though is mods. I've very few worth while mods for most weapon categories save for the shotguns and even then most of what I have is level I or level II at best. Alot of those guns like the M-29 Incisor and M-8 Avenger aren't guns I'd really use often if ever. I've tried them sure, but didn't like them. I loved the M-29 Incisor in Mass Effect 2, but not here. Something different about it. Feels less effective, less accurate.
Actually, if you reimport that ME3 Shepard in and start again each weapon can be upgraded an additional five levels. So if you cleared the game with your favorite weapons and level V, then you can take them to level X. And on pickup of an existing weapon you'll be granted three bonus levels. So a level II weapon becomes a level V on pickup. Then you can upgrade it an additional 2 levels.
But yeah, some guns like the M-99 Saber you literally pickup at the end of the game. It's on the Horizon mission and by the time you get it, you are done fighting enemies until you assault the Cerberus base. Then you pickup the M-37 Falcon almost right away there. I never got to try them until my next playthrough. I stuck with my M-76 Revenant because it was upgraded to level V and I knew what it was and how to use it best. I wasn't sure how the new guns would be and didn't try them until later.
You do realize that in terms of missions the game is pretty close to the length of Mass Effect 2 right? It's also got more dialog than Mass Effect 2 had, though much of it is diverted from nonsense conversations with NPC's to actual characters you want to talk to. Now I will agree that it is more linear than the other games are to a point. It gives you all your missions in waves. Mass Effect 2 did this as well, but once you did the mission on Horizon and triggered the Collector Ship mission, then you pretty much got hit with every mission at once. From that point on the galaxy map was full of crap to do. It isn't that you had more to do, it's just that you got to see it all at once on the map. In Mass Effect 3, you get a handful of missions, then once a priority mission is done, then you advance to the next set. If you do a priority mission first, then the other missions can no longer be done as they won't be relevant and you lose out.
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not even close. me2 has a good 50% more real missions (ie. not hunt and fetch), or me3 has less than 2/3rds the content of me2, to put it another way. and that's not counting all those random missions you find from planet scans/star charts, some of them 2 or 3 parts long, so it's more like half.
they did a real good job of bombarding players with this clusterfuck of a journal, and running you around talking/fetching. so while it seems long, it's all just fluff.
http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Missions
Well Mass Effect 2 always takes me right around 43 hours to complete and Mass Effect 3 about 36 hours. 3 always seemed shorter, but I didn't think the difference was that large. Everything points to BioWare running out of time and money on this game. Even with the endings sucking hard, I still thought it was a pretty good game overall. (Though that ending is hard to forgive.)
It seems weird that BioWare delayed the game to implement a multiplayer component instead of finishing off the singleplayer component in a proper manner. Is multiplayer a new direction for BioWare?
I wonder how much money BioWare has made from MP unlocks. Honestly, there may be more money in soemthing like this than with selling DLC for singleplayer games.
I wonder how much money BioWare has made from MP unlocks. Honestly, there may be more money in soemthing like this than with selling DLC for singleplayer games.
Maplehamwich
[H]ard|Gawd
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I think BioWare as a dev studio is still story based. However, pressure from EA may be forcing them to move in a Multiplayer direction.
You'd better believe it. I'd wager resources being devoted to the MP component led to the single player game's deficiencies.