Major spoilers and nerd raging will be in this thread. 
Complaints about ME3 killing the legacy, and people collecting all the stuff BioWare has “stolen” are now flooding the Internets.
http://img560.imageshack.us/img560/2816/acsch.jpg
Here’s a teaser of what’s in that link:
Go wild. :lol:
I will not read… i will not read… need to play Mass Effect 3 first… i will not read. 
Got my copy today.
Kind of disappointed that even the collectors edition doesn’t come in as nice a package as eroges do, especially considering this cost as much as a preordered eroge. Oh well =p
Glimpsed a bit of the GL part. Still waiting for my copy (that’s free super saver shipping for you), but if this is true…well, at least they ripped off something good. Hope this doesn’t turn out to be the game equivalent of Turkish Star Wars…this:
So far it’s good stuff, although it’s more of a better Mass Effect 2 than something that takes good things from the original formula. But it does the planet scanning stuff a lot better, has a lot more customisation and makes up for the fact that the game is basically missions connected by a a space screen by having a really ridiculous number of them (as well as a lot of side diversions)
Money is also actually useful in ME3 and in quantity is a good compromise between Mass Effect 1 where you have way too much money that you can’t use and Mass Effect 2 where you never have enough money and can’t get enough money for everything no matter what you do.
The Easter Eggs are really hilarious this time around. The Blasto easter egg is a lot funnier now that I finally realized why the vorcha sound so familiar: It’s the same voice as Dr. Nefarious. (The R&C series’ best villain since the first game’s Blarg leader.)
And the Shepard VI is great. I am so glad they added it in, the minute they mentioned it in the previous game I immediately wanted one.
As far as quality control goes … already had the game crash once on me. (I died, the game was reloading the checkpoint, and … it hung.)
Worst bug I’ve found so far was losing all my money after the Tuchanka mission. I got it back with a memory editor >_>
Just finished the game. I guess one of the problem is that there’s so much content here, but it likely requires N permutations of save file imports from ME1->ME2->ME3 to see all of it- so it kind of ended up being a bit short for one playthrough.
The story is decent but ME3 had the misfortune of being released around the same time as Hatsuyuki Sakura, which has a story that is actually good. Plus they probably take about the same amount of time to finish =p
Alot of people seem to be complaining about the ending(s) for the game; are they really so bad? Still haven’t gotten my copy yet, so no spoilers please.
Short and anticlimactic. Actually, the entire last section of the game is like this.
They’re not that bad but Mass Effect really felt like quite an epic series so an ending that didn’t dump, without foreshadowing, the entire ‘gimmick’ of the plot on you and then be rolling credits five minutes later would have been better (even if you’d tolerate that in another game.)
Mass Effect 3 has everything promised but it’s all quite a shallow application - partly, I suspect, because of the necessity for the narration to be generic enough to work no matter who you got killed in the previous games. I think in the end I preferred the first game.
Me too. I think I’m the only person that liked driving the mako around. Fun times.
I guess I’ll pretty much have to spoiler the whole thing.
[spoiler]What bugged me wasn’t just that the Big Reveal was anticlimactic and far too abrupt - although it was both of these things. No, what bugged me the most was the way that Bioware appeared not to notice the fundamentally racist nature of the Big Reveal - the Reaper’s “motivations”. (There was also ParagonShep referring to the indoctrinated Hanar diplomat as a ‘big stupid jellyfish’ – WTF, Bioware? Just because it’s not offensive to the reader’s ears doesn’t mean it’s not a racial slur.)
So, what do we have? An AI, embedded within the Citadel. No sign of its creators. It seems fairly safe to presume that this AI is directly responsible for the destruction of its creators, given what it says about organics. Then it says that conflict between organics and synthetics is inevitable, and will always end in the destruction of the organics.
Well, damn. Bioware seems to think this is pretty deep and philosophical, but it’s not. It’s not a philosophical debate about the nature of life. It’s a racist offering a racist justification for ethnic cleansing in the form of race war. Replace “synthetic” and “organic” with “white” and “black” – or equivalently, with “Christian” and “Jewish” – and it’s totally obvious. Everyone would be up in arms about how this is racist propaganda. Hell, if I were to go looking, I’m sure I could find almost-identical anti-semitic literature out there.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. They can write an ending where the big ultimate bad guy is a racist AI if they want to. The problem is that they didn’t seem to notice this was racist. Shepard doesn’t get any dialogue options to call out the AI on its morally bankrupt philosophy. And that’s BS, because there’s plenty of grounds on which to do so. It doesn’t even make sense because organic species exterminate each other all the time. It’s explicitly proven wrong on at least two counts: It is not guaranteed that organic life will create synthetic life. The current cycle’s culture specifically outlawed it. And then there are the geth, who - regardless of whatever Shepard does - were content to stay in their own region of space and keep to themselves. Shepard can even make lasting peace between the geth and the rest of the galaxy in ME3, if you want.
No, you just blithely accept this claptrap as if it were a deep and meaningful thing, and decide which of the three courses of action open to you that you’re going to take.
God, I hated that.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]Pretty much. Why can’t I just destroy the Reapers?
Where did the Reapers get the idea that synthetics always take over? From empirical evidence looking at themselves?
The most positive explanation for the ending is the ‘indoctrination theory’ but it still feels like an anticlimactic end because they show so little afterwards. Still slightly better than if you take the ending at face value, in which the entire Mass Effect trilogy basically amounts to a shaggy dog story.[/spoiler]
THAT SAID it was still a good romp and I’d still recommend this series to anyone wanting to play a computer game that’s not an eroge. I just wish it was better!
Of course, I still have to rant- and about a different topic this time. Origin.
Now, Valve and I have had this sort of mutual understanding (well, maybe not ‘mutual’) for some time- they package and release their games on their buggy bloated malware delivery system ‘Steam’ and I don’t buy them (or play them in any other way that does not involve buying them)- those games simply do not exist for me. Fine, whatever- it’s hardly a loss for them and it’s hardly a loss for me.
This doesn’t entirely solve the problem of Steam, though, because every once in a while someone else will decide it’s a good idea to make a packaged store-bought game use Steam. Well, whatever- I’ll ignore it, or, if it’s something I sufficiently want (e.g. Skyrim) I’ll buy it and then find some way (probably illegal but I don’t care- as far as I’m concerned, once I’ve bought a product I can do what I want with it) to install it without Steam.
Now, props to BioWare for not releasing this as a Steam game. But they didn’t quite get it right! Instead of getting rid of Steam entirely they packaged something that isn’t Steam but looks suspiciously like Steam. After playing ME3 and closing it down, I noticed that my fans were still spinning quite fast and pulled up the task manager to see that Origin (the Steam-alike bundled with ME3 that is required for the game to run) was using an entire CPU core by itself and, according to the usage graphs, was doing that even while ME3 was running (and using up a core itself.) Looks like Origin is as bloated and inefficient as Steam, at least.
Very annoying. I paid for a game, not your fancy-pants malware. I don’t even mind DRM that much as long as DRM just does what it needs to do and then gets out of my face. Eroge companies have known how to do this for ages- when I run an eroge with DRM, it just starts up. Maybe sometimes it shows a very brief loading bar. When I start up ME3 I get asked to log in. Then, the thing has the gall to tell me my password is incorrect (it wasn’t- found out later it was just too long, even though Origin never complained when I used that password to register) and ask me to reset it by pasting a confirmation code sent by email, which didn’t appear in my inbox until the next day. This is not good design.
So yeah, while I don’t fault BioWare too much for putting shitty romance in their games (this is standard for western PC games- only eroge have really mastered this really) or for making a much shallower game than advertised (they only had two years, which was an ambitious development cycle for something of even the depth delivered and I’m pretty amazed they managed it) or for making the ending rather ordinary (nothing they created would match consumer anticipation anyway) I do fault them for Origin. It says a lot about how good I thought Mass Effect 3 was that I was actually willing to put up with this shit in order to play it. Twice, in fact.
I see people say this a lot, and I’m not trying to be flippant, but … That hasn’t ever been true for anything. Ownership rights have never been absolute. You’re not allowed to crank your stereo at 3 in the morning. You’re not allowed to take a dead tree hardcover book and crack someone’s head open.
If you want to argue that the restrictions being imposed are excessive, that’s fine. (Hell, I generally would agree.) But arguing from the idea that no restrictions are ever acceptable … well it’s just not true.
I eventually decided that I can deal with Steam. The thing that concerns me most about DRM is the idea that the games could one day evaporate into the aether. What would have happened to all the V-Mate “enhanced” games when GC went under, if Peter hadn’t been there to pick up the pieces? But Steam is too big to fail catastrophically like that now. I think Origin is doomed. They’re just going to put their stuff back on Steam eventually, and when they do Origin will sink like a stone, and then they’ll kill it a few years later.
I share basically the same complaints as the rest of the internet about the ending, so I won’t go into those here, but after a second playthrough, I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t measure up to ME2 in other important ways as well.
First, there are only two sets of enemies, with a brief appearance by a third in the geth missions. Compare this to ME2, which has 6, 7 if you count the DLC. By the end of the game, I was very tired of fighting assault troopers and cannibals.
Second, and this may be more about my skill level than anything else, the combat veers between tedious and frustrating, whereas in ME2 it was just about perfect. In particular, all my favorite powers, warp, shockwave, incinerate, etc., seem to have been nerfed. I almost always enjoy combat in 2, whereas in 3 I mostly just want to get through it as quickly as possible.
Third, the conversational aspects, which were the best part of the first two games, have been cut way back. There are very few paragon/renegade persuasion opportunities. In fact, the whole paragon/renegade axis is just about irrelevant.
Fourth, I think the ME2 characters were really given short shrift. I didn’t expect all of them to be recruitable, but it’s very disappointing that none of them are.
Fifth, it’s actually pretty short. I haven’t timed it, but it feels like it’s around 2/3 the length of ME2 without counting DLC.
Now, all this aside, I still think it’s a very good game, but I don’t think it’s up to the level of ME2. It feels more like a souped-up version of ME1. I going to keep playing it, but more because I’m a bit compulsive and need to see what happens in all the romances than because I love it as a game. In comparison, I’ve played ME2 about 15 times and could easily do more.
Heh, I’ve got a pretty different view on this than GaiusMax. To me ME3 was a souped-up version of ME2 and something that didn’t compare to ME1. I do agree that Warp was probably nerfed* (it’s still necessary to have it and necessary to take it up to level 6 because there is no better way of removing biotic barriers in the game) but Pull and Throw have been seriously souped up and I ended up using them (along with a decent dose of Singularity) for pretty much all of ME3 as an Adept. Enemies that were difficult or slow to take down as a soldier (Brutes and Banshees) crumpled like paper to the Warp+Throw combination.
In general I liked the combat much more than ME2’s, although I agree I would have liked to see more kinds of enemies, certainly.
*Warp is still as good as ever, it’s just that it really shined against biotic barriers and approximately two enemies in ME3 use biotic barriers (minus things being fed barriers by those barrier machines, which I tend to Shockwave out immediately) compared to ME2 where the barrier was the main thing the Collectors used - instead most things have shields and Warp isn’t very good against those. Instead you’ll mostly use Warp against things with armour, which is fine but only if you follow it up with Throw.
Oh, and
Those are ridiculously bad examples. I’m allowed to crank my stereo at 3 in the morning if I live miles from civilisation. I’m obviously not allowed to ever kill anyone with my hardcover book, but the point is both of those activities directly infringe on the rights of others (the right not to have to listen to my shitty music at 3 in the morning and the right not to have your skull cracked open) On the other hand, when I do buy a dead-tree hardcover book, I should (and do) have the right to read the book at home, read it on the bus, read it while waiting for my doctor’s surgery appointment, highlight passages of text with my highlighter, scribble notes in the margins, cut out sections of the book, paste in stuff I printed out from my computer to replace it, draw obscene pictures in the book and then tear the whole thing into confetti when I’m done. Why not? It’s my book.
If the book came with a foreward telling me that the book should only be read under the light of a green lava lamp on Tuesdays, well, screw you, it’s my book. I know game companies try to argue nowadays that they don’t sell games, they sell licenses to use games, but frankly I think that’s garbage because most people in a shop will think they’re buying products, not licenses- plus, as far as I know the first sale doctrine holds up even for purchases of games so by extension the right to modify them as necessary to enjoy them how I see fit should come with that.
The examples you listed before would have been illegal anyway- they were not restrictions conveyed by the product and no book (to my knowledge) tells you you aren’t allowed to kill people with it. That fact doesn’t give you the right to kill anyone with any book, though. This is an example of the publisher creating extra restrictions that impact on how I use the product I bought without bothering anyone else and that is a problem. If I bought a book I should be able to do whatever I like with it, providing it would have been legal under normal circumstances. I get that I’m not allowed to scan the book in, send it to my university’s printers and start selling copies on the street, even though I would be allowed to do this for public domain works, but that is a normal restriction I think is reasonable. But if I buy a game, I should be able to do what I want to it. Modify the executable, give myself extra health and money, make all the guards wear pink, change the game’s window caption to “i hate aeroplanes” and, indeed, change things so that I can just play the game without having to install Steam or some similar crap. I should be able to do these things- it is not legally clear that I can, though, and can you give a good reason why not? It’s my game.
I don’t use Steam because I don’t like hypercontrolling DRM, but many people seem to like it or at least think that it works well… UNLIKE origin, which I’ve never heard anyone have good things to say about.
I installed Origin in order to play the free copy of ME2 I got with my DA2 purchase, because free was the only way I was ever going to play a Mass Effect game. It was such a massive pain in the ass to get the game downloaded and working that it put me off the prospect of EVER buying anything through origin. Yes, a game they gave me for FREE was sufficiently offputting. 
Heavily online/DRMed games are constantly being shut down and cutting off all their players, sometimes less than a year after launch. I whine about it on my blog constantly, and I continue to refuse to use the stuff in my own releases. Not that it helps - most anti-DRM whiners just pirate everything rather than support people who don’t use it. (Not all. I do get a few who are grateful.) Personally, I try to research my purchases and avoid obvious evil.
(Yes, Magical Diary has an online update system but it’s only for delivering new content and fixes. You can play the game just fine without ever connecting to the internet. Unless you were stupid enough to download a pirate copy that was broken by the cracker and then whine at me because the game you stole won’t run without an update. No, I’m not cranky about this at all!)
You have a tsundere relationship with people who steal your products?
[duck]
I’ll have to try using Pull and Throw more next time I play a biotic. I basically never used them in ME2 since Warp and Shockwave were almost always better. I see Warp as being nerfed mainly because I could one-shot kill pretty much anything that had just health with it in 2, whereas in 3 it only does about 2/3 damage even to the base enemies like assault troopers and cannibals.
It’s interesting that you see 3 as a souped up version of 2. The creators were obviously trying to combine what they saw as the strengths of 1 and 2, but I wonder how many people who had a strong preference for one or the other they were able to satisfy. I really liked all three games, but for me the order is definitely 2>3>1.
http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic … 10056886/1
I know this is old news.
Sorry Lancer I gotta disagree with you on this one.
ME3 got watered in important areas compared to its predeceser. Sure shooter part was enhanced, as well as nice multiplayer, but other…
