What are your thoughts on the Mass Effect trilogy? What went right and what went wrong?
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 Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
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What are your thoughts on the Mass Effect trilogy? What went right and what went wrong?
What are your thoughts on the Mass Effect trilogy? What went right and what went wrong?
|
Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
|
1 is fricking garbage
2 and 3 are good
Mass Effect 1 - Canon.
Mass Effect 2 - Unfinished fanfic.
Mass Effect 3 - Shitty attempt at finishing fanfic.
>muh story
Mass Effect is not a glorified VN like Planescape Troonment
low iq zoomer opinion
>NOOOO WHY CAN’T I PLAY GEARS OF WAR!?
Reddit Efffect sucks
>what went wrong?
EA and "BioWare" magic falling apart.
Incredibly shit-take.
(you)
I like them all but I wish they executed 3 better.
I like ME2's episodic format. It's essentially a Star Trek TV series. Wish there were something else like it.
This. Self-contained planet adventures that set up a little lore. They even did it so each character has an introduction and a climax episode to their arcs.
It might not even be the best writing, but they were one of the few teams to tackle the format well for a small spaceship crew.
Bro every BioWare RPG has an episodic format. For KotOR each planet was a different episode. For Mass Effect 1 it was the same. ME2 just lacks a strong overarching narrative so the "episodes" are just about solving companion daddy issues.
One companion has an issue revolving his dad starting a cult. Theirs enough to criticize about mass effect without making thing's up.
"daddy issues" is obviously a catch-all for whatever personal issues they have.
This is bait right?
Jacob - as you said
Miranda - daddy created her perfect ass and is trying to kidnap sister
Garrus - was rebelling against his dad in the first game
Tali - dad is an admiral, dies and she has to face trial for him
Thane - his son has daddy issues
Grunt - trying to find his place in krogan society, which he would more easily do with a krogan daddy
Mordin - like Thane he has an apprentice or whatever but its basically daddy issues
Jack - Cerberus was her daddy but shes also a walking talking daddy issue
Sounds like you're projecting your own daddy issues on the cast, anon...
No he's dead on the money, I didn't even realize it while playing but eight times over isn't a coincidence lol. Makes a lot of sense with the extreme gay direction biotroon went in, to be fair.
Its realistic. Makes sense seeing as everyone has a dad
bg2 is the only game that doesn't fall into this and it's why everyone loves it
Baldurs gate was co-developed with black isle. It's not a bioware only project.
Thats why initially bioware gave obsidian (nu black isle) their scraps. Old business relationships.
afaik they don't did relatively minor things like sound design
hero's journey anon
Gears of War mogs it hard. Both are not RPGs.
ME1: Best story
ME2: Best characters
ME3: Best gameplay
Spot on, anon. Excellent summary
/thread
1: Did a great job of establishing ME as a new sci-fi setting as at the time there was basically just trek, Swars and Alien. But... Combat and class system was jank and were weakened each playthrough because of class unlocks. Overall the game feels very linear with random planets and side quests feeling empty and too much like padding. Is quite replayable though.
2: Brought in some good characters and second antagonist (elusive man) to up the space opera feel. The class system was a bit more refined too and there was at least a sense of choices matter. But... The replacements of major first game characters (wrex, kaiden/ash) didn't sit well which was felt in the 4/3rd game. Oh and the suicide mission felt like they were a bit lost with what to do. It almost felt like originally they weren't planning on continuing the reaper story from 1 and wanted a different direction but had to pull something out their ass. Replayable alot because of the number of major plot moments.
3: The combat system is about as good as it could get with the limits they were working with (even Andromeda didn't really develop it any further). But... 3 felt even more linear than 1 did. Disregarding the ending, about 80% of the game is pretty solid, but 20% was rushed or half-baked or unsatisfying as a resolution. It felt like they wished they could have retained the original crew, but because they needed to accommodate player choice from other games they couldn't. Is also feels largely un-replayable because you can have a save before "pressing button for desired ending" which undermined everything built up to that point from 1 and 2 and nothing really changes because the war effort meant frick all and most characters you built relationships with arent in the party or die anyway (Rip Squidbro).
If an ME4 does happen...I just want more adventures of Shephard and friends.
Trilogy? I'm pretty sure they made just one game. The rest was just a nightmare.
I dropped 1 after the first Saren fight, right after you met Sovereign. I think this was late into the game and there was only final battle at the Citadel left.
I wasn't really enjoying the game. I didn't find the gameplay to be very fun, and I found most of the characters to be unlikeable. I only kinda liked Garrus and Wrex. Both of the romantic interests were unlikeable. I didn't really know why Ashley, Tali, and Liara are tagging along. They didn't really have a personal stake in my mission and weren't really close friends with us.
I didn't find the ME setting to be very interesting. The Citadel and the Council don't feel like alien societies and organizations. They feel like the modern US but in space. The Citadel has human style bars and clubs... that have been operated by aliens for decades long before humanity was admitted. The cities on the Citadel are organized like human cities. The council uses modern 21st century American logic that worships laws and constitutions and is skeptical of esoterism. Nothing about the Citadel or the Council feels like it an alliance of non-human races at all.
The Turians and the Krogan and the Volus have interesting faces to look at (Saren looks really good!), but ME's aliens for the most part suffer from rubberhead alien syndrome, where everyone has the same posture and proportions as a human. The floating evangelical alien at the citadel, and that ambassador who stood on four legs were visually quite unique, but sadly there are no party members that are unique like that.
1/2
2/2
The writing felt mediocre. Lots of huge leaps in logic, antagonists to the player act cartoonishly, dialogue is stilted at times, the story can't decide if being a Spectre means being revered like a Jedi Knight or being super secret and treated with suspicion like Section 31, etc. You have that scene early on when the Citadel Council disbelieve any accusations against their favorite agent, Saren, and then Shepherd plays a soundbite and they immediately oust Saren and replace him with Shepherd without analyzing the soundbite to see if it was doctored or launching an investigation). I read Shamus Young's Mass Effect retrospective series, and it seems like the writing gets even worse in the sequels. I feel like Mass Effect's storytelling was carried by the filmic presentation of its cutscenes, with the camera angles and the character animations.
Music was forgettable.
I wasn't seeing the hype here. Story heavy RPGs are kinda dead in the West, so unless you're into JRPGs, and Mass Effect/Dragon Age were your only exposure to RPGs, I can see why it'd get hyped up as an amazing RPG. I guess Bioware was subject to Pixar syndrome, where they were hyped up as the greatest animation studio ever when the Japanese were putting out a higher volume of animation just as good, if not better than Pixar, but since Pixar was pretty much the West's only real exposure to big animated movies, they thus got hyped up to high heaven.
This is good post.
>What are your thoughts on the Mass Effect trilogy?
Fun trilogy with its ups and downs. I enjoyed all three games.
>What went right
Tali
and what went wrong?
Every other LI
Mass Effect ruined Dragon Age. It also ruined Bioware from then on.
Mass Effect managed to get them to hit off with the mainstream audeince and ever since then they tried to chase it, with the casualizing of Dragon Age in DA2 and the "We want Call of Duty's audience"
1 is the only one that feels sci fi
2 feels like a buddy cop movie, 3 feels like a normal zombie game
The ending to the third game is so bad it ended the franchise. It just took Andromeda flipping on its face for bioware to realize that.
You can't frick up the ending of the trilogy
Now no one cares about it or bioware. I dunno if bioware is even still operating
it is but they just had a huge bunch of layoffs and people are pissed about it
I only know about it because I'm in the same city and it made the news
ME2 was the only good game.
The originals combat was just horrific.
ME3 was awful, especially the ending. It's only saving grace was the combat.
If you play the original without taking cover and just be more mobile than it's 10x better. ME2 combat is just static whack a mole from behind cover.
First one was meh, and I dropped the second one on two attempts. It's weird how highly they're held, but to each their own. I didn't enjoy the gameplay at all.
The Reapers were a terrible idea, and a worse execution.
3 is complete garbage, minus 2-3 high points.
1 is deathly boring and bloated but it's impressive how they built up a sci-fi universe so efficiently
2 is the best thing EA-ware ever did but it has a very unambitious plot that gets completely thrown away in 3 and if they were always going to do a trilogy it doesn't do enough for the metaplot. The DLC is fricking awful because everyone that wouldn't go on to work on ME3 left after the base game went gold.
3 pretty much torched the series forever and is terrible on its own merits but if you got invested in 1 and 2 it's better than nothing
Pretty great but not perfect series, but despite its flaws it is considerably better than most other rpgs, especially today.
Like all Bioware games of that era the discourse around them was ruined by the terminally online tumblr users that later migrated to twitter.
The reaper plotline was good in the first game but rough in the second. The setting is decent enough to have plenty of spinoffs but thats difficult with how it ended.
The endings being memed as 'bad' because i"ts just three colors" weren't that big a deal to me either.
>What went right
The concept.
>What went wrong.
The execution. Specially beginning with ME2. A ME1 remake with extra content would be god tier. I enjoyed that it made you feel the vastness of space and the wonder of exploration. These feelings weren't captured by later games.
That liminal ME1 Mako exploration. I even like how janky it is to drive it at this point. Only Elite: Dangerous comes close to the same feeling but lacks the story and context to give it any meaning.
If you've ever played Starflight or Star Control 2 you can see it's a bizarre obvious copy of their planet exploration, despite that not even being a good aspect of those games
Bioware was still enough of a nerd company when doing pre-production for ME1 that they could just make an extremely low quality copy of a mediocre element of games they loved without doing any corporate playtesting or prototyping
I haven't played those but I enjoy space sims so I think I might give them at try despite how dated they are.
I believe it if they just cloned the gameplay, you could get away with more of that back then, though technically the way a game is played can't be copyrighted anyway I think.
They are not dated at all
graphics stopped improving after 2010
I can agree that graphics improvements in the last ten years have been questionable at best that new gimmicks like raytracing an AI upscaling have to be invented...
But those older games do sometimes have some control and AI clunkiness in their gameplay for their time, I'm still capable of enjoying them though but they usually don't respond the same as games after the 2000s. Or do these two games not have that? If so that's more the reason for me to give them a try, just to see how far ahead of their time they were.
Starflight is from 1986 and Star Control 2 is from 1992 genius
Star Control 2 is as close to a timeless classic as you could ever find. I'd recommend it to anyone.
Although I'd even recommend you play SC1 first to properly appreciate 2.
Mass effect 1 in 2007 at least felt like an RPG
mass effect 2 was like a fun action game
Mass effect 3 was bad, i had fun posting here about it though
I'm playing it for the first time now and I'm close to finishing the 2nd game, it's quite fun and I love the setting and the characters. The one thing that disappointed me though was the look of the Migrant Fleet.
How did you expect it to look, more junky?
More junky, diverse, bigger. The interior was okay though.
well if the exterior is not maintained they all die. that's the only thing you should expect to be well maintained
Not a single one of your "choices" actually fricking matters.
shouldve stuck to the exploration stuff in ME1 and added actual melee combat instead of the repetitive GOW wanna be shit in ME3. The subverting expectations BS in ME3 regardless of your choices was a slap in the face. there shouldve been an option to tell the star child to frick off or shoot star child in face. At least Alpha Protocol gave you options till the very end inspite of playing like shit. EA forced the multiplayer shit in ME3. End boss in ME2 sucked. The obvious references to shit like Ringworld were eh. The binary choices starting in ME2 were just lazy.
3 was not that bad, the ending was just so bad it overshadowed the whole game.
Very weird how my "Renegade" Shepard willingly surrendered my ship and happily agreed to live locked in a prison cell for 6 months to appease the worthless Batarian shitskins who killed my parents when I was a little colonist kid growing up on Mindoir.
The end of Mass Effect 3 wasn't the problem. The opening of Mass Effect 3 was the real problem.
It's not like 2's opening was any better, most braindead opening maybe ever
>Mass Effect 2 intro
I liked it. Shepard dies and gets replaced by a an upgraded "copy", they just should have pursued that theme harder. And Bioware should not have cut the scene where you explain to Ashley you're no longer technically the real Shepard, the real Shepard is dead.
The Mass Effect 2 DLC was all by the worthless ME3 team because everyone good bailed after ME2 went gold
>What went right?
A lot
>What went wrong?
A lot
Obsession with Reapers ruined this series. Their story should have ended on a first game where you have in practice indefinitely delayed their arrival. Once they arrive they will obviously kill everyone and nobody will be able to stop those eldritch horrors. But nobody can know when this will happen. Maybe in a year, maybe in ten, maybe in hundreds or thousands of years. They should remain as a looming threat in background, but we as a players should never again meet them.
Every next game should be about different story and adventure, just like every Star Trek episode had different story. ME2 was great because of it, game being basically a collection of sidequests is what ME should have been all along, even though it unfortunately turned out that Collectors are connected to Reapers anyway.
ME3 made its focus Reapers again and obviously failed, because there is no point to Eldritch Horror enemy that can be defeated and explained. It was a shit, linear game overly focused on a main story which sucked and ruined both Reapers and Cerberus and effectively killed series with utterly moronic ending. Shepard becoming a God or life itself merging with fricking printed circuit boards was so fricking moronic and made it impossible to make any sensible sequel.
Why did they even add this fricking pointless star kid, ending is significantly superior when game simply ends next to a dying Anderson lmao.
Also Mass Effect 2 should have been the first game. As a reward for stopping Collectors you become a Spectre and Mankind joins council. Collectors could even retain their connection to Reapers, but in game itself existence of Reapers is only hinted at. After Mass Effect 2 you actually have a reason to believe in Reapers and in Mass Effect 1 (which is a sequel) you stop Saren and Sovereign. Mass Effect 3 has a completely different threat, maybe even different protagonist and a playable Ayy. Shepard's and Reapers duology would be good enough.
Mass Effect 3 > Mass Effect 1 > Mass Effect 2
Mass Effect 1: good.
Mass Effect 2: not so good.
Mass Effect 3: never played it, because I never played another BioWare game after Dragon Age 2.
Opinion as an actual shill for the series.
>1
Good rpg that has aged like warm pilk in the gameplay department even on the remaster. Original release pretty much had only 1 fun play style, that being vanguard maxing shields and running around with a shotgun killing everyone. Remaster thankfully gave us a 2nd fun playstyle with the snipers being actually usable now without having to take car sickness medicine. Would be the best in the series if the side content wasn't actual garbage 50% of the time and the dialogue wasn't so robotic in both writing and delivery.
>2
Easily the best the series but it is not an rpg, however your choices do have consequences, big ones at that, too big perhaps. The side content is great for the most part, companions are really well written, heck even the literal who of the party has a good companion quest. Dialogue is far better in both acting and writing and the game fleshed out the universe in a fantastic way. However, I will say it did frick mass effect 3 over, the suicide mission is peak rpg design even in an non rpg game, if the story had ended in mass effect 2, but because of all the possible ways that mission can go breasts up, it really left the mass effect 3 in a massive frickin ditch. There is no way to account for all that shit, heck accounting for all the bullshit in me1 and 2 would have been hard enough already, but the suicide mission really was the nail for me3 imo.
>3
Great fan service and fun gameplay, easily the best in the series, nothing more really. And that ending was ass it really can't be understated how ass that ending is, playing that game on release at the time really sours you on the whole series, as it used to be worse than what you'd get today with the extended ending dlc. Character writing took a dive off a cliff in many cases with average IQ dropling by 30 points. Side content is once again a mixed bag. All of our decisions are reduced to a number in an imaginary fleet. Citadel dlc was nice tho.
>Literal who
You mean Kasumi?
I can't forgive the extended ending for that unbelievably moronic scene where the normandy flies down in the final sequence to pick up party members, stupid on so many levels I shouldn't need to explain
If you enjoyed the Citadel DLC you are the worst ME fan to have
is there a restoration mod for Legendary Edition?
I need my red skies, Miranda ass and shit ending