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Going into the game I suspected that the solution would be destroying all of the mass relays permanently, maybe by deploying some virus that disables all Reaper tech, perhaps from reading A Fire Upon the Deep at some point, and was disappointed that wasn't the option; or rather that it was sort of an option but incidental to the purpose of the Catalyst. If the plot had built up to that inevitability I would have loved it. Skip forward a few hundred years for the sequel if they want to make one. But the plot as it stands doesn't build towards the ending, no one ever tells you what the Catalyst does or how it does it until the last few minutes. And that in itself wouldn't be bad if the reveal worked with the prior material. A plot reveal works best when you can go back to the earlier scenes and see the hints, and both ME1 and 2 have that to some extent. I thought 2's reveal (that Reapers are made out of liquefied organic species) was quite silly but it was still thematic with the harvesting, "ascension", "genetic destiny" stuff. ME3's reveal instead seems to contradict prior knowledge which is why I found it a bit weird and incoherent.
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Sep 12, 2013 05:05
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SgtSteel91 posted:I think sometimes that having a Prefect Ending in ME2 colored people's expectations in that if they put in enough work no one would die and you can have a flawless victory. "Because I could get everyone out of the Suicide Mission alive in ME2 by doing the loyalty missions and making the right choices I can defeat the Reapers in ME3 without making a huge sacrifice if I collect enough war assets and making the right choices throughout the trilogy." I figure the possibility of getting a perfect ending in ME2 didn't colour people's expectations as much as the fact that the game ends with you outrunning an explosion in your  spaceship. I think ME3's big misstep in the ending was the tone; the series is Star Wars With gently caress Words, and I find all the talk of "what did you want, to punch out the bad guy and ride off into the sunset" odd, given how 100% reasonable it is to expect that after the previous two games and huge chunks of the third(what did you want, for Wrex to blast a bunch of husks with a shotgun and yell "THIS IS MY PLANET" as Mordin cured the genophage while humming his song in a room full of explosions?)
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Sep 12, 2013 05:09
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Subverting expectations isn't necessarily bad, though. I mean, it's not inherently good, either, but it can be a powerful narrative tool when used properly. Like, the bit in the original ending when the Normandy fails to outrun the relay blast is so effective because everything in you completely expects the Normandy to outrun it, so when it doesn't, it's legitimately upsetting, reflected by the triumphant-to-shocking music in the soundtrack. It's a pitch-perfect subversion of audience expectations.
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Sep 12, 2013 05:11
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Fag Boy Jim posted:Subverting expectations isn't necessarily bad, though. I mean, it's not inherently good, either, but it can be a powerful narrative tool when used properly. But I really don't think this audience wanted their expectations subverted given the response. I know I didn't. But it's been a year and I've accepted the endings as is.
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Sep 12, 2013 05:19
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Fag Boy Jim posted:Like, the bit in the original ending when the Normandy fails to outrun the relay blast is so effective because everything in you completely expects the Normandy to outrun it, so when it doesn't, it's legitimately upsetting, reflected by the triumphant-to-shocking music in the soundtrack. It's a pitch-perfect subversion of audience expectations. One of the few actually-good parts of the ending sequence, providing you remove it from any context. The EC change to it is so dumb.
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Sep 12, 2013 05:41
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Milky Moor posted:One of the few actually-good parts of the ending sequence, providing you remove it from any context. The EC change to it is so dumb. Oh my god, yeah, changing the high-EMS (everyone has high EMS) version to "Normandy triumphantly flies away from explosion" *cut to* "crash-landed Normandy" was more moronic than pretty much anything the EC set out to "clarify".
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Sep 12, 2013 05:56
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^^^^ might wanna tag that  Milky Moor posted:One of the few actually-good parts of the ending sequence, providing you remove it from any context. The EC change to it is so dumb. Basically. Whether or not it had a 'good pitch,' it didn't make much sense as to why they were getting the hell out of there beyond Shepard Saying So, unless I'm misremembering. It seemed like there was literally no reason for them to get off of Earth, or out of the Sol system, so far as I could tell. It just stank of 'why?' to me, honestly, though, yeah, stripped of context, all those scenes certainly looked neat. I don't know that I'd agree that the EC totally ruined all of it, though. More that they didn't want to lose that content entirely and did a poor job of working it back in. This has also spontaneously become the Spoiler Thread, and, uh... there's more than a few piffling spoilers up there when people are still coming in here saying they're playing for the first time. Might want to necro the other one if we're going back to an ENDING DISCUSSION. Old Boot fucked around with this message at 06:27 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 05:56
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Fag Boy Jim posted:Oh my god, yeah, changing the high-EMS (everyone has high EMS) version to "Normandy triumphantly flies away from explosion" *cut to* "crash-landed Normandy" was more moronic than pretty much anything the EC set out to "clarify". But it's not like the original was any better what with the Normandy breaking up and crashing badly on some uncharted world. Now a lot of people are hating the fact that their crew/friends/LI appear to be stranded for god knows how long. Coupled with the Stargzer scene and now there are people who think Stargazer and the kid are the offspring of your crew who never got off.
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Sep 12, 2013 06:08
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SgtSteel91 posted:Coupled with the Stargzer scene and now there are people who think Stargazer and the kid are the offspring of your crew who never got off. For the first statement to be true, the second must be false 
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Sep 12, 2013 06:28
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Do we really need spoiler tags for a game that's been out for over a year or whatever?
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Sep 12, 2013 07:24
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I thought the spoiler thread got archived, I guess it didn't.
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Sep 12, 2013 07:26
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Vigilance posted:Do we really need spoiler tags for a game that's been out for over a year or whatever? I would technically say no, but also technically this is still the spoiler-free thread so yeah. Just click all the black boxes you see.
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Sep 12, 2013 07:31
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I was not happy with the endings, but blowing up the mass relays was the one thing I thought both made sense (they were the "trap" the Reapers used to force our civilizations into a certain development) and was a good idea for the franchise. I could not understand the hate this part got. We know they have FTL travel, even if it is slow (a quick look at the ME wiki gives you a human speed of fifty times the speed of light). This would mean a loss of contact with he other Citadel species, but at the same time new opportunities to explore the surroundings. And really, it is not like the galaxy was mapped out, the Citadel species basically knew only about the explored bubbles of space around the mass relays, with several of the relays not even connected to their counterparts because of what happened when they activated a certain relay and the Rachni swarmed the galaxy. So any new games could play with exploring the space around Earth, giving you the perfect excuse to introduce new species. Later games can have faster FTL travel (science marches on!) and a reunion with the old council races. If I recall correctly the Salarians and Krogans are not that far away from Earth, with the Asari the furthest away, but all the Council races originate in the same quadrant of the galaxy. You can then even introduce new takes on the other species, exploring how they and their societies changed after over a hundred years or so of not having contact with them. I think that would have been a great starting point for further games in the ME universe, but nooo... And the complaint about literally blowing up the universe was always an overreaction. Even the ending immediately after release shows the mass relays as merely falling apart, there is no huge explosion like with the Alpha Relay. It is a completely different mechanism (huge asteroid versus internal process due to the catalyst) and looks not even remotely the same.
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Sep 12, 2013 07:52
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Fag Boy Jim posted:I think you and I might have disagreed on this specific point in the past, but I still love the idea of "blowing up the universe", because it's absolutely the correct way to sell the fact that you have to sacrifice a lot to win this war. I'll just spoiler most of this post, as it's pretty much entirely ending discussion. Just click on the black box once I guess! I can appreciate that idea, especially with regards to making the Reapers the very real threat they're supposed to be. I would still say that I don't think this means that Mass Effect absolutely must not / cannot follow the more traditional "back to square one" approach, as you put it, or Hollywood happy ending, or however you want to define it, given how this formula was also exactly how the previous games ended as well as the conclusion to most of the major quests / plot point throughout the series. Still, exploring the idea a bit further, and I don't think having a galaxy-changing, hugely sacrificial ending is inherently bad either (on its own), I'll add my own, personal input on why I thought the thing we got was pretty botched. My biggest complaint is the lack of outlook for future games set after the ending of ME3 due to having three (equally possible) endings with significantly different outcomes. I mean, in a way, they were in a pretty tricky situation here to begin with; It's Still, and this is my personal opinion and I can totally see why someone would disagree with it, I would have still preferred for them to make a somewhat coherent but single ending that is, largely, the same for everybody, if only to enable future games taking place after Shepard's trilogy without tearing continuity a new with by, say, having three utterly different endings. And more specifically on this point, the very obvious elephant in the room here is Synthesis, which, if they did pick a single ending for everybody, would be the one they would have gone for. I don't want to get into detail on why I hate it so much, I guess everyone can figure it out as it's been discussed to death already. Suffice it to say, while having a big, universe-changing ending doesn't have to be an inherently bad thing, Synthesis certainly is. Now, again, this is just my personal take on it, at this point, and given what we have to work with (and all the not all-that-well-thought-out stuff with the Catalyst that happens before the ending choice), I've made my peace with the EC's "good" Destroy ending (or heck, even with the non-EC variety, if you want to explore the destroyed Mass Relays variety of the universe, which could be pretty interesting too!) and I'd be good with this as a basis for future stuff happening in the ME universe. I'd still be disappointed in the massively wasted opportunities to create a much more engaging story and having to settle with the silly crap of the Catalyst, but, hey, what can you do? (Though at this point I'd take pretty much anything and I'd be good if they just did a complete clean slate, just so they could get this series back on track. I'm not quite willing to buy and of the ME3 DLC, let alone pre-order ME(not)4, but I really, really do hope the new team gets its poo poo together and manages to create a game that can bring my enthusiasm for this series back.) As I said in my wall-of-text post earlier, it's not a single of any of these issues that utterly drags down the ending (like shuffling the entire universe around a bit, as long as it's done right, or the Catalyst, or the presentation), it's the combination of many, many different parts that went wrong. A sacrificial ending with high stakes (like Destroy) I could appreciate, sentient hats not so much. Fag Boy Jim posted:Well, it's worth noting that Bioware had originally said that ME was going to be a trilogy, and this game was pretty much hyped as an Ending To The Saga Of Shepherd. You're right that this doesn't constitute an explicit ending of the franchise, but I actually took it as such when I sat down to play ME3 for the first time, so perhaps I wasn't so surprised to see actual universe-changing events unfolding. This is a really interesting point because I think it's very important and gives a lot of insight on our rather different perspectives on the thing. I've had that mindset during ME1 and even before ME2 came out, I'd played through ME1 multiple times and I thought the game made for a pretty awesome, self-contained story. The more I got into the series, and the more I played ME2 (and also read two of the EU novels that y'all consider to be worse than Hitler, though I thought the first two were a fun read if you're interested in the ME universe at all), however, the more I started to look forward to Bioware doing a lot more with this universe than just Shepard's trilogy (and it was at this point they specifically said that while ME1-3 would be Shepard's trilogy with an absolute conclusion, they were planning of doing a lot more with the universe itself). Like everyone I was really looking forward to GTA: Citadel or playing Zaeed or, heck, just any random merc at any point in time in this awesome universe. I think the apex was probably playing the ME3 multiplayer demo where Bioware clearly showed that they had really refined and mastered the combat aspect of the game and I thought to myself that if they'd just poo poo out spin-off after spin-off of games with just little side-stories in that universe, I would be hooked for years, but for the reasons stated above that was obviously a bit problematic and hence the ending was even more of a damper. Burning Mustache fucked around with this message at 09:05 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 08:57
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Burning Mustache posted:(Though at this point I'd take pretty much anything and I'd be good if they just did a complete clean slate, just so they could get this series back on track. You've probably heard it before but you should at least consider picking up the Citadel DLC. It has absolutely gently caress-all to do with any of the plots in the entire series but if you have any affection at all left for the main characters of ME1 through ME3 then its absolutely worth it.
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Sep 12, 2013 09:36
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Kibayasu posted:You've probably heard it before but you should at least consider picking up the Citadel DLC. It has absolutely gently caress-all to do with any of the plots in the entire series but if you have any affection at all left for the main characters of ME1 through ME3 then its absolutely worth it. I've thought about it, especially as I'm in the middle of a new ME2 playthough that I eventually want to take into ME3 to play the third game at least more than once, but I feel the price is a bit steep, especially given how it was recently on sale for Xbox and how PC never got any ME DLC on sale ever, so far. Coupled with lovely forced Origin that's a business practice I'm not too keen on supporting. If I'd still be as enthusiastic about the series as I was back during ME2 I would buy it no questions asked, but right now, ehh ...
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Sep 12, 2013 10:58
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I got the Paramour achievement while having a friendly chat with Kaiden as Male Shepard, I hope it's just a bromance. Otherwise... Then again it did sound a bit too "friendly." EDIT: Oh god MaleShep can romance Kaiden. 
wafflemoose fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 18:15
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Burning Mustache posted:(and also read two of the EU novels that y'all consider to be worse than Hitler, though I thought the first two were a fun read if you're interested in the ME universe at all) Opinion invalidated. Seriously, I don't think anyone should make any judgements on the quality of a thing if they are a franchise reader.
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Sep 12, 2013 18:34
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Starhawk64 posted:I got the Paramour achievement while having a friendly chat with Kaiden as Male Shepard, I hope it's just a bromance. Otherwise...
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Sep 12, 2013 18:48
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Lt. Danger posted:Opinion invalidated.
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Sep 12, 2013 18:50
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Starhawk64 posted:I got the Paramour achievement while having a friendly chat with Kaiden as Male Shepard, I hope it's just a bromance. Otherwise... It's the truest bromance of them all now.
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Sep 12, 2013 18:51
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Burning Mustache posted:Pretty sure none of the games have native controller support on PC, not even ME3. Native controller support isn't needed though; Xpadder or Pinnacle can be used which both offer mouse emulation and full re-mapping.
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Sep 12, 2013 18:55
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SubponticatePoster posted:Yeah sorry, you're gay now. Enjoy picking out tasteful curtains for your cabin on the Normandy! Well, good thing I'm a frequent saver then. It was funny in Saint's Row 4, but not here. wafflemoose fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 19:02
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You should be fine if you just load the save right after Kaidan gave you a friendly kiss.
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Sep 12, 2013 19:04
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Starhawk64 posted:Well, good thing I'm a frequent saver then. It was funny in Saint's Row 4, but not here. ...yeah, it's not meant to be funny when he asks you if you want to be a couple and you say yes. Are you for real?
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Sep 12, 2013 20:42
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epenthesis posted:...yeah, it's not meant to be funny when he asks you if you want to be a couple and you say yes. Are you for real? Yeah, the dialog, music, and achievement pop-up clued me in on that. I got a good laugh out of it however. 
wafflemoose fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 20:52
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Starhawk64 posted:Yeah, the dialog, music, and achievement pop-up clued me in on that. I got a good laugh out of it however. Did you take the Confirmed Bachelor perk in New Vegas to get all sorts of ultra-jock dialogue choices when talking with other alpha males like Boone? Smol fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 21:07
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Smol posted:Did you take the Confirmed Bachelor perk in New Vegas to get all sorts of ultra-jock dialogue choices? No, for the 10% damage bonus. The dialog choices are an extra. I do know what Confirmed Bachelor means though. wafflemoose fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 21:09
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Starhawk64 posted:No, for the 10% damage bonus. The dialog choices are an extra.
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Sep 12, 2013 21:57
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Starhawk64 posted:Well, good thing I'm a frequent saver then. It was funny in Saint's Row 4, but not here.  GayShep runs are fun! I always imagine in London when they have their goodbye and start kissing that the other soldiers are trying to pretend they don't see anything
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Sep 13, 2013 00:52
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SubponticatePoster posted:Aw, just ride it out While Cortez looks on crying.
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Sep 13, 2013 01:58
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GayShep runs are boring because all of his options are boring. 
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Sep 13, 2013 02:03
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I heard a rumour before the game came out that male Shepard could bone Garrus this time around (which makes as much sense as woman Shepard being able to do it, how much can an alien's gender really matter right?!) and was kind of disappointed when it turned out not to be the case. Man on man romances don't appeal to me, but if there was one dude I would want to get it on with in a video game it'd be my spiky dinosaur monster bro.
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Sep 13, 2013 02:08
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Garrus is my bro but even with Femshep I can't date him. Look at his goddamn teeth. Now picture making out with him. Sorry Garrus, we're just gonna shoot bottles up on this here skyway and get drunk, ok?
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Sep 13, 2013 02:22
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SubponticatePoster posted:Garrus is my bro but even with Femshep I can't date him. Look at his goddamn teeth. Now picture making out with him. Sorry Garrus, we're just gonna shoot bottles up on this here skyway and get drunk, ok? Also that anything physical would result in the equivalent of what happened in the season 4 finale of the League.
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Sep 13, 2013 02:25
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But nobody seems to care that Tali would be facing pretty much the same drat problem with manshep
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Sep 13, 2013 02:30
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GenericOverusedName posted:But nobody seems to care that Tali would be facing pretty much the same drat problem with manshep
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Sep 13, 2013 02:37
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Elysiume posted:Considering that canon Tali is roughly as far removed from a human as asari, I doubt she'd have a problem. And that is the greatest failing of ME3.
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Sep 13, 2013 02:38
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fancy stats posted:And that is the greatest failing of ME3. 
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Sep 13, 2013 02:40
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Burning Mustache posted:I've thought about it, especially as I'm in the middle of a new ME2 playthough that I eventually want to take into ME3 to play the third game at least more than once, but I feel the price is a bit steep, especially given how it was recently on sale for Xbox and how PC never got any ME DLC on sale ever, so far. Coupled with lovely forced Origin that's a business practice I'm not too keen on supporting. If I'd still be as enthusiastic about the series as I was back during ME2 I would buy it no questions asked, but right now, ehh ... I got all of ME3's DLC about a month ago, and I'd say Citadel is worth the price. It's all about hanging out with your teammates, and if you like the dialogue in the ME games at all, it's a blast. The main mission is pretty good too, and even though it doesn't matter in any way Shepard get's a sweet luxury apartment. Overall, I'd say it's a pretty good DLC, probably up there with Lair of the Shadow Broker for ME2. Regarding the other 2 DLCs, Leviathan was good, it gives some interesting backstory, and Omega was kind of meh. It seems a lot of people hated Omega, but I just thought it was ok, not as good as the other DLC or even the main missions, but it had some fun combat.
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Sep 13, 2013 02:51
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