Gavinrad's Mass Effect 3+ Thread

Tuco_sl said:

Another aspect is all the discussion and focus on ME2 and ME3 before its release. It had more hype for the quality of its story than literally any game ever. So any disappoint was so much more glaring than it would be if someone wasn't following it before hand.

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OK you just inspired me to replay 1 and 2 and then do 3 of which i have never played.

Tuco_sl said:

Another aspect is all the discussion and focus on ME2 and ME3 before its release. It had more hype for the quality of its story than literally any game ever. So any disappoint was so much more glaring than it would be if someone wasn't following it before hand.

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That's a very good point. Almost everything is more enjoyable when it's not surrounded by hype.

Tuco_sl said:

Another aspect is all the discussion and focus on ME2 and ME3 before its release. It had more hype for the quality of its story than literally any game ever. So any disappoint was so much more glaring than it would be if someone wasn't following it before hand.

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I'm calling bullshit. Most players that were playing ME3 when it initially came out had at least 2 playthroughs of ME1 + ME2 or at least ME2. Anyone who has played the game more than once and is invested in the story would have been thrown for a loop when the entire direction of the storyline diverged and the character development pulls a complete 180.

Sulrn_sl said:

I'm calling bullshit. Most players that were playing ME3 when it initially came out had at least 2 playthroughs of ME1 + ME2 or at least ME2. Anyone who has played the game more than once and is invested in the story would have been thrown for a loop when the entire direction of the storyline diverged and the character development pulls a complete 180.

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Agree 100%. Anyone who has any kind of investment in the story should easily be able to see that Mac Walter and Casey Hudson took a gigantic fucking shit all over everything.

Yeah I played through the series over the last year or so, and I didn't find the ending as game ruining as so many people seem to. It wasn't amazing, and I think the original idea they had with the dark energy problem was much cooler than what they went with, but coming up with an ending is always hard, let alone for such a massive series, and I think the expanded ending did a relatively acceptable job at wrapping things up (the original one, less so). Could it have been better? Of course. But that didn't kill the huge amount of fun I had playing through the series as a whole.

I honestly think a huge part of the issue is the gaming industry/community. Dev teams spend so much effort building up hype pre-release that they create this fantasy in the heads of the players which the reality of the game can almost never match, let alone exceed, no matter how good it actually is. A solid, enjoyable game with a few bad elements becomes a terrible piece of shit when compared to the perfect ideal you've constructed in your head off the scraps of hype and info and trailers and sterilized "gameplay" videos you've been fed leading up to release. They might net more sales at launch, but they're shooting themselves in the foot in the long run.

Not that it's entirely the devs fault, we as gamers are eager to lap up the fantasy, even go out of our way to construct it, then we wonder why we don't enjoy video games as much as we used to. We've become like those guys who are in their late 20's and can't maintain a relationship because they compare every girl they meet to their idealized, nostalgic memories of their first teenage love.

Tuco_sl said:

I agree they would have been thrown for a loop. But someone playing through the trilogy after ME3's release won't have multiple playthroughs of ME and won't have the time to get as much investment as people did waiting for the game.

I know when I've blown through multi-game sagas before I didn't have as much involvement with them. It's like having a TV show marathon and watching an entire season or two in a weekend, you just don't get the same prolonged exposure to it you get watching it week by week and talking with people about it between showings and seasons.

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Agreed.

I also hated the fact that I was seriously invested in several of the playable characters in ME2 (as HUGE all time video game favorites) and they were almost completely written off in ME3.

Azrayne_sl said:

Yeah I played through the series over the last year or so, and I didn't find the ending as game ruining as so many people seem to. It wasn't amazing, and I think the original idea they had with the dark energy problem was much cooler than what they went with, but coming up with an ending is always hard, let alone for such a massive series, and I think the expanded ending did a relatively acceptable job at wrapping things up (the original one, less so). Could it have been better? Of course. But that didn't kill the huge amount of fun I had playing through the series as a whole.

I honestly think a huge part of the issue is the gaming industry/community. Dev teams spend so much effort building up hype pre-release that they create this fantasy in the heads of the players which the reality of the game can almost never match, let alone exceed, no matter how good it actually is. A solid, enjoyable game with a few bad elements becomes a terrible piece of shit when compared to the perfect ideal you've constructed in your head off the scraps of hype and info and trailers and sterilized "gameplay" videos you've been fed leading up to release. They might net more sales at launch, but they're shooting themselves in the foot in the long run.

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It's not so much the quality of the ending that upset people, just the complete disconnect between the last half of the game and the first 2.5 games. It seemed like it was written by completely different people for a completely different game. It had 0 correlation to everything that happened before and it also made everything you did prior to the last choice completely meaningless, which was the exact opposite of what they had been promoting for the franchise for years.

There probably would have been people unhappy no matter how it ended, but not the universal "WTF WAS THAT??" that it was

I'm failing to see the argument here. So you're saying that the horribleness of ME3 is exaggerated because people who aren't invested in the game in the first place think it's okay and "not that bad"?

And again, Tuco. I'm calling bullshit on the TV analogy. I recently marathon'd the first two seasons of American Horror Story with my girlfriend and I guarantee you we are just as much engaged as fans that have been watching it season by season. Yes, replaying the games increases attachment (for most people), but there are plenty of people that can get engaged on the first go through regardless of the time span (hence "addictive" personalities - hyperbolic extreme). I preordered ME2 based off my first run of the initial ME game.

eXarc_sl said:

Agreed.

I also hated the fact that I was seriously invested in several of the playable characters in ME2 (as HUGE all time video game favorites) and they were almost completely written off in ME3.

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Miranda. She was the peas to my carrots. Then she went off to find her sister again or some bullshit.

Kind of felt the same way about the whole beginning of ME3 with my renegade. Personally, I thought the Illusive Man was on the right track. We were homies at the end of ME2. There was a massive fucking disconnect coming into ME3. When I went to Mars I went running up to the Cerberus guys with open arms to ask them where my leader was only to have them start shooting at me! Immediately ALT-F4'd and tried to read up on what the fuck happened between games.

Jait_sl said:

Miranda. She was the peas to my carrots. Then she went off to find her sister again or some bullshit.

Kind of felt the same way about the whole beginning of ME3 with my renegade. Personally, I thought the Illusive Man was on the right track. We were homies at the end of ME2. There was a massive fucking disconnect coming into ME3. When I went to Mars I went running up to the Cerberus guys with open arms to ask them where my leader was only to have them start shooting at me! Immediately ALT-F4'd and tried to read up on what the fuck happened between games.

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Yeah, the transition from ME2 to ME3 was definitely an awful and nonsensical clusterfuck.

Jait_sl said:

Miranda. She was the peas to my carrots. Then she went off to find her sister again or some bullshit.

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Miranda and Thane. Come back to us, please.
R.I.P. to the best assassin character to ever exist.

I never really liked Thane. Mordin and Jack were badass though.

I'm failing to see the argument here. So you're saying that the horribleness of ME3 is exaggerated because people who aren't invested in the game in the first place think it's okay and "not that bad"?

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No, I'm saying that anyone who thinks a shitty ending is enough to write off at least 2.5 awesome games, or even to write off a game that was in itself otherwise pretty damn good, has lost any sense of perspective, and that this state of affairs comes about, in part, because the media hype surrounding big budget games creates an idealized version in the imagination of players which the reality will never match. When you feel that any imperfection completely derives a thing of value, then you need to take a deep breath, step back and reconsider your attitude. I'm not attacking anyone here, I'm as guilty as the next hardcore gamer, but I think perhaps there's such thing as being too invested in a game, on an imaginative and emotional level, to the point where it actually detracts from your actual enjoyment of it. It's a counterproductive way to enjoy a hobby, in the same way that (to go back to that relationship analogy) diving into every relationship with fervor, blinding yourself to each new date's flaws and convincing yourself that she's perfect, that she's "the one," that you're in love, etc. is counterproductive to your love life.

Oh, and I don't really think it's valid to imply that people aren't at all invested in a game just because they played it later than you did, that just comes off as some kind of weird snobbishness. Notasinvested, sure, in the sense that they didn't spend years doing multiple playthroughs while snapping up every bit of info they could get about impending sequels, but the experience of the game, the enjoyment and involvement and emotional reaction it invokes, is no less real just because you aren't playing it immediately after it came out. And, as I've been arguing, I feel that maybe it actually makes for a better overall experience, because you're enjoying it without any preconceived expectations. You can take it for what it is, instead of weighing it up constantly against what you thought it would be.

double.

I thought Mordin was one of the best characters in a modern game. The presentation of an ACTUAL ethical/moral dilemma where there is no "best" option and there is no third option was refreshing.

And then he sang that goofy little song just fucking randomly and I was all "lolwtf"

And then they tried to do it again in me3 and I was all "/facepalm". The dilemma was false and the repost cheapened the OC.

I actually thought his death scene in ME3 was awesome, one of the highlights of the game.


What really did piss me off about ME3 was how many pivotal decisions were swayed by seemingly unrelated factors from previous games. I was really pissed off when I couldn't keep both the Geth and the Quarians alive because I hadn't done a bunch of shit in the previous games that wasn't all that related in the first place. I understand that other people might feel differently about it, but it it really pissed me off. Having decisions in earlier games with ramifications in later ones is great, but it should generally be somewhat reasonable to extrapolate those ramifications from the situation when you make the decision. In a lot of ME3 it just felt random. Too mean to the wrong quarian admiral in the first act of the previous game(or what the fuck ever it was, I don't actually remember)? BL, gotta get yo genocide on.

Azrayne_sl said:

I actually thought his death scene in ME3 was awesome, one of the highlights of the game.


What really did piss me off about ME3 was how many pivotal decisions were swayed by seemingly unrelated factors from previous games. I was really pissed off when I couldn't keep both the Geth and the Quarians alive because I hadn't done a bunch of shit in the previous games that wasn't all that related in the first place. I understand that other people might feel differently about it, but it it really pissed me off. Having decisions in earlier games with ramifications in later ones is great, but it should generally be somewhat reasonable to extrapolate those ramifications from the situation when you make the decision. In a lot of ME3 it just felt random. Too mean to the wrong quarian admiral in the first act of the previous game(or what the fuck ever it was, I don't actually remember)? BL, gotta get yo genocide on.

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Which in the end, doesn't even matter. Your entire critic about seemingly unconnected decisions that held sway over the course over a game or two, while valid, is negated almost entirely through the last part of the game.

Yeah. Legion was heartwrenching. 'Does this unit have a soul?'

Which in the end, doesn't even matter. Your entire critic about seemingly unconnected decisions that held sway over the course over a game or two, while valid, is negated almost entirely through the last part of the game.

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What would have been an acceptable ending which didn't negate it?