next »

[Carrie Nation]

Is it just me or does nobody like anything anymore?

[John Sandoval]

i... i like things...

[Blademasterbobo]

maybe nobody likes shitty cash ins

maybe?

idk

maybe

[iffi]

Is it just me or does nobody like anything anymore?

Well said.

[Blademasterbobo]

really?

that's what you're gonna go with?

"well said"

haha

ha

hhhh

[eld]

Liking it for the dlc alone!

[kummerspeck]

I never really liked Bioware RPGs starting with KOTOR.

[Udderdude]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIP73xIAPLU

[Samtagonist]

40% of people who bought Mass Effect 3 at Gamestop also bought the From Ashes DlC.  I'm sure EA grows ever bolder as this news reaches them.

[C.A. Sinner]

Gamer Culture

Anyone who defend this game is either too young to play good games or retarded homo-lovers instead of you finding the romance, this game practically romance onto you, not to mention the all-too-famous DA2 (Dragon Age 2) where the characters forces gay love upon you.

They are trying to force homosexuality, telling yourselves that being straight is tha bad choice (if you choose to not have sex with men its marked as a renegade option)

For 2 games we were led to believe he was heterosexual and also led to believe, given everything hes accomplished, that Shepard is ‘all that is man’. Now, all of a sudden, Commander Shepard likes to sleep with men between fighting the reapers. It breaks the story and breaks the image i have of him in my head. This royally pisses me off. This is completely unneeded and strictly done to be politically correct. Ridiculous.

Love,

A huge bioware fan; however, very disappointed at the moment.

 

[Dragonmaw]

This is depressing. Mass Effect 3 is the best example of bad writing over the course of a series. This is like reading a fanfiction, not a canonical entry into the main series of such a highly lauded science fiction epic. It is the Star Trek Generations of Mass Effect. Just how badly did BioWare fuck up to make a game this poorly written? I miss the days of subtlety and nuance, of futurism and science. Now? Now it’s a ridiculous patriotic space marine soap opera with all the subtlety of a dog smearing its ass on your carpet as it blasts out diarrhea. About as appealing, too. But when it’s the end of the galaxy, I suppose you can indulge in your wildest writing fantasies. Even if they have less dimension than a piece of paper.

[Warning: Pretty heavy Mass Effect spoilers ahead, for all games in the series]

In Mass Effect and sequel, there are two events that stand out as nuanced, influential, and impactful character moments.

In Mass Effect, you find the queen of a race long thought extinct held prisoner inside a laboratory on a frozen planet. Centuries before, her and her children wreaked havoc across the galaxy, and were only stopped by one of the Council races uplifting an army of brutes to beat the snot out of them. She is the last of her kind.

You are given two choices in this scenario. The first is to release her, which could potentially lead to another galactic war. She possesses the dead to talk, after all, and her story sounds a little fishy. Her children have, after all, been attacking you this entire time, and her reassurance of “oh, they were crazy” doesn’t appeal. The second is to incinerate her, completing the genocide of her species and potentially saving the galaxy from another century of strife. Both choices offer a hard consequence. In one, war is likely to happen if she is ever found. In the other, you commit complete genocide. What can you do?

In Mass Effect 2, you are given a choice between using a virus to rewrite Geth that are hostile to organic life forms, or destroying the virus and allowing the Geth to make their own decisions. It underlines the concept of free will and whether or not any one person has the decision to remove it from those that have it. If you destroy the virus, the Geth that wuld be affected will continue attacking organics, but they do so of their own free will. If you use the virus to rewrite the Geth, you stop a conflict but remove their ability to think independently. It is, yet again, a poignant choice that feels smart and subtle.

So far, in Mass Effect 3, every choice I have been given has been catastrophically unsubtle and poor. During a mission where you encounter Grunt and find that he has joined the Krogan military for real, you encounter the Rachni queen. She has been imprisoned by the Reapers and exploited for the military effort. If you free her, Grunt dies (unless he was loyal at the end of Mass Effect 2). If you don’t free her, she dies and Grunt lives. It is, quite literally, a binary choice of “which character do you like more.”


This underlies the ultimate laziness of Mass Effect 3: it’s the final chapter, so let’s just kill people off and call it a day. Really? Is that the best you can do? Here’s a clue: just fucking killing people off doesn’t make your game dramatic and inspiring. It just makes you look like amateurs. I can seriously count the number of missions in which no characters relevant to the plot die on one hand. ONE HAND. What the fuck is wrong with BioWare?

This is just the ultimate expression of BioWare’s lazy writing, but it’s hardly the only one. The whole game starts, almost verbatim, in the same way that Halo 2 starts. There are countless scenes of flat dialogue and uninteresting responses. The game attempts to pull you into the conflict by beating you over the head with an emotional truncheon. And the funny thing is that, unless you understand writing a bit, you won’t be able to point to why Mass Effect 3’s story feels dumber and weaker than the previous installments. But I do, and here’s why:

Mass Effect 3 takes the path of least resistance in every single element of its writing, and it shows.

[Blademasterbobo]

you're just jealous

why don't you like anything?

[allen]

Mass Effect 3 takes the path of least resistance in every single element of its writing, and it shows.

I agree with this. Though I did enjoy the game, seeing character after character die left me a little numb. It seemed like at one point they couldn't figure out how to kill off a character so they just hard them commit suicide. It was very stupid, the character could have reacted differently and it would have been more enjoyable than just watching them die. Fuck that, reloaded my save and played through that again.

The ending was poorly written, but I liked the basic premise of it. It was just poor writing that ruined an otherwise acceptable ending.

[PaleFox]

The more annoying thing, to me, is I used the default save, so unlike most of you (I assume) I started with most characters dead. Now, because of the plot railroad (choo choo) they couldn't just get RID of those segments with Wrex and Legion and such, so they just put in transparent expy characters. My favorite is Urdnot Wreav, whose name is similar enough to mean they can save on lip syncing and also looks the same to save on animation.

The copy of Legion is literally just a hologram of Legion that they use because they couldn't figure out a way to do the bit without him there. Which is even lazier, I suppose, since they don't have to change any dialog at all, or make a new model -- that was really the first time I felt annoyed by it, even though I guess the thing with the bugs happens before it... At least with that they paid lip service to it being someone else, right?

Choo choo!


I still... had fun with it, because I thought the shooting wasn't bad and it was pretty short. Story was really just... badly done. Not a bad idea, but the worst execution I've seen since DA2.


So it was ok, and I don't mind having played it like I have some games, but if you're thinking of buying it I'd say wait.

[rob]

This is depressing. I really liked MA before, I'm really not sure if I'll get this or not though. More depressing, though, is that Bioware recently has been kinda sucking and this means if there is a Jade Empire 2 it will suck.