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Mass Effect


OmarBradley

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When I finished all of The Witcher and its expansions I decided I needed an RPG to fill that void. I'd heard good things about Mass Effect, and I had just rewatched the newer Star Trek movies, so I was in a space mode. :lol:

Anyway, I finished the first game last night. Very good, obviously fairly dated at this point, but an enjoyable story (a bit cliche and corny at times, but not too egregious), and a pretty fun combat system as well. Pretty simple game, I liked that it was lean - though the side stuff did get VERY repetitive, and driving the Mako over anything other than flat terrain was a nightmare. And the Tropical Time Trial map from the DLC was the only thing I gave up on in the game.

I just started the second one today, I'm about 40 minutes into it or so. Just met with President Space Bartlett via hologram. The modern graphics are a nice change from the first game, and the GUI has shifted a bit too, looking forward to diving deeper into the story and the new features. I did import my ME1 character, I was only level 45 though so I only got the basic level of bonuses.

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I LOVE ME. You need Lair of The Shadow Broker when you get 2. Also, Extended Cut, From Ashes, and Leviathan are NECESSARY for 3. The game is incomplete without them, and they are necessary for the story.

I love 1, but its probably my least favorite of the 3. 2 is more of an action game, and 3 is that with a bit more rpg stuff. 

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I am enjoying ME2 so far, no complaints really. I am not finding it all that pandering. I do think having a character named, "The Illusive Man" is sort of dumb though.

My goal is to get myself up to speed for ME4. I have a feeling that's going to be pretty great. I know it's technically a different story though.

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21 hours ago, OmarBradley said:

I am enjoying ME2 so far, no complaints really. I am not finding it all that pandering. I do think having a character named, "The Illusive Man" is sort of dumb though.

My goal is to get myself up to speed for ME4. I have a feeling that's going to be pretty great. I know it's technically a different story though.

Most people consider ME2 the highlight of the series. ME3 is my favorite. Everyone hates the ending, and rightfully so. If you get Leviathan, From Ashes, and the Extended Cut its better though

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I finished ME1 last Xmas after playing through it slowly over preceding months; 12 hours straight on last play and loved it.

Started ME2 in May, finished it in a few days. My favourite of the series, make sure to get the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC.

I got ME3 straight after and got From Ashes, Citadel, Leviathan and Extended Cut DLC; all highly recommended.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Finished ME2, really great game. Almost a masterpiece I'd say. Great line in the Shadow Broker DLC about "throwing omnigel on everything" referring to the first game :lol:. All of my team survived the final mission, but none of the crew did except for doc :(, I didn't realize you had to go do it right away, I would have done it to save them.

I blew up the Collector's ship because fuck Cerberus. ME3 is pretty great so far, having a lot of fun and it feels very modern even though it's about 4 years old. Very annoying that I paid about $10 for all three of these games, but will end up spending something like $50 on DLC. Shadow Broker was great, but it was like 3 hours of gameplay; highway robbery!

Cool seeing Thane early on in ME3, and the Presidium is beautiful. Once Kaidan is out of the hospital I'll have my ME1 squad again; Shephard, Kaidan, Liara. I don't like this James guy that much so far.

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  • 2 weeks later...
35 minutes ago, Amir said:

You finished yet @OmarBradley? I didn't think the ending to ME3 was bad if you have Citadel + Leviathan +Extended Cut DLC.

Close. I did Leviathan and Citadel already though (and Omega and From Ashes) - wanted the XP and any War Assets/items prior to ending the main plot. Cool that Citadel brought back the Lower Wards. There's even a reference about the elevator chat from ME1.

I'm on Sanctuary right now, the refugee camp that's actually a Cerberus base. Just a few main story missions left before it gears up for the ending I'm pretty sure.

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I liked From Ashes but didn't get Omega due to the price and mixed reviews; how was it?

Regarding the Collector's ship from ME2,

I held onto it, but it makes no difference in ME3 apart from being a war asset that's worth a few points :/

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8 hours ago, Amir said:

I liked From Ashes but didn't get Omega due to the price and mixed reviews; how was it?

Regarding the Collector's ship from ME2,

  Reveal hidden contents

I held onto it, but it makes no difference in ME3 apart from being a war asset that's worth a few points :/

 

From Ashes was good, but was disappointingly short. Omega is quite long, the price is semi-justified, I can understand being put off by it though. I paid $10 for all 3 main games, so buying all of the DLC at sale price wasn't too big of a hit.

I blew it up. Not too worried.

Yeah next mission I'm heading to the Illusive Man by following Kai Leng.

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2 minutes ago, OmarBradley said:

From Ashes was good, but was disappointingly short. Omega is quite long, the price is semi-justified, I can understand being put off by it though. I paid $10 for all 3 main games, so buying all of the DLC at sale price wasn't too big of a hit.

I blew it up. Not too worried.

Yeah next mission I'm heading to the Illusive Man by following Kai Leng.

Yeah I paid £6.90 for ME1-3 (including From Ashes), but Shadow Broker, Citadel, and Leviathan brought the total to £30.02. Worth it for all those hours of gameplay, though.

I went about 70/30 Renegade/Paragon. I'm tempted to do another playthrough full Renegade so I can use the conversation options which require you to have full Renegade points.

One thing that annoyed me about ME3 was how nerfed the shockwave power became. It was fantastic in ME2 and when I imported my character into ME3, even though the stats were high it seemed useless. I'm pretty sure every time I targeted an enemy in ME3 with shockwave, it would be "redded out" as unavailable to use. But Nova is cool in ME3; shotgun + melee + nova combo = devastating (I played Vanguard).

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Alright, I finished ME3 a few days ago. Overall, I put about 95 hours into the ME series, including DLC. I did realize toward the end of ME3, I probably should have played the Arrival DLC for 2 before starting 3. They do explain what happened with the Batarians in 3, but it would have been cooler to play that beforehand.

I thought ME2 and ME3 were both pretty much masterpiece games to be honest. The character development/acting, incredibly immersive world, and great combat were real highlights. The quirky things were cool too like listening in on the Salarian's bachelor party on Illium in ME2, EDI and Joker's developing relationship, and raving in Purgatory in ME3.

Okay, so Kaidan.... that was a bit unexpected. I definitely noticed they were doing some progressive things with homosexuality throughout ME2 and 3, but I didn't expect that at all! I felt a bit weird picking Kaidan for my party after that, not because I have a problem with it, but it just seems really awkward. And you can't have unit cohesion if one of your soldiers has feelings for you that you don't share. So I pretty much played the rest of the game with Garrus and Liara, sometimes subbing in Javik for Garrus.

I was mostly Paragon, probably 90/10 or 95/5, something like that. Only Renegade actions I did that I recall were shooting Udina and The Illusive Man, probably a few other minor ones. I didn't have enough points to convince The Illusive Man he was indoctrinated, was that only for perfect Paragon/Reneage?

Clearly Bioware had 3 in mind when working on 1 and 2, when playing the 3 it feels like 1 and 2 were really just the lead up to 3 which is really "the game" of the series, if that makes sense. The concept of galactic war, and the delivery of the concept were great. 

As far as the ending goes, I was not disappointed but I also didn't think it was great, it was fine. I never played the ending without Extended Cut though, so my view is a bit skewed. I picked option #1, use the fucking Crucible that I just spent 45 hours of gameplay working on, save (most of) the people I've been fighting for, and end the Reaper threat. Sorry EDI and the Geth.

From watching other endings on YouTube, it looks like the supposed "best" ending is when you don't comply with the AI at all, and pick nothing. The Reapers destroy civilization and end the cycle, but it's revealed that the next cycle defeats them. But I don't give a fuck about that, I fought to save and preserve humanity and end the Reaper harvesting cycles. Why wait another cycle? There is no mention of the next cycle finding a better solution than the Crucible, so what's the incentive there?

My ONLY real annoyance with ME3 was that the Normandy never had enough fuel. Only being able to travel between 1-2 solar systems before needing to refuel really disincentivized space travel and exploration. But I edited some of the games files to change that so I basically had unlimited fuel.

Bradley out.

 

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  • 4 months later...
5 hours ago, ZoSoRose said:

Andromeda is getting a bad rap based on the demo. I've been playing it and I really like it so far. The animations and character faces/hair ARE inexcusable bad, but so far the rest of the game seems really cool. Excited to play more!

Maybe they can sort it with a day one patch. I really want this game to be good!

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On 3/17/2017 at 9:27 PM, ZoSoRose said:

Andromeda is getting a bad rap based on the demo. I've been playing it and I really like it so far. The animations and character faces/hair ARE inexcusable bad, but so far the rest of the game seems really cool. Excited to play more!

Same. I paid the $5 to play the trial, did about 8.5 hours and I'm pretty sure I've done everything I can do. Overall, very positive experience. It's a new Mass Effect game with modern graphics, mechanics, and an intriguing plot. Some of the voice acting, some of the animations, character customization and oddly the game menus are surprisingly sub-par. I did think the intro sequence (2-3 hours of play time) was really great, I know some people felt it was emotionless and threw you into a plot too quickly, but I enjoyed it a lot. I will be pre-ordering soon. I am very excited and optimistic for the rest of the game.

On 3/18/2017 at 3:21 AM, SoundOfAGun said:

Maybe they can sort it with a day one patch. I really want this game to be good!

I don't think a day one patch will be happening. That's the buzz on the EA forum.

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7 hours ago, OmarBradley said:

Same. I paid the $5 to play the trial, did about 8.5 hours and I'm pretty sure I've done everything I can do. Overall, very positive experience. It's a new Mass Effect game with modern graphics, mechanics, and an intriguing plot. Some of the voice acting, some of the animations, character customization and oddly the game menus are surprisingly sub-par. I did think the intro sequence (2-3 hours of play time) was really great, I know some people felt it was emotionless and threw you into a plot too quickly, but I enjoyed it a lot. I will be pre-ordering soon. I am very excited and optimistic for the rest of the game.

I don't think a day one patch will be happening. That's the buzz on the EA forum.

That is good to know, reviews are out today, so that should give a clearer picture on the game as a whole. I read about there being no day one patch for the issues; that makes sense if the problems are actually baked into the animations and not just bugs.

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6 hours ago, Oldest Goat said:

They should do a remake of all 3 combined in the new engine, or at least each separately.

Nostalgia has become such a marketable product this century, I'd bet we'll see remakes within 15-20 years. 

EDIT: Though now that I think about it, KoToR is probably due for a remake/refresh before ME is.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I've got 33 hours on the game, I think that is counting the 9 hours I spent in the trial. I'm basically done with Voeld, and probably 75% done with Eos and Havarl. So I'm guessing I'm around halfway through the game. After the initial excitement of playing a new ME game, I have to say I am a bit disappointed. The game is good, at times very good, but it rarely reaches greatness. I'm going to do a mini-review, mostly so that I have all of my thoughts put in one place for myself. Note: as I mentioned before, I'm probably only halfway done, so some of this could change - and your play style may vary. Also I'm going to refer to the first three games as MET (Mass Effect Trilogy).

The good:

Combat: is better than ever, it is very similar to previous MET, but much more fluid and polished.

Graphics/performance: the world is mostly beautiful, from what I've seen so far. Voeld and Eos can be a bit boring, but they still look great. Havarl has a variety of colors, as did the few minutes of Aya I got to see. I thought Habitat 7 was really coo too. I have been monitoring performance throughout playing, and Bioware's required/recommended specs are good approximations of reality, on PC at least. 

The intro: I thought it was excellent, I seem to be in the minority opinion with that. Wish the rest of the game felt as cinematic and riveting as the intro did, there's some of that epicness in the game, but so far it's not been a whole lot. I think that's partially because once you get into the "open" world, the pace does feel a bit slower. Which is normal for a large world, but it's exacerbated by ME: A when doing all of the...

The bad:

...fetch quests that don't really feel substantive. "We will have side quests that feel like the Witcher's" - said some dev prior to release. This is mostly untrue. Admittedly, some side quests do seem to have heavy substance and it's clear a lot of work was put into them. But many are just: place 3 things here, get the 8 things from there, scan 2 things, etc..

Animations: yeah they suck in conversations. MET animations were better. There was an ex-Bioware developer who commented on Twitter that to him, it looks like they did intend to improve the animations, but they ran out of time.

Writing: pretty bad - seems like it was written by a middle schooler, very corny lines and few of the characters have interesting backgrounds/personalities. Really no excuse for this.

The plot: not terrible but other than the fact that we are in another galaxy this game has a lot of similarities to MET. Fighting Kett and infiltrating their bases feels very much like fighting the Geth and Collectors, just another generic enemy with a crazy psychopath leader bent on power/domination (it seems so far at least). I suppose it's hard to break out of that box for a sci fi/fantasy style RPG, but a lot of the plot feels redundant.

Bugs: I can't talk to Niilj on Voeld (hundreds of others reported this on EA forum) which is very annoying, meaning I cannot finish that Priority Ops quest, though it is not game breaking. Luckily, that's really the only major glitch I've experienced, if you go over to the EA forums, you will see horror stories: people logging into the game to find they now have someone else's saves, constant crashing even with high end hardware, completely inability to play multiplayer, and many many others.

Character creation and menus in general: unexpectedly bad, not easily customizable and the options in some areas are very limiting, which leads us to menus and menu navigation in general. There are two main menus (in game) as far as I can tell, which is confusing. Also, if you press M for map or J for journal, you can't press those keys to exit quickly, you have to Esc/exit through back to the top menu, then out of there back into the game.

And the glyph puzzles are annoying. Very annoying, especially the bigger ones. I don't want to play Sudoku in my RPG. And if it's there, make it optional and reward-yielding like how they did it for DA: I.

My half-playthrough conclusion:

Although it feels Mass Effecty due to the continuation of MET combat, character mechanics, and the space story - this game feels less Mass Effecty than the trilogy. There's an abstract quality missing; a mixture of subtle humor, quirky self-awareness, and of course clever plot devices and the constant stream of intrigue we felt when we played the trilogy games.

Both EA and Bioware are to blame here. EA for rushing release when it clearly wasn't ready, and Bioware for taking 5 years and 40 million dollars to not finish the product properly. Since the main Bioware studio (the one that did the MET) was tasked with doing DA: I, another studio was given ME: A; that's what I have read at least. This other studio was apparently cobbled together by EA, and did not include much input from the original developers. Add that to the fact that several of MET's major devs/creators left Bioware during ME: A's development, and you have a clear answer as to why this game comes across unpolished, messier, and buggier than MET.

Good game, worth playing, big disappointment.

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11 hours ago, ZoSoRose said:

Haven't had time to play much but I think the combat is a problem the more I play. Taking away squad controls on the wheel and only giving you 3 powers was a HUGE mistake imo

I was never into squad dynamics that much, though I do agree 3 powers is not enough.

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Played all night. I am starting to really enjoy myself. I think they did a great job with the exploring aspect, and I am liking the characters more and more. I take forever with big games, so it'll be a while before I give my overall impressions, but tonight was the first time I got to feel like "wow, I am playing Mass Effect 4". It does have some major problems, but I do think the bad reviews have (so far) been unfair. The huge development time hurt expectations. 5 years is a TON of time, and we all expected something that would truly move the series forward. This sort of is, and it isn't. They did a lot of work. This isn't some half-assed let down like Destiny, Titanfall, Battlefront, or almost any other disappointing game release this generation. I can tell this game is enormous and has a ton of content, its just there are some major flaws and failures. So far, I do appreciate the scope of the game and I am starting to feel engrossed. I miss the lore and politics and I miss how detailed the different races and civilizations got in 2 and 3, but this game is more like ME1. Frontier worlds and a seemingly focus on the setup. I will say that now that the Nexus opened up more, it is at least feeling a little more like Mass Effect.

 

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2 hours ago, Amir said:

https://www.masseffect.com/news/the-journey-ahead?sf53509845=1

Think I'll pick up Andromeda in a few months after all these patches and improvements are out (and it's cheaper).

Good plan. These patch notes don't address all of the noted issues, hopefully the patch itself will - but I'm not confident. The game plays like it's in beta testing tbh. At least BioWare is semi-acknowledging that the game still needs a lot of work.

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  • 1 month later...

Really want to replay the OT while I wait for Andromeda to be patched.

Will buy Kasumi if I do, is Overlord worth getting as well? Each of these DLCs would cost me £4.33, already spent £30 on the first 3 games plus Lair of the Shadow Broker, From Ashes, Leviathan + Citadel.

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