Mass Effect Legendary Edition remaster trilogy

[Trojan_generic]

One big mystery of Nature of ME 3 is how the devs playing their game for years couldnt see the mountains of cringe every time that generic little kid shows up.

To me it looked exactly like the ending was written by the CEO. Or his retarded offspring.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

I like the kid, in theory, as I think the game needed some way to demonstrate Shepherd's trauma and regret. However, I've always thought that instead of a kid, they should have had whoever you let die in ME1 (either Ashley or Kaiden) haunt you. It would have been a nice throw-back and a neat way to use the character again.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

I like the kid, in theory, as I think the game needed some way to demonstrate Shepherd's trauma and regret. However, I've always thought that instead of a kid, they should have had whoever you let die in ME1 (either Ashley or Kaiden) haunt you. It would have been a nice throw-back and a neat way to use the character again.

Funny, you'd think such a thing would be basic writing 101, especially in a trilogy that thrived on acknowledging even the littlest things in the original. But I guess even that's too much to ask from a Bioware game.

 

[Orud]

If I remember correctly they settled on the child instead of a former team member, because Mass Effect 3 was designed around the concept that you didn't need to have played previous installments. They expected a child to resonate more (emotionally) with players, rather than some unknown adult from Shepard's past. I remember Casey Hudson giving an interview about this, and about how proud he was about how they managed to pull it off (the interactive comic to create a save-game to be imported into ME3, etc... ).

They probably considered the additional overhead for creating follower specific dream sequences as a cost that wasn't worth it.

 

[Larianshill]

as I think the game needed some way to demonstrate Shepherd's trauma and regret.

Does the game need to show Shepard's trauma and regret? Did it need to be one big war movie?

 

[Correct_Carlo]

Does the game need to show Shepard's trauma and regret?

Yes. For the entire series up to that point, Shepard is basically playing armchair psychologist to every single person he meets. This is the first time in the series where the games shift to focus on shit Sheperd is going through or acknowledge any emotional impact of the stuff that's happened in any sustained way. Was this the best way to do that? I already said it probably isn't, but I think it was a smart decision to do it.

The very black/white nature of the games' morality system unfortunately makes Shepard into a pretty dull, non-character, for most of the games, denying him the nuance that the NPCs are afforded. You are railroaded into being either perfect or evil, which is a really dull way to roleplay.

Did it need to be one big war movie?

Probably. I mean, it was hyping the confrontation for 2 full games prior.

 

[KVVRR]

Does the game need to show Shepard's trauma and regret?

Yes. For the entire series up to that point, Shepard is basically playing armchair psychologist to every single person he meets. This is the first time in the series where the games shift to focus on shit Sheperd is going through or acknowledge any emotional impact of the stuff that's happened in any sustained way. Was this the best way to do that? I already said it probably isn't, but I think it was a smart decision to do it.

The very black/white nature of the games' morality system unfortunately makes Shepard into a pretty dull, non-character, for most of the games, denying him the nuance that the NPCs are afforded. You are railroaded into being either perfect or evil, which is a really dull way to roleplay.

this is something that 2 should've dealt with since it has something very traumatizing happen to him (fucking dying and being revived years later), not 3. It was already too late to do that by that point.

 

[gulagdandy]

I played for a bit the other day, didn't even finish Eden Prime. Of all things, I was surprised at how badly the narrative design has aged. Every interaction feels so gamey, every conversation a thinly-veiled excuse to dump exposition on the player. You get all these options to "investigate" but are given no real reason to do so (do I really need to ask every random settler about the beacon, when I already know where I'm supposed to go?), there's even some mentally unstabled guy foreshadowing the plot of the whole trilogy with the subtlety of a hammer to the head.

I suppose this is hardly surprising to most codexers, but as someone who used to consider herself a big fan of the trilogy I'm shocked to see how cartoon-y and infantile the whole thing feels.

 

[Riddler]

They were never working on a 'contained story', there was a spinoff being developed actively alongside ME2 -- and which would have taken place concurrent to the main story -- that was canned. The idea that they had the "entire story" already written is PR bullshit. At one point, the reapers were supposed to align with Shepard to stop dark energy anomalies from destroying the galaxy. Parts of this storyline are still in the game, btw. Specifically, in ME2, dark energy fucking with things is mentioned quite a few times(that you've probably already forgotten) and it's never followed up on.
Also, there was originally a somewhat-similar ME3 ending would have been less ridiculous and more sci-fi. The crucible would have been based on real world physics rather than space magic. I guess hiring a physicist to help flesh the idea out was too much for EA so therefore space magic.

essentially, they wrote themselves into a corner due to time constraints, shit writers, and having too many cooks in the kitchen.

Additionally, most of the reason Andromeda is so subpar is because of how much of it was cut. At various points of development they had things like manually piloting your ship between planets, dynamic weather/environments, etc., Not to imply that they would have been good features(who knows), but that is a lot of wasted time and effort.

There is also all the talk about the unique genetic diversity of humans in ME2 which was supposed to tie into the reason the collectors were capturing humans as well as the overall ending.

As I remember it the choice would have been to either sacrifice humanity to solve the biotic/dark matter problem or don't and hope that the galactic community could solve the issue before the universe unravelled.

 

[Butter]

redditors seething

 

[retinoid]

Mass Effect 2 does one thing and one thing only very well - creating these weird, disjointed side stories that have no connection to one another and completely overshadow the main over arching plot. The main story was obviously put in the backseat in favor of the side content and loyalty missions, and what little main story IS in the game is astonishingly bad/non-existent. So it's quite literally the opposite of ME1's philosophy - whose side content was mainly composed of copypasted content with little thought put into it, but the main quest is a focused, engaging, and consistent narrative from beginning to end with a clear progression of acts that eventually lead to a satisfying conclusion.

 

[Rinslin Merwind]

devs playing their game for years

Oh, the naivety is strong with this one.

 

[donkeymong]

I'm about to start ME2 and I'm wondering which difficulty level I should choose. Playing ME1 on hardcore felt like it was a mistake, it wasn't difficult, just annoying with the instant kills and massive health pools.

.

The game has an ability called Warp.Had you used it, it wouldnt be a chore.

 

[donkeymong]

What is the game designed for?

That's easy to answer: ME2 is designed to piss on the corpse of ME1, triple down on bullshit romance plots, screw up the lore forever and "human baby reaper".

And turned the council into complete imbeciles to have a halfass justification to force Shepard to work for Cerberus. Would have been nice to have a choice here...(Council, Cerberus or even Shadowbroker).But Bioware isnt as good as Obsidian(Fallout New Vegas)

 

[Gregz]

ME2 is absolute irredeemable garbage for one reason.

Mandatory sticky cover.

 

[donkeymong]

ME2 is absolute irredeemable garbage for one reason.

Mandatory sticky cover.

Another reason, useless biotics and tech and the retarded global cooldown. And the annoyance of thermal clips.Instead of improving the overheat mechanic so its as good as in Control.

 

[Riddler]

I'm about to start ME2 and I'm wondering which difficulty level I should choose. Playing ME1 on hardcore felt like it was a mistake, it wasn't difficult, just annoying with the instant kills and massive health pools.

.

The game has an ability called Warp.Had you used it, it wouldnt be a chore.

I did and it was still a massive chore. ME1 just has god-awful gameplay, especially on the higher difficulty levels.

 

[Morgoth]

redditors seething

Ah, the fruits of switching out Drew Karpyshyn with Mac Walters.

 

[Bumvelcrow]

ME2 is absolute irredeemable garbage for one reason.

Mandatory sticky cover.

Shows where my mind is at the moment. I thought you had been looking at too many pictures of Miranda when you bought the DVD edition.

 

[Tehdagah]

I played for a bit the other day, didn't even finish Eden Prime. Of all things, I was surprised at how badly the narrative design has aged. Every interaction feels so gamey, every conversation a thinly-veiled excuse to dump exposition on the player. You get all these options to "investigate" but are given no real reason to do so (do I really need to ask every random settler about the beacon, when I already know where I'm supposed to go?), there's even some mentally unstabled guy foreshadowing the plot of the whole trilogy with the subtlety of a hammer to the head.

I suppose this is hardly surprising to most codexers, but as someone who used to consider herself a big fan of the trilogy I'm shocked to see how cartoon-y and infantile the whole thing feels.

Hell yeah videogames don't have good storytelling, with extremely rare exceptions

 

[Lacrymas]

I played for a bit the other day, didn't even finish Eden Prime. Of all things, I was surprised at how badly the narrative design has aged. Every interaction feels so gamey, every conversation a thinly-veiled excuse to dump exposition on the player.

It was never good in the first place, I vaguely remember people complaining about the dialogue wheel/style when ME first came out. You also can't shake off the feeling you've seen and done all of this before, in Bioware's own oeuvre no less. Once the novelty of the setting wears off, you are left with a C-grade Star Trek/Farscape/Babylon 5 -esque romp which gets worse and worse as the trilogy drags along. The gameplay being awful prevents replays too.

 

[J1M]

I played for a bit the other day, didn't even finish Eden Prime. Of all things, I was surprised at how badly the narrative design has aged. Every interaction feels so gamey, every conversation a thinly-veiled excuse to dump exposition on the player.

It was never good in the first place, I vaguely remember people complaining about the dialogue wheel/style when ME first came out. You also can't shake off the feeling you've seen and done all of this before, in Bioware's own oeuvre no less. Once the novelty of the setting wears off, you are left with a C-grade Star Trek/Farscape/Babylon 5 -esque romp which gets worse and worse as the trilogy drags along. The gameplay being awful prevents replays too.

I disagree here. You guys are looking at this as if it was a new Star Wars game or something, but that first Mass Effect game had the burden of introducing an entirely new and expansive universe to the player. A setting that isn't grounded in something easy to explain like "it's new york, but everything is steam-powered".

It's actually a testament to the good job they did of laying out the universe that you look at it now as "explaining things everybody knows". Did they invent a new form of storytelling instead of relying on the techniques they developed on past projects? No, and it's probably for the best that they didn't try to innovate too much in this area. See: action mode in ME3.

 

[Lacrymas]

That's why I said that the novelty of the setting must wear off first. By "you've seen and done all of this before" I mean the structure and overall plot. This is literally a rehash of Neverwinter Nights' OC, down to the space aliens coming to kill everyone/take over the world. Same plot, same structure, same outcome. Except worse this time because they couldn't stretch this into 3 games, so the writers got completely lost in the narrative, rebooting it 3 times and shitting out one of the worst endings in the history of fiction.

 

[Nano]

This is literally a rehash of Neverwinter Nights' OC, down to the space aliens coming to kill everyone/take over the world.

This is your fault for actually sitting down and playing the NWN OC.

 

[J1M]

That's why I said that the novelty of the setting must wear off first. By "you've seen and done all of this before" I mean the structure and overall plot. This is literally a rehash of Neverwinter Nights' OC, down to the space aliens coming to kill everyone/take over the world. Same plot, same structure, same outcome. Except worse this time because they couldn't stretch this into 3 games, so the writers got completely lost in the narrative, rebooting it 3 times and shitting out one of the worst endings in the history of fiction.

Bioware has used the "dragon invades the realm" story structure so many times that it's basically a genre at this point. Singling out NWN is bizarre.