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Mass Effect Trilogy

Tytus

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So buds. If EA decided to release remastered editions of the Trilogy would anyone here buy it?

They'd have to totally rework the ending of Mass Effect 3. Unlikely since to my understanding, Casey Hudson is back at the helm and the ending of the franchise was his brainchild.

In other respects, having Casey Hudson back at the company can only help because he brings a classic dude bro producer perspective to balance out the SJW inclinations of the other creatives which overtook Andromeda.


The only way to "save" Mass Effect would be to bring back Drew Karpyshyn and Chris L'etoile - they basically wrote the main story and all the important lore. The new games should follow their original story plan (that was being changes since the ending of ME2), but would have to be a remake of the entire trilogy which will never happen. For example their reveal for what Collectors were doing was actually much more interesting than what Bioware actually went with.
 
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The only way to "save" Mass Effect would be to bring back Drew Karpyshyn and Chris L'etoile
Chris L'etoile's role in writing Mass Effect cannot be overstated, he was the loreguy, the one who wrote all of the planetary descriptions, he pushed for a less Star Trek-y universe and was responsible for some of the best written characters. He only worked on the first game and some of the second and his disappearance from the team is very noticeable. Old Hermes has saved some blogposts he wrote about the development of the first game and I will leave them here for posterity and to grant knowledge to those who seek it, it's not a part of the hermetic corpus, but you should read it anyway if you are interested in Mass Effect. To most this is lost knowledge.l

Unofficial Mass Effect Dev Diaries

So back when I worked at BioWare, I wrote a 3000-word article for the BioWare Blog. I submitted it up the chain for approval, but received no response before I left for my new job at [reacted].

Since the blogs still have not been posted by BW, and none of the content is covered by my NDA (it's all about my work on ME1, not ME2), I have decided to publish it here. I'll break it up into pieces, expand parts I felt were underdeveloped, and dribble it out over the next few weeks.

You must consider the work unofficial and "only my opinion" as a guy who was part of the writing team on the biggest SFRPG since... hell, at least since the 21st century began. (Note to Halo partisans: Halo defines itself as an FPS, not an RPG. Apples and oranges.) Each piece will include a boilerplate disclaimer to the effect that I don't speak for BioWare the company, nor for any of the talented colleagues I had the privilege of working alongside, nor for the Money Hats at Electronic Arts.

It's just me. Capische?

Unofficial ME Dev Diary I: The Future Ain't What it Used to Be

This is an unofficial dev diary. I used to work at BioWare as a writer on Mass Effect 1 and 2. In August of 2009 I moved on to new position at another company. Therefore, I don't speak for BioWare, nor for any of my former colleagues , nor for Electronic Arts. The following is my opinion only.

The year is 1987, and NASA launches the last of America's deep-space probes....
- opening credits, Buck Rogers

I grew up in the post-Apollo years. My father watched Star Trek reruns in syndication every night. Star Wars blew up around me, followed up by knockoffs like the original Battlestar Galactica, Space 1999, and Buck Rogers. I even have fond memories of Roger Corman’s deliciously cheesy Battle Beyond the Stars, with its cow-head spaceship and drawling space trucker. My family traveled down to Cape Canaveral to watch the first launch of the space shuttle Columbia on April 12, 1981. For me, space development was an "of course." Of course we'd build space stations. Of course we'd build a moon base. Of course we'd send men to Mars.

It wasn't to be. No one wanted to pay for it.

The grand dreams of my father's generation turned into a short haul space truck, a porta-potty in orbit, and fleets of robots. A cash-starved and gun-shy NASA creeps timorously up to low Earth orbit, while private investors and new players like China and Japan try to rekindle the public’s fire in the belly for the final frontier.

When I was born in 1974, no one imagined that our species would go an entire generation without revisiting the moon.

I'm well aware that there are more immediate and morally significant problems here on Earth. But the human race is looking at its feet, too preoccupied with not tripping to admire the view or see where they're going. We no longer look to the horizon. We no longer have a destination in sight or in mind. As a species, we simply plod onwards, content with getting through another day and purchasing a new CD, game, or movie.

Where reality failed me, science fiction literature provided. In the novels I devoured in the 80s and 90s, humanity –united or not – still looked up and strode across the galaxy. We touched the faces of innumerable worlds. We prospered, even as we brought our problems with us; for every book of cosmic wonders, there were ten which cast starships in the role of World War II dogfighters, Jutland-esque big gun sluggers, or even Napoleonic ships-of-the-line.

Yet in the “aughts,” there’s a trend away from space operatic themes of glittering cities and fleets of starships blotting out the sun. Even nanotechnology has been brushed aside as the physical impossibility of the Drexlerian vision became clear. The new literatures are those of Transhumanism, in which humanity is radically transformed by wedding itself to technology, and the Singularity, wherein man is eclipsed or brushed aside by hyper-intelligent, self-evolving machines.

When I grew up in the last century, science fiction was a laser pistol and a space fighter. In the new century, it's altered genes and immortality in the form of software emulation. It’s not as punch-in-the-gut impressive as ten-kilometer dreadnaughts bristling with laser turrets and antimatter thrusters, but it shows the improvement of science fiction’s maturity as a medium. The new generation of pulp futurists (Charles Stross, Ken McLeod, Alistair Reynolds, and Iain M. Banks) are just as concerned with where we're going as with where our hardware is going.

What I didn't understand as a child was that science fiction is not about a gun that atomizes someone; it's about what a human does when they can commit murder and not leave a corpse.

Mass Effect presents a hypothetical future for man. It hearkens back to the optimistic, hardware-driven visions of thirty years ago, but is tempered by the diminished expectations and futurist visions of the present. Our technology matures swiftly. Our species does not.

This is why, in Mass Effect, the Earth groans under an overpopulation of 11.4 billion souls.

This is why the Third World is still poor and polluted, while the First World gorges on the resources of a hundred planets.

This is why global warming occurs despite all the warnings, and the sea levels rise.

That is why there is the “Earth first” political party Terra Firma, railing against cultural and economic integration with the rest of the galaxy.

That is why the most common reaction to quarians is, “they’re here to mooch off our taxes, pick our pockets, and take our jobs.”

And, that is why when I was developing the backstory, I decided that the first permanent human lunar base in Mass Effect’s future history does not come about until 2069. I can no longer conceive of a future in which I can realistically expect my two sons to walk on the moon, as my father taught me to expect when I was a child.

In retrospect, the Apollo landings were a giant leap for a man, but only a small step for mankind.

Always in motion is the future.
- Yoda

Unofficial ME Dev Diary II: Mere Anarchy Loosed Upon the Stars

This is an unofficial dev diary. I used to work at BioWare as a writer on Mass Effect 1 and 2. In August of 2009 I moved on to new position at another company. Therefore, I don't speak for BioWare, nor for any of my former colleagues , nor for Electronic Arts. The following is my opinion only.

In Mass Effect, Earth is still divided into self-interested nations, and our solar system has been developed by a multitude of national and corporate interests. However, a single entity – the Systems Alliance – has political and military authority over all human colonies, outposts, and stations beyond the solar system. We felt it was important that humanity present a single, united face to the galaxy, one that has left terrestrial regionalism behind.

Part of my job on ME1 was to explain how this came about, as part of the Codex and as reference for the novel Revelation. Knowing the goal, how did I build towards that?

My problem with the Roddenberrian image of united humanity is that I think real humans tend to be greedy, selfish creatures that don't easily share political power, possessions, money, or living space. That's how we were made to be - evolution is usually unkind to the altruistic in times of scarcity. Only exceptional individuals can rise above their own biological impulses to place the needs of the many above the needs of the few or one.

I freely admit my glass is always half empty.

Based on this logic, I find the concept of "world government" ludicrous. Put any two people together, they'll find something to argue about. There are too many opposing and entrenched positions on Earth about who did what, who owns what, and who should get what. Every day, people are killed over grievances thousands of years old. I can’t conceive of that changing unless the nature of mankind changes. Should our species one day evolve into such saints, I doubt you and I would still recognize them as human.

My feeling is that in the future, changes of technology and economy will allow increasing numbers of ethnic and ideological microstates and micronations. People will build peace for themselves by establishing enclaves with like-minded fellows, and keeping The Other out.

Certainly we see this trend in the modern age. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia shattered virtually overnight. Quebec and Scotland have independence movements. Tens of thousands flood the streets in protest of “globalization” – the forcible integration of national economies into a world free market. In the US, the last decade has seen increasing divide between Red State and Blue State. We don't talk with our neighbors, we talk to people who think like us on the forums of the Huffington Post or Free Republic. Groups on both left and right speak openly of seceding from the United States, a discussion which would have been unthinkable 50 years ago.

I look at the post-WWII Earth and see that the center cannot hold against factionalism and regionalism.

ME1 lead writer Drew Karphyshyn thought I was jaded and cynical. He looks at the same time period and points to the expansion of NATO and the establishment of the European Union. He sees the Kyoto Treaty, the Euro, the Channel Tunnel, and UN peacekeeping operations. He sees trends of centralization and cooperation.

The disagreement between us is why we never pinned down the exact number of nations on Earth in Mass Effect. There are currently 195 sovereign nations on the Earth. I feel that by 2183, that number should increase by about 50. Drew feels it should drop by the same amount.

To preempt an argument over what is – for the purposes of the player's experience – a meaningless number, we made a gentleman’s agreement to simply leave it unspecified. Of course, since we made that agreement, Drew has moved to BioWare Austin to work on Star Wars: The Old Republic three days a week and play golf four days a week (he's also been known to write New York Times bestselling Star Wars novels), and I left BioWare altogether. It's possible the new writing team for ME3 will come to a new agreement.

Given all this, I felt the most likely way for a pan-human government to come about was by starting again from scratch. A new structure must be established, completely divorced from the issues of Old Earth.

The problem with this idea was the time scale of Mass Effect. Humans have possessed interstellar flight less than 35 years at the beginning of ME1. Colonies in virgin wilderness are reliant on the mother country for manufactured equipment and population growth for many years. England's first permanent settlement in North America, Jamestown, was founded on May 14, 1607. It was 169 years before that colony developed sufficiently to break away on July 4, 1776 - and that was accomplished in a human-friendly biosphere and environment. The idea that Earth nations would simply allow their various dependent colonies to break away and form their own government is fairly preposterous.

Space travel is expensive. A single space shuttle mission has an average cost of $1.5 billion. Mars Direct, the “faster, cheaper, better” manned Mars mission, expected to put four people on the Red Planet for around $50 billion. The operating costs for a permanent lunar base with rotating crews of four are estimated in hundreds of billions per year.

Placing a permanent human colony on another world involves moving thousands of people. Even assuming ideal Earth-like conditions – what we called a “shirtsleeves” environment – setting up a civilization on a virgin world requires millions of tons of supplies to boot-strap to something approaching self-sufficiency. The requirements are even higher for worlds that are not quite ideal - where it's difficult to grow food locally, for example, or where water needs to be filtered for material or biological contaminants, where minerals vital for Earth life (manganese, chrominum, etc.) are in short supply, or where trace atmospheric pollutants require rebreather masks and special filters for HVAC systems.

The sheer cost of moving bodies across light years explains the apparent discrepancy between the populations of Earth and its colonies. Earth is heavily overpopulated, but entire human colony worlds rarely equal the population of modern Los Angeles (Terra Nova, the most populous Alliance world, has only 4.4 million inhabitants). The concept of space colonization to relieve terrestrial population pressures is like the old idea of getting rid of garbage by shooting it all into the sun; it sounds like a great solution until you run the numbers.

How can anyone be expected to afford space colonization? Our answer was that no one nation, faction, or corporation could – but Earth as a whole did. In order to take humanity to the stars, nations had to pool their resources.

My personal feeling is that most nations wouldn't pool their resources unless all the participants see benefits proportionate to their investment measured against their own economic strength. Again, the logic lies in my belief that humans are self-interested creatures who only kick in if they expect to see a profit for themselves. A system in which everyone gains based on their contributions as measured against each other would be perceived as unfair for those on the bottom, and they wouldn't participate. The G8 can afford to throw in more money. If, say, Hungary (Gross Domestic Product $196.7 billion) kicks in 20% of their economy, or $39.34 billion, they’ll get four times what the United States (GDP $14.44 trillion) would for kicking in 5% of their economy, or $722 billion. (I will emphasize that this was never vetted by anyone else at BioWare, and remains purely my own theory.)

Everyone works together, everyone profits based on effort versus capability. This plants the seeds for the Systems Alliance, the organization through which the participants coordinate their efforts.

The early SA was an intergovernmental organization, not a government in and of itself. It administrated colonization efforts and set space development policy. It had its own merchant fleet to keep colonists and supplies flowing outward. As more people moved into space, it gained its own small navy to protect those colonies and merchant ships from calamity. Many of those warships were obsolescent “hand-me-downs” from national militaries.

The structure was there, but I felt it would take a dramatic event to believably allow the SA to become a true government. Fortunately, we already had something suitable in the IP's backstory.

It was the Alliance's hand-me-down fleet that liberated Shanxi from the turians while the colonial nations back on Earth bickered about who should have the prestige of leading a relief effort, and what the fleet's objectives should be. This showed those who lived and worked in space that the nation-states of Earth were too busy with their old arguments to organize a relief effort on their behalf. This display – not of force, but of cohesion – gave the Alliance the political clout to push for and gain independence from the nations that had spawned it.

By this point, Earth's economy was booming thanks to the influx of colonial resources. My logic was that no politician would want to trade a boom economy for a war and recession. Again, this was predicated on my cynical belief that humans are self-interested above all else. Earth wanted to keep the political power, resources, money, and living space of the colonies. However, they were loathe to temporarily sacrifice the standard of living they enjoyed to keep them.

Humans, at least those in Third Wave nations, tend to be impatient and short-sighted about such things. We tend think of the next economic quarter or the next paycheck.

The Sol system was left to the powers of Earth. Everything beyond was the Alliance.

I also saved a part of his page on the wiki, where he wrote about the parts of the games he worked on and could claim full credit for.

I'm Chris L'Etoile, a former BioWare writer. I left the company in 2009, and no longer speak with any canonical force. Currently I'm at Visceral Games (EA Redwood Shores) working as a Narrative Designer.

I wrote a couple of unofficial dev diaries about my ME1 work on my GamerDNA page. I emphasize unofficial. They are my opinion only, and not approved by anyone at BioWare.

In ME, I did:
I also worked on Mass Effect 2.
  • Legion (though not the "confrontation" scene)
  • Thane Krios
  • EDI (her dialogues, Luke Kristjansen did her interjections in Joker's dialogue, and Patrick Weekes her N7 exposition)
  • Citadel Zakera Ward
  • Geth codex entries, touch-ups to older tech-related entries
  • Parts of the Galaxy Map
 

Ninjerk

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That's very interesting for a game that ended up being Cassandra kills the dragons.
 

Tytus

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That's very interesting for a game that ended up being Cassandra kills the dragons.

Yeah I remember reading on some forum right after ME3 launched when he aired his frustrations about the whole thing. He said that they begun to be overruled by people paid more than him. So he probably meant Hudson, Walters etc.
It really started happening to a big extent during ME2 when for example he was pissed that they started making Geth into a pinocchio trope while he himself wrote them specificity to avoid that.
Or they started to throw all the important plot point they wrote with Drew out the airlock and substitute them with humanity is special, humanity is the best.
 

Tytus

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Prelude: Chris L'Etoile was a former writer on the original Mass Effect as well as on Mass Effect 2. He left BioWare shortly before ME2 was released. His characters include Legion, Ashley, Thane, and EDI. He also wrote several quests and missions (such as the Noveria questline for ME1). Additionally, he wrote the planetary descriptions featured in the Galaxy Map.
[09:46]
On emotions and Legion:

Emotions would ruin the uniqueness of the geth. They're not humans. They're not organics, at the mercy of hormones and subjective senses. They're Different.

Geth are comfortable with what they are. They accept that organics are different, and that their way is not suited for organics (and vice versa). IMO, only an intelligence divorced from emotion could be so completely accepting. Geth are the essence of impartiality. If you pay attention to Legion's dialogue, you'll note it uses "judge" and judgment" quite often. I went out of my way to use that word, since judges in our society are supposed to impartial and unaffected by emotion when they make their decisions.

I wanted to treat AI with more respect than the tired Pinocchio "I want to be a Real Boy" cliches of Commander Data. The geth are machines. There's absolutely no reason they should want to be organics. They should be allowed to be strong enough to want to better themselves, not change themselves.

A geth wanting emotions would be no less disrespectful a character than a black man who wanted to be white.


EDI was added by decree from on high, but I think she works fine. She fills a role on the ship that no organic could (electronic warfare against Reaper-level computer software) and has severe hardware and software restrictions on her freedom for most of the game. To me, that's consistent. Organics want to enjoy benefits of AIs without the perceived risks.


Why Legion had Shepard's armor:

The truth is that the armor was a decision imposed on me. The concept artists decided to put a hole in the geth. Then, in a moment of whimsy, they spackled a bit Shep's armor over it. Someone who got paid a lot more money than me decided that was really cool and insisted on the hole and the N7 armor. So I said, okay, Legion gets taken down when you meet it, so it can get the hole then, and weld on a piece of Shep's armor when it reactivates to represent its integration with Normandy's crew (when integrating aboard a new geth ship, it would swap memories and runtimes, not physical hardware).

But Higher Paid decided that it would be cooler if Legion were obsessed with Shepard, and stalking him. That didn't make any sense to me -- to be obsessed, you have to have emotions. The geth's whole schtick is -- to paraphrase Legion -- "We do not experience (emotions), but we understand how (they) affect you." All I could do was downplay the required "obsession" as much as I could.


On Legion's acquisition:

The reason Legion has dialogue in every mission is because originally, its acquisition could come much earlier in the game. The late game critical path point of acquiring the Reaper IFF was going to be a separate mission. That additional work that seemed unnecessary when the IFF could be neatly folded into what already existed for Legion's acquisition with a few dialogue changes. The drawback is that you're now forced to choose between hearing half of Legion's dialogue (its latter two Normandy conversations) and saving Normandy's crew by heading through Omega-4 immediately after they get captured.


I had written harder science into EDI's dialogue there. The Reapers were using nanotech disassemblers to perform "destructive analysis" on humans, with the intent of learning how to build a Reaper body that could upload their minds intact. Once this was complete, humans throughout the galaxy would be rounded up to have their personalities and memories forcibly uploaded into the Reaper's memory banks. (You can still hear some suggestions of this in the background chatter during Legion's acquisition mission, which I wrote.) There was nothing about Reapers being techno-organic or partly built out of human corpses -- they were pure tech.


I believe emotions in "life as we know it" are largely a product of chemical processes in the meat brain; hormones, phermones, adrenaline, etc.

So from my perspective, while organic life may evolve without responses akin to emotions, electronic life cannot evolve with responses akin to emotions.

Note I said "evolve." The geth are a "ground up" AI that evolved from non-sentient code. EDI and the other AIs in the IP are "top down" models designed and coded specifically to gain sapience. If they're programmed to have responses akin to emotions, they will. EDI has a sense of humor, for example, but she doesn't have the capability to get mad. You don't want your starship OS getting mad at you.


I haven't watched the endings yet (I'm not going to play the game, because being the sort of OCD I am, I'll just end up throwing juvenile tantrums over every physics violation, canon retcon, and ship painted the wrong color), so I don't know what ended up in the final version. When I left, the Big Reveal was going to be



I saved some of it. And also from some article:



"Giving the player government authority in the form of military rank was an easy explanation for getting a ship, a fully-loyal crew, and a resource base at the outset," says L'etoile. A writer for Mass Effect 1 and 2, he was responsible for worldbuilding and companion writing. Most recently, he helped create the character of Parvati Holcomb for Obsidian's The Outer Worlds. "Going one step further and inventing the Spectres was a quick handwave to extend that authority across the galaxy."


"The archetypes we were told to follow for Shepard's dialogue were Captain Kirk of Star Trek for Paragon and Jack Bauer of 24 for Renegade," says L'Etoile. "Kirk always takes a morally upright path, and somehow makes it all work out... even if that requires reprogramming the Kobayashi Maru simulator. Jack Bauer does morally questionable things because he knows 'there is no other choice' to save lives. In the game, both options must lead to successful outcomes."

If Mass Effect turned out to be Shepard saying, 'You know what? I'm actually going to trust in the overall mechanisms of the larger nation state of which humanity hopes to be a part,' and it works itself out over time; the systems work the way that they should, and Saren is routed out and Shepard slots into a job within middle-level bureaucracy, right?" asks Youngblood. "Who the hell is going to play that? But, hey, the system's fucked. Nobody's listening, but you know the deal. That's exciting."

"Even 15 years ago, I considered that aspect of the Mass Effect setting a direct and needed antidote to the unacknowledged attitude of 'human exceptionalism' that pervades much of science fiction," says L'Etoile.


"Part of the glossing-over of Earth cultures was the result of an informal agreement between myself and Drew ," says L'Etoile. "He believed that humanity would progress in the optimistic way Gene Roddenberry anticipated—that over time nations would amalgamate in the manner of the European Union. He felt there would be fewer nations on Earth in the time of Mass Effect and a more unified global perspective brought about by entertainment monoculture and the ubiquity of online interaction with those of different perspectives."


Before joining the Mass Effect writing team, L'Etoile had worked in MMORPGs and witnessed a culture of harmful behavior towards other players, from doxxing to stalking and constant bigotry. He watched global politics enter a decade of bloody secession movements, occupations and balkanization. Contrasting Karpyshyn's optimistic vision of the future, he saw humans only becoming more siloed and insular in their beliefs and treatment of others.

"Since we weren't planning to present Earth in the game, it didn't seem worth the effort of arguing over it. Drew and I just set the matter aside," he says. "I'm not happy to be winning the argument in 2020."


L'Etoile and Hepler say Mass Effect was meant to "tell an exciting military space opera trilogy in an updated style from the late 70s,"

'''Chris L'Etoile, AKA Stormwaltz: The power vacuum at the end of Mass Effect 1 is purely at the Citadel. The Council defense fleet there gets pasted, but the overall turian, salarian, and asari fleets outnumber the humans 10:1. Despite rah-rah-Earth-First rhetoric from Udina, it's utterly impossible for the Alliance to militarily best the Council on anything more than a local and temporary scale. All they have to do is gather their fleets and steamroll us.

Also, we have a dozen official garden colonies, none with a population larger than a modern city (Terra Nova, the largest at 4.4 million, is about equal to Riyadh). The Council races each have hundreds of colonies, many old enough to have populations in the billions. We can't out-produce or out-populate them, either.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
he was responsible for worldbuilding and companion writing. Most recently, he helped create the character of Parvati Holcomb for Obsidian's The Outer Worlds.
and nothing of value was lost
"Part of the glossing-over of Earth cultures was the result of an informal agreement between myself and Drew ," says L'Etoile. "He believed that humanity would progress in the optimistic way Gene Roddenberry anticipated—that over time nations would amalgamate in the manner of the European Union. He felt there would be fewer nations on Earth in the time of Mass Effect and a more unified global perspective brought about by entertainment monoculture and the ubiquity of online interaction with those of different perspectives."
Before joining the Mass Effect writing team, L'Etoile had worked in MMORPGs and witnessed a culture of harmful behavior towards other players, from doxxing to stalking and constant bigotry. He watched global politics enter a decade of bloody secession movements, occupations and balkanization. Contrasting Karpyshyn's optimistic vision of the future, he saw humans only becoming more siloed and insular in their beliefs and treatment of others.

"Since we weren't planning to present Earth in the game, it didn't seem worth the effort of arguing over it. Drew and I just set the matter aside," he says. "I'm not happy to be winning the argument in 2020."

Earth was in a far worse state in Star Trek's universe at this point, what a dumbass.
Turns out that having magic replicators that create anything on demand fixes a lot of problems.
 
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Readher

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Portuguese retailer lists Mass Effect Trilogy Remastered for PS4, Xbox One, and Switch
Portuguese retailer Gaming Replay has listed a “Mass Effect Trilogy Remastered” for PlayStation 4 (cached, archived), Xbox One (cached, archived), and Switch (cached, archived) with an October release window.

The unannounced collection would presumably include remastered versions of 2007-released Mass Effect, 2010-released Mass Effect 2, and 2012-released Mass Effect 3.

Back in May, VentureBeat’s Jeff Grubb reported Electronic Arts would release Mass Effect Trilogy Remastered in fiscal year 2021, which ends on March 31, 2021. While Grubb did not mention specific platforms at the time, he said not to expect it on Switch—“at least not at first.”
https://www.gematsu.com/2020/09/por...rilogy-remastered-for-ps4-xbox-one-and-switch
 

Tyranicon

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I want to replay Mass Effect but the rumor of a remaster coming out soon is preventing me from doing it
:negative:

Go and play the old games. They're still fine. Remasters will propably not be worth it anyway.

If it was a remake, I would be much more interested. But a remaster with some higher-detail textures and new lighting... I don't see what's the point because the gameplay and graphics are still going be dated. It's like the Kingdoms of Amalur remaster (which according to fans, is a patch). I don't get it.
 

J1M

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I want to replay Mass Effect but the rumor of a remaster coming out soon is preventing me from doing it
:negative:

Go and play the old games. They're still fine. Remasters will propably not be worth it anyway.

If it was a remake, I would be much more interested. But a remaster with some higher-detail textures and new lighting... I don't see what's the point because the gameplay and graphics are still going be dated. It's like the Kingdoms of Amalur remaster (which according to fans, is a patch). I don't get it.
It mostly hinges on the hope of a new 5th ending that sets up future sequels.

And less realistic wishes like importing the sequel combat into the first game.
 

Togukawa

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The basic story of me3 is completely flawed. It all hinges on building something that isnt understood, which should in a nonretarded universe turn out to be a trick killing everyone, like in
Enderal
.

Having the macguffin spawn a literal machine god with galaxy wide magic powers is the most retarded thing I have ever seen, and thats not even touching on how stupidly the actual execution was done.

I can't understand people hoping for a fifth variation of retardation, as if it would fix anything.
 

oldmanpaco

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The basic story of me3 is completely flawed. It all hinges on building something that isnt understood, which should in a nonretarded universe turn out to be a trick killing everyone, like in
Enderal
.

Having the macguffin spawn a literal machine god with galaxy wide magic powers is the most retarded thing I have ever seen, and thats not even touching on how stupidly the actual execution was done.

I can't understand people hoping for a fifth variation of retardation, as if it would fix anything.

The problem with ME3 (story wise) was that they were trapped in EPICness. A smaller ME not created by a bunch of woke zoomer faggots might be OK. But they need to fix the ending of ME3 to give an option for the galaxy to survive more or less intact for that to happen or you're stuck in prequel land which no one cares about.
 

Tytus

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:prosper::prosper::prosper::prosper::prosper::prosper::prosper::prosper:
 

Stella Brando

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2005
Messages
8,968
Location
Castle Volkihar
This is how I've always seen each game in the trilogy:

Mass Effect 1 = Star Trek
Mass Effect 2 = Star Wars
Mass Effect 3 = Independence Day

This is perfect.


Mass Effect 1 is sometimes praised for it's story, but should I remind anyone that it is a massive rip-off of Revelation Space by Alastair Raynolds?

Didn't Alistair Raynolds just rip off Steve Childers?
 

Tytus

Arcane
Joined
Jul 9, 2011
Messages
3,596
Location
Mazovia
I saved some of it.
Very nice. Old Hermes had it all saved once but I lost it. Anyone know what L'Etoile is up to now? Is he still in the industry?
I was searching for L'etoile's dev diaries on google and came across this post. Thank you for sharing, I haven't seen them anywhere else. Did he just write two or are there more out there somewhere?

There are more at the old F13 forums. But it's a chore finding them. He posted there under the nickname Stormwaltz.

http://www.f13.net
 

Sunsetspawn

Arcane
Joined
Feb 10, 2013
Messages
1,039
Location
New York
Having the macguffin spawn a literal machine god with galaxy wide magic powers is the most retarded thing I have ever seen, and thats not even touching on how stupidly the actual execution was done.
One of the codex entries (forget which game) mentions built-in safeties regarding FTL ramming that no species in the galaxy could circumvent. I had been assuming that the macguffin being built was going to be an omnidirectional mass driver that would be connected to the most powerful mass relay in the galaxy: the citadel. Aside from the issue of a galactic targeting system, which I'm sure the citadel could've accommodated, this would have neatly connected the dots of the trilogy while also allowing for the creation of a device, consistent with in-universe scifiwoophysics, that would wipe out 99% of the leapers in the Milky Way instantly while forcing the survivors to fight a hopeless war, constantly keeping a celestial body between themselves and the citadel. This could also have allowed a few Reapers to go into hiding where they could never be shot, permitting future Reaper intrigue if the series was continued and the devs so desired.

I have to wonder if that idea was even considered, given how obvious it seemed to me.
 

Nutria

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 12, 2017
Messages
2,252
Location
한양
Strap Yourselves In
It's pretty incredible how everyone trying to guess what the superweapon would be came up with an idea that's way better than what it turned out to be.
 

Tyranicon

A Memory of Eternity
Developer
Joined
Oct 7, 2019
Messages
5,861
I don't want to be a debbie downer for a series that ended years and years ago, but Mass Effect's writers did not build the series to logically have a happy ending.

IMO the only endings that made sense were either a mass exodus to Andromeda, or another downer ending. The Reapers are a force of nature that has culled the galaxy "more times than your kind can fathom."

Should've stuck to the semi-lovecraftian theme they had going and given the series a properly dark ending.
 

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