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Mass Effect Legendary Edition remaster trilogy

Joined
Nov 23, 2017
Messages
4,010
They'd have to rewrite major portions of the story starting in ME2 and retcon reapers back to their original intention. There's simply nothing Shepard can do that could ever compare to dealing with the reapers, they're a galaxy-wide extinction event.
I wonder how much they kick themselves for writing themselves into a corner like that. Easiest way out would probably be an alternate universe.

I thought remasters implied minimal changes to the original content.

A remake of Mass Effect would be a great idea to resuscitate some of the original value of the intellectual property, which is why I am absolutely certain beyond all doubt that EA/Bioware will never, ever even considering doing it.

As it is now, they are just going to remind people in vivid detail why they are pissed off at EA/Bioware.

"Rotating crops" is utterly alien to EA's "slash and burn" strategy of buying up studios, forcing them to do dumb things, and then shuttering the ones that don't get the results they want.

More often than not over the last few years "remaster" has meant remake when it comes to video games. Spyro Reignited Trilogy, Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, and Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled were branded as remasters, but they're very much remakes of the original games as opposed. Likewise you've got those "remasters" like Wild Guns Reloaded and The Ninja Warriors Once Again which have completely new characters sprites and backgrounds. Even something like the new Command & Conquer Remastered Collection is a remake given they remade all the maps, buildings, units, and recorded new music for it.

From all the interviews I've seen, Bioware's fuck ups don't sound like they're EA fault. It sounds like EA lets them do what they want. There's an interview one of the doctors did after they left BioWare, and he said EA gave them enough rope to hang themselves.

There's not a lot you can do to *really* be an independent studio when your part of a big Western-style corporation like EA.

Even if EA doesn't mandate multiplayer (ruining level design in the single player campaign in various ways to accommodate system changes) or require people to switch to their company standard Unreal engine rather than building better and more interactive content and systems with the engine they already possess, they'll always allocate resources and give bonuses and promotions based on the rank-and-file below them conforming to the "tone at the top."

This isn't as big a problem (at least not historically) in say Japanese development because usually the top executives have absolutely no fucking idea of any kind at all what video games should be like (Sony, Konami) or are game designers themselves who rose to their position of authority from being the company's best designers (like Dark Souls creator becoming President of FromSoftware, various Nintendo presidents, etc).

Western executives know too little about video games to make one themselves but just enough their opinions and ideas can utterly ruin entire studios and franchises simply because those opinions and ideas exist and the rank-and-file want to satisfy their superiors and get those budgets/promotions/bonuses.

Obviously, EA is going to give a bigger budget to studios who follow the top executives idea of what makes a game commercially successful, and will tolerate lack of success far more if you at least attempted to do things the way the top said it should be done.

Besides, pretty sure doctors are directly contradicted by the fact that EA mandates all studios to have things like DLC, multiplayer (among others) in all EA games.

But sure, I'll grant that Bioware is probably more responsible for their failures internally than EA as a whole is. EA may only be guilty of not actively punishing studios for *not* being more independent as creatives.

Q: Do you feel that BioWare's games were ever made to conform to some homogenous EA standard with things like forced multiplayer, micro-transactions, smart phone spinoffs, etc.? Did any of this make you jaded? Or you reject this notion?

Greg Zeschuk: No, I definitely reject it. And I can explain it too. The best analogy I use, in a positive way, is EA gives you enough rope to hang yourself. It was really interesting because we really made all the choices we wanted to make ourselves; these are all things we wanted to try. And that's something to remember - while we were independent we didn't have quite the resources we had as part of EA, and then we got to EA and it was like "wow we can do all this stuff." We had to be really thoughtful about what we wanted to focus on.

I remember this really distinct moment where - it was probably five or six months - we were just starting to wrap our head around how we worked with the company. And it took months for this formal period of joining EA, and learning how everything works, and when the initiation was done, we were sitting around asking how do we do stuff. It dawned on us, you just do it. That was the biggest revelation, that rope that EA gives you; they don't second-guess you, they don't say you shouldn't do that. We had complete creative control over a lot of it; some fans didn't like some of it and some of it was experimental, quite frankly.

The one caveat is at the end of the day for any company you have to run a profit, so you have to be thinking of things that actually make you profitable. So while you're taking all these creative risks in trying crazy stuff you almost have to simultaneously focus on the bottom line. The top line is not enough. In some ways, being independent I would say we had to be more conservative - being part of a big company, you could be more aggressive and try stuff. I think that's something people [struggle with] when they join EA; they do too much or they do too little.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...n-bioware-ea-and-the-uncertain-console-future
 

J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
Agree that post seems fake. Author doesn't really understand how much work it would be to remake a game in another engine, even if you already have the art assets ready to go. The only reasons to go that route are either if the licensing costs are more expensive or if the old engine doesn't work on current platforms. Neither is the case here.

They could absolutely bring back the actors for a ME3 ending remake or some unnecessary woke scenes. Voice actors are paid by the hour, and none of their stars have risen since the series ended. Hell, Mark Meer is probably teaching a community college acting class or something.
 

RepHope

Savant
Joined
Apr 27, 2017
Messages
400
Yeah pretty impressive how little work any of them got other than Hale, who was already a superstar before she was Shepard.

Unless this totally redoes ME3 to make it not shit, I’m going to pass.
 

Terra

Cipher
Joined
Sep 4, 2016
Messages
896
What sort of madman is going to put all that work into adding content into a remaster across 3 separate games and not touch the shitshow of an ending that caused such an explosive backlash. Calling BS on the rumours.
 

Luckmann

Arcane
Zionist Agent
Joined
Jul 20, 2009
Messages
3,759
Location
Scandinavia
If they remastered the entire trilogy so it all played and looked the same,applied the gearing of the first game, restored ME2 to its pre-consolization/release state, fixed the glued-on DLC CNPCs, and fixed the dogshit ending of ME3, I might give a shit.

But they're not going to do that. They're just getting into the remaster game to milk consoomers a bit more.
 

Luckmann

Arcane
Zionist Agent
Joined
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Messages
3,759
Location
Scandinavia
restored ME2 to its pre-consolization/release state
Any vids of that remaining?
I don't think so. Basically, the game wasn't staggered until just shortly before release. You could recruit squad members in any order, and all the squad members actually still have interactions and voiceovers relating to conversations and locations they literally cannot go to unless you use an editor to add them to your squad before going on the mission in which they're recruited.

It was split up solely because consoles could not handle it, and they wanted to keep the number of times plebs had to change discs to a minimum.
 

Technomancer

Liturgist
Joined
Dec 24, 2018
Messages
1,417
I don't think so. Basically, the game wasn't staggered until just shortly before release. You could recruit squad members in any order, and all the squad members actually still have interactions and voiceovers relating to conversations and locations they literally cannot go to unless you use an editor to add them to your squad before going on the mission in which they're recruited.

It was split up solely because consoles could not handle it, and they wanted to keep the number of times plebs had to change discs to a minimum.
Right, right, like Tali getting ill on Omega? I remember seeing cut lines on youtube. Never knew the fucking consoles are to blame.
 

Luckmann

Arcane
Zionist Agent
Joined
Jul 20, 2009
Messages
3,759
Location
Scandinavia
I don't think so. Basically, the game wasn't staggered until just shortly before release. You could recruit squad members in any order, and all the squad members actually still have interactions and voiceovers relating to conversations and locations they literally cannot go to unless you use an editor to add them to your squad before going on the mission in which they're recruited.

It was split up solely because consoles could not handle it, and they wanted to keep the number of times plebs had to change discs to a minimum.
Right, right, like Tali getting ill on Omega?
Yeah, there's tons of those. Legion is especially noteworthy. He's even got voiceover stuff for Horizon, iirc. It may sound like a small issue of the order of missions, but it's actually a lot of lost content, everything taken together.

Almost all (or even all) squad members have some kind of input in every single mission, but huge parts were essentially "cut" just because some peasants can't be bothered to switch discs on their digitized butter-churners.
 

Tytus

Arcane
Joined
Jul 9, 2011
Messages
3,596
Location
Mazovia
Legion has by far the most cut dialogue. He was moved towards nearly the end of the game. Which is ridiculous considering how unique he is.

To quote Chris L'etoile:

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.

And all that dialogue can be re-added with a simple mod as it sill in the game files:

 

Nano

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 6, 2016
Messages
4,647
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
^ Sounds like Chris doesn't know ME2 lets you continue playing post-ending. You can easily unlock all of Legion's Normandy dialogues by doing a few side missions.
 

Luckmann

Arcane
Zionist Agent
Joined
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Messages
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Location
Scandinavia
^ Sounds like Chris doesn't know ME2 lets you continue playing post-ending. You can easily unlock all of Legion's Normandy dialogues by doing a few side missions.
Who the fuck keeps playing after a game has ended, how the fuck does that make sense, and what kind of cretin hasn't finished everything else before the game ends?
 
Last edited:

Nano

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 6, 2016
Messages
4,647
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
Who the fuck keeps playing after a gzme has ended, how the fuck does thzt make sense, and what kind of cretin hasn't finished everything else before the game ends?
Lair of the Shadow Broker and Arrival DLCs are supposed to be done post-ending.
 

alyvain

Learned
Joined
Mar 18, 2017
Messages
376
Who the fuck keeps playing after a gzme has ended, how the fuck does thzt make sense, and what kind of cretin hasn't finished everything else before the game ends?
Lair of the Shadow Broker and Arrival DLCs are supposed to be done post-ending.

You sure about the 'supposed' part? I mean, is there anything supporting this narratively?
 

Nano

Arcane
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Joined
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Messages
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Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
You sure about the 'supposed' part? I mean, is there anything supporting this narratively?
They're giant detours in a game already with littered with detours. Narratively speaking, it's just awkward to finish these DLCs and then forget about their impact on the plot for a while until you start ME3.
 

raesha

Educated
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
53
You sure about the 'supposed' part? I mean, is there anything supporting this narratively?

Frankly, it doesn't really matter whether you do them in the post-game or not. They were intelligent enough to change parts of the story in the DLC to fit either of them, depending on when the player engages with it.
 

Semiurge

Cipher
Joined
Apr 11, 2020
Messages
6,077
Location
Asp Hole
If they remastered the entire trilogy so it all played and looked the same,applied the gearing of the first game, restored ME2 to its pre-consolization/release state, fixed the glued-on DLC CNPCs, and fixed the dogshit ending of ME3, I might give a shit.

But they're not going to do that. They're just getting into the remaster game to milk consoomers a bit more.

I might if they were bundled with all of the released DLC, but then I remember that they won't be made available without DRM until I'm 90 or so. That's when I stop giving a shit again.
 
Joined
Dec 9, 2013
Messages
226
Location
Calgary
Just completed all three games again, using the ALOT texture tool and loaded in the fix packs. I have beaten the games a few times in the past, this time went fully modded this time.

Really enjoyed the series again, as always. It always jarring jump between 1, then 2, and even 3 feels a bit different than 2. However, great games from my view point. I don't really think a remaster unless it is perfect could ever compared to how the original games play.

I still don't think Bioware can pull it off correctly.
 

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