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Dalatrass Effect 3
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More co-op dlc with "two new maps, three new weapons and six new classes". No new enemies but could they add new enemies? I mean, they could add the Collectors but that "wouldn't be canon".
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It's weird that they talk about canon for some things and not others. The geth being enemies is not canon for everyone. Alright, so maybe they have a distinct set of variables that makes up official canon for multiplayer, or maybe there are pockets of evil geth still hiding out there somewhere. There can't be pockets of evil collectors as well? Or there can't be mercenary enemies like the Blue Sun who DIDN'T join up with the war effort?
Not to mention that two of the new classes are very likely to be Prothean which would, uh, be pretty hard to explain. -
It takes some nuts to talk about canon in a series where the last five minutes says "you know how the whole series has been about one thing? Turns out that all along it was something else!"
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I don't care about canon in multiplayer video games, generally, let alone canon in a game that still has me promoting units to a "galaxy at war" that, in my single-player campaign, ceased to be at war well over a month ago.
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Yayyyy, Graz got a Valiant in her commendation pack. Now I don't have to feel like a horrible person for having one.
(still need to feel guilty about my Black Widow)
I got another Eagle. :( No Hurricane for me. However, I complained to customer support last night about not getting my commendation pack and they gave me a pack worth 300k credits. Got a bunch of garbage, but I'm up to a Claymore III now, so that's nice. -
You are saying that like a Hurricane is actually desirable right? I just got one and went "aww man"
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Are all the sub-machine guns rare as hell? I only had two until last week, and virtually none of them are above rank 1. Excited for the Black Widow II, though. Every rank I get in that gun will probably make me smile.
Also, to whom do I direct my question about getting a commendation pack? I didn't get mine, either. -
So, got the game after finals ended and just finished it last night. GAME WAS SOOOOOO GOOOOD, a couple "meh" sidequests and a befuddling reputations system, BUT SOOO GOOOOOOD. Multiplayer is a total blast and from the looks of having now read this thread, seems like only one other guy has it for the 360? Alas.
I successfully avoided ads and talk of the game since the first trailer so I didn't feel over hyped and hearing that people hated the ending with a passion probably lowered my expectations. A giant improvement to the game was having your crew wander the ship and the citadel for you to talk to and the friendship sequences they included made me care about my crew more than ever. Combine that with the failure to keep Grunt alive in the 2nd game and the growing list of names on the Normandy Memorial, my perception of the end game shifted from, worrying how the galaxy would turn out, to, just wanting to make sure no one else on my crew died. As far as I knew, the end of the game would be like ME2's Suicide Mission all over again.
As for the ending,Spoiler:I don't really care at this point. I'm happy that my crew made it to a sandy getaway, since it seemed like half of them talked about retiring to a beach, and I don't care whether Shepard has to die or not. The only thing that really disappoints me is that there's no way to save the mass relays from being destroyed. I didn't pick the New Dark Age Tracer Tong option at the end of Deus Ex and I'm sure not going to pick it here when it takes a whole galaxy out of commission instead of just a planet. Seriously, if they just had one ending that allowed the surviving fleets to return to their respective homeworlds I would have zero problems with the overall endings. With the Reapers gone, the cycle is broken which I count as a win. I went with the "destroy" option and I think it was the best available. In my opinion, upon returning to Rannoch, after seeing the immediate help the Geth provided in helping them settle/fixing their immune system, I think the Quarians would try to rebuild them.
Overall though, with the rest of the game and its storylines, I'm not to bothered by the short comings of the last 5 minutes. Except for the relays. Maybe part of the galactic knowledge that Liara seeded on all the worlds would included schematics to help everyone rebuild them.
Also, I see nowhere in this thread has anyone appreciated the batarian Kishook Harpoon Gun in the multiplayer. That thing is almost as much fun as the sniper crossbow from Half-Life 2. Unfortunately it's the best gun I have at the moment so my vanguard was stuck using it. :/
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Loknar64 said:
Multiplayer is a total blast and from the looks of having now read this thread, seems like only one other guy has it for the 360? ATLAS!
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Maybe he wants to be a vanguard who never charges.
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Spoiler:Even with the mass relays gone, it's not like system-to-system travel is entirely impossible. You travel about inside star clusters all the time in the game, and the Reapers managed even further without them, and hey, there's plenty of Reaper wrecks all around to start reverse-engineering.
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Which takes the world in some interesting Cthulu-mythos directions. We're exploring a Reaper wreck, but we have to be careful we don't wake it up! (spoiler: it wakes up.)
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Spoiler:That's a mission in the second game!
In one of the endings the mass relays don't get destroyed. Control? I think? And yeah, I think the comparison the codex uses is that mass relays make things take hours instead of weeks. So FTL is still around (EDI says "Faster than light jump successful" when you leave systems since ME2) it's just way slower. So it's not like the combined armies of six civilizations are all stuck in one solar system forever, even though it would be a great Perfect Strangers-style buddy comedy where the Salarians and the Krogans have to move in together.
Also, keep everything but pistols and shotguns off of Vanguards, and not even shotguns most of the time. Just use a Predator pistol and rejoice in your 200% cooldown (amped up to 200% + 15% + 15% + 15% + 15% + 15% with proper Nova stacking, which might even been multiplicative which would just be CRAY-CRAY). For Bronze and Silver you barely need to fire your gun at all. Then you can upgrade to a Phalanx when you get it, and a Carnifex/Paladin whenever you get it to a high enough level to keep your cooldown up.
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Spoiler:I think the relays are still destroyed in the Control ending; it's missing the pull-back shot where you see chunks of the relay flying away, but it still clearly starts to shatter in the up-close shot along with every other variant.
I wouldn't mind a Hurricane to try out on my Turian soldier, but at the moment he's doing just fine with a Revenant III and copious prox-mine spam. -
Dave said:
Also, keep everything but pistols and shotguns off of Vanguards, and not even shotguns most of the time. Just use a Predator pistol and rejoice in your 200% cooldown (amped up to 200% + 15% + 15% + 15% + 15% + 15% with proper Nova stacking, which might even been multiplicative which would just be CRAY-CRAY). For Bronze and Silver you barely need to fire your gun at all. Then you can upgrade to a Phalanx when you get it, and a Carnifex/Paladin whenever you get it to a high enough level to keep your cooldown up.
Using my other human to automax everything except shockwave up to max, one match convinced me that this is basically the best thing ever. Until you try to charge away from a Banshee and it picks you up right beforehand, creating a fun glitch animation where I am lifted up across the hallway by a spectral hand and choked to death dark jedi style. :(
Edit: trying it out with other people while listening to this -
Spoilered for size:
Spoiler:
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We actually cleared that match. It was on gold, even! Anybody else experience this bug yet? Billions of husks, and only husks, especially during mission objective rounds. Got some obscene amount of money and exp at the end, too.
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That was my biggest disappointment: I was playing my infiltrator, so I was next to useless. I did get kill streaks off sticky grenades, so that was pretty goofy. Using a missile launcher during one of the hacks almost crashed my game.
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So I just watched my wife beat ME3 this past weekend, and she's pretty miffed about the ending, as am I. I assumed everyone was whining because they didn't like the direction things went in, but it turns out it was just bad. Like, they forgot what the hell game they were writing. I disagree with Joel in that there are some solidly scripted and plotted missions and character interactions, not all the writing was as bad as the ending.
TL;DR, basically everything I have to say has already been said in this thread.
Spoiler:So while it's true that synthetic vs. organic has been part of the game since the beginning, it's not really the central theme, because Mass Effect splits its story between all these different plot threads equally, as Dave mentioned. The Genophage and the central organic/organic conflicts have lots of other themes like duty vs. personal convictions, morality vs. necessity, colonial notions of more advanced races dominating and shaping the development of others, and so on. The ending comes out of left field because Mass Effect is a bunch of great little stories that the writers suddenly had to hang a big, shitty story on.
Besides screen time, there are a bunch of things that severely undercut the "organics vs. synthetics as the central conflict" angle that the writers thought they were going after. Essentially, the Reapers say that all synthetics will inevitably turn against organics and dominate them. First, the Reapers being synthetics, and seeking to eradicate all organic life, you assume they're in the antagonist side of that equation. But no, their purpose is supposedly to foster a cycle that encourages organic life, so there's a synthetic race that in a twisted way, ended up serving organics. Second, and far more notably, Shepard managed to reconcile the entire Geth and Quarian races from their generations-old blood feud by picking up a phone and spouting two or three sentences of blue-tinted dialogue at the admiralty board. The Reapers and their creators, beings far beyond our comprehension, somehow did not account for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict they think is inevitable. There's a lot of Shepard-worship in this game, far beyond the level of the others, but it's silly to say in all the other Cycles, not ONE managed to have a diplomat that brokered a peace between warring organics and synthetics, or that this rather simple resolution was incomprehensible to advanced races. You spend the entire game doing something that the Reapers show up and tell you can't be done, gotta hit the reset button.
All the stuff alluded to about the Reapers harvesting the galaxy for their own use turned out to be false, and it was stupid. It reminded me of the Matrix, and not in a good way; I'm talking about the scene with The Architect and Neo, where he uses a bunch of big words, and outlines the plan where the machines blow up Zion and the resistance every time, and somehow he's the first person to make it this far and say, "Nope, screw your dumb system."
I think there were plenty of endings I would have been happy with. Even just straight out losing to the Reapers, and the point wasn't that we won, but that we managed to unite the entire galaxy against the Reapers, synthetics and all. At least give some meaning to the gameplay thus far, or the war asset system-- no attention was paid to either. Convincing players that if you didn't jump through their hoops re: Galactic Readiness, you wouldn't get the good ending was one of the biggest bait-and-switches in videogames. Instead, they pulled this sort of Canticle For Leibowitz ripoff BS. The writing decisions that piss me off the most are the ones where the writers forget what the hell their story was actually about, and what made people like it. -
Also most of the time the reapers are even more successful, such that diplomatic talks probably aren't in the cards and the one other period we know about was dominated by an empire.
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Squirrel said:Spoiler:I just want to say that the peace between Geth and Quarian is not a guarantee. It never felt awkward to me because in my game the Geth were destroyed.
Doesn't matter. If the point of the Reapers is to resolve the cycle of synthetics achieving dominance over organics, you also managed to resolve it, albeit in a different way than I. It's awkward because they somehow never foresaw the eventualities both of us got to, even though it's really pretty obvious.
This talk reminds me, anyone ever played Sonic Adventure 2? It probably has the most amazing non-sequitur in video games (outside of Deadly Premonition), where Shadow the Hedgehog has sacrificed himself, all the main characters are on the space station, and Shadow is probably dying a fiery death, burning up on re-entry, and Tails says in his chipper little kid cartoon voice, "But the important thing is, we did it together!" While SA2's writing is certainly pretty bad, the disconnect between Shadow's journey of revenge and redemption is so jarring to any viewer, you have to wonder at the writer who thought that was an appropriate capstone to the entire story. -
Clearly the paradigm of the narrative was the sine qua non, and as such, I feel that Mass Effect was the true Feminist Manifesto.
BORING
New DLC is out. Go gets it. -
New bug encountered: we couldn't get new ammo, but we became invincible. Four-man melee apocalypse! Thank god we were fighting Geth.
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Fucccckkkk. You get all the good bugs. :(
Spoiler:Also I read a thing that was like "why wasn't the reaper's goal to prune intergalactic life to make way for new species" which wouldn't have been the BEST explanation, but probably better than the one we got.
HOWEVER: the reapers do have the advantage of the longview on things. You made the Geth all huggy-pals now, but that's like a gambler's fallacy of "well, the Geth are our bros, nothing bad will ever happen to us again."
ALSO TECHNICALLY THE REAPEARS ARE A RACE OF ORGANO-SYNTHETICS. -
I feel like I've paid for it with the million Vanguard corpse charge bugouts. Also, all the objectives were fucked. Hacks prompted a "devices disabled" HUD element, while device disabling runs prompted an "objects recovered" element. Pretty great.
Spoiler:Isn't organo-synthetic a kind of herb salad? -
I just don't understand why the Reapers have to kill everyone to stop some organic/synthetic race war from possibly happening. Why not just be some police force that intercedes if one happens rather than assuming that one will happen?
Or why not just subjugate the species in such a way as to prevent them from developing AI? Is it that hard to just leave a Reaper in orbit that blows up a city every once in a while? Maybe someone should give them a copy of God Emperor of Dune. -
Some of the writers already read that. I'd have to replay the From Ashes mission (I think that's where I was getting the Dune vibe) to call out the specific moment that made me think "hmmmmm".
I mean aside from evolutionary peak of humanity and threat of destruction from an unknown source from beyond known space. Which turned out to be synthetics by the way... Fuck you Brian Herbert. -
I think the issue is that they wanted the story to be "the Reapers are gardeners, the galaxy is their garden, and organic life is like vegetable plants." You do things to encourage growth in patterns you want, you cut away growth that's not productive or undesirable, and when the harvest is ready you collect the tasty parts and throw away the rest.
Unfortunately the writers didn't have the chops to pull off a switcheroo of that magnitude in the time they had to do it. They'd have been better off just leaving it as "Saberhagen's Berserkers, The Video Game". -
RobotBastard said:
"the Reapers are gardeners, the galaxy is their garden, and organic life is like vegetable plants." .
Having now read this analogy I will never think the Reapers are threatening ever again. :/
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Dave said:
Spoiler:HOWEVER: the reapers do have the advantage of the longview on things. You made the Geth all huggy-pals now, but that's like a gambler's fallacy of "well, the Geth are our bros, nothing bad will ever happen to us again."
Is that a gambler's fallacy, though? There's a possibility that they're completely wiped out as well, which entirely subverts the Reapers' claim. There's not much proof given that synthetics have a house edge on organics. -
I think the point is that the Reapers said "there's never been a situation where organics and synthetics were friendly, they always try to kill each other, therefore it's totally inevitable that it's going to happen", and here's a situation where that's...not true.
I mean, if the Reapers had a quick line about "yeah, we've seen that before, trust us when we say it never works out" that would be one thing, but the ending didn't even address it. -
Dave said:
I'm just saying that, if you're basing it on stastics, the reapers have a much bigger sample size.
Spoiler:
They have a giant sample size, but they're saying that organic/synthetic coexistence or organic dominance is not a truly stable end state, but only metastable-- further development will result in the "true" final state of synthetic dominance. Even assuming they've let galactic cycles go along different spans of time, they cannot say definitively what would have happened had they not intervened.
You're right in that the Reapers have conducted this particular experiment many times, but the problem is that the constraints they put on the experiment (wipe out galaxy if synthetics win OR time limit is reached) can never disprove the possibility that given enough time, there can be a stable end state that has a place for organics. It's a fundamentally flawed experiment.
Assigning motives to the Catalyst or Reapers or whatever is where I think things started to go wrong. It has to be a very good reason, or else you can't have one at all. I'd have been fine with the Lovecraftian angle they initially introduced Sovereign with. "You exist because we allow it; you will end because we demand it." is a great line, and it's scary. The entirety of galactic civilization is an insect, and they are simply the flyswatter. I'm also reminded of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. origins in Roadside Picnic. But inherent in the notion of the Lovecraftian apocalypse is the idea that the entirety of civilization is a meaningless interlude, which rebels at the themes of Manifest Destiny and Romanticism in the modern Western RPG. It was silly of me to think they'd ever have an ending where we were truly irrelevant, even to a godlike galactic civilization we couldn't comprehend: in fact, the Reapers only exist to take care of us organics, because we're so fragile and special, and need a little helping hand from the mean synthetics every now and then. -
guys seriously ME has been out for like four years now
" "You exist because we allow it; you will end because we demand it." is a great line, and it's scary. "
And it fits with my "gardeners of the galaxy" idea.
If anything they're going more for a "galactic zoo" approach, where they keep organic life going because it's cute or something. -
Well it's now been two months since I've played it, so my memory is pretty rusty, but I remember them saying "over time, these systems will fail" not "as soon as the synthetics become AI, you guys are fucked," as you say RB. Maybe that's not actually how it happened and I inserted that line, but if it did that's why saying "but me and the Geth are totally bros, WE HAVE A FOREVER LOVE!" doesn't annul the Reaper's argument.
But I really would've preferred a galactic gardeners/roadside picnic approach, which is something I think you can see coming if you're looking only at ME/ME2. I don't know if I've mentioned it in this thread, but you can find stuff in ME2 about Harbinger's thoughts on the viability of Reaperizing various species.
Actually on that topic, I'm kind of disappointed that, for the most part, the Roadside Picnic stuff really wasn't represented in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. -
Dave said:
Well it's now been two months since I've played it, so my memory is pretty rusty, but I remember them saying "over time, these systems will fail" not "as soon as the synthetics become AI, you guys are fucked,"
Right, but they don't seem to consider an organic civilization re-achieving dominance over an AI, or a young organic upstart race showing up and completely rebalancing the power structure. It diminishes the reaper argument because you could argue they never waited, or they never waited long enough for the possibility to reassert itself-- their model hits the reset button at a given time limit, or when they have deemed synthetics to be dominant.
Really, they don't spend a whole lot of time exploring the Reapers, or even the Collectors aside from what you mentioned. Halo 3 at least you got a bunch of the Forerunner history they'd been hinting at. -
The new sniper rifle with variable scope and exploding bullets is probably the best thing ever. I'm still unsure how something counts as a headshot when one bullet explodes the entire creature. OH WELL! =D
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Do you call it "the karl reegar special"?
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Now I'm stuck with the image of Kal'Reegar looking like Carl Winslow under the suit.
