Happy Birthday Joel

Happy Birthday, Joel! Congratulations on another year of life (i.e., not eating a dessert hoagie). May you have many more years of not eating a dessert hoagie in your future.

Happy birthday, Joel.

I now have plans to make a variety of dessert hoagies. Puff pastry hoagie bun filled with ice cream, fruit, and creme fraiche, topped with shaved chocolate. Truly this is the gateway to the void.

Yakov, we have a date with dessert. Destiny. Dessestiny. Whatever.

This weekend or next week, we shall gather to create madness.

With regards to eating things before you pay for it. My step dad, once made a sandwich in the supermarket and ate it during checkout. So my mother paid for opened bag of bread, deli honey ham, cheddar cheese and margarine.

Did she also pay for a bag of plastic knives? :D

Either would be acceptable.

I like the fact he bothered to butter it. If I'm rushing a sandwich i'd skip that step.

Brother!

Nah, he alway kept a pocket knife on him. He never goes anywhere unprepared.

Actually diabetes gets more serious as the numbers go down, which means he invented Diabetes Zero, and, like, glucose has replaced a key amino acid and so he has to keep eating pure sugar every day for the rest of his life or else he disintegrates.

It's true. I love the generic "dooooooo-WOP" as time slows down for a second then immediately speeds up. It's especially satisfying if you do a melee that falls on both the slow and fast side of the teleport. I really miss the time dilation in ME3's multiplayer, but it's made about even because my guy goes GRRRARRRARRRARERRRR when I hold down the melee button and they make a purple energy fist punch.

I would argue the choices at the end are not necessarily the result of logic, and thus not really "earned." Whether or not someone survives is directly dependent on how much 'loyalty' they have with you, i.e. how much they like you. This is a very "Bioware" conceit, but it does not make logical sense. Also, apparently doing side missions after you activate the "endgame" state of the Omega 4 Relay can also result in the death of characters. This is a very "RPG" conceit, and does not make logical sense. While you're technically right that the endgame is the result of choices the player made (in the sense that they're not random), you're being held to the effects of game mechanics that are counterintuitive, so I wouldn't say you "earned" them. It's true, you DO have to choose someone with an appropriate specialization, so that makes sense, but a "disloyal" expert will die, and a woefully underleveled character will survive just fine.

It's "ballsy" because it's one step under a permadeath run. That's deletion of main character, this is essentially deletion of an important NPC that's part of your party.

Not having them loyal is a product of your actions, or lack of them. The omega relay is, "shit just got real" but let's go see what's going on over at the citadel? It's a gaming conceit that people always gripe about. The world is ending but can you get me 10 monkey eyes? ME2 had the balls to make the sky is falling actually mean something.

I much preferred the way 2 handled party death than 1 did. Choosing one or the other because someone has to die for our story progression is pretty weak. Same with how they handled Wrex.

I think the loyalty based deaths are limited to the the normandy attack right? Does it matter why they died? If Miranda just ate a reaper laser to the face, while running down the corridor, and you didn't look up why on the internet couldn't it have always been scripted? Like Wash's death in Serenity which I know people praise Whedon for. That whole mission is played up as a suicide run for hours, people should expect characters to not walk away from it.

How is my Legion's death different from Aerith's? Mordin? I loved that guy and he's gone. His death was revealed to me in a camera pass over a battlefield where my crew expected to die. I didn't know why until talking with people who were following my progress.

I complain about ME2's combat because I can see the seams and it seems people complain about this aspect because they can't.

I don't think I added anything. My point is that all the things you're not happy with, you wouldn't know without outside information or multiple playthroughs. Playing the game, as presented, no deaths would feel like they weren't supposed to happen.

I'm almost willing to allow "you wouldn't know without a guide." But come on, excluding "multiple playthroughs" is absolutely something you're adding.

This is the sort of thing that ludonarrative dissonance was coined to describe. The entirety of the game, survival is based on gameplay choices, but in the final suicide mission, survival is based (partly) on dating-sim affinity choices. Saying that this is not apparent if you put single-playthrough blinders on is not a realistic mode for experiencing a game. You added that particular constraint yourself, and while I don't doubt it improved your experience, I still get to call it out as a BS game design decision.

I'm surprised you felt emotionally vested, Nth. I wasn't excited about the choices I had to make because every choice was preempted with "I think we should send [the best character for the job] to do this."

In fact, unless you really like having Zaeed and Grunt in your squad at the end of the game, statistically if everyone is loyal (and why wouldn't they be) everyone probably lived anyway. Maybe you lost Mordin. It's Wrex all over again. If you cared enough about Wrex to talk to him a lot and do his sidequst, Wrex doesn't die. Likewise: if you cared enough about characters in this game to do their sidequests, generally they didn't die either. Loyal characters CAN'T die in the final fight until all the unloyal ones are dead.

I would've been a lot happier with more failure states, as we stated in a different thread, and I was looking forward to a bunch of complex choices not "We need a tech specialist" followed by Tali and Legion going "Beeboop we are the best at tech." My first playthrough I lost only Tali, who was not loyal because of the Tali/Legion fight. My second playthrough, I wanted to try the game on Insanity, I lost nobody. And this is before I knew anything about the systems at work, I simply did everything in the game.

I bet more people lost their crew than lost a significant amount of teammates and that's only because the game kind of pulls of a fast one on you. It's like, hey in this video game there is a ship that is crashing into a planet LITERALLY FOREVER until you get to it and the 5 minute timer starts. Likewise, those terrorist missiles will hang suspended into mid-air until you get around to landing on that moon and diverting them, but THIS choice, this is the one with a time limit. Things like that should be consistent.

It's probably irrelevant anyway. I'm betting most characters from 2 will only have bit parts in 3. The only decision I really struggled with this time around was Samara v. Morinth. I really wanted to go for Morinth, as I did in my Insanity playthrough, but in the end my guilt won me over and I picked Samara. Mostly, I just want to see what Morinth would do in ME3. I don't give a shit about Samara, she's probably the most boring of the ME2 cast, I just let my weird videogame morality beat me into submission and let her live.

Dave said:

Maybe you lost Mordin. It's Wrex all over again. If you cared enough about Wrex to talk to him a lot and do his sidequst, Wrex doesn't die.

I lost Mordin, but I thought he was loyal? I'm still not sure why, which is why I'm thinking about going back and replaying it.

Squirrel, your method is a perfectly valid way to play the game, but Mass Effect's persistence complicates the idea of the narrative. They've largely dodged around this issue so far, but imagine if season 2 of a show went one way for you and another way for your friend. Then, as a consequence, a character you liked was dead and didn't show up in season 3, but did for your friend, and you think you'd have liked theirs better. This is why permadeath runs (which is essentially what you did) are a niche; you gain some things and you lose others-- you deliberately only experience one facet of the content and seek to increase the weight of that facet by excluding the others.

I'm with Dave, though, I'll bet most ME2 characters will have bit parts in 3 because basically every character, including Shepard can die in the final mission, right?

I don't see the perma death comparison at all. I played the game, the way they made it, to completion. I get your TV show analogy but the idea, which I may be adding as you put it, that my experience is different than yours is what makes it what it is. Is yours or mine better? Doesn't matter. That we can have a conversation about the differences does. Isn't that the whole thing the internet goes into a tizzy about Bethesda games for? It's what makes Mass Effect different from Uncharted.

That's the other issue. If someone's dead it's probably not going to spawn a new plot arc, so by leaving people dead you're putting a full stop on certain avenues of content. It's metagaming, yeah, but I want to see all those story threads, even down to the niggling little ones that only show up as one sentence news broadcasts.

This is good, I think that we've identified the core discrepancy here. I don't actually care about seeing all of the game content; I might check YouTube for a few particulars, but I place a higher value on the particular "shape" of my one, personalized playthrough, and I'm generally fine if that means that certain pieces of content are cut off from me at a later point. It feels more authentic to me that way.

Anyone going to play it with kinect? I know I will. ;-)

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