Mass Effect 4

[Gaidin]

But give me a good/evil meter so it is a RP game that focuses on who you choose to be throughout the game. I liked how you look more badass the more renegade you became.

Shephard will never look as badass as Max Payne. Guess which one of them had no need of a morality meter.

[The Dude]

I never understood why Bioware felt the need to keep the whole morality meter gimmick in their games to begin with. I mean, in KotOR it had a function within the lore. Being light or dark side matters, physically. It changes the way you look, how you behave, the powers you have access to. It made total sense. But why do I need a bar that shows exactly how callous my Shepard is? And how does it make sense that her ability to choose the deaths of innocents over a mission's primary objective is determined by how much of a jerk she's been in completely unrelated situations?

[Sir Adrian]

Because, just like in real life, it takes a certain frame of mind to make a choice like that, and, unless you are a schizo, you cannot go from being the salt of the earth to queen-***** of the universe just like that.
A good character will never even take that choice into consideration, and would rather fail the mission than let a bunch of people die, while "renegade" character will go to any lengths to get the job done not caring about anything else.

It's a gradual process, which is exactly what the morality bar represents. The real problem with it is that in their other games the choices you had to make were waaay to extreme.

[Mangalore]

I never understood why Bioware felt the need to keep the whole morality meter gimmick in their games to begin with. I mean, in KotOR it had a function within the lore. Being light or dark side matters, physically. It changes the way you look, how you behave, the powers you have access to. It made total sense. But why do I need a bar that shows exactly how callous my Shepard is? And how does it make sense that her ability to choose the deaths of innocents over a mission's primary objective is determined by how much of a jerk she's been in completely unrelated situations?

Additionally there seems to be a strange breakdown in reconstructive surgery in the future with virtually anyone of note sporting facial scars for no apparent reason. Do they use medieval doctors to patch them up? And if your face starts cracking up due to your cyber implants I'd say there is some serious immune rejection on the way and you need a doctor!

I mainly don't like that the decisions are rated paragon and renegade but actually range from hippie tree hugging to psychopathic murderer. It's really hard to play the natural in betweens as you don't know if the renegade choice is just a tough reprimand or Shepard shooting someone innocent in the face.

The meter itself and the limitations of choice later on would make kind of sense if they built your character to be a certain way in a certain situations so you suddenly changing your mind becomes strange but overall it has the strange effect that it limits your actions as you hit a paragon/renegade interupt if you see one and will choose a paragon/renegade option if you have it available over a neutral one out of fear you lock yourself out of cool decisions later on.

I mostly try to play the in between with different flavour (e.g. paragon concerning personal interaction but often renegade options concerning politics and military decisions). I really liked having my neutral Jedi turn Sith in Kotor by simply solving problems for the good in a bad way, but it still needed that final leap where she had to act slightly out of character. Would have been better if that final step over the edge would have been as natural as her long slide towards the dark side.

[Kanaric]

Why is there 10 pages for a game that everyone knows is going to be bad? I don't get why EA games are this popular. Is everyone confused into thinking that they make good games? Or are we all just 14 here?

[Tankfriend]

This is why:


Sad to see that it works, eh?

[Mangalore]

Why is there 10 pages for a game that everyone knows is going to be bad? I don't get why EA games are this popular. Is everyone confused into thinking that they make good games? Or are we all just 14 here?

boredom, what else? Otherwise they had a good universe set up for great stories and it's sad to see all this potential got wasted bit by bit. Some of it is obviously over saturation aka it was only interesting because it was unexplained but this is kind of the the thing: You don't have to turn every small hint and side character into a meaningful subplot for the main story.

Shadow Broker? Could have remained an illusive spy ring in the background.
Cerberus? Could have remained some crazy radicals paid out of Black Ops money.
and so on.


Eh, yeah, it's lunchtime atm...

[The Dude]

Also I keep coming back to these threads because I'm curious to see how people deal with fiction that doesn't live up to their expectations. On the BSN it's a horrible mess, but here you can see how after ME3 some people (like me) instantly lost all interest, others turned into apologists for reasons likely having to do with stockholm syndrome (the indoctrination theory could basically be summed up as saying that Bioware's genius went over our heads and that because we approached the game at face value it kept us from appreciating the ending as the work of art it was), and others still seem strangely unaffected, as though the quality of the story was never important to them at all. I see some people muster up interest for Mass Effect like nothing ever went wrong. Like the stories aren't completely ridiculous and the DLC's aren't 90 minutes of clownesque stupidity. It fascinates me how you can just be completely oblivious to a story's quality and enjoy it either way.

[trance]

boredom, what else? Otherwise they had a good universe set up for great stories and it's sad to see all this potential got wasted bit by bit. Some of it is obviously over saturation aka it was only interesting because it was unexplained but this is kind of the the thing: You don't have to turn every small hint and side character into a meaningful subplot for the main story.

Shadow Broker? Could have remained an illusive spy ring in the background.
Cerberus? Could have remained some crazy radicals paid out of Black Ops money.
and so on.


Eh, yeah, it's lunchtime atm...

Well, I suppose the pay-for-content idea kind of milks the story dry quite quickly, especially when storywriting isn't at its highest. Also, making novels and crap part of the canon also dries up the lore rather than expand it, focus is taken away from building up the in-game universe and experience and is instead placed in making a compatible canon. The drop in quality lies no doubt among monetary considerations, since ME3 was a big EA release it needed to appeal to as many people as possible. What then happens is exactly what happened with Dragon Age 2 - dumbing down both story, universe and gameplay.

Also, ME3 multiplayer just sucked bum. They didn't even try to hide that it just was a bad excuse to sell content, but I suppose it's logical when you try to appeal to kids in their early-mid teens whose parents buy them whatever they point at - it's a real mainstream game industry favourite target group obviously.

[ggggtotalwarrior]

Well, in response to everything that's been said here:

I'm a teenager. I haven't played ME in months. After the ending I kinda gave up on it. I also don't play any console multiplayer and buy all my consoles and games with my own money that I mostly earn myself. I'm kinda annoyed by all the statements being made here about the younger generation. However, I still agree on almost every point regarding Mass Effect, EA and gaming in general (****ING DLCS can burn in hell!) So, I think in spite of all thatm, we're pretty much on the same side.

[Gaidin]

Also I keep coming back to these threads because I'm curious to see how people deal with fiction that doesn't live up to their expectations. On the BSN it's a horrible mess, but here you can see how after ME3 some people (like me) instantly lost all interest, others turned into apologists for reasons likely having to do with stockholm syndrome (the indoctrination theory could basically be summed up as saying that Bioware's genius went over our heads and that because we approached the game at face value it kept us from appreciating the ending as the work of art it was), and others still seem strangely unaffected, as though the quality of the story was never important to them at all. I see some people muster up interest for Mass Effect like nothing ever went wrong. Like the stories aren't completely ridiculous and the DLC's aren't 90 minutes of clownesque stupidity. It fascinates me how you can just be completely oblivious to a story's quality and enjoy it either way.

Are you saying I need to get more than entertainment out of my games?

[The Dude]

Not at all. Get out of it whatever you want. Same reason I enjoy Gears of War and Michael Bay films. What fascinates me is the instance of Mass Effect. The inability of a group of writers to come up with a plot that works and the lunacy they invoke to correct their mistakes. It's the narrative equivalent of watching a someone you thought was an acrobat slip over a patch of soap that he himself made, and then claw around him at whatever he sees in an attempt to retain his footing. By the time he finally hits the floor he does so with all the grace of a crippled elephant, and you realise he might've never been an acrobat at all. Somehow that doesn't seem to bother some, and they go see his next show anyway. "Why?" you wonder, but it doesn't matter. His shows are crowded either way and he still has an audience, even if his original fans left him. Apparently his ability to perform his art was never what determined his success. But how is that possible?

[Captain Jin]

I'm disappointed by the ending for sure, but I simply love the Mass Effect universe too much to simply take a dump on it because Walters and Hudson decided to piss on the rest of the team's creative consensus. It's so senseless to completely swear off an insanely detailed and creative world simply because of a mistake-- even if it's a bad one.

Dude, you and I have talked about your own creative ventures and just think about how upset you'd be after putting painstaking work into something then you write something that your fans don't like for whatever reason and then most of them simply swear off your entire universe that you spent hours upon hours upon hours crafting and pulling hair over and trying to bring to life. It's not really fair to all the guys on Bioware's creative team to just say "****** you Bioware your ending didn't live up to my expectations and now your universe sucks donkey nuts".

[The Dude]

I'm disappointed by the ending for sure, but I simply love the Mass Effect universe too much to simply take a dump on it because Walters and Hudson decided to piss on the rest of the team's creative consensus. It's so senseless to completely swear off an insanely detailed and creative world simply because of a mistake-- even if it's a bad one.

Dude, you and I have talked about your own creative ventures and just think about how upset you'd be after putting painstaking work into something then you write something that your fans don't like for whatever reason and then most of them simply swear off your entire universe that you spent hours upon hours upon hours crafting and pulling hair over and trying to bring to life. It's not really fair to all the guys on Bioware's creative team to just say "****** you Bioware your ending didn't live up to my expectations and now your universe sucks donkey nuts".

I understand what you're trying to say here but I think that the true mistake Bioware made wasn't so much the crappy ending itself. I mean I was there rooting for them to make something awesome with the extended cut, but by the time it became evident how unlikely it was that things would turn out that way I pretty much gave up. The thing is that I do believe that a writer can make a mistake. Just because it's a creative job doesn't mean that there isn't a certain level of quality you should try to uphold. Nobody's saying that the ME setting isn't awesome. If that was the sole measure by which I judged I'd still be playing the trilogy. What gets to me is the massive discrepancy between the quality of the universe and the quality of the writers trying to tell stories in them. What good is it to buy a Lamborghini if you live in a country with dirt roads?

I would've felt worse for Hudson and Walters if they hadn't spent months blatantly lying to the media in an attempt to sell their game as something it obviously wasn't. They wouldn't give us an ABC ending. They wouldn't end the game with a Reaper off-button. The Rachni would be involved. The Reapers could win if you made the wrong choices. And all the while as they were saying this they were working on exactly the opposite of what they were promising. The final act of the game is a cobbled-together mess that contradicts everything they said. And afterwards, when their fanbase voiced their concern, we got a belittling, conceited response. That's what gets me. And I know that there's good people on that team. If there weren't we wouldn't have had Tuchanka and Rannoch. But even those were unable to avert the disaster that was Leviathan.

What's so bad about just retconning the whole mess? This whole schtick about artistic integrity, man... get outta here. What a load. With Leviathan they only dug a deeper hole for themselves, made the story more ridiculous. If I had written something so exceptionally poor as an ending to my work and I'd see people who had invested so much money and time into what they hoped would turn out to be an awesome story respond the way the BSN did to Bioware, you bet your ass I'd be thinking about what I could do to make it up with them. I'd certainly not cite my creative license to write nonsense. Matter of fact, I already have my ending mapped out. Bioware never did. Walters himself admitted it. They made the whole thing up as they went along. Is that how you're going to write a trilogy where player choice is supposed to carry over? Walters literally said 'it's the only way you can do a trilogy like this, because you don't know how player choices turn out'. What do you mean you don't know? You're the one who thought them up and put them in. You know all the equations. You can map them out. A little bit of diligence goes a long way. But no, planting your baret-wearing ass down in front of cameras is more important.

So no, it's not so much the bad ending itself that put me off. Gears of War 3 was rather disappointing too, but not offensively so because I never expected it to be much more than it was, and even then their resolution actually stuck with the plot and used material already present. It didn't conjure new characters up out of nowhere in the last five minutes. Bioware made every mistake they could possibly make and still had the nerve to be arrogant about their accomplishments. How about a little humility? "Sorry guys, we messed up." Chris Metzen was man enough to do the same and Warcraft has a greater following than Mass Effect I can promise you that. You know that night where Michael Richards got heckled and he called that guy a ******? Seven years later he's saying how if it was up to him he'd go back in time and show some humility. Admit that he was messing up, that he wasn't being funny, and that he'd go back to work on his material. Instead he started calling his audience names and it blew up in his face and he's still upset about the way he handled it.

Something tells me that seven years from now noone at Bioware will give a crap either way. Maybe that's what distinguishes an artist from a fraud. I've no problem with Weekes, no problem with Dombrow. I don't even have problems with making a guy with no writing experience whatsoever the lead writer of a company-defining trilogy so long as you have faith that he can pull it off. But when he can't, messes up bigtime, and suddenly sprouts an ego, I give up. Mac Walters is the main reason I got so angry. That guy drank way too much of his own kool-aid. I'm not gonna fork out my own money to fund a person like that.

[Gaidin]

I understand what you're trying to say here but I think that the true mistake Bioware made wasn't so much the crappy ending itself. I mean I was there rooting for them to make something awesome with the extended cut, but by the time it became evident how unlikely it was that things would turn out that way I pretty much gave up. The thing is that I do believe that a writer can make a mistake. Just because it's a creative job doesn't mean that there isn't a certain level of quality you should try to uphold. Nobody's saying that the ME setting isn't awesome. If that was the sole measure by which I judged I'd still be playing the trilogy. What gets to me is the massive discrepancy between the quality of the universe and the quality of the writers trying to tell stories in them. What good is it to buy a Lamborghini if you live in a country with dirt roads?

Well in your defense, I was being somewhat snarky with my earlier question about entertainment. I think the setting is the sole measure for it to be judged precisely because I'm indifferent to the trilogy. I mean, I can play it, I can be entertained(I still do occasionally), but it was always something of an rpg-shooter meshed together that went the way of Deus Ex. And yes, before you ask, I can be somewhat entertained by Deus Ex 2, when I can get it to run on a modern operating system, but Deus Ex 1 and Deus Ex: HR are the ones I actually play over and over.

But that's why my judgement is around Mass Effect's setting. This is the one thing where EA's greed can literally do some good if put on a proper leash in the new CEO. Open the floodgates of programming and writing creativity. Space strategy games between the races. Spec Ops shooters of your more traditional missions instead of saving the universe. A police shooter on the Citadel.

What's so bad about just retconning the whole mess? This whole schtick about artistic integrity, man... get outta here. What a load. With Leviathan they only dug a deeper hole for themselves, made the story more ridiculous. If I had written something so exceptionally poor as an ending to my work and I'd see people who had invested so much money and time into what they hoped would turn out to be an awesome story respond the way the BSN did to Bioware, you bet your ass I'd be thinking about what I could do to make it up with them. I'd certainly not cite my creative license to write nonsense. Matter of fact, I already have my ending mapped out. Bioware never did. Walters himself admitted it. They made the whole thing up as they went along. Is that how you're going to write a trilogy where player choice is supposed to carry over? Walters literally said 'it's the only way you can do a trilogy like this, because you don't know how player choices turn out'. What do you mean you don't know? You're the one who thought them up and put them in. You know all the equations. You can map them out. A little bit of diligence goes a long way. But no, planting your baret-wearing ass down in front of cameras is more important.

Thing is, you have a lot of world potential from the idea of ever-present but ever-silent Reapers that do nothing but people react to them culturally anyway. Cults will rise. Even religions. And not cults brought about by that reaper corruption we ran into. Just cults worshiping of their own accord. See the idea of the police shooter. Any writer sees the value here because it so turns the world upside down and mixes things up for the future, even if it wasn't the greatest thing for the trilogy proper.

But again, as I said, I don't think of it from the standpoint of the trilogy anymore.

[The Dude]

Don't you feel, though, like the way the Reapers have been handled has sort of contaminated the lore? With that I mean that no matter how awesome any other story told within the setting turns out to be, it will always take place in the same universe as where a race of godlike space squids made a machine to solve the problem of machines rebelling. And it will always be the same universe where space magic reigns and a beam of green light can turn people into robocop. It will always be the universe of the Crucible, the universe of that douchebag Kai Leng, and of Mass Effect: Deception or whatever that travesty that Dietz wrote was called. Bioware takes no artistic responsibility for the quality of their work, so what does it matter if others do? I can't escape how I feel about this.

To use a comparison, take Star Wars. The prequels ruined it for so many people. Darth Vader will now forever be that whiny kid from Tatooine who blew up a base of comic relief droids. Jar Jar Binks will always be in the lore. Before the prequels we at least had the luxury of dismissing the occasional idiot plot taking place in the Expanded Universe. The whole post-ROTJ clone Emperor plot was so bad, but it was also not canon. It wasn't until the prequel series that real offense was caused.

[Gaidin]

All things being equal, that should've been seen coming from the first game when the invincible Reapers were revealed. They were going to need an outrageous solution to handle them anyway. It's why I was never sucked into the land of surprise or disappointment when it came to Mass Effect 3. It was only merely not as good as the first two. But now, the invincible Reapers are irrelevant to the story, however they were handled. They're either inanimate and they affect the culture by being there or they're destroyed. Everything has its limits and we're dealing with a more traditional world.

[Crusader Invasion]

Don't you feel, though, like the way the Reapers have been handled has sort of contaminated the lore? With that I mean that no matter how awesome any other story told within the setting turns out to be, it will always take place in the same universe as where a race of godlike space squids made a machine to solve the problem of machines rebelling.

I completely agree with this. The existence and absence of the Reapers gave the ME universe a distinct sense of intrigue. The concept of the Reapers felt like actual science fiction. ME3 changed that. The Reapers, instead of being some unknowable force of nature, became just another conventional foe. The nail in the coffin was explaining them away as "tools" whose only purpose is to solve some vaguely defined, ill-conceived problem.

I agree with Gaiden in the sense that it would have been very difficult to end the series without addressing the origin and purpose of the Reapers, but even I can think of far more interesting and thoughtful ways to do it than the version we got.

[Gaidin]

I agree with Gaiden in the sense that it would have been very difficult to end the series without addressing the origin and purpose of the Reapers, but even I can think of far more interesting and thoughtful ways to do it than the version we got.

Oh if I were to comment with respect to the trilogy itself, I'd be saying something much different. I like the idea of keeping the Reapers around as totally neutral cultural effects for reasons stated above, but as you say, there are much better ways to do it from the standpoint of the trilogy. Just that for reasons I've already stated, I hardly speak from that point of view.

[Habelo]

I gave myself 15 seconds of thought to explain the reapers and i found that there were a number of ways explaining them.

Number one: Reapers harvest technological diversity in their galaxy to be able to get an edge on their war on other galaxies that also have a ruling power (may be way different, may not) that they have to protect their galaxy from. Harvesting the best of one cycle to add to their military power.

Way better then the retarded synthetics vs organics even if it hadnt gone against the whole series logic.