Jeshibu on 4/8/2017 at 17:04
"Man I don't feel like wrecking all organic life again. Last time was only a few hundred millennia ago. Sovereign dear, won't you just try and brainwash them to kill each other for us? Thanks, love."
Sulphur on 4/8/2017 at 17:09
That's the thing. If Sovereign could only indoctrinate people within a certain radius, that's pretty much a losing game on its own without help from others. Brainwashing on its own isn't contagious to even the majority of an entire populace, and if the idea is to get all organic life go pell-mell zap-zap KZZBRAP at itself and the Reapers to then sweep up the remnants, Sovereign pretty much jumped the gun entirely.
PigLick on 4/8/2017 at 17:11
Over analysing Mass Effect games is a poor mans meal
Sulphur on 4/8/2017 at 17:16
It is too late to get in on some hot kebab action at the tandoor right now. Goddammit.
Starker on 5/8/2017 at 06:39
The reaper nonsense aside (like reapers landing on Earth and ambling around blowing things up with their laser beams), parts of the story haven't actually been that bad so far. I thought Sur'Kesh and Tuchanka were quite interesting and you even get to dabble in some space diplomacy, sort of. Really, my biggest complaint so far is that you seem to spend half the time fighting a human terrorist organization in a game that's ostensibly about fighting a galactic war against and alongside aliens. Oh, and the Rachni queen thing was pretty disappointing, though I don't know what I was expecting, really.
Sulphur on 1/5/2018 at 17:32
So. I got ME:A because I had a hankering for interstellar hankypanks (of the inorganic kind, get your mind out of the... oh never mind). Also it was on sale, and there wasn't much reason to not shotgun some change into the EA coffers as they have more or less fixed the bugginess and graphical oddities at this point.
Question #1 for some folks (I was one of these folks): is this Dragon Age: Inquisition in space?
Answer: Yes. Yes it goddamn is.
Having said that, it's not as low-effort obnoxious as DA:I's collectathon/kill X amount of enemies bullshit, but most of its 'tasks' are cut from the same cloth. My advice, if you don't have videogame quest completionist OCD, is to ignore them the moment they get old, which they will. The same basic structure is in place: the crafting, fetch quests, collectathons, and even the war table with time-based auto rewards are all here. Even the role of Pathfinder is as nebulous and ill-defined as the Inquisitor was. If you couldn't stand that stuff in DA:I, you probably won't be able to here either. If, however, you found the boringness of running around and looking for shit in wide-open maps strangely compelling, you're likely going to find that exact same feeling here as well.
Question #2: is the facial animation as bad as the internet memes made it out to be?
Answer: no, not in general. Almost everyone displays some hardcore uncanny valley-itis, but it's nothing you haven't seen in mid-budget tier PS3/X360 games from ten years ago. The worst cases were the ones that got memed and deserved it. The rest... is just dead or stiff with some awkward brow furrowing and random eyeball rolling thrown in. You get used to it, like you would have ten years ago.
Question #3: is the writing as bad as everyone says it is?
Answer: depends on what your points of comparison are. If you're expecting a Garrus Vakarian-level badass, or a Wrex-like dramatic standoff, or a Mordin-level eccentric, forget about it. Remember Miranda and the black dude from ME2 who was so non-descript I've forgotten his name? Samuel? Jacob? Whatever. Expect characters slightly more interesting than those two, but not by much. As for the plot - unfortunately, despite its marked similarities to ME1, ME:A just doesn't have the flashes of dramatic flair Bioware Edmonton used to sell the fiction in ME1.
This is a shame, because the bones of a decent amount of worldbuilding lie beneath the drab execution. A lot of gamey shit that you can't really sell if you think about it aside (you earn 'points' that let you unfreeze a section of colonist cryopods at a time, and you can't unfreeze them all because there aren't enough resources yet), the little things like crew member fights and banter on the info bulletins or in person, the ship's doctor sending out helpful dietary guidelines to everyone, a terse e-mail from a woman who mixes pragmatism and emotional blackmail to force someone's hand in thawing her daughter out of cryosleep, all of this comes together to give you the impression of people trying their damnedest to just live a normal life and make things work in a difficult situation. And the rest of it's not bad, just blander than it should be, and doesn't take the risks it should like making the aliens truly alien. Almost all the aliens seem to be fundamentally similar to humans in their emotions and outlook.
Question #4: is there anything this game is actually good at?
Answer: Where the game isn't completely a mixed bag is in its environmental visuals and combat. The planets you explore follow tried and true tropes (desert planet, jungle planet, ice planet) but they're more often than not gorgeously lit and fun to pootle around in. The combat, meanwhile, could have easily been the best in the series simply by virtue of the enhanced mobility of a jetpack that lets you dodge and jump around. However, cover is 'automatic' -- which means you crouch whenever you approach something that can be used as cover. In practice, this means having to constantly rub up against things to get the game to recognise you're trying not to die, then dying anyway because part of you was still sticking out for some reason. Anyway, the guns handle well, have a decent amount of oomph, and the powers are fun - combos return and are more straightforward this time because the game tags them as primers and detonators respectively, and the resulting explosions are very satisfying to execute. BUT: the inventory and UI is a goddamn chore that's almost as bad as ME1's.
In summary, with any game this big, it's a grab bag of things that are good, things that are not so good, and a few things that are almost great. It's fundamentally flawed but not broken -- like Starker mentioned a while ago, it's overall a decent experience. I'm still soldiering on because its structure has this sort of drably compelling pull to it. It's just not a great experience like ME2 and most of ME3, and that's why it seems to have been nailed to the cross of high expectations. It's a shame, because under normal circumstances this would have been a 7/10 game that few people would have vilified, and not something a new studio should have felt the weight of or floundered under.
icemann on 2/5/2018 at 00:41
When it comes to Mass Effect, bland is not acceptable. Even 3 is never bland. It may have a crappy ending, but it's never bland. Even more so with the DLC added in which improves the game immensely.
Starker on 2/5/2018 at 01:47
There were plenty of bland parts in the previous games. Like the side missions in ME1 or the dream sequences in ME3 or the entire main story in ME2.
Also, it brings the series back closer to the first one, where it was more about the big ideas and space politics and less about a big hero shooting space monsters in the face.
Sulphur on 2/5/2018 at 04:23
True. The closest analogue ME:A has is ME1, both in terms of story and execution.