Mass Effect 3 Catch-All

Scratched wrote:
LarryC wrote:

My loadout as a Soldier

*record scratch*

The more customisable skill lines do add a bit though.

My "canon" Shepard is a soldier, that is what she does. I realize it probably isn't the funniest class but that is just my Shepard.

I will probably play through again as something more Bioticy

MannishBoy wrote:

Is it expensive? I'm sure late in the game a character doing side missions will be loaded to where it doesn't matter.

Not sure, I haven't actually done that myself yet. Probably not to bad, the game has not been too stingy with credits thus far.

Kamakazi010654 wrote:
Scratched wrote:
LarryC wrote:

My loadout as a Soldier

*record scratch*

The more customisable skill lines do add a bit though.

My "canon" Shepard is a soldier, that is what she does. I realize it probably isn't the funniest class but that is just my Shepard.

I will probably play through again as something more Bioticy

I did it too and I think the lack of enemy variety does a disservice to this class. The soldier is a very under-powered class in ME3 I think.

GOODJER MULTIPLAYER SESSION FRIDAY NIGHT (on 360)?

I'm going to spend Friday night kicking in the MP. Probably from 7pm PST onwards. Join me!

Grubber788:

I certainly haven't been feeling the underpoweredness. Of course, I did import an ME2 save, but I would do the same for my later runs, too. I'm gunning down enemies ridiculously fast for something called "Hardcore," and I've got something like 40 points now that are unassigned. The way the ammo powers interact with concentrated gun upgrading and the Combat Mastery boosts is just - I'm gunning down Primes and Brutes practically in the face. I mow down Husks so fast, I have to wait for them to come.

Of course, with Biotics now working on every enemy, they're bound to be stronger in ME3. Incinerate is just brutal on mooks.

I'm sure this has been mentioned, but are the PC textures improved from the demo? They were a monstorous step backwards from ME2.

El-Producto wrote:

I'm sure this has been mentioned, but are the PC textures improved from the demo? They were a monstorous step backwards from ME2.

Nope. The lighting environment in the demo is really harsh, though, so the textures seemed worse than ME2 even though they aren't. Also, ME2 had that film grain filter which softened everything up.

I'd say the textures over all are on par with ME2, however, without that film grain filter, the bad textures are much more noticeable.

I think the problem with the textures is that they're not placed well enough to hide their resolution. There's a lot of diagonals that show up on edges as blocky, but if the texture was aligned correctly on the model wouldn't draw attention to it. Higher resolution textures will still have the problem, but be less noticeable.

The game looks amazing on the 360 to me. But then, I'm not sitting a foot from a PC monitor

Well, it's Bioware. Anyone expecting more than an OK/lazy PC port must have been delusional. Still, it looks good to me, i don't focus too much on staring at textures and I am constantly on the move so everything is fine.

liquid wrote:

Well, it's Bioware. Anyone expecting more than an OK/lazy PC port must have been delusional. Still, it looks good to me, i don't focus too much on staring at textures and I am constantly on the move so everything is fine.

Yeah, I constantly flick the mouse from left to right. This causes the motion blur to be on constantly, and you don't notice the textures issues.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:
liquid wrote:

Well, it's Bioware. Anyone expecting more than an OK/lazy PC port must have been delusional. Still, it looks good to me, i don't focus too much on staring at textures and I am constantly on the move so everything is fine.

Yeah, I constantly flick the mouse from left to right. This causes the motion blur to be on constantly, and you don't notice the textures issues. ;)

I just got a great visual of your Shepard walking through the presidium rapidly moving her head back and forth as she walked.

I changed one character's costume because of some distracting texture artifacts. Other than that, not really a problem. I think it's quite a bit better than in ME2 and they managed to mask a lot of the jankiness with lighting effects.

Kamakazi010654 wrote:
tuffalobuffalo wrote:
liquid wrote:

Well, it's Bioware. Anyone expecting more than an OK/lazy PC port must have been delusional. Still, it looks good to me, i don't focus too much on staring at textures and I am constantly on the move so everything is fine.

Yeah, I constantly flick the mouse from left to right. This causes the motion blur to be on constantly, and you don't notice the textures issues. ;)

I just got a great visual of your Shepard walking through the presidium rapidly moving her head back and forth as she walked.

This is how everyone walks around in real life, no?

I take back the "Joker has a dull script" comment, it depends on who's with him in the cockpit.

MannishBoy wrote:
MojoBox wrote:
MannishBoy wrote:

Is the "reset powers" for Shepherd and the squad members that's available for free in the med bay of the Normandy just a straight up respec option that just lets you respend your points?? Is it one time only, or a thing you can repeat over and over?

First hit is free, gonna cost you after that.

Is it expensive? I'm sure late in the game a character doing side missions will be loaded to where it doesn't matter.

Have done one respec of Shepard so far. The second one will cost me 5k credits. No idea how it progresses after that what the squad mates will cost after their initial free respec.

El-Producto wrote:

I'm sure this has been mentioned, but are the PC textures improved from the demo? They were a monstorous step backwards from ME2.

According to both BioWare and some news outlets, the textures were upped between demo and release, at least on the PC. You can definitely see a difference in the uniform fidelity when comparing the initial attack on earth cinematics between the demo and the full version.

MojoBox wrote:

Nope! I'm a Vanguard and it's all shotty all the time. This is probably the most satisfying iteration of the Vanguard yet. The combo of Biotic Charge and Nova has you pin-balling around the battlefield, flanking entrenched enemies, and generally wrecking sh*t with a pump action. So goddamn much fun!

The ability to recharge your shields fully with a Biotic Charge means that when the situation gets tight it actually benefits you to advance on the enemy rather than retreat. I'll make the Krogan proud.

1000x this! I barely use my guns in SP anymore and am only carrying the N7 pistol and a weight-modded SMG, so I get the 200% CD bonus. Charge -> Nova -> heavy melee/dodge roll -> repeat with literally no downtime. Beat the crap out of an Atlas last night. Have yet to encounter the tougher Reaper and Geth enemies, but as far as Cerberus forces go, no problems (other than the occasional Turret bugging out and taking 0 damage after charge+nova+heavy melee). This is on Hardcore btw.

Scratched wrote:

All of those, including ME are serials, DLC and the novels exist outside of those series, it's not as though that story content was retrofitted into the core game by a patch.

...

With Arrival (and other DLC) you've got content that applies to the core of the story they're trying to tell, but chopping it out. Something like Overlord on the other hand is truly a side-story that expands the fiction of the world, but you're not poorer for missing it.

I think the difference is that DLC is still being told through the same medium as the base games; novels are a different medium and it's more likely that more people aren't going to want to consume their ME fiction in that way.

The problem with more standalone DLC like Overlord is that it feels superfluous. I play Mass Effect first and foremost for the story, and if the story in that kind of DLC isn't relevant to the greater plot or character arcs, then I wind up feeling like I've wasted my time at the end of them.

That's highly game-specific, of course: ME is just about the only game series where I feel that way. In something like Fallout, I'm mostly in it for the exploration of the world and the gameplay, so I don't mind that something like Point Lookout is more partitioned off from the main game.

The other factor is, how much does it really inconvenience those who didn't buy the DLC? It takes, what, five minutes to look up what happened on a wiki if you're really that interested?

hbi2k wrote:

The problem with more standalone DLC like Overlord is that it feels superfluous. I play Mass Effect first and foremost for the story, and if the story in that kind of DLC isn't relevant to the greater plot or character arcs, then I wind up feeling like I've wasted my time at the end of them.

I stumbled into references to the events in Overlord almost immediately in ME3.

Jonman wrote:

GOODJER MULTIPLAYER SESSION FRIDAY NIGHT (on 360)?

I'm going to spend Friday night kicking in the MP. Probably from 7pm PST onwards. Join me!

I'll throw in with you.

SpacePPoliceman wrote:
hbi2k wrote:

The problem with more standalone DLC like Overlord is that it feels superfluous. I play Mass Effect first and foremost for the story, and if the story in that kind of DLC isn't relevant to the greater plot or character arcs, then I wind up feeling like I've wasted my time at the end of them.

I stumbled into references to the events in Overlord almost immediately in ME3.

Hm... I only played that on one of my 4 ME2 Sheps.

Can't wait to play this, but I'm going to wait until the inevetible 50% off sale from Origin in a month or so, just like BF3.

Hopefully someone will get a hi-rez texture mod done as well.

Finally finished up my ME2 game and jumped right into ME3. I'm not sure if what I'm seeing is the face import bug, but despite the face codes being identical, they look nothing alike. After ~70 hours in ME1 and ME2 over the past few months with a fairly consistent look between the two games, it's a bit disorienting to see the voice coming out of a face that doesn't look remotely like what she's looked like for the previous games. Now I have to decide if I want to spend a bunch of time trying to re-create a close approximation.

CptGlanton wrote:
Jonman wrote:

GOODJER MULTIPLAYER SESSION FRIDAY NIGHT (on 360)?

I'm going to spend Friday night kicking in the MP. Probably from 7pm PST onwards. Join me!

I'll throw in with you.

I'm in!

Just started on 360, and by god I'm loving it. I just finished the ME2 DlC yesterday, and the improvements in graphics and combat are really obvious.

My favourite thing? Kinect voice control! I thought that I would set the thing up, try the function and expected never to use it again, but it is ace. The opening of doors and stuff is pointless, since pressing A is quicker, and the conversations are too disrupted, but in combat is is amazing. Switching my weapons and ammo types on the fly is great, but it really comes into it's own with my squad mates. I can just tell Liara to throw a singularity when the situation demands it.

I know that it was always possible to bring up the radial to do that, but it disrupted combat too much for me in the previous games. It flows and feels so much better this way. I just wish they could have implemented it with mikes rather than Kinect.

Sadness! I can't play the game.

Everytime I launch the game it shows me the Invalid Cerberus Network Code error.

This is my first ME game and I'm playing on PC so i'm not even sure where the Cerberus network code is coming from.

Any ideas on how to get past that error?

Well, it's Bioware. Anyone expecting more than an OK/lazy PC port must have been delusional.

This was pretty impressive. NSFW language.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjlZ-Bp41Ww

koshnika wrote:

Sadness! I can't play the game.

Everytime I launch the game it shows me the Invalid Cerberus Network Code error.

This is my first ME game and I'm playing on PC so i'm not even sure where the Cerberus network code is coming from.

Any ideas on how to get past that error?

Probably Origin. I don't think you have to log in within the game like you did with ME2. If Origin is logged in, it should just work.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:
liquid wrote:

I'm torn on the multiplayer affecting ending part. I will try and do all the missions and quests anyway, but I do want the best ending I could get (like in ME2). This just discourages me from experimenting with options and just sticking to my paragon choices for the entire game. And MP making the SP easier? Ugh. The more I think about this synergy, the less I like it.

The coop is so fun, though. Join us. :)

But will anyone be playing coop when I get around to playing ME3 in N months? I don't want to have the optimal ending effectively unavailable just because people have lost interest in the multiplayer component of my single-player game.

i38warhawk wrote:

I kind of resent Bioware for the choices they've made regarding DLC. The worst part is that after I "finished" the game" they kept throwing plot into the universe. My Shepard's been doing all this sh*t without me apparently. I figured she was in trouble for helping Cerberus or something. Turns out she blew up a solar system? What the hell Bioware?

In Arrival, you aren't really given a choice either--BioWare just wanted that bit to be canon. Their major mistake was not having a recap cutscene when starting a new game.

complexmath wrote:

But will anyone be playing coop when I get around to playing ME3 in N months? I don't want to have the optimal ending effectively unavailable just because people have lost interest in the multiplayer component of my single-player game.

I for one, probably. And I'm not far enough along to see how it will all shake out, but I think not playing Multiplayer will only mean you need to scan more planets. I for one am finding the planet scanning to be a blast. They've taken the tedious space mechanics of the past two games and molded them into something this is A: actually a game, and B: rather enjoyable.

And it totally sells the Reaper war aspect for me. You're not free to safely roam the Galaxy anymore, fuel depots are being destroyed and you're really on your own out there, hoping to find fuel from wreckage so you can get the hell out of Reaper occupied space. YMMV.

complexmath wrote:
tuffalobuffalo wrote:
liquid wrote:

I'm torn on the multiplayer affecting ending part. I will try and do all the missions and quests anyway, but I do want the best ending I could get (like in ME2). This just discourages me from experimenting with options and just sticking to my paragon choices for the entire game. And MP making the SP easier? Ugh. The more I think about this synergy, the less I like it.

The coop is so fun, though. Join us. :)

But will anyone be playing coop when I get around to playing ME3 in N months? I don't want to have the optimal ending effectively unavailable just because people have lost interest in the multiplayer component of my single-player game.

I realize the concern is legitimate. It shouldn't be a problem for anyone on GWJ (PC) for a year or two. I'm sure there will be plenty of people willing to hop in for a couple hours so you can get the readiness up to 100%. There will always be pub games too for a few years. It really doesn't take that much time.