Bioware's "Mass Effect".

Sundown wrote:

Also, I just checked, and the toilets and showers in ME3 aren't interactive.

Terrible Crappy game.

Trick missed, sir.

Checking in, since I've made some progress. I'm about 37 hours deep, and doing all collect-a-thon missions for reasons that I can't explain. Spoilers for story stuff.

Spoiler:

1) Since I'm playing Paragon, I getting most of the good results; cured the genophage and got the Geth and Quarians to get to peace. Feels good so far.
2) They're really leaning in to killing off people. I kept everyone alive through ME2, but Mordin and Legion ate it in their respective missions. I even felt bad when Mordin went, since I thought I heard a tinge of fear and anxiety in his voice as he sang at the end before going boom. I finished his song with "....a scientist salarian" out loud for him.
3) That said, sometime I want to see what the body count would look like if I went full renegade. Might need to do a replay in a few years and test that out.
4) As a Vanguard, I don't see the purpose of Pull, so it's the only ability I haven't spent many points on, even just to dump them somewhere. Any time I use a power that's not punching someone from across the room is a wasted opportunity that I should have spent punching someone from across the room.
5) Before starting Thessia, I'm doing the Citadel DLC mission (the internet says that's a good place for it) but saving the actual party until the point of no return. The writers had way too much fun with the writing in this thing. Everyone's just barely in character and are spouting one-liners like it's a competition. I love it.

Jonman wrote:
Sundown wrote:

Also, I just checked, and the toilets and showers in ME3 aren't interactive.

Terrible Crappy game.

Trick missed, sir.

I can hardly contain my shame. My dad joke game isn't strong enough.

Pull for Vanguard is so you have some distance game. You combine it with Warp from squaddies for biotic explosions.

ME3 works best if you combine responses from Paragon and Renegade to craft a specific character. I got some of my most memorable playthroughs by not having the "best" options available and by pingponging between Paragon and Renegade.

LarryC wrote:

ME3 works best if you combine responses from Paragon and Renegade to craft a specific character. I got some of my most memorable playthroughs by not having the "best" options available and by pingponging between Paragon and Renegade.

Oh, I definitely may bounce around in the moment to moment stuff, and there have been some good cathartic moments where I busted out the renegade dialogue and interrupts when even my patient Shepard couldn't deal with their crap any more. There was a certain Quarian admiral who comes to mind who absolutely needed to get yelled at and punched in the gut for his actions. It's just the larger bringing, people together decisions where I lean heavy into Paragon.

Sundown wrote:
LarryC wrote:

ME3 works best if you combine responses from Paragon and Renegade to craft a specific character. I got some of my most memorable playthroughs by not having the "best" options available and by pingponging between Paragon and Renegade.

Oh, I definitely may bounce around in the moment to moment stuff, and there have been some good cathartic moments where I busted out the renegade dialogue and interrupts when even my patient Shepard couldn't deal with their crap any more. There was a certain Quarian admiral who comes to mind who absolutely needed to get yelled at and punched in the gut for his actions. It's just the larger bringing, people together decisions where I lean heavy into Paragon.

A reverse "mostly Renegade" approach is also best. For Paragon, an all-Paragon approach yields a milquetoast girlscout with a boring story. With all-Renegade, you end up with a strangely violent and misanthropic individual with no real consistency to their character. Extremely unsatisfying.

Playing your Shepard as a real person who shifts from Paragon to Renegade and back for various reasons gets you something closer to believable and she sounds more plausible. She doubts herself, has second thoughts, and makes mistakes she comes to regret.

What’s the longest time you have contioniously played a MA game in one sitting? (Not counting bio breaks).

jrralls wrote:

What’s the longest time you have contioniously played a MA game in one sitting? (Not counting bio breaks).

Maybe four hours? I have kids and a full time job.

Eleima wrote:
jrralls wrote:

What’s the longest time you have contioniously played a MA game in one sitting? (Not counting bio breaks).

Maybe four hours? I have kids and a full time job.

And you still managed four hours? I'm impressed.

Basically, I’ll start once they’re in bed (8:30pm’ish) and not stop until midnight, sometimes 1am.
I’m basically running on fumes at this stage.

jrralls wrote:

What’s the longest time you have contioniously played a MA game in one sitting? (Not counting bio breaks).

Probably like 12-14 hours. I was unemployed, not going to school, and just would play all night while my roommates slept and had lives.

I finished ME3 a couple of days ago, so that means I played the entire trilogy over the span of the last 5 months or so, which is quite the feat for me. I'll put my final thoughts below.

Spoiler:

1) It's not often I play a game for 55 hours and feel like I played it for only half of that. I really got pulled in.
2) Every part of the Citadel DLC was fantastic. Getting the band back together, the one liners, the Grunt flashback, the party, all of it. That may be the most fanservicey thing I ever played, and it showed me that the writers understood that the characters were still probably the best part of the game.
3) I tried firing up a multiplayer game once, but unsurprisingly no one else was playing, and fighting solo on a map, even on the bronze challenge, didn't go well.
4) The final battle where you are holding off waves of enemies while the rockets arm was a lot of fun, but I think I accidentally found an exploit. After getting wiped about 4 times, I hid over on the left behind a phone booth, which made the banshees amble towards me in a straight line. The Reaper laser came at me, and while the phone booth protected me, the banshees got evaporated. I got the Reaper to kill easily half a dozen banshees for me that way.
5) The ending sequence after that battle, from the hopeless charge towards the portal into the Reaper laser, to the love interest (Tali) going down and having to get medevaced, to the final confrontation with the Illusive Man, was pretty fantastic.
6) But even with the Extended ending, and even knowing what was coming, and even with the context that the Leviathan give you, the last 10 minutes still hit with a thud. It wraps up way too quickly, and made me wonder "wait, was that it?" I was hoping for more than a few scenes with a quick voice over. If that was the extended version, I can't imagine how incomplete the original one was.
7) It didn't help that I picked the wrong ending at first. I got pulled away from the game after they explained what was what, so when I went back to the game I got mixed up, and picked the Control ending instead of the Destroy ending, which was what I wanted to do. So I wound up redoing the whole ending sequence a second time to get the correct ending. I did change how the Illusive Man died the second go around, though (talked him to death, as opposed to shooting him down the first time). The game seemed like it really wanted you to pick Synthesis, but I didn't think I had the right to force that on the galaxy, and I after all he had been through I wanted to see Shepard survive.
8) Looking back on the trilogy, I think ME1 is now my favorite. The others have more polish and are better made, but I'm generally here for games that give you an experience of exploration and wonder, and ME1 does that since everything is shiny and unknown and new, to you as the player. I appreciated the craft and streamlining of systems that came in ME2 on my second playthrough way more than I did years ago on the first. And I liked the way that ME3 managed to tie up a lot of the loose galactic ends that had been set up in the first two games. And ME 3 managed to keep fleshing out their world and the people in it, all while narrowing the scope of the game to a handful of actual places that you visit. That was some impressive world building they pulled off.

Well put! Couple things:

Agree with just about everything you said, but ME3 is still my favorite. Javik is awesome.

If you really want to try some multiplayer (and I recommend it, after playing hundreds of hours), first make sure you have all the multiplayer DLC installed (it's free). The game only matches people with the same DLC installed. Maybe find someone to join in https://reddit.com/r/mecoop - they're generally good folks in that subreddit, and quite a few still play ME3 coop.

BadKen wrote:

Well put! Couple things:

Agree with just about everything you said, but ME3 is still my favorite. Javik is awesome.

Javik was fantastic. I would have been outraged if I had had such an important character locked out because of DLC.

Spoiler:

His smack talking of every race (especially the Salarians eating flies) was great, and I'm glad I took him to Thessia, since he dropped a bomb on Liara with the "that wasn't your gods, that was us lol."

It directly impacted several reviewers opinions of the game because the Jarvik content wasn’t available pre-launch.

Vector wrote:

It directly impacted several reviewers opinions of the game because the Jarvik content wasn’t available pre-launch.

Yep, I'm aware. One of the benefits to playing it years later was I could pick up the DLC pack with everything in it, so I wasn't impacted by such shenanigans.

Sundown wrote:
BadKen wrote:

Well put! Couple things:

Agree with just about everything you said, but ME3 is still my favorite. Javik is awesome.

Javik was fantastic. I would have been outraged if I had had such an important character locked out because of DLC.

Spoiler:

His smack talking of every race (especially the Salarians eating flies) was great, and I'm glad I took him to Thessia, since he dropped a bomb on Liara with the "that wasn't your gods, that was us lol."

If you haven't done it already and/or plan to replay, make sure you take Javik along with Liara when you go to the Asari temple on Thessia. Great dialogue!

Well, finally finished Mass Effect 1. That was fun. There was a point in the middle where the game dragged on a bit, because I was front-loading most of the side missions, but that did mean that once I'd done everything (including the DLC content), I could focus on the main story, which was much better. Being a telekinetic space wizard was highly enjoyable, especially near the end when I was fully-levelled and was basically just charging around tossing enemies into the air while unloading my pistol into everything from Krogan Warlords to Geth Armatures with gleeful abandon (other weapons, what other weapons?).

I was almost entirely paragon the whole way through except for a few side-missions where the neutral or renegade option seemed more appropriate/interesting (basically where the paragon option was to be boring and refuse to actually do anything). Having investigated a few of the different possibilities for certain major decisions, I'm interested to see how Mass Effect 2 does or doesn't incorporate them, not least from a development-effort perspective.

Spoiler:

It seemed as a player I was intent on making my Shepherd's personal life as tragic as possible: I chose the colonist upbringing (so, entire family killed by slavers) and the survivor background (so, entire squad eaten by thresher worms), and then on Virmire Shepherd's love interest (Ashley) was left behind to set off the bomb (I am bad at romance)—I might redo that last one, since the game proceeds to its conclusion very quickly from that point, but it seemed narratively appropriate that paragon Shepherd wouldn't put personal feelings ahead of making the most appropriate-at-the-time-seeming tactical decision, even if it hurt.

Though part of me wants to jump straight into Mass Effect 2, I'll probably take a break to play something else for a little while as a palate cleanser. Still, looking forward to the next instalment.

I always thought it a shame the best love interest wasn't available as such until the second game.

JeremyK wrote:

I always thought it a shame the best love interest wasn't available as such until the second game.

You’re wrong.

Eleima wrote:
JeremyK wrote:

I always thought it a shame the best love interest wasn't available as such until the second game.

You’re wrong. :D

This is the perfect use of a game forum. Debating the "correct" Mass Effect love interest years after the fact. Not being sarcastic. I'm being completely honest.

I wish these games were released for the Switch. I'd run through them again in a heartbeat.

JeremyK wrote:
Eleima wrote:
JeremyK wrote:

I always thought it a shame the best love interest wasn't available as such until the second game.

You’re wrong. :D

:D

Duh, everyone knows Ashley is the best.

Count me in with the game king - no romance is the best romance.

garion333 wrote:
JeremyK wrote:
Eleima wrote:
JeremyK wrote:

I always thought it a shame the best love interest wasn't available as such until the second game.

You’re wrong. :D

:D

Duh, everyone knows Ashley is the best.

But Ashley is racist...

The correct answer is Liara, of course.

I don't know what y'all are talking about romance for. Shepard was a shameless philanderer, who picked a new alien race to bang in each outing.

DSGamer wrote:
garion333 wrote:
JeremyK wrote:
Eleima wrote:
JeremyK wrote:

I always thought it a shame the best love interest wasn't available as such until the second game.

You’re wrong. :D

:D

Duh, everyone knows Ashley is the best.

But Ashley is racist...

The correct answer is Liara, of course.

Spoiler:

Ashley is the worst. I figured everyone knew that so didn't point out my sarcasm. ;)

Guys, come on. We all know it's Tali.

JeremyK wrote:

Guys, come on. We all know it's Tali.

I would accept this answer as well.

garion333 wrote:
DSGamer wrote:
garion333 wrote:
JeremyK wrote:
Eleima wrote:
JeremyK wrote:

I always thought it a shame the best love interest wasn't available as such until the second game.

You’re wrong. :D

:D

Duh, everyone knows Ashley is the best.

But Ashley is racist...

The correct answer is Liara, of course.

Spoiler:

Ashley is the worst. I figured everyone knew that so didn't point out my sarcasm. ;)

I think that's the risk of picking up this debate after all these years. The sarcasm flew right by me.

DSGamer wrote:
garion333 wrote:
JeremyK wrote:
Eleima wrote:
JeremyK wrote:

I always thought it a shame the best love interest wasn't available as such until the second game.

You’re wrong. :D

:D

Duh, everyone knows Ashley is the best.

But Ashley is racist...

The correct answer is Liara, of course.

From my (first game only) perspective, Ashley clearly had issues with aliens, but didn't strike me as truly anti-alien, just mistrustful and a not very diplomatic in her language. Of course, that's just based on the dialogue I'd seen of her in my one playthrough, so I might have missed some less ambiguous signs, or maybe I'm just too forgiving.

Romance-wise, Ashley struck me as having more personality and had more amusing interjections in the course of play, while Liara seemed a nice person but came across a bit dull, so I figured my Shepherd wouldn't see her in a romantic light.

I was playing male Shepherd, so Kaidan wasn't an option, but I'm sure he's a swell guy.

Spoiler:

And hey, I didn't let him blow up on Virmire, so that counts for something, right?

And JeremyK, if I interpret your comment correctly, I was indeed slightly disappointed when Liara and Ashley demanded Shepherd choose between them and somebody was missing...