Mass Effect Series Catch-All

I liked it and I let people here know that at great length. Some people didn't appreciate that, though.

Budo wrote:

Am I the only person here who actually loved the ending?

My only gripe with the game overall was that I wish during the final battle there were some of the characters that weren't on the mission with you or on the Normandy who could have died during the battle. But gameplay wise and story wise I thought it was great.

I was more disappointed with the ending of ME2. I rarely get into video game stories. I find most pretty stupid and pay attention enough to understand why I'm doing stuff, but I am usually listening to podcasts, skipping through dialogue etc. I did get into the ME2 story and the ending was soooo stupid. It didn't ruin the game or anything. It was comically WTF.

Mass Effect™ Legendary Edition - My Shepard Art Creator - EA Official Site

Spotlight your best friends, true loves, and favorite squaddies with this custom #MyShepard art creator.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/RqxREBP.jpg)

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/gqC3e49.jpg)

I would preorder from their store if they would just put my game in the box I designed.

Edit, TH we have similar taste in companions...

Edit 2: I've poked around with this longer than I thought I would...

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/ZkjITWz.jpg)

I'm torn about this Legendary Edition. I love these games and it's been years since I've played them. But also, I've already played them, and I'm assuming a playthrough of the trilogy would mean 100+ hours? I dunno. Maybe there's some good Mass Effect-adjacent media I should get instead? All this Mass Effect content going around makes me want to engage in some way but I don't know how.

mrlogical wrote:

I'm torn about this Legendary Edition. I love these games and it's been years since I've played them. But also, I've already played them, and I'm assuming a playthrough of the trilogy would mean 100+ hours? I dunno. Maybe there's some good Mass Effect-adjacent media I should get instead? All this Mass Effect content going around makes me want to engage in some way but I don't know how.

I played them multiple times, and I'm also hesitant on the Legendary Edition. Reminder you don't need to pay full price. This is EA, we'll get a hefty sale within 3-6 months, probably a $40 version within 60 days (maybe that's more of an Ubisoft move?). That's if you buy it.

So, unless you want to be part of the zeitgeist, I wouldn't let this throw you.

As for adjacent media, I'm a terrible person to ask.

IMAGE(https://media4.giphy.com/media/bPTXcJiIzzWz6/giphy.gif?cid=790b76117ec37381c21332174dd3c3a0d56718a541df20d8&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g)

mrlogical wrote:

I'm torn about this Legendary Edition. I love these games and it's been years since I've played them. But also, I've already played them, and I'm assuming a playthrough of the trilogy would mean 100+ hours? I dunno. Maybe there's some good Mass Effect-adjacent media I should get instead? All this Mass Effect content going around makes me want to engage in some way but I don't know how.

I enjoyed Mass Effect: Revelation, a prequel novel that tells a complete story but also wonderfully sets up the games.

Did not care nearly as much for the other books I read.

beeporama wrote:
mrlogical wrote:

I'm torn about this Legendary Edition. I love these games and it's been years since I've played them. But also, I've already played them, and I'm assuming a playthrough of the trilogy would mean 100+ hours? I dunno. Maybe there's some good Mass Effect-adjacent media I should get instead? All this Mass Effect content going around makes me want to engage in some way but I don't know how.

I enjoyed Mass Effect: Revelation, a prequel novel that tells a complete story but also wonderfully sets up the games.

Did not care nearly as much for the other books I read.

That's about my experience too. I think I read the ME1 and ME2 lead-in books and they were fine for what they were. IIRC, the ME3 lead-in got a bunch of stuff about the universe wrong and was pretty consistently panned, which is saying something given the normal expectations for a video game tie-in novel.

They got some good writers to write books related to Andromeda, but since I never played the game I never read any of the books.

Thanks all, yeah, I read Revelation at some point--my gmail inbox tells me it was January 2011, so I'm guessing it must have been around the release of a Mass Effect 2 DLC? was that the game that had a DLC that featured the Batarians who were a race discussed in Revelation that didn't appear in ME1? Anyway I did just download the bonus content from ME2+3, which they just posted for free, and it's got some art books and comic books in there, maybe that'll satisfy me. Probably I'll spend the next week or two not buying this and either will forget about it or will finally be pushed over the edge to buy.

I liked the first couple of ME books that were written by Drew Karpyshyn. I heard so many bad things about the 4th book (which they were supposedly going to patch to fix errors from the fact that they hired an author who didn't even consult the established lore) that I never bothered to read it.

In a recent Q&A on Twitter they were talking about how they have rebalanced the Paragon/Renegade checks in ME2 to be a little less strict. I think this is a good thing as there were a few (the Jack vs Miranda and Tali vs Legion scenes) that were very hard to pass unless you had imported a fully Paragon/Renegade Shepard from ME1 or were doing a new game+ play through. Obviously importing from ME1 is the correct way to play ME2, but my first play through of ME2 was actually a no import play through due to issues with my ME1 save on the 360.

Also looks like the game is going to be about 84 gigs on Xbox with a Day One patch around 11 gigs.

How do people feel about Renegade playthroughs? I played all (or at least mostly) paragon man shep when I played this the first time, so the obvious choice if I replay this now would be to play as a renegade fem shep. But is the renegade experience satisfying, aside from the occasional shut-a-guy-up-by-pushing-him-out-a-window sequence? If it's just the same story but you're kind of a jerk, I might not bother changing alignment.

I could never do it. There's a lot of conversations and you have to be a dick in most of them and I just can't get over that. Even though I've played several BioWare RPG's multiple times with different genders and classes, I probably end up playing the same character (a goody two-shoes, but will get aggressive if you push me too far).

I know it's just a weird mental thing I can't get past because I have had no issues playing many other games where I do awful things and laugh about it because I know it's just a game.

That said, it also is an issue with the Mass Effect Paragon/Renegade setup (and with other games that used similar systems) where you never really actually roleplay your choices where things could lead you down somewhere in the middle path because side story options and/or upgrades are intrinsically tied to maxing one or the other out.

Paragon Redhead FemShep for life, yo.

I did do a Renegade playthrough of ME 1 and 2 way back when, and it was . . . fine. I didn't enjoy it as much, just because I prefer the Big Damn Hero stuff over the Do Whatever It Takes stuff, and it's not like the harder-edged "let them die so others may live" approach really made any difference. The game was the game, and Paragon/Renegade didn't switch things up all that noticeably.

I am curious to see if the changes made really impacts your need to stick closely to your chosen Paragon/Renegade path, because it did make such a difference in the options you got. I figure I'll wait a while anyways; while ME is my favorite game series of all time, any good will I had towards Bioware evaporated in a puff of Anthem, with a few whiffs of Andromeda enforced developer crunch thrown on top. Genuinely wonder if Bioware can even pull off a remaster/update with as much of a clusterf*ck they've been for years.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

Paragon Redhead FemShep for life, yo.

Truth

Yeah, that's what I figured. The Dragon Age series has always done a better job of having ranges of choices that feel much less like a forced binary, whereas ME always felt a bit more like the "hug a child/kick a puppy" dichotomy that didn't make sense. And yeah, I definitely remember trying early on to approach the series with a role playing perspective and not lock into one mode or the other, but the game just wasn't interested in that, especially when later game stuff required you to have X Paragon points or Y Renegade points. It would've been much more interesting if some options were locked off if you were too far from center. Oh well!

One thing I always enjoyed doing was choosing the "wrong" background for my playthroughs. DudeShep, a xenophobic hardass Renegade with hookups but no real relationships, was from a prestigious military family and single-handedly saved a colony from slavers. FemShep, a warm and accepting Paragon who fell in love with Liara and was faithful for three entire games, was a gang rat from the slums of Earth that was the sole survivor of a thresher maw incident that killed her unit.

From what I remember, you also got punished a bit if you tried to mix Paragon and Renegade in a single character in the first couple games because you wouldn't have enough points in either to make some of the dialog choices. 3 was better about more naturally letting you combine approaches.

It's only a "punishment" if your goal is to min-max and get the perfect ending or whatever. I prefer a story where sometimes things go wrong and there's not always a perfect Captain Picard speech that you can give to make everyone get along. Failing Tali's loyalty mission in 2 yielded a really heart-wrenching scene. That's my story, not the one that happens when you look up guides to find the "right" way to play it.

Yeah, like the other, I could never do the Renegade playthrough on ME. I tried it a few times, but as someone said your choice always seemed to be "save a child vs. kick a puppy". I want to be a hard-ass, not cruel.

My main Shep ended up mostly paragon, but I did tend to mix and match based on my feelings in any given situation, and never really ran into troubles (I did, obvs, import).

My Renegade playthrough was very interesting, in that I came to really loathe that Shep. He gradually hardened in my mind as a faithless, cowardly, mistrustful, domineering person who assumed the worst about everyone and was utterly incapable of envisioning that any other person could or would act or think in a way different than him. By the time of 3, he was actively killing beloved characters, sometimes directly, sometimes through his actions or inactions, and he very casually committed a genocide or two for the sake of a species he honestly didn't seem to actually like much. Ultimately, he failed the final test because he could not commit to a course that didn't come with a 100% guarantee, could not entrust to anything that might fall outside his control, and he doomed the entire cycle. It was, needless to say, pretty memorable.

mrlogical wrote:

How do people feel about Renegade playthroughs? I played all (or at least mostly) paragon man shep when I played this the first time, so the obvious choice if I replay this now would be to play as a renegade fem shep. But is the renegade experience satisfying, aside from the occasional shut-a-guy-up-by-pushing-him-out-a-window sequence? If it's just the same story but you're kind of a jerk, I might not bother changing alignment.

I tried to do a Renegade play through once and truthfully a good percentage of the play through I just felt like I was being a racist (specist?) dirtbag and I couldn't keep it up. I did come up with an interesting semi-Renegade option though: the anti-Council chip on their shoulder version of Shepard.

Even when playing mostly Paragon there are way too many awesome Renegade interrupts in ME2 not to do some... or all of them. Not going tell us what we need to know? See you at ground level then. Krogan dude won't shut up about whatever it was he was going on about? Enjoy the exploding gas cylinder. Your friends trying to sneak up behind us for an ambush? I hope they don't mind when we drop a crane load of crap on them.

Paragon was my go-to. It's difficult to be Renegade.

I've planned to not be a heroic white knight. In many games. Not just Mass Effect. And, well, whilst mapping that out and entertaining the notion can be interesting - couldn't care less, shut 'em down, brash, cocky, arrogant - in practice I often cannot. Even mimicry, for variety, for laughs, can bring me down and stir disinterest. I've got to try. I've got to be courteous. I've got to have integrity.

Sometimes, on occasion, mirrored behavior for those way out of bounds, whom are overstepping the mark, with dictatorial abandon. If they cannot be reached. Well. Then. Yeah. Administering their own medicine unto them can most certainly feel necessary. At least in video games.

In theory I want to do a complete failure playthrough where as many companions (and everyone else) as possible die along the way. But I can't. Mostly because it doesn't actually seem fun.

As much as I love Mass Effect, what we're discussing now is, to me, its greatest failing: the mapping of morality onto a single gamified axis. The initial promise seemed like "How coldly would you handle the Trolley problem?" but came to include nativism and just being a violent asshole.

Compare to Dungeons & Dragons (perhaps the most famous and well-known example of gamified/codified morality) which uses two axes and can still seem facile. Paragon/Renegade should probably be, or at least promised to be, more about the Law/Chaos axis (are you "by the book" or "get the right thing done at whatever the cost?") than a Good/Evil axis, but they're conflated here.

Since Shepard is ostensibly heroic and has been tasked with doing good, playing Paragon happens to work out fairly consistently; but Renegade can end up being inconsistent and contradictory.

So if the game gets solid review and no real tech issues should I rebuild my first character or build a brand new one? What about squaddies? I know I will always start out paragon but as thing go one I will muddle more into a mix then renegade as the council continues to annoy me.

Stealthpizza wrote:

So if the game gets solid review and no real tech issues should I rebuild my first character or build a brand new one? What about squaddies? I know I will always start out paragon but as thing go one I will muddle more into a mix then renegade as the council continues to annoy me.

I have played through the full series a good number of times so see different options yet I will probably be doing my mostly Paragon redheaded soldier FemShep romancing Liara and bromancing Garrus and Tali yet again. At least for the first play through.

Rykin wrote:

I have played through the full series a good number of times so see different options yet I will probably be doing my mostly Paragon redheaded soldier FemShep romancing Liara and bromancing Garrus and Tali yet again. At least for the first play through.

And now I know why I enjoyed playing ME3 multiplayer with you. You and me?

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I'll most likely and unsurprisingly roll as a Paragon. Class? Probably not Engineer. Been there. Done that. Maybe an Adept. Maybe a Sentinel. I'm still flitting between John or Jane. I think Jane, because I'd like to experience Shepard via Jennifer Hale (as opposed to Mark Meer) which may freshen the tale (even though John and Jane are one and the same - differentiated by the irrelevance that is gender - but for interesting variation in voice and performance). Romance? I don't know. Maybe Liara. Besties? I think perhaps Kaidan and Garrus. In both instances that'd be a contrast to before, where Tali was Shepard's heart, whilst his back was had by Grunt, Mordin, Thane, Legion.

Yeah. I'll probably do another playthrough sometime this year (if this collection isn't any good, I'll just play the original versions with the texture, controller and 4K video mods).

If I'm honest with myself, I'll probably stick to mostly Paragon (some of those Renegade QTE's are too good to pass up) and likely end up going with one of the two classes I always stick to. But I'm going to try and make different side decisions. I won't romance Liara this time. Maybe for once Ashley will live this time.

Should I also try as a male? I don't know if I can ever cross that bridge. Maybe I can compromise and not make her a redhead.