Mass Effect General Discussion (spoilers)

...motherfucker, that's a brilliant idea. Mind if I steal it for my fanfic?

Kai Leng and the stupid nightmares are the two things that annoy me to no end when I replay 3. Leng is a complete writing failure, I don't even Love to Hate him since he is Cutscene Power to the Max incarnate.

I mean, all the various 2 bosses, even the ridiculous ones - "Delusions of grandeur" Jedore, or "Bullying a Dragon" Kuril, for example - gave interesting fights, despite being sometimes so utterly stupid that the whole reason to fight was a borderline joke. But Leng does not even give the player the satisfaction to be hard to defeat. I remember as an Engineer with Garrus or Tali in my squad downing his shields in less than 3 seconds on Thessia, and putting him down in less than 20 in the station - on Insanity. He is plain pathetic an opponent.

Seriously, take any final fight in 2, it will be harder than the fights against Kai Leng in 3. Garrus' recruitment alone gives us three local merc bosses that are more dangerous than Leng. Knowing that because the plot and the cutscenes said so, Shepard has to be dominated twice by this buffoon never fails to irk me.

Also, @some earlier posts about 2 being the weakest of the trilogy, I strongly disagree. It is the episode that turned Mass Effect from an old-fashioned RPG with a horrible rhythm (seriously, this game is slooooooooooooooow, even without the insufferable Mako sessions) to a dynamic TPS, and that got away with the rather blank depictions of 1 to focus on the characters - the strength of the series. The soundtrack also improved, with themes that adapted to every situation, making the scenes more unique. The combat system, while obviously not as refined as it would be in 3, made combats much more action-packed than they were in 1. I can understand people feeling that 2 went "mainstream" while 1 was deeper and harder to get in, but if Mass Effect 2 become the standard for mainstream works, I will never use that word as an insult again. 2 is pretty much the Empire Strikes Back to the trilogy - the scale is not as big as it can be in ANH or ROTJ, but the drama is at its finest, and the few flaws are overshadowed by the numerous improvements.

3 had the best combat system, and the best character interactions (especially once you consider the DLC) but its story was riddled with plot holes and very bad scenes. I mean, Kai Leng and the Starchild pretty much are Ewoks, if the previous comparison is used. They should not belong to that universe, and dumb down the entire plot.

edited 22nd Apr '15 4:42:31 AM by Julep

Took the words right out of my mouth.

Seriously, I absolutely hate Kai Leng not for his actions, but as a character.

edited 22nd Apr '15 5:05:45 AM by Elbruno

Good news: I managed to replicate the glitch for several Soldiers! Bad news: it worked for everyone after the Destroyer, gah. Still, I have 6/6/6/6/6 Havoc, Trooper, Marksman and Juggernaut, so I won't complain.

If you are playing on PC, you can use a cheat engine to automatically allocate yourself 105 points on any class you wish. Since you plan on exploiting a glitch, that may be the fastest way.

You just have to open the character screen, reset its powers, then look for the ref whose value is "84" and change it to "105". Usually, it is used to give you infinite money, but you can also use it for this semi-moral reason.

Also, Havoc 66666, woo-hoo, Cryo Blast 6! Awesome!

...yeah, I think this power stinks.

Is it really that easy?

Yeah, it really is. Since its multiplayer is coop, the security is minimal, and there is no one to ban hackers anymore. A guy I am playing with also hacked his challenges points, and now he is #1 in the world (but he can't unhack it - he just wanted to troll someone by taking a screenshot when he did it). Fun fact: when he is in the lobby, he has his correct challenge score displayed, but on the ladder, it is the hacked one that appears.

However, if you install cheat engine, some other programs (such as Battle.Net) won't start until you uninstall it.

You can also easily create modded games by changing your coalesced.ini once you get the hack of it. For example, games with 12 enemies appearing at once instead of 8. Or 50. Or with stronger enemies. Or with husks only. Or with 20 waves. Or with a 10 minutes long extraction. Or that give 300.000 credits when you complete it. The aforementioned hacked created "Diamond" games, that are harder than platinum. For example, if a Banshee gets close to you, she will grab you (the probability is .75 in Platinum and .5 in gold iirc).

edited 22nd Apr '15 6:00:23 AM by Julep

I think the problem with focusing on the characters is that there are too many and it stretches the players investment too thin. The guy with the gundam avatar finds doing the character missions boring, and I've said before that I have certain characters I really don't give a shit about.

I'm not sure if it's a failure or a success that bioware characters are likable to some people but not to others. I don't know though.

edited 22nd Apr '15 6:50:03 AM by CalamityJane

Most people care about Grunt or Thane tho.

...but in 2, there is a very good plot reason for the player to get invested in the characters, no matter if s/he likes them or not: s/he has a suicide mission to deal with, and has to prepare everyone for it if s/he wants to have a chance to succeed.

If you play a Shepard that does not care about losing some subordinates, then you can avoid their loyalty missions. But if you lose someone else because of that, then you won't have to complain, it will be your fault as a bad commander. Not Bioware's.

As for the investment, I don't think it stretches. If anything, I think the most common complaint is that players want more of some squadmates than what the game offers (Tali & Garrus after 1, Kasumi or Legion after 2). The fact that Citadel was so well-received is kind of a proof that the casting was not considered "too large" with "not enough investment" in the characters. Some of 2's squadmates offer amazing moments - Zaeed & Garrus in paranoid mode (bonus points if you are a FemShep romancing Garrus), Zaeed hitting on Samara, Grunt's Hangover, Grunt and the elevator, Jack & Miranda's insult exchange, Jack and her pet, Jack's romance scene...

Admittedly, Citadel had fanservice in mind, but the fact that fanservice included more interactions with the squadmates is telling. Also, despite being labelled "fanservice-y", the combat content was astounding. To me, it is proof that pleasing the fanbase does not necessarily mean forgetting about doing a great game in the first place.

I think any Mass Effect fan should sing Citadel's praises on a regular basis, just so BW execs remember that this is what makes a BW game great. Not Omega and its awful story, not philosophical dreams, not fighting a ninja during cutscenes. Meeting interesting characters and kicking ass with them.

edited 22nd Apr '15 7:06:25 AM by Julep

While the gameplay did improve — it cut down on customization a bit more than I'd like, but was still far better than the first game's kind of mess — I still think it has the worst overarching narrative of the series, and as part of the series as a whole it fits in like a square peg in a round hole. Note that this doesn't equate to "the worst game in the series", or even "the one with the worst writing".

The first game ends with a semi-cliffhanger, "the Reapers are coming and we'll be ready". Mass Effect 2 almost completely fails to follow on from this, jumping ahead two years and following a largely disconnected plot about a rogue team stopping a random Collector/Reaper plan. Not entirely disconnected, there, but still really distant. In terms of its actual story, it contributes relatively little to the third game, with its main antagonists being largely irrelevant from then on. Would anything really be different if the Collectors had been dropped completely from the series, especially since they weren't mentioned in the first game at all? It gives a lot of characters for the third game, true, but these are largely disconnected from the main narrative, and Cerberus have been retconned to hell.

At the start, they kill off the main character for drama... only go to immediately revive them. This puts them in debt to Cerberus, but they just got brought back from the dead. There are many more ways of setting up an Enemy Mine without bringing up so many questions. Are you you? Is this the premise for a personal introspective, perhaps cyberpunky, look at the nature of identity? No, you come back perfectly, everyone's insistent it means nothing at the start, and then you and others go on to pretty much ignore it.

The overall narrative is lower-scale, yes, but that's because it's gone from "save the galaxy" to "save the human colonists". The story wants to be a kind of Ocean's 11/Dirty Dozen flick, but by and large it fails at this. The characters themselves are interesting, but they aren't placed into this narrative well at all, and their personal development is completely unrelated to whatever's going on, and no work is put into making these guys feel like a team, aside from a few instances and the Suicide Mission. Just like bigger-scale stories, you can pull lower-scale stories both well and poorly. Empire pulled it off well.

That's not to say it's the only game in the series with these kind of problems. ME3's Crucible is a MacGuffin, but could work okay enough as a fairly cliché set-up for an overall better plot, but as a series finale it just comes out of nowhere. If you want "the Crucible" to be the key goal of the whole ending, you probably want to bring it up earlier. Where it does succeed in is following on from the whole "Reapers are about to come to war, will fuck us up", which had seemed to be the climax of both the first and second (admittedly to a larger degree) game. Overall, as a "trilogy" Mass Effect is honestly not the greatest, both in narrative and in terms of a continually in-flux gameplay.

And wow, I wrote more than I thought I was writing. Off-handedly refer to possibly me and get an essay in return, I guess.

edited 22nd Apr '15 7:03:50 AM by Lavaeolus

I was actually relieved not to be forced to go through some Jesus-philosophy in 2. It is exactly the same reason that makes me rate Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex far better than the movies: you are given a setup that allows you to think if you wish to, but does not forces you to do so. There are some philosophical chats, but overall the bunk of the time is about the plot advancing.

You can very well think about Shepard's resurrection and what that implies, some hints are even dropped here and there in 2 and 3, but you can also ignore it and accept that it is simply a way to remake Seven Samurai in space. I highly dislike games that say "hey, look how smart and deep and philosophical I am!" to the point that it slows down the plot. Exactly like the stupid Starchild dreams.

I like to think about a work because I find the universe interesting, not because the writers decide to tell me that their story is worth thinking about.

As for some of your other critics, again, I think they are true now that 3 and especially Citadel have been released, but that back then, there wasn't another game that displayed such a large and colorful cast (in recent, voiced games at least, I can't really count Final Fantasy VI where the only limit there was was the size of the cartridge, not the amount of time to spend on dubbing). It is like seeing the CGI in a rather old movie: even if they still look good, you'll see the difference when you compare it to recent works.

On the resurrection, I feel they don't really give you much avenue for exploring it yourself, though. It just... sort of happens. Partly that's due to the nature of an RPG, where a lot of the PC's mindset is left unsaid, but even so it seems out of place in the story. It slows down the story moreso, like a random event, a random alligator walking onto the screen for a nice chase, never to appear again. If you want to remake Seven Samurai in space, which is a great enough goal, it's probably best not to have that scene at all.

edited 22nd Apr '15 7:54:35 AM by Lavaeolus

I am among the first ones to complain with Mac Walters' obsession with Cerberus as a cool and dark and ambiguous organization (which I think they aren't, they're just a bunch of a-holes with a guy savvy enough to hide that to Shep during 2, more or less), but it is a rather good way to allow the Seven Samurai setup.

After 1, Shepard is a hero of the Alliance, a soldier everyone loves: if s/he asked for a ship to go hunt Collectors, then s/he would get a ship and the best the Alliance has to offer, no need to build a team. After saving the Citadel, there is no way to go Ragtag Bunch of Misfits if there isn't that convenient two-years disappearance. And seriously, Arrival shows how smart it is to try to lock Shep up for a couple of days, so two years? No.

It may not be that great, but it is, I think, necessary to go from plot point A to plot point B. Plus, it allows to cancel the possible consequences of Paragon vs. Renegade run in 1 - sure, some are kept, but Shep's aforementioned status could be badly affected by his/her decisions back in 1, and a knight in shining armor all-loving hero(ine) may not make the same choices for a team than a ruthless human supremacist. Basically, you would have to create two different games depending on the decisions of the player in 1.

See how Shep disappears again between 2 and 3: writing a trilogy of games with choices that matter is hard enough, if you don't use a reset once in a while, it becomes impossible to consider all possible options. Plus, the death justifies Shepard being even more OP in 2 and 3.

I dont see any thing wrong with making 2 games based on the choices of the first one. Sure it's more work, but it's also more money for the bottom line, right? I don't know how business works, though.

Also I think I stated an opinion as an absolute again. What I meant to say is my ability to socialize with many people at once is limited, hence I believe certain characters in mass effect aren't worth my time because they fail to appeal to me the way they appeal to other people (I think?).

My only real excuse is I just don't like some characters and I'm getting signals that it's a bad thing?

edited 22nd Apr '15 9:36:43 AM by CalamityJane

Not at all, it's just that your reasons for liking the trilogy are, from what I can gather, quite different from the norm. You just have to watch the extensive shipping threads for every single character that is not Jacob Taylor to see how much many players love them (on the BSN at least).

Aside from Jacob, Kai Leng and the Starchild, there are very few openly disliked characters - and considering the size of the cast, it is quite an accomplishment. You will find fans of pretty much everyone if you look and many fans of more than one character or ship.

Sure, some characters get some hate (the VS - especially Ashley after 3 - Liara/Tali among the most rabid fans of the other) but overall the cast is loved by many and considered among the best ever seen in a video game, if not the best. And in the three games, 2 is the one where the cast is the largest.

Making two different games is extremely difficult. We are not talking about doing pokemon red/blue, but two games with widely different casts, that should only appeal to half the players of the previous one - many people would not buy twice a game even if they liked the previous one, I mean, I will not both of the next Fire Emblem games no matter how much I loved Awakening. When it comes to money and time, I think it will be a waste. Using those plot devices allows to concentrate on more important things, I guess.

edited 22nd Apr '15 9:37:24 AM by Julep

Your opinions seem to go against the general grain of other Bioware fans, but that doesn't mean we don't like you. On the contrary, I'm very much the same type of guy with unconventional opinions on things widely praised within Bioware fandom, so I understand were you are coming from with a lot of your thoughts.

@Julep: Hmmm, yeah I see your point. The characters are great and many of them are phenomenal, every single one of them appeals to at least SOMEONE. That's what having a diverse cast is all about after all. My reasons for liking the trilogy is more about the lore, the history, the politics, and the places. The characters are great, sort of like an added bonus for what I like. Essentially I love settings more than I love characters and it's good to know that isn't the default for other people.

And yeah, the point about making two games does make sense. Thanks for telling me, now I see why fewer companies actually make different versions of a game.

@Very Melon: Thank you, it's good to know I'm not a black sheep in all this.

edited 22nd Apr '15 9:47:46 AM by CalamityJane

I at least got the impression that the Western release for the new Fire Emblem games might have them combined into one (since there's apparently going to be a special edition later down the line), but I guess we'll see.

I can definitely enjoy the setting, but for me, a lot of that is because of the characters. Still, while we may disagree on a few things, I don't dislike you for it, nor do I think that anyone here does.

Isn't Fire Emblem getting a single version with both storylines outside of Japan anyway?

Still, yeah, I can understand both sides, even if I agree more with one than with the other.

The weakest point of Citadel was the lack of Legion or a mention of the Virmire victim. Oh well, Mordin's recording and Thane's wake were already quite well handled.

I do appreciate giving Thane a wake in the Citadel DLC, especially after he was shafted in the game itself. I actually did his romance in one playthrough and I found the treatment of Thane really awful and pulled at my heartstrings in all the wrong ways. The one in the Citadel DLC is much better.

And yeah, if the next Mass Effect is like the Citadel DLC then I don't think that's a bad thing. I just hope we still get to explore and make big decisions.

Agreed on Legion by the way. I love him the most out of all the characters introduced in Mass Effect 2.

edited 22nd Apr '15 10:04:13 AM by CalamityJane

No problem CJ.

As for my own thoughts on Mass Effect 2, it really works better as a narrative when it doesn't have anything to do with the Reaper plot. There's nothing wrong with playing a game dedicated to just exploring the galaxy with your space buddies with helping them and other random people with your issues, that's actually when the game is at it's best.

The problems come when Mass Effect 2 fails to make any headway on the Reaper plot by itself, because you spend the whole game chasing the Collectors, you have no time to find way to stop the Reapers. It took post-game DLC to address the Reapers at all, and all you get out it is 6 more months to find a way to stop the Reapers.

I'm playing the PS 3 version, sadly. Anyway, I've always preferred exploits over just cracking the game open like that. Like the difference between conning someone out of their money and mugging them.

Ever since I learned how to save edit my PS 3 Mass Effect 2 save files, I've never played the game the same way again. Thanks to how the upgrades and ammo work there's just so many ways I could tweak things to my preference. On top of that, I can fix that Conrad import bug.

I always found that silly. How in the world did that get past testing, and why couldn't/wouldn't they patch that problem?

edited 22nd Apr '15 10:17:42 AM by Elbruno