I've been enjoying the multiplayer somewhat. It has some nice features like integrated voip (though barely anyone uses it - but at least it has it, unlike some other game that should *cough*Battlefield 3*cough*) and it can be pretty fun.

However, it's buggy as hell. I've had days where I flat out can't connect to anything, and today I had a round where I was still in the game, but my ammo wouldn't reload, my skills wouldn't activate, and I basically couldn't do jack.

Also, Banshees suck.

 

Banshees are made of everything wrong in the world, Shepards nightmares and a hand full of the topsoil from hell.

I couldnt agree more.

 

Reapers are the most difficult enemy to beat solely because of banshees. They're mobile because they can teleport right up to your face, take a hell of a lot of bullets to put down, can do massive amounts of ranged and close quarters damage (including an instant kill attack) including and attack that can follow you around corners and into cover, and lag means they can sometimes instant kill you from ten or so meters away.

They literally have all the advantages of the other "tank" enemies and none of their weaknesses. Needs nerfing, Bioware.

By the way, pro-tip in case you didn't know it (I didn't until recently): Banshees' weak point isn't their head, but their stomach. Shoot them there for better damage.

 

Noted.

I've found that this document sums up the Indoctrination Theory best. I don't even care if it's what Bioware intended or not, it's my headcanon now, unless it's supplanted by something better later. (And we're all on a fanfiction forum, so consider that before judging me on it.)

Nonsense.

EDIT:

 

You've been around the pony fandom too much.



Would you folks say that the ending spoiled the entire game for you? I've actually never played Mass Effect, but it seems like most people had fun with it up until the last ten minutes.

Though maybe I should keep all my money away from EA at this point.

 

I'll put it this way. I've been playing this series from 2007, and I have many different play throughs of Mass Effect 1 and 2 to see all the different outcomes, etc. When I finished the first two games, the first thing I did was start another play through.

I finished ME3 over a week ago, and have not touched the single player since. I originally intended to do another playthrough of all three games after finishing ME3, but I honestly can't bring myself to put in the effort to play through the three games only to see that shit at the end.

So, no the ending didn't ruin the game for me - it might have ruined the entire series, one that I've been playing for half a decade and is one of my favourite series. That may sound like a dramatic over reaction, but it's the truth - why put many hours into something when I know the outcome will be the exact same every time?

 

Allies take out the shields of the banshee, then 3-4 shots of a fully charged Geth plasma shotgun lolol. Half a dozen brutes charging at you? Big deal.

The story is really the driving point of the game. The writing is exceptional for a modern blockbuster; even the background conversations between random NPCs are interesting if not marginally important. The gameplay actually immerses you and makes you feel like your decisions have an impact on the story.

There's probably thousands of posts across hundreds of threads and forums articulating the rage about the ending better than I can. Suffice to say, I haven't played the first two games, but I loved the game and fucking hated the ending.

Were it not for the ending, I would wholeheartedly recommend you buy the game.

Good plan.

 

I wish I could do that. I have the Geth Plasma Shotgun at it's tenth level, but the constant lag I get because of being matched up with Americans combined with my below average internet speed mean the gun is less than worthless to me. Shots travel to slow for me to hit anything, and are liable to travel straight through enemies without doing any damage.

 

I have a question about the 'Shepard is indoctrinated' theory, has anyone ever tried letting Marauder Shields kill Shepard? If you can't be killed at that point in time, it would support that what happened was a dream. I would do it myself but I didn't save before the last mission and would have to redo the Cerberus base at the very least

 

if this is legit, then yeah, Shepard can die before the beam.
http://knowyourmeme.com/videos/34293-marauder-shields

 

He can, but it's "Critical Mission Failure".

That's a rather amusing joke, showing that even a ridiculous ending like that would be preferable.

You can definitely die to him, apparently he's a bitch on Hardcore or Insanity. From what I've heard, at least.

 

Also, I actually feel sorry for the people that romanced Jacob. All two of them.

 

After reading how much most people hated the ending (can't call it endings), I'm happy that I haven't buy ME3 yet. I will wait for the final edition, so I don't need to buy any possible DLC fixing the ending.

Also, is it true that Shepard can survive, but only if you play in multiplayer mode (not sure what exactly that means in this game)?

 

It's possible in single player but you need almost a perfect import game to do it. Or you can just go to coalesced.bin and edit one of the war asset values.

 

Apparently if you bought the game through Amazon even if it's for the PC and opened you can return it for a refund. I'm curious if Amazon will disclose how many people returned their copies of Mass Effect 3.

 

Probably a few already so far.

 

I lol'd.

/10char.

 

So after I finally finished the game I want to join the discussion.

Spoiler

I’m really disappointed in the game and especially the ending because of all the plot holes. That the endings are almost the same just makes this even worse.

They could have had a lot of different endings, even if just the last 5-10 minutes were different, it wouldn’t have been that much more expensive, would it?

They could have had an ending in which you always supported the Illusive Mans mission of making Humans superior and dominant to the other species. In that ending controlling the reapers would have worked and Humans would have become the most powerful species in the galaxy. That could have been one ‘happy’ ending.

Another one could have been standard ‘good’ happy ending. Bringing all the races in the galaxy together to fight with you opened a crucial window in the reapers defenses that allowed you to deactivate them. Maybe even introduce a virus to make retarded Independence Day ending. That would have still been fine in my book.

You can have an ending similar to the current one, where you succeed but the Mass Relays blow up, because you haven’t done everything ‘perfect’.

You could have one where you just fail, but leave behind crucial information for the species of the next cycle to discover, that may allow them to finally defeat the reapers. You get this one if you just rush through the game.

All these endings could be slightly modified by who of your friends survived in the previous games. Yeah even an 80s style montage of “Garrus started up his own band and become a famous singer; Tali settled on her home planet, married and had 17 kids, Doctor Chakwas cured cancer and her face was chiseled onto the moon to memorize the event” would have been better.

-

Apart from the ending, I really liked the two big choices you get to make in the game:
- curing the genophage or sabotaging it
- siding with the Geth or the Quarians
I really agonized over the choice, and I was at the same time relieved and slightly disappointed when I was able to create a Happy Ending on Rannoch and avoided the bad consequences of my decision.

-

Overall I disliked the focus on organics vs robots/AI. It seemed to me more like poor imagination to make this distinction than anything else. Organics can only be lumped into one because all organics in the Mass Effect universe are just different looking humans. Then in the 2nd and especially the 3rd game it’s established that the Geth and EDI are also just different looking humans. All the aliens in the galaxy are just different cultures, not actually different beings.

If they had been really different from each other it would have been impossible to just lump in all “organics” into one faction and all AIs/robots/synthetics into one.
The story of EDI especially seemed ridiculous. It would have been one thing to have an AI that’s designed to act and feel sort-of like a human and that AI is now one of your teammates. It’s a whole different animal if you have an AI that is constantly self-modifying and just happens to give itself human values/feelings/behavior and have it actually fucking date a human! WTF?

-

Maybe it’s just my memory playing tricks on me, but I felt Mass Effect 1 had a few things that didn’t really make sense, but were excusable because they had to tell a cool story and have cool gameplay which you don’t get if you want everything to be ‘realistic’ in some sense.

But by Mass Effect 2 and now especially ME3 I felt the whole setting was sacrificed for the sake of telling Shepards story. Nothing made sense anymore from an overall perspective and plot holes were everywhere. In ME2 no one cares that thousands of colonists go missing except a terrorist organization and that organization seems to have almost unlimited resources and outclasses Alliance technology. It’s one thing if they were a different country with all the resources that entails, but they are what exactly? Some kind of hi-tech Al-Qaeda in space that gets its resources… where exactly? Donations from human supremacists?

-

The story seems to have been influenced by the desire to have Shepard fight lots of different enemies so that the basic gameplay wouldn’t get too tedious. To me it just felt forced how often you had to fight someone who wasn’t the main enemy in the games and how the story had to be adjusted to accommodate that.

The series started out as science fiction (it cared about explaining how and why thinks worked the way they did and tried to stay internally consistent) and ended as science fantasy (doesn’t matter if it makes sense for something to happen in this setting, it does or it doesn’t happen depending on what’s needed for the story now).

-

Something else that bugged me about the series was that they classified many different choices into Paragon/Renegade and awarded you points in them. Even worse that some choices could only be made with a high enough Paragon or Renegade score. This meant that it felt like playing with a handicap if you didn’t always chose the blue options or always the red. If the player is ever in the situation to think “I would like to make choice B, but I’ve been playing Paragon until now and choice A is the paragon one, so I have to choose that” you’ve made a mistake. But this is more of a pet-peeve of me personally than anything else.

---------- Post automerged at 14:29 ---------- Previous post was at 14:17 ----------

More on the ending:

Spoiler

I played as a pure Paragon and at the ending I was so dumbfounded that I actually chose the Cerberus option of trying to control the reapers because the other choices seemed so much worse. Destroying all AIs after I just established that EDI and the Geth are just as valuable as anyone else in the galaxy? Seemed like genocide. 'Fusing' both forms of life (See further above what I think about that classification)? I'm fuzzy on the details here. How would that even work? Seems like one huge plot hole and I didn't want to have the potential death of everyone in the whole galaxy on my conscience.
In the control scenario I at least don't commit genocide (maybe on the reapers, but they're too evil to count ) and the rest of the galaxy is free to make their own choices.

 

Spoiler

Control seems like a tenuous solution at best. What's guaranteeing that Shepard can keep control over the Reapers and stop the cycle from repeating? Not to mention you've spent the entire game arguing how it's a bad idea with the Illusive Man, only for you to do a complete heel-turn on that at the last minute on the word of a little ghost kid.

The very idea of synthesis is more than a little disturbing, and it dumbfounds me how it's considered the best option. How can you possibly justify forcing that decision on everyone in the galaxy?

Destroy is the only option to me. It's the job you were sent to do and what you were planning on doing throughout all three games. And yes, he says that all synthetic life will be destroyed, but we never actually see the Geth and EDI go down. There's no weight to his words. Plus he says that you'll die if you choose it... but then that's the only ending where it's possible to live, apparently. So fuck that kid, if he's lying about that who knows what else he's lying about.

The point is moot, as all the endings are retarded anyway. With the Mass Relays gone, everything is fucked.

 

http://blog.bioware.com/2012/03/21/4108/

Seems like there will really be a overworked ending. But I am not sure how much of the critics they really understood.. For me it sounds like they now just make a happy ending to shut the people up. But even that would probably better than what we have now.
(I still find it find it funny that they say their end is the right one and we are just to dumb to understand it. I understand it.. I played Deus Ex. The difference is, it made sense there..)

And I really wonder what sort of people work do the marketing for Bioware.. Because they more than failed with this. And it is not exactly like Bioware has that much goodwill in the community that Bioware can afford to lose it .. after Dragon Age 2, Sw:ToR (which I found good but also seems to die), and Origin most of their fans are not exactly happy with them.

@Ayreon
You are right.. ME1 mostly focuses on the hunt for Saren while ME2 focuses on Shepard and his teammates.
I personally liked ME2 better and didn´t think there were that many plotholes. But I am also a lot more forgiving in that aspect than many others. I also liked fighting different enemies and missed that in ME3 for me it makes the game more interesting and challenging.
Cerberus gets his money and most of its technology from straw companies and donations from people like Miranda father (who is one the richest humans). You have to remember that companies in ME are a lot more powerful than today.. they can even own their own planets (Noveria). And they are not the only one with the technology and manpower. Ecplipse had enough manpower to fight a whole war and the same seems true for the Blue Sons.

Edit:
And is it really possibly for Shepard to survive? In all my endings the station exploded and there was nothing that hinted at a survival of Shepard. (I had 7700 Points and 50% war readiness not sure how you could get more without multiplayer)