Well, frankly I think Obsidian has some of the best writers in the business on their side that others struggle to match. Maybe not the best programmers and such though, given the amount of bugs and glitches they always seem to have.

You're never supposed to be Darth Evil in Mass Effect. That's not the point of the games. It's not supposed to a choice of Light Side/Dark Side like in KotOR, but a choice between good/bad cop. You're never supposed to be the bad guy. Granted ME3 wasn't the greatest example of that system most of the time, since they felt the pressing need to give Shepard so many automated responses, but still.

Part of it's because there's more of a continuity between the games. The amount of variables to keep track of in each game would grow huge if there were more choices, or if more choices were given greater meaning and had wider repercussions. The two KotOR games were largely separate, with different characters and conflicts between them. You play as Shepard and hang out with largely the same people in all three Mass Effect games. I'm not saying I don't think they could have done better at it, but it's not like they didn't have a reason for limiting themselves.

 

It's weird because a lot of people mention glitches but I played it on Xbox and then PC and other than a rare "everything freezes and shuts down" or getting stuck in a wall, I didn't experience major glitches\bugs.

It felt similar to the amount of bugs\glitches in Fallout 3.

In ME1 I felt like I could be the bad guy. It's been a while since I played but the game somehow promised far more "badness" (even a bad cop can pull some teeth and disappear a few bodies and do a bunch of other illegal stuff). Maybe I assumed that Bioware made it so there could be an option.

Then the endings also make it seem like there were good\neutral or okay\and terribly bad results that should have tied into alliances\choices better throughout.

Yeah, I mean as far as RPG's with story\choice go it's a good game and in the top fifteen. And it's hard to find science fiction settings (I enjoy Dragon Age but there's something special about light sabers or plasma guns and having a damn spaceship). But if you look at KOTOR and then ME, in one the graphics\elements seriously improve but the story potential is not fulfilled (for example with the party characters).

Are there other recent games you recommend that have good RPG stories like ME series or Fallout 3?

 

To be honest I don't experience the crazy amount of bugs from Obsidian games other people seem to have either. I mean yeah, there are bugs, but it's not like the games are unplayable. Either the accounts are exaggerated or we're in the minority.

Well you can be a bad cop, essentially, but not a bad guy. You can never join the opposing faction (Saren, the Collectors, Cerberus, the Reapers) in any of them, whereas in both KotOR games you can become a worse Sith than the ones you fight by the end. I think KotOR II presents you with some of the darkest choices in any game I've played. Not just "MUAHAHA, I WILL KILL ALL THE CHILDREN BECAUSE I AM DARTH DEVILHORNS" crap like the first one either, but the subtly manipulative kind which can be even more evil.

Frankly I didn't think Fallout 3 had a very great story. The first two games did the same thing (hunt for water, the Enclave) better. FO3 just threw in some half-baked family plot into the mix. Not that I hated the game, but it didn't really do anything new despite the entirely new setting and everything, which was disappointing. I much preferred New Vegas. Play that if you haven't already.

Anyway, I don't know what you've already played. Try The Witcher and its sequel out. For older games look to Deus Ex, Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines and Morrowind.

 

FO3 was the first and only game I played in the series. It was, for a while, my favorite game ever (and Dogmeat is one of the best companions). It makes me wonder about the first two.

I haven't gotten to New Vegas bc of mixed reviews but will check it and the other recs out.


---

If and when there is an ME4, when in time do you think it should take place? Some people want a prequel but then I hope they'd keep the PC as powerful, if not more, then Shepard.

Personally, I'd prefer something that took place a hundred or more years later (but continuity would be hard to keep depending on the "ending" they adopted as official from the previous one).

 

I think the lack of depth and scope to the Mass Effect expanded material is a damn shame. Everything seems to revolve around Shepard and the story of the existing games. The Citadel was around for a long time before humans entered the scene. So I say we should see the galaxy as it was before humanity entered the galactic community.

Personally I think the Rachni Wars would be an interesting time period to see. You could even tie the Reapers in still, at least a little, given that the Rachni were indoctrinated. But they should also pursue side stories that have nothing to do with the Reapers. Not everything in Star Wars has to do with the Sith after all. All sorts of stories can be set in the Mass Effect world.

 

[fanboy mode on]
What the fuck are you waiting for? Go to GOG.com and buy those games. They're cheep as hell. One of the best RPGs ever created (except Planescape: Torment) - they eat that kind of shit which was Fallout 3 on breakfast. In F3 you can go wherever you want, but can you play as a total idiot and a retard? In both original Fallout you could and the dialogs are hilarious. In both games you could finish the story without killing any sentient beings or you could murder everyone you came across. In F2 you could become a freaking cyborg, a boxing champion and a pornstar. Show me a game that offers as much possibilities and fun.

Also, New Vegas rocks - almost as good as the old Fallouts.
[fanboy mode off]

 

I like the original games and all, but the ability to play as a retard doesn't really sound like a selling point to me.

 

So I finally managed to find the time and more important motivation to play ME with all DLCs from beginning to end and had some thoughts I wanted to share.

First the DLCs:
From the Ashes is the only one that adds an new character which sadly doesn´t have anywhere near enough of an impact onto the story. This is the one that most clearly feels cut out and suffers from it. Javik had so much potential that never gets used.

Leviathan is the DLC that I had hoped ME3 would be mainly about. The search for the origin of the Reapers is something I missed in the normal game and while not perfect it manages to be interesting and more importantly explain some important things like the whole Synthetics/organic theme.

Omega is nice if have read the books/comics but otherwise useless.. they missed the chance to explain the radical change from ME2 Cerberus to 3 here.

Citadel is fun and fixes one of the bigger problems of normal ME. Crew Interaction. And the library mission is pure Gold even if the ending is a bit weak.

The Extension cut tries to fix the unfixable and does an OK job with it.. It still sucks and is dumb but less so then before.
If you ever want to experience what a good ending is look at the Witcher 2.


The normal game:

It would a lot better if would play as a new character as opposed to Shepard because your choices mostly don´t affect the game. The ME3 Shepard already feels like a completely new character(whiny, melodramatic, etc) so it would have been only consequent.

For example the start:
There is no reason for Shepard to be on earth. Paragon one is Spectre and as such above Alliance control and a Renegade should be with Ceberus/doesn´t care about orders.
It is also strange why Shepard feels so bad about losing earth, two of his 3 origin are space/colony and even in the third he doesn´t many pleasant memories of the place but the game still portrays him as absolute shocked.

I could continue this list endlessly but what I want to show is that with a new character Bioware could have easily avoided that. Simply make him a an Alliance soldier with family on earth like James and you have both a reason why he wants to liberate earth and why he follows orders.

 

It's the homeworld dude. Of course he's going to be affected; it is where his species began. How would you feel if you were raised in one country, and then heard on the news that the country your parents came from had been nuked? That's not even taking into account that Shepard holds himself responsible for not stopping the Reapers before they made it to Earth in the first place.

 

Yeah, I never really had a problem with Shepard feeling empathy for Earth, even if mine had the Colonist origin. Though I didn't play a hardline Renegade Shepard either. I imagine those that did might be miffed with Shepard's attitude. That comes right back around to the lack of player choice in ME3 and the automated characterization for Shepard.

 

I can see the Council revoking Spectre status for the elimination of a planet.

 

Not sure if that is true... I mean the whole ME1 was about how much power a Spectre has and the Batarians aren´t that well liked..

But even revoking the status shouldn´t change the responsibility of the Council. Even when Saren got his Spectre status revoked the Council dealt with him and not the Turian hierarchy.

But not his homeworld. I could understand that he cares a bit about it but the game portrays it like the universe is ending when earth falls.

What makes earth more special than Thessia, Palavan or his birthplanet? Why does he expect that the other races sacrifice anything to help liberate one damn planet?

Yep.. that is the real problem.. like I said it doesn't feel like I play my Shepard anymore.


And yeah.. if you want a game about choices, consequences and moral dilemmas then play The Witcher and the Witcher 2. It has immense replay value. But should probably read the books first otherwise you will find the world and the characters a bit strange. The greatest achievement of CDProject is how they managed to give you freedom as Geralt while still managing to capture his character perfectly.

 

Imagine a tree turned on it's side. Divide that tree into three sections.

That's what the storyboard for the trilogy would/should have looked like, if they hadn't coped out on us.

Each game is not only continuous with the one(s) before it, but each game offers:
- New choices to be made that will (theoretically) matter later down the line
- Options to terminate and/or resolve certain plot and character threads through various manners (Garrus dies in the Suicide Mission, Garrus isn't there in 3, and that has to be compensated for).
- A continuation of older threads with new choices to be made, so now there are multilple branch-offs of each branch-off.

Mass Effect 3 would have had to keep track of a labyrinth of plot threads. I'd go so far as to say that any given playthrough would only see roughly 20% of the full content of the game, had they given all your previous choices justice. They simplified it, because they got caught in the crunch.

And I don't hold that against them. I'm not upset that they had to cut down the plot bush with a weed wacker to be able to release on schedule. EA is tyrannical that way.

What I hold against them is that they pretended that the game was complete and the way it had always been intended to be, and they went with moral outrage instead of being honest and saying "we were pressed for time, and didn't get to do a lot of the things that we wanted too. We're sorry about that."

 

Well that's a legitimate complaint I think. Until the Reapers brought the Citadel over Earth there wasn't any real reason why the allied forces had to strike at Earth over anywhere else. I think if they wanted Earth to be so special to the story they should have raised the stakes a bit more somehow. Have something on Earth related to the defeating the Reapers that nowhere else in the galaxy has, and have it there from the beginning, not just before the end.

Only a couple of the books are translated to English, though I heard that the book series actually goes downhill as it goes on. Apparently the Ciri character isn't very well-received. A lot of people say she's a Mary Sue.

I bought The Last Wish and The Blood of Elves (I think The Last Wish was better), but I learned all I really needed to know as it relates to the games from the internet.

I've also heard that Bioware really doesn't like the idea of a player not experiencing the whole game at once and being locked out of content.

 

But that is their own fault.. They knew they were making a trilogy and that the choices had consequences so why were they surprised when nothing fit together?

 

Right so I finally picked up ME3 because I saw it for $30 at a Shoppers. I agree that the ending is sort of space magic-y bullshit. It would have been a lot better if there had been some serious human centric AI, transhumanist stuff happening across both previous games. But there wasn't. Maybe this is covered in the dlc somewhere, I'm not sure as I haven't bought hardly any of the stuff.

With that said I actually liked the ending. Hilariously it's because I didn't expect anymore than two choices at the end of the game. The fact that I could choose something other than a paragon/ renegade ending sort of blew my mind a bit. I didn't expect "my story" to be done any justice whatsoever. Not to knock Bioware or anything, but I just didn't expect them to be able to deal with so much material. I sort of lost faith with the ending of ME2 I guess. There was no culmination of ME1 plot-lines there, so I didn't really expect them to be able to pull off two games worth of choices.

At least the geth are still awesome.

 

Raine is right on this. Had the game been done properly, almost everyone would have had a completely unique experience in ME3.

An image from the Mass Effect retrospective panel at PAX East.

Now imagine the choices mentioned there multiplied by ten, and you'd come close to the reality of what ME3 really could have been.

Bioware's main problems when it came to ME3 can be traced back to two things.

1. They fucked up pretty hardcore with ME2. - Now before I get shat on for that comment, let me explain.

Mass Effect 2 is probably my favorite in the series when it comes to gameplay (ME1 wins for story) but the story, and the entire game really, were pointless. Take a look back at the story of ME2, it's actually not very long at all ( it just seems that way because we spend the entire game filling our ship with expendable characters.

• Prologue - Save Joker (The Normandy)
• Prologue - Awakening (Cerberus Medical Vessel)
• Freedoms Progress (Freedom's Progress Colony)
• Exploring the Normandy SR2 (Unofficial)
• The Citadel - The Council
• Dossier - The Professor (Omega)
• Dossier - Archangel (Omega)
• Dossier - The Convict (Purgatory Prison Ship)
• Dossier - The Warlord (Korlus)
• Horizon (Horizon Colony)
• Miranda - The Prodigal (Illium)
• Jacob - The Gift of Greatness (2175 Aeia)
• Jack - Subject Zero (Pragia)
• Mordin - Old Blood (Tuchanka)
• Grunt - Rite of Passage (Tuchanka)
• Garrus - Eye for an Eye (Citadel)
• Dossier - Tali (Haestrom)
• Dossier - The Justicar (Illium)
• Collector Ship (Disabled Collector Ship)
• Dossier - The Assassin (Illium)
• Samara - The Ardat-Yakshi (Omega)
• Tali - Treason (Quarian Flotilla)
• Thane - Sins of the Father (Citadel)
• The Reaper IFF (Derelict Reaper)
• Jokers Jump (Unofficial) (Normandy SR2)
• Legion - A House Divided (Heretic Station)
• The Center of the Galaxy (Unofficial) (Normandy SR2)
• The Collector Base

The items in red are the real story missions, everything else is just fluff. My insanity completionist game just before ME3 came out took around 42 hours, I took my time, did every DLC, and didn't skip a single dialogue scene. The average playthrough time for the standard game is 33 hours with 15% of cutscenes skipped. Those 9 missions which are crucial to the storyline, take under 4 hours to complete, and that's being generous.

So much wasted time spent gathering a bunch of crew members that you can't even keep in ME3. Why? Because Mass Effect 2 was never supposed to be important. It was the Treyarch game between two Infinity Ward releases. It was simply a holdover used to preserve important characters (Liara, Ashley, that Alenko douche.) for the third game.

The second game should have given us Javik, focused on the origins of the Reapers and the divide between synthetic and organic, reunited the old squad, and finally ended with Arrival.

They ended up trying to cram too much into ME3, and it suffered greatly for it.

2. EA ruins all the things.

EA acquires your studio and demand that you make the game accessible to everyone (even if they haven't played the first two games) add in multiplayer, and get it out close to a year ahead of schedule. Bioware basically got crushed under the tyrannical boot-heel of EA, simple as that really. They're not the first, and they certainly won't be the last.

----

When the criticism started rolling in, Bioware could have manned up and said , "Look, the game was rushed and we screwed up, our bad. Sorry." But they didn't. They instituted mass bans on the forums, locked countless threads that didn't deserve it, and basically decided to say,

"Nope, that's the story. We don't make games for you. Fuck you if you don't like it."
- Casey Hudson, March 2012 paraphrased.

 

Some more of the neat numbers from ME3. Definite spoilers if for some reason you're interested but have yet to play the game. It's still mind-blowing to me that the boring Soldier was still the most popular class.

 

I have a bit of trouble believing that only 4% of all of us finished the game on Insanity. It wasn't that difficult, especially if you used an Infiltrator.

 

If there's one thing ME3 multiplayer has taught me, it's that there are a lot of people who are inexplicably bad at the game.