Bethesda barely acknowledged their ps3 version of Skyrim was broken, it's best to just ignore things.
Mass Effect 3 Demo Impressions [Online Open To All]
- Thread starter CyReN
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Bethesda barely acknowledged their ps3 version of Skyrim was broken, it's best to just ignore things.
Reave
Member
I'm sure they're glossing over those questions too -- frees up more time for them to post more "OMG thank u our game IS awesome!" replies.
I still think it's poor story telling, sorry! When you put things into perspective it really seems to me like they were mading up stuff as they went along (especially in ME2). I find there's no decent hints in ME1 at what you can expect in 2 and to me some of the plot in 2 feels like a retcon of the plot 1. Even if you argue that it's not clear about the status of the Reapers in 1, the game gives you more hints about how they are machines than they are organic. The twists that they harvest life forms was poorly introduced to me and felt like a retcon, especially since they had the tools (protheans , artifact, AI) to hint at their organic nature properly in 1.
Even then, if the animations haven't changed at all since the demo, our concerns wont change anything, the game is gold. I don't think patches usually do anything with animations either.
Unless someone can prove me wrong.
shinobi602
Member
Isn't this kind of important?...
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
.shinobi602
Member
This is an illogical way of thinking. Basically, if you learn new things in sequels of any media form, they're automatically retcons and not just continuation of information/story? How does that work? Should we learn every single thing in the first game?
That would make for boring sequels.
don't worry!
So, I don't know who runs the EA games twitter but chances are that it's a PR company that has no real links with Bioware or EA. They are purely there to "represent" EA and interact with the community.
There is no guaranty that they know what they are saying or are fully aware of a game technicalities.
So yeah, I'll wait before believing the high-res texture info.
There is no guaranty that they know what they are saying or are fully aware of a game technicalities.
So yeah, I'll wait before believing the high-res texture info.
"We had two previous games to plan for this, but you wanted to airquote them. So we're all fucked, you morons. Airquote them away, that's my plan!" *hops on the Normandy as Earth is destroyed.*
(Mass Effect 3 logo here)
Open on the Galaxy Map. Reaper's being "Earth" while Shepard is in space. Has sexy parties while the rest of the galaxy gets blown up. BAD END inbound. Millions of copies sold for this shitty storyline.
Ventilaator
Banned
The demo not being final code doesn't mean that PS3 final code won't have framerate issues, it might just mean that they added a tree in a park somewhere.
Unless they come out and say otherwise, I'll continue thinking that the PS3 version is shite.
Unless they come out and say otherwise, I'll continue thinking that the PS3 version is shite.
Expecting some kind of natural progression isn't illogical to me. There is a difference to me between adding things in an out of the blue manner that make it seems like it condtradicts the original or previous work and bringing new elements that make sense and that you can more or less understand why the story went there by reading or playing the first game.
Since GAF love dubious comparison, I will use one with DA since its also a Bioware IP. From DAO to DAII you learn more about the Tevinter Imperium where mages are the ones in control of the town and their rivalry with the Chantry that believes magic is ultimately evil. In the second game you learn more about both sides of the conflict and they are at the center of the plot, yet nothing outrageous is added. It's not like they decided that Tevinter was now a haven of happiness or that in fact it was darkspawn disguised as mages that were causing havoc. It stays in the boundaries of the plot of the first game and over the span of the 2(3 games if you count Awakening) they flesh out the stories and the rivalry with the Chantry. You also have hints in the first game about how tense the conflict is and it eventually blows up in the second game.
Anyway this is far OT for this thread right now as its supposed to be a demo thread. Sorry for the side discussion, I didn't mean to hijack the thread.
Even then you should know about it in the beginning of ME2 as Sovereign was destroyed in Citadel Space. Some organic matters should remains on the parts of the "ship". It wouldn't have been hard to add this info in the first game through a Prothean artifact or the AI. A simple hint about how they have strange behaviour for an entirely mechanical race would have been enough, especially since you could compare them to the Geths.
You even said yourself we shouldn't be shocked that if there is a Deux ex machina twist to destroy the reapers. This proves onca again how sloppy the writing is. They had 2 games to give hints or possibilities about their weakness and we got nothing.
thetrin
Hail, peons, for I have come as ambassador from the great and bountiful Blueberry Butt Explosion
Because there's no reason not to find it out in the first game.
It's just as frustrating as when two characters in a TV show talk, and one has VITAL INFO for the other, but they instead say "oh, it's nothing" just so we can experience that revelation in the season finale.
It's bad writing. They could have simply created circumstances where it would be impossible for them to know in ME1, or simply hinted in a subtle way.
Simply put, it's sloppy writing.
Making characters magically stupid or tight-lipped to serve the pacing of the plot is awful writing, and it's so prevalent in modern media that people seem to think that's just how things are written now.
Casey Hudson, is that you?
shinobi602
Member
What...in that case, no story ever told should have a sequel. We should just learn everything the first time around. How would we feasibly find out the Reapers are semi organic in ME1? Would Sovereign just start unveiling everything about himself when we meet him? Where he came from? What he's made out of? etc
There's no proof that the fleet actually consists of thousands of Reapers. The shot at the end of ME2 showed hundreds at most. Plus, consider: if the Reapers create 1 new Reaper per cycle, and each cycle is 50,000 years, 1000 Reapers would take 50 million years, give or take however many Reapers the initial fleet started off with.
Also, there's no proof that the Reaper fleet consists entirely of dreadnoughts. As other posters have already guessed, it's most likely that Sovereign was the exception rather than the rule.
If the majority of the allied ships are equipped with the same Thanix cannons from ME2, it's entirely possible that every combined fleet in the galaxy could defeat the Reapers by brute force.
LightofRohan
Member
ME3's running animation
OK... that is really bad. I take back what I've said. Haha.
Are these hand animated or controlled motion capture? I thought they used all mocap. This is good though, if I plan on going the animation route, bioware will have some nice openings!
thetrin
Hail, peons, for I have come as ambassador from the great and bountiful Blueberry Butt Explosion
Please tell me you're just playing devil's advocate, and you actually understand the concept of proper and genuine pacing in a story.
No one is saying Sovereign needed to literally go through a 4 page diatribe on what Reapers are and what they're made of.
If a character has vital information for another, and there's no reason NOT to tell them (Sovereign has every reason not to tell them, but the Protheans do not), they should tell them. Simple.
I also said they could have avoided this all by making it impossible for Shephard and his crew to know these things in ME1. Unfortunately, they are able to access Prothean records in ME1. You'd think Protheans would have written it down SOMEWHERE AT SOME TIME. It's kind of important!
Which seems stupid when you think about it. A collection of species less technologically advanced than the Protheans stand a chance against the very alien race that wiped them out?
Hmm, sounds like a good read. Recommend it? and where should i start in the series?
The reapers that arrive on earth don´t necessarily constitute their entire "species". There could be... multiple reaper fleets, would make for more efficient ass kicking.
shinobi602
Member
I really just don't believe that would have been necessary at all. I just can't see how it's a retcon in ME2....in my opinion I think it's one of the more interesting things we learned in ME2.
They had 2 games, true. But why does that automatically make it seem like they are just making things up as they go? Why couldn't all this be planned from the beginning? Maybe a huge part of ME3 is actually discovering what their weakness is? If we even had small hints as to their weaknesses, they would have been more less menacing from the very start.
shinobi602
Member
Granted, but who said the Protheans knew everything about the Reapers? Vigil was only on Ilos and nowhere else. He wouldn't have known what happened outside of it...
thetrin
Hail, peons, for I have come as ambassador from the great and bountiful Blueberry Butt Explosion
That's a fair point. The Protheans didn't seem to know fucking anything about the Reapers other than the fact that they exist.
It just seems pretty unlikely that the Protheans had a galaxy-spanning empire, and never took down a simple Reaper, and a ragtag band of dudes led by a living dead cyborg man infused with Prothean knowledge would do it twice.
HarryHengst
Member
I followed this order: http://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2009/06/revelation-space-books-by-chronology.html , which worked for me.
Although following that means you have to start with two collections of short stories, instead of a full novel. If you just want a novel start with either Chasm City (more of a noir/detective story set in a city) or Revelation Space (probably the better choice, especially if you want to see where Mass Effect got some of its inspiration from).
AlimNassor
Banned
It sells millions because it's a genuinely good series.
HarryHengst
Member
They did figure out what the Keepers where being used for, and how to disable them opening the relay in the citadel, thus giving the current species more time (not that it did them any good, thanks to people like mr ah yes, "Reapers".
Fine Ham Abounds
Member
So uh, I feel compelled to begin my impression at the beginning, even though anyone reading this is unfortunately going to think I'm just trolling here, but...
Well, I played the PS3 version of the demo first, right after playing the Gal Gun and Binary Domain demos, and it really struck me how inferior the ME3 demo felt from the standpoint of character animation, performance, effects, to even setpieces in the case of BD. I kept thinking about how much I hoped the demo was from a very old build. The animations... These can't be the same animations from ME2 and I'm only now noticing how bad they are, can they? Why would they even bother remaking them?
Narrative-wise, the dialog of course was the usual corny fare and felt like it was composed in one sitting by an adolescent playing with action figures and went straight into production without ever passing under a second set of eyes. That said, it at least made some contextual sense, as opposed to the plot setup offered here at the beginning of this story which seems to be one giant plothole designed to do nothing but present a setpiece, and left me wondering in every scene how any of it was supposed to be believable knowing what modest amount I do about the ME universe. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now considering this is maybe 2% of the game's story and maybe some things will be built upon or explained later, but considering the reaction a lot of you have had to the script leak (which I've avoided), I'm not going to set my expectations too high.
Gameplay wise though, I felt everything worked pretty well. I was very happy with the number of options the game gives you, the new skill system seemed a readily noticeable improvement over that in ME2, and even the kind of wonky rolling mechanic seemed to work well and jive with the existing cover/vault business.
The worst thing I took from the demo however was actually how distracting the gulf in quality between the soundtrack and the amateurish, cheap attempts at emotional involvement offered by the writing was. It was almost comical, like having Vangelis compose the soundtrack to The Room or something.
Well, I played the PS3 version of the demo first, right after playing the Gal Gun and Binary Domain demos, and it really struck me how inferior the ME3 demo felt from the standpoint of character animation, performance, effects, to even setpieces in the case of BD. I kept thinking about how much I hoped the demo was from a very old build. The animations... These can't be the same animations from ME2 and I'm only now noticing how bad they are, can they? Why would they even bother remaking them?
Narrative-wise, the dialog of course was the usual corny fare and felt like it was composed in one sitting by an adolescent playing with action figures and went straight into production without ever passing under a second set of eyes. That said, it at least made some contextual sense, as opposed to the plot setup offered here at the beginning of this story which seems to be one giant plothole designed to do nothing but present a setpiece, and left me wondering in every scene how any of it was supposed to be believable knowing what modest amount I do about the ME universe. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now considering this is maybe 2% of the game's story and maybe some things will be built upon or explained later, but considering the reaction a lot of you have had to the script leak (which I've avoided), I'm not going to set my expectations too high.
Gameplay wise though, I felt everything worked pretty well. I was very happy with the number of options the game gives you, the new skill system seemed a readily noticeable improvement over that in ME2, and even the kind of wonky rolling mechanic seemed to work well and jive with the existing cover/vault business.
The worst thing I took from the demo however was actually how distracting the gulf in quality between the soundtrack and the amateurish, cheap attempts at emotional involvement offered by the writing was. It was almost comical, like having Vangelis compose the soundtrack to The Room or something.
Everything you said makes sense and should be true but there's no reason Vigil would know any of this. Once the Reapers came in and took over the citadel all communications were cut off, all the relays shut down. Every star system was completely isolated from the others.
Whatever one group learned and found out about the reapers and their successes in fighting them was meaningless for the Protheans as a whole because they were completely cut off from one another and had zero means to relay this news to one another. They couldn't coordinate or share wraps secrets or anything.
Shepard and Co only succeeded because of the efforts of those few surviving Protheans centuries later with their message in the beacon about what was to come. Plus there's the whole speculation that the Protheans actively intervened in the development of species in order to speed up their development, like the Mars facility. So they were actively trying to stack the odds in our favor for when the reapers returned.
You don't seem the point we are arguing for right now. We are saying the writing is sloppy. They had 2 games to have a decent build up and they failed terribly. When you read a good story, its fun to learn plot twists because you can actually read the plot back from the beginning and notice how it makes so much sense. Like how in a good mystery novel you can reread the whole thing when you know the identity of the murderer and it makes so much sense since there are some hints in place. In ME this is not the case. What happens is sometimes completely far fetched and out of the blue. They are also creating an artificial tension by using ridiculous plot devices like the council who refuses to acknowlegde the Reaper's existence even if one crashed in their office simply because they want a suprise attack and panic in 3.
I mean we are talking about writing that makes you ally yourself with a terrorist group which is responsible for the worst crime against life forms in 1. Moreover, it's a human supremacist group and you even get aliens to join you on you crusade because you are amazing :lol
As for making the Reapers less menacing, they pretty much did so in 2 where you spend the game fighting their underlings instead. They did not even explain their rapid progression in space unless you play the DLC!
It once again seems like they are making up stuff as they go along and to me it does appear as retcon since it contradicts what you're told in the first game as there's no other hints to another possibility...
I'm ready to bet that some prothean informations, database, horse armor, magical gizmo or whatever will be the key to defeating the Reapers but that you conveniently didn't find it in 1 simply because they wanted you to find it in 3.
Vamphuntr's truth bombs all up in this thread.
Brilliant analogy. I could not agree more.
I took the Cerberus story as a parallel to the STG, League of One and all of those organizations. I really hope we find out Cerberus is still an off-the-record Alliance operation. Similarly, Shepard's arc in 2 mirrors Saren's fairly frequently.
To me the reapers lost their menace when for some reason 1 dying husk meant the Normandy could deliver a kill shot to sovereign.
thetrin
Hail, peons, for I have come as ambassador from the great and bountiful Blueberry Butt Explosion
Thank you for posting this. I forget a lot of the details from ME1.
The biggest issue with the reapers is that Bioware wrote them as these Lovecraftian machine gods, but they have no idea how to write themselves OUT of that hole...so they make them humorously fallible.
Exactly my point. The whole thing feels utterly disjointed and prolonged purely for the sake of making it a trilogy.
We don't know if they didn't take down a Reaper or not, there is no reason to think they didn't.
The Proteans that survived on Ilos had cut themselves off to not be discovered and were hidden away in stasis until the Reapers left, Virgil was a repository for their knowledge on the Reapers which would have been severely lacking considering, hence no mention of what you guys seem to think they should know.
The Reapers took hundreds of years to kill off everything in the galaxy, after they left the last remaining Proteans that survived were woken up by Virgil and got on their merry way to seeing what happened, after they had discovered how to stop the Citadel and Relays being controlled by the Reapers they made a one way trip via the Conduit so that it wouldn't happen again.
As far as we know there was no one left at this point, no Proteans left to talk to for any information, they were the last living sentient beings in the galaxy, and while we don't know what happened to the few that survived we know they did what they set out to and stopped the Reapers from shutting down the Mass Relay Network, hence the events of ME1 and Sovereign needing a pawn.
diamondstar
Member
That is how I want it to go down but fuck me I just can't think of how the story will pull that off with the Reapers appearing so early in the game.
Like others I really feel Bioware seriously fucked up the execution of a potentially amazing story and experience. That is why I am so pissed off right now. I have a full renegade save ready to go and just started my paragon Femshep but after playing the demo I am starting to think if it is really worth trucking through both games again?
And like many I enjoyed ME2 because on its own it was still a pretty good game. But story wise it is seeming more and more irrelevant. Again if they were going to have the Reapers arrive so early in ME3, we should have spent the entire game of ME2 recruiting entire races not a dirty dozen squad that in the end was pretty irrelevant to the main story anyway.
Ugghhhh.. This trilogy is stressing me the fuck out.
CrunchyFrog
Member
So I bought ME1 off of Steam in the Christmas sale and have been playing it off and on since (haven't yet finished). While I find the atmosphere and universe of Mass Effect hopelessly engaging, the impressive design and well thought-out nature of the races and future history involved, the actual combat seems to be really awkward. No matter how well equipped my characters are, a lot of the fights boil down to super quick skirmishes with little to no strategy involved beyond hit the thing before you die, rather haphazard in the least. There seem to be little environmental elements to use like conveniently set bomb-like canisters, but I can never use em because they're hidden behind a set of crates which i can get to because if I hop out of cover for more than 2 seconds I'm dead. The AI is also as repetitive and predictable as the consistently rehashed combat environments/cargo holds/planetary terrains. Tying into combat, weapons and equipment are also rather dull and uninteresting, especially with weapons series just labeled with arbitrary numbers to differentiate later models.
The long and short of it is I don't wanna read the rest of this thread for fear of spoilers but I figured this would probably be the best place to ask.
Does the combat improve in ME2/3? Or should I expect more of the same?
The long and short of it is I don't wanna read the rest of this thread for fear of spoilers but I figured this would probably be the best place to ask.
Does the combat improve in ME2/3? Or should I expect more of the same?
Yeah the running animation looks kinda weird but that's not going to change...how can they change that for the whole game and can something this huge be patched in at some point? probably not...just loved the demo and this won't detract me for getting this day one,it looked amazing to me(360).
Blake'sGrave
Member
Don't worry, the combat gets MUCH better in ME2, one of the reasons it was so acclaimed was because of the huge improvement over the first one combat wise.
CrunchyFrog
Member
Good. I want so much to like this series, been a while since I've found a halfway decent lore-focused game.
With some minor tweaks I believe Mass Effect 1 and 2 should just switch places. Missing Colonies -> Collectors -> Hint of Reaper -> Prothean Beacons -> Ilos -> Citadel -> Mass Effect 3.
Blake'sGrave
Member
This is so true
Holy shit :lol
In my mind that would be much better. Don't know how I would feel about the Reaper reveal and the fate of the Protheans, but in terms of proper narrative structure and exposition, this fabula is ten times more intriguing than what we got.
Haha, I never even thought of that. Just have the Arrival DLC after Citadel and it works.
thetrin
Hail, peons, for I have come as ambassador from the great and bountiful Blueberry Butt Explosion
I completely agree. Mass Effect 2 should have been the first game.
I...wow. This is actually a pretty good idea.
I mean ME2 would still need to have its story reworked but doing it like that would actually fix some things.
Blake'sGrave
Member
Holy shit, I think you've fixed the mass effect series
Count of Monte Sawed-Off
un33dab@dpu$$y
Just to jump on the train, this is definitely a better idea than what we got.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
waaaaaaaaat
Fine Ham Abounds
Member
The Librarian
Banned
Good god...
Just start recalling your games Bioware and make this instead.