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[staticneuron]

Couldn't disagree more with this, at least on Insanity. Enemies are super-aggressive and attempt to flank you constantly, along with trying to remove you from cover with grenades, and occasionally by shooting through cover itself. This forced you to actually move around the levels, which were bigger and allowed for much more flanking than the simple straightforward levels of ME2 (we probably have the MP to thank for this). I made it a point to flank in almost every encounter, while sticking my teammates at the front. Pincer attacks ahoy.

Battles took longer in ME2 on Insanity because they gave every single enemy - even the basic ones - layers of defenses that you first had to remove. In ME3 most enemies have the simple red health bar and are thus much more prone to instant biotic attacks, which also recharge much faster than they did in ME2. Shepard also runs around much more quickly and is far more agile in general. All of it combines to make combat in ME3 much quicker and frantic than it ever was in the previous games. The Quake player in me actually found it quite a treat. My only issue was the sticky cover system; on PC they really should have allowed you to bind cover/roll/sprint all separately.

Most gamers don't think of putting it on hardest difficulty first just to enjoy the game.

 

[ShockingAlberto]

I don't think Gears of War does the cover system any better at all. It suffers from the exact same 'one button does everything' thing that Mass Effect 3 has, and now that ME3 has a roll, quickjumping over cover instead of having to crouch down into it before you can hop over, grab kills, and going around corners without leaving cover, there's really nothing left that Gears does any better.

To touch on this for a second, I agree that ME3 and Gears have the same problem of using the same button for too much stuff, but I felt like I was doing the wrong thing less in Gears than in ME3.

Probably every one in three times I tried to interact with a console in ME3, I ended up taking cover in front of it. Or tried to unstick myself from something and ended up getting stuck to something else.

In Gears, I can not recall too many times I have meant to dodge and ended up taking cover. This is not to say it simply never happened, I'm sure it has, but it was either quickly remedied or infrequent enough that it made no real impression on me.

 

[Zeliard]

Most gamers don't think of putting it on hardest difficulty first just to enjoy the game.

If you're finding it too easy or repetitive on Normal then maybe you should increase the difficulty. Difficulty settings are there for a reason. I put it on Insanity immediately because I beat ME2 on Insanity.

 

[Papercuts]

I think ME got better with each game. They all have their share of issues, but the ones in ME3 bothered me the least. The journal is complete junk, some non combat missions would have been very much appreciated, etc. are certainly true, but beyond the ending I got engrossed into the game like crazy. I find the combat to be great too, not "mediocre at best" even compared to the top TPS games out there, the MP has actually hooked me.

I always liked ME for the characters moreso then the story, and the amount of dialog everyone has on the normandy and pairing up on missions is pretty nuts. ME2 was great with the cast, but they were completetly silent off the normandy, and even on it you would go into loops like garrus calibrating which lasted damn near half the game it felt like. ME1 characters were boring as piss to me aside from Wrex.

 

[EatChildren]

It was worse in that it felt like a Mass Effect Carnival Game's production values and was totally incongruous with the rest of the game.

Bad-looking reaper lego models slowly plane-shift toward you and then the Game Over screen comes up. It might be the thing that most speaks to severe budget cuts in the game, short of Jessica Chobot's face modeling.

It was crap, but man, that ME2 mini-game. That mini-game I'd rate is a good contender for the worst mini-game ever implemented into a game, relative to the necessity to actually do it. It was definitively anti-game in design: no challenge, no objective, no goal, no hurdles, no anything except a grind. A long, tedious grind essential if you actually wanted to upgrade all your stuff.

I mean yeah, the Reaper mini-game was pretty tripe, clearly tacked on, and probably shouldn't have been in the game at all. But worse than ME2 scanning? The simple fact it took significantly less time to get what I needed, with significantly less tedium, and presented some kind of challenge (even if that challenge itself was poorly conceived) makes it, by definition, better than what I had to gruel through in ME2.

 

[ShockingAlberto]

That's another thing

No Krogan teammate.

What the shit, Bioware?

 

[Auto_aim1]

I liked the idea of sending a pulse wave (or something) to find war assets and other things, but the Reaper chase was so poorly implemented. Sometimes I didn't even get the game over screen even though the ship was hidden under three Reapers. Planet scanning was repetitive and monotonous in ME2, but here, it's simply pointless and poorly executed. I'd still prefer the one in ME3, though.

 

[Melchiah]

In what way?
2 proved they had no idea what to do with a long term narrative.

I said closest, not necessarily the best. I was talking more about the experience than the narrative. At times it felt like I was playing something akin to B5.

As far as the story goes, there are a plenty of similarities. Spoiler tags for those who haven't seen the B5 series.

Spoiler

- The Shadow/Reaper war ends with three choices. In B5 the choices are: Shadows (chaos), Vorlons (order), and the third option, which results with the Shadows, Vorlons and all the other old ones leaving the galaxy.
- Both Sheridan and Shepard died and were resurrected.

- And the already mentioned, Minbari/Turian vs. human first contact war, and the animosity it created between the races.

 

[ShockingAlberto]

It was crap, but man, that ME2 mini-game. That mini-game I'd rate is a good contender for the worst mini-game ever implemented into a game, relative to the necessity to actually do it. It was definitively anti-game in design: no challenge, no objective, no goal, no hurdles, no anything except a grind. A long, tedious grind essential if you actually wanted to upgrade all your stuff.

I mean yeah, the Reaper mini-game was pretty tripe, clearly tacked on, and probably shouldn't have been in the game at all. But worse than ME2 scanning? The simple fact it took significantly less time to get what I needed, with significantly less tedium, and presented some kind of challenge (even if that challenge itself was poorly conceived) makes it, by definition, better than what I had to gruel through in ME2.

I dunno, I was able to scan what I needed to get my upgrades in ME2 and it actually felt less stupid than the reaper system in ME3. Part of it may have simply been that I felt less rushed in ME2 as ME3's story (and the reaper system) makes it so just flying around right-clicking is a lot like randomly honking your horn during a car chase in GTA4.

Neither one was good, but I found ME3's more offensive even if it was not actually qualitatively worse.

 

[Galactic Fork]

I liked the first 95%, I was annoyed at a lot of things, especially the mission journals. Poorly done. But what I liked wasn't enough to make up for ending and the conversation with the Reaper on Rannoch. Getting to shoot it in the face again wasn't enough for the horrible exposition of why the Reapers reap.

I really really dislike overly powerful godlike force of nature type enemies like the Reapers. It was what soured me to Freespace 1 and 2 too. Why am I even playing this game if I can't win? So honestly, I'd have liked a happier ending to offset the annoyance of the reapers. I don't mind a Shepard dies type ending if it's done well (think SOTC). But for annoyingly powerful enemies like the reapers, I want to feel like I kicked their ass. Because really, if an enemy is a force of nature and can't be beat, they're nothing but a plot device and not an antagonist. Just makes me lose interest.

 

[AniHawk]

while i think me3's was less bad as a game-thing than me2's, it does do even more to lessen the reapers as a threat by making them into 'uh-oh, they're gonna getchu!'

they really needed someone to sit down and organize things before me2 was made.

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

That's another thing

No Krogan teammate.

What the shit, Bioware?

Hardly something to complain about. I thought it was weird, too, but that's stretching.

 

[ShockingAlberto]

If you take out ME3's last five minutes, I feel the worst misstep the series made was changing the more in-your-face antagonists from Reapers to Cerberus.

Hardly something to complain about. I thought it was weird, too, but that's stretching.

It was clearly my biggest complaint delivered with the utmost anger and seriousness. Good on you for calling me on it and keeping me humble.

 

[Zeliard]

I don't think Gears of War does the cover system any better at all. It suffers from the exact same 'one button does everything' thing that Mass Effect 3 has, and now that ME3 has a roll, quickjumping over cover instead of having to crouch down into it before you can hop over, grab kills, and going around corners without leaving cover, there's really nothing left that Gears does any better.
Similarly, active reloads are not particularly skill-based and are definitely not interesting at all. Either you do it right (there's only one way to do it right; there's no on-the-fly decision-making, just a really easy 'hit the button at the right time' mechanic) and you get a bonus, or you don't do it right, and you don't get a bonus. The extent to which you have to catastrophically fuck up the timing to actually get the failed reload is such that I don't think it ever happened to me more than a dozen times throughout all three Gears of Wars combined, and it isn't even all that much of a big deal if you do screw it up. It just means that you have to wait another two or three seconds before you can shoot again.
The boss fights are unique, but they're still boring and scripted to all hell. If they didn't have cool visuals to go along with them, mechanically they'd be dull as hell. Both ME3 and Gears of War are only ever really good when they're putting you up against a variety of standard enemies, where all the normal rules apply.

And Gears is just a standard shooter where the choices that let you prepare for combat are basically limited to choosing two out of however many weapons (and further limitations apply there, be they 'hard' limits, where a certain weapon just isn't available for that part of the game, or 'soft' limits, where you can technically keep the weapon, but you'll have a hard time getting enough ammo to actually make proper use of it).
In Mass Effect 3, the preparation options you have range from lasting for an entire playthrough (your class choice) to 'the rest of the playthrough' (which weapons, armour, upgrades, etc you choose to purchase/upgrade, and which skills you choose for yourself and your party members, although there's a limited ability to respec the latter), to 'for the whole mission' (which party members you decide to bring along, which armour you want to wear, which weapons you bring along), down to the moment-to-moment decisions that are common in any shooter, like enemy prioritization, positioning, which weapon to use and how much ammo to save before grabbing a refill, whether to retreat into cover to recharge or whether to poke your head out and keep attacking, etc. Only there are other considerations that are not in a standard shooter like Gears: Which weapons and skills your squadmates use, which skills to use once your cooldown comes up, along with the skills that use non-cooldown resources (those that are limited based on a stock of consumables, like grenades and medi-gel, or on some other resource, like Nova requiring you to spend your Barrier).

The general feel of shooting, moving, and making 'shooter' decisions is about on par (that is to say: It's definitely no Vanquish, but it's certainly not any worse than Gears), only there's an entirely separate dimension to the combat since your longer-term decisions play into which options are available at any given second, and since you have options like Biotics and tech that simply aren't available in a standard shooter. You're also given much more feedback in ME3 than you are in Gears: Your health is an actual goddamn health meter, instead of a vague red screen overlay, and you can see the enemy's health meter as well, instead of just having to plug shots into them until they die. The Shields/Armour/Barrier/Health dynamic is more interesting than enemies simply having an HP bar, and I thought there was a much more interesting variety of enemies in ME3 in comparison to Gears.

Basically I think Mass Effect 3 is easily on par with the biggest 'pure' third-person shooters (Gears, Uncharted, etc) in terms of being a 'pure' shooter, but it goes above and beyond by having the customization aspects and the greatly expanded repertoire of abilities. If you're going to call it a "mediocre" shooter then I think you have to explain which games you're comparing it to. If those games aren't Vanquish or Serious Sam or something, I don't think the argument holds much water.

Pretty much all true. ME3 is a legitimately solid third-person shooter.

 

[Papercuts]

Hardly something to complain about. I thought it was weird, too, but that's stretching.

Vega is effectively a Krogan in combat.

On the reaper minigame, it's dumb but it's sooo much faster and is basically completely avoidable. I always play the games twice over, once as a vanguard and once as an infiltrator, and the planet scanning in 2 didn't fully hit me until that second play where you try to do it as little as possible but still NEED to to upgrade the normandy so people don't die in the end, not to mention all the upgrades that cost resources make you want to do it throughout. I'm at the Quarian/Geth part in ME3 and already have a maxed out EMS bar doing very little scanning. Though this also is part of EMS not meaning a damn thing being an issue in itself.

 

[B_Rik_Schitthaus]

Pretty much all true. ME3 is a legitimately solid third-person shooter.

Sadly the universe should have had so much more then that.

 

[ShockingAlberto]

Until Mass Effect gets rid of the blood screen, I'm never going to consider it on par with Gears.

Tiny icon > "Hey what's going on anymor--oh hey I died"

 

[Zeliard]

At least they got rid of those horrible veins.

But I agree the red smear shit isn't really ideal.

 

[ShockingAlberto]

I actually wouldn't mind the red smear so much if it were accompanied by an AI trigger to cool it with grenades I can not possibly see.

 

[Papercuts]

I have never been killed as often from a damage indicator than I have from Uncharted's extremely long lasting color desaturation. And it's no ME2 vein effect which was...I don't even know.

They overdo it in 3 but it can be somewhat offset with power wheel freezing. And with a vanguard, charge mitigates it further. Chalk one more point to vanguards being the best!

 

[Rezbit]

Even though I was able to suspend my disbelief pretty easily, I did have to laugh at Aria's mission on the Citadel. "Oh hey merc groups, um I slaughtered like 1000 of you guys, but now you can join me! No hard feelings right?!"

 

[lastplayed]

They're mercs. They follow the money.

 

[evilhomer]

Went through and watched some of the videos with Jarik since I didnt get the dlc before hand. Very dissapointing that such an important part of the narrative and the only new, interesting, character was taken out of the game to be made dlc. Guess I can thank youtube though so I at least got to see it.

 

[Jake Tower]

Even though I was able to suspend my disbelief pretty easily, I did have to laugh at Aria's mission on the Citadel. "Oh hey merc groups, um I slaughtered like 1000 of you guys, but now you can join me! No hard feelings right?!"

 

[Photolysis]

Went through and watched some of the videos with Jarik since I didnt get the dlc before hand. Very dissapointing that such an important part of the narrative and the only new, interesting, character was taken out of the game to be made dlc. Guess I can thank youtube though so I at least got to see it.

Don't forget the blatant lies about how most of the art assets were created, animated, voiced, included on the disc in time for certification & manufacturing and yet was only 'done' in the month between the game going gold and being released.

 

[evilhomer]

Don't forget the blatant lies about how most of the art assets were created, animated, voiced, included on the disc in time for certification & manufacturing and yet was only 'done' in the month between the game going gold and being released.

Ya I avoided as much discussion to avoid spoilers before playing the game. When I saw dlc character I just assumed it would be like Zaed who was completely worthless and didn't think much of it.

Watching scenes like the ones on Thessia (I think thats the name) makes it fairly clear Jarik was always a part of the story development process.

 

[Jintor]

Forget about a Krogan teammate. Where was my Hanar and Elcor teammates?

"Mixed Exhilaration and Fear: Grenade"

"This one believes Dr Tsioni should keep her stupid mouth shut"

 

[Ghost]

Forget about a Krogan teammate. Where was my Hanar and Elcor teammates?

"Mixed Exhilaration and Fear: Grenade"

I was so excited when I found the Elcor side mission on the citadel, then I quickly came to the realisation it wouldn't result in me actually getting to see the Elcor fight. They should have built a mission on the Elcor homeworld, would have been a high point for me.

 

[Zeliard]

If I had to pick the single most disappointing aspect of the Mass Effect trilogy, it'd have to be the almost total lack of exploration. Oh, what could have been. They've got a huge amount of lore and you barely get to explore any of it outside of Codex entries.

And please don't say Mass Effect 1 did it to any degree. Playing that game after Muzyka promised what he did as far as exploration, among other things, is what caused me to completely modify my expectations for the series, as well as to very rarely listen to what devs have to say pre-release unless I trust them implicitly (like the guys at Obsidian).

ME1 is also the game that effectively killed Bioware the RPG developer for me. Not so much Jade Empire, which I figured was just some experimental one-off at the time. So naive.

 

[HadesGigas]

Yeah the "less important" species pretty much all got pushed even further into the background in ME3.

You only talk to like one of each for the hanar, elcor, vorcha, and drell. Still a few volus to talk to at least I guess.

Can only hope that somewhere out there theres an elcor version of Commander Shepard assembling a crew consisting of these forgotten races.

Also odd that for how many batarians there are on at the refugee camp, there is almost nothing important to do with them. A batarian squadmate would have been kinda neat, since they'd pretty likely distrust Shepard even more than stupid Ashley does.

 

[Bazza]

I'm sorry to to have to inform you, but it only gets worse. First, you will be speechless and apathetic. Next, you will begin to feel hollow inside as you realize one of you favorite series was destroyed in a ten minute span. Finally, you will feel anger towards the disregard of the writing team who pushed this through. Unfortunately, acceptance will not come.

That's pretty much exactly how i felt as soon as i finished the game, except anger was replaced with bitterness. As soon as i finished the game i just laid down on my bed for about 40 mins doing nothing but going over the last 10 mins of the game i was almost in shock, quite a weird experience for just completing a game, normally after a bad ending you just move on but not ME3 it played on my mind for about 4 days after i completed my run.

 

[CrankyKong]

Anyone else encounter some game breaking bugs in ME3?
I had the hanar diplomat quest bug out so that I couldn't access the terminals, a planet flash green but wouldn't allow me to initiate a mission on it, and the entire refugee area of the citadel blocked because the game would freeze when I tried to go there.

I don't mind animation bugs or getting stuck in the geometry so much, but being locked out of missions like that is pretty unacceptable.
Not sure i remember anything that nasty in ME2

 

[Arjen]

Anyone else encounter some game breaking bugs in ME3?
I had the hanar diplomat quest bug out so that I couldn't access the terminals, a planet flash green but wouldn't allow me to initiate a mission on it, and the entire refugee area of the citadel blocked because the game would freeze when I tried to go there.

I don't mind animation bugs or getting stuck in the geometry so much, but being locked out of missions like that is pretty unacceptable.
I don't remember anything that nasty in ME2

Hanar quest was bugged for me in the first playtrough to, fine in my current playtrough though. And a couple of freezes

 

[Zomba13]

Yeah the "less important" species pretty much all got pushed even further into the background in ME3.

You only talk to like one of each for the hanar, elcor, vorcha, and drell. Still a few volus to talk to at least I guess.

Can only hope that somewhere out there theres an elcor version of Commander Shepard assembling a crew consisting of these forgotten races.

Also odd that for how many batarians there are on at the refugee camp, there is almost nothing important to do with them. A batarian squadmate would have been kinda neat, since they'd pretty likely distrust Shepard even more than stupid Ashley does.

Yeah. It sucks how little the lesser races are in ME3. Yeah, some of them are a bit silly like the Hanar but it'd have been nice to see more of them. Kinda sad how under utilised the Batarian's were in this. They had the perfect opurunity with Arrival to have lots of friction between Shepard and some Batarians. It was nice though that the terrorist from Bring Down The Sky made an appearance and even donated some ships to the cause (if you didn't kill him). Would have been pretty cool if that guy (or someone like him) was a squadmate. Would be distrustful of Humans, like a Batarian version of Ashley.

 

[GorillaJu]

Anyone else encounter some game breaking bugs in ME3?
I had the hanar diplomat quest bug out so that I couldn't access the terminals, a planet flash green but wouldn't allow me to initiate a mission on it, and the entire refugee area of the citadel blocked because the game would freeze when I tried to go there.

I don't mind animation bugs or getting stuck in the geometry so much, but being locked out of missions like that is pretty unacceptable.
Not sure i remember anything that nasty in ME2

I had a nice PS3 breaking bug where it crashed and ever since my disc drive has gone from whisper quiet to audible. It distresses me greatly.

Fuck this game. This is without question the last EA game I buy.

 

[B_Rik_Schitthaus]

If I had to pick the single most disappointing aspect of the Mass Effect trilogy, it'd have to be the almost total lack of exploration. Oh, what could have been. They've got a huge amount of lore and you barely get to explore any of it outside of Codex entries.

And please don't say Mass Effect 1 did it to any degree. Playing that game after Muzyka promised what he did as far as exploration, among other things, is what caused me to completely modify my expectations for the series, as well as to very rarely listen to what devs have to say pre-release unless I trust them implicitly (like the guys at Obsidian).

ME1 is also the game that effectively killed Bioware the RPG developer for me. Not so much Jade Empire, which I figured was just some experimental one-off at the time. So naive.

The Planet at the end of ME1 had a nice feeling of been the first to go through the ruins of a world.

 

[USIGSJ]

They really should have gave some teammate like Blasto instead of Vega. Imagine if you had Javik and Blasto in squad, now that would be hilarious.

 

[EatChildren]

If I had to pick the single most disappointing aspect of the Mass Effect trilogy, it'd have to be the almost total lack of exploration. Oh, what could have been. They've got a huge amount of lore and you barely get to explore any of it outside of Codex entries.

And please don't say Mass Effect 1 did it to any degree. Playing that game after Muzyka promised what he did as far as exploration, among other things, is what caused me to completely modify my expectations for the series, as well as to very rarely listen to what devs have to say pre-release unless I trust them implicitly (like the guys at Obsidian).

ME1 is also the game that effectively killed Bioware the RPG developer for me. Not so much Jade Empire, which I figured was just some experimental one-off at the time. So naive.

All I want is a Mass Effect flight/ground sim with exploration running on the Infinity engine.

Is that so much to ask?

 

[Kabouter]

All I want is a Mass Effect flight/ground sim with exploration running on the Infinity engine.

Is that so much to ask?

I want an even less likely game. I want a large scale Mass Effect 4x (either turn-based or real-time would be fine) game.

 

[KenOD]

I had quite a few bugs in my play through. I couldn't actually get past the start mission on Earth due to it constantly freezing on me until I uninstalled everything.

That damn slow motion Reaper battle section took me 15 tries not because a lack of skill, it just wouldn't activate my firing of the reticle no matter what.

Ladders wouldn't show up in the hanger and forced me to restart the mission over again.

Did enjoy Lift Grenade throwing Cerberus goons through the windows of the Kai fight though.

It was crap, but man, that ME2 mini-game. That mini-game I'd rate is a good contender for the worst mini-game ever implemented into a game, relative to the necessity to actually do it. It was definitively anti-game in design: no challenge, no objective, no goal, no hurdles, no anything except a grind. A long, tedious grind essential if you actually wanted to upgrade all your stuff.

I mean yeah, the Reaper mini-game was pretty tripe, clearly tacked on, and probably shouldn't have been in the game at all. But worse than ME2 scanning? The simple fact it took significantly less time to get what I needed, with significantly less tedium, and presented some kind of challenge (even if that challenge itself was poorly conceived) makes it, by definition, better than what I had to gruel through in ME2.

As someone who wanted to look around and read up on every planet and get an idea on the size of the universe plus any hidden missions, ME2 and it's scanning was okay for me. I was going to click on those planets anyroad, so why not get something out of it as well?
Not for everyone I know, but it worked okay for me only scanning rich to medium planets. Come the second play through I already had more than enough and barely had to scan at all to make up the difference in part thanks to Shadow Broker.

The real shame for me is that they didn't think it through and realist moderation was key. Shadow Broker's revealing of rich planets should have been there from the start, not DLC. Buying probes really made me not want to do it as it's own ends to a mean as well, especially with the idea I could run out and have to waste time picking up more.

Running from the Reapers I can say was worse for me. Perhaps at the start I thought it was interesting, but it lost any real surprise or shock value once I realised what it was. They couldn't even catch me unless I let them, so rather than be there as something I could do while exploring each sector, it just became a point of making my visits take longer and wasting my time with no reward to it.

 

[USIGSJ]

I want a Freelancer type game with some ME elements, you fly your ship around systems, dock a station with ability to explore it, do some quests, go jump ship again, fly to another system, etc.

 

[EatChildren]

I want a Freelancer type game with some ME elements, you fly your ship around systems, dock a station with ability to explore it, do some quests, go jump ship again, fly to another system, etc.

Yes. Infinity Engine.

 

[USIGSJ]

I know of it, actually been following for some time, but it won't happen anytime soon. Infinity as a game is on pause now (or quit), they're focusing on i-novae engine to license it for games. So maybe then if someone licenses it, hopefully some day. Info on this page is kinda outdated, but you can follow their twitter on progress, they update it regularly.

http://www.inovaestudios.com/technology.htm

http://inovaekeith.blogspot.com/

 

[inky]

I want a Freelancer type game with some ME elements, you fly your ship around systems, dock a station with ability to explore it, do some quests, go jump ship again, fly to another system, etc.

Don't we all...

You should write that on a T-Shirt and finish it with "and all I got was this lousy TPS"

 

[EatChildren]

I know of it, actually been following for some time, but it won't happen anytime soon. Infinity as a game is on pause now (or quit), they're focusing on i-novae engine to license it as a SDK for games. So maybe then, hopefully some day. Info on this page is kinda outdated, but you can follow their twitter on progress, they update it regularly.

http://www.inovaestudios.com/technology.htm

http://inovaekeith.blogspot.com/

Yeah, I know. My heart sinks when I think about how few people are actually working on the engine (only two?), and I'm reminded how little interest there seems to be from the industry .

That engine is, so far, one of the only tech demoes that screams "next generation" to me. Having an engine be able to do what it's doing, wrapped in solid procedurally generated game code to keep shit interesting. Man, it's a dream game.

 

[Kyari]

Ya I avoided as much discussion to avoid spoilers before playing the game. When I saw dlc character I just assumed it would be like Zaed who was completely worthless and didn't think much of it.

Watching scenes like the ones on Thessia (I think thats the name) makes it fairly clear Jarik was always a part of the story development process.

Not to mention that he is in the artbook, published a full month before the game came out, nevermind how long before that it would need to have been put together.

 

[Zeliard]

I want an even less likely game. I want a large scale Mass Effect 4x (either turn-based or real-time would be fine) game.

All I want is a Mass Effect flight/ground sim with exploration running on the Infinity engine.

Is that so much to ask?

I think such things are too much to ask.

I want a Freelancer type game with some ME elements, you fly your ship around systems, dock a station with ability to explore it, do some quests, go jump ship again, fly to another system, etc.

There's potentially room for such a thing with, I dunno, some Mass Effect spin-off title. I mean they've gotta be planning something that isn't Dragon Age 3. I'm curious what Bioware is doing, actually, other than DA3 + SWTOR expansions, I guess. Dunno if they're really in such a big rush to jump back into Mass Effect anything at this point, though.

Then again, money talks. And so does EA. Those guys probably never shut the fuck up.

 

[USIGSJ]

Yeah, I know. My heart sinks when I think about how few people are actually working on the engine (only two?), and I'm reminded how little interest there seems to be from the industry .

That engine is, so far, one of the only tech demoes that screams "next generation" to me. Having an engine be able to do what it's doing, wrapped in solid procedurally generated game code to keep shit interesting. Man, it's a dream game.

Unless they hired someone new, yes, I think it's only 2 guys working on it. One who was working on Infinity and I think Keith used to work at Epic before.
But yes, it's specifically targeted toward vast space to work with procedural stuff. It's something you could do in other engines too if you had source access and good programmers, but here you get all of that right out of the box so it makes it ideal for space sim games.


Here's one more cool vid:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ghulpp6CPw

Some guys who have been working on real time planet rendering for some time and showing it on SIGGRAPH, they also release code so now you have more and more people doing large planets stuff.

 

[Firebrand]

Anyone else encounter some game breaking bugs in ME3?
I had the hanar diplomat quest bug out so that I couldn't access the terminals, a planet flash green but wouldn't allow me to initiate a mission on it, and the entire refugee area of the citadel blocked because the game would freeze when I tried to go there.

I don't mind animation bugs or getting stuck in the geometry so much, but being locked out of missions like that is pretty unacceptable.
Not sure i remember anything that nasty in ME2

Was the planet Aequitas in the Minos cluster? I think that's a left-over from ME2 ("N7: Abandoned Mine").

Apart from the face import issue I didn't really experience a lot of really bad bugs. Quite a few minor ones though, including:
- Balak from the ME1 DLC "Bring Down The Sky" appearing on the Citadel, despite me killing him in ME1. That was one of the tougher choices I had to make in ME1, so yeah, him suddenly being alive again was a bit disappointing.
- There's one "support one of two guys" event whose outcome actually gets reversed in the War Assets log and may result in a slight score penalty.
- The "Photo Opportunity" markers for "Citadel: Inspirational Stories" disappeared before I was done, so I had to reload.
- Handing in some thing to a salarian at the hospital results only in 90 XP and no War Assets.

 

[Noisepurge]

Yeah, I know. My heart sinks when I think about how few people are actually working on the engine (only two?), and I'm reminded how little interest there seems to be from the industry .

looks amazing but i bet there is some serious limitations in it and that's preventing it from being in the next Mass Effect or so :/ (can't build cities or something or it requires 8GB's of RAM)