In the cinematic trailer:Copy pasting from the other thread.
By the way, you can spot what appears to be one of the new species in the combat sequence.
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The Mass Effect Community Thread
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Cassandra was meh, not something I would personally go for
Josephine was cute, but her face looked weird at times, not sure if it was the engine or something else.
Dorian...lol.
Cora is meant to be the blonde hottie iirc, which gives me some hope of a decent looking romance who makes dealing with the awkwardness and cheese that is Bioware romances worth it.
But yeah, looking at FemRyder....yeeesh. If anyone can find a way to mess up making a blonde hottie, then it's Bioware.
In all seriousness though, faces in the Frostbite engine look very weird at times, so I'm not sure if we can blame Bioware for that. Then again, they did fuck up a bit with Yvonne Strahovski's and Jessecia Chobots in game face models, so maybe we can blame them.
Josephine was cute, but her face looked weird at times, not sure if it was the engine or something else.
Dorian...lol.
Cora is meant to be the blonde hottie iirc, which gives me some hope of a decent looking romance who makes dealing with the awkwardness and cheese that is Bioware romances worth it.
But yeah, looking at FemRyder....yeeesh. If anyone can find a way to mess up making a blonde hottie, then it's Bioware.
In all seriousness though, faces in the Frostbite engine look very weird at times, so I'm not sure if we can blame Bioware for that. Then again, they did fuck up a bit with Yvonne Strahovski's and Jessecia Chobots in game face models, so maybe we can blame them.
I really liked Dorians dialogue and character, and took him with me on every mission. But in terms of visual design, he was Freddy Mercury wearing leather bondage gear. That really wasn't a good look at all, and felt a bit stereotypical to be frank.
That's why Kaiden male romance in me3 worked well for me / it felt very natural, well integrated and he didn't come over as a package of stereotypes.
That's why Kaiden male romance in me3 worked well for me / it felt very natural, well integrated and he didn't come over as a package of stereotypes.
I felt like that was very forced, since it suddenly came up in the third game after having his character be established over the previous two games.
One thing I do prefer about the way DA does romance is that it makes it very clear if you're flirting with somebody. With ME, I just avoid talking to other potential love interests because I find myself accidentally flirting with them. It's part of why I never get to know Jacob, because I never talk to him.
They've gotten better about this, but it was BAD in Mass Effect 1, since just talking to a potential LI apparently made them convinced you were super interested in them.
It didn't feel forced to me because you simply didn't talk to him about stuff in me1 (crew dialogue and options was far less detailed compared to me2 and 3). By me3 your relationship had significantly changed and he went through a really dangerous life or death event, and then after that he opens up and you get together. It felt very believable to me.
(Heck, kaidens character in me1 was basically standoff-ish and gets headaches a lot. In me2 he shouts at you a ton in one cutscenes that that's it. It only felt like he gained depth in me 3, which is why the romance felt right).
There's also that whole thing about how he had a childhood love affair with a girl at Biotic training camp and killed a Turian instructor, and how, along with the headaches, it somewhat troubles him about his Biotic abilities.
So it's just a tad bit more than "he gets headaches."
I'm playing through the trilogy again on PC right now and this has been a lot more annoying than I remembered. It sucks being paranoid about talking to characters because you're afraid you'll accidentally trigger their romance.
I don't remember having that problem at all when I played DA:I.
DA:I has the helpful tone icon making it clear that you're choosing a flirting choice.
This story was later told in one of the comics.
It was okay, compared to some other ones... The one with Joker stealing the Normandy so that he can be appointed as the pilot still gives me headaches.
My first playthrough I was romancing Ashley and thought I was just being nice to Liara... or at least I thought I was until Liara showed up in the "grounded Normandy" scene and I realize she just ninja'd my romance.
ME1 was really weird about that.
Ironically, in my last ME1 playthrough a couple weeks ago I was actually playing MaleShep for only the second time, and Ashley almost ninja'd my Liara romance. I thought I was playing it safe until I got the confrontation scene between the two where I had to pick one.
Then again, in my current ME3 playthrough where I'm back to playing FemShep, it's almost like Liara doesn't believe I want to romance her, despite me romancing her in ME1 and ME2, and telling her already once that I want to stay in a relationship with her. She still threw the "We're great friends!" line to me on the Citadel where I had to clarify again that I wanted to be more than friends.
She was damn lucky I had already shut down Traynor...
Both of these have happened on my current playthrough, despite all my precautions I thought I had screwed up the Liara romance since she kept calling me a friend.
The Ashley thing seemed strange at the time since I hadn't talked to her much and then she showed up demanding that I pick between her and Liara. I should have left her on Virmire.
DeadlyParasite
Member
I don't know, there's got to be a better and more subtle method than Inquisition's "press heart for romantic success". It just trivializes the conversations and is why for all its faults I still prefer Mass Effects text only dialogue options.
Inversely, I felt that Liara just kept coming on to me throughout the whole trilogy. "No," I told her over and over. "We're just good friends."
... Then her dad pops up in ME3 and calls me Liara's boyfriend.
I think it was more "this dialogue is romantic intent". It never guaranteed romantic "success" (you could often try and flirt with someone who never reciprocated your feelings).
This changes everything.
Even Hissing Wastes has you hunting for parts of the key to enter the tomb, and Western Approach at least has areas locked off that you have to return to the table to unlock.
I liked it a lot. It tied a good story into multiple quest lines over a wide area. At the very least you'll definitely be able to see the improvements in their quest structure in that DLC. It's one of the best areas and it shows.
If you liked Inquisition, you'll probably like it. I enjoyed it a lot outside of the poison spiders.
It's also very much a standalone adventure with a beginning, middle and end that has some fun lore stuff that sheds new light on some major events in Thedas.
And the best part about those zone narratives (besides just being interesting) is that the quest is long enough that it actually takes you through a sizable portion of the zone. This in turn makes the collectible/small sidequests much more palettable as "stuff I'm doing as I'm omw doing the important stuff" instead of just feeling like aimless exploration.
Thanks, that sounds great. I'll definitely give it a shot once I'm done with ME.
I don't take any chances when it comes to talking to a potential romance in the trilogy. Only select the bottom and middle options, at least you're sure you'll never get in a relation that way.
BrassDragon
Member
Yeah, I love these games but let's be honest: looking at poor face models is part of the BioWare experience by now. Fans like to make excuses about technological limits but it really looks like problem of artistry, like they can't stop tinkering/sculpting with them and lose sight of the big picture over the course of many iterations... so we end up with uncanny valley puppets like ME3 Ashley, FemShep or DA:I Josephine.
It's has its own charm but I'm not going to pretend it looks amazing.
DeadlyParasite
Member
Romantic intent, friendliness, caring, it didn't really matter. If the heart symbol was there it was/is the best option to choose because even if you're already in a romance with another character it is the best option to boost your +/- score with all Inquisition companions. There are no consequences or drawbacks, which is why it trivializes the conversations.
There were consequences if you were in a romance, because it could lead to your partner breaking up with you.
I wouldn't mind if they got rid of the symbol, but they would at least need to give more information on what you are selecting. Choosing a positive response shouldn't be an automatic flag that you want to change your relationship with someone.
DeadlyParasite
Member
Not in my Female Elf/Blackwall romance Nightmare playthrough I completed a few weeks back. I tossed heart dialogue left and right to Dorian, Ironbull, Cassandra, and Sera without consequence.
¯\_(ツ
_/¯As long as you don't lock-in the romance permanently (which for blackwall happens when
you break him out of prison and judge him on your throne. You can literally delay this until just before the last mission.
I agree, which is why I suggested a kind of middle ground between blatant heart symbol and confusing ME1 style behind-the-scenes romance calculation.
But... I did lock it in. That was why I romanced Cassandra in the first place.
DeadlyParasite
Member
My original point was that it boils down to "Press pink button to romance" in every conversation. There has to be a better way than that to make things more natural. BioWare said they wanted to address this with romances but as far as I can tell from that brief gameplay trailer they're resorting to the icon system again.
Which is weird because everyone had/has an extreme hate-on for Paragon/Renegade but somehow choosing the same "Smiley face with thumbs up" symbol or "Angry head with exclamation points" is seen as the better alternative when it literally serves the same purpose.
And if it's anything like Inquisition it becomes the illusion of choice because the real decisions are done without the symbol wheel and instead with a left or right option choice.
EDIT: Mass Effect 2 at least had it partially right because even if you somehow screwed up and started a fling with a character on the ship you could go talk to them and break it up and move on to someone else without serious consequence.
Sub_Level
wants to fuck an Asian grill.
There's this one room in ME3 in the biotic school level that took me over an hour this morning lol.
Frustrating but was satisfying to finally get. Would have gone easier if I tried to be more conservative, but being an aggressive Vanguard is too fun. By the time you level up high enough, the Engineers are barely noteworthy. But early on the Engineer turrets do a ton of damage and take a lot to bring down.
Frustrating but was satisfying to finally get. Would have gone easier if I tried to be more conservative, but being an aggressive Vanguard is too fun. By the time you level up high enough, the Engineers are barely noteworthy. But early on the Engineer turrets do a ton of damage and take a lot to bring down.
I always have trouble with that room. It's the constant reinforcements that creates the issue, along with dodging Atlas missiles, turrets and grenade spam.There's this one room in ME3 in the biotic school level that took me over an hour this morning lol.
Frustrating but was satisfying to finally get. Would have gone easier if I tried to be more conservative, but being an aggressive Vanguard is too fun. By the time you level up high enough, the Engineers are barely noteworthy. But early on the Engineer turrets do a ton of damage and take a lot to bring down.
Plus it's fairly early in the game.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
BioWare's writing and romance structure can be a bit goofy. We've talked about it before, but I prefer a more organic, somewhat unpredictable but entirely logical approach character interaction and arcs, but BioWare goes for a more rigid tick-the-right-boxes system of building interactions/romances that comes across as a bit binary to me. Which in turn results in a bit of tension as you try to choose "the right dialogue" to initiate a game state you're satisfied with. It's a terribly unrealistic means of building your game, but pretty common because...well, there has to be some number crunching and calculating behind the scenes.
I do hope Andromeda goes for a more organic approach, where you can't always get what you want and stop treating character interaction like a puzzle. Changes made to rigid paragon/renegade measurement are a step in the right direction.
I do hope Andromeda goes for a more organic approach, where you can't always get what you want and stop treating character interaction like a puzzle. Changes made to rigid paragon/renegade measurement are a step in the right direction.
DevilDog
Member
I don't think that this is a problem regarding writing, so much as that its a problem of interactive storytelling. Making a system that mitigates real life romance is, impossible at this point?
Well, it sounds like they are at least attempting to go in that direction for some of the characters. Some will look for something long term versus a fling. Sure, sometimes the writing can be a bit contrived, but there have definitely been improvements - DA:I was overall very good with the characters and romances imo. One thing that is helpful is that they get good voice actors to portray the characters which goes a long way. Like DevilDog said, there is always a degree of gaming the system based on the nature of interaction. If you want to pursue a character romantically or even just get them on your side, you pretty much know what you need to say in order to get them to agree with you. The blurring of paragon/renegade is a good start, as you say. Adding tone versus what the original trilogy had is good as well. In the original trilogy, I knew upper right was paragon, middle or left side of the dialogue wheel was asking for more information, and lower right was renegade for the most part. Tones in DA:I helped that a bit. Also, DA:I had the ability to hide the tone icons in the settings, so if people are looking for a little bit more nuance, I'm sure that will be an option. I must say though, BioWare has been doing these sorts of interactions/C&C games for a long time, it's their bread and butter. However, I am grateful for what TW3 brought to the medium (of course there have been other games as well, but this is an off-the-top-of-my-head AAA example). Good games make others strive to do better and TW3 was great at making a lot of its choices feel as though you wouldn't always get what you want.
Sub_Level
wants to fuck an Asian grill.
I didn't recruit Thane at all. So when Kai Leng tried to assassinate the Salarian Councilor, Captain Kirrahe stopped him instead. That's so random, but it's also kind of cool that a random ass side objective I did 2 games ago had an effect on the story lol
DeadlyParasite
Member
I've never not recruited thane so I can't speak to know other outcomes but doesn't another salarian replace Kirrahe if you didn't save him either? I think the councilor dies in that outcome as well.
It's kind of interesting how many variations of dialogue that mission has. If you save the council in the first game they're more willing to believe you're telling the truth in the faceoff vs Udina than the new council.
It gets a lot of hate for Kai Leng but I actually think the Citadel attack is one of my favourite missions from the third game. Given more development time I think it would've been neat if they had a string of missions where you have to take back the rest of the station from the remaining Cerberus troops if for example you had given them the Reaper base in Mass Effect 2, making them stronger militarily.
It's kind of interesting how many variations of dialogue that mission has. If you save the council in the first game they're more willing to believe you're telling the truth in the faceoff vs Udina than the new council.
It gets a lot of hate for Kai Leng but I actually think the Citadel attack is one of my favourite missions from the third game. Given more development time I think it would've been neat if they had a string of missions where you have to take back the rest of the station from the remaining Cerberus troops if for example you had given them the Reaper base in Mass Effect 2, making them stronger militarily.
(Sorry for replying so late!)
Thanks for the help, guys. I just found out that Bioware points are MUCH cheaper on bioware.com, so I'll go ahead and get everything.
Seriously, it's 196 NOK for 1600 points on Origin, while the same amount costs 115 NOK on Bioware's site.
Any CRPG with branching choices will suffer from that. In the end, as long a romance is game-ified, it is gonna be that way. For example Witcher 3 Yenn romance can be concluded in a sidequest where she recalled a genie wish subplot out of left field and we can end with a simple dialogue choice.
I think DA2 did try to diversify a bit with the friendly-rivalry romance thing.
If neither Kirrahee nor Thane are present (because they are either dead or, in Thane's case, was never recruited) than nobody intervenes and the Salarian Councilor dies.
However, if either is present the Councilor is saved but the savior is mortally wounded.
I was never able to kill Kirrahee(or even Kalreegar in ME2 Tali mission). Is it just a matter of not pressing the red/blue buttons like I always do?
I believe Kirrahee dies if you neglect to do any of the side objectives on your way to the base on Virmire (don't disrupt the communications, don't destroy the satellite dish and don't destroy the drones). You may also need to trigger the alarms on the Salarian's side of the base.
Kal Raeger will die if you don't tell him to stand down, and actively encourage him to help you.
They've explicitly said Andromeda will have more variance such as the kind EC wants, so we'll have to see how it's implemented.
But another reason why it's trickier for BioWare to really play with the romances is because of the LBGT content. They have to be extra careful to try and avoid minority stereotypes - even unintentional ones. For example, it'd be "organic" to have a character more interested in a fling, right? Or a promiscuous character not interested in romance? That character can't really be bisexual because of the negative silly stereotype that bisexuals are loose simply because they are attracted to both genders. Additionally, you have to be careful about having a male gay character die because of how often gay characters are portrayed as tragic in romantic stories.
Another reason why BW has a tough job: they write blank slate player characters. Meaning that for the most part BioWare writers can't assume prior relationships with other characters for the PC or it can break role-playing. So what you're always seeing is the beginning of the romantic relationship when you start going through the romance path. Of course some of that's going to be embarrassing/cringey. It wouldn't feel real otherwise.
All this adds up to the degree of difficulty in BioWare writing multi-gender, multi-orientation romances which is far greater than the relatively easy job that CDPR had (which they fucked up anyway) in writing a pre-established romance that's always straight man-woman dynamic, and a far far easier job than something like Uncharted which is purely at the writer's discretion and needs no directional narrative input from the player.
But another reason why it's trickier for BioWare to really play with the romances is because of the LBGT content. They have to be extra careful to try and avoid minority stereotypes - even unintentional ones. For example, it'd be "organic" to have a character more interested in a fling, right? Or a promiscuous character not interested in romance? That character can't really be bisexual because of the negative silly stereotype that bisexuals are loose simply because they are attracted to both genders. Additionally, you have to be careful about having a male gay character die because of how often gay characters are portrayed as tragic in romantic stories.
Another reason why BW has a tough job: they write blank slate player characters. Meaning that for the most part BioWare writers can't assume prior relationships with other characters for the PC or it can break role-playing. So what you're always seeing is the beginning of the romantic relationship when you start going through the romance path. Of course some of that's going to be embarrassing/cringey. It wouldn't feel real otherwise.
All this adds up to the degree of difficulty in BioWare writing multi-gender, multi-orientation romances which is far greater than the relatively easy job that CDPR had (which they fucked up anyway) in writing a pre-established romance that's always straight man-woman dynamic, and a far far easier job than something like Uncharted which is purely at the writer's discretion and needs no directional narrative input from the player.
DeadlyParasite
Member
That video game Odyssey musical/concert is tommorow in Montreal where they're playing the main theme of Andromeda for the first time. Would it be unreasonable to assume that we'll know who is composing for the game tomorrow as well?
Sub_Level
wants to fuck an Asian grill.
Not necessarily. On my last playthrough I told him to provide support but he still lived.
Either my game bugged out for that part or there is some other factor dictating his survival.
Reading up, it looks like you're right. Apparently if you tell him to stand down you're guaranteed his survival. Otherwise, if you take too long he will die.
Sub_Level
wants to fuck an Asian grill.
That level is cool because it's one of the few where the environment is actually hazardous.
Hoping for more scenarios where heat, cold, wind, radiation, chemicals, e.t.c. are a factor in Andromeda. I understand for a game of large scope it can't be too involved, but just even having more generic zones where you lose health if you stay too long would be neat.
Hoping for more scenarios where heat, cold, wind, radiation, chemicals, e.t.c. are a factor in Andromeda. I understand for a game of large scope it can't be too involved, but just even having more generic zones where you lose health if you stay too long would be neat.
You should be happy, then, because they've talked about there being hazards, and there was at least a section of the gameplay trailer where it showed off a meter listing a hazard.
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