Mass Effect 3 - Page 14

Planet scanning is such a pointless drag, I can't believe they included it.  I mean, I know it has a point in giving you money to spend, but there's no way anyone at any point along the line could've thought "people are really going to have fun with this."

 

As much flack as the Mako gets, I wouldn't mind its return (or the hovertank).  It actually handled fine, it was just that they seemingly designed half the levels around the idea that what we really want is to test its ability to sloooooowly inch up vertical cliff faces rather than tear ass and blast heards of space monkeys with a cannon.  But I'd like a return of vehicle sections in ME3.  Isn't a little part of you going to be disappointed if Shephard's story ends without you ever getting to actually take control of the Normandy during an action sequence?

Ugh, jesus, planet scanning.

 

They'd better sweeten the deal with more nightclubs so that I can be all like this with some awkward robotic Shepgrooving.

 

That being said, I like the demo! Combat seems tighter and yeah while that DRAMATIC MOMENT was way hamfisted, I'm still in like sin. Still haven't tried the multiplayer bidness though.

Did that for every planet on my first playthrough too, space equivilent of rpg gravestones...not lol funny, but neat touches by Bioware to add depth, where other devs would shrug and say fuck it, we'll just use planet names and call it a day.

If Shep does hit the dance floor I hope they mocapped our man Dmitri if he was successful in saving the galaxy, recreating that bit 1:1. (but more of a post credits nugget/tag)

I do seem to recall at some point they mentioned at some point in the game that resurrecting Shepard and rebuilding the Uber-Normandy actually had severely depleted Cerberus' resources.  Not completely, but enough that they definitely were feeling the pinch.

 

And the stuff from Multiplayer now isn't gonna carry over to the main game?  Bummer....

That's actually too bad. It seemed like a great way to get me hooked on multi.

The latest tv spots for this are really fanning my Earth-saving flames.

I'm really quite happy now going total blackout (other than my ME2 replay) until my collectors edition arrives in the mail.

 

...and that read from earlier Justin posted was frikkin brilliant. Not only did it help crystalize many of the reasons I'm so enamoured of this scifi world, but I found out I'm actually a cosmicist as well. So there you go.

It's complicated.  There's a whole Galaxy at War system linking single player and multiplayer.  You can get the best ending playing SP only, but it's significantly harder than doing a mix of both.

 

Hang on what?

 

You haver to do multiplayer to get the best ending possible in single player?

 

Seriously?

 

Cause if so that's a massive steaming mound of horse shit.

 

I think he meant, things won't carry over from the demo multiplayer to the retail multiplayer.

 

I'm pretty sure something I've read said that while it would take longer, it's perfectly possible to get the best ending without touching multiplayer.

Everything I've read says you can certainly get the "best" ending from playing single-player only, simply by doing all the side-quests (why anybody skips side-quests in rpgs has long been a mystery to me). The multiplayer and iOS games will apparently just give you a leg up in single-player. Everyone relax.

Just caught that new "Take Earth Back" CG trailer on youtube.  It's ridiculous how pumped that got me for this baby.  Two more weeks till my sweet, sexy N7 collectors edition enters my life and all social recreation goes out the fucking window.

 

Anyone else hoping for a renegade "Not noticing Ashley's new hair-do" option? 

The only option I want is finishing up the job I should have done on Virmire.

I kinda wish Bioware would fuck with everyone's heads and let her introduce her new Hanar boyfriend in this game.

I don't get the new trailer - there's some strange dude leading the charge and with him is that horrendous woman that Shep left next to an exploding nuclear bomb. Go figure.*

 

Anyway, yeah, there's no need to fret over the multiplayer = best ending thing because it's more likely been implemented to help first time and/or Action Mode players have a chance of getting the 'best' ending. Anyone importing their Shep and/or doing Story/RPG and questing like a mofo has very little to worry about.

 

 

* I rather liked the news story on (small pile of) Ash in ME2 where she's posthumously awarded medals by the Salarians and Turians and they have some comical misquote from her.

Extended cut of that Walking Dead trailer dropping today, BTW.

Sandworm vs Reaper.

 

 

 

SANDWORM VS REAPER!

The Thresher Maw v. Reaper fight is very end of Oblivion.   Love the sound of the Reaper's canon. 

Fuck.

 

Yes.

 

Think that was the same trailer that debuted at the VGAs a few months back.

 

But yeah. Thresher Maw squadmate. Don't care if it's DLC, either.

 

...Fucking NOW, BioWare.

There's a part of me that really wishes that the game would select a team made up of Conrad Verner, a Hanar doctor, an Elcor second-in-command, a Vorcha love interest, and a Volus sniper if you managed to kill everybody off in Mass Effect 2.

 

It'd be the saddest, and oddly greatest thing in the series.

Okay, Xbox Live randoms?  If you're going to play Vanguard, I don't want to see you just hanging back with a sniper rifle and not charging.

 

In fact, pep talk time.  I'll let the special guest celebrity handle this.

 

Skit under spoiler (Click to show)

 

Well fuck, that's better than anything I've ever said in my life.

 

FUCK YOU!

That took me by surprise. Fucking admirable.

I'm really enjoying multi. Is this the full version? It can't be, right? So how deep is it really? And how will it effect single player? Mass Effect will not be satisfied with a mere 30-40 hours of my life. It will have it all.

I'm kind of nervous actually. I've spent so much time playing and thinking about Mass Effect these past years that now that the conclusion is near I'm worried about it going out properly. And I don't know what type of ending I will prefer. The "Shepard, you're special, insert artifact X in artifact Y to defeat Reapers" that will probably happen? Or the "This time we'll defeat the Reapers because we'll fight them harder. Like, extra hard." that the trailers seem to be playing up.

 

I wish that this would happen:

 

 

Warning: Spoiler! (Click to show)

 

But it probably won't.

Probably not if there's chatter about keeping your save files after the game is complete. I say they keep the Universe going - not flush it all away - after establishing so much lore. Doesn't have to be Shepard. Give me a ship, a hardy little crew, and we can go from system to system helping/griefing those we come across. Had some decent times reforging my save file/progress this long weekend. A couple of loyalty missions away before hitting the suicide mission. Also, just about to start the Shadow broker dlc tonight.

Art book is so god damned massive. Flipped through a couple of entries and it's always cool to see the various stages of concept art. It was always a treat when we'd do week end show off's and see the crazy things Colin Fix was working on, of which he has a public blog here... So much work goes into creative development it's a shame the vaults aren't opened for other titles in similar fashion.

Master Shake, that is amazing, and even makes me want to give up my 100%, hardcore, Infiltrator-4-lyfe ways.

 

One thing that's occurred to me is where do they go from here? Even if they take the railroading route in a lot of places, one would imagine there are still too many variables to deal with/agree on for a game set anywhere near the same time period without risking alienating a bunch of the playerbase. Which would mean they're stuck with either going in to the far future or exploring the period between the First Contact War and ME1, perhaps?

They've hinted heavily at a couple of possible total non-crowdpleasing endings, and I'd be very okay with this being one of them.

 

If anything the third game actually has to sell me on the Reapers being legitimately frightening antagonists again. First game pulled this off without any problems, but man the second game made them kind of a weak element all around.

Yeah, Sovereign alone chewed through the Citadel fleet and it took another Earth fleet, which also got their shit slapped and Shepard sheparding as usual to take it down. And now hundreds arrive en masse on Earth and it's not game over in five minutes? They got fiercely de-powered.  

The flaming remnants of the Alliance fleet raining down through the atmosphere during the demo disagree. They didn't even get a warning out.

And then they get down and start blowing up one building at a time?

Reapers suffer like a lot of other obvious Lovecraftian homages in pop culture. And that's mostly because what makes them interesting antagonists keeps them from being able to function long-term.

 

This is ultimately because the ideas at the base are so profoundly nihilistic that translating them into a general "good guys triumph" setting means undercutting what makes them scary in the first place. You can't lecture them, you can't really win an argument with them, and even when you beat them there's always just the implication that more will come back at some point. For example Soverign in the first game is great because you hardly interact with it, and when you do, it treats you with as much respect as we treat the average dust-mite.

 

Forcing them back into the series just about forces you to either find chinks in their armor that shows how arrogant they are, which is fundamentally boring. Or depowering them, which makes them seem a lot less intimidating than they should come across.

 

 

They really only function better if they happen to be one-shot adversaries, or happen to have somebody(*cough* *cough* Saren) representing them.*

 

 

 

*Oh and really underseen. Like while it's fucking badass(and I'm totally okay with this) to whoop the fuck out of the big scary robot alien, these things functionally work way better as slow-burn "I don't want t ever see another one" threats as opposed to an invasion force.

I'm fairly sure this has probably been said elsewhere, but Christ, it's a pleasure to read your posts, Lauren. People like you make CHUD the unique experience it is.

Point taken. There really isn't a point of them all coming down to the surface to begin with when they should be able to glass the entire place from orbit. Unless Shepard is bringing along an army of Thresher Mauls, there shouldn't really be a ground war.

 

Plot-convenience-wise, I believe that it's possible that they'll try and explain it as the Reapers are (ME2 spoilers) limiting the destruction so they can harvest biomass to create more Reapers... or maybe after waiting 50,000 years to destroy all organic life they want to stretch out the destruction a bit.

 

And yes, LaurenOrtega kicks ass.

Yeah, we honestly have no idea how long the Reapers generally take when it comes to wiping out life.  The Protheans apparently had time to build that huge vault during the last cycle, so maybe being super advanced, immortal machines, the Reapers just like to take their sweet time.

I like to imagine the Protheans just happened to have some time bought because their national sport involved dodging giant lasers.

 

"WE NEVER THOUGHT IT WOULD PAY OFF! BUT IT DID!"

 

*Reaper swears loudly as some Prothean asshole just does cartwheels around it's single slow moving death laser"

Watch this space. She has something awesome coming to the main page later in the week.

Having just replayed ME1 (lost my hard drive, couldn't bring myself to play a prefab Shephard in ME3), we actually know quite a bit more about the Reapers' methods and why we sorta have a chance than you guys are recalling.

 

The normal method is to bring in the Reaper fleet through the Citadel and then shut down the entire mass relay network.  At that point, the entirety of galactic civilization that has grown around that network is crippled and each system is cut off from the others, preventing any coordinated defense.  The Reapers then spend decades if not centuries idling from system to system wiping out pockets of civilization at their leisure.  They missed a spot in the form of a handful of Prothean scientists in stasis, who took a one-way trip to the Citadel after they left and programmed the Keepers to disrupt the Reapers ability to warp in.  Hence Sovereign needing Saren to retake the Citadel and get the plan back on track.

 

But Shephard weren't having none of that, so we're facing a Reaper invasion with a functional galactic civilization whereas the Protheans and all their predecessors had just been plunged back into the Dark Ages when they were attacked.   Not that Lauren's point about Lovecraftian villains doesn't stand, but it's not just Shephard being the ultimate badass that gives us a chance.  In fact, no matter how things shake out, most of the credit for defeating the Reapers should go to the Protheans.

Man, if there's a Deus Ex off switch involves pouring Shepards aquarium collection into the Presidium pool on the Citadel...wooing Kelly was the best move in the entire series.

I half imagine there'll be points where Reaper ships are blocking the Mass Relays limiting where you can go or who you can help, requiring you to unifiy/dominate whatever faction has the strength to aid you in taking them down to free up the Mass Transit system. As Schwartz mentions ME1, I'm just curious why there's been no mention or any seen effort to make interplanetary Conduits based on what the Protheans built to the Citadel, more wide spread just in case.

....And Schwartz just grabbed my post out of my head and posted it. I just played ME1 and ME2 again recently myself, and realized that for all Sovereign's bluster, the Reapers are really just a bunch of bushwackers, who are now scrambling about for Plans C to E (Plan B, let's try a Human Reaper, was kind of a nonstarter) for the first time in who knows how long. They trash talk like nobody's business, but their cycle of genocide is dependent on no one knowing they exist. And yeah, it was the last of the Protheans who made this current resistance even possible.

Jesus you Nerds are Dorks.

 

Played the Demo. Ashley Williams is smoking hot by the way which just means she a smoking hot Xenophobe. My Shepard is going to slip her a space mickie. Then when she's out I'm gonna have Wrex and Mordin get in bed with her and Shep will take holo's of the "three way" and then Shep is going to sell the holo's to Emily Wong to publish cause she owes me a couple of BIG favors. Ashley will be ruined. Mwaa-ha-ha!!

 

Does anyone know if Miranda is going to be in this game? She lived at the end of my Mass Effect 2 game and I kind of miss her. I mean my Shepard kind of misses her..sheesh.

I imagine that's only if you import a game.

If not, the only returning party member is Zaeed "guddamn" Massani.  Ha ha ha.

 

But seriously, yeah, she's returning.

I'm still working through ME2, but I don't recall what the point of making a human Reaper was supposed to be.  I remember something vague about modeling their forms after the species they wipe out, but all the ones we've seen in the games/promos have looked like Sovereign.  And a 10 story metal skeleton doesn't seem as formidable as a mile-long squidship when its time to erase civilization from the galaxy.

Might be an unintentional consequence of whatever base matter they're using to form the Reaper?  You use Cthulhu grey matter you get a squid ship, you use a bunch of humans, you get a gigantic terminator?

 

Well, perhaps that means the Reapers have other plans this time; maybe theyŕe giving the hybrid/proto reaper idea another turn, and they need the raw material...or maybe they developed another reason for having a special interest in earth and humanity; the demo clearly states at one point that human colonies and sectors have blacked out, so if the Reapers are focusing on humanity first...well, that cant be good.

Also, the Reapers remain dormant for quite a while in the space outside the galaxy, which might put a huge drain and impact on their energy and power; they might not be at the top of their game when they invade Earth at all, thus the need for superior numbers and their lack of power; Sovereign invaded the Citadel after being active for quite some time, maybe thats why he was so powerful; the whole "mass relay hidden in the citadel" plan from ME1 gave the Reapers an edge in not having to travel and deal with defense forces after awakening; with the Events in ME1 and the "Arrival" dlc in ME2, the Reapers clearly have to invade through traditional means.
 

 

It seems the Reaper "giant cuttlefish" look is their outer shell, some sort of form they favor for space travel and function; Reapers might be different inside based on the lifeforms used to replenish/reproduce themselves, or perhaps they actually do not have a natural physical form at all, being artificial, sentient machines.

 

From what I could gather on the ME2 playthrough, turned out that the Protheans were fine for slave material, but didn't have sufficient genetic properties required to withstand full Reaperening. So we may be looking at a bunch of Reapers who missed a lap in their reproductive cycle, too, and might look like whatever civilization they wiped out in the round before the Protheans. Humans got their attention this time specifically, so they figured to get a head start seeing if our race had the chromosomal goods to make more Reapers by picking off a few outlier colonies. And that was a bingo. As for Three Eyes only being 10 stories tall instead of a skyscraper-humper like Sovereign, EDI points out that it's still the equivalent of an embryo. And Shepard's the goddamn coat hanger.