Mass Effect

This thread made me play it again. 17hrs to compete the first game and even though I missed a few things it's nice to blast through it quickly.

Giving Paragon Lost a watch while working from home this morning. I don’t mind James as a character and I like having the option of a generic soldier man in my squad for side missions but I’m not sure he’s earned his own anime movie.

It looks like Mass Effect but the writing is very bad and the animation isn’t great either. No one looks like their in-game originals and its almost like the script was procedurally generated from a bank of military cool guy cliches.



They should’ve done an Archangel movie not a James prequel.

I guess it comes back to the old adage that sci-fi simply reflects our current time back at us - by extension, it would reflect us, as well.

Mass Effect 3 finished.

What an epic. I’m very happy I didn’t remember as much of it as I did ME2 as it was much easier to get swept up in everything.

Only a couple of negatives and they’re minor. First, the inconsistency as to whether the gun you were carrying in in-engine cutscenes was part of your loadout or not. Sometimes yes, sometimes no? How hard could that be to fix? Armour parts always switched out correctly, why not weapons? Second, I can’t decide if I left it too late to do the Citadel DLC. I did it as the final mission before the point of no return so it felt like an odd shift in dramatic stakes. Third, as discussed, would it have made more sense if Earth was the last world to be invaded rather than the first?

The good. Basically everything else. The story was huge and dramatic, the characters more fleshed out and connected than a lot of tv, the combat satisfying, the world and lore rich. Plus the continuity of presentation that Legendary Edition implements really felt like it wrapped up a single huge experience.

On the ending, honestly, I never played it without the patched extra content but I don’t hate it. As with narrative games like TellTale games or Life is Strange, its the journey you take to get there that informs you final choice. Having you choose how things play out doesn’t invalidate the previous 100 hours of gameplay because its my understanding of the universe, characters and my Shepard that made me go the way I did. And to be honest



Next up: do it all again in a new galaxy. Never played Andromeda before so it’ll be interesting to see if any of the big decisions from the trilogy carry over or get referenced.

Will do. Think I’ll need a little buffer while I comedown from the Reaper invasion.

I remember in the end

Agree



One other question about the ending

No way! Well don’t I feel fucking stupid now

I honestly never thought it was that ugly. Don’t get a lot of the complaints about it. 360-gen Lego hair aside, it looks about as good as you could expect from an RPG of that era, and the environments in particular look spectacular.
That said, it does have a bit of the Inquisition-style semi open world filler and DA2-style cut corners, most glaringly in that literally every Asari that isn’t Peebee uses the same model.

It was mostly the animations, a lot of which weren't finished (and in some scenes, not even there) on release. Especially ME2 and 3 did a great job (within their technical limitations, at least) at making face movement believeable and natural enough to make characters feel pretty real--very important in games relying so much on engaging character interaction.

When MEA was released, facial animation was janky, eyes erratically jumping around and all, and much of the time their faces were like in a nondescript default state rather than expressing anything. Characters often felt like broken automatons rather than actual people. It was distracting and throwing people out of the immersion, especially in contrast to ME2/3.

They improved most of that through patches, although I'm still disappointed how e.g. Krogan mouth movement looks primitive even compared to ME1. I also don't like the lighting which a lot of the time looks pretty flat and washed out.

I never thought of it as a generally bad looking game, it looks great in places, but that it fell short of its previous gen predecessors in some regards was disappointing.

Unlocked the Nomad and… that’s one big environment. I think this going to be a long game.

Enjoying the initial exploration and talkiness of Andromeda so far. Outside of the combat it feels very television-y.

Went with a default looking male Ryder and he feels like a decent fit as a nervous noob after spending so much time with Femshep’s hyper confidence and competence. The shift to tonal answers rather than paragon/renegade is quite interesting too, so far at least its helped round the character out without him being a superhero or enormous dick.

That Turian is just FemGarus though.

Yeah, why can't Mordin 2.0 take care of the logistics.

Gil is terrible. The one character I didn’t go chat with between missions.
The Scottish pilot lady looks like a PS3 character too, but she’s at least fun to talk to.