Mass Effect

[Ordo]

Personally I loved the series and was not bothered at all by the ending, at least not to the level of others in the fandom. To me Mass Effect 1 is a good solid start, but I am not a big fan of it's gameplay. I appreciate that the heat system was unique when it came to weapons...but I honestly preferred how weapons were handled in 2 and 3. The visual, auditory and performance difference of each one was greatly appreciated as was the way powers were handled. ME 1, to me, felt like it was clinging too hard to certain RPG conventions and the gameplay suffered as a result.

Mass Effect 2 is overall my favorite experience in the series. I like that the ending is based off the work you put into your ship and crew before the final mission, as well as the decisions you make during that last conflict. It's also, to date, can be the most triumphant of the endings considering everyone assumed this was a suicide mission. I also feel that the changes in most of your old crew are justified since you were dead for two years and the council/alliance buried everything you'd learned about the Reapers.

Mass Effect 3 has the best gameplay and rpg system of the series (to date) in my opinion. The weight system was an excellent way to handle weapons and powers and I liked how the powers branched as you went down the line. The story had issues, but I know that they changed the original ending for the series sometime after ME 2...and had to scramble for a new one. Overall I enjoyed ME3, though I understand why others did not.

Now...we have Mass Effect Andromeda on the Horizon:


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[Fixer]

It's a bit different for people who spent hundreds of hours playing that game and the prior two games, the people who waited years to see where the saga was going, how their choices would effect the galaxy.

To have all of that boiled down to "Red, Blue, Green, pick one, have all other choices ignored save some score-card for War Asset Points" was, yes, quite Goddamned infuriating. And I wasn't even one of them since I didn't even play Mass Effect until the summer of 2013.

Indeed. Pretty much anyone that had invested time whether they were hard Renegade or Paragon got exactly the same outcome.

Relays explode. Galaxy in ruins and isolated. Normandy crew crash on an uncharted world to found a new civilisation. Except for Tali and Garrus who will die due to their dextro DNA physiology not being compatible.

Thanks to the war asset score being boosted by PVP as well, it was possible for a player to intentionally sabotage every effort to save the galaxy and still get the exact same result as someone who had deliberated long and hard to get best possible result in every choice for his story.

[Thanotos Omega]

Mass Effect was pretty dang good, until the high school level symbolism and terrible writing that was everything after Harbinger shot Shepard, also no final boss, like it's BioWare so i expect a crummy final boss for the most part but i at least expect it to be there,

I have little interest in the series now, BioWare through sheer incompetence ruined an entire galaxy we hadn't even come close to being done with, and also insist on being Irony blind about Racism, so yeah, shame it was once my undisputed favorite franchise,

[Karha of Honor]

also insist on being Irony blind about Racism, so yeah, shame it was once my undisputed favorite franchise,

Is this a complaint about the content of the game?

[Thanotos Omega]

Is this a complaint about the content of the game?

More about the fact that they refuse to grasp the simple fact that if you have sentient species in a series you have to treat them with the same respect you do the humans, or else in the end you encourage the same us vs them mentality that has been a drag on our species for it's entire existence,

i could deal with having to play a human only again, but the whole idea of the paragons of each species thing combined with the humans are special crap that began to seep in during ME3 (and has been a problem over in it's sister series Dragon Age) basically kills it for me, this isn't like Star Wars where there are dozens of separate writing teams making stuff and the need to focus on the outdated main cast from the Original Trilogy, they have a simple and centralized control over it, and still muck it up,

[Fixer]

The underlying message of the "best" ending has some unfortunate implications.

As a paragon, despite making sure a diverse group of factions unify for the good of the galaxy and ending the threat of the Reapers, the only way to prevent the "inevitable war" between organics and synthetics (despite having possibly already resolved such problem a day earlier) is by homogenising everyone to be the same via space magic.

So much for respecting alternate life and differently sentient beings. Change them, dominate them, wipe them out. Those are your options.

[Thanotos Omega]

The underlying message of the "best" ending has some unfortunate implications.

As a paragon, despite making sure a diverse group of factions unify for the good of the galaxy and ending the threat of the Reapers, the only way to prevent the "inevitable war" between organics and synthetics (despite having possibly already resolved such problem a day earlier) is by homogenising everyone to be the same via space magic.

So much for respecting alternate life and differently sentient beings. Change them, dominate them, wipe them out. Those are your options.

Destroy could have been a great ending if it had only effected the Reapers and those using to much of their tech, it takes care of them and Cerberus leaves the Geth around as a neat member of the galactic community, and cripples Shepard so they can become Humanities new councilor and help subvert the heck out of the obstructive bureaucrat trope for the new PC in the 4th game,

[Fixer]

Destroy could have been a great ending if it had only effected the Reapers and those using to much of their tech, it takes care of them and Cerberus leaves the Geth around as a neat member of the galactic community, and cripples Shepard so they can become Humanities new councilor and help subvert the heck out of the obstructive bureaucrat trope for the new PC in the 4th game,

If the Crucible's purpose had been to wipe out Element Zero across the galaxy and destroy the very foundation of Mass Effect technology, that would have made for a more profound ending.

It would also have tied in with the Prothean AI Vigil telling you there were multiple paths of technology not taken as the Reapers pushed everyone down the same path to use technology based on them. That and the Geth focusing on making their own path separate from the Reapers (prior to the whole Rannoch event).

So many more difficult complex moral choices and ramifications you could have based on that. Do you fire the weapon knowing it'll cost you Earth and trap your allies here, or use the threat of using it to demand the Reapers leave the galaxy, knowing they may return with a way to defeat it? Or perhaps the weapon only performs depending on how well you developed/protected it.

So much lost potential.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

Certainly one of my top (if not the top) video game series. I'm worried about Andromeda, but Mass Effect did so much right. I can't even be *too* mad at the ending, given just how gargantuan a task it must have been to create (and code) such a rich universe with so many different great characters and choices. It sucks that it didn't end perfectly, but it's still a great series.

Mass Effect 1 has the best story and story structure. The last few missions are simply wonderful, and some of the scenes (like Shepard's conversation with Vigil) are among my favorite in science fiction. The other two games have a lot of awesome stuff (including the Shadow Broker and Citadel DLC), but each have their issues with plot (especially ME3). What puts ME1 definitively below ME2 for me is the lack of great missions as well as the clunky gameplay. The side missions are all the same, tedious thing.

Mass Effect 3 probably has the best gameplay, but I don't see it as vastly superior to ME2 in that regard. Obviously ME3 has the biggest flaw.

Mass Effect 2 is the best combination of the two (story and gameplay), the best game of the series, and one of my favorite games of all time.


I finished a replay of Mass Effect 2 a couple of weeks ago and plan to go through ME3 just before Andromeda's release.

[Ordo]

One of the things I am glad about when it comes to Andromeda, is the fact that the chances of Shepard and their crew showing up in person are highly unlikely. This might be one of the reasons ME3's ending doesn't bother me much, as it ended Shepard story pretty conclusively...and now Andromeda puts enough time and distance between that story and the new one for me to feel safe. You see, I was never happy about Revan being brought out again in the KOTOR timeline. There's just no real way to write a good story about a character I controlled since subsequent interpretations or versions of the character could differ wildly from the personality I went with in my run through. I was honestly concerned that any story set in the Milky Way galaxy would find some way to drag Shepard back into things. So putting Six hundred years and an entire galaxy between Shepard and Ryder allows me to judge the upcoming game and it's character on it's own merits without fear of relentless call backs and reintroduction.