Mass Effect

[Admiral X]

Of course ME3 just assumes that you played Arrival, too. Also it apparently assumes you picked Udina for the council. I was rather confused why, even though I picked Anderson, there wasn't even any lip service paid to why he was suddenly an admiral again.

[Steve]

Of course ME3 just assumes that you played Arrival, too. Also it apparently assumes you picked Udina for the council. I was rather confused why, even though I picked Anderson, there wasn't even any lip service paid to why he was suddenly an admiral again.

IIRC there's a line about how he resigned the post to return to Earth after Shepard surrendered to the Systems Alliance, should your save file have Anderson as the Council selection. OTOH, ME3 actually does reflect not paying Arrival by reducing the war asset value of a Systems Alliance Marine unit, stating said unit lost an entire team thwarting the Reapers' early arrival.

[MissKittyFantastico]

That Anderson thing really ticked me off - I've already posted this in Headcanon a while back, but it would have been so easy for them to drop in a line about Anderson (if Councilor) being on Earth as a Council observer at Shep's hearing (since s/he blew up a batarian solar system, that's kind of a matter the Council needs to deal with), and having decided to stay, Udina becomes interim Councilor in his place. Boom, not a single thing needs changing in the game. In fact I prefer it, insofar as I never felt Udina's betrayal of the Council to Cerberus was 100% backed up - sure he was a prick, but he had to have been an intelligent man to get where he was to begin with, and anyone with half the brains of a vorcha should've known Cerberus was the path to ruin even if their plan had come off. Whereas if the 'the buck stops here' sign had landed on his desk literally the same day as Earth got taken out, well, that's the kind of pressure I can believe would make him convince himself, against all reason, that Tim's scheme was worth a shot.

(It's a while ago so I may be muddling up the details, but I believe Anderson's resignation happened in one of the novels, so he could go off and have an adventure with whatsername, the blonde you meet at the Grissom Academy. I think it was never specified in the novel whether he was resigning from the Council, or a position as Udina's advisor, so it 'worked' either way - but regardless, some two-bit paperback which I recall finding quite shoddy got to override a major player choice to facilitate its own storyline. Thanks.)

The main thing that bugged me about Arrival - besides not having my team along (damn did I rely on Samara and Kasumi doing all the work for me through all of ME2) - and this was a pattern ME3 repeated, was that you finally got to visit batarian space, and it's a generic concrete prison and then you're off to a secret Alliance facility to screw around with Reaper stuff some more; I got more of a flavour of the batarians from Bring Down The Sky and random NPCs on Omega than I did from actually visiting their home turf. Same for Palaven and Thessia, Sur'Kesh, Earth for crying out loud - in fact come to think of it, ME3 lets you visit basically every major homeworld in the setting, and they're all Tom Clancy's Generic Cover-Based Shooter, with the occasional segment of looking at a handful of museum relics or carvings on old walls as lip service to world-building. It's like going on a round-the-world holiday and never getting off the tour bus. I get that there's a war on, but still...

[SlackerinDeNile]

The main thing that bugged me about Arrival - besides not having my team along (damn did I rely on Samara and Kasumi doing all the work for me through all of ME2) - and this was a pattern ME3 repeated, was that you finally got to visit batarian space, and it's a generic concrete prison and then you're off to a secret Alliance facility to screw around with Reaper stuff some more; I got more of a flavour of the batarians from Bring Down The Sky and random NPCs on Omega than I did from actually visiting their home turf. Same for Palaven and Thessia, Sur'Kesh, Earth for crying out loud - in fact come to think of it, ME3 lets you visit basically every major homeworld in the setting, and they're all Tom Clancy's Generic Cover-Based Shooter, with the occasional segment of looking at a handful of museum relics or carvings on old walls as lip service to world-building. It's like going on a round-the-world holiday and never getting off the tour bus. I get that there's a war on, but still...

This bothered me too, I did some research (read some interviews and the TV Tropes pages) and apparently it was to do with how Bioware had to rush the development of the game to fit EA's demands, they had so many cool ideas and they had to condense them and make do with what seemingly worked best at the time. For example, the Omega DLC was supposed to be part of the full game and it was supposed to be a more in-depth and strategic experience as well as a revisitable location like it was in ME2. The final Earth battle was supposed to be longer as well and actually feature more of the war assets you accumulated throughout the game. Having the original lead writer from the first two games would have helped a lot too.

Although it's sad to think about what could have been, I didn't dislike ME3 as much as most people do, although I played it for the first time last year with all the DLC installed so I didn't get to experience the intense disappointment hardcore fans must have felt when they played the first version around the time of its release...

[MissKittyFantastico]

Although it's sad to think about what could have been, I didn't dislike ME3 as much as most people do, although I played it for the first time last year with all the DLC installed so I didn't get to experience the intense disappointment hardcore fans must have felt when they played the first version around the time of its release...

I had a similar experience, although by luck rather than design - I bought ME3 on release and got as far as the Palaven's moon mission that same day before my PC (the pre-Alienware-mess one) did a Marauder Shields and sacrificed itself (specifically something small and meltable inside the hard drive) to save me from disappointment. By the time I'd gotten around to replacing it, the extended cut was out. ("When I went under, the world was at war. I wake up, they say we won. They didn't say what we lost...")

[Fixer]

Different for me.
Since the UK release was slightly behind the US I completely shut down social media for a few days and took a day off to play through.

When I finally hit the ending my first response was to wonder if I had screwed up somewhere. Then I reloaded, made another choice and saw it was the same. I couldn't believe that awesome ending that I was supposed to be getting was this, one of the worst written pieces of trash I had ever suffered though. Almost fractal in the levels of awfulness where looking deeper into any part of it's terrible malfeasance would uncover new and in depth complexity to how wrong everything was.

I logged onto the internet to find that this was in fact, the real ending and that the fandom was not on fire because BioWare wasn't currently even giving a response to the perfectly reasonable question as to whether or not this was the real ending if they were bamboozling everyone.

[Riedquat]

That Anderson thing really ticked me off - I've already posted this in Headcanon a while back, but it would have been so easy for them to drop in a line about Anderson (if Councilor) being on Earth as a Council observer at Shep's hearing (since s/he blew up a batarian solar system, that's kind of a matter the Council needs to deal with), and having decided to stay, Udina becomes interim Councilor in his place. Boom, not a single thing needs changing in the game. In fact I prefer it, insofar as I never felt Udina's betrayal of the Council to Cerberus was 100% backed up - sure he was a prick, but he had to have been an intelligent man to get where he was to begin with, and anyone with half the brains of a vorcha should've known Cerberus was the path to ruin even if their plan had come off. Whereas if the 'the buck stops here' sign had landed on his desk literally the same day as Earth got taken out, well, that's the kind of pressure I can believe would make him convince himself, against all reason, that Tim's scheme was worth a shot.

The problem I had with Udina's betrayal was that up to that point ME3 had gone a little way from being the boo hiss thorn in the side one dimensional character he'd been up to then, then bam, back to being that with the coup.

[bronnt]

That Anderson thing really ticked me off - I've already posted this in Headcanon a while back, but it would have been so easy for them to drop in a line about Anderson (if Councilor) being on Earth as a Council observer at Shep's hearing (since s/he blew up a batarian solar system, that's kind of a matter the Council needs to deal with), and having decided to stay, Udina becomes interim Councilor in his place. Boom, not a single thing needs changing in the game. In fact I prefer it, insofar as I never felt Udina's betrayal of the Council to Cerberus was 100% backed up - sure he was a prick, but he had to have been an intelligent man to get where he was to begin with, and anyone with half the brains of a vorcha should've known Cerberus was the path to ruin even if their plan had come off. Whereas if the 'the buck stops here' sign had landed on his desk literally the same day as Earth got taken out, well, that's the kind of pressure I can believe would make him convince himself, against all reason, that Tim's scheme was worth a shot.

It's just kind of spitting in the player's eye though, isn't it? I mean, you made an end of game decision and a pretty significant one, and you want to see how it plays out. It's a binary choice so it's not like they would have had to code tons and tons of story branches to reflect how this decidion happened. But nope, regardless whether you pick Udina or Anderson to serve on the Council, Udina is still going to betray the Council in the third game.

Just make a minor plot branch where maybe Udina gets jealous of Anderson and helps try to stage the coup if you chose Anderson, but if you chose Udina, maybe then you have to defend him from a Cerberus assassination plot, but the mission plays out much the same way. Just something to reflect that your choices as a player matter.

[excalibur]

They didn't even explain how Anderson was no longer the human councilor and now Udina is in that spot, almost as if they took your alternate choice in ME1 and made it irrelevant.

[Arkle]

Facebook memories today reminded me of about this time last year when gamer bros lost their shit over the protagonists of ME: Andromeda being announced as being brother and sister. Phrases like "political correctness run amok" and "SJW" were thrown around.

To this day I still have no fucking clue what these people were whining about. Of course, these are the same people who throw a hissy fit over the mere existence of (purely optional and almost never default) easy settings or think death threats are an acceptable response to a journalist doing badly at a demo that he played while tired, so I guess it doesn't matter.