Mass Effect 3

[Reverend]

ATimson wrote:

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Shrugging it off would require some sort of reference, and I didn't see any.

^Worse than I thought then.

In the real world, I'd agree. On the other hand, she'd opened up noticeably even by the end of Ascension (or whichever book it was), after spending time without the drugs. So it wouldn't exactly be unprecedented.

I'm willing to suspend disbelief *to a point* for the sake of drama and buy into her condition improving in the relatively small timespan that Ascension encompassed (a few weeks/months?) However, no amount of 1-on-1 care and hanging out with quarians is going to erase that entierly. It's quite literally part of who she is and always will be, right down the the neural pathways.

Think Dustin Hoffman in 'Rainman' or Summer Glau in 'Firefly' & 'Serenity' for good fictional comparisons. Both characters improved greatly over the course of their respective stories, but they were still who they were. If someone were to write a story featuring River (who BTW, I realise wasn't autistic) set some years after 'Serenity' and wrote her dialogue as if she was a perfectly "normal" young woman with no trace of her idiosyncrasies, it wouldn't be River and nobody familiar with the character would--or should--buy into it. The way she perceives the world around her never changes, only her ability to process and articulate changes.

I didn't necessarily mind the comments about the Warden disappearing. Characters coming back from the dead, though... that's a problem.

My concern with bringing our saves further forward again - I know that ME1 and DA:O both have a lot of save flag bugs that result in imports not getting all the right data. I don't exactly have confidence in ME2/ME3 not suffering the same fate.

While I do recall some issues, I don't think any of them where particularly serious. In fact the only ones in ME2 I can recall have something to do with a news report regarding Sirta Foundation and whether you intimidated or charmed Conrad Verner. Admittedly the latter was a little annoying, but the difference was minimal with no impact on actual gameplay the latter was utterly harmless and I doubt most would even notice. As far as I'm aware all the major flags worked fine, as did most of the minor ones.

Dragon Age was a different situation since the development team (who I should point out are a separate team to the ME devs) made a conscious choice to run roughshod over several possible endgame permutations. Maybe because they didn't originally intend for any of the DA:O characters to figure much into any of the following games and so painted themselves into a corner in DA2 when they found they wanted to use some characters who were killable in the first game.

In the case of Mass Effect 4, moving things on eliminates any such conflict as just about everyone (who isn't an Asari or a Krogan) would be long dead. I'd be happy if the only carry over from my ME3 save is a statue of my Shepard on the Citadel, rendered with my custom appearance.

[ATimson]

Reverend wrote:

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While I do recall some issues, I don't think any of them where particularly serious.

In ME2, maybe not. I seem to recall that DA2 had some genuine bugs regarding party members/love interests, especially if you played Awakening or the DLC (above and beyond Leliana and Anders automatically being resurrected for the sequel).

Reverend wrote:

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In the case of Mass Effect 4, moving things on eliminates any such conflict as just about everyone (who isn't an Asari or a Krogan) would be long dead. I'd be happy if the only carry over from my ME3 save is a statue of my Shepard on the Citadel, rendered with my custom appearance.

I think the bigger problem with a Mass Effect 4 is "how do you top the Reapers"?

[HotRod]

Simple. You do not try and top the Reapers. Not every story needs to be some huge and epic tale with the entire galaxy at risk. I personally hope for a story taking place shortly after the Reaper invasion and dealing with the current state of the galaxy and its efforts to rebuilt. Maybe told from the point of view of someone non-military. We have already seen the galaxy from the point of view of a Soldier/Spectre, now lets see it from the point of view of the everyman. Maybe the crew of small cargo ship dealing with their own issues. Or maybe Mercs, or just some schmuck who sets out on an adventure. The Mass Effect Universe is so full and rich with possible story ideas that anything could be possible.

[throwback]

My biggest hope for this game is that there are no Sinmara-type missions.

http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/N7:...search_Station

[Herkimer Jitty]

I didn't find much wrong with that mission in particular. Bit short, but it wasn't awful.

[Reverend]

^While ones like that didn't add much to the overall game, I think it was nice to have some variety beyond "walking into room, shoot everyone. Then walk into next room, rinse and repeat until cutscene."

ATimson wrote:

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In ME2, maybe not. I seem to recall that DA2 had some genuine bugs regarding party members/love interests, especially if you played Awakening or the DLC (above and beyond Leliana and Anders automatically being resurrected for the sequel).

So do I, but the details elude me at the moment. Mind you that game had plenty of bugs to worry about besides the import flags. More to the point I think the source of such problems actually stemmed from the way Awakening saved it's data (or didn't, as the case may be) rather than there being an inherent problem with the import process. But like I said, ME & DA have separate dev teams and ME so far has a *much* better track record.

HotRod wrote:

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Simple. You do not try and top the Reapers. Not every story needs to be some huge and epic tale with the entire galaxy at risk. I personally hope for a story taking place shortly after the Reaper invasion and dealing with the current state of the galaxy and its efforts to rebuilt. Maybe told from the point of view of someone non-military. We have already seen the galaxy from the point of view of a Soldier/Spectre, now lets see it from the point of view of the everyman. Maybe the crew of small cargo ship dealing with their own issues. Or maybe Mercs, or just some schmuck who sets out on an adventure. The Mass Effect Universe is so full and rich with possible story ideas that anything could be possible.

Absolutely. I could totally get behind a ME game where you start off as some nobody colonist farmer, or a Terminus systems smuggler rather than as a soldier. More than anything I'd like to see a DAO approach where you get to pick your race and origin. Not sure how practical that'll be for a fully voiced game though.

[HotRod]

Yeah, I'm willing to bet that whatever we get will still be told primarily from a human point of view. Which itself could be really interesting in the next game if there weren't many humans left thanks to the Reapers.

Still on the issue of Mass Effect 4. If they are suggesting people maintain their saves from ME1-ME3, does that not mean it would still be current generation. Giving Bioware a minimum time of 2 years development, that would put it out sometime in early 2014. Damn, the 360 just might get its 10 year life cycle.

[ATimson]

HotRod wrote:

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Still on the issue of Mass Effect 4. If they are suggesting people maintain their saves from ME1-ME3, does that not mean it would still be current generation.

Not necessarily. Between the current generation's cloud storage capabilities, and their ability to copy saves to USB media, adding in support for bringing saves to the next generation is going to be trivial for console makers.

(While I don't think there was any way to bring original Xbox saves forward, PS2 saves could have been via memory card. Were there any games that actually did that?)

[bullethead]

Tons of new material, courtesy of Bioware.

[LeadHead]

Cool stuff! Thanks for posting.

[HotRod]

No words to describe it. Poetry! They should've sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful... I had no idea.

[Reverend]

...and yet again they tease the new femShep.

Nice to see the site updated. I had wondered why they'd stopped updating the N7ops section.

[John Clark]

Just watching the Femshep trailer. I like

[DarkHorizon]

There are a lot of nice, shiny things in that trailer - even setting aside FemShep...

Jacob, Miranda, Samara, Legion, Kaiden...
Asari biotics protecting artillery
An interesting-looking assassin type attacking Shep's aircar
Quarian fleet attacking... something
Shep taking down a Reaper single-handedly!

Also, is anyone else having problems with the links in the page on the Bioware forums that bullethead flagged up? When I click on them, they just lead me to a 404 error.

[Reverend]

^Nope, I just checked and they all work fine.

Defiantly worth the wait...not sure if I like the final look of the new default face though. The huge eyes make her look a little too doll-like for my taste. Rather prefer my own attempt if I'm being honest.

Also spotted Legion (in hologram form), some action on the presidium and what looks like shots from a different on-rails shooter section than I'd seen before. It's nice to know they've gone to some effort to vary the gameplay a little more this time around.