Mass Effect 3

[TheGodBen]

Jeff O'Connor wrote:

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Red Dead Redemption is a completely different kind of game, granted, but to give a good measure of how much this stuff really matters, its completion rate is 10%. And they used the same definition -- not 100%ing the game, just beating its main story path.

Keep in mind that RDR's real ending was hidden as a side mission and a lot of people missed it, and there's quite a few people out there who think they finished RDR when they actually didn't.

[Reverend]

PsychoPere wrote:

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You just had to mention those two, didn't you? I also haven't finished either of them yet...

Or The Witcher 2, or The Amazing Spider-Man, or Max Payne 3, or Spec Ops: The Line, or Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions...

Hey I haven't even *started* Witcher 1 yet...or Bulletstorm, Trine 2, Morrowind, STALKER SoC. Indeed, If I look down my Steam library I can easily name 12 or more games that I never finished (more if you count the Dawn of War Expansion packs!) Which is a bit weird as I like to think I usually complete the games I like, but the reality is, some just fall by the wayside.

[Reverend]

In other news: Leviathan shall rise from the abyss on August 28th.

Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn! And all that jazz.

[Camren]

I have dozens of games which I didn't complete. Literally dozens. Hell, some I only played for a few hours and that was it. The Mass Effect series of games are among the very few that I've completed multiple times.

[Camren]

Reverend wrote:

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In other news: Leviathan shall rise from the abyss on August 28th.

Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn! And all that jazz.

Oh yes, looking forward to this.

[LeadHead]

They planned it perfectly for my first week back at work! :P I'll Still find the time.

[PsychoPere]

The Deception rewrite is still underway, according to Chris Priestly:

Chris Priestly wrote:

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Yes, it is being worked on by the publisher. When we have an era, we'll let everyone know

It is the same author/story, just re-edited with closer attention to game lore with help from our ME team.

Also, if anyone is interested, Jessica Merizan, Chris Priestly, and Fernando Melo held a reddit AMAA today.

[Reverend]

^Taking me a while while to dig though all the responses, but so far I haven't seen anything particularly interesting. Mostly Merizan doing her best to dance around some very direct questions. Not that I begrudge her for it, she's only the community manager after all so has to be diplomatic...still, her response to the question about the Tali stock photo bordered on insulting one's intelligence.

[-Brett-]

PsychoPere wrote:

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The Deception rewrite is still underway, according to Chris Priestly:

Also, if anyone is interested, Jessica Merizan, Chris Priestly, and Fernando Melo held a reddit AMAA today.

I'm as critical of Bioware and ME3 as anyone, but I actually think she got it about right when it came to Harbinger. His role in the story is right there in the name.

Harbinger. A herald. To foreshadow a future event. To make known the approach of another.

I wouldn't have objected if he'd had a role in ME3, but I didn't miss him, either.

[Reverend]

^While I do appreciate her position, that would only have been a valid argument if Harbinger had vanished into the crowd after ME2. Instead it gets it's own new codex entry playing up it's age and significance. Then he gets foreshadowed, *twice*, once by a dying reaper and again before the final mission...only to show up in a cameo.

It's pretty obvious they they had intended to use Harbinger in a more substantial way at some point, but didn't have time to implement it. A familiar pattern.

My problem is that a lot of the responses in that discussion were like this; justifications after the fact bordering on patronising. I'd have more respect for them if they dropped the PR nonsense and just answered honestly: "Why did we use a stock photo for Tali? Because we didn't have the time of money needed to do a full face scan and build a proper mesh for her."


In other news; the full Leviathan trailer is out.

[Reverend]

OK, this is new. Looks like they're doing a little ARG for Leviathan on the Bioware blog. Oh and the ANN twitter account has been "hacked" by this guy too.

[Evil Twin]

Just finished Leviathan. Pretty good DLC overall! I'd rank it as not QUITE as good as LotSB, but arguably better than all the other ME2 DLC's. And I was thrilled that they bothered to record new dialogue for all your squadmembers (and Cortez and Hackett, but unsurprisingly no new Joker stuff.) Wonder if they did it at the same time they recorded the new Extended Cut dialogue.

The new cabin trophy is hilarious. My miniature giant space hamster has a new friend now!

Oh yeah, one thing, making my post-mission rounds on the Normandy, I noticed Tali chatting with Garrus on the comm each time I entered engineering. Something tells me those chats existed in the original game (since it foreshadows the two of them hooking up right before Earth) yet there were never enough missions in the game before to give you the opportunity to hear them all.

[LeadHead]

I was blown away by the Leviathan DLC, if this is the standard they're going to set for the ME3 DLC, then bravo! I hope that the practice of having the squad have new dialogue is a continuing thing, it added a lot of depth to the missions. It wouldn't surprise me if that's due to the Extended Cut, but I'd love for them to get long term plans set for the DLC so that they can record all they'll need and continue to have that be a part of the DLC.

[Reverend]

I enjoyed it. The squad banter was very nice to have as it's absence in ME2 DLC was always a pet peeve of mine. You can definitely see that they've been using the multiplayer as a testing ground for new game-play mechanics. The escort & power cell relay bits helped shake up what would otherwise have been some fairly dull combat.

The Leviathan themselves are fairly interesting and I like how it ties together several background stories like the 'Leviathan of Dis', Kasumi's lover's greybox, the rachni acting against their will and the origin of the reaper form. It raises a few questions though; if the Leviathan need "lesser" races to create technology and facilitate space travel for them, that means they had to have evolved on a planet with just such a race. If so, what happened to that first race? Did they become the Keepers? That would seem to be appropriate. I also have the wonder if there's a connection between Leviathan and the Thorian. Their MOs are very similar, so perhaps they evolved on the same planet? I mean Leviathan couldn't been the only branch of it's evolutionary tree, could it? I mean something that massive must have requited either a prey species of significant mass and/or enormous numbers. Perhaps the Thorian and it's thralls were that prey species? The implication there of course would be that Feros is the Leviathans' homeworld, presumably with it's oceans long since dried up. That or Thorian spores were somehow transported there at some point in the past...perhaps as a handy food source?

Overall, I can't shake the slightly hollow feeling that none of this matters, given we already know how things end...though it may make me rethink choosing the destroy option in future. I mean, with all the synthetics gone, what's to stop the Leviathan from enslaving all the lesser races all over again?

Oh and as for the severed Cerberus trooper head: I named mine Murray! And if you don't get the reference, go play Monkey Island 3.

[Hartzilla2007]

Reverend wrote:

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The implication there of course would be that Feros is the Leviathans' homeworld, presumably with it's oceans long since dried up. That or Thorian spores were somehow transported there at some point in the past...perhaps as a handy food source?

Well I read on one of the TV tropes fridge pages for the Mass Effect games that there was a race mentioned in one of the Mass Effect games (I think it was ME 2) that was apparently clashing with one of the dominate races of a cycle who's name is similar to the Thorian that led to speculation that the Thorian used to have its own little interstellar empire. So it might not be native to Feros.