Mass Effect Mass Effect general thread

Urabrask Revealed

Let them go.
Founder
Did they say anything about the PvE multiplayer mode? Has that been scrapped, or did they decide to try and expand on it? I mean, all three games could have their own PvE mode. Part 1, you fight pirates and cerberus operatives. Part 2, you defend colonies from the Collectors. Part 3, that mode stays the same.
 

Stargazer

Well-known member
Here's a bunch of shit on the remaster:



I'm very encouraged by all of this. I was worried they would change too much about ME1. Worst case was the rumor from months back that they were gutting the combat from all three games and replacing it with Andromeda's combat. I would have hated that, but clearly they're just tweaking things here, rebalancing things there, and making some quality of life improvements. The core of what was fun and unique about ME1's combat - and in some ways, better than ME2/3's combat - should still be intact.

Also, hearing the Noveria theme at the start of the IGN video reminded me of just how damn good ME1's soundtrack was. Quintessential atmospheric sci fi synth. It's got me itching to start a new playthrough of the trilogy right now! But I'll hold off until I have the legendary edition.

One thing I'm hoping they add is native gamepad support on PC, none of the original PC releases had it. I think you could mod/hack the game into using controllers, but it didn't have the right interface, etc. I did play the first two games originally on Xbox, so I have some nostalgia for the "couch experience", it would be nice to have that on PC too.
 

Husky_Khan

The Dog Whistler... I mean Whisperer.
Founder
Sotnik

Husky_Khan

The Dog Whistler... I mean Whisperer.
Founder
Sotnik
Anyone played it?

I'm not getting it til it's in EA Play or on sale for $20.

I'm planning on getting it eventually. But yeah maybe a sale... or maybe if the nostalgia overwhelms me. Looking at the Lets Plays on YouTube and it does look like a nice HD remaster of the original game.



But yeah 59.99 for three games is either a really good value (especially if you never played the games or its been over a decade) or in my case... not that good a value... since I remember replaying the previous games not too long ago and ya know... actually owning them still on Origin or whatever it's called now.
 
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ParadiseLost

Well-known member
Or it's not a good value because it'll be way cheaper once you actually get around to playing it.

My backlog is hundreds of games. First of all I'd want to purchase an updated graphics card for ME:LE, which I hope to do this summer when the RTX 3050 comes out, and then I'd have to actually get to the point where ME:LE is high priority.

Which isn't going to be for a long time. I have an insane backlog, and even at my current rate of 50-70 hours of gaming per two weeks I'm not getting through it anytime soon.

Current goal is to finish Red Dead Redemption 2 this month, along with the Resident Evil Biohazard and COD:MW 2 and 3. Even at that rate though... My backlog is hundreds.
 

ParadiseLost

Well-known member
Speaking of cards, when is the crypto-mining era coming to an end?!

Intel and TMSC (TMSC is the one actually manufacturing most GPUs, Nvidia and AMD just engineer them) are warning supply shortages could last through 2022.

Honestly I'm just thinking of buying a gaming laptop. At this point it's actually cheaper. I can get a 16 GB RAM 1 TB SSD RTX 2060 4K laptop for $1200. Seriously tempted to just make the purchase.
 
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Lord Sovereign

Well-known member
So, I've been looking into Mass Effect lore and character backstories a little more, and I find myself absolutely astonished that the Illusive Man not only got himself indoctrinated, but was obsessed with Reaper tech in the first place. He has seen first hand that it cannot be harnessed for the greater good of humanity and indeed only indoctrinates those who study it or are exposed to it, so why the fuck is he at all interested in it?

He should have more of a "the Reapers are a threat to humanity's dominion. You blow those bastards to hell, Shepard. Here's a few billion creds to help you do just that!"
 

Urabrask Revealed

Let them go.
Founder
So, I've been looking into Mass Effect lore and character backstories a little more, and I find myself absolutely astonished that the Illusive Man not only got himself indoctrinated, but was obsessed with Reaper tech in the first place. He has seen first hand that it cannot be harnessed for the greater good of humanity and indeed only indoctrinates those who study it or are exposed to it, so why the fuck is he at all interested in it?

He should have more of a "the Reapers are a threat to humanity's dominion. You blow those bastards to hell, Shepard. Here's a few billion creds to help you do just that!"
Have you also read the comic too? To answer your question, it's the same reasoning behind any dangerous thing being researched: "We can use it against them!"

Man, imagine if TIM and Saren teamed up after the events of the comic...
 

Lord Sovereign

Well-known member
Man, imagine if TIM and Saren teamed up after the events of the comic...

Pls no. Saren is a badass villain that would only have been dragged down by the Illusive Man (primarily because TIM just does not suit the role of "central villain." He's certainly a good antagonist at certain times but not as overall nemesis of the series. Harbinger would have worked much better than him as Shepard's chief tormentor in ME3). I mean, the latter went out whimpering like a little bitch, whilst Saren went full chad mode.
 

Lord Sovereign

Well-known member
Oh no, there are still such people. It actually resurfaced recently thanks to the new remastered version they just released. They are actually complaining that BioWare made that extended cut ending because of people complaining.

Oh God...it's going to be like socialism isn't it? You know, "the stupid bloody idea that just won't fucking die off."
 

Stargazer

Well-known member
So, I've been looking into Mass Effect lore and character backstories a little more, and I find myself absolutely astonished that the Illusive Man not only got himself indoctrinated, but was obsessed with Reaper tech in the first place. He has seen first hand that it cannot be harnessed for the greater good of humanity and indeed only indoctrinates those who study it or are exposed to it, so why the fuck is he at all interested in it?

He should have more of a "the Reapers are a threat to humanity's dominion. You blow those bastards to hell, Shepard. Here's a few billion creds to help you do just that!"
Hubris. The Illusive Man's problem was hubris. He saw the threat of Reapers and thought, it would be a waste to just destroy them. How much greater would humanity be if we could master the very things that presume to use us for their ends? Hubris isn't rational. It's a common literary theme, going all the way back to Homer.

Speaking of TIM and the god awful ending he was involved with, no one still seriously defends ME3's endings right? The "Bioware doesn't owe you anything crowd" must have died off by now as their argument aged horribly over the course of the decade.

When ME3 first came out, I was very disappointed in the ending. And I was part of the crowd petitioning BioWare to change the ending. It was just a bad ending and I wanted something better, simple as that. I don't I was entitled to a better ending, I don't think Bioware was obligated to give us one, but I also wasn't about to keep buying Bioware games if that was the kind of ending I could expect from them and Bioware wasn't interested in doing better.

I had a lot of problems with the ending. To list a few:

-The reveal of the origin of the Reapers, their purpose and goal, felt out of the blue and wasn't properly foreshadowed. And the Catalyst, the AI that created the Reapers and controls them, taking the appearance of the kid you saw at the start of the game... Was just dumb.
-Your decisions throughout the game didn't really effect the final outcome of the story. And there was no observable difference in the story with the final decision. All it did was contribute to a score that let you choose between seeing a red wave, a green wave, and a blue wave.
-The writers didn't think through what blowing up the mass relays meant. That it would screw the galaxy over, particularly the very group you assembled to liberate Earth. And they seemingly forgot that we'd already been shown what happens when a relay blows up - it wipes out its entire system. I doubt that was the intention, but they should have made it clear that it didn't happen in the case. Either they forgot about all of that, or they knew but didn't think it was important. Either way, it was lazy writing.
-Your squad mates you brought with you in the final push were probably killed. So that sucks.
-The Normandy running from the energy wave and crashing on some verdant world made no sense and was dumb. Are we to assume that Joker & co are just stranded there forever?

That said, there were some things I liked about the ending:

-The purpose of the Reapers. People made a lot of fun of it ("Yo dawg I heard you like not being wiped out by synthetics"). And I don't think it's explained in the most convincing way, even after the DLCs. But there's a way to look at it which I think makes a perverted sort of sense. The Catalyst's goal is to prevent organic life from being wiped out permanently. Only harvesting advanced spacefaring species, leaving primitive species alone. The fear being that an organic species could develop an AI threat that won't make that distinction, and will wipe out all organic life in the galaxy regardless of intelligence. And the Reapers being constructed using the genetic code of millions of individuals from a species can be seen in a perverted way as "preserving" those species, even after wiping them out

The final decision becomes a question, relating to a theme common to sci fi and one that has been present throughout the trilogy: can organic life coexist with its own synthetic creations, or will the creation inevitably surpass and destroy its own creator? I think that's an interesting, high concept sci fi question to be asking. And I think it's actually a lot better than the "dark energy" plot that was originally going to be the motivation of the Reapers.

-The Illusive Man's demise. Like I said above, the Illusive Man was a character defined by hubris. But I also think he's something of a tragic figure. Like Icarus flying too close to the sun and melting his wings. I think the final confrontation with TIM is haunting, tense. And I actually prefer what happens when you shoot him, rather than convincing him to kill himself. I think he's a more tragic figure if he dies still pursuing his ambition. And I've always liked his final words in that scenario. "There. Earth. I wish you could see it like I do, Shepard. It's so... Perfect."

-Your final moments with Anderson. 'Nuff said.

And with all that said, I was actually appeased to a great degree by how the DLCs - both the extended cut and Leviathan - changed things. No, it's not perfect, and there are some things I still wish were different. But it did take me from really disliking the ending to being able to be content with it:

-Leviathan actually went a long way to properly foreshadowing the ending reveal. I think it should have been part of the main game. So yay, proper setup. Starchild Catalyst is still dumb though.
-You're actually shown an epilogue with the outcome of your decisions, and what the effect of the final decision actually looks like! Much appreciated.
-Only the rings of the mass relays are shown blowing up, not the entire structure. So they're damaged, but not destroyed. And the epilogue explicitly shows them being repaired. So yay, the entire galaxy isn't screwed over!
-Your squad mates are shown getting evacced. I think it's a little silly that the Normandy took a break from the battle above to do that, but yay, your squad mates explicitly aren't dead!
-The Normandy is shown jumping away with the rest of the fleet in anticipation of the Crucible going off, so at least that's explained. I still think crashing on some random world is dumb, but yay, the Normandy is explicitly shown taking off and is not stranded there!

So yeah. I think there were some nuggets of good ideas to ME3's original ending, but the way it was written and executed was indefensible. But I will defend the ending post-DLC as being satisfying and acceptable. I'm not really a fan of "indoctrination theory" - it's an interesting idea, but I don't think it would be all that satisfying of an ending either, and it's not compatible with the story as it stands. And I was never on board with demanding Bioware give us a "happy ending", I've never been interested in mods along those lines - I get the sort of ending Bioware was going for, I just think they really botched the execution of it.

Does that count as "defending the ending"?
 

Battlegrinder

Someday we will win, no matter what it takes.
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Staff Member
Founder
Obozny
So, I saw an article reviewing ME2, and one bit jumped out at me.

It wasn’t. Krogan biology was adapting. Slowly, Krogan women were beginning to deliver more and more healthy children. So Mordin took it upon himself to…fix the Genophage. He made the executive decision to go beyond study and update that atrocity’s particular Github, then reapply the Genophage to the entire Krogan species — and, because such a judgment is inextricably bound up in making such a decision, he reaffirmed his belief that it was the moral and just thing to do. The original authors of the Genophage were war criminals beyond measure, yes, but all they had to go on were simulations and mathematical models. Mordin saw the way the Genophage broke Krogan society, studied it closely, and concluded that not only was it worth it — it was optimal. He compares the Genophage approvingly to gardening.

Mass Effect 2 Legendary Edition: The Dirty Dozen, for the Dozenth Time

An article by Jonathan Bernhardt Reviews Video Games June 16, 2021 0

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I’ve now completed Mass Effect 2 for either the seventh or the eighth time, and I have some thoughts on the matter.
First, the occasion: we’re going through all three of the original Mass Effect games in their remastered form, the Legendary Edition that BioWare released in May as some sort of victory lap slash mea culpa slash distraction from the complete tire fire that the studio’s original work has been for the past five or six years. Previously we covered Mass Effect, which felt like a transition into a genre that never was — RPG shooters would survive and thrive in the 2010s, but they’d look a lot more like Bioshock than they would Mass Effect. The biggest third-person shooter/RPG hybrid with active cooldown powers other than the Mass Effect series in this time period is probably Alpha Protocol. I love Alpha Protocol. I’ve written about it before on this site. It does not reach the heights of Mass Effect 2, and it spawned no progeny for reasons beyond the infamous debacle over its Metacritic score and Sega’s lack of vision as a publisher. Mass Effect 2 remains the king of whatever these sorts of games are.
The game starts with possibly the best sequel pitch in modern video games: You, Commander Shepard of the Normandy, have been ambushed and killed by an unknown foe, dying to save your crew (and if appropriate, your loved one from the first game). Resurrected by your enemies, you are asked to put your differences with them aside and lead a suicide mission into the heart of the galaxy to save humanity. You can’t do it alone. You have to put together a team.
The accoutrements certainly help; all of the living characters from Mass Effect return in some fashion, some as party members and some as very important plot NPCs. Seth Green is once again excellent as Jeff “Joker” Moreau, the Normandy’s pilot. The casting of Martin Sheen as the leader of the referenced previous enemies, the Illusive Man of the human supremacist organization Cerberus, is nothing short of brilliant. In 2010 he was only a few years removed from the jewel of the second act of his long career in television and film, the role of President Jed Bartlet on Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. Bartlet is a reasonable-seeming, incredibly charismatic leader of men. He is also a fanatic who, in the rare instances where he is unable to talk someone into something, simply deploys all of the power available to him upon them like an earthly agent of God. In West Wing, this fanaticism is for the American project as interpreted by Reaganite and Clintonian professional-class liberalism. In Mass Effect 2, it is for the zero-sum, total and complete advancement of the aims of humanity, done as elegantly as possible or as brutally as necessary. In practice and in Sheen’s performance, there is very little daylight between the two.

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Looking good, Mr. President!
The simple act of building the team, though, is what the game revolves around, and what makes it the purest expression of what BioWare has shot for in all of these titles. It is character-focused to a fault — the characters are the narrative. How you interact with these people (indeed, whether you interact with these people; you don’t have to recruit all of them or even any of them to technically complete the game) determines how the plot resolves itself. Do you listen to them? Do you value them? This will have deterministic effects on how your suicide mission resolves, and this makes narrative sense: the reason you do everyone’s loyalty missions isn’t to fill a quest log or tie up loose ends or see content, but because their loyalty and buy-in will matter when push comes to shove.
That’s for the end of the game, though. In the beginning, the first thing the player will notice is how much better everything about playing Mass Effect 2 feels compared to its predecessor. Aiming is snappier, ammunition for weapons is handled with a standard clip/reloading system instead of the overheating concept from Mass Effect, cooldowns have been simplified to a shorter global cooldown on all activated abilities instead of longer cooldowns on each skill, and the wonky physics system has been scaled back to turn powers into reliable, predictable applications of damage and debuffs rather than sandbox-y interaction machines. The game definitely tilts more towards the shooter end of things than Mass Effect did, but that’s to its benefit: it emphasizes skill and tactics-based gameplay that rewards knowing what powers hard counter what defenses or enemy types, rather than strategic exploit-based gameplay based on using Adepts to trivialize entire encounters with power interactions. (It helps that Adept is still probably the most powerful class in the game, though Vanguard is close, and for some players much more fun.) Part of this was just a dedication to streamlining a pretty clunky combat system from the first go-round, but part of it was business: Consoles were on the rise in the market and the conventional wisdom was that PC gaming was waning. BioWare wanted a playstyle that better fit a controller, and they got what they set out to achieve.
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Sometimes you want to worldbuild so much you end up with a luxury resort essentially named “Hotel Dick.”
There is, in fact, a lot of this game that’s informed by its age. There aren’t any more close-ups of Miranda’s ass, perhaps, but most of the stuff that’ll make you blink a little bit can’t be fixed by changing a camera angle. There’s the fact that the developers attempted to balance her out with the male counterpart Jacob, who also has a finely toned ass, also wears a painted-on jumpsuit, and also has extreme problems with his father. Whereas Miranda’s story leaves the disconnect between the rather tame stated designs Miranda’s father has for her and her younger sister and the violence which with Miranda reacts to the idea of either of them returning to him up to the reader to untangle, Jacob’s loyalty mission lets it all hang out there: Ronald Taylor is an absent father who, after his starship crashed on a world with psychotropic drugs, went around getting every woman on his crew doped up on space weed so he could put them in his harem. There’s a particularly odd juxtaposition if you’re playing as female Shepard trying to romance Jacob, because over in his dialogue tree, she’s turning every work conversation into a comment on how hot his body is, or leering “the Alliance lost a fine soldier, Jacob.” Do you get it? You expected the male superior officer to harass the female subordinate, but instead it’s the other way around. Is your mind blown? At least the voice work is top notch.
There’s the entire Jack character, of course; the badass biotic bitch who will have casual sex with Shepard but will have to be taught that’s unhealthy by a firmly abstaining Shepard before they can get into a meaningful, long-term relationship. Male Shepard only, though, as Jack is the crowning achievement in BioWare’s still-ongoing tradition of making all of their queercoded female characters straight — it’s pretty well established fact now that BioWare management changed direction on Jack at the last minute after making up a Fox News segment in their heads to scare themselves with. That they thought it would be okay if they just gave you another Asari woman to sleep with, when the Fox segment that prompted this panic attack specifically went after the Liara/Shepard female romance from Mass Effect, is the epitome of how all these companies who would be changing over to rainbow logos for June less than a decade later handled their business back before Pride was used to sell hamburgers.
There’s David in the Overlord DLC, an incredibly insulting caricature of an autistic man who sits about monotoning square root calculations and acting as his brother’s lab recorder, whose neurodivergent condition is presented as giving him not a figurative but a literal computer brain that can interface and share data with the evil Geth mass consciousness. Most directly his autism manifests by giving him the apparent mental age of a nine or ten year old, and turning the denouement of the DLC story package into a custody battle while he remains strapped to some Hellraiser device. It’s easy to see where things went wrong: the writers were chasing a storyline that was able to pack the most emotional impact possible into three or four hours of content, and that meant shorthand, shortcuts, and emotional dirty pool. And they were almost certainly told that no, they couldn’t use an actual child. So this is what they went with instead, and they’d probably do it differently now.
It’s a genuine relief, then, how much better the writers did on the subject of genocide.
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Damn, I never thought of it like that before!
Two years after the release of this game, Mass Effect 3 tried to pay off two massive, trilogy-long plotlines building directly off of two of the best character moments of this game, and while the enterprise as a whole more or less fell on its face, the cure for the Genophage and the Quarian return remain the most beloved parts of the flawed project. This is because the characters involved in them were beloved, and they were beloved because both previous games did the hard work of providing players with meaningful if simple and binary choices that paid off, setting the stage for the next game to build further. Though wild fan favorites now, when we meet them in Mass Effect 2, Mordin Solus and the Quarians of the Migrant Fleet are still very much on trial in the court of narrative morality (and in Tali’s case, literally on trial) for their vast, civilization-scale crimes against the Krogan and the Geth. While Tali, Legion, and the Quarian fleet are great, it’s worth putting them to the side to look closely at the best-written, best-conceived single mission in all of Mass Effect: the loyalty mission for Dr. Mordin Solus.
Mordin is a fantastic character. Players immediately fell in love with him, and it’s easy to see why. He’s the complete package: the quirky, confident, motor-mouthed super-genius who doesn’t take shit from anyone, is thoughtful, warm, and funny in private conversation, and is always able to pull some piece of sci-fi tech nonsense out of nowhere to save the crew’s bacon. The Salarians were the last of the big five alien races to get their team member slash mascot, and Mordin is right there with Wrex, Garrus, Tali, and Liara.
Mordin Solus is also, without hyperbole or deception, the greatest monster of the last 50,000 years of galactic civilization. And that might comfortably include Sovereign.
First, a primer on the Genophage: A sterility plague that works by forcing miscarriages in all but 1 in 1,000 live Krogan births. Mass Effect is a bit vague on this but Mass Effect 2 clears it up decisively and intentionally: the Genophage does not work by preventing conception. It works by making all but .01% of Krogan fetuses develop into a newborn that is clinically braindead and cannot survive outside of the womb. It is an atrocity. Mordin Solus didn’t make the Genophage, however; he was simply assigned to study it with a group of junior researchers and make sure it was still working.
It wasn’t. Krogan biology was adapting. Slowly, Krogan women were beginning to deliver more and more healthy children. So Mordin took it upon himself to…fix the Genophage. He made the executive decision to go beyond study and update that atrocity’s particular Github, then reapply the Genophage to the entire Krogan species — and, because such a judgment is inextricably bound up in making such a decision, he reaffirmed his belief that it was the moral and just thing to do. The original authors of the Genophage were war criminals beyond measure, yes, but all they had to go on were simulations and mathematical models. Mordin saw the way the Genophage broke Krogan society, studied it closely, and concluded that not only was it worth it — it was optimal. He compares the Genophage approvingly to gardening.

Mordin tells you all of this and more during a whirlwind interrogation in the morgue of the lab where Clan Weyrloc attempts to backsolve a Genophage cure; a lab Mordin furiously condemns in the harshest terms as monstrous, deviant science whose barbarous methods could bear only poisoned fruit. Not satisfied with just the standard Salarian/Turian party line about Krogan birth rates leading to a savage tide overwhelming the galaxy, Mordin pulls out all the stops: that his whole team unanimously agreed the Genophage had to be restored, as if they were a democratic legislature instead of a military unit he commanded; that the Salarian ‘wheel of life’ religious doctrine (Much like your people’s Hinduism, Shepard!) tells him that all those dead Krogan babies were simply borne into their next lives; that all Shepard needs to do is run the data — the impartial algorithms he and his team programmed themselves were quite clear that the Krogan were too savage and violent to sustain peaceful civilization. The numbers can’t be racist, Shepard! In a particularly sublime and grotesque moment he turns pro-choice rhetoric against the player, reasoning that fetuses are not babies and because his Genophage stopped all neurological development, these stillborn deliveries are just the expulsions of undifferentiated natal tissue, no matter how emotional the mothers understandably are. At every step he assures you that not just every argument against the Genophage but the suffering of the Krogan that you so piously wield has been heard and seen by him, and that when he decimated their decimation to the tenth generation, he did it because he cared.

I cite the bolded bits because, contrary to the writers implications, the idea of a never ending tide of krogan overrunning the galaxy is not just rethotic, it factually happened, and mordin had more than just data, he had years upon years of krogsn history (the writer here conveniently forgets that this conversation happens in the ruins of a bombed out krogan hospital, which was bombed when the Krogan civilization nuked itself out of existence due to a shortage or resourcesleading up competition and war, and yes that is exactly what lead to the Krogan rebellions as well), and neither this writer nor mass effect ever really address those issues, they just seem to assume that without the Genophage those issues will just fix themselves, somehow.

That's not to suggest the Genophage is morally sound, it's not, however bioware seems to have written themselves into a corner, because they built thier only opitions as "completely cure Genophage" and "keep it in place and also be totally evil", neither of which seem like good choices objectively (though narratively the former choice is framed as good), instead of the actual solution of "limit Krogan fertility rate without causing thousands of still births".

Or at least that's my thoughts on the matter. Anyone else have a different viewpoint?
 

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