Mass Effect 3

[Brill Weave]

Aw. I want to read it but social networking sites are blocked at work.

[Tarage]

Aw. I want to read it but social networking sites are blocked at work.

Spoiler: show

Westley Hayes: @masseffect Do you think Shepard can become indoctrinated by the Reapers?
@masseffect: Anything is possible

Boilerplate answer for someone who can't say anything substantial.

[Brill Weave]

Anything is possible

Except a coherent ending!

[Judai]

Spoiler: show

Terrible ending to an amazing game and franchise. At least show me some scenes of my squad members, current and past, moving on in their new lives. Not some bullshit ending where magically my squad is on the Normandy, leaving the Sol system for no reason and crashing on a beautiful world after I choose between bad end, terrible end and compromise but regardless of my decision, the galaxy was left in ruins.

Way too much bullshit with games and movies now because everyone wants to keep making money and won't end shit. You say it's the last game, then fucking end it properly, not in a couple months with some DLC, if at all.

[Kiarax]

My body is ready

[Brill Weave]

Niiiiiice. Do want.

[Tarage]

And then they promptly got banned from the game.

I'm not kidding, EA seems to have a stick up their ass about ANY form of cheating, so much that if someone you play with cheats so you get a bunch of credits you also get banned. You heard me right, you can get OTHER people banned through YOUR actions. I'm waiting for 4chan to get a hold of this...

[6souls]

I could see that DLC down the line. Many other games are getting DLC like that 4-5 months after release.

[Rokku]

Oh god, Geth Infiltrator and Krogan Battlemaster. Want so hard, body is beyond ready, etc.

[Chrian]

quarian and geth sabatogers would be fun.

[Brill Weave]

I'm not kidding, EA seems to have a stick up their ass about ANY form of cheating, so much that if someone you play with cheats so you get a bunch of credits you also get banned. You heard me right, you can get OTHER people banned through YOUR actions. I'm waiting for 4chan to get a hold of this...

Are we talking just random strangers you would meet by doing quick match? Because if so I'm going to have to call BS on that. For EA to hold others accountable for something they have nothing to do with opens them up to all kinds of problems.

[Tarage]

Are we talking just random strangers you would meet by doing quick match? Because if so I'm going to have to call BS on that. For EA to hold others accountable for something they have nothing to do with opens them up to all kinds of problems.

http://www.qj.net/ps3/videos/me3-pla...ltiplayer.html

I mean granted the dude could be lying but I wouldn't put it past EA.

[Brill Weave]

but I wouldn't put it past EA.

That's the one thing that keeps me from outright dismissing it as bullshit. EA is some shady mother fuckers.

[Pendulum]

Spoilered for hueg but not a spoiler

Spoiler: show

Edit: I hope that expansion of MP classes includes Blasto the Jellyfish.

[Rokku]

That's the one thing that keeps me from outright dismissing it as bullshit. EA is some shady mother fuckers.

While I'm quick to agree that EA can be pretty shady, I'd call the affected individual's story.. questionable at best. If they were really banning people for "indirect cheating", I'd imagine it'd be a bit more widespread than this one guy that they initially jumped to try and help out.

But you know, grain of salt and all. Either party could be lying through their teeth, certainly wouldn't be the first time EA bullshitted about something, or that someone cheating made up some sort of "I didn't do it what happened" story.

[Dryr]

And then they promptly got banned from the game.

I'm not kidding, EA seems to have a stick up their ass about ANY form of cheating, so much that if someone you play with cheats so you get a bunch of credits you also get banned. You heard me right, you can get OTHER people banned through YOUR actions. I'm waiting for 4chan to get a hold of this...

I've played a couple matches with cheaters. But, they weren't credit cheaters, they were never reload, one hit kill cheaters.

BW seems to be moving slow/didn't secure anything but the store where they try to get more money when it comes to cheating.
Seriously, I haven't done it, but it appears that you just open a certain file and edit plain text lines of code to be a god with no security server-side. Kind of hard to believe seeing as how there are multiple DRM checks at startup for the single player.

[Brill Weave]

Why you cheatin Dryr?

[6souls]

There's an almost universal outrage at the moment over the ending of Mass Effect 3. After playing a series for what's usually over 100 hours, people are very upset at the manner in which the trilogy wound down.

And they have every right to be.

But not for the reasons I see so many putting forward. It has nothing to do with the story, or the writing, or the fate of Shepard, or indeed the fate of the Mass Effect universe itself. Those are creative decisions, and as the creators of the content, BioWare can do whatever the hell they like. If Shepard had sprouted wings and gone off to fight Sephiroth, whatever, that's what they had in mind. Stories are subjective things.

No, the problem lies in something more direct, and thus culpable, than any of those offenders. It's in how the game's conclusion played out.

The Mass Effect series features walking, and running, and shooting, and mining, and flying, and what passes for science magic. But the core of the game, they thing that kept gamers on the hook and so invested in a story to the point they're this angry about a video game ending (remember, most endings suck!), is the game's dialogue mechanic.

Building on over a decade's work, across various BioWare franchises, Mass Effect 3 again let you alter the course of the game's story by selecting dialogue options that correspond to a desired moral compass. Want to be the galaxy's nicest guy? There are spaces on the dialogue wheel set aside just for you and your holier-than-thou answers. Vice versa for being the galaxy's biggest badass.

It's a system that worked as advertised across the first game, the second game and nearly all of the third. That's, for most people, over one hundred hours of gameplay.

And then, at the very end of the trilogy, at the moment your decisions matter most, the system gets thrown out the window.

Spoiler: show

At the point where you face off against the Illusive Man inside the Citadel, he eventually gets hold of a weapon, and aims it at your series-long friend and ally, Anderson. As he does so, a prompt appears on-screen for a Renegade intervention. On my first playthrough, I let this pass, as I let almost every other Renegade possibility (reporter punching aside) go, since I was playing as a Paragon.

Anderson gets shot. That's...unfortunate, I thought. No sooner has his body hit the ground, though, than the Illusive Man points the gun at me. Again, a Renegade prompt, again, I leave it, because that's not how I play. He shoots me. Game over.

I was speechless. I was being forced to take a Renegade option, even though this was the polar opposite of the Shepard I had built over the trilogy. Why was there no Paragon option? Why had the binary system built to power the games suddenly not working? Why tell me there's a choice when it's not a choice at all?

Maybe I missed something, maybe I didn't get the right amount of EMS or TMS or however the hell that stupid "go play multiplayer or buy an iOS" system worked (and to which there is still no definitive explanation/guide), but to encounter it felt like the worst kind of sucker punch. "Oh, that way you've been told to act and intervene over the last three games, yeah, it's different for the next five minutes".

Swallowing the need to be a little meaner, I reloaded, shot him as quick as I could, and sat back as the endgame began to play out. When the time came to make THE ULTIMATE DECISION, I was again floored. This time, because the decision had suddenly become unclear.

I had no idea which was the "good" ending I was after. All three choices I'd been presented with seemed ambiguous. Which was surely another creative decision on BioWare's part, but a poor one, because this one interfered with the trilogy's most basic assumption: that you can build the story the way you want to.

That's why every single choice you made previously with regards to Paragon or Renegade pathways was so obvious; because it needed to be. People were invested in building their character the way they wanted to.

The way the game's endings were presented didn't just undermine this, it threw it out the window. What had been the point of making all your decisions across three titles based on good or "evil" (well, "rude") if the final payoff did not represent these?

It feels like walking 100 miles to get lemonade only to get there and be told you can choose between a pair of shoes, some brass knuckles or a cheeseburger.

You can say part of this is down to, yes, creative decisions, but that only works to a point. In the case of Mass Effect 3's conclusion there's no separation between creative decisions and mechanical ones. They're one and the same. So when one directly impacts the other, it can't magically be spared criticism.

I feel for the developers on one level, because what's happening here is the result of a conflict that's been brewing since the series began. Since we first took control of Shepard, there's been a delicate line walked between who was actually driving the story, the developers or the players. Previously, that line was held because players were given clear and direct consequences for their decisions.

At the end, the very end, that line couldn't be walked any further. Someone had to win, someone had to actually finish that story, and of course BioWare were always going to play the more important role in that. We, the players, were never writing the story, we were just the ones with our shoulder to the wheel.

But I think they played too important a part. With all three endings being incredibly similar, down to many shared assets, it gave players the impression their choices no longer mattered, that they were being Sheparded (sorry) through a cutscene rather than actively determining its outcome.

Would three clearly different endings have improved things? A decision is meaningless without consequence, after all, so giving the player genuinely differing outcomes from their decisions would surely have been a more satisfying end, if only in terms of design and following through on one of the key tenets of the series' gameplay. But ah, that would also involve making changes to the plot and story, and asking for changes to a story is a line a consumer should never cross.

BioWare's failure here, then, isn't in terms of its story-writing, or its pacing, or that Shepard dies (indeed, my Shepard clearly did not die). It lies in changing the way the game's most important decisions - the very things that gamers were so invested in - are made at the eleventh hour, with no indication or feedback to let players know this is going on.

http://kotaku.com/5892676/why-mass-e...ium=socialflow

[Dryr]

Why you cheatin Dryr?

Didn't apply to me ; ; Just the person cheatin got to play god.

[Mots]

Playable Geth!? HUNGNNNHNHGGGGGGGGGGGGGG