Jump to content
DVDVR Message Board

MASS EFFECT 4 (and beyond)


Ace

Recommended Posts

I think my biggest concern regarding ME:A at this point (Other then not being sure if going to a more open world dynamic is a good thing or not) is simply that Bioware hasn't put out a good, complete story since ME2, and hasn't really hit a homerun with a Villian since ME1. And there writing team has been dismantled in the last 5 years.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 hours ago, El Dragon said:

I think my biggest concern regarding ME:A at this point (Other then not being sure if going to a more open world dynamic is a good thing or not) is simply that Bioware hasn't put out a good, complete story since ME2, and hasn't really hit a homerun with a Villian since ME1. And there writing team has been dismantled in the last 5 years.

Drew Karpyshyn carried the ME franchise on his shoulders as far as the writing goes.  When he left, he took the story quality with him..   

As far as the villainy goes for ME2 and ME3, I have to slightly disagree.  ME2 had quality antagonists, but the problem was that you were working for one of them.  The Illusive Man was such an excellent douchebag that his villainy diluted the menace of the Collectors.

The Collectors were really fucking scary in the parts of the story that they dominated.   Problem was that there were not enough parts of the story where they took center stage.

Kai Leng was a great bad guy.  I couldn't wait to kill that asshole.

The Reapers were also solid antagonists, but we don't remember them as such because bad guys are only as memorable as your final showdown with them aka ME3 should've ended with us blowing Harbinger to bits and not a decision tree moment with Starboy giving us an ethics lesson..

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, J.T. said:

Drew Karpyshyn carried the ME franchise on his shoulders as far as the writing goes.  When he left, he took the story quality with him..   

As far as the villainy goes for ME2 and ME3, I have to slightly disagree.  ME2 had quality antagonists, but the problem was that you were working for one of them.  The Illusive Man was such an excellent douchebag that his villainy diluted the menace of the Collectors.

The Collectors were really fucking scary in the parts of the story that they dominated.   Problem was that there were not enough parts of the story where they took center stage.

Kai Leng was a great bad guy.  I couldn't wait to kill that asshole.

The Reapers were also solid antagonists, but we don't remember them as such because bad guys are only as memorable as your final showdown with them aka ME3 should've ended with us blowing Harbinger to bits and not a decision tree moment with Starboy giving us an ethics lesson..

The Illusive Man point is a very good one. I'll concede on him. 

The Collectors other big problem to me was simply that in the grand scheme of things, they were not really that important. And the fact that you fought the Collecors a grand total of.... 4 missions, if you include the one you are Joker, I think, is a ghuge problem. Admitted, the entire final mission & that mission with Joker are spectacular, but basically, the real bad guy of ME2 to me was Harbinger, and we never really get to fight him in the entire series. Save for running at him to die.

Kai Leng... I mean, he was cocky and arrogant, but that was kinda it. We never got motivation for Kai Leng. I don't get the sense he's completely indoctrinated like the Illusive Man is. Also, I've gone on this before, but most of Illium felt empty to me, and the attack on Cerberus base mission wasn't awesome to me, and the boss fight against him just made me think he was an annoying evil guy instead of a giant threat. 

And the Reapers. I've gone on this rant before, but I strongly feel that the ending of Mass Effect 3 greatly hurts how I view the Reapers as an entity. Before all we knew was that they were a giant, incredibly powered, machine race that came in every 50,000 years. That's awesome. The more they pulled back the curtain on them, the more blah they got, and the star child in retrospect makes them just tools. You originally thought the Reapers kinda evolved past everything. But really, they are just tools for this one all powerful entity whose logic is broken. That's kinda awful. I think they were really fun to fight against, just in the grand scheme of things, the main takeaway I had of the Reapers in ME3 was that there motivations ended up being pretty awful, and they felt like an empty threat.

 

I'm very biased in this discussion, I will admit. The "Random Character who was the real bad guy for all 3 games shows up in the last 10 minutes, you can't kill him, you can only agree to one of these 3 things on his terms, which are stupid." stuff really did huge damage.

 

Random thought, but man, if they just did the Star Child reveal around when they did Illium, and the final mission was just about finding a way to destroy the entire Citadel (after a mass evacuation) instead of just having that be the very the last thing, that would have been so much better... Then again a lot of random thown together stuff would probably have been a better ending.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I feel like an idiot for forgetting the Illusive Man. He was one of my favorite characters in the trilogy, easily my favorite villain from the trilogy.

I see Kai Leng is mostly hated, but it doesn't seem to be a love to hate deal so much as many consider him a bad character. I never had a problem with him, but I didn't love the character either. Why do so many hate the character?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Most people have issues with Kai Leng because his character was fleshed out really well in the novels but in the game, players felt he came off as fairly one dimensional.

I think that is rubbish because the things that Leng did in the story really pushed my buttons and I couldn't wait to put a bullet in his head..

The only problem I have with Kai Leng is that he was a little too sadistic and I prefer my sci-fi villainy like The Illusive Man and the Reapers to have a much more grey sense of morality.

The Reapers weren't terrifying because they were malevolent.  Like most mechanical adversaries in pop culture, the Reapers were terrifying because they were indifferent to our existence.  We are so many ants to be trampled underfoot in the name of progress.

When you think about it, the same qualities that that make the Reapers, the Machines from the Matrix movies, or Skynet from the Terminator films scary as all et out are the very same characteristics that bring a shiver to your spine when you think of Lovecraft's Old Ones.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I can see the argument that he was one dimensional. On the other hand, it kind of came with the territory for his specific role which was more top henchmen spoiler than a big bad. I think I'm more in line with you as far as how well he worked in ME3. I was so damn happy when I achieved vengeance for Thane.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, odessasteps said:

FWIW! There is a new Mass Effect TPB collecting all the ME comics from Dark Horse. 

oh thank god - I always regretting not picking them up when they were first out

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, Eivion said:

How are the comics?

Quite good.  The Mass Effect anime movie, Paragon Lost, is something you should stay far the fuck away from especially if you are not a fan of James Vega.

There is a also fan made ME live-action short film called Red Sand, but I haven't tracked it down yet.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm still not entirely sure what to make of this project. Crafting system sounds a lot like the inventory spam that riddled the first game. Other than that I'm down.

I cannot shake the feeling that the plot of the game Very Conveniently starting after ME2 but before ME3 is their way of internally acknowledging the writers blew 3 in every possible way with their absolute commitment to making it Grim Horse Shit from start to finish. Like, the ending was a non issue. Destroy is obviously the good guy choice, I'm not even sure how you play these three games and choose anything else just because the villain, who is openly manipulating you, puts an Evil Red Light by Destroy. But everything leading up to it was basically "let's make every choice you made in the first two games feel meaningless". They can spin Andromeda's choice to dodge ME3 any way they like but that's how it feels, and I'm QUITE GOOD with that. Live and learn.

I guess my only other Andromeda concern besides the crafting is just waiting to find out the real scale of the thing. We are really spoiled for choice in open world games and it's going to have to be a pretty significantly sizeable world to not feel like a let down, but honestly there's not much reason to think they drop the ball there.

Whimsical Statement: I kind of wish we could have an Elcor companion.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

37 minutes ago, Death From Above said:

I'm still not entirely sure what to make of this project. Crafting system sounds a lot like the inventory spam that riddled the first game. Other than that I'm down.

I cannot shake the feeling that the plot of the game Very Conveniently starting after ME2 but before ME3 is their way of internally acknowledging the writers blew 3 in every possible way with their absolute commitment to making it Grim Horse Shit from start to finish. Like, the ending was a non issue. Destroy is obviously the good guy choice, I'm not even sure how you play these three games and choose anything else just because the villain, who is openly manipulating you, puts an Evil Red Light by Destroy. But everything leading up to it was basically "let's make every choice you made in the first two games feel meaningless". They can spin Andromeda's choice to dodge ME3 any way they like but that's how it feels, and I'm QUITE GOOD with that. Live and learn.

I guess my only other Andromeda concern besides the crafting is just waiting to find out the real scale of the thing. We are really spoiled for choice in open world games and it's going to have to be a pretty significantly sizeable world to not feel like a let down, but honestly there's not much reason to think they drop the ball there.

Whimsical Statement: I kind of wish we could have an Elcor companion.

Destroy involves genocide of the Geth. If genocide of a species is the "good guy choice" then there was no good option.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 1/13/2017 at 7:12 PM, Death From Above said:

 

I cannot shake the feeling that the plot of the game Very Conveniently starting after ME2 but before ME3 is their way of internally acknowledging the writers blew 3 in every possible way

Give over. It's a way of offsetting the major issue with multichoice games - stating a particular choice is canon ruins the very nature of the game you've made, so them slotting Andromeda in between allows your ME3 decision to be 'canon' while allowing you to continue to play with the toys you're familiar with

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
5 minutes ago, Craig H said:

So...Lucio is making the jump from Overwatch to Mass Effect?

Thank you

I was wondering if I was the only one who noticed this.

But I think this has become the new video game default. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...