Tag: Mass Effect 3

Even though I haven’t played any Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, nor the iPad game (though I did buy it when it was a dollar a week or so ago), I finished the Mass Effect 3 story line and didn’t mind any of the 3 endings I tried. There are some spoilers below, so if you still have plans to finish ME3, stop reading now.

Because I didn’t do all those extra things mentioned above, my galactic readiness level was stuck at a miserable 50%, so there was no hope of Shepard living happily ever after. The final sequence begins after a fairly brutal cutscene where all the troops are wiped out (well, except for a gravely wounded Shepard who soldiers on, plus a couple of others, whom I won’t reveal so you can still have some sense of wonder when you play it. After Shepard opens the Citadel, he is confronted by an AI (the Catalyst) that says he needs to choose between controlling the reapers or killing them. There are a couple of other choices that I’ll describe too. I had read that there was a choice to merge organic and machine, thus creating a hybrid lifeform, but I must not have met some criteria, so that wasn’t presented.

Annoyingly, there is no way to save the game during this sequence, so to see various endings, you should play the whole 20 or so minute sequence again and try a different choice. This is disappointing, since the one thing that denotes Bioware games is the good writing, yet they want to make us suffer. Instead, we should be able to save to explore all the possible options and get all that good writing and story. Anyway, after the first playthrough, I learned my lesson: the game autosaves at various points, so Alt-Tabbing out and killing the game, then copying the Saves folder allows easy restoration to the previous point.

The first time I tried, instead of choosing to destroy the Reapers or control them, I shot the AI. That pissed it off, so the reapers went ahead and destroyed all life. But, Liara left a time capsule for the next epoch so they could fight the Reapers and the epilogue scene shows that someone managed to do so 50,000 years in the future. OK, so I made a difference.

Next, I decided not to make a decision, which also pissed off the AI and resulted in the same ending as above.

So then I destroyed the Reapers, killing myself in the process. The Normandy was pulled out of the Mass Effect system and crashed, but they survived. EDI, the ship’s AI was killed by the same effect that nuked the Reapers, since she was a machine. So the crew survived and I stopped the Reapers. Not bad…

Lastly, I decided to control the Reapers. In this case, Shepard became an AI, replacing the Catalyst, and converted the Reapers to be good. The Normandy still crashed, but EDI survived and the Reapers helped rebuild the Mass Effect gates. Not a bad ending at all – eternal “life” and the Reapers on our side.

So, while Shepard didn’t get to live a long and happy life chasing women and aliens or alien women, in the end, it wasn’t nearly so depressing as all the stories I had read. A fairly good ending to the series.

I’m well along in the final mission sequence of Mass Effect 3 and should be able to wrap up the game in the next few days. I hear that there are hours of cutscenes left, so perhaps they will exceed the remaining game play.

Yesterday, I read ahead in the IGN walkthrough and read about the endgame options. I didn’t read the details of the fights to get me there, so I will still have the joy of exploring and learning how to manage the tough enemies between me and the Citadel. It turns out that because I haven’t played multiplayer or the iOS game, I have no hope of getting the best ending in which everyone lives. In fact, though I did all the side missions and gained as much support as I could, it looks like I will have to pick an ending where Shepard dies, the Earth is devastated or destroyed, and probably the whole crew will die. But at least I should be able to stop the Reapers.

Yesterday, I was pretty depressed about it, but I’ve decided that I will put up with it and finish the game. Perhaps if the iOS game goes on sale for $1 again, I’ll buy it and retry the end game if I can boost my readiness level to see if I can do better. I can’t imagine spending much time playing multiplayer to boost the galactic readiness level, but I may try and see.

I’ve been mostly enjoying Mass Effect 3, but like so many Bioware games, including Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age 2, I am feeling excessively constrained by the plot the writers have constructed. Though I have done all the side missions, I don’t have any feeling of making a difference in the universe. Sure, all the NPCs I meet know Shepard, but none of my actions are making any difference in the plot, which is smothering and oppressing me.

In the game so far, I have had the choice to kill or save the Rachni (I chose to save them, though I don’t know whether that will be a good idea in the long run), cure the Krogan genophage or not (I did), and I had to make a choice to kill an entire race. At the end of a long and nasty fight that someone should smack the Bioware devs for (more below), I had a choice to either kill off the Geth or the Quarians. In either case, Legion dies, but in the latter, Tali kills herself because I sacrificed her entire race. I call bullshit! The great Commander Shepard should have been able to separate the two forces and broker a peace rather than having once side wipe out the other. Not knowing the consequences, I first chose to support Legion and the Geth, which ended badly for the Quarians. Hating that outcome, I redid the horrible Reaper boss battle and tried the other way, which was better, but not much. I read from the IGN walkthrough that if I had certain criteria met in my imported save file, perhaps I could have saved both sides somehow. Again, what a stupid design?!? You mean doing the side missions to save the Quarian general and their fleet from the fighters didn’t give me enough pull to make them see reason and back off? Come on!

I have a hunch this is just the beginning of me not liking the stupid either/or plot choices, and I know enough people have complained about the ending that I’m sure I won’t like that. I’m just at the point where I am about to be funneled into the final sequence of missions, which is another characteristic of Bioware games that I don’t like. And if this one, like Dragon Age 2, only gives me bad choices, I’ll be pissed (and yes, I’m prepared to be pissed).

So back to the Reaper boss battle on the Quarian/Geth homeworld: Did anyone actually think that was fun? In the battle, you need to keep a laser target designator on a certain area of a huge reaper that is shooting at you and if it even comes close to hitting you, you die and start the whole thing over. And you need to do that for several weapon strikes, so even if you manage to stay alive through a couple, you can still be killed and have to start over. Sure, once I figured it out, it wasn’t terribly hard, but it was never actually fun. This is why I don’t play some of the old console games, like the early Metal Gear games – the penalty for even a small screw up is huge and therefore, I don’t see it as fun.

That being said, there are a couple of very clever sequences the Bioware devs included that they should be commended on. Getting onto a Geth dreadnought through a damaged entry tunnel and being able to use magnetic boots and move all the way around the tunnel was very cute. The mission where Shepard virtually treks through a Geth server was also very creative and unique. So someone had a spark of creativity when doing those missions, but they made up for it and fell back to lazy design when I had to choose to wipe out the Geth, which depressed me.

So I will soon be done with ME3 and will not play multiplayer, I’m sure. The lousy experiences with this game have even made me wary of Bioware’s Star Wars MMO, though if it ever goes free-to-play, I may need to try it.

Though I was several hours into Mass Effect 3, I decided to restart with an imported character from Mass Effect 2. I read some things on IGN’s excellent ME3 Wiki and Guide that made me realize I had messed up by not importing my character. Without importing, some known characters didn’t even show up in ME3. Some of my choices in ME2 may come back to haunt me in ME3, but so far, it has been OK. The other thing that made me want to restart is that I had been getting a little too far in the main plot, so some of the early side missions were about to be cut off so I couldn’t finish them.

The biggest change so far is that I met up with the crazy tattoo chick, Jack, while rescuing the students from Grissom Station. The end of that mission goes way better when Jack is present, because one of the students died in a scripted scene in my first play through, but with Jack present, the student didn’t die (though he did have a lesser role). A few of the dialogue choices throughout the game are different too, based on the choices I made in ME2, and that may come to haunt me when I’m dealing with the Krogan and the genophage cure. We’ll see.

The only odd thing is that I didn’t import my ME1 character in to ME2, so ME2 didn’t know that I had chosen Ashley to be killed rather than Kaidan, so Kaidan was alive in my first attempt at ME3, while Ashley is alive in my new one.

So, yes, I did waste a few hours, but I was able to re-do the missions more quickly with the imported character than before. Besides, imported characters are high-level and have way more abilities than freshly rolled ones. So I don’t regret restarting at all, other than the cognitive dissonance of Ashley being alive.

I made the mistake of starting Mass Effect 3 on Sunday and now it is taking all my spare time. ME3, like its predecessors, is a well-written, mostly great looking RPG with third-person cover shooter elements. The game starts off with the invasion of Earth and our hero Shepard’s escape to rally the galaxy to fight the Reapers. Then it turns into a conventional mission-based RPG with some missions that move the plot forward and side missions that provide allies or better abilities. Because the overarching goal is to gather support against the Reapers, the distinction between plot missions and side quests is much more blurred than in conventional RPGS. In my opinion, this is a good thing: if my world were under enemy occupation, fetch quests and kill ten rats quests would seem like a colossal waste of time, but quests to gain support would be okay.

The graphics in the game are typically very good. As with other Bioware games, the textures for armor and such are not quite up to par, but even with all settings maxed, I get great frame rates at 2560×1440. Unfortunately, the cut scenes are probably ones rendered for the original Mass Effect, because they look horrible. The scenes right before a mission that show the shuttle bay on the Normandy seem quite low-res, as do the Mass Effect Relay movies where the Normandy is launched through space. Even some of the shuttle landing sequences look unnatural and not smoothly done. These lousy cut scenes hurt the continuity of the game. On the other hand, the female characters’ bodies are lovingly rendered and look perfect, even under the low-res armor.

The game is split between wandering around on the Normandy, interacting with crew and passengers, visiting the Citadel space station, dealing with government officials and criminals and more, and the missions on various planets and space stations throughout the galaxy. The problem with Mass Effect games is that after a certain point, you get funneled to the endgame missions, and, (per ME2) if you try to do other missions after that point, consequences are dire. I’d prefer that not happen, so I’m trying to be careful to not get too far in the plot while my mission list is still huge.

Overall, I am enjoying ME3 very much and it takes all my spare time, while other games go unplayed… OK, so it isn’t a mistake to play ME3, but it is one to think of having free time again.