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Oh you’re not wrong, Bioware has long been dead. Being put into supporting roles by EA is essentially killing them. What EA did recently is to formally organise a funeral on an already rotting corpse.
fr. They haven’t done anything even remotely good approximately since 2014. Either ea managers got very intrusive, all the competent people left, or a mix or both. Anyway, their shut off was long overdue. I see some people worry about the fact that so many people yet again lose their job, but i honestly can’t attribute myself to one of them. Every time a competent and passionate gamedev leaves a AAA game studio, a new indie studio is made.
The remaining 2 of the 3 founders left 2012 or 2013, after ME3. No idea how much the other staff changed, but I suspect that was the tipping point.
Every time a competent and passionate gamedev leaves a AAA game studio, a new indie studio is made.
Unless of course they can’t afford to start a new indie studio and have to pick up a trade that actually pays the bills. Gamedev is the worst part of the software industry to work in sadly.
yeah, you’re right…
My hot take is that Mass Effect sucked… at release. If you get the Legendary Edition, all my issues with it go away.
The biggest problems were with Mass Effect and Mass Effect 3. The latter had loot boxes/gambling, and that was removed and you’d never know it was there. Meanwhile, Mass Effect 4 had its servers shut down, but they still sell online junk for it. The stuff simply does not work. There’s an interface for it, but it won’t work. Fortunately the base game goes on sale dirt cheap, and even the deluxe edition is worth it for what you get, which is kind of a “less good Mass Effect 2” in a sense.
The issue with the first one is, it doesn’t respect difficulty choice when you’re on a planet, it just jumps to the highest difficulty. Also, you don’t get experience when you’re in the Mako (the planetary vehicle), which is the hardest part of the game. Any victories you gain in your toughest trials, and I’m not even exaggerating here, have exactly zero reward. That’s not good game design. That sounds like a bug and BioWare never fixed it for the OG. The Legendary Edition both respects your difficulty choice throughout the entire thing, and you get XP for stuff done in the Mako. The OG also had far fewer repair kits for the Mako, and a longer cooldown to use them.
Unfortunately, they didn’t fix the trinary choice at the end of Mass Effect 3. Martin Sheen just prattles on for about 20 minutes about the end and what the choices are, and then you’re given 3 paths and just enough time to reach one of them. They never tell you what each one does. Sure, you could pause the game and look it up, but at that point you kinda just want it to end. It’s three deus ex machinas, they’re all explained ad nauseum, but they aren’t identified. Then they play a short cinematic, and then it’s over. A lot of people complained about this upon release, and I’m annoyed they did not fix it.
Then there was Mass Effect 4, the one that took place in Andromeda. Such a fun game as far as the terraforming stuff. But then you get done with that and it’s a bunch of fetch quests and side quests. And I’ve seen some softcore stuff of Peebee online that I do not believe is faked (e.g. it’s in tribute videos), but I never got any romance options in mine. Not sure if that was because I was on Xbox or what. Still, I got a censored experience and that seems like a valid mark against the game. Not to mention straight up lazy, almost slop-like code where an NPC wants to talk to you on the ship, won’t speak to you on the planet, so you take off (unskippable cutscene), and talk to them on the ship, and they want you to do something for them on the very planet you were literally just on, so you land again (another unskippable cutscene) and then you have to drive however far to the destination. It’s a silly game. But, despite what people said, it’s just as good as the others. Better than the first. About on par with the third. Not quite as good as the second.
Still, I wish we’d got that ME4 DLC, and I wish they’d finished ME5, especially after dropping that epic teaser.
ME3’s loot boxes were for multiplayer, which I have only seen positive sentiment for.
The rest is valid.
Really? I never played the OG ME3.
It was my understanding that you needed online to get a favourable outcome in the war. I know that’s not exactly lootboxes, but I assumed there was some crossover.
In the Legendary Edition, it is possible to maximise the bar without online (as online was not present), but it’s very difficult to save both the Geth and the… I forget, whatever masked girl is. I thought I did everything after reading up later, but I didn’t follow a guide. I must have missed something. I think the point is to make you choose. I chose masked girl, even though I played femshep and had no shot with her. I just loved her character. (Liara romance all the way, no one in ME2 because you can’t romance best girl there… and Jack blew me off because I wasn’t a guy. Of course I tried.)
Unfortunately, they didn’t fix the trinary choice at the end of Mass Effect 3. Martin Sheen just prattles on for about 20 minutes about the end and what the choices are, and then you’re given 3 paths and just enough time to reach one of them. They never tell you what each one does. Sure, you could pause the game and look it up, but at that point you kinda just want it to end. It’s three deus ex machinas, they’re all explained ad nauseum, but they aren’t identified. Then they play a short cinematic, and then it’s over. A lot of people complained about this upon release, and I’m annoyed they did not fix it.
It’s even worse. The trinary choice and deus ex machina was the fix.
From Wikipedia
Upon its release on March 6, 2012, for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Windows, Mass Effect 3 generated controversy when its ending was poorly received by players who felt that it did not meet their expectations. Criticisms included the ending rendering character choices inconsequential, a general lack of closure, plot holes, and narrative inconsistency.
On June 26, 2012, developers released an Extended Cut as downloadable content (DLC) intended to clarify the endings and remedy fan concerns. The initial announcement of the development of add-on content to amend the ending as well as the subsequent release of Extended Cut sparked debates over the treatment of video games as art and whether BioWare should have to alter their vision of the work in response to external pressure, regardless of its quality.
Ehh… Not really. The original ending was 3 choices presented by the deus ex Ghost child thing.
They later added a 4th choice, which was to reject those 3 choices, and effectively lose. Despite that being the answer in the previous two games, as the control and synthesis choices were what the antagonists were pushing in those games, and presented as bad choices. It was a basically a fuck you to the fans.
“You want more choice, here you can choose to fail now”
No, those were in the original versions. The fix was as described there: extended endings. The whole problem with the original is that the endings were so abrupt and you got no payoff for all the time spent with the crew and the universe. It’s like they forgot they had to tell anything more than Shepard’s immediate story somehow.
The Extended Cut endings basically showed what happens elsewhere in the galaxy and with the crewmates. And the DLC where you hang out with your crew before the final mission really helped even things out as well.
But it was always a three button choice. That wasn’t a post-release fix.
I was just never a fan of RPGs, or games heavy on dialogue and story, questing, turn based games… So I didn’t play ANY of their games.
Books: The video game.
[EDIT: This is a joke about video games that have a lot of reading in them. Which clearly, I don’t like. Ironically I love choose your own adventure books.]
What have you got against books? lmao bffr
Nothing, I just prefer video games to be actual video games. If I wanted to read a book, I’d just read a book.
RPGs are videogames. And they are much more than just reading a book. It depends on what type of RPG we talk about; Final Fantasy, Pokemon, Skyrim, Disco Elysium, Fire Emblem, Baldur’s Gate 3, Witcher 3, Mass Effect just to name a few. It is more than just reading a book, solve puzzles, be the character you play, customize the builds, learn spells, tactics and buy and sell items, find secrets.
You don’t have to like it, but saying RPG games are just books is a false statement. This isn’t even an opinion, it is plain and simply wrong.
I never said RPGs aren’t games. I made a joke about games that have a lot of reading in them:
“Books: The Video Game.”
…and now everyone is butthurt about it and I don’t care. I like the games I like. I’m not going to argue or strawman about it, because that would be stupid and a waste of my time.
Liar. You edited your previous reply to
Nothing, I just prefer video games to be actual video games.
Which previously stated that RPGs aren’t videogames.
Never said (or edited out) the claim that RPGs aren’t video games. The last edit on my comment was made 2 hours ago, your reply is from an hour ago. So you’re what they call: A sad little liar man.
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You did said it. I should have quoted it. It was a direct response to that statement. You said RPGs aren’t videogames, and my entire replay is based on that as a direct response. Lesson learned. Quote the stuff I reply to, because there are always liars like you. The post also shows it was edited:
Edit: I got confused for a moment and deleted this part.
It’s insane that such an innocuous statement like this is being so heavily downvoted. Wanting a medium to play to it’s strengths isn’t a radical opinion.
Being an immersive story-telling medium is a strength of video games. Yes they’re also good at “guns go brrrrr” but being able to effectively do so many things is part of what makes games cool.
Yeah but immersive story telling usually isn’t referencing having walls of text that happen to be inside of a game.
“Zork” remains one of the most important video games ever made. Walls of text built this culture.
It sounds like you might be taking the little vote numbers on the internet too seriously.
Commenting on something doesn’t denote how seriously I take it. It’s an insight into the aggregate opinion in this thread that was the actual point of my comment.
Dark Cloud was a pretty cool RPG. Action/RPG, but both the first and the sequel were pretty heavy on dialogue. I liked the “town building” feature where you could save the villagers and find objects in the dungeons to reconstruct the town. But hot damn, your namesake was a text heavy couple o’ games, bub. Dark Cloud I was actually a launch title for PS2. I had it. Great game.
I feel like this got out of hand, I got that you were joking and I was just snarking. Sorry buddy
Anthem wasn’t a RPG.
