Mass Effect's broken promises.

The biggest issue is that the half decent writer from the first game upsticks and they decided to fuck with the plot he had set up.
And it then got fucked up again by some other hack writer and the whole series became a goddamn mess for it.

Plus gameplay wise it all devolved into a really lame arena shooter with multiplayer by the end of the third game rather than the action RPG the first game had envisioned.

EA and Bioware fucked it all up. That's what happened.

>paragon=good
>renegade=bad
10/10 writing

>>385701505
Nigga, it is 1 AM and this revelation just now comes to bother you?

>>385703165
ME1's writer is a better novelist than a writer for games. Going back to ME1 is hard because the writing is so dry and boring the second time around.

And yeah the gameplay got dumbed down but don't act like the gameplay was good to begin with. The AI was braindead, the gunplay sucked shit, strategy was shallow and all the micromanagement with the inventory and all the skill points was tedious as fuck.

The IDEA of mass effect was that choices matter but you could tell from the very start of ME2 that a lot of choices from the first game didn't amount to much. There's only so much a dev can do when it comes to tailoring sequels based on previous decisions. Fans who were expecting the "thousands" of different endings thing fell for a lie and an exaggeration that anyone with commons sense could have seen coming.

>>385703165
>>385703789
And let's not forget. The original plan for the ending was some bullshit having to do with dark energy. The explanation for the reaper's plan was convoluted, yes, but way than the generic ass concept of "dark energy"

choices is one the biggest phantom features in the history of games, mass effect aside.

As long as you're still mad I'm still winning.

>>385703943
I thought it was something to do with entropy and heat death of the universe.

>>385701505
Did it make me angry? No, just dissappointed but after time I stopped caring. Still love the series.

In truth Bioware could never deliver on this and no company ever will without an insane amount of time or resources OR with some asinine way of doing it where every little slight change in detail counts as a different ending.

I don't really understand the want for something like that in the first place. If a game had thousands or even hundreds of endings what are the chances that even 10% of those would be good. That many different endings would dilute the purpose of an ending, the satisfaction of closure and finality.

>>385703964
choices are a mistake beacuse game dves dont know how to do them right.

>>385703789
You are right, the first game is clunky and flawed. But what I loved about ME1 is the world building and sense of mystery and threat.

The character focus of 2 is ok in its own way but detracts from the idea ME sold its fans on in the first place. The story barely goes anywhere.

ME3 could of had both but its true crime is that it failed to deliver either aspects. And handwaves the plot in an absolutely insulting matter.
Yeah choices could still not matter much if the end still delivers and the story has traction.

Look at life is strange. People like that game despite its choices not mattering.

>>385704093
I think that was another idea that was tossed around but Drew's leading plan was that biotics was causing dark energy to creep into the galaxy and it would eventually cause a reverse big bang.

The reapers were looking for a race advanced enough in biotics to combat dark energy (the thing that caused is also the thing that somehow beats it)

>>385701505
>in the first game you coincidentally only see members of a handful of the member races in Council space, with the actual reasons being budget/time constraints
>sequels add pretty much fucking nothing, including female models for several races
ME2 taught me that Bioware were lazy hacks.

>>385704253
You're right the world building in 1 is great and an amazing setup for a trilogy but going back to it after experiencing it already is tough. I loved 2 because of the shift in tone compared to 1. Yeah, overall it seemed like it didn't move the story of the trilogy forward but it makes sense considering that Shepard stopping the reapers from coming in through the citadel set back the reaper's plans by quite a bit so they used the collectors to fuck shit up in the meantime.

I look at ME3 as a whole to be the ending of the series. The finale was flat, and the lack of "here's what all your choices amounted to" sucked but I just wanted an ending where "the good guys won" and wasn't expecting much more than that.

To be fair I got into the series a few months before 3 came out so I wasn't as invested as people who were on board since day one.

>>385701505
They started out with an RPG where the protagonist tries to stop the Elder Gods from ending the universe but abandoned the concept halfway through and went with Gears of War in space.

>>385703789
>Fans who were expecting the "thousands" of different endings thing fell for a lie and an exaggeration that anyone with commons sense could have seen coming.

This doesn't nor should it excuse Bioware for lying like this. I think you are forgetting here that Mass Effect 1 came out at a time where the industry for the most part still looked good to many. There wasn't yet things like season passes and tons of DLC plaguing the industry. Before it came out there was articles and videos discussing what was to come. We couldn't have known fully at that point how the series was going to turn out. It is understandable that people would be massively butthurt by the time ME3 came around.

>>385703789
ME2 was shit. The way they derailed the story by having Shepard die just so that he could work for Cerberus was incredibly heavy-handed and you got absolutely no choice on the matter. And the whole story made no sense since the Reapers were so powerful there was no point in them to create some retarded baby Reaper when they could just sweep in and destroy all spacefaring life a few years later. ME2 had some nice characters but it was a dumpster fire otherwise and the point that the series went completely wrong.

>>385703257
DAO's approach to this was so much better.

Instead of "good/bad guy points," your decisions effect your party members' opinion of you.

The lazy good/evil approach only worked in KOTOR because its built into the setting, but they just kept using it forever.

Was Mass Effect 3 really that bad? I want to play through the trilogy but I never made it past a couple of hours into 2.

>>385704707
I'm not saying it's an excuse but it would naive to think Bioware would actually stick to their word.

The industry had it's share of lies and exaggerations way before 2007.

And despite the fact that seasons passes and dlc weren't around there has always been scum in the industry.

Remember the "adventure" series on Atari? What about Kutaragi saying the PS2 was so advanced it was like jacking into the matrix?

>>385703943
The explanation we got was awful. The AI versus Organics was a very minor theme earlier on, so suddenly having it take over as the defining struggle of the trilogy made no sense. Also it conflicted with what came before if you managed to get the Geth and the Quarians to make peace. Plus, wanting to preserve intelligent life by genociding it is an absolutely retarded plan.

To this day I still don't understand why the Catalyst's plan is "no longer" viable simply because Shepard reached him, and why the Catalyst would allow Shepard to decide the fate of the galaxy as a result.

>>385704964
Gameplay wise its a fun power based shooter. That's about all the praise i can give it. Most complaints about the game are pretty valid

>>385704843
You want choice in the matter? Ok, say Shepard doesn't go with Cerberus. No one in the Alliance or the Council believes the reapers are an actual threat. Who else has the resources to continue fighting them? And the human wasn't supposed to be superweapon for the reapers, they always made reapers based on the harvested race (the real thing to be pissed about is the fact you only see lobster reapers)

A dumpster fire? Have you played an actually bad game? Now you're just exaggerating like Bioware my man

>>385704964
It was.
The gameplay improved somewhat over 2, but in every other regard it is the worst of the series.
For example, you spend literally all of ME2 recruiting and developing a big cast of new characters to go on space adventures with...only for all of them to be ditched in a time-skip between the games. the only ones who aren't cameos were the two who rolled over from the first entry.
Even visually it's inferior to the second game (first hasn't aged as well).

>>385705084
Yeah, the reaper child simply let Shepard win. He could have just said "It's just a prank bro" right before Shepard sacrificed himself and kept on wiping out organic life.

>>385704964
Tits and cameltoe are nice, gameplay is refined-ish, multiplayer is praised a lot and iirc a few are still playing
Doubtful, but hey if there is then that's a testament to the game's multiplayer?

Why they shortened Anderson's death scene I'll never know.

>>385705084
And Shepard just takes this thing at its word.

>>385705029
yeah it is a retarded plan that's why they're the villains instead of the "chaotic good" heroes. I didn't say the ending was good but just better than dark energy nonsense.

>>385705294
Villains should have motives and plans that make sense. Saying "my alignment is evil so I'll just kill everyone" is a terrible motive.

>>385704997
>but it would naive to think Bioware would actually stick to their word.

Did you not read what I posted? The industry wasn't anywhere near as shit at that time. Broken promises happened sure but the kind of hype, marketing and lies we see with games now is basically lightyears ahead of what they were doing back then. Back then Bioware still had a lot of fans. A pretty different fanbase as well. The seventh gen of gaming was still pretty new. We didn't really fully understand what was to come. Looking back it is easy to see how so many people could have gotten fooled by these promises.

I don't think you are understanding the true context here at all. I had no reason to believe they couldn't deliver on such promises back then just like many others. Games only kept getting more impressive in regards to graphics, technology and scope. So why should anyone not think that this was possible when it was promising to essentially be a first of its kind? Many times over we have seen first of their kinds in gaming. It is easy to think this was going to deliver. It just didn't. Big time it didn't.

It actually reminds me in some ways of Assassins Creed. I remember everyone I knew was pretty hyped for it. It looked like it was going to be a stealth game that was possibly going to be a GOAT game. Then it came out and I remember thinking wow the mechanics for this game mostly fucking suck besides the parkour stuff. Then of course the series got milked even worst than CoD. Did we know this would happen before the first game released? No we didn't. Just another example of a game that broke promises that also came early in the seventh gen of gaming.

>>385705250
>Tits and cameltoe are nice
Even that sucked, since it came at the expense of EDI's development.

Her ME3 development is such a familiar story you could probably predict entire lines.

>>385704964
>very integral parts of game/story/whatever are made PAID DLC day one
>18+ game but dialog and story are written like something a teenager sounds epic.
>>they attempt to make EVERY goddamn line sound epic. still writing like a 15 year old. gringe(I'm sorry) is real.
>choices....oh, you got someone killed that is supposed to do something meaningful here? no problem! some other character does the same exact thing instead.
>everything you do only adds to a number that is poorly explained and only affect is if it's high enough you may get an extra scene that makes little to no sense.

And then some more minor things but too sick to bother now

>>385705029
>Also it conflicted with what came before if you managed to get the Geth and the Quarians to make peace.

This is probably my most major complaint. It requires so many flags from the previous game and was satisfying because of it. That was an example of the whole "choices matter" thing where they actually made good on it. Then they completely negate it by forcing you to either wipe out synthetic life or make one of 2 equally retarded decisions. Like shit, just cause I was alright with the geth didn't mean I wanted everyone to become fucking synthetics.

>>385704964
I would suggest you marathon all 3 games for maximum enjoyment. It's the type of series you'd have to experience to really understand the outrage.


You'll love it for what it gave you, then hate it for what it took away from you.

It's a very interesting relationship to have for a series.

>>385705385
it's cool when they do but usually the way it goes is that a villains motive only makes sense to them. So that when a rational person hears it they think "that won't actually solve anything, that's retarded."

If you have a villains motive make total sense and have it be justified then you make your heroes look like shitters. I know moral ambiguity is popular these days but does every villain have to be a "literally did nothing wrong" meme? SHOULD they be?

>>385705294
The dark energy shit would have been a far more reasonable and logical cause for the genocide cycles.

>>385705603
>>choices....oh, you got someone killed that is supposed to do something meaningful here? no problem! some other character does the same exact thing instead.

I can't quite articulate this point, but I wish choices matter didn't mean "do this or we'll fuck you out of any reasonable resolution to a problem"

>>385705765
I thought the idea of stars dying extremely quickly would have been a much better crisis than "lol synthetics"

>>385705029
There's nothing retarded about the plan.
It works, and for very obvious reasons.

And cold calculating machines have no reason to care about collateral damage.

>>385705423
If you really think the industry became shit within the last decade then you haven't paying attention the history.

Big promises were always made at the beginning of a generation. Exaggeration is an easy way to sell ANY product.

Yeah, there's no sure way to know what's possible and what isn't at the start of a generation but if you look at what's come before you should know that a single company can't make a leap that big in just a few years. Unless, as I said, the different endings were just slight variations of each other.

I'm really glad Andromeda flopped enough to kill the series.

Two terrible games made me sad enough.

>>385704545
The plot of these games have more holes than anything I have ever seen. It amazes me how they somehow got people invested in this shit.

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27KB, 760x428px

>people actually defending the entropy bullshit plot

>>385706105
As an alternative to the AI gone rouge bullshit plot?

Absolutely

>>385706053
Probably because they played them

>>385705765
cause? sure but how the hell do you even tie that up? You stop the reapers from harvesting advanced races but then what? All biotics just shoot lasers at an intangible force to defeat it? Do they use a superweapon like the cruicible to focus all their power? Does Liara teach the reapers how to use biotics so they can help out too?

The dark energy thing is a better justification for what reapers do but then you just create a bigger than the giant robo lobsters to defeat. And all of this shit would have had to end up resolved in one game. It's an interesting idea but think about it past the point of concept.

>>385705997
You seem to just keep brushing off things by saying it happened back then to so why does it matter as much now. The thing is now they could do so much more with games. This isn't like NES type of promises being comparable to the modern gens of gaming. Games are so much more massive in scope than before. This even applies to mid 90's to early 00's consoles as well.

The more gaming progresses the bigger and more painful the lies are going to get. I don't even see why anyone would want to dispute this when it is pretty obvious.

>>385704545
Well Sheperd is responsible for killing Sovereign, a reaper who was crucial to part of their plan, so it wouldn't be too outrageous for Harbinger to focus on Sheperd.

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10KB, 233x205px

>>385704545
>The franchise has had moderately decent gameplay
>This amount of delusion

>>385706242
Present the players with the choice to
>unite all species against Reapers, destroy them and doom the entire galaxy
>unite all species against Reapers, harvest their tech and spend everything to create something that can stop the dark energy shit (would require the player to have shitloads of resources on hand and the most surviving people after the fight with the Reapers)
>Shepard can be turned into a Reaper which presents the players with the choice to either continue the cycle again or unite the Reapers with the other species to stop the dark energy shit

>>385706243
I'm not saying it doesn't matter now I'm saying it's been going on long enough that people should be more skeptical.

The more gaming progresses, the bigger it gets. The bigger it gets the more money it needs to make. People shouldn't put their faith in businesses.

>>385706395
It makes them seem so much less cool and intimidating.

That they're worried at all about any one single person makes them immensely more mundane.

>>385706201
They haven't gone rogue, they're fulfilling their purpose.

And honestly the series never gives a real answer to the problem they pose.
An organic is always constrained by his body. A species can evolve, but nothing comparable to a super AI in intellect.
Assuming that all species in the galaxy will eventually compete with each other, given an incredibly large amount of time, organics will be driven extinct because synthetics will be just better at everything. Or maybe organics will upload their consciousness to computers, in which case they become synthetics and organics disappear all the same.

>>385706525
You're going after them to stop them. Why the fuck would they not pay attention to you?

>>385705727
There's no need for moral ambiguity. The villains might simply want something that benefits them but harms others. E.g. if the Reapers were harvesting the galaxy because that's how they reproduce, then that would be a simple motive that made sense.

>>385706105
We never got to see what the finished version of that plot would have been.

>>385706395
He wasn't crucial. All the Reapers woke up and arrived at the galaxy a couple of years later anyway even though he failed.

>>385706518
>create something that can stop dark energy
and pad the game another hour? two? And what's the difference between that and destroying them all? Just harvesting them? Who wouldn't do that if it meant stopping the larger threat?
>Shepard turned into a reaper
The reapers are a hivemind so Shepard would have to be king reaper (control ending) and even then the bigger problem is how to actually stop dark energy. How does defeat energy?

How is this any different from the endings that already exist anyway?

>>385706610
that is how they reproduce, problem solved. Turns out it made sense all along.

>>385706719
Well he was the guy who was supposed to turn on the elevator, and now they want to know the reason they have to go up the stairs.
It's still an annoyance, it makes sense to care.

>>385706808
Except that wasn't their actual motivation.

>>385706734
>How is this any different from the endings that already exist anyway?
Better justification for why the Reapers do what they do than we've got. You asked for a way to tie that shit up so I did. It wouldn't take much thought at all to have made the dark energy plot work and it would have done wonders for the trilogy. Shame we live in this universe though.

I still feel that Shepard being indoctrinated is what really happened

>>385706886
they had like 3 different motivations but everyone clings to the AI organic conflict angle.

>>385703964
They are also some of the most ovverated things.

I'll take a linear but well written story over a clusterfuck schizophrenic story any day. At least when it comes to the big plot points, the little decitions is what's always been the important thing to me since it allows me to roleplay, not what some decision I did 20 hours ago with no knowledge of what it would do so it was basically just a random choice affects the story.

If I want choices in games I'll play something that actually supports it well like Crusader Kings, not a story based game like whatever shit Telltale is pumping out these days.

>>385706974
Because that's the one that the Reapers themselves present to you.

>>385706591
Because you're an ant.

Defying that expectation that killing Sovereign would make you their target would play into their "we are beyond your understanding" shit.

>>385706928
Justification isn't everything. There needs to be follow through, resolution. You justify the reapers but then you have dark energy to beat.

It wouldn't take much thought to make it work? You still haven't even come up with a hypothetical way to beat it just "this happens then they beat it"

>>385707108
An ant that is capable of making a team capable of destroying a base of their puppet species, and reuniting many species of the galaxy to fight back against the reapers. They're just taking precautions towards you as they perceive you as a threat.

>>385707086
At the very end yeah but the Leviathan dlc provides a lot of important backstory and explanations about the reapers that should have been in the base game.

Honestly, if it was there for everyone then we wouldn't have so many butthurt people 5 years later.

I don't blame fans for not wanting to buy it but if you're going to discuss the story then you should know all the facts and angles.

>>385706974
Maybe because that's the one they themselves tell you?
Fucking retard.

>>385707286
WRONG

>>385707213
The Collector subplot was awful as well and should have been a side-quest at best. It made no sense for Harbinger to screw around with collecting humans to create a baby reaper. Did he just give up on bringing all of the other Reapers in and decide to build a new fleet from scratch?

>>385707272
I played that DLC. The Reapers were created to prevent the extinction of organics at the hands of AI and they decided that wiping out organics was the solution.

>>385707213
That's my exact point.
Any expected reaction on their part that isn't just KILL EVERYONE makes them less threatening.

That they regard any one person as a threat makes them seem too human. And kinda just makes them look like pussies.

>>385707351
That's irrelevant, my point still stands that it's reasonable for the reapers to take precautions towards you.

>>385707351
Yeah, there's literally no point to it, since just by invading a world they automatically start brainwashing people.

Just have them march themselves into the people blenders.

>>385707409
Well that would make them look retarded if they just underestimate you.

>>385707409
Agreed. Ancient unfathomable machine gods seeing one dude and his squad as a huge threat to the point that they send avatars to fight him that spew dumb insults before getting blown the fuck up was awful.

>>385707112
They create deus ex machina to contain it. Tali was already able to detect the dark energy build up which already means it's observable and likely measurable. The Catalyst shit is already a deus ex machina pulled out of nowhere, at least creating something that can stop the dark energy build up would have a logical chain to it. We already have a cause for the dark energy which is the zero element abuse to induce the mass effect phenomena. Several scenarios to stop it can be presented ranging from extreme (ban the use of zero element which cripples the galaxy due to no FTL travels and biotics) to extremely expensive (spend shitloads of resources to create a zero element alternative that doesn't contribute to dark energy build up). I'm sure lorefags would be able to come up with more detailed explanations or better alternatives, I'm just coming up with these on the spot.

>people attacking the unfinished and scrapped plot
Gee, you Sherlocks sure are something for spotting this one.
Who would have thought that the few vague snippets and generalization from the author we got would be so unsatisfying?

>>385707726
Yeah. Countless species over the course of millions of years designed a device whose function they did not even know? And then humans built it, again without knowing what it does? The Catalyst was an awful plot device.

>>385701505
I wonder sometimes how many people from the original game jumped ship after the EA takeover.

>Indoctrination theory
What about this one

http://fextralife.com/forums/t456166/dt-the-david-bowie-theory/

>>385707908
>The Catalyst was an awful plot device.
Yes anon, I know. That's why I'm trying to come up with something that is at least more reasonable and logical in concept than a glowing kid with a dumb fuck motivation for the genocide of those millions of species.

Mass Effect died when BW was sold to EA and turned it in to shitty arena shooter.

>Did this make you angry?
It did when I played Mass Effect 2 and almost none of my choices from the first game mattered and when I found out how little there actually was of the Citadel.

Anyone who thought that their choices would matter in ME3 is an idiot that didn't learn their lesson from ME2.

>>385706568
Their logic is flawed for the reason they give for the cycle existing.
>"Organics will always fight synthetics"
Are we supposed to believe that in the 500,000,00 years of the reapers existence, they never saw a species evolve to the point they can create AI, then NOT destroy them?
Statistically, they should have seen it by now

>>385709043
They probably did and refused to acknowledge it. I mean, Shep managed to help the Geth and Quarians get along and they never acknowledged that shit either. Catalyst is dumb as fuck and the child persona is very, very apt.

>>385709043
>500,000,00 years of the reapers existence
You'd expect them to be a little smarter.

>>385709043
Not only that, but we see in the second game that Legion and the Geth's grand plan is to build a dyson sphere to house all Geth. So they can live in peace from the rest of the Galaxy like Monks. it's only because of the blind retardation of the Quarians that the sphere was destroyed and the Geth (Retardedly) went to the Reapers for aid.

>>385705287
>>385705287
>shoot it in the face
>WAAAH STOP DISRESPECTING MY WRITING FUCK YOU HAVE THE EVERYTHING DIES ENDING

Fuck marc with a rusty shovel.

>>385701505
>hundred maybe thousands of different variatons
>people believed this is somehow a realistic goal in a fully voiced 3D game

>bought ME1 without knowing anything about it
>was fun
>bought ME2 expecting a nice sequel
>gameplay was fun but the plot was dog shit
>buy ME3 to get to see the ending
>gameplay and story utter shit

The series is shit even if you didn't fall for BW's lies.