It's been five years since Mass Effect 3 ended. Are

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>>388379408

I don't even have the screencap of the post of the person who was eternally mad I am so mad.

EA is forever enemy number 1.

No, that poor man's Star Wars was always overrated trash, from a lore standpoint and gameplay.

>>388379408
no

somewhere between then and now I stopped playing video games as feverishly as i did. the things that me3 represented, want of a girlfriend, a job i was good at, friends, and the desire to leave home and go on an adventure were things i discovered in real life.

now i just have this ache to play video games like i used to but no motivation to start again. i'll browse steam for an hour but everything looks like it just sucks.

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>>388379408

I've never liked ME since 1's introductory segments built up and up and up the notion of being a Spectre as a badass agent but the rest of the game fails to adequately do anything with that concept.

I was never mad, i could read the writing on the wall as far back as Mass Effect 2

No because I've moved on and found other things to be disappointed with since

I tried playing Mass Effect 2 yesterday. The actual series means nothing to me and I had played the game all the way through once before. Jesus fuck this game plays like an absolute piece of trash. KB & M is fucking terrible for this shit and the shooting is absolute trash. I fail to see how this was even ok in 2010

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>>388379408
Of course I'm still fucking mad. The only thing that lessened my anger was how big of a flop Andromeda was, but even that festering pile of shit has its fans and sworn defenders.

I don't think about it much day to day, though. Only when I glance at the ME3 Collector's Edition box I still own, for whatever reason.

>>388379408
I didn't even bother playing 3 after I played through 2.

>>388379408
Nope, I thought the shitty ending was funny, and so was the attempt at fixing it with the extended content. Also it's a great example of creative bankruptcy and a complete lack of artistic integrity, so it should be a long lasting counter example whenever any narcissistic businessman tries to extol the artistic merits of their vidya products.

>>388380274
The writing was on the wall in the first game, when you chat with Sovereign but he says your puny minds are too simple to understand the Reapers' goals.

>>388379408
no, mass effect 2 and dragon age 2 prepared me to not be surprised or even offended

>>388380862
Different anon here, I stupidly gave them way too much credit, I thought that if they made any sequels they wouldn't revolve entirely around reapers and instead deal with other issues, perhaps with the occasional reaper sympathiser or indoctrinated character but apart from that the reapers would just be something you knew where out there somewhere and they would be coming eventually but you'd never get the chance to deal with them or even develop a plan to stop them. Oh well. I still like the first game though.

>>388380862
This. Right then and there you just knew it was going to be something retarded.

>>388379408
Recently did a replay with the extended universe mod and still got mad.

>less squaddies than ME2
>Taco Beef McQueef, wasted squad slot
>Day 1 Prothean DLC, shit character wasted squad slot that ruined some of the mystery
>Cute ginger secretary replaced with obnoxious brown lesbian
>Virmire Survivor, shitty dull characters in ME1 and a shitty dull characters in ME3
>Cold Steel, the edgiest writers pet that ever existed
>the Asari withheld Prothean technology, breaking the entire foundation of the Council

If Garrus and the Citadel DLC wasn't there it wouldn't be worth at all.
Deus Vult with the N7 Crusader is pretty fun though.

>>388381219
You can't very well set the doomsday clock and then put it in the corner behind a partition. With Dragon Age they had latitude to make the sequels about something else, since they establish that Blights only happen every once in a while. But if they made sequels about something other than the Reapers, people would just be left asking, what about the doomsday gap?

>>388379408
Yes

>>388380068
We all go through this, anon. I too miss the days where I was okay with sleeping 4 hours a night to fit in more gaming.

Don't feel down though. You're like a drug addict building resistance. It's harder to find that high but it is still out there, just keep looking.

>>388381519
>You can't very well set the doomsday clock and then put it in the corner behind a partition
It worked for the Borg in TNG. Then they totally ruined them in the film and Voyager, just like they ruined the reapers in the sequels.

How could I be mad when ME2 had left the major plotline in a miserable state. I just enjoyed feeling like an unstoppable special force in space.

>>388380862

Tbf, I loved that monologue until after it became clear that the Reapers were going to be the main antagonists of the series at the end of the game. Until then, I had just assumed that the Reaper arc was going to end after you stop them coming by killing Sovereign. After all, who would be retarded enough to unironically have the unstoppable Godmachines actually reach the galaxy lmao.

REEEEEEEEEEE

Nope. Bioware is in shambles - precisely what it deserves.

>>388381672
Yes, fair point. But I can't help but feel that the Borg got ruined precisely because they were played out. I can recall, off-hand, four TNG episodes about the Borg: "Q Who," where they meet them, "The Best of Both Worlds," "I, Borg," and "Descent," where Lore brings the drones from "I, Borg" under his sway. But that's the problem with having villains who are the faceless swarm, what can you do with them? You can turn it into an action series, or you can have one or two ethical dilemmas. They could possibly have had an arc about militarizing the Federation, though that got done later with the Dominion.
Introducing a queen (which ended up being a terrible retcon on "Best of Both Worlds"---shouldn't she have stopped their sabotage of the Cube?) turned the Borg back into something that writers can write about, it gave a face to the swarm and allowed the swarm to be centralized into a character with motivation and dialogue, and so ruined them. Which is, in any case, also why the Reapers were never going to work.

>>388380862
That line made me worried, too. They were trapped into 3 options: make the goals retarded, make the goals some next level philosophical shit that blows our minds, or don't explain them at all. They went for the retarded option, as we now know.

>>388382316
>But that's the problem with having villains who are the faceless swarm, what can you do with them? You can turn it into an action series, or you can have one or two ethical dilemmas.
Or keep them as a distant unknowable threat instead of making them the primary antagonist three timed in a row and spending a ridiculous amount of time trying to flesh them out with retarded crap like human goo giant terminators and robot ghost children.

>>388379408
No. The entire game was shit, I wasn't even surprised at the ending.

2 stands very well on its own.

>>388382730
At first I was wondering what human goo and ghost children had to do with the Borg. As for the Reapers, I agree that they should have remained an unknowable threat, which is why having a chat with Sovereign was such a mistake. If the Reapers had stayed as impersonal as the Borg, then they could've served as blank antagonists for a story of galactic unity.
Hence getting back to my original point: the writing was on the wall once you had a phone call with the machine god.

>>388380178
I wonder where anon is today.

>>388379408
No. I've played too many games that are way worse since then.

>>388379607

Please Lord, let her end up being raped by that stingray.

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>>388380862

>The writing was on the wall in the first game, when you chat with Sovereign but he says your puny minds are too simple to understand the Reapers' goals.

It's not even the Reaper motivations that people get mad about, it's lack of player choice impacting the ending.

When ME2 on the PS3 distilled down all the choices in "Mass Effect Genesis" to just a few important ones, i knew the series ending was going to be at the very least, constricted.

When ME was first being shown off i pictured it as one long continuous game, rather than 3 separate, very different experiences that the final product ended up being. I thought ME2 would be more akin to an expansion pack, taking ME1 and refining the rough edges and making improvements. What ME2 ended up being was a complete and total rehall of every system that ME1 built. On top of this the game dissolves your crew and makes up an excuse to build a new looking Shepard in reconstruction surgery. Basically the game takes a few binary choices you made in 1, takes your Sehpards level and gives you a small boost in XP, and gives you a completely new character given the class archetypes they made for 2.

But i didn't fucking want to do any of that, i wanted to keep my original crew, my original Shepard with all his ME1 gear and abilities(with some improvements and refinements were necessary) and plop me back into the gameworld with whatever improvements they made to the combat system. We didn't get any of that, unfortunately, we got a barebones stop-n-pop shooter with 5 abilities per character, and 5 different weapons for each weapon type.

Maybe I sound crazy, but the first few hours of ME2 shattered my interest in the series substantially. It wasn't one long continuous quest, it felt like 3 completely separate games that had some small links between them. And no ending could possibly reflect all the large and small choices you made in those games, because only a few variables transferred from game-to-game.

>>388383057
The dialogue wasn't great but I think letting Shepard know the reapers are sentient and fully intend to eradicate sentient life is a good setup for a looming threat. But like I said, I was foolish to think they would leave it at that rather than constantly bombard the player with retarded reaper bullshit throughout the sequels.

If you agree they should have remained unknowable, but disagree that they shouldn't have been present in the sequels, what would you propose instead? 2 could have kept the collectors but removed the reapers and most or all references to reapers, maybe someone like Liara or TIM could theorise they might be reaper agents but leave it at that. And obviously 3 would have to be completely rewritten, into what I'm not sure but then I don't have a huge corporation and a team of professional writers. But making Cerberus or heretic Geth or perhaps a new krogan army or batarians or mercenary armies or something the primary threat could work, it's not like they didn't have options.

>>388379408
Only because the memeing about how bad the ending was dissuaded Valve from finishing Episode 3.

>>388383953
Well, I don't think the Reapers were a good idea in the first place---much like, looking back, the Borg weren't a very good idea. As far as an anti-Federation goes, the Dominion were much better.
But I don't want to evade your question either.
There's a tendency in stories about ancient evil to have a load-bearing villain; there's always some sort of fulcrum about which the threat hinges, and if you take that out you win. Saren in Mass Effect, for example, the Archdemon in Dragon Age. Malak in KOTOR is an even stranger example, since there's still a Sith fleet surrounding the Star Forge (yeah, yeah, battle meditation, but then who gives a shit about Malak?). The horseshit in Mass Effect 3 was just an example of this that was too stupid for people to deal with. (Of course, this isn't just a video game thing, which is, again, part of why the Borg got a queen. Which is also part of why the Dominion were better: in the end, they gave up the Alpha Quadrant to get Odo back.)
This is also part of why the phone call with Sovereign was a mistake, because it put them on this road.
Now, what would I have done if I were somehow in charge of Mass Effect? I don't have a great answer, and it's not something I really think about. The answer that comes to me right now is, I'd have done a genre shift and made Mass Effect 3 a real-time strategy game, in the classical style. Not a game about heroes and villains, but about objectives and armies.
Past that, there was probably no way out of the Drew-Karpyshyn-shaped hole they'd made for themselves.

>>388379635
> Poor man's star wars

Look man, I'm sure star wars was awesome in it's time, and it's still enjoyable, but after the original trilogy it just wasn't that good.

The prequels weren't even good if you separated them from the legacy of the first movies.

The new movies are entertaining, but there is literally no difference between them and the marvel films like the avengers. Same tone, same style of comedy, same green screen cgi style.

It's time to let go, and stop pretending that star wars is the be all, end all of sci-fi. It was once. When it was basically all there was.

Say what you will about mass effect, but jar jar binks is worse than anything mass effect can ever possibly do.

Also ewoks defeating the empire.

>>388384960
The borg did end up pretty cool in later iterations though, like first contact borg were creepy. I enjoyed them.

>>388380178
It's Casey's horrid, knowing grin that really ties this whole screencap together.

>>388384960
Darren was just an indoctrinated puppet and fighting him only distracted the reaper just enough for a pyrrhic victory. Which itself adequately sets up the reapers as an unstoppable force, given that there ate thousands of them.

Thinking of genre shift, maybe something a bit more adventure/survival-horror-y could work, exploring ancient ruins and a reaper corpse or two, they had elements of that in the sequels and I definitely preferred the potential of that sort of exploring to the mind-numbing shootan.

That's another thing I foolishly anticipated in the sequels actually, I thought they'd develop the powers and put less emphasis on guns guns guns guns guns.

>>388383248
Some say he still shit posts on Vietnamese potato forums to this day

>>388385451
>
The new movies are entertaining, but there is literally no difference between them and the marvel films like the avengers. Same tone, same style of comedy, same green screen cgi style.

I hate this style of modern meme movies so goddamn much.

>>388385573
And yet the Borg threat in First Contact is neutralized once they take out the load-bearing queen. First Contact was a decent movie that was seriously marred by its last twenty-or-so minutes. I also liked "Endgame" for being the most flamboyant series ending, but the Borg in Voyager had a totally different tone from TNG, and not necessarily for the better.

>>388385848
But, narratively, Saren filled the role of the "single point of failure" for the Sovereign threat, which is typical but lazy. This might be a really unpopular opinion, but I sort of wish we had fewer last bosses in the world, because it's always so strange to have a single thing maintaining the threat. Like the view that throwing Sheev down the long tube ends the Galactic Empire.
This would inevitably lead to people using the word "unsatisfying" a lot, but if you want something approaching realism, the world is a pretty unsatisfying place.
I should confess (?) that I never actually played Mass Effect 3, because it's been downhill since KOTOR and Dragon Age 2 was my limit. But I do feel pretty confident in saying, there was no way Mass Effect 3 would work as an action RPG.

>>388386513
>narratively, Saren filled the role of the "single point of failure" for the Sovereign threat
I would say it fills that role in gameplay rather than narrative. Shepard killed robo Saren, an entire fleet killed one reaper, and there's an entire army of reapers out there plotting to lay waste to the galaxy. Neither Saren nor Sovereign maintained the reaper threat. Shepard and the citadel races won one small battle in a war they have no hope of winning. I don't see how anyone could claim that's not an accurate description of ME1's finale.

>>388380178
legendary

>>388379408
Yes.

>>388386979
The fleet forms a sort of background to the narrative, like Saren is a floodgate holding back a reservoir. While one could point out that, in this case, a deluge requires both the opening of the floodgate and the water, it's a quirk of people's sense of causality that the floodgate is seen as the key. In other words, there's a reason that Shephard is the hero of the Citadel attack, rather than the field commanders---not because the fleet doesn't matter, but because people can't focus their gaze on it. This also shows up in how the situation is presented; the fleet is an abstraction that's there and needs something to be done, and the battle is over once that thing is done.
This might sound incredibly pedantic, because the ending of Mass Effect was a pretty mild case of this phenomenon, and one that's mild enough that you can reassert the existence of the fleet. Yet this is always how these stories are structured, because writers don't know any other way to write, so stories about wars have to be stories about individuals, because otherwise they're stories about numbers. And stories about the OUTCOMES of wars have to be stories about titans.