It appears that they did. I’m exploring the environments a lot more now, also because picking up objects and reading datapads nets you a small amount of XP. An amount that looks like it will really accumulate over the course of the game. Which means that the player is arguably compelled to scour every area.
And the locations in ME3 are generally much larger and more populated with non-cover objects. I’ve replayed [the segment after the part covered in the demo] several times, testing different gameplay elements, and I’ve stumbled across a few things that I completely missed on my first pass. Thankfully, they were only datapads, but I’d hate to miss out on a nice weapon mod or piece of armor.
Given how much I loathed the character in ME2, I was very surprised that I really enjoyed the mission where you rescue a biotic training school from a Cerberus attack and discover that Jack’s a teacher there. I like her dialogue, attitude, and situation WAY more this time around.
Because, as I mentioned earlier in my post, it took me an hour of hard work to get through the boss encounter that began this series of events.
Teiman
1984
Same here. It even made me laugh. I even like his graphic style more for some reason. Its now a character I would have in my team.
Can anyone who has successfully imported a renegade ME2 Shepard face into ME3 confirm that you get the glowy scars and eyes? I am a bit attached to them. I have the issue with faces not transferring because I imported them from ME1 into ME2 and didn’t adjust them, or some utter bullshit like that. So, I have had to reconstruct my Shepard face by taking screenshots of ME2 and using the voodoo of two separate third party websites to port across the face settings, and that is Bioware’s official workaround!
How can they not have tested this, or even forseen it? It’s a multimillion dollar AAA RPG where the character history in the savegames is one of the big selling points of the series. Very poor indeed.
Based on a later conversation with Dr. Chakwas, I believe the scars may return if you’re a growly Shepard. As to them importing, I dunno…I’m one of the folks who imported their ME1 face into ME2 unchanged, so I had to rebuild my Shepard from scratch.
walTer
1988
On the Xbox, my face was vaguely similar to my ME1 and 2 but definitely not exact. AND the character generator while giving you lots of options seems to have issues- my face in game is sufficiently different from what I altered it to in the generator.
In a bad way.
I am restarting the game tonite to fix it. Fortunately I didn’t even get past the first “mission” so not too bad.
Warning about spoilers: Don’t look up the Wikia page that lists the characters of the Mass Effect series unless you want to spoil a big surprise about at least one party member in ME3. And I’m not talking about DLC, either.
Combat is back to being fairly easy in these story missions. Overload helps. I love the new miniboss too. I’m having a much better time than I did in ME2 as a Soldier. The only problem is the occasional instadeath on Insanity.
One new bright spot in the conversations is the effective use of silence. A few characters now have stared off into the distance before responding. It usually works. As always, I don’t remember this from ME2 but I might have just forgotten.
I just did the Grissom Academy. I can’t believe how much better combat is compared to ME2. It’s all due to the maps and encounter design.
I shouldn’t get ahead of myself, but I’m almost to the point where I have faith in Dragon Age 3 now.
The maps are so much better than in ME2, where everything was so obviously on rails even the architecture looked stupid. It’s nice to actually have to take some tactical consideration, and react to how events unfold rather than just plow forward.
It’s the right kind of “challenge” too. Not just more damage or layers of defense to peel away. I feel like the variety of enemy types makes more sense and feels more relevant to the battle this time. There’s a natural priority list I don’t recall in the previous games.
The flanking is good enough that I felt like I was hitting a wall in Grissom Academy until I realized I could run up the stairs to take out the guys above me. They had even mounted a turret up there that shredded us! That was satisfying despite the instadeaths.
And all this is happening on maps that actually have cool stuff going on in the background to give everything a sense of place. That’s just as I suspected from the demo.
ShivaX
1995
They go away, but come back if you start going renegade again.
jeffd
1996
Is it just my imagination, or is shep noticeably aging as this game continues? I’m about fifteen hours in and his face seems more worn than I recall it being in me2.
I wouldn’t go quite that far. Firstly, ME3’s combat style is still basically the same as ME2’s. There’s just been a bunch of design tweaks that make it work, which (in my opinion, of course), it did not in ME2. This is something that I think is possible because ME2 represented a transition to a different style of shooter combat - the Gears-style pop-n-shoot cover-based kind - which Bioware didn’t quite know what to do with initially. (To be fair, neither did the Gears franchise.)
DA2 on the other hand simply represented a bastardizing of the existing Dragon Age combat formula. Could it be improved by going back to what they had in DA1? Absolutely. Do I expect them to? Not really.
Secondly, I can’t recall any of the main creative people on DA2 admitting that there was anything major wrong with it. The build up to ME3 included a fair amount of talk that they were aware of the complaints people had about ME2 and planned to address them. (So far, so not-quite-what-I-wanted-but-certainly-better-than-before, for me.)
That said, hell yes, ME3 combat is better. And fun! The weapon weight system, the improved variety of enemies, the more natural combat environments, the flanking…
I was thinking the same thing, jeffd. My character definitely looks like he’s getting more lines on his face.
edit: whoops, again I forget there’s a quote button.
It’s some of the most satisfying single-player shootering I’ve had in years, at least in terms of tactics and AI intelligence. It’s certainly the most FPS I’ve ever had in my RPG. The only knock I can make against it is that the enemy doesn’t appear to be as aware of my LOS as often as it should. This is mostly with vertical cover (walls, as opposed to crates). I frequently get clear headshots because they’re standing too close to the edge.
But then they drop a smoke bomb just because they see one of us carrying a sniper rifle. Not even shooting it yet, just displaying.
idrisz
2000
I frequently get clear headshots because they’re standing too close to the edge.
Some times it’s intentionally design that way, so it makes player feel smarter.
