3441

Me! This was an RPG I had been invested in since 2007, playing the same dude across 3 games over 6 years. The ‘score’ mechanic (questionable to begin with) having a multiplayer (or app) component fucked up the finale of an epic series.

3442

…but it didn’t? The ending was already fucked up and the warscore made no discernable difference.

3443

Well, it made some difference but the terrible bones of the ending were already in place. I don’t fault them for adding things like the dumb mobile game or multiplayer (things I played the heck out of) because that is just what A) Companies do; B) People ask for and seem to want. Its not so much a matter of making you play the game in other venues but integrating the experience across several platforms. It was easy enough to max out your warscore in-game, though, IIRC, but I still ordered raids while eating with my family at Chili’s and played the hell out of the multiplayer.

The ending was ruined starting with Mac’s notes, he and Casey’s sessions locking out the rest of the team, and their seeming desire to never work on another ME game again.

3444

I recently picked up all three Mass Effect games (with all DLC) and I’ve been playing through all of them in a glorious gaming binge.
ME1 - Absolutely fantastic! It really felt like proper epic space opera (score 8.5/10).
ME2 - Very disappointing. I felt the writing was really weak, it wasn’t nearly as cinematic as the first game and the episodic nature kept removing me from the immersion. I had to really force myself to get through to the end (5/10).
ME3 - Hooray, now we’re talking. ME3 has been a blast so far. Shit is actually happening this time around instead of all the boring filler in ME2. The combat is much faster paced and really enjoyable this time around. Far more cinematic too (9/10).

What were your impressions on the trilogy overall?
List your best to worst? :)
(please try to avoid ME3 spoilers if possible, I’ve not quite finished :))

3445

Play the ending before you decide.

I liked ME3 the best for similar reasons to what you describe (and I came to ME late).

3446

The DLC’s. I’m still waiting to get a deal on them so that I can replay ME2 and get started on ME3. But they will never go on sale for PC.

That being said, I enjoy the ME 3 Multiplayer.

3447

I loved the space opera tone of the first game. While I’ll freely admit the mechanical play of the game is clunky, I like this one best as a story. You are not some omnipotent resurrected savior of the galaxy, but are entirely human in scope playing at events bigger than you.

I loved the character bits in 2 best though. There are a ton of good smaller story lines, and I love the Seven Samurai type formulation to the story. While I like the overall story best in 1, there are more memorable individual moments in 2 for me.

I never played 3. I played ME1 probably 5 times, if not more. Hell I bought it 3 times. First disk got lost when I let someone borrow it, so I bought another for the 360. Then I shifted to PC, and bought a copy on Steam shortly before 2 came out, so I could replay 1.

I played ME2 probably 3 times. It is no small thing to say I truly loved exploring these games. But the lead up, marketing, and design decision so thoroughly turned me off from 3. It just seemed so much doubling down on the worst bits of 2, that being LOL Cerberus and you being super important dude, and the turning the Reapers from existential horror that an entire fleet had to work to take out 1, to something far far less.

3448

Craig, you must play Mass Effect 3. I understand the marketing made you stay away, but it was a “Dragon Age” thing (remember how stupid the marketing for the first Dragon Age game was?). It closes the trilogy pretty well, it is more fun to play than the other two games in the series (IMO), and it has some fantastic character moments.

I know there’s been a lot of fuss over the endings, but I personally don’t think they’re are as bad as most people said, and the ending added after release is brilliant. All in all, it’s very worth playing, and you should do it at your first opportunity. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

Also, Mass Effect 3 multiplayer is a lot more fun than I expected. We can play together if you want ;)

3449

I liked the tone of the first game. As far as how it plays (and looks), it’s the odd one out, but I still had fun replaying it each time a sequel came out.

The plot of ME2 was a disappointment on a couple levels. Big picture, ME2 and 3 go a slightly different direction from the way ME1 sets things up (as you’ve already mentioned); I think one of the original writers or designers left or something. I wish that hadn’t happened. If I try to ignore that, I still remember the beginning and the end of ME2 as disappointing in their own right, though I can’t remember specifically what the story was doing at that point. Big picture, didn’t like ME2’s story. BUT! As CraigM says, the middle part of rounding up your team was up there with the best of the series. That was really fun and I could deal with the rest.

ME3 was good too, up until the ending. I only played it once, so the details of everything else are even fuzzier, but if they ever released an HD remaster of the whole series on PS4, I’d buy it in a heartbeat.

3450

draxen, don’t let anyone worry you about the ending. Play it and enjoy it and decide later what you think about the whole experience of ME3 and how it concludes the series.

3451

I liked ME3’s actual combat bits more than 1 or 2, but the story was an awful pile of gobbledygook. (I’m not even talking about the ending.) With the exception of the personal stories like Mordin’s, I found the writing dreadfully dull in the third game.

3452

I still love the first game far more than the latter two but I enjoyed the whole trilogy. I loved how open the first game felt, it was the only one that gave you the opportunity to explore. I should probably give it another go since I’m hearing the combat really didn’t hold up, but that was never my favorite part of the game anyway.

3453

Heh, yay for conversations in multiple places :P

Alright perhaps clarification: it wasn’t the marketing per se, but rather what that marketing was representing.

Let me explain what I mean. It was how the marketing belied the underlying design decisions that turned me off. Things like the somewhat odd multiplayer and companion apps, and how that created a metagame that I felt would run counter to what I enjoyed about Mass Effect. Or how the story seemed to be getting pushed in a direction I didn’t care for, basically going all in on the parts I felt weakest in ME2. Shepard was always the least interesting part of the series to me, and ME2 made him into some kind of ‘only person who can save the galaxy’ with regards to anything Cerberus. I could ignore it since the grand thrust of the game didn’t match, it was more about building a team, not how special Shepard was.

But what really sealed it for me is how they felt that making Earth the all important focus was essential for making the audience care. To me this belies how little they think of their audience. By making earth the place they have to protect at all costs cheapens the Reapers. This should be a war of desparation, one where every move is calculated and no resource goes wasted. By making Earth so important that everything would be thrown away just to save it turns the Reapers from Cthulu-esque horrors, to barbarians at the gates. Powerful and scary, sure, but by no means the inevitable force of nature they seemed in 1.

All the seeds were sown in ME2 for this, mind, so it wasn’t a betrayal or anything like that. It was merely emphasizing what I felt were the worst parts of 2. ME2 was about the Genophage, the Geth, the morality of how those were handled, and how that was thrown in sharp relief facing a dire threat. Was what the Salarians did right? Would it be right to undo that? How do you judge the actions of the council races regarding the Krogans and Rachni? That made ME2 for me. And I’m sure there are moments like that in ME3 (thinking particularly of Thane). It is just that the parts that bothered me in 2, while largely ignorable, became points of emphasis for 3. Making Shepard and Earth so critical is what turned me off.

Though it was helped along by my declining interest in RPG’s in general. That is not to be ignored.

3454

Overall story could have been better, even if there are some pretty great story bits there. Anyway, what makes ME3 for me are the many great character moments. It’s more about characters than anything, I feel, and the best moments in the game are shared with the characters you came to know and care about in the previous games.

3455

“Train of thought” response coming!

That’s the thing, Craig. Earth is not the most important place in ME3 (apart from the somewhat stupid opening). I won’t tell what the focal point of the story is, but it is true to the series, particularly ME1.

Shepard as “THE special one” is not a ME thing, it’s a Bioware thing. Of course ME2 goes on overdrive in that particular area, but I felt ME3 doesn’t take it quite as far.

And if what you liked best in ME2 was the Genophage conundrum, and the Geth, there are many parts in ME3 you’ll absolutely love. A few of the most important sections in the game are actually about those, rather than about “saving Earth”.

You see, that’s the tragic thing - just like with Dragon Age, marketing makes you think the game is one thing when it’s another. Mass Effect isn’t about super Shepard and saving Earth any more than Dragon Age is about having fun times with Morrigan bathed in blood. Both games are far better than marketing have led most people to believe, and I really think you should experience ME3 by yourself.

Mind you, ME3 is not flawless. There are numerous problems, as there are in many games (and particularly Bioware games), but I really enjoyed my time with the game, and I think it closed the trilogy quite well, despite the problems with the last act of the game. I certainly recommend it, especially if you enjoyed the previous games in the series.

3456

Like all of Bioware’s multi-platform multimedia ventures, it’s all completely pointless in the end. The War Assets mechanic was a mostly-harmless waste of time. I just filter these things out.

To their credit, multiplayer was an enjoyable distraction for a few hours.

3457

Multiplayer in ME3 was freaking awesome. Skipping the game just because of the inclusion of multiplayer is doing yourself a severe disservice.

3458

Agreed. I don’t usually care about multiplayer at all, but ME3 got me hooked for a while. I still want to play every once in a while. :)

3459

Hmm, interesting. That actually runs somewhat counter to a lot of what I read (I’m on the far end of not caring about spoilers, so I already read a lot of plot related reviews/ reactions). I’ve nearly pulled the trigger a few times admittedly. It was this combination of factors that all led to me not getting the finale in a series that by all accounts remains one of my favorites. This perfect tempest of bad decisions, wrong focus, poor marketing, Origin only, and my loosing interest in RPG as a genre for a while.

Perhaps I’ll give it a look in the future.

3460

ME1>>>ME3>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>ME2, for me. The first game is a wonderful story with cool set pieces all over the place and a stunning denouement. It’s a little rough in terms of gameplay, but the sequels didn’t polish that gameplay, they ejected it in favor of systems that I liked a great deal less. And although it has a couple of bits of minor DLC, it came before DLC was much of a thing and on PC comes with the only story DLC for free, so there’s no feeling that things integral to the overall experience are relegated to overpriced addons, and there’s no dealing with Bioware’s deeply wrongheaded approach to DLC in more recent years. There were clearly places to go from ME1, but then the lead writer left and ME2 and 3 didn’t go those places. -sigh-

ME2 was a crushing disappointment on a lot of levels. I pretty much hated the combat, which felt like the worst bits of the first Gears of War: just an endless procession of obtrusively placed waist high cover to sit behind and drawn out pop-n-shoot exchanges of fire without any significant variety in enemies, encounter design, or weaponry. (I could never get very far in Gears because it was such a monotonous slog, ME2 felt very similar on that front. Gears 2 really started playing with the formula though and was consequently significantly more fun even though I’m still not a fan of cover shooters, really.) I hated what they did to the Adept class, who went from absolutely wrecking shit in late game ME1 to being crippled by an inability to affect enemies with any kind of defense up with almost any of their powers in ME2, compounded by the unified cooldown on the powers meaning there was no reason to ever use any power but the most effective one or two. I hated the resurrection of ammo and the stupid lampshaded fictional justification. (And of course, none of the levels were ever all that interesting or attractive because they were so focused on providing waist-high cover.) I hated the total interchangeability of companions. I hated the complete elimination of the inventory in favor of completely imperceptible percent bonuses to numbers I didn’t have access to. And I hated the changes to levelling, which made my point assignments feel pretty much irrelevant since I had so few options and would get pretty much all of them over the course of the game anyway.

I also didn’t much like the main direction of the plot in ME2. It didn’t feel like the next step in the plot arc being pitched by ME1 at all and working for Cerberus made zero sense no matter how much they tried to sell you on the idea. That said, I really appreciated all the callbacks to choices you made in ME1 and I thought the various recruitment and loyalty missions were pretty awesome as a sort of anthology of stories set in the Mass Effect universe. And I loved most of the characters (and liked the rest). So I don’t write the game off, by any means. It’s just really disappointing in light of the brilliant first game, and not all that prepossessing as a -game- even on its own merits. Between Dragon Age II and ME2, though, I was certainly worried about the direction Bioware was heading.

Enough so that I didn’t preorder ME3 and almost didn’t buy it at all, but the lure was too great. And you know, it addressed many of my issues with ME2. It was still an evolution of that style of combat, which isn’t my favorite, but it gave meaningful decisions to make about weapons and how to customize and upgrade them, gave significantly more depth and flexibility to levelling, mixed up the combat encounter design and had enemies with distinct, memorable designs and power profiles (especially key to the multiplayer, which I was originally convinced was a colossal waste of their time but turned out was actually pretty fun), etc. And it was back to dealing with the primary plot and not shoehorning you into working with the bad guys, although it still doesn’t feel like it’s going where ME1 was going. Or ME2, for that matter. I still really appreciated how the game called back to earlier game decisions and moments, and there were some really great bits paying off running themes like the Krogan genophage and the Geth/Quarian conflict and lovely (and/or agonizing, if you went full Renegade, like I did) moments with beloved characters in the series. The whole warscore business was a bit of a misfire, especially given the complete lack of payoff, but I still kind of liked accumulating it. So, generally speaking, I think it’s the second best game in the franchise and while it never reaches ME1’s heights overall, I like it so much better than 2. There’s a couple of sour notes, though: the GM’s Pet NPC insert of some character from the novels or something like we should be pleased to see him as he gets his ass soundly handed to him in gameplay but wins every cutscene, and of course that Fucking Ending. God, that was awful. I don’t feel like 30 minutes of nonsense, anticlimax, and abandonment of everything in the story up to that point retroactively spoils the whole game, though, unlike some. And hey, maybe the extended cut fixes it. I haven’t gotten to ME3 in my second run through the franchise yet and honestly don’t know if I will because I have so many other games to play, so I haven’t seen the extended cut endings. But I have this feeling they don’t fix the premise of the ending, so…

In both ME2 and ME3’s cases I’ve read that there’s DLC that does a lot to enhance the experience and I might like them more if I had it. Alas, Bioware charges too much for the DLC, never lowers the price and never puts them on sale (at least on PC) so getting that enhancement would at this point cost multiple times the amount it would cost just to buy the game.