1921

It’s a vignette effect. It was in ME1, at least, as well. I can’t remember if it was in 2.

It sucks real bad in ME1. I’m not noticing it much here.

1922

I think it’s an old Unreal engine problem. At least it looks much better this time around. I don’t notice it very often. Maybe take a screenshot to make sure nothing’s wrong.

1923

I dont know how to play ME3. For Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim I have played the random completionist way. Doing everything, but not in a fixed order, other than whatever feels like doing. With ME3 the internet has informed me that this style can result on losing the game. I dont want to lose because I finished ME2 without losing any companion and having the good end, and I dont want to have a inferior score. I have decided to play ME3 slowly, making a lot of savegames just in case, and using the coop mp to max my readines. I dont know if that will be enough.

1924

I wouldn’t count on using MP to increase Galactic Readiness on a “late” playthrough.

  1. This is EA we’re talking about. I don’t think they’ll turn off the servers too early, but they will do it someday.

  2. This isn’t Call of Duty. People will migrate to something else. Right now, ME3 is the new hotness, so the MP numbers are very high. As the months drag on, I expect that getting into matches will take a lot longer.

If you’re set on using MP to augment your SP game, I’d advise doing that on the earlier playthrough.

1925

Has ANYONE on 360 been able to import their Shepface from ME2? What a colossal disappointment that it failed for me. I’ve done my best to manually recreate him, but he’s just not quite right…

1926

Hmmm. I already have ME2 for the XBox sitting on the shelf, and I’ve really become a convert to console gaming.

However - will ME1 play well on an older laptop? Specs are:

Intel Core 2 T7200 2 GHz CPU
nVidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX
4 gig Ram

1927

Regarding the whole evil EA thing. . . has anyone ever managed to hack up one of their existing titles to continue running even after the official servers went down?

I mean, people have LAN working in Starcraft 2, so anything has to be possible, right?

1928

Not sure what the Core 2 T > Core 2 Duo or GeForce Go > GeForce conversion rates are, but that should be sufficient for ME1 & 2. 3 is all but certain to fail spectacularly, though :(

1929

Oof, had a really bad experience last night, before I gave up and went off to bed.

During a big (BIG) boss fight, the sound went out. Just a couple of pops from the speakers every now and then, and that was it.

My first thought was to reload the game, and start the fight again, but it was a really long one, and I’d been at it, trying to win it, for nearly an hour. So, I pushed through, hoping for another save point where I could jump out of the game and come back in, hoping the audio would restart at that point.

But, no, 20 minutes. TWENTY Minutes of uninterrupted dialog, cut scenes, people dying, important decisions being made, etc. etc., before the game let go of me again and let me save. By that time, pivotal things had happened in the story, and I was simply an observer, trying to figure out what was going on by context alone.

This morning I fired up the game, and the sound was there, as normal, but I’d still missed out on that 20 minutes of game.

1930

Hmm dont recall seeing it in ME2, will post a screenie tonight then.

1931

I hit a sound glitch last night as well where everything started popping all over the place.

BTW, it’s pretty clear from where I am in the game now that the demo is either vastly different in structure because I used an import or they changed quite a bit after it was forked.

I ripped through about nine hours of the game yesterday and so far I am really happy with it. This is pretty much what I wanted; now I just don’t want it to end.

1932

Ehm, no offense, but why didn’t you cut your losses after 5 minutes and reload? I mean, I get the idea of hoping for a savepoint, that’s reasonable, for a while. But I personally would have stopped hoping right after the first important dead/dialoge/descision…?

1933

In the pc version, the game transformed my Femshep from Me2 (she still had the default name, Lawliet Shepard!) in a male Shep. :(

1934

My quick impressions:

  1. Game is good!
  2. Few squadmembers so far. Interesting.
  3. I would not recommend playing this without playing at least Mass Effect 2.
  4. Looks great. Love the lightning, textures, and character models.
  5. Damn, these sidequests have come a long way from ME1! Remember when you would hunt generic Cerberus troopers through identical bases for no real reason? Now each one (so far) has its own story, its own setting, well-shot cutscenes and dialogue, and some damn high stakes. Still has the generic Cerberus troopers. When my journal started filling up with sidequests I got worried, but they’ve been awesome to play so far.
  6. Music is very good. Sound effects can be pretty lame. Sound engineering is phenomenal.
  7. Tom was right on that the space dungeons look and play much better. I was never that bothered by ME2’s setup, and these areas easily trump those.
  8. Playing on normal difficulty feels good to me. I’ve died a few times when I’ve gotten careless, but mostly it’s been satisfying shooting that makes me sweat for the story but doesn’t frustrate. Action feels about on par with Mass Effect 2 to me, although with greater variety of weapons and powers. I like it.
1935

There’s a thread on this on the Bioware forums. It’s known issue.

And no, I wasn’t able to.

I created a similar face, it looked fine in the model viewer, but I’m not happy with it in-game. It just… doesn’t look right. The lips are pushed out too far, for example (and I know I turned her head to the side to make sure they DIDN’T do that). There are other issues as well that are harder to describe. Others on the Bioware forums have said the same.

I’m not happy with the Femshep body, either. It looks too thin.

Sigh.

1936

Well, that sucks. How the hell did something like that get past QA?

I assumed my save was somehow corrupted. I hate the way my recreated Shep looks now. I mentally chalked it up to her getting (more) reconstructive surgery during the hiatus. Gotta do something during the downtime, right?

On the other hand, I’ll agree with most of the others that this is great so far. The quest structure unfolds a lot more organically now. It’s better than “Hey, have a ship and go gather your crew!” The battle spaces are more natural looking as well.

1937

I replayed the prologue up to Mars three times because I wasn’t happy with my imported character’s cheekbones, so I can understand why you guys would be upset. That sucks.

Combat is hard, y’all. I jumped into Hardcore because that’s how I played the first two games with this character and man, those cerberus motherfuckers can be nasty.

1938

I’m not sure even the imported faces look right. Did the default female Shepard have drab orange hair in ME2? And freckles? Also, you can almost see the vertical seams where the cheek meets the mouth. It’s kind of distracting.

Since the shadows aren’t so glitchy anymore, the biggest problem with the graphics engine is the low-res shiny shaders. They make bright little waves on the sides of characters. Forcing 8xAA helps with aliasing but not that.

The only bug I’ve encountered is a conversation where both characters focused on a floating VI assistant instead of each other. Kind of funny. Not sure how they missed it though.

Oh and the lipsyncing still sucks. It wasn’t this bad in ME2, was it?

Hmm well I’d like to see these. The first one you’re free to select is the one I described last night: straight-up combat on an absurd map (with artifacts literally baked into every room of the map and the game decides which ones you should grab). I assume that’s one of the multiplayer map missions in singleplayer. At least they should be handy if I ever need a combat fix after too much chatting.

1939

Lip syncing was never great in the previous games, either. I’m not convinced the imported faces are exactly right, either–hence my cheekbones-fiddling. Surely I didn’t play the whole last game with a face that angular? She looks like a skeleton for god’s sake. Anyway.

Shadows do look good now. That’s a plus.

Lest I sound like I’m complaining, these are very very minor niggles and I absolutely loved the hour or so that I’ve played into the game. I can’t wait to get home and ignore my wife.

1940

That makes me wonder: will other factions use fewer grenades? Maybe it’s just Cerberus that has a unique style like that. I know the geth use grenades in multiplayer. Maybe the husks / Reaper faction doesn’t use any?