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#577 Nov 07 2012 at 11:12 AM Rating: Excellent
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#578 Nov 07 2012 at 11:52 AM Rating: Good
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I really wish they could have gotten Mordin's original VA back, but his replacement did a sufficient job. Killed me, because his original voice was awesome, and it seems particularly awful because the sound of things is that they never even reached out to Beattie to reprise the role (and for the life of me I can't understand why).
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#579 Nov 09 2012 at 12:43 PM Rating: Excellent
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idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
I really wish they could have gotten Mordin's original VA back, but his replacement did a sufficient job. Killed me, because his original voice was awesome, and it seems particularly awful because the sound of things is that they never even reached out to Beattie to reprise the role (and for the life of me I can't understand why).


Yeah, just got to the part with him... this VA isn't bad, but I really liked the original better. Also, this game is totally messing with me... I keep running into old friends, thinking I've gotten lucky and saved them... and yet I'm SURE they're gonna die later somehow!

Totally thought Grunt was going to bite it, but he pulled through.
#580 Nov 09 2012 at 12:54 PM Rating: Good
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Some characters will die regardless of what you choose. Some will die as a result of your choices. Some will live/die according to your past choices from previous games (loyalty of past squad mates being a potentially big one, depending on the choices you make in ME3).

In general, they do a good job of never letting those deaths feel gimmicky, or like they're just plot devices. And things often go ways you wouldn't expect. When characters die, they usually get deaths befitting their characters and involvement (and Shepard's own investment).

It's not perfect. Some of the character deaths seem too quickly forgotten compared to others. But for a game with this many potentially losses, they did a good job of making each memorable and important.

In response to your spoiler:
Grunt lives there because he was loyal to you in ME2. If you imported a save file where he was not, then he would have died instead. Of course, you could have chosen to save his company instead. Pretty sure he lives through that regardless of loyalty.

Edited, Nov 9th 2012 1:55pm by idiggory
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#581 Nov 09 2012 at 3:00 PM Rating: Good
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You mean the other way around, right?
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#582 Nov 10 2012 at 6:45 AM Rating: Good
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Any tips on single player? I've been playing as Vanguard, which is new to me... but charging at enemies every few seconds is SO much fun! I also tend to die a lot, but the game auto-saves pretty often so it's not usually an issue. Playing on Normal currently.


Nova gives invincibility frames. If you have half blast (talent) and you're not too weighed down you can chain charge->nova->nova->charge on packed groups and barely be hit.

Oh, and aim for the head.
#583 Nov 10 2012 at 9:27 AM Rating: Good
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Mazra wrote:
You mean the other way around, right?


I don't know what you're referring to. I also haven't had my morning coffee yet.

If you choose to save the queen, but Grunt isn't loyal to you, Grunt dies.
If you choose to save the queen, and Grunt is loyal to you, Grunt lives.
If you choose to save Arlack company, I'm pretty sure Grunt just lives.


Don't know for sure. I've yet to do my Renegade run through.

[EDIT]

Also, for multiplayer, Vanguards are the devil.

Don't get me wrong, they're stupidly powerful. But the ease with which they wrack up kills, plus the mobility, means that they're way too common and annoying as hell.

Why?

Because their stupid charge skill shakes the screen, thoroughly pissing off every single player on your team that needs to rely on headshots (pistols/sniper rifles in particular, though this obviously applies to all weapons and weapon-using classes).

It also means that every frickin time they go down, they're on the other side of a horde of enemies from the rest of us.

I hate them, I hate them, I hate them.

Smiley: madSmiley: madSmiley: mad

/rant off.

Edited, Nov 10th 2012 10:30am by idiggory
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#584 Nov 10 2012 at 6:17 PM Rating: Good
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Oh, yeah, you're right.

If I remember correctly, the most optimal outcome is to save the Rachni queen in ME1 and again in ME3, and gaining Grunt's loyalty in ME2. You lose Arlack company, but you gain the Rachni and Grunt. If the queen wasn't saved in ME1 and you save the one in ME3, they'll turn on you near the end of the game, withdrawing their War Assets, or whatever it's called, meaning you only really gain Grunt. Lots of variables, but it rewards consistency. If you saved the queen in ME1, save her in ME3. If you killed the queen in ME1, kill the one in ME3 as well.[/sm]

I need to play this game again someday.

I can always pretend that EDI and the Geth didn't all die when the reactor thingy blew up, right? Right?

Edited, Nov 11th 2012 1:18am by Mazra
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#585 Nov 10 2012 at 8:14 PM Rating: Good
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I need to replay my ending. I already knew how choosing D would mean for Shepard living, and I wanted her to have her happy life with Kaidan. But I played pure Paragon from ME1 all the way through. And I KNOW my Shepard would never have chosen destruction over Control or Synthesis (the last being by far the most likely). Hell, if Shepard had the same clairvoyence I had she still would have chosen otherwise.

So I just can't get comfortable with that decision. Because it was too much me in it, with literally no Shepard.

I've also chosen to elect for a head-canon in which her body is cloned and the map created by the Catalyst, which was use to create the hybrids, was accessed to implant Shepard's exact neural state at her time of death, so she gets her happy ending that way.

And I justify that by imagining that what the galaxy most needed in the wake of the Reaper attacks was unity, and the council knew that Shepard would be a huge boon in that endeavor, as a symbol alone. Earth needed it more than most, having spent the majority of the war in a complete media blackout. So even though they new, in the end, that the entire galaxy sent their fleets to liberate them, they still held the grudge they developed during the long terror of the invasion. Shepard would be huge in remedying that.

So, yeah, there's the ending I've crafted for my Paragon fem!Shep Kaidanmancer.
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#586 Nov 10 2012 at 9:58 PM Rating: Good
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I hate bittersweet endings.

I think the Synthesis and Control endings were changed last minute by the two McNuggets who took direct control of writing the ending. I think the laser beam option was the original Control option, because disintegrating Shepard so he can become one with the Reapers makes more sense. Likewise, a Synthesis ending where Shepard grabs the two handles and the Crucible reads his DNA profile and does its thing - without killing Shepard - would make more sense than Shepard having to jump into a light beam and get shredded.
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#587 Nov 11 2012 at 4:55 AM Rating: Good
Oh, I guess we're still spoilering this ****?

I have trouble believing anyone would choose synthesis, as a matter of psychology. The reapers and their converted troops are the only examples Shephard has seen; the former are interstellar nightmare factories with an Augustine contempt for flesh, and their creations are organic beings made into puppets by the addition of the machine parts. Synthesis has been used as a tool of psychological warfare and annihilation. You aren't given much of an idea of what the option entails, only that the entity that saw the reapers as a great solution thinks it's swell. No-one would choose it.

Similarly, control is set up over the entire rest of the series as impossible and insane; the reapers are Lovecraftian machines that bend lesser minds to their will simply by existing. They don't even have to be alive. If you wanted to demystify them you'd have to start somewhere before the very end of the game - I'm not against that as a direction for a third game where reapers are in any case suddenly all up in your business. But, you know, that requires an actual thematic shift and some actual exposition. Trying to do both in afew minutes at the end achieves nothing but the destruction of the narrative energy built up in three games.

Destroy is the only ending that makes any sense, and also the one where it's most dramatically appropriate to knock Shephard off. The other endings take away enormously from it, though, because they make the reapers seem kind of sh*t right at the climax.


Edited, Nov 11th 2012 10:55am by Kavekk
#588 Nov 11 2012 at 8:42 AM Rating: Good
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Kavekk wrote:
Oh, I guess we're still spoilering this sh*t?

I have trouble believing anyone would choose synthesis, as a matter of psychology. The reapers and their converted troops are the only examples Shephard has seen; the former are interstellar nightmare factories with an Augustine contempt for flesh, and their creations are organic beings made into puppets by the addition of the machine parts. Synthesis has been used as a tool of psychological warfare and annihilation. You aren't given much of an idea of what the option entails, only that the entity that saw the reapers as a great solution thinks it's swell. No-one would choose it.

Similarly, control is set up over the entire rest of the series as impossible and insane; the reapers are Lovecraftian machines that bend lesser minds to their will simply by existing. They don't even have to be alive. If you wanted to demystify them you'd have to start somewhere before the very end of the game - I'm not against that as a direction for a third game where reapers are in any case suddenly all up in your business. But, you know, that requires an actual thematic shift and some actual exposition. Trying to do both in afew minutes at the end achieves nothing but the destruction of the narrative energy built up in three games.

Destroy is the only ending that makes any sense, and also the one where it's most dramatically appropriate to knock Shephard off. The other endings take away enormously from it, though, because they make the reapers seem kind of sh*t right at the climax.


Edited, Nov 11th 2012 10:55am by Kavekk


Locke just bought the game, and I assume he'd like for the endings not to be spoiled.

I think there's a significant difference between what the synthesis option proposes and what the Reapers have been doing, even when limiting yourself to just what the Catalyst says. You also have to remember who is making the choice--Shepard is essentially already extremely close to synthesis already. We don't actually know how much of her consciousness is a direct result of computers. It may well be that she's capable of bring the Geth into the fold with the other races specifically because she already understood them well enough to give them a chance where no other organic would have.

Plus, it seems more to me that the Catalyst is saying that Synthesis is more about the way they think. It doesn't sound like they intend to fundamentally change either side physically or mentally, but more like they're giving them the tools to understand and surpass the fundamental barriers created by their different ways of thinking.

As for the Control option, I don't think it was so bad, and you're definitely retroactively applying a theme. "Destroy the Reapers" wasn't a theme of the first game, it was "Stop Saren" followed by "Don't let the Reapers through." The theme of the second game was "Stop the Collectors" followed by "Don't let the Reapers through."

Well, Reapers are through. That's the first time the series ever really looks at the idea of destroying them. Before ME3, "Stop the Reapers" clearly meant "Do everything we possibly can to keep them as far away as we can." Control was the ending seriously sought by the Illusive Man. He fought for it nonstop, and Shepard and his missions clashed regularly because they didn't trust each other.

While the ME games have always been about Shepard's story, they've also been about the other characters. The Illusive Man as kind of the anti-Anderson. The reason everyone dismisses the control possibility throughout ME3 is generally pretty clear--they don't want to waste time on something that may never happen when destroying them is within sight, and would permanently solve the problem. Also, no one wants the Illusive Man to have control of the Reapers.

As far as I can remember, no one ever objects to the notion of controlling the Reapers itself as a flawed idea. They see it as a plan that can't work, won't work, etc. Doesn't surprise me that Shepard would take that route. Particularly when it's discovered that destroying the Reapers would mean the genocide of the Geth as well.
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#589 Nov 11 2012 at 10:53 AM Rating: Good
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I think there's a significant difference between what the synthesis option proposes and what the Reapers have been doing, even when limiting yourself to just what the Catalyst says.


Sure, if you watch the ending, it seems so. But Shepard doesn't know that. All they do know is that every example of synthesis they have seen is at the hands of the entity they're talking to and that they've all been designed to be as horrific as possible.

Quote:
As for the Control option, I don't think it was so bad, and you're definitely retroactively applying a theme. "Destroy the Reapers" wasn't a theme of the first game, it was "Stop Saren" followed by "Don't let the Reapers through." The theme of the second game was "Stop the Collectors" followed by "Don't let the Reapers through."


That's not at all what I was talking about. In the same paragraph as I used the word 'theme', you will find what I am talking about. I'm talking about the lovecraftian themes surrounding the reapers, the hubris of the illusive man in believeing he can control them... the catalyst's premise that organics and machines are fundamentally different and doomed to war is also a complete subversion of the second and third games and the themes of tolerance, understanding and cooperation contained within. It could have developed fairly smoothly out of the first game, where you have a couple of side missions (Luna, that AI on the citadel) and the behaviour of the geth seeming to support it. The subsequent two games then go out of their way to destroy this: the geth were indoctrinated when they killed, have no desire to fight the wuarians and are keeping their homeworld in stasis in anticipation of their return; EDI later integrates into the crew.

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Doesn't surprise me that Shepard would take that route.


Honestly, it's more that it doesn't work within the established framework of the universe. If somebody told Shepard they could control the reapers, why would they believe them? Especially considering who they are. That's why indoctrination theory exists, because it was a more plausible explanation than a straight reading. The fact that it is possible is terrible story telling, because it goes against everything established up to that point.

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Particularly when it's discovered that destroying the Reapers would mean the genocide of the Geth as well.


A bizarre addition. I guess destroy is meant to be the renegade option and this is one way of showing that, but there's no reason why the catalyst should do this. There's a direct link to the reapers, why can't you just destroy them? Why are all sentient synthetics destroyed? It seems really contrived.
#590 Nov 12 2012 at 8:44 AM Rating: Good
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Kavekk wrote:
I guess destroy is meant to be the renegade option and this is one way of showing that, but there's no reason why the catalyst should do this. There's a direct link to the reapers, why can't you just destroy them? Why are all sentient synthetics destroyed?


Because the hero Can't Get Away with Nuthin'.

My guess is that the writers wanted to see how many tropes they could fit in one video game.

Edited, Nov 12th 2012 3:44pm by Mazra
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#591 Nov 12 2012 at 6:12 PM Rating: Excellent
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Mordin is dead (but he went out singing... er... humming!
I got Ashley back,,, and realized I had no use for her Smiley: lol Oh well! Thane is dead too! We've officially bit the dust on two ME2 characters, but I figure Jacob and Grunt are relatively safe now... we'll see? Also hoping Jack and Miranda are safe... but now the Quarians are open... interested to see how the Tali/Legion stuff works out... but my money is on Tali.

Maybe because I romanced her and I'm making sure she lives Smiley: glare
#592 Nov 14 2012 at 3:51 PM Rating: Good
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The Talia/Legion sequence is probably one of the most powerful in the game, especially if you make the "wrong" choice. Smiley: tongue
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#593 Nov 14 2012 at 4:58 PM Rating: Good
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Mazra wrote:
The Talia/Legion sequence is probably one of the most powerful in the game, especially if you make the "wrong" choice. Smiley: tongue

Which I unfortunately did. Smiley: bah
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#594 Nov 15 2012 at 7:25 AM Rating: Excellent
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I feel like making some of my "good" choices in ME2 come back to bite me if my reputation isn't high enough like how Wrex was pissed at me for destroying the Genophage cure research, and though he forgave me in the end it seemed to cost the Salarian war assets. I have a feeling like helping the Geth in Legion's loyalty mission might backfire too...

In other news, I had bought ME3 through Origin (for $30... much more reasonable than the $60), but I noticed when turning on my computer this morning that I am no longer auto-logged. With the password scare, I'm paranoid that it's due to being hacked o_O No e-mail though. I'll try to log in tonight...
#595 Nov 28 2012 at 11:51 PM Rating: Good
Thoughts On the Omega DLC:

- There's something kinda gratifying about Aria re-arriving on Omega and yelling, "I'm back, ************* at the Cerberus occupiers.

- Elevators again? Really? The first one made me nostalgic for ME1, the 2nd one was every bit as annoying as I remember them. No muzak this time, though.

- Female Turrian squad member, yay! Female Turrian Squad member with a unique ability I will never use, boo!

I'm about half way through it & its better than Leviathan. Some of the new weapon mod are worth the price tag, its just too bad they don't carry over into multiplayer.
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#596 Nov 29 2012 at 9:56 AM Rating: Excellent
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Might as well update, as I beat the game with the "good" ending (Synthesis?). I didn't care for the ending, though I'd need to think more about "why"... I guess it just bites that Shepard doesn't really get a "happily ever after" option.

I'm still on the fence about all the DLC. From Ashes (or whatever it's called) sounds like a cheap cop-out to introduce a new character... but darn it, I want a new squad mate! I haven't heard much good about Leviathan. Omega actually looks kinda neat, but I don't like that I can't use my other squadmates and I don't get to take the Omega squadmates with me after.

I think I have some 1300 Bioware points, so I could buy any one of them right now. Not sure which I should go for.

As for multiplayer, I switched to Vanguard and suddenly started winning all my matches Smiley: laugh Might have just been luck. I think I got her to around level... 16? My main goal wasn't to do extraordinarily well for myself, but just to boost my Galactic Readiness for single player. Mission accomplished; think I was up to 76 or 77% by the end.
#597 Nov 29 2012 at 1:32 PM Rating: Good
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Red is the only good ending :P

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#598 Nov 29 2012 at 4:50 PM Rating: Good
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I'm still on the fence about all the DLC. From Ashes (or whatever it's called) sounds like a cheap cop-out to introduce a new character... but darn it, I want a new squad mate! I haven't heard much good about Leviathan. Omega actually looks kinda neat, but I don't like that I can't use my other squadmates and I don't get to take the Omega squadmates with me after.


From Ashes is worth it, as Javek isn't the throw away character that either of ME2's were & has some pretty interesting scenes on the Asari homeworld if you take him.

Quote:
As for multiplayer, I switched to Vanguard and suddenly started winning all my matches Smiley: laugh Might have just been luck. I think I got her to around level... 16? My main goal wasn't to do extraordinarily well for myself, but just to boost my Galactic Readiness for single player. Mission accomplished; think I was up to 76 or 77% by the end.


Wait until you get a Krogan Vanguard. They're almost invincible at level 20 on Bronze. I can solo Bronze on mine (Geth & Cerberus. **** Banshees & pretty much all the Collectors.)

Still havent gotten a Harrier to drop >.<
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#599 Nov 29 2012 at 9:42 PM Rating: Excellent
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Omegavegeta wrote:
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I'm still on the fence about all the DLC. From Ashes (or whatever it's called) sounds like a cheap cop-out to introduce a new character... but darn it, I want a new squad mate! I haven't heard much good about Leviathan. Omega actually looks kinda neat, but I don't like that I can't use my other squadmates and I don't get to take the Omega squadmates with me after.


From Ashes is worth it, as Javek isn't the throw away character that either of ME2's were & has some pretty interesting scenes on the Asari homeworld if you take him.

Are all the DLC worth it? I wanted From Ashes primarily for the new character... but I'm favoring Omega over Leviathan right now...
#600 Nov 29 2012 at 11:23 PM Rating: Good
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IIRC, There's evidence suggessting that Javek, the From Ashes squadmember, was originally going to be included in the game from the getgo, but they turned him into DLC for day one DLC $$$ some reason or other.
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#601 Nov 30 2012 at 9:20 AM Rating: Good
I'd say Omega is better than Leviathan, but again, From Ashes is the best of the lot.
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