It's out and the reviews are loving the game. Anyone here is playing it and stuff? No spoilers posts please!!!

I personally think it's the best of the three as far as gameplay/graphics go.

The plot... well, it's pretty standard mass effect.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Day 1 story DLC and BioWare's recent bad games equal me not buying this.

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Bioware has really turned into EA as of late as far as quality goes....

Oh yeah.....I forgot.

EA is just the publisher, they don't have any creative control. Bioware didn't have any help phoning in the plot.

bioware is a fully owned business unit of EA, it's not just a publisher/developer relationship.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Good point -- I keep forgetting about that, and thinking of the relationship like the one with Valve.

Yeah, ME3 is getting raked over the coals for its poor quality right now.

I dunno, I might have exceptionally low expectations, but I like it. =(

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

I think he was joking. Most reviews are loving the game and stuff. Maye he can link those bad reviews here

There's a crapton of bad reviews on Metacritic. Mostly bitching about bad writing and release day DLC (I do sort of dislike that myself... all of the content for the DLC is on the disc)

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

I have yet to play a single Mass Effect, I just don't see myself doing it now as I'd hate to jump in so late while refusing to bother with 1 and 2.

Eh. Skyrim will work for now

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It's also not doing very well financially.

I'm waiting for a price drop like I do with most of the titles I buy. Very rare do I spend more than $50 bucks for my games. I can wait for the cost to be reduced in a few months

The graphics really suck too. Like playing an old Xbox classic game

PC>360 version of the game. I don't buy anything on the console if there is a PC version etc

I'm ten hours into the PC version. I'm a big fan of immersion, for those of you who weren't around to read Felishanna's and my freaking fanfic from Lanys. I don't have any complaints yet, except that the Krogan characters get weaker in each game, and that shouldn't be allowed when

Way to shit up a perfectly good thread.

You were in favor of that much immersion, Tranthas?

That's fairly extreme. Remember, there's an exception to every rule.

Especially when one is in need of a group teleport with a darkie.

Or a jade mace is up for grabs.

Or "Frog Thief" Miggent.

Anything good I said about this game?

I take it all back. Fuck the endings. Fuck them in their stupid asses.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Yeah I've heard things about the way they chose to end it and none of them nice.

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Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

Damn, look away for a minute and...

To clarify some things folks might have heard, that I did not say:

The person playing Felishanna Secretlight meant well, but was misguided in that she forgot that behind the game there were real people with goals and feelings, and so her character became a Fantasy Racism Simulator. That, I do not condone.

However, she also took the time and trouble to write short stories involving her character (very light on the racism there) and post them on the old Lanys board. That level of immersion, we had in common.

I've been through the main plotline of ME3 once. Steering clear of spoilers, lemme point out some good and bad:

Good:
- This is not boilerplate Mass Effect storytelling. I take back what I said earlier about phoning in the plot. It gets much more interesting as the game progresses, and there are points where it's hard not to get emotionally involved.
- Players are rewarded for playing the earlier games, in the form of continued relationships with some of the characters.

Bad:
- Players are punished for not playing the earlier games. My savefile from ME2 was corrupted, so I couldn't bring it forward. There are at least two scenes in the game where it is mathematically impossible to prevent fucking terrible things from happening, unless your save file dates back to ME2 and you did certain missions in the previous game. If you didn't carry your game forward or ME3 is your first try for the franchise, well, brace yourself for a couple of really, really bad experiences -- and understand that reloading and retrying them won't help.
This is in the Bad column because it's not the same thing as rewarding people for playing the earlier games. There's a baseline of enjoyment I expect out of my games, and if consequences for my actions within the game impact the outcome negatively, so be it -- I won't even reload that. On the other hand, if EA makes me, all because a dialog option was suppressed because I can't prove I bought their previous game, I'm gonna have a teensy problem with it.

What the fuck choices did you make during THAT conversation? o_O



Either you chose...poorly...or you didn't have a high enough Paragon/Renegade score.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

I looked up the mechanics later.

ugh, that blows. =/

Of course, a month ago when I was preparing for ME3, I found out that my 360's drive was dead, and I hadn't updated it to have cloud save capability (not like that would have mattered, go go no import from cloud saves...) so I rushed a playthrough of ME2 and had a fresh save.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Yea, I had that happen to me because my Xbox died and I bought a new one. So all my ME1 and ME2 saves went with the old xbox. I lost the fleet, even though I wanted all of them, so now I only have the Geth from that scenario.

There should be a way to pull cloud saves back to your local drive before you start the game, allowing you to import them into ME3 on the 360. Lemme check.

The instructions from EA said:

- If you have the console the save game was originally created on, copy it from cloud saves to the hard drive, import save, and put ME3 save in cloud saves.

- If you do not have the xbox that originally created the save, then you're SOL.

I paraphrased of course. :p

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

I'm sorry that happened. I'm not in a position to legally point fingers about what the deal there is, but I can say it won't happen with every game.

Oh it's fine, I had been meaning to replay ME2 again anyway. I hadn't done any of the DLC, so that was new.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

I could care less about the storyline, the ME line was always overrated anyway. I'm more curious about the gameplay mechanics. The FPS/RPG mix and party system have been the saving graces of ME. If that's still good in ME3, I'm in.

Gameplay mechanics are a bit more refined in ME3 than ME2.

There's a weight limit involved for your weapons now, so a soldier carrying a heavy weapon, pistol, shotgun and assault rifle now faces a pretty stiff penalty to power recharge time. there are weapon mods that reduce weapon weight, increase accuracy, increase damage, increase armor/shield/barrier penetration, etc etc, but you can only install two mods at a time.

Everything else is pretty much standard ME fare. Oh... running is forever now, there's no "sprint, run out of breath and stop"

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

You just got done complaining about FPS games in a separte thread, Venen. Have you ever played anything you didn't hate?

Huh? Where? I enjoy a lot of FPS games, particularly TF2 =p Honestly, I haven't gotten around to playing the MW or BF series, but I want to eventually. I think there's a lot of room for improvement, but that's true for most genres.

I'll admit I've become much more snobby when it comes to enjoyment of games, though. Still, I'm not quite Joxur where I can't find the enjoyment in something, even if it's innocuous.

Anyway, some of what Vanamar mentioned sounds interesting. I'm hoping that the skill trees are more elaborate but I'm not holding my breath =/ Is the weight limit as annoying as it sounds? =p

Eh, there's a little more choice involved in the skill trees. levels 4,5,6 of each skill each have two options to pick from.

The weight limit isn't so much annoying as it is...restrictive. My soldier couldn't carry (for example) a sniper rifle, shotgun, assault rifle and pistol without suffering severe cooldown penalties, but since I rarely use shotguns as a soldier, I passed on the shotgun. I also passed on the pistol and went with a low recoil SMG instead, since it was lighter. I ended up having 50% faster cooldowns, so I was happy.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

I carried a lightweight sniper rifle, an ultralight-mod SMG, a high-caliber pistol and a small assault rifle for most of the game. Near the end, I tricked out the Black Widow sniper rifle and dropped the pistol, and had -11% cooldown speed.