Mass Effect 3 - Save import problems, Metacritic woes, MP impact

If Mass Effect 3 isn't the biggest thing in your life today, you aren't doing it right it seems. Here's a handful of miscellaneous odds and sods.

First various sites are complaining the X360 save game import feature is broken, which EA has confirmed:

While Mass Effect 3 supports cloud saving for new or successfully imported Mass Effect 2 saves, it does not support the importation of endgame saves directly from the cloud. Additionally, this can cause it to not recognize save files that have been transferred via cloud to a console other than the one where they originated.

It looks like disenchanted players (or those with a certain political agenda?) have targeted the Metacritic score, possibly for including a gay romance scene. The user score is currently 2.4, which may please some, but just goes to show review consolidation sites are as unreliable as the games press. Thanks, CVG.

Lastly, PC Gamer unveils just exactly how the multiplayer impacts the single-player portion, with the Readiness rating having a tangible impact on your SP game:

Mass Effect 3 is about a war with the Reapers, and as you play the single player game, the people and armies whose help you earn count as War Assets. The game’s still story-driven, and it doesn’t end until you’ve completed the main series of missions. But when you do, what happens in the final cut-scene depends on how many War Assets you have accumulated.

That part is kind of cool. But the balance is incredibly harsh: I did every proper quest I could find in Mass Effect 3, made sensible decisions that didn’t conflict with my choices in the previous games, and brought people together. But I still got a gallingly bleak ending.

That’s because I’d never played the multiplayer. It’s a co-op mode where you and up to three other players have to survive waves of AI enemies and complete objectives. If you succeed, you get an increase to your Readiness rating – a percentage by which your single player War Assets are multiplied by. These are specific to each sector fo the galaxy, so if you have a lot of War Assets in the Terminus Systems, you’ll gain more by playing on a multiplayer map set in the Terminus Systems.