"11 Amazing Minutes Of Mass Effect 3 Footage"

human_male said:

I notice no inventory again. Ok, so you customise individual weapons now at benches, that's cool but I guess it means no loot, no buying and selling different weapons, and the only things you can buy in stores are mods, fish and model ships.

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That's another thing that's pretty stupid. Why would I be on a mission and decide to stop what I was doing to modify my weapon on a work bench. Usually these are high pace missions that you need to do quickly, at least according to the story. Why stop and use a work bench on your weapon? Makes more sense for it to be on the ship.

Lurking Grue said:

Not too impressed by the video, a sleeker ME2 is what it looks like - now with omniblades!!1! (A holographic blade, really?) Good thing is that Dr Mordin (sp?) makes a comeback. He was the most interesting party-member in ME2. Too bad in my playthrough of ME2 he's dead…

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I wonder how they are going to handle that mission then. Perhaps it's just a side mission and you won't get it, but what's likely is that it won't matter who died in ME2 and people will make a comeback regardless.

For me it's too early to comment one way or the other... But if I had to guess ME3 might be a better shooter than ME2, adding environments that go beyond narrow corridors with plenty of cover would do the trick(I think this is one of their aims).

A pure SP shooter on rails isn't normally my thing.

I don't really understand the complaints about the apparent lack of RPG features. It's not as if the ME series ever had any significant amount of stats/skills/etc to begin with. Even the original game was sorely lacking in that area compared to a traditional crpg.

The question I ask myself is rather : Should be the ME series considered as RPG at all ??

I tend to assume that this could lead to a kind of "schism" and the forming of a new sub-genre (like what Blizzard's Action-RPGs did).

For me it isn't a complaint about lack of RPG features it is about using marketspeak to claim that it is something it does not seem to be. I suggest it it is also a reaction to the da2 'dumbing down' criticism. People can buy what they want but I personally am not comfortable with deliberate 'misleading'. Again, for me, doing something that to me is a starting point for an RPG e.g. Skill trees, modding and calling it 'deep' falls in that category.

Hurls said:

For me it isn't a complaint about lack of RPG features it is about using marketspeak to claim that it is something it does not seem to be. I suggest it it is also a reaction to the da2 'dumbing down' criticism. People can buy what they want but I personally am not comfortable with deliberate 'misleading'. Again, for me, doing something that to me is a starting point for an RPG e.g. Skill trees, modding and calling it 'deep' falls in that category.

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Well Bioware has been doing that for years now, and that's why I'm skeptical of pretty much anything that comes out of their mouths nowadays. I said this before, and I'll say it again, Mass Effect 3 could be the final Bioware game I purchase. I have zero interest in the direction they're heading.

JDR13 said:

Well Bioware has been doing that for years now, and that's why I'm skeptical of pretty much anything that comes out of their mouths nowadays. I said this before, and I'll say it again, Mass Effect 3 could be the final Bioware game I purchase. I have zero interest in the direction they're heading.

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Agreed but it seems to be getting worse and they have developed/expanded their 'bunker mentaility' after DA2 criticsm.

Well that's an impossible question to answer because there is no official definition for what an RPG really is. Everyone seems to have their own definition about what makes one up.

That's also what makes a phrase like "deep RPG elements" meaningless. Given all the different personal definitions people have about what RPG elements even are, what could be deep for one person could be completely absent for another.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

The question I ask myself is rather : Should be the ME series considered as RPG at all ??

I tend to assume that this could lead to a kind of "schism" and the forming of a new sub-genre (like what Blizzard's Action-RPGs did).

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Grimlorn said:

I'm kind of doubting that anything you did in the past 2 games will matter for more than a cutscene, and regardless of choices made you will still be able to beat the reapers in ME3.

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The choices made in Mass Effect made up a lot of the flavour in Mass Effect 2. There were literally hundreds of little things that were changed in the sequel because of events and quests in the first. And did you honestly believe that anything in the previous game would prevent anyone from finishing the game with the "good" ending?

Alrik Fassbauer said:

The question I ask myself is rather : Should be the ME series considered as RPG at all ??

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The question should be: is this important? As for marketing, it is misleading by definition.

Thaurin said:

The choices made in Mass Effect made up a lot of the flavour in Mass Effect 2. There were literally hundreds of little things that were changed in the sequel because of events and quests in the first. And did you honestly believe that anything in the previous game would prevent anyone from finishing the game with the "good" ending?

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What flavour? Nothing you did in ME mattered in ME2. You still had to go with Cerberus. Both councils treated you the same. You only got some cameos from characters in the first game. There weren't hundreds of little things changed. Look at ME3, Cerberus are the enemy regardless of the choice you made at the end. Implying they get indoctrinated somehow even if the base is destroyed.

And since the Prothean/Reaper base in ME2 doesn't appear to matter much because Cerberus are the enemy in ME3, I think that the game should be a lot more difficult if you let the council die, killed the Rachni queen and killed Wrex. The krogan aren't united, the Rachni are all but extinct, and the universe isn't as united. So it should be more difficult to beat, but I'm betting it won't matter in the end. We'll see though.

Grimlorn said:

And since the Prothean/Reaper base in ME2 doesn't appear to matter much because Cerberus are the enemy in ME3, I think that the game should be a lot more difficult if you let the council die, killed the Rachni queen and killed Wrex. The krogan aren't united, the Rachni are all but extinct, and the universe isn't as united. So it should be more difficult to beat, but I'm betting it won't matter in the end. We'll see though.

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Well I never finished ME1 so I can't speak about the decision to kill or not kill the council. But I do remember that the decision about whether to kill to Rachni queen was far from black and white, and you could argue that either choice would destabilize the universe more. I mean yeah I'm sure if you save the queen she helps you later, but most games focus more on the positive effects of your choices no matter what you choose (unless your playing witcher in which case it's the opposite). Similarly the Krogan are also potentially a huge threat to the galaxy and uniting them could just as easily make things worse.

So yeah I don't think it's going to severaly punish you for making reasonable decisions 2 titles ago. It's probably going to just be little things here and there. But given that every other sequel doesn't even address what you did in previous games at all, I'll take it.

Grimlorn said:

So it should be more difficult to beat, but I'm betting it won't matter in the end. We'll see though.

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I'm hoping it won't matter in the end. I have absolutely no idea how in the nine hells BioWare is supposed to create a coherent game that is fun to play with all the possibilities and non-linearity that you are proposing. Some sort of VI behind the scenes that determines the game's behaviour?

Besides that your choices influence the game that comes after it, they also have to stand on their own. If a choice I made two games back severely hampers me in the third game, I would hate that. My save games alter my game enough to feel more of a connection and familiarity to the game world and not so much that it fundamentally chances my experience to the point that it is a different game. I like that. This is the way it should be, in my opinion.

Grimlorn said:

What flavour? Nothing you did in ME mattered in ME2. You still had to go with Cerberus. Both councils treated you the same. You only got some cameos from characters in the first game. There weren't hundreds of little things changed. {snip} but I'm betting it won't matter in the end. We'll see though.

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My thoughts exactly. What has disappointed me the most in the Mass Effect saga, so far, is the lack of real continuity and change in the game due to your choices. Before the release of ME1, I remember the devs (and I used to listen to Bio devs back then, not so anymore) going on and on about how they plan to make this a trilogy and have such great plans for it and that the player's going to be challenged with choices that dictate the course of the trilogy for him, et cetera. Of course, even then, I realised that it was mostly just marketing and hype-building, but they were saying they had this trilogy planned right from the start with continuity between the games.

Now, come ME2 and what do we have? Just like Grimlorn wrote above, nothing really that big. Small things, yes, and cameos, but that's about it. Nothing that different from other game series that haven't promised ANY choice in their gameplay (e.g. in the sci-fi shooter genre Halo 1-3 or Gears of War 1-2). The plot of ME2 doesn't resemble anything that could be said to have good continuity or have the feel of planned saga. It just looks like they hashed it together after ME1 without so much as a thought given to it prior ME1. If they really had planned the story arc of the Mass Effect trilogy beforehand, then the execution of it has been really poor (given that Bio writers proud themselves as being superlative story-tellers).

JDR13 said:

I don't really understand the complaints about the apparent lack of RPG features. It's not as if the ME series ever had any significant amount of stats/skills/etc to begin with. Even the original game was sorely lacking in that area compared to a traditional crpg.

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Well, I was getting riled up now, mainly because of the term "deep RPG elements" in the video. To me, it just sounds so utterly stupid that I had to comment it.

When I first heard of Mass Effect way back when, I had hoped we'd be getting something resembling SS2 or Deus Ex in the shooter-RPG genre, only to find out to my disappointment we got this super-lite RPG slash clumsy shooter. So, I'm grumpy (and I can hold a grudge like a dwarf!).

Lurking Grue said:

When I first heard of Mass Effect way back when, I had hoped we'd be getting something resembling SS2 or Deus Ex in the shooter-RPG genre, only to find out to my disappointment we got this super-lite RPG slash clumsy shooter. So, I'm grumpy (and I can hold a grudge like a dwarf!).

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Well in all fairness, ME may be RPG lite in terms of stats, but so were Deus Ex and System Shock 2. I wouldn't say that the stat based RPG elements are deeper in either, and certainly there are a lot more story based RPG elements in ME then in SS2.

Probably more of an issue is that you just that you didn't like the feel/gameplay of ME, which is very different then those other two games.

fadedc said:

Well in all fairness, ME may be RPG lite in terms of stats, but so were Deus Ex and System Shock 2. I wouldn't say that the stat based RPG elements are deeper in either, and certainly there are a lot more story based RPG elements in ME then in SS2.

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Deus Ex and SS2 weren't advertised as RPGs though. Mass Effect on the other hand was hyped like it was the new messiah of role-playing games.

fadedc said:

Well in all fairness, ME may be RPG lite in terms of stats, but so were Deus Ex and System Shock 2. I wouldn't say that the stat based RPG elements are deeper in either, and certainly there are a lot more story based RPG elements in ME then in SS2.

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YES! THIS! SO MUCH! People are blinded by nostalgia, and I am guilty of that on occasion. But this is one thing that has always bothered me in this discussion. SS2 has been viewed as a first-person RPG classic, while really it is just a shooter with RPG elements. I don't mind calling it an RPG, though.

There are a lot more RPG elements in Mass Effect than System Shock, to me.

Yep, some people pay more attention to other role playing elements. Like story, characters and dialogue.

As for the marketing of Mass Effect... I don't rightly remember. Who cares, though? Marketing is lies, as it has always been. (my washing powder makes your laundry 10x more white than my competition's washing powder! True story!)

Thaurin said:

SS2 has been viewed as a first-person RPG classic

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By whom?
As far as I remember, the game has been always generally viewed as a shooter with RPG elements, same with Deus Ex.
Saying that they´re just shooters with RPG elements sorta doesn´t do them justice though since both are such special breeds .

Especially since they are more RPG than some games that are marketed as RPGs today.

Maybe it's just the way that people talk about these games with watered eyes that makes me think they see them as true RPG classics. But as far as I can tell, the story and atmosphere are the most important parts of both games, and I see that as being true for the Mass Effect's, too.