Kristina Shepard, Sentinel of humanity

Spacer; War Hero; 330 Paragon, 0 Renegade.




(Yes, I only have screenshots from ME1. So far.)

o Ventus wrote...

Arturia Pendragon wrote...

Honestly, the entire (new) crew of ME2 except Mordin Solus. Don't get me wrong, I liked the characters, they just aren't important to the overarching story. I would have been fine with just having the 5 ME1 survivors for all 3 games...

And so Shepard stays dead and the latter 2 games never happen, because Miranda wasn't present to bring Shepard back to life.

I would argue that Shepard's contrived death happened solely to give Miranda some semblance of importance besides having a nice back side. But I'll give you that one.

Honestly, the entire (new) crew of ME2 except Mordin Solus. Don't get me wrong, I liked the characters, they just aren't important to the overarching story. I would have been fine with just having the 5 ME1 survivors for all 3 games...

Download it here: http://social.biowar...lsoundtrack.php

The answer to all your questions is quite simple: because the entire trilogy is a story being told to a child by a senile old man from what remains of his memory.

Thus all the plot holes, inconsistencies, and sudden thematic changes.

Fred Savage had it good compared to the Stargazer's victim.

Favorite scenes:

• Femshep's tango with Garrus.
• Jennifer Hale's voice cracking during Thane's elegy (romanced) and the subsequent reaction to Message #4 (romanced-only). It mirrored my own; sitting in silence with tears running down my face.
• Glyph continuing Variations on Vigil to set the mood for a romance interrupt.
• Joker's Atlas story. That whole damn scene.

Favorite quotes:

• Tali to Garrus: "NEEEERD!"
• Shepard to EDI: "I'll dance with you." Joker proceeds to laugh for a minute straight.
• Grunt's many, many, many variations of "no" as the doorman.
• Shepard telling Jack and Miranda to resolve their sexual tension.
• Shepard's reaction to "I should go" from her clone.
• Go for the eyes, Boo. Go for the eyes! Wait, wrong game.

MECavScout01 wrote...

To be honest, I believe BW has no idea what the hell they can do in the next game.

Due to Casey and Supermac's art, anything post ending is just about trashed.

I thought it was quite obvious that the next game would take place in the First Contact War.

Your character? A young Alliance officer named David Edward Anderson.

Did you know he was born in London?

Seifer006 wrote...

Future trailers suggestions:

• no more liara
• More Wrex and K.R.O.G.A.N.S.

Well, let's see. We can either make Seifer and his Liara-hating vocal minority happy by not including Liara in promotional material. Or we can make the ridiculously large number of players happy by including her. 40% of responders to the only ending survey supported by BioWare identified themselves as having romanced Liara (see pages 11-12).

I think the business case for using Liara as much as possible is quite clear.

Doctor_Jackstraw wrote...

you can clearly see that she aint wearin no glove.  got some weird ass lizard hand AWESOME great.

Dinosaur DLC confirmed?

On a more serious note, that looks like a piece of sculpture in the background.

Noticed it on my first playthough. Then again, I made sure to check every nook and cranny of the Citadel after every quest. I enjoyed the heck out of the game until...well, it's all been said before.

I find it interesting that people will still line up to pay 1/4 of the cost of the base game for a single extra mission DLC.

Boggles the mind, really.

For a supposedly good role-playing game, there sure is a lot of minuses for "roleplaying" in your review.

Anyway, good read so far. Keep it up.

Hexley UK wrote...

crimzontearz wrote...

Reth Shepherd wrote...

Keatstwo wrote...

Can you ever trust anyone to finish a story that you've become invested in in exactly the way you'd want?

But yes, as much as is possible.

MEHEM and Marauder Shields say hi. It is entirely possible to end a story in a satisfying way without getting absolutely everything perfect. Tacking on the ending from another game without making any effort to knit it into your game is a recipe for disaster, however. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, Youtube the ending for Deus Ex. Or watch the video mashup someone made of their endings: Shepard talking to the computer from Deus Ex. The two games' endings are so nearly identical that the resulting conversation is coherent.)

LOL

That's just incredible....how in the hell haven't they been sued by the writers of Deus Ex?

ME3's ending is almost word for word lifted from it.

Tin foil hat time.

Ever wonder why Final Fantasy XIII-2 randomly got a paid ME3 costume DLC less than a month after ME3's release? Odd considering Japan is one of BioWare's least successful locales.

Babylon 5 actors needs to stop dying.

R.I.P.

AlexMBrennan wrote...

Blasphemy! The one miniature giant space hamster must always be addressed by his true name.

Amen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch

aj2070 wrote...

Suppose it is okay to speculate but they did confirm that Matriarch Athetya is Liara's "father".

Yes, there's an entire dialog exchange dedicated to their reconnection. It even awards you some War Assets if you eavesdrop on the whole conversation (Aethyta gives Liara a squad of Asari Commandos; she's too old for a pony).

Space Cows; a shifty-looking one tried to steal my creds.

Easiest way? They'll just make a multiplayer horde game with no single-player story mode.

You know, if I get bitten by a snake and go to the doctor, he or she is going to administer an antivenom and monitor my progress to minimize the cellular damage caused by the venom. They will try to do whatever they can to ensure I leave healthy and happy.

If the BSN is "toxic", then maybe the resident doctors should have done more than give empty thank yous for feedback, turn a cold shoulder to criticism, and go into early retirement. Maybe they should have addressed and treated the cause and not simply tried to overwrite or change the symptoms.

Daniel_N7 wrote...

Here's something I wrote for... some blog. Just my two cents...

It’s easy to compartmentalize the generic problem of the “toxicity of gamer forums” but that’s also a way to circumvent the real issue here.

Fan backlash to Mass Effect 3 was astronomical and BioWare has been deeply hurt by it. Yes, the whiners ruined their year and got in the way of their stroll down the red carpet to the GOTYs.

Maybe we should look back. Remember a time when hundreds, thousands of Mass Effect fan blogs out there on the web were raving about the upcoming Mass Effect 3, for months on end. Celebrating every new video (“femshep trailer yey”), every bit of concept art (“is that a prothean squadmate omg!?”), every piece of music (“omg Clint Mansell is awesome”).

Mass Effect 3 was a sure win. Mass Effect 1 and 2 had set the ground for an absolute homerun. And then something happened that I’ve never seen before in my life as a gamer. You would go through those blogs and it was an emotional wasteland. The ending of the game did that. BioWare/EA’s PR mess made it worse.

Sure, we can compartmentalize the worst of the worst – threats, abuse – to catalog “the fans” and discard this phenomenon. But that’s a questionable way of illustrating everything that happened. Sure, it was a messy flame war – this is the internet, after all. But I remember reading many well spoken, assertive arguments, discussing every single aspect of the game and the ending to realize that the Mass Effect fan community has many educated and interesting members as well.

I feel bad for David Gaider and many talented professionals that have been deeply hurt by all this. But BioWare should make a better effort to maintain an honest and open dialog with its community, and unfortunately that’s not what they did. We’re not all trolls at BioWare Social Network. If BioWare feels alienated from its own community, they need to look within as well.

This.

Honestly, on my first playthrough, it was probably when Liara was dodging bullets while crawling in an air vent. Yeah. Right. Whatever.

Followed by her unceremoniously killing the Cerberus guys with that look on her face...

Not that I wanted her to get shot or anything... I was just, like, uh huh. Sure.

I could ignore most of the bad dialog due to ME2's Brick Shepard. I could ignore the lack of information about James because I was willing to give him a chance. And my first Shepard had Ashley as the VS, so I could accept that she wouldn't really trust me.

But Liara magically dodging assault rifle bullets and enjoying killing people? Yeah. No.

I'll take it one step further:

Soldier: James Vega
Infiltrator: Garrus Vakarian
Engineer: Mordin Solus (or Tali'Zorah, if he's locked out for story reasons)
Sentinel: Miranda Lawson
Adept: Liara T'Soni
Vanguard: Urdnot Wrex (or Jack, if he's locked out for story reasons)

Liara T'Soni
Falere
Tela Vasir
Shiala
Councilor Tevos
Aria T'Loak

The same reason some foodstuffs turn green after a while: it's rotten.

Niftu Cal

I stopped my last playthrough after shish-kabobbing Kai Leng in Priority: Cerberus Headquarters. That was, like, 5 months ago.