They don't want feedback they don't agree with.

DA:I says hello, though.

I'll take the fact that they're shutting us down as an official "YES".

To be fair though, when the negativity is overwhelming as it often is here, it becomes the norm and we feed into each other with negativity and even if most people try to be rational about it, BioWare is probably right to some extent to let this go. I genuinely wonder how bad the ME3 controversy would've been if not for this place to blow it more out of proportion than it already was. People have seen terrible endings before, but only a dedicate forum like this would get these thesis like writeups and documentations of it.

It's the same with Witcher 3 except that board isn't quite as popular due to when it was formed. Most people loved that game universally and barely anyone noticed the quality of the storytelling falls off a cliff in the finale when you look at impressions anywhere but a few select comments or articles but especially the CDPR board had strong support for the "How to fix the third act" topics.

I do wonder what it'll be like if ME:A turns out to be bad though, now that there will be no BSN to stir up the pot.

Personally I find GameFAQs and NeoGAF to be a much more diverse source of discussion. There's none of the crybaby threads about romance demands or "anti-SJW" posts.

wat

wat indeed. I'm gonna scoot off to bed now and save myself from further embarrassment.

No more repeating idioms. Example:

 

Hackett: ...I'll throw everyone who can hold a hammer at it

 

a little while later

 

Garrus: ...yeah, maybe someone who can hold a hammer

 

 

There are tons more examples of characters repeating lines from other characters, usually using really bad out of date north American slang.

This is a common issue as well where you can tell a writer is mistakenly reusing the good phrases they saved up for multiple characters and places. It's like how too many characters' most personal comment have to do with buying drinks. It's so boring and lacking in personality. Garrus says it, Jacob says it, James says it, I think even Tali says it, and they say it in Dragon Age Inquisition too.

Shepard also says "We fight or we die" at the end too if you pick renegade during his final speech. Also, Anderson in the opening says "...and so does the comittee" at the end of 3 consequtive lines of dialogue.

I've also noticed Mac is a fan of saying "in turn" a lot on twitter which ironically the Starchild said too.

Yeah they need to let go of the headline sort of dialogue. There's so many platitudes and generic dialogue in ME3 where it becomes pretentious about how deep it wants itself to be where every line has to be really theatrical and impactful like in a Christopher Nolan movie. The worst thing about those movies is that they popularized **** dialogue along with the admittedly complex plots and cinematic wonder.

You don't want characters to spout lines it sounds like they heard from other movies or impactful-sounding phrases all the time. I remember in ME3 a lot of it was even nonsensical but they went with it anyway because it sounded cool or something like when some guy says "Next time there's going to be blood. REAL blood!" as opposed to blood that isn't real?

Or the popular to hate defense comittee scene or the Kid going "Everyone is dying". Fun fact it was even worse at some point. In a PC mod fans dug up another unused line where the kid goes "You can't defeat them all!". Note that's also a Nolan-like cliche, to write children as if they're very mature. I don't know what's up with that but I would guess that certain writers lack the common sense to recognize that childrens don't talk like adults.

Lol, Hey, Bioware can you hear us! Go outside, become more social. Get more social skills!

That's not how these things work, you don't get to stick racist slogans on your stuff and than crank the wide eyed innocence to eleven.

I misread the latter word so I mistook this for saying that I can't say there's racism for elves but not black people

The whole Hanar mission on the Citadel where you magically save the Hanar homeworld by not making the indoctrinated ambassador upload some virus was also a really disgusting attempt at comedy. It's a serious game with a real sense of weight and grit and they make the quest to decide the fate of all hanar and Drell a joke? What the heck? "You big. stupid. jellyfish!" ha-ha-ha-ha

Joker: "So, Thessia huh? I guess the Asari would be wishing they had fewer dancers and more commandoes about now." It's so obvious it's supposed to be an out-of-line comment but it's out of character for Joker to be this tactless when he makes jokes. It only contributed to the forcedness of Shepard getting angry afterwards.

The more I emotionally detach from the trilogy from not having thought of or played it in a year or more the more I know I'm just generally apathetic towards it and especially ME3. ME1 and 2 are good games, that's never gonna change in my mind but the whole thing was soured by how much negative rep it got after the fiasco of ME3's ending and for me ME3 just in general. It's not completely bad but the overall impression matters the most and mine is a bad one.

But based on how good Mass Effect is whenever it's good, I'm definitely looking forward to Andromeda. It's a chance for a fresh start and an entry to the series where you don't have massive expectations beforehand because there are no hanging plot-threads that need to be shown and resolved; it's all new stuff here, so it's hard to be too demanding as a fan. I'm skeptical because of what I've thought about Bioware lately of course, but overall I feel like I'm just going to receive ME:A with open arms and enjoy it for what it is. Then I'll always join in on the ranting and ******-talk in here afterwards as usual because I will always find some grievances in every game and inevitably people are gonna be pissed about something and then I realize some of the criticisms are right and we end up picking out all the things that sucked in the end and start to think the entire game sucks ass

Finally someone is able to see that it's the fault of both parties (BW and Fanbase) rather than another "evil fanbase ran poor BW away" narrative.  Nine out of ten, a failure to communicate is the fault of everyone involved and BW had their own faults as well.  Sure fans went nuts over ME3's ending but BW's backhanded apology didn't help matters either. And I've seen some of Gaider's posts on this forum, often times he aided in fueling the flames just as anyone here.  Him running away from Tumblr doesn't surprise me.  He seems to be doing well on Twitter though.  Where he just tweets one sided convos about his diet plan.

 

Edit: I had nothing against the ME3 endings and I like the addition of the EC.  I just wasn't invested in the endings enough to care. But yeah, both BW and the fans handled that whole thing poorly.

Lately he's complaining about how bad the Beamdog community is. I get it's frustrating but as a big-name developer/writer as he is you can't ****** act like that in public and expect it to be inconsequential. He's only making matters worse for himself and his company by defending it. In general, I've been told to (senior developer here, Ooooh!) that it's an absolute no-go to respond to comments to be defensive about your work. Me and a mini-company just put out a game recently and it's no big deal lol but my leader made a point to say we now have certain rules in regards to commentary and quote-unquote "PR" to followers or fans. Basically the point is to "engage proffessionally". I think it's debateable whether the way Bioware interacts with their biggest fans or badmouths their badmouthers on Twitter is "professional". I understand though that each employee is responsible for their own accounts though but they also affect the reputation of the company.

Or they just got tired of being screamed at or have someone like you continually wag your finger in their face and tell them they have been bad boys and girls...... did you even read what you wrote?  You came off far more entitled and pretentious than the company you are complaining about.
 

No, no. I know it's really easy to pick apart every fault they have and I understand how hard game development is and can only imagine what it's like to run such a big company like Bioware with that much at stake, but that said I stand by what I said that I think they have a bad way of presenting themselves publically. I guess some of their fan-events is fine and healthy, but their last 2-3 E3s for example had even people who don't usually critique them say "that was lame", like certain people at IGN or Kinda Funny or the Gametrailers crew. The way they make videos featuring themselves taking about how good they are is disingenuous AF.

"Stories are timeless and they last forever" "Our Award Winning writers at BioWare" etc. can this company with any audacity claim these things right now? They did last year and the year before that and they have nothing to show for it and even non-fan/morons like myself have started to notice it.

I know about drew karpyshyn but Mac Walters took the reigns later and he did some good stuff. I do miss drew though. He would never had stood for those endings.

I like Mac because he's apparently very on-hands with everything right down to giving voice direction and designing Action Mode in ME3 lol. I think he should avoid making large-scale plots in the future though. ME3 had potential but boy, it was such a mess, not that it was an easy thing to do, but there were so many things in the scenario that came across as really strange. I can't put my finger on it because ME2's plot isn't that good either, but I didn't notice how bad it was at first whereas in ME3 I constantly felt developments were being thrown at a wall and they reintroduced elements of ME1's plot just to misuse them or how TIM's role was very forced and lacked a sense of theme.

I know about drew karpyshyn but Mac Walters took the reigns later and he did some good stuff. I do miss drew though. He would never had stood for those endings.

I like Mac because he's apparently very on-hands with everything right down to giving voice direction and designing Action Mode in ME3 lol. I think he should avoid making large-scale plots in the future though. ME3 had potential but boy, it was such a mess, not that it was an easy thing to do, but there were so many things in the scenario that came across as really strange. I can't put my finger on it because ME2's plot isn't that good either, but I didn't notice how bad it was at first whereas in ME3 I constantly felt developments were being thrown at a wall and they reintroduced elements of ME1's plot just to misuse them or how TIM's role was very forced and lacked a sense of theme.

Hm. Maybe you're right. But I feel despite of their inclusivity that they had a lot of sexualized and objectified female characters in ME2 and DA2 right around the time when Batman Arkham City also had a lot of sexualization and I think other games in general around that 2010-2012 time-frame until suddenly from 2013 and onwards you have you Sarkeesian and everyone shouting about women rights and stuff and both movies and other games almost go in the opposite direction with representation of female characters, and in that sense I still feel like DA:I was too "response-driven" but maybe DA2 and ME2 were as well from their respective times. In general I think developers who attend panels end up going with the flow from seeing presentations and trendiness and that's important when selling a product of course.

I agree, I'm a gay guy but I usually only do the straight romances. DAI lacked in that, bit strange considering straight guys probably make up the majority of the fan base.

And this comes back to the fact that Bioware are too desperate to please everyone. I don't think they would be willing to make a gay-only game because what matters to them is the size of the audience and not the promotion for minorities when it really comes down to it. I would like to seem them do it, but this is probably the big criticism I have of the movie and game industry's SJW attitude in general; they are simply jumping on a bandwagon but don't seem to be doing it for themselves or for the people they seem to want to address.

Kabraxal. I guess I actually agree. I wish maybe in the future Bioware would give the romanceable characters more agency though so it's not always the player who hits on them until they have sex with you. It would be nice if they had a character who hits on you until you go "I'm not straight, sorry." or whatever. 

At this point, his mug should probably read "while heterosexual male tears" since a lot of the flak for games like Inquisition came from those screaming "SJW!" because Bioware dared have lesbian only romances, a gay only romance, and a transgender character.  Seriously, less than 5 percent of the total game and there were people that went insane over it.  And this is from the same dev that decided to relax their "censorship" and actually show quite a bit of nudity... if anything, Bioware bucked the SJW trend since some of those moments and DLC clothing can be looked at as the "evil" sexualisation (not arguing against those additions just to be clear).   I just don't get it sometimes. 

The only thing I have with Inquisition in this regard is how it seemed to have more emphasis on the... what can you call it, segregation(?) of sexuality in romances and different accents and skin colors. I don't care about skin colors, personally. It's a fantasy setting where if there's any sense of allegory to history of racial oppression they use elves rather than blacks because it's socially responsible and can be taken without being seen as racism that relates to the real world, and it's not based in history so they have no incentive to be pro-white. But to go back to sexuality, it did bother me but in an overbearing way, that I know they are trying to be inclusive because it's the nature of the game, being an RPG that highly focuses on self-customization, power-fantasy and player-agency in general but where increasingly Bioware gives supporting characters more agency as well, so it's not for the player to decide whether a woman wants him or not or whether they'll be straight for him or not.

I disliked it in an overbearing way because I'm a straight white guy and I couldn't help but compare it to ME2 where I had a lot of fun trying out all different romances on subsequent playthroughs, where in DA:I I really only had two options as a male straight character and I had no desire to play as a gay character since i'm attempting to immerse myself. But alas, I understood it; it's because there is parity and something for every type of gamer which is more satisfying across a wider audience. So anything else is greediness.

But still, the sense of "inclusivity" did slightly diminish my impression of the game. It's was trying so much to respect everybody that there was also less enjoyment for each player. I welcome the changes, but honestly, I'd rather maybe some day they said "Okay, you have a character who is homosexual by default, and you have 4 options per gender" than trying to squeeze as much which then becomes little in for everybody. I wouldn't personally enjoy playing as a homosexual but I guess I would play it still if I could opt out of romance and the characters were good nonetheless as well as a great plot.

I just think DA:I is too transparent in how safe it is in trying to pander to as many people as possible. People jokingly calls it a "high fantasy wonderland" and I have to agree on that sentiment, unfortuantely... no it's not a positive. I guess it's okay since Bioware games are so player-driven, but I couldn't help but prefer how after all I had a clearer defined personality and character arc in other games and that being straight-only (IIRC) in KOTOR2 and ME1 for example enabled a lot of tension between the romanceable characters, that was lacking in DA:I due to how they had to add in a lot of extra dialogue in total which became one or two casual sentences from a character going "So, I've heard you like Cassandra, eh?"

No, they have certain employees who relish in their most childish fanboys's attention like they're assigned to take care of people at an institute for disabled people. Then they have other employees who have that PR mask on who pander a lot to the audience when making presentations and act positive about things but really deep down are just doing their job, and then there's people who seem relatively unfazed by whatever fans may be thinking.

I think the latter trait is the only thing I admire about Mr. Walters when I've seen his public appearances. He seems to like the fandom but he also seems to have a sense of ego that makes him feel like whatever he makes is valid and if there's flaws and people criticize it then that sucks but it's back on the horse.

The worst employees are those who occasionally snap back or complain about the behavior of certain parts of the fanbase. David Gaider's commentaries about this board being too toxic or his depressed rants on twitter about people who weren't nice is sympathetic but ultimately not one in his position should do. As a game developer you have to avoid addressing criticism too directly with your fanbase in the comment section. The best approach is the PR-response in some ways but I prefer the developers that seem to acknowledge the fan response but don't do it on a personal level. It can disarm them or get over their heads. Any response can, also critical.

Look at Neil Druckmann at Naughty Dog. I thought he had some well-deserved "auteur" status after the success of The Last of Us but at some point he got too much of it and started claiming his company had become too mature to have jokes about fat people in them or shoving his employee writer with a big repuation, Amy, out of the company due to some ego issues where he and his buddy decided to take over her project and throw out her work because they saw a way that would be better etc.

I can't shortly summarize Hideo Kojima either but he's my idol when it comes to developer people and how they can interact with their fans or the press. He's often put himself out there but he rarely does anything that comes across as unworthy or unrespectable IMO. He doesn't sit down with his most hardcore fans to talk about how good his own game is and he doesn't make generic marketing headlines for his own games that oversell them too much. He also admits the grievances he had working on certain games. I've never seen Bioware admit that the ending to ME3 didn't work out or that they regret how ME2's plot was developed for example. They don't seem to have that internal creator-passion. Instead they talk about how from a developer-standpoint ME1 was bad because the Mako wasn't well-designed and the combat wasn't all that good. In the Final Hours of ME3 I also liked to see more of how they had some struggles.

They would be a more respectable company if they more openly admitted to such things though, like the role of the Prothean in ME3 being cut and changed or how they produced the ME3 ending because they were still changing the plot right to the end of production. They may be afraid of losing face, but I think they are too hush-hush to the point where it makes them disingenuous and this is all the while they are a very public firm that make their own YouTube videos where they make scripted conversations about how good they are; they make E3 presentations where they praise themselves and they hold panels where they encourage fans to come and talk about their favorite romances.

They're just an entirely unrespectable company when it comes to how they communicate and how they work their audiences. Just incredible distasteful I find it, and i'm not excusing toxic or vehement fan-criticisms they may have received, but they really lack balls sometimes and come across as weak and disingenuous... and they are too freakin' self-absorbed for their own good. They are afraid of not looking perfect in the spotlight when it's really their own self-image of being "highly acclaimed" and "Greatest storytellers in the industry" yada yada that generates a lot of irritation towards them because they aren't speaking for everyone with those statements and everyone knows how much criticism they have received in the later years, so they should really just lay off with the self-admiration as a company, be a little more humble.

Unfortunately this is just how a lot of western industry culture is, and EA in general. Sony does this too, except they have more to show for it.

This explains everything.

Ever since the promo material of ME3 I have been. It started with the way Casey Hudson went on stage and said "this is all-out galactic war". Instant turnoff but I kept believing it was going to be fantastic. It didn't really happen and I couldn't believe it when I first played ME3 how streamlined and generic it had become with all the autodialogue and generic movie-wannabe stuff.

And with the ending I was definitely amazed they actually produced something as profoundly stupid as that, but I was more agitated at this company when I saw the way they handled the backlash; By staying silent and occasionally doing PR-scripted stuff like statements that emphasize the critical reception or talk around the issue at hand or an interview with Bioware employess by Bioware employees who cherry pick the conversation, to writers that project the issue into something as banal as "the fans' favorite character died" and stuff.

Just deeply, deeply disappointed. I think I'm playing Bioware's games from now on just knowing to expect less and it's going to take a super well-done project to convince me to believe in this company again. They really have something to prove, and I'm definitely not the only one who thinks that. If anything they had a good run from their old games to KOTOR and ME1 as well as DA:O but maybe it'll be known the day Bioware is no more that it was EA that ran them into the ground.

@SimonTheFrog: I genuinely wonder which Bioware game in the last 5 years you played that had polish.

What are your picks for lines or moments in the series that were meant to make you laugh but rather made you facepalm or say "Oh my god..."

My picks:

Vega has several in ME3:

1. "Mordin's like a frog on a hot rock in the middle of summer" My Reaction: "Haha-- wait, what?"

2. The line where he says something ordinary and then goes "Whuh, whah? What's so funny?"

Garrus being self-referential about calibrations in ME3

Jack's student saying "I will destory you" to make fun of Jack, who said it in ME2 during combat moves as an inside joke to generic enemies in ME1. Too much self-referential self-referentialness.

Jack not allowed to say the F word: "Screw you f... flight lieutenant". MR: "Ha-ha..."

Shepard making the "<:O" face to EDI. This one just annoyed me.

Every time EDI says "That was a joke" in ME3. Diminishing returns.

I don't know if this has been mentioned before but we need new hair. Badly.





Thoughts?

I want the option to choose hair like his and not a lump of fudge.

It'll have a lot a handful of abrupt "character-driven" side-missions that can barely be called stories.

It'll have a lot of dialogue that aims to reach for the stars but lack the context to be meaningful.

- "We humans have always been explorers. Blablabla, It's always been in our nature to stretch out our arms and reach up in our own butthole!"

It's going to have a system that monetizes your Colonization progress called "TEA" (Total Expansion Advancement) and for example, you'll need a TEA of 20% to unlock a vital story-mission. You earn TEA by taking down hostile outposts on other homeworlds or do pod-racing against other Mako-like vehicles and by setting up camps-- I mean bases around the world. The game makes you feel like you're accumulating points that will determine the ending you get but really it just unlocks it and goes up to 300% if you complete the game 100% and 200 of those percentages are practically pointless unless you enjoy doing fetchquests or extracting fuel and minerals by holding down a button when prompted in the Mako, which you'll need to do for 10 seconds in 400 different places.

The characters will get lots of raving fandom but in actuality they're not three-dimensional or tied into the story well at all.

Oh, and the main plot is going to suck ballz. It'll be about the player being a Mary Sue who becomes a historic figure in the advancement of the human Race in the Andromeda Galaxy by defeating a generic bad guy and setting up some bases, and on the side it will have the Ryder Family, full of the trademark BioWare daddy-issue stories. The father and mother is getting divorced and the brother is going through a phase. What will Ryder do to unite his/her family!? Something as lame as that.

When the game ends you'll have a feeling of emptiness becuase there really wasn't much of an arc to the story or any stand-out moments that weren't blatant setpieces where everything is all actiony and cool.

I'm expecting that because it's ME:A if you base it on DA:I. Hopefully it won't do that; BioWare said so, but they say a lot of things that end up being complete BS.

It feels especially weird because I felt ME2 moved the emphasis from being about humans to being even more about Aliens thanks to a less than interesting main plot involving humanity but a much more memorable and interesting series of subplots with each of your companions. They introduced new alien raced and made characters like Tali more human and appealing and at the end of that game I truly felt like aliens were on par with humans.

So it felt very alienating how ME3 returned to the "humans are special" trope. I don't expect it but I would like for ME:A to be a story about humans without turning them into the most special race next to the aliens.

Ever since the first actual promo-marketing stuff Mass Effect marketing has been terrible. Sure, the "distress beacon" trailer for ME1 was good but not as a trailer to what ME1 is; it misrepresents the game as being all about emergent gameplay which it isn't at all.

I really love the first trailer with Casey's voice-over though where they show pre-alpha footage of the game in the Flux and an early concept footage of the Galaxy Map. All they promised in concept was showed nicely and made it into the final product, not that exact gameplay, but in terms of features.

ME2 have some of the most confused marketing I think I've ever seen and ME3 just had the mantra of "reduce Mass Effect to the most basic element so idiots understand it" so all ME3 marketing was painfully generic; "Take Earth Back!", "Laser Swords!", "All out galactic war!"

ME:A's promo material has been so clueless that even still nobody really knows what this game is though. Either it's a video that feels like some strange advertisement of a guy jumping around in a desert in a spacesuit with a jetpack with cowboy vibes, or it's a video showing unfinished assets and a developer (Mac) saying the usual platitudes about how much bigger and better the new game is without giving any examples of what it actually is.

I have no idea what to expect from this game at all, seriously. The lack of a clear image of what this game is going to be beyond a basic concept for the setting makes me feel like I shouldn't expect anything good. To me it feels like the developers aren't confident in what they have so far when they choose not to show anything 3 years in a row when the game is coming out by next spring in little more than half a year, and no amount of Mac Walters telling me this game is going to be amazing is going to make me believe it. It feels like someone is just sticking their heads in the sand to me.

There is "why they made them" and then there is "how", and I'm not really holding my breath for either. How they work will either be something seemingly plausible sci-fi babble or some less-than-convincing vague talk about "energy, essence, it's very powerful yet very capable!" or some such nonsense.

Why they made them really contextualizes the whole premise in ways that really irk me to think about. Was it made because of the Reaper invasion, or did the invasion simply rush the development or what happened here?

In a way I hope the game isn't too much about this, but at the same time, it has to be. The Ark and colonizing humanity is the core theme of the game, it seems, so the more they make it clear how much an Ark can hold or what it takes to sustain it, how many resources it uses etc. the better; It's all part of knowing what's technically at stake if you don't succeed or it will end up feeling cookie-cuttery or like a cartoon and it can't because the atmosphere and visuals are aiming for realism.

Random science-trivia Mac Walters saw on Discovery.

https://twitter.com/...7330688?lang=da

JK

EDIT: Duude, ME3 is way more BSG inspired than ME2. ME3 is the mlitiaristic one. ME2 feels a lot more like a mix of Star Wars/Trek. ME3 also skimped way more on detailed science-y explanations like how BSG is kind of a loose story with lofty ideas about science and faith but its rich and gritty visuals make it seem more "realistic". BSG also had a nonsensical ending like ME3.