54 réponses à ce sujet

[WindOverTuchanka]

Well, your scenarios are pretty nice, and are not THAT hard to implement. But there's something common about them: they are consistently punishing to the Renegade/Failure style.

I might have liked them that way because I, too, play the 'failure' Shepard to experience his story as more challenging and dramatic compared to the baseline.

However, Bioware made ME3 based on a different design premise: both completionist players and failure players should not be cheated out of their chunk of content. So, yes, it was geared towards players who make their choices once and then replay that character indefinitely, not the group who wants to make their second playthrough contrasting. For Bioware, it's choices mattering across the entire fanbase, between different people, not just in a single player's mind. And it was a perfectly viable design decision, one that I cannot really critisize.

So I can live with choices mattering in subtle ways, through text messages without cutting first-time renegades out of content. I really liked Wrex/Wreav scenario, where killing Wrex for once benefits the renegade. Kudos to them for doing that.

[magechron]

*thinks back on Chrono Trigger and the many different endings you could get in that and wonders why Bioware couldn't follow a proven example of choices mattering.

[Fenderbaum]

Lyrandori...

Don't play many games then do you....

To the OP...awesome post...spot on

[Siansonea]

Lyrandori wrote...

If ME3 fully covered and fleshed out in great details all the possible and feasible variables coming from our ME1 and ME2's decisions then they would have needed months just to complete a few of them. It might have taken them more than five or six years to perhaps manage to do half of them. I remember when they said that there was a total of around a thousand variables in ME3, as results of ME1 + ME2 decisions. If that was true on paper, it certainly did not end up in the game. How many variables were "covered" (as little as it was) in ME3? Maybe 100? 200? The whole genophage sub-plot might have needed almost a full game on its own to cover all possible details.

The trilogy is very figurative overall, and players have to rely on a lot of head-canon, assumptions, conjuncture, speculation and a great dose of suspension of disbelief to connect the dots and fill up the holes, and the canyons in some cases. Simply put, ME3's real potential in scale was too much for anyone out there even if BioWare had been granted a decade to complete it, it still wouldn't have been enough. They had to compress everything they could and only cover the "essential" parts, even if what they did cover ended up mostly as cosmetic changes.

In the end, however, no one else in the video gaming industry has ever managed to do a trilogy like Mass Effect, and arguably enough once DA3 will be released the same will be said about that trilogy despite the shortcomings and mishaps.

Oh, is it too hard to do what they promised? Well, I accept that. THEY SHOULDN'T HAVE PROMISED IT, THEN.

[Siansonea]

WindOverTuchanka wrote...

Well, your scenarios are pretty nice, and are not THAT hard to implement. But there's something common about them: they are consistently punishing to the Renegade/Failure style.

I might have liked them that way because I, too, play the 'failure' Shepard to experience his story as more challenging and dramatic compared to the baseline.

However, Bioware made ME3 based on a different design premise: both completionist players and failure players should not be cheated out of their chunk of content. So, yes, it was geared towards players who make their choices once and then replay that character indefinitely, not the group who wants to make their second playthrough contrasting. For Bioware, it's choices mattering across the entire fanbase, between different people, not just in a single player's mind. And it was a perfectly viable design decision, one that I cannot really critisize.

So I can live with choices mattering in subtle ways, through text messages without cutting first-time renegades out of content. I really liked Wrex/Wreav scenario, where killing Wrex for once benefits the renegade. Kudos to them for doing that.

And that's why my ideas are just rough concepts. Maybe in about half the scenarios, having someone out of the picture actually makes your task easier. Especially if it's non-squadmates. I do think there should be some "punishment" for getting your squadmates killed, that's poor leadership by anyone's definition, "renegade" or not. Especially since there's no Paragon/Renegade bump for assigning Jacob to the vents, Grunt as 2nd squad leader, etc. You just picked the wrong people for those jobs. So punishing the player for those choices, or at least showing that those choices had real consequences, would have been nice. 

I really do get tired of people letting them off the hook for this though. I keep coming back to a basic principle: Don't promise something you can't deliver. As we've seen from Padok Wiks, Urdnot Wreav, Not Legion™, Not Tali™, Oriana Lawson, Random Ex-Cerberus Scientist, Random Aralakh Company Krogan, Absentee Mom Samara, Not Sparatus/Not Tevos/Not Valern, and the "Rachni Abomination", BioWare's idea of "your choices will have consequences" is far different from what most of us had in mind. I mean, BOTH Asari Councilors kowtow to Aria T'Loak? BOTH Salarian Councilors hide under the same table? BOTH Turian Councilors broker a deal with Shepard to enlist the krogan to help save Palaven? Lazy lazy lazy, but hey, if it's good enough for you, who am I to argue? 

Modifié par Siansonea II, 03 avril 2012 - 05:02 .