andy69156915 wrote...
Yeah, I am officially ignoring those people as of my last post. They're not worth responding to if they don't want to say anything real or without being a dick about it. Frankly, if they don't care then they should just skip the thread and not come in and act like a jerk. But that would take actual maturity, so of course that's far too much to expect from people on this board. I should have seen it coming.
And that's the majority of the BSN as I've often described it in the past. Don't worry, I empathise. There are just far too many anti-intellectual thugs around here, and they tend to like to gang up and attack the person rather than respond to any points we have intelligently. Other than them, you have the demagogues who like rallying the peanut gallery with appeals to emotion and prejudices. It's funny, because the people who tend to not do this are the ones that agree with us, which makes a good debate a rare beast indeed. And for what it's worth, I also think that ME1 spread itself too thin and didn't really accomplish anything. ME1 is BioWare's Oblivion, plain and simple. It just wasn't a great game, it was an unfocused mess that didn't know what it wanted to be and was going far too much for mainstream appeal.
After ME1, Mass Effect started to figure out what it wanted to be and the writers and designers began to get behind that, 2 was a step in the right direction, and 3 was the ultimate culmination of it. The gameplay, the story, the personality of it all came together with a laser focus in ME3. They dropped the elements that just weren't relevant and only served to dilute the process, and delivered a genuinely enjoyable experience. They nailed down the gameplay so well that even the multiplayer is enjoyable, as it is. I feel that with ME1 they were trying to be CoD in space meets Dragon Age, and that... didn't work. ME2 had that problem to a lesser degree, with powers not having their own personality and weaponds not being balanced. In ME3 they figured that problem out.
Also, in ME1 and ME2, they had a bunch of writers working on the same characters. Too many cooks spoil the broth. In ME3, they had certain writers overlooking certain characters and plot points, they finally seemed to understand that having multiple writers write one character leads to inconsistencies in both plot and personality. HYR 2.0 brought up this problem in a thread about Legion, which was caused by Legion having more than one writer. When you're doing an RPG, it's best not to have the writers bounce around, but to have each writer assigned to a certain task or group of tasks, and to never have those tasks overlap with another writer.
That's why the representations of Legion, Mordin, and Wrex were so good in ME3. And I hope they keep this approach for future games, because character writing has always been a huge problem for BioWare -- they've never really done it well. Even Lionhead have been better at character writing than them in the past. This is an area where they really needed to pull up their socks, to cure their long-running issue with unfocused, overly diversified, wooden characters. In ME3, it was possible to relate to most of the characters, due to this, because each character was the child of their respective writer. And they were written with clear motives in mind.
And then there's the Mako and the Hammerhead. Whilst they were fun, they drew development time away from other things -- that development time could have been spent on flushing out missions with more visually interesting levels. That's another area where I think ME1 and ME2 suffered -- the on foot levels were just dull. Not bad, per se, but just visually uninteresting. Can you think of a single area in Mass Effect 1 or 2 which had singularly brilliant aesthetics? I can think of numerous areas in ME3 which impressed me, but ME1 and 2 just seemed to be spread too thin, too much stuff, not enough good stuff. Sometimes less is more. I'd rather have fewer genuinely memorable environments than more environments which are bland.
Now, I know some people have hated BioWare for this and think the opposite. I've heard before that some have said that they "spent too much time working on skyboxes and pretty little corners," when they could have been working on side missions. But I disagree -- to the contrary, I think that if they'd spent too much time adding a ridiculous amount of side missions, then we'd end up with ME2 again, where the levels feel unfocused and they don't really represent what they're supposed to be. Here's an example: Compare the Geth dreadnaughts in ME2 and ME3. The ME2 dreadnaught felt like an organic base (sans windows), weirdly well lit and Citadel-like, the ME3 one actually felt correct and fixed these issues.
Ultimately, yes, ME3 could have been even better (especially Priority: Earth), but I think it's an iterative process for them and they're learning what works and what doesn't. While I don't think that ME3 is a perfect game, I do think it's hands down one of the best games BioWare has ever put together, and definitely the best Mass Effect game. Sometimes you just have to stop being clouded by nostalgia to see the truth of things, but there's also that ME3 got more philosophical/symbolic than previous entries, and I don't think people took kindly to that and as such they're attacking it in any way they can just to make it look bad.
I can but shrug.
At the end of the day, though, ME3 is definitely the best we've had thus far. And I look forward to future endeavours.
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