65 réponses à ce sujet

[Dean_the_Young]

AlanC9 wrote...

AlexMBrennan wrote...
I think you have this wrong - ME2 is a game trying to tell a bunch of side stories, and the side missions do fit the game (Shepard is waiting for the elusive collectors to make a move so we might just as well deal with Jacob's daddy issues while we wait).

Me3 increases the urgency by having the Reapers invade everywhere and start killing everyone, and it now makes no more sense for Shepard to go play stupid fighting games whilst the Reapers are everywhere killing everyone.  

I think we've talked about this before, but I don't see how the ME3 plot is substantively different from the ME2 plot in this regard. In ME2 Shepard waits for the Collectors, in ME3 Shepard waits for the Crucible to be completed. (How long is that, anyway? )

One thing I'll throw out is how ME2 and ME3 differed in  presenting their core plot story missions.

ME2 frequently made the core missions mandatory the moment they came forward: only the Derilect Reaper and the Suicide Mission could actually be delayed indefinately, and there was no apparent need to hurry for the Derilect Reaper. This helped the point about waiting around and waiting for something to do, as for most of those ambivalent quests you had no other immediate priority. Your aimless exploration phase was before your objective identified phase.

ME3 put that in reverse, usually giving you an objective of immediate importance and then letting you run around and doing whatever. There were two main points before the point of no return that you had buffer time where you were waiting for necessary requirements: Mordin creating his genophage cure, and the Quarians trying to find the Rannoch base. Both of these were points to do a few missions before moving on... but both of them also gave you those immediate arc sub-missions as well. Otherwise, Shepard would usually be left with some immediate goal to reach for the next story mission, and not much reason to wait around to do it.

Sure, ME3 had Shepard waiting for the Crucible, but it's main story was generally a sequence of immediate priorities. The main exceptions I can think of are the pre-Citadel Coup, and the pre-Rannoch arc: otherwise, Shepard almost always has something relevant to winning the war to do.

[Dean_the_Young]

katamuro wrote...

AlanC9 wrote...

katamuro wrote...
That and several decisions also stemming from the departments of EA rather than developers lead to stupid things like total replaceability of all characters. Multi-player requirement~(multiplayer itself was really good) Deaths of many supporting characters offscreen and the war assets that never get used. Also the retcon of battle for the Citadel from ME1.

Huh? EA forced Bio to make characters replaceable? I thought  ME2 did that.  And what was retconned about the Citadel battle?

I'm also not sure MP was EA's idea -- the Bio guys have said that they always wanted to do it.. Anyway, iMP doesn't matter. No MP revenue in ME3, no MP funding for ME3. For SP it's a wash.

I rather doubt that they came up with "ME3 is the perfect place to jump in". And all of their assurances that players only playing ME3 wont miss out on content. That was done to get new people to play it even if they have never heard of ME before. That was more than likely the department that wanted to sell to all. Same goes with addition of "narrative" mode where you dont make any choices. As for MP, if you havent noticed all the games lately "need" MP, Uncharted, Tomb Raider. Anything where it can be stuck in its getting stuck in. 

They never claimed that players only playing ME3 wouldn't miss out on content. Nor was narrative mode ever presented as for their benfit, and if you can't imagine why some people might enjoy it on later playthroughs you lack imagination.

The fact that multiplayer is common with modern games doesn't actually challenge Alan's point, which is that the developers have mentioned that they had wanted to include MP from the beginning. MP isn't something that was slapped on at the mandate of EA against their wills- it was something they had been looking at from the beginning, even before EA.

What was retconned about the Citadel battle? Well how about that in ME2 Shepard clearly states that 8 cruisers were lost from the 5th Fleet. But in ME3 suddenly ALL fleets have lost ships and the reason for it is stated as the Citadel battle. And yes ME2 did that too but I thought there would be more for the players who did not start at the end. 

Most the current fleets with ships lost are said to be so because the immediate conflict, not the Citadel battle. You should re-read those war asset entries.

[katamuro]

[quote]
What was retconned about the Citadel battle? Well how about that in ME2 Shepard clearly states that 8 cruisers were lost from the 5th Fleet. But in ME3 suddenly ALL fleets have lost ships and the reason for it is stated as the Citadel battle. And yes ME2 did that too but I thought there would be more for the players who did not start at the end. 

[/quote]Most the current fleets with ships lost are said to be so because the immediate conflict, not the Citadel battle. You should re-read those war asset entries.
[/quote]

Info and quotes taken from http://masseffect.wi...Assets/Alliance
I did and here are the quotes:
First Fleet
UPDATED (If used to save the Council)
Military Strength:[/b] -25
This fleet lost a third of its vessels protecting the Council during the Battle of the Citadel two years ago. Unfortunately, the Alliance did not have time to rebuild the fleet to its previous strength before the Reapers invaded.Third Fleet:

UPDATED (If used to save the Council)
Military Strength:[/b] -25
This fleet lost a third of its vessels protecting the Council during the Battle of the Citadel two years ago. Unfortunately, the Alliance did not have time to rebuild the fleet to its previous strength before the Reapers invaded.

Only the Fifth participated in the battle as told by another quote:
With advice from the team, Shepard opens a communication channel and gets Joker... who has the Fifth Fleet just waiting for the Commander's word once the mass relays are unlocked. Shepard has to decide between sending the Fleet to defend the Destiny Ascension and save the Council, letting the Council die, or focusing on Sovereign. Once the orders are given, Joker brings the Fleet through the nearby mass relay as Shepard opens the Citadel's ward arms.

Modifié par katamuro, 18 février 2014 - 01:40 .

[Dean_the_Young]

And where does that wiki page, or the game, say that only the Fifth fleet participated? In ME1, Joker talks about the entire Acturius Fleet as everything Hacket could round up in time. In ME2, Shepard talks about ships lost saving the Destiny Ascension but not about total losses in the battle.

Not, mind you, that ME2 was particularly consistent with its own depiction of the difference in the battles and the value of the ships therein. There's also the difference in the Human influence in the Council, which opens the door for the Alliance to have the resources to replace the losses in time.


All in all, besides number discrepancy (which the planet scans alone have loads of), what's the major retcon? Do these arbitrary numbers suddenly reverse the established impetus of the plot's narrative, that the Alliance took a substantial military weakening if it saved the Council?

[katamuro]

Dean_the_Young wrote...

And where does that wiki page, or the game, say that only the Fifth fleet participated? In ME1, Joker talks about the entire Acturius Fleet as everything Hacket could round up in time. In ME2, Shepard talks about ships lost saving the Destiny Ascension but not about total losses in the battle.

Not, mind you, that ME2 was particularly consistent with its own depiction of the difference in the battles and the value of the ships therein. There's also the difference in the Human influence in the Council, which opens the door for the Alliance to have the resources to replace the losses in time.


All in all, besides number discrepancy (which the planet scans alone have loads of), what's the major retcon? Do these arbitrary numbers suddenly reverse the established impetus of the plot's narrative, that the Alliance took a substantial military weakening if it saved the Council?

Ah yeah of course absence of concrete evidence to prove one thing is complete proof that the other thing is right. 

[Iakus]

Dean_the_Young wrote...

And where does that wiki page, or the game, say that only the Fifth fleet participated? In ME1, Joker talks about the entire Acturius Fleet as everything Hacket could round up in time. In ME2, Shepard talks about ships lost saving the Destiny Ascension but not about total losses in the battle.

Not, mind you, that ME2 was particularly consistent with its own depiction of the difference in the battles and the value of the ships therein. There's also the difference in the Human influence in the Council, which opens the door for the Alliance to have the resources to replace the losses in time.


All in all, besides number discrepancy (which the planet scans alone have loads of), what's the major retcon? Do these arbitrary numbers suddenly reverse the established impetus of the plot's narrative, that the Alliance took a substantial military weakening if it saved the Council?

Still doesn't explain how eight cruisers (and yes it was eight, Shepard can name them all in ME2 while talking to al-Jilani) represents a third of two fleets.  ME3 specifies that these losses were acrued while defending the Council.  Not in the overall battle.  Particularly when Shepard also mentions that the Citadel Fleet lost twenty in the same battle

[FlyingSquirrel]

As much as I love Mass Effect, its premise is fundamentally problematic. It boils down to, "Here is this extraordinarily complex and fascinating universe for you to explore. Now go stop some invincible superbeings from obliterating it, and also sort out some unrelated hostage crises and criminal schemes along the way."

ME3, for all the flak it takes, probably dealt with this the most effectively by introducing the war assets system and giving every mission at least some connection to the Reaper War. Yes, there's too much focus on Cerberus, but it's not as if Cerberus are just some pesky merc gang - they're actively sabotaging the war effort and their leader is indoctrinated.

ME2 works around it by not having the entire galaxy in immediate danger and giving you crew members who do actually need their sidequests completed to perform at peak capacity. (In fact, if Shepard walks past the crew members in the bridge corridor and the crew quarters often enough early in the game, the Collectors apparently just take a break, because you don't hear about any more attacks after those dialogues are exhausted.) ME1, on the other hand, has a "Race Against Time" that is in fact no such thing, and apparently all of the Alliance's bomb squads and hostage negotiators are on vacation since Hackett calls Shepard every time there's some random crisis somewhere. In retrospect, they should have either given Shepard a reason to suspect a larger conspiracy that might involve these seemingly unrelated events somehow or not made the scope and immediacy of the Reaper threat clear until later in the game.

It's true that open worlds are tricky to integrate with clear, forward-moving narratives. Even in Fallout: New Vegas, for example, you do reach a point, after going to the Strip, where the tension seems to heighten and everyone starts talking as if the NCR/Legion showdown is going to happen soon, and yet if you want to delay it indefinitely, you can do so by just not triggering the prerequisite quests. On the other hand, the game designers can't be expected to anticipate or preclude every possible way in which a player might choose to screw with the format.

[Iakus]

FlyingSquirrel wrote...

ME3, for all the flak it takes, probably dealt with this the most effectively by introducing the war assets system and giving every mission at least some connection to the Reaper War. Yes, there's too much focus on Cerberus, but it's not as if Cerberus are just some pesky merc gang - they're actively sabotaging the war effort and their leader is indoctrinated.

Problem with the War Asset system is that it's completely arbitrary, and the numbers do nothing but sill up a bar. It's not like finding different War Assets makes unlocking different outcomes easier, or anything like that. 

ME2 works around it by not having the entire galaxy in immediate danger and giving you crew members who do actually need their sidequests completed to perform at peak capacity. (In fact, if Shepard walks past the crew members in the bridge corridor and the crew quarters often enough early in the game, the Collectors apparently just take a break, because you don't hear about any more attacks after those dialogues are exhausted.) ME1, on the other hand, has a "Race Against Time" that is in fact no such thing, and apparently all of the Alliance's bomb squads and hostage negotiators are on vacation since Hackett calls Shepard every time there's some random crisis somewhere. In retrospect, they should have either given Shepard a reason to suspect a larger conspiracy that might involve these seemingly unrelated events somehow or not made the scope and immediacy of the Reaper threat clear until later in the game.

The Collectors are barely in ME2 at all.  And given the number of mercs Shepard fights across the game, we might as well have made them the ones kidnapping colonists, and save a few art resources.

As for ME1, yeah, but that would have required planning.

And the main quest is poorly named.  Especially since ANderso's advice is "Saren's gone, don't even try to find him"

[Dean_the_Young]

katamuro wrote...

Dean_the_Young wrote...

And where does that wiki page, or the game, say that only the Fifth fleet participated? In ME1, Joker talks about the entire Acturius Fleet as everything Hacket could round up in time. In ME2, Shepard talks about ships lost saving the Destiny Ascension but not about total losses in the battle.

Not, mind you, that ME2 was particularly consistent with its own depiction of the difference in the battles and the value of the ships therein. There's also the difference in the Human influence in the Council, which opens the door for the Alliance to have the resources to replace the losses in time.


All in all, besides number discrepancy (which the planet scans alone have loads of), what's the major retcon? Do these arbitrary numbers suddenly reverse the established impetus of the plot's narrative, that the Alliance took a substantial military weakening if it saved the Council?

Ah yeah of course absence of concrete evidence to prove one thing is complete proof that the other thing is right. 

Now that's silly. A lack of concrete evidence to prove on thing simply means that you don't have evidence to claim one thing. In this case, the claim that no one except Fifth Fleet was involved in the Battle of the Citadel.

There's only an inherent issue if that assumption is true, and if it's not it's easy to rationalize it away. Perhaps when Shepard talks about 8 cruisers, (s)he's referring to those lost in the initial charge to save the Council- certainly we don't get any comprehensive battle tally in any ending. And perhaps getting a hold of the Citadel and Council leads the Alliance to replacing losses faster than it could otherwise have done.

But it be this way? No, but it's a way to resolve a minor potential problem. It's pretty standard when dealing with Bioware's chronic struggle with any concrete numbers of scale.After all, this is the same setting whose official promotional material can't decide whether the galaxy has a population in the billions or trillions, and who spends most of ME2 wavering between whether the Collectors have abducted tens of thousands or millions of colonists, and not in an ascending order either.

[Dean_the_Young]

iakus wrote...

FlyingSquirrel wrote...

ME3, for all the flak it takes, probably dealt with this the most effectively by introducing the war assets system and giving every mission at least some connection to the Reaper War. Yes, there's too much focus on Cerberus, but it's not as if Cerberus are just some pesky merc gang - they're actively sabotaging the war effort and their leader is indoctrinated.

Problem with the War Asset system is that it's completely arbitrary, and the numbers do nothing but sill up a bar. It's not like finding different War Assets makes unlocking different outcomes easier, or anything like that. 

Outline a system to reflect choices that wouldn't be arbitrary.

Since filling up the War Assets bar is unlocking different outcomes, that's exactly what they are doing like.

[FlyingSquirrel]

iakus wrote...
Problem with the War Asset system is that it's completely arbitrary, and the numbers do nothing but sill up a bar. It's not like finding different War Assets makes unlocking different outcomes easier, or anything like that. 

True, but at least there's a narrative tie-in there. I'd have liked to see, for example, a cutscene of Samara taking down some banshees during Priority: Earth if you went to the monastery, but at least she doens't disappear entirely after that mission and you are told that she's helping with the war. It could have been better, sure, but it's still an improvement over games where the sidequests are just hanging out there with no context.

(Though I do still wonder why Jacob's new job requires standing around in Huerta Memorial for the entire rest of the game.)

[Daemul]

von uber wrote...

If you remove the planet scanning from ME2 or the war asset collection from ME3 how much shorter would the game be?

A couple of hours for ME2. That's how long it takes me to get enough resources to get every upgrade anyway. For ME3, every side mission gives War Assets, including DLC, not to mention the planet scanning.

Modifié par Daemul, 18 février 2014 - 05:15 .

[Iakus]

Dean_the_Young wrote...

iakus wrote...

FlyingSquirrel wrote...

ME3, for all the flak it takes, probably dealt with this the most effectively by introducing the war assets system and giving every mission at least some connection to the Reaper War. Yes, there's too much focus on Cerberus, but it's not as if Cerberus are just some pesky merc gang - they're actively sabotaging the war effort and their leader is indoctrinated.

Problem with the War Asset system is that it's completely arbitrary, and the numbers do nothing but sill up a bar. It's not like finding different War Assets makes unlocking different outcomes easier, or anything like that. 

Outline a system to reflect choices that wouldn't be arbitrary.

Since filling up the War Assets bar is unlocking different outcomes, that's exactly what they are doing like.

Problem is it unlocks the same outcomes.

How about gathering certain resources lowers or removes bad outcomes or side effects?

How about putting the three choices (or more) on separate tracks?  Still not a great system, but it would at least be slightly more dynamic.  As it is the Reaper Heart and Brain are the only assets that have even a slightly similar effect.

[AlanC9]

Dean_the_Young wrote...
Sure, ME3 had Shepard waiting for the Crucible, but it's main story was generally a sequence of immediate priorities. The main exceptions I can think of are the pre-Citadel Coup, and the pre-Rannoch arc: otherwise, Shepard almost always has something relevant to winning the war to do.

Right. It's a version of the standard RPG thing where the player's actions control the speed of his opponent's actions, except this time how fast you do the Priority missions governs how fast the Crucible is built.

Someone here once joked that whoever named the missions must have come from the Bizarro world, since "Priority" means "do this one last."

It's a pity that Bio didn't rip off Starflight's clock when they were copying its planetary exploration. Taking that part would have made sense.

[AlanC9]

iakus wrote...

Problem is it unlocks the same outcomes.

How about gathering certain resources lowers or removes bad outcomes or side effects?

We already have that, you know.

How about putting the three choices (or more) on separate tracks?  Still not a great system, but it would at least be slightly more dynamic.  As it is the Reaper Heart and Brain are the only assets that have even a slightly similar effect.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by separate tracks there. Different categories of assets determine the functionality of different endings?

[ImaginaryMatter]

von uber wrote...

If you remove the planet scanning from ME2 or the war asset collection from ME3 how much shorter would the game be?

The one advantage that I found about ME2's system is that it doesn't take a lot of time. Only scanning the dozen or so wealthiest planets (list needed) as you encounter them is more than enough to upgrade everything.

[Iakus]

AlanC9 wrote...

iakus wrote...

Problem is it unlocks the same outcomes.

How about gathering certain resources lowers or removes bad outcomes or side effects?

We already have that, you know.

How about putting the three choices (or more) on separate tracks?  Still not a great system, but it would at least be slightly more dynamic.  As it is the Reaper Heart and Brain are the only assets that have even a slightly similar effect.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by separate tracks there. Different categories of assets determine the functionality of different endings?

Yes.

For example, ex-Cerberus personel and intel would go towards unlocking the Control ending.  Prothean artifacts would go towards Destroy, and geth/quarian researches and data would go towards Synthesis.  Three tracks And you can unlock any or all of them depending on what you gather.

Fleets and military personell would go towards prtoecting the Crucible, allowing for "better" outcomes since it takes less damage.

Thus you can get a huge fleet, but a cr*ppy Crucible that may not even fire once it docks.  Or a high-tech, elegant Crucible that gets shot full of holes on the way to docking. if you neglect your War Asset gathering (kinda like the low EMS runs we have now).

[CronoDragoon]

ImaginaryMatter wrote...

The one advantage that I found about ME2's system is that it doesn't take a lot of time. Only scanning the dozen or so wealthiest planets (list needed) as you encounter them is more than enough to upgrade everything.

It also seems appropriate to bring up that subsequent playthroughs give you like 50k of every mineral to start.

Modifié par CronoDragoon, 18 février 2014 - 05:54 .

[AlanC9]

iakus wrote...

For example, ex-Cerberus personel and intel would go towards unlocking the Control ending.  Prothean artifacts would go towards Destroy, and geth/quarian researches and data would go towards Synthesis.  Three tracks And you can unlock any or all of them depending on what you gather.

Fleets and military personell would go towards prtoecting the Crucible, allowing for "better" outcomes since it takes less damage.

Thus you can get a huge fleet, but a cr*ppy Crucible that may not even fire once it docks.  Or a high-tech, elegant Crucible that gets shot full of holes on the way to docking. if you neglect your War Asset gathering (kinda like the low EMS runs we have now).

Conceptually, this still has the problem that the current design has with completionist runs. Unless you figure that isn't really a problem anyway? WA collection would also have to be changed so the player has more info about what he's collecting, unless we figure everyone would just metagame it from a wiki after the first playthrough.

[AlanC9]

CronoDragoon wrote...

ImaginaryMatter wrote...

The one advantage that I found about ME2's system is that it doesn't take a lot of time. Only scanning the dozen or so wealthiest planets (list needed) as you encounter them is more than enough to upgrade everything.

It also seems appropriate to bring up that subsequent playthroughs give you like 50k of every mineral to start.

With the replay bonus do you ever need to mine eezo at all?

You do have to drop more probes per planet in ME2, but you don't have to dodge Reapers. I found the total playtime for both systems to be about equal.

[Iakus]

AlanC9 wrote...

Conceptually, this still has the problem that the current design has with completionist runs. Unless you figure that isn't really a problem anyway? WA collection would also have to be changed so the player has more info about what he's collecting, unless we figure everyone would just metagame it from a wiki after the first playthrough.

What do you mean by problems with completionist runs?

And given the player currently has no information on how a lot of these Assets are useful to the war effort, besides "more guns" and "smart people" I'd think providing more information could only be a good thing.

In addition one of the complaints about the ending is how these "solutions" seemingly spring out of nowhere.  If there were clues earlier on, that Shepard could potentially build towards, would that have been such a bad thing?

[cap and gown]

AlanC9 wrote...


With the replay bonus do you ever need to mine eezo at all?

For my insanity playthroughs (engineer) i did. I was changing Shepard's and squadmates' power allocation in between most missions. Collectors? Time to downplay overload and focus on incinerate, maybe switch over to AP ammo as well. And Kasumi can change from overload to greater weapon damage, etc. Still, the 50k starting bonus sure did help!

Modifié par cap and gown, 18 février 2014 - 06:52 .

[cap and gown]

FlyingSquirrel wrote...


It's true that open worlds are tricky to integrate with clear, forward-moving narratives. Even in Fallout: New Vegas, for example, you do reach a point, after going to the Strip, where the tension seems to heighten and everyone starts talking as if the NCR/Legion showdown is going to happen soon, and yet if you want to delay it indefinitely, you can do so by just not triggering the prerequisite quests.

Skyrim always made me laugh when Ralof/Hadvar urged me to go see the Jarl RIGHT AWAY before there were any more dragon attacks. I always felt like I should be given the option to tell him to chill, that the dragons would only attack if I DID go see the Jarl.

[FlyingSquirrel]

iakus wrote...
The Collectors are barely in ME2 at all.  And given the number of mercs Shepard fights across the game, we might as well have made them the ones kidnapping colonists, and save a few art resources.

My point was that you do hear about them continuing to attack colonies even if you don't face them every time they do it, except that it seems to progress based on how often Shepard walks past the crew members who talk about it. So you can get to the point where they stop reporting additional attacks pretty early in the game.

I don't really have a problem with how the Collectors were handled since there's usually very little warning before their attacks - it would have been unrealistic if the Normandy *had* intercepted them more than once or twice. While ME2 does sit awkwardly within the trilogy, having one game with a slightly lesser threat and more opportunities to explore the back alleys of the galaxy was worth it.

I suppose you could think of the Collector attacks as the Reapers trying to complete *their* sidequests before Priority: Kill Anything That Moves begins in ME3.