Polygon: In Defense of Mass Effect

Who said anything about being angry over this review?   I'm certainly not angry.  There is a world of difference between being concerned about something and being angry about something... I'm more the former, not the latter.  As I've clearly said several times here, my concern originates with comments on the Twitter thread that indicated there was some sort of pattern to this... trashing first... redeeming later.  I also said that IF it was a pattern, then I'd ask the question why the gaming media was so adverse to just putting an "average" review for an "average" game, rather than swinging first one way then the other.  Now, there have been some commenters on this thread that have clearly said they don't see that sort of pattern happening.  I don't see where there's any anger being expressed here.

The one thing that does irritate me (defining irritate as mild anger) is that I don't like opinions being shoved in my face when I'm looking for information... so things like having informational videos automatically run onto opinion pieces on YouTube does irritate me... because I know they get credit for another viewing of the video even though that isn't what I was remotely interested in seeing even the beginning of it for the 10th time.  I generally try to avoid reading opinion pieces of any type... what the "run-on" videos do is take away my option of avoiding them completely... and as I said, gives the video credit for a view that I never intended to give it.

I can see where you're coming from but I really have to disagree on point 2.  ME2 could have been written to advance the Reaper plot without necessarily putting any more limitations on ME3.  Certainly, ME3's story would have been different; but not necessarily any more limited than it was.  No one can really predict what might have been though... it went down how it went down... and there are several story related issues in ALL four games.

This argument only works if the problem with making a sequel is not having an existing ending you want to continue with. There's no reason to think that's true with ME3 as written. It's pretty easy to write a Destroy- or Control-based sequel. We had a lot of practice doing that on the old boards before ME:A was announced.

But if the problem with writing the sequel was the divergence of the endings, as Iakus says above, then more endings can't make this better. OTOH, they probably can't really make it worse for ME3 as written, since that difficulty level was already infinite.

It's not clear why you think the italed is an issue. The various races will recover given enough time. There's no reason the game can't jump forward however many decades or centuries the new plot would require. You might have the salarians be relatively stronger in the future since their systems don't seem to have been as thoroughly trashed as the other major races, but that isn't a problem; it's just a different balance of power.

I'd argue that the writers had a clue where they were taking the story. The shape of the Citadel Tower floorplan in ME1 indicates as much.

What that it's shaped like a Reaper?  We've known since ME1 that the Reapers built the Citadel.  That's not really long-term planning.

Agreed. Can you imagine if Dragon Age: Origins had endings like Mass Effect 3?



Such a thing would've been a clusterfuck. How would you write a sequel that isn't an utter mess from the get-go, when you're basing it on nonsense like that?

Keeping the big picture simple while making the smaller details unusual would be a better route.

If streamers are our barometer of what makes a game good or bad, I kind of worry for the future when we see a lot of people playing Fortnite and Player Unknown Battle Grounds, which were more subjectively flawed games. 

I noticed that some people place a nonexistent value on streamers and memes. It's childlike. Don't think for yourself, let Pewdiepie do it for you.