Everything Wrong With Mass Effect 3 Redux by GCN

And that's a good thing. I would also argue that Kirrahe showing up, instead of Thane, is also a bad choice. Implement Kirrahe somewhere else, if he is alive. Or have Kirrahe kill Kai Leng, if both he and Thane are alive, because when Kai Leng raises his sword to stab Thane, he is left open to Kirrahe taking the shot. Like saving Melissa in Chora's Den in ME1, saves Conrad Verner in ME3.


I think we've made enough of a case about how bad the "War Asset" system is, to not even need to argue the uselessness of the ME2 followers implementation in ME3 and why Bioware gets so many complaints about it.


If you want to keep the "Mass Effect" in "Mass Effect", I'd put the percentage at 70% of them. But I find it ridiculous that the Conrad Verner outcome above is more thought out and impactful than say Samara, who comes off as a cheap cameo. Before the ending debacle hit, remember the "<enter squadmate name here> deserved better" campaigns on the BSN, or the "<enter squadmate name here> for squadmate in ME3" campaigns? Maybe you do, maybe you don't, but there was a reason for all of them. Like it or not, in the scheme of things, it wasn't enough.


Yes. And there are many missions in ME3. And maybe that all results in the bad destroy endings, regardless. But maybe that is an incentive to go back and buy the old games. Bioware could have even made a promo campaign to give the old games along with ME3, like White Knight Chronicles did, with its save import function into 2. But that would be good PR and EA is into making money, not a good name. And then EA whine about it, when they get the golden poo.

Exactly. It's all so very transparent and blatant. It actually reminds me of Ghost in the Shell 2, where Batou keeps giving us "famous quotes" the entire movie, as if to invoke some profound revelation or a instill some deep philosophical thought, only it gets repetitive, boring and predictable. Similarly, Bioware wanted us to "feel" and wanted to give us "feels" the entire game. Only those weren't earned, so they come off as forced, manipulative and contrived, in addition to everything else.

But what would that 70% reflect? Would that be the amount of total content locked out in a default playthrough? I don’t really see that standing up well as a stand-alone product, and I’m not so sure that it would provide adequate incentive to go back and buy the games from the perspective of someone who hasn’t really played this sort of thing before. I fully appreciate the problem from a story continuity perspective, but it does matter that the game also provide an adequate amount of content by default. 

I think the importance of a character like Samara might be a bit overstated when compared to a trilogy-spanning meta device character like Verner. Frankly, the Conrad Verner path kind of earns its payoff with all those piddly collection things and RPG tropes gags, whereas Samara’s doesn’t really seem to have anyplace to go once Morinth was dealt with. It’s not surprising that the most she got later was just more Ardat-Yakshi story. That’s about the only meaningful thing that her character revolves around. If you go through the gamut of his quest lines to get to this point, you actually have more history (and more content) than Samara does, before ME3 even begins. 

As for the “deserves better” campaign, like I said before, we can blame ME2’s extensive level of character disposability for that. Mordin and Legion are probably the only ME2 newcomers that feel particularly essential to playing a role, with the closest runner up being Miranda (it kind of adds to how she’s the easiest one to keep alive in 2). I don’t really count Kasumi and Zaeed because they’re DLC characters, and add absolutely nothing outside of their loyalty missions, so having any kind of cameo in ME3 at all already gave them more content than what we got in ME2 outside of their quests. Heck, you never even interact with them on the ship. You just cycle through a few sentences. I actually thought Jack was a nice surprise. I know some people didn’t like where she ended up, but to me it felt like a satisfying conclusion to her character, particularly if you went the paragon path in her loyalty mission. 

I suppose those issues are kind of moot. They’re something we complain about to varying degrees, but it’s all really small potatoes against the ending. If the ending was good (or great), we’d still complain, but probably not with as much bitterness as we might find on these forums. 

How? It is piss easy to say make more content but how do you make more content? Were is the magical endless money check and infinite development time in the real world for a game that already on it's own has to carry the narrative weight of 2 whole games?

Sure. How much content should the game have? Should it have an entirely alternate path with mutually exclusive missions? At some point, feasibility is stretched pretty thin. Question is, how much would BioWare have been able to afford to invest the effort to add to the base game? “Make more content” is not a realistic, or even reasonable idea, especially if there’s no clear vision of what that extra content should be, or how this branched path resolves itself by the endgame. 

However important Conrad is over a follower is up to the individual player, but Conrad is more of a fixture in the trilogy than Samara is. Heck, Gianna Parasini, a character we can actually get killed in ME1, would probably have more fans than Samara if she was permitted to even step foot on the ship. 

Or BioWare simply created too many companions and too many combinations of dead or surviving NPC’s by the midway point of the trilogy. BioWare was biting off more than it could chew with the characters. The ME2 exclusives lacked little hope of returning as followers again, considering just how many there were along with how many you can get rid of. Garrus and Tali are the obvious outliers due to their being from the original, and with Liara and the VS clearly kept on reserve to return later, it was only a matter of time before they got pushed out. How much content can they all get, and how vital should most of them be? Samara doesn’t really have anything relevant to offer, neither does Jack, Grunt, Zaeed, Thane, Kasumi and even Jacob, despite his somewhat closer tie to Cerberus. Mordin and Legion are the only characters that actually contribute to a larger subplot of the trilogy, and why they’re the only ones that get stand-ins with meaningfully different dialogue, Wreave notwithstanding. Miranda is a special case because she is the closest thing to a Cerberus insider, and frankly, I think she should have been scripted to always survive for use later. 

I think you have it backwards. People complain about various details of the trilogy, but the ending is first and foremost the primary complaint about ME3. People gripe about auto dialogue, things that make no sense, anemic [former] companion content, etc., but the ending is the crown jewel of the trilogy’s failure. By all accounts, some of the major arcs prior to Priority: Earth are actually fairly well received. People like the Tuchanka and Rannoch stories, and had the ending not dropped the ball so fast and so hard, the nitty gritty of the game’s weaknesses throughout would have largely been less of an issue. 

Yes.


Well, if I were given access to set timeframes, employees, resources etc. I would be able to give an answer to that. Since I don't have access, I'd answer "as much as it needs". There is a reason some games release "when it's done".


And had that been an option, possibly so. But we didn't develop that. What we did develop, turned up lacking. By all accounts, evident from where we are today.


I'm sorry you feel that nobody has anything to offer the games with their returns. Obviously, it is not a shared sentiment, or those aforementioned campaigns wouldn't have happened. The lack of said teammates was detrimental to the enjoyment of many people, which, ultimately, was one of the factors that led to us being where we are today. I can't tell you whether it's too much work to implement, but I can tell you what not implementing them does. As John Epler said, 90% of the time, a bad decision is the best decision that could be made at the time. It's still a bad decision and it's going to bear the effects of a bad decision and all the excuses won't change the fact that it was a bad decision regardless.


And the customer is always right.

I don't think more money is necessarily the answer to making a better product in this case, but perhaps creative decisions that make more efficient use of the trilogy-long choice design they were going for. Like, maybe there shouldn't be so many decisions that could have broad, sweeping implications right at the start or middle of the trilogy, but keeping things smaller and more manageable to save the big payoffs for the final act.