Why does Mass Effect 3 feel so different?

OP - Still grinding the same old axe I see.  Your poll is heavily biased and I won't vote in it.  There are many reasons why ME3 can feel different not related to writing.  For example, the color palette and lighting changed.  The combat, weapons, and skill trees all changed.  Several new crew and squad members... to name just a few.

When I first booted up the demo or when I saw the E3 demos I was nothing but impressed with the new graphical look and the slickness of the mechanics. The first time the record broke for me was the intro-scene which many excluding me have agreed is a terrible scene.

But it goes on. Anderson swears all the time. He went from a somewhat virtuous official military guy turned diplomatic to this gruff rookie soldier, Udina has no accent anymore, Shepard has this >:-< look all the time and his/her voice direction is much more angsty but also more emotional so it's hit and miss.

There are so many areas where ME3 feels different outside of just the graphics. I personally think the lack of Drew K and Chris L'Etoile was a huge loss but it goes beyond that and into how the overall game-direction felt.


Rantedy-ranty-rant about why ME3 consistently pisses me off:

I always was a bit ambivalent upon booting ME2 after ME1 because of that game's changes but I quickly adjusted because the tradeoff was totally great. You get less freedom and less RPG for overall better dialogue sequences, better combat and more diverse and bigger roster of critical path missions (every recruit- and loyalty mission is crit-path as far as I'm concerned) so it didn't just feel like a downgrade. In ME3 there are tradeoffs too, like how dialogue is spread out more across the game so you can't exhaust every companion's dialogue halfway through the game, but overall the word that pops to mind in how ME3 plays to me is just "restrictive". Everywhere I go in it I'm constantly reminded that I only have a handful of missions to do because I can only access one subplot at a time and I can never talk to squadmates unless they have new things to say, the missions are so combat oriented they almost have no story sometimes. There are all these pointless mini-activities during missions like the strange decontamination scanner on Mars or opening some hatch for a husk on Horizon.

And another thing is the stupidity of the plot. "Don't you think I'd rather stay and fight!". Shepard wants to stay on Earth to "fight" Reapers... Anderson wants to stay on Earth and actually does so to "fight Reapers", and granted Anderson evacuates people and stuff but holy mother of god this is so stupid it haunted the whole story by being in the premise. How the hell do we fight Reapers after seeing what they do in 10 minutes to the capital city on Earth in the introduction? At it best the game has the Genophage arc and even then it has a completely contrived setup "Oh yes! The Shroud, it's this facility that can conveniently ventilate for pollution so it can be used for the cure" but "There is a Reaper in the way! Shit what do we do?" "oh yes, the MOTHER OF ALL THRESHER MAWS IS HERE".

And i concede the Genophage cure mission is great for other reasons but it doesn't change how even the best part of ME3 is filled with shoddy writing and it's all downhill from there.

ME2 squaddies all conveniently show up on missions you "incidentally" encounter and then they just tell you "I can't join you" for convenient reasons. Some characters like Mordin, Wrex, Legion and Thane have better parts but aside from Thane and Wrex all of these completely 180 from their previous life-philosophies and you can sort of buy it but you can still tell how it is a forced writing decision and not something ME2 helped build up.

ME3 keeps checking boxes. "Oh man, we had that choice with the Rachni didn't we? We have to address that somehow... sigh" and you get something really basic that doesn't really do anything for the plot. And moreso than anything it's this sense that ME3 didn't properly follow up on ME2. That game is widely regarded as the big mistake of the trilogy specifically because of how it didn't do anything for the plot of ME1 in terms of moving it forward, but ME3 almost goes out of its way to readjust course than to keep moving in the direction of ME2 which could've worked. IMO it's thanks to ME3 that ME2 looks pointless as I bought the development from ME1 to ME2 just fine only conceding that the overarching plot didn't move forward but only widened itself instead. But as a result of many things I just found the universe to feel less believable, less likeable and much much smaller with so many of the plot-developments made in ME3.

Did we really have to indefinitely cure the Genophage? I wasn't aware that this arc was going so far in this direction after ME1 and ME2. It felt cheap to me, as opposed to merely showing some kind of hope for the Krogan by giving them a potential remedy for the future.

I'm overall fine with the Rannoch part in how it indefinitely resolves the conflict, EXCEPT, I don't like the humanification of Synthetics in this game and especially not how bluntly it was handled. You'll hear Chalkwas go "But synthetics are people" and Adams go "No they're not" and you get to support either, and every dialogue with EDI is this obvious hint-hint of "What, you can have human emotions?". It's got zero subtlety and that's ME3 in general. It tries too hard and some people think that's beautiful because they have no patience for nuances or they like the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies as their primary entertainment.

And biggest one is inarguably how they handled the Reapers, nevermind the Catalyst, Crucible or the ending. I'm merely talking about the plan to avert the end of ME1 by throwing all Reapers into our galaxy simultaneously and start this huge "Us vs Them" plot. Imagine if due to cautiousness Harbinger was not some "leader of all Reapers" that ME3 says it is, but just the human-harvest-focused leader and ME3 was about the Reapers pressing on the borders of the galaxy while the main threat was at Earth. This way the indecisiveness of the Council would've been a stronger theme, Cerberus might've had a much more plausible role as they once again have the only means to get things done -- gah, there are so many things with this game where the direction was just completely off and it shows both in the plotting and especially in the writing and how little subtelty there is left.

I think ME3 is a great game whenever I don't have ME1 or ME2 in the back of my memory, I do... but as a bookend to a trilogy I hate it for so many of its fundamental directions.

/Rant

I changed the poll and kept grinding the axe in an edit of your quoted post. I don't feel like I have to prove to you why ME3 is bad -- it's fine if people disagree to me, but I was just very passionately disappointed with so many aspects of the game and I'm currently replaying ME1 so the pain just sparked itself up all over again lol. As far as I'm concerned ME3 feels like an elaborate fanfic at times with incredible graphics. No, it felt like when a movie sequel is passed on to completely different directors or something, and IMO this series is the only set of games that came close to being to gaming what Lord of the Rings is to cinema, but in the end it feels more like a Matrix or if it were a show, like LOST. You can just feel the quality of writing and maybe even the overall product slowly degrade over the course of playing these 3 games back to back. Only, after ME2 I always have this feeling that I wish ME3 could've just been ME2 but with new content to expand the plot and not a completely different beast. Editing the design-philosophies of the dialogue wheel and Shepard's parameters for characterization was a criminal mistake IMO and one that the writers all defended as they were making the game, which is so disheartening to me.

For some Reason BioWare has degraded themselves more and more over the last couple of years by making what they seem to consider to be optimizations of game-design, but the tradeoff is that you just get more quantity and less quality when dialogue is sparse'd out with less interaction in between or having Shepard speak for a whole minute before you get a choice just because writing 3 lines of mandatory lines for him saves you of having 1 dialogue tree with 3 responses that don't affect the plot or something. Completely lame. And also screw Mac for designing Action Mode. As if this series needed to pander even more to a crowd that it wasn't originally designed for.

I find it very difficult to answer the poll since all three games 'feel' different from each other.

Dialogue-wise ME1 and ME2 are fairly close. ME2 felt more refined in the dialogue trees than ME1. Specifically, ME1 had some dialogue choices that resulted in Shepard saying the same thing; ME2 got rid of that.

Combat-wise, ME2 almost completely changed its combat mechanics from ME1, whereas ME3 felt like it was trying to be a refinement+improvement over ME2 (I don't think it was but a lot of other players disagree with me).

Story-wise, the themes of each game are different. ME1 is about discovery and exploration. ME2 is more about personal relationships. ME3 is more of a war story.


I think the hidden question you are really trying to ask is "Why did ME3 fail when ME1 and ME2 succeeded?" There is no one thing. I think it just could not live up to the burden of expectations set upon the franchise.

As a person who found these games a year ago a played them back to back, I just don't see where this is coming from. ME2 seems like a dip into some other territory. ME3 is like finally returning to the story that started in ME1. Sure, the Collectors worked for the Reapers but they still weren't the real threat. They were underlings. Worse, your Alliance military character is in the hands of people who are OBJECTIVELY bad guys in ME1. This makes no sense. Storywise, I think ME2 is the one that went off the rails with the overall plot of the trilogy.

Yes, the tone of ME3 is clearly one of the biggest changes. I think also the "rule of cool" started with ME2 admittedly (a few places in ME1 too) but in ME3 it reached another level mainly with Kai Leng but also the intro with Shepard's lame motivational speech to the nonsensical defense council and then the part where you singlehandedly take on a Reaper Destroyer with a gun that directs the fleet target from orbit.

I would also say whereas ME1 feels like a rather intellectual narrative in how it presents the various alien races and compares them to humans while in ME3 it's more emotional with how all characters are very on edge and emotional about stuff. I felt like ME3 was very melodramatic at times trying to dig out too much drama from things that didn't need that extra punch but then ME1 has some absolutely dorky attempts at dramatization as well like the Hold The Line speech or Liara crying over Benezia's death (just in the way it's executed).

I feel like ME3 lost its innocence though. ME1 had a certain innocence to how dorky it was and ME2 in my humble opinion wasn't even all that dorky, but in ME3 there's this vibe of "look at how REAL this all is" and it tries hard to be on the same level as a summer hollywood blockbuster flick like a Michael Bay movie, not just in scale but also in how bombastically emotional it can be, with celebratory shots of characters doing sacrificial/heroic things with choir-esque vocals in the soundtrack -- it was just a lot of "uurrck..." for me. The worst thing about it is that it makes it all feel generic. It's not special to have scenes where our favorite characters get their moment to shine with all focus on them as every narrative device from the cinematography to the music seems to celebrate it -- it's a rather tired cliche that's used all the time in modern cinema, particularly in Marvel and DC movies. You know, the movies where the camera constantly zooms in on Superman to show his emotional face expressions every time he talks. So edgy, too theatrical and over-choreographed. ME1 didn't give a fuck half the time. It was just being itself.


It makes every bit of sense. Shepard is KIA, the council loses the spectre that preached about the Reapers, but after saving the Citadel from Sovereign and potentially all Reapers in ME1 they're left to wonder how much of Shepards claims rung true, and to avoid increasing the already tense tension around in council space and elsewhere they PR the Reapers as being a myth to preserve the artifical peace on the Citadel and elsewhere and continue to deny it 2 years later after Shepard is reborn. Cerberus makes their case that Shepard knows the Reapers are real and only Cerberus is left wanting to do something about it -- Shepard can't refuse, and along the way he also learns that this "EVIL(TM)" faction also has staff that isn't purely out to spite the entire galaxy which only makes the ME universe more realistic.

It may not have been planned but that's the direction they went with in ME2 and there would've been nothing inherently wrong with that if it wasn't for the fact that ME3 decided to backpedal and go hand-in-hand with the plot ME1. It's sort of in between the two games's plots but it didn't just follow exactly off of 2 which a sequel to ME2 should've done IMO. No, as usual BioWare did their forced time-skip and switched up the role and status of every character in the universe because time = forced changes.

ME3 is the best place to start playing a trilogy.

Certain elements of ME3 feel like a compromise yes. It deepened the RPG systems from ME2 (nevermind that roleplaying with dialogue wheel is RPG but they cut that...) and re-introduced weapon modding and buying weapons but really it felt very similar to the upgrade system of ME2 just with credits instead of minerals.

Speaking of the upgrade system of ME2, I never really had a problem with that. It's kinda silly it has to be accessed from the Normandy but otherwise I don't get what was so problematic about it. I got the exact same sense of satisfaction of growth out of it as I did with the level-up system and inventory system of ME1 because you could feel how each upgrade strengthened you or your crew and getting new weapons was slick. The lamest part of ME2 was how you didn't get XP from combat encounters and how it had that level-complete screen instead of just being an RPG, and ME3 remedied this by making XP checkpoints per combat scenario and by accessing medical containers with full medi-gel.

But aside from the RPG aspect which is really give or take between ME1 and ME2 (still lame with the autodialogue and static crew-convos) I guess ME3 did feel slightly more like ME1 because of your being Alliance and you have Liara, Ash/Kaidan, Tali and Garrus back on your squad, and the plot feels like it starts where ME1 left in a sense, I guess.

I still think it's the lamest installment despite of admittedly being a good and sometimes great game.

All the games feel differently. And frankly they should feel slightly different. To copy and paste the same feeling, same action of each game into a squeal or trilogy is a bad idea. The game then becomes boring and repetitive. Any negative feelings with the difference is personal perspective of it and completely self created.

Case in point people who complain about the Crucible as a stupid Deus Ex Machina device. Yet seems to think the Conduit from ME 1 is perfectly ok. Both forfill the same set up of magical item that allows the player to avoid galaxy ending circumstances right when it is needed. The Alliance just happens to find a blue print of something that might be able to stop the Reapers just when they happen to need it most. Just like the Protheans just happen to create a mini Relay that just happens to drop them right at the base of the Presidium Tower. The location they just happen to need and is found just when it happens to be needed. ME2 equally has Deus Ex Machina though it is less overt obvious action and far close to the bad guys just magically forget about something when it is convenient for them to forget about it. AKA when the Normandy blows the the Collector ship then crashes on the Base they just assume it is destroyed because it is convenient for them to do that. Or when squad mates are holding the line they conveniently forget about the entire room full of seeker swarms that could over whelm the counters Mordin made. A point the game stresses very strongly not long before. But is conveniently ignored because it is convenient.

The main plot sure is, except for how much TIM and Cerberus matters to the plot. You could say the premise of ME3 is ME1 part 2.

I still think there's a sense of sameness to ME1 and ME2 that just isn't there in ME3 and I blame the overwhelming shift in writers and the design-changes for autodialogue as well as Mac deciding the overall story-direction and narrative style with his first draft.

ME1: Mac Walters, Patrick Weekes, Drew K, Chris L'Etoile, Luke Kristjanson
MEBDTS: Mac Walters, Chris L'Etoile

ME2: Mac Walters, Patrick Weekes, Drew K, Chris L'Etoile, Luke Kritjanson, Brian Kindregan, Chris Hepler*
ME2LOTSB: Jay Watamaniuk, Sylvia Feketekuty, Patrick Weekes
ME2Arrival: Mac Walters
ME2Overlord: John Dombrow

ME3: Mac Walters, Patrick Weekes, Drew K, Luke Kristjanson, Chris L'Etoile, Brian Kindregan, John Dombrow, Jay Watamaniuk, Chris Hepler, Sylvia Feketekuty, Neil Pollner, Cathleen Rosaert, Ann Lemay 
ME3FA: John Dombrow, Patrick Weekes
ME3Leviathan: Chris Hepler
ME3Omega: Ann Lemay, Neil Pollner
ME3Citadel: ME3 staff

Blue = Original ME1 staff
Green = Later additions
Cyan = Returning added writers from previous game
Red = Writers that had left since last game

*Chris Hepler joined ME2 when Drew and Chris L'etoile left because they needed a new "Codex Guy". So he wrote all galaxy map content. Source: 

Not only did ME3 lose a bulk of the trilogy's original staff, it also got twice the amount of new people in and while some like Dombrow has an obvious love for ME1 (and too many self-referential, immersion breaking jokes) I still think it goes for all writers that they weren't there when ME1 was drafted and they had blindspots to the overarching story because there's so much ground to cover and I don't think all writers played ME1 and ME2 extensively to brush up, but did their best, but because they weren't the original minds there are obvious spots in the writing where it just feels off. You can tell, at least I could, as I was playing ME3 the first time that something within the development must have changed drastically because you get characters that don't completely talk the way they used to and overall different vibes. Where ME2 may have distracted from the series' direction by taking it in a strange new direction that didn't develop the plot very far, it didn't feel different in its vibe too much. The technical aspects and the voice direction got better, the dialogue was written slightly more like in a screenplay than a bookish narrative, but there was this sameness despite all this.


Similarly you can tell that the writers of DA:I The Descent are way different staff than the ones that wrote the main game because there's a blandness to even your interactions with the DLC-exclusive characters.

1. Actually I'm so-so about Drew. Chris L'Etoile was much bigger loss for how in-depth and enthusiastic he was about handling the lore and considering even before knowing any of the writers' profiles back in the 2010s and 2011s I naturally felt attached to Ashley, Thane and Legion -- those made the biggest impressions on me over ME1 and ME2 and they are all L'Etoile's characters. That said, for all that ME1's plot was about "plot device A needs plot device B to find plot device C" kind of plot it was still more consistent and better executed than ME3. ME2 is kind of haphazard though but who knows how much Drew actually wrote before leaving.

2. I'm not looking for ways to blame the writers. I think Chris Hepler is a fine writer and I think Sylvia is a decent writer etc. I just think ME3 felt different and ME3, for me, sucked because there was a change in writers and not becuase the new writers sucked.

3. Again, not a given. We haven't seen what a Mass Effect with Drew, Mac, Patrick but without Chris L'Etoile would've been like. Again, Drew's plot was very "plot device A needs to work with plot device C" and Mac actually tried to follow suit with that brand of storytelling with ME3 and the Crucible, but he just slightly failed in building up and foreshadowing the bigger twists unlike Drew in ME1 who was great at foreshadowing the truth about the Protheans and Reapers and also Saren's indoctrination. ME3 would've, might've (dunno) been better with Drew than Mac in the lead, but ultimately I think most of ME3's flaws are continuity misinterpretations or forgetfulness. Drew's writing is super nerdy whereas Mac's is more mimicing "real talk" and sometimes much more relatable, but Mac has a tendency to write shorter, simpler plots where Drew at least seems to flesh out his writing a lot more in detail (even if it's sometimes kind of cheesy),

You can tell the difference between Drew's talent and Mac's in ME1's companions for example. Granted I actually like Wrex and Garrus (Mac) a lot more than I liked Liara and Tali (Drew) but you can really tell how much "Mac" there is in the overall topics and the paraphrased dialogue responses as well as the level of depth to the dialogue trees (or lack thereof). Drew's characters are kind of lore-dumps and Mac's is a bit more grounded. Wrex is a great way to give lore without shoving it down your throat but Garrus is just kind of generic to be honest. But for example, most of Garru's dialogue trees consist of two choices that make Shepard say the same or cut to the chase and it's all very much Mac's agenda, where the point of the conversation is to teach Garrus about what it means to be responsible or not. The paraphrased responses often carry a sense of nonchalanty. "Good", "Great", "Whatever." and stuff like that. You can feel Mac's personality in those lines.

And that's why I feel it was a mistake to put Mac into the lead for the franchise and ME3 because he can write nice, grounded characters, but he seems to lack the patience to make more complex narratives. Sometimes you don't need more, but the baggage he was trying to tackle with ME3 - the Illusive Man, The Crucible, Earth and Anderson, Udina etc. - it falls kind of short. Saren's arc in ME1 is way more impressive than TIM's arc in ME3 because the dialogues you have with Saren are actually meaningful but just one-sided rambling with TIM. In ME1 you get to learn about Indoctrination from people who have encountered Saren and his ship so they warn you about it. When you meet Saren you understand what's going on and you can see it in him and the dialogue revolves around making him realize it. TIM however is a confused mess about him wanting to control but is secretly another puppet but Shepard blurts it out, out of nothing that he might be indoctrinated, and then the following dialogues with him on Thessia, Cerberus HQ and the ending, you get to tell him how wrong his idea is. We never had extensive arguments with Saren about not having to succumb to Reapers becuase we knew intelligently that the true issue was that Saren was being controlled. With TIM there is no intelligence to the confrontations in ME3 and again, Mac is just not as good at carrying tremendous baggage like this. He needs smaller, more universally relatable characters who can be grounded like Wrex who tells you about his adventures and snorts about the Genophage issue.

What I wanted to say with the list after digging it up again, is that they had someone to hold people in the ears in ME1 and ME2 and they were Drew and Chris L'Etoile, and with the change of guard with Mac taking over shit got too fast and loose. Legion became jesus and the Geth became pinnochios. TIM became a rambling idiot, Anderson started swearing every second line, EDI had no subtlety and it goes on. My bottomline is, you can tell something is different in ME3 and not just the autodialogue.

Funny thing is, outside of the intro where the choreography seems pretty tight, I think there are actually still the same checkpoints in the way the dialogue system works, so if you modded it you could make it ME1 style where you'd get responses in between the usual autodialogue but then all 3 choices make Shepard say the same thing. I always liked that illusion in ME1 even after I found out it didn't change the spoken dialogue. Just a preference.

I might actually attempt that some day. It could also make Shepard talk less if you don't have the patience for 4 or so full lines of dialogue before anything happens.

Similarly the game could technically still let you speak to Garrus and other crew members in investigative style the same way ME1 and ME2 did throughout the whole game, but BioWare just made it so, for the sake of continuity maybe, that you can only investigate in the beginning and until all investigative responses are exhausted and then the companions revert to comment-style dialogue. I know it's moddable, and if not me then I hope someone eventually does it so I can have the ME2-style companion interaction. I have a few ideas about how I would engineer it.