FileFacts: Fun-facts of Mass Effect inside the game files

You are rather one note aren't you?

And you keep grinding that same axe in every thread. At this point there is no axe left just the haft.

I'm not the first to use that phrase.

It happens because while everyone here is more or less willing to discuss and debate all sorts of plot points of ME trilogy. Linkenski seems to focus mostly on the ending of ME 3. To the point you could make a fair point that it is all that Linkenski talks about.  That is pretty much what all of his self created threads are about. Some way shape or form working any topic or idea around to complaining about how shitty the final game is.  I don't always agree with UpUpAwayRedux but even they called Linkenski out on the extremely hilariously bias poll created for their thread Why Does Mass Effect 3 Feel So Different. Which even the title is dripping with the obvious angle of ME 3 is the odd one out. Even though the trilogy suffers from the same issues when you get into it. Yet only when those issues show up in ME 3 are they suddenly a problem.

So when they create another thread out right saying

Basically a lot that proves BioWare just had to cut their losses and ship with what they could manage to finish in time, if anyone is interested in such closure 5 years after the fact.

It really is just continuing a running theme with them.  Hence the grinding the same old axe comment.

Yes and if you applied the same logic you do to other games including Andromeda as you do to ME 3 you should be ranting and raving about how shitty and terrible ME:A will be.  But my guess would be that you aren't. Because as I said those fatal flaws you complain about ME 3 having that ME 1 and 2 have and that ME:A will inevitably have due to how they are building the basis for their story for that game.  Only magically became a flaw you complain about with ME3.

... and here I thought I was starting to see some success in getting linkenski to start threads on some actually different topics.  He did, afterall, recently start the ME2 playtrhough suggestions thread... so, I'll give some credit where credit is due.  It's a great thread that deserves some more attention than it's getting.

I enjoyed the vid clip; however, I'm not going to post further here since this is just turning out to be more of the same ending controversy type threads we already have too many of here, IMO (regardless of who starts them)... and I've pretty much already said everything I can think of saying on that topic anyways.

Carry on.

As an aside:  It would be more convenient if at least some of the threads on the same or very similar topics were stitched together so at least I wouldn't find myself reading things being repeated all over the place and, consequently, repeating things all over the place myself.

I just think they were too hell-bent on answering every little plot-flag they could and instead of making really good use of choices made in ME1 and ME2 (primarily the Rachni, Council and Collector Base) they took a lot of trivial things (outside of romances) and just gave those a little email or a single cutscene on the Citadel as if they were checking boxes.

The result was that there was a fair mix of genuine surprise but also frustration over seeing your most expected choices addressed but not even close to the level they seemed to have been building up to. Again, each game had a handful of really important-feeling choices; ME1 has the Rachni Queen and save/sacrifice the council and it has whoever you picked as the new councilor. ME2 had the collector-base choice and who lived or died in the suicide mission. Flash forward to ME3 and every ME2 companion get a seperate mission, a little one-off quest and I almost think they should've just left some of them out at the displeasure of fans for a better overarching story, but the Rachni choice doesn't matter at all. All you get is the same mission, same cosmetics and a flipped dialogue-response depending on whether the Queen survived or not and then a war asset that, like every war asset doesn't even mean anything in the end; only the score determines which generic end-sequence you'll see. Granted they actually fixed things with Extended Cut but I was still expecting more from the big choices than ME3 simply acknowledging the fact that I had made them.

What they did with Tuchanka in terms of incorporating pretty big choices in ME1 or ME2 like if Wrex and Mordin are alive or what you did with Maelon's data of all things, but notice how none of those choices are really those big "CHOICE(TM)" choices from ME1 or ME2? In the comic Mass Effect Invasion Mac Walters even had the ignorance to just plainly say "Cerberus is trying to recover the Collector Base from the Omega 4 relay that Shepard gave to them" -- it plainly says that, fully ignoring the big end-choice at ME2 about whether you destroyed the base and then in ME3 it's the same thing. Destroyed the base? You see the remains of it in the Cerberus HQ mission anyway and all you get for making the choice is Shepard lampshade-hanging the issue. Earlier on the Mars mission TIM just briefly puts up a display of the Collector Base on his GUI or not depending on the choice in ME2, those are all wasted, meaningless forms of addressing the choice! And this is a philosophy that was spread through the entire game.

If you go look up some interviews with Walters you can tell how his leadership as a writer was a thorn in the side of the entire project. All he talks about is incredibly vague and generic "I think we've managed to address ALL the problems, I think ME1 and ME2 were great but with ME3 we're really going all the way! It's the biggest game, fans are going to be blown away! yadayada". But then at the same time he brings up how "we were bound to make mistakes sooner or later. It's so hard to keep track."

And all the same, I'm thinking that this is not really the case for every writer. Yes, it's hard to keep track but Mac can't even keep the default canon consistent if his life depended on it. Try reading the Inquisition comic he wrote where Udina is the emperor from Star Wars and Bailey kills Executor Pallin. Every story he writes is a pointless waste that kills off important characters or just gets them wrong half of the time. He can only write his own characters like Garrus, Aria, Wrex etc. who are all these super renegade badass characters. Whenever he touches anything else it becomes super unimpressive, yet he was the friggin lead writer who had to design the entire framework for ME3's Reaper-war plot and in the end the only really good things about ME3 were the parts Mac DIDN'T write.

And then personally, I dislike even the concept for Rannoch and Tuchanka. I think it's too monolithically closed-off when both issues are ones that have lasted for thousands of years, and then Shepard comes around, the mary sue he is, and solves both things in a matter of days, maybe weeks because every character conveniently changes motivation or the shroud conveniently gets introduced and the Geth becoming true AI makes them real people or some bullshit.

ME3 just tried to do waaaaay too fucking much. I still think it's impressive how it actually managed to do well with the Tuchanka and Rannoch part but I still think Mac's directive of "Hey John Dombrow, you have to figure out how we cure the genophage and end the issue!" and "Hey, Patrick, you have to write how Shepard resolves the morning war". Mac is this "all, everything, biggest, amazing, nothing, never, always" single-minded writer who puts everything in platitudes, never goes into the nitty gritty where all the substance lies - the closest he can get is the emotional bond between two characters or the human psyche of a relationship and explore that but PLOT (you know, logically connecting a series of events and matching it up with the character motivations highlighting themes) he can't do those things with any subtlety or finesse. He's a terrible writer to have as lead and he ruined the trilogy with that. His scope was simply too big for its own good, and the vision he had for ME3 would've required more than 1.5 years of development. It was an insane attempt.

Friendly thread reminder/suggestion, please keep discussion to the topics, not the people. That way lies a zone of danger.

Scanning in ME2 did not enable you to "buy new stuf and upgrades"; that is, you did not get any credits from scanning.  In fact, scanning consumed credits for purchasing probes and fuel.

Neither did ME2 scanning acquire upgrades for you; that is, it was only after acquiring the upgrade during a mission that you were able to process it using the resources you gathered.  You could only scan at your own pace to the point where you figured you actually needed said upgrade to enhance your weapons or armor in battle.  If you delayed acquiring the resources for the upgrades you needed, a critical mission failure was likely the result (on most difficulties).  If you delayed in having suffficient resources to do the ship's upgrades prior to entering the Omega 4 relay, the deaths of some of your squadmates was the result.
 
In ME3, scanning did also provide the player with credits; and that actually enables the player to "buy new stuff and upgrades." - both directly while scanning and when returning items to strangers on the Citadel.  For example, merely scanning the planet Adek in the Apien Crest yields 10,000 credits and giving the Turian officer the Banner of the First Regiment yields 15,000 credits.   The player doesn't have to buy probes and there is also enough fuel scattered around through scanning that the player actually never has to buy any throughout the entire game either. So, in reality, your first statement is truer for ME3 than it is for ME2.  Since this result of squad mates dying was not really revealed to the player prior to actually entering the Omega 4 relay, I would also argue that your last statement (i.e. that you understood exactly what you unlocked) is not totally accurate for ME2 either.

I agree that our fuel limit in ME3 should be 1500 if we did the ME2 upgrade and 1000 only if we didn't.  Unfortunately, on the Xbox, I can't mod it in.  Fortunately, it's not really an issue.

Try after the 3rd planet. Xenoverse has better grinding for items because at least you can mix up the fights a bit by the different PQ.