So far – I've just made it to the Citadel – so Mass Effect. I'm pretty sure they've changed the controls a little, and the massively reduced film grain makes the handheld camerawork feel unnecessarily energetic, but honestly any misgivings I've got about it are pretty well dispelled by the inclusion of a photo mode.
I'm going to be taking so many screenshots of the Citadel.
I'm torn on this. On the one hand, I never played ME2 or 3 and enjoyed playing the first one through twice (once for each moral path). On the other hand, do I really have the energy to dedicate all of my gaming time to three ME games back to back, knowing how long it took me to finish the first? Survey says… no.
I played the first two and really enjoyed them, I never played the third though. It wasn't even all the fuss about the ending that put me off, from what I remember, it was the way they'd hived off a load of the game into day one DLC that everyone agreed was pretty much an essential purchase. And for some reason they never released "complete" versions of either ME2 or ME3… until now.
Not gonna lie, I'm very tempted, but I'm also expecting these games to have aged terribly, in the way that cinematic games from 15 years ago have a tendency to do. I'm intrigued to see what people make of it all.
One pretty major expectation adjustment I've had to make is around the sniper rifle recoil - in the original, I remember it being massive until you'd levelled up that track a bit, but here there just doesn't seem to be any at all.
It'll be in EA Play eventually. I'll wait.
I'm guessing there isn't any chance it'll show up on the Switch at some point? Handheld Mass Effect would be top.
Have EA tried any of those streaming-type offerings on the Switch yet, à la Control and Hitman? That's the only way I could see them trying it.
This has the vague whiff of a title that'll be £17.99 in 2 weeks, but I think I'll be picking it up tonight. Through ME1 for a fifth time? Go on then.
I played the first Mass Effect on 360 more times than I can count; it was at least six, but pretty sure less than a dozen? I only ever played 2 twice, maybe three times, and might have only played 3 once.
None of the multiplayer stuff is in there, is it? It was basically just a horde mode, but I quite liked it.
Oh Mass Effect. The music and vibe, unparalleled. I'm firstly very impressed at the performance. I'm running this on the PC I have connected to the TV at 4k, everything on (inc HDR) on a pair of SLI'ed 780tis (which are still very capable, but also 2013 era PC cards) and it's smooth AF. That's what triggered me to get it in the end: partially the now 30 quidish price on cdkeys and also seeing a Youtube video where it was running at 120fps on a 970. Knowing the performance would be good was enough for me (and I appreciate it's a 2007 game, but you never know these days) and I wanted to play sat on my arse on a pad on a huge screen rather than on my main gaming PC.
I like the minor overhauls to combat and the UI, which are very sensible but don't really destroy the heart of the game (which is ridiculously clunky by today's standards, but also charming and full of nostalgia). The remastering has certainly improved the fidelity in some areas (massively so on some of the facial and environmental textures), but clearly on some of the B-characters there's only so much you can do. I'm torn at the moment between just doing it slow and really exploring the conversations (which I've done many times before) or just pushing on through it. I think I might try to take my time. I'm not especially keen to play through 3 again, but 1 and 2 for sure.
One thing that is fascinating is how many things Mass Effect did have slowly been either streamlined out of games, improved or just entirely dropped. Cyberpunk does a lot of similar stuff and it's interesting to see how far we've come and yet how far we still have to go in terms of complex UI design around games with high levels of character and equipment customisation.
I'm torn at the moment between just doing it slow and really exploring the conversations (which I've done many times before) or just pushing on through it.
Me: I love the story and characters in the first Mass Effect
Also me: [hammers X repeatedly through every single conversation]
ridiculously clunky by today's standards, but also charming and full of nostalgia
I'm going to use this totally out of context and claim that's the nicest thing cav has ever said about me.
Your facial textures could do with some improved fidelity, though.
My lift* is also still notoriously slow.**
*bladder
**in need of emptying all the time
incredible that after 10 years this game still looks ass
Kiwami has ruined my sense of 'yes, this counts effort going into a remaster.'
Mass Effect's a franchise that's pretty badly fucked at the moment and it needed a great big hit to come back from Andromeda and the general 'what even are we doing' thing that Bioware's been rocking for 10 years. This ain't it.
There's a creeping awareness that Bioware haven't made a good game in a full decade. They really should have put more effort into this than they did.
I'm torn at the moment between just doing it slow and really exploring the conversations (which I've done many times before) or just pushing on through it.
Me: I love the story and characters in the first Mass Effect
Also me: [hammers X repeatedly through every single conversation]
That's exactly what I said.
On the conversation point, I'm talking largely about just going through the game and seeing how they've remastered the different planets and doing the main inflection points rather than exhaustively doing every side quest. But I'm always struck by Bioware's solution to the problem of dropping you in a world where you can't possibly have lived up until the game starts not having heard about any of the terminology/lore. They try to make it an optional component, but it's still largely ludicrous "what are the Geth? What is a spaceship? etc" but I was trying to think of a game that managed this well without dropping to some sort of amnesiac trope or something. It's a difficult design challenge - I suppose a Codex and optional questions are the best solution, maybe?
it's still largely ludicrous "what are the Geth? What is a spaceship? etc"
Something that's struck me on this playthrough is how happy people are to give you their personal life story, or to break down their entire culture into easily-digestible soundbites, when Shepard asks. Just once I'd like to find an NPC who responds to Shepard's "what's your story?" question with, "that's none of your fucking business".
They kind of excuse some of the asking-about-lore stuff by making humanity one of the newer races to arrive in the Citadel, but surely at some stage an Asari ambassador is gonna lose the rag when another human wanders up to ask blunt questions about their mating rituals.
It's still better than the approach taken by, say, Final Fantasy XV, which had characters spouting incomprehensible bollocks at great length and then expected you to spend hours catching up in the codex to understand what the hell was going on.
The best example I can think of is, oddly, the Yakuza series - which has a lot of strange and unfamiliar elements for a Western audience, from the structure and nature of the Yakuza clans themselves to Japanese traditions, honorifics, food items and so on. And it doesn't explain any of it. There's no point at which one character sits down with another and laboriously explains something they'd already know; there's no opportunity for Kiryu to read through the Ladybird Book of Japanese Gangsters or ask a million questions of everyone he meets. But somehow it all ends up making sense. It's a combination of good writing, great world-building (helped, of course, by the fact it's an actual culture rather than a made-up thing featuring blue alien sex ladies) and general trust in its audience: you follow the story, get involved with the characters and then all the background detail steadily falls into place.
I'm willing to bet large sums of money that, in certain bits of Tokyo, you can find blue alien sex ladies.
Turns out there's a bug in this where certain parts of Mass Effect 2 stop tracking squad members and their loyalty, meaning the Advanced Training – which is supposed to let you borrow powers from loyal squad members – just eats your Element Zero but doesn't allow you to pick a power.
It's not tracked any of my squad gains since the second one I got. 😐
Well that fucking sucks. That doesn't just mess up your main game, it also messes up replays.
That's rubbish. Is there any indication of how prevalent it is? I have it sitting on my HDD waiting to be played (any year now, I'm sure…), but that sort of sounds like a 'wait until this is patched' situation.
EA are apparently aware, but it seems fairly common based on a cursory Google. I'm still getting the Xbox achievements and the characters are showing as loyal (and they're in my squad, obvs), so it's got a pretty limited impact, at least.
Mass Effect 3 is pretty bad, y'all. I'm not that far in yet, but it's just been nonstop overly slick triple A bullshit so far.
It definitely has the least personality of the original trilogy.
Mass Effect 3 is pretty bad, y'all. I'm not that far in yet, but it's just been nonstop overly slick triple A bullshit so far.
I've got about 3 hours into ME3 several times and quit for exactly this reason. There's so little character there at the start and on Mars/the Moon (I forget which - the first mission anyway). Just bang pew pew and "emotional" blowing up of buildings/people. I imagine the difference from ME1/ME2 is even more stark when you go straight in rather than leaving a gap.
I still want to persevere at some point to finish the fight (to coin a phrase), but the memes have ruined all the story beats now so it's kind of because I feel I should rather than because I want to…
Coming to Game Pass very soon, it would appear.
Tomorrow in fact! Can't wait to see all those facial textures up close.
Might have another run at 3, see if it grabs me this time.
I'm definitely keen to play through the trilogy again. Might try and play a few more new games first though.
I never played 2 or 3, but I did 1 twice (once Paragon, once the other one). Hmmmm.
[Deleted, as it was basically a word-for-word repetition of my post up-thread.]
But yes, while I couldn't really justify splashing out for this again on PS4, I'll definitely give it a whirl on Game Pass.
Played through 1 so many times, 2 quite a lot of times and 3 I think I've finished once or twice (on the WiiU of all things). It's shit, but it's sort of ME shit so sort of good. I can't even remember the 15 different endings and which were good and which were terrible, but I do vaguely remember being annoyed by it.
Then I played Andromeda and all was forgiven.
The ending for the original trilogy isn't bad, and it's certainly not without precedent, but the big issue I had with it was that it was so obvious; not to mention clumsily telegraphed without a hint of subtlety, and missing the triumphant final flourish of not just Mass Effect, but the pulpy, 70s-era sci-fi the series started out emulating. But then, the move to that more bombastic, "cinematic", and modern take on the setting was always something that bugged me.
I may play this, I was one of those types that loved the clunky RPG style of the first though and didn't like the 2nd, kind of liked the 3rd even though it was annoying and felt like I was doing everything I had just done in 2, but with a 'wink'.
I also loved the original Dragon Age though and have never been able to finish any of the others as always just end up missing the style of the original.
Maybe I will just get back to actually playing KOTOR on the Switch instead.
I also loved the original Dragon Age though and have never been able to finish any of the others as always just end up missing the style of the original.
I've been meaning to try out Dragon Age on GamePass (am I making that up?) since I got the Series X, but still haven't. Now that I've (accepted that I've) given up on New Vegas, I might jump into this and finally see what all the fuss is about.
I also loved the original Dragon Age though and have never been able to finish any of the others as always just end up missing the style of the original.
I've been meaning to try out Dragon Age on GamePass (am I making that up?) since I got the Series X, but still haven't. Now that I've (accepted that I've) given up on New Vegas, I might jump into this and finally see what all the fuss is about.
The first one is great, as bmb said above, although there are compromises on console compared to pc - it plays much better in the Baldurs Gate style tactical view than in the close up "action" view they built for consoles. Controls are a bit clunky too from memory. Still, I played through it first time on the 360 all the way through, so it's perfectly doable.
Diminishing returns in the sequels -2 is a weird thing, much more action heavy and limited in size and scope. I still can't believe it ended up the way it was planned, it's more like a sort of side project. 3 is massively bloated with terrible and incessant combat, although has some fun base building and a good villain or two.
I played Origins on PS3 and thought it was fine; enough so that I did all the DLC, and multiple playthroughs. I might have turned the difficulty down, though, and they're yet to do a Fade section that's any fucking fun at all. When I played the demo on PC (which, for clarity, I did before the console version), I hated the pulled-back isometric camera.
2 was reportedly intended as a halfway-house budget release called Dragon Age Exile, but EA pushed them to call it Dragon Age II and over-marketed it. They got that thing together in a year and a half, and - much like Mass Effect 2 - has the best companions.
It's definitely not perfect, but it's far and away my favourite one of the series.
I absolutely fucking loved Origins and the often forgotten follow up expansion 'Awakening'. Not a big fan of the way the series went after that, didn't like combat in 2 and then thought it was a lot better in 3 then after a while it sort of felt like a cheap imitation of something they already nailed in the first game but with less strategic depth, I can't remember what it was exactly and I'm willing to be called out but I think it was Dorian and his magic skill trees or rotation being completely identical gameplay wise or something like that.
2 is deeply flawed, but it was exactly the game I wanted to play at the time it came out. Again, though, I played it on console - I imagine if you went from isometric, Baldur's Gate-style camera with thoughtful RPG combat to MASHMASHMASHBOOM in close third-person, that would be somewhat jarring.
Though even saying that, how fun the combat was depended at least partly on my (sub)class; a rapid-slashing dual-dagger rogue was way more fun than an archer, for example. The speed at which Hawke could throw around a greatsword twice her* size was hilarious; I always half thought of it as a kind of "arcade RPG"?
*and it is always her
It's the Awakening dlc in the gamepass version of DA:O? If not I think I have it on disc somewhere…
Game Pass games don't typically include DLC, so I doubt it.
Good luck getting that disc into your Series S!
I'll make it work.
Strangely, the PC version on Game Pass is the Ultimate Edition, but the 360 one seems to just be the base game.
2 was reportedly intended as a halfway-house budget release called Dragon Age Exile, but EA pushed them to call it Dragon Age II and over-marketed it. They got that thing together in a year and a half, and - much like Mass Effect 2 - has the best companions.
I did not know that, but it makes a lot of sense!
Dragon Age was so exciting when it first came out, it felt like a whole new beginning for isometric RPGs. As it turned out, it was basically the end of them.
It was also the last really good game Bioware made (give or take a Mass Effect 2). Which is crazy because it was 13 years ago!
Dragon Age Origins is one of the brownest games ever made. I played it on PC at launch and it was pretty fugly even then, I suspect it's aged like milk.
It's been given the FPS Boost treatment on Series (and the usual resolution enhancements that 360 games get on the X consoles) so that might work in its favour. Don't know if it's got Auto HDR but that does wonders for FFXIII so would probably be worthwhile here too.
I remember quite enjoying it at the time but it's very much Poundland Baldur's Gate, on PC at least.
Started Dragon Age those morning. I've made it to some mostly-grey ruin, after leaving a mostly-brown slum (with a detour into a mostly-brown series of corridors that everyone charitably refers to as a "palace"), admit to hear into what I assume will be a mostly-brownish-green swamp/forest.
I'm not really seeing the appeal, tbh.
Combat is very dull so far, a little too close to MMO autopilot for my liking. I'm just not doing anything. The plot is Very Serious, with what appears to be an early but acute case of Proper Noun Syndrome. It's propulsive enough despite its lore density, pushing me through the succession of muddy environments at a fair clip, but not all that compelling.
I'm starting to see the appeal of a "one hour review" approach to the backlog.
I'm starting to see the appeal of a "one hour review" approach to the backlog.
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