TheUnsunghero26
Member
They've actually said that every cut they had to make was because of the PS3. I'd assume the PS3's split memory was the reason.
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The Mass Effect Community Thread
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They've actually said that every cut they had to make was because of the PS3. I'd assume the PS3's split memory was the reason.
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
Having played both 360 and PS3 versions, I can safely say the PS3 version was still the worst one, terrible frame rate.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
Yep. I ain't no game developer but I was saying shortly after finishing Mass Effect 2 how oddly planned, if at all, this trilogy was to be doing stuff like the suicide mission. Baffling writing.
JohnnyFootball
GerAlt-Right. Ciriously.
If you play any of the biotic classes, then Liara is far and away the most effective squadmate. Use her singularity and combine it with Warp or throw and those biotic explosions are damn powerful.
Doctoglethorpe
Member
Yeah, Sentinel + Liara makes the game almost too easy. Use throw on everything she gets in singularities, both of which can be upgraded to the point of near instant cooldown, and use overload on everything with shields or barriers. With that combo I just leave my second companion slot open for rotating in whoever fits each particular mission the most story-wise since I end up not even noticing their presence in combat.
I never really used James much so I never noticed he was a tank, but it wouldn't surprise me considering how buff Grunt was in ME2.
Blue Ninja
Member
Liara and Garrus were my go-to team in ME3. In ME2 it was Miranda and Garrus (double overload, baby). In ME1 Wrex and Garrus.
That turian just can't do no wrong.
That turian just can't do no wrong.
Yeah, the entire series starting going downhill within the first 10 minutes of ME2 with the Lazarus Project, I have no idea what Bioware thought they were doing with that. Things like making the Council backslide on the Reaper threat when they had absolutely no logical reason to and the nonsensical increase in influence that Cerberus had in the series because of Mac Walter's obsession with them just compounds the issue, Bioware had no idea what they were doing.
That interview posted in the previous page where Walters wonders what they were thinking when they did the Suicide Mission tells me all I need to know.
I rolled with a lot of combinations in ME1, due to the fact that I've played it so much. Wrex and Garrus and Ashley and Tali are the two most common combinations.
In ME2, I pretty much locked onto Zaeed and Kasumi. They're really a great team, and Zaeed is my bro.
ME3 I tended to play with Garrus and Javik.
In ME2, I pretty much locked onto Zaeed and Kasumi. They're really a great team, and Zaeed is my bro.
ME3 I tended to play with Garrus and Javik.
figadapaura
Member
Liara and Wrex are my go to team in ME1. Since I play Vanguard, it means I can almost never open any containers, but being able to just throw enemies around at will is great fun.
I've gone with a lot of different teams in ME2, but I pretty much stick with Miranda and Kasumi now. Shadow Strike is my favourite power ever. Makes me laugh watching Kasumi just punch Harbinger in the face. Incredibly useful on Insanity as well since it stops any enemy it's directed at until they've been hit. And Miranda's powers are useful against shields and armour, which Vanguards aren't. I sometimes roll with Garrus and Zaeed as well.
ME3 is always Liara and Garrus unless I'm otherwise forced to bring anyone else. In that case I bring Liara. Biotic explosions are one of the best things about ME3.
I've gone with a lot of different teams in ME2, but I pretty much stick with Miranda and Kasumi now. Shadow Strike is my favourite power ever. Makes me laugh watching Kasumi just punch Harbinger in the face. Incredibly useful on Insanity as well since it stops any enemy it's directed at until they've been hit. And Miranda's powers are useful against shields and armour, which Vanguards aren't. I sometimes roll with Garrus and Zaeed as well.
ME3 is always Liara and Garrus unless I'm otherwise forced to bring anyone else. In that case I bring Liara. Biotic explosions are one of the best things about ME3.
Winterfang
Banned
I'm more of a fire explosion guy, since I'm almost always soldier I always use incendiary ammo and conducive shot or James's carnage to activate them. Destroy reapers in seconds. James Frag grenades are instant and save my ass countless times (I think they also activate all the different explosion types). He is very useful.
I like Garrus because of Sniper boosts and great moves but he is made of paper Mache. Dies so much is almost not worth it. Tali is surprisingly durable and so is Javik.
Liara is great, Statis saved my ass against many phantoms and nemesis.
I like Garrus because of Sniper boosts and great moves but he is made of paper Mache. Dies so much is almost not worth it. Tali is surprisingly durable and so is Javik.
Liara is great, Statis saved my ass against many phantoms and nemesis.
figadapaura
Member
Doesn't Tali have the highest armour rating? Makes sense since she needs more protection than anyone else.
Pretty sure Liara has the lowest by a good bit.
Pretty sure Liara has the lowest by a good bit.
Miranda was exceedingly versatile in ME2. Overload and Warp with some nice ally bonuses to boot.
In ME3 I mostly concentrated on BE friendlies. Javik was almost always on my team because his dialogue was amusing and his powers were BE friendly.
After playing so much ME3 MP partners never really mattered. It's crazy how overpowered Shepard is even on Insanity. An enemy boss unit getting a big introduction is more of a comedy moment than a tension builder.
In ME3 I mostly concentrated on BE friendlies. Javik was almost always on my team because his dialogue was amusing and his powers were BE friendly.
After playing so much ME3 MP partners never really mattered. It's crazy how overpowered Shepard is even on Insanity. An enemy boss unit getting a big introduction is more of a comedy moment than a tension builder.
Laughing Banana
Weeping Pickle
But damn ain't that Suicide Mission awesome. How many RPGs can you say that actually make it feels like every single party member counts and you can have that much freedom in determining their fate?
Doctoglethorpe
Member
Yes it was fantastic, which made the lack of anything remotely like it in ME3 bewildering.
Spectral Entity
Member
Veering slightly OT, but has anyone ever posted clear, close up pics of the Ark of the Covenant as seen in the archives of the Citadel DLC?
If not, I took some a few months back while playing and will post if anyone was interested.
If not, I took some a few months back while playing and will post if anyone was interested.
Blue Ninja
Member
I didn't even know it was there. Post 'em, dammit.
figadapaura
Member
What........? I'm interested.
HP_Wuvcraft
Banned
BW trying to write branching plot is the worst thing that has happened to the company. It's soiled the very idea of the concept.
Sleeping Lesson
Member
The first one, Revelation, is by far the best. Basically covers what Anderson and Saren were up to before the original Mass Effect. They're all decent books as far as video game novels go, just don't expect high literature.
[EDIT] Except Deception. It's not written by Drew Karpyshyn, and the author is clearly not knowledgeable about the Mass Effect universe.
JohnnyFootball
GerAlt-Right. Ciriously.
Yeah, there's this. Never once used James. Sentinel plus Liara never failed.
Really Sentinel was the best class for all the games IMO.
JohnnyFootball
GerAlt-Right. Ciriously.
I disagree. Retribution I felt was the best. Ascension was decent, but Retribution really set up the whole Cerebus controlling the Reapers plot in ME3
Sleeping Lesson
Member
Actually, yeah, that was a pretty cool plotline that tied in nicely to the games. I just like how Revelation took place before the reapers a big deal, and not as much was at stake. And reading how Saren became a specter was well done. I wish there were more Mass Effect stories that were smaller in scope. It doesn't always have to be saving the damn universe.
Usually I just stick with the humans as part of my squad, unless I have no choice but to take aliens, like after losing one of the VS or during ME2 loyalty missions. I've not really got anything against the aliens, though I do find most of them boring, I just prefer saving the galaxy with my own kind fighting next to me. One of the series' main themes is humanities place in the galaxy, so we might as well mould our place together.
ME1: Ash + Kaidan until Virmire then I use Garrus for the rest of the game
ME2: Zaeed + Miranda except for loyalty missions and suicide mission, where I leave Zaeed to hold the line and take Jacob instead.
ME2: Ash + Vega, my triple Soldier death squad with two offensive Soldiers in Ash and my Shepard and our tank in Vega.
Vega, Ashley and Kaidan have more protection than Tali iirc, but yeah, Liara has by far the least, you have to stop her from constantly charging enemies or else she'll spend most battles dead. Garrus and Javik are also made of paper it sells, a more durable type of paper than Liara is made from though.
ME1: Ash + Kaidan until Virmire then I use Garrus for the rest of the game
ME2: Zaeed + Miranda except for loyalty missions and suicide mission, where I leave Zaeed to hold the line and take Jacob instead.
ME2: Ash + Vega, my triple Soldier death squad with two offensive Soldiers in Ash and my Shepard and our tank in Vega.
Vega, Ashley and Kaidan have more protection than Tali iirc, but yeah, Liara has by far the least, you have to stop her from constantly charging enemies or else she'll spend most battles dead. Garrus and Javik are also made of paper it sells, a more durable type of paper than Liara is made from though.
I wonder if the fact that I managed to get through the suicide mission without anyone dying on my first try without reading anything makes me view it a little differently.
It was a fun mission, true, but I certainly did not end that game feeling the FUCK YEAH! feeling I had after playing ME1. Part of that may be that I royally hated the Terminator baby.
Yeah, i agree. Bioware Montreal need to take a good look at the last mission of ME1(Saving the Citadel) to make a truly awesome ending for "ME4". No stuff coming out of nowhere like a giant Terminator baby or Star Child talking nonsense.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
I think I'm the only person who didn't have a problem conceptually, and was almost totally fine with the execution, of the Reaper baby :lol
ThoseDeafMutes
Member
No conceptual problems?
Why is it human shaped? Would the completed version fly through space like superman? Or if its encased in a reaper shell why does it have stupid arms and eyes and shit?
Also, try not to think of how Sovereign was able to hide as spaceship (i.e. people could go inside and stuff) and how that would operate with a human inside a Reaper shell.
APZonerunner
Member
A nice bit of foreshadowing for the Reaper baby could've been perhaps for some sort of strangely-shaped core to the dead Reaper when you go get the IFF, to hint that the core looks like the race it was built from, with the insect-like shell added around it. Alas.
Baron_Calamity
Member
I was ok with the ending as well. The rest of Mass Effect 3 was terrible. :\ To be fair, most of it was fixed in DLC but at the same time, making the game require DLC to make any sense or be enjoyable was terrible in itself.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
The execution had problems. I had no issue with the concept of Reapers harvesting organic species as a form of breeding/creation and said Reapers either adopting certain physiological traits or housing those traits in the Sovereign-like shell. I wasn't happy with how it ultimately looked, and the way the series never seemed to settle on why it looked that way versus the other Reapers.
By conceptually I mean I had no issue with "Collectors are harvesting humans to build or prototype a Reaper in secret, one that has adopted physiological traits of the harvested species, just as Sovereign did for its." It was the execution and everything that came after that muddied it all.
On top of that, why does it have three eyes?!. If this baby reaper thing was based on humans, why the third eye? Did the reapers think any of this shit through? It's such a minor thing that never ceases to frustrate me about that dumbass thing.
All Reapers contain a core that apes the physical appearance of the species used to create it, then covered with a Reaper cuttlefish outer shell.
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/04/21/mass-effect-a-q-amp-a-for-hardcore-fans.aspx
"The exterior of the Reapers does follow a similar pattern, an efficient design for the purpose they were created for. However each Reaper is created from a unique species, and as we saw at the end of Mass Effect 2, the core of each Reaper is designed in the likeness of that species." - Mac Walters
Nostremitus
Member
Then why didn't we see any strange giant aliens bursting from their Reaper shells during the final battle? You know, the outer carapace becomes too damaged to go on, so it discards it to fight without it. Instead they seem to be allowing themselves to die as it explodes around them for no damned good reason. That's called pulling an excuse out of his ass to make up for something making no damned sense.
Fata1moose
Banned
So Harbinger must be like one of those Russian dolls, he has a Leviathan shell and within that shell is a smaller Leviathan.
I'm not sure how they could fight without it. Without the shell they have no propulsion system in space, and they aren't build for land combat. I guess they could flail around mouth-lasering stuff, which doesn't sound all that much better.
Nostremitus
Member
If they aren't designed to fight without it, how did the human one fight Shepard? They're synthetics, they wouldn't have waisted the energy or materials on offensive/defensive weaponry if they weren't designed to ever use them. You don't think a giant Prothean throwing buildings and mouthlasering people would be effective in a ground fight? Maybe not as effective as it would be shielded in it carapace, but infinitely more effective than letting itself die for no reason.
Spectral Entity
Member
Okay! I'll upload them early tomorrow morning when I get off work.
I thought it was a cool Easter egg! The only other Easter egg I have is a video of the whale in the bayou of Assassin's Creed Liberation HD.
I think the disconnect here may be in assuming the Reaper shell is exploding around them, as you said earlier. It's more likely that the entire Reaper is exploding, including the core. Not many opportunities to unbuckle yourself and jump out of the moving car, so to speak.
Of course, we know the real reason the Reaper has a laser is for the boss fight.
Nostremitus
Member
Shit design on the Reapers' part if there's no ejection mechanism. Well, not the Reapers, the game developers. We've gone full circle back to the original point. If that had been the plan from the beginning, these types of things would've been considered.
The Silver
Member
I always thought it was obvious the human reaper was just a core, even if it was fully "grown" it would be too small for a Reaper.
Nostremitus
Member
I'm just saying that I don't think the team had a coherent plan from the beginning.
Someone thought, "Let's have a giant terminator for a boss fight." Then later they decided to backpedal on the idea of Reapers taking the forms of the beings they are destroying and retconned a reason for the Human shapes thing's existence. If it was originally planned to be this way, I firmly believe they'd have incorporated the concept in some fashion...
In the end it probably came down to money. It's cheaper to use the same core design for all reapers instead of having the create a shit-ton of different races for on-off uses. That, and in the ME universe the Reapers really have no reason to keep the physical forms of the different species, they are synthetics. The shape is just the vessel. They'd use the most efficient vessel to store the collective consciousness that becomes the new Reaper's personality.
I agree that the team didn't have a coherent plan from the beginning (I mean, they've said as much for various aspects of the plot), but since Harbinger is shown to have a cuttlefish form at the end of vanilla ME2 (you see his hologram when he releases control) then it would seem that they had planned the core vs. shell idea since - at the latest -ME2's dev cycle. I don't think this was retconned after ME2 and before ME3.
However, as for why they even bothered with the "shell" concept to begin with, I absolutely agree that it's largely for time and resources. But it also works to make them iconic, I think.
Winterfang
Banned
I didn't had a problem. The reapers are not interested in wiping out intelligent life, they want to help then ascend in reaper from. The proteans and humans where particularly candidates for a new reaper form. It doesn't have to be flying in space. Maybe it could ride a regular reaper. A human shaped reaper would be a significantly tougher enemy in ground to face.
royox
Member
No. It has been said like 100000 times. They harvest the organics and create a single reaper with the form of the original race, the Leviathans. The "human reaper" we fought on ME2 is a "reaper fetus", the core of the real reaper. They make a Sobereign like reaper with the most important race and "little reapers" with the other races.
ThoseDeafMutes
Member
The terminator baby really doesn't make sense on any level. Physical resemblance to a human cannot be coincidental, yet serves no function since that's going to be the "core" of a ship. None of its "human traits" in terms of body plan could serve any purpose. Making something out of liquified humans doesn't make any sense because it would be no better than making it out of the raw elements that humans are composed of. The fact that some carbon once belonged to a human is utterly irrelevant and makes it no more suibtable as a building material, nor do any of the "essential properties of a species" get transferred. This is on par with eating the hearts of your victims and thinking it's going to add to their power to yours.
The idea that a species is being preserved through this process is quite bizarre. Are their brains being uploaded to a computer before being liquified? Are we expected ot believe that once dissolved, their mind is preserved in some other capacity? Or is it simply that this intangible "essense of species" magically influences the behaviour of the Reaper's main computer because it's physical body is constructed out of person-goop?
Furthermore, putting their "worthy species archives" in a combat chassis that gets risked every single cycle seems like a pretty good way to have your achive destroyed. I hope they make backups somehow because we know that Reapers get destroyed in cycles periodically - not just ours, but we've found multiple dead reaper carcases throughout our galaxy. And we know that smaller, weaker, easier to destroyer Reapers exist, whom would presumably be more likely to be blown up in any given cycle.
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