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Mass Effect 3


Sly Reflex
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Final bit of DLC for this is on the horizon.

Single player action in the form of "Citadel" - 1200 moon dollars on 05/03.

When a sinister conspiracy targets Commander Shepard, you and your team must uncover the truth, through battles and intrigue that range from the glamour of the Citadel’s Wards to the top-secret Council Archives. Uncover the truth and fight alongside your squad – as well as the cast from the original Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2.

Multiplayer malarky in the form of "Reckoning"

Newfound allies join the multiplayer war for survival in Mass Effect 3: Reckoning. The Geth Juggernaut, Female Turian Raptor, Talon Mercenary, Alliance Infiltration Unit, and more take up arms to stop the Reaper threat. Smash your enemies with the Biotic Hammer as you lay waste to the battlefield as the Krogan Warlord

Wield 7 new weapons for multiplayer, including the Geth Spitfire Assault Rifle, Venom Shotgun, Lancer Assault Rifle, and amplify your arsenal with new equipment and weapon mods featuring the Geth Scanner and Assault Rifle Omni-blade.

Free an that innit - 26/02

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  • 8 years later...

Started my sci-fi month a bit earlier than planned. Fired up Mass effect 3, still playing ODST, and have Metroid Dread waiting in the Switch (waiting for me to finish ODST).

 

Looks great. Not as good as 2 for some reason, and this is the one where they run funny😄. But I'll tell you one thing, it feels (I've only played a bit) like they really streamlined the RPG out if this. The way the game handles weapons, upgrades, planet scanning is almost automatic in this. And when I imported my Shepard she had all her upgraded powers from 2. Maybe she loses them (Metroid like) at some point, but initially this is a pure action game. Having said that there's plenty of talking to be done, and the writing, once again, is excellent.

 

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  • 1 month later...

 I think I've hit the endgame in this. With all the DLC it's been quite a long game, and a bit of a slog if I'm honest, because the game has been really just gun fight after gun fight with very little in between (or it seems that way). Maybe I've just taken on too much mass effect this past year as I started with Andromeda on gamepass. 

 

At one point I considered throwing in the towel, but I've stuck with it and now the end is in sight. But this is definitely the weakest mass effect game. It's just too much of an action game for my tastes, with hardly any new characters and very little interaction with those that are there. And the action isn't that great to be honest.

 

Anyway. I think I'm right in saying there's a new one in the works, so we'll see where that one goes.

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  • 2 months later...

Now onto this. These are early impressions, like 10 hours or so, but so far it seems excellent. It has some messy controls for handling its cover systems but coming from Mass Effect 2 I think it is a really well thought out and developed TPS action-rpg hybrid. They bring back the skill trees and give you 2 options per level to optimise for things like 'larger damage radius', or 'longer duration magic' or whatever, which can stack with other effects and debuffs your party are deploying. The thing they have in this that seems new is when you suspend enemies with biotic abilities you can then 'detonate' them with certain moves. So suspend un-armoured enemies with Singularity, or Pull, then detonate them with Throw or Warp. Then chain lots of effects throughout an arena.

 

Tons of weapon mods too to give it more stuff to think about, and a mechanic which associates equipment weight with cooldown speed, so you can go in gun's blazing or be more of a mage with a light gun loadout. It's probably not that deep or anything but it feels like the game where they finally figured out what they wanted to do with this stuff, after ME1's janky and floaty mess of a combat system (improved in LE, but still) and ME2's bland bread and butter Gears rip off with jedi powers. Positioning and changing cover feels more important here too. It's good stuff, a lot better than 2

 

Questing feels almost non existent tho. You eavesdrop people on the Citadel and scan a planet while dodging vacuum cleaners. There you go, there's your quest. Here's your galaxy points to save the galaxy from the vacuum cleaner menace. But after 60 hours of deep questing in the first 2 I don't mind it, I just treat it as the action packed final season of a massive RPG. The action holds up, what a surprise. The ending will have to be really incredibly shit to ruin this so-far positive impression.

 

Tho I will say so far it suffers from an unsatisfying lack of narrative continuity from ME2, most of the cast from that have just being making basic cameos. To give a sense of it, I'm off to Tuchanka next and Jack, Thane, Miranda, Kasumi and Mordin have made appearances but not main party appearances. It feels like that suicide mission stuff fucked them over when it came to including the ME2 crew, why put a ton of work into characters who might not show up.

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Aside from Shadow Broker which reveals an interesting part of the world, I think all the DLC is fine but not necessary at all. Even the extra characters are not that good. The base games are good on their own. 
 

Good that you’re enjoying ME, though. Gotta play Dragon Age Origins after. Has all the same things that makes these games good but with more D+D shit and bigger consequences to choices.

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DA feels extremely dated in a lot of aspects compared to ME. I think they released around the same time but DA was in development for an eternity so it was still built on the principles of something like Neverwinter Nights and KotOR – solid, classic BioWare but maybe hard to digest from a 2022 standpoint.

 

But off-topic anyway. ME2 party members will get their time to shine in ME3, I really enjoyed Thane's and Mordin's arc in ME3, particularly if you consider that, yes, technically all the work that went into those scenes was extra work because some people might have left ME2 with both of them being dead. Makes you appreciate the effort even more.

 

Also, if you like ME3 combat you should check out Andromeda at some point. It might be a downgrade in basically every aspect but it's here where ME combat peaked. 

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The 'planet scanning' in this game is ridiculous nonsense. The reapers hear your sonar and can eat you while scanning planets, but the game checkpoints you at the start of entering every solar system anyway so there's no actual risk. You pop in and spam scan and get eaten and then go back in after reloading and scan the planets you know have the stuff

 

So I just downloaded a mod to disable the system altogether. I can't even consider this a cheat, it just saves having to reload the game

https://www.nexusmods.com/masseffectlegendaryedition/mods/144?tab=description

 

I dunno, some of the design decisions here seem a bit senseless and strange to me

 

edit, adding impressions from later on

 

I've done a bunch of story stuff which feels like it could be pulling me closer to the third act of the story, if I had to guess. I also beat the Omega DLC, which simply refused to end. It went on so fucking long, omg. It's a shame, cause I like the characters involved Omega in ME2 is where the game really makes its statement about the types of worlds and cultures you're going to see. So to see it reduced to a (very pretty) 3 hour slog of shooting galleries was disappointing. The action is good, but it just needed something else, you know? ME is never a good time when you are doing nothing but shoot robots.

 

I'm sort of reaching a point where the complete lack of exploring is becoming a bit of an issue. It's mostly just about finishing the story and not really learning much about the galaxy. The game is weirdly structured as a series of dramatic climaxes. It's a game made out of endings to stories from the other games, but I don't completely get down with how it ties up with a bow 100s of years of history with some paragon dialogue options. It kinda makes the universe feel a bit small, and the moments don't have the impact I think they are intended to have. I dunno, I really like when ME uses its story as a vehicle to build a world. But in ME3 the world is already built, so now it's time to blow it up with vaccum cleaners, it just has a different priority I guess. But in general I find ME's storytelling can be a bit weak and relies a lot on some of the stronger characters.

 

That said I think ME3 is a masterclass in building a setting. It communicates a sense of war weariness with its Citadel and the background chatter of missing loved ones and supply chain crises. The docks are full of refugees sleeping on the floor, Batarians preaching to liven spirits while exiled from their home. Lots of really interesting details that gets more interesting each time you visit after story events of major consequence. I think it sells the gravity of what everyone is facing, even if structurally the game has that same sort of feeling that ME2 had for me where it's just a bunch of short stories dotted together, even if the stories are endings of stories from ME1. Also speaking of the characters I'm noticing a lot of bespoke interactions between characters, which must have been a lot of work. Grunt had a lot to say about my Prothean DLC squadmate, which is more than can be said for the hitman in ME2 who has less impact than Jenkins in ME1, not even joking. Tali and Kaiden had a big argument over which type of omnitool is best, that was cool as well

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Wrapped it up. I think overall this is really excellent stuff and a big surprise given the toxic reputation this particular game has, I'm glad I finally got around to playing it. It sort of feels like this is where they really 'reap' what they sowed with ME1 and 2's world and character building. Not as deep a piece of sci fi as those games are but with the citadel DLC especially they just really pull off the different character interactions. This is the type of thing you are missing out on by not having the full DLC package, essential stuff 

 

 

 

Both the final DLCs are pretty interesting. Leviathan is a kinda Lair of the Shadow broker style bit of content with lots of investigating and mystery, except it ties into the main plot (in particular the ending). Citadel DLC is an excellent bit of content that gives you much more to interact with on the citadel and a really fun party segment which I recommend watching on youtube if you've never played it. The mission in the citadel DLC is a mixed bag for me though, a little too on the nose Whedon-esque with all the quips and constant joking. But all the mcu was blowing up right around then so it was probably a bit more novel at the time. It also just helps with the tone of late game stuff, tho if you do it at the wrong time it can feel a bit like whiplash 

 

Spoiler

Joker and Shephard had a massive falling out in my game, then immediately after they went to have sushi in the DLC, then remembered that they had their falling out. Was weird lol

 

Final 4 hours of it do suck though and leave a negative impression. Not just the ending, the final 2 or 3 hours is a weird slog through horde mode encounters. Ended up dropping it to 'narrative' mode the 15th time that Liara and Kaiden got one shot by reaper lasers while I was trying to set up biotic combos on banshees. Lame shit. The ending itself feels like something thought up on the spot, not necessarily bad on a conceptual level but not something which was really developed by the rest of the story and other games. Felt lazy and unearned The Leviathan DLC feels like a bandaid to fix that, but it comes in a bit too late imo. Enough has been said about this stuff though, even tho it ends pretty poorly a lot of the other stuff in this game is exemplary imo. Not decided yet where I rank it with ME1, definitely better than 2 at least. Maybe ME1=ME3>ME2

 

I think the DLC does a lot here tho, thinking about all the vanilla content by itself I think this game would feel a bit lacking in variety and would have too much guns and not enough chatting. Citadel and Leviathan at least pace the action out a little better (Omega DLC is shit though)

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I played the "semi-complete" version of ME3 (expanded ending but no DLC) and still enjoyed it. I've heard only good things about its DLCs but I've always had such a strong stance against this kind of additional content that I refused to buy them at the time. I've never quite understood how, or rather when, Citadel is supposed to fit into a playthrough though, as from what I gather it's rather light-hearted but also endgame-content, which seems a bit of a strong juxtaposition.

 

I suppose I could see for myself as technically I have the DLC now in the Legendary Edition but I'll refrain from replaying this trilogy as I fear I'm no longer in the right state of mind to get fully engrossed. Rather just have the good memories.

 

Anyway, glad to finally find another member for "Team ME3". If Andromeda wasn't a thing, the whole backlash and discourse about ME3 due to certain choices about its ending would still be the most unfair evaluation of a videogame on the web IMO.

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I didn't have any specific issue with ME3 - other than how I felt the series declined from ME, in the sequels, through the removal of core RPG elements, to become more of a squad shooting game (much in the same way they did with Dragon Age - where tactical combat was weaned out, so it was less RPG and more ARPG).

 

But I don't think I played any of the DLCs.

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I think the ending hate is pretty justified but tbh I don't see where the RPG has been stripped from the action as such, I think ME3 comes a lot closer to ME1's style of combat than 2 did, but with less of a 'dice roll' feel to when you point your gun at stuff (which I don't mind tbh). Most of my fighting was done from the power wheel, by the time I got to the end I was pretty much exclusively a team of mages with Liara and Kaiden and guns were only used occasionally when stuff was on cooldown. There's a ton of options there to level up that reward a kind of team synergy that the other 2 aren't as good at I feel

 

The main stuff that gets stripped out in ME3 I think is any sense of exploring uncharted worlds and you have less dialogue options, and your Normandy is a skeleton crew. But I think a lot of that is made up for a bigger focus on little details like how every time you visit the Citadel it feels like you are on shore leave and can visit people like Joker and Liara and have unique dialogue with them there. At the very least each visit felt fairly purposeful to me anyway. Citadel DLC is the 4 hour DLC version of all of that, but the base game has it a good bit too

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