Mass Effect 3

[Neon]

'Mass Effect 3: Earth' is out.

• Three New Maps – With the fate of the galaxy at stake, Earth’s military efforts have concentrated on three strategic locations. Defend Firebase Rio, home to the N7 training facility, along with Firebase Vancouver and Firebase London in the last stand for mankind.
  
  • New Array of Playable N7 Characters – Step into the boots of the Alliance’s most elite military units with the N7 Demolisher Engineer, N7 Destroyer Soldier, N7 Fury Adept, N7 Sentinel Paladin, N7 Shadow Infiltrator and N7 Slayer Vanguard.
    
    • New Powerful and Unique Weapons – Lay waste to the enemy by unlocking the N7 Piranha Shotgun, N7 Typhoon Assault Rifle and Acolyte Pistol.
      
      • New Powerful Upgrades – Outfit your weapons with 12 new modifications and fortify your gear with 11 unique upgrades to defeat even the toughest foes.
        

      [*]New “Platinum” Difficulty – Conquer bronze in your sleep? Take down Silver with one hand? Beat Gold without breaking a sweat? Then grab your friends and test your skills on the brand-new Platinum difficulty.

      [*]New In-Mission Objective – Randomly occurring during waves 3, 6 and 10, this new objective will challenge teams to keep a targeted agent alive by protecting and escorting them to a designated extraction zone on each map.

Edited July 17, 2012 by Neon

[turbojet]

Ninja Vanguard!

Holy shit!

Be right back.

[turbojet]

Now I know why the DLC has been free. Apparently, getting the new characters is hard as hell and EA puts a price on packs like it's fucking Pokemon cards and you may never know what you get or if you get anything valuable. Fuck.

[Emmett L. Brown]

Guess this means EA won't be in any hurry to have their Bioware underlings make some single-player DLC missions, since they can only get players to pay for those once.

[Neon]

Guess this means EA won't be in any hurry to have their Bioware underlings make some single-player DLC missions, since they can only get players to pay for those once.

There's single-player DLC in the making, right now.

Edited July 19, 2012 by Neon

[Emmett L. Brown]

There's single-player DLC in the making, right now.

Well, that was quick. A traitorous Reaper, eh? I'd have called that incredibly lame and unworthy of the Mass Effect storyline quality before I saw the original ending. Right now I'm actually genuinely interested in seeing the Reapers explored further as characters. It might shed some light on what the hell happend to Harbinger.

Picture the Reapers being nice and friendly in the Synthesis ending, and then picture Harbinger. At least in the Control ending I'll happily accept that Harbinger is God-Shepard's bitch, and hopefully chafing really badly from it.

[Rinzler]

The scary thing is a few months before that was announced I actually made up a bad fan-fiction story revolving around a few traitorous reapers.

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

Er...da fuq?

A friendly reaper? A traitorous reaper? Those words don't belong in the same sentence.

And it can be on our side? Kinda foaming at the mouth in anticipation to see how the hell this'll work because it's really interesting.

...

And they still stuck us with the (now lukewarm) endings...

[Phos]

Mass Effect 3: "Welcome to Earf'"

[Neon]

[Rinzler]

[Emmett L. Brown]

Well, great! This comes just in time for the Shepard I brought all the way from MA1 just to get the homosexual man sex with Kaidan.

That's right. There was still one good thing in MA3 that had me coming back again. Mansex!

[Emmett L. Brown]

Leviathan's out on August 28th.

Which incidentally is my birthday.

News seems to indicate that playing this DLC will have an effect on the ending, but all we know is that the Catalyst will have some extra lines, so don't get your hopes up. Unless those extra lines are "I AM HARBINGER, YOU'VE SEEN THROUGH MY WEB OF DECEIPT AND CAN NOW IGNORE THE CHOICES I OFFERED YOU IN FAVOUR OF SOMETHING MORE SATISFYING."

"THIS HURTS ME."

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

Here's hoping the reaper that joins you makes the sacrifice and not shepherd if the EMS is high enough.

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

Okay, so I did you guys a favor and wasted $10 on the DLC so none of you guys would have to in order to give you my impression of it.

The final verdict: Meh...not bad but not too good either. It's so-so to be exact.

So you find out the origins of the Reapers, find out about what Leviathan is and see the power that it is capable of. But when you get to the endgame and reach the Star Child the DLC hardly changes a thing. It just gives you the option to remind yourself of the origins of the Reapers as a dialogue choice.

Not saying that it sucks, but you'd think they could have put more into this DLC than they did. But yeah, if you guys decide to get it, you'll find it okay at best and a waste of money at worst. Just a heads up.

[SIXTH-RATE SOMA]

No one seems to care about Leviathan on either of the forums I frequent.

I'm not sure if that's good or bad.

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

There's really not much to care about the DLC to be honest.

Edited September 7, 2012 by ChaosSupremeSonic

[Emmett L. Brown]

I liked Leviathan. It was a nice side-story with some interesting locations and a few new gameplay gimmicks. The only thing about the DLC that both surprised and impressed me was that every single one of your squad members has full voice acting for the entire lenght of the adventure and comments on the Normandy between missions. Whoever you've got as your love interest also gets altered dialogue to reflect the relationship.

None of the previous DLCs had squad member voice acting (except possibly 1-2 recycled lines in Lair of the Shadow Broker), so it's pretty nice.

[Forever Eevee]

This is one of the games I'll be getting with the Wii U at launch.

I've played both the 1st and 2nd games on my girlfriends old 360 and I'm looking forward to finishing the trilogy.

. . .

Renegade for life!

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

Bioware: We're not done with Mass Effect

BioWare is working on more single-player DLC for Mass Effect 3 and has plans for a brand-new game in the franchise.

There's a silver lining to today's sad news that BioWare co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk are leaving the company and retiring from the business of making videogames. In his tribute to the good doctors and their monumental contribution to the videogame industry, BioWare Edmonton General Manager Aaryn Flynn said the company is ready to "carry on their legacy" with some big plans for the Mass Effect universe.

"We are releasing more multiplayer content and we have more single-player stories coming throughout the next six months, including Omega which is coming in the fall," Flynn wrote. "But the Mass Effect universe is vast, and Casey [Hudson] and our teams have plans for another full game. 'Where to go next?' with such a project has been a question a lot of us have been asking, and we'd all love to hear your ideas."

Flynn also revealed (without actually revealing anything) that BioWare is laying the groundwork for "an all-new game set in a fictional universe, built from the bottom up with all-new gaming technology."

"Where to go next?" is certainly a loaded question. Regardless of how you felt about the way Mass Effect 3ended, there was such finality to it that any kind of follow-up is almost doomed to be anti-climactic. There's plenty of room for new stories, sure, but how do you come up with something that compares to the end of the frikkin' galaxy as we know it? That's a mighty tough act to follow.

Edited September 19, 2012 by ChaosSupremeSonic

[Carbo]

The process of every major "trilogy" franchise.

First game is made and creates an innovating, if not genrebusting video game that's given 10s across the board.

Second game is released to massive hype and excels in the areas the first game delivered despite the underlying feeling that we've done all of this before.

Third game is hyped to shit to the point that it's a part of the mainstream, for better or for worse, and also gets a shitty conclusion. Also the game is pretty much the norm at this point and what was once fresh and new is now uninteresting and dull.

Prequel to the trilogy is announced where the developers are now going to "give it all", make it the best game they've ever made and innovate on itself, only it doesn't end up managing any of that and is just another run-of-the-mill game with higher production values, and the subtext of "this is not going to change the story at all" creates a jarring discontent having come way too many games, novelizations, expanded universe content and action figures too late.

[Emmett L. Brown]

Well, I guess that makes the Destroy ending canon if they wanna make a game after MA3. Any other ending, no matter what new threat arises, the friendly/controlled-by-God-Shepard Reapers can just show say "Hi! Die! Bye!" and thus the galaxy is safe again.

So my triumphant heart-warming, tear-jerking achievement of uniting the Geth and Quarians is shot down for the second time. Nuts.

[Candescence]

... Goddamn it, Bioware, I swear you explicitly stated that you wouldn't create another ME game.

See, people, this is what happens when EA gets their grubby hands on a once-independent studio. No wonder Valve shut down EA's attempts to buy them.

Also, Bioware's founders, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk have resigned. GEE, I WONDER WHY.

Edited September 19, 2012 by Masaru Daimon

[Emmett L. Brown]

Now, now. Just because Westwood mysteriously had a sudden drop in quality after they were acquired by EA and mysteriously turned the Command & Conquer franchise from a record-breaking quality series to a trainwreck of epic proportions doesn't mean the same thing is already happening to Bioware.

I mean...it's not like EA demanded they slap together a sequel to Dragon Age in nowhere near the required development time to make a worthy sequel to the greatest western RPG (that isn't Elder Scrolls) since Baldur's Gate... Or that Bioware gave in to pressure to push Mass Effect 3 out the door in about two-thirds of the time they were planning to invest on development...

Oh god, I can't even keep up the sarcasm. EA WHY MUST YOU DESTROY EVERYTHING I LOVE!?

EDIT: You have to love EA:

Bullfrog

The creators of such hits as Theme Hospital, Dungeon Keeper, Populous, Syndicate, Flood, and more. Killed in 2004.

Maxis

The creators of Sim City, the Sims, Spore, and other jewels of Will Wright's imagination. Still alive, but stuck on expansion pack milking duty indefinitely. Spore was infected with DRM plague at EA's insistence and Will Wright's chagrin.

Westwood

Created Dune II, and in doing so became the father of the Real Time Strategy genre. Command & Conquer was the only series able to face Blizzard's War/Starcraft head-on. Their last original employe quit in 2003. Dead.

Bioware

...fuck.

Edited September 19, 2012 by Grumpy Old Guy

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

The process of every major "trilogy" franchise.

Note to self: if I ever make a series, never make it a trilogy.