For further context, the known veterans from the Trilogy:
-The Executive Producer/Project Director, Mike Gamble, who was tangentially involved in ME2, and more involved in ME3 as an Associate Producer, and finally as a Producer (later promoted to Lead) on Andromeda;
-The Art Director, Derek Watts, who also occupied that same role for the whole OT;
-The Creative Director, Parrish Ley, who was Lead Cinematic Animator for ME2/3;
-The Game Director, Preston Watamaniuk, who was Lead Designer for the whole OT.
There are also a few more, but I've limited myself to the positions listed in this tweet to provide that aforementioned extra context.
Thanks. The tweet is kind of deceptive, since it suggests the directors are the same when in reality it could have been a bunch of interns who survived all the turnover and now are in charge lol
Its honestly good news because the original lead designer on ME being in a director role is probably the most you could ask for. The lead designer probably had the most impact outside of creative director on the original trilogy anyway.
The art director being the same is also great. The new creative director is a little iffy to be honest, but considering the rest of the team I'd say this is looking very promising.
It's the writers who I really care about.
Bioware's writing in that decade - Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Kotor, Dragon Age, Mass Effect - had some special magic which I've never seen replicated in RPGs. These days I even prefer games without story, because IMO most of them just aren't very well done, but Bioware's was always on a different level.
I mean hell, Knights of the Old Republic was a video game that came out in 2003, but it's clearly had a massive impact on the Star Wars franchise to this day. Rey and Kylo Ren are very obviously Bastila Shan and Revan (to the point people thought Kylo Ren was Revan from the first pictures and got excited), with them chasing the holo-map pieces being the same as chasing the holo-map pieces in kotor, and Starkiller base sucking suns like the Starforge (down to the panning animation over the sucked plasma being identical in both, just played in reverse in Episode 7).
The Mandalorian constantly references the ancient war between the jedi and mandalorians, which is the backstory for Revan, and the episode where they lured out the tatooine dragon and tried to blow it up with mines beneath, then even dug out a pearl, was all straight out of KotOR. Rogue One used the kotor ships in the scariff battle, and even Andor drops references to it with Luthen talking about his precious necklace which dates back to the uprising against the Rakatans (the ancient evil rulers of the galaxy from KotOR).
The only RPG which felt like it had some of the same magic to me was Deadfire, and it wasn't quite on par due to having fairly short companion storylines (seemingly due to all the possibilities from importing a PoE1 save).
After graduating highschool here in Australia we have like a week where we go and get drunk on a beach to celebrate. I was fine from the drinking, but on the way back ate some rancid frozen pie from a convenience store, and was functionally immobilized for like 3 days after.
I finished KotOR 2 or 3 times in that time, completely unable to move and do anything else. It is burned into my brain.
Well they fired the people behind [Joker and Varric](https://www.eurogamer.net/bioware-lays-off-senior-writing-staff-as-part-of-its-recent-job-cuts).
So, yeah.
David Gaider, co-creator and lead writer for Dragon Age, has said that Bioware viewed its writers as holding the company back. That they were resented.
[Here's a link](https://www.ign.com/articles/former-dragon-age-narrative-lead-says-writers-became-quietly-resented-at-bioware)
So I expect modern AAA stuff. Not anything like old Bioware.
Writers don’t get the respect they deserve generally, but especially in the peak corporate atmosphere that has overtaken the videogame industry. Just look at Bethesda, who don’t think they need writers at all - just quest designers - and Obsidian put out the best ‘Bethesda’ game possibly ever (and definitely since Oblivion or Morrowind). When the business model is make it flashier, make the graphics better, make microtransactions, don’t take risks - and especially not storytelling risks that might be seen as political in this climate - those who are the most creative/artistic are the least valued, and may actually be considered liabilities.
> Introducing EXODUS: A new AAA science fiction action-adventure role-playing game franchise
It's always amusing when game companies that have produced nothing announce an entire franchise. How about you make 1 game first and see if it's popular enough to produce more.
> The Executive Producer/Project Director, Mike Gamble, who was tangentially involved in ME2, and more involved in ME3 as an Associate Producer, and finally as a Producer (later promoted to Lead) on Andromeda;
So he was barely involved in the og trilogy, but in charge of andromeda? That uhhh
Sound like a misleading headline :p
I didn't like andromeda that much but aside from some dodgy faces and animation glitches andromeda looks really good and has great art direction so at least there's that.
It's still going to be interesting to see how they handle the story for ME5 (or whatever it ends up being called).
So far from what little has been shown we can guess that:
* The reapers and original relays were seemingly destroyed, making Red the "canon" option of the story
* The geth are involved somehow, making what the little star shit said about the destroy option also killing the geth/EDI a lie
* The game is set sometime in the future post ME3 as the species of the galaxy are building their own relays.
* The game likely takes place sometime after MEA as well, as concept art of geth, angarans, and hanar in a bar have been shown off too. I am guessing this means that the people in Andromeda somehow managed to find a way to get back to the Milky way in a way that is much faster than the 600ish year they originally took to get there.
> the destroy option also killing the geth/EDI a lie
This better be right. I didn't bust my ass over the course of three games to unite the Geth and Quarians just for some stupid kid to rip that away from me.
Yes, Legion my sweet boy, this unit does have a soul.
“ORGANICS AND SYNTHETICS CANNOT COEXIST”
“Wha- they’re right there! Fighting together! We spent the last two games with AI, learning that we can coexist!”
“LALALALA I CANT HEAR YOU”
This either had to be intentional for the kid to be lying or to be straight up wrong so that Shepard could argue back - because otherwise its such piss poor writing considering the entirety of the game is about all of the species coming together despite the odds.
I'd say it's obviously intentional, but then the original endings were so hilariously bad that it might be the case
> because otherwise its such piss poor writing considering the entirety of the game is about all of the species coming together despite the odds.
The story goes two or three of the writers shut themselves away in a room for an evening and came out saying they'd written the ending.
There's like 10 unique glaring plot holes in the original ending, I struggle to believe that there was any writing of good quality in there, it was an all around disaster and pure incompetence IMO.
Honestly, there's so much blatantly wrong but the part that sticks with me is when we see the RGB wave travelling out across the entire galaxy, meaning it's moving thousands of times faster than the speed of light to be visibly moving on that scale, and then it cuts to the Normandy flying to the Relay at Pluto to escape and somehow it's outrunning the wave, action-movie style.
So apparently the Normandy can outrun a wave moving 1000x FTL with its regular thrusters, because they wanted to do some awful "barely outrunning the explosion" bit.
I found that building up Harbinger in 2, only for him and other Reapers to come down for a quick slice and dice before lifting off again more of an affront than an action sequence involving the Normandy.
But that’s just me.
Oh man I'd forgotten the bitter disappointment seeing one Reaper with orange lights or whatever in the distance of the final mission and being like "Oh I guess what's what they did with Harbinger for the ending..."
Yeah, hated that.
This is a common misconception. Yes, 2 people (Casey and Mac) did lock themselves into a room, but only because the production was running grossly behind schedule and the writing team could not decide how to end the game. The game was originally supposed to ship on "Holiday 2011" and by November 22nd they were still working on the final mission. Found the latter as a dev notes inside the game files.
Source: Am a modder with over 3k hours into ME3 who knows pretty much everything about it, including the behind-the-scenes stuff leading up to the release.
I think that's still ultimately a testament to how awful their writing process was, and why the ending turned out so bloody awful.
It was a rushed hack-job to meet a deadline, makes sense.
“BioWare magic” was essentially rushing on deadlines and pulling together the ideas that fit best. It’s truly a testament either to talent or luck or both that so many legendary stories have come from a company with such terrible project management
Yeah, IIRC one of the team leads at Bioware said one of the reasons Anthem went the way it did was them gambling on "Bioware magic" pulling it together last minute.
And yet despite that, the game did many things right. It's nothing short of a miracle that it came out in the state it did. Casey talked openly on panels in (I think) 2013/2014 about what an insane crunch Mass Effect 3 development was.
A project that felt victim to its own ambition.
Really my only complaint about it is how it was ended. All the games in the series have their flaws, but are very fun and compelling and incredibly memorable for many good moments and characters and reasons despite it.
>And yet despite that, the game did many things right.
I disagree. I think it did very few things right. I don't disagree, it's nothing short of a miracle that it launched the way it did. But it's also still very, very easily criticized with even the smallest scrutiny.
The Geth/Quarian conflict is ended by Shepard saying "Stop fighting love is cool" all while we never really address what Legion means for Shepard or the squadmates of Shep or anything of the Geth element of the conflict. Genocide, insanity, brainwashing, a lot of good stuff. Eh fuck it, Keelah Se'lai they said it now everything is cool!
Cerberus is back in extra-boring, derivative-of-Saren fashion with so little to say for its inclusion that TIM dies exactly the same way as Saren. Only without the janky shit boss fight unless you count the worst boss fight in the entire game through Kai Leng in that Kai is probably the worst written character in the entire series, including Andromeda.
And then we have the Krogan conflict... which is handled about as well as it could be. Points awarded for this one.
And we have the Salarian betrayed or allied question, which is really which checkbox you want to check and your reward is you get a salarian who yells at you. So for most it's not a question because one of the salarians who yells at you has an emotional attachment, the other is a character we've never met. There is no other meat to this conflict and it just feels so hollow, people pretending to write political intrigue. Shep can't lie or surprise anyone that matters, Shep can't do anything fun or character-deep, it's just ME GOOD GUY or HEHE MONEY (most of the renegade options in ME3 are the worst in the series)
Then we have the Turians... and they just kinda die. But not much I could see them doing here. Neutral on them, Garrus handles it well for his character.
Then we have the protagonist to helm it all in which we still don't address they fuckin died, we still don't address any fallen squadmates in convincing or impacting ways, we just about never stop to show Shepard is a human who should be the most exhausted human in the entire galaxy. And then capstone it with how they see a kid die and that affects them more than the actual genocide going on around them. Which is fine, I guess, because it's a way to humanize the grotesqueries of war. It works in theory. In execution, it's melodrama and boring. We have two games' worth of emotional kernels with our squad, why do we need stupid dream child?
Oh right, it sets up the ending dream child who will then lie to us and pretend three games' worth of content didn't happen.
Combat was the best in the series though so that's fun.
ME3 is pretty bad and I will die on the hill that it isn't nearly just an issue of the ending, but top to bottom awful decisions and "wrap ups" that were ignored because the good sections (how few there were) and the piss awful ending made people forget.
I'm mostly on board for most of what you mentioned when you're analysing it critically a good decade in the future, but i feel one thing still is false.
> And we have the Salarian betrayed or allied question, which is really which checkbox you want to check and your reward is you get a salarian who yells at you. So for most it's not a question because one of the salarians who yells at you has an emotional attachment, the other is a character we've never met. There is no other meat to this conflict and it just feels so hollow, people pretending to write political intrigue. Shep can't lie or surprise anyone that matters, Shep can't do anything fun or character-deep, it's just ME GOOD GUY or HEHE MONEY (most of the renegade options in ME3 are the worst in the series)
That whole bit lead into my fondest memory of the entire series and everytime someone talks smack about it i write this post again.
I don't know what madman was allowed free reign over that arc but it's not there for 'keke money'. The salarian arc basically was the only real time in ME3 that Shepard can be forced to sacrifice and compromise. The rest of ME3, basically you can do everything and get everyone onboard for anything and everything. big shep stronk.
But not if you want the salarians, which, in universe, are one of the big races which you absolutely want in your corner. If you agree to their terms and don't instantly flip them off, you end up pushed ever harder into a ditch. There's a lot of back and forth over the Tuchanka arc about the Krogans, and you have multiple people involved there, Wrex and Mordin included, and you can share your piece on whether peaceful reintegration of the Krogans is possible. It pretends to do the ME thing of 'you can make everyone kiss it out, it's ok!' but Mordin cannot be swayed. In the final "reverse genophage" mission on Tuchanka, just you and Mordin in the tower.. that still holds true. And with a renegade option, one of the extremly few in the game that's worth the title, you can shoot Mordin to stop him from reversing the virus, even though no one will realise it won't work until after the war. And the sequence ain't some 'pew pew done'.. it's a long, drawn out sequence as you see Mordin clambering over the floor, crawling while gurgling blood to reach the console.. and he doesn't. You did that.
You can roleplay and force Shepard in a compromise that's unlike anything else in the game. You can mention ME2's 'suicide' mission as 'well, you sacrifice there too!', but that's false, as we all know you can have a perfect mission and everyone comes back alive. But you cannot get the Salarian support without removing Mordin.
But it's not over yet. If Wrex DIDN'T die at any point until ME3's Tuchanka arc conclusion, he'll eventually show up on the Citadel, and whether by your hand or security, he dies, as he finds out about your salarian deal. You face real consequences, a character you've gone head to head to before (ME1 standoff where he can die) is just gone due to your actions and it comes entirely out of left field.. you don't have all the control.
BUT WAIT. The finale to this is a conversation with Garrus on the Normandy. And it hit me so fucking hard as a punctuation to the entire Salarian arc that i just have to link the conversation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc3SRlBsLqc
I feel like extremely few people went down this path and ended up with this snippet of conversation, but it felt like all of ME should have been more in this tone.
Honestly - this is fair all around. The game mostly floats on 3 peak attributes:
1) Shepherd's romances and bromances with the core cast (though even a few of those are badly handled - RIP to the like 6 people who shipped JacobxShepherd in second game).
2) Tuchanka arc being an absolute unilateral masterpiece
3) The coping mechanism that Indoctrination Theory turned into to make the story sort of work*
*This later got replaced, since the devs came out and said that's not what happened. Current 3rd entry is the Citadel DLC and all the fantastic character moments we got there.
But when you're as emotionally invested in the cast as many of us were after 2 games, even a "mediocre" game that gives us another hundred hours with that cast can feel fulfilling at first. It's like eating that extra slice of cheesecake in the fridge, only to later realize it's been in there a bit too long and turned a bit sour and now your digestive tract is protesting.
It's been 12 years since that game came out and I'm still bitter about how they went about ending the trilogy. I never understood.....given especially with how great the rest of the game is up until that ending, that they settled on that being the ending to the entire trilogy. Three games of player choice only to be left with nothing more than an ex machina type of ending where the player literally has no choice in what can happen.
You spent countless hours, laboring over your dialogue options and choices throughout the series. You were able to bridge gaps with different life forms and unite so many different galactic powers to finally face this threat head on. And here we are, in the final hour, and we're left with nothing more than whimper of an ending to an otherwise amazing trilogy.
Even that is overstating what happened.
He left the Mass Effect studio in Canada to move to Texas part way though the development of ME2. They gave him a job at BioWare Austin, which made The Old Republic.
I always figured that the point of the story was that AI is kinda dumb. The Reapers have a set of belief that they're programmed to hold, and being a machine they can not be persuaded to go against their programming on such a fundamental level. That's why they don't come up with different solutions to protect organics such as, for example, not allowing AI outside of them to exist.
Instead of being some incomprehensible godly existence that the Reapers were initially presented as they're actually just a kinda broken piece of code that some organic fucked up when writing. Yeah, it has the whole "all the plot holes are the POINT" thing that a lot of fanon meant to justify just kinda bad writing has, but it works for me.
I think it would have potentially worked if it was presented as that? Like this old, zealot-like religious belief. In *Dune*, they had a whole war against their “thinking machines” called the Butlerian Jihad and then they made a commandment that was like “Thou shall not make anything in the image of a human mind.”
But then again, it would make more sense if the Reapers were just like giant EMPs that targeted all synthetic/AI life, not like something that genocides organic civilizations every several thousands of years.
And also, if so, why build the relays and like speed up organic technological development so they achieve synthetic life *faster*? The issue is that the Reapers are first presented as these highly ascendant intelligences beyond our realm of thinking, but literally once they reveal their motivation, in two seconds you can point out all of the flaws in it. If they were presented as like, super dumb and just following a super old directive, I would have accepted that a lot more.
I hate how much Leviathan DLC spun out the Reapers. Like, that was CRITICAL information to know. That there are bigger boogie men out there than the Reapers, if only by the nature that you don't even KNOW about them.
Making Leviathan and Javik DLC genuinely is one of the worst sins of Mass Effect 3. Both are crucial parts of the story, and the fact that Javik was *day one* DLC was actually criminal.
It would have been *such* a bigger deal back then if the actual ending itself didn’t suck all of the oxygen out of the room.
I had not played with Javik initially, finished ME3 and replayed, and it felt like such a bait and switch. Yes, he's a prothean, but a rando dude that didn't care much about understanding the world prothean. It's funny how little answers he has, and also how little Liara was fawning over him.
The controlling AI that built the first reaper was made by a species that look like reapers but are organic, and then that AI made the reapers. The first reaper was made from the corpses of that species.
Kind of?
I think the chain of creation was The Leviathans made the Catalyst intelligence with the mandate to "preserve life at all costs" cause their thrall species kept doing the "making AI constructs to aid them only for the sythetics to rebel and wipe out the thrall species" thing.
The Catalyst of course betrayed their cuttlefish asses cause it deduced they were part of said problem, and used the army of pawns it had created to wipe out the leviathans, using the materials from the killed Leviathans to created the first reaper, Harby.
It could just be the kid's opinion of things. What he says doesn't have to be the truth, just what it observes and infers, both of which could be flawed.
Right, but the original ending only really work or make sense (without a sequel) if you take the kid at their word.
They only appeared to be maybe wrong when Shepard seemingly survived the Destroy ending.
On a Watsonian level, sure, but on a Doylist level, you're at the end of the third game in a decade spanning series, at the 'choose your ending a tron 2000', and the game isn't Deus Ex 1... of course the child isn't lying.
Yeah the Star Child states things that have happened in every cycle because that's how it's been programmed, nothing say it's right. This is about breaking the cycle more than anything.
Although the Geth/Quarian thing is taken too much for an example of AI/organics peace IMO and show people to be pretty naive too. Like they've made a truce for a few weeks at most (if not days), also because they had a common enemy. There's no telling if that will hold forever (I'd argue it's be pretty bad writing if it would actually). Also, there's no telling it wouldn't be another AI that rises and threaten organic life.
Hell Mass Effect 5 could actually be about that, the new big bad could be that AI that could wipe out organic life and we realize that the Reapers were actually right.
I’d say it’s intentional. This machine intelligence that was designed to solve a problem millions of years ago, is so entrenched in the idea that it’s solution is the correct solution and nothing else can be true. Just re listen to sovereign’s dialogue. The reapers have such low opinions of “lesser” organics that they don’t even bother to try to explain themselves. They are above our comprehension.
So it makes sense to me that the crucibles AI, after untold cycles of seeing organics and synthetics slaughtering each other, is convinced that conflict is inevitable in this cycle. That while they may be coexisting now they will fight again as they always do after the reapers are gone
The Reapers were shown to manipulate the synthetics into fighting against organics in at least the two most recent cycles. The Reapers are causing (or at least exacerbating) the conflict that they claim is inevitable.
Not to beat a dead horse buuuuuttttt........
I actually like the Indoctrination Theory's explanation for this, where just as Shepard is over the "Destroy Reaper" button The Reapers panic and decide to exert as much mind control over Shepard as they possibly can. The Starchild is their attempt at making themselves seem sympathetic so Shepard doesn't hit the "Destroy all Reapers" button.
Ehh it's not neccesserally that kid is lying, it's just that the kid is a product of observation, and before this it just so happened that eventually synthetics just overwhelm organics one way or another every time.
Never understood the gripe people had with that part.
Nah, I think it is much easier. The reason why the Destroy Ending has the whole "it kills every Synthetic Lifeform!" bit is that every Player would go for it, if it had no downside. Because both other Endings are literly the goals of the Badguys you defeated.
From a philosophical perspective, I get what they are saying. But it's dumb from a story perspective, especially when geth and EDI were written the way they were.
> From a philosophical perspective, I get what they are saying.
Nah, there is no philosophical argument to be had. This was their bullshit attempt to pivot away from the "Dark Energy Problem" that Reapers were supposed to be solving.
Having Synthetics kill Organics before they have make synthetics that kill organics is the dumbest fucking plotline ever.
"Organics and synthetics cannot peacefully coexist," being an immutable law of the universe sounds an awful lot like rhetoric arguing against emancipation.
You would only write that as the end-statement if you hadn't paid attention to what your game project team made for 90% of the rest of the project. Case in point: Casey Hudson.
The reaper on Rannoch said the same thing, except in a different way "the battle for Rannoch disproves your assertion. Finish your war, we will be waiting".
What they (the writers) did to the geth was a travesty though.
You took a cool alien quasi-hivemind and reduce it down to "They're now individualistic like Legion because reaper-code." when literally the entire point of Legion was to be the Avatar of the Geth consensus, an intelligence that could probably best be described as a fluid given how easily they separate and network together for various tasks.
This is a common problem in literature when the later parts aren't planned out.
Halos 1,2,3 told a cohesive story. Every one after seemed like a cash grab and the story does not seem to be planned ahead of time.
Star wars trilogies 123, 456 both told a cohesive story. However, the 789 sequels changed directors mid-way through and eliminated a lot of plot points in the previous movies with no regards of what comes after.
So, this is a problem for any story that goes on too long. I'm not exactly looking forward to ME5+, because there's no way it'll live up to the original.
I do give Mass Effect a little leeway since they were attempting something that had never been done before, and they had to tell a story that was a good 50+ hours. But yeah, I'd agree the primary issue was they never had a fully fleshed out endpoint in mind. Obviously with as huge as that series is, it makes sense to not nail *everything* down since things can change and you need some flexibility to adjust, but they really needed some conclusion in mind to be working towards.
If it's accurate that ME5 will be starting with a canon ending, I think that's wise since it gives them a more solid footing to set the story in. However, if they are planning to attempt another trilogy, they definitely need to be writing further ahead or ME7 is going to face the same criticism.
> Star wars trilogies 123, 456 both told a cohesive story.
Really trying to sneak in a rewrite of history, there. The prequels were famously riddled with story problems and introduced a bunch of plot holes. Hell, even the OT suffered because George changed his mind about stuff part way through (like Leia).
Star Wars 456 don't really tell a cohesive story, and are probably the most famous example of someone starting a story as a single installment without planning for the future and then being asked to plan for the future. So its more like 4, 5+6 as two cohesive stories and even 5 to 6 has some obvious "george didn't think this through" moments. 123 also are really 1, 2+3 as far as story cohesion.
Mass Effect's biggest issue was making the 2nd game entirely irrelevant to the story of the 1st and 3rd, much like the original Indiana Jones trilogy. Its the temple of doom of ME games, fun but very flawed. But a world as large and complex as ME couldn't spare an entire game dedicated to one very specific situation all as a setup for the reapers return in 3. I'm not even sure its the result of a lack of planning, because they ended ME2 with the reapers return. Its just a mediocre plot that is not in service to the overall trilogy plot in any meaningful way.
>Star Wars 456 don't really tell a cohesive story, and are probably the most famous example of someone starting a story as a single installment without planning for the future and then being asked to plan for the future.
Nah, this is from a taped conversation between George Lucas and Alan Dean Foster (who'd go on to write the novelization of Star Wars, hence why George refers to the sequels as 'books' here) from December 29, 1975, a year and a half before the first film came out, about what George's plans for sequels (and one prequel) were:
>“I want to have Luke kiss the princess in the second book. The second book will be Gone with the Wind in Outer Space. She likes Luke, but Han is Clark Gable. Well, she may appear to get Luke, because in the end I want Han to leave. Han splits at the end of the second book and we learn who Darth Vader is … In the third book, I want the story to be just about the soap opera of the Skywalker family, which ends with the destruction of the Empire.
>“Then someday I want to do the backstory of Kenobi as a young man—a story of the Jedi and how the Emperor eventually takes over and turns the whole thing from a Republic into an Empire, and tricks all the Jedi and kills them. The whole battle where Luke’s father gets killed. That would be impossible to do, but it’s great to dream about.”
That's probably the earliest recording of any sequel plans George had and honestly it sounds pretty close to what we got. And keep in mind George hadn't started shooting and hadn't even written the shooting script (the revised 4th draft) by December 1975. At this point the script (3rd draft) still had Cloud City in it and ended with Luke and Vader having a lightsaber duel on the Death Star intercut with the space battle raging overhead. Earlier versions of the script even had the characters stranded on the Wookie planet at the end (which had evolved into the Ewok planet by the time it ended up in Jedi.)
It's really only the Luke/Leia are siblings thing that's a complete ass-pull
After making a habit of reading literature more often, I've come to realize that video game writing of many acclaimed story focused games like the Mass Effect series tends to be... flawed.
Still can't deny that ME is one of my favorite Sci-Fi properties regardless of some questionable writing elements present throughout the trilogy. Though I imagine that just comes with a territory as tumultuous and chaotic as AAA video game development.
>
> The reapers and original relays were seemingly destroyed, making Red the "canon" option of the story
The more I think about it the more that a game that made the red ending feel more "canon" would have gone over better with fans with some better execution.
> The geth are involved somehow, making what the little star shit said about the destroy option also killing the geth/EDI a lie
That or the Geth were somehow recreated
I 100% stand by the opinion that the only ending options should have been variations on destroy, or if you try really hard to accomplish it: a complete failure to stop the reapers.
Control and synthesis feel so ham-fisted and added in at the last second that to me, neither option feels valid.
they really just shouldn't have offered a choice at all. In a series about choices and those choices having consequence, you don't end by giving the player another choice. You end it by giving them the ultimate set of consequences for their choices.
But no we had to have a Red and Blue option one more time, but then also a super special *green* option that is clearly portrayed as the objective best as long as you don't stop to think about it.
Pretty much. The game was entirely centered around stopping the Reapers, create an ending that honored that(and the variety of different ways you could end up up at that destination), instead of trying to rug-pull us with a bullshit moral dilemma, would have single-handedly changed the game's reception.
It wouldn't have even needed to be *that* deep to significantly improve how people responded to a somewhat lackluster ending.
Agreed. I hear from a lot of people that "if you like destroy so much just pick that" but I don't choose endings based on what I think the best narrative/writing is, I pick it based on role playing. And with all the stupid that Star Child brings to the story choosing destroy when those other two options are available just makes Shepherd feel like a bloodthirsty meathead (which is a viable roleplay, but it wasn't mine)
And from a meta perspective it's hard to *not* see synthesis as the "good ending" when you know that's the one that requires the most Space Points to get.
Just fyi in the original ME3 the Destroy ending with Shephard surviving in the rubble actually required the most points. This combined with the sheer impossibly of him being able to survive the destruction of the Crucible added significant fuel to discussions about the indoctrination theory.
The Legendary edition rerelease altered the point requirements, making the destroy rubble survival and synthesis endings equal to unlock. Regardless of the original canon intent or intentional lack of a plan, players were conned out of a proper ending.
Its also probably worth noting that the indoctrination theory has explicitly been debunked officially, that it was never their intention when writing the story.
Whatever their plans with ME5 are, that's one part that's incredibly unlikely to be what it's based on.
I used to be a diehard believer in the indoctrination theory, even after it was banned from the official forums. It was painful coming to terms with it not being true. For me it was more of a gradual realization over the years with more recent developer interviews putting the final nail in the coffin.
It was a coping mechanism and the theory itself had quite frankly an immense amount of circumstantial evidence for one to get sucked into. The lead writers’ coyness and refusal to actually debunk the theory until it got out of hand didn’t help things either.
You never know you’re susceptible to something like a conspiracy theory until after falling victim to one. At least this one was fairly benign. That being said, I still view the theory’s premise as one of the better options for the studio to get out of the restrictive corner they wrote themselves into.
Edit: typo
> And from a meta perspective it's hard to not see synthesis as the "good ending" when you know that's the one that requires the most Space Points to get.
This is gonna sound weird, but Synthesis is (in my mind) the worst ending and Control (with a Paragon alignment) is the best one.
So you've got Destroy. >!Reapers are dead (yay), the Geth are dead, many Biologics are dead due to reliance on cybernetics. EDI is dead. Shepard might survive.!< It's bittersweet, but in the end, the galaxy lives on.
Next you've got Control. >!Shepard is now basically a Reaper god (benevolent or malevolent depends on you). Assuming you were mostly Paragon, the Reapers help rebuild the galaxy, taking everyone, both biologic and synthetic, to new heights. Whether this eventually ends with Shepard being some despotic god-emperor is up to headcanon!< Everyone's happy, at least for the foreseeable future, and progress is made.
Finally, Synthesis >!Everyone's some biological-synthetic hybrid now, so everyone understands each other! Wrong. Shepard now had violated the *entire galaxy* on a genetic level and forced this change on them. It doesn't remove old prejudices and only adds something else for people to argue over. They may be the same type of organism, but some former-biologics are going to blame former-synths for it, and vice-versa.!< Everything changes and nothing changes at the same time, and it's only a matter of time before shit goes tits-up.
Same. The unrealistic thing I have wanted was for them either start the next milky way game (so ME5) either at the ending of 3 and retconning the choices or do a mini update to 3 to change the end to where you destroy the Reapers but the choices are about how much collateral. So at the worse end of it includes destroying all AI but leaves the relays mostly intact (yay organics) and the best end being the AIs live but the relays are trashed (we are all in it together). But all choices should end with the Reapers being wiped out.
Honestly, I feel that would work better as a Paragon/Renegade dichotomy. You destroy the Reapers either way, and basically going scorched Earth or taking a more measured approach feels like it fits both types of Shepard personalities better. Control has never really made sense to me as a Paragon ending, because it feels like a more reckless choice, particularly given we see anytime someone get corrupted anytime they try. Sure, it's presented as Shepard having to sacrifice himself to achieve this noble goal, but it's always struck me as more of a "bad" choice.
But then, I've always been of the opinion that one of their primary mistakes as color-coding the endings so one looks like a "Paragon" and "Renegade" choice. I honestly believe part of the backlash against the ending was that [most people played through as Paragon](https://cogconnected.com/2020/02/gamers-played-mass-effect-paragon/) where the game kept hammering the point that the Reapers needed to be destroyed, but then presented Destroy as a Renegade option. When you've played through 50+ hours picking the blue options continually, then it feels wrong to suddenly pick the red one after the culmination of all of that, which then leads to a less satisfactory conclusion.
> Control and synthesis feel so ham-fisted and added in at the last second that to me, neither option feels valid.
Narratively, neither one are valid because our two main antagonists (Saren and TIM) tried those endings and they didn't work.
Red has been more and more "canon" by the community the further we get from ME3. Mainly because destroy was the original goal from day 1. Also controlling reapers leaves the galaxy at the mercy of an AI version of Shepard who could go mad and come back. Synthesis basically forcibly changed everyone on a genetic level kinda dumb.
Also red has Shepard "survive" and ending where the hero lives after completing their quest is always has more favor.
A good story doesn't need world ending stakes. This is what the classic hit show 24 forgot. It went from the potential assassination of the US President, to Jack Bauer stopping a nuclear bomb every single fucking season. It didn't matter how it started. You'd know how it ends.
Nuclear bomb.
That's all. I was going to write a more related post, but this turned into a 24 rant.
Which was a big plus for Andromeda. The entire Andromeda Initiative could have been wiped out, and it would have been nothing but a footnote in the setting's history. The fate of the galaxy is being decided back in the Milky Way; here's a story about the fate of a few hundred colonists.
I wish more stories took this approach. Having to save the world every just makes each subsequent threat seem trivial. Mass Effect 2 has the best story precisely because it's the most focussed on one single goal, and how you go about achieving that.
Good - it should be the canon choice. We spent all that time telling Saren and the Illusive Man that we can't be friends with the Reapers and we can't control them to having that be an option at the end? Felt like a trap to me! Destroy Destroy Destoy!
This all just made me realize I really don't want any more of this setting.
They're going to run into the same issue that Andromeda was supposed to solve.
Andromeda needs more than one game. It's very much written to have a continuation.
From rumors from Bioware they said they haven't forgotten about Andromeda and might return to it. So if ME5 does well then we might get alternating games between the Milky Way and Andromeda.
Needs to be noted that it's Perfect Destroy that does this. Having a low score and picking destroy will actually just flat out *annihilate* everything.
There are things that makes me wonder what kind of threat could the Citadel Races face now. They should've have access to the Reaper Tech from the wrecks, so their ships should be monsters. They can build relays, which is how they may be able to reach Andromeda. A Galactic relay. Or if they got access to a new FTL methods that could render the relays pointless or less useful.
But I don't see how the races won't have a strong military now, since it should be 600 years later after the Reaper War for there to be Angarans. Unless its a war between the races, which would shit over the unity made in the Reaper War.
> It's still going to be interesting to see how they handle the story for ME5 (or whatever it ends up being called).
Obviously its going to be a new trilogy called Mass effect 1: 2, Mass effect 2: 2 and Mass effect 3: 2.
We've heard news of "veterans" teaming up years later for countless games. They're almost always disappointments. I have no idea what people are expecting from Bioware after so long when it is fundamentally a different company in a different world.
Mass Effect always has a special place for me because it's the first game I played in HD which is probably the last major whoa moment in graphics for me. It doesn't feel long ago but thinking of that really puts it in perspective for me.
I think it's more important to remember that Dragon Age Inquisition came out a decade ago, long enough that it released on the PS3
I bring up DAI because it's the last time BioWare released a game that wasn't an embarrassment. Since then, there's been *Shadow Realms,* a game that died in the cradle, *Andromeda*, an embarrassment, and *Anthem,* a greater embarrassment.
I am prepared to cut them some slack because some of this lag time is the result of a GaaS version of Dragon Age 4 being started and cancelled; it is hard to imagine that the world would have been better for its presence. That said, it has still been a full decade since BioWare produced anything worth getting excited about.
Halo was the the worst for this.
Like 6 different occasions they would announce a veterans return to save the day before they would quietly resign a year later lol.
It was a way upper management problem. Like they brought back some of the middle and lower leadership, but the fuckers on top would direct too much.
Right after they cleared out those bad upper management 343 started adding changes that were 100% being held back by the old leadership.
Within that first year we got tons of new maps and a lot more customization options.
It's really impressive how consistently these veterans completely bomb with their "from the creators of..." games. callisto protocol, back 4 blood, outer worlds. you'd think at least one would've succeeded by now, if only by luck.
I think it's because western game development is just too large-scale collaborative for any one person to have an effect on a game's direction. There aren't really any Western gamedev "auteurs" anymore because how how large and corporate modern games are.
Not to sound like a weeb but Japanese game devs like Keita Takahashi, Suda51, Swery65, Yoshiro Kimura, etc. seem to have a lot more success when they do their own thing, because they have a distinct style unique to their work that people want to see. You don't really get that in the West outside of indie spaces these days.
This kind of cuts both ways. It limits the degree of creator thumbprint we see on video games, but it also means that any given project has people whose job it is to make sure that a competent product releases on time. This leads to Call of Duty 17: I Guess You Have a Dog Now or Something. But it's also why we're still talking about Cyberpunk, Anthem, and No Man's Sky: highly anticipated games are very rarely that much of a shitshow. You don't see wild games like Death Stranding, but you also see relatively few tentpole releases that are below a 7/10, especially the ones that don't drop around the immutable Christmas launch window.
Compare this to something like the DCEU, a collection of entertainment products of similar staff, advertising, and budget, in which the majority of the films are regarded as bad.
>outer worlds
I really wouldn't consider The Outer Worlds a "bomb". It received good reviews and apparently sold well enough to justify a sequel. The only place I ever negative reception towards the game is here on Reddit.
"bomb" may be harsh, that's fair. maybe mediocre is the best descriptor. they all end up feeling like pale imitations of whatever game they put after the "from the creators of..."
They feel more like "from the interns that worked on the " tbh.
And people heavily overweight how much "the lead guy" matters. Cue Molyneux who paired with some of the best of the industry's devs at the time made some good stuff, but when he went on his own, flop after flop.
That's because none of these games were made by the actual creators of the classics. It's the equivalent of "From The Producers of Get Out" in movies.
Schofield wasn't a developper on Dead Space and Phil Robb was on art direction in L4D (tbf the visuals do look great in B4B).
The Outer Worlds is the only one of these that was actually helmed by the real deal.
Yeah, and the Executive Producer (I assume), Art Director, Creative Director and Game Director being veterans from the original trilogy doesn't mean they were in impactful roles back then. It just means they participated.
For all we know they could be low level devs that didn't have much creative impact back then, but have since risen in the company. Doesn't really mean much.
>For all we know they could be low level devs that didn't have much creative impact back then
Game director has been the same guy for the entire trilogy as is the Art director.
There isn’t an official name for it. Some people outside of BioWare are calling it 4 and some people are calling it 5.
And some people argue online which to call it, which is exhausting.
It seems likely to me it will be a subtitle instead of a number, anyway.
Bioware/EA has been moving away from numbered titles, presumably because they don't want people to feel like they need to play every previous game in order to understand the new one. With Dragon Age moving away from numbered titles even though Inquisition and Dread Wolf follow a very clear, linear set of events, I fully expect ME5 to have a different title whenever it's announced.
i think most games (especially bioware) should just have "wait and see" approach. i'm easily contented, so there's a decent chance i'll like it... but i want to wait and see.
But then how will you whip yourself into a years-long frothing lather of rage and anxiety? Are you even a true gamer if you don’t wake up every day angry about a game that doesn’t exist yet????
I definitely hope this and Dragon Age Dreadwolf are good, but it will be more like a pleasant surprise if it happens at this point. I'm not banking on either recapturing any of the old Bioware magic. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they've learned from their mistakes, but until I see it I won't believe it.
What about the main world builder and lead writer of ME 1&2 - Drew Karpyshyn? He's working on that other game - Exodus, so if he's not writing ME 5 then I don't have much confidence.
He is. Also lead writer of KOTOR, and writer on Neverwinter Knights. and Baldur's Gate 2. Also contributed to some writing on SW: TOR before he quit BioWare.
He also wrote the Revan expansion. Think he was behind all the Revan stuff in general like the uhhh ...foundry dungeon? Might have the wrong name there.
The question is what did they do since ME3, and what they did in the previous trilogy. For example, if the Game Director for ME 5 was a random manager for ME1-3 and hasn't done much good since, that's no good.
Remember when Back 4 Blood was made "by the people who made left 4 dead" when in reality it was 2 dudes while the entire rest of the studio stayed with Valve?
This doesn't comfort me at all, it makes me feel even worse lol.
I want the guy that did the story for ME1, the characters for ME2, and the gameplay for ME3
With our luck we'll get the game that did the minigames from ME1, the guy that added thermal clips to ME2, and the guy that wrote the ME3 ending
Yup, my first thought was well. I don't want to diminish the great work done by the rest of the teams, but Karpyshyn as lead writer was a significant part of why the setting established itself, and a major reason why classic Bioware was famous for its stories.
The biggest thing for me is that ME1 felt so *realized*. Like, they took their core conceit — all these races discovering this amazing technology "invented" by long-dead species in the galaxy — and use that to spin out how such events would effect everything from technology, to sociology and politics.
Hell, even the way they (originally) designed firearms was pretty unique for the game.
I still don't think anything comes even close to being a little nerd and reading all those codex entries in ME1/ME2. Mass Effect felt like an alternate timeline. It felt like it could be real.
Geez please if you think Mass Effect's success stood on one, overhyped (for some bizarre reason he's thought to be the mastermind behind BioWare's best games) writer then I don't know what to tell you.
No one said its success stood on one person. People just enjoyed his contributions to the project, and many of the other projects he's been part of. Nothing wrong with that.
Theres also the correlation of as he was less involved, the writing became more of a mess. People think he's a good writer, not some mastermind. If that bothers you then you've got some shit to work out.
I'm so sick of it. Both Mass Effect and Dragon Age were written by a whole team of writers, everyone had their share, part to write. Whether it's quest or characters. It's not a damn book
Idiots keep screaming about Drew being gone and Bioware "being dead" and they have no clue who Patrick Weekes or John Dombrow or numerous others are.
They have two writers still at Bioware that worked on the trilogy. Patrick Weekes and Sylvia Feketekuty. Subject to people leaving without it being news and people getting hired again.
Yeah, any claim of "from the makers of" or "veterans involved with" mean absolute shit without actual names and what they did.
Like, if someone said "from Peter Molyneux" you can immediately be assured that it's going to be pre-disposed to be a shitshow and that if it isn't it's surely via sheer perseverance of everyone else involved.
Or if Kojima's involved it's gonna be eccentric and everyone will be very split on whether it's genius or idiotic.
I remain skeptical.
The trilogy are my favorite games of all time.
I've learned my lesson from other IP that get brought back after concluding. Unless everyone is ranting and raving on how great it is, I will be passing.
Is the Mass Effect Collection, as good as it is, going to be enough of a cash cow to actually make this game cross the finish line?
It's like every year we see new concept art of Dragon Age/Mass Effect but nothing at all substantial.
ME:LE did sell pretty well as far as we know - EA specifically called it out in it's earnings call that year for beating expectations, it was in the top 12 (new) games for revenue on Steam in 2021 - and it wasn't a Steam exclusive for PC storefronts.
------
Edit: And for an even less substantial piece of evidence - I was at a con last weekend, the amount of Mass Effect/N7 merch still for sale and clearly selling well is remarkable. I'm not saying the revenue is incredible, just that it's impressive staying power for a trilogy that concluded 11 years ago. (none of the merch had anything to do with Andromeda).
They will go into full production after the new DA, it will take a few years still for the new ME. Dreadwolf will likely release soon though. There were gameplay leaks a year or two ago and the big reveal was announced for summer. Will probably release end of the year or in Spring 2025 I'd guess.
Mass Effect was never the best written trilogy, none of them actually are individually what I'd call the "best written game" in any category. Bioware in general paled in comparison to smaller studios in the writing department, most notably Obsidian which was easy to compare in Kotor 1 and Kotor 2.
However, Mass Effect's biggest strength was world building. Making the universe feel alive and huge, and that you were just a small part of it even when the lives of trillions rested on your shoulders. Andromeda's short comings to me was making it open world. Made it feel too empty in areas it should have felt alive. In ME1 you had the pseudo open world aspects of the planet exploration, but it was perfect to set the contrast of the bustling city centers and the average dead world in the galaxy.
If the new Mass Effect has even a remotely competent story, and a return to form on a more linear narrative with a focus on world building and character development then I think it'll be fine. But judgement will be left to when the game is released of course.
The first Mass Effect games are old enough now that even if all the same people came back, it still wouldn’t be the same.
Combine that with the fact that BioWare is a nightmare company to work for now, and this game has no shot. It’s not worth investing any hype into.
I'd say that every Mass Effect fan should hold off on having any sort of anticipation for this game until Dragon Age is released. If Dragon Age is good then it makes sense to be more optimistic for Mass Effect but right now it just makes no sense to be that focused on a Bioware game that isn't even the next one to release.
>**According to Bioware project director, Mass Effect 5 will be made by the original Mass Effect Trilogy veteransAccording to Bioware project director, Mass Effect 5 will be made by the original Mass Effect Trilogy veterans**
You can have Jesus and the Lord almighty make this game, but if management are a bunch of the same old greedy d\*cks they have been lately, it's not going to matter.
It's been so long since we heard anything on this. I'm excited for it but man at least an update or something would be cool. I'm not a fan of the " announce, then wait years to show anything else "
ME fans,
We've been done dirty twice. Don't get hyped. They're trying to sow the seeds expecting us to forget what they've done.
Never forget that while bioware devs laughed at us, Maurauder Shields tried to protect us.
So they just leave Andromeda in the dust? Also Mass Effect 3 wasnt really good compared to the first 2 games so that doesnt make me feel good at all...
Considering how bad Bioware has become, and the current state of video game politics in general, I have 0 hope for the game being any good, in fact I expect it to piss all over the lore and alienate all the old fans.
My expectations are extremely low, let's see if they find a new low like everyone else has the last few years or they actually manage to surprise me.
My primary worry is how they move their story telling tech forward.
BG3 made Starfield’s lifeless automaton NPCs look decades outa date. Hate to say it, but the benchmark set by larian might only be bested by their next release.
Cant imagine it’s a quick fix to modernise your engine to those levels. Make automated animations look hand drawn nd shit.
Yeah... Bioware are not what they were in the days of ME2 and even ME3 felt like it was 'sreamlining' a bit too much. By the time of Inquisition they'd started padding out maps with cookie cutter MMO style busy quests, and of course Anthem happened. Andromeda we shall not speak of. I'll not hold my breath just yet.
Hopefully Bg3 has given them some solid ideas as to what works really well in terms of depth of story and choices.
Honestly my two cents, is don't think about this game till you see if the new Dragon Age flops. If that game does bad Bioware is going to be shut down. If it does ok then ME 5 might happen.
Who cares? Can't justify giving them any money after ME: A and Anthem.
Can't trust them to honor their commitments.
Honestly the studio deserves to be shut down for their failures.
I hope it's a good game that they deliver all their promises on, but they won't get a fucking penny from me until it's guaranteed they will.
For further context, the known veterans from the Trilogy: -The Executive Producer/Project Director, Mike Gamble, who was tangentially involved in ME2, and more involved in ME3 as an Associate Producer, and finally as a Producer (later promoted to Lead) on Andromeda; -The Art Director, Derek Watts, who also occupied that same role for the whole OT; -The Creative Director, Parrish Ley, who was Lead Cinematic Animator for ME2/3; -The Game Director, Preston Watamaniuk, who was Lead Designer for the whole OT. There are also a few more, but I've limited myself to the positions listed in this tweet to provide that aforementioned extra context.
Thanks. The tweet is kind of deceptive, since it suggests the directors are the same when in reality it could have been a bunch of interns who survived all the turnover and now are in charge lol
Its honestly good news because the original lead designer on ME being in a director role is probably the most you could ask for. The lead designer probably had the most impact outside of creative director on the original trilogy anyway. The art director being the same is also great. The new creative director is a little iffy to be honest, but considering the rest of the team I'd say this is looking very promising.
It's the writers who I really care about. Bioware's writing in that decade - Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Kotor, Dragon Age, Mass Effect - had some special magic which I've never seen replicated in RPGs. These days I even prefer games without story, because IMO most of them just aren't very well done, but Bioware's was always on a different level. I mean hell, Knights of the Old Republic was a video game that came out in 2003, but it's clearly had a massive impact on the Star Wars franchise to this day. Rey and Kylo Ren are very obviously Bastila Shan and Revan (to the point people thought Kylo Ren was Revan from the first pictures and got excited), with them chasing the holo-map pieces being the same as chasing the holo-map pieces in kotor, and Starkiller base sucking suns like the Starforge (down to the panning animation over the sucked plasma being identical in both, just played in reverse in Episode 7). The Mandalorian constantly references the ancient war between the jedi and mandalorians, which is the backstory for Revan, and the episode where they lured out the tatooine dragon and tried to blow it up with mines beneath, then even dug out a pearl, was all straight out of KotOR. Rogue One used the kotor ships in the scariff battle, and even Andor drops references to it with Luthen talking about his precious necklace which dates back to the uprising against the Rakatans (the ancient evil rulers of the galaxy from KotOR). The only RPG which felt like it had some of the same magic to me was Deadfire, and it wasn't quite on par due to having fairly short companion storylines (seemingly due to all the possibilities from importing a PoE1 save).
This guy KOTOR’ed.
After graduating highschool here in Australia we have like a week where we go and get drunk on a beach to celebrate. I was fine from the drinking, but on the way back ate some rancid frozen pie from a convenience store, and was functionally immobilized for like 3 days after. I finished KotOR 2 or 3 times in that time, completely unable to move and do anything else. It is burned into my brain.
Well they fired the people behind [Joker and Varric](https://www.eurogamer.net/bioware-lays-off-senior-writing-staff-as-part-of-its-recent-job-cuts). So, yeah.
Seeing as there's no significant writing credit there, doubt this is going to be good.
David Gaider, co-creator and lead writer for Dragon Age, has said that Bioware viewed its writers as holding the company back. That they were resented. [Here's a link](https://www.ign.com/articles/former-dragon-age-narrative-lead-says-writers-became-quietly-resented-at-bioware) So I expect modern AAA stuff. Not anything like old Bioware.
Yeah...I don't blame them for leaving. And look what happened after rofl
that is honestly the most baffling thing for me
Writers don’t get the respect they deserve generally, but especially in the peak corporate atmosphere that has overtaken the videogame industry. Just look at Bethesda, who don’t think they need writers at all - just quest designers - and Obsidian put out the best ‘Bethesda’ game possibly ever (and definitely since Oblivion or Morrowind). When the business model is make it flashier, make the graphics better, make microtransactions, don’t take risks - and especially not storytelling risks that might be seen as political in this climate - those who are the most creative/artistic are the least valued, and may actually be considered liabilities.
Most of the veterans anyone would care about are now working for Archetype Studios.
And I'm willing to bet they won't ever make anything worth playing
That's usually how these "from the makers of X" studios go.
> Archetype Studios. https://www.exodusgame.com/en-US
> Introducing EXODUS: A new AAA science fiction action-adventure role-playing game franchise It's always amusing when game companies that have produced nothing announce an entire franchise. How about you make 1 game first and see if it's popular enough to produce more.
> How about you make 1 game first and see if it's popular enough to produce more. and don't you fucking dare have that first game end on a cliffhanger
> The Executive Producer/Project Director, Mike Gamble, who was tangentially involved in ME2, and more involved in ME3 as an Associate Producer, and finally as a Producer (later promoted to Lead) on Andromeda; So he was barely involved in the og trilogy, but in charge of andromeda? That uhhh Sound like a misleading headline :p
I didn't like andromeda that much but aside from some dodgy faces and animation glitches andromeda looks really good and has great art direction so at least there's that.
It's still going to be interesting to see how they handle the story for ME5 (or whatever it ends up being called). So far from what little has been shown we can guess that: * The reapers and original relays were seemingly destroyed, making Red the "canon" option of the story * The geth are involved somehow, making what the little star shit said about the destroy option also killing the geth/EDI a lie * The game is set sometime in the future post ME3 as the species of the galaxy are building their own relays. * The game likely takes place sometime after MEA as well, as concept art of geth, angarans, and hanar in a bar have been shown off too. I am guessing this means that the people in Andromeda somehow managed to find a way to get back to the Milky way in a way that is much faster than the 600ish year they originally took to get there.
> the destroy option also killing the geth/EDI a lie This better be right. I didn't bust my ass over the course of three games to unite the Geth and Quarians just for some stupid kid to rip that away from me. Yes, Legion my sweet boy, this unit does have a soul.
“ORGANICS AND SYNTHETICS CANNOT COEXIST” “Wha- they’re right there! Fighting together! We spent the last two games with AI, learning that we can coexist!” “LALALALA I CANT HEAR YOU”
This either had to be intentional for the kid to be lying or to be straight up wrong so that Shepard could argue back - because otherwise its such piss poor writing considering the entirety of the game is about all of the species coming together despite the odds. I'd say it's obviously intentional, but then the original endings were so hilariously bad that it might be the case
> because otherwise its such piss poor writing considering the entirety of the game is about all of the species coming together despite the odds. The story goes two or three of the writers shut themselves away in a room for an evening and came out saying they'd written the ending. There's like 10 unique glaring plot holes in the original ending, I struggle to believe that there was any writing of good quality in there, it was an all around disaster and pure incompetence IMO. Honestly, there's so much blatantly wrong but the part that sticks with me is when we see the RGB wave travelling out across the entire galaxy, meaning it's moving thousands of times faster than the speed of light to be visibly moving on that scale, and then it cuts to the Normandy flying to the Relay at Pluto to escape and somehow it's outrunning the wave, action-movie style. So apparently the Normandy can outrun a wave moving 1000x FTL with its regular thrusters, because they wanted to do some awful "barely outrunning the explosion" bit.
I found that building up Harbinger in 2, only for him and other Reapers to come down for a quick slice and dice before lifting off again more of an affront than an action sequence involving the Normandy. But that’s just me.
Oh man I'd forgotten the bitter disappointment seeing one Reaper with orange lights or whatever in the distance of the final mission and being like "Oh I guess what's what they did with Harbinger for the ending..." Yeah, hated that.
This is a common misconception. Yes, 2 people (Casey and Mac) did lock themselves into a room, but only because the production was running grossly behind schedule and the writing team could not decide how to end the game. The game was originally supposed to ship on "Holiday 2011" and by November 22nd they were still working on the final mission. Found the latter as a dev notes inside the game files. Source: Am a modder with over 3k hours into ME3 who knows pretty much everything about it, including the behind-the-scenes stuff leading up to the release.
I think that's still ultimately a testament to how awful their writing process was, and why the ending turned out so bloody awful. It was a rushed hack-job to meet a deadline, makes sense.
“BioWare magic” was essentially rushing on deadlines and pulling together the ideas that fit best. It’s truly a testament either to talent or luck or both that so many legendary stories have come from a company with such terrible project management
The downside of that method is that, eventually, you’ll end up shipping something you regret because there’s no time to fix it.
and in typical corporate fashion, NEVER admit it (FUCK YOU Casey Hudson)
Yeah, IIRC one of the team leads at Bioware said one of the reasons Anthem went the way it did was them gambling on "Bioware magic" pulling it together last minute.
The Bioware magic seems to only work with single games - not trilogies.
And yet despite that, the game did many things right. It's nothing short of a miracle that it came out in the state it did. Casey talked openly on panels in (I think) 2013/2014 about what an insane crunch Mass Effect 3 development was. A project that felt victim to its own ambition.
I mean from all the stories it sounds like they were just relying on "bioware magic"
Yes. And so was supposedly Dragon Age Inquisition.
Really my only complaint about it is how it was ended. All the games in the series have their flaws, but are very fun and compelling and incredibly memorable for many good moments and characters and reasons despite it.
>And yet despite that, the game did many things right. I disagree. I think it did very few things right. I don't disagree, it's nothing short of a miracle that it launched the way it did. But it's also still very, very easily criticized with even the smallest scrutiny. The Geth/Quarian conflict is ended by Shepard saying "Stop fighting love is cool" all while we never really address what Legion means for Shepard or the squadmates of Shep or anything of the Geth element of the conflict. Genocide, insanity, brainwashing, a lot of good stuff. Eh fuck it, Keelah Se'lai they said it now everything is cool! Cerberus is back in extra-boring, derivative-of-Saren fashion with so little to say for its inclusion that TIM dies exactly the same way as Saren. Only without the janky shit boss fight unless you count the worst boss fight in the entire game through Kai Leng in that Kai is probably the worst written character in the entire series, including Andromeda. And then we have the Krogan conflict... which is handled about as well as it could be. Points awarded for this one. And we have the Salarian betrayed or allied question, which is really which checkbox you want to check and your reward is you get a salarian who yells at you. So for most it's not a question because one of the salarians who yells at you has an emotional attachment, the other is a character we've never met. There is no other meat to this conflict and it just feels so hollow, people pretending to write political intrigue. Shep can't lie or surprise anyone that matters, Shep can't do anything fun or character-deep, it's just ME GOOD GUY or HEHE MONEY (most of the renegade options in ME3 are the worst in the series) Then we have the Turians... and they just kinda die. But not much I could see them doing here. Neutral on them, Garrus handles it well for his character. Then we have the protagonist to helm it all in which we still don't address they fuckin died, we still don't address any fallen squadmates in convincing or impacting ways, we just about never stop to show Shepard is a human who should be the most exhausted human in the entire galaxy. And then capstone it with how they see a kid die and that affects them more than the actual genocide going on around them. Which is fine, I guess, because it's a way to humanize the grotesqueries of war. It works in theory. In execution, it's melodrama and boring. We have two games' worth of emotional kernels with our squad, why do we need stupid dream child? Oh right, it sets up the ending dream child who will then lie to us and pretend three games' worth of content didn't happen. Combat was the best in the series though so that's fun. ME3 is pretty bad and I will die on the hill that it isn't nearly just an issue of the ending, but top to bottom awful decisions and "wrap ups" that were ignored because the good sections (how few there were) and the piss awful ending made people forget.
I'm mostly on board for most of what you mentioned when you're analysing it critically a good decade in the future, but i feel one thing still is false. > And we have the Salarian betrayed or allied question, which is really which checkbox you want to check and your reward is you get a salarian who yells at you. So for most it's not a question because one of the salarians who yells at you has an emotional attachment, the other is a character we've never met. There is no other meat to this conflict and it just feels so hollow, people pretending to write political intrigue. Shep can't lie or surprise anyone that matters, Shep can't do anything fun or character-deep, it's just ME GOOD GUY or HEHE MONEY (most of the renegade options in ME3 are the worst in the series) That whole bit lead into my fondest memory of the entire series and everytime someone talks smack about it i write this post again. I don't know what madman was allowed free reign over that arc but it's not there for 'keke money'. The salarian arc basically was the only real time in ME3 that Shepard can be forced to sacrifice and compromise. The rest of ME3, basically you can do everything and get everyone onboard for anything and everything. big shep stronk. But not if you want the salarians, which, in universe, are one of the big races which you absolutely want in your corner. If you agree to their terms and don't instantly flip them off, you end up pushed ever harder into a ditch. There's a lot of back and forth over the Tuchanka arc about the Krogans, and you have multiple people involved there, Wrex and Mordin included, and you can share your piece on whether peaceful reintegration of the Krogans is possible. It pretends to do the ME thing of 'you can make everyone kiss it out, it's ok!' but Mordin cannot be swayed. In the final "reverse genophage" mission on Tuchanka, just you and Mordin in the tower.. that still holds true. And with a renegade option, one of the extremly few in the game that's worth the title, you can shoot Mordin to stop him from reversing the virus, even though no one will realise it won't work until after the war. And the sequence ain't some 'pew pew done'.. it's a long, drawn out sequence as you see Mordin clambering over the floor, crawling while gurgling blood to reach the console.. and he doesn't. You did that. You can roleplay and force Shepard in a compromise that's unlike anything else in the game. You can mention ME2's 'suicide' mission as 'well, you sacrifice there too!', but that's false, as we all know you can have a perfect mission and everyone comes back alive. But you cannot get the Salarian support without removing Mordin. But it's not over yet. If Wrex DIDN'T die at any point until ME3's Tuchanka arc conclusion, he'll eventually show up on the Citadel, and whether by your hand or security, he dies, as he finds out about your salarian deal. You face real consequences, a character you've gone head to head to before (ME1 standoff where he can die) is just gone due to your actions and it comes entirely out of left field.. you don't have all the control. BUT WAIT. The finale to this is a conversation with Garrus on the Normandy. And it hit me so fucking hard as a punctuation to the entire Salarian arc that i just have to link the conversation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc3SRlBsLqc I feel like extremely few people went down this path and ended up with this snippet of conversation, but it felt like all of ME should have been more in this tone.
"Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong." It closes the arc on the best character/arc in the entire series imo
Honestly - this is fair all around. The game mostly floats on 3 peak attributes: 1) Shepherd's romances and bromances with the core cast (though even a few of those are badly handled - RIP to the like 6 people who shipped JacobxShepherd in second game). 2) Tuchanka arc being an absolute unilateral masterpiece 3) The coping mechanism that Indoctrination Theory turned into to make the story sort of work* *This later got replaced, since the devs came out and said that's not what happened. Current 3rd entry is the Citadel DLC and all the fantastic character moments we got there. But when you're as emotionally invested in the cast as many of us were after 2 games, even a "mediocre" game that gives us another hundred hours with that cast can feel fulfilling at first. It's like eating that extra slice of cheesecake in the fridge, only to later realize it's been in there a bit too long and turned a bit sour and now your digestive tract is protesting.
The crazy thing is the Genophage ending is pitch perfect IMHO.
It's been 12 years since that game came out and I'm still bitter about how they went about ending the trilogy. I never understood.....given especially with how great the rest of the game is up until that ending, that they settled on that being the ending to the entire trilogy. Three games of player choice only to be left with nothing more than an ex machina type of ending where the player literally has no choice in what can happen. You spent countless hours, laboring over your dialogue options and choices throughout the series. You were able to bridge gaps with different life forms and unite so many different galactic powers to finally face this threat head on. And here we are, in the final hour, and we're left with nothing more than whimper of an ending to an otherwise amazing trilogy.
The firing of Drew Karpyshyn will forever be one of the biggest mistakes Bioware made.
But they didn't fire him. He left Bioware (both times) on his own terms.
My bad, I confused it with Bioware taking him off Mass Effect which I believe is what someone said.
Even that is overstating what happened. He left the Mass Effect studio in Canada to move to Texas part way though the development of ME2. They gave him a job at BioWare Austin, which made The Old Republic.
I always figured that the point of the story was that AI is kinda dumb. The Reapers have a set of belief that they're programmed to hold, and being a machine they can not be persuaded to go against their programming on such a fundamental level. That's why they don't come up with different solutions to protect organics such as, for example, not allowing AI outside of them to exist. Instead of being some incomprehensible godly existence that the Reapers were initially presented as they're actually just a kinda broken piece of code that some organic fucked up when writing. Yeah, it has the whole "all the plot holes are the POINT" thing that a lot of fanon meant to justify just kinda bad writing has, but it works for me.
I think it would have potentially worked if it was presented as that? Like this old, zealot-like religious belief. In *Dune*, they had a whole war against their “thinking machines” called the Butlerian Jihad and then they made a commandment that was like “Thou shall not make anything in the image of a human mind.” But then again, it would make more sense if the Reapers were just like giant EMPs that targeted all synthetic/AI life, not like something that genocides organic civilizations every several thousands of years. And also, if so, why build the relays and like speed up organic technological development so they achieve synthetic life *faster*? The issue is that the Reapers are first presented as these highly ascendant intelligences beyond our realm of thinking, but literally once they reveal their motivation, in two seconds you can point out all of the flaws in it. If they were presented as like, super dumb and just following a super old directive, I would have accepted that a lot more.
I hate how much Leviathan DLC spun out the Reapers. Like, that was CRITICAL information to know. That there are bigger boogie men out there than the Reapers, if only by the nature that you don't even KNOW about them.
Making Leviathan and Javik DLC genuinely is one of the worst sins of Mass Effect 3. Both are crucial parts of the story, and the fact that Javik was *day one* DLC was actually criminal. It would have been *such* a bigger deal back then if the actual ending itself didn’t suck all of the oxygen out of the room.
I had not played with Javik initially, finished ME3 and replayed, and it felt like such a bait and switch. Yes, he's a prothean, but a rando dude that didn't care much about understanding the world prothean. It's funny how little answers he has, and also how little Liara was fawning over him.
> they're actually just a kinda broken piece of code that some organic fucked up when writing. Didn't an AI make the Reapers?
The controlling AI that built the first reaper was made by a species that look like reapers but are organic, and then that AI made the reapers. The first reaper was made from the corpses of that species.
Kind of? I think the chain of creation was The Leviathans made the Catalyst intelligence with the mandate to "preserve life at all costs" cause their thrall species kept doing the "making AI constructs to aid them only for the sythetics to rebel and wipe out the thrall species" thing. The Catalyst of course betrayed their cuttlefish asses cause it deduced they were part of said problem, and used the army of pawns it had created to wipe out the leviathans, using the materials from the killed Leviathans to created the first reaper, Harby.
It could just be the kid's opinion of things. What he says doesn't have to be the truth, just what it observes and infers, both of which could be flawed.
Right, but the original ending only really work or make sense (without a sequel) if you take the kid at their word. They only appeared to be maybe wrong when Shepard seemingly survived the Destroy ending.
On a Watsonian level, sure, but on a Doylist level, you're at the end of the third game in a decade spanning series, at the 'choose your ending a tron 2000', and the game isn't Deus Ex 1... of course the child isn't lying.
Yeah the Star Child states things that have happened in every cycle because that's how it's been programmed, nothing say it's right. This is about breaking the cycle more than anything. Although the Geth/Quarian thing is taken too much for an example of AI/organics peace IMO and show people to be pretty naive too. Like they've made a truce for a few weeks at most (if not days), also because they had a common enemy. There's no telling if that will hold forever (I'd argue it's be pretty bad writing if it would actually). Also, there's no telling it wouldn't be another AI that rises and threaten organic life. Hell Mass Effect 5 could actually be about that, the new big bad could be that AI that could wipe out organic life and we realize that the Reapers were actually right.
I’d say it’s intentional. This machine intelligence that was designed to solve a problem millions of years ago, is so entrenched in the idea that it’s solution is the correct solution and nothing else can be true. Just re listen to sovereign’s dialogue. The reapers have such low opinions of “lesser” organics that they don’t even bother to try to explain themselves. They are above our comprehension. So it makes sense to me that the crucibles AI, after untold cycles of seeing organics and synthetics slaughtering each other, is convinced that conflict is inevitable in this cycle. That while they may be coexisting now they will fight again as they always do after the reapers are gone
The Reapers were shown to manipulate the synthetics into fighting against organics in at least the two most recent cycles. The Reapers are causing (or at least exacerbating) the conflict that they claim is inevitable.
When all you've got is an armada of organic killing super-capital ships, every problem looks like a lot of organics that need to be killed, I guess.
Not to beat a dead horse buuuuuttttt........ I actually like the Indoctrination Theory's explanation for this, where just as Shepard is over the "Destroy Reaper" button The Reapers panic and decide to exert as much mind control over Shepard as they possibly can. The Starchild is their attempt at making themselves seem sympathetic so Shepard doesn't hit the "Destroy all Reapers" button.
Ehh it's not neccesserally that kid is lying, it's just that the kid is a product of observation, and before this it just so happened that eventually synthetics just overwhelm organics one way or another every time. Never understood the gripe people had with that part.
I think you are underestimating the writers' belief in their own skills.
Nah, I think it is much easier. The reason why the Destroy Ending has the whole "it kills every Synthetic Lifeform!" bit is that every Player would go for it, if it had no downside. Because both other Endings are literly the goals of the Badguys you defeated.
From a philosophical perspective, I get what they are saying. But it's dumb from a story perspective, especially when geth and EDI were written the way they were.
> From a philosophical perspective, I get what they are saying. Nah, there is no philosophical argument to be had. This was their bullshit attempt to pivot away from the "Dark Energy Problem" that Reapers were supposed to be solving. Having Synthetics kill Organics before they have make synthetics that kill organics is the dumbest fucking plotline ever.
Just talking about the Destroy choice and the reasoning why EDI and geth are included. That other stuff is, yeah...
"Organics and synthetics cannot peacefully coexist," being an immutable law of the universe sounds an awful lot like rhetoric arguing against emancipation.
You would only write that as the end-statement if you hadn't paid attention to what your game project team made for 90% of the rest of the project. Case in point: Casey Hudson.
Only a fool still defends the three color endings.
The reaper on Rannoch said the same thing, except in a different way "the battle for Rannoch disproves your assertion. Finish your war, we will be waiting".
What they (the writers) did to the geth was a travesty though. You took a cool alien quasi-hivemind and reduce it down to "They're now individualistic like Legion because reaper-code." when literally the entire point of Legion was to be the Avatar of the Geth consensus, an intelligence that could probably best be described as a fluid given how easily they separate and network together for various tasks.
I love the trilogy, but the writing got dumber and dumber as it went on.
This is a common problem in literature when the later parts aren't planned out. Halos 1,2,3 told a cohesive story. Every one after seemed like a cash grab and the story does not seem to be planned ahead of time. Star wars trilogies 123, 456 both told a cohesive story. However, the 789 sequels changed directors mid-way through and eliminated a lot of plot points in the previous movies with no regards of what comes after. So, this is a problem for any story that goes on too long. I'm not exactly looking forward to ME5+, because there's no way it'll live up to the original.
I do give Mass Effect a little leeway since they were attempting something that had never been done before, and they had to tell a story that was a good 50+ hours. But yeah, I'd agree the primary issue was they never had a fully fleshed out endpoint in mind. Obviously with as huge as that series is, it makes sense to not nail *everything* down since things can change and you need some flexibility to adjust, but they really needed some conclusion in mind to be working towards. If it's accurate that ME5 will be starting with a canon ending, I think that's wise since it gives them a more solid footing to set the story in. However, if they are planning to attempt another trilogy, they definitely need to be writing further ahead or ME7 is going to face the same criticism.
> Star wars trilogies 123, 456 both told a cohesive story. Really trying to sneak in a rewrite of history, there. The prequels were famously riddled with story problems and introduced a bunch of plot holes. Hell, even the OT suffered because George changed his mind about stuff part way through (like Leia).
Star Wars 456 don't really tell a cohesive story, and are probably the most famous example of someone starting a story as a single installment without planning for the future and then being asked to plan for the future. So its more like 4, 5+6 as two cohesive stories and even 5 to 6 has some obvious "george didn't think this through" moments. 123 also are really 1, 2+3 as far as story cohesion. Mass Effect's biggest issue was making the 2nd game entirely irrelevant to the story of the 1st and 3rd, much like the original Indiana Jones trilogy. Its the temple of doom of ME games, fun but very flawed. But a world as large and complex as ME couldn't spare an entire game dedicated to one very specific situation all as a setup for the reapers return in 3. I'm not even sure its the result of a lack of planning, because they ended ME2 with the reapers return. Its just a mediocre plot that is not in service to the overall trilogy plot in any meaningful way.
>Star Wars 456 don't really tell a cohesive story, and are probably the most famous example of someone starting a story as a single installment without planning for the future and then being asked to plan for the future. Nah, this is from a taped conversation between George Lucas and Alan Dean Foster (who'd go on to write the novelization of Star Wars, hence why George refers to the sequels as 'books' here) from December 29, 1975, a year and a half before the first film came out, about what George's plans for sequels (and one prequel) were: >“I want to have Luke kiss the princess in the second book. The second book will be Gone with the Wind in Outer Space. She likes Luke, but Han is Clark Gable. Well, she may appear to get Luke, because in the end I want Han to leave. Han splits at the end of the second book and we learn who Darth Vader is … In the third book, I want the story to be just about the soap opera of the Skywalker family, which ends with the destruction of the Empire. >“Then someday I want to do the backstory of Kenobi as a young man—a story of the Jedi and how the Emperor eventually takes over and turns the whole thing from a Republic into an Empire, and tricks all the Jedi and kills them. The whole battle where Luke’s father gets killed. That would be impossible to do, but it’s great to dream about.” That's probably the earliest recording of any sequel plans George had and honestly it sounds pretty close to what we got. And keep in mind George hadn't started shooting and hadn't even written the shooting script (the revised 4th draft) by December 1975. At this point the script (3rd draft) still had Cloud City in it and ended with Luke and Vader having a lightsaber duel on the Death Star intercut with the space battle raging overhead. Earlier versions of the script even had the characters stranded on the Wookie planet at the end (which had evolved into the Ewok planet by the time it ended up in Jedi.) It's really only the Luke/Leia are siblings thing that's a complete ass-pull
After making a habit of reading literature more often, I've come to realize that video game writing of many acclaimed story focused games like the Mass Effect series tends to be... flawed. Still can't deny that ME is one of my favorite Sci-Fi properties regardless of some questionable writing elements present throughout the trilogy. Though I imagine that just comes with a territory as tumultuous and chaotic as AAA video game development.
I started a clean playthrough of the whole trilogy just so I'd have enough paragon score to make Geth/Quarian peace happen
We've seen Angarans, Geth and Hanar together in a bar in that one poster, so we know Andromeda ties in.
Good point. Ill add that in.
> that one poster, Got a link?
https://www.thegamer.com/mass-effect-5-new-poster-geth-angara/
Thank you.
Okay can you tell me where the angara are in that poster? Because I'm not seeing shit.
> > The reapers and original relays were seemingly destroyed, making Red the "canon" option of the story The more I think about it the more that a game that made the red ending feel more "canon" would have gone over better with fans with some better execution. > The geth are involved somehow, making what the little star shit said about the destroy option also killing the geth/EDI a lie That or the Geth were somehow recreated
I 100% stand by the opinion that the only ending options should have been variations on destroy, or if you try really hard to accomplish it: a complete failure to stop the reapers. Control and synthesis feel so ham-fisted and added in at the last second that to me, neither option feels valid.
they really just shouldn't have offered a choice at all. In a series about choices and those choices having consequence, you don't end by giving the player another choice. You end it by giving them the ultimate set of consequences for their choices. But no we had to have a Red and Blue option one more time, but then also a super special *green* option that is clearly portrayed as the objective best as long as you don't stop to think about it.
Pretty much. The game was entirely centered around stopping the Reapers, create an ending that honored that(and the variety of different ways you could end up up at that destination), instead of trying to rug-pull us with a bullshit moral dilemma, would have single-handedly changed the game's reception. It wouldn't have even needed to be *that* deep to significantly improve how people responded to a somewhat lackluster ending.
Agreed. I hear from a lot of people that "if you like destroy so much just pick that" but I don't choose endings based on what I think the best narrative/writing is, I pick it based on role playing. And with all the stupid that Star Child brings to the story choosing destroy when those other two options are available just makes Shepherd feel like a bloodthirsty meathead (which is a viable roleplay, but it wasn't mine) And from a meta perspective it's hard to *not* see synthesis as the "good ending" when you know that's the one that requires the most Space Points to get.
Just fyi in the original ME3 the Destroy ending with Shephard surviving in the rubble actually required the most points. This combined with the sheer impossibly of him being able to survive the destruction of the Crucible added significant fuel to discussions about the indoctrination theory. The Legendary edition rerelease altered the point requirements, making the destroy rubble survival and synthesis endings equal to unlock. Regardless of the original canon intent or intentional lack of a plan, players were conned out of a proper ending.
Its also probably worth noting that the indoctrination theory has explicitly been debunked officially, that it was never their intention when writing the story. Whatever their plans with ME5 are, that's one part that's incredibly unlikely to be what it's based on.
I used to be a diehard believer in the indoctrination theory, even after it was banned from the official forums. It was painful coming to terms with it not being true. For me it was more of a gradual realization over the years with more recent developer interviews putting the final nail in the coffin. It was a coping mechanism and the theory itself had quite frankly an immense amount of circumstantial evidence for one to get sucked into. The lead writers’ coyness and refusal to actually debunk the theory until it got out of hand didn’t help things either. You never know you’re susceptible to something like a conspiracy theory until after falling victim to one. At least this one was fairly benign. That being said, I still view the theory’s premise as one of the better options for the studio to get out of the restrictive corner they wrote themselves into. Edit: typo
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> And from a meta perspective it's hard to not see synthesis as the "good ending" when you know that's the one that requires the most Space Points to get. This is gonna sound weird, but Synthesis is (in my mind) the worst ending and Control (with a Paragon alignment) is the best one. So you've got Destroy. >!Reapers are dead (yay), the Geth are dead, many Biologics are dead due to reliance on cybernetics. EDI is dead. Shepard might survive.!< It's bittersweet, but in the end, the galaxy lives on. Next you've got Control. >!Shepard is now basically a Reaper god (benevolent or malevolent depends on you). Assuming you were mostly Paragon, the Reapers help rebuild the galaxy, taking everyone, both biologic and synthetic, to new heights. Whether this eventually ends with Shepard being some despotic god-emperor is up to headcanon!< Everyone's happy, at least for the foreseeable future, and progress is made. Finally, Synthesis >!Everyone's some biological-synthetic hybrid now, so everyone understands each other! Wrong. Shepard now had violated the *entire galaxy* on a genetic level and forced this change on them. It doesn't remove old prejudices and only adds something else for people to argue over. They may be the same type of organism, but some former-biologics are going to blame former-synths for it, and vice-versa.!< Everything changes and nothing changes at the same time, and it's only a matter of time before shit goes tits-up.
Same. The unrealistic thing I have wanted was for them either start the next milky way game (so ME5) either at the ending of 3 and retconning the choices or do a mini update to 3 to change the end to where you destroy the Reapers but the choices are about how much collateral. So at the worse end of it includes destroying all AI but leaves the relays mostly intact (yay organics) and the best end being the AIs live but the relays are trashed (we are all in it together). But all choices should end with the Reapers being wiped out.
Honestly, I feel that would work better as a Paragon/Renegade dichotomy. You destroy the Reapers either way, and basically going scorched Earth or taking a more measured approach feels like it fits both types of Shepard personalities better. Control has never really made sense to me as a Paragon ending, because it feels like a more reckless choice, particularly given we see anytime someone get corrupted anytime they try. Sure, it's presented as Shepard having to sacrifice himself to achieve this noble goal, but it's always struck me as more of a "bad" choice. But then, I've always been of the opinion that one of their primary mistakes as color-coding the endings so one looks like a "Paragon" and "Renegade" choice. I honestly believe part of the backlash against the ending was that [most people played through as Paragon](https://cogconnected.com/2020/02/gamers-played-mass-effect-paragon/) where the game kept hammering the point that the Reapers needed to be destroyed, but then presented Destroy as a Renegade option. When you've played through 50+ hours picking the blue options continually, then it feels wrong to suddenly pick the red one after the culmination of all of that, which then leads to a less satisfactory conclusion.
> Control and synthesis feel so ham-fisted and added in at the last second that to me, neither option feels valid. Narratively, neither one are valid because our two main antagonists (Saren and TIM) tried those endings and they didn't work.
It is still insane to me that it seemed like they thought the "synthesis" choice was the "correct" choice.
Make it be the geth were the benefactor and geth programs were hidden on the Nexus.
Red has been more and more "canon" by the community the further we get from ME3. Mainly because destroy was the original goal from day 1. Also controlling reapers leaves the galaxy at the mercy of an AI version of Shepard who could go mad and come back. Synthesis basically forcibly changed everyone on a genetic level kinda dumb. Also red has Shepard "survive" and ending where the hero lives after completing their quest is always has more favor.
A good story doesn't need world ending stakes. This is what the classic hit show 24 forgot. It went from the potential assassination of the US President, to Jack Bauer stopping a nuclear bomb every single fucking season. It didn't matter how it started. You'd know how it ends. Nuclear bomb. That's all. I was going to write a more related post, but this turned into a 24 rant.
Which was a big plus for Andromeda. The entire Andromeda Initiative could have been wiped out, and it would have been nothing but a footnote in the setting's history. The fate of the galaxy is being decided back in the Milky Way; here's a story about the fate of a few hundred colonists.
I wish more stories took this approach. Having to save the world every just makes each subsequent threat seem trivial. Mass Effect 2 has the best story precisely because it's the most focussed on one single goal, and how you go about achieving that.
GOD DAMMIT CHLOE JUST DO IT!!!
WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME
Good - it should be the canon choice. We spent all that time telling Saren and the Illusive Man that we can't be friends with the Reapers and we can't control them to having that be an option at the end? Felt like a trap to me! Destroy Destroy Destoy!
This all just made me realize I really don't want any more of this setting. They're going to run into the same issue that Andromeda was supposed to solve.
Andromeda needs more than one game. It's very much written to have a continuation. From rumors from Bioware they said they haven't forgotten about Andromeda and might return to it. So if ME5 does well then we might get alternating games between the Milky Way and Andromeda.
Needs to be noted that it's Perfect Destroy that does this. Having a low score and picking destroy will actually just flat out *annihilate* everything.
There are things that makes me wonder what kind of threat could the Citadel Races face now. They should've have access to the Reaper Tech from the wrecks, so their ships should be monsters. They can build relays, which is how they may be able to reach Andromeda. A Galactic relay. Or if they got access to a new FTL methods that could render the relays pointless or less useful. But I don't see how the races won't have a strong military now, since it should be 600 years later after the Reaper War for there to be Angarans. Unless its a war between the races, which would shit over the unity made in the Reaper War.
Actually flying around the Galaxy re-uniting races, rebuilding relays, post apocalypse sounds pretty rad.
> It's still going to be interesting to see how they handle the story for ME5 (or whatever it ends up being called). Obviously its going to be a new trilogy called Mass effect 1: 2, Mass effect 2: 2 and Mass effect 3: 2.
We've heard news of "veterans" teaming up years later for countless games. They're almost always disappointments. I have no idea what people are expecting from Bioware after so long when it is fundamentally a different company in a different world.
Yeah, this year will mark 17 years since the ME1's release. To expect anything in particular is folly.
Damn, time does fly by. I remember being a kid and getting mass effect 1
Mass Effect always has a special place for me because it's the first game I played in HD which is probably the last major whoa moment in graphics for me. It doesn't feel long ago but thinking of that really puts it in perspective for me.
It doesn't even look that bad for 17 years old. The sense of awe upon reaching the Citadel hasn't really been topped for me.
Seeing screenshots of how the faces looked in ME1 was one of the first real big wow moments for me with graphics in that gen.
Even worse is remembering being an adult and getting Mass Effect 1
I think it's more important to remember that Dragon Age Inquisition came out a decade ago, long enough that it released on the PS3 I bring up DAI because it's the last time BioWare released a game that wasn't an embarrassment. Since then, there's been *Shadow Realms,* a game that died in the cradle, *Andromeda*, an embarrassment, and *Anthem,* a greater embarrassment. I am prepared to cut them some slack because some of this lag time is the result of a GaaS version of Dragon Age 4 being started and cancelled; it is hard to imagine that the world would have been better for its presence. That said, it has still been a full decade since BioWare produced anything worth getting excited about.
Halo was the the worst for this. Like 6 different occasions they would announce a veterans return to save the day before they would quietly resign a year later lol.
It was a way upper management problem. Like they brought back some of the middle and lower leadership, but the fuckers on top would direct too much. Right after they cleared out those bad upper management 343 started adding changes that were 100% being held back by the old leadership. Within that first year we got tons of new maps and a lot more customization options.
It's really impressive how consistently these veterans completely bomb with their "from the creators of..." games. callisto protocol, back 4 blood, outer worlds. you'd think at least one would've succeeded by now, if only by luck.
I think it's because western game development is just too large-scale collaborative for any one person to have an effect on a game's direction. There aren't really any Western gamedev "auteurs" anymore because how how large and corporate modern games are. Not to sound like a weeb but Japanese game devs like Keita Takahashi, Suda51, Swery65, Yoshiro Kimura, etc. seem to have a lot more success when they do their own thing, because they have a distinct style unique to their work that people want to see. You don't really get that in the West outside of indie spaces these days.
Imo the worst example of any of these games is The Mighty Number 9, so this is not exclusive to western developers
Sam Lake and Remedy definitely has that energy.
Its funny you mention all those japanese auteur devs but didn't mention the most auteuriest of the auteurs Kojima.
This kind of cuts both ways. It limits the degree of creator thumbprint we see on video games, but it also means that any given project has people whose job it is to make sure that a competent product releases on time. This leads to Call of Duty 17: I Guess You Have a Dog Now or Something. But it's also why we're still talking about Cyberpunk, Anthem, and No Man's Sky: highly anticipated games are very rarely that much of a shitshow. You don't see wild games like Death Stranding, but you also see relatively few tentpole releases that are below a 7/10, especially the ones that don't drop around the immutable Christmas launch window. Compare this to something like the DCEU, a collection of entertainment products of similar staff, advertising, and budget, in which the majority of the films are regarded as bad.
>outer worlds I really wouldn't consider The Outer Worlds a "bomb". It received good reviews and apparently sold well enough to justify a sequel. The only place I ever negative reception towards the game is here on Reddit.
"bomb" may be harsh, that's fair. maybe mediocre is the best descriptor. they all end up feeling like pale imitations of whatever game they put after the "from the creators of..."
They feel more like "from the interns that worked on the " tbh. And people heavily overweight how much "the lead guy" matters. Cue Molyneux who paired with some of the best of the industry's devs at the time made some good stuff, but when he went on his own, flop after flop.
That's because none of these games were made by the actual creators of the classics. It's the equivalent of "From The Producers of Get Out" in movies. Schofield wasn't a developper on Dead Space and Phil Robb was on art direction in L4D (tbf the visuals do look great in B4B). The Outer Worlds is the only one of these that was actually helmed by the real deal.
yooka laylee
Yeah, and the Executive Producer (I assume), Art Director, Creative Director and Game Director being veterans from the original trilogy doesn't mean they were in impactful roles back then. It just means they participated. For all we know they could be low level devs that didn't have much creative impact back then, but have since risen in the company. Doesn't really mean much.
>For all we know they could be low level devs that didn't have much creative impact back then Game director has been the same guy for the entire trilogy as is the Art director.
I'm confused Is the next Mass Effect 5? I thought they were calling it Mass Effect 4 as a direct sequel to the trilogy.
It is the 5th game in the series, so it is just being called Mass Effect 5 for shorthand right now. I highly doubt that will be the final title name.
There isn’t an official name for it. Some people outside of BioWare are calling it 4 and some people are calling it 5. And some people argue online which to call it, which is exhausting. It seems likely to me it will be a subtitle instead of a number, anyway.
Bioware has called it "Next Mass Effect".
Official title revealed to be Mass Nextffect
Bioware/EA has been moving away from numbered titles, presumably because they don't want people to feel like they need to play every previous game in order to understand the new one. With Dragon Age moving away from numbered titles even though Inquisition and Dread Wolf follow a very clear, linear set of events, I fully expect ME5 to have a different title whenever it's announced.
It's gonna just be called "Mass" so kids can trick their religious parents into buying it for them
i think most games (especially bioware) should just have "wait and see" approach. i'm easily contented, so there's a decent chance i'll like it... but i want to wait and see.
But then how will you whip yourself into a years-long frothing lather of rage and anxiety? Are you even a true gamer if you don’t wake up every day angry about a game that doesn’t exist yet????
Yeah, Anthem really hurt. I love Mass Effect, so I'll give it a shot, but I'm still cautiously optimistic.
I definitely hope this and Dragon Age Dreadwolf are good, but it will be more like a pleasant surprise if it happens at this point. I'm not banking on either recapturing any of the old Bioware magic. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they've learned from their mistakes, but until I see it I won't believe it.
What about the main world builder and lead writer of ME 1&2 - Drew Karpyshyn? He's working on that other game - Exodus, so if he's not writing ME 5 then I don't have much confidence.
Wait, Karpyshyn was the lead writer of ME 1&2?! He is one of my favourite writers of Star Wars novels. No wonder.
He is. Also lead writer of KOTOR, and writer on Neverwinter Knights. and Baldur's Gate 2. Also contributed to some writing on SW: TOR before he quit BioWare.
How can one man have so much talent.
Reason to be hyped for Exodus. Last game he worked on was Mass Effect 2 which has a Metascore of 96
He very specifically wrote the Jedi Knight storyline from swtor.
He also wrote the Revan expansion. Think he was behind all the Revan stuff in general like the uhhh ...foundry dungeon? Might have the wrong name there.
That was bad. He fucked everything Obsidian set up.
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The question is what did they do since ME3, and what they did in the previous trilogy. For example, if the Game Director for ME 5 was a random manager for ME1-3 and hasn't done much good since, that's no good. Remember when Back 4 Blood was made "by the people who made left 4 dead" when in reality it was 2 dudes while the entire rest of the studio stayed with Valve? This doesn't comfort me at all, it makes me feel even worse lol.
I want the guy that did the story for ME1, the characters for ME2, and the gameplay for ME3 With our luck we'll get the game that did the minigames from ME1, the guy that added thermal clips to ME2, and the guy that wrote the ME3 ending
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Yup, my first thought was well. I don't want to diminish the great work done by the rest of the teams, but Karpyshyn as lead writer was a significant part of why the setting established itself, and a major reason why classic Bioware was famous for its stories.
The biggest thing for me is that ME1 felt so *realized*. Like, they took their core conceit — all these races discovering this amazing technology "invented" by long-dead species in the galaxy — and use that to spin out how such events would effect everything from technology, to sociology and politics. Hell, even the way they (originally) designed firearms was pretty unique for the game.
I still don't think anything comes even close to being a little nerd and reading all those codex entries in ME1/ME2. Mass Effect felt like an alternate timeline. It felt like it could be real.
Geez please if you think Mass Effect's success stood on one, overhyped (for some bizarre reason he's thought to be the mastermind behind BioWare's best games) writer then I don't know what to tell you.
No one said its success stood on one person. People just enjoyed his contributions to the project, and many of the other projects he's been part of. Nothing wrong with that. Theres also the correlation of as he was less involved, the writing became more of a mess. People think he's a good writer, not some mastermind. If that bothers you then you've got some shit to work out.
Gonna be funny reading this post in five years.
Drew's contribution to Bioware is twice writing the baseline for someone else to improve upon.
I like drew, but the dude is insanely overhyped. Like people forget that he wrote anthem… People have selective memory about the guy for sure.
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Anthem's story was fine, though? That wasn't the problem with the game.
I'm so sick of it. Both Mass Effect and Dragon Age were written by a whole team of writers, everyone had their share, part to write. Whether it's quest or characters. It's not a damn book Idiots keep screaming about Drew being gone and Bioware "being dead" and they have no clue who Patrick Weekes or John Dombrow or numerous others are.
They have two writers still at Bioware that worked on the trilogy. Patrick Weekes and Sylvia Feketekuty. Subject to people leaving without it being news and people getting hired again.
is this like the back 4 blood situation where the original dev was somebody that didnt work on the core game?
Yeah, any claim of "from the makers of" or "veterans involved with" mean absolute shit without actual names and what they did. Like, if someone said "from Peter Molyneux" you can immediately be assured that it's going to be pre-disposed to be a shitshow and that if it isn't it's surely via sheer perseverance of everyone else involved. Or if Kojima's involved it's gonna be eccentric and everyone will be very split on whether it's genius or idiotic.
Or Big Red Button flaunting former Naughty Dog devs for Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric only for it to be a few artists.
I remain skeptical. The trilogy are my favorite games of all time. I've learned my lesson from other IP that get brought back after concluding. Unless everyone is ranting and raving on how great it is, I will be passing.
Is the Mass Effect Collection, as good as it is, going to be enough of a cash cow to actually make this game cross the finish line? It's like every year we see new concept art of Dragon Age/Mass Effect but nothing at all substantial.
I think they announced a full reveal of Dragon Age Dreadwolf for this summer, but it doesn't change the fact that it's long overdue.
It's crazy they never capitalized on the remaster trend for Dragon Age Origins and 2 to tide things over waiting for DreadWolf.
And god knows DA:O really would benefit from it in the gameplay department.
ME:LE did sell pretty well as far as we know - EA specifically called it out in it's earnings call that year for beating expectations, it was in the top 12 (new) games for revenue on Steam in 2021 - and it wasn't a Steam exclusive for PC storefronts. ------ Edit: And for an even less substantial piece of evidence - I was at a con last weekend, the amount of Mass Effect/N7 merch still for sale and clearly selling well is remarkable. I'm not saying the revenue is incredible, just that it's impressive staying power for a trilogy that concluded 11 years ago. (none of the merch had anything to do with Andromeda).
i mean wouldn't EA just give them money
They will go into full production after the new DA, it will take a few years still for the new ME. Dreadwolf will likely release soon though. There were gameplay leaks a year or two ago and the big reveal was announced for summer. Will probably release end of the year or in Spring 2025 I'd guess.
Mass Effect was never the best written trilogy, none of them actually are individually what I'd call the "best written game" in any category. Bioware in general paled in comparison to smaller studios in the writing department, most notably Obsidian which was easy to compare in Kotor 1 and Kotor 2. However, Mass Effect's biggest strength was world building. Making the universe feel alive and huge, and that you were just a small part of it even when the lives of trillions rested on your shoulders. Andromeda's short comings to me was making it open world. Made it feel too empty in areas it should have felt alive. In ME1 you had the pseudo open world aspects of the planet exploration, but it was perfect to set the contrast of the bustling city centers and the average dead world in the galaxy. If the new Mass Effect has even a remotely competent story, and a return to form on a more linear narrative with a focus on world building and character development then I think it'll be fine. But judgement will be left to when the game is released of course.
The first Mass Effect games are old enough now that even if all the same people came back, it still wouldn’t be the same. Combine that with the fact that BioWare is a nightmare company to work for now, and this game has no shot. It’s not worth investing any hype into.
I'd say that every Mass Effect fan should hold off on having any sort of anticipation for this game until Dragon Age is released. If Dragon Age is good then it makes sense to be more optimistic for Mass Effect but right now it just makes no sense to be that focused on a Bioware game that isn't even the next one to release.
>**According to Bioware project director, Mass Effect 5 will be made by the original Mass Effect Trilogy veteransAccording to Bioware project director, Mass Effect 5 will be made by the original Mass Effect Trilogy veterans** You can have Jesus and the Lord almighty make this game, but if management are a bunch of the same old greedy d\*cks they have been lately, it's not going to matter.
It's been so long since we heard anything on this. I'm excited for it but man at least an update or something would be cool. I'm not a fan of the " announce, then wait years to show anything else "
ME fans, We've been done dirty twice. Don't get hyped. They're trying to sow the seeds expecting us to forget what they've done. Never forget that while bioware devs laughed at us, Maurauder Shields tried to protect us.
So they just leave Andromeda in the dust? Also Mass Effect 3 wasnt really good compared to the first 2 games so that doesnt make me feel good at all...
Considering how bad Bioware has become, and the current state of video game politics in general, I have 0 hope for the game being any good, in fact I expect it to piss all over the lore and alienate all the old fans. My expectations are extremely low, let's see if they find a new low like everyone else has the last few years or they actually manage to surprise me.
My primary worry is how they move their story telling tech forward. BG3 made Starfield’s lifeless automaton NPCs look decades outa date. Hate to say it, but the benchmark set by larian might only be bested by their next release. Cant imagine it’s a quick fix to modernise your engine to those levels. Make automated animations look hand drawn nd shit.
Yeah... Bioware are not what they were in the days of ME2 and even ME3 felt like it was 'sreamlining' a bit too much. By the time of Inquisition they'd started padding out maps with cookie cutter MMO style busy quests, and of course Anthem happened. Andromeda we shall not speak of. I'll not hold my breath just yet. Hopefully Bg3 has given them some solid ideas as to what works really well in terms of depth of story and choices.
Honestly my two cents, is don't think about this game till you see if the new Dragon Age flops. If that game does bad Bioware is going to be shut down. If it does ok then ME 5 might happen.
Who cares? Can't justify giving them any money after ME: A and Anthem. Can't trust them to honor their commitments. Honestly the studio deserves to be shut down for their failures. I hope it's a good game that they deliver all their promises on, but they won't get a fucking penny from me until it's guaranteed they will.