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As long as ME:4 keeps the surprisingly addictive multiplayer and runs a competent story I believe I will be relatively satisfied.
If ME:4 is a technical sequel or at least a continuation set in the future I wonder which ending will become the official one. Or is it possible that it simply won't get mentioned.
I'm not convinced it is some sort of later future with greater technology yet. Mostly because we don't (I believe) what the warp sequence in the trailer is refering to precisely and also because the protagonist is bearing the N7 designation. Which would be odd to think the post reaper war remnants of earth's military would continue the use of a service code for a special operations school far into the future.
Hopefully they will try to bridge the rpg style system of the first game with the better combat flow of the 3rd game. Along with pulling back to the roots of exploration that the 1st was built on. So I guess mostly they should just go and revisit why they were successful with the 1st game. Maybe even see this new game as a reset of sorts and have the series play out in a way that they fully intended.
Hmm, what could have made people think they might win where others had failed.
I've talked to quite a few people who disliked the ending, and not one of them was thrown over by the above. All of them went in thinking that Shepard was not getting out alive.
People keep bringing it up when trying to explain why the people who hate the ending are wrong, but it doesn't apply at all.
Shepard getting out alive isn't necessary for the player to feel they've succeeded. Constructing an ending that doesn't make most or all of your character's actions in the narrative thus far pointless, however, is. Also useful is an ending that doesn't destroy the civilisations you have ostensibly been fighting to save, and which doesn't reduce three games worth of fighting and sacrifice and alliances wrought in pain and blood to "pick a colour, watch a cutscene, trite ennui, le fin".
The problem with ME3's ending wasn't that Shepard died, or that it tried to do something interesting and high-concept, it's that it failed to pull it off and, worse, felt like the writer had zero regard or respect for the time and emotional investment players had put into the story and characters over the course of three games. The guy tried to bolt 2001-esque existentialist mumbling on to the end of a well-executed but pretty boilerplate action space opera, and the result was both incongruous and disappointing for the people who had been given every expectation by the narrative up to that point that they would be able to shut down the game at the end feeling like they'd won, rather than like they'd just been forced to watch a highschool philosophy student's short film about angst.
"Your society's broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No, lets blame the people with no power and no money and those immigrants who don't even have the vote. Yea, it must be their fething fault." - Iain M Banks
-----
"The language of modern British politics is meant to sound benign. But words do not mean what they seem to mean. 'Reform' actually means 'cut' or 'end'. 'Flexibility' really means 'exploit'. 'Prudence' really means 'don't invest'. And 'efficient'? That means whatever you want it to mean, usually 'cut'. All really mean 'keep wages low for the masses, taxes low for the rich, profits high for the corporations, and accept the decline in public services and amenities this will cause'." - Robin McAlpine from Common Weal
The problem with ME3's ending is that they literally put a god in the machine. As if the phrase Deus Ex Machina wasn't literal enough, they went and put a god in a machine, that invalidated the bulk of the previous two plots in the series by introducing a massive plot hole from nowhere, and basically reduced the sum of a decade of gaming to multicolor.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2015/06/16 14:30:42
I don't feel like it invalidated the other games at all.
The people in the past who convinced themselves to do unspeakable things were no less human than you or I. They made their decisions; the only thing that prevents history from repeating itself is making different ones.
-- Adam Serwer
My blog
mattyrm wrote: A whole new galaxy to explore, with millions of different choices to make that can completely alter the shape of the cosmos AND THEN BE TOTALLY RENDERED MOOT BY THE STUPID fething ENDING!
Seriously, I'm still sour about ME3....
Spoiler:
Sometimes, the future is inevitable. The life of one man is nothing more than the merest ripple on the surface of the galaxy.
Me? I will be there with bells on. I loved every aspect of the Mass Effect series, including the ending of 3, which presented exactly the choices I was expecting to get. Everything in the previous games was leading up to that decision.
And a space-western? Sign me up!
It is best to be a pessimist. You are usually right and, when you're wrong, you're pleasantly surprised.
If ME:4 is a technical sequel or at least a continuation set in the future I wonder which ending will become the official one. Or is it possible that it simply won't get mentioned.
I think it will be Destroy, if it is mentioned. I doubt it would be synthesis. If they still want a multi-racial team with some of the old races as well as new ones then having them all be weird biosynthetic hybrids would be a bad move. People want their Krogan to be Krogan, their Turians to be Turians, their scientist Salarians to be someone who has studied species turian, asari and batarian, etc.
Control I just didn't like
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2015/06/16 21:06:11
The Laws of Thermodynamics:
1) You cannot win. 2) You cannot break even. 3) You cannot stop playing the game.
Colonel Flagg wrote:You think you're real smart. But you're not smart; you're dumb. Very dumb. But you've met your match in me.
Today we debuted the first cinematic trailer for our next game, Mass Effect™: Andromeda. While we are still many months away from the game’s release date in holiday 2016, we’re excited to show you a bit of where we’re at. First, though, some background on the game itself.
When we wrapped up the original Mass Effect trilogy with Mass Effect 3: Citadel in early 2013, planning and design on Mass Effect: Andromeda was already well underway. We knew we wanted to start with a foundation composed of the best parts of any Mass Effect game: exciting new worlds to discover, great characters, and intense action. At the same time, we clearly wanted to expand the definition of what you should expect from a Mass Effect game.
While we aren’t ready to go into too many details just yet, as you saw in the trailer and can tell by the name, this game is very much a new adventure, taking place far away from and long after the events of the original trilogy. You will play a human, male or female, though that’s actually not the character you saw in the trailer (more on that later). You’ll be exploring an all-new galaxy, Andromeda, and piloting the new and improved Mako you saw. And through it all, you will have a new team of adventurers to work with, learn from, fight alongside of, and fall in love with.
We built this trailer in Frostbite™, our game engine, and it represents our visual target for the final game. We are thrilled by what we’ve already been able to achieve in bringing Mass Effect to Frostbite and by putting our entire focus on PC and current gen consoles. With the time remaining in development, we’re excited about the possibility to push things even more.
Thank you again for all of the support you keep showing us, and we’re looking forward to sharing more details with you near the end of the year. Until then, the teams in our Montreal, Edmonton, and Austin studios will be hard at work creating an entirely new adventure for you to lose yourselves in.
Thanks,
Aaryn Flynn, Studio General Manager, BioWare Canada
I hope that doesn't mean I have to have a quadcore like with dragon age inquisition. Cause I odn't.
The people in the past who convinced themselves to do unspeakable things were no less human than you or I. They made their decisions; the only thing that prevents history from repeating itself is making different ones.
-- Adam Serwer
My blog
Funny you should say that. My computer has a dual core from ~2006.
The people in the past who convinced themselves to do unspeakable things were no less human than you or I. They made their decisions; the only thing that prevents history from repeating itself is making different ones.
-- Adam Serwer
My blog
Melissia wrote: Funny you should say that. My computer has a dual core from ~2006.
So does mine.
I'm running an old E8400. And it's starting to become an issue...
/sigh
Intel should be releasing its next round of processors (Skylake) a few months from now, and I would expect that'll shake up Intel's line a bit - hopefully even bring the prices down on the current batch that they're selling.
As for ME3 endings and ME4, I suspect that they're following the example set in Deus Ex: Invisible War - i.e. leaving things vague enough that you can't really tell which option was chosen. The new game is set in Andromeda Galaxy, and the Reapers appear to have been purely a threat to the Milky Way. So there's no way to tell whether they were Destroyed or Controlled without a character explicitly stating (which they won't). And Shepard was already half synthetic himself, following his rebuild at the start of ME2, so there will be enough cybernetics floating around in characters to obscure whether or not the Synthesis ending was chosen.
Melissia wrote: Funny you should say that. My computer has a dual core from ~2006.
Assuming you're not joking(I'm bad at detecting that) - I'm honestly not coming at this from a snooty "LULZ PC MASTA RACE DAWG" position, but; you're not really hoping you'll be able to play a brand new game on a next-gen engine using hardware that's ten years old, are you? I mean, I know a lot of people have developed pretty unrealistic expectations about PC gaming in recent years thanks to WoW and the major devs neutering their PC offerings so they''d still function on the previous generation of consoles, but ten years?
I can only afford to upgrade my gaming rig on a five year cycle(sometimes three years if I go with midrange parts), and even that I have to accept that by the time I'm into year four or so there will be games my PC is struggling to play at all, nevermind at reasonable graphical fidelity. By the time ME4 is out you may well need an entirely new PC to run it properly, considering by then Win10 and DX12(which will require new graphics cards) will be fully released(and you can bet Microsoft will be paying through the nose for devs to optimise their games' performance for DX12 first and foremost).
"Your society's broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No, lets blame the people with no power and no money and those immigrants who don't even have the vote. Yea, it must be their fething fault." - Iain M Banks
-----
"The language of modern British politics is meant to sound benign. But words do not mean what they seem to mean. 'Reform' actually means 'cut' or 'end'. 'Flexibility' really means 'exploit'. 'Prudence' really means 'don't invest'. And 'efficient'? That means whatever you want it to mean, usually 'cut'. All really mean 'keep wages low for the masses, taxes low for the rich, profits high for the corporations, and accept the decline in public services and amenities this will cause'." - Robin McAlpine from Common Weal
streamdragon wrote: Given it's EA, that's basically guaranteed. I mean, ME2 and 3 came out on PC. PSx didn't get the ME games until ME3 was coming out I think?
ME2 was released on the PS3. PS3 players were automatically shunted into the default starting path (which, from what I understand, generally meant that Shepard screwed up a *lot* in the first game), until later on when the "pick your choices" add-on was released shortly before ME3 came out.
streamdragon wrote: Given it's EA, that's basically guaranteed. I mean, ME2 and 3 came out on PC. PSx didn't get the ME games until ME3 was coming out I think?
ME2 was released on the PS3. PS3 players were automatically shunted into the default starting path (which, from what I understand, generally meant that Shepard screwed up a *lot* in the first game), until later on when the "pick your choices" add-on was released shortly before ME3 came out.
Yeah, wasn't Wrex dead as standard in ME2? Worst choice ever!
The Laws of Thermodynamics:
1) You cannot win. 2) You cannot break even. 3) You cannot stop playing the game.
Colonel Flagg wrote:You think you're real smart. But you're not smart; you're dumb. Very dumb. But you've met your match in me.
In my first ME2 playthrough, that was the state I had. Kaiden dead, Wrex dead... my first ME3 playthrough was even worse, as both Legion and Jack had bought the farm in the Suicide Mission.
It is best to be a pessimist. You are usually right and, when you're wrong, you're pleasantly surprised.
Can't wait for this.. my only hope is its not too far ahead as I'd love to see some of the trilogy characters pop up.. such as EDI or a Matriarch Liara.
"That's not an Ork, its a girl.." - Last words of High General Daran Ul'tharem, battle of Ursha VII.
Two White Horses (Ipswich Town and Denver Broncos Supporter)
Morathi's Darkest Sin wrote: Can't wait for this.. my only hope is its not too far ahead as I'd love to see some of the trilogy characters pop up.. such as EDI or a Matriarch Liara.
Liara might put in an appearence. But EDI will most likely not show up, as one of the ME3 endings explicitly killed her.
streamdragon wrote: Given it's EA, that's basically guaranteed. I mean, ME2 and 3 came out on PC. PSx didn't get the ME games until ME3 was coming out I think?
ME2 was released on the PS3. PS3 players were automatically shunted into the default starting path (which, from what I understand, generally meant that Shepard screwed up a *lot* in the first game), until later on when the "pick your choices" add-on was released shortly before ME3 came out.
Not only that, but by making you choose the bad choices from the first game, you were forced into making bad ones in the second too. IIRC Mass Effect 3 and DragonAge: Inquisition both included the choose your choices thing by default, so if this new game is expecting you to have a save file I'll assume they'll include that tool as well.
Eugh, though seriously, who here still has a save from Mass Effect 3? IIRC there was at least a mod that allowed you to go through and check boxes in the second for every little thing you could have done. That tool thing didn't include everything, whereas that mod allowed you to act like you'd played the first game (down to how much resources you had).
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2015/06/17 20:37:55
streamdragon wrote: Given it's EA, that's basically guaranteed. I mean, ME2 and 3 came out on PC. PSx didn't get the ME games until ME3 was coming out I think?
ME2 was released on the PS3. PS3 players were automatically shunted into the default starting path (which, from what I understand, generally meant that Shepard screwed up a *lot* in the first game), until later on when the "pick your choices" add-on was released shortly before ME3 came out.
Not only that, but by making you choose the bad choices from the first game, you were forced into making bad ones in the second too. IIRC Mass Effect 3 and DragonAge: Inquisition both included the choose your choices thing by default, so if this new game is expecting you to have a save file I'll assume they'll include that tool as well.
Eugh, though seriously, who here still has a save from Mass Effect 3? IIRC there was at least a mod that allowed you to go through and check boxes in the second for every little thing you could have done. That tool thing didn't include everything, whereas that mod allowed you to act like you'd played the first game (down to how much resources you had).
Before ME3 was released, Bioware released an application that ran you through some of the more significant decisions in ME1, and let you choose which option you wanted to go with. So even PS3 players could start ME3 with an optimal save.
As for ME3 saved games for ME4...
I suspect that you needn't worry about it. DA:I basically threw saves out the window, and let players create their own save states to import. In fact, you could *not* import a save from DA2 to DA:I. The game wouldn't let you. Instead, you had to import it into the website, and use the website to create the new save state, which you could then download into your game of DA:I.
I will be very surprised if ME4 doesn't do the same thing (assuming that it carries over your ME3 save).
Given that ME4 is going to be in a galaxy "far, far away" and the events of ME1-3 are "a long, long time ago", I don't think the save states from the previous games are going to make that much of a difference.
It is best to be a pessimist. You are usually right and, when you're wrong, you're pleasantly surprised.
