Mass Effect 3 Demo

[Stofsk]

Also, way to drop an unmarked spoiler there.

I don't see how something that will be mentioned in the blurb describing the DLC in the Xbox marketplace can really be called a spoiler.

Well if they've announced it that's different. In future though I'd still appreciate it if people would tag even minor stuff like this.

[Losonti Tokash]

Bioware released a statement here: http://social.bioware.com/forum/Mass-Ef ... 705-1.html

They clearly state the From Ashes dlc wasn't finished before it went to certification, like I guessed.

[Anacronian]

Biowares responce to Totalhalibut and others complaining. Spoiler

As most of you know, yesterday there was a leak that revealed the upcoming DLC “ME3:From Ashes” on the
Xbox LIVE Marketplace. This leak took place before we were prepared to make an announcement about the details of that pack (slated for this Friday).

There has been a lot of discussion about the DLC offering but we wanted to clarify a few things...

- “From Ashes” includes the Prothean squad mate, an adventure on Eden Prime, a new weapon, and an alternate
appearance for every squad mate. Note that these alternate appearances are in addition to the ones already advertised in the CE.

- The Collectors Edition has been advertised from the beginning as containing a bonus character/mission, but we were not at liberty to provide the details. The Prothean is optional content that is certainly designed to appeal to long-time fans, which is why he is part of the CE offering (the version many fans would be likely to purchase). Mass Effect 3 is a complete – and a huge game - right out of the box.

- The content in “From Ashes” was developed by a separate team (after the core game was finished) and not completed until well after the main game went into certification.

- The Collectors Edition has been sold out in most places for some time now, and is becoming very hard to find (many players prefer not to purchase the digital version). As such, we wanted to make this content available so that SE buyers could also incorporate the Prothean into their game.

We’ll be releasing someimages and video about this pack in the coming days.

As always, we are extremely thankful for all of your support. We pulled out all of the stops to make Mass Effect 3 the best game ever, and we can't wait for you all to experience it.

Mike

Linky

[Block]

Man, I was waiting for the wave of racism that was the initial reaction to Javik's dialogue to reach here. While I'm impressed that it only took two months for you guys to catch on to something that's been advertised for ages, I'm less impressed by your accent locating abilities. Protip: Jamaica is not in West Africa.

Because of course my complaint had to have been that it was a non-white accent, rather than the fact that it sounds like a voice actor doing a caricature of non-white accent, just like Jar Jar did. I actually know a lot of west africans, Ghanians sound more English than most Brits I've met, most of the former French colonies sound more French than that voice does. Frankly I'd like it if there were less human voices period and more having to work through some sort of translation device or something. Like Vorlons did.

[Losonti Tokash]

Sure, except it only sounds like that to idiots. I guess you get bonus points for saying a Kenyan actor sounds like a white guy doing a Jamaican accent, though.

PS, having alien voices worked out so well for Kotor, didn't it? Oh, wait, it was fucking obnoxious and didn't do anything but save money on voice talent since they only needed about 6 lines of dialogue for multiple characters.

[Block]

Kenya's not in West Africa either btw.

[Losonti Tokash]

Which is why I corrected myself. But please, continue on about how he should have a normal accent like the other characters.

[Chardok]

Which is why I corrected myself. But please, continue on about how he should have a normal accent like the other characters.

I have to to quickly interject here, and I'm being 100% serious, that having a Spoiler

Prothean

character on my team that had a southern American (read: Redneck) accent would be the most entertaining and amazing thing to ever happen in a game ever created.



Yeah. Better than KING OF FRANCE.

[SylasGaunt]

Also, way to drop an unmarked spoiler there.

I don't see how something that will be mentioned in the blurb describing the DLC in the Xbox marketplace can really be called a spoiler.

Well for one I'm playing on PC and so I didn't hop onto live and read the blurb. Some of us are deliberately avoiding stuff like that.

For another, that's like saying 'it's not a spoiler because it was in the trailer'.

[DPDarkPrimus]

Fucking entitlement babies whining about having to pay for extra content that was developed and finished after on-disc content went gold. Gamers being gamers.

[Gaidin]

Personally, I find the self-righteous indignation utterly hilarious. DLC is just another application of the paradigm "More Content for More Money". In the gaming industry this has long taken the form of expansions to main games. With the development(for lack of a better term) of what is essentially permanent network connectivity for console games in the same fashion as PCs, Game Companies have started doing what amounts to a series of small expansions, for smaller chunks of money instead of one huge(relative to DLCs) project that's its own independent release that may or may not require the original game.

All of a sudden, the shift in pattern causes the gaming community to blow its top. Is it really that conservative(persay)?

[PeZook]

Personally I think it's prety bad because of how huge, storywise, that content is. You find a living Prothean dude ; This has world-shattering implications. Or should have, but this is bioware, so who the fuck knows.

[White Haven]

A lot of the indignation comes from how...intermittently cheap the content is. Look at the ME2 DLC. Some of it was great, some of it was '...that's it?' and you could definitely tell the difference between the DLCs where they had the budget to get the real voice actors and, say, the Arrival (which was otherwise fairly decent), but had a very dubious method of straining out the rest of Sheppard's team so they wouldn't have to do dialogue for them, and the last second 'wait, who the fuck is that flying the Normandy?' bit. The sometimes-justified fear is that companies will often try to do DLC on a shoestring and get away with it, since it's not 'expansion-length' content.

Compounding that issue is the fact that because DLCs are so short, they don't get the review coverage that full-length expansions do/used to, so it's harder for an end user to gauge which are cheap cash-ins and which had genuine effort put into it.

[Gaidin]

Not as world-shattering as you may think. Illos was unique in that it was designed from the start as a research station so they already had their best minds there. The Reapers came, they went dark for a few centuries, but with a protocol not only for survival but for figuring out how to counter the Reapers int he future. Bearing that in mind, this provides for a Prothean inclination to provide for speciatic(is that a word?) survival as much as anything else. It is not unbelievable that other Prothean outposts(now out of communication due to Reapers taking over the relay network) would take the same course. It is also not unbelievable that, without the mindset of those on Illos, they may just focus on pure survival. They wouldn't need as much maintenance for systems, materials, and life as Illos would. They just need to maintain the Stasis Pod systems.

As far as world-shattering implications, that depends on the Prothean. They have their grunts on the ground as much as any other society. As for implication to central story, I find that lacking, especially if they play the individual Prothean backstory correctly. Shephard basically has to get extremely lucky and stumble upon this guy to make him relevant as he's confirmed to have been in stasis for 50,000 years. It's not like he's out and caught up on galactic politics, knows the people of interest, and is definitively searching out Shephard. Hell if that is true and he's searching out Shephard he's one of two things anyway. He's either a grunt and wants to blow Reapers up, or he's a leader who knows his time has passed, and wants to blow Reapers up and fuckall to being questioned by the Galactic Alliance(for lack of a better term) for information because he wants to blow Reapers up dammit(repeated on purpose).

[PeZook]

Except for this small thing where he will have more precise and concrete information about the Reapers than pretty much anybody else in the galaxy, you are correct.

[Gaidin]

That's where the "fuckall to being questioned because I want to blow reapers up" part comes in...

[PeZook]

Wellcome yeah if you assume that he's a psycho/an idiot theb it makes perfect sense :p

[DarkArk]

Except for this small thing where he will have more precise and concrete information about the Reapers than pretty much anybody else in the galaxy, you are correct.

Why? I don't see why he'd inherently have a better grasp on the Reapers than everyone else now that the next Reaper cycle is happening. He was most certainly part of the science team that survived on Ilos, so he might not even have a good grasp on what was going on in the rest of the galaxy when the Reapers were destroying everything.

Also people bitching and moaning about having the ability to buy the digital content of the CE, for half the price of the CE, just reeks of entitlement. Most developers would not do what Bioware is doing, and wouldn't even give that option.
Spoiler

Also a Mass Effect Lore question. I'd always been under the impression that the civilizations of the current Reaper cycle the game takes place in had advanced further along in technology than the Reapers really wanted. So when was the first time Sovereign tried to activate the relay? Because it seems to me that he was responsible for the Rachni Wars, and so that was quite a long time ago. Thus one of the major reasons organic life has in this cycle is it's already centuries more advanced than the Reapers are used to. Throw in that they've been developing Reaper-like tech in the form of the Thanix cannon and such, and it might very well be that the Reapers are more vulnerable than people realize.

[Losonti Tokash]

Plan A: Activate Citadel, foiled by Prothean scientists
Plan B: Rachni Wars, defeated by Krogan
Plan C: Use Saren and Geth to gain control of and activate Citadel, Shepard kills Sovereign
Plan D: Fuck it, just invade
Spoiler

Anyway, there's no indication Javik is one of the scientists. In the voice samples earlier, he basically says he was born during the Prothean genocide, and his homeworld and culture had long been destroyed by then.

[White Haven]

Plans B1-Bn: Whatever Sovereign was up to in the mean time. Before anyone actually knew to recognize indoctrination, it would be a ridiculously powerful tool to make puppet-nations dance to your tune. Anything that's happened in the span between the Rachni War and ME1 that has menaced the Council races could easily have been Sovereign trying to find more useful puppets to try to weaken the current holders of the Citadel. The abortive Human-Turian war, Batarian hostility towards the Council, Cerberus's violently pro-human policies... There's been no evidence put forwards for any of those, or for other undocumented events, but it would certainly fit with Sovereign's MO. By the time of ME1, he was on an increasingly-short self-imposed timetable; the Reapers seemed to want to hit the galaxy's younger races while they were less advanced, and in the mean time the galaxy was in a perfect position for military advancement. On one hand, it's dangerous enough to provide motive for an arms race. On the other hand, the Council and the Systems Alliance are powerful enough that they're not really losing enough ships to keep them in check.

In light of that, I have to wonder if Sovereign might have had some involvement in the creation of the dreadnought-limitation treaty in an attempt to curtail the proliferation of capital ships heavy enough to threaten Reapers. Perhaps an attempt to buy time by artificially limiting naval strength in line units.

[PeZook]

Why? I don't see why he'd inherently have a better grasp on the Reapers than everyone else now that the next Reaper cycle is happening. He was most certainly part of the science team that survived on Ilos, so he might not even have a good grasp on what was going on in the rest of the galaxy when the Reapers were destroying everything.

Well, maybe he wouldn't have any tactical information that could help spank the Reapers in direct combat, but if he was on Ilos and survived then he's almost certainly a Prothean scientist, which mean a bonanza of knowledge for the galactic powers.

Remembed that Vigil killed off the soldiers and janitors first.

Spoiler

Also a Mass Effect Lore question. I'd always been under the impression that the civilizations of the current Reaper cycle the game takes place in had advanced further along in technology than the Reapers really wanted. So when was the first time Sovereign tried to activate the relay? Because it seems to me that he was responsible for the Rachni Wars, and so that was quite a long time ago. Thus one of the major reasons organic life has in this cycle is it's already centuries more advanced than the Reapers are used to. Throw in that they've been developing Reaper-like tech in the form of the Thanix cannon and such, and it might very well be that the Reapers are more vulnerable than people realize.

Hmm...the Protheans were way ahead of current galactic civilization, and they still got spanked, though of course the Citadel worked as intended for them. Makes me wonder why current Reapers don't just blow it up along with current galactic leaders and rebuild the thing after they're done.

It's not like they'd be in a hurry...

Plans B1-Bn: Whatever Sovereign was up to in the mean time. Before anyone actually knew to recognize indoctrination, it would be a ridiculously powerful tool to make puppet-nations dance to your tune. Anything that's happened in the span between the Rachni War and ME1 that has menaced the Council races could easily have been Sovereign trying to find more useful puppets to try to weaken the current holders of the Citadel. The abortive Human-Turian war, Batarian hostility towards the Council, Cerberus's violently pro-human policies... There's been no evidence put forwards for any of those, or for other undocumented events, but it would certainly fit with Sovereign's MO. By the time of ME1, he was on an increasingly-short self-imposed timetable; the Reapers seemed to want to hit the galaxy's younger races while they were less advanced, and in the mean time the galaxy was in a perfect position for military advancement. On one hand, it's dangerous enough to provide motive for an arms race. On the other hand, the Council and the Systems Alliance are powerful enough that they're not really losing enough ships to keep them in check.

In light of that, I have to wonder if Sovereign might have had some involvement in the creation of the dreadnought-limitation treaty in an attempt to curtail the proliferation of capital ships heavy enough to threaten Reapers. Perhaps an attempt to buy time by artificially limiting naval strength in line units.

Eh...you know, blaming everything bad that happens in the galaxy on the Reapers is kinda...well, maybe it could be forced into making sense, but seems terribly lazy and uninspired. PLus, if Sovvie could indoctrinate people into signing treaties worded as he wanted them to be, he could've kept the human-turian war going.

[White Haven]

Indoctrination isn't an instant process, remember. I would be great for premeditated bullfuckery, and a lot less awesome in a reactionary role. And i'm hardly saying that Sovereign Was Behind Everything, but that Anything Could Have Been Sovereign. I would also adore the irony if Sovereign was behind the Dreadnought treaty, and then the Reapers found that they had big problems dealing with droneswarms off of human carriers that were built to do an end run around the treaty.

[DPDarkPrimus]

1) PeZook, way to spoil who the squad member is for me.

2) It's been stated that the reason it's day one DLC is because their biggest complaint about Kasumi was how they got a squadmate like four months after the game came out, and so unless you started a new playthrough, you only got to use her on that one mission. So they were determined to get their squadmate DLC out on launch day so people who want it can have it on their first playthrough.

[Anacronian]

Plan A: Activate Citadel, foiled by Prothean scientists
Plan B: Rachni Wars, defeated by Krogan
Plan C: Use Saren and Geth to gain control of and activate Citadel, Shepard kills Sovereign
Plan D: Fuck it, just invade

Rachni Wars had nothing to do with Sovereign trying to gain access to the citadel nor did Sovereign know at that time that the citadel wasn't going to respond to his signals.

Chorban's mail about the Keeper data makes it clear that the signal is supposed to go off around now not 2000 years ago, Also i find it hilarious that you think that Sovereign just fucked about for 2000 years without being able to gain access to the citadel.

For all we know Sovereign tried to send the signal just before the start of ME 1 and the events unfolded from there.

Whatever reason the reapers had to start the Rachni wars it had nothing to do with gaining access to the citadel - perhaps it had more to do with the Rachni and a desire on the reapers part to have them wiped out, which worked perfectly by the way.

[Losonti Tokash]

The Rachni were clearly indoctrinated and driven to war as an attempt to weaken or destroy the military capability of the Council races. This was deterred by the Salarian' discovery and uplifting of the Krogan, a pre-spaceflight race. The effects, beyond the near extinction of the Rachni, was instead a massive arms race between Krogan and council races for something like 300 years. Again, a war ended by the discovery and inclusion of another powerful species with a strong martial history.

A Rachni victory instead would have left the galaxy dominated largely by a loyal, indoctrinated military, the Council's strength shattered, Krogan nuking themselves all over again, Turians oblivious, and humans sitting on earth with their greatest weapon being a catapult. allowing Sovereign to cruise in, activate the citadel relay, and start their purge of the galaxy.