Mass Effect 3 Demo

[KhorneFlakes]

Hell, I was replaying Nexus: The Jupiter Incident for some reason, and upon playing the ME3 demo, I must say I feel more threatened by the Mechanoids, and they're stupid nanotech wank evil space polyhedrons.

I agree with STRAK's point in the first post - The Reaper landings are hilarious. I was hoping they'd get rid of the cuttlefish reapers walking around, since it looks really stupid, but Bioware decided to keep them for whatever godawful reason. The four legged ones should have been the only ones around.

[Havok]

I'm confused as to why there seems to be a need to unite the other races. Why couldn't they like... respond to an imminent threat without you having to settle petty racial differences first? Couldn't you make a good story out of Sheperd's team being either an elite commando squad that gets assigned some of the nastiest missions of the war to defeat the Reapers because they've killed one before, or maybe have him act as the commander of a part of the war, thus having direct impact on the outcome? I mean the whole "lets gather the troops cause all races are stupid and petty" has been done hasn't it?

You are forgetting that it was Cerberus that was funding everything Reaper related, not the Alliance or even the council. The major races as a whole still seem to not buy into the whole "monsters from the far reaches of space are coming to eat us". It's not surprising they don't have their shit together, nor that they are having problems getting it together. Or that Cerberus is fucking with all of them.

No, I'm talking about the plot of the third game. Clearly the other races would be able to verify that Earth and all of their outlying bases just got slaughtered by a massive external threat, no?

How? Without the relays they are completely blind outside their own regions. Earth's relay was cut off, as they say in the demo, they have no info coming in and presumably there is none going out.

[White Haven]

The other half of it being that, once the Reapers are out in the open, nobody's going to want to be fighting the Great Battle Of Our Time to protect/rescue Earth without some MAJOR Sheppard-brand armtwisting, not if there's the threat of the Reapers rolling right over their own homeworlds in the mean time. I suspect most of the trouble is going to be A) convincing mutual enemies to work together without spending half their resources looking for an opportunity to backstab one another and the other half of them on guarding against the same and B) putting out brushfires so they feel safe enough at home to stick their necks out for Earth which, face it, has already fallen. If the Systems Alliance Navy has been properly skullfuckerized, there's not even really any enlightened self-interest in the other major powers banding together to save Earth. Look at it from their perspective. The Reapers are coming, we need to band together...but why the fuck should we spend precious ships and lives fighting over an already-fucked world that can't offer us anything in return, when we could be massing for the Great Battle of Our Time over, say, the Turian homeworld instead. Looked at from that perspective, Sheppard's got a diplomatic shitstorm of monumental proportions in her lap, and her only starting leverage is a very loud voice that can say 'I fucking well TOLD you so, assholes!'

[Omeganian]

I'm confused as to why there seems to be a need to unite the other races. Why couldn't they like... respond to an imminent threat without you having to settle petty racial differences first? Couldn't you make a good story out of Sheperd's team being either an elite commando squad that gets assigned some of the nastiest missions of the war to defeat the Reapers because they've killed one before, or maybe have him act as the commander of a part of the war, thus having direct impact on the outcome? I mean the whole "lets gather the troops cause all races are stupid and petty" has been done hasn't it?

Perhaps with the Citadel out of Reaper hands, they believe they can use the intact mass relay network and wage a proper lengthy war against the enemy - but a few planets will have to be sacrificed.

[Darksider]

Ugh. What is it with Sci-fi "invasion" game plots that makes them all suck? From what people are saying, This game has the same major problem as Halo: Reach. The invasion of earth by the reapers should be fucking epic, with orbital fire falling from the sky and people desperately trying to survive long enough for help to arrive, but instead it looks like nothing more than a bunch of small-scale ground engagements. Has there ever been a planetary invasion in a Sci-Fi game that wasn't a colossal fucking letdown?

[Stark]

I will say this in defense of the Reapers not nuking from orbit and as to the crater sized railgun hit...

The Reapers come back to harvest the organics for raw material, presumably to pro-create, so it makes little sense to vaporize them en masse.

The rail gun crater was from a race fighting against the Reapers, not from the reapers themselves. Remember the hull they went to at the end of 2 that they think was hit with the same gun.

If only cloning wasn't cheap and easy I guess. I've seen more destruction on the evening news, which is pretty embarrassing for a galaxy-cleaning robot locust swarm. Emotional impact of local park being destroyed = zero, threat to earth = minimal.

At least Shep has like months to get help; it'll take the reapers ages just to kill everyone in that one city. Bit of a comedown from the OH SHIT END IS NIGH guys from ME1. :v

Darksider, the Halo2 battle was probably MORE involving and interesting than this one. It's just a 'cool' backdrop to a forced tutorial/platforming section.

[Darksider]

Stark. Do you mean the Halo2 earth battle, or the levels in Reach? Because if it's the former, that's goddamn pathetic. The Halo 2 earth levels were the most uninspired "invasion" levels i've ever played.

[Stark]

I meant the stuff on the MAC platforms. At least you saw a battle, even if one-sided, and there was a sense that things were happening and people were struggling. In the ME3 demo it's just PLOP! reapers walking around like stray dogs firing popgun lasers at children's play equipment.

There isn't even enough smoke to cover the sky; it's a beautiful sunny day with squadrons of doves wheeling around.

[Havok]

Well keep in mind guys this is literally, like, 10 minutes of the invasion. There may actually be a reason that the Reapers are just soft landing and kinda just looking around. I'm more optimistic than Stark that the Reaper invasion is going to go further than the local park.

What stands out to me, is that there are something like 4 Reapers in less than one square mile. I wonder if that says something about the sheer amount or if there is something else going on since they don't have unfettered access to the mass relays.

[Stark]

Doesn't 2 suggest there's assload of them out there in the phantom zone?

And Hav the Normandy can hover for minutes at a time in full view of more than one reaper totally unmolested. Sadly, that's incredibly lame. It want even shot at with the suddenly-nerfed five-hits a kill reaper beams. The pace and level of action is what I'd expect at a retirement home, not the long awaited doom of mankind.

But I hear it's STEALTH. :rolls:

[Darksider]

Because it's not like the Collectors saw right through the Normandy's stealth systems using Reaper tech *I'm a smarmy asshole*?

[Havok]

The optimist in me says that there is a treason for all that.

[PeZook]

Even if they make up some justification for the sheer shittiness of the opening battle, does it really make it any better?

Epic fiction should get you emotionally involved ; Doing an underwhelming set-piece and then writing two pages of text/dialogue saying why it had to be like that is shit writing however you look at it.

If you want to say "LOL reapers want to capture as many humans as possible", you can still make it LOOK fucking scary. The sky covered in smoke and soot, massive harvesting machines setting buildings on fire and herding civilians towards processing ships, thousands of nuclear missiles streaking into the sky...they didn't even do the "the sun is eclipsed by the coming menace" which is simple yet extremely powerful!

What about sirens, panicking crowds, cities being evacuated, people forcibly converted into husks en masse, all that stuff which makes you go "shit things are turning into pure chaos jesus christ..."

I actually had the same problem with ME2, what with Collector raids being so sterile: people magically frozen and collected, thank you, end of story. It just wasn't scary or menacing at all.

Are you also willing to bet there won't be any sort of time pressure involved and you'll be able to leisurely go around doing quests instead of frantically juggling competing priorities in order to save mankind?

EDIT: Frankly, the destruction of the 12 colonies in nBSG was made more dramatic than the ME3 demo with just crackling radio dialogue and fleet dispatches, so you don't even need visuals for that

EDIT: Also, dolled-up Ashley?

COMPLETE SHIT.

The only reason she was remotely interesting as a character was because of her "gunnery chief" no-nonsense thing, which is traditionally reserved for buzz-cut muscley males. Now she a fucking playboy model swooning over Shepard and his macho machiness. Jesus...

[Ford Prefect]

Doesn't 2 suggest there's assload of them out there in the phantom zone?

You get a shot of the Reapers approaching the galaxy and what we see is dozens or hundreds of the things. Vigil in the first game describes the Reapers as appearing in such numbers that they filled the skies and blotted out the sun.

[PeZook]

I really like how there's no sense of struggle throughout the demo. The characters have throwaway lines about how "we knew they were coming, and it still wasn't enough", but it doesn't seem like anyone took anything Shepard said seriously or actually tried to do any fighting, and this just destroys suspension of disbelief.

Here we are, with top military minds of the Alliance learning the Reapers are on Earth from FUCKING CNN and asking Shepard for some empty platitudes on how to fight them as if now's the time to plan the defence instead of starting to give orders

The first fifteen minutes or so of the demo feels like nobody did any planning or preparation. It's not a desperate fight we are doomed to lose, it's the Army shooting hippies who are wondering what is going on and oh my god why are we dying?

...and not even that, because that would be more dramatic than we've seen, with people screaming and wailing and emotion...

But ooooh a kid flatly says "Everyone's dying..." when the background noise is more like construction work than THE END OF HUMANITY.

[Omeganian]

Doesn't 2 suggest there's assload of them out there in the phantom zone?

You get a shot of the Reapers approaching the galaxy and what we see is dozens or hundreds of the things. Vigil in the first game describes the Reapers as appearing in such numbers that they filled the skies and blotted out the sun.

I think it was Sovereign who did.

[KhorneFlakes]

Sovereign loves to exaggerate. I think we can ignore what the retarded mecha-cthulhu says, given that there are only a few hundred Reapers in the ending cutscene for ME2.

[Anacronian]

Sovereign loves to exaggerate. I think we can ignore what the retarded mecha-cthulhu says, given that there are only a few hundred Reapers in the ending cutscene for ME2.

Was it somewhere stated in the game that the reapers shown at the end of ME 2 were all the reapers?

[Omeganian]

I just posted a small fic on the subject here.

[Stark]

Clearly they killed all those species by landing and forming a special shape on the surface (or maybe doing a magic dance like bees) and not thought their actual power, giving Sheppard an easy way to defeat them after visiting 3 places and solving their 'riddles'.

[PeZook]

I wonder if the primary locations will have a complex web of interactions, where decisions made in one affect the other two in positive or negative ways, so that you will have to forge the new interspecies alliance by cleverly juggling competing interests?

Oh wait Bioware game, never mind.

You know, a small and naive part of me hopes the demo is something they threw together in five minutes and is actually a first draft, because some douchebag amateur who writes terrible pastiches of America (me) could think up something more dramatic and non-surreal in FIVE MINUTES. The worst part is the sheer surreality of it all: the defence comittee learning about the invasion from CNN, sitting there meekly and asking Shepard to teach them while the world burns and its time to take command and fight, Anderson screaming "How can you fight something so POWERFUL?!" after a Reaper weapon fails to cause significant damage to the building he's standing on, Shepples and Anderson having a leisurely chat in clear view of a Reaper, the Normandy doing nothing about the walker that kills civilians despite hovering fifty meters from it...

It's like some coke-fuelled fever dream, when you know it ain't real because nothing and nobody behaves like it would in reality.

[phongn]

I actually had the same problem with ME2, what with Collector raids being so sterile: people magically frozen and collected, thank you, end of story. It just wasn't scary or menacing at all.

They even had a perfect setup to show the overwhelming power of the Collectors - just have it ignore all those laser batteries while blotting out the sun with the magical freezing bug things and overwhelming the Alliance forces stationed on the ground. But no.

The only reason she was remotely interesting as a character was because of her "gunnery chief" no-nonsense thing, which is traditionally reserved for buzz-cut muscley males. Now she a fucking playboy model swooning over Shepard and his macho machiness. Jesus...

Don't forget that terrible uniform we see on ... wait, no other Alliance servicewoman.

If you want to say "LOL reapers want to capture as many humans as possible", you can still make it LOOK fucking scary. The sky covered in smoke and soot, massive harvesting machines setting buildings on fire and herding civilians towards processing ships, thousands of nuclear missiles streaking into the sky...they didn't even do the "the sun is eclipsed by the coming menace" which is simple yet extremely powerful!

You'd think we could get glimpses of, oh, the fleet around Earth getting obliterated in minutes. But no.

I wonder if the primary locations will have a complex web of interactions, where decisions made in one affect the other two in positive or negative ways, so that you will have to forge the new interspecies alliance by cleverly juggling competing interests?

Apparently there's something like this! It's not a complex web, but, for example
Spoiler

Your decisions in certain ME3 Quarian missions, Legion's loyalty mission in ME2 and if you got Tali mission in ME2 will affect whether you can make peace between the Geth and the Quarians (or have to choose between which fleet and character you'll get in support)

[Havok]

Wow... I should preserve this thread in the FattynerdTM HoF

OMG ASHLEY GREW HER HAIR OUT!!! PLAYBOY WHORE!!!

HUMANITY ISN'T OBLITERATED IN 3 MINUTES OF A DEMO!!! GAMES SUCKS!!!

You know, even the Nazis probably blew up a couple of "playgrounds" first.

I mean fuck, you guys. Can't the Reapers get, like maybe a day or a week to set up their concentration camps? They've been chillen for 50,000 years. I don't think they are in a hurry to get things done.

You all act as if their mere presence = instant death of civilization, when over the course of the last two games that isn't their M.O. at fucking all. The first Reaper made allies and built armies, the second used others to collect humanity... what were those guys called again? Oh yeah, fucking COLLECTORS. There obviously a way they go about things and, whether you think the writing, story and reasons suck or not, they are staying consistent and working with what they have set up. They don't just randomly annihilate, they don't just nuke from orbit. They subvert and scheme because they want things to go smoothly. Again, I'm guessing they want as much human/asari/krogan etc., as they can get their hands on. They could just fling asteroids from fucking nowhere if they just wanted to destroy civilizations. It has been made painfully obvious that that is not what they want to do.

This is like listening to the whining that was straining out of zit covered double chinned fattys world wide when OMG!!! GOD IN BATTLESTAR GALACTICA!!! SO STUPID!!! after the last episode. Really? Didn't see "God" coming there?

This is why I hate FNs, and sometimes even Ford and Stark, you are engulfed in the sci-fi culture, it is your lives, and you know every little fucking thing about it, so you then end up comparing it all to each other and just sucking the damned fun out of it.
I have never played Halo, never heard of Universe at War, still don't know what the fuck cathullu is. I don't know the difference between a Gundam, A Macross, or a Mech Warrior nor do I care.
War of the Worlds? Yeah OK, I know that, but we know for a fact that there aren't little green aliens that are going to catch a cold and die. I mean come the FUCK on. You guys are fucking ridiculous.

[Stark]

Story sucks. Action sucks. Interactive cutscenes suck. Levels are linear shooter levels.

Don't criticise; Hav will call you fat. You'll never take our BIOWARRRRRRRRRRRRE.

Hav, explain to me where the 'fun' is in the robo devils showing up and being less violent than US peacekeeping forces. Why'd the set the scene that way if they had no intention on following through? Fans have waited two games and like 5 years to see the reapers in full flow, and they actuall edit AROUND anything interesting.

That's right - because they're too stupid to keep their art guys under control and will probably later talk about how the cutscenes are non-canon. Read the codex!

[Havok]

Story sucks. Action sucks. Interactive cutscenes suck. Levels are linear shooter levels.

The story is the same as it has been: Mythical Bad Guys are coming. No one believes Sheppard except the one group that every species hates, Cerberus. No one is prepared.
The action is the same: Sheppard is awesome and always saves the day.
The interactive cutscenes are the same: Paragon or Renegade!
The levels are the same: It's not a sandbox game.

My point? They are being consistent. Not just in the mechanics of the game but in the story and what they have presented in the previous installments.

Don't criticise; Hav will call you fat. You'll never take our BIOWARRRRRRRRRRRRE.

This isn't about me liking Bioware and you know it. Fuck the only time I even remember who makes the game is when you guys bring it up. It's just an EA game to me. It's also isn't about criticizing, I agree with most of what you said. It's about criticizing based on expectations of imagination and hope.
That's why I brought up nBSG. The series is replete with religious overtone and has out right religious dogma and events in it, yet somehow FNs were SHOCKED when it turned out GOD was behind it all! It is the perceptions of fans that I am laughing at. It's the same with Star Wars: GL is dumb he should have spent all his own money to make the movie that I imagined for 30 years, He sucks and raped my childhood for money RARRRRR!!!
It's just fucking ridiculous.

Hav, explain to me where the 'fun' is in the robo devils showing up and being less violent than US peacekeeping forces. Why'd the set the scene that way if they had no intention on following through? Fans have waited two games and like 5 years to see the reapers in full flow, and they actuall edit AROUND anything interesting.

This is where I will defend the game makers a bit, like I have said earlier... Isn't it possible, that they didn't put that shit in the demo for a reason? I mean, honestly, does this game even need a demo? It's not like they need to get word of mouth generated. I have no idea why they even put it out, other that to show off the new multi feature. As far as editing around... what exactly did they edit around? Massive piles of bodies? The invasion has been going on for 5 minutes. Nuking cities? Not the Reapers M.O.
If they edited around anything it was the defense fleet being obliterated into the falling debry, but story wise, I thought that worked because it gives a sense of how inept and still unbelieving the Alliance was until it really was too late. Would have I like to have seen it? Sure, it would be cool. Do I think the whole fucking game is going to suck because they didn't show it in the demo? No.

That's right - because they're too stupid to keep their art guys under control and will probably later talk about how the cutscenes are non-canon. Read the codex!

This is one of they few VALID criticism I have seen in this thread. But again, it's about what has been seen and done in the game, and not the codex. That's what is cracking me up in this thread. It's a whole bunch of "well why didn't they do this?" or " they should have done this!" when based on what they have actually done with the story and characters, those things were not going to happen.

Say what you want about the quality of the story, my point is that they are being consistent in what they have established and SHOWN. Listening to FNs whining that they didn't make wholesale changes from a formula that has made them bajillions of dollars and then mocking them for that whining, is something I would think you would revel in with me,

If you are still picking this game up after two installments of saying it SUCKS, then you are a fucking idiot. Other than some combat tweaks, 2 didn't change that much from 1, so why was everyone expecting 3 to go beyond that?