Alright you whacky kids. It's out and I know you've been playing it. What are we thinking?

Not bad. The writing is juvenile at times though (The Kaiden + male shephard hospital scene is just... Wow. Incredibly bad).
Eve makes a lame-ass replacement for Legion. Morodin is extremely awesome.
The save game importing sucks donkey balls. (It didn't wokr for me. I ended up needing to download someone else's save game, and fiddling with it for an hour to get it to work). Also, Origin sucks steam balls.

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Photography
Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

I'm not a big fan of the companion roster, the only ones I have any real interest in are Garrus and EDI since Tali died in my last playthroguh. Not a fan of the level design, either. There's also certainly a lot less hub planets to visit, with the Citadel being the only one so far. I got the Rise from the Ashes DLC and the Prothean is boring as fuck. Honestly if it weren't for Joker, Garrus, Wrex, Mordin, and the rest of the previous cast I'd take it back.

Back on the character roster this is my biggest grip about the game, I cared more about non-companion characters like Wrex, Mordin, Grunt, and Thane than half my companions; Vega is the most generic soldier ever and Javik just bores me to tears, about the only new character I actually have sympathy for is Cortez for his dead husband.

Thankfully the game treats the old cast better than the new one.

SPOILERS! Pick a color you like, Red, Green, or Blue, because you get a nigh-identical cutscene for the ending that just swaps the colors of the energy doing its thing all over the galaxy. In fact, I think they straight-up stole part of the ending cutscene from Supreme Commander...

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"The 4th Earl of Hereford led the fight on the bridge, but he and his men were caught in the arrow fire. Then one of de Harclay's pikemen, concealed beneath the bridge, thrust upwards between the planks and skewered the Earl of Hereford through the anus, twisting the head of the iron pike into his intestines. His dying screams turned the advance into a panic."'

SDNW4: The Sultanate of Klavostan

Energy doing its thing all over the galaxy? So...deus ex machina ending, as was predicted by absolutely everybody?

How creatively bankrupt are these people that they use a totally bog-standard sci fi story arc; Alien invasion, then end it with a totally bog standard deus ex machina? OH MAN BIG 'SPLOSION.

Amazing narrative 10/10 GOTY!

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Best care anywhere.

What is Project Zohar?

A Deus Ex Machina ending can still be dramatic and engaging, though, hence why I reserved judgement until hearing more about it.

The thing with the ending...is that it's actually really good and dramatic up until the very END of the ending. That's what made it such a shock, it went from a desperate all-out war for Earth, near-failure, Shepard horribly mauled and barely alive...to 'suddenly, pretentious assholes are borrowing from Deus Ex' for the last five minutes or so. It was so close to being a good ending from start to finish. Also, daaaaaaamn, the combined fleet has the scale right. You know the bit in Spaceballs when the camera just keeps panning along Spaceball One? It's like that, only with ships pouring through the Sol relay.

My mind, in a desperate attempt to not let five minutes of absolute shit spoil the rest of the game, has already managed to file the very end of the game as 'epilogue, not ending' in a valiant bit of disassociative memory editing.

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Chronological Incontinence: Time warps around the poster. The thread topic winks out of existence and reappears in 1d10 posts.

Out of Context Theatre, this week starring Vanas
-'I think a relativistic paladin has its own problems.
Lack of skin error, please reboot.'


Fiction!: The Final War (Bolo/Lovecraft) (Ch 7 9/15/11), Living (D&D, Complete)

Did you sit through the credits?

Yeah, that wasn't even relevant to what made the ending shit. Who cares that the crew of the Normandy is stuck in Bumfuckistan for all eternity and tells their offspring stores of The Shepard? What made the ending shit wasn't that Normandy crashed, although it does have the huge wtf of how the ground crew got back onto it. What made it shit was the sudden left-turn into a...more or less literal Deus Ex Machina, and not even a well-written one.

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Chronological Incontinence: Time warps around the poster. The thread topic winks out of existence and reappears in 1d10 posts.

Out of Context Theatre, this week starring Vanas
-'I think a relativistic paladin has its own problems.
Lack of skin error, please reboot.'


Fiction!: The Final War (Bolo/Lovecraft) (Ch 7 9/15/11), Living (D&D, Complete)

Definitely, but I expected that they would end it like they did.

That's either very astute or very cynical of you.

(Cross post from somewhere else I post....at.)

Dudes....the game did not "recognize" my customer face code from ME2. I lost my Shep. My Shep is gone. The face I associate with ME had to be remade and it doesn't....really....look like him. This is disturbing.

Also: This game is not that great. It doesn't feel as nice as 2, the storytelling is hamfisted and lame. at the beginning you meet a dude you "knew" and it's like YO MANG, HOWS IT GOING IM A MAJOR NOW! YOU REMEMBER ME, RIGHT?!
*brood brood brood ignore*
YOU KNEW THE KOMMANDAH?!
Yeah...*brood*....I used to.

*facepalm*

then you get on Normandy and hear a familiar voice on your comms
"Commander blah blah blah thing I did."
"ZOMG JOKER THAT YOU?!"
"YA TOTLLY LOL"
AWESOME WE FRIENDS, 'MEMBER?! SO GLAD U BACK AND ALL THAT


Also Tank from the Matrix is there but he's 'roided up.

PS - Earth military council are full of cowards and morons and Sheppard lives in the skyscraper where they are housed thus insuring all extremely important military "leaders" can be efficientlykilled with one shot.

If I hadn't already spent 62H on this dude I would give zero fucks about "finishing the fight" (which is a good analogy - ME3 = Halo 3 except more talking. Also there are dream sequences.)



And...



Ugh...Man, this game IS REALLY REALLY REALLY not great. After playing it some more I can confirm it's suuuuuuuper mediocre. It's telling that the 3 times I've died so far have been a direct result of the horrible controls not grabbing on to cover. So you got CAMMANDER Sheppard, tactial and combat genius doing the fucking macarena in front of a crate as he gets peppered with bullets before he finally just falls over.


Macarenad to DEATH.


Also - do any of you guys find it weird or...do any of you feel like there should be some sort of crouch thingo? If there is one, I've not found it and I don't think any other bioware game has had it, but I really wish there was some way outside of of snapping to cover that one could diminish one's silhouette. It's good to be confident in your equipment (armor) but let's not get retarded, eh shep?

I know Stark will pop up and say 'lolPC' the instant I say this, but, GOD the spacebar being absolutely fucking everything reeks of consolitis. Yes, use/revive/sprint/cover/vault over cover should all be the same function, no, that will never result in you dying due to the spacebar misinterpreting what the fuck you want to do. There are a good ninety unused keys on the keyboard, for fuck's sake. At least LET us rebind away from that 'spacebar to do aaaanything!' control scheme.

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Chronological Incontinence: Time warps around the poster. The thread topic winks out of existence and reappears in 1d10 posts.

Out of Context Theatre, this week starring Vanas
-'I think a relativistic paladin has its own problems.
Lack of skin error, please reboot.'


Fiction!: The Final War (Bolo/Lovecraft) (Ch 7 9/15/11), Living (D&D, Complete)

Well it's Bioware. DE:HR also did the same thing, perhaps its in vogue.

It's not a new thing. Writing by committee means its easy to write into a corner and just say 'and then you win lol'. Almost every scifi game of the last few years does it.

I will now insert my ability to out-write Bioware.

Activating the Crucible has propagated a field via the mass relay network that disables Reaper kinetic barrier systems. Accordingly, they're now as vulnerable to our weapons as we are to theirs. Cue the hand grenade fight in a broom closet effect as the younger races of the galaxy and the Reapers tear into each other at point blank range. Now we get to see massive ground and space battleporn in the ending of the ending, rather than pretentious assholery from an AI. As an added bonus, it lets the galaxy save itself, not just fight a holding action while Shepard does literally everything.

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Chronological Incontinence: Time warps around the poster. The thread topic winks out of existence and reappears in 1d10 posts.

Out of Context Theatre, this week starring Vanas
-'I think a relativistic paladin has its own problems.
Lack of skin error, please reboot.'


Fiction!: The Final War (Bolo/Lovecraft) (Ch 7 9/15/11), Living (D&D, Complete)

While I don't own it, I was following a thread elsewhere so I'd have an idea of the plot and it just seems like they phoned some of it in. Making Udina councilor even if you didn't want that after two, return of the Rachni and what not. Interestingly, the image of Tali you can get is just a doctored up stock image from a website.

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I've committed the greatest sin, worse than anything done here today. I sold half my soul to the devil. -Ivan Isaac, the Half Souled Knight



Mecha Maniac

For that matter, why does Shepard even trust the little translucent-kid-AI-thing? It's the intelligence that's been committing mass genocide every fifty thousand years like clockwork for MILLIONS OF YEARS. Naturally, you should accept that its options are offered in good faith, including the one where Shepard jumps off of a cliff into a beam of blazing light.

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Chronological Incontinence: Time warps around the poster. The thread topic winks out of existence and reappears in 1d10 posts.

Out of Context Theatre, this week starring Vanas
-'I think a relativistic paladin has its own problems.
Lack of skin error, please reboot.'


Fiction!: The Final War (Bolo/Lovecraft) (Ch 7 9/15/11), Living (D&D, Complete)

'Battleporn' isn't writing; it's fan service. If you're saying you dislike the ending because it didn't hit your favorite scifi cliches, don't call that 'bad writing'.

Frankly an actual war as you describe could have just been, y'know, half the game. Instead of three games banging on about how super tough informed threat the reapers are and then winning. :v

Oh, Stark, leave it to you to fixate on one word and build an entire strawman around it. 'Battleporn' is just a happy side-effect of rewriting the ending such that Crucible goes from being a quite literal Deus Ex Machina to something that just comes close enough to evening the playing field to give the allied races a fighting chance.

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Chronological Incontinence: Time warps around the poster. The thread topic winks out of existence and reappears in 1d10 posts.

Out of Context Theatre, this week starring Vanas
-'I think a relativistic paladin has its own problems.
Lack of skin error, please reboot.'


Fiction!: The Final War (Bolo/Lovecraft) (Ch 7 9/15/11), Living (D&D, Complete)

So you get the Rachni either way?

Cause I was going to do a 1-3 play-through and kill them and blow up the Collector base but if everything plays out the same I may as well just start a brand new character in 3.



Well, the kid showed up in the form of the kid at the beginning .

Trust weepy to knee jerk, lol. Anything that increases the number of steps between 'doomed' and 'oops won' is arguably an improvement, regardless of how many pictures of tough spaceships in space king pew pew there are to turn you on.

Aaron, Los, since I'll never play this, isn't most of the game supposed to be the galactic war stuff? Why didn't they depower the reapers first?

Holy shit

I spoilerified the ending for myself and yeah, I'll wait for a bargain bin occasion, thankyouverymuch.

God. The way Shep just goes "Oh yeah little kid AI guy i'll do what you say, totally man I believe you" is incredible. I thought Shep was the only smart person in the galaxy?

Eh, its more like sidequests, multi, scanning and randomn helpful shit on the citidel helps the general war effort. While the main missions advance you to the final battle.

Having the Crucible drop the Reapers shields and have the result hinge on you gathering assets would be preferable to what we got. I did the finale with 64% and won.

It feels like the side shit is just an excuse to see Jack, check Miranda's ass, etc.