Mass Effect 3 Scenes of Death

This is depressing but since they could have all died in Mass Effect 2 I am just happy all my crew made it to the third one even though I couldn’t bring them back to my squad (which I am still pissed about). Thanks to CVG on YouTube.

Mass Effect 3 Ending – Pick a Colour, Any Colour

In Mass Effect 3 you are given 3 options at the end of the game:

1. Control of the Reapers (blue)

2.  Synthesis between organic and synthetic (green)

3. Destroy all synthetic life (red)

Now throughout the Mass Effect trilogy of games the two paths you can take are as a renegade or a paragon. Basically one you are a bad ass willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done, the other you play nice before getting your gun out and busting caps.

If you are up on your lore of the Mass Effect universe you will know that the Reapers have repeated their harvesting of organic life countless times, through many cycles. To me that means only one ending can be taken and that is destroy all synthetic life.

I know it also means that EDI and the Geth will be wiped out but as the player I couldn’t take the chance that 50,000 years from now the Reapers could come back and escape control. Synthesis has the opposite problem because it asks Shepard to make a choice for all organics to combine them with Synthetics. That is a choice that no one should have to make.

So I took the red laser because if the Reapers were responsible for the death of trillions upon trillions then I say they must die so they have no chance to come back. That was the only option that made sense and it meant the final act of Shepard was shooting something, and that felt right.

Here it is for those who want to take a look:

My real problem with the ending is that they pretty much close the book on the world they created in this form. After learning about the Mass Effect universe nothing can ever be the same and in that sense the future of a world players have spent years getting to know is now gone with no hope of seeing what happens next because there is no going back. I don’t have a problem with that per say because it closes the book on Shepard’s legendary story but to get no chance to explore the world they created and to see what happens after the war is over, and to have so little closure at the end saddens me a lot.

Mass Effect 3 Ending: Why All Your Choices Don’t Matter

I have loved the Mass Effect series since it started. I read a few of the books and thought the world their team crafted was amazing. Then I saw the spoilers for the ending of Mass Effect 3 and now I am not sure what to think. This was a big budget sci-fi Space Opera like an interactive Star Wars where the developers gave you the illusion of choice.

They gave you some choices through all the games but in the last minutes of the trilogy all that choice ultimately means nothing. As someone who wants to write I can appreciate the bold move but as a player it punches you in the gut to realize nothing you did mattered.

One of the weird parts about the endings was seeing the Normandy in the Mass Relay Network with some of your crew when they were just on Earth with you minutes before. The way it the endings were presented doesn’t make any sense because having the Normandy not on Earth at that moment should not have happened.

Joker and EDI wouldn’t have left you in the middle of the biggest battle in galactic history and how the hell did the people you just saw at the London staging ground make it back to the Normandy. That would mean they all left you high and dry in the final minutes of the war. That alone makes the 3 different coloured light endings feels hastily slapped together.

I think the ending on some alien planet was meant to show who survived and that was all but after all this time of following their stories to know that everything you did to craft that was jettisoned out the air lock makes it feel hollow. Having the Normandy on some random planet felt like so inconsistent with the characters and something to have there to show that your team survived, be damned consistency or coherence.

Even if BioWare could fill that peace in to show how that happened, not having it in the game when you first played makes the gap that much more inexplicable. There are huge gaps in that and the star child ending.

I think that if BioWare was determined to destroy the galaxy they created then they could have done a few simple things in-game to make if feel like the galaxy wouldn’t be cut off from each other forever, that they would adapt and that the world we all spent so much time engaged with would continue in some shape or form.

If there was a mission about scientists looking to end their reliance on the mass relay network that would help make you the player feel given time everyone on Earth could go home instead of feeling like everyone would be cut off from each other and trapped in the Earth local cluster.

The space child was inferred a bit in the game but I think if they had filled it in more across the more of the game then at least the player wouldn’t feel as though it came out of nowhere because that is what it felt like to me. It felt like a course correction for the why and the gaps in the ending are evidence of that to me.

My problem is that no matter what you do galactic civilization is nuked, full stop. You can stop the cycle but only by destroying the Mass Relays and returning hundreds of worlds to the galactic dark ages. It would be as if you took away all cars, highways, and could only travel by foot.

So everything that we the player have grown to love is gone. Now I understand why they would do it but for the player it makes me feel as if nothing I did mattered and for a game about choice that isn’t the best way to end it.

The choices they gave you for Shepard to die and control the reapers, for Shepard to die then have organic and artificial life merge, and to destroy all synthetic life were all imperfect.  I don’t think that the endings were bad per say but how they were executed in the context of the game was.

That makes them feel worse than they were. A little more follow through from the outset to make sure that the consequences of each choice wouldn’t be the end is what was missing for me. When you think about the endings each has vast consequences but the way it was presented makes it feel all the same and that is something that should have been mitigated in some shape or form.

I loved the universe that BioWare crafted, it was epic, it was memorable but so much could have been done to make the endings better than they were. I still love the game even if the execution of the endings left a lot to be desired, ap here’s hoping for some DLC (and I still want a movie).

One thing playing the game after this ending feels hollow knowing that no matter what you do, all the species are screwed.

I totally agree with most of what Jeremy Jahns is saying in this video:

Welcome Back Sim City – Your City Building (and Destroying Antics) were Missed

So Sim City is coming to PC in 2013 with Sim City 5 YAY. That is one of the best announcements to come out of GDC so far. I remember the first Sim City I played way back when, Sim City 2000 and then 3000 and how cool it was to create my city while trying not to go broke. I’m also happy that it is for the PC only, that was always where it felt most at home and I don’t expect that to change in its next iteration.

From putting down pipes to creating power plants it was a fun and complex management game. Now after a way to long absence it is returning in style and with multiplayer. I wonder how multiplayer will work in practice and I hope that the graphics will rock without making my computer slowdown to a crawl. That is the hope anyway and here is the trailer of the new game. I will be following it as we go.

I am glad it is being helmed by Maxis, that is where it was created and where I think it should always stay. Now can we get Will Wright involved?

Enjoy the launch trailer in all its CGI glory:

Mass Effect 3 – Time to Save the Galaxy

This Wallpaper showed up because of an Ad that appeared during The Walking Dead.

I remember playing the first Mass Effect a few years ago and to me it was a new type of game that combined shooter mechanics with the stats and powers you find in an RPG and after a long journey Mass Effect 3 marks the end of my Shepard’s story. I have always been a fan of BioWare in part because they started in Canada but more because they made some of my favorite games like Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, Bauldur’s Gate, and Neverwinter Nights.

I remember playing Mass Effect and the story was so epic in nature, the mystery about the threat and the world they created so diverse that I couldn’t help but get sucked into it. Now when I got on to Mass Effect 2 I found the epic nature curtailed a bit too much to my liking. The sprawling scope of the first game became more compartmentalized than I liked. The story wasn’t as consistently grand with the story points being minor in comparison to the first game.

Look at that Reaper go!

I would be off if my Shepard would have died and having him comeback and work for Cerberus which was a pain in the ass in the first game seemed to contradict a lot of things and in Mass Effect 3 it seems Cerberus has flipped again. I have not played Mass Effect 3 yet but Cerberus seems to be the bad guy again but why when they were so focused on saving humanity in 2.

When I think back to all the decisions I made as Shepard throughout the first 2 Mass Effect games I find that most of the big decisions I want to see how they shake out happened in the original Mass Effect game while 2 seemed to be pretty explicit once it was said and done.

I played the game as a good guy I just felt horrible being back except for punching the living crap out of the reporter back in the first game. I feel like with Mass Effect series I have played a part in a movie instead of a game and I can’t wait to see how it ends for my Commander Shepard, let’s go save the galaxy.

I just got a new graphics card because my old one exploded, my PC (body) is ready!