Don't you think that the morality system that the first Mass Effect was actually quite good...

Don't you think that the morality system that the first Mass Effect was actually quite good? I know it was just an "idealistic choice" and a "practical, but violent choice". But at the same time I liked how the game doesn't pretend that you're choosing between good and evil, your goal, and story is still the same but the way you get there is way different. I dislike how in almost every game with good and evil morality system, the creators try to paint both of the paths as completely separate, when they are actually almost the same, save for a few differences. Here they threw out the idea of black and white morality and put it in a more honest light. You are a hero no matter what you do, but the thing is that you can either be the idealistic hero, who tries to save everyone he meets and tries to do the good thing no matter what happens, and the cynical, realist hero who will do everything to accomplish his goal, even if he has to get his hands dirty.

It might not be the perfect morality system, but at least it's better than what we're presented most often.

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no

Can't remember it was long ago I play it. All I remember is paragon was blue and renegade was red, the elevator was a lengthy ride, and the series is now dead.

I actually decided to reply Mass Effect just so that I can go through the series and pirate Andromeda so that I can laugh at it with friends

The problem is that the first game is actually quite good and it will probably now be painful

No. Locking persuasion options behind morality points means you're locked out of the best outcomes in certain situations if you try to play a character that doesn't fit perfectly into either of the two boxes. This would be tolerable if the boxes were just "good" and "evil" because mixing those often feels incoherent anyway, but Paragon and Renegade are nebulous enough that it seriously constrains your character. Maybe I want to play a character who distrusts aliens, but also isn't rude to everyone he meets for no reason.

Still a stepdown from its predecessors which covered the full range of alignments. Basically, in Mass Effect, you're choosing either lawful good or chaotic neutral.

What an underage faggot, bet you never even heard of Black & White

/thread

Alignment systems all suck. They're a necessary evil if you're playing a character like a paladin whose powers are tied to following a code, but in a game like Mass Effect they add nothing. Mass Effect would have been a better game if the alignment meters were ditched altogether, the few bits of the story that changed based on your alignment offered you the choice directly, and charm/intimidate were treated like every other skill.

That was definitely the original intent, but it didn't work out that way. "Paragon" and "Renegade" ended up just being different terms for "Light Side" and "Dark Side"

It was a great idea for a morality system, they just didn't properly utilize it (see also: Jade Empire).

No.

No, are you retarded? It was basically good or bad option and you couldn't pick some unless you were good enough or bad enough. Doesn't help your roleplay options with these amount to "hero" or "hero who's a dick"

I agree. It adds nothing. The point of an alignment system was to add challenge. You choose an alignment at the beginning and then you get penalized if you stray from it. That's the line that separates "playing a game" from "playing pretend." The way Mass Effect does it, it's nothing more than flavor. Mass Effect isn't even the first to do it this way.

I don't think the Paragon/Renegade system was any good, at least with Bioware's half-hearted implementation, and you can really boil down why.


At the end of the day, Paragon/Renegade was a system that didn't matter much in gameplay and dissipated after the halfway point while never having any impact on the story or progression itself, inevitably only ever mattering at specific milestones where you couldn't turn back to go farm more good boy points.

You'd have to be a retard to think that.

/thread

You're actually quite dumb.
WOW SO GOOD

I feel like the OP is talking about some other game and not ME1.

The morality system in Mass Effect while it was intended to be less black and white, really still was when you get down to it. There were only a handful of moments in the game where I felt like your renegade option wasn't just the "be an asshole to the NPC" button. The one that comes to mind is when you meet someone who tells you that an alliance marine's body is being used to conduct tests on geth weaponry, and he wants you to release her body to him. That quest actually had two outcomes and both of those outcomes had the usual "good guy greg" and "scumbag steve" responses. But it still allowed you to choose an option that was more inline with the player's personal philosophy. Which was great since the rest of the game was biased towards a liberal "helping other races is good, prioritizing your own kind is bad" viewpoint.

Otherwise it really was just Kotor but cinematic. And it got more and more exaggerated with each game. It's a big reason why games moved away from morality systems because it pigeonholes the story into requiring you come up with black and white solutions to every problem. Regardless of your interpretation.

Like a good example is how the ending of Mass Effect treats sacrificing most of the Alliance fleet to save one ship as the "morally good" decision and leaving the council to die and concentrating on Sovereign and the citadel as the "renegade" option. It was clearly written with a very liberal bias against being nationalistic, practical and pro-human and was always something that rubbed me the wrong way about the game.

It was something Bioware clearly picked up on with Dragon Age Origins since that game lacked a morality meter entirely and your actions were entirely judged by what your party members thought about it.

Tying your renegade and paragon score to your persuasion checks is the biggest reason it should be kicked out. How persuasive you are as a person or how threatening you are should really have nothing to do with whether or not you tend towards a practical or an idealistic approach when confronted with morally ambiguous situations.

Ultimately, morality systems are inherently flawed and punish nuanced approaches to problem solving. I don't mind having a game react to whether or not you're a monster or a saint, but it's almost always handled very poorly, with an arbitrary bar that labels you and doesn't affect anything beyond that and a few cosmetic changes.

Binary morality systems as a whole have no place in games.
Even the infamous D&D alignment chart, which everyone who bitches about alignment uses as an example of alignments being overly restrictive, has 9 different representative viewpoints.
If your alignment system gives people less options than a fucking 3x3 table, it's a fucking terrible alignment system.

Even with D&D morality is a huge problem that kills groups. A lot of DM's either ignore morality entirely or rigidly enforce it. IE: A player isn't allowed to do something because it goes against his morality on his sheet. Almost every D&D player has a story about an argument over morality getting heated.

Even with D&D's morality a lot of it overlaps and is generally a really broad representation of something that should be a lot more complicated. You can see it with how the alignments mostly just define actions, the player's approach to morality. And not what their actual definitions of right and wrong are. Like the only reason two evil characters are lawful evil and chaotic evil respectively are because the lawful evil character wants to tax an orphanage out of business whereas the chaotic evil character wants to burn it down.

I've never really found morality as a concept in D&D as a system worth having especially since 99% of the time it gets brought up is when you don't want to do something that your character sheet has pigeonholed you into doing.

First Mass Effect only did the story right, everything else was a mess. thats why casuals think its the best game

Not much of a traditional roleplayer myself because
But I always kind of got the impression the morality table exists almost entirely because Paladins must follow a very strict set of rules that can cause them to fall if it's broken, having a very drastic impact upon gameplay. Thus you need a system to affect that, and then that system needs to be applied to everybody.

Am I right in that assumption? Just curious.

All morality systems are silly. Nobody in real life stops and says to themselves, "What should I do here as a chaotic good person?" or "I can't do that, I'm lawful neutral!". Why would a character?

Somewhat. The morality system was there for a bunch of reasons. Like you had spells like "Detect evil" and so forth that would allow you to see if there were any villains located near by. And I think because they wanted to spice up character creation. Paladins also factor into that but at the time Paladins were somewhat different. Since in order for a character to be a paladin you had to have a pretty high charisma score. It wasn't something just anyone could do. You had to be human and you needed like a 17 in charisma. Therefore being a paladin was already something that came across like you were above petty things like stealing since you had to have legit good stats.

It was alright, but it could have been better. A lot of the Renegade options involved being a dick to people for no real reason, rather than emphasizing a rule-breaking or ends-oriented philosophy. And they penalized you for taking them, by awarding less XP for the Renegade path.

It's designed as a guideline for roleplaying a character that is not yourself. You know, like what RPGs are supposed to be.

First game is designed around a Paragon path, Renegade options are there just for the sake of it, the second and third are actually much better at dealing with P/R choices.

ME had a morality system?

Stick with red/blue answers to get more impactful red/blue actions later… Not exactly a morality system but it worked to history/character as in "Oh yea, Shepard shooting peole in the face for shits and giggles is not unexpected" sort of way.

Fairly certain you could get above 90% of said red/blue actions regardless of previously picked red/blue actions. I reiterate, ME had a morality system?

U wot m8? I am replaying ME right now to forget about all the Andromeda autism and he gave me that quest shortly after the first planet

If I remember correctly, didn't DA:O have a system where party members would either approve or disapprove of your actions, and if their approval got low enough they'd abandon? That seems like a better system that judging character morality on a sliding scale. And I can't believe I'm about to bring up Call of Duty as an example of doing moral choices well, but in WaW, your decisions as far as how brutal you were in the slav portion changed the ending narration a bit.

the morality system in bioware's kotor made sense because the whole idea of star wars is based on black vs white and good vs evil.
I'm really not sure why they decided to take that and use it in mass effect, a game that didn't have anything to do with the good vs evil cliche.

so no. It didn't work and was pointless 90% of the time.

In theory. In practice though, you could only get rid of them at prescripted times. Also a big part of that system was look, I know you're a blood mage degenerate that fucks dogs and plans to betray us all to the demons and darkspawn but you gave me a bunch of generic gifts so I like you.

Only some party members would leave. Alistair would stick around largely because he has to. Morrigan wouldn't leave because she has to stay due to the whole god child thing and so forth

Sten you could ask to fuck off at any time (or you could just let him die in the cage at the start of the game). However if you have a shit disposition with him and you bring him on the Urn of Sacred Ashes quest, he up and asks you what the point of doing that quest is and attacks you to assume leadership of the group. And you have to make him fall in line.

The rest mostly just get really pissed off at you and you can very snidely tell them to go fuck themselves.

Oh and some would get mad if you did something during a particular story moment.

Like when you confront Loghain at the end of the game. You're given the option to make him a grey warden doing this pisses Alistair off and makes him leave the group.

The most pivotal moment is if you poison the urn of sacred ashes or not. If you do this with Leliana or Wynne in your party they straight up attack the player.

I really liked this about the game since the game actually gave party members their own agency.

One could also argue they just gave you that impression because not every line of dialogue was earmarked ((romance)) or ((be edgy)) or how not every flag raised provoked a giant, across the screen notification as such.

But I guess like functional animations, that's a lost art for Bioware.

How renegade of you.

The blue cunts are the pinnacle of arrogance in ME universe.

Nah, IIRC Morrigan does leave if you do certain things she just comes back during that plot point, but doesn't join your party


Nah, not all of them are prescripted times. For example, If you've been evil and Leliana has like -50 relationship, she just talks you about it and if you don't apologize she just leaves. If you apologize and then continue being evil she leaves without asking you again. Only Morrigan leaving is at some prescripted time IIRC, and even then she might leave if you have bad relationship with her, I don't think I ever did that so I don't know

Morality systems can go fuck themselves. Consequence based systems are best, The Witcher games made good steps towards them and devs should advance from there.

I do respect the quran

I don't think there's ever been a good morality system. I think games would be better if they let the player deal with the consequences of a choice rather than having some arbitrary good/bad system with every choice/dialogue option.

kinda shame that Jade Empire too failed in the execution of its morality system. I kinda liked the open palm closed fist thing on paper, but was quite disappointed when I realised that it still was simple good/evil asshole morality. imho some of the open palm choices should have been evil and some of the closed fist choices should have been good

Nothing personal, kid.


You seem to have played it more recently so I'll concede but I do remember not being able to ditch that cuckling Alistair or the metrosexual elf Zevran for the life of me. I'm also fairly certain I took a shit in the urn to unlock the reaver prestige class and that no one left as a consequence.


That's because it's not a straight up good/evil scale but rather some bioware homebrew derivative of Wuxia tropes philosophies.

There is that mission where a part of a probe is stolen by monkey's, I was able to farm good goy points from mashing e at one of them in the cave thing. I'm not shure if there is a similar one for the dark side.

OP here, I wrote this when I was a little bit tired, so let me clarify a few things.

First of all, now when you guys all mention it, it's true that the morality system isn't implemented all that well, and it definitely shouldn't have been, but what I meant was rather that the idea of the morality system in Mass Effect was quite good. The idea that the choices aren't just simply good and evil, but simply different approaches to things even if it in the end boiled down to "mean choice" "kind choice" was a pretty nice concept that could definitely be used somewhere else with some polish.

I don't really think that was their intention.
"Renegade and Paragon" instead of "good and evil" may have implied that, but the choices you were given weren't really indicative of a game trying to reinvent morality.
Renegade at a lot of times was pretty clearly just being an asshole for no reason, while Paragon options were the usual generic RPG hero stuff.

i already shilled kotor earlier in this thread, but kotor 2 explored this topic fairly in depth.
Unfortunately the idea of "choices aren't inherently good or evil" is usually a direct contradiction to a "good or evil morality reward system" in a game.

I've never seen a game pull off the "good and evil are arbitrary" philosophy stuff and execute it well.
Kotor 2 got pretty close, but mass effect was really far from it, and I don't really think they were going for that just based on how many random acts of violence they allowed you to do as renegade shepard.

You can't get rid of Alistair until later on in the game, but you can definitely just kill Zevran when you first meet him. I think fucking the urn only makes Leliana and Wynne attack you, but I'm not as sure about that.

Morality system was never meant to be a railroad that limits you to that one track.
Rather it was a goal. The direction to travel to. The travel doesn't have to be straight and on course all the time. The desire to get there is the core part.

This is even more evident if you take into account the different justifications and thought process behind the same action.

Alignment is nothing more than a descriptor for your actions, a neat tag to sum it up. It's not a cage that constrains you.

It was pretty much the Light Side/Dark Side people already knew from Kotor and Jade Empire with a slight twist. It wasn't that new or revolutionary and was most likely inmplemented because it became sort of a trope in Bioware games at that point and fans pretty much expected it.

Problem with it in Mass Effect is that you get locked out of certain dialogue options without a certain rank in Paragon/Renegade, which encourages the player to strictly stick to one route instead of picking the dialogues that would make most sense to the Player and would be more of a middle road.

Try entire sidequests. There are alignment exclusive quests in ME1. For paragon Hackett asks you to kill a bunch of biotics and not let civilian scientists die. For renegade he sends you to a negotiation, expecting that you will kill the guy and Alliance won't be blamed.

no

Funnily enough, I hear he gets annoyed with you if you successfully negotiate with the guy.

My nigga

ME1 was better just for that fact that you could act as a xenophobe.

Yes. but the terms are downright insulting and you have to act like a complete pussy through the entire conversation.

You can literally kill Zevran when you meet him. Making him tag along with the party is something most of your party members even think is a bad idea.

if you have shit disposition with him, he betrays you and tries to kill you with his fellow Antivan Crowes

He can get angry at you and leave. I know because I gave him bad gifts until he did. If you convince him to stay in one of the last dialogues he'll make a joke about you doing it just to take all his gear off before he leaves.

I'm replaying DA:O right now and several followers have a dialogue option where i can either literally tell them to leave (Leliana, Zevran, Oghren, Sten) or a repeatable question that royally pisses them off until they leave (Morrigan).
It's been ages since i played DA:O, is this new, or modded in?

Also on a sidenote, i think DA:O was pretty much the last game where you could "harden" (as in, turn "evil") companions, right? It's not as well done as in Kotor2 or Jade Empire but i noticed that Bioware pretty much dropped that with Mass Effect. You could nudge Garrus to be more of a good cop or bad cop but it didn't compare to previous Bioware games.

In addition to WaW, Black Ops 2's campaign did 'your choices matter' better than probably any RPG I've ever played other than New Vegas.

It was in the game when I played it on release.
I think you could turn some companions kinda evil in DA2 but I tried to purge this game from my memory.
Also, if you are playing with mods, get Ser Gilmore and maybe Dark Times Act one (other acts never came, and the companions aren't as well implemented but Gilmore interacts with them. The dark elf is alright, the woodlady ripoff is meh, the warrior is forgettable).

That's what they keep saying about communism.

Ah. I thought it was something where you verbally judo the guy into terms favoring the Alliance. That would explain the annoyance.

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It was a pretty good scifi RPG. Not many of those around these days.

Morality systems always really bugged me. It's all about min/maxing so you can get the good/evil or whatever they call it endings.

And yeah the choices in mass effect 1 did alright, but look what happened as it went on. You either talk it out, or punch a guy. Same effect, same outcome why fucking bother?

Now, if your known for attacking people who disagree with you, and this resulted in a party member who normally wouldn't follow you to listen, that would be a small impact, and any impact is important in a game that gives you choices.

Also I want to point out that I really hate the romances in pretty much all games but especially bioware games.


Meanwhile if I think my character would be more worried about the end of the world then getting his dick wet then im weird and usually punished in some way.

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Well, remember that you are decapitating the galactic government and putting your own in charge. Essentially, you just used a potentially civilization-ending crisis to make a power grab.

Rich Evans just refuses the cuckery of AIDSMoby this one time.

Really though? At that point you're being told that the entire Galaxy is about to be wiped out in a moment if you fail to stop Sovereign.
And the Alliance Fleet is the only one fleet that have a chance to stop it.
And you're asked to risk a third of that fleet to save 3 people.
If your fleet goes down you don't know if you have enough firepower left to break through the Geth and take down Sovereign.
You're gambling the entire galaxy for the lives on board of that battleship who would die anyway if the Alliance Fleet fails. That's not just one hell of a gamble, that's beyond unresponsible.

I'm just putting down how it could be construed as "wrong" without the liberal mindset, user, nothing more.

Destiny Ascension has the crew of over 10000 and is the largest ship in the entire fleet. It has more people on it than on all 8 ships that are lost trying to save it on the paragon way.

It's always been there. It was actually a selling point to the game that your party members were supposed to be sworn to your service for their own self interests but weren't always going to be loyal to you. I remember reading reviews praising that aspect of the game at the time.

You can especially see this by how a lot of party members will flat out leave your service or attack you if you do something against what they want. Like Shale will attack the party if you try to use the Anvil of the Void to create more golems. Even if you don't take her during that quest, she'll leave when you return to the party camp. Iirc the only way to keep Shale and do that is if you do the Anvil of the Void quest before getting her, and when she asks you about it you have to lie to her that you weren't involved

Alistair leaves the party if you make Teryn Loghain a Grey Warden, and he instead takes his spot in the party. If you haven't convinced him to marry Anora he becomes a wandering drunk after that, or Anora executes him for treason. If you convince him to marry Anora before that he becomes King of Ferelden but still doesn't want anything to do with you

Leliana and Wynne will try to kill the player for poisoning the urn of sacred ashes

Stuff like that. It adds to the feeling that your party members are more like actual people with their own self interests outside of what the player wants. It's something that they completely backpeddled on with DA2 and DA:I because of muh player romance and waifu/husbando. (seriously they made this elf party member in DA2 and admitted it was purely to appeal to anime fans).


Well you can't turn companions "evil". With Alistair you can get him to tell you about how he has a half sister and you can track her down, and she turns out to be a colossal bitch to him. If you do this you can tell him that he needs to stop being a pussy and that everyone is only out for themselves. Which "hardens" him and later on if you ask him to become King of Ferelden he's way more on board with it. That's the only one that comes to mind.

DA2 had this mechanic where you had two meters with companions. "Friendship" and "rivalry". Basically the more you disagreed with a companion the more it increased rivalry and vise versa. This was mostly to make it so you didn't have to pretend to be a sycophant if you wanted to talk to a party member. I thought this was a neat system and delivered a different context if you romanced that character.

Hardened Leliana is pretty fucking psycho.

That's not how the choice is presented to the player. That's what occurs afterwards. The way the choice is presented to the player is that you can rescue the council and decimate your fleet in the process. The council that up to this point has done next to nothing to help with your quest.

Or you can get them to concentrate on sovereign. Bare in mind at this point in the story Sovereign is still destroying most of the fleet and nobody can even scratch him. You haven't had the final boss battle yet. And by this point you haven't had the final cutscene that reveals humanity has taken over the council.

When I first played the game I saw it as the game treating me like a dick for wanting to destroy sovereign more than save the council. And it really rubbed me the wrong way.

Leliana admits to "talking" to the Maker and that he sends her visions. She was always a psycho

So? My point is that the story at that point depicts a race against the clock where you pin your own limited force against a seemingly all-powerfull enemy in a fight for the gorillions of lives spread over the entire galaxy.And you're asked to decided if you want to risk a considerable part of your fleet to save a battleship and potentially dooming the galaxy. Deciding against that doesn't really seem evil at all.

Your fleet isn't even in the battle, and all you decide is the time when to let them in. Letting the council die means holding back the reinforcements and leaving Ascention to fight Sovereign mostly alone.

full pic?

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Fuck no

fug

What's wrong?

That system is as ancient as Wizardry.

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Femslut probably loved those tentacles…

holy ffuck those legs. i didn't intend to masturbate today

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Why not? :^)

Admittedly this thread was already pretty much dead.Sadly the same can't be said for you.

???

This is tali cancer man not turian porn

Turians are the bird-like xenos, user.

I'd rather have a space gypsy porn dump than talk about how good Mass Effect's morality is anyway.

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Who gives a fuck what happens in a ME thread or with the games. You're fucking idiot, m8.

you rang

Despite the shit around it, this game nailed player choice. You couldn't just pick the top option and be approved. If you were a dick to one guy you got his boss fight earlier in the game, but if you earned his respect he helped you in a later level. You could let a beefy muscle lady rape you. There wasn't a strict right or wrong because you never knew who you could trust. Even though it was points based it was still a great system for what it was.

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Having played it recently, no. The gameplay, which takes up a lot of the game, is shit plain and simple. The story is the only thing that keeps it afloat, and it ain't that good.

Now, let's get some Turians in this shit.

I just realized I ended this line without ever getting into the morality system. I don't know why I did that.
Oh well.

Basically, it boils down to it makes no difference in any situation throughout the game. It does nothing, and it doesn't matter. It's just a passive persuasion to skip some things, or get special boosts. No real change anywhere else.

You know, I never thought of it until now, but humans are the only things in the ME lot what seem to have hair.

Quarians too. Even if I find that stupid.

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The only reason why I liked the first Mass Effect was because I bought it for $2 in a bargain bin, long before Mass Effect 2 came out.
I never played anything Bioware had made at that point, so I thought that the cheap price point and kitschy sci-fi feel was made by folk who never made a game before, especially a third person shooter. Never would I have guessed back then that this was made by a reputable developer.

I consider the whole method of "good and evil choices" morality is incredibly bland for a game with a non-branching narrative, as it doesn't do anything but lock the player onto one of two rails for the story to unfold and then punish the player for not picking a side.

If we compare Mass Effect to something like Megami Tensei series, where the story DOES split between the Order, Chaos and Neutral paths, then the choices of "good" and "evil" do a service to the player by offering more content for different paths.
In a non-branching narrative like Mass Effect, it should instead focus on how the characters react and the setting changes to your actions, instead of a bar filling up on your stat screen or muh evil glowing scars.

Those pictures don't even look like turians, but a furry's recreation of them, turning the face into something more cat-like, from the nose to the presence of lips. I'm still annoyed that they ever let Turians start kissing humans despite the clear lack of lips.

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To be fair it's generally hard to draw something hard surface like that if you're mostly used to drawing organic characters.

they look like turians to me, you autist.

dat graffiti

I'll grant you they're romanticized, but I'd point out, the cannon turian females look like arse anyway. Far too human. At least these look somewhat alienish.

so is Andromeda cracked yet?
I want to see the trainwreck with my own eyes, but there is no way in hell I'm giving bioware money

Yes, it is. You can find it easily.

Morality systems like this are always dumb because of what you can do with them.
You could spend the first half of the game being Paragon and then suddendly go full Renegade out of the blue for no logical reason at all.
This, coupled with the fact that the story is much the same only tinted in a different color, leads to the conclusion that it'd be better if you chose at Character Creation what your alignment is and every "choice" would be made automatically respecting said alignment.
It's what everyone else does anyway, sticking with Good, then Evil, then Neutral with 3 different classes to replay the game and see different things, bang different girls, try different builds.


This however was a much, much better way of doing "alignment" since it wasn't just a one-dimensional scale but rather different traits you had in different amounts that you chose based on what you believed and what seemed like the best choice at the moment.
You weren't required nor was it possible to be Sarcastic or Good everytime, but you had a reason to pick different things and it was actually mostly to what you believe or not.


I'd like to interject that there are fundamental differences between Chaotic and Lawfull that do make them imcompatible but not just on what actions they take, much like Good and Evil.

Good and Evil is mostly about distribution of power in all it's forms, with Good people believing it should be freely given and distributed to everyone, while Evil people think they are best suited to wield any kind of power at all and no one else deserves a share. Knight Orders might amass power for themselves but it's all in the name of saving and securing the peasants so they can lead their life as well, while Evil Lords will instead amass power so the peasants are forced to serve them but any means.

Chaotic and Lawfull however is about trust, order and the safety net it often brings you. 2 Lawfull Evil lords will never fully trust or cooperate with each other since both believe they should own what the other has. But should it come a time where they must work together to beat a greater evil, they will have checks and bounds in place that prevent mutual backstabbing until the deal is over and they'll know they can trust each other.
Or to use a better example, Lawfull people waving a white flag will always be spared by other Lawfull people since they know they will respect the concept of a white flag. Meanwhile, Chaotic people will kill the white flag bearer because they give no fucks and everyone else will kill them in return since they'll never trust a Chaotic person waving a whiteflag.

The Ascension is a pretty important ship though and would be worth the risk.

I guess there's a difference in morality between letting people die and risking lives to save them.

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A pre-made cinematic story is at least more consistent than this "your choices matter (but not really) garbage that only delivers the illusion of freedom and decisions.

Why are you bitching about "my feeble mind can only cope with a pre-made cinematic story" when talking about an actual "pre-made cinematic story"
How would you even begin to "roleplay" it when every scenario is a variation of "hey, we went to this planet and killed everyone plus this guy\except this guy"
You don't even have any real freedom or actual choices at all besides being snarky or giving your opinion on things that never affect the game at all (Rachi Queen)

First Mass Effect didn't do anything right. It doesn't count as an RPG and it's a terribly mediocre Third Person Shooter with a tacked-on dialogue wheel.

Play KoTOR instead.

I wish Paragon options had really taken you into diplomacy, working through the system, really getting into making a multilateral approach to Saren, the geth, the collectors and the reapers work, and Renegade had focused on breaking the rules, recruiting allies or assets from the fringes of galactic civilization, or just plain going it alone as the Systems Alliance.

There were bits of this in the game, but I wish there had been a lot more divergence in the two paths. Of course, to do that, I guess they'd have had to make basically two games in one, but it would have been more satisfying.

Leave it to Bioware to turn Joan of Arc into Felicia Day.


Hanging up on politicians, slapping civillians and being a dick in general or bullying infantry with your IFV was pretty comfy.

bioware was never good, they just stopped being able to trick people into thinking they were

Wasn't she lying there? I remember that being a lie but where was that revealed, I can't remember

woot unbanned

I've DMed D&D games for many years, Before i moved and lost my group and never picked it back up and I've used the alignments as a guide for how the Player wants his character to act and kept a hidden list to add/subtract points from their alignment(s) and then announced when they have changed alignments, unless they rolled Pally then I was hardcore on them playing the character by the guidelines.

It was actually pretty bad. Like said it was designed by someone with a culturalmarxist mindset and who also moist likely had no experience with real world choices beyond what to get in the Starbucks coffee. Dragon age did it much better in that your choices affected your group's individual view of your character. Sure a few big choices should be applied to the galaxy at large but most should be in-group changes.

/thread

Man I've been thrashing the ME:A it's a shitty cringeworthy tedious game that just has so many MMO style quests and often feels like I am playing SWTOR again.

I'm up to the final battal before we go fight BBEG but am putting it off to mess around. I'm gonna uninstall after finishing.

Pic related on the girl I chose.


W8 how do you even get b& from fullchan?

posting porn
need more turian sloots

I got banned during the downtime on halfchan for posting porn but I didn't know it happened here.

Was it guro or something?

No just the porn I'm posting right now >tfw no sound

Lurk moar newfag.

This was my biggest complaint with Mass Effect's morality system: if you tried to be a realistic human being and do what feels right at the time rather than commiting to one "philosophy" or another, you get locked out of some very valuable conversation options. It's dumb as fuck.

Mass Effect 2 was actually a lot more forgiving on that front, you could occasionally pick the opposite side and it wouldn't really hurt you, but you still would get locked out of your second option's best choices.


No kidding, it really was just Jade Empire 2.0. It was an improvement, but that's like saying the dog shit doesn't stink anymore.


ME's morality system was basically "considerate" or "rude" conversation options, when it could have been things like a planet covered in factories is rioting over having to bear rationing (or whatever) and you have multiple branching paths to fix it:
- You can help the governor restore order by various paragon/renegade methods like convincing the people that the war against the reapers is too important to stop working now, or by helping to quell the riots by arresting/killing the leaders
- You could use your spectre authority (and guns) to remove the governor and install another one (like a more aggressive one or one of the workers' union leaders).

There are so many better ways to include morality, and to give the player options to walk a different path. Instead, Bioware just lets you be rude to people and punch reporters and calls you a RENEGADE. Fucking lame.

Your disingenuous assertions won't lead you anywhere.

It was shit.

I want to make Hurians with Vetra.

I couldn't get past the pudding faces, the respawning pointless enemies and the gorilion fucking sloooooooow-ass animations required to do anything. Five (ten if you're counting the trip back) loading screens because some fuckwit figured it was cute to run around doing e-mail prompted fetch quests.

And I'll never forgive them for what they did to assault rifles

I run the game windowed mode and tab out when the game is doing its loading screens.

But yeah the going to ship then planet and ship again quests are the worst. Pure padding for extra game time.

I am using Assault rifles they seem really strong what are you using? The Kett "sudden death" is my raifu

Reverent, Avenger, Valkyrie and Mattock are pure garbage. The exile ARs didn't impress me either. And the 3-burst plasma ayy rifle either had misaligned sights (or sidewinder bolts or something) on the account of me draining the entire magazine and barely making a dent. Maybe I need specialized ammo?

I ended up using two widow DMRs and the beamer SMG before giving up around the 46% mark.

...

>Save alien senate and maintain stagnant governance universal balance
>Enstate human leadership because humans arrived late saved the day
Cool decision, I'm excited to see what they do with the next game if politics are getting involv-

The fully automatic Cerberus-Mattock was pretty good, but that was actually a DLC weapon Fuck BioWare for doing that so I couldn't use it in SP mode. I don't even remember what I used throughout the game, I think it was the Avenger.

Never played MP in 2 or 3 but I do remember most weapons being something else if you could aim worth a shit and actually hit the head, and honestly they even felt better. Infiltrator in particular was like dirty Harry on roids. But in this shit I honestly felt queasy over most of my guns whimpering instead of providing that satisfying bang you'd expect. For one where's my heavy weapons at?

And what's up with having to unlock the same fucking gun five+ times?
Nigger, fuck you. It's the same goddamn gun except slightly stronger so as to keep up with level scaled enemies.

I hate it when people say "I did it on the first try"… but I did it on the first try. For the longest time I didn't even know that Wrex COULD die.

I still don't and I played ME2 some three times to completion. I mean contrary to what the game may imply there's absolutely no rush for the main story missions or any reason to send someone incompetent to do a specific role and expect them to do work.

To be fair, would Hackett really trust a Shepard with a rep for making renegade decisions to try and avoid casualties with the scientists?

I'm playing Andromeda. I like it.
Still would never pay for it because I don't want to give Bioware money for more games with gays.

I have it too, and I already its good and bad points.I'm glad I didn't pay for that.
There's no "mass effect" feeling in this game.

The fun thing is I found daddy ryder more charismatic than the one we play.

If you ram a dildo up your ass you're a faggot, regardless of whether you paid for that dildo or not.

This is one of the stupidest analogy I've read here…

Putting things in your ass isn't gay, retard. Pick up a dictionary sometime.

...

No surprises there.

Nothing surprising here neither.

He's technically right, you know. It could be plain degenerate or even medicinal

anyone else find it funny that all the alien species and human groups that aren't the bad guys all have voluntary nice western style cultures and democracies
Like no one has military dictatorships at least ones that persecute people and everyone save that ONE species you are supposed to hate are socially liberal with the evil ones being genocidal maniacs

If only Marauder Shields was here…
He would have pushed back the generic cliche Liberal Alien Civilizations and actually added something original

user we can't have diversity of thoughts, only of thots that we can stick our genitals into

Turians are very much like Terran Federation. From the book, I mean. Garrus even tells you to sacrifice the council for the chance to get at reapers.

I mean like a real fascist dictatorship 1984 shit not a military run oligarchy/republic
there is no real racism or specieism in the game either I mean for fucks sake we hate eachother and we are all technically the same species what the fuck is stopping hatred of another species

Here's the direct english translation of Mussolini's manifesto
worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini.htm

Nigger I'm a natsoc and I know and welcome the fact that fascists support 1984 style shit better to only be allowed to choose a good choice then be allowed all the wrong ones

Yes and no, in a facist state it's every man's right to do as they wish, but it is their duty to use that right for the betterment of their family and kin. There are rules for what can and cannot be done, and punishments for committing an that hurts the rest of the country in a physical, spiritual or moral manner, but the planning out of everyone's day, assigned numbers, extreme micromanagement shit is a very communist idea. You get a man to do what is right through showing him that it is right and good, not by holding a gun to the back of his head at all times.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is a better book, btw. Orwell got an early translation and copied the plot for 1984, but left out a lot of the atmosphere. In We, the protagonist is very happy and cheerful, almost to clown-like manner, showing his extremely controlled and brainwashed state, and sings the praises of the the One State. Orwell went for the easier emotional impact and made everything gritty and sad because he thought it'd be too hard for your average normalfag to look past the cheerful attitude.

How does this work with
We do not believe in a libertine state, you do not have freedom to make bad choices
This is very much true, we are authoritarians not totalitarians, I am not going to regulate when you have to shit I'm just gonna break down your door and kill you if you sell drugs
This has been proven wrong time and time again, if we really could do that we would have no need for laws

In reality the right choices, monogamy, hard work, loyalty, family, etc all make people happier in the end so under a fascist state people would be happier solely because they are forced to do things that are meaningful

but back to the game, even in this case there are no theocracies, monarchies or really any real right wing goverments in mass effect only the krogans and batarians come close, with the krogans being a warrior tribal society, and the batarians being a mix of syria, iran and north korea

Vetra the Turian, the thinking mans waifu.

you have the freedom to make the choice, bad or good, but you will be severely punished for it if it is bad for the nation and people. A man can drink all he wants in his own house or with friends, that is his choice and he is free to do so. If he, say, kills someone in a drunken rage or becomes a drunkard mess, there will be repercussions, but no one is giving him a mandate of how much and when he can drink, or taking the drink away from him completely so he cannot make the wrong choice.
Except that's literally how Codreanu and Hitler got their movements. By showing the disgusting practices of the Wiemar populace, the hopelessness of their situation, and how filled with vice everything was at the time, they got their followers to discard their modern sensibilities and readopt their pre-enlightenment traditional outlooks on life. Family, people, country, king, culture, tradition.
You need laws because men are a corruptible creature that can fall to the wayside, but you do not micromanage. A child that is appropriately taught how to act by a caring family will almost always become a responsible adult, even if they falter here and there. A child who's raised by controlling helicopter parents grows resentful and will lash out on purpose, even if they know their decision is wrong, just to be able to say they have some control of their own lives.

I think we're actually pretty close and probably agree, but you're confusing a firm and steady hand that guides with a tight grip pushing you forward

sage because way off topic

Agreed but your idea of freedom and mine are two different ones
Fascists fight for what is right damn those that hold the reigns of power, when decitent liberals hold the reigns we fight them, when libertarians hold the reigns we fight them. Only when the just hold power will we bow before them.
You confuse my ideas of enforcement and rule for micromanagement

I think we're actually pretty close and probably agree, but you're confusing a firm and steady hand that guides with a tight grip pushing you forward
I the hand sometimes has to clench into a fist to guide, does it not?

anyone got more of these?

She's actually kinda nice. Adaptive and restrained. Must have good genes.

The free markets and capitalism are based on the idea that demand creates supply. Totalitarian ideologies like nazism or communism tend to prefer defining the supply first and then blaming the end-users if there is no demand. Usually this means mandatory consumerism or famine.

Are you some kind of sovereign citizen?

the "free" market is a jewish construct that promotes frivolous things and attacks traditional ways of thinking
Don't think it will last much longer, Europe and America will collapse soon because of our weak societies
Before you get all insane on me, no capitalism/=you owning shit and not getting taxed out the ass for it capitalism is materialism made turned into economics
also
I am not a totalitarian I am an authoritarian a harsh one but an authoritarian and if we want to use the correct term it's national socialism

Most people in those games fucking hate other races. Zaeed hates batarians, calling them "goddamn terrorists", and most humans do as well. The feeling is mutual. Quarians are internationally regarded as thieves, Vorcha as murderous animals, Krogan as bloodthirsty fighters, Asari as space whores and Volus as space jews. The first thing executor Pallin says to you is how much he hopes humanity fails.
My favorite exchange in ME1 is vidrelated, where Shepard exresses his joy at the concept of a Turian shoah.

Your soft-commies with a nationalist spin, don't pretend to be anything more. You've got minorly different goals but the exact same means of achieving them.

Pure-Capitalism doesn't take some grand conspiracy to come about, it just takes limited resources and unlimited need. Social-Darwinism, survival of the fittest. Your system requires the people be completely dependent on the state. You preach strength, but take away the crutches and your people are dependent and weak.

...

I meant as in klan style racism, you know literally lynching space niggers


Those means are? If you mean brute force then yes, but almost every ideology and all the applicable ones involve some level of force.

Just the continued want of the worthless consumer
Hello unmitigated materialism, and goodbye morality and common sense
If that was the case the kike bankers would be dead a long time ago
It's cycical, the state depends on the people, and the people depend on the state, on many levels this is true for all sane forms of government, look at for example police forces
And you shackle them to their wants

Which is true, for both.

I loved being able to say that.

All of that was true.

Even on 3, where it shoves in your throat "let's cooperate and be friends or else the reapers will kill us" and "the best ending, which we really want you to choose, is the one where you basically rape the galaxy and turn everybody into happy glowing green cyborgs", there was some, with the salarians wanting to fuck the krogan and kept the genophage.

As I remember the original Mass Effect kind had its fair share of up's and downs It didn't sell well on console but it did gain a cult following thanks to fox news reporting about it had sexual content.

Seriously, that game is tame as fuck.

The only thing that got me thru ME3 was Sheppard occasionally being Sheppard, but this dickRyder is something else. I'd even play with a nigger voice just to lessen his whining.

...

Reapers did nothing wrong?

SJWs at Bioware are rectifying problematic lore piece by piece so it fits in with political correctness. The Qunari got it in DA:I. The asari are just their latest victim.

The sheer implication of the cancer to follow makes me want to buy a nagant, five tons of canned beans and a bowie skinning knife. Stockpiling fertilizer also seems appropriate.

This is an absurd claim. Nazi Germany didn't throw everyone who was too successful in gulags and confiscate their stuff like the Soviets did. "National Socialism" and "socialism in one country" may sound the same, but were radically different in practice.
Demonstrably false. If this were true we'd have pure capitalism now, instead we have multinational corporations writing laws to crush competition.

Oy vey think about the six million goy!

There's a moment in the game where you have to transfer a bunch of messages from angarans to the Nexus (((cultural center))) and you can either send the messages as they are or edit them. There are some redpilled angaran messages.
TBH Andromeda doesn't need the Reapers, with all those fags and trannies they're all probably gonna die from aids.

That's why we need more people like Cora.

Shitty memes won't fix a shitty game.

At least the memes are more enjoyable than the game itself

there's nothing wrong in the binary morality system itself, because all the actions can be judged using binary morality (how much this action affects to the issue X, and X can be anything relevant to the game world), but they are unsig it in a wrong way; in reality, the opportunist middle ground has the best perks, but in biohomo games you have to be an extemist to get the best goods, and that's just fucking dumb

Its only logical that daughter of the illusive man would be human supremacist.

Was it confirmed?

Is there anymore SJW shit associated with that place? Is that where the Bioware bluehairs dumped all their propaganda? As I understand it, all the content there is just for flavor, so maybe the bluehairs thought they could get away with it if they met it all "optional."

I accidentally cheeki breeki'd deleted post, sorry.

They are related at very least. Also i believe Cora was modeled after Tasha from The Next Generation. At least this is from where they grew inspiration for her image and the fact she's straight.

I know that they both share the name Harper but was it confirmed that she's related to him? It could be another Mac Walters' mistake, thinking that "Harper" sounds like a cool name while forgetting that TIM's name was Harper too.
Although there's one thing that supports your theory: in the game it's said that she was supposed to be the Pathfinder, not the autistic siblings. Maybe she was placed there by TIM.

the webm has nothing to do with the discussion, I just wanted to share it

And that's the best thing about Cora ; it drived sjw bigots crazy. They were soooo sure she would be a complete butch.

Nope

Yep probably. That wouldn't be the first mistake from this untalented guy, about Cerberus.

I fucking hate SAM's voice and the fact it is present all the time. EDI was already a pain in the ass, but SAM is even worse.

By the way, I love how that IA basically says Sara to fuck off, with her stupid easy going, overly sympathetic way of talking. I really don't like that side of Ryder's personality.
There's no way for you to be a jerk like Shepard could.

Cucking your AI is not nice.

Given the Walters admitted he has to go on the ME Wiki to look things up because he doesn't know shit, it's very likely he did it by accident

Both Edi and Sam are just Lt. Commander Data. All of them repeated same jokes over and over again, and same references. To the point when it became really painful. And not just Edi, Liara and Legion also did similar shit to Data. "oh, you are joking" or "why didn't you fixed that n7 armor piece? - No data available".
Its like Data's character was spread around many other characters of mass effect, so its "alive robot" cliche now.

We went from multiple choice (kotor, nwn) to binary (me1-2), and now with Andromeda we are at no choices at all. Oftentimes you are presented with 2 estetic options, you can jokingly be a little bitch or you can be a sniveling little bitch (in many cases these options will even lead to the exact same word for word conversations). It´s like they completely missed the point about the criticism of the ending in me3. Player agency is wiped out, but they took away the colours so that we can´t complain about every choice being different colours with the same result.

(webm) but it didn't happen on the Nexus


I can't stand the idea of being forced to have an AI implant, so I didn't want another crazy AI to be with SAM.
I thought that the angarans deserved to get their AI back. So far it leads to nothing interesting (except for that scene), I guess the writers didn't expect the players to choose that option.
What happens if you allow the AI to be with SAM? I don't think I'll do a new game+


EDI was like Data but SAM is way worse because it's always there with you throught that implant (god, why did Mac Walters come up with that insane idea?!), telling you what to do.


Exactly. In ME:A you have no choice on the story, it's already been decided by the writers, you only get to select the tone of the answer (leddit/Whedon/sarcastic or professional).

If you give your boy Sammy the AI pussay.

They put her in a room with him and she gets less depressed and really likes SAM they have some pure autism back and forth too.

Have you ever completed Overlord project quest? Autistic children can be merged with an AI. That's the whole plot of both Overlord quest and Andromeda. Autistic mind of David could recognize the Geth speech, so they tried to use them to control the geth, but eventually he broke and became rogue, while perceiving reality as buggy virtual environment. Ryder is just a succesful David.

Something feels off about femryder's voice to me.
I can't really put my finger on it, but it sounds weird.

Not all autistic children, it only worked on David.
Ryder isn't autistic, please be careful with the memes, don't use PeanutButterRyder to alter reality.

No, binary moral systems are always a shit idea possible exceptions for Star Wars games since the original films are lazy fantasy in space so a poorly-thought-out system like KotOR's system is accurate.

I'm talking about the cultural centers. That's where the asari VI lectures the angaran about her pronouns like a fucking tumblrina.

Echdina planet?