Mass Erect

All the effort that was put into 1 and it was for nothing.
What a waste of a series.

shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27792
This is a 120,000-word essay book on Mass Effect and its squandered potential. It is the most thorough, definitive, and autistic final word on the franchise. Read this, and afterward you will realize that there is literally nothing more to say about it.

Why don't they just make a spinoff prequel where you play as Marauder Shields?

Aside from what's already posted:
That last one is what ruins a lot of games and I'm willing to bet money Bethesda will kill Elder Scrolls VI due to this.

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Do you hate fun or something?

No, just tumblr. And machines should serve man not the other way around.

The far future of humanity is a post-biological one. We are going to become machines.

Technological advance without a spiritual core and a strong moral culture to keep it in (((checked))) can only lead to catastrophe.

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I'm not commenting on the morality of it. I'm just convinced of its inevitability.

sage

user, it's the other way around. You are in control of several bodies, not several personalities in control of one body.
user, man is machine. There is no servitude, only symbiosis.

ME1 felt like a videogame, and felt like I was in a real world with real characters. the game took itself seriously and did it correctly. it was one of the only games I felt that did space opera correctly. that rover exploring was very unfinished and could have had way more content but it was so fun, I loved it.

ME2 removed this rover, and the whole game became incredibly linear and punished you if you did anything the way you wanted to, there was only one way to do everything "right" or the game screwed you over, it was so restrictive and everyone was such an asshole in the game, and the game didn't seem to take itself seriously anymore and felt like I was playing a giant goofy cartoon.

the game offered no freedom, and all the endings were garbage. if you didn't do everything the way they wanted, you got screwed over and got a less than average experience. that being said, even when you did it perfectly, the ending still was complete garbage.

I also hated the way it always made you choose black and white morality instead of letting you do what you believed was the right thing and just rewarding the player.
the way it forces you to go either full paragon or full renegade and punishes you.

every single mass effect that came after ME1 was hugely worse in every possible imaginable way. every game that came out became less ME and more of a money grab.

also, ME2 or any of the future titles which I played at some friends house who moved away (ended up being a cuck) didn't allow femshep to romance tali. my fucking rage when I played ME1 over and over and over again trying to do everything right, loading the game save into ME2 and playing over and over and over trying to find out what I did wrong and why Tali wasn't wanting to romance me, and then I heard that she just didn't swing that way, meanwhile all this other gay stuff was in the game, but NO, tali was off limits for no fucking reason. I find EA to be abhorrent. I hope they all just stop making games and go out of business forever.

We got ourselves a Talimancer, boys!

Why people here here mock that sort of autism is beyond me. If it had been on this site that that kind of analysis had been posted Drow spiders, anyone?, the reaction would be the opposite.

I am quite impressed in the same way one might be impressed by pannenkoek. High functioning autism at its peak used for something completely meaningless. I shudder to think what they could do if they were to use their autism on real problems.

If autism could be weaponized, jews wouldn’t exist anymore.

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You listed the reason why I dislike the series. Would be fun if you could choose a character and each one had their unique side quests.
I imagine something similar to how blizzard handled WoW characters

We meet again Dr. Steve Brule

Sounds like Dragon Age: Origins.

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I don't think theres a more cancerous thread on this board than this one right now.

For all it's faults, ME2 did the best job of factoring all your choices into the end of the game. While getting the best ending required you to play the game in an unerringly specific way, it did offer a whole range of possible outcomes based on your decisions throughout the entirety of the game.
It certainly could have been done better, but it offered you the freedom to fuck up and roll with your failures, which would come back to haunt you at some point later in the game. That alone is a point in it's favor over ME1.

You could even fuck up so hard that Shepard dies in the ending.

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I think you will find that this game is rated 7/10 and up you bigot!

What?

Did you even see Andromeda? Nothing about the PCs is remotely human in that game.

Because you can't relate to nonhumans, you just can't. Nope. Unable to.
:^)

Maybe, just maybe, you can have fun learning to relate to one

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heh

These decisions are made by people that think that black women can't play video games because there's no black women in video games. They need to see themselves on the screen or they're "alienated". They don't want to think about another race or another species, they want to think about themselves and only themselves.

But making aliens who aren't just blue humans is hard for people who learned game development in the gender studies track.

The nigger on the screen is almost never the same as the ones IRL. They're these fictional characters with white beliefs and values underneath black skin. Bam, jewish crisis averted.

There's not much you can do with a real one outside of GTA and sports.
Gamedevs don't even want to let you play a real one anymore. See: GTA V.

I don't know how I find the strength to carry on

>>>/gaschamber/

The Volus are the Jews m80

my 'tism flares up whenever I see faggots using the term "waifu" for western cartoons or shitty hollywood kikettes.

eat a dick nigger, waifu is part of board culture

>>>Holla Forums
'Board Culture' is a meme used exclusively to justify posts of low quality. Go away. Also you're tumblr or something anyway, so I'm not surprised.

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Miranda is best girl.

She is sterile, she cant be best girl if she cant carry your child.

Most of Mass Effect's aliens are just humans with funny heads and green skin anyway.

Or Jews.

Why do they do this?

YUO NASTY TROLL

END OF RINE

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RINE ENDS HERE
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all these damn human racists smdh tbh

No. We are going to fuck machines

хорошо

they're actually german but whatever.

either way they're degenerate

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Just give it time.

the shitposting always starts when Holla Forums takes top board

Another one of these threads about how much andromeda sucked?

Well here we go. . .

I worked QA on this game and it was a mess from the start. When the game even arrived to Austin it had been already 18 months or more (i want to say 22) into development and nothing had been made for it. Just a lot of hot air and false promises.

So ask me anything. I will try answer what I can.

Which pokemon would you fuck?

Ditto: infinite fuck doll

gay

What are some other games you've QAed and what was the general feeling of the people around you while Andromeda was being tested, did the upper management even like it?

How horrible did the people smell that worked on this piece of shit.

How desperate was EA?

What was the funniest or most memorable bug?

How badly were things rushed in crunchtime?

What were story/plot/character details that were changed?

What features were cut?

I worked on various games passing through austins qa office but i apso touched Kotor online for “ea” games.

Upper management wouldnt show too much in the way of hopefulness. Originally it was a lot of being very quiet. You know when someone says something a little too blunt and a whole room goes quiet? Thats how it was. Everyone knew that we were in trouble when we got the project and they essentiaply took more than half the studio and shoved it at nothing.

There is this one girl who has the breath of a rotton trash can but otherwise everyone smells fine.

Any reason why they fucked up their handling of the Star Wars license? How're the games coming? They contemplating a KOTOR 3? The Sith Lords seems to have made it into the Disney Canon with Rebels and the new movie, which is why I'm wondering if they're gonna make BIoware take a crack at it.

What did he mean by this?

I assume you mean producers and executives "money people". Not very. To be completely honest they sent Mass Effect out to the farm on this project even though they were given every chance to U-turn and scrap it altogether. I had known about the project long before it had reached the Austin office and even then it was in dire straights. (more bellow for why)

The everything. It was all busted. Shooting in the opposite direction to where you're pointing. There's less "Funny" bugs and more "Stop moving this ticket over its not fucking fixed.". There was numerous times we just had p0 or sev0 bugs and they would be there. Start the game leave it on the main screen, wait, game freezes. There was a point where the menu would just dissapear after a while. The UI would flicker (I think it still did even on release). It was months before the game was even stable enough to be put to a position where you could get anywhere. We were writing test cases or doing other things for weeks. A bulk of it was just carried by UX.

(This is where I'll answer the "more")
The entire project was crunch. When Austin had gotten the game it was already 18-22 months or so in development. Nothing had been done. We did everything. If you read anything that says otherwise it's complete bullshit I.E. fuck this company are you kidding me? At a super high level it was essentially "Make the next Mass Effect game". We were like "Cool. What were you assholes doing this whole time since the?"

Too many for me to recall. Every now and then I'll be talking with a co-worker or we'll be out shooting the shit and one of us will recall a detail and then be like, "OH YEAH!" To be completely honest I think the game was supposed to be based on one of the books by Drew Karpyshyn. You also have to know that writers did and still do carry a bulk of the company's worth because "We make RPG games" Which is fine. That's totally okay to have something that you hold your laurels to and do it well. The issue comes from the fact that when you do this eventually someone is going to swing their dick at the wrong person or open their mouth or whatever and the person on the receiving end is not going to take your shit. This is what happened with the writers in Austin and specifically if you look at the writers from between Dragons Age 1 to ME:A you'll see a dramatic shift in who the writing staff are and that's primarily to do with people like Daniel Erikson and Rich Vogel. There's a lot of other writers to the credit of the Austin department but what I'm trying to get at is that they pissed off the wrong people because they were completely unprofessional. In the game industry I want to point out it's not looked down upon if you're an asshole, if anything they judge you more based upon your output of completed projects so more often if you are a person who is difficult to work with that'll be overlooked in favor of whats best for the project. Because of what happened in the past they basically yanked out that power structure and since then we've been sorta left with this void area that has and hasn't been quite filled in. I'm not sure what the answer is to how it should be fixed. I'm just trying to give you context to why the story is so bizarre and uneven. Sometimes you need an asshole to drive the ship.

Because lazyness. It would require a lot of work (different skeleton for the animation, different voices, different origin stories and dialogues) and Bioware can't be bothered.
This is why for example every new races in ME:A aren't really original in terms of design, they all have the exact same skeleton used for the turians and the salarians (that's also why the salarians are "big guys"). The Angarans' hands for example appear to have 3 fingers but in reality they have 5 but 3 of them are stuck to each other (once again the devs couldn't be bothered to make a hand with only 3 fingers, because "animation").

Weirdly enough it was the only good thing in ME3.

I mean they already made them playable in multiplayer, would it really be so hard to just put that in singleplayer? maybe you would have to change dialogue here and there but that is not too much work for what you're getting is it?

Was the reaction to how much people were making fun of it before release? Were the characters intentionally ugly fucks?

I wanted to break this one out specifically because this is going to be off the top of my head and I actually had a complete written report of what we cut, what features didn't make it, etc. Basically the backlog report that I would have presented. I'm going to be probably missing a lot but I'm going to go from memory.

There was a goal of making the game have exploratory style similar to No Man's Sky. I'm not kidding. The original aspect was going to be so fucking huge it was insane. They wanted Mass Effect + No Mans Sky. When I originally heard this I remember sitting in a meeting room and sweat just began forming on the back of my neck because at this point the project was underway to having 0 actual "physical" development and we were told how big they wanted it. The QAing for this would have been insane. Going home, having a panic attack and just thinking about the amount of "Oh god. . . oh god. What the fuck!? How are we going to test any of this!?" That is until they realized it wasnt feasible. So that was nice.

We had a design doc talking about playing as other races. I think it was your big 3: Human, Asari, Turian as the "confirmed" races because there wasn't much difference but when they had the open universe the idea began to expand because the game wasn't linear. There was a lot more in this area but since it was just lots of fluff it went nowhere.

This. The base building that is currently there is a shell of what it was supposed to be. If I had to compare the original idea it was going to be more along the lines of Halo's forge mode. Its pretty dumbed down.

They had planned on making personal quests that you could just make up and someone out in the world could complete your made up quest for points for a sort of open universe style game. It was actually somewhat functional at one point where I could send out a quest like, "I need 20 credits." Someone could respond with it.

Red Faction style destroying levels. Main path's couldnt get destroyed but you would be able to red faction style around and make caves.

Would have been able to go about doing planet stuff a la "Star Citizen".

There was stuff like . . . going from space to the planet or vice versa that was just cut out visually it looked fucked. You'd go from like the atmosphere level and drop down to the planet and the game just wasnt loading. You'd rocket through the level. Things were supposed to be a lot cleaner.

;
At one point there was an optional tactics mode that got scrapped.

They had this idea for a living planet, it got scrapped.

I take my character and we're all walking around a space station you and I can talk, shoot the shit, have a conversation, drink, have sex, whatever. That was cut.

tell us the hot and dirty shit the rainbow colored wamen would do in the office and shit

I can answer from QA: "I fucking told you so." Everyone god damn knew we were sending it out to the slaughter. We knew. We knew not only were we sending it out to die but highest level execs tend to put the blinders on and go "OH ITS AMAZING!" No its not. From the highest level dev down to the lowest QA we all knew that this was a shit show. The first indication is when your game thats been in development for nearly two years has nothing done for it. Not even a grayboxed example of a level. I have a friend who works within dev as a senior and I remember talking to his wife and she was telling me he came home like 9 hours after I had left, he had been there nearly 18 hours I think that day and came home so furious he was in tears. They weren't mad at the consumers but at higher ups.

I really cannot answer this one because I remember they didn't look butt ugly and in fact it was quite different for a long time. Somewhere along the line they tweaked it to the point where I got told to shut up. I said the female looked like she was an albino black person. There was multiple times I was spoken to in private about this project but specifically me pointing out that she looked like they had turned her into a black person without the skin tone offended someone.

and about currythunder.

In Austin there's a lot of snowflakes so you'll have to be more specific. If you mean non-white people in general I can't think of anythig specifically offensive. If you mean random SJW's I can point various incidents but nothing other than one time I had called out the new female MC looked like she had no specific heritage that made sense.

Among the ton of stuff that was supposed to be in the game, what is the feature that was cut that you regret the most?

The "choice" you make on Eos (science or military base) is the only thing that remains from that idea, right? I like how it was still implied that this initial choice would have consequences for the rest of the game while in reality it has no impact.
When I played that part I thought that the concept would be like the Mother Base system from MGSV.

Now I'm interested.

Speaking about that, I always wondered if the fact that the Tempest had no weapons systems was the result of devs having too many issues with the space suff and the engine? To me (and many other players) it makes zero sense to send people in another galaxy onboard ships and land vehicles without weapons.

Does EA even have a studio competent enough to make any of this a reality?

No fucking way this is all horseshit

As an aside, I hope none of you fuckers bought this game.

Final question, what was the average level of experience and/or competence from each of the team members? This game did not look like it was made by a bunch of people who had already made 3 games.
Also know that I think you're lying about all of this.

It's a Bioware game, user.

Might as well ask why a Star Control 2 ripoff lacked space combat to begin with.

I know that, but allowing players to have sex with one another would net you an A for adults

Playable races. Gotta be honest if they had somehow kept that in I would think that you could have just overlooked how some characters ended up looking.

I'll have to look up how base construction in MGSV worked but I do remember the base construction intended for ME:A was a lot more complicated. I dont think there was any intention for the base to end up as anything more than a fun addition. This is in part that we began to realize that people in office were really bad at strategy or defending themselves from oncoming waves of attacks and this is only in theoretical situations not executed scenarios. So if you take that people who have hands on with this every day dont know how to even defend themselves how were were supposed to make it mandetory to the rest of the general public? We couldnt imagine people not getting frustrated because they decided to build some ass backwards set up.

SO to elaborate there was several ideas floating around:

1. Player goes onto a cooking show style minigame and wacky hijinks occur then they unlock cooking on the ship or somewhere ingame where player will get food bonus's.

2. Player collects items then can cook, thus getting food bonus's.

3. You ask someone to cook for you and then get food bonus's.

All of it was a result of seeing so many games including food. The idea was even to have more survival possibly like the player had to eat or had to drink water. When throwing ideas at a table the idea of the player having to actually survive for a period came up.

What the fuck does this even mean? Are you saying they were bad at playing imaginary games or something?

I get so tired of hearing about games being dumbed down because people are too stupid to push buttons and click.

There was a couple of reasons. One that I knew about but never touched was that they never put a limit on the area of combat. So I heard someone would just disengage the battle and fly off into space. Another I heard about was that it just felt like dogshit. There was a bunch of stuff that eventually it came down to an FPS shooting gallery something like a turret style shooting gallery. It was very dull and I never actually got to touch any of the attempts. I can say I saw a lot of ships, I saw a bunch of lasers, etc.

They don't rate online interactions.

Repent and be purged.

Typically if you are going to create a portion of a game that isn't even blocked out or put out or designed by UX someone like the UAT testers may pull you aside and have a demo. In this case we had a sort of "base construction" scenario where you were supposed to defend yourself from oncoming waves of enemies.

We'd have a meeting where like one or two QA would come in and other members of other teams and we'd all talk about it. Then we'd break off into teams and play out the scenario and then have UAT testers.

Mind you they werent actually looking for a correct answer so much as seeing as how it'd work.

In genral it'd go like this:

QA: Discussed and demonstrated some sort of normal base.

Dev: Demonstrated a normal base, discussed the base's strengths.

Producers: Would shit the bed. Mumble about incorporating mobile features.

UAT: Get confused not understanding base defense and how it worked.

UX: Get pissed off that people weren't playing it how they designed.

Writers: Didn't understand how this was supposed to work and weren't involved more than a day.

In general it was a mess. You're probably seenig a pattern here (It was a mess)

To elaborate on this as well.

Nothing really came to fruition. Our development time or engineering time was trimmed down so much that as we were maybe 30-60% developed into something we knew we had more time to do it, it'd be scrapped and thus the work would get thrown away.

I guess this also explains the way they changed the weapons animations (like the Avenger reload animation where the character opens the top part of the weapon to add ammunition, it wasn't like that in previous ME games). I wanna bet that they've never touch or used a real weapon before…or even looked at the old models. I still laugh at that cutscene with Peebee using a gun backwards and the fixed cutscene with the 3D model cut in half.

So the Tempest had weapons at some point in the development of the game?
Thanks. I've never understood the people who wanted space combat in ME, or those who wanted to fly the Normandy. Why? There's already a NPC who is the pilot. Space battles was never a core aspect of ME.

Previous ME games didn't have space combat but the ships were armed and you could see them fight through cutscenes. Then again, I don't think space combat should be a core part of a ME game.

lol I remember that app for ME3 that they disabled less than a month after release.

Smug, autistic and afflicted by arthritis.

Please leave.

You're the commander, you don't get to fly the ship, you're suppose to have people to do that.
I'd be ok with space combat if the story requires it though.

Thats because it wasn't. When we got the game from the Canada office it was a handoff of "We can figure this out, you do it." The first time I had heard about it was during an all hands and everyone was really excited. Then afterwards we then realized the game had nothing. The very first expectation was that the game was as I had previously stated nearly 2 years into development. It wasn't. There was no grayboxing, no level boxing, no code, nothing. Nothing was made. What we knew is what we thought was to be done by that point. They saw No Mans Sky and said "We can do that." they couldnt figure it out. They saw Terraria, Minecraft, Skyrim, Fallout 4, etc. Games with construction. They couldnt figure it out.

The people who were put onto the project in Austin were in fact very experienced people. A bulk of the development was done within 16 months on crunch working 6+ days a week with a rotating schedule with certain key members on almost every day of the week and some people working 7 days where they'd work a couple hours in the afternoon only to end up working the rest of the day.

In general the actual experience level was very high within the engineering team but very low at the executive levels. Many people were moved around and shifted.

That's fine.

woah.

What is the average pay at a shitshow like this?

So are you saying that for example the reversed and cut off pistol model in that one scene wasn't the fault of your 'experienced staff' but of execs? LMAO That fuckup was elementary for anyone having at least little contact with previous games in the series.

Ironically, ME2 was the best of the series actually, unironically.

Try writing an entire book but in the time frame that it takes to edit it.

It takes far less time to do that right than to mess it up so spectacularly, in that particular case.

You're talking to a QA on the project, not someone who was a dev or UX. I'm right there with you.

We'd put in tickets and they'd get thrown right back at us, we'd build, we'd run, cut to the point in the game, jump to it, run script, etc. Then we'd be like, "Its still there." Spit the ticket back and then it'd get thrown right back to us.

The gun thing gets thrown around all the time but for some reason but you're still not discussing the lack of being able to load the game. Save's just straight up crashing. Quick saves not being in the game because you could do it during a scene and just lock up the entire sequence. Skipping a scene would cause the UI to stay on the screen but you'd be out of the scene and the entire world was gray and fuzzy like you were still focused on that one person so the filter was on the screen.

Yeah man, the gun thing was bad but there was like 100 other things in the backlog with higher priority.

Why is anime hellbent on making everything incredibly melodramatic? The never ending train of gasps, "oohs" and dramatic shots to that persons reaction, why? Does everything need to be shoved in to the viewer's face and rubbed in? Are the Japanese incapable of subtlety?

Good, no condoms required

Sounds like Americans, who also can't into irony, sarcasm or anything that requires the viewer to digest what they are seeing or hearing.

What kind of things were they speaking to you about other than the black comment?

I'd like to play with her Legos

Americans don't make things melodramatic specifically, but they do overexaggerate too, mostly in comedies. You can see how they think they need to keep talking, making noise, distracting the viewer with jingling keys and it's insulting.

But I'm no talking about the Americans, I'm talking about anime. It just shocks me how bad the delivery is.

I was outspoken about the project to the point that I was pointing out how fucked up it was. I was always defending the QA' and how they shouldnt be pulling this many bugs. I was pulling the "stop" card long before we even started development. I mentioned before we were basically handed nothing and told to build it from scratch so my times getting pulled aside I was being told that either I was frustrating higher ups, I was being too complicated when I said "We cant do that. Testing that will be unreasonable. How are we supposed to regress this?" I once haulted regression entirely because we couldnt even initilize the game so when our report came in I had nothing and told them there was nothing. I started cursing too much out loud. I remember I pulled the build, loaded it, went to a save file, the save file immeidatly crashed and I said, "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!?"

At one point I was told I was being too disruptive to the dev's even though I was telling them they needed to merge whatever code it was to be checked. X build was done but nothing was there and I said "If it was merged then where is it, otherwise you never put it in."

At the end we were basically told to sit down, shut up and be happy we have jobs and wait for the next project.

I want to add to this: I wasnt the only one. People were working crunch to the point of actual emotional breakdowns. They weren't seeing their families, people weren't eating right, people were coming home and their family would be out at dinner because they weren't ever around so you'd just have these miserable people. I have no doubt this stupid game ruined families.

So how was everything resolved? What happened to the employees when it came out?

Why do you care? You seem frustrated. That sounds like good advice tbh. Go in, file some tickets, blame devs and Austin for bad game, get paycheck.

Almost everyone was moved onto other projects. Some people like me stayed to work and resolve issues.

Because I gave a shit and I liked Mass Effect. I wanted the game to be the best it could possibly be. I would do the job for free. I love working on video games. Pointing at someone and saying "Its their fault" isn't useful at all. You dont learn anything from that. Instead looking at where it went wrong and not doing that again is more important than just saying "Oh it was Dave's fault. He fucked up." In this instance it wasnt one persons fault.

I'm frustrated because what could have been wasnt and this is still a sore spot for me. Also I like to vent about it.

I like ME as well, but there is a difference between working for EA and playing a game you enjoy.

But I do appreciate the fact there are still people like you in the video game industry of today. I thought passionate people and gamers all left. Or, well, most of them anyway.

It's absolutely your fault and you're wrong. The whole economy has been (((engineered))) to trap people in debt and with a fear of losing their job because they won't survive two weeks without one. If your boss treats you like shit, you have every right to walk the fuck out and work somewhere else. If you're not living beyond your means, you should have a little savings so you won't immediately be destitute without a paycheck. If you set aside your pride and retarded fanboyism for a series of video games made by one of the worst corporations on Earth, you can immediately get another job that pays less while you search for another you'll like. And if everyone did these things, companies would be forced to treat their employees better because of the high turnover if they don't.

Are you shitting me? People who are passionate about games are part of the reason pubs can run fucking steamrollers over their devs; there's always higher supply than demand as more and more people get into the industry for love of games. Almost anywhere else in the tech sector is better if you're looking for higher pay, job security, blah blah.

You think anybody cares? Refer to above, and remember that he got the job and stuck with it even after he knew the game was irredeemable because he liked doing what he was doing. Money comes easy to anyone with some common sense in their skull - doing what you WANT in life, hang the consequences, is beyond fucking rare.

I'd rather be doing something I mostly enjoy than making lots of cash.
Sage for off-topic

I agree. There certainly is a massive difference between playing for enjoyment and playing for work and I know that all too well. For me though I wanted to make sure at the end of the day that I could pass on that experience of enjoyment as the "gate keeper" onto someone else when all was said and done.

Ouch. Sorry to hear that you feel this way but we already have a high turnover rate to be completely honest. Most people take their game deveopment experience and go into regular software development because its easier. It really is about passion at the end of the day though.

I contemplated leaving a couple of times during the project and there were a lot of times I contemplated leaving but I didn't really think that would solve anything. My happiness or comfort wasn't going to suddenly end a troubled development cycle. I'm not writing code and I'm not an exec or producer. A lot of people in Austin fought for this game to slow down and pump the breaks a bit.

Ideally in any environment people in their roles would be able to play them perfectly. A dev would be able to create exactly what he's asked, Ux would be able to do everything perfect, QA would find no bugs and those that we did were minor, then we'd just push it out to the next row. Thats not reality though. These are developed by humans, passionate humans who are talented but. . . get their hands tied.

Didn't know you neofags stayed here.

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So what you are really saying is that you are only human after all, and not to put the blame on you?

A woman with the mind of a man is the best you can hope for user

They already do. Chemical autism tends to spill out everywhere in your life, including your online activities.

Is Mass Effect perma-dead or are they going to try again in a few years with people who know what they're doing instead of Tumblrinas and diversity hires?

yes

I doubt you'd be privy to this information but why the fuck did ME:A inject SJW-style identity/gender politics into the asari? Just because BioWare does that sort of thing?

Wait a minute, that face.

You're forgetting the number 1 problem:

ALL VOICED LINES

Doing that makes the MC a fucking chatterbox and has so fucking many lines that just doing male/female is a chore. Lets not get into:

I count at least 14, not counting any special snowflake other species that would be made playable/introduced. You could feasibly get away with choosing your character and then selecting from one of 3 base voices (higher, average, deeper), and then the species you choose puts a filter onto the voice, but regardless, unless you have 14 different voice actors depending on the species, you will end up with a limp wristed performance.

Have some legit Quarian faces back before photoshop replaced them.

here is the summary.

They're not going to fucking do that.

Eh, depends how many lines of dialogue you'd actually have and if it's robots and aliens you can just process the voices of the same actor.

Asari have multiple genders now, shitlord. Their old lore was made by problematic straight white men. Their new lore is inclusive and progressive. Check your privilege.

I'm with dinoman in this. Who the fuck doesn't want to become a dinosaur? That's been my dream since I saw Jurassic Park when I was 8.

So? It's the future, artificial wombs exist. Shepard can still have an heir.
Nah you're just a bitchboy.
Doesn't look like one.
NO! HER AND JACOB WERE JUST FRIENDS!!
What girl doesn't have those?
In your cuck dreams

Her gravest sin is being ugly.

I wish Bioware made good games again. Neverwinter Nights wasn’t too bad.

...

I hate this timeline

I didn't pay attention to Andromeda, why was it so bad?

Got 20 minutes?

BioWare dropped a fat stack of cash to get Natalie Dormer to voice Lexi T'Perro. Both of them use a British accent. Don't ask how that works with the setting's universal translators. It doesn't make any sense at all.

...

I live in a world where people actually hold this opinion

At least he's a human speaking human languages. Where did the asari speaking asari translated to English spoken with a British accent get that? Can you choose that like choosing what voice your GPS uses? Why would an asari choose that? Did she think it sounds good? Why?

In the first game, I believe, one of the Elcor modifies their translator to outright lie but he's such a plebe he could only make it do the opposite of what he meant.

All you'd need to do is add some new lines and edit the voice slightly depending on the race, wouldn't take that much effort.

It was though, 1 had a better story and a waaaaaaay better villain i'll give you that but at least 2's gameplay wasn't a fucking slog, and the suicide mission is still one of the best bits of gaming period

Elcor should have been one of the main races tbh, way more interesting then the asari or turians

You didn't play a biotic in 1 did you?
Playing a biotic in 2 was LITERALLY just waiting for the damage bowling ball to come off cooldown

no i played a soldier like a fucking man

This is factually correct. ME1 had objectively worse gameplay than 2, and that outweighs the fact ME1 had better world building.

What was this guy's name again?

And you have an objectively worse opinion than me
ME1>>>>Dogshit>ME2
Gameplay fucking included you fucking pleb. I bet you think heatsinks were a good idea.

would you fug a geth

ME2's gunplay was so into trying to be CoD that your trained space marine couldn't keep a recoil-resistant gun under control and couldn't be assed to recenter it. In this, ME1 is superior; though you won't really feel the effects of recoil in your camera motions and aiming, at least you don't have to fight for control afterward.
I did prefer 2's cover mechanics though

gay

ME2 multiplayer was legitimately fun and the way the combat played was far smoother and more enjoyable than ME1. ME1 has arguably the worst third person shooter mechanics and combat of any game ever made, it was terrible.

Honestly the best thing Mass Effect did as a series was attempt to get away from classic RPG combat. RPGs have such shitty gameplay on average that it's hard to even consider them games at times, yet they continue to be made the same way rather than companies realizing their error and taking combat mechanics from other genres to actually make the combat interesting.

At this rate, though, rather than doing that companies are just going to keep terrible RPG combat and justify it by making it ridiculously easy as they have in most games, or simply making it skippable altogether. Problem "solved".

are you sure you don't have a tumor or something? EA managed to not shoehorn MP into 2

...

Humans First.

Jagged Alliance 2 and ToEE exist. You're a nigger.

actually, surprisingly hard sci-fi, even if they didn't know it at the time
most of the properties of element zero are found in the theorized exotic matter

but in this case, the author was probably referring to the story being written around a more realistic future society rather than a fairy tale in space (Star Wars, loads of 80s movies) or raygun gothic (Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Forbidden Planet, Barbarella)

I will say this Mass effect 2 had one of the best endgame tracks of any game.

You are taking them for their word, which was your first mistake. Their goal is to control you, control media. What they say is just an means to that goal. They do not actually believe a single word they say. It is all lies. Again, your first mistake was assuming they are honest.

Okay.

JA2 combat is repetitive garbage. ToEE is the best an RPG game can ever aspire to and it's still not engaging compared to any other genres combat. RPG games are flat out trash when it comes to actual gameplay and always have been, and the only people who defend them are the shitters who can't ever be good at any combat system requiring actual skill or intelligence. This is why RPG players and RPG games are at the forefront of the "let me skip combat and just enjoy the world" bullshit that is being pushed by the normalfags and lazy publishers alike.

It's okay user, I already know you're a coon.

The entire crew of the Normandy in the first game is white, though.

Your commanding officer is a nigger. There are women in the armed forces.

ME1's gameplay was fucking awful despite ME2's story issues and streamlining of RPG features it was fun to play unlike 1.

Every single ME game was garbage. The writing was garbage and the gameplay ranged from godawful corridor shooter to bad corridor shooter.

You cannot seriously think the JA2 combat was worthwhile. All you do is abuse line of sight and once you get to the good equipment you can destroy everything just by setting up snipers in good positions. There's no skill involved, and that's the entire problem with RPGs. And JA2 is a stellar game for its combat, for an RPG, which is absolutely pathetic.

Compare RPG combat to any other genres gameplay engagements, platformers, RTS, FPS, fighters, hell even something like Hearthstone or ASSFAGGOTS has more gameplay merit than an RPG. All of those require actual skill to play and be good at. RPGs barely qualify as games with how lackluster their gameplay is, the only genre worse is GSG. And instead of recognizing this and changing the gameplay, what little gameplay is there is facing advocacy to remove it entirely. Pretty much sums up the RPG market and the people that play them.

you are the cancer killing good video games. refrain from voicing your opinion. appoint a non-retard to make your purchasing decisions for you.

Oh shit there are women in combat positions in a sci-fi game. You can't be serious, who gives a fuck? You keep defending JA2 yet half of that games cast is female which is far more egregious given the setting than having them in a sci-fi universe where people have telekinetic powers and genetic modifications.

He also wants you to join America's Navy.

We already established you're a subhuman.

I defended the gameplay of JA2. Also, the cast in JA2 are parody characters, they're all unhinged and awful people, plus the main villain is feminism incarnate, and you get to blow her brains out and put a man in charge again.

Yeah real convenient how you give JA2 a pass despite it being made far, far earlier than ME1 and yet containing just as much if not more degeneracy than a fucking Bioware game. Dedrianna is a caricature of a fascist system you fuckwit, not feminism. You do favors for faggots in the game, all of Arulco is filled with shitskins who you are "nobly saving" and they push homosexual acceptance in Stellas biography on the almunus page.

In a game made in 1999, they were pushing that shit. If you're going to be critical of that kind of garbage then at least be internally consistent, if you hate ME for having female combatants and multiculturalism you should hate JA2 far more for the same reasons. Just look at the merc team it is literally a Jews wet dream smorgasbord of diversity.

Yeah man JA2 was totally about pushing against the progressive agenda. Give me a fucking break. Also the combat still sucks.

Did you miss the part where they're all awful people murdering shitskins for money?

Man, you really are butthurt I keep making fun of your shit game. Then again, you're the ignorant chimp that claimed ME2 has multiplayer, or that ME3 mutliplayer is actually fun.

You're making it sound like that you would be able buff/debuff attackers based on your building choices. Wowzers! That's more advanced than nuXcom!

They're murdering other mercs Dedrianna hired to save the poor opressed mudshits, to destroy the evil fascist oppressor and bring in wonderful democracy. Yeah man that's totally Holla Forums. What a fucking joke. You can delude yourself all you want but JA2 pushed the libtard talking points of its day as hard as any game now does.

Also

Are you fucking retarded? The point I made was that Mass Effect had a good idea in trying to incorporate a different genres combat into an RPG since RPG combat sucks. Let me put it to you this way since you seem to fail to grasp that point: what good game from ANY other genre has worse gameplay than JA2? Even your supposed "good" RPG combat is absolute trash compared to any other genres gameplay because RPGs always have shit gameplay and rely on other facets of the game like story, world building, stat management and so on to carry them.

For the main trilogy it doesn't make sense story wise. The first game established (((Shepard's))) character as a human spec ops commando dude, and the next 2 games continued said story. Blame bioware's shit writing and overall lazyness. They were too lazy/greedy to add female Turians and Krogan and even made a lore excuse for not having male Asari.
As for Andromeda, they again wrote the whole story around the MC being human, probably to again excuse their own lazyness, since if they added other races they would have to also have to make character customization options for them.

James Vega

I would like to take a moment and yet again post my alternative premise for ME:A.
Instead of it being related to them attempting to escape the reapers It would have been better to have the project started as a project that humanity was planning, saving up for, and building since before they even got off of earth, and having the implementation of the project occur during the events of ME1 or ME2. Explain that this kind of large scale project as something that is normal for most races, but for everyone else, once they get to the citadel either they give up because they can just use the relays or the the council all but directly forbids them from doing so, explaining the dangers of that kind of travel using the rachni as an example of why they shouldn't go exploring in parts unknown, pointing out that there is no guarantee they will find a relay out there and that they may end up stranded out there, that they would miss out on the cool alien sex culture, convincing them to spend the money on other things like tech that would make their lives better, or taking a heavy handed approach and implementing sanctions of the species causing them to be unable to finance the project while still incorporating the new alien tech that would improve it.
But not humanity. Why?
The council was unwilling to impose sanctions on humanity because they were afraid that humans would take it as an act of war or at least continuing hostilities from the turians. Humanity did sell off the assets from the project, but not to the council, instead they ended up selling it to other humans, who happened to be libertarians who saw this as their only chance of setting up a society that they always dreamed of in another galaxy. Hell, you could even throw a bone to Cerberus and have them be in on it a bit.

Salarians who are disgruntled by their societies population control join up right away and end up providing major tech support that furthers the project like no other project has ever been before. Additionally a small group of anti genophage researchers join up which necessitates Krogen to join.
Some Krogen join up knowing that there is going to be a cure worked on, others just want to leave a galaxy they don't think they have a future in, and who knows, maybe they can find a cure out there in Andromeda, or another species that can help them reproduce even as a hybrid, sort of like the asari.
Once the project grew to the point in which even if the council tried to stop it, it becomes officially supported by the Turian government as they will not miss out on a chance to expand their territory and cannot afford to risk other races finding new weapon tech that they cannot use or at least prepare to fight against.
Its all about the money for them and they see profit in claiming new planets then selling them off
Hope to find new genetic material to incorporate into their genepool
Shockingly the quarians are not on board with the project for the vast majority of its development as they have lost a lot of resources in the past supporting these schemes only to have them stopped by the citadel, and its only at the last minute are they able to get a viable population of quarians on board the ship with explicit instructions to claim planets then send a ship back to pick up more quarians. Additionally some quarian leaders are against it because at the end of the day all they really care about it reclaiming the holy city of Jerusalem their home planet.
Geth stowaways that were against allying with the reapers end up in Andromeda and become friends with a native race, explain their circumstances to them and end up, depending on the players choices, being strongly recognized as a legitimate race or being barely accepted and only not hunted down for sport because it would piss off the native race they are pals with.
Spread the good word of the Enkindlers and make sure that no artifact are disturbed or destroyed by any of the other races. They find an "incomplete" mass relay that turns out to be damaged by a large asteroid which is what allowed the Andromeda galaxy to have an above average technological level, but less then what it is back in the citadel space.
Where the Hanar go, they go
Turns out the Batarians' FTL travel system they are so damn proud of has a novel feature to it that would allow the project to be even faster, but the Batarians are secretive about it and had to be paid a large sum of credits to allow for it. The accept the deal and their government runs stories like "Humans beg Batarian Hegemony for FTL technology" and "Hegemony trades incomplete and outdated FTL schismatics for X credits from inferior Humans". The agreement only is for the ships going to Andromeda and they send a represetive population to make sure they do not use it beyond their agreed terms.
There are two major groups of humans on board with the project, the libertarians who funded the damn thing and kept it alive, but there also developed a large majority of more centrist humans who end up taking the reigns. This leads to conflict between humans in the Andromeda galaxy over issues such as recontacting the old galaxy, setting up a centralized space council and "finishing" the "incomplete" mass relay that is discovers.

Two things factored into it. First being the fact that not only did they have a population of salarians who didn't go into hyper sleep and instead opted to manage the ship during its long ass journey, but this population of salarians also didn't believe in heavy handed population control (which is part of why the original small team of anti genophage researchers joined in the first place), resulting in a larger number of researchers who were rallied together to all research the genophage on principle. Needles to say it wouldn't take long for them to solve it, maybe only two or three generations. They don't make a cure or a vaccine however, they only create a way to prevent transmission from infected parents to their child, but does not increase fertility. Once they get it working they wake up some of the krogen and get a genetically diverse population size, then put them back to sleep and start working on a way to cure already infected krogen and a vaccine to prevent future generations from being infected.

This results in a shift of power in the new galaxy as the turians that joined Andromeda project are not too happy about this, meanwhile the krogen are busy buddying up with the salarians and naming their planets and capital city after the names of the scientists who made notable contributions to the cure research. That said, some salarians did opt for hypersleep on the journey and are very much not happy about the fact that there are uninfected krogan running around.and are also against a cure for already infected krogan.
This is a plot point for the player, they get to chose to sabbatoge the vaccine, which, though irritates the krogan, it doesn't upset them enough to stop interacting with the player or outright try to murder them on sight (for the most part)

Chuck Flankface

If you want autism, this guy wrote a 500 page pdf on fixing the stuff in ME3.
files.bioware.ru/me3/others/masseffect3vindication.pdf

Human protag would be part of the nonlibertairan human majority but could join the libertarian group.

I didn't touch ME3 and really have no intention of doing so.

Bump

First pic doesn’t look that bad.

Trips confirm Bethesda will block off race selection, because "race is a social construct".

Daily reminder that todd is the reason we aren't getting anymore races in the elder scrolls

Asari don't carry your child either. One Asari you meet in ME2 tells you this outright.

Because the devs had no idea how to make a game, and tried to make "No Mans Sky" on the Frostbyte Engine, only to backpedal after "No Man's SKy" was revealed, leaving them with a year to do pretty much the whole game.

They just carry their child or something?

Yes. They reproduce through parthenogenesis. Having fuck just makes it so that the DNA of the child is randomized.

Let's take a moment to compare that gun grab to the gun grab in Yakuza 0

Well shit, guess ill just have to breed with a human like a fucking normalfag. Say can quarians breed with humans?

Spoiler that shit.

I forgot, mod please help.

For the same reason you can't play as an ithorian in any star wars games. Creating an entire civilization with it's own culture and practices is an in depth process that takes a lot
of work.
I mean the last person to do it successfully was Tolkien and we're STILL talking about that guy to this day. And even he had to base the dwarves off the jews.

It's far easier to just say "The Asari are all female, have 1 religion that's loosely based on a real human religion, and are otherwise blue humans" rather than go super in depth with it. If you played as an Asari you would expect to have a different culture than if you were human, you would expect your character to act differently than a human, you would expect your character to have a radically different biology than a human, and you would expect your character to have different motivations than a human, but they know that's over their head so they just shoehorn you into a certain race/species to cut down on development time and costs.

Damn I forgot just what a butterface Miranda was.

My god that is unbearable to watch. I'll never understand how you nerds enjoy it. At least we all hate niggers together.

anime ist mostly for 8-14 years old boys

I got you fam

Bold Bigflank

Looks alright, pretty close to the real person.
Her face isn't also one of those generic pretty faces, which is nice.
tbh

Chunk Megapecs

Miranda has a face?

So, you like ugly women. Okay.

It's from ME1 back before they decided to go with the "taboo" of hiding the Quarian face.

Rest easy knowing the original artist still feels that IS the way Tali should look, even post ME3.