[MatthTheGeek]

ME3's ending and some few other stuff were not well accepted. Most ME3 players however will agree that about 90% of the game is somewhere between good and downright awesome.

[Scotty]

The Old Republic's problem wasn't that it was bad, it's that they were trying to make a collection of single player games into an MMO.  On the face of things, they succeeded.  However, it wasn't enough better than the alternatives (WoW, Guild Wars, etc) to succeed as an MMO.  Just like movies, financial flops are not necessarily bad games, nor are blockbuster hits necessarily good.

As a fan that played ME3, it was absolutely ****ing brilliant for 95% of the game.  It's the other 5% that get *****ed at (and justifiably so).

[newman]

riiiiight

Wow, I had no idea George Costanza worked for Bioware.

[starbug]

Those are tattoos are pretty good

I don't mean to sound like a troll, but are people actually looking forward to this? Bioware hasn't made a good game in years. Dragon age 2 was terrible.

Yes Dragon Age 2 is the weakest game they have released but it did have some good qualitys. ME 3 is a great game despite a few issues, which i am not goin into as i  am sick to death of hearing about that certian issue. So.....

PLEASE no more mention a certain part of ME3.

Old Republic is actualle enjoyable and i hate MMO's, If you play the storyline and ignore the MMO side it is actually a not a bad game.

So yes i am looking forward to Dragon Age 3. Yes Bioware have made a few mistakes but can someone please name me a company that hasn't or has had every game perfect???

[SpardaSon21]

TOR: KotOR3, but free to play!

[LordMelvin]

Those are tattoos are pretty good

I don't mean to sound like a troll, but are people actually looking forward to this? Bioware hasn't made a good game in years. Dragon age 2 was terrible.

So yes i am looking forward to Dragon Age 3. Yes Bioware have made a few mistakes but can someone please name me a company that hasn't or has had every game perfect???

The original Black Isle Studio?

[karajorma]

Much as I liked it, I'd hardly call Icewind Dale II perfect.

[phatosealpha]

It's one thing to have an occasional turd.  Quite forgivable, but they're not exactly on a winning track here, and it's been ages since they hit one out the park.

ME3 - god awful ending, and didn't make good on promises of how your choices would matter.  TOR only managed to show me that it wasn't the lack of plot I hate in an MMO, it's the way MMOs waste your time as their primary form of game balancing.  DA2 had an interesting cast, but totally wasted the 'changing over the years' angle, repeated environments over and over, and had god awful mechanics.  ME2 was actually pretty good in retrospect, but it was still a lot more action game then RPG.

[Scotty]

I'm not sure I understand your last complaint.  Compared to the "RPG shooter" paradigm of ME1, ME2's gameplay was head and shoulders better and more fun.  "Shooter with RPG elements" is demonstrably superior to "RPG with shooter elements" with respect to the Mass Effect series.

[MatthTheGeek]

Speaking about RPGs and shooters, I wonder where BL2 fits ? RPG with shooter elements, or shooter with RPG elements ?

[The E]

See this: http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/aesthetics-of-play for why that question is more or less pointless.

[MatthTheGeek]

Blargh. Why do people make videos instead of writing. What's wrong with writing.

[Scotty]

Good video, would watch again.

[MP-Ryan]

ME3's ending and some few other stuff were not well accepted. Most ME3 players however will agree that about 90% of the game is somewhere between good and downright awesome.

Yup, if not more.  Even with the ending nonsense, the rest of the game was great (and the gameplay has been so much improved since the trilogy started it isn't even funny).

I also enjoy the hell out of multiplayer, but BioWare repeatedly show they are amateurs in this department.  Everyone complains (rightly) that Geth are ridiculous because of stunlock and create fake difficulty by taking away player control.  Do they patch the Geth?  Oh yeah, they fix the drone so it can stunlock you from even further away, and they don't add a value to the weekly balance changes allowing them to adjust range, frequency, or remove stun.  And then, since Cerberus was actually a working faction that was probably the best balanced, pre-patch, they decided to add Dragoons... which don't take cover, blast the crap out of players with their weapons and sprint toward you like Zerg to - surprise! - stunlock you into oblivion.  Also, no regular fixes for PC issues despite no external cost (they broke shadow strike in the last patch, good job), the lack of text chat for PC, and the generally gameplay-breaking sync-kill mechanic have never been addressed despite all of those things being bad design or bad support.  In general, multi is fun but FFS I will NEVER buy a multi-exclusive title from BioWare unless they demonstrate they can get their **** together.

I wouldn't say BioWare releases bad games - far from it, in fact - but I would say that they stubbornly resist to follow well-reasoned industry conventions to their detriment when they go into new places.  All you need to do is compare ME3 multiplayer to coop like BL2 to see who has done it right and who needs more practice, and it ain't Gearbox who needs more practice.  Similarly, if they want to make DA3 a success they should be going back to the things that make DA:O great and building upon it with new and interesting features that improve the experience instead of detracting from it.

And that Penny Arcade video is brilliant, I hope someone senior at BioWare is watching it.

[Luis Dias]

Meh. Mass Effect 3 lacks je ne sais pas de quoi. If it was that good and only the last fifteen minutes were bad, then people would and should replay it. But it ain't. Last time I went to "visit it", I really was underwhelmed on how bad the Citadel is, on how the controls and the new UI put me off just as they really put me on in ME2. And the whole depressing 40 + hours of grimdark + downright depressing story on how everything is being slowly wrecked, ruined, huskified, corrupted, betrayed (with the slight positive notes here and there).... jesus. It's a ride of deep depression. It almost feels like we are experiencing the pain and sad mood of the developers who had to endure long nights to finish it on time.

Oh, completely OT now. My bad.

[TrashMan]

Meh. BioWare has been on a downward sipria las far as I'm concerned.

ME1 > ME2 > ME3
DA:O > DA2

[phatosealpha]

I'm not sure I understand your last complaint.  Compared to the "RPG shooter" paradigm of ME1, ME2's gameplay was head and shoulders better and more fun.  "Shooter with RPG elements" is demonstrably superior to "RPG with shooter elements" with respect to the Mass Effect series.

Mainly that there wasn't really much in the way of actual RPG mechanics in the second one.  No weapon mods, very limited weapons, character building was very slimmed down.  As I said, ME2 was actually a pretty good game, but it was a drastic right turn from the stat heavy ME1. 

ME3 was a good game, discounting the ending - but even taking the ending out of the picture it didn't quite live up to it's promises.  Many decisions in previous games didn't seem to carry much weight at all.  Save the collector base or destroy it?  Just changes some numbers in War Assets.  Cheated on your ME1 romance?  They'll forgive you awfully quick.  Chose Morinth over Samara?  Lucky you, they change the name of 1 enemy later on. 

[StarSlayer]

To be fair I'm not particularly sad they spared us some of the overhead from ME1 to ME2.  I mean, Jimmie Crickets I spent more time looking at inventory and trafficking more weapons then Yuri Orlov between missions.  Comparing the stats between a Tsunami IX and a Kovalyov VIII was tedious.

[Scotty]

Chose to save Maelon's data?  Eve survives and leads a resurgent Krogan in mauling the Reapers.
Legion and Tali both survive the suicide mission (and a lot of other stuff you have to do)?  Geth and Quarians make peace, instead of one or the other raining down on Rannoch as flaming debris.
Thane survives the suicide mission?  Save the Salarian councilor and put the council firmly on your side.

There are a whole lot of things like that, where things you did in previous games subtly (or sometimes unsubtly) alter the narrative.  You'd have to play through dozens of times to see them all.

Does that mean you'll have a fundamentally different game if you choose one playthrough to do everything "right" and one playthrough do everything "wrong"?  No, you'll still get to the same ending point.  It's still the same game, but it's definitely influenced by decisions across the entire franchise.

Re: equipment in ME1.  Good God am I glad they simplified it in ME2, though the final system in ME3 was a very good compromise between both.  There was nothing more tedious in the entire game than managing your inventory and mods in ME1.  It was, in retrospect, a terrible way to do things.

[phatosealpha]

To my knowledge, for the Salarian councilor to die, Thane and Kirrahe both have to die.  And yes, true on all examples - the thing is, those are the big examples.  We're talking about hundreds of decisions over two games, and only a couple have any noticeable impact, much less the 'drastic impacts' they promised repeatedly in the lead up to ME3.

And while ME1 certainly needed some simplification - the inventory management there was horrible - they went a bit further then just fixing the problems.  Baby got tossed out with the bathwater.  If they just added proper stacking and sorting, like every other game in the universe, the ME1 inventory problem would've largely evaporated.  Make it so every mod/weapon stacks, and each is listed once, with a sublist of mark versions, and the inventory instantly becomes 100 times easier to use.  Instead, they remove the inventory entirely.