Assassins Creed Brotherhood I finished the story a couple of days ago and I'm leaving the extra side quests and stuff for later, for now I've got revelations to get through before October. I played for about 30 mins last night and it's really trippy, something about Desmond being in a coma I guess and he has to complete memories to escape. Also for some reason after 3 games of Desmond looking like Desmond they've now changed his face and he looks like a different person now, I don't like.
Mass Effect 3 It started off strong, but turned to absolute shit during the last third of the game. The ending was lame beyond belief. None of the choices you make matter, there's no epic final boss fight, and the endings are all pretty much the same except for the color of light emitted by the crucible shockwave. Also where was the Normandy going when it crashed? Why did the Mass Relays have to blow up? Why the fuck was the catalyst a little kid? None of it made a damn bit of sense. The mission in London leading up to the ending was also awful. It was basically you getting spammed by lots of low level enemies in a shooting gallery. I may as well have just been playing Call of Duty or Gears. They hype the shit out of the Reapers, and they're generic sci-fi enemies who aren't that intimidating and basically just spam you. That's not even mentioning the shitty new characters, or the extent to which they've dumbed down the gameplay to basically just cover based shooting. Any pretensions of this being anything more than a cover based shooter fall apart on that London mission. It was pretty clear Bioware was more focused on their MMO. You could definitely see where their interest in making Mass Effect 3 dropped off. Everything after you attack the Cerberus base was shit. If this had spent more time in development and they had done a complete do over of the last third of the game, my opinion of it would be quite different. The build up to that last third is actually pretty well done. Overall: 6/10. For shame Bioware. And this is coming from someone who loved the two earlier Mass Effect games. The worst part is they killed off many of the likeable characters and destroyed the Citadel and Mass Relays, so the Mass Effect universe is done. They created one of the best Sci-fi IPs since Star Trek or Star Wars, and took about 10 minutes to completely destroy it. It's clear EA wants them focused on that cash grab MMO. The ending was a big fuck you to Mass Effect fans.
I completed Journey and had another player join me after the first quarter. It really is quite impressive at how easy it is to form an emotional bond with the other player when the only form of communication is to beep. I was quite distraught after getting to the end of the game and I discovered I had lost the other player. I spent about 5 minutes backtracking and beeping, trying to find them again. Monsly, you should try playing it again online, it's a very different experience to singleplayer.
@cmdrmonkey I didn't think you'd care for the last bit of Mass Effect 3. I was expecting a lot of anger from you when you found out what the Catalyst was. I also felt like they just ran out of time and resources by the end of the game. It's mainly the last few connected missions of the ending sequence that sucked. Prior to that was pretty awesome. The boss battle that was terribly hard that I was talking about was with Kai Leng on Insanity. He's a real bastard on Insanity, and it didn't help that I had an Adept.
Isn't it bad when a franchise you love and have spent many hours investing into suddenly becomes shit? Reminds me of Tekken.
@AKS The first two thirds of the game is actually quite good, and I couldn't understand why people were so angry with the game when I was playing it. Some of it was pretty suspenseful, like the Cerberus attack on the Citadel. It has fantastic art direction and music. The weapon handling is improved. I liked the way a few of the minor plot threads resolved, like how the Quarians and Geth made peace and resettled their homeworld together. The problem is, it's all building up to that ending. And the game had one of the worst endings I've ever seen. I cant' remember the last time I was that disappointed by how something ended. You could tell it was slapped together very quickly, a lot of it didn't make any sense, and everything about it felt out of character for the Mass Effect games. Since when is Mass Effect supposed to be depressing? Shepard was always portrayed as an epic hero, and the games were about everyone finding ways to get along to fight a bigger threat. There was no option for the ending that reflected that. There was also no final boss fight. I was expecting to fight some big reaper boss at the end and it never happened, which was quite lame. Instead you get to see a bunch of dead civilians piled up on the Citadel after mass genocide (Yay!), have a pointless encounter with the Illusive Man where you find out he was indoctrinated all along (I had high paragon and those dialogue options don't open up much for you), and meet with an annoying little kid AI thing. It fucking sucked. You could tell where they stopped caring, and you could also tell that the EA suits wanted them kill off the Mass Effect universe once and for all and get to work on that cash grab MMO. The Mass relays probably took down most of the known galaxy when they blew up, so there isn't a Mass Effect universe left to go back to. The ending was like let's stop the reapers from blowing up the Milky Way so we can blow it up ourselves. Bioware owes it's fans a fucking apology. And I hope they completely redo everything from the Cerberus base on somehow. I would have been fine waiting another few years if it meant the last third of the game didn't suck so badly and we got a proper ending. I gave it a 6/10 because I feel like they only delivered 2/3's of the game they should have.
Yeah, they absolutely ruined a great franchise, similar to how badly Metroid got messed up by Other M. Just took a huge steaming shit all over it. I don't see how it could be redeemed by DLC. They would have to completely redo the last third of the game. It's not just the ending that's bad. It's also a bunch of stuff leading up to the ending. For instance, I was expecting a final boss battle with Harbinger, the main villain of the series. It's strongly suggested by Mass Effect 2 that you'll have a showdown with him. But that never happened. The game had no final boss battle. How lame and anticlimactic is that? The closest thing you get to a boss battle is getting spammed by ton of low level enemies right before the deus ex machina ending they went with. The worst part is I had high paragon and war assets, and picked destroy, and supposedly saw the "good ending" and it was still absolute shit. Let's put it this way, the ending was so bad, I think I'm done with Mass Effect. I doubt I'll ever go back and play any of the games again. It all just seems so pointless after seeing that ending. I also don't care about spoiling the ending for anyone. This is a shameful ending that should be used as an example of how not to write an ending. Bioware are a bunch of assholes if they really think kicking their fans in the balls like that is okay.
Here's how I would have ended it: -The citadel sends a signal through the mass relays for the reapers to hibernate at the end of each cycle. The crucible is a weapon that taps into this signal. -Shepard is winning on the ground in London, so Harbinger "assumes direct control" and has a final showdown with shepard -While shepard has Harbinger distracted, the alliance delivers the crucible. The boss battle consists of you surviving for a certain time while the crucible is delivered -The reapers shut down and the alliance fleet obliterates them -The council races rebuild, and the citadel is now orbiting earth, giving earth a more central role in galactic politics -Have a big wrap up at the end of what's going on in the galaxy, which would be dependent on the choices you made in the three games -Forget all of the shit about synthesis or controlling the reapers. That shit was lame. And have the showdown with the illusive man at the cerberus base instead of later. Paragon you convince him he's been indoctrinated and he kills himself, renegade you kill him yourself. Either way, he's dead and Cerberus is out of commission. Him magically ending up on the Citadel out of nowhere didn't make a lot of sense. I came up with that ending in five minutes and it's way better than the shit they wrote.
Maybe It's a life lesson for us all. No much of an epic hero one is, somewhere along the line one will meet an indomitable force and all one can do is wait for the shit to hit the fan. Hollywood endings are so passé.
I would agree with you if the ending they went with made any sense. I don't have a problem with an apocalyptic, depressing ending. But this was a trainwreck with massive gaping plot holes. Parts of it don't even make any narrative sense and seem like they were taken from other planned endings. Where was the Normandy going for instance? It was orbiting earth afaik. Why were my squadmates who presumably died fighting the reapers on earth getting out of the crashed Normandy? They weren't even on the Normandy. And it wasn't even a depressing ending like you're thinking. It left off on what was supposed to be a hopeful note with a grandfather in the future telling his grandson about "the shepard." But that doesn't make much sense because the galaxy would have been pretty well destroyed by the mass relays blowing up. It just didn't make any sense. I also don't like being strongarmed into playing multiplayer to get a slightly better ending. I have no interest in Mass Effect multiplayer.
LOL. Yes, that's how fucking lame it was. I'm not sure what was worse, the AI little kid, or the grandpa storytime thing at the end. The Mass Effect 3 ending was probably the worst betrayal against a fanbase since the Star Wars prequels. It was on the level of Jar Jar Binks, and I wish I were joking or exaggerating.
I never got into the Mass Effect series, just felt overly clunky from what I'd played and the dialogue was just awful. Especially the terrible flappy mouths and cold, dead eyes of everyone.
I liked the first two games, but after this POS I'm wondering what I ever saw in them. I'm almost hoping they just take the indoctrination theory that's floating around the internet and roll with it because it would give them a chance to fix the damage they've done. The indoctrination theory is lame "it was all a dream" fan fiction bullshit, but it's still better than what they gave us.
Is that really the fan solution? It's all a dream? That's never going to be better. I thought L.A. Noire did a reasonable job of having a "not so happy ending" to a video game, but avoided the problem you're talking about in terms of it not making sense relative to the player experience within the storyline. Sounds like Mass Effect played like the standard hero quest archetype throughout, and then they simply tacked on a doom/gloom ending. I can see how people would be pissed about that type of storytelling.
Yes, that's the fan solution and they've carefully scoured the game for hints. I love depressing endings. I would have been thrilled if Shepard got indoctrinated (brainwashed) by the reapers, and ME3 was him slowly losing his mind. That actually would have been a very cool way to end the series, or set things up for a sequel. The Dead Space games had your character slowly going insane, and I loved those. But that's not what we got. The indoctrination thing is just fans reading too much into it. What we got was an ending with a jarring change in tone and gaping plot holes that was clearly slapped together last minute.
The truth is that they are all made of the Flesh! And this was all a simulation created by Patriotic computers!
It's also worth noting that most of the Mass Effect storyline was stolen from the Freespace games. The reapers are basically the Shivans, an unstoppable machine race that returns every 50,000 years to wipe out organic life fortold by a now extinct race, and using a series of FTL nodes to ensure organic races develop along predictable lines. But the Freespace games were bleak all the way through. The first game ends with the Alliance deciding it would be better off having earth cut off from the rest of the galaxy and unreachable rather than let the Shivans kill everyone like they did on the Vasudan homeworld. So when you die at the end of those games trying to save a bunch of civilians from the Shivans, it didn't feel like a jarring change in tone. I actually think blowing up the node to Earth at the end of Freespace 1 is where they got the idea for the Mass Effect 3 ending with the mass relays blowing up. But they totally botched it. Even Cerberus is ripped off from Freespace. Cerberus=the Neo Terran Front. The Neo Terran Front are pro human terrorists who want to use Shivan technology to make humans rulers of the galaxy. Their attacks on the Alliance screw up the war effort. Also the Alliance in Freespace didn't behave like a bunch of fucking retards like in Mass Effect. They build the biggest baddest ship in the galaxy when the find out the Shivan armada is coming to wipe them out, but it's still not enough. It's sad that they actually stole another game's story, and still couldn't get it right. Also, anyone who hasn't played Freespace 1 and 2, play them now. They're fucking awesome games. Especially Freespace 2. Watch these videos from 13-14 years ago and tell me Mass Effect isn't a complete ripoff. And not even a good one in retrospect. Freespace even had a better explanation at the end for the reaper/shivan harvesting cycles.