ummmmm yeah, I'm at work currently so I'm not gonna click that

Well, that particular link itself just gives you the homepage (very minimal, like google). However, the definition of rule34 in a nutshell is "if it exists, there is porn of it." Let that be the warning.

Im waiting to see what a Turian female looks like, if they'll be butt ugly like Males or if bioware is gonna make em somewhat good looking

edit: scratch that, they're even uglier than males

Speaking of Mass Effect 3

This is actually pretty cool

I have Steam coupons for 50% off a Valve game/pack, and 50% off Silent Hill: Homecoming. They expire March 1st and I don't need them, so if anyone here would use them, let me know.

Same here. Well, I don't mind grittiness at all in my sci-fi (it's great in Starcraft), but not as a replacement of the sci-fi.
Now it's not even really sci-fi, like Star Wars isn't really sci-fi but fantasy (basically The Hidden Fortress in space), and ME3 even more than ME2. ME2 still had the Collectors, but they missed a potentially neat adventure. I was hyped to explore the Terminus systems and deal with the Collectors (yes I read Ascension which was quite competent and had what you wanted to read), but after that big introduction to ME2, it was complete letdown. The Collectors were written as a mysterious alien race with weird practices, dropping from time to time at some place in the Terminus systems to deal living beings. Instead of doing a bit like in ME1, scouting the galaxy in search of hints and people who got into contact with them, they turned the whole thing into a shooter game: your boss briefs you on what's what and you shoot your way out. No discovering (or almost), no mystery, eeriness, nothing. ME2 is basically a shooter, and the sci-fi is barely present to warrant to tag.

ME3 seems even more lifeless. While the Reapers (which were never that great of bad guys) were shown as some sort of creepy monsters who show themselves at the end of the world, they show in daylight what was not so good in the first place. I always thought the whole cosmic thing around the Reapers and the Citadel was interesting, but by showing them in numbers they basically turned them into regular bad guys. They also try (as in ME2 but in worse) to shove you the "epic" in the face, trying to make you good as a human by constantly telling you how you are important and all. Shepard has turned from an "among the best, but not that good, not that important guy" into a superhero who solves every galactic conflict guy, with every other characters (except Garrus) having boring (getting top promotion) evolutions. It's all about superlatives, which turns the whole thing into boring and cringe-worthy territory. And I bet you'll be uniting every council race for the big "epic" battle... Shepard was always kinda boring and limited in choices, but it's getting so streamlined, getting to choose only between Jesus and a redneck. Why not choose "which Shepard do you want" option right at the beginning of the game and forget the choices...

I don't think ME1 is particularly good, but the series had a lot of potential. Instead, they went the complete opposite road they should have taken. For example, while the planet exploration could be a bit boring at times, I thought it had a great feel and could be potentially awesome: instead of fixing things they scrapped the whole thing.

Good point on your final note there. Sure ME2 had more polish on the engine and all, might have looked sharper, but the game felt far more compact. The random planets in ME1 were terrible with the hilarious triangular mountains, but overall the game itself just felt much much bigger in scope. ME2 on the other hand just had very small streamlined levels, invisible walls, and other nonsense. This was pretty noticeable to me. The "hub" worlds were insanely small too. Sure it might be a little pointless running around on the Citadel in huge open area's, but I'd prefer that over unrealistically confined studio sized rooms with hallways and lazy ass crates blocking off everything.

ME2 lacked good subtlety, which the first game had more of.

The good news is I'm playing Thief 2 right now and it's amazing.

Yeah, ME2 really lacked a sizable 'hub' area. It made sense for the dumpy stations to be small and cluttered, but c'mon, they had some really 'large' stations that just seemed tiny, like the one Liara is based in, as opposed to the Citadel in the first one, which seemed really big.

Very good!

Didn't really care about the smaller areas in ME2. I'd be big on exploration if the environments warranted it, but I found the citadel to be pretty boring and the layout annoying. It was better to have different, smaller city areas, with varying aesthetics.

Probably a controversial statement around these parts, but overall I think it's a better game than the first. Worse plot, but I enjoyed the ride anyway. One of my favourites from 2010.

I would agree with you. I think about ME1 and all the exploring made it feel huge and the settings and plot made it feel more engrossing, but I gave a shit more about the second's more shoot-'em-up style. It all builds up to 1 big mission that was tits when I first did it. Is there any replay value in the second? Barely - I typically start a new game and breeze right through all of it in less than a day, but it's still fun. ME2 has it's problems, but ME1 was far worse in that regard. Holy hell I don't even want to list them, but I remember almost re-buying the game on steam and then stopping immediately once all the negatives I experienced flooded my mind once more.

ME2's ending does piss me off, though, and in the way that the "good" ending is actually the far dumber one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb_WX_Osgk4

So, if you thought the galaxy map was gimmicky in ME2, check this shit out...

Whatever happened to "if it isn't broken, don't fix it?" The galaxy map in ME1 was superb and needed no changes at all, least of all a stupid little toy ship to fly around the gravity well in unrealistic ways and (now) with which to run away from the Big Bad Reapers.

Well that certainly makes it a little annoying (the reaper part). The rest of that does away with the stupid grind, but now has even less to do with exploration.

Yeah, looks completely worthless now. Whooo flying around and shit.

Never played Star Control?

Looks like you do stuff in Star Control. The point is that in ME3 it looks like you're just flying around, picking up some items, scanning, and that's it. After the borefest that was ME2's "overworld", this looks just as boring. I guess it's good they sped up some of the stuff, but the Reaper thing definitely looks annoying like other said.

Looks no different than pointless repetitive hacking minigames in most games nowadays to me, a waste of time.

The thing is, not only is it a waste of time, but it takes what previously was a very pretty and immersive interface and makes it gimmicky and immersion-breaking. The ME1 galaxy map was really quite nice - it was satisfying just to click and read the various planet descriptions while enjoying the nice artwork. Now we have little a little toy ship that moves in completely absurd ways, and stupid rotate-able spheres instead of nice planet artwork. It's mind-boggling, really. To whom is BioWare trying to appeal with this sort of shit?

Gameplay > graphics. It's just that no gameplay > bad gameplay.

Graphics > gameplay in contexts where no gameplay is needed. Or, rather, if they truly wanted add more to the exploration mechanics they could have easily done it without turning the interface into a gimmicky pile of shit - ya know, the galaxy map can still be interactive without the little model ship to fly around.

:S

When, in a video game, is no gameplay needed? Are you talking about like cinematics?




Haven't played games much lately, I can't seem to find a decent game that I haven't played that runs on my older PC. The last thing I played was Age of Empires 1, and comparing it to modern RTS is pretty pathetic business Granted, i was a little surprised when I found it had control groups! Magical starcraft APM ensued.

How about an interface whose primary purpose is simply to move you from one place in the game to another? Yeah, turning everything into a minigame doesn't necessarily improve your game.

Did you guys also hear about the DLC hitting the day the game releases?

BUT WAIT, it comes with the $80 special edition release.

BUT WAIT, YOU'LL NEED $100+ ANYWAYS FOR ALL THE DLC TO PLAY THE FULL GAME IN THE END

Yeah, day 1 DLC is bullshit and I'm certainly not buying ME3 until the inevitable reduced-price bundle package with all the DLC included (if at all).

I would have said gameplay encompasses more than minigames and puzzles. If I'm moving from one place to another I'm still deciding what to look at, how much time to take, which paths to take. Whether we want to call those things 'gameplay' or otherwise, they surely aren't always enhanced by more realistic graphics?

This is an RPG, not a travel sim. Moving from one system to another is not a major part of the gameplay, and I'd certainly say the loss in immersion from the graphical change of taking it from a simple interface to a minigame makes the experience as a whole worse rather than better.

Of course, there's nothing saying that travel *can't* be a major part of gameplay, but it has to be planned and developed as such - that's not something you can just tack on, it's a critical game design choice. If your game is designed such that the galaxy map serves primarily to do little more than move between game areas, then there's no need to add unnecessary "gameplay" (in the form of a gimmicky minigame) to it at the expense of the interface looking nice and being immersive.

We get it, Bioware's run over by slashfic writing hambeasts, committee design and corporate interest and their products are milled out, dumbed down wish fullfillment tripe. same old same old.

Loads of RPGs have good travel systems. Most space RPGs also seem to have ship to ship combat in some form. This just goes to show how shitty BioWare are at designing anything. And you people spend £30 to fund more games from them?

The thing is, if your RPG is going to have an extensive travel system, the game has to be designed for that. It's pointless to just have it tacked on, which is why attempting to implement anything of the sort at this point was a stupid idea that serves to do nothing but hurt immersion.

I'm not so picky as to think that a game *needs* complicated travel mechanics to be good. ME1 was great for what it was.

What do you mean "at this point"? They've spent over two years making this game. How much time do they need?

ME1 was clearly not designed with an extensive travel system in mind. The core of the game is about what you do at each of the hubs, not between them. As they decided to follow this formula going forward, they gain nothing by attempting to pad gameplay length by turning the galaxy map into a minigame. Because, given that the rest of the game clearly isn't designed for an extensive travel system, that's all it could ever be - a minigame. A little, self-contained bit of content that does nothing to impact the rest of the game in any coherent way. Sure, they can try to integrate it via. planet scanning and upgrade resources, but it ends up feeling tacked-on and unnecessary, because that's what it is.

What does that have to do anything? They still had 2 years to implement a decent travel system. Some completely new games are made in less time than that.

Because the game didn't need an extensive travel system. The basic structure of the game is not one that is conducive to micromanaging travel, because there's no sensible way to make that have any relevance to the rest of the game. You don't necessarily make your game better by adding features at every possible point - if a certain gameplay element is going to be extensively developed, the entire game has to be designed with that in mind.

So then explain to me why Realms of Arkania needed a travel system and why it ended up making the game awesome. You can't just make three games in a row with no decent innovations.

Sure you can. A sequel doesn't need to significantly change the formula of the game, if the formula is good to begin with.

It seems the problem you have is that you simply don't like Mass Effect and wish it were a different game than it is. Sure, that's fine, but you can't fault the sequel for not drastically changing the style of the game to fit your tastes.

No. But I can fault the developers for implementing a shit space travel system instead of a good one.

I do prefer ME2's shooting, although they ditched certain combat and RPG elements and the level design kinda sucked most of the time. ME1's level design was more... "realistic" and fun, more RPGish instead of being corridors to shoot through. Some planets were just big areas to go through and get quests, while you could be killing enemies at some point, like Theros or Noveria. Although they did use copy-paste quite a bit for uncharted planets.

Some planets had ridiculous triangular mountains, yes, but I thought a certain number of them were nicely made and provided an excellent sci-fi feel. Some had rings around them, or you could land on a moon and see the planet in the sky. Some of the terrain was more even and realistic. They just needed to polish things up, elaborate the planets more and give us more interesting exploration and quests.

Sure, but a bad one was about all they could do without significantly changing the focus of the game, so really my main problem is that they implemented one at all. Not that a change in focus would have been bad, mind you, rather that it's clear they'd never really do that so if they were going to implement one it would have been shitty under any circumstances.

What are you saying? That a shit travel system is better than a good travel system because it doesn't change the focus of the game? I don't get your logic.

No, he's agreeing with you and you're talking past each others. Keep at it, though, it's somewhat amusing and entertaining to see two uber-nerds argue about something they actually agree with.

Is anyone here familiar with the Legacy of Kain saga?