Video Games: Next Stop... Andromeda

[Corvinus85]

Finished my ME2 playthrough. It took me about a month as I took it slow. I lost Miranda's loyalty after her spat with Jack, and could not get it back. Not that it matters much in Miranda's case, but I was annoyed that even with the paragon level I had prior to the suicide mission, I still couldn't get her to talk to me. I guess you need to have the paragon/renegade stat at max level. I didn't have Zaeed's loyalty either, but that guy is a dickhead anyway. I wish there was the option to actually kick him off the ship. Also, if you do every mission ahead of the Reaper IFF mission, then the reason why the team has to leave the Normandy before the attack becomes pretty silly. Bioware should have thought of a better alternative.

On to ME3, but with the Old World edition of TW: Warhammer coming out soon, I may put ME on hold. I've been looking forward to play with Bretonnia since the game was first released.

[Jon AS]

31 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

Finished my ME2 playthrough. It took me about a month as I took it slow. I lost Miranda's loyalty after her spat with Jack, and could not get it back. Not that it matters much in Miranda's case, but I was annoyed that even with the paragon level I had prior to the suicide mission, I still couldn't get her to talk to me. I guess you need to have the paragon/renegade stat at max level.

The persuade/intimidate checks in ME2 operate on a system that checks what percentage of Paragon/Renegade points available in the game up to that point you've collected rather than for an absolute value. Bonus points from savegame imports are "free" for the purpose of this calculation.

This system can make playing a character who doesn't lean heavily one way or the other rather annoying in situations like this, particularly if you didn't import from ME1.

28 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

I didn't have Zaeed's loyalty either, but that guy is a dickhead anyway. I wish there was the option to actually kick him off the ship.

You can leave him to die if you save his loyalty mission until after the endgame.;)

29 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

Also, if you do every mission ahead of the Reaper IFF mission, then the reason why the team has to leave the Normandy before the attack becomes pretty silly. Bioware should have thought of a better alternative.

That was always incredibly clumsy. Would have been nice if they had designed a mission that involved the entire team, sort of like parts of the Citadel DLC.

[Werthead]

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As for the two more titles thing.. yeah about that...http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-30-dont-expect-another-deus-ex-game-anytime-soon

Basically the franchise has been put on hiatus due to the poor sales of Mankind Divided, Eidos Montreal is working on the next Tomb Raider. At this point, the franchise may just be dead forever, optimistically we won't see another Deus Ex game for at least 10 years which sucks seeing how much meaning this franchise has to the industry, fans and myself. I blame Square, they truly botched every aspect of the release and development from the engine to the marketing. Truly a disaster looking back on it, its surprising the game came out as good as it did. 

Obsidian was once approached to do Human Revolution believe it or not, and seeing as how they are very much fond of these type of games, they are really the only hope for the franchise if Eidos Montreal is steered in a different direction because I sure as hell don't expect Square to bring it back of their own volition. 

 

That is dumb. They'd started working on the third game and were several months into it. Abandoning it now means wasting a few million dollars.

Argh. That means we probably won't see another cyberpunk RPG until Cyberpunk 2077, but I don't think anyone is realistically expecting that this side of 2019.

[Werthead]

Excellent article (in the middle of a much longer mega-series) about how Mass Effect changed for the worse in theme and conception between the first two games, and how the screw-ups in the ending are the result of decisions made before ME2 was written.

There's also the suggestion that EA buying up BioWare had as much of a disastrous impact on Mass Effect as the already well-known impact on Dragon Age (resulting in the clusterfuck that led to Dragon Age II's horrific development cycle) by turning the series from an RPG into a cover-based shooter with fairly minimal skill development, with more focus on narrative choices. I'm less convinced by that, as Mass Effect 1 was already dropping the RPG elements down even from the likes of KotOR (which was already a streamlined approach from Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights).

[Jon AS]

33 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Excellent article (in the middle of a much longer mega-series) about how Mass Effect changed for the worse in theme and conception between the first two games, and how the screw-ups in the ending are the result of decisions made before ME2 was written.

Wow, that is not a good article. Basically the author doesn't have a firm grasp on the way the series developed and, maybe more importantly, who the writers responsible were.

The ME Series is big, flashy scifi action that revolves around characters the player can get attached to. Intricatly plotted it is not (see also: Leviathans, dropped dark matter plot and, oh yeah, the ending).

Thematically, the series stayed pretty consistent right up until the end of ME3.

 

To pick on some of his criticisms:

That part about humanity "seizing control"? That's a badly thought-out bit from ME1. ME2 kind of has to acknowledge it, but then it's such a wild divergence from the other possible outcomes that it can't be properly reflected in the game. So if you import a ME1 game with that ending, it kind of gets mentioned once, then is quietly dropped in the hope that people won't remember that embarassing detail (and it almost worked with the article's author!).

Cerberus has numerous operations, most of which are indeed run by cartoonish supervillains (you even get to visit some of them during the course of the game!). The ME2 crew is specifically put together to put the best face on the organisation (why a known criminal organisation operates as openly as Cerberus does in ME2, complete with corporate logo, now that's another question...).

TIM was indeed not mentioned in ME1 and he was introduced in a tie-in novel... written by ME1's lead writer (who was also co-lead writer on ME2...). That same book also introduces the Collectors. Now this is certainly not a great way to set up plot points that will be relevant in a completely different medium, but at the same time wanting the fictional universe to be confined to elements that were established in the first game seems like a pretty silly idea to me.

 

So you're right that most of the mistakes were probably made before ME2 war written, namely during the writing process of ME1. There was clearly never an overarcing plan for the entire trilogy, so plots were dropped as new ideas developed and ultimately the whole construction came crashing down at the end.

Along those lines I'd say ME2's biggest flaw is actually an ME3 flaw: we spent an entire game building a team, then most of them weren't given much to do in ME3.

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, Jon AS said:

Wow, that is not a good article. Basically the author doesn't have a firm grasp on the way the series developed and, maybe more importantly, who the writers responsible were.

Given the many hundreds of thousands of words and lengthy podcasts Seamus Young has created about the trilogy (and his prominent role in criticising the ending in a literate and intelligent way rather than some of the lazier criticisms presented at the time) over a decade, that would be an unsupported criticism.

We were told before Mass Effect's release in 2007 that it was going to be a trilogy with a storyline unfolding across the three games. There was certainly a plan in place before the game came out, with Drew Karpsyshyn as the lead writer. The degree to which Mass Effect 2 and 3 were planned during the writing of ME1 is certainly debatable, although I believe Karpyshyn was already writing to the idea that that Reapers would be trying to stop the dark energy unleashed by the mass effect from destroying the galaxy (some stuff in ME1 makes more sense when you know that was the original plan).

EA taking over BioWare just as they were shipping ME1 clearly had an impact, more noticeably on Dragon Age, but there also seems to have been a push to make ME2 more streamlined and action-oriented, stripping out the RPG elements of ME1 and also removing a lot of lore and worldbuilding in favour of shooting things. The fact the shooting and combat model was prioritised as the first thing developed for ME2 and RPG elements like skills and inventory were dropped back until later is certainly interesting in that regard. Karpyshyn dropping down to co-writer (along with Mac Walters) I put down to the workload of writing and prepping both ME2 and 3 back-to-back, but maybe there was more to it.

For the third game Karpyshyn was gone to The Old Republic and Mac Walters and Casey Hudson seem to have taken over the writing themselves, throwing out the original ending that had been put in place since ME1 in favour of their own stuff (which feels suspiciously like they'd heavily binge-watched the BSG box set a few times), resulting in a massive tonal mismatch and plot holes you could fly the Normandy through. It's also rather telling that the other writers who worked on the game got pissed off with the blowback when they publicly said that the ending had not been peer-reviewed by the rest of the team (suggesting some of the other Mass Effect writers themselves thought the ending was rubbish, which isn't great).

I do agree with Young's conclusion at the end of the series:

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Every single installment of Mass Effect had a different arrangement of lead writers. That might be acceptable if this was a series of games like Uncharted or Fallout, where each installment is supposedly a stand-alone story. But the Mass Effect Trilogy supposedly exists to tell a single overarching story, and that story is completely incoherent because the parts don’t fit together.

So if there’s one thing I wish I could impress on the suits at EA / BioWare it’s this:

Writers are not interchangeable.

Everyone realizes that voice actors aren’t interchangeable. In the same way, writers also have distinctive voices and treating them like generic script-writing machines can only lead to disaster. Pick a lead writer and stick with them. Even if your writers are are all literal geniuses, don’t shuffle them around in the middle of telling what is supposedly a single story. Pratchett and Tolkien were both masterful and inventive storytellers, but that doesn’t mean either one would have been a good fit for taking over a Vernor Vinge novel in progress.

I realize this advice is probably lost on EA, who have built an entire company culture around the wrongheaded idea that you can turn all videogames into assembly line products. The thinking seems to be that if it works for Madden, why can’t it work for all games?

 

Video games are obviously a more collaborative medium than most (especially since there were half a dozen or more sub-writers working on individual quests and characters in the trilogy), and there may also be outside reasons why a writer is not available, but it's definitely a good idea. Not having a consistent voice in a game series can be as damaging as a book series swapping writers every volume or a movie swapping its entire creative team every movie.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Walters) I put down to the workload of writing and prepping both ME2 and 3 back-to-back, but maybe there was more to it.

For the third game Karpyshyn was gone to The Old Republic and Mac Walters and Casey Hudson seem to have taken over the writing themselves, throwing out the original ending that had been put in place since ME1 in favour of their own stuff (which feels suspiciously like they'd heavily binge-watched the BSG box set a few times), resulting in a massive tonal mismatch and plot holes you could fly the Normandy through. It's also rather telling that the other writers who worked on the game got pissed off with the blowback when they publicly said that the ending had not been peer-reviewed by the rest of the team (suggesting some of the other Mass Effect writers themselves thought the ending was rubbish, which isn't great).

 

 

I think the 2nd game had a tonal and style mismatch from the 1st, and no doubt that was an EA influence--but I think that change made the series infinitely more enjoyable (for me). I LOVE Mass Effect 2. I can take or leave the first, and the third I would love if not for the litany of issues already talked about endlessly.

My biggest fear for Andromeda is Mac Walters seems to have doubled down and decided the issue with ME3 remains a vocal "minority" of fans, and thus, nothing is wrong with the third game. He is stubborn about the issues people were upset about, Bioware in general seems kind of anti-fan right now (didn't they close down their forums for being "toxic" or something? Toxic usually seems, to me, to mean critical in a lot of cases). But really, as Jon AS noted, spending a game assembling the coolest team ever, and then never using those team members again was really the worst. I might have swallowed the flow of the game if I could have had Legion, Thane, Miranda, etc. back.

Mass Effect 4? I don't know. I'm concerned about some things, but it's too early to tell. Namely though, no classes? You basically respec every mission? That seems the antithesis of these games. But what do I know? I'm a vocal minority.

[mcbigski]

All of the talk about dragon age lately got me wondering how much it would cost for the PC.  Played origins and awakenings on Xbox and woulndt mind a revisit.  Turns out the ultimate edition is $7.50 on steam this week and has several new to me dlc packs.  Score.

[Werthead]

10 hours ago, Simon Steele said:

My biggest fear for Andromeda is Mac Walters seems to have doubled down and decided the issue with ME3 remains a vocal "minority" of fans, and thus, nothing is wrong with the third game. He is stubborn about the issues people were upset about, Bioware in general seems kind of anti-fan right now (didn't they close down their forums for being "toxic" or something? Toxic usually seems, to me, to mean critical in a lot of cases). But really, as Jon AS noted, spending a game assembling the coolest team ever, and then never using those team members again was really the worst. I might have swallowed the flow of the game if I could have had Legion, Thane, Miranda, etc. back.

Mass Effect 4? I don't know. I'm concerned about some things, but it's too early to tell. Namely though, no classes? You basically respec every mission? That seems the antithesis of these games. But what do I know? I'm a vocal minority.

I agree with the thesis that there's been three distinct age of BioWare: the Early Age (Baldur's Gate I & II, Neverwinter Nights), the Classic Age (Jade Empire, KotOR, Mass Effect, arguably Dragon Age: Origins) and Nu-BioWare (Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age II through now), and a strong component of the Nu-BioWare ethos is that they are always right, the fans are always wrong and they are going to ignore all the things that they did to get into their respected status and also go on ignoring the fact they haven't had a game with blanket critical acclaim since Dragon Age: Origins, eight years ago.

I'd also be interested to see EA's assessment of BioWare's performance. The Mass Effect trilogy has sold 14 million copies in total lifetime sales to date, which is startlingly low given its profile and budget (although still profitable, probably, and has had a long tail with the trilogy edition); Fallout 4 sold slightly less than that in its first month on sale, by itself. Dragon Age has done better (Inquisition was their biggest launch ever) but it looks like Inquisition was still beaten handily by Witcher 3 in sales and destroyed totally in critical comparisons. For a company and game franchise that BioWare helped launch, that's got to be galling and concerning. There was also the collapse of BioWare's attempts to launch a new franchise, although apparently they have something new planned for next year (and not the much-rumoured new Star Wars RPG, which they're still refusing to confirm).

[DunderMifflin]

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[Fez]

The big Mass Effect gap to me is between 2 & 3, not 1 & 2. ME1 to 2 felt like a standard case of a video game franchise getting bigger and better with the sequel; they took what worked, dropped what didn't, and introduced some new plot elements to expand the universe. And the only things that were dropped were some bad ideas that shouldn't have been in 1 in the first place (like the human domination choice).

Whereas 2 to 3 felt like a franchise very much changing directions; with tons of elements being dropped or changed and none of the major threads of 2 being followed up. The team that was assembled over the course of a game was no longer important, the main threat from before disappeared, the premise of Cerberus completely changed, etc. Also, all the foreshadowing from 2 was dropped; for instance, whatever was going on with Haestrom's sun was going to be key to defeating the Reapers in Drew Karpshyn's story outline.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

I agree with the thesis that there's been three distinct age of BioWare: the Early Age (Baldur's Gate I & II, Neverwinter Nights), the Classic Age (Jade Empire, KotOR, Mass Effect, arguably Dragon Age: Origins) and Nu-BioWare (Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age II through now), and a strong component of the Nu-BioWare ethos is that they are always right, the fans are always wrong and they are going to ignore all the things that they did to get into their respected status and also go on ignoring the fact they haven't had a game with blanket critical acclaim since Dragon Age: Origins, eight years ago.

I'd also be interested to see EA's assessment of BioWare's performance. The Mass Effect trilogy has sold 14 million copies in total lifetime sales to date, which is startlingly low given its profile and budget (although still profitable, probably, and has had a long tail with the trilogy edition); Fallout 4 sold slightly less than that in its first month on sale, by itself. Dragon Age has done better (Inquisition was their biggest launch ever) but it looks like Inquisition was still beaten handily by Witcher 3 in sales and destroyed totally in critical comparisons. For a company and game franchise that BioWare helped launch, that's got to be galling and concerning. There was also the collapse of BioWare's attempts to launch a new franchise, although apparently they have something new planned for next year (and not the much-rumoured new Star Wars RPG, which they're still refusing to confirm).

 

That's interesting--I had no idea Mass Effect's sales were so low, comparably, I always assumed it competed with most games (aside from CODs and the like). Wow, that's really underperforming. And too bad, because it's, ultimately, a great series. I think the stance with the fans doesn't help.

I did know Dragon Age couldn't compete with Witcher--which is crazy considering where the Witcher came from--the first game was released a couple of years before the first Dragon age, so if you held them as comparisons, many people would laugh. I remember, actually, being a toxic fan once on Bioware forums once in this very regard. I opened an account and commented on there when Dragon Age 2 was being promoted. I remember being upset that the Qunari were being retconned, and I expressed that (not in any nasty way of course), and David Gaider got REALLY offended and got into a huge argument with me. I don't remember the details, but I remember saying that the upcoming Witcher 2 was progressing in a way that was honest to how fans would want it (and at that time, no one expected anything from Witcher 2, not even me really, it was kind of like my Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines getting a sequel and hoping it'd be better). Gaider really dismissed the Witcher series as being anything even close to the Dragon Age, but to his credit he was kind of nice about the guys at CDProjekt. He was just like, "Different tiers of gaming bro" essentially. And the Witcher 2 is where people took notice. Then, of course, the Witcher 3 smashed Dragon Age 3, it wasn't even a competition.

I suppose that's what I love about CDPR. They seem to be in their own "classic" phase, and they promote a love of the fans. It's not like they cater to the fans (many were pissed that Triss was thrown to the background for Yennifer in the third Yennefer, or the Wild Hunt wasn't in a primary enough role). Either they didn't engage or said something like, "yeah, we kind of messed up on the main villains. We learned a lot from that." Which I think is great. On top of that they released a shit ton of free DLC which is unheard of, and their first foray into a season pass was worth more than many new games. Still, despite all that, CDPR knew fans had a core love of certain aspects of the novels and the game that needed balanced: Ciri, Geralt, and Yenn's relationship from the novel. Triss and Geralt's relationship from the games--could still be preserved, though admittedly to the background. Characters like Zoltan, Dandelion, Roche, and Letho all returned and featured prominently. Eskel, Lambert, and Vesemir were there. It was really a balancing of fan expectations, whereas Mass Effect 3 was like, "oh you liked Thane? Well he's basically dead now." I don't know.

If Bioware could step back from hubris and reconnect with fans, I think their games would be top notch. You don't cater and cave to fans, but you understand why certain things (like retconning Qunari--as badass as the new ones might have looked) would bother people.

[DunderMifflin]

Iirc, fallout and mass effect were fairly close in total sales before fallout 4. 

Andromeda looks to do current gen numbers as well. 3milllion projected first week.

Also, in what context does "cartoonish" stop being a putdown? A completely animated shoot em up space game should be too high brow for cartoony stuff?

[Werthead]

 

 

Fallout 3 first month sales 3 million, lifetime sales to date 12.5 million (almost equalling lifetime sales of the entire Mass Effect trilogy). New Vegas first month sales 5 million, lifetime sales 12 million. So quite a big difference in sales. When you add Skyrim (first month sales 7 million, lifetime 30 million), you can see why BioWare decided to try to make Inquisition an open-world title to try to compete.

 

 

[DunderMifflin]

That's not that bad competing with strong franchises that go back to the 90s. 

Also Mass Effect was xbox exclusive up until between 2 and 3.

[Jon AS]

17 hours ago, Werthead said:

Given the many hundreds of thousands of words and lengthy podcasts Seamus Young has created about the trilogy (and his prominent role in criticising the ending in a literate and intelligent way rather than some of the lazier criticisms presented at the time) over a decade, that would be an unsupported criticism.

It really doesn't come across at all in the linked article, though. It mostly reads like a rehash of his original ME2 review.

17 hours ago, Werthead said:

We were told before Mass Effect's release in 2007 that it was going to be a trilogy with a storyline unfolding across the three games. There was certainly a plan in place before the game came out, with Drew Karpsyshyn as the lead writer. The degree to which Mass Effect 2 and 3 were planned during the writing of ME1 is certainly debatable, although I believe Karpyshyn was already writing to the idea that that Reapers would be trying to stop the dark energy unleashed by the mass effect from destroying the galaxy (some stuff in ME1 makes more sense when you know that was the original plan).

The dark energy plot, at least what we can glean of it from the stuff left in the games, was sadly pretty dumb as well. I can totally see someone deciding to scrap it for that reason, only to then come up with something that's in no way better, and quite possibly worse. It's the kind of thing that happens in serialised storytelling. Things change from the initial draft, often or the better*. That they changed as drastically as they did with the ME series suggests to me that whatever story structure they had worked out, it wasn't exactly set in stone.

And the project director stuck with the series throughout, though of course he's apparently at least 50% to blame for the ending.

17 hours ago, Werthead said:

EA taking over BioWare just as they were shipping ME1 clearly had an impact, more noticeably on Dragon Age, but there also seems to have been a push to make ME2 more streamlined and action-oriented, stripping out the RPG elements of ME1 and also removing a lot of lore and worldbuilding in favour of shooting things. The fact the shooting and combat model was prioritised as the first thing developed for ME2 and RPG elements like skills and inventory were dropped back until later is certainly interesting in that regard. Karpyshyn dropping down to co-writer (along with Mac Walters) I put down to the workload of writing and prepping both ME2 and 3 back-to-back, but maybe there was more to it.

I'm sure EA set different priorities than the ones Bioware operated under beforehand, but I find it hard to believe they'd micromanage the storyline to the point of forcing the kind of changes Young bemoans in his article.

There's definitely a shift towards more action-oriented gameplay, though. I figure they were faced with the decision to go with heavier tactical RPG elements or more of a shooter style, because the ME1 system made for a rather unhappy marriage of the two. And shooters sell better. So prioritising that makes a certain amount of sense, as does looking at the ME1 loot and inventory model and asking the simple question of whether it added anything at all to the finished game.

I wish they had improved the exploration element of the first game instead of scrapping it, but I was one of the few people who didn't mind the Mako. I just wanted more interesting worlds where there was actual stuff to do besides shooting random mercs and thresher maws.

 

*There's of course a kind of fundamentalist subset of video game fandom, one that has often been quite vocal in Bioware fandom, which holds that every scrap of code or dialogue that can be found in a game file but is not part of the actual finished product is some kind of work of genius that has been cruelly denied to us by malicious corporate execs. Sometimes the stuff they unearth is definitely worth a look, but sometimes it turns out more like the droid planet in KOTOR2.

[briantw]

2 hours ago, Simon Steele said:

That's interesting--I had no idea Mass Effect's sales were so low, comparably, I always assumed it competed with most games (aside from CODs and the like). Wow, that's really underperforming. And too bad, because it's, ultimately, a great series. I think the stance with the fans doesn't help.

I did know Dragon Age couldn't compete with Witcher--which is crazy considering where the Witcher came from--the first game was released a couple of years before the first Dragon age, so if you held them as comparisons, many people would laugh. I remember, actually, being a toxic fan once on Bioware forums once in this very regard. I opened an account and commented on there when Dragon Age 2 was being promoted. I remember being upset that the Qunari were being retconned, and I expressed that (not in any nasty way of course), and David Gaider got REALLY offended and got into a huge argument with me. I don't remember the details, but I remember saying that the upcoming Witcher 2 was progressing in a way that was honest to how fans would want it (and at that time, no one expected anything from Witcher 2, not even me really, it was kind of like my Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines getting a sequel and hoping it'd be better). Gaider really dismissed the Witcher series as being anything even close to the Dragon Age, but to his credit he was kind of nice about the guys at CDProjekt. He was just like, "Different tiers of gaming bro" essentially. And the Witcher 2 is where people took notice. Then, of course, the Witcher 3 smashed Dragon Age 3, it wasn't even a competition.

I suppose that's what I love about CDPR. They seem to be in their own "classic" phase, and they promote a love of the fans. It's not like they cater to the fans (many were pissed that Triss was thrown to the background for Yennifer in the third Yennefer, or the Wild Hunt wasn't in a primary enough role). Either they didn't engage or said something like, "yeah, we kind of messed up on the main villains. We learned a lot from that." Which I think is great. On top of that they released a shit ton of free DLC which is unheard of, and their first foray into a season pass was worth more than many new games. Still, despite all that, CDPR knew fans had a core love of certain aspects of the novels and the game that needed balanced: Ciri, Geralt, and Yenn's relationship from the novel. Triss and Geralt's relationship from the games--could still be preserved, though admittedly to the background. Characters like Zoltan, Dandelion, Roche, and Letho all returned and featured prominently. Eskel, Lambert, and Vesemir were there. It was really a balancing of fan expectations, whereas Mass Effect 3 was like, "oh you liked Thane? Well he's basically dead now." I don't know.

If Bioware could step back from hubris and reconnect with fans, I think their games would be top notch. You don't cater and cave to fans, but you understand why certain things (like retconning Qunari--as badass as the new ones might have looked) would bother people.

I think the important thing when you make a creative product for customers is that, while you don't always have to do what your customers want you to, you at least need to be respectful toward their opinions.  The issue that BioWare has run into since the Mass Effect 3 debacle is that they are just downright dismissive of their fans.  They were just total dicks about the ME3 ending, and it seems their attitude toward their fans hasn't changed much since.

[Jasta11]

Mass Effect definitely suffered from changing writers so much. Even if you ignore the ending (which is hard), there's still loads of things that changed in between games, such as Liara going from naive archeologist to a freaking information broker from 1 to 2, or the Geth going from a genuinly different alien species in 2 to robot pinocchios in 3. The series started to collapse under the weight of its baggage towards 3.

The problem is that you can't simulateneously plan for a trilogy from the get-go, yet make your plot up as you go along. That's how you get weird stuff like the above, or jarring idiocies like being ''killed'' and forced to work with Cerberus in 2. Or how the Reapers are pretty much absent from 2, and crash land during the first 10 minutes of 3 where we also, by coincidence, discover the anti-Reaper plot device literally right after.

Dragon Age kept its lead writer from games 1 to 3, and it shows. That series is much more internally consistent and flows far better from one game to the next (even if not in the gameplay department). There's been some support since Origins for some of the big lore reveals that have happened in Inquisition. That's a level of planning ahead you simply did not see in Mass Effect.

[Pliskin]

On 04/02/2017 at 8:02 PM, Azzanadra said:

Basically the franchise has been put on hiatus due to the poor sales of Mankind Divided, Eidos Montreal is working on the next Tomb Raider.

Wait what? What about Crystal Dynamics?

[Fez]

32 minutes ago, Pliskin said:

Wait what? What about Crystal Dynamics?

They're working on some big new Marvel video game.

The quest for a decent licensed game continues...