Mass Effect 3 (Seriously, Use Spoilers People!)

[Yakk]

Barriers must suck for you.

[maybeagnostic]

Barriers must suck for you.

Haven't found anything that beats barries yet. Well, except asari adepts and rocket launchers but those destroy everything.

[ArgonV]

Isn't concussive shot supposed to be effective against barriers? Not that I've ever actually noticed that.

[Yakk]

Warp also mentions being good against barriers, if I recall correctly.

[maybeagnostic]

I've tried out both in ME2 and neither seemed too helpful. In ME3 two maxed out warps don't quite take down the barrier of a phantom on bronze. I still haven't started single-player yet. Maybe enemies in mp are just much harder to kill.

[An Enraged Platypus]

I had no problems importing my ME2 Shepherd, although it did look a bit different than it did in the previous game.

Spoilerific:

Spoiler:

I has a sad. Mordin died to cure the genophage. He died singing Scientist Salarian.

Also, fuck reaper brutes. Fuck them with a rusty spoon. They're horrifyingly dangerous and I had to fight like a dozen of them at the same time in the cure genophage mission. I had to lower the combat difficulty to get through that bit.

In my game too.

Spoiler:

Fuck the Reapers. Seriously.

[Xanthir]

In the demo you could choose all the aspects of a quick game too. It would be kinda useless if you couldn't choose difficulty, after all - golds are *impossible* without a good character and good teammates.

How can you choose them? And, yes, every gold game I have started I was completely unprepared for. My favorite was when my level 1 vanguard was dropped into a wave 4 gold match surrounded by 3 bleeding teammates, two engineers and three phantoms. That lasted about three seconds.

At least in the demo, when you selected quickmatch you got sent to a screen with four boxes on the left detailing the choices. Up/down on your left stick selects a box, left/right changes the option.

[An Enraged Platypus]

RE: Phantoms. Max overload takes out the barriers on a Phantom. For favourite, get an adept to Stasis them and an Infiltrator to shoot it in the head from cloak.

[Lucrece]

In the BSN spoiler group, one of the leakers that has already done 5 playthroughs seems to have clarified for those confused that it is possible to get 4k SP in ME3, it's just very hard when you import choices that may complicate things.

So, yeah, if you don't want to be too stressed about getting that magic number, 30 mins-1hr of multiplayer will do the trick for you. You can still join and be carried without much detriment to a party at certain levels in MP so it shouldn't be a big hassle even if you're not a good player.

[Obby]

Spoilerific:

Spoiler:

I has a sad. Mordin died to cure the genophage. He died singing Scientist Salarian.

Also, fuck reaper brutes. Fuck them with a rusty spoon. They're horrifyingly dangerous and I had to fight like a dozen of them at the same time in the cure genophage mission. I had to lower the combat difficulty to get through that bit.

Same.

Spoiler:

For that part, I killed like 5 or 6 of them, then literally just said "fuck this" and sprinted through the rest to activate the hammers. They all disappear once you hit the second one.

And I really, really wish there was a way to tell the Salarian Dalatrass to go fuck herself. Seriously, stop being a xenophobic cunt.

Though I do have to say, I was also pretty pissed when the Turian primarch's son sacrificed himself to stop the bomb from exploding. I liked him.

[SlyReaper]

Spoilerific:

Spoiler:

I has a sad. Mordin died to cure the genophage. He died singing Scientist Salarian.

Also, fuck reaper brutes. Fuck them with a rusty spoon. They're horrifyingly dangerous and I had to fight like a dozen of them at the same time in the cure genophage mission. I had to lower the combat difficulty to get through that bit.

Same.

Spoiler:

For that part, I killed like 5 or 6 of them, then literally just said "fuck this" and sprinted through the rest to activate the hammers. They all disappear once you hit the second one.

And I really, really wish there was a way to tell the Salarian Dalatrass to go fuck herself. Seriously, stop being a xenophobic cunt.

Though I do have to say, I was also pretty pissed when the Turian primarch's son sacrificed himself to stop the bomb from exploding. I liked him.

Spoiler:

I was pissed about the primarch's son dying because I thought it would make it harder to get the primarch to commit forces to my cause. I thought the boy himself was nothing special. And yeah, that Salarian Dalatrass needs to get her head out of her cloaca.

For the multiplayer, I've started trying out the vanguard. I've never played vanguard in any of the Mass Effect games before, and now I know what I was missing. That biotic charge is just ridiculously powerful, especially when followed up by that biotic punch the ground shockwave thing that I can't remember the name of. The only reason I thought of it was because I was playing with someone doing that and he was getting all the kills.

My galactic readiness is 80% now, and I've not played that many MP games. I'm starting to resent it less.

[Lucrece]

Yup, it's really not a grind. People are blowing the "I'm forced to grind in MP!" Out of proportion. At best a day or two of MP will make your campaign significantly easier, so it's not a huge unpleasant commitment.

[Vaniver]

So... ME3 didn't launch with a 64bit .exe. You have to update it. [/rage] At least that problem was fixed easily.

So, I had to do Responsible Adult things and so didn't get to play until today. I've been playing for ~12 hours now.

Genophage spoilers:

Spoiler:

So... the decision about the cure for the Krogan genophage. I had saved Maelon's research, and Mordin (well, everyone) survived the Collector Base, so Mordin was able to both come up with the cure and save Eve, and then the Salarian Dalatrass shows up with a plan.

In all the discussions so far, it's seemed obvious that the Krogans are bad news, and the less of them there are, the better. The projections the Salarians ran were done back when the Krogan were normal, and so it's reasonable to expect them to still be relevant. (If anything, things are probably worse now, since the selection pressure for Krogans has not been in a peaceful direction.) And so... I didn't want to cure them.

But Mordin? Oh, Mordin. You were my second favorite. Why did you make me shoot you, Mordin? You deserved better.

One more body amongst foundations makes little difference.

(It tore me up inside that you had around five different opportunities to give up on the sabotage. While the first four were dialogue options, and so relatively easy to avoid, the last one was... passive. That is, you had to renegade interrupt to continue with the sabotage.)

[SlyReaper]

I can understand the ire though. It does feel like they're penalizing players who prefer to just do the single player. I think the idea was that you could complete the single player campaign either by spending loads of time in the single player, or by spending moderate amounts of time in both single and multi. Trying to cater for both play styles. But the way they've implemented it means it's nearly impossible to get the best ending without doing some multiplayer. Apparently you have to do every shitting little side quest, probe every system, and generally be an obsessive completionist to get the best ending.

But I've still not finished my single player campaign yet (released during the week, only able to play in the evenings), so I don't know.

Edit, @vaniver:

Spoiler:

I spilled the beans about the sabotage and Mordin died anyway. In this case, he had to go to the top of the tower to fix the sabotaged system, knowing he'd never get out of there before it exploded. I wonder how that mission would have played out if Mordin had died on the collector ship in ME2.

[VectorZero]

Apparently you have to do every shitting little side quest, probe every system, and generally be an obsessive completionist to get the best ending.

Pretty much the way I play anyway.

Is there any way known to reduce the galaxy at war %age? If you want to see the bad ending, does it have to be before playing mp?

[SlyReaper]

I think you'll get the bad ending if you trigger the ending as soon as it's available without doing side quests. Again, I'm not sure exactly how it works because I'm not at that point yet.

Alternatively, watch the bad ending on YouTube. I think the whole end fight and aftermath are done as just one big cutscene which depends on your effective military strength at the time it was triggered, so someone will have uploaded all the endings onto YouTube.

In other news, I just found out my phone autocorrects YouTube to have capital letters.

[Obby]

Apparently you have to do every shitting little side quest, probe every system, and generally be an obsessive completionist to get the best ending.

Pretty much the way I play anyway.

Is there any way known to reduce the galaxy at war %age? If you want to see the bad ending, does it have to be before playing mp?

I think the percentage bottoms out at 50%. The more MP you do, the more percentage you gain, but that percentage slowly decays over time (I believe it's 1% per day of not doing a multiplayer match, at least that's what it's been for me).

RE: Cerberus

Spoiler:

ALL you motherfuckers are gonna die. Every last one of you. You killed Thane, and now you all will die the slowest death I can imagine.

At least Thane died being the baddest-assed motherfucker ever.

[maybeagnostic]

So I finally started the single player. Impressions from the first mission and some conversations with teammates follow:

Spoiler:

• I still can't get used to Ashley's new appearance. Why is she the only Alliance soldier not wearing a uniform? I really hope there is some reason for that.
• The reaper-destroying prothean device is such a cop out. Liara spends so much time lampshading it that it makes me think the writers weren't happy with this solution either.
• On that note the conversations with Liara are all over the place in tone- from intimate in the middle of a gunfight to awkward and confused to that one conversation where I had no idea what Liara OR Shepard were talking about. So far it seems to be intentional so I assume it's not just badly fit-together personalized vs generic dialogue.
• Conversations in general seem much more limited. Most only have one input and there is always a binary 'paragon or renegade' decision that doesn't even come until the conversation is almost over anyway. Really not happy about this.
• The interview on the Citadel is, so far, the best example of this. In previous game you had this exact same situation with 4-5 different topics your Shepard can express an opinion on. In this game you have a single paragon or renegade QTE. Choosing the renegade option and having her kick your ass was hilarious though. The paragon pat-on-the-shoulder-and-bland-sympathy approach wasn't nearly as satisfying.
• Combat is much improved. I had to replay the final mission of ME2 right before importing my character to ME3 and the difference is huge. Of course, that was already apparent from the mp which is more fun than the single player so far. Maybe I am just a sucker for co-op mode.
• That dream sequence with the little kid had me laughing so hard.I guess that makes me heartless but I really don't care about that one specific kid I know almost nothing about. The C-sec commander made me care more about Earth in that one line mention of his kids than the pointless slow mo dream sequence did in the however long I spent sauntering around the forest.

Vanguards are amazing at bronze difficulty because they can even beat an infiltrator to the kill. On silver you have to be very careful where and when you charge and nova unless you want to get poked full of bullets. On gold the main use of charge is to get as far away as possible from the most powerful enemies, anything else is suicide. I am playing vanguard in the sp and any use of nova that doesn't kill off the final enemy loses me 2+ health bars. I probably just haven't gotten the hang of the vanguard yet but charging when there are more than two enemies around regularly proves to be suicide.

[Belial]

So I got amazon to refund me and grabbed the non-CE. Whoever is currently enjoying my CE, I hope it somehow gives you smallpox.

Anyway...

Spoiler:

The paragon pat-on-the-shoulder-and-bland-sympathy approach wasn't nearly as satisfying.

Spoiler:

I thought it was brilliant. Shepard looked through all of Khalisah's Aggro Fox News bluster and saw the scared little girl underneath. Then she reached through the appearance, patted that little girl on the shoulder, and told her she could just stop. Hush. It'll be okay.

And then sent her on her way.

In its way, it was a much, much better shut-down than the headbutt ever would be.

[An Enraged Platypus]

Massive spoilers. Do not read unless the war has advanced a lot.

Spoiler:

ALL you motherfuckers are gonna die. Every last one of you. You killed Thane, and now you all will die the slowest death I can imagine.

At least Thane died being the baddest-assed motherfucker ever.

Spoiler:

I almost choked up by his hospital bed. It's been a long time since a video game had that effect on me; I'm curious how it plays out when I do my FemShep run, seeing as he was her romance in ME2.

Also, who the jumping fuck is Kai Leng? Not having read the books or comics he seems ludicrously out of place. I mean, come on - a guy with a Chinese name wielding a Katana, with those permanent emo-mascara eye implants? I want to kill him so badly, both for being a blatant Marty Stu and for Thane.

[maybeagnostic]

Spoiler:

In its way, it was a much, much better shut-down than the headbutt ever would be.

Spoiler:

Oh, no, she kicks Shepard's ass this time. You take the renegade QTE (which I thought would be confronting her about her attitude but Shepard actually tried to punch her), she dodges the punch and while I stared in astonishment (and missed a pretty short second renegade QTE) knocks Shepard downs, says something along the lines of "Not this time, asshole" and walks away.

I wasn't so much disappointed by the paragon option but the lack of interview before that. The previous two interviews really showed me (or let me express?) Shepard's opinions on what is happening and I am sorry to miss this opportunity.

[Belial]

Spoiler:

Yeah, if you catch the second renegade interrupt, you headbutt her

[SirBryghtside]

YES! ME3 just arrived, a day early!

Now I just have to pray to Azura that it works already...

Edit: Nope

[An Enraged Platypus]

On the new guns:

Spoiler:

Is it just me, or is the Incisor the most pointless sniper rifle ever? Three shot burst on a sniper rifle, really? I can get that with a scoped M-97 assault rifle without using up a slot that could contain, say, a Widow or a Mantis.

[Belial]

Spoiler:

Yeah, it made sense when it was impossible to scope any other weapons. That is not true anymore.

Also, I don't understand why, if we're just limited by weight now, we can still only have one weapon of each type. What if I want to spend my weight allowance on three different assault rifles with different properties? Maybe one scoped and one that's fire-able close-up.

[Dauric]

Not sure how many people have it on XBox, or have used the Kinect for the voice command, but it does have some.. frustratingly amusing results...

Ashley had gotten stuck behind some crates in a small room, her pathfinding kept running her between two corners instead of turning around and going between the crates.

Out of frustration I said out loud "Ashley you're an idiot."

She threw a grenade.

...

Apparently there's no friendly fire (or I'm not playing it at high enough difficulty to have friendly fire) but if there was she probably would have posthumously proved my point...

[maybeagnostic]

The game does seem to have a lot of trouble with path finding or just movement in general. The first mission had a part where you have to climb up three levels of boxes to get to the next floor. Ashley and I climbed successfully, Liara climbed two levels of boxes and got stuck. Nothing I did would make her move after that until I got to a cut scene and she was just teleported next me for the dialogue. Later I had a conversation with Joker and then Shepard wouldn't move any more even though I could look around and talk to Joker. Several reloads didn't fix the problem but playing a round of multiplayer did for some reason.

[ArgonV]

YES! ME3 just arrived, a day early!

Now I just have to pray to Azura that it works already...

Edit: Nope

Strange. Worked fine for me

[Belial]

From Ashes Spoiler

Spoiler:

I am glad to find out that the Protheans were giant, unmitigated cocks. I think Javik is going to be the Morrigan of my party.

[omgryebread]

From Ashes Spoiler

Spoiler:

I am glad to find out that the Protheans were giant, unmitigated cocks. I think Javik is going to be the Morrigan of my party.

Spoiler:

God, that was refreshing. I'm so used to the wise-ancient-race thing, I didn't even dread the Protheans being it, because the archetype so ingrained it didn't occur to me there could be other options. Unfortunately, I got the impression that Javik was the exact same character as Velanna from DAO:A. That's not too bad, as she was awesome, but the backstory and personality seem extremely similar, though I'm not far in ME3 at all yet.

The whole requiring multiplayer thing is lame for me, at least. I don't like playing Co-Op games like this with strangers, and the only person I would want to play with is the person whose copy of the game I am playing.

[Xanthir]

Once again, it doesn't require multiplayer. It is possible, though rather difficult, to get the best ending without any MP at all. Playing MP for an hour or two before you finish the game should make it quite a bit easier, though.

The MP is pretty fun, though!

[Obby]

At least on the bronze level matches, I seem to be earning 4% galactic readiness per match, regardless of whether I win or lose. I'm not sure why, really, but whatever. Each bronze match is taking me about 20 minutes, so I figure I can max out my galactic readyness in a good afternoon of MP.

[Dauric]

Once again, it doesn't require multiplayer. It is possible, though rather difficult, to get the best ending without any MP at all. Playing MP for an hour or two before you finish the game should make it quite a bit easier, though.

The MP is pretty fun, though!

omgryebread's thing isn't that MP is or isn't fun (according to the post above), it's a dislike of playing co-op with strangers which is an entirely personal judgement call and no more wrong or right than anyone else's.

It's an interesting idea, but... having things cross between SP and MP the way ME3 does it isn't very common which means pretty much every time it's tried it's kind of experimental.

In general I'm against mandatory, or even "Significantly easier SP.." online gameplay because broadband is hardly universal. There's plenty of places that don't have good internet access, like my parents' house out in rural Colorado. They get internet through a satellite dish, uplink and downlink so there's about 1 second of lag between pushing the button and seeing the result which makes online play impossible (Satellite downlink and phone uplink is hampered by the poor maintainence and quality of the phone lines, and the cable company has yet to lay cable out there).

IMO. It wouldn't have been that difficult to have included some sort of "random battlefield" levels in single-player where you essentially pick an entire squad and then have a single-player battle strictly to change the galactic readiness levels for single-player (wouldn't have an effect on MP characters). People interested in Multiplayer would still play online to chat with friends and socialize, but it wouldn't penalize people who don't like online play, or have crappy internet and can't join in.

[Xanthir]

Note: multiplayer doesn't require multiple players either. If you're the last person left in the lobby, you can still play. It's really hard, but hey.

[An Enraged Platypus]

At least on the bronze level matches, I seem to be earning 4% galactic readiness per match, regardless of whether I win or lose. I'm not sure why, really, but whatever. Each bronze match is taking me about 20 minutes, so I figure I can max out my galactic readyness in a good afternoon of MP.

I get the same for silver. Generally, though, the average standard of play seems less than it was on the demo. SP spoiler (related):

Spoiler:

Also, I have yet to encounter the Geth in MP, although I have not talked to them or the Quarians in SP. Does anyone know if encountering an enemy in SP unlocks it for MP?

[maybeagnostic]

At least on the bronze level matches, I seem to be earning 4% galactic readiness per match, regardless of whether I win or lose. I'm not sure why, really, but whatever. Each bronze match is taking me about 20 minutes, so I figure I can max out my galactic readyness in a good afternoon of MP.

I get the same for silver. Generally, though, the average standard of play seems less than it was on the demo. SP spoiler (related):

Weird. I've been getting 3% for the last few games and 2% for the very last. I think the higher your readiness rating, the less bonus you get from a game. My rating hit 91% with the last game which was the 6th I won. I also lost a few in the beginning when I (and everyone else) was level 1 but I didn't know what the readiness rating was yet so I don't remember how much of it I got.

Spoiler:

Also, I have yet to encounter the Geth in MP, although I have not talked to them or the Quarians in SP. Does anyone know if encountering an enemy in SP unlocks it for MP?

No, you can just select your enemies in MP (Cerberus, Geth and Reaper). Geth seem more rare but I have played a few games against them. If you want to fight them just select Geth on the enemy Quick game screen. You will lose the +5000 point bonus for an unknown enemy but... well, I still haven't figured out what those bonuses do so I doubt its a big deal.

You can't play mp by yourself without an internet connection and even if you are the host you can still get dropped from the ME servers. Happened to me a few times, quite annoying.

[F117Landers]

If you want to fight them just select Geth on the enemy Quick game screen. You will lose the +5000 point bonus for an unknown enemy but... well, I still haven't figured out what those bonuses do so I doubt its a big deal.

The points allow for you to unlock packs in the store, which give you random weapons, mods, power ups, classes, etc.
In regards to the whole Multiplayer affects singleplayer, I wouldn't really have so much of a problem with it if I could just have 3 buddies on my console.

Actually, I'm pretty much against the idea of online access requirements for anything other than Multiplayer (such as the CoD Constant Internet access DRM), but that's only because consider each game purchase an investment, one that I should be able to use whenever, wherever I want (imagine if Goldeneye required you to validate your game with a server).

[maybeagnostic]

If you want to fight them just select Geth on the enemy Quick game screen. You will lose the +5000 point bonus for an unknown enemy but... well, I still haven't figured out what those bonuses do so I doubt its a big deal.

The points allow for you to unlock packs in the store, which give you random weapons, mods, power ups, classes, etc.

No, credit awards are unrelated to the points you get. You receive them for completing the in-game missions with bonus credits for completing them faster.

[Dauric]

If you want to fight them just select Geth on the enemy Quick game screen. You will lose the +5000 point bonus for an unknown enemy but... well, I still haven't figured out what those bonuses do so I doubt its a big deal.

The points allow for you to unlock packs in the store, which give you random weapons, mods, power ups, classes, etc.

No, credit awards are unrelated to the points you get. You receive them for completing the in-game missions with bonus credits for completing them faster.

Is it the tech/biotic skills? Credits for guns and gear and exp points for abilities are the only two point-pools that I can think of.

[maybeagnostic]

But I don't think either of those pools is influenced by your score in the round. For example you get ~1000ish points for killing a phantom (if you deal all the damage), +1000 points for getting 25 assists, +5000 points for fighting an unknown enemy and other kinds of stuff. That doesn't directly influence your xp, at least not linearly, as far as I can tell.