Mass Effect 3 live-ishblog
Happy Mass Effect 3 day! Here I am, playing it. I’m also bitching about it, because bitching is the bestest. I’ll hide the rest of this post behind the New York Times paywall a jump so you don’t get your face spoiled if you’re not into that sort of thing.
Hey! Welcome back. So the first thing I’ve noticed is that the goddamn thing requires goddamn Origin to be installed and running or it won’t work. That’s just insulting. If I wanted to use your fly-by-night Steam ripoff, I would. But I don’t. Because it’s ass. Also, once you actually get the game started, it does a "connecting to server" act that’s just as slow as the one at the beginning of Mass Effect 2, but at least doesn’t prevent you from interacting with the game while it’s going on. Oh, and it doesn’t fail 80% of the time either, which is a nice change of pace.
But you know what does fail 80% of the time? Actually, 100% of the time? Goddamn face importing. That’s right, food friends — you can import your Mass Effect 2 savegame and it’ll get everything else right, but the game is completely unable to solve your custom appearance, and it’ll make you rebuild the whole thing from scratch. It also seems like some of the choices aren’t there anymore, since I wasn’t able to get mine quite the same. Also also, the lighting is way way weird on the face customisation screen, and your skin is many shades lighter in-game than it appears while you’re configuring it. Which is bizarre.
Once the game begins, you see a cutscene that would be pretty keen had Bioware not spoiled it in the goddamn banner ads. Seriously, Bioware, what are you thinking? It wasn’t hard enough to avoid spoilers about the ME2 intro, so you decided to spoil this one on every web site in the universe and also signage on buses? And the front cover of the kooky metal keep case the game discs came in because I ordered a physical copy specifically to avoid installing Origin which you made me do anyway? Go fuck yourselves and have a good day.
Oh, I see I start at level 30. Don’t know that I appreciate that. I’d really rather be able to import my character but start over from level 1. Ah well. Skills are way more detailed than they were in Mass Effect 2, but… WEIGHT CAPACITY? WHAT IS THIS SHIT? Hey, here’s my impersonation of the original Mass Effect:
Dune buggy dune buggy dune buggy HAY YOUR INVENTORY’S FULL convert to Omni-gel convert to Omni-gel convert to Omni-gel dune buggy dune buggy HAY YOUR INVENTORY’S FULL convert to Omni-gel convert to Omni-gel dune buggy dune buggy whoops missus giant moon worm spawned right below you you are dead time to reload dune buggy dune buggy HAY YOUR INVENTORY’S FULL
Take your weight capacity and blow it out your airlock.
So weight capacity’s not as awful as I thought; it’s involved in some complicated weapon loadout management. The more weight you take, weapon-wise, the longer your powers take to cool. Interesting. It’s not presently clear to me if companions need to care about weight at all.
Load times are way lower than in Mass Effect 2. That’s nice. Sadly, the loading screens are less fun. Can’t win ’em all.
Apparently I’m collecting stuff to help the war effort! Sweet! I’m prepared to bring my stacks of Heavy Runecloth Bandages and Grilled Yellowtail to the ambassador in Ironforge so we can get those gates open!
It’s nice to have a crew member who swears in foreign languages. It’s like Firefly. Or, well, Star Trek: Voyager, but I think we’re all still trying to forget that.
It looks like they’ve removed the limitation on how long you can storm when not in combat. That’s nice. It was sort of bullshit how, in Mass Effect 2, you could storm for less time and at a slower speed when you weren’t getting shot at.
Holy shit, this game has mopey black-and-white spooky ghost-y dream sequences. That reminds me of something. So, yeah, Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 were about shooting aliens until they’re dead; Mass Effect 3, on the other hand, appears to be about Commander Shepard making a Lifetime Original Movie about schizophrenia.
Also, wait, how long is the goddamn intro sequence? This whole game’s a bunch of movies, for crying out loud. Let me run around and fly around and shoot around and sleep around, Bioware. That’s what we do in Mass Effect, for pity’s sake! If I wanted to watch movies about giant sentient spaceships eating the galaxy, I’d watch… uh.
Specialist Traynor is oddball. She’s a much more interesting character than Kelly Chambers was. And the way her eyes move when she’s talking makes me think she has a sinister ulterior motive… but I’m pretty sure she’s not actually a Reaper. Probably it’s just a new manifestation of the same weirdness that caused me to think everybody was up to No Good back in the original Mass Effect.
So apparently the Alliance sends its really important e-mails in all caps like a twelve-year-old boy. Wait, no, that makes sense. Never mind.
Joker’s still a penis. That’s nice. Wouldn’t want all that character development he had in Mass Effect 2 to convince Bioware to make him more likable.
Ah, they’ve finally given Doctor Chakwas an end-of-conversation animation that isn’t super strange. Nice lady like that, she deserves it.
Hey, my head’s just started whipping side-to-side in this conversation. And my eyes aren’t pointing in the same direction very often. I look like one of those crazy ninja zombies from Big Trouble In Little China.
Uh. So I guess "reputation" is now a thing, and it’s entirely separate from paragon and renegade. I don’t get it. I imagine it’ll become clear in the fullness of time.
HAMSTER! Shit yeah!
