Soooo....Mass Effect 3

[[wcip]Angel]

This is getting ridiculous:
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/mass-e...ect/727583

[Bolty]

Game's out today. While gaming critic reviews are generally positive, early player reviews are overwhelmingly negative. To an extreme extent: at the time of this posting, 402 negative to 96 positive on Metacritic. Compare that to the user scores for ME2: 78 negative to 1,048 positive. To be honest, I enjoy saying "I told you so" as much as the next guy, so I was starting to get a kick out of it...but even I don't want this. I want to have a game I can eventually enjoy someday when I don't feel that I'm being gouged by EA. These reviews are just consistently describing the game as a pile of trash:

This game is an irredeemable mess from start to finish. The animations and writing are a massive joke, even compared to the first 2 games. Don't get me wrong, I loved Mass Effect 1 and 2, but that's why I'm so incredibly disappointed. This is the last Bioware product I will ever play, they shown with SW TOR that they're incompetent at what they do, and this is just the icing on the cake.

Wow. Just wow. Bioware, EA, and gaming journalism in general have all reached a new low. It's almost sad, but I want to see where this tragic drama will end. I mean seriously, the gameplay is awful and the story is an abomination. I don't get it, i can't believe they could mess up as bad as they have. I hated ME2 back in the day for being too dumbed down, but even that was better than this. The only way I could get enjoyment out of this game is if I played it with the same mindset as I would Superman 64. And really, I don't know whether I should find this funny or depressing. It's a joke to be sure, but it's what that joke means that's truly sad. This will be the last Bioware product I even pay attention to. And don't get me started on DLC that you need to get the best ending and other such snot. This game is awful. Truly, truly awful. And those 'journalists' whose pockets are being lined with EA money even as we speak should be ashamed.

Sigh. F*** you, EA. Always.

[Jester]

Game's out today. While gaming critic reviews are generally positive, early player reviews are overwhelmingly negative. To an extreme extent: at the time of this posting, 402 negative to 96 positive on Metacritic.

Wow. That's a lot of hate, for a game that came out... today. Are we sure they're not just being bombed, trolled, or both?

-Jester

[Lissa]

Game's out today. While gaming critic reviews are generally positive, early player reviews are overwhelmingly negative. To an extreme extent: at the time of this posting, 402 negative to 96 positive on Metacritic.

Wow. That's a lot of hate, for a game that came out... today. Are we sure they're not just being bombed, trolled, or both?

-Jester

I agree. Even if they could download at midnight (let's go with eastern for sake of ease), that's only 15 hours. You can't tell me that you could have completed the game in that time period *and* saved the galaxy considering what Bioware has said. The main story arc in both ME 1 and ME 2 took about 20 hours each without considering the side quests (which probably added between 50% and 100% to the time making the game from 30 to 40 hours on a single play through). I think Jester is right.

[Quark]

Game's out today. While gaming critic reviews are generally positive, early player reviews are overwhelmingly negative. To an extreme extent: at the time of this posting, 402 negative to 96 positive on Metacritic. Compare that to the user scores for ME2: 78 negative to 1,048 positive. To be honest, I enjoy saying "I told you so" as much as the next guy, so I was starting to get a kick out of it...but even I don't want this.

No shit, sherlock. Have you paid attention the Metacritic for any seriously hyped game in the past few years? It's always like this. Metacritic is trash.

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/call-o...-warfare-3
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/star-w...d-republic
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/dragon-age-ii
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/world-...-cataclysm

Say what you will about any of these games - they didn't deserve the "user" score they got.

Oh look, this came up a few months ago. Actually, there's stories of this for tons of games (Skyward Sword, Battlefield 3, Bastion, etc) but Metacritic has since deleted the offending negative reviews, hiding how dumb their system is and instead putting bandaids on it.

[Quark]

I'm remembering FFXIII had a sub-3.0 score at some point, too.

[Bolty]

Cool, then. Hopefully it's just haters.

[[wcip]Angel]

I'm remembering FFXIII had a sub-3.0 score at some point, too.

What's your point?


ME3 scores:
Gametrailers gave an astounding 9.5.
Same with IGN (9.5)
Giantbomb gave 4/5 stars
Gamespot 9.0

Haven't played the game yet myself, so I can't comment on these just yet.

[Jester]

What's your point?

ME3 scores:
Gametrailers gave an astounding 9.5.
Same with IGN (9.5)
Giantbomb gave 4/5 stars
Gamespot 9.0

In fairness, the critics have blown things epically before. Did anyone actually try to play the frustrating sack of crap that was Black and White? Got killer scores from all the critics. It just wasn't any good.

Haters gonna hate, hypesters gonna hype.

-Jester

[Lissa]

What's your point?

ME3 scores:
Gametrailers gave an astounding 9.5.
Same with IGN (9.5)
Giantbomb gave 4/5 stars
Gamespot 9.0

In fairness, the critics have blown things epically before. Did anyone actually try to play the frustrating sack of crap that was Black and White? Got killer scores from all the critics. It just wasn't any good.

Haters gonna hate, hypesters gonna hype.

-Jester

I wouldn't say Black and White was utter crap, it had a very steep learning curve, but I agree, it wasn't as good as the critics made it out to be.

But yes, your last line is very true of just about any game.

[Chesspiece_face]

I wouldn't say Black and White was utter crap, it had a very steep learning curve, but I agree, it wasn't as good as the critics made it out to be.

But yes, your last line is very true of just about any game.

Black & White was a brilliant game, nearly 10 years before it's time, but it suffered from some pretty serious control issues (even at that time) and tried to force contemporary gameplay structures onto what would have been a 5 star sandbox environment. The cardinal sin of Black & White was when they tried to shoehorn "challenge" into the game by taking everything you had built up and reset you back to 0.

[Jester]

Black & White was a brilliant game, nearly 10 years before it's time, but it suffered from some pretty serious control issues (even at that time) and tried to force contemporary gameplay structures onto what would have been a 5 star sandbox environment.

We are now 10 years past the release of Black and White, and it doesn't look ahead of it's time. It looks stranded in time, an overambitious experiment whose results went nowhere. Who else has tried for 1st person simcity? Trainable learning AI? Iconless control? Almost none of the things in that game have become standard. The genre itself is practically dead, except for some wacky Nintendo experiments like Pikmin. I guess the gesture system was ahead of its time? Even that's still kind of iffy.

There was nothing 5-star about that game except Peter Molyneux' self-opinion.

-Jester

[NiteFox]

I'm remembering FFXIII had a sub-3.0 score at some point, too.

What's your point?


ME3 scores:
Gametrailers gave an astounding 9.5.
Same with IGN (9.5)
Giantbomb gave 4/5 stars
Gamespot 9.0

Haven't played the game yet myself, so I can't comment on these just yet.

Eurogamer: 10/10
PC Gamer UK: 93%
Notoriously difficult to please Edge: 8/10.

Also, could everyone please remember that the game isn't out in the UK and Europe until this Friday please?

[Bolty]

Cool, then. Hopefully it's just haters.

http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/06/metacr...r-reviews/

Looks like Quark called it.

[Maitre]

We are now 10 years past the release of Black and White, and it doesn't look ahead of it's time. It looks stranded in time, an overambitious experiment whose results went nowhere. Who else has tried for 1st person simcity? Trainable learning AI? Iconless control? Almost none of the things in that game have become standard. The genre itself is practically dead, except for some wacky Nintendo experiments like Pikmin. I guess the gesture system was ahead of its time? Even that's still kind of iffy.

There was nothing 5-star about that game except Peter Molyneux' self-opinion.

-Jester

Kind of iffy? Everytime I swipe the screen of a smartphone, I think of whacking the crap out of a lion for eating someone. Everytime I see squad commands in tactical shooters and lament the terrible decisions the squad makes in choosing their chest high walls, I think of a cow wandering back and forth between a field and a granery with absolutely no idea what it should be doing. And when I look at the convoluted conversaion/moral/rep system in Mass Effect, I'm reminded about the decision I had to make about whether to accept a human sacrifice from my loyal subjects (warning, the choice you make probably won't have the consequence you think it will).

I have no idea whether any of those have a direct relationship to the overall progress of game development, but to me, I see things in Black&White that seem to be implemented in newer games. I'll agree it was not a great game, but I disagree with the idea that it wasn't any fun. Yes, there were serious issues with the controls (lofting a projectile was nearly impossible to distinguish from flinging a worm-burner, for example, or hoping that twisting the camera just a bit more would let the game figure out that you wanted a large hut rather than a school), but it still had moments of great joy (flinging wolves into the ocean, or "Disciple: Breeder" which made me laugh every time).

A quick re-read of my post is making me realize just how partisan it may seem. Eh, I guess you can count me as one in the bag for B&W. And I even tried to bring it back to the original thread topic...

So ME3, huh? Anyone have a PC that will run it?

[Jester]

Kind of iffy? Everytime I swipe the screen of a smartphone, I think of whacking the crap out of a lion for eating someone.

Okay, fair enough. There are differences between them (notably finger/stylus control vs. mouse control), but it's probably fair to say that Black and White was ahead of its time in control scheme, wretched though it was.

Everytime I see squad commands in tactical shooters and lament the terrible decisions the squad makes in choosing their chest high walls, I think of a cow wandering back and forth between a field and a granery with absolutely no idea what it should be doing. And when I look at the convoluted conversaion/moral/rep system in Mass Effect, I'm reminded about the decision I had to make about whether to accept a human sacrifice from my loyal subjects (warning, the choice you make probably won't have the consequence you think it will).

As much as I would love to blame Peter Molyneux for the invention of stupid AI, that would probably be a little unfair. Likewise, the idea that moral decisions have consequences. These aren't innovations from Black and White, they're aspects of all games, from before and after.

So ME3, huh? Anyone have a PC that will run it?

I sure hope so. Are the requirements really so bad?

-Jester

[Lissa]

So ME3, huh? Anyone have a PC that will run it?

Well, considering my present comp is running SWTOR at full setting at around 40 FPS with 2 year old video cards (SLI GTX 460s), I'll let you know when I get it, but I didn't have any issues in the demo.

[[wcip]Angel]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pla...Z2ggklIfSY#!

[Chesspiece_face]

We are now 10 years past the release of Black and White, and it doesn't look ahead of it's time. It looks stranded in time, an overambitious experiment whose results went nowhere. Who else has tried for 1st person simcity? Trainable learning AI? Iconless control? Almost none of the things in that game have become standard. The genre itself is practically dead, except for some wacky Nintendo experiments like Pikmin. I guess the gesture system was ahead of its time? Even that's still kind of iffy.

There was nothing 5-star about that game except Peter Molyneux' self-opinion.

-Jester

Well that's a hell of a lot of hyperbole and an unbelievably narrow view of developments in gameplay.

Let's expand the PoV a bit shall we? Pikmin is a good example of a game which directly built of off gameplay ideas that were first introduced in B&W but that is a simple extrapolation. How about Nintendo's million selling series Nintendogs/cats? How about the newer Xbox Kinectimals? How about Viva Pinata and Viva Pinata 2? How about Kingdom of Keflings 1+2.

A lot of the key designs that B&W was initially playing with are only now being seriously explored. A lot of that has to do with interface and technology advancement. Like I said though, B&W suffered from control issues. I also believe I stated the game suffered from shoehorning a genre and gameplay elements onto it that didn't fit. Claiming a genre is dead that in my initial argument I stated didn't even fit the game we were discussing isn't a very strong point. And it's less strong when I've offered a lot of examples above which have found some level of critical or commercial success which definitely recently fall in that genre.

[Jabberwolky]

Installed the game last night and played it for about 5 hours. I have really enjoyed it. I have not read all the reviews of the game. I played ME2 extensively and up till launch of ME3 I still played the game.

The combat controls have been improved in that you can move from cover to cover and its fairly intuitive. The game feels the same but improved. I like the feature that allows you to tune on your weapons when you find upgrades.

The story line has kept me very interested and I have felt that thus far they have tied everything together nicely. So far I have not messed with the online play and I don't plan on it until I have the campaign mastered.

IMHO...if you enjoyed ME2 or ME1 its worth it. I have really enjoyed the game thus far. The thing that does disappoint is the fact that I recieved the collector's edition which of coarse came with alot of nifty extras and the CD's..when you install the game it installs Origin Beta...a program like Steam and Impulse that allows you to buy and download EA games on the internet...so you are sent the CD...but instead of it installing from the disc, you have to download ME3 from Origin.