T w e n t y S i d e d

Enjoy your stay.

Everyone is so worried about the recent Mass Effect 3 trailer, complaining about how bad the next game will be. So I sat down and interviewed Mr. Scruffy, who is actually the Creative Director of Creativity at BioWare and not a sock puppet on my left hand. He gave me the following details on the upcoming game:

In Mass Effect 3, Cerberus no longer believes that the Reapers exist, and abandon Shepard. Shepard is then forced to work for “The Secretive Man”, who is the shadowy leader of the Blue Suns. When confronted with the fact that all of his men have been hapless mooks, he’ll explain that those men were rogue elements of the organization, and the real Blue Suns are actually all cybernetic Ex-Navy SEAL Ninja biotics in power armor. He’ll give you the Normandy 3, which looks exactly like the other Normandi except it’s even bigger on the inside. There will be a little pet house where you can play the Tamagotchi-style space-hamster game. There will be a disco where you can play Japanese-style dating sim with your harem of collectible Yeomen. There will also be a Mako racing circuit.

The rest of the game will take place in bombed-out New York, the linchpin of the entire galactic invasion. The only way to stop them is to find someone who is bad ass enough to hunt down the gigantic bio-mechanical Reaper King, who has taken control of the Statue of Liberty and bombed the city with highly toxic Brownium-5.

How does the final battle end? Do the Reapers win? You’ll have to wait until the game launches to find out!

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I have to say, the Miranda interview had a lot less fan service than I expected. I seem to remember that every time I visited Miranda I was treated to the boob-cam and the butt-cam whenever she spoke. Maybe it only does that if you’re male Shepard. Or maybe that happens later in the game.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spoiler Warning S4E14: Let’s Talk About Our Feelings”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

At the three-minute mark:

Hey, your videogame protagonist is so fat, she jumped up in the air, and got stuck.

Thank you, thank you. I’m here all week.

While BioWare games are always trope-filled, I think cataloging all of the tropes in Jack’s recruitment would be a lengthy undertaking. Jack herself is a few tropes, then there’s her breakout, the warden, his plan, his shield and boss fight, and the prison itself.

Having said all that, I actually enjoyed the gameplay here, even though the story is a bit bent. Later there’s Grunt’s recruitment, which is pretty good, story-wise, but which I thought was tedious from a gameplay standpoint. (Fight waves of Krogan in a brown industrial wasteland? Ugh.)

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I know yesterday we revealed that we’d used an editor to change our save. I think this was a good move, but I want to stress that this was an exception and we’re generally not going to change our stance on mods. We went to play games as they came out of the box. I don’t want a big debate over what mods we should use, and when a game bugs out I don’t want people to blame it on the mods we’ve installed.

I really dislike how they handled saves from the previous game. The default setup given to someone without a ME1 save is about the least interesting of the possible choices. And BioWare really should have let you (optionally) pick from the available choices. Kaiden or Ashley? Council live or die? Wrex alive or dead? Rachni Queen free or dead? Anderson or Udina? Letting the player choose at the start of the game would have added replay value.

I guess they were trying to sell copies of Mass Effect 1, but without knowing what those options were or that they even existed, I don’t think there’s any incentive for newcomers to go back and get the original game.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.