T w e n t y S i d e d

So Mass Effect is done. As I’ve said before, we didn’t want this to turn into “The Mass Effect Show”, so we’re not going directly in to Mass Effect 2. So our next series will be Fallout 3.

And you people got sick of me pointing out tiny little flaws and objections to the Mass Effect story? That thing is air tight compared to the tale in Fallout 3. There are more holes in the first two minutes of the game than in the 66% of the Mass Effect trilogy we’ve seen so far. I’m pretty sure there are plot holes and continuity errors on the title screen. Even the installer is probably on shaky ground. If I do the same nitpickery here the series will be infinity episodes long.

I don’t know how we’ll get through this, to be honest.

More importantly, we’re getting a new host. Randy is leaving the show for reasons I’ll divulge later if he fails to make the blackmail payments. Starting with the first episode of Fallout 3, Rutskarn will be joining the team. Josh will play Fallout 3, and Rutskarn and I will do whatever it is that us non-player characters do on this show.

We’re taking a week off. We’ll have a special episode next week, but look for the first episode of Fallout 3 in the first week of May.

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.

It’s over!

Cheating was done in this episode. Foul play. Shenanigans. We gave ourselves some high-end gear between last episode and this one. This final stage of the game is 90% combat, and we didn’t want to spend two hours getting pancaked or sucking our thumb behind cover. (Particularly since we’re a little under-leveled.) This episode would have been about three times as long with about half the commentary. We’ve been careful to play it straight up until now, but I think the cheat codes were the right way to go here. (It was either that or heavy editing and re-takes.) Besides, now you get to see a lot of the fun weapons we’ve been missing.

So that’s it for Mass Effect. I’ll have another post later today announcing the next series.

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.

We’ve reached the Expositional payload of the game. I can’t think of another (active) AAA game company that’s still willing to focus on story to this degree. In other games, the story just there as a (lazy, often incoherent) justification for combat, but in BioWare games it feels like they design it the other way around. It’s used as an in-game reward, and they’re not afraid to let players sit through several minutes of it at once. I don’t want to snipe our eventual play-through of Mass Effect 2 here, but it’s instructive to compare this deep, thorough, lengthy, and thoughtful conversation with what we get at the end of Mass Effect 2: pew pew pew! boom!

Sorry about the massive framerate drop in the middle of the episode. Randy posted this an earlier thread:

In what might be the biggest “DO OVER” of my life, I realized today that I had been running ME at max resolution, even tho during the editing process it was being reduced to a much more appropriate resolution. I apologize to all you viewers out there that were forced to witness abysmal FPS, I just tested it, and Fraps+Livestream+Mass Effect+Vent+Steam ect.. was running at a smooth 30 FPS consistently when done with 1080 Resolution. I demand a do over!

Ouch. The last episode is already done, so we will have to apply this knowledge to our next series. I’ll be announcing the next game and some other changes to the series on Thursday.

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.