Mass Effect 3 - Page 153

As a huge fan of the ME series who has played through Mass Effect 1 and 2 multiple times (including all ME2 DLC), has read every codex entry, and been to every planet (often just to read its description), I thought I’d go ahead and write an entirely too-long post about what I thought about Mass Effect 3 and how it compares to its predecessors.

Note: I have only played through ME3 once as of now, and without the From Ashes DLC. I will also completely ignore the events after killing Kai Leng; I will only be comparing Mass Effect 2 to Mass Effect 3 up until that point. Plenty of other people have talked about the ending and have summarized why it was terrible far better than I could. I will go ahead and say right now though, that overall, and until the last few minutes of the game, I enjoyed the game immensely and thought that it was excellent.

For good articles/videos on the ME3 ending, see:

http://www.gamefront.com/mass-effect-3-ending-hatred-5-reasons-the-fans-are-right/

and



On to the rest of my post….
I think the most important aspects of any Mass Effect game can be broken down into these parts:
Main Story Arc
Sidequests
Character Interaction
Exploration
Combat
Random Interface Stuff

Main Story Arc:

I think it is fair to say that Mass Effect 3 had a better main story arc than mass effect 2 did. The main story arc for mass effect 2 revolved around recruiting companions and then taking out the collector’s (a threat minor enough to where most factions in the galaxy hadn’t even noticed their existence). Mass effect 3’s story is much grander in scale. You can cure the genophage, end the quarian-geth conflict through a variety of methods, unite the various factions of the galaxy, and eventually take down the reapers.

For the most part, ME3 did an excellent job with capturing the epicness that was all of those events. The cutscenes were awesome, the main missions themselves were a lot of fun and very well done, and the soundtrack complemented it very well. More so than any either of its predecessors, key moments of the ME3 campaign could give you the sickest nerd chills and get you all emotional. When Mordin died after redeeming himself by curing the genophage, I remember having to turn my xbox off and just kinda sit for a while, because it was done so well that I was feeling too damn sad to do anything.
Unfortunately, this was one of the few things that Mass Effect 3 did better than Mass Effect 2.

Sidequests:

Mass Effect 3 had two types of sidequest: the ones that were actual missions, and the ones where you scan a planet and grab an artifact for someone.

The first type of sidequest was actually fairly well done. They were lengthy and well-developed. I think the biggest problem with them was that there were so few of them, although I can forgive that because of how interesting they were to play. My personal favorite was probably Grissom Academy.

The second type of sidequest might actually be the dumbest thing that has ever been put into any ME game. First of all, you acquire them simply by eavesdropping on random conversations people are having. And then you just got to whatever planet they tell you to, scan it, and you complete the quest. You don’t actually have to do anything. These are dumb because they’re boring, you have no idea why this artifact is important most of the time because they never tell you, and they were obviously put in the game to merely lengthen the amount of time it takes to complete the entire game. It would have been better if you had to initiate the conversation at least and for there to be at least a few lines of dialogue explaining why the artifact is important.

Mass Effect 2 wins out when it comes to sidequests in my opinion. The loyalty missions for your companions were almost always a lot of fun (the only possible exception being Thane’s mission), and there were plenty of random actual missions to be found. And each of those random missions tended to have an explanation of some sort during the mission about why that place was important (such as a mining operation being taken over by the Blue Suns, for example).

Character Interaction:

I have mixed feelings about this when it comes to ME3. On the one hand, I definitely liked a lot of the random interactions that you could observe between your crew members on the Normandy. I also liked the fact that when you docked on the Citadel, your crew members were in various places enjoying their time off. But I absolutely hated how most of the dialogue did not initiate an actual conversation, and instead it was just Shepard and the crewmate saying one or two sentences to each other. This made your interaction with your crewmates feel very shallow. I also thought we were a little too limited in our crewmate selection (no krogan or salarian squadmates, for example).

Mass Effect 2 character interactions felt a lot deeper, since each crewmember had a lot to tell you, and you had to gain their loyalty and all that. To be fair, that’s because Mass Effect 2 was a game that was driven by you recruiting squadmates and gaining their loyalty for a final suicide mission at the end. Given that, it’s logical that your interactions with them would be deeper than in Mass Effect 3, which is driven by you recruiting entire species rather than individual squadmates. So Mass Effect 2 wins out when it comes to character interaction, even if that was to be expected.

Exploration:

This was one of the biggest shortcomings of Mass Effect 3. There is very little sense of exploration in this game. You have access to only one hub world (the citadel). That is the only place where you can pick up sidequests (and even then, those sidequests are the really pointless ones without any development) and buy stuff. You have no incentive to visit random planets, since you can scan and check to see if a planet has artifacts without ever entering orbit, and there’s nothing else you can gain since you no longer have to gather minerals and you can’t find random sidequests like that. The only sidequests that are actual missions are given to you by Traynor every time, you don’t have to go out and find them.

Mass Effect 2 is miles ahead of ME3 in that regard. Mass Effect 2 has 4 hub worlds (unless I’m forgetting any): Omega, the Citadel, Tuchanka, and Ilium. You can and should visit every planet of every system in the galaxy to see if there are any random sidequests you can pick up (the only way to know for sure is to enter orbit around the planet). You have to go around and talk to all the people you possibly can at the hub worlds so you can initiate conversations start sidequests that you will actually care about due to knowing a bit of background behind them.

Combat:

Mass Effect 3 definitely wins here. They made a lot of improvements over the Mass Effect 2 combat system, such as being able to roll and limitless sprint. You have a lot more weapons options and unlike in ME1, the weapons are actually substantially different from each other. The fact that any class can use any weapon, the weight system, and diversity in leveling up powers means you can customize the way you fight like never before. I do think it’s unfortunate that they took away heavy weapons, but it isn’t a huge deal.

It’s also kinda lame how you only have 3 enemies (Cerberus, Geth, and the Reapers), but each faction is so different and there’s such a variety of enemies within each faction that affects the dynamic of each battle that it’s forgivable.

Random Interface Stuff:

The new journal is terrible. It doesn’t give you any information on the specific step of a mission you might be at. Don’t know why the changed it. I liked the new layout of the Normandy, it was nice and big. The panel of the Normandy where you could access any store you’d been to at an increased price was a very helpful little feature (not as helpful as it could have been, since all the stores were in one place at the citadel anyway).

Conclusion:

This is already really long, so I’ll keep the conclusion short. Mass Effect 3 was a great game that was a lot of fun, but it did have a lot of very obvious shortcomings that stand as pretty big evidence that the game was rushed. It could have been better, and I just think it’s a shame they didn’t take a few more months to flesh it out more.