Nemusus said:
The problem with the dialogue wheel in Dragon Age II is that half the time Hawke would go off on a tangent and say something other than what the dialogue wheel suggested he'd say. It meant that you were basically unsure of what the character was going to say at any time other than the fact that it was going to be vaguely "good" or "bad" or "witty." It made many of the conversations feel pretty hit and miss, and it's not something I ever encountered in Mass Effect.
The main problem for me with Mass Effect 3 (and for most people, I guess) is that your decisions didn't really seem to have that much of an impact. Regardless of whether or not you went around and gathered all the war assets and weapon upgrades, and saved all the little kids in the interplanetary orphanages and such, the Mass Relays got wiped out, Shepard dies (kind of, depending on the ending)... It feels like there was no real reward for doing all those side-quests, which tended to get a bit samey toward the end. My rush playthrough didn't differ in any significant way from a more extended one, which generally wasn't the case with Bioware games: Origins, a particularly pertinent example, let you rush through, but if you took your time, did a few sidequests, you could end up with small but definitely noticeable end game changes. That's definitely something I'd like to see come back in DA:I.
Right, now I understand that completely. Your problem was with the dialogue wheel in DA2, not dialogue wheels in general. Yeah, I can get on board with that. I didn't quite encounter the "surprise romance" problems that some people seemed to have found, but yeah. I assume rushed development reared its ugly head again with those, so hopefully whatever system they use for dialogue in DA:I will be accurate, at least.
Hopefully.
And yeah, I understand peoples' concerns with ME3. I sort of saw the whole game as the ending, where your choices from the previous games were concerned. At least the major ones, some of them weren't given the impact that maybe they should have. But whatever, I thought that it tied up the knots in a reasonable way throughout the game as a whole. Not great, but reasonable.
I mean, I almost cried at the whole Mordin bit. Saddest part of the whole series in my opinion. Not gonna spoil it, but you probably know what I'm talking about.
The choices in ME3 itself? Well the whole war assets thing was done pretty poorly in my opinion. So I didn't care much about that. A lot of the new story that they introduced was also a bit dumb. Cerberus being comic book evil again? Evil Raiden-like cyborg-guy? Meh. My main emotional ties were to all the stuff from the previous two games, and that worked out OK.
And then there was the big human sacrifice-techno-voodoo bit at the end that was at least dramatic enough for me to overlook the plot holes. And the fact that I might have just got a different colour? I mean, philosophically it matters, right? The fact that actually your actions didn't count, I mean. But in the moment that I was experiencing it, I didn't know about the different colours, so it didn't matter at the time, see? And so when I found out, I sort of didn't care. If that makes sense?
But yeah. I mean, it certainly wasn't a superb game. Still not sure about the "hate" as such. I don't think it was as bad of a video game that you should be wary about buying further products from the same developer. But different strokes, I guess. I, for one, don't like shellfish. Makes me feel sick.
