Mass Effect Almost Had a Non-Humanoid Squadmate

[immortalfrieza]

So really it all comes back to Bioware being a lazy bunch of.....my god.... I just realized how nerdy this all sounds.

If people are getting into long winded nerdy sounding arguments about a fictional creature's ananomy, then it means that Bioware have truly created an effective fictional world that people care about, and whatever else has happened they have to be given props for that. Mass Effect pretty much the Star Trek/Wars equivalent of this past decade.

You have no idea how funny that comparison is

A rich universe with possibilities for engaging story telling destroyed when it had to appeal to a wider and wider and wider audience. Dumbing down their more cerebral stuff for more action and having tacky storytelling and reset-button episodes with cheap drama forced onto it to keep it on the air. Hack writers being put in charge of not so much writing scripts as farting them out by the dozen. More and more sex appeal and forced comedy being added to the point where we literally have two boobs in jumpsuits bouncing around the ship on top of that we get a woman who is basically Seven of Nine with bare cleavage.

If you meant that then yes Mass Effect is exactly like Star Trek, a beloved piece of fiction that crashed and burned harder than the box office results for Star Trek Nemesis.

Actually let's rank them.

Mass Effect would be TOS, TNG and DS9. All three shows had both excellent and horrible episodes but were overall good and consistent in quality. Much like Mass Effect which did have the occasional hiccups or weird moments.

Then we have Mass Effect 2. The Star Trek Voyager of the group and maybe a few of the Really bad TOS, TNG and DS9 episodes. The franchise is taken in a "new" direction to attract more viewers and get a wider audience, be that with more action, comedy or sex appeal. It eventually results in hack story writing with a plot that really has no point and just ends up being a giant waste of time at the end with severe damage being done by the events in the series and technobabble retconning of about a dozen different things. Kind of the perfect analogy for ME2.

At last we arrive at Mass Effect 3: The Rebetrayaling. This would be Enterprise. A sloppy, plot hole ridden, character inconsistent, exploitative, dumbed down and just plain old stupid mess of a game that not only screws up itself but contradicts almost everything in the previous games by essentially making them pointless and retroactively ruining their stories, which I thought was fucking IMPOSSIBLE because the only one with a story was ME1 but ME3 somehow even ruined the nearly non-existent story of ME2 with the new information it gives you!

So yes, Mass Effect is very much like Star Trek if you compare it this way

This kind of thing eventually happens to all media in the end, it loses what made it good in the pursuit of broader appeal. I always thought that ME had pretty wide appeal from the start though. If nothing else Bioware did try to address much of each game's common complaints from installment to installment, which is a point in their favor even if they did drop the ball in the end. I liked the entire ME series outside of the ending, and I've always been cautiously optimistic at best when it comes to all the media I've tried to develop an interest in, so I'm going to adopt a wait and see approach to the series from this point forward.

Also, for the record, personally I liked Enterprise well enough and Voyager was easily my favorite series out of all of them. I never cared for TOS (because of how aged and corny it was) or DS9, (because of the opposite, the overall atmosphere was too dark for my taste) and while TNG was a good enough, it lacked a sense of real urgency and importance with the plot in most of it's episodes, something that I felt Voyager and Enterprise managed to nail right on the head, even if they got melodramatic on occasion.

 

[1337mokro]

This kind of thing eventually happens to all media in the end, it loses what made it good in the pursuit of broader appeal. I always thought that ME had pretty wide appeal from the start though. If nothing else Bioware did try to address much of each game's common complaints from installment to installment, which is a point in their favor even if they did drop the ball in the end. I liked the entire ME series outside of the ending, and I've always been cautiously optimistic at best when it comes to all the media I've tried to develop an interest in, so I'm going to adopt a wait and see approach to the series from this point forward.

Also, for the record, personally I liked Enterprise well enough and Voyager was easily my favorite series out of all of them. I never cared for TOS (because of how aged and corny it was) or DS9, (because of the opposite, the overall atmosphere was too dark for my taste) and while TNG was a good enough, it lacked a sense of real urgency and importance with the plot in most of it's episodes, something that I felt Voyager and Enterprise managed to nail right on the head, even if they got melodramatic on occasion.

I had the exact opposite opinion. In DSN9 the stakes and tension was always present. It was as close to Babylon 5 politics Star Trek ever got, it was also something I was missing in other series where it wasn't Dark enough, the Federation shown in other series would be wiped off the face of the Universe by the first threat. Whilst the TOS are of course horribly corny, I still enjoyed a bunch of episodes despite or maybe because of the corniness. The same corniness I enjoyed when they unexpectedly ran an A-team marathon on TV this weekend.

However Voyager suffered from the rest button disease, to often characters just didn't pan out or went no way and most of the tension was fake or technobabbled away, same with most of the continuity or problems faced by the ship. For example the Holodeck has a separate incompatible power supply. That way we can still do Holodeck stories as filler! Whilst at the same time showing a ship short of supplies and in dire need of fuel! It was those moments that ruined the show for me, but it was also the reason why it's ME2 and not ME3.

Enterprise... oh Enterprise. Watch a Night in Sickbay or that one with the cum creature in it to jog your memory of what most of that show was. It was without a doubt the worst of all if for nothing else but the fact that the characters were nothing but mouthpieces, spouting whatever dialogue the writers wanted them to be no matter how hypocritical, disgusting or stupid it sounded. It ended up looking to me like a parody of Star Trek, Red Neck: Enterprise.

However they didn't actually fix anything in the Mass Effect series. All they did was continually drop more and more and more elements from the game. They TRIED to fix things in ME2 but by ME3 they just gave up and said fuck it! When you compare ME3 and ME1, the latter ends up having more elements, more dialogue, more story and more missions and exploration. ME3 was nothing but a shallow attempt at making a third-person cover shooter with a sci-fi story, a BAD story mind you.

It really says it all when the reason we didn't get Super Elcor, yes that image does exist, was because it would be to hard to program a walk cycle for a quadrapedal squad mate. Heck it was to fucking hard to program a walk cycle for additional Drel that's why the only one in the game is in your squad and the rest are stationary or in cutscenes only.

"Don't make us do actual work! We're to busy copying models and textures from ME2! We still have to inject 30cc of silicone in all the female characters breasts and then we have to photoshop an image of google for Tali's picture. We're totally swamped!"

Also this, I had to post it when I saw it

 

[Strazdas]

There is a reason it didnt make the cut. Psyuchological tests show that most humans are incapable of feeling emotions to creatures that dont have humanoid qualities (4 legs/hands, head). Like a lifform could be a rock with small legs or a blob of jelly but to make people actually like those characters would be extremely hard as oppsed to just stick a blue woman in there and call it an alien. that is the reason all "cool" supermutants ect are humanoids.

 

[Therumancer]

Yeah, the Joker part in ME2 seemed a bit jarring and out of place when I first played it. It didn't seem to fit in seeing as how I'd spent ME and the majority of ME2 as Shepard. I don't rightly know I'd have felt if we'd spent more time playing as secondary characters. Something about it just wouldn't feel... right to me.

Interesting to hear a different perspective. Playing as joker made me realise what a BMF Shephard really was. I spent my time running and hiding as Joker compared to the Shep would have smashed the lot of em with a shot gun.

Jokers vulnerability was a big change from my Sentinel/tank Shephard.

One would think that the recoil would shatter is bones if he was as crippled as was previously established,

Only if one knows jack all about guns, 10 lbs is a fairly typical recoil, even Joker isn't *that* busted.

It's an old recurring forum joke. Nobody was intending it to be taken that seriously. I probably wrote it badly. The gist of it was that when ME2 came out they stuck you with that whole "gimp joker" scene only to have him firing from a hatch like Rambo at the end. It was a little jarring when you think about it, but the idea wasn't to take it that literally... and the idea of Joker being a benefits fraud is kind of amusing since it's so wrong in the scope of Mass Effect.

It would be sort of like bringing "real bureaucracy" into it (meant sarcastically) where instead of having Shepard in trouble for his actons during ME2 and it's expansion at the beginning of ME3, it was to open with him in trouble with the miltiary seniority system when someone claimed that his Spectre Status that jumped him to command rank caused someone else down the line to miss their own promotion leading to an internal suit and inquiry, where a group of military lawyers argue on behalf of some career military geezer who had spend 25 years as first officer on a star tender delivering toilet paper and propaganda leaflets to the actual militay but was due for promotion and got skipped due to the shuffling inherant in Sherpard's command status.... That would have made things so much more thrilling and dramatic, just like the "real military" (lol).... it's meant to be funny... not stand up to any real examination of the arguements, the arguements existing just to sound plausible enough on the surface to make you stop for a second and chuckle.

 

[carpathic]

An elcor squadmember? Yes please.

"Badassfully, can you not see the giant cannon strapped to my back?"

FTW sir. FTW.

I quite enjoyed hearing this one in my head.

"Mockingly, you seem to be hurt - it looks like it might have been caused by a mako cannon. Imagine"

 

[Falseprophet]

The Hanar sure died out alright...
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Wait a second. A salarian director in the late 22nd century has to use painted backdrops? Humans have had chroma key technology since the 1930s, and this guy hasn't even heard of a green screen?

 

[blackrave]

Romancable Hanar squadmate for Femshep?
Sooooo much yes.

"This one likes your many orifices"