Sutter Cane said:
Actually Shepard continuing to work for cerberus makes less sense than him leaving the group given that we know Cerberus is the type of group that seriously looks into the possibility of using thorian creepers as biological weapons, and has no issue with performing torturous experiments on people on multiple occasions, or in setting a thresher maw on a unit of alliance soldiers basically for shits and giggles. Not even renegade shepard is cold enough to support stuff like that.
If you played Paragon Shepard that's a totally valid option,
but some of us played a more pragmatic Shepard, and some of us played Shepard as a strait up asshole.
Frankly by the end of ME2 even my Paragon Shepard (Who was a Sole Survivor)Was like "The Alliance needs get up off their lazy ass and do something, maybe Cerberus is the better option"
The only reason you think fighting Cerberus is the only valid option is because of how Cerberus was presented in ME3.
and they only made them act that way so you would think fighting was the only way to go. the plot in ME3 is a circle jerk of contrivance.
They could have just as easily written Cerberus the same way they did in ME2, an organization unfettered by red tape or morality. instead of mustache twirling villains.
The Cerberus Railroading was pretty bad, but at the time it felt like a means to an end.
I mean you spend the whole first game with the alliance, you spend the whole second game with Cerberus.
I thought (And I'm sure at least a couple other people thought) that was setting up a choice for the third game of whether you side with Cerberus or the alliance to take down the reapers. That was not the case.
see above. Actively siding with Cerberus makes little to no sense given the type of group they are shown to be.
They saved your life and all of humanity while the alliance did nothing. maybe that means something to some people.
maybe that doesn't justify their past actions in your eyes, and that is a reasonable position to take. but that isn't the case for everyone. and Bioware should have at least tried to accommodate them given that those people poured as much time and passion into the first two games as you did.
My problem with this is that's just what they told you.
Bioware made up The Crucible, and them made up that there's no way to beat the reapers conventionally.
They introduced a new contrivance to justify the first one.
They killed Sovereign. they know for a fact that enough guns can kill a Reaper
So throwing all their resources into the Crucible doesn't actually make sense. (I mean it could have been presented as a valid option, do you throw all your resources into the Hail Mary option or throw all your resources into the 1% certainty that a big enough fleet can take down the reapers)
See I actually agree that the crucible is a complete ass pull at the start of ME3, but i feel it was an inevitable one. It took the combined council and alliance fleets to take down a single reaper at the end of the first mass effect game. If the third game had you take on an army of full on reapers in a straight up fight and win, that would have been a much bigger story issue that the crucible was.
No... it wouldn't have.
finding out the only way to destroy the reapers was by peeing on them would have been less of an issue than the Crucible was.
The way the crucible was introduced, every line of exposition surrounding it, the starkid, everything about the Crucible was a plot black-hole that sucked every bit of anything out of the story. And if you didn't feel that way I honestly envy you.
She talks about how bad of an idea it was in ME3, maybe it's hindsight. But I still don't remember her saying she voted in favor of war.
Not sure which person you're talking about here. If you're talking about raan, I was saying that she probably couldn't make up her mind. Tali does have a quote right after you encounter her again where shepard asks her why she went along with the war effort even if she was personally against it, and her reply is what I was referring to in my previous post
I forgot that line happened (It has been 2 years since I played the game)
but Raan going along with the war even though she's against it is still contrived and could have been avoided by replacing "Admiral Tali" which never should have happened with a new admiral who was in favor of war
See this just reslly doesn't bother me, especially since the missions that are focused around former companions for the most part flow organically from the plot anyway, and so shepard would likely be doing those same things whether said companion was alive or not.
This is the base level problem I was talking about.
The game was written from scratch in such a way that it didn't matter whether or not any given character was alive. That right there is the problem.
ME 3 could have been full of personal dramatic arcs that were intertwined with character dynamics, but it was full of "Point A to point B" objective based missions that could have been completed by an automatic button pushing machine.
You didn't have to save Samara's Kid because you cared about Samara, you had to save her because she might turn into a banshee.
I don't think that I really have an argument against that, other than that the concept of breaking down things into numbers to represent the abstract concept of "war readiness" just never bothered me personally, but i can totally see how that could rub people the wrong way.
I also disagree with your comments about people being written out of character. Sure Jack is different than she was in ME2 but it seemed clear to me that this was primarily a result of being able to finally start to put her past behind her, and how she's finally starting to forge her own identity instead of letting her past tragedies do it for her. Also i'm just completely clueless as to where you're coming from with your Garrus comments. He still seems like the same guy from ME 2 to me. I mean in either case it's not like the bullshit they pulled in Saints Row The Third where they took a likable and interesting character from the previous game in Shaundi and turned her into generic angry woman #1276 while also completely changing her character design for no discernible reason.
I noticed Garrus spouting off a whole bunch of one liners when you tried to talk to him on the ship.
"I want to paint walls with reaper blood" is one I remember.
He was set up in the first two games.
he was a cop who got sick of red tape so he wanted to play outside the law for once
then he was a vigilante who lost his whole team because of a betrayal so he wanted revenge
and in the third game he's king bad ass so he wants to stand around talking like a tool.
You get some conversations with him where he's completely on your side no matter what
if you tell him you sabotaged the genophage cure he's like "That's okay"
and you can tell him you gutshot Ashley and left her to die and he's like "That's okay"
he was boring, and he sounded bored. even in his citadel bottle shooting scene. (Could have been the actor)
If you romanced him he basically turned into a character from a bad romance novel (I've never even read a romance novel)
where the underlining theme of all his scenes become "Shepard, I'd be lost without you!"
Which is a complete departure from his awkward shyness from the second game.
All the characters seemed deeper in the first 2 games.
I could go so in depth in any of the characters in ME3. and post a wall of text that's 10 pages long.
I've never been more insulted than Mass Effect 3. and I don't think I will ever be again, because it broke me and I will never love anything as much as the Mass Effect series. It broke me with bad writing, and disrespect for my choices, limiting my ability to roll play. destroying the characters I have grown attached to. the controls.
Just everything. and that's the only way I can describe it. if I stop and think about anything that happened in ME3 I my head just aches from sheer incompetence that must have gone into the design or writing of the game
