Report: EA Is Remastering The ‘Mass Effect’ Trilogy At Long Last (Unconfirmed)

[Ruin]

I'd like to take this opportunity to bitch at the mega missed opportunity this presented. Cerberus, a sketchy organization, got their hands on one of the most influential personalities in the galaxy and who is directly involved in shady operations on behalf of the galactic government and you intend to use them to advance your own organization's goals...

So you just rebuild them and give them a superior ship with no strings attached and ask them to do you a solid? What if they said "no" and just resumed doing Alliance or spectre stuff?
Cerberus certainly should have had a kill switch for shepard 2.0 or something to maintain control. I think the justification for not having anything was "We want the real shepard" or something equally retarded.

Didn't they address that in the Citadel DLC? I could have sworn there were some throw away dialogue lines about how Cerberus had a bunch of Shepard clones as a contingency in case the original wouldn't play ball.

 

[Aidan]

Didn't they address that in the Citadel DLC? I could have sworn there were some throw away dialogue lines about how Cerberus had a bunch of Shepard clones as a contingency in case the original wouldn't play ball.

idk i didnt play it. I was all mass effected out when I finished 2 and haven't played any of its dlc or any of 3.

 

[Back me up!]

I already played the game and know the story...... How much for the ME3 Remastered multiplayer?

 

[Snekposter]

I get the ME1 purists say ME2 tarnishes its legacy, but ME2 doesn't completely gaslight players into bad options, it at worse neglects to confront the consequences of some of your actions, and it did so by exploring areas you wouldn't have seen through the framework ME1 set up. Think about all the characters, factions, and worlds ME2 gets you to. Fighting the Collectors is very side-questy but it did the job highlighting there's vast swathes of space uncontrolled by the Citadel that need to be roped in too if you're gonna stop the Reapers.

That is something I would have loved to seen more of. Citadel space is by the standards of a galaxy, incredibly small. Half the reason the Systems Alliance gets so big so fast is because massive chunks like the Skyllian Verge and Attican Traverse were controlled by criminals and other scum the civilized parts couldn't bother to drive off, but the Systems Alliance decides that's all free real estate after the Council hands them what they consider a monkey's paw of colonization grants. While a First Contact War prequel was mentioned and dismissed as being too short, a prequel could take the PC from Shanxi to Eden Prime, hitting all sorts of fun times in between like the Skyllian Blitz in 2176 (150 is the average for humans in ME, so taking the same person through the whole deal from First Contact War in 2157 to the invasion of Eden Prime in 2183 is plausible, even by our standards). Could be a retiree by that point, mustered out after PTSD from seeing the slavers in action started to take its toll, so they call it quits and receive some land on Eden Prime as thanks, hoping for an easy life... until Saren shows up, and they're called to action one last time, sacrificing themselves to save a bunch of colonists from the Geth.

 

[Milwaukee Macho Man]

I don't know why, but for some reason I went on the ME subreddit. One of the first things I see is argument over if a remaster should remove Miranda booty shots. Then it seems most of the talk is about how they basically need to make it so everyone is Bi and fuckable.

Jesus Christ this series really did get hijacked by the tumblr crowd, huh?

 

[Bumblino]

Mass effect is fucking dead and buried, 3 was a blight on society and andromeda was just them spitting on their corpse lol

 

[Absolutego]

None of it matters unless they fix ME3, how do they not know this?!

I get the ME1 purists say ME2 tarnishes its legacy, but ME2 doesn't completely gaslight players into bad options, it at worse neglects to confront the consequences of some of your actions, and it did so by exploring areas you wouldn't have seen through the framework ME1 set up. Think about all the characters, factions, and worlds ME2 gets you to. Fighting the Collectors is very side-questy but it did the job highlighting there's vast swathes of space uncontrolled by the Citadel that need to be roped in too if you're gonna stop the Reapers.

Now, ME3? Whole thing's fucked with an ending like that, and everybody knows it. Your choices ought to matter... but they don't. Even some of the weirder moments like Rachni enemies and Udina being a traitor? That stuff can be forgiven if they add some text here and there to flesh them out. A bit of foreshadowing goes a long way to making audiences think they've discovered a secret all by themselves, but Kai Leng? Closest thing to a Donut Steal I've ever seen in media. Like I said, they established all these new characters in earlier games with untapped potential, I don't understand why their go-to was some e-book villain instead of a character with a bit of emotional weight behind them.
And the final hour? Chop it off, start over. Total mess and everybody understands why. EA aren't gonna do any of this, of course. Re-masters are commissioned because devs don't want to do any work.
But I re-played ME2 so much to get the different options and save / kill companions, and I tried replaying ME3 a month after finishing it but couldn't even finish Mars knowing what lay ahead.

Again, who is this re-master for? 'Once bitten, twice shy' will be the mentality from anybody who bought the first time around, and new players only know the series for the shit ending so they're hardly enthused.
I'm not gonna tell Bioware I told you so, but beginning with Dragon Age 2 I've never seen a company so comprehensively burn bridges and goodwill like Bioware. From the games' content to the media strategies to the indignant developers firing up twitter? It's crazy, and the downward spiral really started with ME3--THAT was when everyone started taking more critical notes, and began to think it and DA2 weren't flukes but the new standard we could expect from Nu-Bioware.
Thousands tried warned them on their own forum that leaving the ending as-is would lead to this exact situation: gamers don't hate your company, they just feel 0 emotion whatsoever to anything you get up to. That's why Anthem was a miserable failure. Players didn't hype it up or hate-watch, they just tuned it out altogether.

You cannot fix the problems in the Mass Effect series by touching ME3 alone. Call me a purist all you want, but the cracks that gave all of you narrative death when the Star Child showed up began in the first minutes of ME2, you were all just sufficiently distracted by good character writing and interesting sidequests to not notice/not care.

You mention choices not mattering in ME3, and that kind of behavior began in ME2. Why would Shepard ever work for the Illusive Man? Why would Sole Survivor Shepard in particular agree to work for Cerberus? Answer: he wouldn't, but your choices in ME1 don't matter, so Bioware just used the dialogue wheel to give you the option of being a proud or reluctant lickspittle. You call Kai Leng a cringe OC Donut Steel, but both the Illusive Man and, I would argue, Aria are only a matter of degree less cringe than Kai Leng. Maybe they fit the setting better and have less awful character design, but they still relentlessly mock Shepard and the game won't let you fight back, just like Kai Leng and his goddamn anime villain taunt lines.

And your justification of the main story in ME2 is especially jarring. ME2's main story is why the last hour of ME3's is a mess. Because ME2 did literally nothing to advance the plot. What do we care if there's regions of non-Council space that "need to be reigned in"? Did any of the Omega lore come up in ME3 at all besides Aria having a cameo in the bar? Did those colonists we saved matter in the slightest, or even ever come up again outside of codex entries? Did any of it help us discover how to fight the Reapers? Because that's what ME2 needed to accomplish, narratively. Instead it shunted that responsibility off to be delivered in the first 10 minutes of the third game, and because the third game had so much narrative work ahead of it to wrap things up, the "solution" proffered is some lame deus ex machina never mentioned in previous games.

This series was doomed the minute EA added ridiculous production schedules and told Bioware to "tone down the nerd shit", and that happened with ME2.

 

[Miller]

Jesus Christ this series really did get hijacked by the tumblr crowd, huh?

It's not new. There was a ME1 mod on Nexus that would replace the exposed skin on female character models with a plain black texture.
This is the audience that EA and Bioware want. They've been catering to them through the writing and the character designs for quite some time.

 

[HeyYou]

I'm pretty sure this series was always doomed, ever since the Reapers were introduced. As cool as Sovereign was in ME1 (despite having very little substance and ignoring Shepard's questions that would have actually fleshed the Reapers out), the dark energy plot that's circlejerked so heavily very likely wouldn't have satisfied fans, either. That's what happens when you introduce Lovecraft-like villains, and outside of Bloodborne I can think of very few games that pull it off well.

 

[Miller]

You mention choices not mattering in ME3, and that kind of behavior began in ME2. Why would Shepard ever work for the Illusive Man? Why would Sole Survivor Shepard in particular agree to work for Cerberus?

Also: Why would Shepard with a colonist or spacer background care about what is happening to Earth?

 

[ZMOT]

That's why Anthem was a miserable failure. Players didn't hype it up or hate-watch, they just tuned it out altogether.

anthem failed because it was utter fucking shit at launch. there was enough interest from biodrones and normalfags that get swayed by pretty bullshots (and the tards who still pay for destiny and warframe would've been just fine with another space-y loot&shoot), but bioware couldn't even deliver that, it was battlefield 4 levels of bad, if not worse.
that's not how you launch a new franchise that's supposed to compete with an entity like destiny.

it's mostly fixed now, if they would've released in that state (which is basically just fixes and polish, it hardly got anymore content) it would've looked completely different. but then that's par the course for bioware, just look at TOR.

This series was doomed the minute EA added ridiculous production schedules and told Bioware to "tone down the nerd shit", and that happened with ME2.

that was bioware because dean takahashi (yes, the one of cuphead fame) was too retarded to upgrade his shit in mass effect 1 and wrote a review about it.

as for ME2, most of it's faults could easily be ignored because it gave most people what they wanted - more space adventures while banging aliens. ME3 fucked even that up. that's why the most criticism you hear is about the beginning and the end. as you said, the setup makes no sense but it's easy to forget afterwards - till you fight the T-800 reaper.

I'm pretty sure this series was always doomed, ever since the Reapers were introduced. As cool as Sovereign was in ME1 (despite having very little substance and ignoring Shepard's questions that would have actually fleshed the Reapers out), the dark energy plot that's circlejerked so heavily very likely wouldn't have satisfied fans, either. That's what happens when you introduce Lovecraft-like villains, and outside of Bloodborne I can think of very few games that pull it off well.

reapers were fine, trying to explain them was where it went off the rails. you can't have your villain be "beyond comprehension", even if it was just written for omg so deep wank, and then have their motives be completely mundane. the dark energy plot would at least have some philosophical depth to it where you could argue the willingness to kill off whole civilizations on the regular because there really is no other way is "beyond comprehension" (still not good, but miles better than OMG SKYNET).

but the smart move would've been to silently drop them for good and only mention them when necessary for the plot. the whole point of ME1 was that the reapers can't jump in directly anymore, it was all about postponing their threat, and not go "nah, it was just another year lawl". with the reapers looming in the background it would've affected the whole political and societal landscape, which would leave plenty of hooks for spectre or even cerberus shenanigans. but no, bioware needed another BBEG for the "press button something awesome happens!!1" crowd.

 

[ZMOT]

Also: Why would Shepard with a colonist or spacer background care about what is happening to Earth?

why do the reapers care enough about it to not just nuke it but dick around long enough for shepard to complete his deus ex machina, needing the citadel, which conveniently is parked right next to it?

 

[WinchesterPremium]

why do the reapers care enough about it to not just nuke it but dick around long enough for shepard to complete his deus ex machina, needing the citadel, which conveniently is parked right next to it?

To be fair their obsession with humans was established in 2 with the Human Reaper, it at least gives them a reason to not genocide humanity at the first opportunity. Which in turn was because Shepard was human and kicking their buts since game 1.

 

[Snekposter]

Also: Why would Shepard with a colonist or spacer background care about what is happening to Earth?

Because Earth and by extension Sol is the single most populated and developed system in human space? There's 11 billion people on Earth, 4.1 million on Luna, 3.4 million on Mars, and Uranus and Saturn are both massive sources of He-3 fuel for the Alliance Navy. In 2183 there's more people on the fucking Moon than Eden Prime with just 3.7 million for the latter. Terra Nova, our first major colony outside Sol? 4.4 million. The industrial world of Bekensten? 5.425 million. The resort world of Elysium? 8.3 million, many of them non-humans. There's a very good chance that Earth itself has more people and industry than the rest of the entire Systems Alliance combined.

 

[HeyYou]

Because Earth and by extension Sol is the single most populated and developed system in human space? There's 11 billion people on Earth, 4.1 million on Luna, 3.4 million on Mars, and Uranus and Saturn are both massive sources of He-3 fuel for the Alliance Navy. In 2183 there's more people on the fucking Moon than Eden Prime with just 3.7 million for the latter. Terra Nova, our first major colony outside Sol? 4.4 million. The industrial world of Bekensten? 5.425 million. The resort world of Elysium? 8.3 million, many of them non-humans. There's a very good chance that Earth itself has more people and industry than the rest of the entire Systems Alliance combined.

Yeah, that's a weird point to make. If this were the far future, it wouldn't matter if I was born on a completely different system, Earth is still the homeworld of the human species. It's like the Vatican being attacked. Even if you're a lapsed Christian or a Protestant, it would be heart-breaking.

 

[Snekposter]

Well, Miller seems to be saying that a Spacer or Colonist has no cultural reason to be attached to Earth, so I was providing a more material reason. I mean, Shepard is whatever a player makes them, to be honest.

 

[Notgoodwithusernames]

The whole Reapers situating themselves on earth reminds of how in Halo during the invasion of earth the covenant centered most of their forces in Africa. Except there it made sense because thats where the mcguffin to get to installation 00 was. In ME I dont think its ever explained why the reapers hang around in one place

 

[Miller]

Yeah I never understood why the Reapers had to bring the Citadel into Earth orbit.

 

[Milwaukee Macho Man]

I don't remember if it was confirmed or just Bioware Fanboys making excuses, but I seem to recall the question being asked back in 2012 and the answer was "because they wanted to make a Human reaper still and Earth had the most humans in one spot."

Why they needed the Citadel to do that I don't remember.

 

[The Penultimate Warrior]

I've just remembered another crap thing about ME3 - they shoehorned in that IGN journalist playing herself.