Mass effect 3 - Page 4

You know I read your original post wrong. When I read crew I think of the generic guys who maintain the Normandy. They have not said what will happen with your Squad if they did not live. I assume we will get swaps like the Wrex replacement in the second game if you killed him in the first.

I believe a video said the Normandy will be the same ship from the second game, but some things will be redesigned.

By replacing all the ME1/ME2 squadmates with unknown/generic replacements, I'm curious how that affects the ME3 story. I'll hope without the original squadmate, Shepard will be at a major disadvantage. One of my ME2 save has Shepard as a lousy commander getting almost every squadmate killed. I also have ME2 save that sided with Cerberus including giving unactivated Legion and Collective base to them. Will be interesting if Shepard gets more support from Illusive Man in ME3.

An interview with one of the game's producers.

http://blog.bioware.com/2011/11/04/m...jesse-houston/

The details for what you get in the Special Edition were released.



http://www.computerandvideogames.com...acter-mission/

I need this game. NEED it.

The latest Bioware Pulse

Here's the Mass Effect 3 trailer from Spike's VGA show.

New Pulse focusing on writing.

30 Shepard quotes they cut from Mass Effect:
http://www.oxm.co.uk/37767/features/...m-mass-effect/

Didn't you ever buy every item from the Shepard endosed store?
Don't you wish sometimes you can keep Shepard back in the ship while take the squadmates on the mission?
And several cut quotes that you have thought off while playing the game?

According to IGN,
http://www.ign.com/wikis/mass-effect-3

Returning Characters for ME3:
Ambassador Donnel Udina
Ashley Williams**
Captain David Anderson
Captain Kirrahe
Conrad Verner
EDI
Garrus*
Jacob Taylor*
Jack*
James Sanders
Jeff "Joker" Moreau
Kaidan Alenko**
Kelly Chambers*
Legion*
Liara T'Soni
Miranda Lawson*
Mordin Solus*
Tali'Zorah vas Normandy*
Thane Krios*
The Illusive Man
Urdnot Wrex**
Zaeed Massani*

Note: *If the character survived Mass Effect 2. **If the character survived Mass Effect 1.

I wonder Bioware's reason for Grunt and Samara/Morinth not to return in ME3.

I already have ME2 save game that only Shepard, Samara, Kasumi and Zaeed survived the final suicide mission. Time to replay ME2 to kill off Zaeed so that no squadmate will return in ME3.

Just curious if many of us here like the idea of carrying decisions you made in the sequel into the sequels. Other than Dragon Age and Mass Effect, I can't think of any other games do this. At most for other games that have some kind of ability of importing prequel save is give you some extra XP, weapon or something but not the decisions you made in the prequel. That's the reason we often hear prequel that has multiple endings really only has one real ending that the sequel is based on.

I read Bioware making kind of a big deal of keeping your ME1 and ME2 squadmates alive for ME3. Question is there are so many variations are more to only which squadmates being alive. Not having played ME3 since it's not out, can Shepard also influence his/her relationship with Cerberus. We only know Cerberus is the enemy. What if in ME2, everything that Shepard did everything was in favor to Cerberus. That includes giving Legion to Cerberus, ending Overlord keeping the person in Cerberus control, dialogs that always supporting Cerberus and other smaller Cerberus related quests. And there's Tali loyality mission what who Shepard tells which changes the influence on future support. Do any of these decisions carry to ME3 or they just go to waste?

The decisions that is know matters is squadmates survival. If one or two from ME1/ME2 got killed, that probably matter less as someone generic will fill the roles. But what if almost every squadmate died in ME2 but enough to keep Shepard alive in the suicide mission? As my earlier post, I have a ME2 save that only Shepard, Zaeed, Kasumi and Samara alive at the end of suicide mission. From IGN info, Samara and Kasumi aren't returning in ME3. Even if they do, they probably play a small role anyway. I could replay another path with Zaeed dead since I found him to be useless in saving Shepard. The point is all ME2 squadmates that play important roles in the Shepard's story are dead. Simply replacing the dead squadmates with new and generic characters is more complicated. If Bioware wants to cheat, the new crew will have as good abilities as the previous dead squadmates which will be disappointing to me. Is the idea of having old squdmates that have been through many missions with you is their experience and influence. Some newbie replacement can't do that.

Looking at how Bioware handled Dragon Age: Origins save to DA2. If you play each DA: O DLC and Awakenings carefully, you can carry the save game over and over several times which includes everything you every done in the entire series. I did that and when DA2 imported the DA: O save, it said like there are 14 different unique events in DA: O. Well, during DA2 gameplay, I only saw two unique decisions carried from DA: O, state of Alistar and who the Grey Warden is take the injured sibing. I expect that I may not encounter every decision from DA: O but not missing the rest of 12 unique decisions? I guessing Bioware simply ignore most unique decisions from DA: O that got imported. One is if Leliana is dead in DA: O, she will always be alive in DA2.

So, will importing ME1/ME2 save into ME3 create a can of worms. I'll love if ME3 has multiple alternate storylines based on prequel decisions for replays than just play with different class only. What do you think?

I think any changes based on previous saves/choices will be just like going from ME1 to ME2, minimal background things. The only exceptions really will be how you handled Cerberus and the bug alien queen, those will probably have some story effect, and possibly some characters carrying over to be playable. The really big story elements have to be stable, for the most part.

What you said could be all that matters. I could be looking at squadmates being alive or dead through ME1/ME2 save game backwards.

If Bioware is going to bring ME1/ME2 squadmates back by default, then starting ME3 as a new game gets the best story path. Importing save game with some squadmates dead is more for player's amusement but really doesn't matter to the story anyway.

I still think it would be cool if a lousy Shepard that let most of his/her squadmates died and having poor alliance will ended up failing to save the Earth in the end or to save Earth in the end, Shepard has to give up his/her life by doing a suicide attack.

i wish character deaths had more of an impact.

kinda gay if you let wrex die in 1, you get a different krogan in #2 to take his place... so basically the same story either way, with different dialog.

True but I believe Wrex is the only one who can unite the clans. This may have a significant impact in 3...

Here are a couple of impressions for the new Mass Effect 3 Kinect features. The video is the same from that showed up on the dashboard.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/18/27...mands-xbox-360

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/01/18/te...g-february-14/

Yeah, but if they radically change things, you get the problem where the story forks and you start to miss content. A lot of time is spent making that content you'll miss - time which arguably is better spent making the content everyone sees of a higher quality. And there's that anxiety that you missed something. If its a 5 hour long game, no big deal, but these games are 30 hour epics, and I usually don't have the time to play through them more than once.

The two things I hate most in gaming are filler content and being forced to replay stuff. Both of those kind of tie in when we're talking about decisions radically changing the game...I think ME strikes a pretty good balance.

Gizmodo has a great blurb about it:
http://gizmodo.com/5877075/mass-effe...-a-good-reason

the following are only excerpts. for the full text, go to the aforementioned link:

"Mass Effect 3's Kinect integration is drop-dead simple. It's simply voice. And it's really simple. You shout commands to your squad mates"James! Frag grenade!"and they follow your orders. You can instantly switch to whatever weapon you want or activate whichever skill you want to pull out of your bag of tricks. Or you can just open a door. No menus, no buttons, no pausing the game play. Fluid, simple, and most importantly, natural. Kinect with Mass Effect 3, while optional, doesn't feel like a bolted-on gimmick. It feels right. James, move your ass and kill that guy. "

"The genius of Mass Effect 3's voice commands is that they both radically simplify the game's controls while simultaneously allowing more complex gameplay action than ever before."

"A somewhat major change in gameplay thanks to the Kinect is that the start-stop-queue-and-attack turn-based rhythm of the old Mass Effect is obliterated by the stream of constant, real-time commands coming out of your mouth. The gameand you and your partynever stop moving. It's more immersive not just because you're yelling at your party members, but simply because you never have to break the cinematic game play to jump into an abstract menu to switch guns or tell a party member what to do next."

"For all the excitement about what Kinect brings to Mass Effect 3 gameplay-wise, what's potentially more exciting is the very real possibility that in the next year or two, we might look back at Mass Effect 3 as a watershed momentthe game that brought Kinect to gamers, that broke it out of the motion-control-gimmick ghetto. That made a Kinect-powered Halo suddenly seem like a real possibility, and for all the right reasons. I hope so, because it feels like something that's just the beginning."

note that the guy apparently hasn't tried Halo Anniversary with the Kinect which I found the integration useful for some things.

here's the video that someone camcorded from the dash:


here's another different video:

So basically it only uses the mic of the kinect, something the POS stock headset can accomplish just as well? I assume you won't be able to use the headset though?

I think It's funny they say the voice commands are simpler and more fluid, when pushing a button is actually much faster.

yeah, let's skip the fact that the kinect has multiple onboard audio processors.

Does it? I thought they stripped all the processing power out of it before they released it to keep costs down.

no. they took out some but left in many processors (audio/video). all the 3d depth calculations are done within the kinect. the audio is processed there.

http://www.myce.com/news/microsoft-d...r-costs-33064/
http://kotaku.com/5609840/kinect-dum...-sign-language

I can confirm Kinect visual camera is 320x240 when I compared the video conference live video to the old X360 Vision camera. Both picture quality look very similar and suffer from lower framerates. PS3 Eye camera produces much better picture quality because it's 640x480 and higher framerate.

As for audio, Kinect still has some kind of noise cancellation ability but I don't know if other areas of the audio got crippled in the shipping version.

I read Kinect takes 15% away from X360 for processing.

It depends on what you are doing. If you are doing complex squad commands it would be easier to just say then hunt through the menu or power wheel. Besides that it will probably be a whole lot more cooler/fluid to use your voice.

I am going to quote this comment I saw on The Verge because I think it answers perfectly why Bioware or any other developer is using Kinect.

You guys really should read the Kinect thread as you're posting a lot of wrong information and misinterpreting the articles.

The VGA RGB camera is a 640x480 camera. What is 320x240 is the resolution of the depth sensor.

If you don't know the abilities of the Kinect, don't comment on them.

Either way, Tom clancy's endwar says hello. It was lame in that game, and it'll probably be lame here. It's simply easier to use a controller as long as the UI doesn't suck. And ME's is traditionally very good.

I watched several Bioware gameplay demos using Kinect voice command on ME3. On every demo, the player didn't give complicated and speak quickly to pack many commands together.

For example, with controller, it's easy to give Shepard: Overload, Liara: Singularity and Garrus: Concussive Shot stringed all together. It's very effective because even any enemy still isn't dead, I can quickly kill them with a few shots. With controller, I can do that in 1-2 seconds easily. So, with voice command, will that work especially, if I speak very quickly?

Also with controller, while selecting attack commands for the squadmate, I can quickly change the attack command. With voice, if you already spoke the attack command, can I say something like, forget last command, new command. Even then, I just wasted a lot of time. With controller, I don't loose anytime.

I really do want Kinect voice command to work well in ME3 since I don't play Kinect casual games. So far, I'm not sold from ME3 voice command videos.

I have never had a quick jump to experience with the controller in ME2. I doubt that would be different with ME3. For me, I would much rather just say the thing then remember the controller options.