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Gaming's Biggest Space Opera Returns (axios.com) 43

Posted by msmash from the weekend-project dept.
The iconic spacefaring adventure "Mass Effect" is back today with "Mass Effect: Legendary Edition," a single, remastered version of all three games. From a report: There is no series like "Mass Effect" -- even when it comes to BioWare's other choice-driven RPGs like "Dragon Age." "Mass Effect" is a big ol' space adventure first and foremost, but it's also about loyalty, love, and tough calls. "Mass Effect" follows Commander Shepard -- a hero players can customize for looks and gender -- across three games as they wage war against a galactic threat known as the Reapers. Key choices carry through all three games, whether it's who survives, or who you ally yourself with.

"Mass Effect" (2007) is a classic sci-fi thriller, where Shepard races to stop a turncoat operative hungry for power.
"Mass Effect 2" (2010) is a miscreant adventure centered on building a ragtag squad, culminating in a final "suicide" mission where everyone's survival is on the line.
"Mass Effect 3" (2012) brings the trilogy to a close through a more somber, war-focused story about loss and consequence.
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Gaming's Biggest Space Opera Returns More

Gaming's Biggest Space Opera Returns

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  • choices matter (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kwoff ( 516741 ) on Friday May 14, 2021 @02:48PM (#61385142)
    I choose to not buy the game again.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      When I saw the title I hoped that Space Quest 7 finally was going to get out.

      • Seriously. I looked into the future in Space Quest 4 and was looking forward to Space Quest X and Space Quest XII, but we can't get there if there if 7 never comes about.

        Clearly we're living in an alternate timeline.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lsllll ( 830002 )
        I think the same thing that happened to "Leisure Suit Larry 4: The Case of the Missing Floppies" may have happened here.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ranton ( 36917 )

      The only meaningful reason to remaster this game would be to improve the storyline and ending so that choices throughout your playthroughs actually mattered.

      • Shamus Young Retrospective (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Friday May 14, 2021 @04:05PM (#61385462)
        Before ME3 came out, I had played ME1 and ME2 over and over. I expected the "trilogy" to be one of those series like Zelda or Fallout that I would revisit years (or decades) later and always find (or rediscover) something to enjoy. I specifically remember planning to play through all three games again back-to-back-to-back immediately after beating the third for the first time. Instead, I was so put off by the ending that I haven't played any of them since. ME3 was so destructively bad that it retroactively ruined the experience of playing ME1 and ME2; the comparison to Game of Thrones is apt.

        Shamus Young wrote a great series analyzing the story of the Mass Effect games, from how well ME1 worked and left a lot for the sequels to work with, how ME2 mostly squandered it by "resetting" Shephard and the story, and how everything that was left fell apart in ME3:
        https://www.shamusyoung.com/tw... [shamusyoung.com]

        This is probably the best video from the time about the ME3 ending:
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
        • Ohh thanks for the second link! I may have found a new favorite youtuber.
          • I especially like the points he makes about Tuchanka and Star Trek. And it says a lot that "Am I going to destroy the Earth?" is a valid (unanswered) question about any of the available solutions.

      • The only meaningful reason to remaster this game would be to improve the storyline

        That is literally the only thing that is *not* done when remastering something.

    • More power to you. I can imagine many people will chose the opposite, just like they chose to buy their favourite films on Bluray and throw out their DVDs / VHSs.

      I'm normally right there with you but the Mass Effect series had one hell of an epic story and was generally okay from a gameplay perspective. I won't buy it simply because I don't have time to revisit older stories and explore new ones so something's gotta give, but I personally see this being hugely popular.

    • Nothing against you not wanting to buy the game a second time, I am lucky in that I never played any of them, and the story sounds good enough that I will probably get this remastered version of all three...

      Not sure about actually playing through the third one as I heard some people did not like the story, but maybe it was also because of technical glitches I assume will be fixed in the remastered version.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by grub ( 11606 )
        I am envious of you getting to experience Mass Effect for the first time. If there was a pill that could wipe my memory before replaying, I'd pop it without reading the side effect warnings.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by chihowa ( 366380 )

        If you haven't played any of it, you should definitely pick this up and play it. The gameplay and graphics get better as the series goes on, so maybe this version fixes the clunky gameplay of the first one.

        You should play the third too. If I remember correctly (rose glasses?), the third was very good up until the actual end. I remember some pretty awesome scenes in the third, but the ending was atrocious.

        • Thanks for the thoughts on the ending, I guess it's worth a bad ending for a great story leading up to that... I was OK with Game Of Thrones that way since so much was so awesome, so I'll give Mass effect 3 a chance.

  • They redo the thing and they left the same terrible modified ending. They should have spend some money on it and made decent ending for the story.

    • They actually did change the ending, to include the DLC ending released a year later...I've heard good things.

      Anyway, you don't play a video game for the ending FMV.

      • I originally played with the "extended" ending and it was still bad compared to the previous games. It did expand upon a lot of things and your choices in the game did make a difference in the story(compared to the original ending where they largely did not).
        While the lack of a good ending in not going to stop me playing it does matter how the game leaves you when done. For instance the fallout games are far better overall games because of the ending to the story vs if it just showed a "the end" once you
    • Considering the more recent titles from the studio which include the likes Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda, do you honestly have any faith that the hollow shell of Bioware (or their soulless parent EA) could honestly make improvements? The people who made all of the great Bioware titles that you remember are all long gone, having gone on to work at other studios or even found companies of their own, leaving EA to fill the position with unrelated people who walk around in a Bioware skin suit trading on the
  • Their lost. I will wait a year or so and get the TPB edition. There is no reason to require Origin to be install beyond being dicks. Especially since the multiplayer has been removed.

  • Gaming's Biggest Space Opera Returns

    Clearly not talking about Star Wars.

  • They must have run their teem into the ground or something because middle management let it slide and executives are "too busy" to actually do any kind of oversight or work, or this wouldn't have happened. How do you run such a popular franchise into the ground? No evidence, besides the product, but I think we've seen it enough by now to know how it goes. Why work harder? They caught on to the pattern of manipulation and said screw it, it's not like working harder would do anything but get CTO a couple

  • Mass Effect 1. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by JackAxe ( 689361 ) on Friday May 14, 2021 @03:21PM (#61385304)
    Is one of my all time favorite games. The PC version is great IMO. It had good mouse support for both gameplay and the UI. ME2, I enjoyed it, but that was after using a hex editor to fix the questionable control choices put in by the developers. I finished ME2, but it soured my opinion of Mass Effect do to its streamlining, so I did not bother with ME3 other than YouTube videos to see what happened. I would buy this Legendary set just for ME1, but not if they've messed up the controls and UI, like they did with the later games.

    The first Mass Effect is the complete game as far as I'm concerned. ME2 added nothing to the story IMO, but it was still entertaining.

    • They "fixed" the gameplay of ME1 by making it more like ME2.

      I would stay away from this if I were you. As usual, all remakes are just plain worse than the original.

  • Am I the only one who realized that Bioware cribbed large portions of Mass Effect from Alastair Reynold's Inhibitor Sequence? Like the Reapers are a complete copy of the Inhibitors. The "borrowing" is so obvious, I'm surprised lawyers weren't involved.

    Anyone interested should start by reading "Revelation Space" - the writing is much better than Mass Effect anyway.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by spun ( 1352 )

      It's not like Reynolds was the first guy to come up with the idea of a genocidal precursor race. But his take on it is very, very good and I highly recommend all of the Revelation Space series, not just the Inhibitor Trilogy.

    • and Dragon Age is also heavily based on a whole lot of mainstream fantasy works.

  • I don't know about all of you but I've noticed as the years go by that anytime I attempt to return to a thing that I loved earlier in life,
    ( be it games, food, etc ) it's never quite as good as you remember it.

    There is probably some scientific or psychological name for it, but remembering that tends to turn me off towards trying to enjoy
    the things I used to enjoy in years past.

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