Mass Effect 3 review

Last week I finished up Mass Effect 3, and I thought I would post my thoughts on the game here. I’m not going to score the game in a traditional way, but rather give my thoughts in ugly, bad and good point form. ME3 is a highly subjective game, and depending on how you played the previous games, most of the outcomes will differ from player to player.

The Ugly:

• The character importer is severely broken. If you customised the face of your Commander Shepard in the previous games, there is a very high chance that when you import him/her into ME3 your face will either look very different or will fail to appear at all. I can understand that BioWare worked on improving the graphics in ME3, but to have your custom Shep face not available immediately breaks immersion. Very poor form BioWare, and the 1.02 patch does not resolve the problem!
• The endings ruin everything that was built up over 5 years. It’s too short, too full of holes and feels incredibly rushed. It poses far too many questions that deserve answers, being the end of the trilogy.

The Bad:

• If you play on a PC, EA’s Origin service is required. Depending on how you view it, this could be a non issue or a massive pain. Origin is a lot like Steam, though I find it to start up faster and be more responsive. Still, it’s a bit intrusive to have the service forced on you.
• Multiplayer can be buggy. MP is a lot of fun with the right team, but sometimes it glitches really badly. Apparently the MP section is peer to peer hosted, so if your hosting player is on a slow connection, strange things can and do happen. It’s also frustrating when you get disconnected right near the end of great match.
• Enemies are repetitive! There are only 3 types in the entire game, and they get boring after a while. The previous 2 ME games had a lot more variety.

The Good:

• There are some truly epic moments in the game. Some characters get a wonderful ending that leaves you emotionally wrecked. These missions are truly the BioWare standard of old!
• Graphics seem to have been spruced up again. ME3 is no Crysis, but it’s come a long way since the first game. Also, crying seems a lot more natural now and not like the oil slick effect from ME2.
• Ashley is back. She’s my favourite character and love interest, so it’s great to have her back.
• Great squad dynamics. The smaller squad makes the game feel a bit more like ME1, where you could get to know your team mates quite well, unlike ME2 where there were up to 12 members. Banter is great, and the team mates generally work together very well.

Overall, Mass Effect 3 is a very good game with many fantastic moments, but it is also rough around the edges in many places. There was a massive leak of the game’s contents in November last year which forced BioWare to make a lot of last minute changes. I’m sure that impacted quite a bit on the game as well, and could go a way to explaining the nature of the endings.

BioWare have announced an Extended Cut that will come as free DLC in “Summer 2012.” They won’t change the endings, but they intend the EC to flesh out the choice you make, as well as provide closure. If BioWare pull this off, then at least it will go some way to helping us accept our Shepard’s fate in the end.

Until then, I will leave it at this: Mass Effect 3 is a fine game in most of its areas, but as a complete package, it falls short of Mass Effect 2. I hope that further DLC as well as the Extended Cut will flesh out the game to the level of ME2.

Is this the last we’ll see of Commander Shepard? Probably and sadly so. I just can’t see how Shep will feature in future games after the Reapers. Will it be the last Mass Effect game? Unlikely – Electronic Arts knows when they have a gold franchise, and I am sure that they will push for more games to be made in the universe in the future.

Mass Effect 3 Redux

My last blog post was about the failure of Mass Effect 3 to correctly import the face of my Commander Shepard. I’m still waiting on BioWare to patch the problem, so I’ve yet to start the single player campaign. However, I thought that a picture would be worth a thousand words, so I’m going to graphically demonstrate how far off the importer is.

My Shepard in Mass Effect:

Mass Effect 2:

And what Mass Effect 3 wants to offer me:

I tried fiddling with the values in the Character Creator to get him close to what he was, but this was the closest I could get:

Needless to say, I will only get to fully experience Mass Effect 3 once – replays after that will not have the same impact. It’s painful to wait, but I will wait until the patch comes out and fixes the problem, or BioWare says that they cannot fix it. Until then, it’s multi player only.

Mass Effect 3 trials and tribulations

When it comes to game companies, BioWare is my favourite developer. I don’t even want to think about the number of hours I’ve sunk into their games over the years. In the last couple of years, the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series have captivated me like no other. Whether it’s the Warden or Commander Shepard, my imagination has worked overtime living in these worlds.

Last week, Mass Effect 3 was finally released. I, like millions around the globe, looked forward to the conclusion of Shepard’s story. The trailers BioWare put out only made the desire heighten. For 2 fantastic games, we guided and moulded our individual Shepard. I even ordered 2 copies of the Collector’s Edition, as a memento the entire series.

I got home with my copy in tow on Friday and went through the setup procedure. A bit different thanks to Origin, but nothing too major. The amount of DLC was long to download, thanks to my slow internet connection at home. Nonetheless, I let it finish first so I could dive into the game in one go. By the time I was ready to play, I had read about a bug on the BioWare forums that affected characters imported from earlier ME games. The faces of said imports either errored out or produced vastly different results compared to ME2. I hoped that I wouldn’t be hit by this, as my Shepard was chosen from one of the presets in ME1 and then modified to suit me.

Lo and behold, the bug affected me as well. My Shepard has green eyes, ginger hair, no beard and is a white character. The import face I was offered had brown eyes, brown hair, brown skin and a scruffy beard. Needless to say, I didn’t continue. I tried to customise the import to match what I had looked like in ME2, but I gave up after a while as it was nowhere near close to what I had. Instead I’ve had to delay playing the game and satisfy myself with multiplayer instead.

There is currently a 150 page thread on the BioWare forums about this bug. BioWare are aware of the bug, but there is precious little feedback on when/if the bug can be fixed. I have to admit that I am not impressed, as something this major should have not slipped by Quality Assurance. One of the unique and fantastic aspects of the ME universe is that you would carry your same Shep through the entire trilogy. To have it fail at the start of ME3 feels like someone either overlooked the bug or didn’t test properly.

All in all, I am not impressed. I am prepared to wait for a final verdict on whether this will be fixed or not, but what I really want is just some feedback from BioWare. Just a quick note to say they’ve made progress, or something to let us know. Many people will put up with the bug if they know it’s being worked on and there is feedback. Silence on the other hand only inflames the situation. I hope that for BioWare’s sake, they take this to heart and communicate more about this sort of situation. BioWare has many passionate fans thanks to their wonderful games, but they need to be more open with the fans if they want to keep the fans.

The Witcher 2 initial experience is troublesome

This past week, I decided on a whim to buy both The Witcher and The Witcher 2 on gog.com, a site that has earned plenty of praise for their work with, literally good old games. In particular, the GOG version has no SecuRom copy protection in it, something I am always happy to avoid. I must add that while I have no major issue with copy protection or DRM, it needs to work right, be reliable and not mess with Windows. SecuRom in particular doesn’t fit this bill, but that is a story for another time.

Long story short, I downloaded the files and brought them home. Installation of both games went well, no issues at all. The problems began once I tried to get online to register the games however. The Witcher website appears to have been redesigned shortly before the launch of Witcher 2, which is nothing major in of itself. What is a problem is that you cannot login or register on the site, with those buttons being greyed out. Attempting to register from within the launcher for Witcher 2 is a very hit and miss affair with the servers seeming to be constantly offline or having connectivity issues.

While I finally managed to get the game registered, I’ve been unable to download the first piece of free DLC they released. The launcher struggles to connect to their servers, most attempts simply die. When it does connect, it downloads the file, says Verifying and then does nothing. Going back into the Downloadable Content option on the menu shows that the DLC was not installed. Mass Effect 2 was a good example of how to do DLC right technically. Download an exe file, install it and content is available if you log in with the matching account.

Trying to register Witcher 1 has been even less successful, as it appears the servers are either down or not available. Reading the Witcher website reveals that there is some hairy server maintenance going on, accounts being moved, forums offline, use one account for Witcher 1 and one for Witcher 2 and many other issues.

The overall feeling from this is one of irritation. While I have no problem with server issues, a clear announcement on the front page of the website would be useful as well as some sort of concrete timeframe on when everything will be up and running.

In mitigation, I will say that perhaps the demand has surprised the crews at CDProjekt Red, and based on what I’ve read, they are working insanely hard to get it all worked out. It’s just a pity that no game seems to be launched these days without some or another flaw that makes the initial experience less than perfect. I begin to understand what draws so many people to consoles now…

Overall, I’m going to give things about a week to settle down, and in the mean time I can play through Dragon Age 2 and Witcher 1 before finally getting into Witcher 2.

Thoughts on Steam

Steam is probably the most interesting product Valve has ever created. Starting off on shaky ground, it’s grown to become pretty much the dominant digital game distribution platform on the internet it seems. More and more games are tying into Steam, whether for copy protection or for the whole caboodle of patching, achievements and so on.

With the falling ADSL prices in South Africa, I decided to reinstall my copy of The Orange Box a week ago. I’ve been sitting with this bundle for well over 2 and a half years now, during which I installed it once on Windows XP, played for a while then lost everything when I moved over to Vista.

I began the process by getting the latest Steam installer off the Steam website. It’s a small MSI installer, which automatically retrieves up to date files from the internet when it’s installed, roughly 40MB worth of data. Once that was done, I inserted my Orange Box disk 1 and chose to install everything. Luckily, the installer didn’t overwrite the newer Steam install with the older version on disk. The installer went ahead, download roughly 300MB of data from the internet and then installed off of my 2 dvd’s.

Once running, Steam had to apply a number of updates to the games, which chewed up a lot of bandwidth. As I mentioned above, ADSL data has become a lot cheaper in SA over the last year, and with uncapped starting to make a mark for itself, these download sizes are no longer such an issue.

My experience with the Steam client so far has been mostly positive, it seems to work as expected. It does seem a little fragile at times though, hanging for a while before suddenly becoming responsive again. As I haven’t bought anything over Steam, I can’t comment on how the shopping procedure actually works. Perhaps my minor stability problems were due to Windows 7 x64, though I must stress that the incidents were pretty random.

After really making use of the product for a bit now, I’m left mostly impressed. Increased broadband penetration and falling ADSL prices means that the huge bandwidth requirements are not such an issue like when Half-Life 2 first launched back in 2004. The range of games on offer is pretty impressive, though there are quite a few games not available. I think this is partly due to regional restrictions, as well as some publishers using alternate digital distribution platforms.

Personally, I’m a bit old school and prefer the feeling of a game case, printed manual and game DVD in my hands over a purely digital download, and even more so with things like Collector’s Editions of games. Still, for all the old school folks like myself, there are plenty others who love the convenience of Steam and digital downloads. Steam has become a juggernaut, and rightly so. Valve did their homework and took their time building their platform. They were in the right place at the right time and have developed something that the rest of the industry can only look at with envy.

BioWare: my favourite games studio

I don’t post too often on this blog about gaming, due to the fact that I don’t get enough time to truly play games anymore. When I do, it’s usually small bursts of a few hours, slotted in amongst the events of real life. I was looking over my game collection the other day and it struck me that I own most of the games BioWare have developed over the years. I found myself smiling when I thought of this, because BioWare games have consumed more hours of my life than every other game company combined.

My collection of BioWare games

When I first got into computer gaming, I only played first person shooters. I really enjoyed them, in fact I still do, but after a while the games started getting repetitive. Back in 2002 I think it was, I got my hand on a PCFormat magazine from the UK, where they had reviewed Neverwinter Nights. It made me quite interested, so I eventually got hold of a copy. It took me a while to get into the game, especially the lore of the Dungeons and Dragons universe, but before too long, I was hopelessly hooked. I played until the wee hours of the morning, questing, saving people, destroying evil. Over 60 hours in total, it was a stunning introduction to role playing games. I later bought the two expansion packs for the game, but I have never finished them. I keep promising myself I will one day.

Here are hours of my life

After that, I got Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which I haven’t played for longer than 10 minutes. Will get around to that as well. I never got Jade Empire, as I don’t think it was too widely available in South Africa. I may pick this up off of Steam one day, to see what it is like.

The next game I got was Mass Effect 1, at the end of 2009. I had reviews about it, but I hadn’t thought to buy it. I got a copy on a budget sale, and I was sorry I hadn’t bought it full price. The game was epic in every single way. Music, art, action, role playing, characters. I played though it twice, spending roughly 100 hours on the game.

Mass Effect 2 followed in February of this year. This time I pre-ordered the Collectors Edition, and it was worth the extra cost. ME2 as a game is shorter than ME1, but I’ve played through it twice, spending about 60 hours so far. I will be making one more run through it just before ME3 comes out, to do a canon run through to import into ME3. The added DLC so far has been of mixed quality, so was nice, some was “meh”

BioWare had released another game before ME2, Dragon Age: Origins. I ignored this, as I was too absorbed in Mass Effect. However, I bought Origins and the expansion pack about 2 months ago, and I was ever sorry I didn’t buy the Collectors Edition. This game has already sucked up almost 100 hours of my life, and with some of the mods I’ve downloaded, it’s going to keep going up. The game is awesome in so many ways I can’t even begin to describe it.

Can’t wait for Dragon Age 2 to add to this collection!

I’ve learnt my lesson for the future. Buy all Collectors Editions of future BioWare games and be prepared to be sucked into whatever story they are telling. These guys know how to make role playing games, so much so that I’m not afraid to admitting that I am a nerd when it comes to their games. Roll on Mass Effect 3, Dragon Age 2 and whatever else!

LAN gaming is fun

Yesterday my best friend came over to my house to have a mini LAN. We had spoken of doing this before, but we hadn’t set a date or time for it. Yesterday somehow just worked out conveniently and he came over on the spur of the moment. We weren’t able to do this before as he didn’t have a computer and I didn’t have a network switch. However, I now have a switch built into our ADSL router, and since it also has wireless, it’s even easier.

I have my beast of a computer and he now a company laptop that is pretty high end. The graphics card onboard is unfortunately one of the Intel 4 series chips, but for the games we played, it worked out fine.

We only played Warcraft 3 and Unreal Tournament 2004 but it was a lot of fun. Unfortunately during UT2004, my friend had an attack of what seemed to be vertigo, which left him pale and nauseas. I stopped to let him recover. At the same time my parents came home with some supper, so we ate and that helped him recover even more. It seems this happens to him in most first person games, something to do with how the motion yet no motion confuses his mind.

This is my first real time doing any sort of LAN gaming for an actual decent amount of time, and it was well worth it. The only downside of any LAN is setting up your games and getting them running. This only counts if you it hasn’t been installed before the time of course. Then again, sometimes you have no real idea of what you are going to play

We finally finished after 11pm, we were too tired to go on. After this, we are definitely hoping to do it again some time, and hopefully involve a 3rd person so that it becomes even more fun.

Now I know why thee are so many LAN addicts out there.

Another 2 good games completed

Recently I was able to finish another 2 good computer games, Crysis Warhead and Call of Duty 4. Both are pretty visually stunning, with Warhead taking the lead.

Call of Duty 4 had a good story line, but its ending was a bit weak I think. It didn’t leave me satisfied after all the insane action of the main game itself. That aside, graphics were very good, and audio as always superb, though some of the sounds seemed recycled from COD2. I believe Multiplayer is where this game is really at, but since I can’t do that at home, I’m unable to comment on that.

Crysis: Warhead was fun, with lots of full on action. Not the same kind of insane action as the COD series, but still up from the original Crysis. Psycho makes a really good character, maybe even more than Nomad. Sound quality and music was again top notch. Graphics was again as stunning as only Crysis can be, but somehow I was left feeling that the original game was more beautiful. I don’t know what it was, but something just felt different with Warhead. I don’t agree with people saying that it looked better than the original game however, I would actually give the older game the lead.

One thing that really irritated me though was the random crashing of the game. From what I’ve read online, this is a known issue. Unfortunately I am already finished with the game, and by the time a patch comes out, I may not want to replay the game. The original game worked for hours on end with no problems, so I know it’s not my computer.

One thing I can say for both games is that they are short. I play on the Easy setting, which does make things shorter I guess, but overall both games are short. COD4 is about 10 hours, and Warhead 6, maybe less. Sometimes games are priced rather high here in South Africa, which can leave a bitter taste in your mouth when your new game is over so quick. Long games seem to be a novelty these days, with far more effort focussed on graphics and physics than storyline or length of the game.

With these games out the way now, I will focus more on Oblivion again, and get my enjoyment from that epic game. I wanted to play Unreal Tournament 3, but that game crashes evert few minutes no matter what I do. That’s a story for another post.

Why PC gaming piracy has lost

Softwre piracy is a very controversial topic. Some people see it as theft, others as freedom from companies charging ridiculous prices, a way to strike back. In some ways, the situation has slowly been getting worse year after year. New networks come online to share. In turn more effort is put into shutting down those networks and suing the users on the network. Copy protection methods in products keeps getting more and more exotic as crackers find ways around protection.

It has actually come to the point now where it’s easier and more hassle free to buy a computer game, install and play. With the exotic new Starforce, SecuROM, and SafeDisc protections, the effort involved in cracking the games is no longer worth it. Just when you think you’ve got it working, a new update patch comes out that updates the game, and suddenly your crack no longer works. So the cycle goes on and on. Some games can be played fine with the “Gold” release, but many others are buggy and therefore need the patches.

Console gaming is generally devoid of this issue on the newer platforms, especially the Playstation 3. Because it’s Blu-ray based, no games have yet been pirated, nor the system chipped. I know an image of a game was made by using Linux on the console, but whether that game could be burnt and played I never found out.I don’t know about Xbox360, but I assume it’s also near impossible to break. With the console, you also get the added bonus of that the game will run, unlike on a PC where your system might be too slow or old.

After seeing first hand the effort that goes into trying to get a new game to work as a pirate copy, I believe it’s simply easier to buy the original and enjoy it. Sometimes the price is too high, but often enough games end up in the bargain bin quickly, and you can pick up some good stuff for pretty cheap. I have picked up quite a few classics that way. Best of all, I’ve supported the guys who make a living from making the games, so it feels good.

The war will go and on, much as it always has, but slowly I think that piracy will end up fighting a losing battle. Every copy protection system will be cracked, but the time and effort involved may slow down crack releases a lot. If the game companies can just reduce the prices of games a bit, more and more people would turn legit again.

PC Gaming may never recover the limelight it once had thanks to consoles, but if piracy rates come down, along with prices, some good growth may again occur.

Two great games

This past weekend I finally managed to finish off 2 great games, Call of Duty 2 and Crysis. I have not been playing too often, so it has taken me quite some time.

Call of Duty 2 has some very good graphics, and although it’s not cutting edge, it’s quite good. Sound was simply mind blowing, I truly felt like I was on a battlefield most of the time. It also made tremendous use of my surround sound system, which left me smiling.

The game itself has a strong, if disjointed storyline with it’s 3 campaigns. To be honest, I think that was probably my only dislike of it. The campaigns never tied together, and the endings felt somewhat weak. The end of the American campaign took me by suprise, I didn’t expect it to be so short. But being positive again, I will say that the opening mission of that campaign has to be one of the most brilliant levels in any computer game, no matter what genre. I really felt that I was on the beach, making landings as part of D-Day. Medal of Honour Allied Assualt had a great level with Omaha Beach, but this was better. Wow.

I picked the game up at a budget price in a computer shop, and it was well worth it. I have heard rave reviews about COD4, and if it is anything like 2, I know the hype is justified.

On to Crysis. I couldn’t help but feel a thrill when starting the game up, knowing that I was about to play the most graphically beautiful game of all time. I got even more of a thrill when I was able to play the game with all settings on high.

From the first moment, I was hooked. Graphics blew me away, as did the sound. Once again it made good use of all my speakers, and bathed me in sound. Once I was on the ground and got used to the nanosuit, I had a sinking feeling. I knew that any other shooter I played would not be the same without that suit. I haven’t yet felt myself reaching for that suit button in other games, but I do wish it was there.

The story line of Crysis is pretty strong right though, you just want to keep playing and playing. The music in game is also extremley beautiful, really adds to the mood. I do have to say though that the last few levels were a little let down, I don’t think it really did justice to the rest of the game. They set it up for a sequel, but did it in such a way that made you really want that new game now. I would say that Nomad shares the stage with Master Chief from Halo, they both want to finish the fight.

I look forward to getting Crysis Warhead, as well as the next Crysis game, whenever that may eventually arrive.

With those 2 games out the way now, I can focus on some of my other games, but I find that it feels a little shallow compared to the treats I have been given in COD2 and Crysis. Computer gaming may not be as easy or quick as consoles anymore, but it still is the king. You can mod, replay and multiplay in ways that consoles can’t touch. Overall, it still gives the best experience.