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miffy495

Mass Effect 3

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So I figured I'd throw this out here. I had intended to not touch the ME3 multiplayer at all, but then a real-world friend who is totally into it roped me into a couple of games with him. It's actually pretty fun and I just sank another hour into quick play matches this evening. I'm on the PC, Origin username is the same as my name here. Anyone interested in a match or two? The fact that they only take 15 - 20 minutes is a big draw for me, as time is limited. Makes it really easy to hop into a game pretty guilt-free about the time I'm spending.

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yeah it is surprisingly entertaining. I stopped playing the minute I finished the single player game though. Maybe I'll fire it up later when the new DLC update is out.

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Same. I don't think I'm ever going to play this again. Reminds me of my brief love affair with AC:Brotherhood's multiplayer. Fun, but not sustainable after the novelty wears off.

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I've been playing a little bit with my girlfriend, we could really use a couple more guys as the missions seem fairly tailored to a full party. jonac13 on Origin and we should be up for playing any time this weekend, let me know if you're interested.

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I'd be up for a round or two after work tonight. If you're on the East coast it may be a little late for you, but I'll add you on Origin anyway and we'll see what's up.

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I'm posting here so as not to derail a non-related thread with ME3 talk with Twig.

 

I find the combat in Mass Effect pretty boring, so I'm sort of surprised you'd say a horde mode redeemed the game.

 
So it turns out that combat was actually really fun and interesting in ME3, but you would have been hard pressed to figure that out in SP.  SP discouraged experimenting, since you had to pick your power/weapon loadouts before leaving for a lengthy mission.  But MP rewarded experimenting, as you could radically change character, race, class, weapons and powers each mission. 

 

The mechanics of weapons, powers, ammo and the interactions of them all really shined in co-op when you could have much longer running battles with more enemies.  And being able to play as all the different races, with their variations in health and mobility, added a ton of diversity.  The difference between being a squishy, but lighting fast, Drell versus playing a slow, non-cover using mountain of a Krogan warlord was dramatic.  It really was the best thing to come out of ME3.  I sank well over 100 hours into it BEFORE I talked my wife into getting into it, and then together we played another 100+ hours.  Plus it had just enough RPG hooks with leveling up each of the classes and leveling up guns/equipment to scratch that itch.  The random reward store did get very, very, very old though. 

 

Yeah, I could gush about ME3 MP for awhile.  All I want them to make is a co-op squad game built around it, forget the SP stuff. 

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That does make it sound more interesting than I expected, at least, but I'm more concerned with the core FEEL of Mass Effect. I don't know if ME3 makes it better than ME2 (hopefully it does!), but ME2 just... FELT lame. I don't like using this word because it has a lot of unnecessary wait with a certain crowd, but: GUNPLAY. It ain't feel gooood. The core gameplay is that of a shooter amplified by special powers (be they shields or drones or mini black holes or whatever), and the shooting just does not feel great.

 

It doesn't help that I also HATE over-the-shoulder cameras. Absolutely DESPISE them.

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That does make it sound more interesting than I expected, at least, but I'm more concerned with the core FEEL of Mass Effect. I don't know if ME3 makes it better than ME2 (hopefully it does!), but ME2 just... FELT lame. I don't like using this word because it has a lot of unnecessary wait with a certain crowd, but: GUNPLAY. It ain't feel gooood. The core gameplay is that of a shooter amplified by special powers (be they shields or drones or mini black holes or whatever), and the shooting just does not feel great.

 

It doesn't help that I also HATE over-the-shoulder cameras. Absolutely DESPISE them.

 

Well, the camera is no better in MP, as it's still a third person shooter.  But the mechanics of shooting were much better.  Guns had the right "feel" to them, in that heavy shotguns had a satisfying weight to them while light energy weapons felt right too.  With up to four people per match, you could really design a character to fit with a squad if you were playing with people you knew. 

 

ME3 added an explosion mechanic as well.  Certain powers and ammo types would "prime" an enemy.  Then other powers would detonate if they hit the same enemy within a certain amount of time.  Tech powers would cause a lightning explosion, fire powers a fireball and biotic powers a biotic explosion.  Each type of explosion caused varying damage amounts based on if it was hitting shields, health or armor.  Which meant that building teams to capitalize on that mechanic was always fun. 

 

Then there were new powers that were unique only to MP, like the Krogan Warlord with a warhammer you could prime with different effects, an engineer with a resupply pylon, a crossbow, grenades that recharged your shields. an electic net that pinned enemies down, a wrist mounted blade cannon and more.   Some were definitely better than others, but all of them were fun and had a useful role to play.

 

Oh, and melee builds were fantastic.  The Batarians had the most satisfying heavy melee in the entire ME series.  With the Batarian Vangaurd you could Biotic Charge a group of enemies, stun them, blast one with a shotgun and then punch another one to death, then charge into another group of enemies.  There were a bunch of other great melee builds as well.  The EDI bot got a Mike Tyson upper cut that was insane when used coming out of Tactical Cloak.   The Geth have an AoE electric pulse that was surprisingly useful for as slow as it was.

 

Oh, and they added in the Volus as a playable race.  Which was either the best or the worst thing to ever happen, depending on who you talk to.  The little guys were hilarious, and surprisingly useful.  They have a power that lets them recharge the team's shields once every so often, but were very squishy themselves and were too short to hop over all the cover that normal races could vault over.

 

During the height of its popularity, they ran weekend events that had some story elements that tied back to the SP story.  They had one where the reapers had dispatched thousands of Banshees across the galaxy to terrorize troops, which meant that Banshees had a chance to randomly spawn in any match, regardless of the faction you were playing. 

 

Stuff like that is what kept me coming back to it.  There were so many different builds that were just fun to play.  If I just wanted to kill and hour or two having fun with someone, ME3 was there and waiting. 

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On the 360.  I thought about moving over to the PC at one point, but the way you progress is by earning credits playing matches, which you then spend on booster packs that unlock and upgrade guns/equipment/characters.  You have to start over if you start playing on a new platform, and I couldn't imagine starting over after having almost everything unlocked on the 360.  When you're starting out, it sucks if you want to unlock one specific gun/character, but it's not bad if you just accept that everything can be fun and enjoy what you are unlocking. 

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Hmm, well, you say you had fun, so that's a thing, but I dunno, I have my doubts that I personally would enjoy any combat-focused thing in Mass Effect. I guess I'll see whenever I eventually get around to playing it!

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If ME3's combat had the story of ME2 to match, the SP would have been bananas. Also, if MP didn't include that pay-to-win stuff that mangled the MP economy I think people would have given it a more fair shake. Also, I wish they didn't balance MP for a full party, I had a lot of fun in GoW3 rolling around with 2-3 players in Horde.

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The store was the worst part of MP.  You didn't really need to pay to win, just get good enough to run Gold level missions most of the time.   I usually spent $6 each time they released a new content pack.  Not because I felt that I needed to, but because each of the content packs was awesome and I would have paid double that had they charged for them. 

 

I eventually got good enough that I routinely ran 2 and 3 people squads on Gold.  It was actually a lot of fun that way.  It was about a 50/50 chance for my wife and I to extract on Gold with just the two of us, whereas we almost never failed with 4 people.  So it added a nice challenge.  And we'd do themed role playing matches like having two Quarians, or a Krogan and Salarian who had been marooned together and had to depend on one another to live. 

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ME3 is on sale for PC on Origin for $6 right now, so my wife and I both bought it this week.  Our 360 Gold accounts have been expired for months, and we were hankering for some ME3 MP.  Just as cheap to buy it on PC and start over as it was to re-activate Gold for each of us. 

 

Got in a few matches last night, god we were super rusty, plus starting with no advanced characters or gear.  I never moved to PC from 360 mostly because the thought of starting over was horrifying after the amount of time I put in to unlock so much stuff on console.  But now it's been most of a year since we played regularly, and starting over is kinda fun!  I get to unlock stuff again (I was down to just Ultra-rares before) and am forced to use gear I might not otherwise. 

 

My Origin is BjornDaDwarf and my wife's is Zanasta-1.  Late in the evening if just one of us is on, it's probably me.  I'll bounce back and forth between our accounts if I'm playing by myself to unlock stuff for both of us. 

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I got ME3 on PC free after the Sim City appology just to play multi with friends. I've got a couple of maxed out characters, but I'm certainly not super advanced. I'll try and remember to add you when I get home. I could use more Origin friends.

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My Origin thing is BadHatNZ, added both your IDs Bjorn.

Are the multiplayer content packs unlocked from the get-go if I have the main game? You mentioned something about new classes but I don't see any.

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You have to download them separately on Origin, there are 5 of them, all free.  They are Retaliation, Resurgence, Rebellion, Reckoning and Earth.  All told, they probably doubled the number of original classes (some with radically new powers), close to doubled the number of weapons, added new maps, added re-imagined versions of the original maps with weather/hazard effects, added a new difficulty, new weapon mods and a "Gear" slot that lets you put on equipment with gives various effects. 

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