Kommander wrote:This is unfair. You have no idea what any of these people may otherwise be doing with their lives.
Fair enough. My assumption was based off of the fact that the last ten minutes -or less- of the final installment of a series of video games in which you can easily spend 25 hours or more apiece is apparently worth so much trouble to so many people, that they must not be doing much with their lives. Admittedly, that's kind of a hypocritical position for someone who spends most of his free time gaming, but when I get behind a charity or donate to something it's because I believe in it, not because I want to make some sort of statement about my entertainment.
I guess one thing that soured me to the argument early on was the review you linked to earlier, and a different point of view on implementation.
It’s all rather… dirty. Presumably they’re trying to encourage you to try the multiplayer because to do well in it, you have to buy or earn unlockable items, and you can get these for real money. But they’re doing it by hurting your single player game, slapping a good playthrough with a bad ending as a penalty for not playing co-op. Even if you like co-op, it’s not unreasonable to want to play through the single player first.
This is misleading.
Your default war readiness is 50% and it's elevated by playing co-op, yes. But there's no need to pay for anything with real money. At all. They aren't following Zynga's Farmville/Mafia Wars model; the default set of weapons is perfectly fine, and equipment is so cheap, you can easily buy it with points earned after every successful mission. Your main source of success is leveling up your multiplayer characters, and that's almost as straightforward as Call of Duty. Oh, and not to mention
having an IQ of 71 or higher.
Even if you have a disastrous co-op run, your war readiness will increase. I got stuck with some truly inept teammates earlier today at a difficulty level they weren't ready for, and it still increased despite the fact that we were wiped out on wave 2... of 11.
The review is mostly bitching about predictable symptoms that come with installing a game on release date and beating it ASAP. In other words, if you're complaining about planet-scanning now, why didn't you pan Mass Effect 2? Or the first one with the damn flubber Mako APC/rover? Oh wait, that'd mean you'd have to do some grinding in an RPG! Grinding takes time, and the review has to be kicked out before anyone else's review.
Gotcha.
Teal Deer: Review sites are utter crap. Now for the legitimate beef:
Multi- and singleplayer segregation. For at least fifteen years now, multiplayer and singleplayer gameplay modes have existed in separate universes. If you wanted to play Duke3D or Quake against other people, the game you'd play would
resemble Duke3D or Quake, and would have the same weapons, but the arenas would exist largely independent of the singleplayer world, and have no bearing on it. And so it has been for generations and generations of gaming and gamers.
So... what? Does that mean they
have to be that way?
Let's be real now: Anyone playing Mass Effect 3 is virtually guaranteed to have a broadband internet connection, and will need to use it for authentication purposes, if nothing else related to the game. Case in point: Origin.*
So, irrelevant logistics aside, why should multiplayer necessarily be
have to be completely divorced from single? Some players might not care for singleplayer? Okay, fine. I just played a mission in Mass Effect 1 where I had to chase a bunch of goddamn alien monkeys around to find a MacGuffin. I didn't want to do that, but I wanted the XP to get "better" results.
RPGs: Life is pain. Deal with it.
*A godawful imitator of Steam that I would gladly destroy.
Kommander wrote:Well that's what I did. I have not and will not purchase this game. I refuse to support crappy sequels. I never saw the second and third (or fourth) Pirates movie, didn't pay to see the second and third Star Wars prequel, and will probably never see a new Speilberg movie again. Also note that I am not really angry, just disappointed and have decided that my money is better spent
elsewhere.
I understand that. Frankly, since I'd already dropped the money on pre-ordering Collector's Edition, I was rather horrified when I was still waiting on it to arrive to my APO address, and Internet opinion went drastically south. But, being a longtime gamer, and this being far from my first "initial release" rodeo, I decided to reserve judgement until I could play it myself. (Hence the previous disclaimer about building up my ME1/2 playthroughs).
This is why I used the demo, and full version multiplayer, to shape my perceptions. Because, admittedly, we gamers are a self-entitled lot, and we bitch about everything. But if our bitching was capable of getting anything done, Day of Defeat: Source would be an actual fucking
game, instead of a piece-of-shit Source engine tech demonstrator and stand-in for Team Fortress 2, irrelevant since 2007.
Kommander wrote:I'll grant that it's first world problems, but so is allot of stuff posted on this forum. "Oh Noes my extractor on my super rare M-1924 Tireur Caniche is broken! Whatever shall I do!" It's not like anyone is claiming that this games ending destroyed their life.
It's true that most of the problems we post here are, in the grand scheme of things, inconsequential.
Still, I can't recall anyone comparing, say, Springfield Armory's new cast M1's to CMP's original forged M1s and invoking slave imagery. Everyone posting here is a first-worlder, so most of the problems we'll talk about will be first-world problems. It's true, and there's nothing wrong with that.
But when your priorities are so friggin' skewed that you'd compare a story having a less-than-perfect ending to the master's whip... well, that's just ridiculous.
