Currently playing through the Mass Effect trilogy for the first time

Currently playing through the Mass Effect trilogy for the first time.

What should I expect?

First one is kino
Second is movie
Third is flick

No payoff by the third game

Greatness until the last 5 fucking minutes.

you will enjoy each game in the series a little bit less than the last

Of the first Mass Effect or the trilogy? I don't remember the ending of Mass Effect being particularly terrible; and you can't be talking about ME3, since the entirety of that game was garbage.

fpbp

AND I NEED YOU TO RECOVER

>He fell for the only the ending is hit meme
The whole game is shit

mass effect 1 is vastly overrated

Disappointment

BECAUSE I CAN'T MAKE IT ON MY OOOWN

Play all three games and then fucking stop right before Priority Earth in Mass Effect 3. Don't ask why, just shut up and listen to me. DON'T FUCKING PLAY PRIORITY EARTH. Just pretend you beat the game and headcanon fucking everything. SERIOUSLY

don't fucking do it.

I'm telling you right now.

Good series with some missteps and a lackluster final stretch that didn't ruin the more memorable characters for me.

A pretty good use of ~100 hours. The DLCs are pretty damn good if you can get past the fact that you're giving EA your shekels.

Unpopular opinion ahead though: People overreact hard about the ending to 3 to be frank. Like, it's pretty lackluster and raises far more questions than it answers, but the hivemind really blows it out of proportion.

No one blows it out of proportion faggot. The ending to Mass Effect 3 is quite possibly the worst ending to a video game ever conceived. Try to think of a worse one.

I think with the Extended Cut and Leviathan DLC that the ending's adequate.

Still disappointing that it's not the huge ME2 suicide-mission styled climax dialed up to eleven like people were hoping for, but it wraps things up enough that it doesn't ruin the story as a whole for me.

Though I still head-canon the Citadel DLC as my epilogue.

>Try to think of a worse one.
Do completely unresolved cliffhangers for games I otherwise love count?

Overall it's a good series. Don't listen to the Sup Forums hivemind. As long as you have the From Ashes and Leviathan DLCs then the ending is actually solid and the story of the reapers is legit. It's just shitty that you have to buy a dlc for anything to make any fucking sense.

Indigo Prophecy. In a way that makes me giggle over how shamelessly ridiculous it is.

>It's just shitty that you have to buy a dlc for anything to make any fucking sense
Honestly, this sums up the entire transition from ME2 to ME3 in a nutshell. Like, if you didn't get LotSB and Arrival, you're out two important plot points in 3 in the first couple hours.

It doesn't wrap anything up, it throws away the actual plot ME2 tried to introduce with the prematurely collapsing stars and replaces it with the fucking bullshit of the star child.
>the story of the reapers is legit
No, no it fucking isn't "legit". Leviathan tells you absolutely nothing that makes the ending not suck.

I still love all three games though.

ME1 is the only good Mass Effect game.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong and a faggot.

Why would you ever play ass effect? It made sense to play them back when they were new games because "the next one will fill the holes in this one" was plausible at the time

Potential, but disappointment. Sheer disappointment. I wouldn't bother personally.

GOGOGO

YOU MUST DIE

I WILL DESTROY YOU

Romance Tali in 2 and 3 for the best romance side story

Mass Effect 1 is classic BioWare before they turned into a garbage compressor. It's amazing.
Mass Effect 2 is a mix between the classic BioWare and the terrible, terrible things EA had in store. It's still actually amazing, if you can get over the fact that it's more focused on action. The twist is that the action is more fun in this game than in a ton of trashy "action RPGs" like Borderlands.
Mass Effect 3 was never made, sadly.

>bullshit of the star child
Yeah, but Leviathan and Extended Cut actually acknowledge that star child is full of shit, and that it's just a flawed supercomputer stuck in a loop forcing you into an ultimatum.

It's still a disappointing explanation to the Reaper mystery after everyone built them up to be incomprehensible cosmic horrors connected to dark matter, but it's still better than Shepard just blindly going along with everything in the original ending.

>it throws away the actual plot point ME2 tried to introduce with the prematurely collapsing stars and replaces it with the fucking bullshit of the star child
God, why did you have to remind me

would've been more scifi and interesting than what we got

The following text is a spoiler.
-Viewer Beware-
Shoot Wrex on Virmire.

blue balls, disappointment, a sort of hollowness

/thread

I still defend ME3 as having one of the best branching relationship dynamics that I've seen in an overarching series.

Well, that is as long as you romanced someone like Tali or Garrus. And not Jacob.

>What should I expect?

Disappointment, terrible disappointment.

Play the first 2, skip the third entirely or at most play it up to the final chapter then make up your own ending.

ME2 is a great game; but its also the point at which the series started going to hell and knowing what we do about how ME3 turned out its impossible not to see it.

ME1 had a great story while ME2 had great moments and some fun characters but its story was disjointed, forced you to do what it wanted and fucked up characters from ME1 (Liara).

I still love ME2's combat system though. If you crank the difficulty to max and set your squad's power use to manual then it provides a really great mix of strategy and action since you need to plan out how you're going to handle the terrain, where to take cover, which enemies to prioritize and how to employ your squad's powers. Then ME3 fucked it all up and turned it into a no brains multiplayer shooter spam fest.

TLDR: As a story ME1 is far superior as a game ME2 is far superior.

The thing is the original ending was LITERALLY just TTGL

At least TTGL had a fucking good ending.

So what?

This.

Fuck that!

He's the only one happy to see you in ME2

Getting bored as fuck in the Citadel and wondering if you should quit.

Garrus is happy to see you.

I romance Ashley cause I like that their relationship has some unavoidable serious conflict, what with them breaking up for a while and Ashley having trust issues.

Garrus and Tali seemed happy enough. But they were kind of in the middle of dealing with their own teams' body counts.

this happened to me and i did quit

The Citadel was fucking boring but it wasn't as bad as DA:O making you do your origin story and then Ostagar

I almost did that in my most recent play through. Loaded it up a few months later though and got through to Ilios. Now to put it away for another half year and finish it up.

Thinking back there were a ton of parts in DA:O that fucking sucked. Deep roads and the fade for two. I have no idea how I managed to replay it as many times as I did back then.

I loved DA's different origin stories.

The only bit of that game I thought was really slow on replays were the deep roads and fade nightmare section.

You have the same opinion of like all of the people who liked DA:O

A fantastic ride that goes off a fucking cliff in the last ten minutes I'd highly recommend getting the DLCs for ME2 and ME3. But make sure you pirate that shit EA doesn't deserve any money

Could Bioware even make another Shepard if they tried?

ME1
>Wide open setting. You do feel like you're a small part of a big galaxy. Humans being the newcomers was a cool idea.
>Iffy experimental gameplay that sort of works and just needed to be fine tuned (recharging guns were both a unique and immersive feature).
>Saren is a fine scifi villain. Brought back fond memories of Dukat and Khan.
>Mako was much like the gunplay. Experimental, iffy, but just needed to be worked on. Not torn out.
>The story is a lovingly inspired scifi that the devs had fun producing. They really needed more wacky, fish out of water, 'Star Trek' side quests. I get that they were going for a hard edged military-scifi theme, but ME could've used a giant green hand.
ME2
>Setting feels... Really small. I can't quite explain it, but it feels like you're a big part of a pretty small galaxy. Plus humans shouldn't be a dominant species.
>The Terminus Systems really didn't feel any different than Citadel Space. It should be like the wild west with weird as fuck aliens you haven't seen before, not the usual bunch.
>The gameplay resembles a third person shooter. A really generic one at that. What the hell Bioware? Why do we need to reload our guns again!? Shit makes no sense.
>Mako cut.
>Story was pretty generic. The collectors really didn't feel that threatening, and only a few of the new characters stuck. It mostly relied on the strength of fan favorites like Tali, Garrus, and Wrex to carry it along. And that wasn't enough, I almost dropped it if not for Mordin. I mean, Jacob and the others just suck.

Oh boy, ME3.
>Cliche storm. Humans are the most important species, earth is the center of everything, superhero x-academy, all the species acting like one political bloc, 'humans are special cause diversity', goddamn Bioware. Also, why did you drop the decaying stars plot point?
>The planets just feel like nothing but corridors and outlets. I mean, ME1 wasn't any better but I could at least lose myself in the Citadel. Here? It's literally just a market square. Not that ME2 was any better. You were literally stuck in a shopping mall at the Citadel. Also, there's only one hub.
>Gameplay is now third person COD. Why bother playing anything other than a soldier?
>Vehicles only in DLC.
>The story was terrible. Plot points were introduced, built up, then dropped in the blink of a eye. Take for example the indoctrination stuff. It was pretty clear to anyone who bothered to read the Codex Shepard was getting brain flayed. But that was never properly explored. There's more, but I would quickly run out of room.
>New companions suck balls. They really fucking do. Especially James 'Jersey Shore' Vega.
>While I'm at it, the Normandy didn't feel like the Normandy. I have no idea what ship Shepard is piloting now, but that sure as shit isn't my frigate.
>The endings. This is what happens when the author smells too many of his own farts and refuses to listen to criticism. There's no payoff, it clearly rips off Deus Ex AND the Matrix, then introduces more 'subtle' implications that ultimately go nowhere. In a attempt to build 'lots of speculation' ME lost it's identity and died.

Download the meituum mod or whatevers its called if your on PC and then just get lost in the all the kino tiered codexs and just imagine your in a space opera. Also when the game ends just pretend the series dies/ended there with no explanation as to what happened with the reapers and how it ended overall

>What should I expect?
Massive faggots and soyboy tier plot and characters.

I finished ME1 on the highest difficult today, and its fucking annoying how the gameplay can be wonk sometimes.

>if you get close enough to a enemy, shepard will default to the shitty useless melee attack, this means the ai will always default to rushing the player and only the player, which means you will get krogans warlords and geths juggernauts bashing your face to death while all your powers are on cooldown

>the ai bash attack will eat 60% of your health or shields with each strike, but the player melee attack does zero damage, the only time this thing is useful is when its time to put the infected colonists to sleep in feros and you ran out of anti-thorian grenades

>its rare, but sometimes thresher maws will spam under the mako, killing you instantly and forcing you to deal with the tedious loading times.

If we got mass effect 1 exactly as it was, but remade in a better engine with better loading times, it would be one of the best games of all time.

It's not just the ending, ME3's writing is shit in general. This cunt alone ruins every part of the game he's in.

i agree with your ME1 summary but ME2 had the best character development of any game

>Shoot Wrex on Virmire.
?
Thats literally the worse thing you can do user, Wrex is one of the best companions in the series if the not THE best.
Also have fun have fun shooting Mordin to stop the Genophage cure so Wreav doesn't go insane and start killing everyone after the war, retard.

>but ME2 had the best character development of any game

Mass Effect 1's ending was never all that enthralling but the journey getting there was what made the first game great

>it provides a really great mix of strategy and action since you need to plan out how you're going to handle the terrain, where to take cover, which enemies to prioritize and how to employ your squad's powers.

but it was still more fun to just play as Vanguard and kill every enemy yourself

>Cliche storm. Humans are the most important species, earth is the center of everything,

Its too late to bitch about that when we already had humanity getting its dick sucked since me1, humans end up being the big damn heroes of me1, harbinger, a reaper, gets wet just thinking about how humans are special because shepard, and me2 leaves it clear humans are the only race the reapers want to fully harvest this time around.

>Gameplay is now third person COD. Why bother playing anything other than a soldier?

You could say the same about 1 and 2, soldier has always been infinitely easier and safe to play than any other class, biotics are fun, and vanguard is the best class, but in all me games there are many points where the game was designed with only with soldiers players in mind.

>The endings

Honestly I dont have the enthusiasm to hate stupid endings that much, sometimes they can be still serviceable, but me3 had no ending before extended cut, and barely has one now, I will never understand how they shipped the game with such a lazy ending like that.

Its weird because dragon age origins had such a good ending, all the major things you did were explained and left you either satisfied or ready for a 2nd playtrough to get something different, but in me3, the last game of a fucking trilogy, there is nothing, just magical beam with
different colors.

Its like be the end of me3 every person with talent had already jumped ship.

a lot of boredom and bad writing

Better than me1 at least, since in me1 only garrus and wrex change themselves a little, everyone might as well be inflatable dolls.

Be focused on the journey, not the destination; enjoy the ride.

Someone stop him.

>What should I expect?

You old enough to ever see one of these in person?

Enjoy.
Make sure you punch out that smug reporter bitch every chance you get, OP.

Everyone hates ea, but if whatever is left of bioware launched a reaper game/dlc where you play as the reapers and go forth harvesting both the milky way and the andromeda galaxy, I would buy day one.

I can play this scenario as much as I want in stellaris, but without the reapers ships models is just not the same.

ME2 is the pinnacle, romance Jack and don't fuck her till the end

I preferred Soldier or Infiltrator; but I'm partial to sniping.

>but without the reapers ships models is just not the same.

You can design your own ships in Galactic Civilizations 3 and someone already uploaded a pretty solid Reaper model to the Steam Workshop.

Do you fuckers work for EA? Stop telling me to buy shit

Pretty much this. First one is a good game. Second is simplified slightly but still fun. Third and fourth are trash.
All have fake choices that don't really affect the ending and all have dragon age tier "pick up hot alien chicks and fuck them" dating sim shit in it too trick you into doing a few play throughs.
I say play the first two then just stop there.

The first two games are free on origin, along with all the dlc. If they're not free anymore just email EA and say you lost your disc.

Three only thing wrong with da:o was all the shitty alternate dimensions shit that forces you to do jumping puzzles as mice

sadly this,

Just stand there and let Marauder Shields execute you.

2's story felt more like a side step, a filler arc, rather than a continuation of the over all plot. Not that I mind it, it felt like a cool space adventure, but it doesn't really fit in between the tones of 1 and 3. If I had to do it, I would make 2 the first game (Shepard, the first human specter, going around the galaxy doing specter stuff picking up people along the way with the threat of the collectors) and the 1st game the 2nd one (Now as a revered specter, Shepard is tasked with another specter to investigate a geth attack)

Aliens
Dialogue Choices
Guns

>First game is great. But gunplay is kinda weak
>second game has better gunplay, and an ok story, rpg elements gets waterd down, but its still good. The DLC expansion mission is 10/10
>third game is a pile of shit. No more rpg elements, the ending is horrificly bad and retroactively ruins everything
>andromeda isnt even a game, its a pile of barley functioning assests

>What should I expect?
Best girl isn't even romanceable.

One of the dopest journeys last gen
Take your time

ME3 is awful from the beginning. The kid dying was the point that broke how bad it would get from that point on.

ME1 was incredible
ME2 should have been a spin-off
ME3 was shit; the MP was strangely fun though
posting best boy

...

shoot this whiny faggot when you get the chance

to become a furry

...

Casey Hudson wasn't who killed ME, it was Mac Walters.

I wish ME2 had the overheat system in addition to its tighter gunplay. Would have been even more fun.

>humans end up being the big damn heroes of me1
That's not because of humans being special snowflakes, though. It's because they're really damn opportunistic and snap at the bit to actually do shit. In ME2 Collectors are harvesting humans because LOLHUMANSRSPESHUL (also them harvesting biomass instead of minds was retarded), which marked the real turning point.

ME3 multi was serious loads of fun. I'm sad that I stopped playing before the Volus/Collectors/Vorcha became playable.

There are too many Turians in the series that could be Best Boy

It was both of them without Karpyshyn to keep them on point

>People overreact hard about the ending to 3
I really hate that all the pop culture focus, not just here on Sup Forums, but all over the internet, is about how bad the ending to ME3 was. Not because I thought the ending was good, god no, but because focusing the hate on the ending implies, by exclusion, that the rest of the game was good, and then at the end it shits the bed. When in truth, the ending was a shit-covered cherry on a sundae made of turd.

They're worth playing and the DLCs are good. Sure, the ending to 3 isn't great but there are a lot of memorable moments in it as well.

Humans were special in ME2 because they had the greatest genetic diversity among species of the current cycle. That's apparently why they want to make a giant terminator out of us.

The only good part of 3 was the Tuchanka Arc and that was because it had different variables on if Wrex died, Mordin died and if Maelon's notes were destroyed or kept

Yeah, and it's seriously fucking retarded. What the hell happened?

Just best mass effect 3 yesterday user, first time I played through the series
>me1
Amazing game that establishes a really fucking interesting and intricate universe, lots of exploring and interaction. More rpg than gears of War clone. Combat is eh but its works. Story probably the best.
>me2
Characters are still great, story is good but kind of feels like a spin off game. Unforeseen and world feel small.
>me3
Even with the extended cut which is free the endings still suck, but I view this game as someehst of a synthesis between 1 and 2. You get the good combat of 2 with the better characters of 1. Story is actually pretty good other than the ending.

Mac Walters was also the creative director for ME:Andromeda, so I think it's fair to say he was probably more responsible for ME3 being shit.