Mass Effect: Andromeda

[Neil Tyson]

In the Witcher 3 your choices mattered in the end. there's no real excuse for the rainbow ending.

 

[winb83]

In the Witcher 3 your choices mattered in the end. there's no real excuse for the rainbow ending.

I never played that. I've also never seen a narrative heavy game have choice matter. If it does it would be the first.

I actually Googled that game and there's 3 major endings. That's Path A, B, and C.

 

[ORDER_66]

Saw the E3 EA video earlier today wasn't that impressed....

 

[hex]

I think it's past time to accept that in a narrative heavy game choice can't matter. If you want choice to matter there are games for that like The Sims and Civilization.

They're telling a story to millions of people, they have to nail it down and it can't diverge too much either. It's impractical to expect a game with an audience so wide to have choices that alter the outcome in any major way other than taking predetermined general branches like a path A, B, and C.

The Mass Effect team was a bit naive. Also some of the writers that started on the series didn't finish it and the head writer was completely different. This is a case of both what I was saying and the fact that Mass Effect was never really planned out and was made up as it went along.

In the Witcher 3 your choices mattered in the end. there's no real excuse for the rainbow ending.

I never played that. I've also never seen a narrative heavy game have choice matter. If it does it would be the first.

I actually Googled that game and there's 3 major endings. That's Path A, B, and C.

I'm that people came in here to say "nah, you're wrong, 'The Witcher 3' accomplished that"....and your response is to Google a game to disprove people that actually played it.
Go play the game for a few hours before you come in here trying to argue.

For the record he's right. There's more choice variation in that game than the entirety of the "Mass Effect" trilogy. And to say "yeah, that's path A, B, and C"....do me a favor, go into the "Blood And Wine" thread and compare "TW3" ending to the "Mass Effect" trilogy. You're gonna get laughed out of the conversation because it's a ridiculous comparison.

Fred.

 

[winb83]

I'm that people came in here to say "nah, you're wrong, 'The Witcher 3' accomplished that"....and your response is to Google a game to disprove people that actually played it.
Go play the game for a few hours before you come in here trying to argue.

For the record he's right. There's more choice variation in that game than the entirety of the "Mass Effect" trilogy. And to say "yeah, that's path A, B, and C"....do me a favor, go into the "Blood And Wine" thread and compare "TW3" ending to the "Mass Effect" trilogy. You're gonna get laughed out of the conversation because it's a ridiculous comparison.

Fred.

Millions of players are forced into one of 3 major endings and that's choice mattering? Not really.

Ultimately choice can't matter in a narrative heavy game because the games actually have a plot. That means they have to force you down predetermined paths to actually tell you a story they wrote out.

If you want choice to matter they make games with limited to no story where the entire game is the decisions you make. If you're asking someone to tell you a story then their choices are the ones that matter, not yours.

 

[Mowgli]

Looks clean as hell.

 

[Malik1time]

i need gameplay bioware teaseing us too much
muthfukkas said news coming this fall

 

[Alfred0Santana]

All this time and we barely see any gameplay...just some bullshyt

 

[MikelArteta]

I beat mass effect 1 like 45 times, mass effect 2 like 15, mass effect 3 beat it once and never touched again

 

[winb83]

Choice in narrative heavy video games is almost always going to boil down to here's path A, here's path B and here's path C type shyt. There may be some deviations in those paths but you make typically a major decision or two and you become locked into set paths.

Mass Effect exposed that formula in all it's ugliness at the end of Mass Effect 3. Now could they have handled it a bit better? Yeah at the end of it all you're still typically choosing from a very limited number of branching paths. Mass Effect 3 didn't attempt to dress that formula up at all. Instead of giving you fan service cut scenes for your choices they merely took them and turned them into a number and added them up at the end to give you a tiny extra scene on certain parts of the endings. But even so as far back as the first game say I want to join forces with Sovereign and Saren that ain't even an option. In the end even if you want to save Saren the game basically won't let you because the pre-written plot mandated he has to die.

Your choices are going to be very limited and lead you down predetermined outcomes because they're telling you a written story.
If a person wants choices to really matter than the ridged plot has to be either removed from the game or marginalized. If not the fact that they have a story to tell you and that story will go in the direction they decided. It will always is going to beat out choice mattering.

 

[Ice Cold]

There's no way this game is releasing Q1 if they can't even show 30 seconds of it now.
I was very disappointed in the presentation yesterday
I'm still there day 1 as long as they don't put a bunch of crappy quest like DA:I did god that game just wasn't good.

As far as choices mattering it's pretty hard to justify the added cost especially over a trilogy of having radically different paths

I played witcher 2 and witcher 3 and what huge game changing decisions truly mattered from one game to the other? I only beat the game once tbt but I did some googling and some major characters who had major choices about didn't even show up as far as I know.

Spoiler

Iorveth is no where to be seen in the entire game
Saskia no mention of her, no dragon no nothing
Letho apparently makes an appearance if you didn't kill him which is cool
Anais doesn't make an appearance apparently (In one of my witcher 2 playthroughs she married that crazy king Radovid

So I don't think that Witcher 3 is an especially good example of choice mattering across multiple games

 

[duncanthetall]

There's no way this game is releasing Q1 if they can't even show 30 seconds of it now.
I was very disappointed in the presentation yesterday
I'm still there day 1 as long as they don't put a bunch of crappy quest like DA:I did god that game just wasn't good.

As far as choices mattering it's pretty hard to justify the added cost especially over a trilogy of having radically different paths

I played witcher 2 and witcher 3 and what huge game changing decisions truly mattered from one game to the other? I only beat the game once tbt but I did some googling and some major characters who had major choices about didn't even show up as far as I know.

Spoiler

Iorveth is no where to be seen in the entire game
Saskia no mention of her, no dragon no nothing
Letho apparently makes an appearance if you didn't kill him which is cool
Anais doesn't make an appearance apparently (In one of my witcher 2 playthroughs she married that crazy king Radovid

So I don't think that Witcher 3 is an especially good example of choice mattering across multiple games

Really? Maybe not just for the end game, but your choices matter in The Witcher 3 more so than probably any other game ever released. Your choices throughout the game impact the story throughout the game. It influences who you deal with and who lives and dies not just at the end, but throughout the whole game.

 

[Ice Cold]

Really? Maybe not just for the end game, but your choices matter in The Witcher 3 more so than probably any other game ever released. Your choices throughout the game impact the story throughout the game. It influences who you deal with and who lives and dies not just at the end, but throughout the whole game.

Well yeah Mass Effect had that as well eg if mordin dies a different salarian is with you on the mission and you can't save the krogans I don't think, but again it's a LOT easier to have a range of paths in a single game but stretched through mutilple games with increasing complexity it makes it near impossible. The return on investment likely is really not worth it as well as less than 40% of people go through a game even once on average so people who play multiple times to see all the differences is very rare.

I beat witcher 2 twice and it was one of my favorite games of last gen (well top 20 at least) but I didn't even recognize maria la va lette in witcher 3 until I was just googling it and my memory is pretty decent.

With the rising of cost of making a game let alone voice acting and motion capture even making a game where 25% of the game most people who actually play through it will NEVER experience is a tough sell to publishers imo

 

[duncanthetall]

Well yeah Mass Effect had that as well eg if mordin dies a different salarian is with you on the mission and you can't save the krogans I don't think, but again it's a LOT easier to have a range of paths in a single game but stretched through mutilple games with increasing complexity it makes it near impossible. The return on investment likely is really not worth it as well as less than 40% of people go through a game even once on average so people who play multiple times to see all the differences is very rare.

I beat witcher 2 twice and it was one of my favorite games of last gen (well top 20 at least) but I didn't even recognize maria la va lette in witcher 3 until I was just googling it and my memory is pretty decent.

With the rising of cost of making a game let alone voice acting and motion capture even making a game where 25% of the game most people who actually play through it will NEVER experience is a tough sell to publishers imo

If its so hard, they shouldn't have sold that to us though. The story overall seemed as though it was going to be much grander and expansive at the end of ME1. It seemed like it was setting us up for a huge space epic only to significantly narrow the focus of the story in the next 2 games. I dunno. I just felt at the end of ME1 when you were conversing with that Prothean computer on their long abandoned world that they were setting up for something on a grander scale. I dunno. The series just didnt deliver how I thought it was, although it is still probably my favorite gaming trilogy of all time. Seems like they got kind of content with the story and just focused on the gameplay and making it more actiony.

 

[Killigraphy]

I never played that. I've also never seen a narrative heavy game have choice matter. If it does it would be the first.

I actually Googled that game and there's 3 major endings. That's Path A, B, and C.

You should probably play the game, the choices you make to get to path a, b, and c are some of the best choices that matter in gaming since killing yourself in Mass Effect.