Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Saving the Galaxy

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Morning Friends! Last night I did in fact finish up my play through of Mass Effect Legendary edition. This morning I am going to try not to talk about anything terribly spoilery, which is sorta hard when most everything about this game series my brain takes for common knowledge. My memories were correct that when I started the mission to attack the enemy base, it was in fact a downward slide to the conclusion of the game. Weirdly in my brain I actually remembered the run up to the end being longer than it actually was last night. Side note, I talked about skipping dialog in my Mass Effect 1 discussion but that became less and less of a thing as I moved into 2 and 3. The dialog is just more compelling once you leave that first game.

I have no clue what the absolute maximum number of War Assets that you can gather are, but I feel like I got pretty close. I had read somewhere that you needed over 7000 to get the best possible endings, but I am not entirely certain what that number is. The problem is all data from before is out the window because the Legendary edition works differently. A decent chunk of your War Asset score comes from having made specific choices in the first and second game to unlock the ability to gain large caches of points in this one. There are a few things I would change but I think I got as close as I have ever gotten to the perfect playthrough… at least for someone like me who is extremely paragon minded.

One of the things that I greatly appreciate about the Mass Effect series is how by the time you reach the third game… you have spent a lot of time “living” in this universe. There are so many games that pull a third act turn that instead of a tightly focused foray, you now have the fate of the world hanging on your actions. The problem with this is that it often doesn’t feel earned… that you sorta step out into the high water and get swept along with the tide of the narrative. Given how much you go through in this series, by the time you reach the third act or third game in this case, it feels like it has earned the stakes that we are playing for. The game shows you from the very start just how overwhelming the odds are and that the only way we make it out of this alive is if we get all of the forces of the galaxy to band together in a tentative unity.

For me the game will always be best however, when I am jetting around the galaxy with my crew and completing little missions. I think this is why the second game in the series resonates so deeply with me because it is almost entirely “away missions”. You feel like you have plenty of time to spend getting to know your crew and shifting around using them for various missions. The problem with both ME2 and ME3 however is that you end up getting back Tali… my FAVORITE crewmember a bit too late in the game for it to feel like she makes a very meaningful impact on the decisions. There are a lot of things that I would change about how I played through Mass Effect 3. Most specifically a character died due to my actions that I would have preferred to have saved… but now I know specifically how to stop that from happening and it doesn’t require too much fiddling.

You might ask what I did last night after seeing the credits roll? Well I rebounded and created a new save as Male Shepard, aka the way I am honestly more comfortable playing the game. I liked playing as the Jennifer Hale voiced female Shepard quite a bit, but I still struggled with the romance options in the end. I also rushed my way through the first game, and I really should have spent more time doing Mako missions because I missed quite a few important sub plots and I am uncertain what influence those have on later missions. Since I am currently in need of good good feelings of nostalgia to get me through the bad bad chaos of my life… I am perfectly fine setting this on repeat for a bit and chilling out. I somehow doubt I will make it all the way through this second playthrough, because I can rarely play the same game twice in a row… but I guess we will see how that goes.

The other small miracle is that you have two blog posts in a row from me. Here is hoping I am “back” for now.

AggroChat #345 – We Still Totally Exist

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Featuring:  Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we prove that we totally do exist and you get to listen to a very tired Bel.  Bel gives a slight explanation of why we did not record the last two weeks and why nothing is certain in the coming weeks either.  We talk a bit about how we are in this weird new era of “Must See TV” which is a phrase that only us “olds” will know but Disney is absolutely creating destination television again.  From there we talk about the Mass Effect Legendary re-release and how Bel is coming to love Jennifer Hale’s Shepard.  We talk a bit about the news coming out for FFXIV Endwalker and how Dark Knights are no longer the TRUE edgelords.  Finally we talk a bit about PSO2 New Genesis Beta.

Topics Discussed

  • New Era of Must See TV
  • Mass Effect Legendary Edition
  • Demon’s Soul Remake
  • FFXIV Stuffs
    • Bring on the Edgiest Lords
  • PSO2 New Genesis Beta

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Mass Effect Legendary Thoughts

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My world is still very much in a fucked up state right now, but occasionally I get home early enough in the evening to play a little bit of something before falling asleep and starting the process all over again. Right now I am leaning heavily on two experiences, one of which I know EXTREMELY well at this point and with the recent release of the “Legendary” edition it Mass Effect 1 has represented the majority of my game time. I’ve played through the game a number of times at this point including playthroughs where I link all three games up together like I am doing right now. I am still in the first title but I am in that spiral of events that leads towards the end right now.

The key differentiator this time however is that I am playing as “FemShep” or the female version of Commander Shepard voiced by the very excellent Jennifer Hale. I opted to go with Vanilla Shepard because if given my druthers I am almost always going to create a red headed character when I am creating female characters. I know from past experiences with the character creator… that it is very easy to create something that looks kinda fucked up in cinematics.. my first Shepard appearance was this way so I thought it safest just to go with what the experts created for me.

The weird part for me right now with this playthrough, is that for the last decade I have been told by friends that I trust and admire… that I chose the wrong Shepard to play in picking the male Mark Meer voiced version. So I had this built up in my head to be this earth shattering experience that was going to change my perspective on the franchise. The truth is… it feels almost exactly the same to me? I notice the better graphics with the Legendary edition and better mechanics, but the voice actor doesn’t seem to really matter that much to me. I still find myself hitting space to speed up the dialog because I can read so much faster than the actor can deliver the dialog. I still have that general feeling of “yeah yeah, lets get back to the fighting” that I did with Mark Meer at the helm.

I’ve also been told that I would appreciate Kaidan Alenko more as a female character… but no he still annoys the fuck out of me. I think I might just hate Raphael Sbarge because I also hate Carth Onasi. Incoming spoilers if you have never played this game… skip the rest of this paragraph. Last night I played through Virmire and I already feel like I chose the wrong choice. Like Ashley Williams is racist as fuck but I take pleasure it telling her to shut the fuck up about it and stop being so horrible when the game gives me the option. Kaidan on the other hand never stops being this wet blanket character that I actively want to push out the airlock, and mistakes basic human decency as me wanting to snuggle up with him. Mass Effect is a game about me hanging out with a bunch of interesting Aliens and as a result I NEVER use any of the human characters in ME1. In ME2 we get Jacob and Jack which are both awesome… but still I mostly run around with a bunch of Aliens.

The Mako is much better than it was in the original release of this game… but the Mako levels are still the worst thing about the experience. Legendary edition significantly helped Mass Effect 1 feeling more in line with the rest of the franchise, but it still feels clunky but a more reasonable version of clunky. Instead of feeling like an odd throwback to an earlier time… it just sorta feels like playing a game from a B Tier studio like Spiders. The pretty is appreciated but I guess there was only so much they could do with the way the game felt and performed mechanically without doing a port to one of the newer engines.

I did apply a field of view mod to the game and you can see the difference between this screenshot and the one earlier. This game defaults to a FOV that is zoomed in way the hell too close and makes me feel claustrophobic. If you are interested the mod supports all three games, which should allow me to have a similar FOV in each of them. My basic takeaway is that I am having a lot of fun playing the game again and experience it all over with a fresh coat of paint. The sub summary is that apparently the voice actor and gender of the protagonist doesn’t matter that much to my overall experience. I couldn’t have a decent beard with “HimShep” so I really didn’t have much attachment to that version of the character or at least no more or less than I have so far with “FemmeShep”. Both were very much me playing someone else in a video game and not me creating a character that represented me.

Unsupported Alts

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Good morning friends. Today is my Friday because I took tomorrow off and depending on my mood may be calling it part of the weekend. I am not sure which one of you commented that remembering random things is a sign of a midlife crisis, because lord is it hitting me with a vengeance right now. While getting ready this morning I remembered this one story from my childhood which is dumb but I am still going to share it. My entire life my father had the side hustle of a portrait photographer, this is in part why I tend to take those sort of things for granted because I effectively grew up in the darkroom and one of my first jobs was helping him photograph weddings. My dad gave his business a pretty generic name “Bill’s Photography”, and paid a local calligrapher to create a good clean masthead for him.

During the 90s when direct mail started to computerize some weirdness began happening. Always in the past he would get mail addressed to himself and mail addressed to his business, because a human being was effectively interpreting that business name correctly. However at some point this shifted and he started receiving mail for the mythical being known as “Bill S. Photography” which at the time I thought was the funniest thing that had ever happened on the face of the planet. On very rare occasions it would come through as “Bill S. Photograph” which was even better. So here I am this morning giggling like a madman as I am remembering this, and I am sure my wife thought I had completely lost it.

I think I might be done with Outriders. Recently I started leveling a Technomancer in part so that I could see how the narration and story worked with the female voice actor. I’ve now been through the entire story and I have to say if you are wanting to start the game fresh… absolutely go with the female character because the line delivery just works better. There are so many times when you are playing as the male character, that the line delivery makes it sound like he doesn’t actually understand what he is saying. I was never certain if this was a problem with the audio editing, or the line delivery itself… but after playing through with the female voice actor it seems like maybe it was the later.

Essentially I have reached this place where I don’t feel like going through the world tier grind once again with a second character. I think this is the general problem with the way levels and gearing works in Outriders is that there is zero “catch up” benefit to your alts. Sure I have a vault full of level 42 gear from my main character, but my alts can’t use a single bit of it because they have not “leveled” to the point of being able to use it. In theory this should have worked in a manner like Champion Levels in Elder Scrolls Online, where the World Tier and Challenge Tier are associated with your account and not your character, and once you finished the main story you would zoom forward to whatever your “Account Level” was at that point.

Outriders was an enjoyable but flawed game experience, which I guess is pretty par for the course with outings from companies who are not already seasoned in the looter shooter genre. Then again… I guess I could say the same about most of the other games in the genre as well, they are all sorta flawed experiences. I am hoping that Outriders sold well enough that we might see an Outriders 2 that makes good on the promise of this title, fixes some of the tonal issues of the story, and actually has a proper plan for what to do with players upon completing the final bit of story. They told us in no uncertain terms that this was not a “live service” title and I guess we should have believed them. There are a lot of things that need tweaking but I get the general impression that they are moving on to other game titles and not really that interested in anything that is not strictly a bug fix.

In other news… Fallout 76 is unabashedly a “live service” game and has seemingly found its stride. I have been enjoying myself greatly as I roam around Appalachia, which I really wish was easier to spell. At least with the Commonwealth it was two easy to spell terms jammed together, but maybe over time I will get used to it. That said it took me years to be able to spell shenanigans on the first try… and I LOVE that word. As of last night I am level 8 which means I am rapidly catching up to where I left off with the game the first time. The quests and the NPCs make the entire experience feel more enjoyable. The responder area is more or less intact with it being largely told through audio diaries, but what makes all of that feel more alive is that there are random human NPCs wandering the wastes adding flavor here and there and making it feel less dead.

I’ve built a somewhat nonsense house that cantilevers off the side of the main structure. Given that there is no actual gravity in this game… I didn’t have to do anything to make this more logical but I nonetheless added some support struts because visually it bothered me. Sometimes in a game like this I just keep building in a very “weasley house” manner until I run out of materials. Ultimately what I really need to do is pick up my camp and move it somewhere that works slightly better. For now it has been handy to be next to the Wayward while doing quests, but eventually I can see logic in uprooting it. I wish there was a way to do some terraforming, but you are pretty much stuck with way things are which is what lead me to have the second story wider than the first.

What I really need to do is sort out a more stable method of healing myself and a better source of water and food that don’t irradiate the hell out of me. I mean I have radaway, but I also know that is a fairly limited resource right now. I do pretty well in a stand up fight, but end up needing to heal pretty regularly afterwards. I did find an interesting option for grinding… up at the lighthouse on top of the mountain which seems to have a nigh unlimited number of rad toads. If I hang out in the house I can pretty safely kill those at range. There is also a quest up there for filling up the lighthouse with bioluminescent fluid that I should probably do as well. I wish there was a way to upgrade a piece of gear to the next level range rather than needing to craft a brand new item, but the game is what it is.

All in all however I am having a blast in Fallout 76, so I apparently was away from it the optimal amount of time for it to feel fresh and for the game to have evolved while I was away. Maybe at some point I can return to Outriders and have that same feeling.