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You have done well to bring this to us, hama.
Let us see what the future holds...
Well, my hype level just shot up.
....but Shepard died
....but Shepard died
I'm sorry. Says who?
Oh yes. Oh Hell yes. YESYESYESYESYES!
This can't arrive quickly enough. I must have it, play it and replay it to death like I've done with the other ME-titles.
Now I can spend all the intervening months pining away for it ... my friends are going to hate me.
I am looking foreward to this. I just have to complete Mass Effect 1 - 3 first.
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This showcase just surfaced.
Well done finding this, sir.
I love the Johnny Cash "Ghost Riders in the Sky" usage. It seems to imply that this game will be set in the Andromeda galaxy - is that like the frontier of Citdadel space? (When? Post-Reapers, maybe?). My initial guess is that by staying away from a more "epic" music and opening, this game might try and stay away from a "meta-plot" (at least at first). A game taking place outside the main storyline (but during the same time-frame) might also let you hand-wave all those plot conclusion that were setup at the end ME3.
I would love to have it sooner rather than later, but so much good stuff has been revealed at E3 for this year and the start of 2016 I'm not sure I could manage yet another massive game too soon.
Awesome, hope it matches up to the other Mass effect games.
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Mass Effect 1-3 are some of my favorite games of all time (minus the last 15-20mins of 3).
But I'm on the fence on this one. The biggest item for me is going to be does this take place before, during, or after the story in the original trilogy? I would assume it would take place during the same time frame in a very distant part of the galaxy. If it took place before it would be difficult to reconcile a human PC as in Mass effect 1 Humans are still new on the scene and before that had a very hostile relationship with the Citadel races. If After they will have to either retcon the end of 3 (yes please) or give a cannon choice that allows for exploration which in most cases would be difficult, or advance the timeline so far that the story of the first trilogy has reached mythical history status.
For all that the trailer looked promising I will be heavily salting my media intake for this one.
It's slated to take place hundreds of years after the events of ME3, as I understand it.
I believe it's supposed to occur at the same time period as 2/3, whether it's a back up plan or just colonization I suppose is something else.
I am assuming this new galaxy - whether the time frame is contemporary with ME 2/3 or in the future - is Reaper-less. Despite their enormous reach, I was under the impression they were busy enough wiping out races in the Milky Way. But I guess if they are the creators of the relays, then nothing is out reach.
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You guys realise there was more than one N7 agent in the galaxy right?
Oh yeah....trust me I know a guy who can set you up.
Cool I am just now starting Mass Effect 3. So I can keep having more story! Yay!
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I am cautiously pessimistic about this. I don't trust the BioWare people at all anymore to develop a good story and this whole "going to the Andromeda galaxy" thing just seems like a way to avoid dealing with the whole fiasco the ME3 endings were.
I am cautiously pessimistic about this. I don't trust the BioWare people at all anymore to develop a good story and this whole "going to the Andromeda galaxy" thing just seems like a way to avoid dealing with the whole fiasco the ME3 endings were.
I'm trying to be more optimistic that it can be a story that stands on it's own, but otherwise I tend to have much of the same feeling. Like I said previously - lots of "hand-waving" to make it fit.
So now that everyone has given every possible answer to the question of "When does ME: Andromeda take place?", the actual answer is that it takes place some significant span of time after the original trilogy.
It is very, very unlikely that the end of ME3 will be retconned. It is likely that one of the three endings will be considered canon. Safe money is on "Destroy", poor odds on "Control", and "Synthesis" gets a Certificate of Participation and a pat on the back.
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I still don't get why some people are so upset about the ending of ME3. I thought it was sheer, utter brilliance.
Sure, one of the endings is probably going to be considered canon. I don't care which one. This isn't a continuation of the original trilogy anyway, but the start of something new.
I'll miss Garrus and the Normandy most of all, I think. Best and most loyal follower in any game, ever, and the best looking ship in computer gaming history. Just my $0.02, of course.
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I still don't get why some people are so upset about the ending of ME3. I thought it was sheer, utter brilliance.
Sure, one of the endings is probably going to be considered canon. I don't care which one. This isn't a continuation of the original trilogy anyway, but the start of something new.
I'll miss Garrus and the Normandy most of all, I think. Best and most loyal follower in any game, ever, and the best looking ship in computer gaming history. Just my $0.02, of course.
Because it negated everything you DID FOR 3 ENTIRE GAMES and just presented you with 4 choices that were in NO WAY WHATSOEVER modified by what you did over ~130 hours of gameplay.
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It is very, very unlikely that the end of ME3 will be retconned. It is likely that one of the three endings will be considered canon. Safe money is on "Destroy", poor odds on "Control", and "Synthesis" gets a Certificate of Participation and a pat on the back.
I've got five bucks that says they import your save and modify dialogue for whichever ending you picked.
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Because it negated everything you DID FOR 3 ENTIRE GAMES and just presented you with 4 choices that were in NO WAY WHATSOEVER modified by what you did over ~130 hours of gameplay.I still don't get why some people are so upset about the ending of ME3. I thought it was sheer, utter brilliance.
Sure, one of the endings is probably going to be considered canon. I don't care which one. This isn't a continuation of the original trilogy anyway, but the start of something new.
I'll miss Garrus and the Normandy most of all, I think. Best and most loyal follower in any game, ever, and the best looking ship in computer gaming history. Just my $0.02, of course.
The immediate outcome wasn't modified, though I do seem to recall differing voiceovers depending on if you were a renegade or paragon implying that the way Shepard went about things may have been different (I could also be wrong here, I've just got a vague memory of my friend's Renegade Shepard sounding like a despot during the control ending, while my Paragon sounded more benevolent).
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If the time setting is advanced as far as that, I honestly doubt they'll do anything other than passingly acknowledge that "something" happened. It'll either be Destroy or Control...but we won't know which.
Honestly after the debacle that occurred around the ending of 3 we might not even get more than the barest hints that the Reaper incursion even happened.
Based on the story hints given so far, that you are explorers searching for a new home for the citadel race, something bad happened, either a resource shortage, or overpopulation, or something similar.
I'm really hesitant about this game at the moment, just still so much burnout from the (in my opinion) disappointing ending of ME3. I don't know if I can bring myself to invest in a story that way thinking the entire time that nothing I'm doing probably matters.
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But... damn, without Garrus, things will be UNCALIBRATED!!! Or, maybe, perhaps, he calibrated stuff enough to last for a few hundred years...
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Because it negated everything you DID FOR 3 ENTIRE GAMES and just presented you with 4 choices that were in NO WAY WHATSOEVER modified by what you did over ~130 hours of gameplay.I still don't get why some people are so upset about the ending of ME3. I thought it was sheer, utter brilliance.
Sure, one of the endings is probably going to be considered canon. I don't care which one. This isn't a continuation of the original trilogy anyway, but the start of something new.
I'll miss Garrus and the Normandy most of all, I think. Best and most loyal follower in any game, ever, and the best looking ship in computer gaming history. Just my $0.02, of course.
I know that's the general argument, Hama. I've seen it many times before. I just don't see why this is a problem.
Is that dystopic? Absolutely. Did it produce a happy ending? Fortunately, luckily, it did not. A happy ending would in my opinion totally have destroyed the game, and left me completely unsatisfied. If I learned one thing from that trilogy, it was that the forces at work were so overwhelming ... so massive ... that any one person overcoming it all and coming out on the other side, smelling of roses, would've lost all credibility.
Secondly, I thought it left an impression of a series of games that dared to break every convention it could along the way, and succeeded. Instead of churning out a cookie-cutter action-adventure where the hero miraculously overcomes every adversity and ends up, as I usually put it, standing on top of a pile of enemy corpses, while waving a flag over his head while the heroic, ambient background music plays, the producers had enough guts to make a game where, throughout most of the series, you always felt you were one step behind the bad-guys, and that it was becoming increasingly clear that you could not catch up.
By the time I reached Earth the first time, in my first of many playthroughs, I KNEW it couldn't end well, and I was incredibly relieved that they had dared go that far. I think the first time I truly realized that this was the kind of series, where there was a very real chance that we'd get a non-happy ending (and where I was clapping my hands excitedly at the prospect, I admit this), was when the original Normandy was blown to pieces by the collectors. I sat there, eyes wide open going "The bastards just blew up my ship? WHAT THE HELL?!"
It was the biggest case of foreshadowing I can remember seeing in a game, ever, and I was genuinely pleased by this. I didn't want 200 different possible endings to this game. I WANTED an end to it all, where Shepard either ended up dead, or at least suffered so tremendously in terms of losses of friends and lives in general, that a victory would've seemed hollow and pyrrhic at best.
Most of all, I wanted Shepard to not seem invincible and superhuman. I wanted, more than I wanted anything else, a Shepard that was capable of failing at least to some extent. I wanted a human Shepard.
I'm personally tired of games that leave us all happy and content at the end. I'm tired of games that don't dare to break new ground in that respect.
ME3 succeeded in breaking new ground and being unconventional at the end. The actions you take throughout the game has dozens of consequences, such as which ones of your companions survive. Which ones die. Which factions support you and whom do you have to cut loose. All of these things come to a head before the final battle, and all those consequences that I hear people cry out for, are shown in how big a fleet you have available to take with you for the last battle.
But in the end, it came down to one man or woman against something so overwhelmingly powerful that there was no way to have a clean, knockout win.
And I loved that.
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I confess, I hope the game starts off as the Plan B to Shepard's struggle against the Reapers, the evacuation plan should Shepard fail. I think it'd be real neat if the travel to the Andromeda galaxy resulted in centuries somehow passing in a blink and the surviving expedition being well and truly cut off from any hope of recovery or return.
Let the excellent triology that came before inform and influence the prologue (perhaps by enabling or disabling certain companions from being available?) and then cast off our small group, lock them into desperate and total isolation, and face us with a struggle to both explore and survive.
I would play the ever living crap out of that.
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I didn't want a win. I knew it wasn't possible to get a clean one. But I just wish that they didn't reduce player agency to three colors plus transparent.
I must say that I'm not bitter about it as a lot of people. It's just the part that I tend to not think about. I mean 20 minutes cannot ruin the amazing 130 hours spent in a beautiful, amazingly thought out world of relatable characters and cool story. But it sure tried it's best.
If Shepard failed in the end, I would be fine with it.
It's arbitrary completely unrelated crap that I can't stand.
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This is certainly not an old war I want to refight, but I have to admit, I never felt like my choices "didn't matter" or that the ending was simply about RGB. The only thing that was missing from my first playthrough was the knowledge of what happened next - there was a climax for certain, but almost nothing in denouement. I cured the genophage; how does that impact the krogan in the aftermath of the war? I decided that the quarians would never be able to let the war end*; where does that leave the geth in a world where the Reapers have been tamed and repurposed? I knew my choices had made a difference, I just wanted them to go ahead and show me what those differences were. Which the Extended Cut nicely provided. End of issue, as far as I was concerned.
On the other hand, if they choose a canon ending - and most especially if it's Destroy - that will feel like agency being stripped away and my choices didn't matter. Whether it would be enough to make me not buy it and play, I really doubt, but it would nonetheless piss me off.
*Yes, I wiped out the quarians on my first playthrough. That playthrough was, for various irrelevant reasons, one that did not have an imported game save, so someone had to bite it, and only one species was acting as an unrelenting aggressor.
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The immediate outcome wasn't modified, though I do seem to recall differing voiceovers depending on if you were a renegade or paragon implying that the way Shepard went about things may have been different (I could also be wrong here, I've just got a vague memory of my friend's Renegade Shepard sounding like a despot during the control ending, while my Paragon sounded more benevolent).
The original release was the fiasco, the Extended Cut should not have been needed, but it was. That said, when you play with the (FREE) Extended Cut DLC, yes all your decisions very much DO matter. Trust me, I've played through the game many times and seen all the differences in the ending cutscenes. There is the one you mention here, plus even the stills show different things... Like if you saved Wrex and cured the Krogan, you see a sweet scene of him and the krogan female with a baby. If you didn't cure the Krogan it's a scene of them depressed because their baby died. If Jack's kids survived you see a scene of her with them and they are all happy... if they died you see a scene of her back to her old pissed off at the world self.
Also, in the original release the relays blew up completely no matter what, but the extended cut they changed it so that how badly they were damaged depended on your Effective Military Rating. Low EMS and the galaxy is screwed cause the relays all were completely destroyed. High EMS and just the centrifuge breaks, which means they will be a lot easier to repair.
There's a lot more cases where your choices ARE reflected, but two things make that seem to not be true.
1. The rushed release to get that 3/3/13 release date made the base game all the crap people said it was.
2. The Extended Cut therefore was damn good, but for many people it was too late, so they either didn't bother with it or they did but were so pissed about it before that they don't see that the choices matter now.
I myself am in the middle... I thought the rush was bad, the endings were... boring... but the Extended Cut fixed them beautifully and I think if they'd done that in the first place, it wouldn't have been the sheer rage from the community. Sure, there would be haters, every game has them... but it wouldn't have been nearly as bad.
All in all, how the ending of Mass Effect 3 was handled was a screw up of epic proportions. Did EA learn their lesson though? Only time will tell. Although, Dragon Age: Inquisition being delayed an additional 2-3 months (forget the original release date) is a good sign.
On the other hand, if they choose a canon ending - and most especially if it's Destroy - that will feel like agency being stripped away and my choices didn't matter. Whether it would be enough to make me not buy it and play, I really doubt, but it would nonetheless piss me off.*Yes, I wiped out the quarians on my first playthrough. That playthrough was, for various irrelevant reasons, one that did not have an imported game save, so someone had to bite it, and only one species was acting as an unrelenting aggressor.
I imagine that's part of why they are doing it in another galaxy. They can reference your choices so they DO matter... but when you are in the Andromeda galaxy does it really matter if there are Reapers flying around The Milky Way under control of The Shepard or if the Reapers were all destroyed?
Now, the synethesis ending... that would be the only one that would have minor differences, making your people from the Milky Way's face glow... and they'd be friendly to both organics and synthetics... but overall, I think that's all minor enough to matter yet not matter, kind of like DAI did with how you get some different dialogue based on who your Warden was and what Hawke did, but the actual war happens no matter what. Does Morrigan have a child? is the child a god? Etc, that all matters, but only as a side plot.
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I've got five bucks that says they import your save and modify dialogue for whichever ending you picked.
It is very, very unlikely that the end of ME3 will be retconned. It is likely that one of the three endings will be considered canon. Safe money is on "Destroy", poor odds on "Control", and "Synthesis" gets a Certificate of Participation and a pat on the back.Pay up.
There won't be any save import. If there is a world state import it will be via a questionnaire.
They managed it for Dragon Age. Not sure why they wouldn't do the same for Mass Effect.
So now that everyone has given every possible answer to the question of "When does ME: Andromeda take place?", the actual answer is that it takes place some significant span of time after the original trilogy.
A single sentence on a Wikipedia page with no reference doesn't exactly sell it yet for me. The rest of the developer's portion is more explaining how "it won't be like Mass Effect 3." Still curious to have more details as to what they are going to do.
Here's the funny thing about ME3 for me. While the Extended Cut did a good job of resolving what your Shepard's actions did, how the whole ending process was handled kind of got ridiculous. What made me appreciate the series especially more was the Citadel DLC that came later. The lighter tone and the chance to interact with the whole group of characters in a different way seemed like more of a "farewell" piece by the developers than the actual ending(s). You know what's coming and how bad it might be in the conclusion, so it was a chance to celebrate the whole series in a good way. While the endings are kind of there, it was the DLCs that made me appreciate the game even more in hindsight (and willing to give it a go again and again).
I will also confess to an interest in seeing how the multi-player element is handled and how it will be different from ME3's. Honestly, I find ME3's multi-player combat zones to have been really well done mechanically and fit well into the storyline as a something extra without being tedious.
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Dragon Age: Inquisition did not have a save import. It had a feature to import a world state file that you made by answering questions on a website. Bioware already said this is how it will be handled if it happens at all in the N7 stream a few months back.They managed it for Dragon Age. Not sure why they wouldn't do the same for Mass Effect.I've got five bucks that says they import your save and modify dialogue for whichever ending you picked.
It is very, very unlikely that the end of ME3 will be retconned. It is likely that one of the three endings will be considered canon. Safe money is on "Destroy", poor odds on "Control", and "Synthesis" gets a Certificate of Participation and a pat on the back.Pay up.
There won't be any save import. If there is a world state import it will be via a questionnaire.
But you could upload your save file to the website, pre-setting the answers to the questions. It was convoluted, but it was a save file upload.
Refusal was the only real bad thing about the Extended Cut. A temper tantrum.