Topic: The Presidium - A General Mass Effect Topic

@themcnoisy Can't wait to see what you've captured using the Photo Mode!

@RogerRoger how are you going to run this year's screenshot of the year competition with people on PS5 Rog? Thinking about that whilst snapping a boss shot yesterday.

@themcnoisy I think "with great difficulty" is gonna be my answer for now. Might have to make a submission dumping ground topic here on the forums, and write out instructions for people to either upload and embed from Twitter or do the ol' USB shuffle.

Next year we'll have Discord integration, which might make things easier.

@RogerRoger fair one. I hate loads of memberships not too sure about discord but I will join of you set it up

Ok so it seems everyone in this thread has completed the game.

I'm currently about 60% through 3 and there is a trophy for beating 3 spectre level opponents. Can someone kindly give me the rundown as I would hate to miss it!

@themcnoisy I'm afraid I can't help you there, as I kinda cheated to get that trophy (well, okay, replace the word "kinda" with the phrase "gratuitously and unashamedly"). Have you made any progress?

@RogerRoger clicked it was the mirror mode! Finally beat it on normal tonight. Took 40+ goes. Used the wingman map as on the classic and other maps the clones charge you, on wingman you have a better chance. They stand off a bit more. First round was the hardest, I couldn't take them down and was perma grenaded initially on the other maps. On wingman if you stand to the left rear you have a space to move out of the way undercover. Round 2 is easy once you have the technique down as it's the same as round 1 with less grenades but 5 spectres. Then round 3 is insane, fortunately on the final go Garrus had 3 of them pinned to the right and I could handle the others one at a time with a sniper rifle as they spawned in. Then the remaining 3 came round one at a time. Chuffed to grab that.

I've missed setting 100 enemies on fire and getting a mech. Hopefully I can dust them off tomorrow!

@themcnoisy Big respect for your determination, my friend. Working all that out and making over forty attempts is something I simply didn't have the patience for, not after playing through the entire trilogy back-to-back. Suppose that's the argument for spacing out each game! One day I'll go back and do it properly and, when I do, I'll remember your tips. Thanks, and best of luck with those last trophies!

So as I mentioned in another thread, I just started playing Mass Effect: Andromeda and at first, I only played it for 1.5 hours. Now that I'm done for today, my total playtime is at almost 5 hours, lol. This game is just so much fun and I've really missed playing this series.

I've arrived on the second planet now and I'm actually really liking the team members a lot. For starters, there's a female turian in our group! I don't think we've ever seen one in the original trilogy, so this is very awesome and I'm definitely keeping her in my party. I mean, imagine having a female Garrus in your team, it's so cool. Then we have the asari of the group and I honestly think Liara has met her match. The asari, Peebee, is both smart and funny and she's completely stolen my heart. I'm definitely romancing her down the line. The ship's crew in general is a lot more unique and memorable compared to Normandy's where most of them were people you didn't even speak with. Here you're interacting with everyone on the ship, albeit a lot fewer than the Normandy's crew but still.

They've also brought back the Mako from the first game (I don't think it showed up in the second and third games but could be wrong) and it controls wonderfully. No more floaty controls, it drives like a normal car now.

I'm genuinely having a great time with this game and I've also been playing it on my Vita through Remote Play. Granted, it doesn't feel great on Vita during combat, but it's very suitable to use when you're just walking around on the Nexus station and talking to people, which you will do a lot of.

@LtSarge Stupid sexy Asaris.

@LtSarge "The asari, Peebee, is both smart and funny and she's completely stolen my heart. I'm definitely romancing her down the line."

Calm down, man. She's just a video game character...

As for the Normandy crew comparison, I actually disagree. You don't have to talk to them much outside of their loyalty missions, but I ended up talking to some of them as I found a decent portion of the crew in Mass Effect 2 to be quite good and memorable. Kasumi was actually one of my favorites even though she was just a DLC character, and obviously most of the trilogy crew was great (Garrus, Liara, Tali, etc.). Miranda as well, but it didn't hurt that I was a Yvonne Strahovski fan since she was on the TV show Chuck and I was a huge fan of that.

@KilloWertz I was actually referring to the people on the ships that aren't in your party. There are so many random people on the Normandy that are just in the background, maintaining the consoles or whatnot and you never talk to them. While on the Tempest, there are fewer people on the ship but you'll get to know everyone, which makes you feel a lot closer to the group so to speak.

@LtSarge Oh, then you are right. Just a misunderstanding then.

I still need to play Andromeda at some point. Maybe later in the year or 2023 at the latest. I still have Mass Effect 3 left from the Legendary Edition.

@LtSarge It's a shame that Mass Effect: Andromeda is one of those games so many will never be able to separate from its controversial launch, because it's a very, very good game. Not perfect, I grant you, but absolutely a victim of impossible audience expectations and intense publisher pressure. I'm therefore real glad to see you enjoy it so much, and hope you continue to have fun!

Been playing Andromeda for 20 hours now and this game is just so much fun. Playing as an explorer of a new galaxy has been really satisfying. Being able to establish contact with a new alien species, who are afraid of you because another alien has been terrorising them, then doing a bunch of missions for them and rescuing their people to prove your worth and finally having them accept you as allies is such an awesome feeling! There was nothing like this in the original trilogy. In fact, it was emphasised in the trilogy that it was the humans who didn't like the aliens. Remember how Ashley stated that she hated aliens when Shepard brought a krogan, asari, turian and so on to the Normandy? We never truly felt what it was like to be on the other end of that. When you walk through the alien world in Andromeda for the first time and people are calling you "it" and saying that the leaders should get rid of you, it felt very real. So it felt very gratifying to have changed the people's minds now. It's just as gratifying that humans are working together with turian, asari, krogan and salarian in order to explore the Andromeda together. In the first game it wasn't even conceivable that humans would work together with other species and now they're exploring galaxies together. Look at how far we've come now! It's just so nice to experience this level of progression.

Not to mention that the worlds you colonise actually feel like living breathing worlds. There's so much to do in them that feel meaningful and you can even come back later to previous worlds and have more stuff to do in them. So it's not like you'll never visit previous worlds again after having done everything in them. While completionists might not like the sound of that, I find that aspect enhances the level of immersion. And then you have all these people from your HQ praising you for finding and colonising new worlds. If there's anything this game does a great job at, it's making it feel that you've accomplished a lot of significant things.

And I haven't even mentioned the amount of dialogue there is when it comes to your party members. Every time you return to your ship after having accomplished something major, your team will have new things to say to you. They will also speak with each other spontaneously and it's fun listening in on their conversations. Then there's different dialogue depending on who you bring with you on story missions and then there's the coolest thing I've seen yet in terms of dialogue, which is that depending on who you bring with you while exploring the open worlds on your 'Mako', they will converse with each other about stuff specifically between those two individuals. So depending on the combinations, there's so much different dialogue to experience, which heightens the immersion even more! This is important because there's only one game in this story arc, while with the Shepard story you had three entire games to get to know your party members like Liara and Garrus. So of course you would come to like those characters more since you spend more time with them, but now that you get to talk and listen more to your party members in Andromeda, I've come to really like them much faster compared to Shepard's teammates.

This game is just so good and definitely the most underrated one in the series.

@LtSarge So glad you're still enjoying it, and agree with every single word you've written up there! Hope your enjoyment and enthusiasm for it holds 'til the end; will be interested to read what you make of the whole thing, when all is said and done. You're making me wanna replay it for myself now!

@LtSarge The Outer Worlds was really good for having so much dialogue between different combos of companions too. And it can make such a difference to make a game feel more organic and real rather than just trigger dialogue line 633 when companion x walks past object y

@RogerRoger I'm actually trying to pace myself with this game as I've been finding myself playing it for 4-5 hours per session without any breaks lol. Been a while since I've had that type of experience, it reminds me of when I played Horizon Zero Dawn last year. It's one of those games where I actually want to do everything because it's so much fun and rewarding. Even if I'm driving to a spot to simply scan a mineral, I know that I'll enjoy the drive there thanks to the wonderful dialogue between my teammates. But because I'm playing it so much, I've decided to play the game every other day just so I won't get burned out. And it's worked out well so far, so hopefully that will continue until the end.

@Thrillho Now you've made me even more intrigued of that game. Do you actually explore worlds with party members and they'll talk to each other from time to time? My impression of The Outer Worlds is that it's simply a Fallout game and when it comes to Bethesda franchises like Fallout and Elder Scrolls, they just aren't that immersive to me compared to Mass Effect due to lack of party members and just characters in general that are interesting and memorable.

After finishing RE7 I just thought I'd take a look at ME:LE being as I bought it back in the sale. I played the initial part of the first mission before it got too late but I'm tempted to carry on. I've got a window now before Horizon and Elden Ring come out in Feb so I've basically got just over a month. So the question I've got is - is it better to play the ME games one at a time with a break in-between or plough into it and try to complete the trilogy in one hit? If it's better to play them all in one go would I be better to actually come back to it when I've got more time or will a month be enough time to cover them all bearing in mind that I probably get 2 hours a day to play, if that, and perhaps a bit more at the weekend so maybe 120 hours in all? Difficult question I know but any input would be much appreciated

@render I played through Mass Effect 1 in 2016, then played through Mass Effect 2 and 3 back-to-back in 2019 and I still enjoyed the trilogy a lot. I think it's fine to play them one at a time because they are RPGs with a lot of world-building, so you want to take your time playing them. I believe I spent 50 hours in the first ME1, but noticeably less in ME2 and ME3, probably because it was the first game and there's so much to learn when you start out. You also have to factor in the DLCs in ME2 and ME3, so yeah there's a lot to do and I wouldn't recommend rushing them. I think it'd be much better if you spent this coming month playing the first Mass Effect, took a break and then came back later to ME2.