sully

@Spam101 said:

just need to voice this but was anyone else expecting kai leng to be a Cerberus resurrected kaidan alenko who's mind had been twisted into bitterness at his sacrifice with the intention of stopping shepard. I was certain that was the purpose for the mask/visor

Instead we got this random guy who had very little backstory or filling out. What's he been doing up till now? why wasn't he on your squad in 2 as he's obviously so leet and at the illusive man's disposal.

Would have been a great to kill kaidan again but not before he had a darth vader style redemption providing perhaps some useful information to defeat the illusive man.

That is a terrific idea. A real shame it didn't happen!

I have nothing against her or her performance, but she "wore" a low-cut top in the game, the camera focused on her ass a couple of times as she walked in/out of shots, and you can have sex with her in the game. How surprised can she be about how her role would be seen by gamers?

@Marz said:

@pw2566ch said:

@C_Rakestraw said:

Pretty sure Bioware confirmed that to be fake.

Is there a source that it was confirmed fake? Not saying you're wrong. I just want to see for myself.

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/355/index/10399933&lf=8

That's an odd rebuttal. What is fake - the entire user account? Multiple people say otherwise. Is BioWare claiming the account was hacked? Or that the screenshots were faked? I'm perfectly willing to accept their statement but the vagueness of the statement is eyebrow raising.

@FLStyle said:

@sully: 1) This has been posted before on the Giant Bomb forums, please use the search button in future. 2) BioWare and the writer in question has already said it was fake last week, Wednesday I think it was, may have have Thursday.

I figured it would have been posted, but I searched for "Takyris" and "Patrick Weekes" and got back no results. I'm not sure what else I could have searched for that would have brought up links to this but not every other post talking about the ending.

Re: being fake, that's actually a bit of a relief.

Piki Geek - Controversy Erupts Over Mass Effect 3 Writer's Forum Post, Name Release

Evidence that one of the Mass Effect 3 writers posted a denunciation of the ending on the Penny Arcade forums has come forward to a huge amount of controversy. The writer noted that he was very disappointed in the ending of the game and that it wasn’t what he thought it would be. The final mission was written entirely by Casey Hudson and lead writer Mac Walters, without input or review from the other writers, which wasn’t true for every other mission in the game.

With this coming to light now, it only shows that fans are not only justified and supported by a member of the ME3 writing staff, but also that BioWare should have been aware of the backlash it would have caused, and shows poor decision-making and lack of communication among the team, at least with regard to the ending.

The full text, which was copy and pasted from the original forum to places like Something Awful and others, reads as follows (warning, spoilers):

I have nothing to do with the ending beyond a) having argued successfully a long time ago that we needed a chance to say goodbye to our squad, b) having argued successfully that Cortez shouldn't automatically die in that shuttle crash, and c) having written Tali's goodbye bit, as well as a couple of the holo-goodbyes for people I wrote (Mordin, Kasumi, Jack, etc).

No other writer did, either, except for our lead. This was entirely the work of our lead and Casey himself, sitting in a room and going through draft after draft. And honestly, it kind of shows.

Every other mission in the game had to be held up to the rest of the writing team, and the writing team then picked it apart and made suggestions and pointed out the parts that made no sense. This mission? Casey and our lead deciding that they didn't need to be peer-reviewed.

And again, it shows.

If you'd asked me the themes of Mass Effect 3, I'd break them down as:

• Galactic Alliances
• Friends
• Organics versus Synthetics

In my personal opinion, the first two got a perfunctory nod. We did get a goodbye to our friends, but it was in a scene that was divorced from the gameplay — a deliberate “nothing happens here” area with one turret thrown in for no reason I really understand, except possibly to obfuscate the “nothing happens here”-ness. The best missions in our game are the ones in which the gameplay and the narrative reinforce each other. The end of the Genophage campaign exemplifies that for me — every line of dialog is showing you both sides of the krogan, be they horrible brutes or proud warriors; the art shows both their bombed-out wasteland and the beautiful world they once had and could have again; the combat shows the terror of the Reapers as well as a blatant reminder of the rachni, which threatened the galaxy and had to be stopped by the krogan last time. Every line of code in that mission is on target with the overall message.

The endgame doesn't have that. I wanted to see banshees attacking you, and then have asari gunships zoom in and blow them away. I wanted to see a wave of rachni ravagers come around a corner only to be met by a wall of krogan roaring a battle cry. Here's the horror the Reapers inflicted upon each race, and here's the army that you, Commander Shepard, made out of every race in the galaxy to fight them.

I personally thought that the Illusive Man conversation was about twice as long as it needed to be — something that I've been told in my peer reviews of my missions and made edits on, but again, this is a conversation no writer but the lead ever saw until it was already recorded. I did love Anderson's goodbye.

For me, Anderson's goodbye is where it ended. The stuff with the Catalyst just… You have to understand. Casey is really smart and really analytical. And the problem is that when he's not checked, he will assume that other people are like him, and will really appreciate an almost completely unemotional intellectual ending. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it.

And then, just to be a dick… what was SUPPOSED to happen was that, say you picked “Destroy the Reapers”. When you did that, the system was SUPPOSED to look at your score, and then you'd show a cutscene of Earth that was either:

a) Very high score: Earth obviously damaged, but woo victory

b) Medium score: Earth takes a bunch of damage from the Crucible activation. Like dropping a bomb on an already war-ravaged city. Uh, well, maybe not LIKE that as much as, uh, THAT.

c) Low score: Earth is a cinderblock, all life on it completely wiped out

I have NO IDEA why these different cutscenes aren't in there. As far as I know, they were never cut. Maybe they were cut for budget reasons at the last minute. I don't know. But holy crap, yeah, I can see how incredibly disappointing it'd be to hear of all the different ending possibilities and have it break down to “which color is stuff glowing?” Or maybe they ARE in, but they're too subtle to really see obvious differences, and again, that's… yeah.
Okay, that's a lot to have written for something that's gonna go away in an hour.

I still teared up at the ending myself, but really, I was tearing up for the quick flashbacks to old friends and the death of Anderson. I wasn't tearing up over making a choice that, as it turned out, didn't have enough cutscene differentiation on it.

And to be clear, I don't even really wish Shepard had gotten a ride-off-into-sunset ending. I was honestly okay with Shepard sacrificing himself. I just expected it to be for something with more obvious differentiation, and a stronger tie to the core themes — all three of them.

I take it it's too late to join?

Wow.

Man, now that's some perfectly stereotypical nerd hair.

That frivolous comment aside: It looks interesting.

I was hoping to find a way to host my own private game so that I might run around all of the multiplayer maps and figure out where everything is. Is there no way to do this? Seems a rather odd choice by DICE.

@SpudBug said:

I'm kind of a total derp when it comes to these things, setting up RSS feeds, sharing from my laptop across the network to my PS3, etc.

What's the best way to go about using the zune software since I have a WP7 (but any software will work) to auto download videos and have them show up on my PS3 to play in the living room?

I'm not really interested in getting them on a mobile device. I don't watch videos on the go much at all.

Should be fairly straightforward:

1. The Zune software should let you specify a directory to download podcasts into. Specify a directory on your PC and remember the path to it.

2. Next, you'll need to turn on UPNP media sharing so your PS3 can access the files on your PC. Windows Media Player has a UPNP server built into it - follow the instructions here for Windows 7 to get that set up, and of course add the directory you made note of above to the list of folders to serve.

3. Assuming your PS3 is on the same local network, it should automatically find the UPNP server and be able to see the videos you downloaded from Giant Bomb in it.