Mass Alex: Mass Effect 3 - Part 01

my dude. reload when you're not in combat

Wait yeah what the hell? Alex Ryder deepfake or bust.

Also, fun fact @vinny@alex, I don't know what it's like for the console versions but I just booted up Multiplayer on PC tonight at about 1AM and the matchmaker put me in an occupied lobby within 5 seconds (and the game was full by round 3).

It's such a lightning-in-a-bottle moment for BioWare - it's basically an extremely digestible form of Gears of War horde mode (10 rounds as opposed to the traditional 50) with Mass Effect skills. It fucking rules and I'm not surprised at all that people are still playing it 8 years after the game came out. I'm pretty sure the games themselves connect by P2P because it does have host latency advantage, for what little that means in a PvE mode.

Also the fun of it is that BioWare spent a lot of time mixing it up with novel classes with new skills and abilities not found in the original single-player at all, to the point where at higher difficulties players spend a lot of time completely disrespecting core mechanics like hard cover or being almost completely cooldown-agnostic

Mass Effect 3's multiplayer was fucking great

At first wonder if Alex as really playing...

Then I saw that the aiming reticle was always pointed three feet off the target and that the player refused to take cover, and I said, "That's the Alex I know!"

I have been waiting for this for so long I didn't think they would ever play ME3!

Characters like James Vega are one of my huge pet peeves. Nobody who is THAT into being a soldier would be caught dead with their dog tags hanging out of their shirt like that. It's unprofessional.

That dude is one war crime away from starting his own vetbro coffee company.

So, at least in the 360 version, the code didn't work if you imported all the way from ME1. It just gave a generic face. However, if you had done any customization in ME2, then *that* code would give you "your" Shepard. All of them look a little different because of the ME3 engine, but it is pretty close.

For me, I had to recreate my FemShep as best I could using the ME2 sliders and putting that code into ME3. But I ended up changing a few things drastically (hair color, cheek gauntness) because the 'almost right' provided by the code felt more wrong oddly enough. (NOTE: I played the whole trilogy for the first time when Mass Alex started)

While I appreciate all three games for different reasons, ME3 was the one I thought was most fun to play. I hope @vinny can get @alex to get the rhythm of the biotic and tech explosions. They work great with someone who really only uses pistols anyway. He can ditch the assault rifle and ditch the sniper rifle and have almost zero power cooldowns. With "warp" and "throw" combined with Liara's singularity and James' Fire Ammo, you can just chain explosions from afar. I played as Adept and barely ever even used a gun. It was AWESOME!

The fun thing about everyone telling Alex & Vinny they're playing the game wrong is that their suggestions are also wrong

god the opening to this game is so good. the destruction of the normandy in 2 is cool but freedom’s progress doesn’t hold a candle to mars.

Are the random hitches in the game or in the capture? Can't help but wonder if mods are to blame.

Also Avina's nipples are probably from some texture mod too. Unless they were there originally and I somehow completely forgot, which seems unlikely.

The most recent season and episode of Mass Alex is my favorite season and episode of Mass Alex on the Citadel.

Let the roller coaster of emotions commence.

Super excited this is back! I played through ME 1&2 but and loved them but never got around to 3. So glad I'll get to experience it for the 1st time along with you folks! Hooray for the return of Shep Shep!

what are they gonna do about the galactic readiness? you can't get the most complete endings (no matter which of the 3 choices you make) without 100% readiness

At some point, they tweaked the system such that you can get all the endings simply going through all the single player content. I guess all the DLC makes up for the old app and even the need to play multiplayer. They *should* be able to max out readiness, especially since I think they get additional "imported character" bonuses as well.

They also rebalanced some of the encounters at higher difficulties at some point I think. I remember playing through ME3 on Insanity difficulty at launch and the final arena fight of the game was infinitely spawning waves of Banshees, Brutes, Marauders etc.

They made a lot of things *much* more forgiving at some point

Yo can they throw a mod in after starting the game that switches Ashley in for Kaiden?! ;)

lol doubtful, but I know next to nothing about mods haha so who knows?!. I get why people hate on her - space racist, etc. But isn't that the point of her character? She mistrusts and dislikes all aliens (I think based on some family history, father stuff? not positive), and grows as a character throughout the trilogy to become a trusted friend/romantic interest with Shepard and the diverse, alien cast of characters. Anyway, just my thought whenever I see people dismissing her as a space racist - you're not wrong and I get it, but she's an interesting character that grows and does better! Hopefully I'm not alone in stanning (kind of) for her haha.

I don't hate Kaiden either, mainly because it's Carth Onasi, otherwise he's rather milquetoast in these games. I kept Ash alive in most of my playthroughs and enjoyed her romance quite a bit, but also had fun with my imagined Kaiden/Vega bromance in ME3 based on them chilling on the citadel playing poker. I

Continue to love this series Alex and Vinny, I've been most looking forward to this game as I remember it the least of the series. All the DLC should be a blast, I never actually played the Leviathan or Omega DLC (heard Omega is garbage, but Leviathan is essential). I'm working my way through ME2 as a soldier (never played that class), and bought all the DLC for ME3 on my fucking PS3 haha. Gotta get to work to get ahead of this run. Cheers!

Thank you so much guys

You made the right decision. For You.

Very excited to see more Alexy- Mass Alex!

On Vinny bringing up Kaiden having a small role because he could be dead, that's not really the case. If Kaiden's dead, that means Ashley is alive. She takes the same role in ME2 and ME3. There is no opportunity for that character to die in ME2, so whichever of them survived ME1 is guaranteed to be there.

I unironically love the gushing Vinny does for Jennifer Hale at multiple points in this episode. She's very good.

On a related note, I remember thinking when I started the ME series (after it was finished and ME1 was ported to PS3) that it seemed... unbalanced, who they got to do the Shepard voices. You've got Mark Meer, who at the time of ME's inception, was a newbie to voice acting; and a genuine veteran of twenty years in the industry with Hale. Not to downplay Meer, but it seemed to me, if you cared about performance in a dialogue-drenched game series, the choice was obvious.

Oh, yeah! Good to have you back, Commander Alex. I guess that's actually X-COM, huh? Happy you decided to bring Tali back. Not only was that some bullshit, but when you're talking about including or excluding a main character from a game like this, unless some monumentally different stuff happens if you choose to exclude them, it really seems pointless and punishing to do it for any other reason than roleplay. Especially in an LP like this, it really seems more like a question of "would you like more content, or less content?"

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Aw, I was hoping you wouldn't punch the reporter, I like the dialogue you get if you don't do that in all three games.

I loved this trilogy (all of them) but it's easy to forget how old they are now. The character animation and facial stuff looks way jankier than I remember.

Team resurrect Tali all the way. Most of these guys played ME 2 a thousand times before ME 3 came out and had multiple outcomes for their many playthroughs. If you only get one shot at this game, you need to make it one with perhaps the most iconic crewmember alive.

Man ME3 would be so good if the ME story didn't become an inexplicable disaster at the end of ME2. It's so clear from everything that they had no idea how to handle the "reapers are an impossibly strong force that we are hopeless against" thing.

God this game is a steaming pile but I'm glad they are doing it

@stoutlager Oh you sweet summer child

@lesliemagnafuzz: I also heard Leviathan was essential but to me it felt like a waste of money. Any significant bits of backstory were told (or at least could be inferred) with From Ashes. Though that may depend on having a certain character with you at the right times.

It put me off from buying any of the other DLC which was a shame because when I eventually watched someone play Citadel on youtube that turned out to look really fun.

Commander Bailey: I wouldn't mind a chance to get my fingers dirty
Alex: Are you coming on to me?

Lol! You're filthy, Alex!

@cannedstingray: Saidly, yes...

Lmfao as if the character import is still broken after all these years. Its not as bad as it was on release but jesus christ the whole point of this game is playing through your own story.

For people that don't know if you create a character in 1 and import in to 2 and 3 it messed it up big time because they changed a bunch of the character assets, how they "fixed it" was by incorporating a fan mod that gave you a rough approximation and put it in to a patch - that is how lazy Bioware under EA are. If you wan't the exact same face as in 1 and 2 you basically need to recreate it from scratch using the save editor.

Played the hell out of ME 1 and only did 1 playthrough of 2. But I never played 3.

Only hope this doesn't inspire me to restart Andromeda

Blown away by the number of folks who never played 3, despite it being better than 2 in every way.

Never liked the flippant attitude toward Kaiden and Ashley but that's the meme everyone decided to lazily hop on board to.

Happy to finally get around to watching this season, but as a hardcore fan of these games, yeah, this is going to be a rough watch.

Hahahaha yasssssss I was so so so happy to hear this "housekeeping" news after just finishing season 2 five minutes ago!

An excellent choice!! Woooo! Series hype increased 1000%!!

A friend of mine plugged his 360 and got into Mass Effect 3 multiplayer games as recently as today! Apparently it's still SURPRISINGLY active.

My reaction to playing this on the Legendary Edition was IDENTICAL to Vinny's: "Oh GOD, I forgot about all this dream sequence/little kid bullshit."

That said, this is still the best playing Mass Effect game, and got WAY WAY WAY more shit than it deserved at the time. From HILARIOUS "plot holes" like the galaxy not dropping everything to unite against an existential threat (oh how naive we were in 2012) to the supposed "dumbing down" of the series (by making combat more engaging and challenging, and far less inventory juggling), I'm glad it's holding up about as well as I remember.

And GOD Traynor is such an upgrade from Kelly Chambers as a character.