Mass Effect is my Favorite Series of all time

I've played through Mass Effect three times, Mass Effect 2 three times, and Mass Effect 3 literally like seven times.

These games are too good. And yes, I did NOT approve of ME3's ending, could have been SO. MUCH. MORE. But, with that said, it was one of the greatest campaign experiences I've ever had, besides, of course, the previous two games. The gameplay, the cutscenes, and just everything. Such a good game.

Now, what saddens me is.........I. Have. Never. Played. The. DLCs. Not one. And even after all this time, all I want to do is play through the entire series again with all downloadable content. It absolutely sickens me that combined, all those DLCs equal to about a whole different game that I haven't played.

Has anyone, replayed the entire series, with all DLC?

I might, if that remastered Mass Effect Trilogy for PS4 and Xbox One is a thing. If it's a real improvement, all the DLC is included, and doesn't cost me an arm and a leg - I'll totally replay it all.

@seppli: Woooah, hey now, what the hell did you just say about a remastered rumor????? I need a link, RIGHT NOW.

I have to agree with you. I'm currently going through my 5th playthrough of the series. I never played the DLC before and so far, it's been pretty great. I've only managed to play some of the ME2 DLC. Kasumi is a great crew member and the mission with her is great.

I've also played through each game at least 3 times. And I have the PS3 trilogy set with all the DLC. And I would buy a PS4 remastered version of that again. Without pause.

Wait, don't you have a reasonable gaming PC? I doubt they would do much for a next-gen remaster that the PC doesn't already do. The only thing that would make me buy that is if Mass Effect 1 was completely re-tooled to play similarly to the second and third games.

Google is your friend. 'Til then, here's a link.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/03/mass-effect-trilogy-may-be-remastered-for-ps4-and-xbox-one

Sure I do. I also own all 3 games for PC, sans DLC. I've played ME1&2's DLC on 360. Didn't bother for ME3.

I highly doubt a Mass Effect Trilogy remaster would just be a straight port from the PC version. They'll soup-up the effects at the very least. Better lighting, more particle effects, that kind of stuff. I wouldn't be surprised about much improved character models either. Ontop of making it 1080p 60FPS.

meh dragon age is better XD it feels more like a rpg than mass effect does

Different strokes for different folks, but that being said DA2 disappointed me more than any of the faults that ME trilogy combined.

I think Mass Effect is my favorite game series. I've played through ME2 more times than I an count, and since all three games were released on the PS3 I've decided to make running through the trilogy a yearly thing.

For those of you who haven't played any DLC, all I have to say is GET THE CITADEL DLC FOR ME3! Seriously, if you get only one piece of content ever, make it Citadel. Might be my favorite DLC in any video game, ever.

@believer258: There's no controller support on PC and TPSs feel weird on K&M

i bought ME1 on xbox live, controls like complete dog shit. I really like 2 and 3 was cool too. Never gonna play 1 cause its control shit

oh no not dragon age 2 i mean origins ^^

i only own dragon age 2 to boost up my collection ^^ and it was cheap (about £5)

Y'know what? I'm gonna finally play ME2. This has reminded me. I've been putting it off for a while now. I played the 1st on my Xbox years ago, then the save file got corrupted. I attempted to play through the first a couple of times but lost interest. Then last year I got the trilogy for my PS3 and lost interest in it again. I'm going straight into 2 this time. Hopefully I don't lose too much of the experience for not porting my save over.

Mass Effect is an impressive series. It's maybe the most impressive series. What they tried to do there and how close they came, it's why those games are still sitting on my shelf. That's why I bought that discount N7 billfold on a whim one day. But I can't ignore its faults. Just because something tries something really fucking grandiose, doesn't excuse it from the missteps.

It's kind of why I am always weary of games with 'moral' choices or multiple narrative paths. It's really fucking hard to construct a narrative with multiple paths that makes a powerful statement and does it without eating its own ass. Look at the recent GTAV, that game falls apart hard in the third act because it can't quite make sense of the shoehorned player decision. Ultimately it comes down to the development cost it would take to, essentially, make two different games, two different narratives. And Mass Effect tries to do this a thousand times over. All those choices and narrative possibilities. Half of the responsibility does ultimately wind up on the audience to create a Shepard that doesn't break his character logic (be an asshole here, then suddenly a good guy for no reason), I guess. That idea has always been hard for me to swallow though. I would prefer a writer tell me a story, give me their vision, and that's nigh fucking impossible when I'm there practically, intentionally trying to break it.

Mass Effect comes close though. I think that comes down to a lot of those decisions, secretly, not really mattering. You don't have to know that, and I think that's the trick. Write your story, let the player think it's their story, and let them feel like the impacts on the world were their doing. Ultimately that all comes to a head though when you have to end your story and show some conclusion that an audience can accept as unique and fulfilling.

Man, I feel bad for those guys. And I defended them when Mass Effect 3 came out. People were going to whine about the ending regardless, but what really irked me is that nobody actually knew what the fuck they wanted out of it.

Imagine what it could've been though if they hadn't fucked up the ending of 3. People would've pointing to the ME series as the game(s) of an entire console generation.

When it comes to playthroughs though, I played through 1 and 2 like 3-4 times and I played 3 exactly once. That says it all, really. I know there's DLC and stuff that makes the ending more bearable/better, but I just can't bring myself to play it again after the letdown that vanilla ME3 was.

Mass Effect 1 on insanity was the most teeth-grinding, thigh-punching, controllers throwing experience of my life. 2 has proven to be equally as hard. 3 was the easiest.

Ah okay... man I loved me some Origins, I bought 3 times. Once on my 360 til that broke, once on my PS3 til I sold it and the PS3 to a friend, and finally on PC where I discovered for myself the mod that let me bypass the fade in the Circle Tower and the mod that let me keep Dog as a party member without him taking a slot.

But anyways, my biggest gripe with the ME series game design wise was the paragon and renegade system. If anything it is those types of black and white systems that really make choices in games feel so arbitrary like they don't matter as much as they should. They also force the player down one path which further hurts the sense of the choosing something because it's something that I would truly do. An example of this is in ME2 where the player is penalized if by a certain point in the game they haven't gotten I believe tier 4 paragon or tier 4 renegade; the player must choose either Jack or Miranda unless they are T4 P or R where they can defuse the situation. This is something that DA:O did so much better than the entire ME trilogy.

Now you made me go buy the trilogy on PC. Shame on you.

I love em too, and they have a well deserved place on my favorite games list on this site.

Same. I would definitely replay them again on my PS4 if given the chance.

@sacui: over here man and I also didn't like the ending. I can honestly say I played through all three mass effects like 6 or 7 times. That even includes all dlc.

@sacui: When you say you didn't get any of dlc does that include Javik in ME3? If so that's a damn shame. He is up there with Garrus and Wrex for me. Making him dlc was bullshit.

Bring Down the Sky, Overlord, and Shadow Broker are pretty good pieces of DLC. The rest are not good and can be easily skipped.

What? I have most of the mass effect games on both 360 and PC, and the PC versions don't really look any better. The only real noticeable difference is that ME1 had SLIGHTLY less gross texture pop-in. Slightly.

Maybe i'm ignorant of the finer details of graphic quality, but i didnt really notice a difference. Then again I can't really tell the difference between 60fps and 30fps. I can only really tell if its super low or if it changes drastically.

There's not much, I'm just saying that I wouldn't bet on EA and Bioware making big changes to the graphics. Perhaps a few touch-ups here and there. They might bump the resolution, framerate, and AA up, but all of those are bumped way up on the PC version. And Mass Effect 2 still looks pretty good.

I don't know if Mass Effect 1 looks that much better on PC or if it was just the much-improved framerate that made me appreciate its visuals a lot more. I do know for certain that I just can't make myself play that game again, even on the PC.

I'm right there with ya. I love the Mass Effect series, but have barely touched the set of Dlc. If that remaster rumor is true and it comes with all the Dlc then I'll definitely play them again.

@believer258: Oh sure. I don't think they'd bother with much of a remastered edition or anything like that. Not for awhile at least. The games already look good. Even ME1 with all its awful texture pop-in (i've honestly never played a game with worse texture pop-in and ive been playing titanfall on 360 lately....) looks great. It's just the art design. Those skyboxes look great. Even that crappy mako world exploration crap i loved.

I love the Mass Effect universe and trilogy. Probably some of the best games of the generation, at least in my opinion. Sure it shit all over itself at the end of ME3 (if it ended 20 minutes earlier it woulda been fine) Sure they have its flaws and quirks, but its a god damn super rich sci-fi universe thats actually really well done. Plus it was a stroke of genius to basically base all the "out there" technologies on a single concept. being able to artificially manipulate an objects mass, since that lets you do all sorts of crazy shit if you accept that one thing.

Great games. Just great. I eagerly await more news on that rumored ME4 or whatever it is. I know theres another mass effect game in the works.

Mass Effect 2 is pretty solid, apart from that merely an above average series.

Yeah, I could still go for a somewhat remastered trilogy on PS4, with all the DLC included. Have only ever finished the first one and got...I don't know, 4-5 hours into ME2.

Pretty damn good series. Each game has it' problems but as a series it's pretty incredible. I would probably put it at the top of my (theoretical) list too.

And yea, if the current gen version (happens and includes DLC) then I would pick that up for sure. There is a bunch of content worth playing for sure, outside of the first one.

I considered doing this as well since theres nothing coming out atm but its like $60+ for all the dlc

I hate a lot of things about the gameplay of the 1st and 3rd game, and the ending is indeed an extreme disappointment, but I still love this series so fucking much. There's just something to love about every character, the world is so interesting and it constantly made you feel like you were shaping your own story. Not gonna lie, I got misty-eyed on about seven different occasions during Mass Effect 3 (off the top of my head; the end of the Grunt mission, Mordin's death, Thane's funeral, Legion shutting himself down, Saying goodbye to everyone before the final mission, Apologising to Tali that I couldn't be there to build a home with her), and basically the entire party scene in the Citadel DLC made me feel so warm inside. I think it's going to be a long time before another series makes me feel so emotionally involved as Mass Effect.

Well I do love it also. It's my favourite franchise, although there is a slim chance Witcher 3 might change that, if they make it a good game with with considerable nods to the prior players of the franchise.

So here's an opinion that I feel few people will latch on to: the first Mass Effect was the best of the series, and Mass Effect 2 was the worst.

Mass Effect (1) set up a vibrant, rich universe that was almost impossible not to enjoy exploring, even through the flawed Mako sequences and the rigid movement and combat systems. It was the only game of the series that was legitimately an RPG; the second and third games were flimsy Gears of War clones that did nothing to iterate or improve upon the systems that they tried to emulate (and I played Gears of War, didn't really like Gear of War 2, and never touched the third or fourth games). The ability to explore and partake in the environments in the first game was superior to the light and uninteresting "run down a hallway full of chest high walls" experience that dominated the second and third iterations.

Mass Effect 2 introduced a slew of characters that I found profoundly uninteresting. Most of the issues surrounding your squadmates involve their family, in the most banal and generic ways possible. If I remember off the top of my head correctly, Miranda, Jacob, Tali and Ashley (recurring from the first game) all have issues with their father and Samara and Thane can't deal with their kids. Grunt has little to no character at all, Garrus and Kaidan are still both sticks in the mud, Jack is dull and stereotypical as hell, and Mordin and Legion are interesting only in that they are the least uninteresting (of the DLC characters, I preferred Zaeed, because he shut the hell up and did what needed to be done most of the time). All of the exploration was demoted to "run down hallway, take cover, shoot, keep running down hallway." They completely replaced planetary involvement with the probe system (which was even further simplified in the third game) and the Citadel went from being an expansive, multilevel area to 2 or 3 small floors. All told, I very much disliked most of the major characters in Mass Effect 2.

The third game is such a downbeat affair, not necessarily because of individual plot points but because you inherently know that things are going to end. As the game began to kill characters off and drag on and on, I became less and less attached to the story and by the time it ended, I was glad that it was over - not because of how the ending played out (I finished the game before the ridiculous additions that Bioware made to the ending) but because I didn't have to play this damn game anymore. It had no energy, because you as the player know how (in general) how the game will reach its ultimate conclusion - and if there's anything worse than a long, drawn-out, and needlessly self-congratulatory story, it's one that is also predictable.

I will make no claim that any of the above points are objective truths. It is entirely my opinion that the first Mass Effect had a potential that was wholly unmatched amongst the entire last generation of video games and their respective consoles, and that the sequels squandered that potential in the most uninteresting and boring ways possible. I have had a similar experience with other Bioware games, and my only conclusion in that matter is that Bioware write great introductions and completely drop the ball on every subsequent iteration. I will, for the rest of my video game playing days, regret that I played Mass Effect 2 and 3 after becoming so heavily invested in the original, because nothing but disappointment followed. For a game that so heavily relied on you the player becoming involved in each character, it was unfortunate that I disliked almost every single one of them.

I loved these games too. They were great games in a lot of ways (for example I think 3's multiplayer, which was fantastic, has been overlooked in this thread) but I think the quality of the story slipped from game to game, and I'm not just talking about the ending.

Mass Effect 1 was an amazing Star Trek like experience, with all sorts of cool new races and galactic politics to encounter, a great main story to unravel, and the leisurely pacing to drink it all in. The gameplay was janky as hell, but partially because it tried to provide a lot more options, with all the equipment, conversation areas where gunfights would suddenly break out (You'll notice that in 2 and 3 the fighting and talking areas are generally segregated) and areas that could be approached in a vehicle or on foot from multiple angles with whatever strategy you wanted. Enemies came from every species and every faction. It was open world in the best and the worst ways.

Mass Effect 2 was character focused with less extraneous world building, and a sense of time pressure that is at odds with what makes the series great. It also had way fewer locations than 1 (due to the removal of the Mako) and a boring, ill-defined, villain. The individual vignettes varied in quality, but if you wanted to get the most out of the game you had to run around after every mission and talk to everyone, which was annoying, and while attempts were made to knit the relationships together the lack of interaction between other crew members just seemed weird to me. Why did Garrus never play poker (or whatever) with Jacob and Thane? Why wasn't Mordin always bugging Grunt, trying to learn more about him? They were all just always at their posts waiting for you to come around so they could unload their stories (some of which were quite interesting.) The gunplay in ME2 was much more polished but at the cost of the open world feeling. It was like 2 games stitched together, a talky adventure game and a third person corridor shooter. I get why people liked it, but I missed the integrated world of 1. I missed fighting thresher maws and mercenaries on the same planet.

Mass Effect 3 had its moments and was still better than most games, but 90% of it was super predictable, the fact that nobody really reacted to Javik (or Eva, the unshackled AI) was SUPER distracting for me, and the whole thing was so focused on the war effort that the expansive Star Trek feel was almost totally lost. The enemies were all mercs or a few boring other types and the whole thing just felt like Intergalactic GoW, including collectibles to find and conversations tacked on. The gameplay was fine, the story was still great for a videogame, but I was bored with the game well before the stupid ending and might not have finished had I not been playing the same character for over 100 hours of gametime.

As for the DLC...it was a mixed bag. From Ashes was absolutely necessary. Bring down the sky, Shadow Broker, and Citidel were all great. Overlord, Arrival and Leviathan was good but not worth the money. Zaeed and Kasumi were...fine. Omega was exhausting and had way too much combat (when I think of ME3 these days most of what I remember is fighting through those endless red hallways full of troopers and robots) The fact that they were all integrated into the games and released well after the games' release was just stupid.

Overall the series changed over time, and in my opinion not for the better. It got more polished, less ambitious, and less interesting. Still pretty amazing overall, and there's never been anything quite like it in videogames.

The first two games are two of the best games I've ever played, but goddammit that third game is such a bummer.

Its first or second for me as well. Shame people are so sour on three, I think its almost as good as two.

@seveword: From a story sense, ME1 is superior, but it's gameplay is a fucking mess compared to ME2 and 3. The load times are horrendous, the citadel is a bore to explore, managing your inventory is a fucking nightmare, and the combat is the weakest of the series. I appreciate the game for setting up such a great universe, but I have tried to go back and play it and failed numerous times. It just feels too dated.

I love it as well, and I think it's probably the most important series of games to come out last generation along side the Uncharted games.

Mass Effect 1 was fantastic. It was probably my favourite game at one point, and had limitless potential for a series. Then Mass Effect 2 happened, its dull FPS combat and miserably put together soap opera of a story draining away every bit of enthusiasm I had; what the fuck, Bioware?

Amazing, for a moment I thought I had written this post myself and forgotten about it, hehe. I think my favourite thing in two was the way they solved the problem from the first game with the long elevator rides... by introducing loading screens. Awesome. So now I get to watch a loading screen instead of hearing my crew banter and new broadcasts and whatever else was going on in those elevators. Bravo. And man did they mess up exploration. I missed the Mako. It may have been clunky, but all they needed to do was make the worlds more Mako friendly. Instead they just remove that whole aspect of the game and introduce some minigame which is incredibly tedious. Not to mention they removed loot and basically, as you said, turned the game into Gears of War with a story. Luckily the story was good enough to keep me interested, but it never, ever got as good as the first game.

There are some real stinkers in that batch of DLC available for Mass Effect.

Mass Effect 2 is top 5 favorite games ever, the whole series is amazing, and the fact that the ending was so controversial shows how much the series meant to a lot of people. I really hope to see more from that universe.

If they do release a Trilogy on new consoles I hope they have the option to play the 3 games without credits in between each game. It would be cool to play through a 100 hour game, no breaks and all the DLC available from the get-go. That would mean they would have to streamline the 3 games to make them not so different anymore but it would be cool to see it happen.

I have played every Mass Effect game including DLC at least 2 times and am actually going through ME3 again at the moment. It is my favorite series as well and I'm curious if we get the official announcement of ME4 at E3 this year.

I've only played the first Mass Effect, and I ran into some game breaking bugs so I quit half way through. It seemed neat, and everyone seems to be in love with ME2 so if this remastered rumor turns out to be true, I'll definitely give them another shot.

I've played through all games and ALL DLC (all of them) and it is really great, though I wish EA gave Bioware more than like 1 year to do the third game, and I wish the games were on steam with achievements and trading cards instead of origin. That developer who wrote the whole Kai Leng thing on Thessia in the third game said himself that he wishes he had more time to "massage" that idea (i.e. come up with something better).

I have to say, that car chase sequence in Lair of the Shadow Broker is still the most fun driving sequence I've ever played in a game. Also that hammerhead vehicle was REALLY fun too.

I can understand why people love Mass Effect enough to consider it their favorite series, but then I think about how the first game sort of plays like ass or ME3's rotten ending and I can't personally go that far. There are also plenty of examples of... questionable writing throughout that trilogy. Still, if nothing else they're clearly some of the most important games of this last console generation.

I've hung out while a friend played most of the major DLC, and it's all really beautiful. I'm devastated by missing out on Leviathan; none are as essential as From Ashes (well, unless you romanced Liara, in which case Lair of the Shadow Broker is vital) but they're all really good.

Also, I adore the ending. It's the most controversial and thought-provoking moment we've had in video games since Metal Gear Solid 2. I don't think I've had more conversations about anything in a video game.

@sacui: agreed. Best series IMO