#mass effect trilogy? i had to beat all three games on insanity and it made me feel cool as fuck when i did. the little bit of grinding in

[quietwingsinthesky]

if i ever have to play beyond two souls again im going to kill someone someone’s life ends with me

#the thing about achivement hunting is that it will either prove to you how much you love a game. or make you hate it forever. #like. assassin’s creed origins? i have a platinum in that and i never want to touch it again it was so boring and bad and by the end i was #in pain trying to finish it #mass effect trilogy? i had to beat all three games on insanity and it made me feel cool as fuck when i did. the little bit of grinding in #me1 at the end for power trophies was worth that sense of accomplishment. they’re damn good games. #beyond two souls? i have had to replay black sun. 11 times. at least. trying to see all the fucking endings. because my game wont register #that i have despite having seen all of them. I MIGHT HAVE TO REPLAY IT AGAIN. I HATE THIS FUCKING GAME. I WANT TO BE FREE. #no one is makingnme do this i just like number go up #but if i ever met david cage ill kill him with chainsaws #im so sorry elliot page but i dont want to see your face again for like a year im so tired #like this experience Has let me appreciate some parts of the story that i think were genuinely good ans critique other bits in new ways. #but then i had to experience both of those things like 4 more times in a row. and i want to scream

[theglowworm2008]

57 Facts Tag

I was tagged by @alienshootlove (I hope I can think of that many facts about myself. Lol.) Thank you for tagging me. :D

Rules: Post 57 facts about yourself and tag at least ten people. When posting include the tag “57 facts” in order for people to find out more about you and perhaps find a kindred spirit to talk to. :)

1.) I just turned 30 years old.

2.) I’m a mother of four, three boys and a girl, all under the age of ten.

3.) I’ve never been married and I’m not sure if I’m ever going to.

4.) I have a serious distrust complex about people, but I act really nice anyway.

5.) I curse like a sailor as much as possible when my kids are finally out of ear shot. Lol. I miss swearing so fucking much!

6.) My favorite food is sushi (Mostly because it’s expensive and I can’t have it all the time) and Chipolte rice bowls. 

7.) When I can drink, I always go for a dark beer. I love it! I can’t deal with fruity, girly drinks.. like, at all.

8.) I have a fiance who I love/hate all the time. Secretly, though? I love that we argue as much as we get along. Arguing is honesty, and honesty is HUGE for me.

9.) I lost my virginity at 16. And duuuuuude... guys take forever to get good at sex. I didn’t get an orgasm from a guy until... I don’t know.. my early twenties? Lol. Just a note, watching porn doth not a sex god make, mkay?

10.) I’ve always had guy friends; I was into video games and playing sports and girls my age were into... not that stuff. Plus.. girls are fucking mean, lol. 

11.) My best friends are also family members. I don’t really trust people and I just never clicked with anyone that way. My two best guy friends growing up.. one turned into a douche drug addict that was in and out of jail and the other, his wife was the jealous type and so we stopped talking. And then having kids.. well, you pretty much lose any friendships you have that existed once you have kids. 

12.) I have too many favorite books, lol, but one series that I’ll never get bored rereading is The Sevenwaters Trilogy by Juliet Marillier. 

13.) Growing up, I never lived in any home longer than a couple of years. Now, I hate sitting still too long. I don’t know if I’ll ever buy a house.

14.) I have never stuck myself into anything for long. As a kid, I tried out a lot of the stereotypes. Music, I have songs I like out of all of them. Religion, I like hearing all kinds of ideas and theories, but don’t like being stuck in one. Etc, etc.

15.) I’m insecure about myself (But who the hell isn’t, honestly?)

16.) My fiance calls me “The Ball Buster” because I am sarcastic and playfully fling insults at him when his ego gets too big for my liking. Lol. He says it’s how he fell for me. <3

17.) I used to be a correctional officer and I liked it, but kids and that profession really don’t go together. All U.S. jobs are insanely unsupportive of family vs jobs. 

18.) I got pregnant at 19 and, having no resources, I had to give up on college. 

19.) I still struggle with “what will I be when I grow up”. 

20.) I have been homeless once and I never want to go through it again. I am, now, obsessively on top of my bills as a result.

21.) My name is Bryanna.

22.) I can type without looking at the keyboard since my grandma wouldn’t let me touch a computer for any reason other than to play keyboard learning games. 

23.) My favorite video games will always be Zelda related, but I’m also into things like Dragon Age, Mass Effect, KOTOR, Horizon Zero Dawn, Super Mario, etc. When I was younger, I was really into Final Fantasy and Legend of Dragoon and .. god.. so many others. Most of my games had like.. four game discs. Lol. 

24.) I am an insane coffee addict. Seriously, I will get huge migraines and throw up when I go a day without it. Even when we’re broke, I will scrounge for loose change to keep myself stocked. Haha. 

25.) If I’m honest, I’m afraid of the dark.

26.) I’m also afraid of mirrors, especially in the dark.

27.) Because of those things alone, I avoid all horror movies. I just can’t even...

28.) I love Cheese-Its.

29.) I am deathly afraid of Spiders and bees/wasps/hornets.

30.) In fact, I hate most bugs.

31.) I was the type of kid who grew up with iguanas.

32.) I’ve literally beat boys up for trying to harm animals. Idgaf! 

33.) I feel trapped in my life sometimes, as a mother and as a girlfriend. I wish I had more time for myself to just be Bryanna. Hense, this Simblr obsession! Lol.

34.) Although I’ve played Sims forever, this is the first time I’ve ever made stories with my sims and shared them. It’s made the game so much more fun. 

35.) I hate being picked up or tickled.

36.) I love fall and, of course, all the pumpkin flavored shit!

37.) I really hate feet.

38.) I have never slept naked... ever. 

39.) I really want to have a career involved in computers.. one that I don’t have to deal with people in that.. fake friendly way.

40.) My father died when I was 15.

41.) My mother has struggled with chronic pain for most of my life; it’s made things kind of hard in ways I’m still trying to understand.

42.) When I was younger, I did nothing but write stories and draw. I don’t do as much of either anymore.

43.) I have freckles everywhere and I love them.

44.) I hate that I have brown eyes.

45.) I never put the toilet paper roll on the holder. Ever.

46.) I have a small dog named Atlas. She’s more like a cat than a dog, though. And a total brat.

47.) I can deal with all kinds of stuff; blood, poop, pee, etc. But I HATE throw up. Ugh..

48.) I am honest to the point of almost ruining my life. Lol.

49.) Unpopular opinion; I am not a fan of Apple products.

50.) I have never been outside of my country. Traveling is something I’m going to do as soon as my kids are old enough to live on their own.

51.) I love to sing; I used to be good enough to be in choir and get paid to do Christmas carols... but lack of use has kind of killed my voice. Lol.

52.) I think farting is freaking gross. Lol. And rude. Do it somewhere else! 

53.) My nick name ‘glow worm’ comes from the fact that I’m so white I “glow in the dark”. Me keeping it was a big middle finger to those that made it. Idgaf! Lol.

54.) I hate cake; I prefer ice cream cake on my birthday, with whipped topping.

55.) I am really blunt; sometimes I can hurt people’s feelings.

56.) When I’m sad, I will turn on Christmas music (Any time of the year) and sing along. I freaking love Christmas!

57.) I used to live in Florida; I moved to the top of the U.S. and now I can safely admit that snow is only good until Christmas is done, then it needs to fuck off! All the good it does, at that point, is keep all the bugs dead.

I tag: @mellocakes, @jupidella, @tigerellasims, @sparkiemonkey, @elliesimsx, @all-harlows-eve, @okruee, @oakella, @oakglow, @aharris00britney, @hiddenspringss

#57facts #57 facts

[enrychan]

comparison mass effect andromeda / dragon age 2, yeah or nope? i hear that a lot around the fandom

short answer: nope

extremely long answer [lots of MEA negativity and Personal Opinions™ under the cut, you’ve been warned. Please don’t read if you enjoyed the game and/or you are tired of hearing negative things about it, believe me i totally understand the feeling]:

alright i’m not going to act like DA2 wasn’t disappointing because yes, it was. especially after a game like DAO which remains among the best RPGs i’ve ever played. so I would compare MEA to DA2 because they are both disappointments. that said, i still disagree with the part of the fandom that says they are similar because of the “smaller story” and/or “the focus on the characters”. DA2 is a smaller story than DAO, but it’s laser focused on the delivery of that story within a three chapters arc, and through its characters. Exploration is almost non-existent and the fetch quests are few and so unimportant you can skip them without missing anything. The companions are the true narrative and emotional center, and each one of them has a personal mission during each one of the three chapters of the story. Some of them (especially Anders and Fenris) represent a piece of the problems and politics of Thedas and force Hawke to make decisions regarding those problems. Their growth and fate depend almost entirely on their relationship with Hawke and on the choices of the player.

On the other hand, MEA is all over the place. it gives me a number of huge maps filled with nothing but fetch quests that don’t make the narrative proceed in any way and are entirely forgettable. The game also gives me a humongous researching/developing system for weapons and armor with an absolutely ridiculous and confusing as hell UI, which requires three different currencies (milky way tech, kett tech, remnant tech), that you have to collect by scanning things, just to research the projects for said weapons and armor, not to mention the materials to actually build the fucking things - which come in like six or seven different levels, so if you want to update your weapon or armor to the next level you have to gather the materials all over again. That’s insane. At some point I just skipped that mess altogether and went through the rest of the game with my shitty level 2 gear because i was sick and tired of scanning and gathering and researching just to discover lately that i didn’t like how my new weapon worked and i wasted time for nothing. Obviously that meant the combat was much harder for me than it needed to be. There is a more in depth analysis on the researching/developing system in this review, if you’re interested. I’m not going to delve into the ridiculous implications of having to scan the rebels’ tech on Kadara to get milky way tech currency, like on the Nexus they don’t have, I don’t know, archives or books on their own technology?

I’ll also add that while the combat is probably the best part of the game, and it’s much more dynamic than in the trilogy, it’s still much less fun for me because they took away the option to order your companions to use a certain power, preventing me from planning any tactic or combo. this also had the side effect of creating another layer of separation between my Ryder and her companions; like there weren’t enough already, with the mediocre writing and everything else going wrong in this game. Basically I always fought like I was alone and most time i actually was because my two companions were KO and i didn’t care, as they were almost useless to me.

I should probably add that the quest design in MEA is atrocious, the worst of every bioware game i’ve played - and i played most of them. for almost every mission i was required to go to a certain planet, than back to the ship, than back to a planet, then back to the ship… each time going through unskippable cutscenes and loading screens. Luckily for me when i played the game they already patched the galactic map, letting me skip the cutscenes of the voyage between planets, which are very pretty at first but at the fifteenth time they start to really grate on your nerves. And despite the patch, the voyage is still very slow compared to, say, ME3. I cannot even imagine the pain of the day 1 players who were forced to suffer through those unskippable cutscenes hundreds of times. Some missions (the worst ones imo) require you to follow a signal through more than two solar systems, reading a series of five or six “false positives” or whatever, before finally finding the “real one” and conclude the mission; an utter pain in the ass and a complete waste of time. I understand that MEA had huge problems during its development, but this kind of stuff has nothing to do with those problems and everything to do with artificially extending your gaming time with boring activities, just to say that the game is “100 hours long”.

At this point I want to make clear that I would have forgiven everything - the fetch quests, the confusing crafting system, the awful quest design - if Bioware gave me a good protagonist and/or interesting companions. Not even a good story really, I didn’t even care about that, just give me a fully flashed out crew with clear motivations and backgrounds and I’ll be happy. That’s basically the reason why I forgive every shortcoming in DA2 - and there are a loooot of those. But nope, Andromeda fails there too.

With the exception of Jaal and to a lesser extent, Cora, the loyalty missions of the companions are completely disjointed from the main story and universe in which they are set and don’t make us understand more of this new galaxy in any way. This lack of relevance would still be ok if the relationship between the companions and the protagonist and/or the protagonist’s choices actually mattered (like in DA2, where the companions’ loyalty determines who lives and who dies in the end) but unfortunately they don’t, and i mean at all.

Speaking of the protagonist, again the comparison with Hawke doesn’t hold. Hawke could have three very distinct personalities which made them somewhat memorable, for good or bad. Ryder on the other hand has two or more kind of replies that are almost always the same, just with slightly different wording (as this video says: do you know the difference between “now we are building again” and “this is vital to our progress”? - not that i agree with everything said in that review but here i agree completely). Ryder fares even worse if compared to other bioware protagonists like the Warden, who had a wide range of reactions that in some cases could even include outright killing their interlocutor. Combine this with the almost complete lack of choices and/or consequences in MEA and you get the most forgettable and boring protagonist of a bioware game to date; and yeah, I’m including the Inquisitor, because while the choices of dialogue in DAI were similar to those in MEA, at least the facial animations were decent so you could have a connection with your own protagonist on some level.

To be clear, it’s not lost to me what the original intention was with Ryder’s character arc. Ryder is specifically written as inadequate, uncharismatic and sometimes incompetent, because they weren’t the intended heir to the title of Pathfinder. They kinda found themselves thrown into that role and had to adapt. On its own that’s not a bad character arc at all. On the contrary, it could have been even more interesting than Shepard’s, who was a leader even before the first mission in ME1. Unfortunately there is no actual character arc for Ryder, only premises. Ryder never becomes more charismatic or assertive during the story, in fact they make very few choices at all, and even those few have little to no consequences both in the main story and in their relationships with the other characters. Ryder is just kinda there, reacting with various shades of tone to other characters actually making choices. Again compare that to Hawke’s arc, since we are discussing whether or not the two games resemble each other. In DA2 there is a simple premise (Hawke is a poor refugee who runs from the Blight and has to survive in an unforgiving city like Kirkwall) and a very clear payoff (Hawke becomes one of the central political figures in Kirkwall, while ironically still not being able to save their own family and, possibly, friends). With Ryder there is a clear premise but no payoff. At least not on a personal level, which is important in creating a connection with our character. Of course the story goes on anyway, but it doesn’t seem to actually affect my protagonist or change them in any way, so it remains almost irrelevant to me.

Everything said until now would be already experience breaking on its own, but it becomes even more remarkable in Ryder’s specific case, because Ryder comes with an extra passenger, aka SAM - and SAM is a very invasive extra passenger. To the point that most of the time you’re convinced it’s not actually Ryder the one in charge of that brain, or of the Pathfinder team. 99% of the time it’s SAM who solves problems and tells you and the others what to do. Sometimes is becomes frankly annoying. I’m not even talking about the vaults. You have to solve a murder case? SAM doesn’t just gather the evidence, oh no, he also tells you exactly what the evidence means and how it must be interpreted, like Ryder is too stupid to connect the dots. You intervene in a beating or a robbery on Kadara, either to stop it or just to understand what’s going on? SAM tells you not to get involved. And guess what? Ryder does exactly that, instead of, idk, telling SAM to shut the fuck up? SAM also becomes downright unbearable on Voeld and on Elaaden where it keeps telling you that the temperature is rising or falling or that it’s within acceptable range. I don’t know if they finally patched the thing but god was that annoying.

In any case my point is, since it’s actually SAM and not Ryder that does all the work, you have the distinct feeling that you are not actually the protagonist in this story, just a vessel. That could have been a cool premise if, for example, Ryder leaned too much on SAM and then halfway through the story it was taken away or shut down. That could have been a dramatic moment of growth for Ryder, where they were forced to finally rely on their own strenght and actually become the Pathfinder humanity needed. But again: cool premise, no payoff. SAM is taken away only near the end of the story and Ryder almost dies because of that. And even when they can’t access their SAM during the final mission, there is still the SAM inside the other Ryder sibling’s brain to tell them and you what to do. In short, Ryder is almost entirely dependent on SAM throughout the entire story, making them even less memorable as a protagonist, if possible.

Unfortunately, the same could be said of most of the characters that populate Andromeda and particularly the Tempest. Jaal is relevant only because he is an angara, the only new friendly species introduced in MEA (another disappointment), but he is otherwise completely forgettable on his own. It’s repeated over and over again how the angara have an extremely open behaviour towards each other, expressing feelings without many constraints like we do, but the problem is, without good and complex facial/body animations, that kind of behaviour is hard if not impossible to deliver. I think that’s one of the main problems with Jaal’s character. The other main problem is of course the writing, always generic and kind of vague. For example when you ask him about his relationship with the Moshae, he tells you that she “inspires” and he “loves her”, but he doesn’t give you anything that actually communicates that inspiration and that love, even only through the tone of his voice (has anyone given some direction to these voice actors?). It’s only telling without showing. Compare that to Dorian talking about Felix, for example. With just one image (Felix sneaking him treats from the kitchen while he was studying) he gives you an idea of both the person that Felix was and his relationship with him.

Cora is similar to Ryder in the fact that her character has good premises, but no payoff. She has two main character traits: she was trained as an asari commando and has great admiration for them; and she was the second in command under Alec Ryder, so she should have become the Pathfinder, but she didn’t. Aside from the fact that in my opinion she repeats that she was trained as an asari commando a little too many times, like she wanted to be 200% sure we got the message, and that becomes kind of annoying after a while… if we take a look at her character arc we see that there is a great disappointment when she finds out that the asari heroine that she admired the most lied about the death of the asari Pathfinder for her own personal gain. This should have set in motion a series of consequences on her character journey similar to those Liara experienced when she found out that the Protheans weren’t actually the ethereal, moral beings she thought they were, but instead they were conquerors and imposed a totalitarian regime on the galaxy. But while Liara at first gets angry and sad and then she slowly accepts to re-examine her own previous work under a new light, no relevant change can be seen within Cora’s character. More on this comparison can be found in this excellent video. In a similar way, her other main trait (the fact that she was the designated successor to Alec but she didn’t get the Pathfinder title in the end), also doesn’t have any payoff. In fact she is just slightly disappointed/irritated at first but she gets over it very quickly (even if Ryder is clearly not the charismatic figure humanity needs) leaving little to no consequence on her relationship with Ryder. In these conditions, the scenes in which she talks about her hobby ring hollow because I didn’t previously build my relationship with her on anything substantial, so I don’t really care about her plants.

I’d say the only companion who gets a very simple but complete character arc is Peebee, because she starts as kind of an outsider in the group, extremely afraid of commitment (the writers made sure it was super obvious with the “I live in an escape pod” thing), and in the end she learns to relax a little and trust Ryder and the rest of the crew more. Unfortunately I also found her annoying as hell since her first appearance, so that didn’t do a thing for me.

I could go on with the other companions, but this reply would become a bible. I’ll just add that the “good premises - no payoff” thing includes non-companion characters as well, Reyes for example. For the first 40/45 hours I didn’t romance anyone because, well, I found every possible LI either boring, paper thin or annoying af. That’s something I never experienced in any other Bioware game, but hey there’s a first time for everything I guess. Then I went to Kadara, I met Reyes and honestly he was a breath of fresh air. I’m not saying he was particularly deep or complex, but at least he was somewhat charismatic and charming (also, that accent), so I decided to romance him. Unfortunately both his character and his romance get no satisfying closure, as there is literally no change whatsoever, external or internal, if you let him kill Sloane; and you can’t really confront him on the fact that he used you and lied to you, even if you romanced him so it should have been kind of a big deal. bigger deal. whatever.

I’m not preteding that something like this never happened before. Speaking about the Mass Effect trilogy, Jacob is the most infamous example of boring, not entirely flashed out companion. Moving to the most recent Dragon Age, I’d say Blackwall also suffers from something similar, since he has good premises (she is vague and evasive at first because he’s lying about his true identity) but little payoff (even after the big reveal he remains pretty vague and generic about himself and his own story, nor he behaves even slightly different than before), though he’s still more interesting than the majority of the MEA crew. The point is, some shortcomigs are normal and expected and, if counter-balanced with other high points, they can be forgiven. But Andromeda didn’t shine in any way. Outside of combat the gameplay was boring and clunky, basically go from point A to point B, scan stuff, gather stuff, repeat. The sudoku puzzles were boring af and honesly ridiculous. No one ever solved them before you? is everyone in the Heleus cluster a moron?

In fact, the whole foundation of the story is that no one in the Heleus cluster could gain access to the vaults and activate them, despite having known and studied them for centuries. One day a complete stranger from another galaxy comes and solves everything in literally five minutes. And I’m supposed to believe that. I mean my suspension of disbelief can stretch a lot, but this is a little too much for me. Also that makes the angara seem like a bunch of idiots, which is not exactly flattering for the only new friendly species we meet in Andromeda.

The writing in general is poor to say the least. I understand that the writers were included too late into the project due to the huge problems experienced during the earlier stages of development, but some of these mistakes are super basic, like writing from the POV of the omniscient narrator instead of the POV of the characters. So we get dialogues in which the characters know that they are in no real danger even though they have been shot, they are about to get shot, they risk getting spaced, and so on and so forth.

I get that the writers were aiming at something completely different from the grim, fatalistic atmosphere of ME3, but the problem is: if the script doesn’t take itself seriously, why should I take it seriously.I mean I’m all for jokes and lighthearted moments, there were a lot of those in the trilogy and i loved them (most of them), but the entire MEA script doesn’t seem to take itself seriously. The stakes SHOULD be high - the Pathfinders have the responsibility of 100.000 souls on their shoulders - but not for a moment you feel that burden, that responsibility.

Even the real reason of the voyage itself (escaping the Milky Way before the Reapers annihilate every advanced organic society) is kept secret from the player until you gather all the “memory triggers” your father left behind. Until then the whole Initiative - a huge, extremely dangerous and exceedingly expensive project - is presented like a fun stroll through a new galaxy, just because “we are explorers” and we like new beginnings and whatnot. This is another incomprehensible narrative choice that doesn’t make sense, no matter how you look at it. If you played the trilogy, the Reaper threat is certainly no surprise to you so the “plot twist” doesn’t work. If you’re a newcomer to the series you don’t even know what a Reaper is so the “plot twist” still doesn’t work. Not to mention that for some reason Alec Ryder’s “memory triggers” are scattered on planets he never even visited in his life. Instead of placing them somewhere among his things, idk, family pictures, books or music he loved, where it made sense to find them?

And even after you discover everything about the Reapers, and that everyone back in the Milky Way may have been dead for the last 600 years, there is again no consequence in the story or in the dialogues whasoever. Not even Ryder seems to be particularly affected by the terrible news. But we should be happy because we found out that their mom is still alive! Too bad we don’t care about her because we don’t know her. Exactly like in the beginning we didn’t care about Alec’s death because we didn’t know him. Those are extremely basic narrative mistakes. The whole experience is on this same, boring, safe, non-consequential level. Bioware is so much better than that.

(sorry for the long rant. I had a lot to say)

#MEA negative #MEA critical #enry replies #sorry for making you wait so much and also for the super long reply I'm so so sorry #i even derailed a lot from the actual topic whoops #mass effect is important to me ok