What are you playing? Mass Effect 3 edition

[Jaedar]

No...they're getting slammed because they're trying to make art and, with the ending, that comes with a massive cost.

Look Aemer. People very rarely hate other people because of their intentions, because as it turns out, most people have pretty noble intentions. Everyone is the hero of their own story and all that. Nobody would say they hated hitler for trying to unite the world and make the human race better, they'd say they hate him for (being part of the group that) started a war that claimed millions of lives and for attempting genocide. It's a dumb example and internet hitler arguments are about as old as they come, but I hope you can see my point.

The shittyness of the endings might possibly have come about from a desire to be art but that isn't WHY or WHAT people hate. They hate it because it's shit. They hate the result, not the (presumed)intent.

Generally, you need to rely on ctrl, space and shift for hotkey combinations, because you can't even rely on 2 alphanumeric keys being pressed down registering correctly.

Just like a 360 pad relying upon the shoulder buttons(usually the two lower ones afaik?) because they're the ones suited for it.
As the math in one of my previous posts showed the mouse+keyboard setup can about as many urgent actions, but like DDL said, you can bind stuff like inventory and map to far away keys, so you only have to fit the frequent/actiony keys around WASD.

This video is poignant and hilarius
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4ifcWPs ... embedded#!

[bobby 55]

Eek! I was having a read over on RPS and saw Richard Cobbett was doing a piece on the ending. Erm, I couldn't help myself. Now I want to play this more than ever.

*** Ending spoiler!!!

It seems the ghost child explaining whatever it is he explains is a major sore point. Don't tell me, I only read enough to get a gist. Anyhoo, that aside, there seems to be a concensus that the rest of the game is fantastic.

[AEmer]

Link?

And jaedar you're right - I was probably being hasty in my conclusions about the difference in what you can react to quickly, pc vis-a-vis controller. I still think it's easier to not look on a controller as the control set grows, but it's not that big a difference.

On your point...the road to hell is paved with good intensions, is what you're saying, yeah? So don't blame the good intentions?

Except on this ending, the problem is elitism. There's a very clear message: What you do generally doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. All of your actions are ultimately relatively futile.

It's a good point for a piece of art; it'd be an excellent point for a sci-fi short story.

It's a horrible point to make at the end of ~150 hours worth of gamey content, and a really crappy ending to any narrative because the bloody point of making narratives is to emphasize values that are fundamentally different from such a point. It's high-art bullshit, is what it is, and I don't want it in my games.

It's the same thing that happened with braid, concerning the BS symbolism Blow put in. The game itself is great, but that bullshit unluckable explanation of the symbolism is just completely misguided. It's the same thing that makes game developers put in cinematics, and try to put in cinematic narratives.

It's all excellent untill the point where it isn't, and that happens when they get their priorities messed up; when they forget they're making a bloody game, something to give a lot of people some joy and happiness, and instead resort to message mongering on whatever message is their favorite at the moment.

[Jonas]

How lazy are you? It's at the top of the site right now...

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/03 ... f-an-epic/

[AEmer]

Very. I'm very lazy.

[bobby 55]

Very. I'm very lazy.

There ya go.

Lots of spoilers. Lots and lots of spoilers. The link is spoiler city.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/03 ... f-an-epic/

Eep, didn't see Jonas had a link. He mighta snuck a ninja edit in though.

[Jonas]

Eep, didn't see Jonas had a link. He mighta snuck a ninja edit in though.

No, you're just getting old and your eye-sight is deteriorating.

On a separate note, I'm not actually reading anything in this thread. Fucking spoilers everywhere.

[bobby 55]

Christ! I thought my monitor was on the fritz.

[AEmer]

Read it now...and yeah...I don't disagree with Cobbett. I wouldn't go so far as to say he's on exactly the same page as I am, but his Lincolns Nose analogy is close enough. Bioware was so sure of themselves that they kept on piling on, all the while not noticing that they had gone too far. It's a bloody m night shyamalan ending is what it is, and if his problem isn't being a pretentious elitist, I don't know what it is.

[bobby 55]

Interesting analogy AEmer. M Night Shyamalan and John Le Carre both suffer from being entertaining for the most part but I could do without their waffle. This seems to sum up ME 3 if my reading of non spoilery stuff is correct.

[Jaedar]

On your point...the road to hell is paved with good intensions, is what you're saying, yeah? So don't blame the good intentions?

No, that's not at all what I am saying, altough it is related.

I'm saying that if you shoot a hundred dudes in a starving community to 1000 dudes can eat people will not hate you for trying to make sure they can eat, they'll hate you decimating their community.

Nobody(except you it seems) hates bioware for trying to make it art, they hate them for (in trying to make a artsy ending) making a shitty ending.

On a separate note, I'm not actually reading anything in this thread. Fucking spoilers everywhere.

It is dark. you are likely to stumble upon a spoiler.

[AEmer]

You're misrepressenting what I'm saying, or you don't understand.

I'm saying they were so intensely focused on feeding the 1000 people that they decided with full intent to kill 100 people, and that the issue is, they should be much more concerned about not killing the 100 people than about feeding the 1000.

I've tried to deconstruct and show you why they might be so focused on the high art aspect, and why that's detrimental to the thing they should've been concerned with. Ultimately, making that last high-art point at the detriment of the entertainment value is the issue here. They shouldn't have wanted to do that in the first place, because the high-art points should always be secondary to the players enjoyment and fun.

To say that somehow the issue is that bioware are simply incompetent is ridiculous: They did exactly what they wanted to do, and what they wanted to do was wrong, and came from a misguided understanding of what was ultimately more important.

The issue is not pandering to the lowest common denominator, because that would never have resulted in this. It's pandering to people who think the game should be artistic and different and original. It's elitism, not dumbing down, that's the problem.

[DDL]

So we're kinda looking at the difference between say, an auteur director giving us a moving, engaging but complex narrative with a shocking but memorable ending (high art when high art is appropriate), and ...a disney movie with plucky teenage spy heroes who suddenly get brutally raped, murdered, dismembered and fed to pigs by columbian drug lords in the last 5 minutes (high art when high art is not appropriate).

Is that the sort of thing we're looking at?

I mean, I haven't been reading all the spoilers and shit, but by inference I'm guessing the ending is going to be either "rocks fall, everybody dies" or worse.

Also, for the record, I would totally watch that disney movie. It would be fucking hilarious. Actually, no, for the last ten minutes I'd watch the audience.

[AEmer]

Hahahah, yeah. And well, yes, I firmly believe this is high art when it is not appropriate. To an extent, that just reinforces the message of cosmism that the ending is meant to portray, making its point relatively undeniable...but it's not the place to make that point.

The Mass Effect series has always had a significant amount of high art in it, but the foremost point has always been to entertain the audience. I think a more appropriate comparison would be if those things you described happened at the end of Star Wars which also has a good chunk of high art to it, but is also ultimately entertainment first and whatever else it is second.

Added: Oh, and the movie that comes closest to what you describe is probably Aliens versus Predators 2. I know, shocking.
Also a good sci fi action movie.

[DDL]

Is that the one where generic hot chick gets impaled on a deathdisc? I admit I laughed at that: that was a classy move.