What Are You Playing 6: DLCs of Kevin Bacon

[Dame_Mechanus]

I liked Liara as a contrast, she's the only companion (I can think of right now) without some sort of military background.

In ME1 and ME3, yes. In ME2 Jack, Thane, and Kasumi all lack military backgrounds. Also it's debatable how much of a military background Tali has; the way that the flotilla is structured is a bit ambiguous in that regard. But then, you could make the same argument about Miranda and Legion having more of a paramilitary background if you wanted to, and at a certain point you're just spinning your wheels. The point is that Liara is definitely someone who did not train to or expect to pick up a gun and use it to shoot anyone.

[Rynjin]

Gah, and Kai Leng. How anyone can be mad at Andromeda when Kai Leng and his bull**** is in the main trilogy....

The first time I saw a playthrough of ME3, years after I dropped it, I genuinely thought Kai Leng was some random DLC bull**** that got mixed into the main game. Like some guy won a contest to get his OC added to the game or something. I just could not believe this random fanfic character kept showing up in the main plot on release.

[Resileaf]

In ME1 and ME3, yes. In ME2 Jack, Thane, and Kasumi all lack military backgrounds. Also it's debatable how much of a military background Tali has; the way that the flotilla is structured is a bit ambiguous in that regard. But then, you could make the same argument about Miranda and Legion having more of a paramilitary background if you wanted to, and at a certain point you're just spinning your wheels. The point is that Liara is definitely someone who did not train to or expect to pick up a gun and use it to shoot anyone.

I guess it's something of a grey area, but Thane being a government-sanctionned assassin feels pretty close to military background to me.

[Anonymouswizard]

The first time I saw a playthrough of ME3, years after I dropped it, I genuinely thought Kai Leng was some random DLC bull**** that got mixed into the main game. Like some guy won a contest to get his OC added to the game or something. I just could not believe this random fanfic character kept showing up in the main plot on release.

To be fair he is the super edgy self-insert of the writer of the first two games. Who, depending on the novel, is either a cool badass assassin who kills krogan despite not being augmented or somebody who pees in your plants. Judging by his displays of incompetence I'm guessing somebody on the team was sick of him as well

They instead made the mistake of taking an actually important plot central character and making them DLC. I'm not even kidding, it's another reason the ending is so bad.

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Javik was the conduit or cypher or whatever, which suggests to me that either:
-your ending would depend on how you acted around him, or
-Javik would argue for the destroy ending, TIM for control, and possibly somebody else for Synthesis.

In either case EMS probably would have had an effect other than unlocking endings.

[Psyren]

Yeah the ME3 endings are why I'm hesitant to start a ME trilogy playthrough even though I got the legendary edition from a steam card as a birthday gift.

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they seem to be very much of the "no right answer" school of thought, when you could've had a "no wrong answer" school of thought instead and have all the options be positive and have no downsides:
Control: Shepard simply gets a control panel to reprogram all the Reapers at once that they can't do anything bad, but doesn't sacrifice their sense of self
Destroy: Shepard destroys only the reapers, all other robots are spared
Synthesis: The Reapers cease to exist, and turned into beings that grant people transhuman forms if they desire it or something, I dunno

or of course, the classic "final battle where all your choices add up to you succeeding better" kind of thing would've worked to.

That isn't much of a choice honestly; Destroy with no downsides is the clear hands-down winner. While I don't agree with the endings they originally went with, I can respect them trying for something a bit more complex than that.

The endings would have made more sense with the original story idea for Mass Effect 3, I suppose.

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I.e. "Mass Effect tech is doing weird things to dark energy, which makes stars go out, and the Reaper's mission is to find out how to stop it, while wiping out civilization before they can advance far enough to build more mass effect tech".

The endings would then be "Destroy the reapers and continue as you did before, possibly damning the galaxy as all the stars go out", "Let the reapers do their thing, wiping out most life, but saving the galaxy in the very long run" and "Destroy the mass relay network, dooming most of galactic civilization as planets are cut off, but slowing the stellar death".

This is another choice that really isn't one. "Let the Reapers continue" is just Refusal, and "destroy the mass relays" is just low EMS Destroy, both of which would be relegated to Failshep joke runs, leaving only one real option.

In ME1 and ME3, yes. In ME2 Jack, Thane, and Kasumi all lack military backgrounds. Also it's debatable how much of a military background Tali has; the way that the flotilla is structured is a bit ambiguous in that regard. But then, you could make the same argument about Miranda and Legion having more of a paramilitary background if you wanted to, and at a certain point you're just spinning your wheels. The point is that Liara is definitely someone who did not train to or expect to pick up a gun and use it to shoot anyone.

Tali herself wasn't military when she initially joined you, but her father definitely was, so she had the upbringing. After ME1 she completed her pilgrimage and joined formally.

[Eldan]

This is another choice that really isn't one. "Let the Reapers continue" is just Refusal, and "destroy the mass relays" is just low EMS Destroy, both of which would be relegated to Failshep joke runs, leaving only one real option.

I don't think it's that clear with the Dark Energy storyline. Destroying the relays makes considerably more sense to me when the relays themselves are inherently dangerous even without reapers controlling them. You bring a dark age to the galaxy, but thode who survive will be free. And stopping the reapers, but keeping the Mass Effect is quite dark too, with the galaxy's time numbered. I think with good writing, you could make that a nuanced choice.

[Anonymouswizard]

I mean, there's really three issues with the endings:
-The Reapers' motivation makes no sense as described.
-The final choice mostly boils down to what colour special effect you want.
-S is ethically worrying, C is just shifting who's hands the power is in, and R is little more than spitting in the Reapers face before accepting your fate.

The first isn't hard to solve (the dark energy idea, while not perfect, would have been better), the second can likely be fixed by making the ending longer again, and the third by giving non-D endings more context.

Like why is S onlyan option now? Shepard isn't even that augmented, I'm sure there were more blended people or species in previous cycles.

[Eldan]

Point two, I think, would require a long outro to fix, and a specific one for each choice. Several minutes of "And then this happened to the galaxy". Could be done with a narration (perhaps by Liara, as in the "screw the reapers" ending), or with shots of what the various planets look like now. Not just the same shot of your companions landing on a planet and some different-coloured glow.

Also, for Synthesis... we don't even see how it happens. There's some green light, and now everyone is a Cyborg? I don't buy it. If you look at how the Reapers, the Geth, Cerberus, everyone has been doing heavy cyberization until now, I can't shake the feeling that it would be absolutely horrifying.

[Anonymouswizard]

Honestly I was surprised that there wasn't several minutes of 'and the turians abandoned their military ways and took up their true calling as the best dancers in the galaxy'. There had been in both Jade Empire and DAO, and it seemed fitting for the great big climax of the series.

As for Synthesis it's just problematic all round. It doesn't explain how it works, there's no indication as to how people are half-synthetic, most characters in the game have implants anyway (even of just the fingertips), and logically it only works until people start creating babies.

Refusal, despite everything, is a more fitting ending. You get the giant weapon built, finally get to the control room, and find your choices limited to 'destroy all AI', 'go down fighting', 'put your mind in their hands', and 'wait, what'. Refusal might doom humanity, but it's making sure it's done on your terms.

[GloatingSwine]

I mean, there's really three issues with the endings:
-The Reapers' motivation makes no sense as described.
-The final choice mostly boils down to what colour special effect you want.
-S is ethically worrying, C is just shifting who's hands the power is in, and R is little more than spitting in the Reapers face before accepting your fate.

The first isn't hard to solve (the dark energy idea, while not perfect, would have been better), the second can likely be fixed by making the ending longer again, and the third by giving non-D endings more context.

Like why is S onlyan option now? Shepard isn't even that augmented, I'm sure there were more blended people or species in previous cycles.

Synthesis, despite being presented as the "best" ending by the dialogue and also being the one which requires the most effort to reach, is also the one that offers the least emotional catharsis to the conflict of the games.

The conflict of the games is "the reapers want to kill everyone", and whilst synthesis removes the (very silly and not at all communicated by the rest of the trilogy) reason they want to do that it does it by submitting to their premise.

Synthesis is the ending where the Reapers win. Even moreso than Refuse.

Which leaves Control or Destroy. And that's just a replication of the ending from Legion's loyalty mission in game 2 except less interesting because we don't have the touchpoint of a character we have at least met and seen that they have a relatable perspective to bind us to the choice emotionally.

I don't really think the Endingtron-3000 could have been fixed. Just change the Catalyst to being some kind of Reaper-specific EMP that allows the fleet you brought to fight them on even terms and have the degree of success and outcomes determined by the volume and nature of war assets you brought.

And yes, this requires a long Fallout style epilogue for every choice you made over three games.

[Psyren]

Like why is S onlyan option now? Shepard isn't even that augmented, I'm sure there were more blended people or species in previous cycles.

That's not a hard question to answer; ours is the only cycle, ever, to have both enough juice from the prior cycle and enough of a lull between Harvests to be able to successfully construct the Crucible.

It's also implied that one of the reasons for that is that we're the most diverse cycle to ever exist too, giving us the perfect alchemical cocktail of scientific know-how, military prowess and diplomacy - with humanity itself being a microcosm of that.

I don't think it's that clear with the Dark Energy storyline. Destroying the relays makes considerably more sense to me when the relays themselves are inherently dangerous even without reapers controlling them. You bring a dark age to the galaxy, but thode who survive will be free. And stopping the reapers, but keeping the Mass Effect is quite dark too, with the galaxy's time numbered. I think with good writing, you could make that a nuanced choice.

The latter is no different than the Crucible - "the Reapers can't come up with a solution before we collectively unalive ourselves, but we're betting that we can by working together." And the former begs the question of why the Reapers didn't simply break the relays themselves if they're truly causing so much trouble - yes it allows them to predict galactic expansion, but steering all of us towards the very technology that is destabilizing the galaxy and weakening it further instead of forcing us to come up with our own makes no sense. Trust me, had they gone with the Dark Energy Plot we'd be complaining about writing just as much if not moreso, the grass is always greener.

The real problem with the endings is endemic to the industry - game development is being put on the shareholders' timeline rather than the players and creatives.

[warty goblin]

As I say every three to five months when this subject comes back up, the Reapers are narratively kinda difficult to handle.

In a fantasy story you can get away with demons invading and killing everyone every 10,000 years without any further justification, they're demons, that's what they do. But the Reapers are machines, somebody built them to do that. That in turn strongly suggests that somebody had a problem that can be "solved" by killing everyone every 10,000 years.

That's kind of a hard problem to create, because the solution is so insane. and while it's OK if whatever created the Reapers to ultimately not solve whatever the original problem is, it's unsatisfying if the Reapers are blatantly and obviously not a solution.

The problem is even worse than that though, because Bioware needed a satisfying, heroic ending where you beat the Reapers. That means you the player also need to solve whatever the hell the original problem is. But you don't play as a scientist or mystic or somebody who can solve huge complex problems. You play as a schmuck who can talk at a problem or lead two other dudes in a small arms firefight. This is a great skillset for a space adventure, but not so much for solving millenia old universal existential problems. And because the problem has existed for eons, you need some real justification for why this time is different. And again, because ME isn't fantasy, and at least started out leaning a bit towards sorta hard sci-fi, you can't just have a prophesied chosen one as your get out of narrative jail free card.

I'm not saying this is a setup that is 100% fated to have an unsatisfactory ending. But it is a hell of an outstanding narrative debt, which apparently nobody had much of a plan for dealing with.

I don't think the Dark Matter plot helps here. Killing everyone now is a pretty odd solution to a very distant problem, and if you kill everyone just when they can maybe figure out there is a problem, nobody ever works on fixing the problem because they're all dead. Besides which, the obvious solution is "use a different kind of space engine" which is not going to be implemented by shooting dudes from behind chest high walls.

I think the Reapers, as set up on the game, solve two problems: stasis/monoculture and preservation/storage. If a single galactic civilization ever develops, it will tend to squash or absorb or simply murder and colonize all other species out of existence. If you value species and cultural diversity, you don't want this to happen. At the same time, if you value these things, you don't want to utterly annihilate them, so you preserve them in some form. From a very warped, big picture view, the Reapers are completely optimal because they maximize and preserve the number of species that develop technology over time.

But this does allow the player to solve the problem. Its still a difficult solution, you would need to guarantee non-interference with, at the very least, existing intelligent species. At the extreme it requires an end to colonization of worlds that could produce intelligent life - it would be quite reasonable to in-universe point out that humanity only exists because Earth wasn't strip-mined for resources half a million years ago, which absent Reapings or some other control it would have been.

[Anonymouswizard]

The Dark energy plotline at least has the advantage of having foreshadowing, but it's by no means perfect. Both it and the ending they went with make more sense if the Spoiler and Reapers are closer to VI than AGI, with their weird methods being used because their directives aren't quite compatible. It's also possible that other FTL methods aren't possible in the ME universe, and the Relays could be less damaging than standard FTL flight between stellar clusters.

More sensible would be the Reapers being a kind of automated weapon that have outlived their creators, with directives to preserve their creators' infrastructure (the Mass Relays and Citadel) while also exterminating everybody above a certain technology level (so they don't become potential threats. This might also explain there only being only one Vanguard, they're intentionally limiting the amount of galaxy they're monitoring because they know these species aren't actually a threat to their creators anymore.

Then you have Shepard at death's door at the ending, with the choice to destroy them (fails if you don't have enough military assets) or reprogram them (which would likely require you to have more research based assets). Then the Reapers either blow up, retreat into dark space and stay there (until somebody messes with the relays) or melt humanity.


ETA: strangely while Shepard isn't a scientist, Engineer Shepard is certainly a competent enough research assistant to lower research costs in ME2. So there might have been an argument for varying the ending somewhat based on class.

[InvisibleBison]

I honestly think the best way to handle the Reapers would be to not explain them. Lean into the Lovecraftian elements and say that their minds are so alien to ours that we can't understand why they do what they do, even if they condescended to explain themselves.

[Zombimode]

I honestly think the best way to handle the Reapers would be to not explain them. Lean into the Lovecraftian elements and say that their minds are so alien to ours that we can't understand why they do what they do, even if they condescended to explain themselves.

Exactly. For that reason I have skiped the Leviathan DLC on my first playthrough and regret not doing so on my second playthrough.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I just finished ME3 again after finishing ME:A. A few observations--

1) ME:A had way better gunplay and gameplay. Like...seriously. Just being able to jump makes a huge difference, as does not feeling like you're driving a tank. ME1-3 felt so...slow.
2) ME1-3 really didn't have that great a storyline. At any point. Sure, you got some bright points (that ME:A mostly lacked), but on average? Meh.
3) The endings weren't any worse, really, than the rest of the game. No real consequences even in the micro. Everything was basically linear gauge filling. Which was why I eventually got bored and ran for the ending, eventually choosing Destroy (because Control is just no).
4) The worldbuilding seemed deep and complex, but was mostly just ad hoc gap filling and was obviously threadbare even well before worrying about the Reapers. But ME:A takes the cake for that--the Nexus had been on site for 14 months, mostly on no/little resources. Yet there were massive quantities of ships, equipment, outpost modules, never-ending supplies of bandits, guns, etc. And all the angara fluent in the common Milky Way tongue (not counting the ones you meet, but the ones working with/against the Outcasts). It's all magitech, all the way down.

So yeah. ME just isn't that good. It was better through nostalgia goggles.

Edit: The "illusion of choice" issue (where you make choices and say things, but it basically changes nothing beyond the responses back) so common to WRPGs is one reason why I'm fairly accepting of JRPGs and their blatant "no, you don't really have any choices" stance. Because I'd rather the game be honest about the fact that I don't really have any meaningful choices. WRPGs, I can turn the dial but it doesn't actually do anything. JRPGs, there's no dial. There might be exceptions, but they're few and far between.

[Eldan]

The reapers don't necessarily have to be programmed, and I don't think they even make much sense if they are. They could be transhumanist (trans-Leviathan?) uploads. I think it makes sense for them. They keep cybering organics, they have at least some personality, etc.

If I was writing them, my suggestion would be that they are the Leviathans, who have uploaded their minds into machines that are able to survive in Deep Space, as a way to escape the galaxy. They mostly spend their time there thinking about the Dark Matter problem and maintaining a kind of civilization, and the entire galaxy-destroying business is a bit of a side-matter. (Could even introduce reaper factions.)

I actually like the idea of the Human Reaper in ME2 under that aspect: they are trying to find species with interesting new mental configurations, and are forcefully uploading them to add them to their intelligence collective. New cyphers, for creative problem solving, so their society doesn't entirely calcify over millions of years.

Actually, how's that for a choice for racist renegade shepherd: let humanity become a new reaper, billions of eternal minds in one immortal body

[Wookieetank]

Edit: The "illusion of choice" issue (where you make choices and say things, but it basically changes nothing beyond the responses back) so common to WRPGs is one reason why I'm fairly accepting of JRPGs and their blatant "no, you don't really have any choices" stance. Because I'd rather the game be honest about the fact that I don't really have any meaningful choices. WRPGs, I can turn the dial but it doesn't actually do anything. JRPGs, there's no dial. There might be exceptions, but they're few and far between.

Telltale games were a huge offender with this. "Your choices matter, and will affect the story, we swear". Really your choices just define the character you're controlling, which is fine when done well and advertised as such (Kentucky Route 0), but when you're telling players they'll be able to influence Everything, and then they can't, it leads to a lot of disappointment.

Tried replaying a Taletell game, The Walking Dead, once to see how things could be "different", only to find out your choices change nothing outside of the character interactions like you said. Quit playing right then and there. ME falls into this same trap, where you can't really affect the overall story, the suicide mission will happen, the reapers do show up, etc, but you do shape how Shep responds to it, which informs how other characters react to Shep.

tl;dr: rambling rant about choice in video games

[Psyren]

{great stuff}

I definitely agree with everything here.

I honestly think the best way to handle the Reapers would be to not explain them. Lean into the Lovecraftian elements and say that their minds are so alien to ours that we can't understand why they do what they do, even if they condescended to explain themselves.

I wouldn't mind this, except they screwed the pooch with 2. If they're truly Lovecraftian and ineffable, then the only real solution is to keep them asleep at all costs. ME1 did this brilliantly, but the moment ME2 ended with "btw, they woke up anyway and they're on their way here" then that goes out the window. Azathoth and the rest of the pantheon rolling through is just not something you can reasonably stop, so they needed to be downgraded, which entails explaining them.

I just finished ME3 again after finishing ME:A. A few observations--

1) ME:A had way better gunplay and gameplay. Like...seriously. Just being able to jump makes a huge difference, as does not feeling like you're driving a tank. ME1-3 felt so...slow.
2) ME1-3 really didn't have that great a storyline. At any point. Sure, you got some bright points (that ME:A mostly lacked), but on average? Meh.
3) The endings weren't any worse, really, than the rest of the game. No real consequences even in the micro. Everything was basically linear gauge filling. Which was why I eventually got bored and ran for the ending, eventually choosing Destroy (because Control is just no).
4) The worldbuilding seemed deep and complex, but was mostly just ad hoc gap filling and was obviously threadbare even well before worrying about the Reapers. But ME:A takes the cake for that--the Nexus had been on site for 14 months, mostly on no/little resources. Yet there were massive quantities of ships, equipment, outpost modules, never-ending supplies of bandits, guns, etc. And all the angara fluent in the common Milky Way tongue (not counting the ones you meet, but the ones working with/against the Outcasts). It's all magitech, all the way down.

So yeah. ME just isn't that good. It was better through nostalgia goggles.

1) MEA definitely has the best gunplay, including the ability to freely choose between ME1 vs. ME2/3 style guns. But the powers were a huge step back, especially if you account for the massive amounts of innovation found in ME3's multiplayer.
2) Agreed.
3) I think the consequences were there and they were just bad at showing them. There's a mod actually that incorporates a bunch of unused dialog and footage into Priority:Earth that goes a long way to recognizing your choices throughout the trilogy.
4) The Angara aren't fluent in Milky Way, everyone is just running around with Translator Microbes. The real silliness is that nobody on the Nexus gave you a heads up that there's a whole indigenous race out there you might run into (and programming your translator accordingly to keep your arrival on Aya from being awkward) when they clearly know the Angara exist. (There is zero chance the Exiles managed to perfectly keep them secret.)

Edit: The "illusion of choice" issue (where you make choices and say things, but it basically changes nothing beyond the responses back) so common to WRPGs is one reason why I'm fairly accepting of JRPGs and their blatant "no, you don't really have any choices" stance. Because I'd rather the game be honest about the fact that I don't really have any meaningful choices. WRPGs, I can turn the dial but it doesn't actually do anything. JRPGs, there's no dial. There might be exceptions, but they're few and far between.

I'd much rather have a limited dial than none at all. With most JRPGs I might as well be playing a visual novel that's padded to the gills with grind. At least lately they began realizing that narrative alone won't save them and they need to innovate on combat/gameplay these days too.

[Anonymouswizard]

DAO was much better with actual choices, but that's because it wasn't expected to be a massive success. A good number of those choices get walked back in DA2 and Inquisition, simply because they suddenly have actual story implications.

Honestly I don't mind the illusionism, but do wish there was more honesty about it mostly affecting your character. In Mass Effect it's mostly about being a bright shiny space opera hero or a grim gritty military SF protagonist, but really it's about deciding who Shepard has sex with.

I hear that 80% of players choose Tali, despite the developers really pushing for Liara.

[Psyren]

PC Gamer's poll had Liara on top. I don't know if Bioware ever released anything official.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I hear that 80% of players choose Tali, despite the developers really pushing for Liara.

I chose Liara (even as Femshep), except in ME3 where I slept with the journalist.

1) MEA definitely has the best gunplay, including the ability to freely choose between ME1 vs. ME2/3 style guns. But the powers were a huge step back, especially if you account for the massive amounts of innovation found in ME3's multiplayer.

I basically disagree. Most of the powers in ME3 (I replayed the others too long ago to really remember) felt weak and inconsequential. As an Infiltrator, I just spammed Incinerate except against synthetics, where the hijack one was more useful. I did like the constant-effect ammo types--not fond of ME:A's consumable ones. And not having the whole combo thing (or not nearly as well developed) was annoying. Nice to have more than 3 active things though.

[Psyren]

Most of the powers in ME3 felt weak and inconsequential.

You must be joking. ME3 had the best pure caster builds in the franchise, and that's before we even get to the DLC powers like Lash and Flare, or the multiplayer powers like Snap Freeze, Arc Grenade and Annihilation Field.

[GloatingSwine]

Compared to ME2 on higher difficulties, ME3 was comparatively basic.

Because ME2 was so strong on layered resistances and hard counters, abilities which hard countered a resistance felt super consequential. If you were going into an encounter that had shields I hope you brought a character with Overload, or Warp for Barrier, or Incinerate/Warp for Armour.

Because if you didn't you were going to have a bad time.

ME3 didn't have hard counters or layered resistances anywhere near as consequential, so it didn't matter as much what power you used.

[Psyren]

All those defenses just meant playing a caster was slow and annoying. For the weapon-using classes, slapping on an ammo power and tearing past them all in seconds on Insanity erased that depth.

In ME3, casting and guns were on relatively equal footing. In 1 and 2 they weren't even close to balanced.

[GloatingSwine]

What it really meant was that ordering your squad to use their abilities was really important.

In ME2 you tailored your squad to the enemy you expected to meet, making sure you had the counters to the defences you needed and ordering the squad to fire them pretty much on cooldown.

In ME3 it basically didn't matter who you brought or what they could do because enemy defences were far more homogenous.

[Thane of Fife]

In a fantasy story you can get away with demons invading and killing everyone every 10,000 years without any further justification, they're demons, that's what they do. But the Reapers are machines, somebody built them to do that. That in turn strongly suggests that somebody had a problem that can be "solved" by killing everyone every 10,000 years.

...

I'm not saying this is a setup that is 100% fated to have an unsatisfactory ending. But it is a hell of an outstanding narrative debt, which apparently nobody had much of a plan for dealing with.

I never played ME3 (or even finished ME2) to have a really strong opinion, but isn't "The Reapers are coming to kill everyone" enough of a problem for one trilogy? I mean, I feel like you could end ME3 with stopping the Reapers and it would feel satisfying. The designer can say, "Yes, we know there is still some outstanding problem that they were ostensibly solving, but that's another story," and give themselves a lead-in to future games.

[Psyren]

What it really meant was that ordering your squad to use their abilities was really important.

In ME2 you tailored your squad to the enemy you expected to meet, making sure you had the counters to the defences you needed and ordering the squad to fire them pretty much on cooldown.

In ME3 it basically didn't matter who you brought or what they could do because enemy defences were far more homogenous.

It's more that everyone has multiple answers to defenses in ME3 so you're not forced to answer a specific defense with a specific character. That allows you to pick your squad based on (gasp) roleplay and relationships rather than leaving the biotic character at home because it's a synthetic mission or vice-versa.

If you want to bring Liara and Tali along on the Geth Dreadnought for instance so you can hear their unique banter (or an awkward catfight), Liara can prime through trooper shields with Heavy Warp or trap Hunters with her Stasis Bubble. Or if you want to bring Garrus along to deal with Ravagers and Brutes, his AP ammo makes short work of their armor. Most importantly, loyalty in ME3 unlocks their signature powers for your use rather than theirs.

The defenses themselves are not "homogenous", there are just more answers per character. You still have to build them correctly, especially while leveling.

[Anonymouswizard]

You must be joking. ME3 had the best pure caster builds in the franchise, and that's before we even get to the DLC powers like Lash and Flare, or the multiplayer powers like Snap Freeze, Arc Grenade and Annihilation Field.

I have to agree, plus the addition of the Weapon Weight system means that you can use those powers a lot more if you want. I finally get to pull off regular pull/throw combos despite going shotgun+assault rifle and it is glorious.

ME3 can't do the layered defences thing as much, partially because it has a smaller squad. In ME2 if you don't like the squadmate with an anti-defence ability you can bring somebody else. But in ME3 it's not hard to have Garrus and Liara as you only anti-shields and anti-barrier options. But hard counters are also boring if overused, while enemies in ME3 could probably stand to use more abilities I find that it's more fun as an Adept than the second game was.

On the other hand why on earth can't I have Emily Wong on the Normandy? Her replacement is boring.

[Dame_Mechanus]

I got tired of discussing ME3's endings when the game came out and I walked away happy and had to deal with endless crowing about it, so I'm not going to step into that. But I did want to talk about this particular point.

Edit: The "illusion of choice" issue (where you make choices and say things, but it basically changes nothing beyond the responses back) so common to WRPGs is one reason why I'm fairly accepting of JRPGs and their blatant "no, you don't really have any choices" stance. Because I'd rather the game be honest about the fact that I don't really have any meaningful choices. WRPGs, I can turn the dial but it doesn't actually do anything. JRPGs, there's no dial. There might be exceptions, but they're few and far between.

See, the irony here is that I tend to prefer JRPGs a lot myself... but it's not because I feel my choices aren't impactful enough in a lot of western RPGs, even though that's frequently the case. It's that I don't care about their impacts.

It doesn't bother me in the slightest if my choices don't necessarily change much in the overall plot. Yes, it helps if there's some change, obviously - I'm making a choice, it should have an impact! But I don't get really upset that, say, I can't choose to have Shepard say "screw the Alliance, I'm happy to be part of Cerberus" in ME3. As the quote in another forumgoer's signature note, agency just means you get to make choices, not that you get to say what impact those choices have on the world. The reality of game development, writing, and simply making this stuff approachable means that you are probably going to have two or three major route-defining choices in a game at most, along with a plethora of choices that have an impact but not a major one, and none of them allow a major deviation from the main plot. That's fine with me.

What tends to turn me off from a lot of western RPGs isn't whether my choices matter, it's whether or not I care about any of them. Like, I know that people love to point to Fallout 3's early choice in Megaton (blow it up or don't) as a terrible choice for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that it's you being a monster for basically no reason, but it's also a bad choice because I do not care. I don't know these people. I don't have an emotional attachment to them. I don't have an emotional attachment to my father who I'm supposed to be seeking out. I don't have an emotional attachment to this world. The one person I had any kind of emotional attachment to was the overseer's daughter, and she's back in the vault!

Compare that to Tales of Berseria, which is a game with no major narrative choices whatsoever... but over the course of the first half hour or hour, depending on how fast you play, builds up an emotional connection to a whole cast of characters who are mostly going to be absent for the entirety of the story so that when they're reintroduced you care about it.

I don't need my choices to knock the world off its axis every time. I need to have an investment in what those choices are, so that they matter to me.