DarthParametric

Good thing we didn't get an ABC ending. Imagine how bad that would have been. (This BBCode requires its accompanying plugin to work properly.)

The whole dev team, including the other writers, already knew what the ending was a year or more before the game was released. It wasn't a secret that Hudson and Walters concealed and sneaked onto the gold master just before the discs were pressed. I'm sure some of them piped in with their 2c, but that changed nothing. Chain of command and all that. And I'm sure some of them actually liked it, just as some fans do.

The ending was dreamed up by him and Mac "Speculation!" Walters, the lead writer, as the scuttlebutt goes. Either way, that doesn't justify falsely representing it.

To me, the issue there is not that they said that at the release of ME1, it's that they were still saying that at the release of ME3. It would be one thing if the games had evolved over the series and Bioware was upfront and honest about it, but when the series' project director flat out knowingly lies about the impact of player choice on the final game in the series as it is being shipped out to customers, that's a whole other ballgame.

At least Lucas had most of the background material for the OT (less so the prequels) roughed out before production on the first movie even started in 1977. Bioware set out to make a trilogy of games with no clear idea of where the plot would progress after the first game. You could argue they were maybe playing it safe in case ME1 was a flop. But then they made the second game and still had no idea about the plot for the 3rd one, or how either tied back in with the narrative arc of the series. That way madness lies....

No. We rarely agree on anything, but we do agree on this. There's bad fan faction and then there's the IT. As I have said since ME2 came out with its go nowhere side-quest and sudden injection of all new (and contradictory) lore, this is what happens when you make up the overarching plot for a trilogy as you go along. It's never going to end well.

A CMYK ending would have been much better than RGB, clearly.

Well the DA thread was a pretty much random necro of a thread with a previous post almost 2 years prior for a game that is soon to be purged from existence (if Bioware/EA has its way). This thread is at least a fairly recent ongoing discussion. Whether there is any merit in said discussion given the polarisation of the issue, as you seem to be alluding to, is another matter.

I have never understood this. It's the same ending. The only difference is a 2 minute addendum that basically says "oh, they just magically fixed those relays" and "the Normandy didn't crash, they just stopped briefly on an alien planet to have an impromptu funeral service before leaving again". Still the same space ghost, still the same "synthetics kill you so you won't be killed by synthetics" reasoning, still the same RGB choices.

More power to you, but I tend to prefer SP in my SP RPGs.

Omega was Bioware Montreal's test run for ME4. So not only does it have to handle all the baggage associated with the ME3 ending, it's also being made by the multiplayer-focused B-team. Should be awesome.

Having just gone through a federal election, I think that women in ponds distributing swords would be a far better system of government than the one we actually have.

Interesting. All I see everywhere are complaints about how buggy it is. But that's par for the course for the launch of a TW game. I dare say that Creative Assembly warrant a far worse reputation than what Obsidian has concerning the buginess of their games, but for whatever reason CA always seem to be given a pass. The rule of thumb for any new TW game is usually to wait until the first expansion drops. By that point it might possibly be in a playable state.

A SSD is a solid state drive. It uses memory chips for storage, as opposed to a traditional mechanical HDD that uses magnetic coated platters. Think of it as a glorified SD card or USB stick. It functions exactly as a traditional HDD in terms of how it is connected to the system and how it is seen by the OS, it's just faster and makes no noise (having no moving parts). The current crop are all SATA3 (unless you buy a highend one that comes as a PCI-E expansion card). You'll see a benefit running games off a SSD whenever there is a lot of streaming going on (so games like Skyrim for example), or for games that do a big preload of a large level/area (MMOs for example). But unless you were running games off a 5400RPM HDD previously though, you probably aren't going to make huge gains. Using a SSD as the Windows drive is the most common option. My suggestion would be a Samsung - one of the 840 series (including the new EVO refresh).

Much of the industry as we know it was founded on and shaped by Japanese games and games companies. Chances are there are plenty of games you like that were either directly or indirectly Japanese in origin. Ever played an arcade game for example? There's a 99% chance that came from Japan.

Schizophrenia?

Along those lines, didn't Mass Effect 3 have some crazy high number in the thousands of dollars because they made certain DLC only available with $100 action figures? Even better, for a lot of that content it seems all you are paying for is an unlock code, as it is already included in the game files. Plus the fact that SR4 is already just re-purposed DLC for SR3 sold at full price makes it even more galling.

Politics isn't the right term, more like economics. It seems pretty hard to me to talk about the state of the industry in general and specific game quality and not make at least some reference to it. Things like annualisation and content split out as DLC don't have an impact? It seems to me that there are a hell of a lot more things to dislike about games these days, beyond just a simple "it was bad". If you are not paying for your reviews, you're not doing it right.

I doubt anyone would be foolish enough to claim there we never any bad games in "the old days". Whether or not the ratio of good to bad between then and now has changed, for either better or worse, is entirely subjective, but I'm not even talking about that. Corporatisation has driven the industry in directions we scare could have imagined back in the "classic" era. There were dodgy practices even back then, but these days the industry is increasingly all about milking consumers dry of every last cent. I own my own business, so I have a passing familiarity with the concept of profitability. However, making a profit is one thing, ruthlessly exploiting your customers is something different. So yes, I would indeed argue that gaming has degenerated. Whether or not there are good games coming out is entirely beside the point.

The latter does not invalidate the former.

You realise that both systems are virtually identical hardware-wise right? If the Xbone is a souped up 2004 HP desktop, then so is the PS4. And actually, they are both more like a 2012 laptop.

No doubt the fanboys will come up with plenty of excuses, but I figured this was only fair turnabout after the fuss over Xbone titles at E3. A demo booth at Gamescom showing the PS4 version of Need for Speed: https://twitter.com/corentin_lamy/status/370581323775090688/photo/1 And the NeoGaf mirror in the event it disappears: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=658829

I'm not sure anyone wants that double whammy as part of their bio. I'm think he'd happily replace both those with "Sardo Numspa in The Golden Child".

For the same reason Sony almost bundled their camera with the PS4. By making it mandatory, you can (theoretically) get devs to utilise it for something more than throwaway party/casual games, because you know every user has the hardware. Sony made the call to keep the production cost lower by leaving it out and thus have a lower retail price, MS is taking the gamble that bundling it will have a payoff via some exclusive killer app. Given what a gimmick I consider the whole motion control BS to be, in the same league of uselessness as 3D tv/movies, my personal feeling is that Sony made the correct decision in this instance. But then again apparently the average slob loved the Kinect, to hear MS tell it. So how it plays out in the long term I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Actually, I think they could do that. What prevents them is the production costs involved with new hardware and the very long lead time for (AAA) game development, more so than marketing limitations.