Mass Effect (2007)

Just when they show a sign of change, EA goes and shows their commitment to "scumbaggery" yet again.

I just finished building a new PC rig and last night as I was looking through my game library, I scrolled past Mass Effect and thought, you know it may not be the LE but I think I'll revisit it anyway. So, I installed my Steam copy.

This morning, as I was drinking my coffee, I thought "Hmmm, I wonder if this supports cloud saves on the Gamepass version. Probably not but let's check anyway." So not seeing any feature listings in the Gamepass app, I realized it might be listed in the new cough EA Play app that they force you to install. Now here is where I'm about to go off the rails. The short answer is no, of course not, optimistic thinking on my part to begin with, even as I thought it.

As I was looking through the games page listing in sigh EA Play, I saw an icon that stated I should upgrade to "Pro" of all its features. I thought "Wait a second, I have All Access and it includes EA Play." So, I clicked the icon, knowing I wasn't going to like what I found. Sure enough, they have a new paid tier above EA Play...."PRO!!" Wow, just wow. So, I thought, I'd like to vent about this, and remembered that I'm a member here! So, I'm here this morning to cry my woes to any who would like to commiserate.

Now, I'd like to qualify my trepidation for this before I continue. I actually paid for an annual subscription to EA Play on Steam last year before I knew I was going to get Xbox All Access. I've long thought that their yearly paid tier was a ridiculously excellent value if one enjoys any of the titles on that list. It's only $30 for the entire year, so it's easily worth it. I also know that it's their way of finding a way to milk all the pennies they can from their aged library and to try and gain what shreds of good will are left to them. Despite my angst towards EA, I still like to pay for the services that I use, and it was a no brainer really.

To make matters worse, over the past few months, I've been hearing small nuggets of news in which it sounds like EA have learned from their complete cluster of f'ups over the last few years and seen how much damage they've done to their already abysmal reputation. And then this. This is a very first world problem, I know. There are much bigger things to worry about, but I just felt the urge to rant about this one.

See, they have taken their current paid tier and relegated it to the new free tier "plus" so to speak. They hope to take all of those who have been using their memberships from Gamepass and EA Play on other platforms and converting them to "Pro" members so they can play titles such as the new Mass Effect LE as part of its "amazing value". Don't get me wrong, $15 versus $60 for a game that I'd play less than a month is worth it, and I might have considered paying for a version of this if not for how they've implemented it.

I don't know, to me anyway, it just feels like they've devalued what was a nice benefit and cheapened it because they still want to get you to pay them that $15/mo and they are locking the new stuff behind it.

I also think that if they wanted to earn some good will, yet still have an upgraded tier, they should have offered current EA Play members from Gamepass and other platforms a small upgrade option of like $5/mo. I would have still griped about it a little just because it's EA and it's become par for the course, but.... I would have easily done that because I would have felt like it was worth it for the new shiny content.

I don't know. I could be reading into it too much because it's EA and they've made themselves such a large and easy target for even the smallest of complaints. Maybe I'm just being an ass about it. To me, it just feels like the latest, unsurprising, and sleezy thing they've done this week.

I regret that this is the first thing I actively engage in after not having used Grouvee for so long, but thanks for reading my petty contrivances, nonetheless.

After playing for a few minutes, I wasn’t happy with my first attempt at setting this up, so I restored my backup of the vanilla game (don’t forget to delete bioengine.ini!) and reinstalled the mods largely as before – but this time adding MEUITM separately (via its own installer, after ALOT, following advice from this Reddit thread), without ReShade. I added Daemonjax’s soft shadows shader afterwards – dropped in the files and deleted the local shader cache.

Now, everything seems to be looking a lot nicer overall, although I’m getting some dropped frames – might have to look into improving performance…

Reinstalled this (with DLC) and used ME3Tweaks Mod Manager to add a bunch of mods (with the help of this handy guide): ME1 Recalibrated; Faster Elevators; Same-Gender Romances for ME1; ME1Controller; Black Blobs Fix for AMD CPUs; N7MAKO; ALOT for ME1 (with 12.1 Update, Improved Static Lighting for ME1, and Liara ME3 Face for ME1); ALOV for ME1 (+ ALOT Addon); MEUITM (installed alongside ALOT with the ALOT installer, including most of the optional updates – such as Soft Shadows and the ReShade preset); and MERLIN.

I bought this ages ago but have never played it, so I was unsure which mods to choose (or even if I installed everything correctly – apparently DLC installation for the Steam version can fail). Anyway – looking forward to getting stuck in!

Having just completed another run of Mass Effect, I’m thinking about the Mass Effect Legendary Collection. Specifically, I am thinking about the fact that BioWare stated they have retooled the original game to unify the gameplay experience. This leads me to some questions, or even concerns. While a lot of people find combat clunky in Mass Effect, it’s my favourite of the three games. ME2 and ME3 are more action friendly, but they are a step back in several ways if you are a power user like an Adept or an Engineer. Mass Effect is also considerably clunkier at the start than it is at the end because you are initially limited in you abilities. But once you fill out your ability tree, the game is a joy to play as a power user. Especially if you set squad mate powers to manual. When you reach end game and you are flattening enemies with a barrage of attacks from all sides, it’s incredibly satisfying.

As a result the following are on my mind:

1. Will they allow us to map squad mate powers to the d-pad to match ME2 and ME3? I suspect yes, but this has me worried. One of the backward steps that ME2 took was the loss of fine control over your squad members. In ME you have access to order move, order attack, order hold, order rally. In ME2 you have rally, squad attack, and your squad powers combined with attack. On paper the latter might seem better, because you can send squad members after separate targets. But I dislike two things about the new setup. One is that a single squad attack order also allows you to send a unit to a position. Often when you press d-pad left or right to issue the command to use a power, if the game misreads where you are pointing, it will send the squad member charging directly to the enemy. Moreover, you can’t actually send squad members after separate targets without also burning a power cooldown. This control scheme also does away with the hold command, something I use a lot in the original Mass Effect for strategic reasons when drawing enemies into a trap.
2. Will there be a global cooldown? Mass Effect does not have a global power cooldown. This is another step back that I disliked when moving from ME to ME2. It’s designed to force the player to spend less time in the power wheel and focus more time on real-time combat, which drives the increased action shooter aspect of ME2 and ME3 over ME. However, I enjoy my ability to plan wave after wave of attacks from the power wheel. It’s very effective for crowd control and setting up attack combos. I am really hoping a global cool down isn’t introduced to the revamped control scheme of ME.
3. Unity: unity was nerfed and oversimplified in ME2, as it was combined with medi-gel. Using Unity revives and instantly heals all party members in ME2. In ME Unity and medi-gel are seperate, allowing you far more control over reviving and healing as seperate actions. I am sure plenty of people enjoy the simplified healing of the sequels, but it bugs me that because Unity is a power, it’s on a cooldown. And if someone like Jacob runs headfirst into a Krogan (as he is wont to do) just after you’ve fired warp, you have to wait to revive him. It may be minor but overall I prefer the approach in ME and hope they don’t change it.

One think I am hopeful for is that they fix the glitch where you lose access to squad powers when squad members spec into too many abilities. If you have ever fully kitted Liara out with every ability you’ll learn that you can’t access a couple of those abilities, and she won’t use them unless you set her to automatic (which I refuse to do). I hope that if they are breaking other things I like that they at least fix the one thing that has always bothered me.

Two new reasons I love the Xbox Series X|S:

1. I can easily capture images and video from old games without a capture card.
2. Microsoft has made it super easy to access your captures from your phone or other device automatically. There's no need to transfer or push phots rom the console to another service. They just show up in the Xbox app. It's phenomenal.

Happy N7 Day. It’s happening!

Mass Effect Legendary Edition

Mass Effect Legendary Edition will include single-player base content and DLC from Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, and Mass Effect 3, plus promo weapons, armors, and packs – all remastered and optimized for 4k Ultra HD. It will be available in Spring 2021 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC, with forward compatibility and targeted enhancements on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. More information to come in the new year!

Even more exciting:

Meanwhile here at BioWare, a veteran team has been hard at work envisioning the next chapter of the Mass Effect universe. We are in early stages on the project and can’t say any more just yet, but we’re looking forward to sharing our vision for where we’ll be going next.

I realised that even though I talk quite a bit about Mass Effect, my girlfriend knows nothing about it beside the fact that I love it. I would like to introduce her to the world, story and characters of the series, but I'm having trouble coming up with the correct setup. Watching me play the three games would suck for both of us, since there's nothing for her in watching me killing endless droves of enemies or driving the Mako up impossible cliffs. Watching some play-through on YouTube will be similarly frustrating plus the fact that she wouldn't get to play her Shepard and make her decisions.

Ideas?

Some years ago I rewatched the movie Contact and realised that the design for the mass effect relays was clearly inspired in the machine of the movie:

You've got the rotating gimbals that puts a capsule through some kind of wormwhole as they accelerate.

But a couple of weeks ago I started to read the novel and there's much more inspiration. In the world of Contact, the machine transports the capsule through a network of interconnected black holes much like the mass relay network. In fact, here's a paragraph from the book:

They were, it seemed, high above the Milky Way Galaxy, looking down on its spiral structure (...). A network of straight lines appeared, representing the transportation system they had used. It was like the illuminated maps in the Paris Metro (...). Each station, she deduced, was in a star system with a low-mass double black hole.

This, mi friends, is a very clear description of Mass Effect's Galaxy Map, written more than 2 decades before the release of the first game.

Not only that, but in the same novel, the aliens explain that they didn't build the network, they found it there, abandoned by some previous civlisation. Now, the whole idea of The Precursors is a trope for a reason, but there more evidence pointing to the connection between the aliens in Contact and the Mass Effect universe.

In Contact, the alien speaks of a whole galactic (and cosmic) community of different species. He also tells Ellie that his species was the first to find the black hole network. His species is shown to be capable of reading people's thoughts.

What do you call the first species of a galactic community to discover a vast relay network left by an long-gone race? That's right, they are the Asari.