What was wrong with ME3, a lot.
*WARNING SPOILERS FOR ME3*
Don't get me wrong there was some very enjoyable stuff in ME3, Tuchanka and Ranoch storylines were good but there was an awful lot very very wrong with it.
First of all the "reviews" were a sham, most of the "perfect scores" they received came from reviewers that had a vested interest to actually give it a good score. I'd expect a good reviewer to actually criticise the game when it shipped with flaws and not fall over themselves to gloss over everything and slap a "10/10" or "awesome" or " I'll give it any superlative you want EA if you pay me money".
The game itself shipped with a horrendous flaw from the get go. The inability to import your characters face code properly. How in hell did that happen? For a game series that prided itself on it's ability to allow players to carry over the look of their Shephard to the final instalment, to ship the game with a broken face import program and then keep deathly quiet about it after release was appalling. It took them a few months to even acknowledge the problem by which time fans had had to cobble something together. Even when Bioware released what they said was a "fix" for the problem it hardly worked.
And the reviewers didn't even comment on it. Great reviewing guys, and yes I am aware not all of them would have imported a saved game but you would have expected some of them to have done so!
"The best place to start!" - Casey Hudson
Really Casey? So for those of us who have slogged their way through 2 enjoyable games and 5 years to get to this point and you are telling us that you are really catering to new players and not your established fan base? Gee thanks.. I think. The sad thing is, it showed. You streamlined the RPG elements, you streamlined the conversations, you streamlined the story, you tried to improve the gfx and what did you make at the end of it? A kick in the nuts for your established fans as you chased the quick twitch crowd of CoD and GoW. Thanks.
Day 1 DLC. It's always annoying to find cut content available the moment you've registered the game. ME3 jumped onto the bandwagon with it's "From the Ashes" which ended up being a very important part of the game that they cut out to force people to buy the Collectors Edition and when they couldn't get you to buy the CE they made sure you paid for the DLC. I just find the fact that it was cut from the game astonishingly poor and then to charge extra for it akin to tearing out Gandalf from Tolkein's books and then charging you money to add him back in again.
Bugs, bugs and more bugs. What happened to the polish guys? There are various instances of bugs that are pretty glaringly obvious and yet no reviewer saw them in their "perfect score" reviews. You have eye glitches, you have head glitches you have scenery from one section of the game overwriting onto other sections (look for battle damage on the citadel, sometimes you see the damage and the smoke BEFORE it has gotten to the stage it's supposed to happen.. and then you still see it when things have been supposedly cleaned up). It doesn't fully detract from playing the game, but it's pretty glaringly obvious that they exist and the Devs and reviewers ignored them.
"The presence of the Rachni has huge consequences" - Mac Walters
Really? I'm still waiting for the huge consequences that they are supposed to bring. If you saved them you see them.. if you killed them.. you still see them... so err.. what consequences? To make a statement like that prior to release and then fail to deliver anything is very misleading and also a big disappointment. As it was a lot of interesting sub plots were ignored or consigned to off screen. Shiala and the survivors of the Tholian are a good example. Shiala who is the only other person in the series who had access to the Cipher, who is the only one to not only recover from indoctrination but has an immunity to it and as a consequence of the Tholian controlling the settlers they too are immune to the indoctrination techniques of the reapers. And yet all this is explained in a 3 or 4 line in game mail message and basically reduced to nothing more than a side note. Hello? Immunity to indoctrination? Surely that's a frigging massive weapon against the reapers and you reduce it to a throw away email? And there are others that make you scratch your head as to why they weren't expanded or investigated.
Hubs.. well a lack of them at any rate. We have a galactic war going on and the only place we can explore is the citadel. Sorry guys but a serious missed opportunity. The lore states that a Reaper harvest lasts hundreds of years even when they have locked down the relays, now it seems that the reapers are basically doing a mass harvest in less than 6 months with everyone resisting them. It smacks of people either forgetting their own game's lore or being lazy and hoping we won't notice. I'd have been ok if they had said that certain worlds were completely off the menu due to them being invaded from the get go, but that still leaves and awful lot of other places available to be hubs. Again very disappointing.
Eavesdropping to get sub quests and a flawed journal. Very very very poorly executed and very very very poorly implemented. The journal is extremely disappointing since it's basically the same fricking thing from ME2! It's not rocket science guys, if you are going to use the same feature from ME2 in ME3 at least make sure it works the same way. As for the eavesdropping to get quests, very lazy. Sure, you could have done some of the quests that way but to do nearly all of them? It sounds like someone ran out of time and they just threw this together and released it and hoped nobody would notice.
Lack of interaction with some ME2 squad mates. Some you get forced on you (Miranda) and have some good screen time, others have very very little (Kasumi, Thane, Jacob, Zaeed, Jack) great if you are a Miranda fan, bad if you are not. Thanks for forcing a character on me that I don't care about and then virtually ignoring the ones I do. I understand that maybe things were tight in development, but you could have added extra content with all the squad mates via DLC and folks probably would have loved you for it.
Reducing the game to nothing but numbers. It's what they achieved, You find a battleship, get 100 points. You save Omega, get 400 points. You save Mr Wiggles the cat from being eaten by Vorcha... get 1000 points. The trouble is they stated that "multiplayer is not needed to get the best endings"
********.
Initially you could only get the best endings if you ramped up your spreadsheet with multiplayer participation. Well done guys the "bug" you obviously missed leads your player base to participate in MP where it just so happens you have a cash store option available to make it go a bit quicker...
The endings. Bad endings are fine, as long as there is choice. The initial endings were different colours but basically the same thing. No real variation, no real sense, no real closure. As someone remarked, the same turd, just a different colour. The real issue for a lot of people is that the end comes out of left field. Without subsequent DLC there is no foreshadowing of what we may face. The game has been all about gathering allies to take back Earth, it gave a feeling of united we stand, divided we fall. The last 20 minutes of the game felt as though we'd suddenly gotten an ending to someone else's game tacked on. There are scenes that make no sense, there are characters that are with you one second, flying away on a ship the next. A gun that has unlimited bullets, what seems to be you going through a dream sequence where you are not you. It's almost as though you've been playing a game directed by George Lucas only for him to give up the reins and let David Lynch direct the ending. It made very little sense and gave very little satisfying closure. With the EC you got some closure but more questions were raised and left unanswered, one big one was how Harbringer suddenly got selective vision when the Normandy was parked slap bang next to him and he was playing spank the human with his lasers. Utterly bemusing. Again it comes down to the Devs seemingly not paying attention to what they are doing. Even so the expanded endings didn't really expand anything, we are still left with God Emperor Shep, Genetic Shep and Genocide Shep (with added ambigious breath scene). The same 3 turds, but now with added 100's and 1000's toppings to make it slightly easier to swallow.
Thanks but no thanks. If I wanted to play the endings of Deus Ex, I'd go back and play Deus Ex. It was the original and it did it a hell of a lot better. I'd just like some endings that make some sense from the game lore we've seen established. I want to see my assets in action, I want to see hope kindled by the combined races of the galaxy trying to fight the big bad, I want to see the decisions I've made in the last 3 games come down to this final battle, above all I want to make it a spectacular finale. Instead we get the 1812 overture up until the final bars where the crescendo is at it's height only for the fat tuba player at the back to play a massive wrong note and the whole thing is ruined.
Which leads me to the cut story content. 2 pieces of the DLC content should have been in the original game from the start (as well as From the ashes), Leviathan and Omega. When you add those 2 pieces to the game it makes it slightly more complete. Not better mind you just complete. I have an issue with adding essential story related content as DLC, especially when it foreshadows the main storyline so much. Previous DLCs from Bioware haven't really had much impact on the main storyline but have been additional stories contained within their own DLC. This is fine, a simple story that is optional, a sub quest as some would call it. Not a glaringly evident important main plot line story, that they didn't add to the original release.
I've probably bored you enough by now, but these were some of the main issues I had with ME3. The game is obviously rushed, whether or not by Bioware or EA who knows, but it is pretty obvious that major mistakes were made and that the game needed to be released as it is now. As it stands the game with all it's DLC works, but is far from perfect, or complete. If they had taken their time and released the current version of the game with potential other DLC the game could have been spectacular. What we got instead was a mess, a very bitter and disappointing mess.
