Mass Effect 3: Revisited

There are two things I want to cover about ME:3.  The first part is regarding the multiplayer and the second part is a giant spoil-rific discourse on the ending of the game.

Multiplayer

ME3's multiplayer (MP) is great.  For anyone who knows me or has read a good deal of this blog, you know I'm not a fan of MP modes for most games unless I'm playing with people in the room.  I hate CoD and Halo online because it's you, Mr or Mrs Normal vs a virtual phalanx of 12 year olds with mouths that would cause sailors to blush who have nothing better to do with their time than play that one game.

Why do I like ME3's MP?  Well, it's basically horde mode only.  You're part of a squad of up to four people trying to defend a base against waves of enemies.  The game can be set up to fight specific enemies or choose them at random (for more XP/Credits) and you fight a particular faction for 10 waves plus extraction.  The same goes for location, pick one or leave it on random for more credits and XP.

You might say, "What?  You favor a rewards based economy in a MP online setting?!"  Yeah, I do, in this case.  You do better, you get more cash.  It gives you an edge.  You use that edge to kill more stuff and get better.  You use the XP to level up your squadies and you use the cash for permanent upgrades as well as one-shot upgrades.

Allow me to explain.  As you probably know the ME universe classifies anyone without brittle bone disease as one of six classes.  So does the MP.  The fun part is there aren't just Shepards to choose from in MP, you can actually acquire (by luck and lots of credits) almost all of the major races in the ME galaxy.  Very cool.  They're mixed in so you can have an Asari Vanguard or a Quarian Engineer.

As you gain experience it is distributed throughout your CLASS.  There are 5 available squadies in each class (a male and female human and three alien race memebers).  If you spend all your MP time using your Krogan Vanguard, all the vanguards gain the same XP and can be leveled even though you never used them.  There is a cap at level 20 to keep balance in the MP (not enough points to fully level your class skills).  Once you hit 20 you can just keep playing at harder difficulties or you can "promote" the class to the main game.  This gives you a galactic readiness boost as well as ups your N7 rating (an amalgam of all your current levels and promoted units).  This is how the MP crosses into the Single Player (SP).  I also feel it helps with the replay value of the MP since you can play through again with slightly different evolution.

Credits and Equipment
As you gain money you can buy packs of equipment of varying cost.  The packs contain random equipment and squaddies.  The higher the cost the more likely you are to get rare items or races (you only get humans from the start, you have to get Asari, etc from the equipment packs).  Equipment ranges from weapons and mods to new race/class combos and extra experience boosts.

Note:  You can also pay real money for equipment packs.  However they're not cheap considering your $1-3 purchase only nets you five items each time.

Weapons and mods are permanent and you can always use them.  If you get the same weapon twice it upgrades the weapon instead up to level 10.  Eventually your level 1 Asari Adept could start off with a fully upgraded super sniper rifle (not actually a weapon name) if so you choose.

Other items can only be stocked up for single use.  You always bring your maximum into battle, ie medi-gel, rockets, ammo packs, and instant shield recharges. There are also items that increase how many of each you can carry into a battle (starts at 2, maxes at 10).  Essentially you'll have 50+ rockets but each full MP mission you get two rockets for use in all 10 waves (they're a one-shot kill if you hit!).  With a full team there could be 8-40 rockets and on Gold they don't stop flying in later waves.

There are mods that are in effect for entire missions.  These are ammo mods, armor mods and weapon mods.  Ammo mods are cryo, incindiary, etc ammo types of varying degree.  Armor mods will grant you faster shield recharge, stronger powers, cooldown bonus, etc.  Supplemental weapon mods can increase the strength of your weapons, help them penetrate armor, make them more accurate, etc.  In the MP screen these appear as "Equipment" and you can have one of each category equipped (or none).

New race/class equipment usually carries some bonus experience for that class and will often result in a free level up at lower levels of the class.  If you already have that race/class combo then you'll usually receive the ability to customize the appearance a bit.

Part of the team
The mechanics of the multiplayer are slightly modified from the single player.  There is no power wheel and there is no weapon wheel.  This removes your ability to pause the game, look around and assign a target for your abilities.  Everything moves much quicker than SP.

In MP each character has an assigned set of skills.  Three skills are active (biotics, tech, armor, etc), and two are passive (fitness and the class skill tree).  The skills are assigned to right, and left bumper and the Y button.  Then cannot be remapped.  As I mentioned before you will never max out your evolutions so it's important to have a defined strategy when leveling out of combat.  If you're heavy on combat abilities bring lighter weapons or just one so you can use your abilities more often.  If you're favoring passive skills then you can probably afford to carry a beefier arsenal.

Those one-shot items you carry into battle are activated by your D-pad.  If you are knocked out of battle, just like in SP mode, someone can come revive you for free, however if you have medigel left, you can revive yourself.  When you're out of medigel and your teammates are either a-holes or couldn't get there in time, you bleed out and die (there are some enemies who can insta-kill you, too).  At this point you go into spectator mode and follow around your still-breathing teammates hoping they can beat back that wave.  If they die, the mission is scrubbed and you're awarded any experience and credits awarded to that point.  If the rest of the team lives through it you're revived for the next wave.

Note: When you're stuck in spectator mode you can change the camera angle and call out things other players can't see, such as a Banshee sneaking up behind them.  Very useful.

Each wave consists of random objectives that are usually just "kill everything you see" with increasing difficulty.  There are three other possible missions: kill four targets in succession, defend a certain area while being IN the area, and activate/deactivate four objectives.  Each of the non kill-everything modes has a timer and you fail if you don't complete the wave in the allotted time.

For killing in succession the commanding officer will call out targets who are highlighted whether you can see them or not.  The targets aren't always the most powerful creature, either.  On occasion you'll get lucky and one of the high value targets is a grunt.

The other two variants are pretty self-explanitory.  Either you're running around defending a guy who takes about 10-15 seconds to activate/deactivate something (and isn't shooting) or you're defending a certain area while standing in it.  I find the latter to be the hardest variant because in order to finish the wave properly you sit in a relatively small area which is just over the radius of a grenade blast.  And there will be grenades.  And blasts...  It's VERY easy to get overwhelmed as almost all of the defense areas have limited cover and you're easily overrun.  When you're in the Gold difficulty level you spend a lot of time high-tailing it out of there, killing everything that follows and running back in, hoping you can accumulate enough defense time before the wave timer causes you to fail.  It sucks.

What really makes the MP go is that it's very difficult to grief other players.  Your squad most likely won't make it through an encounter if you're not willing to help each other out (with the rare exception of a useless teammate who isn't worth reviving).  Teammates can't harm each other so you never have to worry about a pistol whip from a bored 12 year old.  If someone steals your kill (and they will), XP is distributed for damage done, not for finishing off the baddie.  So wearing down a brute to the very last tick only to have a vanguard or sniper finish it off will award you with a majority of the XP.  Bioware made it very difficult to be rewarded in any way for being a dick.

Basically Bioware made a reward and combat system that removes almost ever reason I dislike online MP gaming.  I've been enjoying it immensely.






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Warning, this if full of spoiler.

The ending"s"

There's a lot (a LOT) of.. discussions going on about the end of ME:3.  And for good reason.

Despite how Bioware feels or what they say, there is only one ending to Mass Effect 3, and it has slight variants.  No matter what you do, all the relays end up blowing up.  You cannot prevent this from happening regardless of choices made throughout the game or at the end of the game.  The variants have to do with whether or not the Earth is blown up, if your team survives, and, if they don't survive, when they die.

There are a lot of flaws in this ending too.  Lots of gaping plot holes that lead people to figure they just "called in" the writing.  I reached the end of the game and saw Garrus and Tali live through the ground battle.  I chose to destroy the Reapers and all of a sudden the Normandy is trying to outrun the destruction of the relays.

Why?

If my ground forces survived the fight what prompted them to leave me behind as they tried to save their own skin?  Shouldn't they have been in the fight the whole time to give Shep the time to figure out how to win the galaxy?

Also, invariably there are thousands of ships from the reapers, council races and more floating around in the Sol system as well as thousands of scientists who all know how they work.  If they all survived the fight, why does the very end of the game make it sound like only the humans lived past the events of ME:3 to repopulate Earth?  It's well established that the mass relays are gateways between major clusters and that inter system travel is commonplace technology.  The galactic community would remain.  They would just move slower.

I'm reasonably certain that the non-Earth races didn't just decided to off themselves because it wasn't their planet.

I'm not calling bullshit on the style of the ending.  If Bioware wants everything to blow up, fine.  But what we have is an ending that seems like it was conceived by some kid in 10th grade who always thought, "I hope I make videogames some day and I hope that the last line of my game will be 'Tell me about the Shepard' ".  That's right.  Up until the final battle the story and immersiveness of the Mass Effect galaxy is phenomenal.  Then you get to the end and the writing turns to shit.  It jars you out of your Mass Effect world and throws you into a world not unlike the sins of George Lucas's later years.

For shame, Bioware.  For shame.