You're not going anywhere, the game is.

I just had to post this part of a project update from the Kickstarter by Bare Mettle Entertainment about the game they are making with the help of their Kickstarter.
The game is called Sui Generis, you can read more here on Kickstarter.

"We feel that in recent years the focus of most CRPGs has shifted from creating an immersive world to providing a streamlined gameplay experience. Rarely is there room for subtlety or engaging your wits. Games have been evolving into something where anyone can play for a while and feel they've achieved something. Ultimately though, our achievements are purely virtual, and we didn't even have fun. You're not going anywhere, the game is. You're just along for the ride and nothing you do really matters. We don't exactly come out feeling like we've accomplished something, more like we've satisfied some addiction. It's easy to forget, but we know that games can be genuinely fun, worthwhile and stimulating.

The kind of roleplaying experience we dreamed of and hope to create is one that hasn't been possible without a human game master who can intelligently respond to all your actions. We want your actions to have meaningful effects, not as pre-scripted "choice and consequences" over which we have no real insight or control, but as a world that is affected realistically by everything you do. We want you to be able to make mistakes, to fail and to feel that your successes are your own. We even want you to accomplish things that we as designers have never foreseen. We want a world capable of supporting your most creative strategies, where hypothetical scenarios turn out to be real. We're talking about roleplaying, immersion, being master of your own character in a world that can make you believe it is real".

This quote exactly captures how i have been feeling about gaming and games, no matter how great they were and i thought i liked them.
No matter how much i loved games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, i still have to finish a second playthrough, i mean i want to but i just can't, i allready know what's going to happen, what my choices are going to be, so you allready know how the game is going to end.
And to be honest games like Skyrim and Oblivion are much the same when it comes to questing, the only difference (and reason i still play them) is that you can still just roam around in the world and add lots of stuff through mods.

The same thing goes for MMO's, it's all one big scripted adventure with an outcome allready set, the developers have allready made up the story for you and you are just along for the ride, in the end you know you will be the hero of the world, the saviour of the galaxy.
The path has allready been layed out for you, the only choice you get is path A,B or C (Good, Neutral or Bad) but the end result is always the same.

 Quote: You're not going anywhere, the game is.

In the end it should be a choice i made, not a multiple choice answer given to me by the developers.

So, yeah i am kind of excited to see if Bare Mettle can pull this off with Sui Generis and i am glad i backed a game like this.
It would be awesome to blog about my game progress and know that i have a completely different story than anyone else playing the same game.

Until then i'll just keep dreaming...

Commander Shepard says hi.

Haven't blogged in a long time...
So my 6th year "blogging anniversary" (on Feb 18th) went by without me noticing..
So to make that up i am posting this picture of Commander Shepard :)

Now that's something you didn't see ingame did ya :)

This is one of the things i am doing lately, i made this in a program called XNALara and it's all done with models from the game (Mass Effect.. duh) and a lot of patience trying to pose them :)

Anyways i am still alive, just very quiet when it comes to blogging and gaming.
Been playing some Sims and... well that's about it, i guess i am just tired of gaming mostly, i am tired of MMO's, it's all the same just with some new pretty graphics, blah, blah..

The only games that i have some interrest in right now are basicly RPG with a really good storyline or the really big open world RPG's like Skyrim, Fallout etc.
I really like to be able to change anything in the game i like, so it becomes a game i like and not a game that someone thinks i like.
Also one of the reasons i played a lot of the Sims lately, you can just about change anything you like in that game with the right mods and of course the same goes with games like Skyrim &  Fallout New Vegas.

And then there is my latest "addiction" messing around in programs like XNALara or Gmod, importing models form games and.. well just pose them around in different scenery's and take screenshots :)
I've also been checking out stuff like 3DS Max and Blender, but for now that's kinda out of my league.
Been trying to import my own custom Shepard from Mass Effect but so far this is all i got:

I've managed to import everything from my custom Shepard, like the head, hair and body but so far i have not managed to get the textures on the model right..
But it's always fun to learn new stuff and hopefully i will manage to get it right sometime :)

This blog is not dead (yet), just a little quiet. Who knows there isn't much i am looking forward to this year in gaming, apart form some Kickstarter stuff, but i might show up here every now and then.

Is this really the end? Another ending post.

There might be some spoilers ahead if you haven't finished Mass Effect 3!!!

I won't go into to many details about the ending of ME3 as i think that's allready been beaten to death by now, and besides Anjin over at Bullet Points pretty much sums it up in the post "Random Shots: The Infamous Ending", so i recommend reading that.
Besides the choice of ending (i went left for i think what was called Synthesis) that post pretty much sums up how i feel about the ending.
I ended up pretty much staring at the end credits rolling by wondering WTH just happened and what that was all about, the ending felt so out of place and was very confusing.

Don't get me wrong i love Mass Effect and i love Mass Effect 3, all was awesome right up until the end. The battle for London was epic right up until you meet the catalyst, that's where it all went down.

I didn't mind that fact that Shepard died as that is probably a suitable ending but the way it was done felt really "out of place" as there was no mention of this kind of stuff during the entire series.
Personally i don't know what to feel about the ending as i am still wondering what the hell happened, what was it what my Shepard actually achieved/did. Was it good or bad?? To me it really felt like you were given the option to choose between the lesser of three evils.

What added to the confusion was that i initially didn't know what i actually did, after listening through the entire story (which was a pretty long story) the catalyst tells you, i was confused as to what the 3 different consoles/options actually did or rather which was which, like i said i went left but there was no way of telling what it was, there was no text or anything hovering above the consoles when you selected them, so i really didn't know what option i actually took until i started looking at YouTube videos of the different endings and noticed that i did in fact took the synthesis ending.

I did feel like the ending i took was closest to what my Shepard tried to achieve (my Shepard, saved the Geth, brought the Geth and Quarians together and actually encouraged Joker and EDI) but i am still left with a feeling of what the hell happened, there's is no clear way of seeing what the results were of your actions (besides the mass relays blowing up), no real closure to the story. Another confusing thing was that you see Joker in the end crash landing the Normandy on some planet and Joker steps out and shortly after that i see Liara stepping out of the ship, Liara was with me on the final attack and i really thought that all that went with me on that final approach had died, only Anderson and Shepard survived, so how the hell did Liara end up on the Normandy??

Another thing that really surprised me, in a positive way was/is the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, it has been a long time since i found a multiplayer that was so entertaining, i am actually enjoying myself a lot with this.
I really can't wait to see where they are taking this.
I really hope we're going to see some new maps added soon, i have been playing this so much that i allready have those moments of  "not that map again".
And maybe add some new objectives while we're at it too :)

BioWare has definitely been supporting their multiplayer by putting up events, this weekend they added "operation Fortress" and i really hope they'll be keeping this up.

I really felt that in the end the gameplay was way to short, i finished the main story and all sidequests in just over 30 hours, but the multiplayer is really adding some gametime, which is never a bad thing.

Mass Effect: Galaxy at War

BioWare has been quite busy getting some more Mass Effect stuff out for mobile devices.
Just today they released the "Mass Effect Datapad" for iPhone/iPad.

This is a pretty cool app, as it's free :)

The nice stuff in there is, you get some messages from your crew through this app while you play through ME3, unfortianatly i allready finished Mass Effect, but i guess it would still work if i do another playthrough.

Another nice feature is that you can do small missions through this app and those missions will reward you with "readiness rating" for your ingame Galaxy at War map, which is pretty cool since just playing through singleplayer isn't enough to get a high percentage of readiness rating (my map capped at 50% after finishing all missions in ME3).

And this app will also give you access to the (ingame) Codex, always nice for the lore nerds (like me).

Another app that has been realeased a few day ago was the iPad game "Mass Effect Infiltrator".

Personally i am not a big fan of iPad (or iPhone) games and this one is no different, i just can't get used to the controls, sometimes it feels like the controls have a will of their own as you try to move to a certain point often the character will do the opposite.

I believe this game is made by the developers of Dead Space and has the same type of controls, so if you liked that game you might like this one as well.

I am however trying to wrestle my way through this game as it is a Mass Effect story and another bonus is that any intel you recover in this game can be added to you Mass Effect 3 readiness rating, so yet another bonus :)

I don't know why but i really do like all these mobile apps that tie into the game and give you other ways to improve that ingame readiness rating, other than doing multi-player in ME3 (which is also pretty cool).

Back on the Normandy and it feels great!

Like many people on my Raptr friends list i have been playing Mass Effect 3.
And so far despite some initial problems, like the first message that greeted me the first time i launched ME3.

This was eventually fixed by using "repair install" on the "From Ahses" DLC in Origin, another message that popped up during character creation, or rather the character import.

That of course annoyed me even more, this message means to me that i am playing with a character that looks a bit like my Shepard (after some alterations) but isn't really my FemShep..

Another annoying feature is that you apperantly need an online connection to play the game in singleplayer as during one of my cutscenes i recieved this message

And yes it threw me out of the game and i could only continue after i managed to get my connection back up and running.

But enough with the bad stuff as Mass Effect 3 is still an awesome game and it feels really great to be back on the Normandy fighting the reapers and seeing my buddies again :)
I did however changed the difficulty on the gameplay to casual, i did ME1 and 2 on normal, cause i never was a good FPS gamer :)
However i think that combat in ME3 has evolved as a shooter and i definitely have not :)
Maybe i am just too old or don't have the skills needed to be good at this stuff, but after the first couple of missions where combat was sometimes frustrating i changed the difficulty level to narrative, personally i really enjoy this difficulty setting, it lets me focus more on the story than on combat, still some of the "boss" fights can be hard, but most of the time i am just blasting through the combat.

I have always enjoyed the story in Mass Effect more than the combat and always felt the combat was only there to forward the story, so i guess that's why i enjoy the narrative setting a lot more.

It's been really awesome to see some of the consequences of my actions in ME1 and 2.
It's really awesome to suddenly meet someone that you apperantly saved in one of the previous games and have a chat with them.

I really think BioWare has done a great job on Mass Effect 3 and i am really enjoying the story, so far i think i am about 18 hours into the game and the journey has been great, i can't wait to see what the game has in store for me :)

Mass Effect MMO a possibility?

A really interresting article on Penny Arcade (The doctors from BioWare discuss the Old Republic launch, ending a trilogy, and a Mass Effect MMO) were they interview the doctors and of course eventually come to the "rumor" of a Mass Effect MMO and eventhough they are not saying yes, there is also not a no in there, so jumping the conclusion: yes a possibility.

Of course the biggest question, besides will it happen or not, is how they would pull this off, i mean imagine a 1000 Shepards running around going after the same mobs.

But then again if anyone could pull this off, it would definitely be BioWare.
The Mass Effect universe/lore definitely has a lot of potential for making a great MMO.

Keeping my fingers crossed for a Mass Effect MMO :)

Mass Effect 3: More FemShep

Eventhough i initially felt like i didn't wanna spoil anything by playing the demo (i allready pre-ordered), i am somewhat glad i did, i really think they are not giving much away with the demo, which is good.

You initially start at the beginning of course, which is somewhat of a tutorial on how to move and such and it sets up the story (invasion of the reapers).
After that tutorial you basicly advance to a later part in the story (you are suddenly level 14 i think) and play one level and that's it.

I did however like the fact that i could import my Mass Effect 1 & 2 character into the demo, by using the character code.
Apart from the hair color, i am pretty sure my character was a redhead, she looks pretty good.

It felt really good to see her again and can't wait for the release of the full game and see what trouble she gets into now :)

In Honor of #FemShepFriday

Just a few screenies of my FemShep as i played her through Mass Effect 1 and 2, in honor of #FemShepFriday.

Mass Effect:


Mass Effect 2:


And another cool one from Mass Effect 2:

Commander Shepard Needs Our Help!

If you are a big fan of Mass Effect you probably heard of, or seen Holly Conrad around, she is the (awesome artist) female Shepard showing up on cons and, well anywhere on the web.
Check out some of her (and Crabcat's) awesome work here.

Normally i wouldn't post stuff like this but i really felt like making a post.

I follow her on twitter (@HollyConrad) and recently she tweeted the following:


And a couple of hours after that:


Yes Shepard needs your help, you can go to her page here and if you can spare some money donate and help her get back up and running (i did).
Even if you can't spare some money, you can still help by spreading the word!

Afterall we need Shepard (FemShep) to save us from the Reapers.

No really, it's the rain.

I am not crying, i am Shepard dammit!!

Earlier this month i finished the Arrival DLC for Mass Effect 2, i had put it off because i didn't wanna finish the game, but not playing doesn't make sense either, does it?
It felt pretty short but a really cool story to link ME2 to ME3.

Still sad i finished the game, but also looking forward to ME3.

In other Mass Effect news, i have been reading the Mass Effect books, so far i have finished both Revalation and Ascension and they are really cool stories, Revelation is the prequel to ME1 and Ascension takes place between ME1 and ME2.
Next Mass Effect book on my list is Retribution, which i think, is taking place just before Mass Effect 3.

If you love Mass Effect (and it's lore) these books are definatly a must read.
I really hope BioWare will be continuing with the books long after ME3 comes out, as i am really enjoying the lore of Mass Effect.

It's also my wish for Mass Effect to be an open world RPG (like Oblivion), but yeah, not much chance of that happening is there?.. Unless.... yeah let's do it, make a Mass Effect MMO. There i said it!

The arrival will bring the end

I only finished the last Mass Effect 2 DLC (The Shadowbroker) early this month and of course like all DLC it was awesome yet way too short.
After every DLC i feel that "the end" of a game and now with the last Mass Effect 2 DLC, "Arrival" coming March 29th, the end is truly in sight.
I really enjoyed the ride and hope "Arrival" is really going to be awesome, who am i kidding, of course it will be awesome, what i really hope is that it will bring at least a lot of hours of fun and by that i mean, make it possible to keep exploring/adventuring/questing, but looking at Mass Effect that will be very unlikely.

Of course we know Mass Effect 3 is coming and i personally can't wait to see what Bioware is going to bring.