The Mass Effect 3 Omega DLC was an interesting topic of discussion before its release. While most Mass Effect fans loved Aria T’Loak, the overlord of the Omega space station, would doing a mission with her as a squadmate be worth the $15 that BioWare was charging? When it was released Lair of the Shadow Broker was the most expensive piece of Mass Effect 2 DLC but Omega set a new record price for BioWare DLC. That forced the comparison with Shadow Broker in terms of quality and value whether that was BioWare’s intention or not. Could ME3: Omega live up to the legacy of LotSB? Read the rest of this entry
Two months after they released the Extended Cut DLC, BioWare released their second single-player DLC mission for Mass Effect 3. The Leviathan DLC promised to look at the history of the Reapers. The new mission takes the game for a dark and eerie turn over its three-hour play time for the price of $10. Those numbers put it right in line with Mass Effect 2’s Lair of the Shadow Broker but can ME3’s first post-launch single-player DLC stand up to the epic Shadow Broker DLC? Read the rest of this entry
The immediate aftermath of the release of Mass Effect 3 was an absolute PR disaster for BioWare and EA. The original ending to Mass Effect 3 caused a massive sh*tstorm of unprecedented proportions among gamers. Many gamers put hundreds of hours into one Commander Shepard and some had thousands of hours and well over $200 invested in the series overall and were given an inconclusive ending that left gamers confused rather than feeling anything else. In order to save face, BioWare spent the next three months scrambling together an alternate ending, called Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut, to fix the problems people had with the final twenty minutes of ME3.
Today, I examine the new scenes that BioWare has added to Mass Effect 3 in the Extended Cut to determine if they have solved the problems most had with the original ending. Read the rest of this entry
The summer vacation (though I’m not actually on summer vacation) series of game reviews ends with Mass Effect 3. Going into this game four years ago, my expectations were sky-high. I absolutely loved the first two-thirds of the trilogy and there could be no way that BioWare would screw it up, right? Oh, how naive I was. I’m sure we all know about the controversies about Mass Effect 3 by now. The ending did take away from the game but not as much as some would have you believe.
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You can say a lot of things about fans of BioWare’s Mass Effect 3 but you can never accuse them of not being dedicated to the cause. Last week, Mass Effect fan, Gerry Pugliese, released his year-long passion project, Mass Effect 3: Vindication.
One of the great things about the internet and social media is the little behind the scenes looks at just about everything. That includes AAA games. At a convention last weekend, Raphael Sbarge (AKA Kaidan Alenko) revealed some of the direction that he and the other actors were given ahead of recording the final scene of Mass Effect 3’s Citadel DLC. If you’ve played the DLC, you’ll probably love it.
Via @RaphaelSbarge
As part of their Mass Effect retrospective panel at PAX East, BioWare released an infographic detailing the decisions made by players. They didn’t reveal stats like completion rate or which ending was chosen (for obvious reasons) but they did detail the most popular classes, FemShep vs. BroShep, paragon vs. renegade, the favourite squadmates and even total single player play time across the community.
A quick FYI for Mass Effect 3 fans: As implied by a post on the BioWare blog and later confirmed on the BioWare Social Network forums, the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer weekend operations have come to an end. They had been weekly since last fall’s release of the Retaliation DLC and bi-weekly prior to that.
This is it, isn’t it? One last ride with Commander Shepard as we take on a group of well-armed and ill-intentioned bad guys in order to save the galaxy with our friends in tow. BioWare made us well aware that this was going to be the final piece of DLC released for Mass Effect 3. In effect, Citadel would be a send-off for the series that people had invested so much time and energy into over the last six years.
So how was our ride into the sunset with Commander Shepard and crew?
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the release of BioWare and EA’s Mass Effect 3. The highly anticipated conclusion to the Mass Effect trilogy launched on March 6, 2012, to great reviews from the gaming media but was almost immediately at the centre of a massive controversy among fans over its ending and DLC practices.
Let’s look back at the history of ME3 from launch to today to see what happened and when it happened to make one of 2012’s most anticipated games one of its most controversial. Read the rest of this entry
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