Mass Effect 3 Message Board older than one year ago

#masseffect Writer Tom Bissell, who might be one of the most insightful critics in gaming today, published a great piece over at Grantland today about Mass Effect 3. More »

If you're planning to play Mass Effect 3 multiplayer this weekend, go out of your way to play a certain way. BioWare and EA are hosting the N7 Challenge Weekend starting today at 5pm Pacific...

#masseffect Dear 82% of Mass Effect gamers, More »

As revealed in a behind-the-scenes look at Mass Effect 3's development, The Final Hours of Mass Effect 3, BioWare was working on a Mass Effect multiplayer FPS in 2010...

#gameclub Welcome back to the Kotaku Game Club's discussion of Mass Effect 3. We'll be covering the middle portion of the game's campaign today, picking up where left off last week, after the mission on the Turian Moon of Menae, and looking at everything through the mission on Thessia. It's a lot of material, but some of you thought we weren't covering enough ground last week, so taking a bigger bite this time. More »

In 2010, BioWare Montreal was developing a competitive, multiplayer first-person shooter called Mass Effect Team Assault, but it was reshaped into the third-person co-op mode that shipped in Mass Effect 3, according to a Kotaku report based on the iPad app The Final Hours of Mass Effect 3.

Mass Effect Team Assault saw four months of production before being presented to the Mass Effect hierarchy and transforming into Mass Effect 3's multiplayer skirmish mode.

#masseffect Like radio, film, and theater companies going back hundreds of years, BioWare games often have a very familiar voice cast from one production to the next. A Dragon Age II player can't help but hear Varric's dry tones from the Male Trooper in Star Wars: The Old Republic, nor can a Mass Effect fan miss hearing Commander Shepard herself in, well, almost everything. More »

#masseffect Everybody knows that rapper/actor/Coco-lover is a vocal video game enthusiast, right? Checking in on the game series that he's shouted out over the last few years—Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Gears of War—it's probably safe to say that Ice-T's a fan of shooters, especially competitive ones. More »

#masseffect BioWare's Montreal studio was developing a competitive first-person shooter called Mass Effect Team Assault in 2010 before transforming that effort into the third-person multiplayer mode in Mass Effect 3, according to a new behind-the-scenes iPad app created by gaming journalist Geoff Keighley. More »

#speakuponkotaku In today's spoiler-free episode of Speak Up on Kotaku, commenter Ducce discusses the anxiety that rises while making game-changing decisions in Mass Effect 3. Is this immersion, or is he slowly going insane? More »

#masseffect Actor D.C. Douglas, who played the role of Legion in Mass Effect 2 & 3, has posted an interesting look at the process behind bringing to life a character that doesn't have one set of dialogue, but many. More »

#masseffect OK, just in case this needs spelling out, this will contain ENORMOUS SPOILERS. It's essentially all spoilers. But if you've already finished the game, or more importantly have not, will not and still want to see what all the ruckus has been about, read on! More »

Mass Effect 3 closes off Bioware’s epic sci-fi series with a bang, and one of the most controversial endings of the last few years. Many fans have been clamouring for an update that outright changes it, and not simply because the war with the Reapers didn’t end quite as they wanted. Bioware maintains that it just wanted to get people talking.

So let’s talk a little about That Ending, shall we?

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. ABOUT SPOILERS.

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#masseffect Website Unreality Magazine has uncovered some beautiful portrait drawings of some of our favorite Mass Effect characters. More »

Turns out Mass Effect 3 is controversial. Some people like its DLC, ending and storyline, some don't, and some want to see the entire BioWare team thrown into pools of mud and flogged for days to pay for the things they put in their own game. Franchise executive producer and director Casey Hudson seems to be taking the mixed reactions in stride, and even has some simple, logical reasons behind a few of the supposed scandals, such as Mass Effect 3's day-one DLC, From Ashes.

"I think a lot of the common sense is prevailing," Hudson told Digital Trends. "Initially, it was spun in a direction that suggested that we had taken the lore out of Mass Effect 3 and were holding it inside the DLC only, which now the people who actually have played Mass Effect 3 and the DLC they know that that's not true."

From Ashes is an optional piece of content not integral to the main story, Hudson noted.

"When we finish a game, we finish it many months before it actually hits the shelves and that team goes on to work on something else that in those intervening months represent millions of dollars of development time.... So in this case, we chose to work on a DLC which people really enjoyed for Mass Effect 2 and we also wanted to make sure that people had it as an opportunity to build it into their first play-through if they wanted that as an optional thing."

As for the ending, Hudson said he likes its mystery and interpretation possibilities, and having a reactive ending is better than one that falls flat and fades out. "I didn't want the game to be forgettable, and even right down to the sort of polarizing reaction that the ends have had with people -- debating what the endings mean and what's going to happen next, and what situation are the characters left in -- that to me is part of what's exciting about this story."

#techspot As you've undoubtedly heard, the third installment of BioWare's Mass Effect trilogy hit shelves last Tuesday. Being one of the year's most anticipated launches, it's no surprise to see it with an aggregate review score of over 90. However, in what has become common among high-profile PC game releases, tons of unsatisfied users have slapped the title with negative feedback on Metacritic, Amazon and elsewhere. More »

Bioware Director Casey Hudson has responded to enraged fans that have criticised the game's endings and day-one DLC. In an interview with Digital Trends, Hudson responds "I didn't want the game to be forgettable, and even right down to the sort of polarizing reaction that the ends have had with peopledebating what the endings mean and what's going to happen next, and what situation are the characters left in...

#masseffect Casey Hudson, the Director and Executive Producer of Mass Effect 3, has spoken with Digital Trends about the game's controversial ending sequences, and how it was BioWare's intent all along to "polarise reaction". More »

#masseffect Note: This post contains mild spoilers More »

It's brunch. You and your friends are having a heated debate on the intricacies of Elcor inflection and what caused their massive, elephant-like genetic evolution. Your friend is dead wrong about all of it.

Sure, you could open up your phone's browser and head over to Wikipedia, searching for something that would help you win this argument and harvest the subsequent experience points. Or you could open up your Mass Effect 3 Datapad and access its rich codex database spanning all three games.

Aside from the aforementioned codex, Mass Effect 3 Datapad sends you messages from your in-game cohorts and from the Alliance News Network. There's also a mini-game called Galaxy at War, which lets you deploy ships to increase your Galactic Readiness level for the Mass Effect 3 single-player campaign.

The app is free to download on iPhone 3GS and later iDevices, and available in the App Store right now.

#masseffect Like many of BioWare's games, Mass Effect 3 is chock full of optional reading materials about its history and characters. It's interesting, but it can be a chore to read on your television. More »

All of the storytelling, none of the player choice. The Mass Effect anime is still on the way from Funimation, and, as social media manager Justin Rojas revealed at SXSW ScreenBurn, it's focusing on Mass Effect 3's James Vega.

Mass Effect: Paragon Lost is being written and created by Funimation (who usually works primarily on existing content from Japan) working with EA and BioWare, and tells Vega's backstory before his appearance in Mass Effect 3, which includes some "epic" things, Rojas assured.

Funimation picked up some anime stars to work on the visuals, including studio Production I.G and a character designer from Eureka Seven (presumably Kenichi Yoshida). We'll see how this Texas studio's collaboration with Japanese artists on a Canadian sci-fi license works out this year -- "We're estimating fall or so," Rojas said.

An unknown gamer has posted an image of what appears to be multiplayer DLC for Mass Effect 3. The user in question allegedly downloaded "test DLC" from a developer server, which ultimately unlocked all DLC for the title. Originally posted to a Facebook profile and subsequently picked up by Reddit, the image itself shows off several multiplayer characters, including the Geth Infiltrator and Engineer, Batarian Soldier and Sentinel, the Krogan Battlemaster and the Asari Justicar.

Some are speculating that this is the DLC included with Mass Effect 3 action figures, though BioWare noted earlier this year that said DLC was "slightly randomized" and could include anything from new characters to new weapons, mods or upgrades.

We've contacted EA to confirm the DLC and, hopefully, to find out how players can obtain it.

#fineart Matt Rhodes is one of my favourite concept artists in the business. Why? Because his style, using bright, colourful cartoon characters for games that are often very dark and serious in tone, is a breath of fresh air in an industry where a lot of art ends up looking exactly the same. More »

#masseffect There's an almost universal outrage at the moment over the ending of Mass Effect 3. After playing a series for what's usually over 100 hours, people are very upset at the manner in which the trilogy wound down. More »

Mass Effect 3 multiplayer may have downloadable content coming soon...

#opinion If you died tomorrow, if some kind of disaster struck and removed you entirely from the world, would the choices you'd made with your life to date matter? More »

#opinion Who controls the story of a video game—its writers or its players? More »

EA has responded to claims that Mass Effect 3's 'From Ashes' DLC, which provides a new character and mission, is included on the game's disc...

#screengrab As seen on my Xbox Live friends' list, Saturday night. So much for game sequels that make their predecessors obsolete. More »