Wishlist for Mass Effect 3

[Zay-el]

I quite honestly don't care about the stat system. Put your hand on your chest and tell me, apart from the points where you gained real, palpable improvements(Improved skills and such), was there any point to the ME1 system? Did you feel like you were getting any stronger, needlessly micromanaging the myriad of stats?

The ME2 system was simple, yet very well usable. Every single point you've placed produced massive results in battles, not minuscule ones you would never have noticed. I consider stat-management important in games where I might not have complete and total control over how well I'm doing. I can place any point I want, but if I cannot AIM, then there's no point! In most other RPGs, it's just 'right click and the rest'. I don't like this idea of stuffing in things that aren't necessarily needed, just so we can bang our chests and cry "RPG ÜBER ALLES".

 

[bl4ckh4wk64]

1) A plot that isn't bathed in stupid and badass.
2) Gameplay that isn't boring and so heavily cover-based.
3) A nice trip to The Illusive Man's base and shoot him right in his damn head.
4) Remove the god damn Paragon/Renegade system already. Its stupid and limits choices. Or it would, if ME1/ME2 gave you much choice to begin with.
5)Companion banter like in Dragon Age. Seriously, just do this. It fleshes out the characters, makes it seem like they do more than just sit in their area and faff about. Its just delightful.
6) If your going to have a reaper posess a mook and shout taunts, make sure he has more than 4 and doesn't repeat them ALL THE FUCKING TIME.
7) Planet exploration. The planets from ME1 with the Hammerhead from ME2. And the planets are actually interesting.
8) More open levels. Or at least more levels that look open. ME2 suffered from a bad case of "corridor shooter". So did ME1, but at least the levels looked open and interesting.
9) Male Shepard has some actual emotions.
10) Companions that don't want to have hot sex with me after 3 conversations.
11) Your choices amount to more than just a few more/less emails.
12) Companions comment about things throughout missions, like in Dragon Age. Adds character and is amusing to listen to.
13) Certain missions that have special outcomes depending on which companions are following you, like in Dragon Age 2.
14) More hairstyles already!
15) Return to the more "sci-fi" soundtrack of ME1, rather than the "meh" orchestral stuff that was in 2.
16) No DRM(fat chance of that happening...)
17) If you must have "badass", put more of it into conversations. Example: In ME2 on the Citadel, the one reporter(who you can punch in the first game), paragon option when she asks you to respond about saving/killing the council. You just rip her apart with your words. And it is AWESOME.
18) No giant end-boss fight. It'll just look really, really silly(human reaper, space-ogre... lol)
19) Bring back the stats and upgrading of weapons/armor. It brings a sense of progression. In the beginning you couldn't do much, but at the end you were totally fucking awesome. Thats a great thing. Better than being awesome all the time, which gets boring and stale after a while. Just keep the upgrading restricted to the ship so you don't have to deal with a cluttered inventory.
20) Easter-eggs/hidden goodies are always fun and delightful. Can't hurt. If you include planet exploration, thats a great place to put them.
21) Bring back the elevators, just make them faster. They're better than the immersion-killing loading screens. And make the galaxy feel, well massive. And big. Again, just make them faster, which would mean optimizing the engine more. Or something.
22) More interesting classes. Vanguard and Infiltrator were fine, but every other class devolved into a cover-based shooter. With you sitting behind cover, shooting/casting powers at any enemy who pops their head up. And that is boring.
23) Don't bind every power to a single god damn cooldown. Give each power their own cooldown, and just make the cooldowns short.
24) Bring back the unlimited ammo please. And the overheating thing. Just allow us to cool our weapons off faster by holding what was reload. This also stops weapons which shouldn't have standard heat sinks(*cough*collectors*cough*) from having them and thus creating a tiny plot hole.

And yeah, those are my wishes. Or demands. Or hopes. Whatever you want to call them.

I agree with basically all of those. However, the soundtrack one will not happen. They took Jack Wall and Sum Hulick off of the soundtrack team and replaced them with Clint Mansell. So it's not gonna be sci-fi and it's going to be VERY orchestral.

 

[mrdude2010]

get rid of jack would be my main hope.

But Jack was one of the more interesting characters, plus a fairly good love interest (as far as Bioware love interests go).

after a while she just came off as so goddamm whiney. same with miranda. suggesting that child imprisonment and indoctrination was bad pissed off miranda, and sleeping with anyone other than jack pissed off jack, which was kind of annoying, but at least a human reaction, which i can respect (/run-on sentence). i feel like the exterior badass but interior tortured heroine is kind of a cliche in video games, and i'm kind of bored of it. i would have been vaguely more impressed if jack had been more badass than tortured soul. we already have tali (under danger of excommunication from her fleet), and samara (essentially forced to kill her own daughter) that imply badassery on the surface but internal torment within. most characters fall into this archetype in one way or another in most action games, but i feel like that at least on some level jack should have been powerful instead of vulnerable: instead of dwelling on her rather depressing past i would have liked her more as a character if she had climbed out of the snake pit with a new jacket, so to speak. if she had regarded her status as the most powerful human biotic as a chance to inflict pain on everyone she met i would be more impressed than if she used her confinement as an excuse to whine incessantly. of course, in real life, long term imprisonment usually leads to psychological damage in some form or another, but i feel like they could at least save the whininess for ME3 (if she's used in ME3). if you imply that she's a total badass who wants to exact revenge on her former place of imprisonment, rather than a tortured soul who wants to destroy the symbol of her imprisonment, that sets you up for character development down the line that allows you to reveal a weaker, more human facet of her character without betraying her underlying strength. You can imply weakness without explicitly stating it (to be fair i played through nearly every convrsation permutation of KOTOR, so most of Bioware's character developments seem obvious). mordin was my 2nd least favorite character (idk why i just felt like he was a dick), and mordin's loyalty mission showed, (at least if you played paragon), an underlying compassion for life, and a secret regret at the genophage he helped develop. most player missions allow you to impact teh character's motivations, health, happiness, etc. through your paragon/renegade choices, but i feel like jack's revenge quest was just that: a glorified kill these enemies and blow this base up. theres no way to make jack happy without blowing up the base, and while i understand that a place of childhood imprisonment would naturally be a place of hatred in that person's future, but it would be more impressive if she realized that she could exact much more revenge against cerberus by going rogue and fucking with the illusive man in ME3. ending child imprisonment is all well and good, but that being the primary goal of the mission would have made me much happier (i'm and extreme paragon player for the most part if you couldn't tell: i empathize too strongly with video game characters to steal a widow's money for a champion-level skull plate, etc.). Idk, i suppose a decent summation would have been: Jack is too weak physically for how well she is introduced and too strong mentally for how conformistish she thinks. (/wall of text)

tldr: i don't like how Jack is characterized in ME2


PS. maybe if she didn't die so often during the actual serious battles i would have more respect for her

 

[Belgian_Waffles]

Not to be finished in a year.
Seriously this game needs to be pushed back at least another two years if Bioware doesn't want it to become the next DA2 for all of us to fire upon with hate.

 

[mrdude2010]

these. They may creep the shit outta me, but showing the trailer, I know they are coming back and I wanna shoot them in the face and laugh.

*shudders*

i would rather leave these out of ME3. they're kinda like the flood of Mass Effect. if there was some way to shoot batarians and vorcha and make it an integral part of the game i would be very happy

 

[mrdude2010]

Not to be finished in a year.
Seriously this game needs to be pushed back at least another two years if Bioware doesn't want it to become the next DA2 for all of us to fire upon with hate.

agreed: ;game dev cycles use to be 2 years for a reason, and no matter how well a dev team has learned the graphics/physics engine, you can always work on the storyline'

 

[The Stabilo Boss]

Not to be finished in a year.
Seriously this game needs to be pushed back at least another two years if Bioware doesn't want it to become the next DA2 for all of us to fire upon with hate.

agreed: ;game dev cycles use to be 2 years for a reason, and no matter how well a dev team has learned the graphics/physics engine, you can always work on the storyline'

ME2 was released January 2010, ME3 is expected to be released in November 2011. That's 22 months. Casey Hudson stated that development of ME3 started before the release of ME2, so the cycle is very close to 2 years.

 

[mrdude2010]

Not to be finished in a year.
Seriously this game needs to be pushed back at least another two years if Bioware doesn't want it to become the next DA2 for all of us to fire upon with hate.

agreed: ;game dev cycles use to be 2 years for a reason, and no matter how well a dev team has learned the graphics/physics engine, you can always work on the storyline'

ME2 was released January 2010, ME3 is expected to be released in November 2011. That's 22 months. Casey Hudson stated that development of ME3 started before the release of ME2, so the cycle is very close to 2 years.

fair enough

 

[Hyperactiveman]

Basically Mass Effect 1's style of... well nearly everything... obviously it would need a new story hashed onto it.

"new map"... Lots of new maps... meaning no reused level layouts anywhere

"gtfo ammo"... Worst idea ever... Go back to unlimited plasma with overheating

"no cover based combat" unless you're going to make it work this time

"bring back customization"... I shouldn't have to explain why

"moar freedom" less forced direction and taking orders from illusive a-holes

"make Shepard faster or shrink the ship interior"... and bugger those stupidly long loading screens between the floors

I want other things back the way they were but I can't think of them all... Just too many.

 

[Teh Jammah]

The option to pull off the epic threeway romance ala Jade Empire.

Being able to deck Kalissa Al-Jilani again.

Being able to do the same (or at least give a middle finger and an epic 'you suck' speach) to that damn Turian councillor and/or Udina and/or the Illusive Man

Wrex.

Remove the damn ammo system from 2.

Make combat something other than hiding behind a wall waiting for your shields to recharge so you can shoot at someone for another 3 seconds before your shields and half your health have gone.

less auto-healing, more using medigel to heal.

Wrex!

No more mineral mining. Streamline stuff like that ala the DA2 crafting method.

Epic space battle finale going on during the final boss fight

 

[Zantos]

The one thing I would want to see, AI for teammates that isn't stupid enough to walk them in front of cain shots.

 

[AutobotDecepticon]

It would be neat if it was an RPG.

 

[Professor Lupin Madblood]

Teammate AI that isn't terrible. I cannot count the number of times I have had a teammate designed for support roles (Tali, Thane) walk into the middle of the enemy ranks trying to get to cover instead of moving to the damn left.

On that note, would it be possible to have a "combat tactics" system like Dragon Age? It wouldn't need to be that terribly complicated, just "if enemy is shielded, use Overload" or "if enemy has high armour, switch to best weapon". That sort of thing.

 

[bl4ckh4wk64]

Not to be finished in a year.
Seriously this game needs to be pushed back at least another two years if Bioware doesn't want it to become the next DA2 for all of us to fire upon with hate.

agreed: ;game dev cycles use to be 2 years for a reason, and no matter how well a dev team has learned the graphics/physics engine, you can always work on the storyline'

Apparently they've been working on ME3 since before ME2 came out. However, take that with a grain of salt, but if it's true they've had more than enough time for development. I'm just hoping they change Ashley back to what she was like in ME1, I really don't like how they portrayed her now.

 

[blackdwarf]

1. more of those QTE thing, that you saw a icon for for a perygon or renegade action, but make them better, by making them more frequent and maybey that you see them both at the same time. and i think i would be smart to at least make clear what the action is...

2. make all kind of romances possible, but when soem character just isn't interrested or is clear about his sexuality, let the character atleast be aware that shepperd is interrested in him/her. i love when Mordin (that is his name, correct?) said that he was suprised i visisted him so much, and though that i was sexualy atracted to him, with the following words he was not interrested. i thought that was really clever. although is had that not in mind, he drew his conclussion and reacted on an normal way..... for him.

when you have t make a big decision, give multiple awnsers. not only 2 or the common three. there are situations where more things can be done.

give every planet something interresting and side quest who are interresting on their own.

 

[Facilier]

I - I would love to see an option to be a bit more discerning as to who you gather into your posse.

I picked up ME years after it came out, and was surprised to enjoy the hell out of it, despite some annoying logic holes. Then I started ME2, and got burdened with a massive list of people I had to recruit before being allowed to go save the world, despite the, you know, imminent threat and all that. I gathered some people I really got to like, and we proved ourselves capable of taking on the galaxy, but I still had to go hunt for more... even though I can only take 3 with me, and already have backups that are hard to leave behind. Then found myself rescuing some violent sorcerous psychopath who threatened my ship and after fruitlessly searching for the conversational option of "Fair enough. See you around, maybe." to respond to their "You don't just get to take me." or some such I walked away, and never managed to get myself to come back to it.

II - Some indication that the ME crew have some shadow of KOTOR crew's understanding of "devious" as the alternative to "doormat".

Somebody already mentioned it up above, but "doormat", "jerk", and "lets pretend I responded how you wanted me to so you can finish your exposition" shouldn't be the only options. I wouldn't even mind if a bunch of player responses didn't lead to unique reactions, so you could have a couple of options (hell, it's a wheel, why is it so much of the time we are only looking at one slice?) leading to the same NPC input, but at least it would allow for a difference in the image of Shepard in our mind's eye.

III - Let bad things happen to player characters as a consequence of their actions.

I jumped into a conversation between some guy and the space police about his intentions upon the life of an individual, walked from there straight to the individual's abode and handed him his termination notice from life, and no-one ever mentioned a thing. Didn't even get questioned as a suspect, or grumbles about my moral integrity when I got nominated to "Protector of the Universe". Meh.

 

[Mark Flanagan]

I've split this into three parts to make it, hopefully, easier to read.

Mechanics

1) Remove some of the mini boss's (Ymir mechs I'm looking at you!)

2) Squad based tactics like suppressing fire.

3) Better AI. (LotSB did it better but it needs improving)

4) Implement the DA2 conversation system in it's entirety as well as the way it change the way Shepard acts.

5) More things to spend points on and no minimun point spent on Class power X to unlock Class Power Y.

6) If I have 100K of Eezo why can't I sell/trade some of it to get some platinum?

7) More upgrades and armor pieces, Not whole suits but individual pieces.

8) No more sliders for colour Bioware, Use a wheel like everyone else.

Tone

1) Don't swap back and forth between CGI and game graphics in cutscenes, keep it one or the other.

2) Make the little choices come back and bite you in the arse.

3) Have Shepard show some emotion, How much better it'd been instead of just glancing at his long lost loves picture he/she had sat on the sofa picture in hand and looked freaking upset.

4) Steal DA2 interactivity between the squad mates and have them move around the ship. The lift tells you what floor which squad mate is on so it's not like it'd be hard to find them.

5) Bigger swelling scores.

6) More conversations and a more meaningful romance system.

Squad mates

IMO they need to scale the teammates way back.

Garrus, Tali, Liara, Kaiden/Ashley and James Vega have been confirmed but who else do we really need?

I'd love to see Miranda come back as shes really a big part of the story IMO (Hiring Liara/Ferron as well as ex Cerberus) but Samara/Morinth, Kasumi and Zaeed shouln't return as two of them are non story DLC and the other is a Asari Biotic which we already have in Liara and after Arrival why'd they stick around?

Mordin, Grunt and Legion would fill ambassador roles for their respective races (ala Wrex).

That just leaves Jack, Thane and Jacob who are in that tricky spot of being romance interests but not really adding anything.

So to summarize my preferred line-up would be:

Garrus,Tali, Liara, Kaiden/Ashley as they OC's and all Love Interests.

James Vega as the new players need somebody to relate too (waste of a space IMO)

Miranda as she is important to the story and a Love Interest.

 

[Jabberwock King]

There are a lot of post here and many of them probably cover most of my wishes, so I'm going to give my biggest wholehearted desire.

Spoiler: Absolutely no justifiable reason not to include this.

SPACE COMBAT!

 

[kzgonuts63]

1. Better weapons: maybe some kind of upgrade system and thermal clip combo because the former was tedious and repetitive and the latter because that was annoying but it made for better combat tactics.
2. Not an entire spaceship full of companions: I feel like ME3 is going to have far too many companions which I'm going to have to talk to because I'd feel bad otherwise but i don't want to have to in order to let them live.
3. If you must have a large number of companions, have a crazy badass battle with all of them fighting against everything: because that would be awesome!!!!!!
4. Have male Sheppard have an emotion other than bland reaction
5. Companion banter: because this makes me care about them, not this resolving-the-past-back-story tedium
6. Different Galaxy Exploration: I do not mean none or more, just different. I'd use the word 'better' but I'm afraid of what that might become, possibly an asteroids style minigame every time you travel between planets (shiver). Less probes and scanning if anything, RANDOM ENCOUNTERS MAYBE?!?!?!
7. Less hidey-hole combat