LogFAQs > #954510564

Joe_Biden posted...

too bad m8, since the me3 saves keep track of tons of shit for entirely no reason other than to carry it over to another game

So did DA2. And that didn't matter in the slightest when they decided that DA:I wasn't going to read saves, but they were going to make you jump through ridiculous hoops and make an account on a separate website to "rebuild" your world-state by answering questions about what you did and didn't do. Because fuck you, that's why.

If anything, it's way easier for them that way even if it's annoying as hell for players - people at Bioware have mentioned in the past that the way their games keep track of flags isn't always useful to them (conflicting flags can screw things up, they can actually forget how certain flags were coded, etc), and there've been multiple bugs with flags even in ME (something Conrad refers to at one point, since he basically becomes their main way of breaking the fourth wall to make fun of themselves in-game). Basically, it's definitely easier for them to just simplify the whole process by wiping the whole thing clean and starting fresh.

And even if they don't do a "Mass Effect Keep" (Mass Effect Armory?), they could still easily do a Mass Effect: Genesis-style intro for the game to give you the opportunity to check off specific world states. Or do what KotOR2 or Witcher 3 did, and have a scene where you answer questions in dialogue at the start of the game. Which, it's worth noting, ME2 had to do as well (because ME1 screwed up how the end-game flags were recorded, so again, flags aren't necessarily considered sacrosanct).

Though realistically, there's a good chance they'll try to write the new story in a way that ignores every major event/choice from the first three games, because people at Bioware have also said that the biggest problem with in-game choice is that it generates too many different possible outcomes that require far too much variation in new games, so at a certain point retaining old flags makes it extremely difficult to actually write new content. At most you might get a "So, did Shepard go for Destroy, Control, or Synthesis? Did they cure the Krogan or not?" handful of flags that get retained. Or you might get the massive retcon where they basically tell you "No, this is the canon outcome, suck it up."

Especially since the differences between Destroy/Control/Synthesis alone would pretty much require you to either write/program three entirely different versions of a game, or ignore the entire impact of the final choice ("Oh, Shepard picked Synthesis, but it wore off after a week, then the Reapers died, and it turns out there was a hidden Cerberus lab where they cloned Shepard with all of Shepard's memories intact, so now Shepard's back in spite of vaporizing in the ending").

Like it or not, the real answer to why they released the remaster is "So they could make a ton more money exploiting people's nostalgia without having to do a ton more work." It's much, much easier to upscale older games to newer systems than it is to have a full team working on a new game entirely. Even with minor tweaks or adjustments here and there.



Joe_Biden posted...

and since the literal teaser trailer for the next game has liara in it which means we're back to shepard,

To be fair, even that's supposition more than actual fact - they could easily jump ahead 500 years and Liara's still around, but everyone else is dead. Plenty of games have pulled BS in their trailers that turns out to not be part of the actual game, and that teaser was pretty clearly designed to spur interest more than to sell an actual, finished game with a fully-established and written plot.

But even if we are back to Shepard, there's literally nothing that says they NEED past save states to do it. Again, plenty of other games have managed that sort of forward jump one way or another without needing a prior save.

Especially when you consider releasing a remaster for 8th gen consoles (PS4/Xbone) is utterly pointless in that regard, since by the time we see a potential ME4 it would almost certainly be coming out on 9th gen consoles (PS5/XS) exclusively, and your PS4/Xbone saves would be useless anyway.

And even if that wasn't an issue, there are going to be plenty of people who would say things like "Wait, you want me to buy all three games all over again, and then play through them all again, just so I can recreate my old Shepard? Fuck you, I don't care if those games were two generations ago, find a way to just read off my old saves." That was pretty much their rationale for going the Dragon Age Keep route (so you could upload PS3/360 saves and convert them to data the PS4/Xbone versions of the game could use).

With all the factors involved, and the fact that Bioware very much isn't the company it used to be (and most of the changes were for the worse), the only scenarios I see ever really playing out is they either give us a Mass Effect save-state website which creates a profile you can use for new games (a la Dragon Age Keep), or we get a motion comic/in-game scene that asks you questions to flag important choices (a la Mass Effect: Genesis).

Or if we're really unlucky, we'll get a shit phone app like Mass Effect:Infiltrator (or the GTAV iFruit app), though I kind of hope developers have learned their lesson and cut that crap out from now on. Because pretty much everyone seems to either hate or ignore them every time they've tried to integrate stuff that way.
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