Saturday 17 March 2012

Mass Effect Multiplayer

Sorry for the silence on the blog. I have been playing a lot of Mass Effect 3. According to my Raptr I have spent 40 hours on it thus far. This is not unexpected, ME3 was a game I had always expected to take up most of my gaming time until I completed it.

What I had not expected was for the multiplayer to take up at least half of the time I have spent on the game. It surprised me to see that as a feature in ME3 when it was announced, it has not been something I have expected from Bioware games and I did not really think that the Mass Effect combat system was that well suited to a multiplayer game since I use the pause system a lot to utilise powers in single player.

I was quite wrong about this, the quick use bar that I had never really bothered using in single player showed its value in allowing me to fire off my one or two main powers that my characters in multiplayer have.

The multiplayer works really well because the maps currently available range fairly well in terms of size and layout, the bronze, silver, gold challenges are progressively challenging and rewarding and it encourages players to try out classes that they otherwise never really use.

I played an infiltrator in ME1 and so when I imported my character into ME2 and 3, I didn't really examine the available classes, I just stuck with infiltrator. Thus far in the multiplayer I have a level 20 adept and a level 19 vanguard having a blast with classes I have spent no time with previously.

This screenshot is a few days old but shows my characters

There are a few niggling issues, you have to name your characters, but those names are never seen by anyone else, they just see the name associated with your account, even if you promote a character, the war asset they become does not mention the names of the characters promoted.

You cannot respec characters without a rare respec item, so if you make a mistake with leveling you either abandon that character or get that class up to level 20 so you can promote it out and restart at level 1.

I don't expect that I will be playing this in 5 years time like TF2 but for now it is a great way to play with some friends who for some reason are less interested in TF2.

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