Mass Effect 3 DRM, DLC, and multiplayer

[Marou]

Hot off the success of their new direction with Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 3 promises to launch via Origins service with persistent DRM, no LAN or local co-op, no dedicated servers, and plenty of launch day DLC.

Via Shacknews and Bioware's blog:

Slowly but surely, more Mass Effect 3 news is trickling out of BioWare. Firstly, the PC version of Mass Effect 3 will require an internet connection at launch (every time you start the game), but will no longer require the connection afterwards. Considering BioWare isn't owned by Ubisoft, we'll hold them to that.

Local co-op, whether it's split-screen on console or via LAN on PC, also will not be supported in Mass Effect 3's multiplayer mode. That's a tad unfortunate, given how recent co-op games, such as Uncharted 3 and Gears of War 3, offer these features.

You also won't be able to create your own multiplayer server. "Because of a lot of the match making systems are quite server intensive, we have no plans anytime soon to allow the creation of an offline server," BioWare's Jesse Houston explains in a new Q&A.

If you love griefing your friends, you'll be disappointed to know that friendly fire is also not a part of multiplayer. "We didn’t believe it added a lot to the co-op experience," Houston explained, adding it may be available later as some sort of modifier to the game, but not at release."

Finally, Mass Effect 3's Kinect functionality will be stripped from multiplayer, mostly because you'll be using a headset to communicate with friends, not AI. "We'd want you to yell at them and not your TV," Houston noted.

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Which classes/races can you play as? Can you be a geth?
We haven’t given the full list yet. But as an example, you can totally play as a Krogan, as a Drell, as an Asari. Beyond those, I can’t give away all of the details, but I can say there will be a lot of interesting races that you may not expect to be able to play as because they wouldn’t normally be looked upon as characters who are for the fight normally. That said we’ll be releasing more and more characters through DLC later.

Is there a sunset plan after you decide to take the servers down in a couple of years.
Yes, absolutely. We won’t be taking the servers down until we realize that there aren’t enough players playing to warrant keeping them up and when we do take them down, we will make sure there are options so the players who are playing don’t feel abandoned. If anything is a good example, you can see today that Never Winter Nights is still supported and we’ve kept a lot of our servers live on it. So I wouldn’t be too worried about us taking down the servers anytime soon.


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Based on a leaked screenshot here: http://i.imgur.com/SHhzO.jpg Origins will be used even on the console versions.

0-day DLC announced so far:

N7 Arsenal Pack 1 Submachine Gun, 1 Shotgun, 1 Sniper Rifle, 1 Pistol Included in the Mass Effect 3 N7 Collector's Edition
N7 Hoodie 1 Outfit Included in the Mass Effect 3 N7 Collector's Edition
Robotic Dog 1 Normandy Item Included in the Mass Effect 3 N7 Collector's Edition

[Norska]

i love how he quotes support for nwn as a reason to believe this apparently unsupported game will eventualy get it

all those freatures were standard in nwn, and players hosted the vast majority of games

hell, i still remember some of the persistent worlds i played on and how heavily modded that game was

[Marou]

I think corporations just fail at making good games, I blame banks, and corporate structure. Banks you say? Allow me to explain.

Banks and hedge funds make up a substantial portion (if not majority) of the board of every major video game publisher. They pressure the CEO to deliver good earnings every quarter instead of in the long haul, and since they vote on his compensation this pressure carries plenty of weight. As a result the CEO puts budgetary, feature inclusion, and scheduling pressure on developers and subsidiarity studios to deliver mass market games with heavy monetization in a short time frame. Instead of thinking, "If we strip stuff out of the base game and sell it as DLC, it willl hurt sales of the next game in the franchise" they think, "Kaching!".

The success of Valve and Bethesda, both privately held, says much about the state of the industry. It's not that the corporations are inherently evil, or that they don't understand on some level that taking risks and treating your customers well is good business sense. It's that video games are art, and they cannot be designed by a committee of people that are not artists (market researchers, financiers, businessmen) or gamers. When they are, it shows. The only time studios flourish under corporate rule is when the corporation takes a very hands off approach and doesn't "suggest" or "push" for certain things while holding the purse captive.

If a good game comes out of a corporation, it's in spite of the corporate structure; not because of it.

[trol]

EA's greed has no limits.

[Zoobi]

I knew when EA bought out Bioware that was the end of one of the last good rpg companies.

[Marou]

I knew when EA bought out Bioware that was the end of one of the last good rpg companies.

We all did, it sucks regardless. I love open world Besthesda type games the most, but I did always enjoy a good Bioware epic. I loved the Baldur's Gate games, NwN (ecspecially the mods), and KoToR. Haven't really loved anything they've done since. ME1 and Dragon Age suffered from obvious laziness on all side quests. DA2 was just, terrible and lazy everywhere, and ME2 while entertaining to plenty of people...was a ghetto JRPG with action elements to me.

They've went from a company that made huge linear but re-playable epics about moral choices, into a company that gives you 3 inconsequential ways to answer any given question.

Nice, Mean, or Snarky

[Graveworm]

BioWare is still awesome and you are all retarded.