I will pick it up whenever. Probably when it's around 20-30 pounds.

That's what I said about DA:I... still haven't picked it up yet.

Dragon Age is the franchise where I'd make an exception since the prime of BioWare's writing is centered there -- Mass Effect is blergh post ME1.. not interested in the slightest in their quest to emulate Halo as closely as possible at this point

I disagree, ME1 had a lot of great writing in regards to its lore and characters, specifically the stuff that was written by Chris L'Etoile (he will be missed) whom wrote a lot of the best parts about the franchise, some interesting entries on Geth, technology and everything. It made feel like a space opera, it flowed quite naturally, then you can choose to say what you want about the main story being a retread of KOTOR etc etc. I thought the whole shebang was really good at the time.

If you try hard enough you could up with lots of similar conclusions to most of their villains, though it depends on which angle you wanna look at it from.
The Glorious Strategist remains the most competent of BioWare's villain roster.

I agree - ME1 had great world building that set up the stage for everything people would be interested in - Reapers, Geth vs. Quarians, Krogan genophage, human superiority/galactic balance, etc. Nearly all the plot points introduced in the other two games were the derpiest of derpderp.

Humans being the Reapers big target in ME2? It sets up a totally nonsensical invasion of Earth that does not make a lick of sense, especially when ME3 has the Reapers snag the Citadel as an after thought and then DON'T use it to prevent all relay travel to stop the incoming Alliance invasion like every other cycle.

The dark energy plot teased out in ME2? Not only totally abandoned, but also pretty shoddy space magic (but not as shoddy as the space magic we ACTUALLY got).

The crucible? I mean... please.

ME1 was the most cohesive attempt at telling a story in a believable fantasy setting. The rest of the games, in true modern Bioware fashion, crutch themselves with companion writing to hide the fact their world building and overall narrative turned into a FTL train wreck.

Sorry, when I say conventional I mean conventional in the ME world - FTL thrusters without the mass relays.

Light travels at 6 trillion miles a year. It would take three million years to get to Andromeda if you went the speed of light. However, we know that FTL engines DO to faster than light by quite a bit, even if it is quite slow compared to Mass Relays. Still, we are told in ME codex entries that it takes hundreds of years to cross the galaxy with conventional FTL thrusters.

We can glean from ME3 that from the time the Reapers showed up at the beginning of the game to the point where the entire galaxy was bathed in RBG light was about a year. So if it would take hundreds of years going at conventional ME FTL speed to cross the Milky Way, it would be less than a percent away from the galaxy after just one year. And that's assuming there was a relay that ended right on the edge of the Milky Way.

I just don't see how they could have gotten that far. And that's assuming they loaded up, supplied and manned with people the day the Reapers first showed on Earth. Heck, they wouldn't be all that much further (maybe around 2% of the galaxy's full size) if they left the day Shephard was named Commander of the Normandy at the start of the three year trilogy.


Point being - the Relays allowed instantaneous travel all over the galaxy. And the RBG effects were spread at that same rate. For the effects to cover the entire galaxy, the radius between each Relay would have to cover thousands of light years in all directions. The logistics of it all strongly to suggest there is no way that the Ark could have gotten outside the range of the RGB blast unless there was some secret FTL drive the ship was equipped with that allowed them to travel faster than any other (non-Reaper) ship we are shown in the ME lore.

The fact that Bioware was so committed to making ME3 a war was the problem. Because based off the ME lore, a fleet of Reapers could never be a war, but only an extermination.

People praise ME2. I always saw ME2 as a disaster in story and gameplay that telegraphed the terribleness of where the trilogy was headed. Good companion characters, terrible everything else.

No argument here. Which is a damn shame - if as much thought went into planning the main narrative as the world building, it could have been a hell of a series. Instead... wasted potential all over the place.