February 17, 2012
Great Moments in Bad Demo Design: Mass Effect 3 Edition
The Mass Effect 3 demo is kind of a clusterfuck! It really frustrated me. I will record those frustrations here for future generations. Or something.
First off, why the hell won’t this demo let me load my Shepard? It lets you make all these decisions at the beginning to try to approximate your Shepard, but you know what would be easier? Just loading my save file. Maybe this is only a problem for me as I’ve only played the games once, but the demo getting facts wrong from the previous games just made me angry. “That’s not true!” I told the screen! And it would have been completely avoided if they’d just loaded my fucking save.
I play an Engineer in Mass Effect. I am a motherfucking SPELLCASTER, and I love it. I have never really used guns that weren’t pistols in a Mass Effect game, and I have no intention of changing that in Mass Effect 3. Mass Effect 3 even has this new “weight” system to help me do that: the more weapons you carry, the more cooldown you have, so if you’re just rocking a pistol, your skills refresh super-fast. That’s great! However, the combat portion of the demo loads you up with a small arsenal of weapons. However, it still let me roll an Engineer. So I have all these cool spells, but I can’t USE them, because I have all these guns I don’t want to use that makes me have to wait like a full minute in between casts. This totally invalidated my strategies for enemies I used in ME2. I died so much because I could not rely on what I had learned in previous games. It was so stupid. Why didn’t it have an Engineer Weapon Loadout for me, since I picked that class? Why was there just this Soldier loadout? Ugh.
Finally, let me talk about the multiplayer. When you try to go to the multiplayer, it says it “can’t connect.” It doesn’t say why. Just that it can’t. I knew people were playing the multiplayer right then, but it just wasn’t working for me! What’s wrong! It turns out you need a special code from Battlefield 3 to play the Multiplayer demo early. The demo makes absolutely no indication of that whatsoever, though. If the demo had just told me “hey, only those with Battlefield codes can access the early multiplayer, come back Friday,” I would have said “Cool, see you Friday.” But the fact that I had to look this shit up online just made me angry. Would it really have been that hard to just put that information in the error message?
So yeah, that demo is fucked up. I’m sure the game will be fine, but goodness. Way to make a shitty demo, Bioware.
The point of the demo is to sell the game by providing a sample. People who played the previous game are exactly the kind of people a demo isn’t for. They probably should have just locked off any class but Soldier entirely though.
Comment by Merus — February 17, 2012 @ 7:42 am