This week and the next I’ll be going swapping out games left and right. Currently there isn’t a game that is holding my undivided attention and I have to opportunity to pick and choose how I please. I’ve been dabbling in LoL, reading up on Game Update 1.2 for SWTOR, anticipating the next Guild Wars 2 beta, and a healthy sprinkle of Mass Effect 3 mulitplayer.

Farming the IP [LoL]

Nothing new here for me in League of Legends, but I have been spending a bit more times with a variety of champions and tinkering around with some builds. My new shiny has been Fiora, a new AD carry champion. She’s built to excel in one on one fights with the ability to parry a physical attack. Her ultimate skill allows her to deal damage and become untargetable for the duration. Since one of her abilities grants her a powerful attack speed buff all you have to do is build attack power, which makes her easy to understand. The downside however, is that a smart player will learn when to control her movements to make her less effective and if you play PvP expect to be targeted in team fights early and often.

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It has been almost 5 years since we first met Shepard and their ongoing struggle to combat the Reapers, a machine race that harvests all organics in the galaxy. We have gone from stopping a rogue agent to dying and being rebuilt. Force to work with a powerful terrorist organization to uncover the truth when everyone else has turned their back on you. Soon, all of things we worked for, the decisions we made is all coming to an end with Mass Effect 3.

Investing 5 years on one franchise it would not come as a surprise that people were skeptical when BioWare announced that they would have a multiplayer component to Mass Effect 3. Up until now, they never found leeway to fit it in the franchise. With Shepard’s final story being all about gathering allies and power, they found place to create a standalone multiplayer and still maintain a sensible story element. While Shepard is out doing their thing, there are objectives, resources, important artifacts that need to be secured to boost the overall success of the allied forces. Players will play as an elite solider for the allied forces and with three other people go to various hot spots to secure these resources.

All of the classes that Shepard can play as are available to players in multiplayer. In addition, each class has different races attached them that you can unlock from purchasing packs from the in-game store. Finally, you will have the opportunity to be that unstoppable Krogan Soldier or the crafty Quarian engineer. Each race has their only abilities when compared to other races of the same class, for example, a Quarian infiltrator with have the ability Sabotage whereas a human will have the ability Cyro Blast.

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Remember back during convention season when BioWare had a facebook vote for people to choose the look of the iconic female Shepard? The controversial blond female picture that won and the subsequent vote to choose the hair color? Well, when it was all said and done, the female Shepard people choose was a lovely red head and the artist Patryk Garrett created an excellent wallpaper.

Today as part of #FemShepFriday, Bioware has release some material showcasing the iconic female Shepard including a trailer. Titled Reinstated, this trailer shows Shepard at her finest. They also seemed to have done a lot of work on the character models in the game. The screenshot with Joker along with Shepard showcases the big differences. I like the changes they made and I am hopeful that one day(soon) can create a Shepard I love without resorting to using locked hairstyles and skin textures.

What are your thoughts? If you were one of many waiting for the trailer, have you expectations been filled?

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News broke yesterday that Mass Effect 3 will officially have multiplayer and a lot of people were pretty down on the subject because they felt it would be a tacked on competitive multiplayer or that Bioware would somehow butter up what they built over the past few years with it.

Late last night, Bioware went to their official forums to explain what was in store for players should they choose to participate in multiplayer. First and foremost, multiplayer is strictly a cooperative experience with support for up to four players. Shepard and crew do not make an appearance and players will have to create their own unique character.

The multiplayer portion does have some impact on single player campaign but it’s more of an alternative impact than a mandatory one. Along with multiplayer, they are introducing the Galaxy at War system, a system that allows players to experience the galactic war outside of Shepard story and multiplayer plays a part in this. I’m going to go on a limb here and suggest people think of Spec Ops from Call of Duty to get a bit of understanding.

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In a nice closed off area, I had the chance to sit down and get some one on one time with Mass Effect 3.

Mass Effect 3 brings some new features to the table. They improved A.I tactics, introduced new enemy types, new melee combat mechanics, and re-tooled classes.

I started off having to choose my class, the Soldier, the Engineer, or the Sentinel. I choose the Engineer and it came with quite a few tricks to play with – some old, some new. The Engineer has always been known as a distraction class with the use of the combat drone that stunned enemies and made them susceptible to gun fire and the various tech and biotic powers. Now I have a turret that does the same thing in conjunction with the combat drone leaving enemies open and interrupting their tactics.

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Anticipating the exclusive announcement from Bioware about Mass Effect 3 I tuned in to the Bioware livestream to see Casey Hudson and Jennifer Hale address the crowd. He start taking about how they received a lot feedback about showcasing more of the female version of Commander Shepard in some of the promotion materials. “We’re going to some really cool things with female Commander Shepard with the run up to Mass Effect 3,” says Hudson. So now I’m thinking they are finally going to give more details about what they are going to do with her since we already know she’s getting a trailer of her own as well sharing Box time with male Shepard on the Collector’s Edition.

To my surprise however is that Bioware is asking the playerbase to help decide what the iconic female Shepard should look like. They have a gallery on their Facebook page where players can view six different concepts and ‘like’ the one they think should be the iconic Shepard. I personally choose #3 because in my eyes that look suites Jennifer Hale’s voice the most. I should also mention that it also looks a lot like Cindy, my good follow video blogging friend. No idea what they are going to do after perhaps some further tweaking of the concept.

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It all started with a light interview over at CVG with Casey Hudson, Mass Effect’s Executive Producer, and Derek Watts, Art Director. When asked the question, “All the characters have been given a redesign for Mass Effect 3. Do you ever worry about fan reaction?”

They responded:

“You know, they’ve been pretty receptive to the changes we’ve made. We haven’t really had much negative feedback from them. We changed Tali – that was tough because people were very passionate about her. A lot of people want to have her face revealed and obviously people are going to be pissed off either way.

Like ‘I thought she was going to look beautiful!’ or “I thought she was going to be the most hideous thing ever!’ So we’ve had a lot of debate over Tali’s face, but that’s the one we kind of dread a lot. We’re always ‘well, let’s talk about something else for a while!’ That’s something we’re going to have to decide.”

Immediately countless news outlets picked up this bit of information and ran with it sparking a great debate on whether or not BioWare should unmask Tali and assign a face to the mysterious Quarian race, or should they keep their mystery intact forever.

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Lengthy discussions erupted on the Neogaf forums and the Bioware forums about a fully revealed picture of the armors that came with the collectors edition for certain squadmates. This sparked a bit of a controversy along with a substantial amount of people who just flat out hated it. The biggest topics people discussed was Ashley’s outfit and the character models in general. I had a good discussion with Cindy about the look and feel of female armor even going back to CollegeHumor.com’s video of female armor design.

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Its been confirmed that in Mass Effect 3 we will be able to revisit the physical features of our Shepard along with changing our class and re-specing the existing class he/she was. Good thing we get to take another stab at because at the moment I think my Femshep still has one of the hidden hairstyles in the game and hopefully it still works when imported into the sequel. One of the issues I had with character creation was making a proper face and above all the hair styles. I never really liked the choices we had and hopefully with the redesign on Ashley Williams we might have some more to work with. Also I talked to Manveer a designer at Bioware about when he was asking for suggestions about my favorite classs the Infiltrator and wanted to know about some of the suggestions he recieved but in the end I was teased I had to play it on March 6, 2012 to find out — Can’t win them all. By the way what do you guys want to see when you revisit your shepard in ME3?

.@Hawkinsa1 @cendres Yes, in #ME3 you can revisit your character's facial features and hair etc, as well as re-spec your class and skills.

June 11, 2011 9:40 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@CaseyDHudson

Casey Hudson

The final installment is finally surfacing. Here is where we find out if saving or melting the Rachni Queen is going to save our bacon, was destroying/saving the collector base a good idea in the end and if is the council finally going to believe us. It truly all does come to a end with the final ending being measured by all your choices from the predecessors as well as your actions in the last.

Mass Effect has really set the trend when it came to story and choices. They created an iconic character whose story seamless transitions from game to game over the five years of our lives. A combination of countless of choices some tough and some subtle from sequel to sequel painting a unique picture for each player and a strong sense of ownership.

No matter what you’ve done before shit hits the fan in Mass Effect 3. If you played the Arrival DLC on ME 2 you’ll understand how the game starts out. You are on trial on Earth for you actions in a very dramatic mission and it just so happens that when the Reapers decide to attack. They strike with righteous fury and Shepard start off with getting off Earth and go into survival mode with your primary objective is to get reinforcements to beat what is and still is a unbeatable foe. You need to unite all the species against the Reapers all the while trying to figure how to defeat an enemy that annihilated countless species beforehand.

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