Mass Effect

The once prestigious RPG studio is in a serious rut, but there's a way out.

I should go.

I went looking for Mass Effect wallpapers, and there aren't a lot of great options out there at 1080p and higher, due to the age of the game, how divisive Andromeda was, and basically a lot of the fans have scattered. Is what it is, I guess. I did find some good ones.

Among them however, I found this gem (linked in OP). On the surface it looks like you can just change the background — it's the Mass Effect Legendary Edition cover as a wallpaper. So you can make it all Paragon (blue), all Renegade (red), or the default "split". But, click on the characters and you'll find you can change them, too! So you can put your lover at the top, or your best guy or gal. So for me it's Liara on top, followed by Garrus and Wrex (because they should never be separated), then Solus, and Kaiden and Ashley together to remind you of that choice, then I got Tali and Jack. You can change the bottom background (default is Normandy flying through Citadel). I left it alone. Lastly, you can choose between the "Mass Effect Legendary Edition" and the OG "Mass Effect" logos.

When you hit save, you get an ~11MB .PNG you can use on your desktop. That should be fine for most modern computers, but if you're pinching RAM, you can probably run it through xnview or similar and get most of the quality at 2-3MB (it IS 4K after all), maybe drop the rez down a bit if you don't need 4K. I have a 1440p monitor myself, but I kept the 4K, and it just looks fantastic.

Maybe it'll be your next Mass Effect wallpaper, but if not, it at least deserves a spot in your rotation. Your Shepard's morality (you can't take off the helmet unfortunately, so no FemShep/MascShep choice here), your crew, and your love — or not. For my paragon FemShep, it was Liara all the way (and no one in ME2). For my next play, it'll be renegade MascShep, and I'm thinking Ashley, Jack, Tali. (I don't have the "get laid in all 3 games" achievement, might as well pick that one up.) (I'm also not 100% sure Tali is an option in 3, I know she is in 2 if you're MascShep.)

Mods: I see you have an "AI generated" tag option (or the greater PieFed does?). I don't think this is AI. It's hosted on GitHub, so it's scripts, but I'm not a code monkey, I don't know what it's doing behind the scenes. I don't know if the assets are human generated or not. I figure they come from the game/official art but I'm not sure. If you want it AI tagged and can't do it yourself, kindly message or reply and I'll add it in edit. But I don't think it qualifies as AI art.

After buying mods from Jax to help Chellick's investigation and get Jenna out of Chora's Den

EXODUS Gameplay: First Look on YT

Peter Moore might not remember Commander Shepard's title, but he's still sore about that award

Long story short, I got Mass Effect Legendary Edition (the remastered/rebalanced Shepherd trilogy) for $6 (and it goes on sale for this all the time) on Xbox, played through it, loved it. Saw they had Andromeda for $3, but I paid $4 for Deluxe. I'm not mad, I know the OG version of ME3 also had some online/loot box BS that is just straight up gone from the Legendary version of ME3. So, for those who only played the OG, in LE, you can no longer do online missions, and your readiness level is adjusted accordingly. You can max it via single player actions exclusively. It's not an online game anymore.

But Andromeda? Xbox is still selling the lootbox coins, even though the ME: Andromeda servers were shut down. There's no way to play the game online. I'm not mad, I got it for $4, but two of the Deluxe Edition bonuses are for online, so I've tried to connect, and, no luck. It's so weird because starting the Apex missions (the online stuff) is listed as a main quest and it keeps trying to get me to talk to the turian on the Nexus who runs it (or to go to the computer console on the ship that does the same).

It's just so weird that they shut down the online servers, but they didn't remove the online stuff from the game. Even if, for whatever reason — and I doubt this will be the case — I can't complete the game because of the online stuff, I still got my money's worth. For some reason, Xbox says I have zero days, hours, and minutes in the game, but I've been playing it pretty steadily since January. I should have about 20-30 hours in it.

ME2 is still the GOAT (2 > 4 > 3 > 1 IMO, and I loved the LE of 1, it's just everything after was better), but I feel like with ME:A/4, they took the Mako planetary exploration in ME1 that everyone hated (mostly, I think, because it was so broken in the OG) and made a whole game out of it. So when you drop down on the planet and now you gotta establish a colony and do things for them planet-side, people said "this isn't my ME, I play ME from the bridge of my ship, I'm out there exploring planets." And I get it. And the plant/mineral harvesting is still 100% a waste of your time. I completed the minerals and I think I got 200 credits? And I never have enough materials to craft, and I mine, I collect... but I find the weapons I like just laying around everywhere. I think you only needed mining in ME2, to upgrade the Normandy for the big fight/suicide run. The grind feels as useless in Andromeda as it did in ME1/3.

There are a bunch of dumb bugs, like the smallest root or pebble stops Ryder in their tracks, and you can't just jump over or go around, you gotta boost, and if you're gonna boost, you're gonna air dash, so get used to those sound bytes because you won't stop hearing them until the credits roll. The transmission in the new Mako being manual is also a huge pain in the ass, even though it only has two gears and it's one tap to switch between them. The fact that it can jump is completely useless and never once was it ever needed, but the little popup tutorials never end, so it keeps telling me I can jump, or tap reverse to slow down, or whatever else, over and over. I think the game's biggest sin is how you have to depart a world to get on your ship. So my krogan crew mate who is standing right next to me on the planet (albeit, on shore leave) wants to talk to me on the ship. So we get on the ship and watch the unskippable view of us taking off. I talk to the krogan, and he says he wants to meet up on the planet we were just on, so now we have to watch the unskippable video of it loading. Or the anti-AI mission where, for the peaceful solution, you have to craft an item. But to craft, you have to go all the way back to town, hoof it half a mile where the Mako can't go, go up an elevator... it's actually faster to extract to the ship and go through the cutscene. Then you have to land, go through the elevator, walk half a mile to where you can fast travel... and then you have to glitch up to the base because no road goes there, so you gotta billy goat it up the side of a mountain, Skyrim style. The game's a fucking mess and I can see why it's not popular... yet, I still love it, and I haven't even gotten into how bad the voice acting is (krogans and turians just sound human now, at least they got salarians right)... and for $4 I can't complain. (And yet, here we are.) But the online? Why wouldn't they update the game to disable all that when they shut down the servers?

I haven't finished Andromeda yet, but I'll likely be back if they ever give it the Legendary treatment. I think this game deserves more love than it got, and if you stayed away because of the hate... it has as rough a start as all the others, but once you hit your stride, it's a lot of fun. The Mako (not its name, but it's a Mako, dammit) is fun as hell to drive, and virtually everything relating to the Remnant (especially the Sudoku puzzles) is a blast. The vaults are too damn big, but the last part of them is always epic.

I think if ME5 ever materializes, I'll pay full price. I only paid $10 for the first four titles. (And I re-purchased ME1 digitally for $5. Not sure why. Nostalgia?)

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/pixelart/p/1517856/made-a-set-of-mass-effect-pixel-art-stickers

Available to download at: https://awfukellay.itch.io/massstick

So some know here, I've been unemployed for a couple of months (but unfortunately starting a new job next week). In that time I've done a few projects, and this was one I've wanted to do for a while.

The Mass Effect Character Creator! Simply drop an image of a person and it will use a model I created to generate a character code for your player. I do not store any images uploaded

Now, there's a thousand caveats of course. The ME character creators are limited, there's not a ton of customization that they could do, but it'll do it's best. ME1 for some reason loves to put scars on the faces. 1&2 are similar enough they could be joined in the same model, but 3 was a whole different beast - however try the ME3 code in ME1 and you may be surprised.

Try it out, just boot up one of the games and start a new character, and plop in some codes! If you like, share the comparisons back here, I'd love to see who you're trying and how it turned out!

For now, please keep this to our little lemmy community, I don't have autoscaling turned on, and the CPU is fairly high when generating, so I'm going to just see how heavy the usage gets for now.

Enjoy all! Let me know how it goes!

How I did it:

• Created a random code generator for each of the Slider bars in each game, and then generated 10,000 random codes. For each code then I had a macro that would paste it into the game and take a snapshot of the character. Of those 10,000 then I had a dataset. 10k images took about 14 hours of pasting and clicking and snapshotting for each game.
• Took the dataset and then trained it from the Image -> Code. Took about 6 hours to train each model.
• Source code for the backend is here

Examples I've done:

Schedules set, it's happening!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/44886292

Feel free to follow me on Mastodon or Bluesky

From my first insanity run 🫠

Layoffs are never good news. But there is some Mass Effect news smuggled into it

Been playing Mass Effect off and on since it launched. Great games, but I cannot stand Noveria. It just goes on forever. Anymore I will rush it to be done.

https://slrpnk.net/post/14671174

Episode 3 in my Mass Effect show.

Link to the playlist for the previous episodes.

Comments are welcome!

I’ve put together The Mass Effect Show, featuring my Leah Shepard. A fair amount of effort has been put into removing many of the “game” elements and make this more cinematic.

Weekly “episodes” planned through ME1-3. Any positive feedback is welcome as I’m an extreme novice in video editing. Cheers!