Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer

I thought I might as well write a separate post about Mass Effect 3's multiplayer since I have, quite frankly, played the hell out of it. I've certainly gotten my money's worth from the game I bought at half-price. (Some obscure Finnish webstore had 50% off from stuff, including ME3 preorder.)

The wave survival co-op multiplayer is a pretty cool thing. It gives you the gameplay of ME3 without the story and dialogue, and allows you to try different classes and their ability progression quicker than the singleplayer campaign, though it doesn't have all the powers included. However, you can play as other races of the Mass Effect universe and it does have powers and weapons unique to the multiplayer, especially so since the Resurgence DLC was released for it. And you of course play with human squad mates.

The multiplayer has made the game much deeper for me. I played the whole game trilogy through as a pretty boring soldier Shepard, just shooting things down with an assault rifle, very much oblivious to most of the game mechanics -- the normal difficulty hardly required much thought after all -- and completely unaware of all the cool abilities the other classes get.

There is one weird design choice how armor reduces damage by a flat amount. Since fully automatic weapons, mainly SMGs and assault rifles, do low damage per bullet, they are very ineffective against foes that have armor instead of health. Above Bronze difficulty, most of SMGs and ARs do no damage at all (without weapon mods and/or ammo consumables) against armor since the enemy armor values scale with difficulty. Most characters are better off with semi-automatic, high single hit weapons, aiming for headshots.

The most important mechanic I wasn't aware of in singleplayer, however, were biotic and tech explosions. The idea is quite simple; you prime the target with a power that leaves some debuff and then remove it with a different damaging power, causing an area of effect explosion. The tech ones require the target to die to the triggering attack and are thus much harder to set off. Well, fire and cryo explosions anyway; plain tech bursts, however, are not very damaging. Biotic explosion don't have a such requirement, though. And also are the only thing in the game that scales with difficulty, since the damage is based on the target's health. A team of two asari adepts and asari justicars absolutely wrecks Gold matches without firing a single shot from their weapons.

There's actually another weird thing, visual in nature, and mostly in the multiplayer, where a handful of the abilities apply a graphical filter, making it rather difficult to see stuff. For instance, the Krogan Rage saturates colors in the game world, making things bright and details blurred. While it certainly looks cool, it also limits your performance. There's also the bloody screen effect copied from other shooter games. And in addition to that, ME3 mutes all but low frequency sounds when you're badly wounded. The moment you have to play your best, you can't see nor hear shit. I question the sense of this in a co-op game.

When you reach the maximum level of 20 in the multiplayer with a character class, you can promote it to the singleplayer campaign. This resets the class's level back to 1, adds 75 to the N7 special ops team's war asset value in the singleplayer campaign across all characters, and increases your multiplayer N7 rating by 10. The N7 rating also increases with each character level gained and thus gives some idea how much someone has played the multiplayer. However, since promoting is optional, the rating system is not very accurate for determining someone's skill level. One could have played the multiplayer 24/7 on Gold since the release and have his N7 say mere 120 (all six classes at max level).

I haven't really played the Gold difficulty until recently. I don't actually find it all that much harder than Silver. Usually the challenge on Gold comes from people playing bad builds and/or having bad weapons. On Silver, it's still possible to carry such players through matches to some degree. Gold, on the other hand, has so many tough mobs and they have so much health that carrying is possible only for the best players.

I don't consider myself such a player, although I have definitely improved since starting. I recall calling Bronze challenging when I started. Now I find Bronze too easy. So easy that I often die due to being too reckless, running about searching enemies. The maps feel quite empty on Bronze compared to Gold. I could solo Bronze but there's no benefit from doing so. Everyone gets the same amount of experience and credits regardless of players in the match. And it goes faster with four.

A couple days back, I tried Cerberus on Gold for the first time, and decided that it was also the last time. We completed the objective for Wave 10, and thus all possible credits were gained. However, since I was also going for the Unwavering achievement for that particular map, it was quite upsetting to have the whole friggin' team get sync-killed by Phantoms when clearing the map to get the Extraction wave started.


Seriously, fuck the phantoms. They jump about the map being extremely hard to hit, shoot with their stupidly high damage tsuptsup palm cannon removing your shields instantly, and if you happen to get too close, they will grab and instakill you with their sword. And there are so many of them on Gold!

Reaper Banshees are also capable of sync-killing (as well as Brutes and Cerberus Atlases) and their chain blinking ability puts them on your face very quickly but at least they lack the combat acrobatics and invisiblity cloaks.

When starting the multiplayer, the issue with the omnikey spacebar becomes bigger; you run when holding space, you hug/leave cover by pressing space, you revive team mates with space, and you interact with objectives with space. Since pretty much every obstacle in the game is cover, it rather easily conflicts with all the other actions. Though after playing the game awhile, you start to predict when you will get sucked into cover when sprinting too close to something, and tabbing space to leave the cover immediately becomes a reflex. But reviving teammates that are lying next to something will always remain an issue. Every time it takes some extra seconds to perfectly aim at the body instead of cover.

And since I started picking on the flaws, let's continue on the matter.

ME3 has no dedicated servers and thus one of the four players is always the host for the match. This can lead to quite laggy matches, but based on my experience, the vast majority of games have no real problems. However, using a non-hitscan weapon is pretty much a gamble unless you're the one hosting. Your weapon might shoot planks half of the time (or even nothing but planks), depending on the connection quality to the hosting player. It's a shame as many of the non-hitscan weapons are rather cool.

There's also the notable lack of text chat in the multiplayer. Who would've guessed the majority of PC players won't bother using their mics with randoms. I wonder if they will add it later on. There was a button in the demo, but evidently it got lost somewhere for the release without getting an actual functionality. I'm not sure if it's really required, though. It has been quite fine without so far.

Many seem to have issues with the random unlocking system as well. With the credits you gain from the matches, you can buy differently priced packs that typically give a few consumables, a character card (unlocks the class/customization options and gives exp), and/or a weapon card (an unlock/upgrade up to rank X). The more expensive packs give better stuff. I have maxed all the rare weapons, and since after that the rare slots will mostly be character cards, the few missing character customization options will follow soon after.

There are the ultra-rare weapons too but since they have a miniscule 5% chance to appear in the Premium Spectre Packs, trying to unlock and max their ranks is tad silly. One rank of one of the promotional N7 weapons is given for completing goals in the weekend events every two weeks, so they come rather slowly as well. Of course, one could buy packs with real money, if one so desires. And I guess quite a few do. That could keep the rumored next multiplayer DLC, Rebellion, free of charge like the first one was. Who knows.

I could keep talking about it, but to end this somewhere, I'd say that all in all, Mass Effect 3's multiplayer is a pretty entertaining and fine addition to the game. Thanks to it, I've become somewhat competent in a game genre I previously wasn't very fond of.