BioWare Releasing Tweaked Mass Effect for PC

Post by **Ryom** » 04 Sep 2009, 20:29

What about Bring Down the Sky? And why is Pinnacle Station bad?

Tanuki · Post by **Tanuki** » 04 Sep 2009, 21:38

What about Bring Down the Sky?

BDTS is free. You have to authenticate your game with Bioware.

StingingVelvet · Post by **StingingVelvet** » 05 Sep 2009, 04:03

What about Bring Down the Sky? And why is Pinnacle Station bad?

Bring Down the Sky is great... it's like adding another story planet, for the most part. It has some cool moments, some cool action and you get some nice equipment.

Pinnacle Station has no story, no real new enviornments, it is simply and solely an arena for combat, and combat is not the highlight of Mass Effect.

LeeNux · Post by **LeeNux** » 05 Sep 2009, 04:24

indeed it isnt; mass effect only lives from its great story telling - though the story itself is somehow standard, with its new sheriff + friends fighting in western-movie style against old, corrupt sheriff. overall its lacking difficulty (even insane with a new char is way too simple compared to badurs gate) and you dont really have a squad but rather living meatshields to put between you and the enemy.
bringing down the sky was a good dlc, with a nice addition of a short sidestory and some rather challenging endfight in the station (you get fired upon from 360°). pinnacle station instead is pretty much lacking everything instead. no story, no challenge (at least in my opinion) nothing special making it worth the time. i definitely wont get it.

Post by **Ryom** » 08 Sep 2009, 20:26

My game now has a General Protection Fault every time when I try to use the Prothean Skyway elevator on Feros. Since this is a plot necessary mission I cannot finish the game! Looking for solution on this problem led to some depressing discoveries:

Bioware has an issue with GPFs that hasn't been fixed in over 6 months. The latest patch did not fix the GPF issue

EA support (tech support for Mass Effect) has actually given up on someone's help ticket regarding crashing during cut scenes.

If you get a game breaking bug, you are advised to restart the entire game.

Some of the worst keyboard mapping ever. It is possible (easily!) to completely break the game interface by changing the default keys.

Bioware definitely has some shit programmers or QA. Anyone willing to lend me a hand? Could you load my save game, take the elevator, and resave? Or report if it also GPFs you? (I have the Steam version, 1.02, and BDtS installed if that matters for save games)

StingingVelvet · Post by **StingingVelvet** » 08 Sep 2009, 20:51

Bioware definitely has some shit programmers or QA. Anyone willing to lend me a hand? Could you load my save game, take the elevator, and resave? Or report if it also GPFs you? (I have the Steam version, 1.02, and BDtS installed if that matters for save games)

Bioware didn't port the game, Demiurge studios did. The recent 1.2 patch was Bioware taking back the game and trying to fix some of Demiurge's poor work, but they weren't able to fix much because, as they stated on their forum, they had a very limite patch budget and patch size requirement from EA.

Also, they are quite busy with three games (and more I bet) in the pipeline.

If you want to send me your save I can see what I can do... just take the elevator and save at the top, right? Email it to "dane macmahon AT yahoo DOT com" with no spaces.

Post by **Ryom** » 08 Sep 2009, 21:03

Bioware was a private company whose management chose to sell to EA. They also chose who to do the porting, and not to develop for PC, yet sell it for PC anyway. Sorry, but Bioware is where the buck stops! If Wolfenstein is lousy, I blame iD not Raven.

Anyway rants aside, I'll send you the file. Thanks for any help you can give :)

Post by **Paradigm Shifter** » 08 Sep 2009, 21:40

I'd offer too, but I might not be able to get on it for a few days due to work commitments. Just shove it on the Insiders FTP and drop me a PM if you want.

Post by **Ryom** » 08 Sep 2009, 21:57

I'll keep it in mind if SV can't help.

Anyone else find Geth Armor? I've got a few Geth Assault Rifles but their armor is something else.

StingingVelvet · Post by **StingingVelvet** » 09 Sep 2009, 03:29

Just got home from class... I have to eat something, then I will load the file and see what I can do.

StingingVelvet · Post by **StingingVelvet** » 09 Sep 2009, 04:18

Sent it back Ryom... didn't have any problems.

Post by **Ryom** » 09 Sep 2009, 04:49

Ugghh, when I try to load it, it says: Selected save game could not be loaded, Downloadable Content missing, module(s) in question: Pinnacle Station.

Thanks anyway!

StingingVelvet · Post by **StingingVelvet** » 09 Sep 2009, 07:04

Ugghh, when I try to load it, it says: Selected save game could not be loaded, Downloadable Content missing, module(s) in question: Pinnacle Station.

Awwwwww that sucks. Sorry man.

Post by **Ryom** » 09 Sep 2009, 08:31

[quote]Ugghh, when I try to load it, it says: Selected save game could not be loaded, Downloadable Content missing, module(s) in question: Pinnacle Station.

Awwwwww that sucks. Sorry man.

I blame Bioware. Great writers, lousy programmers!

StingingVelvet · Post by **StingingVelvet** » 09 Sep 2009, 10:32

It is kind of weird you need the DLC to play... why couldn't it be like Bethesda games where if you remove a mod or DLC, it just erases the content?

Post by **Ryom** » 10 Sep 2009, 09:25

Had another friend load it, take the lift, and resave and it worked fine for me after that. I even took the lift back down without any crashes. Finished the game out :)

ReploidGodX · Post by **ReploidGodX** » 19 Sep 2009, 10:00

Uuugh, as much facking trouble as I had trying to get this game to run, I'm surprised I played it to completion. So I bought this game on steam when it was on sale for 10 bucks. so it finally downloaded and it wouldn't run and I had no idea why, that must have been earlier this year i think, maybe... feb or march, possibly april.
anywho, so it wouldn't run and after fruitless searching of the web I gave up till a couple months ago i saw a torrent for it and thought maybe securom was mucking it up cause i have virtual drive software on my computer and 2kgames once told me thats why Bioshock wouldn't run. I'm more inclined to think 2kgames was jerkin my chain but they might have been right.... so i downloaded this torrent and installed it and I got the same thing as before, splash screen opened and never went from there. so I searched a little more and eventually I found that My sound card (Creative SB X-Fi Xtreme Gamer) apparently installed some junk called "hosts openAL" (google it if you'd like to know what it does) and that was the issue. finally got it going right, at this point I still had the Partial steam download so I could get my CD key from the download and use it with the torrent (so it was legit).

So I play for a bit and figure since BDTS DLC is free I'll go ahead and install that. So I did and before I opened up the game again I figured I didn't need the partial steam download so I deleted it though steam and ran the remaining one.... and Got this stupid error "save could not be loaded, missing modules"..... well needless to say I was more than Unhappy with this turn of events, and after a day or so of frustration It dawned on me that deleteing the steam content, whatever was there must have been key files, registry entries maybe or just something was gone.... so after a reinstall of the whole thing It worked and i was able to beat it and I'm happy to say I played it. ohh and one final note here, apparently ME wasn't the only game this "hosts openAL" was stopping from running. Fable-The Lost Chapters, Bionic commando and Mirrors edge all halted cause of this seemingly useless software creative stuffed into my install with the drivers.

StingingVelvet · Post by **StingingVelvet** » 19 Sep 2009, 10:39

Sound cards seem to source for so many troubles... glad I am not a big sound person and use on-board cards, those seem pretty much simple to the point of hardly ever causing problems.

And by the way, Mass Effect on Steam has no SecuROM, so your torrent hunt was for nothing.

ReploidGodX · Post by **ReploidGodX** » 19 Sep 2009, 10:44

Ohh well, the game works now so that's all that really matters in the end right? :)

whismerhill · Post by **whismerhill** » 19 Sep 2009, 13:13

Sound cards seem to source for so many troubles... glad I am not a big sound person and use on-board cards, those seem pretty much simple to the point of hardly ever causing problems.

well I for one use two sound cards, integrated + SB Audigy
because integrated has some problems with some games and Audigy have some problems with some games ... :roll:

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