MASS EFFECT 3 DATAPAD

[TouchArcade Bot]

[KiddToKmart]

IMNS in disguise?

[RaptorF35]

Off topic:

At first I thought: "Toucharcade Bot? Probably just another spammer or a regular new member" until I saw 0 posts.....sounds this is going to be just like IMNS, only this is a true bot

This is in the wrong spot though, shouldn't it be in "iOS apps" since it's not an iOS game?

[zman2100]

I'm a huge Mass Effect fan so I figured I'd offer some impressions and feedback.

First things first: Origin is horribly annoying. There are times you have to login two or three times within a matter of minutes because for some strange reason it just won't keep you logged into Origin. Logging into Origin is necessary to link up to your progress in Mass Effect 3 to access your discovered Codex, current character relationships, and the Galaxy at War portion that measures your Galactic Readiness.

Being able to directly impact your readiness in the game from the Datapad app is pretty cool as this is accomplished by deploying fleets on missions that take between an hour or six hours. Each mission contributes to your overall readiness and nets you credits in the app that can be spent on upgrades to be able to add more ships, shorten mission times, and increase galactic readiness earned per mission.

In addition to the Galaxy at War portion that most casual fans of the series will certainly find useful, there are tabs for News, Messages, Media, and Codex. Linking with Origin will let you receive messages from characters you've met and will let you view Codex you've unlocked already. These are nice features for increasing immersion into the series if you're currently making your way through the last entry. As someone who's read the books and comics in addition to multiple playthroughs, I thoroughly enjoyed those two aspects of the app.

As much as I enjoy the app, it's overall not very well done in terms of graphics and performance. In addition to having to log into Origin all the time, the app will sometimes run quite slow and generally feels old and buggy. The graphics are almost certainly not Retina graphics and the UI for the Galaxy at War section doesn't really feel like it was built for iOS. These are all things that could be fixed in future updates, but really if I had to pick one thing for them to fix it'd be the Origin login issue. I think that and a few performance enhancements are all we can really expect in updates, but honestly I'd be ok with that.

[zman2100]

When you start a thread from an app info page in the TouchArcade app this is what happens. It gets automatically started by "TouchArcade Bot" and is placed in the games forum.

[L.Lawliet]

i'm actually quite disappointed. it has so much potential.

my main problem is that the big feature galaxy at war is buggy as heck. originally mine appeared to not work. 100% of the time it says i have no internet connection. then i FIGURED OUT that if you let it sit there for about 5-8 minutes, with that message on, it'll eventually load. and even after it loads, clicking each item gives a 2-3 second delay. really annoying and no fun. having infiltrator is a better and faster way to work on readiness rating (though it costs money).

[Gnome]

Still, better than nothing I suppose

[Thorwan]

I like the idea of having the Codex on the iPad, but the performance is so unbelievably bad, even on an iPad 2. Sometimes it takes 10 seconds to render the galaxy at war screen, the buttons are unresponsive and it overall feels sluggish. I wonder how they did that - Even as an HTML page this would have had much better performance…

[mashead2000]

I think its great and have had no problems

[zman2100]

Yeah I definitely think this is rushed. They probably wanted this to launch alongside ME3 and ME Infiltrator but that obviously didn't happen. Maybe now that it's out they'll take some time to go back and clean some things up and make it run a lot smoother.