Firearms Expert Reacts To The Mass Effect Trilogy’s Guns

this is jonathan ferguson the keeper of firearms and artillery at the royal armories museum in the uk which houses a collection of thousands of iconic weapons from throughout history this week since we were so excited for the mass effect legendary edition we thought we'd show jonathan commander shepard's tools of the trade from the original trilogy this the mantis m92c mantis looks very much like a modern-day sniper rifle with some stuff stuck to it yeah it's a cool design don't get me wrong but it does it does smack of sniper rifle in space if there are any other games guns or mechanics that you guys want to see jonathan break down let us know in the comment section below make sure to subscribe for more videos like this one and if you'd like to help out the royal army's museum and continue to support jonathan's work check out the links in the description of this video right over to jonathan the first weapon up is the avenger can't we call it a rifle i don't think technically speaking because from what i understand of the the law there's no rifle bore or anything these are sort of miniature coil guns or rail guns propelling some sort of projectile at some sort of velocity uh in this case we've got uh chemical rounds which you can always tell because anything toxic in a game is always green how that works with the mechanics of reloading a weapon feeding a weapon isn't clear because i'm familiar with how the projectile weapons are supposed to work how that works with chemical rounds how you charge them with the chemical isn't clear that might be in in a codex somewhere i don't know i guess that's one of the more iconic designs from from this universe it's very sci-fi looking the two barrels some squat humps looking design with a somewhat recognizable butt stock on it i mean fashion does affect the design of firearms no matter what anyone says the same basic functionality can be obtained with something that looks completely different as far as the aesthetics go so some of what we see here it could well be purely down to aesthetic preference we've got um essentially there a space shotgun and it fits that niche of a shotgun that's pretty much described as such and i always tend to think that in the far future surely shotguns would be obsolete there'd be a weapon that does it all we wouldn't need something that is less precise has more of a spread slower to reload but of course for gameplay reasons you need a variety of weapons and we've had the shotgun in one form or another for pretty much 500 years so why wouldn't it still exist something i'm struck by here is the the sound effects so the weapons are very sci-fi they look they're hyper advanced they look like something from the future funnily enough the sound effects though are very conventional gunshot reports they sound like chemical firearms going off now to some extent that's expected i would expect anything firing a physical projectile even if it's a tiny piece of hyper-accelerated whatever i would still expect it to make a bang it's a surprise in a way aesthetically speaking that they went with bangs but i suspect things like aliens have cemented and blade runner have cemented the idea that if it's a sci-fi weapon firing any kind of projectile or propelling any kind of projectile with with force it's not an energy weapon that it will on some level go back heavy weapons watch yourselves uh we've moved to what's described as a hand cannon here a sort of throwback term here of hand cannon implying that it's something that's low rate of fire but very damaging something equivalent to maybe a sawn off shotgun or maybe it's a space desert eagle we've also moved here in mass effect 2 back to a more traditional ammunition management system from just being energy and heat based to something i don't know if it's meant to be more relatable more accessible to uh players of other types of game maybe given all the chest high walls in in mass effect one they decided to go um gears of war inspired i don't know but you've got this standard count of rounds in the magazine number of magazines it looks to me as though we've got some sort of holographic technology here acting as a sort of interface on the outside of the weapon and possibly as a sighting system forgive my ignorance but um it looks like there is some sort of holographic site which no longer requires a frame or a tube or to be projected it just appears on top of the weapon and i don't think we're that far away necessarily by which i mean 50 years or so from some sort of site that can just be generated above the weapon we are going to move away from the iron sight i think we've already reached the point where firearms are sold without any iron sights right we've got the x9e tempest submachine gun so again we've got um the game mapping itself onto current world tropes for firearms why would you need a submachine gun other than for gameplay reasons there is no reason it really should be able to do what the assault rifle has nearly done in the current era which is make the submachine gun obsolete so same applies here to mass effect why would you need something that is essentially a giant pistol um especially as it appears to have no butt stock and we know that the rifles require butt stocks for accurate firing this is much more of a gears of war inexplicable missing stock situation why wouldn't it have some sort of shoulder stop we've got the avenger here again for me the one of the more iconic weapons of the of the franchise is someone who's not really a player and it has got i've i've criticized it for not having an optical sight but at least by mass effect 2 the m8 has got some sort of built-in optical sight on top of it otherwise the design of the thing is is really sci-fi it doesn't really look like anything that we have today other than having a pistol grip and a trigger and a recognizable butt stop but the description is interesting because it it's one of these game descriptions that could have been written about a mock day weapon modular design inexpensive components favorite of military groups and mercenaries reputation for being tough reliable easy to use easy to upgrade that pretty much fits the ar15 and that description kind of with that without overtly comparing it to the present day equivalent settles your brain into oh yeah it's like an m4 i want to be using that as my stock go-to weapon probably so one of the holographic things that i'm seeing on the weapon here is what i gather as a symbol for some sort of incendiary ammunition so it looks like um you could have had that in the hud which is obviously what the we as a video game player is seeing but it seems as though rather than a sort of head-up display on neural interface what in mass effect 2 anyway you see what you need to project it out of the weapon that's something i've not seen done in contrast to something like gears of war whether we're glowing lights on the weapon because it looks cool this does something functional we are on to the machine guns s76c revenant described as a machine gun and it is big and bulky to sort of fits that the reality of what a machine gun is and also the trope of being something big and uh slows you down but it's potentially more damaging so i'm not quite sure if this is meant to use different technology than the assault rifle and other weapons but it seems to be rather different that they look like energy blasts and they're traveling a lot slower than i would imagine we've also got a muffled report from the weapon which i'm guessing is to do the fact that we're in either no atmosphere or a very thin atmosphere where sound doesn't travel well if there's no atmosphere it wouldn't shouldn't travel at all although you'd still feel the vibration um and if the gun is against your space suit you would get sound conducted through the spacesuit through the helmet through the whatever but it's a change in um changing report that i don't think is reflective of the fact it's a machine gun so much as the environment that we're in and then the sniper rifle class this the mantis m92c mantis looks very much like a modern-day sniper rifle maybe an anti-materiel rifle with some stuff stuck to it which to be fair to mass effect is not normally the case the weapons are really pretty creative i think this falls into the we if it's a sniper rifle it's gonna look like a sniper rifle so it's got to have a big thick barrel some sort of muzzle device looking thing on the end which i'm not sure you'd need and then it's got a sort of integrated electronic looking scope yeah it's a cool design don't get me wrong with some curves and everything but it does it does smack of sniper rifle in space now the description for it claims that it's used primarily by police and militia groups and of course police do have a requirement for marksmans and sniper rifles albeit they tend to use them at much closer range for a very accurate shot at a range that would normally be like an infantry rifle range hundred meters two hundred and probably no more than a hundred meters i would have thought because you absolutely must not harm civilians and if you have to take a shot to use lethal force it has to be dead on whereas military snipers are obviously trying to incapacitate or kill at all sorts of different distances and as we're moving up the destructive spectrum we've reached an actual anti-materiel rifle or as the game has it anti-material rifle which is technically incorrect and the x-98e widow this does look very very science fiction it's but it has an enormous scope on it i'm not really sure why we wouldn't miniaturize optical sight technology or even be using nano drones to fly unseen to the target guided rounds guided triggers all sorts of technology you could extrapolate to do something other than just it's a space barrett this is a space barrett uh the description kind of backs me up there in that talks about how good it is against armor and shields the weight of 39 kilograms just why would a future anti-materiel rifle need to be 39 kilograms i don't understand maybe it's because it gives you near unlimited ammunition i don't know just to further reinforce the trope of not only the sniper rifle in a game but the heavy sniper rifle or anti-materiel rifle this thing is single shot it might have an unlimited magazine for i know but between shots the operator has to charge it i cannot see a reason why that would be necessary we've already reached the point where accurate semi-automatic sniper rifles exist if you've got the money that basically negate the need for a bolt action and in the next 20 odd years i dare say bolt actions will shuffle off entirely bit of a change of pace so we've got something that's classified as a shotgun but is not a shotgun it's not a gun as far as i can tell and it definitely doesn't fire shot uh fires miniature but potent cluster rounds of super conducting projectiles i don't know that that makes sense two-stage trigger system allows for either quick fire capacitors or a charge and release attack ah okay so this is a this is a charge up and release alt fire type situation okay fair enough so it's an alien shotgun essentially or it's what they what they've developed in parallel to our real world shotgun which is then be replaced by the type of shotguns we see in mass effect so i didn't see a huge difference in the way the weapon was depicted um for something that seemed to be saying it was more of an energy weapon and seemed to function much the same sounded a bit more a bit more pew pew but in terms of its role in the game it definitely you can see why it's in the shotgun bracket because it functions much like one really right the really big stuff so uh m100 grenade launcher this is quite a funky looking thing big chunky thing with a big drum magazine given that most weapons in these games seem to work on the basis of accelerating fragments of metal i'm not quite sure how the grenade launchers are supposed to function in actual use the grenade launcher is well it sort of makes sense as an extrapolation of current technology we've already seen things like the xm25 that are semi-automatic smaller grenades that travel on a flatter trajectory are they not as flat as this this is more like a sort of personal rocket launcher actually the speed that the things travel they travel on a flight trajectory they look to be rocket assisted or in some way propelled plausible enough for sort of far future grenade launcher equivalent no reason why we would have to be stuck with an arcing trajectory uh we've got another alien weapon now the collector assault rifle so the term assault rifle obviously implies certain things but this this race has used sort of uh biomechanical technology which which gives it a rather different aesthetic probably the most important thing about it actually and it expresses some vagueness over how it actually works which which is nice you know you wouldn't necessarily know how an alien weapon functioned so but it's interesting that it's developed in exactly the same parallel the description is very reminiscent of the human assault rifle so uh pieces are pellets of metallic enamel rather than just shavings of metal same difference really so it's it's this classic thing of you must have parity in between your races i suspect so that something in the same bracket must be of equivalent power interesting different reports which you might expect from from a foreign technology if you like um seems to work on the reloading principle of slap it like it owes you money not really sure what's going on there we've got another collector weapon here forgive my ignorance as to who the collectors are but it's very alien looking using focused radiation so a particle beam this is an energy weapon this is what the franchise seems to avoid for the most part as it says in the description the amount of energy needed to create a beam that can damage something is several orders of magnitude more than what's necessary to accelerate a projectile so it's less plausible as a human sci-fi weapon but of course if we introduce other races other species if indeed that's what's going on then that opens things up a bit kind of what i expected hoped for something that is a constant being like a like a proton pack from ghostbusters but more focused something that you can hose on target so you can also walk the beam onto target beam weapons they're great fun right so mass effect threes m96 matic two now mata because i know from having trained as an archaeologist is a hand tool breaking up soil so not it's an interesting choice of name uh the aesthetic seems to have shifted slightly although it's recognizably mass effect two sort of barrel like protuberances with a casing so it fits it fits the aesthetic and we've clearly got now in line with the tropes of the day the ability to modify the weapon not just change the ammo out but to actually modify it and change its stats i definitely got the sense there of a sort of sci-fi version of a quote-unquote battle rifle something more powerful but slower firing thank you for watching um please do look at the links in the description in case you'd like to donate or help us out here at the royal armouries we by the time you see this we will be open again at two of our three sites so here at leeds down at fort nelson as well and hopefully not in the not too distant future at the tower of london two otherwise though we'll see you again next time thanks again [Music] so you

Channel: GameSpot

Views: 185,512

Keywords: game, games, video game, gaming, juego, mass effect, weapons breakdown, mass effect guns, mass effect expert reacts, mass effect weapons, gun review, weapon review, expert reacts, mass effect 2, mass effect 3, mass effect legendary editi, jonathan ferguson, royal armouries, firearms expert, firearms expert reacts

Id: BYg0sWr4kZ4

Length: 18min 4sec (1084 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/mirh]

Nice that they are using the PC version to show weapons, but it's like the gamespot dudes were wasting Jonathan's time (and he notices too).

Even a monkey would understand the later two games have no lore at all, and are just gears of wars more in space.

Maybe just focusing on ME1 would have made for a shorter video, but not by much if they had just spent slightly more time (like, at all) talking about what the THE mass effect even is.