toblix

Mass Effect 2

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About pyiades spoiler convo

I really get the sense that the decision to actually kill him comes from a game-play mechanic and a last minute decision. The start on the original Normandy was pretty unbalanced and the supporting dialog in the rest of the game really doesn't focus on it at all. This is one of my biggest gripes, I understand they want to avoid the whole neo/messiah/jesus thing; but really, even in the future with aliens and spaceships, it kind of seems like coming back from the dead is pretty impressive.

Not to mention your working for some evil ass pricks... I mean who wouldn't think your some sort of clone, test tube baby made to serve Cerberus and enhance their image with the famed Shepherd on their side?Then you also have the whole personal experience with Shepherd, he seemed to take it very well, it wasn't like he was almost dead and they fixed him; they really remade shepherd using a shell of a corpse.

I still full expect this to come around at some point, because it seems a little too convenient.

Instead it's "oh, your alive, alright... well I guess I can tell people your e-mail address still works"

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It's hard for me to say if it was a last minute thing or planned for a while. The concept is a big cliche but they don't make it feel like one by making such a huge deal of it every 30 minutes, but perhaps that's because they didn't plan on doing it from the start. Whatever the reason, even if it's unintentional, it works for me on some strange level.

I suppose it could have been their last minute way to allow a mechanism for players to change aspects of their imported character while tying it into the game and story in a semi-plausible fashion and nothing more.

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Is iridium the future word for soil? I swear that it's everywhere and I have too much.

I need a viva pinata style export system to send this crap to friends.

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Two things that I'm starting to hate, now that I'm playing on Insanity:

After a few side missions, you're forced to complete the next story mission. You can't use the galaxy map because the Illusive Man wants to talk to you, and as soon as you talk, the mission starts. I end up stuck with whatever I've got at the time, instead of being able to make preparations and maybe do a few more side missions to improve my character's abilities.

Not being able to buy medi-gel. At least, I haven't been able to find a place that sells medi-gel. Now I'm pretty much stuck in a difficult spot with only 3 doses of gel instead of the 6 or 7 I can normally carry. I know I can hammer my way through if I could just heal my squad a couple more times, but no, not enough gel.

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Is iridium the future word for soil? I swear that it's everywhere and I have too much.

I need a viva pinata style export system to send this crap to friends.

Yeah, that happened to me at a couple of points in the game with different metals, but Just keep mining it - those bars that fill up aren't a good indicator of how much resource you need. Some upgrades later on can cost the whole filled up bar of metal, one even costs twice that amount.

It's a really, really good idea to upgrade everything.

[edit] Also, for anyone who has completed legions loyalty quest,

is it just me or is the paragon/renegade reward choice extremely messed up? I chose to blow up the station because I was playing paragon and out of the 2 choices I thought it was more humane to kill them than to rob an entire culture of its free will, brainwashing them to think the opposite of what they had freely chosen to, and then It turns out that I get renegade points? That the paragon option is the evil brainwashing option? What the shit?!

Edited by spindrift

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Is iridium the future word for soil? I swear that it's everywhere and I have too much.

I need a viva pinata style export system to send this crap to friends.

I think the missions sorta tend to crank out focused loads of upgrades, so it really does tilt and sway for me. I had almost 70,000 iridium not too long ago, now I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel at about 4,000. I was bottoming out constantly on palladium a few hours ago, and now I've got about 95,000.

Really, though, I just want more element zero.

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As a baldur's gate fan, can I just say how awesome it is that

you can get a space hamster for you cabin and he makes a high pitched vaguely 'boo' sounding noise when you interact with him

?

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Having finished my first play through of ME2 last night I give you the things that I liked and the things that I missed.

- I like the space exploration. Moving around the galaxy map is a nice addition.

- I love the attention to detail, how everything you see and do in ME1 comes back in one way or another in ME2.

For instance, the derelict reaper ship you come across has been destroyed by the very same weapon that made a massive crater on one of the planets you can explore in ME1

- I like that the missions you find on the planets are very diverse now. not the same bunker over & over again.

- I like how you can customize your armor in visible ways. And not just the colours.

- It took some time to get used to, but the new notification system is rather nice. I would like to have some kind of button to skip through them, though.

- I loved the new & improved Normandy.

- I miss the old inventory system a bit. Especially now that you can't really see how powerful a gun is and that you can't experiment with the diverse gun modules.

- I really miss the Mako. I guess I'm one of the few people who had no trouble controlling it at all. Eventhough most of the terrains in ME1 where little more than heightmaps I always enjoyed scaling the terrain with the Mako.

- I miss the elevators. Even though they're glorified loading screens, they didn't break the immersion like the loading screens do.

- I miss some of the keyboard controls from ME1, J used to open your journal, P would bing up your character screen, I would bring up your inventory. All those are gone now which I find mildly annoying.

Things I would like to see in ME3:

- I would love to be able to actually control the Normandy in a battle. You spend so much time reading about space warfare, but you don't get to do any of it.

- The option to sell/buy your mined minerals/metals would be neat. A more fleshed out economy so to speak.

Typing this makes me realize I want more of the goodness of the privateer games in ME3. More direct control over your ship and a more complex economy. Which could make sense story wise if you choose a certain angle too

blowing up the station at the end instead of the radio active pulse means that you turn your back on cerberus and it's moneyhats meaning you have to survive on your own and have to earn cash somehow.

Just to clarify I love love love everything about ME2. These things are just nitpicks.

A few questions I ask you all before I go in for my second play through:

- Did you play as a male of female Shepard?

Female for me

- What class did you choose to play?

Infiltrator, the same as in ME1 I love the sniper rifles!

- Did you import a save from ME1?

I imported my female paragon super rich character with Wrex alive, Kaiden Alenko dead and the Council saved.

- Are you a renegade or paragon?

In all the RPG's I played so far I've always been the good guy. Somehow I find it hard to play the bastard. I'm thinking about restarting ME1 and start a male renegade just to see if I enjoy playing that way. Why start with ME1? Because I want to be a nasty bad ass all the way through :)

- Who did you romance in ME1, and who in ME2?

I romanced Liara in ME1 and hitched up with Thane in ME2. I almost ended up with Garrus but somehow broke it off which I didn't want to do :/. Next play through I'm going for no romance. I'm staying loyal to Liara for ME3 since having a romance in ME2 will affect your relationship from ME1 in ME3 :)

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I'm liking all the little things that were put in for people who are paying more close attention or doing more exploration of the spaces. There are the obvious examples of the fish tank and ship models, there have been a few other things that make me smile.

If you had a love interest in the first game, there's a picture of them on your desk, and if you pursue a romantic relationship with a different character this time around, the picture ends up turned face-down.

The space hamster, a nice nod to D&D/Baldur's gate.

When you recruit Zaeed, you can visit the cargo hold he's taken up residence in. There you can fiddle with the trash compactor and eject cubes of garbage into space.

And, of course, there's the alien porn magazine:

fornaxcover.jpg

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[edit] Also, for anyone who has completed legions loyalty quest,

is it just me or is the paragon/renegade reward choice extremely messed up? I chose to blow up the station because I was playing paragon and out of the 2 choices I thought it was more humane to kill them than to rob an entire culture of its free will, brainwashing them to think the opposite of what they had freely chosen to, and then It turns out that I get renegade points? That the paragon option is the evil brainwashing option? What the shit?!

I thought in general the paragon/renegade system was much more ambiguous in this game than it was in ME1. Even though my imported Shepard was paragon, I wanted to play ME2 renegade as I thought it fit better for this game, but I constantly found myself getting paragon points when I didn't expect them.

I would say one of my biggest problems with ME2 was the lack of inventory system and not being able to customize squad mates' appearances. In almost all cases I thought their unlocked appearance was worse than the default and it just seemed lazy to me to use the exact same models with different textures for the alternates, I mean with Garrus why would a different suit of armor still have the damage that his original one does?

All that said about the inventory, I definitely liked customizing my own armor much more than the choices from ME1, which all the armors in that game except the N7 armor look like garbage. Even though I like the look of it, I wish there were more options still as the only other suit I got was the Iron Man one from the preorder and you couldn't even remove the helmet on it so I never used it.

Sidequests were hugely improved in this game, I played this game to near 100% completion (only skipped 1 or 2 sidequests, explored every planet). They were sooo boring in ME1, I only did a few of them because of this. Also I did not miss the Mako at all.

Also, the ending sucks.

A giant Terminator? And it requires no challenge to beat, especially if you have the mini-nuke heavy weapon which iirc takes out at least half if not more of its health.

Especially compared to the moments leading up to and including the fight with Saren from ME1 which I thought was a great ending (pretty rare in games it seems like).

My Shepard was a male paragon soldier in ME1, my save had Wrex alive, Kaiden dead, the council dead, and Anderson appointed to the council. In ME1 I romanced Liara, and in ME2 I was torn between Miranda and Tali, but I ended up going with Tali because of the possibility of seeing her face, only to be disappointed.

Overall I thought the game was great, I just finished a replay of ME1 so I will be importing that Shepard for another run of ME2 pretty soon.

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Commander Shepard, and his harem of girls who want him, returns! I finished it earlier today and I had a great time. The controls confused me at first (shift/space switched around), but I think that overall the changes were an improvement. I also liked the minimalist HUD, although I would've preferred it if they didn't hide all my weapons in the slidy rollout thing; it looks nice, but it makes switching weapons on the fly a bit more of a chore than it should be.

Glad they did away with the inventory. As much as I liked getting stronger weapons RPG style, inventory management felt like such a chore. If in ME3 they use the ME2 system combined with the possibility to give your weapons additional mods, then I'd be really happy.

The Paragon/Renegade system; I still don't like it.

So I just woke up in a strange place after being dead for 2 years, meeting people working for Cerberus, whose people I killed in the first game... Of course I'm going to say that I don't trust them yet!

Seemed like a normal/neutral thing to say, but no, I get frickin' Renegade points. Apparently gullibility is very Paragon.

I always feel overly compelled to do the Paragon thing in ME. It seems limiting to me. In Dragon Age, you got all these choices without the fear of becoming more evil. Your team might disapprove, but you are who you are. I like that better. It allows me to play a character more true to what I would do.

Closing Paragon deals to get store discounts on Citadel by endorsing a store. There are now 5 stores with the exact same endorsement, which is hilarious, but in the end... Kind of Renegade, isn't it? xD

Ysbreker:

- Did you play as a male of female Shepard?

Male

- What class did you choose to play?

Soldier. I really liked what they did with the weapons; their uses more clearly defined. Where, in ME1, I used to Assault Rifles almost exclusively; I found myself using the pistol, assault rifle and sniper rifle almost equally. The reload/ammo dynamic also pushed you to diversify the weapons you had to use.

- Did you import a save from ME1?

Used my male paragon save with Wrex alive, Ashley (racist!!) dead and the Council saved. Concerning Kaidan:

You eventually meet him again on the Horizon colony, after the Collector ship flees. He gets all uppity about the fact that you're working with Cerberus and although I asked him to join, he refused. As long as I was with Cerberus, he didn't want anything to do with me.

- Are you a renegade or paragon?

Paragon all the way, though I got a few Renegade points for bullshit reasons.

- Who did you romance in ME1, and who in ME2?

In the first game it was Liarra and in the second game it was

Tali. To be fair, it would've been Tali in the first game as well, but they never gave me that option. Out of the new crew, I only cared for Mordin and Legion. Grunt and Thane to a lesser extent. In the field I used Garrus and Mordin for a time, until I got Tali. Then it was Tali and Garrus. Then it was Tali and Legion. That last combination just felt really right to me. :D

One of my favourite things about ME2: I absolutely LOVED the fact that sometimes Shepard was actually physically interacting with other characters.

Having Sheppard give Tali a comforting embrace after she finds her father dead; that was so right. It added so much to the scene, with such a simple gesture.

They need to push that concept much further and improve on it in ME3, in my opinion.

tl;dr

Edited by PiratePooAndHisBattleship

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I just started playing last night, so I'm not super far in but I have a couple gripes with the story so far:

The main one being that everyone seems to accept Shepard being alive WAY too easily. I wanted to go back to the Citadel and make a triumphant return to Captain/Councillor Anderson but checking my messages before I left for the Citadel, I find that he's already sent me a message. How the hell were there rumors that I was alive? Citadel was a shadow organization in the first game no one knew about, now all the sudden they're leaking information? Seriously, no one seemed to really be surprised in the least, save Tali, that I was alive.

My second complaint is that the Collectors are introduced so casually and Shepard immediately takes to the mission with fervor that I don't really feel is all that warranted. It kind of makes me start thinking that maybe the Council is right and that Shepard really is just kind of crazy. Also, I kind of wanted the option to say 'no' to the Illusive Man. He'd said I would have the option, I wanted to take it.

That said, I absolutely love the universe and how its evolved. The news stands are amazing, especially where I am where they just talk about stuff that I did in the first game.

Last thing, is anyone getting a KOTOR II vibe from the game? It really struck me on Omega, where you're going through the slums. Your characters have moved on, and I've really missed them especially compared to the people I've found so far. I'm glad Shepard reflects that.

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The main one being that everyone seems to accept Shepard being alive WAY too easily. I wanted to go back to the Citadel and make a triumphant return to Captain/Councillor Anderson but checking my messages before I left for the Citadel, I find that he's already sent me a message. How the hell were there rumors that I was alive? Citadel was a shadow organization in the first game no one knew about, now all the sudden they're leaking information?

Well,...

Get a bit further in and you'll learn that Cerberus is intentionally leaking the info...

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The main one being that everyone seems to accept Shepard being alive WAY too easily. I wanted to go back to the Citadel and make a triumphant return to Captain/Councillor Anderson but checking my messages before I left for the Citadel, I find that he's already sent me a message. How the hell were there rumors that I was alive? Citadel was a shadow organization in the first game no one knew about, now all the sudden they're leaking information? Seriously, no one seemed to really be surprised in the least, save Tali, that I was alive.

You get an explanation for it after a couple of story missions. I don't know whether or not you'll like it, but you'll get one.

I was playing through the "Rescue the Convict" quest again, and a second look reveals it to be one of the most egregious examples of the disparity of what characters can do in- and out-of-cutscene:

Jack is released from cryo-sleep, and then proceeds to wreak utter havoc on the prison ship, to include almost-instantaneous destruction of 4 YMIR mechs, tearing holes in walls, leaving a path of destruction and bodies across the ship, and culminating in the effortless eradication of the docking bay guards. Then, after she joins, she's no stronger than I am, and is reduced to using relatively weak weapons most of the time because of the cooldown on her powers. I understand that allowing her to remain insanely overpowered would unbalance the game, but that just tells me that maybe her powers shouldn't have been presented to be so over-the-top in the first place.

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So this game is pretty buggy so far, I have been caught on a few surfaces when less than 2 hours in.

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So this game is pretty buggy so far, I have been caught on a few surfaces when less than 2 hours in.

I've had both an enemy and a squad member get stuck in walls when recovering from knockdown.

And it's probably not so much of a bug, but there have been a few times when my female Shepard has used male Shepard barks when finding upgrades (the "I could use this" type ones).

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I've only encountered one bug. While scanning a planet for minerals, my escape key somehow became disabled. This meant that I could choose to close the game from the task manager or continue to mine this planet until the end of time. Whee!

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OK, I fucking love this game, despite the bugs, the new crew seems fleshed out more than the one in ME. Visiting the

crash site of the Normandy

was actually really jarring. The only thing i wish you could do was visit the whole of the citadel, I want to see what has changed, if anything; unless I am doing it wrong.

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It seems everything in this game is really

secret.

You could even say this game is so good, it's

out of sight

.

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Seriously, what's the loading lag like? Are there still tons of lifts everywhere? Do things slowly pop in existence as you're looking at them, etc?

Haven't had any pop in at all, also no elevators like the original thus far. This is the PC version, but I expect the 360 version runs the same, someone who has played it on the 360 should chime in too.

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OK, I fucking love this game, despite the bugs, the new crew seems fleshed out more than the one in ME. Visiting the

crash site of the Normandy

was actually really jarring. The only thing i wish you could do was visit the whole of the citadel, I want to see what has changed, if anything; unless I am doing it wrong.

That is one thing I wish, about the Citadel. I think it would have been cool if it had the exact same map as the one from ME1 to see how much it had changed. The beginning part on the citadel in ME1 is one of my favorite parts of the game.

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