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Mass Effect 2


illdog
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Think I've definitely just done another DLC episode, the one where you have to rescue the doctor whose got the reaper artifact. Top bit of space action, that was! It's all nicely integrated in this legendary edition, and the new characters I'm getting like the South African merc, and the stealth assassin are easily my favourites. This game is monumental in this legendary edition.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Done! 

 

Don't know how long I got out of it because the saves weren't keeping track of times for some reason. But every hour I spent on it was pure joy - every cutscene, every battle, every character interaction, every piece of beautifully written lore. 

 

One of the best games ever, I'd say. The only thing I could criticize it for is a bit of a lack of freedom to just go off the beaten track and find something amazing. Plenty of uncharted planets around but only a few with anything other than precious metals to probe. I had the feeling that maybe they planned to to include some of that 'Bethesda' style exploration with all those planets just waiting to be landed on, but perhaps financial constraints forced them away from following thru on that. Still, given how much the game actually does give the player, it's a minor complaint.

 

Masterful.

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  • 6 months later...

Made a 10 hour dent into this over the past three days. I did somebody's loyalty mission and visited Ilium. At first I was pretty disappointed that the Citadel had been relegated to a customs area with a couple of shops. But getting more time with it it's way more focused on the edges of citadel space and the 'terminus' systems and so it sort of makes sense. It's all about the seedy criminal underbelly of places outside citadel jurisdiction, or in the case of Ilium places which try to toe the line between crime and order. The stuff the council wants to keep out of, so they seem to be keeping out of Mass Effect 2 in general.

 

Gameplay wise it's fine, I think, but it's very shooting gallery so far. They drop you into linear corridors with chest high walls and away you go with the shooty bang bang. I dropped a lot of games during this era cause so many of them were this sort of thing. I have a distance closing option, a biotic charge, as well as ways of flinging fuckers in the air and shooting them as a rag doll pinata. But I actually think it's a step back from ME1 legendary edition where you spent a lot of time thinking about upgrades (on hard mode anyway), maybe those optimisations in Legendary ME1 were bigger than I expected. ME2 reportedly has no changes at all and the combat encounters are pretty tropey (hold the spot while waves of aliens attack, take cover and regen health and pop out. rinse repeat)

 

I find it pretty interesting how unimportant the critical path is in this. They pull it up now and then to remind you that there is this ancient evil on the way, but the game doesn't seem that interested in it really. Feels more like they took the sidepath stuff from ME1 and gave it a budget. 

 

As an aside, I had an issue with this game where it was way too dark. Like so dark that about 50% of the detail is completely lost in black crush. I could only fix it by completely disabling depth of field in the ini. That was weird, consoles have the same issue apparently, no idea what you would do on those systems though

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Wow, 'lair of the shadow broker' was nuts. Insane scope for that kind of thing. Very noirish and well paced, with an interesting reward at the end

 

Also

 

Spoiler

?imw=1024&imh=576&ima=fit&impolicy=Lette

 

was not expecting Lynch. A volus is 'the arm'.

 

 

Some of the stuff ME2 is really good imo, with how deep it goes into the culture of some of the species that were mostly summarised and introduced to you in the first game. It has more of a 'showing' style, than the 'telling' of ME1. On the other hand, the 'recruit person and do loyalty mission' thing is a bit of a staccato structure. Sometimes the little vignettes are really good, othertimes they can be a bit dull and they don't really play off each other. But when they are good they are really good, it's like a collection of short stories

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Clocked it just short of 28 hours, no lifed it over the weekend. It comes together pretty well by the end, One thing I found was I ended up picking quite a lot of renegade dialogue choices despite being a canon 'paragon' Shephard. Pushed some motherfuckers out of windows and knee capped some people. It feels like a game that was specifically written to produce more interesting outcomes for renegade players. I think it's needed to alleviate the sense of cognitive dissonance this chapter in Shepard's story brings while you work for a gang of outlaws in the seedier parts of space.

 

For the suicide mission I ended up reading guides to not get people killed. For instance, there is this time limit thing where if you pick up a mission before picking up the suicide mission 

Spoiler

half your crew gets turned into smush

, which is a mechanic never at all communicated by the game. You have to assign people roles in the mission, which is exciting from a narrative setup point of view. But tbh, I am just here to learn more about the universe. Missing out on plots in the sequel would just piss me off too much so I wasn't as much into this section and found it a hassle

 

The DLC for ME2 is pretty interesting. I think Shadow Broker elevates the game. it just seems like a very vital chapter in the story and it's a shame I think that lots of people probably missed out on it cause it was DLC. The piece meal approach to telling the stories in this game can do good and bad I think, you couldn't manage to fit a 2 hour chapter as good as Shadow in the main game without fucking up a development cycle, but it also leaves a lot of people out if they traded the game in. It's up there with something like the old hunters as a bit of content I think people need to play when playing this game

 

Overlord is interesting, but goes in weird directions story wise that I wasn't really into. But they trial out this vehicle mechanic where you go through these large locations doing sort of platforming in a hovercraft, it's a glimpse into what ME2 could have been if it had ME1's uncharted world exploration. I think having a few more missions like that in the main game would have helped bring hack some of that space faring adventure feeling that ME1 had, but arguably ME2 isn't really designed narratively speaking in that way.

 

Arrival is so weird. Reading online, it came out a year after ME2 and a year before me3. It's a prologue to ME3 that pops up in the middle of the story, I knew that going in so I left it until the very end which seems like its intended design, cause it doesn't fit into the Collector's plot at all. It's just Shepard by himself, which is barely justified by the story and feels more like they couldn't get some voice actors back on site. It takes wild narrative swings that make it's existence as DLC feel extremely weird cause of the things it's setting up. I didn't love it tbh, it has some pretty incredible narrative implications but when it comes to role playing this character some of the stuff they have Shepard do is a little incredulous

 

Spoiler

he steers a meteorite into a mass relay that wipes out 300000 batarians, a clear flip of the scenario from the  'Bring down the sky' DLC from ME1 which feels more than a little intentional. Leading to the possibility of war with the Batarians in ME3 when there was already a ton of bad blood there due to the Council granting favours of planets Batarians had interest in, so it pulls back some prior history to give it some weight. Which is super interesting but the lack of hesitation to do that sort of hurt immersion a bit. Like, I would have probably chosen to do that, but why isn't it a player choice here? It's the most fucked up thing the character has done in this story to this point.

This DLC is a wild piece of nonsense, I dunno how it carries into ME3 but I have to imagine ME3 would be confusing if you don't play it. Unless they sideline it very quickly and never refer to it at all. But I think if you approach the game a certain way you could do Shadow and Overlord maybe 2/3s of the way through the game to break up the pacing during some of the more boring loyalty missions and it really helps the game a lot

 

As for the main game, there's a lot of highs and lows in there. Some of the cast feel a bit awkwardly placed, especially the DLC characters. I can see why people think it's better than ME1 but I think not having weapon mods, limited armour options and a severely nerfed degree of player expression when it comes to your build hurts it a bit for me. Apparently ME3 is a bit richer in that sense. But I thought the game was a really successful middle chapter of a saga like this, more than most middle chapters. Apparently some people think it doesn't do enough legwork to setup the finale, but I think the Seven Samurai structure, more fragmented and morally grey narrative was the right take to have for part 2 (but with maybe a smaller cast, like I said).

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On 09/05/2022 at 13:35, one-armed dwarf said:

This DLC is a wild piece of nonsense, I dunno how it carries into ME3 but I have to imagine ME3 would be confusing if you don't play it. Unless they sideline it very quickly and never refer to it at all.

 

There's your answer.

 

Which in retrospect I'm thankful for because I never played it. Shadow Broker is more important, but both prove the point that EA's handling of DLC during that generation was abysmal and counter-productive.

 

Suicide mission is actually doable without a guide just by going with your gut feeling and having done all the loyalty missions, which is a prerequisite if you want everyone to stay alive.

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I mean you say that but my gut didn't tell me that half the crew would get turned into collector soup if I did Legion's loyalty mission before going through omega 4, so I went back and corrected that. Then I made Samara a leader cause just about everyone finds Miranda insufferable, Garrus was a leader of a merc team

Spoiler

that got murdered by one of his underlings

and it says Samara had centuries of experience. But of course that's experience of being a James Bond lone operative rather than a leader and anyway Tali got her head blown off closing a door, which is the lamest type of death you can ask for a character that's supposed to be pretty important. Cheats all the way.

 

Yeah I'm not really into the way that stuff works. Cool if you were playing back in the day maybe and have years to look forward to ME3 and doing a replay before it's release. But playing back to back as a giant RPG it's a bit annoying having to repeat it over and over. It feels sort of like getting a multiple choice question wrong and allowing that to have a big impact on the next chapter. I know the takeaway is just accept the cards dealt, but from what I hear it just results in a less interesting third installment if your Tali got decapitated cause a door was a bit stiff.

 

I think the game is great other than that stuff tho, and some of the loyalty missions

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I don't remember that aspect of Legion's loyalty mission at all, so I must have done that in the correct order by accident in both playthroughs. I can see how that could be annoying if you were less lucky. The role assignment for the suicide mission always felt really logical to me though. Samara as the Biotic, Tali as the tech, either Garrus or Thane as the leader – or something along those lines. But it's cool to still read about new outcomes like the one in your spoiler which I didn't even know was a thing.

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