See, if I was a Rachni and there was this super ass-kicking human going around and stomping everyone, you know what I would do? I would lie. Lie my little Rachni ass off. No matter what I would make myself appear as an ally and draw as little attention to myself as possible.
Real Intentions:
Take over the world - "Hi Shepherd we are friends!"
or
Be allied with Shepherd - "Hi Shepherd we are friends!"
Whatever real intentions the Rachni have, you can only guess at.
Well she wasn't exactly trying to avoid contact with Shepard when she rescued a dying Asari and sent her to Illium to tell Shepard she was in his debt 2 years later. Even if she's lying and planning to take over the galaxy, that's still one hell of a far reaching consequence even though it said "Mission Complete".
Something tells me you fried her in your playthrough didn't you. XD
I haven't gotten to ME2 yet (still wrapping up 1) but I think I would need to see some context and see the lines before I made a judgement. Best answer I could give you, they didn't want you to auto-fail and have to reload because you picked the wrong teammate, particularly since I am assuming they carry over similar achievements from the first game, meaning keeping a consistent team matters. Locking out a whole quest just because you decided to play a team with Tali and the geth at the start of the game and want to be consistent would be kind of a dick move. Also, you are Shepard the Spectre. If saying that Spectre can't get you out of any situation then I no longer know how to proceed with life.
Well...I'll try to explain without giving too much away. It's not just a matter of picking the wrong teamate. Picture it like this: it's like going to a massive gathering of Holocaust survivors with a friend dressed in full Nazi regalia. In the case of the game, there's no reason not just to tell him to stay on the ship and take someone else.
Also, the Spectre card only really works in ME1, unfortunately.
kuyo said:
I still think bringing Miranda on The Migrant fleet is even worse than Legion. Sure, she's not the only one who doesn't wear a helmet, but Mordin and Jack are bald, so I feel that makes them not as bad. Also, the fact that you're flying around in a white stealth ship with a bunch of terrorist logos on it should be enough evidence.
Not that there isn't more.
Hell, bringing along Miranda or Jacob is really stupid for another reason: if you read the novels, a few months earlier, Cerberus mounted an attack on the Migrant Fleet. Not as facepalm-worthy as bringing Legion, but still really bad.
Indecipherable said:
Gigatoast said:
remember the Rackni queen in Mass Effect 1. Well if you spared her she's going to help you defeat the Reapers in ME3, but if you killed her... you're effed. (not entirely of coarse, that'd be screwed up)
What'd be really funny is that the bleeding hearts that saved the Rachni Queen and listened to her lies discover that they've gone back to their old ways and bred up an army to stomp out bipedal life across the galaxy.
I honestly doubt that Rachni thing will have any real significance. Save them or don't save them will just be maybe one or two lines of dialog then business as usual.
Actually, it looks like she'll actually be important in some way. Spoilering the rest of the post since one of the people I've quoted above is still playing through ME1.
It looks like ME3 is going to be all about gathering allies to stop the reapers. Like, that's the entire plot as we know it now. It's been hinted at in ME2 that the Rachni:
a)Attacked in the first place because of the Reapers' influence and
b)They're rather ticked off about that.
Consequently, it seems like the Rachni Queen's promise in ME2 to help fight the reapers will be VERY relevant. I mean, look at how every squad mate from ME1 (bar Garrus), as well as a couple from ME2 has ended up. Wrex leads the Krogan (if he's alive). Liara is the fucking Shadow Broker. Tali in very influential within the Quarians and their rather large fleet (assuming she's alive and you Took A Third Option at her trial), the Human Survivor likely has some pull in the Alliance (and if not, Hackett and Anderson have your back), Mordin has pull with the Salarian STG, Legion has the Geth and their ginormous fleet, etc. I doubt that they'd spend this much time setting up for a Gondor Calls For Aid sort of situation and then just sum it all up in a few lines of dialog.
There is some potential for failure in ME2/DA2, but... I will admit that the failures aren't quite as harsh as they could be in some older RPG's. At the same time... I don't really mind this change too much. Honestly, I think the problem actually has more to do with the fact that you can do "perfect" playthroughs where nobody dies and everything turns out well. For that reason, that's exactly what people try to go for. In my first ME2 playthrough, I ended up almost getting massacred the first time I did the suicide mission, escaping only with Tali, Mordin, and Grunt. But even though every single run i've done since has been absolutely flawless, I still consider that mission to be one of the best i've ever played in an RPG for actually creating a real sense of lethality to the mission. This might not be like the "good old days" of Baldur's Gate where a party member could end up getting perma-killed from just about any fight if they got hit with the wrong spell or whatever, but... honestly that was frustrating anyway. The present isn't so bad. :3
See, if I was a Rachni and there was this super ass-kicking human going around and stomping everyone, you know what I would do? I would lie. Lie my little Rachni ass off. No matter what I would make myself appear as an ally and draw as little attention to myself as possible.
Real Intentions:
Take over the world - "Hi Shepherd we are friends!"
or
Be allied with Shepherd - "Hi Shepherd we are friends!"
Whatever real intentions the Rachni have, you can only guess at.
Well she wasn't exactly trying to avoid contact with Shepard when she rescued a dying Asari and sent her to Illium to tell Shepard she was in his debt 2 years later. Even if she's lying and planning to take over the galaxy, that's still one hell of a far reaching consequence even though it said "Mission Complete".
Something tells me you fried her in your playthrough didn't you. XD
I did both actually, I have one high Paragon Shepherd and one high Renegade Shepherd.
Also disappearing completely 'off the map' is perhaps a clue you're up to something. I'd (very rarely) poke my head in and say "still with ya Shep!" while breeding up my army of Rachni for world domination. Oh, and, without drawing attention to myself, be hoping to keep that Krogan genophage the way it is.
I haven't gotten to ME2 yet (still wrapping up 1) but I think I would need to see some context and see the lines before I made a judgement. Best answer I could give you, they didn't want you to auto-fail and have to reload because you picked the wrong teammate, particularly since I am assuming they carry over similar achievements from the first game, meaning keeping a consistent team matters. Locking out a whole quest just because you decided to play a team with Tali and the geth at the start of the game and want to be consistent would be kind of a dick move. Also, you are Shepard the Spectre. If saying that Spectre can't get you out of any situation then I no longer know how to proceed with life.
1. Shepard is not a Spectre in ME2. You can get "reinstated", but it requires a fairly specific setup in the imported savegame and not much comes out of it. It's possible that the Spectre thing will be completely forgotten by the third game.
2. You get the geth at the very end of the game, so you have to: a) explicitly skip Tali's mission until after you get the geth; b) break up your favorite team anyway; c) run the risk of being "too late" for the Endgame;
And they don't have to lock you out - if they didn't have the resources to give the Geth visit proper reactions, they could just kick you out until you get another teammate (like Morrigan not being available for her own Flemeth quest or Bastila avoiding Korriban). Easy to implement, easy to justify.
itchcrotch said:
i've never seen a game that boasted "every decision makes a difference" without it being a huuuuuge exaggeration. the basic formula for rpgs with choice all through it like this, is to have a single story, and have every possible choice lead back to the same result, perhaps hoping that you'll never play through twice and notice that it's gonna be the same no matter what yo do.
It seems a continuing trend right now. I don't even know if I can actually fail more than one or two missions in the whole game. The suicide one, Zaeed's Loyalty mission... what else? What can you actually lose on?
Actually, you can fail on a number of the missions, Tali's included. However, usually the key to not failing is to have enough Paragon or Renegade scores to use a Charm/Intimidate option. Those blue or red dialog options are always instant-win choices.
All I'd really like to mention is that the "old RPGs" had two things working for it: lower quality visuals and text-based dialogue. When you have higher quality graphics, it takes more effort to add these failure options; additionally, you'd need to record all the voiced dialogue you could normally type up in an afternoon.
In short, it takes a LOT more time and effort to do such extraneous options these days and, as such, does not seem very feasible for such larger developers. You can have the pretty graphics and the great voice-acting with fewer options of today, or you can have the simple graphics and text dialogue with lots of options of the old days and less prominent developers.
Along the same lines, look at the Elder Scrolls games. It takes a few hours to actually walk from one end of Cyrodiil to the other in the detailed "Oblivion", while the copy-pasta world of "Daggerfall" would take a full week (real-time).
It's less that I feel that developers are losing their touch so much as being limited by the times.
Well, from what I remember, only a few guards actually had guns. And considering Shepard's history/reputation, those few armed Quarians probably didn't want to get killed in a firefight.
Gigatoast said:
Yeh, I noticed nobody seems to have any reaction to a Geth just walking around. It was probably just an unavoidable oversight.
Speaking of oversights, the one that bothers me the most is Garrus. In ME1, you can actually leave him at the Citadel for the entire game while you and the rest of your crew go have super fun space adventures. But when you import that save where Garrus was never in your party to ME2, there's no alternate dialog or anything between Shepard and Garrus. They still act like Garrus was present during all of the ME1 events. A real shame, because I did a new run of ME1 with Garrus standing by the elevator for the whole game to see what happens and they still acted like old chums in ME2. Such a waste.
Julianking93 said:
It's similar to...
Mass Effect's ending when no matter what you do at the end, The Council (or was it the Citadel?) will always be destroyed.
First, I would like to point out that I think the Mass Effect series is among the best RPGs ever made, and I find myself more immersed in them than I ever have in older RPGs. Yes, including Baldur's Gate.
However, I absolutely see where you're coming from.
The Geth are the Quarians mortal enemies, they hate them with a passion, they perform experiments on them, they are at war with them. If someone rocks up to the Migrant Fleet with an armed Geth soldier walking alongside them, they're gonna get shot, saviour of the universe or not.
In fact, anyone who takes Legion along with them for that mission 'not' expecting to get shot, is an idiot. Or at least they would be, but as has been said, the consequences are trifling - a few harsh words.
This isn't about having more 'auto-fails' in games, it's about actions having consequences. Taking a Geth soldier to the Migrant Fleet should have blindingly obvious consequences, and when those consequences fail to manifest themselves, the believability of the game suffers.
I think what a lot of RPG'ers are frustrated with are the lack of hard-refusals on the part of the NPCs.
It was a running gag in DnD that with how ambiguous the conversation rules are, you could bluff a berserk demon into being indifferent to you, without fail, at first level. It was garbage!
Mass Effect had something going with Wrex - how you had to be very slippery tongued to keep him alive, because there was no way Shepard was going to allow Saren to keep his Krogan Army.
Of course, it was also stupid that you couldn't choose a third option: stop Saren but recover the cure for yourself.
In Mass Effect 2, there were conflicts between Miranda and Jack, Legion and Tali, and a cut conflict between Grunt and Solus. In the game, the worst that happens is one of them stops being "loyal" to you.
That's not much for drama, if the worst consequence is they stop being your friend. They ought to kill each other or leave the ship - how strong are their convictions? Legion and Tali are basically fighting a blood war and Jack isn't the most mature or stable person in the world. Miranda would be sleeping with the light on for the rest of her life - even if Shepard talked them into reconciling.
There are no hard positions for the NPCs to take. There's no moment where they say, "No Shepard, you go too far. Now leave, or there will be violence."
[ul][li]The Quarian Captain should have said that if you bring Legion aboard.[/li]
[li]Grunt should insist on keeping the research if brought along to Mordin's loyalty mission.[/li]
[li]Jack and Miranda's conflict ought to have ended with one of them leaving the ship at best, or Jack killing Miranda at worst. It is inconceivable that Jack concedes to Shepard on this point, even if they're lovers.[/li][/ul]
The short answer is that Bioware wanted to avoid this sort of melodrama in case the playerbase latched onto one of the characters.
The long answer is that Bioware doesn't have it in them to be so bold in their storytelling, at least not anymore.
I haven't gotten to ME2 yet (still wrapping up 1) but I think I would need to see some context and see the lines before I made a judgement. Best answer I could give you, they didn't want you to auto-fail and have to reload because you picked the wrong teammate, particularly since I am assuming they carry over similar achievements from the first game, meaning keeping a consistent team matters. Locking out a whole quest just because you decided to play a team with Tali and the geth at the start of the game and want to be consistent would be kind of a dick move. Also, you are Shepard the Spectre. If saying that Spectre can't get you out of any situation then I no longer know how to proceed with life.
Well...I'll try to explain without giving too much away. It's not just a matter of picking the wrong teamate. Picture it like this: it's like going to a massive gathering of Holocaust survivors with a friend dressed in full Nazi regalia. In the case of the game, there's no reason not just to tell him to stay on the ship and take someone else.
Also, the Spectre card only really works in ME1, unfortunately.
kuyo said:
I still think bringing Miranda on The Migrant fleet is even worse than Legion. Sure, she's not the only one who doesn't wear a helmet, but Mordin and Jack are bald, so I feel that makes them not as bad. Also, the fact that you're flying around in a white stealth ship with a bunch of terrorist logos on it should be enough evidence.
Not that there isn't more.
Hell, bringing along Miranda or Jacob is really stupid for another reason: if you read the novels, a few months earlier, Cerberus mounted an attack on the Migrant Fleet. Not as facepalm-worthy as bringing Legion, but still really bad.
Indecipherable said:
Gigatoast said:
remember the Rackni queen in Mass Effect 1. Well if you spared her she's going to help you defeat the Reapers in ME3, but if you killed her... you're effed. (not entirely of coarse, that'd be screwed up)
What'd be really funny is that the bleeding hearts that saved the Rachni Queen and listened to her lies discover that they've gone back to their old ways and bred up an army to stomp out bipedal life across the galaxy.
I honestly doubt that Rachni thing will have any real significance. Save them or don't save them will just be maybe one or two lines of dialog then business as usual.
Actually, it looks like she'll actually be important in some way. Spoilering the rest of the post since one of the people I've quoted above is still playing through ME1.
It looks like ME3 is going to be all about gathering allies to stop the reapers. Like, that's the entire plot as we know it now. It's been hinted at in ME2 that the Rachni:
a)Attacked in the first place because of the Reapers' influence and
b)They're rather ticked off about that.
Consequently, it seems like the Rachni Queen's promise in ME2 to help fight the reapers will be VERY relevant. I mean, look at how every squad mate from ME1 (bar Garrus), as well as a couple from ME2 has ended up. Wrex leads the Krogan (if he's alive). Liara is the fucking Shadow Broker. Tali in very influential within the Quarians and their rather large fleet (assuming she's alive and you Took A Third Option at her trial), the Human Survivor likely has some pull in the Alliance (and if not, Hackett and Anderson have your back), Mordin has pull with the Salarian STG, Legion has the Geth and their ginormous fleet, etc. I doubt that they'd spend this much time setting up for a Gondor Calls For Aid sort of situation and then just sum it all up in a few lines of dialog.
The sequel sounds really bad. Apparently, it starts with Shep in court, and Reapers invade Earth in the middle of the trial. So, no build up, no mounting a defense, just boom, Reaper time. Then Shepard has to run away like a ***** to collect forces to take on the Reapers, which is presumably where the second act takes place. So, I'm going to be dicking around in space doing their new planet scanning thing (seriously, through all the vitriol heaped on the thing, they're just changing it rather than doing what any sensible person would and scrapping it. Seriously, I want to be a space cowboy, not a fucking orbital miner. what sense is there in being in space if you stay on the ship and only interact with planets with probes. Shepard isn't agoraphobic, so let me tool around some goddamn planets.)
So, by the time Shep gets around to saving Earth, it'll be gone.
Also, half of the new locations they're teasing are on Earth. I kinda wanted to check out earth in the first game just to see how things differ, but the game begins with the invasion, so this is just going to be another burnedout New York level, and also London.
Oh yeah, and Cerberus is the enemy again. Are they going to address how fucking idiotic it is for them to reveal themselves as an enemy after inventing necromancy to bring Shepard back from vaporization? My guess is no.
If you talk to the judges with Legion in your party, they talk to him, even question him. They could have made more out of it, but how much time shuld they spend working on a completly missable event?
If you talk to the judges with Legion in your party, they talk to him, even question him. They could have made more out of it, but how much time shuld they spend working on a completly missable event?
Considering how much of the game you can skip if you really are dedicated to not wanting to play it then you can, with the above logic, pretty much ignore roleplaying for 90% of the game.
It was stated quite eloquently before that it is a cost of voice acting as to why this happens. I do miss the old text based RPGs where a nice long conversation didn't cost tens of thousands of developer dollars.
I replayed ME 2 and did Tali's mission right at the very end before the suicide mission. You know, the one where she was being charged with treason for sending back active Geth components to the Migrant Fleet. Out of morbid sense of curiosity, I decided to take Legion along with me.
And you know what?
There were one or two arguments with Quarians who were upset about an active, walking talking Geth on the Migrant fleet, but all I needed to do was be angry with them and they were fine with it. I just told them to f*** off and they backed down.
OHMYGOD THERE'S A SINGLE GETH UNIT (y'know, them things any Quarian or Shepherd can shoot down with like a single bullet to the head) THAT'S COMPLETELY DOCILE ON OUR SHIP, QUICK, MURDER EVERYONE REMOTELY CLOSE TO IT!!!!!!
Yeah, I'm not quite seeing that as a superior RPG scenario...
Indecipherable said:
Is Bioware serious? Or have they just given up on the RPG elements of this game. Because frankly it appears that I can make the most appalling decisions possible and STILL succeed. Why the heck weren't the Quarians blasting the Geth, Tali, my entire crew, into oblivion?
They had a ship completely full of Geth that they were happy to give you a shot at before they blasted it into space. A ship that also had numerous vital information on the Migrant fleet iirc. One single unit that's completely docile in the midst of about 20 Quarians who could take it down with a single shot at any time was quite likely not to be perceived as much of a threat.
Indecipherable said:
It seems a continuing trend right now. I don't even know if I can actually fail more than one or two missions in the whole game. The suicide one, Zaeed's Loyalty mission... what else? What can you actually lose on?
I really miss old RPGs where if you did something, or said something, profoundly stupid, you were punished for it. Right now it seems I can do whatever I want, at any time, and the game just keeps rolling on without consequence.
It's because a choice isn't a choice when a choice is between "click right option" and "press other thing or you die". The suicide mission is not a dialogue choice (no clue what you mean by Zaeed's Loyalty mission, didn't notice a death option there).
And I'm not sure of what "old" RPGs you're talking about. I can't say I played through all of them, but I don't remember there ever being a "say something stupid to die" button (in fact, "old" RPGs didn't even have a "say" part, you just got a pile of quest text WoW style...).
Oh yeah, and Cerberus is the enemy again. Are they going to address how fucking idiotic it is for them to reveal themselves as an enemy after inventing necromancy to bring Shepard back from vaporization? My guess is no.
You want to fail in Dragon Age 2? Don't have Isabela high enough in the friendship ring when the time comes, or side against her. Or Fenris. Or side with the Templars and spare Anders. Try telling me those choices have no consequences with them. As for Mass Effect, I'm betting a lot of the choices you make in the second game will have huge consequences in the third game. As for Shep being able to bring Legion on board and not have anyone gun her down on sight, did you see the opening part where they entire squad has weapons in her face? If you don't have a high enough Renegade or Paragon, Legion can't come. Also, several Quarians point out that Shep's killed hundreds of the things, so if she's palling around with this one, it must be different. They don't like it, but they accept it.
Ah. I understood the connotations of having a geth in your party. That was not what was concerning me. I was operating under the assumption that getting your squad mates in ME2 was similar to ME1 in that you would get all of them fairly early. Clearly this is not the case. I also had the no a spectre thing spoiled for me so that makes more sense. Since clearly things are not as they appeared to me initially the best I can say now is that it does really bother me. I would want at least extra conflict for bringing a geth onto their ship. I would expect it. Maybe not an immediate mission failed, but a everyone suddenly becomes hostile and just straight up attacks until you murder most of/the entire ship or leave. I would expect something similar to happen if I brought Garrus into a colony filled with Krogans that were not on friendly terms with me. Racism exists in Mass Effect and is an active force. I would expect that my team has an impact on people's actions. Its not like they were trying to keep the dialogue overly simple in this game.
As long as you have a high paragon score, you can't fail Zaeed's loyalty mission, you use the force or some shit and he's just completely loyal even though you just completely fucked him over and saved some civies in the process.
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