How has Mass Effect 2 'dumbed down' the series?

[mechanixis]

I guess not everyone takes story as seriously as I do, but there was a pronounced tonal shift from the first game to the second. The first one takes the universe and science fiction elements very seriously, and great care was taken to ensure everything was consistent. Just listen to the codex entries from the first game: serious thought and research went into making this setting plausible. Mass Effect 2, on the other hand, veers into "flashy action movie" territory. While the first game has a very restrained, hard sci-fi aesthetic - technology like weapons, armor, and ships all look drab and functional rather than flashy - the second game slaps unnecessary glowy lights and bulky shoulderpads on everything. Lots of characters are ushered into the plot because they're 'cool', rather than being relevant to the story (Jack, for instance, brings hardly anything to your team you can't get from a mentally stable Asari.) Cerberus is changed from a terrorist organization to a benevolent, omnipotent Illuminati that gives you a massive ship, gets all your friends back together to crew it, and knows everything at all times (but, again, can't find anyone more professional than Jack to join your squad, because someone on the dev team thought she was a badass.) A new villain is introduced that has almost no bearing on the overarching plot. Think about it: what progress has been made in stopping the Reaper invasion from the end of ME1 to the end of ME2? Did the events of the game even delay them?

All of these things are writing genocide to a franchise that had a lot going for it. The first game had a really tight narrative with a well-conceived mystery plot ("What is the Conduit?"), strong antagonist (Saren), strong reveal (Sovereign), and meaningful finale (a climactic battle that cements a new position for mankind in the galaxy). It had a classic three-act structure that any fiction writing student can immediately recognize. All the characters and events were an organic part of the plot. Comparatively, Mass Effect 2 was a string of unrelated action scenes, culminating in a silly fight with a giant terminator.

Lastly, what the "faffing about" provided was pacing. Mass Effect 2 consisted almost entirely of pointing a gun at things and shooting them; the original involved a lot more exploration and negotiation. It did get rather slow at times, but it felt more like it was a game about a space adventure, rather than being a game about shooting things.

Anyway, that's my dissertation. I thought Mass Effect 1 was Bioware's crowning achievement, and the sequel took away a lot of the elements I lauded the first one for. I honestly don't mind the reduced RPG elements; it's everything else getting dumbed down that frustrates me.

Well, seem as Bioware let you import your entire codex from ME1 to ME2 along with everything else, that would suggest they were still taking the detail of the first gamer into account.

I guess Bioware are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Yes, there was a tonal shift, but if there hadn't been people would have just got pissy with the old sequel argument of 'They're just selling us the same game for full price again!'.

In regards to Cerberus... In the first game you learn nothing about their command structure or the true extent of their organisation's reach. So who's to say they were ever meant to be just a terrorist organisation. They were large and well resourced enough to track down, abduct, and kill an Admiral in the Alliance Navy in what must have been a matter of day's, so they can't have been that small, and who's to say they couldn't have grown in the 2 years that Shepard was dead.

As far as the plot goes... No, you don't slow the Reaper advance or do anything quite as significant as the end of the first game. But of course you don't, the second installment of a trilogy isn't supposed to be as climactic as the first or third. And you do still deal the Reapers a blow. Although they would never admit it, the Reapers are scared of facing humanity in a fair fight after what you did to Sovereign, so they try to use the Collectors to subtly remove humans from the picture, paving the way for the invasion. They also want to use human genetic material to create the next generation of Reaper, the logic being that they will become stronger if they use the DNA of their strongest adversaries.

This is just my opinion, but I thought the dialouge added pacing far better than the vehicle sections or the equipment swapping did, which is what I was referring to by 'faffing about'. and the dialouge is still there in ME2.

I have no doubts that ME2 reaches a larger audience with its softer sci-fi tone, but that doesn't mean it needed to go that way in order to keep things fresh.

And we did know some things about Cerberus - we knew they were a radical fringe group that focused on dangerous human experimentation. In ME2, that's thrown out the window, and replaced with this organization with seemingly infinite resources, manpower, and intelligence as the plot demands it. It's like ME3 opening with the reveal that the President of Earth is an erudite, well-spoken Thresher Maw, and dismissing the fact that all previously encountered Thresher Maws were radical terrorist Thresher Maws acting alone. Suspension of disbelief only goes so far. I guess if you like it you like it, but personally I felt like Cerberus was a totally unnecessary addition to the plot in an effort to make the story "darker" than the first game.

And while it's true that the second part of the trilogy isn't supposed to wrap up the whole conflict, it should at least address the same conflict as the first part. What would you miss if you went straight from Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 3? Do you spend the time preparing for the Reaper invasion? Do you postpone their plans at all? No: a new enemy is handwaved into existence to give you a neat new character model to shoot at, and at the end of the game you blow up their base. The closest thing to relevance is learning some trivia about the Reapers' objectives that in no way will help in ME3.

And on the subject of Reapers, let's compare Sovereign and Harbinger, because they're very different characters. When you meet Sovereign, he seems barely annoyed that you're bothering him. He's an ageless, deathless machine god the size of a small continent, and you're talking back to him. He explains nothing and brushes you off. It made the Reapers seem really ominous, unknowable, and intimidating; it's an important part of their character in the first game. Harbinger, on the other hand, can't smack-talk you enough. He warps in to fight you every five minutes and spouts silly grimdark dialogue that sounds like a 14-year-old Dungeon Master wrote it. You kill him a hundred times before the end of the game. And what was that unknowable, eternal purpose that Reapers harvest all life for? Reproduction. A nice, easy to understand, unimaginitive reason.

Again, being different isn't a reason for it to be worse by itself. It's just that ME2 is saturated with terrible writing decisions that directly contradict the first game. Killing the main character at the start of the story and then immediately bringing him back with zero consequences is just a bad writing move. So is having a character who somehow knows everything and simply tells the protagonist what to do. And telling the viewer that an organization is dangerous and controversial without ever showing them do anything dangerous or controversial (and instead showing them be helpful and reasonable.)

Heat Sinks weren't introduced because Geth weapons technology made Alliance shield tech obsolete - it was introduced because they wanted to make the game into more recognizable action schlock. Mass Effect 1 seemed above that.

 

[hermes]

The only thing that I felt was worst in ME2 than in ME1 was the story... It was way too mankind-centric.
In the first game, mankind was the new kid in town. We weren't the heroes, we weren't the best and even when compared to the asari or the turians, we were like kids in a playground. We were newcomers and even if mankind as a whole become extinct, the galaxy would still go on as normal. Threads like the Reapers were some kind of eldritch abomination, too big, too powerful and too unstoppable to even dream of fighting alone. Then, in ME2

Spoiler

it turns out the Collectors are after the humans (and humans alone... not the turians, asari, elchor or any of the tens of sentient species in the galaxy), following orders from the Reapers to gather or kill us so they can turn us (just us, apparently) into Reapers... no other specie was in immediate danger. In other words, they changed the role of mankind from one of the characters in the play to the main protagonist,

which makes the motivation for characters like Garrus, Samara or Mordin a little harder to believe.

 

[LarenzoAOG]

I don't think that ME2 was dumbed down, quite the opposite, at least in respect to the inventory system and skills.

In ME you pretty much could change your armor and weapons with different colored ones with different numbers, even the upgrades pretty much just changed the numbers. In ME2 you got less weapons but with more variety, for example, your starter pistol shoots fast and does little damage, the next pistol you get is like a 44 magnum, it shoots slowly and puts people on their asses at the expense of less ammo.

Also, in ME all the armor did the same thing, in ME2 you can mix and match different armor pieces that might increase your mellee damage, increase your sprint speed, or increase the damage your headshots do.

Also the skills in ME were pretty much "put one point into 'explode shit' to increase the damage by 5%" in ME2 it pretty much starts out the same way but it does give you the option to evolve it into one of two completly different skills with different applications.

SHORT VERSION: Less shit, more variety.

 

[NinjaDeathSlap]

What do you mean about the Reapers? The Reapers were barely in ME2. For the most part their involvement was just you gathering more information about what they actually are from souces like Legion. Why is that so bad?

In ME1, the Reapers were established as an unknowable, nigh-omniscient force of destruction.

ME2 made them the space equivalent of a Scooby Doo villain.

Everything they do in ME2 makes no sense. They either do things in the least direct and most inefficient manner, or they act illogically for goals that are, honestly, unimportant.

Every single involvement of the Reapers in ME2 is nothing more than a very bad joke. In order:

1) Why the fuck don't they have another extra-galactic relay? There's no reason to limit themselves to only the one in the citadel. If anything, there's every reason for there to be a dozen of the stupid things that they can use at will.

2) The Collectors. Why do they still exist? It takes a massive amount of resources to keep an organic race alive for 50,000 years, especially when they cannot take independent action. It would have been far more efficient and logical to let them die out and use some small robots to kidnap sentients and determine when the current galaxy is ripe for extermination.

3) Why are they kidnapping humans? They're trying to open the relay to destroy humanity. Why the fuck don't they just build a ship out of the overly abundant metal near the Collector base and throw a Reaper AI into it. Then send that ship at the Citadel. Or better yet, use the Normandy after the Collector's kidnap everyone off the ship.

Or even better, kidnap some Asari or something, indoctrinate them and have them unlock the Citadel relay.

Or even betterer, don't lock your only way in or out of the galaxy in the first place.

4) Why the fuck are they focusing on Shepard? If anything, they should be actively avoiding him. He's the only one to ever successfully combat the Reapers, and no one has any idea how or why. Until they can actually bring overwhelming firepower to bear, it's a much more strategic decision to avoid him wherever possible.

Literally, everything the Reapers did in ME2 was either illogical, emotionally driven or just plain insane. They were established as gods-made-real, living machines older than the human mind can possibly comprehend, driven by nothing more than the continuation of an infinite cycle and a disdain for all organics.

ME2 decided it was a good idea to shit all over it.

1. The idea of the Citadel was to trick the highest levels of government and military into congregating around one location. So when the Reapers attack all hope of organic life establishing an effective and organised resistance is wiped out in one swift ambush. If the Reapers had built more than one of these the Galactic hierarchy would end up spread between them, decreasing the chances of victory across all fronts.

2. True, although it would be much harder for a race of machines to live undercover for 50,000 years. The Collectors could pretty much pass themselves off as a race of alien mercenaries and slave traders for that time. Dangerous, but never posing a direct threat to any significant authority (and I suppose they could get their own food, as the Collector General is the only one with a permanent neural link to Harbinger, all he has to do is order them to, y'know, survive)

3. They're kidnapping humans because they see humans as their biggest threat after Shepard's actions in Mass Effect 1 and don't want to risk a direct assault until humanity is out of the way. So they use the Collectors, who operate outside council space and have no proven connection to the Reapers, to try and kill Shepard and wipe out his entire race. Also, because they consider humanity to be their strongest adversary, they figure the next generation of Reapers will be stronger if they use human genetic material. That also answers why they couldn't just build a ship out of scrap and put a reaper AI in it, because you need the liquefied remains of billions of organic lifeforms to make a Reaper (and also a ship made out of scrap would fly like scrap and fight like scrap).

As for the whole indoctrination plan, that didn't exactly work well for them the first time around, and would be unlikely to work on a second attempt with all the increased security after the Geth attack. Also, they were supposed to be able to unlock the Citadel without any help in the first place, but they couldn't because the Keepers evolved to resist the indoctrination, something the Reapers couldn't have foreseen.

4. Because Shepard and his allies are the only people to have seen for themselves hard evidence of the Reaper's existence. Even the people who saw Sovereign attack the Citadel never got the chance to find out what it really was. Shepard was the only person ever to speak to it. As we saw, after Shepard was killed in the first Collector attack, everyone was quickly able to let denial take over in the face of no conclusive proof. If they had let Shepard live, he might have been able to persuade enough people that Sovereign was a Reaper, and that there were more of them out there, and they could have already started forming a united front ages before the Reapers could reach the Galaxy. With Shepard dead before he can spread his warning too far however, they maintain the element of surprise.

 

[Orangeheart]

(Mass Effect 1) had a classic three-act structure that any fiction writing student can immediately recognize. All the characters and events were an organic part of the plot. Comparatively, Mass Effect 2 was a string of unrelated action scenes, culminating in a silly fight with a giant terminator.

Better Crafted Storyline
ME2 focused primarily on your squadmates, which wasn't a bad idea but it did push the main conflict of the game to the side for most of it. You only encounter the Collectors on the select few missions dedicated to them, they only get a passing mention otherwise; and the Reapers' involvement is minimal. As interesting as it was to flesh out the crew, the plot lacked a cohesive momentum. ME1 had a better storyline by having all of the core missions draw back the primary objective: Stop Saren (and the Reapers). Each of the four primary missions all contained part of the puzzle needed for you to get to Ilos: you need Liara to understand your vision (Therum?), the location of a lost mass relay (Noveria), the ability to decode the vision (Feros), and the second half of the vision you first received on Eden Prime (Virmire). Fighting geth all the time may have made things a tad monotonous (though there was a good variance of them), but it ensured that the main missions all had a link to Saren as well. Anyhow, ME1's storyline was more coherent.

I thinnk Mass Effect 2 deserves some slack in regards to it's story line beause it sufferes from the curse of being the middle installment of a trilogy. It can't have a defined beginning and a conclusive end because it's neither the beginning nor the end. As was said before, it's not supposed to be as "drawing in" as Mass Effect 1 and it's not supposed to climactic as Mass Effect 3 will be. Plus, the writers in Bioware have to struggle with the mulitple story possibilities that come from the players choices. So as far as Mass Effect 2's "incoherent" plot strung together by a few measly collecter mission, there's really not much more that the writers of Mass Effect could do.

As for the differences between Harbinger and Sovreign, Sovreign being an all-knowing all-powerful god-machine who could only be destroyed by the huge sacrifice of the human forces, and Harbinger being a glowy collecter who you kill every five minutes. You'd think Harbinger would be a lousy reaper and wonder why he's in Mass effect 2 at all. But the problem, again, lies in Mass Effect 2 being the middle child. The reapers need to be both an immediat threat and a distant one. With Saren and the Geth out of the way, there needs to be a new antagonist who has means of directly opposing Commander Shepherd. You can't be an antagonist and oppose your protagonist when all you can do is float areound in dark space. For the sake of the story, the reapers need to have a preasence in the galaxy without physically being in the galaxy, and Shepherd needs to have a distinct antagonsit who can directly oppose him.

 

[Eveonline100]

[/quote]

For the sake of the story, the reapers need to have a preasence in the galaxy without physically being in the galaxy, and Shepherd needs to have a distinct antagonsit who can directly oppose him.[/quote]
And now you know why i like ME's story clever but still jumbled hope ME3 can pull it all together *cross fingers*

 

[MetallicaRulez0]

I like the complex, often tedious item comparing and swapping. I used to play WoW and was heavy into stats and maximizing damage, so Mass Effect 1 had me at Cryo Rounds I and Heat Sink I. Mass Effect 2 added things that were much needed. Mass Effect 1 felt a tad bit clunky at times, but the action was good enough to make up for it, as well as the glorious story and immersion into the universe. Sadly, sequels are never perfect. I was a tad bit saddened to see Mass Effect 2 end up less as an RPG and more of a 3rd Person Shooter with a few stats and something more tedious, scanning. Plus, I wouldn't mind the revival of side quests and the more open world. Mass Effect 2 just seemed so much more confined. All your side missions were set and had no, or little flare to them aside from extra cash or potential research that made you scan untold amounts of Paladium. I hope Mass Effect 3 turns out to be a healthy mix of 1 and 2 with a more open universe with no scanning and infinite ammo back with the overheating. Thermal Clips are not an, "upgrade"!

This is basically how I feel. I play RPGs primarily for inventory and stat management. I do a little dance in my head every time I see that "Level Up!" flash on the screen. Mass Effect 2 lowered the level cap (why, exactly?), removed many of the talents, and removed experience entirely. Yes I know it gave you experience at the end of missions, but come on, that's not a fucking Experience system that we all recognize.

Mass Effect 2 was a brilliant game, and in many ways it was a better game than ME1, but they just made some very odd choices regarding the RPG elements. It's especially odd considering how much of it they got right in the first game, and then decided to radically change them for no good reason in ME2.

Oh, and don't even get me started on planet scanning. I already said that whoever came up with that idea should have been fired... out of a cannon into the Sun.

 

[WouldYouKindly]

Less variety in abilities for each character. The game outright tells you in the interface how effective this ability will be against this enemy at this moment instead of letting you figure out that damping should be used against biotic enemies. Elimination of decent vehicle combat. The hammerhead doesn't count because it's made of paper mache, has only one attack, and doesn't really include free roam sections. The upgrade system was just a goddamn time drain. I preferred the mix and match upgrade system from ME. My last pet peeve is the notable lack of armor on certain companions.

It's not a bad game, and it's improved in a lot of areas, but it's not perfect.

 

[Pillypill]

The cutting of the optional things like weapon mods, having to buy new guns and armour, and things like the hack skill. They weren't needed (I beat ME1, on it's hardest setting, with very little dabling in side skills and weapon mods) but it was nice to have those things there if you wanted to use them.
Also they made leveling up pretty much a definite at the end of major missions, which while certainly must have made balancing easier, did detract from the RPG experience many people were expecting. The world was smaller and exploration was less rewarding, credits were made pretty much worthless to the player because they were so abundent.

But i didn't care, because i play RPG's to RP, that aspect of ME was vastly improved in the sequel.

 

[Undeadpool]

In ME2 I have to take cover dynamically with a changing situation and use my party's abilities to get through even the simplest encounters on the higher difficulties (Hardcore/Insane). In ME1, which I went back to after playing a TON of 2, I could stand in the middle of a firefight, completely ignore my party, and snipe one enemy after another. If I took enough damage to actually matter, I could pop a medigel and completely recover, or I could take cover for a few seconds And this was as the "fragile" Infiltrator class.

It's really sad that so many people define a deep, intelligent experience with tedious number crunching and inventory management.

 

[scorptatious]

Honestly, I'm kind of glad that they trimmed down some of the stuff from Mass Effect 1. There are a ton of different ammo types, armors, and guns that you'll probably never use. So streamlining them in ME2 makes it so that you don't have to deal with all that cluttered inventory.

I also didn't have too much of a problem with the skill system. Granted, I wish it was a bit more like ME1's leveling system and you had more to choose from, but I believe that it's still large enough so you have some amount of customization.

That said, I am glad they are bringing back some RPG elements in Mass Effect 3. I just hope Bioware doesn't go completely overboard.

 

[NinjaDeathSlap]

The only thing that I felt was worst in ME2 than in ME1 was the story... It was way too mankind-centric.
In the first game, mankind was the new kid in town. We weren't the heroes, we weren't the best and even when compared to the asari or the turians, we were like kids in a playground. We were newcomers and even if mankind as a whole become extinct, the galaxy would still go on as normal. Threads like the Reapers were some kind of eldritch abomination, too big, too powerful and too unstoppable to even dream of fighting alone. Then, in ME2

Spoiler

it turns out the Collectors are after the humans (and humans alone... not the turians, asari, elchor or any of the tens of sentient species in the galaxy), following orders from the Reapers to gather or kill us so they can turn us (just us, apparently) into Reapers... no other specie was in immediate danger. In other words, they changed the role of mankind from one of the characters in the play to the main protagonist,

which makes the motivation for characters like Garrus, Samara or Mordin a little harder to believe.

Mordin is a scientist/spec-ops soldier, so the combination of mystery and adventure excites him.

Samara owes you a favor after you helped her with her investigation on Illium.

Garrus is your friend, he's looking for a way out of Omega anyway, and he already knows about the threat the Reapers pose to everyone, so of course he's going to follow you.

(as for the other non-human allies...)

Thane is on a quest for self redemption, and saving an entire race from genocide is a pretty redeeming feature.

Legion is fascinated by you and realises you are the only one who can warn the galaxy about the Reapers as no-one trusts the Geth.

Tali already knows you, is in love with you, and you do save her ass on Haestrom.

Grunt is just in it for the killing, although he does respect you once he sees you in action.

 

[AM City Watch]

I think it comes down, at least in terms of mechanics, to how much control a player wants over their character. ME1 allowed more (micro)management of stats and abilities, ME2 less so. Whether that's dumbing it down or cutting the clutter depends on the player.

For myself, I am ambivalent about the mechanics changes but consider the story to be so stupid it hurts.

 

[Agayek]

1. The idea of the Citadel was to trick the highest levels of government and military into congregating around one location. So when the Reapers attack all hope of organic life establishing an effective and organised resistance is wiped out in one swift ambush. If the Reapers had built more than one of these the Galactic hierarchy would end up spread between them, decreasing the chances of victory across all fronts.

Except that they don't have to build gigantic Citadel things where people can actually find them. A perfect example is the Collector base. Why not stick an extra-galactic Mass Relay on that. Then they can't be locked out of the galaxy. Or just find another few places that are similarly hard to get to and build it there.

Besides, the Citadel is a lot more than just a mass relay. I'm referring to nothing more than a mass relay that can accept jumps from outside the galaxy. It doesn't have to be habitable, by anyone or anything. Just leave one laying around so they don't get locked out of the galaxy they feed on regularly.

2. True, although it would be much harder for a race of machines to live undercover for 50,000 years. The Collectors could pretty much pass themselves off as a race of alien mercenaries and slave traders for that time. Dangerous, but never posing a direct threat to any significant authority (and I suppose they could get their own food, as the Collector General is the only one with a permanent neural link to Harbinger, all he has to do is order them to, y'know, survive)

First off, from my understanding, the Collector General is Harbinger. Everything I've read in the Codex and seen in the game supports that.

Second, it's still vastly more efficient to use some probes to ambush the occasional transport ship and sift through the wreckage. Or even kidnap the occasional individual off of their worlds. It would accomplish whatever the Collector's did and cost vastly less resources.

3. They're kidnapping humans because they see humans as their biggest threat after Shepard's actions in Mass Effect 1 and don't want to risk a direct assault until humanity is out of the way. So they use the Collectors, who operate outside council space and have no proven connection to the Reapers, to try and kill Shepard and wipe out his entire race. Also, because they consider humanity to be their strongest adversary, they figure the next generation of Reapers will be stronger if they use human genetic material. That also answers why they couldn't just build a ship out of scrap and put a reaper AI in it, because you need the liquefied remains of billions of organic lifeforms to make a Reaper (and also a ship made out of scrap would fly like scrap and fight like scrap).

Except they don't wipe out humanity. They don't even try. They pick off individual colonies when they have significantly less military strength than the last time. They are picking a fight with an enemy that already killed a Reaper and a fleet, when they have a mass of drones and one ship. It makes no sense.

As for the slushy, you're right. It may be required to use liquified organics to build a Reaper (even though that doesn't explain why the Terminator thing was made out of metal), but they don't need a Reaper. They need to open the Citadel's mass relay. Throw a copy of Harbinger's consciousness into the Collector ship or a ship made out of the debris surrounding the Collector's base and send it to the Citadel to hack in and open the relay.

Or even better, instead of running in and dragging off the crew of the Normandy when they attacked, kill all the humans then and there, then take the ship itself. Replace EDI with Harbinger and you then have a Reaper consciousness in charge of the most advanced ship in the galaxy, with the capacity to go completely undetected by anyone in Citadel space. Fly that to the Citadel and open the relay. Then your problem is solved.

Also, all metal is scrap metal. Melt it down, maybe purify it a bit, (both of which the Collector's have the tech and room for) and pour it into molds or whatever to build your new Reaper.

As for the whole indoctrination plan, that didn't exactly work well for them the first time around, and would be unlikely to work on a second attempt with all the increased security after the Geth attack. Also, they were supposed to be able to unlock the Citadel without any help in the first place, but they couldn't because the Keepers evolved to resist the indoctrination, something the Reapers couldn't have foreseen.

I'll give you that, but they didn't even try to sneak Saren in quietly. All they really had to do, once Sovereign indoctrinated Saren, before Shepard even got to the Citadel, was bring Saren there, on the excuse of meeting the Council. No one would question why he brought his ship with him. Then Sovereign could have opened the relay himself, or had Saren do it if it required someone tiny.

They've already proven they can control high-functioning individuals, just use that again.

Also, the Keepers didn't evolve. The Protheans actively altered them during their extinction so that they would ignore Reaper signals in the future.

4. Because Shepard and his allies are the only people to have seen for themselves hard evidence of the Reaper's existence. Even the people who saw Sovereign attack the Citadel never got the chance to find out what it really was. Shepard was the only person ever to speak to it. As we saw, after Shepard was killed in the first Collector attack, everyone was quickly able to let denial take over in the face of no conclusive proof. If they had let Shepard live, he might have been able to persuade enough people that Sovereign was a Reaper, and that there were more of them out there, and they could have already started forming a united front ages before the Reapers could reach the Galaxy. With Shepard dead before he can spread his warning too far however, they maintain the element of surprise.

Except that's not how reality works. Do you believe the Lizardman guy is right? Will any amount of time of him spewing his rhetoric change your mind on that?

The Reapers are machines that have been manipulating organics for presumably billions of years. They know how organics work. Without proof, someone raving about evil spaceships coming to wipe out all life sounds like nothing more than a lunatic.

The Reapers know this.

The logical play would be to let Shepard discredit himself while they quietly worked in the background to prepare for their invasion.

Instead, they actively antagonize the only person ever to defeat them, using a weapon they do not know and do not understand.

The bolded bit is the most important part here. They have no idea how Shepard did what he did. There's no clues to whether it was a one-off or if it could be repeated, or even what he did in the first place. All they know was that Shepard and Sovereign had a punch-up and Sovereign lost.

No one with half a brain will seek a fight in that scenario without at least attempting to figure out what Shepard did and why it worked.

 

[GrizzlerBorno]

Can't agree there. I played ME2 with a "Leaning heavily on Paragon" Shepard who occasionally foul-mouthed TIM and certain other people.

....and I didn't have the Persuasion to stop Morinth. I didn't have the Persuasion to keep Jack's Loyalty. I didn't have the persuasion to do a few other things (Tali's loyalty, I think?) in spite of being a "Nice" guy, JUST because I refused to kiss Illusive Man's ass.

Maybe it was a difference in Difficulty level? Maybe you get less Paragon/Renegade points in Hard......which would be dumb and broken.

I think this is a big problem with this game. It ties Paragon/Renegade scores to a gameplay mechanic that punishes you for getting both Paragon and Renegade points, which defeats the purpose of having a Paragon/Renegade system instead of a morality slider in the first place. I'm much more a fan of the dragon age-style "pick your favorite response out of these 6" alternative.

I .....wouldn't use Dragon Age as an example tbh. DA2 made the same mistake as ME2, and whilst Origins had a MUCH better (old-style) conversation system, overall, it tied the Persuasion mechanic to that whole unnecessary "Talents" system where persuasion was the ONLY talent you're PC would train in. It was not an ideal way of doing so.

I think ME1 is, so far, the best example. Just make it a simple, and separate, skill that I may or may not invest in.

 

[Katana314]

- Mass Effect 1 allowed me to change Wrex's shoes! Oh, the complexity.

I lol'd at this one. I pretty much agree, too.

I like how in Team Fortress 2, when you activate the Kritzkrieg, turning on all critical hits for the person you're healing so that they deal 4x as much damage each hit, YOU REALLY NOTICE. There is active reason you'd want to do that, and you see the effect right away. When you swap for a 194-damage sniper rifle with 95% accuracy to a 197-damage sniper rifle with 98% accuracy, you don't notice.

 

[NinjaDeathSlap]

I guess not everyone takes story as seriously as I do, but there was a pronounced tonal shift from the first game to the second. The first one takes the universe and science fiction elements very seriously, and great care was taken to ensure everything was consistent. Just listen to the codex entries from the first game: serious thought and research went into making this setting plausible. Mass Effect 2, on the other hand, veers into "flashy action movie" territory. While the first game has a very restrained, hard sci-fi aesthetic - technology like weapons, armor, and ships all look drab and functional rather than flashy - the second game slaps unnecessary glowy lights and bulky shoulderpads on everything. Lots of characters are ushered into the plot because they're 'cool', rather than being relevant to the story (Jack, for instance, brings hardly anything to your team you can't get from a mentally stable Asari.) Cerberus is changed from a terrorist organization to a benevolent, omnipotent Illuminati that gives you a massive ship, gets all your friends back together to crew it, and knows everything at all times (but, again, can't find anyone more professional than Jack to join your squad, because someone on the dev team thought she was a badass.) A new villain is introduced that has almost no bearing on the overarching plot. Think about it: what progress has been made in stopping the Reaper invasion from the end of ME1 to the end of ME2? Did the events of the game even delay them?

All of these things are writing genocide to a franchise that had a lot going for it. The first game had a really tight narrative with a well-conceived mystery plot ("What is the Conduit?"), strong antagonist (Saren), strong reveal (Sovereign), and meaningful finale (a climactic battle that cements a new position for mankind in the galaxy). It had a classic three-act structure that any fiction writing student can immediately recognize. All the characters and events were an organic part of the plot. Comparatively, Mass Effect 2 was a string of unrelated action scenes, culminating in a silly fight with a giant terminator.

Lastly, what the "faffing about" provided was pacing. Mass Effect 2 consisted almost entirely of pointing a gun at things and shooting them; the original involved a lot more exploration and negotiation. It did get rather slow at times, but it felt more like it was a game about a space adventure, rather than being a game about shooting things.

Anyway, that's my dissertation. I thought Mass Effect 1 was Bioware's crowning achievement, and the sequel took away a lot of the elements I lauded the first one for. I honestly don't mind the reduced RPG elements; it's everything else getting dumbed down that frustrates me.

Well, seem as Bioware let you import your entire codex from ME1 to ME2 along with everything else, that would suggest they were still taking the detail of the first gamer into account.

I guess Bioware are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Yes, there was a tonal shift, but if there hadn't been people would have just got pissy with the old sequel argument of 'They're just selling us the same game for full price again!'.

In regards to Cerberus... In the first game you learn nothing about their command structure or the true extent of their organisation's reach. So who's to say they were ever meant to be just a terrorist organisation. They were large and well resourced enough to track down, abduct, and kill an Admiral in the Alliance Navy in what must have been a matter of day's, so they can't have been that small, and who's to say they couldn't have grown in the 2 years that Shepard was dead.

As far as the plot goes... No, you don't slow the Reaper advance or do anything quite as significant as the end of the first game. But of course you don't, the second installment of a trilogy isn't supposed to be as climactic as the first or third. And you do still deal the Reapers a blow. Although they would never admit it, the Reapers are scared of facing humanity in a fair fight after what you did to Sovereign, so they try to use the Collectors to subtly remove humans from the picture, paving the way for the invasion. They also want to use human genetic material to create the next generation of Reaper, the logic being that they will become stronger if they use the DNA of their strongest adversaries.

This is just my opinion, but I thought the dialouge added pacing far better than the vehicle sections or the equipment swapping did, which is what I was referring to by 'faffing about'. and the dialouge is still there in ME2.

I have no doubts that ME2 reaches a larger audience with its softer sci-fi tone, but that doesn't mean it needed to go that way in order to keep things fresh.

And we did know some things about Cerberus - we knew they were a radical fringe group that focused on dangerous human experimentation. In ME2, that's thrown out the window, and replaced with this organization with seemingly infinite resources, manpower, and intelligence as the plot demands it. It's like ME3 opening with the reveal that the President of Earth is an erudite, well-spoken Thresher Maw, and dismissing the fact that all previously encountered Thresher Maws were radical terrorist Thresher Maws acting alone. Suspension of disbelief only goes so far. I guess if you like it you like it, but personally I felt like Cerberus was a totally unnecessary addition to the plot in an effort to make the story "darker" than the first game.

And while it's true that the second part of the trilogy isn't supposed to wrap up the whole conflict, it should at least address the same conflict as the first part. What would you miss if you went straight from Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 3? Do you spend the time preparing for the Reaper invasion? Do you postpone their plans at all? No: a new enemy is handwaved into existence to give you a neat new character model to shoot at, and at the end of the game you blow up their base. The closest thing to relevance is learning some trivia about the Reapers' objectives that in no way will help in ME3.

And on the subject of Reapers, let's compare Sovereign and Harbinger, because they're very different characters. When you meet Sovereign, he seems barely annoyed that you're bothering him. He's an ageless, deathless machine god the size of a small continent, and you're talking back to him. He explains nothing and brushes you off. It made the Reapers seem really ominous, unknowable, and intimidating; it's an important part of their character in the first game. Harbinger, on the other hand, can't smack-talk you enough. He warps in to fight you every five minutes and spouts silly grimdark dialogue that sounds like a 14-year-old Dungeon Master wrote it. You kill him a hundred times before the end of the game. And what was that unknowable, eternal purpose that Reapers harvest all life for? Reproduction. A nice, easy to understand, unimaginitive reason.

Again, being different isn't a reason for it to be worse by itself. It's just that ME2 is saturated with terrible writing decisions that directly contradict the first game. Killing the main character at the start of the story and then immediately bringing him back with zero consequences is just a bad writing move. So is having a character who somehow knows everything and simply tells the protagonist what to do. And telling the viewer that an organization is dangerous and controversial without ever showing them do anything dangerous or controversial (and instead showing them be helpful and reasonable.)

Heat Sinks weren't introduced because Geth weapons technology made Alliance shield tech obsolete - it was introduced because they wanted to make the game into more recognizable action schlock. Mass Effect 1 seemed above that.

What is assumed to be known about Cerberus in the first game is mostly speculation from people trying to make dealings with or hunt them down, and most of them ended up dead, no matter how big they were. That should have given us a clue that they were far bigger than anyone predicted. Certainly there is nothing concrete in the first game about how far their sphere of influence reaches. I'm not saying that Bioware had it all planned out from the start, but they DID leave room for Cerberus to be explored further, as they were always keeping their cards close to their chest.

Admittedly Mass Effect 2's plot basically plays as a build up for ME3, with the event divided between finding out more about the Reapers, and foreshadowing some of the conflicts you will have to resolve in ME2. But then again, build up is useful. Finding out more about what the Reapers are and what they want gives them an identity of their own a villains, and I certainly found everything I learned about them interesting. Also, without ME2 presenting stuff like the state of Tuchanka after the Genophage, or finding out the Geth's ultimate objectives from Legion, then being asked to resolve these issues in the limited amount of time ME3 will be able to give you before it has to start the final battle would seem a little overwhelming would it not?

You're right in saying Harbinger takes far more interest in you than Sovereign did (and he does get a little tacky in his puppet master role admittedly). But it is worth remembering that in Mass Effect 1 you had not yet killed a Reaper, so of course Sovereign is going to consider you insignificant compared to him. In ME2 it's a whole different story, from where Harbinger stands you killed his Vanguard and then cheated death. He's gonna be a litte pissed off about that. I also thought the 'reproduction' explanation was perfect myself. Think about it, the Reapers are supposed to be completely cold, ultra-logical machines. So what is the only motive for anyone to do anything when you take away all emotional response... self-preservation. So basically, anything other than food or reproduction (and in this case it's kinda both) would have been silly.

Ok, the whole 'dying only to be brought back to life with no consequences' thing was a little pointless. Or was is pointless? You lose all your allies, your ship, it allows the Citadel government to play down your theory about the Reapers, and all these things force you to partner up with an organisation who you fought against last time, presenting a moral dilemma. Being dead for two years also gives the writers a way to bring in tech updates to the new game in a way that makes sense, rather than just "all their guns just changed overnight ok, deal with it!". And let's be honest, even if it was bad writing, it's still better than what most RPG sequels do. That is, something extremely convoluted happens that makes the protagonist lose not just all the weapons they had accumulated over the last game, but all their stats as well, as if somehow losing your sword suddenly makes you forget how to use a sword. Yeah, that makes loads more sense.

No, introducing the ammo system in ME2 wasn't to make it more mainstream. It was because they realised that 1. Infinite ammo makes no kind of sense, and 2. An enemy (Geth Stalker in this case) who is very hard to hit, and whose primary attack essentially stun-locks you by instantly overheating whatever weapon you have drawn at the time, forcing you to pause the action and draw a less efficient weapon for the range you're shooting at, which will then be instantly rendered useless by another one you didn't see (as was the case in ME1) is extremely bad game design! (sorry, but the old system really pissed me off sometimes)

 

[NinjaDeathSlap]

Except that they don't have to build gigantic Citadel things where people can actually find them. A perfect example is the Collector base. Why not stick an extra-galactic Mass Relay on that. Then they can't be locked out of the galaxy. Or just find another few places that are similarly hard to get to and build it there.

Besides, the Citadel is a lot more than just a mass relay. I'm referring to nothing more than a mass relay that can accept jumps from outside the galaxy. It doesn't have to be habitable, by anyone or anything. Just leave one laying around so they don't get locked out of the galaxy they feed on regularly.

If they used this though they would lose the advantage of a surprise attack right at the heart of organic power, and without it an effective resistance could potentially be formed. The Reapers might still win anyway, but they could lose more units than they could replace in one cycle. Seem as the Reapers obviously have long term goals beyond each individual cycle it doesn't seem worth the risk.

First off, from my understanding, the Collector General is Harbinger. Everything I've read in the Codex and seen in the game supports that.

Second, it's still vastly more efficient to use some probes to ambush the occasional transport ship and sift through the wreckage. Or even kidnap the occasional individual off of their worlds. It would accomplish whatever the Collector's did and cost vastly less resources.

Harbinger is the chief Reaper who controls the Collector General through a neural link, which can then be used to possess individual grunts

and if a Reaper probe was ever captured it would be clear that it did not belong to any race in the Galaxy, which might cause people to ask questions. However, tt would not occur to someone who did not already know of the Reapers existence and their connection with the Collectors to check their DNA to see that they were re-purposed Protheans. They can hide in plain sight by posing as an organic race in their own right.

Except they don't wipe out humanity. They don't even try. They pick off individual colonies when they have significantly less military strength than the last time. They are picking a fight with an enemy that already killed a Reaper and a fleet, when they have a mass of drones and one ship. It makes no sense.

As for the slushy, you're right. It may be required to use liquified organics to build a Reaper (even though that doesn't explain why the Terminator thing was made out of metal), but they don't need a Reaper. They need to open the Citadel's mass relay. Throw a copy of Harbinger's consciousness into the Collector ship or a ship made out of the debris surrounding the Collector's base and send it to the Citadel to hack in and open the relay.

Or even better, instead of running in and dragging off the crew of the Normandy when they attacked, kill all the humans then and there, then take the ship itself. Replace EDI with Harbinger and you then have a Reaper consciousness in charge of the most advanced ship in the galaxy, with the capacity to go completely undetected by anyone in Citadel space. Fly that to the Citadel and open the relay. Then your problem is solved.

Also, all metal is scrap metal. Melt it down, maybe purify it a bit, (both of which the Collector's have the tech and room for) and pour it into molds or whatever to build your new Reaper.

They are trying to abduct all of humanity, they are just doing it one colony at a time so they don't attract too much attention because they are vulnerable. Remember, they are so good at covering their tracks if it hadn't been for Veetor on Freedoms Progress no-one would ever have known it was the Collectors. Assuming they never attacked Earth or the Citadel by themselves, they could easily have harvested every single human colony and left without a trace.

The Reapers could have supplied the Collectors with all the synthetic parts required to build a Reaper, they just needed the organic element. Also, by creating a new Reaper inside the Galaxy they would have a much better chance of opening the Citadel relay. Think about it, Sovereign attacked accompanied by a massive Geth fleet, as well as Saran using the conduit to bypass the Citadels defenses... and still lost. So you're saying that one ship, with a ghost copy of a reaper inside it (you don't know if that's possible anyway, what with Reapers being half organic) attacking an even more heavily defended Citadel than last time, without the aid of the Conduit, would stand a better chance???

Again, even if you could copy Harbinger's consciousness and fly the Normandy with it, you reckon the amount of collectors that you could fit on the Normandy could land at a docking station in the wards, then fight their way all the way to the Citadel tower without being killed? Yeah, no.

I'll give you that, but they didn't even try to sneak Saren in quietly. All they really had to do, once Sovereign indoctrinated Saren, before Shepard even got to the Citadel, was bring Saren there, on the excuse of meeting the Council. No one would question why he brought his ship with him. Then Sovereign could have opened the relay himself, or had Saren do it if it required someone tiny.

They've already proven they can control high-functioning individuals, just use that again.

Also, the Keepers didn't evolve. The Protheans actively altered them during their extinction so that they would ignore Reaper signals in the future.

I think some questions would have been raised about exactly where Saren got hold of his kilometer long spaceship with technology beyond organic comprehension if they tried that.

ok, I got my wires crossed about the Keepers, but my point still stands that they couldn't have predicted that some Protheans would survive, discover the Keeper's secret then replicate Mass Relay technology, create a back door into the Citadel and reprogram all the Keepers before they starved.

Except that's not how reality works. Do you believe the Lizardman guy is right? Will any amount of time of him spewing his rhetoric change your mind on that?

The Reapers are machines that have been manipulating organics for presumably billions of years. They know how organics work. Without proof, someone raving about evil spaceships coming to wipe out all life sounds like nothing more than a lunatic.

The Reapers know this.

The logical play would be to let Shepard discredit himself while they quietly worked in the background to prepare for their invasion.

Instead, they actively antagonize the only person ever to defeat them, using a weapon they do not know and do not understand.

The bolded bit is the most important part here. They have no idea how Shepard did what he did. There's no clues to whether it was a one-off or if it could be repeated, or even what he did in the first place. All they know was that Shepard and Sovereign had a punch-up and Sovereign lost.

No one with half a brain will seek a fight in that scenario without at least attempting to figure out what Shepard did and why it worked.

After ME1 Shepard is a hero, that means his word is going to carry some weight with both politicians and the masses in the euphoria after his victory. That IS how reality works.

Shepard then drops off the face of the Galaxy for two years before he can spread the word too far. In that time, the euphoria dies down. The Citadel Council dismiss your claims out of fear (again, recognisable organic emotional response). When you come back in ME2 few people know you're alive and most of those who do think you've turned terrorist, so no-one will believe you.

Agreed, they didn't know how Shepard defeated Sovereign, which is why they ambushed him using the Collectors rather than going after him themselves. Even if they failed they might at least learn something. Fear of a second defeat was eclipsed by fear of letting him live.

Look, at the end of the day it's sci-fi, and it's a game so we could argue about tiny details for weeks and it wouldn't change the fact that in a world of FTL travel and aliens who all speak English SOME dramatic license is acceptable. Anyway, plot holes of not, Mass Effect 2 is still miles ahead of what most games consider to be good writing, so is there really any need to nit-pick?

 

[hermes]

The only thing that I felt was worst in ME2 than in ME1 was the story... It was way too mankind-centric.
In the first game, mankind was the new kid in town. We weren't the heroes, we weren't the best and even when compared to the asari or the turians, we were like kids in a playground. We were newcomers and even if mankind as a whole become extinct, the galaxy would still go on as normal. Threads like the Reapers were some kind of eldritch abomination, too big, too powerful and too unstoppable to even dream of fighting alone. Then, in ME2

Spoiler

it turns out the Collectors are after the humans (and humans alone... not the turians, asari, elchor or any of the tens of sentient species in the galaxy), following orders from the Reapers to gather or kill us so they can turn us (just us, apparently) into Reapers... no other specie was in immediate danger. In other words, they changed the role of mankind from one of the characters in the play to the main protagonist,

which makes the motivation for characters like Garrus, Samara or Mordin a little harder to believe.

Mordin is a scientist/spec-ops soldier, so the combination of mystery and adventure excites him.
Samara owes you a favor after you helped her with her investigation on Illium.
Garrus is your friend, he's looking for a way out of Omega anyway, and he already knows about the threat the Reapers pose to everyone, so of course he's going to follow you.
(as for the other non-human allies...)
Thane is on a quest for self redemption, and saving an entire race from genocide is a pretty redeeming feature.
Legion is fascinated by you and realises you are the only one who can warn the galaxy about the Reapers as no-one trusts the Geth.
Tali already knows you, is in love with you, and you do save her ass on Haestrom.
Grunt is just in it for the killing, although he does respect you once he sees you in action.

Which means every other non-human is there because of YOU or because they were hired. Its not that they are not motivated, but it makes it look like only humans are concerned and endangered by the Reapers (who, by the way, doesn't appear until the end of the very last mission).

 

[WorldFree55]

Mass Effect 2 was better in practically every single category than Mass Effect 1. However they took out some if not little RPG elements that apparently pissed some people off.