Just finally bothered to do Zaeed's loyalty mission and I think it demonstrates what's bothering me about the game, or rather, the game's lost potential and lack of ambition:
Zaeed, being a psycho, goes mental and endangers civilians by setting fire to an oil refinery. Shepard has to make a choice - let the refinery workers burn to death in order to stay on Zaeed's good side, or tell Zaeed to go fuck himself and abandon him to rescue the workers. I chose to save the workers, I don't know what happens if you pick the other option, but I'll give the devs the credit of assuming the following encounter doesn't happen.
Zaeed's target gets away, ostensibly due to Shepard delaying the mission by insisting on saving the workers. The game even signals to the player that choosing to do the right thing here will fail Zaeed's loyalty mission (the dialogue wheel choice is phrased as "screw loyalty" or something like that). Zaeed's target escapes and he points a gun at Shepard, screaming at her that she's cost him everything.
If the game was brave, it'd stick with the theme it's set up here. The cost of doing the right thing should be to lose Zaeed, or even to be forced into a lethal confrontation with him. Instead, a nearby girder falls on him (lmfao) and Shepard gets an easy dialogue choice which clears the mission and also assures Zaeed's loyalty.
This is one of the very, very few times so far where Shepard's actually been able to take an active role in events and assert herself and her values as a leader, and it ends up being meaningless and devoid of consequence. If they just had the balls to make your choice actually matter here, and to make the morally appealing choice that most players will go for have a real consequence for the player, this could have been great. Imagine if all the loyalty missions were like this, inviting the player to either discard their morals for the sake of keeping their crew of lunatics happy, or stick by their morals at the cost of alienating their team and potentially having them turn on you. This would have made the game incredible for Paragon characters, and a lot of fun for Renegade characters too, since it'd offer opportunities to go apeshit which ME1 never really did.
This would make the story fascinating since it'd be about a relatively honourable ex-military officer trying to keep his or her moral integrity intact while dealing with some of the worst people in the galaxy. This'd make it a nice counterpart to ME1 too - it's easy to do the right thing when you're a military officer with the entire Alliance behind you and you're being put in simplistic black-and-white situations, but it's much harder to be a good person when you're out on the fringes of the galaxy being immersed in all kinds of horrific shit.
Instead, the game always pussies out and offers you a nice colour-coded dialogue option to get all the rewards at none of the costs. Tali's mission does the same thing - turning in the evidence of her father's atrocities is clearly the right thing to do, but alienates Tali. Taking part in a coverup is ethically unconscionable, but will keep Tali happy. It doesn't matter though because you can click the red or blue auto-win option to get the best of both worlds. If the game had allowed you to alienate crewmates to the point where they ditch you, the suicide mission could be fascinating for Paragon characters - you'd have basically nobody left to stand by you, meaning you'd be essentially fucked (it could even be impossible to get a good ending at this point if the writers had any real balls), and it would encourage subsequent playthroughs where players would have to consider exactly how far they're prepared to morally compromise themselves in order to get a better ending.
Haha, onto the Arrival DLC which I've never played before and I'm already loving it.
Yeah, stuff can get wonky at times. Have you played Lair of the Shadow Broker before?
Never played it and I'm still putting it off, as the one thing I know about it is that it involves a hovercar chase. However, I'm kind of looking forward to it now as I've given up on taking the game in any way seriously and I'm starting to enjoy it as the nonsensical B-movie disaster that it is. Arrival legit made me laugh out loud several times.
If ME1 has better gunplay now, I might put that one at the top now. Maybe.
Legendary Edition's combat is pretty good - it still feels strangely stiff and clunky but it's a hundred times better than the original game's, and if you stay on top of upgrading your equipment, the game offers a nice steady stream of rewards to players who specialise in one type of weapon. I chose pistols and it was great, killing everything in three or four headshots on Hardcore. ME2's is smoother but somehow a lot less fun, there's far less powers available to play with and there's no real sense of building a character in a typical RPG sense, so it just feels to me like a third-rate cover shooter. Any larger mech units in particular just suck the fun out of the game, bullet sponge nightmares.
