Mass Effect Legendary Edition remaster trilogy

[Caim]

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.

Treating Mass Effect as a B-movie with a nine figure budget is the way to go. You're Commander Shepard, hardass space soldier who goes around punching reporters and banging aliens.

Speaking of banging, how have you handled Kelly Chambers?

 

[Lemming42]

Laughed at her hairstyle, which is way different in Legendary Edition to what I remember.

Amazing how much worse they made her look, she literally looks like she's stolen one of Diana Ross' old wigs:


Other than that, I've mostly ignored her, trying desperately to avoid going too near her in case she announces that I've got new messages at my private terminal or that Jacob needs my help with something.

Does Kelly have a romance arc? I'm playing as femshep so I'm not sure who my options are. I ignored Kaidan and Liara in ME1 because I couldn't stand either of them. There seems to be something developing with Samara which might be interesting given the whole weird insane Samurai thing she has going on.

 

[Caim]

Does Kelly have a romance arc? I'm playing as femshep so I'm not sure who my options are. I ignored Kaidan and Liara in ME1 because I couldn't stand either of them. There seems to be something developing with Samara which might be interesting given the whole weird insane Samurai thing she has going on.

Kelly is a "light" romance option, aka you can chat her up but you don't get to bang her. Instead she'll do some "sexy" dancing for you like the strippers in Omega do. Which is okay, given that in one of the dialogues it is strongly implied that she carries several Varren STDs. Yes, she fucks space dogs. Romance options for a female Shepard are:

- Garrus, who has become the Punisher IN SPACE. Probably the most "normal" of your options in ME2.
- Thane, the lizard assassin who's dying of a failing respiratory system. Don't romance the dude whose remaining years can be counted on one hand.
- Jacob, who has the most over the top corny dialogue that you HAVE to look up if just for the meme alone. Romancing him will lead to an interesting turn of events in ME3, which is pretty based on Bioware's behalf.
- Samara is not a true romance option either, and if you connect with her you can have an exchange with her about it in ME3. You won't get to bang the blue alien GILF though. If you want that go look up porn of her.

 

[J1M]

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.

If you do his loyalty mission after the suicide mission (i.e. the post-game), you can actually leave Zaeed to die in the fire. No idea why Bioware restricted the choice that way.

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.

It doesn't. Zaeed kills his target and everyone leaves happy. (except for the the workers and their families)

I think you meant to say a wicked-cool cutscene plays where he burns the target to death by ejecting a heat sink into a pool of gasoline.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

At least now after playing the DLC you'll have some idea wtf is going at the start of ME3. For me, I was just getting accused of committing some horrible crime and I didn't even know what it was. At first I thought they were intentionally trying to make it Kafkaesque, but then I realized they just were so stupid that they assumed everyone had played the DLC.

If you don't complete the DLC you're just accused of being a member of Cerberus or something. Not really sure what since I played the game years after it was finished, and as a result, never beat the game without also beating that DLC. Instead a whole bunch of marines went to that space station, and all died. As a result you lose some of your war points.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

There is alot to like about ME2. While there is a bit too much lens flare, it epitomizes the slick, well packaged Hollywood experience. If they would have kept ME1 skills and frankly, the planetary exploration, it would be the best. It was just dumbed down a bit too much. ME1 was in some ways crude, but it had freedom. It wad also based on the fundamentals of a game, rather than a movie. That's what keeps ME1 as being the best of the series. It was an experience by the player, rathwr than for the consumer.

 

[Lemming42]

I just finished the Collector ship trap mission, and the spongey-ness of the enemies on Hardcore is getting to me. Even with the new sniper rifle and maxed out inferno ammo, the flying things and the Scions are just irritating. Not least because the squadmates will invariably be slaughtered in seconds by the scions.

Anyway, the excellent main plot continues. The Collector trap was a double-trap! The Collectors set it, The Illusive Man found out about it, and then he lied to us to send us into the trap! Why? Well,

That's it. That's the whole explanation. What the hell does that mean?

Well, Shepard doesn't bother to ask about it. She yells at him whichever option you pick, but only because he lied. She doesn't really ask why. He tells us to pass this on to the team, which we do, entirely off-screen. Jacob is relieved to discover that The Illusive Man "didn't sell us out", and Mordin agrees that The Illusive Man took "a necessary risk" with our lives. That's the end of it, the matter is closed.

I'll ask here since the game didn't bother to tell me - why were we made to walk into this trap? How could telling Shepard tip the Collectors off "in any number of ways"? Are they monitoring our communications? If they're such hot shit when it comes to intel, why didn't they know that Cerberus had intercepted and decoded their fake distress signal? What would the Collectors have done if they were tipped off? Their plan was just to get Shepard into the ship and then lock it down and send waves of mooks to kill her, which they would have been able to do anyway whether she'd entered the trap willingly or not. Also, they power up the ship, but only right as Shepard is leaving. Was there a reason they couldn't power it up as soon as she got on board, lock everything down, destroy the Normandy (or force it to flee, abandoning the away team) and then fly out of there with Shepard's team trapped aboard?

 

[Ismaul]

She-pard?

 

[U-8D8]

I'll ask here since the game didn't bother to tell me - why were we made to walk into this trap??

Bioware wanted a morally ambiguous character without having the skill to write a morally ambiguous character. Hell the entire MO of Cerberous in ME2 is doing ill-advised, morally subject things all for a nebulous "greater good" so Bioware could prompt fans to either shake their fists at the evil badmen or delude themselves into thinking the Illusive man is actually deep, instead of asking the ever-pertinent question "why?" At least when they were a hodunk terrorist cell in 1 you could handwave their idiocy but Bioware being Bioware had to give the shadowy organization a face.

Truth be told I hadn't even thought about how stupid the Collectors were in that mission. I think I built up a tolerance for messy logic like that after the black-hole of intelligence that was the Purgatory.

 

[J1M]

It's common for writers to assign a faction the "chaotic stupid" morality when they can't think of a good argument against their core position. (In this case, human preservation and supremacy.)

 

[Caim]

She-pard?

Wr-ex.

 

[Lemming42]

EDIT: In the next room there's three more of this guy, all identical, in equally bizarre poses, all bald. Some kind of RPGCodex meetup?

 

[Lemming42]

Oh god what the fuck. Now I'm in some kind of Crash Bandicoot level, in a vehicle that's somehow way worse than the fucking Mako, where I have to leap over steam vents. This game is on another level, it's actually a masterpiece.

 

[Aarwolf]

Oh, you seem to enjoy that famous Hammerhead, my deepest condolences to you.

 

[Lemming42]

Shadow Broker DLC, this boss fight against the teleporting Asari might be the worst thing ever made. The preceding carpark shootout where it just sends endless identical cars of four guys after you (who all arrive right as the previous wave dies) was jaw-droppingly shit but this is really something else.

Awful from a gameplay perspective, nonsensical from a story perspective - we cornered her as she staggered away, beaten and bleeding, and she was forced to take a hostage in an attempt to make us stand down, as she was in no shape to fight. We knock her down and save the hostage, she stands up completely unharmed and is the toughest enemy so far. Amazing.

 

[karoliner]

There's nothing particulary good about ME 1. People keep repeating this meme about ME 1 having the best writing and is just bullshit. And the sequels do this annoying thing were they improve in some aspects but fuck up in others. So you need to put up with a lot of bullshit to enjoy the good parts.

 

[Lemming42]

There's nothing particulary good about ME 1. People keep repeating this meme about ME 1 having the best writing and is just bullshit. And the sequels do this annoying thing were they improve in some aspects but fuck up in others. So you need to put up with a lot of bullshit to enjoy the good parts.

ME1 isn't very good, but it's not actively annoying in the way ME2 is. ME1 at least feels like an earnest attempt to make a sci-fi setting where everything makes internal sense, which they mostly achieve, except the end result is boring because nobody seemed to really have any good ideas, and just recycled Star Trek TOS plots ("people are being controlled by a psychic plant!", "the last member of an endangered non-human race is a mother who begs our heroes for mercy!", etc) - and removed almost everything that made those plots work in Star Trek in order to simplify them for an action game targeted at 12 year olds - and then combined that with an overarching plot that's just BioWare's usual "the world will end soon unless one asshole and his annoying companions can kill a bullet sponge boss".

I'd take ME1's earnest dullness over ME2's try-hard retardation personally, but a lot of it comes down to preference. ME1's other big advantage is that you have a lot more control over Shepard's responses to things, which makes you feel at least slightly involved with what's happening (even if ultimately you have virtually no control over the plot), while ME2 might as well just not bother giving you dialogue choices half the time since you end up just being offered one option anyway.

 

[tritosine2k]

Not only ME1 is more of a labour of love (if that exists in AAA) than a thrown together ME2,
it should be obvious by now they not only won't throw together a ME1 caliber game- they can't.

Apparently it's not so obvious if you are prime demographic for 2's "epic" "streamlined" "button awesome" wank.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

There's nothing particulary good about ME 1. People keep repeating this meme about ME 1 having the best writing and is just bullshit.

ME1 was decent as a first part of a trilogy which was meant to do worldbuilding (which it did well), but otherwise most characters and the various planetary plots are quite unmemorable. ME2 on the other hand is quite good as an 'episodic' sort of game with a focus on characters rather than plot proper (i.e. ditching ME1's storytelling focus on a grand narrative centered on a hero's journey for one in which the main plot serves only as a skeleton onto which to add the meaty side stories which explore the various companions and the relationships that develop between them and the protagonist in the form of loyalty missions +/- romance). Problem with this change in direction though, besides the occasional inconsistent character writing, is that it doesn't work well at all when envisioned as the middle entry in a trilogy. The game's main plot basically amounts to a lazy narrative copout meant to maintain the trilogy structure of the series without actually splitting the narrative into three big acts. The threat of the Collectors (and the central role played by Cerberus in stopping it) is lazy lorecrafting and the resolution of ME2 feels anticlimactic as fuck, with the defeat of the antagonists being more of a return to the status quo of ME1's epilogue rather than a real advancement of the plot. It isn't a real middle act meant to up the stakes, just a superfluous narrative bridge meant to connect ME1 to ME3.

TL;DR - ME2 would've worked well as a standalone title, not as the middle part of a trilogy.

 

[Silverfish]

ME1 at least feels like an earnest attempt to make a sci-fi setting where everything makes internal sense, which they mostly achieve, except the end result is boring because nobody seemed to really have any good ideas, and just recycled Star Trek TOS plots

Hit the nail on the head. ME1 is the "best" of the lot because crap Star Trek is still leagues better than the Michael Bay stuff 2 and 3 were dishing out.

 

[Nano]

while ME2 might as well just not bother giving you dialogue choices half the time since you end up just being offered one option anyway.

That's an exaggeration IMO. But if you think ME2 already lacks role-playing, wait until you get to ME3.

 

[Lemming42]

Not gonna draw this one out because I'm sure it's been discussed to death over the last ten years, but:

Just got to the part where the Reaper IFF is ready.

I select the Galaxy Map.

Shepard and the entire fucking crew head off in a shuttle for no reason, just so we can have this gay segment where Joker goes prancing about the ship being spooked by Collectors like it's a haunted house.

What the hell? I was only opening the fucking Galaxy Map to go buy more fish for my aquarium. I had to take the whole team with me for that? I had to bring Jack the crazy psycho and Thane the shithead hitman and Samara the insane samurai and Miranda the complete arsehole and Mordin "Mengele" Solus to buy new fish with me? Then the entire crew of the Normandy get whisked away by the Collectors because of this decision.

Complete shit. An actual insult to the player. I'm glad this game's drawing to a close, can't wait to get onto ME3 which I have virtually no memory of. The funniest part is that I still had to go manually buy new fish afterwards because the shuttle sequence doesn't do anything, so as far as my playthrough's concerned, Shepard took the entire team into a shuttle* and flew around in a circle doing nothing and then returned to discover the crew abducted and the ship in tatters.

Like this is completely retarded, it's not even because of something the player did and/or was railroaded into doing. At least when the people of Arroyo get taken away near the end of Fallout 2, it's because you were away on your mission to recover the GECK. How hard would it have been to set this up so that the player returns from whatever loyalty/recruitment mission they were on to find that the ship was attacked in their absence? Yeah, it'd be dumb that all the recruited teammates are mysteriously the only survivors, but it'd be way less idiotic than this shit, and it'd at least make it seem like the player was actually blindsided while on a routine mission away from the ship that they themselves chose to do, rather than being forced away from the ship by a cutscene to buy fish.

*I like how you can see in the cutscene that the shuttle isn't even big enough to contain them all. They just keep getting in like a clown car.

 

[Lemming42]

Uhh what the hell's going on. I started ME3 and the game seems to have malformed into some bizarre load of shit. Press space to leap across the gap!!! Press space to dodge-roll (lmfao)!!! Hold F for the big omni-knife takedown!!!

We're on Earth and buildings are exploding!! Pew pew pew, follow Anderson (who runs like he's shat his pants) down this straight corridor! Oh, but now we're on Mars! Liara and Ashley are both here for some reason and Liara's executing downed people - cool! But not just any people - CERBERUS SUPERSOLDIERS who wear CERBERUS POWER ARMOUR! Only Shepard and her old pals can take down the Cerberus power raiders! Epic!

Who the fuck's Vega? He's my old mate who I've known for years or something but I've never seen this fucker before in my life. Why's Ashley here? Why does she look weird? What's happening?

Actually gasped in shock as ACHIEVEMENTS flooded the bottom-right corner of the screen. 500 headshots! 1500 kills over all three games! Kill 200 enemies with powers!!!

I feel like I'm locked out of participating in dialogue even more than in ME2. When I was going into the options menu to put subtitles on, I saw that there's an option to remove dialogue choices. Like, there's just an option right there in the menu to remove dialogue choices from the fucking game. That can't be a good sign.

My girlfriend's been watching me play the whole series and she's in absolute stitches at how bad things have gotten. I wish I could laugh along with her but I'm actually sat with my mouth agape, stunned into silence at what I'm seeing. She's been a good sport thus far, laughing it up while I've been going off on half hour long rants about how nothing in ME2 made sense. This game seriously better improve as it goes on, because right now I'm actually in shock. Cerberus power armour raiders! Is this some kind of attempt by the writers to make it up to players? As in, nobody liked being with Cerberus in ME2, so here's chaotic evil Cerberus supersoldiers for you to kill with your new BIG TAKEDOWN skill?

I can't handle this interface, popups everywhere telling me I've gained XP to invest in my mad skills, NEW CODEX ENTRY GAINED! ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED! PARAGON GAINED! LEVEL UP! Losing my mind. Please tell me this gets good.

EDIT: I JUST WANT TO PRESS THE FUCKING ELEVATOR BUTTON BUT SHE DOES A FORWARD ROLL INTO THE WALL BECAUSE IT'S BOUND TO THE SAME KEY

 

[Zeriel]

Oh boy are you in for a beating if you want ME3 to improve. It only goes downhill as you progress. I think the "best" moment in the game is when you get out of the early cinematic/rail-road hell and get to explore the Citadel again and some galactic free-roam, but that's followed by realizing how much of a hollow facade the war effort system is, and then topped by the awful ending arc.

 

[Nutria]

I disagree, ME3 starts off terrible but it becomes pretty okay in the middle and then rapidly turns into ass cancer in the last few missions. Shepherd being literally retarded and saying we should fight the Reapers with a bayonet charge is at least better than Shepherd being both literally retarded and a cuck following Martin Sheen's orders.

Also the combat is actually really good.