DAMN YOU CHICK

I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say here, to me KOTOR is just a rehash of BG except with light sabers instead of swords, whereas ME actually makes the combat somewhat enjoyable.

That said, I agree with Alexb about the game overall. ME2 was better because it was more fun, and in fact I did just about everything you could do in the game. However, the story and characters were still pretty laughable. Literally every character sidequest effectively amounted to playing family counselor to resolve some stupid dispute between a crew member and their parent/child/sibling. Which is pretty retarded on a surface level but extra retarded if you actually think of it in the context of the story, which is that you and your crew are the only thing protecting billions or trillions of people and your crew is all "Hey, my son has strayed from the path, can you help me deal with that first because obviously if we don't help my son we won't be able to save the galaxy and not the other way around."

While it's sometimes true that reviewers have deadlines that can affect how they play a game -- and it can be really irritating even when you're as lucky as I am to have editors that let me push deadlines when I tell them I need more time -- this whole screed is a massively unfair pile of speculative nonsense. I could invent a narrative for anyone's playthrough of anything that purported to inform their views of the game, but that would be ridiculous because I'd be making shit up out of whole cloth. I'd be incensed if someone made this kind of argument to pick apart a review I wrote, and as much as I disagree with Tom critically (all the freaking time) this is a bad way to go about it.

Now this I have no argument with.

IIRC, Tom said that he skipped most of the side missions in ME2. I even remember him remarking that the ending, in which most of his squad didn't survive the suicide mission, was a bold choice by BioWare. Of course, very few actual people would get that ending because the typical RPG player is obsessive about completing all the quests and would be more invested in the characters and story than he was.

I understand the distinction people are trying to draw between BG and BG2 + later Bioware games. BG2 is the first iteration of the 'bunch of planets' structure, so if that's what you're thinking of when someone invokes BG that might be the disconnect. The first BG had a bit more open-ish world exploration going on (attached to a much more linear plot).

That said, they've really weakened that structure in ME2-3 and DA2, to the point where I think saying they've been clinging to that model implies that one hasn't actually played any Bioware games post ME1/DA:O. I mean, you can find a shitload of complaints about the narrative structure of ME2 and DA2 out there from Bioware's more traditionalist fans, and a lot of that boils down to them moving away from people's comfortable 4 planet structure expectations.

Ha, that's awesome. Especially because deciding if someone survives a massive battle based on whether you helped them reconcile with their father isn't bold, it's retarded. Who cares if you took the time to mine minerals and craft better weapons and armour, my family is whole again and that makes me invincible!

Not so speculative anymore. Even if he gave ME3 more time, Mass Effect is a series that builds on itself. Someone who blew through ME2 as quickly as possible is absolutely going to have less invested and care less about the ending of the series than someone who put 30 hours into the game.

My recollection is that Tom assumed every player got a bloodbath for an ending. At the time he wrote his review, remember, the mechanics of the suicide mission and who survives/dies weren't as well-known as they are today where we can consult handy flowcharts like this one.

I thought the justification for the side quests was a decent one, as such things go: you're helping your hand-picked suicide squad put their houses in order so that when they rush headlong into almost certain death, they have no regrets or doubts that might make them hesitate to die. The fact that doing those quests made them highly unlikely to be killed was a bit wacky, though; they still should have had a decent chance of not making it out, given how much the slim chance of success was hyped.

I sort of interpreted completing loyalty missions to be an abstraction of gaining the trust/confidence/respect/whatever of your squad members. Viewed in that light, it's not that far-fetched that they would be more effective in combat once they were loyal to Shepard. You see a similar effect in sports, for example, where the best coaches have the ability to make athletes play harder and achieve better results.

So it's not so much that Jacob (for example) is invincible now that his daddy issues have been put to rest, it's that he's more willing to go to the wall for Shepard for helping him resolve a family situation that was weighing heavily on his mind.

I had no problem with the content of the side missions up until about the fifth or sixth one, then they started to feel a little samey. Can't one of you hardened veterans not be wracked by guilt over mistakes you made as a parent?

It was more the non-sensicalness of the ending that got to me. Especially when my free DLC evil side-kick died at the end because I had refused to let him blow up an orphanage or whatever.

Helping your buddies with their personal problems is also completely out of character if your Sheppard makes saving the galaxy a priority. Human colonies are being gobbled up by alien invaders, and the noble hero is taking time-outs so that teammates can resolve their personal issues? That made very little sense to me. ME3 "war readiness" side-missions made a lot more narrative sense within the game, however you felt about the impact of war readiness on the ending.

Sure, but it's not like you ever had a choice between saving a human colony or helping Thane become a better father. The Illusive Man specifically instructs you to build your squad and gain their trust, so that's what you do. Whenever there's a time-sensitive event (attack on Horizon, disabled Collector Ship, etc.), you're not even given the option of doing a loyalty mission instead.

Also, unless I'm missing something, just three of the side missions involve 'family issues' (Thane, Jacob and Miranda).

Samara and Tali too, although those are of a slightly different nature than the ones you cited.

Well, if I'd had to choose I suppose that would have been interesting in its own right. But as it stands, you spend much of ME2 doing busywork missions for your teammates while the humanity is under threat. That doesn't make much sense to me, and the fact that the game gives you no choice but to do the busywork isn't an improvement.

I should say I didn't mind doing a lot of the busy work, because it was fun in its own right. I just think the motivation in ME3 (you are collecting assets to save the galaxy) makes a lot more sense in context with the plot.

I think the Jack loyalty mission is pretty clearly a metaphor for child abuse, and the Wrex mission is about abandonment and the desire for a father figure. Samara's mission is about her relationship with her daughter. That's how I understood those missions any way.

Fuck me, for real y'all. Someone message me if this thread ever goes back on topic. Aren't there enough threads about ME?

Traditionally, I think the thread needs to get into a few pages of intense argument about how if you're not playing Mass Effect on the very highest difficulty level you're not playing it properly.

Yeah, good points.

Anyway, I expected Chickstrionics when I went to that ME3 thread and it didn't deliver.

There need to be more threads about me.

Yeah, I agree with that, and I think ME2 was the weakest in the series from a story perspective for that reason. My first time playing, I repeatedly asked myself, "When is the real quest going to start?" All the recruitment/loyalty missions felt like an extended prologue before you went out to save the galaxy. On subsequent playthroughs, I appreciated that BioWare was breaking free of their "four planet" formula and trying something new, though.

Also, to be fair to ME2's writers, The Illusive Man does state several times that Cerberus is acting in the dark and always a step behind the Collectors, so he advises you to build your team until he has something more important for you to do. When a priority mission does come along (e.g. the attack on Horizon), you're forced to go there right away.

If Brad Wardell ever posts about female Shepard in that thread, we're all screwed.

Yeah, if the new Tom is just some asshole who argues in bad faith and refuses to accept other viewpoints as valid but doesn't ban anyone or do hilarious things like tapirgate or the self-banination, that's not entertaining at all. There are a million other people like that on the internet.

I dunno about that, ME1 was such a weak game overall that there was nothing worth doing except the main story, but I didn't think it was any great shakes. In ME2 they made the side plots more fun if not less pointless and improved the gameplay overall so that the main story was the weakest part. I haven't played ME3 yet because honestly, I just don't care about the series. It's not quite as formulaic as other iterations of The Bioware Game, which made me quit KOTOR halfway through and KOTOR 2 before I even got off the first planet, but it's not great by any stretch. Fallout 3/NV is more what I look for in an RPG now.

And I also still remember the review that compared Mass Effect and its claims of a giant, teeming metropolis filled with aliens and Assassin's Creed, which actually let you walk around in a teeming metropolis. Even ME2 kind of felt like playing a retro game, like a stroll down memory lane to when RPG villages only had 12 people in them.

Check the very first post of this thread. We ARE on topic!

Ah, well, never mind then. I'll just take this thermos, cause that's all I need.

Well this is an interesting reversal. Someone is complaining about a game discussion occurring in a thread devoted to pointless drama?

Great point.

This thread is a win for everyone concerned.

I don't see how drama is any more pointless than games.

ME2 is the strongest in the series from a story perspective by a light year, and anyone who says otherwise doesn't understand what ME2 is doing. People can whine until they fall over about how the overarcing Reaper plotline is mostly ignored, but that simply betrays how little they grasped the point of the game. The Reaper issue is a framing device only. ME2 is a collection of short stories that are intensely character-focused, with the end goal being that the squad you hit the finale with is a group of characters the player knows intimately and attaches importance to. They want you to care whether or not Mordin dies, or hope that Samara bites the dust, or want to keep Tali in your squad so you can make sure no random events happen to her.

The ME2 crew is one of the most well-developed ensemble casts in gaming history, because they all get their moment in the spotlight. Clearly this approach did not sit well with some players, but I have yet to hear an argument against the approach that cogently damns the approach rather than the comprehension level of the one promoting the argument.

Double Post.

Mass Effect 2 rules.

Okay here's one. Although I do love the game, I've always felt that the dramatic tension that it's going for with that suicide mission is undermined by the game play.

Playing Mass Effect 2 essentially teaches you to be a completionist; do every mission, even if it seems inconsequential, because to skip a mission means negative effects later, or worse, missing out on major, important parts of the story. A player who has learned to play this way will not happily accept an ending where their characters die if they happen to make an incorrect choice. If you, for example, send Thane into the ducts to open the doors for you, he will die. I can almost guarantee you that players who made it to that point savescummed their way through the suicide mission until they had saved everyone -- or at least the people they cared about. Which is fine, because this is exactly what the game has taught you you should do.

Except that essentially reduces the meaning of the narrative you'd get by finishing the game with a beloved character dead. If Mordin died in your ME2 play through, and you were someone who did his loyalty mission, that should have been a powerful moment for you, that you savour and remember, the way the death of characters in JRPGs are savoured by fans of that genre. Instead, it will be a moment that you quickly discard, go back to a save game, and proceed with Mordin so you can take him with you into ME3.

I love the game, but this has always seemed to me to be it's biggest problem.

I think it's shitty writing. If the "Reaper issue" is just supposed to be a framing device, then why would you create a framing device that undermines the short stories you want to tell? Why not use a framing device that doesn't put the galaxy under a deadline, and therefore make all the daddy-issue resolution kind of nonsensical? It's easy to think of framing devices that actually make sense with the "short stories" that the game wants to tell (e.g. make the game a revenge story or a heist story instead of a save the galaxy story). To me the whole idea that Sheppard is trucking around the galaxy helping everyone get in touch with their long-lost fathers/daughters/sons is just totally ridiculous. The "Seven Samurai" approach is a good way of introducing and exploring characters, but you'll note that 1. Seven Samurais wasn't dumb enough to have "loyalty missions" and 2. Seven Samurais wasn't the second film in a trilogy involving the end of the galaxy.

For an ensemble cast to really work, they'd have to interact. The individual characters in ME2 are quite well developed*, but they have little, to almost no interaction with each other to be considered an ensemble cast, rather than dialog vendors for ME2's take on Bioware's dialog game. Yes, Jack and Miranda fight, as do Tali and Legion, and perhaps Garrus and Tali acknowledge one another, but beyond that, it feels like there's a whole group of people on the ship, but really only Shepard as the saviour of the galaxy.

As such, ME2 felt more like a collection of short stories, tied together with a fairly underdeveloped spine of the main plot. It sorely lacked an Act II, showing the band bonding, conflicting, or really reacting to some of the choices made during their loyalty missions. Shepards agency through the game becomes TIM's general pawn, and Dr Lucy Shepard, "The commander is in" psychiatric help. So to me, the final fight at the Collector's base didn't feel earned, and more like they were put through their paces based on their individual stories rather than a group story. It felt like an entire section of the group's story was missing.

It's did not feel like an ensemble story, is what I'm saying.

Also, as AlexB says, the framing device is poorly married to the general story arc of each individual cast member. Bringing the band together to face the collector threat is all well, and good, but the hidden time checks, the odd sense of urgency that TIM throws at you whenever the game needs to move the framing device forward, while somehow also balancing the passage of time requirements for the loyalty quests felt at odds with one another.

*Give or take your preference, of course. I still hate Jacob, and Samara is only really good if you factor in ME3. I loved Legion, but when you get him; the invisible timer of the missions means you don't actually get to spend a lot of time with him, nor take him to places where he might have more interesting things to say. Which is really, my general gripe with ME2. They spend all that time introducing you to a bunch of fairly cool characters, then more time developing personal stories for them, but then, nothing beyond the final fight. A fight less about character interaction than it is about fitting the right shape into the right hole.

Yes, exactly. The story structure should have been:

Act 1: Assemble your team
Act 2: Bond with your team, including inter-personal conflicts that Shepard has to resolve (or not)
Act 3: Kick ass with your team

Or, to put it another way, all the recruitment missions take place in Act 1, all the loyalty missions take place in Act 2 (plus new events showing the entire crew coming together and learning to trust each other), and all the "save the galaxy" missions take place in Act 3. Each act could conclude with a major priority mission, e.g. Act 1 ends with the attack on Horizon, Act 2 ends with the Collector ship, and Act 3 ends with the Reaper IFF (Legion would need a new recruitment mission in Act 1). Then comes the finale, namely the abduction of the Normandy's crew and the suicide mission.

Yeah, I don't want to keep beating this to death, but ME2 feels like a collection of short stories that have nothing to do with each other. The game feels so meandering that I lost interest about halfway through the loyalty missions. But those felt like the main content, so skipping straight to the end seemed pointless.

What you said, but also the game teaches you not to care when your squadmates die because they're pretty useless in a firefight except as bullet-sponges, and they'll pop right back up afterward anyway. So their big OMG my favourite character died! moment is undermined not only by the fact I reloaded right after, but also by the fact that everybody I take into battle has died literally dozens of times previously, and it's kind of lost its impact.

Thank you, yes. Anyone who thinks Mass Effect has great writing needs to read some genuinely good science fiction, like Peter Hamilton or Iain M Banks. Hell even pulp genre books like Star Wars and Battletech have a more coherent plot, better characters and a genuine story arc. ME2 was a fun game but if you look at it as a story or collection of related stories, it's pretty terrible. No arc, no pacing, and a climax that undermines itself. And that's just the actual missions, it doesn't factor in all the time you can spend literally fucking around. "The galaxy could be destroyed at any moment, but I haven't scanned every planet in this system yet and there might be some good minerals down there, or a guy who needs a package delivered." Or the dialog, which surely should count as part of the writing. None of your dialog choices affect the story progression one iota. So effectively, the main character of this story is someone nobody listens to. Brilliant!

Why do you keep raising this when it has been answered in this thread already? You are developing your squad until you actually have the intel necessary to proceed.

I'd argue firstly that completionism is something taught by RPGs long before Mass Effect 2. In games where more stuff done = more XP = more power, you always want to do everything.

Secondly, reloading the game to save someone for no other reason than to save them would appear to undermine your point about not caring about the characters. There are also deaths in the suicide mission that cannot be undone without backtracking tens of hours.

How did the game teach you to savescum?

Your assumptions are also somewhat undermined by the fact that I lost two, and I didn't reload for either. As I have argued before though, their deaths mattered more because they were preventable and not scripted.

What? Threat identified, team recruited, everyone closes the book on their lives ready to die, mission carried out, threat defeated. Each character has their own mini-arc, Shepard has an arc across the game about his relationship with Cerberus.

What is an arc in your eyes?