By the way, it continues to be hilarious to me that when I romance Ashley you have an understandable but weirdly stilted row, but then she sends you a 'survive and come back to me' letter and you're sort of reconciled, whereas Kaidan basically DUMPS YOU VIA EMAIL.
My favourite bit is 'Shepard is taking all his team away for a mission so that he can presumably pick two of them while he's there so that the ship can be unmanned when the Collectors can attack and you play as Joker. No we won't even tell you what the mission is supposed to be'
I think the original sin is Bioware's broader reluctance to really *punish* you for your choices. This is why Dragon Age Origins continues to be the best thing they have ever done IMV. The willingness to go 'no, sorry, you can either do a dark pact, sacrifice your lover' sets it apart.
It means there is an awful lot of pointless 'here's a scene only ten people will see' time rather than as they should do, more of the 'no, sorry, if you didn't save the rachni, no extra mission, bye!'
When you’re sinking 100 hours into a game, people don’t actually want that. People (by which I mean me) will min-max using FAQs to get the best narrative outcome
Devs and former devs there (particularly Gaider) have said that the studio really doesn't want to spend money and time developing content most players won't see, which explains... a great deal of things
Or there’s a bit where TIM tricks you into answering a fake distress call that he knows is a trap, when they could’ve just started the mission with TIM saying “hey, this is probably a trap but you can handle it and it’s worth checking out”
Absolute nadir for me is the bit where the Collectors abduct the Normandy crew. It’s a perfectly fine plot beat that should fit well enough, but the game turns it into a massive contrivance
Weirdly it's one of those things that would work much better with Veilguard's (good) decision to have the entire party come along to big critical-path missions
On my first play through, I assumed the big twist was going to be that Cerberus was the Alliance. In ME1 it was described as a rogue faction of Humans, then in ME2 there were other rogue factions of Cerberus you fought against so of course I assume TIM was Alliance set up with deniability.
ME1 was doing loads of world building. I assume BioWare had a huge lore bible they were pulling from. Cerberus were the only human organisation other than the Alliance mentioned (I think). ME2 didn’t add any lore that wasn’t in ME1, so I assume the lore bible wasn’t redone.
The lore largely wasn’t redone, but there was a big shift in what the writers were focusing on. He was more negative on 2 and 3 than I am, but I highly recommend the late Shamus Young’s retrospective series on the trilogy
I remember broadly agreeing with his critique at the time. Most of what I like about ME2 he isn’t touching on. ME2 is better in all the game parts and I think the more focused squad story works better. ME3 is where thing come off the wagon for me.
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