I get the feeling I'm nearing the end of Mass Effect 3. The climax isn't in sight yet, but the rising action feels like it is reaching a peak. I kind of wonder if my increasing attachment to the multiplayer game is at least partly an attempt to delay the inevitable end.
I don't have a whole lot to add to the multiplayer conversation from my last post - I still enjoy it, and seem to be getting better at it, to the point where it might make sense for me to try a Silver match sometime. (I only tried Silver once previously, several months ago with my brother; I think we made it to about the fifth wave in Firebase Reactor before getting horribly overrun by multiple Banshees.) I have noticed one interesting trend: while my scores and kills are going up, my gold medals are going down. Previously, I would almost always end a successful round with a gold medal for 50 Assists, and about half the time I'd get a medal for 50 Tech Kills. I think that these days, I'm more likely to finish killing off an enemy that I would otherwise have "lost" to another player, and I'm also getting more kills from my Geth Plasma SMG and fewer from Incinerate. So, for example, instead of 50 Incinerate kills and 50 Assists, I might now be getting 40 Incinerates and 40 SMG kills and 30 Assists. Which overall is way better, but it's funny to see more mediocre medals even as I climb higher on the score charts.
I do really love how the game strongly encourages a team focus, though. For players who have already reached level 20 (and it looks like some people are happy to keep those characters without promoting, which makes sense if you aren't continuing the single-player storyline and want to get the most out of multiplayer), XP doesn't matter at all, so all you'll care about is accomplishing the objectives and finishing the match as quickly as possible. And for those of us who are leveling characters, we gain far more by helping the team succeed than we do by focusing on our own achievements. For example, an individual gold medal gives you +2000 XP, and it's rare to see a player get more than one of those; in contrast, a full extraction gives everyone +15,000 XP. I've also recently played a few games with excellent teams that were able to stay alive through the whole match with no deaths, and was pleasantly surprised to see that this "10 Rounds Survived" bonus is also +15,000 XP. (The downside is that knowing this makes it even more annoying when you see someone chasing after kills and screwing over the objectives, but whatever. It's just a game.)
The most exciting thing, though, has been the single-player game, which is coming along quite well.
MINI SPOILERS (for ME3, mega for ME2)
A few random thoughts that I failed to mention in my last post:
I'm convinced that the game is fully aware of my obsession with what Quarians look like, and has decided to tease me mercilessly as a result. During the Geth Consensus level, you see flashbacks of the Quarian creators prior to the Geth rebellion; Shepard asks Legion, "Wait a minute... if this was on Rannoch prior to the war, then why was everyone wearing environmental suits?" Legion's lame response was "Oh, uh.... your own consciousness knew that they were Quarian, and so you filled in the images with your own concept of what Quarians look like. Yeah. Yeah! That's the ticket!" The worst moment, though, was at the end of the Rannoch mission when Tali, full of emotion (and high off of claiming beachfront real estate), decides that she will risk infection and take her first breath of her homeworld's fresh air... she reaches up, unclicks, and removes her face plate... AND SHE'S FACING AWAY FROM THE CAMERA! ARRRRRGH! Stop being so MEAN, Bioware!
A similarly amusing bit of story that attempts to justify the game's technical limitations in plot-related terms comes during a great scene with Dr. Chakwas. Back in ME2, I had bought Chakwas a bottle of her favorite brandy, which led to a great scene where the two of us killed it in the med bay. During that conversation, she mentions that we should do it every year. In ME3, she returns the favor - it hasn't yet been a year, but hey, we'll probably all die soon anyways, and it would be a shame to waste perfectly fine brandy. Once again, I departed from my standard Paragon predilection - the Paragon response was something like, "Let's save it for later", while the Renegade option was, "Yes, let's." (I can see how "don't drink" would seem like a Paragon move, but personally, I think it's even more of a Paragon action to show appreciation for a subordinate and spend time with them.) This led to a delightful scene of two buzzed women reminiscing about their time together and speculating about the future. Again, I was amazed by the terrific voice work in the game: Shepard in particular perfectly captured the slightly over-focused rhythms of speech you get into when you've had one too many beers (enough to get a bit drunk, but little enough that you can still control it). Anyways. Shepard thanks the doctor; she says, "Oh, please call me Karin. You've earned it," which leads you to say, "All right, then. Thank you, Karin." And then SHE says something like, "I, on the other hand, would NEVER refer to you by your first name! It would be disrespectful in the extreme! After all, you are the person who is saving the galaxy! No. No, to me, you will only be Commander Shepard." There's a respectful pause, and then Shepard says, "That's got to be the stupidest reason I've ever heard."
MEGA SPOILERS
Back to the story, proper:
It took a while, and a lot of arm-twisting, but I finally got the resolution I had wanted from the Quarian war. We went down to Rannoch, and effing killed an effing Reaper. That was AWESOME! The earlier fight against the Reaper on Tuchanka was a frustrating challenge with an epic ending; the dang thing kept stepping on me, which instantly-killed me, so I eventually just gave up on fighting the enemies and ran to the thumpers, which led to the phenomenal Mother of Thresher Maws - vs - Reaper battle, which is like a knight fighting a samurai but a million times more violent. On Rannoch, I deactivated the broadcast system that was controlling the Geth, which got the Reaper's attention. We had an entire fleet of space ship ready to bring the bastard down, but it was jamming the area and so they couldn't get a lock. So, in one of the most kick-ass scenes of the game yet, you jump out of the drop ship with a laser rifle - not to damage the Reaper, but to paint it so the ships can target. That led to a unique and very satisfying boss fight where you try and hold a target steadily on the Reaper while it is trying to focus its own beam on you; I got really good at doing side-rolls during this sequence, which in turn has helped me out when I need to avoid charging Brutes in multiplayer. After a few paints, the sky rains destruction on the beast, and all the galaxy rejoices as one of these seemingly invulnerable enemies is destroyed. There was a brief, odd conversation with the "dying" Reaper; he says that all organic life is chaotic, while the reapers represent order, and it is inevitable that the order must prevail over chaos. Later developments make it seem like the Reapers are not actually the primary agents of the universe; there is some other intelligence, force, or SOMETHING that is somehow directing their movements. I'm a bit curious if we'll find out what this is or if it will remain mysterious.
Ahem. Anyways, Legion had, without my prior permission, added Reaper code to his programming; he had cleansed it from Reaper control, and as a result he gained the superior capabilities of Reaper technology while staying free of their control. Around this time, Legion became an "I" instead of a "We": the Reapers had unintentionally granted "him" autonomy, independence from the Consensus. This had freaked Tali out, but I backed up Legion. Once the Reaper was dead, the Geth became inert. Legion asked for permission to upload his modified Reaper code to the Consensus, which would not only liberate his brethren but also make them more capable AND give them self-determination. Tali was reluctant. Her fellow admirals were apoplectic. I used my ultra-Paragon charm (I've had my Influence bar maximized for a while now) and browbeat them into holding off their fire against the defenseless Geth for twenty precious seconds. Legion finished the upload, then discovered that he would need to deactivate himself in order to propagate the "virus". (I'm still unclear on exactly what made him do this, apart from the Law of Narrative Causality.) And so, Legion, who had just become a self, sacrificed his self in order to save his species... and, potentially, the galaxy.
And so, the grand alliance that I have dreamed about ever since first learning about the Heretics in Mass Effect 2 has come to pass. The war between Quarian and Geth has ended. Quarian engineers and Geth warships have joined in my campaign to destroy the Reapers. It has ended on an even better note than I could have imagined: the Geth have invited the Quarians to re-settle on Rannoch, and are even assisting them in plowing the land; it's highly ironic that they are doing the very tasks for which they were first created, but are now doing it from their own free will. Tali has been overjoyed by the outcome, noting with wonder that Geth have even moved their consciousness into some Quarian environmental suits, and are acclimating those Quarian bodies to the native bacteria of Rannoch; as a result, it may not take generations before Quarians can shed their suits and actually live in the atmosphere of Rannoch.
I was sad to see Legion go, and felt touched to see his name added to the memorial wall on the Normandy. Even though we've seen the end of the story, I still feel like we haven't learned everything there was to know about him. He seemed a little odd, even back in ME2 long before he acquired Reaper upgrades; specifically, he was actually... coy, I guess, about why he was wearing a piece of Shepard's armor. I guess we'll never know, and I'm okay with that. It's another example of feeling like I'm part of a vast universe with many stories going on around me, and even the stories that come closest to me contain elements that I may never see.
Like I mentioned above, I feel like I'm heading into the endgame, and I mostly base that on the fact that I've finished my work with all the major species of the Mass Effect universe. After the Quarians, I flew to the Asari homeworld of Thessia, trying to retrieve a cryptic artifact that could lead us to the Catalyst and, thus, a chance at completing the Crucible and defeating the Reapers. I had mixed feelings about Thessia. On the one hand, I like the Asari, and hate the Reapers, and hate what was happening to their home. On the other hand, the Asari leadership has been astonishingly obstinate throughout the course of the war, even more so than the Salarians; I fail to see how the Asari could have ever believed that they could defend against Reapers on their own, even just within a single theater of war. If they had engaged with allies like the Turians and Krogan did, they would at least have a shot. Instead, they went it alone, and are paying for their leaders' arrogance with their civilians' lives.
Liara is a mandatory companion for the Thessia mission, but I would have brought her along anyways. Ash came as well. I would have loved to have seen Thessia in peacetime: as the capital planet of the oldest, most cultured, and wealthiest race in the galaxy, it must have been astonishingly beautiful. However, I've only seen it as a smoking pile of rubble. The individual Asari you meet are incredibly brave: confronted with overwhelming odds, they are doing their best to try and save as many as they can. I felt really bad about endangering them, like when two helicopter-type gunships are taken down by Reaper Harvesters while trying to open a path for you.
Eventually you reach the temple of the Goddess; most Asari are no longer religious, but their ancestors credited the Goddess with giving them various knowledge, such as the cycles of the moon for harvesting, the making of metal for weapons, and so on. Approaching the statue, you feel the buzzings of a vision, and immediately intuit the truth: the Goddess is a Prothean beacon! Like the one back on Eden Prime all these years ago! Instantly, dozens of thousands of years fall into place and make sense. It isn't accidental that the Asari have grown into such an influential position within the galaxy: they (or at least the people at the highest level of religion and government) had access to Prothean data, the apex of the most advanced civilization before the prior Reaper invasion. Granted, it's almost impossible to comprehend the Protheans, but every scrap the Asari could decipher advanced their society by hundreds or thousands of years. That's all fine; the part that sucks, though, is that the Asari have selfishly kept this beacon secret to themselves even after meeting other races. This has ensured continues Asari superiority, but indicates a colossal wasted opportunity. If they had shared this knowledge, then the whole galaxy could have benefited from the Protheans' knowledge, and as a result might actually have been prepared for the war.
A Prothean intelligence makes contact and fills you in with some interesting tidbits of knowledge. One, which I'd mentioned above, was that the Reapers aren't the top of the hierarchy; some other thing behind them controls or compels them to repeat their cycle of annihilation. And it is a cycle: the Protheans themselves were aware of previous civilizations lost in earlier cycles, and realized that the patterns of destruction were eerily similar. In their time as in ours, a splinter group thought that they could dominate the Reapers, and so betrayed the Protheans working on the Crucible and destroyed the war effort from within. Shades of Cerberus! The intelligence (or whatever) directing the Reapers seems to have a great deal of control over the organics as well, in ways that the Protheans never understood.
More immediately and surprisingly, I learned that the Crucible itself was NOT of Prothean origin. Much as we had learned of it from them, the Protheans had found plans for the Crucible from the species who had been extinguished 50,000 years before them, who in turn had learned of it from their own predecessors. This cycle has been going on for a very long time, and I can understand why the Prothean is skeptical that we might be the race that finally breaks free. I'll show him, though! I'll show them all!
First of all, I need to show Cerberus. There's a very frustrating case of forced failure at the end of your time in Thessia, when Kai Leng shows up with a gunship, shoots up your team, and takes the Prothean artifact. I re-played the fight three times and am pretty sure that the game doesn't let you beat him; it switches to a cut-scene once you get his health low enough. It's a bit glaring just compared to the incredible flexibility of the rest of the game, which has multiple possible outcomes for pretty much every encounter. It's also a big part of the reason why I think I'm heading to the endgame: dramatically, this feels like a late-game twist.
And, that's where I am at the moment. Just need to finish a bunch more simple fetch quests and then I'll take my vengeance!
END SPOILERS
Yet another reason why I think I'm near the end: my Effective Military Strength is getting awfully high. I don't know exactly what the maximum is, but I'm getting close to 7,000, with a 100% Galaxy at War readiness rating. It looks like the "minimum" (I presume to get the worst ending) is just around 2,000, and my bar has been completely filled since around the time I reached 5,000, so further improvements to that score aren't even registering anymore. I'm sure I'll continue to play multiplayer until I finish the single-player game, but it's nice to feel like I have some breathing room so I don't need to worry too much about the score slipping a bit.
Let's keep on pushing. Once more unto the breach, dear friends!
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Monday, July 09, 2012
Goth Geth
I'm still cruising along and loving my experience with Mass Effect 3. I'm getting more engaged with the multiplayer as well. I think a big part of the reason I'm enjoying it more now is just being more familiar with the controls. Around the time I first started playing multiplayer, I was still playing Mass Effect 1, which had reversed keys for Storm (left shift) and HUD (spacebar). I would adapt, but little things like that would throw me off. Now that I'm playing the same class, on the same engine, with largely the same powers, I don't really need to adjust, and can pretty directly apply the skills I'm picking up in single-player to the multi-player game.
I'd previously mentioned how deeply I enjoy the cooperative aspect of multiplayer. I still stand by that, but it's also true that enjoyment has a lot to do with how good your team is. I'd had an especially good run when resuming MP, with experienced players who played well and supported each other. In recent days, I've had some really good matches with my brother, but also some mediocre matches with strangers where people will do dumb stuff like wander off into a group of enemies during an objective-based round. Weirdly, there isn't a very tight correlation between a player's N7 rating (basically a global experience level) and their skill in the game; I've seen a person with an N7 rating of 4 who acquitted themselves quite respectably (hanging back behind the front lines and getting in a good number of kills while staying alive), and people with N7 ratings of 2000+ who die every round and don't participate in objectives. It's weird. I suppose maybe roommates might play under the same gamer tag, or maybe some people are just kind of moochers. For better or worse, everyone shares in a mission's credits and XP bonuses, so if you free-load for long enough you can probably get decent advancement, even if you aren't really playing well.
The addictive part of MP comes with the equipment packs. You earn a chunk of credits after finishing a mission; I always play Bronze challenges, and usually end up with a little over 15,000 credits for a successful match. You use these credits to buy what are essentially booster packs, which unlock a bunch of stuff. Some of these are consumables: medi-gel, rockets, special ammunition. Some of them are weapons or weapon mods. And some of them are new characters. When you first start playing MP, you can play as a Human in the six classes, which are the same as for single player (Soldier, Infiltrator, Engineer, Sentinel, Adept, Vanguard). So it's basically a Shepard-like character, although you only have a subset of the available skills (five trees per class, generally three offensive and two passive) and are limited to reaching level 20. With the right cards, though, you can unlock new races for each class. These aren't necessarily better, but each offers different assortments of skills, and possibly different primary stats - for example, a Krogan Soldier will have a lot more Health than a Human Soldier would.
A while back, I had unlocked a rare Drell Vanguard. After promoting my first Engineer to reach level 20, I'd switched over to the Drell. Another advantage of getting these cards is that they provide an instant XP boost to that class, so instead of starting from level 1 I was able to start around level 6, with a good chunk of developed skills. I ended up taking that Drell to level 20. It was VERY different than playing as an Engineer... an Engineer is arguably the best support class in the game, and their main purpose is to soften up targets so other team members can take them down. In contrast, a Vanguard is typically at, well, the vanguard of a conflict: they charge into battle, stand toe-to-toe with the enemy, and do a lot of damage. It was fun, but very different from being an engineer.
While I was Vanguarding, I kept saving and buying new packs. These days I always save up almost 100,000 credits so I can get a Premium Spectre Pack; this typically contains two rare cards, one uncommon card, and two common cards. Even the common cards are usually better in a Spectre-class pack, though, since they grant more consumables. (A regular Recruit Pack with a Medi-Gel card will give you 1 Medi-Gel, but that same card in a Spectre pack will give you 5 of them.) Over time, I should have a better shot at filling out my selection of rare equipment and classes. (I've since learned that many people actually prefer to start out buying a ton of Recruit Packs, then moving on to Veteran and then Spectre. The advantage here is that you can get all the mods for your weapons, and can get higher-quality versions of each weapon. For example, if you get 5 copies of the Predator heavy pistol, then that means you'll have a Predator Pistol V, which is a little lighter and does a bit more damage than a Predator Pistol I. Over the long term, though, everyone wants high-end rare equipment, so I think my premium-only strategy will eventually pay off.) Along the way, I got a few more unlocks, including a Salarian Infiltrator, a bunch of rare sniper rifles, and a Geth plasma SMG.
After promoting my Vanguard, I tried a couple of rounds with my Salarian sniper, but gave it up; partly because it was highly redundant with Andrew's preferred playstyle, and also because I'm not great at headshots. (My firearm MO is generally to aim for the center of mass, and while I'm emptying my clip, gradually move up so the end of fire is centered between the eyes. Works well for a pistol, not well for a single-shot rifle.) So, I'd switched back to my Human Engineer, and was delighted to see that my Geth Plasma SMG was a perfect complement to my skills. My two SMG mods are an extended ammo clip and Ultralight Materials; taken together, that means I have a 200% recharge time on my powers, and never, ever run out of ammo, even during extended objectives. I'm generally not a fan of SMGs - they're inaccurate at long range, and if you're shooting at short range, a shotgun has more spread and does more damage - but the Geth variation (which, as far as I can tell, is only available in multiplayer) is actually highly accurate, and has an incredibly fast firing rate, even compares to other SMGs. So, my general strategy is to drop a Combat Drone behind a group of enemies, take out any shields or barriers with Overload, then fire away with Incinerate, filling in the (very short) recharge times with a hail of Geth bullets.
I'd taken a break from MP for a while as I played ME2, but picked it back up again and finished promoting my second engineer (and third overall character). In my next premium Spectre pack, I unlocked something awesome: a Quarian Engineer! That was my first Engineer-specific rare card, which made me very excited, I created a new chatacter, SebVasQwibQwib, and started to play.
The Quarian engineer visually looks to be modeled after Tali, but has an almost completely different skill set: instead of drones, energy drain, and sabotage, she has a sentry turret, cryo blast, and incinerate. I had just recently picked up the sentry turret skill in my SP game, and while it didn't seem as useful there as combat drone, I had a feeling it would be more useful in MP. Unlike the drone, which can move around in pursuit of enemies, the turret always stays in one place. That generally limits its usefulness in SP, since most levels involve you steadily going forward and encountering fresh batches of enemies. In contrast, MP is confined to a single stage, and particularly in objective-based rounds, you'll be spending a great deal of time within several meters of space.
I maximized my sentry turret, opting for boosts to its damage and a flamethrower mode that unleashes 84 points of damage every second to anyone within close range. This is an awesome upgrade for MP, especially for situations like uploading from the reactor core: when you have a Banshee and two Brutes in a confined space, you want that sustained damage. In contrast, in SP I'd opted for the upgrade with long-range rockets, since that gave it a longer period of usefulness.
After that, I maxed out my Cryo Blast and Incinerate powers. I usually spec for maximum damage, but in this case I opted for spread: my goal was to use them as crowd-control powers. A shot of Cryo will freeze or slow down a group of enemies for a few seconds. If they freeze, I can then shoot them with Incinerate for a tech combo that creates a Tech Explosion, dealing a chunk of damage to anyone nearby.
I've played a few rounds with this build, and while I enjoy it, I think I'll be switching back to my human engineer. I've gone from generally being #2 on the score chart to #4. I get more kills as a Quarian, and my turret is capable of killing quite a few weak opponents without any assistance from me, but I make a lot fewer assists. I'm also finding the Cryo/Incinerate combo a lot less satisfying than I had hoped. It's decent against Reapers, but since I no longer have a way to easily strip shields it's basically useless against Geth, and by the time I strip armor off of Cerberus I might as well just finish the job.
The best game I've played with this character was actually the first one I ever played. It was a totally crazy class grouping: me, the Quarian Engineer; a Geth Engineer; a Salarian Engineer; and an Asari Adept. So, basically, the four squishiest classes in the game. BUT, thanks to our various drones and turrets and singularities, we essentially had eight bodies on the field. We MASSACRED the Geth. We were playing on Firebase White, and we set up our armaments at the various points of egress, then waited outside on the top ledge and just slaughtered everyone when they came out. It's a beautiful thing to see a Geth Prime go down in three seconds: shocked by a combat drone, flamed by a sentry turret, its shields overloaded away, its armor incinerated.
Since that promising start, though, I've generally felt a lot less useful than usual in my matches, so I think I'll regretfully leave SebVasQwibQwib behind and get back to what I do best: getting rid of barriers, shields, and armor so my buddies can kill people.
MINI SPOILERS
It's been interesting playing the SP game after spending time with MP. I'd mentioned before that the presence of Cerberus in the MP games made me suspect that they couldn't be trusted in ME2; similarly, the fact that recent expansions of ME3 MP have added Geth as a playable race has foreshadowed the part of the single-player campaign that I'm currently in.
Super-random note: I kind of hate the music in the captain's quarters in ME3. ME2 and ME3 have both had sound systems that you can play and switch between songs. ME2 had just a couple of tracks, but they were awesome: a sweeping, dramatic, classical suite, and a cool, bass-heavy electronic track. ME3 has a ton of songs, and they all suck; they sound like pre-sets on a 1992 Casio keyboard. The music in the rest of the game is quite good, though. I'm happy to be able to recognize some returning themes from previous games, like the Presidium theme that's been around since ME1. The dance track in Purgatory is pretty good, too. I just wish I could relax with some better tunes for myself.
Oh, but I'm pretty happy with the new fish tank system. In ME2, all my fish died since I didn't always visit my quarters to feed them between every mission. (Chambers eventually volunteers to take care of them, so I should have waited until after then to start getting them.) In ME3, one of my very first purchases was a new aquarium feeder that automatically dispenses food as needed to keep them alive. I'm now getting some rarer fish, including a sweet electric eel thingy. The ship models are pretty neat - there are some new ones in ME3, like a Quarian Lifeship. My favorite thingy, though, is the space hamster. In ME2, you buy him; in ME3, he's gotten loose, so you need to find and capture him in the Engineering quarters under the drive core. It took me way too long to figure that, duh, of course this is Boo, from the Baldur's Gate games. Hooray for crossover continuity! I think that might even be the same "Squeak!" sample they play in the BG games.
MEGA SPOILERS
Let's see... after the attack on the Citadel, I got Ashley to join my team, which I'd been expecting but still made me very happy. I've been feeling serious nostalgia for ME1 now that my standard away team is the "girls group" of Shepard, Ashley, and Liara that I always used in the first game. Ashley's been a good character. She's lost some of the xenophobia that she exhibited in ME1, although she can still be a little prickly. She's a bit less confident than I would expect from the second human spectre. (Incidentally, I'm still really curious about what Udina's whole story was. He promoted Bailey and Ashley to their new positions, and both of them ended up helping to thwart him. Just how long was he working for Cerberus? Did he think that he could control Ash and Bailey, or was he hoping to keep an eye on them, or was he actually trying to do the right thing by them and only turned bad later?)
Returning to the Citadel after the attack was a sobering experience. The Presidium at first looks as lovely as ever, but then you start to notice little things: the large glass windows were smashed, and so they're now just empty frames; many of the large monitors are now on the fritz; various engineers with omni-tools are repairing vending machines and other equipment. It's also been sad to see the misery in Huerta Memorial Hospital. It's now so crowded in there that many patients are on operating tables in the middle of the hallway. Once again, I wonder how much responsibility I bear for that. There have been a few times that I've weighed in on arguments, and when it comes to medical treatment I'm very much a Paragon: I'll always argue for treating as many people as possible, even if it means fewer supplies may be available for future conflicts. If I'd pushed more for triage and rationing, would this level be less crowded? It's interesting to think about.
Oh, Huerta is also the site of a phenomenal example of the diffuse storytelling style of Mass Effect. Like most of my favorite pieces of fiction, Mass Effect gives the impression that you're a single (albeit important) particle in a huge universe; for every story that you're involved in, there are many other stories progressing on their own. Often that takes the form of conversations that you overhear as you wander the Citadel. One story, which has been playing out ever since I first visited right after escaping Mars, concerns an Asari commando who seems to be suffering from PTSD. She's talking with a therapist, describing a horrific encounter with the Reapers she had on her last mission. Each time you visit, you'll hear maybe a minute of the story, and there are probably a dozen or so sections. (Spoiler: the humans she was trying to protect has been Indoctrinated, the farmgirl she was trying to save broke her leg, and the commando apparently ended up killing all of them in order to secure her own escape.) She's clearly distraught. Later on, when visiting the Spectre Terminal on the Embassies level, I was asked to authorize her request for a firearm. I usually authorize any request I get, but giving a disturbed ex-military woman a gun just seemed like a bad idea, so I refused.
My next Priority mission was at the Quarian fleet. Ironically, Priority missions are the ones you should do last: the Priority missions will advance the main plot, which sometimes will close off side-quests, so you should do every available non-Priority mission before the Priority. (But, again, some of your missions won't be accessible since their Galaxy Map locations won't open up until you do more Priority missions. It's confusing. I really wish this game had a better Journal.) So I explored everywhere, did a bunch of the fetch-quest-type side-missions, and the combat side-missions. I'm now finding many of the multiplayer maps in the single-player game, which is pretty fun. They tend to play pretty differently, but I enjoy walking into the situation already having a feel for the lay of the land, anticipating choke-points and escape routes.
I've managed to reconnect with a few more of my squadmates from ME2. The saddest was Thane. I'd run into him at the hospital before Cerberus's attempted coup. He was terminally ill in ME2, and had already lived years longer than his doctors had thought he would, but the illness was now in its final stages; he refused to join me, and I understood given his weakness. So, he surprised me when, during the coup, he turned the tables on Kai Leng, the assassin who was trying to kill the Salarian ambassador. Thane saved the ambassador, but was brutally stabbed through the chest. He didn't die immediately, and later I visited his deathbed at Huerta. His reconciled son joined him there, which was particularly bittersweet; I had worked hard in ME2 to get the two of them together, and it was touching to see Thane get some peace, and just as touching to see that his son was turning into an honorable man, free of the anger that had driven him to crime. There isn't much religion in the Mass Effect series (other than the occasional Asari exclamation of "Goddess!"), but I appreciated the scripture reading at Thane's end, which had a Catholic last-rites feel to it, and also focused nicely on the living. (I forget the exact phrase, but one part of the prayer said something like, "Please watch over her," and afterwards I asked Thane's son, "Why did he say 'her' instead of 'him'?", to which he replied, "He is at peace. He is praying for you." Anyways. It's something that could easily have been melodramatic and saccharine, and instead felt very earned and appreciated.)
But, boy, it sure would have sucked if you were romancing Thane. I wonder if they let you carry that forward into ME3, or if he dumps you? I suppose players would already know what they're getting into once they start dating a terminally ill assassin, but still that would be doubly harsh to lose both a friend and a lover.
The Crew Quarters floor on the Normandy has a memorial wall, somewhat like the Vietnam Memorial or the new 9/11 Memorial, which lists the names of everyone from either Normandy who has died. Since I messed up the rescue attempt at the end of ME2, my wall has a lot of names on it, including Chambers and Gabrielle. It also includes Pressley and Kaidan from ME1. Now, with Moridin and Thane joining the wall, the sense of death is growing stronger and more pervasive.
Not all reunions are that dire, though. Miranda has left Cerberus, and is resuming her conflict against her father in protection of her sister. If she wasn't such a capable woman, she'd be an a really bad spot: she has betrayed Cerberus, the Alliance has no reason to trust her, and so she's left without any allies, meeting you clandestinely (in a busy shipping corridor, or on a secured vid-screen channel, or in a private residence) and swallowing her pride to ask for help. She also apologized for how she wanted to implant a control chip in you, when she'd fought so fiercely to keep her father from controlling her and her sister. I just now sent Miranda off with access to my Spectre codes, without a clear understanding of what she'll do with them. I wish her the best, and wish I could accompany her wherever she's going, but I have a galaxy to save.
There was also an interesting reunion with Zaeed. It actually started as an investigation into a Volus diplomat; you learn that he was secretly in Cerberus's pay and was selling them Turian secrets. Since the Citadel attack, he has tried to cut ties, and now he's in a very bad spot. Cerberus can blackmail him, while the Turians want him dead and have hired some mercenaries to kill him. The diplomat feels remorse for his actions, and you eventually track him down, where Zaeed has captured him. I eventually persuaded the diplomat to provide info on a Turian colony under attack, and also donate some Volus materials to the war effort. Zaeed was slightly annoyed at the job's complications, but was happy to stick it to Cerberus, and eventually said that he would get in touch with some mercenary buddies on Earth to join the resistance. Anyways. I was never a huge Zaeed fan, but it was good seeing another familiar face. (Even one with icky scars.)
On to the Quarians!
I really dig all the interesting races that Bioware has created for the Mass Effect series. The Quarians are one of the most interesting, though. They all speak with accents that sound Eastern European, but to me, the story of their people sounds a lot like one of the tribal groups from the Middle East - perhaps the Hebrews, or the Kurds. Their story is focused around a lost homeland, a diaspora, a long time spent wandering in lands that are not their own, and a yearning desire to fight those who took their homeland and reclaim their home.
The deeper I've gotten into the game, the more complex their story has become. The rest of the galaxy views the Quarians with a mixture of pity and distaste. Pity, because of their trials in exile; distaste, because they feel like the Quarians not only brought it on themselves, but also brought danger to the rest of the galaxy. The problems started several hundred years ago, when the Quarians created the Geth. Quarians were always technologically sophisticated, much like the Salarians, and made the Geth as a set of autonomous, intelligent, networked helpers who could fulfill mundane tasks like farming, mining, and construction. However, the Quarians had accidentally given the Geth too much of a capacity for self-learning and improvement, and so the Geth evolved from being a VI (Virtual Intelligence) to an AI (Artificial Intelligence).
What happens next is murky - as you hear in the first game, the Quarians realized what had happened and tried to shut down the Geth; the Geth rebelled against their masters, eventually defeating them and forcing the Quarian into exile. The Geth claimed the Quarians' former home planet and colonies in the Perseus Veil for their own. The Quarians had already built the largest fleet in the galaxy, and now the Flotilla became a mobile home for the survivors: it nomadically flew from system to system, buying food and fuel as they arrived, and selling the advanced technology that they're good at creating. The Geth were the most terrifying enemy that the galaxy had faced between the Rachni invasion and the reappearance of the Reapers, and the organic species of the Milky Way quickly learned to stay out of the Perseus Veil if they wanted to survive. At the start of Mass Effect 1, there's an enormous amount of unease among the Citadel races about what the Geth are up to: they are presumably building a larger and larger army, and one day they may emerge from the Far Rim and destroy everyone.
I've previously noted how the "all Geth are evil" meme of the first game gave way to a more nuanced view in the second, which posited that most Geth actually just want self-determination. The third game is expanding the view even further, and revealing that, in a certain sense, the Geth are actually the victims. In one mission, you penetrate into the Geth Consensus, the shared consciousness that all Geth inhabit. Here, you witness recordings from the birth of the Geth, and see how it was the Quarians who first struck against them. Even more intriguing, many Quarians (who Geth call the Creators) supported the Geth, arguing that they should be protected, even while others started their campaign of extinction. We learn that the Geth don't hate the Quarians, and, in their odd, digital way, actually kind of honor the Creators who stood by them.
I should back up a bit. I'd held off on starting the Quarian priority mission until I'd finished all my side-quests, even though I had a hunch that I'd be able to pick up Tali once I started. I now wish that I had done it earlier. You basically get Tali right away, and still have a few other Quarian Priority missions after that's done, so there's no harm in heading there first. I really enjoyed being reunited with Tali; along with Garrus, she's one of the few stalwart companions to have stood by your side in all three games. She has recently been appointed to fill her father's Admiralty Board seat. Much like Ashley, she's a bit self-conscious and not sure whether she's ready for command yet. However, she's an extremely capable and intelligent woman and a great member for that position. She's done an even better job than Ashley at overcoming her prejudices: her experience with Legion has even helped her overcome the anti-Geth animosity that most Quarians share. (There are definitely factions within the Quarians between hard-liners who want to launch a war to retake their home and doves who want to preserve their own race, but even the doves don't feel sympathy for the Geth, they merely recognize the danger they pose.)
Quarian politics are maddening - again, I found myself thinking frequently of today's Middle East, where persecuted groups with grievances perpetuate endless cycles of violence against one another. I'd thought that I'd left it in a good place at the end of ME2, as I'd urged the Quarians to avoid attacking the Geth, modified the Heretics to rejoin the main Geth consensus, and secured Legion's allegiance and even an agreement to avoid betraying Quarian logistics to the collective. (Side note: it's interesting that the Geth are so reminiscent of so many famous sci-fi species, and yet feel so unique. The story of their creation has very strong echoes of the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica and the Replicants of Blade Runner, while their collective mind and endless drive makes me think of Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation.) That's all gone to hell now. Admiral Xen of the Quarians had discovered a new type of signal broadcast that could shut down individual Geth; elated at this breakthrough, the admirals decided to launch a full-blown attack for their old homeworld, even strapping cannons onto civilian ships to increase their firepower. The threatened Geth were then targeted by the Reapers (the "Old Machines") who upgraded the Geth as they had the Heretics, and broadcast their own directives through the Consensus, using Legion as a medium. These two groups, who I had hoped I could rope into the war on my side, were about to murder one another and hand the Far Rim to the Reapers.
One thing that makes me very happy about starting Geth missions is that I can finally justify taking EDI along. She's a lot of fun in the squad, as she is on the ship. All of my Geth missions so far have consisted of me, EDI, and Tali: that's three female engineers, tearing stuff up. We're... basically unstoppable against machines.
In the first Geth mission, things are looking grim for the Quarians. The Reaper-aided Geth have overcome the signal attack, and are leading a counterattack against the flotilla, putting countless civilian lives at risk. The most dangerous component of this is an enormous Geth dreadnought, which is single-handedly annihilating all resistance. The three of us got on the ship, starting with a very cool zero-gravity level where you enter through an exterior docking tube. That vaguely reminded me of the Battle of the Citadel at the end of ME1, which had a similar mission outside gravity at one point. Once on board, we fought our way to the server control room, where I was reunited with Legion. Legion had been aiding the Reapers, but not through any choice of his own; I chose to trust him, and together we shut down the dreadnought's defenses.
Of course, that made one of the battle-crazy Quarian admirals "seize the opportunity" and open fire on the ship, while we were all still on board. Fortunately, with Legion's help we were able to make it out, but I was TICKED. Here we had an opportunity to open a division among the Geth, weaken them and improve our overall chances of victory, and the Quarians were too short-sighted to take advantage of it.
This led to some... unpleasantness back on the Normandy. In this game's dialog/morality system, the answers at the top of the wheel are usually the "Paragon" answers - not exactly "good", but generally more peaceful, diplomatic options. The answers at the bottom tend to be "Renegade" - not "evil", just more focused on getting results, willing to make short-term sacrifices for long-term objectives. (I think I've made this observation before, but the best analogy I can think of is Machiavelli's classic distinction between Love and Fear; Paragon choices make people love you, while Renegade choices make people fear you.) Anyways, I'm usually around 90% Paragon, but I think carefully about each choice, and don't regret picking Renegade when it suits me. There are some cases where a situation is so complex that even the game's thoughtful dichotomy doesn't seem to apply. After we (barely) escaped the dreadnought, I confronted the two other Quarian admirals on board the Normandy. The admiral who ordered the attack said something like, "Well, you made it out alive. I saw an opportunity and I had to take it." The top response was something like, "I understand." The bottom response was basically "Unacceptable." I chose the latter. Not so much for myself - I'm used to being put in danger - but for the Geth: I've been trying my hardest to broker some kind of rapprochement between Geth and Quarian, and this admiral had spit in the eye of the great opportunity Legion had just handed him. He started to argue, and I got a Renegade interrupt action; I usually let these pass, but this time I selected it, which led me to the rare satisfaction of my Shepard gut-punching the Admiral, yelling at him for endangering our lives, and throwing him off my ship. Yeah! Take that! So, he's gone now, and a much more reasonable female Quarian admiral and Tali are the only Quarians left on board.
Since then, I've continued a bit farther with the Quarian missions, which means more installments of the Shepard/EDI/Tali show. In one of them, I tracked down the Quarian admiral of the civilian fleet, who was stranded on the homeworld. Without his leadership, some civilian ships were starting to talk about breaking off from the flotilla and retreating back to the Mass Relay; this would have been suicidal in the face of the Geth warships, and we needed the admiral back to maintain the population. This mission had some really fun elements to it, including a segment where you're firing an artillery cannon from a flying gunship as you escort the admiral to an extraction point.
The last, very cool mission was where I entered the Geth Consensus, as I'd mentioned above. This part of the game vaguely reminded me of the very cool Fade sequence from Dragon Age: Origins; of course, the Consensus is digital, while the Fade was dreamlike, but both are awesome in the way they present a thoroughly unreal world inside your familiar interface.
Some quick notes on romance:
After repelling the Cerberus attack, you get a bunch of chances to move your romances forward. I'm very pleased to see that Yeoman Traynor is an option for female Shepards; like I'd said, I'm a sucker for British accents, and she has a really fun personality, with a nice combination of intelligence, humor, and self-awareness. I kind of cheated there - I saved, started the romance, smiled, and then re-loaded. I'm pretty committed to Liara at this point, and didn't feel sufficiently callow to abandon her. Still, that's a pretty nice scene. An officer's cabin has some definite perks.
It looks like Diane Allers is another romance option - at least, you can flirt with her, and she flirts back, though it doesn't lead to anything as, um, visual as the Traynor cut-scene. I re-loaded again. I'm happy to have Allers on my ship, but she isn't too tempting as a romance partner.
Instead, I met with Liara on the Presidium, and we had a very nice chat. She's far more calm than the others, and things are going slow, but I'm optimistic about the progression. It feels like we still aren't quite back to where we were at the end of ME1, but we've re-established the trust that was damaged during ME2.
I think I'd sufficiently repelled James in my first couple of conversations with him, since he hasn't even broached the subject recently. (Other than a crude comment he made while getting tattooed, which led to an entertaining "put up or shut up" challenge from Shepard.) And it looks like Garrus and Thane got the message from ME2, since neither of them has offered any openings.
END SPOILERS
It's good to have filled out my party more, though I'm curious whether I still have any more recruits to go. At the moment I "just" have six companions, exactly as many as in the first game. I'd love getting more like I did in the second, but I won't be too disappointed if I don't, since the game has done such a good job at letting you keep up relationships with people who aren't currently in your squad.
Wow, that was a long update. Time to stop typing and start shooting!
I'd previously mentioned how deeply I enjoy the cooperative aspect of multiplayer. I still stand by that, but it's also true that enjoyment has a lot to do with how good your team is. I'd had an especially good run when resuming MP, with experienced players who played well and supported each other. In recent days, I've had some really good matches with my brother, but also some mediocre matches with strangers where people will do dumb stuff like wander off into a group of enemies during an objective-based round. Weirdly, there isn't a very tight correlation between a player's N7 rating (basically a global experience level) and their skill in the game; I've seen a person with an N7 rating of 4 who acquitted themselves quite respectably (hanging back behind the front lines and getting in a good number of kills while staying alive), and people with N7 ratings of 2000+ who die every round and don't participate in objectives. It's weird. I suppose maybe roommates might play under the same gamer tag, or maybe some people are just kind of moochers. For better or worse, everyone shares in a mission's credits and XP bonuses, so if you free-load for long enough you can probably get decent advancement, even if you aren't really playing well.
The addictive part of MP comes with the equipment packs. You earn a chunk of credits after finishing a mission; I always play Bronze challenges, and usually end up with a little over 15,000 credits for a successful match. You use these credits to buy what are essentially booster packs, which unlock a bunch of stuff. Some of these are consumables: medi-gel, rockets, special ammunition. Some of them are weapons or weapon mods. And some of them are new characters. When you first start playing MP, you can play as a Human in the six classes, which are the same as for single player (Soldier, Infiltrator, Engineer, Sentinel, Adept, Vanguard). So it's basically a Shepard-like character, although you only have a subset of the available skills (five trees per class, generally three offensive and two passive) and are limited to reaching level 20. With the right cards, though, you can unlock new races for each class. These aren't necessarily better, but each offers different assortments of skills, and possibly different primary stats - for example, a Krogan Soldier will have a lot more Health than a Human Soldier would.
A while back, I had unlocked a rare Drell Vanguard. After promoting my first Engineer to reach level 20, I'd switched over to the Drell. Another advantage of getting these cards is that they provide an instant XP boost to that class, so instead of starting from level 1 I was able to start around level 6, with a good chunk of developed skills. I ended up taking that Drell to level 20. It was VERY different than playing as an Engineer... an Engineer is arguably the best support class in the game, and their main purpose is to soften up targets so other team members can take them down. In contrast, a Vanguard is typically at, well, the vanguard of a conflict: they charge into battle, stand toe-to-toe with the enemy, and do a lot of damage. It was fun, but very different from being an engineer.
While I was Vanguarding, I kept saving and buying new packs. These days I always save up almost 100,000 credits so I can get a Premium Spectre Pack; this typically contains two rare cards, one uncommon card, and two common cards. Even the common cards are usually better in a Spectre-class pack, though, since they grant more consumables. (A regular Recruit Pack with a Medi-Gel card will give you 1 Medi-Gel, but that same card in a Spectre pack will give you 5 of them.) Over time, I should have a better shot at filling out my selection of rare equipment and classes. (I've since learned that many people actually prefer to start out buying a ton of Recruit Packs, then moving on to Veteran and then Spectre. The advantage here is that you can get all the mods for your weapons, and can get higher-quality versions of each weapon. For example, if you get 5 copies of the Predator heavy pistol, then that means you'll have a Predator Pistol V, which is a little lighter and does a bit more damage than a Predator Pistol I. Over the long term, though, everyone wants high-end rare equipment, so I think my premium-only strategy will eventually pay off.) Along the way, I got a few more unlocks, including a Salarian Infiltrator, a bunch of rare sniper rifles, and a Geth plasma SMG.
After promoting my Vanguard, I tried a couple of rounds with my Salarian sniper, but gave it up; partly because it was highly redundant with Andrew's preferred playstyle, and also because I'm not great at headshots. (My firearm MO is generally to aim for the center of mass, and while I'm emptying my clip, gradually move up so the end of fire is centered between the eyes. Works well for a pistol, not well for a single-shot rifle.) So, I'd switched back to my Human Engineer, and was delighted to see that my Geth Plasma SMG was a perfect complement to my skills. My two SMG mods are an extended ammo clip and Ultralight Materials; taken together, that means I have a 200% recharge time on my powers, and never, ever run out of ammo, even during extended objectives. I'm generally not a fan of SMGs - they're inaccurate at long range, and if you're shooting at short range, a shotgun has more spread and does more damage - but the Geth variation (which, as far as I can tell, is only available in multiplayer) is actually highly accurate, and has an incredibly fast firing rate, even compares to other SMGs. So, my general strategy is to drop a Combat Drone behind a group of enemies, take out any shields or barriers with Overload, then fire away with Incinerate, filling in the (very short) recharge times with a hail of Geth bullets.
I'd taken a break from MP for a while as I played ME2, but picked it back up again and finished promoting my second engineer (and third overall character). In my next premium Spectre pack, I unlocked something awesome: a Quarian Engineer! That was my first Engineer-specific rare card, which made me very excited, I created a new chatacter, SebVasQwibQwib, and started to play.
The Quarian engineer visually looks to be modeled after Tali, but has an almost completely different skill set: instead of drones, energy drain, and sabotage, she has a sentry turret, cryo blast, and incinerate. I had just recently picked up the sentry turret skill in my SP game, and while it didn't seem as useful there as combat drone, I had a feeling it would be more useful in MP. Unlike the drone, which can move around in pursuit of enemies, the turret always stays in one place. That generally limits its usefulness in SP, since most levels involve you steadily going forward and encountering fresh batches of enemies. In contrast, MP is confined to a single stage, and particularly in objective-based rounds, you'll be spending a great deal of time within several meters of space.
I maximized my sentry turret, opting for boosts to its damage and a flamethrower mode that unleashes 84 points of damage every second to anyone within close range. This is an awesome upgrade for MP, especially for situations like uploading from the reactor core: when you have a Banshee and two Brutes in a confined space, you want that sustained damage. In contrast, in SP I'd opted for the upgrade with long-range rockets, since that gave it a longer period of usefulness.
After that, I maxed out my Cryo Blast and Incinerate powers. I usually spec for maximum damage, but in this case I opted for spread: my goal was to use them as crowd-control powers. A shot of Cryo will freeze or slow down a group of enemies for a few seconds. If they freeze, I can then shoot them with Incinerate for a tech combo that creates a Tech Explosion, dealing a chunk of damage to anyone nearby.
I've played a few rounds with this build, and while I enjoy it, I think I'll be switching back to my human engineer. I've gone from generally being #2 on the score chart to #4. I get more kills as a Quarian, and my turret is capable of killing quite a few weak opponents without any assistance from me, but I make a lot fewer assists. I'm also finding the Cryo/Incinerate combo a lot less satisfying than I had hoped. It's decent against Reapers, but since I no longer have a way to easily strip shields it's basically useless against Geth, and by the time I strip armor off of Cerberus I might as well just finish the job.
The best game I've played with this character was actually the first one I ever played. It was a totally crazy class grouping: me, the Quarian Engineer; a Geth Engineer; a Salarian Engineer; and an Asari Adept. So, basically, the four squishiest classes in the game. BUT, thanks to our various drones and turrets and singularities, we essentially had eight bodies on the field. We MASSACRED the Geth. We were playing on Firebase White, and we set up our armaments at the various points of egress, then waited outside on the top ledge and just slaughtered everyone when they came out. It's a beautiful thing to see a Geth Prime go down in three seconds: shocked by a combat drone, flamed by a sentry turret, its shields overloaded away, its armor incinerated.
Since that promising start, though, I've generally felt a lot less useful than usual in my matches, so I think I'll regretfully leave SebVasQwibQwib behind and get back to what I do best: getting rid of barriers, shields, and armor so my buddies can kill people.
MINI SPOILERS
It's been interesting playing the SP game after spending time with MP. I'd mentioned before that the presence of Cerberus in the MP games made me suspect that they couldn't be trusted in ME2; similarly, the fact that recent expansions of ME3 MP have added Geth as a playable race has foreshadowed the part of the single-player campaign that I'm currently in.
Super-random note: I kind of hate the music in the captain's quarters in ME3. ME2 and ME3 have both had sound systems that you can play and switch between songs. ME2 had just a couple of tracks, but they were awesome: a sweeping, dramatic, classical suite, and a cool, bass-heavy electronic track. ME3 has a ton of songs, and they all suck; they sound like pre-sets on a 1992 Casio keyboard. The music in the rest of the game is quite good, though. I'm happy to be able to recognize some returning themes from previous games, like the Presidium theme that's been around since ME1. The dance track in Purgatory is pretty good, too. I just wish I could relax with some better tunes for myself.
Oh, but I'm pretty happy with the new fish tank system. In ME2, all my fish died since I didn't always visit my quarters to feed them between every mission. (Chambers eventually volunteers to take care of them, so I should have waited until after then to start getting them.) In ME3, one of my very first purchases was a new aquarium feeder that automatically dispenses food as needed to keep them alive. I'm now getting some rarer fish, including a sweet electric eel thingy. The ship models are pretty neat - there are some new ones in ME3, like a Quarian Lifeship. My favorite thingy, though, is the space hamster. In ME2, you buy him; in ME3, he's gotten loose, so you need to find and capture him in the Engineering quarters under the drive core. It took me way too long to figure that, duh, of course this is Boo, from the Baldur's Gate games. Hooray for crossover continuity! I think that might even be the same "Squeak!" sample they play in the BG games.
MEGA SPOILERS
Let's see... after the attack on the Citadel, I got Ashley to join my team, which I'd been expecting but still made me very happy. I've been feeling serious nostalgia for ME1 now that my standard away team is the "girls group" of Shepard, Ashley, and Liara that I always used in the first game. Ashley's been a good character. She's lost some of the xenophobia that she exhibited in ME1, although she can still be a little prickly. She's a bit less confident than I would expect from the second human spectre. (Incidentally, I'm still really curious about what Udina's whole story was. He promoted Bailey and Ashley to their new positions, and both of them ended up helping to thwart him. Just how long was he working for Cerberus? Did he think that he could control Ash and Bailey, or was he hoping to keep an eye on them, or was he actually trying to do the right thing by them and only turned bad later?)
Returning to the Citadel after the attack was a sobering experience. The Presidium at first looks as lovely as ever, but then you start to notice little things: the large glass windows were smashed, and so they're now just empty frames; many of the large monitors are now on the fritz; various engineers with omni-tools are repairing vending machines and other equipment. It's also been sad to see the misery in Huerta Memorial Hospital. It's now so crowded in there that many patients are on operating tables in the middle of the hallway. Once again, I wonder how much responsibility I bear for that. There have been a few times that I've weighed in on arguments, and when it comes to medical treatment I'm very much a Paragon: I'll always argue for treating as many people as possible, even if it means fewer supplies may be available for future conflicts. If I'd pushed more for triage and rationing, would this level be less crowded? It's interesting to think about.
Oh, Huerta is also the site of a phenomenal example of the diffuse storytelling style of Mass Effect. Like most of my favorite pieces of fiction, Mass Effect gives the impression that you're a single (albeit important) particle in a huge universe; for every story that you're involved in, there are many other stories progressing on their own. Often that takes the form of conversations that you overhear as you wander the Citadel. One story, which has been playing out ever since I first visited right after escaping Mars, concerns an Asari commando who seems to be suffering from PTSD. She's talking with a therapist, describing a horrific encounter with the Reapers she had on her last mission. Each time you visit, you'll hear maybe a minute of the story, and there are probably a dozen or so sections. (Spoiler: the humans she was trying to protect has been Indoctrinated, the farmgirl she was trying to save broke her leg, and the commando apparently ended up killing all of them in order to secure her own escape.) She's clearly distraught. Later on, when visiting the Spectre Terminal on the Embassies level, I was asked to authorize her request for a firearm. I usually authorize any request I get, but giving a disturbed ex-military woman a gun just seemed like a bad idea, so I refused.
My next Priority mission was at the Quarian fleet. Ironically, Priority missions are the ones you should do last: the Priority missions will advance the main plot, which sometimes will close off side-quests, so you should do every available non-Priority mission before the Priority. (But, again, some of your missions won't be accessible since their Galaxy Map locations won't open up until you do more Priority missions. It's confusing. I really wish this game had a better Journal.) So I explored everywhere, did a bunch of the fetch-quest-type side-missions, and the combat side-missions. I'm now finding many of the multiplayer maps in the single-player game, which is pretty fun. They tend to play pretty differently, but I enjoy walking into the situation already having a feel for the lay of the land, anticipating choke-points and escape routes.
I've managed to reconnect with a few more of my squadmates from ME2. The saddest was Thane. I'd run into him at the hospital before Cerberus's attempted coup. He was terminally ill in ME2, and had already lived years longer than his doctors had thought he would, but the illness was now in its final stages; he refused to join me, and I understood given his weakness. So, he surprised me when, during the coup, he turned the tables on Kai Leng, the assassin who was trying to kill the Salarian ambassador. Thane saved the ambassador, but was brutally stabbed through the chest. He didn't die immediately, and later I visited his deathbed at Huerta. His reconciled son joined him there, which was particularly bittersweet; I had worked hard in ME2 to get the two of them together, and it was touching to see Thane get some peace, and just as touching to see that his son was turning into an honorable man, free of the anger that had driven him to crime. There isn't much religion in the Mass Effect series (other than the occasional Asari exclamation of "Goddess!"), but I appreciated the scripture reading at Thane's end, which had a Catholic last-rites feel to it, and also focused nicely on the living. (I forget the exact phrase, but one part of the prayer said something like, "Please watch over her," and afterwards I asked Thane's son, "Why did he say 'her' instead of 'him'?", to which he replied, "He is at peace. He is praying for you." Anyways. It's something that could easily have been melodramatic and saccharine, and instead felt very earned and appreciated.)
But, boy, it sure would have sucked if you were romancing Thane. I wonder if they let you carry that forward into ME3, or if he dumps you? I suppose players would already know what they're getting into once they start dating a terminally ill assassin, but still that would be doubly harsh to lose both a friend and a lover.
The Crew Quarters floor on the Normandy has a memorial wall, somewhat like the Vietnam Memorial or the new 9/11 Memorial, which lists the names of everyone from either Normandy who has died. Since I messed up the rescue attempt at the end of ME2, my wall has a lot of names on it, including Chambers and Gabrielle. It also includes Pressley and Kaidan from ME1. Now, with Moridin and Thane joining the wall, the sense of death is growing stronger and more pervasive.
Not all reunions are that dire, though. Miranda has left Cerberus, and is resuming her conflict against her father in protection of her sister. If she wasn't such a capable woman, she'd be an a really bad spot: she has betrayed Cerberus, the Alliance has no reason to trust her, and so she's left without any allies, meeting you clandestinely (in a busy shipping corridor, or on a secured vid-screen channel, or in a private residence) and swallowing her pride to ask for help. She also apologized for how she wanted to implant a control chip in you, when she'd fought so fiercely to keep her father from controlling her and her sister. I just now sent Miranda off with access to my Spectre codes, without a clear understanding of what she'll do with them. I wish her the best, and wish I could accompany her wherever she's going, but I have a galaxy to save.
There was also an interesting reunion with Zaeed. It actually started as an investigation into a Volus diplomat; you learn that he was secretly in Cerberus's pay and was selling them Turian secrets. Since the Citadel attack, he has tried to cut ties, and now he's in a very bad spot. Cerberus can blackmail him, while the Turians want him dead and have hired some mercenaries to kill him. The diplomat feels remorse for his actions, and you eventually track him down, where Zaeed has captured him. I eventually persuaded the diplomat to provide info on a Turian colony under attack, and also donate some Volus materials to the war effort. Zaeed was slightly annoyed at the job's complications, but was happy to stick it to Cerberus, and eventually said that he would get in touch with some mercenary buddies on Earth to join the resistance. Anyways. I was never a huge Zaeed fan, but it was good seeing another familiar face. (Even one with icky scars.)
On to the Quarians!
I really dig all the interesting races that Bioware has created for the Mass Effect series. The Quarians are one of the most interesting, though. They all speak with accents that sound Eastern European, but to me, the story of their people sounds a lot like one of the tribal groups from the Middle East - perhaps the Hebrews, or the Kurds. Their story is focused around a lost homeland, a diaspora, a long time spent wandering in lands that are not their own, and a yearning desire to fight those who took their homeland and reclaim their home.
The deeper I've gotten into the game, the more complex their story has become. The rest of the galaxy views the Quarians with a mixture of pity and distaste. Pity, because of their trials in exile; distaste, because they feel like the Quarians not only brought it on themselves, but also brought danger to the rest of the galaxy. The problems started several hundred years ago, when the Quarians created the Geth. Quarians were always technologically sophisticated, much like the Salarians, and made the Geth as a set of autonomous, intelligent, networked helpers who could fulfill mundane tasks like farming, mining, and construction. However, the Quarians had accidentally given the Geth too much of a capacity for self-learning and improvement, and so the Geth evolved from being a VI (Virtual Intelligence) to an AI (Artificial Intelligence).
What happens next is murky - as you hear in the first game, the Quarians realized what had happened and tried to shut down the Geth; the Geth rebelled against their masters, eventually defeating them and forcing the Quarian into exile. The Geth claimed the Quarians' former home planet and colonies in the Perseus Veil for their own. The Quarians had already built the largest fleet in the galaxy, and now the Flotilla became a mobile home for the survivors: it nomadically flew from system to system, buying food and fuel as they arrived, and selling the advanced technology that they're good at creating. The Geth were the most terrifying enemy that the galaxy had faced between the Rachni invasion and the reappearance of the Reapers, and the organic species of the Milky Way quickly learned to stay out of the Perseus Veil if they wanted to survive. At the start of Mass Effect 1, there's an enormous amount of unease among the Citadel races about what the Geth are up to: they are presumably building a larger and larger army, and one day they may emerge from the Far Rim and destroy everyone.
I've previously noted how the "all Geth are evil" meme of the first game gave way to a more nuanced view in the second, which posited that most Geth actually just want self-determination. The third game is expanding the view even further, and revealing that, in a certain sense, the Geth are actually the victims. In one mission, you penetrate into the Geth Consensus, the shared consciousness that all Geth inhabit. Here, you witness recordings from the birth of the Geth, and see how it was the Quarians who first struck against them. Even more intriguing, many Quarians (who Geth call the Creators) supported the Geth, arguing that they should be protected, even while others started their campaign of extinction. We learn that the Geth don't hate the Quarians, and, in their odd, digital way, actually kind of honor the Creators who stood by them.
I should back up a bit. I'd held off on starting the Quarian priority mission until I'd finished all my side-quests, even though I had a hunch that I'd be able to pick up Tali once I started. I now wish that I had done it earlier. You basically get Tali right away, and still have a few other Quarian Priority missions after that's done, so there's no harm in heading there first. I really enjoyed being reunited with Tali; along with Garrus, she's one of the few stalwart companions to have stood by your side in all three games. She has recently been appointed to fill her father's Admiralty Board seat. Much like Ashley, she's a bit self-conscious and not sure whether she's ready for command yet. However, she's an extremely capable and intelligent woman and a great member for that position. She's done an even better job than Ashley at overcoming her prejudices: her experience with Legion has even helped her overcome the anti-Geth animosity that most Quarians share. (There are definitely factions within the Quarians between hard-liners who want to launch a war to retake their home and doves who want to preserve their own race, but even the doves don't feel sympathy for the Geth, they merely recognize the danger they pose.)
Quarian politics are maddening - again, I found myself thinking frequently of today's Middle East, where persecuted groups with grievances perpetuate endless cycles of violence against one another. I'd thought that I'd left it in a good place at the end of ME2, as I'd urged the Quarians to avoid attacking the Geth, modified the Heretics to rejoin the main Geth consensus, and secured Legion's allegiance and even an agreement to avoid betraying Quarian logistics to the collective. (Side note: it's interesting that the Geth are so reminiscent of so many famous sci-fi species, and yet feel so unique. The story of their creation has very strong echoes of the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica and the Replicants of Blade Runner, while their collective mind and endless drive makes me think of Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation.) That's all gone to hell now. Admiral Xen of the Quarians had discovered a new type of signal broadcast that could shut down individual Geth; elated at this breakthrough, the admirals decided to launch a full-blown attack for their old homeworld, even strapping cannons onto civilian ships to increase their firepower. The threatened Geth were then targeted by the Reapers (the "Old Machines") who upgraded the Geth as they had the Heretics, and broadcast their own directives through the Consensus, using Legion as a medium. These two groups, who I had hoped I could rope into the war on my side, were about to murder one another and hand the Far Rim to the Reapers.
One thing that makes me very happy about starting Geth missions is that I can finally justify taking EDI along. She's a lot of fun in the squad, as she is on the ship. All of my Geth missions so far have consisted of me, EDI, and Tali: that's three female engineers, tearing stuff up. We're... basically unstoppable against machines.
In the first Geth mission, things are looking grim for the Quarians. The Reaper-aided Geth have overcome the signal attack, and are leading a counterattack against the flotilla, putting countless civilian lives at risk. The most dangerous component of this is an enormous Geth dreadnought, which is single-handedly annihilating all resistance. The three of us got on the ship, starting with a very cool zero-gravity level where you enter through an exterior docking tube. That vaguely reminded me of the Battle of the Citadel at the end of ME1, which had a similar mission outside gravity at one point. Once on board, we fought our way to the server control room, where I was reunited with Legion. Legion had been aiding the Reapers, but not through any choice of his own; I chose to trust him, and together we shut down the dreadnought's defenses.
Of course, that made one of the battle-crazy Quarian admirals "seize the opportunity" and open fire on the ship, while we were all still on board. Fortunately, with Legion's help we were able to make it out, but I was TICKED. Here we had an opportunity to open a division among the Geth, weaken them and improve our overall chances of victory, and the Quarians were too short-sighted to take advantage of it.
This led to some... unpleasantness back on the Normandy. In this game's dialog/morality system, the answers at the top of the wheel are usually the "Paragon" answers - not exactly "good", but generally more peaceful, diplomatic options. The answers at the bottom tend to be "Renegade" - not "evil", just more focused on getting results, willing to make short-term sacrifices for long-term objectives. (I think I've made this observation before, but the best analogy I can think of is Machiavelli's classic distinction between Love and Fear; Paragon choices make people love you, while Renegade choices make people fear you.) Anyways, I'm usually around 90% Paragon, but I think carefully about each choice, and don't regret picking Renegade when it suits me. There are some cases where a situation is so complex that even the game's thoughtful dichotomy doesn't seem to apply. After we (barely) escaped the dreadnought, I confronted the two other Quarian admirals on board the Normandy. The admiral who ordered the attack said something like, "Well, you made it out alive. I saw an opportunity and I had to take it." The top response was something like, "I understand." The bottom response was basically "Unacceptable." I chose the latter. Not so much for myself - I'm used to being put in danger - but for the Geth: I've been trying my hardest to broker some kind of rapprochement between Geth and Quarian, and this admiral had spit in the eye of the great opportunity Legion had just handed him. He started to argue, and I got a Renegade interrupt action; I usually let these pass, but this time I selected it, which led me to the rare satisfaction of my Shepard gut-punching the Admiral, yelling at him for endangering our lives, and throwing him off my ship. Yeah! Take that! So, he's gone now, and a much more reasonable female Quarian admiral and Tali are the only Quarians left on board.
Since then, I've continued a bit farther with the Quarian missions, which means more installments of the Shepard/EDI/Tali show. In one of them, I tracked down the Quarian admiral of the civilian fleet, who was stranded on the homeworld. Without his leadership, some civilian ships were starting to talk about breaking off from the flotilla and retreating back to the Mass Relay; this would have been suicidal in the face of the Geth warships, and we needed the admiral back to maintain the population. This mission had some really fun elements to it, including a segment where you're firing an artillery cannon from a flying gunship as you escort the admiral to an extraction point.
The last, very cool mission was where I entered the Geth Consensus, as I'd mentioned above. This part of the game vaguely reminded me of the very cool Fade sequence from Dragon Age: Origins; of course, the Consensus is digital, while the Fade was dreamlike, but both are awesome in the way they present a thoroughly unreal world inside your familiar interface.
Some quick notes on romance:
After repelling the Cerberus attack, you get a bunch of chances to move your romances forward. I'm very pleased to see that Yeoman Traynor is an option for female Shepards; like I'd said, I'm a sucker for British accents, and she has a really fun personality, with a nice combination of intelligence, humor, and self-awareness. I kind of cheated there - I saved, started the romance, smiled, and then re-loaded. I'm pretty committed to Liara at this point, and didn't feel sufficiently callow to abandon her. Still, that's a pretty nice scene. An officer's cabin has some definite perks.
It looks like Diane Allers is another romance option - at least, you can flirt with her, and she flirts back, though it doesn't lead to anything as, um, visual as the Traynor cut-scene. I re-loaded again. I'm happy to have Allers on my ship, but she isn't too tempting as a romance partner.
Instead, I met with Liara on the Presidium, and we had a very nice chat. She's far more calm than the others, and things are going slow, but I'm optimistic about the progression. It feels like we still aren't quite back to where we were at the end of ME1, but we've re-established the trust that was damaged during ME2.
I think I'd sufficiently repelled James in my first couple of conversations with him, since he hasn't even broached the subject recently. (Other than a crude comment he made while getting tattooed, which led to an entertaining "put up or shut up" challenge from Shepard.) And it looks like Garrus and Thane got the message from ME2, since neither of them has offered any openings.
END SPOILERS
It's good to have filled out my party more, though I'm curious whether I still have any more recruits to go. At the moment I "just" have six companions, exactly as many as in the first game. I'd love getting more like I did in the second, but I won't be too disappointed if I don't, since the game has done such a good job at letting you keep up relationships with people who aren't currently in your squad.
Wow, that was a long update. Time to stop typing and start shooting!
Friday, July 06, 2012
Massive Attack
Here's another dispatch from the war in the Milky Way...
I figured out that, contrary to my assumptions about the importance of finding items on missions, Mass Effect 3 actually does give you a chance to pick up upgrades and plot-related objects that you might have missed. After a mission is over, when you go to the Spectre Requisition Office on the Citadel, you'll occasionally find these items for sale at the terminal. Plot items cost 1000 credits, and upgrades cost the same amount as they would in a store, generally around 4000. I think that's a very fair system, and I'm relieved to know that I don't need to panic about potentially missing stuff; I still try to find everything I can, of course, and there's no compensation if I miss a cache of credits, but I appreciate how this small change lets me be less anal about the way I'm playing. (They also try to justify the presence of these items within the game's continuity, which can occasionally be amusing. Once, when I was picking up some dog tags for a side-quest from the terminal, the description for the item said something like, "When presenting these dog tags, the spectre should act as though they retrieved the tags personally." Which, of course, is a way of making the recorded dialog still apply.)
I'm still fiddling around with the new weapons systems. I don't have a feeling yet for which is the "best" weapon in each class, and since weapons are expensive to improve while upgrades are cheap and convertible across models, I've been maximizing my upgrades and mostly just holding on to the Tier 1/2 weapons that I've found so far. In multiplayer, I'm madly in love with my upgraded Geth SMG, but there's no equivalent weapon in singleplayer (at least that I've found), so at the moment I'm rocking a Predator with high-caliber and armor-piercing upgrades. My biotic companion uses the same, along with an SMG with similar upgrades. My fighter companion uses an assault rifle and sniper rifle, but I can never remember what weapon he has equipped when I'm on my ship, which is the place where I could improve his weapons. I just finally realized last night that I could add an SMG to my loadout and still be at a 200% power recharge time, so I think I may either do that or switch to a heavier pistol. Ammunition is MUCH more prevalent in ME3 than it was in ME2, so I never need to worry about running out of ammo, even if I have a single weapon without an ammo upgrade. (At least, that's been true for my pistol so far, it might be a different story with other weapons.) So far I haven't been able to find a way to see my companions' power recharge times, which makes it a bit hard to optimize their own loadouts. I think my biotic is probably maxed for recharge, and I've tried to get my fighter in decent shape with a heavy sniper rifle and a mid-weight assault rifle.
Just in general, I've been having trouble figuring out what I should spend my money on. There are several tiers of goods: cheap stuff at 1000 credits (mostly fun inessentials, like fish for your tank); low stuff at about 3k-6k credits (weapon upgrades, some armor pieces); weapon improvements; full sets of armor (50k); and premium weapons (250k). Right now I'm hovering around 250k. I snap up all the cheap stuff that I can find, and all the damage and piercing upgrades for the weapons my squad uses, but that leaves me a ton of money... but not so much money that I can just buy everything. I'm holding off for now from spending it in case I regret my choice. That's definitely a contrast to ME2, though, which had an excellent economy (I felt like I had just enough money to buy everything I wanted by the end of the game, and up until then needed to prioritize and buy things I needed), and also quite unlike ME1, which had way more money than things to spend it on. That said, I have a ways to go before finishing the game, so maybe the situation will become clearer.
The galaxy map works a bit differently than in previous games. In ME1 and ME2, you could go pretty much anywhere from the beginning; certain missions wouldn't be unlocked until later, but you could still go to those planets and stations, just not land until you had the quest. In ME3, only about a dozen systems are available at the start of the game. When you complete major plot points, a couple of new systems will open up. I've gotten into a new rhythm now where, when a new system opens, I'll arrive; I'll scan in the first cluster once or twice, until the Reaper alert level is above the halfway point; if there are other clusters available, I'll fly to those. I'll scan and try to find resources. If the Reapers arrive, I'll keep flying in and out of the system to evade them, constantly scanning and trying to locate the remaining resources. I WON'T try to collect anything after the Reapers arrive, just find where they are. I'll then return to the first cluster and do the same thing, trying to find everything even if the Reapers are chasing me. At the end, I'll relay out of the system. I'll do this for all the new systems, then get down to doing all the side-quests I've found (most of which start from the Citadel, a couple of which come over vid-com from the Admiral). Any side-quest that involves an away team will globally re-set Reaper awareness, so I can then go back to all the systems I'd previously visited and easily acquire all the resources I had previously marked.
Oh, and from the Miser's Notes department: landing at the Citadel will always refill your fuel, for free. I was a huge cheapskate early in the game, so I would do this between scouting systems to avoid paying at fuel stations. I'm now finally at a point where I'll happily spend the 1000 credits to avoid a 30-second interlude at the Citadel.
Storywise, here are some
MEGA SPOILERS
I am seriously loving how all the choices you've made throughout the previous games have been carried forward. Way back at the end of the first game, you have to make a choice: with the Citadel under attack, and the Council's ship under fire by the Geth, should you direct the human Alliance navy to intervene and save them, or stay out of the fight and preserve their strength? I had chosen to save the Council, in the interests of furthering galactic cooperation and security. Well, now that we're facing down the final war against the Reapers, I'm reviewing my War Assets and seeing that the Alliance hasn't fully recovered from all the ships they lost in the fight; they've lost about one-third of their strength from before. As a result, the galaxy is in a worse position to fight the Reapers. Granted, I've saved the Council, but I've been extremely disappointed in their behavior in the last two games; they didn't acknowledge the Reaper threat until it was too late, and now that Earth is under attack, they refuse to commit their own resources to help defend it. If I knew then what I know now, I might have let their ship go down, Paragon be damned.
Andrew explained what was going on with my mixed-success rescue attempt in ME2. Apparently, it IS possible to both do Legion's quest and save Chambers and Gabby and the rest of the crew. You need to get the Reaper IFF, then IMMEDIATELY do Legion's quest, and then IMMEDIATELY go through the relay. In my case, I had already done all of the other side-quests before the IFF, so the only mission I did was Legion, BUT I made the mistake of stopping at the Citadel first. I had hypothesized (correctly) that this was my last chance to spend all the credits I'd accumulated, so I went on one last spending trip. However, visiting the Citadel counts as a mission, and so picking up those last few items cost half my crew their lives. Argh. (Apparently, there's strong evidence on the disc that earlier versions of the game had Legion join your party fairly early on; they moved him back to near the end later on, which put added pressure on your race to save your compatriots.) Now that I know, I kind of want to go back and re-do the end of ME2, but I'm far enough along in ME3 now that I won't. It has certainly added a strong sense of loss and sadness to the story.
Galactic politics are pretty intense. Earth and Palaven, the Turian homeworld, are both under heavy attack by the Reapers; the Salarians and Asari have so far avoided most of the attention, but their time is coming. The Asari have perplexingly disengaged from the process, not even attending a summit meant to discuss military cooperation. I've come to like the Turians more and more throughout the series, which I think is fairly reflective of the ways that humans see them within the story. The Turians were the original bogeymen, the scary aliens that killed humans; we've passed through the rough start of the First Contact War, through a cold peace, through envy in power-sharing and representation at the Citadel, through cautious cooperation in constructing the original Normandy, to now being brothers in arms against a common foe. (There's a funny and really excellent conversation later in the game between Garrus and Joker up in the cockpit, with each telling jokes about the other species. "What's the hardest part of treating a Turian who took a rocket to the face? Figuring out which side of the face the rocket hit." "Why does the Alliance hire cripples as pilots? So their marines can beat someone in hand-to-hand drills.")
That said, while the Turians and humanity are united in recognizing the threat and willing to work together, they're also overstretched and neither side can come to the other's aid. The new Turian negotiator has a suggestion, though: bring the Krogan, the galaxy's most feared warriors, in to relieve pressure on Palaven; that will free the Turian fleet to assist Earth. Which is a fine idea, since Krogans love a fight... but, there's the little matter of the fact that the Turians created the Genophage, a genetic virus that sterilized most of the Krogan population and came close to extinguishing the species. My buddy Wrex is a progressive guy, but he's certainly not happy about the Genophage, and he isn't afraid to use the dire circumstances to improve his own negotiating position: he'll only help the Turians if they cure the Genophage.
I was actually really into this; I was a little bummed way back in ME1 when you didn't have any option to rescue Saren's own genophage cure, so I was looking forward to doing it properly. Few others share my enthusiasm, though. The genophage was created for a reason, and most people, especially the Salarian negotiator, take a hard line against it. Assuming that the galaxy can defeat the Reapers, they would then be left in a weakened position, while a resurgent Krogan empire would easily be able to conquer everything in their path. From the Salarian perspective, without the Krogan there's a chance to beat the Reapers; with the Krogan, that chance might be slightly improved, but there's no chance of surviving the Krogan after the war.
Once again, I'm amazed at all the contingency in the plot... the saga of the genophage cure was really exciting and gripping, and it's hard to imagine that other people might be playing the game with very different circumstances. What if Wrex hadn't survived Virmire? What if Moridin had perished in the suicide mission against the Collectors? What if I hadn't convinced Moridin to save his erstwhile partner's data records on his own genophage cure? Was Moridin now willing to reverse the genophage because I hounded him so relentlessly in ME2 about his complicity in the modification program?
Moridin is the first former team member (not counting non-squad people like Chambers) to have died in the game, and it was really moving. I love how true to himself he stays throughout his whole storyline. Near the end, I'd asked him what made him change his mind. His response was something like, "Never changed mind. New circumstances, new outcomes. Only I could do it. Someone else would do it wrong." He's surprisingly matter-of-fact about sacrificing his life to save another species. I got a lump in my throat when he said "Would have enjoyed classifying seashells," and of course loved his final humming of Gilbert & Sullivan.
But, yeah... contingency. I can't even imagine how that whole sequence would have played out if those people weren't around. I assume the game would have introduced a new character to play the role? Or maybe some off-screen Salarian would have synthesized the cure, and I would have delivered it myself? And who would lead the Urdnot if not Wrex? Would the female be into them? The mind boggles.
The Salarian ambassador was quite upset at me for following through with the genophage cure, but asked me to return to the Citadel to discuss matters. Once I arrived, the moment I'd kind of been expecting ever since Mass Effect 1 came to pass: Councilor Udina betrayed the Citadel. (Seriously, this was broadcast pretty heavily, in both ME1 and ME2. Once again, though, I wonder how the story would have been different if I had supported Udina over Anderson at the end of ME1.) That said, I wasn't expecting the details of what happened, although in retrospect it makes a lot of sense: Udina is secretly allied with Cerberus, who have shown their true colors now. Near the start of the game, they had launched an attack on Mars, where the Alliance and Liara were analyzing Prothean data. As the Illusive Man has always said, Cerberus's goal is the protection and elevation of mankind: in his twisted logic, this doesn't mean simply defending against the Reapers, but learning from them, acquiring their technology and knowledge, in order to create a superior human race to rule the galaxy. Udina, with his prickly humanity-first attitude, seems like a reasonable candidate for this philosophy. Still, the attack itself is quite breathtaking. It isn't the first time the Citadel has been the site of a battle, but it's the first time that it's been betrayed from within, and the fighting through the Presidium feels unusually gruesome.
There are also plenty of quiet moments along the way, and I think I like those even more than the (very cool!) epic battles. I think my favorite so far has been a conversation with Liara in my quarters. Liara is a long-lived individual, whose life has been (mostly) devoted to studying a race that disappeared 50,000 years ago, and so her mind works at a different scale than most others. She knows from history that it took the Reapers several centuries to finish wiping out the Protheans, and since she's only one hundred years old, she could easily live to see the end of civilization. She also knows that the only reason there's hope for the galaxy now is because the last Protheans ensured that knowledge of the Reapers and a possible means to fight them would last those 50,000 years after they were gone. And so, while the war is still in its early stages, she is putting together a time capsule that explains the legacy the galaxy is leaving behind for its next generation. She has finished most of it already, and wants to include a section describing you. I said that I would leave the description up to her, which led to a really sweet, touching, and technically astonishing hagiography from her about Shepard. It perfectly reflected my conception of the character, based on specific aspects of my story but also more generally her attitudes and values. She even mentioned my skill as an engineer. So, that was cool, but what's really impressive is how seamless and natural it felt. There are probably, I dunno, maybe something like six factors that would contribute to that simple little speech from her, and all of those could vary independently of one another depending on your character's background and choices. That might mean somewhere on the magnitude of 2000 different versions that scene could take! And I'm not even sure how the romance factor plays into it - would I have seen it at all if I hadn't been romancing Liara? Or would there have been a little less tenderness from her? Anyways... it's just the latest in an astonishing series of great storytelling examples from Bioware.
END SPOILERS
I am a bit surprised at how few squad members I have; I've been playing the game for a while, and only have four potential companions. There's a biotic who I always take, a tech specialist who I'd like to take but is redundant with my engineer skillset, a fighter who I dislike and leave behind, and a fighter/tech member who I would usually take, but who I'm almost positive could have been killed in the previous game (which would have left me with only three members!). I'm pretty sure that I'll be picking up at least one more member in the near future, but still, that's a pretty paltry lineup. By this point in the first game I'd picked up all 6 potential squad members, and by this point in the second game I had acquired 7 of an eventual 11 members. I hope that my field increases soon, but I'm already preparing for the possibility of the smallest group of companions yet, and wondering if I've inadvertently missed some recruitment options along the way.
This game gets more and more addictive the more I play it. Unlike SW:TOR or Civilization, there's a definite end in sight, and I'm already wondering how hard it will feel once I reach the story's conclusion. I have a really hard time leaving behind well-loved stories like Lord of the Rings or Snow Crash, and I get the feeling that I'll want to continue spending time in this universe even after the game ends.
I figured out that, contrary to my assumptions about the importance of finding items on missions, Mass Effect 3 actually does give you a chance to pick up upgrades and plot-related objects that you might have missed. After a mission is over, when you go to the Spectre Requisition Office on the Citadel, you'll occasionally find these items for sale at the terminal. Plot items cost 1000 credits, and upgrades cost the same amount as they would in a store, generally around 4000. I think that's a very fair system, and I'm relieved to know that I don't need to panic about potentially missing stuff; I still try to find everything I can, of course, and there's no compensation if I miss a cache of credits, but I appreciate how this small change lets me be less anal about the way I'm playing. (They also try to justify the presence of these items within the game's continuity, which can occasionally be amusing. Once, when I was picking up some dog tags for a side-quest from the terminal, the description for the item said something like, "When presenting these dog tags, the spectre should act as though they retrieved the tags personally." Which, of course, is a way of making the recorded dialog still apply.)
I'm still fiddling around with the new weapons systems. I don't have a feeling yet for which is the "best" weapon in each class, and since weapons are expensive to improve while upgrades are cheap and convertible across models, I've been maximizing my upgrades and mostly just holding on to the Tier 1/2 weapons that I've found so far. In multiplayer, I'm madly in love with my upgraded Geth SMG, but there's no equivalent weapon in singleplayer (at least that I've found), so at the moment I'm rocking a Predator with high-caliber and armor-piercing upgrades. My biotic companion uses the same, along with an SMG with similar upgrades. My fighter companion uses an assault rifle and sniper rifle, but I can never remember what weapon he has equipped when I'm on my ship, which is the place where I could improve his weapons. I just finally realized last night that I could add an SMG to my loadout and still be at a 200% power recharge time, so I think I may either do that or switch to a heavier pistol. Ammunition is MUCH more prevalent in ME3 than it was in ME2, so I never need to worry about running out of ammo, even if I have a single weapon without an ammo upgrade. (At least, that's been true for my pistol so far, it might be a different story with other weapons.) So far I haven't been able to find a way to see my companions' power recharge times, which makes it a bit hard to optimize their own loadouts. I think my biotic is probably maxed for recharge, and I've tried to get my fighter in decent shape with a heavy sniper rifle and a mid-weight assault rifle.
Just in general, I've been having trouble figuring out what I should spend my money on. There are several tiers of goods: cheap stuff at 1000 credits (mostly fun inessentials, like fish for your tank); low stuff at about 3k-6k credits (weapon upgrades, some armor pieces); weapon improvements; full sets of armor (50k); and premium weapons (250k). Right now I'm hovering around 250k. I snap up all the cheap stuff that I can find, and all the damage and piercing upgrades for the weapons my squad uses, but that leaves me a ton of money... but not so much money that I can just buy everything. I'm holding off for now from spending it in case I regret my choice. That's definitely a contrast to ME2, though, which had an excellent economy (I felt like I had just enough money to buy everything I wanted by the end of the game, and up until then needed to prioritize and buy things I needed), and also quite unlike ME1, which had way more money than things to spend it on. That said, I have a ways to go before finishing the game, so maybe the situation will become clearer.
The galaxy map works a bit differently than in previous games. In ME1 and ME2, you could go pretty much anywhere from the beginning; certain missions wouldn't be unlocked until later, but you could still go to those planets and stations, just not land until you had the quest. In ME3, only about a dozen systems are available at the start of the game. When you complete major plot points, a couple of new systems will open up. I've gotten into a new rhythm now where, when a new system opens, I'll arrive; I'll scan in the first cluster once or twice, until the Reaper alert level is above the halfway point; if there are other clusters available, I'll fly to those. I'll scan and try to find resources. If the Reapers arrive, I'll keep flying in and out of the system to evade them, constantly scanning and trying to locate the remaining resources. I WON'T try to collect anything after the Reapers arrive, just find where they are. I'll then return to the first cluster and do the same thing, trying to find everything even if the Reapers are chasing me. At the end, I'll relay out of the system. I'll do this for all the new systems, then get down to doing all the side-quests I've found (most of which start from the Citadel, a couple of which come over vid-com from the Admiral). Any side-quest that involves an away team will globally re-set Reaper awareness, so I can then go back to all the systems I'd previously visited and easily acquire all the resources I had previously marked.
Oh, and from the Miser's Notes department: landing at the Citadel will always refill your fuel, for free. I was a huge cheapskate early in the game, so I would do this between scouting systems to avoid paying at fuel stations. I'm now finally at a point where I'll happily spend the 1000 credits to avoid a 30-second interlude at the Citadel.
Storywise, here are some
MEGA SPOILERS
I am seriously loving how all the choices you've made throughout the previous games have been carried forward. Way back at the end of the first game, you have to make a choice: with the Citadel under attack, and the Council's ship under fire by the Geth, should you direct the human Alliance navy to intervene and save them, or stay out of the fight and preserve their strength? I had chosen to save the Council, in the interests of furthering galactic cooperation and security. Well, now that we're facing down the final war against the Reapers, I'm reviewing my War Assets and seeing that the Alliance hasn't fully recovered from all the ships they lost in the fight; they've lost about one-third of their strength from before. As a result, the galaxy is in a worse position to fight the Reapers. Granted, I've saved the Council, but I've been extremely disappointed in their behavior in the last two games; they didn't acknowledge the Reaper threat until it was too late, and now that Earth is under attack, they refuse to commit their own resources to help defend it. If I knew then what I know now, I might have let their ship go down, Paragon be damned.
Andrew explained what was going on with my mixed-success rescue attempt in ME2. Apparently, it IS possible to both do Legion's quest and save Chambers and Gabby and the rest of the crew. You need to get the Reaper IFF, then IMMEDIATELY do Legion's quest, and then IMMEDIATELY go through the relay. In my case, I had already done all of the other side-quests before the IFF, so the only mission I did was Legion, BUT I made the mistake of stopping at the Citadel first. I had hypothesized (correctly) that this was my last chance to spend all the credits I'd accumulated, so I went on one last spending trip. However, visiting the Citadel counts as a mission, and so picking up those last few items cost half my crew their lives. Argh. (Apparently, there's strong evidence on the disc that earlier versions of the game had Legion join your party fairly early on; they moved him back to near the end later on, which put added pressure on your race to save your compatriots.) Now that I know, I kind of want to go back and re-do the end of ME2, but I'm far enough along in ME3 now that I won't. It has certainly added a strong sense of loss and sadness to the story.
Galactic politics are pretty intense. Earth and Palaven, the Turian homeworld, are both under heavy attack by the Reapers; the Salarians and Asari have so far avoided most of the attention, but their time is coming. The Asari have perplexingly disengaged from the process, not even attending a summit meant to discuss military cooperation. I've come to like the Turians more and more throughout the series, which I think is fairly reflective of the ways that humans see them within the story. The Turians were the original bogeymen, the scary aliens that killed humans; we've passed through the rough start of the First Contact War, through a cold peace, through envy in power-sharing and representation at the Citadel, through cautious cooperation in constructing the original Normandy, to now being brothers in arms against a common foe. (There's a funny and really excellent conversation later in the game between Garrus and Joker up in the cockpit, with each telling jokes about the other species. "What's the hardest part of treating a Turian who took a rocket to the face? Figuring out which side of the face the rocket hit." "Why does the Alliance hire cripples as pilots? So their marines can beat someone in hand-to-hand drills.")
That said, while the Turians and humanity are united in recognizing the threat and willing to work together, they're also overstretched and neither side can come to the other's aid. The new Turian negotiator has a suggestion, though: bring the Krogan, the galaxy's most feared warriors, in to relieve pressure on Palaven; that will free the Turian fleet to assist Earth. Which is a fine idea, since Krogans love a fight... but, there's the little matter of the fact that the Turians created the Genophage, a genetic virus that sterilized most of the Krogan population and came close to extinguishing the species. My buddy Wrex is a progressive guy, but he's certainly not happy about the Genophage, and he isn't afraid to use the dire circumstances to improve his own negotiating position: he'll only help the Turians if they cure the Genophage.
I was actually really into this; I was a little bummed way back in ME1 when you didn't have any option to rescue Saren's own genophage cure, so I was looking forward to doing it properly. Few others share my enthusiasm, though. The genophage was created for a reason, and most people, especially the Salarian negotiator, take a hard line against it. Assuming that the galaxy can defeat the Reapers, they would then be left in a weakened position, while a resurgent Krogan empire would easily be able to conquer everything in their path. From the Salarian perspective, without the Krogan there's a chance to beat the Reapers; with the Krogan, that chance might be slightly improved, but there's no chance of surviving the Krogan after the war.
Once again, I'm amazed at all the contingency in the plot... the saga of the genophage cure was really exciting and gripping, and it's hard to imagine that other people might be playing the game with very different circumstances. What if Wrex hadn't survived Virmire? What if Moridin had perished in the suicide mission against the Collectors? What if I hadn't convinced Moridin to save his erstwhile partner's data records on his own genophage cure? Was Moridin now willing to reverse the genophage because I hounded him so relentlessly in ME2 about his complicity in the modification program?
Moridin is the first former team member (not counting non-squad people like Chambers) to have died in the game, and it was really moving. I love how true to himself he stays throughout his whole storyline. Near the end, I'd asked him what made him change his mind. His response was something like, "Never changed mind. New circumstances, new outcomes. Only I could do it. Someone else would do it wrong." He's surprisingly matter-of-fact about sacrificing his life to save another species. I got a lump in my throat when he said "Would have enjoyed classifying seashells," and of course loved his final humming of Gilbert & Sullivan.
But, yeah... contingency. I can't even imagine how that whole sequence would have played out if those people weren't around. I assume the game would have introduced a new character to play the role? Or maybe some off-screen Salarian would have synthesized the cure, and I would have delivered it myself? And who would lead the Urdnot if not Wrex? Would the female be into them? The mind boggles.
The Salarian ambassador was quite upset at me for following through with the genophage cure, but asked me to return to the Citadel to discuss matters. Once I arrived, the moment I'd kind of been expecting ever since Mass Effect 1 came to pass: Councilor Udina betrayed the Citadel. (Seriously, this was broadcast pretty heavily, in both ME1 and ME2. Once again, though, I wonder how the story would have been different if I had supported Udina over Anderson at the end of ME1.) That said, I wasn't expecting the details of what happened, although in retrospect it makes a lot of sense: Udina is secretly allied with Cerberus, who have shown their true colors now. Near the start of the game, they had launched an attack on Mars, where the Alliance and Liara were analyzing Prothean data. As the Illusive Man has always said, Cerberus's goal is the protection and elevation of mankind: in his twisted logic, this doesn't mean simply defending against the Reapers, but learning from them, acquiring their technology and knowledge, in order to create a superior human race to rule the galaxy. Udina, with his prickly humanity-first attitude, seems like a reasonable candidate for this philosophy. Still, the attack itself is quite breathtaking. It isn't the first time the Citadel has been the site of a battle, but it's the first time that it's been betrayed from within, and the fighting through the Presidium feels unusually gruesome.
There are also plenty of quiet moments along the way, and I think I like those even more than the (very cool!) epic battles. I think my favorite so far has been a conversation with Liara in my quarters. Liara is a long-lived individual, whose life has been (mostly) devoted to studying a race that disappeared 50,000 years ago, and so her mind works at a different scale than most others. She knows from history that it took the Reapers several centuries to finish wiping out the Protheans, and since she's only one hundred years old, she could easily live to see the end of civilization. She also knows that the only reason there's hope for the galaxy now is because the last Protheans ensured that knowledge of the Reapers and a possible means to fight them would last those 50,000 years after they were gone. And so, while the war is still in its early stages, she is putting together a time capsule that explains the legacy the galaxy is leaving behind for its next generation. She has finished most of it already, and wants to include a section describing you. I said that I would leave the description up to her, which led to a really sweet, touching, and technically astonishing hagiography from her about Shepard. It perfectly reflected my conception of the character, based on specific aspects of my story but also more generally her attitudes and values. She even mentioned my skill as an engineer. So, that was cool, but what's really impressive is how seamless and natural it felt. There are probably, I dunno, maybe something like six factors that would contribute to that simple little speech from her, and all of those could vary independently of one another depending on your character's background and choices. That might mean somewhere on the magnitude of 2000 different versions that scene could take! And I'm not even sure how the romance factor plays into it - would I have seen it at all if I hadn't been romancing Liara? Or would there have been a little less tenderness from her? Anyways... it's just the latest in an astonishing series of great storytelling examples from Bioware.
END SPOILERS
I am a bit surprised at how few squad members I have; I've been playing the game for a while, and only have four potential companions. There's a biotic who I always take, a tech specialist who I'd like to take but is redundant with my engineer skillset, a fighter who I dislike and leave behind, and a fighter/tech member who I would usually take, but who I'm almost positive could have been killed in the previous game (which would have left me with only three members!). I'm pretty sure that I'll be picking up at least one more member in the near future, but still, that's a pretty paltry lineup. By this point in the first game I'd picked up all 6 potential squad members, and by this point in the second game I had acquired 7 of an eventual 11 members. I hope that my field increases soon, but I'm already preparing for the possibility of the smallest group of companions yet, and wondering if I've inadvertently missed some recruitment options along the way.
This game gets more and more addictive the more I play it. Unlike SW:TOR or Civilization, there's a definite end in sight, and I'm already wondering how hard it will feel once I reach the story's conclusion. I have a really hard time leaving behind well-loved stories like Lord of the Rings or Snow Crash, and I get the feeling that I'll want to continue spending time in this universe even after the game ends.
Tuesday, July 03, 2012
Across the Traverse
Since I'm only six months behind in playing Mass Effect 3, as opposed to the four years behind on Mass Effect 1, I'll indulge myself and be a bit chattier while playing, instead of waiting for the end to do a standard summary.
The first thing that struck me, and hard, was how incredibly great the game looks. ME2 had much better character models than ME1, but ME3 is an order of magnitude better. No, it still isn't life-like, but it's darn good. I'm most in awe of the people, though the environments are great as well. The Citadel's evolution has been particularly neat to see throughout the series, from the sprawling but very flat Presidium of ME1 to the clearly torus-shaped (though non-reachable) Presidium of ME2 to the lush, detailed, vibrant Presidium in ME3. Space combat has looked awesome in all of the games, and is at its best here.
I would have thought that the vastly improved graphics would translate to even longer load times, what with having many more polygons per character model and higher-resolution textures. Nope! I've been astonished by how darn fast the levels in ME3 load. With ME2, I would pick a destination, then walk to another room, brush my teeth, check my email, play Fallen London, and wander back to the PC around the time it was ready to let me play. In ME3, none of my load times have been longer than a couple of seconds. I'm not sure how Bioware pulled this off (maybe more intelligent on-demand loading?), but I'm very impressed at the results.
They've revamped the gameplay yet again for the third installment, but it's a more natural evolution on top of ME2, unlike the drastic revision from the first entry to the second. My powers carried directly over to the new game. You can re-set your powers in the med bay, for free the first time and for 5000 credits afterwards; I took the free reset, mostly because at the end of ME2 I had put two ranks into Cryo Blast, and I don't think I'll be pursuing that tree in ME3 - in the short term I'm working to reach the new 6th ranks of my bread-and-butter skills of Combat Drone and Incinerate, and I'm more interested in checking out the new powers like Sentry Turret than Cryo Blast. They did largely reset my Paragon score, which I expected; I'd maxed it out around 2/3 of the way through ME2, and had filled maybe a fifth of my Renegade bar, so at the start of ME1 I had one full segment of Paragon and no Renegade. So far, I haven't had the chance to make any Paragon or Renegade dialog choices, but there have been a couple of Heroic Action opportunities.
The actual controls are very similar to ME2, with some welcome improvements. You can no longer get tired while storming, so you don't need to alternate between turning it on and off. (You also now storm much faster in combat zones than in settlements, which is probably realistic, though it would be very welcome in cities since you're often retracing your steps many times.) The thing that's been most challenging for me has been the lower visibility given to actionable items. I remember now how weird it had felt in ME2 that you could be standing on the opposite side of an enormous cavern, and an object would light up when you moused your viewpoint over it. ME3 seems to go too far in the other direction: you need to be within a few paces of the object to see the circle that shows it's interact-able, and practically on top of it to see its name. That makes it a bit of a pain to find interesting items, which makes cities a little more time-consuming, and adds a lot more anxiety to missions: like in ME2, you only have one chance to pick up an item, and if you miss it, it's gone forever (as far as I can tell). So, in addition to killing bad guys, I not only need to sweep each room, but actually walk over all of it to make sure I'm not missing anything. (I think I'm going to give myself permission to let this go. The fast-paced parts of the game are too much fun for me to slow it down like that, and the map designers seem to at least be pretty reasonable about putting most items in places where you're likely to pass them.)
My biggest complaint is with the journal, which I think is actually worse than in either of the previous two games. Missions don't update as you make progress, and will always say something like, "Find the Prothean artifact in the Hades Gamma cluster, and return it to Dr. Rigel in the Citadel Hospital." If you're juggling a dozen quests at once, like I am, you won't be able to tell from your journal whether or not you have already located the Prothean artifact, and so must spend more time running around. (That's one downside of not having an inventory: there's no place to see what plot-related items you've found.) I find myself badly missing the excellent journal system from Dragon Age: Origins. In DA:O, the journal would always update with your current objective, and you could choose to "activate" a particular quest, which would then show an arrow pointing in the direction of your next goal. I'm pretty surprised that they couldn't do something like that here, especially since the two franchises feel fairly similar and DA:O came out several years before this game.
On a positive, if minor, note, ME3 gives you the option to hide Shepard's helmet, either in dialog or in all scenes. I actually avoided some useful helmets in ME2 since they obscured her face, instead sticking with a cool-looking holographic viewfinder that gave me a mostly-useless bonus to headshot damage.
The character model looks really good. In ME2, I wanted to use the casual wear outfit that looks kind of like space peasant overalls, but I got so horribly distracted by what was going on with her neck - that texture did not mesh at ALL above and below the neckline, leading to really weird artifacting - that I switched back to the rolled-up-sleeves semi-uniform-looking thing that she wore in ME1. I want to try it again in ME3, though, since it seems OK on other NPCs. There's also the option of a cocktail dress, which I was highly amused by at first, but ended up needing to return. It's pretty awesome, but just feels way out of character for my conception of Shepard.
(While looking up an image for that outfit, I stumbled across a sweet Mass Effect fashions tumblr. That's not my scene, but I'm so happy that it exists!)
Vaguely along the same lines... I don't think I've ever mentioned this before, but one of my favorite parts of the atmosphere of the Mass Effect games has been the nightlife. Each game has a couple of clubs where you can go, drink, chat, and dance. The music is surprisingly good in these (at least for my tastes, I'm sure people who are less happy with electronic music would disagree), and I get a kick out of being able to dance in them. There's usually a bunch of broadly grinning Asari pulling off some fantastically limber moves, some human females swaying and gyrating... and a few males of various species standing around awkwardly, maybe shifting weight from foot to foot. ME1 even had a Volus on the dance floor. It was incredible. The only club I've found so far in ME3 has been Purgatory, and its dance scene isn't nearly as good as Afterlife in ME2, but the music and lighting are fantastic.
ME3 has dramatically improved the resource-gathering aspect of the game by basically eliminating planet scanning. Instead, you have a sonar-type ability as you fly around that points out anomalies. If there's an anomaly on a planet, then you will need to send down exactly one probe to claim it. No more spending multiple minutes patiently spinning a globe and firing off a dozen probes! Other anomalies are in space, and can be claimed immediately. Instead of being a time sink, Bioware has actually made this kind of interesting and challenging. Many systems are under attack by the Reapers, and each time you scan a system, there's a chance that they will notice you and start chasing. This leads to some fun hit-and-run strikes, and quick risk/reward analysis: is it worth trying to find the third artifact in this system now, or should I leave and come back after things have cooled down? (Oh, that's yet another thing that Bioware has done right: they add a counter that lets you know how much stuff is left to find in the system, so you don't need to comb over every square inch to make sure you've found everything.)
As far as I can tell, there aren't really any "resources" any more, either. You can directly find credits, and some quest items, and other assets. Instead of finding, say, 2000 units of Element Zero, you might find an Alliance cruiser, which then gets added to your War Assets.
War Assets have been controversial enough that even prior to playing ME3 single-player, the discussion about them had penetrated my self-imposed blackout. ME3 has a variety of endings, and the quality of the ending you receive primarily depends on the number of assets you can acquire. You get some starting War Assets based on the actions you took in the previous games; you gain many War Assets while completing missions in ME3, particularly optional side-missions that help strengthen the alliance of species opposing the Reapers; and you also can gain War Assets by playing the multiplayer game long enough to promote a character to Level 20. Tied to that is "Galactic Readiness", which is improved when you play multiplayer matches, but decreases by several percentage points each day. Basically, Bioware wants you to play multiplayer in order to get the best single-player ending, but supposedly hard-core completists can still get this by maximizing every other aspect of the game.
Thanks to my sessions with Andrew earlier, I've already managed to promote two MP characters to Level 20. My Galactic Readiness had decayed to 50% (of COURSE it did), but I've been able to jump back into things, and am having a blast... yeah, I miss having a level-headed brother who understands how to defend a position, but on the plus side, all the single-player ME I've been doing lately has made me a LOT better at controlling and playing well; I'm no longer somersaulting into walls and trying to melee Banshees. I'm sure it also helps that I've picked up some good upgrades over the last few months; I use a rare Geth Plasma SMG with an ultralight mod and heat sink, and have worked out a really nice personal routine with my Combat Drone and Incinerate powers that, combined with judicious use of cover, lets me survive all ten rounds even if the rest of the squad is goofing off. Anyways, I've been planning to keep hitting MP periodically while I play ME3 with the hopes of getting my readiness up to the 80-90% range by the time I finish the game, but it's fun enough that I find myself voluntarily squeezing in extra sessions when I can.
Fundamentally, I think I'm discovering how much I really like co-op online gaming. This is the first time I've done co-op for any action game; the last time I played action games online was with the original Half-Life back in 1999-2001, and that was almost always deathmatch. Back in those days, I was playing that FPS enough to actually get decent at it - I was rarely on top of the score charts, but on my favorite maps (especially the warehouse one) I could get into the top quarter. I had a few moves I particularly enjoyed: strafing with a pistol, John Woo-style, and the old sneak-up-behind-a-sniper-and-whack-them-with-a-crowbar maneuver. That never gets old! After I abandoned Windows and became a pure Linux user, I was no longer able to keep up my Half-Life play, although I did host a fairly permanent MP server, the original Timmy's House of Sprinkles.
Since then, I've periodically returned to action gaming - most recently with Deus Ex - but I've completely eschewed the online form. To be honest, this is probably mostly out of pride: I doubt that I would hold up well against today's young gamers, and would rather test myself in single-player than complete against others in multi-player. However, co-op provides a great solution. I almost always end up ranked as the third player in a list of four, and feel great about it: as long as I feel like I've helped the team more than I've hurt them, then I view it as a success. And there's something fundamentally satisfying about working together to achieve an objective. When you're on a good team who gets it, and all players huddle around a hacked terminal to make the upload go faster, or people cover a corridor so a carrier can make it safely to an extraction point, it makes the victory all that much sweeter for being shared.
A few random thoughts about the early part of the game follow!
MINI SPOILERS (for ME3, probably counts as mega spoilers for ME1-ME2, with the disclaimer that my ME experience may be very different from yours based on my plot choices)
I do love what they've done with the character models, but I'm not a huge fan of Ashley's makeover. She seems way too... glamorous, with extremely glossy lips and long hair and sizeable bust. She was attractive in the first two games, but also seemed like a soldier; here, she just seems like a complaining romantic interest. I am looking forward to getting her back on my squad, but I kind of wish that they'd updated her design instead of changing it.
I'm not a big fan of James, the new "male grunt" crew member. He's way disrespectful of Shepard, and a pig, too. I'll give him a chance to improve his attitude, but so far I've been mostly Renegade-ing with him.
It feels great to have Liara back on the team! I'd missed having her around for most of ME2. In this game, it feels like she's finished the path she was on in ME2, and ended up in a happier place than where she started, but still much more mature and a bit sadder than in ME1. It looks like the relationship is going to rekindle, which is cool. I'm a little curious if the game throws any other options into the mix; it could get a little awkward if Samara showed up. Anyways, thanks to what we saw in ME2, it actually doesn't seem totally crazy for Liara to be the most powerful information broker in the galaxy and running a vast spy network and information processing system from a closet on the Normandy.
The EDI show is awesome. The EDI+"Jeff" show is amazing! I hadn't realized until the end of ME2 that Tricia Helfer does EDI's voice, and the more I think about it, the more impressed I am. She can't express any emotion in her voice since she's portraying an artificial intelligence; starting about 2/3 of the way through ME2, though, she's an AI who is evolving, discovering a sense of humor, and making an effort to relate to humans. Tricia's lines are hilarious, even if she needs to deliver them in a near-monotone. Anyways... EDI's new body looks great, and I love playing matchmaker between her and Joker. (I have to admit to being curious if the game will present EDI as a romance option... but if Joker's interested, I'm not going to stand in the way of true love.)
Garrus is back, and I'm still really liking him like I did in ME2. I appreciate that the game lets you see another aspect of his role when you run into him on Palavan; he's grown into a very capable leader. I also love the conversations his presence sparks on the Normandy. Joker has a line like, "I'm glad Garrus is back, there's a whole lot of [dreck] out there that needs a bullet between the eyes. Plus, we might need something calibrated." And Liara tries to convince him to not sleep in the missile bay.
In the early portion of the game, my award for "Most Improved" goes to Jack. I didn't particularly like her in ME2, but really enjoyed seeing her again when rescuing the Academy. Her hair is better, she's wearing some clothes, which makes the tattoos look better, and she's still violent and abrasive but has discovered a sense of humor that she channels while browbeating her students. After all that, I'm a little disappointed that (from the looks of things) she won't be joining my team, but I'm glad to see her in that role.
Man oh man, that opening was awesome! I love the intense kineticism of the whole opening sequence, from exiting your cell through jumping onto the Normandy shuttle. Experienced players (or people, like me, who had been playing ME2 less than 48 hours previously) can fly through it, while still feeling part of a pretty epic story.
And, on the downside, I'm already sensing why some people are bummed about this whole thing with Shepard having nightmares about the little boy on Earth dying. It just feels like a really sloppy technique from Screenwriting 101. Since I'm playing with the Extended Cut expansion, I'm hoping that they make that sequence fit with the reality of Shepard's situation.
END SPOILERS
I'm still early on, but between the game's technical improvements and the quality I've seen from the plot thus far, I'm excited to see where it goes.
The first thing that struck me, and hard, was how incredibly great the game looks. ME2 had much better character models than ME1, but ME3 is an order of magnitude better. No, it still isn't life-like, but it's darn good. I'm most in awe of the people, though the environments are great as well. The Citadel's evolution has been particularly neat to see throughout the series, from the sprawling but very flat Presidium of ME1 to the clearly torus-shaped (though non-reachable) Presidium of ME2 to the lush, detailed, vibrant Presidium in ME3. Space combat has looked awesome in all of the games, and is at its best here.
I would have thought that the vastly improved graphics would translate to even longer load times, what with having many more polygons per character model and higher-resolution textures. Nope! I've been astonished by how darn fast the levels in ME3 load. With ME2, I would pick a destination, then walk to another room, brush my teeth, check my email, play Fallen London, and wander back to the PC around the time it was ready to let me play. In ME3, none of my load times have been longer than a couple of seconds. I'm not sure how Bioware pulled this off (maybe more intelligent on-demand loading?), but I'm very impressed at the results.
They've revamped the gameplay yet again for the third installment, but it's a more natural evolution on top of ME2, unlike the drastic revision from the first entry to the second. My powers carried directly over to the new game. You can re-set your powers in the med bay, for free the first time and for 5000 credits afterwards; I took the free reset, mostly because at the end of ME2 I had put two ranks into Cryo Blast, and I don't think I'll be pursuing that tree in ME3 - in the short term I'm working to reach the new 6th ranks of my bread-and-butter skills of Combat Drone and Incinerate, and I'm more interested in checking out the new powers like Sentry Turret than Cryo Blast. They did largely reset my Paragon score, which I expected; I'd maxed it out around 2/3 of the way through ME2, and had filled maybe a fifth of my Renegade bar, so at the start of ME1 I had one full segment of Paragon and no Renegade. So far, I haven't had the chance to make any Paragon or Renegade dialog choices, but there have been a couple of Heroic Action opportunities.
The actual controls are very similar to ME2, with some welcome improvements. You can no longer get tired while storming, so you don't need to alternate between turning it on and off. (You also now storm much faster in combat zones than in settlements, which is probably realistic, though it would be very welcome in cities since you're often retracing your steps many times.) The thing that's been most challenging for me has been the lower visibility given to actionable items. I remember now how weird it had felt in ME2 that you could be standing on the opposite side of an enormous cavern, and an object would light up when you moused your viewpoint over it. ME3 seems to go too far in the other direction: you need to be within a few paces of the object to see the circle that shows it's interact-able, and practically on top of it to see its name. That makes it a bit of a pain to find interesting items, which makes cities a little more time-consuming, and adds a lot more anxiety to missions: like in ME2, you only have one chance to pick up an item, and if you miss it, it's gone forever (as far as I can tell). So, in addition to killing bad guys, I not only need to sweep each room, but actually walk over all of it to make sure I'm not missing anything. (I think I'm going to give myself permission to let this go. The fast-paced parts of the game are too much fun for me to slow it down like that, and the map designers seem to at least be pretty reasonable about putting most items in places where you're likely to pass them.)
My biggest complaint is with the journal, which I think is actually worse than in either of the previous two games. Missions don't update as you make progress, and will always say something like, "Find the Prothean artifact in the Hades Gamma cluster, and return it to Dr. Rigel in the Citadel Hospital." If you're juggling a dozen quests at once, like I am, you won't be able to tell from your journal whether or not you have already located the Prothean artifact, and so must spend more time running around. (That's one downside of not having an inventory: there's no place to see what plot-related items you've found.) I find myself badly missing the excellent journal system from Dragon Age: Origins. In DA:O, the journal would always update with your current objective, and you could choose to "activate" a particular quest, which would then show an arrow pointing in the direction of your next goal. I'm pretty surprised that they couldn't do something like that here, especially since the two franchises feel fairly similar and DA:O came out several years before this game.
On a positive, if minor, note, ME3 gives you the option to hide Shepard's helmet, either in dialog or in all scenes. I actually avoided some useful helmets in ME2 since they obscured her face, instead sticking with a cool-looking holographic viewfinder that gave me a mostly-useless bonus to headshot damage.
The character model looks really good. In ME2, I wanted to use the casual wear outfit that looks kind of like space peasant overalls, but I got so horribly distracted by what was going on with her neck - that texture did not mesh at ALL above and below the neckline, leading to really weird artifacting - that I switched back to the rolled-up-sleeves semi-uniform-looking thing that she wore in ME1. I want to try it again in ME3, though, since it seems OK on other NPCs. There's also the option of a cocktail dress, which I was highly amused by at first, but ended up needing to return. It's pretty awesome, but just feels way out of character for my conception of Shepard.
(While looking up an image for that outfit, I stumbled across a sweet Mass Effect fashions tumblr. That's not my scene, but I'm so happy that it exists!)
Vaguely along the same lines... I don't think I've ever mentioned this before, but one of my favorite parts of the atmosphere of the Mass Effect games has been the nightlife. Each game has a couple of clubs where you can go, drink, chat, and dance. The music is surprisingly good in these (at least for my tastes, I'm sure people who are less happy with electronic music would disagree), and I get a kick out of being able to dance in them. There's usually a bunch of broadly grinning Asari pulling off some fantastically limber moves, some human females swaying and gyrating... and a few males of various species standing around awkwardly, maybe shifting weight from foot to foot. ME1 even had a Volus on the dance floor. It was incredible. The only club I've found so far in ME3 has been Purgatory, and its dance scene isn't nearly as good as Afterlife in ME2, but the music and lighting are fantastic.
ME3 has dramatically improved the resource-gathering aspect of the game by basically eliminating planet scanning. Instead, you have a sonar-type ability as you fly around that points out anomalies. If there's an anomaly on a planet, then you will need to send down exactly one probe to claim it. No more spending multiple minutes patiently spinning a globe and firing off a dozen probes! Other anomalies are in space, and can be claimed immediately. Instead of being a time sink, Bioware has actually made this kind of interesting and challenging. Many systems are under attack by the Reapers, and each time you scan a system, there's a chance that they will notice you and start chasing. This leads to some fun hit-and-run strikes, and quick risk/reward analysis: is it worth trying to find the third artifact in this system now, or should I leave and come back after things have cooled down? (Oh, that's yet another thing that Bioware has done right: they add a counter that lets you know how much stuff is left to find in the system, so you don't need to comb over every square inch to make sure you've found everything.)
As far as I can tell, there aren't really any "resources" any more, either. You can directly find credits, and some quest items, and other assets. Instead of finding, say, 2000 units of Element Zero, you might find an Alliance cruiser, which then gets added to your War Assets.
War Assets have been controversial enough that even prior to playing ME3 single-player, the discussion about them had penetrated my self-imposed blackout. ME3 has a variety of endings, and the quality of the ending you receive primarily depends on the number of assets you can acquire. You get some starting War Assets based on the actions you took in the previous games; you gain many War Assets while completing missions in ME3, particularly optional side-missions that help strengthen the alliance of species opposing the Reapers; and you also can gain War Assets by playing the multiplayer game long enough to promote a character to Level 20. Tied to that is "Galactic Readiness", which is improved when you play multiplayer matches, but decreases by several percentage points each day. Basically, Bioware wants you to play multiplayer in order to get the best single-player ending, but supposedly hard-core completists can still get this by maximizing every other aspect of the game.
Thanks to my sessions with Andrew earlier, I've already managed to promote two MP characters to Level 20. My Galactic Readiness had decayed to 50% (of COURSE it did), but I've been able to jump back into things, and am having a blast... yeah, I miss having a level-headed brother who understands how to defend a position, but on the plus side, all the single-player ME I've been doing lately has made me a LOT better at controlling and playing well; I'm no longer somersaulting into walls and trying to melee Banshees. I'm sure it also helps that I've picked up some good upgrades over the last few months; I use a rare Geth Plasma SMG with an ultralight mod and heat sink, and have worked out a really nice personal routine with my Combat Drone and Incinerate powers that, combined with judicious use of cover, lets me survive all ten rounds even if the rest of the squad is goofing off. Anyways, I've been planning to keep hitting MP periodically while I play ME3 with the hopes of getting my readiness up to the 80-90% range by the time I finish the game, but it's fun enough that I find myself voluntarily squeezing in extra sessions when I can.
Fundamentally, I think I'm discovering how much I really like co-op online gaming. This is the first time I've done co-op for any action game; the last time I played action games online was with the original Half-Life back in 1999-2001, and that was almost always deathmatch. Back in those days, I was playing that FPS enough to actually get decent at it - I was rarely on top of the score charts, but on my favorite maps (especially the warehouse one) I could get into the top quarter. I had a few moves I particularly enjoyed: strafing with a pistol, John Woo-style, and the old sneak-up-behind-a-sniper-and-whack-them-with-a-crowbar maneuver. That never gets old! After I abandoned Windows and became a pure Linux user, I was no longer able to keep up my Half-Life play, although I did host a fairly permanent MP server, the original Timmy's House of Sprinkles.
Since then, I've periodically returned to action gaming - most recently with Deus Ex - but I've completely eschewed the online form. To be honest, this is probably mostly out of pride: I doubt that I would hold up well against today's young gamers, and would rather test myself in single-player than complete against others in multi-player. However, co-op provides a great solution. I almost always end up ranked as the third player in a list of four, and feel great about it: as long as I feel like I've helped the team more than I've hurt them, then I view it as a success. And there's something fundamentally satisfying about working together to achieve an objective. When you're on a good team who gets it, and all players huddle around a hacked terminal to make the upload go faster, or people cover a corridor so a carrier can make it safely to an extraction point, it makes the victory all that much sweeter for being shared.
A few random thoughts about the early part of the game follow!
MINI SPOILERS (for ME3, probably counts as mega spoilers for ME1-ME2, with the disclaimer that my ME experience may be very different from yours based on my plot choices)
I do love what they've done with the character models, but I'm not a huge fan of Ashley's makeover. She seems way too... glamorous, with extremely glossy lips and long hair and sizeable bust. She was attractive in the first two games, but also seemed like a soldier; here, she just seems like a complaining romantic interest. I am looking forward to getting her back on my squad, but I kind of wish that they'd updated her design instead of changing it.
I'm not a big fan of James, the new "male grunt" crew member. He's way disrespectful of Shepard, and a pig, too. I'll give him a chance to improve his attitude, but so far I've been mostly Renegade-ing with him.
It feels great to have Liara back on the team! I'd missed having her around for most of ME2. In this game, it feels like she's finished the path she was on in ME2, and ended up in a happier place than where she started, but still much more mature and a bit sadder than in ME1. It looks like the relationship is going to rekindle, which is cool. I'm a little curious if the game throws any other options into the mix; it could get a little awkward if Samara showed up. Anyways, thanks to what we saw in ME2, it actually doesn't seem totally crazy for Liara to be the most powerful information broker in the galaxy and running a vast spy network and information processing system from a closet on the Normandy.
The EDI show is awesome. The EDI+"Jeff" show is amazing! I hadn't realized until the end of ME2 that Tricia Helfer does EDI's voice, and the more I think about it, the more impressed I am. She can't express any emotion in her voice since she's portraying an artificial intelligence; starting about 2/3 of the way through ME2, though, she's an AI who is evolving, discovering a sense of humor, and making an effort to relate to humans. Tricia's lines are hilarious, even if she needs to deliver them in a near-monotone. Anyways... EDI's new body looks great, and I love playing matchmaker between her and Joker. (I have to admit to being curious if the game will present EDI as a romance option... but if Joker's interested, I'm not going to stand in the way of true love.)
Garrus is back, and I'm still really liking him like I did in ME2. I appreciate that the game lets you see another aspect of his role when you run into him on Palavan; he's grown into a very capable leader. I also love the conversations his presence sparks on the Normandy. Joker has a line like, "I'm glad Garrus is back, there's a whole lot of [dreck] out there that needs a bullet between the eyes. Plus, we might need something calibrated." And Liara tries to convince him to not sleep in the missile bay.
In the early portion of the game, my award for "Most Improved" goes to Jack. I didn't particularly like her in ME2, but really enjoyed seeing her again when rescuing the Academy. Her hair is better, she's wearing some clothes, which makes the tattoos look better, and she's still violent and abrasive but has discovered a sense of humor that she channels while browbeating her students. After all that, I'm a little disappointed that (from the looks of things) she won't be joining my team, but I'm glad to see her in that role.
Man oh man, that opening was awesome! I love the intense kineticism of the whole opening sequence, from exiting your cell through jumping onto the Normandy shuttle. Experienced players (or people, like me, who had been playing ME2 less than 48 hours previously) can fly through it, while still feeling part of a pretty epic story.
And, on the downside, I'm already sensing why some people are bummed about this whole thing with Shepard having nightmares about the little boy on Earth dying. It just feels like a really sloppy technique from Screenwriting 101. Since I'm playing with the Extended Cut expansion, I'm hoping that they make that sequence fit with the reality of Shepard's situation.
END SPOILERS
I'm still early on, but between the game's technical improvements and the quality I've seen from the plot thus far, I'm excited to see where it goes.
Monday, July 02, 2012
Flock
Playing a Mass Effect game is a lot like starting a season of a really good TV show. I can put it off for a while, but once I get into it, it becomes very hard for me to do anything else. I badly want to know what happens next and keep pushing forward. In the case of TV, that means watching the future; in the case of ME, that means creating the future.
My last post talked about the technical aspects of ME2, so this is all about plot. Let's start off with the
MINI SPOILERS
I loved the way they handled your squad from ME1 in this game. They didn't bring everyone along automatically; and, they didn't wipe the slate clean to force you to start from scratch. You start off with a few new members of questionable loyalty, Miranda and Jacob, but over time you can recruit a few people from before: Tali and Garrus. You also see a lot of the people from the first game, who have filled new roles. The awesome Wrex has become the clan leader of the Urdnot, and is leading a hard-nosed-yet-progressive series of reforms. Ashley is serving Alliance intelligence by helping defend new human colonies in the Traverse. The former Captain Anderson is now Ambassador Anderson, helping to advance humanity's interest on the Council while dealing with the frustration of their obstinacy. (It's remarkable that they STILL don't believe that the Reaper threat is real, but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.)
In ME1, I had romanced Liara, and that ended up on a very bittersweet note in this game. When you first see her, you embrace tenderly, but it quickly becomes clear that she has moved on: she has thought for years that you were dead. More than my slight surprise at her emotional distance, though, I was even more surprised by the change in her character. In Mass Effect 1, Liara was an adorably awkward nerd, who had a lot of trouble understanding social cues and exhibited a strong sense of naive positivity. Now, she sits at the center of a powerful information network on Illium, and she seems... colder, harder. She's definitely not evil, but she is overly wrapped up by her desire for vengeance and dominance. I helped her out and we collectively struck a blow against the Shadow Broker, but it was still sad to see her like that.
Actually, let's go ahead and do a quick inventory of the characters:
I liked the Jacob character, but was always pretty cautious around him, since I suspected that the game was setting up a Shepherd/Jacob romance. I rarely brought him along on missions, either, once I got a more full squad developed; my philosophy is to bring a team of members who are very strong in one area, so I'd rather have a very strong biotic and a very strong soldier than two biotic/soldier hybrids like Jacob. His personal quest was interesting; while I usually despise stories that are built around daddy issues, I thought the way they handled it was quite compelling.
Miranda was pretty awesome. I'm a sucker for a British accent, and liked her confidence-bordering-on-arrogance. I loved her personal quest, too, and liked the way that her personality seems to have been affected by the experience. (As in the first game, I primarily followed the Paragon path, with a few crucial or especially entertaining diversions to the Renegade side.) Since I play as a full Engineer, her Overload skill tree wasn't especially useful to me, but I still took her along occasionally because I enjoyed her dialog. I was a bit bummed to see that Bioware doesn't allow females to romance her, but it does make sense, I guess; I can accept her being a little like Morrigan from Dragon Age: Origins.
Moridin was HILARIOUS. It's a toss-up for whether he or Joker were more amusing, but I think Moridin's best material (pre-emptively declaring his lack of interest in Shepherd and an astonishing Gilbert & Sullivan rendition of I Am the Very Model of a Scientist Salarian) might be the best in the game. Every single conversation I had with him cracked me up; I love the absent-minded way that he mutters about his research.
I think Zaeed may have been from one of the freebie DLC bits that I picked up with the game. He didn't seem quite as well fleshed-out as the others, especially when you're chatting with him in his quarters. He was quite useful early in the game, since he's the first pure soldier you get for a while. After I finished his loyalty mission, though, I left him off my squad.
My new favorite soldier: Grunt. I was skeptical at first: how could a vat-grown Krogan have any personality at all, especially in comparison to his phenomenal predecessor Wrex? He won me over, though. A lot of the credit has to go to the game's fantastic animators: Grunt's movements are wonderful, particularly the way he'll smash his hands together and bob up and down. He just seems so lively and enthusiastic about everything he does. I get a kick out of your conversations after he joins the Urdnot clan: "I had the most wonderful dream where I was murdering a Salarian!"
Jack, on the other hand, it pretty hard to like. Jack is ruthless and prickly. The bald head and the tattoos made me think of Kaliyo from SW:TOR, though, so I did appreciate that.
Tali was great. Since her skills almost totally overlap with my own, I almost never used her in either game, but she has a great personality (helpful without being at all obsequious) and a fascinating story; here, we finally get to see inside the Migrant Fleet, and learn a lot more about the Geth. (I was a little surprised that, even on board the Quarian ships, we still don't get to see what's under those helmets; they talk a LOT about how bad their immune systems are, so I guess I understand the reasoning, but I still felt a little cheated.)
The biggest surprise for me may have been Thane, the Drell assassin. I wasn't particularly predisposed to like him, but he won me over with his sadness, dignity, and honor. Not at all what I was expecting from an assassin.
The award for "most improved" belongs to Garrus. I'd never particularly liked him in ME1. I didn't dislike him, either, but he just seemed a bit too prickly and hot-headed for me. He's turned into a great person and a great leader, though. He and Miranda were often my team: like with Miranda, I really enjoyed his chatter while on a mission.
I really liked Samara. She emphasizes a lot of what's strange about the Asari: the fact that she's over one thousand years old, and part of a long tradition and set of beliefs that were ancient before human civilization even began. Her personal quest is really interesting, too, and also a lot of fun; I deeply appreciated that not everything in this game took the form of "Walk from point A to point B and kill everyone in your way," and this mission, which required some light detective work and careful social manipulation through dialog choices, was one of my favorites. The outcome was pretty amazing, too; I'm guessing that, if I had made another choice at the end of the quest, I would have lost Samara and gained another party member. Which is pretty awesome. (Again, there are shades of Dragon Age here, specifically with the question of how to handle Alistair.) I tried to romance Samara, but I think I messed it up; we had a conversation where it was clear that both of us were interested, but she wasn't willing to get involved on account of her Justicar oath. I tried to encourage her to go forward, and nothing came of it; maybe backing off would have worked? I dunno. I deliberately stayed away from any guides while playing because I wanted to be surprised, but now I wish that I had at least peeked to see how to make it work, since I doubt I'll re-play this before starting ME3. Bioware RPGs can feature notoriously difficult paramours; the un-patched version of Baldur's Gate 2 had Aerie's romance so convoluted that it was probably impossible to complete without cheating.
Now, to the plot proper....
It was interesting to have Cerberus be so central to the plot. They were always kind of in the shadows during ME1; I fought them a few times, but never got a clear understanding of what they were really after. The Illusive Man was an enigma: charismatic and generous, but I always wondered what he was hiding. (It probably doesn't help matters that I've played ME3 multiplayer, which includes some missions against Cerberus; that made me particularly skeptical that we would end ME2 as allies.)
The intro to the game did a great job of handling the shift in game systems. Like I mentioned in my previous post, they have drastically overhauled the skill system between the two games, so there's no straightforward way of importing your existing character's stats; at the same time, it would be annoying for the game to pretend that you hadn't done anything in the previous game. Having you go through a near-death experience and spend years in recuperation provides a great excuse for rebuilding a new skill tree from scratch - and, incidentally, making any changes you wanted to Shepherd's face. (I gave mine a nose job. Yeah, that probably makes me doubly shallow.)
I would ordinarily be a little annoyed at the "let's round up the gang!" structure of the first part of the game, since it's been so overdone in games and movies over the year: Seven Samurai, the Magnificent Seven, Blues Brothers, Ocean's 11 all do this. Still, there's a reason why everyone uses it: it's a very effective way to introduce a large cast while giving each individual a chance to express what makes them interesting and unique. It's also a case where a video game's structure helps a lot: you have a great deal of agency in deciding how you go about acquiring your crew, which makes it feel less like a chore than a reward.
The Collectors are a sufficiently menacing threat in this game, largely replacing the Geth (+Saren+Sovereign) from the first game. I kind of wish we had seen more of them; they're in many of the required plot points, but that still meant that I went for several weeks in real time without seeing any while I was doing side missions between Horizon and acquiring the Reaper IFF. The Harbinger is pretty scary and cool. Their whole MO is pretty darn scary: slavery and brainwashing are two things that seem worse than death, which elevates the entire Reaper threat and adds more urgency to Shepherd's mission.
MEGA SPOILERS
I'm intrigued by the whole Legion business. The Geth are one of the great mysteries of the game: for years everyone has wondered, just what are they up to behind the Veil? It looked like they tipped their hand by allying with Saren, but now we learn that these are only a fraction of the Geth. It seems like the majority of them are primarily interested in self-preservation and self-evolution; they fight against "the creators" to ensure their survival, but do not intend to conquer the galaxy. They see "the old machines" as a threat, and would rather discover tech on their own than receive fully-formed gifts from the Reapers. I ultimately decided to use the virus that would convert the wayward Geth into the main body; it seems extraordinarily risky, and I'm waiting with bated breath to see what consequences that brings in ME3, but we'll need all the help we can get in fighting the Reapers, and I hope that a fully intact Migrant Fleet and a unified Geth will help in that war.
I still don't really get Legion, though. He never could provide a satisfying answer for why he was wearing a piece of my armor.
The attack on the Normandy was shocking and cool; not only are many people who you've grown attached to under enormous threat, but you are now in control of goofy sidekick Joker, bum legs and all. You can't save the game during this section, and I needed to restart from the beginning once since I ran (er, limped) too quickly and bumped into a Collector outside of Engineering.
Oh, yeah: the Joker/EDI stuff was wonderful. I thoroughly enjoyed all their dialog throughout the game, and it paid huge dividends here. I love how Joker mutters and verbalizes my own fears: "This is how it all begins. People will be blaming me when they're plugged into a protein feeder since I turned on the Overlord." EDI also develops a sense of humor here: "I enjoy watching humans on their knees." It begins what I hope will be a long-lived and successful catch-phrase: "That was a joke."
The end-game is INTENSE. Like ME1, it seems like you have to make a choice between two people on your crew. After the Collectors harvested the Normandy crew, I went to the Geth station to upload Legion's virus. Apparently, this took so much time that my dear, dear Yeoman Chambers died. Sigh. That was pretty horrifying. If I'd raced their immediately, then maybe I could have saved her, but perhaps not Legion.
The cinematics for the last half-hour or so of the game are just incredible. Flying through fields of debris! Dodging Collector beam weapons! Discovering a hideous harvesting operation! Explosions after explosions after explosions!
There are also some cool strategic aspects to the final mission, instead of the purely tactical ones that most missions have. You need to make decisions about whether and how to divide your forces, who to appoint to command, who to accomplish specialized tasks, and so on. Mine seemed to work out all right: I got Tali to hack a system to open two doorways into the base; my right-hand-man Garrus led one team while I led Miranda and Grunt to the other. Later, I sent Moridin to lead the survivors back to the Normandy; the powerful biotic Jack led me, Garrus, and Samara through a vast chamber filled with Collector swarms, drawing their fire while Miranda led the others through a safer route. At the end, Garrus, Miranda and I fought an awesome, enormous Human-Reaper broodling while the rest safely guarded our rear. Then: kaboom! I thought a LONG time about the Illusive Man's suggestion/order to preserve the Collector's station for our own ends. It didn't feel like the "right" thing to do, but it did seem likely to be a huge help in the Reaper war, which ultimately is the most important thing. After deliberating for nearly ten minutes, I finally decided to blow it all up. Miranda was awesome: "Consider this my resignation." Eff yeah!
END SPOILERS
Even though I've beaten the game, I'm refraining from my usual process of reading FAQs and other resources to find what I may have missed; since the ME trilogy is so tightly woven, I'm a bit worried that some ME2 spoilers may spoil parts of ME3 as well, so I'll wait until everything is done before I allow myself to geek out on the series.
OH! With all the talk above about other characters, I haven't directly talked about Shepherd. I can't believe I haven't mentioned this before, but a bit part of the reason I finally started playing the ME series (in addition to Andrew's welcome nagging) was a New Yorker profile of Jennifer Hale that I read last year. Jennifer provides the voice to the female Shepherd character, and this article not only prompted me to start playing, but also to pick the female Shepherd ("FemShep", in fan parlance) for my run. I add my voice to the chorus praising Hale's voice work: it is full of integrity, deeply meaningful without ever seeming melodramatic. While I'm quick to praise the writing in this game, a lot of the credit belongs to Hale and the other actors who bring their lines to life.
I've since gone back and reviewed her curricula vitae, and am happy to see that she's also voiced some of my other favorite Bioware characters: Dynaheir from Baldur's Gate, Mazzy Fentan from Baldur's Gate 2, Falls-from-Grace from Planescape: Torment. She was also Katrina in Quest for Glory IV (!!! Probably one of the first voice-acted Sierra games, that's so cool!) and Dr. Naomi Hunter in the Metal Gear games. I almost never think of voice actors when playing games, and now I'm really curious if there are other amazing actors in the field. In a way, the mark of a highly successful voice actor/actress is probably that you don't think about them: their performance becomes part of the character, not something that distracts you from the story.
Also on the topic of voice acting: I can't believe I didn't find out until the end credits of ME2 that Seth Green does the voice of Joker! That's AWESOME! I can totally hear it now, but somehow never picked up on it during the game. So cool. I'm generally not a big fan of celebrity voices in video games - again, it can be distracting, feel gimicky, and either detract from the character or feel like a sloppy shorthand for trying and establishing a personality for the character - but some of them are sufficiently awesome for me to absolve, like Green here or Samuel L. Jackson's fun turn in San Andreas.
Conversely, if you would like to hear some hilariously awful video game voice acting, be sure to check out the Gameological Society's Great Performances series. The Oblivion video is particularly funny, and a compelling counterpoint to the high level of quality that Bioware puts in their RPGs.
While it's taken me longer than I'd thought to get caught up on Mass Effect, it seems to have worked out for the best, since Bioware just released the new "expanded ending" free DLC a few days ago, so I can hit the ground running with that. I'm looking forward to seeing how Shepherd's saga ends!
My last post talked about the technical aspects of ME2, so this is all about plot. Let's start off with the
MINI SPOILERS
I loved the way they handled your squad from ME1 in this game. They didn't bring everyone along automatically; and, they didn't wipe the slate clean to force you to start from scratch. You start off with a few new members of questionable loyalty, Miranda and Jacob, but over time you can recruit a few people from before: Tali and Garrus. You also see a lot of the people from the first game, who have filled new roles. The awesome Wrex has become the clan leader of the Urdnot, and is leading a hard-nosed-yet-progressive series of reforms. Ashley is serving Alliance intelligence by helping defend new human colonies in the Traverse. The former Captain Anderson is now Ambassador Anderson, helping to advance humanity's interest on the Council while dealing with the frustration of their obstinacy. (It's remarkable that they STILL don't believe that the Reaper threat is real, but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.)
In ME1, I had romanced Liara, and that ended up on a very bittersweet note in this game. When you first see her, you embrace tenderly, but it quickly becomes clear that she has moved on: she has thought for years that you were dead. More than my slight surprise at her emotional distance, though, I was even more surprised by the change in her character. In Mass Effect 1, Liara was an adorably awkward nerd, who had a lot of trouble understanding social cues and exhibited a strong sense of naive positivity. Now, she sits at the center of a powerful information network on Illium, and she seems... colder, harder. She's definitely not evil, but she is overly wrapped up by her desire for vengeance and dominance. I helped her out and we collectively struck a blow against the Shadow Broker, but it was still sad to see her like that.
Actually, let's go ahead and do a quick inventory of the characters:
I liked the Jacob character, but was always pretty cautious around him, since I suspected that the game was setting up a Shepherd/Jacob romance. I rarely brought him along on missions, either, once I got a more full squad developed; my philosophy is to bring a team of members who are very strong in one area, so I'd rather have a very strong biotic and a very strong soldier than two biotic/soldier hybrids like Jacob. His personal quest was interesting; while I usually despise stories that are built around daddy issues, I thought the way they handled it was quite compelling.
Miranda was pretty awesome. I'm a sucker for a British accent, and liked her confidence-bordering-on-arrogance. I loved her personal quest, too, and liked the way that her personality seems to have been affected by the experience. (As in the first game, I primarily followed the Paragon path, with a few crucial or especially entertaining diversions to the Renegade side.) Since I play as a full Engineer, her Overload skill tree wasn't especially useful to me, but I still took her along occasionally because I enjoyed her dialog. I was a bit bummed to see that Bioware doesn't allow females to romance her, but it does make sense, I guess; I can accept her being a little like Morrigan from Dragon Age: Origins.
Moridin was HILARIOUS. It's a toss-up for whether he or Joker were more amusing, but I think Moridin's best material (pre-emptively declaring his lack of interest in Shepherd and an astonishing Gilbert & Sullivan rendition of I Am the Very Model of a Scientist Salarian) might be the best in the game. Every single conversation I had with him cracked me up; I love the absent-minded way that he mutters about his research.
I think Zaeed may have been from one of the freebie DLC bits that I picked up with the game. He didn't seem quite as well fleshed-out as the others, especially when you're chatting with him in his quarters. He was quite useful early in the game, since he's the first pure soldier you get for a while. After I finished his loyalty mission, though, I left him off my squad.
My new favorite soldier: Grunt. I was skeptical at first: how could a vat-grown Krogan have any personality at all, especially in comparison to his phenomenal predecessor Wrex? He won me over, though. A lot of the credit has to go to the game's fantastic animators: Grunt's movements are wonderful, particularly the way he'll smash his hands together and bob up and down. He just seems so lively and enthusiastic about everything he does. I get a kick out of your conversations after he joins the Urdnot clan: "I had the most wonderful dream where I was murdering a Salarian!"
Jack, on the other hand, it pretty hard to like. Jack is ruthless and prickly. The bald head and the tattoos made me think of Kaliyo from SW:TOR, though, so I did appreciate that.
Tali was great. Since her skills almost totally overlap with my own, I almost never used her in either game, but she has a great personality (helpful without being at all obsequious) and a fascinating story; here, we finally get to see inside the Migrant Fleet, and learn a lot more about the Geth. (I was a little surprised that, even on board the Quarian ships, we still don't get to see what's under those helmets; they talk a LOT about how bad their immune systems are, so I guess I understand the reasoning, but I still felt a little cheated.)
The biggest surprise for me may have been Thane, the Drell assassin. I wasn't particularly predisposed to like him, but he won me over with his sadness, dignity, and honor. Not at all what I was expecting from an assassin.
The award for "most improved" belongs to Garrus. I'd never particularly liked him in ME1. I didn't dislike him, either, but he just seemed a bit too prickly and hot-headed for me. He's turned into a great person and a great leader, though. He and Miranda were often my team: like with Miranda, I really enjoyed his chatter while on a mission.
I really liked Samara. She emphasizes a lot of what's strange about the Asari: the fact that she's over one thousand years old, and part of a long tradition and set of beliefs that were ancient before human civilization even began. Her personal quest is really interesting, too, and also a lot of fun; I deeply appreciated that not everything in this game took the form of "Walk from point A to point B and kill everyone in your way," and this mission, which required some light detective work and careful social manipulation through dialog choices, was one of my favorites. The outcome was pretty amazing, too; I'm guessing that, if I had made another choice at the end of the quest, I would have lost Samara and gained another party member. Which is pretty awesome. (Again, there are shades of Dragon Age here, specifically with the question of how to handle Alistair.) I tried to romance Samara, but I think I messed it up; we had a conversation where it was clear that both of us were interested, but she wasn't willing to get involved on account of her Justicar oath. I tried to encourage her to go forward, and nothing came of it; maybe backing off would have worked? I dunno. I deliberately stayed away from any guides while playing because I wanted to be surprised, but now I wish that I had at least peeked to see how to make it work, since I doubt I'll re-play this before starting ME3. Bioware RPGs can feature notoriously difficult paramours; the un-patched version of Baldur's Gate 2 had Aerie's romance so convoluted that it was probably impossible to complete without cheating.
Now, to the plot proper....
It was interesting to have Cerberus be so central to the plot. They were always kind of in the shadows during ME1; I fought them a few times, but never got a clear understanding of what they were really after. The Illusive Man was an enigma: charismatic and generous, but I always wondered what he was hiding. (It probably doesn't help matters that I've played ME3 multiplayer, which includes some missions against Cerberus; that made me particularly skeptical that we would end ME2 as allies.)
The intro to the game did a great job of handling the shift in game systems. Like I mentioned in my previous post, they have drastically overhauled the skill system between the two games, so there's no straightforward way of importing your existing character's stats; at the same time, it would be annoying for the game to pretend that you hadn't done anything in the previous game. Having you go through a near-death experience and spend years in recuperation provides a great excuse for rebuilding a new skill tree from scratch - and, incidentally, making any changes you wanted to Shepherd's face. (I gave mine a nose job. Yeah, that probably makes me doubly shallow.)
I would ordinarily be a little annoyed at the "let's round up the gang!" structure of the first part of the game, since it's been so overdone in games and movies over the year: Seven Samurai, the Magnificent Seven, Blues Brothers, Ocean's 11 all do this. Still, there's a reason why everyone uses it: it's a very effective way to introduce a large cast while giving each individual a chance to express what makes them interesting and unique. It's also a case where a video game's structure helps a lot: you have a great deal of agency in deciding how you go about acquiring your crew, which makes it feel less like a chore than a reward.
The Collectors are a sufficiently menacing threat in this game, largely replacing the Geth (+Saren+Sovereign) from the first game. I kind of wish we had seen more of them; they're in many of the required plot points, but that still meant that I went for several weeks in real time without seeing any while I was doing side missions between Horizon and acquiring the Reaper IFF. The Harbinger is pretty scary and cool. Their whole MO is pretty darn scary: slavery and brainwashing are two things that seem worse than death, which elevates the entire Reaper threat and adds more urgency to Shepherd's mission.
MEGA SPOILERS
I'm intrigued by the whole Legion business. The Geth are one of the great mysteries of the game: for years everyone has wondered, just what are they up to behind the Veil? It looked like they tipped their hand by allying with Saren, but now we learn that these are only a fraction of the Geth. It seems like the majority of them are primarily interested in self-preservation and self-evolution; they fight against "the creators" to ensure their survival, but do not intend to conquer the galaxy. They see "the old machines" as a threat, and would rather discover tech on their own than receive fully-formed gifts from the Reapers. I ultimately decided to use the virus that would convert the wayward Geth into the main body; it seems extraordinarily risky, and I'm waiting with bated breath to see what consequences that brings in ME3, but we'll need all the help we can get in fighting the Reapers, and I hope that a fully intact Migrant Fleet and a unified Geth will help in that war.
I still don't really get Legion, though. He never could provide a satisfying answer for why he was wearing a piece of my armor.
The attack on the Normandy was shocking and cool; not only are many people who you've grown attached to under enormous threat, but you are now in control of goofy sidekick Joker, bum legs and all. You can't save the game during this section, and I needed to restart from the beginning once since I ran (er, limped) too quickly and bumped into a Collector outside of Engineering.
Oh, yeah: the Joker/EDI stuff was wonderful. I thoroughly enjoyed all their dialog throughout the game, and it paid huge dividends here. I love how Joker mutters and verbalizes my own fears: "This is how it all begins. People will be blaming me when they're plugged into a protein feeder since I turned on the Overlord." EDI also develops a sense of humor here: "I enjoy watching humans on their knees." It begins what I hope will be a long-lived and successful catch-phrase: "That was a joke."
The end-game is INTENSE. Like ME1, it seems like you have to make a choice between two people on your crew. After the Collectors harvested the Normandy crew, I went to the Geth station to upload Legion's virus. Apparently, this took so much time that my dear, dear Yeoman Chambers died. Sigh. That was pretty horrifying. If I'd raced their immediately, then maybe I could have saved her, but perhaps not Legion.
The cinematics for the last half-hour or so of the game are just incredible. Flying through fields of debris! Dodging Collector beam weapons! Discovering a hideous harvesting operation! Explosions after explosions after explosions!
There are also some cool strategic aspects to the final mission, instead of the purely tactical ones that most missions have. You need to make decisions about whether and how to divide your forces, who to appoint to command, who to accomplish specialized tasks, and so on. Mine seemed to work out all right: I got Tali to hack a system to open two doorways into the base; my right-hand-man Garrus led one team while I led Miranda and Grunt to the other. Later, I sent Moridin to lead the survivors back to the Normandy; the powerful biotic Jack led me, Garrus, and Samara through a vast chamber filled with Collector swarms, drawing their fire while Miranda led the others through a safer route. At the end, Garrus, Miranda and I fought an awesome, enormous Human-Reaper broodling while the rest safely guarded our rear. Then: kaboom! I thought a LONG time about the Illusive Man's suggestion/order to preserve the Collector's station for our own ends. It didn't feel like the "right" thing to do, but it did seem likely to be a huge help in the Reaper war, which ultimately is the most important thing. After deliberating for nearly ten minutes, I finally decided to blow it all up. Miranda was awesome: "Consider this my resignation." Eff yeah!
END SPOILERS
Even though I've beaten the game, I'm refraining from my usual process of reading FAQs and other resources to find what I may have missed; since the ME trilogy is so tightly woven, I'm a bit worried that some ME2 spoilers may spoil parts of ME3 as well, so I'll wait until everything is done before I allow myself to geek out on the series.
OH! With all the talk above about other characters, I haven't directly talked about Shepherd. I can't believe I haven't mentioned this before, but a bit part of the reason I finally started playing the ME series (in addition to Andrew's welcome nagging) was a New Yorker profile of Jennifer Hale that I read last year. Jennifer provides the voice to the female Shepherd character, and this article not only prompted me to start playing, but also to pick the female Shepherd ("FemShep", in fan parlance) for my run. I add my voice to the chorus praising Hale's voice work: it is full of integrity, deeply meaningful without ever seeming melodramatic. While I'm quick to praise the writing in this game, a lot of the credit belongs to Hale and the other actors who bring their lines to life.
I've since gone back and reviewed her curricula vitae, and am happy to see that she's also voiced some of my other favorite Bioware characters: Dynaheir from Baldur's Gate, Mazzy Fentan from Baldur's Gate 2, Falls-from-Grace from Planescape: Torment. She was also Katrina in Quest for Glory IV (!!! Probably one of the first voice-acted Sierra games, that's so cool!) and Dr. Naomi Hunter in the Metal Gear games. I almost never think of voice actors when playing games, and now I'm really curious if there are other amazing actors in the field. In a way, the mark of a highly successful voice actor/actress is probably that you don't think about them: their performance becomes part of the character, not something that distracts you from the story.
Also on the topic of voice acting: I can't believe I didn't find out until the end credits of ME2 that Seth Green does the voice of Joker! That's AWESOME! I can totally hear it now, but somehow never picked up on it during the game. So cool. I'm generally not a big fan of celebrity voices in video games - again, it can be distracting, feel gimicky, and either detract from the character or feel like a sloppy shorthand for trying and establishing a personality for the character - but some of them are sufficiently awesome for me to absolve, like Green here or Samuel L. Jackson's fun turn in San Andreas.
Conversely, if you would like to hear some hilariously awful video game voice acting, be sure to check out the Gameological Society's Great Performances series. The Oblivion video is particularly funny, and a compelling counterpoint to the high level of quality that Bioware puts in their RPGs.
While it's taken me longer than I'd thought to get caught up on Mass Effect, it seems to have worked out for the best, since Bioware just released the new "expanded ending" free DLC a few days ago, so I can hit the ground running with that. I'm looking forward to seeing how Shepherd's saga ends!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)