Bypass and Hacking

While Mass Effect used the silly circular frogger thing for everything ME2 expanded it’s repertoire to two distinct games: bypass game and hacking game. The former is for opening doors and unlocking chests while the latter is for breaking into computer systems, deactivating stuff and etc… It makes sense.

Bypass looks like this:

It is essentially a memory game. You have to match symbols into pairs, and you can only see one of them at a time. It has nothing to do with bypassing security but… Well, the way it is designed it almost looks like you are criss-crossing some electronic circuits, connecting them to each other to cause some kind of overload that will trigger the locking mechanism. Surprisingly the game didn’t make me rage the same way Frogger did. Go figure.

Hacking is a pattern matching game:

You need to match 3 patterns in a row, under a time limit while avoiding the red rectangles. Once again, it is easy and requires no skill but is much less awful than the Frogger sequences from ME1.

This reinforces my point that if you make a mini game look a bit like what it is supposed to be, it becomes less annoying. Still, I don’t think anything beats lock-picking from Fallout 3 which you do exactly what is says on the tin: pick a lock.

Mining:

Arguably the least enjoyable part of Mass Effect 2 was the mining:

I didn’t mind it that much on my first run through the game, but I hated doing it my second time around. The worst part is that it is absolutely crucial to put in time into doing it, if you want your whole team to survive the suicide mission.

It appears that BioWare wanted to have something to replace the dull and boring Mako sections of the game. Sadly, boring minigame in which you drag your mouse cursor in circles is not a good replacement.

I understand why they made the game. BioWare wanted us to have some reason to explore all these little planets and asteroids they included on their map. Making them contain resources was a good idea. It’s just the busy work involved in mining becomes a thankless chore after a few hours. For example, wouldn’t mind just flying to a planet, say “deploy a probe” and then having my resource income randomized. But no. We can’t have that! Randomized is evil!

Honestly, I don’t understand this aversion to randomized results in modern video games. To me, pressing a button and getting a randomized result is perfectly natural. But then again, I have a background in pen and paper RPG’s where everything can be determined by a dice roll. Still, this is exactly what happens in every game when you deal damage – it gets randomized based on your stats, the weapon stats and enemy resistances. It makes absolute sense to use the same mechanic for unlocking doors or hacking computers – make a roll of your skill vs difficulty and announce the result to the player.

These days everything must be a mini game – opening doors, hacking, operating machinery, defecating. Soon there will probably make mini-games for reloading your weapons efficiently. I hate this trend. Why can’t we have skill rolls anymore?

Hell, I personally think skill rolls are infinitely more satisfying than mini games. When you use randomized rolls you can clearly see your characters progression. If you invest points to upgrade your lock picking or hacking skills your character will become better and better. With mini games, this is offloaded onto a player – you either master it after few tries and nail it every time or you continue sucking at it for the rest of the game.

Can we please reverse this trend? No more mini games in RPG’s please! Hell, let’s start some sort of a club or a society to promote this idea. We can call it Fight Against RPG Mini-games (or FARM for short).

What do you say? Will you join me in this fight and become FARM’ers?

Oh, and my Mass Effect 2 post queue is exhausted. So if you are sick and tired hearing about this game, you should now rejoice. I’m done with it.

In my last post I ranted about the nonsense that was Mass Effect 2 main storyline. And yet, I really enjoyed this game. I enjoyed it so much that I finished it twice – once with male paragon and once with with female renegade. Would I put so much time into playing a game I hated? I wouldn’t. Mass Effect 2 is a good game – and the best parts of it are the side quests during which you recruit your crew, and/or help them resolve their personal problems. That’s where the writing shines, and the your company members really come to life.

Location, location, location…

ME2 does a really good job taking you to places you heard about in the first game but couldn’t visit. For example, you learn a lot about the the Krogan home world throughout both games. But ME2 actually lets you visit it. You get to see first hand the type harsh conditions that shape Krogan warriors. Tuchanka is basically the Salusa Secundus of the Mass Effect universe. If you ever read Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, you would know that Salusa Secudus was a harsh, unforgiving penal colony that forced it’s inhabitants to hone their combat and survival above anything else skills in order to stay alive. The dreaded imperial Sardukar units were recruited from that very planet and their efficiency in combat could only be matched by the Fremen of Dune who grew up in similarly harsh environment. You get a glimpse of Krogan society, culture and rituals. I thought that participating in the traditional right of passage was a great touch.

Krogan home planet - post nuclear westland of fun.

I was similarly excited to see the Quarian Migrant Fleet. Tali is one of my favorite characters so I was stoked to see the place where she grew up. I was a bit surprised to find out that Quarians wear their environment gear even on their ships. I always assumed that they simply keep their vessels are clean enough to be able to walk freely inside. But I guess this makes sense in a way. It’s easier to handle trade goods and grow food this way I guess. I was a bit disappointed that I couldn’t see how Quarians looked underneath all that gear – that’s all.

I really got a kick out of talking to Admiral Xen voiced by Claudia Black – who was also the voice of Morrigan in Dragon Age Origins. Of course in my heart, Claudia will always and forever be Aeryn Sun from Farscape. I love the fact she keeps showing up in BioWare games. If you skipped that dialog, make sure you talk to her the next time you play that mission.

My favorite mission however must have been the Legion loyalty quest, during which you actually get to visit a Geth controlled space station which turns out to be just a huge server farm. I really liked the fact the base seemed to be deserted, save for some maintenance and sentry platforms wandering about. It really revealed a lot about Geth and their way of life. It also put an interesting spin on the Quarian quest.

Legion - most interesting character in the whole game.

At the end of Tali’s trial you can state your op opinion about the war to reclaim the Quarian home world either by endorsing the idea, speaking out against it or ignoring it altogether. I initially chose to ignore it. Who was I to meddle in the affairs of the Quarian people. However after doing Legion’s quest, I wished I could have went back and urge the Quarian Admirals not to wage war against Geth.

In fact, to me finding and recruiting Legion was a much more rewarding, mind blowing, surprising and awesome plot twist than the lame reveal that Collectors descended from Protheans. I really did not expect ME2 to tell us so much about the Geth, their culture and way of thinking. They were great faceless foes to throw against us, and being able to talk to one of them, and ask it all kinds of questions was probably the best part of the game for me.

Your personal universe

I love the fact that so many NPC’s from the first game return in the sequel. And I’m not speaking about the original Normandy crew. I’m talking about random ass NPC’s that I saved or helped in the past, coming out of the woodwork. I met the inspector from the Noveria mission, the Thorian controlled Asari commando, that stupid scientist who was helping to make a Krogan army for Sarren. It is a really nice touch. Meeting people you saved or spared gives the game continuity. It almost makes up for the messy retcons at the beginning of the game. Almost.

The most interesting of these NPC’s was the emissary of the Rachni queen I liberated in ME1. It seems that the Rachni are rebuilding their society and so far have not decided to conquer the universe. In fact, they seem to be quite determined to live peacefully with other races, and one day join the intergalactic society – once they are sufficiently strong and established to discourage a knee-jerk reaction campaigns against them that could be launched by the citadel. Neat! I sometimes wondered if the paragon option of freeing the queen was the right thing to do. This random encounter didn’t erase all my doubts, but it was reassuring.

I liked visiting the former crew mates – especially Wrex who really seem to have found his place. I was bit baffled by Liara’s new job as the information broker though. The shy, introverted scientist is now a super spy? I didn’t really buy it, but whatever.

I get by with a little help from my friends…

I talked about most of the female characters in the romance post so I’m not going to repeat myself here. I liked Jack and I was always fond of Tali. That said, my favorite character out of the whole game (other than Legion) must be Mordin. I loved visiting him early on in the game because he always had something interesting to say. It was very interesting to talk to one of the original creators of the genophage. The Salarian scientist regrets unleashing it upon the Krogan, but believes that it was the only way to actually save their species from being wiped out like Rachni. In fact, Mordin is one of the few people in ME universe who feels that extermination of that race was a mistake. I think he would really appreciate the fact that I spared the queen in ME1 but unfortunately there was no dialog option to tell him that.

Mordin and my female Sheppard.

BioWare was able to write him as a scientist and an intellectual without actually falling into the stereotypical awkward science dork archetype you usually see in movies and video games. You know what I’m talking about right? Most smart people you see on the screen in interactive and non-interactive media is the same twitchy, cowardly chronically awkward, stuttering dweeb with taped up glasses, greasy hair and annoying habit of mumbling incomprehensible techno-babble to himself as he delivers exposition to bored characters who always have to cut off his explanations and tell him to get to the point. Mordin is different. He is strong, confident and a bit eccentric – he has a personality. Take his manner of speech for example. You could write it off as just being hyper but if you listed closely to how he says things you will realize this is not the case. Mordin avoids flowery language and uses short, succinct and precise sentences. Each conveys a single idea or notion in as few words as possible and in a direct manner that is difficult to misinterpret. I imagine the way he speaks is the way he writes notes for his experiments. It is the type of succinct, to the point, scientific shorthand you would expect to see on lab reports or in peer reviewed articles.

But he is not just a one-track-mind scientist. Mordin is a true Renaissance man. He does science, he can handle himself in a firefight, he is a patron of the arts and he sings. If you haven’t seen Mordin break into song yet, you just haven’t talked to him enough. That scene was priceless – especially Sheppard’s reaction to the sudden musical number (or complete lack of thereof).

I wish there were more characters like him out there. No one ever seems to know how to write good scientist characters. Most of the time the writer tend to fall into one of the extreme cases: you either get a total dork or a tough, muscular, dumb looking action hero in a lab coat. There is almost no middle ground. And yet Mording seems just right. BioWare nailed it.

Joker after the abduction scene.

I also always liked Joker – and not just because he is voiced by Seth Green – though that’s probably a part of it. ME2 really gave him a chance to shine. I absolutely loved the abduction sequence where you briefly get to play him instead of Sheppard in order to save the ship. It was a very well done sequence. It’s even better that Joker now gets a sidekick that he could interact with in the cockpit. I loved how his relationship with EDI starts with outright hostility on both sides, but at the end of the game they are are pretty much like a married couple. I cracked up the first time I heard EDI call Joker by his first name. Hell, I didn’t even know his first name!

Conclusion

While the story is a bit lame, it’s the little things like I described above are what make this game so enjoyable. It’s the characters, their relationships an the Mass Effect universe itself. Oh, and the combat is somewhat fun too. I enjoyed the cover based tactics of ME2 much more than the more conventional shooter mechanics of ME1. But that’s purely subjective and some people feel the other way.

So even if you are put off by the silliness of the main story, various nerfs and retcons I’d recommend sticking with the game till the end. You will miss out on all the awesome side quests and Mass Effect lore otherwise.

This is the post in which I complain and rant about the stuff that annoyed me in this game. I should probably mention that I don’t hate Mass Effect 2. In fact it is quite the opposite. I love it. I really had a great time playing it and I am definitely going to buy and play Mass Effect 3. I just hope they won’t reboot my Sheppard again… Which brings me to my complaint #1:

The Reboot

The begging of the game is absolutely baffling. You die, your ship gets destroyed and your team splits up. Two years later you are resurrected by a dangerous human supremacist terrorist organization, given a new Normandy that was based on original and your first task is to try to recruit your team back. What the hell?

I really don’t understand the need for such a drastic reboot of the game. I mean, if they wanted Sheppard to end up working for Cerberus in the second game, they could have foreshadowed it in the first, right? It’s not like a different game design studio made the sequel. It was created by the same people! Usually when you see a sequel begin this way is because the original game wrapped up all the lose ends so well, that there is no more story or conflict left. But this is not the case with Mass Effect series. It was penned to be a trilogy from the get-go. The first game had a satisfying conclusion, but not a complete one. The Reapers were still out there being a major threat and the citadel was ruined after the Sovereign attack. The story could have easily picked up right there and then exploring the effects of citadel attack, and the Reaper menace.

There was absolutely no need to fast-forward the story two years into the future. But if they really wanted it, there could have followed a path of easy, gradual transition. Let me give you an example:

After the events of ME1 the Council (or whoever is ruling the galaxy now) decide that Reapers do not exist. They ask Sheppard to either STFU about the Reapers or step down and relinquish his Specter title. He refuses to ignore the threat and since he is a hero of the Citadel he is liable to stir up trouble. In the end he gets stripped of his rank, and honorably discharged with a nice retirement package, with all kinds of benefits and privileges. They also officially deny Sheppard’s claims about Reapers. His team is disbanded and they all go do the stuff we see them doing in Mass Effect 2. Two years later Sheppard is still considered an eccentric war hero with some kooky obsession. No one save a handful of his friends believes in his rants about the threat to the galaxy. That’s when Cerberus approaches him with a proposition he cannot refuse: they give him an unlimited resources, a new ship and highly trained team and ask him to investigate the reaper threat for the good of humanity. How is that? IMHO, it’s much more plausible than the whole resurrection thing.

Honestly, I don’t actually understand why the Cerberus subplot is really needed here. Why couldn’t Sheppard continue working as a Specter? We could easily replace the word “Cerberus” with the words like “Alliance”, or “Council” in most dialogs and the game would not change all that much (save for the few spots that actually deal with Cerberus being evil). I don’t get it. The reboot was just a bad idea. And so were the Collectors.

If killing Sheppard and resurrecting him was designed to explain resetting his skill tree and experience, it was a stupid thing to do. Most of us can deal with such a change quite easily. Oh, sure – we would make jokes about how Sheppard forgot all his training all of a sudden, but it’s not uncommon. Many games do this, and we frankly don’t care. What really scares me is that they will try to pull this off again in Mass Effect 3 when they reset the skill trees again.

The Collectors

In ME1 the main antagonist was a race of robots that worshiped Reapers as their gods. It seemed like a sensible alliance: ancient sentient AI’s working alongside a race of self replicating synthetics that rebelled against their organic masters. ME2 switched things around and the main enemies you face are now Collectors – a race of mysterious insectoids that are somehow connected to the Reaper menace. Later in the game it is revealed that Collectors are actually degenerate Protheans that were enslaved by the Reapers and co-opted to do their bidding very much like Geth were.

Sadly this revelation does not make a shred of sense. For one, Collectors use semi-organic technology. Their ships are all gooey, twisted and covered with cocoons. They look nothing like the traditonal Prothean architecture we have seen in the first game. Why would Reapers make Protheans abandon their old technology and seek to reinvent it from scratch?

Furthermore, early in the game Mordin studies the collectors and decides they are probably a race that was uplifted rather than degenerated. According to Mordin’s theories the Collectors Reapers must have enslaved Collectors just as they reached a cusp of sentience. But instead of allowing them to develop their own culture and philosophy, Reapers bestowed technology upon them and trained them as obedient drones and ruthless warriors, thwarting creativity and independent thinking. The discovery that Collectors are descendants of Protheans – a highly advanced race with sophisticated culture and philosophy – that used to dominate the galaxy seems to invalidate Mordins’ claims.

It’s almost as if the writers changed their mind about what the Collectors back story halfway through the script, but didn’t bother to fix up the earlier dialog options to reflect this shift.

A Human Reaper?

The first game established that the Reapers are sentient machines that hate all organic life. Every few millennia they make a clean sweep of the galaxy, destroying all sentient life. We are never really thought why they do that, but there were some clues left. For example, Reapers don’t actually destroy any organic life that is not sentient. Furthermore, they fully expect organics to crawl back out of the primordial goo, develop space flight technology and find Mass Relays and the Citadel. They essentially herd the organic races in the Mass Relay connected space. Why? I always assumed they assimilate their technology. I guess it works a bit like how Asari use the genetic code of different species to introduce beneficial mutations to their own genome. Reapers use the technology produced by organics to introduce new design variations to their own systems. Then they wipe all sentient life out to maximize entropy – ensuring that next batch of sentients will come up with new interesting technology templates of their own.

ME2 shows us this is not the case. Apparently Reapers use organics to reproduce. What they do is they pick a species at random, then harvest it’s members, put them in some sort of sophisticated blending machines, turn them into orange goo and then use that goo to build a new Reaper. I’m not sure how do you make a space worthy vessel out of organic gloop, but I guess Reapers have some sort of mind blowing technology that we mere mortals cannot understand.

Also, Reapers are apparently built in the shape of the “donor” species that was used as the building material. So the Reaper “larva” you find at the end of ME2 looks like a half finished terminator – complete with the red eye sockets and all. It is suspended over a bottomless pit via 4 glass tubes that pump human flavored milk shake into it’s shoulders. As soon as I saw it, I was like – I bet I will have to drop the damn thing down by shooting at these glass tubes. And guess what? That’s exactly what I had to do.

Furthermore, if Reapers take shape of their goo donors, what species was Sovereign and other Reapers we have seen based on? So far all the reapers save for the larva were shaped like big squids or strange claw like appendages. Did they blend and ingest Cuthullu during their previous incursion? I guess we could assume that their shape is vaguely similar to that small Collector operator bug that sits in the control center… Maybe…

I don’t know about you, but I sort of liked my theory about Reapers evolving by assimilating organic technology way better than this while thing about liquefying humans and using them as ship building materials. It just seems silly.

The End Game Choice

Possibly the worst part of the game is the final choice you are given after defeating the end game boss. You find yourself in control of a Collector base filled to the brim with Reaper technology – including the now-dead Reaper larva, and the machinery that was used to create it. You are given two options: destroy the base, or keep it so that Cerberus scientists can study it. Guess which one is the paragon choice?

First time I played through this ending, I was like “You better believe we are keeping it!” Studying this base and the dead Larva will tell us how Reapers are made. Sovreign was pretty much shot to pieces, but the technology that was salvaged from him was very useful. Now we have a largely intact, larva. It has a big hole in it’s skull, but there are lot’s of undamaged parts there. We can pick it apart and probe it for weak points. Not only that – we could also call up the Citadel Council and be like “What now motherfuckers? You still don’t believe in Reapers? Well, I have this huge ass base that says you are full of shit!”. There is really no reason not to capture this base.

But this is apparently the wrong thing to do. Apparently the Reaper technology is evil, and The Illusive Man starts to drool at the mere thought of how much power it would give to his organization. If you don’t destroy the base, he will gets his sweaty, nicotine stained paws on it and he will use it to terrorize the galaxy. The game ends on a very negative, ominous note. If you continue playing, all the characters will tell you that you fucked up. It’s strange. After seeing this ending, I reloaded my game, and destroyed the base instead – and everyone thought it was the right thing to do.

You know what? It was not. It was the stupid thing to do. The right thing to do – no the logical thing to do would be to it over to the Council so that it could be properly studied. But that option is speciously absent from the equation.

Sniper Nerf

I played the game on mu first play through and as a vanguard on the second, so the heat-clip mechanic didn’t bother me that much. But when I tried playing as a sniper, I quickly started to hate them. In ME1, you could sit back in cover and snipe at your enemies indefinitely. That’s sort of what snipers do. ME2 breaks this mechanic by making all sniper rifles carry very limited number of bullets. After 5-6 shots you usually have to switch to your secondary weapon, and finish off the rest of the enemies at close range while foraging for heat sinks. Which defeats the whole purpose of playing a sniper-centric class to begin with. This mechanic worked great for my soldier though – I used the sniper rifles to pick out high priority targets (rocket launchers, snipers, drop shields on mini-bosses) and then closed the deal with the assault rifle. I was usually able to pick up enough clips from enemy corpses to reload both my weapons. If you like to use a sniper gun as your primary weapon… Well, you can’t so forget about it and re-roll a soldier class.

Conclusion

I really don’t know what happened with this game. The main quest seemed like it was hastily stitched together at the last minute, while drunk, by combining work of two or three separate groups of writers who didn’t really agree on how the story would unfold. Every single part of it was somehow stupid and contrived – from the resurrection, through the collector missions all the way down to the final battle. ME1 had it’s flaws, but at least the main quest was somewhat consistent. It was the strong point of the game while the side quests were boring and repetitive. ME2 is quite the opposite. The main quest sucks. I mean, I have to admit that I was excited to jump the Omega 4 Relay to see the collector base, and see the Collector base. So it is not all bad. The problem is that it has more plot holes than a slice of Swiss cheese after being shot with a shotgun. The side quests however… They are awesome – this is where the game really shines.

I’m going to talk about those parts of the game in my next post.

In Mass Effect 2 a male character you can flirt with the 4 female companions: Miranda, Jack, Tali and Samara as well as with Kelly Chambers – the Normandy Yeoman. The most popular romance option seems to be Miranda: a Cerberus operative with a figure and personality of a barbie doll and a major superiority complex and daddy issues. You see, Miranda is profoundly unhappy because she is just too perfect. Her incredibly rich and powerful father arranged for her genome to be custom-tailored to produce a prodigy child who would take over his legacy. She loves to complain about her shitty childhood almost as much as she hates being the smartest, prettiest and the most amazing person in the room. She often wishes that she could be super lame like all the other crew members, so that people would notice her for her personality rather than the stunning looks or brilliance she was gifted with. I can see where she is coming from, but I can’t really sympathize with her on that. She is stuck up, bitchy, self centered and spoiled brat. Good character concept but a lousy person.

Jack is on the other end of the spectrum. She is self destructive, nihilist with deep intimacy issue. Jack was hurt, betrayed and screwed over so many times she is permanently and almost irreversibly broken inside. She knows everything about pain and suffering, and nothing about love or friendship. She is a bit of a cross between River from Firefly and Chiana from Farscape. Like River she spent her childhood locked up in a lab being experimented on and trained to be the ultimate weapon. Jack however did not have a loving brother who could bust her out and take care of her – she had to rescue herself. She spent most of her life as a fugitive running away from something – her past, the law, relationship. Like Chiana she is tough, individualistic, strong minded and irreverent. She plays by her own rules and does not care about moral or social norms. She treats sex casually, and runs at the first sign of commitment. I found her genuinely interesting to talk to.

In fact, romancing Jack is a bit different from the usual BioWare formula. Usually you can win over every girl by being a super nice guy. With Jack however, you have to be a bit of a dick. If you are nice to her, she will just insult you. Actually, she will insult you no matter which dialog option you pick. But if you are confident, persistent and refuse to take shit from her she will slowly open up. Of course once Jack opens up to you, the game puts her on the relationship track. I never really intended to sleep with Jack to begin with. She was extremely unstable and emotionally damaged. It was clear to me that she wasn’t looking for a heated romantic fling. What she needed was normalcy and a genuine human connection. I just wanted Sheppard and her to be friends – not lovers. I wanted Jack to see that she was a valuable member of the team, and that someone can be interested in her as a person – with no strings attached. It seemed as if sex would actually cheapen the relationship the two of them have developed. The problem with scripted dialog trees is that they often don’t cover everything you would want your character to be able to say.

In fact, there is no “nice” way to let jack down. The best you can do is to have Sheppard blurt out something about having “other options” and Jack being a bitch for not putting out – which is probably the worst thing you can say to emotionally volatile woman who just let her guard down for the first time in her life. For the rest of the mission Jack would only say two words to me. One of those words was “you”. The other one was “fuck”. I really felt bad about this… But alas, I really wanted to pursue Tali’s romantic subplot.

You see, I always liked Tali. I thought she was a great character. In ME1 is was basically an idealistic teenager undergoing her right of passage. In ME2 she returns as a fully fledged member of Quarian society. However she is still the same polite, shy, introverted young woman. She tends to babble when she gets nervous, she probably understands machines better than people, she names her combat drones after Baldur’s Gate pets – let’s face it, Tali is a bit of a geek. In a good sense. Also unlike the other two characters I described above, she doesn’t have some major issues that plague her. She is just young, and inexperienced girl. She tends to be optimistic, cheerful and pleasant to talk to – as opposed to moody, obscenity spewing jack, holier than thou Miranda or fatalistic Samara. Tali is just Tali – competent, driven, reliable, idealistic.

The Quarian environment suit gives gives her that mysterious quality. For all we know, she can be a stunning beauty underneath that mask. Sadly, most of the time we can merely glimpse outlines of her eyes and her nose through the helmet. Her predicament reminds be that of Rogue from X-men. Intimacy and closeness are never casual for her – they carry great risks. She can never touch or kiss anyone without some preparation, and risking a serious infection.

That said, the “love scene” was rather underwhelming:

I was really hoping they will at least show us her face. I guess they didn’t feel like spending a long time modeling her head from scratch for a few seconds of optional cut scene. Perhaps they didn’t want to ruin it for us. I mean, by the end of the game, most people probably imagined how she might look underneath the helmet based on the outlines visible through the semi-transparent face shield. No matter how pretty or interesting they would make her look, it would probably be a let down. Maybe it it’s a little bit of both. It’s a cop out though – I was disappointed.

I didn’t really have a chance to unlock all of Samara’s dialog options or get to the romance part because she was the absolute last person I recruited and did a loyalty quest for before the suicide mission. Then she died eaten by the collector swarm for absolutely no reason. Similarly, since I played a nearly straight paragon I didn’t even have an option to recruit Morinth.

I also found it funny that you can blatantly flirt with Kelly – your Yeoman and personal assistant and she seems to love it. Half the lines you can say to her would count as blatant sexual harassment in most professional and military type environments. But one of the first things she lets you know when you board Normandy is that Cerberus does not really have any strict fraternization rules. She will also dance for you and feed your fish – gotta love that girl. And she seems to swing both ways, unlike other ladies of ME2.

On my second run through the game I was really bummed out that not a single female character had a lesbian romance option. That’s seriously lame my friends. My female renegade Sheppard is into ladies. This is why she made sweet, sweet love to Liara in ME1, and wanted to sex either Miranda or Jack in ME2 but the game wouldn’t let me. Sleeping with a dude would be out of character for her. Thank God for Kelly at least.

Who did you romance in Mass Effect 2 and why?

Another interesting upgrade is the quantum entanglement communicator in the conference room. It is essentially a high bandwidth Ansible that allows for instantaneous point-to-point communication with Cerberus command from any point in the galaxy. It transmits life size holographic image and audio stream which is actually quite impressive. In most universes Ansibles are kinda crappy. In Le Guin’s Ekumen universe they can only send/receive text. The device installed on Normady is much, much more powerful.

In fact, existence of such device in the universe makes one wonder why most civilizations build their communication network Mass Relays instead of these awesome Ansibles. In fact, you can even ask the ship AI about it. This conversation pretty much goes like this:

Click to embiggen.

EDI basically hand waves this away (which is actually pretty impressive seeing how it has no hands) and gives you some bullshit about point-to-point communication. It is quite obvious that no one at BioWare reads this blog. If they did, they would know that I already came up with a clever idea for galaxy wide internet based around Ansibles. In case you are to lazy to read that article let me re-iterate it here:

1. Establish point to point Ansible connections to bunch of your neighbors
2. Plug all this Ansibles into a router
3. Connect the router to the planetary internet
4. Set it up to route outbound off-world requests to appropriate Ansibles
5. If you get an inbound packet that should go to a different world route it out using an appropriate ansible

It would take some coordination, but if everyone would do this, Mass Effect universe would have instantaneous packet switched internet that covers the whole galaxy. The best part is that all you really need to do this, is good old 20th century TCP/IP networking. And yes, they would probably still be using IPv4. Isn’t it funny that all modern OS’s and modern hardware support IPv6 but no one actually uses it for anything?

So yeah… BioWare – read my post, and please take it into consideration when making Mass Effect 3. I’m expecting a galaxy wide internet, or a good explanation why it is not there. The fact that your Ansibles are point-to-point doesn’t mean shit.

I really complained and nitpicked a lot when I reviewed the original Mass Effect. This does not mean I didn’t like it. To the contrary, I liked it very much despite the numerous jarring flaws that I mentioned in my reviews. I have the same relationship with Mass Effect 2. I love it even though it is flawed in many ways. I will probably rant about all these flaws in the next few posts, but please don’t think I’m trashing the game. I do this out of love.

Mass Effect 2 Cover

In many ways, the new game is an improvement over the old one. For example, do you remember how I said the inventory management in Mass Effect was a train wreck? Well, they fixed that problem quite definitively. Inventory is no longer annoying because it is simply not there. They removed it.

At first I raged at this, but then I realized it’s actually not such a bad thing. They simply got rid of a broken, under-designed feature and routed the game play around it. You can still find new guns and armor upgrades, but the process is much more streamlined and organic now. When you find a weapon upgrade you pick it up and equip it immediately, discarding the old gun – which is what your character would probably do in real life. The new weapons are always designed to be better than the base models they replace so you never actually end up with a gun that sucks. Similarly, instead of carrying 17 different models of heavy armor in your backpack, you collect blueprints that allow you to upgrade your personal armor when you go back to Normandy. The lack of inventory also removed the irrational requirement that each character carries 1 weapon of each kind strapped to their back, even if they are not skilled enough to use it. Now you manage your weapon load-out before a mission, and those characters who for example are not trained to use an assault rifle, can’t be issued one. When you pick up a new weapon upgrade, only those characters that posses the skill to use it are affected. It works much better than the former system.

Inventory is not the only much maligned game element that got axed. They also removed the silly Mako driving sequences. They were repetitive, boring and annoying due to the fact that the random terrain generator seemed to love huge mountains and canyons that were really hard to navigate using the four wheel vehicle. They could have fixed this issue by tweaking their terrain algorithms, but they got read of the headache altogether. Instead of being dropped 50 miles from the mission objective and having to traverse 8 mountain ranges to reach it, you now land right on top of it using a shuttle, which is a vast improvement. They also replaced the generic, super repetitive “land on the planet, kill all Geth and get out” missions with actual quests that involve interesting NPC characters, plot twists and expose you to a lot of new information about the Mass Effect universe, it’s history and the races that inhabit it.

Similarly, Geth are no longer your only enemy. In original Mass Effect all weapons and powers that had diminished or no effect against synthetic enemies were completely useless since 99% of the missions had you fight against the same 5 or 6 Geth models. The sequel has a wide variety of organic and synthetic enemies, forcing you to switch weapon based powers and strategies with each mission. It is a welcome improvement.

Really, it’s almost as if BioWare developers listened to customer feedback, and re-designed their game removing the disliked or controversial features. But I know that this is a silly notion. I mean, it’s not like these companies ever listen to our rants, do they?

All these improvements came at a cost of course. The game was significantly dumbed down compared to it’s predecessor. The skills and abilities were another major causality. Now each character gets 3 special powers (except Shepard who gets few more) that have exactly 4 levels of power. The system is dumb simple, but, very, very intuitive. I remember spending lots of time in Mass Effect 1 agonizing over spending my XP into the right skills, trying to figure out how they worked and why they were needed. And it was not the good kind of agonizing (like in Dragon Age) but the frustrating kind. The original system seemed a bit dumb, and stripped down compared to the RPG games I was used to. It felt simplistic and silly, and yet clunky and awkward at the same time. The new system doesn’t even pretend to be a fully fledged RPG game. It is a neat skill leveling system attached to a great shooter.

That’s really how I view Mass Effect 2 – a Gears of War/Halo like game but with a very, very good story and interactive dialogs. After an awkward first installment, Mass Effect finally got the guts to come out of the closet and say “Fine, I’m not an RPG. I’m an action shooter with RPG elements”. And you know what? It is not a worse game for it. I like it this way. I can’t blame BioWare for trying to make their games appeal to a wider market of FPS enthusiasts, especially since they have retained the best elements that make all of their games so damn good – well written story, great characters, interesting quests and deep dialog trees. Besides, Dragon Age proved that they are not abandoning us RPG nuts and they will keep making classic RPG’s for us. They are simply using Mass Effect to branch out and explore new markets.

Now that I mentioned that I like the story in the game, let me point out that I do have quite a few nitpicks. But we can talk about them later. In the meantime let’s talk about the differences between the two games, and how they affect the game play. Do you like these changes? Do you think the game was dumbed down to much? Or is it just right? Let me know.

Please keep this thread free of spoilers. I will have another thread to discuss the plot and the end game/