Mass Effect 2 gameplay thread

[johnhughthom]

Hmm, I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but how do I import my ME1 Shep? Nothing comes up when I select Import and I can't find a save folder to put the save into. Apologies if it has been covered here, didn't want to read through in case I came across a spoiler. I have Steam ME1 & 2.

edit: Figured it out, just created save folder in my ME2 folder and copied the save over.

[rajpoot]

Right. Finished one play-through. Going to lay off for a week or two now.
I wonder how they'll continue the story.....I mean ME1's plot was quite good, and yup, the Vigil bit was done very well....then along comes ME2, nice characters and all that but the ending turned out to be, well....gah

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Human reaper? And the Protheans became the Collecters? What happened to the 'indoctrined die due to radiation' theory....
And not once did they actually show the Rachni.....just a message on Illium...after getting that I was hoping to actually be aided by the Rachni in the course of the story missions somewhere....And in ME1 this was supposed to be one of the biggest decisions you could take...

All in all, just slightly disappointed that ME1's actions don't actually have any really groundbreaking outcomes.....I mean I understand that it might be hard development-wise, but still it would've been more fun if the decisions would have made a greater impact....

All that said, ME3 just can't come soon enough for me......

[Ironside]

Right. Finished one play-through. Going to lay off for a week or two now.
I wonder how they'll continue the story.....I mean ME1's plot was quite good, and yup, the Vigil bit was done very well....then along comes ME2, nice characters and all that but the ending turned out to be, well....gah

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Human reaper? And the Protheans became the Collecters? What happened to the 'indoctrined die due to radiation' theory....
And not once did they actually show the Rachni.....just a message on Illium...after getting that I was hoping to actually be aided by the Rachni in the course of the story missions somewhere....And in ME1 this was supposed to be one of the biggest decisions you could take...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Indoctrinated humans ends up as husks somehow, so going cybernetic seem to keep the indoctrinated alive. And the reapers had to have a reason for that cyclic destruction (and humans got a huge "we're special!" treatment in this game).

The rachni is probably more important in the third game, that is heavily hinting on being gather an army to defeat the reapers coming in full force story. Pure speculation would be that they're destabilising the galaxy before moving in. Since every lost reaper is the loss of a reaper condensed civilization (it's likely more than just genetic material in those ships), they're wimpy about losses. The predictable ending would be preventing a full scale attack on earth with the gathered fleet, while bording a reaper ship to place some virus to stop the whole fleet. Or how to stop a fleet with a ground specialist team. It's a bit too predictable so I doubt I'll get it fully correct, but they have painted themself a bit in a corner.

[frogbeastegg]

India, regarding your spoiler comment, did you speak to Mordan on your ship after that revelation? He had lots of info on that matter when I spoke to him ... say one or two squad missions later. Basically

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The Collectors were heavily modified. As organs and biological systems failed they were replaced with Reaper friendly versions. As generations passed intelligence dropped severely, as did related aspects like autonomy, and the Collectors became little better than drones. The Collectors are truly a pale shadow of the original Protheans.

Speaking of Mordan, everyone needs to ask him about art when chatting on the ship, then pick the new option which chases on off-hand comment he made during that dialogue. You will need to do his personal quest first. Loved it.

[Krusader]

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Indoctrinated humans ends up as husks somehow, so going cybernetic seem to keep the indoctrinated alive. And the reapers had to have a reason for that cyclic destruction (and humans got a huge "we're special!" treatment in this game).

The rachni is probably more important in the third game, that is heavily hinting on being gather an army to defeat the reapers coming in full force story. Pure speculation would be that they're destabilising the galaxy before moving in. Since every lost reaper is the loss of a reaper condensed civilization (it's likely more than just genetic material in those ships), they're wimpy about losses. The predictable ending would be preventing a full scale attack on earth with the gathered fleet, while bording a reaper ship to place some virus to stop the whole fleet. Or how to stop a fleet with a ground specialist team. It's a bit too predictable so I doubt I'll get it fully correct, but they have painted themself a bit in a corner.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Mass Independence Day Effect!!

India, regarding your spoiler comment, did you speak to Mordan on your ship after that revelation? He had lots of info on that matter when I spoke to him ... say one or two squad missions later. Basically

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The Collectors were heavily modified. As organs and biological systems failed they were replaced with Reaper friendly versions. As generations passed intelligence dropped severely, as did related aspects like autonomy, and the Collectors became little better than drones. The Collectors are truly a pale shadow of the original Protheans.

Speaking of Mordan, everyone needs to ask him about art when chatting on the ship, then pick the new option which chases on off-hand comment he made during that dialogue. You will need to do his personal quest first. Loved it.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Kekvit Irae]

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Pfft. Here's the full version:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[frogbeastegg]

And done. 29 hours, got the best ending. I was somewhat disappointed at how easy it was to do that; I suspect the ending would have had more punch if I'd been less successful.

The short summary of my feelings on it would be this: the game shines when it is tying in to the first, and it does that in a lot of ways and frequently. Plot, writing and presentation wise, I really enjoyed it. If not for the poor presentation of joining Cerberus at the start it'd fare much better and sit on a par with the first game. Instead it's slightly below it. Gameplay wise, not so hot, and I much preferred the first game. This is clearly the middle act of a trilogy and so spent a lot of time bring things forward and setting things up.

I was surprised at how short the plot chain of missions is. Most of the play time comes from doing optional stuff like the loyalty missions.

The incidental material is some of the best. The adverts and conversations you hear as you wander can be hilarius. Humour was on an overall up compared to other Bioware efforts, I felt. Lots of excellent lines throughout the game, and some outstanding conversations.

Elcor Hamlet is awesome. Also, the game needed more Elcor.

My comment earlier on someone being a romance option because they started complaining about dead people was accurate. Amazingly, said romance was quite well done. One of Bioware's better efforts.

Despite its problems and lows, ME2 shows why I called Dragon Age: Origins static, bland and boring in its storytelling and conversations. ME1 was doing all of this, and years ago. ME2 only continues the effort and adds a new trick, the interrupt. In conversations people walk around, sit down, stand up, gesture, have decently animated faces, and do all of the other motions which happen in real life. You can select your next option while the other side are talking, you don't pick word for word what you will say, and it's voice acted so it feels like a proper conversation instead of half of one. Can't the two Bioware teams talk to each other? It's going to be even harder to finish my replay of Dragon Age now.

On the ending specifically:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

So the Collectors were liquidising humans and using the mush to build a giant metallic human skeleton that was somehow going to be a Reaper. O ... k. Maybe it's the fact I saw that near midnight, but I'm really having trouble seeing how this was supposed to work. How would it get around? Flying like Superman?! And aren't the Reapers meant to be machine intelligence? And how does pulped human result in metal? If the Reapers were built out of pulped species, what about the original Reapers which went wild and killed the civilisation which made them? And just ... why?! The whole thing was a complete what the heck moment.

I had pictured the Reapers to be ships with powerful AIs, much like the ships in Ian M Bank's Culture books or in Neal Asher's Polity.

Getting the team through alive was very easy. I got everyone's loyalty, used paragon dialogue to resolve the two personality clashes, and chased after my crew immediately. Then it was a simple case of picking people who were the best at the job. Legion for the door, Samara for the bubble, Jacob to escort, Garrus to lead the distraction, and Miranda to lead the second team.

Some achievements do give in-game bonuses. There's a 25% XP bonus for future characters after completing the game, and you're supposed to be able to pick a squad mate's power when building your next character provided you have their loyalty achievement.

Hmm, yes. Mostly good but the bad annoys me enough to hold it back.

I shall play again with one of my other Shepards. I want to do insanity and reach level 30; not sure that latter is possible without the XP bonus and/or replaying a ME2 character, as I only managed level 26 after porting over my cannon Shepard and doing as much content as I could find.

[rajpoot]

Reaching level 29 at-least is entirely possible without the xp bonus, with a ported Shepard. I'd used a save file with a level 60 Shepard from ME1 and that gave a XP bonus in the start. After the end game, I was level 29. I did use the wiki to find the side quests though, so that I don't miss out on any of them.
The interrupt system is quite nice and I do hope they keep it for future games.

[Kekvit Irae]

I was surprised at how short the plot chain of missions is. Most of the play time comes from doing optional stuff like the loyalty missions.

Well, you gotta admit, the loyalty missions (at least some of them) give plenty of emotional moments, such as Mordin and the dead female krogan. Mordin and Legion's are both my favorite, since they have far reaching consequences in Mass Effect 3 (presumably).

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I cant wait to see how the Geth will turn out now that I've freed them from the Reapers' control!

I also like Samara's loyalty mission as well. Not only because there's no combat whatsoever, but also because

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

you can choose to kill Samara and recruit Morinth instead.

The incidental material is some of the best. The adverts and conversations you hear as you wander can be hilarius. Humour was on an overall up compared to other Bioware efforts, I felt. Lots of excellent lines throughout the game, and some outstanding conversations.

From my current playthrough:
(spoiler tag to avoid clutter, not plot point)

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I must be the only one who's curious about the Shin Akiba Asari/Hanar porn games. Can't be as bad as Japanese school girl/naughty tentacles.



I love how Shepard just casually says "Charge." That garnered more than a few giggles from me.

Some achievements do give in-game bonuses. There's a 25% XP bonus for future characters after completing the game, and you're supposed to be able to pick a squad mate's power when building your next character provided you have their loyalty achievement.

I only noticed this on my second playthrough. Long Service gives you 200k credits and 50k of each resource (you never need to mine for Eezo ever again). I do miss the little bonuses, like getting a 25% bonus to the duration of Marksman for 150 pistol kills, or improving Barrier and Statis recharge time by 10% by completing 15 missions and 35 assignments with Liara.

[Ironside]

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Mass Independence Day Effect!!

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Aye, why I thought it was predictable. It did occur to me that the "dark energy getting stars to age fast (going nova)" plot should have a reason, so I'll say that the bulk of the reapers will die due to that. That means somewhere else than earth for obvious reasons. Likely to be a reaper weapon turned against them.

I was surprised at how short the plot chain of missions is. Most of the play time comes from doing optional stuff like the loyalty missions.

Some of those are semi-optinional. You'll need to to do at least a bit of recruiting to continue the main plot chain.

On the ending specifically:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

So the Collectors were liquidising humans and using the mush to build a giant metallic human skeleton that was somehow going to be a Reaper. O ... k. Maybe it's the fact I saw that near midnight, but I'm really having trouble seeing how this was supposed to work. How would it get around? Flying like Superman?! And aren't the Reapers meant to be machine intelligence? And how does pulped human result in metal? If the Reapers were built out of pulped species, what about the original Reapers which went wild and killed the civilisation which made them? And just ... why?! The whole thing was a complete what the heck moment.

I had pictured the Reapers to be ships with powerful AIs, much like the ships in Ian M Bank's Culture books or in Neal Asher's Polity.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

They are cybernetic AI:s, so they mix that genetic goo with metal. For that human thingy, it'll probably end up as a part of the reaper ship, as they all look the same on the outside. It's too small to be a full ship anyway, even when done. The big question is why it got weapons installed.

I got no idea if they'll ever explain the original reapers, but if they do, I suspect it is connected to that "your salvation can only be reached by you destruction" rethoric the harbringer spouts. They are a sort of preservation of the species they wiped out (and made a reaper of).

[Mailman653]

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The Collectors were heavily modified. As organs and biological systems failed they were replaced with Reaper friendly versions. As generations passed intelligence dropped severely, as did related aspects like autonomy, and the Collectors became little better than drones. The Collectors are truly a pale shadow of the original Protheans.

Kind of like the Keeper's.

[Crazed Rabbit]

Playing some more, and loving it. They've added different types of armor with different weapons effective against them. Makes the different types useful, which is nice.

Also, went to the citadel, and I'm very amused by all the ambiance and newscasts.

CR

[tibilicus]

I'm playing through Mass Effect one right now and plan on picking this up sometime next week.

I plan on doing more than one play through but only one of my play throughs will be with an imported save. Does any one know what the "default" settings are if you don't play from an imported save?

For example which decisions stand i.e Wrex for example.

[Krusader]

Hmm, I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but how do I import my ME1 Shep? Nothing comes up when I select Import and I can't find a save folder to put the save into. Apologies if it has been covered here, didn't want to read through in case I came across a spoiler. I have Steam ME1 & 2.

edit: Figured it out, just created save folder in my ME2 folder and copied the save over.

Actually you have to use the Import utility through Launcher. Although you have found another workaround

[Crazed Rabbit]

BOOYAH!!

I have rid my game of the scourge of the red veins!

FYI for those interested:
I downloaded texmod and used this tutorial as guidance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8p2...eature=related

Some notes;

• Use the MassEffect.exe in the binaries folder, not the launcher.exe.
  
• I saved the texture as a bmp, transparency was black, so I just paintbucket'd the whole image black.
• I was playing very near the beginning, right after
  Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

  the security chief tells you that Cerberus brought you back from the dead.
  
  
• I note this only because when I paused the amount of textures that in texmod were 1974. The red vein texture was about number 1600 or so (+/- 100). It's pretty obvious.
  
• Also, you need to run texmod every time you run Mass Effect. It's a small program though.

I can email the file I made for use with texmod to anyone interested.

CR

[Mailman653]

Hopefully you can enjoy the game now.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Heaven forbid you just stay in cover and wait for natural breaks in the shooting.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Also, I am planning on playing with a imported ME1 perfect paragon character that I downloaded from an awesome website that hosts different versions of ME1 shepard, gonna see what the difference is between import and starting brand new. I hear it's night and day.

[al Roumi]

Also, I am planning on playing with a imported ME1 perfect paragon character that I downloaded from an awesome website that hosts different versions of ME1 shepard, gonna see what the difference is between import and starting brand new. I hear it's night and day.

Well being still-mid way through my first game, with an imported Renegade Shep (who had enough "moral" points left to save the council), I can't make a compariosn, but I can give you an inkling:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

A fair bit of work seems to have gone in to linking the two episodes -this you've probably already seen even with a new Shep. I have to say, I think almost every quest you completed in ME1 is at least footnoted in ME2. This comes out in the game on the lightest side with an email of thanks, through minor encounters to mini quests (e.g. Conrad V and the investigator from Noveria). Some characters from ME1 are built right in to the main plot (e.g. Nassana, Harkin).

I'm sure you'll get the same kinds of spam email and quests irrespective of importing or not, but the difference between an import or new Shep are in the dialogue and relationships you have with these people. I do find it more satisfying to note what I've done, and have at times felt a pang of guilt at being a hard-ass in ME1.

Then again, there are more opportunities to be blunt and rude in ME2. The interrupts are a good idea and fun, the only one I haven't used so far is...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

When Miranda shoots Nikahl (sp?) on Illium, he had it coming.

[Crazed Rabbit]

Heaven forbid you just stay in cover and wait for natural breaks in the shooting.

Yes, because removing the red veins now means I'm invincible and don't have to do that.

Well I played a fair bit last night and here's my impressions (not much in the way of spoilers, just didn't want to take up too much space);

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I really like the new squad ordering system. Easy to order your 'henchmen' around in real time. I'm liking the new characters as well.

Overall, they have simplified the interesting stuff and added complexity to the boring stuff. The last game had too many different brands of armor; one was usually the best and the rest just got in the way of collecting that good armor. Same with the weapons. So now they've done away with inventory completely, instead of just reducing the different brands of armor.

I also like being able to significantly change how weapons worked with the mods you could add. Now you can't, though you are provided with weapons that are actually different, instead of just reskinned versions, in terms of rate of fire and damage.

As was mentioned, this is now a cover shooter. I don't think I like it as much. In ME1 I'd run around dodging enemy attacks and crouching behind cover while using the various powers. Here, because of the mechanics you get killed quickly if you're caught by a couple mooks in the open. So the order of the day is to go to a new planet, get behind cover, shoot at the enemy when they pop up from the cover they're behind, get shot a couple times, duck back behind cover, repeat until all enemies dead then go to another planet. Because you're really only using the mouse to attack, and not any keys to move, it's less exciting.

Why can't games just provide crouch and lean options and let you use cover more freely, instead of this 'sticky' sort of cover? Not being able to crouch if you're not right behind cover in this game is perplexing. And now we have ammo, which is odd. The first game had the neat overheating concept, and fun ways to manipulate it with mods. But reloading isn't as bad as the limits to how much ammo you can carry. It's a shame.

And then we have the added complexity in areas like moving around the galaxy and planet scanning. I have to ask why. The old system functioned fine, and I don't see any improvements offered by having to pilot the Normandy around, only added time. And then we've got planet scanning, which is like a mini-game, except boring and tedious. Why would they force Shepard, on a ship with a full crew, to personally scan a planet and direct probes? I guess they felt they couldn't simply reward clicking on one survey button with a heap of resoruces, so they added the price of tedium.

The whole fuel system is annoying; for one when you run out, you simply jump FTL to the nearest fuel store. Why can't you just FTL to other star systems? Fuel and lame scanning simply act as a disincentive to explore.

Oh well, I should've known not to expect great combat. I did get the game mainly for the story.

Question about planet-scanning; is it necessary to get enough resources, or are the resources you gather not completely necessary to getting enough upgrades? I don't want to spend a bunch of time having to do an ensign's job.

CR