Well, I did manage to get her shields down and do a bit of health damage once, so I got close enough to getting it done to think it might be doable.

Incidentally, turns out there is an explanation for why Anderson isn't the Councilor any more in his Codex entry. Nothing too surprising; he hates politics, and felt that going back into the Navy to organize the defense against the Reapers was more important and a place where he could do more good. Would have been nice to have that mentioned in-game instead of buried in the Codex though.

 

Eh, personally I found the chase sequence to be good but a bit annoying with the scripting, mostly because of my Vanguard!Shepard raping physics along the way though and catching her. Seriously, maxed charge + nova is so incredibly overpowered its really not even funny, especially if you only go with one of the lighter shotguns so you get the 200% recharge.

 

Spoiler

Alright, after checking out the bioware forums I've become convinced that everything between being hit by the beam to my Shepard showing signs of survival post credits did not happen in reality.

There's a huge thread about this here: http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/355/index/9727423/1

I'll post some highlights of why I found this theory so convincing despite not having major problems with the normally seen ending.

1.I didn't notice this originally because I was completely focusing on Shepard but they make it clear that his body is still on Earth at the end.
a)the rubble is concrete and rebar, not Citadel materials
b)there is the sound of wind blowing and the Citadel would lack wind.
c)The sky looks exactly like it did in London.

2.Everyone looks happy or in awe as they exit the Normandy, they wouldn't be if this was all real but a dying Shepard would want to see them safe, happy, and at peace.

3.Apparently you can have a critical mission failure while you're supposedly talking to the reaper controller. This occurs if you take too long to decide which of the three options to take and you get a message that the Citadel was destroyed. The Citadel that you're supposed to be inside, yet from what I've heard you still see your surroundings intact. I looked for a youtube of this but couldn't find one, I'm going to check it out in the morning on my first file but have to replay the final missions.

4.Harbinger flying off without finishing Shepard is definitely strange, so is a complete lack of reaper forces(besides TIM) on the Citadel.

5.The radio chatter that everyone's down yet Anderson and Shepard both supposedly make it to the Citadel. My first playthrough I was expecting a "Wait! Shepard just got up! He's moving towards the (whatever that light thing was... Conduit?)!" to come across, but if he's hearing the actual chatter in an unconscious state this suddenly makes sense as well.

There's a bit of a split between people that believe Shepard is having a near death(or death) experience and those that believe he's also being subjected to a heavy attempt at indoctrination.

Here's some that points to indoctrination that I think is going on, there's variations but my own personal opinion is that the reapers have been working towards indoctrinating Shepard for most of the game.

Mass effect codex on indoctrination:
"Reaper "indoctrination" is an insidious means of corrupting organic minds, "reprogramming" the brain through physical and psychological conditioning using electromagnetic fields, infrasonic and ultrasonic noise, and other subliminal methods. The Reaper's resulting control over the limbic system leaves the victim highly susceptible to its suggestions.

Organics undergoing indoctrination may complain of headaches and buzzing or ringing in their ears. As time passes, they have feelings of "being watched" and hallucinations of "ghostly" presences. Ultimately, the Reaper gains the ability to use the victim's body to amplify its signals, manifesting as "alien" voices in the mind.

Indoctrination can create perfect deep cover agents. A Reaper's "suggestions" can manipulate victims into betraying friends, trusting enemies, or viewing the Reaper itself with superstitious awe. Should a Reaper subvert a well-placed political or military leader, the resulting chaos can bring down nations.

Long-term physical effects of the manipulation are unsustainable, Higher mental functioning decays, ultimately leaving the victim a gibbering animal. Rapid indoctrination is possible, but causes this decay in days or weeks. Slow, patient indoctrination allows the thrall to last for months or years."

1.There's this buzzing growling noise that we hear at times early in the game, like at the end of the scene with the child(no I don't mean the loud reaper one). Personally, I don't think the kid's real at all. He's shown at the beginning playing with a Normandy model yet Commander Shepard is there, who he likely idolizes, and his reaction is to insist that Shepard can't save him and back away? Also, Shepard is the only one to ever react to the child's presence.

2.Vega also hears a high pitched sound that he complains about, seemed like a throwaway comment at the time but its been pointed out to me that the last one like this in Mass Effect was from Kaidan in ME1 on the Citadel, right when he's next to what we later learn is the Conduit. Every other person on the ship has been exposed to reapers before or been on the ship before, perhaps they've tuned it out as background noise at this point. My guess on what's causing this: the Reaper IFF that we installed in 2.

2.Whispers can be heard in both the scene with the illusive man and the Reaper controller(kid AI thing) There's also the black around the edges of the screen, both of these heavily featured in the dream sequences that Shepard had, in each dream they got more pronounced indicative of Shepard getting closer to being fully indoctrinated. It made me think of alien voices even on my first playthrough but I'd not looked at the codex entry at that point.

3.The way that Shepard doesn't question the choices presented to him and the way that it seems like the reaper controller is presented as highly advanced/god-like. Suddenly Shepard is both trusting the enemy and seeing it somewhat with awe. *points at codex*

4.Anderson suddenly represents the renegade choice and TIM represents paragon? To me it seems like the color coding is representing the indoctrination confusing Shepard entirely making the wrong thing seem right.

If you attempt to control you've fallen into the same trap that TIM did. If you attempt to combine synthetic/organic forcibly you're falling into the same trap as Saren. Either way Shepard's will has been defeated, which is why he only awakens back on Earth if his resolve stays strong and despite everything still attempts to destroy the Reapers in his mind. Shepard burning in the final dream sequence as he embraces the child could be seen as a warning to the players not to trust him or Shepard's own subconscious warning him.

There's even more than this in the thread, I originally clicked it thinking that it would be full of wishful thinking but if anything the ending seems more bleak this way since Shepard is either indoctrinated, dead and the reapers are still around, or waking up to Harbinger above him and between him and the entrance to the Citadel. I'm not sure if I like this more or less but after reading the thread it makes too much damned sense for me to be able to ignore.

 

Mother Fucker.

I ...

Shit. It fits so perfectly and also explains why

Spoiler

the hardest ending to get is the destroy where Shepard lives.

Edit: And more that I just picked up on (damn you Bioware I should be working).

Spoiler

You start looking an awful lot like a husk in the Control/Synthesis endings don't you? -_-

 

So, eight hours into my first playthrough, and I've already run into two nasty bugs (a repeating CTD and a broken quest that costs you a nice chunk of War Assets). I'm starting to wonder if companies even bother to properly beta their games before shipping any more.

 

So yeah, The DLC party member files are already on the disc. Note, the normal game disc, not the CE or anything.

You can unlock the character in question by editing a single line in a file, as demonstrated in the link I posted above.

I'm curious as to what Bioware have to say about this.

 

I knew it.

 

Well duh, of course the Prothean is on the disc. I don't know why that surprises anyone.

 

I wasn't surprised but Bioware stated the DLC was developed after the game was complete and sent for certification by a completely separate development team. I'm very curious how they'll defend their lies this time, no content cut for DLC indeed.

 

At a guess, they'll use the entirely factual response that sending the finished game code off to get certified doesn't mean that they instantly started pressing the discs.

 

Seems like they really cut the character..But then what did you expect..Making money is the goal of Bioware and more importantly EA. And Bioware showed in the Past that they have no problems with using DLC´s at the start of game(Even the first Dragon Age had two mayor DLC´s at the beginning).


So after playing some more I have a few questions...
It has been some time since I last played ME1 but if remember correctly there are some discrepancies between the games.

1. The citadel can be used to control all Mass Effect portals thus dividing the universe when the Reapers attacked in previous circles, that didn´t happen this time which should give the Council an enormous advantage.. especially as it seems that even the reapers need those Portals.. I don´t understand why for example they don´t just lure the reapers to Earth ( or a other system) and destroy the portal.. thus killing or at least stop them for a long time.

2. I am pretty sure that Liara mentions in ME1 that the Proteans vanished in a very short amount of time (1 year or so) But my new friend tells me that they fought centuries against them.

 

Retcons. BioWare did then in their previous ME game and they did it in this one.

 

Or Liara was... you know, wrong.

 

I'm pretty sure she never said a year, and centuries are short in terms of geological scale. Considering she's an archaeologist...

 

The Reapers are spread out all over the galaxy, so the chances of luring them all to the same place are very slim. Even if the Council did manage to get them all to the same place and shut down the relay... the Reapers probably know how to fix it. If they can't fix it for some reason, they'll just head for the next closest relay - and there are still a lot of relays out there that haven't been discovered yet, so there's no way of telling where they'd go or how long it would take them to get there. The Council would have to use the Citadel to disable the entire relay network just to make sure, which would leave every world to fend for itself and cripple any chance of fighting back.

But the biggest reason the Council didn't do any of that? Nobody actually knows how to operate the Citadel. The keepers handle everything and they aren't exactly chatty.

 

The Council doesn´t have to control the Relays... just denying the Reapers the control would be enough. Because they would able to muster their fleets and destroy small Reaper forces and thus forcing the Reapers to form bigger fleets.
And the destroying the Relays was just an idea I had when I read that the Reapers attacked the Batarians first. And that the humans knew which way the reapers would take. And it is possible to destroy those Relays so I don´t understand why the Alliance didn´t do it.


And yeah I get that this is just a game and that doing these things would destroy much of the game.. I just find it hard to accept that the Reapers are unbeatable with conventional means especially if these include big cannons.


Ah and by the way.. The rachni make the arguments of the child pretty much invalid.. or at least I think so. No need for an AI for Hivemind controlled insects.

 

Going by the first game this really seems like a bad idea to me since sovereign, one reaper, pretty much carved through both the alliance and Citadel fleets without much effort.

 

The Reapers go from "deep in dark space" to "invading Earth" within the span of months. They use the relays out of convenience, not necessity. If all the relays were shut down and for some reason they couldn't reactivate them, their FTL travel is still a viable way to get around the galaxy relatively quickly for a group of synthetics that just chill out for 50,000 years until their next invasion.

Also, I was wondering if anyone had a decent source for Reaper fleet numbers? I mean, in ME2 we saw a couple of hundred in dark space, but then in ME3 they seem to be invading 90% of the occupied planets in the galaxy, and they still have enough ships to chase you down when the Normandy gets too scan happy.

By the way, if anyone wants to play multiplayer feel free to add me on Origin. My id is Denial73 - I usually play gold, but I don't mind silver or bronze as I can just level up some of my lower classes.

 

I kind of wondered about this too when I played the Arrival DLC for ME2.

Spoiler

If the destruction of a mass relay causes an explosion large enough to sterilize an entire star system, why didn't anyone think "Hey, what if we wait until the Reapers arrive, then destroy the Alpha relay?" Clearly it takes less firepower to destroy a Reaper- even the big ones- than it does to ravage an entire solar system. Would have been a damn good way to wipe out at least a sizeable chunk of the Reaper invasion force, but no one seemed to think of it.

And while it would have caused fairly horrific loss of life (as in every living thing in the Sol system), my first thought when they said the Reapers were massing at Earth with the Citadel was to ram another asteroid into the Charon relay. Do that, and you've just one-shotted the single largest concentration of Reapers in the galaxy, as well as their means of shutting down the relay network. Probably wouldn't win the war, but it would sure as hell tilt the balance of power between organics and the Reapers. As a bonus, it would keep their massive, multi-species armada in tact, which they could then use to jump around the relay network, hitting smaller Reaper fleets with overwhelming force. Doing that just might have made it possible to win a war of attrition.

EDIT:

If that turns out to be true... My mind will be so blown, I'll never say another bad thing about Bioware ever.

 

Are spoiler tags still needed?
Erandil that huge post I put in a spoiler would also explain why the child might be wrong.

Blowing up all the relays honestly seems like a strategy doomed to failure considering that for every relay you destroy you delay the reapers for around three months but destroy the system it was in as well. The reapers move damned fast even without relays. If anything you would make guerilla style warfare entirely impossible and if you're wanting to win by conventional means that's your only hope(not that its much of one). There's also the fact that after the Batarians basically got wiped out all the other races are unlikely to allow the alliance to go around destroying a bunch of them.

Anyways...

Spoiler

I'm finding the very beginning to be a creepy taunt in retrospect if the theory is right, and I definitely think it is, its like Harbinger(because isn't that who we're told is the leader of the reaper forces before the final indoctrination attempt?) is saying that by the end Shepard(and perhaps his crew) will be his puppet by showing him the child playing with a model of the Normandy.

@fuubar Someone pointed out the husk thing in that thread as well, I didn't mention it because to me it looks more like he's being incinerated from an explosion. You coming up with the same thought without reading his is making me give it more credence though.

Some people believe endings picking up from Shepard awakening will soon be forthcoming and are already on disc. The evidence is that for box users disc 1 was barely used, we used it for maybe 20% of the game(probably less), the beginning and ending. Pc users have remarked that it says it needs 15gb but apparently only uses 11gb. A few suspect that the unlock will be a free dlc assuming you have the online pass which would fit with ea's model of curbing used game sales.

The main question to me is why would they lock the ending? Supposedly it would be to ensure that players have a chance to play through the indoctrination sequence without possibly being spoiled but I don't find that terribly convincing.