Given the significant difference in tone between the Tuchanka missions, and the Rannoach missions on one hand and many of the other major missions on the other, I feel like the former were written well before the others.

 

Actually, are there any other quests besides the Rachni quest, Priority: Tuchanka, and Priority: Rannoch that actually have choices that you can make, which will impact the game? I can't think of any off the top of my head atm and it's not a coincidence that of the entire game, those two missions and one assignment were the best of the bunch.

 

Yes, I fully agree. That was probably one of the better scenes in the game, despite how much I liked Mordin.

A really, really good example of the fact that a scene doesn't have to be absolute bullshit to be "bittersweet".

Honestly, I cannot word it better than ElDee. And even though the entire scene is centered around Mordin's choice, you still do get a choice. The choice to argue helplessly and then eventually give in to what your friend wants.... Or ruthlessly shoot him in the back and watch him bleed all over the floor.

 

The way I played it is that at first my Shepard(s) were going to warn the krogan about the sabotage, but after the first interruption Wrex's dialogue shook their confidence in what was right. So they brushed it off, and then told Mordin in private and let him decide because god damn if he isn't so much fucking smarter than any of my Shepard's could ever hope to be.

I was VERY pleasantly suprised with how well the dialogue options flowed and ended up telling the story for closely to exactly what I wanted.

 

The outcomes are up on YouTube of course. Mordin survives, Mordin rebels and Mordin sacrifices himself. If you sabotage the cure and Wrex is alive, he isn't happy about it.


It doesn't surprise me that they'd put the most effort into Tuchanka and Rannoch. Those two arcs have played out through all three games, they deserved a good payoff. It's just a pity they couldn't manage to tie up the main Reaper plot so well.

Speaking of the ending, I played through Mass Effect 2 again and was reminded just how much unresolved plot and blatant foreshadowing about dark energy there was. It seems to pop up all over the place - especially on Haestrom, Illium and in Arrival - but isn't mentioned anywhere in Mass Effect 3. Confusing.

 

Actually it is. Like once. If you talk to Conrad Verner during the sabotaged medigel quest and collected the Matriarch Writings, Retrieved some Data on Feros for some guy, and got the Elkoss Combine License. All obviously in ME1.

Basically Conrad is some sort of genius or soemthing and he adds a total of 5 points to the Crucible (I think). It's not much in the end, but it does mention dark energy.

 

I just finished a ME1 playthough, and it had a bunch of "dark energy" stuff as well (at least I think it did - I also played ME2 again recently and the two games might be blurring together slightly). It's like they just dropped that whole plot thread in ME3.

Also, I'd forgotten just how godawful the combat in ME1 was. The cover system is utter shit compared to ME2, let alone ME3, but if you don't use it, you get mashed to tiny bits (at least as an Adept) for most of the game. And I think I prefer the biotics system from ME2/3, despite everyone saying that they were neutered in the later games. The long cooldowns and lack of biotic explosions got really annoying after playing an Adept in ME3 multiplayer. Sure, you can lift up a bajillion geth with one singularity, but then you have to shoot them all before they hit the ground because biotics don't do any damage. It made gameplay more interesting though, I suppose.

---------- Post automerged at 01:46 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:43 AM ----------

Huh...if I ever get around to running my most recent ME1 character through ME3, I'll have to see if that shows up - I satisfied all the prerequisites at least. I think the last character I went through ME3 with met all those requirements as well, but Konrad died in a speeder chase after I talked to him at the bar.

 

I satisfied the prerequisites my first playthrough but I completely missed because I didn't even notice him standing there. The entire conversation is pretty funny because of the the way it's structured (He keeps stopping because he needs a specific thing to continue decoding something, and you magically provide it and it's just so rapid fire).

 

There's also some pretty interesting and funny dialogue after that sequence, if you keep talking to him. Shepard's scream of frustration is especially amusing after Conrad reveals he has a shrine of you.

 

Strange, I let him cure it, but he didn't sing/show me the subtitle text of him singing. All of those endings are fairly awesome. I still think there isn't enough choice in them, and despite them being good, they still just copy/pasted massive chunks into each other, lol. Just expected more I guess. But if the entire game had been like that it'd have been so much better. I miss the long story filled planet arcs. Instead most of the missions I've been on so far have been 5-10 minute little throw away levels fighting endless Cerberus hordes of the same three or four types, with no story impact at all.

Speaking of which, how the hell did Cerberus get an army tens of thousands strong? I was under the impression that they were super covert, mostly doing research/torture style stuff, then suddenly they're a force strong enough to invade entire planets and enslave entire colonys at a time.

Yeah I wondered that too. I played through a chunk of ME2 to try to make a PC save set up the way I wanted, and dark energy is nonstop mentioned.

 

Remember the Cerberus trooper you and the VS look at on Mars? Yeah, pretty much that.

I too was disappointed by the amount of time we ended up spending on most planets. Hopefully DLC might expand the Thessia/Sur'kesh/Menae sections.

 

IIRC, Mordin only sings if you heard him sing in the last game, and only if you tell them all about the Salarian sabotage in the trucks.

There was another of those Gamer Poop videos. Link here.

 

I didn't tell them about the sabotage in the trucks and he sang. So it's likely connected to whether or not he sang in ME2.

 

Yeah I think that's right. Obviously ME3 was a bit of a let down for most everyone, but I think it definitely had its moments that were pretty great story telling. I'm especially fond of the scene where Mordin sacrifices himself(the singing sells it) and the scene where Garrus and Shepard have their bro-shooting moment on the citadel.

 

I can't find it now but apparently all that dark energy stuff was supposed to play part in the original ending, before the entire script was leaked.

EDIT: Here it is. And it is as retarded as the edning we got, so nothing really changed.

 

He sang in ME 2 for me, and I tried to tell them in the trucks but I got cut off by a bump.

The Dark Energy was a force that was going to consume everything. According to Karpyshyn, "The Reapers as a whole were 'nations' of people who had fused together in the most horrific way possible to help find a way to stop the spread of the Dark Energy. The real reason for the Human Reaper was supposed to be the Reapers saving throw because they had run out of time. Humanity in Mass Effect is supposedly unique because of its genetic diversity and represented the universe's best chance at stopping Dark Energy's spread."

The original choice was between killing the Reapers and trying to find a way to stop the Dark Energy threat with what little time was left before it consumed the galaxy, or, "Sacrifice humanity, allowing them to be horrifically processed in hopes that the end result will justify the means."

This still doesn't change the main sticking point of fans: all of the recruitment, all of the alliances, all of the sacrifices, were essentially moot because they essentially were inconsequential to the resolution.

So the original ending turned the Reapers into misunderstood good guys? That doesn't really work when the means to the end is sticking humans into a giant juicer machine And why are the devs so intent on making humanity super unique because some of the apes that went to cold climates got lighter skin, and some of the apes that stayed in the super hot areas got darker skin? That doesn't really make any sense. Sure it makes us look differently, but they talk about humanity in the game like just because skin color is different it makes us super unique in the galaxy. I mean hell look at animals. Using that mentality any animal on Earth would be a million times more unique then humans. Look at the differences in fish, or fuck DOGS. They don't just have different skin colors, slightly different skeletal structures like humans do, in many cases they look like totally different damned types of animals, especially fish and insects.

Another gripe with the story, Cerberus and the Citadel... again they'd need thousands of troops to storm the place, and tens of thousands, if hundreds of thousands, to be able to continue their operations elsewhere. With as many C-Sec officers there are on the Citadel, as well as god knows how many biotics, how the hell did the like 40 guys and 1 mech I killed in that mission take over the entire place? I mean, look at Citadel, it's essentially bigger then multiple New York Citys thrown together amongst it's various arms, and a crack team of brainwashed soldiers took it over? I just don't get it.


Edit: Also I forget who said it, but I just had Dark Energy brought up in ME3 sometime between Tuchanka and the Citadel mission

 

As far as the Cerberus thing goes: as I recall, a lot of the functions of the Citadel can be controlled from the Citadel Tower and the Presidium, even disregarding the hidden main control hub which can control anything from one point that Saren and Shepard used at the end of ME1. If that's the case, then they don't really need a hundred thousand troops to sweep over the entire thing, Ward arms and all. They just need to take and hold a few key points on the Presidium and the Tower, helped in advance by sleeper agents in C-Sec. And I'm sure there were more soldiers there than you saw directly.

 

Comparing humans to other Earth animals is irrelevant. Dogs aren't the ones piloting starships around the galaxy and killing reapers. It's more than skin colour anyway, it's about how individualistic and variable humans are as a species when compared to the other sapient alien races.

Mordin sums up the scientific info during his loyalty mission in Mass Effect 2, while Samara does the same with the more personal differences in a conversation on Normandy.

 

The Mordin helps explain it, thanks, I'd forgotten that conversation.

 

One thing I've been wondering about is the shape that Reapers take. In ME2 you have the human Reaper with human features, and it's implied at some point that new Reapers take on forms resembling the species they're made out of, but in ME3 (the first time we see any Reapers other than Sovereign), all the Reapers look the same. Did the new writers just twist that idea into the husks, brutes, banshees, etc? I was half-expecting an army of differently-shaped Reapers to come out of the sky when Earth was attacked...