Maria Caliban

Hmm. My favorite sequence was the lead up to the broodmother. I thought that was well written and executed.

In DA, if you don't romance Morrigan or Alistiar they start something with one another. I wouldn't call it a romance though.

A developer popped into a thread and said that Kelly was his favorite love interest. I was.. odd. I think he must be new or something because BioWare doesn't just drop romancable info. With Dragon Age, Alistiar and Morrigan both had offical announcements from Chris. I suppose that banging one's secretary is a little bit less creepy than putting the moves on inferior officers for whom one has direct command responsibility... I find it far more skeevy, and Kelly is a yeoman so Shepard does have direct command responsibility, whatever that means. Cerberus built the SR2, and Shepard seems to be working for them now, but it seems to also be an Allience warship and he's a Commander even though he's officially dead. Unless the human military is now blatently working with a massive terrorist originization, it doesn't make much sense to me. Hopefully the game will explain it. Anyways, none of the squadmates are military.

Remember to be careful as console commands can do bad things to your game.

All armor for Shepard is customizable. If you want every piece of armor Shep wears in the game to look like the black N7 armor, or the Red Dragon armor, or the Cerberus basic armor, you can do this. I believe you can buy different designs as the game progresses (I'm betting there's an armor pack DLC in the future). You can't change armor design on the fly, but have to go back to your ship to customize it. There is no NG+ in ME2. Rather, after the ending, you can still roam the galaxy finishing side quests and playing the various DLC adventures. 'Default' Shep seems completely renegade. The council dies, the Rachni queen dies, Wrex dies, and the squadmate of the opposite sex of the PC dies (for dudeShep it's Ashley, for femShep it's Kaiden), Conrad ended up killing himself, you kill the asari that was inside the big plant monster and all the colonists on Feros, etc.

I went to Patrick's blog and found something I'm glad to see. He's replaying ME 1 and commenting on it. "But anyway, I was talking about the original Mass Effect: Holy sweet mother of heaven, that first couple of hours has too much talking. Great on the first playthrough, invulnerable to the magic X-X-X-X skip buttons on the seventh or eighth. I'm fully aware that as the guy who had to play this when there was no sound and only placeholder animation, I am a bit jaded when it comes to these groundbreaking cutscenes and dialogs. That said, I'm only on my second real playthrough, and I can only imagine what people on the tenth playthrough are doing. In Mass Effect 2, we can skip cutscenes, and there are far fewer non-skippable conversation lines, at least right now, and I hope we manage to keep that when we ship. Our big plot dialog is also a whole lot shorter, at least if you want it to be shorter. So there: win. And then there's the loading. How many times have I run into a weird pause while we loaded a new area? How many elevators did I ride even on my quick-and-dirty playthrough to unlock and hammer AI Hacking as quickly as possible? It was a massive improvement on the clunks and crashes before we released ME1, as I remember, and still... I look at it now and can't imagine how we thought it was okay. What we have now, the clever layout of loading tunnels and carefully checked art and conversation assets -- it works. You run around seamlessly. People are going to pick up ME2 and, well, ideally, not even notice this, because what this is is the absence of something bad."

Indeed. DA:O DLC doesn't impress. I'd wait for them to bundle it before picking anything up.

Was the Samara intro video posted yet? And the Tali one?

No, I'm sorry if I gave that impression. What I listed are all the default options. You can build a custom (gender, class, apperence) Shepard. We don't know what events the Miranda conversation changes.

Interesting... so this is then Cannon for Mass Effect? I like my nicey nice happy happy ending save game. Oh well. :/ It's the default if you don't import a game. Using the word 'canon' will get you torn to shreds on the ME BioBoards, so forgive me as I reflexively cover my head.

8 inches. Far more amusing than my reply. Good show, Monte.

And then smuggle it to you in a cake?

Is it really worth it? For me, it is. I like the idea of taking a single character through the entire game and having my decisions acknowledged. My biggest gripe with ME1 was that at the end of the game, I didn't feel as though my choices meant jack. I

I'm wondering how extensive the questioning is. I'm still going to finish my playthrough of the game to make sure all the choices I want are acknowledged. For example, on Noveria, you could help a certian opprative with corruption in the administration, and as she hauls another character away she mentions what if she ever meets the Commander again, she owes her a drink. Little things like that won't make it into a Q&A, so I'd be left with the default choices.

For those of you who've d/l 1.02, the difference is how it handles Rally.

Defualt Shep: Male earthborn, sole survivor, soldier class Ashley dies Council was destroyed when Sovereign attacked There

Mass Effect. Must make carry over character.

That would appear to be the case. Perhaps you get to pick your 'background' as in ME1 only they reflect ME1 choices.

I don't think even paragon/renegade transfers over as they have the new system that gives you KotOR/Fable like facial changes depending on your alignment. And I think you can change your class. But none of this is for certain.

He looks more like a frog to me.

Yay for new footage! Boo for half trailers! It's a trailer for a trailer... Which makes no sense, but it is pretty.

From the people that gave you the 'Sacred Ashes' trailer Mass Effect 2 trailer

There are times where gameplay trumps lore. This is because BioWare found the lore it created too bothersome as in , because the content got cut , or for no reason whatsoever . I don't think genlock emisaries are an example of gameplay disagreeing with lore. @Gromnir: I said that poorly. David has said that

Yeah all these videos are making me reconsider my main save of a straight up soldier. Some really cool stuff so far, maybe soldiers will have some sort of special access to heavy weapons other classes can't use. IIRC, the BioDevs were considering letting you change your class when you import your character. Don't know if that's allowed though.