mr insomniac

He's getting rid of Shepard to weaken Anderson's position on the council and eventually return to power himelf. With Shepard gone Anderson loses a powerful and influential ally.

I just finished an infiltrator game, and I never used the cloak, but then I'm not interested in the insanity difficulty either. I can definitely see where it'd have advantages. But I did snipe every chance I got. As someone said earlier in the thread, the bullet-time effect infiltrators get is pretty cool. I also preferred the rapid-fire sniper rifle (viper?) over the widow. Also, infiltrators get shotguns?

Since the N7 armor is also stored in the locker with the pistol, it's reasonable to assume the gear belonged to Shepard. With all the money Cerberus pouured into the Lazarus project, I'd say Miranda didn't let anything happen to Shepard unless she was there, so a misdose or an OD was highly unlikely. I'm also guessing that Miranda was just as much a target as Shepard, and Wilson would have been perfectly content if Shepard had never woken up at all. TIM had no problem with Miranda killing Wilson without hesitation. She was in charge. It's like putting Shepard in charge of the Normandy and all those Cerberus people. Yes he/she was given direction from time to time, but was given free rein as to how the goal was accomplished. Other examples, such as activating Legion or letting Grunt out of the tank were also Shepard's choice. I wondered about who, if anyone, hired Wilson as well. My money's on Udina.

Abandoning Ferelden makes you pretty cold-hearted about the people who live there, not to mention turnning the countryside into a wasteland. Also the possibility of allowing the archdemon to gain that kind of foothold on the surface will make it even tougher, if not impossible to stop it when the horde does eventually reach Orlais.

Right-click on the game in your games list and selct properties, then the updates tab. From there you can set it to not automatically update.

Ravel wasn't blind. /nitpick Interesting thoughts. Haven't played MotB, so won't comment about any of that. From what little we've seen of AP it doesn't look like some of that will fit in the game, but who knows. I've actually been looking forward to finding similarities with the older games in both AP and F:NV.

Another squad member?! Right, like there isn't enough. Bio, just concentrate on adding more sex with the existing squad members. +1

The reunion with Shiala (the asari from Ferros) also puts Liara's reunion to shame. EDIT: The Shepard celebrity look-alike stuff made me miss this, heh. Completely forgot about those ones. The area right after talking with Tali right? Has a geth prime at the end? The floating drones keep respawning, but I think that's it. Now that I think about it, Garrus loyalty mission has a couple areas that will keep dropping groups of three LOKI mechs on you, but I found only the last one had time to do so more than once unless I was taking it really slow and standing around after everyone was dead. Yes that's the part I'm talking about. There was one drone who somehow ending laying on its side on top of a crate without dying. Probably a bug or a glitch, I haven't seen it happen again. I couldn't see the drone right away, and it seemed like the squads of geth didn't stop until I found that drone and shot it. Lost a lot of ammo on that one.

I noticed that the Geth in Tali's recruit mission seemed to keep spawning until you killed all the floating scouts. There are also a couple side missions where mechs keep coming at you, until you do a specific action to effectively end the mission, like shutting down a production line, or reaching your shuttle.

No, not kidding. ME citadel is kinda bland in comparison. I like all the advertisements on the walls, the galactic news kiosks. I liked punching that snotty reporter in the face, and Shepard saying, "I should have done that the first time." The Dark Star Lounge had more atmosphere than Flux and Chora's Den put together. I liked the comments from the used game salesman. I liked giving shopkeepers endorsements to get discounts. Captain Bailey is an infinitely better cop than any smug Turian. I would have liked to revisit some of the people who sent me e-mails, but oh well. The only time it felt like Bioware didn't even try was if you had saved the council in ME. That whole conversation felt like it was just tacked on. Oh yeah, and ME2 has no elevators. ME2 citadel wins just for that. Outside of the main missions roaming around planets in the Mako was fun once or twice but most of the time it was just a grind. Maybe the best way to tweak it would be to let us fly the shuttle around the planets.

Agreed that the ME2 battles are much more fun. I'm on my 3rd playthrough of ME2 and I'm still having a blasting running from cover to cover, sniping the bad guys. I dunno how yahtzee could say that wasn't fun. ME was pretty epic though, and very enjoyable at the time. I couldn't get enough of it for a fair while. Can't say that about too many games. Some places got old pretty quick cough Noveria cough. And yes, I'd take the Mako over the planet scanning. Again, like Yahtzee said, for all its flaws the Mako made ME seem bigger. I think they could have removed the need for resources to do upgrade research altogether. Perhaps put the research on a real-time clock instead. ME2 has better atmosphere - the citadel definitely felt more alive, even if it felt smaller, better missions, better visuals - I love the way bad guys dance around after being hit with incendiary ammo, giving you time to kill 'em, for example. but I'm definitely glad I played ME first. Just like Grunt, I wouldn't feel any reason to care about why I'm doing what I'm doing, if I hadn't.

It's like TIM told Shepard, "I don't know if the reapers feel fear or not... but you killed one." There's only evidence this has been done once before, and that was pre-prothean (i think), and again TIM describes it as the last gasp of a dying civilization. Vindictive? Maybe. Afraid, perhaps. At least aware that the civilized galaxy isn't going to be as easy to harvest this time around, thanks to Shepard and humanity. Killing Sovereign certainly wasn't the last gasp of a dying civilization.

Just finished playing the game a second time last night, and perhaps I'm mistaken but that's how it looked to me.

Wasn't preparing the galaxy for a greater threat by waging war on it Revan's idea?

Torment didn't really have an evil ending, I think. Bad endings for 'ol Nameless, but not evil.

Okay, I gotcha, and yes all those tactics and ideas on a large scale - flooding fields, salting the earth, hampering supply lines, pitching like artillery against like - would be great fun... if I were playing a RTS. As far as DA goes, sorry, but do. not. want. When Bioware makes a RPG, I know I'm gonna get a good, or at least decent, story, and I'm gonna get characters that I mostly enjoy interacting with, and I'm gonna get some fun battles and locations. That's why I buy Bioware's games, and why I'll continue to buy them. Same goes for Obsidian. If I want that other stuff, I'll buy a different type of game. Smaller scale maybe, the occasional skirmish using the different units of your army before the finale, just to show them off. The idea of Dalish elves and guerilla warfare against the darkspawn actually intrigues the hell out of me. Or maybe even "the great dwarven march" from Orzammar to Denerim. I could get into things like that, as long as they didn't become the game.

Okay I understand what you're saying now, and yes I do agree the game would be improved. I guess I was trying to suggest that it's tough to have encounters with the advancing horde -- to go beyond the coffee stain on the map -- if your route to Redcliffe/Orzammar/Brecilian Forest/Urn is blocked by that horde because you didn't go there first. Trouble is, the darkspawn horde is immense, and it doesn't have supply lines, and it's not trying to conquer the land so that it can be used later after all the pesky surfacers are taken care of. Its only goal is to make a wasteland of everything. By sheer numbers they would render pointless guerilla warfare in the forest. I'm reminded of that line in The Dark Knight when Bruce asks Alfred how they caught the crazy bandit in Southeast Asia, and Alfred says, "We burned the forest down." That's what the darkspawn horde does.

The only drawback I could see in the things Monte Carlo and Tigranes are talking about is that not everyone plays the game in the same order. perhaps it's not difficult to work around as i'm thinking, but if you're gonna have events occur at certain key times, especially in the scope of hordes (or units or companies if you prefer) of darkspawn, and arl eamon, for example, is a key component of that event... well player A and Player B may not go to Redcliffe at the same time, or may not go in search of the Urn at the same time, etc. I'm thinking that in order to work around that, the key events need to be more generic, and ultimately have less impact on the overall game, such as the hiring of, and subsequent encounter with Zevran.

Didn't Mordin say something along the lines of the Krogan being given the use of advanced technology, as in advanced beyond their natural means, in order to fight the Rachni? his general point was that the Krogan didn't advance their civilization on their own, and so didn't evolve too far beyond their warlike natures. I can't remember all the conversations about the genophage word for word, but something like that was in there somewhere.

Been reading through this thread at random, and I can see that I'm probably alone in this, or at least in a very definite minority, but I liked Jack. Just finished my first playthrough last night. MaleShep, imported from ME, and romanced Tali. Although I tried to play paragon as much as possible, I found myself picking renegade dialogue choices and interrupts fairly often, because it felt like the right thing to do at the time. Few missions I didn't complete, I didn't ever go back to Ilium and talk to Liara again after helping her out once. I also didn't do much planet hopping outside of mission requirements. Once or twice when I needed some resources, but I only ever explored planets in the same system as the mission location. Oh, except once, when I stopped a ship (MSV Broken Arrow?) from crashing into a planet. I really dislike timed missions. Probably my favourite part of the game was Tali's recruitment mission and I really hope Kal'Reegar returns in ME3 with a bigger role. I also enjoyed meeting up with, and getting messages from, various ME characters. I thought that was a nice touch. I think someone mentioned it before but they seemed to have messed up with Conrad. I know I treated him well in ME, but he didn't remember it that way. Also enjoyed Legion's recruit and loyalty missions. The Geth are much more interesting when they're not simply Sovereign's puppets. I hope they release a patch that lets me take off the bonus armour helmets soon. How the hell could Bio miss that?. Ah well, FemShep import this time around.

Shooting non-stop until the enemy dies is how I liked to play ME. IIRC the only time I used any biotic powers at all was during the tutorial on Eden Prime, when I had to. In fact, I even made squad powers defense only so Wrex would stop messing with my sniper kills, heh. That said, I'm finding biotics and tech powers more useful (when the squad uses them) in ME2. Mostly I forget they're even available.

Waiting for ME2 in the mail (shipped today), and giving DA:O a rest after 3 playthroughs. Checking out L4D2 and it's a blast. Pulverizing zombie waves with guitars while a rock concert pyrotechnics and light show are going off all around me will never get old. Also finally playing Borderlands. Damn Scar just pushed me backwards off a cliff. Almost had him killed too. Grr.

I forgot to mention that once the previous release date came and went, amazon.ca changed their release date to (i believe) june 30th. it's only recently been updated to april 1st.

amazon.ca has a release date of apr 1st, 2010, and they've updated my pre-order status with a delivery date of apr 12th, which is about right based on my past amazon deliveries. AP is not listed in steam's "coming soon" section, but the game's steam page says "spring 2010". Just over 2 months away baby wooo. I should be done with ME2 by then... maybe.

Amazon.ca now lists an April 1st 2010 release date for AP. Something about that date...