Raithe

For the slightly random thing.. How many things have people noticed that should be affected by ME1 playthroughs? (beyond the main storyline aspects of Wrex/Ashley/Kaidan dead or not, Rachni queen alive or dead, Council save or not).. I mean Conrad Venner acts as if renegade option was chosen, (even though I went paragon on him). The Asari Consort mission was done to save her reputation, and yet there are the news stories about her having to leave the Citadel due to leaking information... I ran into Helena Blake doing social work on Omega.. The Asari scientist I told on Virmire to "run if you can, because I'm about to nuke this place) turns up with the amusing "I saw it was you, so I turned the security cameras off..now I'm about to run before you nuke this place"... How many other aspects have people noticed? and how many seem to go with the choices made in ME1?

I get the feeling that if she's not loyal she'd actually be shot at that point. I had Zaeed lead the second team once, (thought the whole, veteran mercenary, battlefield expert would count for leading teams) and he came through that door, leaned against it almost exactly like Miranda does, then falls over dead gasping out "shields went down at the last minute" or something to that effect. (and yes, he was even loyal at the time).

I've had everyone loyal and still people died.... So it's got to be as much who you choose to go on which teams beyond just having them loyal or not..

Mordin kept being the only one that died until I used him to take the Crew back.. Of course, then I used Zaeed to lead the second squad and he died.. I did manage to juggle it so no-one died.. but I do get a feeling there's some really finnicky reasons for people dying on the Collector Base...

" In a post-gunpowder society, physical toughness and blind aggression aren't decisive." That's judging purely by human standards. Krogan have the whole.. multiple redundant organs, an extra nervous system, and the big hump that stores water/food type stuff. When a big hump is a sign that you're a successful hunter and have been able to take on the very predatory wildlife of sunny Tuchanka.. and that gets you scoring points with the ladies and being able to breed... Krogan society keeps bouncing from advanced to wasteland.. if it wasn't for all the alien contact they wouldn't have the "steady" aspect of technology available.

IIRC, the blood rage thing is "promoted" to survive in the post-nuclear environment and had nothing to do with the salarians. Which is pretty stupid by itself and another excellent example of what I'm saying, as it's not uber macho bull**** that can rebuild a society but initiative, intelligence and, yeah, you guessed it: production. Looks like somebody in the writing team isn't familiar with the concept of diminishing returns. I wasn't saying that the Salarians had anything to do with the Blood Rage itself. Just that before the Krogans were uplifted, before they had the technology to destroy themselves, the Krogans actually viewed the Blood Rage as a bad thing. It was only after the whole given advanced tech, blow themselves up, and the Blood Rage becoming a near universal thing to the Krogans that they stopped viewing it as a bad thing. And frankly, the Krogans as is, come off like the psycho gangs in any apocalypse movie.. because they haven't rebuilt anything. They've reverted to the tribal clan structures. They don't really have their own spaceships, they don't seem to have much in the way of production at the moment. If it wasn't for other people turning up to hire them as mercs you wouldn't really see them off-world. Heck, Wrex is the one that's actually trying to rebuild the Krogan's as a "unified" society. He is showing initiative, and attempting to use intelligence and increase the production of the species. But he's mostly the exception to the Krogan rule.

Maybe it's because the "warmonger" aspects are in-line of the Krogan being the "ultimate jocks". That might appeal to the gamer-jocks more then the gamer-geeks

Hm, well its not as if the Krogans developed totally naturally. There's even the conversation with Mordin at some point where he regrets what the Salarians did. He does the commentary that "to develop to x point, a species has to deal with the warlike attitudes, but we bypassed that for the Krogans by giving them the technology and pointing them at the Rachni. If we'd left them alone they could have worked it out naturally." .. or words to that effect. Also, the Krogan Blood Rage - it get's pointed out (in the Codex entry I believe) that before the Salarians uplifted the Krogan race, the Blood Rage was considered a pathological condition, was rare, and treated as such, as some form of disease. But after the Salarians had uplifted them, and they'd destroyed their own world and had to rebuild and regrow.. only those with the Blood Rage had survived the fallout and general apocalypse conditions. So it's almost unheard of for modern-day Krogan to not have the Blood Rage.

o O (I foresee a lot of duck and cover time...)

Then again, Bio spent a long time on crafting DA.. they've obviously put a lot of effort into this whole "original ip" for Bioware.. maybe part of that was laying a lot of the groundwork to follow on with sequels and related games set in the same fantasy universe... Which would cut down on the "usual" time frame for producing a game.

I thought Tali's actually had a time limit.. or at least if you spent too long doing other missions there was only one possible outcome...

Ah but the point is special forces groups , while willing to do the odd suicide mission, aren't designed for suicide missions. They're meant to do the mission and get out alive. Remaining capable of performing further missions. Unconventional warfare does not equal suicide missions.. o O (But also, throw in the whole cinematic style. How can you not see the shiney aspects of The Dirty Dozen in that? A bunch of competent, slightly deranged and creative, out of the box people.. ) The point wasn't so much burnouts and psychoes for the team... Just that the odds of people in that frame of "brilliantly violent, and willing to do a suicide mission" means there's going to be a few personal issues, baseline stable wasn't really a big point. Just because most of the persona issues in ME2 were family related...

ME works as a fairly standard space-opera style universe. It doesn't really try to claim to be some groundhshaking thing in that way. The main thing Bio pushes is the voice acting and trying to do the actions and consequences. Which I think will be sort of hard to say about until you can get the "trilogy" together and played through. Then you can sit down and go "yeah , there were consequences to my actions" or "crapcrapcrap" to the tune of spam. FR has aspects that were deep. Also that were shallow. It was immensely patchwork after 30 odd years of accumulated pen n paper supplements.. While i enjoyed many aspects of it, the whole "archmage in every town" was a touch annoying. It was like they were put in just for the "in case the GM needs a big stick to hit players with". Personally, I tended to prefer Dark Sun and Al-Quadim (and yes, I know, technically Al-Quadim was on the same planet as FR). Hell, even Spelljamming was interesting for its little twisting around of conventions. But I think Bio is taking a break from having to partner up with WoTC and the like at the moment, and trying to experiment with their own worlds.. They haven't said what type of other games they'd follow with in the ME setting.. sure there might be other rpg stories, but they could always try something else.. They've created a universe, let's just see what they come up with to use it..

There was a bit more to it then that. After the Alliance decided to sweep the whole "reaper" side of it under the carpet they broke the surviving Normandy crew up and Doc got grounded. She's a doctor whose career was all about being on ships, travelling around, the constant change of situations challenging her. And suddenly the Alliance had her stuck on a major base where she couldn't go out flying around the universe and she was one member in a big medical staff. That was part of it. The other, the only real "stability" in her career had been looking after Joker in a medical capacity. So it sounded almost like a mix of medical and maternal aspects kicking in. (even if it half countered her wish for new challenges by having the one constant). So with Joker away, she was losing that. Which she regained by joining the crew. Plus, it wasn't so much hero-worship as the fact that she respects Shep as a Commander, and trusts him to make the correct choices. When presented with a galactic danger, Joker being on the crew, and then being told that Shep was going to be commanding... it doesn't quite seem like joining up enemy #1...

Well looking at it from a certain point of view.. If you're gathering together a collection of individuals who are: a> extremely capable of violence in a large degree and b> likely to be okay with going on what everybody believes is a total suicide mission.. There wouldn't be many people who can tick the "mental balance" box on their cv Even Shep has to have issues, although you can't really get a feel for them , I mean, Ruthless / War Hero / Survivor, all things that would leave a few mental scars.. that's not going into the whole Death Experience. "We heard you were dead." "I was. I got better." Plus by now, I'd think Shep would be developing a nice case of a Cassandra complex..

Yeah, the whole conversation with the if you'd played Paragon and not exterminated them in ME1 does kind of hint they could play an important role in ME3 when it arrives..

Hey, at least Wrex is trying to be a bit cosntructive (if you got him to live through ME1) rather then the typical Krogan destroy, destroy, destroy rant.

Supposedly, there is a random selection of which characters will get killed off for each non-upgraded part.. If you play it several times, it shouldn't be the same person being killed at the same point.. It's not a direct "if you haven't upgraded this, this specific person will die".

Every character you recruit gives you an upgrade option. Sometimes it's one that just helps that character, other times its relevant to the ship.

Hm, I was a little disapointed with the CE... the shiny box was nice.. I did like the art book (but then I like concept art stuff)... but the Bonus DVD was fairly crappy. about 5 of the character trailers, and the "Behind the Scenes" stuff was more like a compilation of rehashed "interviews" with the usual suspects of Producers, Lead Designers, and a few of the voice actors gushing over ME2 rather then providing any serious behind the scenes look. And I think nearly all of those "interviews" had already been shown in some of the pre-release internet teasers and such.

Yeah, I researched the Nuke-Em Cain before heading to Purgatory.. thought Yeah, I'll give it a try for that.. then ended up running through the whole mission without being able to use the dang thing because it kept flashing 62% at me.. If I'd realised that I'd just have taken the missile launcher and had a few moments a bit easier...

Yup, I only used the nuke twice, right at the end of the game.. apart from that, I always found the other heavy weapons more useful. I think I ended up using either the missile launcher or the avalanche cryo blaster most.

I only used the nuke twice in the game.. both times during the final fight. Didn't quite get the mushroom cloud effect..but definitely lots of plenty flashing lights around

I found the two.. hm, Praetorians you face in the game a bit annoying. The first one on Horizon was the repeated bouncing around cover because it came close, and then the one on the Ghost Ship that's bouncing at you while the Husks swarm.. You'd take down it's shields.. have to reload to take down it's armor.. and during the reload it would hit the ground, do that squat, blast of energy, and it's shields would be back up 100%..

Yeah, getting "Inferno Ammo" evolution was fun.. why I kept Grunt with me for most of the Collector suicide run