Yeah the Mass Effect Universe has had a huge amount of work put into it, and the fact that a comic, a couple of books and two games can develop such a strong mythos is astounding. On another level, I just realised I traded in both my Mass Effect games, and am now punching myself repeatedly. Its fine though, my friends have them too. Going to get them back off them and have another run through.
Oh and for more spoilers, if you have Lair of the Shadow Broker you find out who Liara's Father is, although it can be overlooked, so I'll put in spoiler tags regardless. Spoiler If you go to the video room on the Shadow Broker vessel and cycle through the videos you should see one of Matriarch Aethyta (The Bartender on Illium) she is looking down at a photo of Liara. If you speak to her, she'll mention that she mated with another asari, as the father. I was surprised they let such an important detail be so easily overlooked by most of the gaming community
Randle, I may have already said this in this thread, but seeing as how you liked LotSB so much I'll say it again. Bioware has said themselves that every single story mission in ME3 is intended to be of equal or better quality to that of LotSB. Also, I think they kept Liara's father's identity that way on purpose. The average person probably wouldn't think anything of it when that Asari spoke about her mate, but if you've done multiple playthroughs of both the games it really becomes sort of obvious, and that video clip pretty much guarantees it.
Didn't know about the Bartender being Liara's father, but supposedly Aria was in a relationship with Wrex before the events of ME1. You'd only really be able think that if you'd played both games repeatedly and actually gotten into the backstories of both Wrex and Aria. So yeah, Bioware does a fantastic job at giving story easter eggs to the dedicated fans.
There should be a full out Bioware discussion thread, they have so many fantastic games worth mentioning. I'd say they are the masters of storytelling, and it's not because of the main storyline, but because of all the lore they pour into their games to create a living world.
Holy ****. Clint Mansell, the man behind the soundtracks of The Fountain, Moon, and Requiem for a Dream, is officially composing the score for Mass Effect 3. This guy is a fantastic composer, but a part of me is worried. Jack Wall has done such a phenomenal job in both Mass Effect's, I'm getting a sense of "if it ain't broke..." Hopefully I'm just worrying over nothing. Source: Film Composer Clint Mansell to Score Mass Effect 3 - Xbox 360 News at IGN [br][/br]Edited by merge: Do you remember Wrex telling the story of his battle with an Asari bounty hunter on a space station? Did he ever reveal her name? Now that I think of it I'm not sure it even matters, since I believe Aria says that she has gone by many different names in her life. I think you might be right about Wrex and Aria having had contact prior to the games.
Bump for great justice, but mostly because the Arrival DLC is coming out in three days. I've taken the pains to replay ME1 again for a Renegadey good guy. I honestly meant to be a complete Renegade **** and choose all of the 'bad' choices, but somehow it's impossible to force myself to kill the Rachni Queen, kill Wrex, or even be a little mean to Tali. ****, they're way too realistic lol. I'm probably going to end up doing the good endings with a Ruthless Shepard, which will be interesting for ME2 and ME3. Anyways, replaying it brought back a lot of good memories from my first and second runthrough with Vanguard and Soldier, respectively. This time around I picked the Adept class. Holy crowd control, Batman! I can't wait until I get into ME2 with this character, because with the streamlined power system, I won't have to wait a minute to recharge Throw. Also, this is the first time I got around to playing Bring Down the Sky and Pinnacle Station DLC. In my opinion, I think ME2 needs something like Pinnacle Station in order to provide replayability. Especially because of the lack of N7 missions, the game effectively becomes unplayable after you finish every planet...which I have with all of my ME2 characters. As for customizing weapons...I'm extremely glad that ME2 did away with weapon and armor mods. They're fun and all, but it gets slightly ridiculous to be carrying so many useless items. If ME3 intends to bring back customizing components, they should improve the system; perhaps by bringing in a sort of 'mod upgrade system', so that instead of having to carry five different levels of an ammo mod, I can just hang on to a set that I can continually upgrade.
I love the power use system in ME2, but I was a little upset that an enemy couldn't be affected by biotics until all it's protection was gone. I thought that biotics should at least be able to affect enemies with physical armor on, unlike shields or barriers. That pretty much forced me to play Adept on casual, but it was still a blast. There's really nothing better than running an Adept with Samara/Thane and Jack.
Just played the new Arrival DLC. Spoiler Used my Paragon account, so I only know the Paragon ending. It kinda sucks that I couldn't save the Batarian colony, because now Shepard has to go to trial on Earth in the indeterminable near future. I thought the countdown for the Reaper invasion was interesting, however. I wonder what would happen if you just waited for the remaining time to go to zero, would there be a game over? The fact that Dr. Kenson and her team were indoctrinated actually surprised me. I assumed that she'd be smart enough to find a way to block the indoctrination process; when she turned her gun on me, I was pretty pissed off. The Object Rho survival mission was ridiculous. I normally have the game scaled up on Insanity; but having to play with no squadmates and having barely any cover was incredibly difficult. I ate through almost all of my medigels before finishing and I had to dial it all the way down to Normal to survive. Of course after surviving all five waves, I got the achievement and realized that I probably could've just died any time, and the story would've progressed. Meh. The Harbinger interlude was really interesting as well. It was cool to talk to the Reapers again, albeit annoying because all they say is, "Your species is doomed," blah blah blah. Holy **** the destruction of the Alpha Relay was awesome. I wonder why the hell Dr. Kenson even thought it was a good idea to bring Shepard to the Project. I guess she thought it would be fun to try to indoctrinate Shepard, but wouldn't it have been infinitely safer for her to just steer him the wrong way for a couple of days? Or just say that the Reapers are gonna be arriving in three days, instead of two, so that he doesn't activate the Project? God, that was moronic. For ME3, I want Blasto, the first Hanar Spectre, as a squadmate. More seriously, it would be neat to actually fight alongside a Batarian for once, instead of just killing them. Since all the species should be working together against the Reapers, it seems like it would be an interesting storyline.
I've not played ME2 yet, but I kind of like having the mods. The most powerful sniper rifle with high explosive rounds may only fire one shot at a time, but that's all you need. You don't even need a direct hit at that point.
Thanks for the reminder to get this DLC. I would've forgotten about it completely what with all the Reach update excitement yesterday.
My favorite mod was the HMWA X Assault Rifle with Scram Rail X and Frictionless Materials X, along with Tungsten/Shredder VII Rounds. Without even aiming, it would tear up synthetics/organics instantly. The HE rounds were ridiculous; they're powerful, alright, but the damage increase doesn't justify the massive overheat increase. I never bothered sniping, however, so that might be why. Even if you do snipe, though, the rate of fire is dramatically reduced, to the point of uselessness to me. Most of the time in ME you end up fighting not one single colossal lumbering target, but waves of many medium-armored enemies. In that case, you do need a rapid rate of fire. I think that if ME3 brings back mods, it should really streamline them. Instead of having to manage many different levels of mods, it should just be able to upgrade each mod. As I said before. I'm also thinking that they should not allow 'hot-swapping' mods (except for ammo mods) in battle. It was really cheap to be able to do so, and by restricting when you can mod, the game forces you to strategize your modding.
The mods do need streamlined because it is rediculous to need to search through them all to find the best. And fighting waves of enemies doesn't matter when there is a huge explosion wherever you point. The last level is the best because the enemies are always coming from the front, so your allies can keeo them in cover while you blast them, fighting Saren is a pain because he jumps so much. My character was the combat engineer that specializes in sniper and pistol so I didn't have much of a choice for a rapid fire weapon, so over powering on shot has seemed to be the best option, after a certain point it doesn't matter how much heat it produces because an over heat only takes 2 seconds to get over it regardless.
I'd hardly call it a 'huge explosion', each burst is about as big as the blast of Inferno Ammo in ME2; you really need to use a shotgun to get the most shock-and-awe out of it. It's also not substantially more damaging, and the weapon force isn't very noticable. The overheat, however, is. An assault rifle, combined with the fact that Tungsten/Shredder VII does +40% damage is enough to tear through enemies quickly. HE X only gives you a bonus of +28%. Just specialize the ammo rounds as necessary, and Tungsten/Shredder becomes way more powerful than HE. Add on Scram Rail X (26% damage bonus, -10% heat damping) accompanied by a Frictionless Materials X (7% damage bonus, +28% heat damping) to dramatically compensate for overheat increase, and you're looking at a 72% total damage increase with a net overheat decrease of 18%. You can hold down the trigger for a ridiculous amount of time and lose virtually no accuracy, all the while spraying super-powered rounds at 10 shots a second. Sure, you could take the one-shot sniper rifle HE X kill approach, but that means that for every one shot you fire, I can send 20. Individually they don't damage as much, but enemies can't regenerate health (except of course krogan, but since they like to rush out of cover, they're not that big of a deal). I don't need to be nearly as accurate with that because the bigger reticule of the assault rifle means that some rounds are bound to hit the target. With sniper rifles, the aiming is hampered by the shaking motion, meaning that I can line up my shots faster than you can line up your one shot.
I don't think there should be any argument that the AR was ridiculous in ME1 compared to any other gun. Pistols with the right mods could get silly too, but the AR was in a league of its own. Only thing I used a sniper for is on Garrus just because I could, and I did use the high explosive rounds with him, but mostly for comedic effect of occasionally he'll send something flying. He would occasionally knock something down from a mile away for me, but for the most part the Tungsten/Shredder AR was just too dominant. I also used hammerhead rounds on Wrex's shotgun for comedic effect. One hit and anything within range went flying 50 feet. Sadly things rarely got close enough through my AR to be within shotgun range. Hopefully ME3 brings back the variety of ammo types, but does them differently than either ME1 or ME2. I'd prefer you have to pick before the mission, and then you could swap at those loadout crates. Treat it like ME2's heavy weapons.
Wait. Does this mean that ME3 is coming out in a few weeks? I thought that I heard something about a DLC, then ME3 weeks later. Or was that something else?
No, that was something about the Cerberus News Network, I believe. If I'm not mistaken, BioWare said they would begin posting news on the network several weeks before the launch of their last DLC (Arrival) and once again several weeks before the release of ME3. Mass Effect 3 won't come out until this holiday, or possibly early next year if it gets pushed back like I predict.
Bump. Just read an article giving further details about ME3. Mass Effect 3 story details announced | bit-gamer.net Points of interest: Ash/Kaiden, Liara, Garrus, and a new character named James Sanders can be recruited into your squad. James Sanders shares the surname of Kahlee Sanders from the books, insinuating some sort of relation (siblings? son?). He might be the soldier that we see in the teaser trailer? Because of the events from the Arrival DLC, you go to Earth to face trial. That's when the Reapers attack, so you take the Normandy and escape, presumably to try to get help from the rest of the galaxy. Apparently Illusive Man and Cerberus now want to kill you? I wonder why? I understand if you go Paragon, but what about Renegade? Incidentally, it will suck that you just gave him Collector technology... Mass Effect Wiki also has some interesting information on the improvements made to the game itself. Mass Effect 3 - Mass Effect Wiki - Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, walkthroughs and more Points of interest: Improved movement system now lets you engage rolls and leaping without having to take cover first. New melee system where different classes have unique melee attacks. Enemy AI improved, coordination with other enemies. All classes can now carry any weapon, but with the exception of the Soldier class, they can only hold a few weapons at a time. Weapon modifications are back! You can now pick up weapons that enemies drop? What? Vehicle usage will not be part of the linear game anymore; it'll be delegated to the open-ended exploration part of the game.
Well....for the illusive man thing I suppose if you went the renegade route and helped him out the Illusive man has all that he asked for and might not need you anymore. Thus Shepherd poses a risk with all that he knows about Cerberus and Shepherd's goals don't align with the Illusive man's so that's why he could want him dead regardless?