Mass Effect 2 - favorite parts (MASSive unboxed spoilers)

The Game Room
1

There’s a thread about the game itself but I figured a second thread might be a good idea for those who have completed the game can talk without worry of accidentally spoiling the game for others. So if you’re in here and don’t want to have the plot ruined for you, make like a tree… and get out of here.

Me personally, I loved the game from start to finish even though it was a lot more FPS-y and less RPG-y. That was fine with me because I was far more interested in the story and characters in ME1 than I was fiddling about with inventories, and I thought the combat worked out very well in Part 2. I thought the writing and directing (this game is seriously cinematic) of most of the characters’ stories and loyalty quests were better than a majority of movies. I really, really wanted to keep my peeps alive, and when I lost one during the final battle it made me sad. It’s been a long time (Mass Effect 1, maybe) that a game really got me emotionally attached to the characters.

Favorite moment of the game: Reunion with Wrex. Wrex was my favorite NPC from ME1 and I was a little put off at having Wrex-Lite (Grunt) shoehorned in as the token Krogan/Klingon dumb brute warrior. Wrex played the part but was a whole lot more complicated in ME1 if you talked to him, and was definitely smarter and wiser than anyone gave him credit for. I used all the paragon talk on him I could in ME1 to try and convince him that he should use his brain instead of just his brawn, and was relieved at not having to kill him on Virmire. I was all set to have a grand ol’ reunion on Normandy 2.0 with a lot of the old gang, and was hoping Wrex would be in the mix.

So if you’ve played the game, you know how poorly life went for our heroes after the Normandy went down. Garrus (another favorite of mine) tried to become Sheppard Jr., forming a team of his own that got betrayed and wiped out, leaving him physically and psychologically scarred. Kaiden/Ashley (whoever survived) shows up and spits in your face for rescuing them while working for Cerberus, accusing you of betraying the Alliance. Tali has the joyless job of scrounging former Quarian colonies looking for geth technology for her dad, and is similarly disgusted by that Cerberus badge on your armor… all before being put on trial for treason by her own people. Liara has gone from doe-eyed historian/scientist to Don Corleone and tries to get you to do her dirty work. Pile on the sad stories from the new team and you have the most dysfunctional, messed up crew in the galaxy. It was all excellent drama, though, and I loved every minute of it. It was all just so depressing. Nothing went right for these people.

So back to my favorite moment. I’m taking the new Krogan pup back to his homeworld to find out why he’s so screwed up and am told to go talk to the head honcho on the planet. Lo and behold, sitting on the Krogan throne was Wrex. Because of the dark tone of the game I figured I was either going to have to fight my way in to see him, or do horrible favors for unsavory characters to get an audience. And then, like the others from Shepard’s past, he would be distrustful or downright hostile for something that happened during the 2 year window. He was, after all a Krogan Battlemaster, not known for having a sunny disposition.

Instead, when Wrex sees Shepard, he shoves the diplomat he’s talking to aside, pushes past his bodyguards and greets Shepard with a big happy smile (as much as a walking crocodile can) and a warm handshake. Of all the people in Mass Effect 2, Wrex was the only one who was actually happy to see his old friend return after thinking him dead for two years. In a game where so much goes wrong for the protagonists and good things always seem to turn sour, the reunion with Wrex was an unexpected moment of joy in the oddest place.

What’s more, talking to the new Krogan leader you find he’s trying to use what he learned from you in the first game to reshape his culture. With all the good deeds and progress from the first game swept under the rug by the Citadel Council and forgotten, it was nice to see something actually positive happen as a result of your actions from the first game.

It’s a heck of a narrative, the Mass Effect games. I can’t wait for part 3.

Anybody else got any favorite moments/scenes?

2

Finished the game for the first time a few days ago, some favorite moments off the top of my head…

In the prologue when you walk out into the C&C area in the original Normandy and the ceiling has been blown off and you can see out into space. Sad, but awesome at the same time.

The meeting with Liara was bittersweet. She truly has changed a lot in 2 years.

Seeing Tali at Freedom’s Progress and if you follow the Paragon route and let her take her comrade back to the flotilla. “I’m glad you’re the one still giving the orders Shepard.”
In fact most of Tali’s moments are pretty cool, her finding her father aboard the derelict ship and giving the Quarian council a piece of your mind at the trial are both good to.

Jack smashing her way through the guards and mechs in the prison the first time you see her. (Cutscene natch, she can’t do that kind of stuff during gameplay unfortunately.)

Landing aboard the Citadel and seeing that reporter again. (Not Emily Wong, the other one who smeared you after you gave her an interview.) I didn’t hesitate to slug her. “I should have done that the first time.”

A lot of the interrupts on both the Paragon and Renegade sides are nice to. Working over the suspect in C-Sec while on Thane’s loyalty quest, and creating a sudden distraction to end the standoff with his son without killing anyone. Not allowing Garrus to shoot the guy responsible for betraying his team by placing yourself in his sniper scope. Headbutting a Krogan! :smiley:

I’m still mulling over the whole ‘heretic’ thing with Legion, the Geth, and Sovereign. It rewrites a lot of what we knew about them and the Quarians from the first game. It’s very interesting but I’m still not sure if it was a good thing or not.

Speaking of Legion he knows something that he doesn’t want to reveal to Shepard. If you press him on why he has a piece of Shep’s old armor welded to his chest, his response? Lots of hemming a hawing and, “there was a hole.”

My favorite part though was the very end, if you’ve followed the Paragon route and blown up the Collector base. When you go back to talk to TIM and he castigates you because he wanted the base so they could study the Reaper technology. Paraphrasing here, because I don’t recall the exact dialogue, but it went something like…“Reaper tech is too dangerous for anyone to have much less Cerberus. I’m leaving now and I’m taking the Normandy and her crew with me.” I like to imagine that my Shepard silently appended that statement with, “and I dare you to come after us.”

3

This game is all about the characters. As the marketing materials say, your mission is first and foremost to build your team - and it’s a helluva team. I enjoyed the characters in ME1, but the crew in ME2 is a huge leap forward in terms of complexity and backstory. I enjoyed every single one of the recruitment quests, and the loyalty quests even moreso.

Teaming with Grunt to take down a thresher maw, placing myself between Garrus and his target, comforting a grief-stricken Tali (with a Paragon interrupt no less!)… all awesome moments, made truly memorable because they’re built on a foundation of solid character development, excellent writing, and fantastic voice acting. As the OP said, this game is cinematic. But it’s cinematic, not in the sense of being a video game aping a movie, but in that it presents you with a world and characters so vivid that you react emotionally - something that, sadly, few story-driven games manage to do.

A personal favorite sequence of mine was the final mission. Some people have criticized the absence of a clear “choose who you want to live or die” moment like the Kaiden/Ashley choice in ME1, but I far preferred the “choose your specialists” route that Bioware took with ME2.

The decision between letting Ashley or Kaiden die never rang true to me, partly because it’s such a binary choice (aka *no uncertainty *- not exactly a realistic command decision), and mostly because there was absolutely nothing to the choice besides which character you liked better (or wanted to bone). Regardless of your decision, the mission goes perfectly. The character you choose to sacrifice dies. What a shocker. And since you inevitably pick whichever character you find less likeable (since their abilities have absolutely nothing to do with the outcome), you’re not even that upset about it.

It doesn’t help that Kaiden and Ashley were the two least interesting characters in the game, of course.

In contrast, the choices you are given in the final mission of ME2 are true command decisions - the closest feeling I’ve ever gotten from a role-playing game of being the “commander.” You’re forced to put aside your personal feelings for each character and consider their qualities as soldiers. Choosing Grunt as the fire team leader may seem to make sense because he’s an excellent fighter, but it’s ignoring his lack of command experience or skill. Far better to choose Miranda or Garrus, who are more than capable of holding their own in a fight and whose strategic and leadership skills are established.

And there are multiple overlapping decisions to be made. It’s important to choose a good techie for the tunnel quest, but you need to choose a good fire team leader as well if you want said techie to survive. In other words, the game integrates a serious of difficult choices in determining the outcome. What’s amazing is that (Mordin bug aside) it manages to do so in a way that “feels” like it accurately reflects the wisdom of your choices. It’s an level of intellectual engagement that few RPGs even attempt, much less succeed to this level.

4

“Human, you’ve changed nothing. Your species has the attention of those infinitely your greater. That which you know as Reapers are your salvation through destruction.”

Note that it took Shepard killing Sovereign’s avatar, plus the combined forces of the Citadel fleet (Sovereign can also brush aside the Destiny Ascension, the most powerful dreadnought in the galaxy, without effort) and Systems Alliance Fifth Fleet to take out one of these bad boys. ME3 is gonna be…interesting to say the least.

5

Like everybody else, Tali could just not get a break. Coming aboard to stand trial for treason, expecting her dad to be on the hearing board only to find out after walking in that he is most likely dead and responsible for endangering her entire species… and then to hang for it to protect his honor. That the whole trial was just a cover so the Admirals could make power plays over how to handle the Geth situation makes it worse. The really stupid thing is that the Quarian are unfairly looked down upon by pretty much the entire galaxy for being shiftless, dishonest and untrustworthy. So what do they do? They cast out the one Quarian that is the best example possible of a selfless, tireless and loyal hero who has earned the respect of the Council species and could single-handedly change the opinion of the Quarian species. What a waste.

There is hope for Tali, though. If she can calm down and open a dialogue with Legion, especially with Shepard acting as referee, that’s an outstanding path to ending the Geth conflict and getting the admirals sacked as a bonus. The Migrant Fleet goes home, maybe the Geth relocate to another world and get representation, and a few generations later there is a lasting peace. Being Mass Effect, though, it’s a 50-50 shot that it will end in disaster. :wink:

I let Garrus take the shot. Testimony again to the writing and voice acting in the game that I felt I knew Garrus well enough that he needed to avenge his dead squadmates for closure, just like he needed to avenge the victims of the evil surgeon from the first game. I play mostly paragon and didn’t see a reason the dude should live. Did I miss a clue somewhere that the guy wasn’t guilty? Don’t tell me Garrus had the wrong guy… I’d have to go back and replay the game just to fix that one mistake!

Win. “I LIKE this human!”

I didn’t notice the plot inconsistency. What did they change?

This was the biggest moral quandary in the game for me, even moreso than destroying or salvaging the collector base at the end. On the one hand, the geth are just machines and it’s just altering programming. On the other, Legion shows geth can be “individuals” to a certain extent, and that the schism in their own society with the heretics shows they are capable of independent and differing thought. What sold me was when Legion pointed out that if the virus succeeds, the millions of heretic geth will be destroyed outright, as opposed to just being “reformatted.” Of course that really means that I chose to brainwash a bunch of free thinkers, which is also morally repulsive. There’s no right answer here – I just hope it works. Legion, whatever happens, tell the collective I was trying to make the right choice between two wrong answers…

I did let Cerberus take the collector station at the end of the game. I was going to take the paragon response out of reflex but realistically destroying the base is a stupid thing to do. One reaper ship almost took out the entirety of the Citadel defense forces and there’s a whole lot more on the way. It would be insane to destroy that wealth of knowledge before the invasion. My crew certainly wasn’t happy with it afterwards, and I definitely don’t trust the Illusive Man. I wish there was one additional choice at the end. “EDI, call up the Citadel. Send everything we got on the base, location, info on the IFF do get through, and have them gather up the best brains on every planet to come take a look at this thing. Put it out on the extranet if you have to. Everybody needs to see this.” That way, no one gets an edge.

I did see a clip with one of Shepard’s go to hell responses to the Illlusive Man after destroying the base. “What was that? Sorry, can’t hear you. There’s too much bullshit on the line.” click

How did everybody else handle the final decision?

6

I kept it for the illusive man. That technology is dangerous, but its also too vital to simply throw away. Human dominance is better than reaper annihilation.

Yes, there is the risk of indoctrination, but its a known risk, and is better understood now, and it CAN be useful… Hell, one of your ship upgrades, the Thanix cannons, are derived directly from the main armament on Sovereign.

Like you, however, I am sorely disappointed by the continued lack of middle ground responses. Sending all the data to the council, with an addendum chewing them out and pointing out the a known terrorist was the only one who made it possible for you to save their asses from the frying pan, again.

Oh, and Zaeeds mission was particularly bad. Let the workers burn, or complete his mission. I know Bioware loves to force difficult decisions on us, but I take exception to it when there are obvious reasonable alternatives they exclude simply to make the choice harder. Like, sending the third squad member to free the workers while you and zaeed go after Vito. I felt the same way when my only choice was kill the Rachni queen or set her free. No keep her in captivity and let the council deal with the problem option?

Most awesome bit…

Legion. It is by far the greatest character they have created in ME, and honestly the only truly alien individual you meet.

‘But why my armor specifically? Why did you wait so long to repair yourself, and then do so with my armor?’

A brief thought, and then a very silent, confused Legion responds ‘No data available’.

The geth admire shepard, but are have no idea why, or what that feeling is. They are evolving as a species.
Complaints and Grievances

Loss of the mako. I wasn’t big on planetary exploration in ME1. It was lame. BUT! The mako was perfectly fine on actual missions! It made planets actually seem large, instead of tiny little set pieces.

Lack of plot elements during missions. Take Noveria(I think… The snow planet in ME1). You hopped in the mako, busted through to the base, killed some geth, killed some rachni, then you had this area where there were holdouts, with plots to uncover, conversations to have, then you proceeded again. All the missions in ME2 were very linear, with a minimum of interruptions.

If you didn’t find an upgrade going through a mission, thats it. Not possible to get later on. Yes, ME1 spammed you with gear constantly, but you could at least get it later on if you missed it.

The last mission. Don’t get me wrong, it was great, but they also took that moment to spring two completely new mechanics on you with zero warning. I’m speaking, of course, of the mechanic where you pick people to do jobs, and the mechanic where the longer you waited to go through the relay, the more of your crew would die.

The first mechanic was at least somewhat intuitive. I figured tali or legion needed to go down the vent shaft, for instance. Still, it would have been nice if they had used this mechanic before a couple of times to get you used to it, and indeed, I really, really hope they make greater use of it in ME3, as its very nice to include all those squad members you never use in the mission.

The second mechanic was completely out of the blue. So far as I’m aware, Bioware has NEVER done a time based objective like that, so I took my time, ‘knowing’ that it doesn’t matter how long I take, the mission will be the same whenever I show up. Not so. So I was left in the position of having to replay like 6 hours of game if I wanted to actually save my crew, meaning they are all mush.

7

Hmmm. Am I the only person who, playing mostly as a Paragon, let Garrus take the shot? I trust Garrus after everything from ME1, and if he said the guy needed to die, the guy needed to die.

Also, was there a way to play as a paragon and get Zaeeds’ loyalty?

8

I think if your charm is high enough you can make him loyal. I saved the workers, let his target get away, but somehow convinced him it was the right path to take.

9

I just want to add that I haven’t finished the game yet. I am at the final mission, but now distressed to find that the crew will all have died because I didn’t go through the Omega 4 relay ASAP.

10

I really enjoyed how harshly the game punished me for making bad decisions - and in ways that made logical sense. I didn’t put any time at all into upgrading the ship - I’d delayed the planetary exploration bits, figuring I could gather resources at my leisure before jumping through the Omega Relay. But the Collector attack on Normandy scuttled that plan - I thought there was no way my character would just diddle around the galaxy while his crew was in danger, so I went ahead and jumped immediately. From reading the other posts, it looks like that wasn’t a crazy call - time really was of the essence.

But the Normandy took a pounding right after she cleared the Omega relay. Shot to hell - Jack, Legion, and Thane didn’t even make it to the Collector base. Crash-landed there - in time to rescue the rest of the crew, but in rough shape. And I made more bad decisions afterwards, with more bad consequences - sent Jacob into the tunnel instead of Tali because I didn’t want her to buy it, and he took a rocket to the face. Gave Grunt command of a fire team, and it cost him his life. Sent Zaed on the escort run back to Normandy, because Grunt was dead by then - and that cost Zaed.

Came out of the game with the Normandy main crew intact - but the only survivors on my squad were Mordin, Tali, Miranda and Garrus. I lost most of my team, and none of it seems to have been random plot devices - it’s because I made decisions that I knew were dangerous, and others that were just stupid calls. That is good gameplay - and it says something about the strength of the writing that it feels a bit odd walking around Normandy now. Ship feels empty.

As for other good bits - I loved Jacob’s loyalty mission. Very heart-of-darkness. Jacob wasn’t that interesting a character - it was a pleasant surprise to see how screwed-up that mission was.

Mordin singing was hilarious, of course. :smiley:

Call me a sap, but I thought the Tali romance was actually kind of touching. It was a huge surprise - but then, of course, Tali had a great line to the effect of “well, you keep playing the dashing hero to my maiden in distress - why wouldn’t I dig you”? That character was very well-written, and well-acted. (And I laughed out loud when the camera cut away before showing Tali’s face.)

11

On the plus side, if you took the time to mine for resources and upgrade your ship, you’ve a decent shot at saving most of your squad.

12

I have to agree with those who voiced dissatisfaction with the endgame choice. In ME1, I favored the option of letting the council die not because I was rah-rah humans, but because sacrificing thousands of lives to save a few ineffectual leaders seemed like a waste. I would have been happy to let them reform the council like it was before without forcing human control over it. And in ME2, the extremely obvious thing to do is to not destroy the collector base and then make the info immediately available to everyone so that Cerberus doesn’t get an edge. Not having that option is forcing a tough choice where one shouldn’t exist.

Good games, but Bioware still needs to put some work into coming up with reasonable moral choices.

13

He had the right guy, and I always let him take the shot. But if you warn him Sidonis starts moaning about how miserable is life is since he betrayed Garrus, and Garrus doesn’t take the shot. Boo hoo! Imagine if you recruited a squad member who then betrayed you and got the rest of your squad killed - you’d hunt him down before you could say krogan testicles. Not letting Garrus have his vengeance is hypocrisy.

Presumably the lack of the schism in ME1, and no hint that the geth weren’t worshiping Sovereign of their own free will. The virus appears to be a kind of indoctrination for synthetics. I always blow up the heretic base. Remember Eden Prime!

I bathe the place in radiation. Knowledge is power, and we need power. I’m also annoyed that we couldn’t send the data back to the Council, with a note attached that reads “Explain this.”
Either option could (and probably will) bite us in the arse in ME3, though. Like the Rachni Queen in ME1, which I now regret giving an acid bath after the asari tells you ol’ queenie plans to keep her promise. At the time though it seemed the the correct decision. Of course, in ME3 it could turn out that the Rachni become indoctrinated again and your paragon choice leads to the Rachni Wars mk 2.

14

Heh - Compared to Mr. Kobayashi, I made all the opposite choices. I think it’s a testament to the game’s strength that we both feel completely justified about our decisions. :slight_smile:

For me, this one was not about justice, but about how a decision to pursue vengeance and a vigilante lifestyle would affect Garrus as a person. Garrus is a tough sonofabitch, no doubt, and he’s seen and done things that would shatter a lesser person. But at his core, he’s a person of strong morals who, in his own words, only kills those who are actively harming others. Sidonis did a terrible thing (and if Omega had some sort of functional justice system, I would have captured him and brought him to them), but he’s clearly suffering the repercussions and is of no danger to anyone else. Garrus doesn’t need that death on his conscience as well - better to support his sense of compassion and foster healing that way.

In other words, I don’t disagree that Sidonis should be punished for his betrayal, but given the option between having Sidonis go free or have Garrus carry out that punishment himself at the cost of his humanity (err, turianity), I’d take the former option. No hypocrisy there, BTW, since I would’ve made the same choice had Shepard been in Garrus’s shoes.

To Bioware’s credit, they do hang a lampshade on this in the Codex entry on the heretics. It’s specifically mentioned that the heretofore unheard of schism means that Citadel intel on the geth is shockingly incorrect, and that the geth’s military strength must be far, far larger and more powerful than anyone had suspected. My immediate thought was, man, it’s a good thing I argued against a quarian war with the geth. Tali’s people would be pulped.

As far as the actual decision, I felt that Legion himself (and by proxy, the rest of the non-heretic geth) were leaning towards unleashing the virus, no matter what they said about votes. I chose to rewrite the heretics purely out of self-interest, as a diplomatic overture to the geth - to sort of say, “look, I’m willing to give you back this giant military asset, so I expect you to return the favor and not start a god-damned war.”

Ironic that my very renegadey reasoning there would give me paragon points, but that’s the trouble with trying to map a linear morality system onto an increasingly gray universe. :slight_smile:

I usually take the view that more data is always better. But this is an exception. Everyone who has ever attempted to study the Reapers has become indoctrinated. Everyone. I don’t trust Cerberus to do any better - nor the Council, for that matter. This isn’t a case of “knowledge is power, ergo more knowledge is more power.” This is a case of “knowledge will brainwash your allies and turn them all into creepy blue husks that want to eat your face while a giant squid fleet is coming to blow up your planet.”

I figure there’s a 50/50 chance of your latter scenario coming to pass. At least, I hope so. If your difficult moral quandaries don’t have a decent chance of blowing up in your face, then they’re not exactly “difficult,” are they? :slight_smile:

15

Ha, and these choices were on my ‘main’ Shep too, who generally veers toward the paragon route and co-operation with other races. I have a pure renegade jerkass to explore the other options after I’ve done my main playthrough.

I didn’t have to think about this for more than a millisecond, although to address your points through my Shepard’s eyes;
Garrus deserved some closure after what happened to his squad. If you spare Sidonis he gives you a sob story about how miserable his life is and how he was coerced into betraying Garrus’ squad - although a truly moral person would rather die than cause the deaths of 10 (I think it’s 10, anyway) people. Note that Sidonis isn’t an idiot - he knows his life is in danger and clearly would say anything to weasel out of it, for no wise man ever thought that a traitor should be trusted. Even if he is telling the truth, his betrayal deserves a bullet to the back of the head, both for Garrus’ sake and his murdered team.

Garrus’s …turianity is never in question - he’s already well down the renegade path with his vigilante activities (which work, judging by his nickname). To encourage his lawfulness is to side with those idiots who let Dr. Heart fly away to mutilate more patients instead of killing him outright.

For my Shep, stopping the assassination would be a betrayal of trust, for Garrus sets everything aside and trusts Shepard implicitly, willingly following him into hell. My Shep would not dare to question his motives or morality after all he’s done. Likewise, my Shep would always gun down anyone who had betrayed him. Who did you pick for the council - the faithful Anderson, or backstabbing Udina? What’s worse, there’s no guarantee that there will ever be justice for the men who died under Garrus’ squad. C-Sec is famously useless and corrupt, and nobody else will care. On the Normandy you get an email from the wife of one of Garrus’ men, telling you that Garrus blames himself for what happened. Letting him take the shot absolves him of this burden of guilt, the real reason his squad is dead has been eliminated forever and he earns some much needed closure. Otherwise, Sidonis walks, likely snickering to himself and wondering how you could buy his sob-story.

On this matter I left it to the quarian people, it’s a bit presumptuous for some human with no real knowledge of the quarian plight to stick his nose in their business. Although with the violent heretics reduced to scrap metal they are a step closer to retaking their homeworld. The quarian story reminds me very much of ‘The Second Renaissance’ in the Animatrix, the backstory for the Matrix where the humans first turn on the machines. It’s a moral quandry that isn’t mine to begin with (“Do these units have a soul?”).

They all go boom in my game, every time. Legion (and consequently the rest of the geth) don’t seem particularly broken up about the fate of the heretics, Legion is still loyal if you turn the base into scrap metal. We all know what the geth are capable of, how easily they can be manipulated by the Reapers and what a threat this poses. The risk potential is simply to great to allow them to live - you have a chance to greatly weaken a threat that poses a danger to the entire galaxy. Legion says that there is a non-zero probability that the heretics won’t simply become heretical again, as well as noting that “The minds of both forms of life can be shaped. Organics require time and effort. With synthetics, replacement of a data file is the only requirement.” So all it would take is a Reaper inserting another virus and we’re back to square one.

Due to their collective nature there’s also the possibility that their ideas would infect the ‘true’ geth. Legion says that there’s nothing inherently wrong with the heretic conclusions - “Heretics say one is less than two. Geth say two is less than three.”. To organics (especially people like the widows of Eden Prime and the murdered crewmen of the MSVs Cornucopia and Broken Arrow) this conclusion is much more contentious.

This would be true but for the fact that you’re not sparing a Reaper to study, but the Collector base. Admittedly there is the embryonic Human-Reaper, but Shep destroyed Junior (and we don’t know that the Human-Reaper is yet capable of indoctrination). It’s more a matter of acquiring the data aboard the Collector base and sending it back for study. Even the scientists on the derelict Reaper were able to send out some useful data before they huskified (the existence of the IFF system). If the operatives sent to the Collector base end up huskified, then their sacrifice will not be in vain. The Collector base seems to be effectively a construction yard for Reapers - imagine how useful the data could be when fighting Reapers, knowing their composition, how they are built, analysing any weaknesses. If the base goes kaboom, we’re no better off than when we started (other than stopping the Collector attacks - which were never the real threat).

The Rachni queen decision was probably the most difficult in the series so far for me. Again, I weighed it in terms of risk/reward. If the queen is telling the truth (which an intelligent being fearing for its life has no motivation to), then the Rachni return and send an apology fruit basket to the Council races. If Shepard is wrong, the Rachni hide away and breed, ready to conquer the galaxy at their leisure (which they may feel justified in doing, considering how the rest of the galaxy caused their annihilation in the first place). Only this time, we’ve no krogan to defend us. Plus the Reapers are coming. So the worst case scenario is billions dead even before the Reaper fleet arrives, so all the Reapers need to do is indoctrinate the Rachni again with the ‘sour yellow note’ and leave them to starve. Job done, easiest galaxy-wide genocide ever.

16

Make sure you choose a male Shepard for that. For some reason, his delivery of the renegade lines always just comes off as… douchier than Jennifer Hale’s. For example, his response to Joker that ends, “…And I died,” almost sounds accusatory, like it’s somehow Joker’s fault!

Heh. Yeah, I’m just not big on vigilante justice in general. If the guy deserves to die, then he should be convicted by a trial and sentenced to death. Admittedly, this doesn’t jibe so well with the whole “Shepard is kind of a vigilante no matter what you do in ME2” business, but eh. :slight_smile: Cognitive dissonance is good for the soul!

Even as Archangel, though, he only ever attacked those who were actively in the process of harming others. There’s a distinction between rescuing people from their tormentors and gunning down an enemy in cold blood, even if said enemy “deserves” it.

I don’t buy that killing one’s betrayer absolves one of anything. It serves as momentary satisfaction, sure, and may give one the feeling of having laid one’s burdens to rest. But it also means you’ve given in to some pretty dark urges. No, what Garrus needed was to realize who he is - someone who, despite his distaste for red tape and bureaucracy, is ultimately a man of the law. A man of morals. If he killed someone just to sooth his need for revenge, he’d be taking his first step into becoming the type of thug he’s dedicated his life to fighting.

Sure, maybe Sidonis is lying to you and is off to set fire to an orphanage right after you let him go. But that’s not relevant to the question at hand, which is Garrus’s motivation for killing him is entirely personal. It’s precisely because Garrus was the one wronged that makes him the wrong person to dispense justice against Sidonis.

Again, if they had the option for you to knock Sidonis out and haul him into C-Sec headquarters, I would have chosen that option in a heartbeat. As is, if Sidonis decides to continue his criminal ways later on, well, I am technically still a Spectre. And I happen to have a number of contacts on the Citadel who will let me know if he toes the line. :smiley:

It’s definitely a cool story, and one that you can potentially impact in a lot of different ways. I get the presumption argument, but I’d counter by pointing out that you can make the same argument about any other side quest in the game. :slight_smile:

A fair point, to be sure.

Except we know that the Collectors are nothing more than Reaper pawns. They use plenty of husks against you, on both the Collector ship and the Collector base, so presumably they have the capability to make them on-site.

Furthermore, if a long-dead Reaper like the derelict has enough residual indoctrination power to drive a research crew mad in a matter of days, I shudder to think what a recently-killed Reaper built using human DNA is capable of.

Definitely a reasonable point. I let the queen live because it was the obvious “paragon” choice (ME1 was far less subtle about these things), but again, I fully expect that it may come back to bite me in the ass.

17

Actually, if you don’t let Garrus kill him, a later Galatic News report on one of the Citadel terminals says that Sidonic voluntarily turns himself in. Not that you’ll know that before making the decision, but it does seem as though he was being honest about his conscience.

18

I followed the paragon path pretty faithfully, because on my second playthrough I would be importing my renegade, so I’d get to see how it played out both ways. But my paragon let Garrus take the shot, and the renegade sure isn’t going to winge about the law. The truth, though, is that we all know the only reason this is a moral dilemma at all is because we weren’t given the option to actually fight it out with the guy. Most of the killing Shepherd does is morally and legally dubious even when she gets paragon points for it. I’ll see the paragon option, I suppose, when I import my Neutral Avenger, though I’m not sure ME2 supports neutrality the way ME1 did.

I’m looking forward to having my Renegade tell Lou (or TIM, as Jihi calls him) to piss up a rope at every opportunity. Also, where my Paragon remained faithful to Kaiden, the Renegade is going to find out how many crew members you can fuck, and who ends up being your special one if you’re playing the field.

As to the story, I recall hearing it claimed that a particular characteristic of science fiction is the way it tends to push an expanded sense of what it means to be ‘like us’. The humanoid races have proven very human-like without losing that alien flavor (usually), but after being drawn into sympathizing with geth, I shouldn’t be at all surprised to find in the next game that some Reapers are in fact our friends.

It’s funny about people’s complaints as to the limited choice in the use of the Collector’s base. I was actually more frustrated in the first game by not having the choice to help find a cure for the Genophage, or at least save data from the project.

I was a little alarmed that Bioware was asking for trouble when they described the Human reaper as an “embryo”, and no less so when Shepherd then concludes “it’s not alive, then.” So far, I’ve heard of no trouble over this. Maybe the pro-life crowd doesn’t play video games, or at least not ones with homosexuality and xenophilia.

19

Yep, my renegade soldier Shep is modelled on Samuel L. Jackson for added effect. I’ve got a pure paragon engineer FemShep too for Jennifer Hale’s superb delivery. There’s a lot of life you can squeeze out of ME with all the combinations, that’s for sure.

I agree, like the Rachni choice I wish there was a ‘third way’. But to me it seemed pretty clear cut - let him walk or let Garrus kill him. There wasn’t any hint of C-Sec being on his case (and he already has experience making himself disappear, further clouding their investigations - if they even care about something that presumably happened on lawless Omega).

This is why I trust Garrus not to jump off the slippery slope. In ME1 I encouraged his renegade tendencies because I sympathised with his frustration with obstructive bureaucrats, yet in two years he didn’t cross the line and murder an innocent (so far as we know, at least - BioWare would probably have made us aware of the fact if he had). When we find him he’s holding off three armies of thuggish criminal mercenaries. We’ve got no reason not to trust him on this, and Shep owes him for coming along with him (unlike Ash/Kaiden, Liara, Wrex).

Revenge was no doubt a strong motivation, but doesn’t necessarily automatically make an action wrong - Garrus is clearly distraught over the loss of his team, blaming himself and Sidonis. Knowing Sidonis’ role in the betrayal, his death closes the matter. He has enacted justice for his squadmates. Letting him walk, even if Sidonis is feeling bad, doesn’t seem like justice. Again, we really only have Garrus’ judgement on this, judgement Shepard should trust by this point in the story.

Given that Garrus has spent two years trying to improve Omega, a lawless society, he has seen the criminal underbelly which C-Sec and the like have been unable or unwilling to curtail. Even as a paragon, Shep bends the rules as a Spectre numerous times in ME1 to get the job done. I would say he is a man…er, turian primarily concerned with justice. Even though revenge is a motivator, gunning down Sidonis is well within his character. Sidonis was directly responsible for the deaths of many, and paid the price for it. He’s seen how the galaxy works, how if he doesn’t act nobody else will. Hence his vigilante work against the mercs.

Ditto, although like I said I doubt C-Sec would care. The killings (presumably) occurred light-years outside of their jurisdiction and they have only Garrus’ testimony. Good enough for Shepard, given all they’ve been through and how well Shep knows him, but likely not convincing enough for C-Sec. This is why Garrus felt he needed to act - if he didn’t end Sidonis the killer of his squad gets off scot-free (apart from ‘feeling bad’, not exactly consoling for the widows of his team).

Fair enough, but for most of the quests others are asking for your help. The quarians didn’t ask you for your opinion on the geth, but you can throw your two cents in anyway. Shep can point out the morals of the ‘Morning War’ to Tali in ME1, but at the end of the day it’s quarian lives which are effected. The geth (apart from the heretics, which I blew up - a favour to the quarians who fight geth no matter what the flavour) aren’t an issue for the rest of the galaxy as they aren’t seen beyond the Perseus Veil, so it seems to me a purely internal matter how the ‘true’ geth and quarians deal with each other.

The Collectors were once Protheans, so the Reapers have had 50,000 years to rewrite their genetic code and turn them into slaves - it doesn’t seem to be the function of the base. Husks are definately Reaper tech, explaining why the heretics and Collectors have them. I’m not saying that it isn’t risky, but we’re talking about the future of all life in the galaxy. If a few researchers get huskified (note that we don’t know that this will happen, plus we have a much better understanding of indoctrination following findings on the derelict Reaper - Shepard and his crew seem to be no worse off for their time aboard the Reaper or Collector base), then it seems a noble sacrifice for the good of the galaxy. If their data reveals a way to defeat the Reapers and save more lives, they have laid down their lives to ensure victory.

The Human-Reaper was an embryo, and we don’t spend any time inside it (which was the primary cause of Saren’s indoctrination and the researchers in the derelict Reaper - although Sovereign does emit an external ‘field’). We know a dead god can dream, but whether a Reaper in the earliest stages of construction poses as much of a threat we don’t know. Compared to Sovvie and the derelict Reaper it is far easier to kill and far smaller, speaking to its capacities.

Perhaps both choices could have stings. The renegade option robs you of a potential ally, perhaps meaning that the Reapers would be more difficult to defeat. But then the paragon option has a potential enemy appear. Perhaps both possibilities will come to fruition, a sadistic choice. I’d have rather left it in the tank for the Council, to be honest.

20

Hmm, he was being sincere? I still don’t blame Garrus for taking the shot, not Shepard for letting him though, given all that they’ve seen - the injustices, the bureaucracy.

@ Johnny Angel - Doesn’t EDI say that there’s not enough data to know whether the Human-Reaper is aware or not?

Speaking of the genophage, what you do in Mordin’s side quest might have an effect on ME3. I always let Mordin wipe the research. “Simulation results were clear, krogan population increase always lead to war, always!”