Is [spoiler]keeping everyone alive primarily a matter of ship upgrades and keeping everyone loyal? In which case I’d probably be best throwing Miranda’s boobs (and consequently the rest of her) out of the nearest airlock, she’s always the one who isn’t loyal because of Jack.
On the Reapers - it is possible that this is part of their reproduction cycle. Remember Sovvie’s speech on Virmire - “We are each a nation.” They need to harvest organics to make more of themselves, containing the experience of that species.
Harbinger is definitely a Reaper who controlled the Collectors. Consider his speech at the end - Harbinger to Shep: “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.”
To the Collector General: “You have failed. We will find another way. Releasing control.”
Then the Collector General’s eyes cease glowing, and he is destroyed. At the end, Joker hands you a datapad containing an image of a Reaper, Harbinger.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]This is how I took it. The reason they go through this whole cycle of guiding people to creating vast starfaring empires only to then destroy them is because it takes vast quantities of people-juice to create a new Reaper. Seeing the human-reaper, I figured they probably made one in the form of whatever race they had available to juice, and that Sovereign was just the one they made from the squid people. But when we saw the bunch of other Reapers, it looked like they were mostly squid people, so I could be wrong about that.
There are other races in the galaxy, of course, but if they’re paying attention they’ll have noticed that humans are the only species known to produce Player Characters, which is a huge advantage for a species – anything goes wrong, they can go back to a saved game.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]EDI does make it clear that the Reaper-Human (or Human-Reaper?) is an embryo, it’s certainly far smaller than Sovereign or the derelict Reaper. The Reapers may well harvest the genetic material of organics, begin work on the new form then squidward it up later on.
The Leviathan of Dis has some similarities with Reapers, namely its size and age (around a billion years old, older than the derelict Reaper which was 37 million. No idea about Sovvie, but he talks about years in the millions and is a similar design to the derelict reaper, so he’s probably a similar age). It’s possible this organic, genetically starship was among the first generation of created Reapers, or the original variety of Reaper which augmented itself into the mechanical horror we know and love.
Strange that organic materials seem to be necessary for Reapers, given their disdain for organics. Or maybe it’s the cause of their disdain, they view organic resistance like we would view… cement fighting back.[/spoiler]
>That’s a helluva lot of 100s. These critics genuinely believe there’s nothing that could have been done better? Really? I bet Bioware’s having a gigantic grand slam release party.
Ive put a few hours in and so far its excellent and very cinematic, but I its very much “on the rails” and in a pretty small sandbox. Character progression is pretty linear (finish a task, get a level up) and you only have a few skills you can put points in. I feel this game is more like an interactive movie than a game, at least moreso than Dragon Age.
The thing that royally narks me off about ME2 is that it’s so…and I hesitate to use this term…shootery.
I play RPGs. I enjoy RPGs. And I’m not biased against shooters - I even played several minutes of Halo 3 before recognising it as a worthless waste of electron alignment - but I really don’t like them.
I could play through the shooting of the first game by gritting my teeth, holding down the right bumper, carefully aligning the crosshairs, releasing for just long enough to squeeze off a couple of shots, spazzing out madly and then jamming down on the bumper again. It surprised me that this wasn’t the most irritating part of the game.
The Mako. Ah, the Mako. Its bits of the game even made me hate Moon Patrol, which it plagiarised shamelessly. I read somewhere that it had been designed to be impossible to get the Mako stuck.
I beg to differ.
But I could struggle through on “casual” difficulty, relying on the fact that I could just lay down blankets of bullets and eventually the Geth would wander into one. Remembering the story bits, and having been told that the Mako no longer existed, I picked up ME2. And now I find out that not only does using the bumper no longer really work (it snaps you out of zoom and causes problems if you’re in cover), they’ve now got ammo limits?
I ran out of ammo looking for both of the first two recruits. This is going to be a long slog.
[spoiler]I think it will turn out that each reaper, not simply being a sentient machine, is the distilled product of an entire race, meaning each of those thousands seen at the end represent an entire race that they wiped out.
This cycle will be lucrative for them. With at least a dozen sentient spacefaring races, they are looking to add 12 new reapers to the fold.
What I don’t know is if the races being used remain intact in some way, or if they are just reapers. If a reaper was built from distilled humans, is it the human reaper, or simply reaper #52742.[/spoiler]
I also keep getting stuck. Sometimes my character will get stuck onto of a box or somehow on some ropes hanging from the ceiling. I dont see any unstuck key.
The deaths aren’t random but nobody has found all the triggers. I’m thinking Mordin is bugged though. It seems the people who die on the line at the end are the ones marked as disloyal. I bet Mordin isn’t being flagged as loyal properly if you resolve his quest a certain way.
Often it’s possible to unlock the debug console, which among other things allows you to turn off clipping. Lots of games have clipping bugs, and it makes me wonder how people on consoles, who don’t have the option of activating the debug console, deal with it.
Hmm…on his loyalty quest I [spoiler]stopped him blasting his apprentice, to get as many paragon points as possible. Maybe that caused him to hesitate firing when faced with the Collectors. Still couldn’t reconcile Miranda and Jack, which was a bit of a joke since I was able to calm down a quarian and a geth, for crying out loud.
I’ve switch specialism to Bastion from Nemesis, so hopefully on my next playthrough I’ll get a few more paragon points. [/spoiler]
@ BigNik - what class are you playing? Using your powers as much as possible should alleviate your ammunition problems. I’m an adept, so I only really use firearms to finish off targets or when my powers are recharging, never completely run out off ammo yet.
How do you get her to dance in the crotchless Assari outfit (as seen on youtubes everywhere)? I charmed her, had her over for dinner and all that. She even fed my fish. What did I miss?
After the suicide mission, continue the game and wait a minute or two. Then check your personal terminal. You’ll have an email from her, where she tells you that you should spend more time with her. Then all you need to do is go to the captain’s cabin and use the intercom on your desk to call her up.
They shout, “Fuck you” and compulsively squeeze the firing trigger. It’s the same process for any console shooter and applicable for any reason, but you get an achievement for doing it if you’re playing on multiplayer with a microphone.
[spoiler] Yes, you just need the ship performance increasing upgrades (you don’t need the dermal healer thing, I think, though I did have it at that point). You don’t need all the other upgrades, since I didn’t have Legion’s sniper rifle upgrade at the end (2000 short, and I wanted to go save the crew ASAP).
And yeah, you need everyone to be loyal. And to give everyone reasonable jobs to do in the endgame.[/spoiler]
Were they actually absorbing memories and so on then? I was under the impression that what was happening was just them using the fleshy parts of humans. After all, the geth are able to create new geth programs without absorbing organic minds (so far as we know), so the vastly superior Reapers could presumably create new Reaper programs relatively easily, if not bodies, apparently.
So, who’s everyone’s favourite companion? I have to say while I usually used Garrus and Tali, my overall favourite character was probably Mordin. His loyalty quest was just really well written - there’s a part where you can examine a female Krogan corpse which is entirely skippable, which leads to a great big conversation about him and his role and views on whether the genophage was acceptable and moral. The voice actor managed to get in some great pathos while still doing the whole odd speech pattern.
I’m glad about that, scanning the planets for resources gets a bit old. Although I didn’t upgrade Mordin’s omni-tool and he died, so maybe it is one of the variables.
At the end EDI (I think it’s EDI, anyway) tells you that the Human-Reaper has taken its form not through design, but that it’s taken that form simply due to its construction material. So, the organics give it physical form, it’s not completely impossible that humans contribute to the ‘mind’. Although it is more likely that there is some sort of ‘default Reaper program’ so that the Reapers can keep propagating. Perhaps a bit of both. I guess we won’t know for sure until ME3.
Without a doubt, my main man Garrus. His loyalty quest is great, I always let him take the shot. And Tali, she’s really quite sweet, even if she can kill you will an omni-tool. Paragon Shep is a saint to her, comforting her when she finds her father - crowning moment of heartwarming. Grunt is usually in my a-team, his shotgun is often very useful.
