Doing it now. It wasn’t in my journal, but I looked up how to activate it and you have to just head to the cluster it is in. It kicked in then.
WRT the mapping and if it improves in ME2/3, they actually made it a special button (it’s pushing one of the triggers down on PS3) and there will be a little arrow that points you to where you need to go. It’s a bit more hand-holdey, but it also makes it so that you don’t need to use the map for anything other than locating enemies (everywhere!) and your squad mates. I enjoyed the addition because I have played this trilogy a billion times and I STILL get lost on Ilos.
Also, my in-laws have been in town since Friday and I haven’t been able to play and it’s KILLING me. I’m hoping to fire it up tonight.
I love this thread btw
A feature I might have added would have been the ability to choose which sidequest I consider my “active” quest. When you return to the citadel, I have a couple people I need to find and no idea where they really are.
I did the Bringing Down The Sky mission today and it was really great.
I also finished Feros and was glad to learn that the game considered the colonists “saved” even though I only managed 8/16 alive.
I also got Wrex his family armor, though I don’t see him putting it on or it in his inventory list of armors.
It’s just sentimental junk.
Yes, Wrex can get sentimental. 
I discovered something in ME1 today where they actually changed and improved the gameplay noticeably rather than just refining and smoothing the existing mechanics as I described above: thresher maws.
In the OG game, they’d pop out, and then they were basically just bullet sponges. If you were careful, you could dodge their poison spit without moving too much (generally by jumping the Mako), which is what triggered them to dive underground and pop up somewhere else. So with them not changing position, you’d just pour bullets into them until they died.
Now? Very different. Their poison spitballs are more of a spray, harder to dodge, and they drop underground more readily, on their own. And as they move, they leave a dust trail on the surface. AND if you get trucking in the Mako, it senses you and chases you. AND it sometimes pops up its feeler tendril things to give you more targets.
It’s way more exciting now to cross a nest, trigger the popup beastie, and zoom around peppering it with fire as it appears, while sometimes frantically avoiding pursuit.
This was clearly one of the things where the revamp team said “we can do better.” And they did.
I returned to the Citadel and:
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successfully charmed an inspector over my ship. OK, that was random.
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gave an interview and passed every charm check
I have fully maxed out charm, I think, and I often get the blue choice. I’m going to miss having a somewhat leveled up character when I switch to ME2.
One interesting thing about ME3 is that a good chunk of level progress actually carries over from ME2. (Less so from ME1 to ME2, but you still get a few goodies.)
FYI, regarding the mechanic from ME1, where your ability to make the blue/red choices is a combination of your cumulative choice-based Paragon/Renegade score plus skill points assigned to Charm/Intimidate? That second component is totally gone in ME2. It’s all in the Paragon/Renegade number, which you build via your game actions. The skill trees are way stripped down.
And on top of that, one of the quirks of the OG ME2 is that you were statistically incentivized to lean heavily to one side or the other, because you were penalized for mixing your choices. In other words, if you didn’t follow a largely blue or red ticket, you’d find yourself in the latter stages of the game unable to choose many of those options because you were scoring too low. I remember there’s one particular moment where you need the blue/red choice to avoid a bad outcome, but you couldn’t use them unless you’d gone 100% one way or the other.
I read somewhere that this has been softened somewhat in the Legendary Edition, and made more forgiving, but it’s something to keep in mind.
I did go all in on Paragon once I understood the mechanic, but I do appreciate that you can do both in the first game. It’s a rare game that allows you to mix and match without negative scores coming off the other one.
Anyone play on PS4? Is it possible to activate photo mode during cut scenes? I’ve seen pictures online that look like they’re from them, but idk
I’m on PS4. I haven’t tried photo mode during cut scenes. I’ll make a note to check this out.
I did activate it during an elevator ride once, just to see what happens, and discovered that in that context the camera is essentially locked and can’t float around. I assume it’s because the elevators are used to cover the load time between environments, which means there’s inherently no actual defined space where the camera can move so it has to be pinned.
So, what did you do with Balak?
My Renegade Shepard refused to let him get away and let him kill the hostages, then executed him after the fight. I picked the Colonist/Ruthless background for Shepard, meaning that her parents were killed by batarian slavers during a raid on her homeworld and that she herself fought the batarians to the death at Torfan, so I figured she would be extremely vengeful towards batarians in general, and that she wouldn’t take Balak’s word that he’d release the hostages and figured they’d be better off dead than slaves. (I know that he does let them go if you pick that option, but I figure she wouldn’t know that.)
I thought it was an interesting way to roleplay Shepard
I let him go and saved the prisoners. If that gives me a chance to kill him in ME2 or ME3, great. If not, it seemed right. I am almost entirely Paragon at this point.
Well, as long as I can play as Renegade Obama, I think I’m in!
One of my fondest memories of that game was good ol’ Barack throwing a merc through a window to his death and deliver a pithy one-liner.
Is the character creator in the sequels good enough to do that or was that a pre-made thing imported?
It was just a customization code off Faces of Gaming website.
Click “Customization” tab.
Doing the assault on Virmire. Saren’s ship, at least as I understand it, just revealed to us that it is alive and actually is the Reaper…and that they made the mass relays that caused mass effect.
I take everything with a grain of salt here, but that was reasonably surprising to me. I’m picturing the ship being the final boss.
Wait, I just got a quest called “Final Battle”. Is this it? I did plenty of sidequests, spoke to all my companions, and am EXTREMELY surprised if the game is ending all ready.
I only have 15.5 hours in.
I thought it’d be 25 hours at least. Maybe it was too easy on normal and I flew through to much of it?
Here are things I did in the game if this is indeed “the end”
- talked to all companions a lot
- had a character fall in love with shepard
- found Wrex’s armor
- did the main DLC as I understand it
- did a good chunk of sidequests, but not the “collection” style ones
I was stunned when things looked like they were coming to a conclusion of sorts.
Just checked the wiki because I certainly don’t remember the mission names, and it doesn’t sound like you’ve missed much. I really don’t remember if the game felt short on my first playthrough, and on subsequent playthroughs doing ME1 was just something to get through so I had a savegame with the right decisions/romance options/etc for how I wanted to play 2 & 3 so it’s not like I was wanting to stretch things out.
@Mahaloth , who was the Virmire Survivor? Who’s your romance?