Mass Effect 2

On Red And Blue

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Blaugust Post #18

I have to give the Mass Effect series credit for being the first series I played where the morality system isn’t choosing between “Be a Good Guy” or “Kick Puppies”. (Neverwinter Nights and other D&D-based games have been really bad about that, as is Knights of the Old Republic) In Mass effect you’re always the good guy, you might just be a bit of an asshole about it. (You might also kick some puppies.) For those unfamiliar, Mass Effect tracks your decisions as either “Paragon” or “Renegade”, where Paragon is “Compassionate and Heroic” and Renegade is “Apathetic and Ruthless”. These aren’t directly opposed, so you can have a high score in both, depending on your actions.

On Red And Blue
The red one has a star, so it must be better.

In Mass Effect 1, these scores determine how many points you can put into Charm/Intimidate, and the resulting value of your Charm/Intimidate skill is what gives you access to particular conversation options. Mass Effect 2 got rid of the Charm/Intimidate skills, in favor of an alternate approach.

The Great Mistake

Mass Effect 2 decided to use your Paragon/Renegade values directly to determine your effective charm/intimidate values. Because Mass Effect 2 is very non-linear, the values required aren’t static. Instead, they’re a percentage of the total number of paragon/renegade points available in the areas you’ve been to. The problem here is that while your scores aren’t mutually exclusive, most of your actions are. Unless you go very hard toward one or the other, you’re likely to find that you can’t pass either Paragon or Renegade checks near the end of the game. (A particularly difficult one is sorting out an argument between two party members, and it’s hard to have this happen any time other than near the very end of the game.)

Playing the game without being entirely dedicated toward either red or blue feels more natural to me, and ME2 punishes you for it. Importing a character from ME1 mitigates this somewhat, as you start with a moderately large bonus to your meters based (roughly) on what they were at the end of ME1. This helps a lot, but isn’t a perfect solution.

On Red And Blue

Building a Reputation

Mass Effect 3 throws a decent chunk of that out. There’s still no individual charm/intimidate skill, but instead a statistic called “reputation”. Paragon and Renegade are tracked on the same bar, and the total is your reputation. There are also completely unaligned “reputation” points that extend the bar, but preserve your paragon/renegade ratio. Your available choices depend on how much reputation you have. I feel like this is a much improved situation compared to ME2, because your ability to impress people depends, more than anything else, on how much you’ve done. Choosing the “nice” options doesn’t later lock you out of the “jerk” options. This is important, because some people are absolutely worth being a jerk to.

On Red And Blue

And what fun is it if you can’t indulge, sometimes?

On Unexpected Surprises

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Blaugust Post #16

First things first, this post will contain extremely minor spoilers for Mass Effect 2, and large spoilers for Mass Effect 1. ME1 came out 8 years ago, so I’m not exactly going to step lightly, this warning is all you get.

Yesterday I beat Mass Effect 1. If you know what you’re doing, it’s about 15-20 hours long, depending on how many elevators you take and how many sidequests you do. (If you want one of the squadmember achievements or the completionist achievement, expect to extend this to 30+.) I like it, but it’s really my least favorite of the three. One of the major reasons for this is the way powers work in Mass Effect 1: Each power has an independent cooldown ranging from 30 seconds to multiple minutes. Mass Effect 2 dramatically reduced the cooldown on individual powers, most of them are under 10 seconds, but all powers now have a shared cooldown. For power-spamming classes like Adepts or Engineers, this changes how they play dramatically. (It does decrease those classes alpha-striking potential, however.)

On Unexpected Surprises

On the other hand, Saren is a better villain than anything in the later games, although Harbinger’s taunting certainly makes an impression in ME2. Even though he’s under control of the real big bad (Sovereign), he provides a face to what you’re searching for. He’s even a moderately difficult boss fight on Virmire, although I’ve never fought him in the citadel. (I have no idea what the Charm/Intimidate Threshold for skipping that encounter is. Since it’s at the end of the game, I’ve never been without at least one of them at 10.)

On Unexpected Surprises

New Game++

So this brings me to Mass Effect 2. Normally, your choices in the game allow you to pick up select powers from your squad for your own, whether this really makes sense or not. (It doesn’t make much sense for a non-biotic to have Slam, for instance.) One of the bonuses on starting a new game is immediate access to one of these powers of your choice at the start of the game. It’s my personal opinion that some of them aren’t balanced for this, but it’s kind of a nice bonus for repeat playthroughs. Id’ completely forgotten about this, and now I have an engineer with Shredder Ammo, which does a large amount of bonus damage against targets with no armor/shields. Engineers specialize in stripping armor and shields, so I suspect this will go pretty well.