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The Hammerhead is slated to be a Mako replacement. It will be DLC and I am assuming it'll come with a bunch of planets/missions for you to use it on (otherwise whats the goddamn point of having it?), but I guess there were a few kinks in the system or they decided to hold off on it and made it DLC rather than implement it in the game.

As for the Normandy's crew still being 'like furniture', I'm unsure of what you mean. You can interact with joker, the engineers, the ship's cook and Kelly, and the latter is supposed to be your go-to girl for dealing with the crew. Everyone else is sort of in the background at their stations but what else are they supposed to be doing?

But yeah, it's so much better than ME1, which looks downright primitive in comparison. The only reason I'm even playing ME1 is to get a couple more characters up to level 60 for import purposes.

I'm going to make a bold prediction and say that the Hammerhead and associated content is too ambitious/ too much work for DLC and they will push it back until the expansion pack comes out, whenever that'll be (late 2010/ early 2011?).

Stofsk wrote:The Hammerhead is slated to be a Mako replacement. It will be DLC and I am assuming it'll come with a bunch of planets/missions for you to use it on (otherwise whats the goddamn point of having it?), but I guess there were a few kinks in the system or they decided to hold off on it and made it DLC rather than implement it in the game.

I figured it'd be something like that, actually. Not that I miss it, I hated the MAKO (well, not the concept, but the gazillion of empty maps to drive it around in)

Stofsk wrote:As for the Normandy's crew still being 'like furniture', I'm unsure of what you mean. You can interact with joker, the engineers, the ship's cook and Kelly, and the latter is supposed to be your go-to girl for dealing with the crew. Everyone else is sort of in the background at their stations but what else are they supposed to be doing?

There's some small quests and they comment on the overall situation, which is an improvement over ME1, but you don't really feel like a ship's commander: more like a passenger taking a bunch of buddies along for the ride. Of course, the game isn't really a starship simulator, so that's quite okay. I still wouldn't mind some small changes depending on how you run the ship, being reflected in crew behavior - or actual, hard choices during combat, like sending people off to die (I didn't get to the part where you fight the collector ship, though, so I wouldn't know yet) during damage control efforts. These always help with dramatism.

For example: while you can interact with the engineers, and even play poker with them, it doesn't matter if you use your command authority to pressure them into letting you win or not. There's not a single line of dialogue about it.

Stofsk wrote:But yeah, it's so much better than ME1, which looks downright primitive in comparison. The only reason I'm even playing ME1 is to get a couple more characters up to level 60 for import purposes.

Take a look at dialogue choreography in both parts: while ME2 has some really awkward parts (people getting up, sitting down, immediately getting up again, etc.), it looks way more fluent and alive than ME1's puppet show, or wooden "Shepard lunges forward, gets in somebody's face, immediately backs off, dialogue continues like nothing happened" incidents.

Not to mention texture quality: it really adds to immersion when you can visually tell Grunt is a young and healthy Krogan, or texture of the material, and it doesn't impact performance negatively at all!

Vympel wrote:I'm going to make a bold prediction and say that the Hammerhead and associated content is too ambitious/ too much work for DLC and they will push it back until the expansion pack comes out, whenever that'll be (late 2010/ early 2011?).

I don't see how its too ambitious. It's just a gravtank with accompanying missions. But I guess we'll have to wait and see. I think it'll probably be announced soon. Dragon Age already has an expansion scheduled for March, which would be less than half a year after its release.

I'm more interested in hearing when ME3 will be released, considering they need to release it in the Xbox 360's lifespan - but it has a few more years left to it.

PeZook wrote:loyalty quests except for Thane and Samara.

Rather amusingly, these two have absolutely no combat in their loyalty missions...

After playing a few hours, ME2 has been better than the original in all cases so far. The one thing I miss from ME1 though is that you're not a Spectre anymore. Well, you are in ME2 as well, but here it's just an empty title. In ME1 it gave you the feeling you had carte blanche, gave you a license to kill or to be a dick. Working for/with Cerberus, far less so.

There are a lot of nice little touches compared to ME1.

Oh as to the moral qualms of punching a reporter, she was in ME1 and if you played nice to her she totally misrepresented everything you said. I think she was working for the Mass Effect Universes equivalent of Fox News or the National Enquirer. She's totally obnoxious, so don 't feel guilty about punching her out. Even if you did in ME1 Admiral Hackett gives you a mild ticking off for it, then wryly comments that at least not to do it on camera.

The little stand off with the Batarian bartender in Omega is amusing, whatever choice you make.

wautd wrote:After playing a few hours, ME2 has been better than the original in all cases so far. The one thing I miss from ME1 though is that you're not a Spectre anymore. Well, you are in ME2 as well, but here it's just an empty title. In ME1 it gave you the feeling you had carte blanche, gave you a license to kill or to be a dick. Working for/with Cerberus, far less so.

Bah, you can still fuck up a factory on the Citadel, leaving behind dozens of mangled bodies, and nobody gives a shit, despite you being the only person to book transport to the factory district while wearing a fucking arsenal on his/her back

Andrew_Fireborn wrote: Rather amusingly, these two have absolutely no combat in their loyalty missions...

Holy shit, man. The irony is literally palpable

PeZook wrote:

wautd wrote:After playing a few hours, ME2 has been better than the original in all cases so far. The one thing I miss from ME1 though is that you're not a Spectre anymore. Well, you are in ME2 as well, but here it's just an empty title. In ME1 it gave you the feeling you had carte blanche, gave you a license to kill or to be a dick. Working for/with Cerberus, far less so.

Bah, you can still fuck up a factory on the Citadel, leaving behind dozens of mangled bodies, and nobody gives a shit, despite you being the only person to book transport to the factory district while wearing a fucking arsenal on his/her back

But officially, you're still dead, so what does it matter if people thought they saw you there? Must have just seen someone's Shepard VI.

Actually, you're not officially dead by then, not after having a conversation with Captain Bailey.

Stofsk wrote:Actually, you're not officially dead by then, not after having a conversation with Captain Bailey.

Only if you let him reactivate your ID's. You can choose to "stay dead" and he just blocks the system from registering you.

Oh right, I forgot you had a choice in the matter. Nevermind.

Stofsk wrote:Oh right, I forgot you had a choice in the matter. Nevermind.

Well it doesn't really affect anything. I did it for this play through and then went up to Udina's office and got reinstated.

That is my only big issue with ME2. A decision like that, staying legally dead, should have consequences. Along with the other decisions of the like that should effect gameplay and do not.

It's kind of annoying that all loyalty quests are basically shooter missions with some dialogue in between: I kind of expected the Tali mission to be different, but no, it quicly got to "go shoot the geth".

See, you avoiding Thane+Samara's loyalty missions is why you think this. Thane has you tailing somebody from a rooftop then stopping an assassination, without firing your gun once. Samara's has you attracting an Asari serial killer, getting her to take you back to her bedroom then stalling for time until the Cavalry arrives.

- Hard vacuum areas? Fear not, all a naked woman needs is an oxygen mask!

No, just hostile atmospheres. Although it is jarring to see everybody wearing a hardsuit, then Miranda in her Space Slut outfit with a breather mask. Afaik nobody is actually exposed to vacuum.

Cerberus rebuilding Shepard for...uh, for some reason.

Them killing him and rebuilding him solely as an excuse for character creation screen was a really dumb move. And that Cerberus could have solved the problem by using the SR2 to just blockade the Omega 4 relay, since in the end we find out that the SR2 with no upgrades is perfectly capable of destroying the Collector ship, and they only have one.

What, the Alliance can't spare ten guys to go and take a look/download security camera footage? For fuck's sake, the goddamn Quarians managed to realize one of their dudes on Pilgrimage was gone, and get a squad there!

The ridiculousness hits critical mass when you realize that they won't accept being able to actively examine the dead body of a reaper (Turians managed to reverse engineer it's main gun from the scraps...), testimony of the human spectre and his crew as evidence that the Reapers are a real threat, but one goddamn audio clip is enough to make the council 180 on Saren without even checking it for falsification. Entire human colonies are going missing, and the all human council suddenly doesn't give a flying fuck about it and won't even see you to chat.

Then you go and meet your surviving human buddy from the first game, and they're all "oh, you mean Cerberus wasn't behind this?[/i]

Er, you make an unaided zero-gravity space-jump to the airlock of the Normandy off the derelict reaper. Yeah, don't tell me that's pressurized.

White Haven wrote:Er, you make an unaided zero-gravity space-jump to the airlock of the Normandy off the derelict reaper. Yeah, don't tell me that's pressurized.

You're not in vacuum, you're in the upper atmosphere of the gas giant.

That's not exactly better though...

Havok wrote:That is my only big issue with ME2. A decision like that, staying legally dead, should have consequences. Along with the other decisions of the like that should effect gameplay and do not.

But you'd like it if the choice between returning and serving the goverment or staying in the shadows with Osama changed the tone of the game.

adam_grif wrote: See, you avoiding Thane+Samara's loyalty missions is why you think this. Thane has you tailing somebody from a rooftop then stopping an assassination, without firing your gun once. Samara's has you attracting an Asari serial killer, getting her to take you back to her bedroom then stalling for time until the Cavalry arrives.

I'm not really avoiding them: I just postponed Illium for a while, and when I finally got around to doing it, I was kinda sick of the loyalty quests. It's not like I care about space slut Samara anyway, so I thought I'd just skip solving her family issues.

But now I guess I'll do it just to see how it unfolds

adam_grif wrote:No, just hostile atmospheres. Although it is jarring to see everybody wearing a hardsuit, then Miranda in her Space Slut outfit with a breather mask. Afaik nobody is actually exposed to vacuum.

The "derelict" Collector ship had a huge motherfucking hole in its outer hull that you use to board it, and no forcefield in sight. Besides, it's not like hostile atmospheres don't hurt, say, your exposed nipples

adam_grif wrote:Them killing him and rebuilding him solely as an excuse for character creation screen was a really dumb move.

The really dumb move was making Lazarus something incredibly expensive (4 billion credits? Shepard better be a planet-destroying superweapon for that kind of money...)

It would've worked better if the project was deemed difficult rather than something that necessitated its own space station.

Also, why the fuck did Wilson betray the project, anyway?

adam_grif wrote:And that Cerberus could have solved the problem by using the SR2 to just blockade the Omega 4 relay, since in the end we find out that the SR2 with no upgrades is perfectly capable of destroying the Collector ship, and they only have one.

How were Cerberus supposed to know there is only one Collector ship, and that the SR2 Normandy was capable of destroying one, and that the bugs would always come into known space via Omega 4?

adam_grif wrote: The ridiculousness hits critical mass when you realize that they won't accept being able to actively examine the dead body of a reaper (Turians managed to reverse engineer it's main gun from the scraps...), testimony of the human spectre and his crew as evidence that the Reapers are a real threat, but one goddamn audio clip is enough to make the council 180 on Saren without even checking it for falsification.

Yeah, introductions for both games are pretty terrible, though Eden Prime was at least logical and believable, unlike combat tutorial continued Freedom's Progress.

adam_grif wrote:Entire human colonies are going missing, and the all human council suddenly doesn't give a flying fuck about it and won't even see you to chat.

Don't forget humans now have the largest warfleet in Citadel space, thanks to Sovereign wiping out everybody else and forcing them to rebuild, yet for some reason they're worried shitless about sending in ships to check on colonies that suddendly go black. Clearly, sending in a frigate to see what's up will lead to a war with the Terminus Systems! Our hands are tied by politics!

Especially grating since it's mentioned all over that the Alliance did send in materiel and personnell to set up a defence grid. It's like a group of US military advisors vanishing along with an entire Pakistani city, and a couple days later the site is still deserted, with no single soldier in sight.

adam_grif wrote:Then you go and meet your surviving human buddy from the first game, and they're all "oh, you mean Cerberus wasn't behind this?[/i]

Obviously if Cerberus was behind this, there's no need to worry

Also, why the fuck did Wilson betray the project, anyway?

Never explained. You hear in one of the audio logs that Wilson "wished that he (illusive man) would throw some of that money my way". That's as much as we get.

How were Cerberus supposed to know there is only one Collector ship, and that the SR2 Normandy was capable of destroying one, and that the bugs would always come into known space via Omega 4?

How was Cerberus supposed to know that Shepard would bump into Garrus, who happened to have contacts in the Turian military, who happened to know guys who knew guys who had access to the technical specifications to the Thanix cannon?

What was their plan again? To have Shepard and a frigate... do something? The omega 4 relay being the only relay into Collector space is common knowledge in the galaxy. "Let's put some cruiser guns into orbit around it" is a better and cheaper plan than "hey lets resurrect a soldier who has no experience fighting a mysterious enemy we know almost nothing about except the general direction they come from".

The Illusive Man's plan, as evidenced by the whole "lets grab the reaper IFF then hit them where it hurts" mentality, was to send a frigate through to attack their homeworld. Shepard preparing to jump through the O4 relay and take his crew back is unbelievably suicidal, because at this stage they don't know how many ships they have and think they have a planet instead of just a small base with minimal defenses.

This is expressing an astounding level of moronitude, mainly on Shepard and Illusive Man's part (who apparently had no problems with his 4 bln credit investment doing something so apparently suicidal). The collectors being such pushovers was sheer blind luck.

Especially grating since it's mentioned all over that the Alliance did send in materiel and personnell to set up a defence grid. It's like a group of US military advisors vanishing along with an entire Pakistani city, and a couple days later the site is still deserted, with no single soldier in sight.

Oh, and lets not forget the idiocy with how there is "no trace of anything" in any of the colonies, but the goddamn Collector ships take off with some sort of enormous fusion torch or something that scorches half the fuckin' colony.

adam_grif wrote: Never explained. You hear in one of the audio logs that Wilson "wished that he (illusive man) would throw some of that money my way". That's as much as we get.

Oh, yeah, I remember that. I guess there were no surveillance bugs in this all-important facility, unlike the Normandy, huh?

adam_grif wrote:How was Cerberus supposed to know that Shepard would bump into Garrus, who happened to have contacts in the Turian military, who happened to know guys who knew guys who had access to the technical specifications to the Thanix cannon?

What was their plan again? To have Shepard and a frigate... do something? The omega 4 relay being the only relay into Collector space is common knowledge in the galaxy. "Let's put some cruiser guns into orbit around it" is a better and cheaper plan than "hey lets resurrect a soldier who has no experience fighting a mysterious enemy we know almost nothing about except the general direction they come from".

The galaxy knows they live "somewhere beyond the Omega 4 relay", not that it's the only way in or out of their space, and most people consider them a myth anyway.

adam_grif wrote:The Illusive Man's plan, as evidenced by the whole "lets grab the reaper IFF then hit them where it hurts" mentality, was to send a frigate through to attack their homeworld. Shepard preparing to jump through the O4 relay and take his crew back is unbelievably suicidal, because at this stage they don't know how many ships they have and think they have a planet instead of just a small base with minimal defenses.

Yeah, it sounded completely insane when IM told Shepard this. "We need to hit them where it hurts!". With a single frigate and ten guys. What if they have twenty million soldiers under arms and a planet bristling with defences? Or even more than one ship in orbit? Replace "Collectors" with "The Alliance", for example, and the plan suddendly sounds like something out of a fever dream.

adam_grif wrote:This is expressing an astounding level of moronitude, mainly on Shepard and Illusive Man's part (who apparently had no problems with his 4 bln credit investment doing something so apparently suicidal). The collectors being such pushovers was sheer blind luck.

Don't worry, ME3 will surely reveal IM had some great plan all along and reasons to believe Shepard would survive the suicide mission.

They'll probably say something along the lines of "Oh, it was just a test, I needed to see if you're up to the next task I have for you. Also, I'm not crazy."

adam_grif wrote:Oh, and lets not forget the idiocy with how there is "no trace of anything" in any of the colonies, but the goddamn Collector ships take off with some sort of enormous fusion torch or something that scorches half the fuckin' colony.

They were kind of in a hurry on Horizon, though, what with defence systems shooting at them already. Of course, if they had just sent two Pretorians out of their gigantic starship to blast the control systems, they'd be just fine

They were kind of in a hurry on Horizon, though, what with defence systems shooting at them already. Of course, if they had just sent two Pretorians out of their gigantic starship to blast the control systems, they'd be just fine

Or if they would just coordinate their forces into a single flanking attack instead of slowly spreading them out over waves of successively more powerful groups so as to acclimatize Shepard. If those 2 scions attacked at the same time as the Praetorian, husks, and collector troopers, gg Shepard.

The galaxy knows they live "somewhere beyond the Omega 4 relay", not that it's the only way in or out of their space, and most people consider them a myth anyway.

The O4 relay is where all their ships come from. Them being a myth is the public at large, important people seem to know the collectors exist because they pop up every few years and make trades. Thane, Samara etc all seem to just buy it at face value. Asari especially should be able to confirm their existence because they live for thousands of years.

But people have seen them coming through O4 relay, and all ships sent through it never return. It's pretty obvious that it's some kind of Collector strongpoint, so blocking off their obvious entrance to the terminus systems seems like the logical thing to do. If they find another way we can work from there, but blocking off what appears to be their only logistical route seems like a no brainer. If TiM didn't expect big guns to kill them, then resurrecting Shepard and building the SR2 with the intent to directly assault them was a colossally stupid thing to do in the first place.

As it turns out, the O4 relay is their only way in. So even trying this obvious first step would have proven to be 100% effective as a measure to stop Collector attacks. They have one ship that falls to a half dozen hits from a frigate's wing mounted mass drivers. The standard Cruiser length mass accelerator would fucking slaughter it. The SR1 cost as much to build materially as a heavy cruiser, the SR2 was twice its length, substantially more massive and had a proportionally larger drive core (the most expensive component). Ergo it must have been at least twice as costly as the SR1, meaning that he could have bought at least 2 heavy cruisers for the price of the SR2 alone. Some kind of light cruiser would presumably be cheaper, or a whole wolf pack of normal frigates.

This is just more of the supersoldier wankery we see in games and fiction all the time. The mindset that it's better to have one Commander Shepard than a squad of marines with drone support. That one supership is better than a fleet of normal ones, even if they have substantially more firepower.

Yeah, it sounded completely insane when IM told Shepard this. "We need to hit them where it hurts!". With a single frigate and ten guys.

The dirty dozen being able to take on a collector base by their lonesome and come out with zero casualties potentially is astonishingly poor writing. Even what they came across, a 20+ kilometer long space station with the entire enemy army on board, and somehow nobody blinks when Shepard gives the order to land on it?

'Blocking off' their entrance? How the fuck are they going to do that, with their nonexistent space navy in the Terminus Systems where people like batarians and other merc groups fucking hate humanity? How would Aria take to having a small fleet of warships blockade anything in her system? How would the bands of mercs and criminals respond to that?

And how is sending in one stealth ship to see if the IFF worked or not a dumb idea, when as far as anyone else knew nobody who has ever gone through the relay has ever returned? The Collectors were never shown to have many ships either - just the one. And despite its impressive spinal mounted beam weapon, it was basically a large transport ship. Ironically it would have probably had an easier time of smashing through conventional warships that same way Sovereign's finger beams sliced through Alliance heavy cruisers.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and the mission was to stop the collectors, but TIM's secret mission was to actually capture the base - you can't capture territory you're blockading. And they didn't know for sure that the Omega-4 relay was the only means the Collectors had to come and go. AND the debris field directly in the emergence point shows seems to have deliberately been set up to have interlopers collide with them and be destroyed. You'd need a small, nimble ship to plot a safe course out of the Omega-4 emergence point.

Stofsk wrote:'Blocking off' their entrance? How the fuck are they going to do that, with their nonexistent space navy in the Terminus Systems where people like batarians and other merc groups fucking hate humanity? How would Aria take to having a small fleet of warships blockade anything in her system? How would the bands of mercs and criminals respond to that?

Well...if Cerberus spent those 4 billion creds on something else than resurrecting commander Mary Sue (like a huge fucking army), I'm not sure Aria would have anything to say about the matter.

Stofsk wrote:And how is sending in one stealth ship to see if the IFF worked or not a dumb idea, when as far as anyone else knew nobody who has ever gone through the relay has ever returned?

It was a dumb idea because it wasn't just a stealth ship, it was a gigantic investment carrying yet another (unnecessary to boot) gigantic investment aboard. They could've sent a stealth drone first, before telling Shep to go and hoping for the best.

Stofsk wrote:The Collectors were never shown to have many ships either - just the one. And despite its impressive spinal mounted beam weapon, it was basically a large transport ship. Ironically it would have probably had an easier time of smashing through conventional warships that same way Sovereign's finger beams sliced through Alliance heavy cruisers.

It had impressive sensors, too, and cut up the first Normandy like it wasn't even there. Also, at the stage in the game I'm at now, nobody realizes they only have one ship, just that the same one appears all around the place.

Stofsk wrote:EDIT: Oh yeah, and the mission was to stop the collectors, but TIM's secret mission was to actually capture the base - you can't capture territory you're blockading. And they didn't know for sure that the Omega-4 relay was the only means the Collectors had to come and go. AND the debris field directly in the emergence point shows seems to have deliberately been set up to have interlopers collide with them and be destroyed. You'd need a small, nimble ship to plot a safe course out of the Omega-4 emergence point.

Small nimble ship doesn't automatically mean the Normandy + Shepard. The point is they didn't even try to conduct recon with the IFF code before sending the Normandy in to capture the base, the IM was all "Shep, go and hit the Collectors, k?".