DATA CORRUPTION DETECTED

Mass Effect 2's portrayal of the ME universe is rather shallow. You can see the direction the series is going it, that of being pure shit, already beginning in ME2. It was a game that mainly took its inspiration from childish comic books rather than actual science fiction novels and films. That's why the main plot is so nonsensical with a universe that doesn't quite make sense any more or have any consistency.

Anyway, Bioware started work on Mass Effect and Dragon Age before they were acquired by EA. However as soon as EA got its hands on them the studio was doomed and their products were guaranteed to gradually degrade. The same thing happened to studios that came before them and the final result will be Bioware not existing.

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I think she is highly overrated as Shepard. She tries too hard to sound dramatic and it comes across to me as pretty fake. I do admit that in ME1 Mark Meer had a few lines were very flat, but the most part his Shepard sounds very natural and real. He only got better as the series went on. Hale's Shepard tries too hard to sound grizzled. Plus it's hard to take her seriously because Femshep's model is just too small to realistic ally intimidating or physically imposing.

dont forget how cerberus goes from a terrorist cell to somehow being able to declare war on the entire rest of the galaxy

Sometimes I think that class selection for Shepard was a bad idea. The game could have expanded on Shepard more as a character and it would have fit the themes of the series better if Shepard was a male soldier without fancy abilities besides Charm/Intimidate and Unity. Thus Shepard must rely on leading a team of characters with more specialized abilities. It would reinforce team-work. At the same time, bring back the ability from the Mass Effect beta where the player could switch to playing as any of the squadmates in the thick of battle.

Having just one gender for Shepard would have freed up more dialog for him and his class being locked in as soldier would avoid the issue of him using in appropriate weapons in cut-scenes or never using biotic or tech powers in cut-scenes.

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Really all you need is snipers and pistols, maybe shotguns if you're dealing with aggressive melee enemies.
Soldier is really good for all the toughness through armor, immunity, shield boost, and adrenaline rush.

I knew as soon as my Sole Survivor Shepard looked upon the terrorist group that killed his unit, tortured his comrade, and killed an alliance admiral out to stop them and said "yeah sure I'll join" ME2 was going to be shit

>Mass Effect 2's portrayal of the ME universe is rather shallow
It's because that was ME1's job. ME1 is presented as a big space opera movie where everything is shiny, ME2's job was fleshing out the people and presented as a TV series depicting all the dirt that the universe wants to hide from the tourists. They had very different goals that should have come together in 3 but we all know what happened there. Personally 2 is my favourite because of the TV series angle and I find myself replaying it way more than I do the first.

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>big organization
Can't hide

>Cerberus is incompetent
experiment goes wrong/rogue in each game.

>Cerberus has massive funding
Why given the above?

>Cerberus is secretive but everyone knows them on sight
Contradiction

>Resurrecting Shepard and building the SR2
We are told by EDI that the Lazarus Project and Normandy SR2 consumed a majority of Cerberus' financial assets. That's before Lazarus gets blown up, Overlord blows up, Firewalker gets ripped apart, and the team of the Derelict Reaper is lost.

Then in Mass Effect: Retribution, the turians raid Cerberus and capture or kill dozen of Cerberus agents in the Terminus and Citadel Space, shut down numerous Cerberus front organizations, destroy many bases, and seize several Cerberus bank accounts.

A literal line from that book in which we are reading TIM's private thoughts states, and I am paraphrasing,

"Cerberus' resources were very limited and were already stretched thin. He (the Illusive Man) had always worked to portray Cerberus as being all knowing and all encompassing, but the truth was that it was a small organization by galactic standards."

Later he thinks that it would take him probably at least a decade to recover from the losses Cerberus has sustained. For not only have the turians destroyed much of his organization, but he fears that utilizing what resources he has left will give them away and invite further attack. He's largely paralyzed. Mind you, this happens about six months after ME2, so only about six months prior to ME3. Somehow in that short time frame TIM manages to EXPAND his organization into hosting entire armies and fleets with technology superior to the galactic standard. He also implants himself with Reaper tech despite his mindset in Retribution being that Reaper tech is extremely dangerous and demonstrating extreme caution in studying it, and his first thought about it being to find a way to prevent or reverse indoctrination.

NOTHING makes sense.

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ME2's job was carrying on what ME1 started you mong, there was absolutely zero reason to go the direction 2 went in beyond EA's desire to make a game that sold to a wider audience

>ME2's job was fleshing out the people and presented as a TV series depicting all the dirt that the universe wants to hide from the tourists.

Which it fails to do. The Terminus was described as a lawless region of space where many SPECIES hostile to the Council reside. They are implied to be weak on their own but united together against the Council they'd be a threat. Instead we get three MERC gangs and we don't really explore any of the worlds of the Terminus or meet any new aliens there and we experience none of the politics of the Terminus. That's why I call it shallow.

Bioware released the first animation ever developed for Shepard, and Shepard was originally designed as a women instead of a male
Male Shepard was only on the box art & commercials for marketing purposes, because more people would buy a game if they had the option to play as a male & fuck every women in the game.

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The game was basically fully complete before EA acquired the studio user so it was going in that direction regardless.

>we don't really explore any of the worlds of the Terminus
Wut? we go to more than a few of them
>or meet any new aliens there
Vorcha
>and we experience none of the politics of the Terminus
Omega and Illium both demonstrate their politics however I'll give you it's very hands off and informative instead of experiencing it ourselves.

So everything you said was complete bullshit just as I thought. Sheploo is the canon face of Mass Effect and having a female model before a male one (providing that person isn't just straight up lying to gain points, this is Bioware) doesn't mean a thing unless you want to say all Asari are Quarian as one of the Quarian designs were used for the Asari race during production.

You COULD write sensible reasons for Shepard to be compelled to partner with Cerberus even with the incidences you described, but then Shepard and TIM/Miranda/Cerberus need to talk about this shit. That tension between the two would make for GREAT conflict and drama. Having TIM/Miranda actually have some plausible reasoning to justify their actions would succeed in coloring our perception of Cerberus as very grey in deed.

You see, in ME1 we spend the majority of the Cerberus sidequest trying to find out that the organization even exists and what it is. The conclusion we are given just before Admiral Kahoku disappears is that Cerberus is an Alliance Black Ops group that has gone rogue. That already makes them interesting because it means they were created by our very own military of which we are apart. Their being able to go rogue and being former Black Ops, combined with how they are shown in ME1, being very secretive, tells us they must be a very small, very elite force.

So they make sense, though their motives and reasons for going rogue in ME1 are not revealed to us. The knowledge that they only recently went rogue is interesting though because it means Akuze and Pragia (Jack's loyalty mission) are incidents that happened more than a decade before Cerberus ever departed from the Alliance. So we are left to wonder about the nature of their recent actions. Did they go rogue because TIM was opposed to the Alliance's rather callous use of Cerberus or was it the other way around, with TIM being caught by his superiors but hten successfully transitioning Cerberus into his own private army via' his crafting of a cult of personality within Cerberus and cultivation of Cerberus own independent assets and private supporters in government and business?

That would all be very interesting to explore in ME2 and 3, but instead ME2 retcons Cerberus to have always been some civilian survivalist group with no connection to the Alliance at all.

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Infiltrator has the same toughness + tech abilities. It's probably the most versatile class in ME1. Bring along Wrex and maybe Liara or Kaidan and nothing can stop you. Really on Hardcore/Insanity you just need a biotic to control those charging Krogan.

>Having TIM/Miranda actually have some plausible reasoning to justify their actions would succeed in coloring our perception of Cerberus as very grey in deed.
too bad the only mention of it in ME2 was a single line in the DLC calling Shepard a traitor for it, which Shepard doesn't react to in any way. And then in ME3 Shepard's only thoughts when asked about it were "yeah it was tough"

Cope, FemShep is canon
> youtube.com/watch?v=Rn98FdSg-Fo

Yes, and originally Gordon Freeman was a biker with a huge beard. Look it up.

Somebody please post the pic of the monster Shepard saying, "I try"

>using memes to defend your argument
>posting a video 3 years after ME3 came out and the series ended
If she was canon, they wouldn't have used Sheploo for everything and would have stated otherwise when the game was still relevant. All you're doing is the vidya equivalent of Rowling saying stuff about Harry Potter after the fact to stay relevant.

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ME2 went to shit in the opening minutes as its revealed that Shepard is chasing down rogue Geth on the Council's orders. Shepard is a Spectre, an entirely independent operative, who entire job description involves doing his own thing to combat potential threats to galactic civilization. At the end of the last game, he clearly announces his intention to track down a way to stop the Reapers. ME1 had the Council intervene because his first mission was to bring in their best agent, something someone just promoted to Spectre would need help with.

So instead of starting the game showing that Shepard has come into his own and started making progress by himself, it reveals he's spent 3 months wasting his time doing chores for the Council. What a great start.

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ME2 had the best gameplay tho

Both are equally valid as Shepard's gender has no bearing whatsoever on the plot and femshep's VA did a great job, seethe harder

>Wut? we go to more than a few of them
We go to Omega and Ilium. On Omega we get a sense of some local politics, but we aren't actually involved in them at all. We just extract people who were actually involved.

>Vorcha
Non-entitities. They just exist to be fodder without any interesting lore or motivation attached to them. Compare them to the batarians whom we are introduced to in ME1 as slavers and rivals of humans. They competed with the Alliance for worlds in the Attican Traverse and Skyllian Verge. Their survey teams lied about the mineral richness on a world and causing human mining organizations to waste billions in investment. A batarian pirate carves his name into the surface of a moon with a message calling humans bastards. They withdrew from the Citadel and began supporting pirates, culminating in the Skyllian Blitz in which an entire pirate fleet attacked the human colony on Elysium. During the course of ME1 a batarian fanatic hijacks an asteroid and tries to crash into a human colony. When confronted he rants about how economically depressed the batarian people are after being shoved out of the region humanity. He resents that his people live in squalor without the worlds and resources that they need and ultimately blames humanity for "forcing" him to commit mass murder. We know the batarians are secretive people who found an ancient artifact on a moon and then hid it from the galaxy, we know their government is oppressive of its own people, successfully pulling all batarians from Citadel space.

The vorcha? Too dumb to speak. They are violent and their biology is adaptable. They aren't a real space faring race, having been taken from their world by krogan for use as fodder in their armies. They skulk around in dark alleys and live in shit holes.

What happened to the species opposed to the Council, whom united together would wage war on it? Where are the turian separatists and lysthenthi salarians, offshoots of the mainline salarians?

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Both are valid, only one is canon.

>ME1 had the Council intervene because his first mission was to bring in their best agent, something someone just promoted to Spectre would need help with.

The Council only interevened in ME1 to stop Shepard from going to Ilos, as it was thought he might be detected and cause a war with the Terminus Systems. As well, behind the scenes you can discover that the Council is seriously questioning Shepard's sanity at that point. (to discover this you have to visit Udina after completing Virmire, but before triggering the confrontation with the Council. Basically, you have to do Virmire as soon as it is revealed so that there is another main plot mission left).

ME2 was just ME1 but with the all the RPG elements cut out and replaced with nothing. ME3 did it better with fun gimmicks like the weight system and by having more unique combat areas that felt much more like natural locations

There is no canon, thus why Shepard could be male or female even in Andromeda.

Lazy trolling, try harder.

When people think of Commander Shepard, they think of FemShep. Cope harder

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>There is no canon
Plot wise? no. Presentation wise? yes. Sheploo is the face of Shepard and has been since day one and still now.

Kek they fucking don't and pushing your own blind ass thinking as fact is pathetic.

> Seething this fucking hard
Typical

>gets destroyed as you're unable to find anything to back up your statement during development
>is now just shitposting out of anger
Beautiful

Vorcha have some neat lore tidbits. They can communicate by inflicting pain on one another or something like that. Not the deepest stuff but at least they tried to flesh them out a little bit.
I'll take vorcha over endless waves of identical human Cerberus drones any day

ME2 scrapped ME1's concept of combat entirely and replaced it with a cover shooter. This had some advantages in that it had more distinctive weapons, even if there were fewer of them, and combat was faster paced. However you're right that it stripped out the RPG aspects, but that was mainly in the form of having simpler enemies. ME2 did improve on some things like adding in location-based damage.

To really understand the difference between ME1 and ME2 you have to play both on Hardcore/Insanity. In ME1 you will spend a lot more time in the powers menu directing your squadmates to use abilities like sabotage, damping, and lift/throw/singularity. In ME1 you have more enemies who charge at you, very quickly, do horrific damage at close range, and need to be managed. Damping and sabotage prevent from activating their own defensive powers or weapon abilities and the biotics are used to stop their charge while you pump 'em full of lead. Much more strategic.

In ME2 it is more about using abilities solely to do as much damage as you can as quickly as you can. It has its merits, but it is more action based.

Vorcha are a shallow addition. ME2 doesn't really deal with any politics in the Terminus.

What would be interesting would be visiting a turian colony that stands in defiance against the Turian Hierarchy. Maybe our turian squadmate this time is a supporter of them. He'd stand in stark contrast to Garrus, who was a turian patriot. Why does this turian think his colony should be independent? Why does he resent the Hierarchy? How do he and his fellow rebels feel about the Council, how is life in the Terminus? Maybe we see a different side of the turian race that casts them in a new light.

What ARE Lysthenthi salarians?

Drell and Vorcha should have been their own independent species with actual politics and cultures of their own. Cultures that could actually be articulated in an in depth way. Writing the drell as clients of the hannar was a bizarre direction to take them. It makes them very scarce and thus not well developed in the game. It also doesn't really leave open for them to be interested in any real politics as entities in their own right and I should also point out that they aren't a Terminus race. The vorcha I've been over.

WHY weren't we interacting with batarians more in ME2? Why not visit a batarian colony where slavery is being practiced in every street corner? Now THAT would give ME2 a dark tone. You'd interact with shop-keepers who are slaves or own slaves. The dancers at the nightclub you can visit would be slaves. We'd witness people being oppressed by people who are themselves oppressed, who live under a government that itself feels oppressed by the bigger fish in the pond.

Maybe we help some slaves escape or rebel. Maybe we help some batarian abolitionists? Perhaps we are forced to choose between batarian government officials who can help us but spread slavery and piracy or between rebel slaves who can't offer us anything but whom we can help escape to freedom?

So much potential and ME2 just has you shoot mercenaries.

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