Unpopular opinions

What about the people suffering brain decay in Jacob's loyalty mission? They weren't bad guys. Shepard had the option not to kill the colonists on Feros while they were shooting at them. Sure, Shepard had the means to save those colonists ME1 and not ME2, but the topic of avoiding slaughtering them in ME2 wasn't even discussed. They were cannon fodder to get to Jacob's dad. Unnecessary gameplay padding.

I saw it as another excuse to pew pew unrelated to the actual core plot. Shepard mowed through them without batting an eyelash or taking into consideration that they can't help it. As for the mercs in the other missions, most of them imo were unnecessary. There may have been some in-story reason why they were there, but most of them came off as trivial and boiled down to "let's shoot stuff" to get to the actual core part of the loyalty missions themselves. For example, the Cerberus lab in Jack's loyalty mission just happened to have mercs there under the command of Aresh. Some reasons made more sense than others, but Shepard was investigating the Collectors, not going on a mission to thin down the galaxy's merc numbers.

I enjoyed Samara's loyalty mission because it didn't have any actual fighting (well until their confrontation, but it was all story). Of course, all of that pew pew to track Morinth was taken care of on her recruitment mission, ha. Thane's was OK too, but it's hard not to get distracted by the techno turian.

The thread is titled "unpopular opinions", so I went in here posting my opinion. It was a part of the game I didn't like. It doesn't mean I disliked the whole game, and I was responding to someone on that topic.

Actually, the colonists on Feros could also be knocked out by a melee attack. Unlike in other portions of the game, this was not counted as a kill and was an alternative to the grenades that came in a limited amount. Something similar could have been implemented in Jacob's loyalty mission especially since those people weren't wearing armor as well, from what I recall.

So what your saying is...

In terms of Jacob's LM, I agree, if we were given the means to pacify those guys in a non-lethal way, that would have been great. In general, non-lethal weapons of some sort would have been a nice idea for paragon players. Deus Ex showed how it can be rewarding to entangle gameplay and dialogue in that sense, make it a bit harder to use non-lethal weapons but get some acknowledgement in dialogue for it.
That said, I didn't exactly have too much of a problem defending myself against the attacking hunters in Jacob's LM. At the time, Shepard and team have very little idea of what exactly is going on. All they see is a bunch of people who start shooting at them and they need to defend themselves. Once they discover what's happening in the camp, they shoot only mechs and 2-3 of Taylor's guards (by the way, what was the deal with the guards? Were they sane or not? If not, why weren't they hunters like the rest? If they were, who were they? I thought Taylor killed all the officers?)

As for Pargia, Well, there was a point to Aresh being there beyond the pewpew and I have to say, the mercs did improve the pacing of the mission quite a bit, so I don't mind that. After all, ME2 does have two LMs that have no gun play whatsoever, so they weren't opposed to it, they just felt that mission needed some fights (and Id agree with them). It's similar to the turret section during the goodbye scenes in the final earth section of ME3. A lot of people criticized that turret section as bein pointless. I disagree. I do think it provided a necessary distraction and reminder that we are still in this war zone in between talking to everybody like they were on a conveyor belt. Pacing is important and IMO, the MET gets that just right 99% of the time.

That's a fair assessment in terms of the story for sure. I guess I saw it more of a coincidence. Reapers happen to attack while Shep walks by -> Shep gets on turret and shoots reapers. But that one works just as well.

I was just more thinking in terms of mission design. If I were a level/game designer and I had looked at all those goodbye scenes in a row without the turret section during development, I'd probably also have said "we need some break-up in there or it'll get to monotonous, ticking the conversation check box for each character". Whether it had to be turret section, that can be argued but IMO it works fine as a little breaker in between (and it was probably one of the cheapest ways to implement it).

Well, if we were to redesign the entire thing, I'd have Shepard meet all of the guys in the field while fighting, sort of struggling on from foxhole to foxhole, meeting our guys in various situations (get saved by sniping Garrus, meet Jack and her students who do whatever you assigned them to earlier, join Wrex and Grunt for a krogan offensive and so on).
But, since I guess that was not in the budget, I think the goodbye scenes as they are were a nice touch. Especially when taking into account that the original ending pre EC had no slides or memorial. It was the last time you'd see them in the entire game. So I think some moment of catharsis with every one of them was needed there.

Kai Leng is a great villian. Not that he is a good character or anything but he is so digustingly repulsive, that I wanted to kill him more than anyone else.

Only if you choose to murder everyone. The player can still be renegade without doing that. I've played renegade many times without having killed everyone.

Or an entire galaxy of races. Remember you can always pick the decision are hard/my ego is most important option at the end.