Things that are annoying

So much good bad stuff in here.

Let's see.

- Miranda's ass shots. One of the few moments in my decade long gaming career where I felt that a game actively insulted me. Almost as if it sidled up to me with this really skeevy grin, nudged me a few times and whispered "tee hee hee, I know why you're really playing this game. Tee hee hee."

- Pretty much everything about ME's firearms/thermal clips lore is stupid. Ridiculously overengineered weapons that don't hold a candle to present day guns, with stats that contradict the lore. If thermal clips were truly universal, pistols should have a huge magazine count because they generate way less heat over time than an assault rifle or machine gun does. But clip sizes are pretty much the same as in present day firearms, with pistols and shotguns having small clip sizes and assault rifles big ones. Thermal clips are standard ammunition in everything but name.

- The forced cutscene incompetence that was apparently required to make Kai Leng look awesome. That scene where he's hanging on to Shepard's shuttle made me furious. All that Shepard needed to do was hit the brakes and let Sir Isaac Newton take care of things, but nooo... and let's not even mention Thessia.

- Cerberus, that human extremist splinter group, apparently being a threat on par with the reapers.

Game play mechanics often contradict or don't line perfectly with lore. But the treating of a thermal clip like an ammo counter is a game play mechanic. If they didn't then the game wouldn't be balanced at all. Game play balance is a necessary evil that often times requires them to ignore lore in a game. Similar actions happen in movies all the time.


They aren't on par with the Reapers.  This is shown when the Alliance finally tracks TIM down and takes out his base of operation. They are only a threat because the Reapers are literally decimating troops, land and civilian populations requiring the full effort of every race to be devoted to fighting them to slow their advance.  At that point someone armed with a grapefruit spoon would be a threat simply because all the other resources are devoted to holding back another threat.

Yes, I know about gameplay and story segregation, and it's never a good thing. Gameplay and story should support and not undermine each other.

But here, the lore contradicts the lore before any gameplay happens by stating that thermal clips are universal and then completely ignoring what that actually would mean for any weapon's magazine capacity. Why even include this lore if the game does absolutely nothing with it? Magazine size vs heat generated per weapon type aside, even the clips are not universal as the lore states. When you pick up clips, it increases the ammo count of your individual guns, instead of giving you one common pool to draw from.


Yet Cerberus hands the player the only direct setbacks when they assault the Citadel and when they beat Shepard on Thessia. Yes, their base gets blown up in the end, but during the entire game, their ground forces are no easier to beat than the reaper troops. They are a small fraction of humanity which itself is only a small fraction of all council races, and yet the game gives them just as much attention as the horde of galaxy-genociding robo-cthulhus. That's completely out of proportion.

There is no over simplification here.  TIM needed Shepard to get access to the Collector base. Even the most paragon Shepard still worked for and allowed TIM access.  Shepard is not shown alerting the Alliance to the treasure trove of salvageable tech.  Hell all Shepard would have to do is tell Aria that Cerberus can access a treasure trove of Collector tech and she would have parked a Fleet of Mercenary ships outside the Omega Relay. She like everyone else with a pulse and not a sympathizer would know letting Cerberus have access to this tech, even the scraps of it is a shitty shitty idea.

But our protagonist with all the understanding of object permanence of a 6 month old does nothing and is shown to do nothing. Even though EDI directly states that Cerberus used tech salvaged from Sovereign to upgrade her hacking capabilities to be able to theoretically take on a Reaper. 




Shepard does nothing not even showing him attempting to prevent Cerberus from getting access to the wreckage of the Collector base.  The end result is TIM getting access, reverse enginering technology to make his own husk copies that are then used to attack the Grissum Academy in an attempt to kidnap powerful biotics/gifted children to twist and alter to his own gains.


Jack's slap across the face for putting Cerberus in the position to be able to attempt to kidnap the kids is Shepard's fault. Regardless of how noble the purpose was in ME 2 the end results are not so good.

The game makes it clear that the Catalyst studied and tried many attempts before settling on the Reaper solution. Many of those attempts were successful in short term but long term fell apart.  The Reaper solution is the noblest of intention. Preventing all life from being wiped out in a galaxy wide war. And it has been unbelievably successful given the thousands and thousands of cycles that have happened.  But the consequences to their actions is the death of billions upon billions of lives.

Univeral doesn't mean different guns have different restrictions. Hand guns are more compact which means less cooling capabilities. Higher heat production per trigger pull. Even in ME 1 when there as not heat sink set up the pistols could only be fired a limited number of times full auto compared to the likes of rifles. You really needed end game pistols before they became more useful as standard fire arm. And again that is more game mechanics comes into play.

Smaller design means more heat generated when the gun fires. Which means less shots per clip due to the quicker over heating. While guns like M-8 Avenger are much larger and could easily have more internal cooling allowing for the clip to last longer.

Also the reason you don't get an ammo pool is so when you empty your primary weapon and you are surrounded by enemies and you switch to secondary you aren't just stuck and die.  This isn't a survival game were you have to carefully manage your inventory. And setting the game up for people to constantly die and repeat levels because they burned up all their ammunition with one gun wouldn't make a lot of players happy.  Particularly at higher levels were even with a fully upgraded sniper you still often need 2-3 shots of a Black Widow to take enemies down.  Even more so if you start a new game + with an existing character for a second play threw.

Seriously I invite you to do a NG+ with an infiltrator on Insanity difficulty on ME2.  Have fun doing Mordin and Grunt's recruitment mission. No health upgrades, no weapon upgrades and all the Vorcha and Krogan have armor and shields and you have  the Mantis that takes 2-4 shots to kill each enemy.  I finally said F this after Grunts and just started a new play threw from my previous import on insanity.



Reaper ground troops are nothing more then cannon fodder. There only to purposefully waste and exhaust the capabilities of the races during the Harvest. The Reapers lose nothing when a dozen of them are killed because 2 dozen more are made from captured soldiers.  And then to be used to drag out the screaming remainder to processing faciliites. And at the end of the day abandoned to die and rot away on planets when the Reapers complete the harvest.

Both of those set backs are small potatoes to the Reapers.  Ceberus lead an almost successful Coup of the Citadel and stole some data by getting there before Shepard. Compare that to the Reapers that decimated the Batarian home world, harvesting and converting 90% of the planet into their soldiers.  Smashed threw the Alliance Fleets scattering them to the wind and attacking and dominating the Earth rendering entire cities smoking ruins  were the surviving citizens have no choice but to hide in the rubble like rats.  Took on the Turians the most heavily armed race outside of maybe the Geth and not only pushed them back to their home planet but also broke threw their defensive lines to attack and burn the planet from the surface.  Repeated on thousands of planets with countless lives lost. 

And some how you are making that equal to stealing a glorified USB and a failed assassination attempt.


Cerberus troops being an enemy provides 2 bonuses.

First it provides variation to prevent game play from getting overly stale. You will notice the MP side of the game uses 4 different enemy groups that vary up the combat and prevents the horde mode system from getting boring 2 rounds into it as you face the same 5 enemies over and over again. If you replace Cerberus troops with Reaper troops in every encounter in the game it would become very boring.

Second by mixing up the fights it allows them to keep up the idea that the Reapers are a threat. If you simply spend 6-8+ hours mowing threw them the threat of the Reapers is reduced. Because it sets it up like a child with a pair of scissors could take them out.  The variation provides the same benefit that bandits or mercenaries did in ME 1 and ME 2 compared to the main villains of Geth and Collectors respectively.

How were they to deal with the Collectors inside the Base? Continue blowing it up and then go blockade the Relay? How are they to know whether anything of the base is intact after exploding their safety point the IFF is supposed to attach to? If they decide to keep the base, how are they going to convince any major powers to cooperate and come retrieve it when Shepard's word is what they're basing it on? For all they know, it could be a lure to a trap. How exactly is one ship supposed to fend off multiple ships should Cerberus want to take it? ME3 showed that to gain access to the academy, Joker had to lead them on a goose chase instead of combating them directly.

As for the Catalyst, you might be content with the explanation, but too many others aren't. We've been given an example of where one of my suggestions actually did work effectively. They used subterfuge to indoctrinate the Batarian home world instead of direct invasion. It worked for the Reapers so efficiently when Batarians took in that Reaper corpse on Jarter, the home planet never could muster more than a few token ships to the resistance. Why the need to stomp all over the place trying to catch fleeing prey when using subtle ways to indoctrinate the races did the job without the mess? The Mass Relays were readily analyzed and integrated into society. Why didn't the Reapers masquerade as part of that tech?

How am I twisting what you say? It's rather hard to see why you're convinced by some aspects of the story. For example, why would Aria have any interest wasting resources on an organization that's not threatening her? She didn't give a damn about Cerberus until they actively removed her control over Omega. Her policy generally is one where she doesn't care what someone does so long as you don't mess with her. It worked for Archangel and it worked for Morinth. The other part I'm confused on is what Black ops can Shepard rely on? Are they enough to take out any number of ships Cerberus sends?

As for the Batarians, I don't see how what you said refutes that the Catalyst had other options available to approach this. Every major power with citizens dependent on stable security and cooperation has an investment to stay ahead on technological advancements. Every galactic race was intentionally made dependent on the Mass Relay tech. All it would have took was for the Reapers to integrate themselves into society and wait until a clean harvest was ripe.

Because you continue to to ignore the simple statement I made. That Shepard is never shown even attempting to disrupt the salvage operation. Not even a 5 second audio clip. Shepard knows TIM is capable of reverse engineering upgrades from scrap as he did from Sovereign to make EDI.  Which leads back to Jack's slap of Shepard being completely justified.  Doesn't matter how noble the reason Shepard still helped Cerberus and simply trusted the guy that used him as live bait by lying to him so simply not go after all the technology scraps that he not moments earlier tried to persuade Shepard to leave in tact for Cerberus to exploit. And that isn't even taking into account the literal Reaper that Shepard simply lets TIM have and continue to mess with.

Cerberus isn't like Morinth or Archangel who only kill random nobodies or other gangs that might attempt to challenge or authority. Cerberus is literally a terrorist organization that targets non humans and them getting a hold of Collector Tech after the Vorcha were able to almost wipe out an entire section of Omega when they give them a virus. It would be pretty clear that Cerberus would become a threat to her. In fact in ME 3 Cerberus kicks her out of Omega and you have to fight with her to retake her station.

The Reapers utilize the Mass Relays just as much as the rest of the galaxy. Hence why Shepard blowing up the Alpha Relay delayed their invasion for 6 months as they traveled to the next Relay.  As well the entire point and only reason we have a trilogy is they are suppose to capture the Citadel first and spread from there disrupting the Relay Network. Protheans altered that and prevented that from happening.

Also, Jack can complain all she wants. Without Cerberus, she'd still be locked up. So, no, her slap isn't justified.

Would they have? They weren't that concerned about the colonists being abducted. Who would replace Shepard? Would that person have been able to gather the galaxy together to fight the reapers?

People love to be on their high horse and moralizing about their position. Also Due to the political bullshit of the Citadel Council Space and Council Fleet gets their asses handed to them by Sovereign, So having the Alliance's hands tied by the aftermath of Sovereign.  Inept Leaders are the Reaper's best friends and Shepard is/can be roleplay as a capable leader and willing to fight the Reapers.


Also by the time that the Collectors made an overt attack on Alliance and Council Space, it will be too late and be a more of a clusterfuck than what we saw within ME3.