Why ME2 is the least good game in the trilogy for me

I think each of the games has things it does better than the other two. For me, ME1 is the favorite but I'd still put ME2 slightly above ME3.

I agree with the OP that ME2 is too limiting in not letting Shepard return to most of the environments after the combat sections are over and in the way Shepard ends up working with Cerberus. It felt as if BW worked backwards from "let's go darker and edgier" to "let's put Shepard with Cerberus instead of the Alliance or the Spectres" and then to "we need a reason for that, so let's kill Shepard and have Cerberus bring him/her back to life." I'm not saying that's actually what happened, just that it felt contrived as a way to send Shepard into some of the darker corners of the Milky Way. But it would have been simpler to have the Council ask Shepard to investigate the Collectors and pass along the crew dossiers on the ground that it's a covert mission and they can't afford to divert too many on-the-books resources to help.

Also, does Bioware think we're all a bunch of six-year-olds and will turn off the game if there isn't something to shoot at every 15 minutes? Some of the ways they shoe-horn in more combat are just goofy - Jacob's LM has the insane "hunters" and the shoot-anything-that-moves bodyguards, Aresh brings a bunch of mercs with him to the Teltin base for basically no reason that I can discern, the Blue Suns try to kill the people attempting to cure a plague that's wiping their own people out, Nassana's mercs happen to start shooting everything in sight just as Shepard shows up, and then there's Shepard's boneheaded decision to open all the doors at once on a ship full of violent criminals. If you're playing a Paragon, some of this makes Shepard look more morally questionable than I suspect Bioware actually intended (I even spacebar through the "open all the doors" scene so it seems like something else causes the riot).

I think where ME2 excels, aside from the Collector Base mission, is in some of the smaller character moments: Miranda coming to trust and respect Shepard, Thane's very un-assassin-like personality, Legion showing us a new side to the geth, the "it all seemed harmless" final frames of Overlord, the ironies in Tali wanting to protect her father's reputation at the cost of her own and of Jack discovering that another Teltin victim wants to restart the facility to make all the torture they endured worth something. ME1 has the shipboard conversations and the possible romances, but aside from the confrontation with Wrex on Virmire and Nassana's death, the character moments aren't quite as stark and unpredictable as in ME2. ME3 also has some good character scenes, but there's a little less variety - aside from EDI's arc, they're mostly some form of lamenting all the lives being lost, needing a break from the gloom, or making "big sacrifices."

So, here I am, again, how does changing whether we find the macguffin in ME2 instead of ME3 actually save ME3?

OK. Can you explain to me how and why it would/could demonstrably help and how that would improve the later missions or affecting the crucible's development?

Extremely superficial changes, speculation of whether it would have any effect at all, when it may have gone down the exact same way plus minus a thing or two, doesn't change structure of ME3 in any fundamental way. Doesn't even get rid of the starkid necessarily.


Something that could actually work. A very large undertaking, though, that would not have produced the games we got in the timeframe that we got them.


It is incorporated in the trilogy. Just not in the way you seem to want.


But it should be. Changing one thing around, doesn't mean that everything after it gets immediately re-written, it just gets reworked.


ME2 does what it wanted to do and does it well. Maybe it doesn't do what you want it to do in the trilogy, but that is not a fault of ME2 in itself. ME3, however, was a project that was doomed from the start. My argument is that nothing that ME2 could do, would have helped the 16 month long development of ME3. ME3 needed to bake for 4 years to be the game it needed to be.

I agree that I would rather have the plans to the microphone found in ME2 instead of the first 10 minutes of ME3. I've said before that the plans could have been discovered while investigating the weapon that created the Great Rift. Have A/K join Shepard. The plans are handed off to Hackett for study. At the beginning of ME3, Anderson can say the plans are for something that could stop the reapers. After leaving Earth, Hackett can tell Shepard to head to Mars to get t'soni who is looking for more information on what the device will actually do.

If not, have what I've been saying for years, is have Shepard travel to darkspace leaving the collectors as a big side mission. Once there, he/she finds plans that can stop the reapers or find information on how to stop the reapers, namely destroying Harbinger.

It is June 2019 and I still like ME2 the best.

As far as finding the "plans" go, I won't say that I have a strong opinion on that. However, there would probably have been less angst about ME2 if in the prologue Normandy was out scouting a lead on whatever might help understand or defeat the Reapers, and then are targeted by the Collectors for the effort.

One of the big complaints is the lack of Council support. I am not sure what the alternative is though. Even in ME3 once the Council can't deny Reapers, they still do jack all to help Earth.

Given the lack of evidence, it really isn't hard to believe that they take the threat of the Reapers seriously anyway. Especially considering the idea that this is a crisis that may occur somewhere in the future. Humans in general have a difficult time taking problems seriously when they do not affect their immediate lives. I think in some ways it is more believable that the Council might handwave away the threat as they do in ME2 then the retcon that they secretly were working on the threat but didn't tell Shepard.

I do think ME3 was improved with DLC and some balance changes, but I agree that at release it was pretty disappointing. Multiplayer was the surprise to me and maybe the strongest bit, but it does not improve the single player. Actually as above you can argue that with the original War Asset system and the poor N7 missions on the recycled maps, it indirectly reduced the quality of SP a bit.

No. I love my anger over ME3. It has seasoned and marinated for years


What are you talking about? Over half the quests, as described by the chart, are filler. Nothing of importance is extracted out of them, literally go here, collect 10 rat assholes and 5 bear dongs. ME3 is filled with figurative padding up the ass to stretch a game over a number of hours. The core game content is less than Anthem.


Let's count a bullshit excuse that Bioware made, to excuse their lack of a suitless quarian model, which was sure to turn up. Yeah, OK.


Nobody listens to Tali, she is purely cosmetic, as far as her admiralty goes and she admits it herself. She only says it because you said it and Gerrel, for whatever the fuck stupid reasons, goes along with it.


Without even a journal entry. And, as stated, on release, you had no idea whether those markers were legit, or if they'd even pop up.


Not even talking about the final cutscene. Unlike previous entries in the series, you can even choose which priority mission to do first; Rannoc, Tuchanka, Citadel, Sanctuary or Thessia and while ME2 did that for some missions as well, it did not do this to ME3's extent.

Again, fuck ME3.

What? I'm having trouble reading that. Can you rephrase?



If these are the only main quests, then why can't you tackle them, unless you also recruit a set amount of squad members between them? Which you can tackle at a more leisurely pace. Not entirely free, but more freedom than ME3s.


Which is also true for ME2, with the exception of certain events getting triggered and propping up a certain story mission that can't be circumvented. But that is done for tension. ME3 has about as much tension as Andromeda.


Consult the graph.