Mass Effect Playthrough: Part Four (The End)

 I finally finished playing through Mass Effect 3 (for the second time).  I already knew that the ending of the game had some issues, so there was not the big let-down that there was the first time.  Though to be honest, I did not have nearly the same rage against the end of the game that most seemed to.  I felt like Mass Effect 3 was, on the whole, a success, even the first time through.  I played for over 30 hours on the game.  If the last twenty minutes were subpar but the rest of the game was really good, I called it a success.

Note: there will be a lot of spoilers below.  Read on at your own risk.

CHOICES IN MASS EFFECT 3

So what did I decide to end up doing?  There were a lot of big choices.

The Genophage – I was working with Wrex, having seen him survive the previous two games.  He was one of those characters I did not grow incredibly close to in the first game, but always wished I knew more about.  He was a tough character – stubborn (like my Shepard).  I liked seeing the two of them butt heads.  I didn’t really want it to happen, but I knew there was no way we would both get what we wanted.  He wanted the Genophage cured.  I wanted peace in the galaxy after the war.  The Krogan were not going to be that peace.

Heck, even when Mordin arrived to try to cure them, almost every Krogan wanted to kill him.  Eve and Wrex talked them down, but it would be nigh impossible for the two of them to hold back the entire species from trying to wage war.  Once I found out that Eve was dead too by the end of the mission, I knew the Krogan could not be allowed to repopulate.

I tried to delay Mordin, but he saw through my attempts.  I have to say when he turned around and shouted that he wanted to cure the genophage because he had made a mistake, I got chills.  A fantastic revelation for the character.  Unfortunately, I was trying to do something bigger.  I needed to save all life, not just Krogan.  I tried talking Mordin down, he refused, and I shot him in the back.  Made me feel about the worst person in the galaxy at that point.  I hated seeing him try to crawl to the console to release the cure.  Shepard tossing her gun away after shooting Mordin was just about exactly how I felt.

The Quarians and the Geth – I knew this was coming and was dreading it from the beginning.  The friggin Quarians are dumb.  Every time I feel a little bit of sympathy for them, they go about trying to bring about their deaths faster again.  They attacked the Geth at every turn, and then came crawling back to me again to try to save them.

Once the Geth were freed from the Reaper, I was given the choice of letting Legion upload the upgrades to the rest of the Geth (and give them the ability to overwhelm the Quarians) or leave them to die.  To me it was not much of a choice.  At every turn I had argued that the Quarians should not be following this path.  The Geth had tried peace with the Quarians several times only to be attacked each one.  I was done with it – the Geth had as much a right to live as the Quarians.  They had tools – let them use them.

Fortunately I was given the chance to say pretty much exactly that to the Quarians.  “I’m done trying to save you.  If you don’t stand down in 30 seconds, your ships will be blown out of the stars.”  The Quarians finally listened and sought peace.  Seeing the Geth and Quarians work together at last made me quite happy.

The End – I have to say, I liked the new scenes added in to the end.  Being able to say goodbye to Liara (who I ended up choosing this game over Garrus) was touching.  The extra conversation pieces with the kid at the end were fun to explore (especially in light of the Leviathan DLC).

The first time I had played through this game, I went with the Destroy option.  It felt the most in-line with what I had done up to that point.  I couldn’t justify spending so much time working towards the death of the Reapers only to give in at the end.  I couldn’t take Control because I had just argued with the Illusive Man that it was a bad choice.  And Synthesis just did not feel right to me.

This time through, after a lot of conversation, I ended up going with Synthesis.

Sadly, there’s not much to really say about the ending.  While I had a lot of emotion during the part with Mordin (disgust at myself, desperation to keep the Krogan in check) and in dealing with the Geth (anger at the Quarians, defensiveness for the Geth), I didn’t have nearly as much in the end of the game as a whole.  I had already said my goodbyes to the characters and come to terms with the fact I was probably going to die.  I was confused to see that the Krogan started repopulating anyway (so… what was the point of all that?), but it was nice to hear EDI’s voice-over end with “Because of Shepard, I am alive.”  A nice touch.

CARRYOVERS FROM OTHER MASS EFFECT GAMES

There were a lot of choices that moved from the first game to the second and then the third.  I was surprised at how much actually impacted the future.  There were some big events – like not killing Wrex in the first game.  Keeping my crew alive during the suicide run led directly to a lot of them returning in the third game.

But there were also minor changes that happened.  For example, in the first game, I played through a bunch of the minor missions.  One took me to Luna where there was a rouge AI.  In the second game, when I first met EDI, there was an extra line of dialogue that talked about how I was untrusting of AI, partially because of the rouge I fought against in the first game.  I thought that was a nice touch but didn’t think much of it.

Then, in the third game, I was rewarded with a full couple-minute scene with EDI where she revealed to me that she was, in fact, that same AI from Luna I had fought with before.  She explained that was when she first “woke up” and that it was a particularly confusing time for her.  It was a nice add-in and felt like it was helping to bring pieces of the story full-circle.

That’s one of the things I liked most about this playthrough.  I found the green-skinned Asari because I helped her on the plant-world in the past.  The Rachni sent someone to speak with me in ME2 because I had saved her in ME1.  Convincing Miranda to speak with her sister in the second game led to different interactions between them in the third game.  Everything built on itself.

DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT

In order to prepare for my trip through Mass Effect 3, I downloaded all the extra missions I could.  Since this might be my last playthrough (though I am already thinking about going again down the line), I wanted the full experience.

Omega – Of the three Mass Effect 3 missions, the Omega one was certainly the worst.  Which, to me, says a lot, since it was still a significant addition to the game and felt fun.  I was disappointed that I could not take my team with me, though, and overall the missions felt a bit more hollow than the rest of ME3.  I enjoyed it, but mostly because I enjoyed any time I could play Shepard.  It didn’t really add much to the story.

Leviathan – This one, on the other hand, provided a ton of great stuff.  It slid straight into the overall plot and added a lot of answers to the mystery.  It took us to some pretty creepy locations (heading to the place where you first started sussing out Leviathan where all the people seemed eerily calm, or the floating ship in the massive ocean), but also stuck is in some real boring spots too (the place we sought out the scientist’s daughter).  The end conversation was fantastic and added a lot to the mythology.

Citadel – I can’t say enough good things about this piece.  Getting to see all the characters again in a light-hearted, self-referential mission was fantastic.  My favorite parts were certainly when Shepard used Joker as bait at the beginning and he figured it out, and when Shepard was finally captured by evilShepard and stuck in the airtight vault.  The most important thing to Shepard at that point was making sure people agreed with her that she sounded better than evilShepard.  A top-notch “epilogue” to the story, and a great chance to see everyone again.

INDOCTRINATION THEORY

After the game ended, I went back to read more about the Indoctrination Theory.  I haven’t gone through everything yet (some of these videos are almost two hours long!) but I intend to watch more.  I have to say, I think some of what it’s suggesting is pretty compelling, and I do not think that the extra material in the ending completely closes the door on it.  At the same time, there’s obviously nothing in the game that completely points to it.  There’s just a lot of circumstantial evidence that if it’s lined up right leads to the idea of Indoctrination.

I think I’m okay with the ending being ambiguous like that.  I know some people will say with complete certainty that the Indoctrination Theory is wrong.  Others will say with complete certainty that it is right.  Bioware hasn’t weighed in on it.  Yet.  Maybe they will some day.

But for now, I think I prefer thinking of the Indoctrination Theory as true.  It does leave some rather big holes (like: what happens in the end, then?  If Destroying the Reapers was just in his mind, doesn’t that mean they’re still out there?), but I always prefer games that are a psychological mind-twist to those that come out straight-forward.

So there we have it.  My trip through Mass Effect is over for now.  I had a great time doing it, and while my intention started off that this would be my last journey through the Mass Effect world, I may well start back up again sometime in the future.  Can’t close the door on all this yet.

But what’s in the future for me?  I had considered starting up Fallout 3 again.  I always liked that game.  Or I heard that Dishonored had a new set of missions that you could play.  But Dan is whispering in my ear that I should give the new Bioshock game a try.  That might be the next playthrough.  Whatever it ends up being, be sure that I’ll be writing about it here.

Fearsome Foursome Festivus - Third Annual

When I was in college, I had a group of friends with whom I would game extensively.  We’ve kept in touch after graduation remaining very close.  Unfortunately, life and distance keep us from being able to see each other very often.

In no particular order, we have Adam, Josh and Serious Mike (he had to be differentiated from me somehow, and Adam enjoys assigning nicknames to people).

Josh speaks quietly and is a great sport for ribbing and teasing.  Which works well, because Adam and I certainly enjoy picking on everyone.  Josh always comes with great game ideas, but sometimes (and mostly accidentally) says and does some of the funniest things in games.

Adam likes to joke and hates when people try to tell him what he should be doing.  To the point where if someone suggests that he should do something, often he’ll do the opposite just to show them that in fact, he would do something different.  His usual stance is to avoid being serious in games, though he can come into streaks or games where he takes them quite seriously.  Just got to make sure he’s prepped for it ahead of time.

Serious Mike understands rules, numbers, and efficiency.  Very early on in our friendship, it was fun to see him come up with the most efficient method to achieve a result and explain it to the group, and then watch Adam do whatever he could to not do what Serious Mike suggested.  He has a dry and sarcastic sense of humor.

I don’t remember which of us it was that first suggested it, but three years ago we decided to pick a weekend in the Spring and head to a hotel somewhere centralized (in New Jersey, as the case turned out), bring a bunch of games, and just pretend we were back in college again playing games all weekend.  We’ve managed to do so every year now for three years.  This past weekend was the most recent one – the Fearsome Foursome Festivus, or the Fearsome Foursome Reunion Tour.

So what did we end up playing?

Zombicide

This is one I am quite familiar with.  By the time I arrived on Friday night, Josh and Adam had already played this one a few times.  We went for dinner and then got a few more games in.

At one point, Adam was trying to put together the board (which, for those who have tried, know it involves a healthy amount of cardboard).  One of the pieces on he put down made no sense where it was.  Josh deduced that Adam must be reading the instructions wrong so he took it from them, but after reading, he made no changes.  Knowing that both Josh and Adam must be wrong, I took the instructions and found that indeed, they were incorrect.  Adam laughed at how little either Josh or I trusted him.

But an example of our lack of trust for him followed later that same game!  Adam has no idea how to play games (at least that’s the opinion I have in my head despite all evidence to the contrary) so at one point Josh and I were getting excited about how close we were to winning and told Adam what he needed to do in order to get us to a full victory.

Now it’s worth saying that Adam does actually know how to play games just fine.  Unfortunately for Josh and me, he also hates people telling him what to do.  So instead of following our instructions, he took the car his character was in, drove over one of my characters, killing him, and then hopped out of the car and shot another of my characters.  I proceeded to drive over both of his characters.  While we were engaging in a battle in the streets, Josh’s two characters up and fled the scene, escaping and winning while my last character was pulled down by zombies.

Good times.

Gauntlet of Fools

Serious Mike joined us for the next game, Gauntlet of Fools.  This was the only new game for me this weekend.  At the beginning of the game, four characters were selected and each was given a random weapon.  We went around bidding on characters.  You could steal characters from other players, but to do so you had to add a boast to them (“I’ll play the Monk with the Throwing Stars, but I’ll do it while juggling!”)  Each boast provided a different mechanical disadvantage to the character.  Once all players had characters, you head into the dungeon to defeat monsters and collect gold until the monsters kill the last player.  Then whoever has the most gold wins.

Overall it was a decent game.  We were getting tired by the end of it, and most of us were not really paying much attention.  At one point I had a hungover, juggling, one-hand-tied-behind-my-back, hopping-on-one-foot barbarian head into the dungeon.  He got killed pretty quick.

Level 7

The guys wanted to try out Level 7.  We went through the first two adventures, the first time with Adam and I escaping through the elevator while Josh and Serious Mike were captured in the medical room as the Lockdown began.  The second game we all escaped as we got the aliens and guards to start fighting in the first few minutes of the game.  That gave us the breathing room to get everyone out by the end.  Wasn’t easy, but it was a lot of fun.

Flashpoint

This game has become a staple of our Reunion Tours.  Josh is the one who introduced it to me back at the first outing.  He had one expansion that I do not currently have (though I will be getting it soon).  It brings you into a two-story house.  We played two games, the first we managed to win but barely, and the second we rescued everyone we could.  Then, for absolutely no reason, we decided to try to get Josh into the house on the second story and cut the house down around him so it collapsed.  Adam took over the Captain to force Josh to move while Serious Mike and I ran around the outside of the house with chainsaws cutting down the supports.  We managed to get him killed – it was fun.

Iron Kingdoms

Serious Mike ran us through the introduction session of Iron Kingdoms.  It was pretty good – I had already played through it once before at GenCon, so I generally let the other guys make the decisions about the game while I moved around and helped out.  I picked the magic character – the first time I tried using one – and he was quite good.  Blasting out spells and being able to boost hit and damage was fun.

The session itself was pretty linear (as expected for an intro).  With the exception of the fact that this time we essentially opted not to open a biscuit business like we had the first time I ran through this campaign, we did everything almost exactly the same.  The boss fight felt a little tougher, but Serious Mike was playing the villain a bit smarter and healing him for 6 or so wounds every turn.  With an armor of 19, it was tough to take him down.  We ended up doing so by surrounding him and removing his shield from the equation.

Later, I ran the group through a second Iron Kingdoms session – one I had written a while ago and just left the notes in my book.  It involved a lot of negotiating, some history, and then a small fight.  We ended up passing out at 2:30 in the morning and leaving the session unfinished (which cut out two more fights).

Quarriors

Finally, we played Quarriors.  Since last year, I had picked up two new expansions – one that introduced Locked Dice and one that introduced Quests.  Overall, neither of those expansions really added much to the game.  They brought in some needless complexity while not really adding anything of value.  The best way to play Quarriors, I think, is to use the base game and first two expansions.  They don’t really add too much more in the way of rules, and don’t muck things up too much.

Overall, due to external circumstances, the weekend did not go as long as normal and I felt we got fewer games in than usual.  Hopefully next year I’ll have a little more freedom to get some time off from work and get out there early on Friday rather than losing about a half a day there.

Mass Effect Playthrough: Part Three

I have been continuing my Mass Effect playthrough and discovered something: it’s not as much fun to poke fun of this game as it is other games.  As such, I’ve been a little light on updates of late.  Then Dan had the nerve to call me out on Facebook, so now you’re stuck here listening to me for a brief period of time.

Some spoilers from Mass Effect below:

I finished off the Mass Effect one game and there were, as far as I could tell, five major choices I had to make:

Who to mack on

Well, I was playing female Shepherd (her voice is so much better than male Shepherd’s) so I had only two choices.  Kaiden and Liara.  My wife thinks it’s hilarious that video games let you play lesbians all the time.  I managed to convince her that she was like Liara, she finally agreed, and then I had to choose Liara.  Besides, Kaiden was a whiny bitch.  So that was easy.

Who should die

Going back to the above issue, Kaiden is a whiny bitch.  That was no contest.  Let him die.

What to do with Rachnai

As I was playing through the Rachnai mission, I had full intention to kill off the Rachnai queen if I ever found her.  I mean, how could I let her live after all this.  But when I got to the end, I had an Ender moment and couldn’t quite pull the trigger and wipe out a whole race (yeah, not sure how I’ll deal with ME3 at this point).  I let her go, but reasoned that if she ever went crazy, I would hunt her down and kill her.

What to do with Urdnot Wrex

I saved him.  This was mostly an “on a whim” choice.  I wasn’t going to let the genophage get cured no matter what.  I was fine killing him to make sure of that.  I didn’t have to, so I kept him alive.  It was fun seeing how he talks to me more like a respected enemy in the other two now though.  I found I liked the character more after I “betrayed” him than before.

How to deal with the Council and who to put as the Human Representative

I wanted to save the Council, but in the end, I didn’t feel their lives were worth possibly failing to stop Sovereign.  I would have liked to keep them around, but they hadn’t done much to endear themselves to me, and in the end, they drew the short straw.  As for who to put on the council, there was never any question.  Anderson was a far better choice.  Udina was a weasel.

So with those choices in tow, I headed on to ME2.  I didn’t really get a chance to deal with Liara much, just on the Shadow Broker extra stuff.  I could tell that overall the choices I made has some impact on the second game, but not a tremendous amount.  Whoever I let live between Kaiden and Ashley would end up mad at me for being with Cerberus.  Urdnot Wrex had some fun conversation options since he was still alive.  Anderson being the Councilor did not seem to do a whole lot.  And the Rachnai were mentioned briefly, but they didn’t matter too much.

I did manage to get a whole new set of choices in the second game that got carried on to the third.

Who to mack on

This time I went with Garrus.  The romance scenes with him were comic gold.  Besides, he seems like he’d be cool enough if we don’t stick together in the third one.  Liara’s my girl.

Maelon’s Genophage data

Oh, I wiped that.  I wiped it right out.  Having seen how easy it was with Urdnot Wrex to have an ally in the Krogan turn enemy, I wanted no chance of another Krogan Rebellion.

Tell the Quarians what happened with Tali’s father

I wanted to tell them.  Only my loyalty to Tali kept me silent about her father.  I didn’t want her to end up in trouble, but her preference was to be exiled over having her father exposed, so I honored those wishes.  Fortunately I’m the mack-daddy at making people realize how dumb they are when I speak, so I convinced them to leave Tali alone and let her remain in the fleet.

I didn’t end up weighing in on the war effort, though.  I had my own problems to deal with.  I wasn’t going to get myself into their mess too.

What to do with the Geth Heretics

I decided they were too dangerous to let live.  I didn’t want them coming back and screwing with Geth programming again, so I opted to wipe them out.

Save or Destroy the Collector Base

I destroyed it.  That Illusive Man is pretty untrustworthy, regardless of whether he sounds like he’d make an awesome President.  I swear, the first time I heard him talking, it took me a while to not see him as President Bartlet and automatically assume he was wise beyond his years.  I think by about the third or fourth time he strung me out to die, I was ready to do whatever it took to piss him off.  If it destroyed a huge base in the process, so much better.

Did anyone die

I really worked hard at it and managed to keep everyone alive.  I had them all loyal until Tali went all buck-wild after she found out Legion was sending information about the Migrant Fleet back to the Geth.  I sided with Legion, saying that she was doing the same thing that he was, so let it be, but she evidently wanted me to side with her regardless of how much she was trying to screw over the Geth.  Unreasonable woman.

So with all those choices in tow, I have fired up Mass Effect 3.  I’m already about 15 hours through it, having made my first really tough decision (I like to think that if I was going to shoot Mordin in the back, I’d at least have the decency to shoot him in the head so he wouldn’t suffer – he was a great singer!) but I simply refuse to risk another Krogan Rebellion, especially with Eve, a stabilizing voice, having died.  The fact that only she and Wrex were able to put the Krogan in place implies to me that once both of them are gone, the race will descend back into chaos.  I’m not ready to risk that, especially when I can gain their support against the Reapers without worrying about it.

Anywho, with that, I’ll be heading back to Mass Effect 3 and trying to save the galaxy.

All this does make me want to run a sci fi roleplaying game though.  Dan told me I’m not allowed to stop running Legend of the Five Rings.  Jerk.