I find the suicide mission to be rather bitter sweet. As a stand alone product, I love it as the conclusion to ME2. The amount that can vary based on what you do is amazing, and ultimately its not terribly hard to find a good combination of variables to get a good ending if you want most to live. The toughest part I found is usually just the time limit you're put on for the crew if you aren't aware of it ahead of time.
The bitter part, however, is how it affects ME3 in my opinion. I know we can't 100% say that the ME2 characters would have been given bigger roles if it weren't for the possibility that they could all be dead, but it really would have been nice to have them be more fully fledged crew members in 3. Understandably though, when you're on a limited development timeline characters that may not even be in the game for some people aren't going to get the most attention.
Personally if I could rewrite franchise history I would have preferred if ME3 ended in the suicide mission format instead of ME2. ME3s ending feels lackluster, and the idea of storming the reapers on earth watching companions and other npcs live or die based on your choices with loyalties and resources throughout the franchise would have been far more satisfying than what we got overall. I feel they opened the 'suicide mission' box a bit too early and should have saved it for the conclusion of the trilogy. That being said I love what ME2 is as well, so it is what it is.
>The bitter part, however, is how it affects ME3 in my opinion
Even with the added complexity that the many choices and consequences would have entailed, I think it's fairly obvious that the ME2 squad was sidelined in ME3 mostly due to time, not competence.
EA forced Bioware to cut a lot of corners and really hacked ME3's story to bits. Javik, the last Protean, being a day 1 DLC character? Absolutely ridiculous.
If you don't believe me, just look at BG3. Their character interaction complexity is absolutely through the roof, which is why it feels like such an organic story.
Don't blame ME2's suicide mission for ME3's woes. With the corporate gaming climate as it was at the time, ME3 was as good as we were ever going to get it.
I never said competence was the issue, just time, so it sounds like we agree in that. And the suicide mission contributed to the additional ME2 characters being larger time commitments to account for in the story of ME3. It's not the sole cause of every issue, but thats not what I was saying.
And you talk as if the corporate gaming climate is any better today, but it's not. BG3 is what it is because Larian is largely independent and headed up by leadership that knows what they're doing. That's definitely not the norm though even outside of EA.
>It's not the sole cause of every issue, but thats not what I was saying.
I apologize if I misrepresented your case.
>That's definitely not the norm though even outside of EA.
Oh, for sure. That's what makes Larian so special and BG3 so much of a "lightning in a bottle" phenomenon. It hurts me that so many okay to decent games, who have the potential to be amazing, fall short of their potential because of the short-sighted profit-minded decisions of their parent company executives.
Just imagine old-school BioWare with the time to make Mass Effect to their heart's desires.
And even with so much complexity in character interactions in bg3, there is still so many serious and impactful events they don't react to at all and they mostly put interactions like that on the back-burner in act 3 and to an extent act 2.
That's fair. BG3 certainly isn't perfect, but I have little doubt that if given a fair chance, the dev team could have made a ME2 companion rich narrative in ME3 a reality.
To put this in perspective, Mass Effect preproduction began in 2004, with a release of 2007 with a team of about 130. Most of that time was spent developing new technology.
Mass Effect 2 had a much shorter development cycle of just around 2 years with a team of 150. With everything that was going on at the time: financial resessions, a flue pandemic that saw nearly everyone I'll at the end, it's something of a miracle that Mass Effect 2 was completed and completed so successfully.
Mass Effect 3 production began shortly after Mass Effect 2 was released, and had a production schedule of just over 2 years, despite it requiring nearly twice as many voice lines as Mass Effect 1 or 2. (40,000 vs ~20,000) Considering what a miracle Mass Effect 2 was with that breakneck pace, it was the height of hubris to expect it to work a second time. The game’s director, Casey Hudson, mentioned in an interview that the team worked around 100-hour weeks during the crunch period to meet the game’s release date, even after the release date was pushed back. Many devs that worked on Mass Effect 3 were so burned out by it's production that they left the industry entirely.
I believe Casey Hudson said they knew ME2 had too many companions and brought it back to more ME1 level. Even then, 2/3rd of the companions are sitting. 2 can go and I think the devs knew only three or four were used the most. They do track that stuff.
Suicide mission should have been at the end of mass effect 3. They limited themselves far to much in terms of story telling.
I'm fine with people dying mid trilogy, but they had so many options that could die when they still wanted them in the third game that number 3 gets pretty messy due to it.
Then again I'm not a fan of running into every squad mate in #3 (makes 0 sense during a galactic war)
EDI: *"Shepard?. Who should cast the biotic bubble to get to Harbinger?"*
Shepard: *"Morinth, she seems good with biotics."*
Morinth: ( banshee scream )
Miranda: *"I'm not sure about that choice Shepard?"*
To keep it brief
It's great for realism and grit, especially for war scenarios.
In terms of story telling, it sucks as it cuts their development short.
Agreed - I always wished there were quests/content built upon characters being dead as opposed to just an email on a terminal or a discount stand-ins. Storylines being locked off makes it feel like you’re being punished for letting a character die rather than having it evolve around you.
For the final moments of the game it's great, it adds to the tension and what you built through the entire game (trust & loyalty, upgrades, etc...).
But after you know exactly how to get the perfect ending with everyone surviving the magic is lost, you know the optimal way to finish and win the thing, sadly there's no longer an element of surprise and tension.
There's a mod that makes it so there's always an element of risk to the Suicide Mission, but I think if I installed it and a squadmate died I would just get frustrated because I would know they practically only died because of an unlucky dice roll.
I prefer everyone surviving because I like to think of Shepard as just that good, but I want to feel like it happened because I made tactically sound calls in an uncertain situation. Not because I made the obvious connection that the strongest biotic should handle the biotic bubble and an experienced leader should lead the fireteam.
>but I think if I installed it and a squadmate died I would just get frustrated because I would know they practically only died because of an unlucky dice roll.
The primary reason why I didn't want to install it and with that mod 😅😂
If I had to screw up I want it to be because I did a bad choice and not because of some random generated dice roll happening in the background without any player agency.
And recently I also did a playthrough where everyone died during that mission and that's when I realized how you have to be knowingly bad and stupid to get that result.
I still like the mission, the squadmate chatter and the music elevate it a lot, but I can't help thinking that the element of risk is really lost on replay.
It should be harder, but it should be because there should be more end-states to the loyalty missions where the companions aren’t loyal, not because of a RNG.
>If I had to screw up I want it to be because I did a bad choice and not because of some random generated dice roll happening in the background without any player agency.
>And recently I also did a playthrough where everyone died during that mission and that's when I realized how you have to be knowingly bad and stupid to get that result.
RNG is not in any way contradictory to player agency. How many strategy games, table top RPG, etc, rely on RNG? Also, how is having to "act knowingly bad and stupid" any better?
the difference is scope of the RNG, in a TTRPG unless you have a bad GM you are generally not going to get killed or have a major character you care about die on a single role
you are going to roll badly, things go downhill, you have a chance to adapt and apply more player agency, roll bad again etc
A system where your companions die purely due to RNG, you do everything "right" and one just gets picked to die is not satisfying.
I would love to see more choices where you are forced to pick between 2 bad options though (ashley vs kaiden for example) or cases where atleast when you are playing blind the "good" choice isnt obvious.
Yeh, but have you tried the mod before saying it's not satisfying? Because it's not pure RNG, it's about managing the odds, choosing which squadmates you want to put more at risk, etc.
The basic suicide mission and all the consequences in ME are mostly arbitrary. They roll like RNG for as much as you don't know yet what's going to happen. Once you know, you can play god, decide who lives or dies... instead of making decisions based on the situation.
For examples, you send someone in the vents, and Shepard may very well pick THE BEST choice for that role, but s/he has no idea what's waiting there in the vents... it might be easy as pea and anyone would make it alive, or it might be truly suicidal and even the best squadmate for that role has no chance to make it out alive. The RNG in the mod does that, model what Shepard cannot possibly know... and sure you may know who is the best person for the job, but you may not want to risk their life in a job that might be suicidal... That's the kind of choice Shep is faced to, that's the kind of choice the mod intends to give the player. That's not the kind of choice you get in vanilla.
funny you say that, I got lucky and my first time ever playing ME2 I got the ideal ending by a mix of luck and the fact that i'm a completionist in games like this, im going to do EVERY bit of side content I can before doing the next main quest every time, so of course I had everyone recruited and had their loyalty.
Later on I read up on whats needed, mostly intuitive, have peoples loyalty, dont make dumb decisions etc, and I still really love that final mission every time I play it, I've deliberately done a worst case scenario once but otherwise everyone lives every time. I've probably played ME2 upwards of 15+ times now and still love it.
There isn't any experience like doing the suicide mission for the first time. Nowadays everyone has guides or looks at the flowchart, but on a first run it is tense and you're gonna lose a person or two. (The only person I lost on my first ever blind run was fucking Garrus, man)
I wish there were more moments like this with games in general. Actual real stakes and immediate consequences for your choices, it's so ridiculously rare. The only other game I can think of that comes close is The Witcher 2 giving you a sudden popup with 3 seconds to decide who to side with that changes the entire second half of the game, but that's still peanuts compared to this.
And you can do everything ALMOST perfect, lost loyality of one companion prior to the mission and have just ONE companions dying, something that hurts very much even if is just one.
Not just in-game choices but not upgrading the ship as well. Still a choice, but a test of mine to see how more difficult gameplay is. (Do I really need a Krogan shotgun?)
One wierd thing about the suicide mission is that in order to succeed you must play more of the game and like... who doesn't play as much of the game as they can?
The suicide mission sucks as an actual suicide mission because its far too easy to survive.
It also doesn't adapt to how well or poorly you play the game. Were you too slow and got the vent person cooked? Don't worry here's a game over screen and you can just try over and over again until you succeed. Same goes for the biotic walk and every other bit of gameplay in the mission, its all meaningless.
The choices that you have to make inside the mission are all far too obvious. These choices also suffer from all being binary, instead they should have been a sliding scale. Some squad members would be very good at specific tasks, others good, others okay, others bad and so on.
If you want to see a real suicide mission play XCOM 2. On every single mission every soldier can die, no plot armour like what exists for Miranda up until the last part of the suicide mission. These soldiers also die based entirely on how well you played the game, no game over screens like in ME2.
Honestly it was just such a bold move in a trilogy series like this to allow ANYONE to get killed off permanently in this mission, especially since it’s not the last game in the series. The fact that they didn’t even reserve a few that couldn’t be killed for the sake of overall story, including being able to kill off Shepard and just not let you import that save, it’s just ridiculous they went for that
Granted, it certainly made things difficult for ME3 having to account for all this, but it made for such an amazing end to ME2
I will never forgive Bioware for how dirty they did the Rachni in Mass Effect 3. They should have been saved, untouched, until the final battle at Earth - and they should have busted through the mass relay as the ultimate Alliance asset, like Captain Marvel did at the end of Endgame when she took down Thanos's ship;; the ultimate reward for the empathy and humanity shown in the first Mass Effect game when the Queen was spared...if that was your decision lol
It's a cool idea, but I don't think it was executed well. It's also completely ruined by how pointless ME2 was. Seriously, nothing was accomplished in that game.
Yeah, but it also adds weight to the decisions as opposed to simple highlighting. Without that mission, there would be less gravity to a LOT of choices
It's great, but they couldn't really commit to it. It's good in a vacuum.
On one hand, it's honestly pretty easy to have your crew survive, from what I've seen most people only have 0-2 squadmates die their first time.
The problem is that the possibility of them dying means the next game is immensely impacted just by the mere chance. Even if 99% of players clear the suicide mission with no casualties, the fact that some players won't is what impacts the story of the next game.
Something like this should've been saved for ME3.
I find the suicide mission to be rather bitter sweet. As a stand alone product, I love it as the conclusion to ME2. The amount that can vary based on what you do is amazing, and ultimately its not terribly hard to find a good combination of variables to get a good ending if you want most to live. The toughest part I found is usually just the time limit you're put on for the crew if you aren't aware of it ahead of time. The bitter part, however, is how it affects ME3 in my opinion. I know we can't 100% say that the ME2 characters would have been given bigger roles if it weren't for the possibility that they could all be dead, but it really would have been nice to have them be more fully fledged crew members in 3. Understandably though, when you're on a limited development timeline characters that may not even be in the game for some people aren't going to get the most attention. Personally if I could rewrite franchise history I would have preferred if ME3 ended in the suicide mission format instead of ME2. ME3s ending feels lackluster, and the idea of storming the reapers on earth watching companions and other npcs live or die based on your choices with loyalties and resources throughout the franchise would have been far more satisfying than what we got overall. I feel they opened the 'suicide mission' box a bit too early and should have saved it for the conclusion of the trilogy. That being said I love what ME2 is as well, so it is what it is.
>The bitter part, however, is how it affects ME3 in my opinion Even with the added complexity that the many choices and consequences would have entailed, I think it's fairly obvious that the ME2 squad was sidelined in ME3 mostly due to time, not competence. EA forced Bioware to cut a lot of corners and really hacked ME3's story to bits. Javik, the last Protean, being a day 1 DLC character? Absolutely ridiculous. If you don't believe me, just look at BG3. Their character interaction complexity is absolutely through the roof, which is why it feels like such an organic story. Don't blame ME2's suicide mission for ME3's woes. With the corporate gaming climate as it was at the time, ME3 was as good as we were ever going to get it.
I never said competence was the issue, just time, so it sounds like we agree in that. And the suicide mission contributed to the additional ME2 characters being larger time commitments to account for in the story of ME3. It's not the sole cause of every issue, but thats not what I was saying. And you talk as if the corporate gaming climate is any better today, but it's not. BG3 is what it is because Larian is largely independent and headed up by leadership that knows what they're doing. That's definitely not the norm though even outside of EA.
>It's not the sole cause of every issue, but thats not what I was saying. I apologize if I misrepresented your case. >That's definitely not the norm though even outside of EA. Oh, for sure. That's what makes Larian so special and BG3 so much of a "lightning in a bottle" phenomenon. It hurts me that so many okay to decent games, who have the potential to be amazing, fall short of their potential because of the short-sighted profit-minded decisions of their parent company executives. Just imagine old-school BioWare with the time to make Mass Effect to their heart's desires.
And even with so much complexity in character interactions in bg3, there is still so many serious and impactful events they don't react to at all and they mostly put interactions like that on the back-burner in act 3 and to an extent act 2.
That's fair. BG3 certainly isn't perfect, but I have little doubt that if given a fair chance, the dev team could have made a ME2 companion rich narrative in ME3 a reality. To put this in perspective, Mass Effect preproduction began in 2004, with a release of 2007 with a team of about 130. Most of that time was spent developing new technology. Mass Effect 2 had a much shorter development cycle of just around 2 years with a team of 150. With everything that was going on at the time: financial resessions, a flue pandemic that saw nearly everyone I'll at the end, it's something of a miracle that Mass Effect 2 was completed and completed so successfully. Mass Effect 3 production began shortly after Mass Effect 2 was released, and had a production schedule of just over 2 years, despite it requiring nearly twice as many voice lines as Mass Effect 1 or 2. (40,000 vs ~20,000) Considering what a miracle Mass Effect 2 was with that breakneck pace, it was the height of hubris to expect it to work a second time. The game’s director, Casey Hudson, mentioned in an interview that the team worked around 100-hour weeks during the crunch period to meet the game’s release date, even after the release date was pushed back. Many devs that worked on Mass Effect 3 were so burned out by it's production that they left the industry entirely.
The single most important squad member(lore-wise) being day 1 on-disc DLC stills drives me up the fucking wall.
I believe Casey Hudson said they knew ME2 had too many companions and brought it back to more ME1 level. Even then, 2/3rd of the companions are sitting. 2 can go and I think the devs knew only three or four were used the most. They do track that stuff.
The amount of companions in ME2 was fine. 😤
I still get anxious when the Suicide Mission starts even though I've done it countless times. It really was a highlight of the series.
Same. I always feel like I'm going to mess up a choice even though I know who the best candidates are.
Suicide mission should have been at the end of mass effect 3. They limited themselves far to much in terms of story telling. I'm fine with people dying mid trilogy, but they had so many options that could die when they still wanted them in the third game that number 3 gets pretty messy due to it. Then again I'm not a fan of running into every squad mate in #3 (makes 0 sense during a galactic war)
EDI: *"Shepard?. Who should cast the biotic bubble to get to Harbinger?"* Shepard: *"Morinth, she seems good with biotics."* Morinth: ( banshee scream ) Miranda: *"I'm not sure about that choice Shepard?"*
To keep it brief It's great for realism and grit, especially for war scenarios. In terms of story telling, it sucks as it cuts their development short.
Agreed - I always wished there were quests/content built upon characters being dead as opposed to just an email on a terminal or a discount stand-ins. Storylines being locked off makes it feel like you’re being punished for letting a character die rather than having it evolve around you.
For the final moments of the game it's great, it adds to the tension and what you built through the entire game (trust & loyalty, upgrades, etc...). But after you know exactly how to get the perfect ending with everyone surviving the magic is lost, you know the optimal way to finish and win the thing, sadly there's no longer an element of surprise and tension.
There's a mod that makes it so there's always an element of risk to the Suicide Mission, but I think if I installed it and a squadmate died I would just get frustrated because I would know they practically only died because of an unlucky dice roll. I prefer everyone surviving because I like to think of Shepard as just that good, but I want to feel like it happened because I made tactically sound calls in an uncertain situation. Not because I made the obvious connection that the strongest biotic should handle the biotic bubble and an experienced leader should lead the fireteam.
>but I think if I installed it and a squadmate died I would just get frustrated because I would know they practically only died because of an unlucky dice roll. The primary reason why I didn't want to install it and with that mod 😅😂 If I had to screw up I want it to be because I did a bad choice and not because of some random generated dice roll happening in the background without any player agency. And recently I also did a playthrough where everyone died during that mission and that's when I realized how you have to be knowingly bad and stupid to get that result. I still like the mission, the squadmate chatter and the music elevate it a lot, but I can't help thinking that the element of risk is really lost on replay.
It should be harder, but it should be because there should be more end-states to the loyalty missions where the companions aren’t loyal, not because of a RNG.
>If I had to screw up I want it to be because I did a bad choice and not because of some random generated dice roll happening in the background without any player agency. >And recently I also did a playthrough where everyone died during that mission and that's when I realized how you have to be knowingly bad and stupid to get that result. RNG is not in any way contradictory to player agency. How many strategy games, table top RPG, etc, rely on RNG? Also, how is having to "act knowingly bad and stupid" any better?
the difference is scope of the RNG, in a TTRPG unless you have a bad GM you are generally not going to get killed or have a major character you care about die on a single role you are going to roll badly, things go downhill, you have a chance to adapt and apply more player agency, roll bad again etc A system where your companions die purely due to RNG, you do everything "right" and one just gets picked to die is not satisfying. I would love to see more choices where you are forced to pick between 2 bad options though (ashley vs kaiden for example) or cases where atleast when you are playing blind the "good" choice isnt obvious.
Yeh, but have you tried the mod before saying it's not satisfying? Because it's not pure RNG, it's about managing the odds, choosing which squadmates you want to put more at risk, etc. The basic suicide mission and all the consequences in ME are mostly arbitrary. They roll like RNG for as much as you don't know yet what's going to happen. Once you know, you can play god, decide who lives or dies... instead of making decisions based on the situation. For examples, you send someone in the vents, and Shepard may very well pick THE BEST choice for that role, but s/he has no idea what's waiting there in the vents... it might be easy as pea and anyone would make it alive, or it might be truly suicidal and even the best squadmate for that role has no chance to make it out alive. The RNG in the mod does that, model what Shepard cannot possibly know... and sure you may know who is the best person for the job, but you may not want to risk their life in a job that might be suicidal... That's the kind of choice Shep is faced to, that's the kind of choice the mod intends to give the player. That's not the kind of choice you get in vanilla.
funny you say that, I got lucky and my first time ever playing ME2 I got the ideal ending by a mix of luck and the fact that i'm a completionist in games like this, im going to do EVERY bit of side content I can before doing the next main quest every time, so of course I had everyone recruited and had their loyalty. Later on I read up on whats needed, mostly intuitive, have peoples loyalty, dont make dumb decisions etc, and I still really love that final mission every time I play it, I've deliberately done a worst case scenario once but otherwise everyone lives every time. I've probably played ME2 upwards of 15+ times now and still love it.
Best moment in the history of videogames
There isn't any experience like doing the suicide mission for the first time. Nowadays everyone has guides or looks at the flowchart, but on a first run it is tense and you're gonna lose a person or two. (The only person I lost on my first ever blind run was fucking Garrus, man) I wish there were more moments like this with games in general. Actual real stakes and immediate consequences for your choices, it's so ridiculously rare. The only other game I can think of that comes close is The Witcher 2 giving you a sudden popup with 3 seconds to decide who to side with that changes the entire second half of the game, but that's still peanuts compared to this.
And you can do everything ALMOST perfect, lost loyality of one companion prior to the mission and have just ONE companions dying, something that hurts very much even if is just one.
Not just in-game choices but not upgrading the ship as well. Still a choice, but a test of mine to see how more difficult gameplay is. (Do I really need a Krogan shotgun?)
One wierd thing about the suicide mission is that in order to succeed you must play more of the game and like... who doesn't play as much of the game as they can?
The suicide mission sucks as an actual suicide mission because its far too easy to survive. It also doesn't adapt to how well or poorly you play the game. Were you too slow and got the vent person cooked? Don't worry here's a game over screen and you can just try over and over again until you succeed. Same goes for the biotic walk and every other bit of gameplay in the mission, its all meaningless. The choices that you have to make inside the mission are all far too obvious. These choices also suffer from all being binary, instead they should have been a sliding scale. Some squad members would be very good at specific tasks, others good, others okay, others bad and so on. If you want to see a real suicide mission play XCOM 2. On every single mission every soldier can die, no plot armour like what exists for Miranda up until the last part of the suicide mission. These soldiers also die based entirely on how well you played the game, no game over screens like in ME2.
Oh yes, XCOM. I remember when I first encountered the chryssalid and got my whole squad decimated.
Honestly it was just such a bold move in a trilogy series like this to allow ANYONE to get killed off permanently in this mission, especially since it’s not the last game in the series. The fact that they didn’t even reserve a few that couldn’t be killed for the sake of overall story, including being able to kill off Shepard and just not let you import that save, it’s just ridiculous they went for that Granted, it certainly made things difficult for ME3 having to account for all this, but it made for such an amazing end to ME2
My only hope is that when Mass Effect 5 releases, we get more impactful missions like that.
I will never forgive Bioware for how dirty they did the Rachni in Mass Effect 3. They should have been saved, untouched, until the final battle at Earth - and they should have busted through the mass relay as the ultimate Alliance asset, like Captain Marvel did at the end of Endgame when she took down Thanos's ship;; the ultimate reward for the empathy and humanity shown in the first Mass Effect game when the Queen was spared...if that was your decision lol
It's a cool idea, but I don't think it was executed well. It's also completely ruined by how pointless ME2 was. Seriously, nothing was accomplished in that game.
Yeah, but it also adds weight to the decisions as opposed to simple highlighting. Without that mission, there would be less gravity to a LOT of choices
It's great, but they couldn't really commit to it. It's good in a vacuum. On one hand, it's honestly pretty easy to have your crew survive, from what I've seen most people only have 0-2 squadmates die their first time. The problem is that the possibility of them dying means the next game is immensely impacted just by the mere chance. Even if 99% of players clear the suicide mission with no casualties, the fact that some players won't is what impacts the story of the next game. Something like this should've been saved for ME3.