Comments on: I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

By: Melmoth

Melmoth — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 07:15:07 +0000

@Eliot: I look forward to the main event, the cage match of Illusive Man versus Convenient Plot Device in a battle royale to determine whether you get to keep any of Mass Effect 2′s team around in Mass Effect 3.

@unwize @Pardoz: I may have to have a second play through as Evil Shepard (assuming there’s a suitable pointy beard option in character creation) and a stealth class would seem to fit in well with the concept of a back-stabbing renegade type, so perhaps I’ll get to try it out for myself at some point. I may need to finish my second run of Dragon Age: Origins first, though.

By: Pardoz

Pardoz — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:27:56 +0000

Really? I’ve found that whenever I toggle on the cloaking ability enemies just stand around and do nothing while my crew shoot them.

By: unwize

unwize — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:09:11 +0000

The Infiltrator has a handy cloaking ability which is great for ensuring that the enemy attacks your team mates from time to time.

By: Eliot

Eliot — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:51:41 +0000

I think the sheer number of people you can recruit is the game’s roundabout way of ensuring that even if you do get half of them killed in the final mission, there’s still some cast left over for the forecasted sequel. You’d think that the Illusive Man could just bring them back from the dead, of course, but that takes some time and money. Seeing as I’ll frequently not bother expending five seconds and a unit of my overflowing medi-gel bucket to get someone back on their feet, I can’t exactly blame him.

By: Zoso

Zoso — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:17:41 +0000

The whole “only two companions on a mission” business is significantly amplified in ME2 from the first one for a few reasons. Your party grew quite organically in the first game as part of the story, and everyone that joined the team had a point, to a greater or lesser extent they had a reason for being on board ship so that it didn’t seem the act of a lunatic to leave the others there while on a mission. ME2, of course, you’re actually sent to recruit them, as you point out, the sole reason they join the team is because (apparently) you desperately need their help to fight the Evil Enemy, and most of them just clutter up the cargo bay between missions. It’s like the game’s lampshading its own bizarre mechanics, “you have four people who’ve just been sitting on their arses for the past three missions? GO AND GET MORE!”

And eleven slots? ELEVEN? Picking two from six in the first game was pretty straightforward, ignore the dull humans, take a couple of the others with you, sorted, but slapping up the entire Dirty bleedin’ Dozen on the squad select team every time and shouting “haha, you’re leaving 82% of the people you expended so much effort in recruiting sitting around doing bugger all” rubs it in a bit.

The old Baldur’s gate games probably had a similar ratio of possible NPCs to actual party members, but crucially (for me, at least) if someone wasn’t in the party, they’d go off and exist in the game world somewhere, you didn’t pile everybody into a wagon and drag it round the world with you, rummaging around and pulling a couple out any time a fight started. Miranda and Jacob, fine, they fit into the Normandy, but some of the cargo-bay-clutterers would make much more sense if they had a job/life somewhere else they’d go back to, and you could go and pick ‘em up if you needed them. Mechanically, not much different to the current system, apart from having to schlep around the galaxy a bit instead of heading down to Engineering to chat about their personal life (which, granted, we’d probably then bitch about; maybe you could vid-phone them or something), but slightly more believable, I think.