ME's game mechanics seem well-suited, or at least better suited than most systems, to carrying over into the epic levels above 60 (which is as far as I'm aware the upper limit in the game) so I wouldn't rule out Shepard being in the second game. It would just require some retooling and rebalancing. But we're not dealing with D&D ridiculousness.
I'm hoping for a substantial expansion pack with a self-contained plotline in the meantime, although Bioware hasn't made an xpac since NWN. There will definitely be galactic exploration add-ons, though it remains to be seen how in-depth the new sidequests will be.
If I were to wager a guess, I'd say that the next game (or xpac) will deal with either A) The "Cerberus" wetworks conspirators B) the Batarians or C) the Geth, on their home turf. All three were skirted around enough in the storyline to count as being "foreshadowed".
i'm pretty sure i read somewhere that you will be able to load your game onto the next one. that way, the actual galaxy will be different for everyone instead of just your character. i.e. kaiden/ashley dead, wrex dead/alive, council dead/alive, who you chose for human coucilor etc.
there will be some sort of "default" story for starting a new character or if you didn't play the first one but i believe you'll be able to continue from you left off.
I heard that as well, but that's a colossal amount of content to work in. If they were to do that, I'd expect them to take 2 full years of dev time (minus QA) at the least, and they're working on a tighter timeframe than that. I envision something like KOTOR2, where at the beginning of the game you're asked questions about events in the first game and the story adapts to
more or less what you'd expect from a sequel to the particular game you played.
About the speech with Sovereign on Virmire. Did anyone else get the implication that synthetic life actually preceded organic life? If that's true, that's completely insane. It's more likely that Sovereign was just refusing to acknowledge the origin of the Reapers, but that totally blew my mind when I first heard it.
Well, they seemed to be going a Lovecraftian direction with the Reapers. Sovereign was "beyond human comprehension" and didn't really acknowledge Shepard at all. So the most likely answer is that Sovereign either didn't know what created him or wasn't telling, probably the latter. You can bet your sweet ass somewhere down the road it will turn out that the only way to know how to defeat the Reapers will come from the things that created them. I will bet you real money defeating the Reapers will involve ancient creator artifacts of some sort. The Reapers obviously aren't organic, and all synthetic life forms have to be created, that's what "synthetic" means. It's also worth considering that the Reapers may have been organic at some point but
became robotic.
Also, I'm curious about who died in everyone else's game on Virmire. Did anybody not have enough Charm/Intimidate to avoid killing Wrex? And who did you let die between Kaiden and Ashley? I let Kaiden die because I thought he was kind of a tool. Maybe next playthrough I'll change it, but probably not.
Kaidan, both times I played. For one, I was a male character and because you can't romance Kaidan when you'r male they make a number of character-building conversations unavailable, something they didn't do with Ashley, for whatever reason. Kaidan was just sort of there, and I used Ashley more.
And the part where you can talk Saren into shooting himself in the fucking head? Insane.
What I want to know is if you actually have the option to fight Saren apart from when he's resurrected by Sovereign. The fact that I could convince him to shoot himself was diminished somewhat by the knowledge that Bioware wouldn't allow it to really end that way. The only game I've ever played that allowed you to talk your way past the very last boss is Planescape:Torment, which was nice, because combat in that game was boring.
I almost forgot, but the true mark of how much this game engrossed me was how for the 40 seconds after Sovereign was destroyed where I thought the debris had killed Shepard I felt like somebody had punched me in the gut. I didn't want the character I had created and brought so far to be taken away from me just so I'd have to start over in the next game. Also, choosing Captain Anderson over Ambassador Udina for humanity's spot on the Council gave me serious amounts of glee. Serves him right for being a giant dick the whole game.
You need to watch more action movies / play more action games
Hell, did they really kill the Chief in Halo?
It would be really cool to get to know the non-Reaper controlled Geth better in the next game. A Geth squad-member would be AWESOME.
Eh. The Geth aren't really that compelling as villains. There wasn't a single Geth character, I doubt there will be in the coming games. The entire race serves as evil cannon fodder to be sent to die by Shepard's hands. That's what you get when you make your villains mute and universally hostile. They might as well have been goblins.
Who wants to bet we meet some surviving Proteans next game? All the talk about stasis chambers on Ilos makes me think there are probably some on ice somewhere.
But the big twist was that for the most part, the Protheans weren't nearly as important or all-powerful as everybody believed them to be. They were just another tool of the Reapers (God, that name will always be hokey). I'd guess that Bioware is moving on to bigger and better things, so to speak.
It looks like I'm alone in that I wasn't terribly impressed with the Reapers. For one, the whole 50,000 year cycle / prophecy thing seemed more at home in a fantasy game than a sci-fi game. My eyes just about rolled back into my head when I ran across the mad doomsayer at the beginning of the game. Unlike Star Wars and its ilk, ME puts in a good faith effort to explain just about everything and tries not to rely on invisible magic or mysticism, which makes the weird stuff stick out like a sore thumb. That serves as further proof to me that everything will be revealed in due time and the Reapers will not remain mysterious. And I felt like Saren, a perfectly adequate villain who himself was barely in the game, was tossed aside in favor of an even more vaguely sketched sentient ship that the PC has no connection to.
Maybe I went wrong in expecting KOTOR "oh
shit" twists.
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Topic: Mass Effect Plot Discussion (There Will Be Spoilers) (Read 16666 times)