Paragon vs Renegade - aka you're all a bunch of huge sissies

[Jessweeee♪]

Yeah, punching the reporter lady and headbutting krogans is always a must.

[Madame Adequate]

Hell, headbutting Krogans shouldn't count as renegade, that's just how they ARE. Shed GETS Krogans, s/he understands them.

[Freya]

Also, I don't think my love, Kaiden Alenko, would approve of me being an asshat.

[Skyblade]

Also, I don't think my love, Kaiden Alenko, would approve of me being an asshat.

Fortunately, Mr. Alenko is radioactive dust on Virmire, and I no longer have to put up with him and his inability to take "no" for an answer (granted, a lot of that was that FemShep was written without "no" lines for most of the dialogue, but I still blame him). Although since I am finally starting to play Knights of the Old Republic, I am having to put off my desire to slit Carth's throat.

My faithful love, Liara, has no problem with the occasional psychotic rampage, as Lair of the Shadow Broker proves.

[Kossage]

I prefer to be the good guy whenever possible: it just feels more rewarding to me to actually play the part of the hero and try to turn a crappy world into a better place. Sadly most games that I've played (with a few notable exceptions) also had the problem of having too big of a black&white setting where you couldn't really try being anything but a shining knight or a cackling crook and nothing in between. Luckily it seems that modern games are introducing more and more grey options.

The Witcher 2 has been a particularly interesting (and impressive) game because you can't fully RP a total villain or a total hero. Instead you'll be forced to do some heroic and villainous actions from time to time although you can affect the outcome in some ways. It's also nice that many characters aren't clearly villainous or heroic: each have their shade of grey so even the vilest villains have some redeeming qualities and heroes have quite a few skeletons in their closet. This has made it quite a daunting (but enjoyable) task to RP a full-blown hero in this setting: the game brutally subverts your expectations (e.g. a damsel in distress turns out to be a backstabber), and some choices are really hard so you can only hope to choose the lesser of two evils most of the time. But when the time comes when you can actually do some good despite the crappy world full of lies and betrayals, it feels very rewarding to try to do whatever you can to make the world a better place. Much of this is tied to your own morality, though, so often there's no clear-cut good/evil distinction of your choices: some seemingly benevolent choices result in even more suffering whereas more brutal tactics can actually turn things slightly better. This game of cat and mouse in the morality system is what makes the Witcher 2 so alluring, and I hope other games will follow suit.

[Jessweeee♪]

While we're on the topic, can you get all you want out of Dragon Age II if you pick too many neutral options? I know the conversation wheel is the same as Mass Effect, but is there a good/bad scoring system as well? In the first Dragon Age you just needed high coercion and you had all the conversation options available, polite or rude.

[TrollHunter]

Liara was easily the best character of ME1 in terms of awesome in and off the field. She just smurfed :goomba::goomba::goomba::goomba: up.

Kaiden... well it's always such a hard decision of who to kill on virmire... I hate them both so much

[Goldenboko]

Badass.

Thanks, now I have to go beat Mass Effect again. Jerk.

[Jessweeee♪]

Liara was easily the best character of ME1 in terms of awesome in and off the field. She just smurfed :goomba::goomba::goomba::goomba: up.

Yeah, Liara is awesome but when I replaced her with an Adept Shepard on my Renegade file, Shepard sucked so much ass. I don't know if it was a glitch or what, but her biotics only affected a small handful of enemies. Good thing I had an assault rifle left over from my Paragon file.

[DK]

That is the exact same as my renegade Shepard in ME1 as well, Adept with assault rifle training. I'm about halfway through that playthrough, well, maybe 2/3's and it has been a lot harder than playing as a soldier, tho I guess it depends on what biotics you actually like using. Now that i've gotten everything useful up to the second rank of the skill, so like throw, lift and singularity, they work pretty well on most things. The only enemies that have really dicked me over so far, randomly, are the drones on the moon base. Well, and the Thorian creepers, but that was mostly because I had no medi-gels and Shep had about 20 HP so I had to go incredibly slowly.

The thing that's really making this adept playthrough harder for me is that the AI teammates have gone totally batshiet, Tali's favourite thing to do is steam into the middle of the enemies and die. Especially if there are multiple Krogan, god damn does she love running up to Krogan.

[Skyblade]

That is the exact same as my renegade Shepard in ME1 as well, Adept with assault rifle training. I'm about halfway through that playthrough, well, maybe 2/3's and it has been a lot harder than playing as a soldier, tho I guess it depends on what biotics you actually like using. Now that i've gotten everything useful up to the second rank of the skill, so like throw, lift and singularity, they work pretty well on most things. The only enemies that have really dicked me over so far, randomly, are the drones on the moon base. Well, and the Thorian creepers, but that was mostly because I had no medi-gels and Shep had about 20 HP so I had to go incredibly slowly.

The thing that's really making this adept playthrough harder for me is that the AI teammates have gone totally batshiet, Tali's favourite thing to do is steam into the middle of the enemies and die. Especially if there are multiple Krogan, god damn does she love running up to Krogan.

Always, ALWAYS carry med-regen gear with you. Early in the game, Phoenix armor rocks. Once out of combat, equip it, regen to full, and switch back to your normal armor. The medical upgrades have the same effect.

[Shiny]

Tali's favourite thing to do is steam into the middle of the enemies and die.

Hahaha I noticed that as well. In my first play through she was the only one who died at the end of Mass Effect 2.

[Jessweeee♪]

Hahaha yeah. "Let's make her leader of the fire squad when she's shown us throughout the entire game that her squad always gets annihilated."

[DK]

My favourite Tali moment so far was in this adept playthrough, I was on Feros doing the random missions for the Zhu's Hope people. I went into what turned out to be the door that was where the Geth transmitter is, but was at the top of the passageway just checking my equipment and setting myself up and stuff. Out of nowhere, Tali goes blazing past Shepard and Ashley with her Pistol out, and runs off into the next room. I was pretty blagged and thought "shiet, better get in there", ran after her and as I came around the corner I saw her vaulting over this bit of cover, right into middle of her favourites, three random Krogan.

The Krogan were standing so they formed a triangle pretty much, and Tali just ended up smack bang in the middle of all three. And then they just all stood there for about 5 seconds, staring at each other, while I was being highly confused. Then out of nowhere, all three Krogan pull out shotguns and completely wreck Tali, instant death. So then I have to kill them and whatever else was in the room with just Shepard and Ashley which was a pain in the arse, I didn't have unity at this point of the game. Anyway after they were all dead and Tali revived, she just wouldn't leave her spot. She stood there rooted to the spot where she died, looking at the ground, like she was in total shock that her beloved Krogan friends had blown her away, and when she woke up she found that they were dead and gone she couldn't bare to leave. I ended up having to go all the way back onto the Normandy and back again just to get her to move again.

[TrollHunter]

My favourite Tali moment so far was in this adept playthrough, I was on Feros doing the random missions for the Zhu's Hope people. I went into what turned out to be the door that was where the Geth transmitter is, but was at the top of the passageway just checking my equipment and setting myself up and stuff. Out of nowhere, Tali goes blazing past Shepard and Ashley with her Pistol out, and runs off into the next room. I was pretty blagged and thought "shiet, better get in there", ran after her and as I came around the corner I saw her vaulting over this bit of cover, right into middle of her favourites, three random Krogan.

The Krogan were standing so they formed a triangle pretty much, and Tali just ended up smack bang in the middle of all three. And then they just all stood there for about 5 seconds, staring at each other, while I was being highly confused. Then out of nowhere, all three Krogan pull out shotguns and completely wreck Tali, instant death. So then I have to kill them and whatever else was in the room with just Shepard and Ashley which was a pain in the arse, I didn't have unity at this point of the game. Anyway after they were all dead and Tali revived, she just wouldn't leave her spot. She stood there rooted to the spot where she died, looking at the ground, like she was in total shock that her beloved Krogan friends had blown her away, and when she woke up she found that they were dead and gone she couldn't bare to leave. I ended up having to go all the way back onto the Normandy and back again just to get her to move again.

Best ME story I've read in a LONG time