YMMV / Expanded Galaxy Mod

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Like the vanilla game, the mod incentivizes scanning every planet as soon as possible, allowing you to gain additional armors, weapons, intel and War Assets. To its credit, the mod combats this by making more War Assets have depreciable values; as you play through the main missions, systems will be attacked and destroyed by the Reapers, causing assets you've previously obtained to lose some of their value (and in some cases, be wiped out completely).
  • Sure, you could rescue Aria's faceless group of mercenaries during the "Veterans vs. Criminals" Assignment... or you could rescue The Atoner, Sidonis (from the previous game), who just e-mailed you a short while earlier and is busy leading a group of Turian veterans behind Reaper lines.
  • Barring a specialized melee build (itself a rarity in a franchise that emphasizes gunplay and hiding behind cover), try finding a player who didn't go the easy route and picked the Avatar of Leadership for their Prothean Implant. Besides being a Generalist build with several benefits, it's the only Avatar that confers a direct boost to War Assets (+30 to the Alliance Marines), and has the smallest drawback of any of the Avatars — a measly -15% Health cut, which can be almost completely negated by Intel found throughout the galaxy that confers Health bonuses.
• Fandom Rivalry: Between the Priority Earth Overhaul Mod and Take Earth Back mod teams. The latter mod (which focuses on adding back units found throughout the game, boosting level events and taking more creative liberties) split off as its concept from the former due to apparent disagreements between both teams and though they both acknowledge each other, each mod's focus makes them inherently incompatible with each other.
• Ham and Cheese: The "Cooking with Zaeed" Easter Egg (referencing this video) has YouTuber Koobismo giving a near spot-on impression of Robin Sachs while going on at length over how to make... chocolate chip cookies, while swearing and grumbling all the while.
• Player Punch:
  • The Evacuation of Thessia assignment. As if Shepard and co. watching Reapers landing on the surface of the planet wasn't bad enough, it's possible to screw up the following assignment so much that you barely gain any War Assets at all, condemning numerous ships to destruction for a few small pockets of Thessian refugees and specialists.
  • Regardless of how the Bekenstein assignment is handled, the planet is eventually carpet-bombed into oblivion by the Reapers. Even worse, if you coerced the ruling government into manufacturing weapons in exchange for a (false) promise to protect them, Diana Allers will rail at you via e-mail once she discovers what happened to her home colony.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer:
  • The Normandy itself can become this, as there's an entire metagame based around the Crew Manifest, a shuttle bay that can be customized with items found around the galaxy, a shooting range (that confers a unique Intel Bonus for playing it enough and unique comments from your squadmates who show up to spectate) and special encounters with Canon Immigrant characters after each mission.
  • The Spectre Expansion Mod (a tie-in module for EGM) not only adds a large number of visitable planets with their own Intel and War Assets but also reimplements Mass Effect 2's Baria Frontiers vendor on the Citadel, allowing you to buy star charts that allow exploration of additional locations. It also has a text-based storyline, The Ghosts of Antilin, which can be acquired during Priority: Sur'Kesh and plays out across messages and scanned planets found throughout the game.
• Surprise Difficulty: The Ark Mod more-or-less presumes that the player has either (a) completed the game at least once, or (b) played a Gold-level multiplayer match, as the combat encounters during the initial mission, "Operation: Paladin", are comparable to it. Not only can this trip up players, but doing the mission early outright makes the level harder, as certain squadmates aren't available at that point — the mod FAQ itself even recommends waiting until the very last moment to start the mission, as well as take Non-Crew Specialists (via the Expanded Galaxy Mod) to stand the best chance of beating the mission.
• That One Level:
  • The Evacuation of Thessia, for all its change-ups in gameplay, is ridiculously hard, even on repeated plays. To start with, it isn't immediately clear that you have to scan the surface of Thessia, enter the planet's orbit, choose which group to save, and then fly back out to scan the fleet before docking at the nearest signal, all while the Reapers are chasing you. Each round, you get text reports detailing crewmen crying out in fear as the Reapers tear Alliance ships to shreds, and there is no clear understanding of what groups are worth the most from a War Asset standpoint. As the rounds continue, the Reapers get faster and faster, to the point that it's nigh-impossible to complete the last rounds unless you've somehow managed to acquire all of the Normandy upgrades and have incredibly good reflexes.
  • Within the Ark Mod, the opening mission, "Operation Paladin". Shepard and his/her entire roster of squadmates deploy to Menae to protect a critical outpost, and get more than they bargained for when the Reapers send down swarms of units. Nearly everything in the mission, including what squadmates you bring (ME2 squadmates are recommended to help lighten the load), the enemy fighters you "tag" with a special weapon, the mechs you have onboard and the squadmates you've acquired up to this point all play a factor, and even seasoned players will find themselves frustrated with the onslaught of enemies, akin to Priority: Earth's final horde mode siege.

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