Why no Uplifted Animals in Mass Effect? They made it illegal on Earth way back in canon, which is lame. They really missed a big opportunity there, imagine an uplifted dolphin as a team member.
So I ended up ordering the trilogy on Amazon today after a good number of years of watching Let's Plays and following the various stuff surrounding the series. Now, with any good game series, I've been putting a bit of thought into my general character and how he or she will generally conduct themselves throughout the trilogy.
My main character will likely be a Fem Shep, with a Colonist and War Hero backstory. She lost her family and friends at sixteen when batarian slavers went after her home colony of Mindoir. She was among the few people who were rescued by a passing Alliance patrol, and joined the Alliance military as a means of striking back against the forces that took her loved ones away from her. During her early service, she was on shore leave on Elysium when the Skyllian Blitz went down. She rallied a resistance force and singlehandedly held off the invading pirates and mercs long enough for Alliance reinforcements to arrive and drive their asses out of the colony. I'm not really sure which class I want for her — Soldier, Infiltrator and Vanguard all appeal; Soldier and Infiltrator for their focus on gunplay, and the Vanguard for combining combat skills with biotic badassery. Since I prefer playing heroic characters, my Shepard will be mostly Paragon through this little saga.
Don't get too used to the idea of having a strongly in-character roleplay throughout the trilogy though. For example, almost all of the xenophobic comments and responses are in ME 1, and by the end of ME 2 it's virtually impossible to be a xenophobe since even Renegade Shep starts acting somewhat open-minded. And by ME 3, it's mostly political pragmatism and reaping what you sowed in the previous games, mainly in part due the desperation of the Reaper War by that point.
So a question: What do we know about the fourth game besides that its early on production and EA is eager to mention it exists even though they have nothing to show? I remember hearing we will only be able to play as humans, but I don't remember where is that coming from :p Also that Hudson left the company so I guess Walters will be only slightly famous/infamous guy left from original trilogy
(Also, I don't really see their point on insisting it won't be sequel to trilogy and more of next game set in the same universe <-< Heck, even if they do some type of star trek thing where ship is sent to explore unknown part of the galaxy and gets stuck there for duration of original trilogy, it still feels kinda pointless of them)
So, I'm on my second playthrough after getting the trilogy in August (current Shep is Male Shep Commander Shepard Shepard, Vanguard, Earthborn, Ruthless. First Shep was maleshep Commander Commander Shepard, Soldier, Spacer, War Hero.), and I have only one thing to say:
Biotic Charge + Nova. It's effin' beautiful.
edited 9th Dec '14 11:05:21 AM by GeekCodeRed
Then you should've seen these very boards back before the mods closed both ME 2 and ME 3 discussions. Most of the fora was talking about which classes were optimal for Insanity runs and how easy it becomes once you've figured out the game's mechanics and which abilities were OP or not. For example, a favorite of mine whenever I was using an infiltrator in ME 2 would be to take all of the damage buffs that cloaking gives and have Miranda on the squad with her squad DPS buffs maxed out. That way, I could have Miranda constantly casting Warp and Flare to quickly cripple enemy defenses, while the third character (typically somebody with Overload) would work on the targets that had shields or were synthetic. Their guns never mattered, since the Ally CPU almost never shoots at a satisfactory rate of fire, so just having team members with strong abilities and decent survivability counted the most. Same goes for the Biotic moves such as throw, lift and pull, since those required enemy defenses (even armor) to be down FIRST before taking effect.
In fact, DPS builds like this were pretty much THE way to go since the enemy's attacks were so drastically buffed that you'd die in 2-4 hits no matter how well shielded you were. Your squaddies were included, meaning that any defensive perks or buffs were useless, doubly so for Grunt. Except cloak, since that little bastard of an ability basically allowed you the ability to almost never get pinned down into a corner (the Collector Ship and Garrus's recruitment missions being the nasty exceptions).
Miranda doesn't have flare. Flare was only introduced in ME 3 with the Omega DLC.

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