Mass Effect 2

a few years ago and he's like yeah i was on that team he's like you should have seen it when when we were first working on it it was a mess and It was like all haphazard, and they were trying to build it into this, make it into what it could be.

And I know EA stepped in, right, Kayla? EA stepped in for Mass Effect 2, and I remember this famous line, the developers at EA were like, we were retooling the combat for them, and they were showing the combat on screen, and the enemies were getting shot, and they were flying all over the place, and they were taking hits on the shoulder, and they were like, is that too much? Because the original Bioware team, when you play Mass Effect 1, it's very stilted.

I think it's very difficult for me to say which one I like more, 1 or 2.

Sometimes it's 1.

And it is written.

The narrative designer is Drew Karpyshyn and he wrote Mass Effect 1.

He wrote the novels for Mass Effect 2.

He worked on Knights of the Old Republic.

And...

Yeah, and Mass Effect is one of the – especially Mass Effect 2.

That is one of the greatest video games of all time, and it's a damn shame that – I know a lot of people didn't like Andromeda, and I played a little bit of Andromeda.

But that also wasn't made by Bioware.

And it was such a great game.

And of course, eventually they went on to do Mass Effect 2, which critically has been probably their most successful game in that particular franchise, and the most beloved one.

Now, Mass Effect 2 carried over all your information from the first Mass Effect, with the promise that it would go over to the upcoming third game eventually, which was going to complete the trilogy.

So it was very exciting times.

Now, I really like Mass Effect 2 a lot too.

However, it is technically a better game than the first Mass Effect, but I will say one thing, that Mass Effect 2 was the first one that turned the shooting mechanic into more of a twitch shooter, whereas the first Mass Effect...

You had the feeling of aiming and shooting at someone, but it was always based on your stat and your accuracy stat.

So it still had that role-playing element, whereas Mass Effect 2 was just how good you were at a shooter.

getting that game for christmas with my xbox 360 along with lost planet um way back in 2007 you know i was i think what like maybe like 20 years old um 21 um and i was absolutely just lured by that game there was a sense of scale to that game that I had never experienced in a game before.

Um, the, and it's really kind of difficult to realize that kind of, it's kind of hard to understand that when you realize like Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 are also great games in their own right, but they do not have the sense of scale that the first Mass Effect, um, gives you in fact in a lot of ways they're much more streamlined productions they don't really have the sort of openness that the first game gives and like so yeah that game is a defining moment for me in my imagination and it still is um obviously people said they started seeing the crack showing When Mass Effect 3 came out, obviously it had a rather controversial ending.

I didn't really mind the ending that much.

It just sort of left the door open for, you know, it's like, oh, there's so many possibilities or whatever.

Yeah, it seemed like the intro to that trailer is like, God damn, it's been a while since we've had that kind of vibe out of a game.

Yeah.

We haven't really seen that since, like, Mass Effect 2.

Yeah.

With Mass Effect 3, the ending.

Pax and Day One DLC in Mass Effect 2.

There's so many gamer things linked to Mass Effect.

With one of the weirder parts being that I saw a stat on Twitter that I think it was just Horizon Zero Dawn has sold more than every Mass Effect game combined.

Aloy.

But yeah, obviously Mass Effect 1 and 2 are seminal.

Specifically Mass Effect 2.

I think both.

And between Prime and Tubi and Disney and Paramount+.

He voices characters in Fallout, Halo 2, Saints Row Transformers, The Game, Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 2, Mass Effect 2.

He's just all over video games, which is kind of crazy.

He's Vice President Keith David, right? In Saints Row, which is fucking crazy.

There's like...

It was... yeah anyways but um yeah and then i remember the the controversy with the ending you know what's sad enough is like outside of mass effect 2 probably the one that's like the most in my memory is mass effect andromeda because it's just the one i played most recent most recently and um it sucks because that could have been an amazing game really i had

an article on that uh where i talked about the problems and the glitches and i had an article on that that didn't wear very well at the time for our popculturecosmos.wordpress.com.

If you go ahead, it's still in the archives there if you want to take a look at it.

I was worried about what would happen to the people in the game itself, which is a weird feeling.

And then Bioware carried those decisions into Mass Effect 2, and then in Mass Effect 3, characters remembered things, relationships developed, decisions that I made earlier could come back to matter in some big ways or small ways.

Yeah, there were problems with the whole Mass Effect franchise.

Mass Effect 3's ending I personally liked, but it was really controversial, to put it mildly.