syllogi wrote...
The nose, eyes and lips seem the same, but Face Seven seems different in some way...

For Face 7, the chin is either taller or else the position of the mouth on the chin starts out higher. If you decrease "Mouth Height" or increase "Chin Height", you can get it back to what it looked like in ME2 pretty easily.

There's a couple of other minor differences I've noticed:

-Eyebrows are a shade darker compared to ME2. It seems like you need Brow Color to be 1 less than Hair Color, if you're using black or near black hair color.
-In ME2, Mouth Shape 4 and 7 were identical or nearly identical. In ME3, they're quite different.

Also, there's somethig really unflattering about the lighting in the entire first segment of the demo. Faces look to look bad no matter what. If you want a better indication of how a face will turn out, you have to wait until the second segment of the demo.

Or you guys can just assume that BioWare purposely made the areas empty to ****** you off. 

Maybe not to ****** us off, but maybe they have internal design philosophies or rules that cluttered areas are bad and that as a matter of principle, they don't want a lot of NPCs walking around. You blame the DA2 engine on consoles, but the lack of big, vibrant populated areas has been a problem in BioWare games since they left behind the Infinity Engine and entered their RPGs entered the 3D era:

-NWN1 and NWN2 had small cities and sparse NPCs.
-KoTOR 1 and 2 had small cities and sparse NPCs.
-Jade Empire had small cities and sparse NPCs.
-Mass Effect 1 and 2 had small cities and sparse NPCs.

Are you noticing a pattern here? Across games, franchises, and engines, BioWare's 3D RPGs have had... small cities and sparse NPCs.

So I don't think that the "engine is limited because consoles are wimpy" argument holds up. They've been shipping games with this problem for almost 10 years, both for titles that have been solely on the PC and titles that have been cross platform. Various contemporaries of the games they've shipped (such as the aforementioned Assassin's Creed, or even really old console titles like the GTA games) have managed to have big sprawling cities with lots of bustle and NPCs. So I think there's only two possible explanations that would explain why BioWare can't manage a properly bustling city:

1. They're opposed to creating such settings as matter of design principles (which I hope is not the case, because it would be really, deeply misguided).
2. Over the last 9+ years, they've either refused, postponed, to or are unable to implement engine technology that would allow them to create bustling cities.

The second seems most likely to me. As recently as Mass Effect 1, you could detect strains of NWN still in their engine. The un-pausable, uninterruptible dialog sequences; the massive over-reliance on prefabricated areas and texture sets; disjoint areas that require lots of level loading; and a general lack of verticality in the settings were all clues. If you ever played around with the NWN toolset, you'd recognize all those "features"  because they were all limitations of the way the NWN engine worked.

So, I'll make an un-bold prediction! Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 3 and even Dragon Age 3 will have the following issues:

1. There won't be a "city" that has a single uninterrupted area area that's physically larger than  a square mile.
2. There won't be a "city" that has more than 200 non-enemy NPCs in a single uninterrupted area.
3. There won't be a "city" where there's ever more than a dozen non-enemy NPCs on the screen at one time.

There have been other games on the market for years that have managed all these feats.

I love BioWare games, but they really need to fix this. It's like their worlds have become a shallow set of cardboard props for their ever more complex dialog sequences. I mean... the tiny town in rural Alabama I grew up in is bigger and denser in terms of population than Denerim, the allegedly huge and crowded capital of Ferelden. The problem has been going on so long, and is such an obvious and glaring problem in all their games that it's become a running joke and really interferes with suspension of disbelief.

Enemy health is increased. Enemy damage is increased. Enemy force is increased. Enemy cooldowns are decreased. Hostile effect durations on enemies are decreased. Less health potions drop. Enemies heal themselves more often. Party members can have more injuries. Some enemies have additional effects on their abilities (dispel, bypass damage resistance, steal health potions, etc) as well as some miscellaneous things (like the combat cooldown reset not being present). There may be others.

That sounds really cool, but it makes me sad that NG+ isn't in the game. It seems like Nightmare should be what you play your second time through, when you're max level, you have all your abilities, and you have some good gear. If I'm fighting uber enemies, I want to do it with my full arsenal (not to make it easy, but to make it interesting), and not just the three buttons I get to click after making it to level 4 by completing the intro sequence.

On a related note, does anyone know how much Hard mode differs from Normal? Is it 3/4ths the way to Nightmare, or is it just barely tougher than Normal?

Thanks!

Just finished the PC demo.
The Bad:

A lot of technical glitches:

1. If you have volumes installed on your system that aren't in a file system that Win7 recognizes, you get a bunch of cryptic alerts that say, "There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive \\Device\\Harddisk\\DR1." This happens every time you log into your EA account, which means it happens at startup if you've set it to log you in automatically.

2. It doesn't seem to play nice with Win7's screen-blacking power saving feature. I have my screen set to go dark in after a minute of idle. Most other games seem to disable this. While running DA:O, for example, the screen will never go dark. The DA2 demo will, though. It happened a lot during cutscenes or if I went for a moment without answering some dialog. And after that happened and I did something to un-black the screen, there are garbage graphical artifiacts along the bottom of edge that don't go away until I alt-tab.

3. Once while playing, Win7 interrupted the game with an alert about the graphics running slowly, and asked if I'd like to disable the Aero UI.

4. The Tactics UI gets into a foobared state vey easily. Sometimes, I could only activate the tactics popups by clicking in a very specific spot. Sometimes, I'd pick one item from one of the popups but it would set the value of the popup to some other item. Sometimes, it seemed to randomly change the new values I set right as I was saving changes to tactics. Basically, the only way I could reliably change tactics was to make a single change, exit the tactics screen, and then go back again to make more changes.

5. There seemed to be other UI glitches that were more random/less reproducible. A couple of times, I had party members who had leveled up and I was unable to easily get to their character screens. Clicking their portraits either did nothing or took me to Hawke's screen instead.


Other bad things:

The zoom distance on the camera was too short. I missed DA:O's high overhead camera in some fights.

Cutscene transitions that happened during or right after combat were very abrupt and also sort of glitchy. Combat just sort of stops before a cutscene and then there's a delay of several seconds before video starts, and it's rather disconerting. And Going into one of the Isabela cutscenes, a brief after-image of Varic sitting in his inquisition chair before the Isabela video started.

The Carver/Bethany/Wesley death sequences didn't seem to have a lot of emotional impact. No tears, and Hawke's responses aren't merely emotionally flat, but also sort of weird. I don't think Hawke ever expresses any sort of sadness or even hints that she felt any sort of affection for her dead sibling.

The "Another Wave!" shout for approaching enemies. Really, that phrasing sort of breaks the fourth wall. Who uses the term "wave" to describe a group of enemies? It's like the characters know they're in a video game. It's horribly, horribly anachronistic, given the medieval-ish setting.

New enemy models: these seem like they were changed just to be changed. I mean...  I don't hate the new Hurlocks, but the old Hurlocks were perfectly serviceable. Plus, it makes things seem really weird if you played DA:O. A few miles and a few days away from where the Warden massacred a zillion darkspawn to prepare for the Joining, and now Hawke's fighting a totally different looking variety of Hurlock? It makes no sense.



The Good:

The animations. Really, they're hugely improved from DA:O The only one I didn't really like is the rogue's sort of goofy default ready stance, where she holds one dagger behind her and over her head with her arm bent. That looks bad. Otherwise, they're pretty good. In particular, 2H warrior is much, much better than DA:O: no more slow-mo high school band flag-girl twirling of 2H weapons

Enemy health. In DA:O on Normal, stuff died way too fast. It's nice to see some of the enemies live long enough for you to need to use your cooldowns on them in order to kill them decently quickly. I'm hoping the harder difficulties give them even more health.

The skill trees. Very happy to see that there will be a lot more activated skills per character than in DA:O (well, mages in DA:O had a zillion skills. Warriors and Rogues not so much).

The voice acting. It seems generally good. I love LadyHawke's voice. Much like in the Mass Effect games (especially ME1), I have no doubt that some scenes and specific responses will be be badly phrased or emotionally flat or not what I meant to say at all, but in general, the voice work seems to be of a high quality.



The Surprising:

I'm surprised at all the feedback on this thread that says that combat is simpler than DA:O. Just from browsing the in-game skill trees, it seems like there will be a lot more active abilities. Given that and that Tactics are still in the game and that enemies take longer to die, I think combat will actually work out to be more complicated than it was in DA:O. DA:O was horrible for combat complexity. Even at level 15+, rogues and warriors usually only had 3 or 4 activated abilities, and those were sort of pointless to use, because (on normal difficulty) you could mow down standard enemies with just auto-attack once you were high-level.



The Verdict:

DA2 looks like it's going to be great in terms of content and combat. The acting is good, the story seems to have potential. The combat felt like a net improvement over DA:O (the new camera is irritating, but the expanded menu of skills is a huge improvement) and they kept Tactics in the game (when I first read the DA2 announcement, I was convinced Tactics would be removed in the name of making it more console-friendly. I am very happy to have been wrong).

The graphics are better than DA:O but still somewhat disappointing. They're not really as good as other current games or even Bioware's own Mass Effect 2.

And all the technical glitches are extremely vexing. On the one hand, none of them are more than irritations. On the other hand, they give the impression that the game's been rushed, because they all seem like really stupid and noticeable bugs. Plus, BioWare is horrible about patching things in a timely fashion. I expect that the Tactics screen will still be goofed up in June, three months after the final game ships.

That being said, I'll be buying the game. All the negatives I listed are minor technical glitches or irritating but ultimately unimportant cases of poor design. The important stuff about a BioWare game--a great story and fun combat--seem like they'll be there, and there seem to be many obvious and welcome improvements over DA:O. Those factors are what really count. So... I hope the final game will be a little more polished than the demo indicates, but even if not... the content will still make it worth it.

I had the same issue. I'd run down down the hall from the Trading floor to the Shipping area and crash hard. I tried everything. I fiddled all the graphics settings to low. Turned off sound, etc., etc. I even followed the uninstall instructions on this thread:



http://social.biowar...index/5698156/1



Turned off UAC and reinstalled the game and all the DLC, in the order they were released. I tried that twice, with no joy. Finally, after the second reinstall, I just turned around, boarded the Normandy, and then landed again on Ilium. I ran back to the hallway and made it to Shipping without a problem. Since then, no crashes. But the save game I have right before that hallway still causes the crash.



My system specs are similar to yours:



Xeon @ 3.3GHz

12GB RAM

Radeon 5870

Windows 7 64-bit/DirectX 10.0 (March 2009-later)

jlb524 wrote...

Very nice Shepard. Could I trouble you for the facecode?

I don't have them

ME1 import. 

Doesn't the game display them on the Squad screen, when you have Shepard selected? I think they're in tiny print in the top left corner.

Agree with the OP. Heavy weapons suck and should never have been added to the game. After blowing up the mechs with the grenade thing in Lazarus station, I save, quit, and switch to a coalesced.ini file that disables them. Shepherd looks so much better without them.



People say that this is a minor thing, but it's like not being able turn off the helmet on some armors, or not having helmets retract for cutscenes. Every time you see it, you think about how dumb it is, and that Shepherd would never lug a piece of stupid equipment she doesn't need into battle.



In fact, Blizz should make all weapon slots toggle-able, both for looks and challenge.

There's also parthenogenesis and/or other exotic ways of producing human children, apparently. Miranda didn't have a mother--her father is her sole genetic parent.

Yantze wrote...

Considering the derelict Reaper looked just like Sovreign they probably would just blow you off again claiming it as another Geth ship. And once you get the IFF you end up having to destroy it anyway to get off it. But your base idea is a good one.

Yes, but there had been an entire Cerberus research team on the derelict long before the Normandy arrived there. At the very least, Shepherd could have passed their findings on to Anderson. Shepherd probably can't expect to convince them in a single stroke. She'd have to keep gathering evidence and submitting it to them, until the accumulation of data can't be ignored.

 So after beating ME2, I was really frustrated that there weren't more Paragon options for trying to keep the Council informed about what was going on with the Collectors and Reapers. Two huge omissions really stand out:

1. When the Illusive Man tells Shepherd about the derelict Reaper, Paragon Shepherd should demand that Cerberus share all data about the derelict Reaper with the Council  Paragon Shepherd's primary problem with the Council is that they don't believe her about the Reapers, so one of her secondary goals in dealing with the Collectors ought to be gathering evidence about the Reapers that will convince the Council that they're real. And what's better evidence than an actual Reaper ship? It's really, really out of character and inconsistent in terms of the story  for Paragon Shepherd not to insist that the derelict Reaper be revealed to the Council and the Alliance.

2. At the very end, when Shepherd has to decide whether to keep or destroy the Collector Base, there should have been a third option: keep the base, but insist that the Council be told of it and given the opportunity to join Cerberus in researching its secrets. At this point, Shepherd finally has the chance to put the Illusive Man and all of Cerberus to the test: is Cerberus really serious about fighting the Reapers for the sake of the whole galaxy or is it just a bunch of human-centric racists who have been snowing Shepherd the whole time?  This was the only time in the game when Shepherd had the upper hand in her relationship with the Illusive Man. If he doesn't agree to share with the rest of the galaxy, she had the ability to deprive him of his heart's desire by blowing up the Collector Base. To me, it's inconceivable that Paragon Shepherd wouldn't have tried to exploit this situation and force Cerberus to play nice with the Council.


The fact that these two options weren't in the game makes me worried for ME3's story. It implies that BioWare is going to continue with the improbable and sort of asinine contrivance that the Council refuses to believe in the Reapers. There's been plenty of evidence discovered by Shepherd over the course of ME1 and now ME2 for her to present a convincing case about the Reapers to the Council. If the writers continue to plot the story arc so that in ME3, the Council still doesn't take the Reapers seriously, then that will be a huge plot hole that will really sour the story for players with brains. 

Plan B was to send an indoctrinated agent through the Conduit to open the mass relay when the keepers failed.  OK, makes a bit less sense (it's unclear why the Conduit is needed since it wouldn't exactly be difficult for a mind-controlled Spectre to infiltrate the Citadel, but whatever).  Still, suspension of disbelief goes a long way.

Plan B never really made any sense at all, either. Your parenthetical is right. The Conduit doesn't make sense. The plot of ME1 is like this:

http://xkcd.com/530/

Why didn't Sovereign just ring the doorbell? When Saren was a Spectre in good standing, Sovereign could have just sent Saren into the Council Chambers at any time and used the master control console of the Citadel to open up the Reaper Relay.

malres wrote...

Another thing: I hope ME3 explains why, instead of a human Reaper, the Collectors don't simply build a new portal to dark space...

Don't hold your breath. They still haven't explained any of the plot holes from ME1. Why didn't Sovereign just implant Saren in the first place, have him walk into the Council Chambers during off hours, and activate the Reaper relay? Saren needing the Conduit never made any sense.

Philhart wrote...

I think Mass Effect 2 was a great game and would be a whole lot better if some of you didn't think into every little detail so much because you are ruining a truly magnificant game for yourselves.

Hmm, no. It was a great game and would have been even greater had BioWare applied some common sense, consistency, and good editing to their story, and fixed a lot of really obvious things that don't make sense. Good science fiction stories make it easy for the audience to suspend their disbelief. When the writers jeopardize that by dumb mistakes and forgetting what they wrote in previous chapters, it's their fault, not the audience's.

Drakron wrote...

And that is one of reason why ME2 fails as a RPG, the "upgrade" race exist but that part of the carrot-on-a-stick that keeps the players going forward, ME2 is just meh as there is almost nothing of the sort as everything is served on a platter.

What upgrade race in ME1? Certainly not for weapons. You earned a million credits, you got you got your Spectre weapons and you were done. For armor, you found your Colossus or your Predator L/M/H and... you were done. You could fiddle with the mod slots on each item, but for almost all of them had an optimal combination that you'd acquire relatively early in the game. And it just got worse on your second playthrough on the same character. There was literally no possibility of obtaining any interesting items at all.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that ME1 had the worse itemization of any BioWare game, ever. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of items that were completely useless but that had to be actively managed and disposed of with a profoundly cumbersome inventory UI. And ME1's "classic RPG" inventory/itemization concepts made no sense for the story. Would Shepherd and his squad REALLY schlep around a pile of 150 weapons/armors/bullets/mods with him at all times? Or would they pick their weapons and configure their armor before starting their mission, using the guns that they have on board? "Suspension of Disbelief" is a far more crucial element of making a great RPG than the mechanics of the inventory system, and ME2 makes a lot more sense in that regard.

To be clear, I don't think ME2's system is great. It's sort of a half-assed crafting system in which you can farm materials to produce a tiered sequence of boring but useful improvements to your guns and armor. But... anything would be better than what was in ME1.

TheGuv wrote...

The Reapers likely did have multiple redundancies.  They know they aren't indestructable, so they came up with a virtually foolproof plan.  The thing that seems to have screwed the Reapers up is the Protheans themselves.  They were the only civilisation able to mount an effective defense against the Reapers, even if it was a somewhat delayed one.

Well, it was hardly a foolproof plan, then, was it? All it took was one slightly smarter than average species of organics to ruin their grand scheme. Given how much the story talks the Reapers up, they ought to have been smart enough to anticipate something like the Protheans. And since they built the Citadel and all the mass relays, it was easily within their capabilities to leave other, hidden gateways to dark space.

What star?  It's a nebula.  Besides, what makes you think Cerberus haven't considered it?

The Citadel is virtually indestructable though.  It took multiple presumed strikes from weapons that sheared dreadnoughts in half with virtually no exterior damage, only interior.

The Citadel is near the star Widow. Possibly in orbit around it, though the wiki isn't clear. I don't think that anyone on either side shot directly at the Citadel, so I still don't think that the story supports the idea that it's "indestructible". Given a big enough bomb, you ought to be able to blow up anything, or at least render the relay inoperative.

And yes Cerberus should be considering it, but there's no mention that the idea is on the Illusive Man's mind, or that he or anyone else has any plans for doing something about the Reapers aside from dealing with the Collectors.

Or it could simply be that the Protheans did not discover that particular Reaper.  They were very thorough, but they did not completely expunge the Protheans from existance, afterall.  Ilos went dark, and the Reapers could not find it until Saren did.

Umm, no. Protheans have nothing to do with it. Vigil said the Reapers went to great effort to clean up after themselves, not that the Protheans cleaned up after the Reapers. The Reapers would know that one of their own had been killed: "Hey guys, dinner's over and we've cleaned off the table. It's time to go back to dark space! OK, quick headcount before we get back on the bus home. Hmm... 7867346 out of 7867347. OMG, we're missing one of our apocalyptic doomsday brethren. He was least seen having dessert in Hawking Eta. Somebody cruise by there and tell him to stop stuffing his face and hop back through the Citadel Relay. We need to clear out so the next generation of food can grow without figuring us out."

She's been nipping in and out of systems constantly.  She was obviously meant to fill a Cortana role, for lack of a better comparison.  She also spent a substancial amount of time inside Collector systems - it's likely she picked up on things and extrapolated from there.  The Illusive Man also seemed to know what was going on.

Umm, sure. She "scans" things that no Council race has ever imagined before, much less encountered or observed, and then instantly tells Shepherd exactly what's going on. Liara T'soni couldn't figure out how to work a Prothean elevator after months of study on Therum, but EDI instantly deduces that the Collectors are making baby Reapers out of puree'd colonists and that baby Reapers have the characteristics of whatever organics they're made from.

Jonny_Evil wrote...

1: Reapers have never before failed, not in all their millions or billions of years harvesting the galaxy. Why have a backup?

2: Apart from being indestructable, the Citadel is the heart of galactic society and governance. It'd be like nuking Washington DC because a few people think there's a gateway to hell under it. Not to mention if you know about the Reapers you'd know how the Citadel ties into the Relay network. Destroy it and the relays might shut down, say goodnight to civilisation.

3: Harbinger said they were "salvation through destruction". The Reapers might operate like that to preserve civilisations within themselves for an as yet unknown reason.

4: The Reapers are sapient beings, they don't run according to a program, they're adaptable. The Collectors were collecting interesting life forms long before humanity came along and stopped Sovereign, they could easily just be a Reaper experiment to more thoroughly catalog life in between harvests and only got pressed into building a new Reaper to open the Citadel relay after Sovereign's destruction. Also space is big, shut down starships are cold. The derelict Reaper was only found by following the trajectory of the mass driver shot that scoured a planet before killing it, and Sovereign made itself known, it wasn't discovered.

5: It's EDI's guesswork, not fact. Many people on the forums have pointed out that the Human Reaper was much, much smaller than Sovereign or the Reapers shown at the end and have guessed that the squid like ship is a shell containing the Reaper which resembles it's parent species. As I said above, they mention salvation through destruction, they may be collecting and preserving species instead of harvesting them for some other reason, but with the destruction of Sovereign they've had to repurpose the Collectors into building a replacement to open the Relay.

6: Harbinger's just another Reaper. With Sovereign dead he's taken over efforts to get back into the galaxy, that's all, although your theory is interesting.

1. The Reapers are godlike super intelligences. Surely they understand entropy? Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, especially over a long period of time. There's already evidence that things don't always go exactly to their plans. The Mu Relay was blown out of position by a supernova; 37 million years ago, one Reaper was actually taken out by organics; and any number of other bad (for them) things could happen in a chaotic universe over the course of billions of years. If they're really as nearly omniscient a as the story implies, and they really do plan to live forever, then they would have devised countless ways to make sure that they always have access to their food source. They are capable of calculating contingencies and backup plans beyond the ken of mortals, and simple common sense holds that they must have. Supervillians ought never to act so stupid that it contradicts their very nature.

2. As far as I know, there's no evidence the Citadel is indestructible. Sovereign certainly gave it a good thrashing in ME1. At the very least, it could be rigged with plasma torches like those from the asteroid in Bring Down the Sky and shoved into the nearest star. That it won't be evacuated is a political problem. And even if it can't be evacuated, there's a strong Renegade/Cerberus case that it ought to be destroyed, anyway. You'd be trading the lives of its 25 million inhabitants for those of untold trillions of current and future sentients in the Milky Way who'd be saved from harvesting by the Reapers. My point is that the first, second, and last concern of anyone serious about defeating the Reapers ought to be the destruction of the Citadel--it's the most effective, feasible, and safe path to victory.

3. Well, regardless of what the Collectors/Reapers think they're doing, Reapers are made of organics and the Collectors seemed to be making a new Reaper. 

4. I could buy the idea that the Collectors were left behind by the Reapers to prepare a menu for the next time the Reapers are ready for dinner. There's no real evidence in the story to support that theory, though.

4a. The more I think about it, the more the derelict Reaper seems to be a huge plot hole, too. Remember that in ME1, Vigil went to great lengths to explain that the Reapers were really, really thorough about cleaning up after themselves so that they'd leave no evidence about themselves for the next generation of organics to discover. So... during Reaper dinner time 37 million years ago, one of their number went MIA, and the rest of them didn't go find it and clean up its corpse, too? It's not like it would have been hard for them. All they would have had to do would have been to disable its Mass Effect core and let it fall into whatever star it was orbiting (which was what Shepherd did).

5. I certainly hope you're right about the Squid form being a shell for a Reaper core. As for Edi... whenever she's delivering info-dumps to Shepherd, she's always right. She's a plot crutch to explain things to the player. She's incapable of generating a map of a planet from orbit for Shepherd to use while he's on the ground, but she can scan the guts of a hyper-advanced alien starship and know exactly what's going on inside it. Nearly all the information that EDI reveals to Shepherd through her "scans" is pretty /eyeroll. In some ways, she's as godlike as the Reapers: her ability to scan things and figure out what they mean without doing any real research and investigation defies belief.

6. This was admittedly speculation on my part, and I forgot that Sovereign thought of itself as Nazara. Since a core element of  way the Reapers seems to be that redundancy is never, ever  necessary, then it would make sense that Nazara is Harbinger and is the only Reaper presently in the Milky Way.

Harbinger says "releasing control" and the collector looks around like "wtf" just before being consumed in the explosion (paragon ending, not sure how the "keep the base" option plays out.)
Makes me thinkg that Harbinger was a reaper overmind of sorts.

the end showing the fleet of reaper ships just confused me. Did they just decide that since they can't use the mass relay thru the citadel that they're going to hoof it across space manually? did the collectors build another "citadel" scale relay somewhere closer?


what do you guys think?

I think the shot of the huge Reaper fleet meant that they're still stuck in dark space. They're so far away that from where they are, the entirety of the Milky Way was visible. To me, it looked like they were at least as far away from the Milky as the Milky Way is wide. I don't remember the exact codex lore for it, but I recall that the Mass Relays exist because even FTL drives are far too slow to travel distances more than a few dozen or hundred light years at a time. So... the reaper fleet is still waiting for the Citadel relay  to open and let them in.

After I spent some time thinking about the ending of ME2 and of ME1, these are the things I've decided:

1. The Reapers are stupid, for not building more relays from their dark space lair to the Milky Way. Remember that the relays themselves are pretty inconspicuous, in terms of cosmic scale. The Mu Relay  in ME1 couldn't be found without the information from the Rachni queen because it was a cold, dark object floating randomly in space. Why didn't the Reapers leave lots of hidden relays to dark space floating around where they likely would never be seen by Milky Way inhabitants? For godlike AIs, they don't really have any concept of redundancy.

2. Shepherd, the Illusive Man, Anderson, and all the other people in the Milky Way who believe in the Reaper threat are also stupid. The way to defeat the Reapers isn't to go chasing the Collectors around, it's to blow up the Citadel. The Citadel is the one route the Reapers have into the Milky Way. If it were destroyed, the Reapers would be stuck in dark space forevermore. There's only 25 million or so people on the Citadel. It could be replaced with an asteroid habitat, something like a non-ghetto version of Omega.

3. The reason that the Reapers come around every 50K years and harvest the Milky Way is apparently for the purposes of maintenance and/or reproduction. Solyent Green is made of peoples! Organics get processed into Reaper parts and/or new Reapers.

4. Why the Collectors exist just... isn't apparent. Are they Sovereign's backup, in case it failed? If so, that's also stupid. If you're the Reapers and you're worried about the vanguard you left behind not getting the job done, then... why would you use a lobotomized race of organics you indoctrinated as your vanguard's back up? The better, and more obvious, solution would seem to be to leave more vanguards. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of Reapers in the dark space fleet. Why didn't they leave five or ten behind instead of just one? It's not like they're conspicuous. Sovereign hid for 50K years, and the derelict Reaper went unnoticed for... 37 million years. In fact, the derelict Reaper makes you wonder why they bother retreating to dark space at all. Milky Way organics don't really seem to be good at noticing Reapers.

5. If you can suspend belief really hard, or else come up with some sort of Rube Goldberg explanation for why the Collectors are there instead of a few other vanguard Reapers, then I think that the best explanation of what they were trying to do is to build a new Reaper vanguard, to take Sovereign's place using an early  mini-harvest of available organics. My guess is that it will be revealed that since the Keepers are no longer in thrall of the Reapers, it takes an actual Reaper to activate the Citadel relay to dark space. Why the new Reaper would look like a human skeleton is beyond me. What would it have looked like once it was full grown? A 2km long Terminator robot flying through space like Superman? That would be farcical, not menacing. The whole "Reapers look like the species they're made of" plot detail is just... really dumb. It also doesn't fit with the image of the amassed dark space Reaper fleet. If Reapers looked like the Solyent Green they were made of, then there ought to have have been hundreds, if not thousands, of differently shaped Reapers in the fleet. Unless, of course, the Squid Reapers were the Cool Kids and hung out in a clique by themselves away from all the others.

6. I think it's pretty obvious that Harbinger the Bug, the boss of the Collectors, was being remotely controlled by a Reaper. I'd even go so far as to say that it was the Reaper Formerly Known As Sovereign doing the controlling. Legion implies the Reapers are software, like the Geth are. So if the Reapers are like the Geth, in that they're just a collection of programs, then Sovereign would be able to work like the Geth by being able to take control of different physical platforms. A Reaper squid ship would be one such platform, as would implanted Saren and the King Collector Bug who got incinerated at the end of ME2. Thus, I think the main antagonist of the story arc is Harbinger the Reaper, who controlled Sovereign the squid ship in ME1, the Collector King in ME2, and will be back in another form trying to open the Citadel Relay again in ME3. Thus, the plot of ME2 is driven by Harbinger the Reaper trying to build itself a new physical platform for retaking the Citadel. Another clue is the name: "Harbinger" is a roughly a synonym of "vanguard" and of course, Sovereign described itself as the vanguard of the Reapers. I believe that Legion also said that it was Saren who came up with the name "Sovereign". 


Apologies if this seems like an unduly harsh take on the ME storyline. I have conflicting impulses with respect to the Mass Effect story. One the one hand, stupid plot holes that ruin my suspension of disbelief really annoy me, but on the other, ME is somewhat less stupid than most science fiction that makes it to the mainstream. And, as video games, they've been great fun. In other words, I only hit them because I love them. >.<

I've been meaning to write up a huge cumulative list of plot holes and inconsistencies in the Mass Effect story and post it, but I am lazy. I should probably do it soon, though, since all developers love to read their forums right after a new release. I should know. I've done the same myself. <.<

Does Cryo freeze shielded/armored enemies? If it does, I've been playing Vanguard the hard way. <.<