The assignment with Toombs and Dr. Wayne in ME1 is probably the worst offender in my book, because frankly, I *don't* think it makes much sense, for several reasons:
First, when Hackett gives you the misison, he says that several scientists have already been murdered. So why is Toombs standing there, seemingly hesitating to pull the trigger, if he already had no problem killing several other scientists? It seems like Wayne would be a dead man once Toombs got his hands on him, unless Toombs is now starting to feel regret over what he's done and doesn't want to kill anyone else. Which I could believe, except...
...there are all those mercs that are shooting at you. I have a tough time believing Toombs could recruit and pay for a whole merc squad for this, but even if he could, he has to have noticed that they're under fire out there, so again, why hasn't he already killed Wayne by the time Shepard gets to him? And that makes his not having killed Wayne already even more surprising - not only has he murdered several scientists already, but he's willing to throw his own people up there against fellow Alliance soldiers and potentially kill them as well. And yet this is the guy who's still standing there with one of his tormentors at gunpoint and hasn't killed him yet?
I suppose the other possibility is that the mercs are Cerberus and are there to rescue Dr. Wayne (or to make sure Toombs and Wayne *both* die in order to cover up evidence), and that they'd still rather kill Shepard and his/her companions to keep this quiet than allow the Alliance to interfere. But there's not really anything in the dialogue to back that up, and as I recall, they are simply identified (by the game) as mercs, not Cerberus agents.
Now, I suppose this *could* all be rationalized by some complicated psychology - Toombs does seem unstable, and maybe he has an easier time dealing with the killing when others are doing it than when he's doing it himself - but again, the game doesn't really explain it very well. As I recall, the dialogue has him say something to Shepard along the lines of "I don't have anything against you," but it doesn't give Shepard a response choice along the lines of, "Um, what about all those mercs of yours that just tried to kill me?" (Of course, the dialogue also seems to proceed as if Shepard had been on Akuze even if you don't pick the Sole Survivor background, so go figure.)
In the end, it left me feeling like the designers just decided the players needed to shoot at something before getting to the conclusion of the assignment - it would be like if you couldn't go talk to Talitha at the docking bay without first getting attacked by a random pack of crazed varren. For me, at least, it felt unnecessary and out of sync with how the scene eventually plays out.
Other examples of this, in my book, would be the biotics who take Chairman Burns hostage, Harkin's mercs in Garrus's ME2 loyalty mission, the crazed test subjects on Dr. Saleon's ship, and the Blood Pack in the Pragia test facility. Now some of those might actually make some logical sense - for example, on Garrus's loyalty mission, I could believe that Harkin would throw his people out there as cannon fodder but then surrender once he himself is cornered - but on a more basic level, it *felt* jarring and, again, made me wonder if the designers just thought we needed another battle sequence. And on a couple of them, I even just had Shepard sprint past all the faceless hostiles to get to the scene at the end rather than shooting them. Personally, I'd rather just have the assignments go straight to the dialogue scene rather than put us through another shoot-em-up that doesn't feel like it belongs, and, in the cases I mentioned, is not even all that tactically challenging.
Modifié par FlyingSquirrel, 07 février 2011 - 02:09 .
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