Mass Effect 1 Dlc How To Start

[Ena Marklund]

Iloved the original Mass Effect. I've played through it multiple times: I have one character at level 60 (canonical, with which I played through thrice), another at level 50-something (female engineer, with which I played through twice), and another at level 40-something (biotic, with which I played through once).

I've recently ordered Mass Effect 2 on Amazon (for GBP 13, what a deal). My question is, should I start Mass Effect 2 continuing one of my Mass Effect playthroughs or "start afresh"? Do you lose much if you start afresh? What do you gain otherwise? What are your experiences either way? Part of me would like to remain canonical with the series, and continue as BioWare suggests the story goes, but I've heard it's a lame choice.

With my level 60 character, I played through the game three times. Each time I did things differently; on the second playthrough I completed each and every quest, even. Now I can't remember what choices I made. On one playthrough, I even killed Wrex, just for the hell of it. Can I start from any of these characters' playthroughs or just the most recent one (the one at level 60 or the one at level 50, for example)? Can I change any of my choices (I seem to have read that I can't, if that's so, bad show, BioWare).

I'm not really invested in any of my characters; but there are some choices I'd prefer rather than others. (Just for the sake of completeness, the major ones: Ashley and Wrex still alive, the council dead, Anderson the human ambassador, all the characters with their subquests completed, Rachni queen alive...)

For example, at one point you visit the council on the Citadel, and that plays out completely differently depending on whether or not the original council is still alive (same with the choice of who you nominated for the council, Anderson or Udina). The same goes for who you killed on Virmire (Ashley or Kaiden) and if Wrex is still alive.

The same is true for the side quests, to a lesser extent. However most of these only have the follow up in the form of an e-mail to your private terminal on the Normandy, but it's still cool to know that your choices had a lasting effect on the story.

If you had a love interest, it doesn't have a huge impact on Mass Effect 2. When you meet them, you share a brief kiss, but that's about it. You are free to have a new (different) love interest in Mass Effect 2, but apparently that will have some sort of impact in Mass Effect 3.

As for importing characters, I'm not completely sure about this but I believe that you can import any play through for a given character (it's been a while since I imported my Mass Effect 1 characters). If you don't mind doing another Mass Effect 1 play through, I'd suggest starting again with your level 60 character (or whichever one you want to import), and make all of the decisions that you want to carry over to Mass Effect 2. You could always put the difficulty on easy to help things go faster.

If you don't import a Mass Effect 1 character, the game basically makes the big Mass Effect 1 choices for you. Also, some dialog that is present for an imported character is not present for a new character (mostly minor things, but some text wouldn't make sense if you didn't play the first game).

And even if you import a character, you can change just about everything about them (class, appearance, etc, etc), so that's not a handicap, and re-importing them resets your morality, so that's fine as well.

You got it right. Had the same problem, repaired (per EA tech support) w/o success. I was placed on hold for 20+ minutes, during which I tried right clicking on masseffect.exe, clicked compatability, and set it to xp sp3 compat. mode and it worked fine

I wonder sometimes whether BioWare will ever do another trilogy of games again, because the more time that passes, the more I appreciate what an ambitious idea that was, with Mass Effect. Three games that would tell one story and that you could carry one hero all the way through - that's not just bold, that's borderline outrageous, especially when you consider all the choices and consequences typically in one of the studio's games. And it's only now, really, when I see no one else attempting to do the same thing - not to that degree, anyway - I realise how special it was.

Perhaps it was so hard to do, BioWare never wanted to do it again. It's a thought that leads me down a rabbit hole and to someone I've dubbed Mr Mass Effect: Mac Walters, the writer who spent 19 years at BioWare, and most of it writing and making Mass Effect. He was senior writer on ME1, lead writer on ME2 and ME3, creative director (eventually) on Andromeda, and then project director on the Legendary Edition remaster. He wrote Mass Effect books and graphic novels, and, it turns out, he was there at the very beginning, when a core group of people - project leader Casey Hudson, systems designer Preston Watamaniuk, and writer Drew Karpyshyn - dreamt Mass Effect up.

And the trilogy idea was already there then, he says. "It was definitely Casey [Hudson's] idea," Walters tells me, in a larger podcast interview you'll see embedded in this piece, and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

"I would often sit in their office and we would [talk about], 'What is the game going to be?' But from the level of 'it was Jack Bauer in space' - that was an early thing that we talked about, and the idea of it being a trilogy of games. That was something that Casey had put a stamp on very early, even before, when I was still finishing off Jade Empire."

And the reasoning behind it being a trilogy was two-fold: one, to make it feel cinematic, in the way that the three-arc Star Wars story was. Hudson was apparently greatly inspired by Star Wars. "We often talked about Mass Effect 2 being the darker middle act, much like Empire [Strikes Back] - there was a lot of influence coming from that from day one."

Two: BioWare needed an exciting innovation to sell the series with. This was a new IP, remember - the studio had left Star Wars behind with Knights of the Old Republic, and was now striking out into space on its own. And a trilogy was exactly the kind of idea that would make people take notice of it. "Saying we're going to do three games in a franchise: okay that's challenging," says Walters. "But [saying] we're going to do three games where the choice and consequences actually carry over for you: that was the big bold innovation that we tackled."

On the very first design document, then, were sections for Mass Effect 2 and 3. Small sections, mind you. "At that time, we had maybe a generous paragraph of what we thought Mass Effect 2 might be," he says, "and literally a line on what Mass Effect 3 would be. And it would be very aspirational, like, 'Let's wrap this whole thing up!'"

The intention was to seed ideas that would grow through the series, but exactly where they'd end up or how they'd be resolved, they didn't know. The pervading feeling was, "We're not going to answer this now, and we don't know how or where or when we'll answer it, but we want to put the mystery in there and then pay it off some day going forward."

Walters remembers talking about the romance arcs a lot back then, and already there were ideas for Ashley and Kaidan to be potential romances that would stretch through the trilogy. "I remember even talking, early days, about having Ash and Kaidan - or whoever survives of course - fall away from you in the second game only to return in the third game, and this idea that if you stayed true to them there might be something different than if you didn't." And, of course, that idea made it into the final game.

But a lot of things were left open-ended simply because "we weren't sure where we wanted to take things". For instance, you've probably read about the different ideas BioWare originally had for the Reapers and what was going on there, and how it would all be wrapped up. The original lead writer, Drew Karpyshyn, had this whole Dark Energy idea that wasn't used. But he wasn't upset about that when I spoke him about it, in the wake of Mass Effect 3 being released. As he told me, "projects evolve, and you rarely end up in the place you expected when you first started".

Walters adds: "There's so much of the way that we handle story and world building in these IPs that's very organic. There's obviously things that you hash out before anyone starts really doing work to build the game, but then the actual building of the game is where I would say a majority of that world-building happens." Plus, "you don't know how the fans are going to respond". What if fans hate an idea you've really gone in on, or what if their tastes change? BioWare wasn't just committing to one game, after all, but three, stretched over a decade of development. It had to try and remain flexible.

The other benefit of putting off the worrying was it freed the team up creatively. "The fact that we created a suicide mission in Mass Effect 2, where any or all or none of the characters could survive, tells you that we weren't too daunted after [Mass Effect] One on complexity, because there couldn't be anything you could do that's more complex than that and then have to follow it up. So by the time we landed on that concept for the suicide squad," he says, "we often joked in the early days, 'Well I guess our future selves won't be too happy with this but it's a great idea so let's go ahead with it!'"

In other words, "we didn't let it hold us back", and it's an attitude Walters really loved seeing on the team. "Every once in a while we'd be like, 'Okay this is going to be challenging,' but we had that sort of 'we'll figure it out' mentality 'when the time is right'. And I'm so thankful for that, because if you think of all the things that people tend to talk about when they're referring to Mass Effect 2 [...] the suicide squad, the conflicts that you can have with your characters. All of that is, like you said, it's a spaghetti of conditionals and things like that in the background, that if we had taken too much time and said, 'Oh this is going to be hard, let's not do it,' well, Mass Effect 2 wouldn't have been what Mass Effect 2 was."

3a8082e126