Editing Bioware (section)

====Mass Effect 2====
Mass Effect 2 was a great game, arguably the best of the series (according to fans and critics alike). The game is more focused in scope and less open-world like, with tighter if-a-little-rudimentary combat and more emphasis on the characters in your team than the entire world. ME2 is a bit more cinematic in comparison to 1 and spends more time presenting the setting to the player. Also notable for being fucking ''huge'', being released on TWO DISCS, which was becoming increasingly rare at the time of release.

There was quite a change of scope of the story: You are fucking dead, your spaceship blown up by a then-unknown enemy. 

Your body is recovered by the human supremacist rogue black ops (or alt-right group, depending who you ask) Cerberus, and gets rebuilt over the course of two years a la 6 Million Dollar Man.

Now Shepard must assemble an elite team of the galaxy's best mercenaries, criminals, and specialists to stop a race of aliens called the Collectors abducting entire humans colonies.  All while Cerberus gives you a new spaceship, are financing your mission and are certainly not planning to betray you when you're no longer useful. "Main" missions take a backseat to recruitment and "loyalty" missions where you acquire and secure the loyalty of your team-mates, respectively (some of whom you can still bang on your loveboat).  There's even some series-essential lore and plot-changing decisions locked away in specific recruitment and loyalty missions (in particular, Tali's missions are absolutely vital regarding the geth and the geth-quarian conflict, and also set up a plot arc for a galaxy-wide threat that could upstage even the Reapers... [[Fail|which got retconned out in the third game]]). The side quests, loyalty statuses and resource gathering are so important that now if you fuck up all three (and you can easily since money is very limited, and there are no warnings) you can die permanently at the very end unable to export the save to the third game.

This makes for a character-focused story that goes at the player's own pace and takes you to previously unseen, seedy parts of the galaxy. Your enemies are more often than not mercenary organizations than evil robots this time, and you tangle with the criminal underworld just as much as you do the Collector threat. Speaking of pace, the game has a surprise countdown that triggers a very nasty mission to give your ass a kick to get a move on. Twice. The plot and pace in the second game is seen "the best" for a reason.

Combat and RPG mechanics took a very harsh swerve; resources and weapons are ''extremely'' limited. There is more focus on straight shooting-and-cover-camping than game breaking Biotic powers with Doom 3 grade unflinching mechanical strafefest of 6 gorillion exchanged bullets by both sides. There are new "tech" powers such as a secondary synthetic solid light coating that doubles shields and acts as a SECOND armor but explodes and hurts everyone once shields are down. While somewhat disliked at the time, it was at least less janky than ME1 and easier to get the grasp of. The RPG system also took a grievous hit, but in the grand scheme of things, the new system boiled down what the old system was to what it actually provided - simply progression, with a choice of specialization at the end.

The DLC was very split; the major ones are spectacularly good and are generally considered some of the best for the entire trilogy (Lair of the Shadow Broker - where you help Liara rescue a friend who saved you while fighting to take down the Shadow Broker and their allies), while the smaller ones reek a bit too much of EA-style pay-money-for-guns-and-cosmetics bullshit (Firewalker Pack). Major [[rage]] ensued when one of the "DLCs" (a full extra party member) proved to be ''actually on the discs'', indicating that it was functional at release but intentionally suppressed from the player unless you paid extra for it - in other words, [[EA|a blatant fucking cash grab]]. Luckily all the good shit is included in the remaster.