Mass Effect 2 Day#3: The Omega Effect

This day I get out of the intro and into the story proper with a mission on my first real planet. I get a bunch more conversation, although I’m finding the Paragon and Renegade stuff disturbingly easy and blurry. The plot stays pretty strong although there are moments of confusion in what I’m doing. The game is still quite good, but I hope that the Paragon/Renegade stuff hasn’t been dumbed downed even more than it was in the previous game. Spoilers within.

I spend a little more time looking around the ship, but I can’t find Miranda. There are sections of the ship I can’t unlock without a certain kind of officer — maybe she’s in one of those. Whatever. I go to the familiar galaxy map and look up Omega (note NOT Omega 4 relay, just Omega). I select it and there’s an animation of the Normandy heading to the plant that has a lot more flying around than I remember in the previous game. There’s an animation of the ship moving through space and then coming in on Omega — it’s pretty elaborate. I do some more leveling up and then enter the base. A couple of guys introduce themselves to me, and say they don’t trust me. Turns out Omega is a pretty lawless place, and they are worked I’m here to cause Alliance trouble. I assure them I’m not, but they say that I have to come to Afterlife to meet some big deal person.  Without some other goal, I go right there.

The Afterlife is some kind of nightclub, which is funny because this “nightclub” takes up something like 20% of the available map in this station. That’s a party culture. I walk past the mini-line to go inside. In the entrance, I try to talk to some alien guys and they immediately threaten us. I use a Paragon option to threaten them back and they back down. It’s a little weird that the Paragon option is a threat — doesn’t seem very noble. Anyway, I head inside the club, which features the hipper cousin of the music from Mos Easley, and I find Aria, who is one of the blue unisex aliens.  She the leader of this city, and doesn’t really have much patience for me.  She won’t go into the history of the place or her history, but she will help me find who I’m looking for, since that seems to help her. Kind of cool to have a character who doesn’t have time for me. She tells me archangel (one of the people I’m looking for) is being hunted. Apparently, he betrayed the mercs (armed gangs) on the station in some way and they all want him dead. If can hook up with mercs, I can get to him. The other person I’m looking for, some doctor, is helping the quarantined poor who can’t live in the nice part of town. I thank her for her help, she gives me a loose idle threat, and I’m off.

Looking for the mercs, I meet a quarian pilgrim selling salvage to earn his way off of the station. He’s being forced by another merchant (Harrod) to sell high, which is making it impossible for him to earn money.  He wants to earn his own way to make up for his mistake, but I do offer to talk to Harrod and get him to knock off the bad trade. I meet some aliens called vorcha and they are crazy; they just babble something about not doing anything wrong and leave. I meet a petty criminal who I busted before — is that from ME1? I don’t remember — and tell him to stay straight. I order a drink at the bar and pass out. When I come to, I’m in another area and a random NPC tells me the bartender poisoned me. He hates humans — most humans die, but I am the hero, after all. I chose a threatening “I’m going to kill that guy” line of dialogue that earns me a wee bit of Renegade, and I go right back to the bar. Here’s where this gets weird. When I talk to the guy, I have Paragon options that allow me to rile up the people around me against the bartender. I make those choices and the result is that I incite another guy in crowd to shoot the bartender. I got Paragon for that. Excuse me — tricking others to kill my enemies earns me Paragon? Since when was Paragon a synonym for “cowardly weasel?”  It’s also a little odd to me that I have so many Paragon and Renegade options this early in the game. I remember feeling like I earned them in the first game, and when I got my first Paragon choice, I was proud I had it and wasn’t totally sure it would work. I really hope they haven’t nerfed that system down.

Anyway, bartender “nobly” killed, I’m back on the hunt for the mercs. Along the way, I threaten Harrod and get him to back off on the quarian, the threats an obviously honorable move that earns me more Paragon. I finally find the merc recruiter. The deal is that Arcangel is holed up in a building and massacring anyone who tries to cross the bridge to him. They have a team that snuck a bad way across the bridge, but they can’t get in the building unless someone distracts Arcangel from the bridge. That’s where we come in. The guy tells us it’s potentially a suicide mission, but that’s what we’re getting paid for. I get connected, my party knowing that we’ll take out the mercs instead and convince Arcangel to join us when we free him. As I leave, this young guy comes in to join up. I have the choice to talk to him and I take it, and in that conversation, I realize he’s an amateur going to his death, and I get a Paragon QTE to take his gun away and thus stop him from joining.  On my way out, I meet a guy guarding against vorcha, but he doesn’t have any further information. I head to the transport area the merc recruiter told me about, and go to find Arcangel.

We cut to at the destination. There I meet the various merc bosses, and get some more details on what the different gangs do and verify that they all hate Arcangel. I find a robot depowered in a room and I hack it to help me out in the future. I’m not really sure where I’m going, but after wandering a little ways, I do stumble into the main room of the level and quickly, almost accidentally, get into fight and turn on the other mercs. It takes a few rounds, but I clear the room. However, I have no idea what to do now, so I decide to save and check it out next time.