Like everything has this weird green glow to it. Every single living thing seems to be glowing unnaturally. Also not to mention all the husks and reaper enemies gain sentience as well. It feels really quite disturbing to me.

Scanning planets blitzed out of my mind at 3am was enjoyable to me. Meticulously scanning ever square just helped to slow things down in my head, then the absolute rush of finding a spike of resources? Oh baby. And then sometimes the ticking sound of a DOUBLE resource spike? Oh man. That is pure orgasmic ecstasy. I'm hoping to someday crowdfund a game that is just scanning planets.

And guys, let's keep this professional. Let's be respectful, okay? I know tensions get high when we're talking about our favorites. But personally, I would totally date Jack or even the last option.

Especially with the Geth Consensus mission on Rannoch in ME3 shows a very one sided view of the Quarians as the only ones in the wrong when then Geth killed over 99% of the Quarian population. Even in ME1 Commander Shepard chastises Tali for her ancestors actions against them and the Geth were completely hostile in ME1 which makes no sense as to why Shepard would defend them.

The decision was reportedly driven by caution and a desire to avoid media backlash. Following the release of the first Mass Effect in 2007, the studio faced heavy criticism from conservative media outlets—including a prominent panel on Fox News—over the game's depictions of sexual content and relationships. Because of this controversy, BioWare pulled back on several non-straight romance options late in Mass Effect 2's cycle, leaving Jack exclusively heterosexual in the final release despite in-game dialogue hinting at her past relationships with both men and women.

I get why people have issues with them but I feel like in terms of the options we were given (Destroy the Reapers and all Synthetics, Assume Control of the Reapers yourself, Merge all Synthetic and Organic Life, Refuse all the options and let the Reapers win) I felt satisfied with them.

Besides, worse endings have and will continue to exist after and in comparison, to those, I think Mass Effect 3 at least worked. It wasn't 100% satisfying but I feel like it got the trilogy over the finish in a way that would made me feel okay with it.

I've been thinking about this lately. A lot of marketing effort has gone into calling LLMs like ChatGPT AI, and a large part of the public is under the impression that we're approaching science fiction style AI which is conscious and self-aware. There are people who think they're in a relationship with an "AI" boyfriend/girlfriend and believe that they're interacting with an artificial person and not just reading recycled responses from other people's conversations.

Mass Effect deals a lot with the themes of conscious AI and personhood of artificial beings. VIs are like LLMs, automated computer programs without awareness. AIs are actually capable of thought. I really like how this setting depicts a future where everybody understands a clear distinction between an automated message generator and a conscious artificial being.

We should popularize virtual intelligence as a real life term!

I have replayed the game many times, but I have never explored the Engineer class.

I'm gonna ask a really naive question.

As most of you know, Liara's sex scene in ME1 got blasted on Fox News (for anyone outside the US, "Fox News" is a very popular but often conservative-learning news station, that's summing it up in a sentence, I don't want this to devolve into just dunking on Fox News or conservatives or anything else political so let's just move on) for its nudity, bad enough to where Fox branded the entire game as a "sex simulator" and causing enough of an uproar that this is the primary reason why you had to wait until ME3 for same-sex romance options before that caused more teeth-gnashing. EDIT: Thanks to u/kagernaut, here is the Fox News segment itself.

Here's the naive question...Why was that so bad?

Because IIRC you could see like...the side of her right asscheek, I think, and presumably she was naked because she was in bed with Shep. So like, 1/3 of one nude buttcheek. I'm reaching here because I haven't romanced Liara in ages so if anyone wants to correct me on that, feel free. It wasn't like she showed a whole nipple or something. Hell IIRC Miranda had the most "nude" sex scene because she actually takes her catsuit partially off and is there in her bra so she showed the most skin (as of ME2, of course Traynor and FemShep have their shower scene in 3). The other women, Tali had one big kiss, Jack just wanted cuddles, which is fitting for both of them respectively for obvious reasons. So how come Liara got so much vitriol and Miranda didn't?

Only thing I can think of is because Liara is female and the real reason for pearl-clutching was if FemShep romanced her, which would explain them holding off on same-sex romances altogether in ME2.

But that's just something that's popped into my head since someone else was talking about Liara in a different sub and I brought it up. I know that Liara made Fox News shit bricks. I just never knew how/why

Keith David in the new spidey trailer today

Next up under the VA spotlight- Kimberly Brooks! She voices one of our OG squadmates, Ashley! She may be a controversial character, but I think we can all agree that Kimberly does an amazing job.

What do you think?

I’d say my biggest mistake was failing to secure Zaeed and Miranda’s Loyalty in ME2 which led to their deaths in 3.

I put together a visual showing Mass Effect romance options divided by whether they’re available to femShep or maleShep.

It made me curious how people feel about the trilogy’s approach to romance variety across gender, sexuality, and species.

• Do you think BioWare handled the romance distribution well overall

• If you could change anything about the romance structure, what would you change?

• And for those who play both series: how does this compare to Dragon Age’s approach

Now while the Genophage was the only way to stop the Krogan Rebellions when they were happening due to the Krogan's extremly high birthrate, there was not excuse to keep their entire species forcibly sterilised for 1476 years afterwards. The Council was basically trying to keep the Krogan to kill themselves off and they wanted them to go extinct. Also while the Quarians did break the Council's AI ban rules and also tried to exterminate the Geth once they became self aware the Geth did kill 99% of the Species and then squatted on their planets they were not even using for 290 years. Also the Council revoked their embassy, stopped them from settling new planets with the threat of orbital bombardment, allowed businesses to legally not hire them due to being Quarians and did nothing to protect them from being targets from slavers. I have no idea why so many people both in and out of universe defend both species being collectively punished for their ancestor's crimes despite their ancestors did horrible things?

On a side note, I've been playing this game for years and years, and I just now realized that C-Sec is short for Citadel Security. 🤦‍♀️