This also creates headaches for me as I analyze this story.

The Arrival moved the Reaper plot forward, then moves it back again, because no matter what it does it can’t feed back into Mass Effect 3 because not everyone is going to choose to pay for The Arrival. The “How do we stop the Reapers from coming to kill us all?” plot – which most people seem to regard as the main plot – doesn’t budge in Mass Effect 2, and instead it only moves forward in this piece of DLC. Publishers: DLC is all about hats and guns and new skins and cosmetic things.īut here we are. Players: We don’t want to have our games cut into pieces! Will we have to pay for lore? For the last boss fight? For the end of the game? This is exactly the dystopian world people predicted when DLC became a thing. The worst problem is that we are now dealing with an immensely important plotline that may or may not exist in the main story, depending on whether or not you bought enough DLC from BioWare. The Arrival retroactively makes Mass Effect 1 dumb and pointless.īut that’s not the worst problem. So how long was it from the end of the second game to The Arrival? A few weeks? Months? If that’s all it takes, then Sovereign and Harbinger are idiots for enacting their plans instead of… whatever caused this to happen. This seems to make a mess of the previous games: How did the Reapers get here? Did they just fly in from dark space? Remember that we saw them all “wake up” at the very end of Mass Effect 2. Shepard ends up fighting them and then crashes an asteroid into the local Mass Relay to blow it up just as the Reapers arrive, thus slamming the door in their face.

They even have a countdown timer on the outside of their base, showing how long until the Reapers arrive. In it, Shepard abandons the team he established in the main game and finds a cult of indoctrinated people who are predicting that the Reapers Are Coming. But I think we need to stop and at least mention the events and ideas of The Arrival anyway, because of the problems it creates for the main story. And it certainly wouldn’t be fair (or wise) of me to attempt to dissect content I haven’t played. I know I said earlier in this series that I wouldn’t be covering DLC.

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