When I first saw this mod available for download, I hesitated. On the one hand, I love the Suicide Mission of Vanilla ME2, but at the same time always thought it could be massively improved, for exactly the reasons you cite:
1) The presence of a "safety net" with certain choices, which are not hard to guess ahead of time, really takes a lot of the element of suspense out of something that is nominally a "Suicide" Mission. 2) The roleplaying approach of (character action) = (character interpretation) = (this exact result in gameplay) might be appealing for some die-hard fans of the RPG genre (including those who prefer ME1 to ME2), but was something I found took a lot of the enjoyment out of the game for me personally, since I prefer explanations for things like character motivation or psychology to be either very complex or left open-ended, if not both simultaneously.
That said, once I looked at the mod description, the stats on paper definitely gave me pause. But I decided to give the mod a go anyway, just to see if my misgivings would end up playing out (since I've learned in the past to not lean into first impressions too zealously without experience or other concrete evidence). Long story short, I'm VERY glad that I gave this mod a chance, and I am even more glad that waited to provide any feedback until AFTER I was done playing it at least once.
There aren't many things (if any) I would actively want to change about this mod as it currently stands. As I initially said, I had quite a few reservations before playing through it, but all of them but one have faded into the background once I've experienced the mod (at least once, anyway, though a few different playthroughs with worse luck or maybe a different character / backstory setup might change my mind) as actual gameplay rather than a series of numbers in the mod description or on a spreadsheet. I'll go into them in more detail as replies to this post, so it's easier to look at each point separately. But for now, I've endorsed this mod because I think I will always have it installed for future playthroughs.
Another minor beef I still have is with the fact that the tech specialist can be anyone on the team. I'm actually in favor of your idea of not having the "good for specialist" flag count as an absolute-win-condition and of not NOT having that flag count as an absolute-lose condition.... I like the idea of higher readiness scores compensating somewhat for proficiency bonuses. However, for the tech specialist (I have no issue with the idea of anyone from the squad being a possible team leader, or with Zaeed getting the leader bonus in addition to Garrus, Miranda, and Jacob), I think it would be better to bring that more in line with how you implemented the biotic bubble specialist: the "poorer" candidates for the job CAN still succeed, but if you have no basic training for the job to begin with, you can't do the job at all.
(Especially if you're unlucky like I was on my first run and lost BOTH Samara AND Jack in the approach at one go... my choice for the biotic run still ended up failing, but again, it kept me MUCH more invested in the gameplay right up until the end to feel like I genuinely still had a chance until the moment of decision actually came.)
That being said, I'm guessing that you probably treated the tech and biotic specialists differently because that's a difference that exists in the vanilla mechanic. So it's certainly not your responsibility to fix, but if you're not averse to making further improvements and tweaks, I think it's still worth considering for setup and immersion purposes, as it's something that still managed to bother me even after playing through your mod a couple times. The vanilla mechanic as it stood was simplistic, but didn't have the potential to result in what looked like a plot hole, because anyone who wasn't a tech specialist would automatically fail anyway, so while I think your numbers ARE an improvement over what's going on in the vanilla game, further "recalibration" might be warranted.
If you DO decide to limit the possible candidates for tech specialist to only some squadmates rather than all who are surviving by that point:
1) For the "benchers" for this segment, I would nominate Mordin, Garrus, Jacob and Miranda as possible alternate choices... Mordin because he's the resident scientist, so the challenge for the player comes in realizing that Mordin is a biologist / medical doctor, not a computer expert. Garrus because he obviously has tech expertise all the way back to ME1, but as far as we see in the game, only insofar as it applies to real-world weapons and vehicles, and not in cyberwarfare or cybersecurity (his sabotage / damping powers from ME1 aside). Miranda for much the same reasons she's a possible-but-inferior choice for the biotic run, and Jacob not because he has any tech training in particular, but because he volunteered (so if anything, he should get a hidden minus score for the job). The rest I can't see of being of any use in a job that demands a highly specialized and honed technical skillset (and keep in mind, this is a futuristic setting where space travel is ubiquitous, so a lot of things that look like really, really advanced tech skills by our standards probably barely pass muster as "basic subsistence-level tech" in the ME universe): not Zaeed, not Thane, not Jack, certainly not Grunt.
2) I also notice that, for the biotic run, there's a 20% success chance gap between someone who merely has the highest degree of readiness, vs someone who has the highest degree of readiness AND a specialist bonus. And that feels like a better way to make the specialist bonus work for your team's chances of success, as opposed to the tech specialist, where there's only a 10% gap between someone who is properly specialized and someone who isn't.
Well, bad news first. Good news (that is to say, the positive feedback, the things I actively liked about this mod and think should not be changed) in the next post.
Thanks again for the detailed feedback, and for the effort of moving posts around. Still looking forward to the "good news" of course, but I will try to already answer about the Tech specialist.
I am actually a bit confused about your comment, since not all squadmates are available for this task. And if all were indeed available for thisin your game, I have no idea how this could have happened: knowing the relevant code, it seems impossible that a bug or conflict with another mod could cause this.
The only ones available should be Tali, Legion, and Kasumi (with the bonus), plus Jacob, Garrus, Mordin, and Thane. I did consider some changes, but kept this identical to vanilla. The questionable ones are: - Miranda. She's half Tech half Biotic, and I fully agree that she should logically be selectable. But she's not in there simply because she has unique lines during the rest of the mission and is therefore not allowed to die until the last events. She also volunteers for Team Leader right after you select the Tech specialist, which wouldn't make much sense. - Jacob. Despite having no Tech specialisation, he is selectable because he volunteered. I agree that it would make sense to give him a negative bonus. I briefly considered adding other squadmates (e.g. Jack), and giving them and Jacob a negative bonus. But in the end, I felt it would just mean adding an unecessary complication. I don't see any positive effects of this in terms of gameplay, as it would most likely just dismiss Jacob from the choice (except maybe for someone who didn't read carefully enough). There are many ways I could have made the Readiness system more complex (more possible values, depend on more things before and during the mission, etc), but I actively tried to find the simplest possible version that still achieved what I wanted to achieve in terms of gameplay. - Thane. He is more difficult. His class is a Combat+Biotic mix, but he's not really a Vanguard, more like a Biotic Infiltrator. You mention that the type of Tech activities involved here (inflitration, security, etc) do not match Garrus' calibration tech skills. And Mordin is the only pure Tech squadmate who doesn't work in vanilla because he is more of a BioTech specialist. For similar reasons, I don't find it so hard to believe that an Assassin like Thane would have some experience and skills with that kind of task, despite having no Tech combat skills. The first time we meet him, he literally drops out of the vents/ceiling right in front of us, after infiltrating a Merc building.
But I'm like you in that I don't like very much working on such simplistic arguments regarding squadmate personalities/abilities, to determine success-failure. Which is why I seriously reduced the impact of specialisation. One readiness point may seem too small compared to having the appropriate skills, but in the majority of cases, it's still going to be enough to make the player automatically pick one of the squadmates with the bonus. And other cases (like your situation with the biotic bubble) should not be penalized too much either.
Way I see it, Shepard knows the team and knows who is best suited for the task, but does not know how difficult the task will be. It's really just opening and closing doors, which could mean simply pushing a few buttons, or could end up being much more complicated. Jacob volunteered because he assumed the task would be dangerous but only require very basic common tech skills, and well he might just be right. That's what the randomness in my system creates, and justifies that in some cases sending someone with low Tech skills might just be enough. So overall, lore-wise I'm not fully, but reasonably, satisfied with Jacob, Thane, Mordin and Garrus all being on the same level, and I prefer not to complicate things gameplay-wise. Also, Kasumi is DLC, Legion can be sold, Tali, Garrus and Thane can die during the approach. So it is good to make sure the player has at least a few options to choose from, whatever the circumstances.
Concerning your second point (the 10-20% success chance gap between someone with the highest degree of readiness, and someone who also has the specialist bonus): this is due to the fact that the Inflitration event depends on two squadmates (Tech Specialist and Team Leader), while the biotic bubble depends on a single squadmate. So for the infiltration, the chances of failure are split over two squadmates, and each one necessarily matters less individually. The overall probabilities for the two events are actually very similar: with both Tech specialist and Team Leader at very high readiness but no specialisation bonuses, you get 0.9 x 0.9 = 81% chance success, and that is what must be compared to the 80% for the biotic bubble.
Heh, still working on the positive part of my feedback. I have a tendency to get very wordy, especially when I find something I like, so I'm trying to find out a way to say the things I want, without repeating myself too much.
As for the tech specialists.... that's really weird. I could SWEAR I got everyone available to choose for the Tech Specialist in my first run (and in my second, which was just another version of that first run restored from a backup save, which I played just to see how the random factor can play out differently even with the exact same setup going into the Omega-4 Relay). I should go back and look in my FRAPS folder to check...
And you are right, I was remembering wrong, I must have seen the squad selection screen with WAY more people than I expected there to be, mentally inserted a scroll bar in there somewhere that wasn't actually there, and assumed that everyone was selectable when that wasn't actually the case. Sorry about the false alarm then.
As for your points about who is selectable and who isn't then... now that that misunderstanding is cleared up, I do not have any major objections with any of the criteria by which you decided to give this alignment point or that specialist point to such-and-such character (and I actually am writing about that a bit more in detail for the rest of my feedback), so I have nothing more to point out or to ask to change. But while we're here, I might as well respond to your points, for posterity if nothing else.
- Miranda. She's half Tech half Biotic, and I fully agree that she should logically be selectable. But she's not in there simply because she has unique lines during the rest of the mission and is therefore not allowed to die until the last events. She also volunteers for Team Leader right after you select the Tech specialist, which wouldn't make much sense.
Hmm. I see your logic there, especially about how Miranda's dialogue flows after Jacob's lines. That makes complete sense, then, and you're right, Miranda's main significance during the SM is as someone who is there to supervise the plot progression (which explains why she has plot armor until the virtual end).
My quip about Jacob getting a minus point was also more tongue-in-cheek than anything else, as, like you said, it introduces unnecessary complication (and also forces an extra, overbearing layer of interpretation on the player as well, an interpretation that each individual player may or may not agree with) into the mechanics to give him that negative point and no one else, for no specific citable in-game reason. For now I think it's quite enough that team members like Jack and Grunt (Grunt especially, just imagine what that would look like) are not possible choices for the tech specialist job.
- Thane. He is more difficult. His class is a Combat+Biotic mix, but he's not really a Vanguard, more like a Biotic Infiltrator. You mention that the type of Tech activities involved here (inflitration, security, etc) do not match Garrus' calibration tech skills. And Mordin is the only pure Tech squadmate who doesn't work in vanilla because he is more of a BioTech specialist. For similar reasons, I don't find it so hard to believe that an Assassin like Thane would have some experience and skills with that kind of task, despite having no Tech combat skills. The first time we meet him, he literally drops out of the vents/ceiling right in front of us, after infiltrating a Merc building.
I've actually never considered that before... and you're right, even if Thane has less experience in total than someone like Garrus, what skills he has are probably more likely to be suited for infiltrating the Collector Base. And he's been in tons of weird situations before, all sorts of out-of-the way places where regular troops (like turian garrisons) would never deploy, so if anything, he's more likely to have been in contact with weird eldritch alien tech than someone like Garrus, or maybe even Mordin. I'm still not totally (emotionally) convicted on the idea of Thane as a techie, but you make an undeniable (and intriguing) point, that just because we never see him use tech powers in gameplay, it doesn't mean he can't use them at all.
Feedback (Played) on Risky Suicide Mission (5 comments)
1) The presence of a "safety net" with certain choices, which are not hard to guess ahead of time, really takes a lot of the element of suspense out of something that is nominally a "Suicide" Mission.
2) The roleplaying approach of (character action) = (character interpretation) = (this exact result in gameplay) might be appealing for some die-hard fans of the RPG genre (including those who prefer ME1 to ME2), but was something I found took a lot of the enjoyment out of the game for me personally, since I prefer explanations for things like character motivation or psychology to be either very complex or left open-ended, if not both simultaneously.
That said, once I looked at the mod description, the stats on paper definitely gave me pause. But I decided to give the mod a go anyway, just to see if my misgivings would end up playing out (since I've learned in the past to not lean into first impressions too zealously without experience or other concrete evidence). Long story short, I'm VERY glad that I gave this mod a chance, and I am even more glad that waited to provide any feedback until AFTER I was done playing it at least once.
There aren't many things (if any) I would actively want to change about this mod as it currently stands. As I initially said, I had quite a few reservations before playing through it, but all of them but one have faded into the background once I've experienced the mod (at least once, anyway, though a few different playthroughs with worse luck or maybe a different character / backstory setup might change my mind) as actual gameplay rather than a series of numbers in the mod description or on a spreadsheet. I'll go into them in more detail as replies to this post, so it's easier to look at each point separately. But for now, I've endorsed this mod because I think I will always have it installed for future playthroughs.
(Especially if you're unlucky like I was on my first run and lost BOTH Samara AND Jack in the approach at one go... my choice for the biotic run still ended up failing, but again, it kept me MUCH more invested in the gameplay right up until the end to feel like I genuinely still had a chance until the moment of decision actually came.)
That being said, I'm guessing that you probably treated the tech and biotic specialists differently because that's a difference that exists in the vanilla mechanic. So it's certainly not your responsibility to fix, but if you're not averse to making further improvements and tweaks, I think it's still worth considering for setup and immersion purposes, as it's something that still managed to bother me even after playing through your mod a couple times. The vanilla mechanic as it stood was simplistic, but didn't have the potential to result in what looked like a plot hole, because anyone who wasn't a tech specialist would automatically fail anyway, so while I think your numbers ARE an improvement over what's going on in the vanilla game, further "recalibration" might be warranted.
If you DO decide to limit the possible candidates for tech specialist to only some squadmates rather than all who are surviving by that point:
1) For the "benchers" for this segment, I would nominate Mordin, Garrus, Jacob and Miranda as possible alternate choices... Mordin because he's the resident scientist, so the challenge for the player comes in realizing that Mordin is a biologist / medical doctor, not a computer expert. Garrus because he obviously has tech expertise all the way back to ME1, but as far as we see in the game, only insofar as it applies to real-world weapons and vehicles, and not in cyberwarfare or cybersecurity (his sabotage / damping powers from ME1 aside). Miranda for much the same reasons she's a possible-but-inferior choice for the biotic run, and Jacob not because he has any tech training in particular, but because he volunteered (so if anything, he should get a hidden minus score for the job). The rest I can't see of being of any use in a job that demands a highly specialized and honed technical skillset (and keep in mind, this is a futuristic setting where space travel is ubiquitous, so a lot of things that look like really, really advanced tech skills by our standards probably barely pass muster as "basic subsistence-level tech" in the ME universe): not Zaeed, not Thane, not Jack, certainly not Grunt.
2) I also notice that, for the biotic run, there's a 20% success chance gap between someone who merely has the highest degree of readiness, vs someone who has the highest degree of readiness AND a specialist bonus. And that feels like a better way to make the specialist bonus work for your team's chances of success, as opposed to the tech specialist, where there's only a 10% gap between someone who is properly specialized and someone who isn't.
Well, bad news first. Good news (that is to say, the positive feedback, the things I actively liked about this mod and think should not be changed) in the next post.
I am actually a bit confused about your comment, since not all squadmates are available for this task. And if all were indeed available for thisin your game, I have no idea how this could have happened: knowing the relevant code, it seems impossible that a bug or conflict with another mod could cause this.
The only ones available should be Tali, Legion, and Kasumi (with the bonus), plus Jacob, Garrus, Mordin, and Thane. I did consider some changes, but kept this identical to vanilla. The questionable ones are:
- Miranda. She's half Tech half Biotic, and I fully agree that she should logically be selectable. But she's not in there simply because she has unique lines during the rest of the mission and is therefore not allowed to die until the last events. She also volunteers for Team Leader right after you select the Tech specialist, which wouldn't make much sense.
- Jacob. Despite having no Tech specialisation, he is selectable because he volunteered. I agree that it would make sense to give him a negative bonus. I briefly considered adding other squadmates (e.g. Jack), and giving them and Jacob a negative bonus. But in the end, I felt it would just mean adding an unecessary complication. I don't see any positive effects of this in terms of gameplay, as it would most likely just dismiss Jacob from the choice (except maybe for someone who didn't read carefully enough). There are many ways I could have made the Readiness system more complex (more possible values, depend on more things before and during the mission, etc), but I actively tried to find the simplest possible version that still achieved what I wanted to achieve in terms of gameplay.
- Thane. He is more difficult. His class is a Combat+Biotic mix, but he's not really a Vanguard, more like a Biotic Infiltrator. You mention that the type of Tech activities involved here (inflitration, security, etc) do not match Garrus' calibration tech skills. And Mordin is the only pure Tech squadmate who doesn't work in vanilla because he is more of a BioTech specialist. For similar reasons, I don't find it so hard to believe that an Assassin like Thane would have some experience and skills with that kind of task, despite having no Tech combat skills. The first time we meet him, he literally drops out of the vents/ceiling right in front of us, after infiltrating a Merc building.
But I'm like you in that I don't like very much working on such simplistic arguments regarding squadmate personalities/abilities, to determine success-failure. Which is why I seriously reduced the impact of specialisation. One readiness point may seem too small compared to having the appropriate skills, but in the majority of cases, it's still going to be enough to make the player automatically pick one of the squadmates with the bonus. And other cases (like your situation with the biotic bubble) should not be penalized too much either.
Way I see it, Shepard knows the team and knows who is best suited for the task, but does not know how difficult the task will be. It's really just opening and closing doors, which could mean simply pushing a few buttons, or could end up being much more complicated. Jacob volunteered because he assumed the task would be dangerous but only require very basic common tech skills, and well he might just be right. That's what the randomness in my system creates, and justifies that in some cases sending someone with low Tech skills might just be enough. So overall, lore-wise I'm not fully, but reasonably, satisfied with Jacob, Thane, Mordin and Garrus all being on the same level, and I prefer not to complicate things gameplay-wise. Also, Kasumi is DLC, Legion can be sold, Tali, Garrus and Thane can die during the approach. So it is good to make sure the player has at least a few options to choose from, whatever the circumstances.
Concerning your second point (the 10-20% success chance gap between someone with the highest degree of readiness, and someone who also has the specialist bonus): this is due to the fact that the Inflitration event depends on two squadmates (Tech Specialist and Team Leader), while the biotic bubble depends on a single squadmate. So for the infiltration, the chances of failure are split over two squadmates, and each one necessarily matters less individually. The overall probabilities for the two events are actually very similar: with both Tech specialist and Team Leader at very high readiness but no specialisation bonuses, you get 0.9 x 0.9 = 81% chance success, and that is what must be compared to the 80% for the biotic bubble.
As for the tech specialists.... that's really weird. I could SWEAR I got everyone available to choose for the Tech Specialist in my first run (and in my second, which was just another version of that first run restored from a backup save, which I played just to see how the random factor can play out differently even with the exact same setup going into the Omega-4 Relay). I should go back and look in my FRAPS folder to check...
And you are right, I was remembering wrong, I must have seen the squad selection screen with WAY more people than I expected there to be, mentally inserted a scroll bar in there somewhere that wasn't actually there, and assumed that everyone was selectable when that wasn't actually the case. Sorry about the false alarm then.
As for your points about who is selectable and who isn't then... now that that misunderstanding is cleared up, I do not have any major objections with any of the criteria by which you decided to give this alignment point or that specialist point to such-and-such character (and I actually am writing about that a bit more in detail for the rest of my feedback), so I have nothing more to point out or to ask to change. But while we're here, I might as well respond to your points, for posterity if nothing else.
Hmm. I see your logic there, especially about how Miranda's dialogue flows after Jacob's lines. That makes complete sense, then, and you're right, Miranda's main significance during the SM is as someone who is there to supervise the plot progression (which explains why she has plot armor until the virtual end).
My quip about Jacob getting a minus point was also more tongue-in-cheek than anything else, as, like you said, it introduces unnecessary complication (and also forces an extra, overbearing layer of interpretation on the player as well, an interpretation that each individual player may or may not agree with) into the mechanics to give him that negative point and no one else, for no specific citable in-game reason. For now I think it's quite enough that team members like Jack and Grunt (Grunt especially, just imagine what that would look like) are not possible choices for the tech specialist job.
I've actually never considered that before... and you're right, even if Thane has less experience in total than someone like Garrus, what skills he has are probably more likely to be suited for infiltrating the Collector Base. And he's been in tons of weird situations before, all sorts of out-of-the way places where regular troops (like turian garrisons) would never deploy, so if anything, he's more likely to have been in contact with weird eldritch alien tech than someone like Garrus, or maybe even Mordin. I'm still not totally (emotionally) convicted on the idea of Thane as a techie, but you make an undeniable (and intriguing) point, that just because we never see him use tech powers in gameplay, it doesn't mean he can't use them at all.