This mod also felt like it improved the pacing and tone of the whole game in general. Since there are so many more opportunities to boost readiness scores now, it felt like the entire game mattered a whole lot more, which was NOT a benefit I was expecting from installing this mod, but may have been the most important one it brought to my experience.
One of ME2's major strengths is its interactivity, but simultaneously its drawback comes from the fact that, in the vanilla game, said interactivity is achieved almost exclusively through the mechanic of loyalty missions. A major side effect of this mechanic is that the game stays tight and exciting only until Horizon, and then the second half of the game starts turning into a long slog of loyalty missions that gets tedious no matter how fond you are of all of your squadmates. And that's because in the story, you are basically told that your entire job is to stop the Collectors, but you are given no way to actively do anything on your own initiative to prepare for them, aside from being manipulated into random missions by the Illusive Man, and this gives you absolutely zero opportunities to exercise your agency / make consequential choices when it comes to actually fighting the main villains of the story.
Add on top of that the unavoidable metagaming knowledge that almost all players know the loyalty missions are the SINGLE most important factor in determining squadmate readiness, even though, with the situation the story sets up for you, the more logical conclusion is that loyalty missions are a distraction from your main mission to "save humanity" and will not help you directly in achieving that goal. It doesn't really help that the importance of the loyalty missions isn't specifically supported by anything you're told within the game, either, other than some very generalized comments about squad morale that could be taken to mean anything in-universe (of course, once you translate them into "RPG genre-speak", the message is pretty obvious, you HAVE to do loyalty missions or your crew will die, but it also feels very illogical to assume that Shepard or any of the crew in-universe is party to this message and so it's awkward to play your game around this weird theory-of-mind asymmetry between the player and the player character).
All-in-all, what you get is a pretty confusing setup where, on some level, it doesn't feel like anything should matter, because consequences neither logically follow from in-game story events nor from the backstory of the world as we are familiar with it. And the end result of that is that it gets progressively harder and harder to find a reason to care... until you install the Reaper IFF and the Collectors hit the Normandy.
Anyway, IMPO that's the main problem with the general story when you're playing it through. So when I downloaded a mod that calls itself "Risky Suicide Mission", I didn't expect it to substantially change my experience of the game any earlier than entering the Omega-4 Relay... but to my very pleasant surprise, that's exactly what it did.
1) Since the loyalty missions are reduced in importance re: their significance to survival during the SM, this makes them less consequential to the plot... which, paradoxically enough, makes them MORE interesting. The loyalty missions no longer feel like they have the burden of having to carry the actual plot (a task they are not well-suited to do), but like character sketches and particularly dedicated / intricate sidequests, which makes each one shine brighter on its own merits.
2) Since the plotline missions (Horizon, the Collector Ship, the Derelict Reaper) all count towards your squad readiness scores, it makes those missions feel like opportunities to proactively prepare for the SM, rather than feeling like you're being passively herded through the storyline. It gives you extra incentive to diversify your squad as much as possible (especially the squadmates who you might not otherwise "get along with", or who might not be natural complements for your playstyle / class, or who may have to take on specialist roles during the SM, whatever fits best with the individual player's strategy) throughout the main story missions at least, and explaining that as "training" to prepare for fighting Collectors works on multiple levels: in-game it helps with familiarizing yourself with those same squadmates and their abilities, on a meta-level it helps build the player's familiarity with the characters (and thus, it is presumed, the player character's intimacy with those squadmates) and make the SM more interesting since, again, chances are you're now more emotionally invested in whether or not each individual squadmate survives.
(Speaking of the morality bonuses, that ended up being another fun wildcard during the SM, as my squadmate readiness scores ended up being different from what I'd expected them to be, before jumping through the relay. Turned out, my paragon-to-renegade point balance was exactly 4.9 at the point of jumping through the Omega-4 relay, so I got morality point bonuses for an entirely different set of squadmates from the ones I'd been anticipating. That threw me for a loop, though the challenge of thinking on my feet was fun, I'm definitely not complaining.)
Feedback (played) on upstream effects of enriching the readiness system: rebalancing the second half of ME2 (1 comment)
One of ME2's major strengths is its interactivity, but simultaneously its drawback comes from the fact that, in the vanilla game, said interactivity is achieved almost exclusively through the mechanic of loyalty missions. A major side effect of this mechanic is that the game stays tight and exciting only until Horizon, and then the second half of the game starts turning into a long slog of loyalty missions that gets tedious no matter how fond you are of all of your squadmates. And that's because in the story, you are basically told that your entire job is to stop the Collectors, but you are given no way to actively do anything on your own initiative to prepare for them, aside from being manipulated into random missions by the Illusive Man, and this gives you absolutely zero opportunities to exercise your agency / make consequential choices when it comes to actually fighting the main villains of the story.
Add on top of that the unavoidable metagaming knowledge that almost all players know the loyalty missions are the SINGLE most important factor in determining squadmate readiness, even though, with the situation the story sets up for you, the more logical conclusion is that loyalty missions are a distraction from your main mission to "save humanity" and will not help you directly in achieving that goal. It doesn't really help that the importance of the loyalty missions isn't specifically supported by anything you're told within the game, either, other than some very generalized comments about squad morale that could be taken to mean anything in-universe (of course, once you translate them into "RPG genre-speak", the message is pretty obvious, you HAVE to do loyalty missions or your crew will die, but it also feels very illogical to assume that Shepard or any of the crew in-universe is party to this message and so it's awkward to play your game around this weird theory-of-mind asymmetry between the player and the player character).
All-in-all, what you get is a pretty confusing setup where, on some level, it doesn't feel like anything should matter, because consequences neither logically follow from in-game story events nor from the backstory of the world as we are familiar with it. And the end result of that is that it gets progressively harder and harder to find a reason to care... until you install the Reaper IFF and the Collectors hit the Normandy.
Anyway, IMPO that's the main problem with the general story when you're playing it through. So when I downloaded a mod that calls itself "Risky Suicide Mission", I didn't expect it to substantially change my experience of the game any earlier than entering the Omega-4 Relay... but to my very pleasant surprise, that's exactly what it did.
1) Since the loyalty missions are reduced in importance re: their significance to survival during the SM, this makes them less consequential to the plot... which, paradoxically enough, makes them MORE interesting. The loyalty missions no longer feel like they have the burden of having to carry the actual plot (a task they are not well-suited to do), but like character sketches and particularly dedicated / intricate sidequests, which makes each one shine brighter on its own merits.
2) Since the plotline missions (Horizon, the Collector Ship, the Derelict Reaper) all count towards your squad readiness scores, it makes those missions feel like opportunities to proactively prepare for the SM, rather than feeling like you're being passively herded through the storyline. It gives you extra incentive to diversify your squad as much as possible (especially the squadmates who you might not otherwise "get along with", or who might not be natural complements for your playstyle / class, or who may have to take on specialist roles during the SM, whatever fits best with the individual player's strategy) throughout the main story missions at least, and explaining that as "training" to prepare for fighting Collectors works on multiple levels: in-game it helps with familiarizing yourself with those same squadmates and their abilities, on a meta-level it helps build the player's familiarity with the characters (and thus, it is presumed, the player character's intimacy with those squadmates) and make the SM more interesting since, again, chances are you're now more emotionally invested in whether or not each individual squadmate survives.
(Speaking of the morality bonuses, that ended up being another fun wildcard during the SM, as my squadmate readiness scores ended up being different from what I'd expected them to be, before jumping through the relay. Turned out, my paragon-to-renegade point balance was exactly 4.9 at the point of jumping through the Omega-4 relay, so I got morality point bonuses for an entirely different set of squadmates from the ones I'd been anticipating. That threw me for a loop, though the challenge of thinking on my feet was fun, I'm definitely not complaining.)