Should Mass Effect 2 Arrival Been an Expansion Pack?

[Winter]

Last year I wrote up a fan fix summery of Mass Effect 3 in which removed the Crucible, The Little Blue Troll, replaced them with Leviathan as the Deus Ex Machina Shepard is looking for to defeat the Reapers and made it so that while Leviathan was needed to beat the Reapers the real deciding factor was Shepard uniting the galaxy into a single army that could actually stand a chance of beating the Reapers once and for all.

However, the first part of this fan fix was a fan fix of Arrival which I changed into a 15 hour Expansion Pack which while changing, adding and expanding a number of scenes was more or less the same basic plot. The reason for this is I feel the issues with ME3 really started with ME2A, a lack of choice, characters doing stupid things to move the plot forward and making Shepard less important.

What I want to know is, what do you all think? Is this a good idea or should it have just remained a DLC with a number of changes to make it more like DA2's Legacy DLC?

If anyone is interested here's the fan fix summery on Arrival I wrote last year. https://www.deviantart.com/winterthe-ma ... -718178807

[Kinky Vorlon]

I dislike DLC period. Either release the game complete or don't bother releasing it at all.

[CharlesPhipps]

Honestly, you could have ended the entire plotline of the Reapers with Arrival.

"The Reapers are coming through the gate!"

*shut down the gate and destroys/strands the Reapers*

[JM23]

Honestly, you could have ended the entire plotline of the Reapers with Arrival.

"The Reapers are coming through the gate!"

*shut down the gate and destroys/strands the Reapers*

It's amusingly sad how bad and pointless Arrival's story was.

youtu.be/71nZTpAcCtE

[Admiral X]

Glad I'm not the only one who watched smudboy's exhaustive analysis on those games.

[Riedquat]

Honestly, you could have ended the entire plotline of the Reapers with Arrival.

"The Reapers are coming through the gate!"

*shut down the gate and destroys/strands the Reapers*

Which was pretty much the plot of ME1.

[chaos42]

personally something like arrival is ok as long as its priced right. the issue with arrival is its One solo mission and adds nothing new to the game other than the after effects so a low price tag is need. If its something like me3 citadel or me2 shadow broker a little more is fine as it adds new areas and stuff to do. The issue with dlc is it needs correct pricing to match what you are getting.

[CharlesPhipps]

I felt Arrival and Overlord were both badly written as well as inferior to the rest of ME2.

[Worffan101]

Arrival should have been main-game. Period.

Overlord, like Citadel, works fine as an expansion pack--something largely disconnected in theme and location from the rest of the game--but Arrival and Omega are both entirely relevant to the main plot thread and absolutely belong in the base game. Fuck EA.

I actually like Arrival except that I miss my squadmates taking out the chaff (if I wanted to do stealth action I would play Metal Gear Solid, not Mass Effect), so it's more fun as a story than as a thing to play. I think it really reinforces just how fucked the galaxy is and how dangerous the Reapers are, that they can fly into the galaxy 3 different ways and even if you blow up their main channel in and their backup plan with most of their fleet, they still kick your ass. It also was nice to have Shepard unable to figure out a third option or way out for once, reminds you you're still mortal.

Still, it really should've been a part of the base game.

[Riedquat]

I felt Arrival and Overlord were both badly written as well as inferior to the rest of ME2.

Overlord wasn't too bad, although the autistic kid with special abilities part is a bit of an eye-rolling, unconvincing cliche.

What ME2 needed, if the Reapers weren't just going to be retired after ME1 (a better plan, although it would invalidate having a continuing story for a trilogy) was for the means of defeating them to be in ME2. Then 1 would've been discovering the threat, 2 discovering the solution, and 3 putting it in to practice. Since that had been missed from the main game (a huge oversight) if Arrival was going to be about anything, and we're not rewriting the trilogy from the ground up, it should've at least included ME3's Mars mission.