Recently watched through a blind stream of Mass Effect 3 and as someone who did play Citadel post-game (because I had already finished the main game at launch), it works pretty darn well being injected mid-late game. Some might get a bit of tonal whiplash but it can bring some much-needed levity to a game that might become overbearingly grim/depressing for a bit too long (by necessity of the plot, but overbearing nonetheless)
@zoofame: thank you for saying what needed to be said. The whole rhetoric around Bioware having 'objectively bad writing' back in the day made me (and still makes me) roll my eyes so hard they exit out the back of my fucking skull
Throwaway side quests aside, they pretty much have to do Citadel and Leviathan next time given the next Priority mission after this one is the Point of No Return
Yeah Shepard has the option to get super confrontational with Jacob, and they even added more options for that in the Citadel DLC, the writers definitely committed to it in an interesting way
@zandrake94: Yeah Jacob is anything but pure. I think it's cool when RPG companions make active decisions that aren't solely for the player's whims, but boy people who romanced Jacob in 2 got a real hard slap in the face.
It is neat that a lot of interactions play out differently for those femsheps.
I like this mission better when you actually have to make a choice. The "one paragon/renegade check and everybody lives happily ever after" cop-out is weaksauce. For all the shitting on Dayvid Cayge in here, Detroit actually does the whole choice and branching narrative thing better than any Bioware game ever has. It's a pity it's trapped in a non-game and wasted on a story not worth telling.
Yeah nah there's a bunch of story flag checks under the hood that Mass Effect 3 draws from Mass Effect 2 (and 1) in order to even have those choices available, let alone successful, not to mention the checks from the side missions done in 3.
@csl316: In fairness the Traynor romance option is pretty poor signalling for a game series that traditionally structures its dialogue option as 'top = paragon/bottom = renegade'. They already fixed it with the romance iconography signposting since Dragon Age II though, so I can only assume there had to be some sort of limitation during development that they wouldn't implement it for Mass Effect 3 (time, engine, budget, etc.)
Also see: Patrick Weeke's incredible twitter thread explaining why the Thane romance dialogue option was Shepard being immediately thirsty after he talks about his dead wife
The tonal dissonance of the Citadel DLC is why I rank Shadow Broker slightly higher than it even though Citadel has more content and fanservice by several orders of magnitude.
I can't offer any solutions to that though since it is technically the send-off to the trilogy and it fulfils that purpose just about perfectly
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