Mass Effect Legendary Edition: ME2 Ep 08 – Dossier: The Warlord – Grunt and Horizon
Mass Effect Friday returned with what I thought was a perfectly sensible plan. We were going to recruit Okeer, get our new Krogan aboard the Normandy, speak to the crew, and then work through six N7 side missions before calling it a night.
Horizon was supposed to be next week.
That plan did not last very long. By the end of the stream we had rockets everywhere, squadmates occasionally forgetting they were meant to help, the Collectors forcing us into Horizon early, an old boss fight disappearing far faster than I remembered, and one very large Krogan finally wandering around the Normandy.
🌌 About the Game
Mass Effect Legendary Edition brings together the single-player content from Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, along with more than 40 DLC packs, weapons, armour and other content, all remastered and optimised for 4K Ultra HD.
In Mass Effect 2 we are back with Commander Shepard, building a new crew and trying to understand why human colonies are disappearing. The Collectors are becoming a much bigger problem, Cerberus is providing the resources, and practically everybody we recruit arrives with their own history, problems and unfinished business.
🚀 Where We Are in the Journey
We are now well into our Mass Effect 2 playthrough and still working towards the 100-percent completion run. The plan going into this episode was fairly straightforward: complete Dossier: The Warlord, recruit the Krogan connected to Okeer, then spend the rest of the evening cleaning up a collection of N7 assignments.
The important part is that Horizon was not meant to happen yet. I wanted to leave it for the following Mass Effect Friday because it closes Act One and gives us a natural point to move into the next stage of the story. The game had other ideas, so by the end of this episode Act One was already finished and our plans for the next stream had completely changed.
🔥 What Happens in This Episode
The night opened with what has become a familiar Mass Effect ritual: checking the Normandy, topping up fuel and probes, and scanning planets on the way to the main objective. Even with six N7 side missions supposedly waiting later, there was still time to chase promising resource spikes for iridium and palladium. This is a 100-percent playthrough, after all, so “we won’t spend too long exploring” inevitably means checking every planet, making sure nothing useful is hiding nearby, and grabbing anything worth having before moving on.
The real destination was Dossier: The Warlord, with Shepard heading down to find the Krogan scientist Okeer. The approach quickly became a long push through mercenary territory, and it did not take long for rocket troops to become a recurring problem. Shields disappeared at inconvenient moments, ammunition had to be collected whenever possible, and our squadmates developed an unfortunate habit of standing around while Shepard did most of the work. Several attempts were made to reposition them somewhere useful and persuade them to actually engage the enemy, with mixed results at best.
That became one of the running gameplay frustrations of the mission. At one point both squadmates were down during a close fight, and with only one enemy apparently left there was little point wasting a revive. They eventually picked themselves back up once the danger had passed, which was helpful of them. Somewhere between the rockets, Krogan and repeated shield breaks, the mission began feeling less like commanding an elite team and more like repeatedly asking whether anybody else fancied shooting something.
There were plenty of quieter discoveries mixed into the fighting. Dr Ravenholm kept checking side rooms, boxes and anything that looked remotely clickable, partly for resources and partly because leaving something behind during a completionist run would clearly be unacceptable. There was also a brief attempt to point out an area useful for grinding some of Mass Effect 2’s power-related achievements, although the constant supply of enemies made demonstrating anything neatly slightly difficult.
The story became considerably darker when Shepard encountered one of Okeer’s tank-bred Krogan. Despite being only around a week old, he was already fully grown, able to speak and more than capable of fighting. He described the voice that had educated him inside the tank, the “glass mother” he had emerged from, and the knowledge that he had somehow been judged imperfect before he had even properly entered the world.
It was a strange and unsettling conversation, particularly because the Krogan understood that he had a purpose without really understanding why he had failed. Dr Ravenholm still found time to notice the slightly amusing contradiction in a Krogan referring to everybody else as “fleshy things” while being rather obviously fleshy himself, but beneath that was a fairly grim look at exactly what Okeer had been creating.
Further into the facility came a familiar face from the original Mass Effect. Rana Thanoptis, last seen on Virmire, had survived the destruction of Saren’s facility by escaping before the nuclear blast. Shepard had allowed her to leave back then, and she had apparently taken that second chance—although finding her working around another questionable scientific operation did raise a few concerns.
Her explanation helped reveal what Okeer was actually trying to accomplish. J’adore wanted an army, but Okeer was not particularly interested in mass-producing ordinary Krogan or curing the genophage in the conventional sense. His obsession was one perfect soldier: a Krogan powerful enough to represent something new for his species, built through relentless experimentation and the rejection of thousands of failed subjects.
Meeting Okeer himself made the philosophy behind that work even clearer. He saw the failed Krogan as expendable and believed his perfect creation could make the genophage irrelevant rather than simply reversing it. It was an uncomfortable conversation, especially given just how casually he talked about the lives discarded along the way.
Things deteriorated rapidly once J’adore threatened the project. Shepard headed into another fight while Okeer remained behind with the prototype, and the resulting boss encounter became a scramble of shield management, powers, explosives and occasionally pressing the wrong control while trying to keep everything under control. The grenade launcher finally got some proper use, and after enough explosions the room was ours.
By the time Shepard returned, however, Okeer had sacrificed himself to protect his creation. We had gone looking for a Krogan warlord and instead returned to the Normandy with one enormous tank containing whatever Okeer considered his greatest achievement.
That should have been the moment when the original plan resumed. The idea was to deal with the new Krogan, speak to the crew and then start working through those six N7 assignments. Instead, the Illusive Man called with considerably more urgent news: Horizon had gone silent, the Collectors appeared to be moving, and Ashley Williams was stationed on the colony.
That was a problem, because Horizon was supposed to be next week.
There was an immediate attempt to see whether the game could be persuaded to let us leave and return to the planned schedule. Unfortunately, the autosave had already committed us to Horizon, while the previous usable manual save would have meant going all the way back to the previous week’s stream and losing the progress we had just made. Chat’s sudden reminders about saving were technically excellent advice, just not especially useful by that point.
So the N7 marathon was abandoned and Horizon began early.
The mood shifted immediately. The colony had been attacked by the Collectors, with Seeker swarms leaving residents frozen where they stood while people were taken from the settlement. Shepard’s team moved through abandoned buildings and defensive positions while husks and Collector troops kept applying pressure. Ammunition became something worth actively worrying about, shields repeatedly needed time to recover, and the squad continued its proud tradition of occasionally falling over when they were most needed.
Dr Ravenholm remembered what was waiting near the end of Horizon from an older Nightmare-difficulty playthrough, and that memory made the final stretch considerably more tense. The upcoming encounter had previously been remembered as one of those horrible fights where progress was measured by patiently wearing an enemy down while trying not to die.
This time, after surviving the waves leading into it, the oversized heavy weapon came out.
The terrifying old boss lasted roughly two charged shots.
After years of remembering that encounter as a complete nightmare, there was a moment of disbelief as it simply disappeared. It also led to the immediate conclusion that this information would have been extremely useful during the old Xbox run. When the time eventually comes to return to Nightmare difficulty for the remaining achievement, the plan is now very simple: bring the big gun.
Horizon still had one major story moment left. Shepard finally came face-to-face with Ashley Williams, one of the old Normandy crew who had believed Shepard dead for two years. The reunion was not exactly welcoming. Ashley was shocked to see Shepard alive, angry that there had been no contact, and deeply uncomfortable with Shepard now working alongside Cerberus.
Shepard tried to explain what had happened and why stopping the Collectors meant accepting help from people who would normally be nowhere near the top of the trusted-allies list, but Ashley was not convinced. An invitation to rejoin the Normandy was refused, leaving the reunion on a much colder note than Shepard might have hoped.
With that conversation, Horizon brought Act One of Mass Effect 2 to an end, a full stream earlier than planned.
Chat, meanwhile, had been running a second story alongside all of this. “Mandatory Mass Effect Friday” remained firmly enforced whenever somebody arrived late, while the channel’s Bouncy Bouncy, Marry & Kill command kept producing increasingly questionable results. Frodo seemed to spend a suspicious amount of the evening being selected for elimination, to the point where even Dr Ravenholm noticed how badly the random choices were treating him.
The question of Shepard’s romantic future also surfaced more than once, with Miranda becoming the obvious subject of the evening’s “bouncy bouncy” discussion. Somewhere between serious conversations about Krogan genetics and Collector attacks, the community was therefore also attempting to organise Shepard’s love life. Business as usual.
There was also plenty of conversation about The Lord of the Rings: Gollum following the previous stream. Its performance problems, frame drops, graphical issues, character design and general state all came back under discussion, along with chat requests for more of the now-familiar death loops. The verdict from the previous night had clearly left an impression.
As the evening continued, the conversation wandered even further into gaming nostalgia. Starship Troopers, Wing Commander, Quake, Unreal Tournament, Command & Conquer, Dungeon Keeper, Black & White, Populous and memories of renting games from Blockbuster all found their way into the discussion. It was one of those streams where stopping the Collectors could comfortably share space with remembering the days when you had a weekend to finish a rented game before it had to go back.
Returning to the Normandy after Horizon did not make Shepard’s task list any shorter. If anything, the ship became a mission-generating machine. New dossiers arrived, Jacob revealed that an SOS had been received from the ship his father disappeared aboard roughly ten years earlier, and Miranda asked Shepard for help protecting and relocating her sister before her father could find her.
There was also the assignment involving Dr. Amanda Kenson, whose evidence pointed towards an imminent Reaper invasion, giving us the beginning of Arrival – Part 1. Between those larger developments, Dr Ravenholm continued making the Normandy rounds, talking with the crew, checking for upgrades and picking up the personal stories that gradually turn the ship from a collection of recruits into an actual team.
That included another conversation with Jack, whose past continues to make “difficult childhood” sound like a spectacular understatement. Her stories added another reminder that practically everybody Shepard has recruited seems to arrive carrying enough baggage for an entire cargo deck.
Eventually, attention returned to the enormous Krogan tank sitting aboard the ship.
Opening Okeer’s legacy went about as peacefully as expected. The Krogan emerged ready for a fight, immediately tested Shepard, and wanted to know who—and what—he was supposed to be now that his creator was gone. Without Okeer to provide the answer, he chose one for himself: Grunt.
There was a tense moment as Grunt challenged Shepard’s authority, but Shepard held firm. Grunt ultimately accepted Shepard as commander, turning Okeer’s mysterious prototype into the Normandy’s newest crew member and finally completing the objective we had actually started the night intending to accomplish.
By the end of the stream, the planned six N7 missions were still sitting untouched, but almost everything else had changed. Grunt was aboard, Horizon had been completed ahead of schedule, Ashley had returned to the story, Act One was finished, and several major character and DLC assignments were now waiting for attention.
After a final stretch of conversation aboard the Normandy, the stream wrapped up by sending the community onward with a raid into TheEar5000. Next Mass Effect Friday therefore begins in a very different place from the one originally planned: Act Two is underway, the side-mission backlog is still waiting, and there is now a fully grown Krogan called Grunt wandering around the ship.
What could possibly go wrong?
🎬 Watch the Episode
If you want to see the entire evening unfold — including the point where the original plan disappears completely — you can watch the full episode here:
Watch Mass Effect Legendary Edition: ME2 Ep 08 on YouTube
You can continue through the full series with the Mass Effect Legendary Edition playlist, and there is plenty more on the Dr Ravenholm YouTube channel.
If you enjoy the episode, leave a like, tell me in the comments what you thought of Horizon and Grunt’s introduction, and subscribe so you do not miss the next part of the playthrough.
🔴 Join the Adventure Live
If you would rather be there when the plans actually go wrong, come and join us live. Mass Effect Friday tends to involve just as much chat, distraction and questionable decision-making as it does saving the galaxy.
You can find me live on Twitch and YouTube. Come along, join the conversation and help keep an eye on the save files before chat has to remind me again.
This episode finished with us raiding into TheEar5000, so the community carried on even after the Normandy closed for the night.
🛰️ Community & Links
The stream does not have to end when we leave the Normandy. There are plenty of places to keep up with what I am doing, talk with the community and find everything else connected to Dr Ravenholm.
Live — Come aboard for the next stream and see what happens before the plan changes again:
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Community — Join the rest of us between streams and keep the conversation going:
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Socials — Follow the latest posts, clips and updates across the wider network:
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Music — If you want something to listen to away from the games, my music is here:
Spotify | Apple Music
Support — If you would like to help support the channel and everything around it:
Fourthwall | Teespring | Streamlabs
More — There is more going on beyond the streams if you want to explore further:
Business Centre | Download the Brochure | About Me | Blog
🧬 Grunt Is Awake, and Act Two Has Arrived
We started the evening expecting one recruitment mission and a stack of N7 assignments. We finished with Grunt aboard, Horizon completed, Ashley back in the story, Act One finished and several new missions waiting for us.
That means the next Mass Effect Friday is already looking rather different from the one I originally planned. The N7 backlog is still there, the Normandy has more problems to solve, and now we have a Krogan who was designed to be perfect standing in the cargo hold.
— Dr Ravenholm
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