Mass Effect Legendary Edition: ME2 Ep 10 – N7 Assignments and Collector Ship
Mandatory Mass Effect Friday returned with what was supposed to be a fairly organised evening: finish the remaining Act One N7 assignments, tidy up some side content and try not to push the main story any further than necessary.
That plan survived for a while. We got lost looking for a data package, balanced Shepard on a collapsing wreck, discovered that my squadmates were once again very good at falling over, and eventually got dragged onto a Collector ship whether I wanted to go there or not. Somehow, Twitch chat settings also became a problem before the night was over.
🌌 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, promotional weapons, armour and other extras, all remastered and optimised for 4K Ultra HD.
In Mass Effect 2, we are back in control of Commander Shepard, travelling aboard the Normandy and building a crew while investigating the Collectors and the wider threat connected to the Reapers. It is one of those games where a simple trip to clear a side mission can quite easily turn into several hours of trouble.
🛰️ Where We Are in the Journey
We are now well into Mass Effect 2, with Horizon already behind us after I accidentally triggered it earlier than I had planned. That meant I wanted to spend this stream getting the remaining Act One N7 assignments completed before allowing the main story to pull us any further forward.
There was already plenty waiting for us. Crew loyalty missions were starting to appear, side quests still needed attention and the Normandy had no shortage of places to visit. The main objective, however, was to regain some control over my carefully planned mission order.
That went well.
🔥 What Happens in This Episode
We began on Omega with what looked like a relatively harmless loose end: Ish and his package-delivery job. Miranda and Jacob came along because they had some additional dialogue for the encounter, including Jacob immediately recognising Ish from a previous job that had apparently involved a nest of turians and a batarian ambush. Ish, naturally, presented himself as a perfectly respectable businessman who merely wanted us to collect some discreet data packages. Nothing suspicious there at all.
The first package sent us back to the Citadel, where the main difficulty was not combat but remembering exactly which shop we were supposed to be looking for. There was a fair amount of wandering around, staring at signs and trying to work out which level we needed, all while stubbornly avoiding the obvious solution of simply using the map because that would apparently have been far too sensible. We eventually found the data pad outside the correct shop and returned to Omega, but rather than handing it straight back to Ish, I decided to leave the assignment unfinished. There is another possible way to resolve the mission for the Paragon points, so it joined the growing pile of things marked “we’ll come back to that later.”
From there, the proper N7 cleanup began with the Eclipse Smuggling Depot. I had gone into the mission thinking we were doing something slightly different, so discovering that the real objective involved protecting cargo while enemies attacked created a brief moment of confusion followed by the much more familiar experience of shields disappearing very quickly. Heavy weapons came out, enemies went down and there was a definite “whose idea was this again?” moment before the fight ended rather more abruptly than I expected.
We technically completed the job, although our cargo-protection career probably was not destined for greatness. Out of the twenty available crates, we saved seven. Not exactly a flawless operation, but the important part was that the mission could be crossed off the spreadsheet.
The Lost Operative assignment came next, taking us into an Eclipse base for a much more straightforward mixture of gunfire, locked doors, hacking and poking around every corner for anything worth collecting. There were a couple of moments where I did not realise another attack had already started, followed by the usual scramble to get Shepard’s shields back while checking whether the squadmates planned on contributing. That became something of a theme for the night: occasionally it felt as though my companions were less an elite combat team and more an audience with guns.
The mission itself wrapped up fairly quickly once we found what we had come for, giving us another satisfying entry to mark complete before heading back out into planetary exploration.
The real standout among the early N7 assignments was the MSV Estevanico. The Normandy detected the wreck, Shepard went in alone, and almost immediately the game warned that the ship was unstable and could fall over the cliff edge. There was no squad to help, no ability to save once we were aboard and an enormous ruined spacecraft visibly shifting beneath Shepard’s feet.
Chat responded with exactly the sort of encouragement you would expect. “No pressure” arrived fairly early, followed by “Don’t jump mate” as I tried to work out how to cross the broken sections of the wreck. Once the ship started moving more noticeably, the reassurance became “It’s moving,” then “The ship is going down,” and eventually the entirely reasonable question of where the lifeboats were.
Naturally, none of that stopped me searching every possible corner.
Even with a massive wreck balancing over a cliff, there were still boxes to investigate and resources to collect. At one point Shepard moving across the structure seemed to make the whole thing tilt further, leading to the suggestion that she had perhaps eaten too many burgers, followed shortly afterwards by the question of who had eaten all the pies. The scenery was impressive, the ship continued making increasingly worrying movements beneath us, and somehow we managed to get through it without disappearing over the edge.
The reward was 2,000 iridium, which was particularly useful given how much time had already been spent scanning planets and trying to gather enough resources for Normandy upgrades. More importantly, Shepard escaped before the wreck finally decided gravity had been ignored for long enough.
Back aboard the Normandy, the side missions began opening other threads as well. Grunt was becoming increasingly agitated, describing the urge to fight and kill as something beyond his normal Krogan enthusiasm for violence. EDI could not offer much help from Cerberus medical records, so the conversation pointed us toward Tuchanka and unlocked Grunt’s loyalty mission.
Not long afterwards, Garrus also had something important waiting. He had finally found a lead on Sidonis, the man who betrayed his old team and left ten of them dead. Garrus was not particularly interested in forgiveness at that stage, and his search for revenge gave us another loyalty mission waiting in the journal. The Normandy was rapidly filling up with people who had personal business requiring Shepard’s attention, even while I was still trying to stick to the N7 plan.
Then came the Wrecked Merchant Freighter, where things became considerably less comfortable.
What initially looked like another exploration job turned into a fight against waves of mechs in poor visibility, with ammunition becoming increasingly scarce and the squad demonstrating their remarkable ability to spend important battles lying on the floor. Miranda went down more than once, retreat became increasingly attractive, and one attempt did not end particularly well.
Eventually I stopped trying to fight the mission the sensible way and settled on what I called the “Halo run.” The plan was uncomplicated: get the overshield up, sprint toward the extraction point and avoid engaging anything that did not absolutely need to be shot.
It worked.
Barely.
After all the careful clearing, resource hunting and tactical positioning, simply running for the shuttle turned out to be the solution. Unfortunately, completing that assignment also triggered the exact thing I had spent the evening trying not to trigger.
The Illusive Man wanted to speak to Shepard.
A supposedly disabled Collector ship had been located, and Cerberus wanted us to board it. This was the major story mission I had hoped to postpone while finishing the side content, so I immediately became suspicious of what the game was doing. I even reloaded an earlier save and tried to find some way around the conversation.
There was not one.
Mass Effect had decided it was Collector time whether the spreadsheet agreed or not.
Chat, of course, was tremendously sympathetic to the situation. “Do it do it” appeared while I was attempting to resist, followed by the beautifully timed “Resistance is futile.” With every escape route closed, the planned N7 cleanup night suddenly became a major story episode.
The opening sections aboard the Collector ship were quiet enough to be unsettling. We moved through enormous chambers filled with pods, bodies and evidence of what the Collectors had been doing, with the lack of immediate resistance making the whole thing feel more suspicious rather than less. The deeper Shepard travelled, the more obvious it became that nobody should be feeling comfortable.
Then came one of the major revelations of Mass Effect 2: the Collectors were genetically altered Protheans, transformed over generations into servants of the Reapers.
It was a huge piece of the wider Mass Effect story, connecting the creatures Shepard had been fighting directly back to the civilisation whose ruins had shaped so much of the first game.
We also gained access to new weapon training aboard the ship, and I chose assault-rifle training for Shepard. That turned out to be rather well timed, because not long afterwards EDI confirmed what everybody had already suspected.
It was a trap.
The Collector ship suddenly came alive and what had been tense exploration became a prolonged fight for survival. Collectors attacked from multiple positions while platforms shifted around us, ammunition disappeared at a worrying rate and the squadmates once again demonstrated a strong commitment to falling unconscious at inconvenient moments.
Miranda in particular seemed determined to spend portions of the battle horizontal, while I was repeatedly trying to get shields back, find ammunition and encourage both companions to perhaps stop doing little dances behind cover and actually shoot something.
One particularly appropriate moment came after I had been talking about the classic RPG problem of saving powerful ammunition for later. You know the habit: keep the biggest weapon untouched because there might be something worse around the next corner, then finish the entire game with a full supply because the mythical “right moment” never arrived.
Almost immediately afterwards, something large enough appeared to justify it.
Out came the heavy weapon, and for once all that hoarding paid off exactly when it needed to.
The escape continued through more Collector resistance before we finally made the run back toward the Normandy. Once clear of the ship, however, the real sting in the mission arrived. EDI revealed that the Illusive Man had known the distress signal was suspicious and had deliberately withheld that information because he wanted Shepard to investigate anyway.
That left the relationship with Cerberus feeling even less comfortable than before, but it also produced the next major objective: locating a derelict Reaper and recovering its IFF, something that will eventually allow the Normandy to follow the Collectors through the Omega-4 Relay.
With the main story having successfully hijacked the evening, I did the only sensible thing and went straight back to the N7 assignments I had originally intended to finish.
The next stop was the Abandoned Research Station, where something had gone badly wrong with the facility’s systems. The mission became a quieter change of pace after the Collector ship, involving restoring power through different sections of the station, opening routes through the complex and gradually piecing together what had happened while the hostile VI attempted to make things difficult.
Once the system was dealt with, that assignment opened up the final stage of the chain at the Hahne-Kedar Facility in the Titan Nebula. That brought us back to the familiar language of mechs, weapons fire and working our way through another compromised installation. By this point, the original objective for the stream was finally within reach: the remaining Act One N7 assignments were almost completely cleared.
Naturally, the last major disaster of the night had absolutely nothing to do with Mass Effect.
While trying to type manual shout-outs in Twitch chat, I somehow started changing the actual chat settings instead. Follow-only mode appeared. Slow mode appeared. Chat was cleared. What should have been a simple bit of stream housekeeping rapidly turned into its own miniature technical boss fight as I tried to work out what I had switched on, what I had switched off and how to put everything back the way it had been.
It also provided an excellent reminder of why AIDA normally handles these things.
“#BlameChrissy” inevitably resurfaced while I attempted repairs, and after surviving collapsing spaceships, mech ambushes and an enormous Collector trap, I found myself being defeated by Twitch controls.
Chat had been running its own parallel story throughout the night as well. The Bouncy, Marry & Kill command repeatedly produced increasingly questionable relationship decisions, with happy_cat_lady becoming so consistently popular that she eventually declared herself “in demand” and later established that her hourly rate was apparently cuddles.
A community bank heist also went ahead, except I did not make it out with the survivors. The explanation from chat was that I had nobly stayed behind to cover everybody else—although another interpretation was offered almost immediately.
The harmonica of doom spread dysentery through chat more than once, while the ongoing story of erris87 and the stolen police hat escalated from claims that he was still on the run, to wearing the evidence, to discovering that the hat did not fit, and finally turning it upside down and using it as a flower pot. It was exactly the sort of completely unrelated background storyline that develops during a long stream and somehow becomes perfectly normal by the end of the evening.
Through all of that, there was still the usual relaxed conversation about games, weekend plans and what everyone had been doing, alongside some genuinely supportive moments within the community. That mixture of Mass Effect, running jokes and people simply dropping in for a chat is a large part of what these Friday streams have become.
By the time we finally returned to the Normandy for the last time, the original goal had been achieved—just by a considerably more complicated route than planned. The remaining Act One N7 assignments were complete, the Collector ship had been survived, Grunt and Garrus both had loyalty missions waiting, and the Reaper IFF now sat on the horizon as the next major piece of story progression.
After everything that had happened, I made very sure the game was saved.
Because if this episode proved anything, it is that no matter how carefully I organise the mission list, Mass Effect, Twitch chat or one badly timed button press will eventually decide that it has a different plan.
🎬 Watch the Episode
You can watch the full episode here and see the N7 assignments, the Collector ship and the Twitch-settings disaster unfold for yourself:
Watch Mass Effect Legendary Edition: ME2 Ep 10
You can continue the playthrough through the Mass Effect Legendary Edition Playlist, and there is plenty more on Dr Ravenholm on YouTube.
If you enjoy the episode, leave a like, let me know your thoughts in the comments and subscribe so you do not miss the next part.
🔴 Join the Adventure Live
These episodes are always better when chat is there to offer advice, encouragement and apparently several ways to make the situation worse. You can join us live on Twitch or YouTube and become part of whatever goes wrong next.
At the end of this stream, we sent the raid over to mayhem_bedlamite, handing the evening on to another community before calling it a night.
🌐 Community & Links
There is plenty going on between streams as well, whether you want to join the community, follow what I am working on or explore more of my projects.
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💾 Save the Game Before Anything Else
We ended exactly where I wanted to be, even if Mass Effect took a rather indirect route to get us there. The remaining Act One N7 assignments are finished, the Collector ship is behind us and several major crew and story missions are now waiting.
Next time we can start deciding which of those threads to follow. Given how well the planning went this time, I am making no promises that the game will agree.
— Dr Ravenholm
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