Having just finished replaying the Overlord missions in ME2, looking back I feel like it was during the writing of this DLC that the creative team finally committed to making Cerberus actual BAD GUYS? Like as I’ve brought up before, I feel like the underlying problem with ME2’s Cerberus writing is that the base game is just always doing this wishy-washy, noncommittal waffling between ‘Cerberus has done horrible things and can’t be trusted!’ and ‘maybe Cerberus has a point…’. To the point that even the horrific child-slavery/experimentation that Jack went through is tried to be made ‘ambiguous’ through a whole ‘maybe they went rogue and TIM didn’t know about it?’ bit.
💬 3 🔁 40 ❤️ 86 · Having just done Jack’s Loyalty Mission in my Mass Effect 2 replay, I feel like there is an understated point to the whol
(Which as I go into here, is absolute bullshit when you actually think about it.)
Whereas Overlord not only makes no attempt to hide but ultimately focuses in on the truly horrific shit that Gavin Archer and the team did to his brother David. Like moreso than basically anything else we’ve seen in ME2, Overlord ends up being all about the terrible, morally bankrupt atrocities that Cerberus can and will commit for their whole ‘safety and betterment of mankind’ bullshit.
I actually think it’s rather interesting to compare Jack’s Loyalty Mission to the Overlord Mission, because I feel like the difference is purely in the framing and presentation? Like I think it’s pretty hard to say who had the worse experience between David Archer and Jack. One was turned into an agony-filled human-CPU and the other spent her childhood being horrifically tortured and experimented on. At that point they are pretty much just on the same level of horrific atrocities.
Yet there is a VERY stark difference in how they are actually presented to the player. The horrors that Jack experienced are presented in a rather vague and distant fashion. Something that was horrible, but happened long in the past. Along with the aforementioned noncommittal waffling about how much Cerberus was really involved.
Whereas the horrors that David goes through are not just very much in the present, they are FOCUSED on, emphasized and placed front and center for the player to see in all its depravity. Plus there is absolutely ZERO ambiguity about Cerberus’s involvement this time, with Dr. Archer being a one-hundred percent Cerberus loyalist and even Shepard’s rescue of David and taking him to Grissom Academy being framed as them going AGAINST what The Illusive Man would want.
Hell I think it says something that the Paragon response/interrupt from Shepard at the end of the Overlord mission is to pistol-whip Gavin Archer and make it clear that they WILL kill him if he ever gets near David again.
All in all, I kinda get the impression that it was during the Overlord DLC that the Mass Effect creative team actually committed to Cerberus being actual BAD GUYS. Like I wouldn’t be surprised if during the work on ME2 proper, there was still an idea floating around that maybe Cerberus could wind up being the good guys in the third game. But by the time they got to working on Overlord, they'd decided on Cerberus being one the unwitting Reaper stooges that we see in ME3.
And I have to say, if we had been able to get the Paragon Shepard that we can see at the end of Overlord in the rest of the game, ie; having basically ZERO patience for Cerberus bullshit, I think Mass Effect 2 would have been a HELL of a lot better.
