Paragon vs. Renegade

After pondering the possibility of Mother Theresa eating babies, it got me thinking about my least favorite aspect of Mass Effect 2: the paragon and renegade options. For those unfamiliar, in any given conversation you are at some point presented with three options of dialog, the paragon, the neutral and the renegade. Using paragon responses gain you (wait for it...) paragon points. The higher your paragon score, the more agreeable people find you and therefore the more willing they are to take your word. On the adverse, using renegade options increases your renegade score which makes you more intimidating and therefore people are more willing to back down and accept your word for it. Neutral responses do exactly dick for you, so even having a neutral response option seems silly. So here are the two big problems with this system:

1) First, and foremost, once you choose a path, you'd better stick with it. If you try to spice up your life and bounce between paragon and renegade scores, you'll end up in that master-of-none zone where both scores are low until you do a billion side quests in which case you'll still only be 1/2 & 1/2. The problem with this is that you need a certain score to open certain responses. In some conversations I found myself with the paragon response open, but the renegade response closed to me. Or in the play-through where I experimented with going 1/2 & 1/2, I found myself in a sticky situation. *** Spoiler warning *** After completing Miranda's and Jack's loyalty missions, you return to the ship to find the two ladies fighting. You walk in to break it up. If you have a high enough paragon skill you remind them of the bigger battle, if you have a high enough renegade you tell them to shut up and deal. Both ladies part ways, angry, but still loyal to you. However if neither score is high enough, your option is to tell Miranda to back down, or tell Jack to back down. Whichever lady you side with will remain loyal, and you lose the loyalty of the other. *** Spoiler end *** So this kinda breaks the illusion of freedom of choice in dialog which is occasionally a problem as illustrated in point two.

2) The conversation options generally suck. As an RPGer I tend to approach dialog choices from the "What would I say in this situation?" standpoint. Mass Effect 2 I find myself thinking "Okay, well I need to paragon/renegade points so I guess I'm goin' with this!" That's not much of a choice, is it? And in some instances the options are so grossly black and white it's laughable. I can't tell you how many choices I made and cringed while they were spoken. I much preferred the like/dislike system of Dragon Age where there was the warm fuzzy option, two neutral-ish options and the asshole option. You could, on occasion, use the neutral option and still gain approval of a certain character. That is, the neutral options served a purpose. I have yet to find a situation in Mass Effect 2 where the neutral option was of any use to me. Again, you're either polishing your halo or wiping blood off your pitchfork.

I'm not sure if my point is that the dialog writing for Mass Effect 2 was weak, or if the whole good/bad system is too simplistic for my tastes. Or maybe it's a whole lotta both.