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FoolyCharged posted:Then why did it go wrong? Their goal was to find a way to communicate with and control the Geth - they accomplished that. The problem is, the person they used and abused for this purpose became panicked and stressed to a horrifying breaking point, screaming about overwhelming sensory overload. In this very unstable mental state, he could only think of, and work toward, one thought: "QUIET PLEASE MAKE IT STOP" However, as stated, they did in fact find a way to communicate with and control the Geth. It was not an ethical or in any way anything-but-horrifying method, but they did find one. The Geth/Mechs/etc going nuts and killing everyone was not a failure of the system; it was a scared-out-of-his-mind individual trying to make the bad things stop using the functional system he had been plugged into. edit: Crap, I meant to edit this into my previous post at the bottom of the last page, not make this a separate post. Sorry for the double-post.
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Jun 6, 2021 11:24
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Waltzing Along posted:Re: Omega. I’m playing through now and she laid out that Cerberus faked an invasion of those monsters in the mines to get her out and then said they would blow up the station if she didn’t gently caress off forever.
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Jun 6, 2021 11:29
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omg chael crash posted:I am going to replay Mass Effect Andromeda I’m doing it now and enjoying it way more than I thought I would.
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Jun 6, 2021 12:13
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BlazetheInferno posted:Their goal was to find a way to communicate with and control the Geth - they accomplished that.
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Jun 6, 2021 12:24
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 so glad I bought ME for the 3rd time to experience it in this level of fidelity.
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Jun 6, 2021 12:40
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Animal Friend posted:so glad I bought ME for the 3rd time to experience it in this level of fidelity. Look, Kaiden and Jenkins had a choice between the imaginary gun or the incredibly lovely shields that can't stop a single Geth Drone bullet. Kaiden chose wisely.
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Jun 6, 2021 13:46
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I feel like the story sometimes forgets that shields (and armour) are even a thing with how often shots just tear through people in cutscenes. The one good bit of Bring Down the Sky is the part where the scared scientist guy shoots shepard in a panic, and Shep just looks at where the bullet smacks into their kinetic barrier. Good joke.
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Jun 6, 2021 13:50
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Animal Friend posted:
Ah, that's the Mas effect 1 I know and love. BlazetheInferno posted:Their goal was to find a way to communicate with and control the Geth - they accomplished that. "The theme park filled with dinosaurs worked, it's just a bunch of the monsters (that weren't real dinosaurs) got loose and ate everyone so the army had to come in and blow the whole place up. It wasn't a failure of the system, just the people involved"
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Jun 6, 2021 13:56
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The point is that "David's autistic computer brain has a unique ability to interface with the geth" is treated as accurate by the story, that's the insulting and weird part people are complaining about. No-one is saying the story thinks Gavin Archer is a morally righteous person, but David is controlling the geth (to fulfil his only desire, "make it stop") and it's stated in the text that the experiment worked to this degree because of David's autism.
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Jun 6, 2021 14:12
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Rohan Kishibe posted:I feel like the story sometimes forgets that shields (and armour) are even a thing with how often shots just tear through people in cutscenes. The one good bit of Bring Down the Sky is the part where the scared scientist guy shoots shepard in a panic, and Shep just looks at where the bullet smacks into their kinetic barrier. Good joke. It’s like in Yakuza where no one ever dies outside of cutscenes, and even then possibly not
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Jun 6, 2021 14:23
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That kind of stuff happens so often in games that it really stands out when they treat the game logic in cutscenes the same as regular gameplay. Death Stranding was really good for this, like the scene where you meet Heartman and you keep getting Likes
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Jun 6, 2021 14:27
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Finished the Reaper IFF and Collector Base missions along with all of the loyalty missions and Overlord. 1. Holy poo poo the Hammerhead is awful in insanity. Literally one turret can shred the goddamn thing in 3 seconds 2. There is a special place in hell waiting for the person who decided that loving Husks needed armor on this difficulty
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Jun 6, 2021 14:28
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I don’t take many photos but do like to look at stuff in photo mode. All the explosions and effects in ME3 are just so well done. One other thing I’m always interested in seeing is what bits of the graphics still move in photo mode. Generally particle effects and background stuff that’s constantly in motion. One funny detail to me was when I wanted to take a closer look at the fish in Shep’s aquarium  The big eel and the schools of tiny fish swim around in photo mode, while other fish don’t. Their fins do wiggle around, though. Also, photo mode is fun for seeing stuff you were never supposed to look at close enough to make out. Like the patch the medics in the hospital wear that say ”hgchxhdhj” or whatever or the fact that in the Normandy game deck they apparently play poker with, umm, tiny paper documents? Instead of playing cards? It’s funny and I’m always fascinated by the shortcuts etc. devs use in games. One of my favorites is that bit in Fallout 3 where a train you ride is actually a hat because that was the easiest and fastest way to make it look ok.
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Jun 6, 2021 14:29
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David made geth noises once and managed to play Simon says with a functional geth mobile which were established to be functionally intelligent beings by other writing in the game. His brother decides to plug him into an illegal AI because he's a piece of poo poo/"his autistic mind" This goes badly, David freaks out because of information throughput, hence "make it stop" Thing is tho, this hybrid AI also tries to upload itself off world? Which I don't feel like is terribly effective at making it stop. So like discussed earlier there's a pretty strong argument that David never actually had genuine control capability and everyone's just forgetting that there was a whole other allegedly sapient component of this mess that might have been acting on its own as well, or at least interpreting David's distress in a way that made it act in the rogue AI takes over base and tries to infect galaxy kinda way. This isn't to defend overlords writing as good mind you, because the fact that this ambiguity exists at all is a failure. Plus there should have been an interrupt to just put a slug in Gavin.
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Jun 6, 2021 14:30
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Psycho Landlord posted:Plus there should have been an interrupt to just put a slug in Gavin. I have good news, he takes care of that himself.
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Jun 6, 2021 14:36
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FoolyCharged posted:Then why did it go wrong? I mean, my guess was that while David was largely in control, he was using that control to try to shut out the "noise". But the idea of using a person to interface with a VI to talk to the Geth totally worked. Archer wrongly predicted he could control David which was silly. Comrade Blyatlov posted:And why was he still screaming QUIET PLEASE MAKE IT STOP He was doing that before he was ever in the machine because of ~*autism*~. Overlord is written pretty badly in general and I don't think it can really decide where to land on its characters. I do think that the writers want you to think that Archer totally hosed up but when you watch the replays of past events you can see that he largely succeeded in creating a machine that did what was advertised. David totally interfaced with the machine, and totally controlled the Geth. David was just outside of Archer's control. I think the horrifying state of David at the end is supposed to make you go "this is hosed up" (because it was) and conclude that Archer was totally wrong but the reality is the machine he designed worked, albeit with a design flaw. e: my major objection to Overlord (besides the writing being a mess) is the use of Autism as a plot device in really, really stupid ways. The writers use it as this weird McGuffin that can basically do anything and it's really insensitive.
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Jun 6, 2021 14:45
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I'm certain this is a hack bit by now but it is kind of funny in The Citadel DLC how your squad mates have cheeky banter with each other as you just brutally murder like hundreds of guys lol. Kaiden made some joke about how the other team are copiers as a merc just got gibbed into a billion pieces.
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Jun 6, 2021 15:32
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Levantine posted:I mean, my guess was that while David was largely in control, he was using that control to try to shut out the "noise". But the idea of using a person to interface with a VI to talk to the Geth totally worked. Archer wrongly predicted he could control David which was silly I mean, there was the slight issue where it drove the human insane resulting in a not ai killing everyone. That would kind of qualify as "not working" to most people.
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Jun 6, 2021 15:52
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FoolyCharged posted:I mean, there was the slight issue where it drove the human insane resulting in a not ai killing everyone. That would kind of qualify as "not working" to most people. Sure, in the broadest sense. But Archer was right in that he could merge an organic life form and put it in charge of a VI to control AI systems. The system did what it was designed to do. Archer was right that he could do that one thing. It "worked", but with a fatal control design flaw. But the Geth definitely were under its control!
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Jun 6, 2021 16:01
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We're just about to finish Priority: Tuchanka in ME3 and my wife hates the game already. There's still moments where she's genuinely invested in the material (Just about everything involving Tuchanka, Garrus, and Javik, really. She's still not a fan of Liara and wants to shoot Jaidan dead every time we visit him at the hospital. Also, EDI's body raises a ton of questions from her). She sounds very frustrated with a lot of the game conversations in general, where there isn't much agency for the player in the actual conversation. Most recent example being the renegade interrupt for the Salarian Dalatress being a strongly worded letter when in the previous game Shepard would have like, shot her in the leg or something. It's pretty clear that there's a sharp drop in the writing quality between ME2 and ME3; Probably has to do with the proto-gamergate poo poo and massive turnover bioware had during the production of DA2. It also suffers from the same problem Dragon Age 2 had where they throw another wave or two of enemies at you after the natural stopping point of an encounter, the key difference is that the combat is ME3 is still fun as all hell.
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Jun 6, 2021 16:03
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Is it lazy writing or an intentional motif that almost every loyalty mission is addressing Daddy Issues of some sort? Mordin and Garrus plus the two DLC squad excepted.
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Jun 6, 2021 16:05
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Arrrthritis posted:We're just about to finish Priority: Tuchanka in ME3 and my wife hates the game already. I think that ME3 needed another 6 months to a year of development. There is a skeleton of some really cool ideas in ME3 and the best ones I think are the ones that got the most time to bake. Everything else feels very undercooked by comparison.
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Jun 6, 2021 16:06
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I remember the auto dialogue in ME3 really being a big issue back in the day. Especially compared to ME1/2 where you pick almost everything Shepard actually says
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Jun 6, 2021 16:07
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I thought the reduced dialogue was actually a design goal. They wanted the game to be welcoming to newcomers and non rpg people ( ) so that's why they dialed it back and often only had two choices to make it less 'confusing'.
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Jun 6, 2021 16:11
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The Wiggly Wizard posted:Is it lazy writing or an intentional motif that almost every loyalty mission is addressing Daddy Issues of some sort? Mordin and Garrus plus the two DLC squad excepted. We noticed that as well when we were playing through ME2. Zaeed, Kasumi, Mordin, and Legion are the only ones that don't have to do with parents. Grunt is tangentially related because his is more of a coming of age thing (that has more to do with his warlord dad growing him in a tank). Don't really know how that factors as a theme into the rest of the game though, so i'd guess lazy writing. Arrrthritis fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Jun 6, 2021 |
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Jun 6, 2021 16:12
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Eimi posted:I thought the reduced dialogue was actually a design goal. They wanted the game to be welcoming to newcomers and non rpg people ( I think you're right. They did this with James too as a new player perspective character, but the difference is that James was cool and good and the autodialogue was like "hmmm my Shepard said this dumb thing like 'we fight or we die. THAT's the plan  '"
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Jun 6, 2021 16:26
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The Wiggly Wizard posted:Is it lazy writing or an intentional motif that almost every loyalty mission is addressing Daddy Issues of some sort? Mordin and Garrus plus the two DLC squad excepted. i wouldn't be surprised if the ME writers were told beforehand that loyalty missions, on paper, should expose some psychological weakness or dependency of the squadmate that emanates from something important and personal in their lives that shepard will resolve for them with violence like some kind of shotgun toting therapist, thereby gaining their trust and functioning as a team-building exercise for a mission so deadly everyone's gotta be running at 110% a lot of people would take a writing prompt like that, one that's personal and psyche-affecting, and read 'family problems' into it (at first glance), between that and tight deadlines that's my guess for how this played out because it doesn't feel like there's a steady thematic undercurrent driving the similarity here imho
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Jun 6, 2021 16:32
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Mass Effect broadly deals with themes of generational trauma, which many of the individual loyalty missions echo to varying degrees of success. The tendency of all the Milky Way civilizations to create a new crisis to solve the old crisis while at the same time being utterly dependent upon the mechanism of their own destruction hiding in plain sight is returned to again and again throughout the trilogy. I think the parental issues are mostly intentional and successful in their aim.
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Jun 6, 2021 16:39
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Eimi posted:I thought the reduced dialogue was actually a design goal. They wanted the game to be welcoming to newcomers and non rpg people (
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Jun 6, 2021 16:41
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It's always fathers, though, isn't it? Does anyone in Mass Effect other than Spacer Shepard and Liara even have a mother?
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Jun 6, 2021 17:05
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Lord Hydronium posted:It's always fathers, though, isn't it? Does anyone in Mass Effect other than Spacer Shepard and Liara even have a mother? Garrus's mom is dying from illness in ME2 and he uses his friendship with Mordin to get her access to experimental treatments but the prognosis isn't good. Given that she's not mentioned at all in 3, it's likely that she dies between games. You also find out in ME2 that Jack was taken from her mother at the hospital, who was told her newborn Jacqueline had died.
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Jun 6, 2021 17:12
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The autodialogue is mostly bad because it's written from the perspective of paragon shep. If you take mostly top of the menu answers most of the auto poo poo is reasonable because it sounds like how your shep's been talking for three games now. If you play assholeshep a lot of the autodialogue is real out of character.
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Jun 6, 2021 17:15
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The Wiggly Wizard posted:Is it lazy writing or an intentional motif that almost every loyalty mission is addressing Daddy Issues of some sort? Mordin and Garrus plus the two DLC squad excepted. Mordin's mission with Maelon is one in which he's the bad dad and Maelon is struggling with squaring what he was taught as Mordin's student and seeing the impact of their work. Garrus' is about trying to do what Shepard did--assemble a team to kick rear end and do some good in the galaxy--and figure out what to do after it blew up in his face. Both are less direct than, say, Thane's or Samara's loyalty missions, but in their mentor/protégé conflict they echo the parent/child struggles which undergird the series. I would not at all be surprised if the reason Zaeed and Kasumi were cut, after they nailed the squad roster down, was because they didn't hold as tightly to that theme
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Jun 6, 2021 17:18
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Good point about Mordin. Samara and Morinth is of course a mother-daughter relationship. Legion and the Geth is about resisting their "creators"exquisite tea posted:Mass Effect broadly deals with themes of generational trauma, which many of the individual loyalty missions echo to varying degrees of success. The tendency of all the Milky Way civilizations to create a new crisis to solve the old crisis while at the same time being utterly dependent upon the mechanism of their own destruction hiding in plain sight is returned to again and again throughout the trilogy. I think the parental issues are mostly intentional and successful in their aim. This is a nice way of putting it.
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Jun 6, 2021 17:35
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exquisite tea posted:Mass Effect broadly deals with themes of generational trauma, which many of the individual loyalty missions echo to varying degrees of success. The tendency of all the Milky Way civilizations to create a new crisis to solve the old crisis while at the same time being utterly dependent upon the mechanism of their own destruction hiding in plain sight is returned to again and again throughout the trilogy. I think the parental issues are mostly intentional and successful in their aim. while i definitely like this idea, i would be more confident in this interpretation if, say, the resolutions of your loyalty missions made a meaningful commentary on the state of the galaxy's generational trauma if we're going to argue the connection here is intentional, given that you can renegade-chat jack into murder is the answer psychopathy, let jacob watch his dad get torn apart by feral colonists, let zaeed burn down a refinery to get his man, etc, etc, etc without following up on any potential consequences of these routes of problem solving, given they're all equally effective, if there's an intentional undercurrent tying them all together without a tighter interaction between the missions and mass effect's broader themes, the connection seems a little thin, at least imho, since we're just taking family dysfunction as a stand-in for the galaxy's messy history having downstream effects, that's the kind of broad reading you could fit almost anywhere could be fun to think this one through tho
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Jun 6, 2021 17:37
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The ending of the suicide mission is basically a daddy issue in reverse, with you having to kill a baby reaper.
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Jun 6, 2021 17:42
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hard counter posted:while i definitely like this idea, i would be more confident in this interpretation if, say, the resolutions of your loyalty missions made a meaningful commentary on the state of the galaxy's generational trauma if we're going to argue the connection here is intentional, given that you can renegade-chat jack into murder is the answer psychopathy, let jacob watch his dad get torn apart by feral colonists, let zaeed burn down a refinery to get his man, etc, etc, etc without following up on any potential consequences of these routes of problem solving, given they're all equally effective, if there's an intentional undercurrent tying them all together I do think you could take a loose reading of the Renegade path as "continue the cycle of generational violence" vs. the Paragon path as "seek resolution to the issue". Like, unambiguously, most of the major Renegade choices are bad ideas that have short-term benefits in exchange for traumatic long-term costs. In that sense, Renegade Shepard is a creature shaped by the galaxy she lives in, while Paragon Shepard is a messiah that can redeem the galaxy. There are exceptions (Garrus' loyalty mission comes to mind - the Renegade option is not exactly a clear-cut bad idea in that case), but for the most part the Renegade choices are just Shepard reduplicating the random and/or institutional violence that caused the problem in the first place. You could also tie this notion of generational violence into the Reaper cycle, which makes the Reapers more apposite antagonists in that the galaxy they've shaped is unconsciously mimicking their exploitative and self-serving behaviour on its own subsequent generations.
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Jun 6, 2021 17:43
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Pattonesque posted:Honestly in ME3 you can build a vanguard so that firing a gun is an afterthought Yeah even on Insanity you can just Charge Nova Nova Charge Nova Nova Charge... forever
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Jun 6, 2021 17:44
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fadam posted:I'm certain this is a hack bit by now but it is kind of funny in The Citadel DLC how your squad mates have cheeky banter with each other as you just brutally murder like hundreds of guys lol. Kaiden made some joke about how the other team are copiers as a merc just got gibbed into a billion pieces. You gotta remember that all of your squad mates are space cops with no oversight so that's just realistic writing
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Jun 6, 2021 17:47
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Simone Magus posted:Yeah even on Insanity you can just Charge Nova Nova Charge Nova Nova Charge... forever I’m definitely missing this since the dang thread convinced me to try Engineer. I enjoy the explosions but they’re not Charge->Nova!!!
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Jun 6, 2021 17:49
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