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Ilos track best track. e: evidence http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHkBFymRiOs
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Apr 17, 2012 20:10
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The poster from Penny Arcade (Patrick Weekes?), I think.
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Jul 2, 2012 07:29
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Arglebargle III posted:Welp the quote-splice post comes out and the battle of attrition is won. I'm not responding to that beyond pointing out that you're grasping at straws to find things from ME2's plot that are important to ME3. I guess I could take on every point but no one would read it and I'm going to go play ME3. Maybe after that I will have some more points about ME2. Dan Didio if you want to continue this conversation and have archives access I believe we had this same conversation like two years ago in this same forum. I know you wanna just leave it be and I don't want to seem like I'm just jumping in on an argument or nothing, but goddamn living gently caress the three-act structure is descriptive not prescriptive! Stop using it wrong!
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Sep 28, 2012 16:51
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sassassin posted:Cerberus weren't bad guys in ME2. TIM is basically the villain, though.
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Nov 14, 2012 18:46
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sassassin posted:Nah, he's your Dad. Everyone is everyone's dad.
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Nov 14, 2012 21:51
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Craig Spradlin posted:Exceptions would, of course, be made for Gabby and Ken. I think Cerberus works best if you ignore ME1 and 3 and just look at 2, where it's just a human shadow government/military. ME1 is just all over the map anyway: sending a squad of marines into a nest of giant monsters for research is really stupid writing.
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Apr 21, 2013 21:30
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Squirtle Squadee posted:It's really obnoxious when you get never-ending waves of enemies. Be more aggressive. Pushing forward will cut down the number of enemies you face.
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May 30, 2013 09:26
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Paragon and Renegade die with Anderson and TIM. The general idea seems to be that when Shepard meets the Catalyst, they are 'beyond good and evil'.
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Jul 8, 2013 20:24
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video game tattoo
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Jul 16, 2013 21:42
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C'mon, guys. The Starchild's reasoning isn't literally about robots and humans fighting each other. The Rannoch resolution is poor writing that confuses and obfuscates, but the core conflict actually has very little to do with organics or synthetics.
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Sep 9, 2013 22:32
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Cobalt Chloride posted:So then... the core conflict is that organics will always destroy themselves? I dunno, our cycle was doing pretty well there before they showed up. The core conflict is entropy; limited and decaying resources inevitably lead to conflict between older and younger generations. The Reapers 'reset' the cycle by harvesting and preserving species, clearing the way for a whole new set of species to emerge, dominate and eventually fall into conflict with one another. Similar (non-synthetic/organic) conflicts include the Council and the krogan, and the humans, batarians and Council.
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Sep 10, 2013 18:23
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2house2fly posted:Yeah that was definitely the vibe I got when the Catalyst said "without us to stop it, synthetics would destroy all organics. We've created the cycle so that never happens." Subtext. It's the natural extension of 'daddy issues' from ME2. quote:The only really cringeworthy bit is the creator's self-insert. The whole thing is cringeworthy, a gutless hollow cop-out of an ending
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Sep 10, 2013 22:30
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Burning Mustache posted:(and also read two of the EU novels that y'all consider to be worse than Hitler, though I thought the first two were a fun read if you're interested in the ME universe at all) Opinion invalidated. Seriously, I don't think anyone should make any judgements on the quality of a thing if they are a franchise reader.
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Sep 12, 2013 18:34
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Geostomp posted:Let's not even get into the fact that we're suddenly lead to believe that this is the completely nonsensical solution to a "problem" that hasn't been at the forefront of the story because our newly revealed greatest enemy tells us to. Intergenerational conflict is a theme right back in ME1, where the geth are the main enemies and Saren hates the upstart humans.
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Dec 1, 2013 11:42
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Geostomp posted:And yet I didn't hear anyone in-game clamor for turning every organic into freakish hybrids before now. Almost as if enforced homogeny wasn't the instant solution to all problems before some writers screwed up, ran out of time and threw some fake artsy crap at the wall to cover for it. Saren, Shepard and the Reapers are all crude versions of the Synthesis solution. I'm not certain what your criticism here actually is.
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Dec 1, 2013 19:19
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Sarkeesian's got a point. I think a lot of people use "Shep(ard)" and "FemShep" to refer to the two different characters, which does imply that male Shepard is default and female Shepard is the derivative, which is kinda sexist. Obviously she wasn't talking about you though. You're one of the good ones.
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Dec 6, 2013 19:51
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Alteisen posted:No its a dumb thing to nitpick, there is literally no other term to use to refer to the female Shepard. How about "female Shepard"? e: goddamn beaten It's not "FemShep" that's the problem, it's that it's used as a marker to show a deviation from the norm. Compare how many people use FemShep and how many use ManShep/MaleShep. If they're just used to distinguish male and female PCs, shouldn't they be equal? Or, if anything, more ManSheps/MaleSheps because more people play a male Shepard, right? A cursory Google shows FemShep is a lot more common. Why?
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Dec 6, 2013 20:24
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Bobby Deluxe posted:Mass Effect 1 was more about the story than the Gears of War clone 2 and 3 kind of became. Nope
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Dec 8, 2013 12:25
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It was never about organics and synthetics come on
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Dec 25, 2013 00:16
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Organics and synthetics are a shorthand for intergenerational conflict, not a thing in and of itself.
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Dec 25, 2013 00:27
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Utritum posted:For the record, I agree with the previous posts about the story being about intergenerational conflicts. The problem is that the story suddenly drops that so it can throw around some high-faluting ambiguity about the singularity. The only solution to intergenerational conflict is the singularity. I mean, you could just have humanity blow up the Reapers, no tech loss, but then the subtext is about the inevitability of children murdering their parents, Titanomachy all over again, and the cycle essentially doesn't actually change. That's not a bad thing, but it is quite dark if you look beyond superficialities. Also in the old ME2 thread quite a few people had difficulty with the idea of ME2 being about daddy isues, so it's not much of a stretch that people might not 'get' ME3. Which, yeah, is pretty shameful. Yeah I went there
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Dec 25, 2013 18:59
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cafel posted:Yeah, but this concept was handled infinitely better with the possibility of getting the Geth and Quarians to come to a consensus over their past crimes and conflicts and reach an agreement to work together as creator and creation. Why? What was so good about it? What is the solution to the inevitable conflict - having enough global variables to make the problem go away? How does it apply to the other examples of the same problem in the series? quote:The original ending of waving your hand and making everyone green was really stupid and nonsensical. The Extended Ending stuff makes it slightly less nonsensical, but it remains a stupid and highly cheap out. What makes it nonsensical? Is it that the science doesn't make sense? Because Mass Effect has never made sense. Sentient husks? Part of the cop-out that was the Extended Cut. It's literally rewriting the rules of the story, altering the premise both "in universe" and narratively. Shepard comes to create a new covenant with God and change the nature of sin forever. He did a Jesus pose and everything! You don't just do a Jesus pose for no reason.
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Dec 25, 2013 21:48
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cafel posted:The first is simply a result of investment in a narrative, solving an ongoing conflict you've been trying to deal with over the course of three games is inherently going to be more satisfying than being handed a magic solution to an undiscussed wider problem in the last ten minutes of a single game. I was talking thematically. If you want to go down this road, you have bigger problems (Mass Effect is a linear corridor-shooter with minimal player input). quote:The solution to inevitable conflict is to make an effort to see things from the perspective of the other side as demonstrated by the Geth/Quarian situation and the events surrounding Mordin's decision to cure the genophage. The "inevitable conflict" is a zero-sum game, so 'seeing things from the perspective of the other side' isn't a solution. Mordin's decision is emphatically a decision to side with the younger generation (the krogan) over the older (the salarians). The Rannoch compromise is essentially a dodge, an attempt to say that there is no problem at all, and never was. Asimov's solution to the (in)evitable conflict, in the short story of the same name, was for the younger and more worthy generation to covertly seize control in order to gently shepherd the older generation into a new era. Bioware's Synthesis solution was to eliminate the concept of generations altogether. Bioware's writing is weak, don't get me wrong, but the problem is in Rannoch and other things, not Synthesis/the Catalyst. quote:It's an awful Jesus metaphor, seeing as how the point of Jesus's death on the cross isn't that he fixed everything at that moment. Instead he gave people the means to live a better life by providing guidance and inspiration. Shepard's sacrifice straight up forces everyone to get along, synthesis is really no different in spirit than the control ending. Legion and Mordin are both much better examples of Christ like sacrifice. Not sacrifice, but transformation. Shepherd's death changes the nature of the whole universe - that's the point of Synthesis. If it's a bad Jesus metaphor, so is King Kong. quote:Was there another example of that organic/synthetic conflict at all in the series? Like I said, the organic/synthetic conflict has always been a stand-in for parent/child or older/younger conflict. So this includes:
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Dec 26, 2013 00:24
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Milky Moor posted:Like, you just pointed out eight intergenerational conflicts and only one of them really involves the tension between synthetic and organic life. So, why is this conflict the 'central theme' of the trilogy? Why is it what the final climax of the game revolves around? Why is it that, instead of emphasising a shared understanding of everyone's perspectives, synthesis concerns itself with amalgamating organic and synthetic life into 'a new DNA'? It's all the same. There is no difference. The organic/synthetic conflict is all the other conflicts. Salarians are quarians are Reapers are Tali's dad are TIM are Cerberus are the Council are Thane. Krogan are geth are the current races are Tali are Shepard are Jack are the Alliance are Kolyat. Text exists to serve its meaning. The Catalyst and the Reapers focus on organic/synthetic conflict to further Bioware's discussion of intergenerational conflict, not because organic/synthetic conflict is a thing in itself.
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Dec 26, 2013 01:04
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Milky Moor posted:If it's all the same then the Catalyst's motivation would reflect that. It's not. In the text there is something inherently different or special about synthetic and organic conflict that makes it worth having a multiple, perpetual apocalypse over to stop. The Reapers are not concerned with intergenerational conflict as a wide concept - they exist to prevent a synthetic uprising that eliminates all organic life forevermore. I... it's subtext. The Reapers already exist to stop intergenerational conflict because that's what organic/synthetic conflict is. That's what it means. You didn't think that it was a cautionary tale on the dangers of artificial intelligence, did you? Subtext isn't text. That's the whole point. Next you'll be telling me Maelon isn't actually Mordin's son.
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Dec 26, 2013 09:54
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CaptainCarrot posted:I'll certainly tell you that, because there's absolutely no reason to think that he is, particularly since his loyalty mission is one of the few that isn't directly parent-child. 
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Dec 26, 2013 17:01
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Geostomp posted:This is part of why ME3 bugs me: the writers had so many potential outs, but just bulled on putting themselves into a corner by dropping all of it so the Reapers were so invincible that they needed the massive cop-out of the Crucible's mystery magic to end things. It's like they had to try to make things go so wrong. ME3 was not an accident, like they were trying to write something and slipped and ended up with the Crucible. Bioware told the story that they wanted to tell - they didn't forget about all the other plot threads they could have used to resolve the Reapers, they just didn't want to use them because they wanted to write in the Catalyst, because Mass Effect has always been a giant grab-bag of sci-fi, 1960 to present day, and they hadn't done 2001: A Space Odyssey yet. For the record, like exquisite tea used to say in the spoiler thread, I think ME3 is an interesting 'failure'. I think that's worthier than the 'happy ending space opera' that we've all seen before, because at least this is new and different. Milky Moor posted:'suddenly alter everyone in the galaxy without their consent' Unless you mean this as an ironic Pythonesque "I never asked to be liberated from the dictatorship!" joke then this is a very silly criticism. Geostomp posted:If you try hard enough, you'll eventually make all the square pegs of the world's problems fit into the round hole of "generational conflict" (which is still broader than very specific "synthetic vs. organic" conflict that the ending claimed). Okay, look, come on guys. This is starting to annoy me. The text isn't going to spell out the themes for you, yeah? That isn't how it works. As it is, the ME series comes close enough to explicitly saying what it's about, what with all the heavy-handed references to bad dads, disobedient creations and old vs new. When we say (I say, when I say, I've been saying this since ME2/not that long after ME3 hit, now suddenly we're all saying it...) Mass Effect is about intergenerational conflict, it's not saying that literally the hot button issue in the galaxy is what to do about parents fighting with children, it's saying that that's the topic Bioware wanted to address in their game series. Whether or not the characters in their fiction are aware of this is irrelevant - Mass Effect has always been about this idea of the past fighting or conflicting or just plain determining the present, whether covertly (the Mass Relays have determined the course of all pan-galactic civilisations for millenia) or overtly (giant killer robots from outer space murdering everything). Strictly speaking this is good old Entropy, but it best expresses itself in the series as intergenerational conflict, or daddy issues. Synthetics vs organics, older races vs newer races, parents vs children - they don't directly relate, because they don't need to! They're themes! They're part of the series as a literary construct, which is something I think the thread forgets at times.
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Dec 30, 2013 22:33
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Vigilance posted:The Mass Effect series was always about cliched pulpy sci fi endings. Pulp sci-fi is an actual thing, not a shorthand for "big dumb explosions and a Hollywood plot that doesn't challenge me too much." There's a good couple of posts in the ME3 spoiler thread that explains this far better than I could. If anything, pulp sci-fi is one of the few kinds of sci-fi that Mass Effect actually isn't about.
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Dec 30, 2013 22:40
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orcane posted:I don't think the thread forgets, I think "the thread" simply doesn't agree with your pretentious interpretations and apologism. No, you're dumb. apologism for a game jeeesus
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Dec 30, 2013 23:06
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Vigilance posted:We can argue about terminology, but I don't think it's at all arguable that Mass Effect is and always was a fairly basic and cliched story of good guys vs the big bad with a few slightly more interesting concepts mixed in. Gonna be all contrarian again and say that it is. I know we all make fun of Bioware for heavily mining Joseph Campbell but there's more to the series than goodies and baddies in space. For example, look at the different inspirations for the art direction in each game: ME1 is like Star Trek or Babylon 5, ME2 is like Alien or Blade Runner, and ME3 is like Star Wars or Independence Day.
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Dec 31, 2013 00:23
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I think Mass Effect, Jade Empire and Dragon Age were part of a drive to build up their own portfolio of stuff so they weren't beholden to external interests for all their business. Star Wars is pretty straightforward, but apparently between Hasbro and Atari the D&D license was always a bit of a minefield... But by owning the IP Bioware can make direct bank from all the terrible expanded universe poo poo that people like to buy, instead of having their KOTOR cash-ins go straight to Lucas.
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Dec 31, 2013 00:34
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U.T. Raptor posted:One of the dumbest and most infuriating things in the aftermath of the endings were all the idiots (including, I believe, some reviewers) going "You want a happy ending? What are you, a child? I agree. If you only want a happy ending in your stories, then you're worse than a child.
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Dec 31, 2013 11:42
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Fwoderwick posted:I'd think the Venn diagram of people who want a happy ending in everything and the people who wanted a happy ending as an option in this particular game aren't perfectly overlapping circles. KOTOR had a tragic ending where DS Revan dies in Carth's arms in a final act of redemption. Bioware cut it, though. It'd be silly to think that they should have put it back in as an option - and that was a solid ending, creatively speaking. Bioware didn't want a tragic ending in their space opera, and that's fair enough - it is what it is. Bioware also didn't want a perfectly happy ending in their sci-fi epic, and that's also fair enough. It's not even as if it's that sad or complicated!
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Dec 31, 2013 12:49
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Fwoderwick posted:Yep, Bioware produced the game (and endings) they wanted with the time, resources and skill they had available. Thread closed. You'd be surprised how few people agree with this! quote:ME3's ending would, at best, involve billions horribly killed (including at least a few of Shepard's crew members), planets burned (including Earth), intelligent species nearly wiped out, and the entire civilization in shambles. Yet, somehow, that is still not tragic enough for some unless Shepard dies and forces some ridiculous magical change on everyone in a hamfisted semi-religious metaphor. Has anyone actually asked for ME3 to be made more tragic? I think people have only said "tonally it fits just fine with the rest of the series," which it does, and "you'd lose something by not having Shepard (appear to) die," which you would. ME3 is actually quite upbeat. Death is ended! Millennia of genocide, both avenged and averted! A future that belongs to us! What more could you possibly ask?
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Dec 31, 2013 16:09
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Fwoderwick posted:Personally I think if you can't finish something with a genuinely thought provoking ending (let alone 3), then you're better off with a hollywood triumphant overcome the odds ending. Fair enough. Again, though, I'm gonna have to disagree and say that to me, a creative risk is always more interesting than a by-the-numbers trope, even if the risk doesn't pay off. Like, ME2 had a great ending that everyone likes, so the only thing we can ever get from it is "yup, that's certainly a great ending." A cool chase, a big explosion, Shepard runs a lot... yeah. ME3 is divisive and is more... difficult as a work, but I think it has more value than ME2 as a cultural artefact. And I loving love ME2.
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Dec 31, 2013 18:02
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Malderi posted:Talking about the ME3 dev process, there was a video where the lead writer mentioned starting with a 3-4 page story outline and then dividing up all the missions from there. Are you serious? You think Bioware should have made a seven year plan for their flagship AAA title? Are you some kind of idiot? quote:I'm not even in professional project management This isn't really a good start to a post on project management, is it? J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5 and infamous creeplord, who plotted out exit stories and alternatives to storylines in case actors left, who once freaked out at an actor because he adlibbed a non-verbal characterisation to his non-recurring part which potentially threatened his entire creative vision... even he had to significantly alter the show's myth arc between conception and finishing production. As it is, Bioware actually did manage to pick up and tie off most of their story threads. More importantly, the games got made. If we're going to talk project management, we should probably realise that the objective was releasing a game and not getting fired or sued for breach of contract, rather than anything else.
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Jan 1, 2014 21:21
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I think you're underestimating how much money and man-hours go into a title like Mass Effect. You can't plan three of them all together at the same time, and you can't sustain a continuous planning process over so many years - it's simply not logistically possible. I don't understand what it is you're looking for. They had a roadmap. They even had an overarching narrative in mind, but they changed it. The ending was a result of a too-short turnaround and artistic choices on Bioware's part. This isn't a project management issue!
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Jan 1, 2014 23:22
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Milky Moor posted:What was that adlib? Haven't heard about this. One of the Earth military officers had a scene where he wrote a letter to his wife, back at home. At the end of the scene, he kissed his pen as a kind of sympathetic act to kissing his wife. Apparently afterwards JMS confronted the actor because it wasn't in the script. I'm overstating JMS' reaction - I don't think he actually blew up at the actor, just was a little too concerned about what happened.
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Jan 1, 2014 23:49
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Ah, there we go, that's the bunny. I stand corrected.
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Jan 1, 2014 23:59
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I don't really like the child either, but there are advantages to that choice. Alongside what others have said, there's the reference to 2001, and, as bad as it may seem now, the infodump/implicit demand for Shepard to resolve the crisis probably comes better from a child than from an overt authority figure.
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Jan 3, 2014 00:57
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