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You know one thing that really bugged me about the ending, aside from the obvious? The Reapers had the Citadel under their control, but didn't use it for anything. The information and ability to control the Relay network would allow them to completely bone over the resistance movements, but nothing happened. What happened? Did the guy writing the ending just not really understand the series or did he really think that ignoring all the practical issues of the story were less important than whatever it was s/he wanted to tell us through the ending?
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| # ¿ Mar 11, 2012 19:36 |
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| # ¿ May 23, 2013 10:04 |
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The one big inconsistency that pissed me off about the Reapers' "motivation" is that they have repeatedly admitted that they deliberately guide organic civilizations down the same technological development path. For all the little glowing prick's preaching about the dangers of synthetics, he completely forgets that the whole Cycle depends on his Reapers setting organics up on the path where they'll fail by getting killed by synthetics either of their own creation or their so-called "guardians". The more I think about this ending, the more convinced I am that the writer never played either of the previous two games and just wanted to seem "deep" and "philosophical" without any understanding of what either word meant.
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| # ¿ Mar 15, 2012 14:56 |
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Aphrodite posted:Oh, she's there? I never even saw her. She's at the bar in that cafe Liara spends the first part of the game sitting at.
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| # ¿ Mar 17, 2012 03:24 |
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This is a bit off-topic from the justified ending bashing, but I wonder why we didn't see more variation with the husks. I wanted to see husk versions of every major species instead of mostly mix-n-match beasts. Who doesn't want to see an elcor or salarian cyber-zombie?
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| # ¿ Mar 17, 2012 16:05 |
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Does anybody know why they bothered to build Harbinger up as the single biggest, oldest, and all around baddest Reaper in the fleet, then proceed to do absolutely nothing with it aside from a few lasers and the occasional name-drop? Is the answer incompetence?
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| # ¿ Mar 17, 2012 16:24 |
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Rissei posted:You know what I found profoundly depressing? Before the last ten minutes of the series, it seemed like the exact opposite lesson. Shepard was leading the galaxy to finally break through the oppression of the Reapers and move on to a true future. Then one writer decided that was too happy or wasn't "deep" enough and we got the starchild telling us that we really can't do anything more while Shepard blindly takes everything it says at face value. That's what really pisses me off. I could take the Starchild's horrific reasoning as just being more Reaper-class arrogant rambling, but watching Shepard lie down like a dog and agree with it's asinine arguments is just insulting after everything s/he's been through. Geostomp fucked around with this message at Mar 17, 2012 around 17:44 |
| # ¿ Mar 17, 2012 17:40 |
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Charlie Mopps posted:Haha, apparently CNN was talking about the ME3 ending and frustration of fans just now. If this doesn't embarrass Bioware into giving us something that makes a lick of sense, nothing will.
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| # ¿ Mar 17, 2012 19:42 |
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I just got back from the TVTropes page and I'm even more angry. There you see die-hard defenders of this asinine ending trying to justify this horribly written crap. I know that it's important to keep something resembling objectivity (as much as that site is capable of), but some people are really eating this garbage up just because they've seen the various elements in better scenes in other works. I know it's old hat now, but these guys are so obsessed with noticing tropes that they completely forget why they work (or don't work, in this case) at all.
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| # ¿ Mar 19, 2012 16:26 |
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Was I alone in thinking that the Crucible was a huge trap and just waiting for the damned thing to backfire at some point? From what everybody said, it had all the warning signs that "the Reapers want organics to use this thing" just like the Relays and Citadel. Even Shepard had a few scenes that hinted at some justified distrust of this super-ancient anti-Reaper weapon that nobody understands or has even heard of before now. Maybe that our score would determine if organics could actually find some constructive use for it or be wiped out at the end? Anything would be better than wasting all game on this thing so it could be used by an author-insert to go off on a pseudo-philosophical tangent that destroys the whole setting.
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| # ¿ Mar 19, 2012 18:32 |
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Lotish posted:At least they talk about it, sometimes. They say that adepts and vanguards have different amps that allow them to use their signature powers. They don't go into enough detail about biotics or even the classes to say if they can potentially learn to use powers outside the default skill sets.
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| # ¿ Mar 19, 2012 22:55 |
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This "artistic vision" excuse is the biggest load of pretentious crap I've ever seen. This is a mass-marketed videogame that finishes a trilogy five years in the making (well, seven, with all development time, but still). The series depends on making characters and settings that entice people and make them value them as "real". When you destroy them without regard to what was previously established in favor for some vage, half-assed "Holokid Explains it All" for no reason beyond the fact that you want LOTS OF SPECULATION FOR EVERYONE, the audience has every right to get mad and refuse to swallow your "brilliant vision". Everyone on this board can deconstruct at least six different ways the ending was an insult to their intelligence. When outcry of this magnitude comes up for one of the most beloved IPs of the last decade, it's time to pull your head from your rear end and realize that you might not be quite as good an artist as you think.
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| # ¿ Mar 19, 2012 23:17 |
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Transmetropolitan posted:I blame post-modernism. "EVERYTHING CAN BE ART" became more of an excuse rather than a new approach to things, and lo and behold, we can't even do a proper three-story arc properly nowadays without some hack putting a oh-so-clever-twist-I-am-a-GENIUS thing. That annoys me to no end. The term "art" has become an excuse to completely ignore quality control or outside input in favor of an excuse for whatever bit of ego stroking the "artist" vomits out. Art should be an ideal to aspire to, not a way to dodge criticism. Ambiguatron posted:I think there was a major disconnect on the part of the head writer, Walters. Apparently, we're supposed to deeply connect with the idea of making a huge sacrifice for the sake of the future/breaking the cycle. This is completely at odds with the rest of the trilogy, where we go around visiting strange cultures and beautiful scenery and interesting characters and, in many cases, improve their situation and generally do more to uplift the galaxy than a hundred other people could do. Hackett even puts it in those terms at one point. Exactly. The ending completely forgets the relatively optimistic tone of the previous parts of the series in an attempt to seem "mature" by going as pointlessly bleak and surreal as possible. That's really what people are so upset about, the fact that the entire ending is based on this newly introduced holo-brat arbitrarily declaring that you have three options to die and use space magic to remove the most important parts of the setting without any chance to argue. As if "because I said so" is supposed to be a good excuse. People go on and on about a new ending "setting a bad precedent" but does allowing one writer to steal the ending of your largest IP away so he can go off on a tangent with no regard to the previous setting because "billions dead, civilization in shambles" isn't bleak enough. Geostomp fucked around with this message at Mar 20, 2012 around 00:00 |
| # ¿ Mar 19, 2012 23:53 |
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Thinking about the ending again, why didn't they just make the Crucible's function manipulating the Mass Relay network? It's already established that the Citadel can do this from the first game and that it was the single biggest advantage the Reapers had. Just use the giant McGuffin give the united galaxy this supreme strategic advantage and have them win the uphill struggle as they isolate the Reapers from their numerical advantages. Deny the Reapers their overwhelming force of numbers and they're just big targets. It'd use what we already know exists, make EMS scores actually important (bigger fleets-better margin of victory or worse defeats), keep the setting mostly intact, and make the ending an actual struggle that could be anywhere between tragic to well-earned victory. I know I'd consider it poetic for the accumulated wisdom of countless cycles to show technological superiority by using the Reapers' own trap to destroy them. But no, we had to get starchild and space magic because Walters thinks anything else is "too happy" or doesn't elicit enough SPECULATION FOR EVERYBODY!!!
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| # ¿ Mar 20, 2012 15:50 |
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Sombrerotron posted:I think it's appropriate that ME3 doesn't end with a typical boss fight. There's some concept art in the little art book that comes with the CE, showing how TIM might've looked as a Reapified monster that you'd have to kill. It looks weird and scary, yeah, but I think it's much more effective and appropriate to have an indoctrinated and only partially hosed-up TIM try to convince you as you try to convince him - and failing that, have your differences be resolved with a single bullet. I'm fine with the idea of the Illusive Man conversation "boss fight", it really does fit his character better than any giant husk beast could. What annoys me is that the writers became obsessed with TIM and Cerberus to the point where they forgot to treat the Reapers as intelligent enemies instead of just a relentless force. Aside from one bit of gloating with that Destroyer on Rannoch, none of them got a single line. Not even Harbinger, who the game decided to build up as the single biggest and most important Reaper, gets to do anything besides shoot lasers. The Starchild just makes it all worse by retroactively making all the Reapers drones for some program with no sense of gravitas or wisdom in his presence. Their retconned "purpose" removes all the sense of gravity or mystery surrounding these previously unknowable monstrosities into mere servants of a contradictory, arbitrary goal of "preserving" organic life. All the horror surrounding them vanished when Walters decided that their purpose should be such overly-simplistic nonsense that we much accept based solely on the fact that a newly-introduced, never before hinted at (nowhere did it say that "the Catalyst" was a character before the glow-kid showed up), character says so. The whole ending reeks of lazy writing.
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| # ¿ Mar 20, 2012 17:46 |
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I thought that the final part of Earth felt really truncated. It seemed more like this game's equivalent of Illos and I, for one, was really looking forward to the Citadel climb 2.0. Then we got hit with a Reaper drive-by and everything went "artistic". I understand that this was probably the point; building the audience's expectations with the familiar, then subverting them; but that kind of thing requires a lot of thought and narrative skill to pull off. Two things we all agree were sorely lacking in the final portion of this game.
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| # ¿ Mar 20, 2012 21:10 |
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I've already ranted about the "it's art, you can't change it!!" bull before, but I want to add that the mere fact that videogames qualify as an artistic medium does not mean that anything put into them is automatically an unquestionable gem. If it did, then we could equate From Justin to Kelly with Casablanca. We rank art all the time and the home stretch of this game ranks very low as a resolution compared to 2.9 games worth of great experience. Mac Walters is no genius, the ending of ME3 is no triumph, happy endings are not automatically childish or "unrealistic", Commander Shepard is no tragic hero, the galaxy recovering from the Reapers is already bittersweet, and adding in a semi-deity to solve the main problems of the story (while creating untold new ones) is incredibly lazy writing no matter what tragic outcome you arbitrarily tack on. Twisting the ending and setting to suit the vision of one writer while ignoring everything established is not brilliant, it's allowing a pretentious ego trip. Especially blatant attempts at emotional manipulation like the child and dream sequences. Adding vague symbols without meaning is no better than just making noise. Bioware and the ranting designers all need to swallow their pride and look at this work critically. They need to stop acting like spoiled teenagers and recognize the faults that we've continually gone over with this ending. Most of all, they need to get off this pretentious kick where they assume that the fans who dislike their work are entitled and actually listen to our analysis like we're intelligent adults instead of whining, unwashed masses.
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| # ¿ Mar 21, 2012 18:56 |
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afflictionwisp posted:It causes galactic civilization to become dependent on the relays so that, when the Reapers shut them off, it cripples the military's ability to respond. I think that he was wondering what this does for the "organics will always create synthetics that will turn on them" theme that the ending so ham-handedly molded itself around. The answer is, it doesn't. The established fact that the Reapers deliberately lead organics down the technological paths that create the Cycle (specifically to make killing them all easier) was completely lost on Walters in favor of forcing in an insultingly simplistic and contradictory "high concept" to make things seem deep without really having to develop the ending any further. I just can't understand how this ending happened. Why was Mac Walters, who as far as I can tell not usually assigned to making the main story, given full creative control on something as important as the final moments of Bioware's top franchise? Why would they risk something as big as this project on the man instead of continuously grilling the ending as satisfying as possible to the massive fanbase? Why not just give him one ending, then allow other writers to come up with their own and see if it was possible to use them all to get some real multiple ending sequences instead of just a choice of colored lights? I know that Bioware went on and on about not wanting there to be a clear "best" outcome, but why in the hell would they tie it all to the blatant number-crunching of the EMS score and follow it up with an outcome that makes it irrelevant. Why include this pseudo-philosophical bullshit just to force a tragedy into the end? Isn't the fact that the galaxy is already in shambles with billions dead enough of a downer? That's not even getting into the fact that the sequences make no sense on any level and make it so blatant that the story is ending this way solely because the writer wanted to end here instead of letting it grow organically. Why deliberately destroy the entire setting when you've admitted that you're not quite done with the IP? Is the possibility of an MMO so important that you had to kill it off right now? You're already skipping ahead with Space Grandpa (I am so sorry that Buzz Aldrin had to be used as part of such a crass attempt at emotional manipulation) that actual multiple endings would make no difference into a later story, so why do this? This script went through multiple hands. How is it that nowhere in this process did anyone with an ounce of literary knowledge see this ending and tell them that it was terrible? Everyone knows that the ending is by far the most important part of the story. People will forgive a lot so long as the end is satisfying. So why didn't they take the same care and craftsmanship with this as they did the krogan plotline? Were they just pressed for time or too close to the project to see any wrong? Did they forget to focus group the last part of the script? Did some writers quit? What went so wrong? I just don't understand how this happened.
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| # ¿ Mar 21, 2012 19:44 |
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Following this board's trends, I've come up with my own ending for ME3. First, they establish the purpose of the Crucible early on: it interfaces with the Citadel to control the entire Relay network. With some work, including at least one more missing into a derelict Reaper and using some of the gathered scientists, they recover or jury rig up some sort of Reaper lure. Using the two, they devise a plan to move the Citadel itself into a relatively isolated area of the galaxy and sacrifice it (remember, it's a gigantic Mass Relay itself) to remove the bulk of the Reaper forces. The final mission on Earth is an attempt to reach the Citadel to enact the plan with the aid of the gathered fleets. Your choices and EMS score will determine whether this desperate plan succeeds, fails, or even deactivates the Relay network. Add in some form of confrontation with both Harbinger and the Illusive Man and potential sacrifices to taste and you've got the potential for a nice finale. Of course that's just the bare bones and a bit of a deus ex machina itself, but it would at least use what's been established and be more satisfying that what we've got.
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| # ¿ Mar 21, 2012 20:22 |
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I thought we all agreed that Moviebob was just a pretentious jackass obsessed with seeing "art" in games to look smarter than he really is. It was the talk of the Other M thread for like a page before we found another example of horrific writing that puts this game's ending to shame.
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| # ¿ Mar 22, 2012 00:19 |
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I gotta know if people like Chipman are so up in arms because they actually liked the ending and thought it was intelligent (which practically no one has said online), because they respect artistic freedom (whatever that may be in this case), or just because they hate the idea of us "whiners" getting something changed? All three stances show a limit to critical thinking, but I could tolerate the first one better than the others if only because they don't revolve around a misguided attachment to an ideal rather than the actual reality.
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| # ¿ Mar 22, 2012 00:24 |
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If anything good (besides, hopefully, a new ending) comes out of this, I hope that this finally gets game developers to wise up and test their stories on focus groups before going forward. There are many ways this could go bad (see I Am Legend's ending that completely ignored the point of the book), but it would help the writers to get some perspective before going on crazy ego trips like this game's ending.
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| # ¿ Mar 22, 2012 00:28 |
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ZombieLenin posted:How so? Haven't yet beat it myself nor actually watched the endings. Is it the "Shepard Lives" post-script? If so isn't that just available when you choose "destroy the Reapers" and do some other stuff (like shoot TIM to "save" Anderson?" Basically we're thrust forward an indistinct amount of time into the future to see some human-silhouette grandfather (voiced by Buzz Aldrin for extra manipulation) telling the story of "the Shepard" to his grandson on some non-earth planet who says that nobody knows what's out there, implying that whoever they are they aren't part of any grand galactic society or even capable of space flight.
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| # ¿ Mar 22, 2012 00:59 |
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The worst part of the ending, that I think so many reviewers have been suckered by, is that it tries so hard to hide how meaningless it is under the thin veneer of "art". From the music, to the cinematics, to the semi-religious symbolism, everything is designed to look so pretty and mysterious that we're supposed to forget thinking about how it's all basically writer-mandated magic that destroys the entire setting. Remove the music, the only actually artistic thing about it, and you've got a series of complete non-sequitur scenes that end with a new character that frames the story in the most condescending manner possible. It's as if Walters had a checklist of "artistic" elements that he added without for a moment thinking about how they fit together. It's meaningless, nonsensical drivel that deliberately destroys everything we've worked achieved just so Walters could have his "bittersweet" ending. And yet all these so-called "professional" reviewers are suckered in by this just because it wasn't what they expected. Are they so intent on being smarter and more mature than their audience that they'll tune out the many flaws just to be contrary?
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| # ¿ Mar 22, 2012 01:30 |
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CaptainCarrot posted:They didn't take precedence over her daughters. Yeah, but that's more personal than anything involving Shepard.
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| # ¿ Mar 24, 2012 23:02 |
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CapnAndy posted:Of everything wrong with the ending, "the combined effort of every sentient race the Reapers have ever exterminated or were seeking to exterminate revealed possibilities that Ghost Kid never could have imagined" is way, way at the bottom of the list, if it's even on there. He's not omniscient, he's a dipshit AI with some very bad ideas. Yeah, on paper, I could see the Crucible being the ultimate victory of the Reapers' victims as a whole given it's nature as a combined super project. My problem is that Bioware screwed up in several ways with this thing: 1) They needed to introduce the idea way earlier, possibly with just vague hints throughout the entire trilogy before making it central. 2) They needed to suck it up and define it's purpose as soon as they could. Purposefully leaving it vague then assigning it such ridiculous, unrelated powers in the last few minutes is incredibly lazy writing. 3) Make discovering the purpose of this device absolutely paramount to the organics instead of having them waste what few resources they have left blindly hoping that this unknown doodad will save them all. If nothing else, make it clear that it is the absolute last resort out of pure desperation. 4) Connect it to the Mass Relay network (given the true nature of the Citadel) in a more concrete way than saying "by the way, this will destroy the very basis of your society because we say so." 5) Make it a Reaper trap. It has all the signs of Reaper bait technology. Your EMS would determine if they could make good use of it or fail completely. They even had a few scenes of Shepard expressing well-founded doubt to the device's ease of use and potential power. 6) Tie it more closely to the Reapers. Say by adding a mission to retrieve some vital components from a Reaper without alerting the fleet. 7) Have a more clever method of Reaper defeat than whatever magic the Starchild barfed at us. Tie it to the Relays or something, but none of the three options. 8) Do not have the Starchild give us any information on it at all. Not only does it not make sense that it'd know anything useful about the item, but we have no reason to believe it at all. 9) Make the Reapers care about it. This is a huge, unknown potential threat. Given how far we've seen the Reapers go to destroy anything capable of hindering them at all, this should be their number 1 priority. Of course these would require actual planning from the writers and we've seen how they dislike doing that.
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| # ¿ Mar 25, 2012 00:26 |
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Now that I think about it again, isn't it weird the that Star Child refers to it's creations as "Reapers"? Both Sovereign and Harbinger were very clear that their kind doesn't actually have or need a name. The Protheans were the ones who started calling them Reapers and that's the only reason anybody else does. Why should this impossibly ancient AI adopt the term at all? It just makes Casper's position as author-insert more obvious.
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| # ¿ Mar 25, 2012 00:57 |
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Urdnot Fire posted:Well, I suppose it makes sense to use terms Shep's familiar with. That makes about as much sense as it appearing in the form that that one little kid that Shepard has been obsessing about all game. Is it psychic or something?
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| # ¿ Mar 25, 2012 01:06 |
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McNally posted:LOTS OF SPECULATION FROM EVERYONE! I know, I know, but there's just so much that pisses me off that I can't help but nitpick until the entire thing is reduced to the pile of literary rubble that it spawned from. It's like Other M or Clock Tower 3 or Insert-Least-Favorite-Final-Fantasy-Here in it's terribleness.
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| # ¿ Mar 25, 2012 01:14 |
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I know I'm late on this, but people are missing the absolute worst part of Mass Effect's combat: you had to spend points to use weapons at all. Without using your precious points, you were stuck with weapons that danced all over the screen and shot milk duds. The very most basic part of all combat in the game and you had to level up before you could use it. It'd be like a Final Fantasy game where you occasionally dropped your sword without levels. Let's not even get into the fact that you needed to drag a tech member along for unlocking doors and containers. I absolutely hate systems that forces you to nerf yourself in leveling to reach the arbitrary requirements of a non-combat skill (yes, even leveling Charm and Intimidate annoyed me, did they really need to tie them to karma and make them separate values in the level up screen?). That kind of thing, combined with all the other complaints, is why I will never understand why such a substantial minority of gamers are so pissed that they removed the meaningless number-crunching busywork from the sequels. ME1 was utterly overly-complicated and straight up primitive. Nelson Mandingo posted:For real. I mean, the only problem I really immediately picked up was Wreave being in charge of Krogan society was benevolent, when he's a very power-hungry and selfish person. Only Wrex and those of like mind would be able to be male leaders in krogan society and have a positive outcome. Apparently, Bakara can reign in either of the two possible male leaders, but much more effectively with Wrex. If she's dead, Mordin will agree that Wreav will lead to disaster and can be talked down.
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| # ¿ Mar 26, 2012 03:20 |
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Quandary posted:ME1 was a great game at the time, that was dumbed down a bit much for ME2, and then I thought put back to the proper balance between RPG and shooter in 3. I put far more thought into ME2's combat than I ever did ME1. Having reactive enemies that move quickly is much more engaging than deciding which of the identical assault rifles I should slap the +2 damage mod. Milky Moor posted:Gamers loving love numbers. The numbers don't even have to do anything (see: gamerscore). But you're not doing anything. The computer's the one doing all the calculations, unless you're a complete obsessive compulsive who works out the formula after each shot to feel better about yourself. Number-crunching is good for tabletop games, not anything involving an actual computer. Geostomp fucked around with this message at Mar 26, 2012 around 03:27 |
| # ¿ Mar 26, 2012 03:24 |
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BrianWilly posted:I think people who are wondering why the stranded fleet can't just rebuild the mass relays given time are forgetting that the Prothean extinction lasted centuries and no one was able to reactivate the mass relays, which the Reapers deactivated, during that time; the one on Ilos -- which only came about at the very, very tail-end of their cycle -- was a small, one-way facsimile. That's a good point. Without the Citadel, they don't even have an agreed-upon neutral zone to meet and organize any rebuilding efforts, meaning that warfare is even more likely now that you've got a bunch of war-ravaged fleets filled with tired, scared aliens who all want to get to homes that they'll likely never see again. Just another strike against this terrible ending. What were they thinking?
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| # ¿ Mar 26, 2012 03:40 |
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The next time anybody brings up "artistic integrity" to defend this insult of an ending, I will show them this on their iPhone and make them eat the damned thing and write a ten page report on why pretentious ambiguity is not the same as art.
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| # ¿ Mar 27, 2012 12:32 |
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Miss Hime posted:Did I miss the Turian councellor in ME3? You know Nope. The Reapers show up and everybody treats them as a matter-of-fact enemy. No time for "I told you so!" (no matter how cathartic it would have been) when mecha-Chutulu is turning people into goo/cyber-zombies while vaporizing everything the see.
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| # ¿ Mar 27, 2012 14:17 |
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that is constantly dismissing your claims with hand waving? Just wondering if he showed up at all so Shepard could be all smug about the Reapers finally turning up.
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Aceofblue posted:I played through ME3 with a full paragon character that I started with ME1, and did all missions available to me but never saw Kasumi. She definitely survived ME2, was loyal, and I let her keep the greybox. Now, I'm playing a full renegade character that I started in ME2, and just got Kasumi's mission with Bau on the Citadel. I had destroyed the greybox, but she gives me some line about how she reconstructed it. Any ideas as to why the mission with Kasumi and Bau never showed up in my paragon playthrough, but now did in my renegade? I'm fairly certain it wasn't an issue of me just simply missing it, since I obsessively ran through the citadel after every big mission to see all the little conversation changes and whatnot. You get her quest by talking to the Salarian Spectre outside Udina's office after he sends you an e-mail. He'll tell you to go into the Spectre office to authorize something and Kasumi will be waiting.
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| # ¿ Mar 27, 2012 15:23 |
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gibbed posted:How do you know it was soulless? For all you know it had become a true sentient AI, and you killed it. Then it qualified as a merc. As we all know from ME2, mercs barely qualify as sapient entities so kill to your heart's content. 
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| # ¿ Mar 27, 2012 17:58 |
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Rei_ posted:The Star Child does actually have a bit of setup, the conversation with the Prothean VI on Thessia alludes to it. There's one line that states that the Reapers are just part of the Cycle. What that means is left completely ambiguous and does not at all hint that the Catalyst is an actual character who runs Cycle or that it has anything to do with an impending organic-synthetic war. Even if it did, it's still terrible writing to have an unknown character introduced in the last minute that devalues your antagonist by declaring them to be its servants and giving them a purpose that not only makes no sense, but has been contradicted by multiple sources in-story without allowing any argument. That's not even getting into its absurd powers and arbitrary rules that exist solely to make us not immediately take the option that's been our goal since the beginning. The Catalyst as a character is a failure on every level.
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| # ¿ Mar 27, 2012 18:45 |
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So Yahtzee agrees that the endings sucked, but it still holding on to the same "authorial intent is sacred" nonsense that so many other so-called professionals are spouting? Well, it's not like I cared about his opinions to begin with, but I have to say that defending this garbage by claiming that it was written by people who "know better" than fans is the same sort of arrogance that got us into this in the first place. If a writer can't get over themselves to see that their work is flawed and outside opinions might be useful, they need to stop writing now because they've allowed their egos to overwrite their actual skill. Harping on "it sets a bad precedent" is a complete non-argument. Both because it ignores that there already is precedent of this happening in game writing and because it reinforces this kind of terrible writing by encouraging authors to ignore writing flaws and reject alternate viewpoints. It coddles creators instead of encouraging them to improve. MH Knights posted:Another question: Why didn't the Alliance/Turians/Council ever mass produce the (SR1) Normandy? You would think that after its performance in fighting Sovereign/geth they would put the Normandy class(?) into full production. They built the Crucible in a week or two so they should have been able turn out a few ships in the three years since Sovereign was defeated. The SR1 was an amazing ship, but it's really only good for small-scale tactics. Cruisers and dreadnoughts are generally more useful and cheaper for larger military operations. Mass produced SR1s would probably just get blown to pieces given what something as comparatively weak as the Collector cruiser did to the original. What made it so effective in such unusual times were the people on board moreso than the ship itself. Not to say that they wouldn't be useful at all, but they just wouldn't be near as helpful unless they all had crews equal to Shepard's. Geostomp fucked around with this message at Mar 27, 2012 around 19:07 |
| # ¿ Mar 27, 2012 18:59 |
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I personally wasn't big on Grunt, Jack, or Zaeed in ME2. Grunt and Jack did improve for the third game, but Zaeed is pretty much the same as ever.
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| # ¿ Mar 28, 2012 13:12 |
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Neo Rasa posted:The Quarian liveships are armed with Thanix Cannons though. There aren't really any heretics anymore. What you're fighting is the bulk of all geth thanks to the quarians being stupid enough to force them into allying with the Reapers for survival (at least before being brainwashed again. Killing off that many geth would leave the rest of them barely sapient, effectively ending them as a race.
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| # ¿ Mar 29, 2012 02:20 |
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| # ¿ May 23, 2013 10:04 |
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Bass Concert Hall posted:That's fine but it's still hard for me the player to care. Ok fine it's Earth, except we've never seen earth until the game's intro, where we mostly get the impression that Earth is just a repository for more incompetent stupid assholes and dumbfuck kids, all of whom the Reapers immediately show up and obligingly kill off anyway. Ok I guess Anderson stays behind, but then the only thing we see or hear from earth for the rest of the game until going there is reports from blue hologram Anderson, who seems to be pretty loving nonchalant about his situation the entire time. I thought Shepard being torn up about Earth did make some sense. Even if you don't personally have any ties to the planet, watching the entirety of human history (and humans in general) be brutally vaporized would still be a big blow. The big failure there is that the writers forgot that the player has spent only this opening sequence on Earth. We don't have any real attachment to ME Earth because we've never been there and only know one character who's still on the planet, Anderson. So long as he's fine, the player has yet to actually lose anything of importance. Really it's the same flaw that Walters and Hudson had with the ending: they expect us to grow attached to the abstract "big picture" (Earth or organic life as a whole) without stopping to realize that they didn't bother to personalize them enough to make us willing to give up our goals to save these abstracts. The child was an obvious, ham-fisted attempt to rectify this, but it just shows that neither of them understood the underlying problem at all.
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| # ¿ Mar 29, 2012 18:02 |
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