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Waltzing Along posted:
I'm sure someone else can explain it in more detail but off the top of my head: - Screen shot LP where the pictures were too big and broke tablets. The OP didn't fix it because - Low effort LP and complete making GBS threads of Dragon Age 2 and all things Bioware by everyone and encouraged by the OP - Thread got gassed when OP made a "contest" which involved buying him steam games - OP made his own webiste and finished the LP here SgtSteel91 fucked around with this message at 06:40 on Aug 14, 2014 |
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Aug 14, 2014 06:37
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Neruz posted:Um, no, Eezo is definitely a cornerstone of the entire story since it's kind of neccessary for the story to happen at all in the first place. Biotic powers are eezo being magical for example. Just because the game isn't constantly screaming "EEZO IS MAGICAL" in your face does not at any point change the fact that it is a foundational part of the story. Except they could never mention it and you would be none the wiser. It's the dilithium crystals of Mass Effect, the thing that makes the magical space science work so that they can handwave the technical crap and actually tell you the story about the planet full of half-white-half-black people who hate the half-black-half-white people for some inexplicable reason. One of those two elements is more critical to the overall story than the other.
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Aug 14, 2014 06:37
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SgtSteel91 posted:I'm sure someone else can explain it in more detail but off the top of my head: I couldn't finish DA:O. I got to the lazy demon and became lazy and never finished the level and never played again. It just didn't stack up to ME1. Why is DA2 so bad?
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Aug 14, 2014 06:41
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Waltzing Along posted:I couldn't finish DA:O. I got to the lazy demon and became lazy and never finished the level and never played again. It just didn't stack up to ME1. Why is DA2 so bad? Imagine an entire game's worth of content of the calibre of ME3's ending and about as many art assets.
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Aug 14, 2014 06:42
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Which reminds me, did anyone complain about how ugly and empty Javik's flashback scenes in the facility were? I like to imagine that he's discovered by Cerberus just chilling in a box dead centre on the floor in the middle of a spacious beige corridor.
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Aug 14, 2014 06:50
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The OP for that DA2 LP also didn't let people choose between quest resolutions and stuff, because he had already completed the game before starting the thread. It's a very good showcase of some of the shocking dialogue, at least. Without having played it, DA2 seems like kind of a bold experiment- a game where you're a gently caress up, and your whole party is gently caress ups, and instead of saving the world from great evil you just gently caress everything up. I wonder how much that has to do with people hating it compared to the reused cave area and lines like "I like big boats, I cannot lie"
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Aug 14, 2014 06:50
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Koopa Kid posted:Which reminds me, did anyone complain about how ugly and empty Javik's flashback scenes in the facility were? I like to imagine that he's discovered by Cerberus just chilling in a box dead centre on the floor in the middle of a spacious beige corridor. They probably didn't even think it was a Prothean at first. They might have just figured it was some ancient Prothean cooler bin and wanted to get at the Prothean beer inside. 
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Aug 14, 2014 06:55
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2house2fly posted:Without having played it, DA2 seems like kind of a bold experiment- a game where you're a gently caress up, and your whole party is gently caress ups, and instead of saving the world from great evil you just gently caress everything up. There but for the grace of god goes Final Fantasy VII.
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Aug 14, 2014 06:59
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Koopa Kid posted:Which reminds me, did anyone complain about how ugly and empty Javik's flashback scenes in the facility were? I like to imagine that he's discovered by Cerberus just chilling in a box dead centre on the floor in the middle of a spacious beige corridor. It's a non-ruined Ilos.
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Aug 14, 2014 08:27
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Lt. Danger posted:It's a non-ruined Ilos. Do you mean from a design perspective or a story prospective? Because if I'm remembering correctly, Javik says in other dialogue that the facilities on Ilos were only a rumor or something in his cycle. Could be wrong though since I stopped talking to him like, long ago on my New Game+ runs.
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Aug 14, 2014 08:31
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SgtSteel91 posted:- OP made his own webiste and finished the LP here Welp, thanks for making me read Arishok gay porn. 
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Aug 14, 2014 08:35
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Design. It's a quick short-hand to tell you "this is a Prothean installation". Plus another callback to ME1. Video is encoding!
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Aug 14, 2014 09:14
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Lt. Danger posted:It's a non-ruined Ilos. Based on where we find him I'm pretty sure it's a facility beneath the surface of Eden Prime. e: Oh you mean its the same design as Ilos but non-ruined, yeah. Makes sense too since Ilos was also a secret hidden Prothean stasis chamber storage facility.
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Aug 14, 2014 09:28
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People are citing a lot of story information from the DLCs. Having not played any I have no idea what happens in them. If I had gotten the third game, I probably would not have gotten DLCs for it either and would have been even more confused. I'm starting to wonder if the story's problems result more from marketing/business decisions than from the writing team.
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Aug 14, 2014 10:15
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I think people are overstating the relevance of Leviathan. I've not played it myself, but from what I can tell it doesn't say anything you need to know or couldn't work out from the main game.
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Aug 14, 2014 10:39
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Lt. Danger posted:I think people are overstating the relevance of Leviathan. I've not played it myself, but from what I can tell it doesn't say anything you need to know or couldn't work out from the main game. Leviathan is incredibly important because it gives you exposition about major plot points sooner than 10 minutes before the game ends.
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Aug 14, 2014 10:50
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Koopa Kid posted:Which reminds me, did anyone complain about how ugly and empty Javik's flashback scenes in the facility were? I like to imagine that he's discovered by Cerberus just chilling in a box dead centre on the floor in the middle of a spacious beige corridor. That's one of the reasons I said that from ashes reads like an unfinished level that for some reason got pushed out the door when it had originally been cut for time. The objectives for the prefab area would make much more sense in the bunker area. The bunker is pretty obviously unfinished, and they couldn't recycle any assets from the original game because that was a space car level. This theory also explains the bizarre placement of the pod at the beginning of the level on an elevator the player can't use. The position of the elevator suggests the prefab area was originally going to have the player fight through it to activate the elevator and descend until the bunker. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 10:56 on Aug 14, 2014 |
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Aug 14, 2014 10:53
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Lt. Danger posted:I think people are overstating the relevance of Leviathan. I've not played it myself, but from what I can tell it doesn't say anything you need to know or couldn't work out from the main game. In Leviathan you meet the Leviathans who are the guys who originally built the Reapers and they tell you about how they were basically space squid gods and they looked around them and noticed this cycle of creator - created - destruction happening over and over and over again to all the lesser species and they got sad and created the Reaper AI and tasked it with finding a solution and the Reaper AI pondered it for a bit and then concluded that it couldn't come up with a solution so it came up with a holding pattern, turned around and promptly murdered most of the Leviathans to create Harbinger, the very first Reaper and thus the Leviathan themselves fell to the very cycle they were trying to solve and poo poo has been bad ever since. Then Shepard convinces them to help against their better judgement and you get a little note about how the workers at the Cruicible flipped their poo poo when a bunch of what looked like 'living Reapers' turned up and started to help and you get like 200 warscore from the Leviathans helping you out.
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Aug 14, 2014 10:53
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If i recall you suggest that now that you've found their hiding spot they're boned anyway, totally justifying their efforts to kill you and everyone involved in the search.
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Aug 14, 2014 10:58
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I really like that dragon age 2 let's play, it did a good job of showcaseing the endlessly reused areas and atrocious characterization and dialog. I'm not sure if it was fair of him to blame it all on that one writer, but it certainly was very bad.
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Aug 14, 2014 11:02
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Promontory posted:People are citing a lot of story information from the DLCs. Having not played any I have no idea what happens in them. If I had gotten the third game, I probably would not have gotten DLCs for it either and would have been even more confused. I'm starting to wonder if the story's problems result more from marketing/business decisions than from the writing team. They certainly were at fault, but the writing staff screwed up plenty on their own. There's a good amount of blame to go around. 2house2fly posted:The OP for that DA2 LP also didn't let people choose between quest resolutions and stuff, because he had already completed the game before starting the thread. It's a very good showcase of some of the shocking dialogue, at least. It may have been, but it wasn't written nearly well enough to pull that off. Especially since they had to constantly contrive ways for every situation to always end in the worst manner possible, usually through convenient psychopaths suddenly killing anyone at all sympathetic or effective while Hawke lets it happen.
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Aug 14, 2014 11:04
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Koopa Kid posted:It's just that I think the way AIs are presented in interactions, hostile or friendly, are mismatched with how they are portrayed in exposition and setting text dumps. People's difficulty accepting the Catalyst's rationale results because of that dissonance, not because they don't remember the Moon mission or whatever. Of course, it could be argued that the existence of the Catalyst and the Reapers, somewhat ironically, proves the Catalyst right. BioMe posted:Leviathan is incredibly important because it gives you exposition about major plot points sooner than 10 minutes before the game ends.
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Aug 14, 2014 11:16
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Sombrerotron posted:Fair enough. I confess that I tend to view prior encounters with AI through the Catalyst's lens, because I find the essence of its argument (i.e. synthetic life is bound to outperform organic life at some point, and conflict naturally arises from that) both plausible and an interesting premise for a story - more so, I suppose, than "we can all be friends if we just really want to". That probably makes me a little blind to legitimate criticism regarding the player's expectations. The thing is that from what we are shown, an AI so superior to organics that it could wipe them out wouldn't, because the only reason synthetics are hostile is that they view organics as threats (or because the Catalyst itself is manipulating them). The Geth consistently stop shooting the moment Quarians surrender and stop being a threat, even when their explicit goal was to genocide all Geth. The premise is "too powerful AI will want to kill all organics", yeah, but that doesn't make any sense because A) logically that powerful AI wouldn't have a reason to B) in every single case we see the organics are the ultimate aggressor, not the machines.
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Aug 14, 2014 11:49
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BioMe posted:The thing is that from what we are shown, an AI so superior to organics that it could wipe them out wouldn't, because the only reason synthetics are hostile is that they view organics as threats (or because the Catalyst itself is manipulating them). The Geth consistently stop shooting the moment Quarians surrender and stop being a threat, even when their explicit goal was to genocide all Geth. No the premise is "organic and synthetic intelligence will always come into conflict" that can mean the AIs flip out and murder everyone, or it can mean the organics become fixated on destroying the AI's and either succeed or get destroyed themselves as we see with the Quarian-Geth conflict.
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Aug 14, 2014 11:52
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Neruz posted:No the premise is "organic and synthetic intelligence will always come into conflict" that can mean the AIs flip out and murder everyone, or it can mean the organics become fixated on destroying the AI's and either succeed or get destroyed themselves as we see with the Quarian-Geth conflict. No, it's definitely about AI ultimately winning. "Turning you species in a Reaper is the only way to save you", remember?
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Aug 14, 2014 11:57
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BioMe posted:No, it's definitely about AI ultimately winning. "Turning you species in a Reaper is the only way to save you", remember? Well the synthetic intelligence will ultimately win because if the organic intelligence survives it just creates another synthetic intelligence and eventually it makes one that is too good and they lose.
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Aug 14, 2014 12:03
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Neruz posted:Well the synthetic intelligence will ultimately win because if the organic intelligence survives it just creates another synthetic intelligence and eventually it makes one that is too good and they lose. Back to my first point then.
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Aug 14, 2014 12:05
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BioMe posted:Back to my first point then. Note that the Geth are only not interested in wiping out the organic sophonts right now, in say a million years time when they have grown so large that they now require resources that biologicals are using that attitude may no longer hold true.
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Aug 14, 2014 12:07
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BioMe posted:Leviathan is incredibly important because it gives you exposition about major plot points sooner than 10 minutes before the game ends. What is the black goo?
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Aug 14, 2014 12:14
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Neruz posted:Note that the Geth are only not interested in wiping out the organic sophonts right now, in say a million years time when they have grown so large that they now require resources that biologicals are using that attitude may no longer hold true. I don't see why machines would have the problem of overpopulation. Also another detail they throw about Geth is that they don't really occupy the same space organic life does and are perfectly happy to just float in vacuum doing their own thing. And again, this goes back to the story showing and saying different things. It's bad writing no matter how well constructed argument the game throws at you in the last ten minutes if everything up to then has been the completely opposite message.
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Aug 14, 2014 12:18
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BioMe posted:I don't see why machines would have the problem of overpopulation. Also another detail they throw about Geth is that they don't really occupy the same space organic life does and are perfectly happy to just float in vacuum doing their own thing. The Geth require physical resources of some sort, metals, carbon etc. They require power which means either sunlight or more physical resources. Unless both organic and synthetic lifeforms cease reproduction they will eventually come into conflict because there is only a limited amount of resources in the galaxy.
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Aug 14, 2014 12:23
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Neruz posted:The Geth require physical resources of some sort, metals, carbon etc. They require power which means either sunlight or more physical resources. Unless both organic and synthetic lifeforms cease reproduction they will eventually come into conflict because there is only a limited amount of resources in the galaxy. It's an entire galaxy, but fine, it's a scifi writer's galaxy where the scale is whatever. I'm not going to sperg about that, because the actual problem is that the story doesn't present the problem as some kind of darwinist struggle for limited resources, it's "the created will rebel against the creators!" and other enemies-by-nature conflicts. And right at the end it flat out states a completely different moral about the issue to the one the player has been slowly uncovering through experience. poo poo writing. EDIT: I mean the best solution you are handed with is turning everyone into some kind of magical organic-synthetic hybrids. It's not a solution to the eventual overpopulation of the galaxy, because that's not the problem the story is about. BioMe fucked around with this message at 12:37 on Aug 14, 2014 |
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Aug 14, 2014 12:30
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Lt. Danger posted:What is the black goo? Whatever it is, it's in the first five minutes of the movie and it behaves the same way and has the same properties throughout the film. The causal logic of the events in the film is introduced at the beginning of the film, not the end. I agree that Mass Effect as a series presents the argument of its last ten minutes poorly, but I believe that that's because the series was never trying to present that argument and that it was tacked on not because it was what the series was building to but because they were running out of time and had to kludge together an ending that "worked" in the same way that Lost or Battlestar Galactica's ending "worked." And by "worked" I mean that it didn't work for most of the audience and it later came out that the creators didn't know what to do and came up with the ending only when presented with inescapable time pressure. Some people are for some reason more easily convinced that these endings ticked enough thematic check boxes for them to be good because they're thematically appropriate. These tend to be the people who judge works by whether they are "interesting" or not rather than on more prosaic measures like entertainment or catharsis. A good ending will tick those same checkboxes but also provide a cathartic and consistent resolution without leaving plot threads hanging or mysteries that viewers/players reasonably expect to have explained unexplained. With a video game like Mass Effect there's another element to consider: player agency. Players of Mass Effect 3 were upset with the ending, but felt downright insulted when they chose the Synthesis or Control endings and the Mass Relays still exploded, with no indication that their choices would lead to such an apocalyptic ending. When people complain about the red/blue/green ending they're not complaining about the colors, they're complaining about the slap in the face to player agency that the game's single ending cutscene represents after a very railroad-feeling ending sequence, and this is a game that is, according to some, attempting to say something about the player's impact on the game world. But the most surefire way to recognize that ME3's ending is a bad ending is to look for, and find, exposition within it. Endings that need to provide exposition are generally very bad endings unless they're genuinely a last-minute twist. This is because, if the writers need to insert exposition, they haven't come up with an ending that flows naturally from what we've already seen. For example, it's obvious that Battlestar Galactica's ending is going to be terrible the moment they start flashing back to events in the characters' lives from years ago that we've never seen before. That says, "I don't know how to end this story, so I'm going to go back and change it and insert content so that I can end a different story." And I've never seen that work. Mass Effect 3's ending introduces a new character who's supposed to be the main antagonist and whose main job is to deliver exposition while standing in front of three buttons that (before the final cut DLC) all triggered the same cutscene. That's terrible. I expect Lt. Danger to like the exposition delivered by the Catalyst/Kid but everything surrounding those lines of dialog is deeply worrying at best. I expect Lt. Danger to respond about themes of creator versus created. A good ending would include those themes. I won't disagree about that. I understand we're not going to see the Final Cut in this LP, which makes it hard to argue that themes of player choice are not subverted by the ending.
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Aug 14, 2014 13:15
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Maybe you could tell me what I am and am not going to say about the ending when we get to it? I mean, this is right in the OP
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Aug 14, 2014 13:56
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space uncle posted:Hey Lt. Danger - I think the LP would benefit from tighter editing. You've already chastised people for asking you not to speak over dialogue and mentioned that all viewers should be familiar with the game. You're not speaking for the entire portion of gameplay, so I would actually be far more interested in your audio analysis as the primary attraction. Sprinkle in clips or dialogues or gunfights as you will to prove your point, but I think an exhaustive recording of the entire game is not doing your analysis any favors. I'd have to agree. There are large portions of the videos where nothing really happens and I end up skipping around trying to find either plot material or your analysis.
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Aug 14, 2014 15:05
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Lt. Danger posted:Maybe you could tell me what I am and am not going to say about the ending when we get to it? We waited almost 20 pages before we started ending-chat
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Aug 14, 2014 16:08
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In ME1, on Noveria, there's a spot, if I'm remembering correctly it's when your confronting a group of corrupt security guys ransacking that one Turian's corporate offices. You can threaten them to get them to leave, and they express disbelief that you'd actually shoot them. If Tali is with you, she says something like "How certain of that are you? Ninetieth percentile? Is a ten percent chance of death really acceptable?" I thought of this line often when listening to the Catalyst's argument. It made me a lot more accepting of it. But my opinion was always that the Catalyst's problem was that it created the system that exists in the galaxy because it was programmed to create a system. I place all the blame on the Leviathans, because they seem stunningly lazy, all things considered. Back in their time, the galaxy was probably filled with intelligent life, much more than the current cycle, so these organic-synthetic conflicts might have popped up every few thousand years or so. Even still, the Leviathans didn't want to bother with the problems of their tribute races themselves. They styled themselves as gods, but just coming down and nipping the problem in the bud by simply saying "don't make synthetic life, it never ends well" was too much work for them. These things don't happen overnight. It takes decades, maybe centuries. Instead, the impression I got was that they created the catalyst to find a single solution that would solve the problem 100% of the time, forever. With a requirement like that, what is an AI with no apparent free will to do? Hence, the Reapers, and the galactic history-spanning system that allows them to do their work. But again, that's just the impression I got. I don't have a mountain of evidence to support my interpretation, but it makes sense to me. Still, at least it kept trying alternatives. Like it says about Synthesis, "We have tried a similar solution in the past, but it has always failed." It doesn't elaborate, so we don't know exactly how it failed, but when I heard that I immediately thought that it was talking about Husks. That they were failed attempts at Synthesis, which were eventually repurposed as infantry. Did anyone else leap to that conclusion?
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Aug 14, 2014 17:01
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Arglebargle III posted:ending stuff You write way too many words about a mediocre video game.
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Aug 14, 2014 17:08
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 Part 8: Intertext Further Reading Mass Effect is Not Pulp (Dan Didio) - http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3471712&pagenumber=1205&perpage=40#post406334641 Cassandra Clare Controversy - http://www.journalfen.net/community/bad_penny/8985.html#intro Aliens Flamethrower Scene - http://youtu.be/eCTGJilJ9l8 What other sci-fi is referenced by Mass Effect? What other influences did Bioware throw into the pot?  I'd like to go back to Usual Spoiler Rules for this thread, since despite my request some of you clearly just want to post-post-post about the ending. You don't need my videos to do that, so go do it in the other Mass Effect threads - God knows we have enough of them. Thanks.
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Aug 14, 2014 18:49
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gently caress, this really is the darkest timeline.
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