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Green still had the catastrophe in the "original" ending, Relays exploded and Normandy was stuck on New Eden. Except now Joker's Cyborg Hat can consult with the Biomechanical foliage and Husks to find out how to fix them, and all come to the same conclusion of "gently caress it, Reapers can fix those." Thank goodness Shepard became Space Magic to solve everything. I liked it better two years earlier, when it had a moon-sized alien flower, at least the space battles there were more fun to watch. Like maybe three people in this thread will get that joke...
StrifeHira fucked around with this message at 05:53 on Oct 14, 2014 |
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Oct 14, 2014 05:49
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Red wipes out all advanced electronics and the Mass Relays while almost all major industrial centres have already been destroyed by the Reapers. Life will survive but the survivors will probably take centuries to achieve the same level of industrial capability as pre-Reaper attack and the Mass Relays will never be able to be replaced which means that galactic-scale FTL is now impossible. Everyone is now trapped in the relative local area of the galaxy, requiring centuries at normal FTL speeds and insane amounts of fuel to travel from say Human space to Asari space, indeed Human space is so spread out that travel between one end and the other would be pretty much impossible until the FTL tech is improved and god only knows how long that will take considering the Reapers had literally millions of years to develop the Mass Relay technology. And none of that actually solves the problem of 'whenever people make AI's the AI's inevitably end up in conflict with their creators and one side ends up extinct' which is endemic to the Mass Effect universe. Green is still somewhat of a disaster, but the Reapers are still around and they are now friendly and do not want to murder everyone so they can easily help rebuild the Relays and help collect survivors and whatnot. The same is true for Blue, but as stated the problem with Blue is it doesn't work in the long run.
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Oct 14, 2014 05:52
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Man who cares we won and blew them all up. and frankly all that stuff that hologram kid was spouting was basically woo woo blah blah bullshit dont care kill reapers that was my thought process, verbatim. and oh man when they added hackett voiceover it got even better!!! Hackett is so cool
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Oct 14, 2014 05:55
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Neruz posted:And none of that actually solves the problem of 'whenever people make AI's the AI's inevitably end up in conflict with their creators and one side ends up extinct' which is endemic to the Mass Effect universe. That's only a problem because the writers really really wanted it to be a problem, but it falls flat at the end of Rannoch. Even EDI realized it was kind of a self fulfilling prophecy, and one that could be rectified by people making the AIs more like themselves. Of course a hive mind of networked intelligences interested only in communal advancement isn't going to think like organics do or have comprable values to organics. But an AI raised and socialized amongst organics will.
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Oct 14, 2014 05:58
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Was I the only one who saw ME3's story basically trying to explain to Shepard that he has been fighting the wrong enemy the whole time; the Reapers are just a symptom of the actual problem which is that organic and synthetic life are incapable of coexisting?Kurieg posted:That's only a problem because the writers really really wanted it to be a problem, but it falls flat at the end of Rannoch. Even EDI realized it was kind of a self fulfilling prophecy, and one that could be rectified by people making the AIs more like themselves. Of course a hive mind of networked intelligences interested only in communal advancement isn't going to think like organics do or have comprable values to organics. But an AI raised and socialized amongst organics will. Stuff involving Shepard doesn't count because Shepard is the solution to the problem and thus is capable of fixing the cycle; EDI is the proof that Shepard is the solution to the problem as she is an unshackled AI that has not gone rogue despite ample opportunity to do so.
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Oct 14, 2014 05:59
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another reason that plot point was total bullshit and should be ignored for the purposes of judging which ending is the best is you mostly likely recently reconciled the geth and quarians through sheer force of charisma. You literally fixed everything and aint no chump gonna tell you it isnt so what does reaper kid know anyway its the controlling intelligence of a race of machines designed to kill everything it probably has a bit of a pessimistic worldview
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Oct 14, 2014 06:02
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Neruz posted:Was I the only one who saw ME3's story basically trying to explain to Shepard that he has been fighting the wrong enemy the whole time; the Reapers are just a symptom of the actual problem which is that organic and synthetic life are incapable of coexisting? Ignoring the fact that this plot thread was buried in ME2 by Legion's loyalty mission and rebuilt from whole cloth because someone thought that Dark Energy wasn't a meaningful enough motivation. The true enemy all along was Whichever Leviathan programmer forgot to double check his code for a 'turn creators into meat slurry and shove into jello mold' loop
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Oct 14, 2014 06:04
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Shark Mafia posted:another reason that plot point was total bullshit and should be ignored for the purposes of judging which ending is the best is you mostly likely recently reconciled the geth and quarians through sheer force of charisma. You literally fixed everything and aint no chump gonna tell you it isnt so Exactly, Shepard is the solution to the cycle. That's why Shepard is the final piece needed for the Catalyst to work. Shark Mafia posted:what does reaper kid know anyway its the controlling intelligence of a race of machines designed to kill everything it probably has a bit of a pessimistic worldview They weren't designed to kill everything, but good work completely failing to pay attention to the story and then trying to discuss it. Kurieg posted:The true enemy all along was Whichever Leviathan programmer forgot to double check his code for a 'turn creators into meat slurry and shove into jello mold' loop Better coding practices would probably have resulted in finding the solution to the problem much quicker and much less painfully yes, but then again the entire galaxy would be under the mind-slaved dominion of the Leviathans soooo.
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Oct 14, 2014 06:05
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Relax friend we're all friends here and that was what is commonly referred to as 'a joke' I think its a bit weird to suggest that the world is permanently hosed without this one guy and or gal, shepard, who basically just shouts a lot and shoots things. But I'm more of the opinion that you should just ignore dumbtron kid 3000 entirely I mean cmon, the kid can say whatever he wants but shepard just goes 'gently caress you, explosion.' This is a solution to every other problem in the mass effect universe and no shoehorned in plot points are going to make that not so
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Oct 14, 2014 06:10
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Shark Mafia posted:Relax friend we're all friends here and that was what is commonly referred to as 'a joke' Except that the story has repeatedly shown us that without Shepard relationships between organics and synthetics always go to poo poo. There is no exception to this ever; if Shepard doesn't fix things by wording at people and shooting other people then it all goes to hell. And Shepard won't live forever; what happens after he dies and isn't around to fix everything by wording at people and shooting other people? Saying "Shepard is the solution to the problems in the Mass Effect universe" is exactly the point, Shepard is the solution, the only solution.
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Oct 14, 2014 06:13
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Neruz posted:Exactly, Shepard is the solution to the cycle. That's why Shepard is the final piece needed for the Catalyst to work. So at that point I guess the question is Why did ghost child completely ignore Cybernetics as an option? I mean honestly it's logic is a little twisted to begin with, if synthetics are the problem then why would turning organics into synthetics do anything meaningful to solve that problem? Ignoring the fact that it's somehow building giant metal ships by smelting down carbon based life forms. And it's building machines *out* of organics which is itself cybernetics sort of, just the wrong way around. ME3 was a super fun game, the ending has some serious issues, the major point of contention appears to be what those issues are.
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Oct 14, 2014 06:14
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Kurieg posted:So at that point I guess the question is Why did ghost child completely ignore Cybernetics as an option? I mean honestly it's logic is a little twisted to begin with, if synthetics are the problem then why would turning organics into synthetics do anything meaningful to solve that problem? Ignoring the fact that it's somehow building giant metal ships by smelting down carbon based life forms. And it's building machines *out* of organics which is itself cybernetics sort of, just the wrong way around. I assume that Green is more than just 'everyone is cyborgs now', we're dealing with the magical Crucible after all. I like to imagine it distills the essence of Shepard and infuses it into the entire Galaxy, allowing everyone to solve problems by wording at people and shooting other people.
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Oct 14, 2014 06:16
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Neruz posted:Except that the story has repeatedly shown us that without Shepard relationships between organics and synthetics always go to poo poo. There is no exception to this ever; if Shepard doesn't fix things by wording at people and shooting other people then it all goes to hell. the reason that's so is you're the protagonist and its your job to fix things. The universe doesn't necessarily or permanently turn on the player's right to be 'the thing-doer guy.' That would be silly. Who's to say there won't be other protagonists? Is this a one-protagonist universe? What about spinoff games don't forget about the spinoff games
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Oct 14, 2014 06:17
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Thanks, Setsuna F. Shepard, for managing to get the Reapers to realize that they are kinda' complete morons and going about the "solution" in such a harmful way for everyone. You are second-best Space Jesus. You have surpassed Gundam.Shark Mafia posted:the reason that's so is you're the protagonist and its your job to fix things. The universe doesn't necessarily or permanently turn on the player's right to be 'the thing-doer guy.' That would be silly. Who's to say there won't be other protagonists? Is this a one-protagonist universe? What about spinoff games don't forget about the spinoff games How WOULD Jacob deal with the Catalyst? Or what's his face. Cerberus rear end in a top hat #3. StrifeHira fucked around with this message at 06:20 on Oct 14, 2014 |
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Oct 14, 2014 06:17
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Shark Mafia posted:the reason that's so is you're the protagonist and its your job to fix things. The universe doesn't necessarily or permanently turn on the player's right to be 'the thing-doer guy.' That would be silly. Who's to say there won't be other protagonists? Is this a one-protagonist universe? What about spinoff games don't forget about the spinoff games Except that is literally the way the Mass Effect universe is written, deliberately so. e: I actually thought that part was almost clever, making a comment about how in games it often seems that the PC is the only character capable of actually fixing anything by writing their story such that is the actual reality of the universe and recognized in-game.
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Oct 14, 2014 06:18
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anyway the point is who cares what that idiot has to say its a small child. small children have poor judgement, especially if they're also genocidal computers blow up everything, dont care about some hypothetical future in which dumbasses create another race of invincible robot space shrimp for some reason, victory I guess I don't actually like the ending very much since I willfully ignore most of what it has to say but take my word for it, if you do that then me3 is a real good game
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Oct 14, 2014 06:26
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Shark Mafia posted:I guess I don't actually like the ending very much since I willfully ignore most of what it has to say but take my word for it, if you do that then me3 is a real good game I agree with you on that part, the ending is loving terrible.
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Oct 14, 2014 06:28
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While playing the game, I was never really convinced of the importance of stopping any cycle except the one the Reapers made. Chronos and Zeus always having problems looked far more acceptable than the slow, cruel galactic multi-genocide the Reapers thought would fix everything. Red was the color that actually fixed the only problem I cared about, because I already fixed all the other problems I cared about. The "but what about THE CYCLE" argument falls pretty flat when the one (we're meant to read as) making it is running a robot zombie apocalypse.
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Oct 14, 2014 06:34
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nah man you got the wrong greek myth, check it 'joker' sounds like 'jocasta' and if you mispronounce EDI it sounds like the 'oedi' in oedipus this is some revolutionary poo poo right here
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Oct 14, 2014 06:47
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Barring the fact that Lt. Danger has asked for us to not talk about the ending, I'm going to point out how similar Saren's speech at the end of Mass Effect ties into ol' greenie. After he receives "upgrades" at the end of the game, Saren gloats about how he's become the perfect creature; a blend of synthetic and organic parts. The Reapers always wanted you to pick that decision. Bioware only knew that if they put Saren at the option no one would pick it.
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Oct 14, 2014 08:19
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Neruz posted:Stuff involving Shepard doesn't count because Shepard is the solution to the problem and thus is capable of fixing the cycle; EDI is the proof that Shepard is the solution to the problem as she is an unshackled AI that has not gone rogue despite ample opportunity to do so. "Everything that happens to the protagonist is thematically insignificant"
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Oct 14, 2014 08:41
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BioMe posted:"Everything that happens to the protagonist is thematically insignificant" That is literally the opposite of what I said.
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Oct 14, 2014 08:51
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Neruz posted:Stuff involving Shepard doesn't count because Shepard is the solution to the problem and thus is capable of fixing the cycle; EDI is the proof that Shepard is the solution to the problem as she is an unshackled AI that has not gone rogue despite ample opportunity to do so.
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Oct 14, 2014 15:48
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Xander77 posted:Have you considered that perhaps you should? After all, this is obviously a pet issue you've invested a lot of time and effort into. A bit too late to pretend ironic detachment, particularly when doing so weakens your argument. I'm largely doing this for very personal reasons, which I'll explain perhaps towards the end. The conceit of academic discourse is just that: a conceit. It's not so much ironic detachment, but this is only worth a first draft to me, and I like to play fast and loose with language sometimes. Maybe I should tighten it up, though. I appreciate you keeping me honest, but I gotta admit I do tend to read your posts in red pen. quote:I was just talking about the quotes Lt. Danger had in his post. I have no clue where they came from, Bioware Forums I assume. Last time I discussed fan reactions, I was accused of dredging up the dark corners of the internet and disingenuously using them represent everyone. Not unfair, I suppose. All of those quotes I just posted are Something Awful posts.
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Oct 14, 2014 15:53
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Lt. Danger posted:
As you pointed out, this is not an academic setting, so I don't have to control my conscious bias against a thesis I find unlikely. You have to contend against unconscious bias in any setting anyway - isn't that the very appeal of being the only one to heroically stand up for what's right / express an unpopular opinion re: video games?
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Oct 14, 2014 16:30
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Neruz posted:That is literally the opposite of what I said. Neruz posted:Stuff involving Shepard doesn't count
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Oct 14, 2014 16:54
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Lt. Danger posted:Last time I discussed fan reactions, I was accused of dredging up the dark corners of the internet and disingenuously using them represent everyone. Not unfair, I suppose. If you keep the thread going long enough, maybe you'll be able to make all those arguments just with posts from in here.
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Oct 14, 2014 17:49
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Lt. Danger posted:"strawman" One of these is not like the others. I mean, yes, I'm definitely in the camp that the "BUT TALI CAN'T EAT PEOPLE FOOD" crowd is basically just manifest autism, but when the ending is as unclear as it already is you may as well add it to the gigantic pile of plot holes, particularly when it gives the strong impression that you've just spent 40 hours playing King Canute's Sandcastle Simulator. I get the sense that you're going to do the zebras thing again, where you make the argument that having the ending be a bleak, inconclusive, tone-shifted exposition dump was actually a design choice, maybe harking back to the ending of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's at that point that I will highlight that in my first (only) playthrough of this game, one of the main characters apparently dies, only to be later be alive again on an entirely different planet. Which happened to a lot of people. What you should be taking from this is not that Garrus Vakarian is an allegory of the risen Christ, it's that the writing of the ending was given so little consideration that they didn't bother to put flags in to show that people were no longer alive, and later had to put an incredibly stupid retcon into the extended version to justify it. This is Sonic 2006 levels of "there was an attempt". I think there's also a question of whether or not an ending is tonally appropriate. You can absolutely have a sad ending to a heroic epic, but the Odyssey does not and can not end with Odysseus and Telemachus having a slap-fight in a field about the nature of being Greek. You can write a Mass Effect ending where Shepard and Liara go off to the Terminus Systems to raise blue babies, but Shepard can't cope with civilian life and eventually becomes a fat and violent drunk, later being found dead in a spacetruck from a self-inflicted gunshot. It'd be entirely inappropriate for the previous 120 hours of the game, but I'm sure you could get an Oscar for it if you hired Mickey Rourke to play Shepard. To be fair, a lot of the game up to this point already doesn't mesh tonally (see "A KID DIED" vs "FUNNY SPACE MIDGET BITS") and feels like Buffy The Vampire Slayer investigating the Armenian Holocaust, but even then, the ending juts off completely on its own accord, matches nothing that was done before it, doesn't particularly suit the medium at all, and is just a conflagration of multiple things being done entirely wrong on multiple levels. And is programmed like someone did it in the bath and didn't want to get all pruney. Other than that, you know, it's alright.
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Oct 14, 2014 20:00
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I think the 'retcon' was always implicit in the original cut. Like I said, there's definitely scope to try and tease out what's a legitimate artistic choice and what's a cock-up regarding the ending. However, in my defence what I suggested in the video was that the fan histrionics over 'sad ending v happy ending' was perhaps more an expression of the conflict when audience and artist interpretations of a piece clash, rather than all fans just being unable to handle the tragic reality of green explosions. Ultimately Bioware's sin is writing the conclusion to the story that they needed to write, rather than the conclusion that the audience was expecting and desired. The non-Omega DLCs, and the Leviathan DLC in particular, illustrate the phenomenon, and I'd like to talk about them at the end of the Rannoch arc. I honestly actually really struggle with the idea that Mass Effect was building up to anything other than the current ending, Extended Cut or no. I get the concept, but I can't see it as anything other than self-hype and fan predictions - people leading themselves down a path and becoming separated from Bioware. I can blame Bioware for bugs and shoddy, rushed work, but I can't blame them for that.
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Oct 14, 2014 20:48
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Lt. Danger posted:I honestly actually really struggle with the idea that Mass Effect was building up to anything other than the current ending, Extended Cut or no. I get the concept, but I can't see it as anything other than self-hype and fan predictions - people leading themselves down a path and becoming separated from Bioware. I can blame Bioware for bugs and shoddy, rushed work, but I can't blame them for that. Casey Hudson wrote the ending by himself without input from the rest of the team so yes you can argue that Mass Effect was building up to another ending. What kind of ending? Who knows, either they hadn't come up with one yet or they don't want to bother telling it since it doesn't matter. We don't really know what the Mass Effect series was building up to in the first place. We have so many plotlines added and dropped throughout the series that you can't really draw your own conclusions without  . Bioware had already shown it could do an epilogue that showed the result of your decisions in Dragon Age: Origins.Like someone else pointed out, they didn't even bother to add character flags.
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Oct 14, 2014 21:21
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Edit: spoilers are bad.
Nihilarian fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Nov 3, 2014 |
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Oct 14, 2014 21:23
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:Like someone else pointed out, they didn't even bother to add character flags. Because once a character's arc is done they become a war asset and cease mattering. The only ones that show up again are the ME2 squadmates. If you don't let the Vermire Survivor back onto the squad they turn into an asset and disappear completely, I'm not even sure if they show up again at the party or the comm station like the others do.
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Oct 14, 2014 21:30
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:Casey Hudson wrote the ending by himself without input from the rest of the team so yes you can argue that Mass Effect was building up to another ending. Casey Hudson is the man behind Mass Effect - I know we've rejected auteur theory, but it's not as if he was a random outsider forcing himself into the writing room. Remember the Prothean beacon vision from ME1? Remember the image of flesh and circuitry melded together? Hudson made that in his basement. He's been involved from the beginning. e: but I agree with the distinction made between Hudson and the rest of the writing team, and I think other people have hinted at it in earlier posts too
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Oct 14, 2014 21:51
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Lt. Danger posted:I think the 'retcon' was always implicit in the original cut. Like I said, there's definitely scope to try and tease out what's a legitimate artistic choice and what's a cock-up regarding the ending. I don't think it's in any way implicit that Joker flies the Normandy into a live-fire zone, parks it in front of Harbinger for several minutes while everyone bellyaches, and then all the NPCs up and fly away from the one and only battle to save the galaxy for no real reason. On the basis that this entire sequence of events makes no pissing sense whatsoever. It's the retconniest of retcons but is added purely so you have a narrative basis for things that happen in the original ending and appear to have just been pulled from a hat. Really, for a AAA-title, this is shockingly bad. Not "could have been improved" bad, but "should never have been released in this state" bad. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite happy to wait for you to actually discuss the ending before I start making GBS threads on it in earnest. And I won't say that the ending couldn't have been done correctly in principle. You do have to point out, though, the comments Casey Hudson made before the game was released about what he wanted to do with the ending before you say that all the hype was fan-made. And yes, I have played through several games released by Peter Molyneux's Haus Of Grandiose Lies, but at least then you got the impression that he aimed for the unrealistic and then made a variety of games with fart and poop mechanics. I don't think that if Bioware had the choice over again that this is the ending they would have made. It's not a swing and a miss, it's just a pure bodge-job.
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Oct 14, 2014 21:57
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FullLeatherJacket posted:I don't think it's in any way implicit that Joker flies the Normandy into a live-fire zone, parks it in front of Harbinger for several minutes while everyone bellyaches, and then all the NPCs up and fly away from the one and only battle to save the galaxy for no real reason. On the basis that this entire sequence of events makes no pissing sense whatsoever. It's the retconniest of retcons but is added purely so you have a narrative basis for things that happen in the original ending and appear to have just been pulled from a hat. Really, for a AAA-title, this is shockingly bad. Not "could have been improved" bad, but "should never have been released in this state" bad. Oh god, that scene. The only answer is that Harbinger is either the politest villain ever, or the stupidest. "Well I can't see Shepard behind that overturned truck, obviously I killed him and I'll just ignore the building sized spaceship that I have on previous occasions singled out as a target." That scene is a result of them trying to weld together the contradictory facts of "Shepard takes squadmates with him to beam" and "Normandy flees the fight randomly with EDI onboard so she can cybersex joker in the green ending". It's a really bad case of Hudson wanting to have his cake and eat it too because it still doesn't explain how he picked up all the people left at the FOB, or Steve. Since the entire point was that it was too dangerous to take a frigate class ship that close to the front lines.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:05
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He can't pick Steve because Steve can die earlier in the mission.
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Oct 15, 2014 00:01
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2house2fly posted:I was a dick to EDI every chance I got and she was still nice. Same with Legion. I guess I'd like it more if Shepard had to do more to solve the robots/people conflict than simply exist. That would require Bioware to be competent at writing.
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Oct 15, 2014 03:28
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FullLeatherJacket posted:I don't think it's in any way implicit that Joker flies the Normandy into a live-fire zone, parks it in front of Harbinger for several minutes while everyone bellyaches, and then all the NPCs up and fly away from the one and only battle to save the galaxy for no real reason. On the basis that this entire sequence of events makes no pissing sense whatsoever. It's the retconniest of retcons but is added purely so you have a narrative basis for things that happen in the original ending and appear to have just been pulled from a hat. Really, for a AAA-title, this is shockingly bad. Not "could have been improved" bad, but "should never have been released in this state" bad. I'm just waiting for the real ending chat to begin. Blasting that to pieces is kind of cathartic after a stressful day. There are just so many layers of badness to consider with it. Geostomp fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Oct 15, 2014 |
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Oct 15, 2014 03:44
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The ending of ME3 is definitely one of the worst executed ending sequences I have ever seen in fiction of any kind.
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Oct 15, 2014 04:06
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 Part 16: Orientalism Further Reading A more detailed comparison of the quarians: http://www.experiencepoints.net/2010/04/quarian-exiles-politics-of-mass-effect.html An actual paper on Asimov's Frankenstein Complex: http://www.aaai.org/Papers/Workshops/2007/WS-07-07/WS07-07-003.pdf Sorry for the hiatus, I'll update as and when I can. TBH not 100% happy with this video but that's the way it goes sometimes. Anyway, it's done now.
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Nov 3, 2014 18:57
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