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nine-gear crow posted:Yeah, Control works as an ending because you are Commander Motherfucking Shepard, that's why. Yeah, I picked Control because hey, that whole "Organic and Robotic life are bound to destroy each other" thing? I I already fixed that, on foot, with a sniper rifle. Give me a fleet of invincible space ships and I'll have this galaxy whipped into shape in no time.
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# ? Feb 18, 2021 19:39 |
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# ? Apr 25, 2024 00:55 |
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The real control ending is you stop playing after killing Kai Leng and you go play Control instead.
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# ? Feb 19, 2021 18:47 |
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I picked Synthesis, because I'd like to be a human sometimes (for sex obviously) and a Reaper sometimes (also for sex obviously).
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# ? Feb 20, 2021 03:36 |
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The Klowner posted:organics and synthetics will inevitably conflict with each other.... Unless my army of omnipresent robotic space squid cops have anything to say about it All (Robotic Space Squid) Cops Are
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# ? Feb 20, 2021 05:03 |
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Commander Shepard was placed on administrative leave following the incident in which he reportedly struck a female reporter. The SPECTRE later settled with the journalist for an undisclosed sum and admitted no wrongdoing. Shepard was returned to duty but permanently relieved in an unrelated incident in which he destroyed an inhabited moon.
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# ? Feb 20, 2021 05:14 |
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I came here to laugh at you
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# ? Feb 20, 2021 08:54 |
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Sanguinia posted:
Our "collar popping" technology is lightyears beyond yours, human.
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# ? Feb 20, 2021 23:44 |
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His torso is so long.
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# ? Feb 22, 2021 12:57 |
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On the drive to work today I was thinking about that theory that Mass Effect using civilizations were creating dark matter and destroying the universe or whatever from that one planet in ME2, and the reveal of the Reapers was going to be that they were cultivating and controlling civilizations to prevent that. Then I realized that that would have been insanely dumb without some major changes to the lore because the Reapers creation of the Citadel, the Mass Relays and thereby encouraging sentient races to only develop technology along the lines which will lead to a galactic apocalypse the Reapers are actively making the situation WORSE. Because of the Mass Relays these races are almost certainly consistently developing Mass Effect technology much faster and using it on a much larger scale every cycle than they would be in their absence. Why are the reapers even allowing races to develop that far in this silly cycle of theirs instead of just using force to keep every species pre-FTL? Why are they providing the Mass Relay system to encourage every cycle to go all-in on ME drives instead of forcing them to either invent the things themselves and thereby make the problem exponentially smaller and stretched over a much longer period that will hopefully allow for a solution to be found, or find a totally different method of FTL travel that wouldn't bring about entropic Armageddon? No wonder they dropped this plot point, it doesn't stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever.
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# ? Feb 22, 2021 19:19 |
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I think they could've found a number of ways to spin the dark energy buildup into good foreshadowing, but making all mass effect technology harmful to the universe seems like a bad one.
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# ? Feb 22, 2021 22:01 |
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Also, Bioware's pretty clearly familiar with Star Trek, and TNG had an episode with the same plot, where they discovered that warp drives were damaging subspace. In the episode, they didn't decide to destroy civilization to prevent people from breaking the universe, they just made a speed limit so people weren't burning maximum warp all the time. Maybe someone just saw that episode and realized that their plan didn't actually make sense.
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# ? Feb 22, 2021 23:55 |
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Maybe they wondered if they ought to diverge from outright lifting the plot of Revelation Space but figured nah.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 00:13 |
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And much like poop returning to the butthole, Star Trek Picard lifted the main conflict from Mass Effect for its halfhearted attempt at hoovering up Trek nerd dollars.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 03:46 |
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Maybe the techno-eldritch abominations didn't need to have their motivations explained. Maybe any attempt to assign motivation would have been underwhelming. Maybe explaining the unknowable inevitably leads to disappointment.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 04:01 |
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Bogus Adventure posted:And much like poop returning to the butthole, Star Trek Picard lifted the main conflict from Mass Effect for its halfhearted attempt at hoovering up Trek nerd dollars. And it didn't even have the decency to copy the best scene from Mass Effect 1 and let Picard have a conversation with Sovereign.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 04:04 |
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The Klowner posted:Maybe the techno-eldritch abominations didn't need to have their motivations explained. Maybe any attempt to assign motivation would have been underwhelming. Maybe explaining the unknowable inevitably leads to disappointment. I mean, I was totally fine with just "they consume species to reproduce," as ME2 implied. I didn't really need a reason why they needed to limit themselves to FTL capable (and thus threatening) races, although I'm sure it wouldn't have been hard to conjure one, or like you say just leave it an enigma.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 04:27 |
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Sanguinia posted:I mean, I was totally fine with just "they consume species to reproduce," as ME2 implied. I didn't really need a reason why they needed to limit themselves to FTL capable (and thus threatening) races, although I'm sure it wouldn't have been hard to conjure one, or like you say just leave it an enigma. I'd like to think the Reapers are basically just massive gardeners and their job is to make sure the universe doesn't run out of resources too quickly, so they let civilizations reach the point where they can colonize other worlds and go "okay, that's enough living for you, now let someone else have a turn" and just wipe the slate clean before any one cycle of civilizations can cannibalize every usable resource in the galaxy. Then every few cycles they move the mass relays around and change what star clusters they connect with to give other emerging races a chance to use them in line with that "your civilization develops along the paths we desire" thing. Like farmer letting a field go fallow for a season or two to keep it from being ruined by continued farming.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 05:11 |
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nine-gear crow posted:And it didn't even have the decency to copy the best scene from Mass Effect 1 and let Picard have a conversation with Sovereign. Nope, it just decided to make the bright 24th Century dark and edgy, and somehow brought Captain Picard back to life in an even worse way than Captain Kirk in "The Return."
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 06:16 |
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Been getting into this recently after getting it on a GreenMan sale. Ya'lx reccomend a fire or lightning build?
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 06:33 |
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Just play the engineer, level up the drones, and pretend you're Obama. Just sit behind cover as they do all the killing.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 07:02 |
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nine-gear crow posted:I'd like to think the Reapers are basically just massive gardeners and their job is to make sure the universe doesn't run out of resources too quickly, so they let civilizations reach the point where they can colonize other worlds and go "okay, that's enough living for you, now let someone else have a turn" and just wipe the slate clean before any one cycle of civilizations can cannibalize every usable resource in the galaxy. Then every few cycles they move the mass relays around and change what star clusters they connect with to give other emerging races a chance to use them in line with that "your civilization develops along the paths we desire" thing. Like farmer letting a field go fallow for a season or two to keep it from being ruined by continued farming. they're literally called reapers op
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 08:51 |
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for real though the kind of obvious livestock/agriculture motif (character literally named shepherd fights bad guys literally named reapers) that gets unceremoniously dropped in the second game so that they can make some hilariously on-the-nose religious metaphors (character literally named shepherd dies and is reborn, goes to purgatory, meets an archangel, so on and so forth) is then abandoned again in the third game and we get Glowing Small Child scenes that suck and are bad
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 08:53 |
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ungulateman posted:for real though the kind of obvious livestock/agriculture motif (character literally named shepherd fights bad guys literally named reapers) that gets unceremoniously dropped in the second game so that they can make some hilariously on-the-nose religious metaphors (character literally named shepherd dies and is reborn, goes to purgatory, meets an archangel, so on and so forth) is then abandoned again in the third game and we get Glowing Small Child scenes that suck and are bad I mean, is there any doubt that they named him Shepherd so they could have that post-credits scene in 3 where they had a small child in the distant future ask his grandpa to tell him about THE SHEPHERD. BECAUSE HE'S BECOME A MYTH YOU SEE. DEEEEEEEEEP.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 09:54 |
Sanguinia posted:I mean, is there any doubt that they named him Shepherd so they could have that post-credits scene in 3 where they had a small child in the distant future ask his grandpa to tell him about THE SHEPHERD. BECAUSE HE'S BECOME A MYTH YOU SEE. DEEEEEEEEEP. absolutely nothing that happened in 3 was planned by the writers of 1. you can tell because the things that happen in 3 suck and make no sense, op
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 09:57 |
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Mass Effect is the game you get when the writers are high on jenkem.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 10:34 |
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ungulateman posted:for real though the kind of obvious livestock/agriculture motif (character literally named shepherd fights bad guys literally named reapers) that gets unceremoniously dropped in the second game so that they can make some hilariously on-the-nose religious metaphors (character literally named shepherd dies and is reborn, goes to purgatory, meets an archangel, so on and so forth) is then abandoned again in the third game and we get Glowing Small Child scenes that suck and are bad the livestock/agriculture metaphor is still a heavy handed religious metaphor but at least if they'd followed through on 'cain and abel, but instead of two dudes and few days its billions and billions of people across thousands of years' it'd be kind of cool Bogus Adventure posted:Mass Effect is the game you get when the writers are high on jenkem. ME is what it is because of how bioware is managed: very badly
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 16:32 |
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the star child in ME3 explicitly says they harvest only advanced life to make room for new life to flourish, and they specifically harvest these civilisations because they keep trying to make robots that outcompete organic life
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 17:35 |
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Lt. Danger posted:the star child in ME3 explicitly says they harvest only advanced life to make room for new life to flourish, and they specifically harvest these civilisations because they keep trying to make robots that outcompete organic life So the Reapers are all-powerful eldritch creatures that have guided the races of the galaxy for eons toward their own consumption by manipulating their technology and cultures along pre-determined lines... but are also totally impotent on the whole AI thing other than just destroying the races that invent them. Also didn't Jaavik make it clear that the Prothean's despised AI and stopped other races from developing it through force and their hegemony? And yet they harvested them anyway. I think the Reapers might be dumb guys.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 17:39 |
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Once they introduced the Leviathans, things got even dumber:
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 17:57 |
idk i kinda like the leviathans. the reapers had to come from somewhere, and a species of extremely stupid but very powerful mind controllers that gave the reapers vague, stupid instructions and then said "alright, now go solve all of our problems so we can chill out and pop a cold one" is as good of an origin as any even if it's a complete rip-off of star control 2
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 18:00 |
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Jazerus posted:idk i kinda like the leviathans. the reapers had to come from somewhere, and a species of extremely stupid but very powerful mind controllers that gave the reapers vague, stupid instructions and then said "alright, now go solve all of our problems so we can chill out and pop a cold one" is as good of an origin as any Also whatever Azimov story the Will Smith I, Robot was based on.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 18:15 |
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They unironically should have gone the Star Control 2 route. Ur-Quan reapers want to destroy civilization and squash most of humanity into juice to fuel more reapers, Kohr-Ah reapers just want to exterminate everything and have done
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 18:18 |
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Sanguinia posted:So the Reapers are all-powerful eldritch creatures that have guided the races of the galaxy for eons toward their own consumption by manipulating their technology and cultures along pre-determined lines... but are also totally impotent on the whole AI thing other than just destroying the races that invent them. Also didn't Jaavik make it clear that the Prothean's despised AI and stopped other races from developing it through force and their hegemony? And yet they harvested them anyway. well, Reapers aren't eldritch though, they're modernists who believe they have "solved" physics/politics/economics etc. and like modernists they come a cropper when it turns out they haven't solved everything. and like modernists their response is to double down on what they've been doing all along regardless the final sequence with the Catalyst is the Reapers admitting that they can't solve the AI problem and their "solution" of continually putting it off won't work anymore, so they hand it over to Shepard to decide
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 18:20 |
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Honestly, I think the overarching plot of Mass Effect already resembles something in Star Control 3, where it turns out in the end that all the sentient races of the galaxy are regularly harvested by a race of extragalactic beings and their repeated feedings have been damaging the fabric of reality. Star Control 3 isn't a good game, its combat is broken, its visuals are ugly, the writers for Star Control 2 aren't involved and the writing that is there is a weird mess, but I don't think the core principle of its plot was necessarily garbage (although it runs into a similar thing as Mass Effect where the final enemy can't be confronted directly because the mechanics don't really support that). I don't think that the way AI is handled in the earlier games really jives with trying to make that into the central premise of the final conflict, but then I think I may also just not care for the idea of musing over the inevitability for people to build AI that will inevitably surpass and rebel against them. It just feels stupid to me. Like I don't think I'd buy a book that openly had that as part of its premise, and I don't think any of the rest of the games encouraged me to think in those terms.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 19:17 |
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Jack2142 posted:Make it so Sovereign is essentially an Ancient Killbot that helped wipe out the Prothean Civilization, no weird conspiracy on the cycles and honeypot development. It got reactivated by the Geth as an AI God figure, and Sovereign and realizes the Reapers failed and uses the Geth / Saren as patsies for the plan. Maybe make it so the attack on the Citadel was Sovereign trying to reactivate other hibernating/inactivated reapers. The end of ME1 is Sovereign dying, but managing to send out the signal to wake up the remaining Reapers who are dangerous, but not literally cataclysmically galaxy ending like they were in the actual game, and maybe some of the Reapers don't have giant superdreadnought bodies which could lead to some weird variety and explain why some are more subtle than others, you could even do stupid poo poo like TIM is a Reaper Android or some poo poo that Bioware would love. Also the weird humanoid Reaper stuff could just be a Reaper that wanted a rad mecha body to gently caress poo poo up with. You just reminded me of Homeworld Cataclysm which did this story but better and wished it was included in the remaster.
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# ? Feb 23, 2021 20:54 |
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You know what sucked worse than all of that? ME: Andromeda. Because they went to an entirely new galaxy and everything was still exactly the same. All the technology was the same, but there was one new kind of alien who was indistinguishable from the face aliens of ME. It wasn't just bad design, it was outright loving cowardice.
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# ? Feb 24, 2021 04:47 |
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Defiance Industries posted:You know what sucked worse than all of that? That's not entirely true... They gave the Asari facepaint.
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# ? Feb 24, 2021 10:23 |
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Is there a good intuitive save editor for ME1? I played it a few years after it came out. Tried replaying it recently but I liked my decisions. I don't want to play it again with different ones and I'd rather not replay it making the same (or at least similar) ones. I never played ME2 and ME3. I'd be curious to play around with them.
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# ? Feb 24, 2021 21:41 |
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ME2 has (or used to come with?) a DLC that let you set choices for the major forks in ME1 and then import the result to ME2
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# ? Feb 24, 2021 21:52 |
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# ? Apr 25, 2024 00:55 |
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skasion posted:ME2 has (or used to come with?) a DLC that let you set choices for the major forks in ME1 and then import the result to ME2 The sad thing is there are still some things you NEED to have actually played ME1 to see in ME2, like Conrad Verner.
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# ? Feb 24, 2021 22:01 |