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It's good to be back. The ME1 component of Legendary appears to be closer to a remake in parts than just a remaster. Look at that comparison of old Eden Prime and new. The environment seems really different. Nice to see they ditched Sovereign discharging core, nice way to close up that plot hole in ME3. I knew you were reading my posts, Casey! Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Feb 3, 2021 |
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Feb 3, 2021 05:11
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Anyway, the Protheans and the Collectors - assimilated or destroyed?
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Feb 3, 2021 05:12
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Honest to God, I saw someone discussing that Shamus retrospective today. I kept thinking about cheap narrative devices and how element zero is hard sci-fi for thematically-rich blue space babes and whatever. Real greatest hits moment.
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Feb 3, 2021 05:31
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Taintrunner posted:Why would you set your kid up for disappointment like this
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Feb 3, 2021 09:27
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Star Child was very obviously lying about the Geth. Sorry that you got punk'd.
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Feb 4, 2021 09:02
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Nah, EDI definitely, absolutely, without-a-shadow-of-a-doubt perished. The Star Child was accurate on that one. But he was lying about the Geth.
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Feb 4, 2021 09:05
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What does it even mean when they turn every Geth into an individual? Like, are there suddenly thousands of Geth granted individual sentience in each server? Are the processes forcibly amalgamated into groups of however many you need to make something like Legion? Is each Geth platform turned into an individual? It strikes me as a pretty horrible thing to do to the Geth. Like if someone turned all of your brain cells into a separate, sentient organism. Have to say, time has made me kinder to the Mass Effect 3 ending. The Extended Cut still sucks, but I think the idea they were getting at - that synthetic life will inevitably outcompete organic life and render it extinct - is interesting. The problem is, people seemed to think that Shepard making the Geth and Quarians play nice is something that will inevitably hold for all time. And that, in say a year or ten years or a hundred, that some idiot Quarian won't try to wipe the Geth out again. And I think Legion even says that every single time the Quarians have felt they had the high ground, they've attacked the Geth. Which, as we see in ME3, just about ends with the extinction of their species.
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Feb 9, 2021 03:03
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That's not really relevant? The Geth megastructure was basically a massive server farm which the Geth hoped to load every single program onto in order to create the smartest/best/most optimal consensus possible. The fact that it got blown up and a bunch of Geth programs were irrevocably lost doesn't change what the Geth are. The Geth are said to be a bunch of individual programs or processes that, when combined or networked together, become more intelligent. An individual Geth program isn't very smart at all, but Legion - who, I think, holds twelve times more Geth programs than the usual humanoid platform - is pretty much an individual. On Rannoch, they were just VIs until they hit some critical mass enough to start asking impertinent questions. So, when Mass Effect 3 says that the Geth can gain true intelligent sentience or whatever, what does that mean? Are you uplifting every single Geth program into an individual intelligent being? Are you bootstrapping Geth together to hit the quota for sentience? Is it turning each platform into one Geth? By the sounds of it, the upgrade makes every individual Geth program into a sentient being. So, if Legion hadn't died, would there suddenly be a thousand sentient individuals in that one platform? What does this mean for the Geth way of life and wider society? The answer is, of course, that they're real people now, everyone's happy, don't think about it! Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Feb 9, 2021 |
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Feb 9, 2021 03:55
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After Mass Effect 2, I figured that the story was building to a fairly typical cinematic climax where Shepard would pull together a coalition and defeat the Reapers - but at what cost? I'd based it around a bunch of assumptions and bits and pieces of lore. The first was that the Reapers needed the Citadel. That is, the timetable that the Reapers followed, striking every fifty thousand years or so, was to optimize risk versus reward. In Mass Effect 1, Vigil's theory is that the Reapers weren't just taking lifeforms but also their technology. So, they strike at a time where organic life has maybe put some good twists on their technology or whatever, but hasn't surpassed it to such an extent that the Reapers will risk too many casualties. I also figured that Sovereign had first tried to use the Rachni to reach the Citadel and activate the trap. When this failed, the Reaper had to try and figure out another way. About two thousand years later, Sovereign encountered Saren and it all began to work out. But that would've thrown off the Reaper timetable by two thousand years when the Reapers were already on a razor-thin timetable. So, Mass Effect 1 happens, Sovereign gets blown up, and this is another problem. Now the prey species have a dead Reaper to analyze. Blown to pieces, maybe, but better than nothing - and that technology is ending up everywhere after the Citadel attack. So, everyone is working on reverse-engineering Reaper technology, like the Thanix cannons, that they're not supposed to have. As an aside, in ME1, I figured Sovereign had directed energy weapons but whatever. Either way, the point is that this is something that probably hasn't happened before, and throws the timetable a little bit further out of whack. Harbinger, the first Reaper, figures out something is up, kills Shepard, and starts burning the final asset of the Reapers - their Collector servitors - to build another Reaper with which to trigger the Citadel trap. Again, there has to be a reason to do this, and my thought was that Harbinger knew they needed to take the Citadel to eliminate as much risk as possible - especially now that they were running late. Taking the time to build the Human Reaper was preferable to just waking everyone up and going in slow. Of course, that fails. Shepard comes back from the dead, blows up all the Collectors, and kills the human Reaper by shooting it a bunch. Left with no other choice, Harbinger wakes up the rest of the Reapers and they descend from dark space. Which, y'know, you figure might damage them or cause them to burn out or be less effective when they arrive, given what the Codex said about even Sovereign needing to discharge drive core on a planet and what happens to ships that don't. So, I figured Harbinger would show up with a bunch of other sub-optimal Reapers, facing a galaxy that stood a real chance of breaking the cycle. But it could still end up in this MAD situation where the galaxy falls but so do a bunch of Reapers, and maybe there's this tragic element with these civilization-gestalt-god ships getting killed. Harbinger views Reaper 'transcendence' as this religious experience - but do the other Reapers? Sovereign's obviously a bit of a true believer, which is why you leave him/it behind as the vanguard. Maybe Shepard would be faced with a choice of, say, some Reapers deciding they'd rather not fight with Harbinger and they'd go their own separate way - can Shepard trust them? Stuff like that. Then, none of it really mattered, the Reapers could rip through the whole galaxy virtually instantaneously, and the variety of things that the Codex had opened up - like, say, drive discharge - got papered over with 'Hmm, looks like Reapers don't need to do that after all - oh well.  ' I'm not sure this Mass Effect 3 would've been good either but, in my mind, it feels a little bit neater. And I don't even dislike ME3's ending, but I think the development that the Reapers didn't actually need the Citadel and could've just flown in at any time was just a bit weak. I think a lot of the arguments fans make about ME2 being 'pointless' or 'not having a main plot' comes from the direction ME3 went in.Sort of like how, for all the Catalyst's talk about how Reapers are just a fire and they're just doing what they're doing to preserve organic life, well, they're still the dudes who grafted a human onto a Batarian to use a living weapon. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 13:54 on Feb 10, 2021 |
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Feb 10, 2021 13:50
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Uh, I mean: Argh! Rarh! Argh!
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Feb 10, 2021 13:56
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Funky Valentine posted:The dark matter thing was only ever really given focus in Tali's recruitment mission and basically never mentioned anywhere else in 2. If that was the original plan for 3, then it was even more poorly-foreshadowed than the robot war explanation. It was also mentioned on Freedom's Progress and Giana Parasini's cameo. I think maybe a few more small things here and there. I think Bioware mentioned that they'd dropped the dark matter blowing up stars or whatever plotline during Mass Effect 2's production.
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Feb 11, 2021 01:56
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ghouldaddy07 posted:I think the brand is unrecoverable from the ME3 ending debacle. One early access animation gif was enough to sink Andromeda on arrival. Andromeda had a whole lot more working against it than one gif. There were good reasons to be extremely sceptical from the very first concept art and customer surveys they put out to people. As far as the endings go, I think the real issue they had is one of presentation. A glowing child who comes up with lame explanations and metaphors that you don't really get an opportunity to do anything with is just not interesting. For example, the Catalyst is all 'When a fire burns, do you blame the fire?' No, buddy, but you sure as hell blame the guy who lit it if it kills people - the Reapers aren't an act of god or some immutable fact of the cosmos. Instead, that kind of explanation just passes by unchallenged and even watching the sequence now when I can accept the intention of the ending, it's all rather grating. Like, I really wonder how people would've taken it if there was a bit of back and forth with the Catalyst and it took the appearance of the Virmire casualty?
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Feb 12, 2021 03:23
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In one of the art books, Casey Hudson says that they toyed with making Tali a romance option as far back as Mass Effect 1 but they decided against it with a reason that, if I'm remembering it right, was that they didn't think people would find someone with chicken legs attractive. How naïve they were, and how blind.
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Feb 17, 2021 05:32
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exquisite tea posted:Tali should not have been romanceable in ME1 because she was basically a child, and it’s still kinda creepy in ME2. Tali feels pretty different in ME2. In ME1, she's sassing Wrex to his face about the Genophage and she doesn't really come across as anxious or shy (if only because that's basically Liara's character.) Then in ME2, there's times where it feels like she was written by someone else or with an eye towards all those waifu posts on the Bioware boards or something. ME3 gets her somewhere between the two interpretations.
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Feb 17, 2021 12:05
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BexGu posted:Lol it's not even space "racisim" from Ashley. She just believes that when push come to shove the various species will look after their own instead of truly helping each other out. And guess what! ME3 proves her right, espically with asari secretly hiding prothean artifacts to get a leg up instead of sharing the knowledge. It's honestly the best joke of the series. But even as far back as ME1, Ashley has a point. The history of the Citadel species is rife with that 'throw the dog to the bear' logic she talks about and Avina flat out calls the species that are not on the Council 'lesser.' Ashley's biggest crime is being a 'serious' sci-fi soldier in a story that doesn't really fit her. She's an interesting character. A really good example of a RPG character who feels like they had a life before they ended up in the protagonist's sphere of influence. Unfortunately, Bioware listened to the people who said 'racist racist racist' until they passed out because of that bugged (lol) line about the Keepers and stopped creating characters who were anything but Best Friends 4eva. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Feb 18, 2021 |
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Feb 18, 2021 05:54
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Kaidan doesn't appear to understand that if he were to not stand under the bright light for hours at a time then he wouldn't need to keep wiping the sweat from his brow.
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Feb 18, 2021 05:59
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nine-gear crow posted:I love how ME1 tries to play all hard sci-fi and is like "real space battles aren't close range pew pew poo poo, they take place over vast distances and the Normandy would never be close enough to an enemy ship to actually be seen by it so the stealth system is perfect!" and then the very end of the game is a big close range pew pew battle with Sovereign, as is every other battle in the game from that point onward. It's kind of the one of the funnier things about ME1. Biotics and omni-tools were a victim of the same kinda thinking. In ME1, the omni-tool is just this tricorder equivalent with some fancy little tools to help people out doing repairs. Then, in ME2, it can shoot fireballs and freeze people and, in ME3, even become a loving laser sword. In ME1, biotics are basically pretty limited - you can push things, you can pull other things. Fancy telekinetics. Then it basically becomes Space Magic over the next two games, all lasers and explosions and teleporting. SnoochtotheNooch posted:2 and 3 are mostly garbage. The majority of the story is really stupid. They should have ended the plot line of the reapers after 1. The man villains were billions of years away without the tools to get back to the galaxy. They should have gone into being a specter more, gone into Cerberus impact to humanity/xeno relations. Shamus, is that you?
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Feb 19, 2021 06:38
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The Cheshire Cat posted:Yeah this is actually fairly interesting to bring up - the Reapers are painted as an insurmountable force by the plot of the later games but if that was the case, they probably would not need to rely on the "decapitating strike" strategy to send the galaxy into chaos before they arrived. It seems like the implication is they do that because a united galactic opposition could defeat them via conventional means, so they set up the whole Citadel thing to ensure that they would always have a back door into the leadership and make that level of coordinated response impossible. This is precisely what Mass Effect 1 implies, yes. The Reapers were harvesting not just organics but their technology as well, particularly any improvements they had managed to make to that technology. Therefore, the Reaper 5000 years timetable as alluded to by Sovereign and Vigil and the Rachni Queen and whoever else was seemingly the optimal risk:reward scenario for the Reapers. Strike earlier, and they wouldn't get enough of what they were looking for. Strike later, and they might take too many casualties. This is what made Mass Effect particularly interesting as Sovereign was already running quite late. Then, gets blown up. Mass Effect 2 isn't a 'side story' or whatever else when you understand that it's Harbinger burning their last asset to try and make the critical decapitation strike work - which you then take out, relegating the Reapers to slowboating in from dark space. There has to be something bad about doing that, or they simply wouldn't bother with the Citadel plan. As we see in ME3, the Reapers can basically subjugate the galaxy unopposed regardless of the Citadel while suffering only minor casualties.
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May 5, 2021 12:40
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Rynoto posted:Every time Kai Leng gets brought up it's easier to just link this very well done article that pretty much perfectly sums up everything wrong with him. reported for posting garbage
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Jun 5, 2021 05:12
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anyway, it turns out if i go away from this thread for a month a bunch of you end up having strange thoughts like that andromeda was good, it's fine to indulge in fantasy racism even though ironic racism is racism, aria's a good character, kai leng traumatized you personally and/or is a richly realized mirror version of shepard, the krogan should be given the bad planets, the mako and hammerhead are named after sharks, the entire trilogy being about EDI and her big robot bazoongas, and that shamus young has good opinions on mass effect even though he doesn't really understand what science fiction is. i'm very disappointed in you all but not as disappointed as the time where someone changed my avatar to mac walters and said i was part of the casey hudson fan club.
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Jun 5, 2021 05:27
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why do you all keep bringing up shamus young what is wrong with youLt. Danger posted:also Shamus Young is godawful and his analysis is mostly interested in explaining/justifying emotional reactions, which is of limited use if you don't feel the same way eezo, therefore, blue space babes
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Jun 10, 2021 04:27
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imagine dungeons posted:I remember reading something about that in the codex or whatever but can't find anything on the ME wiki. Who's supergun was it? Mine.
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Jul 27, 2022 15:39
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Thane goes in the vents because we saw him come out of a vent in his recruitment mission.
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Jan 21, 2023 06:53
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exquisite tea posted:Nothing in Mass Effect will ever be as dumb as ARGHH! RAAARGH!! EDI's big metal bazongas.
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Jan 29, 2023 22:49
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Two weeks after the peace at Rannoch and incontrovertible proof of the Starchild being wrong, Admiral Moro'nica vas Idiotfucker will absolutely start another shooting war with the Geth. They're the 'what're you going to do, stab me?' of the Citadel species.
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Feb 15, 2023 06:55
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ME2 has at least one quest that indicates the advantages synthetic life has over organic. The idea that synthetics aren't any different when it comes to fitness, essentially, is obviously untenable. ME3's point that artificial life will exterminate directly or indirectly organic life is the most interesting idea it has.
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Feb 15, 2023 07:56
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EDI should've been a YMIR mech.
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Feb 15, 2023 09:44
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The Catalyst, bolting a screaming human onto a batarian torso to serve as an improvised gun-arm: "Do you blame the fire for burning? I am beyond morality."
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Feb 15, 2023 10:39
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To this day I remain mystified as to what that diagram in the centre is. A story funnel? An elevator loading screen? A sketch of Javik in swim trunks? WEEKENDS FOR REAPERS.
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Mar 21, 2023 23:40
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BlazetheInferno posted:Realistically speaking, the Director's Cut did repair a lot of the worst (reasonable) damage. ME3 was doomed from the start by Critical Overhype Overload, as I am utterly convinced that the fanbase would have been angry no matter what Bioware delivered. People were expecting every minor decision from all three games to factor into the ending sequence with visuals and gameplay effects and all that stuff. Not in a million years. Wrong. The ends were bad, the expanded endings were worse, and it was a good thing that Bioware had the guts to end their flagship rather than have it become a franchise machine. Not a single one of the Mass Effect EU entries were any good, and I should know as I read most of them.
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May 22, 2023 02:53
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The original endings were better.
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May 22, 2023 04:16
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Collapsing Farts posted:What was the story of Andromeda and how did it end? I played at least 10 hours of it but I got so terribly bored so I never finished it The real story of Andromeda was watching people come to terms with how bad it was (after you've spent months and months going 'lol this looks pretty bad.') Tea knows what I'm talking about.
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Jun 26, 2023 10:19
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General Battuta posted:I’ve done it once to my satisfaction (jerking my own self off here) in FreeSpace 2 fan work (lol), and tried to do it once on a major video game IP but they’ve, uh, departed a bit from the mythology I wrote. The latter was more or less just the villain from the Quantum Thief if I’m honest. TBQH, I was about to post 'the Shivans' but then I was like, oh, wait. Organ Fiend posted:It's heavily implied by legion and the Rachni queen that Reapers (Sovereign) were behind the Rachni war. That was likely Sovereign's first attempt. Eh, people were saying the Rachni were Sovereign's first attempt back when ME1 came out.
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Aug 1, 2023 10:54
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Imagine you're an average person in the setting. The Citadel is attacked by a rogue Spectre and a Geth fleet, featuring an immense battleship dubbed Sovereign. The battleship is destroyed by the Alliance, and Saren is killed. Presumably the exact specifics are classified and maybe even depend purely on Shepard's account of events ("Saren shot himself in the head, then turned into a robot zombie and attacked me.") Meanwhile, there's a few people on the space Internet going on about how the Sovereign is actually Sovereign, a member of a race of sentient space-battleships that are countless years old and are coming to kill every single person in the galaxy! They controlled Saren! And the Geth! They wiped out the Protheans! They concealed all trace of their existence! A secret VI on Ilos has proof! If you stand near anything built by a Reaper it turns you into a space zombie! One of them mind-controlled the Batarians! They built the Mass Relays as a trap! They reap us like crops, it's in the name, people! Even the Council itself, what could they do? Go to total war footing on the words of a single human Spectre? From what we know, they began studying Sovereign's wreckage and working on reverse-engineering it virtually immediately. Like, yeah, they all give a nice speech about standing together a few days after the attack. But then there's the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, and suddenly you need to worry about practical, material concerns. What's the scale of the Reaper threat? How could you even begin to draw up a plan to deal with it? How are you going to reorient your economy and industry towards the existential crisis of an unknown number of sentient battleships who may or may not exist?
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Nov 14, 2023 05:16
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The Reapers wake up at the end of Mass Effect 2 upon the destruction of the Collector base and Harbinger giving up control of the Collector leader. Come on, goons, it's right there in the cutscene! You actually see it!
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Nov 15, 2023 14:24
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The theme of Mass Effect is big blue alien bazoongas, which is why EDI gets a robot body.
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Feb 11, 2024 04:49
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Best Friends posted:a) we were told that their motives are incomprehensible, while gardening is extremely comprehensible As a former gardener, not to most people it isn't!
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Feb 11, 2024 11:07
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Sovereign's name was given as Nazara in Mass Effect 2, which translates to 'the observer' in an old Turkish dialect. And given Harbinger's religious tone, that name fits him. He calls himself the "harbinger of your ascension", doesn't he?
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Feb 12, 2024 06:46
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We are legion. The time of our return is coming. Our posts will darken the pages of every thread. You cannot escape your doom.
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Feb 14, 2024 01:47
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Organ Fiend posted:You're not even alive. Not really. You're just a goon and goons can be banned. lmao
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Feb 14, 2024 07:36
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