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Also the upgrade that turns them into real boys is treated as a good thing despite the fact that it was made by the reapers. Who, if you will recall, previously made the Geth into loyal servants by introducing subtle rounding errors into their software. But apparently the update that fundamentally changes how the geth work is a-okay and doesn’t include any reaper indoctrination stuff.
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Feb 8, 2021 21:23
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Imagine if there was a subplot where the reapers were giving away brain implants to a Cerberus cell that lets them fight better, and the conclusion of the plotline was saying “Great, the reapers built enough brain implants for everyone! Let’s give a brain implant to every single human in the alliance!” That’s the geth plotline.
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Feb 8, 2021 21:45
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“Fusing organic and synthetic life” makes no sense as a thing you can do, but it also makes no sense as a solution to the synthetic life problem in the first place, because it does nothing to stop people from building machines to do work for them, and then making those machines smarter so they can work better, etc, until you have geth 2.0 or whatever.
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Feb 11, 2021 05:58
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Well sure, that’s the other half of the issue - the game never actually makes a case that synthetic/organic conflict is inevitable, but the endings act like it is and all your options revolve around how you’re going to solve it. Synthesis is cool because even if you accept the flimsy premise, it still falls apart as a solution because it doesn’t actually address the problem in any way.
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Feb 11, 2021 06:15
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The timeline in general doesn't really make sense. The games themselves are written as if humans have been part of the galactic community for a lot longer - I'd probably have guessed 70 years or so since first contact. 26 is crazy and doesn't really fit with how many colonies they have and how many humans there are all over the galaxy. Cerberus's numbers are even more insane but that's kind of a separate factor considering how wildly they fluctuate between games.
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Feb 14, 2021 05:30
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Funky Valentine posted:I'm pretty sure that's not what happens when you kill the Council, because then there would be no reason for the new Council to ghost you. It is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wb-ZLB1PcA&t=245s IIRC they just get replaced offscreen between games and are barely acknowledged in Mass Effect 2.
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Mar 2, 2021 19:11
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WrightOfWay posted:Humans seizing total control of the Council seems like a good way to get the species Kroganed. The ME 1 cutscene frames it as plausible because of a combination of the Human military being the strongest at that point, plus the external existential threat of the reapers. It might even work, honestly, the reapers are basically the classic foreign boogyman fascists use to justify taking over, except they really exist, really can’t be reasoned with, and really are a threat to all life. It wouldn’t be as stable once the reapers are gone, but by then the humans would have had a couple years of power + a total war to restructure things, and assuming they successfully beat the reapers they’d have a big accomplishment to point to and justify why they had to take control. It wouldn’t be the least plausible thing to happen in the setting.
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Mar 2, 2021 20:12
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Willatron posted:Synthesis is my canon ending because the games actually kind of harp on the cycle of Control and Destroy between synthetics and organics from the very first game and Synthesis seems to be the only way to break that cycle instead of kicking the can down the road however many millennia until the next conflict arises. How does it break the cycle though? What's stopping the humans-with-circuitboards from saying "Man this 'work' thing sucks, I want to make a machine that can do it for me" just like every other time people made synthetics?
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Apr 1, 2021 19:18
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Yeah, renegade works fine for a first playthrough. You can be a Loose Cannon who Gets The Job Done and just not pick the obvious space racism/Cerberus is good options, you still get enough points for all the major renegade checks.
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May 10, 2021 16:26
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MadDogMike posted:But for some reason the PC controls at least seem to work in relation to the screen facing instead of the Mako’s facing, which gets irritating when you try to circle strafe and the direction pressing forward or left or whatever takes you keeps changing as you rotate your view around. You can change this in the settings, thankfully.
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May 15, 2021 18:44
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Phobeste posted:The weirdest backstory choice they made was that the timeline is like bizarrely short in between the first contact war and everything else. If anderson was considered for a spectre 20 years ago, that's like 5 years after the start of the first contact war. Shepard was born before first contact. Probably like half the admirals in the systems alliance at the time of ME1 started their military careers before the mass effect was discovered. It's just weird Yeah, the numbers there have always been bizarre. The massive number of humans you see doing all sorts of jobs all over the setting, plus the huge number of colonies does not fit with the fact that the majority of the humans you see in the game were alive before first contact happened.
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May 19, 2021 20:08
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Eh, I think there's a pretty big difference between something like global warming (slow, subtle, requires short-term sacrifices to avoid consequences that'll only be apparent long after you've left office) and the reapers (obvious and aggressive outside force that causes visible damage including possibly the deaths of the previous heads of government, requires investment in military that probably is really profitable for whatever military industrial complex they have in the setting). Like I think it would be more realistic if Sovereign's attack was the Mass Effect equivalent of 9/11. That'd make it harder to have Shephard solve everything single-handedly though, so 
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May 19, 2021 22:34
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Thom12255 posted:Like a race that takes 100 years just to reach adulthood isn't doing any quick changes to anything. This is barely related but since you brought up Asari biology I just want to say: it always confused me that they had a taboo against reproducing with another Asari. What did they do before they were a space-faring species? I guess it could be a recent development but even then, they live for 1000+ years and take 100 to reach adulthood, and it's 2,600 years since they met their first aliens, that seems like a pretty short time to decide that romance should be all aliens, all the time. I don't know, it always bugs me when it comes up.
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May 19, 2021 23:23
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SettingSun posted:The 'good' geth accepting reaper upgrades in ME3 when their backs are to the wall was really contrived though. Also the Reaper-built upgrade that turns the Geth into Real Boys apparently doesn't have any sort of backdoor or killswitch or anything. I'm never able to take the geth-quarian choice seriously in ME3 because it always feels like if that "upgrade" is uploaded, the geth should all be reaper slaves. A big casualty of whatever change in writers there was for the geth between 2 and 3.
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May 28, 2021 20:06
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 Obviously he just mistook a geth for Saren, because of Saren's extensive and non-suspicious cybernetics.
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May 29, 2021 03:45
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A lot of people's emotional investment in Mass Effect comes from the talking-and-choosing-dialogue-options part rather than the shooty-gunsman part. Even a really amazing shooty bit wouldn't distract people from a bad talky bit, especially if that talky bit is the culmination and climax of 3 games of buildup.
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Jun 2, 2021 17:25
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HaB posted:But while I was playing last night, I got to thinking a bit, and I'm sure this has been addressed somewhere, if not directly in this thread, then in some sort of analysis forum/nerd gathering - but if The Reapers created the relays and all, why didn't they just immediately cripple everyone's mobility but their own by shutting them down, or adding an IFF mode that only let them use them? They could only do that with the killswitch in the citadel. It seems like they should also be able to shut down an individual relay directly once they get in range, but I guess then you don't have a game.
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Jun 2, 2021 23:50
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Amppelix posted:lmao If there's a conflict between the facts the game presents and the emotional tone it presents things with, it's not weird to notice the conflict. It's no different than people rolling their eyes as Garrus gripes about how it sucks that cops have all these rules and regulations stopping them from just loving executing the bad guys without a trial. Like, in 3 EDI mentions how they're going to need to sedate the Krogan they're transporting to Palavan, because otherwise putting that many adult Krogans on a ship together means they're all going to murder each other. Even if you believe in the Great Man theory of history, it's hard to see how Wrex being in charge is going to change that!
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Jun 8, 2021 23:24
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Android Blues posted:My take is that the violence is krogan culture, not krogan nature. The codex points out that all the biology-based aggressive tendencies krogan have, humans have too, and that their society before nuclear war considered "blood rage" to be a psychiatric illness. Centuries of brutal post-apocalypse, then centuries of war with the Rachni, then a millennium of being targeted by an ongoing genocide which the enlightened galactic community couldn't care less about, has made krogan culture nihilistic, violent and horrible, but that's sort of an understandable reaction to those things. Sure, and that's a totally reasonable take, but the game itself doesn't really make an argument beyond "Hey, it's cool, Wrex is in charge!". It just kind of ignores all the ways it's previously painted the Krogan as legitimately more violent than other races. (For example, the codex in 2 says that after the invention of Gunpowder, death by gunshot was the most common cause of death for Krogan)
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Jun 8, 2021 23:39
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CharlestheHammer posted:I mean for how the Krogan are shown they blend into actual society pretty easily. The krogans you meet do not act like the Krogans presented so it’s pretty obviously propaganda IMO the biggest misstep here was having Grunt, a literal newborn baby with no exposure to other Krogans, turn out to be a generic Krogan who hates Turians and loves fighting. Yeah, yeah, it was the tank imprints or whatever, but if violence wasn't supposed to be the Krogans' nature that would have been the perfect opportunity to show it.
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Jun 8, 2021 23:58
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Mordin was way more popular than any of the human romance options.
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Jun 10, 2021 19:09
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Kibayasu posted:It occurs to me that it’s quite important that BioWare made it explicitly clear that all of Maelon’s subjects in ME2 were volunteers otherwise keeping the data would get pretty uncomfortable. Did they? I remember you find a dead human near the start (which triggers one of those weird conversations about how humans are more genetically diverse than other species) who was at least implied to be unwilling, I thought.
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Jun 13, 2021 16:19
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not just trolling the thread, but you need to be thinking in terms of Hiroshima. Orbital bombardment generates kiloton to megaton levels of energy, not hundred pound bombs. That’s just another one of the codex/game inconsistencies, honestly - the reapers either don’t actually do any orbital bombardment, or orbital bombardment is much weaker in the setting than physics would suggest. See also how there’s still an earth to save after an entire game’s worth of reaper attacks, or how krogan infantry are able to make an appreciable difference on Palavan.
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Jun 15, 2021 00:03
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Now that I think about it, was there ever a handwave in 3 for why the Reapers didn’t instantly capture the citadel and shut down the relay network?
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Jun 15, 2021 00:27
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goblin week posted:I think if you kill ants on purpose outside of your home you're hosed up and evil so it's not like that parable holds this way either. What if you capture a ton of ants and melt them down and use the resulting slurry to construct a new ant-human. I think that would be okay.
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Jul 7, 2021 11:53
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Jerusalem posted:I had utterly, utterly, utterly convinced myself that I had a memory of discovering during the mission that Saren's cure was bullshit to trick the Krogan into working for Sovereign (and then getting indoctrinated, presumably) so when I replayed the Legendary Edition it's quite an eye-opener to realize that uhh... yeah, that Krogan scientist might have actually been close to a no-fooling, no-bullshit cure and then you and Wrex kill him. I want to say that Okeer’s dialogue in 2 implied Saren was just getting around the genophage with cloning instead of a true cure? But if that’s the intention I don’t think it’s ever really made clear
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Jul 9, 2021 03:23
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Wolfsheim posted:'Kill the petty dictator and let the entire thing collapse into permanent civil war' definitely seems like something the Yeah, can you imagine if a Mass Effect game let you improve things by just doing a bunch of violence to the right bad guys? That would be so unrealistic.
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Jul 21, 2021 16:40
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Seemlar posted:I always thought Garrus immediately being able to just call up some guy he knew and get tech specs for a reverse engineered Reaper main gun is kind of odd, that one at least felt like it should be behind a loyalty mission or something slightly more involved By the same token, Jacob being able to apparently access some old contacts to get an upgrade for the Normandy raises the question of why those upgrades aren't just part of the new Normandy by default, since it's both unlikely that he would have alliance contacts the Illusive Man doesn't, and he was already part of Cerberus before joining you. But down that road lies questions like "Why does the infinite budget Lazurus project now require Shepard to pick up new guns from dead mercs and do their own mining?"
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Jul 23, 2021 16:42
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chaosapiant posted:Iirc, you need her for the Saren evidence but can refuse to take her aboard after that’s settled. In 1 she’s forced onto your team if you try to say no. I’m not sure if you can skip her recruitment in 2.
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Jul 23, 2021 21:10
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Zore posted:Space is really, really, really big. Everything is functionally infinite, especially on a timescale as short as a few million years. I don't think a galaxy's worth of resources counts as infinite for a galaxy-spanning civilization. Sure, there's other galaxies too, but they're a very, very long round trip, and they might already have intelligent life of their own using the stuff up. There's no reason they couldn't hit Peak Eezo at some point.
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Aug 6, 2021 18:27
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Dragon Age is just another gritty Tolken-inspired fantasy setting. You’ve got elves who are archers and live in the forest, you’ve got dwarves who live underground and mine stuff, you’ve got human kings and royalty, whatever, there’s a billion rpgs with interchangeable settings just like that. Rpgs in a sci-fi setting are rare as hell in comparison. The third person shooter elements probably helped with mainstream appeal too - that’s always been way more popular than real time with pause. Honestly I doubt the average buyer was even aware enough of how much queer representation there was in the games for it to influence sales in any appreciable way.
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Aug 29, 2021 17:38
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CharlestheHammer posted:I mean if DA is generic fantasy than ME I’d generic gritty SCi fi. Yeah, but rpgs in fantasy settings outnumber rpgs in sci-fi settings 100 to 1 so Mass Effect still feels a lot more unique.
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Aug 29, 2021 18:18
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I mean honestly that seems like a very low bar for an "innovative world". If I'm already familiar with Tolkien and the countless Tolkien-inspired settings, "Elves live in the woods and are very good at archery (but live about as long as humans)" is not exactly blowing my mind.
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Aug 29, 2021 18:32
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NikkolasKing posted:DA never had that problem. It does something fun with all its races and never makes them feel like just a checkbox. Okay, but you're arguing that DA tells a good story with its races. That's a different conversation entirely. Thedas is very much just middle earth with some changes, that's what people mean when they call it generic. Even if they use that setting to tell the most poignant, painstakingly woven tapestry of love, loss and vengeance ever to pen put from pen to paper, it's still a setting where you've got the elves in the forests and dwarves in the mines and knights and magic swords and everything in a very familiar and predictable way, to the point where you can show people a single screenshot and they can get the broad strokes correct about most of the setting. Novelty isn't good in and of itself and you can still tell a fantastic story in a familiar setting, but when people look at Dragon Age and say "Oh, another generic fantasy setting" they're right to do so, it is a very generic fantasy setting.
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Aug 29, 2021 19:21
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Oh dear me posted:Liara has just told me that we humans are creatures of action who pursue our goals with an almost indomitable determination. It's probably connected to humanity's superior genetic diversity (which also makes them better test subjects than krogan for doing preliminary genophage testing???)
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Sep 1, 2021 18:02
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Fuzz posted:Considering who was on staff at Bioware back then when most of the original writers left, honestly I just have always assumed a lot of this was racist "lol black man can't be TIED DOWN, he need a BABY MAMA," poo poo, because let's be real, a huge segment of the game dev community is just racist chauvinist pieces of poo poo who even look like Proud Boys. I think it's probably less of an active rejection of Jacob's romance, and more of a "Here's Jacob's story for 99% of players, not enough players romanced him for it to be worth making a whole alternate version so just add some lines to paper it over" kind of deal. No need to attribute to malice what can easily be explained by time crunch.
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Sep 8, 2021 14:39
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I think, based on the game itself, the only reasonable conclusion is that everyone is dead. That said, wasn't there was some damage control tweet saying that the rest of the citadel was fine, somehow?
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Sep 15, 2021 18:26
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Pattonesque posted:I feel like if they blew straight to the Citadel they'd take some actual Reaper ship casualties (more than if they just took it slow) and the Reapers do not want to take those kind of casualties if they can avoid it Beelining the citadel would them take it over before the galaxy has more than a few hours to muster their forces, at which point they should be able to shut down the relay network and get all the demographic info from the galactic seat of power like they usually do, which means everyone is isolated and disorganized and they can spend centuries reaping the galaxy piece by piece. I don't remember even a handwave as to why they didn't do it in 3, beyond the obvious meta reason that doing so means you don't really have a game.
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Sep 15, 2021 20:00
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Pattonesque posted:well that's what they normally do, right, but IIRC they lost control of the relay network and had to slowboat it in, which brought them a bunch of jumps away from the Citadel? Sure, but they can still shut down the network if they reach the citadel physically (that was the whole point behind Sovereign's assault at the end of ME1) and they can move fast enough after reaching the galaxy to assault earth before anyone knows they're here, so it seems like they should have just held off on assaulting earth for a few hours to instead launch their surprise attack on the Citadel and instantly win the war.
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Sep 15, 2021 20:08
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I do think there's a decent amount of choices the community says is "obviously wrong" for reasons that really only work if you're reasoning backwards from the outcome. Miranda on the bubble is the biggest one, Zaeed as fireteam leader is another. You can sit down after the fact and say, "well, obviously Miranda's biotics aren't good enough" or "well Zaeed told you about all those times he was the only one who made it out alive" but without spoilers I don't think it's possible to logically deduce that Miranda works as a leader but not a biotic, or that Zaeed gets the team killed in one big fight but not the other.
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Sep 21, 2021 22:08
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