15168 réponses à ce sujet

[Boilrig]

(Anderson) Beats me.

Modifié par Boilrig, 12 mars 2011 - 09:09 .

[Sinapus]

(Alt Miranda) I may be bad, but I feel good!

(Had an Army of Darkness flashback when viewing that image...)

[TheMarshal]

(Anderson) That picture? It could be anything! ...even a weapon!

[keboo]

Bump for 1st page.

[Ieldra]

Hmm....apparently everyone has moved to play DA2. While I've been playing DA2 as well, none of its characters come close to Miranda in being immediately fascinating and having long-term appeal as well.

[Jebel Krong]

not me - the demo was plain awful and i hate fantasy anyway. actually tbh given the drought of new games i was hoping i'd like it, but...

[drwells123]

Jebel Krong wrote...

not me - the demo was plain awful and i hate fantasy anyway. actually tbh given the drought of new games i was hoping i'd like it, but...

Me neither, too busy reading (and procrastinating on writing). But yes, all the threads I watch have slowed to a crawl and my pageviews have been kneecapped
Hopefully Arrival will bring some fresh conversational fodder.

[Ieldra]

Hmm...I guess it's too much to hope that Miranda will feature in Arrival? I haven't followed that thread since any real information is buried under a ton of baseless speculation.

[drwells123]

Ieldra2 wrote...

Hmm...I guess it's too much to hope that Miranda will feature in Arrival? I haven't followed that thread since any real information is buried under a ton of baseless speculation.

Not to my knowledge, but I hope since it's the last bridging DLC it will give some hints as to what people like Miranda will be doing in ME3, in the way LotSB did for Liara. (More baseless speculation, I'm afraid.)

Modifié par drwells123, 14 mars 2011 - 12:01 .

[Jebel Krong]

even if she's not actively featured, i'm sure she will as possible team-member when you go on-mission. so far BW have resisted getting expensive VAs back for the DLCs, depends though if it's done in conjunction with ME3, if so then anything's possible.

[jtav]

Ieldra2 wrote...

Hmm....apparently everyone has moved to play DA2. While I've been playing DA2 as well, none of its characters come close to Miranda in being immediately fascinating and having long-term appeal as well.

I just finished it yesterday, and I had the completely opposite reaction. I found the companions so much better than the ones in ME2, including Miranda. DA2 gave me a level of moral ambiguity and character depth that I've been after for years. Several times during the game, I wish I could've taken Miranda and put her in DA2. Without spoiling much, she should have had the same level of ambiguity as Anders when it came to politics.

[Ieldra]

I agree that the ME games don't do moral ambiguity well. I meant the appeal of Miranda's personality isn't matched by any NPC in DA2. Not for me, anyway. Anders is way too passionate to fill the same slot, and Miranda's moral ambiguity is there even if it's not used in the game's story at all. The ME team didn't do enough with Miranda, but that doesn't lessen her appeal.

[Prudii Aden]

Having recently finished Dragon Age 2, I'll admit they did a reasonable job with the characters, but I didn't really feel any attachment to them. Certainly for Anders and Isabella, the attachment was there, but that was partially due to Origins and Awakening. I was more cheered by seeing a couple of Origins characters than most of the sequel's characters. I suspect this was because I got to know them and what made them tick, rather than having to wait for a companion quest to pitch up before I could have a brief chat with them about the problem du jour.

[themark443]

I can't really say too much about DA2 since I don't have it. Never really been a fan of the medieval RPGs. I've been too busy working on my fic. As for the whole 'Arrival' buzz, part of me is hoping that it isn't going to be some sort of 'reset button' for the third game. By that I mean, kill off most of the team because they don't have the budget for it. I'm hoping that won't be the case since I'm pulling for some sort of happy ending with Miranda.

[HighFlyingDwarf]

This thread is awesome.

Miranda for ME3!

[ScoobyJew]

HighFlyingDwarf wrote...

This thread is awesome.

Miranda for ME3!

Agreed good sir!

[drwells123]

www.fanfiction.net/s/6708374/7/

[Ieldra]

HighFlyingDwarf wrote...

This thread is awesome.

Miranda for ME3!

Thank you. Not so awesome any more after all this time I'm afraid. Too many topics have been exhaustively debated. But Miranda herself is as awesome as ever.

I  must say it is surprising that nothing has got out about the return of ME1/2 characters. If nobody wants to say anything, that usually bodes ill. On the other hand, there is this old chart by Christina Norman where "keep the old team" was an important item to keep in mind for ME3. This waiting is insane....

[Jebel Krong]

? nothing has "gotten out" about anything - that's what's driven so many people away in frustration in the last 6 months or so... i understand they want to hype DA2, but releasing no mass effect info at all just pisses the people not interested in the other project off and is, therefore, self-defeating. BW's marketing is plain awful and amateurish.

[Ieldra]

BTW, this is what I've posted on another thread about Miranda being the reason my interest in ME2 has not waned after more than one year. Most Miranda fans seems to be largely indifferent to that aspect of her backstory, but for me SF has always also meant exploring possible paths into the future:

ME2 - Miranda Lawson. There are so many cautionary tales about genetic engineering I'm thoroughly sick of it. It was such a relief to see a functional genetically engineered character with desirable traits. Add that she's got a personality I can immediately relate to so much that it's not hard to write fanfic about her, and she's the main reason my mind has stayed on ME2 for more than a year. I can only hope they don't ruin all that by canonically confirming her infertility.

Miranda's genetic engineering and what the fact that such things are possible might mean for humanity's future has generated much less interest than the considerably less important topic of her sex life and her romance with Shepard. I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that most people are more interested in soap operas in space than in actual SFal concepts, but I still find it disappointing.

Modifié par Ieldra2, 15 mars 2011 - 10:14 .

[HighFlyingDwarf]

I'm not going to go into any length bashing Bioware, the trolls on the DA2 boards are having a field day as it stands, but yes, it is frustrating that there hasn't really been much talk about ME3 wise.

How about Arrival, surely there's some info on the way with that?

[drwells123]

Ieldra2 wrote...

ME2 - Miranda Lawson. There are so many cautionary tales about genetic engineering I'm thoroughly sick of it. It was such a relief to see a functional genetically engineered character with desirable traits. Add that she's got a personality I can immediately relate to so much that it's not hard to write fanfic about her, and she's the main reason my mind has stayed on ME2 for more than a year. I can only hope they don't ruin all that by canonically confirming her infertility.

jtav had a nice bit in Persistence of Memory where Liara tells Miranda an Asari myth akin to that of Icarus - i.e. someone reaches for some knowledge or ability that people "shouldn't" have and it destroys them. (I'm butchering the details, but I believe that was the gist.) Of course, Miranda is disgusted and angered by this story. (And I can only imagine her reaction to Flowers For Algernon.)

There was a debate on the Liara thread a while back about whether the Lazarus project was "right", and whether Liara was right to go look for Shepard's body rather than let the dead rest. As I recall, more than one person suggested that death is not for humans to tamper with, or that refusing to accept it reflects some sort of God complex or delusional withdrawal from reality.

Whenever I used to read about some religion, philosophy, or other belief system that suggests death is merely part of a cycle, or that "it's our mortality that defines us", I coudn't help thinking, "This is just high-flown bulls--- trying to evade or reconcile people to a fundamentally rotten aspect of the world." It struck me as the same kind of thinking used to justify human sacrifice or the deaths of people from diseases that, later, proved easily curable - in other words, thinking used as an excuse for the failings of, or unwillingness to apply, reason.

Then I read something in Atlas Shrugged that really nailed this for me. Animals - i.e. beings that can't reason - are defined by a circle. They live and die, or are killed. They are forced into an equilibrium with their environment. But the shape for humans is a straight line - going forward, changing their environment to better suit them. Looked at this way, death is just one more obstacle to be overcome, not passively yielded to. The same goes for the human limitations that are overcome by Miranda's engineering.

This isn't meant as some blanket argument that everything humans do is right, or that they're somehow apart from or better than nature, or that all inventions represent progress, or that it's okay to despoil the earth for our own pleasure, etc. We have some ways of looking at the world that were useful once but are dangerous liabilities now, and become more so as our capabilities increase - Nassim Taleb has made a career out of talking about this. Likewise, there are things in nature and in human society that reason can't be used to replace (and Hayek made a career out of talking about that).

If the wages of reason are still subject to misuse by the lizard brain (and if I recall we already had the debate here about using reason to simply engineer out the lizard brain, versus letting people make that choice as individuals), I'm glad we don't have to listen to any in-game sermonizing about playing God, eating the forbidden fruit, or using the Lazarus project to resurrect Hitler. Instead, it's taken for granted that overcoming human limitations is inherently a good thing and that that's where our hope lies.

[MsSihaKatieKrios]

No matter what, death is pretty much insurmountable. Besides, could you live with your conscience bugging you for eternity if you could live forever?

[jtav]

It was more of a Frankenstein myth that Icarus, but that was the gist of it. And of course she would hate it because it branded her as unnatural/soulless. I think her creation was immoral and I think Lazarus was immoral, but I'm always very conscious that she wouldn't agree with me. I get around it by saying that Shepard wasn't truly dead and/or Miranda was an instrument of the divine even if she wouldn't acknowledge it as such. I really wish they hadn't gone the Lazarus angle because they were so manifestly unwilling to touch on the metaphysical implications. Most major religions have been turned on their year and nobody cares. Ah, the perils of being a Catholic fan of this universe...

I have more or less left for the greener pastures of DA2. Anders and Isabela have grabbed me by the nose in the same way that Miranda once did, and I find the world deeper and richer, with the characters also being better drawn. I'll still be around a little, but not nearly as much.

[Jebel Krong]

MsSihaKatieKrios wrote...

No matter what, death is pretty much insurmountable. Besides, could you live with your conscience bugging you for eternity if you could live forever?

i don't have a conscience. though boredom would be a factor... eventually.