158 réponses à ce sujet

[Sajuro]

angj57 wrote...

Whatever. I think the thread title says it best. The people they lost are red shirts-- the Illusive Man doesn't really care about losing them. We really don't know if what they learned from those experiments outweighed what they lost by losing their teams.

The choices and tone of the game make a lot more sense if Cerberus is competent. They certainly seem to freak out the Council and the Alliance, which wouldn't make sense if they are as bumbling as people say.

I would be freaked out  if someone who screwed up constantly had such dangerous weapons.

[rabidhanar]

Shandepared wrote...

If they are inept how do they keep getting their hands on such volatile weapons, how have they not wiped themselves out through work related accidents or been rounded up by the Alliance/Council?

Illusive Man keeps buying more people and weapons. hell, If he is fine with destroying bases for security risks a few people won't phase him.

[rabidhanar]

Shandepared wrote...

How does he keep getting money? Investors don't have infinite bank accounts.

Counterfeiting maybe?

It's just another loophole in the story, we have no idea. Hell if he had infinite money why doesn't he just buy out all corporations and use them for research.

[Highdragonslayer]

Hey guys! Judging from Cerbersus' track record they wouldn't be able to survive the zerg swarm

[Sajuro]

Shandepared wrote...

How does he keep getting money? Investors don't have infinite bank accounts.

He has the same investors who provided Umbrella with their finances

[Sajuro]

mrsph wrote...

How good is the health-care for the average Cerberus employee?

I imagine it is quite excellent, just getting to take advantage of it is another story.

[killersinc]

angj57 wrote...

I just don't get it. Everyone talks about how incompetent Cerberus is. I don't think you guys are thinking it through enough.

Cerberus successes:

Restoring Shepard
Building EDI
Rebuilding and Improving the Normandy
Finding the Derelict Reaper (the Council/ Alliance can't even prove that Reapers exist)

Someone will argue that these were actually failures because Shepard can turn against Cerberus. Irrelevant. TIM's primary goal was to beat the Collectors and he succeeds in doing this through these projects. You could also argue that killing Kohoku was a success-- not a nice thing to do, but he was a security leak, and it can't be easy to take out an Alliance admiral.

Cerberus failures:

Jack
Husks
Rachni
Thorian Creepers
The team on the Derelict Reaper
The Firewalker Team

These are all minor failures. In each of these projects, from a Cerberus point of view, the potential gain-- getting a super weapon, far outweighs the potential loss-- one science team. Jack is also established to be a rogue team and it's debatable whether it should even count.

Then, finally, there are all the missions we don't hear about. Cerberus is a shadow organization, and their successes are not going to be as publicized as their failures. Clearly they maintain an extremely effect information network and a powerful funding base. Overall, I think most Cerberus "failures" are calculated risks with teams that are judged to be expendible, rather than major setbacks for the organization.

I agree with you that cerberus isn't a complete failure. Remember the red shirts were the dying group in star trek. They were successful in getting the job done but at huge costs. Same with cerberus. I will agree that they building EDI and finding the reaper was a stroke of brilliance. But the reaper did kill off their entire group. Also I want to see where they had actually achieved their goals. TIM needs to step up his game and give us a tour of the missions that went right. I like cerberus but they not giving us a true view of where they will achieve the goals.

[lovgreno]

Sajuro wrote...

Shandepared wrote...

How does he keep getting money? Investors don't have infinite bank accounts.

He has the same investors who provided Umbrella with their finances

I assure you all that in finance we usualy waste at least a quarter of all money on projects we know are probably hopeless. If you add some vague ideas about things like "humanitys best" or "we are the cynical tough guys who are smart enough to do what is needed" or "we are kind of racist but we never say it out loud" there is always someone with too much time and money on their hands who wants to give you money.

[RiouHotaru]

EDI states that Cerberus uses dummy corporations as a front, which gives them a budget of several billion credits per year.



Yeah, I know, sorta ridiculous. But I agree, Cerberus' track record of utterly fantastic failures doesn't inspire any confidence, and Overlord was simply the final nail in the coffin (Honestly, if you really agreed with Archer's plan and didn't feel the least bit guilty about David you are a heartless, souless monster and possibly a liar)

[JohnnyBeGood2]

Shandepared wrote...

Sajuro wrote...
He has the same investors who provided Umbrella with their finances

Umbrella went bankrupt pretty quickly once they started losing labs, as I recall. The whole Raccoon City getting nuked kind of put a damper on things. Then they lost their Island and Arctic labs...

Shand, you weren't about to say: "therefore, Cerberus must be doing a good job because they still have financiers" were you?

[Ahriman Dragonhand]

Failure and successes can be quite relative. For example, when looking at reports from Overlord I think TIM would put the emphasis in that it can be done, not in that it blew in their hands. History remembers the invention/achievement/whatever but rarely metions how many failed tries there were before success.



Shepard is remembered as the one who put down Saren, should we think he couldn't defeat him in Virmire hence giving him only a 50% success rate? As I said, imho everything is in the mind of the observer and you can bet that many things we label as "failure" TIM will merely see them as one step in the right direction, just not the final step.

[MadCat221]

angj57 wrote...

HopHazzard wrote...

Frankly, it's not Cerberus's success to failure ratio that I take issue with. It's the fact that they've repeatedly experimented on beings capable of calculus.

Who? The Telton Project (Jack) was a rogue cell, not the main organization. The Rachni are intelligent, but no one knew what the Rachni were really like pre-Noveria. I'll remind you that the Council gets furious with Shepard that he didn't kill the Rachni queen on sight. According to Miranda, the Husks and Thorian Creeprs were already "turned" before they began experimenting on them.

Teltin is only a "Rogue Cell" because it's a convenient excuse to ethically absolve themselves of the mess there.  If things turned out differently and the study there was a success, they'd be singing a whole different tune.

[Sledge454]

HopHazzard wrote...

Sledge454 wrote...

HopHazzard wrote...
Except that when every single project that gets discovered is a "rogue cell" that he didn't know about, it kinda just looks like he's lying. Hence it becomes implausible even if the excuse worked the first one or two times.

Have you ever listened to a politician?  As long as he's consistent, people will accept anything.

Except he's not running for office. He's running a known extremist group.

Do you know the definition of "semantics"?

Try not to take everything so literally.

[HopHazzard]

I know the definition of semantics. It why I always try to say exactly what I mean as precisely as possible.

[lovgreno]

MadCat221 wrote...

Teltin is only a "Rogue Cell" because it's a convenient excuse to ethically absolve themselves of the mess there.  If things turned out differently and the study there was a success, they'd be singing a whole different tune.

And there are sure suspiciously many of these "rogue cells" of failiure.

[Giggles_Manically]

Shandepared wrote...

JohnnyBeGood2 wrote...

Shand, you weren't about to say: "therefore, Cerberus must be doing a good job because they still have financiers" were you?

If they were doing a lousy job nobody would want to waste so much money on them.

cough SPIDER MAN 3 cough

[SandTrout]

Think about this one:

Miranda has been a Cerberus operative for approximately 15 years (she joined as a teenager and is in her 30's now), and the only very major setback she's experienced (that we know of) was when Lazarus station security was hacked by what's his name. That's one 2 year project out of 15 +/- years of operations. Not bad, considering that Cerberus regularly takes on tasks that are either to ethically shady or risky for standard commercial Research and Development.

It's highly likely that even the 'failures' of Cerberus yielded advancements that were taken advantage of by Human corporations and the Alliance, even if they never knew the true origins of the advancements. The experiments that were performed at the Pragia facility probably lead the way for L4 and L5 enhancements for example. We do know that some of the scientist involved did piggyback their results onto the Ascension project.

High risk, and high gain for humanity as a whole, if not for the poor bastards sucked into TIM's web.