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[Goneaviking]

Clonedzero wrote...

Goneaviking wrote...

Wulfram wrote...

didymos1120 wrote...

Wulfram wrote...

If, for example, Humans with 9 years of experience of advanced technology can out fight the Turians....

You realize the whole point of that was that we got lucky. They underestimated our military capacity.  Liberating Shanxi really was not due to our innate awesomeness.  The turians weren't gonna get caught out like that again and would have curbstomped us with ease if the Council hadn't stepped in.

They'd have overwhelmed us with numbers, yes  But in the battles which took place they were clearly outfought, taking greater casualties than the humans.

It's worth remembering that the Turians don't even regard the First Contact War as a war, to them it was just a couple of ******-for-tat skirmishes with apparent criminals. The only battles that humans won were ones that we had the benefit of surprise.

What makes it jarring to me isn't that we were noticeably superior to them in their field of species, it was that in a handful of years we'd mastered the technology to the level that we could compete with them with their thousands of years of development.

thats sorta  because we had all that tech handed to use and explained to us
it really doesnt take that long to incorperate a new technology. look how quickly cellphones became something that pretty much everyone has? look how quickly cars became super common? look how quickly well any significant advancement in technology was intergrated into society.

ive had an xbox 360 for what? 5 years now? im extremely familiar with how it works. my sister who's never used one before only took a couple minutes to figure out how to work it as well as i can.

for a more mass effect example, humans grasped onto mass effect technology with alarming speed. the rest of the galaxy jumped onto medi-gel with alarming speed to become the norm in medical technology accross all species. i dont get why thats so hard to believe that handing someone technology with the schematics on how to build and operate it that they'd start using it pretty quickly lol

Mobile Phone technology was built upon science that we developed ourselves and was well understood by the researchers, it made the developments a logical progression that didn't require that new theories be developed and rethinking of old ways of seeing the world.

Discovering a completely alien technology would be a rather more complicated process. Reverse engineering the technology would absolutely take a lot longer than a decade before we'd get to the point we would be able to make usable prototypes let alone mass assembled vessels and weapons. The technology will have been developed along a technological path that makes no sense to us, with inbuilt assumptions that are not only foreign to us but unknowable. New theories have to be developed to explain the new findings, existing sciences need to be rethought to take into consideration new information from the extinct alien culture.

At no point was anyone holiding humanity's hand after they found the hidden mars base, any surviving instruction manual wouldn't be written in a language that any human understood. So everything has to be done blind, with no guidance.

Developing completely new technology, and then training thousands and millions of people in its use is going to take a little longer than learning how to use the controller for a gaming console.

Then we've got the strategic issue. How many wars has humanity fought in space prior to first contact? My guess is: not enough to plausibly develop competent strategies for military engagements. Admirals can think and theorise all they like, but only experience is going to help them develop winning strategies, especially with recently added technologies. 

Yet a few short years after leaving their system humanity was on par with the most powerful military in the known galaxy in tech and strategizing.

[ISpeakTheTruth]

That's why I'm rather upset that the main goal of ME3 is to save Earth... come on every SciFi movie/game involves saving Earth I wanted Mass Effect to be different

[Goneaviking]

Clonedzero wrote...
you dont have to play it if you dont like the major theme of the series

I haven't seen anyone put forward a credible reason to believe that it actually is a major theme of the series, certainly not the major theme.

If it actually were humanity seeking it's place in the universe I wouldn't object to it, but considering the game starts with the Alliance already being a recognised power it's a tough sell that that's what the game's about.

[Swimming Ferret]

Though apparently in ME3 Earth is already screwed. So meh, my Shep will go live on the Hanar homework and swim with the jellies.

Dreams aside, it does seem that humans have an intense Mary Sue complex in ME. We are awesome at everything and even if we are complete ****s we are rewarded for it. ME1 ending, anyone?

[mcsupersport]

In war it is almost always the underdog who innovates, whether it was the Americans in the revolutionary war, the Germans blitzkrieg in WW2, or the Vietcong in Vietnam. The is very little reason for a superior power to change tactics or tech, because why change what works? For at least a thousand years the Turians haven't needed anything more than their fleets to win, even against the Krogan they managed with brute force.

[Whatever42]

I'm not sure why the protagonist of the game is always special either. That just doesn't make sense. Almost every single person in universe is just an ordinary shmuck. We should just play some bored office worker who watches the action on tv. That would be far more realistic. Its just lazy writing that we always play the hero.

[jamesp81]

Really?

It's quite simple. Bioware is in business to make money. They don't make money by making a game that gets all preachy to their 100% human audience about how humans are not noteworthy, inherently bad, or are of no unique intrinsic worth.

Grow the hell up people.

Modifié par jamesp81, 08 août 2011 - 02:32 .

[jamesp81]

mcsupersport wrote...

In war it is almost always the underdog who innovates, whether it was the Americans in the revolutionary war, the Germans blitzkrieg in WW2, or the Vietcong in Vietnam. The is very little reason for a superior power to change tactics or tech, because why change what works? For at least a thousand years the Turians haven't needed anything more than their fleets to win, even against the Krogan they managed with brute force.

Actually, my read was that the Turians were losing the war with the Krogan due to the numbers, before the genophage.  I think it was more a case that the Turians were winning most of the battles, but were losing to far superior numbers.

[Dean_the_Young]

I wouldn't be surprised if the Renegade path is 'mankind's reach exceeded his grasp', with it coming tumbling down in the worst ways possible.

[Dean_the_Young]

Which category would I fall under?

I would like to say I would certainly support it whole-heartily if the Paragon alternative was something more along the lines of this.

http://social.biowar...3/index/7852081

[lovgreno]

Dean_the_Young wrote...

I wouldn't be surprised if the Renegade path is 'mankind's reach exceeded his grasp', with it coming tumbling down in the worst ways possible.

I can see this happening to the paragon path as well actualy. Paragon decisions are as arrogant and naive as the renegade ones, just in a different way.

In fact a ending where everyone loses everything but their lives is kind of interesting.

[Abispa]

Only humans are buying and playing this game. The support of Turian, Quarian and especially Krogan players has been shameful if not nonexistent.

Earth is the planet we know for good and ill. Bioware doesn't have to write pages and pages and pages of riveting codex [never bother with them myself] or create an overacted scene to explain its importance, particularly to Shepard.

Imagine scene after scene of Liara breaking into tears at the destruction of alien worlds, over acting to the hilt to make us FEEL something about "historic" alien sites that didn't exist before the game-makers created them.

*Sob!* "Oh, Shepard! Look at the Elcor city of Scratchass! Centuries of cultural enlightenment brought about by the intense study into flatulence and poetry destroyed by the damned evil god-like sentient starships! They must be stopped! *Sob!* THEY MUST PAY FOR THIS OUTRAGE!"

And of course the protagonist of ME is "special." S/he has to be able to conquer a race of genocidal god-like sentient spaceships through a series of missions using her/himself and two other people using machine guns.

[Humanoid_Typhoon]

SandTrout wrote...

Can anyone please point out to me anywhere that Humanity is unreasonably portrayed as 'special' other than being unique, which every species in ME is?

I think it may be the thing about the Protheans paying a little special attention to us.

[Anacronian Stryx]

Someone With Mass wrote...

Saphra Deden wrote...

Humans being more genetically diverse than the aliens is stupid.

The speed of our rise is just... implausible.

I would've bought it if had taken the Alliance about a hundred years to be founded and rise to power among Earth's nations, but the games and the books makes it sound like it happened overnight, which is very improbable by today's standards.

I seem to remember that before the release of ME1 some of the devs hinted at there being a mystery involved in just how fast humanity had adopted to space travel and the formation of the Alliance - they also hinted at the in hindsight that the governments of Earth didn't seem all that surprised when the data cache was found on Mars.

I wonder why that story line was dropped.

[Vengeful Nature]

SandTrout wrote...

So BioWare isn't composed of BioLogists. Who'd have thunk it. I recognize that diveristy is a plot device, but not one that lays out the galaxy on Humanity's lap. If you wish to discuss the validity of the plot device itself, there are other threads for that.

Writers are supposed to research this stuff if they use it in their media. This is Science-Fiction we're talking about. Without a degree of scientific accuracy, you may as well have space fairies that come in a turn all the Reapers into bubblegum, smiles and leprechaun farts. I'm not saying you can't have some futuristic tech in there, since we need our Unobtanium to be able to get to other stars, but when a writer gets this basic stuff wrong, your universe is no more science-fictional than Star Wars or Lord of the Rings.

It seems like being special isn't such a good thing in this case, now does it? From a practical litterary standpoint, it would be difficult to convince an audience to empathise with the vitims if it were some random alien species geting harvested. Saying that the Reapers targeting us first makes us unduely special is like saying that 28 Days Latter made England unduely special because they were able to make the virus.

But the writers do a great job of getting us to empathise with these aliens to begin with. Would you honestly refer to the asari, the turians or the salarians as "some random alien species"?

But my point here is that nothing special about humanity is required when you can make a human-centric story, but about humanity's role in the larger interstellar community. You can focus on humanity, but you can also bring in this massive galaxy full of interesting and dangerous things. The interesting part, and why this is human-centric, is that it's about how humanity fits into this larger community. It doesn't matter if your special human-unique feature is a blessing or a curse, it's unnessary, and also a hackneyed cliche.

So we know that the Reaper interest in humanity isn't just arbitrary. Reapers think we're special, no one else does, and we're not getting anything on a silver platter.

It doesn't matter if anyone else thinks we're special. The story is about the fight against the Reapers, so what the Reapers think of us is a pretty big turning point in the story. Also, the fact that the Reapers think of us in special terms at all is what we're discussing, and what I'm saying is, that it is a boring and hackneyed trope that is overused in science fiction, that we demand this special attention in the first place. Wouldn't a far better story have been one of an indiscriminate threat to all galactic life to an equal measure, and how humanity comes to fit into this plethora of life because of the events of the games, either as an integral part or as a dominator?

I thought it was just alludeing to why the Reapers might pick Humanity over other species (goes along the the Harbinger thing). Just because Reapers value genetic diversity doesn't inherently make it some overpowering trait beyond dealing with the Reapers.

No, but it still makes humanity the special kids that are somehow better or more interesting to the Reapers than everyone else. Again, an overused cliche, especially in the wake of the Halo series.

Events that make the Main Character special do not inherently make that character's entire species special.

They do when we are told they do, both by the writers of the games, and by a large part of this community. I can't count the times that people have supposed that Earth is a target because if Shepard's actions in the face of Reaper aggression.

Modifié par Vengeful Nature, 08 août 2011 - 03:57 .

[matt-bassist]

SandTrout wrote...

Honestly, ME doesn't portray Humanity as all that 'special'. We are unique in our diversity, both biologically and culturally, but all of the other species are pretty unique as well. The Asari are a race of jedi space-elves, the Turians are a highly disciplined military dictatorship, the Salarians are sneaky, quick-thinking, interstellar lizards, the Krogan are biological tanks, the Elcor are slow-tempered inhabitants of a high-gravity world, and the Volus are dormant Biotic Gods. In this menagerie, humans are not that special.

The only thing that is Special about humanity is that we happen to be the ones that BioWare is marketing to, and therefor the story will be a human-centric one.

Let me correct that for you: ME1 doesn't portray Humanity as all that special. Following the change of lead writers, ME2 and... other non-canon media, have portrayed Humanity as the only important race. Let's hope ME3 changes things back.

[Patchwork]

Anacronian Stryx wrote...

Someone With Mass wrote...

Saphra Deden wrote...

Humans being more genetically diverse than the aliens is stupid.

The speed of our rise is just... implausible.

I would've bought it if had taken the Alliance about a hundred years to be founded and rise to power among Earth's nations, but the games and the books makes it sound like it happened overnight, which is very improbable by today's standards.

I seem to remember that before the release of ME1 some of the devs hinted at there being a mystery involved in just how fast humanity had adopted to space travel and the formation of the Alliance - they also hinted at the in hindsight that the governments of Earth didn't seem all that surprised when the data cache was found on Mars.

I wonder why that story line was dropped.

Aliens being the driving force of Earth's development is almost as trite as humanity being a special snowflake. However someone (the protheans?) engineering humanity to be the key to defeating the Reapers is one of the few ways I can swallow the cliche.

Half remembered codex entry but didn't the Alliance win against the Turians because of mechs? 

[Elvis_Mazur]

Because, if the other races have many years of advantage than us, it doesn't make any sense that they somehow stagnated technologically. We should have inferior tech, and that is not what is happening in the Mass Effect universe.

If we were the first species to discover the Citadel, it would make sense if we were superior.
If we were technologically inferior during the current age of Mass Effect, that would make even more sense.

[Whatever42]

matt-bassist wrote...

SandTrout wrote...

Honestly, ME doesn't portray Humanity as all that 'special'. We are unique in our diversity, both biologically and culturally, but all of the other species are pretty unique as well. The Asari are a race of jedi space-elves, the Turians are a highly disciplined military dictatorship, the Salarians are sneaky, quick-thinking, interstellar lizards, the Krogan are biological tanks, the Elcor are slow-tempered inhabitants of a high-gravity world, and the Volus are dormant Biotic Gods. In this menagerie, humans are not that special.

The only thing that is Special about humanity is that we happen to be the ones that BioWare is marketing to, and therefor the story will be a human-centric one.

Let me correct that for you: ME1 doesn't portray Humanity as all that special. Following the change of lead writers, ME2 and... other non-canon media, have portrayed Humanity as the only important race. Let's hope ME3 changes things back.

In ME1, all the races were complaining that humanity was be given special status. It's all about humans joining the spectres. At the end of the game, they even take over the council. ME1 most certainly does portray humanity as a special snowflake.

In ME2, humans are actually less the centre of things. We travel to many non-human worlds where humans are nothing special. The only thing special about humanity is that the Reapers have chosen humanity as their victim because of some genetic diversity. This is likely because humanity is the youngest race. However, humanity is not really shining in ME2 as it is in ME1.

[Whatever42]

PetrySilva wrote...

Because, if the other races have many years of advantage than us, it doesn't make any sense that they somehow stagnated technologically. We should have inferior tech, and that is not what is happening in the Mass Effect universe.

If we were the first species to discover the Citadel, it would make sense if we were superior.
If we were technologically inferior during the current age of Mass Effect, that would make even more sense.

China has a much richer history than Europe with many centuries of technological advancement and innovation. Yet the Europeans took that technology and very quickly surpassed them.  This happened because the Chinese were an incredibily stagnant society while Europe was a brutally chaotic, super-competitive environment.

Sounds pretty similar here. 

Modifié par Whatever666343431431654324, 08 août 2011 - 04:03 .

[silentassassin264]

So we have people complaining about humans being "special" when Krogan have redundant organ systems, regenerate, and are well nigh indestructable and adaptable in the first place. Asari that live for a thousand years, all have magic powers space bending powers, can go inside your mind, control galactic commerce and culture, etc. Seriously? Find something real to complain about. Humans need to have something special besides being Reaper's Choice Chow.

[Anacronian Stryx]

Ser Bard wrote...

Aliens being the driving force of Earth's development is almost as trite as humanity being a special snowflake. However someone (the protheans?) engineering humanity to be the key to defeating the Reapers is one of the few ways I can swallow the cliche.

Half remembered codex entry but didn't the Alliance win against the Turians because of mechs? 

Well then ME is already trite since the protheans are the driving force behind human development and they are definitely alien.

But if i remember this correctly there were indications that the cache on Mars wasn't the first prothean technology found by humans and by the time they opted to go for Mars the governments were already prepared to deal with the political upheaval.. or something like that.