Interesting read that I found...
The direct link is
http://forums.steamp...d.php?t=2011810BE ADVISED THAT IT LINKS INTO ME3 DATA SO, I ONLY POSTED TO TOPICS ME2 STUFF TO AVOID SPOILERS.
Many of the missions directly involving the Collectors seem like they were set up for failure as well. How did the Illusive Man really get such advanced warning that the Collectors were planning to strike Horizon? Without the AA Towers, the probability of success for Shepard’s team would have been dramatically less. What’s more, Mordin’s countermeasures weren’t guaranteed to protect the team against the Seeker Swarms.
On the Collector Ship, the Illusive Man literally sends Shepard into a trap. The Illusive Man tries to justify this as being necessary to acquire important data. Shepard and his team are lucky to have made it off the ship, and he is rightfully furious at the Illusive Man for exposing him to such a bleak and potentially tragic situation.
Shepard’s expedition aboard the Derelict Reaper is an interesting one. If the Illusive Man was telling the truth in saying that he always suspected that the Collectors used an IFF system to navigate the Omega 4 Relay, why didn’t he send Shepard there to begin with? Why expose Shepard to all of the previous risks if not to hand him over to the Collectors? Cerberus had obviously been working on the Reaper for some time judging by how well set up the base seemed to be and the number of Husks on board.
Then we’ve got the matter of the IFF itself. It exposes the Normandy’s position to the Collectors. Shepard and the rest of his team is lucky to have boarded a shuttle before trials commenced, otherwise it’s probable that they all could have been killed during the assault. The best case scenario would have seen the Normandy taken if not for Joker’s heroics and EDI’s quick response.
Then we’ve got the Suicide Mission. It’s possible that the Illusive Man didn’t expect Shepard and his team to survive the trip. The most interesting development here is that the Illusive Man wants to keep the base intact because, according to him, it will assist humanity in better understanding the Reapers. “That knowledge, that framework could save us”. But how? What could have convinced the Illusive Man that what the Collectors were doing on the base – constructing a Human-Reaper – could prove invaluable to humanity’s fight against the Reapers? What does he get from it?
Remember what Sovereign said. "Your species develops along the paths we desire." The series has made it clear that you cannot use Reaper technology without aiding the Reapers. The Reapers expect us to use their technology. And that's where the Illusive Man has always been wrong. He thinks repurposing the Reaper technology is the key to their defeat, but in reality by doing so we are only setting ourselves up for failure.
What really caught my eye was this...
Remember what Sovereign said. "Your species develops along the paths we desire." The series has made it clear that you cannot use Reaper technology without aiding the Reapers.
By using that base something is going to go terribly wrong!
Here was another thing that caught my attention when reading this
Its a very interesting take on arrival and why it loads after horizon...
I think it’s fitting to start with the one thing that is proving most controversial. One of the biggest complaints about Mass Effect 2 was that it felt like it was largely retreading old ground. There was a widespread opinion that the Human-Reaper was being built by the Collectors in order to accomplish what Sovereign failed to do. That is to say, the Human-Reaper would act as a second vanguard. The game never confirmed either way so proponents of that theory (pretty much the entire fanbase) couldn’t be blamed for assuming as such. But upon closer investigation the idea comes off as fundamentally ridiculous.
EDI herself mentions at the very end of the game that the Collectors still need millions of humans to complete the Human-Reaper. Up until that point they’d only abducted tens of thousands, and all of those came from outlying colonies which were poorly defended along the fringes of the Terminus Systems. Where would the Collectors have managed to take millions more? Your squad-mates correctly states Earth aboard the Collector Ship. We can also assume that they’d target human colonies in the Attican Traverse and Skyllian Verge. If the Collectors had gone ahead and attempted such an incursion they’d have attracted much greater attention and provoked a much greater response. Not only from the Alliance but the entire galactic community. Given what we saw of them in Mass Effect 2, the Collectors have limited numbers and what appears to be only a single vessel. There’s no feasible way the Collectors could have accomplished this task on their own.
Except they wouldn’t have been alone. And Arrival makes this pretty clear. Since the release of Arrival, BioWare have been attacked for invalidating Mass Effect 2’s plot. If the Reapers have been heading to our Galaxy since the end of Mass Effect 1, why are they seemingly using the Collectors as tools to bring about their return? We can conclude that this is not what the Reapers intended with the Collectors. Arrival does not invalidate Mass Effect 2 but it does re-contextualize it. If anything, it strengthens it.
With Arrival, we’re treated to a story that essentially tells us that the Reapers are descending upon a system along the edge of the Galaxy (the Bahak System) that contains the closest – and, incidentally, one of the oldest - Mass Relay's available to the Reapers. By using a large quantity of Dark Energy, the Reapers are able to convert this seemingly normal secondary relay into something more versatile; giving it the ability to transmit cargo across much larger distances.
We assume, then, that the Reapers have always been heading towards this particular relay (in fact, in the final scene of ME2, I challenge you all to completely debunk the idea that the Reapers aren’t already flying towards the Milky Way as opposed to just ‘waking up’). This was Plan B after Sovereign failed. The actions of the Collectors, then, is something entirely different. The nature of the Human-Reaper must be reconsidered, because it’s obvious that it was never intended to allow the Reapers access to the Citadel again. As I said, if you play through the Suicide Mission, there is never any point that this is either explicitly confirmed or denied. So there isn’t a glaring paradox here.
If all of the above can be agreed upon, the question then becomes; why wouldn’t the Reapers have used the Alpha Relay to begin with? Why go through all the apparent trouble to come through the Citadel using a Vanguard when they could simply FTL to the Alpha Relay? It may be a surprise that this question comes up a lot. But as we know from the games, this isn’t a particularly viable option for the Reapers given the preferable alternative. Firstly, we know that the Reapers spend much of the duration of each 50,000 years hibernating in Dark Space. Despite their advanced state they don’t harness unlimited resources, and according to Vigil it is assumed that they do this in order to conserve said resources. Traveling through Dark Space for two years to reach the Alpha Relay would be counter-productive. It's an act of last resort.
It also removes their strategic advantage. The Citadel serves as a control center for the entire Mass Relay network and links directly to Dark Space. When the Keepers respond to the signal, the Reapers pour through and cripple the galaxy’s central network “in a single surprise attack”. What’s more, Vigil states that through the Citadel the Reapers are capable of disabling every Relay, effectively isolating every major star system/cluster in the galaxy. They are also capable of assimilating all of the information accumulated by a species. “Information is power and they knew everything about us”. The Alpha Relay cannot do any of the above. They are forced to jump from relay to relay, system to system, without the element of surprise.
Consider. Arrival completely fixes the issues that Mass Effect 2 had with seemingly rehashing the first game. As soon as the player finishes ‘Horizon’, they are inadvertently prompted to speak to Admiral Hackett about the Arrival mission. There is no choice. You can no longer access your private terminal without the mission being triggered. This is not an oversight. BioWare are trying to goad you into playing Arrival as soon as Horizon is complete.
Why? Because they’re trying to compel you to think about the Collectors differently. If you play Arrival immediately after Horizon there isn’t any chance the player will derive faulty conclusions about the Collectors and what they intend to do with the Human-Reaper. You’ll no longer assume that the Human-Reaper is supposed to be a Vanguard designed to replace Sovereign. Granted, we still don’t know exactly why the Collectors were building the Human-Reaper (aside from Reaper reproduction), but it isn’t fair to judge it irrelevant either.
In Mass Effect 2’s main narrative the last world that the Collectors hit throughout the game is Horizon. If Arrival can be played immediately following that can we assume that there is a connection? I think so. You've got to consider the fact that the Reaper's intended arrival through the Alpha Relay coincides with the Collector's activities (which are being monitored by Harbinger himself). This is not a random coincidence. It's a correlation. The Collectors have already started the Human-Reaper, but they dare not risk going into the heart of Alliance territory to continue abducting humans to complete it. So they stop after Horizon and await the arrival of the Reapers, who will prove to be more than sufficient in completing the task. The Collectors were simply getting a head-start in preparation for the culling of Earth during the Reaper invasion.
At the very end of Mass Effect 2, Harbinger says “you have failed, we will find another way”. I think in the context of the narrative, Harbinger is speaking not to the player but to the Collector General in saying that the Reapers will find another way to resume their construction of the Human-Reaper. Now the Reapers have to start from scratch.
Its interesting how the dlc's and choices all play into the outcome and why arrival comes after horizon.
Modifié par DemonSlayer_1, 18 décembre 2011 - 08:37 .
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