Changer the Elder wrote...
The fact that the Reapers are more than the usual big bad who comes every 50k years to kill people just because they can made my day. As an occassional Exiles writer, what ties me to that series is the very same moral dilemma - that sometimes to save the world, you can't be a hero and you have to kill people. Sometimes even good people. If you don't, the world goes boom.
I don't know if you've heard of the 'original dark energy ending' floating around in which the Reapers are actually the good guys trying to prevent the galaxy from being consumed with Dark Energy (here we're parting from the premise of "what if dark energy wasn't only responsible for the rapid expansion of the universe, but also of its rapid deterioration?") and all that, the Reapers were actually a last resort/massive sacrifice the entire galaxy had to make in order to maybe come up with an idea to stop the dark energy expansion/galactic deterioration- this is assuming that the organic milkshake actually contains nanites of some kind that somehow join and keep entire species' consciousness together so that they'll maintain sentience here. Thing is, as I understand it, this problem was much too complicated and individuals of that first species (that everyone assumes to be Harbinger) were too much like each other and as a consequence, even with all their joined intellect, couldn't come up with anything. And so, their harvesting of other species began! Ah, happy times! Okay, not really. In any case, all of the other species somehow had the same problem -Now, I think that's kind of impossible, the fact that virtually all the species the Reapers had ever harvested being as homogenous as they themselves once were, but that's something I'm willing to overlook, since I don't know in what conditions their species' evolved.
As the milennnia went by, the Reapers lost all hope [/Beauty and the Beast], and they were running out of time. That is until humans came on board. Sort of. The Reapers realized, because of Shepard, that humans might be the solution to their problem, because were so completely different from each other ("Yours is a very interesting species. For example, if there are
three humans in a room, there will be six opinions." -Samara. May the BSN forums beware). Supposedly, this is why Harbinger gave the Collectors the orders to harvest humans (It'd have been easier to start harvesting salarians, for instance. They don't put much of a fight); and this is also hinted numerous times throughout the second game. For instance, in Mordin's loyalty quest, he has a nice talk with Shepard about how he couldn't determine a human's ability or intellect with a first glance because of "too many variables", whereas it's easy to do that with turians, asari or salarians. Also, there's Haestrom's sun.
The thing is, Shepard would have found all of this out in the third game and the big decision you'd have to make was to reject the Reaper idea and hope the entire galaxy would find a way to stop it (even when they have little time, as evidenced by Haestrom's sun) or accept the Reaper idea and hope the sacrifice was worth it.
I think this would have fit the story much better. Maybe because I know nothing of Dark Energy and how it works, maybe because the decisions you have to make are much heavier than "control the
systemReapers, destroy the
systemReapers or merge with the
systemReapers"; Do you have the right to send an entire species to the milkshake machine for the greater good? Or should you put your faith in the brightest minds of the Galaxy (maybe with the Reapers' help, maybe without it) and hope they can come up with something? What IS the best way to go? Are they both equally bad? In my opinion, this is a much harder logic to argue against than "Yeah, synths will always kill organics because synths will always kill organics" and it feels a lot more like the "keep or destroy the Collector's Base" choice you had to make at the end of ME2- I actually stood there staring at the dialogue wheel for fifteen minutes, no joke; or maybe because I just feel it fits better within the lore, universe and evidence we had been previously given. But again, matter of opinion. And as a bonus, we get to find out the Reapers aren't really Eldritch abomination ship gods doing what they do for ****s and giggles.
Agh! Maybe I just rambled on and on about something that makes no sense or has nothing to do with the conversation at all! D: In any case, I'll leave it here. Totally would like to hear your opinion on the DEE.
Changer the Elder wrote...
Just don't bring salarians. We don't need another problem 
Unless it's Kirrahe. He'd turn his ship's drive core into a bomb and nuke the problem. Or hold the line.
Changer the Elder wrote...
Well, it's arguably fridge brilliance, but I think that the Catalyst was proven exactly that by Shepard's very presence in the heart of the Citadel and it accepted the fact. That's why it left the choice up to him/her, not because it couldn't control the Reapers anymore. But the organics proved him that the cycle, its solution, will not work anymore (it even says pretty much the exact words), since the organics have evolved in a way its main directive is useless for. Let it be completion of the Crucible, machines gaining actual organic-like sentience (even if you fried the geth, there's still EDI) or the fact that the races were able to put their differences aside and stand together.
And I think that Reapers/Catalyst are far more than AI/VI. They're part organic and even though it's tough to guess how exactly do they think ("We are each a nation", yet they seem to be one entity-per-Reaper at the same time), I doubt hitting them with a simple paradox to fry their brain would be enough. They seem to be fully cognitive and free from the usual boundaries of artificial intelligence. And, pardon the reference, due to their size and power, it's doubtful you could fire any question that could fry their potato.
"Why do hot dogs come in packages of ten when hot dog buns come in packages of eight?" Ahahaha!
Anyway, maybe it's because I only saw it once (stopped second playthrough right after saying my good-byes,started over) but I remember it telling Shepard that it, somehow, couldn't control the Reapers anymore after Shep entered the room. If he hadn't said anything like that, then I find it even more absurd that you'd have the option to sacrifice Shepard to tell the reapers to pretty pretty please GTFO my GD Galaxy with sugar and cherries on top rather than, I don't know, telling the holokid to call off his fleet. And if Reapers are, indeed, organic minds, then it'd have been much easier to reason with them.
Warning, the following dialogue is not in character because a writer I am not:-"Hey! You're kind of maintaining the cycle you're so desperate to save us from! Besides, there CAN be peace!"
-"Come on! Look what it took for there to be peace between the synths and their creators in this cycle? We had to start destroying the entire galaxy!"
-"But there WAS peace. It took a lot to get there, but we got there. You don't have the right to commit genocide just because you think we might end up killing ourselves, or each other. Tell you what: this cycle has achieved peace. You go back to where you came from, okay? I'm gonna make sure there are no wars in my lifetime. You send someone back here to check on us every, I don't know, 100 years. If there is a synth uprising, you destroy them and leave a warning. If in the next 100 years the same thing happens, take them but leave the rest. The entire galaxy doesn't have to pay because of one species' mistake, that's just... Dumb."
Or something to that effect. I'm pretty sure someone smarter than me, like I know the BW writers are, could come up with an argument much better than that.
Changer the Elder wrote...
Oh, so it wasn't just my impression. Well, too bad. I'm still glad EA took the franchise from Microsoft, I wouldn't have known about ME if I couldn't play it on my PS3. But yeah, some companies' business models are... plain stupid.
I bought a 360 just for Mass Effect (also, because I needed a newgen console. No PS3 for me :C). That is the hold BioWare games have on me (or at least it was). I was all, like, "OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG BIOWARE GAME!! MUST. BUY. 360!" in allcaps. Though the first MEseries game I played was ME2, because by the time I could afford a 360 ME was long gone. It took me months to find a copy. :c
Changer the Elder wrote...
Unfortunately, that presumes all the fans are as reasonable as yourself. My experience proves they are not. Some would understand that, but some would be more than a bit annoyed and just as they do now, they would... demand stuff. That was no way a win-win scenario.
Come on! People can't be THAT bad, can they?
The way I see it, most people ARE reasonable but the most visible ones are the, ah, jackasses. Besides, if BW had given a good reason for the release date to be pulled back and the fans outraged anyway, they'd look like fools. I don't think anyone intentionally wants to look like a fool, even if to save face on teh internets. Or they could not have given a release date at all until they made sure the game would hold up well.
Changer the Elder wrote...
On that, I do agree. But the business doctrine ordered them to spend their time on multiplayer and kinect voice stuff (again, sensing BW being paid to do it, not actually agreeing to do it). The multiplayer's less at fault, since it was in the project from the start and it was probably very hard to guess how much time will they need, but yes, there indeed have been some things that clearly seemed as wasting time.
I understand EA's need to cash in on multiplayer, which begs the question as to why did they demand so many unnecessary features and not extend the game's deadline? Again, it'd have been better if they just hadn't given a release date at all until they made sure they gave us a game worthy of BioWare.
Changer the Elder wrote...
Well, I know I'm not a good choice, but I can still see something like it happening. But then again, you could count on the fact that as soon as general fan populace found out, there would be more than enough people throwing a tantrum about "why these people and why not them and how Bioware only picked those they thought they'll reach an agreement with as a public stunt to keep them from admitting they're stupid"...etc, etc...
See, that's all they need: If someone asks "WAH WAH Y U NO PICK ME BW?!?!?!?!" and the staff had a legitimate reason to not pick this person, they can just print their forum post(s), shove it on their face and say "Because you were behaving like a five-year-old. If you had played like a big boy, you'd be here. There's dozens of people who held civilized arguments even with differing opinions and not once did they resort to petty insults or, ah "stfu". You weren't one of them."
As for the second issue people might have, how does that argument work? If they invited people of both sides to talk it's because they've admitted there's SOMETHING wrong with how they handled things, they want to make their fans happy and are now sitting down to talk to both sides to see how they can make both sides happy, better their reputation and sell moar games. I'm just curious as to how anyone'd make this work, thassall.
Changer the Elder wrote...
And good morning, world, I'm back in strength to stalk the forums again
... okay, I presumably should do something more productive today, too... fanart... yes, doing fanart seems like a good option 
Ahaha, I overslept. 'S what I get for staying up late destroying other people's empires.
Hmm... something productive would be a good idea. But... pencils... too... far away... [/Shatner]
Modifié par StillOverrated, 09 avril 2012 - 05:09 .
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