23455 réponses à ce sujet

[Benchpress610]

3DandBeyond wrote...

It all makes complete sense now. The kid or whoever the creator is created the citadel and plans for the crucible so the created could destroy the creator. Where's my prize?

???? Could you please include a diagram?

[3DandBeyond]

Benchpress610 wrote...

3DandBeyond wrote...

It
all makes complete sense now. The kid or whoever the creator is created
the citadel and plans for the crucible so the created could destroy the
creator. Where's my prize?

../../../images/forum/emoticons/andy.png???? Could you please include a diagram?../../../images/forum/emoticons/lol.png

In order to do that I'd need to be ambidextrous and double-jointed.  My pre-arthritic condition precludes such things.

Some things are just like the mirror in mirror effect. You know where you point a mirror into a mirror and the reflection goes on forever. The ending starts a cascade like that.

As pointed out by others, once you start down the rabbit trail of trying to explain it, you just opened up another rabbit trail you must chase. And so on and on and on until reality has at last finally folded upon itself and what is real no longer exists and what was once not real is, yep, it's reality now. At that point you will believe anything, buy anything, do anything-just to make it stop.

Modifié par 3DandBeyond, 02 mai 2012 - 08:12 .

[mallot75]

Lohan7 wrote...

Favorite moment is when I was finally able to have Shepard kill Kai Leng. The only problem was that Kai Leng ran to much, it should have been a staight up fight.  I mean what is the melee ability for anyway.

Yeah but the renagade options was awesome, especially how its just like hell yea!

[sdinc009]

Exactly why many are concerned about the EC DLC because they say they're "clarifying". All they will end up doing is attempting to fill plot holes and in the process create more unexplained plot holes and on and on it will go.

[3DandBeyond]

mallot75 wrote...

Lohan7 wrote...

Favorite moment is when I was finally able to have Shepard kill Kai Leng. The only problem was that Kai Leng ran to much, it should have been a staight up fight.  I mean what is the melee ability for anyway.

Yeah but the renagade options was awesome, especially how its just like hell yea!

Melee would have been cool, but that final stab "this is for Thane" was worth the rest.

[AmstradHero]

Thanatos144 wrote...

AmstradHero wrote...

Thanatos144 wrote...
Seems you all stuck on the fact that the geth are the first synthetic lifeforms that found a way out of genocide to save themselves. Instead you all seem to foolishly use it a a fault when.in truth it is needed to end the cycle. I don't expect any of you to accept it. It would fake away a major strawman

So we just happened to get the Geth AND EDI in this one cycle? Something that's NEVER happened before?

Quick question: Do you have any proof that the Geth are the first synthetic race to not try to wipe out all organic life?

No?

I didn't think so.

It is really that hard to understand that the happenings in this cycle were diffrent than any other?

One, yes, because one theme of the ending is that "History always repeats." i.e. Every thing has happened before and will happen again. i.e. Someone writing it liked Battlestar Galactica too much.

Also, I'll repeat this, because you've not answered it:

Do you have any proof that the Geth are the first synthetic race to not try to wipe out all organic life?

Your reply above proves that you don't. Until you can actually contribute to this argument and defend your suppositions with more than "It's what I think", then you have no business debating in this thread.

[MaxRage]

I loved the entire game... until...
THAT STUPID ****ING REAPER LASER HIT SHEPARD, giving me no real rpg choice!

From that point on, the whole thing is just scripted, giving us a false illusion of a choice.

[AmstradHero]

mallot75 wrote...

Lohan7 wrote...

Favorite moment is when I was finally able to have Shepard kill Kai Leng. The only problem was that Kai Leng ran to much, it should have been a staight up fight.  I mean what is the melee ability for anyway.

Yeah but the renagade options was awesome, especially how its just like hell yea!

Personally, I found it very disappointing that the renegade and non-renegade action are basically exactly the same.

[sdinc009]

Here is a Literary Definition from PFS Publishing

Literary Definitions: Deus Ex Machina
Deus ex machinamight be one of the world's oldest plot devices. The ancient Greek playwright Euripides used this device in nearly half of his plays that still exist - and based on the writings of Aristotle and others, we know that Euripides was considered one of the foremost writers of his day. If that's the case, then we can probably safely assume that a deus ex machina was used in a lot of Greek plays - the same source that most of our modern narrative techniques come from.

Deus ex machina (pronounced day-oos x mach-ee-na) means "god out of the machine" or "god from the machine" in Latin. As a literary device, it is where, at the conclusion of the narrative, a climax and ending simply presents itself. In Euripides' play, it would have been a god causing something to occur, which triggers the ending - this is where we get the name.

Essentially, the deus ex machina is when, at the end of a story, an extraneous element appears, having nothing to do with the main characters or the central plot, that solves all the problems in the narrative and effectively ends the story.

So why is this bad for modern readers?

In modern narratives, readers expect that the writer will solve the narrative (the story-wide tension building leading from the instigating incident to the climax) by building a set of clues into the main characters' actions and personalities. If you have a murder mystery, you want your main character to solve the problem - not a random cop you've never seen before show up to explain what really happened.

Even Sherlock Holmes can sometimes be considered a deus ex machina, because some of the lesser stories don't have enough clues in place for Holmes to really be able to solve the case, so his explanations just sound like a justification for the ending. "Miracle" endings - where things suddenly change for the better, like incurable cancer suddenly goes into remission despite no effort on anyone's doing, are also deus ex machina.

Basically, when deus ex machina happens, it breaks the readers' trust in the writer, because the writer wasn't able to solve the narrative organically and from within the story. We go to stories to escape from reality, but not to the point where reality doesn't hold.

In essence, the deus ex machina breaks the reader's willing suspension of disbelief - the act of believing in a story's truth, even when the reader knows it's just a story. Since this break happens only in the final moments of a story, the deus ex machina generally ruins the entire narrative for the reader. It is the considered one of the weakest narrative endings.

[Redbelle]

I'll allow deus ex to get away with an ending like that, especially the first one.

Btw, trawling through youtube I discovered that someone has synched 6 of the Red Green and Blue ending so ppl can see for themsleves the similarities between endings:

[heraymo]

yeah i saw that video it makes me sick to watch i cant wait to see them resynced to the new i mean extend cutscenes lol i bet it will look as lame but i cant say until it actually comes out

[sdinc009]

Redbelle wrote...

I'll allow deus ex to get away with an ending like that, especially the first one.

Btw, trawling through youtube I discovered that someone has synched 6 of the Red Green and Blue ending so ppl can see for themsleves the similarities between endings:

I agree with you here, but technically speaking even Deus Ex didn't really use a Deus ex Machina. It's alluded in the tital of the game and even presents itself logically throughout the story so there's already a foreshadowing aspect. Because it's expected to appear it's no long the random out of left field device it's supposed to be. In fact if a DEM was not used it would hurt the story structure. But since they use a semi DEM it works well and doesn't derail the the narrative

[Archonsg]

MaxRage wrote...

I loved the entire game... until...
THAT STUPID ****ING REAPER LASER HIT SHEPARD, giving me no real rpg choice!

From that point on, the whole thing is just scripted, giving us a false illusion of a choice.

I am fine with the illusion of choice, as long as it's done well. Both ME1&2 end choices were illusionary because, going from 1 to 2 and onwards to 3, those end choices mattered little if at all. Example, saving the council, did nothing in the big picture other then cosmetic references to that fact.

But, because they maintained that illusion, we felt it mattered.
The same with the Anderson/Udina choice. Going into ME3, imagine my surprise that Udina is now the human representative instead of my choice, Anderson, back in ME1.

ME2, went a step further. Again, if we really stop to think about it, the end of ME2, and yes it was "an ending", singular, regardless of what we did, even if we got Shepard killed.

But again, they maintained the illusion, by making very distinctive variations, from death of Shepard and complete loss of all companions to utter and complete victory and the survival of all.

What Bioware did in ME2, was to make sure that the characters we have invested in, played pivotal roles and that the player was given choices, illusionary as they might be, to visibly effect what happens to those characters and play out those choices in the narrative of the story and ending.

ME3's ending took that illusion of control away. Worse, it did not allow the player to effect his or her choice as to how things will unfold for characters that our player, if they were veterans from ME1, have invested at least 60hrs (bare minimal) to well over 120hrs or more if multiple playthroughs are considered.

If the goal was to remove the mass relays, having a gamut ranging from relays exploding (worse case) to just shutting down and going dormant (best case) would have achieved this and maintained that illusion of choice with the player.

The same with removing Shepard from any role in future games. Ranging from death to being alive, in victory and riding off with love interest, there are any number of mechanisms one could use to affect Shepard's removal.

Instead, the player became a passive witness to Shepard's path to suicide.


The lack of an epilogue for the last "book" in a series' arc, is also just not done.


 
Ps: pls excuse the edits. Posting from the phone.

Modifié par Archonsg, 02 mai 2012 - 09:59 .

[3DandBeyond]

It's always a given that there's an epilogue at the end of a series. There's always something to tie up and provide closure to.

And @Archonsg, you are so right it's always been about the illusion of choice. That's because no game could offer real choice since there's just no way to program for some open ended decision. Your choices are always necessarily tied to some specific answers.

The point about the council is right on point. Same thing if certain required characters are killed or not where they should be when they are supposed to be. Maelon subs for Mordin and Wreav for Wrex, because there'd be nowhere for the story to go.

At the end it's the lack of any believable illusionary choice that is annoying and Shepard's lack of a backbone or a voice..

Modifié par 3DandBeyond, 02 mai 2012 - 10:01 .

[Sigma2010]

Benchpress610 wrote...

@ 3DandBeyond and Voodoo-j, let me interject my thoughts in this discussion:
 
Since ME1 I’ve been always puzzled as how in hell was it possible to defeat a whole fleet of reapers when it took most of the Alliance fleet, plus some asari and  turian ships, to take down just one. And this was only possible after Shepard defeated its avatar/Saren/husk thing, which brought down its shields…Further,  In ME2’s Derelict Reaper mission, EDI stated that “Reapers are impervious to dreadnought fire”. In the ME universe, what’s more powerful than a dreadnought? … Hence, the need for a super weapon which can strip down the reaper’s shields. See where I’m going with this?
 
Fast forward to ME3 when from the very beginning the concept of the Crucible was introduced. It can be debated whether the mere concept of the Crucible is a form of Deus Ex Machina or not,  but it’s reasonable to assume that over the course of several cycles many civilizations have labor to find a way to stop the reapers by bringing down its shields so they can be destroyed. Every cycle has improved this weapon upon each other designs.
 
This is the point where all reason and logic goes to hell in a hand basket… How did the writers make the leap form a perfectly reasonable premise to the whole disjointed concept of the Catalyst/Star/kid? How a contraption that had been developed independently of the reapers became dependent on a reaper construct? Did the organics know how to make it work in the first place? Or did they know about the existence of the glowing child? Because obviously the Crucible wouldn’t work without it. It stands to reason that the reapers must have known the attempts of the organics at building a super-weapon to destroy them. Why didn’t they destroy it first along with all its research and knowledge of its existence?.. I can keep going, but see my point? And it keeps getting more and more convoluted and illogic.
 
It would’ve been simpler that the Crucible was a device which would’ve sent an EMS pulse synchronized to the reapers’ frequency that would’ve brought down their shields, thus allowing the victory fleet to dispose of them. For that purpose it needed a huge amount of energy, and what’s the biggest mass effect engine in the galaxy? The Citadel, hence the Catalyst.
 
The elements for an epic end were there, but for some reason that escapes logic (pun intended) they chose to go the star kid route.   

You brought up the derelect Reaper. I went back to that portion of ME2 in my head and thought about how apparently this alien race created a super weapon capable of defeating a Reaper.  When the crucible and catalyst were brought up that's where I thought they were going with ME3 find the technology that made that weapon and build it.  But instead we get the crucible ala starkid whose apparently been on the Citadel the whole time waiting to say "Shep dude how's it hang?  Here are three utter ridiculous ways to stop the Reapers kill all your allies and don't question them."  No story or game is meant to be perfect, but damn all the possibilities that were laid out just in ME2, paved the way for some great endings.  But we get introduced to this superbeing that only has a one-dimensional way thinking, but yet is so advance.  Anyone heard this line before?  "My logic is undeniable."  (I-ROBOT)  That's what the whole starkid speech sounds like to me.   

[Burben23]

Thanatos144 wrote...

3DandBeyond wrote...

@Voodoo-j,

I think my main issue with it is that unless the Protheans knew the Catalyst would change its mind and give 3 choices, then what did they think it was for? How'd they happen upon the idea? And given the 3 choices, the effort doesn't seem worth the gain.

They didnt know what it would do cause they never finished it. They didnt even know what the catalyst was.

Then how did the Prothean VI know it was the citadel if the Protheans had no idea?

[Archonsg]

3DandBeyond wrote...

It's always a given that there's an epilogue at the end of a series. There's always something to tie up and provide closure to.

And @Archonsg, you are so right it's always been about the illusion of choice. That's because no game could offer real choice since there's just no way to program for some open ended decision. Your choices are always necessarily tied to some specific answers.

The point about the council is right on point. Same thing if certain required characters are killed or not where they should be when they are supposed to be. Maelon subs for Mordin and Wreav for Wrex, because there'd be nowhere for the story to go.

At the end it's the lack of any believable illusionary choice that is annoying and Shepard's lack of a backbone or a voice..

Agreed.
The core issue I believe is that the producers and it seems the powers that be in Bioware is treating ME3's ending as they would if it was a movie or book.

And this is where all this "Artistic Integrity" angst is coming from. ME3 should have been their Magum Opus, that rivals the movie industry, hell, could even be made into a movie... Only that they seem to have forgotten that ME3 is first and foremost a game.
Games are interactive and should impart upon the player a definite sense of "winning."
Now, "winning" and Shepard being alive need not be mutual, as even in sacrifice, one  might win. But because as you pointed out, Shepard's lack of back bone, being out of character further alienates the player from accepting the ending if it's not a "winning" solution.

Which is why I am sure I was not the only one to have went "WTF?!" and tried in vain looking for the "alternate" path. Because whomever wrote that end, broke character with both Shepard and the game's theme.

[Voodoo-j]

This is what I would like to see... or something similar.
At the end of Dragon Age you could talk to those in your party and various characters, that gave further fun dialogue of events you affected the outcome of, followed by short descriptions of how you affected a few other outcomes.

http://dragonage.wik...logue_(Origins)

1 of many outcomes displayed in video.



(not mine)

Culminating the ending of 3 games I was expecting something of this caliber.
(Even if I was dead, which btw Dragon Age had one for that aswell.)

This was a Bioware game.. the 1st in its series. WTH BIOWARE??

Modifié par Voodoo-j, 03 mai 2012 - 12:35 .

[Voodoo-j]

That has to be one of the best epilogues for a game I've played.

[Archonsg]

DA:O is still on my HDD, and I still want to replay it from time to time.

[MaxRage]

Archonsg wrote...

MaxRage wrote...

I loved the entire game... until...
THAT STUPID ****ING REAPER LASER HIT SHEPARD, giving me no real rpg choice!

From that point on, the whole thing is just scripted, giving us a false illusion of a choice.

I am fine with the illusion of choice, as long as it's done well. Both ME1&2 end choices were illusionary because, going from 1 to 2 and onwards to 3, those end choices mattered little if at all. Example, saving the council, did nothing in the big picture other then cosmetic references to that fact.

But, because they maintained that illusion, we felt it mattered.
The same with the Anderson/Udina choice. Going into ME3, imagine my surprise that Udina is now the human representative instead of my choice, Anderson, back in ME1.

ME2, went a step further. Again, if we really stop to think about it, the end of ME2, and yes it was "an ending", singular, regardless of what we did, even if we got Shepard killed.

But again, they maintained the illusion, by making very distinctive variations, from death of Shepard and complete loss of all companions to utter and complete victory and the survival of all.

What Bioware did in ME2, was to make sure that the characters we have invested in, played pivotal roles and that the player was given choices, illusionary as they might be, to visibly effect what happens to those characters and play out those choices in the narrative of the story and ending.

ME3's ending took that illusion of control away. Worse, it did not allow the player to effect his or her choice as to how things will unfold for characters that our player, if they were veterans from ME1, have invested at least 60hrs (bare minimal) to well over 120hrs or more if multiple playthroughs are considered.

If the goal was to remove the mass relays, having a gamut ranging from relays exploding (worse case) to just shutting down and going dormant (best case) would have achieved this and maintained that illusion of choice with the player.

The same with removing Shepard from any role in future games. Ranging from death to being alive, in victory and riding off with love interest, there are any number of mechanisms one could use to affect Shepard's removal.

Instead, the player became a passive witness to Shepard's path to suicide.


The lack of an epilogue for the last "book" in a series' arc, is also just not done.


 
Ps: pls excuse the edits. Posting from the phone.

Very valid points.

...Tbh, after the last 20 minutes of ME3, I can pretty much now determine... Dragon Age had a MUCH better ending. at least the endings didn't sh*t on us, the fans.

Before finishing ME3, my opinion was the ME series was the best... but not anymore... many things will surpass it

Modifié par MaxRage, 03 mai 2012 - 03:01 .

[Thanatos144]

The protheans never knew what the catalyst they assumed it was the citidel cause that's what the crucible was made to fit. Remember they were not the ones who started it.

[eoinnx03]

Keep on trollin OP.

[Thanatos144]

Cause stating obvious facts means I am full of it huh? I am starting to wonder if some of you even played the game

[ghost9191]

i played the game, and not sure if it matters but what thanatos said is fact. well science fiction fact. didn't think it was trolling but my opinion. i just got here

Modifié par ghost9191, 03 mai 2012 - 04:00 .