223 réponses à ce sujet

[SkitSkit]

sH0tgUn jUliA wrote...

Zuka999 wrote...
But realize that in a few billion years, Dark Energy will eliminate all life.

This is going to happen in the Milky Way anyway. For example, in our own solar system, in 500,000,000 yrs the earth will become uninhabitable due to solar radiation like Haestroms sun, just from the sun's natural aging.

Eventually, Hawking predicts that the age of stars we're now in will end and the universe will go dark. All that will be left is dark matter.

Yeah, but Hawking's theorys are always a bit of a downer. Originaly he thought singularities destroyed matter, which makes no sense.

I had a point here but i forgot it, oh wait

Hold the line

[jla0644]

I don't think they should have tried to explain their motivation, not after telling us that humans can't comprehend what the Reapers are about. I'm okay with a little ambiguity and speculation when it comes to questions like these, because usually, when they try to answer them, it turns out pretty lame. And it seems ME3 proves that point.

[SyyRaaaN]

sH0tgUn jUliA wrote...

Zuka999 wrote...
But realize that in a few billion years, Dark Energy will eliminate all life.

This is going to happen in the Milky Way anyway. For example, in our own solar system, in 500,000,000 yrs the earth will become uninhabitable due to solar radiation like Haestroms sun, just from the sun's natural aging.

Eventually, Hawking predicts that the age of stars we're now in will end and the universe will go dark. All that will be left is dark matter.

I saw in a documentary that the all the matter in the universe will be in 1 single black hole in 18 000 000 000 years from now.

[Newl0w]

 Wasn't Sovereign pretty clear that their motivation is beyond human understanding? Could leave it at that. A race of almost god-like machines doesn't need to have a motivation that's explained in two lines of dialogue.

[Zuka999]

Newl0w wrote...

 Wasn't Sovereign pretty clear that their motivation is beyond human understanding? Could leave it at that. A race of almost god-like machines doesn't need to have a motivation that's explained in two lines of dialogue.

My only problem with this is that its wanting for answers to anything. "Beyond your understanding" doesn't mean, "concept you wont even be able to grasp". The dark energy motivation fits this. Your average joe does not know anything about quantum physics. Neither does Shepard, I would think. But we as players can still be like, "damn, yo, that's some serious business".

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

SyyRaaaN wrote...

sH0tgUn jUliA wrote...

Zuka999 wrote...
But realize that in a few billion years, Dark Energy will eliminate all life.

This is going to happen in the Milky Way anyway. For example, in our own solar system, in 500,000,000 yrs the earth will become uninhabitable due to solar radiation like Haestroms sun, just from the sun's natural aging.

Eventually, Hawking predicts that the age of stars we're now in will end and the universe will go dark. All that will be left is dark matter.

I saw in a documentary that the all the matter in the universe will be in 1 single black hole in 18 000 000 000 years from now.

But 18 billion years? Are we really going to care at that point?

[Stygian1]

Challenge won?

[Tony208]

sH0tgUn jUliA wrote...

SyyRaaaN wrote...

sH0tgUn jUliA wrote...

Zuka999 wrote...
But realize that in a few billion years, Dark Energy will eliminate all life.

This is going to happen in the Milky Way anyway. For example, in our own solar system, in 500,000,000 yrs the earth will become uninhabitable due to solar radiation like Haestroms sun, just from the sun's natural aging.

Eventually, Hawking predicts that the age of stars we're now in will end and the universe will go dark. All that will be left is dark matter.

I saw in a documentary that the all the matter in the universe will be in 1 single black hole in 18 000 000 000 years from now.

But 18 billion years? Are we really going to care at that point?

Exactly who cares?

That's another issue I have with the ending. Shepard was never fighting for the next cycle, it was for the people he/she knew.

[SkitSkit]

Saying that there isn't an explanation is a bit of a cop out. Shepards dialouge with the reaper destroyer was about how i felt, "Try explaining, i might just get it." And I can, I can accept that the reapers see life as finite and thus preserve what they consider important, the genetic code. every 50,000 years they preserve the life they think is worth of preserving.

It makes some logical sense if you define life as the genetic code that builds it up, and works for the villains as it goes against every theme the series has had thus far. however if the villains go against the themes of the series the Protagonist has to tell them to shove their solutions up their arse.

You could drop the whole "Synthetics will destroy you" to "You will destroy yourselves" because "Yo Dawg..."

And while the reapers are not altruistic by our standards, they are by their own.

I do, I do comprehend your argument Harbinger. I however invoke my right to respectfully disagree with my Infinite Killing Machine.

[Sc2mashimaro]

Zuka999 wrote...

Newl0w wrote...

 Wasn't Sovereign pretty clear that their motivation is beyond human understanding? Could leave it at that. A race of almost god-like machines doesn't need to have a motivation that's explained in two lines of dialogue.

My only problem with this is that its wanting for answers to anything. "Beyond your understanding" doesn't mean, "concept you wont even be able to grasp". The dark energy motivation fits this. Your average joe does not know anything about quantum physics. Neither does Shepard, I would think. But we as players can still be like, "damn, yo, that's some serious business".

Well, you may be right about that, but I don't think Sovereign was saying it that way - I think Sovereign believes itself to be a higher life form than Shepard, like a human talking to a monkey. That's the whole point of it, they're "beyond our comprehension" because we're not as "advanced" as they are. Leaving them abiguous is better for exactly that reason, if we're really talking about a significant difference in "intelligences", there's no reason for them to try to explain themselves to us anyway.

[Cucobr]

“We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it.”

"My kind transcends your very understanding. We are each a nation - independent, free of all weakness. You cannot grasp the nature of our existence."


simple like that.

[Pedro Costa]

Sovereign had it right, a consciousness so alien, so detached from our own we couldn't rationalize it, but since ME2 made sure that boat had set sail after Horizon...
I go with Reapers reap because they, like every other life forms, share a few basic traits: self-preservation, reproduction and fear.
They fear organics will progress to a point where they can pose a threat to the Reaper's very existence; yet, they can't completely wipe all organic forms out because then they couldn't create new Reapers.
It's a catch-22 for them.
"Can't live with them, can't live without them."
So they make the Galaxy a breeding farm until the organics are a few millenia old and just ripe for the taking, and then select what they like best before reseting the playing ground so no surviving species can pose a threat to them the next time they show up, or decide to kill all other sentient organic species as they reach space-traveling capacity and when the Reapers return, they have nothing to create new Reapers out of.

I also like SkitSkit's hypothesis:

I can accept that the reapers see life as finite and thus preserve what they consider important, the genetic code. every 50,000 years they preserve the life they think is worth of preserving.

It makes some logical sense if you define life as the genetic code that builds it up, and works for the villains as it goes against every theme the series has had thus far. however if the villains go against the themes of the series the Protagonist has to tell them to shove their solutions up their arse.

You could drop the whole "Synthetics will destroy you" to "You will destroy yourselves" because "Yo Dawg..."

And while the reapers are not altruistic by our standards, they are by their own.

[GnusmasTHX]

Reapers kill all organic species so daemons in The Warp remain weak.

[phifty sikkz]

I kind of had my own idea before this whole debacle. I assumed Sovereign and the Reapers gave Shepard attitude because, well, they just had bigger things going on. I was under the impression that they had their own conflicts and interactions with other super-advanced extragalactic duders. I thought they were advanced enough to go to all kinds of places, and they only came back to farm every 50000 years. I guess you might say the Milky Way was a Reaper "garden" where they raised races to "harvest" later.

Think of the Relays and Citadel as bikes with training wheels: they're only their to get the organics to the desired level of advancement. Why Reapers need organics to develop this way is up for interpretation, but once certain races "bear fruit" it becomes harvesting time again. Meanwhile, instead of being lame and napping in dark space, they cruise the cosmos on Harleys and do their own thing.

[Siansonea]

Maybe the Reapers aren't really afraid of organics, but the advanced synthetics that organics could create. But at the same time, they want access to innovation and upgrades they themselves can't imagine, so they allow organics to progress just up to a point where they're starting to create sophisticated AIs. Now that the crop is ready, they harvest. They're the Reapers, they harvest, they are getting some kind of payoff. They're not the Cleaners or the Exterminators. Organics, with their dizzying variety and multiplicity, can innovate in ways that AIs simply can't, so the Reapers need organics, up until their AI creations are no longer subservient to them, then they're expendable. Look at the geth, the Reapers approached the geth, and the geth said "no thanks". So the Reapers tried to take over the geth with Indoctrination, but STILL failed to get them all. It's clear that the Reapers wanted the geth for more than just shock troops, that's what Husks, Cannibals, Marauders, Brutes, Harvesters and Banshees are for. I think that the Reapers want to add diversity to themselves, and the organics are just a catalyst for their process. Their "Borg Queen", Catalyst, may not have been telling Shepard the whole truth, or any part of the truth, and the RGB endings may or may not serve the purposes of Catalyst more so than Shepard and Team Organic. But it's interesting to wonder why the Reapers are named Reapers as opposed to Giant Killer Robots From Space, or some other just-as-descriptive name. But using an army of synthetics to kill all organics in order to keep all organics from being killed by an army of synthetics? Yeah, that doesn't make sense.

[Zuka999]

phifty sikkz wrote...

I kind of had my own idea before this whole debacle. I assumed Sovereign and the Reapers gave Shepard attitude because, well, they just had bigger things going on. I was under the impression that they had their own conflicts and interactions with other super-advanced extragalactic duders. I thought they were advanced enough to go to all kinds of places, and they only came back to farm every 50000 years. I guess you might say the Milky Way was a Reaper "garden" where they raised races to "harvest" later.

Think of the Relays and Citadel as bikes with training wheels: they're only their to get the organics to the desired level of advancement. Why Reapers need organics to develop this way is up for interpretation, but once certain races "bear fruit" it becomes harvesting time again. Meanwhile, instead of being lame and napping in dark space, they cruise the cosmos on Harleys and do their own thing.

Wow. This is actually genius.

[CitizenSnips]

I believe the original intent was to have the reapers wanting to stop the spread of dark energy?

[Aver88]

I think that their motivation from leaked scrip was good enough. Definitely better than cliché ultimate conflict between biological and synthetic life forms.

[Skirlasvoud]

Them being C'thulu also works.

Sometimes, evil needs no explanation. They're just evil, like zombies, or Sauron.

It's THEIR effect on the universe that matters. Seeing the myriad races scuttling around them... that's fun. I don't want to know why the reapers do anything.

It's far more dignified.

[HBC Dresden]

In an ending I outlined (in my sig), I took BioWare's existing explanation and make sense out of it:

The very first cycle long time ago was organics being killed by their synthetic creations and put into Harbinger, the oldest and biggest Reaper. However, to perpetuate this victory, Harbinger and the Reapers are twisted into thinking that they must harvest organics into synthetic creations (the Reaper ships) to prevent synthetics from killing their masters and taking over the galaxy. This is an influence of the synthetic victors merging with the first organic losers within Harbinger. See, the synthetics that defeated the first organics wanted a merging of consciousnesses (even with the organics they defeated), similar to how the geth want to merge all of their consciousness in a Dyson sphere (even Shepard in ME2 makes the comparison between the geth Dyson sphere and a Reaper). The twisted logic appeals to the organic consciousness put into the Reaper but with one flaw: the worst has already happened. This also explains the terminology of “chaos” and “order.” More like out of control and submission from the point of view of the original synthetics. The Reapers’ paradoxical existence also feeds this Original Delusion: they are mechanical but contain the consciousness of organics. The main evil, the original victorious synthetics, are literally internalized in all Reapers, the most important being Harbinger.

[spacehamsterZH]

This has been said a dozen times by a dozen people who worded it better than me, I'm sure, but I don't see why the rules put in place by the OP are somehow necessary. On the contrary. What made that original encounter with Sovereign so appealing to me was actually the utter nihilism of the character and its disdain for Shepard and his squadmates. They were, at best, a couple of annoying insects to Sovereign. And the more we learned about the motivations and the minutiae of what the Reapers do, the weaker it got. "Incomprehensible robotic space gods who wipe out all intelligent life every 50K years because they can" was basically where it started, and that was fine.

[Lmaoboat]

adam_nox wrote...

The endings have lots of problems, but I see an underlying theme with a lot of criticism being tossed around, and that's discontent with ANY interpretation of 'why' the reapers do their reaping.  I tend to think that most people just can't handle the idea of wiping out everything.  It's just too much for them to take, so any reason put forth to explain why they do it is shot down or claimed to have plot holes or rely on space magic.

Here's your chance to prove me wrong.  Shepard asks starkid why the reapers do what they do.  It's your turn to answer in his place, but there are rules (otherwise your answer will suck on a storytelling level and be inconsistent with themes from the game and bioware's style).

1.  The motivation can't be based in selfishness of the reapers.
2.  The motivation must make logical sense and stand up to the same criticisms leveled at the current explanations.
3.  The motivation must provide some sort of greater good/utilitarianism or be absolutely necessary as part of some goal that is grand in scope.

good luck.

You challenge us to come up with a good motivation for the reapers while restricting us to the rules that made their motivations lame in the first place. A++ thread, would read again.