90 réponses à ce sujet

[pomrink]

i read the script,biscuit is recalling it correctly

[Militarized]

IsaacShep wrote...

malra wrote...

your right, they talk about the Geth/Quarian conflict quite a bit.  but then couldn't pull it together to make it mesh in the end with the whole inevitabiltiy thing and while your certainely entitled to your opinion, I can assure you that I am not wishing for what I can't have.  The Dark Energy ending as I read about it is the only attempt to explain in any way that stays within the confines of the story presented.  I mean really, ascension?  Liquification equals ascension?  Whatever.

It ain't just the Geth. Rouge AI on Luna -> EDI. Rouge AI on the Citadel. Project Overlord. And that's just ME games alone. It's much more true to the themes, plots and characters actually discussed and focused on in the franchise than Dark Energy.

I'd argue this point, personally. The big myster with the LUNA base is the code you receive from EDI after you "kill" her. It says HELP in binary... which opens up more in line with the ideas behind the Geth, which is sentience. Are machines able to be sentient? Are they life? It's not about them taking over. Or they didn't present it well, that's for sure. 

The Overlord DLC, to me, was more about transhumanism... the virus is a human, not an AI. 

[Arios1570]

ALRIGHT, so here's the big problem with Dark Energy ending:

"We're going to stop dark energy by making organic races who are consistently creative and capable of great scientific advancements into things like us that are creatively stagnant and devoid of free will. Maybe if we keep doing this, some race is going to pop up super UBER fast and be like 'I HAVE AN IDEEEEAAAAA!'. Yeah...that'll work."

NOW, IF YOU THINK DARK ENERGY IDEA IS BETTER THAN ORGANIC VS. SYNTHETICS IDEA, EXPLAIN!

[pomrink]

Arios1570 wrote...

ALRIGHT, so here's the big problem with Dark Energy ending:

"We're going to stop dark energy by making organic races who are consistently creative and capable of great scientific advancements into things like us that are creatively stagnant and devoid of free will. Maybe if we keep doing this, some race is going to pop up super UBER fast and be like 'I HAVE AN IDEEEEAAAAA!'. Yeah...that'll work."

NOW, IF YOU THINK DARK ENERGY IDEA IS BETTER THAN ORGANIC VS. SYNTHETICS IDEA, EXPLAIN!

You cant make any arguments against the dark energy thing because it was thrown out before this game. we have no information on it. had they done it they probably wouldve seeded more things into the plot. as is, we cant judge it.

[IntoTheDarkness]

Arios1570 wrote...

malra wrote...

lucidfox wrote...

Ugh, this sounds even worse than the released ending.

I find that hard to believe.  At least they talked about the problem with dark energy in ME2 on Haestrom.  I think if done well it could have really been a really great ending.

I actually have to agree with lucidfox.  Dark Energy wasn't a huge issue in the series.  It was a side problem.  To have it suddenly become the reason for the reapers makes no sense.  Why would they harvest civilizations that are making technological progress to stop dark energy?  By doing that, they are destroying any chance that the civilizations could come up with a solution.  If the reapers don't have one, they're not going to come up with one, so why kill off those who could so that a solution can be formed?  That's worse than creating synthetics to kill organics so synthetics won't kill organics.

Canon reason means the reapers are working to their own solution, albeit in a roundabout way, it makes sense for a corrupted computer to see this as a solution.

This old reason means they are shooting themselves in the foot.  They are stagnent creativly, but organics aren't.  To hope for a solution, they should be helping organics develop further and act as peace-keepers, not reapers.  By keeping organics alive and simply saying "hey, this dark energy is a bad thing, but we don't have a clue how to stop it, here's all we know, now get to work."

if each reaper is a nation of people, it could possibly mean that the intellect of people melt to make a reaper is still intact. so the reapers could be a solution of gathering super-intelligent species those otherwise would never meet across time and space. the reapers are not pure machines as you see in ME2. they could certainly be much more creative than individuals if BW had decided to push the dark energy ending.

[Total Biscuit]

Militarized wrote...

IsaacShep wrote...

malra wrote...

your right, they talk about the Geth/Quarian conflict quite a bit.  but then couldn't pull it together to make it mesh in the end with the whole inevitabiltiy thing and while your certainely entitled to your opinion, I can assure you that I am not wishing for what I can't have.  The Dark Energy ending as I read about it is the only attempt to explain in any way that stays within the confines of the story presented.  I mean really, ascension?  Liquification equals ascension?  Whatever.

It ain't just the Geth. Rouge AI on Luna -> EDI. Rouge AI on the Citadel. Project Overlord. And that's just ME games alone. It's much more true to the themes, plots and characters actually discussed and focused on in the franchise than Dark Energy.

I'd argue this point, personally. The big myster with the LUNA base is the code you receive from EDI after you "kill" her. It says HELP in binary... which opens up more in line with the ideas behind the Geth, which is sentience. Are machines able to be sentient? Are they life? It's not about them taking over. Or they didn't present it well, that's for sure. 

The Overlord DLC, to me, was more about transhumanism... the virus is a human, not an AI. 

Overloars was indeed transhumanism. Which means it was a technological singularity, just not the one the Reapers are terrified of.

[ImpudentInfidel]

http://social.biowar.../index/10214299

Original ending from the leaked script

[Moogberg]

Arios1570 wrote...

ALRIGHT, so here's the big problem with Dark Energy ending:

"We're going to stop dark energy by making organic races who are consistently creative and capable of great scientific advancements into things like us that are creatively stagnant and devoid of free will. Maybe if we keep doing this, some race is going to pop up super UBER fast and be like 'I HAVE AN IDEEEEAAAAA!'. Yeah...that'll work."

NOW, IF YOU THINK DARK ENERGY IDEA IS BETTER THAN ORGANIC VS. SYNTHETICS IDEA, EXPLAIN!

Dark energy would have provided something the current ending totally lacks: an acceptable motivation for the main Villain of the trilogy, the Reapers. Had this idea been more seriously considered, it would have been developed over the course of the game, not just dropped at the eleventh hour (as any rewritten ending will do).

With the current ending, you have an entire species/race whose aims is to systematically destroy all evolved life every 50,000 years, so they don't have time to develop AIs and synthetics, which would ultimately destroy all life in the universe(*). They've spent hundreds of thousands of years just sticking to this idea, without taking into consideration that progresses can be made and that all intelligent life, whatever it is, can work its way towards some peace. The Reapers don't think or evolve. They basically don't live and, yet, they're supposed to act that way to preserve life? That makes them idiots.

The Dark Energy stuff would just have required a few more clues. It didn't need to be fully explained at the end of the third game. All the writers would have to do was to give us another example of one system (or two or three) dying abnormally fast during a mission, something that had nothing to do with the Reapers to give us some idea of the damages it can produce.

Then, in the final stages of the game, you finally understand why the Reapers act like that, because there's a bigger threat coming, which was the extinction of all life due to something even them can't fully understand, dark energy (link it for instance to the use of eezo, Dan Simmons did something similar in his cycle of Hyperion). Their own calculation showed that this would be the final cycle, their last chance to reap all the advanced races of the galaxy and make them reapers themselves to reach the point where they could face the menace.
You were desperate to save humanity and every other living race? Wait for it, the Reapers were even more desperate than you, because they knew all life could end and the best thing they had found was to turn species into Reapers, into forces that would be strong enough to make a difference in the bigger fight that's coming.

That would have been totally in line with most of the arcs in the trilogy, where races or people want to do something for the best but ultimately lose their way and their soul. The Protheans became a crual and imperialistic race that only lived to make war and were actually no better than their Reapers enemies, Cerberus did sacrifice humanity in the supposed interest of humanity, Turians and Salarians became afraid of Krogans but turned them into hate machines, and a bigger threat, because of the Genophage. Jacob's father... Miranda's father... Tali's father...

Fortunately, the whole trilogy showed persons and species getting closer because they started to accept their differencies and they embraced diversity as a cause for expansion and development under one thing everybody had in common: the voice of reason, usually embodied by Shepard. That's a solution that's totally opposite to what the Reapers wanted to achieve but most players would have agreed that it's more likely to succeed against Dark Energy or whatever it would have been called. That's the spirit of the entire games. People giving their individual best and their creativity vs being a puppet of their former selves and being incorporated in a soulless entity.
(That's also why I don't like the whole organics/synthetics fusion ending in the released game: it makes everybody mixed and closer physically, while they had already achieved that in their mind, which was much more important, and it actually reduces diversity).

Then, Shepard could have made her/his choice, which would have concluded the trilogy. I can even throw some choices:
- destroy the Reapers, and salvage as much of their knowledge and technology as possible
- accept what the Reapers say about a doomed universe and make the humanity another reaper
- sacrifice yourself and your crew by sacrificing the crew of the Normandy and your associates to create a small and mixed but significant Reaper that could take the lead and show the other Reapers a different direction for action.

And it would have naturally paved the way for another game/trilogy set decades after the events of the Shepard trilogy, without significantly altering the universe for ever as the released ending does.

I agree that the "Dark Energy" idea was a little vague (and it could remain a little vague). It definitely needed some work. It was more a concept than a story line, the name, the effect and the execution all scream "work in progress", but it showed some real potential, much more than the synthetics vs organics conflict that had been covered much more efficiently in the rest of the released game.

Drew Karpyshyn's absence from the third game might not have harmed the character development and the gameplay but I guess the guy definitely had some interesting and coherent ideas that had a positive impact on the work of Casey Hudson. George Lucas is definitely the guy who made Star Wars but in the original trilogy, he had Rick McCallum, his wife Marcia (editor) and Gary Kurtz. Producer Gary Kurtz left before Return of the Jedi, but he definitely had some creative input and ideas that would have definitely made RotJ (and the planned sequels) or the prequels better, with lots of development, of course. Left on his own, Lucas was able to complete RotJ adequately and to make prequels that only work when they echo or refer to the original trilogy. And Gary Kurtz did nothing significant himself (apart from The Dark Crystal).
Sometimes, it takes a few talents to make a real spark. The ideas decided by Hudson and Karpyshyn had enough fuel to feed an entire trilogy, Hudson did a great job on most of ME3 but he might not have been able to to create alone (so far...) an ending worthy of what had preceded


(*)Which means they're actually destroying all civilizations and intelligent life, so the goldfish and the varren could still exist.

Modifié par Moogberg, 02 avril 2012 - 11:56 .

[Ieldra]

The_Crazy_Hand wrote...

Total Biscuit wrote...

Just to be clear, the Dark Energy stuff was NOT in the leaked script from back in November, the leaked scripts ending was exactly what ended up being in the game, and yes, most everyone who saw it hated it back then too.

The only difference was that we didn't know all the details for cut scenes without dialogue, so the Relays blowing in all endings and the Normandy crash wasn't thought to be unavoidable.

Again, BIOWARE CHANGED NOTHING BECAUSE OF THE LEAK.

At least nothing important, or to do with the ending anyway.

Not true, the synthesis ending was originally sheperd becomming one with the reapers.  Backlash happened because of that, and it was changed.

Artistic Integrity my ass.

That it false.

There were three scripts in the November leak. The noticeably very old short script that contained no dialogue but outdated mission descriptions had this "Shepard becoming one with the Reapers". But the complete game script with all the dialogue had the same final choice we have now, only with a different description for the Synthesis ("We synthetics will become more like, and organics will become more like us") and the difference that the relays were only destroyed if you chose Destroy.

I would have preferred that version over what we have now.

Modifié par Ieldra2, 02 avril 2012 - 11:38 .

[Sharkster]

The relays only being wiped off the map in the "Destroy" option certainly would have made all the others more palatable --- and it would have made some sense since that is the option with the lowest EMS.

Anyway, it doesn't change what Bioware did put out and how people react to it.

[Asharad Hett]

Finally, an ending worse than the one we got!

[Federally]

I liked the Reapers when they were big scary cyborg monsters harvesting advanced species for procreation and their own sort of evolution, as proposed in ME2. Purely selfish motives make for good antagonists and being turned into a Reaper or husk is scary. Not only is the monster gonna kill you, but he's gonna make you kill your friends and family.

Over complication to motives make poor antagonists and what's with the effort to make the player sympathetic to the Reapers? In both the Dark Energy ending and the end we got they try and make us understand and sympathize with the Reapers.

The only way the current motivation works is if we had been given the opportunity to disprove it and tell the Reapers to **** off and die. Then use our new synthetic allies to finish them off.

[xxskyshadowxx]

Devil Mingy wrote...

The ending of the leaked script is almost exactly the same as what we got.

However, some details were leaked out about an older concept involving dark energy, but details are pretty sparse.

^This.

I find it interesting that in the Final Hours app, they bring it up...and the response to the leaked ending was very negative. No one liked it...and the writers expressed in the Final Hours app that they were very hurt by the response.

So, they knew fans hated the ending....released a rewrite that basically ends in the same way...and lied about it pre-release. That's one of the things that really annoys me about the ending. Bioware used to be a trustworthy company.

[Siegdrifa]

malra wrote...

M U P P 3 T Z wrote...

Drew debunked the "Dark Energy" ending by saying there was no canon ending from the get go. That was just one of the many, many possibilities laid out on the table.


LINK to the interview.

Yes, that actually didn't surprise me.  He is the ultimate professional and I have tons of respect for his work.  Doesn't make it true though.

i Think so.
The big difference for me, is that dark energy plot actualy give an agenda in addition to their motive, to the reapers to justify their existence in the ME univers.
And i find it much MUCH more important than relegated as simple giant eraser that switch-on every 50k years to reset the score.
One can introduce twist and big deep stuff... the other is juts.... big things to kills for the lolz, i mean, survival.

Also, if the AI vs organic was THAT much of a problem... first you don't let technologi to advance races progress further and faster than needed !
Letting the citadell and mass relays could provok this problem a lot faster than if each system was isolated from eacher other (If the reapers are just giant eraser, they don't need them, time to travel is not a concerne to them).

Let's face it, the relays, citadell and all their technologie are here to make sure the races can meet each other and evolve more quickly, for what purpose ? because the repears need us to evolve faster than on our own, and here the dark energy is a pretty descent answer.

AI vs organics kills the justification of existance of the mass relays...

[shepskisaac]

Militarized wrote...

The Overlord DLC, to me, was more about transhumanism... the virus is a human, not an AI.

But that just one of the themes of Overlord. Another is human's interaction with AIs - Geth.

[Chuvvy]

Not sure if anyone has answered (I assume someone has) but as I'm narcissistic, I will too.

The original endings were largely the same. Although less terrible.

Control
Synthesis (Called Merge)
and Destroy

In control, you controlled the reapers, the relays didn't blow up, and the Normandy crew didn't get stranded. It was assumed Shepard would be trapped in the citadel forever, similar to what happened to David in Overlord, or Legion in the Rannoch Arc.

In synthesis it was unclear what happened, we just knew that everyone was turned into a synthetic, we assumed it would be explained better in the full game, we were wrong. It was unclear whether or not Shepard died. The relays didn't blow up, and the Normandy crew didn't get stranded

In destroy, we knew you destroyed the reapers, but we didn't know you shot a pipe to do it. This is the ONLY ending that the relays blew up in. The Normandy Crew wasn't stranded, and this was the only ending where there was a confirmed possibility for Shepard to live.

Modifié par Slidell505, 02 avril 2012 - 01:11 .

[Fuzzfro]

I believe it was the dark energy plot

Dark energy was consuming the universe and the reapers purpose was to harvest and destroy civilisations to make more reapers and let the amount of dark energy subside.
The human reaper was also going to play a role and was apparently able to stop this dark energy problem. Shepard would chose to sacrifice humanity to continue making this reaper or find another way.

[Moogberg]

Federally wrote...

I liked the Reapers when they were big scary cyborg monsters harvesting advanced species for procreation and their own sort of evolution, as proposed in ME2. Purely selfish motives make for good antagonists and being turned into a Reaper or husk is scary. Not only is the monster gonna kill you, but he's gonna make you kill your friends and family.

Over complication to motives make poor antagonists and what's with the effort to make the player sympathetic to the Reapers? In both the Dark Energy ending and the end we got they try and make us understand and sympathize with the Reapers.

I agree with you about motives weakening the villains, but the writing team at least had to speculate about why the Reapers were that way, even if they stay ambiguous in the actual game, just to keep them a little coherent. There's lots of sci-fi with God-like intelligence who are out of the protagonists or the reader's comprehension.

The released ending explicited the motives (any kind of vague McGuffin would have done the deal), strips them of any mystique, and paints them as complete idiots, which is something that even the idea of the Dark Energy that was never seriously developed could have prevented.

Don't get me wrong. I don't ask for the "dark energy" stuff  to be "reinstated" or I don't consider it to be the true vision of the original authors.
It just shows that instead of having a clear idea for the end, the writers chose to give some ill-thought motives to the Reapers (nothing in the trilogy even suggests that their idea of greater good is right), while not fixing the central flaws for the game ending (incoherence, choices that had little to do with the kind of choices you had made before in the game, absence of closure), or at least keeping the motives vague and ambiguous.

Modifié par Moogberg, 02 avril 2012 - 01:59 .

[Federally]

I think the problem really is, the dark d regular ending and the ending we got make it plainly obvious they wrote ME1 and ME2 without even having a basic outline for the trilogy. That's a terrible way to do things and leads to this mess where we have threads leading to dead ends and a nonsense ending that lacked any foreshadowing.

[Moogberg]

Federally wrote...

I think the problem really is, the dark d regular ending and the ending we got make it plainly obvious they wrote ME1 and ME2 without even having a basic outline for the trilogy. That's a terrible way to do things and leads to this mess where we have threads leading to dead ends and a nonsense ending that lacked any foreshadowing.

The dark energy ending was actually more in line with many elements of sci-fi. Take for instance the Hyperion novels by Dan Simmons. Farcasters, developed by man, are the equivalent of the mass relays in the Mass Effect universe.

In the final novels of the cycle (MILD SPOILERS), farcasters and related technologies are shown to be actually a disruption of the universe energy.

Of course, Simmons did a lot of ret-con between the two halves of his cycle and the ending is, naturally, a little controversial and some kind of a deus ex machina mystical mumbo-jumbo.

In sci-fi, there's lots of recycling between authors (and far less lawsuits than in other branches of intellectual property). The dark energy stuff wasn't completely organic to the Mass Effect universe when somebody thought of it and it was never properly adapted or developed, so it could fit the rules of coherence. But, even in that state and even with the direction that Mass Effect 3 took and the different experiences you made compared to the original "ideas", the dark energy stuff would still have been more effective than what was ultimately used as a motive.

[daigakuinsei]

Genetic diversity being the key to "beating" dark energy makes less sense than the current ending. Space magic, indeed.

[The Original Dazac]

Arios1570 wrote...

I actually have to agree with lucidfox.  Dark Energy wasn't a huge issue in the series.  It was a side problem.  To have it suddenly become the reason for the reapers makes no sense.  Why would they harvest civilizations that are making technological progress to stop dark energy?  By doing that, they are destroying any chance that the civilizations could come up with a solution.  If the reapers don't have one, they're not going to come up with one, so why kill off those who could so that a solution can be formed?  That's worse than creating synthetics to kill organics so synthetics won't kill organics.

Canon reason means the reapers are working to their own solution, albeit in a roundabout way, it makes sense for a corrupted computer to see this as a solution.

This old reason means they are shooting themselves in the foot.  They are stagnent creativly, but organics aren't.  To hope for a solution, they should be helping organics develop further and act as peace-keepers, not reapers.  By keeping organics alive and simply saying "hey, this dark energy is a bad thing, but we don't have a clue how to stop it, here's all we know, now get to work."

This^

[Exolyps]

To be honest. The Dark Energy thingy would have been worse.

For one, it was said that if Shepard did not sacrifice the humans, then there would be a few hundred years left to find a new solution. Now if this is the case, then why could the Reapers be so patient about invading the galaxy, if there was just this little of time left.

Also, another one, humans got a high dna variety which is supposed to be the solution?
However, the Reapers have been reaping for more then 17 million years (oldest known Reaper dates back to there, and Harbringer is probably even older.

This would mean at least 340 cycles. You mean that in this long time, no other race like the humans had the chance to appear? Seems doubtful.

So I'd rather go with the idea of the Reapers just reaping because they want to do so. Could come up with some idea of some crazy leader in an ancient race wanted to become the ultimate being and turned himself into the first Reaper. And then to avoid any race to become strong enough, go with the cycles.

However, I must agree that the 2nd game would make a lot more sense, especially the part where they make a human Reaper, if the Dark Energy plot would have been true. In return however, the 1st game would make less sense.

So in short, neither option is perfect, but I prefer it this way. (I hate the ending, but the reason why the Reapers exist)

[Vhalkyrie]

I don't know that dark energy would have been the most mind blowing ending ever, but it would have been consistent with the story. Starchild and the crucible were never part of the build up in the previous games. The Haelstrom mission (one of the best) heavily implied dark energy was going to be a central theme. Then it just disappeared. I would have preferred they stuck with the lore they had established, rather than create a magic machine.