913 réponses à ce sujet

[Funkdrspot]

CrutchCricket wrote...

Funkdrspot wrote...

Personally I think it would cheapen the power the reapers are supposed to have by allowing a conventional victory. Maybe if the batarians were still around

We've already proven they're not invincible. It's just a matter of scale and quantity.

And you can't honestly use the words "cheapen the Reapers" in DEFENCE of the stupid holokid can you?

nowhere did i say theyre invincible and nowhere did i defend the star child

[Jeb231]

Well they would have to be good enough to win 20000 times in a row.

[M0keys]

Jeb231 wrote...

Well they would have to be good enough to win 20000 times in a row.

The only difference? Shepard wasn't in any of the other cycles.

Sounds a little far-fetched? That's cause it is, but it is self-fulfillment fantasy and you're the hero, so... yeah.

[Solmanian]

Byronic-Knight wrote...

 All of this could have been avoided if they would have just gone with what they (potentially) had before:
h9.abload.de/img/jhtqyrqxxg.jpg

(I can't get the image to show up. Follow the link.)

Found it in this thread: social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/355/index/10708065/4

I don't know if the original poster was being sarcastic when he presented it as something that bioware considered. But if not, it the most fake thing that pretends to be genuine that I saw on this site. The "leaked" script saying that in ME4 sheprad's ship will be a reaper called "murmur", was more believable.

This was obviously made by a disgruntled fan as displayed by the obssession with salvaging the relays (As I said before, there's a reason why the relays get destroyed in all endings. the existence of the relays is not a good thing, it's a monument to the reapers manipulation), and obvious missunderstanding about how a video game is writen (automatic failure 2/3 into the game if your EMS wasn't high enough? That would've caused an even bigger nerdrage than the endings). He was also an obvious talimancer to boot: extreme bias towards the quarians (no quarian fleet? no best ending and probably death), and unreasonable geth hate: according to the chart making peace between quarian and geth is a bad decision that will hurt you. while wiping out the geth is the road to victory  that does sound right to you? wiping an entire race would produce better results than peace sounds like something that has anything to do with ME? Or any game where the hero suppose to be a positive charecter?

Please....

[ArtificialIdiot]

Something I've been thinking on. If Bioware didn't want to add a fourth ending where you tell the Starchild to do one and let your forces battle it out in one last stand because it would invalidate the purpose of the Crucible (which is fair enough, they *have* been building it up for the entire game) then it's quite easy to just set the 'I'm not making this choice!' up as a stopgap option. If your EMS isn't high enough, you get steam rolled and the universe belongs to the Yargh, Pyjack and Varren. If it *is* high enough, however, the combined might of the allied forces pushes the Reapers off Earth, out of the Sol system. Right back to the fringes of the galaxy.

Doesn't destroy them (as it's established the only thing that can do that is the Crucible) but it does give you the chance to get the greatest scientific minds up top to study the thing, question the Starchild, and buys you a significant amount of time for the combined brainpower of the universe to find a way they can fire the damn thing with the minimum amount of destruction. Bioware can out and out state what they decided, or leave it ambiguous. Or even have it change depending on what you did.

I just think it'd be an intelligent option to put in, and one that doesn't contradict anything we already have in game. They can keep the old endings, and still produce a shiny new ending where the Crucible is key.

[Thatguyky]

I voted. I honestly expected a "no" option to be present during my play through. In my head I was thinking there was no way my Shepard would buy into this bull ****. If a "no" option was thrown into the EC I would be ecstatic!

[PsyrenY]

So what space magic is it that makes the Citadel suddenly relevant in weakening the Reapers, again? Keeping in mind that such a thing would have to be used while Starkid is awake and active.

[Solmanian]

The citadel does't control the reapers. The catalyst controls the reapers. He just live in the citadel.

[Solmanian]

Oh, and your chances of "hacking" the catalyst are only slightly lower than your chances of defeating the reapers using spambots...

[killnoob]

bump

[killnoob]

i highly doubt they will even look at it though...

[Joolazoo]

It would be kinda dumb to be able to win conventionally when the entire series you're told you can't...if anything this would be a huge plothole if they actually added it in.

Edit: Also, any shepard who tries to win conventionally is literally staking the galaxies chances on the most miniscule possibility. No one even hinted they have anywhere near the forces to battle the reapers in any kind of prolonged situation, or their entire force. The only way a conventional ending works is if it is one where Shepard decides to take his humanity with him and allow the galaxy to be destroyed so he doesn't have to break his principals or something. 

Modifié par Joolazoo, 10 avril 2012 - 10:55 .

[SNascimento]

Conventional victory is impossible, but saying no and see the reapers winning should be an option.

[M0keys]

Joolazoo wrote...

It would be kinda dumb to be able to win conventionally when the entire series you're told you can't...if anything this would be a huge plothole if they actually added it in.

Edit: Also, any shepard who tries to win conventionally is literally staking the galaxies chances on the most miniscule possibility. No one even hinted they have anywhere near the forces to battle the reapers in any kind of prolonged situation, or their entire force. The only way a conventional ending works is if it is one where Shepard decides to take his humanity with him and allow the galaxy to be destroyed so he doesn't have to break his principals or something. 

Crucible can manipulate Reapers, thus something inside the Crucible should be used to weaken the Reapers instead of using one of the three available options.

Obvious that the Crucible is basically a "magic machine"

Starchild is trying to make it seem like only 3 things are possible, when in actuality there's more the Crucible can really do.

[Naugi]

If you go down the 'destroy the Geth' route on Rannoch the Quarian fleet uses the weakness the Geth suffer when the Reaper code that is uplifting them is removed to destroy the now vulnerable Geth fleet.

This is exactly what the Crucible should have done to the Reapers allowing our forces to take down the Reapers with levels of success modified by EMS.

[Byronic-Knight]

Solmanian wrote...

As I said before, there's a reason why the relays get destroyed in all endings. the existence of the relays is not a good thing, it's a monument to the reapers manipulation 

But to destroy the Relays betrays the theme of unified diversity trumping homogeneity that I thought was so prominent throughout the series up until that last moment---that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and that forced assimilation was a detriment.

Javik regretting the fact they essentially did what the Reapers do to the galaxy (subjugating other races and cultures into conformity with Prothean ideas) because he saw that as a major contributing factor in their failure to stop the Reapers in his cycle only drove the point further. 

The Relays are what made all the unity possible. the Citadel is a celebration of galactic diversity, a great melting pot of races and cultures. 

Even ignoring all the problems proposed with interstellar travel without them, to destroy the Relays (and the Citadel) is to reduce the galaxy back to its respective parts. It shatters any notion of unity or brotherhood amongst different peoples. 

Modifié par Byronic-Knight, 10 avril 2012 - 11:35 .

[Joolazoo]

M0keys wrote...

Joolazoo wrote...

It would be kinda dumb to be able to win conventionally when the entire series you're told you can't...if anything this would be a huge plothole if they actually added it in.

Edit: Also, any shepard who tries to win conventionally is literally staking the galaxies chances on the most miniscule possibility. No one even hinted they have anywhere near the forces to battle the reapers in any kind of prolonged situation, or their entire force. The only way a conventional ending works is if it is one where Shepard decides to take his humanity with him and allow the galaxy to be destroyed so he doesn't have to break his principals or something. 

Crucible can manipulate Reapers, thus something inside the Crucible should be used to weaken the Reapers instead of using one of the three available options.

Obvious that the Crucible is basically a "magic machine"

Starchild is trying to make it seem like only 3 things are possible, when in actuality there's more the Crucible can really do.

You don't know this. I know you want it to be able to weaken the reapers, but it was obviously not intended to have that use. Just because you can manipulate something in a certain way doesn't mean you can do whatever you like to it, especially when it seems like the whole point was that these 3 options were forced on the starchild once the crucible was attached. Not to mention the starchild would have no real motivation for telling you about destroy, but not about weakening them...compared to his timescale wiping out synthetics and keeping organics safe for a couple hundred/thousand years before they make AI's again doesn't help him, and if the crucible only had one charge weakning them might not even be enough.

Modifié par Joolazoo, 10 avril 2012 - 11:08 .

[Hogge87]

Excellent idea, if BW are listening at all, they should include this option.

[killnoob]

someone make sure the devs read this post, there are some honest, really constructive discussion going on here

[SamFlagg]

social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/355/index/10349127

*chuckle* I should've made a poll when I did my original thread 

[a.m.p]

WARNING: Wall of text incoming

@Solmanian
You do realize we are arguing based on almost zero numeric data that isn’t even supposed to be internally consistent on such deep levels? Because it’s made up. We are right now probably giving it more thought than whoever wrote this did.

My main point that I am trying to communicate in this thread is that there’s evidence to support both positions. Some of that evidence contradicts each other. There’s room for maneuver. If the writers choose so they could write in a conventional or semi-conventional victory even at this point and it will be much less of an asspull than the entire crucible plot.

Nevertheless, let’s continue because why the hell not?

well sure. The shenghai break the war asset system. How can a single regular cruiser be worth almost twice than a stock alliance cruiser

Khalisah al-Jilani is what breaks the war asset system. What exactly is one unit of war assets? See, when I am told that one reporter is worth 1/9 of the whole alliance sixth fleet, I dismiss this as a poorly thought through gameplay mechanic and move on.

*calculations on reaper numbers*

I honestly don’t want to make any detailed calculations based on assumptions and arbitrary numbers. My point is again, we don’t know. We don’t even know how many reapers there are in Sol when we attack. Could be argued and written either way.

actualy thats quite the opposite. You see which class/type performed best in combat (i.e. least got blown up) and replicate it in masse. Just look up the T-34, and how it practicaly replaced all other soviet tanks in WWII. (I happened to be a tank commander in my youth, so I know my tank history... ). And yes hacket says: it's the only plan we got. So, no plan B... 

Well that is more depressing then seeing stargazer for the first time.

Let me start from afar. You know, one thing that is barely ever addressed is the protheans. The reapers took centuries (Vigil and Javik told us) to wipe out all of them, and that with the citadel and the relays under reaper control.

Let’s be generous and say that most part of those centuries they spent cleaning up the remaining protheans who were hiding and hoping to outwait the end of the world (see how Javik got frozen). Javik himself was born after the invasion began. He spent some part of his life actively fighting the reapers, so in his time there was still active resistance. So let’s cut that first century in half and say that it took them under 50 years (Vigil says "decades")  to obliterate the prothean defenses.

Since you’re fluent in soviet military history, let me refer you to repurposing civilian industry  to mass produce those T-34s you mentioned (because they did get destroyed in great numbers and there was always need for more, right?), evacuating whole industrial facilities from territories about to be occupied reorganizing the infrastructure for war and so on. You mean to tell me a galaxy facing annihilation didn’t try and do anything similar? Yes, I know the game tries to tell me that, but from a common sensed tank commander’s point of view, really?

And you really mean to tell me that in mere months the same reapers, that took decades to kill protheans, destroyed the whole infrastructure of the whole galaxy, and that with relays and the citadel under our control? Were they lazy and less effective last time? There was absolutely nowhere to fall back to form Earth? There wasn’t a contingency plan just in case the magical device nobody-knows-what-it-does didn’t work the way they hoped it would?

Or let me rephrase that. If all of the above was written into that fourth ending I’m proposing, if we found out about a plan B that Hackett did actually have, would that make less sense than “Oh, nobody starves, and FTL travel is totally possible without relays, don’t you worry”?

I realy don't have a counter argumet for "writers don't count"... By that reasoning even if I produced a signed affidavit by Ray Mazuka saying "there are over 10,000 reapers", that still won't be considered "cannon".

Well, haven’t seen any such statements so far. My point was, if they want me to believe while I first go through their game that their evil fleet is absolutely unbeatable, they should put those intimidating numbers in the game. “Shepard, they outnumber us one hundred to one and that’s just the big ones, this is more than we ever predicted”. Not “Shepard, we can not win this fight conventionally and we aren’t even going to consider it – Wait, why? – Because”.

A) the reapers are centered around population centers. There is no reason for large reaper forces to occupy abandoned systems.

So we dismiss the galaxy map as another fun and silly gameplay mechanic? No objections here.

About those population centers. How many survivors are there in smaller population centers with strong reaper presence? And provided we don’t shut the reapers down with the crucible and can’t spend forces to free that particular planet in time aren’t these people dead anyway?

And blowing up sol, and oblitirating the majority of allied forces

Evacuating the majority of the fleet before ramming the relay? In Arrival the Normandy was just fine jumping away seconds before impact. Protect the retreating forces (See Shield fleet protecting the crucible all that time we were having philosophical conversations with TIM), evacuate as many as you possibly can, ram the relay when they are about to reach it.

As for ramming, I’m not sure what factor of the rock collision exactly made the alpha relay blow up, but I’m going to speculate™ it’s kinetic energy ("small planet at very high speed" - Kenson). So what if the thing we ram isn’t a rock but a big ship? Say a dreadnaught at a speed less than c and faster than that arrival rock. It’s all very kamikaze and dark, sure, but that’s the point. That’s what the cost of refusing to pick a color is.

Or they can do what every ship in ME is said to do, according to the codex, when they're about to lose a fight: jump to FTL.

That is a fair point. Therefore requires an asspull to address (didn’t say it would be genius storytelling). So let me perform one: this could be justified by claiming that whatever happens when the relay explodes also expands at FTL speed. The spacemagic from the crucible is obviously FTL, or reapers could outmaneuver it.

Oil metaphor

Using your oil metaphor, at the point when we presumably have the reapers retreat, oil already ran out. It is immediate danger. They could be back anytime and we need better FTL yesterday.

Let’s go back to tank history. Correct me if I’m wrong, because my knowledge of tank history is limited to books, documentaries and the Artillery Museum. The T-34, was developed in a relatively short time after previous models were considered unsatisfactory and launched into mass production spring 1940, right? As part of an ongoing campaign to prepare for an inevitable attack. Because it was immediate danger.

Modifié par a.m.p, 11 avril 2012 - 04:21 .

[a.m.p]

Sorry about that ^^^ ,I had to.

Optimystic_X wrote…
You're right - it was an arbitrary unexplained plot device that showed up in a prequel instead.

Prequel. Exactly. Also, as far as LotR lore goes it was very well explained. Even with some poetry. I don’t need to know quantum mechanics of magic in a fantasy universe.

No, he just borrowed his volcano.

Again, exactly. He borrows the mountain and destroys the ring, because that’s what he came here to do, because people whom he trusts told him this would destroy the ring and explained why. And Sauron is extremely unhappy about it.

Still no differences?

Modifié par a.m.p, 11 avril 2012 - 04:20 .

[a.m.p]

SamFlagg wrote...

social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/355/index/10349127

*chuckle* I should've made a poll when I did my original thread 

Thanks for posting this, adding to the pile.

[a.m.p]

Joolazoo wrote...

M0keys wrote...

Joolazoo wrote...

It would be kinda dumb to be able to win conventionally when the entire series you're told you can't...if anything this would be a huge plothole if they actually added it in.

Edit: Also, any shepard who tries to win conventionally is literally staking the galaxies chances on the most miniscule possibility. No one even hinted they have anywhere near the forces to battle the reapers in any kind of prolonged situation, or their entire force. The only way a conventional ending works is if it is one where Shepard decides to take his humanity with him and allow the galaxy to be destroyed so he doesn't have to break his principals or something. 

Crucible can manipulate Reapers, thus something inside the Crucible should be used to weaken the Reapers instead of using one of the three available options.

Obvious that the Crucible is basically a "magic machine"

Starchild is trying to make it seem like only 3 things are possible, when in actuality there's more the Crucible can really do.

You don't know this. I know you want it to be able to weaken the reapers, but it was obviously not intended to have that use. Just because you can manipulate something in a certain way doesn't mean you can do whatever you like to it, especially when it seems like the whole point was that these 3 options were forced on the starchild once the crucible was attached. Not to mention the starchild would have no real motivation for telling you about destroy, but not about weakening them...compared to his timescale wiping out synthetics and keeping organics safe for a couple hundred/thousand years before they make AI's again doesn't help him, and if the crucible only had one charge weakning them might not even be enough.

Yes, we don't know. That idea is based on the jarring fact that literary nobody knows anything about the crucible and that creates some room for maneuver to write in other options.

Modifié par a.m.p, 11 avril 2012 - 04:37 .

[a.m.p]

M0keys wrote...

Jeb231 wrote...

Well they would have to be good enough to win 20000 times in a row.

The only difference? Shepard wasn't in any of the other cycles.

Sounds a little far-fetched? That's cause it is, but it is self-fulfillment fantasy and you're the hero, so... yeah.

Differences:
1)    previous cycle sabotaged the reaping routine and sent a warning
2)    this cycle's reaping because of that sabotage was delayed for three years, which allowed to prepare and study what remained of a dead reaper, that in turn allowed to develop new powerful weapons
3)    this cycle, because of that sabotage, kept the citadel and the relay network

Shepard’s only importance in ME3 is that they are the person with personal connections: to the krogan chief, the guy with the genophage cure, the quarian admiralty, the geth consensus. They are able to use those personal connections to bring the galaxy together. Once that’s done Shepard is just one soldier among many running for the conduit, because that’s what they do best - run and shoot.

If anything, the existing endings + stargazer turn Shepard into this messianic hero figure, which was an awful, awful thing to do to Shepard.


Also, updated OP with funny twitter PR.

Modifié par a.m.p, 11 avril 2012 - 06:50 .