239 réponses à ce sujet

[Delta-62]

the man VS machine plot has always been there, there is no way anyone could deny that... but it was always in the backseat behind the "together we stand, divided we fall" theme which was much more interesting. I mean hell you end a man VS machine plot in the name of the "we must unite" theme.

[Kawamura]

pistolols wrote...

The Charnel Expanse wrote...

pistolols wrote...

Personally i think ME2 messed everyone up made everyone think it was all about the characters which was never my take at all and in fact i found ME2 to be rather tedious dealing with all these characters personal problems that i didn't even care about.

I always knew the heart of this was a conflict of man vs machine. And i loved the way the end tied everything together in the form of an AI behind it all... it was pretty mind blowing to behonest.

You represent a tiny minority.

Yeah because most people don't pay attention.  The final choice of the game, for example, to control or destory synthetic lifeforms is a conflict brought up NUMEROUS times throughout the series.  It is absolutely a major theme.

I think it's a big theme, yes, but I wouldn't agree that it's the -major- one. 

Honestly, I'm paying attention. I love paying attention to things. I like dissecting. It gives me pleasure. 

I'd say that diversity vs compliance and homogeny is a bigger part of the game than man vs machine. The man vs machine part ties into it. Several times in the series it comes up that stagnation and constant sameness is bad. 

For example, humans are special because they're so diverse. This is pointed out several times ("you guys can't even get your religions right" I think is a line in ME2). We're genetically and culturally diverse. We're special like that. The Protheans fall becuase they lack that diversity, remember? Building along lines created for us and being the same as every other Cycle is bad.  Cerberus is bad because they have solutions that do not favour diversity.

It also comes up in small things: the Quarian's population mixing to avoid genetically screwing themselves up is a bit of minor evidence touching on this theme. Kaidan mentioning how difficult the Council and C-Sec have it to keep the races from squabbling. 

Dealing with differences and celebrating those is a bigger part of the games' themes to me than man vs machine, as man vs machine can fit in that theme of diversity. 

[Doctor_Jackstraw]

Uniting everyone was the theme of ME2 and ME3, it wasnt the theme of ME1. the theme of ME1 was going off on your own to uncover a mystery.

did people just forget about mass effect 1? did they really? @_@


I bet everyone forgot about the 38 times Anderson brings up that the Protheans may have developed a weapon capable of wiping out all life in the galaxy.  Remember when he kept saying "Saren must be after a Massive Prothean Weapon"

Remember when he talks about that a whole lot?  (no you dont stop lieing)

Modifié par Doctor_Jackstraw, 07 avril 2012 - 06:47 .

[MaximusRex]

blacqout wrote...

I think that it's the other way around, and that a majority of the fanbase has been misinterprating things since ME1.

If this is the case then that is really a verification that BioWare can't tell a story.

[Fhaarkas]

People assumed. Their assumption turned out wrong. Rage.

[OchreJelly]

pistolols wrote...

*Snip*

And i loved the way the end tied everything together in the form of an AI behind it all... it was pretty mind blowing to behonest.

It's not mentioned anywhere whether it's an AI or synthetic lifeform. The fact that it can essentially read Shep's mind and take a form and voice (mostly) that Shepard is familiar with suggests something else. Even better, it conveniently is the form of a thing Shep regrets or has been having issues with.

Any conclusions about the Catalyst's state of existence are pure speculation, because it's not explained at all.

Modifié par OchreJelly, 07 avril 2012 - 06:48 .

[The Charnel Expanse]

Joeyv wrote...

Man. The arrogance of thinking you know the game better than members of the team who developed the damn game series..

Sorry, but anyone who paid attention to the first 99.9% of the trilogy would realize what the central theme is. It doesn't take any degree of arrogance to understand a work. And just because the guy is credited with creating a franchise doesn't mean Hudson has full authority over its contents. He might have had his own vision of where to take it, but clearly Karpyshyn, who was the head writer for the first two games, was the one exercising the most creative control and setting the parameters for what the story was actually about.

[LucasShark]

pistolols wrote...

2484Stryker wrote...

The theme wasn't wrong, they just twisted it beyond acceptance. Those three ending choices made no sense.

Sorry, but you are wrong.  Replay Tali's loyalty mission in ME2 and then come back to talk to me.  You will see those 3 choices pop out at you in a very surprising way.

See this is the problem.  Nobody was paying attention.

Yeah... except the bits where you found out the Geth had divisions... when you found out that they didn't intend to exterminate the Quarians... When you got a Geth emisary on your crew... when the Geth and Quarians made peace...

[Xyos]

Its not about artistic integrity, they want an ending that they can salvage to milk more ME games afterwards.

[MaximizedAction]

pistolols wrote...

The Charnel Expanse wrote...

pistolols wrote...

Personally i think ME2 messed everyone up made everyone think it was all about the characters which was never my take at all and in fact i found ME2 to be rather tedious dealing with all these characters personal problems that i didn't even care about.

I always knew the heart of this was a conflict of man vs machine. And i loved the way the end tied everything together in the form of an AI behind it all... it was pretty mind blowing to behonest.

You represent a tiny minority.

Yeah because most people don't pay attention.  The final choice of the game, for example, to control or destory synthetic lifeforms is a conflict brought up NUMEROUS times throughout the series.  It is absolutely a major theme.

Bold claim. Please, give examples and elaborate them.

[sagouro]

pistolols wrote...

2484Stryker wrote...

The theme wasn't wrong, they just twisted it beyond acceptance. Those three ending choices made no sense.

Sorry, but you are wrong.  Replay Tali's loyalty mission in ME2 and then come back to talk to me.  You will see those 3 choices pop out at you in a very surprising way.

See this is the problem.  Nobody was paying attention.

Replay Tali's recruitment mission, foreshadowing of dark energy plot.
They changed the plot in between Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, thats why the ending comes out of left field.
Conflict between man and machine is very important in the series but as a moral theme, not the motive behind the Reapers.
You 're the one paying attention to what suits you to justify the ending

[MaximusRex]

Doctor_Jackstraw wrote...

Uniting everyone was the theme of ME2 and ME3, it wasnt the theme of ME1. the theme of ME1 was going off on your own to uncover a mystery.

did people just forget about mass effect 1? did they really? @_@

I've been replaying ME1, building an alien crew that I need to overcome Saren/Sovereign and then dealing with everyone's alienphopic nature is a major major theme, I can't talk with a human crew member without the subject coming up.  ME1 is absolutely about building power through unification and diversity.

[balmyrian]

pistolols wrote...

2484Stryker wrote...

The theme wasn't wrong, they just twisted it beyond acceptance. Those three ending choices made no sense.

Sorry, but you are wrong.  Replay Tali's loyalty mission in ME2 and then come back to talk to me.  You will see those 3 choices pop out at you in a very surprising way.

See this is the problem.  Nobody was paying attention.

The theme of Mass Effect is not Synthetics vs Organics, that would be more like the premise.

The theme of Mass Effect is "Commander Shepard Does The Right Thing, either the right way or the wrong way".

There's two problems that appear in the story, muddying the premise's consistency:

1°) Synthetics and Reapers are differentiated, ultimately leading to the fact that you can think that Synthetics are okay (Legion, ME2; Legion, ME3) and that's it's really the Reapers messing up everything. Lampshades the theme completely.

2°) The story diversifies, introducing other narrative lines and therefore other themes, further obscuring the premise. The entire Cerberus line being about the theme of Humanity in the Galaxy, for instance.

The problem is not that people aren't paying attention. The problem is that the writing diversifies the themes, obscures the initial premise (if there really was one), and therefore leads people to form conclusions as to what the initial premise is.


People who're happy with the endings and find that everything is logical and was stated from the get go are looking at the entire thing from a more global view. It was exactly the same thing with Galactica, where some people could honestly argue that everything was foreshadowed from the first season.

Those people look at premises and are not as adamant about narrative consistency and intrinsic logic as most the audience always is.

Nothing wrong with that, but as long as mass entertainment writers don't realize that you need to think to make both types of audiences happy from the get go, we'll get more messes.

To me it's a case of immaturity as a writer, unfortunately we've seen over again that even the most celebrated succumb to that.

[NoUserNameHere]

Synthetics being hell-bent by nature to wipe out organics hasn't been a major theme since those first conversations with Tali onboard the Normandy in game one.

Her loyalty mission? Xen's advocating some kind of control, yes, and it is portrayed by abhorent. Qwib Qwib rejects the synthetics v. organics conflict, and is pretty much 100% right come the third game. There's a reason why you need to save him to make peace.

Legion further humanizes the geth... oh, wait, the one ending defender here chooses to straight-up reject ME2 and all its legitimate character development.


Organics v. synthetics was an implied theme in game one, a background theme taking a back seat to galactic unity. It is subverted at every point in the series... up until the ending, where it's suddenly played straight again.

[Zix13]

pistolols wrote...

2484Stryker wrote...

The theme wasn't wrong, they just twisted it beyond acceptance. Those three ending choices made no sense.

Sorry, but you are wrong.  Replay Tali's loyalty mission in ME2 and then come back to talk to me.  You will see those 3 choices pop out at you in a very surprising way.

See this is the problem.  Nobody was paying attention.

The goal of the series was to stop the reapers, not to impose your views on one of the many themes upon everyone in the galaxy. Clearly you missed the defeating the reapers part of the series.

[Doctor_Jackstraw]

MaximusRex wrote...

blacqout wrote...

I think that it's the other way around, and that a majority of the fanbase has been misinterprating things since ME1.

If this is the case then that is really a verification that BioWare can't tell a story.

no its more a verification that ME1 was kind of boring to play and people didnt really memorize it the way they did ME2.  People FORGOT about ME1 because it was boring and the cutscenes were lame and the mako missions sucked and took forever. 

The common complaint of ME1 is that in the middle of the game people would FORGET about Saren and what his evil plan was because they became pre-occupied with just doing every side mission (missions that could take upwards of 30 minutes per planet to complete)  Recently a letsplay group I follow finished the first game and they skipped almost all the side missions and I noticed how they reacted to the game's story was more in line with how you're supposed to react on a first time playing.  They didnt forget about saren or the central themes established throughout the game.  ME1's UNC missions are the reason that people are complaining about ME3 not fitting the trilogy.  ME3's ending is the CONCLUSION to ME1's ending in every way.

[balmyrian]

mispost

Modifié par balmyrian, 07 avril 2012 - 06:51 .

[Saul Iscariot]

As a PS3 gamer I was introduced to the series with ME2, so I missed the whole Saren plot. I had to learn it from Massipedia but I felt the struggle with the Geth was more preeminent in ME2. Artificial life forms obviously play a bigger part than some people give them credit for. But that ending glosses over the other parts of the story by making it the central focus.

[Computron2000]

In ME2, the themes IMO were as below
Thane - Represented family and dying
Samara - Represented family and loss
Miranda - Represented family and acceptance of yourself
Tali - Represented family and loss
Garrus - Represented brotherhood and loss
Kasumi - Represented love and loss
Zaeed - Represented vengeance and hatred
Grunt - Representing finding social acceptance and your own path
Jacob - Represented family and role models
Mordin - Represented practicality and morality
Legion - Represented civil war and role models

The final suicide mission didn't have much of a theme because you were there to stop the collectors. Terminator showing up was not so much about man vs machine because up to that point you were fighting collectors. To me Terminator was a plot device rather than a theme.

*edit* forgot legion

Modifié par Computron2000, 07 avril 2012 - 06:54 .

[The Charnel Expanse]

Doctor_Jackstraw wrote...

Uniting everyone was the theme of ME2 and ME3, it wasnt the theme of ME1. the theme of ME1 was going off on your own to uncover a mystery.

did people just forget about mass effect 1? did they really? @_@

I certainly didn't. In fact, I played through it just last week to see if there were any hints as to what was coming. But all the hints pointed to the central theme being cooperation and conflict resolution for the greater good. They hadn't fully crystalized yet at that point, because the threat facing the galaxy was only being introduced. But all the subtext was there in abundance - right down to the fact that you took the role of a lone soldier who assembles a ragtag bunch of misfits, each with his/her own agenda, to go up against a rogue spectre who thinks he alone knows what's in the galaxy's best interests.

[pistolols]

OchreJelly wrote...

pistolols wrote...

*Snip*

And i loved the way the end tied everything together in the form of an AI behind it all... it was pretty mind blowing to behonest.

It's not mentioned anywhere whether it's an AI or synthetic lifeform. The fact that it can essentially read Shep's mind and take a form and voice (mostly) that Shepard is familiar with suggests something else. Even better, it conveniently is the form of a thing Shep regrets or has been having issues with.

Any conclusions about the Catalyst's state of existence are pure speculation, because it's not explained at all.

Indeed i am definitely open to speculation from everyone regarding it being something else entirely.  But when i compare the starchild to the very first AI we meet on the citadel in ME1... i find i am able to put a lot of the pieces of the puzzle together and better understand the catalyst and it's origins.

[Skvindt]

pistolols wrote...

Personally i think ME2 messed everyone up made everyone think it was all about the characters which was never my take at all and in fact i found ME2 to be rather tedious dealing with all these characters personal problems that i didn't even care about.

I always knew the heart of this was a conflict of man vs machine. And i loved the way the end tied everything together in the form of an AI behind it all... it was pretty mind blowing to behonest.

I do agree with you that one of the core themes was the conflict of man vs. machine.  Once the Reapers were introduced in the first game, as with the Geth, it was pretty clear that it would be a major component of the story.  I would be fairly upset if it wasn't brought up in the finale as I do think that the organic versus machine 'conflict' is a crucial part of the story.

That being said, I just do not feel the conclusion was executed very well.  The star-child AI feels exceptionally out of place.  It felt so odd.  It didn't seem like it was the Mass Effect universe anymore.  Not to mention the numerous and bizzare plotholes that I do not think can be properly rectified.  

And while the man versus machine theme is a major theme to the series, other themes, such uniting races and friendship, are just as important. I don't think they were properly addressed in the games final moments, as it should of been.

[Doctor_Jackstraw]

The Charnel Expanse wrote...

Joeyv wrote...

Man. The arrogance of thinking you know the game better than members of the team who developed the damn game series..

Sorry, but anyone who paid attention to the first 99.9% of the trilogy would realize what the central theme is. It doesn't take any degree of arrogance to understand a work. And just because the guy is credited with creating a franchise doesn't mean Hudson has full authority over its contents. He might have had his own vision of where to take it, but clearly Karpyshyn, who was the head writer for the first two games, was the one exercising the most creative control and setting the parameters for what the story was actually about.

Sorry but can you explain to me how Unity has anything to do with the first game?  The first game was about sobservience and doing what you needed to even if you had to do it alone.  Or did you forget about Shepard STEALING the normandy to go fight Saren by himself?  The conflict with Wrex is another excercise in sobservience vs duty.  Wrex rebels against you because what you're doing goes against everything he believes in.  He doesnt want to blindly follow orders just like you dont want to blindly submit to the reapers.

[Daedalus1773]

The Charnel Expanse wrote...

It's pretty clear that in crafting the ending, the two men ostensibly responsible for it completely lost track of what has been the established central theme of the Mass Effect trilogy - the struggle of one wo/man to unite a galaxy against an existential threat and the difficult choices s/he is forced to make in the process. It's a simple theme and one that should not have been difficult to stick with. Instead, when it came time to conclude the series, they took what had been an existing but ultimately ancillary theme in the game universe - the conflict between man and machine [or organics and synthetics, as it were] and decided to wedge that in as the main focus of the series at the very last moment, thus completely upsetting the narrative flow of all three games. 

What makes this worse is that significant portions of the storyline in ME2 & ME3 are spent disproving in absolute terms that conflict between synthetics & organics is certain. In my game I freed EDI, helped her to understand and grow into her own sentience, make her own decisions to ultimately stand with humanity & make the ultimate sacrifice if necessary. Looming even larger over this ending was the conclusion of the Rannoch mission - mere hours before the StarKid delivers Shepard his manifesto & horribly flawed logic & RGB choices - whereby the Geth & Quarians are united & help one another rebuild their homeworld in peaceful harmony.

But StarKid who I just met says it's inevitable & he has to harvest all advanced organic life every 50k years, so it must be true. I'll just say, "I ... I don't know," kill myself and force some horrible galactic civilization-ending genocide on everyone.  Cool ending, Casey. What game were we playing again?

Modifié par Daedalus1773, 07 avril 2012 - 06:56 .

[I am KROGAN]

SRX wrote...


That being said, I just do not feel the conclusion was executed very well.  The star-child AI feels exceptionally out of place.  It felt so odd.  It didn't seem like it was the Mass Effect universe anymore.  Not to mention the numerous and bizzare plotholes that I do not think can be properly rectified.  

And while the man versus machine theme is a major theme to the series, other themes, such uniting races and friendship, are just as important. I don't think they were properly addressed in the games final moments, as it should of been.

You put my thoughts down better than I can, seconded.