5087 réponses à ce sujet

[edisnooM]

Well it's getting on and I need to go to bed, so this will probably be my last post tonight, unless I think of something incredibly profound to come back and make you all suffer through. But if this is my last post, then I probably won't be back on until tomorrow evening after the EC.

In which case I say to you, my friends, my comrades, my brothers in arms (or sisters as the case may be); Good night, good luck, and I shall see you on the other side.

Edit:

Oh for pity's sake. All right because it seems fitting: The Suicide Mission theme.

Modifié par edisnooM, 26 juin 2012 - 04:36 .

[Taboo]

I want to wish everyone in here luck. It's going to be very nasty in here tomorrow I think, and we should all be prepared for it.

[thisisme8]

I'm saying the catalyst was right that the peace wouldn't last. It never has. May be a logical fallacy, but it is logical conclusion - to think otherwise would be foolish.

Again, and Hawk, you and I go back and forth on this constantly - whether or not its bad writing or whatever, neither of us can judge the original decision to start the cycle. Too little information to reach any conclusion. We can judge the morality or the extent of the cycle, but little else.

[Taboo]

You cannot have a logical conclusion to a logical fallacy.

Possible =/= Probable.

Furthermore he presents an appeal to authority.

Probability is not fallacious, appealing to it is.

Modifié par Taboo-XX, 26 juin 2012 - 04:40 .

[CulturalGeekGirl]

thisisme8 wrote...

I'm saying the catalyst was right that the peace wouldn't last. It never has. May be a logical fallacy, but it is logical conclusion - to think otherwise would be foolish.

Again, and Hawk, you and I go back and forth on this constantly - whether or not its bad writing or whatever, neither of us can judge the original decision to start the cycle. Too little information to reach any conclusion. We can judge the morality or the extent of the cycle, but little else.

But the Catalyst isn't arguing that peace won't last in general.

He's arguing that peace won't last with synthetics, and that war between organics and synthetics is more likely and more dangerous than all other potential wars - when so far every organic-lead war has been much much more dangerous than any of the synthetic lead ones.

So you're completely incorrectly representing the Catalyst's point, equating it to a broader more sensible one. If the idea behind the catalyst had been "we're worrid one NONSPECIFIC SPECIES will wipe out all other species, so we're trying to prevent any species from advancing that far" then that would make sense.

That's not his point, so you're grossly misrepresenting his point, replacing it with a better one.

Modifié par CulturalGeekGirl, 26 juin 2012 - 04:43 .

[KitaSaturnyne]

No matter the EC's effect on the endings as far as narrative, will any credit be given to BioWare for realizing that something needed to be fixed, and for extending the olive branch that the EC potentially could be? Or is it simply an all-or-nothing proposition here?

For instance, I may or may not be willing to forgive the thematic disconnects in the name of sufficient closure, but is something like this completely unforgivable on every conceivable moral level?

I mean, if you asked me to draw an Asari, and I drew you a stick figure with some funny bumps on the head because that's all I was capable of, would that mean that you and I couldn't be friends anymore?

PS - What time is the EC going to be released? Midnight? Noon?

Modifié par KitaSaturnyne, 26 juin 2012 - 04:46 .

[thisisme8]

Taboo-XX wrote...

You cannot have a logical conclusion to a logical fallacy.

Possible =/= Probable.

Furthermore he presents an appeal to authority.

Probability is not fallacious, appealing to it is.

Here we go.

I'm in a desert with a gun and a hungry lion for 3 days.
Day 1 - the lion moves closer to me
Day 2 - the lion moves closer to me
Day 3 - the lion is moving closer to me and.......

You can herald your superior logic and point out my fallacy, or you can feel relieved that I shot it based off of:
Possible =/= Probable but damned too high of a risk.

Modifié par thisisme8, 26 juin 2012 - 04:49 .

[drayfish]

[I'm really sorry, but with the ending of all this one day away I guess I had a momentary maudlin lapse... The following is some self-indulgent wallowing, so feel free to flame and/or ignore.  Also, let it be shouted to the heavens that I know that all of this is just vain speculation given that from this vantage point – before actually seeing the final result of the[i] EC[/i] – nothing is definitive...]
 
 
Goddamn it. I made the mistake of listening to the Walters/Hudson Extended Cut podcast a second time, allowing it to actually sink in. Of course, I agreed with you before, CulturalGeekGirl, but I think I now feel your initial reaction to it more acutely.
 
'We don't know how to tell that story.'
 
Damn.
 
That was my greatest fear all along: that I had somehow been mistaken about the themes of the whole series, that I had unknowingly projected all those qualities of unity, fellowship, negotiation and understanding onto the text against its will. I guess that when I heard Bioware announce their Extended Cut I thought: Ah, yes!  They see the confusion this has brought. They want to show that this isn't the point they were trying to make. It's not about being forced into unwinnable scenarios where you have to bow to succeed; it's not about compromising your soul. ...But it looks like the current conclusion was their story. The story they were telling. The one in my head was – Well, I guess they're now saying that my story was none of their concern. And I guess on many levels they're right (despite what they may have said many times previous). Another thing to add to my pile of misapprehensions.
 
It looks like maybe it does all come down to the distinction between 'imply' and 'infer'. Maybe that wasn't the journey they were engaged in at all; maybe I was only reading into it something they never intended. But damn, I didn't think hope was the last thing I'd have to sacrifice to their moral grindstone.
 
 
As we all turn in for the night (even though it's still day here), I guess I'll offer a short, but heartfelt prayer:
 
 
Dear Batman,
 
Please let me be wrong.
 
Let me have fundamentally misinterpreted what the Extended Cut actually is.
 
Please let there be some magical (not space magic!) way to justify how we get to those three choices – if three choices are what we are stuck with.
 
I know that you are all-powerful, almighty Bat, and will act in your grand wisdom, but please take pity on my love for the franchise, and for all that I believed it to be.
 
In your Holy Sacrilegious Name, Batman!
 
KA-BLAmen.
 
 
 
and @ frypan: As edisnooM said, I believe that we Australian-scums have to wait until tomorrow (27th) to download the EC. (I will have to wait a further few days intil the weekend, sadly, but am looking forward to your reading of it. ...I'm also a little scared for my system: did you say that you've been having black-screen crashes? Is that from the shonky x-box patches Bioware put out to fix the face import thing?)
 

[Taboo]

Incorrect. You have not accounted for variables.

Is the lion male or female?

Is the lion hungry?

How old is the lion?

[playoff52]

Chesta12345 wrote...

delta_vee wrote...

ME1 and ME2, though, had the reveal roughly 2/3 of the way through, allowing both time to explore the new idea in some depth and time for the audience to acclimatize themselves to the change in priorities. Timing is everything.

Great point. And I think that's what made the Star Child dialogue (if you could even call it that.. He basically talks *at* you) so frustrating. It was like being force-fed an entire cake in a matter of seconds.

Perhaps It could've been sweet if we'd been presented with the theme slice by slice with enough time to digest, but instead it just made most of us sick.

I pointed this out a few times earlier in other threads, but upon a second play through on Thessia when speaking with Vendetta the Prothean VI, he hints (However poorly) at the notion that the Reapers aren't acting of their own volition, but that the Protheans had suspicions the Cycle was being perpetuated by some other entity. When Shepard asks who or what, Vendetta then replies they weren't certain as they had no time to investigate the idea. Merely that they observed there was a pattern in the cycle, and that it was too systematic to be coincidence.

So...It's kinda there, but they needed to do a better job of foreshadowing it than they did. Granted, I'm probably just connecting points B and X together with a worn out strand of yarn, but after I heard the conversation again it seemed to click a little better. Still doesn't excuse the craptastical presentation of it on the first play through.

[thisisme8]

Taboo-XX wrote...

Incorrect. You have not accounted for variables.

Is the lion male or female?

Is the lion hungry?

How old is the lion?

What?  What's that?  Logic depends on context?

[Taboo]

You MUST account for variables. This creates reliable data. The Catalyst has not presented any. This is the root of his fallacy.

He predicts that a hyperbolic growth curve will lead to a singularity. This is false. He has not accounted for feedback loops.

He has no relevant data to share.

[Hawk227]

thisisme8 wrote...

Again, and Hawk, you and I go back and forth on this constantly - whether or not its bad writing or whatever, neither of us can judge the original decision to start the cycle. Too little information to reach any conclusion. We can judge the morality or the extent of the cycle, but little else.

I don't entirely disagree, but to me an assertion made without proof is a useless one. He could well be right, but without any evidence he is unreliable and in simply practical terms, wrong. I know you think he's alien and unknowable, but I don't think being a charlatan is alien.

[CulturalGeekGirl]

KitaSaturnyne wrote...

No matter the EC's effect on the endings as far as narrative, will any credit be given to BioWare for realizing that something needed to be fixed, and for extending the olive branch that the EC potentially could be? Or is it simply an all-or-nothing proposition here?

For instance, I may or may not be willing to forgive the thematic disconnects in the name of sufficient closure, but is something like this completely unforgivable on every conceivable moral level?

I mean, if you asked me to draw an Asari, and I drew you a stick figure with some funny bumps on the head because that's all I was capable of, would that mean that you and I couldn't be friends anymore?

Personally, I give Bioware credit for being bioware... that is to say, I'm still giving them credit for all the great games they've created, all the great characters they've written, all the great strides they've made. I'll probably continue to buy all non-Mass-Effect-related games in the future, and I've said that before. I do not want to see them perish from the earth.

But the EC itself? No. Unless I'm wrong (and I am never wrong), the EC was never meant to be an olive branch. It was... something else.

I would have believed it was an olive branch if, say, they'd put Weekes and Dombrow not just on the project, but in charge of it. If they'd looked at those two guys and said "OK, people seem to like the stuff you did in this game, why don't you take a crack at the ending?" If the interview podcast had been not just with Mac and Casey but with Mac, Casey, Weekes, and Dombrow... I'd have hope. I'd believe in the olive branch. Right now, I don't.

Modifié par CulturalGeekGirl, 26 juin 2012 - 04:55 .

[Darkeus]

All I know is, there are some rumors on /V/ that say this is going to be a clusterf@!k tomorrow.

Let us just say, do not expect the EC to be good....

[Taboo]

Don't believe things from 4Chan.

EVER.

EVER.

[CulturalGeekGirl]

Taboo-XX wrote...

Don't believe things from 4Chan.

EVER.

EVER.

I don't know, they were right about the ponies.

Of course, they were SO RIGHT about the ponies that 4chan rejected them for excessive rightness.

[Taboo]

CulturalGeekGirl wrote...

Taboo-XX wrote...

Don't believe things from 4Chan.

EVER.

EVER.

I don't know, they were right about the ponies.

Of course, they were SO RIGHT about the ponies that 4chan rejected them for excessive rightness.

Mods are asleep. Post Ponies.

[thisisme8]

Hawk227 wrote...

thisisme8 wrote...

Again, and Hawk, you and I go back and forth on this constantly - whether or not its bad writing or whatever, neither of us can judge the original decision to start the cycle. Too little information to reach any conclusion. We can judge the morality or the extent of the cycle, but little else.

I don't entirely disagree, but to me an assertion made without proof is a useless one. He could well be right, but without any evidence he is unreliable and in simply practical terms, wrong. I know you think he's alien and unknowable, but I don't think being a charlatan is alien.

And I think that's intentional and possibly a mistake.  I believe the reaction they were looking for was not the one they received.  They tried painting an enemy that we couldn't understand with a choice that was just as uncomfortable, but instead of taking it out on the catalyst, we took it out on the writers.

[delta_vee]

playoff52 wrote...

I pointed this out a few times earlier in other threads, but upon a second play through on Thessia when speaking with Vendetta the Prothean VI, he hints (However poorly) at the notion that the Reapers aren't acting of their own volition, but that the Protheans had suspicions the Cycle was being perpetuated by some other entity. When Shepard asks who or what, Vendetta then replies they weren't certain as they had no time to investigate the idea. Merely that they observed there was a pattern in the cycle, and that it was too systematic to be coincidence.

So...It's kinda there, but they needed to do a better job of foreshadowing it than they did. Granted, I'm probably just connecting points B and X together with a worn out strand of yarn, but after I heard the conversation again it seemed to click a little better. Still doesn't excuse the craptastical presentation of it on the first play through.

I remember, and you're not quite playing with frayed yarn, but Vendetta was thoroughly non-specific (in fact, it didn't even necessarily say it was an entity at all). Like I said a bit earlier, I was hoping they'd do something fun with dynamic systems and fractals and the like, something which could remain mysterious and actually beyond our full comprehension (and, incidentally, push the religious imagery down a couple layers). So technically there was an attempt at foreshadowing the Catalyst's existence, but nothing on the problem it espouses.

[Hawk227]

KitaSaturnyne wrote...

For instance, I may or may not be willing to forgive the thematic disconnects in the name of sufficient closure, but is something like this completely unforgivable on every conceivable moral level?

I think that taking the time to fix the most minor and superficial problems with the end is not sufficient. Especially when there were numerous sources (on their own website, ahem) telling them why the ending was so poorly received. The whole first 20 pages of this thread is "Wow, thanks for articulating what I couldn't!". To act like giving Joker orders to bail on shepard, and to throw in some cutscenes with Rachni is the grand old fix we wanted is, frankly, dishonest.

To go back to your Truck analogy, It wouldn't be sufficient for the mechanic to fix my flat when the engine was on fire.

[Jorji Costava]

thisisme8 wrote...

First off: The catalyst is right about one thing. Sure, you have peace with the Geth and other races, but for how long? Besides, the peace you worked so hard for was only possible in the face of that threat, so how much peace would you have had otherwise? Anyway, your broad and nuanced view is also a temporary one, and his basic solution is a more permanent one. <----that's a huge generalization, and I know it - but it's true in its simplicity.

Finally, I've gone over the choices. I believe they are using the impossible decision tool of storytelling. It forces you to make a decision that is as horrific as the consequence. They did a good job of leading up to it. In all three games they constantly told you that you wouldn't win the battle against the reapers. Sure, you killed a few here and there but you stood no chance once they got there. One of the major themes in ME3 was Shepard descending into despair as a result of it. They are practically telling you that a complete victory is out of the question, and an impossible decision is looming.

EDIT:  Which is why I said the reveal wasn't that good because it happened with 45 seconds left on the clock and no sequals coming.

First, let me echo frypan's sentiment and say that it is good to have dissenting voices here.

As far as the inevitability of conflict between synthetics and organics, I'd argue that from the point of view of the quality of storytelling, it's neither here nor there how much more the catalyst knows than we do. In fact, I'd go further and argue that it doesn't matter even if in reality, what the catalyst says about the singularity is exactly right. I've made this analogy before, but it's silly enough that it hasn't caught on; since I'm stubborn, I'll repeat it anyway (if it's too stupid, then you can look up the Picard and Q analogy I made a couple pages upthread, although maybe that's just as dumb):

Let's say you want to make a story whose overarching message is that the idea that love lasts forever is an illusion. You could portray this by showing a relationship between two people falling apart due to circumstance, their own flaws, etc. Or, you could have them get together, but approximately 10 minutes until the end, an omniscient being (played by Morgan Freeman, so we know he's legit) says that their relationship is doomed and has no hope to last. The characters then simply accept this and separate.

I hope it's obvious that the second way of telling the story isn't any good. Speculating on how many relationships Mr. Freeman has seen crumble in his thousands of years of existence doesn't help the story at all; we need to be shown that he's right. And it wouldn't help even if some brilliant MIT neurophysicist shows that the physiological basis of emotion is such that love must always be a short-term phenomenon. The problem is that the mechanism of delivery is fundamentally flawed. In both the ME3 ending and the above silly story I sketched above, we are simply told, by authorial fiat, what the fundamental truths of reality are. This doesn't strike me as a particularly satisfying way to tell a story.

[delta_vee]

@Hawk

To go back to your Truck analogy, It wouldn't be sufficient for the mechanic to fix my flat when the engine was on fire.

<cargeek>It's more like trying to do an alignment when the frame is twisted. Best thing is to get a better car.</cargeek>

[jbauck]

KitaSaturnyne wrote...
<snip>
I mean, if you asked me to draw an Asari, and I drew you a stick figure with some funny bumps on the head because that's all I was capable of, would that mean that you and I couldn't be friends anymore?
<snip>

If someone draws me a blue stick figure with funny bumps on the head and scrawls "asari" across the bottom, that someone would be my bff.  Just sayin'.

But to your actual question - I wrote this whole thing where I got all caught up in the semantics of "forgive".  I deleted it, because it got crazy out-of-hand.  I will say that an attempt to fix the problem that does not actually fix the problem will also not fix the consumer trust issue.  BW was one of the few companies I'd pre-order a game from.  I usually wait until games are on sale (hence I am just now playing DE:HR ... and to clarify, I'm playing HR, in case anyone is keeping track ...).  BW is now off the list of people I will pre-order a game from.  If they fix the thematic issues with the ending, they might make it back onto the list of people I will pay full price for a game from - but that's, say, within a week of release, if I know how it ends, and I know the ending doesn't make me want to beat myself.

Otherwise, it's a ... maybe, six months after the release date, when it's deeply, deeply discounted and there's already a bunch of dlc available (and if I know how it ends, and I know the ending doesn't make me want to beat myself).  There's pretty much no chance I'd pick up any part of a trilogy from them until the entire thing had been released.

[Darkeus]

Taboo-XX wrote...

Don't believe things from 4Chan.

EVER.

EVER.

Well, you know.  Never trust them until they are partially right about most of the DLC that had come out.

They have been right enough times....