Shush. I actually watched that entire ME1 space battle. The projectiles in ME1 look absolutely nothing like the projectiles from either the thanixized SR-2 or the normal SR-2. But those projectiles with the giant blue trails look exactly the same as the thanix shot from ME2, aside from the differences in camera angle and projectile travel distance.
My point is that, if you throw away the Crucible, you could also replace Shepard with Admiral Hackett and teams of generic Alliance marines and get the same outcome. So, the Player Shepard is not special, when it's a theme of the trilogy that the Player Shepard is special and we can't do it without them.
I agree, but the problem going in was that the events depicted in ME3 are simply too great for Shepard to handle alone. Shepard is still only one human being. The great irony in arguing that without the Crucible Shepard has no easily-defined place in the ending, is that apart from going to Mars Shepard has little if anything to do with it throughout the entire game. "Finding people and resources to aid in building the Crucible" isn't a strong or direct enough link between the player and by extension Shepard and the Crucible itself.
Of all people, Conrad Verner has a better place and would have a more integral role when it comes to actually building the Crucible than Shepard. The best Shepard can do -- and does -- is channel resources Hackett's way. And in that, reading through the broker terminal Liara does a much better job of it. Hell, when it comes to actually putting the fleets together and organizing the attack(s) Shepard's a glorified support specialist; a mission-critical one nevertheless, but still support. Shepard regardless of class is a ground pounder, and nothing changes that.
So, to provide immersion, closure and catharsis, the game must be designed to have a role for a ground pounder in the finale. As I hope I persuasively demonstrated earlier, you needn't a plot device like the Crucible that for the context of the game is no more than an ongoing subplot to give a relevant place for Shepard.
Number of ally ships outfitted with Thanix cannons = 1 gazillion Number of ally ships actually using their Thanix cannons = 0
an over statement, but the essential complaint and why people won't shut up about thanix cannons. We wanted to see them in action, what we got was ME3's Jar Jar equivalent.
After the Battle of the Citadel, human and turian volunteers spent three months clearing the station's orbit of debris. During the cleanup, the turians secretly salvaged Sovereign's powerful main gun along with much of the weapon's element zero core. Eleven months later, the turians introduced the Thanix, a scaled-down version of the weapon.The Thanix's core is a liquid alloy of iron, uranium, and tungsten suspended in an electromagnetic field powered by element zero. The molten metal, accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light, solidifies into a projectile as it is fired, hitting targets with enough force to pierce any known shield or armor. The gun can fire reliably every five seconds.The weapon's relatively small size allows it to be mounted on most fighters or frigates. It is now widely used by the Alliance military and is the primary weapon on the refurbished Normandy SR-2.
I'm going to quote the most relevant portion of that again, for emphasis:
It is now widely used by the Alliance military and is the primary weapon on the refurbished Normandy SR-2.
That's interesting, because I found the most relevant portion of that to be:
The molten metal, accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light, solidifies into a projectile as it is fired, hitting targets with enough force to pierce any known shield or armor.
And since they salvaged the main gun, it would stand to reason that they also salvaged portions of the hull, to test their fancy new guns against that material---much like what (everyone thought) Tali's dad was doing on the Alerai.
I have the same problem as some others, in that they weren't being used. At all. So, you've got the entire Alliance navy barrelling toward what most people consider certain doom and don't think to fire the most powerful weapon at their disposal, which the codex says can be mounted to most fighters and frigates and implies that they have been considering their wide use.
Of course, if they did have everyone fire their thanix cannons---which (the codex claims) can go through just about anything---then the strange super weapon/needless plot device that was introduced at the very beginning of the game would be rendered irrelevant and you would need some other excuse to forge alliances spanning the entire galaxy. Oh, wait. . . you do, since the Reapers---the threat that has been dismissed and/or ignored since the first game---have shown up and seem pretty intent on doing what they said they were going to do (salvation through destruction, incomprehensibility, etc. etc.).
Honestly, the big twist I was expecting was that the Crucible ended up not working and then you get to prove the might of a unified galaxy (despite the nay-sayers) could reduce the Reapers from gods and prove they were, and are, very, very mortal.
Modifié par Byronic-Knight, 18 avril 2012 - 12:53 .
Yes, if the fleet fired their thanix cannons instead of their silly mass drivers and actually did massive damage to the reaper fleet the reapers might have retreated and become the hunted instead of the hunters. Then the battle for earth would have been won, and the reapers would have been forced to face their own mortality.
Bioware would have been forced to write DLC extending Shepard's story. Wiping out the reapers from the rest of the galaxy, and the writers would have had to come up with something other than "choosing A, B, or C." Or not, they could have just done an epilogue where the reapers were eventually wiped out by a unified galaxy.
But that would have been too videogamey, and not grimdark enough, and not fitting with the DA2 image the company seems intent on continuing.
Honestly, the big twist I was expecting was that the Crucible ended up not working and then you get to prove the might of a unified galaxy (despite the nay-sayers) could reduce the Reapers from gods and prove they were, and are, very, very mortal.
Yes, if the fleet fired their thanix cannons instead of their silly mass drivers and actually did massive damage to the reaper fleet the reapers might have retreated and become the hunted instead of the hunters. Then the battle for earth would have been won, and the reapers would have been forced to face their own mortality.
I dunno, they might also have had to do something wild like.... coordinate their targets so they can concentrate fire if they went that route.
Too big a risk, I'd rather go with a better plan like time travel, or teaching the Reapers to love.
But truly, I do still agree with our resident Orthodox Infidel- main space battle thing that was not present that should have been were those thousands of Thanix cannons mentioned in the Codex, if only to maintain consitency with what all those Codex and War Asset entries were saying.
Orthodox Infidel wrote... My point is that, if you throw away the Crucible, you could also replace Shepard with Admiral Hackett and teams of generic Alliance marines and get the same outcome. So, the Player Shepard is not special, when it's a theme of the trilogy that the Player Shepard is special and we can't do it without them.
If Hackett could've done all that we would be playing as him. The point is someone brought all these species together and that person is the hero of the story. The details are just that, details. If that's not special, I don't know what is. And I don't see how the Crucible makes Shepard special anyway. Can't Hackett pick a color instead?
As I said already, Shepard has the Cipher. Hackett doesn't. Yes, as Mr. Spork points out, it's dumb on a number of levels, but there's the plot we have. And we're playing as Shepard because Shepard is the designated hero for the trilogy.
A lot of very nice stuff that I snipped to get to this point, including his prior post
So, to provide immersion, closure and catharsis, the game must be designed to have a role for a ground pounder in the finale. As I hope I persuasively demonstrated earlier, you needn't a plot device like the Crucible that for the context of the game is no more than an ongoing subplot to give a relevant place for Shepard.
Yes, the "hold the line against Harbinger himself and beat him" you outlined would have been a lot better for Shepard. That actually would have been much better for everyone, regardless of whether the Crucible gets thrown away or not. That would maintain Shepard's narrative necessity and player agency right until the end without a genre shift. You know, now that I'm reading it again, you should actually write that down someplace. Even if you submitted that to Bioware and they didn't use it, it would still be a cool narrative and game mechanic combination.
These debates that use the codex as the main point of argument always annoy me because majority don't know the codex or some cherry pick stuff to make their point while ignoring other valid information.
The Thanix Cannon- The thanix's core is a liquid alloy of iron, uranium, and tungsten suspended in an electromegnetic field powered by element zero. The molten metal, accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light, solidifies into a projectile as it is fired, hitting targets with enough force to pierce any known shield or armor. The gun can fire reliably every five seconds. The weapons relatively small size allows it to be mounted on most fighters or frigates.
Reaper Capabilities- The main gun on a reaper capital ship dwarfs that of the alliance's everest-class dreadnoughts. No dreadnought has yet survived a direct hit from the weapon. Estimates put its destructive power anywhere from 132 to 454 kilotons of TNT. Even if the target is hardened, as in the case of a surface based missile silo, the gun can instead bury the target beneath molten metal. Precise targeting computers and correctors also give reaper weapons a longer effective range than organic's dreadnoughts or cruisers.
The kinetic barriers on a reaper capital ship can shrug off the firepower of a small fleet. Weapons specifically designed to overcome shields, such as the javelin, GAURDIAN lasers, or the thanix series, can bypass the barriers to some degree. The difficulty is getting close enough to use them-- the surface-mounted weaponry on reaper ships, similar in principal to GAURDIAN, presents an effective defense against organic species fighters.
Reaper Vulnerabilities- Although clearly technologically superior to the citadel forces, the reapers have experienced casualties in the battles across the galaxy. This indicates that, theoretically, with the right intelligence, weapons, and strategy, the reapers could be defeated.
Reapers rely on kinetic barriers. In the case of a reaper capital ship, these kinetic barriers can hold off the firepower of two dreadnoughts simultaneously, but three clearly causes strain, and four typically results in destruction. Weapons designed to maximize heat damage, such as the thanix series, show better results against the reapers than pure kinetic impacts.
The barriers of reaper destroyers are less formidable than those of capital ships. It is possible for a single cruiser or many fighters to disable or demolish a destroyer if they can get within the range before they are themselves destroyed.
Reaper capital ships can turn faster than citadel dreadnoughts, but to do so, they must lower their mass to a level unacceptable in combat situations. Consequently, it is possible for a dreadnought to emerge from FTL travel behind a captal ship, then bring its guns to bear faster than the reaper can return fire. This is a poor tactic, however, against reapers flying in proper formation.
That is all the relevant information I could find in the mass effect 3 codex regarding the thanix cannon and other things brought up in this threads topic of conversation. I might have missed some stuff and if i come across any I will add it in.
Basically the conclusion I come to is that yes the thanix cannon is a more capable weapon against the reapers than traditional kinetic weapons. But by no means is it some super weapon capable of kicking the crap out of the reapers like some tend to believe.
1) what this means is that conventianally a war could be won against the reapers, even the codex signifies this, given that the universe is united with different tactics and fighting it is very very possible that the fleet could defeat the reapers conventially but bioware went against that notion with the final battle, we don't see the same type of beam fired from the more powerful dread nought and frigates instead we see more of the mass accelerator slugs fired from the first game since the normandy 2 is the only vessel we have to go on about how the thanix cannons work even in ME3 we can only assume that none of the ships have them and that what we are actually seeing is is the slugs, while the thanix missiles are used in the surface.
The reason I say they are the slugs is because the actual cannons just cut through the collector ship and the little space mines like butter. Whats more interesting is that the cannon itself is a miniturized version of sovereigns main gun meaning that by all rights and purposes it should look like normandies gun fire during both ME2 and Me3 but instead the normandy seems to be the only one who has it, either this was an oversight by bioware when creating the scene which is possible or that maybe the beams were made too translucent which would answer a lot of questions posed about it. What fustrates me is for the most part the codex says that almost every ship is supposed to be equipped with them, so why are most of the alliance ships firing rockets(the yellow pprojectiles) and MA slugs(there is a difference in speed and lighting.
Mostly I think its an oversight in the final battle in actuality the thanix cannon projectiles should not explode and should be thicker beams of light but oh well these four videos do well to show that both mass accelarator slugs and thanix beams can look very similar to each other.
ME1 citadel invasion you'll notice in this scene the geth are firing blue projectiles very similar to what we see in the final battle in three, also note the geth ships coming out of the realy look more like the projectiles seen in the final battle in ME 3
ME 2 normandy without upgrades once again firing blue projectiles with a tracer trail, skip to 4:56 in the vid to see this
ME3 You'll see three differnt armanent types, first your see the common mass accelerator slugs which are yellow and smaller in diameter, then you'll see the asari dread naught slugs which are more powerfully fired and could have done reaper type of damage with thanix equipped and lastly you'll see the normandies thanix cannons if anything the blue streamed projectiles in the game have the possible look of thanix but act more like an MA slug which seems like a step back wards http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLlAObjR-gs
after looking at different variations the whole space battle section could have used a lot more support with lower EMS you actually get more cutscenes of the ships fighting the reapers before the normandy breaks just seemed like that whole battle could hav ebeen handled better including the thanix debate.
But what about this; we add more Thanix Cannons to the already over-equipped, Thanix Cannon-toting Alliance vessels, and then make some even bigger Thanix Cannons to go with them?
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