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[Ieldra]

I was going over the leaked script from November 2011 again, and with increasing annoyance I noticed how much more sense it all makes than the version we got in the game. Not that I haven't known this before, but now, since polls have shown how much the endings are biased in favor of Destroy, it really sends me up the wall

Some quotes from the Catalyst encounter (leaked script version):

About itself and the organic/synthetic problem:
C: I was created eons ago to solve a problem.
C: To prevent organics from creating an AI so powerful that it would overtake them and destroy them.
(after Shepard says they'd rather keep their own form:
C: Organics will always trend to a point of technological singularity. A moment in time where their creations outgrow them.
C: Conflict is the only result, and extinction the consequence."

This gives a much clearer picture of the organic/synthetic problem from the viewpoint of the Catalyst.

About Destroy:
C: It's energy can be released as a destructive force. Organics will prevail at our expense. All synthetic life will succumb.
C: As will much the technology your kind rely on [possibly optional low EMS variant. Also note how "much" is replaced by "most" in the current version"].
C: Including the relays you depend upon. [no mention of this in the other endings]
S: But the Reapers will be dead?
C: Correct. But the probability of singularity occurring again in the future is certain.

About Control:
C: Harness the Crucible's energy. Use it to take control of the ones you call the Reapers.
S: Control? So the Illusive Man was right.
C: Correct... though he could never have taken control, as we already controlled him.
S: What would happen to me?
C: You will become the catalyst. You will continue the cycle as you see fit.
S: And the Reapers will obey me?
C: Correct. [no ambiguity here, Shepard will continue to exist and the Reapers will obey]

About Synthesis:
C: You may combine the synthetic and the organic.
C: Add your energy, your essence, with that of Crucible. The resulting chain reaction will transform both of our kind.
C: We synthetics will become more like you, and organic life will become like us.
S: So we'll just... go on living, together?
C: It is a very elegant solution. And a path you have already started down. [Note how this points towards a symbiosis instead of a genetic rewrite-analogue]
C: The harvesting will cease. It will be a new ascension, for synthetic and organic life. [no utopian aspect]

I can't be the only one who finds this version better by several orders of magnitude. Any comments?

Modifié par Ieldra2, 11 mai 2012 - 11:08 .

[Tyrannosaurus Rex]

Wasn't the being Shepard talked to in the end also called the guardian instead of simply being the catalyst (which was simply the Citadel in the leaked script)?

"EDIT"

But I agree that this version is much better than what we got. The current dialog is too ambigious and carries too much nonsense in synthesis.

Modifié par Lizardviking, 11 mai 2012 - 09:17 .

[tilusN7]

 I initially went with control on my first playthrough, because that's what my Shepard would have done. The rewrite makes it sound a lot worse than it did in the leaked version. I always imagined that if Shepard was truly controlling the reapers that he could make them do whatever good they could for the galaxy (repair relays etc) and then take them away forever or destroy them later.

Even though synthesis appears a lot worse in the current endings than it does in the leaked script, I still have the problem of how it is physically accomplished which is why i'd never pick it. To this day haven't, after 5 playthroughs as well. It's just too magic for me.

It certainly seems like destroy is biased in the current endings though, even though the kid flat out tells you that's not a good idea.

[ZIPO396]

Synthesis is still broken. But who knows if the ending would of been better had there been no leak.

Modifié par ZIPO396, 11 mai 2012 - 09:23 .

[Ieldra]

@Lizardviking:
There are several scripts, some older than others. I don't have the one where the Catalyst was called the Guardian.

@ZIPO396:
Yeah, maybe they would've kept the leaked version had it not been leaked.

Modifié par Ieldra2, 11 mai 2012 - 09:26 .

[d-boy15]

it's still no detail in synthesis, what transform? how it can make organic more like synthetic?
how synthetic more like organic? it's doesn't explain in those dialogs.

the only thing that more clear from the old script is control, which explain that shepard is still
exist as a catalyst in this ending. destroy seem to be more BS 'cause it's the ending that the
relay are gone while synthetic still dead and tech are gone.

[kookie28]

If this were how they presented it to me the first time I would literally have to flip a coin between Destroy and Synthesis.

And even Control sounds better to me. (I dislike control very much as is)

[daecath]

Nope, still sucks.

The premise of "synthetics vs. organics" was never laid out like this in any of the rest of the game. There isn't a single incident where a hostile synthetic was the result of a willful decision.
Geth - defending themselves against an oppressor and fighting for their freedom
Presidium AI - rebelling due to the restrictions imposed on AI's
Luna base VI - external tampering
Rogue VI factory - computer virus

And the synthetic vs. organic conflicts were never shown to be anything unique. The conflict with the geth was shown as the same as the rachni wars, the krogan rebellions, the first contact war, and the conflict between humans and batarians. So to elevate that one conflict above all the others, and to twist it from a race defending itself into an existential inevitability that all synthetics have a fundamental need to destroy organics, is insulting to the story, and insulting to the player. It would be like saying that blacks have a fundamental need to destroy whites, because just look at what they did in the civil rights movement.

Then there's synthesis. Synthesis is still stupid. It still doesn't fit. At least this version doesn't mention "synthetic DNA". That I suppose is an improvement. But it still is a complete WTF in how it could possibly do what it does, or even understanding what it's supposed to do at all.

Control and destroy are better, in that they make more sense how they work here. A little. I actually never had a problem with the control ending. You are destroyed physically and your mind is uploaded to the reapers to control them, or something. This is just a better explanation. And destroy I like better because it makes it clear that it isn't just selectively targeting certain things while ignoring other very similar ones. Technology is technology, and it's all going to be destroyed. So those two are improved in that they make more sense.

Overall though, no, that version doesn't really do anything to improve the ending.

[d-boy15]

at least the current ending explain synthesis in term of altering DNA (which is stupid, at least for me)
I say, it will be a hardwork for bioware writers to explain it in detail in EC.

Modifié par d-boy15, 11 mai 2012 - 09:42 .

[Ieldra]

@d-boy:
No detail is better than nonsensical detail. It says we've already started down the path towards Synthesis, pointing to the increasing integration of synthetics with organics. I can make sense of the rest, even if the process is still "magical" (or rather sufficiently advanced technology). Also I've always said that destroying the relays is in the spirit of Destroy ("Destroy all Reaper tech") but not in the spirit of Control. I'm sitting on the fence with Synthesis since Synthesis is not so much about preserving the status quo than leaving it behind. Could go both ways.

Edit:
Unfortunately, Mike Gamble has tweeted "We will not explain the endings" (in the EC). But I certainly hope they'll remove the nonsense.

Modifié par Ieldra2, 11 mai 2012 - 09:36 .

[ZtalkerRM]

Post-leak changes didn't ruin the ending.

Two arrogant men who pushed their own artistic vision through did. Walters and Hudson decided on the ending with just the two of them, without play testing it or discussing it with the right people. The exact same people who wrote the other 99% of the game that was coherent and good in terms of story.

Lesson to learn from this? Be a team. I dare to bet you 95% of the Bioware employees would, if asked about this ending before creating it, point out if didn't fit the story and prompt for something else. How I know this? All Bioware games upto now were coherent in story telling. Even the (slightly) disapointing DA2 was, from a story perspective, good. At least the ending worked, although it was an extreme cliffhanger.

Good leadership is showing you're not 'above' the people you lead. As a boss, you need to involve them in decision making and sometimes get coffee for them, simply to show you're 'with them.'
Covey wrote about this in the 70's, but I think it hasn't reached Hudson yet. Thomas Gordon wrote about it in the 90's and 2000's too. I urge them to read both books.

Modifié par ZtalkerRM, 11 mai 2012 - 09:43 .

[d-boy15]

great... so, from that, it's sound like no hope we can understand about it.

I begin to think that writers who wrote it didn't even know what it is. they just want to put adam&eve
reference in to game.

[CptBomBom00]

bascially for me syntesis is like in Deus Ex HR, whne you choose to side with sarif, and I still after my 4th playthrough I choose destroy, and then I make up my own ending.

[Noelemahc]

Holy hell, this was nice and to the point. Why did they decide to obfuscate them so badly? This doesn't make them any less pleasant, but it certainly makes them more comprehensible and less reprehensible =)

[tilusN7]

Noelemahc wrote...

Holy hell, this was nice and to the point. Why did they decide to obfuscate them so badly? This doesn't make them any less pleasant, but it certainly makes them more comprehensible and less reprehensible =)

Agreed, this actually made me feel less bad about synthesis believe it or not. I think i'm still going to go with control as my favourite ending though. The version in the leaked script for control is much better too, just by changing those two lines of dialogue.

Makes you realise what a few words in a few lines of dialogue can do for the endings.

[a.m.p]

Ieldra2 wrote...

I can't be the only one who finds this version better by several orders of magnitude. Any comments?

Several orders of magnitude? No.
Slightly better? Yes. It allows for more variation with the relays, makes Control 10% less dumb and removes the word "DNA" from synthesis, which is something that has been driving me up a wall since I first heard it.
Core problems of the scene stay though.

[Noelemahc]

Core problems of the scene stay though.

Those can only be excised with the existing purpose of the Crucible and, apparently, the Starchild. You know, as a package deal. One can't exist without the other and all that jazz.

[azerSheppard]

Nope, still sucks.

The premise of "synthetics vs. organics" was never laid out like this in any of the rest of the game. There isn't a single incident where a hostile synthetic was the result of a willful decision.
Geth - defending themselves against an oppressor and fighting for their freedom
Presidium AI - rebelling due to the restrictions imposed on AI's
Luna base VI - external tampering
Rogue VI factory - computer virus

And the synthetic vs. organic conflicts were never shown to be anything unique. The conflict with the geth was shown as the same as the rachni wars, the krogan rebellions, the first contact war, and the conflict between humans and batarians. So to elevate that one conflict above all the others, and to twist it from a race defending itself into an existential inevitability that all synthetics have a fundamental need to destroy organics, is insulting to the story, and insulting to the player. It would be like saying that blacks have a fundamental need to destroy whites, because just look at what they did in the civil rights movement.
 

Let me help you out on this, as what you say sounds right, but is limited to your experience and knowledge of the games.
The Star Child has existed for long enough to realise that synthetics vs organics will always result in conflict, and unlike an organic vs organic conflict, the synthetic party will attain technological singularity, making the gap between both parties immensely big and therefore destroying any change of development from other side.

The Star Child has likely witnissed the rise and fall of many nations under their own AI creations. All it takes is one Unfriendly AI reaching technological singularity to mess up the entire galaxy.

"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. "

Why?

"The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else." 

Reasoning: Do you ever notice the bacteria inside your body? Do you feel bad when you squash a bug? Well what about all the single celled organisms that you kill by breathing them in? An AI that is Tech singularity will think the same of us.

 
Then there's synthesis. Synthesis is still stupid. It still doesn't fit. At least this version doesn't mention "synthetic DNA". That I suppose is an improvement. But it still is a complete WTF in how it could possibly do what it does, or even understanding what it's supposed to do at all.

Molecular nanotechnology.

"Nanotechnology (or molecular nanotechnology to refer more specifically to the goals discussed here) will let us continue the historical trends in manufacturing right up to the fundamental limits imposed by physical law."

With enough energy, anything can be done that is imposed under physical law, infact if you have enough energy (nigh infinite for our comprehension), you can even go beyond the physical limitation, creating new physics. e.g. Big Bang.

Control and destroy are better, in that they make more sense how they work here. A little. I actually never had a problem with the control ending. You are destroyed physically and your mind is uploaded to the reapers to control them, or something. This is just a better explanation.

Control has statistically an almost certain chance for the Reapers to continue doing what they do; What occurs during control?

Shepard is uploaded into the catalyst, his mind is added to the AI and Reapers as an additional viewpoint, all data is shared among them, and Shepard concludes the same thing as the Catalyst did: "Inevitable".

And destroy I like better because it makes it clear that it isn't just selectively targeting certain things while ignoring other very similar ones. Technology is technology, and it's all going to be destroyed. So those two are improved in that they make more sense.
 

Destroy is arguably the most redundant and galaxy dooming choice, all technology is destroyed, the Reaper cycle start from beginning, worst case this time no organic race creates a Star child esque prevention AI, and galaxy is wiped clean from all organics by highly advanced synthetics, or nano synthetics.



I laugh when people say "synthesis is space magic", just because you lack the knowledge or capacity to know if some thing is possible or not, doesn't mean it's magic. But ofcourse this isn't the players, fault, the least BW could have done was explain things to non-science fiction buffs, i mean most player don't even know about Arthur C. and Asimov...

Although i bet half of you would have ****ed all over it if they said "using dark energy we blah blah biotics blah blah blah powerfull mass effect fields blah".

Modifié par azerSheppard, 11 mai 2012 - 10:35 .

[Wulfram]

The technological singularity stuff is a legitimate sci-fi concept, and could be a decent motivation for the Reapers. But it's not something you can spring in the last 5 minutes of the story, when you've got nothing which really supports it previously.  That's just poor writing.

Modifié par Wulfram, 11 mai 2012 - 10:43 .

[The Night Mammoth]

azerSheppard wrote...

Nope, still sucks.

The premise of "synthetics vs. organics" was never laid out like this in any of the rest of the game. There isn't a single incident where a hostile synthetic was the result of a willful decision.
Geth - defending themselves against an oppressor and fighting for their freedom
Presidium AI - rebelling due to the restrictions imposed on AI's
Luna base VI - external tampering
Rogue VI factory - computer virus

And the synthetic vs. organic conflicts were never shown to be anything unique. The conflict with the geth was shown as the same as the rachni wars, the krogan rebellions, the first contact war, and the conflict between humans and batarians. So to elevate that one conflict above all the others, and to twist it from a race defending itself into an existential inevitability that all synthetics have a fundamental need to destroy organics, is insulting to the story, and insulting to the player. It would be like saying that blacks have a fundamental need to destroy whites, because just look at what they did in the civil rights movement.
 

Let me help you out on this, as what you say sounds right, but is limited to your experience and knowledge of the games.
The Star Child has existed for long enough to realise that synthetics vs organics will always result in conflict, and unlike an organic vs organic conflict, the synthetic party will attain technological singularity, making the gap between both parties immensely big and therefore destroying any change of development from other side.

The Star Child has likely witnissed the rise and fall of many nations under their own AI creations. All it takes is one Unfriendly AI reaching technological singularity to mess up the entire galaxy.

Irrelevant. 

Unless I'm shown something similar to what it's telling me then I dismiss it as bullsh*t. 

The Catalyst is talking about a pretty specific situation. Organics will always create synthetics, these synthetics will always try to wipe out all organic life, and these synthetics can't be stopped.

There's literally nothing in this game that even comes close to that. Literally nothing. The kid may be an eons old machine intelligence that has seen it happen many time before, but despite it being a flawed premise to being with, unless it actually uses some solid reasoning to convince me that I should take it seriously I will continue to ignore its little problem.

An AI that is Tech singularity will think the same of us.

It's a singularity, and the machine is intelligent with at least the basics of human ways of thinking. There's no certainty with this, there can't be. It's specifically called a singularity and an event horizon because we don't know what happens after it. There's no reason to believe an AI will think this way other than the Catalyst's word, which is worthless. 

I laugh when people say "synthesis is space magic", just because you lack the knowledge or capacity to know if some thing is possible or not, doesn't mean it's magic. But ofcourse this isn't the players, fault, the least BW could have done was explain things to non-science fiction buffs, i mean most player don't even know about Arthur C. and Asimov...

What two other authors have said is irrelevant. 

Although i bet half of you would have ****ed all over it if they said "using dark energy we blah blah biotics blah blah blah powerfull mass effect fields blah".

If the in-game science is fine, then no. 

[Ieldra]

Wulfram wrote...
The technological singularity stuff is a legitimate sci-fi concept, and could be a decent motivation for the Reapers. But it's not something you can spring in the last 5 minutes of the story, when you've got nothing which really supports it previously.  That's just poor writing.

I agree. But that's just an execution failure, like the phrasing of the current endings.

It would've been easy to introduce the concept by using the geth. After all, 300 years after their creation they are on their way to surpass organics significantly. They're on the verge of a type II civilization (Kardashev scale), can build megastructures and increase their intelligence significantly by conjoining their minds.

A single conversation about this, with someone asking "What if this continues for a thousand years?" would've done the trick. Ah....and I did I mention there was a Codex entry about "technological singularity" - which was CUT?

It sends me up the wall. They had everything to make an ending that makes sense. And they replaced it with nonsense. It boggles the mind.

[BunBun299]

No, this alternate script is no better, because it still retains the ending's most fundemental flaw, the existance of the Catalyst. Or at least, the catalyst as a sentient AI that controls the Reapers. Its existance destroys everything that happens in the first two games, because if it exists, why the frak can it not just over ride the Prothean hack that prevents Sovereign from remotely opening the Citadel Relay, and let the invasion begin. Also, the Catalyst's explination of all of this is still insulting stupid. While you may have made an arguement for the Synthetics v Organics conflict in ME1, we were opperating with an incomplete picture. We had no idea of the Geth's perspective, or EDI's, or that the Reapers themselves are infact cybernetic, so they're already a synthesis. So when you factor in the knowledge we obtain in 2 & 3, the Catalyst's reasons could fill an entire episode of Penn & Teller's BS.

The Catalyst should not be any sort of character, merely a power source for the Crucible. Anything else, and it ruins all three games. I really hope when the Extended Cut comes out, we find out its merely Harbinger trying to mess with our heads.

[LKx]

I'll have to go through that again, but i remembered that the Guardian offered as the third option to became a reaper, not synthesys. However i might remember it wrong.

Anyway, still not much better though.

Modifié par LKx, 11 mai 2012 - 11:17 .

[wright1978]

Ieldra2 wrote...

I was going over the leaked script from November 2011 again, and with increasing annoyance I noticed how much more sense it all makes than the version we got in the game. Not that I haven't known this before, but now, since polls have shown how much the endings are biased in favor of Destroy, it really sends me up the wall

Not sure what you are on about there.

Destroy supposedly sacrifices Geth/EDI and mass relays and in most occassions Shep.
Control unclear as to exact nature of damage to relays and shep dies
Synthesis sacrifices relays and shep

Personally destroy if anything has more sacrifices. The reason it is most popular is because it destroys reapers, the possibility of Shep surviving which are 2 things people wanted. Also there's the sheer distaste/dislike for in particular synthesis but to some degree control.

[Ieldra]

@BunBun299:
The organic/synthetic conflict makes sense if explained properly. Read the OP and azerSheppard's post further up on this page. And the Reapers are physically 100% synthetic (Legion in ME2). The processing of organics was done to get at the minds and the information about their physical structure - since that would have to be preserved even as the original bodies were destroyed.

Apart from that, I think that making the Catalyst a character was a result of perceived storytelling constraints as applied to visual media. Talking to someone is always more interesting than figuring out a machine and reading its instruction manual, to most players anyway. It made sense for storytelling, even if it created a plot hole. It is not optimal, but I can live with it.

@wright1978:
They made Control deliberately contradictory with this sentence about Shepard dying, and made Synthesis 85% nonsensical with the "new DNA" and the "final evolution of life". That's why I say the endings are biased in favor of Destroy. At least it's somewhat clear what happens in that ending. With the others, people are free to project their worst fears on them, and since they want the ending where Shepard survives to be the best, that's what they're doing. With the version of the leaked script, things would have been clearer.

Modifié par Ieldra2, 11 mai 2012 - 11:29 .