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[Restrider]

To add to that:
In the shown examples USSR/Afghanistan and USA/Vietnam, the USSR and USA did not try to purge the countries -> harvest any human being there. If they tried that, I guess the guerilla tactics would've been futile.
The Third Reich for example (I'd say the one entity that used "Reaper tactics" most) was not defeated through guerilla tactics, but by the combined forces of a huge part of the entire world. And it was a bloody mess.

[Restrider]

Just a friendly request for a favor:
I am going offline, can someone post in the Character Thread, when it is going to the 2nd page?
And SPREAD THA WORDS!

[Davik Kang]

Arashi08 wrote...

I've been thinking about the endings a bit more and have been wondering about their purpose and why they were presented to us in such an enigmatic manner. It got me thinking about how we as a culture view stories and how we determine how plots unfold based on both are ability to compose and enjoy stories.

Oftentimes we get a clear understanding of who the antagonist and protagonist in a story is because the story defines them as such. Typically both the reader as well as the characters in the story define who is who based on their actions and the character's perspectives and system of morality. When you look at it this way it does seem like a subjective viewpoint; from the point fo view of the the characters, the antagonist is seen as such based on his or her actions, but more often than not, the antagonist feels that their actions are justifyed in some way, either out of fulfillment of their own selfish desires, or their desire to help others in a kinf od "ends justify the means." kind of way.

However, in an interactive medium like video games, there is room for other possibilities, much in the same way a choose-your-own-adventure book let's you interact with the story, a video game gives you even more freedom as you are not necessarily limited by narration. A video game could in theory allow you to decide who will be the protagonist and antagonist based on how the characters see your actions. You can see that alot in games like DA:O, where your companions can see you as a villain, no better than the darkspawn, rather than a hero based on your actions, even though you "evil" character as the same goal as a "good" character. Of course, I think that despite your action you will always be considered the protagonist of the story, but that's because the story in DA:O is central and what you do and what your goal is becomes the primary focus.

What this has to do with the ME3 endings, I feel, may well go back to what a well told story is supposed to do; help you look at things from a different perspective and examine yourself. Or more simply, to teach you a life lesson. Imo this is what a story must do if it can be considered a story well told. And if you think about it these endings may well be attempting to do this. This could work with or without IT but I think IT or something similar would be better because it wil provide a real conclusion to the story and give players a sense of consequence because we can see how our choice affected Shepard as well as the galaxy.

The more I think about these enigmatic endings that don't seem to have any character support at that exact moment and kind of force you to remember what characters throughout the series said about choices like these, while at the same time putting Shepard and by extension the player in this vacuum situation could possibly be seen as an examination of the player's soul. The endings could be a way for the player to examine their convictions and beliefs and put it to the test here in this final room where your actions will affect everything. at this moment you have to examine yourself and what you've learned over the course of three games and see which choice you will make based on your interactions with the various races and their plights. the choice you make determines what kind of person your Shepard is, and possibly who you as a player are.

None of these choices are ideal and you will be forced to deal with some form of loss either of yourself or of others. The game is essentially asking you things like: "Are you the kind of person who would sacrifice of yourself to save others? And if you are, do you know what kind of consequences that will bring?" And "Are you the kind of person who would sacrifice others to secure peace? And if you are do you know if that will truly endthe threat?"

What is the right choice? Perhaps it is a matter of perspective. Or perhaps there is a correct choice but you may not see it depending on your view of the world. You have to look at yourself and ask what is right because you don't have anyone else here to tell you what they think, unlike the last two games. Here you are on your own, with only memories and your own sense of morality to guide you.

Imo the endings could also be about a psychological battle where you struggle with yourself and your own sense of morality and whether the guideline of your life that you spent years creating is actually correct for you. The sci-fi story unfolds on the surface, but it represents your own struggle with life and it's objective, amoral nature. What's truly right and what's truly wrong? it it better to enslave and preserve or destroy and liberate? Is surrender truly preferrable to extinction or is life truly worth living without freedom? These could be questions the endings force you to ask yourself, or maybe they only reinforce your convictions. IT adds another layer to this because it may well bring it into perspective for Shepard and the player. Shepard beciming indoctrinated or not could again force players to reexamine themselves because their decision may turn out to be the wrong one because they didn't think it through enough, or didn't pay enough attention to the events unfolding around them to see the truth.

I guess only time will tell whether my guess is correct or not, but if this is similar to what BioWare intended then the endings may well bring a new perspective to how we view stories (or perhaps restore them) as well as how we view out own convictions and judgments of right and wrong.

...Or i could just be overthinking it waaaaaaaaaaaay too much lol .

No I think you are completely right.  I also think this is why Bioware effectively refuse to give us a clue as to what the 'true' or 'best' ending is.  And the indoctrination part of the ending can be seen separately from this too.  That is why, in a perverse way, I think Xil can be right, in that you can beat indoctrination and still pick Con or Syn.

[Davik Kang]

Restrider wrote...

Just a friendly request for a favor:
I am going offline, can someone post in the Character Thread, when it is going to the 2nd page?
And SPREAD THA WORDS!

Yes I will come up with some pointless point about something.  I am good at that.

[Bill Casey]

What I don't get about literalists is the claims that the ending makes no sense, or is comic book logic...
Why should I listen to your interpretation if you don't think your own interpretation makes any sense?


It's pretty much every literalist save Seival and a few others, too...

Modifié par Bill Casey, 11 novembre 2012 - 12:26 .

[abnocte]

Raistlin Majare 1992 wrote...

We cant beat them "the hard way" at least not in the direct battle at Earth, it is just not feasible

I'm not saying everything was resolved in a single battle.

But we do know that Reapers can be beated the hard way. We did so with Sovereign in ME, and in ME3 various Reapers are destroyed besides the ones fought directly by Shepard.

In short we are severily outgunned in the heavy gun department and think of it this way if we thought we could win conventionally would we bet everything on the Crucible?

If Shepard never reached the Citadel and activated the Crucible due to everything after being hit by Harbriger being a mental fight, you think Hackett and everyone will stop fighting that very moment?

Shepard managed to unite all species into a single army, that in itself its quite an achievement even Anderson ( or Hackett... I'm not sure now ) says so.

Are you really sure they really bet everything on the Crucible?

Also at no moment we learn what the Crucible really does, and if the options offered by the Catalyst are nothing more than Shepard imagination... we still don't know what the Crucible does.

We don't know if the Crucible was nothing but a Reaper ploy.
We don't know if the Crucible was actually activated.

But we do know that after the credits there is a scene that it is exactly the same regardless of which option we picked. And said scene features two humanoid life forms talking about "the Shepard" and how his/her actions saved the galaxy.

Those actions could be activating the Crucible... but that is not the only thing s/he did, s/he did more, much more.


Anyway, this is the way I interpret it.

Modifié par abnocte, 11 novembre 2012 - 12:35 .

[Davik Kang]

Bill Casey wrote...

What I don't get about literalists is the claims that the ending makes no sense, or is comic book logic...
Why should I listen to your interpretation if you don't think your own interpretation makes any sense?


It's pretty much every literalist save Seival and a few others, too...

Literal interpretation has a head start, because a literal interpretation is naturally how many players will inevitably take the game to be.  It's like with a film - how it appears on its surface will be how many viweres will understand it, and the film-maker must know and intend this.  So a Literal 'interpreter' isn't really interpreting anything, and so has no interest in making others 'listen to their interpretation'.

What I don't get about those people is why they stick around.  People like Seival can seem completely misguided at times, but at least they're here to talk about the game and their ideas.  Many come here every day just to say the ending sucked, and then rage at everybody who sees something different in the ending that makes it clear that it plainly didn't suck.

Hence I do understand why Literalists consider their view to be superior... what I can't understand is the determination of the many haters to actively go about dismissing other people's interpretations.  It's as if hating Bioware is so important to them that they actually need to keep reminding everybody to hate along with them.

[abnocte]

*wrong option*

Modifié par abnocte, 11 novembre 2012 - 12:35 .

[Bill Casey]

Davik Kang wrote...

Bill Casey wrote...

What I don't get about literalists is the claims that the ending makes no sense, or is comic book logic...
Why should I listen to your interpretation if you don't think your own interpretation makes any sense?


It's pretty much every literalist save Seival and a few others, too...

Literal interpretation has a head start, because a literal interpretation is naturally how many players will inevitably take the game to be.  It's like with a film - how it appears on its surface will be how many viweres will understand it, and the film-maker must know and intend this.  So a Literal 'interpreter' isn't really interpreting anything, and so has no interest in making others 'listen to their interpretation'.

What I don't get about those people is why they stick around.  People like Seival can seem completely misguided at times, but at least they're here to talk about the game and their ideas.  Many come here every day just to say the ending sucked, and then rage at everybody who sees something different in the ending that makes it clear that it plainly didn't suck.

Hence I do understand why Literalists consider their view to be superior... what I can't understand is the determination of the many haters to actively go about dismissing other people's interpretations.  It's as if hating Bioware is so important to them that they actually need to keep reminding everybody to hate along with them.

So... I'm not interpreting the ending because shepard fighting indoctrination is how I saw it the first time?
For me, the "literal interpretation" came from here, which I've discussed quite a bit and went back and forth on what I believed...

The EC removed any doubt...

Modifié par Bill Casey, 11 novembre 2012 - 12:42 .

[ZerebusPrime]

Javik looks down upon the Salarians because they used to eat flies.

Javik's people became the Collectors. The Collectors are very much like flies.

Coincidence?

[Davik Kang]

Bill Casey wrote...
So... I'm not interpreting the ending because shepard fighting indoctrination is how I saw it the first time?

That's how I saw it too, so I'm hardly gonna fight you on that one!  

All I meant is that to figure that out, you have to think about the information that's being presented.  A 'standard interpretation' of the information we're given is that we're talking to a floating spacebrat who gives us three repulsive choices.  Even something as straightforward as considering that the Kid from our Dreams being here might imply something is a kind of 'second tier' reasoning.  (That doesn't make it 'cleverer' or something btw, just that it's a different kind of rationalising the information we're given).

As an example just to clarify, I saw a film called the The White Ribbon a while back (last year I think).  If you ask someone what it's about, they'd probably say it's about a community of people in a small village in Germany who have some disputes that get out of hand.  This would be the straightforward literal interpretation.  When I watched it I thought it might be about how the first world war started.  I have no idea whether this is right or not (I never watched it again or looked into it further), but this understanding, whether right or wrong, is like a secondary interpretation, where you imagine what the things presented on screen might represent from the writers' point of view.

Now the indoctrination thing in ME is kind of half-way between these kinds of interpretation, but still involve processing the information we're given and imagining which bits might be imaginary, misleading, symbolic, etc. etc.  

You're always gonna start with the straightforward literal interpretation and then work from there.  But if the secondary interpretations start to make a lot of sense based on the information you've collected, then you can start imagining that they are what the ending was 'supposed' to be about.

This might be a massively long-winded way of saying "you / we were interpreting it because we had to attribute secondary meanings to what we were seeing/hearing in order to come to the Indoctrination conclusion".

Modifié par Davik Kang, 11 novembre 2012 - 01:51 .

[spotlessvoid]

ZerebusPrime wrote...

Javik looks down upon the Salarians because they used to eat flies.

Javik's people became the Collectors. The Collectors are very much like flies.

Coincidence?

Yes

[estebanus]

Hey, did you guys see this article on the omega DLC already?

Modifié par estebanus, 11 novembre 2012 - 12:57 .

[spotlessvoid]

All you have to do to beat the Reapers is choose synthesis. It's all reverse psychology you see. You just think Reaperfying evey organic thing in the galaxy is what they want. It's a trick. Can't you see?

[paxxton]

estebanus wrote...

Hey, did you guys see this article on the omega DLC already?

4 hour DLC? Is this a joke!?

[masster blaster]

Hey guys at my cousins 18 birthday. Can you believe instead of licking the Cherry he bit the whole thing off. Anyways so what's up?

[estebanus]

paxxton wrote...

estebanus wrote...

Hey, did you guys see this article on the omega DLC already?

4 hour DLC? Is this a joke!?

And apparently, Omega isn't a hub world as well. According to the article, at least.

[hukbum]

Davik Kang wrote...

What I don't get about those people is why they stick around.

I can only speak for myself:
Looking how others see it and looking if I've misunderstood something (Which might be a diffrence to some others).

What I found? Black and white. I'm a hater for most of the people here, because I don't like the ending. If I take what the kid is talking about serious, there is no ending for me. Destroy? Geth gone. I think they're alive so - Genocide. Control? No way I choose that, I've a real life friend who suffered greatly under a regime of control. Synthesis? Come on - speaking the same language and everything is fine (simply put)? That's just stupid.

In fact there is no ending for me, but I like ME. So what am I supposed to do? I'll keep looking for answers.
So I stick arround

[CmdrShep80]

paxxton wrote...

estebanus wrote...

Hey, did you guys see this article on the omega DLC already?

4 hour DLC? Is this a joke!?

keep this in mind they said 70+ hours for the trilogy too. ME3 has an action mode so that would probably be right just to play without any exploring. For me I will probably take 6-8 because of the exploring. I know I didn't beat Leviathan all in one  or 2 hours because of the same reason 

[paxxton]

estebanus wrote...

paxxton wrote...

estebanus wrote...

Hey, did you guys see this article on the omega DLC already?

4 hour DLC? Is this a joke!?

And apparently, Omega isn't a hub world as well. According to the article, at least.

I'm not going to read it because of spoilers. But this is unsettling. Even more so when combined with no squadies other than Aria and Nyreen.

[CmdrShep80]

 I wonder how this developed?

Her name is Nyreen Kandros, the turian leader of the Talon mercenary group and the first female turian to be seen in the Mass Effect video games.

Bet it was cause you took out the leadership over the Blue Suns, Eclipse, and the Blood Pack creating a vacuum to where the Talons swooped in and out their claws in Omega puns all intended

[paxxton]

CmdrShep80 wrote...

paxxton wrote...

estebanus wrote...

Hey, did you guys see this article on the omega DLC already?

4 hour DLC? Is this a joke!?

keep this in mind they said 70+ hours for the trilogy too. ME3 has an action mode so that would probably be right just to play without any exploring. For me I will probably take 6-8 because of the exploring. I know I didn't beat Leviathan all in one  or 2 hours because of the same reason 

Oh, it took me about 10 hours to beat Leviathan. So if it was meant to be a 2 hour DLC, Omega, being a 4 hour DLC, could take up to 20. That's more like it.

[CmdrShep80]

estebanus wrote...

paxxton wrote...

estebanus wrote...

Hey, did you guys see this article on the omega DLC already?

4 hour DLC? Is this a joke!?

And apparently, Omega isn't a hub world as well. According to the article, at least.

Spoilers-

youre reading into it wrong it's a hub just like leviathan with Bryson's lab. You just can't go back once you make your final choice:

Omega is not a hub players will be able to revisit once the DLC is complete.

Within Omega, though, is plenty to do. There's a central hub, Aria's bunker, which you use to upgrade her drug smuggling operation. From here you trigger side mission as you do in the main game. Outside the hub are four main missions

[CmdrShep80]

At paxxon- I guess I lowballed the number. Guess mine will take probably close to yours

[byne]

estebanus wrote...

Hey, did you guys see this article on the omega DLC already?

Something I noticed from that:

Nyreen is ex-turian military, but, despite this, she is a biotic (turian military hierarchy prohibits biotic powers).

From the Turian Military Doctrine codex:

Biotics are uncommon. While admired for their exacting skills, biotics' motives are not always trusted by the common soldier. The turians prefer to assign their biotics to specialist teams called Cabals.

Lore is hard.

Modifié par byne, 11 novembre 2012 - 01:15 .