317 réponses à ce sujet

[AresKeith]

AlanC9 wrote...

Fixers0 wrote...

Arrival: Relay destroyed = System totally wiped out.
Mass Effect 3's ending: Relay destroyed:  System not wiped out.

this is as far as exposition on the subject goes, everything mentioned in your third paragraph can be labbeled as supposition, as is the fact that the systems is wiped out is because of slamming an asteroid into the relay. 

The thing is, the only two planets we see after the relays blow up are not wiped out. The Citadel is a relay itself, and it doesn't destroy Earth when it blows  -- unless you want to assume that it explodes twice, once before the cutscene and an unseen explosion after the cutscene. I can't prove that didn't happen.. The jungle planet is not destroyed either. You can either add even more space magic to make those two planets special somehow while everything else gets blown up, or assume that the Crucible does the things it's shown doing and doesn't do things that it isn't shown doing.

or that the whole thing about the relays got retcon because nobody else but Mac wanted the Galaxy to be a Wasteland

[AlanC9]

Well, if Mac really wanted a wasteland, he shouldn't have shown Earth surviving the Citadel's explosion.

[ShepGrimr]

Nor did i either we had this build up in me1 and 2. we took down sovereign and annihilated the collected base. Shepard had the reputation of making the impossible possible and yet in me 3 they screw up the lore. Its like they took an entire different writing team(which I'm sure they did) threw out everything that was done in me 1 and 2 and made a game. They probably could have called it something different because that wasn't the mass effect i know. Shepard wouldn't quit. He'd never give. he find away to defeat harbinger at the very least the rest of the reapers would fall like dominoes w/o harbinger. He wouldn't of used the cop out of the crucible either. One of the reasons they used the crucible is because casey hudson didn't want a video gamey ending. Oh what is this exactly a book perhaps???

They never did explain why they tried making a prothean reaper and then a human reaper again this is due to ea not giving a dam. If anything I'd like to see someday the original writers from me 1 and 2 write their version of me3 and I'm sure it would a whole lot better.

[3DandBeyond]

Fixers0 wrote...

AlanC9 wrote...

I agree there was stupidity going on.

Arrival shows what happens when you slam an asteroid into one.But that simply isn't what happened at the end of ME3. At the end of ME3 the energy in the relays is tapped to do work.

If you can control the energy released from a relay precisely enough to destroy just synthetic life while leaving organics intact, or reprogram all Reapers, or fundamentally alter all intelligent life in the galaxy, venting the remaining energy away from the inhabited systems isn't exactly unimaginable.

Arrival: Relay destroyed = System totally wiped out.
Mass Effect 3's ending: Relay destroyed:  System not wiped out.

this is as far as exposition on the subject goes, everything mentioned in your third paragraph can be labbeled as supposition, as is the fact that the systems is wiped out is because of slamming an asteroid into the relay. 

Mac Walters view of galaxy post-ME3 ending: a wasteland
The Final Hours App: crucible will create a galactic dark ages
Desperate Measures codex: a ruptured relay will ruin terrestrial worlds in a system

EC announcement interview with Walters and Hudson: We don't understand why people would think the relays destroyed the galaxy.  We never intended that.

[3DandBeyond]

AlanC9 wrote...

Well, if Mac really wanted a wasteland, he shouldn't have shown Earth surviving the Citadel's explosion.

This is a part of what made no sense.  The Normandy crash.  The idea that Shepard could be alive.  It's one reason people were upset because it didn't fit together.

A lot of people repeatedly complained that if the destruction happened then the citadel should have destroyed Earth.  They complained that the ending meant massive starvation along with the fleets stranded at best or worst, depending on if you think instant death or a slow agonizing one is best.

Modifié par 3DandBeyond, 25 août 2012 - 10:29 .

[inversevideo]

AlanC9 wrote...

inversevideo wrote...
But we should have seen why we needed to build the crucible. As I said earlier, I would have bombarded Reaper installations with asteroids, and collapsed a relay or two. We should have seen something like that in-game, as well as have it shown why that would not work.  Think about most of your sci-fi invasion scenarios, The original H.G. Wells  'War of the Worlds' or 'Independence Day', we fight a conventional war, and use the biggest 'boom stick' we can find, and we see it is not enough.  Audience has to understand what they are up against. They are not left to head-canon why it will not work.

Of course, we do see Earth's defenses blown to shreds in the opening scenes, and we see the turians getting pounded at Palaven. So it's not like the game doesn't have any of this stuff. 

I'm not quite sure how ihis would work. We spend, say, 1/3 of the game being defeated, and then get going on the Crucible? And are we talking about adding this material, so it's now a 40- 50 hour game?

The closest parallel to ME3's situation that I can think of in gaming is Wing Commander 3 -- also about a space war that's being lost conventionally and needs to be won with a super-weapon (or two). In that game we don't actually see much of the war being lost. We do see the wreck of the Concordia in the opening scenes, and Angel's covert mission didn't go too well, but after those scenes Blair's own part of the war can go quite well if the player wins his missions. You only find out that the war in general is being lost from Rollins' radio intercepts, and later on when Admiral Tolwyn explains why they're deploying the Behemoth before it's completed.

That worked fine for me. Anyone else remember that game, or am I just dating myself?

For me, none of that shows us going all out, sacrificing a system if need be. Javik spoke about fighting a war of attrition. The Protheans foght city by city, sacrificed worlds, and systems, to slow down the Reapers. We don't have the benefit of advanced Prothean tech, but I still would have thought,  especially after 'Arrival' that we would have tried extreme measures. By any means necessary. 

In my own 'head cannon', there would have been a single mission, where we tried collapsing a relay, in a Reaper owned system. We incinerate every Reaper in the system. Then the Reapers just send twice as many after our FOB in the cluster. And it dawns on us that they have that many they can'spend'. The endless horde we saw at the end or ME2. That the Reapers just keep replenishing their numbers; for every one we destroy, they replace it with two.  And it is driven home that we have no chance to beat them without thinking outside of the box.

But that is my 'head canon', and really, I should not have to 'head-canon'. 

The other issue I have is with the Crucible.  Our Manhattan Project. We pour all that effort and resources into it and then it does not work?  I feel robbed, flim-flammed, bamboozled, hustled, cheated, abused, and deceived.  Where is the beef? Where is the creme filling? 

Modifié par inversevideo, 25 août 2012 - 10:50 .

[samb]

 I agree with the OP, the galaxy could have done better and BW could have done better portraying it.   But my reasons are different. If they didn't spend 3 years waiting and bickering maybe conventional victory is possible. It was never brought up. No "hey maybe Shepard was right all along. Darn us for not heeding his warning". 

Not enough of that.  

[knightnblu]

It's difficult to convey desperation when the scenery shows a day in the park. The Citadel was clean and friendly up until the point that Cerberus invaded it and then it became messy, but only because Cerberus invaded it. There is little talk of war, there are no piles of bodies, nobody is asking what did the Council know and when did they know it, the refugees are all polite and civil. Where are the problems? Even the C-Sec guys outside of Purgatory don't speak about the war at home initially and one of them has his entire family caught up in it on Palaven and he has no idea if his wife and children are alive. He must not like them very much.
 
Aside from the fuel storage facility wreckage in Reaper controlled systems floating around, where were the desperate calls for help? Where were the fleets of refugees? Where were the civilians running as if the devil himself were behind them? If you look at the game adverts you get the impression that the situation is desperate. In game however, not so much. If Garrus hadn't told me that the Turians were getting hammered I wouldn't have known anything about it. The reason for all of this was because BioWare failed to convey these things in the story. There is an old adage in writing: don't tell, show. I and many others have said since March that the game should have been much darker. However the ending of the game shifted focus for many people and the atmospherics of the game got swept under the rug.
 
There should have been a pervading sense of desperation from the get go and that desperation is what should have been driving the action in game. The Reapers show up, completely trash all of Earth's defenses, Admiral Hackett sacrifices an entire fleet to save two more, and then...hold please.
 
That's why I have been harping about Shepard's lack of participation in the war effort. He takes on Cerberus as his primary foe and leaves the Reapers to everybody else despite having the best track record against them. Additionally, Reaper indoctrination never seemed to be a problem aside from making Cerberus Reaper puppets. Sure, Rana Thanoptis took out some Asari brass, but that was it? Really? Apparently loose lips doesn't sink ships in the future.
 
The game was way too short, too bright, and the original ending was an atrocity. That isn't to say that it was a total failure. The missions on Tuchanka and the Quarian missions were excellent. The fleets arriving at Sol was incredible and the ground situation in London was as it should have been atmospherically. Character development was good as well because you really got to see the war taking its toll on Shepard, although I strongly disagree with the PTSD thing. You don't see Shepard drinking heavily, you don't see him having a go at everybody, and you don't see him isolating himself or engaging in self destructive behavior. He has nightmares and is fatigued and that's about it. Who the hell wouldn't leaving Earth the way that Shepard did?
 
In short, BioWare didn't think this one through. They didn't pay attention to details, they phoned in the ending, and they didn't bother to immerse the player in what a war like that would look like. I think that they really didn't want to go full blown with the Reaper war because they were afraid of turning off the player. ME3 was a game that told all of the advanced civilizations in the galaxy that they must die and the Reapers were supposed to be serious in that endeavor. Never showing the Reaper resolve in the ruthless pursuit of that objective was a mistake.
 
By keeping the player in the dark as to the dirty side of the war, BioWare failed to fully immerse the player in the main story. In the months running up to release the community speculated on what the war would look and feel like and the ME team didn't get the hint and it shows, but they did get 75 perfect scores from people who have no idea what I am talking about.
 
In the end, it is all about the story that you tell. The player must become a part of that story through his game play and in order to do that he must become immersed and that is why sight and sound are so important. The VAs take the game environment and bring it to life, but if you decorate the world inappropriately you break immersion despite the best actor's efforts and you waste the money that you spent on them. It is called follow through and that is one of the ways that BioWare failed in ME3.

[Zulufoxtrot]

wisekill1 wrote...

Zulufoxtrot wrote...

I think it's pretty far, Aeia's deep in Terminus on the otherside if I remember right, but given the massive energy wave, I have a feeling the Normandy might be lucky it's still in the Galaxy at that point.

But.. when you look at the cinematics of relays blowing up the energy wave stops pretty quickly and is just picked by the next relay.

I'll just add this one to my list of plotholes....

Yeah the whole sequence where the Normandy is outrunning it is pretty riciculous to begin with and nows there a part where it can also take off..... especially since it's shown after the victories on Thessia/Tuchanka. 

[3DandBeyond]

knightnblu wrote...

It's difficult to convey desperation when the scenery shows a day in the park. The Citadel was clean and friendly up until the point that Cerberus invaded it and then it became messy, but only because Cerberus invaded it. There is little talk of war, there are no piles of bodies, nobody is asking what did the Council know and when did they know it, the refugees are all polite and civil. Where are the problems? Even the C-Sec guys outside of Purgatory don't speak about the war at home initially and one of them has his entire family caught up in it on Palaven and he has no idea if his wife and children are alive. He must not like them very much.
 
Aside from the fuel storage facility wreckage in Reaper controlled systems floating around, where were the desperate calls for help? Where were the fleets of refugees? Where were the civilians running as if the devil himself were behind them? If you look at the game adverts you get the impression that the situation is desperate. In game however, not so much. If Garrus hadn't told me that the Turians were getting hammered I wouldn't have known anything about it. The reason for all of this was because BioWare failed to convey these things in the story. There is an old adage in writing: don't tell, show. I and many others have said since March that the game should have been much darker. However the ending of the game shifted focus for many people and the atmospherics of the game got swept under the rug.
 
There should have been a pervading sense of desperation from the get go and that desperation is what should have been driving the action in game. The Reapers show up, completely trash all of Earth's defenses, Admiral Hackett sacrifices an entire fleet to save two more, and then...hold please.
 
That's why I have been harping about Shepard's lack of participation in the war effort. He takes on Cerberus as his primary foe and leaves the Reapers to everybody else despite having the best track record against them. Additionally, Reaper indoctrination never seemed to be a problem aside from making Cerberus Reaper puppets. Sure, Rana Thanoptis took out some Asari brass, but that was it? Really? Apparently loose lips doesn't sink ships in the future.
 
The game was way too short, too bright, and the original ending was an atrocity. That isn't to say that it was a total failure. The missions on Tuchanka and the Quarian missions were excellent. The fleets arriving at Sol was incredible and the ground situation in London was as it should have been atmospherically. Character development was good as well because you really got to see the war taking its toll on Shepard, although I strongly disagree with the PTSD thing. You don't see Shepard drinking heavily, you don't see him having a go at everybody, and you don't see him isolating himself or engaging in self destructive behavior. He has nightmares and is fatigued and that's about it. Who the hell wouldn't leaving Earth the way that Shepard did?
 
In short, BioWare didn't think this one through. They didn't pay attention to details, they phoned in the ending, and they didn't bother to immerse the player in what a war like that would look like. I think that they really didn't want to go full blown with the Reaper war because they were afraid of turning off the player. ME3 was a game that told all of the advanced civilizations in the galaxy that they must die and the Reapers were supposed to be serious in that endeavor. Never showing the Reaper resolve in the ruthless pursuit of that objective was a mistake.
 
By keeping the player in the dark as to the dirty side of the war, BioWare failed to fully immerse the player in the main story. In the months running up to release the community speculated on what the war would look and feel like and the ME team didn't get the hint and it shows, but they did get 75 perfect scores from people who have no idea what I am talking about.
 
In the end, it is all about the story that you tell. The player must become a part of that story through his game play and in order to do that he must become immersed and that is why sight and sound are so important. The VAs take the game environment and bring it to life, but if you decorate the world inappropriately you break immersion despite the best actor's efforts and you waste the money that you spent on them. It is called follow through and that is one of the ways that BioWare failed in ME3.

Excellent post.  It is incredibly difficult to get some grim dark feeling when playing fetch and evade the little reapers and when talking to EDI about where to go on a date with Joker or when talking the Aethyta.  But other than the fetch crap, those things made the game great.  They should have followed their winning model which would have been making all those things Shepard was trying to find for people (dinosaur DNA and all) equal some great whole, instead of adhering to it's impossible because it's war with unbeatable monsters.  And then, to top it off dropping in some stupid kid at the end  which again seems like they didn't take it seriously.  It's like they wanted the idea of a grim dark war to exist by repeatedly stating it was unwinnable and not having to work to show that.  Well, if you don't want to show that, then drop that as the basis for all the crap at the end.

They'd have had a much better story with some comic relief, real hardcore fighting, no MacGuffin or Deus or Diabolus ex Machina, and authentic endings based on the goal of the 3 games-destroying the reapers.  It would have been far more satisfying to get a chance to try and beat them, even if a win was awfully hard.  This set of endings doesn't even meet the grim dark standard at all that they were trying to say would happen.  It would be laughable if it wasn't for the fact that this is ME, ruined by someone's decision to want to be Stanley Kubrick with maybe a week left to finish the game.

[mauro2222]

Damn, 13 pages and people still don't get the point of this thread.

[3DandBeyond]

mauro2222 wrote...

Damn, 13 pages and people still don't get the point of this thread.

I think some people do.  It just does offer the opportunity to go off onto tangents.

To rehash, this is not a thread about wanting to defeat the reapers conventionally.  It is a thread saying that we are not shown in any meaningful way that it can't be done.

All we mostly get is people saying it can't be done and then scenes of people running headlong or flying headlong at reapers.  People run with assault rifles and pistols and shoot at reapers.  In space, ships don't seem to shoot at them, they wait to be crushed by them.  The game shows a lot of incompetence but not a lot of all out trying to fight them.  We are just expected to believe they can't be beaten without seeing a lot of the destruction taking place.

If the Normandy is invisible to Harbinger, then at the very least it should have tried to distract Harby so Shepard could make it to the conduit, but it flies off.  Shepard runs headlong in the open to the conduit right in front of Harby.  This is the kind of stuff that cries stupidity and not a real attempt to actually do anything.

The Turian tactics that won in some places would have been cool to see, but we read about that in a codex.  If we'd seen it and then had seen that that was only a minor temporary win, it would have made it really obvious.  But all along it's not made clear in the game.  You get contradictory information, so it's not that you don't believe a win would be improbably or very difficult, but it's like they take great pains to confuse you and make you think there is the sliver of a possibility.  And then you die.

[razzy1319]

I was expecting to deal with suicide bombing reaper vessels(possibly one of your squaddies), sacrificing civilian/refugee fleets/planets (with that long wide shot of the consquences), and Shepard just flat out breaking down in front of the Catalyst, screaming at the top of his lungs(SPOILERS/something like the Spec-Ops: The Line ending/SPOILERS).

I played through the game twice fully, taking my time to take in everything, probably not that much by BSN standards. BUT STILL I felt rushed through the entire thing. There was no time to develop that sense of dread and desperation that a war story provides.

For the people saying that most of the combat environments provided this. Its hard to just stand around looking at everything while your trying to survive combat. You could pause and look around maybe but doing that breaks the immersion/pacing.

[Urdnot Amenark]

They definitely weren't portrayed to be undefeatable, just written to be such. The only thing they have going for them are indoctrination, harvesting, and superior technology. Their tactical strategies - mow through the enemy nonstop - are blunt and are something you'd never find any serious general using. Of course when you're as advanced as they are, their sucky battle skills are kinda moot. What saddened me more was how Hackett just threw the fleets into battle like cheese through a shredder. I wanted to go into battle throughout the game facing off against Harbinger and other Sovereign-class Reapers. All we got in the end were showdowns with Destroyers, the "drones" of their race.

[BatmanPWNS]

Me neither. They can't even aim properly.

[CronoDragoon]

3DandBeyond wrote...


All we mostly get is people saying it can't be done and then scenes of people running headlong or flying headlong at reapers.  People run with assault rifles and pistols and shoot at reapers.  In space, ships don't seem to shoot at them, they wait to be crushed by them.  The game shows a lot of incompetence but not a lot of all out trying to fight them.  We are just expected to believe they can't be beaten without seeing a lot of the destruction taking place.

The game doesn't show competence or incompetence. We can't extrapolate tactics from like 10 seconds cutscenes. The scenes are not meant to be detailed demonstrations of why no tactics work against the Reapers. They are simply visual representations of that fact, sort of like how in battle scenes if they show a couple soldiers on one side killing others that is a visual cue that one side if winning.

It would take far too much work to CG everything needed to show tactics on the level of the Miracle at Palaven. I agree that we could have used Thanix Cannons in the cutscenes, but I don't agree that this relates to the Reapers being portrayed as anything less than overwhelming.

Modifié par CronoDragoon, 27 août 2012 - 03:09 .

[3DandBeyond]

CronoDragoon wrote...

3DandBeyond wrote...


All we mostly get is people saying it can't be done and then scenes of people running headlong or flying headlong at reapers.  People run with assault rifles and pistols and shoot at reapers.  In space, ships don't seem to shoot at them, they wait to be crushed by them.  The game shows a lot of incompetence but not a lot of all out trying to fight them.  We are just expected to believe they can't be beaten without seeing a lot of the destruction taking place.

The game doesn't show competence or incompetence. We can't extrapolate tactics from like 10 seconds cutscenes. The scenes are not meant to be detailed demonstrations of why no tactics work against the Reapers. They are simply visual representations of that fact, sort of like how in battle scenes if they show a couple soldiers on one side killing others that is a visual cue that one side if winning.

It would take far too much work to CG everything needed to show tactics on the level of the Miracle at Palaven. I agree that we could have used Thanix Cannons in the cutscenes, but I don't agree that this relates to the Reapers being portrayed as anything less than overwhelming.

I'm sorry but the run to the conduit was full on incompetence.  Not utilizing the invisible Normandy to get Harby's attention by shooting at him or the ground near him, behind him, was incompetent. 

And the Asari commando leading a team and ducking down when they'd clearly been seen by a reaper, while her team had assault rifles.  Really, what were they going to do before they got hit by the beam, charge at it with their guns blazing when it turned its back.  Reapers planetside are vulnerable but not to pistols and assualt rifles.

[ShepGrimr]

here's why it's not impossible. This is from me1 and 2 not me3 that is not canon. I do not think the reapers had the numbers to go widespread on harvesting. In me 1, sovereign tries to close off all the relays using the citadel but fails. In either me1 or 2 we learn the reapers tried to create a prothean reaper but failed and then they tried again using humans and again failed.

These two points tell me if they went to every corner in the galaxy they would be stretched too thin and ultimately could be therefore taken down conventionally.