255 réponses à ce sujet

[Break Atmo]

Eterna5 wrote...

I'm curious, do you have a better story or plot occurrence that would allow the galaxy to defeat the Reapers?

Defeating the Reapers through the following:

- The Thanix Cannon, which easily 2-shotted the massive 1km Reaper-made Collector Ship. The fact that even the puny 160m Destroyers take multiple orbital bombardments to kill after that is ridiculous. As well, introduce powerful shielding tech derived from Sovereign (as well as other dead Reapers over the course of the game).
- Study of the gun that killed the Derelict Reaper - have Joker and EDI steal the data during their escape and immediately dispense it to every military and government. By the time of the invasion, others have been made from the data and are effective against invading Reapers.
- Don't shoehorn some 'oh you can't fly FTL into an object because Reapers said so' crap into the Codex, or if you do, allow some way for that to be overridden by the multitude of genius scientists throughout the galaxy, reinforcing the theme of the races working together to acheive great things. Having fighters gunning it at lightspeed into Capital Reapers would have been amazing.
- Have the Reapers be considerably weaker than Sovereign, explained by severe power drain suffered as a result of having to travel all the way to the Milky Way from dark space under their own power.
- Stress the fact that, in other cycles, the Reapers simply shut the mass relays off and rendered any real resistance impossible, while being able to focus their whole numbers on individual systems, harvesting them one by one - in this cycle, they have no such advantages, and are forced to spread themselves thin.
- Actually have the Leviathan mission as the crucial element of the story it should have been, with the Leviathans' capabilities of controlling the various husks and knocking out Reapers forming a core part of the war effort.

There. Plenty of details explaining why even a force as powerful as the Reapers can, with extraordinary effort, be defeated, with all of them (except the Leviathans, and maybe the FTL ramming) being logical, natural continuations from the previous games. Far better and more satisfying than a Space Magic device BioWare pulled out of their asses in the last game with zero buildup to avoid having to actually live up to their promises of 'wildly varying conclusions'.

[Guglio08]

I'm fairly certain that the mention of previous cycles contributing to the design of the Crucible is supposed to imply that the original design was from the Leviathan's cycle, or at least really close to that, because, as has been said, having cycles with no knowledge of The Catalyst would have been ill-equipped to devise such a contraption.

[2Shepards]

Ownedbacon wrote...

The whole Crucible plot is plain nonsensical.

Countless cycles add to a device not knowing what it does with the intent to stop the Reapers. In the end they have a device that seemlessly attaches to a Reaper made device and changes the Reaper leader/controller/collective
conciousness that no one ever knew existed. Not to mention the interface for activating this device is on the Reaper made Citadel.

One function for this fluke device is that grabbing some electrical components, disintegrating yourself you gain control of all sentient technology. Another function is activated by wrecking one of its components.  The final function is to jump into a beam disintegrate yourself and magically alter everything into a organic/synthetic DNA. Synthesis is also something that the Reapers/Catalyst or civilizations prior failed to accomplish. Apparently the beings that have developed/harvested the best technology the galaxy has ever seen, failed where desperate and limited cycles have succeeded.

How could cycles randomly adding to blueprints for a device end up surpassing the Reapers' technological abilities, but they still fail to stop/defeat them? Even better is how this device was the salvation of many cycles and wasn't mentioned in beacons in ME1 intended to give warning of the Reaper invasion.

EDIT: formatting

Tech more advanced....still get your ass handed to you...

[Kamfrenchie]

Mcfly616 wrote...

Random Jerkface wrote...

Mcfly616 wrote...

[...]

I could care less about your opinion. Thems the facts dog.

It's "dogg."

And I'm still trying to absorb the fact that you are justifying--with a straight face--inorganic plot development/resolution with "they had to keep it a secret from the reapers." You need to dissociate the events of the story from the method by which the events are told. Until then, you aren't analysing anything, rhetorically, narratively, or critically.

edit: 

xsdob wrote...

I don't know how many times or ways anyone can explain it, but having fantastic elements or fantastic premises in a story does not licence fantastic or absurd resolutions. There are magic and elves in The Lord of the Rings, but it would be in no way justified if Tom Bombadil appeared in the last twenty pages of Return of the King and wished away Sauron's orc army.

blah blah blah. Your opinion. Your opinion. And.....you guessed it, your opinion. Return of the Kings Epilogue and the way in which events are resolved, well they completely blow anyway(in my opinion lol) so...not a great example there.


ME3's ending takes inspiration from multiple Sci Fi classics. I'm a fan of classic Sci Fi. Apparently you're not. And thats fine. You saying it doesn't make sense, well, you just incorrect. You simply dont like it. Its whatever. Lol

ME3 ending is an insult to the sci fi genre.

You may like it, that's fine, but it's objectively bad according to conventions of storytelling and sci-fi.

[tanisha__unknown]

The problem is not the crucible itself, the problem is that it was so poorly introduced. It comes out of nowhere, the way it works is not plausible, but essentially there is nothing wrong with a superweapon to defeat the reapers if it is established properly.

[Baihu1983]

Finding the Crucible should have been the main objective in ME2.

[FlamingBoy]

it was kind of weird how everyone in the galaxy was sort of onboard with the crucible, bioware kind of made it into a crazy "why not" moment

there were alot of things in mass effect 3 that didn't sit right with me

[iDeevil]

Eterna5 wrote...

I'm curious, do you have a better story or plot occurrence that would allow the galaxy to defeat the Reapers?

better is subjective really.

I still tend to believe ME4 will ultimately answer the questions of what happened in the ending, but then again I've been called insane for that.

[What a Succulent Ass]

Kamfrenchie wrote...

You may like it, that's fine, but it's objectively bad according to conventions of storytelling and sci-fi.

I'm not even sure what he was on about there. I haven't read a decent piece of sci fi--from Asimov to Clarke, to Heinlein, to Card, to Dick, to Le Guin, to Zamyatin, to Collins, to Bushkov, to Vinge, to Vonnegut, to Lem--that pulled anything like ME did.

I'm going to go ahead and say this is because good writing is objective. And because they didn't want their work to be sh*t.

[Davik Kang]

Ownedbacon wrote...

The whole Crucible plot is plain nonsensical.

Countless cycles add to a device not knowing what it does with the intent to stop the Reapers. In the end they have a device that seemlessly attaches to a Reaper made device and changes the Reaper leader/controller/collective
conciousness that no one ever knew existed. Not to mention the interface for activating this device is on the Reaper made Citadel.

One function for this fluke device is that grabbing some electrical components, disintegrating yourself you gain control of all sentient technology. Another function is activated by wrecking one of its components.  The final function is to jump into a beam disintegrate yourself and magically alter everything into a organic/synthetic DNA. Synthesis is also something that the Reapers/Catalyst or civilizations prior failed to accomplish. Apparently the beings that have developed/harvested the best technology the galaxy has ever seen, failed where desperate and limited cycles have succeeded.

How could cycles randomly adding to blueprints for a device end up surpassing the Reapers' technological abilities, but they still fail to stop/defeat them? Even better is how this device was the salvation of many cycles and wasn't mentioned in beacons in ME1 intended to give warning of the Reaper invasion.

EDIT: formatting

Crucible was basically a giant superweapon plot device invented so that ME3 would have a plot distinct from ME1 and ME2.  I don't think that necessarily makes it bad though.  They always had the challenge of making each ME game playable in its own right, without knowledge of the others.

About the 3 choices, I don't think the Crucible is actually a machine with 3 choices.  I think it's just a massive energy source, designed to send a massive power surge through the Mass Relays, via the Citadel.  I think Synthesis is manipulation of this power souce by the Reapers to send a whole different kind of surge, one that warps all life forms, rather than just synthetics.  I think it's Reaper tech and not ancient civilisation tech.

I don't think Control has anything to do with the Crucible, but even if it does, it's not what the Crucible was designed for, it's just how the Reapers manipulate the power source.  The Citadel is the key component in all cases, and it's a Reaper mass relay.

The desperate and limited previous cycles didn't surpass Reaper tech, they tried to build something that they thought could destroy them, but not by surpassing them.  Again, the Crucible is mainly a power source and inherently depends on using the tech of the Citadel (in other words, was designed around the Citadel's design).

Just how I saw it though, I'm not claiming this is indisputable fact.

[iDeevil]

Random Jerkface wrote...

Kamfrenchie wrote...

You may like it, that's fine, but it's objectively bad according to conventions of storytelling and sci-fi.

I'm not even sure what he was on about there. I haven't read a decent piece of sci fi--from Asimov to Clarke, to Heinlein, to Card, to Dick, to Le Guin, to Zamyatin, to Collins, to Bushkov, to Vinge, to Vonnegut, to Lem--that pulled anything like ME did.

I'm going to go ahead and say this is because good writing is objective. And because they didn't want their work to be sh*t.

i dunno, good writing is pretty subjective in the end.  I can't tell you how many times I've been told what a fantastic auteur Jack Keorak was, if you ask me he wrote crap.

truth be told ME was never the height of narrative brilliance, but we enjoyed it.  The ending worked for some and didn't work for others, whether or not it was a fantastic piece of work means nothing when all people here are really making subjective likes and occasionally backing it up with the smallest bit of literary theory.

I'd pull out literary theory that has dues ex machine dating back millennia, some from the very literary theorists that are studied, but there's no point.  The end here is whether or not this ending worked *for you*, because traditional storytelling techniques don't properly carry over to gaming... And yet, they sort of do too.

[Dean_the_Young]

Random Jerkface wrote...

Kamfrenchie wrote...

You may like it, that's fine, but it's objectively bad according to conventions of storytelling and sci-fi.

I'm not even sure what he was on about there. I haven't read a decent piece of sci fi--from Asimov to Clarke, to Heinlein, to Card, to Dick, to Le Guin, to Zamyatin, to Collins, to Bushkov, to Vinge, to Vonnegut, to Lem--that pulled anything like ME did.

A superweapon to take out/take over an unstoppable army?

The Crucible only really gets whacky with the introduction of synthesis. Otherwise, it's nothing we didn't see before.

[N7Gold]

It's funny how each cycle added to the blueprints of the Crucible yet they have no idea what it does, but the Catalyst seems to know the Crucible inside and out. This tells me the Catalyst is the one who designed the Crucible, the cycles were herded like cattle to complete it, but they failed. The whole conflict against the Reapers, the fact that they can't be beaten conventionally forces races from each cycle to rely on the Crucible, which is the machine that the Catalyst has made to reach the solutions that'll replace the harvesting solution. The Catalyst wants to ensure the harvest cycle is broken on its terms, not on the races who constructed the Crucible.

Modifié par N7Gold, 02 octobre 2012 - 12:46 .

[Jadebaby]

Mcfly616 wrote...

Random Jerkface wrote...

Mcfly616 wrote...

It's funny when I see people say, "oh, the crucible is stupid, how come it wasn't shown in the beacon visions", or one of my favorites, "The Catalyst is stupid, how come it wasnt foreshadowed in ME1?."


Lol.....um maybe because they are the 2 best kept secrets in the galaxy....hmm

...This is probably the wackest defence I've read in months.

thanks for sharing your "opinion". Lol You don't have to accept the facts. Plenty of people live in denial. Because both are secrets. Obviously lol. And on the datapads, they say how they just never knew to look. TIM also criticizing the situation since the plans have been under their noses and the alliance squandered it. (Also, people seem to forget that the Reapers are largely believed to be a myth. Only very few people believe/accept the fact that they're actually real. So technically they're still a secret to most. Not much initiative to look for a way to defeat a mythical threat.....besides Shepard and few others)

Oh and Vigil had no way of knowing of neither the Catalyst or the Crucible. Seperate projects. Prothean Empire was divided and conquered, all communication was cut off.

I could care less about your opinion. Thems the facts dog.

It's still wack.

The real answer is; Because BioWare didn't have a clue how it would end when they started writing it.

[Ithurael]

Mcfly616 wrote...

It's funny when I see people say, "oh, the crucible is stupid, how come it wasn't shown in the beacon visions", or one of my favorites, "The Catalyst is stupid, how come it wasnt foreshadowed in ME1?."


Lol.....um maybe because they are the 2 best kept secrets in the galaxy....hmm

Isn't the answer obvious?

We got a new head writer after ME2.

Plots change - we shouldn't get too attached to them.

[What a Succulent Ass]

iDeevil wrote...

i dunno, good writing is pretty subjective in the end.  I can't tell you how many times I've been told what a fantastic auteur Jack Keorak was, if you ask me he wrote crap.

Structure and coherence is not the same as style and aesthetic; they are neither mutually inclusive nor exclusive, and the subjective aspect of writing is only relevant when we start evaluating the latter. A skilled enough author can subvert the fundamentals as he or she wishes, but writing at its core is about the effective communication of ideas, and consistency (thematic or otherwise), cohesion (logical and narrative or otherwise), and clarity (rhetorical, sequential or otherwise) will always be the basic metrics of good writing. If a work fails to meet these requisites and is thus unsuccessful in communicating its message, then it's poorly written.

truth be told ME was never the height of narrative brilliance

No, it wasn't. But works don't have to be complex--or even good--to be enjoyable. ME's premise (and narrative) was a very basic one that enriched itself by supplementing with extensive lore and painstaking attention to atmosphere and detail. That is, it communicated a familiar story with simple ideas, but it did so well primarily because it relied on elementary plot progression, but emphasised with breadth and depth the means of that progression (consider how exploration and conversation were Mass Effect's biggest draws). In an interactive, visual medium like video games, this is a damn good thing.

When you have a narrative like that, when you start stripping away plot clarity, thematic consistency, tone, lore, and minutiae to make way for cinematic explosions, what you will have left is cat sh*t. It's not only the seams that show on the overarching story--you can see the Krazy Glue and the plasters too.

I'd pull out literary theory that has dues ex machine dating back millennia,

The ancient Greeks didn't like DEM either.

traditional storytelling techniques don't properly carry over to gaming... And yet, they sort of do too.

Some basic tenants apply, but otherwise not really. Poetry =/= prose =/= script writing =/= film directing =/= video game writing.

One of video gaming's biggest foibles is that it tries to emulate films. Whilst a cinematic approach isn't bad in and of itself, it should be recognised that these are different mediums: they should not be trying to engage the audience using the same methods.

A film that relies on the tools of a novel is ultimately going to be a failure of a film. A video game that tries too hard to be arthouse cinema is not going to be much of a game at all.

Modifié par Random Jerkface, 02 octobre 2012 - 01:08 .

[Jadebaby]

Random Jerkface wrote...

One of video gaming's biggest foibles is that it tries to emulate films. Whilst a cinematic approach isn't bad in and of itself, it should be recognised that these are different mediums: they should not be trying to engage the audience using the same methods.

A film that relies on the tools of a novel is ultimately going to be a failure of a film. A video game that tries too hard to be arthouse cinema is not going to be much of a game at all.

Which is where ME failed. Way too much art house in those endings.

But at the same time. That's what I don't get. Because Casey said he loves the idea of the endings being interactive in that you choose those outcomes. But then 95% of the game that came before, they were trying to do the opposite by adding all this auto-dialogue and cinematic cutscenes to help everything "flow" smoother...

[What a Succulent Ass]

Dean_the_Young wrote...

A superweapon to take out/take over an unstoppable army?

The Crucible only really gets whacky with the introduction of synthesis. Otherwise, it's nothing we didn't see before.

Nah. We have all seen superweapons before. After all, there's no such thing as a "bad" plot device, only bad implementation. The way the Crucible is presented is poor; the way it is introduced and the point at which it's introduced is poor; the way it undermines previous story elements is especially terrible, and the ending it leads up to...well.

[drayfish]

Personally, I do find it completely absurd that this entire narrative revolves around the notion that the Crucible is an enormous remote control that got lost down the cushions of the galactic couch.

I probably could have gotten on board with it if there were more of a justification for how this feat was accomplished beyond 'we dreamed it up real goodz', but at present it's still not clear to me how multiple generations of civilisations, across countless eons, could all contribute to the construction of a fantastical machine when they had no idea what it was for, where it went, or what it did. That seems like trying to build a supercomputer, in the dark, with rocks, and no idea what electricity is ...while being attacked by zombies. The whole conceit is like a Mad Lib being read at a poetry slam.

And then, despite it being a literal 'I win' button that we are forced to assemble, the game arbitrarily poisons the endings with nonsensical moral compromises that sour the victory in the mistaken belief that forced drama is compelling. For me, for a premise so silly, artlessly tacking on genocide, eugenics and mind-control in order to 'win' only demeaned the whole scenario further.

Modifié par drayfish, 02 octobre 2012 - 01:11 .

[Jadebaby]

drayfish wrote...

Personally, I do find it completely absurd that this entire narrative revolves around the notion that the Crucible is an enormous remote control that got lost down the cushions of the galactic couch.

OH MY GOD!!

My sides

Ohhh... The humanity.............!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[hiraeth]

drayfish wrote...

Personally, I do find it completely absurd that this entire narrative revolves around the notion that the Crucible is an enormous remote control that got lost down the cushions of the galactic couch.

I probably could have gotten on board with it if there were more of a justification for how this feat was accomplished beyond 'we dreamed it up real goodz', but at present it's still not clear to me how multiple generations of civilisations, across countless eons, could all contribute to the construction of a fantastical machine when they had no idea what it was for, where it went, or what it did. That seems like trying to build a supercomputer, in the dark, with rocks, and no idea what electricity is ...while being attacked by zombies. The whole conceit is like a Mad Lib being read at a poetry slam.

And then, despite it being a literal 'I win' button that we are forced to assemble, the game arbitrarily poisons the endings with nonsensical moral compromises that sour the victory in the mistaken belief that forced drama is compelling. For me, for a premise so silly, artlessly tacking on genocide, eugenics and mind-control in order to 'win' only demeaned the whole scenario further.

^yup.

[iDeevil]

Actually Random_Jerkface, in many cases the Ancient Greeks and Romans welcome Deus Ex Machina, and it was used heavily in many occasions. That being said, the Crucible actually wasn't a Deus Ex Machina, star baby was.

As for your statements on narrative, I am aware, but the truth is people like Jack Kerouak didn't subvert any narrative structure with any knowledge of what they were subverting, they subverted it because they couldn't really write. But like most things some people loved it, a subjective outlook, and now it's literary genius. So, really, while ME was always plagued with inconsistencies and narrative pitfalls, our enjoy,net carried it through. For many, if they got the ending they wanted and devised (ie: Sheppard lives), none of those would have ever been overly thought of.

Objective is often the fallback/catch cry  for rational subjectivism.

Mind you, for what ME was I enjoyed the entire trilogy, and while I could pick apart every problem with the story, I'd rather just enjoy what I do have.  Which is rare for me since I tend to over analyze everything.

Modifié par iDeevil, 02 octobre 2012 - 01:56 .

[Siirlock]

iDeevil wrote...

Mind you, for what ME was I enjoyed the entire trilogy, and while I could pick apart every problem with the story, I'd rather just enjoy what I do have.  Which is rare for me since I tend to over analyze everything.

I agree.

[drayfish]

iDeevil wrote...

Actually Random_Jerkface, in many cases the Ancient Greeks and Romans welcome Deus Ex Machina, and it was used heavily in many occasions. That being said, the Crucible actually wasn't a Deus Ex Machina, star baby was.

As for your statements on narrative, I am aware, but the truth is people like Jack Kerouak didn't subvert any narrative structure with any knowledge of what they were subverting, they subverted it because they couldn't really write. But like most hints some people loved it, a subjective outlook, and now it's literary genius. So, really, while ME was always plagued with inconsistencies and narrative pitfalls, our enjoy,net carried it through. For many, if they got the ending they wanted and devised (ie: Sheppard lives), none of those would have ever been overly thought of.

Objective is often the fallback for rational subjectivism.

Various forms of deus ex machina may have been employed by playwrights of the time (there were certainly enough literal gods zipping around in their plots), but it was loudly decried as irredeemably awful by the foremost critics and literary theorists.

Both Aristotle (for the Greeks) and Horace (for the Romans) declared it the laziest, most artless form of narrative manipulation a writer could ever employ, and stated in their respective statements of poetics that it should never be utilised.  If a plot twist did not grow organically from the plot then it was pure, arbitrary nonsense, and had no place in the fiction.

Those sentiments were celebrated and taught at the time, and have remained true throughout the history of narrative to this day.  I suspect that the writers of Mass Effect though that by calling out what they had done (making it a literal 'god' from a 'machine') it would be some kind of metatextual statement that people would nod knowingly at in appreciation, but it is still completely unjustified by the plot, a disruptive last-minute recalibration (pun intended) of the narrative's cohesion, and a fundamental violation of the audience's investment.  Everything that Horace and Aristotle warned against.

They may as well have had a dude dressed as Apollo swing in on a pole with a wooden lightning bolt in his hand to magic away everyone's problems - just like the old days.

Modifié par drayfish, 02 octobre 2012 - 02:10 .