255 réponses à ce sujet

[Reorte]

dreman9999 wrote...
That explaine how it hit eveny reaper at once. It uses themass realy net work. Destroy is like an emp pulse that makes Ai's brain dead. 
Control is a rewrite single amped by the mass realays.

Added, you missing the fact that they a machine oing what they are programed to do. The shepard ai has complete control over them.

Exactly. A magic beam that can make all AIs dead? Please, give me a break. Control is slightly more plausible but it seems daft that all the Reapers would have that sort of vulnerability.

The Reapers are more than straightforward machines. They certainly seem to act with a fair degree of autonomy, more like the Catalyst is their chief commander than something just operating remote controlled machines. They may well be shackled to it in a similar way as EDI was in ME2.

[Nightwriter]

I would be willing to accept all the logistical contrivances they could throw at me if they'd just delivered a satisfying ending.

Oh and proper ME2 character romance content. Damn shame.

[liggy002]

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

ME3 was very poorly written.  This is the proof in the pudding.  Combine this with how they handled Harbinger, and it is just horrible.  I'm never buying a game from these people again.  I don't expect quality anymore.

[Nightwriter]

liggy002 wrote...

ME3 was very poorly written.  This is the proof in the pudding.  Combine this with how they handled Harbinger, and it is just horrible.  I'm never buying a game from these people again.  I don't expect quality anymore.

ME3 was satisfyingly written most of the way through. It relied upon a lot of contrived plot devices and writing faux pas that literary professors would frown upon, but it still managed to give me a great ride.

It wasn't until the ending that it started to combine contrivances with unsatisfying writing.

[shodiswe]

Random Jerkface wrote...

If we're about to explore just how outrageously bad ME2's plot was, I'd like to point out that the Collectors could never have taken out Earth. Those comments your squad members make in the ship are just completely absurd.

The collectors would likely have joined up with the "Arrival" reapers that got stranded by that destroyed relay. If that relay hadn't been destroyed then they could have been collecting humans on earth along side the other reaper forces.

With their stun swarms.

[TheJediSaint]

Nightwriter wrote...

liggy002 wrote...

ME3 was very poorly written.  This is the proof in the pudding.  Combine this with how they handled Harbinger, and it is just horrible.  I'm never buying a game from these people again.  I don't expect quality anymore.

ME3 was satisfyingly written most of the way through. It relied upon a lot of contrived plot devices and writing faux pas that literary professors would frown upon, but it still managed to give me a great ride.

It wasn't until the ending that it started to combine contrivances with unsatisfying writing.

That's pretty much my take.  I was fine with the contrivences because the basic story telling through the game right up to the "Magic Elevator" was quite good.  The problem with the ending is that is that it was everything that an ending shouldn't have been.

Modifié par TheJediSaint, 02 octobre 2012 - 06:55 .

[dreman9999]

Reorte wrote...

dreman9999 wrote...
That explaine how it hit eveny reaper at once. It uses themass realy net work. Destroy is like an emp pulse that makes Ai's brain dead. 
Control is a rewrite single amped by the mass realays.

Added, you missing the fact that they a machine oing what they are programed to do. The shepard ai has complete control over them.

Exactly. A magic beam that can make all AIs dead? Please, give me a break. Control is slightly more plausible but it seems daft that all the Reapers would have that sort of vulnerability.

The Reapers are more than straightforward machines. They certainly seem to act with a fair degree of autonomy, more like the Catalyst is their chief commander than something just operating remote controlled machines. They may well be shackled to it in a similar way as EDI was in ME2.

Not a magic beam. An emp pulse funneled thore the mass realys. That is not hard to understand.

Add,the reaper are organic synthetic hybirids. If the synthetic part dies, the organic partis not going to last.

[Xamufam]

Add this
1. How could the protheans build the crucible when they had no relays
2.
How could the protheans leave the plans of the crucible on mars when
there were no communication or relays on. (vigil said communication
& the relays were down in me 1)
3. How did they leave a VI on thessia with the plans & everything.

If
they had fast travel they would still live because a civilisation type 2
it's impossible to kill of (it's too stabile), they could just move to
another part of the system. our galaxy size is a 100 000 light year, it
would take take them billions of years to kill the advanced organics.
&
They didn't have the crucible plans until the end of the war.

Modifié par Troxa, 02 octobre 2012 - 07:32 .

[Masha Potato]

Ownedbacon wrote...

The whole Crucible plot is plain nonsensical.

THAT'S NEWS

[Masha Potato]

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

that's not how foreshadowing works

[What a Succulent Ass]

Someone With Mass wrote...

It's not a valid comparison because the scientists behind the atom bomb designed it, built it, knew its intended function, and yes--even tested it. The biggest unknowns were not what it would do or how it would do it, but rather what the far-reaching consequences of its deployment would be. 

The Crucible on the other hand, is an old remote control scheme that they found under the bed beneath some lint. They don't know what it actually is, can only guess at what it does (how they came to their conclusion is never explained), they don't know how it will do what they guessed it does, or if it will do anything at all. They have no indication that they aren't throwing the galaxy's material and personnel resources at a massive boondoggle that will bankrupt all known existence. They don't even know what they need to construct the thing (or if it still exists).

It's a false analogy.

[drayfish]

iDeevil wrote...

Drayfish, as annoying as it is 90% of TV and film use some form of Deus Ex Machina and many folks enjoy it (books usually depend less on it) Is it beloved, probably not, is it sincerely enjoyed? Yes.  Do some people see it as the most twistiest piece of twist ever twisted?  You bet.

and at this point I have no idea why I'm discussing Deus Ex Machina in this way .  I think we agree it's a cheat but it doesn't always have devalue enjoyment.  IE: I enjoyed ME3, even the ending.  Would have enjoyed it more fore a number of reasons but I'm typing on my iPhone and my thumbs may fall off.

Funnily enough it's when character act out of character is when the masses start to notice a problem.

Hi iDeevil,

I'm certainly not saying that you're wrong, I guess I just cannot think of any examples of a deus ex machina being employed in popular entertainment where it has elicited anything by eye-rolling groans from the audience.

DEM's are things like when Superman turns the world in the opposite direction to turn back time.  A DEM is not a twist like The Sixth Sense or Fight Club - those things have to be established and justiified; usually it is a riculous expression of impossible power that has never been explained before the moment it is employed - like the Crucible/Catalyst.

Are there any examples you can give so that I know what you mean?

Modifié par drayfish, 02 octobre 2012 - 11:03 .

[MegaSovereign]

All things considered, the way it was introduced wasn't actually all that contrived. You presumably helped Liara become the Shadow Broker in ME2 and she spent the 6 months (that you bought the galaxy) looking for any leads on stopping the Reapers. Her search led her to the Mars archives and well...the Crucible.

My problem with it is the lack of necessary exposition to make it feel grounded to the plot. Fortunately they may remedy with future DLC.

Modifié par MegaSovereign, 02 octobre 2012 - 11:06 .

[Reorte]

dreman9999 wrote...

Reorte wrote...

dreman9999 wrote...
That explaine how it hit eveny reaper at once. It uses themass realy net work. Destroy is like an emp pulse that makes Ai's brain dead. 
Control is a rewrite single amped by the mass realays.

Added, you missing the fact that they a machine oing what they are programed to do. The shepard ai has complete control over them.

Exactly. A magic beam that can make all AIs dead? Please, give me a break. Control is slightly more plausible but it seems daft that all the Reapers would have that sort of vulnerability.

The Reapers are more than straightforward machines. They certainly seem to act with a fair degree of autonomy, more like the Catalyst is their chief commander than something just operating remote controlled machines. They may well be shackled to it in a similar way as EDI was in ME2.

Not a magic beam. An emp pulse funneled thore the mass realys. That is not hard to understand.

Add,the reaper are organic synthetic hybirids. If the synthetic part dies, the organic partis not going to last.

An EMP that can single out specific software running on any platform? (e.g. it presumably kills the geth running on quarian suits in Destroy, but not the rest of the suit or quarian suits in general; Tali certainly looks fine afterwards). That can pass through or around anything to fry stuff that happened to be behind a planet or star from the point of view of the nearest mass relay? The idea that an AI should be so vulnerable to it but nothing else is is ridiculous.

[Boneyaards]

Well, when you're faced with inevitable death and you're watching millions of people get slaughtered and harvested right before your very eyes, I would put my faith into a super weapon, even if its outcome is unknown. Why? Because you either die in vain or you attempt to do something extraordinary to win. It's not wishful thinking, because when you're desperate for survival, anything goes. 

[drayfish]

Boneyaards wrote...

Well, when you're faced with inevitable death and you're watching millions of people get slaughtered and harvested right before your very eyes, I would put my faith into a super weapon, even if its outcome is unknown. Why? Because you either die in vain or you attempt to do something extraordinary to win. It's not wishful thinking, because when you're desperate for survival, anything goes. 

Perhaps this is somewhat off topic, and I don't want to derail the thread, but: really?  Was Mass Effect really about survival at any cost?  That just seems really empty to me.

The game I was playing was about inclusivity, and accepting the diversity of many different cultures and peoples and forms of life - because it was in that unity that we proved our strength, and showed the Reapers just how vile their actions were.

...Then we get to the end of the game and apparently all of our effort, all of our collaboration, was just a means to construct the most racist machine that has ever existed:

Do you want to exterminate a race of allies?  Do you want to brainwash monsters to become an unstoppable overlord?  Or do you want to do the really 'noble' thing and rewrite everyone to have the same DNA, obliterating all that inclusivity and individuality that you were previously celebrating?

I presume the Bioware writers thought that this kind of moral compromise would be narratively interesting, but actually (for me at least) it just hollowed out the entire experience, making it a mystifyingly juvenile love-note to eugenics.

Modifié par drayfish, 02 octobre 2012 - 11:23 .

[Lookout1390]

drayfish wrote...

Boneyaards wrote...

Well, when you're faced with inevitable death and you're watching millions of people get slaughtered and harvested right before your very eyes, I would put my faith into a super weapon, even if its outcome is unknown. Why? Because you either die in vain or you attempt to do something extraordinary to win. It's not wishful thinking, because when you're desperate for survival, anything goes. 

Perhaps this is somewhat off topic, and I don't want to derail the thread, but: really?  Was Mass Effect really about survival at any cost?  That just seems really empty to me.

The game I was playing was about inclusivity, and accepting the diversity of many different cultures and peoples and forms of life - because it was in that unity that we proved our strength, and showed the Reapers just how vile their actions were.

...Then we get to the end of the game and apparently all of our effort, all of our collaboration, was just a means to construct the most racist machine that has ever existed:

Do you want to exterminate a race of allies?  Do you want to brainwash monsters to become an unstoppable overlord?  Or do you want to do the really 'noble' thing and rewrite everyone to have the same DNA, obliterating all that inclusivity and individuality that you were previously celebrating?

I presume the Bioware writers thought that this kind of moral compromise would be narratively interesting, but actually (for me at least) it just hollowed out the entire experience, making it a mystifyingly juvenile love-note to eugenics.

The very fact that the ending was reduced to a simple choice of 3 options, is already sickening to me.

[fil009]

Should have seen a "super weapon" coming. Its the Reapers... I mean, its the Catalyst we're talking about here after all.

[Repzik]

A viable, lore friendly super weapon would be blowing up some relays (or a relay at a key time). Big boom causes big doom for big gloom.

Simple, yet effective. Depending on how the plot would unfold, it could've been killing half the galaxy or very few to stop the Reapers. But I guess this was too simple or something.

[Lookout1390]

fil009 wrote...

Should have seen a "super weapon" coming. Its the Reapers... I mean, its the Catalyst we're talking about here after all.

Well I pretty much assumed 'secret powerful weapon that gets discovered so conviently after all other options have been used" after Hackett's message to Shepard when you leave Earth.

[Boneyaards]

drayfish wrote...

Boneyaards wrote...

Well, when you're faced with inevitable death and you're watching millions of people get slaughtered and harvested right before your very eyes, I would put my faith into a super weapon, even if its outcome is unknown. Why? Because you either die in vain or you attempt to do something extraordinary to win. It's not wishful thinking, because when you're desperate for survival, anything goes. 

Perhaps this is somewhat off topic, and I don't want to derail the thread, but: really?  Was Mass Effect really about survival at any cost?  That just seems really empty to me.

The game I was playing was about inclusivity, and accepting the diversity of many different cultures and peoples and forms of life - because it was in that unity that we proved our strength, and showed the Reapers just how vile their actions were.

...Then we get to the end of the game and apparently all of our effort, all of our collaboration, was just a means to construct the most racist machine that has ever existed:

Do you want to exterminate a race of allies?  Do you want to brainwash monsters to become an unstoppable overlord?  Or do you want to do the really 'noble' thing and rewrite everyone to have the same DNA, obliterating all that inclusivity and individuality that you were previously celebrating?

I presume the Bioware writers thought that this kind of moral compromise would be narratively interesting, but actually (for me at least) it just hollowed out the entire experience, making it a mystifyingly juvenile love-note to eugenics.

"Stop them? This isn't about strategy or tactics;  this is about survival!"

-Commander Shepard. 

[Maxster_]

Break Atmo wrote...

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'.

Fleet tactics also. In ME3, every commanding officer, especially from Earth Alliance having a negative iq. Like priority:earth with absolutely unneeded ground assault, which non-surprisingly led to 100% losses.

[Maxster_]

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.

They are all failed authors, unlike M.Walters and C. Hudson, obviously.

ME3 is not a sci-fi at all.

[iDeevil]

This thread has proved on thing, something we already knew, no one in this fandom agrees on every point.

As for the endings, I think it depends on how you played your character and somewhat the story you have for your character, whether or not those endings work. It's not just based on how it was written.

[Maxster_]

N7Gold wrote...

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.

Yeah I would like to know, how interface and functionality to use giant battery(crucible), was built-in into Citadel from the beginning.