Staff Lt Alenko wrote...
^PsiFive - I don't entirely agree with some of your assertions on Cerberus. ME2 wasn't exactly a failure on their part, after all, they did stop the Collector threat (well, Shepard did). Besides, they could have many many projects we don't know about. They are, after all, a sort of evil CIA, or IRA in space - intelligence agencies, private military contractors and more. What EDI in ME2 and the codex entry in ME2 said.
Yeah, I didn't really explain what I meant by that all that well. Yes, Shepard's mission was a success, but as you point out it's really Shepard's mission carried out with Cerberus as a sponsor and using its resources. Those would be the "virtually unlimited resources" (according to Miranda) The Idiotic Man put into bringing Shepard back, the substantial resources put into the Normandy SR2 (I think EDI says it's more than half of Cerberus' funds, and even if that's half what was left after the Lazarus project that's still a huge amount) and EDI her/itself, plus recruiting and where necessary training the crew. Those resources do beat the Collectors but are then promptly lost to Cerberus forever as Shepard returns to the Alliance and hands over the SR2 plus crew. The Lazarus project was a further failure since everyone on Lazarus station apart from Shepard, Miranda and Jacob ends up dead and the station destroyed.
Could they have more projects that are unknown to us and which might have been great successes? Possibly, but I did qualify it by saying "known missions", and in any case I think what we see in ME2 suggests otherwise. Once Joker removes the blocks EDI can provide some quite detailed information on Cerberus. She tells us that Cerberus never runs more than a dozen operations at a time because, paraphrasing, TIM is a micromanaging pain in the arse, and that Cerberus currently "consists of approximately 150 agents and operators organised into three cells." About 25 of these will be on the Normandy itself: Lazarus cell, according to Miranda.
It's fair to assume that EDI is not counting the dead ones on Lazarus station in the 150 total of Cerberus personnel, but it probably does include the people at the un-named station where Shepard meets Joker and gets the Normandy (presumably that's where the Normandy SR2 was constructed). Maybe they're included in the Lazarus cell headcount, maybe they're not. Assuming for the moment that they are, that the crew assisted with construction and that the number on the station is about the same as the permanent crew then there are two other cells out there somewhere running an unknown project each and with about 100 people between them.
But depending on your individual game there could be none. If your playthrough has the EDI conversation happening before any of the Firewalker or Overlord stuff then those remaining two cells can only be Firewalker and Overlord, and of course we know both are the traditional Cerberus overall stuff up, if not abject failure. We don't know how many people were involved in Firewalker but there are no known survivors at all. The project returns some data leading to a nice artifact to sit on Shepard's coffee table, and that's about it. Overlord, on the other hand, was a disaster as far as providing anything useful goes. There were two survivors but also enough bodies lying around (I counted around 50) to know that it was at least half the remaining ≈100 in Cerberus headcount, and that's with the very generous assumption that the bodies of the whole project staff are in view and there aren't more in areas that Shepard & Co never visit. In all likelihood Overlord was more than half of what was left of Cerberus minus the Lazarus cell.
Could there be cells that EDI doesn't know about? This seems unlikely as if it was possible for that information to simply be hidden from EDI there'd be no need for a block that prevented her from answering in the first place. We can come up with elaborate theories about some kind of TIM double bluff but they'd require TIM to anticipate someone on the Normandy needing or wanting to do something that removed EDI's blocks and giving her false data to cover the situation. Given feelings in the ME universe about AIs that would have to be such a desperate situation (that it turns out to be a pretty easy process once you do need to do it is a moderately forgiveable ME2 plot hole, as is why the Collectors bothered harvesting two dozen people instead of just shooting the defenceless Normandy out of the sky) it's hard to imagine TIM foreseeing it. It also rings wrong with EDI spotting TIM's faked Turian distress signal earlier on.
On the whole I think we can probably take what EDI says on face value, which means at the end of ME2 Cerberus has got at best two ongoing projects which are possibly successful, but equally possibly failures, and about 100 people working for it. In the worst case scenario The Idiotic Man has almost nothing left but the wreckage of Overlord and Firewalker, a hologram of the Collector base Shepard just destroyed, and a fading image of the Normandy's tail lights as the subject, director and remaining staff of the Lazarus cell fly off to hand the bloody thing over to the Alliance military. That Shepard then uses it to kick Cerberus' arse in 3 means that even Shepard's revival and the Normandy's construction were ultimately catastrophic for Cerberus itself.
So I may have been exaggerating slightly when I said Cerberus had a record across two games of 100% failure in all known operations, leaving open the possibility of a maximum of two potentially successful unknown ones depending on indivdual gameplays, but it's only a slight exagerration. That detail aside it looks like we're on the same page: it's not plausible that the ME3 Cerberus should be anything other than substantially weaker and less influential than the ME1 or 2 Cerberus.
Modifié par PsiFive, 21 novembre 2012 - 04:59 .
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