540 réponses à ce sujet

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

Wolfva2 wrote...

sH0tgUn jUliA wrote...

See it's our mistake for not trying to find this "AI" thing sooner. If we had looked for it and found it, we could have blown it up, perhaps. Then that would have changed the end game. No one would be controlling the reapers then. They wouldn't know what to do, in theory. It would be chaos.

Perhaps there would be a grudge match among the reapers. You reaped my species, I hate you. So I'm going to destroy you. And they start fighting among themselves. This gives us a chance to regroup, build more ships, better weapons, and stuff, and get ready to mop up the ones who are left over. In theory.

See?

Or, maybe they'd continue on their programmed path.   Heck, they could have had the crucible be a giant EMP that shorts out the AI causing the Reapers to go into shutdown mode.

Of course, we couldn't have looked for the AI earlier because we didn't know about it.  So...coulda woulda shoulda.

Actually Admiral Xen suspected it existed. It was on the disk. It just never got into the game. Unfortunately we would have been ordered to shut her experiment down because if it were to have been allowed to run to conclusion it would have completely screwed up the Red Blue or Green ending.

And David says it's stupid because it wouldn't allow Shepard to die a hero.

Ask me if I care.

Modifié par sH0tgUn jUliA, 26 juillet 2013 - 10:29 .

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

David7204 wrote...

The entire point of the exchange is that the Catalyst is handing the choice over to Shepard. Including Destroy. It's really not that difficult to grasp.

This is also stupid.

[David7204]

It's somewhat stupid in the way it was implemented. But I don't see the concept as fundamentally bad.

Why is it stupid?

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

David7204 wrote...

Having the Reapers shut down because Shepard shoots the Catalyst is stupid.

Face the fact, David. The entire ending was stupid. The entire way the story was written with the totally overpowered reapers with no weakness was totally stupid. And I don't really care if writing a weakness for the reapers would have denied Shepard the hero status in the end so long as we won the war. I'm not that immature.

[Kataphrut94]

sH0tgUn jUliA wrote...

See it's our mistake for not trying to find this "AI" thing sooner. If we had looked for it and found it, we could have blown it up, perhaps. Then that would have changed the end game. No one would be controlling the reapers then. They wouldn't know what to do, in theory. It would be chaos.

Perhaps there would be a grudge match among the reapers. You reaped my species, I hate you. So I'm going to destroy you. And they start fighting among themselves. This gives us a chance to regroup, build more ships, better weapons, and stuff, and get ready to mop up the ones who are left over. In theory.

See?

It is also possible that if you eliminate the thing that is giving them programming and guidance, they would just go nuts and destroy everyone. There'd be no restrictions, no cycles, no plans. Just mindless unadulterated killing.

That's my interpretation of what would happen if you blew it up. I'm not being a pessimist, it just seems like the sort of thing that would happen. That said, it is still weird how nobody ever bothered to search the Citadel when they found it.

[David7204]

Great thinking, Julia. Not we're at the point where we have the choice between either a stupid weakness, which is stupid, or no stupid weakness, which is also stupid.

[Tonymac]

David7204 wrote...

Great thinking, Julia. Not we're at the point where we have the choice between either a stupid weakness, which is stupid, or no stupid weakness, which is also stupid.

It could be that the story was stupid......

I had always hoped in the back of my mind that the Protheans would have left behind something that we could use - it was even hinted in LOTSB.  I thought that the 12 Prothean scientists from Ilos would have been able to give us a plan, or design, or locate a weakness.....

I hate to think that in a limitless galaxy with limitless possibilities that the endings we got were the best they could do. 

[SpamBot2000]

Indy_S wrote...

AlanC9 wrote...

SpamBot2000 wrote...

And anyone following the instructions is metagaming "Ah, this is the endgame button" or roleplaying a freaking moron.

Or roleplaying a character who realizes that it doesn't matter what you do if the choices aren't real.

I agree with this. If there's nothing to lose, why not give the wheel a spin?

Because giving the wheel a spin involves electrocuting yourself, diving into a beam or blowing up the contraption that was the last hope of the galaxy, all because Space Fuehrer who has been omniciding the galaxy and making monsters for a billion years suggests that it would be a cool thing to do. 

[RiouHotaru]

 It's also amusing how much agency people give the Catalyst.  As though he's the one in control of the situation, when he outright states the current situation is utterly out of his hands now.

People act like you're just doing what he wants, when the entire time he's telling you "What do you want?"

They act like he's dictating your choices.  When all he does is tell you what options you have (because without him how would you know what to do?)

[silverexile17s]

erezike wrote...

I greatly approve of this thread.

Which is why i made one very similar in design.

If the choices are presented by the catalyst, and the catalyst have no reason to present destroy or control.
Then it wouldnt make sense to pick destroy or control.

It make sense for the crucible to be a massive indoctrination device. the prothean cycle failed mostly due to incotrianted reaper agents.
Maybe all of this happened after they decided to fire off the crucible.

AGAIN, you are dead wrong - it's the complete opposate. He has NO reason to NOT tell you. His solution is openly proven to be flawed. He doens't care if he dies, as long as the job he was assigned to do gets done -- just like any machine loyal to it's programming. That includes either passing the torch to someone else (Control) or wiping the slate clean (Destroy). He's not organic -- he doens't have the neccessary emotions for a "grudge."

How the hell does that work, when the Leviathens clearly and openly disprove that? They completely disprove that the Crucible was Reaper-built. AND the fact that the Reapers conquered every single cycle before now using the Citadel Relay to blindside them, there is no reason to create such an elaborate scheme. It's inefficant and waste of time and resources - the Reapers have the power to topple any race. They don't need any such deception.

[silverexile17s]

sH0tgUn jUliA wrote...

Wolfva2 wrote...

sH0tgUn jUliA wrote...

See it's our mistake for not trying to find this "AI" thing sooner. If we had looked for it and found it, we could have blown it up, perhaps. Then that would have changed the end game. No one would be controlling the reapers then. They wouldn't know what to do, in theory. It would be chaos.

Perhaps there would be a grudge match among the reapers. You reaped my species, I hate you. So I'm going to destroy you. And they start fighting among themselves. This gives us a chance to regroup, build more ships, better weapons, and stuff, and get ready to mop up the ones who are left over. In theory.

See?

Or, maybe they'd continue on their programmed path.   Heck, they could have had the crucible be a giant EMP that shorts out the AI causing the Reapers to go into shutdown mode.

Of course, we couldn't have looked for the AI earlier because we didn't know about it.  So...coulda woulda shoulda.

Actually Admiral Xen suspected it existed. It was on the disk. It just never got into the game. Unfortunately we would have been ordered to shut her experiment down because if it were to have been allowed to run to conclusion it would have completely screwed up the Red Blue or Green ending.

And David says it's stupid because it wouldn't allow Shepard to die a hero.

Ask me if I care.

But if it's cut content, then technically it never existed, and thus, Xen never does suspect anything. Another "shoulda, coulda, woulda."

[silverexile17s]

sH0tgUn jUliA wrote...

David7204 wrote...

Having the Reapers shut down because Shepard shoots the Catalyst is stupid.

Face the fact, David. The entire ending was stupid. The entire way the story was written with the totally overpowered reapers with no weakness was totally stupid. And I don't really care if writing a weakness for the reapers would have denied Shepard the hero status in the end so long as we won the war. I'm not that immature.

Yeah, but that's always how the Reapers were presented, right out of the gate. Take a look at Sovergein in ME1 - that was pretty damn overpowered. Come on -- we knew from day one how overwhelmingly strong the Reapers were. Much as I hate to admit it, the way they are now is not an exageration of their strength. After all, they conquered tens of thousands of cycles and many, many, many civilizations - it's perfectly logical that they would have to be overwhelming to do that for so many millions of years.
I mean, name me one time the Reapers were ever displayed as being anything but all-powerful, even before ME3. You couldn't even beat Sovergein in ME1 without the Datafile from Vigil, and without killing the Saren-Husk. Otherwise, the fleet would likely not have beaten Sovergein in time. If anything, the way they are now is anything but totally stupid. If anything, the Reapers being like that was one of the few things that actually stayed pretty damn consistant throughout the series.

[fr33stylez]

RiouHotaru wrote...

 It's also amusing how much agency people give the Catalyst.  As though he's the one in control of the situation, when he outright states the current situation is utterly out of his hands now.

People act like you're just doing what he wants, when the entire time he's telling you "What do you want?"

They act like he's dictating your choices.  When all he does is tell you what options you have (because without him how would you know what to do?)

But shooting a hologram of an AI turns off the Crucible and makes the Catalyst continue with the cycle. Why?

[fr33stylez]

MegaSovereign wrote...
It doesn't matter to you but the narrative implication is there. He's willing to allow the destruction of the Reapers because he knows that the Reapers losing is inevitable. In its eyes it's the worst solution but presents it anyways in case the other two choices are unacceptable to Shepard.

Why exactly is the Reapers losing inevitable? All it takes is one clean comb of the galaxy of any Crucible plans and organics are no better off than they were in cycle #1.

There's no reason there should be a 'progressive defeat' of the Reapers, especially when the Catalyst in this very conversation with Shepard expresses its dismay that the Cruicble plans were still around!

[AlanC9]

silverexile17s wrote...

Yeah, but that's always how the Reapers were presented, right out of the gate. Take a look at Sovergein in ME1 - that was pretty damn overpowered. Come on -- we knew from day one how overwhelmingly strong the Reapers were. Much as I hate to admit it, the way they are now is not an exageration of their strength. After all, they conquered tens of thousands of cycles and many, many, many civilizations - it's perfectly logical that they would have to be overwhelming to do that for so many millions of years.

Right. The Reapers were retconned down in strength. The capships are weaker, and ME3 invented the destroyer-class Reapers so they wouldn't all be as powerful as the capships.

Modifié par AlanC9, 26 juillet 2013 - 06:14 .

[Han Shot First]

It is bizarre.

The only explanation I could come with is that the docking of the Crucible with the Citadel also somehow introduced a hack into the Catalyst's code, and dialed down the aggression. It does tell Shepard that the Crucible introduced new possibilities. Maybe it meant that literally.

In either case having the God-King of the Reapers introduce your ending choices was an odd narrative choice by the writers.

Modifié par Han Shot First, 26 juillet 2013 - 06:15 .

[CronoDragoon]

fr33stylez wrote...

There's no reason there should be a 'progressive defeat' of the Reapers, especially when the Catalyst in this very conversation with Shepard expresses its dismay that the Cruicble plans were still around!

That's pretty much exactly when he realizes that organics will eventually stop the cycle one way or another. He's tried to wipe out the plans and utterly failed. They are "clearly more resourceful" than he realized.

Modifié par CronoDragoon, 26 juillet 2013 - 06:17 .

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

Still even with them scaled down they're impossible. The story is frakking stupid. Seriously, I hope Mac sees the light of day and writes the next installment that the whole trilogy was a tale told by an old man to his grandson, and that it was a series of sci-fi books he was reading.

I hope Mac sets the new story in a galaxy where the mass relays and the Citadel were built by the Protheans, and that the Protheans are still running their empire which spans about half of the galaxy. They are kind of bastards. Their empire is collapsing because of economic and political turmoil. Our current races exist. The quarians are suit free. There is non-Prothean controlled space. Some of our races control parts of it. Other parts of it are open. Leave the Shepard trilogy behind, and leave it dead and buried like it never happened. I am so good with this.

In the old trilogy, I wish that the 12 prothean scientists had discovered something on the Citadel other than simply delaying the cycle so we could stop Sovereign. They should have located a weakness ... something like maybe that the reapers actually were a networked intelligence perhaps, networked through a central hub somewhere on the Citadel and left some clues about this on the Citadel. They didn't have the materials to do anything about it, though. It would have given us a chance.

Modifié par sH0tgUn jUliA, 26 juillet 2013 - 06:40 .

[Reorte]

RiouHotaru wrote...

 It's also amusing how much agency people give the Catalyst.  As though he's the one in control of the situation, when he outright states the current situation is utterly out of his hands now.

People act like you're just doing what he wants, when the entire time he's telling you "What do you want?"

They act like he's dictating your choices.  When all he does is tell you what options you have (because without him how would you know what to do?)

If he's just there as an exposition dump and an instruction manual then that information should've been presented in a different way. When it comes out of the mouth / speakers / whatever of something claiming to be in charge of your enemy then you've got a rather bad mixture that's going to raise questions  - particularly when a lot of what he has to say seems to somewhat contradict itself. Like several other things it only really works if you stop pretending you're in the game and start thinking outside the game universe ("Right, this guy is just an exposition dump"). If your story does that then it's going to get people acting just like this towards it.

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

Someone will have posted by the time I post this, so I'll post a new post.

One thing that is being forgotten is that in previous cycles the reapers used the Citadel to get through. They locked all the relays and went one system at a time. They made one capital ship per cycle from the apex species. Sometimes there were no capital ships made, like with the Prothean cycle. If they lost one capital ship in a cycle they were only treading water, and they were not growing in number. You cannot tell me they could go through an entire galaxy without losing one ship. S*** happens.

Suddenly there are thousands. They are invincible. Then they are scaled down in power, but did it really matter that they were? No, not at all. Did you really want all of them invincible? You might as well have had a "Game Over You Lose" when the reapers landed on earth after the first scene in the defense committee. There would have been no story at all. So they had to be scaled down. And it didn't matter anyway because you were going to win in this story by a DEM. So who cares? Feel like a hero now? They wrote themselves into a corner by making the reapers so damned old and invincible to begin with. They really wrote themselves into a corner when they made this a cycle. The reaper plot IMO should have been dropped after the Collector Base. It was a golden opportunity to drop it, dark energy, and synthetics vs. organics, and go find another plot. Arrival never should have been written.

[Armass81]

Mr. Gogeta34 wrote...

xsdob wrote...

What makes you think he's okay with either destroy or control? He basically says he hates them but that it's what the options do.

He's okay with it because he presents the options to Shepard.  If those options weren't presented by the Reaper leader, Shepard would still be sleeping on the lower floor.  Additionally, if you shoot at the Catalyst, he says "Screw it, you all die" (in so many words, lol)... so it's not some kind of code-based obligation in his programming... it's just his whim.

"You have altered the variables"

He thinks the cycles no longer work perfectly as the protheans and the current cycle and existance of the crucible has proved his control over the galaxy is fallible and information slips through so sooner or later the organics will thriumph, so he wants Shep who represents organics to choose a better solution which the crucible provides.

In short, hes finally provided with a better solution to the problem he was programmed and ordered to fix, but he cant choose it himself so he tries to sweet talk you into choosing for him. Obviously synthesis is his preferred choice.

Its like a cold calculated numbers with preference to a higher.

Before it was something like

Cycles 5
Destroy 1
Synthesis 3
Control 2

Now with the crucible and Shepard there its

Synthesis 5
Control 3
Destroy 2
Cycles 1

If Shepard doesnt choose, he goes with 1.

Thats how I understand it at least.

Modifié par Armass81, 26 juillet 2013 - 07:17 .

[RiouHotaru]

fr33stylez wrote...

RiouHotaru wrote...

 It's also amusing how much agency people give the Catalyst.  As though he's the one in control of the situation, when he outright states the current situation is utterly out of his hands now.

People act like you're just doing what he wants, when the entire time he's telling you "What do you want?"

They act like he's dictating your choices.  When all he does is tell you what options you have (because without him how would you know what to do?)

But shooting a hologram of an AI turns off the Crucible and makes the Catalyst continue with the cycle. Why?

What makes you so sure HE turns off the Crucible?  What's to say it didn't just shut down on it's own?  Also, he continues the cycle because you've clearly demonstrated an unwillingness to end the cycle with the options available to you.  The Catalyst has no choice but to keep to it's original directive because you (Shepard) aren't willing to change anything.

[CronoDragoon]

Reorte wrote...
If he's just there as an exposition dump and an instruction manual then that information should've been presented in a different way. When it comes out of the mouth / speakers / whatever of something claiming to be in charge of your enemy then you've got a rather bad mixture that's going to raise questions 

Well, many villains assume the role of info dump, mostly because it'd be difficult for the protag to obtain the information in another way. That applies in this case.

Still, I agree it needed to be presented much better.

[Reorte]

sH0tgUn jUliA wrote...

Someone will have posted by the time I post this, so I'll post a new post.

One thing that is being forgotten is that in previous cycles the reapers used the Citadel to get through. They locked all the relays and went one system at a time. They made one capital ship per cycle from the apex species. Sometimes there were no capital ships made, like with the Prothean cycle. If they lost one capital ship in a cycle they were only treading water, and they were not growing in number. You cannot tell me they could go through an entire galaxy without losing one ship. S*** happens.

Suddenly there are thousands. They are invincible. Then they are scaled down in power, but did it really matter that they were? No, not at all. Did you really want all of them invincible? You might as well have had a "Game Over You Lose" when the reapers landed on earth after the first scene in the defense committee. There would have been no story at all. So they had to be scaled down. And it didn't matter anyway because you were going to win in this story by a DEM. So who cares? Feel like a hero now? They wrote themselves into a corner by making the reapers so damned old and invincible to begin with. They really wrote themselves into a corner when they made this a cycle. The reaper plot IMO should have been dropped after the Collector Base. It was a golden opportunity to drop it, dark energy, and synthetics vs. organics, and go find another plot. Arrival never should have been written.

To be honest it should've been dropped after ME1. Say that keeps the Reapers shut out and they'll never have the power to get back without a relay. ME2 could've just about gotten away with it (a last-ditch attempt to regain control of the Citadel by building enough Reapers in a safe location to do so) but then what? Ending the series on ME2 would've felt like the whole thing fizzling out, as would having the third one have nothing to do with the Reapers (whereas three different games with Shepard but three completely different stories would've been fine).

The biggest mistake was having the Reapers go so far back. If they'd been around for a small handful of cycles it could be plausible that they were powerful enough to have succeeded in those but had weaknesses we could exploit. Having them powerful enough to have survived thousands but defeatable by us was never going to work.