135 réponses à ce sujet

[Br3admax]

The Night Mammoth wrote...

I wish Miranda's arc at the tale end of the second game and the whole of the third game was completely different, and didn't involve Oriana going randomly missing at all.

I was fine with her loyalty mission, if that is what you mean. Making it pointless is the stupid part. 

[The Night Mammoth]

Br3ad wrote...

The Night Mammoth wrote...

Br3ad wrote...

Seboist wrote...

I'd rather not have Miranda in ME3 at all so I wouldn't have to deal with more lame sister/daddy issues.

Liara comes with that too. 

Forunately, Liara gets over her problem after a ten second conversation and doesn't let it affect her work. 

True that. At least Liara's character grew, if ever so slightly. 

I liked their conversation. It was a change of pace to have a little logical character development for Liara. 

[Arcian]

David7204 wrote...

I'm curious how you think Walters is at fault for anything and everything you don't like in LotSB considering he wasn't the writer. Magic, perhaps?

Is it not evident to anyone with the slightest grasp of logic how moronic these complaints are?

The one-trick pony strikes again! Why make an educated argument when you can just insult someone and their mother?


The fact that he wasn't credited as a writer only means he didn't actually do any physical writing. That doesn't exclude him passing on ideas to the writers that he and Casey thinks are the best for that particular DLC. In this case, I believe his sole indirect contribution is: 

"Let's have Cerberus provide the Broker's location to Liara, because they're super-awesome that way."

Whereas the problem of the Broker's stupidity isn't as much Super MAC's handiwork as a symptom of how badly he and Casey debased the plot and the intelligence of the plot in ME2. When the standards are lower, the writers have less to live up to.

[The Night Mammoth]

Br3ad wrote...

The Night Mammoth wrote...

I wish Miranda's arc at the tale end of the second game and the whole of the third game was completely different, and didn't involve Oriana going randomly missing at all.

I was fine with her loyalty mission, if that is what you mean. Making it pointless is the stupid part. 

I probably shouldn't edit my posts so much. 

I thought her loyalty mission was pretty good. Jokes about daddy issues aside, it was some really good character development, and an interesting situation, having a clone, a sister, that she cared about so much but had never met. 

No, I just would have given her choice to leave Cerberus a little more impact. It's a pretty important thing, if you think about it. The Illusive Man's second in command was turned against him by Shepard, the person he brought back to work for him. It's kind of glazed over.

In the third game, I don't think Oriana should have appeared at all. She should be hidden, safe somewhere, Miranda's already shown us how much she cares about her, so it's not meaningful anymore. I don't know wxactly what she should have been doing instead. Probably working on Cerberus, something she can't do so well on the Normandy. Then she can point you to Sanctuary after Thessia, maybe infiltrate it ahead of you, or just join you.

Modifié par The Night Mammoth, 27 septembre 2013 - 01:00 .

[Jukaga]

Read the op's entire outline, I was quite impressed. I wouldn't agree with all plot points but the influence system between the Alliance and Cerberus with Shep n co acting more like free agents is exactly in line with how I wanted me3 to be and hope meN will be.

[Dean_the_Young]

Normally I'd be flattered that an old TL;DR thread of mine grew four pages overnight, but then I see it's bickering about something exceptionally unrelated to the subject. Mind taking it elsewhere?

[The Night Mammoth]

Yeah, that really got outa' hand fast. Sorry, Dean.

[Steelcan]

Dean_the_Young wrote...

Normally I'd be flattered that an old TL;DR thread of mine grew four pages overnight, but then I see it's bickering about something exceptionally unrelated to the subject. Mind taking it elsewhere?

Sorry about that,

if its any consolation I'm going to get banned shortly

[Jorji Costava]

Going to try to bring this back on topic. So I finished the first part so far, and even as someone who was more lukewarm on Cerberus as a story element, I really do think it's fantastic. I especially like the idea that Cerberus is continuing to provide legitimate services to humans even as it pursues its xenophobic agenda. There's some real world political and historical resonance to that idea.

One small nitpick: I found it a little odd that TIM would be requesting Spectre status for himself, partly because I tend to think of Spectres as being capable in physical combat (Saren, Tela Vasir, Nihlus, and Shepard were all adept in combat situations), and it might be a bit awkward to put TIM in that company.

Perhaps TIM instead proposes Spectre status for a Kai Leng-type character; an elite Cerberus soldier with a long and impressive service record, but also a record of human rights abuses and other assorted questionable activity. This KL character's membership in Cerberus could essentially be an open secret, with the Council officially denying that he has ever had any affiliation with Cerberus. But people would know more or less that this character's induction into the Spectres meant that the Council had changed its tune on Cerberus.

[JShepppp]

I'm JShepppp and I approve of this post.

I have a minor problem with the Dark Energy ending (I actually like the current endings better), I agree with like everything else, like 99.99999% of what you said. This would have been INTERESTING. It would have been AMBIGUOUS. Paragon/Renegade, Cerberus/Alliance, War Assets, all on separate dimensions, all intertwining together to create a unique, colorful, and realistic experience. This is REALLY well-done. Like seriously.

It was great to just READ, let alone WATCH in cutscenes, let alone PLAY and experience. You should be hired on the spot by Bioware. I cannot say enough good things about your epic post. Thank you for a good read.

[Dean_the_Young]

osbornep wrote...

Going to try to bring this back on topic. So I finished the first part so far, and even as someone who was more lukewarm on Cerberus as a story element, I really do think it's fantastic. I especially like the idea that Cerberus is continuing to provide legitimate services to humans even as it pursues its xenophobic agenda. There's some real world political and historical resonance to that idea.

One small nitpick: I found it a little odd that TIM would be requesting Spectre status for himself, partly because I tend to think of Spectres as being capable in physical combat (Saren, Tela Vasir, Nihlus, and Shepard were all adept in combat situations), and it might be a bit awkward to put TIM in that company.

Perhaps TIM instead proposes Spectre status for a Kai Leng-type character; an elite Cerberus soldier with a long and impressive service record, but also a record of human rights abuses and other assorted questionable activity. This KL character's membership in Cerberus could essentially be an open secret, with the Council officially denying that he has ever had any affiliation with Cerberus. But people would know more or less that this character's induction into the Spectres meant that the Council had changed its tune on Cerberus.

Just to give my own thoughts as to why I did that, despite expectations.

What it boils down to is that Spectre status is largely wasted on soldiers like Shepherd. Given what the role of Spectres is (to be the Council's problem solvers), and what sort of problems would actually confront a government with a peacetime viewpoint, and the greatest assets and distinction of a Spectre, the legal immunity, is far more useful in the hands of non-soldiers than it would be in soldiers.

I wrote about it in an old threat/topic about why I thought a Volus spectre would make sense. The Council's real problems in their galactic rule aren't the sort that need unaccountable gunmen to solve: besides the myriad of police forces, black ops, and special forces that exist that already have extensive powers and known histories of doing illegal operations, threats of the Citadel security by the nature of the galaxy will largely fall into two places- inside Council space, in which Council jurisdiction and authority apply, or outside Council space, in which case there's no one else to really sue the Council for anything they do.

Aside from having no peer competitors that a crack squad will really save the day from, the Council's real threats are going to be more political and economic- political destabilization campaigns, economic sabotage and criminality, etc. It's forces that hide within the bueracracy and legalism, not in asteroid belts or pirate dens, that are really going to embarass or damage the Council... and it's the white-collar criminals that Spectre status will actually help against by cutting through red tape. Legal invincibility is pretty useless against pirates and criminals who are already outside the law.

The idea that a Spectre needs to be their own enforce is the misnomer. It exists in Mass Effect as a game because Mass Effect is a shooter and Shepherd is a special forces soldier. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail and you start looking for more hammers.

But being a Spectre isn't about being a lone-wolf gunman- it's about being a problem solver, no matter the cost and regardless of style. And when a Spectre doesn't have the personal skills to accomplish the mission on their own, they're expected to get the assets or skills from elsewhere. Being a master of all trades is an option, but not a requirement- Shepherd is a case in point, in that Shepherd's team (especially in ME2) is built along gathering allies to complement's Shepherd's own abilities and covering Shepherd's weaknesses.

Shepherd is thus a gunman who gets assistance for non-gunmen requirements... but as far as getting the mission done, the Spectre bottom-line, that's conceptually no different than if Shepherd were a non-combat protagonist who brought along Wrex for the muscle if/when he needed it. It's still having a Spectre, of limited abilities, gathering allies to cover his/her weaknesses.

And, as we see with Shepherd's own team and implicitly with Tela Vasir, a Spectre's status can also shadow over the Spectre's allies and partners, enabling them to help the Spectre.

So, summing up that point, a non-combat Spectre who outsources his muscle isn't much different from a combat Spectre who outsources her brains. The bottom line is, can they get the mission done? If yes, the how is irrelevant.



TIM getting the Spectre status is a contrast to the expectations, but it's a deliberate contrast by making Cerberus a foil for the Spectres. Both groups share strong similarities in end-justifies-the-means rationals, a lack of accountability, and questionably legitimacy claims. Cerberus using the Spectre-status as an umbrella also provides an uncomfortable contrast/foil to Shepherd as well, by pointing out how expansive and easily prone to abuse the concept actually is. To a paragon Shep that might be a foil by contrast, but to a Renegade or the potential comparisons to Saren the demonstration of how the system can be abused (or how it's been used in the past) should raise questions.

This is good and useful, and it also serves the narrative purpose of bringing Cerberus into the public sphere by making it legal, without an implausible premise of Cerberus promising not to do bad stuff. Besides that no one would believe that, and that it gives a helpful opportunity to show rather than infer or imply how Spectre status could be abused, it's also about the legitimization of the organization as a whole. I


The idea of Cerberus making a claim of itself as a legitimate player, doing the same sort of thing the Council already tolerates, is part of the overall theme of the Cerberus-Alliance partnership and underlying tension. Cerberus isn't just trying to save Humanity- it's actually trying to supplant the Alliance as the effective institution of Humanity.

All of this, and pretty much the entire legitimacy backdrop, is lost or diluted if Cerberus gets a token spectre and remains an illegal organization. Trying to make Cerberus a legal organization by making it make an absurd promise not to do illegal things, and then blaming everything on the token Cerberus Spectre, only serves a mental contortion to the same end point- that everyone knows that making the deal with Cerberus is effectively legalizing their crimes under the Spectre umbrella.

At which point, you might as well not bother. You're trading a weakened plot and thematic struggle for the sake of... a possible boss fight.