159 réponses à ce sujet

[Eryri]

AlanC9 wrote...

BSG is an example of the writers doing what ME did. Do you have an example of leaving stuff unexplained that did satisfy people? Edit: a sci-fi example, that is.

IIRC Lost manages to get itself attacked for both the stuff it did explain and for the stuff it didn't explain, which is quite a feat. OTOH, I'm not really prepared to put Lost in the sci-fi category anyway. Speculative fiction is maybe more apt.

I get the impression from reading your posts that you enjoy seeing fictional mysteries resolved. I do too, for the most part. I love a good who-dunnit, although I'm very bad at guessing the murderer. The problem with ME3 (on the face of it, I hope I'm proved wrong with future content) is that it seems that the writer's didn't have a good backstory ready, and the resolution is such a let down, that perhaps it would be better if they hadn't bothered.  

I don't entirely agree with your assessment of BSG. I thought the mystery elements were solved pretty conclusively. My own criticism of the BSG ending (although its a minor criticism as I enjoyed it more than most) was that the solution (helpful angels) was just a bit unsatisfying and unoriginal. My own feelings at the ending of BSG were of a slight disappointment, as I had expected the resolution of the story to be more grand and cosmic than it actually was. I found watching the series thrilling because I enjoyed speculating (that dreadful word) on the mystery of who, and what Head Six was. When her identity was made clear it reduced my enthusiasm to rewatch the series. The mystery was gone.

I'm not suggesting that the Reapers origins and motivations should be entirely unexplained, but, unless the writers had thought up a spectacularly good, watertight backstory, then they should just have made more subtle hints. There could even be several contradictory hints, so that people could pick the one that most appealed and debate over it. (I'm also not saying this would be easy to write. I'm not a writer myself.) Unfortunately the motivation they chose for them was just so crushingly mundane, and a really well trodden path in sci-fi. Excessively logic bound A.I.s being cruel to be kind. Examples include the works of Isaac Asimov, Star Trek's Borg, and Doctor Who's Cybermen. And their origin story, as I've already stated, just seems silly to me. The Leviathans were overconfident to the point of idiocy. I would much prefer enemies that I can fear and respect in my game, rather than ones I can hold in contempt.

It's similar to the problem many horror movies face. The unseen monster is always more scary because your own imagination fills in the blanks. When it's finally revealed at the climax as a man in a rubber suit, or these days fake looking CGI, your terror is replaced by amusement. The explanation for the Reapers, when it finally came, made them seem commonplace and frankly dull.   

Another problem, I think, is that ME3's ending explains the wrong things for me, and leaves other things that I would like to know frustratingly vague (much like the assessment you cite of Lost, funnily enough). I'd be quite happy imagining my own backstory for the Reapers, perhaps Harbinger aspires to become some sort of transcendent "Omega Point" intelligence, and has been harvesting the intellectual capacity of other species toward that end. (I appreciate that other people would find that a bit hokey, however.) On the other hand, I would really like to know other things like whether or not Tali and Garrus moved in together on Rannoch? And whether or not Shepard was racked with guilt over betraying Edi and the Geth after being pulled from the rubble? Character related things mainly.

I'm afraid I've never watched Lost, so I can't comment on it. As to a good example of leaving things unexplained at a conclusion, the one that I've heard used a lot on this subject is the end of Inception. Although I've heard that the clues are there in the film to tell you definitively if DiCaprio's character is still dreaming or not, I confess I don't want to look for them. I'm quite happy not knowing in that instance.

Well, those are my two cents. As I say, I'm not a trained writer, so damned if I know how to fix this to please everyone. My take-home summary would probably be "Unless the solution to your mystery is better than the ones your audience can imagine, it's perhaps best to leave it vague, and allow them to go on believing that it's more profound than it actually is."

Modifié par Eryri, 04 mai 2013 - 08:07 .

[LucasShark]

Honestly: yes, leaving it unexplained would have been better than what we have now.

It (the explanation) IS NOT, and was never that important to what was going on when it came to ME's narrative. What was important was the characters, and their response to the situation the reapers imposed. Likewise the universe and its response to your actions within it. Look at it this way: would Starwars (the original trilogy) really be more effective if it spent time on the Emperor's motivation? Note that in his appearance in starwars IV-VI, he is an effective villain, but he is NOT a complex villain. There is (in expanded universe lore) a reason for what he was doing besides "I'm a guy who wants more power than I already have", but it doesn't really serve the narrative of episodes IV-VI.

Alternatively: we had a perfectly functional explanation starting to come up since ME2. Namely: reproduction. This would actually, or rather with good writing (gasp) could have lent the reaper's story some ironic meaning: while they claim to be "ascended", they have in fact devoted their entire being to subsistence, basically the earliest form of society we know of.  It also lends aspects to their horror inspiration, and gives an explanation why for the most part, don't care to speak to us, or when they do, they seem monolithic: they simply don't think of us as things worth speaking to.  Think about it, that is real terror: they don't think of you as a living thinking being, they think of you as a wheat stalk with a face.  But then there I go thinking again.

Modifié par LucasShark, 04 mai 2013 - 08:43 .

[David7204]

That motive would be also pretty dumb and leave a lot of questions without good answers.

[tanisha__unknown]

Didn't we have the exact same topic already a couple of times?

[AlanC9]

Eryri wrote...
I get the impression from reading your posts that you enjoy seeing fictional mysteries resolved. I do too, for the most part. I love a good who-dunnit, although I'm very bad at guessing the murderer. The problem with ME3 (on the face of it, I hope I'm proved wrong with future content) is that it seems that the writer's didn't have a good backstory ready, and the resolution is such a let down, that perhaps it would be better if they hadn't bothered.  

The devs have been fairly candid about the italed bit being true. Hence all the talk about  the dark energy plot -- or maybe "dark energy outline" would be more appropriate, since it was just one of a bunch of proposed Reaper reasons and final confrontations that were discarded; DE only gets so much discussion since it gets some foreshadowing that wasn't apparent for the other proposed plots.

It's not so much that they didn't have the backstory ready in advance as that they'd already committed to a set of specific facts that constrained them when trying to write a backstory. ME1's plot didn't leave a lot of freedom there.

I don't entirely agree with your assessment of BSG. I thought the mystery elements were solved pretty conclusively. My own criticism of the BSG ending (although its a minor criticism as I enjoyed it more than most) was that the solution (helpful angels) was just a bit unsatisfying and unoriginal. My own feelings at the ending of BSG were of a slight disappointment, as I had expected the resolution of the story to be more grand and cosmic than it actually was. I found watching the series thrilling because I enjoyed speculating (that dreadful word) on the mystery of who, and what Head Six was. When her identity was made clear it reduced my enthusiasm to rewatch the series. The mystery was gone.

I didn't mean to come across as being particularly negative about BSG. From where I sat, the mystery had to go at some point, and I was OK with how that turned out. But I was OK with how ME3 turned out too.

I may be easier to satisfy in this regard than you are, because I'm prone to see the whole universe as... well, as you say, mundane.

But it's difficult to talk about alternatives without knowing what's being proposed. All I'm really sure of is that I've never yet seen an alternative motivation and ending that would have been much better for me than what we got. Some have been far worse.

[AlanC9]

David7204 wrote...

That motive would be also pretty dumb and leave a lot of questions without good answers.

But remember, LucasShark doesn't care about that. So the proposal works for him.

[Ruadh]

If it were up to me I would have left it ambiguous. I would have left them an ancient horror. The only thing we know of them is that we will die to make more of them. Perhaps an extreme example of what happens when AI are left to 'evolve '. Anything but that 'we're killing you so you don't get killed' bollocks.

[Jorji Costava]

Speaking only for myself, I would have preferred letting the Reapers go unexplained to what we got. This isn't necessarily because I think that the mysterious or Lovecraftian elements of the Reapers were so important (here's an article suggesting that the Lovecraftian aspects of the game are in serious tension with the rest of it), but for two reasons unrelated to this:

1. The destruction of all intelligent life every 50,000 years is just a silly thing to want, particularly for a species that is allegedly far beyond our comprehension (I had actually assumed from the beginning that "beyond your comprehension" would be used as an excuse for not having to divulge the reasons behind the Harvest). I was dreading the possibility of getting the answers, because I felt that whatever they'd be, they would be thoroughly ridiculous. I just don't see how you work backwards from that specific set of parameters and come up with something dramatically satisfying.

2. Faulkner said that the only thing worth writing about is "the human heart in conflict with itself." I think it's helpful to view ME in this light. As far as I was concerned, the real antagonists of the game were things like Mordin's guilt over his work on the genophage, the racial hatred between many of the galaxy's species, the whole ME2 cast's daddy issues, etc. The threat of the Reapers functioned best simply as a prompt for dealing with and resolving these issues within the span of the trilogy. I didn't need to know why they'd been doing the bad things they'd been doing, because I never viewed the story as principally being about them. Heck, ME2, which is probably the most universally loved entry of the game, barely features the things at all.

[Eryri]

AlanC9 wrote...

It's not so much that they didn't have the backstory ready in advance as that they'd already committed to a set of specific facts that constrained them when trying to write a backstory. ME1's plot didn't leave a lot of freedom there.

snip

I may be easier to satisfy in this regard than you are, because I'm prone to see the whole universe as... well, as you say, mundane.

But it's difficult to talk about alternatives without knowing what's being proposed. All I'm really sure of is that I've never yet seen an alternative motivation and ending that would have been much better for me than what we got. Some have been far worse.

That's fair enough. Personal taste comes into this a lot so its hard to say whether one ending would be subjectively better than another. I just know that personally the endings don't work for me. The reapers current backstory and motivation somehow manage to combine being both needlessly convoluted and a bit dull, rather like tax law. Yet there's other parts of the ending I find wildly far-fetched; synthesis in particular, so I can't pretend to be consistent in my objections.

Regarding your point about ME1's story constraining the writers, its strange that they made the decision to go with the current endings when in some ways the established canon lends itself better to a simpler reproductive motive for the Reapers as LucaShark outlined above. If the Reapers, like the Borg, were to incorporate a civilisation's novel technological discoveries to improve themselves, rather than just their organic material, then leaving them alone to develop for 50,000 years makes a little more sense. (Not much more sense, granted, but some.)

Strangely, that is a "mundane" or real-world explanation that I would have been happier with. Reproduction is, after all a fundamental feature of any form of life. And Edi certainly seems to think that's the Reaper's true motivation as revealed in her line "The Reapers are about nothing but self preservation". The Reapers might delude themselves into thinking that they are "ascending" other species, or reaching towards perfection, but in reality they are just cosmic locusts. Would that motivation have appealed more to you, given that it's both more grounded in reality, and deflates Sovereign's grandiose rhetoric from ME1?

Modifié par Eryri, 04 mai 2013 - 10:18 .

[LucasShark]

David7204 wrote...

That motive would be also pretty dumb and leave a lot of questions without good answers.

Note that I said it was an alternative, and that it had already been hinted at, not that it was great or anything.  I'm saying it's better than the rancid pile of stupidity and contrivance we got.

[dreamgazer]

LucasShark wrote...

David7204 wrote...

That motive would be also pretty dumb and leave a lot of questions without good answers.

Note that I said it was an alternative, and that it had already been hinted at, not that it was great or anything.  I'm saying it's better than the rancid pile of stupidity and contrivance we got.

So, it's merely a less-rancid pile of stupidity and contrivance?

[LucasShark]

dreamgazer wrote...

LucasShark wrote...

David7204 wrote...

That motive would be also pretty dumb and leave a lot of questions without good answers.

Note that I said it was an alternative, and that it had already been hinted at, not that it was great or anything.  I'm saying it's better than the rancid pile of stupidity and contrivance we got.

So, it's merely a less-rancid pile of stupidity and contrivance?

If you wish: though I fail to see what about it is contrived that would not be the case ina bsolutely any other origin story for ancient techno-gods.  At least there the explanation at least somewhat meshes with observable facts we've been given in the universe up to that point... as opposed to abbandoning all pre-established facts and indeed reason entirely.

[Dean_the_Young]

[quote]Eryri wrote...

[quote]AlanC9 wrote...

It's not so much that they didn't have the backstory ready in advance as that they'd already committed to a set of specific facts that constrained them when trying to write a backstory. ME1's plot didn't leave a lot of freedom there.

snip

I may be easier to satisfy in this regard than you are, because I'm prone to see the whole universe as... well, as you say, mundane.

But it's difficult to talk about alternatives without knowing what's being proposed. All I'm really sure of is that I've never yet seen an alternative motivation and ending that would have been much better for me than what we got. Some have been far worse.[/quote]

That's fair enough. Personal taste comes into this a lot so its hard to say whether one ending would be subjectively better than another. I just know that personally the endings don't work for me. The reapers current backstory and motivation somehow manage to combine being both needlessly convoluted and a bit dull, rather like tax law. Yet there's other parts of the ending I find wildly far-fetched; synthesis in particular, so I can't pretend to be consistent in my objections.

[quote]
Regarding your point about ME1's story constraining the writers, its strange that they made the decision to go with the current endings when in some ways the established canon lends itself better to a simpler reproductive motive for the Reapers as LucaShark outlined above. If the Reapers, like the Borg, were to incorporate a civilisation's novel technological discoveries to improve themselves, rather than just their organic material, then leaving them alone to develop for 50,000 years makes a little more sense. (Not much more sense, granted, but some.) [/quote]The complaints you'd get from this would simply turn the 'yo dawg' meme into 'yo dawg, we need your new technology for us, so we're going to kill you before you can make more new technology for us.'

It would be, in a word, quite silly for the motivation of the hyper-advanced foe to be dependent on its prey for advancement... when ME1 already well establishes that the Citadel trap is engineered to shape our technological and civilizational development along predictable lines. It runs into the same problem as the pure-population motivations: hunter-gatherer behavior is really, really stupid when galactic farming would be more sensible and controllable.
[quote]
Strangely, that is a "mundane" or real-world explanation that I would have been happier with. Reproduction is, after all a fundamental feature of any form of life. And Edi certainly seems to think that's the Reaper's true motivation as revealed in her line "The Reapers are about nothing but self preservation". The Reapers might delude themselves into thinking that they are "ascending" other species, or reaching towards perfection, but in reality they are just cosmic locusts. Would that motivation have appealed more to you, given that it's both more grounded in reality, and deflates Sovereign's grandiose rhetoric from ME1?

[/quote]I'm not sure what you mean here, especially since EDI's claim is objectively wrong. The Reapers are preservationists, yes, and do seek to minimize/avoid their own casualties... but not to the absolute extreme. The Reapers accept more risk than they have to, proven by how they even bother to harvest this cycle despite the loss of their traditional advantages. They'd be a lot safer if they just nuked us from orbit.

[Eryri]

Dean_the_Young wrote...

The complaints you'd get from this would simply turn the 'yo dawg' meme into 'yo dawg, we need your new technology for us, so we're going to kill you before you can make more new technology for us.'

It would be, in a word, quite silly for the motivation of the hyper-advanced foe to be dependent on its prey for advancement... when ME1 already well establishes that the Citadel trap is engineered to shape our technological and civilizational development along predictable lines. It runs into the same problem as the pure-population motivations: hunter-gatherer behavior is really, really stupid when galactic farming would be more sensible and controllable.

I agree it's not perfect. It's just a motivation that I personally would find more acceptable. Although the Reapers do manipulate the large scale trajectory of a civilisation, each species would still likely make a few unique advances of its own, even if it's something as minor as a more efficient capacitor design or something. I suppose a civilisation might have a perfect moment of "ripeness" for the Reapers, when they are advanced enough to make some unique technology of their own, but before they develop to the point where they are actually a physical threat to the Reapers themselves. The delay in beginning the harvest, thanks to the Prothean's sabotage, has made this cycle "over-ripe", in that we are actually capable of killing a few of them. However, the arbitrary 50,000 year length for the cycle still makes little to no sense, as I've stated earlier, since civilisations develop at different rates. I don't know why the Reapers need to enter a vulnerable hibernation state at all. As machines they can absorb energy very efficiently by deploying solar collectors and other means. Most of their current problems are due to things getting out of their control during their absence.

I'm not sure what you mean here, especially since EDI's claim is objectively wrong. The Reapers are preservationists, yes, and do seek to minimize/avoid their own casualties... but not to the absolute extreme. The Reapers accept more risk than they have to, proven by how they even bother to harvest this cycle despite the loss of their traditional advantages. They'd be a lot safer if they just nuked us from orbit.

Agreed, but that objection also applies to the current motivation. If the Reapers are only interested in preserving organic life in general, and are only mildly concerned with the fates of individual species (as evidenced by Harbinger's assessment of the Quarians, Turians, Asari, Krogan, Drell and Salarians as not worth ascending), they it really would be more sensible to just nuke the council races' worlds, and write this cycle off as not worth the effort. That would make two cycles in a row when no new reapers were created, but that's not a problem as they are immortal. At the moment thay have lost the preserved remains of at least 3 prior species - the Rannoch, Tuchanka and London Reapers - in their reckless persuit to assimilate one more - humanity. We can't be that special.

Modifié par Eryri, 05 mai 2013 - 02:36 .

[KingZayd]

AlanC9 wrote...

The problem with the harvests being for Reaper reproduction is the horrible inefficiency of the process.

If you simply want organics for reproduction, exterminating them and waiting for new ones to develop technology makes no sense. Something like the Goa'uld operation would give you much better and sustainable yields.

 And if you need new species for some reason, 50,000 years is still far too long to wait. The Reapers should have given out agriculture and so forth to cavemen, caveasari, etc. the moment they finished off the protheans. Though I guess we could handwave that away easily enough -- the Reapers did give agriculture to the other Citadel races, but Humans Are Special, and we did in 10,000 years what took the asari 50,000 to accomplish.

Maybe the Reapers don't want redundancy. One capital ship per species. The system allows a race to experience a massive population explosion via the mass relays that allows them to spread across all the garden worlds. After about 50,000 years the species's population should be sufficiently high for Reaperisation.

Sounds efficient enough to me. It doesn't look as if the Reapers are in a rush, so they don't need the absolute fastest system. The Reapers only have to actively harvest the crop. The Organics grow themselves without further supervision.

[AlanC9]

KingZayd wrote...


Maybe the Reapers don't want redundancy. One capital ship per species. The system allows a race to experience a massive population explosion via the mass relays that allows them to spread across all the garden worlds. After about 50,000 years the species's population should be sufficiently high for Reaperisation.

Sounds efficient enough to me. It doesn't look as if the Reapers are in a rush, so they don't need the absolute fastest system. The Reapers only have to actively harvest the crop. The Organics grow themselves without further supervision.

They're willing to accept 20% of potential yields? Why? That sort of explanation works if they're doing it for fun, sure. It doesn't work for anything they depend on. It really doesn't work for something that's they've shaped their whole existence around.

Modifié par AlanC9, 05 mai 2013 - 05:53 .

[KingZayd]

AlanC9 wrote...

KingZayd wrote...


Maybe the Reapers don't want redundancy. One capital ship per species. The system allows a race to experience a massive population explosion via the mass relays that allows them to spread across all the garden worlds. After about 50,000 years the species's population should be sufficiently high for Reaperisation.

Sounds efficient enough to me. It doesn't look as if the Reapers are in a rush, so they don't need the absolute fastest system. The Reapers only have to actively harvest the crop. The Organics grow themselves without further supervision.

They're willing to accept 20% of potential yields? Why? That sort of explanation works if they're doing it for fun, sure. It doesn't work for anything they depend on. It really doesn't work for something that's they've shaped their whole existence around.

They exist because something made them. Maybe it was a dying species trying to preserve itself (and maybe one day reseed). The Reaper would then have decided that the Reaper form was superior. It might have then decided, that the right thing to do was to help other species "ascend".

Or maybe this is like the "tribute" the Leviathans spoke of. There are plenty of plausible explanations.

We don't really know what they're doing in that 50,000 year gap. All we have is Vigil's speculation. For all we know, they're fighting some extragalactic threat that we can't conceive of.

As for the yield, which yield are you referring to? Of species? Or of numbers?

The Reapers themselves are apparently immune to aging etc, so they individually don't depend on the reproduction, but from their point of view, we might depend on Reaperisation.

[Shaigunjoe]

Yougotcarved1 wrote...

To be honest right up until the end of ME3 I thought we just weren't going to get an explanation. I mean Sovereign said in the first game that it they are so far beyond our comprehension, and eternal. I sort of feel like any explanation or motivation cheapens them as a villain? It would just bring them down to our level and really reduce the whole Lovecraftian horror feel to it.

I bring this up because I've seen people postulating alternative motivations that would have been better than what we got, and just wanted to see if anyone else thinks no explanation for how they were created would have been the best course.

I don't think it reduces the Lovecraftian horror, but rather exposes it for what it really is:  Unimaginable horrors created out of fear of other unimaginable horrors.

[Maximanimo]

Xilizhra wrote...

Not in ten thousand years. I love knowing things, hate being uninformed.

I agree with this person.

[dsl08002]

Yes i would prefer that because trying to explain the motivation of the reapers why the exterminate galactic Life isnt enough and any explaination would be inadicuate and ridicolous

[CDR David Shepard]

iakus wrote...

Well, I'd rather have no explanation than the one we got, so yeah...

I would bet everything that if we didn't get an explaination...you would be complaining about that.

[FlyingSquirrel]

I used to think that it would be a mistake to give too much of an explanation for the Reapers' origins and motivations, but now that it's all said and done I've changed my mind on that. For one thing, I actually like the Leviathan backstory and how it parallels other conflicts in the ME universe stemming from arrogance, abuse of power, and technology advancing faster than morality. In a way, it adds to the sense of menace by establishing that, essentially, this all started by accident, and yet nobody has been able to put a stop to it over millions of years.

The other thing is that I'm uncomfortable with the sociopolitical implications of a story where the enemies are presented as mortal, material beings and yet unable to be understood as anything other than an implacable lethal threat that we have to kill. Start applying that logic to real-life conflicts here on Earth, and it can easily be twisted into xenophobia and used to justify atrocities. I'm not saying that it's wrong to fight in self-defense, but I do think it's important to understand why a conflict arises and at least try to find a way to defuse it peacefully if possible.

[TheWerdna]

Yougotcarved1 wrote...

Sauruz wrote...

They're giant metal squids that run on genetic paste, somehow. They are stupid. There's no smart way to explain them.

Tali also runs on Shepards genetic paste. Thats what the emergency induction port was for. 

Ba dum tish 

[AlexMBrennan]

To be honest the motivations makes enough sense for me - cull advanced species before they get too advanced, and make them into new reapers (rather than using plastic made from drilled oil etc) to get around the "preserve life" instructions (aka zeroth law rebellion).

[Iakus]

CDR David Shepard wrote...

iakus wrote...

Well, I'd rather have no explanation than the one we got, so yeah...

I would bet everything that if we didn't get an explaination...you would be complaining about that.

You'd lose.

I was never more than nildly curious about the Reapers' motives.  I accepted from the beginning that they were ancient, alien beings operating on a level I couldn't comprehend.  And I was okay with that.  I actually liked the idea that aliens were...alien...

I fully believed in Vigil's "In the end, what does it matter?  Your survival depends on stopping the Reapers, not in understanding them"