518 réponses à ce sujet

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

iakus wrote...

Eterna5 wrote...

I liked the outcome of DA:O endings. But the ending of DA:O has one of the most convoluted and stupid plot contrivance I've ever seen. The Old god baby and the ritual. It was just so stupid and random, and you need to under take it to survive. 

Actually you don't need to.

And it's no more convoluted than the Crucible's functions.

Right, you don't. Just stay on the ballistas. Take either Allistair or Loghain with you, and they'll make the final rush and bite the dust. Which is exactly what my "hero" does. Like I wanted to drink that damned blood in the first place. Go get 'em Allistair! Loghain! I've got your back! 

[AndyAK79]

iakus wrote...

Eterna5 wrote...

I liked the outcome of DA:O endings. But the ending of DA:O has one of the most convoluted and stupid plot contrivance I've ever seen. The Old god baby and the ritual. It was just so stupid and random, and you need to under take it to survive. 

Actually you don't need to.

And it's no more convoluted than the Crucible's functions.

Which is exactly the point. Everybody is holding DAO up as some prime example of smooth and believable plotting when actually both are open to similar criticisms.

[AndyAK79]

iakus wrote...

AndyAK79 wrote...

Surely you can headcanon anything,in any game, not just Dragon Age. After the control ending Shepard built a new body but unfortunately developed a severe addiction to petrol and burst into flames after sneaking a crafty cig. After the destroy ending Shepard underwent a sex change and lived happily ever after performing in a semi-succesful drag act.

I don't see how it's harder to imagine a happy ending for Mass Effect than it is for Dragon Age.

Except

Control, Synthesis and 3099 or less Destroy make it absolutely clear that Shepard dies

Control shows the Reapers take over the galaxy
Synthesis shows that it is, in fact, forced on everyone
Destroy makes it abundantly clear that EDI and the geth die
Refuse does everything but laugh in your face at your stupidity for choosing it.

So yeah, the most horrific aspects of the endings cannot simply be headcanoned away.  Or at least, I haven't been shot in the head enough times for that to work for me

Whilst Shepards physical body dies in control it is clear from the voice over that he continues to exist in a different form. And the Reapers don't take over the galaxy at all.

Synthesis is forced on everyone; thats the catch that makes it a difficult choice.

Yes EDI and the Geth die if you choose destroy, but this is, again, what makes it a difficult choice. If the Catalyst said, "or you can pick this option and everything will be great" nobody would pick anything else.
 
The game makes it perfectly clear what will happen if you pick refuse, it still gives you the choice if you want it.

You are arguing (yet again) that you are somehow entitled to a happy ending. That there should be some perfect choice that gives you everything you want. The choices have to be dificult or they are not a choice at all. You don't want a choice, you want a happy ending.

Modifié par AndyAK79, 10 octobre 2013 - 12:37 .

[AndyAK79]

StreetMagic wrote...

You don't have to do the dark ritual. If you want to survive, you can do the DR, Alistair sacrifices, or Loghain sacrifices. You can also just force Alistair or Loghain to do the DR too. lol

Surely if you force someone else to do the dark ritual the consequences (and hence your moral options) are the same. You just get slightly less sex. Essentially you have a choice of evil with sex, or evil without sex. Choices, choices.

Of course you can always go with the send someone to their death option, but I challenge you to feel heroic afterwards.

I'd argue happy endings and easy decisions have never really been Biowares thing - and that this a prime reason why I love their games.

[Obadiah]

AndyAK79 wrote...

iakus wrote...

Eterna5 wrote...

I liked the outcome of DA:O endings. But the ending of DA:O has one of the most convoluted and stupid plot contrivance I've ever seen. The Old god baby and the ritual. It was just so stupid and random, and you need to under take it to survive.

Actually you don't need to.

And it's no more convoluted than the Crucible's functions.

Which is exactly the point. Everybody is holding DAO up as some prime example of smooth and believable plotting when actually both are open to similar criticisms.

*Cough*
Wait was there actually a DAO and ME3 comparison back there? Ok, I liked Mass Effect 3's ending (the original and the EC), and I liked Dragon Age: Origin's ending, but DAO's ending is OBVIOUSLY a better ending. DAO is probably the best ending I've ever seen implemented ever; and I say that with my first character dead at the end, Alistair becoming a drunk, and Morrigan running off with no OGB (from my Warden at least). How is this even in dispute?

ME3's EC epilogue is pretty much an attempt at the DAO epilogue, except that DAO's epilogue was actually fairly explicit in showing the ramifications of all our choices in the game, rather than ME3 showing the ramifications of just the final choice (and the squad mates that survived).

Both are open the criticism? Well hell, isn't everything?

Modifié par Obadiah, 10 octobre 2013 - 01:05 .

[Iakus]

AndyAK79 wrote...

StreetMagic wrote...

You don't have to do the dark ritual. If you want to survive, you can do the DR, Alistair sacrifices, or Loghain sacrifices. You can also just force Alistair or Loghain to do the DR too. lol

Surely if you force someone else to do the dark ritual the consequences (and hence your moral options) are the same. You just get slightly less sex. Essentially you have a choice of evil with sex, or evil without sex. Choices, choices.

Of course you can always go with the send someone to their death option, but I challenge you to feel heroic afterwards.

I'd argue happy endings and easy decisions have never really been Biowares thing - and that this a prime reason why I love their games.

You don't force anyone to die for you.  Both Loghain and Alistair are willing, even asking to be the ones to slay the archdemon.  

Loghain gets a lot of respect back from me  for his line "Please.  I've done...so much wrong.  Allow me to do one last thing right"  I find Redeemer better even than Dark Ritual.  Very heroic.  Even with the now strained relationship with Alistair and Morrigan ditching you.

[Iakus]

AndyAK79 wrote...

Whilst Shepards physical body dies in control it is clear from the voice over that he continues to exist in a different form. And the Reapers don't take over the galaxy at all.

It's celar from the voice that what remains is no more Shepard than the Shepard VI in the refugee camp.  And the Reapers do take over the galaxy.  The only question is how benelvolant/malevolant dictators they will be.  But either way, the galaxy's future is no longer its own.

Synthesis is forced on everyone; thats the catch that makes it a difficult choice.

Heh, Synthesis is a very easy choice.  I choose "No"

Yes EDI and the Geth die if you choose destroy, but this is, again, what makes it a difficult choice. If the Catalyst said, "or you can pick this option and everything will be great" nobody would pick anything else.

Or if the Catalyst said "You'll damage the relays, and who will be around to fix them?  would make a lot more sense.

Throwing synthetics under the bus is jusdt an arbitrary rider to Destroy, there for no other reason than to add DRAMA to picking Destroy.
 

The game makes it perfectly clear what will happen if you pick refuse, it still gives you the choice if you want it.

Indeed  "Don't like the options?  Rocks fall, everyone dies!  Now reload and pick a color!"

You are arguing (yet again) that you are somehow entitled to a happy ending. That there should be some perfect choice that gives you everything you want. The choices have to be dificult or they are not a choice at all. You don't want a choice, you want a happy ending.

No, I'm saying I should have an ending that doesn't make me feel like I did something wrong no matter what choice I made.  I should have an ending that is worthy of a five year, three game journey.  

[Vortex13]

The issue I have with the endings is more of consistency and implementation rather than closure.

Well that is not entirely true, with the Original Endings I did want closure. The game just seemed to be missing a good chunk of the ending; the narrative just stopped and then credits rolled. When I first beat the game (with the Original Endings), and after loading it back to the Anderson/TIM/Shepard dialouge autosave and picking all the other endings all I felt was an emptiness, a feeling that I couldn't quite put my finger on, but one that made my family ask if I was sick or depressed afterwards. Call me a helpless, introvered nerd if you will, but that is what I felt after beating the game orginally, just a gaping nothingness. It was at this time that I went to BSN to see if I was the only one who felt that way and ..... well you know how that turned out.

With the EC endings, I no longer have that feeling of emptiness, I know what happens in each ending, and while I still secretly hope for a conventinal victory ending, I know that it is just something that would never happen, at least without a complete rewrite of ME 2 & 3's plot. My prefered ending is still Destroy, (I find control intresting in keeping the ME setting 'as is' so to speak) but I can see the merits of and respect other players for liking and prefering the other endings as well. My major issue is, like I said, consistency and implementation.

The introduction of the Catalyst as the Reaper mastermind, and the 15 minute exposistion dump he gives you right at the very end of the game totally kills the pacing of the narrative, and introduces a new character allong with a new conflict right when everything should have been wrapping up. I know that several people have said that there was foreshadowing on Thessia and in the Leviathian DLC and that I am just too dense to 'get it', but Thessia only gives the player a scant few lines of dialouge that is more of an educated guess from a Prothean VI then acctual foreshadowing, and Leviathian is a DLC, and one that did not come out until after the EC. But even going on those two points, both of which require heavy uses of hindsight to see; you still don't have any introduction of the Catalyst character until the very end of the game, but do you know who does have lots of introduction, and build up in the games and DLC? Harbinger.

Even if you considered Harbinger to be increadibly cheesy and 'supertroll' in ME 2, you still have to see that he was a character that was established in the previous games, been mentioned in ME 3 core game, and DLC, and had a sizable amount of build up. Throwing all of that away in favor of the Catalyst just derails the reaper plot, and brings all of the previous interactions Shepard had with the other Reapers into question.

"Was it the Catalyst the whole time?"

"Why even have Sovreign and Harbinger, and the Rannoch Reaper talk to us, as well as having differing personalities, if it always was the Catalyst controling everything?"

The overall consistentcy of the Reapers as characters and villans is dissovled as soon as the Catalyst pops up and says: "It was me all along!" While the opinion of some members was that the Reapers had a very shallow motivation before the Catalyst, I would say that his (Catalyst) introduction reduced the Reapers down to a Scooby Doo villian: "It wasn't the lake monster, it was Farmer Bob the whole time!"

Now as far as implementation goes, the Reaper motivation was (IMO) very poorly done. 'Yo dawg' meme not withstanding, the concept of the Reapers as some sort of cleansing fire just reeked of rushed writing. Sure on it's surface, the whole 'killing you to save you from yourselves' trope sounds deep and thought provoking, but when coupled with the Reapers' previous characterization of (more-or-less) being sadistic monsters that enjoyed killing and liquifiying the races of the galaxy, it just makes the Reapers, and by extenstion the Catalyst, seem bi-polar. I can see where the writers wanted to go with the organic/synthetic conflict, but that plot thread had already been dealt with in EDI and the Geth/Quarian conflict; and the fact that Shepard is not allowed to bring up said facts futher divorces the ending scenario from the main game.

If the writers wanted to go with the themes of organic/synthetic conflict, and fate vs. forging one's own destiny, then they should have had the Reapers be following the 'Cycle' or 'Harvest' for reasons that even they don't know.

"There is only the harvest."

The Reapers could have been seen as an example of the 'grey goo' doomsday scenario, wherein machines are programed with a specific task, and they procced to accomplish it regardless of the consequeces. Remove the Leviathians, and the Catalyst and just have Harbinger and the Reapers following the mandates of the cycle almost like a religion. The idea that not only does a series of plans survive the countless cycles, but also the race that created the thing that created the Reapers, and having an in depth recounting of the events that transpired over a BILLION years ago is just way too convinient. 

How is this any different than the implementation that we have now?

Well for starters it reveals the Reapers motivations as machines without seeming like a programing error. It also leaves enough 'speculations' about the Reaper origins to keep the players who liked not knowing everything about them happy. And provides a better way of contrasting the galaxy's fight to be free of Reaper macinations, and the Reapers being bound by some ancient mandate that they follow. 

Modifié par Vortex13, 11 octobre 2013 - 05:27 .

[CronoDragoon]

AndyAK79 wrote...

It doesn't really matter what type of headcanon you are talking about, you are talking about headcanon. I can't discuss the contents of your head.

...How does it not matter? Yes you can discuss the contents of someone's head. For example, the headcanon that the geth/EDI were not killed in Destroy is not equally viable to a headcanon that Shepard survives Destroy. One is contradicted by actual evidence whereas the other is left up in the air.

Similarly, by failing to introduce concrete consequences to the Dark Ritual (thus far, 4 years after Origins was released) you create a situation where downside can be reasonably headcanoned away. You cannot do this in situations where the game shows you immediate consequences. The Dark Ritual therefore lets players off the hook of either dying or letting a comrade die, by passing the buck to future games.

But again, this criticism is likely to at least be accounted for in Inquisition, regardless of how well its done.

[Iakus]

CronoDragoon wrote...

AndyAK79 wrote...

It doesn't really matter what type of headcanon you are talking about, you are talking about headcanon. I can't discuss the contents of your head.

...How does it not matter? Yes you can discuss the contents of someone's head. For example, the headcanon that the geth/EDI were not killed in Destroy is not equally viable to a headcanon that Shepard survives Destroy. One is contradicted by actual evidence whereas the other is left up in the air.

Similarly, by failing to introduce concrete consequences to the Dark Ritual (thus far, 4 years after Origins was released) you create a situation where downside can be reasonably headcanoned away. You cannot do this in situations where the game shows you immediate consequences. The Dark Ritual therefore lets players off the hook of either dying or letting a comrade die, by passing the buck to future games.

But again, this criticism is likely to at least be accounted for in Inquisition, regardless of how well its done.

Given at this point the child from the Dark Ritual would be like ten, I don't really have a problem with delaying the consequences in an open-ended series. 

At any rate, we have been told that whether the Dark Ritual was done or not will be a "nontrivial" component to DAI.  How to take this is currently up to individual interpretation, given the status of the rachni was supposed to be important to ME3.

Edit:  But as I keep saying, even if you remove the DR as an option, DAO's endings are still far better than ME3s.  As in, they're not even in the same league!

Modifié par iakus, 10 octobre 2013 - 03:13 .

[Chashan]

AlanC9 wrote...

Well, they propose alternatives that are happier, anyway. But a lot of them keep telling me that's not the point. I guess it's just chance that the alternaives always come out happier.

Mileage varies there too, though. After all, the vanilla- and especially EC-end quite blatantly offer a god-Imperium and Paradise-across-the-Galaxy on a whim, so loosely set up that they can work on nearly whatever conditionals players want them to.

And 'happier' how? Ending the war itself with just the relays being out of function for an unknown amount of time, with the Reapers gone would make for a dreary post-war galaxy, as you yourself pointed out some place else. That being made a focus I would view as far more believeable than the - practically not acknowledged - loss of advanced artificial intelligence, if the intention voiced by some writers of ME3 to have wished to tell a 'war-story' is to be taken seriously. Red's higher EMS-epilogue speech by Mr Henriksen somewhat touches upon the point of casualties and the relay's loss, but not truly the further logistical disaster that proves to be.

Finally, if BW wanted to go off-rails on grimness with the finale, I would have preferred no choice at all. Let the 'Catalyst' belittle and dismiss Shepards' vain efforts, let the Crucible be one giant hoax, leave Shepards crushed in the dust.
Yes, that's the type of grim end I would rather accept, 'rail-roaded refuse' if you will - if the 'Catalyst' weren't such a failure of characterisation.

As is, I'll settle for that thing being absent.

[DarkestDeceit]

Sad thing really is that no matter were you stand on the ending of ME3 no one can deny the game will not be remembered in a positive light, really now when anyone mentions ME3 the one thing people remember is all the anger and fighting that went on over how it ended.
Really in one way i can understand Bioware refusing to budge and give people a happier ending scenario but on the other hand you have to wander if this is a decision that will come back to haunt them when they start trying to publicize the next ME game.

[AndyAK79]

Yes, killing Shepard and destroying the galaxy with no choice at all would have offered a properly satisfying ending and produced no fan backlash whatsoever.

You are clearly a creative genius.

[Iakus]

AndyAK79 wrote...

Yes, killing Shepard and destroying the galaxy with no choice at all would have offered a properly satisfying ending and produced no fan backlash whatsoever.

You are clearly a creative genius.

That's pretty much what I feel we got with the endings anyway.  Perhaps not in a literal sense, but the feeling of hopelessness and futility after everything that occurred in those three games sure gave me a similar feeling.

You can't save Shepard
You must inflict something horrible on the galaxy in order to "save" it.

Even in the "best" endings, I feel my Shepard becomes worse than Saren ever was.  If that's not having no choice in killing Shepard and destroying the galaxy, I don't know what is.

Maybe this is why Bioware had such a powerful backlash?

[Chashan]

AndyAK79 wrote...

Yes, killing Shepard and destroying the galaxy with no choice at all would have offered a properly satisfying ending and produced no fan backlash whatsoever.

You are clearly a creative genius.

It would at least have kept the Reapers' image as galaxy-wide death incarnate intact, instead of a sad cosmic joke.

And we got the fan-backlash anyhow, as could be observed, despite two scenarios being offered that can be interpreted quite liberally by players even now. Funny thing is, the way the epilogue following Refuse is set up allows for an equally large number of blanks to be filled: no specifics on how the further conflict went, how the next cycle ultimately defeated the Reapers, etc.

I primarily put that out there to disprove Alan's assertion that any alternative preferred by fans would be 'happier' than what BW put forth.

Major impediment that keeps me from potentially settling for that is said encounter with the 'Catalyst'.

Modifié par Chashan, 10 octobre 2013 - 04:11 .

[jtav]

There's nothing horrible about Paragon Control. Any speculation about Shepalyst losing it is just that: speculation. Synthesis is only bad insofar as it suggests synthetic life was invalid before. Destroy is entirely legitimate under the principle of double effect.

[AlanC9]

Chashan wrote...
 Funny thing is, the way the epilogue following Refuse is set up allows for an equally large number of blanks to be filled: no specifics on how the further conflict went, how the next cycle ultimately defeated the Reapers, etc.

Well, we do know that they didn't fight a "terrible war." My money's on them using a Crucible anyway, but I figure making that explicit would be cruel to folks who Refuse for moral reasons.( Though personally I would have gone ahead and made it explicit.)

I primarily put that out there to disprove Alan's assertion that any alternative preferred by fans would be 'happier' than what BW put forth.

Fair enough. It's not 100%, and I shouldn't have said it was. Make that "almost always" above.

Modifié par AlanC9, 10 octobre 2013 - 04:24 .

[Iakus]

jtav wrote...

There's nothing horrible about Paragon Control. Any speculation about Shepalyst losing it is just that: speculation. Synthesis is only bad insofar as it suggests synthetic life was invalid before. Destroy is entirely legitimate under the principle of double effect.

I find Paragon Control "better" only in comparison to Renegade Control.  Either way, the galaxy is no longer in control of its own destiny.

Synthesis suggests that neither organic nor synthetic life was valid before. That both were somehow too flawed to be allowed to continue existing.

Destroy throws an entire form of life under the bus.

[Iakus]

Chashan wrote...

I primarily put that out there to disprove Alan's assertion that any alternative preferred by fans would be 'happier' than what BW put forth.

Alan knows very well what kind of Destroy ending I would have preferred.  Most would consider it more terrible than what we already got.

[Obadiah]

If the next cycle builds the Crucible sooner, they probably discover the Catalyst on the Citadel sooner (maybe even before the Reaper invasion) and can deal with it more effectively without a sacrifice.