195 réponses à ce sujet

[jamesp81]

MassivelyEffective0730 wrote...

caldas wrote...
If I may:

1 - The Crucible

The Crucible is an alright concept, just poorly executed. Honestly, how else are you realistically going to defeat the Reapers? Not necessarily the Crucible itself, but the concept of a superweapon is necessary. 

I just never have been all that keen on superweapon plots.  I find the superweapon plots I like the best are the ones where it's the antagonists building one, because it gives the protagonists the opportunity to demonstrate why hugely expensive superweapons are strategically, tactically, and logistically dumb.

Perfect example: Star Wars and the Empire's Death Star.  Think about how much money and effort went into that thing.  If they'd taken those resources and built warships instead, they'd have gotten far more benefit for their trouble, and wouldn't have lost everything due to a single design weakness and one hotshot young fighter pilot.

[Jaulen]

caldas wrote...

MassivelyEffective0730 wrote...

caldas wrote...
If I may:

1 - The Crucible

The Crucible is an alright concept, just poorly executed. Honestly, how else are you realistically going to defeat the Reapers? Not necessarily the Crucible itself, but the concept of a superweapon is necessary. 

I agree. If it was a Death Star certainly I'd have no problem with it.
I just can't go with:
"We have an unsolveble problem, let's build a machine that does that, I don't know how, by pressing a button, a killswitch if you will"
and..
If the reapers are so advanced and unstopable, why thay take 200 years to harvest the galaxy, they should have a harvest machine that turns everyone to goo by pressing a button too, using the relays they built. Probably It's easier to build a wave of energy that dissolves things than one that creates/changes DNA.

But I know that's just me.

no, no....not just you.

I'm on a playthrough of ME3 right now (had to try a hard renegade) and i'm nerdraging at my husband almost nightly about the silliness of a lot of the game... 

1) The Leviathans built the Starchild AI to solve a problem.....and they are supposed to be so smart.....well, at least they were smart enough not be be fully harvested during their cycle......what sort of quality control do you lack not to keep an eye on what the AI is doing, until *wham* the AI comes out and says "Sorry, need to kill you all"

2) What sort of faulty programming went into the Starchild Ai in the first place, where they were given a problem to solve, but not the ability to change course based on new information provided?

3) Circular logic to the whole reaper thing. In our cycle at least, the Geth are not the ones wanting to fight, they just want to be left alone, it's the organics causing the war, and during the Mourning War...once the Quarians backed off, the Geth left them alone, the Geth didn't wholesale extinct the Quarians. But I guess that didn't fit with the Starchild AI "synthetics will always destroy all life" so the reapers had to come in and stir the bucket to make their programming plausible......Oh, and the reapers leave the technology lying around so that the apex races develop in the direction they WANT them to....they must really like the whole harvesting thing....why not instead let them develop as they will, and THEN when it looks like AIs have been developed that will wipe out organic life, that's when you come out from dark space to do your reaping activities. And why harvest the organic life forms....wouldn't it make more sense to take the AIs offline? (speciest Reapers)

4) The Reapers are this great unknowable machine like god creature..... Who's sole purpose turns out to be an apex race garbage disposal/slurpee dispenser. They were more scary when we didn't know their intentions....and instead of coming up with a super cool interesting thought provoking morally hard way to get rid of them....The galaxy builds what they think is a 'bigger better gun' and they have NO CLUE what it does, or if it will even work...Really? And the design of the crucible was just silly, so many wasted parts resources went into that (what's with the fall away golf ball around it?). (but coming up with a better more cool whatever reason is totally beyond my capabilities...hence why I'm not a creative writer) 

5) Shepard all of a sudden got really dumb and a bad shot in all the auto scenes in this game. Plus....the autodiologue! Ahhh.....why was my Shepard so nice to Tali on Rannoch especially since the first game she's been telling Tali, "Well, I kinda don't feel bad for you, you Quarians brought it on yourselves"



And the whole dystopian 'we create a machine that will kill humanity to save it' was done much better in the book Sea of Glass.

[jamesp81]

Mcfly616 wrote...

You won't find many sci fi novels, games or movies that don't involve humans in some capacity. It just doesn't really happen. More often than not there is something unique about humankind, if not unique they're always seen involved in significant events.

I've read about 75 sci fi novels since I graduated a decade ago. 25 in the last 2 years (I really got back into reading after ME3). And in all of those novels (classics, space opera, hard sci fi, the emergence of cyberpunk, modern sci fi), only 2 of them were told completely from the alien perspective, and only one was completely absent of humans in general.

Take into account that Bioware seems to like their humans, I don't think we're gonna see a game without them.

Readers have to be able to relate to the characters immediately in order to stay interested.  It's easier to do that with humans.  Certainly, readers can relate to aliens as well, but it takes more work.  You have to grab the reader's attention early and hold it in order to tell a successful story.  That's just nature of the beast.

[Han Shot First]

StreetMagic wrote...

Superweapons work well enough for this story, but I still think it sucks on a gaming level. You don't get to actually do much with them. There isn't much interactivity and gameplay to those kind of plot devices. They tend to just be passive, cutscene/cinematic type of affairs. And that's what happened here.

Superweapons are preferable to a conventional military victory however, because it does give the player character a way to affect the outcome. Without some form of a superweapon as a plot device, Shepard would have been a spectator to a victory won by either Admiral Hackett or Primarch Victus. If Shepard is going to end the Reaper War, you need to use a superweapon. I think that was likely the biggest reason a superweapon was introduced to the plot, though no doubt the writers needing a way to offset the Reapers technological superiority also played a role.

The Crucible was just poorly executed.

[Chashan]

Han Shot First wrote...

StreetMagic wrote...

Superweapons work well enough for this story, but I still think it sucks on a gaming level. You don't get to actually do much with them. There isn't much interactivity and gameplay to those kind of plot devices. They tend to just be passive, cutscene/cinematic type of affairs. And that's what happened here.

Superweapons are preferable to a conventional military victory however, because it does give the player character a way to affect the outcome. Without some form of a superweapon as a plot device, Shepard would have been a spectator to a victory won by either Admiral Hackett or Primarch Victus. If Shepard is going to end the Reaper War, you need to use a superweapon. I think that was likely the biggest reason a superweapon was introduced to the plot, though no doubt the writers needing a way to offset the Reapers technological superiority also played a role.

The Crucible was just poorly executed.

I call bull on that being much of a reason at all.

Part of the problem with the Crucible is that the effort of the allied forces is pushed pretty much aside and "ending the war" is demoted to what amounts to button-pushing by a sole individual.

ME1 did not really require that either. Shepards' big-time choice for ME3's end could have been a tactical decision similar to that: make the call on which portion of the troops hold down the fort till the device does its thing and ends the Reapers, say, with the effects that has on the post-war galaxy made prominent.

We can agree that, at any rate, the Crucible was severely lacking in its execution, however, to put it mildly.

Modifié par Chashan, 28 janvier 2014 - 08:11 .

[Vortex13]

Han Shot First wrote...

I'd set a sequel a few hundred years out. Say, 700 years or so.

That is a very long time. I personally don't see how such a setting could still have the whole ME 'vibe' to it if we have 700 years worth of developed technology to add to the setting; to say nothing of the advances gained from reversed engineered Reaper corpses.

Galatic society has remained more or less the same because of the Reaper cycles, but with that artifical limitation gone, wouldn't a MEU 700 years in the future look as comparativly different to players as a person from 700 years ago being brought to the present age would think of our technology? 

Han Shot First wrote...

That is far enough removed from the Shepard trilogy that the galaxy has more than enough time to fully rebuild and recover. Its also far enough out that no one would need to ask where Shepard is, as even High EMS Destroy Shep would be long since dead. And by jumping forward a few hundred years you can present the protagonist with a major threat to deal with, without it straining suspension of disbelief. One of the flaws of the Star Wars EU, is that galaxy wide threats seem to be emerging every few years. And finally, they could get away with introducing some new tech to the setting as several hundred years have passed.

I have experienced the oposite in various sci-fi settings though. A major villian is defeated, and society advances, the next protagonist (encountered hundreds or thousands of years later) has to be an order of magnitude more powerful then the previous one to acount for societies advances.

This could be solved by having a setting wide apocolypse, wherein all advance technology is lost, but then we are back to the issue of the setting looking nothing like the one players have grown attachted to.

[jamesp81]

StreetMagic wrote...

Hate to derail, but what's the name of the first Looking Glass book? Because I'm in the mood to buy it atm.

Be aware that John Ringo has strong political opinions and he does not bother to hide them in his novels.  If that is something that will distract from your enjoyment of the novel, you're probably best off trying something else.

With that said, the books in the Looking Glass series are, in order, 1) Into the Looking Glass, 2) Vorpal Blade, 3) Manxome Foe, and 4) Claws that Catch.  And yes, the guy likes Lewis Carroll.  The novels are intentionally over the top in several ways, mostly as a form of dry humor, but there's a great deal of seriousness about the lives of military people and some of the bad stuff they face in their profession during war time.  Having been in the Army himself, the author knows something more about that subject than the average person.

The last three books are co-written with Travis S. Taylor, who is a genius that has about thousand doctorates in everything.  His influence is seen in a lot of the more technical science aspects.

Modifié par jamesp81, 28 janvier 2014 - 08:16 .

[jamesp81]

StreetMagic wrote...

jamesp81 wrote...

StreetMagic wrote...

Hate to derail, but what's the name of the first Looking Glass book? Because I'm in the mood to buy it atm.

Be aware that John Ringo has strong political opinions and he does not bother to hide them in his novels.  If that is something that will distract from your enjoyment of the novel, you're probably best off trying something else.

With that said, the books in the Looking Glass series are, in order, 1) Into the Looking Glass, 2) Vorpal Blade, 3) Manxome Foe, and 4) Claws that Catch.  And yes, the guy likes Lewis Carroll.  The novels are intentionally over the top in several ways, mostly as a form of dry humor, but there's a great deal of seriousness about the lives of military people and some of the bad stuff they face in their profession during war time.  Having been in the Army himself, the author knows something more about that subject than the average person.

I tend to not like preachy writers (if that's what you mean), but it depends.

I like Lewis Carroll too, so I'll give it a chance.

I wouldn't describe him as preachy.  More like sarcastic and humorously, but strongly, insulting to political ideologies he doesn't like.

ETA: also, if storytelling that is intentionally over the top bothers you, you will really not care for his writing:lol:

David Weber has some stuff in a similar vein as we've been discussing that's not over the top, so that might be something to consider.  His book "The Apocalypse Troll" has some elements of what we've been discussing.

Modifié par jamesp81, 28 janvier 2014 - 08:22 .

[marcelo caldas]

jamesp81 wrote...

StreetMagic wrote...

jamesp81 wrote...

StreetMagic wrote...

Hate to derail, but what's the name of the first Looking Glass book? Because I'm in the mood to buy it atm.

Be aware that John Ringo has strong political opinions and he does not bother to hide them in his novels.  If that is something that will distract from your enjoyment of the novel, you're probably best off trying something else.

With that said, the books in the Looking Glass series are, in order, 1) Into the Looking Glass, 2) Vorpal Blade, 3) Manxome Foe, and 4) Claws that Catch.  And yes, the guy likes Lewis Carroll.  The novels are intentionally over the top in several ways, mostly as a form of dry humor, but there's a great deal of seriousness about the lives of military people and some of the bad stuff they face in their profession during war time.  Having been in the Army himself, the author knows something more about that subject than the average person.

I tend to not like preachy writers (if that's what you mean), but it depends.

I like Lewis Carroll too, so I'll give it a chance.

I wouldn't describe him as preachy.  More like sarcastic and humorously, but strongly, insulting to political ideologies he doesn't like.

Kinda like us with ME3

Modifié par caldas, 28 janvier 2014 - 08:25 .

[MassivelyEffective0730]

jamesp81 wrote...

Mcfly616 wrote...

You won't find many sci fi novels, games or movies that don't involve humans in some capacity. It just doesn't really happen. More often than not there is something unique about humankind, if not unique they're always seen involved in significant events.

I've read about 75 sci fi novels since I graduated a decade ago. 25 in the last 2 years (I really got back into reading after ME3). And in all of those novels (classics, space opera, hard sci fi, the emergence of cyberpunk, modern sci fi), only 2 of them were told completely from the alien perspective, and only one was completely absent of humans in general.

Take into account that Bioware seems to like their humans, I don't think we're gonna see a game without them.

Readers have to be able to relate to the characters immediately in order to stay interested.  It's easier to do that with humans.  Certainly, readers can relate to aliens as well, but it takes more work.  You have to grab the reader's attention early and hold it in order to tell a successful story.  That's just nature of the beast.

Or human like aliens (and I mean the aliens that are essentially humans on the outside. 

Time-Lords would be an acceptable alternative. They're physically the same as humans (on an exterior level).

[R4ZOR GHO5T]

TurianRebel212 wrote...

RETCONS!!!

They will happen.

There will be retcons!!!





Prepare yourself.... For their arrival.

[jamesp81]

MassivelyEffective0730 wrote...

jamesp81 wrote...

Mcfly616 wrote...

You won't find many sci fi novels, games or movies that don't involve humans in some capacity. It just doesn't really happen. More often than not there is something unique about humankind, if not unique they're always seen involved in significant events.

I've read about 75 sci fi novels since I graduated a decade ago. 25 in the last 2 years (I really got back into reading after ME3). And in all of those novels (classics, space opera, hard sci fi, the emergence of cyberpunk, modern sci fi), only 2 of them were told completely from the alien perspective, and only one was completely absent of humans in general.

Take into account that Bioware seems to like their humans, I don't think we're gonna see a game without them.

Readers have to be able to relate to the characters immediately in order to stay interested.  It's easier to do that with humans.  Certainly, readers can relate to aliens as well, but it takes more work.  You have to grab the reader's attention early and hold it in order to tell a successful story.  That's just nature of the beast.

Or human like aliens (and I mean the aliens that are essentially humans on the outside. 

Time-Lords would be an acceptable alternative. They're physically the same as humans (on an exterior level).

Human like aliens helps...still a little harder.  Depends on how they're like humans.  Asari, for example, are not quite as easy to relate to, I think, as they seem on the surface.  Though they have a very human appearance (and this grabs the player's attention early on), the 1000 year life spans and how that has shaped their psychology makes them very alien to humans in many ways.  I think the Turians are probably easier to relate from a psychological standpoint.  Their culture bears a lot of similarities to a number of real Earth cultures.  I view them like a cross between Switzerland, Germany, and medieval Japan, except the government is an actual meritocracy.

Modifié par jamesp81, 28 janvier 2014 - 08:27 .

[dreamgazer]

R4ZOR GHO5T wrote...

TurianRebel212 wrote...

RETCONS!!!

They will happen.

There will be retcons!!!





Prepare yourself.... For their arrival.

Entirely possible, given how many retcons there were between ME1 and ME2, even.

Modifié par dreamgazer, 28 janvier 2014 - 08:34 .

[The Night Mammoth]

StreetMagic wrote...

Superweapons work well enough for this story, but I still think it sucks on a gaming level. You don't get to actually do much with them. There isn't much interactivity and gameplay to those kind of plot devices. They tend to just be passive, cutscene/cinematic type of affairs. And that's what happened here.

I think these things could be remedied by firstly making it a hub of some kind, so we can go there, talk to different NPC's as the war progresses, and see the forces we gather actually work on it. So for example, when you travel there after saving the rachni, you can come across rachni workers milling about the place, and, if BioWare were ambitious, see other NPC's reactions to them wandering the corridors change gradually over time. 

[FlyingSquirrel]

liggy002 wrote...
Also, who's to say that the Catalyst wasn't lying about the synthetics going boom boom.

The EC, for starters. EDI's name appears on the memorial if you pick High EMS Destroy.

I could maybe tolerate a canonized ending as long as Shepard and the Normandy crew don't appear in the game - that leaves me free to assume that this is just another "iteration" of the ME universe that exists separately from my playthroughs of ME1-3. (Honestly, I think the gloating and flame wars that would likely ensue on BSN might turn me off even more than what might or might not happen in the game.)

If they were to canonize High EMS Destroy *and* have it based on imported saves, I might well wait until it's on sale or something - I only have one Shepard who picked it, and she was sort of an experiment with trying to play Shepard as a slightly unstable person.

[jamesp81]

StreetMagic wrote...

jamesp81 wrote...

Human like aliens helps...still a little harder.  Depends on how they're like humans.  Asari, for example, are not quite as easy to relate to, I think, as they seem on the surface.  Though they have a very human appearance (and this grabs the player's attention early on), the 1000 year life spans and how that has shaped their psychology makes them very alien to humans in many ways.  I think the Turians are probably easier to relate from a psychological standpoint.  Their culture bears a lot of similarities to a number of real Earth cultures.  I view them like a cross between Switzerland, Germany, and medieval Japan, except the government is an actual meritocracy.

Asari, to me, are some of the more alien of ME species. They're not human like at all. The whole mindmelding thing and the black eyes creep me out. Not to mention their lifespans, like you said.

I guess I'll agree about Turian psychology being relatable, but I personally, just dislike it. Because I dislike humans like them too (duty bound, sacrificial, heirarchal, militaristic). I grew up in a military family as well, so I dislike it in a very personal way (then again, that seems to be how Garrus feels too).

But it does create a good experience for you.  You understand the Turians.  The Asari were given a lot of Classical Greek cultural trappings in the game, but when you really get to know them, they are way different than humans.

Their appearance is probably Bioware's way of grabbing players' attention and getting them to learn about what is actually a very, very alien culture.  They're turning it on its head, the human like aliens are actually the least human-like, whereas the bi-pedal raptors can be easily related to through existing cultural lenses.  BW likes to do this "turn it on its head" thing and has done it in several other ways in both DA and ME.  The big one that comes to mind there is Leliana, the nice church going girl with traditional values, is also bisexual and used to be an assassin.  This is not quite what you'd expect, but it still has familiar cultural elements.  I think it's one of the little tricks BW uses to be different and grab people's attention.

[dreamgazer]

starlitegirlx wrote...

I think there was a statement that they will have whatever they take place be around the same time as ME1-2. They could probably do that for several games. At ME1 and ME2 the reapers were considered a delusion and entirely dismissed. Meanwhile there could have been other things going on the the galaxy just not reaper level threats but threats nonetheless.

Do you have a source for this? I've never heard it.

[FlyingSquirrel]

Vortex13 wrote...
How far into the future are we talking here?

I don't get the idea that setting the game hundreds or thousands of years in the future somehow fixes everything and the whole universe is back to a 'common' state. Unless the MEU is technilogically stagnent, then the face of the Galaxy should look very, very different from what we have in ME  1 - 3; even moreso if one is taking the various ending scenarios with their surviving levels of technology.

Some of the more extreme versions of the whole "Set it in the future so everything is the same" ideas that I have seen; the ones that call for a sequel to take place 10,000 + years in the future; make even less sense. A story set on Earth during 10,000 B.C. is going to be very different then one set during present day.

And really, what's the point? This is why I actually hope we do get a prequel or something that takes place during the time frame of ME1-3 but separate from Shepard. If you have to contrive a way to ignore vast parts of what makes the MEU the MEU, then you might as well not bother calling it "Mass Effect." What's left if you sweep away all the galactic politics, several of the races, the vastly divergent consequences of the endings, etc.? Anything other than the fact that interstellar travel is called "mass relay jumps" instead of "warp drive" or "hyperspace"? Whoop-dee-doo.