47 réponses à ce sujet

[ElitePinecone]

They could just as easily do that in Mass Effect though, and never need to call it an alternate universe. Having two stories set in the same IP that don't cross over much isn't that difficult to do, surely.

"A multi-species team in a small freighter smuggling a Prothean artifact across the galaxy and on the run from ruthless mercs in 2170" can be made to have nothing to do with Shepard, the Reapers or any of the characters we ever met in ME/ME2/ME3... and that doesn't need a reboot, time travel or any kind of alternate universe.

Ditto for, say, "an Alliance agent mopping up geth in 2183 who stumbles across a deactivated Mass Relay". "A merc bounty hunter with a tortured past turns up on Omega in 2168". "A survivor of Eden Prime sets out to make their fortune in space, and finds more than they ever bargained for."

[ImaginaryMatter]

The problem with a side story is that I doubt BioWare can or will tell a story that doesn't have a large-scale, epic level conflict which doesn't seem doable in a side story without retcons or making the whole thing seem very contrived... or Catalyst forbid more Cerberus.

[Khavos]

There's not a chance they actually divorce the next however many games completely from the trilogy, though. They have too many fans that just want to play the same Shepard story over and over and over again, with different Reaper stand-ins. They'll do what they always do, and mark my words, we'll be getting Garrus and Tali'zorah cameos aplenty, more's the pity.

[Iakus]

ElitePinecone wrote...

They could just as easily do that in Mass Effect though, and never need to call it an alternate universe. Having two stories set in the same IP that don't cross over much isn't that difficult to do, surely.

"A multi-species team in a small freighter smuggling a Prothean artifact across the galaxy and on the run from ruthless mercs in 2170" can be made to have nothing to do with Shepard, the Reapers or any of the characters we ever met in ME/ME2/ME3... and that doesn't need a reboot, time travel or any kind of alternate universe.

Ditto for, say, "an Alliance agent mopping up geth in 2183 who stumbles across a deactivated Mass Relay". "A merc bounty hunter with a tortured past turns up on Omega in 2168". "A survivor of Eden Prime sets out to make their fortune in space, and finds more than they ever bargained for."

Except this isn't the direction the audience as a whole wants to go in, whether or not such stories can be told.  The IP will suffer.

Essentially, it means we've read the last page of the story first.  Maybe if we liked where it ended up, people would be more receptive to prequels.  But knowing what's to come for these people...

[CronoDragoon]

iakus wrote...
Well, Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights take palce in the same setting (Faerun in the Forgotten Realms) but have absolutely nothing to do with each other.  And might as well be different universes.  SO it's not like there's no precedent.

Eh, huge difference between "might as well be" and "are" for me.

The best example is Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy Tactics. Both take place in the universe known as "Ivalice" but Matsuno said they aren't a part of the same timeline. To me this negated the best part about FF12's story, which is that the summons that you free from their seals and use in battle are the demons secretly controlling the political world of Ivalice in Tactics (they have the same name and design). Instead of an interesting history, it was instead merely fan service.

[ElitePinecone]

Han Shot First wrote...
The fans on the whole want a sequel.

It's probably worth pointing out that we have no real way of knowing what the fans "as a whole" want, and using language like this is unhelpful. If you look at the sort of people that hang around on forums a year after launch and reply to dev posts on Twitter, you're going to find the tiny minority of super-obsessive people. 

That doesn't mean that those opinions should be discounted, but there are literally probably millions of people whose desires would be missed if you took the views of people who care about the game after a year as representative of the fanbase as a whole. 

[Khavos]

iakus wrote...

ElitePinecone wrote...

They could just as easily do that in Mass Effect though, and never need to call it an alternate universe. Having two stories set in the same IP that don't cross over much isn't that difficult to do, surely.

"A multi-species team in a small freighter smuggling a Prothean artifact across the galaxy and on the run from ruthless mercs in 2170" can be made to have nothing to do with Shepard, the Reapers or any of the characters we ever met in ME/ME2/ME3... and that doesn't need a reboot, time travel or any kind of alternate universe.

Ditto for, say, "an Alliance agent mopping up geth in 2183 who stumbles across a deactivated Mass Relay". "A merc bounty hunter with a tortured past turns up on Omega in 2168". "A survivor of Eden Prime sets out to make their fortune in space, and finds more than they ever bargained for."

Except this isn't the direction the audience as a whole wants to go in, whether or not such stories can be told.  The IP will suffer.

Essentially, it means we've read the last page of the story first.  Maybe if we liked where it ended up, people would be more receptive to prequels.  But knowing what's to come for these people...

Hopefully they've lost faith in their audience as a whole, then.  Know what happens when you try to link every story you tell to the same core group of characters?  The Star Wars Expanded Universe happens, that's what.  Hell, the prequel trilogy happens, for that matter.

They've got a universe of possibilities.  Hopefully they use it.  My fervent hope is that they set the next game so far in the future that nobody remembers who the heck Shepard was, or else well before the events of ME1 so that who he is doesn't matter.  The Shepard story's been told.  It's over.  Looting its corpse to cobble together some Frankenstein monster out of the remains guarantees inferiority.  

[Iakus]

Khavos wrote...

Hopefully they've lost faith in their audience as a whole, then.  Know what happens when you try to link every story you tell to the same core group of characters?  The Star Wars Expanded Universe happens, that's what.  Hell, the prequel trilogy happens, for that matter.

They've got a universe of possibilities.  Hopefully they use it.  My fervent hope is that they set the next game so far in the future that nobody remembers who the heck Shepard was, or else well before the events of ME1 so that who he is doesn't matter.  The Shepard story's been told.  It's over.  Looting its corpse to cobble together some Frankenstein monster out of the remains guarantees inferiority.  

Setting things that far in the future would either show the Mass Effect galaxy has totally stagnated, or would be so unrecognizably different it may as well be a new IP.

THis is why I suggest jettisoning the entire Shepard stroyline and start from scratch in an AU.  Same setting, same species, same tech.  But the trilogy either never happened, or is treated so vaguely that no details are ever brought up or acknowledged.

[ElitePinecone]

iakus wrote...
the audience as a whole wants to go in,

Again, just pointing out that this actually isn't true. We don't know what the audience as a whole wants to do, because nobody's gone out and done statistically worthwhile polling of everyone who bought Mass Effect.

The best thing we can do is express our opinions as individuals - claiming the authority to gauge the views of the entire fanbase doesn't add legitimacy to any points here. It's tempting to extrapolate the views of a tiny, unrepresentative, self-selecting sample to the entire fanbase and assume that there's a unanimous opinion out there, but at the end of the day that would be misguided - and misleading.

[Mcfly616]

Good. Set it within the current timeline. Plenty of story potential still to fulfill.

[CosmicGnosis]

No matter what they do, people will complain and declare the death of the franchise.

[Iakus]

ElitePinecone wrote...

iakus wrote...
the audience as a whole wants to go in,

Again, just pointing out that this actually isn't true. We don't know what the audience as a whole wants to do, because nobody's gone out and done statistically worthwhile polling of everyone who bought Mass Effect.

The best thing we can do is express our opinions as individuals - claiming the authority to gauge the views of the entire fanbase doesn't add legitimacy to any points here. It's tempting to extrapolate the views of a tiny, unrepresentative, self-selecting sample to the entire fanbase and assume that there's a unanimous opinion out there, but at the end of the day that would be misguided - and misleading.

Okay, the general expression of "individuals who go out of their way to make their opinions known" seem to want a sequel.

What the secret spreadsheets say is anyone's guess

[ElitePinecone]

Sorry, I just have a sort of Pavlovian reaction to "everyone thinks X" when the data isn't really worth anything. It's one of the reasons they seem to have scrapped Polls on the BSN, which I think is a good thing.

(That's not to say the opinions people gave aren't valid, but they're best thought of as a collection of individual people, and not representative of any larger whole.)

CosmicGnosis wrote...

No matter what they do, people will complain and declare the death of the franchise.

This is true. I think the intention might be to wait until what they have to show is good enough to convince some of those doubters, although for a portion of people it seems the timeline issue alone is enough to be a dealbreaker either way.

Do people think that if ME3 had ended differently, there'd be less hostility to the idea of a new game set before Shepard's trilogy? Or would the demand just be to endlessly continue Shepard's story in future games?

[CronoDragoon]

ElitePinecone wrote...
Do people think that if ME3 had ended differently, there'd be less hostility to the idea of a new game set before Shepard's trilogy? Or would the demand just be to endlessly continue Shepard's story in future games?

A certain percentage is always going to be averse to prequels, especially lacking some event that intrigued the playerbase in the existing trilogy. For example MGS3 was accepted because people were already interested in the rise of Big Boss. Without that there's a general feeling of a lack of progression in the universe by going backwards.

But aside from that I have no idea why people want Shepard in ME4. I absolutely do not want that because the guy deserves to live the rest of his life the way he wants, not be at the center of another ****storm.

[Excella Gionne]

I would like more Shepard games should time allow, but I don't think I'd want anything involving Shepard's universe anymore if it's not about Shepard.

[SwobyJ]

Good thing we're done with Shepard's universe then.

[DoomsdayDevice]

SwobyJ wrote...

I agree with him. Post-ME3 is peace in the MEU. Good times. It's pretty set.


EDIT: Yes really. This is perfectly fitting with my views and ideas. Just takes some imagination


Look up what mass effect means. As in, the definition.

I'll be damned if I know what you're talking about, Swobes.

No, seriously, I have no idea what you're thinking.

Traumatic brain injury?

LOL

Modifié par DoomsdayDevice, 06 février 2014 - 09:52 .

[SwobyJ]

DoomsdayDevice wrote...

SwobyJ wrote...

I agree with him. Post-ME3 is peace in the MEU. Good times. It's pretty set.


EDIT: Yes really. This is perfectly fitting with my views and ideas. Just takes some imagination


Look up what mass effect means. As in, the definition.

I'll be damned if I know what you're talking about, Swobes.

No, seriously, I have no idea what you're thinking.
Traumatic brain injury?
LOL

haha hi

I guess since you read my stuff on the other forum now, you know.

Mass Effect has ended (or at least Shepard's trilogy; it depends on the name of the next game) in peace because all of these people and civilizations are preserved forever

Or for a while. I dunno what the next game will be exactly. But you get the drift now. Synthesis really is an imposed peace. Control really is an imposed order. Destroy really is an imposed chaos. Just how those Reapers do it. lol



EDIT: Oh but the 'Normandy' is 'crashed' on a 'jungle planet' to vacation for a while, on the edges of the 'colored wave'. They have their own deal to take care of

Modifié par SwobyJ, 08 février 2014 - 01:06 .

[Iakus]

ElitePinecone wrote...

Do people think that if ME3 had ended differently, there'd be less hostility to the idea of a new game set before Shepard's trilogy? Or would the demand just be to endlessly continue Shepard's story in future games?

Oh, I'm sure there would be disappointment in not getting to play Shepard again.  Heck, there's still disappointment out there at not being able to play the Warden again in Dragon Age.

But the endings are a cloud over the entire franchise.  Even two years later.  I strongly suspect part of the desire for a sequel is so that the next protagonist can somehow "fix" things and create the resolution ME3, even EC, failed to deliver.

By going backwards in time, though, we are just avoiding  the issue.  The cloud is still there, overshadowing the story.  It will still be understood that no matter what this new protagonist does, the path will still lead to Shepard and RGB.  Nothing can avoid that.

Not to say that it can't be done.  Deus Ex: Human Revolution was still a fine game despite Invisible War.  But it's a tricky thing to handle.  And the audience may not yet be receptive enough to give Bioware that chance.

[hiraeth]

StreetMagic wrote...

ElitePinecone wrote...

Do people think that if ME3 had ended differently, there'd be less hostility to the idea of a new game set before Shepard's trilogy? Or would the demand just be to endlessly continue Shepard's story in future games?

I think prequels are lame in principle. Kind of defeats the purpose of what Mass Effect partly means (y'know, creating a massive effect on the galaxy). It could be fun still but if it's just a side story or some fairly ineffectual story, then it may as well not be called "Mass Effect". If that's the case, might as well just move away entirely and make a different IP. Making games cost too much to waste on fluff like this.

I agree. Maybe if the endings were different (i.e., not so horrifying), I'd be more OK with playing a non-Shepard story earlier in the time line. But as it stands now, I can't imagine they'd be even remotely successful with a prequel where ultimately you end up in front of the "Catalyst" anyway. Seems like what's left is either AU/other IP or sequel where they completely ignore Shepard's story (which, as many have said, may as well be an AU/other IP).

[George Costanza]

They just shouldn't be making another game. When you've got a trilogy with a clear ending - and like it or not, Mass Effect 3 does have an ending for the series, anything that comes after will feel tacked on and superfluous.