This thread has been good to me.
A dismissive or skeptical attitude towards the Control and Synthesis choices and the slides that were added in the Extended Cut hardly constitutes a "hole in the argument".
We use our experiences during the Mass Effect trilogy, the lessons we have learned over the course of the games and our knowledge of the universe and lore to make our decision. Less than three minutes before meeting the Catalyst, Shepard was referring to the idea of "Control" as a potentially disasterous pipe dream. Shepard was arguing that we should not risk the future of the human race - let alone the Galaxy - on such a pipe dream, given what we know about the Reapers and their methods.
A couple of minutes of perfunctory exposition, circular logic and vague assurances later, and suddenly it becomes a good idea? I think not.
You can be dismissive and skeptical all you want, but reality remains unchanged. One can choose not to believe that holding back forces from Sovereign will win the battle of the Citadel, or choose not to believe that the geth will not be enslaved by the Reapers again uploading the Reaper code, but it wouldn't make them less wrong in their beliefs, no matter how "sound" their reasons may be. So it is with IT: it only "makes more sense" if you reductio ad absurdum all the things that stand against it...
... at which point, it doesn't make more sense than accepting reality.
The same rationale can be applied to Synthesis; we have seen a union of flesh and steel in the Mass Effect universe many times before. It never ended well.
It's times like these when I think of all IT'ers who claim to know this better than I, and laugh.
Sorry, but you are flat-out wrong on this. We have seen a union of flesh and steel end just fine several times: Shepard, Garrus, Kasumi, Grunt, biotics, the whole damn quarian race (envirosuits contain cybernetic implants). I'm sure there are a few others I'm forgetting. Hell, even the failure at Overlord can be salvaged if you give Gavin Archer another shot; you get data that becomes war-assets, and again when you consider that Legion used the information learned there to help enter Shepard into the geth consensus and thereby save lives in the war over Rannoch. There's really only one failure of said union, and that's the Reapers.
It's for this reason that IT should really can it with this whole "paying attention"-nonsense. All they've paid attention to is that which supports their own narrow agenda, courtesy: confirmation-bias, negativity-bias, and selective-memory.
So the ending slides added in the Extended Cut seem (emphasis on seem) to show that it all works out in the end. So what? Does Shepard know this at the time he/she is required to actually MAKE the decision? No. Which means that the "evidence" of "positive outcomes" in the Extended Cut ending slides are entirely irrelevant when it comes to actually making that decision.
You keep saying this and it is such a crock of s***!!!!
Well, two can play that game: .... Does Shepard know that shooting some random pipe is going to activate the Crucible's destroy function, and that it will all work out as planned, rather than him actually setting off an explosive container that sabotages the device entirely? No. Which means that the "evidence" of "destroyed Reapers" in the ending is entirely irrelevant when it comes to actually making that decision (because you didn't know for fact that it was going to turn out that way without accepting the required degree of face-value).
^ See, I can do it too. I can deny the viability of Destroy endlessly against all empirical evidence. IT only withholds this scrutiny from that particular choice because it's its followers' favorite ending, and conveniently believed to be the only right one.
At some point, the pedantry has to end and people need to see this thing for what it is. We do not dispute the minor workings behind everything in the game and accept that what's shown is truth, because otherwise, the story doesn't frickin work!! Otherwise, how am I to know that playing through the trilogy will only end with Shepard waking up in the med-bay of the Normandy SR1 after Eden Prime with the almost universally-hated "Surprise! None of that was real, you were just dreaming!"-ending, because they never explicitly said that Shepard recovered and the first wake-up scene was just a hoax? If I cannot trust the simple storytelling in these games, why is playing them worth my time? If I get a choice to do something (say, the fate of the geth Heretic Station), only for it to be later revealed that only one or no option is viable in moving the story forward (say, only re-write works, because the bomb to destroy the place is inconveniently fused for some reason), then what's the point of giving us choice? How can I ever trust that I have choice when I'm given it?
Violating this implicit trust is not brilliance. It's stupidity. Better that the villains win out.
But don't believe for one second that they show absolutely everything, or that they rule anything out. You have CHOICE, remember? More than you know.
And yet, much less than some believe.
Retour en haut
