28 réponses à ce sujet

[Ryuzetsu]

In another thread someone suggested that part of the galaxy bugged out before the most recent reaper invasion. While I don't subscribe to that theory, it did get me thinking about the possibility that an older race may have done just that. Consider the planet of Klendagon from ME1. According to the codex, the planet suffered a glancing blow from some kind of Mass Relay delivered projectile 37 million years ago, the explanation of which is not known. What if a civilization built some kind of "world ship" that they used to get out of dodge during their cycle and grazed Klendagon on their way out of the Milky Way. There, fired deep into dark space they make their way to the galaxy's edge and grow their civilization awaiting a time when the Reapers are defeated to return. And given the fact that the Protheans were what we might call less then benevolent, they may not be the friendliest sort. With potentially irked races like the Batarians and possibly the Geth they would have willing allies ready to aid their return.

This may all be to familiar, but I thought since not many people are talking ME4 particulars, I'd get the ball rolling. Besides ME " next doesn't have its own forum yet.

[Mrs_Stick]

Are you talking more about an older race in hiding (similar to what leviathan did) coming back and trying to make an empire and inslave all other races? If so that could be interesting.

[ImaginaryMatter]

I think the next enemy is going to be the Leviathans themselves. They easily fit the big and epic quota, plus for being such a big part of the lore they are noticeably absent from the conclusion of ME3. And the one that Shepard met did say they will once again rule the galactic hierarchy.

[KaiserShep]

I'd rather the Leviathan be rendered extinct unceremoniously than become a new antagonist, because really, they're just reaper lite. Aside from already looking like them, they'd operate the same way the reapers do by creating enemies for us to fight through mind control. To their credit, their motives would be far simpler, since all they could really shoot for is to establish a new empire where they can be the "apex race" again. Another potential plus is that being [presumably] free-willed beings, they can have dissenters among them that could oppose them. But in any case, I don't want any more c'thulhu type characters as the big bad.

[ImaginaryMatter]

I'd rather the Leviathan be rendered extinct unceremoniously than become a new antagonist, because really, they're just reaper lite. Aside from already looking like them, they'd operate the same way the reapers do by creating enemies for us to fight through mind control. To their credit, their motives would be far simpler, since all they could really shoot for is to establish a new empire where they can be the "apex race" again. Another potential plus is that being [presumably] free-willed beings, they can have dissenters among them that could oppose them. But in any case, I don't want any more c'thulhu type characters as the big bad.

 

I would rather have a small scale conflict, something along the line of DA2 even. But given how conflicts like the Geth/Quarian conflict, the Genophage arch, etc. were overly simplified and white washed I doubt the writers can create an engaging small scale story. Which leaves big and epic; and I think the Leviathan's fit this bill the best as the introduction of an even bigger bad than the Reapers would other wise probably come off as contrived.

 

Ideally, I would rather them let the ME Universe die in peace (pieces?) than make another title -- which at this point to me feels like a money grab. I think the coherence of the lore was broken too much as the series progressed that any future story would be building upon a broken base.

[KaiserShep]

No matter what, anything done with the Leviathan would simply be a take-over-the-world type plot, since their interest lies in leaving organic thralls intact.

[justafan]

I don't think it is too beyond possibility to think a race may have built a migrant fleet of sorts and fled known space, into the pockets of the milky way far beyond any mass relays.  However, were a species to have done so, it would have had to have been at least 50,000 years ago, and it shouldn't take any space-faring species that long to rebuild a society capable of challenging the reapers.  Then again, the Leviathans have apparently been twiddling their thumbs for over a billion years, so I guess aliens are just more patient than humans.

[grey_wind]

I think the next enemy is going to be the Leviathans themselves. They easily fit the big and epic quota, plus for being such a big part of the lore they are noticeably absent from the conclusion of ME3. And the one that Shepard met did say they will once again rule the galactic hierarchy.

As much as I don't want the Leviathans to become the new antagonists, I think they are the most likely candidates to do so.

[Big Bad]

If the next game takes place in the known galaxy, I hope the main conflict is an intergalactic political power struggle among the major surviving powers.  That and/or or some sort of conspiracy that needs to be unraveled.

[grey_wind]

If the next game takes place in the known galaxy, I hope the main conflict is an intergalactic political power struggle among the major surviving powers. 

If the writing quality is the same as ME3, we'll end up with one side being unequivocally stupid and evil while the other side will be painted as saints.

 

But if written well, a galactic civil war could be amazing.

[Illusive]

How about a hyper-advanced species that comes from a nearby galaxy? The species would be radically different from anything in the Milky Way (as a result of different evolutionary pressures), and their goals seem to be mainly exploration and colonization. The initial conflict would be about how we (Humans, Turians, Asari, Salarians, etc.) react to their arrival, investigation into whether they pose any danger and what their true intent is.

[FREEGUNNER]

I have a strange feeling it will be a prequel and have you fighting along side the illusive man before he was the illusive man.  So given the time period the "enemy" might be the turians. 

[Kabooooom]

Consider the planet of Klendagon from ME1. According to the codex, the planet suffered a glancing blow from some kind of Mass Relay delivered projectile 37 million years ago, the explanation of which is not known.

Except the explanation IS known. If you didn't play ME2, OP, it's explained there (and don't read further bc I'm about to spoil it for you).

If you did and just forgot, Cerberus tracked down and found both the mass accelerator weapon that caused the Klendagon Rift, and it's target - which it hit, and obliterated - the Derelict Reaper.


That said, your idea itself is a very good one and it is something I've thought about before. The thing is, it's not even that hard I hide from the Reapers. The relay network covers at least 1% of the Milky Way and likely not much more for sheer practicality sake. We know from the story (such as the university attempting to plot a course off the network to Ilos), that vast regions of space exist off the relay network. So, you wouldn't even have to go outside the galaxy to hide - you would just have to be committed to leaving everything behind, accepting a nomadic existence like the Quarians or finding an unexplored garden world a thousand light years away from any mass relay in any direction. And while travelling in unmapped space is inherently perilous - miscalculate an FTL trajectory and you might end up in a system with no suitable worlds to discharge your drive core - it is not impossible. Throughout the course of the cycles, surely a species has done exactly that.

[AlanC9]

The relay network covers at least 1% of the Milky Way and likely not much more for sheer practicality sake. We know from the story (such as the university attempting to plot a course off the network to Ilos), that vast regions of space exist off the relay network.

Off of the known relay network there's no route. This doesn't prove that there's no route to those parts of the galaxy via the inactive relays.

[Mcfly616]

Meh...hopefully nothing like the Reapers. In form or concept. No galaxy eating threat. Something different. A more personal foe. Or maybe some sort of primitive evil that was locked away behind a deactivated relay. (like the antagonists of Peter F Hamilton's Pandora's Star; the 'Primes' sealed within a Dyson Sphere and accidentally let out by a ship of naive explorers and scientists)

[Kabooooom]

Off of the known relay network there's no route. This doesn't prove that there's no route to those parts of the galaxy via the inactive relays.

Agreed. However, logically there MUST be vast swaths of space that are not included within the network. The Milky Way contains on a super low estimate 200 billion stars. If the number of stars included on the network either via direct links to relays or indirectly via FTL travel in the immediate neighborhood is, at minimum, 1%. Then that is 2 billion potential star systems that can be reached through direct relay travel or a couple days travel at FTL.

Once you start increasing the number of stars that the relay network actually covers much more than that, it starts to strain credulity even more than it already does.

So I think it is safe to assume that no matter how expansive the network is, which is an unknown as you pointed out, there are likely a vast number of star systems not included within it.

And the separation between individual relays is likely large as well, as we already know that primary relays can span thousands of light years. Look how long it took the Reapers to reach the closest relay after Arrival, travelling (probably) 30 ly/day.

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

How about all the Leviathans are dead? How about nothing to do with reapers? How about no "danger to the entire galaxy?" It's so cliche.

[ImaginaryMatter]

Agreed. However, logically there MUST be vast swaths of space that are not included within the network. The Milky Way contains on a super low estimate 200 billion stars. If the number of stars included on the network either via direct links to relays or indirectly via FTL travel in the immediate neighborhood is, at minimum, 1%. Then that is 2 billion potential star systems that can be reached through direct relay travel or a couple days travel at FTL.

Once you start increasing the number of stars that the relay network actually covers much more than that, it starts to strain credulity even more than it already does.

So I think it is safe to assume that no matter how expansive the network is, which is an unknown as you pointed out, there are likely a vast number of star systems not included within it.

And the separation between individual relays is likely large as well, as we already know that primary relays can span thousands of light years. Look how long it took the Reapers to reach the closest relay after Arrival, travelling (probably) 30 ly/day.

 

For the most part though the Relays seem to link to clusters, so a single Relay can cover hundreds of thousands of stars.

[shodiswe]

The weapon that damaged Klendagon was found by TIM and Cerberus, it was damged beyond repaird, as massive as the planetary gun was, it was just a massive planetary gun and he belived the civilisation that built it and killed a or a few reapers with it were rendered extinct.

Then again the Leviathans showed that it's possible to avoid the Reapers, or maybe the Reapers gave up on attacking the Leviathans, hard to tell. It's not like that one dreadnaught the Reapers sent was all the ships they had in the system. They were just probing.

It was a massive planetary defense system that did that damage to Klendagon (a bolt that missed it's target, drifted through space and eventualy hit a planet)
The Hanar who are zealous about defending their world and the "Enkindler" relics have also built a massive defense system around their world. You know the quest where an indoctrinated Hanar on the Citadel was about to send a computervirus to disable it for the Reapers.

If he suceeds, then the defences are disabled and the Hanar homeworld is invaded, if you stop him then the Hanar defences tears the reaper attack fleet to pieces. It's nothing special, it's just people who spend more money on planetary defences than anyone else. It might buy them some extra time, but it won't deliver them a victory in the longrun.

Once the Reapers sends a larger fleet they would eventualy fall. I guess the Reapers really didn't expect the Hanar orbitalsand planetary defences to still be active when they arrived.

[Kabooooom]

For the most part though the Relays seem to link to clusters, so a single Relay can cover hundreds of thousands of stars.

Yes, and in my post I accounted for that in my description about the network including star systems that are both directly (relay system - relay system) and indirectly (relay system - FTL - distant star system) linked within the network. Sorry if the wording wasn't clear.

Because of the sheer magnitude and vastness of the galaxy, it doesn't matter if a star cluster that is linked by relay contains potentially hundreds or thousands of stars that can be reached via FTL from the relay system. It's still so vast that the relay network couldn't cover every star in the entire galaxy, even excluding uninhabitable areas like the 25 kilo parsec ring around the galactic core.

Other people have pointed this out before, as an obvious potential direction that the series could take: unknown threat from unknown territory off of the network.

Edit: it's hard to fathom just how massive the galaxy is. I encourage people to fool around with the math a little bit to get an idea of the scale. Consider for a moment a relay network the covers 1% of the galaxy - 2 billion stars. Now let's say each relay in a cluster links to 100,000 stars (this is oversimplification, as we know there are often multiple secondary relays within a close area, such as Sol and Arcturus). That makes 20,000 clusters of 100,000 stars. If you did try to make the network cover the entire galaxy using this rough estimation, it would take a minimum of two million relays. (and actually many, many more as this was oversimplified. To link three separate star systems by primary relay, for example, actually requires four separate relays - two pairs).

[shodiswe]

The thign about the Relays is that they are supposed to work in pairs, they can't create massfree space between them if there arn't 2 of them. If there are two then the mass being transfered wouldn't crash into anythign at all.

Meaning it wouldn't work as a weapon. It's not designed as a weapon and would never work as one unless you use it as a bomb and blow up it's reactor and fueltanks.

[Jukaga]

New Cerberus, run by a clone of Brooks.

 

-you read it here first-

[AlanC9]

The thign about the Relays is that they are supposed to work in pairs, they can't create massfree space between them if there arn't 2 of them. If there are two then the mass being transfered wouldn't crash into anythign at all.

 

Even if it did, a massless object crashing into something wouldn't do any damage. Mass x velocity = impact. 0 x relay velocity still equals zero.

[Iakus]

SHepard is the villain.

 

Like Diablo 2, he is the Dark Wanderer driven mad by his foolishly inept attempt to stop the Reapers and ended up becoming what he fought

[Kabooooom]

Even if it did, a massless object crashing into something wouldn't do any damage. Mass x velocity = impact. 0 x relay velocity still equals zero.

And the codex seems to suggest that massless or near massless travel through a relay corridor actually lets you pass through solid objects, like neutrinos do (even though this wouldn't make sense as presumably charge would still exist). You see this when the Mako passes through the solid presidium when taking the Ilos conduit. It was always a footnote of mass effect lore that I found interesting and moderately well thought out