476 réponses à ce sujet

[Arcian]

In ME4 I want to be a space archeologist or someone who just has a ship but isn't affiliated with anyone but themselves.

Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me.

[ImaginaryMatter]

That's more a problem with the mission designers and scope of the game than Cerberus. Add it all up and they basically are speading an Infantry brigade over all of known space. Even with all the Cerberus missions we really don't see that many troopers. MP matches cannot count as canon in of themselves, as there have been literally millions of matches played. We would have to count millions of alien N7 operatives as 'canon' and that is clearly absurd.

 

My point is that presentation means a lot. Repeatedly shooting equal numbers of Cerberus and Reapers does not enforce the story elements -- it undercuts them. The thing is BioWare could have easily avoided this by just having Cerberus show up in a very few, but important locations.

 

My point in bringing up the multiplayer missions is that story wise you do have Cerberus appearing on multiple fronts (which implies ships) fighting everybody. Often their reasoning doesn't match well with the idea that they engaging in some sort of shadow war -- but rather a conventional one.

[von uber]

Cerberus are able to land substantial troops and equipment on the salarian homeworld into a top secret base during a galactic war when the salarians would have been on high alert and at a minimum have had patrolling fleets and monitoring for any activity whatsoever. It's what they are all about as a species.
Don't tell me Cerberus aren't ridiculous.

[themikefest]

For me it would've been better if the Citadel coup and Thessia missions were switched that way it would give reason for Cerberus to attack the Citadel.

[Endurium]

As a trilogy player I tend to agree with the OP.

 

Shepard's needless death at the start of ME2 is silly and amounts to very skilled necromancy with a huge helping of space magic to reanimate the lifeless corpse with Shepard's intact personality and memories. He defends himself during ME2 with "I don't work FOR Cerberus, I work WITH them, because the Alliance isn't doing anything about the Collectors." In ME3 during one conversation he basically admits to working FOR Cerberus at that time.

 

I don't mind Cerberus so much as an organization, but their use as filler trash in ME3 does get old fast. They're always showing up to slow things down, always seem to be one step ahead of a supposedly stealthy ship and crew, and I always have to wait through a cutscene for them to take their sweet time positioning an Atlas or Turret before I can shoot the damn things. Take Cerberus troops and Kai Lame out of ME3 and the game would be about 1/3 as long, but more enjoyable. I'm always happy to see Reaper forces because that's who I'm supposed to be fighting, but alas they are only around for precious few encounters.

[Jukaga]

To be fair I do like their concept much more than their execution.

[Arcian]

To be fair I do like their concept much more than their execution.

That goes for a lot of ideas in the franchise.

 

On the general whole, however, i feel like the Shadow Broker would have been a better fit than Cerberus in ME2 and ME3. The position is potentially as old as the Citadel itself. He controls an immense wealth of money and information, collected over the course of several centuries or possibly a millennia or two. As we saw in LotSB, he has his own private army and most of the galactic powers are in his pocket. More importantly, he had a much larger role in ME1 than Cerberus. Given his resources, something like the Lazarus Project and the Normandy SR2 would feel somewhat more plausible in his hands than Cerberus'.

[CronoDragoon]

That goes for a lot of ideas in the franchise.

 

On the general whole, however, i feel like the Shadow Broker would have been a better fit than Cerberus in ME2 and ME3. The position is potentially as old as the Citadel itself. He controls an immense wealth of money and information, collected over the course of several centuries or possibly a millennia or two. As we saw in LotSB, he has his own private army and most of the galactic powers are in his pocket. More importantly, he had a much larger role in ME1 than Cerberus. Given his resources, something like the Lazarus Project and the Normandy SR2 would feel somewhat more plausible in his hands than Cerberus'.

 

The only problem being the SB doesn't fulfill the same ethical role that Cerberus does in the trilogy. Cerberus' views about human dominance and such are as important as anything else about them to the story.

[ImaginaryMatter]

The only problem being the SB doesn't fulfill the same ethical role that Cerberus does in the trilogy. Cerberus' views about human dominance and such are as important as anything else about them to the story.

 

You can easily give the Shadow Broker a human angle. Like, say TIM worked for the group and eventually over threw the group and started using it's influence to advance humanity. I think that would be less contrived than the jump they made from ME1.

[Charcolt]

Working with the Shadow Broker (while admittedly lacking some of the pro-human/coexistence dilemma that Cerberus had) would have the benefit of essentially working for yourself once you take down Kechlu and put Liara (or Miranda or whoever) in charge of the network. Even without that, it does seem like a more interesting fit, and would be an opportunity for more alien crew members on the Normandy (not just squadmates).

 

I agree that calling Cerberus the Sith Empire is a hyperbole, but I think the big problem with them as a faction is that their semi-inconsistent inclusion in so many missions takes away from the development of the Reapers. If that time had been spent better developing them as antagonists, they might have made sense instead of having a billion year old supercomputer acting largely illogically.

 

TIM was indoctrinated and we got to recruit the good people in Cerberus, but I feel as though we were missing some agency in the storyline (maybe an Alliance-Cerberus choice like the Krogan-Salarian choice).

[Arcian]

The only problem being the SB doesn't fulfill the same ethical role that Cerberus does in the trilogy. Cerberus' views about human dominance and such are as important as anything else about them to the story.

While I agree that the human dominance plot has a time and place in the Mass Effect franchise, I disagree that the time and place was in the main plot. The main plot was all about the conflict with the Reapers and the challenges of the galactic species to cooperate to overcome said aforementioned threat.

[Display Name Owner]

That goes for a lot of ideas in the franchise.

 

On the general whole, however, i feel like the Shadow Broker would have been a better fit than Cerberus in ME2 and ME3. The position is potentially as old as the Citadel itself. He controls an immense wealth of money and information, collected over the course of several centuries or possibly a millennia or two. As we saw in LotSB, he has his own private army and most of the galactic powers are in his pocket. More importantly, he had a much larger role in ME1 than Cerberus. Given his resources, something like the Lazarus Project and the Normandy SR2 would feel somewhat more plausible in his hands than Cerberus'.

 

On that note, another thing that irks me is that the Shadow Broker, arguably the most powerful man in galactic civilisation, gets taken down - yes by Shepard and Liara, but only because Cerberus were the ones who caught the information that allowed them to find him. TIM is treated as a rival to the SB, but from what we see in the SB's intel centre there shouldn't even have been any competition.

 

Anyway, imo the Shadow Broker would have made a more plausible source for some of the intel TIM gives us, and he might have fixed the problem of the Crucible's out-of-nowhere-ness. If we had to actually work to uncover it by maybe following leads provided by the SB it might not have felt so ...convenient. I guess this is the thing, Cerberus and the 'humanity's place' thing took up a lot of time in the trilogy when it could all have been saved for another game and another story.

[Excella Gionne]

It's a horrible crime that femshep can't romance Miranda. I always held out hope that as it was originally planned as possible there would be buried content in there that a fan patch could release.

LOL! Unless you play around with Save Editor. I remember there was a Garrus and Miranda romance. :S

[grey_wind]

While I agree that the human dominance plot has a time and place in the Mass Effect franchise, I disagree that the time and place was in the main plot. The main plot was all about the conflict with the Reapers and the challenges of the galactic species to cooperate to overcome said aforementioned threat.

The Reapers have always been, ultimately, a framing device. The main plot that revolves around them is cliched, simplistic, and generic. What they have always been good for, however, is allowing a backdrop to examine the themes surrounding the major story arcs: cooperation vs domination, the needs of the many vs the few, synthetics  vs organics, etc etc.

 

In that sense, the human angle is very important, especially as the timeline of the game is set right after humanity has integrated into galactic society. Given humanity's dubious state of power and vulnerability at that point in time, it enhances the story to examine ideas such as humanity's capacity for both great good and great evil, and how our best traits like ambition can also quickly turn into our worst. Cerberus, in that sense, is incredibly important.

 

ME2 had the right idea. Its execution of them was alright. It could have been done a lot better.

 

ME3 had the seeds of a semi-decent idea. Its execution of them, however, was a complete disaster.

[DeathScepter]

I'm a big Cerberus supporter, and a person who can typically rationally explain and support their methods and agenda.

 

On a meta-scale however, I won't lie that they've largely become analogous to a plot tumor.

 

 

Well I like you. 

[Ieldra]

In ME4 I want to be a space archeologist or someone who just has a ship but isn't affiliated with anyone but themselves.

That would be a factor in its favor. If the protagonist is a military type again, the chances that I'll get back into ME will drop to almost zero.

[Fixers0]

That would be a factor in its favor. If the protagonist is a military type again, the chances that I'll get back into ME will drop to almost zero.

 

To a writer, a military protaganist has several advantages that makes the narrative flow better. Most importantly, you gain a degree of control on the player's movements by virtue of simply of ordering them to do so.  As such the player can be given instructions and restrictions that otherwise might give the player the feeling of contrivance.

 

Secondly It also acts as an ingame explaintion as to why the protganist is apt with the use weaponry and why he/she is able to take on lare amounts of enemy combatants. Needless to say however this is far from perfect as there is still no good logic as to why one trained soldier can take on hordes of mooks.

[Treskalterion]

I find the involvement of Cerberus okay. I think what really hurt was the creation of ME 3 as the conclusion to the Shepard-story. I agree that ME 2 (even so i liked it) felt like an intermediate: The Collector were part of the plan to prepare galaxy for Invasion but there was much space for more (Btw. I never got how the Reapers arrived so quickly in the galaxy when they should have been hindered a lot by the events in ME 1).

I would have liked to see more preparations and search for knowledge in order to stop the mighty foe. ME 3 could have been fantastic if they would have allowed themselves to let their story grow a little slower.

 

Nonetheless a lot of you people remind me of movie evenings with my brothers. They kinda made a sport out of finding all logic holes and such in action films. Well maybe you guys are more intelligent than I am, but I am pretty certain I can enjoy stories much more than u do. It is like that because I let loose more and search for the stuff that I actually like rather than the other way round.

[Arcian]

Nonetheless a lot of you people remind me of movie evenings with my brothers. They kinda made a sport out of finding all logic holes and such in action films. Well maybe you guys are more intelligent than I am, but I am pretty certain I can enjoy stories much more than u do. It is like that because I let loose more and search for the stuff that I actually like rather than the other way round.

Enjoying something doesn't necessarily mean that thing is good. Stories which hold up to scrutiny gains a kind of respectable credibility that I personally value a lot, because it means someone put in a lot of effort to make the story believable.

 

That effort did not exist in ME2 and ME3, because Super MAC valued the inclusion of all of his pet ideas high above the believability of the franchise. Cerberus is the biggest and most egregious of those pet ideas, and it has become an almost literal cancer in the franchise.

[dreamgazer]

 

http://masseffect.wi...fect:_Ascension

[Vortex13]

Cerberus was okay as a background, secondary faction, but now it seems like the only characters worth noting in the Mass Effect franchise are (in order of importance): 

 

• Shepard

 

• Shepard's crew

 

• Cerberus

 

• The Human Alliance

 

• The Reapers

 

• The Leviathans

 

• Everyone else

 

We don't get to see any exploits of the Turian military, or see the advances of the Salarian information gathering. At best, we get off handed remarks that vaguely talk about the other races in the form of companion dialog, or the occasional codex entry. Everything else is about humanity (primarily) and about what new and zany plots Cerberus has cooked up, or how Cerberus is secretly behind everything (secondary).  As a fan of aliens and alien elements of sci-fi; in general; and the Rachni; in particular; its annoying to see (almost) every available piece of ME cannon dominated by Cerberus.

 

The fact that even the Reapers and the Leviathans take a back seat to Cerberus is sorely disappointing.

[Jorji Costava]

I think that Cerberus should have just served as the main antagonist of ME2, and been dispensed with there. I've argued before that the Collectors weren't cutting it as villains: Not powerful enough to be effective as an impersonal, implacable menace, but also too impersonal to be effective as villains in a smaller scale, personal story; because they're so impersonal, we can't help but compare them to the Reapers, and they just come up short. It would be like if the Storm Troopers had been introduced in The Empire Strikes Back, and then the whole conflict of that movie centers around them, with only the most passing references to Vader, the Emperor and the rest of the Empire.

 

Cerberus was better-positioned to serve as an antagonist for a more personal story: Cerberus could have hurt Shepard on a personal level beyond anything the Collectors could have done (for instance, you can't be betrayed by the Collectors, but you could have been betrayed by Cerberus, and that could have been the basis for an arc with emotional stakes). Further, there's no reason why we couldn't have just left Udina as the face of pragmatic pro-human nationalism, except for the series' allergy to the idea that politicians could even be semi-competent.

[Hello!I'mTheDoctor]

I think that Cerberus should have just served as the main antagonist of ME2, and been dispensed with there. I've argued before that the Collectors weren't cutting it as villains: Not powerful enough to be effective as an impersonal, implacable menace, but also too impersonal to be effective as villains in a smaller scale, personal story; because they're so impersonal, we can't help but compare them to the Reapers, and they just come up short. It would be like if the Storm Troopers had been introduced in The Empire Strikes Back, and then the whole conflict of that movie centers around them, with only the most passing references to Vader, the Emperor and the rest of the Empire.

 

Cerberus was better-positioned to serve as an antagonist for a more personal story: Cerberus could have hurt Shepard on a personal level beyond anything the Collectors could have done (for instance, you can't be betrayed by the Collectors, but you could have been betrayed by Cerberus, and that could have been the basis for an arc with emotional stakes). Further, there's no reason why we couldn't have just left Udina as the face of pragmatic pro-human nationalism, except for the series' allergy to the idea that politicians could even be semi-competent.

 

I don't think Cerberus should have been a true antagonist, and I think we should have had the option of supporting them and being sympathetic to them. I still don't see how ME2 is the cause of their immense plot importance becoming as pervasive as it is. I wouldn't even say ME3 goes that far. ME3 is more of a symptom of what went wrong rather than what really went wrong in that aspect.

 

There isn't a lot that Cerberus could have done to make things 'personal' for my Shepard. Any betrayal would be seen as practical and irritating, but not really something that would send him over the edge. If TIM tried to betray Shepard and ended up killing Liara or the VS or causing them harm, my Shepard would hunt him down, find him, and french kiss him in gratitude.

[CronoDragoon]

While I agree that the human dominance plot has a time and place in the Mass Effect franchise, I disagree that the time and place was in the main plot. The main plot was all about the conflict with the Reapers and the challenges of the galactic species to cooperate to overcome said aforementioned threat.

 

The human dominance plot is an aspect of the focus on the tensions between humanity and the rest of the galaxy, a focus since the beginning of Mass Effect 1.

[Jorji Costava]

I don't think Cerberus should have been a true antagonist, and I think we should have had the option of supporting them and being sympathetic to them. I still don't see how ME2 is the cause of their immense plot importance becoming as pervasive as it is. I wouldn't even say ME3 goes that far. ME3 is more of a symptom of what went wrong rather than what really went wrong in that aspect.

 

There isn't a lot that Cerberus could have done to make things 'personal' for my Shepard. Any betrayal would be seen as practical and irritating, but not really something that would send him over the edge. If TIM tried to betray Shepard and ended up killing Liara or the VS or causing them harm, my Shepard would hunt him down, find him, and french kiss him in gratitude.

 

I don't think the fact that one or two players happen not to care about 90% of the characters is a reason for the writers not to attempt to provide more personal stakes for players in general. That would be like saying that the Virmire choice should have been written out because a couple of players hated both Ashley and Kaidan. As for supporting Cerberus' pro-human agenda, that's what Udina should have been for. The Collectors were second rate villains at best, and if you're going to (i) have a smaller scale story and (ii) have Cerberus play such a huge role, it makes the most sense to have them be out-and-out antagonists.

 

The human dominance plot is an aspect of the focus on the tensions between humanity and the rest of the galaxy, a focus since the beginning of Mass Effect 1.

 

Probably worth mentioning that it's ostensibly the basis for the Paragon/Renegade system, whatever we might think of that system. When I was playing through ME3 for the first time, I just assumed that the final choice of ME3, if there was going to be one, would have centered around resolving this dynamic.

 

EDIT: Removed unintentional smiley.