229 réponses à ce sujet

[CosmicGnosis]

Did you want the Reapers to have a "noble" purpose? That is, did you want the ultimate goal of the Reapers to be something "good", but the problem was their misguided method of solving it?

 

Or did you want the Reapers to have no purpose? Did you want them to be straightforward monsters with no compelling reason for doing what they did?

 

Or did you want the Reapers to have a purpose, but have it forever remain a secret? Perhaps a few hints as to what their goal was, but only enough to prevent them from being simple monsters?

[Hello!I'mTheDoctor]

No.

 

I want their purpose to be something to be something for which a gamer could have no clear answer to as whether it was virtuous or devious. I wanted their goal to be based off of blue-and-orange-morality, based on an entirely alien sense of logic and morality. There's a lot more to inscrutability than being something to terrifying or unknowable. 

 

Maybe the Reapers want to destroy the galaxy because you only bake Shepard's Pie on Tuesdays.

 

It makes sense, if you're a Reaper.

[KaiserShep]

I'd prefer the vague purpose route myself. I think some answers are probably not worth the bother.

[ImaginaryMatter]

Probably vague since they were introduced as being inscrutable. I also think "noble" from an organic perspective went out the window as soon as Sovereign spoke.

[Vortex13]

Seeing as how the Reapers where at their strongest (IMHO) when they borrowed extensively from the Cthulhu mythos I would have preferred that their motivations remain alien.

[Obadiah]

I think it would have been better if we found out the Reaper's purpose AFTER destroying them - and come to some grim existential realization that they were necessary as they died before us. Hmmm... maybe some of us got part of that with Destroy.

I always liked that ending of the movie The Prestige - where the two rivals have their final confrontation, and even in each other's victory or loss, become aware of what was REALLY going.

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

They had a noble purpose. Preservation of organic life at all costs. There was no war, only the harvest. And now, you as Commander Shepard fight them and destroy harvested species in their ships. You are the one wasting lives. There was no reason for the war. We could have just stood and waited to be harvested. No struggle was necessary. There was a realm so far beyond our own that we could not even imagine. Yet we fought against it. We fought against becoming enlightened. We murdered all those wonderful creatures. Was surrender not preferable to extinction? Imagine the number of destroyers they could have made in addition to the capital ship if we had only just surrendered.

 

So we were playing the bad guys. The Catalyst was the good guy. Right? Right?

 

The reapers will do what the protheans did for us 1000 fold, but only if we can harness their ability to control. I know for a fact that the Crucible will allow me to control the Reapers.

[dreamgazer]

Probably vague since they were introduced as being inscrutable. I also think "noble" from an organic perspective went out the window as soon as Sovereign spoke.

 
Tell that to Drew and his dark energy concept. 
 
At least the Reapers' motives could be viewed as debatable, warped, and ultimately able to be rejected the way they are in ME3.

[cap and gown]

The Reapers were a flawed concept right from the beginning when the writers decided to import a fantasy mind-set into a sci-fi setting. Mythical beings can do whatever they do because they are what they are. But that just doesn't work so well in a sci-fi setting. The writers should have determined their purpose right from the beginning instead of leaving it to later writers to figure out what to do with them. The Reapers represented the total lack of planning for the future you see throughout the series.

[CosmicGnosis]

I think it would have been better if we found out the Reaper's purpose AFTER destroying them - and come to some grim existential realization that they were necessary as they died before us. 

I considered making this an option, but I didn't want to blow up the thread in the first post. It doesn't help that I just saw the ending of the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes again, which somewhat encourages a cynical view of humanity.

[Inprea]

I was hoping for something along the lines such as what I've seen in some video games and animes. Effectively I was hoping that the Reapers would monitor organics and when the rate at which they consumed resources hit a certain point they'd reduce their numbers. It's been done a few times where the human population was controlled to prevent the destruction of earth or in some settings with several species to keep one species from dominating the others.

 

I forget the name but there was one game in which every species had a dragon to represent them. When one species grew too powerful though the gold dragon would show up to knock them down a few levels. Humans had been knocked down around three times I believe and the silver dragon, humanities representative, was sick of it. So it guided humanity into a war to exterminate the dwarfs, elfs, their dragons and especially the gold dragon. I empathized a bit when I looked at it from his point of view. You've nurtured three great civilizations that stood above all others and then this ****** comes and destroys your hard work. Wouldn't you be upset?

 

That's off topic though. Anyway, keeping the organics from using up all the universes resources before a way can be found to reach other galaxies seems like it'd be a good cause to me. Though if that was the case I would advocate birth control.

[DuskWanderer]

I was hoping for their purpose to be irrelevant, as Vigil said. They are trying to kill us, who cares why they are doing it. 

[ImaginaryMatter]

 
Tell that to Drew and his dark energy concept. 
 
At least the Reapers' motives could be viewed as debatable, warped, and ultimately able to be rejected the way they are in ME3.

 

Did Drew K steal your lunch money once? I didn't even bring him up.

[dreamgazer]

Did Drew K steal your lunch money once? I didn't even bring him up.

Sure you did, in a way. He's the one responsible for Sovereign's speech and the basis for the Reapers' agenda.

[HTTP 404]

yeah, fighting dark matter (AKA The Nothing)

[Dabrikishaw]

Sure you did, in a way. He's the one responsible for Sovereign's speech and the basis for the Reapers' agenda.

Wow, you must have heard this Dark Energy plot a lot of times if you reacted like that over an indirect mention of it.

[BioWareM0d13]

No.

 

I'd have been disappointed if the big reveal was that the Reapers were somehow saving the galaxy.

[dreamgazer]

Wow, you must have heard this Dark Energy plot a lot of times if you reacted like that over an indirect mention of it.

When it comes to the Reapers having "noble" goals, yeah, the original writer's take on it is one of the first things that spring to mind.

[AlanC9]

When it comes to the Reapers having "noble" goals, yeah, the original writer's take on it is one of the first things that spring to mind.

I presume your point was that Bio always intended CosmicGnosis' case 1 -- good intent, bad method.

It's pretty clear from interviews that case 3 was right out; they felt that delivering answers was expected of them.

Case 2 is impossible to reconcile with the Reapers' behavior unless they're not just monsters, but insane as well.

As for what I wanted, I would have loathed case 3. Case 2 I consider unworkable given the setup from ME1. So Case 1 is in by default.

[AlanC9]

I'd have been disappointed if the big reveal was that the Reapers were somehow saving the galaxy.

I would have been into it, I think. Finding out that we'd been playing the villain all along would have been a trip. I don't think this would have been very popular, though.

[Iakus]

I just didn't want them to have a stupid purpose.

 

Even no purpose would have been preferable.  Heck malfunctioning Berserkers made more sense.

[Jorji Costava]

Seems to me there's an obvious fourth option that's being overlooked here, which is that the Reapers have a knowable but entirely ignoble purpose: The harvest is somehow in their self-interest, and that's that. For instance, perhaps it somehow allows them to remain effectively immortal, and in their estimation, billions of organics are worth nothing in comparison to even one Reaper, so let's harvest away.

 

I've always felt that given the blueprint for the harvest established in ME1, finding some kind of 'noble' goal for the Reapers was always going to be a fool's errand. And it might make for an interesting subversion if for all of the Reaper's pretense to incomprehensibility and superiority, they are largely motivated by the same human and even petty emotions that typically move lowly organics. It's not as if having the Reapers display recognizably human character traits/flaws would be entirely out of left field; Sovereign's speech in ME1 did nothing if not establish the Reapers as a singularly hubristic foe.

 

EDIT: Fixed grammar.

[ImaginaryMatter]

Sure you did, in a way. He's the one responsible for Sovereign's speech and the basis for the Reapers' agenda.

 

That's really stretching it thin.

 

I think this is more of an issue between you and Drew K or Drew K fanboyism.

[RanetheViking]

Nope. For me they were the 'bad guy's.

 

As for their purpose, I think vague would've been better to keep you guessing.

[dreamgazer]

That's really stretching it thin.

 

I think this is more of an issue between you and Drew K or Drew K fanboyism.

 

Not at all, even though, admittedly, I do think the fanboyism is humorous. It's closer to what Alan stated:

 

I presume your point was that Bio always intended CosmicGnosis' case 1 -- good intent, bad method.

 

... along with the fact that the original writer's touted ending concept made the Reapers indisputably noble, instead of debatably noble.  The topic of this thread.

 

Don't understand why that's not relevant to your comment about what Sovereign's speech purported, or "really stretching it thin", considering Drew's the origin and very easily could have been the lead writer for the entire series.