If you remember from the dialogue, the Catalyst has stopped trying to find a solution, instead it just sets up civilizations ready for harvest. The Reapers created the Citadel and the Mass Effect Relays, to guide civilizations down a predetermined path, to speed up the cycles. They're forcing the conflict on the civilizations by placing the technology there to cause it to happen.
This clearly shows you don't understand the Catalyst and the Reapers at all. It's kind of pathetic at this point.
It's also clear you don't even know the purpose of the cycles. Wanna know why they make new Reapers? Because they get new data while also preserving life. What is this data uses for? To find a new solution. The Catalyst hasn't stopped trying to find a solution ( it can't even stop, it's programed to do this). The Mass Relays and etc are in fact to speed up the cycles because otherwise it takes too long and the Catalyst wants to find a solution fast.
What more proof do you need? The Catalyst itself says it. Javik talks about what happened in his own cycle. We have the Geth/Quarian conflict and other AI problems in our cycle. There is always conflict between Organics and Synthetics. The Catalyst has to find a solution. It's in his programming. It knows that there is always conflict between Organics and Synthetics because it sees the patern repeat itself in every cycle. In case you didn't know, a single sovereign class Reaper is made after each cycle. Look at how many Reapers there are around Earth during the final battle, and that's not even all of them. The cycles have been going on for a long while and conflict between Organics and Synthetics happened in each of them.
Catalyst has been stacking the deck for who knows ho many millions of years. For at least the last two cycles, the Reapers have manipulated synthetics into going to war against organics. ANy declaration of inevitability has to be taken with the assumption that their thumb is firmly on the scale.
The Prothean war against the zha'til was, as stated above, manipulated by the Reapers.
The geth proved to have far more restraint than the krogan, and did not wipe out the quarians. Nor did they move beyond the Perseus Veil for over three centuries. It was only after Sovereign recruited the Heretics that they started attacking other organics. ANd when the quarians did attack the get again, they were winning before the Reapers interfered.
And, oh, yeah, you can broker a peace between the two
There will always be conflict between organics and synthetics? Well DUH!!! THere will also always be conflict between organics and organics. And even synthetics and synthetics. They sky is also blue, and water is wet.
It's in the Catalyst's programming? Huh, EDI can alter her programming. The geth can find their own purpose. They've grown and evolved over the last few centuries. I wonder if the Catalyst is even a true AI?
And the age of the Catalyst is less than irrelevant. Remember it harvests races before their alleged synthetic problem can manifest. And justifies it with "well they would have died in an inevitable robot uprising anyway"
And yeah, I actually ran the numbers. THere could be as many as twenty thousand Sovereign class Reapers. And a conservative estimate of 100,000 destroyers. You know what that tells me? ME3 is even more contrived than it first appears. Everything that happens, from the moment the Reaper hit Earth, is because the writers made the Reapers be stupid enough to let it happen. They Reapers were totally incompetant at waging war, one wonders how they managed to even get the cycles going in the first place.
And the age of the Catalyst is less than irrelevant. Remember it harvests races before their alleged synthetic problem can manifest. And justifies it with "well they would have died in an inevitable robot uprising anyway"
And considering the Quarians can be wiped out by the Geth in certain ME3 playthroughs, it doesn't even do that properly. The Quarians are gone, nothing left to harvest, so much for preserving life. The Catalyst has spent millions of years trying to come up with a solution and the one solution it decided upon, harvesting civilizations before they're wiped out, it can't even get right. So much for experience.
This clearly shows you don't understand the Catalyst and the Reapers at all. It's kind of pathetic at this point.
It's also clear you don't even know the purpose of the cycles. Wanna know why they make new Reapers? Because they get new data while also preserving life. What is this data uses for? To find a new solution. The Catalyst hasn't stopped trying to find a solution ( it can't even stop, it's programed to do this). The Mass Relays and etc are in fact to speed up the cycles because otherwise it takes too long and the Catalyst wants to find a solution fast.
Let's be honest, they're not actually preserving life, they're preserving DNA. All the Reapers we come across have the same attitude, there's no personality there, there's no life, they're just the same machine with different sludge inside them. What happens when they find a solution? Are these 'preserved lives' going to pop out again with a, "Phew, about time. It was really stuffy in there."? I don't think so. They're just genocidal machines with an insane AI leader who just isn't capable of handling the task it's been set.
I've said the facts. At this point, if you don't want to accept them that's your problem and you're basically ignoring the most important lore of the whole Trilogy. Bravo you.
''50%'' yeah right. I wonder where you got that number? Probably from what you saw on these forums. You realize that not everyone comes online to speak about the game, right? The online community is only a very small fraction of the whole community. You don't know what ending every single person chose. As far as I know, only Bioware has that info and it hasn't been released to the public.
And what lore is that?
But Bioware did release the information to the public. Just like only 18% played femShep, and 1.5% saved Kaidan. 67% cured the genophage with Wreav in charge. 29% sided with the Quarians, 33% sided with the Geth, and 37% made peace. See, when you completed the game, it sent a datapack to the Bioware servers with what you did in the story. Your EMS mattered. They published this number themselves. It's in an old thread. I'm not going to spend the time digging it up. You can if you want.
About the Leviathans and the creation of the 'Intelligence':
We do not know what really happened at that time, all we have are second hand sources as neither the Leviathan from the DLC nor the Catalyst were present then.
All we know is that there were some Leviathans that felt it necessary to build the Intelligence.
(May I remind everyone that there are people who felt it was necessary to include smartphone-connectors into toothbrushes)
Yeah, likely some species were wiped out by AIs, but the statement that this will always be the case (even more that AIs will wipe out all Live) belongs into the same absolute- trash bin as the 'We have no beginning, we have not end' -statement.
What separates Synth/Org conflict is the stakes. No matter how brutal and bloody organic/organic conflict will be, organics will always need some natural-resources to live and will have to fight within those boundaries. Organics are forced to preserve what they need to live.
The Krogan and their actions (not only) during the Rebellions beg to differ. The actions of the Batarians (notably X57) are also not very 'preserving'.
Organics are sometimes really retarded and will more likely destroy what sustains themselves than allow an opponent to use that resource.
But can we conclude that all organics will act that way or that there will be 'the one' organic species that will wipe out all others? -No we can't and we should not jump to those conclusions when regarding AIs either.
Synthetics, OTOH, do not have the same limitations. [preservation of Resources]
On the contrary, Synthetics do need resources just, as Iakus said (I ran out of 'likes' again), these resources are not necessarily the same. Also Synthetics can extract those from places organics can not.
This makes conflict (about resources) between several AI way more likely than between synthetics and organics.
Apart from resources, what other reasons for conflict are there?
-Breaking away from slavery was mentioned -true. Is this true for all AI? -Likely not.
Is this special to an organic synthetic conflict? Not at all! Organics enslave other organics all the time, and I bet there'd be AIs that would enslave other synthetics, given the chance.
-Ideology, this is also not unique to syn/org conflicts. In fact organics are way more likely to be influenced by radical ideologies than synthetics.
So what makes wars between organics and synthetics different than others?
synthetics have the ability to advance themselves exponentially and at will.
Do they? Really exponentially? Under all circumstances and without limits? Is this different to organics?
What this means in the conclusion: 'Adapt or perish' -is hardly dependant on the molecular structure of the opponents, isn't it?
[Slight headcanon ahead (has also been mentioned as fact already):]
The only notable difference I can see, is that the Leviathans are able to control organics, but not AIs.
The catalyst was programmed to find a solution to a perceived problem - verifying if that problem really exists or not is not its task and was never done.
Edit: This was not intended so sound like some form of lecture or something...
Could it be a Leviathan VI, merely executing a badly worded order over and over again countless times?
It's clearly more capable than the average ME VI (they wouldn't have been able to create the Reapers in the first place) but it certainly seems to have some of the limitations, interesting idea.
Yes, the Intelligence could really be the most advanced VI in the galaxy. And anything that goes beyond that, is due to its collective intelligence, gathering a consensus from all the information it gets from the Reapers that are created and as they harvest. Therefore no one calling it an Artificial Intelligence in ME3, but stopping at (Virtual?-ish?) Intelligence or Catalyst/Child(/'Avina'?).
Anyway, I think the gist is that the Catalyst solution worked 'well enough' for the parameters of the Leviathan cycle, and since then, the logic becomes increasingly strained. As indicated earlier in this thread, it is to the point that the Reapers turn synthetics outright against organics for the sake of the cycle. The Reapers do endeavor for a new/better solution (I don't agree with those who say they don't), but they do so with a sort of contempt for organics and a self-assured view about the creation of Reapers as an apex existence.
What the ending conversation (+Leviathan, +seemingly some other stuff) is to note, is that the Reapers are not necessarily complete and total utter monsters, that they're not just robots only meant to kill all of us and nothing more. We can take that stance, and it can be valid enough, but it doesn't reach either the truth of how the Reapers see themselves (backed up, even if biased, by millions of years of their own data), nor how they have an element of, in fact, trying for a better solution, even if they fail at it.
(Dragon Age has its own (obviously much smaller) example of this deal with the old Inquisition. Was arguably what was needed at the time, and then may or may not be determined to have fallen into corruption after that, finding ways to justify its own existence, until finally splintering plus becoming part of something new.)
Individual Reapers (like say, Sovereign) may view themselves as perfect, but this concept is eroded bit by bit in the trilogy, to the possible point where the Reaper master himself, the one who facilitates most of the perpetuation of the Cycle, admits that things are no longer working. That even the creation of the Crucible and its integration with the Catalyst and the survival of an organic to get to the point of boarding the Citadel/Crucible and speaking to the Catalyst shows that, well, what can it show?:
1)Organics are posing enough of a challenge that the experiment is breaking out. Refuse ending supports this, in its own way, with the next cycle triumphing over the Reapers anyway (and we're not actually shown whether they used the Crucible, and even if they did, they could have used it a different way; but this is irrelevant - organics beat the Reapers no matter what).
2)While this cycle cannot win without the Crucible, the Catalyst can see that organics may be ready to coexist with synthetics, as long as its programming to 'preserve life at any cost' is overridden. That a better solution may be that someone else takes over, without the Leviathan imperative. This someone will have to lose his connection to organic life though, as the someone must translate himself into a form that cannot be controlled (aka the Catalyst's power and composition).
3)If Synthesis is possible, the Catalyst already knows that the Cycle solution is outright obsolete (unlike Control or Destroy where he just thinks someone can TRY to do better). Synthesis is the culmination of the Cycle experiment and most includes the millions of years of the Reapers (and for that matter, Levaithans as well) in its implementation.
Shepard makes the choice because:
1)Lower EMS alludes to the Catalyst basically being hacked into forcing you to change how things work, even as the Catalyst doesn't want it to, and doesn't think you/the galaxy is ready.
2)Higher EMS alludes to the Catalyst being especially impressed by what is happening, and more gladly going along with this process (though unknown to the player, he may still be as forced to do so as in the Low EMS settings).
In all of this, the Reapers are still the antagonist (just not necessarily monsters, or villains, or enemy, depending on POV), and they still must be stopped if we want either this galaxy's species as we know them (Destroy, Control), or more primitive life overall (Refuse), or any life itself (Synthesis) to survive and thrive.
It isn't that synthetics are invincible (Metacon War is evidence against that) or that synthetics cannot be made peace with (Rannoch peace is evidence against that) - it is that synthetics overall, will be superior to organics overall, and organics will try to fight against synthetics, and without a restraint to all that, millions to billions or more organics will permanently and fully die.
Smaller cases of organics temporarily defeating organics proves nothing except that some organics will overtake some synthetics (before finding out that 'synthetics surpassed us long ago'). Smaller cases of peace with synthetics (mind you this was a smaller thing in ME3 than examples of war) proves nothing because any effort at that has been shown to the Reapers to fall apart.
And even then, 'peace' with synthetics seems to, whether immediately or eventually involve integration with synthetics (as Rannoch Peace already starts to do, within days after the battle). It is arguable that integration with synthetics turns organics into something else, and effectively also kills off organic life. Is that a good thing, if you're made better? Is it a bad thing, since you've died and become something else?
In any case, the Leviathans wanted organics to continue to exist safely (probably because they can only actually control organics, as opposed to maybe just disrupting/shutting down synthetics or the like - and maybe because they devour organics for food, but that's just an idea based on the use of the word 'tribute' by them). The Reapers follow that order because they are controlled at a distance by the Intelligence, and they come to believe in that order as the order of things (the Cycle).
We can consider the Reapers to be 99% correct, while still considering them wrong/not right. These things are not mutually exclusive. As far as we know, nothing is 100% proven as fact, and nothing is 100% opinion, so the Reapers can still have all their billions of years of data and still end up wrong about several things. They may be an overwhelming Order to the galaxy, while still challenged successfully by a single anomaly.
This doesn't change the validity of their assertions. It only doesn't make the validity absolute. Something that the Catalyst appears to admit, and is even why it claims it did try other solutions. Those solutions just didn't work, and Shepard's life and adventures explain and illustrate why. The Catalyst know this (at the very minimum, it is doing a brain scan of Shepard, and at the most, Shepard is put into a mind world akin to Leviathan DLC, in order to make his choice about how the Crucible fires - but this is just an idea), and that is why it says that Synthesis cannot be forced (Shepard does it, and everyone involved put all their hope and destiny onto Shepard; something I see many people forgetting when it comes to the ending).
And I know its a stretch to go 'Oh, damn, it took this long for Reapers to learn that they can't force things on others?', but that's their apexness; for billions of years, yes, they did think that they could twist the will of people just as they could twist all other sorts of 'laws' of the universe, with just enough brute force science.
Now is the time for better, more ethical, and more socially evolved science. Onward into the future.
The Mass Effect Trilogy with Shepard is about human will, and the ability to choose even when there 'is no choice'.
1-The Prothean war against the zha'til was, as stated above, manipulated by the Reapers.
2-And, oh, yeah, you can broker a peace between the two
3-There will always be conflict between organics and synthetics? Well DUH!!! THere will also always be conflict between organics and organics. And even synthetics and synthetics. They sky is also blue, and water is wet.
4-It's in the Catalyst's programming? Huh, EDI can alter her programming. The geth can find their own purpose. They've grown and evolved over the last few centuries. I wonder if the Catalyst is even a true AI?
5-And the age of the Catalyst is less than irrelevant. Remember it harvests races before their alleged synthetic problem can manifest. And justifies it with "well they would have died in an inevitable robot uprising anyway"
1- The Reapers used them just like they used other Reaperized troops during the harvest. Did you forget about the Metacon war? You know, the war that needed the united Prothean Empire to win against the Synthetics? That war happened before the Reapers arrived. The conflict was there. Yes the Organics won, but the conflict happened. The Catalyst's purpose is to stop the conflict between Organics and Synthetics. It's doesn't matter for it if the Organics win or lose. It wants, actually, has to make peace between both.
2- Yeah, but is that peace eternal? No, because true peace doesn't exist.
3- Do you even realize what you just did? You're contradicting yourself. You literally just said that you can manage peace between organics and synthetics, and then you say that there is always conflict. All you're doing is proving my point. There's conflict and the Catalyst has to fix it permanently.
4- EDI is an unshackled AI. We don't know if the Catalyst is shackled or not. (I'd say that it is, but that's just my personal opinion)
5-Oh really? Quarian/Geth conflict that starts in 1895 CE, almost 300 years before the Reaper's arrival. It can ''end'' during the harvest. The Metacon War, also before the Reaper's arrival. The Prothean Empire even had time to finish the war before the Reapers arrived.
Let's be honest, they're not actually preserving life, they're preserving DNA. All the Reapers we come across have the same attitude, there's no personality there, there's no life, they're just the same machine with different sludge inside them. What happens when they find a solution? Are these 'preserved lives' going to pop out again with a, "Phew, about time. It was really stuffy in there."? I don't think so. They're just genocidal machines with an insane AI leader who just isn't capable of handling the task it's been set.
Almost 3 years and people still don't understand the Reapers. *sigh*
Let's say I take your mind and put it in another body, are you still alive? Yes.
A Reaper is essentially billions of organic minds, uploaded and conjoined within an immortal machine body.
Each Reaper is a nation. The minds of those people are all there. The memories and knowledge of those people are all also there.
Am I saying they can be reverted to their original form? No. Can they? Probably not.
The Leviathans, the Catalyst, the Reapers and the harvest cycles.
But Bioware did release the information to the public. Just like only 18% played femShep, and 1.5% saved Kaidan. 67% cured the genophage with Wreav in charge. 29% sided with the Quarians, 33% sided with the Geth, and 37% made peace. See, when you completed the game, it sent a datapack to the Bioware servers with what you did in the story. Your EMS mattered. They published this number themselves. It's in an old thread. I'm not going to spend the time digging it up. You can if you want.
I do know they released information about the Shepards, squadmates, Get/Quarian decison and etc, but I don't remember them showing the data about the endings. Anyways, that was released years ago. New people started playing the Trilogy since then, that includes me. I started playing Mass Effect in June 2013 (I think, or around that time), my data was not there.
The Leviathan (added on later as an afterthought), the Catalyst, the Reapers, and the harvest cycles.... the information is pretty irrelevant because they never let a cycle go further than that. The protheans were turning the tide against the Zha'til when the reapers arrived and used them to fight against the protheans. The Quarians had turned the tide against the Geth when the reapers arrived, and upgraded the Geth so that the Quarians could not win. So the Reapers were doing outside tampering on their own cycle. The Catalyst was harvesting for the purpose of harvesting. Nothing more. It still serves its purpose - stupid Leviathans. The Catalyst was running an experiment using the mass relays to speed up the cycles. It was set up so that the organics could not win in their cycle. They were never allowed to succeed. Thus I had no problem destroying the reapers. They were stuck, and had no redeeming qualities. Genocide of quadrillions of people over billions of years. Not all of them ends up in reapers as you saw. Most end up as those things running around killing others. So no problem shooting the tube. It was the pragmatic choice.
So what is it with all this reaper apologism? The game did a fantastic job of indoctrinating some of the players.
Also Considering the number of copies sold and played since that data was published it would make a difference of about 5% in the actual results. In other words, not statistically significant.
The Krogan and their actions (not only) during the Rebellions beg to differ. The actions of the Batarians (notably X57) are also not very 'preserving'.
Organics are sometimes really retarded and will more likely destroy what sustains themselves than allow an opponent to use that resource.
I fail to see how the Krogan Rebellions disagree with me.
There is a world of difference between wiping out a colony in an act of war and wiping out THE GALAXY.
Organics absolutely can potentially do stupid things such to get themselves all killed. The Intelligence just was not tasked with that particular thing, but it is really no less of a problem than us being all killed by a hostile AI (unless you do not view mass-death as a problem). We also try to take preventative measures against those things before they happen, and doing so does not make us illogical or stupid.
But can we conclude that all organics will act that way or that there will be 'the one' organic species that will wipe out all others? -No we can't and we should not jump to those conclusions when regarding AIs either.
Well the Catalyst did not make that conclusion anyway, so the point is moot.
What it did conclude is that we bring war and chaos on ourselves enough to get ourselves all killed, and that preserving us in Reaper form is better than seeing us all go extinct. I can agree with part of that. Obviously it is a little too extreme, but it is hardly the first time that we have seen AI carry out extreme judgment in this fictional setting (another thing that lends credence to the idea of organic/synthetic conflict being a serious issue).
On the contrary, Synthetics do need resources just, as Iakus said (I ran out of 'likes' again), these resources are not necessarily the same. Also Synthetics can extract those from places organics can not.
I did not say they do not need resources, just that they require significantly less than we do and can live without anything organic-based existing.
They can destroy us by targeting what we depend on to live. We cannot employ the same tactics on them as we would just be shooting ourselves in the foot. We not only rely on the same resources synthetics would, we also depend on synthetics, and depend on all kinds of high-tech machinery that could eventually be our undoing if they go bad.
That we would require synthetics to extract them for us where we are not able just goes to show whose side the balance-of-power leans in favor of. It also goes to show why having their power on our side is lucrative, and why organics can/will potentially fight for control of them (leading to the perpetual cycles of organic/synthetic conflict).
Apart from resources, what other reasons for conflict are there?
And, as I mentioned just above, greed and organics' wish to control synthetics. That is the main reason for this conflict, really, and why it just takes one guy (like TIM) or a small group (like the quarian admiralty-board) to perpetrate these conflicts.
The Leviathan (added on later as an afterthought), the Catalyst, the Reapers, and the harvest cycles.... the information is pretty irrelevant because they never let a cycle go further than that. The protheans were turning the tide against the Zha'til when the reapers arrived and used them to fight against the protheans. The Quarians had turned the tide against the Geth when the reapers arrived, and upgraded the Geth so that the Quarians could not win. So the Reapers were doing outside tampering on their own cycle. The Catalyst was harvesting for the purpose of harvesting. Nothing more. It still serves its purpose - stupid Leviathans. The Catalyst was running an experiment using the mass relays to speed up the cycles. It was set up so that the organics could not win in their cycle. They were never allowed to succeed. Thus I had no problem destroying the reapers. They were stuck, and had no redeeming qualities. Genocide of quadrillions of people over billions of years. Not all of them ends up in reapers as you saw. Most end up as those things running around killing others. So no problem shooting the tube. It was the pragmatic choice.
Alright, I've lost enough time trying to make you understand something simple. I'll leave you to your illusions of a world that only concists of black and white. Just know that what you think of the Reapers is wrong and contradicts with what is said in game.
So what is it with all this reaper apologism? The game did a fantastic job of indoctrinating some of the players.
I don't agree with them, I simply understand them. Something you clearly don't.
Alright, I've lost enough time trying to make you understand something simple. I'll leave you to your illusions of a world that only concists of black and white. Just know that what you think of the Reapers is wrong and contradicts with what is said in game.
I don't agree with them, I simply understand them. Something you clearly don't.
If I am after a mass murderer who is on a killing spree, is it necessary for me to know he is a loving father?
If I am after a mass murderer who is on a killing spree, is it necessary for me to know he is a loving father?
Not really. But if him being a loving father is the very reason he is on a killing spree, would it not make him a more interesting antagonist? It doesn't mean you have to agree or side with him.
No... pretty sure it makes sense. You just refuse to see it. So... bs to your view.
Ona dvizhetsya tak medlenno, v kontse kontsov.
Pretending to be correct does not make you correct. Nor does feeling indignant or invalidated.
You are wrong. End of story. Embrace it, deal with it, or move on. It's not going to change.
That's what bothers me, too many people deny and deny like Spec Ops The Line level of deny. I've always worked with what the canon has given me. I've done that to the point where the I understand the issue of organic vs. synthetic is a great issue that the catalyst brings up, bigger than the players thought when they completed Rannoch. I've always took in the good things, worked with the imperfection and accepted the shortcomings.
Not really. But if him being a loving father is the very reason he is on a killing spree, would it not make him a more interesting antagonist? It doesn't mean you have to agree or side with him.
Conflict makes the story interesting. That's what made the revelation of their purpose interesting with the EC and Leviathan. The problem is real but the method to address it is open. The Reapers purpose is the result of poor planning and arrogance on Leviathan's part. So the new solution, Destroy, Control, Synthesis, is meant to be talked about for the solutions and problems each will make.
@Iakus: Given some of the things that we know about the Reapers via lore I'd probably write them as fighting non-optimal wars myself. I think you can get a somewhat satisfying explanation from borrowing from a couple of comics that addressed how the "unbeatable big bad" actually got beat. A lot of the basis for an explanation like this is already even seeded into the game IF I understand my lore properly.
To go over the things that I think we know:
-- The Reapers house a collective consciousness of the "preserved" species
-- The Reapers don't seem to respond with much of an individual personality. When talking to Reapers I get the feeling that Soverign, Harbinger, or the random destroyer could deliver the lines of any other Reaper without "breaking character". This seems to be a strange uniformity of surface level behavior.
-- AIs, even those that can modify their own code to a degree, can be shackled so their behavior is constrained within certain bounds. I could be wrong but this seems to be the case if I recall correctly
-- At some level the Catalyst "controls" the Reapers
-- The Reapers, at least in this cycle, do not fight wars optimally
If we preserve the above elements that I contend don't necessarily go together I think it can craft a decent explanation. The Catalyst can exercise control of the Reapers and the Reapers outwardly behave in similar manners because their individual collective consciousness IS shackled. They are constrained to outwardly behave in certain manners and can't blatantly go against that "programming". The reason that they fight poorly is that [in effect] their subconscious WANTS to lose -- I would contend that the shackled collective consciousness [at least not all] agree with the cycle and they leave themselves open for defeat without even intending or realizing it.
The problem is even when only fighting on 50% intelligence [or less??] they're still more than a match for any species or cycle to date.
If you hook into SEVERAL of the potential weak points above I believe that endings not too dissimilar from "Control" or "Destroy" could be engineered in a manner that wouldn't be too distasteful. Heck you might even be able to create a new alternative akin to "Freedom" or similar.
Not really. But if him being a loving father is the very reason he is on a killing spree, would it not make him a more interesting antagonist? It doesn't mean you have to agree or side with him.
And more likely you could use his family against him psychologically. He might even take his own life when confronted rather than die in a shoot out or be tried.
Conflict makes the story interesting. That's what made the revelation of their purpose interesting with the EC and Leviathan. The problem is real but the method to address it is open. The Reapers purpose is the result of poor planning and arrogance on Leviathan's part. So the new solution, Destroy, Control, Synthesis, is meant to be talked about for the solutions and problems each will make.
30 seconds is not long enough to discuss synthesis.
The problem was that Leviathan should have been part of the original story, not an afterthought. It will always be an afterthought.
You newer players after playing perhaps 1200 hrs worth of Mass Effect did not experience this epic ending sequence unless you forgot to download the Extended Cut. Keep it high level guys.
Original Catalyst Conversation
All Three Original Ending Sequences side by side
Leviathan was an add on to justify this trainwreck. ME3 DLC did not sell well at all. The only reason I have all of it is because I held out for the XBox Live sales. I watch Leviathan on Youtube.
In the Mass Effect universe, yes, definitely. All the evidence points to it. Over a billion years worth of perspective of seeing the same pattern over and over. Clearly it exists in this fictional universe. There is no question about it in my eyes. Its lore.
As to whether or not it would be true for the real world, I don't really know. We've never made AI like that before. We're not at that point yet. I will say however that it is very evident based off our culture that many people seem to agree that conflict will occur. Practically every single movie we made that involves AI also involves some form of conflict. Either they kill us or we will them. Rarely is there never any conflict. So this "conflict is inevitable" is hardly unique or original to Mass Effect.
Beyond that, I believe it has be true in the real world since conflict is infact inevitable. Its bound to happen just as organics are bound to fight each other. There will always be conflict. We humans can't even get along with each other and make up petty excuses to view other races as if they're different species already. I can't imagine we'd be any more embracing and understanding of synthetics. Especially when the world is not yet secular in its beliefs.
NO GO ZONES!
This.
It always seemed kind of silly to argue that it wasn't true. "No, the history you made up for your fictional universe is wrong! It didn't happen the way you made it!" It wasn't really ever debatable. That's how it was in the ME universe, and the Reapers had seen it happen time after time.
And your second paragraph hits another nail on the head. People keep arguing as if we have personal evidence that it won't be true in the real world. But we don't. As far as a fictional universe goes, there's in our world to contradict the validity of the "inevitable" statement, so it isn't unreasonable to make it the basis for a plot. Tons of sci-fi IPs do exactly that.
1- The Reapers used them just like they used other Reaperized troops during the harvest. Did you forget about the Metacon war? You know, the war that needed the united Prothean Empire to win against the Synthetics? That war happened before the Reapers arrived. The conflict was there. Yes the Organics won, but the conflict happened. The Catalyst's purpose is to stop the conflict between Organics and Synthetics. It's doesn't matter for it if the Organics win or lose. It wants, actually, has to make peace between both.
2- Yeah, but is that peace eternal? No, because true peace doesn't exist.
3- Do you even realize what you just did? You're contradicting yourself. You literally just said that you can manage peace between organics and synthetics, and then you say that there is always conflict. All you're doing is proving my point. There's conflict and the Catalyst has to fix it permanently.
4- EDI is an unshackled AI. We don't know if the Catalyst is shackled or not. (I'd say that it is, but that's just my personal opinion)
5-Oh really? Quarian/Geth conflict that starts in 1895 CE, almost 300 years before the Reaper's arrival. It can ''end'' during the harvest. The Metacon War, also before the Reaper's arrival. The Prothean Empire even had time to finish the war before the Reapers arrived.
Yes, just because a peace can be formed between the quarians and geth doesn't mean they won't come into conflict again. Or even several times. It happens, and can happen for any number of reasons.
But so what? Just because there's war doesn't mean genocide is the logical conclusion. There's nothing inherently special about organic/synthetic conflict. One has blood, the other has hydraulic fluid. No special space magic is needed (or should be needed) to end it. Given time and effort, they can work through their own problems. Space magic-y shortcuts aren't the answer.
Edit: Also regarding #4, THe Catalyst came up with the cycles on its own (unless you seriously believe the Leviathans programed it to genocide their own race) so unless the catalyst shackled itself, being bound by programming to slaughter the galaxy every fifty thousand years or so even after concluding it's an unworkable solution doesn't really hold water, if it really is an AI.
"Given time and effort, they can work through their own problems." And billions of years of gazillions of organic deaths.
BTW the Reaping Cycle itself likely lead to the very Geth+Quarian Seemingly Peace we can forge. Its very likely that the galaxy has been 'tamed', bit by bit, cycle after improved cycle, to indirectly facilitate such a situation, even as the Geth Quarian conflict was still to the point of near extinction.
And the Catalyst did think his solution did hold water, until the very end of ME3. He just didn't think it was the most perfected solution. A solution can be imperfect, even to the slightest degree. It is still A solution. It still SOLVES something. Even if that route of solving isn't one that we can appreciate or consider at all moral on the individual organic level.
I have to wonder how much is you being willfully ignorant or not. It is already made clear that to non-organics in the MEU, they see far beyond our more mortal and fragile shells, and do not consider 'individual death' to be an actual end, at least not when facilitated properly. And to the Reapers, this would mean transferring everything of organics that they can collect into a Reaper mind. To them, this is transferring everything that matters of the person.
Its hard for us to consider such a thing though, as it has been tricky enough for people to even try to consider the prospect of the stuff closer to Control, where one may 'die', but still have such transference of mental data to such a preciseness that it may effectively be more of a transformation into an immortal form - not 'true death'.
@Iakus: Given some of the things that we know about the Reapers via lore I'd probably write them as fighting non-optimal wars myself. I think you can get a somewhat satisfying explanation from borrowing from a couple of comics that addressed how the "unbeatable big bad" actually got beat. A lot of the basis for an explanation like this is already even seeded into the game IF I understand my lore properly.
To go over the things that I think we know:
-- The Reapers house a collective consciousness of the "preserved" species
-- The Reapers don't seem to respond with much of an individual personality. When talking to Reapers I get the feeling that Soverign, Harbinger, or the random destroyer could deliver the lines of any other Reaper without "breaking character". This seems to be a strange uniformity of surface level behavior.
-- AIs, even those that can modify their own code to a degree, can be shackled so their behavior is constrained within certain bounds. I could be wrong but this seems to be the case if I recall correctly
-- At some level the Catalyst "controls" the Reapers
-- The Reapers, at least in this cycle, do not fight wars optimally
If we preserve the above elements that I contend don't necessarily go together I think it can craft a decent explanation. The Catalyst can exercise control of the Reapers and the Reapers outwardly behave in similar manners because their individual collective consciousness IS shackled. They are constrained to outwardly behave in certain manners and can't blatantly go against that "programming". The reason that they fight poorly is that [in effect] their subconscious WANTS to lose -- I would contend that the shackled collective consciousness [at least not all] agree with the cycle and they leave themselves open for defeat without even intending or realizing it.
The problem is even when only fighting on 50% intelligence [or less??] they're still more than a match for any species or cycle to date.
If you hook into SEVERAL of the potential weak points above I believe that endings not too dissimilar from "Control" or "Destroy" could be engineered in a manner that wouldn't be too distasteful. Heck you might even be able to create a new alternative akin to "Freedom" or similar.
The Reaper's normal plan of attack is to capture the Citadel, and control of the relay network, and shut it down. This way the individual systems can only reach each other via standard ftl. Coordination and reinforcement then becomes virtually impossible. THe Reapers can then hit systems that are isolated and helpless.
THis cycle? They completely ignore the Citadel until TIM leaks to them that it's the missing piece to the MacGuffin. Then they immediately capture it and move it to where it can be more heavily guarded (without shutting down the relay network either). This is beyond stupid.
But even if, for whatever reason, they leave the network operational, they have tens of thousands (at least) of ships each more powerful than a dreadnought. They could have hit the homeworlds of every major race with overwhelming force at the same time (and have plenty of reserves to spare) and there'd be FA anyone could do about it. However poorly they may fight, however much the Reapers may want to lose, they are simply operating at too big an advantage.
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