128 réponses à ce sujet

[Larry-3]

Technological evolution control, not population control.

Oh... yes that does make more sense. Thanks, Azarhal.

[Iakus]

I don't think it's a given that the Reapers would want to travel to another galaxy just because they were able.  They had massive resources but not infinite resources.  My impression is that synthetic intelligence is rigid and limited by a lack of creative inspiration or ambition.  They have a certain parameter and scope for their function, so I don't see them as having any reason to branch out into the next galaxy, whether or not the technology exists.

 

So what's to stop them from going to other galaxies, building a few Reapers there, get them started on their own cycle, and coming back?  

 

If they are not protecting all life, they are not living up to their mandate.  It's that very lack of parameter and scope that caused this mess to begin with.

[Spacepunk01]

Again, even a mandate as dumb as the holokid's needs to have a defined scope. "Preserve life everywhere" is nonsensical, even more so than what we currently have.

 

The Leviathans would have no reason to assume (or care about) life in other galaxies. "Dead thralls give no tribute"- well neither do hypothetical thralls you can't get to that might not even exist.

 

I never said preserve life everywhere, but I made an effort to explain that AI will always look for ways to optimize its strategy and/or technology in an effort to reduce the % chance of failure. The Leviathans, as you know, only provided the mandate. The AI were free to solve the problem however they saw fit, which is why they also turned on their creators.

[Heimdall]

So what's to stop them from going to other galaxies, building a few Reapers there, get them started on their own cycle, and coming back?

If they are not protecting all life, they are not living up to their mandate. It's that very lack of parameter and scope that caused this mess to begin with.

We don't know the exact specifics of their Mandate. The Leviathans may very well have only tasked the Catalyst to solve the issue within their sphere of influence.

If they really were mandated to save all life everywhere and were unable to travel to Andromeda , the Catalyst would have dedicated resources to developing technology to reach it a billion years ago. If they did that and there are Reapers in other galaxies, outside the range of the Crucible blast, then Shepard failed and these Reapers will soon come and finish what Starbrat started.

 

It seems only logical that the Catalyst's concerns must have been limited to the MW.

[azarhal]

See above, where that doesn't make any goddamn sense.

 

It's the classic "beware how the wish is interpreted".

Going by how it would take about ~250 years for the Reapers to reach Andromeda with their known FTL speed, that the harvest last only a few centuries and that they wait 50k years between cycles, I can see them having quite the organised trip between harvest. Especially after a billion of years of being "online".

[Reever]

I had hope, once.

 

In 2012

 

Haha, from your posts I understand where you're coming from. My advantage is I'm pretty easy to please and I'm not that critical of the whole thing.

But this being a clean slate, maybe they won't **** up that badly, so well, just wait and see =)

[Arcian]

I had hope, once.

 

In 2012

The doomsayers were right about the world ending. They were just doomsaying about the wrong world.

[NM_Che56]

Dragon Age, the 3rd IP.

 

There's some threads in Off-topic that are interesting.

 

And I like to still point and laugh at what Mass Effect has become.

Translation: To troll

[NM_Che56]

The Reapers were hyper-advanced machines. AGI (artificial general intelligence) as we know it will always look for ways to optimize its efficiency and thereby increase the chances of success. The Reapers weren't contained to the Milky Way. They had a mandate to preserve organic life. Traveling to Andromeda to expand their operations would only make sense. The more crop fields they have access to, the greater the chance for success when the harvest comes along.

 

The Reapers were so advanced that they could've made the journey to Andromeda millions of years before the events of Mass Effect. This would've expanded their operations and increased the harvesting potential. There is no way that a hyper-advances intelligence would neglect this option.

So...head canon is the answer.  

[CrutchCricket]

I never said preserve life everywhere, but I made an effort to explain that AI will always look for ways to optimize its strategy and/or technology in an effort to reduce the % chance of failure. The Leviathans, as you know, only provided the mandate. The AI were free to solve the problem however they saw fit, which is why they also turned on their creators.

It's strategy was optimized. The Reapers were perfectly suited to their task. But the mandate must necessarily include a scope with clearly defined limits. Those limits are the Milky Way.

 

It's the classic "beware how the wish is interpreted".

Going by how it would take about ~250 years for the Reapers to reach Andromeda with their known FTL speed, that the harvest last only a few centuries and that they wait 50k years between cycles, I can see them having quite the organised trip between harvest. Especially after a billion of years of being "online".

Nope. Zero sense.

 

If the Reapers did travel to Andromeda, they would only make the trip by FTL once. Once there they would create a Citadel sized relay to move between galaxies more efficiently. That also means Andromeda is linked to our galaxy via relay and thus it got RGB'd as well. Given the purpose of moving to Andromeda is to get away from the endings, I highly doubt this is the case.

[General TSAR]

Unfortunately, it looks like the space slingshots will not be returning. 

[CrutchCricket]

Unfortunately, it looks like the space slingshots will not be returning. 

Source?

[Arcian]

Source?

Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3. Mass Relays were very clearly established to be a Reaper invention, invented, built and evenly dispersed to herd primitives along the desired technological path for them to be butchered like cattle at a later date. Aside from the Citadel's partner in Dark Space, no Mass Relays exist outside of the Milky Way, and since we are going to Andromeda... no relays.

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

What do you mean? The Milky Way contains over 300 billion stars! We don't need new planets, because we haven't even explored 1% of the total star systems in the galaxy!

 

[Kabooooom]

Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3. Mass Relays were very clearly established to be a Reaper invention, invented, built and evenly dispersed to herd primitives along the desired technological path for them to be butchered like cattle at a later date. Aside from the Citadel's partner in Dark Space, no Mass Relays exist outside of the Milky Way, and since we are going to Andromeda... no relays.

Well, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because it was never explicitly stated that there are no relays in another galaxy and that the Reapers made a journey to other galaxies and constructed relay networks...doesnt mean they didn't. It would be an easy plot hand-wave.

Additionally, while the relays themselves were reaper tech, they exploited the mass effect which is a consequence of the mass effect universes physical laws. If the reapers could build a relay network, some alien species in Andromeda could too. Especially if there was no galactic extinction cycle there - thus they would have achieved technological dominance long ago, as the Leviathans did.

[Spacepunk01]

 

You would think it be possible to write around this problem. The mass relay system covered a very small area of the Milky Way, why can't they say that the synthesis process were ineffective in the unexplored regions of the galaxy? No relays there. I don't think people would be too mad about that solution. With the relay system destroyed the events of ME4 could've taken place in regions that were left completely untouched by the invasion.

[Saul Iscariot]

The more logical answer is the Fermi Paradox. ME addresses it by having dominant species wiped out every 50, 000 years. But what if the Reapers have already explored the Milky Way and realised that 99% of it is actually uninhabitable for whatever reason? I know that is speculation on my part, but we know that prior to ME 1 there were limited habitable worlds in the explored regions. There has to be a reason that other regions remain unexplored and it doesn't make sense that the reapers, at the very least, wouldn't have had a looksie.

[Spacepunk01]

The more logical answer is the Fermi Paradox. ME addresses it by having dominant species wiped out every 50, 000 years. But what if the Reapers have already explored the Milky Way and realised that 99% of it is actually uninhabitable for whatever reason? I know that is speculation on my part, but we know that prior to ME 1 there were limited habitable worlds in the explored regions. There has to be a reason that other regions remain unexplored and it doesn't make sense that the reapers, at the very least, wouldn't have had a looksie.

 

Yes, that's a valid point. However, I don't think it's statistically possible that 99% of the Milky Way is uninhabitable. I don't think it's possible for the Reapers to cover all the star systems either. That would take billions of years.

[DextroDNA]

Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3. Mass Relays were very clearly established to be a Reaper invention, invented, built and evenly dispersed to herd primitives along the desired technological path for them to be butchered like cattle at a later date. Aside from the Citadel's partner in Dark Space, no Mass Relays exist outside of the Milky Way, and since we are going to Andromeda... no relays.

All mass effect technology originated with the Reapers. Mass accelerators in guns likely came from the Reapers, so are all the guns going to just disappear? FTL drives came from the Reapers - so we just don't use spaceships? Just because the Reapers created the Mass Relays doesn't mean they have automatically have to be dismissed for the new game.

 

Who knows, maybe the Reapers even feature in this game? If you remember the leak from ages ago, one of the new races was described as being a Reaper-like golem (or something similar) and we definitely heard signature Reaper noises in the E3 trailer. The Reapers may be gone, but who knows - part of their legacy may remain in Andromeda.

[Saul Iscariot]

Spacepunk, I agree, I only raised it as a possibility. It could be explained away though. If the Reapers explored the Milky Way and sterilised every world that didn't have intelligent life, then harvested the ones they deemed fit, would make it slightly more plausible a reason. I know it is poppycock, but if it was mentioned to get to the meat and potatoes of a more pressing story I wouldn't necessarily be that bothered. 

[Arcian]

Well, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because it was never explicitly stated that there are no relays in another galaxy and that the Reapers made a journey to other galaxies and constructed relay networks...doesnt mean they didn't. It would be an easy plot hand-wave.

They weren't designed to harvest other galaxies. The Catalyst made them to prevent the Leviathans thralls from being wiped out by their machine creations. Since the Leviathan Empire only spanned the galaxy, there were no thralls to preserve outside of the galaxy and therefore no imperative to leave the galaxy.
 
 

The more logical answer is the Fermi Paradox. ME addresses it by having dominant species wiped out every 50, 000 years. But what if the Reapers have already explored the Milky Way and realised that 99% of it is actually uninhabitable for whatever reason? I know that is speculation on my part, but we know that prior to ME 1 there were limited habitable worlds in the explored regions. There has to be a reason that other regions remain unexplored and it doesn't make sense that the reapers, at the very least, wouldn't have had a looksie.

The other 99% remains unexplored because it takes an unbelievably, goddamn long time to explore an entire galaxy's worth of stars.
 
Let's say you have a spaceship with a wormhole drive that can zip from one star to another, regardless of actual distance between them, in one second.
 
If there are 300 billion stars in the Milky Way (median estimate), it would take the ship 9506 years to visit every star in the galaxy. That's one entire star system, planets and moons included, per second, and it would still take 9506 years.
 
Recent findings suggest the Milky Way is 50% larger than previously thought and that it may contain as many as 1 trillion stars. If this was the case, the spaceship would require 31688 years to fully explore the galaxy at a rate of one star system per second.
 
Now, what if the spaceship was travelling at the speed of non-Reaper FTL drives?
 
Exploring a 300 billion star galaxy would take 273,790,926 years instead of 9506.
 
And exploring a 1 trillion star galaxy would take 912,646,088 years instead of 31688.

 

This naturally doesn't account for the requirements of food, fuel and other resource requirements necessary to support an expeditionary vessel. Spaceship range is mostly determined by fuel reserves, as made evident in ME2 and ME3's galaxy exploration, so inavailability of fuel in galactic zones puts a serious damper on galactic exploration.

 

Then there's the economic motivations - no one is going to fund an expedition unless it yields some kind of result, so a lot of time will be spent evaluating potential targets from a distance using long range sensor equipment, which adds additional time and money.

All these factors combined is why 2000 years of spacefaring civilization has yet to explore even 1% of the Milky Way.

 

 

All mass effect technology originated with the Reapers. Mass accelerators in guns likely came from the Reapers, so are all the guns going to just disappear? FTL drives came from the Reapers - so we just don't use spaceships? Just because the Reapers created the Mass Relays doesn't mean they have automatically have to be dismissed for the new game.

 

Who knows, maybe the Reapers even feature in this game? If you remember the leak from ages ago, one of the new races was described as being a Reaper-like golem (or something similar) and we definitely heard signature Reaper noises in the E3 trailer. The Reapers may be gone, but who knows - part of their legacy may remain in Andromeda.

As far as I've gathered, the general consensus in this fandom is that most people are sick of the Reapers and want a story that doesn't involve large-scale galactic war and genocide, both of which are hallmarks of the Reapers.

[Itorlao]

So are we not needing Mass Relays to travel around the galaxy anymore? I can't see how there would be any Relays in Andromeda unless the Reapers built some there too. But the ship in the trailer seemed to manage just fine without a Relay.

 

Is Bioware just retconning the lore or something? The name of the game comes from what the Mass Relays do for god's sake. Are they really just throwing everything out the window and starting from scratch? I'm not going to believe that we somehow figured out how to replicate what the Mass Relays do in (at most) a couple hundred of years when the Reapers couldn't do it in millions of years.

Are you sure there are no mass relays or is it just an asumption as they were destroyed in me3? Well, remember ME1? NEar the end of the game you had to go through a miniatyre mass relay built by the protheans. Maybe they have developed a new technology based on the prothean research, or maybe they found more protheans ruins to study? Or maybe its like you say, we dont need them anymore.

Its a long time since the war on the reapers and the races that inhabbits the milky way will surely have evolved.

[CrutchCricket]

Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3. Mass Relays were very clearly established to be a Reaper invention, invented, built and evenly dispersed to herd primitives along the desired technological path for them to be butchered like cattle at a later date. Aside from the Citadel's partner in Dark Space, no Mass Relays exist outside of the Milky Way, and since we are going to Andromeda... no relays.

A child can retcon this in their sleep.

 

Ever see/read Contact?

 

Relay tech was actually communicated by an extragalactic race, Leviathans had the plans, Reapers adapted them for their purposes.

 

Next.

[N7Jamaican]

I think we could jump from system to system no problem but bioware will write a good way to explain this hopefully.

[Saul Iscariot]

Arcian, thanks for the reply. I wasn't thinking of the Milky Way in terms of the logistics of exploring the entire galaxy. We have to accept that the Reapers would have scoured the entire system otherwise there would, or could, be an organic race that develops without them monitoring it. That would be incompatible with their reason for being. For the races from our time it would indeed present a far greater challenge. But if you hypothesize that the Reapers only monitored sections of the Milky Way then you are going into an area where the whole thing falls down. My suggestion that they could have sterilized vast areas of the Milky Way is quite a weak point, just a plausible one'ish.