If they consulted "real" scientists, then they failed to a degree that's absolutely comical. They don't need to mess up biology to get an immunologically compromised race like the quarians. They don't need to completely misunderstand evolution to justify the mechanism in ME1, or antibiotics in ME2. They don't need to completely mess up chemistry to justify humans/salarians/asari from not being able to eat turian/quarian food.
Mass effect has barely more connection to science than Star Wars, which is almost complete space fantasy. About all I'm going to acknowledge is that Mass Effect was the product of someone completely ignorant of most science and with only the most elementary understanding of physics using a bunch of those terms to justify a lot of science fantasy tropes, and FTL space travel.
We're dealing with complete nonsense here. It's not about it not being "real" science. Science-fiction has to throw out some rules of physics to justify space travel, and it has to fudge with evolution to justify sapient races that are basically human in body-plan, psychology and morals (even apperance). These are the basic rules of the premise. That I acknowledge.
But there are ways to make your physics more or less of a joke, and Bioware choose to make their physics a complete joke, to the level of Han Solo's Falcon boast in ANH. The biology and chemistry are the product of total ignorance, and they didn't need to completely screw up these fields to get their plot off the ground. Same with their portrayal of AI.
I don't think I have much more to say about this. However, I don't agree that the physics in Mass Effect is a complete joke. You say it yourself, that there are ways to make your physics more or less of a joke. Mass Effect introduced some interesting concepts, while at the same time making an effort to explain how things worked. I really appreciated this aspect of ME.
Mass Effect does a much better job than Star Wars when trying to explain how things work.
I'm not sure you two have a real disagreement here. Yep, it's a video game. The science in it is mostly b.s. masquerading as science. If that bothers you then you shouldn't have even made it through ME1.
The problem is when people suddenly act bothered by the science being crap when it's always been crap.
Yep. The paradox is that those ME fans who have high standards for this stuff end up being happier with the endings. If you think ME was always silly science fantasy, the endings can't do any damage to your view of the games.
Nothing is masquerading as science. Its not like BioWare thought they could fool people into thinking this was actual science. I don't think people are bothered with the science. That doesn't make any sense, since ME is a science fiction story. I think people are simply asking for internal consistency.
There is a difference between the concept of reducing the mass of space, in an effort to achieve FTL speed, and the concept of synthesis, which is an attempt to merge the DNA of all lifeforms in one glorious firework. The idea of reducing the mass of space is born from the premiss that we can't travel through space faster than the speed of light, and they decided to take this fact into account - instead they played around with the concept of manipulating space-time, which actually has some support in scientific circles. By support I mean that it's theoretically possible to manipulate space, since space itself has substance.
Mass Effect was never all that well thought out, even back in ME1. There's numerous examples of this, such as how powerful humanity is in such a short time, the bizarre technological stagnation of all the races and how the Citadel was never fully explored.
I agree with this one. I didn't like the heavy emphasis on anthropocentrism in Mass Effect.
I'll just ignore the wish-fulfillment stuff as it makes no sense. As I've said up thread, you don't have to believe the Catalyst is lying for the endings to be terrible. This is a being who justified killing trillions of sentient beings by claiming that it was "storing them in Reaper form!" This being is certifiably insane. Its sense of priorities, morality, and the value of individual lives is so warped and twisted that even its sincere beliefs are not to be trusted. This is why, creating endings where every option is at the whim of this criminally-insane sociopath is bad writing. The solution isn't to pick "Destroy" instead of "Control". The solution is to write a better ending where one isn't forced to pick from choices hand selected by the Catalyst.
You're only expressing how things look like from the perspective of limited organic lifeforms. The AI doesn't really have a concept of insanity, only of rationality and irrationality. The AI certainly percieved organics as irrational and inferior (they were probably right). This is one of the major fears expressed by prominent intellectuals in our world today. We have no idea what a hyper-intelligent machine might be like. They will probably have priorities that seem bizarr to us, but that doesn't mean that they're wrong in any objective sense.
This is at the core of Mass Effect. How can synthetics and organics learn to coexist when they are so different by nature? Take this into consideration and the endings isn't necessarily that bad. They aren't good, but you can actually do a lot of work on your own.
I understand the problem of Shepard's choice. The AI could easily manipulate him. Why wasn't he indoctrinated.. or maybe he was? However, it's not like Shepard had much of a choice. He had to do something, even if he thought the AI was lying.
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