Honestly I don't think it's an entirely unfair stance to take. Just me, personally, I see the potential for more stories to be told here.
Does Shepard make space magic fly around and destroy all the Reapers? No. The Catalyst does. There's no conflict, there's no struggle, there's no fight, there's no standing up to the impossible, doing what Shep had done the entire game. There's just picking a colour and bam, it's over.
The the creepy kid has explanations and justifications doesn't change anything with regards my objection to the ending: that is it utterly inconsistent with the style of story (and game) that Mass Effect had been up to the final 15 minutes.
One of these days maybe someone will finally explain to me which ME3 problems EA's responsible for.
Giving Bioware enough creative freedom to write that ending?
Snip... and now hiding SP content behind MP in DAI, I'm left to wonder why anyone should believe any claims they make about their products anymore. Thy might say there's a lore-friendly method of getting to Andromeda that makes perfect sense. ANd it might just be words to convince us to buy a copy.
<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>
Exactly!
So far, the studio is avoiding "choice matters", "choices have consequences".. etc. If ever Bio employs the words choice, consequence and matter, I'd be cautious in accepting them at face value. I base this on previous promotional hype vs actual product content.
As to the way they got to Andromeda, who really cares? Does anyone really care how the lost Roman legion found themselves in Asia Minor, two thousand years ago?
source: http://www.telegraph...n-soldiers.html
This is a new story, new place, new aliens, new battles and new romance ( with skin showing as in True Blood, I hope). Regardless, I for one, won't allow words, representative cinematics and even actual game content showing off "sparkling" terrain, sway me into pre buying the game.
Does Shepard make space magic fly around and destroy all the Reapers? No. The Catalyst does. There's no conflict, there's no struggle, there's no fight, there's no standing up to the impossible, doing what Shep had done the entire game.
actually, that's what you spent the entire game doing. And there he is, left standing where no organic has ever stood, having accomplished what no one in 20,000 cycles could do. Rendering the Reapers, their overlord and its cycles obsolete. That's winning on an epic scale.
Too bad you couldn't get what you wanted. That is, Shep channelling his inner-Han Solo and shooting down every last Reaper with the Normandy and Alliance cruisers and/or some other conventional means everybody knew wasn't going to happen. But nonetheless, doesn't change the fact that it's a victory. You just don't like how it played out. Don't worry, you're not the only one.
Giving Bioware enough creative freedom to write that ending?
So you're saying EA made a mistake by giving a game developer freedom to develop the game?
I think it was sarcasm
So you're saying EA made a mistake by giving a game developer freedom to develop the game?
You jump around from blaming the industry to calling gamer's entitled. God forbid we expect quality from a $80+ dollar product. You sound just like another over dramatic cynic.
Yet he has a point on all fronts. It may be a cynical, blunt point, but one nonetheless that is all encompassing of the gaming industry and the attitude that many within it be it fan or critic, portray themselves as.
And its frankly sad. I am hopeful though, there is still a lot of good to see in games now, and Andromeda is no exception.
I was joking. Although even if I weren't I say that this still gives me a leg up on "synthetics exterminating organics to save them from being exterminated by synthetics".
That is Drew K's Fault though.
Alternate universe.
Problem solved.
Not sure what you mean...
It's the best answer I've ever heard to my question, anyway.
That is Drew K's Fault though.
The idea that the reapers can have a redeemable purpose is a bad one. But the ME3 team still followed up on it. The fact someone else had a bad idea doesn't absolve the people who adopt it.
except that the idea is not necessarily a bad one.
We can argue the merits of it in execution though, but the idea is not fully disposable.
I was joking. Although even if I weren't I say that this still gives me a leg up on "synthetics exterminating organics to save them from being exterminated by synthetics".
lol, true.
That's the thing about these forums, it's hard to tell when someone is being sarcastic or not. I find adding emoticons helps portray that.
I think while it makes sense to play out the way it did it wasn't a satisfying conclusion. Cory was playing a losing hand like a typical megalomaniacal villain so it wasn't a desperate play on our part nor a look at a desperate man's world crumbling around him.
If we're talking about Mass Effect then I'd hope they play with different ways of building to a conclusion than just giving the villain a space magic twilight device. Not that it's easy to make (realistic) conflicts follow good narrative pacing.
That is Drew K's Fault though.
I thought his idea was that reapers need organic biotic space magic to stabilize the unverse because of nonsense sci-fi dark matter stuff. Thats why they need genetic material and build human reaper and stuff. But Mac Walters in ME3 changed the story to "hybrids butcher organics and preserve them in hybrid form to save them before they eventually get wiped out by their own synthetic creations". Because of this the whole collector thing is just a side story. The story of how Shepard took down one not complete (and not special at all) reaper before the invasion. They didnt give a damn that the story of the 3 games will be inconsistent and the ending was so bad they had to change the galaxy for the next game. And Walters is involved, bad omen for SP.
except that the idea is not necessarily a bad one.
We can argue the merits of it in execution though, but the idea is not fully disposable.
It isn't disposable and the "reason" might be better than killing you to save you nonsense but the effect of the ending where it was:
Save organics now and doom them all later
Allow harvest now and allow how ever many more harvests in hope of a permanent fix
Would have been even more bleak that the endings we had. At least in 2 of the three endings most organics survive but in the dark matter you are dooming life one way or another.
Yeah you are just going back to Earth to deploy your super weapon and nuke the reapers out of the galaxy and in the very end this bigger than life universal problem is presented to you out of the blue. none of the choices are real solutions to the problem explained by the catalyst (except the synthesis maybe), the reapers are not the ultimate evil. You were working toward simply getting rid of them and that option actually dooms the organics if what the catalyst says is true (and on the top of hat theleviathans will be ready to seize control again if you choose it). Storywise Andromeda can only be better than this even if Mickey Mouse brings the colonists to Andromeda.
dont read if you had enough of it already:
except that the idea is not necessarily a bad one.
We can argue the merits of it in execution though, but the idea is not fully disposable.
You're talking about justifying genocide. That's just never going to work, except for when the entities being killed off are so horrible that there's no alterative (cf. the darkspawn in DA). But in ME, arguing that exterminating humanity is moral under X circumstances is just crazy town.
It isn't disposable and the "reason" might be better than killing you to save you nonsense but the effect of the ending where it was:
Save organics now and doom them all later
Allow harvest now and allow how ever many more harvests in hope of a permanent fix
Would have been even more bleak that the endings we had. At least in 2 of the three endings most organics survive but in the dark matter you are dooming life one way or another.
I overall agree but the first scenario would be "and possibly doom them all" and then it would be like all those debates about whether or not saving the rachni was a good idea in ME1, i.e., everyone would make up their own ending and Bioware ocould cash the checks all day long.
He's of the opinion they should have stopped at Black Flag.
Rogue wasn't bad. Better than AC3 and Revelations, at least.
Unity was ... a lessons-learned test run for Syndicate, hopefully.
As you recognize, the fundamental calculus here is the problem: in order for the enemy to pose a credible threat all the way up to an apocalyptic finale, it has to be really strong, and it's simply not possible for most such enemies to be so thoroughly defeated in a single Bond-movie battle that their threat could just evaporate and be satisfactorily wiped out by the end of the story.
Well, you can make the enemy win. They go from strength to strength as your position is weakened and you're forced into a final confrontation to do your last ditch attempt at not being completely destroyed. Of course, that would be a stupid way of starting off Adventures in Andromeda so not really useful here.
Of course, a lot of games and stories don't actually see that as an issue. Take the enormous narrative output on the Second World War. Where drama exists for Allied soldiers, it's not created by the imminent threat of a German/Japanese victory, unless the story ends in 1941 or 1942 with the war itself unresolved. Instead, the stories of the individual characters are what matter: do they survive, do they complete a specific mission, and so on and so forth. The war is a backdrop against which millions of individual human stories are played out - it's not, in itself, the narrative arc. And frankly, unless the focus is on a political leader, it wouldn't make any sense for the war to be the narrative arc! It's not like Private Ivanov is determining the fate of entire nations himself.
Since I never much liked the outsize impact that Shepard could have on galactic affairs, you can see why the notion of an entire war being a narrative arc for a game is something I find to be silly.
I agree that a war makes more sense as a backdrop than as a main focus. Very few characters influence things on a big enough scale for it to be relevant, and its much easier to make a battle fit interesting narrative pacing. Even classic good against evil adventure romp Star Wars mostly didn't touch on actually overthrowing the Empire but beating it in the moment.
All that said maybe Andromeda won't even have a major war for plot fuel.
You're talking about justifying genocide. That's just never going to work, except for when the entities being killed off are so horrible that there's no alterative (cf. the darkspawn in DA). But in ME, arguing that exterminating humanity is moral under X circumstances is just crazy town.
Only one option exterminates Humanity anyway, and it's a moot point there.
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