1395 réponses à ce sujet

[phagus]

Wait, there's an explanation for the magic asari mind reading powers? Because I don't remember it. And let's not even forget the part on Noveria where Bioware forgets they're not writing Star Wars, and they talk about rachni being "sensitive to biotics". 

 

I don't think ME3s ending - in isolation, i.e., ignoring everything else apart from that ending Catalyst sequence - is more nonsensical. It's a huge tone shift and introduces a bunch of stuff right out of nowhere. But stuff like making organic-synthetic hybrids using the powers of lasers isn't that out of left field for sci-fi. 

Read the codex, or the mass effect wiki there is an explanation of sorts. Like I said, an explanation doesn't have to be a detailed scientifically plausible theory, just one believable enough within established lore, so you don't feel the need to question it and then apply real world scientific standards to it.

 

Lets face it how far would you get in a fantasy setting, like LOTR if , say, you question why Gandalf couldn't have just asked the Eagles to take Frodo and the Ring all the way to Mordor, for example, without some suspension of disbelief.

 

I guess the levels of nonsense people can take before their suspension of disbelief is broken varies alot from person to person. Mine is pretty high, but even I have limits, and once they are exceeded I critically examine everything. The ending of ME3 is where I reached my limit. Now even stuff I gave a pass to, and allowed through my critical filter, like the Conduit in ME1, start to ring plausibility bells.

 

So it's not about how nonsensical something is, relative to some other nonsense, but whether your critical mind gives it a pass, based on whether it looks believable within already established lore.

[KallenX]

I am totally good with the revised ME3 ending, the move to Andromeda, and the fact I know very little of what is coming for MEA.  Considering it's one of the most fun game series I've played (as it combines decent storylines with above average gameplay), i don't really see MEA being a let down.  My only issues with the ME series is the technical failues on the playstation system.  Crashes, long ass load times, cutting off dialogue, characters talking but not on screen.  I care a LOT more about Bioware getting the game technically presentable than any canon ending.  Bioware should (and probably will) just pick one, which will, i'm betting, take us back after the dust settles (ME5). 

 

It's crazy how many really bad games are out there, yet many posters here would prefer to just stall the game into Duke Nukem territory than accept something that crushes their emotional connection to their perception of how things should go.  I am more a supporter of the environment and the 'universe' of Mass Effect which can hold many more stories, and realistically, it is time Shepard retires (6 feet under or somewhere on a beach) and we follow some new characters. 

 

I guess people need to whine and ******.  The only way things can progress and improve is by doing and trying new things. Seems that people in general haven't really got the concept that things aren't tailored to their every desire.  Go try the real world some time.  With all the complaints, you'd think everyone would be very happy for the next upgrade in a franchise that has continually topped itself.   

 

When i pick up a science fiction novel, i completely expect there to be parts i wont understand or necessarily like, but that's part of challenging yourself, learning to see things in new and different ways. I think perhaps television has really screwed up science fiction as it is in a market medium that needs to be so commercially digestable it isn't allowed to be fresh or innovative.  That's what all these complainers are doing, watering down a creative work to a point where no one can really enjoy it as something fresh and stimulating.  

 

As long as Bioware sticks to their vision and ignores/laughs at the children crying about how hard it all is, MEA will be just fine.  Step up your game peoples, read a (non game-adapted) sci-fi book.  Here's some starters:  Friday by Robert Heinlein, Macroscope by Piers Anthony, and Valis by Philip K Dick.

[KallenX]

Did you just call hearts magic? Because... umm... they're not. Or is this a brilliant stealth troll post? 

 

lol obviously they are not, but i don't want to have to study cardiovascular systems to believe someone in a story has a functional heart.  Thanks for the compliment i guess, as I am just trolling back at those who cannot somehow accept a fictional universe unless it breaks down and explains every little thing.  it's called fiction for a reason.  There are ways to make something totally unbelievable, however the lore and story has explained at least surface level what biotics are, what the Thorian was capable of.  Once you start that line of thinking, why even play any sci fi games? none of it can be acceptable.  Humans become husks in minutes after being impaled on a geth spike?   hmmm. how does that work?  I want some specs.

[Cyonan]

I guess the levels of nonsense people can take before their suspension of disbelief is broken varies alot from person to person. Mine is pretty high, but even I have limits, and once they are exceeded I critically examine everything. The ending of ME3 is where I reached my limit. Now even stuff I gave a pass to, and allowed through my critical filter, like the Conduit in ME1, start to ring plausibility bells.

 

So it's not about how nonsensical something is, relative to some other nonsense, but whether your critical mind gives it a pass, based on whether it looks believable within already established lore.

 

I've always questioned why Saren needed the Conduit.

 

It's a backdoor to a very common area of the Citadel which he already would have had access to had he not thrown away his spectre status looking for the conduit. Noveria shows that he can very easily smuggle large amounts of Geth past security scanners, so it's not like getting an army of them onto the Citadel should have been an issue.

 

and Soveriegn knew that all he needed Saren to do was get to the master control panel in the Citadel tower in order to take control of the station.

 

At no point would they have needed to go after the conduit for anything except curiosity as to what it was.

[Drone223]

Read the codex, or the mass effect wiki there is an explanation of sorts. Like I said, an explanation doesn't have to be a detailed scientifically plausible theory, just one believable enough within established lore, so you don't feel the need to question it and then apply real world scientific standards to it.

 

So it's not about how nonsensical something is, relative to some other nonsense, but whether your critical mind gives it a pass, based on whether it looks believable within already established lore.

Exactly, the galaxy suddenly being able to develop the means to travel to other galaxies be it in a few months or 2-3 years, when the current technological capabilities make it impossible comes off as extremely contrived.

[KallenX]

I've always questioned why Saren needed the Conduit.

 

It's a backdoor to a very common area of the Citadel which he already would have had access to had he not thrown away his spectre status looking for the conduit. Noveria shows that he can very easily smuggle large amounts of Geth past security scanners, so it's not like getting an army of them onto the Citadel should have been an issue.

 

and Soveriegn knew that all he needed Saren to do was get to the master control panel in the Citadel tower in order to take control of the station.

 

At no point would they have needed to go after the conduit for anything except curiosity as to what it was.

 

You're going to find holes in almost everything if you look hard enough.   perhaps it was a needed ruse, or there was needed some huge distraction necessary to access that council area, being how restrictive access was.  My guess is the need for gameplay space for a final battle trumped having it in some strange back-room area.  Do you think perhaps games today are slowly pushing quality of story from saturday cartoon levels to legit published novel quality?  I'm all for that, but companies need to maintain their writers to maintain quality, and these authors should have more of a say than a CEO as an author can make or break their career with their creative output, but a game company runs for a profit not normally creative integrity.  What should we ask for and expect from our games?

[phagus]

I've always questioned why Saren needed the Conduit.

 

It's a backdoor to a very common area of the Citadel which he already would have had access to had he not thrown away his spectre status looking for the conduit. Noveria shows that he can very easily smuggle large amounts of Geth past security scanners, so it's not like getting an army of them onto the Citadel should have been an issue.

 

and Soveriegn knew that all he needed Saren to do was get to the master control panel in the Citadel tower in order to take control of the station.

 

At no point would they have needed to go after the conduit for anything except curiosity as to what it was.

Yeah.. and don't forget the Catalyst, (who is part of the Citadel), and the Keepers ignored it's construction..and why was Sovereign not informed..and why did Saren attack Eden Prime again ?????  and on and on and on till ME3....and possibly on into MEA as well.

 

Better not think too much about these things..as that will lead to BSN madness...

[Dantriges]

I've always questioned why Saren needed the Conduit.

 

It's a backdoor to a very common area of the Citadel which he already would have had access to had he not thrown away his spectre status looking for the conduit. Noveria shows that he can very easily smuggle large amounts of Geth past security scanners, so it's not like getting an army of them onto the Citadel should have been an issue.

 

and Soveriegn knew that all he needed Saren to do was get to the master control panel in the Citadel tower in order to take control of the station.

 

Just because you can smuggle stuff through Noveria security, a place built and used to looking the other way, doesn´t mean that it´s easy to smuggle an army of synthetics on the citadel.

 

That part about the Catalyst being part of the Citadel was one reason I installed MEHEM.  

[phagus]

Exactly, the galaxy suddenly being able to develop the means to travel to other galaxies be it in a few months or 2-3 years, when the current technological capabilities make it impossible comes off as extremely contrived.

To be fair we should give MEA the benefit of the doubt at the moment, as we know next to nothing about it. But since ME has always been based on contrivance I'm expecting another one as explanation. We may also be pleasantly surprised by a plausible contrivance.

[prosthetic soul]

To be fair we should give MEA the benefit of the doubt at the moment, as we know next to nothing about it. But since ME has always been based on contrivance I'm expecting another one as explanation. We may also be pleasantly surprised by a plausible contrivance.

A plausible contrivance is a contradiction. 

[Cyonan]

You're going to find holes in almost everything if you look hard enough.   perhaps it was a needed ruse, or there was needed some huge distraction necessary to access that council area, being how restrictive access was.  My guess is the need for gameplay space for a final battle trumped having it in some strange back-room area.  Do you think perhaps games today are slowly pushing quality of story from saturday cartoon levels to legit published novel quality?  I'm all for that, but companies need to maintain their writers to maintain quality, and these authors should have more of a say than a CEO as an author can make or break their career with their creative output, but a game company runs for a profit not normally creative integrity.  What should we ask for and expect from our games?

 

The thing is that this is a pretty big hole, and one that they could have written into the Conduit being something really awesome and actually required. They spent the whole game building it up and it was just "It takes me to a place everybody could already get to? Okay, why did we need this again?".

 

Even if Saren had lost his spectre status by the start of ME1 for different reasons and was using it as a backdoor to the Citadel that he now obviously would not be able to get close to, that would have made a lot more sense.

 

I get that not everything will make perfect sense, but Mass Effect 1's entire story making sense kind of hinges on the Conduit being a big deal.

 

 

Just because you can smuggle stuff through Noveria security, a place built and used to looking the other way, doesn´t mean that it´s easy to smuggle an army of synthetics on the citadel.

 

That part about the Catalyst being part of the Citadel was one reason I installed MEHEM.

 

Keep in mind that 2 years later after what was supposed to be large amounts of improvement to security, Legion can literally walk through security =P

 

and then Cerberus had no real issues in ME3.

[phagus]

A plausible contrivance is a contradiction. 

How ?

[AlanC9]

Just because you can smuggle stuff through Noveria security, a place built and used to looking the other way, doesn´t mean that it´s easy to smuggle an army of synthetics on the citadel.

What about krogan and asari? Hell, why not play a long game and start indoctrinating C-Sec?

[Aimi]

I've always questioned why Saren needed the Conduit.

I've always questioned why Saren knew about the Conduit.

[Dantriges]

There was an article  about it in Villains Weekly in the section "Building your secret lair, secret escape routes for the hightech villain".   Somewhere between "pulling your punches without being caught" and "How to do a proper monologue"

[In Exile]

Just because you can smuggle stuff through Noveria security, a place built and used to looking the other way, doesn´t mean that it´s easy to smuggle an army of synthetics on the citadel.

 

That part about the Catalyst being part of the Citadel was one reason I installed MEHEM.

 

Why would you need to smuggle anything in? Spectre Saren shows up in his brand new ship, uses his super spectre powers to order everyone off it, goes right into the Council chamber because Spectre reasons, and BOOM, reaper apocalypse. 

[Dantriges]

Oh, dunno, always thought that having your huge battleship hug the central tower and accessing a control panel in plain sight in the council chambers wouldn´t be covered by the Spectre license but perhaps that´s totally unreasonable headcanon.

[In Exile]

Oh, dunno, always thought that having your huge battleship hug the central tower and accessing a control panel in plain sight in the council chambers wouldn´t be covered by the Spectre license but perhaps that´s totally unreasonable headcanon.

 

Telling your immediate bosses to repeatedly go **** themselves is apparently covered by the Spectre license, as is succesfully committing genocide, threatening one of your boses with genocide, detonating a nuclear weapon at least once, straight up allying yourself with a terrorist organization... where I'm going with this is that I'm not really surprised you'd totes be able to get away with it. 

 

More to the point, though, I don't think Sovereign actually needed to hug the tower to pull off the signal. After all, in the original plan Sovereign doesn't even visit the Citadel. 

[Cyonan]

I've always questioned why Saren knew about the Conduit.

 

If I recall right, Sovereign took the to figure out what happened once the Keepers didn't send their signal this cycle around. It seems likely that Saren would have figured it out through him.

 

Although it just leads to the idea that Sovereign knew what the Conduit was and decided to go after it anyway despite having a Spectre who already had access to pretty much anywhere on the Citadel. Presumably he did this for reasons beyond our comprehension.

 

Oh, dunno, always thought that having your huge battleship hug the central tower and accessing a control panel in plain sight in the council chambers wouldn´t be covered by the Spectre license but perhaps that´s totally unreasonable headcanon.

 

The thing is that this was their end game, but they showed their hand when they attacked Eden Prime.

 

Had they simply opened with attacking the Citadel to take control of it while Saren was already on the station(and everybody thinking that he's still a loyal Spectre), then Shep wouldn't have been ready to stop the whole invasion.

 

Of course if they did that, we wouldn't have a trilogy. Though I still think the Conduit probably should have been something different than a backdoor to a very public area.

[Aimi]

If I recall right, Sovereign took the to figure out what happened once the Keepers didn't send their signal this cycle around. It seems likely that Saren would have figured it out through him.

"Figuring things out"? It wasn't a logic puzzle, it was a problem that required a great deal of knowledge to solve - knowledge that would have been unavailable to Sovereign. Since Sovereign couldn't access the Citadel, they could not have known why it was not responding to commands: sabotage might have been one option, but some sort of accident or mechanical/electronic fault would have been another. Eventually, Sovereign indoctrinated individuals that might have been able to find out what was wrong, but that would only have been a what, not a why.

As Vigil states, all records of the Ilos facility's existence were wiped. If that was the case, there would have been no way for Saren or Sovereign to learn how the Reapers were locked out of the Citadel's control system. If that wasn't the case, the Reapers would have found out while they were harvesting the Protheans, and been able to destroy the Ilos facility before the Protheans there even completed the Conduit.

[Dantriges]

Telling your immediate bosses to repeatedly go **** themselves is apparently covered by the Spectre license, as is succesfully committing genocide, threatening one of your boses with genocide, detonating a nuclear weapon at least once, straight up allying yourself with a terrorist organization... where I'm going with this is that I'm not really surprised you'd totes be able to get away with it. 

 

More to the point, though, I don't think Sovereign actually needed to hug the tower to pull off the signal. After all, in the original plan Sovereign doesn't even visit the Citadel. 

Sure it is.   They can still revoke the license after you come back and dealt with the rogue spectre. It´s a temporary annoyance and every call where you behave like a childish brat is digging your hole deeper and evidence that the humans aren´t ready yet to sit on the council. Or to put it this way, you are lucky that Saren attacked the Citadel or your spectre status would have been gone the minute after you cleaned up the mess and showed up somewhere in striking distance. 

 

Which genocide?

The Rachni? Pot calling the kettle black. They wiped them out first. If you save her, they blame you for letting her loose. Virmire explosion? Hard to blame you for it when the STG proposed the plan in the first place. And well you destroyed the cure for the genophage and it was a backwater planet somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

Threatening a councilor with genocide? Ok, didn´t hear of that or don´t remember. When does it happen?

 

Allying yourself with a terrorist organisation in ME 2? You had your biggest fanboy on the council and it was rather practical. Shepard´s area of operations was the Terminus system only, you were after the collectors and they could simply declare you gone rogue if you made a mess. After you cleaned up the collector mess  they threw you under the bus even if you didn´t blow up a relay in Arrival. Your Spectre status wasn´t worth much for six months after all.

Ah well, the storyline became weird after the first five minutes in ME 2 anyways. So yeah, you being a terrorist flying around in a stealth ship with an official cerberus logo on the hull doesn´t make sense. That the council was ok with it is part of the "Shut down your brain and don´t think about it" package every time the organisation shows up.

 

In short, the council simply doesn´t care what you do out there when it gets the job done and the political costs aren´t too high, parking a mile long battleship in orbit will get their and the fleet´s attention.

[dragonflight288]

Telling your immediate bosses to repeatedly go **** themselves is apparently covered by the Spectre license, as is succesfully committing genocide, threatening one of your boses with genocide, detonating a nuclear weapon at least once, straight up allying yourself with a terrorist organization... where I'm going with this is that I'm not really surprised you'd totes be able to get away with it. 

 

More to the point, though, I don't think Sovereign actually needed to hug the tower to pull off the signal. After all, in the original plan Sovereign doesn't even visit the Citadel. 

 

I always interpreted that as Sovereign trying to undo the change to the signal the protheans made to the Keepers, but that is still strictly headcanon for me. 

[Amplitudelol]

I've always questioned why Saren needed the Conduit.

 

It's a backdoor to a very common area of the Citadel which he already would have had access to had he not thrown away his spectre status looking for the conduit. Noveria shows that he can very easily smuggle large amounts of Geth past security scanners, so it's not like getting an army of them onto the Citadel should have been an issue.

 

and Soveriegn knew that all he needed Saren to do was get to the master control panel in the Citadel tower in order to take control of the station.

 

At no point would they have needed to go after the conduit for anything except curiosity as to what it was.

 

The trilogy would be one very short cinematic of Saren activating something on a console and then doomsday. I never really thought of that, thanks the whole story of ME1 and searching for the conduit does not make sense at all. Unless Sovereign had severe amnesia. It indoctrinated Saren to make repairs but he only got blue screen because the reaper os is based on windows. This is how search for the conduit begun.

[Dantriges]

Not really. This particular line of reasoning is based on as much extrapolation or even more than my stuff a few posts up.

 

Shepard can go up there armed=Saren can go up there, activate a previously unknown console and no one cares or kills him. 

Shepard shows up with two squadmates= Saren can ride the elevators up there with a batallion of krogans, asari elite or geth armed for bear without anyone bothering.

Shepard can dock a small known alliance frigate=Saren can show up with a battleship of unknown design and park huge this traffic hazard between the arms.

Shepard can tell a butthurt alliance admiral to get lost because of his spectre status = Saren can tell the citadel fleet not to bother him about his new ship.

 

It´s based on some assumptions, like citadel defense forces aren´t totally incompetent but this "Saren is totally stupid and the plot too" is based on assumptions and exaggerations too.

I ignore the leaky customs office in ME 2 for now because we were taling about the plot in ME 1 and this whole thing was a groanworthy joke anyways. Some writer wanted to make an artistic expression about the stupidity of american customs agencies after 9/11. That´s what you get when game designers get artistic.

 

If you want a plothole: Why did the Reapers never discover that they had a mini relay on the Citadel in 300 years? Even if the thing was in a lab somewhere in the wards and the prothean scientists later brought it into the presidium park* and "disguised" it as a statue, the Reapers really dropped the ball there. IIRC it was rattling the teeth of kaidasn or something like that and biotics felt weird close to it or something like that.

 

*or whatever this area was in the prothean era.

[MissOuJ]

 

People throwing Mass Effect Andromeda under the bus a full year before its release.

 

Well, this is BSN. Being outraged about rumours and half-baked facts makes up about 75% of the whole forum.