1106 réponses à ce sujet

[Lady Artifice]

 

Basically why should I get invested in a world or setting when its foundation is made of sand?

 

Because you don't know whether it's made of sand?

 

The Yahg is a pretty good comparison. It's true that Deus ex machina is bad in general, but not everything that hasn't been referrenced before in the story universe qualifies as Deus ex machina.

 

No one told me that people were working on a way to get to another galaxy in the trilogy, but it still doesn't surprise me that they were. I would be more surprised to hear that there wasn't anyone trying to find a way, even before the Reaper war.

 

I wouldn't be surprised to hear that people are working on a way dextro based foods, or vice versa, either. The nature of scientific research is to grow and develop.

[Iakus]

That is very clear. You've been accusing this of being a lore-breaking betrayal from the first announcement, but seriously, we don't know yet whether the thing that fell on your head is an apple or a piece of sky.

 

You might be completely right, but none of us actually know yet whether you are, because all of this is built on assumptions.

Do I know for 100% certainty?  no.  I can't read chicken entrails or tea leaves.  I do not have a Delorean with a flux capaciter and a Mister Fusion.

 

But I do have the previous Mass Effect games.  I have seen how they use the DEM as a crutch.  And I have not seen any indication that this will be any different.  This isn't an assumption.  This is an educated guess based on past patterns of behavior.

[Applepie_Svk]

Do I know for 100% certainty?  no.  I can't read chicken entrails or tea leaves.  I do not have a Delorean with a flux capaciter and a Mister Fusion.

 

But I do have the previous Mass Effect games.  I have seen how they use the DEM as a crutch.  And I have not seen any indication that this will be any different.  This isn't an assumption.  This is an educated guess based on past patterns of behavior.

 

...same patterns of evolution and dissolution ...

 

Cycle cannot be broken...

 

couldn´t ressist 

[Iakus]

 

No one told me that people were working on a way to get to another galaxy in the trilogy, but it still doesn't surprise me that they were. I wouldn't be more surprised to hear that there wasn't anyone trying to find a way, even before the Reaper war.

 

I wouldn't be surprised to hear that people are working on a way dextro based foods, or vice versa, either. The nature of scientific research is to grow and develop.

This is a case of Scifi Writers Have No Sense of Scale .  The distance between galaxies is so staggeringly BIG that it puts the distance between stars to shame.  

 

Sure it's the nature of science to grow and develop.  It's also the nature of growth to learnt o stand before you walk.

 

Trying to find a way to cross that gulf is fine.  But finding a way in the near future would be ridiculous.  I mean, Lazarus Project contrived.  It would be like Ford announcing today that they found a way to make an engine that can run constantly for two hundred years on a single tank of gas and no maintenance.  It would be that outrageous, even with the tech of the Mass Effect universe.

 

But again, this is a setting where you stuff a corpse full of money and it's walking around again in a couple of years.  Where a ginormous magic wand can rewrite everyone's DNA, and where 'organic energy" is a catch-all explanation for the impossible.

[FKA_Servo]

The thermals clips was just plain stupid.  And yes, Bioware was called on it.  Repeatedly.  And their response was...to lampshade it in a conversation with Conrad Verner 

 

Yeah. My intention was to illustrate a good addition versus a dumb addition we could nevertheless deal with, but I could have been clearer.

 

In any case, I don't see why a wormhole, or an arkship, or some other heretofore unknown large scale project based on heretofore unknown tech stretches credibility that much in the setting, considering the stuff we've been served up in the existing trilogy. And until we do know how it all happens, I guess I don't see any sense in getting overly concerned about it.

[Applepie_Svk]

 

 

But again, this is a setting where you stuff a corpse full of money and it's walking around again in a couple of years.  Where a ginormous magic wand can rewrite everyone's DNA, and where 'organic energy" is a catch-all explanation for the impossible.

 

 

Admit it, you just don´t like to violate everyone, you just need their consent... you know to violate them 

[Iakus]

Yeah. My intention was to illustrate a good addition versus a dumb addition we could nevertheless deal with, but I could have been clearer.

 

In any case, I don't see why a wormhole, or an arkship, or some other heretofore unknown large scale project based on heretofore unknown tech stretches credibility that much considering the stuff we've been served up in the existing trilogy. And until we do know how it all happens, I guess I don't see any sense in getting overly concerned about it.

Again, it's a crutch.  They should be building on lore that already exists rather than just making up new stuff.  So much miracle technology happens to get dug up it's a wonder the Rapers conquered a single cycle.

 

I could theoretically accept a wormwhole it it's presented well, though that N7 video certainly blows a hole in that theory.  

[FKA_Servo]

Again, it's a crutch.  They should be building on lore that already exists rather than just making up new stuff.  So much miracle technology happens to get dug up it's a wonder the Rapers conquered a single cycle.

 

I could theoretically accept a wormwhole it it's presented well, though that N7 video certainly blows a hole in that theory.  

 

We have yet to see any indication that they won't be, as far as I'm aware. Though I haven't seen the N7 video. Does it also invalidate a long term voyage?

 

I can conceive of a ship powered by some sort of reverse engineered reaper junk making that trip without violating the lore.

[AlanC9]

It's better if the drive isn't reverse-engineered. Then there's only the one ship.

[SentinelMacDeath]

I was singing that during my last play through

 

 

I ended it with a hearty "SUCK IT" and killed all synthetics ... no regurds

[Iakus]

We have yet to see any indication that they won't be, as far as I'm aware. Though I haven't seen the N7 video. Does it also invalidate a long term voyage?

 

I can conceive of a ship powered by some sort of reverse engineered reaper junk making that trip without violating the lore.

Given that current ftl drive technology would fry the crew and the ship if it can't discharge every 2-3 days, yeah, long term voyage (like the one that would last centuries to get to Andromeda) is pretty freaking unlikely without many orders of magnitude of technological development.  Like I said, it would be like building a car that can run constantly for centuries on a single tank of gas and no maintenance.

 

The N7 video had a ship that looked like a Collector ship mated with the CItadel and this was the unholy issue of that joining.  So it looks like either RESOURCES! (if this is set after ME3) or ANOTHER ANCIENT ALIEN ARTIFACT! (if before)

[Lucca_de_Neon]

I was singing that during my last play through

 

 

I ended it with a hearty "SUCK IT" and killed all synthetics ... no regurds

Beautiful song ^^

[Natureguy85]

But you don't know that there are no ghosts. Since you don't know that, you're in no position to judge whether or not they've been driven out. The problem for me is convincing you that they've been driven out, not actually driving them out. A problem, but one that quacks and charlatans have been solving for centuries. You just have to sell something that the target wants to believe.

 

That is a separate argument. Yes, you could convince me that you drove out ghosts, but it's still impossible for you to actually drive out ghosts.

 

 

I've always advocated the idea that ME 3's ending is akin to the confrontation with President Eden in Fallout 3; only, instead of being able to convince the AI that its circular logic has more holes than a wedge of Swiss cheese and making it self-destruct....you're forced to accept whatever the hell it says.  That's right folks, a modern Bethesda game has more RPG elements than Mass Effect 3. 

 

Thank you! I've been bringing up President Eden as a positive example for arguing with a self-important AI for years.

 

 

We will have the necessary context to argue over whether that's the case once an explanation is provided, and not before.

 

Ok, how could the journey be possible within the lore? The problem is that there are known things about the Mass Effect Universe. We understand how their technology works and it does not allow for such a journey to Andromeda. So either there needs to be a wormhole, which would be an obvious DEM, or some new technology, which might be a DEM, unless it comes reasonably from the lore. I suppose they could invent some super heat sink but the journey would still take a Reaper 231 years, a citadel ship twice that, and a human ship over 50,000 years.

(Based on numbers from the FTL entry. http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/FTL)

 

 

There was nothing in the game lore to suggest yahgs or thermal clips, either - at least until the writers added them. This still doesn't seem like a very good reason. It's entirely likely that they come up with a terrific reason and means.

 

It's also not out of the question that they resort to some sort deus-ex-machina either, but honestly, if it's just a way to kick it off, that's not an insurmountable obstacle. The only other way to deal with it would be to take a time machine back to pre-ME2 and fix the nonsense hole they wrote themselves into.

 

Yahgs don't violate or even involve lore in any way. They are just another added race, like Vorcha or whatever else. There is no comparison.

 

Thermal clips are just a stupid gameplay decision. They don't violate lore themselves, but the codex reason for their invention does, in that it's totally ridiculous.

Then the appearance of thermal clips on Jacob's loyalty mission violates lore.

 

 

 

That is very clear. You've been accusing this of being a lore-breaking betrayal from the first announcement, but seriously, we don't know yet whether the thing that fell on your head is an apple or a piece of sky.

 

You might be completely right, but none of us actually know yet whether you are, because all of this is built on assumptions.

 

 

 

Because you don't know whether it's made of sand?

 

The Yahg is a pretty good comparison. It's true that Deus ex machina is bad in general, but not everything that hasn't been referrenced before in the story universe qualifies as Deus ex machina.

 

No one told me that people were working on a way to get to another galaxy in the trilogy, but it still doesn't surprise me that they were. I would be more surprised to hear that there wasn't anyone trying to find a way, even before the Reaper war.

 

I wouldn't be surprised to hear that people are working on a way dextro based foods, or vice versa, either. The nature of scientific research is to grow and develop.

 

The Yahg is not a good comparison because it doesn't even involve lore. Space travel does. A Deus Ex Machina is something that solves a seemingly impossible problem when there is no reason to think it should be a solution. The problem isn't whether or not someone was trying to find away, it's that the given lore does not allow for such a journey without something like automation or an asari/krogan crew and cryo-stasis, which is probably how they will go.

 

 

 

I can't read chicken entrails or tea leaves.  I do not have a Delorean with a flux capaciter and a Mister Fusion.

 

Loser.

 

In any case, I don't see why a wormhole, or an arkship, or some other heretofore unknown large scale project based on heretofore unknown tech stretches credibility that much in the setting, considering the stuff we've been served up in the existing trilogy. And until we do know how it all happens, I guess I don't see any sense in getting overly concerned about it.

 

So once lore has been broken, more breaks don't matter anymore? There is something to be said for that, I suppose. The reason to be concerned is because we've already seen their lazy story telling and it sucked. We don't want more of that. We want to see them start paying attention to details again.

[AlanC9]

I'm not seeing a lore break yet. Stasis pods, mechs, asari, and krogan exist. Drives that can make the journey are physically possible. An alien artifact being discovered is a thing in the MEU.

[Natureguy85]

I'm not seeing a lore break yet. Stasis pods, mechs, asari, and krogan exist. Drives that can make the journey are physically possible. An alien artifact being discovered is a thing in the MEU.

 

An alien artifact would be a DEM.  The problem is that such a journey would have so many "checks" against the Lore. Within the time frame we do have some possible solutions. We have races that could survive the journey. Quarian live-ships show that they can grow food in space. We do have stasis pods. There are still several problems though.

 

1) Where would such a ship discharge FTL charge? Large ships discharge into planets but the Ark will have to cross the empty void of space.

 

2) How much power can they carry? It will take a lot of energy to run everything, including stasis pods and food/farming technology.

[ZipZap2000]

Satan: Hello mortal. I will grant you one wish!

I want a product from Bioware that doesn't suck!

"Granted! Here is a vacuum cleaner made by Casey Hudson himself!"

Baaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!

[Lady Artifice]

Do I know for 100% certainty?  no.  I can't read chicken entrails or tea leaves.  I do not have a Delorean with a flux capaciter and a Mister Fusion.

 

But I do have the previous Mass Effect games.  I have seen how they use the DEM as a crutch.  And I have not seen any indication that this will be any different.  This isn't an assumption.  This is an educated guess based on past patterns of behavior.

 

An educated guess that that isn't unreasonable in itself, but is very unreasonable when framed as a verified fact, i.e. "The move to Andromeda is a betrayal, because..."

 

Until you know the because, you have as little foundation for that claim as you suspect the move to Andromeda has. 

[Lady Artifice]

Ok, how could the journey be possible within the lore? The problem is that there are known things about the Mass Effect Universe. We understand how their technology works and it does not allow for such a journey to Andromeda. So either there needs to be a wormhole, which would be an obvious DEM, or some new technology, which might be a DEM, unless it comes reasonably from the lore. I suppose they could invent some super heat sink but the journey would still take a Reaper 231 years, a citadel ship twice that, and a human ship over 50,000 years.

(Based on numbers from the FTL entry. http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/FTL)

 

Personally, I favor the wormhole theory. 

 

Their making use of some piece of derelict reaper technology would also satisfy me. 

 

 

The Yahg is not a good comparison because it doesn't even involve lore.

 

 

This statement is fundamentally incorrect. The alien species in the Mass Effect universe are very much a part of Mass Effect lore. 

[straykat]

I'd only say the Yahg wouldn't be that cool, because they're primitive. And we already saw one slip through the cracks, as the Shadow Broker. Is this gonna be another unique Yagh who did the same thing? And the Krogan already cover this for being uplifted anyways. I'd prefer they not bother.

[FKA_Servo]

So once lore has been broken, more breaks don't matter anymore? There is something to be said for that, I suppose. The reason to be concerned is because we've already seen their lazy story telling and it sucked. We don't want more of that. We want to see them start paying attention to details again.

 

Maybe we're just characterizing lore breaks differently. What I meant there was that there's already been some stupid stuff that doesn't make sense, even if it doesn't necessarily violate the lore (like Cerberus). I'll say again that co-opting reaper FTL tech would go towards solving issues of speed and core discharge, and would not violate the lore as I understand it. And depending on when exactly the game kicks off, I don't think that an alien artifact would be a DEM. And seeing as mass relay transit is basically just teleportation, I don't see how a wormhole stretches credibility either.

 

It's also entirely likely that I don't remember some stuff. I haven't picked the game back up since Citadel released, and I've only played through ME3 once. But I'm not sure there even was a golden age of Mass Effect where the devs paid attention to details.

[Natureguy85]

Personally, I favor the wormhole theory. 

 

Their making use of some piece of derelict reaper technology would also satisfy me. 

 

 

This statement is fundamentally incorrect. The alien species in the Mass Effect universe are very much a part of Mass Effect lore. 

 

Wormhole would be a DEM. They have never been used or mentioned, but magically we find one that brings us to Andromeda. It would not necessarily violate lore, but it would be contrived.

 

As for the Yahg, you're wrong and seem to have missed the point. The Yahg became part of the lore, yes, but their inclusion didn't involve existing lore.

 

These are also two very different kinds of lore. With the galaxy being the size it is, it's very reasonable for us to assume that there are more types of aliens out there that we haven't met yet. We know from the Krogan's story that not all have advanced to create space flight. Humanity hasn't been doing it very long either. So it's reasonable when we encounter a species we haven't before. It's no different from them adding Vorcha and Drell in the second game. It's actually even better than those because there isn't a good in-universe answer for why we haven't encountered them yet, while the Yahg don't raise that question. Conversely, travel and the technology related to it, is central to everything. In fact it requires the namesake of the franchise: the Mass Effect. Having a suddenly new transport technology not based on this would be weird. This was a big problem with the stupid transport beam at the end of ME3. It wasn't out of the question, but needed some more exposition as to what it was and why we should trust it to be safe transport.

 

An idea I just had to make it work; they build their own relay, much like the Conduit, and launch it on it's own, fully automated, to Andromeda, and then jump to that via another relay. Thoughts?

 

 

Maybe we're just characterizing lore breaks differently. What I meant there was that there's already been some stupid stuff that doesn't make sense, even if it doesn't necessarily violate the lore (like Cerberus). I'll say again that co-opting reaper FTL tech would go towards solving issues of speed and core discharge, and would not violate the lore as I understand it. And depending on when exactly the game kicks off, I don't think that an alien artifact would be a DEM. And seeing as mass relay transit is basically just teleportation, I don't see how a wormhole stretches credibility either.

 

It's also entirely likely that I don't remember some stuff. I haven't picked the game back up since Citadel released, and I've only played through ME3 once. But I'm not sure there even was a golden age of Mass Effect where the devs paid attention to details.

 

Cerberus does violate their own lore.That's why we're all wondering why they went from a rogue alliance scientific group to a well funded independent organization to a galactic army. Not to mention how the heck they got anything from the Collector base without the IFF, particularly if you destroyed the base.

 

If this is set well after the events of ME3, taking Reaper tech could work because they can do almost anything and talk about how the Reapers advanced their technology and blah blah blah.

 

An alien artifact would be a DEM because it's totally contrived and created only to solve this problem. A wormhole would be for the same reasons.
 

[Ahglock]

Cerberus does not violate their own lore. When something is phrased as what we know of them Cerberus is.. A change in way people know is not a lore violation especially when they are portrayed as secret and there is a 2 year time jump. Your info can just be wrong when the information you have is known to be shaky.

[Natureguy85]

Cerberus does not violate their own lore. When something is phrased as what we know of them Cerberus is.. A change in way people know is not a lore violation especially when they are portrayed as secret and there is a 2 year time jump. Your info can just be wrong when the information you have is known to be shaky.

 

Those things are too far away from each other for that to be a good answer. An alliance admiral is a good source for saying that Cerberus was formerly an Alliance project. The info in ME2 comes from EDI, another credible source with inside information. These aren't the wild guesses of random strangers.

[Jorji Costava]

This is a case of Scifi Writers Have No Sense of Scale .  The distance between galaxies is so staggeringly BIG that it puts the distance between stars to shame.

 
This is entirely tangential, but it turns out that nobody has a sense of scale. Joshua Greene calls it "insensitivity to quantity": For example, people feel no appreciable emotional difference between saving 500 lives versus saving 5 million lives. Needless to say, this can have major (mostly bad) implications for policy decisions.
 

Ok, how could the journey be possible within the lore? The problem is that there are known things about the Mass Effect Universe. We understand how their technology works and it does not allow for such a journey to Andromeda. So either there needs to be a wormhole, which would be an obvious DEM, or some new technology, which might be a DEM, unless it comes reasonably from the lore. I suppose they could invent some super heat sink but the journey would still take a Reaper 231 years, a citadel ship twice that, and a human ship over 50,000 years.

 
In general, I don't think it's a great idea to get too caught up in whether or not a given plot device counts as an instance of a named trope, be it a deus ex machina, a MacGuffin, or whatever. Otherwise, you risk committing what's sometimes called "the noncentral fallacy": For example, Martin Luther King Jr. was indeed a "criminal" by the dictionary definition of the term, but that doesn't tell us anything about whether or not his actions were justified. What we want to know is not just whether or not a given plot device is a DEM; we want to know if it's a good plot device.
 

So once lore has been broken, more breaks don't matter anymore? There is something to be said for that, I suppose. The reason to be concerned is because we've already seen their lazy story telling and it sucked. We don't want more of that. We want to see them start paying attention to details again.

The question is more "Why is a wormhole or whatever the straw that broke the camel's back?" If ME has broken its lore numerous times already, and breaking lore makes for a bad story, then ME has been a bad series for quite some time now, in which case there's nothing left to be destroyed by further lore violations. But presumably you don't believe this because you're still here and still invested in the series. So why is this one in particular so important?

[Natureguy85]

The question is more "Why is a wormhole or whatever the straw that broke the camel's back?" If ME has broken its lore numerous times already, and breaking lore makes for a bad story, then ME has been a bad series for quite some time now, in which case there's nothing left to be destroyed by further lore violations. But presumably you don't believe this because you're still here and still invested in the series. So why is this one in particular so important?

 

The best answer is that a new game is an opportunity to right the ship. It's a bad sign if they are going to start by chipping away at the foundation even further. It's like hoping someone turns around from a bad course and instead they hit the accelerator. It's also amplified by knowing that the reason for the move is that they painted themselves into a corner with the endings of ME3.