I'm inclined to believe that the Crucible controls him, not the other way around. In addition, the state of the Crucible is determined by your EMS score. So technically, Shepard is in control of the situation.
No, Shepard may be responsible in that way, but has no actual control because s/he has no knowledge about any of that. EMS exists for us, but not for Shepard. S/he has no idea what "enough" or "minimum readiness" are. And while EMS is divided into categories, there are no category requirements; all that matters is the total. How exactly are ground troops helping the Crucible?
I guess this is one of those things we may never know exactly what went wrong and why. The "dark energy" thing Tali was investigating sounded promising (and VERY Xenosaga), but that was dropped with never another mention. Was the Catalyst a late addition, or were the ME3 plotlines late to the party? Whichever way it happened, they don't jive with one another.
I know it's not a "horror" game, but it does borrow some elements from that genre. Maybe they tried to borrow from too many genres and stories :shrug:
From where I'm sitting the overarching theme was "futility" right up until somewhere in Mass Effect 3 when good things started happening for no good reason. Sure, Shepard keeps fighting the good fight, winning Pyrrhic victories and watching the galaxy ignore all the evidence of the threat coming to destroy them all until the Reapers finally show up in force.
Even in ME3, we finally confirm what we already suspected or knew - all the species of the council are self-serving bastards. Between the genophage, the bomb on Tuchanka, and the Asari hiding the Prothean relic that was specifically left to warn everyone about the Reapers to avoid precisely the mess we're in, nobody is really deserving of any sympathy.
All the game had to do was stay consistent with the ME2 DLC and show that the destruction of the relays torched everything in those sectors, so the only survivors in the galaxy would be those located far enough away from any relay station. That would have been a "win", but at a terrible, perhaps unrecoverable cost.
Oh, we know. The Catalyst was not even a thought at the time of Mass Effect 1. It is a retcon. Usually retcons are bad. Once in awhile you can pull them off, such as with Vader being Luke's father, but it's difficult. The foundation needs to be laid down and the characters need to deal with it, as they do with the "point of view" conversation in Return of the Jedi. I don't know if it was you or someone else, but someone recently talked about the ending being something that is finished early on. That's somewhat true, though I'd say the ending is at least thought through in general, though it may not be fully fleshed out. However, that isn't automatically the case in a multi-part work. You should have part one's ending thought out when making part one, but you don't have to have part 3's ending fully done. To point at Star Wars again because it's awesome, A New Hope wrapped its own story up very well, but they hadn't done the ultimate end of Return of the Jedi at that time. On the other hand, the Genophage and Rannoch plotlines were established in the first game and expanded in the second. While the details of how weren't known, they came to predictable outcomes.
The ending does seem to have tried to borrow from several other works, but they didn't do a good job with any of them.
For the bold line, I'd encourage you to go back and play the first game because "futility" was Saren's argument and he lost. Shepard never had a Pyrrhic victory, except maybe on a personal level if you lost a lot of crew members on the suicide mission. Now had the endings actually followed through with what Arrival established and using the Crucible destroyed the Relays and thereby destroyed every system with a Relay, including the Sol System and the entire Victory Fleet, then that might be a Pyrrhic Victory. Now, there is one argument to be made for your futility idea, which is Saren's question; "Is submission not preferable to extinction?" The answer was a resounding "no." The story could have been about the fight being worthwhile, even if you lose.
By reading more and more posts I start to understand one simple thing:You just don't deserve an ending like that!Don't worry ME Andromeda will play it safe because of whiners like all of you!
You're right, we didn't deserve the crappy ending we got.
A better solution would be to not purchase their games anymore if you don't like how this one turned out. Some people never learn though, and keep buying up products they don't like or have been hosed in the past.
Bioware will keep making their games they want to make, and people will choose whether or not to buy them. That's how it works.
Why just abandon Bioware when we can encourage them to be better? And remember that we're only talking story here. Having a crappy story doesn't automatically make ME3 a bad game. ME2 had a terrible plot and was still a good game.
You completely missed the context of give peace a chance post and my reply to it. The context was that if peace was given a chance it would solve the problem. Which history shows that no peace being given a chance only delays conflict. Never solves it. Delaying the apocalypse isn't the same as stopping it. By that logic the ME series shouldn't have advanced beyond ME 1.
Ha, the "give peace a chance" comment was mine, so if anyone missed the context it was you. I never said it would solve the problem. The point is that I'm not convinced there is a problem and even if there is, the current cycle deserves the chance to exist and not be wiped out. And even if it only delays the inevitable, that delay is worthwhile.
Self-determination is an idiotic argument to use. Particularly when those choices will effect billions of people instead of the individual. A single person chooses to work out till their body covered in muscles is self determination and that is perfectly OK. That person then forcing every person on the planet from the young to the old to follow their workout/diet set up to the letter with no variation to account for age or body set up is quite another.
That's exactly why the endings are problematic, particularly Synthesis.
You don't seem to understand just how intertwined technology is with every day life in the ME universe or how it is growing intertwined with our own lives. Within the game there are plenty of examples of Shep and crew hacking secure doors with their omni tool. Which for them is equal to our smart phones only better because they can create a knife to stab people in ME 3. Even taking into account Shepard would have a special omni tool given only to specters or other high level N7 program graduates. AI's would be capable of the same level of decryption and hacking ability only able to do it even faster due to their ability to think and react is limited only to what ever physical media they are using. Which since it is electrical signals is near the speed of light. The amount of ways an AI could mess stuff up is staggering when you take that into account. Even in a space battle war ships rely on VI's to give them targeting solutions. Hack that to alter it or even simply crash the VI and delete it and now that massive war ship is shooting from the hip. And when you are dealing with several hundred miles between two ships a few degrees off and you miss completely. And holy heck if they get into engine control systems. Not even simply blowing it up by overloading the engine core but forcing it into a position to be broad sided or simply block/take a hit from an friendly ship.
That's true. So what?
BioWare seriously downplayed the hacking capability of a fully formed AI. Save when it came to EDI. They let her go full out to help Shepard but always dumb down everything else.
AI's only have the abilities given to them in the setting. Whatever you think they should be able to do based on the real world, other works, or your own wild imaginings is irrelevant. EDI and other AIs are more advanced, but warships already have VI help for the things a person can't handle quickly enough.
I don't personally believe the ending was bad enough to sour the whole experience, but that's just me.
That's a separate argument from if the ending is good or not. You've been defending every aspect, but now suddenly it's "not bad enough to sour the experience." What changed?
Retour en haut
