34 réponses à ce sujet

[Commander Rpg]

I see magnificent, great chances of completely screwing up the script in this one. I mean screwing up badly as it happened with Indiana Jones 4. Hats off to Biotechwarestuff if it doesn't happen (if it will be decent, at least).

 

Spoiler

[BaaBaaBlacksheep]

I want an alien inspired by Mudukons from Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee and the Na'vi from Avatar.

[Sartoz]

Remember, scooping fuel from gas giants is a known technology in the MEU.

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Cough !... Gasp !!!... Choke !!

 

Really Alan, I was finishing my wine when I read this. I need to wipe off and clean my screen, now....

[Monk]

Remember, scooping fuel from gas giants is a known technology in the MEU.

 

 

Wait, so you're saying there's going to be a large butterfly net attached to the Tempest? Whoa. (players want tramp stamps and the ship's gonna get an ACME stamp)

[Arcian]

Implying that Mass Effect or BioWare ever cared about being scientifically realistic.

Chris L'Etoile, who left BioWare has very clearly stated that the writing team of ME1 went out of their way to try and make the Mass Effect universe as realistic as possible because it would make for a more immersive universe. They still went with impossibilities like dark energy-based FTL, artificial gravity and sound in space because they are space opera staples and a big part of the subgenre's charm. And in the case of FTL, there's no story without it.

But as Chris has also said, the pursuit of scientific accuracy went out the window in ME2 because people above the paygrade of writers wanted to implement ideas they thought were cool without giving them a scientifically plausible basis as they were in Mass Effect 1. A great example is the Reapers reproductive method revealed in ME2 - Chris had the idea that they use advanced technology to rip information from the organic DNA of captured victims, incorporating said information in the construction of new Reaper AIs to make them unique. The bosses upstairs thought it would be cooler if Reapers were made from actual organic DNA, which makes absolutely no sense since Reapers are wholly synthetic beings. Needless to say, Chris was overruled and the idiotic organic goo idea was kept.

Or in regards to Legion, Chris wanted to explain Legion repairing itself with Shepard's N7 armor piece by having it do so as a symbolic gesture of the geth's inclusion into the crew. The bosses upstairs thought it would be cooler if Legion repaired himself with Shepard's armor because it was obsessed with Shepard. Chris had to compromise and wrote in the "There was a hole." and "No data available." lines.
 

Care to say where did you find statistics on Earth-like planets average presence?

Depends on what kind of Earth-like planet we're talking about. There's "Mars/Venus Earth-like" where the planet has potential to host life, and then there's "Earth Earth-like" where the planet is green and full of organic life. Just for the record, I was talking about the latter. Unnecessary confusion on my part, which I will gladly concede.
 
But in the interest of discussion:
 
Globular clusters, the big clusters containing several hundreds to thousands of stars, are super-old and don't contain enough of the elements necessary to form terrestrial planets, let alone life. This is beside the fact that any life developing in a globular cluster would be disrupted by the gravitational interactions between stars passing one another very closely. Ergo, the Helius Cluster in Andromeda can't be a globular cluster.
 
Open clusters, the smaller clusters containing at most a few hundred stars, are much younger and less gravitationally chaotic, and therefore stands a higher likelihood of developing life. The Helius Cluster in Andromeda must therefore be an open cluster with around 100-500 stars.
 
Now, the most realistic estimate of the number of habitable planets in the Milky Way is 40-80 billion. Let's say 60 billion for the sake of the argument. Assuming there's an average of 3 habitable planets per star (based on Sol's Venus, Earth and Mars), that means 20 billion stars can potentially host life. That's around 5-10% of the Milky Way's stars, depending on the estimate used.
 
Assuming the ratio is the same in Andromeda, statistically that means between 5-25 or 10-50 of the stars in the Helius Cluster hosts habitable planets, for a total of 30-150 habitable planets. However, these are just planets with potential for life. They could still be as barren as Venus or Mars, and they likely are due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the open clusters we have observed are younger than a billion years. If life across the universe evolves at a similar rate to life on Earth, a young Helius Cluster would be a couple of billion years too young to host human-level intelligent organisms evolved naturally.
 
Of course, statistics can only get you so far. There's the obvious problem that habitable star systems aren't evenly dispersed throughout the universe, so the Helius Cluster could be much more barren than the statistical average.
 
Look, the real problem with setting a Mass Effect game in a single star cluster is mainly that they're planning to fit more than the total content of the original trilogy's galaxy-spanning games into an area 2 billion times smaller. Using Earth as a comparison, that's a land area 0.0745 square kilometers in size relative to the total land area of the planet, which is 148,300,000 square kilometers. What are the odds that a dozen or more unrelated cultures are living on a patch of land 0.0745 square kilometers wide? It would be unbelievably crowded.

[SKAR]

I see magnificent, great chances of completely screwing up the script in this one. I mean screwing up badly as it happened with Indiana Jones 4. Hats off to Biotechwarestuff if it doesn't happen (if it will be decent, at least).

Spoiler

Keep thinking that.

[Cyonan]

Chris L'Etoile, who left BioWare has very clearly stated that the writing team of ME1 went out of their way to try and make the Mass Effect universe as realistic as possible because it would make for a more immersive universe. They still went with impossibilities like dark energy-based FTL, artificial gravity and sound in space because they are space opera staples and a big part of the subgenre's charm. And in the case of FTL, there's no story without it.

But as Chris has also said, the pursuit of scientific accuracy went out the window in ME2 because people above the paygrade of writers wanted to implement ideas they thought were cool without giving them a scientifically plausible basis as they were in Mass Effect 1. A great example is the Reapers reproductive method revealed in ME2 - Chris had the idea that they use advanced technology to rip information from the organic DNA of captured victims, incorporating said information in the construction of new Reaper AIs to make them unique. The bosses upstairs thought it would be cooler if Reapers were made from actual organic DNA, which makes absolutely no sense since Reapers are wholly synthetic beings. Needless to say, Chris was overruled and the idiotic organic goo idea was kept.

Or in regards to Legion, Chris wanted to explain Legion repairing itself with Shepard's N7 armor piece by having it do so as a symbolic gesture of the geth's inclusion into the crew. The bosses upstairs thought it would be cooler if Legion repaired himself with Shepard's armor because it was obsessed with Shepard. Chris had to compromise and wrote in the "There was a hole." and "No data available." lines.

 

but that's not how AI works. AI is just a series of code, it doesn't use information stored in DNA. If they want unique AIs, they just need to adjust the code.

 

Hell if all they needed is information in the DNA why even bother raiding Human colonies? Accessing the Citadel's medical records would yield much more effective results, and you could have an agent similar to Saren do that. Why do you need "advanced technology" to get what we can already get in 2016?

 

Still, the original Mass Effect had plenty of things that came down "makes sense, unless you stop to think about it for more than 5 seconds". Like a magical space gel made out of unwanted items that can hack any known electronic device.

[Ahriman]

Depends on what kind of Earth-like planet we're talking about. There's "Mars/Venus Earth-like" where the planet has potential to host life, and then there's "Earth Earth-like" where the planet is green and full of organic life. Just for the record, I was talking about the latter. Unnecessary confusion on my part, which I will gladly concede.

I was referring to the fact that we don't know which planets Alpha Centauri has, and that's our closest star system. Therefore any assumptions on habitable planet presence makes no more sense than anything Bioware comes up with.

Besides I don't think Bioware used word "cluster" in astronomical sense, but merely a geographical region of Andromeda galaxy.

[Sartoz]

 

 Big Snip
Look, the real problem with setting a Mass Effect game in a single star cluster is mainly that they're planning to fit more than the total content of the original trilogy's galaxy-spanning games into an area 2 billion times smaller. Using Earth as a comparison, that's a land area 0.0745 square kilometers in size relative to the total land area of the planet, which is 148,300,000 square kilometers. What are the odds that a dozen or more unrelated cultures are living on a patch of land 0.0745 square kilometers wide? It would be unbelievably crowded.

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There are statistics and then there are statistics. "...planning to fit more than the total content of the original trilogy's galaxy.." how so?  Assuming that a number of council races have their own colony ships in addition to the human one, these ships may have a total of 100k-1M colonists for each species.... not a whole galaxy worth.

 

Cluster sizes vary, as you know. The Helius Cluster could host 100-300K stars.  1k habitable planets may seem large but 150 is a rain drop in the ocean. Also, what is inhabitable to us may be habitable to alien species. 

 

Be as it may,  Bio mentioned they wished to avoid a galaxy wide cataclysm plot, for Andromeda. Something they now regret doing, I  think.  The Helius cluster can support many stories. Andromeda is the first and the next one can come from a neighbouring cluster. 

 

Remember, humanity is just starting to colonize. I suspect that by the end of the game we have just one New Earth.  I mean, even with a million human souls, one planet is more than enough, don't you think?

[goishen]

I think the number that we take is gonna be extremely small.   50-100K of each race in the known galaxy.   It is called the ark after all.  Beside this, I think that we'd have to find a solar system much like our own for each of the colonies to live in.  

 

I may be talking out of my ass here, but one of those isn't hard to find.  We might not be at the top of the heap when it comes down to comfy living environs.  When moving, it's more comfortable to have something you know that's close by.   Same solar system solves all of those problems.