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[Jonny_Evil]

mhenders wrote...

Harbinger says "releasing control" and the collector looks around like "wtf" just before being consumed in the explosion (paragon ending, not sure how the "keep the base" option plays out.)
Makes me thinkg that Harbinger was a reaper overmind of sorts.

the end showing the fleet of reaper ships just confused me. Did they just decide that since they can't use the mass relay thru the citadel that they're going to hoof it across space manually? did the collectors build another "citadel" scale relay somewhere closer?


what do you guys think?

I think the shot of the huge Reaper fleet meant that they're still stuck in dark space. They're so far away that from where they are, the entirety of the Milky Way was visible. To me, it looked like they were at least as far away from the Milky as the Milky Way is wide. I don't remember the exact codex lore for it, but I recall that the Mass Relays exist because even FTL drives are far too slow to travel distances more than a few dozen or hundred light years at a time. So... the reaper fleet is still waiting for the Citadel relay  to open and let them in.

After I spent some time thinking about the ending of ME2 and of ME1, these are the things I've decided:

1. The Reapers are stupid, for not building more relays from their dark space lair to the Milky Way. Remember that the relays themselves are pretty inconspicuous, in terms of cosmic scale. The Mu Relay  in ME1 couldn't be found without the information from the Rachni queen because it was a cold, dark object floating randomly in space. Why didn't the Reapers leave lots of hidden relays to dark space floating around where they likely would never be seen by Milky Way inhabitants? For godlike AIs, they don't really have any concept of redundancy.

2. Shepherd, the Illusive Man, Anderson, and all the other people in the Milky Way who believe in the Reaper threat are also stupid. The way to defeat the Reapers isn't to go chasing the Collectors around, it's to blow up the Citadel. The Citadel is the one route the Reapers have into the Milky Way. If it were destroyed, the Reapers would be stuck in dark space forevermore. There's only 25 million or so people on the Citadel. It could be replaced with an asteroid habitat, something like a non-ghetto version of Omega.

3. The reason that the Reapers come around every 50K years and harvest the Milky Way is apparently for the purposes of maintenance and/or reproduction. Solyent Green is made of peoples! Organics get processed into Reaper parts and/or new Reapers.

4. Why the Collectors exist just... isn't apparent. Are they Sovereign's backup, in case it failed? If so, that's also stupid. If you're the Reapers and you're worried about the vanguard you left behind not getting the job done, then... why would you use a lobotomized race of organics you indoctrinated as your vanguard's back up? The better, and more obvious, solution would seem to be to leave more vanguards. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of Reapers in the dark space fleet. Why didn't they leave five or ten behind instead of just one? It's not like they're conspicuous. Sovereign hid for 50K years, and the derelict Reaper went unnoticed for... 37 million years. In fact, the derelict Reaper makes you wonder why they bother retreating to dark space at all. Milky Way organics don't really seem to be good at noticing Reapers.

5. If you can suspend belief really hard, or else come up with some sort of Rube Goldberg explanation for why the Collectors are there instead of a few other vanguard Reapers, then I think that the best explanation of what they were trying to do is to build a new Reaper vanguard, to take Sovereign's place using an early  mini-harvest of available organics. My guess is that it will be revealed that since the Keepers are no longer in thrall of the Reapers, it takes an actual Reaper to activate the Citadel relay to dark space. Why the new Reaper would look like a human skeleton is beyond me. What would it have looked like once it was full grown? A 2km long Terminator robot flying through space like Superman? That would be farcical, not menacing. The whole "Reapers look like the species they're made of" plot detail is just... really dumb. It also doesn't fit with the image of the amassed dark space Reaper fleet. If Reapers looked like the Solyent Green they were made of, then there ought to have have been hundreds, if not thousands, of differently shaped Reapers in the fleet. Unless, of course, the Squid Reapers were the Cool Kids and hung out in a clique by themselves away from all the others.

6. I think it's pretty obvious that Harbinger the Bug, the boss of the Collectors, was being remotely controlled by a Reaper. I'd even go so far as to say that it was the Reaper Formerly Known As Sovereign doing the controlling. Legion implies the Reapers are software, like the Geth are. So if the Reapers are like the Geth, in that they're just a collection of programs, then Sovereign would be able to work like the Geth by being able to take control of different physical platforms. A Reaper squid ship would be one such platform, as would implanted Saren and the King Collector Bug who got incinerated at the end of ME2. Thus, I think the main antagonist of the story arc is Harbinger the Reaper, who controlled Sovereign the squid ship in ME1, the Collector King in ME2, and will be back in another form trying to open the Citadel Relay again in ME3. Thus, the plot of ME2 is driven by Harbinger the Reaper trying to build itself a new physical platform for retaking the Citadel. Another clue is the name: "Harbinger" is a roughly a synonym of "vanguard" and of course, Sovereign described itself as the vanguard of the Reapers. I believe that Legion also said that it was Saren who came up with the name "Sovereign". 


Apologies if this seems like an unduly harsh take on the ME storyline. I have conflicting impulses with respect to the Mass Effect story. One the one hand, stupid plot holes that ruin my suspension of disbelief really annoy me, but on the other, ME is somewhat less stupid than most science fiction that makes it to the mainstream. And, as video games, they've been great fun. In other words, I only hit them because I love them. >.<

I've been meaning to write up a huge cumulative list of plot holes and inconsistencies in the Mass Effect story and post it, but I am lazy. I should probably do it soon, though, since all developers love to read their forums right after a new release. I should know. I've done the same myself. <.<

1: Reapers have never before failed, not in all their millions or billions of years harvesting the galaxy. Why have a backup?

2: Apart from being indestructable, the Citadel is the heart of galactic society and governance. It'd be like nuking Washington DC because a few people think there's a gateway to hell under it. Not to mention if you know about the Reapers you'd know how the Citadel ties into the Relay network. Destroy it and the relays might shut down, say goodnight to civilisation.

3: Harbinger said they were "salvation through destruction". The Reapers might operate like that to preserve civilisations within themselves for an as yet unknown reason.

4: The Reapers are sapient beings, they don't run according to a program, they're adaptable. The Collectors were collecting interesting life forms long before humanity came along and stopped Sovereign, they could easily just be a Reaper experiment to more thoroughly catalog life in between harvests and only got pressed into building a new Reaper to open the Citadel relay after Sovereign's destruction. Also space is big, shut down starships are cold. The derelict Reaper was only found by following the trajectory of the mass driver shot that scoured a planet before killing it, and Sovereign made itself known, it wasn't discovered.

5: It's EDI's guesswork, not fact. Many people on the forums have pointed out that the Human Reaper was much, much smaller than Sovereign or the Reapers shown at the end and have guessed that the squid like ship is a shell containing the Reaper which resembles it's parent species. As I said above, they mention salvation through destruction, they may be collecting and preserving species instead of harvesting them for some other reason, but with the destruction of Sovereign they've had to repurpose the Collectors into building a replacement to open the Relay.

6: Harbinger's just another Reaper. With Sovereign dead he's taken over efforts to get back into the galaxy, that's all, although your theory is interesting.

Modifié par Jonny_Evil, 30 janvier 2010 - 02:48 .

[HiroLSX]

Here's the thing I don't get if they are in deep space still. Wouldn't them coming online with no way into the galaxy use up their..I'm guessing fuel. I mean thats why they "Sleep" for 50k years so they don't run down or out of fuel

Modifié par HiroLSX, 30 janvier 2010 - 02:48 .

[Jonny_Evil]

Giantevilhead wrote...

It doesn't matter if the mass relays are "all over the galaxy." There are between 100 to 400 billion stars in the galaxy. There could be hundreds of millions of earth like planets in the galaxy. Putting a mass relay "near" a star system where life evolves doesn't even come close to guaranteeing that life will find it.

Also, the fact that the Citadel races have been to many planets formerly occupied by the Protheans suggests that the relay network isn't that big. It would take at least millions of relays to cover a significant portion of the galaxy. The chances of the Citadel races occupying or even finding so many Prothean worlds is extremely low if there are millions of relays.

Then if they don't find it, they will by the time the next harvest comes along. Mass effect technology is the only way to travel FTL in the Mass Effect universe, and only the Relays allow long distance travel in a reasonable time. Again, the physical size of the galaxy is irrelevant, everywhere outside the core is within reasonable travel of a relay, and all the relays eventually lead back to the Citadel. Think of it like a bowl with an ever branching maze above it. If that maze has ten thousand openings at the top and you drop a marble in any of them, it will end
up in the bowl. Turn it upside down, and the marble entering the maze from the bowl could reappear in any of the ten thousand exits, that's why new species end up at the Citadel.

As for the Prothean worlds, they spread over the entire galaxy but were based around the Citadel like all other galactic societies. It's logical that they would have colonised the systems around the relays leading directly to the Citadel like the current lot have. The Citadel races have explored a few hundred relays closest to the citadel and have more than enough space to expand so they don't go further. It stands to reason that those few hundred relays are going to be the most heavily used by all the species that have been based around the Citadel, Protheans included.

Modifié par Jonny_Evil, 30 janvier 2010 - 02:48 .

[Jonny_Evil]

HiroLSX wrote...

Here's the thing I don't get if they are in deep space still. Wouldn't them coming online with no way into the galaxy use up their..I'm guessing fuel. I mean thats why they "Sleep" for 50k years so they don't run down or out of fuel

The derelict one still had power after 37 million years. I'm guessing they sleep between harvests because they've got nothing else to do, but with Sovereign and the new Reaper destroyed they've given up the hope of their standard surprise attack through the Citadel and are coming back under their own FTL drives.

[HiroLSX]

Still would like to know their power source and how long it can really last and why they do the whole sleep. I think its more to it then just being bored

[mhenders]

Jonny_Evil wrote...

1: Reapers have never before failed, not in all their millions or billions of years harvesting the galaxy. Why have a backup?

2: Apart from being indestructable, the Citadel is the heart of galactic society and governance. It'd be like nuking Washington DC because a few people think there's a gateway to hell under it. Not to mention if you know about the Reapers you'd know how the Citadel ties into the Relay network. Destroy it and the relays might shut down, say goodnight to civilisation.

3: Harbinger said they were "salvation through destruction". The Reapers might operate like that to preserve civilisations within themselves for an as yet unknown reason.

4: The Reapers are sapient beings, they don't run according to a program, they're adaptable. The Collectors were collecting interesting life forms long before humanity came along and stopped Sovereign, they could easily just be a Reaper experiment to more thoroughly catalog life in between harvests and only got pressed into building a new Reaper to open the Citadel relay after Sovereign's destruction. Also space is big, shut down starships are cold. The derelict Reaper was only found by following the trajectory of the mass driver shot that scoured a planet before killing it, and Sovereign made itself known, it wasn't discovered.

5: It's EDI's guesswork, not fact. Many people on the forums have pointed out that the Human Reaper was much, much smaller than Sovereign or the Reapers shown at the end and have guessed that the squid like ship is a shell containing the Reaper which resembles it's parent species. As I said above, they mention salvation through destruction, they may be collecting and preserving species instead of harvesting them for some other reason, but with the destruction of Sovereign they've had to repurpose the Collectors into building a replacement to open the Relay.

6: Harbinger's just another Reaper. With Sovereign dead he's taken over efforts to get back into the galaxy, that's all, although your theory is interesting.

1. The Reapers are godlike super intelligences. Surely they understand entropy? Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, especially over a long period of time. There's already evidence that things don't always go exactly to their plans. The Mu Relay was blown out of position by a supernova; 37 million years ago, one Reaper was actually taken out by organics; and any number of other bad (for them) things could happen in a chaotic universe over the course of billions of years. If they're really as nearly omniscient a as the story implies, and they really do plan to live forever, then they would have devised countless ways to make sure that they always have access to their food source. They are capable of calculating contingencies and backup plans beyond the ken of mortals, and simple common sense holds that they must have. Supervillians ought never to act so stupid that it contradicts their very nature.

2. As far as I know, there's no evidence the Citadel is indestructible. Sovereign certainly gave it a good thrashing in ME1. At the very least, it could be rigged with plasma torches like those from the asteroid in Bring Down the Sky and shoved into the nearest star. That it won't be evacuated is a political problem. And even if it can't be evacuated, there's a strong Renegade/Cerberus case that it ought to be destroyed, anyway. You'd be trading the lives of its 25 million inhabitants for those of untold trillions of current and future sentients in the Milky Way who'd be saved from harvesting by the Reapers. My point is that the first, second, and last concern of anyone serious about defeating the Reapers ought to be the destruction of the Citadel--it's the most effective, feasible, and safe path to victory.

3. Well, regardless of what the Collectors/Reapers think they're doing, Reapers are made of organics and the Collectors seemed to be making a new Reaper. 

4. I could buy the idea that the Collectors were left behind by the Reapers to prepare a menu for the next time the Reapers are ready for dinner. There's no real evidence in the story to support that theory, though.

4a. The more I think about it, the more the derelict Reaper seems to be a huge plot hole, too. Remember that in ME1, Vigil went to great lengths to explain that the Reapers were really, really thorough about cleaning up after themselves so that they'd leave no evidence about themselves for the next generation of organics to discover. So... during Reaper dinner time 37 million years ago, one of their number went MIA, and the rest of them didn't go find it and clean up its corpse, too? It's not like it would have been hard for them. All they would have had to do would have been to disable its Mass Effect core and let it fall into whatever star it was orbiting (which was what Shepherd did).

5. I certainly hope you're right about the Squid form being a shell for a Reaper core. As for Edi... whenever she's delivering info-dumps to Shepherd, she's always right. She's a plot crutch to explain things to the player. She's incapable of generating a map of a planet from orbit for Shepherd to use while he's on the ground, but she can scan the guts of a hyper-advanced alien starship and know exactly what's going on inside it. Nearly all the information that EDI reveals to Shepherd through her "scans" is pretty /eyeroll. In some ways, she's as godlike as the Reapers: her ability to scan things and figure out what they mean without doing any real research and investigation defies belief.

6. This was admittedly speculation on my part, and I forgot that Sovereign thought of itself as Nazara. Since a core element of  way the Reapers seems to be that redundancy is never, ever  necessary, then it would make sense that Nazara is Harbinger and is the only Reaper presently in the Milky Way.

[TyDurden13]

mhenders wrote...


1. The Reapers are stupid, for not building more relays from their dark space lair to the Milky Way. Remember that the relays themselves are pretty inconspicuous, in terms of cosmic scale. The Mu Relay  in ME1 couldn't be found without the information from the Rachni queen because it was a cold, dark object floating randomly in space. Why didn't the Reapers leave lots of hidden relays to dark space floating around where they likely would never be seen by Milky Way inhabitants? For godlike AIs, they don't really have any concept of redundancy.

This seems pretty simple to me: they are vulnerable in their hibernation state, so can't risk anybody stumbling upon them by accident.  Even if the relays are incospicious and unlikely to be found, remember this is a cycle they have been continuing over billions of years.  Over a timeline that long, even something hugely unlikely starts to become feasible.    They had to weigh the risk of being stuck  versus the risk of being discovered in a vulnerable state, and chose the former.  Which makes sense, since they are basically weighing a potential setback (having to "hoof it" back to the galaxy) against their potential destruction (being discovered while sleeping).

2. Shepherd, the Illusive Man, Anderson, and all the other people in the Milky Way who believe in the Reaper threat are also stupid. The way to defeat the Reapers isn't to go chasing the Collectors around, it's to blow up the Citadel. The Citadel is the one route the Reapers have into the Milky Way. If it were destroyed, the Reapers would be stuck in dark space forevermore. There's only 25 million or so people on the Citadel. It could be replaced with an asteroid habitat, something like a non-ghetto version of Omega.

That's not really fair, since they only have the vaguest ideas of what the reapers are capable of - being complacent is far more stupid.  And as we see with the Collectors, there are at least some Reaper contigency plans in place.  And the Reapers are alreeady locked out of the Citadel thanks to Vigil's code - it's no longer a threat.

3. The reason that the Reapers come around every 50K years and harvest the Milky Way is apparently for the purposes of maintenance and/or reproduction. Solyent Green is made of peoples! Organics get processed into Reaper parts and/or new Reapers.

Well we don't know the real answer yet.  That's EDI's speculation.  But yeah I guess it makes sense if the reason they need organics is for reproduction/avoiding stagnancy (a big theme in ME).

4. Why the Collectors exist just... isn't apparent. Are they Sovereign's backup, in case it failed? If so, that's also stupid. If you're the Reapers and you're worried about the vanguard you left behind not getting the job done, then... why would you use a lobotomized race of organics you indoctrinated as your vanguard's back up? The better, and more obvious, solution would seem to be to leave more vanguards. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of Reapers in the dark space fleet. Why didn't they leave five or ten behind instead of just one? It's not like they're conspicuous. Sovereign hid for 50K years, and the derelict Reaper went unnoticed for... 37 million years. In fact, the derelict Reaper makes you wonder why they bother retreating to dark space at all. Milky Way organics don't really seem to be good at noticing Reapers.

Fair point.  Although leaving behind repurposes organics is something they've done before (keepers).  I dunno - maybe they feel safer risking proxy organic slaves rather than more of their own.  Maybe they're afraid their technology will be deiscovered and reverse-engineered (which is why they only risk one vanguard?)  But yeah that's a potential plot hole.

5. If you can suspend belief really hard, or else come up with some sort of Rube Goldberg explanation for why the Collectors are there instead of a few other vanguard Reapers, then I think that the best explanation of what they were trying to do is to build a new Reaper vanguard, to take Sovereign's place using an early  mini-harvest of available organics. My guess is that it will be revealed that since the Keepers are no longer in thrall of the Reapers, it takes an actual Reaper to activate the Citadel relay to dark space. Why the new Reaper would look like a human skeleton is beyond me. What would it have looked like once it was full grown? A 2km long Terminator robot flying through space like Superman? That would be farcical, not menacing. The whole "Reapers look like the species they're made of" plot detail is just... really dumb. It also doesn't fit with the image of the amassed dark space Reaper fleet. If Reapers looked like the Solyent Green they were made of, then there ought to have have been hundreds, if not thousands, of differently shaped Reapers in the fleet. Unless, of course, the Squid Reapers were the Cool Kids and hung out in a clique by themselves away from all the others.

Well I think the skeleton would have been the "inside" and the reaper would have looked like the other reapers from the exterior.  Perjaps they all have different shapes and what we see is the "armor."  But othe rthan that, their rebjuildin a new vanguard was acctually what I thought they were doing when I first got through the ending...

6. I think it's pretty obvious that Harbinger the Bug, the boss of the Collectors, was being remotely controlled by a Reaper. I'd even go so far as to say that it was the Reaper Formerly Known As Sovereign doing the controlling. Legion implies the Reapers are software, like the Geth are. So if the Reapers are like the Geth, in that they're just a collection of programs, then Sovereign would be able to work like the Geth by being able to take control of different physical platforms. A Reaper squid ship would be one such platform, as would implanted Saren and the King Collector Bug who got incinerated at the end of ME2. Thus, I think the main antagonist of the story arc is Harbinger the Reaper, who controlled Sovereign the squid ship in ME1, the Collector King in ME2, and will be back in another form trying to open the Citadel Relay again in ME3. Thus, the plot of ME2 is driven by Harbinger the Reaper trying to build itself a new physical platform for retaking the Citadel. Another clue is the name: "Harbinger" is a roughly a synonym of "vanguard" and of course, Sovereign described itself as the vanguard of the Reapers. I believe that Legion also said that it was Saren who came up with the name "Sovereign". 

Very plausible - agreed.

Apologies if this seems like an unduly harsh take on the ME storyline. I have conflicting impulses with respect to the Mass Effect story. One the one hand, stupid plot holes that ruin my suspension of disbelief really annoy me, but on the other, ME is somewhat less stupid than most science fiction that makes it to the mainstream. And, as video games, they've been great fun. In other words, I only hit them because I love them. >.<

I've been meaning to write up a huge cumulative list of plot holes and inconsistencies in the Mass Effect story and post it, but I am lazy. I should probably do it soon, though, since all developers love to read their forums right after a new release. I should know. I've done the same myself. <.<

This is sci-fi - nitpicking is encouraged!  All told, I think ME is pretty well thought out as far as huge epic space operas go...

Modifié par TyDurden13, 30 janvier 2010 - 11:46 .

[TyDurden13]

Giantevilhead wrote...

ME falls into the same trap as Star Trek and Star Wars in assuming that space isn't very big. There are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. Assuming that technologically advanced organic life forms are as common as portrayed in ME, the Reapers could never wipe out all organic life in the galaxy even if they numbered in the millions. The Reapers would have needed to build billions of mass relays to truely cover the galaxy and ensure that all intelligent life falls under their domain.

Well, first of all, they're not trying to wipe out all organic life - just the advanced spacefaring races.  Second, that is why the Mass Relay system is in place to begin with - Soverign mentions it in ME1.  The relays are there to make sure the spacefaring races develop "along the lines" the Reapers want them too - i.e. settle the same regions of space, etc.  The Mass Relays exist to make sure the spacefarinng races are easy to find and be harvested.  And even then, it takes them centuries.

[Jonny_Evil]

mhenders wrote...


1. The Reapers are godlike super intelligences. Surely they understand entropy? Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, especially over a long period of time. There's already evidence that things don't always go exactly to their plans. The Mu Relay was blown out of position by a supernova; 37 million years ago, one Reaper was actually taken out by organics; and any number of other bad (for them) things could happen in a chaotic universe over the course of billions of years. If they're really as nearly omniscient a as the story implies, and they really do plan to live forever, then they would have devised countless ways to make sure that they always have access to their food source. They are capable of calculating contingencies and backup plans beyond the ken of mortals, and simple common sense holds that they must have. Supervillians ought never to act so stupid that it contradicts their very nature.

2. As far as I know, there's no evidence the Citadel is indestructible. Sovereign certainly gave it a good thrashing in ME1. At the very least, it could be rigged with plasma torches like those from the asteroid in Bring Down the Sky and shoved into the nearest star. That it won't be evacuated is a political problem. And even if it can't be evacuated, there's a strong Renegade/Cerberus case that it ought to be destroyed, anyway. You'd be trading the lives of its 25 million inhabitants for those of untold trillions of current and future sentients in the Milky Way who'd be saved from harvesting by the Reapers. My point is that the first, second, and last concern of anyone serious about defeating the Reapers ought to be the destruction of the Citadel--it's the most effective, feasible, and safe path to victory.

They can always FTL back to the galaxy by themselves, as they're doing at the end of ME2. The Citadel is a trap, it lets them destroy the government, access census records, control the relays and access relay records. It means that the first strike cripples their prey and makes for an easy mopping up, but it doesn't mean that they can't return without it.

Also, again the Citadel is tied into the relay network. If you destroy it the relays could all shut down, which would totally destroy galactic civilisation anyway.

[TheGuv]

[quote]mhenders wrote..

1. The Reapers are godlike super intelligences. Surely they understand entropy? Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, especially over a long period of time. There's already evidence that things don't always go exactly to their plans. The Mu Relay was blown out of position by a supernova; 37 million years ago, one Reaper was actually taken out by organics; and any number of other bad (for them) things could happen in a chaotic universe over the course of billions of years. If they're really as nearly omniscient a as the story implies, and they really do plan to live forever, then they would have devised countless ways to make sure that they always have access to their food source. They are capable of calculating contingencies and backup plans beyond the ken of mortals, and simple common sense holds that they must have. Supervillians ought never to act so stupid that it contradicts their very nature.[/quote]

The Reapers likely did have multiple redundancies.  They know they aren't indestructable, so they came up with a virtually foolproof plan.  The thing that seems to have screwed the Reapers up is the Protheans themselves.  They were the only civilisation able to mount an effective defense against the Reapers, even if it was a somewhat delayed one.

It's only a stupid plan when it doesn't work.  Sovereign even figured out how the Protheans disabled things and would have won were it not for the Alliance.

[quote]2. As far as I know, there's no evidence the Citadel is indestructible. Sovereign certainly gave it a good thrashing in ME1. At the very least, it could be rigged with plasma torches like those from the asteroid in Bring Down the Sky and shoved into the nearest star. That it won't be evacuated is a political problem. And even if it can't be evacuated, there's a strong Renegade/Cerberus case that it ought to be destroyed, anyway. You'd be trading the lives of its 25 million inhabitants for those of untold trillions of current and future sentients in the Milky Way who'd be saved from harvesting by the Reapers. My point is that the first, second, and last concern of anyone serious about defeating the Reapers ought to be the destruction of the Citadel--it's the most effective, feasible, and safe path to victory.[/quote]

What star?  It's a nebula.  Besides, what makes you think Cerberus haven't considered it?

The Citadel is virtually indestructable though.  It took multiple presumed strikes from weapons that sheared dreadnoughts in half with virtually no exterior damage, only interior.

Sovereign was destroyed by the combined firepower of the entire Alliance fleet while its shields were down and its defenses offline.

[quote]4a. The more I think about it, the more the derelict Reaper seems to be a huge plot hole, too. Remember that in ME1, Vigil went to great lengths to explain that the Reapers were really, really thorough about cleaning up after themselves so that they'd leave no evidence about themselves for the next generation of organics to discover. So... during Reaper dinner time 37 million years ago, one of their number went MIA, and the rest of them didn't go find it and clean up its corpse, too? It's not like it would have been hard for them. All they would have had to do would have been to disable its Mass Effect core and let it fall into whatever star it was orbiting (which was what Shepherd did).[/quote]

Or it could simply be that the Protheans did not discover that particular Reaper.  They were very thorough, but they did not completely expunge the Protheans from existance, afterall.  Ilos went dark, and the Reapers could not find it until Saren did.

Also remember, it was in orbit of a brown dwarf.  Those things kick out a lot of radiation and it was supposedly inside the atmosphere.  It was probably happened upon by chance - all the Reapers would ever have discovered would have been a decimated planet with a massive cannon and not much else.

[quote]5.Nearly all the information that EDI reveals to Shepherd through her "scans" is pretty /eyeroll. In some ways, she's as godlike as the Reapers: her ability to scan things and figure out what they mean without doing any real research and investigation defies belief.[/quote]

She's been nipping in and out of systems constantly.  She was obviously meant to fill a Cortana role, for lack of a better comparison.  She also spent a substancial amount of time inside Collector systems - it's likely she picked up on things and extrapolated from there.  The Illusive Man also seemed to know what was going on.

[quote[6. This was admittedly speculation on my part, and I forgot that Sovereign thought of itself as Nazara. Since a core element of  way the Reapers seems to be that redundancy is never, ever  necessary, then it would make sense that Nazara is Harbinger and is the only Reaper presently in the Milky Way.
[/quote]

I'm guessing that the Collectors or their forbearers were the redundancy plan - take the genetics of whatever race beat their guardian and use it against them.

[MikeFL25]

HiroLSX wrote...

Still would like to know their power source and how long it can really last and why they do the whole sleep. I think its more to it then just being bored

I assume the Reapers have some kind of near-everlasting or renewable power source.  I think it might the the same kind of tech that the mass relays use....which would make sense since the Mass Relays are of Reaper design. 

If you think about it, the Mass Relays have existed for millions...if not billions of years, and they still work.  So it would be safe to assume that since the Reapers built the Mass Relays, they too are capable of running on some kind of power source that allows them to exist for millions of years.  Or perhaps they really are "eternal" as Soverign implies.

[mhenders]

TheGuv wrote...

The Reapers likely did have multiple redundancies.  They know they aren't indestructable, so they came up with a virtually foolproof plan.  The thing that seems to have screwed the Reapers up is the Protheans themselves.  They were the only civilisation able to mount an effective defense against the Reapers, even if it was a somewhat delayed one.

Well, it was hardly a foolproof plan, then, was it? All it took was one slightly smarter than average species of organics to ruin their grand scheme. Given how much the story talks the Reapers up, they ought to have been smart enough to anticipate something like the Protheans. And since they built the Citadel and all the mass relays, it was easily within their capabilities to leave other, hidden gateways to dark space.

What star?  It's a nebula.  Besides, what makes you think Cerberus haven't considered it?

The Citadel is virtually indestructable though.  It took multiple presumed strikes from weapons that sheared dreadnoughts in half with virtually no exterior damage, only interior.

The Citadel is near the star Widow. Possibly in orbit around it, though the wiki isn't clear. I don't think that anyone on either side shot directly at the Citadel, so I still don't think that the story supports the idea that it's "indestructible". Given a big enough bomb, you ought to be able to blow up anything, or at least render the relay inoperative.

And yes Cerberus should be considering it, but there's no mention that the idea is on the Illusive Man's mind, or that he or anyone else has any plans for doing something about the Reapers aside from dealing with the Collectors.

Or it could simply be that the Protheans did not discover that particular Reaper.  They were very thorough, but they did not completely expunge the Protheans from existance, afterall.  Ilos went dark, and the Reapers could not find it until Saren did.

Umm, no. Protheans have nothing to do with it. Vigil said the Reapers went to great effort to clean up after themselves, not that the Protheans cleaned up after the Reapers. The Reapers would know that one of their own had been killed: "Hey guys, dinner's over and we've cleaned off the table. It's time to go back to dark space! OK, quick headcount before we get back on the bus home. Hmm... 7867346 out of 7867347. OMG, we're missing one of our apocalyptic doomsday brethren. He was least seen having dessert in Hawking Eta. Somebody cruise by there and tell him to stop stuffing his face and hop back through the Citadel Relay. We need to clear out so the next generation of food can grow without figuring us out."

She's been nipping in and out of systems constantly.  She was obviously meant to fill a Cortana role, for lack of a better comparison.  She also spent a substancial amount of time inside Collector systems - it's likely she picked up on things and extrapolated from there.  The Illusive Man also seemed to know what was going on.

Umm, sure. She "scans" things that no Council race has ever imagined before, much less encountered or observed, and then instantly tells Shepherd exactly what's going on. Liara T'soni couldn't figure out how to work a Prothean elevator after months of study on Therum, but EDI instantly deduces that the Collectors are making baby Reapers out of puree'd colonists and that baby Reapers have the characteristics of whatever organics they're made from.

[JMKnave]

Interesting thread. I have not played ME1 so I can only go with what I've seen and heard in ME2.

Let me know if I have the following correct:
1. The Collectors were actually the Protheans.
2. The Protheans were a technologically advanced species.
3. The Protheans were the only species able to fight somewhat successfully against the Reapers.
4. The Reapers are called the Old Machines.
5. The Old Machines are made of a combination of advanced technology and organics.
6. The Old Machines cull the ME universe for the "best of" tech and organics once every several millions/billions of years.
7. The Protheans were the "best of" the last time they culled and were subsequently put into slave labor. Had most of their organic selves replaced with tech and are now basically just empty vessels the Reapers can interface with to keep an eye on the ME universe until their next cull.
8. They used the Heretics (a minority of the Geth) against Sheppard in ME1. I'm guessing it's because now the Geth are the top tech species.
9. Sheppard and the Alliance stopped the Reapers and the Heretics making them the top organic species.

The above leads me to some questions:
1. In ME2 the real Geth (non-heretics) are against the Reapers/Collectors. And so the Heretics, with Reaper help, create a virus to turn all Geth into Heretics to serve the Repears. Are the Geth aware of the Repears plans to assimilate them and so that is why they are fighting back?
2. Are humans considered the top organic species because their DNA is more genetically diverse than other species? And because they defeated Sovereign?
3. When Harbinger says we are "your salvation through destruction", does it mean that because they take only the best of such and such, your species becomes immortalized forever as part of the Repears?
4. Are the Reapers after the Geth because they see them as the "New Machines" that could possibly take their place? Do they see Humans as the same threat?

Anyone have answers/guesses?

Modifié par JMKnave, 31 janvier 2010 - 02:09 .

[TheGuv]

mhenders wrote...
Well, it was hardly a foolproof plan, then, was it? All it took was one slightly smarter than average species of organics to ruin their grand scheme. Given how much the story talks the Reapers up, they ought to have been smart enough to anticipate something like the Protheans. And since they built the Citadel and all the mass relays, it was easily within their capabilities to leave other, hidden gateways to dark space.

Does it cost a lot of time and energy to construct a mass relay?  Presumably they have to be manually moved, since it would be difficult to propel a mass relay through another mass relay.  That takes time and energy that the Reapers may not have had.  Also remember that the Citadel is essentially one very, very big relay.  An extra-galactic relay would take a lot of time to build and put together, and moving that material outside the galaxy by hand (tentacle?) might have been troublesome even for the Reapers.

Presumably the Harvesting process is more or less what we saw in the Collector base.  Harvesting is simply the process of using organics to reproduce.

The Citadel is near the star Widow. Possibly in orbit around it, though the wiki isn't clear. I don't think that anyone on either side shot directly at the Citadel, so I still don't think that the story supports the idea that it's "indestructible". Given a big enough bomb, you ought to be able to blow up anything, or at least render the relay inoperative.

And yes Cerberus should be considering it, but there's no mention that the idea is on the Illusive Man's mind, or that he or anyone else has any plans for doing something about the Reapers aside from dealing with the Collectors.

The Citadel is basically a massive cylinder, with about 50% of the useable surface of the inner wall of the cylinder taken up by the Wards.  It almost certainly took multiple hits.

I don't think Cerberus have the firepower to attempt such an attack.  Asteroids?  Good luck getting them through the Citadel fleet.  Nuclear weapons?  Civilian tragedy, but no atmosphere between the wards to propagate the blast.  Fleet attack?  Close the arms, and the station is virtually indestructable.

Nearly every feasible method of attacking the Citadel either invokes the wrath of the Citadel fleet or is simply unfeasible due to the size and the durability of the Citadel.

Umm, no. Protheans have nothing to do with it. Vigil said the Reapers went to great effort to clean up after themselves, not that the Protheans cleaned up after the Reapers. The Reapers would know that one of their own had been killed: "Hey guys, dinner's over and we've cleaned off the table. It's time to go back to dark space! OK, quick headcount before we get back on the bus home. Hmm... 7867346 out of 7867347. OMG, we're missing one of our apocalyptic doomsday brethren. He was least seen having dessert in Hawking Eta. Somebody cruise by there and tell him to stop stuffing his face and hop back through the Citadel Relay. We need to clear out so the next generation of food can grow without figuring us out."

No matter what specific tropes Mass Effect ascribes to, the one it most certainly does is information gathering.  A Reaper that sank into the atmosphere of a gas giant would be virtually impossible to detect at range.  You could only really detect it by chance - exactly the kind of thing an expansionist, curious race like humans might happen to do.

The Reapers also have limited resources.  They may be able to spend hundreds of years combing the galaxy, but who says they all stay and do it?  Maybe the cleanup team isn't that big?  Maybe that particular Reaper was one of the cleanup crew and they annihilated each other.  Or maybe it suffered extensive battle damage during the fight, and simply could not escape or send for help.

What's more, the only reliable quote you have is from Vigil, the Prothean AI and the Protheans may simply have never discovered that particular Reaper.

Umm, sure. She "scans" things that no Council race has ever imagined before, much less encountered or observed, and then instantly tells Shepherd exactly what's going on. Liara T'soni couldn't figure out how to work a Prothean elevator after months of study on Therum, but EDI instantly deduces that the Collectors are making baby Reapers out of puree'd colonists and that baby Reapers have the characteristics of whatever organics they're made from.

She conjectured, likely based on data picked up the last time she was in a Collector system.

It's possible to conjecture, especially if you're an incredibly intelligent AI that can see the entire spectrum through ship's sensors and also recognises the EM and mass effect disturbances caused by an adult reaper, as well as being able to presumably see through whatever telemetry Shepard's suit is picking up.

[Whereto]

oh to clear something up, there is about as many stars in the galaxy as there is grains of sand on earth thus proveing there is alien life cause life on earth CANT be the only life considering that every star atleast has 3 planets and some have more than our solar system. Also consider that if the reapers have made mass realys i bet they have made it to other galaxys and need to gather more supplies to fight the other species in those galaxys. also no army would ever not come with a ground froce so collectors were a good ground froce for the reapers

[KamSolastor]

VettoRyouzou wrote...

marshalleck wrote...

VettoRyouzou wrote...

I must say.. Harbinger sounded allot weaker next to Sovereign When I herd Sovereign for the first time I got the "oh... ****...." Feeling. Harbinger not so much.

Well maybe Harbinger is Nazara's little brother.  He's got big tentacle-lasers to fill.

I actually pondered if Sovereign was perhaps a Ancient reaper or at least not one of the newer ones Just when she... he.. IT talked.. I got a sense of what I was fighting exactly Harbinger dunno felt like all he could do is shoot hollow threats at you, Sovereign on the other hand never threatened you.. no.. It was more like you were talking to some one who knew everything who understood everything and really thought you were nothing but bacteria infesting the universe around it.

Soverign was the whole 'Oh **** me over its Soverign! RUN!' kinda bad guy. Harbinger seems almost a comedy relief character. Look at his quotes in battle:

'I am true power!'
'You cannot escape me, Shepard!'
'I will destroy you!'
 Gimme a break. Two-bit cliche villian much? The ending did surprise me when the 'head collector' (dunno what else to call him) was 'relinquished' and then it like 'Wtf? OH NO! *kaboom'. But my theory is that that was Harbinger controllign it (thus the understandable taunts and not just buzzing noise from the collectors when you fight a 'controlled' one.) But the Illusive Man was kidna creepy at the end with the whole glowy-eyes thing going on. Maybe he's under control by Harbinger or another reaper? Maybe he has a really cool opticologist? Who knows! Tune in next time to find out!

[Jonny_Evil]

JMKnave wrote...

Interesting thread. I have not played ME1 so I can only go with what I've seen and heard in ME2.

Let me know if I have the following correct:
1. The Collectors were actually the Protheans.
2. The Protheans were a technologically advanced species.
3. The Protheans were the only species able to fight somewhat successfully against the Reapers.
4. The Reapers are called the Old Machines.
5. The Old Machines are made of a combination of advanced technology and organics.
6. The Old Machines cull the ME universe for the "best of" tech and organics once every several millions/billions of years.
7. The Protheans were the "best of" the last time they culled and were subsequently put into slave labor. Had most of their organic selves replaced with tech and are now basically just empty vessels the Reapers can interface with to keep an eye on the ME universe until their next cull.
8. They used the Heretics (a minority of the Geth) against Sheppard in ME1. I'm guessing it's because now the Geth are the top tech species.
9. Sheppard and the Alliance stopped the Reapers and the Heretics making them the top organic species.

The above leads me to some questions:
1. In ME2 the real Geth (non-heretics) are against the Reapers/Collectors. And so the Heretics, with Reaper help, create a virus to turn all Geth into Heretics to serve the Repears. Are the Geth aware of the Repears plans to assimilate them and so that is why they are fighting back?
2. Are humans considered the top organic species because their DNA is more genetically diverse than other species? And because they defeated Sovereign?
3. When Harbinger says we are "your salvation through destruction", does it mean that because they take only the best of such and such, your species becomes immortalized forever as part of the Repears?
4. Are the Reapers after the Geth because they see them as the "New Machines" that could possibly take their place? Do they see Humans as the same threat?

Anyone have answers/guesses?

1: Yes
2: Yes
3: No, they got their asses kicked like every other species. The Reapers just missed one research base that deliberately went dark as the invasion started and put all it's researchers into cryo suspension. By the time the Reapers retreated back through the Citadel they'd nearly all died. Fortunately they just happened to be the base where the Protheans were investigating Relay technology, and the other half of their prototype relay just happened to be on the Citadel (instead of another research base like you'd expect) and in several centuries the Reapers never noticed it. So they popped through and re-engineered the Keepers who run the Citadel to ignore Reaper transmissions, therefore when Sovereign tried to activate the Citadel relay they ignored him and he had to find a way to open it manually.
4: Yep
5: Yep
6: Yep, seems about every 50,000 years.
7: Kind of, I'm guessing the Reapers were experimenting with using them to catalog any new races that arise prior to harvesting. The Protheans were the only species to arise during the last harvesting cycle, and EDI said that they failed to make a Reaper out of them, which is why they were repurposed. I don't know how she was supposed to know that, the Reapers could have made hundreds of themselves out of a galaxy spanning species and still had plenty left to make the Collectors out of.
8: No, Sovereign needed forces to storm the Citadel. He failed with the Rachni 2000 years earlier, and so when he encountered the Geth he corrupted some of them to view him as a God and they formed the core of his army. Without being organic it's unknown if the Geth could be "reaperised", Sovereign certainly viewed them as absolute inferiors worthy of contempt.
9: Probably.

1: Yes, the Geth believe in following their own destiny and don't believe in just accepting the technology of the Old Machines. That's why Legion is out from behind the Perseus Veil, he's trying to find out what's going on with Sovereign and the Heretics and to stop them from indoctrinating his people.
2: Probably.
3: That's what I took it to mean. Organic civilisations will fall sooner or later from a variety of reasons, by collecting them in their prime the Reapers preserve them for eternity.
4: I don't know, but I suspect the Reapers view the Geth as an irritant and a vastly inferior copy of themselves. Humans are probably just on the harvesting list.

Modifié par Jonny_Evil, 31 janvier 2010 - 01:05 .

[Falmung]

At the end of the game Harbinger is shown briefly when the general is released. He also says so interesting words before releasing.

"This is not over, Shepard. You have failed."

"We will find another way."

"Releasing Control."

Harbinger appears at the computer as a hologram showing his reaper form as he releases the general.



As for what I can tell the Reapers were trying to find a way back into space and they are aware of Shepard. Its not Sovereign as some say because he mentioned they. That means he was the one probably shown on the fleet. Probably one of the most dangerous reapers having long range power to control the collectors. They probably were breeding a human reaper to attack the citadel and attempt reactivating it. The collector's alone would not be enough to pass the defenses of the citadel.

[JJ Long]

I just figured that the Collectors were building the new Reaper because Sovereign was destroyed and the Reapers needed a new Reaper to replace Sovereign



This new Reaper would then get the job done that Sovereign couldn't and let the rest of the Reapers into the Galaxy.

[xMister Vx]

^Except it would look pretty ridiculous... a flying man. In space. Made me remember Austin Powers and the evil doctor's submarine. Hmm... Austin Shepard... nice idea.



Discussing why and how the harvesting is done is interesting, but we don't have that many details (besides, how can we fathom the reasons of machine gods that have been around for millions of years? they do say it's basically reproduction though).

There's one point that many are missing - one that could be expanded upon later - the derelict Reaper. Now... the game does say that it could have been the last defiant shot of a civilization that was wiped out. It's kind of confirmed by the descriptions of planets in nearby systems, but only partially.

Now, this makes me think more of relations inside the Reapers. They aren't a geth collective, in fact, they seem pretty individualistic, compared to the Geth. There could be conflicts between them. That's something that I half-expect to hear about later... well, they could just be treated as a faceless unstoppable menace, but a couple have been named, and BioWare doesn't make things that simple.



I'm curious how exactly the game will approach the final conflict.

They can't be defeated face to face, that's one. They can be denied entry - but only temporarily. Shepard can't be running around the galaxy, stopping every attempt for the next fifty years or so.

I kind of doubt they can be entirely destroyed. Unless Shepard somehow finds a way to reroute their entry point into a black hole... would that even work on them? What if they eat black holes for breakfast?



It is also curious that instead of one dominant species (like the Proteans) something seems to be different this time around - there are many spacefaring sentients. This fact may be important in the future.

[Brahlis]

Why in the heck would anyone ask why the Collectors were left behind/existed?



It's it painfully obvious that a gigantic machine-race couldn't operate the machines to liquify people into the material needed to sustain Reaper life?



How anyone can't fathom that simple reason is beyond me.

[Jonny_Evil]

Brahlis wrote...

Why in the heck would anyone ask why the Collectors were left behind/existed?

It's it painfully obvious that a gigantic machine-race couldn't operate the machines to liquify people into the material needed to sustain Reaper life?

How anyone can't fathom that simple reason is beyond me.

The Collectors were the Protheans, enslaved during the last harvest. The Reapers have been grinding people up for possibly billions of years before then. They don't need to operate the machinery themselves anyway, indoctrination gets the workers they need.

[davidt0504]

its fiction... if you can wait like ten years for the games to come out then sure they'll have time to fill in every single plot hole but for now, roll with it,its a fantasy and not reality. the over arching story is what the point of playing is.