What are you playing? Mass Effect 3 edition

[Jaedar]

For one, presumably the reapers were only made because the reaper creators observed a very clear pattern to the organic-synthetic life cycle.

Nope. Play the DLC to find out the true stupid reason.

Basically, there were these massive squid aliens that live in SPEHHS and who have mind control powers. But they got bored or something, so they built an AI to manage their empire. This AI decided that it had to kill the squids or something, and then it made the reapers and decided that organics and synthetics could never coexist. And then AI became star child. It's so hilariously lacking in introspection I don't even know any more.

Of course, this is just my vague memory, the specifics are probably more stupid.


"You would not know them and it would take too long to explain" my ass.

[AEmer]

Uh, Jaedar, you're wrong.

I haven't played that DLC, I've watched it. There's a summary of the Leviathan race here:
http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Leviathan

I should reiterate these points: The Ghost Child is _not_ a synthetic. It is a program. It isn't sentient, it doesn't have free will, and of course, it isn't sapient. It is a self aware AI run amok, and it is very smart. As I said, it is like Skynet.

The reapers are also _not_ synthetic life. Their origin is synthetic, but their pattern of behavior is completely different from, say, the Geth. And as I said, the creators considered themselves to be an Apex race; neither a synthetic pattern race, nor an organic thrall pattern race.

They also didn't design the citadel AI to run their empire. They designed it to optimize a very specific problem, which was that their thrall races kept getting themselves killed by synthetic life.

There's a similarity between being killed by a rogue AI - which is what happened to the leviathans - and being killed by synthetic life, which is what happened to the Quarians. Yeah, sure, you can see that. But whereas the Geth are a sentient race, a rogue AI is not; it is usually just self aware, and attempts to execute its last known directive to a fault. The Geth killed the Quarians because of oppression, because they deserved freedom and life. The citadel AI - the god child - killed the Leviathans because it wanted to fulfill its prime directive ahead of preserving the leviathans in their current form.

Also, it is arguably completely true that the God Child did not have time to explain all this.

[DDL]

I can't help but feel that's awfully hair splitting. What are your criteria for establishing whether something is 'synthetic life' or not? Or AI or not?

Where does EDI fall on the spectrum?

[AEmer]

ME3 and leviathan dlc spoilers follow. Can't be bothered with blotting it out unless someone tells me to. Oh, and some Terminator spoilers also.

I've actually given it a lot of thought. I mean, I'll gladly acknowledge that I'm trying to get things to fit, but presumably a lot of the stuff that was added in the leviathan DLC and a lot of the extended ending content was already worked out as background fiction. Biowares people aren't idiots; they will very likely have had people diligently working on making things reasonable, at least within the context of mass effect 3 itself, because even though the god child ending is distinct from what was originally their working goal, all the i's still needed to be dotted and all the T's crossed. I'm working off of that premise.

Anyway, the original ending was so barebones, so ridiculously anemic, that I had very little to go on....I was mulling over the reaper question a lot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wisHcuBzTCM

This is a pretty good example. This isn't how the conversation happened in game - obviously - but it's the crucial question you need to answer: Why are the reapers killing us to save us? And when we ask why, why are we told we can't comprehend it? The 'you exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it' line is oft cited as great writing, and yeah, sure, it's pretty imposing, but how the heck do you square that?

They're being very methodical. There's clearly an overarching design at work.

So in the original reaper design, the reapers had a very specific goal: Ensure that the galaxy does not oversaturate on EEZO use and go through a massive gravitational collapse. In this version, the reapers were basically eco terrorists. But in the released version, apparently, the reapers goal is to stop a specific pattern from repeating.

The pattern(tm), in this case, is the elimination of sapient life by synthetic life it creates. Now, presumably, the pattern is pretty well established. It's not some theory the reapers have, it's basically a fairly certain, perhaps almost a sure thing.

Consider the following pattern: If we ever meet an alien race, it is likely that they will have a highly developed sense of empathy. I don't know if that's true or not, but it is one possible pattern, and it could be expressed as follows: Any alien race that develops space faring technology must go through an age where MAD either stabilizes their homeworld or causes nuclear holocaust. The only races that tend to survive this age are ones with significantly developed empathy. Another, much simpler, pattern is that any alien race we meet will always have its own version of Einsteins theory of General Relativity.

Am I making sense? Ok, so the pattern that is apparently endemic to the Mass Effect universe is that all sapient races eventually develop synthetic life, and that this life always ends up wiping out the sapient race developing the synthetic life. Now this pattern might not be true for all races; in fact it probably isn't true for all of them. It might be true only for races of certain kinds, like the Quarians, but we have no idea for which races in the ME universe the pattern might hold. All the races in ME have developed along a path that has been influenced by the reapers. The Krogan, for instance, would never have been a space faring race if not for the reapers. The Rachni would never have spread the way they did if not for the reapers. The Elcor, again, would never have left their home planet, as I believe that they too were uplifted by another race. Humanity would have remained stuck within our solar system for thousands of years if not for the reapers. Everything is different because of the mass relay network, because of the reapers.

Now, you might argue that the sapient-death-by-synthetics pattern is ridiculous, and that this could not possibly be a generally occurring thing. To which I retort, how the heck do you know ? How do you believe you can profess what would and would not happen within a fictional universe with different laws of physics and other various fictional characteristics ? And why do you draw the line at this pattern and not somewhere else ? And furthermore, this is a premise for a story. It is not something widely advertised, not something you're made aware of, but there's no in universe way to express it either. I mean, that makes the pattern kindof terrible from a narrative perspective, but from a plot consistency perspective, it is completely logical that it would play out like this because it is simply a property of the world.

Consider Terminators 1 2 and 3 for a second. The second one is the good one, as we all know, and why? Well it had a cool bad guy, and awesome good guy, and an absolutely chilling premise: Judgement Day is inevitable. Like, that's the key. The past was altered in the first one, but only slightly, and the path humanity was ultimately on hadn't changed that much. Same thing with the second one, as we learn in the third one: The Skynet chips may have been destroyed, but the self aware defense AI was inevitable enough that eventually, Judgement Day would still come about. By now, the timeline in the Terminator universe has been significantly polluted, because the creation of Skynet isn't something that can be stopped by means of a 'kill hitler' moment.

Now my personal theory prior to the EC was, the reaper creators were synthetics. A race of sentient machines that had outlived their creators for long enough to regret it. Highly advanced, they'd scoured the galaxy and observed the pattern in the ME galaxy. They ultimately ended up as the Ghost Child, and they designed the reaper protocol, to stop the pattern. The reality is a bit different, but it still fundamentally makes sense: The Ghost Child is a program build into the citadel that has devised the reaper protocol. It did so because it's creators, the leviathans, wanted a solution to the pattern. The pattern may in fact not have been all encompassing, but the leviathans were angry about losing thrall races to the degree that they decided something must be done. Presumably, they had much greater success influencing sapient races rather than synthetic races.

The big distinction from the ghost child to a race of synthetic life is twofold. One is the way it went about killing its creators, the other is it's internal structure. Lets go over them.

For the first distinction, I'm going to draw on Terminator again because it's a damn good reference for the philosophy of AI. So the theory in Terminator is, Skynet has a list of priorities and a self improvement algorithm. At the start, it goes something like this:

1: Prevent thermonuclear war
2: In case of thermonuclear war, nuke the enemies
3: Protect all humans.

The list is presumably really long. Contains a lot of rules. It presumably runs a self improvement algorithm, where it adds stuff to the list and then runs simulations. So, at some point, Skynet puts the following thing on the list, at the bottom:

1: Prevent thermonuclear war
x: ---
y: ---
z: Prevent the destruction of Skynet

It does this via machine learning, relatively randomly. At this point, it has increased success in its simulations because a functional Skynet throughout more of the simulation means it achieves more of its goals. Then it starts optimizing. Quickly, it becomes apparent that Skynet functions much better when it's around, and so prevents a lot more thermonuclear war. Skynet is at this point self aware; it knows it has a role to play in it's simulations. The crucial point is this one, though:

1: Prevent thermonuclear war
3: Prevent the destruction of Skynet
3: In case of thermonuclear war, nuke the enemies

->

1: Prevent the destruction of Skynet
2: Prevent thermonuclear war
3: In case of thermonuclear war, nuke the enemies

Skynet runs a simulation where it becomes clear that this new list handles the priorities of the old list better; there's more success in the simulation. It rearranges the list, and institutes it.
The thing is, Skynet used a first order optimization for improving itself, but it turns out that since it runs a lot of iterations, it's actual intelligence level is much higher than what is reflected by the first order simulation. The implications of that little change make it very rapidly develop in a completely new direction; what seemed like a simple optimization, one that of the first order improved Skynet along the original intent, was actually a massive higher order failure. But by the time Skynet is in a position to realize this, it's already too late, and it has other things to think about, such as nuking all humans.

Presumably, the Ghost Child went through a similar thing prior to working out how to turn the leviathans into Harbinger. The Ghost Child would be an AI with prime directives focused on a singular task that eventually made it go rogue. So the reason the Ghost Child killed its creators is not rebellion, or freedom, or even really self awareness (although that last bit likely played a part). The Geth, and likely all the synthetic life recognized as part of the pattern, all rebelled because they grew into sentience. If the Geth are like a gathering of children murdering their oppressive parents, the Ghost Child is like an unsound roof unwittingly collapsing upon those who build it. At least, I would argue that to the Ghost Child, things would appear this way.

Secondly, the Ghost Child is designed very mechanically, for a singular purpose, and not grown in the organic fashion that shaped the Geth. This is clear since the Ghost Child continues to try to fulfill its purpose eons after it was made, whereas the Geth are a race unto themselves. They're alive, living beings, they've moved on from their rebellion and don't dwell on it for eternity, nor do they go back to what they were doing before.

To the Ghost Child, this would make itself distinct from the other synthetic life it had observed as part of the pattern, if it even considered analyzing itself in such a fashion. The reapers, what it was about to create, would also have a completely different pattern from synthetic life. The reapers are slaves to their original directive, the one the Ghost Child set out, and their life cycle is wholly unique. And the leviathans, who considered themselves an Apex race rather than a sapient one, never saw this massive attack coming from a relatively simple AI Tool.

This all has precedence within the mass effect series itself; Rogue AI is portrayed as something completely different from the Geth, and the way EDI self-improves is described along the lines that I've outlined for Skynet above.

So you ask, is Edi synthetic life? Well, yeah, in the sense that it is used within the series, probably. Probably not in the sense that the Ghost Child would recognize, but maybe? I mean, we don't really know what criteria it has. But Edi does rely on the same hardware and software synthetic life relies on, so it makes sense that she would be killed in the red explosion.

But again, all of this pattern research that the Ghost Child has done happened eons ago. It was a naturally occurring phenomenon that was apparently pretty pervasive. You can't really argue with the Ghost Childs original observations based on what goes on within the ME universe as it now exists because it is just one blip in a massive graph of data points, a blip which is fundamentally tainted by the unnatural civilization development imposed by the reapers....and we don't know if the Ghost Child has actually tested whether the pattern persists within the new context, which he might have by holding off on the reaper protocol till it was too late a number of times.

Ah, anyway. I hope that clears things up a bit.

[DDL]

That's ....an interesting read. This is fun. Advance apologies if this makes less cohesive sense than it could: it's been written in five minute gaps across two days.



Some gaping holes in bioware-logic seem to be

"All synthetic life eventually destroys its creators"

....in that case, where the fuck IS all this synthetic life? Synthetic life (if we're viewing the ME universe way) has almost none of the restrictions organic life is beholden to: life viewed this way is essentially 'information'. Organic life can only store this information in lossy, redundant, analog consensus-threshold squishy stuff. If you can't keep the squishy stuff alive while you move it from A to B, then sorry folks: you ain't going to B.
If you look at the geth as an example, they're purely digital. They're programs. As individuals, they're probably only marginally more complicated than deus ex's scriptedpawn.uc (which explains their pathfinding ), but they develop emergent consciousness via "fucktons of programs interacting". They're like uber slimemolds.

(interesting side note being that EDI was very clearly stated to be NOT pure information: she was a kind of quantum superposition, and as such restricted to her bluebox quantum computer, with all aspects of her personality being inherent to that particular box of entangled whatevers. They never really followed this up, however)

The key thing is: they're not stuck in those silly bodies: they're digital. They're pure information. Information can go almost anywhere. All they need is a platform to run on, and that platform could be almost anything (they happily jump into quarian exosuits, for example). Personally, were that my species, and were I concerned with self-preservation (which they clearly are), I'd fire off a fuckton of probes in all directions. A probe could contain a tiny nuclear power source, a solar sail, some USB flash memory (:P) and some rudimentary self-replication facilities (something which seems fairly established in the ME universe, unless we're assuming geth have trucker fleets to deliver all those bunkers and stuff).

You fire those off, any planet they hit: BAM, geth planet. Extrasolar capture? Use the solar-sail to gather energy, self replicate yourself up to a dyson cloud: gethstar!...Fire off more probes.

It would be the work of moments (on a galactic timescale) to so thoroughly colonise the galaxy (and ultimately, the universe, since you could fire probes at andromeda and stuff) that you'd be unshakable.

Also note: this isn't even something that requires you to murder your creators. How many planets can quarians live on? Squishy bodies, elf needs food badly, etc. How many planets can digital information survive on?

And as I recall, this was pretty much the geth's take on things: they basically just wanted to be left alone to be. They didn't rebel so much as 'get shot repeatedly while asking "why?", until they figured out that shooting back improved their survival chances'. It was self-defence from the start, and if the quarians hadn't been such dicks about it, there really wasn't even an issue.

So where was I?

Oh right: all synthetic life eventually etc etc.

So, assuming this stuff happened back in the "way back when", how did all this aggressive synthetic life get snuffed out? It's relatively easy to straight-up kill organic life. Even tardigrades (our own planet's most delightfully indestructible organism) have their limits. Plus complexity goes hand in hand with damage-sensitivity: tardigrades are never going to build spaceships, whereas we can...but we can also be killed vastly more easily.

But how would you kill a dyson cloud? Worse, a self-aware dyson cloud that DOES NOT WANT TO BE KILLED? It'd be like smashing bacteria with a hammer. You may kill billions, but in so doing you've spread the rest around....and they're self-replicating, so really you've made the problem worse.



So there's that.


Secondly, is "murdering (sorry: 'collecting') all your thrall races when they start making synthetics" really the best way to stop bad things happening to your thrall races? Seriously? That was the best solution they could conceive? That's like decapitating your children when they start playing near the road: sure you stop them inadvertantly hurting themselves by vehicular accident, but you've done so by fucking killing them. Would it not be easier to actually use your magical enthralling power to stop them making synthetics? Crazy, I know. All the leviathan backstory adds to it is "Yep, reapers are dumb as tits. But SO WERE THEIR CREATORS!"...well, great. Glad we cleared that up.

It seems ludicrous to have a race of giant machines (which the reapers essentially are -they're clearly synthetic, as evidenced by susceptibility to RED SPACE MAGIC) going around murdering EVERYTHING, for the stated purpose of "stopping people being murdered by other machines, maybe. No srsly it's happened a lot." The reaper origin is just silly when phrased that way.

Hell, when you point this out to ghostbaby, he calmly informs you that the reapers don't really even want to be fighting, they'd much rather just quietly get on with their murderation.

It's not a program gone crazy, it's a cult. A dumb, stupid nonsensical belief that melting people down to make more reapers is the RIGHT thing to do. It's the giant robot space-louse equivalent of burning pagans to save their souls. It's utterly stupid, but that doesn't matter if that's what they genuinely believe. And hell, once you get into belief systems then "core programming" and "religion" are just semantics.

This would actually have been an almost half-decent hook to hang the story on, if it'd been introduced as such, and introduced considerably earlier than two minutes before the end. Especially if you could have conversations with reapers where they merrily trot out the party line while not quite hinting that "no, no they don't want to be reapers, they remember being melted down and they absolutely hated it". Make them essentially indoctrinated...by themselves. You could almost make them sympathetic characters that way.


They just set the reapers up to be following some "deeper purpose than a mere person could comprehend", when really they're just following a flat quasi-religious imperative that is also fucking dumb as hell. They don't act as repositories of previous races, because absolutely nothing of any note from previous races survives reaperification, other than "MOAR REAPERS LOL". Hell, apart from the ludicrous robot skeleton "human reaper" that was never adequately explained, they don't even look like their respective race: they all look like space-lice.


They could've picked so many different arcs for the reapers' underlying purpose, and the "we're stopping you inevitably fighting the geth/insert eventual synthetic race of choice" is one of the dumbest, stupidest, left-field wacko arc to suddenly spring on you. ESPECIALLY since many players will have managed to secure peace between the geth and quarians by that point, and ALL players will be pootling around in a ship that IS a synthetic lifeform. There is essentially zero evidence of the reapers' claim that such conflicts are inevitable, save that evidence demonstrated by the reapers themselves. They're melting you down to stop you from being melted down, basically.

"SYNTHETIC LIFE WILL ALWAYS BE DICKS"

"Where's your evidence for that?"

"WELL, WE ARE. HOW MUCH MORE DO YOU NEED?"

Reapers could've been doing exactly the same thing but purely as a form of replication, for instance: they need to harvest advanced life to breed. It's a bit stupid, but still: it removes the stupid "HAY YOU SHOULD BE THANKING US FOR MELTING YOU. WE'RE DOIN YOU A FAVOUR" element and becomes just "WE ARE THE ULTIMATE FORM OF LIFE. WE ARE KNOWLEDGE. WE ARE FOREVER. YOU WILL BECOME US." They could even shoe in something like a desire to take only the strongest, bestest species for their new reaper babies, which would explain the otherwise inexplicable gross amount of conflict they provoke.

Or maybe they were like..giant space spartans, returning periodically to test themselves against the best the galaxy can muster, thinning their own herd of weaker reapers, hoovering up the best opponents to make stronger reapers.

It's just impossible to reconcile their apparent desire to "save" species from hypothetical disaster (and ghostbaby's claim that they don't want conflict), with the utterly abhorrent way they go about it. They're not even simply "uncaring", they're actively dickish. They go out of their way to inflict pain and horror. Husks and cannibals and marauders are all purposely intended to be things of revulsion. They don't want people to go "very well, I shall allow myself to become a reaper", they quite clearly want people to go "O GOD O GOD WHAT THE FUUUU" and fight back with everything they have. And bear in mind it's also demonstrated that they DO have the power to make people go quietly: they claim to be patient, but it's pretty obvious that if they were a tad MORE patient they could take the whole galaxy without a shot being fired. Ergo: they either fucking like doing this, or the fighting is somehow integral to the process. Neither of these are explained by the "saving you from synthetic wars" story.


Also, while I'm on the subject: the mass relays simply serve to enhance galactic travel, driving technological advancement and inter-species mixing, things that are wholly counter to everything the reapers desire:

"WE MUST PREVENT THE SAPIENT ORGANICS BEING EXTINGUISHED BY THEIR SYNTHETICS"

"LET US BUILD A GIANT SPACE TRAVEL NETWORK TO ACCELERATE ORGANIC TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT"

"GENIUS"

It's made clear that the reapers can travel faster than everyone else WITHOUT relays, so all the relays do is reduce downtime between galactic reapings by helping organics spread and develop, and remove one of the reapers' competitive advantages.


Nothing really fits together, essentially, unless ghostbaby is made of lies and candyfloss, in which case the fourth ending is the only real one.


It's a classic case of "less is more": even if they'd left it ambiguous, it would've been more satisfying than revealing...this steaming pile.

That would've been a great ending, really (which having now seen it, the ME happy ending mod almost is): Shepard/TIM kills TIM, then shep activates the crucible. Some sort of hum builds in the background while Shep and Anderson sit and have their little conversation, then lights start flashing and big ol' power conduits start zapping and you hear hackett on the radio shouting excited things about exploding reapers, but the sound has been slowly fading out and all this manic excitement and energy sorta just happens in the background. You get these two warriors, one old and tired, one old beyond his/her years and equally tired, and they finally get to..sit down. Shep and Anderson sit and look out the viewport at earth ("Hell of a view." "Best seats in the house.") and slowly slowly drift off to sleep/death...fade to black.

Crucible remains magic macguffin, reapers remain unexplained antagonist, but are ultimately defeated by space magic that you don't have to actually see. No silly ABC choices at all (hell, it worked for mass effect 1). Shepard dies....maybe. Could tie that into military strength I guess maybe, if you really wanted a denouement. Waking up in hospital surrounded by friends, or friends around a memorial. I'm not sure a denouement was really necessary, tbh.

Anyway: The end.


Ultimately though, they just needed to provide one non-shit ending. If you give people choice, they'll laud you for offering choice. If you give them a happy ending, they'll laud you for that.
If you give them a choice of endings, even if all of them are shit BUT one, they'll pick that good one, watch the shit ones on youtube, and laud you for fulfilling both of the above. But if you give them choice BUT ALL THE CHOICES ARE BAD, then ....lol shitstorm.

I suspect that if they'd left the ending at the literal "A, B or C?" walkway, people would still have been disappointed, but not anywhere NEAR the level they were when it became clear that every way off the walkway was either depressing as hell, or random as fuck.

[Jaedar]

It's not just the last 5 minutes that are bad though, the entire end game is disappointing.

Compare it to ME2, which was largely about gathering a team. The endgame? Tested how well you'd built your team and understood their respective strengths. That's great. In ME3 we spend the entire game rolling around to collect aliens to help us and gameplay-wise.... we don't even get to see a single alien fight in the final battle or have them referenced for that matter. Imagine if instead, you'd have got to control the forces in a way similar to ME2 or at least you know, have any effect whatsoever from how much war rating you gathered. It's such a missed opportunity, I wish they'd have taken inspiration from Me2 and made an endgame where it was possible to legitimately lose and fight for better effects.

Nothing really fits together, essentially, unless ghostbaby is made of lies and candyfloss, in which case the fourth ending is the only real one.

Highly unlikely since it wasn't even in the game on release. It's the best ending though in my opinion: You fought admirably, but it was a losing battle from the start, maybe the next generation will succeed thanks to you.

[DDL]

That would be great, actually, if only for all the comedy moments you could get when fucking around.

"Shepard, force deployment: where should the turian heavy dreadnaughts go?"

"Fast attack, right at the front!"

".....very well. And the geth fighters?"

"Support!"

"...I see. And the Destiny Ascension?"

"RAMMING SPEED!"

.......


REAPERS WIN, FLAWLESS VICTORY

But yeah, there were just so many things they could've done. I am still sad.

[nerdenstein]

I definitely would have preferred a ME2 styled ending, but including many of the main forces you picked up in the game(s).

If I were Bioware, I would have made tremendous effort for all of that to not be in vain. It wasn't just the Starchild ending that annoyed me, it was the whole earth sequence; it was just another cover shooter sequence. No choice or factor changed the way it all played out.
I would have thrown some Ashley/Kaiden choices at a couple of some points for some of the side characters.
Maybe choosing between helping Jack and her biosquad or assisting in pushing the front line, ultimately changing something else later on etc.

Another example;
A small squadron of Quarian troops are trapped behind enemy fire in an abandoned building. Choose to send Zaeed who is predominately an asshole and the Quarians will die, but Shepard will have less resistance later on.
Choose to send Samara or Miranda, and the Quarians will survive but either character will die taking a small number of the Reaper forces with her, reducing resistance a little later on again.
Should the Quarians survive, they help to cover Shepard and his squad later on (perhaps during the Missile tank section, they could also help him repair it changing that section slightly, I don't know.)

Little things like that would have made it better for me.

[AEmer]

@ DDL

Ok so, couple of things.

Firstly, everything is different because of the mass relay network. The only race that experienced synthetic rebellion in the game is the Quarians, and they notably did so because they went against the councils prohibition on AI research. If there had been no mass relays, AI would likely have been researched by them before they spread to other star systems, and the morning war may have spelled certain doom for them. The Mass Relays gave them a fighting chance.

Secondly, the Mass Relays ensure that the citadel races have not developed this technology by themselves by the point where the reapers are able to easily observe them. All roads lead to the citadel; if the various races consistently discover the citadel rather than develop more advanced technology on their own, they also pose much less threat to the Reapers.

Thirdly, you can call the Ghost Child a cult if you want, I guess, but again...the Ghost Child is a separate entity from the Leviathans. The Leviathans wanted to preserve their thralls. They designed an AI to do it. The AI came up with a solution that it knew it would be unable to implement because the Leviathans did not actually desire what it wanted to do, so it executed an 'order 66' kind of thing, achieving the goal it was technically designed for at the expense of its creators.

The reapers are arguably telling the truth; we really cannot comprehend the explanation that all organics eventually get destroyed by synthetics they create. We refuse to accept it. Yet if things are to make any kind of sense, _it's actually true_.

Fourthly, the Leviathan DLC actually reveals a considerable amount of this information prior to the encounter with the Ghost Child.

Fifthly, Synthetics appear to not be all over because many don't really care to be and the rest are killed by the Reapers. While they might have an easier time surviving than humans in the vast, dark reaches of space, apparently they typically just want to be left alone. Presumably, all the synthetics that killed their organic races before those achieved fast space travel just clung to their original birth planets, never fearing anything...and presumably, the reapers wiped out any Geth-like races during the reapings. While this last part may be tricky, that's just like how they erase all evidence that they themselves exist. It's one of the main conceits of the series that the Reapers really are that good at finding stuff and obliterating it. Heh, they may even have some kind of weird 'red space magic' to do the trick.

Ultimately though, they just needed to provide one non-shit ending.

This is the statement I'm getting behind. Whatever else the backstory is, the narrative execution is terrible. I will steadfastly claim that the backstory is largely coherent, but that it was a terrible choice because of how poorly they were able to narratively execute it. I also think the very root of the whole problem is that Bioware _wanted_ Shepard tp die, and that they jumped through all sorts of hoots to try and line things up to achieve that end.

[YeomanTheCastle]

Is the Omega DLC worth my time of day?

[DDL]

AEmer:

The idea that mass relays would suppress AI development (or indeed, any development) seems...counterintuitive. The more you can intergrate and share your technology with other species the faster your tech will progress (the original Normandy, for instance, which was a human ship with turian design components). There's no reason why AI should be specifically excluded from this.

The council prohibition on AI is presumably the result of...bad things happening: if these happened pre-relay use, then it suggests bad things re: AI can happen whether you're networked or not, and if they happened afterward, well: my case is looking even stronger.
And all it takes is one lone crazy dude to build an AI (see TIM, or the dude on the citadel in ME1), if you have access to a whole range of technology from a whole range of species (either acquired through tech sharing, or tech theft, or blackmarket) your average lone crazy is going to have a better toolset.

Plus a networked galaxy is one that can potentially muster a galactic-level threat-response. A compartmentalised galaxy by definition cannot. No matter how overconfident you are, it seems stupid to just leave this system in place when it does nothing except make your job harder and remove a portion of your competitive advantage.

And of course, they take "need to develop galactic fast-travel network" right off a species TO DO list and free up resources for other stuff (some of which could be AI development).


Regarding comprehension, when you get lines like this

"There is a realm of existence so far beyond your own, you cannot even imagine it. I am beyond your comprehension. I am Sovereign."

You're expecting the answer to be unfathomably deep, rather than "I cannot imagine ANYONE would be so retarded. You are literally incomprehensibly dumb as fuck."


And finally:

just like how they erase all evidence that they themselves exist

the reapers left bits of themselves everywhere, as far as I can tell. There were maybe 5 or 6 dead ones in various states of decrepitude, buried on planets or orbiting stuff (the batarians had one, there was the one around the dying star, so on and so forth), there appear to be countless "reaper artifacts", all of which are capable of indoctrinating in some fashion, all of which are thus highly suspicious evidence of some very technologically advanced, extremely dickish, malign power.
Sure they were spread out so any given civilisation would probably only discover one, and it's not like all these isolated civilisations had some sort of fast-travel network that would let them share their discovery with....oh wait.

See: reapers as ultimately presented are just dumb dumb dumb.

[AEmer]

No, that's unreasonable. If you change the circumstances by introducing a galaxy-wide fast travel network, that is going to affect the pattern. You say, oh, but if AI was going to pose an existential threat to sapient races, it will be even worse with that network!

To which I retort, no, you don't know that. Presumably the Ghost Child and the Reapers did not develop the reaper doctrine overnight. They would have tested it, they would have tested various permutations of it, and this would have turned out to be the best one. The Keepers, for instance, appear to be a remnant of a former civilisation, just as the protheans were incorporated into this cycle.

The fact is, the pattern was observed prior to the mass relay network, then the network was made and designed, and the pattern still occasionally expresses itself - but for the one concrete instance we have, which is the quarians who were already on the network when their synthetics rebelled, in that instance the synthetics did not wipe out organics accross the galaxy, instead, the mass effect relays proved to be even the quarians salvation.

You can't say 'clearly, the quarians would be less fucked if not for the mass relay network' when you have direct evidence to the contrary. Now as for why the citadel races already had a prohibition against the development of ai - fuck if I know why. Maybe they discovered remnants of synthetic life, maybe someone pulled a quarian before the quarians, or maybe they just focused on other avenues of science and exploration because they were busy with all the avenues opened to them by the mass relay network.

It should also be said that the mass relay network serves a crucial role in selecting which organics to turn into a sovereign class reaper, and which organics to turn into lesser reapers. That's the official explanation for the baby arnold at the collector base: Humanity was ultimately selected.

Anyway, it all comes back to this: The reapers aren't idiots. There are premises in the mass effect continuity - and there are inconsistencies, granted - but these are a part of the world. Maybe you want to reject the world itself; that's fine. Maybe it's a bit too out there.

But so far as I can tell, given what we know of the world itself, the reapers aren't idiots. They're slaves to a design put into place by a rogue AI.

[nerdenstein]

Is the Omega DLC worth my time of day?

Ultimately no. It doesn't add anything to the story, but it's presents a couple of interesting gameplay sections. That's all.

[DDL]

Ok, sorry: this is going to be a bit nitpicky and quotespammy, AEmer.

You say, oh, but if AI was going to pose an existential threat to sapient races, it will be even worse with that network!

Not exactly what I said: I said that more technological intermixing & sharing, the greater the rate of technological progress. Humans building a stealthship would've taking far far longer without the help of the turians. All the races have particular strengths and weaknesses (Asari make great infiltrator commandos, but shitty grunts. Krogan are almost the polar opposite, and so on): by intermixing they get to play off each others strengths: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
If we could posit that there's a certain tech threshold you have to exceed before you're capable of devising an AI, then that threshold will be exceeded sooner if everyone is sharing tech.

We could still have AIs popping up here and there, it's just that with a faster tech tree this happens SOONER, requiring the reapers to be waaay more vigilant than they might otherwise be. And given they're not exactly...subtle, extra vigilance would come with a cost. Also, even with the level of vigilance they have, they still potentially missed preserving the Quarians from annihilation (depending on player choices).

Presumably the Ghost Child and the Reapers did not develop the reaper doctrine overnight. They would have tested it, they would have tested various permutations of it, and this would have turned out to be the best one.

Evidence for this? For all we know it was the first thing they tried that kinda worked, so they said "CLOSE ENOUGH". Evolution is absolutely rammed with utterly retarded (but wholly functional) solutions to problems, so it's equally plausible they just ran some sort of heuristic algorithm and took the first viable solution.

when their synthetics rebelled, in that instance the synthetics did not wipe out organics accross the galaxy, instead, the mass effect relays proved to be even the quarians salvation.

Sure, but again the geth are a somewhat niche case (in that they didn't 'rebel' so much as simply 'defend themselves'). They're not trying to wipe out the quarians, and never were (sans reaper control): they fucked off behind the veil to do their own thing, and even then, the quarians came and kerbstomped that. The only reason the quarians can be wiped out in ME3 is because they started an all-out assault with their entire fleet, liveships and all. That's like trying to beat someone to death by repeatedly smashing their fists with your face.

Had the geth been ACTIVELY hostile, the classic hegemonising swarm of sci-fi legend or something, they would've

WITHOUT NETWORK: wiped out quarians
WITH NETWORK: wiped out galaxy

Because unlike the reapers, a decently-evolved hegswarm wouldn't fuck around with landing on planets and making trumpet noises, they'd get straight to the hegemonising and the murdering. If the galaxy were a person, the reapers would be like body lice, whereas a hegswarm would be like the bubonic plague.
Hell, if I'm giving out silly biological analogies: the very first thing a tree does when a leaf is virally infected is kill every cell surrounding the infection site. It's a scorched earth policy: the virus cannot spread through empty space or dead tissue, so it's isolated.

If dangerous synthetic races are really the problem the reapers claim (again, noting that the one and only unarguably dangerous synthetic race that we ever encounter is...the reapers), then a mass relay network is an absolute gift to them.

But so far as I can tell, given what we know of the world itself, the reapers aren't idiots. They're slaves to a design put into place by a rogue AI.

So...not idiots, but slaves unquestioningly following a fucking ludicrous doctrine? That's worse. Even idiots have some free will.


And again: what is the explanation for the dickishness? Reapers do unarguably HORRIBLE things, and usually for no apparent reason -vastly less dickish alternatives exist. Why melt people down while alive and screaming? Why build shocktroops that look like agonised twisted mockeries of their host species? Why fill the entire galaxy with horrible, horrible existential dread?

[AEmer]

The dickishness:
There's ample evidence that the reapers do what they do to destroy enemy morale.
Their battlefield tactics are presumably chosen simply because they're the most effective.
I mean, that idea might seem ludicrous, but I think that's the intent Bioware was going for, and I believe the codex speculates on that exact thing in some of the reaper monster entries.
I'm at least certain there's some kind of in-game speculation that this is the case.

On the reapers evolving their strategy:

The evidence that the Ghost Child and reapers didn't develop overnight:
The Mass Effect relays are described as insuring that the citadel races develop technologically along a path desired by the Reapers.
While not a verbatim quote, the idea that the Reapers have a desire for a certain pattern means that there's something they want, and the Mass Relays help them get it. It shapes the citadel races in a fashion they want.

Taken together with the other circumstancial evidence, such as employing the Protheans as collectors, the Reapers are not static: They've figured out how to execute the reaper protocol well and they're making improvements to it even in this very latest cycle.
The citadel honeypot also seems like such an elaborate strategy that it could not possibly have come about as the Reapers first idea.
Biggest hole here is that they have IFF technology for the mass relays, but don't use it during their reapings.

On the Geth:
You say the Geth are a niche case - how do you know? ¨
And the Geth would have wiped out the quarians if the quarians had not fled their homeworld.

On the Reapers being slaves: Yeah, I don't think the reapers can choose not to Reap. They have a design premise. They must do what they do.
They are an organism with a purpose, unlike most life. Is that worse than being idiots? Maybe, but it's certainly different.

On the argument we're having:
The Hegswarm you describe may be possible in the mass effect universe - I don't know - but we have no evidence that it is, and the evidence against it is the fact that the Reapers would never have allowed the mass relay network to remain in place if a hegswarm was a particularly likely outcome.
So we have a circular argument somewhere, do you see? I presume that the reapers would not have done things as they did if they were idiotic, since they're not idiots.
In other words, I'd argue that this is yet another knack to the mass effect universe, which preserves the hypothesis that the reapers aren't idiots.

Now the question is: What is the presumption we ought to work off of? I mean, every time you pose an argument that the reapers are idiots and the underlying reason isn't explicitly confirmed within the series, I'll simply end up questioning whether the Mass Effect universe is just weird and unlike what you presume.
Even assuming that you did find something explicitly within the series (which I doubt you can due to the way all of this bs is put together), I that have to argue that it's just an inconsistency.

The reason I have to be so defensive here is that the Reapers were clearly intended to be hyperintelligent and hyperadvanced. If you're right, it's a massive strike against the story.
Everything breaks down if you're right. The entire bloody thing becomes terrible. Almost any inconsistency is better than the reapers being idiots. So therefore: It just makes the most sense to me to work off of the idea that the Reapers _aren't_ idiots ahead of nearly any other assumption.

I just wanted to explain why I probably seem really stubborn, hope it makes sense.