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.
Except its not protecting the thralls, its wiping them all out. It's a rogue AI with a god complex.
AEmer wrote:
And the Geth would have wiped out the quarians if the quarians had not fled their homeworld.
The geth could have wiped out the quarians, but they chose not to.
"Delays are temporary; mediocrity is forever."
odio ergo sum
My problem with arguing that "the reapers cannot be idiots thus the ME universe must be as they claim" is that I just find it so so much easier to believe that they're dumb space-louse shaped bags of dicks, than I do "that the entire, relatively well-rounded and fleshed-out universe that stays just the right side of almost plausible...is actually running along totally weird, left-field and hugely specific lines that we're only told about in the last five minutes".
Either the reapers don't make sense, but the universe does....or vice versa. And given there are plenty of better explanations for reaper behaviour that would allow the universe to remain sensible, it just seems a shame they went down the other route.
Allegedly the ending was REALLY rushed. And considering how all this is divulged in the last 5 minutes, it's fair to say quality was dumped in favor of just finishing on time. Which just goes to show that an incomplete ending(kotor2) is better than a bad one
"Delays are temporary; mediocrity is forever."
odio ergo sum
Kotor 2 really, really ticked me off though. I recommended against playing the game because I really, truly felt the ending ruined everything.
I don't feel the same with ME3. I'm angry with it because I really love the ME series, and I wanted that one series to be _better_ than what it was.
The geth could have wiped out the quarians, but they chose not to.
They chose not to pursue the quarians once they were running, you mean. Rather than going all BSG Cylon Asshole on them, they let them limp off and left them alone. They kept killing them all the way untill they ran. Which serves them right. The quarians were dicks.
@ DDL
I don't know, like...maybe? I mean, I don't find the existence of the pattern to be that objectionable, clearly. And honestly, the mass effect relays being used as part of the Reaper scheme to direct technological advancement among the spacefaring species is already well established, and it is pretty far fetched on its own. This is just using some of that same basic conceit that's already kindof there.
The big thing is that the Ghost Child AI is insane in terms we understand. It's run amok. It's a sociopath with infinite power and an illogical desire burned into it.
Maybe that is actually idiotic on it's own. It's a huge let down, certainly, and there were really a lot of other things they could have done with it, but it's not so idiotic that it staggers my belief in the universe altogether.
Personally, I just find the narrative near the end to be the sticking point, the big bullshit bit, as it were. I can honestly live with the plot, even if it is a lot dumber than what they could have done instead. I can't really accept the horrid creature that is the Ghost Child sequence springing all sorts of bullshit on you all at once.
AEmer wrote:Kotor 2 really, really ticked me off though. I recommended against playing the game because I really, truly felt the ending ruined everything.
Even with the TSLRCM?
I enjoyed the game regardless of the abrupt ending. Then played it with TSLRCM and loved it. It's actually a cohesive ending of sorts now.
The real trouble with reality is that there's no background music.
Yeah, I liked KOTOR2 more than KOTOR1 despite the ending: KOTOR1 had the classic bioware OMG TWIST and was a nice self-contained story, but KOTOR2 made you really think. You were constantly in a state of "srsly, what the fuck IS kriea's game?", and it did at least reveal that at the end, even if it did so in the form of "her just flat out telling you, then dying". And it...kinda made sense, in an avellone kinda way. KOTOR2 feels replayable in a way that KOTOR1 doesn't.
Whereas mass effect just...sorta...SHIT DEADLINES SOMETHING SOMETHING SYNTHETICS SOMETHING SOMETHING ANGST OK DONE
And while the gameplay in ME3 was so good I want to replay in NG+, I just...can't. Because I know how it will end.
@DDL
If it's any consolation, you may eventually end up forgiving mass effect 3 for having a bad ending; it took me more than half a year before I could see myself ever playing anything mass effect again, but I'm there by now.
I will say one thing though: I don't believe it ended this way because it was rushed. I think they made a decisive choice to have the denuement prior to the final battles, because they wanted to convey the feeling that, ultimately, you were fighting a losing battle. That in spite of gathering everybody in the galaxy, that only bought you one chance at victory - a fools hope - and that therefore you do not get to see everybody you rounded up being awesome. You rounded up all those people to, essentially, die.
Even the start of the game is in a clear tone of, the reapers are here, we're fucked. The entire game details how the great old ones are slowly gobbling us all up. It is a slow descend into the jaws of the abyss.
The sequences of Shepard going nuts as he's dreaming, and the loss he is ultimately incurred at the hands of kai leng, is meant to make you realize that this time is different. This time, conventional fighting is absolutely hopeless.
The original design for the reapers is Cthulu meets cyberpunk, kindof, and there's only one way Cthulu stories end: You stop him from awakening, or you get eaten and spend eternity in some nether realm. I honestly think at some relatively early stage of development, they decided that the Ghost Child entity was going to be the salvation. That to fit with the themes outlined, you would never win, you would merely do so well so as to convince it not to kill you.
And I think they, from the very start, decided that Shepard must die at the end of this one. To reconcile things, they eventually went with this design.
The ending itself wasn't set in any kind of stone untill sometime around November 2011, when Martin Sheen recorded his lines, and that's still 5 months prior to release. He was originally set to record in August. Apparently they debated the exact execution of the ending all the way untill the end of 2011.
Still, this thing was on their minds from July-August all the way untill the end of December. They had their eye on the ball, they were aware of the problem it posed. The leaked manuscript from November 2011 even illustrates that they had another draft for the ending that required no extra effort to use, and they decided to actively change that because they preffered what was done in the end.
No, I think everything here points not to stress and pressure, but to pure, unadulterated incompetence on the part of the lead game designer, lead writer and lead producer. They simply do not appear to have grasped what exactly they were making. If they didn't end up spending as much time on the ending as they ought to have, I'm fairly sure it's a matter of making a conscious compromise, rather than mismanaging their resources without thinking.
Haven't played the modded kotor2. I played kotor2 when it first came, and I was really, really into it. Below are my thoughts on it; bear in mind it's ages since I played, so some of this may have been made up along the way, but the below conveys to the best of my ability my problems with.
Here's the thing: When I started playing it, I discovered that myself, kreia, atton(?) and the droids were floating through space on the ebon hawk, and brought unto the mining colony.
That was a really interesting mystery to me. How the heck did that happen. Like, that was my main driving force. Kreia had assisted me within that facility, and it was pretty clear that there was something to some of the things she was saying. Yeah, sure. And following up with the masters was a good idea since they apparently had severed me from the force, yeah, sure. I mean, it would be nice to know, but honestly, at the top of my list of priorities was discovering what happened just before I got amnesia.
The main thing I always wanted to explore deeper was, how had I ended up aboard the ebon hawk with Kreia. As I was playing, I kept stopping up and trying to piece things together.
And no. No, you don't get a resolution. Nope. No closure for you.
My suspicion that Kreia and I had to have been brought together by more than mere accident was at the core of my relationship with her, and I wanted to scream at her, why did we meet? What is it that you want? How did you bring it about? Who are you? But I couldn't.
And then, before I kill her, when I want to know why, what does she tell me? There is no overarching reason, there is no mystery. What in the hell fuck balls damn cuntboxer bitching son of a bullshit thing did you just say to me? NO!
THERE FUCKING IS A MYSTERY.
It struck me as so unrelentingly lazy that I lost it. I lost every bit of interest I had in the story. I get that she's kindof this fatalistic deathpriestess of chaos, and so she fundamentally rebels against order, and I was trying to regain some sense of order and control by figuring out the reasons and motives and schemes. To be told that everything was being made up as she went along, though - we were on a derelict spaceship for crying out loud. Together. I got amnesia somehow. There's a fucking reason in there. I want to rub your fucking nose in it, I want you to pack up your fatalistic bullshit and own up to it, or tell you that I fucking know that you're full of shit, and tell you why! There's no way my character should keep yeilding arguments to Kreia like this, especially when she shows her true colours!
It was an absolutely massive cop out. The central premise of the story is all gone, because at this point, it's clear to me that the writers are making Kreia and the PC act completely out of character to cover their asses.
Wait, it all falls apart because it doesn't sufficiently explain why you were on the ebon hawk at the beginning?
That...never bothered me in the slightest, whereas kreia's motivations throughout, on the other hand, were fascinating.
Back on ME3, I also never felt that the "loss at the hands of kai leng" was particularly significant. It was just a "ok, so shitty space ninja needs a cutscene to win? Well, ho hum" moment). I was quite surprised at how much emphasis every character was putting on it, to be honest. I was all "yeah yeah whatevs man: let's trace the fucker back to base and headbutt him to death" and that's about it.
Nor, really, did I feel like it was "you're fucked from the get-go": it seemed more like a sort of "this is your last chance to finally get shit sorted out": tying off all the loose story ends (krogan genophage, quarian/geth war, fucking cerberus, etc) so you can get everyone together for a glorious last stand, with the implication that the better you are at getting the galaxy behind you, the better your chances. As opposed to, say "having a crap ending forced on you by space magic, or just losing outright". I figured it was a fight shep wouldn't survive, but I never thought they'd make all the endings basically "everyone loses, also you die" scenarios.
AEmer wrote: I mean, it would be nice to know, but honestly, at the top of my list of priorities was discovering what happened just before I got amnesia.
The protagonist didn't have amnesia in kotor2. It's very likely you and kreia were on the same ship because kreia was looking for you or similarly trying to escape from the universe. Would be a beautiful irony if it was the second, as this sort of "fate" destined by the force is what she hates.
DDL wrote:
Back on ME3, I also never felt that the "loss at the hands of kai leng" was particularly significant. It was just a "ok, so shitty space ninja needs a cutscene to win? Well, ho hum" moment).
For me it was more of a :"Why are bioware such shitty developers all of a sudden?" moment. Likely followed by many curses.
Also, it always seemed to me like the reapers would never arrive in force during the series, because as DDL says, if cthulhu awakens, you've already lost.
DDL wrote:
And while the gameplay in ME3 was so good I want to replay in NG+, I just...can't. Because I know how it will end.
It's kinda the same for me. If it were pretty much any other ending, I would replay the game to see what happens if you cure the genophage and what happens if X or Y? But every time I think about replaying the game my mind skips immediately to how shitty the ending is and I equally immediately decide never to touch the game again.
"Delays are temporary; mediocrity is forever."
odio ergo sum
The multiplayer isn't bad, if you just like powerspam murdering.
..Which I do.
Though I've only been doing it solo so far, since 90% of the internet is assholes (probably including me, if I'm honest).
If any of you folks still play and feel like trying some teamplay powerspam murdering, I think my origin handle is dumb_lunatic.
(I'm assuming MP has to go via origin, but I don't know)
As for replays, I also have the problem that...well, I only have the one shepard, so it's either her doing NG+ and making the same decisions again (since I REGRET NOTHING), or a different female char (in which case it feels wrong to hear the voice acting coming from 'the wrong shepard') or a male char (in which case I have to listen to Mark Meer, and....fuck that).
I am forced to admit I am a tad...over-involved about mass effect. Ho hum. Credit to bioware for making an engaging series, I guess.
I'll admit that the ebon hawk mystery was something that maybe I focused on a lot because I felt like the opening was really strong and it had a lot of really good stuff going. I wanted to dive in and really get it. I was left very dissapointed when it didn't pan out at all.
I am forced to admit I am a tad...over-involved about mass effect. Ho hum. Credit to bioware for making an engaging series, I guess.
I was forced to admit that about 2 hours after playing the ending. I think a lot of people felt that way.
DDL wrote:The multiplayer isn't bad, if you just like powerspam murdering.
..Which I do.
Though I've only been doing it solo so far, since 90% of the internet is assholes (probably including me, if I'm honest).
If any of you folks still play and feel like trying some teamplay powerspam murdering, I think my origin handle is dumb_lunatic.
(I'm assuming MP has to go via origin, but I don't know)
As for replays, I also have the problem that...well, I only have the one shepard, so it's either her doing NG+ and making the same decisions again (since I REGRET NOTHING), or a different female char (in which case it feels wrong to hear the voice acting coming from 'the wrong shepard') or a male char (in which case I have to listen to Mark Meer, and....fuck that).
I am forced to admit I am a tad...over-involved about mass effect. Ho hum. Credit to bioware for making an engaging series, I guess.
I'd be down for playing a few rounds of Multiplayer with you sometime.
I'll add you later.
The real trouble with reality is that there's no background music.
@ DDL
Well, I think the vision the lead had for Mass Effect 3, the overall structure, and the vision the team had, were very different. The following is just my theory, but here goes.
Look at things in terms of just what goes down throughout the game,
I mean so, every planet you go to has the reapers. You see what it looks like when the Reapers first land on earth. They wreck absolutely everything. Their first strike has cut through the fleets at arcturus. When you're asked by the strategic council how to stop the reapers, Shepards response is, we don't. We can't. All we can do is give it our all and hope it's enough. Right after the council gets destroyed, and you're forced to abandon a kid to certain death in an airduct. Then, you see what the reaper attack on Palaven looks like, and it becomes clear that the strongest fleet in citadel space got crushed really hard. Then you go to Tchunka, and while you do get some kind of victory, you lose at least one prior crewmember...or conversely, you abandon the Krogan to the genophage. Then you go to Rannoch, and in most cases, that ends up in the genocide of an entire species - in fact in all cases for non-importing players, as having the two eventually coexist is a bonus for players of past games - and you lose 1-2 crewmembers.
Oh, and then it turns out, if you saved the rachnii queen, she ends up getting converted to and used by the reapers. You might be able to eventually pull her out and save her, but everything is coming apart at that point. The thessia, where you watch as even the most powerful of the citadel races gets their home planet completely trashed, and you lose in a direct confrontation and nearly die, for the first time in the series.
Then at the cerberus base, the prothean VI is unequivocal: It's too late. You'll die. Don't blow it for the next generation.
Finally, you go to a completely ravaged earth, and you commit to a suicide run where everybody gets blown apart, including you. You watch how the illusive man, the most iron willed individual who has fought for human superiority for decades, has eventually been subdued and indoctrinated, and at most he can manage to off himself.
In the grand scheme, the game depicts a descend into darkness. There is no glory, no chance of victory. This is stated over and over. We are getting swallowed by space Cthulu, and most of us are condemned to a fate worse than death...unless we're really lucky.
On the other hand: You're gathering war assets. You're kicking immense amounts of ass. You keep accomplishing your goals, and you've brought together a last alliance of elves and men. You even have a plan you're working towards. You're going to face down the Dark Lord, and you'll take up your fathers sword and cut off his ring. And there's downtime where you can feed your fish, and gather models of space ships, and have good old fun times with crewmembers who joke around. You're, after all, in a space opera cover shooter and you're having an awesome time, just like in past games.
This dissonance is part of the issue. In plot terms, the olive branch extended to you by the Ghost Child is your one and only hope. The crucible will get destroyed if you refuse to choose or you shoot him. You will lose. You don't get to beat Space Cthulu. This is the idea that the lead designers have been working off of.
But everybody else has been working off of the idea that it's a space opera that's meant to be fun. The context is depicted as not insurmountable, but rather simply as a fight where you're the underdog. So long as you hang in there, you'll surely pull through; even if a lot of the story doesn't seem to say that, the game aesthetics themselves surely are. Ultimately, you'd only choose the deus ex machina ending that we see if you don't comprehend the state of mind the player who plays these games are in. The clash is really jarring.
So, yeah. I think the leads thought mass effect was something it wasn't. They didn't get what they were making. Otherwise, you'd never make such a massive blunder.
Huh. The feeling I got was throughout was a building sense of hope:
It felt like the initial scenes (earth, palaven) served to present exactly what happens when a unified, monolithic, single-goal force of technological superiority hits a fragmented galaxy riddled with species self-interest. You get kerbstomped.
Nobody was working together, despite your warnings: earth was defending the route to earth, turians were defending palaven, the asari were sitting at home going "gosh, that looks terrible...from all the way over here.", everyone was looking out for number one first. Worse (and this I felt was very realistic) people were using a fucking galactic mass-extinction for petty pointscoring and political maneuvering. Because (this includes asari, turians, krogan etc -they're all essentially just humans with exaggerated character traits) people are dicks.
It was showing you that you CANNOT afford to just "look after yourself, and to hell with the galaxy". The Thessia mission was a way of hitting home exactly how successful "staying out of the fight" is: it IS coming to you, and you WILL get kerbstomped. The asari were fucked from the get-go, they just didn't mobilise until this was painfully obvious.
But yet, throughout the story, you're gathering people. Damn their petty feuds to hell, but you're doing it. You get the krogan to come bail out the turians. You broker peace between the geth and the quarians. You're bringing unity. You're bringing HOPE.
Conversations with Javik reveal that the protheans were more..galactic slave masters than they were an enlightened galactic superpower. They had a monobloc culture with slave-races that they forced into war with the reapers, and it wasn't enough: a slave simply does not fight for the same reasons as a free man, plus for all their might, the protheans were somewhat socially stagnant. This was not a solution. Their VIs may not have figured this out (though dialogue suggested Javik had).
But the bringing together of this vibrant, contrary, irascible but magnicificently multifaceted galaxy of species, unified not by force, but by a shared goal...that felt like hope.
Krogans willing to die to save a moon that belongs to their hated enemies, asari ready to deploy commandos against a force that absolutely would destroy commandos, fucking volus sending their ONE dreadnaught away from protecting their homeworld to join your war effort: it felt like finally, finally, you have everyone on the same page, and everyone finally grasped that it literally was "we all stand together, or we all die alone".
Hell, it felt like this was your doing: as the conversation with hackett suggested, people follow you. Even when the odds look stupid and the chances of survival are essentially zero, they don't blink: if shep goes, then they've got your back. They were setting you up as someone with enough natural charisma and enough moxie to finally, finally (and possibly for the first time ever) bring the entire galaxy together, turn to face the reapers, and say "not this time."
And lo and behold: NOPE! NOT ENOUGH GUN. LOL U SUCK! *reaps*
That's how I felt. I never felt like the reapers were unbeatable space-cthulhu, they felt more like giant space-bullies that use shock tactics, horror, insinuation of doubt (bolstered by indoctrination) and technological superiority to hide the fact that they actually were not immortal, not infinite in number, and ultimately were relying on the fact that motivated self-interest would prevent anyone ever raising a unified force against them. Hell, you kill two in the course of the third game: they're big, they're deadly, but all you need is enough guns. The extended cut ending is proof enough that a unified force CAN defeat them.
"YOUR DESTRUCTION IS INEVITABLE"
"You can defeat any of us. We get that. But.....can you defeat...ALL OF US?" *cue appearance of entire galactic fleet*
If they'd done that, and fucking focus-fired (when they just splurged gunfire wildly at the reaper fleet I banged my head on the table), they could've taken down a reaper in seconds. Shift to next target. Another reaper falls. Casualties are huge, but fuck you: this is the galaxy at stake here. Another reaper falls. In ten seconds the reapers have just lost a whole galactic extinction's worth of sovereign-class reapers. Another falls. Holy shit. A tremor spreads through the reaper force.
"WE WILL WIN THIS. THEY CANNOT PREVAIL"
"....BUT AT WHAT COST?"
For the first time in millenia, the reapers know doubt. It's the school bully being suddenly confronted with the four-foot nothing closet-psycho kid who HAS NO SELF-PRESERVATION AND IS NOT FUCKING STOPPING. You can beat him, sure, but how many eyes, noses and fingers will you have at the end? Another reaper falls. Nobody is holding back. A ship sees a reaper's shields drop and they can't swivel their guns in time, so they just blow their magazines, taking them both down.
The reapers finally conclude that this is an unacceptable scenario, and retreat. They drop horrible doomsday weapons on planets in the hope that we'll stop to look after our wounded and let them retreat.
We don't. Gritting our teeth in determination, we do not fucking stop until they are all dead or dying.
....see, that's the sort of thing I was hoping they'd use. Obviously magic mcguffin works too, and provides a focussing point, but I would've laughed with glee if you could reject the dumb choices and just tell people "It's not about the crucible. It was never about the crucible. It was about proving to ourselves we could work together, that when everything is at stake, we stood tall. Now let's prove it to them."
