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Milky Moor posted:
Maybe they would explain the actual "Reaping" as a food/fuel gathering event while they hibernate in deep space. They wake up every 50000 years, attack the developed species for biomass like Tyranids in 40K. They'd use the Citadel because the hunger leftover from their hibernation keeps them from operating at maximum efficiency, so speed is essential. So, with the Citadel plan failed, they need to dig into their energy reserves to reach the galaxy fast enough so they don't die of starvation. That would make their schizophrenic attacks in ME3 look like acts of desperation, as they're literally starving and throwing themselves at the species to keep from dying.
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Nov 30, 2016 04:48
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Milky Moor posted:If it were me, I'd probably try to make the best drat ending I could so I'd get people to go back and buy and play the first two entries. EA doesn't give a poo poo abotu the previous games as evidenced by their completely baffling dlc purchase requirements from the ME trilogy release since there's a loving shitton of necessary dlc missing from the series on origin.
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Nov 30, 2016 04:54
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Alain Post posted:I mean, you could do that but I think implementing any kind of after-the-fact justification that basically means "actually you can blow up the Reapers in normal space combat and win the war now" isn't really satisfying to me. This is where we'll disagree, I think. I can only really point out that the Reapers are not immortal. Sovereign explodes quite easily once his barriers drop in ME1. An (admittedly huge) mass driver mission-killed one in ME2 and you kill another under construction on foot. Two smaller Reapers (man, do I dislike these as a concept, by the way) get knocked down in ME3. It's telling that Bioware handwaved a lot of elements in the setting in the Codex. Questions like "How did Reapers handle dumping heat on the journey from dark space?" or even basic ones like "How long did it take them?" are basically ignored. Why don't people just kamikaze the Reapers with their FTL drives? Oh, there's Reaper safeguards. ME3's Reaper-related codex entries are weird and probably the biggest indicator that the goals and capabilities of the Reapers were never quite settled on. There's at least one that says a conventional military victory is possible and an entire entry to pointing out vulnerabilities. Arcsquad12 posted:Maybe they would explain the actual "Reaping" as a food/fuel gathering event while they hibernate in deep space. They wake up every 50000 years, attack the developed species for biomass like Tyranids in 40K. They'd use the Citadel because the hunger leftover from their hibernation keeps them from operating at maximum efficiency, so speed is essential. So, with the Citadel plan failed, they need to dig into their energy reserves to reach the galaxy fast enough so they don't die of starvation. That would make their schizophrenic attacks in ME3 look like acts of desperation, as they're literally starving and throwing themselves at the species to keep from dying. You could do something interesting with this. It's a good question: is it morally acceptable to let a form of life propagate when that life requires destroying other forms of life to do so? (LT Danger, I'm flashing back to the Starcraft 2 thread here!) But I guess it's similar to the Krogan Rebellion, just on a cosmic scale. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Nov 30, 2016 |
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Nov 30, 2016 05:03
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Milky Moor posted:This is where we'll disagree, I think. To be more clear, my objections aren't that they didn't have a good enough way to plot in a way to beat the Reapers conventionally, it's that I think it's a weak way to deal with an antagonist that you set up as a big bad existential threat to all life in the Milky Way. It's a storytelling objection.
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Nov 30, 2016 05:06
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Pattonesque posted:Chobot's inclusion was kinda weird because like who was on the fence about buying ME3 and then was like "oh dang Chobot is in it? sold!" I wasn't going to buy it until I found out about the Chobes' inclusion.
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Nov 30, 2016 05:15
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i wonder if the scale of the map in andromeda is going to be smaller or if they'll come up with up with a !notmassrelay to excuse jumping from one end of the galaxy to another
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Nov 30, 2016 05:35
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*Mac Walters furiously typing up the script with a kid talking about how the protagonist must either kill his computer girlfriend or imprint circuit boards into every dog in the galaxy* "Someone else might have gotten it wrong" *Leans back in chair, smugly smiles*
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Nov 30, 2016 05:38
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Arcsquad12 posted:Maybe they would explain the actual "Reaping" as a food/fuel gathering event while they hibernate in deep space. They wake up every 50000 years, attack the developed species for biomass like Tyranids in 40K. They'd use the Citadel because the hunger leftover from their hibernation keeps them from operating at maximum efficiency, so speed is essential. So, with the Citadel plan failed, they need to dig into their energy reserves to reach the galaxy fast enough so they don't die of starvation. That would make their schizophrenic attacks in ME3 look like acts of desperation, as they're literally starving and throwing themselves at the species to keep from dying. Being half-mad from starvation would explain a lot about the Reaper's sudden drop in IQ points and planning in ME3. The needed a brainwashed puppet to remind them that the big thing they really need is still around, but were just too drained to remember that using it would be an automatic win button, so they just dragged it around to some place filled with screaming snack foods.
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Nov 30, 2016 05:41
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AriadneThread posted:i wonder if the scale of the map in andromeda is going to be smaller or if they'll come up with up with a !notmassrelay to excuse jumping from one end of the galaxy to another Considering they keep banging on about the Helios Cluster it's likely the first. Normal FTL can handle that.
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Nov 30, 2016 07:00
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Arcsquad12 posted:I wish that mass effect ditched the reapers altogether and just let you play as space cop because you were the only dude bad enough to stop a guy... I just want to point out that this is what Prey 2 was going to be before they canned it for apparently being interesting and changed it to "Dead Space: The FPS"
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Nov 30, 2016 07:13
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Thor-Stryker posted:I just want to point out that this is what Prey 2 was going to be before they canned it for apparently being interesting and changed it to "Dead Space: The FPS" Looking at what was originally planned for Prey 2 and then seeing recent videos of them excitedly showing off how you can morph into a coffee cup to roll under doorway barriers must be like a slapping a gloopy turd in the face of the original devs.
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Nov 30, 2016 07:16
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Drifter posted:Kai Lung should have come out at the end and ninja-flipped onto the back of a reaper and wave his cowboy hat around and then the reaper rears up like a giant Black Stallion and then Kai Lung could ride it into the CItadel and everything explodes and buildings crumble and then you have to fight Kai Lung ontop of the reaper and then when you beat Kai Lung for the final time all the reapers crowd around his dead body as it floats off into space and then they do their air horn blast BWWWAAAAAAAAA but it's like they're all crying and then they all turn to you and then space bow and then they all say "What are your wishes, new master?" IMO the final fight should have gone like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub-6sKfGSmw&t=67s E: I mean shepard should have beaten a reaper in a fistfight because that would be awesome orange juche fucked around with this message at 09:04 on Nov 30, 2016 |
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Nov 30, 2016 08:57
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Holy poo poo that was the dumbest, most boring loving thing I've ever seen since the ending of ME3 but then right at the end the dude you beat to death double-gunned and went all "you're pretty good" and then died. SO that part was cool.
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Nov 30, 2016 09:17
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Kai Leng.....loving lmao
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Nov 30, 2016 09:19
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Drifter posted:Holy poo poo that was the dumbest, most boring loving thing I've ever seen since the ending of ME3 but then right at the end the dude you beat to death double-gunned and went all "you're pretty good" and then died. SO that part was cool. See? It paid off, unlike the ME3 ending Imagine
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Nov 30, 2016 09:25
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Basic Chunnel posted:Like it's a series in which civilian institutions like "democratically elected governments" and "journalism" are inerringly weak / corrupt / obstructionist. Meanwhile the only figures of any real wisdom / benevolence / willingness to face Hard Truths are military officers, and they are the only things preventing the annihilation of a helpless and agency-free populace (as embodied by a nameless, cowering child) that is actively resented for its ignorance. I dunno, man. I kinda agree on a "lol" level but there's always gonna be a lot of crossover between fascism and any kinda heroic narrative because it's such a bankrupt ideology. Also blame for the Rannoch situation is largely placed on the ruthless military leadership of the Admirals (and to a lesser extent you get something similar with Tuchanka - that turian bomb, for instance), and TIM/Cerberus, the Hard Truth faction, are antagonists throughout. Umberto Eco was obviously writing from a historian's perspective but even so he suggests there's a bit more to fascism than the "dumb bureaucracy/strong military/helpless civilians" tripartite trope.
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Nov 30, 2016 10:40
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OtherworldlyInvader posted:If defeating the big boss and winning the game isn't a good fit for Mass Effect 3's narrative, then we're back to Milky Moor's original point of "maybe you should re-think making your 3rd person cover shooter's narrative about fighting giant space battleships." The scale is irrelevant. The stakes in Freespace are an existential threat to the human race that is somehow resolved by a space fighter shooting lasers at subsystems on an enemy ship - the exact mechanism for how this stops the rest of the Shivan armada from annihilating the remaining eight human colony systems ("oh, I guess the Shivans are a hive-mind") is handwaved off-screen in the expansion pack. In games like Dragon Age and KOTOR, you win nation/galaxy-spanning wars by duelling the enemy general and then the other army just goes home. In Alpha Protocol, you stop American imperialism by giving Leland a grenade. In Tyranny, you murder all the Archons and drop a magic nuke. In Deus Ex, you blow up/become the Internet. So on, so forth. There's always gonna be ludonarrative dissonance in games. For that matter, stories in general are going to boil large conflicts down into personal, individual conflicts between two agonists because humans parse that better. That's not really the problem here. I think a lot of people are actually fine with the concept of resolving the Reaper War through confrontation with the Catalyst, and you can see it in the alternative proposals they make: it's not called "the Catalyst", it's called "Harbinger's Drive Core"; you don't accept its surrender through dialogue, you shoot it or plant a bomb; the Catalyst doesn't shoot an energy beam that destroys/controls/synthesises the galaxy, Harbinger's destruction disrupts the Reaper hive-mind etc. etc. Again, not a question of scale, but a question of execution - people don't like the Catalyst as a character, they don't like the final dialogue, they don't like the mysterious mystical energy beams as a device. In turn, what I think Alain Post's problem (and definitely my problem) with shooting the boss Reaper until it dies is is that it's boring and over-used. It also doesn't in itself address the deeper issues of Mass Effect: can man and robot ever truly
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Nov 30, 2016 11:32
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Drifter posted:Holy poo poo that was the dumbest, most boring loving thing I've ever seen since the ending of ME3 but then right at the end the dude you beat to death double-gunned and went all "you're pretty good" and then died. SO that part was cool. it's supposed to be dumb you idiot
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Nov 30, 2016 12:13
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The ending wasn't great but I think it would be selling out the stakes of the game to make it possible to defeat the Reapers in a conventional war. Yes, you kill a few over the course of the trilogy, but it generally requires an outlandish amount of effort/situational convenience (the Reaper you kill on Rannoch is being bombarded with orbital strikes from the entire Quarian fleet at the same time as you're fighting it), and there are a lot more of them where those came from, along with legions of ground troops that convert fallen soldiers into more ground troops, etc. Meanwhile they can demonstrably destroy big bad ships from the Citadel races with very little effort. Much of ME3 is about how you're outclassed and desperately looking for something that can even the odds: even when you're achieving something, you're facing massive losses at every turn. You'd have to change up the tone and stakes of the rest of the game for it to feel satisfying, I think. I do agree that an "allocation of war resources" thing leading up to a narrative conclusion would probably have been more satisfying. I just don't think a final boss fight would be a good answer unless it also had a narrative element, like a better-executed version of the star kid thing.
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Nov 30, 2016 12:17
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Also yeah anything with "destroying the Head Reaper disrupted the Reaper hive mind, you won!" would feel cheap as hell.
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Nov 30, 2016 12:22
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AriadneThread posted:i wonder if the scale of the map in andromeda is going to be smaller or if they'll come up with up with a !notmassrelay to excuse jumping from one end of the galaxy to another Honestly, it would be better if they didn't and instead just limit us to a small but populated/colonised corner of the galaxy. Leave the past behind, make the most of that fresh start.
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Nov 30, 2016 12:32
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I sure hope ME:A has another unexplained annoying kid you are supposed to feel sentimental about for no explained reason whatsoever. Kidding, Dragon Age: Effect will end with a battle on some flying space rocks and we won't get any proper narrative conclusion until the final DLC 6-12 months later.
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Nov 30, 2016 13:47
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Drifter posted:Looking at what was originally planned for Prey 2 and then seeing recent videos of them excitedly showing off how you can morph into a coffee cup to roll under doorway barriers must be like a slapping a gloopy turd in the face of the original devs. The new Prey 2, however, seems like a very Arkane game where they give you gimmicks and let you go nuts with it. In this case, it's "shapeshift into everything".
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Nov 30, 2016 13:53
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The MSJ posted:The new Prey 2, however, seems like a very Arkane game where they give you gimmicks and let you go nuts with it. In this case, it's "shapeshift into everything". If it ends up being Space Dishonored I think people will generally be happy. My expectations are lower though.
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Nov 30, 2016 14:08
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Lt. Danger posted:The scale is irrelevant. The stakes in Freespace are an existential threat to the human race that is somehow resolved by a space fighter shooting lasers at subsystems on an enemy ship - the exact mechanism for how this stops the rest of the Shivan armada from annihilating the remaining eight human colony systems ("oh, I guess the Shivans are a hive-mind") is handwaved off-screen in the expansion pack. My favorite bit of writing from Freespace 1 is a briefing where the player is somberly informed that the Vasudan foothold on Vasuda Prime remains untouched. So much of it reads like a first draft. I'm pretty sure on more than one occasion that the Sol is said to have multiple jump corridors, while the whole climax of the game revolves around there being only one way in or out. And I think the very first mission briefing has them mentioning where the player is like three or four times over six lines. I heard once that FS1 didn't have a dedicated writer.
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Nov 30, 2016 15:56
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My perspective has always been that despite the enormously hacky way it got there, Control was a legitimately interesting endstate for the galaxy at the end of the Mass Effect series and I would have preferred to see them attempt to deal with that setting rather than this slavish, uninspired, and most likely meme-filled rendition we're about to see in Andromeda.
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Nov 30, 2016 15:59
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exquisite tea posted:My perspective has always been that despite the enormously hacky way it got there, Control was a legitimately interesting endstate for the galaxy at the end of the Mass Effect series and I would have preferred to see them attempt to deal with that setting rather than this slavish, uninspired, and most likely meme-filled rendition we're about to see in Andromeda. Yeah, I would have loved to see what the Milky Way looks like post-Control, with unknowable godhead Shepard sequestered in a Reaper somewhere and the rest of society reacting to these big, eerie Reapers just floating around their shipping lanes apparently doing the will of the techno-demigod who saved the galaxy ten years ago. That sounds like a good rear end setting.
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Nov 30, 2016 16:11
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I think a well-developed scenario in which Control is actually the viable winning condition would have been pretty interesting too. The Catalyst would have been something entirely different imho (perhaps an artifact from the leviathan planet) in which you could have a rad reaper infiltration mission to implement it costing you war assets and such.
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Nov 30, 2016 16:19
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Android Blues posted:Yeah, I would have loved to see what the Milky Way looks like post-Control, with unknowable godhead Shepard sequestered in a Reaper somewhere and the rest of society reacting to these big, eerie Reapers just floating around their shipping lanes apparently doing the will of the techno-demigod who saved the galaxy ten years ago. That sounds like a good rear end setting. I'm afraid the current batch of writers would have pulled a Blizzard and "corrupted" a control Shepard. I mean it COULD be interesting if the plot was trying save a techno-demigod that was slowly loosing its humanity/growing indifferent to organic species either from within/outside sources but after ME3 I don't see that turning out well.
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Nov 30, 2016 16:21
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I too think control could have worked if it was totally re-written
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Nov 30, 2016 16:37
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Mass Effect 4 could've worked just fine with any of the 3 endings, as long as it was written by a good writer. Actually I dunno how the hell synthesis could've worked, but the other two could've been just fine.
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Nov 30, 2016 16:43
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ME3 should have just ended with the Illusive man showing up with the dead reaper from ME2 which they figured out how to pilot, then Shepherd flies it inside the head reaper, uploads a computer virus then fires off an eezo-nuke or something for good measure. The head reaper explodes and all the other reapers turn off, and Shepherd flies out of the explosion, zooms past the camera with a "WOO-HOOOO!", end credits.
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Nov 30, 2016 16:48
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Moola posted:I too think control could have worked if it was totally re-written Any of the endings could have worked had they actually lead up to them for the past three games. It's all "We must destroy the Reapers!" for 200 hours of gameplay until the last ten minutes where Starchild casually informs you that you can become god or bi-synthetic or whatever poo poo they made up.
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Nov 30, 2016 16:57
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Nevets posted:ME3 should have just ended with the Illusive man showing up with the dead reaper from ME2 which they figured out how to pilot, then Shepherd flies it inside the head reaper, uploads a computer virus then fires off an eezo-nuke or something for good measure. The head reaper explodes and all the other reapers turn off, and Shepherd flies out of the explosion, zooms past the camera with a "WOO-HOOOO!", end credits. GET US OUT OF HERE, JOKER
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Nov 30, 2016 16:58
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In the intro Shepherd outwits a reaper and when he opens it up he punches a husk in the face while yelling Earf
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Nov 30, 2016 16:58
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I think leaving the galaxy for Andromeda in ark ships to escape the reapers actually would have been a cool ending
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Nov 30, 2016 17:07
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Illusive Man, after making sure that someone was competent enough to get Earthlings into an escape arc, develops a dark matter bomb that will make sure that no Reaper can loving escape when they finally come for us. When the battle inevitably is lost despite how much you can do on your own, Shepard is given the call-sign that "the seeds have escaped" and detonates a massive amount of dark energy from I guess the collective amount of biotics around star child to trigger a super-massive black hole that eats the entire reaper host along with the rest of the milky way galaxy. "B-B-BUT WE WERE SAVING YOU BY KILLING YOU" the light fucker will cry out, to which Shepard just says "gently caress you".
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Nov 30, 2016 17:22
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exquisite tea posted:My perspective has always been that despite the enormously hacky way it got there, Control was a legitimately interesting endstate for the galaxy at the end of the Mass Effect series and I would have preferred to see them attempt to deal with that setting rather than this slavish, uninspired, and most likely meme-filled rendition we're about to see in Andromeda. BexGu posted:I'm afraid the current batch of writers would have pulled a Blizzard and "corrupted" a control Shepard. Then you've got seriously PTSD'd Shepard now adjusting to being a machine god and she could start going off the rails. At some point the crew decides this poo poo ain't working and they plan to pull Shep back out. We've got clone Shepard as a thing, so maybe Cerberus has a few more stashed around. With TIM gone an already morally defunct group with apparently unlimited assets and a bunch of semi husked soldiers really goes off the rails so now you have to locate a new clone and somehow download Shep's consciousness back into a body (sure it's nutty but not out of place in the ME universe). After a whole bunch of poo poo you're successful and there you go, that gets you a living human Shep back, more adventures with the gang, and the opportunity to fix the dumb poo poo that's happened.
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Nov 30, 2016 17:33
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I never imagined Shepard "coming back" in the Control version of the galaxy, but rather their morality gradually morphing into the same unknowable alien intellect that led the OG Reaper AI down the path they took. Shepard in Control is very much dead, or at least exists solely as a machine consciousness with only vague memories of who they once were. I would have liked to see future entries in the Mass Effect series attempt to deal with rebuilding the galaxy in the aftermath of the Reaper War, I think there would be a lot of interesting stories to tell and you wouldn't even have to focus on any of the original cast.
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Nov 30, 2016 17:41
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exquisite tea posted:you wouldn't even have to focus on any of the original cast. Which is fortunate, because I killed them all.
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Nov 30, 2016 17:43
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