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I feel like that quest was probably supposed to happen earlier and you were supposed to get an ON HOLD: step until you unlocked the systems she flew threw, but it got changed up and no one really noticed the weird as gently caress time problem.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:07
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Android Blues posted:The various alien species all mostly act like variations on humans, more like fantasy dwarves and elves than any sort of examination of a divergent culture, and that's how they're mostly treated by the narrative as well - like meeting denizens of another country rather than members of another species. The Kett are less egregious in this area than the Angara, but neither are great. The lazyness of the Angara and Kett really gets to me. They use so many human concepts when they speak as well. Like I said earlier, why would an Angaran know what a Church is? If it was a universal translator thing then sure but the game does say a few times they're actually literally talking English to you. Somehow. It's like we've turned up to Space Italy where everyone is a bit more open with what they say and they dress funny and look a bit different but that's it. Somehow this race in another galaxy is less different than me here now than a tribesman in Papua New Guinea on my own planet would be.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:08
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Ugly In The Morning posted:It's more interesting than another "generic precursors who peaced out a while back" plot, so it's fun to think about. I'm not knocking the actual speculation and guesswork here -- I'd love to hear more thoughts on the whole Jardaan/Opposition thing they set up -- but the page after page of CIA-documentation "Oh god is that really what they're doing??? LOL BIOWARE" freakouts here are super annoying. Let's just be clear that any possibility of the Remnant creators being Synthesis-end people from the Milky Way -- again, not a spoiler, no need to treat it with any kind of mystique or intrigue -- is completely speculative right now. There are some enticing arguments for it, but it could very well just end up being something else as well. It reminds me of the Dragon Age sitch where like half the "fandom" is convinced the old elven gods are actually the old Tevinter gods despite it being completely unsubstantiated.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:09
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You would think that having the universal translator as a conceit would let you skimp on lip-syncing for aliens but no. Hell, same for voice acting. Give them all the same voice actor, run through a machine filter.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:10
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I really don't remember them saying church. I remember it being called a temple. A church is specifically christian (at least in English). It would just be a really weird error for the writers, which isn't improbable for this game, but seems unlikely.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:12
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Nah, they do say church. I just replayed that part of the game the other day. Andromeda Initiative translators are quote Eurocentric, to be sure.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:14
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Serf posted:You would think that having the universal translator as a conceit would let you skimp on lip-syncing for aliens but no. Imagine the Liara romance but the whole time she's talking she's Microsoft Julia.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:14
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WhiskeyWhiskers posted:I really don't remember them saying church. I remember it being called a temple. A church is specifically christian. It would just be a really weird error for the writers, which isn't improbable for this game, but seems unlikely. Someone reprogram the universal translator to say Mosque for no reason other than to get someone frothing at the mouth.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:14
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Weird as gently caress.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:14
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Taear posted:The lazyness of the Angara and Kett really gets to me. They use so many human concepts when they speak as well. Like I said earlier, why would an Angaran know what a Church is? If it was a universal translator thing then sure but the game does say a few times they're actually literally talking English to you. Somehow. What writing space have they left themselves to make races that are "alien," but also familiar enough to not confuse the majority of their player base? The writers from ME1-3 mined a lot of the safe-but-interesting concepts you could do (AIs, sort-of Dextro creatures, blue space ladies, space bugs, four-eyed dudes, rock men etc.) I guess plant people is something they could do, or maybe sentient oozes. edit: if they had hit the myoelectric squid stuff of the Angara harder it might've been more effective at feeling "alien." Nancy fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Apr 12, 2017 |
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Apr 12, 2017 16:15
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Android Blues posted:Imagine the Liara romance but the whole time she's talking she's Microsoft Julia. Unironically better. Charles Get-Out posted:What writing space do they left themselves to make races that are "alien," but also familiar enough to not confuse the majority of their player base? There's really no alien aliens in most things with aliens. I would love a game that featured humans getting along with some really bizarre poo poo though.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:17
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Liara's natural voice sounds like a cross between a spider hissing and a rabbit screaming in pain, raised by a couple dozen decibels. But thanks to superior Asari mind biotics you hear ~sexy female voice selection #19 from human database~. Be funny if the scary black eyes eternity sex thing is how their eyes are naturally and the human-like eyes are just a projection they maintain using mental effort.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:19
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there was a missed opportunity to have the Reapers disable everyone's universal translators in the final battle in ME3 Shepard: "Garrus, are you OK?" Garrus: *gobbles like a turkey*
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Apr 12, 2017 16:21
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The asari are so execrable as a concept that I'm still surprised they made it into these games.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:23
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Serf posted:The asari are so execrable as a concept that I'm still surprised they made it into these games. No way sexy monocolored star trek alike aliens weren't getting put in. Could they have been introduced a bit better than "lol they're all strippers, hookers and mercenaries"? Yes. I think Liara is notable for being the only Asari who isn't a stripper, hooker or mercenary for the entire first game. Well maybe the ambassador isn't one but "regular" non pandering to teenagers Asari characters are few and far between.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:24
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Charles Get-Out posted:What writing space do they left themselves to make races that are "alien," but also familiar enough to not confuse the majority of their player base? - Some lifeform that is purelly space based can be interesting. Star Trek crystal entity. Space whales. - Some lifeform that live has parasite of technology. They find machines and infect the machines making them into their house. You can have a whole planet with ancient machines infested by that. - Some fungus like poo poo that is so deadly nobody would land in a planet that has it, and if you try to fly near it, you get attacked. (The Andromeda Strain) - A bioweapon designed to fuse with the host and turn the host into a super predator, Hitler Xenomorph (like in Alien and Babylon 5) - A race of floating blobs that are into collecting stories and that are so big and powerful that they can't possibly care about politics, war, etc... (so the Ents of Lord of the Rings) - The Kett, but more like the idea than the actual implementation. With different subraces and machines around designed to connect to their bodies / modular design (so if they need a technical arm to repair something, they unplug the current arm, and they connect a human arm ) Infinite possibilities.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:28
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DancingShade posted:No way sexy monocolored star trek alike aliens weren't getting put in. Superficially, I have little issue with the asari. Blue people or whatever? Lazy, but fine. You've already got turians, salarians, krogan, quarians etc as humanoid aliens because animation costs money, I get it. But the fact that they can reproduce with aliens is just the straight up dumbest thing that has ever been put in a Mass Effect game, and that's saying something.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:30
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Tei posted:
The golden worlds detected on FTL telescope post-date the mega scale construction in Heleus and therefore the Remnant also predate ME3. Unless Synthesis humans can travel into the past it's not possible.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:32
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The one thing that I will unambiguously agree with and lambast ME:A for is that Citadel Space from the original trilogy feels much more like an actual melting pot of space cultures and different races. The minute you step outside of the embassy in Mass Effect you got shopkeepers that look like elephants and fat ball bankers and a big stupid jellyfish proselyting in the town square. Sure, the idea in ME:A is that you don't have that yet, and you want to eventually build that here as well, and there's completely understandable lore reasons why there's only one sentient race in the Heleus cluster. In theory you can rationally understand it. But in practice it just makes Andromeda feel muted and claustrophobic. Even after you get the Nexus up and running and invite your new alien friends in, it still doesn't end up feeling very diversified. On a bit of a separate note...in retrospect, having gone through this game one and a half times now, I absolutely think it was a mistake to start out on an all-human vessel and have it mostly be humans as far as the eye can see for the entire, like, first quarter of the game. I think that, as a rule, the Mass Effect series just gets weaker and weaker the more it focuses our attention on humans.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:34
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Halloween Jack posted:Also gameplay literally features two magical "gels" that just fix machines and people, respectively. Medi-gel is basically real at this point though, they're like four years deep in the FDA approval process.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:35
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speaking of that, didn't they say new sections of the Nexus would open up as you made andromeda more viable? that went out the window pretty quickly as I'm pretty sure "The Nexus" is made up of the Docking Bay and Operations and that's it!
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Apr 12, 2017 16:36
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Banter sounds good. Wish I got to hear half of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20nTp5NO2Sk
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Apr 12, 2017 16:36
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Tei posted:- Some lifeform that is purelly space based can be interesting. Star Trek crystal entity. Space whales. I get where you are coming from, but 1, 2, and 4 are Reaper concepts (Robot space whales, machine houses that can infect other machines, husk bioweapon technology) and some of the others would be hard to make compelling gameplay around. ME has mined a loooooooooot of sci-fi concepts, and most of those in ME1 frankly. They should do like a crystal monster alien or an alien that's a gas cloud or something though
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Apr 12, 2017 16:36
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DancingShade posted:We were talking about what hard sci fi was since that was the question asked. Tei posted:Real honest to god science-fiction can be this rididulous awesome. But is hard to make, you need a good writter with good ideas and inspiration. DancingShade posted:Yep. And it all falls apart once you get the Kevin J Anderson of video game writing in charge of it all and it becomes space wizards in space casting space magic on space orcs.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:38
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IcePhoenix posted:Medi-gel is basically real at this point though, they're like four years deep in the FDA approval process. Link?
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Apr 12, 2017 16:39
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Halloween Jack posted:This is what I was asking after in the first place: It never was because Element Zero and the mass effect phenomenon, the underpinnings of the series, aren't. edit: Mass Effect deals with some hard sci-fi concepts sometimes, but it's just Star Trek style space fantasy overall imo
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Apr 12, 2017 16:40
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Serf posted:Link? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJLxRcU9No4 Stuff started popping up in March-ish 2013 I think, this is a little more recent. I think you can actually buy it for animal use now.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:43
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HAmbONE posted:Contagion - Nexus Task The "choice" at the end of this one is so silly. The only way to save her is to let the guy walk away with his weaponized disease, but once his gun is no longer pointed at her head there's literally nothing stopping you from shooting him. You're in the middle of nowhere, he's probably still outside somewhere! Serf posted:You would think that having the universal translator as a conceit would let you skimp on lip-syncing for aliens but no. Most of the NPC's in KOTOR spoke an alien language, and there were only like 3 or 4 different lines of recorded dialogue per race. The only thing that changed was the subtitles. Clever way to save space, tbh.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:43
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Hobo Clown posted:Most of the NPC's in KOTOR spoke an alien language, and there were only like 3 or 4 different lines of recorded dialogue per race. The only thing that changed was the subtitles. Clever way to save space, tbh. Honestly it would be cool to do something like this. Hard sci-fi isn't really a thing, but playing up the difficulties of communicating with an alien species would be neat. Like how would you easily communicate with a species that "talks" via pheromones or precise physical movements? Stuff like that would be neat.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:48
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Charles Get-Out posted:I get where you are coming from, but 1, 2, and 4 are Reaper concepts (Robot space whales, machine houses that can infect other machines, husk bioweapon technology) and some of the others would be hard to make compelling gameplay around. More alien races: - A hivemind that only exist in some sort of internet, they want some humans to add to the hivemind, they will provide artificial heavens to them. - The last survivor of a alien race that has cloned himself x9 billions and want to get your DNA specifically to make a new specimen. - A race of inteligent predators that love to play games but are more or less solitary. (Predators) - A solitary guy from a alien race that is lost and want to get help to come home ( ET ) - A race of gremlins that infect space machines and repair / upgrade the machines. If you get infected by these gremlins, stuff start to fix itself, the engines become better and faster, but you lose the ability to understand how anything works. - A race of politicians that can take over any society and become the leader, but that don't respect human values. - Time travelers / Dimensional travelers, that are not fully constrained by our physic rules.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:51
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Well in ME, they'd work out translators for them like what the hanar have. In gaming, one of the reasons you don't often see really bizarre races is that no one wants to deal with a ton of precise rules for how they work differently (which everyone assumes are necessary). But in Star Frontiers (a TSR game) for example, they have blob-people and just say "they extrude pseudopods like arms and legs as needed, and take damage the same as everyone else, donworryaboudit."
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Apr 12, 2017 16:52
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I'm starting to feel like it would have been a better game if you were around during the uprising to either make sure it wasn't too damaging, some people didn't come into power or at least care about all this bad poo poo that happened before hand while also being ground floor to discover the new alien tech so it can feel reasonable to be so unknowledgable about it - yet also be the one dude or lady that magically unlocks some of this stuff. Like their whole lack of depth with the exact tools that define their entire game, the mass effect relays, would have been better off if you're the one charting completely new territory in space. Which is what Andromeda got half right. Also with how much this patch makes the animations look slightly better, it really makes this game's rush job much more obvious.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:53
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Tei posted:- A race of inteligent predators that love to play games but are more or less solitary. (Predators) This is similar to what happened to the krogan.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:57
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Crabtree posted:I'm starting to feel like it would have been a better game if you were around during the uprising to either make sure it wasn't too damaging, some people didn't come into power or at least care about all this bad poo poo that happened before hand while also being ground floor to discover the new alien tech so it can feel reasonable to be so unknowledgable about it - yet also be the one dude or lady that magically unlocks some of this stuff. Like their whole lack of depth with the exact tools that define their entire game, the mass effect relays, would have been better off if you're the one charting completely new territory in space. Which is what Andromeda got half right. The game would've been better if you have a colonist on the Nexus who is forced to choose sides during the uprising. No Pathfinder or chosen one stuff. A small-scale RPG set entirely on the Nexus where you deal with the factions and get caught up in the rebellion would've ruled.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:57
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Serf posted:Like how would you easily communicate with a species that "talks" via pheromones or precise physical movements? Stuff like that would be neat. Arrival was a loving awesome movie (and the short story that inspired it as well) exactly because of "hey how about some real alien-ness on their language, huh" (but you should not expect such things in mass effect at all)
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Apr 12, 2017 16:59
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I thought Arrival was ok. The stuff involving the aliens and language was interesting (but more interesting as a metaphor for conversing with other human cultures than an actual alien encounter.) The "sci-fi" concept that if you understand their language, you can see your entire timeline, future and past all at once, and thus your past self can have access to future memories is just absurd.
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Apr 12, 2017 17:04
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Serf posted:Like how would you easily communicate with a species that "talks" via pheromones or precise physical movements? Stuff like that would be neat. Uh, if you read the codex the elcor and hanar are exactly this - the hanar "language" is patterns of flashes from their natural bioluminescence, and the elcor language involves subtle body language and pheromones. They've simply programmed their translators to recognize that stuff and translate it into speech. The hanar in particular, when you hear them talk you're not actually hearing the hanar - they have no vocal chords at all. You're just hearing their translator interpret their bioluminescent language into speech.
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Apr 12, 2017 17:06
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Tei posted:More alien races: Like yeah man there are alien concepts, but I direct you to to my earlier statement cause I'm not arguing that there aren't: Charles Get-Out posted:What writing space have they left themselves to make races that are "alien," but also familiar enough to not confuse the majority of their player base? Stuff like Watts or Banks-style internet afterlives aren't going to be in ME. Some of what you list might be workable, but these are video games that operate in the safe pseudo-Star Trek area and most of the plot is an excuse to give you stuff to shoot.
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Apr 12, 2017 17:06
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Contact, Interstellar, Arrival, these hard sci fi movies always have an ending where the character discovers, like, time travel or God or that the fourth dimension is love or something like that.
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Apr 12, 2017 17:08
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Pattonesque posted:there was a missed opportunity to have the Reapers disable everyone's universal translators in the final battle in ME3 I admit, I would've liked to run into a situation like this just once in ME too  . Believe it or not though, that happening just because the translators fail isn't as likely as you think. According to the Codex (I think in the first game) it's a common education thing that most people learn at least one or two alien languages, even with universal translators being a thing. Halloween Jack posted:Well in ME, they'd work out translators for them like what the hanar have. The problem with Andromeda's first encounter with the Angara is it has a fantastic setup of being prodded through the Aya marketplace with no idea who or what these people are or what they're saying, and the moment you enter the Resistance Headquarters... they suddenly start talking in English with no buildup and knowing who and what you are  . I idly suspect there's a mismatch of script drafts between the initial setup and what occurs inside the HQ.
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