poisonpill posted:

I’m never going to play Andromeda but did they ever explain why they brought the krogan? We’re going to explore a new land where we’ll be cut off and alone with no support; better bring the genocidal maniacs!!

poisonpill posted:

I’m never going to play Andromeda but did they ever explain why they brought the krogan? We’re going to explore a new land where we’ll be cut off and alone with no support; better bring the genocidal maniacs!!

Caidin posted:

I'm actually replaying because I'm stuck inside and it's vague but essentially the initiative was looking for support everywhere it could find it and Clan Nakmor decided to go along becuase 600 hundred years in cyro might give their biology enough time to adapt to the genophage a little. I think their stillborn rate went from like 0.001 to 0.004.

I think it's nice enough game.

Moola posted:

how would their biology adapt if they were in stasis lol?

Moola posted:

mass effect fields how the gently caress do they work!?!?

hard counter posted:

i don't know why they even bothered with the no we're not actually escaping a doomed milky way galaxy, we're just explorers on an adventure except not really angle

poisonpill posted:

This is a good opportunity for everyone to think about playing the Mass Effect trilogy again and then deciding not to five minutes into the first game

TheCenturion posted:

Update: got as far as clearing the vault on Eos, remembered what a slog the core gameplay is, uninstalled, downloaded Death Stranding, and am so far enjoying chill backpack balancing simulator.

TheCenturion posted:

Update: got as far as clearing the vault on Eos, remembered what a slog the core gameplay is, uninstalled, downloaded Death Stranding, and am so far enjoying chill backpack balancing simulator.

I've been wracking my brain trying to come up with a way to have a direct sequel to Mass Effect, but it keeps coming down to 'three mutually-exclusive endings.' I always get about this far, but eventually, you have to decide if all the synths got blowed up, got mind controlled, or if everybody is some sort of weird cyborg now, and it all just falls apart.

Commander Playername, daring N7 operative, is leading a mixed-species team on a mission into a remote cluster of stars. The Reaper War rages on, but reports of strange ruins of an ancient civilization proved tempting enough to organize a scratch team of scientists, soldiers and operatives in the vague hope of finding something, anything, that might help. (ME3 doesn't give you a good sense of how long the Reaper War is going on; it could days, could be months. Maybe they're dispatched more around the time the reapers are just arriving into the system. Who knows.)

Aboard their Normandy-class ship Excalibur, they pop through the Mass Effect relay, and head for Planet Whatever. There's a strange, artificial energy field which has kept earlier expeditions from successfully landing, but thanks to an experimental eezo field, powered by plugging a biotic into the shield generator or some poo poo, the Excalibur is able to ride it out and land. On the surface, they do indeed find an ancient ruin, which they explore. Fun times and happy moments ensue as they delve in, and sure enough, they find a data core from an ancient civilization that actually managed to figure out how to build their own mass effect relays. Holy poo poo! If they can build their own, they can bypass the Reaper's systems, opening up all sorts of tactial and strategic options, let alone the new fields of research and technology this poo poo will open up! Hot drat!

Coming out of the ruin, they find a strange shield has been erected over the site, sealing them and the Excalibur in. As they're wondering what to do about it, and why the shield has popped up, they see a bright flash in the sky. An energy wave sweeps over the planet, then the shield turns itself off. They get back to the ship, and realize that the ME relay has exploded, stranding them in the local cluster. Fortunately, there's a settlement a system or two over; they can head over there, resupply, maybe see if there's enough of a manufacturing base to try building some sort of scratch relay that can at least slingshot them a known distance, close enough to another system to find a working relay, or whatever.

They arrive, and find the settlement on the verge of anarchy. Everybody is in a state of panic over the relay exploding, being cut off from the rest of civilization, etc etc. QEC devices still work, and they're finding out that relays everywhere have exploded.

Fortunately, Commander Playername, being specops, has hearts-and-minds training, and steps up. Cmdr PN keeps everybody together, organizes the settlement, and transmits the plans for building new relays to everybody he can, with instructions to relay them as much as possible, and slowly start rebuilding the network. Meanwhile, he organizes expeditions to other planets to gather materials and resources, fight off pirates and marauders, and so on. Meanwhile, the VIs are starting to act a bit funny....

I dunno. The ending of ME3 really does make things hard. It also pretty much establishes that planets don't regain contact for centuries, long enough for Shepard to become mythic.

So, here's a comedy option: Shepard didn't actually talk to the Star Child. Shepard activated the Citadel, which blew up the relays, then hallucinated the whole Star Child thing while dying. With the relays destroyed, the Reapers were all trapped at Earth. Or they were destroyed. Whatever. Point being, Earth is gone, Citadel is gone, Council is gone, worlds are in disarray, and you can kick in with the above plot, possibly culimating with Cmdr PN making their way back to Earth and discovering all of this, including an audio log of Shepard's last minutes. Frantic radio calls from the fleet, 'what do you need me to do,' wounded rambling through activating the thing, more calls about it working and reapers blowing up, which Shepard ignores, and rambling about the Star Child, and needing to choose, then, just, dying.

This builds out into a trilogy of reestablishing relays, recontacting the major and minor races, and forging a new Council.
ME4: Isolation
ME5: Reclamation
ME6: Restoration

I dunno. Thank you for attending my Dying Shepard rambling Ted Talk.

poisonpill posted:

DarkHorse posted:

Indoctrination Theory (aka "No, actually, that didn't happen") is about the only way to salvage the series.

They had a huge, detailed, immersive universe, and they literally blew it up and fundamentally changed it. The only way it recovers is if that didn't happen. Either so long in the (in-universe and real-world) future that everyone has forgotten it or rendered it irrelevant, or that it didn't actually happen.

DarkHorse posted:

Indoctrination Theory (aka "No, actually, that didn't happen") is about the only way to salvage the series.

They had a huge, detailed, immersive universe, and they literally blew it up and fundamentally changed it. The only way it recovers is if that didn't happen. Either so long in the (in-universe and real-world) future that everyone has forgotten it or rendered it irrelevant, or that it didn't actually happen.

Lt. Danger posted:

I can't believe human creative endeavour peaked with the Mass Effect series

Moola posted:

they named a character Pee Bee and made her look like this

Feels Villeneuve posted:

burning down your setting is insanely good and cool and i am still perplexed that this was a bad creative decision because they couldn't make a Mass Effect kart racer or something



to put it another way massively loving up your status quo is actually a really good way to keep your setting fresh if you want to continue it, but ME:A's biggest sin, among its many other sins, was just using it as a reset button to go back to ME1 rather than the much more creatively interesting decision to keep going in a freshly burnt-down galaxy.


in a following thread i will discuss how the reapers actually represent the creative impulse to purge the galaxy (representing fictional universes) from creative ennui by purging it of its most tired, worn-out elements every now and again, and how civilizations represent the creative bankruptcy of franchise "cinematic universe" storytelling by going ahead and telling the same stories over and over again in a never ending cycle. the prothean artifacts/beacons are actually a Marvel box set. to hear more please visit my patreon


the dark matter thing mentioned in me2 is actually capitalism

ninjewtsu posted:

exploring the long term ramifications of any 1 of ME3's endings could make for an interesting game but i think very few people would be super happy with it, even if the game was made competently

orcane posted:

There's a lot of "WTF were they thinking" in MEA like Peebee but let's not pretend that was new for Bioware, the gigglesquee studio.

But indoctrination theory isn't "it didn't happen" it's "the ending didn't happen as it played out in Shepard's mind". It assumes you were exposed to enough "reaper radiation" that you finally went mad through ME3 and by the time you're trying to save McGuffin Station and negotiate with star kid your mind was actually fighting a last stand against indoctrination. If you agree to any of the star kid proposals your mind was gone and you were probably gooified with everyone else, or kept alive to help in the reaping as a mind-controlled pawn (from ME1 we know it takes ages to track down all survivors and resistance cells at the end of a reaper cycle). The "gently caress you" option would be your mind winning over indoctrination, but your body dying after the final fight.

By making the reapers "right" like that, the franchise would have the same problem it has now: The galaxy (as we know it) is destroyed to varying degrees while reapers either won outright, or your "victory" was massively Pyrrhic. The setting is now tainted for anything that happens before or parallel to the reaper war (one problem is humans haven't been around for very long and a pure eg. turian prequel/side story might not win a large enough following) and you can't write sequels unless you want to drastically alter Mass Effect to post-apocalyptic grimdark. If the objective is to keep the franchise relatable, and also stick to the originally optimistic sci-fi theme, you'll have to do an actual reboot that throws out a lot of the reaper plot (a real version of "no it actually didn't happen"), set it so far in the future you may as well play a different franchise (eg. by doing a "next cycle" sequel), or just move everything to a different place.

The latter is obviously the easiest idea because you can just reuse all the elements of the setting you want to keep, invent new ones as you see fit and you get to ignore all the controversial stuff of the original franchise, without having to make hard choices. The risk is creating MEA: A game that reuses too many parts of the old games in a boring way so it doesn't do the old nor the new parts justice and just feels stale and by the numbers. Then they also tied it back to the worst part of the original trilogy so as a reboot Andromeda is utterly worthless.

But yeah you could make a soft reboot with a Citadel-era civilization that doesn't involve the reapers (either ignore them completely or scale them down to a manageable threat that doesn't need full-time supervision by Human McSpacehero, and doesn't lead to an unwinnable war). There was enough in the original setting to create mystery, conflict and interesting stories that didn't need godlike space squids liquefying everyone. They had the perfect setup to do whatever stories they wanted. You could have "mainline" games of a hero thwarting world-ending threats (in moderation, some people called for an even bigger evil than reapers in order to explain the reapers' actions and even for a Bioware game that would be insanely stupid). There was a lot of room for side stories of local heroes or the main hero getting sidetracked or doing tangentially related investigations. They could have tried different genres like straight adventures or pure action games, even hovercar racing games, who knows. The setting allowed for games on a wide variety of worlds, with heroes of all Citadel races, all tied together by a common core of civilized space with the Citadel as a central hub. But, no. Let's just burn it all down after three Shepard games and a bunch of awful books/comics. There's no psyduck large enough for how dumb Bioware execs are.

E: That's all based on the premise that you want to keep Mass Effect around as a franchise instead of a one-off trilogy. If you only want to do the latter than yeah go ahead burn it down for "artistic" value. Might not be the best idea if you want to tell other stories and sell other games in the setting, though.

TheCenturion posted:

Update: got as far as clearing the vault on Eos, remembered what a slog the core gameplay is, uninstalled, downloaded Death Stranding, and am so far enjoying chill backpack balancing simulator.

I've been wracking my brain trying to come up with a way to have a direct sequel to Mass Effect, but it keeps coming down to 'three mutually-exclusive endings.' I always get about this far, but eventually, you have to decide if all the synths got blowed up, got mind controlled, or if everybody is some sort of weird cyborg now, and it all just falls apart.

The Crotch posted:

I never actually knew what synthesis entailed.

The Crotch posted:

I never actually knew what synthesis entailed.

The Crotch posted:

I never actually knew what synthesis entailed.

Pattonesque posted:

The Reapers allow everyone to live because they are now racially pure

Admiral Ray posted:

The Geth were based off of an entirely different paradigm and EDI isn't a Reaper, or a Reaper program. This allows the universe to continue, albeit slowly, and maybe it'll turn out that the Reaper AI was right!

Lt. Danger posted:

the geth used Reaper code to upgrade themselves when the quarians attacked so they couldn't be jammed

EDI is based on the rogue Luna VI combined with scavenged Sovereign tech

Halloween Jack posted:

I know this is space opera, but that's implausible even with the loosest definition of "code." That's like...what would you do if 10% of your DNA fell off.

Halloween Jack posted:

I know this is space opera, but that's implausible even with the loosest definition of "code." That's like...what would you do if 10% of your DNA fell off.