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Milky Moor posted:And N7 day... really? Well drat! I forgot to write my N7 Day cards! The text? 'I should go' 
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Sep 27, 2012 11:47
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I'm fairly sure that when they designed EDI's body, they weren't wondering what the Illusive Man would realistically want built, let alone what would go unnoticed in a research lab. They were pandering to creepy BSN types, as usual. They decided to write about a sexy robot body, wondered what's sexy, and decided 'I KNOW, GIVE IT A ROBOT CAMELTOE!' (See also Miranda, Isabella, and every woman in origins)
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Sep 28, 2012 17:40
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I don't think any if the obvious settings from the background would turn out well. They're all wars (or  incidents), but I think Mass Effect is at its best when it's about ancient ruins and secrets and dodgy bars and exploring space. Something that focused too heavily on the FCW would just end up as CoD in space, which I had my fill of in ME3. Honestly, even just space is a great setting; a Firefly style trader trying to get by would be fantastic if Bioware could pull it off, getting pulled into conspiracies and Prothean ruins and stuff.
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Nov 14, 2012 15:58
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This might be one of my pet hates in science fiction but still - something 'local' in Mass Effect doesn't have to be meaningless. The scale of something that can threaten an entire galaxy is ridiculous. A local plot in ME could be saving an entire system and its millions of colonists. This isn't quite 'we're setting everything in Krikwall' territory, because a colonised galaxy allows so much more space for a big, non 'one man's rise topower' plot before we hit ANCIENT EVIL RISES AGAINST THE GALAXY territory. Of course I'm not saying set everything in one system or something; have the exploration and far reaching travel - but take a star system, and treat it like an actual star system and not a wild west frontier town, and you have all the room you need for big important plots without embarassing yourself trying to one-up the Reapers. Otherwise, we end up with Doctor Who style finales where all-the-galaxies-in-every-timeline-in-all-the-universes-of-every-dimension-also-Earth are at stake.
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Nov 14, 2012 18:07
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Craig Spradlin posted:Agreed - One of the things I did like about ME2 was how made the sidequests a lot more like miniature quests of their own in varied locations, rather than "Go into [BUILDING/SHIP], then [STOP TIMER/KILL ENEMIES]." I think the exact opposite. 2's sidequests were almost all 'go into chest high walls, then stop timer/kill enemies'. There were maybe three exceptions. 1 sent you through the same three buildings, but for the most part it was more than just killing mercs. You might have to talk down a hostage situation, or choose the fate of rogue scientists, or be lured into a booby trapped cave, or save a besieged marine outpost. Of course there were exceptions, especially the godawful asari writings style collection quests, but there was usually something to find other than mercs doing A Bad Thing now go kill.
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Mar 4, 2013 00:14
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Speaking of animations, did we ever learn what was up with Shepard in ME2? That limping walk bugged me to no end, and even the running animation seemed kind of stiff. Was it some kind of 'he's in pain after being resurrected so he limps, see, gritty!' thing?
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Apr 18, 2013 16:14
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Ineffiable posted:I don't think ME1 is going to be much on anyone's favorite list. I mean, all the dlc is pretty standard fare (compared to how amazing stuff like Shadow Broker, Kasumi or Citadel are) and it's so much setting up for ME2/3. I thought one of the most enjoyable parts of 1 was tracking Saren before you become a Spectre, exploring the Citadel, meeting your space bros for the first time...  And I still maintain that 1 had good sidequests. You came across different people, chances to persuade them or shoot them or take bribes or whatever. There are decisions to make (and not in the Obligatory Moral Choice At The End Of The Mission style of 2 and 3). Sure you explored badly generated planets and the same three prefabs, but inside them you had that terrorist with the hostage, the corrupt exogeni scientists, the outgunned alliance soldiers fighting Rachni or the crime boss lady. In 2 you just turned up in a shooting corridor and shot all the mercs (admittedly in a much better environment). I don't think I remember a single conversation from the sidequests in 2. And the sidequests in 3 don't count 
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May 6, 2013 02:45
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The crappy terrain wasn't the real problem with the Mako. It was the bloody shield recharge. If you took it into any kind of combat, like those Geth invasion missions, the shields would go down from small arms fire and the odd actual hit and then you were hosed for the next fifteen minutes. Without shields the thing crumpled as bad as the Hammerhead. And repairing didn't recharge them. So you waited for what felt like half an hour to be able to go back into combat without dying.
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May 7, 2013 19:38
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2house2fly posted:The data file allowed Shepard to open the arms so the fleet could engage Sovereign. If the protheans could lock the Reapers out of the Citadel for the rest of time with a data file the scientists would probably have used it 50k years ago. No, it definitely locked out the citadel relay, and controlled the wider network. That's why Shepard gets to call in the human fleet. Sovereign and zombie Saren were trying to get control back manually when you kill their asses. The whole point is that the protheans didn't use their hack 50k years ago. By the time they had their backdoor onto the Citadel they'd already lost. The best they could hope for was to sabotage the Reapers' control of the station and leave the data for the next cycle hoping they could finish the job. Hell, it would be a pretty good scene for us loyalists for the council to turn round and say 'that's what we've been doing for the last two years,' and start turning the Reapers' own relay network against them. sassassin posted:I was going to argue against this as the whole plot of ME1 is to stop the Reaper's extremely classy 'encourage centralised government -> cripple galactic civilisation in one overwhelming assault' scheme, but ME3 proved that it only took them a couple extra years to paddle to the edge of the galaxy and overwhelm everything anyway even when they're 2000 years behind schedule and their reapees have access to reverse engineered reaper weapons. I thought the idea was that the Arrival DLC relay had been pulling them closer and closer the whole time. So when you destroy it, it's already done a lot of the work, but they're still stranded a few months out. Which is also dumb as hell and I can't remember if the game ever actually says it. Strategic Tea fucked around with this message at 13:25 on Nov 6, 2013 |
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Nov 6, 2013 13:22
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Xander77 posted:Oh yeah - I don't want to search online for fear of spoilers, but which choice will let me kill more Cerberus people in ME3? ME3 plot spoilers Ahahahahahahahahahaha
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Feb 23, 2014 23:09
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The ending sucks because the series had put such an emphasis on unity and working together (under human guidance for renegades) to overcome an overwhelming, uncaring threat. Even in 3, this is the majority of the game. Only for the end to come out and say 'yeah all that is true, all people working together. Oh, unless they're metal people, then it's literally impossible and the bad guys were right.' E: even if you expanded it to parents/children or creator/created, things make no sense. You're invited to debate whether the Krogan can rebuild from what their uplifters did and whether the two can have peace, not dismiss it as automatically impossible. Kolyat and Thane can come to terms slowly, and with effort. Apparently, only when the children are made of metal is it necessary that fathers must kill them or be killed themselves. It's a ~literary~ musing delivered with no reflection or even consistency. The cycle continues. Strategic Tea fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Mar 1, 2014 |
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Mar 1, 2014 15:08
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But the intergenerational reading doesn't fully work anyway. The game has us at least hoping that some generational conflicts like the krogan/salarian one can be resolved. The catalyst never argues that those issues will always come to ruin. Only conflict between beings with nerves and beings with fibre optics are apparently inevitable. Thee game is essentially saying diversity works, except this one case in which the solution is to forcibly homogenise everyone. Look at it in a racial way and the real world implications of synthesis are pretty disturbing.
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Mar 8, 2014 12:36
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PootieTang posted:I don't particularly disagree with anything you're saying, but the ruination of the reapers is inevitable. And you enjoyed it at the time, but that's the whole point of hyping up some off-screen thing as totally awesome you don't even know what's coming man it's gonna be epic! People enjoy the anticipation, but ultimately if you can't back up the hype it backfires. Which is the big problem with a lot of science fiction franchises really, just look at Battlestar Galactica. Or LOST. It's one step away from a cheap trick in my opinion. I feel like, in the Cylon plan sense at least, ME1 didn't try to deliver and was far better for it. The twist about the relays was cool, and maybe I'm just a chump but even the 'not just a Reaper ship' twist also got me. Sovereign's invasion capped things off with an amazing setpiece. If Bioware had just left the Reapers there, I think it would have been fine. There will always be the Star Wars EU contingent who demand to know a Reaper's fusion plant output so they can calculate whatever. To me though, they were alien and scary and defeated, ad that was that - I didn't really need to see more of them. It helped that planet descriptions and so on of the first game had all sorts of other alien and scary things, which created an atmosphere where the Reapers really didn't need to be followed up on. It was a big, old galaxy full of mysteries. Interestingly, all that got eroded at the same time as Bioware decided to go more in-depth with the Reapers, in the second game. All the cool planets from 1 like the one that got railgun'd? Mostly tied to Reapers. The ancient civilisations in the descriptions from 2? Glassed by reapers. Rachni? Reapers did it. Ancient artifacts? Reaper artifacts (also you're now indoctrinated). E: PupsOfWar posted:"All civilian leadership is weak and corrupt! We need the stern and noble guidance of the military caste!" Just once I'd love to see some sci-fi where the military goes in guns blazing against the ancient alien threat that the politicians don't understand, only to royally gently caress everything up. And then get spaced for breaking the chain of command to go full  .
Strategic Tea fucked around with this message at 16:11 on Jun 9, 2014 |
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Jun 9, 2014 16:04
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I think that they imply Shepard's public support as a war hero would be enough to swing the election it either way. Which is still pretty naive. So yeah again poblic support from home would see Udina win. Also that accent
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Jun 9, 2014 16:36
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Der Luftwaffle posted:Omega was great, but it'd have been cool if the lower Citadel wards were crime ridden cesspits like that, though I guess that'd require more of a class war undertone that wouldn't jive well with the existing vision. Class war? That sounds like  politicians to me 
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Jul 9, 2014 21:20
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Being space James Bond in the Kasumi DLC is awesome Also why do goons see anime in everything? Kasumi flipping over the place is just reglar sci-fi schlock dumbness, not a special import from Japan.
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Jul 23, 2014 12:40
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If Kai Leng was intended as a comical try hard, then I guess we should ask why Bioware wanted Cerberus' gameplay figurehead (TIM being the plot figurehead) to be a total joke. In the super serious grim apocalyptic atmosphere of the third game, I can't believe that we weren't meant to take the force we spent half our time fighting seriously. Never attribute to malice what can be put down to Bioware's lovely writing. Dan Didio posted:This is explained in the tie-in comic, Mass Effect: Dirge. I'm on to you. All real Mass effect tie ins have terrible 'ion' titles. Mass Effect: Commercialisation 
Strategic Tea fucked around with this message at 09:53 on Aug 1, 2014 |
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Aug 1, 2014 09:48
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In a way, they're all the refuse ending  makes u think
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Aug 7, 2014 13:35
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Mass effect 1 and 2 explicitly rip you out of the military in the first acts. From then on, there's as much politics, alley firefights and investigation as there is combat as you'd see it on a battlefield. Mass Effect is now spy fi 
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Sep 11, 2014 17:55
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Seriously, though Spectre aren't and never were space yes sir no sir shoot mans soldiers. They were James Bond in space.
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Sep 11, 2014 18:58
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Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:Shep spends the entire series working on behalf of the Alliance military, maintains a military rank, and has an Alliance-owned ship crewed almost exclusively by either Alliance military personnel (ME1 and 3) or former Alliance officers (most of ME2), but in no way has a relation to the military. But you barely answer to military command, and fight alongside Alliance forces perhaps once, in a sidequest. Your missions for Hackett are pretty clearly presented as favours, and a lot of them include negotiation and specops type stuff - not USMC in space. Hell, half the paragon/renegade themes in 1 are over whether you stay loyal to the military or accept your new duties to all races. And in 2, you explicitly work for a rogue black ops organisation - your old crew who come along for the ride make a point of saying that they don't work for the Alliance - they work for you.
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Sep 12, 2014 11:42
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The entire point of storytelling as an art is to be able to communicate the theme while still following a sequence of events that makes sense. Otherwise you just have a really long form (abstract) poem. Also Embassytown is awesome.
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Feb 14, 2016 22:28
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Personally I play Citadel as the ~true ending~, and as EDI is alive in that then clearly the reapers were bullshitting about the destroy ending to stop you choosing it 
Strategic Tea fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Feb 14, 2016 |
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Feb 14, 2016 22:44
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I kind of think the opposite - I mean without the citadel and the spectres and yoomanity and so on, how is it Mass Effect? May as well start a new IP, though I know that's a terrible marketing idea.
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Feb 15, 2016 19:20
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Witcher 3 wasn't perfect but  at comparing it unfavourably with any of Bioware's kill the puppy/save the puppy efforts, especially when that effort is focused around taking the star wars extended universe seriously.I mean come on 'what if the force is evil for starting all these wars that we made up to sell more toys?' is not insightful.
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Feb 15, 2016 21:54
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sassassin posted:Shadow Broker was poo poo. The Shadow Broker is a weird alien species we never see again? Great. Liara gets a boyfriend we never see again? Fantastic. Oh, most of the story happened in a comic book? Cheers. Yeah but spectreing it up having car chases and shootouts and being space james bond was always the best stuff in the series for me, with just a dash of horrible ancient secrets to keep things ticking over.
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Feb 15, 2016 22:36
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Also featuring Urdnot Chad and Urdnot Jayden
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Feb 18, 2016 22:07
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You're on a super secret cutting edge stealth warship for the US navy. The captain invites a Russian intelligence officer, a Somali warlord and the bad guy's brother aboard. "I don't think we should let them walk round the engine room taking pictures" "GOD YOU'RE SUCH A RACIST BUILD THAT WALL AMIRITE"
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May 8, 2016 09:14
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Worse, why did they make the one female turian a massive pushover who ate poo poo form Aria but loved her like an abused puppy? I mean she basically dies fighting to impress a Kai Leng grade author's pet.
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May 23, 2016 20:31
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The Tempest is one sexy looking ship
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Jun 12, 2016 21:55
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It must be after? I can't imagine them launching form Earth mid invasion and it's not like the planet had any warning of the invasion
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Jun 14, 2016 21:02
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Codependent Poster posted:Only if Kai Leng is peeing into a plant with a cereal bowl in his other hand. And only if TIM is wearing Joker's sentient hat
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Jun 14, 2016 23:03
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sassassin posted:You're loving Shephard, your rep is already through the roof. Complete waste of time. But how will I know if I'm doing a good playthrough or a bad playthrough??? :witcher:
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Jun 21, 2016 23:19
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Or better 'everything cool about the setting is so far gone that space travel is a myth and the main character's name is beleived to have been a title' ~so poignant~
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Jun 22, 2016 18:04
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That's probably just the CineD talking. Every recent popular film is a scathing marxist critique of consumer culture, you say?
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Jun 25, 2016 23:05
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'It is right and good to kill your children lest they replace you' isn't what I took from the first 95% of the series...
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Jun 27, 2016 13:32
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Don't you understand control is the stifling centralisation of commuism and and destroy is the anarchy of capitalism and only through the merging - dare I saysynthesis - of the two can a stable mixed economy be acheived. Furthermore the Normandy represents an early tribal-familial patriarchy run by Stepdad Shepard that must choose how to define its economic structure as it matures from a 2001 space baby into a ME3 space child. 
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Jun 27, 2016 18:06
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You can't prove that any human being other than yourself isn't just a puppet either. Turians are made of metal; do they have souls~~ If something tells you it's intelligent without prompting or design, you treat it as intelligent unless you can prove otherwise. Treating something as a metal or meat 'puppet' only because you don't think it has a soul is literally religious murder/slavery. Because souls aren't real silly.
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Jun 28, 2016 06:59
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Depends if you believe that they actually archive the minds of entire civilisations and not just pointless genetic slush. I always took them as an insane attempt to do something that was impossible (NO ONE CAN GO EXTINCT EVER AGAIN MAKE IT HAPPEN ROBOTS)
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Jun 28, 2016 13:41
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 18:40 |
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Milky Moor posted:Eliza the Chatbot told me she is intelligent. This does not prove anything. Like I said, something that claims to be intelligent where we can't prove why it's doing so. Eliza is a chatbot - we know exactly how its code works and can clearly see what's going on inside. The Geth beat their creators' unified planetary empire, had a civil war, built half a dyson swarm, and have been doing god knows what to their code in total solitude for hundreds of years. It's not that they can't be dumb machines, just that it'd take a long time to learn enough about them to tell the difference. Of course the narrative pretty clearly pushes that the universe's AIs are the real deal, and given that ME people can go faster than light I'm not going to argue. exquisite tea posted:I don't think the starkid is bluffing at the end. If I remember correctly he begins by saying something like "your actions have caused us to rethink our programming" which indicates that the Crucible was designed by the Reapers themselves as some kind of galactic failsafe against reap.exe, and this is the first cycle to actually complete it. It's just introduced in a poorly explained and incredibly hacky way so a lot of people miss that aspect. Oh yeah, starkid thinks peace is a better way of preserving life. It doesn't mean the original idea of somehow uploading people by melting them worked. It was probably tortured AI logic when your creators literally can tinker with your brain while it's running, or hell maybe starkid got religious and thinks everyone's soul is still in the goop. TBH I 'miss' that aspect because I choose to ignore it I already don't like the way all endings basically play into what the reapers want. It's even worse if you take it as literally the entire trilogy being their puppetmaster plan to ~make us ready~lalalalala unreliable narrator lalalalala michael kirkbride lalalala
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Jun 28, 2016 19:12
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