Originally Posted by
Aotrs Commander
They're talking cobblers. One way or another.
If the galaxy can recover from preportedly the most intense and destructive conflict in fifty thousand years, followed by the destruction of previously stated most important aspect of space-travel with nary a break in step, then are ONLY four options.
1) The catastrophy of the Reapers just wasn't really all the damaging at all, in the grand scheme of things, and that we probably saw more or less the entire scope of their damage, and there are hundreds if not thousands of worlds completely untouched by the Reapers.
2) Everyone in the entire galaxy for the past thirty-seven million years, from Anderson to Zaeed, is pants-on-head, willfully stupid for relying on the relay network when it isn't necessary.
3) All the previously established codex data we've been fed over the last three games is flat-out wrong.
4) Bioware are talking out of their arses.
Which is the most likely case, since like pretty much the whole trilogy has shown that there just isn't that kind of infrastructure there in the FIRST PLACE. How many planets have we seen where people are barely surviving on a subsitance level? Not mission planets, but those in the system maps? Places where it wasn't cost-effective to keep things going, or after a mineral-rush or whatnot?
Bioware saying that all those places - the ones that weren't outright pulversied by the Reapers - are going to be perfectly fine and that everyone in the entire galaxy is going to have a nice happy ending (except Shepard and the Geth), without any the serious rebuilding efforts priorly seen in the trilogy from smaller conflicts is just flat-out offensive.
It's stupid from a logistical perspective; it's mean-spirited from the narrative perspective ("screw you player, everyone has a happy ending but your character!"), it even manages to undermine the minimal impact of the ending by saying basically everything you did or saw really means nothing in the long run, because there are no lasting consequences; it's insulting to the entire rest of the game's priorly established tone and setting - i.e. gritty and where lots of places are poor and barely hanging on, and where a lot of the wealth lies in the big worlds, not too mention that most of the mineral resources canonically now come from mining worlds (which are either now dead or isolated).
Will there be a "dark age?" No, though I guess that depends on your definition of "dark age." Are lots of people in the smaller, isolated colonies going to be reduced to third-world levels of disease and starvation before the months or years pass it takes the galaxy to become operational enough to be able to start sending out relief (if indeed, they can be pursuaded to CARE, lowest bidder and all that)? Absolutely YES, and Bioware sticking their fingers in their their ears and going "yeah, but, no, because Art" merely makes them come across as obstreperously assinine.
And to re-iterate another point: the council refused to let people blindly activate the relays to avoid a repeat of the Rachni incident - but now the galaxy will have to travel across the other more-than 99% of the galaxy and hope to frag they don't run into somebody else who were either a) in their own section of the relay network and just didn't happen to meet the Citidel species or b) never found a relay and thus have their empire set up on non-Relay FTL (which is likely to already be better than the Citidel races since an relay-independant race would have been consistently imporving FTL tech), because if they do and they happen to be hostile, the Citidel species are BUGGERED.