Quote Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander View Post
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.
I never claimed that nobody would die (or if I did, I retract the statement). In fact, that's why I asked people what kind of numbers they were talking about in my edit on the last page. 7.5% of the world dying out in real history is considered one of the worst disasters ever to befall humanity.

But I'm hearing all kinds of different arguments going on, many of which I think don't make much sense. Also AOTRS I'm not responding to you specifically, you just happen to phrase things really well.

Hear are the different versions I think I've read in this thread.

1. widespread death and extinction, many planets will die out entirely because they can't support themselves. There is no alternative.

Answer: I don't agree. This isn't impossible given what we've seen of the ending, but it's not required either. I consider the availability of reaper tech and the general belief in the ingenuity of people (especially with their backs to the wall) adequate to justify technology that would at least stabilize most planets at a lower maximum carrying capacity even when cut off from the citadel.

2. Long-term political turmoil, degradation of the whole galaxy, improved travel takes hundreds of years to create.

Answer: I also don't agree here. Again, the availability of reaper tech, the prothean VI, and the concentration of scientific talent makes me think that tech will advance faster than this. Humanity had been able to activate their own mass relay using only their own tech and resources available in the Sol system and they didn't get annihilated by the Turian military in the aftermath, so just the Sol system has adequate resources to support a fairly good level of tech. With FTL to nearby stars as well as the whole fleet, I think there is at least enough to get research going and come up with better FTL within a few years. This doesn't address immediate starvation, but I don't see the galaxy falling into a bunch of tiny islands for centuries either, but rather slowly reestablishing itself over a generation.

3. Over 50% of the population dies immediately, or within a year

Answer: I don't see it. This isn't like the real world losing all access to oil where suddenly some places truly couldn't get food. They can grow food in vats, they have heavy tech on nearly all colonies. The black plague sweeping Europe in the middle ages didn't kill this high a percentage of the population.

4. ~10% of the galaxy dies immediately or within a year.

Answer: yeah, this could happen. In fact, it would go down in history as one of the worst disasters ever. It probably wouldn't be evenly distributed, so one could imagine some relatively poor planets dying out while ones with a better environment could become able to feed themselves independently with minimal loss. Overall ability to salvage and use reaper tech, prothean tech, and destroyed industry would matter a lot here as to how much damage occurred.

5. ~2% of the galaxy dies immediately or within a year

Answer: This may well already be happening. Thessia was ruined, Earth was invaded, the Turian fleet was smashed. Many people were indoctrinated or turned into husks, and certainly some will be unable to recover in the wake of the carnage. A 2% loss to the whole galaxy plus massive infrastructure damage would still go down as one of the worst disasters to befall the galaxy, but would be in the range that could be more quickly recovered from.