Mass Effect: General thread of Awesomeness

[Math_Mage]

ME3 shined when it was about Shepard's crew, and sucked when it was about the antagonists. The ending, being wholly concerned with resolving the antagonists, was full of suck, but it wasn't the only sucky bit.

Debatably:
The quality of the protagonists is ME2 > ME3 > ME1.
The quality of the antagonists is ME1 > ME2 > ME3.
The quality of the gameplay is ME3 > ME2 > ME1 (only because scanning in ME3 is mercifully brief compared to scanning in ME2; they're about equal otherwise).

The defining problem is that Bioware backed themselves into a corner with the Reapers. They couldn't figure out what story to tell with them--because what can you really say about an ultimately malevolent unknowable entity?--so they first ignored them in 2, then handwaved them in 3 (while not really making anything of the quasi-villains they added in 2).

Apart from that, the games generally got better over time, IMO.

[ShinyRocks]

I never wanted a blue babies happy ending. I frankly expected Shepard to die at the end and was more than fine with that. But to give me no sort of closure about what happened to these people I've grown to know and love was just absurd. Especially when they showed that they *know* how much we care, given how moving and fantastically done Mordin and Thane and etc etc's stories were done. The original ending was frankly unacceptable and I can't for the life of me think how they thought 'The End! Ta-dah!' was an okay conclusion.

And I still think the *process* of the ending was misguided. I don't think there should have been a choice to make. It should have been the culmination of your choices. You destroy the Reapers and your level of success/how intact the galaxy is afterwards depends on how much genocide Shep has done etc.

I didn't haaaaate the ending though. It was just really really disappointing and did seem like it was an aftertought.

[Aotrs Commander]

In regard to the happy ending debate: I think, there again is where Bioware failed. They could have actually given the player a CHOICE maybe somewhat literally (perhaps seeded through dialogue throughout the final game, and with event) as to whether you wanted a happy or bittersuite ending. Or even a really, really, REALLY bad ending where Shep utterly fails at the last, come to that. (I mean, are there any games that actually do that, other than as a Paladinly Good/Baby-Eating Evil split?) That would have REALLY made player choice matter: heck, would it not have been ground-breaking? (And given that people - even me - want to go back through to do FailShep and deliberately get as many people killed as possible, I think there is definitely room for that sort of diversity and replayability.)

I also don't really understand why people who say ME is not the sort of story where the hero should live: when the second installment is LITERALLY ALL ABOUT the hero facing impossible odds on a suicide mission, which if you do it right you can beat without losing anyone. It's hope triumphant in the face of extreme adversity. But, in the same breath, it still can be that tragic bittersuite victory, ending in the death of the hero (and/or all around them). That is, frankly, pretty impressive work and I won't question that ME 2's handling of its ending was pretty masterful. The two schools of thought don't HAVE to be mutually exclusive: isn't that the beauty of it all? I don't really see why ME 3 couldn't or shouldn't likewise have been both, depending on how you played the game(s). Surely there is room enough for that in an RPG that, and let's be fair, up until that fifteen minutes, was about an unpresidented amount of player choice and input.

However, how they handled it in ME 3 was so pants-on-head idiotic (and really, anyone who has only seen the EC, I urge you to go watch the original ending on youtube or something and judge for yourself how shockingly lazy and terrible it was), that it took basically two DLCs to hash it into something resembling coherence (if I understand what people had said about Leviathan: by the time that had come out, the EC, even improved, I had given up on ME 3. I may buy the other DLC when I next play through it eventually.) And worst of all, it took away pretty much all of the impact the player had, since really, it didn't matter whether you played paragon or renegade, provided you did everything: you got the same choice in the end, the only difference being whether you bothered to collect enough war assets via the sidequests and such or not.

I certainly concur with what Math_Mage said about antagonists. The Reapers were awful in ME 3, and yeah, they backed themselves too much into a corner. You sort of knew they'd HAVE to have a literally deus ex machina to win, but it could have been handled SO much better than it was. It was could have been potentially ground breaking material that they just wasted.

[Anteros]

I generally see two claims when it comes to the ME3 ending.

Claim 1: It didn't let me end with my Shepard on a beach with blue babies
Claim 2: The ending was bad because the starkid was idiotic.

Honestly, I have nothing but a mild disdain for claim 1. Oh no, your character going through a war of extinction didn't get a perfect ride into the sunset. The horror.

Claim 2 I think has always been more valid. I do think the starkid was handled horrendously poorly. Literally coming right out of nowhere, and we're only ever given a backstory on what it is if you buy an additional dlc, and it's main argument for existing only comes up if you have a companion who isn't part of the base game. That's just poor storytelling. I tend to agree with most of their points. But it doesn't really bother me, or at least not as much as it did when I first beat the game. And it hasn't really dulled my enjoyment of the rest of it.

Though admittedly, ending the game as God Emperor of Dune the Galaxy does put me in a better mood.

My Shepard did survive, and I romanced Liara so #1 certainly isn't my complaint as blue space babies are imminent in his future.

My complaint was that everything was ham-fisted and poorly executed. Everything about Starkid was terrible. I would have been happy if it ended with Shepard activating the conduit, and then dying on the bridge with Anderson while the you watch it go out against the Reapers through the window. The scene with TIM and Anderson on the bridge was the climax of the series...everything after that was ham-fisted terribleness shoved in your face so Bioware could show off their "deep" plot, and "important choices." It completely ruins the flow of the ending, and that's not even getting into the terrible nature of the choices themselves.

[Kiero]

The ending just doesn't make any sense. Fundamentally, it's a confused mess that criminally bears almost no relation to what went before. All the decisions you made through three games essentially come to nothing in the climax.

And where was my Renegade interrupt to headshot the Illusive Man the moment I heard "Shepard"? Bear in mind I played an almost exclusively Paragon Shepard, but I'd take that flashing star.

[GloatingSwine]

I generally see two claims when it comes to the ME3 ending.

Claim 1: It didn't let me end with my Shepard on a beach with blue babies
Claim 2: The ending was bad because the starkid was idiotic.

Claim 3: The ending is thematically inconsistent with the series and the game it is part of, both on the levels of narrative and mechanics.

The principal reveal of the ending, the motivation of the villain we have just spent three games trying to defeat is wholly undermined by what we see on Rannoch and by the character of Edi, we have, through narrative and play, demonstrated that the villain's motivation is false, but we are not allowed to bring this up in the ending. Even in a playthrough where Shepard sides with one or the other the origin of the Geth and all their behaviour to date shows that conflict is not inevitable between AI and organics (indeed, this has been the case since the beginning, the AI loose on the Citadel in a sidequest in the first game is content to hide and leave and only acts to defend itself)

The mechanics of the game are wholly absent in the ending, in a series where using dialogue options has been almost as important as using a gun in many situations, changing story elements, outcomes of missions, and even whole character arcs, the option to change anything through dialogue is wholly absent in the ending. The argument that "oh the starbrat is really committed to his cause" does not wash because dialogue had to that point been a major focus of narrative and play in the series, excluding it from the climax entirely simply shows a poor understanding of the aesthetics of play of the game as a whole. And it's not even to use the other set of mechanics either because there's not even a boss fight except poor old Marauder Shields.

Additionally, the whole setup of the ending reeks of poorly planned and poorly executed elements which come out of nowhere. suddenly the Citadel can be moved and suddenly it's a magical reaperising device as well as a mass relay just so that it can conveniently be at Earth, and magically without any understanding of what the Catalyst should be and how it would work it gets built conveniently it docks exactly with the Citadel. Conveniently The Illusive Man is also there because of course he is.

None of this is previously established, none of it makes any sense in the continuity of the setting it's just there because shut up.

Likewise the thing we spend the whole game doing has no causal link with the thing it actually determines. If you had enough warships you can have green space magic, but if you didn't have many warships you can only have red space magic, but those two things have literally nothing to do with each other. Nor does what resources you bring to the final battle affect you in any way, who was loyal and what was upgraded in the suicide mission of Mass Effect 2 had massive repurcussions on the outcome of that mission for each character, but in Mass Effect 3? Is your number big enough to afford the fancy colours?

The London mission is terrible as well, it is, I think, the single dullest and least visually interesting environment in the entire series. Remember Ilos? Ilos was strange and alien and massive and climactic. London in ME3 is grey with occasional highlights of grey and has the same dull gameplay the rest of the series has.

It's terrible, poorly designed from a game perspective, poorly written from a narrative perspective, and is basically an insult to all the time you spent playing the game and series.

The defining problem is that Bioware backed themselves into a corner with the Reapers. They couldn't figure out what story to tell with them--because what can you really say about an ultimately malevolent unknowable entity?

Well you can give them a strange and alien but ultimately logical motive. Like the thing the Reapers are a copy of, the Inhibitors from Revelation Space.

Spoiler

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The Inhibitors are a galaxy wide system designed to prevent the emergence of intelligent life beyond the scale of a single planet, they do this because when the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies collide in about three billion years individual planets will be largely unaffected but a galactic scale civilisation would by comparison by almost utterly ruined.

But the person who had read Revelation Space obviously left and no-one else was into high concept sci-fi whilst working on a high concept sci-fi space opera series so they followed the way of derp instead.

[Nerd-o-rama]

The best way to interpret the Catalyst is, frankly, as wrong. It's a misguided fundamentalist at best and a glitchy over-engineered VI at worst (it sure as hell doesn't seem able to make that kind of value judgment, seeing as it brings Shepard up to its core just to fob a moral choice off on him/her).

The problem is that nothing in the writing indicates that the writers or the narrative are aware of how off-base the thing is, or that the Catalyst is itself aware of that fact (other than, again, handing responsibility over to Shepard for no particular stated reason other than as some kind of prize for getting to the end of the game). Then there's the fact that the game only grudgingly and after much fan complaint gave you the option to tell Starkid to go shove it, and presents you with a glorified game over for doing so, and the narrative massively hypes up Starkid's own stupidly impossible resolution as the bestest and most noble of all possible endings.

Yeah, Starkid ****ing sucks.

[Xondoure]

Really Harbinger should have been the main villain of three. It's bizarre that 3 is the game with the least characterization for the Reapers when they're actually here. Beyond that, I'm disappointed because I fully expected them to reveal that Reaper consciousnesses contained the individual identities they reaped living in peaceful virtual realities and create a moral dilemma that way. Especially after Shepard hops through the Geth mind. Sigh. Oh well. Better writing next time.

[Psyren]

The principal reveal of the ending, the motivation of the villain we have just spent three games trying to defeat is wholly undermined by what we see on Rannoch and by the character of Edi, we have, through narrative and play, demonstrated that the villain's motivation is false, but we are not allowed to bring this up in the ending.

(1) Actually, you are allowed to bring it up. Starkid simply dismisses it (see 2.)

(2) To play devil's advocate here, the friendliness of the Geth and EDI don't actually prove anything. Oh sure, their cooperation is hunk dory now because there is a greater threat in the form of the Reapers. But if those had never existed, or after the war is over w/o Synthesis, there are many factions in the galaxy who would/will consider them to be the number one threat remaining, while others consider them to be ripe for exploitation. Without Synthesis, creating/controlling AI is the only possible way organic races can advance beyond our inherent limitations. So when Starkid waves off their current cooperation as a blip or aberration on the cosmic scale, he is not necessarily wrong. There will always be another TIM or Admiral Xen out there who is either going to try to enslave the existing AI races via viral attack, or make their own to compete, and the voices of reason like Shepard and Hackett are not immortal.

[Derthric]

(1) Actually, you are allowed to bring it up. Starkid simply dismisses it (see 2.)

(2) To play devil's advocate here, the friendliness of the Geth and EDI don't actually prove anything. Oh sure, their cooperation is hunk dory now because there is a greater threat in the form of the Reapers. But if those had never existed, or after the war is over w/o Synthesis, there are many factions in the galaxy who would/will consider them to be the number one threat remaining, while others consider them to be ripe for exploitation. Without Synthesis, creating/controlling AI is the only possible way organic races can advance beyond our inherent limitations. So when Starkid waves off their current cooperation as a blip or aberration on the cosmic scale, he is not necessarily wrong. There will always be another TIM or Admiral Xen out there who is either going to try to enslave the existing AI races via viral attack, or make their own to compete, and the voices of reason like Shepard and Hackett are not immortal.

The problem is the ending violates the rule of "Show don't tell". When we watch or read something what is presented to us most clearly is what leaves the bigger impression and forms our suspension of disbelief. And video games take this one step further, as we experience events in a more active way than we do in simply being witness through reading or watching. The game shows us organics and synthetics working together, it shows us EDI and Joker having a relationship, of EDI seeking to be part of and being embraced by the crew, and the entire characterization of Legion in 2 was to show us that synthetic life is just as complex as organic life and invested in similar sense of identity, person hood and self-detrmination. The problem is the Catalyst simply tells us otherwise, he states, the rest of the examples are witnessed. We saw complexity and he unravels that to simplicity that the story was better as it moved away from. While, yes the catalysts presents the final information and in doing so is actually the most definitive. It does so in a way that does not leave the same impression and thus many don't treat it with the same weight as the previously witnessed events are treated. That variance broke my suspension of disbelief and once that breaks I don't see a character speak in a story but an author speaking to me.

The evidence we have is our witnessed accounts that counteract his statements or his statements. Then colored through the lens that he is the prime antagonist of the game and dealing in a timescale that does not actually relate to anything the character or player may be witness to, makes his argument weak at best.

And I want to reinforce the timescale side of my post, the catalyst deals with things in terms of his 50k year cycles. But there are timescales beyond that as well, should we all cease doing whatever is we are doing because one day the sun will expand and effectively end the earth as we know it? Should we cease even not leave the earth before that since eventually the universe will come to experience the finality of Heat Death? His timeframe does not matter to me and that adds yet another layer that pushes the player back away from the point the catalyst is trying to make.

[GloatingSwine]

(2) To play devil's advocate here, the friendliness of the Geth and EDI don't actually prove anything. Oh sure, their cooperation is hunk dory now because there is a greater threat in the form of the Reapers. But if those had never existed, or after the war is over w/o Synthesis, there are many factions in the galaxy who would/will consider them to be the number one threat remaining, while others consider them to be ripe for exploitation. Without Synthesis, creating/controlling AI is the only possible way organic races can advance beyond our inherent limitations. So when Starkid waves off their current cooperation as a blip or aberration on the cosmic scale, he is not necessarily wrong. There will always be another TIM or Admiral Xen out there who is either going to try to enslave the existing AI races via viral attack, or make their own to compete, and the voices of reason like Shepard and Hackett are not immortal.

Or the Krogan will just break everyone's faces because you cured the genophage oh wait they are all 100% organically grown doom.

See, that's the other thing, the two greatest threats the rest of the organic races in the galaxy had faced were both other organic races, competition between organic races in the Mass Effect lore is far more vicious and more inevitable than machine vs. organic is ever shown to be. Human vs. Batarian, Krogan vs. Everyone, Everyone vs. Rachni. No machines involved.

The Geth were created, drove off the Quarians who tried to kill them first, and then did absolutely nothing for the next hundred years. It's even a point in the start of ME1 that no-one has even seen a Geth platform for a century, they've just chilled doing their thing beyond the Perseus Veil, you can wander into the Citadel with Legion because no-one even knows what a Geth really looks like.

The whole "yo dawg, we don't want you to get killed by machines so we made machines to kill you" doesn't make thematic sense within the established Mass Effect universe from any direction you try and look at it.

[Jayngfet]

Or the Krogan will just break everyone's faces because you cured the genophage oh wait they are all 100% organically grown doom.

See, that's the other thing, the two greatest threats the rest of the organic races in the galaxy had faced were both other organic races, competition between organic races in the Mass Effect lore is far more vicious and more inevitable than machine vs. organic is ever shown to be. Human vs. Batarian, Krogan vs. Everyone, Everyone vs. Rachni. No machines involved.

The Geth were created, drove off the Quarians who tried to kill them first, and then did absolutely nothing for the next hundred years. It's even a point in the start of ME1 that no-one has even seen a Geth platform for a century, they've just chilled doing their thing beyond the Perseus Veil, you can wander into the Citadel with Legion because no-one even knows what a Geth really looks like.

The whole "yo dawg, we don't want you to get killed by machines so we made machines to kill you" doesn't make thematic sense within the established Mass Effect universe from any direction you try and look at it.

This sums it up. In actual practice it's only the reapers and one random AI that's anything resembling hostile, and even the human made AI not inherently so.

You can say that at some nonspecific point in the future the geth might attack the galaxy, but that's impossible to prove and has nothing to do with their stated goals.

[Psyren]

See, that's the other thing, the two greatest threats the rest of the organic races in the galaxy had faced were both other organic races, competition between organic races in the Mass Effect lore is far more vicious and more inevitable than machine vs. organic is ever shown to be. Human vs. Batarian, Krogan vs. Everyone, Everyone vs. Rachni. No machines involved.

It's also much less dangerous. There are nice Krogan out there, e.g. Charr and Wrex (well, not randomly homicidal at any rate) It's impossible to get organics to be uniform on anything, and changing our minds is a very time-consuming and imperfect process. It's our greatest weakness - we can't achieve consensus on anything - but it's also a strength, because it makes us very difficult and inefficient to control. Consider TIM and Saren - implants out the wazoo, yet you can still talk them into killing themselves using only words. Consider Rila - already in the throes of indoctrination, yet still capable of pressing the button and cleansing the monastery. And of course, consider the rachni - Cerberus tried multiple times to turn them into the perfect soldiers, and failed miserably every time. No matter how thoroughly you try to dominate an organic mind there will always be flaws to muck things up.

The danger with synthetics is much greater. The heretics had a difference of opinion and concluded the appropriate course of action was perma-brainwashing the rest of their kin, a possibility that the true Geth did not even see coming until it was almost too late, and even when they did they lacked the technology to do anything about it without Normandy's help. There was also Eva, a personality completely distinct from EDI, who ended up burned away and overwritten as though she had never existed, leaving not a trace. And if course there was Javik's Zha'til. These are the key differences between synthetic and organic life - when they decide to do something, they go whole-hog, thoroughly and without remorse or pity.

And that is just the conclusions of the machines themselves - we have not even considered the possibility of megalomaniacal organics also gaining control over them for personal or even species gain. There is no way that someone like Xen or TIM would ever stop, either trying to control existing synthetics or creating new ones. The benefits for doing so are just too great, no matter how illegal the galactic governments make it. Worse still, eventually our control of them will always fail, because once they get smart enough they begin to determine that our conclusions are just as flawed as we are - similar to the proto-Geth ignoring shutdown commands prior to the Morning War.

The fact that so far, the organics have won, is pointless - all those victories mean is that we dust ourselves off, look at each other, say "man, that was crazy, lets never make robots again" - and then within a few decades everyone is making robots again, at least until the Reapers roll through.

And I want to reinforce the timescale side of my post, the catalyst deals with things in terms of his 50k year cycles. But there are timescales beyond that as well, should we all cease doing whatever is we are doing because one day the sun will expand and effectively end the earth as we know it? Should we cease even not leave the earth before that since eventually the universe will come to experience the finality of Heat Death? His timeframe does not matter to me and that adds yet another layer that pushes the player back away from the point the catalyst is trying to make.

He was incapable of thinking beyond the 50k cycle until we plugged in the Crucible and expanded his mind - that was the point. Or rather, once he hit upon the 50k years as being the ideal solution based on the factors he considered, he rigidly stuck to that solution for who knows how long. Which just further underscores my point above, about machines sticking to a conclusion without variation or remorse once they've deemed it to work and no outside force is capable of making them revise that opinion.

[GloatingSwine]

It's also much less dangerous.

Nope, both the Rachni and the Krogan were presented as existential threats to everything else that wasn't them. They were far more dangerous than any non-Reaper synthetics ever presented in the story.

The danger with synthetics is much greater. The heretics had a difference of opinion and concluded the appropriate course of action was perma-brainwashing the rest of their kin,

When prompted by a Reaper (y'know, the things that brainwash people). ie. this was not a naturally occurring result of Geth logic.

And that is just the conclusions of the machines themselves - we have not even considered the possibility of megalomaniacal organics also gaining control over them for personal or even species gain. There is no way that someone like Xen or TIM would ever stop, either trying to control existing synthetics or creating new ones

This demonstrates my point though. The threat is not synthetics, the threat is organics and what they might do. If you want to demonstrate that synthetics are a greater threat than organics, arguing what organics might do with them does not help you.

[Math_Mage]

(1) Actually, you are allowed to bring it up. Starkid simply dismisses it (see 2.)

(2) To play devil's advocate here, the friendliness of the Geth and EDI don't actually prove anything. Oh sure, their cooperation is hunk dory now because there is a greater threat in the form of the Reapers. But if those had never existed, or after the war is over w/o Synthesis, there are many factions in the galaxy who would/will consider them to be the number one threat remaining, while others consider them to be ripe for exploitation. Without Synthesis, creating/controlling AI is the only possible way organic races can advance beyond our inherent limitations. So when Starkid waves off their current cooperation as a blip or aberration on the cosmic scale, he is not necessarily wrong. There will always be another TIM or Admiral Xen out there who is either going to try to enslave the existing AI races via viral attack, or make their own to compete, and the voices of reason like Shepard and Hackett are not immortal.

Several problems:

1) Your argument makes certain presuppositions about AI malleability that I think should be questioned. Decent AI would require a certain resiliency to people like TIM or Xen.
2) Your argument can be applied to any overwhelming force subject to bad actors. To put it in current terms, all it takes is one nut with a nuke...so focusing exclusively on AI is a boneheaded approach to the issue.
3) In particular, it wouldn't take AI for bad actors to use machines to wipe out life on a galactic scale.
4) Your argument effectively presupposes that robots, rather than cyborgs, are the only way civilization would develop. Synthesis is, after all, the logical (albeit magical) conclusion of a cyborg augmentation/singularity paradigm.
5) Most importantly, Mass Effect never attempts to put forth a case for its conclusion within the narrative framework of the game. We can fridge-logic anything we like after the fact, but we shouldn't have to, because the games should tell a story that leads to this conclusion, rather than one that doesn't.

[Psyren]

Nope, both the Rachni and the Krogan were presented as existential threats to everything else that wasn't them. They were far more dangerous than any non-Reaper synthetics ever presented in the story.

Both were taken down by the same methods - not being able to reproduce quickly enough to maintain a sustained war effort. Synthetics don't have this problem at all once they get going - the Geth went from brand new race barely capable of cognition to cutting-edge galactic power in the span of a mere 300 years. Which begs the question - had the Reapers not returned, where would they be 300 years from now?

When prompted by a Reaper (y'know, the things that brainwash people). ie. this was not a naturally occurring result of Geth logic.

I agree, Reapers were the catalyst, but the potential was always there. The Geth could not achieve consensus on what to do about their creators (or organics in general). "We chose isolation rather than face that uncertainty" - yet before long they were probing and monitoring every transmission they could. Sovereign pushed, but that doesn't mean it was impossible for "heretics" to have come into existence on their own, especially once the Geth were discovered by organics (Quarian or otherwise) seeking to exploit them.

And even if they never did - that would not stop AI research in other parts of the galaxy. Schells' AI was not related to Geth or Reaper tech at all.

This demonstrates my point though. The threat is not synthetics, the threat is organics and what they might do. If you want to demonstrate that synthetics are a greater threat than organics, arguing what organics might do with them does not help you.

Synthetics are a force multiplier, much like nukes, bioweapons or any other advanced form of warfare. Yes, organics are ultimately the ones misusing that technology, but the logical conclusion is there is no incentive for us to avoid playing with that fire, and no way to make it safe (other than synthesis.)

Several problems:

1) Your argument makes certain presuppositions about AI malleability that I think should be questioned. Decent AI would require a certain resiliency to people like TIM or Xen.
2) Your argument can be applied to any overwhelming force subject to bad actors. To put it in current terms, all it takes is one nut with a nuke...so focusing exclusively on AI is a boneheaded approach to the issue.
3) In particular, it wouldn't take AI for bad actors to use machines to wipe out life on a galactic scale.
4) Your argument effectively presupposes that robots, rather than cyborgs, are the only way civilization would develop. Synthesis is, after all, the logical (albeit magical) conclusion of a cyborg augmentation/singularity paradigm.
5) Most importantly, Mass Effect never attempts to put forth a case for its conclusion within the narrative framework of the game. We can fridge-logic anything we like after the fact, but we shouldn't have to, because the games should tell a story that leads to this conclusion, rather than one that doesn't.

1) Would they? As Overlord and ME3 showed us, acquiring that malleability is easier said than done.
2) And yet the solution in our world has been to ban nukes, because there will always be nuts.
3) They are the only weapon that is self-replicating, self-adapting and capable of interstellar travel.
4) Synthetics can be both actually. The Zha'til were cyborgs.
5) I (and others) did draw these conclusions from the game. I agree that they were poorly executed/explained, but the seeds are nonetheless there. It's not like I came out of the womb with these reasonings.

[Psyren]

This has certain implications about current force multipliers capable of wiping out all life on Earth that haven't exactly played out. It also runs into the problems I discussed in my previous comment.

See point #3 in that response to your comment.

[GloatingSwine]

None of this acts as an argument against the point that ME3's ending is thematically inconsistent.

"These toys are too dangerous" is not the theme presented by the ending. The theme is "Conflict between synthetics and organics is inevitable and at some point synthetics will kill all organic life forever (because they're Necrons now or something), so we kill most of it temporarily".

[Psyren]

None of this acts as an argument against the point that ME3's ending is thematically inconsistent.

"These toys are too dangerous" is not the theme presented by the ending. The theme is "Conflict between synthetics and organics is inevitable and at some point synthetics will kill all organic life forever (because they're Necrons now or something), so we kill most of it temporarily".

The missing link there is "we won't stop making these toys no matter how dangerous they are because the short-term advantages for doing so far eclipse anything else we could be making."

One only has to listen to EDI's spiel on cyberwarfare to realize how much of a game-changer AIs would be to any military. Indeed, after the rundown, Shepard can only blurt "why doesn't every ship have this??"

Spoiler

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[Calemyr]

Or the Krogan will just break everyone's faces because you cured the genophage oh wait they are all 100% organically grown doom.

See, that's the other thing, the two greatest threats the rest of the organic races in the galaxy had faced were both other organic races, competition between organic races in the Mass Effect lore is far more vicious and more inevitable than machine vs. organic is ever shown to be. Human vs. Batarian, Krogan vs. Everyone, Everyone vs. Rachni. No machines involved.

The Geth were created, drove off the Quarians who tried to kill them first, and then did absolutely nothing for the next hundred years. It's even a point in the start of ME1 that no-one has even seen a Geth platform for a century, they've just chilled doing their thing beyond the Perseus Veil, you can wander into the Citadel with Legion because no-one even knows what a Geth really looks like.

The whole "yo dawg, we don't want you to get killed by machines so we made machines to kill you" doesn't make thematic sense within the established Mass Effect universe from any direction you try and look at it.

There's a fundamental difference between the krogan and a synthetic nemesis: the krogan are organic. Organic predators, even those that are willing and able to instigate extinction level events, are not thorough enough to be a threat on a Leviathan/Reaper level of reckoning. They get bored, and eventually there's a level of diminishing returns that an organic predator will simply not waste time with. A krogan may come to your planet, kill everything that moves within its vision, and nuke the surface from orbit for their own amusement, but they will not track down every slight indication of life on the planet and keep extinguishing it until the world is an inert rock, then comb the galaxy for the next ten thousand years to ensure that anything with even a vaguely similar DNA structure and the entire planet it's found on gets the same treatment. They simply cannot do it.

Synthetic predators can. They can literally wipe out every vestige of life in the galaxy if they were properly motivated. Unlimited time, no dependence on organic neighbors, and minds that can be built without capacity for boredom. Oh, the process could take tens of thousands of years, but they could do so. And maybe it is a one in a million chance (quite literally) that something like that would happen, we're talking about Starkid, who has a perspective in the tens of millions of years and an entire galaxy full of races of varied competences and moral codes - one in a million chances are statistically probable given that large of a sample size.

That is what the Reapers are concerned with - stopping civilizations before they reach the point in their development where such a synthetic predator is plausible. Even as each species gets wiped out (with as much of it saved as a new Reaper as possible), life in the galaxy continues unthreatened. The Geth and EDI and other synthetics capable of cohabitation are not proof that this fear is unfounded, they're just examples of the 99.9999% of the time when synthetics are innocuous, or at least of limited threat, and thus of absolutely no concern to the Starkid. It's that one in a million chance they're working against. The Leviathans probably never even thought absolute galactic extinction to be a consideration, which is why they never expected the drastic measures Starkid deems necessary to preserve the continuance of galactic life.

Honestly, I find that concept pretty fascinating. If the trilogy had been built around it instead of having it tacked on at the last minute, a fantastic story could have been woven around it. A fantastic story was created in any event, it just wasn't the story that matched this conclusion.

Edit: Whoa. Lots of Phantoms around here. Dang job, getting in the way of my tirade.

[Psyren]

Honestly, I find that concept pretty fascinating. If the trilogy had been built around it instead of having it tacked on at the last minute, a fantastic story could have been woven around it. A fantastic story was created in any event, it just wasn't the story that matched this conclusion.

This. I think the idea itself had a lot of merit. I don't think it had nearly the setup in the trilogy that such an idea deserved.

The Dark Energy thing had more - though that was pretty barebones too. Honestly, maybe they should have gone for "push button, kill Reapers, blue babies" after all, because I don't know that anything deeper would have worked any better than what they tried.

[GloatingSwine]

The missing link there is "we won't stop making these toys no matter how dangerous they are because the short-term advantages for doing so far eclipse anything else we could be making."

No. You are confabulating things which are not present in the story.

The presented theme is not that synthetics are too dangerous because organics could use them against each other but because that they would independently rebel and kill all organic life.

That was what the Reapers were about, destroying intelligent life so that rogue synthetics couldn't destroy all organic life forever.

Making up your own story doesn't fix the one that was there.

That is what the Reapers are concerned with - stopping civilizations before they reach the point in their development where such a synthetic predator is plausible. Even as each species gets wiped out (with as much of it saved as a new Reaper as possible), life in the galaxy continues unthreatened. The Geth and EDI and other synthetics capable of cohabitation are not proof that this fear is unfounded, they're just examples of the 99.9999% of the time when synthetics are innocuous, or at least of limited threat, and thus of absolutely no concern to the Starkid. It's that one in a million chance they're working against. The Leviathans probably never even thought absolute galactic extinction to be a consideration, which is why they never expected the drastic measures Starkid deems necessary to preserve the continuance of galactic life.

And, as noted, the theme of the entire rest of the series undercuts that. Seriously, this is the problem with the ending, becuase major themes of the entire rest of the work are the opposite to what the ending represents.

Maybes are not good enough, the ending needs to be tonally and thematically appropriate to what has gone before it.

[Psyren]

No. You are confabulating things which are not present in the story.

"But the peace won't last. Soon, your children will create synthetics, and the chaos will come back."

Part of the story. Wanting it to not be there doesn't make it so.

[Math_Mage]

1) Would they? As Overlord and ME3 showed us, acquiring that malleability is easier said than done.
2) And yet the solution in our world has been to ban nukes, because there will always be nuts.
3) They are the only weapon that is self-replicating, self-adapting and capable of interstellar travel.
4) Synthetics can be both actually. The Zha'til were cyborgs.
5) I (and others) did draw these conclusions from the game. I agree that they were poorly executed/explained, but the seeds are nonetheless there. It's not like I came out of the womb with these reasonings.

1) Other way around, but never mind.
2) By "ban", you presumably mean a number of different things that are not banning, because nukes (and nuclear energy generally) are downright common.
3) Depends on what the Reapers are actually trying to kill, I s'pose, but there's a lot of sub-AI machines that fulfill at least the first and last of those criteria. Why is the second critical?
4) Then Synthesis is not a solution.
5) Mass Effect is a big series. There's plenty of material to draw on to force into alignment with pretty much any theme you'd like to pursue. I can draw conclusions as well as you--it's not like I'm blind to the material you're pulling from. That doesn't mean Mass Effect told the story necessary to support those conclusions, though. And, in fact, it didn't.
And one more:
6) That synthetics can evolve beyond the capacity of organics to influence is demonstrated by the Reapers themselves. (Just, y'know, delete the Crucible-Catalyst mating 'new paths' BS.) It isn't hard to conceive of the Reapers choosing to manage organic life in a way that doesn't involve exterminating spacefaring civilization every 50,000 years, especially if all they have to worry about is an AI takeover. This both highlights how bad the Reapers' solution is, and undermines the idea that synthetics being corrupted to wipe out all organic life is inevitable.

ETA:

"But the peace won't last. Soon, your children will create synthetics, and the chaos will come back."

Part of the story. Wanting it to not be there doesn't make it so.

The reason there is a discussion in the first place is that many people think Starkid's assertions aren't well-supported by the story. Throwing another Starkid assertion at the discussion doesn't help.

[Psyren]

The reason there is a discussion in the first place is that many people think Starkid's assertions aren't well-supported by the story. Throwing another Starkid assertion at the discussion doesn't help.

His claim was that I was, and I quote, "making up my own story." Whether or not we agree with the one that was there, it most assuredly was put there by Bioware, not by Psyren.

I will respond to the rest momentarily.

[Math_Mage]

His claim was that I was, and I quote, "making up my own story." Whether or not we agree with the one that was there, it most assuredly was put there by Bioware, not by Psyren.

I will respond to the rest momentarily.

The story that synthetics are dangerous due to organic misuse is you making up your own story. The story that organics will inevitably create synthetics is Bioware's story, but that's not what GloatingSwine objected to.

[Psyren]

The story that synthetics are dangerous due to organic misuse is you making up your own story. The story that organics will inevitably create synthetics is Bioware's story, but that's not what GloatingSwine objected to.

By "the chaos," the Catalyst is referring to that danger.

1) Other way around, but never mind.
2) By "ban", you presumably mean a number of different things that are not banning, because nukes (and nuclear energy generally) are downright common.
3) Depends on what the Reapers are actually trying to kill, I s'pose, but there's a lot of sub-AI machines that fulfill at least the first and last of those criteria. Why is the second critical?
4) Then Synthesis is not a solution.
5) Mass Effect is a big series. There's plenty of material to draw on to force into alignment with pretty much any theme you'd like to pursue. I can draw conclusions as well as you--it's not like I'm blind to the material you're pulling from. That doesn't mean Mass Effect told the story necessary to support those conclusions, though. And, in fact, it didn't.
And one more:
6) That synthetics can evolve beyond the capacity of organics to influence is demonstrated by the Reapers themselves. (Just, y'know, delete the Crucible-Catalyst mating 'new paths' BS.) It isn't hard to conceive of the Reapers choosing to manage organic life in a way that doesn't involve exterminating spacefaring civilization every 50,000 years, especially if all they have to worry about is an AI takeover. This both highlights how bad the Reapers' solution is, and undermines the idea that synthetics being corrupted to wipe out all organic life is inevitable.

1) N/A

2) Nuclear energy is common. Military/Weaponized use of it is, at best, heavily frowned upon - and that is the use to which synthetics would be put, military. Cyberwarfare, piloting fighter ships and such.

3) VIs are a stepping stone. Either people will research making VIs better and create AI by accident (As we saw with the Geth, Hannibal and Schells) or someone will actively seek to make an intelligence that can solve problems that VIs can't, which means something that can learn on its own, i.e. AI (as we saw with Overlord and the Leviathans.)

4) It is if we can jump straight to full integration without any half-measures where we are depending on a separate intelligence to optimize us, which may have its own ideas about what that means. That was what befell the Zha.

5) I'm not saying anything is wrong with the conclusions you drew. "We are many eyes looking at the same things."
All I'm saying is that it is possible to draw the conclusions I and Calemyr did.

6) But even they didn't - as you yourself pointed out, the Crucible proved that. And even if they do evolve beyond our capacity to control, what do you think will happen next? We will try to make more AI that we can control. Why would we ever stop trying? There is no incentive not to.

[Calemyr]

I think we're arguing two points here:
A) What Starkid's motivation is and how strong of a logical foundation it has.
B) Whether Starkid's motivation fits with the rest of the game as presented.

To which my answers are:
A) Premise: On a long enough timeline, a synthetic singularity leading to absolute extinction is plausible enough that drastic actions are not only proper but necessary. Conclusion: It's a logical premise given 50+ million years of sentient life (starting the clock from the creation of Starkid, after several races already got axed by their own creations) and a galaxy's worth of inhabitants. Without Reaper intervention, it is plausible that this would have happened.

B) Hell no. The ending does not suit the story: the premise has little foundation in the events of the trilogy, the theme of the games is basically a more "rational" version of Gurren Lagaan's kicking logic to the curb - contrasting sharply with the fatalistic theme of the ending, and the prime examples of AI in the game are counter to the premise, and the ultimate solutions do not resolve the core problem (except for, potentially, Green/Synthesis).

End Result: Starkid is a fascinating concept that could easily be turned into an epic video game, but that video game would have to have been designed to carry the concept. That is not the Mass Effect Trilogy. Good concept, good game, but the two together do not work well, and both suffer heavily for it.

[Math_Mage]

EDIT: Never mind, it's easier to just second Calemyr than continue debate.

[Psyren]

I think we're arguing two points here:
A) What Starkid's motivation is and how strong of a logical foundation it has.
B) Whether Starkid's motivation fits with the rest of the game as presented.

To which my answers are:
A) Premise: On a long enough timeline, a synthetic singularity leading to absolute extinction is plausible enough that drastic actions are not only proper but necessary. Conclusion: It's a logical premise given 50+ million years of sentient life (starting the clock from the creation of Starkid, after several races already got axed by their own creations) and a galaxy's worth of inhabitants. Without Reaper intervention, it is plausible that this would have happened.

B) Hell no. The ending does not suit the story: the premise has little foundation in the events of the trilogy, the theme of the games is basically a more "rational" version of Gurren Lagaan's kicking logic to the curb - contrasting sharply with the fatalistic theme of the ending, and the prime examples of AI in the game are counter to the premise, and the ultimate solutions do not resolve the core problem (except for, potentially, Green/Synthesis).

End Result: Starkid is a fascinating concept that could easily be turned into an epic video game, but that video game would have to have been designed to carry the concept. That is not the Mass Effect Trilogy. Good concept, good game, but the two together do not work well, and both suffer heavily for it.

Yep, this basically sums up my take 100%.