Mikeyfell said:
A player controlled narrative where your choices decide the fate of the galaxy!
But in practice only 2 choices you made had any remote baring on the course of the finally. Minor ones at that that ultimately only effected numbers on a chart.
Did you save Mellon's data (Not did you stop Mordin from shooting him, no. Just did you save his data)
and what did you do with the Geth Heretics (And questionably at that, I've managed to get peace with them destroyed and rewritten)
See, that's just not true. The ending itself is dependent on two factors: your color choice and how much grinding you did in multiplayer. Events up until that moment are influenced by hundreds of factors from the previous games; right off the top of my head there's treatment of Conrad Verner, conversations with Tali and Legion, saving or abandoning the original Council, protecting Kirrahe on Virmire, dealing with Wrex's tantrum at the cloning facility, sparing the Rachni queen, how many of the Asari Matriarch's writings you gathered while chasing Saren...
Granted, many of these things have outcomes that seem roughly equivalent on the face, since it's just not feasible to make an entirely different game for every possible combination of factors: you get husk'd rachni as enemies whether or not you spared the queen because that's a big part of the game design that they can't work around in every single encounter, and so the mission looks awfully similar whether you're revisiting the queen you let loose earlier or meeting the clone of her that the Reapers whipped up. But when you look at the actual results? A genuine queen that you free twice and introduce to the Council races becomes a valuable part of the war effort, and is well on her way to reestablishing her once-extinct race in the galaxy but on peaceful terms. The clone, if allowed to live, just fucks shit up and murders people.
"As much as I complain I have an important job to do here."
That's not something you say before you quit.
And running away from obligation doesn't suit Anderson's character.
No. It's something that you say before you get down to your important business and get shit done, rather than something you say before you sit on your ass trading empty pleasantries with politicals and watch the world burn around you. He didn't quit being a Councilor because it was hard, or because he hated it, he quit so he could actually do his damn job as an Admiral.
Throughout Mass Effect 2 you were allowed to decide whether you agreed with Cerberus or not.
If as you think is, was, and forever will be "evil" that effectively makes anyone who played Renegade in ME2 canonically incorrect. Basically rewriting the Renegade personality into the "Stupid Shepard"
Not stupid. Cynical. Pragmatic. Willing to accept collateral damage as long as the greater good is served. And willing to work with people who are clearly evil because he can't accomplish what he needs alone and the proper authorities are ignoring the problem. In short, how Renegade Shepard always has been. A good man can work with an evil one without being an idiot so long as their goals align, but it doesn't make the evil man good.
everything they're doing in ME3 disagrees with their MO (Which is to help humanity)
Setting up a fake refugee camp so they can experiment on the very humans they're trying to protect is off...
Attacking Alliance bases for... reasons?
They must be indoctrinated... but they aren't because they were investing all their resources into trying to figure out how indoctrination works so they could use it against the Reapers. And if the Reapers were controlling their brains why would they let them do that? So one of those things is a plot hole
When the Reapers want an intelligent, creative minion instead of a mindless pawn they can't just take direct control of his brain. Sovereign never puppetted Saren until he was already dead. Until then he made subtler changes, whispering and tweaking until Saren was just as brilliant as he always was, but unable to conceive of the Reapers being unsuccessful and totally convinced that by serving the Reapers he was saving his race, allowing the Turians to live as slaves instead of being wiped out. And all along, Saren was doing his own research into Indoctrination and convincing himself that he was safe, himself, in control. It would be the same with TIM; Harbinger wouldn't just yell 'kill all humans' when he could whisper about gaining the power to make humanity the rulers of the galaxy, as long as he was willing to take a few acceptable losses along the way. It's not much of a stretch, Cerberus was already killing humans by the dozens if not hundreds in their experiments you interrupted in the first game, because they believed that the gains from those experiments would save millions or give them power over aliens.
bug_of_war said:
While I agree with you that initially the Reapers did feel as they WERE the epitome of the universe, I always saw them as being more robotic and faar too logical to have been AI technology with the depth of EDI or Legion. This is due to a number of things. First off, Soverign and all the other Reaper's refusal to explain to Shepard where they came from tells me that they are restricted by their programming to believe that all organic life is too fragile and stupid (for lack of a better word) to understand their story. Secondly, the very precise cycle and ability to change tactics on the fly show me that they have some form of pre programming and are quite clearly unburdened by any emotions, they simply observe and then act. Thirdly, Soverigns assault on the Citadel had a very distinct split in terms of what's going on. For example, you saw this as the Reaper's ego outweighing his ability to determine risk assesment (very poorly paraphrased, but I believe that is something along the lines of what you said), however I saw this as a machine who was running out of time to perform a task that it HAD to complete because it was time to do so. Seeing as how there is evidence to back up both sides, I think it's clear that there are some examples suggesting the Reapers are more or less following basic programming.
If we assume that the Reapers are just VIs, acting on their programming instead of their own drive, we have to assume that Sovereign was programmed not only toward bluster and condescension in conversation, but also to deliberately lie about their origins ('we have no beginning or ending' is a long way from 'we were built to kill you a few million years ago'). Sovereign alone, in the single conversation you have with him and the one battle we see, displays more personality than any other machine in the series which isn't established to have true AI, emotions and all. And it makes little sense to program him to act that way, with his attention-grabbing tactics and hammy, provocative dialogue, since his duty was to stay hidden among the younger races and stand watch for millenia at a time rather than to intimidate or subjugate. Then we look at the final battle of the first game at the Citadel, and I can't see any way to classify that other than an emotional response or monumentally shitty programming. He had won the war. There was not enough firepower in the entire system to get through his shields and most of the fleet standing against him was shredded. His only possible loss conditions when he entered that fight were if the Citadel's arms had closed before he got inside (because the thing's pretty much indestructible) or if the entirety of the galaxy had united against him, and neither of those had happened or had any real chance of happening. He wasn't desperately reacting in order to take control immediately, because it didn't matter if you had command of the Citadel for a few minutes once he was on the tower. He could have wiped out the remaining ships before engaging you, he could have irradiated you from the outside, whatever, but instead he chose to reanimate his primary servant for a second round of personal scale combat with you because if you killed his Champion, no matter who was in control at the end of the day, a human had beaten him. And that was something he could not accept or allow. And when he lost round two, the death of his avatar was enough of a distraction to lower his shields and allow a simple frigate the killing blow.
Basically, either Sovereign had emotions which affected his choices more than calm logic, his programmer wanted to simulate pride, anger, deception, and overconfidence for no good reason, or his code was so stupid as to force him to risk everything in order to avoid a ten minute delay in a 50,000 year cycle.
Suncatcher said:
What doesn't really make sense is using Earth for the ending, or trying to rally the galaxy to take back your planet specifically instead of generally beating back Reaper forces, but nothing in the ending and little in the core plot makes sense.
Respectfully, I would like to disagree. It's been established that Harbinger seems to be the one whom is pulling the strings in the battle, so to then have the catalyst moved to Earth to be watched under his supervision makes sense when Shepard had done the unimaginable and truly rallied the majority of the galaxy. While the initial 'lets rally the galaxy to save Earth' definately doesn't make sense, as there are the same amount of Reaper's on other planets (That is until the ending), so I agree with you there. There is a spectacular line in the mission where you go to the Asari homeworld and fight with the comandos. During the battle, when you convince the commanding officer to hold the line she yells out "Let the galaxy know that the war was won on *insert Asari homeworld name here*". This shows how each species feels as though the attack is very personal, and that because Shepard, the guy who has been kicking ass before they realised there really was an ass that needed kicking, told them that their planet may hold the key to the destruction of the Reapers, it is clear that that just bolstered their belief that something about them made them more important than other species. I feel that it shows that during an intense moment of impossible odds, people can become closed minded and believe that the problem is only effecting them and no one else. Then, when Shepard reveals the key to winning, and that it's on Earth, everyone whom pledged their alliance (after being saved from the impossible odds) are fully prepared to go to this one planet.
Valid point.
Suncatcher said:
you can see EA's bloody handprints all over that part, after the lead writer of the first two games was replaced
Now, this is where I REALLY disagree...
Yeah, I probably shouldn't have gone quite so far there. And for the record, I didn't think they rushed things, have no problem with day 1 DLC, and definitely never joined any of those stupid petitions trying to force them to change the game.
But EA is a company infamous for, among other things, executive meddling. And the ending, with all its breaks in canon and themes, looks to me like nothing but one guy at the top of a command structure taking control away from the team who had been writing the rest of the series, including 90% of the third game. And then I look at the credits, and the former lead writer, who made so many magnificent games for Bioware before they were assimilated and who built up the universe of Mass Effect from scratch, is conspicuously absent. Given that evidence, is there a more likely theory than that the publisher caused (directly or due to dissatisfaction with other company policies) a change in staff which resulted in the game being released with a small but vital portion being written by an idiot? I hadn't heard anything about Casey Hudson being behind the ending (if you could cite that I'd appreciate it), but even if true there are many cases of writers making a wonderful product under an imperfect director and many more of said directors breaking certain parts of the story when they take control away from the writers or when a particularly talented lead is no longer there to restrain them. Heck, something like that being written by the director is a red flag in the first place; there are good reasons that writers and directors are different roles in producing a game.
On the multiplayer front, I actually have to commend them though. Sure its influence on galactic readyness is annoying, but they managed to make the first plotless online shootfest that I actually enjoyed playing.
And to contribute to the ongoing Vega debate: not everyone needs to be your childhood friend or a comrade of a hundred battles to join your squad. He was, in fact, just some dude (well, high rank marine with anti-Collector experience) who was in the same base at the time. He knew (of) Shepard because Shepard is the most famous human alive at that point. He ended up on the ship because he was alongside Ash/Kaiden when they went to the Normandy, and he stays on your ship because you can't exactly swing by to drop him off back on Earth to join the fight there because it's covered with Reapers and you'd lose the Normandy, Shepard, and the galaxy's one chance if you got caught there. There really isn't any problem with Vega's introduction except for the fact that it results in Vega being near Shepard and I really kinda hate that guy.
