chuckdm said:
CloudAtlas said:
1. The narrative of Mass Effect 3 is about many things. It is about literally saving the galaxy from annihilation - that is Shepard's overarching goal.
No, it isn't.
It was my Shepard's overarching goal. Did I play the game wrong then?
The fact that you aren't even allowed to MENTION your alliance between the Geth and Quarians to Starchild shows how the developers had tunnel vision here. Even if that alliance didn't change Starchild's mind, Shep would never work so hard to make that alliance work, then fail to even mention it to Starchild. Why? Because it serves to disprove that the whole Organics vs. Synthetics conflict is necessary to begin with.
Your reasoning is just flawed. Organics and Synthetics living peacefully together in one instance only proves that they need not always be at war, but nothing more. It could happen again, as it presumably did countless of times before. What differences does it make in the end if this one synthetic race doesn't try to annihilate its creators, but the next one does? And that's the point. You can read that same flawed logic in every ME3 ending thread, but iteration doesn't make it any more correct.
CloudAtlas said:
And you know what? I loved all of it. And I'm not the only one. So don't be so arrogant to assume that everyone hated the deeper themes, that everyone would have preferred a simpler, shallower story. None of that is true, and frankly, a bit insulting.
There's nothing deep about this. That's my whole damn point. It's Organics vs. Synthetics.
And everything else that I listed and that you choose to ignore. And decisions like what to do with the genophage made people ponder so much that they even wrote whole articles about it. I guess that's deep enough alright, and it has nothing to do with synthetics either.
CloudAtlas said:
2. I don't think the concept of moral choice, and moral ambiguity, is what you believe it is. It is about making choices between morally distinct alternatives, but nothing says that one of those choices has to be clearly morally superior than the others.
My point exactly. Neither side is morally distinct from the other any more than either is superior. On one hand, we can damn the many to protect the whole from the few. On the other, we can damn none to protect none from the few. That is, neither freedom for all the Mages, nor total lockdown of all the Mages, is a good choice. They are both BAD CHOICES. Neither is even 1% better than the other. This isn't a choice we can weigh and apply a modicum of logic and reason to - either side is a coin toss and both heads and tails lose. Neither choice has to be drastically superior. But one MUST be at least SLIGHTLY superior to the other, or else it is not a moral choice, but merely a choice. For the side we chose to be moral, there must be something about it that makes it a better choice than the other side. But here, there isn't. Both sides are totally morally bankrupt, as neither solution solves even a tenth as many problems as it creates.
Moral choices that lack a (at least slightly) more moral option to choose are not moral choice. They are coin tosses that we fool ourselves into thinking are superior choices because we aren't allowed to simply not choose, and the consequences of choosing poorly are dire. So we tell ourselves one option is better. That isn't moral choice. It's false moral choice. Mages vs. Templars is false moral choice.
I'm sorry, but you still don't understand the concept of moral choice and moral ambiguity. I'm repeating myself, but choices only need to be morally distinct, but no choice needs to be clearly morally superior. There is no single, clear-cut, valid morality system or theory of judging the moral value of an action. What makes these choices interesting is that there are different concepts, different goals, that are in conflict with each other, and asks you to weigh them against each other to make a judgement. And your judgement will be different from the judgement of others - if one alternative was "at least 1 %" better than the other, wouldn't everyone (who wants to do "the right thing") make the same decision then? And, yes, sometimes no alternative is very appealing. And you know what? That's just how life is. Sometimes you just don't know what is the right thing to do, and that doesn't let you sleep.
CloudAtlas said:
As Chris Tian already said, the mages vs. templars conflict has nothing to do with racism, it is about freedom vs. security. The reason to control mages is very real - they often are dangerous. And this is a conflict I find interesting precisely because it is morally ambiguous, and precisely because it is connected to our real world experiences. Every society in the world struggles to find a balance between freedom and security.
I'd argue that it is still predominantly about racism, but let's say you're right.
Then I doubt you know what "race" and "racism" means.
CloudAtlas said:
4. With all your ranting against moral ambiguity, you seem to forget that DA:O, the one game which you seemed to like, is full of morally ambiguous choices, you have to make them from the very beginning to the very end. I could name countless examples of that on the top of my head. Pretty much the only thing that is not ambiguous in some way is, well, the darkspawn. They are evil and need to be destroyed.
True, but DA:O is ABOUT the darkspawn (and really the Archdemon.) It's a well-crafted game for this very reason. The plot driver, the one thing that guides everything you do, is defeating the Archdemon. Everything else is a means to that end. All the moral choice in DA:O is used for side quests. That isn't to say it's not important.
That is your personal opinion, to which you are of course entitled, but it is nothing more than that. I found this part of the story the most boring. I would even go as far as saying that the main story felt oddly out of place to me: you have this world full of interesting, morally ambiguous conflicts, and then you have the Archdemon. He he looks like a dragon, he wants to annihilate the whole world, and that's why he must be stopped, obviously, and that's all there is to him. No conflict, no deeper meaning, nothing.
In fact, DA:O uses Mages vs. Templars in the BEST way it can be used - solely to determine whose help you gain against the blight. Hell, ME3 even did this right once. Quarian, Geth, or Both? Mages, Templars? But the question here is different because it's not in a vacuum. If the entire game of DA:O was the "return to the tower" mission and nothing else, it'd be an awful game. But the fact that we can add some weight to one side of the scales - we can pick sides on the merit of which side is more useful against the Blight - gives is an ever-so-slightly better choice (Mages) and makes the moral choice system really work.
It looks like you might be quite the utilitarian. What's the morally right choice? The one that benefits the Greater Good the most, obviously. Or, in other words: The ends justify the means. But, again, what is morally right or morally wrong is not that simple, and, I hope I'm not patronizing him, while
Smeatza probably would call your decision morally right, he would do so for a very different reason.
That said, I didn't know whether mages or templars are better for the Warden's cause, so I couldn't have made the decision on this account anyway.
But an entire game built around that mechanic just fails. This is why ME3 and DA2 failed, even if nobody wants to admit it. All the story problems (mechanics are unrelated), endings or otherwise, are limited by trying to fit them into these frameworks. If they'll just drop the stupid Alliance vs. Horde crap for DA3 I promise you it'll be better.
Yea, I know, all the people who loved Mass Effect 3 are just too dumb to see the truth.
