What are you currently playing?

[Bartholen]

This is an interesting point, but I would argue that getting stuck in ones ways - decadent - is actually much more likely of eternal, absurdly powerful beings. What, ever, is their motivation to change? We change in large because we hit obstacles that we can't overcome by doing the same old thing, so what if you're so powerful to never need to? After that, there's ennui: sure, an entity might be able to appreciate an organism at the level of their individual character, but when it's the 240 billionth individual that that entity has encountered, they probably just blend into others: "Oh, another one just like X,Y,Z, I've done this before." Everything is just repeating some algorithm already used. It's easy to imagine that such an entity or race would become incredibly sclerotic.

That's where the way the Reapers are presented is IMO at odds with itself. The first two games present them as fairy basic cosmic malevolent beings, who just do what they do because the game needs a big villain. In the third game this notion is clearly challenged and the Reapers are more fleshed out, by the ending and the Leviathan DLC in particular. Take the scene at the end of the Rannoch mission in ME3 where Shepard talks to the Reaper: that's to my knowledge the first time the reason for the Reaper cycle is hinted at the for the first time. The Reapers do it because that's what they were created for, it's their sole purpose. Then in Leviathan and the ending the Reapers are pretty firmly established to be just a tool, supposedly acting on strictly preprogrammed paths for a single end. The Catalyst even compares them to fire: is fire evil when it burns? That's a pretty clear analogy signaling a lack of deeper intelligence or individual thought.

But the way the Reapers act in the first two games does not IMO match that description. Sovereign, when encountered, does a whole "mu ha ha, insignificant mortals, you fail to comprehend my power" spiel. Harbinger clearly has a personal beef with Shepard in ME2. Sovereign allies with Saren personally, Harbinger employs the Collectors to capture humans specifically to construct a Reaper, which is further contradicted by ME3 stating that each extinction cycle ends with the birth of one... all this IMO signals pretty clearly that the Reapers in fact are capable of switching to a different method or paradigm. I guess you could say that their "programming" is just full of failsafes and "if [x] then [y]" statements to account for these possibilities, but to me that just seems like plot convenience.

 

[Agema]

That's where the way the Reapers are presented is IMO at odds with itself. The first two games present them as fairy basic cosmic malevolent beings, who just do what they do because the game needs a big villain. In the third game this notion is clearly challenged and the Reapers are more fleshed out, by the ending and the Leviathan DLC in particular. Take the scene at the end of the Rannoch mission in ME3 where Shepard talks to the Reaper: that's to my knowledge the first time the reason for the Reaper cycle is hinted at the for the first time. The Reapers do it because that's what they were created for, it's their sole purpose. Then in Leviathan and the ending the Reapers are pretty firmly established to be just a tool, supposedly acting on strictly preprogrammed paths for a single end. The Catalyst even compares them to fire: is fire evil when it burns? That's a pretty clear analogy signaling a lack of deeper intelligence or individual thought.

But the way the Reapers act in the first two games does not IMO match that description. Sovereign, when encountered, does a whole "mu ha ha, insignificant mortals, you fail to comprehend my power" spiel. Harbinger clearly has a personal beef with Shepard in ME2. Sovereign allies with Saren personally, Harbinger employs the Collectors to capture humans specifically to construct a Reaper, which is further contradicted by ME3 stating that each extinction cycle ends with the birth of one... all this IMO signals pretty clearly that the Reapers in fact are capable of switching to a different method or paradigm. I guess you could say that their "programming" is just full of failsafes and "if [x] then [y]" statements to account for these possibilities, but to me that just seems like plot convenience.

That's fine, I accept that. I think computer games can often be narratively weak: the designers have put much more effort into the game than the plot and characters - indeed the plot and characters often may need to be subordinated to the game in ways that diminish them. There are lots of ways the writers could get to that inconsistency (for instance that the games were designed individually rather than as a coherent whole), which perhaps isn't so important as the fact the inconsistency exists.

Interestingly, there's a SF series by Alastair Reynolds that have an enemy very much of one of those forms, called The Inhibitors: they were created to undertake a task, and despite being in many ways intelligent and even creative, are nevertheless absolutely bound into their overarching goal. An obvious problem a game-maker might have is thinking that the audience might more obviously want a "bad guy" to motivate them where a mindless, programmed enemy could come across as bland.

Although I think Alastair Reynolds has also said his stories set in the same universe are not necessarily consistent: the integrity and quality of each individual story is more important to him than the coherence of the wider universe across its multiple novels.