873 replies to this topic

[Erix]

Double posting like a boss!

http://blog.bioware....ation-fortress/

OM NOM NOM!

[Valdez]

Erix, on 23 March 2012 - 11:51 AM, said:

Double posting like a boss!

http://blog.bioware....ation-fortress/

OM NOM NOM!

Aaaaugh now i really wish I have an Asari adept, would be so nice to grind it to level 20.

Meanwhile I've went ahead and gotten the ME3 ending over and done with.Delayed it for almost a week because  I was so turned off by all the whining over the ending's suckiness.

For the record I picked blue. But I'll bet when the revised ending hits, the catalyst kid will offer a new ending for 500 bioware points.

The destroy reapers ending kinda reminds me of Crysis 2 ending tbh. Hostile aliens all suddenly magically die after the magical thing to kill them is activate.

Edited by Valdez, 23 March 2012 - 01:46 PM.

[Erix]

Thanks for spoiling that, I never finished Crysis 2.

I just had an epiphany about the ending while typing the above. Energy originating from a central source encompassing a large area, with the ability to be sent across the galaxy in a high-tech transportation system?

The Ancient seed/weapon device on Dakara from Stargate has made an appearance in Mass Effect.

[Erix]

http://www.pcgamer.c...-writers-think/

Some interesting viewpoints from other developers.

[Valdez]

Valdez, on 23 March 2012 - 01:36 PM, said:

Aaaaugh now i really wish I have an Asari adept, would be so nice to grind it to level 20.

My wish has come true!

Now training an Adept. Currently at level 10~

[Erix]

The Stasis bubble is ace. I'm messing around with it right now.

[Erix]

I have not heard that before. O.o

[Erix]

So, since I stumbled upon the video I linked earlier, I've been brainstorming a bit and I've come up with a new theory about the ending. Wall of text incoming. If it's chaotic, then that's because my mind is rather chaotic when I come up with new ideas, so please bare with me.

Spoiler

I've seen a lot of people go on about how the Catalyst makes no sense and why organics should be destroyed by synthetics just so we could avoid being destroyed by other synthetics. All the clues are actually in the game, they just need to be connected.

The subject is touched on briefly in ME1 with Sovereign saying "We are each a nation", as Legion also paraphrases in the second game. Also in the second game, Harbinger keeps mentioning "ascension", "We are your salvation through destruction", "We are your genetic destiny" and another which I didn't take much note off before which is "The dead are useless" (there are plenty of quotes more to take away from conversations with him: ). It is not until later we learn how the Reapers are actually created, by melting people and feeding them to a Reaper hull. Or as Legion puts it: "Transcended flesh. Billions of organic minds, uploaded and conjoined within immortal machine bodies.". As I see it, this is to be taken quite literally. The Reapers have the technology to preserve a person's mind without the need for a physical body, which is the traditional understanding of "ascension" in science fiction. How the mind is stored we can only guess at, though my personal assumption is that it's stored in the genetic material that people are processed into. The fluid is then led into the new Reaper where everyone becomes one being. The Reaper is quite literally an entire civilization preserved for all eternity.

This is further cemented in the final moments of the third game during the conversation between Shepard and the Catalyst. The Catalyst was given the task of avoiding all life in the galaxy from being wiped out from their own creations. And it did so by storing civilizations in Reaper bodies, making sure to harvest and preserve them before they reached a technological proficiency that would enable them to create true AI. New life is allowed to flourish, while the old life is preserved quite literally in memory for all time.

But why not just let life do it's own thing and then intervene should synthetics threaten to wipe everyone out? This one is more speculation than fact on my part. But the Catalyst is an AI. An AI knows only what it's been programmed to know, or what it has experienced for itself. We can draw a parallel to EDI here. She's absolutely brilliant, she does countless calculations at lightning speed. And yet, she has never experienced what love is. Something that comes natural to most of us she has no clue of how works. My theory is that the Catalyst is the same way. It was presented with a problem, and a very specific one at that: "Every organic race will at some point create synthetics that eventually rebel and kill off their creators". The Catalyst has never seen anything to prove this statement otherwise, and as such it continues with the cycle for more than a billion years.

But at some point, a race somehow finds out about the Reapers coming to destroy them. Whether they know what the Citadel really holds or not is not certain. If they don't, my theory is that they "simply" design the Crucible in such a way that it uses the Reapers' own technology against them (we know that the Protheans were more advanced than anyone in the current cycle, there's no saying that in more than a billion years no one has been more advanced than the Protheans). But before they can finish designing and building it, the Reapers come and complete the cycle. Over the years, the plans are found and improved upon many times. This we know from Vendetta on Thessia. In this cycle the design wasn't found until after the Reapers arrived, the same can most likely be said for previous cycles as well, thus requiring a lot of iteration from different species on the device.

When finally plugged into the Citadel, the Catalyst, being the AI that it is, would quickly be able to find the new solutions it mentions. Originally the Crucible was most likely planned to simply unleash a wave of energy to disable the Reapers (which can still be done). However, being so persistent as Shepard is, shows the Catalyst that not everything is as black and white as it first believed. It believed that all organic life was simply "chaos" and that it's solution was "order" through Reapers. But by seeing what organics are truly capable of, namely hope, the Catalyst recognizes that it's current solution will no longer work. Through the Crucible, the Catalyst comes up with three possibilities to the problem. The first is destruction of the Reapers, which, in my mind, was also the original goal of the Crucible. The second is controlling the Reapers. And the third is synthesis.

And this is where I really began to see why destroying the Reapers is truly the Renegade option. By destroying the power conduits, you essentially unleash a wave on that galaxy that wipes out every independently thinking mind that is occupied in a machine body. You destroy a billion years' of galactic civilization, and all current "living" synthetics and AIs, just so you can get your revenge.

Then we have synthesis. This option truly makes the Reapers and their original function obsolete, thus making this the "perfect" ending. Everyone and everything in the galaxy will be the same forever. There will be no need to create synthetics that eventually rebel against you, there will be no need for wars over differences.

And last we have control. I'm taking this one last since I've had some revelations on what this one might truly entail. Shepard is given the choice to sacrifice himself, but he will still be able to control the Reapers. That had me confused at first, but then I thought of ascension. The mind being able to exist without a corporeal form, often described as "beings of pure energy" in various forms over the years of science fiction. When Shepard grabs the handles, his body and mind is quite literally absorbed by the Citadel, transforming him into energy. At that point the Citadel fires the energy and spreads it across the whole galaxy. Shepard is literally everywhere. His mind joins those of the Reapers, being one with them. He doesn't just gain control of the Reapers, he is the Reapers. With this option, every survivor is saved. Nothing is changed. Synthetics might still become a problem in the future, but all current synthetics and AIs are kept intact. And the Reapers still exist, should the need for them ever arise again. And at the same time, every lost civilization is still stored. Nothing is lost. And this is why control is the Paragon option. You preserve every bit of galactic civilization throughout a billion years or more.

Another thing that's different with the control ending from the other ones is that the mass relays appears to be intact afterwards, including the Citadel. My theory on that is that it would take a lot less energy to "simply" spread a thought, a memory, a mind, than it would take to erase every machine mind, or even completely re-write every strand of DNA, in the galaxy. The surviving races still have the Citadel to use for galactic government, and they still have the mass relays to conduct their trade and transportation.

For me, the control ending is the perfect ending. Shepard saves a billion years of history, and he doesn't doom the entire galactic fleet and quite a few planets alongside himself. The synthetic problem might still arise in the future, but the Reapers are still around, this time to defend galactic civilization.

Phew, that took me an hour and a half to write down. I know this doesn't account for every inconsistency in the current endings but it at least validates

Spoiler

the Catalyst and his original solution, plus the new solutions it comes up with

. This is just my take on things, though I am curious as to how much is proven correct when we get the closure thing. And any thoughts are most certainly welcome.

[ChessRules]

Huh; rewatching the Control ending, it cuts away right at the point where the other endings show the Mass Relay exploding.  I didn't notice that before.  

Thinking about it, many of my problems with the choice at the end have to do with the synthesis ending.  To me, the synthesis ending is just stupid.  

First, there's a much stronger "creators VS created" theme (such as the krogans) than an "organics VS synthetics" theme.  As such, synthesis doesn't do anything to solve the Reapers' concerns, because the new hybrid species may still create synthetics or "raise" underdeveloped species; maybe not for the same reasons, but somebody will still do it.  Those, in turn, would rebel anyways.

Second, IIRC there were no story plots or subplots that even alluded to the relative merits of synthesis, or how the hell it's supposed to be the "apex of evolution".  Saren babbled about it in Mass Effect 1, but the way he said it came across solely as rationalization for why he augmented himself/helped the Reapers.  The Reapers are an example, but it was never the organic-synthetic fusion that made them so powerful.  

Third, space magic.

It seems to me that it was meant to be a "best of both worlds" ending, but it amounts to a complete non sequitur to the themes of the trilogy, one that makes some assumptions I just can't accept.

Edited by ChessRules, 25 March 2012 - 03:41 AM.

[Valdez]

When all else fails one hope remains for the Galaxy:

Fanfiction endings! http://arkis.deviant...ILERS-289902125


Also got salarian engineer. Time to spawn some decoys.

Edited by Valdez, 25 March 2012 - 02:55 AM.

[Piglet]

Oh valdez you!

[Valdez]

"I wear armour into battle, not swimwear!"

Oh Ashley that can be fixed in the coalesced.ini (or apparently now its the coalesced.bin)



Kai Leng in garry's mod

Spoiler

...

Using the awesomeness that is Decoy

Spoiler

Placed at narrow passages or doorways they can block things like Banshees. The one in the above pic literally stood in front of my decoy while 2 of us emptied entire clips into her.

They didn't always take the bait though. In the same match there were 2 occasions where a banshee bypassed the decoy on more open areas and killed team mates.

Edited by Valdez, 25 March 2012 - 11:26 AM.

[Piglet]

Gary's mod. Always makes me laugh.

[Valdez]

[hagren]

So I wasn't the only one who was reminded by Deus Ex after seeing Leng for the first time

[Valdez]

hagren, on 26 March 2012 - 03:32 PM, said:

So I wasn't the only one who was reminded by Deus Ex after seeing Leng for the first time

They just need to replace all the mentions of "implants" with "augmentations".

Come to think of it, isn't the phantom's kill-cam kinda like Jensen's lethal takedown in Deus Ex HR



http://koobismo.devi...rt.com/gallery/

Edited by Valdez, 27 March 2012 - 12:45 AM.

[Valdez]

I had this bug too

[Piglet]

So did I :'D

Also, in Liara's room, those monitors sometimes freak out on me

That shepard is ugly btw.

[Erix]

Unlocked the Salarian Engineer. I have three words to say about that one.

Mother of God.

[Valdez]

Erix, on 31 March 2012 - 02:20 PM, said:

Unlocked the Salarian Engineer. I have three words to say about that one.

Mother of God.

Welcome to the club!

Had a run with him yesterday on Firebase White. Decoy planted at the doorway caused a spectacular traffic jam of 1 banshee, 2 ravagers and 1 brute.

Oh and somehow in the midst of us raining hell on the banshee, the decoy's electric shock finished it. It was hilarious to see the Xierh88[Decoy]Banshee text at the corner

Sometimes planting decoys can still be a challenge though. You can't let the enemies see you planting it, especially banshees, or they'll bypass the decoy.