Mass Effect Mass Effect general thread

[Arlos]

That's not to suggest the Genophage is morally sound, it's not, however bioware seems to have written themselves into a corner, because they built thier only opitions as "completely cure Genophage" and "keep it in place and also be totally evil", neither of which seem like good choices objectively (though narratively the former choice is framed as good), instead of the actual solution of "limit Krogan fertility rate without causing thousands of still births".

Not gonna lie, I never understood why in the hundred of years between the Krogan rebellion and canon, nobody ever thought of making the Genophae more humane, like, you could probably change it to reduce birthrate to sustainable level, without piles of dead babies bodies, instead the council just got it done, then dusted their hands and called it day.
Similar problem with the Quarians.
It’s like they just deal with a problem halfway, leave it in the most horrific state possible, and then go on their merry way.

 

[Lord Sovereign]

Mordin, in his heart, hated the genophage. He is brutally aware of the cultural scars it left the Krogan and regards it as a necessary evil at best. An evil that was only necessary because the Salarians stupidly (in his eyes) uplifted a race that simply wasn't ready for interstellar travel (he outright states he'd have opposed it if he'd been there). In his view, the Krogan should have been allowed to naturally overcome their aggression, rebuild their civilisation, then join the galactic community.

He's fascinated by the science and rationalises a lot of his work to himself ("like gardening"), but his behaviour in the Krogan hospital is not indicative of a man who is at peace with himself. And he balks at the suggestion of going all out and point blank sterilising the entire Krogan race.

And when the opportunity arises, he gladly gives his life to put things right. When pressed on the matter he actually shouts "I made a mistake."

I wouldn't exactly call Mordin a "good person", but he's not quite an evil one either.

 

[LindyAF]

The purpose of the Reapers. People made a lot of fun of it ("Yo dawg I heard you like not being wiped out by synthetics"). And I don't think it's explained in the most convincing way, even after the DLCs. But there's a way to look at it which I think makes a perverted sort of sense. The Catalyst's goal is to prevent organic life from being wiped out permanently. Only harvesting advanced spacefaring species, leaving primitive species alone. The fear being that an organic species could develop an AI threat that won't make that distinction, and will wipe out all organic life in the galaxy regardless of intelligence. And the Reapers being constructed using the genetic code of millions of individuals from a species can be seen in a perverted way as "preserving" those species, even after wiping them out

This is what I hated most about the ending.

See, I get that it makes sense, but it cheapens the conflict. The Reapers in ME1 and ME2 were gods, Lovecraftian Horrors which were "beyond comprehension," terrible and inexplicable beings "without beginning or end," so vast that even one's corpse bent minds and reality alike from it's death-sleep.

ME3s explanation for them reduces them to basically a malfunctioning machine. The Catalyst might as well have been made to collect as many postage stamps as it can. It's not even a super-old Skynet or ME1 Geth type threat, creations that grew beyond their creators, decided they didn't want to be servants anymore, and destroyed them. They're still just constructs of the Catalyst, which itself is still just trying to do the same misinterpretation of the same job that it's creators gave it billions of years ago, long after it's creators and the whole reason they gave it the job in the first place, stopping their slaves from fucking up and killing themselves, has ceased being relevant.

Does that count as "defending the ending"?

Not really.

 

[Battlegrinder]

See, I get that it makes sense, but it cheapens the conflict. The Reapers in ME1 and ME2 were gods, Lovecraftian Horrors which were "beyond comprehension," terrible and inexplicable beings "without beginning or end," so vast that even one's corpse bent minds and reality alike from it's death-sleep.

That's....not actually true. At all. Sovereign claims otherwise, but even ME 1 throws water on that. Indoctrination is the closest the reapers come to any sort of incomprehensible power, even still it falls short. Everyone's response to them doing it is "IDK how it works exactly, it's, like, EMF or something" and not "oh heavens, they can mind control people, this is impossible, the very laws of physics prohibit such a thing, it cannot be and yet it is!" Everything the reapers did, people in the setting could understand what it was doing and roughly how it worked.

ME 2 gutshot any remaining mystique, by both having reaper technology be simple enough that ME powers could reverse engineer it, and then revealing that for all thier talk of higher purpose, in the end it was just talk, and the reapers real motive was simply reproduction, a desire just as base as the organics they loathed.

The reapers where never even remotely Lovecraftian, unless your definition of Lovecraftian is "anything that's vaguely squid shaped".

 

[LindyAF]

That's....not actually true. At all. Sovereign claims otherwise, but even ME 1 throws water on that. Indoctrination is the closest the reapers come to any sort of incomprehensible power, even still it falls short. Everyone's response to them doing it is "IDK how it works exactly, it's, like, EMF or something" and not "oh heavens, they can mind control people, this is impossible, the very laws of physics prohibit such a thing, it cannot be and yet it is!" Everything the reapers did, people in the setting could understand what it was doing and roughly how it worked.

ME 2 gutshot any remaining mystique, by both having reaper technology be simple enough that ME powers could reverse engineer it, and then revealing that for all thier thier talk of higher purpose, in the end it was just talk, and the reapers real notice was simply reproduction, a desire just as base as the organics they loathed.

The reapers where never even remotely Lovecraftian, unless your definition of Lovecraftian is "anything that's vaguely squid shaped".

ME 1 also establishes that the Reapers built the Mass Effect relays - the galaxy-spanning network around which galactic civilization is based. This isn't replicable, they are the only means of long distance space travel in the main mass effect series, up until ME2 no mass effect relay had ever been damaged and they are believed to be indestructible, and in ME2 it's revealed that although they can be destroyed, their destruction will release energy on par with a supernova. ME 1 also has Sovereign and the Geth bypass the known Mass Effect network to lay siege directly to the heart of galactic civilization. Granted, we see how this works, it's a backdoor they built into the system. But given they built the system, who nobody else can understand well enough to replicate, I think this still counts.

In all three games, we repeatedly see people think that they can use Reapers or Reaper tech safely, that they can put safety measures in place to mitigate indoctrination, and it never works. There's never an "oh, turns out it was just EMF or nanobots" moment where they actually figure it out and can actually stop it happening. I don't think having characters that think they know what they're doing is un-Lovecraftian, as long as those characters turn out to be wrong in dramatic fashion, which they do in Mass Effect.

Reproduction is hardly un-Lovecraftian as a motivation either. It's base, but Lovecraftian Horrors are frequently base. The cycle being part of the life-cycle of the Reapers doesn't make them less Lovecraftian.

 

[ShadowArxxy]

Hubris. The Illusive Man's problem was hubris. He saw the threat of Reapers and thought, it would be a waste to just destroy them. How much greater would humanity be if we could master the very things that presume to use us for their ends? Hubris isn't rational. It's a common literary theme, going all the way back to Homer.

This is totally consistent with Cerberus' actions throughout ME1, where the side missions involving them can pretty much *all* be summed up, "Cerberus decided this super dangerous thing should be experimented with so we can control and weaponize it, EVERYTHING WENT WRONG."

Seriously, Cerberus pretty much only had two successful projects, and those were only successful because they happened to be human-friendly *after* they broke out of control. That's Shepard and EDI.

-The reveal of the origin of the Reapers, their purpose and goal, felt out of the blue and wasn't properly foreshadowed. And the Catalyst, the AI that created the Reapers and controls them, taking the appearance of the kid you saw at the start of the game... Was just dumb.

I pretty much took that as the Catalyst trying to guilt trip Shepard. I know that word of dev was that the indoctrination theory was neat but not what they had in mind for canon, but it still makes more sense than anything else.

-The writers didn't think through what blowing up the mass relays meant. That it would screw the galaxy over, particularly the very group you assembled to liberate Earth. And they seemingly forgot that we'd already been shown what happens when a relay blows up - it wipes out its entire system. I doubt that was the intention, but they should have made it clear that it didn't happen in the case. Either they forgot about all of that, or they knew but didn't think it was important. Either way, it was lazy writing.

I disagree -- the Alpha Relay was explicitly shown in-universe to be a unique model which was intended as the primary invasion point for the Reapers. As such, it was vastly more capable than a normal Mass Relay -- whereas a normal relay could only connect to one other relay at a time, the Alpha Relay could connect to sixteen other relays simultaneously, and it was also capable of doing ultra-long-range jumps directly to the Citadel, bypassing the ENTIRE relay network. It makes sense that destroying this super-relay would have exponentially greater effects than destroying any other relay.

Moreover, in ME3 you are "destroying" the other Mass Relays via the Catalyst control network rather than via an asteroid ramming that visibly destabilized the mass relay's singularity while it was active. It's canonical that they're not completely destroyed, merely overloaded and taken offline until they can be repaired; if you have inadequate victory points, the fluff text states they were more severely damaged and required extremely extensive repairs, versus a full-points victory.

 

[Battlegrinder]

ME 1 also establishes that the Reapers built the Mass Effect relays - the galaxy-spanning network around which galactic civilization is based. This isn't replicable, they are the only means of long distance space travel in the main mass effect series, up until ME2 no mass effect relay had ever been damaged and they are believed to be indestructible, and in ME2 it's revealed that although they can be destroyed, their destruction will release energy on par with a supernova. ME 1 also has Sovereign and the Geth bypass the known Mass Effect network to lay siege directly to the heart of galactic civilization. Granted, we see how this works, it's a backdoor they built into the system. But given they built the system, who nobody else can understand well enough to replicate, I think this still counts.

You're not getting it. Relays are very advanced technology that is presently outside the grasp of the citadel races, but it is still just that, technology (and it's not that far out of their reach. The Protheans managed, and per Aethyta the asari could have tried to build their own relays). Lovecraftian horror is not about the unknown for now or the tricky to figure out, it's about the unknowable, the kind of knowledge that simply cannot align with mortal understanding of the universe and that drives men made if they start to grasp at the real truth of the universe.

If relays were, say, something like a Stargate and jumped ships from point to point instantly and no one had any clue how because the laws of physics insistent that nothing like that is possible, and the last few people to try and reconcile the relays to known physics all went nuts and started ranting about cycles of history larger than the aeons or whatever, then yes, that would be lovecrafian. But instead, people go "It's like a mass accelerator, but bigger".

In all three games, we repeatedly see people think that they can use Reapers or Reaper tech safely, that they can put safety measures in place to mitigate indoctrination, and it never works. There's never an "oh, turns out it was just EMF or nanobots" moment where they actually figure it out and can actually stop it happening. I don't think having characters that think they know what they're doing is un-Lovecraftian, as long as those characters turn out to be wrong in dramatic fashion, which they do in Mass Effect.

That's actually wrong, people can use reaper tech safely. The Thanix cannon is reaper tech. EDI is reaper tech. It's difficult and dangerous to reverse engineer and tamper with reaper tech, but it is not impossible.

More important, you are again missing the point of lovecraft. "I thought I knew what I was doing but didn't" isn't lovecraftian, the point of lovecraft isn't that we make mistakes and misunderstand the nature of the mythos on first encounter, it's that the mythos proves that we understood nothing in the first place, that our fundamental conception of reality is wrong. Reapers do not work like, reapers are poorly understand and dangerous, but they are knowable in the end.

People in ME don't understand exactly how indoctrination works or how to block or control it, but they understand how it works conceptually, and can even manipulate it to some extant (Lawson cracked at least parts of it, to the point even the reapers were concerned enough to run in and stop him). That is anti-Lovecraftian.

Reproduction is hardly un-Lovecraftian as a motivation either. It's base, but Lovecraftian Horrors are frequently base. The cycle being part of the life-cycle of the Reapers doesn't make them less Lovecraftian.

I remind you, you said that prior to ME3, reapers were

"beyond comprehension," terrible and inexplicable beings "without beginning or end,"

ME2 has people comprehending the reapers well enough to sell bits of them to the player as shiny new guns, and you witness the beginning of a new reaper, on top of witnessing the end of one in both ME1 and 2.

Literally the only thing that suggests the reapers are anything but big evil squid robots with advanced technology is that one conversation you have with sovereign, who is obviously lying to you even within the context of ME1, let alone ME2. And that conversation itself undermines the idea of it being lovecraftian, because you get under Sovereign's skin.

You cannot annoy a Lovecraftian god, they are so far beyond mortal concerns we're like ants to them. An individual ant might annoy you, might sting you for a bit and cause you minor pain, but it's still so far beneath you that even if it does attract your notice, you will simply squash it and move on. You won't care about that individual ant, or expend any real effort trying to kill it, or try to deduce it's motives or have a conversation with it where you explain how insignificant it is. You just step on it and be done.

 

[Captain X]

I still maintain the first game was best, though there were elements of the second game I liked. Like Zaheed.

Anyway, as for the article, I kind of skimmed it, but between their opinion on the genophage being literally wrong, because what we learned in the games themselves contradicted what they claimed, and their complaints about the fan service, I dont much care what that person thinks anyway. The issue with the Krogans makes me wonder if they actually played for themselves, or is just talking out of their ass based on someone else's description of it.

 

[Stargazer]

ME 1 also establishes that the Reapers built the Mass Effect relays - the galaxy-spanning network around which galactic civilization is based. This isn't replicable, they are the only means of long distance space travel in the main mass effect series, up until ME2 no mass effect relay had ever been damaged and they are believed to be indestructible, and in ME2 it's revealed that although they can be destroyed, their destruction will release energy on par with a supernova. ME 1 also has Sovereign and the Geth bypass the known Mass Effect network to lay siege directly to the heart of galactic civilization. Granted, we see how this works, it's a backdoor they built into the system. But given they built the system, who nobody else can understand well enough to replicate, I think this still counts.

In all three games, we repeatedly see people think that they can use Reapers or Reaper tech safely, that they can put safety measures in place to mitigate indoctrination, and it never works. There's never an "oh, turns out it was just EMF or nanobots" moment where they actually figure it out and can actually stop it happening. I don't think having characters that think they know what they're doing is un-Lovecraftian, as long as those characters turn out to be wrong in dramatic fashion, which they do in Mass Effect.

Reproduction is hardly un-Lovecraftian as a motivation either. It's base, but Lovecraftian Horrors are frequently base. The cycle being part of the life-cycle of the Reapers doesn't make them less Lovecraftian.

The relays actually are replicable. The Protheans were able to construct a one-way relay, the Conduit, and it's a key plot point of ME1.

And as Battlegrinder pointed out, there actually are examples throughout ME2 and ME3 of Reaper technology being safely reverse engineered. In the Leviathan DLC they were able to put a containment field around a piece of Sovereign to prevent indoctrination. And for all the crap Cerberus gets, they were actually successful at the Sanctuary research base in hijacking the control signal to husks, which they hoped was a first step to controlling the Reapers themselves. They were in fact onto something that registered as a threat to the Reapers, causing them to attack the research facility when previously they'd been ignoring Cerberus.

Seriously, Cerberus pretty much only had two successful projects, and those were only successful because they happened to be human-friendly *after* they broke out of control. That's Shepard and EDI.

That, and the Normandy SR-2's construction, and the research on Sanctuary, which was only cut short because the Reapers attacked, not because the experiment itself went wrong. And it's suggested that the crashing of freighters to expose pregnant women to eezo and force an uptick in human biotics was an early Cerberus operation.

I pretty much took that as the Catalyst trying to guilt trip Shepard. I know that word of dev was that the indoctrination theory was neat but not what they had in mind for canon, but it still makes more sense than anything else.

How so? Because I don't think it makes sense (or is satisfying) as things stand.

I disagree -- the Alpha Relay was explicitly shown in-universe to be a unique model which was intended as the primary invasion point for the Reapers. As such, it was vastly more capable than a normal Mass Relay -- whereas a normal relay could only connect to one other relay at a time, the Alpha Relay could connect to sixteen other relays simultaneously, and it was also capable of doing ultra-long-range jumps directly to the Citadel, bypassing the ENTIRE relay network. It makes sense that destroying this super-relay would have exponentially greater effects than destroying any other relay.

The codex indicates that the destruction of any relay would be enough to lay waste to habitable worlds in its system, not just the Alpha Relay.

Codex/Reaper War/Desperate Measures:

"Destroying a mass relay to stop the Reapers' advance is infeasible. Although it has recently been proven that mass relays can be destroyed, a ruptured relay liberates enough energy to ruin any terrestrial world in the relay's solar system. It would take too long to evacuate the millions or billions of people living near each relay, and the Council is unwilling to sacrifice that many lives when combat stands a chance of saving them. Even if a garden world were to survive the relay's destruction, the Reapers have infinite patience. They traveled out of dark space using conventional FTL--travel within the galaxy is not an insurmountable barrier. "

Moreover, in ME3 you are "destroying" the other Mass Relays via the Catalyst control network rather than via an asteroid ramming that visibly destabilized the mass relay's singularity while it was active. It's canonical that they're not completely destroyed, merely overloaded and taken offline until they can be repaired; if you have inadequate victory points, the fluff text states they were more severely damaged and required extremely extensive repairs, versus a full-points victory.

Yes, it's possible that destroying the relays through the Crucible didn't cause the same energy release that smashing it with a KKW would. In fact that was probably the intention. But it should have been made more explicit, not doing so feels lazy.

And in the original ending, the relays are shown on screen exploding, being completely destroyed (or at the very least, Sol's Charon relay is). That happens regardless of what your Galactic Readiness score is. It's only in the Extended Cut that the relays are merely damaged with the rings breaking apart but the rest of the structure remaining intact, and then are explicitly indicated to be reparable, at a high Galactic Readiness score.

 

[LindyAF]

@Battlegrinder

I think you're taking an excessively restrictive definition of Lovecraftian.

Lovecraft himself wrote several stories in which Lovecraftian Horrors fail and are injured. In both "the Shunned House" and "the Dunwich Horror" some sort of Lovecraftian Horror is implied or stated to be killed, without any suggestion to the contrary. Hell, in "The Call of Cthulhu" itself, Cthulhu is at least seriously injured.

Additionally, there are numerous stories in which occultists are able to manipulate the arcane in order to do something, as in "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," or "The Thing on the Doorstep" and some of the times this is even depicted with a science flavor to it rather than an arcane one, as in "Cool Air."

I agree that Mass Effect was not a cosmic horror story, in particular, Shepard wins against them in the first two games, and going in, Mass Effect 3 was going to have to involve stopping the Reapers on some sort of permanent basis. But the Mass Effect games did have clear Lovecraftian inspiration for the Reapers, in particular the logs of the Cerberus researchers on the Derelict Reaper, taken by themselves could basically have been made into a cosmic horror story with minimal changes and it'd be perfectly in line thematically with much of Lovecraft's work. And I think the treatment of the Reapers in ME1 and ME2 is pretty much in line for Lovecraft-inspired elements in a work that is not wholly Lovecraftian.

IMO what's revealed about the Reapers in ME2 makes them more Lovecraftian, rather than less. A Reaper essentially having a core constructed of a harvested sentient species is very much "terrible and inexplicable" and arguably "beyond comprehension" as well, because there's simply no need for something that is simply a very big evil robot shaped like a squid to have that sort of thing - there's no technical or scientific reason for it. But it definitely adds Lovecraftian themes in that each Reaper is literally an entire species, literally a nation unto themselves, and that the process for making them is so nightmarish.

So, given I think I'm taking a more expansive view of the term and considering them as a Lovecraftian element in a work that is not cosmic horror, I should clarify what would have satisfied me here. If they had kept the backstory for the Reapers pretty much the same, but eliminated the Catalyst and have turning themselves in Harbringer something the Leviathans had decided to do in order to resolve or surpass the organic v. synthetic conflict, I'd have been pretty happy with that explanation and have thought that was suitably Lovecraftian. It's particularly that the Reapers are subordinated to a newly introduced villain, which is basically just a malfunctioning VI that is unsatisfactory. Like, the conflict seems to boil down to "there was a Leviathan (or Leviathan thrall) code monkey who fucked up." It doesn't even really tie in well to the organic v. synthetic conflict themes because the VI isn't properly rebelling against it's creators, not like the Geth or the Luna AI did.

 

[Husky_Khan]

Someone on Twitter did a Thread discussing the aborted attempt at bringing Mass Effect to the big screen (and little screen) when the rights to the franchise were sold to Legendary Pictures (the Studio behind the Monsterverse) back in 2010 though apparently those rights have expired now.

 

[Captain X]

I would do a series, but I would also deviate significantly from the plot of the last two games, with only some side missions and some characters surviving from them. It would probably work pretty well to have a season per game.

 

[Arlos]

I think it might be interesting to make a series about less « larger than life » character like Shepard and co, I would be interested in seeing how normal marines live through the Geth wars, the interregnum, and then the Reapers wars, maybe with some snippet about what Shepard is doing in the background.

 

[bullethead]

Yeah, 99% of video games are a bad match for movies and a better match for TV.

You could do a murder mystery show just set on the Citadel or Illium and never run out of stories until the Reaper War happens.

 

[Stargazer]

Someone on Twitter did a Thread discussing the aborted attempt at bringing Mass Effect to the big screen (and little screen) when the rights to the franchise were sold to Legendary Pictures (the Studio behind the Monsterverse) back in 2010 though apparently those rights have expired now.

Mass Effect lead writer Mac Walters actually talked a bit in an interview about how the Mass Effect movie project never got off the ground. What's interesting is that he mentioned he thinks Mass Effect would be better suited for a TV series or miniseries rather than a movie -- which is just what the Youtube channel Lessons from the Screenplay did a whole video on recently.

 

[Stargazer]

You know how we've never gotten a space sim game for Mass Effect? Well at one point there was one in development... For the Nintendo DS. No, not 3DS, just DS.

BioWare prototyped Mass Effect spin-off for Nintendo DS

BioWare considered making a spacefaring Mass Effect spin-off for Nintendo DS.The project, named Mass Effect: Corsair, w…

www.eurogamer.net

"It was going to kinda be a combination of Privateer and Star Control," Darrah continued. "You would be independent, you'd be more like a Han Solo character, not a Spectre. And you'd be flying around, picking up cargo, exploring, and selling that information back to the human Alliance."

The project was called "Mass Effect: Corsair". If you'll remember, Jacob was an Alliance Corsair before joining Cerberus, so I wonder if this game would have involved him.

But in any case, a Mass Effect game inspired by Star Control and Privateer? Take ALL of my money! But the issue was the curious choice of platform. Mass Effect debuted right in the heyday of the DS, so it's understandable that they'd want to reach that market with a spinoff title. But the cartridge would have been expensive, and EA estimated that it wouldn't really sell well so the project never got off the ground. It's a shame they didn't just bring the game to home consoles, I feel there's plenty of fans who would love to play a full fledged Mass Effect space sim.

It does make me wonder, how many game franchises have successfully made spin off games in an entirely different genre? The Halo Wars series comes to mind, and more recently there was Gears Tactics. Studios with mascot characters tend to like exploring spinoffs. Then there's preexisting franchises like Star Wars or Star Trek that aren't married to a particular genre so are free to explore and experiment.

 

[Battlegrinder]

It does make me wonder, how many game franchises have successfully made spin off games in an entirely different genre?

Well, speaking of Halo, RTS franchise Command and Conquer did the reverse and made Renegade, a FPS set in the Tiberium setting.

 

[Pocky Balboa]

It does make me wonder, how many game franchises have successfully made spin off games in an entirely different genre? The Halo Wars series comes to mind, and more recently there was Gears Tactics. Studios with mascot characters tend to like exploring spinoffs. Then there's preexisting franchises like Star Wars or Star Trek that aren't married to a particular genre so are free to explore and experiment.

*talk about game franchises with spinoff in different genres, especially mascots*

*Not mentioning a certain Mr. Video Game, the mustachioed Jumpman, the OG master of countless spinoffs in myriad genres as the prime example of a mascot*

Son, I am disappoint.😞

 

[Bassoe]

Or at least that's my thoughts on the matter. Anyone else have a different viewpoint?

Mass Effect Four set after the Destroy ending with an exponentially reproducing horde of krogan as the main threat.

And when the opportunity arises, he gladly gives his life to put things right. When pressed on the matter he actually shouts "I made a mistake."

I never really saw him as right per say, merely heavily morally conflicted over whether the genophage was a genocidal war crime or not*, self-justifying curing it with 'we need massive hordes of krogan as a weapon against the reapers, sure they'll be a problem later but if we don't have them, we'll go extinct now'.

* It was, but it was also the only way to beat the krogan. There's probably the basis of a great fanfic in an AU where it wasn't used, the krogan overran everything and the entire galaxy is engulfed in an apocalyptic war even before a surviving turian specter finds a bizarre alien superweapon, an autonomous, biomechanical dreadnought which claims to be one of an entire species of same...

 

[Vargas Fan]

A question, I've just finished playing the ME1 Legendary Edition, and there's a planet in the, I think, Argus Rho system, Dis, and it's mentioned that there was the discovery of a derelict starship called The Leviathan of Dis that was moved to the Batarian systems.

Obvious reference to the Leviathan DLC for ME3, but was that in the original edition of ME1?