No they don't. Especially science fiction games that are deeply interested in all things science. Also Common Sense is such a misnomer. I could easily state that it was common sense that lead me to believe Joker had picked them up and they were ordered to retreat because we'll thats happened before. Not only do we know that's reasonable because of what I suggested above, we also know it's reasonable because that's exactly what turned out to be true. Joker was ordered to retreat. Their for my assumption is not only likely it's entirely reasonable.
Or space magic. Tell me that's a more or even equally reasonable assumption.
Last edited by Glorious Leader; 2012-08-04 at 11:33 AM.
IIRC it makes a new dna in the universe. I can't remember exactly the kid explains it. Frankly the star child doesn't have any past experiences so it's hard to make reasonable assumptions about anything that he says or does. Joker however has picked up people plenty of times before and retreated from situations before so that's reasonable. What any of that has to do with the price of tea in china I'm not sure. I maintain that since the most likely answer was that joker had picked them up and ordered them to retreat, it was reasonable to assume that was the case. Bioware is not Hideo Kojima and they weren't going to turn the game into a VR sim.
So if you acknowledge that an assumption isn't reasonable because it turned out to be accurate (Occams Razor not withstanding) does that mean you actually think their is such a thing as a reasonable assumption?
Last edited by Glorious Leader; 2012-08-04 at 11:45 AM.
He says it combines organic and synthetic dna.
Right.
The reason to believe they weren't ordered to retreat is where would they go and for what reason? This was the last attempt for breaking the Reapers and you already have all the forces there, what would be gained from retreating other than giving the Reapers more time to manoeuvre and cripple more infrastructure.
Tbh the whole game is pretty weak story-wise, sure it has some brilliant emotional moments but with them squabbling over every petty thing while the Reapers fail to notice all the fleets and resources massing in one place and side missions reduced to "go pick this up" a 28 hour (my only completed save, did everything I could find (minus 1 geth mission that I didn't do to try and not kill them... which resulted in no peace, awesome) and didn't rush it) on-rails shooter feels pretty distant to the roaming of ME1.
Last edited by mmoca4abc3a051; 2012-08-04 at 12:03 PM.
Synthesis ending is still space magic. The science in Mass Effect is still grounded in real world science, except for a few specific things, which have been explained extremely well since the first game. The synthesis ending is illogical, and Space God basically says a whole lot of nothing about it in the extended cut. And really, no explanation can ever be sufficient. An energy pulse, no matter the kind, even a Mass Effect field, cannot change DNA, and even if it could it wouldn't matter because there's no way the targeting could be that precise that it could rewrite things on the atomic level.
Basically, think of it like this. You have a really fucking big shotgun loaded with microchips and copper wire. You shoot this at someone. It does not turn them into a cyborg. Instead, it gets microchips and copper wire stuck in their now very dead body. It's just not possible. And even if it was, what are the odds that each piece lands so correctly that it just happens to turn the person into a working cyborg. Ridiculously unlikely, but not impossible if it was possible in theory. Now imagine that you must shoot hundreds of trillion of people with this shotgun, all of different sizes, shapes, and chemical makeups. And you must perfectly turn everyone into a cyborg on the first shot with no failure rate.
It doesn't fucking work.
Hardly. The game is excellent story wise and IMO a return to form. Da2 and Swtor weren't that amazing from a story perspective and it's in part because the characters lacked any sense of being full. In Me3 the characters are at their richest and fullest. As for "petty squabling" did you expect every race to forget about old hatreds and egos just because the reapers come? No. Plenty of examples in history were people will turn on each other when the shit hits the fan and not unite to fight a cause. Don't forget the citadel had denied the reapers existence for years and for alot of people the war simple hadn't come to them. One of the characters mentions this on the citadel. I can't remember who. He says it's like the war hasn't come here and that's a fairly common feeling even in life today. Baudrillard had insisted that desert storm hadn't happened for that very reason. It was a virtual war on TV where the american people and the west didn't feel it one bit.
A contingency plan was in place perhaps? No commander worth his salt goes into this thing without having some sort of back up. Even if that was the case do you think Hackett would simply order them to simply just stay and die? I mean Javik managed to survive isn't it likely that Hackett ordered them to retreat because he knew some of them would survive.
---------- Post added 2012-08-04 at 12:08 PM ----------
I doesn't fucking work so long as you have no imagination or ability to suspend disbelief. You accepted that a man came back from the dead and fell from the sky and wasn't completely vaporized or disintegrated by the atmosphere of the planet. But now you have seeming incredulity and can't accept a merging of man and machine.
Last edited by Glorious Leader; 2012-08-04 at 12:12 PM.
The answer to just about the entirety of the internet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWdd6_ZxX8c
That's all.
I have the ability to suspend disbelief. I simply refuse to in an otherwise semi realistic setting. I had an easy time accepting the Lazarus project because of 3 factors.
1. We don't know the temperature, pressure or gravity of the planet Shepard fell to.
2. He was wearing a suit of shielded body armor. Though his suit depressurized, it was still partially intact. You even find pieces of it on the Normandy crash site. This leads me to believe that the armor was good enough to keep his body from being mangled beyond recognition. It's also not that uncommon in science fiction in general. It's happened several times in Halo, with the person inside the suit actually surviving. Having read Fall of Reach helped a lot with my suspension of disbelief on that one.
3. It showed him being brought back. They made this huge deal out of how they spent an asinine amount of money reconstructing Shepard from the ground up.
I can accept a merging of man and machine. I cannot accept a merging of man and machine via what is essentially a giant canon that causes a giant galaxy wide explosion. The two events aren't even remotely comparable.
And please don't insult my imagination or my mental capacity in general. There's no need to turn this into poo slinging.
Last edited by OrcsRLame; 2012-08-04 at 12:19 PM.
I said the story wasn't at its best, not the characters.
In ME1 you could roam entire planets, finding lost artefacts and well hidden side missions (there's an alliance listening post one I particularly like because of the skybox). The game lore was either spoken about right there or in LOTS of codex entries.
In ME2 I felt for my first couple of plays that there were basically no side missions, until I scanned pretty much every planet one playthorugh and found nicely linked small missions with news reports added in once you did them, sure you couldn't roam planets like in 1 but having the ending truly effected by what you did felt so rewarding (or devastating ).
In ME3 there's a handful of isolated missions where you land that are basically used to introduce the MP map of them, all other side missions are 'scan planet and return item for 5-25 EMS', it would feel much more whole if during Earth you got to see something of what you had gathered, it's a wild example but getting those dinosaur things for the Krogan to ride, then only seeing about 12 Krogan receiving a speech in a courtyard and pre-rendered cinematics of them getting shot feels disappointing.
Someone being completely killed, being a "pile of meat a tubes" after falling in a fully intact (minus life-support) suit designed to protect the user then being rebuilt over 2 years with virtually unlimited resources is a stretch, but a long way from an energy wave turning all life in the Galaxy to cyborgs in 2min.
It's not an insult, I just have a hard time accepting people who think that a man can fall from orbit, withstand atmospheric re entry without being vaporized and being essentially brain dead for god knows how long and still be brought back. The two events are indeed comparable, they both stretch the bounds of reason. In one case you would accept it in the other not so much. Merging of man and machine is also not that uncommon in science fiction and done with even less credulity than in Mass effect. In Dune at the end for example Erasmus just sticks his hand inside Duncan Idaho and they become one. He's granted control over the thinking machien army. If you can rationalize the brain dead man who survived atmospheric rentry are you sure you can't rationalize synthesis?
---------- Post added 2012-08-04 at 12:27 PM ----------
The characters are a central part to the story of mass effect. Indeed they've always been. In mass effect 3 however they take a much bigger role as you do all sorts of side missions for them and you come across them at all times during the game. Add to this the fact that they move around the ship and give it a really organic feel and have all sorts of neat interesting conversations. The game was really well written. I agree the side missions weren't as good because they more or less revolved around you running and dropping things off.
Last edited by Glorious Leader; 2012-08-04 at 12:30 PM.
Personally I don't feel that the slightly larger role the characters hold is worth losing the expansive feel of a Galaxy to explore.
Sure Ashley/Tali being drunk was funny, but if that's what makes a game then I don't think I can continue with them.
After watching the "making of Mass Effect" in the classics version I bought after I lost my original I was excited as hell to see what they could do after more time to push the hardware, expecting something more along the lines of a spacey-TPS-DA:O than a Gears of Space with more character emphasis and slightly more freedom.
Yes, I'm sure I can't rationalize synthesis, not in Mass Effect. We don't know anything about the planet Shepard fell on. If the conditions were right, I could survive a fall like that in one of our shitty modern day space suits. It's all about the temperature, the gravity, and the pressure. What if the planet was cold enough to freeze his body, and low enough gravity that terminal velocity for an average Human is like 5 MPH, with only 20% of the pressure of Earth. Very plausible that his body would be intact.
And since his body wasn't vaporized, rebuilding him was comparatively simple. DNA lasts for about a million years in genetic material before it decays completely. If someone was willing to fund it, we would be damn close to being able to clone Shepard in real life if we had that kind of remains. With tech vastly superior to our own though, and infinite money being thrown at it? Sounds perfectly plausible to me. I have never had a problem justifying the Lazarus project. Even years later, having thought about it considerably, still sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
I have never read Dune, so that example doesn't apply to me. I mentioned the Halo thing because I actually knew about it at the time when I first played ME2, so I made an immediate connection with the event. That sounds more like 1980s mystical sci-fi to me though, not modern sci-fi heavily grounded in science. And I doubt that would make sense to me unless that was just like a thing in Dune. But then I would consider Dune an unrealistic setting, so it wouldn't matter. With Mass Effect, I have always considered it as grounded in realism to a point.
Like in DC for example, the Anti-Life Equation is WAY more bat shit crazy than anything in ME. Quick crash course. The Anti-Life Equation is the evil half of God's mind, and it is a literal mathematical equation that when recited by Darkseid transforms everyone in the universe into his slaves, and then it turns Darkseid into a god and starts merging all the different realities of the multiverse so it can all explode in one giant orgy of death. And this is stopped by Batman who in the future goes into the past to leave a message for his present self that explains how to defeat Darkseid.
That shit's okay in DC though, because in DC there's always some unrealistic bullshit evil god trying to start the apocalypse crisis of infinite doom and jaffa cakes. Simply put I expect more out of Mass Effect.
Well, actually
http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Alchera
:3
Lower Gravity/Pressure than earth and likely landed in snow...
Still unlikely to survive in any way but I feel it's at least a remote possibility, unlike suddenly inventing new rules for the Mass Effect universe to work on with the space wave :|
(Although it's entirely possible Shepard landed on one of its moons instead)
While synthetic ending may or maynot be entirely possible for whatever reason, I still feel like its the best ending. To me, Control ending feels like you're a huge fucking hypocrit after all the talks with the illusive man. Destroy doesn't feel any better because why do the geth/synethics have to die because one group of synthetics fucked things up for everyone? While Synthetic takes the choice out of peoples hands in becoming part robot, I'm not killing anyone and I'm creating a peace of sorts without sacrifice. Also if I recall correctly star child mentions that eventually we'll all end up part synethic anyway so I'm just hastening the process, but I might be wrong about him saying that.