That's a bloody risky move if that is true about the ending, draconian

 

Personally, I found The Arrival to have a one of the clumsier retcons so far in the series. ME 1 established Mass Relays as so indestructible that a supernova didn't even scratch one, just moved it a bit out of place.

Then The Arrival comes along and says that really they're easy to break; all you have to do is hit it with a big rock. The only explanation for the change was "Well, nobody wants to admit that relays might be breakable, so nobody's ever tried to damage one in the last 50000 years." Um ... what?

As for the other subject, ME 1 did have Vigil say that the extermination of the Protheans took centuries. As LittleBlackGoldfish said, having an empire that been around for tens of thousands of years wiped out in a couple centuries is practically overnight.

On a totally unrelated note, I tried out the multiplayer just to get my war readiness up. Wound up having more fun than I'd expected to.

 

Draconian, iirc the kid at the start isn't playing with a figure of the Normandy, just a generic Alliance fighter. I'm pretty sure because I remember recognising it from the art book that came with the CE. I think there might have been a trailer though that had a little girl playing with Normandy figurine.

 

It's just an alliance fighter. The trailer you're thinking of is the Take Back Earth trailer.

I've been playing multiplayer pretty much nonstop. Beaten Gold on every map and against every enemy. Probably going on close to 100 Gold matches won at this point.

If anybody wants to do some Gold runs on XBL just send me a friend request, Dr Strange Lulz. 74k credits every game is rather nice.

 

To be fair, there's a significant difference between what a Supernova does and what an impact from an asteroid does. A supernova is mostly deadly deadly radiation whereas an asteroid is kinetic energy. Still, some other explanation would have been better.

 

Yes, it also would have been nice if the destruction cinematic showed the asteroid moving faster than ~10 miles per hour. I actually lol'd when I watched this gigantic rock inching toward the relay and demolishing it when it should have just nudged the relay out of place at that speed.

 

Good point about the toy, still think he's not real because of the other scenes with him. Its definitely risky, but there's a lot to point to it in the game.

Spoiler

Another detail is the rachni describing the reapers' interference as a black oily song(can't remember the exact wording) and doesn't that sound like the black shadows and sounds in the dream sequences?

To me the single most convincing point is the location of the secret conclusion of the red ending. The core points of the theory haven't been explained away by the doubters in a 200+ page thread, instead the argument is whether the writing left massive oddities in the last 10 minutes or if the theory's correct. The argument against it is centered around real world concerns, not in game facts. The kid being completely fake is my own interpretation, not the dominant theory.

Spoiler

Most think the kid's real, dies, and then the reapers prey on Shepard's feelings of guilt by using the child's image in the dream sequences and indoctrination sequence.

Something else to bear in mind that I just thought of: if its real instead of in his head, the soldiers on earth shouldn't be shown cheering, wouldn't Earth be destroyed considering that the sol relay just got blown up? Perhaps my impression of the entire system being destroyed is wrong but it was my understanding from Arrival.

 

Oh fucking Christ. Fucking Walmart. My copy got delayed ANOTHER week and I only found out by fucking calling them. God damn.

 

Even if it was moving that slow, and I doubt it was, K = .5mv^2. It still transmitted an unfathomably high amount of kinetic energy.

 

Yes, but these are the mass relays we're talking about. They're supposed to be so close to indestructible that no one had managed to destroy one in the 2500+ years since the Asari and Salarians (the first interstellar civilizations in this cycle) started using them. And there definitely would have been attempts, since every species in the ME verse has had their fair share of terrorists, traitors and splinter factions. I could accept it if they had depicted the impact at anything close to a realistic velocity, but instead we got this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyM_IEpkI2Q&feature=related

 

^ I really wish they had found a more intricate way to do it than "fly a big rock at it."

Finally started playing. Not sure how far in I am, but I'm about to investigate an Asari colony and I have something with the Quarians and Geth waiting in the wings after that. Avoiding spoilers has been hell.

 

Not to mention the Rachni Wars and Krogan Rebellion, both of which got very, very desperate for the Citadel races, and could have easily been ended by destroying the Suen/Tuchanka relays.

Even leaving aside the fact that destroying a relay annihilates the system it's in (which could be all kinds useful for a ruthless warrior race like the Krogan or Turians), the tactical advantages of destroying relays to restrict enemy movements during a galactic-scale war are so incredibly obvious that it's rather boggling to suggest nobody ever tried it in all the thousands of years of Citadel Council history.

 

I mean, the Turians were worried about Krogans destabilising one of their moons and forcing it to hit Palaven. I'm fairly sure they even said in the codex crashing asteroids into planets was a favourite tactic of the Krogans (or am I just imagining that?) Surely the idea of crashing an asteroid into a mass relay for a massive, system destroying explosion and cutting off the enemy entirely occured to someone if such strategies were already considered.

I was right. Quote from the Mass Effect wiki which is generally pretty reliable.

Bullshit they never thought to crash one of them into the Mass Relay near Palaven. Apparently the Turians were also known for using them on Shanxi in the First Contact War.

 

This is a universe where ramming planets with superluminal spaceships is a thing that you can do. Hell, let's ignore that. This is a universe where Mass Drivers are the preferred form of weaponry. How the fuck had no one blown up a relay at some point in the last few thousand years?

 

Is there anyone on here that's playing this on xbox and hasn't beaten it? I'd really like to check something but don't feel like deleting my save file.

 

Not necessarily. They still have FTL travel, it would likely just delay them until they manage to make there way to another 'close' by relay. The closest one to Sol is only like 30 light years (Arcturus if I remember correctly) which is only a couple of days in game.

 

The races just use the Relay's. They've never really understood them correct? What's to say destroying one wouldn't activate defense measures on the others? Or shut down the network entirely?

 

That didn't seem to stop Shepard. I don't remember much of the details of Arrival, but they seemed fairly sure in their knowledge of what would happen. I could be wrong - as I said, I don't remember much - but there wasn't much evidence to suggest anything other than a relay being destroyed and likely exploding big time would happen.

Also, found a great article that express my opinion on why the ending is bad. Obviously, spoilers. http://www.gamefront.com/mass-effect-3-ending-hatred-5-reasons-the-fans-are-right/

 

True, but losing their home system's relay is still a big hit to Rachni/Krogan ability to keep their forces mobile, makes supply lines much harder to manage, etc. Plus, it would mean the only planets they could threaten until/unless they capture another relay are systems within reasonable FTL distance, instead of being able to threaten anything connected to the relay network. Much easier to defend every system within 100 light years of Tuchanka than every system/cluster connected to the relay network.