Yeah, no. I consider that non-canon at best.

 

It's poorly handled canon. ME3 decided to make the plot center around why the Reapers are doing what they are doing. The problem is, the Reapers are a Lovecraftian threat. They are scary precisely because we do not know why it is that they are doing what they are doing. They are sentient forces of horrifying, unnatural disaster. Their comings and goings may perhaps be charted, like the ebb and flow of the tide, but their empathy is the empathy of a hurricane, their logic the logic of stone and aether. They cannot be comprehended. They cannot be reasoned with. They cannot explain themselves. Your methods of communication are too inferior to do anything but scream as they descend upon you.

You do not try to explain Cthulhu, because the explanation for Cthulhu is not the point of Cthulhu. Cthulhu, like all Lovecraftian horrors, like the Reapers themselves, derives it's sense of fear and terror by exploiting the primal fear of the unknown. The uncomprehending. It is the cold chill that creeps up your spine as you begin to notice the titanic shadow that falls across the land. It is the vile rebellion of the mind against impossible geometries, the whispering madness of words in languages you do not know and yet can read.

Reaper technology should not have been replicable. We should have found Salarian scientists dead after having tried, their wrists cut by their own hands, and impossible, nonsensical mathematical equations scrawled across the walls of their laboratories in their own blood, trailing off into manaic scribblings in languages they did not know in life, old tongues from dozens of species across the galaxy. Quarian engineers who hung themselves after ripping their suits off in a heedless, psychotic frenzy. Entire Cerberus cells compromised and forced to be purged for collapsing into anarchy, blood-orgies, and gibbering madness.

Leviathan should have followed the same pattern. Do not show or reveal. Imply. Innunend. The monster is always more frightening when it remains unseen. The terror always far sharper when the bulk of the work is left to the imagining of the observer.

Leviathan should have ended in true Lovecraftian form. With implications. Do not show them. Do not reveal them. Imply their existence. Allow the viewer, the reader, the watcher, to infer that yes, the Reapers do indeed have their origins. That there was once a species born into the galaxy that indoctrinated all other species as part of their natural biological processes. That they were worshiped as gods by trillions, and that they enslaved galactic empires to their unfathomable whims, culling the species of sentient life, reshaping them with technologies beyond our feeble capacities. That it was they who constructed the Reapers, for purposes and reasons unknown. And it is from their works that an uncountable legion of sentient life has been cut down from the heights of their civilization, that it was from their hands that an endless cyclical genocide was born.

And that they may yet lurk in the dark corners of the galaxy. Watching.

Waiting.

Controlling.

And the DLC ends as the ship takes off. And far beneath the waves on that forgotten and unimportant planet, where only Shepard dared to tread, a shadow the size of a mountain moves in the abyss.

 

Why does it feel like I'm the only one on DLP who actually really enjoyed ME3 and its story?

 

If it makes you feel any better, I often feel that I'm the only person who has ever heard of Bulletstorm.

 

That all seems a little... much. I would prefer some concrete explanations about the Reapers actually as opposed to never finding out. Just explanations that don't suck.

 

I probably should have been more clear about what I meant, I never meant to imply that it was the big problem with the game or even the entire conversation with Starbrat. I was specifically talking about how he says that synthetics will simply destroy organics at some point in the future if you choose destroy and only that point. If you fail to make peace you lack a solid example of it being wrong so its more difficult to challenge and thus doesn't come off sounding quite as dumb as it does if the Quarians and Geth are getting along.

In terms of keeping the Reapers mysterious I felt like it would have been preferable but that ME2 made it fairly clear that that's not the direction BW was taking things. The amount of smack talk that Harbinger engaged in in ME2 never really fit with the Cthulhu like impression of the Reapers that I got from ME1.

 

Man... someone needs to make a game out of that Lord Raine.

 

It's all personal taste, but that's kind of my point. There is no explanation that could be given that would not suck, or seem stupid, or wankish. Anything you could come up with would either diminish them, or make them seen too over-the-top.

What would you do? "They built themselves." That's just dumb. "They've always been there." Logical fallacy, the Reapers aren't gods. "Something created them." Why? For what purpose? Genocide? Are they just delusional machines of war? Were they peacekeepers? Living repositories of information that went wrong?

Some of the possible explanations are interesting, but I find it far more interesting if it's just left open to speculation, and never explained at all. Because the story was never about "who or what are the Reapers." The story was "how do we stop the Reapers." Their identity and motivations never actually mattered.

 

Yeah, Mass Effect 1 and 2 seemed to fit that model pretty well, which really increased the scare factor. Especially since, you know, they can break minds simply by being present. Hell a "dead" Reaper still destroyed an entire Science team.

 

Why? It makes sense to me. It's clear they view becoming a Reaper as a form of ascension. Once their plan was revealed in ME2 I thought it was logical to assume the Reapers started as a species that artificially evolved themselves into a "higher plane of existence," who would then grant the "gift" to others who they viewed had earned it.

 

They couldn't have built themselves, because that makes no sense. Do you think I'm referring to self-replication? No, that's not it. I mean "the Reapers made themselves."

Unless you're divine, you can't make yourself. Nothing making itself into something is an illogical, inherently spiritual concept, and while there are definitely settings where giant robots can will themselves into existence, Mass Effect is not one of them. The Reapers aren't gods.

 

Oh, you meant in a "let there be light" sort of way. Seems I misunderstood.

 

Because those endings kind of ruined the story that it was building, as well as the last 2 games.

 

It's ok, I enjoyed it too, for the most part. The endings were rushed, but the basic idea behind the Starchild wasn't that bad, and if it had been introduced a game earlier, it would probably have worked much better.

 

The problem with ME3 is Bioware did not think things out for ME3 even as late as The Arrival DLC.

ME2, or at least the DLC for ME2 should have been more about catching the characters up on the info gap between what the gamer has experienced and where you want to take the series. Simple things, like having Liara discover something about the Crucible or speculate about the Starchild in her conversations or in Shadowbroker data. Or more ambitiously, take the ideas behind the Arrival and the Leviathan DLCs and combine them into an epic hybrid mission that bridges that gap.

But instead we got nothing. The DLC doesn't even matter in the end; not even increases or decreases in readiness points. Its because Bioware didn't know where they were going to take the series in the long term. That is why, it seems to me, ME3 plays better as a stand alone game, rather than part of a connected trilogy.

 

You know what irritated me? That they dropped the "Cerberus is secret Alliance Black-Ops that went rogue" thing from ME1. There was some lore that supported it in 2, but for the most part, they phased it out completely, which is a terrible shame, because it had a lot of potential for drama and conflict, and added some much needed blurry grey to the black-and-white.

For instance, using the ME1 timescale, instead of the revised ones for 2 and 3, Cerberus was still firmly an Alliance project when Jack was kidnapped. So the Subject Zero experiments were all originally sanctioned by the Alliance brass, until that got retconned.

There could have been so many awesome cloak-and-dagger implications done with that, but it got strangled in it's cradle.

 

I finally got around to playing ME3 over Christmas break, so my super-late and probably stated a million times thoughts:

1. ME3 felt kind of unpolished from the gameplay side, and the story in general was a bit on the railroad-y side. I understand that properly representing all the permutations of story choices players made in the first two games would be a ludicrous proposition but it was still disappointing.

Tuchanka and Rannoch were the high points- even though I honestly did not like most of the actual gameplay in the Rannoch arc in particular.

2. Didn't like the whole deal with the endings, to put it mildly. Didn't like the fact that you almost had to play the (underwhelming) multiplayer or buy DLC to get a non-almost everyone dies style ending if you pushed the big red button and killed the Reapers. Didn't like that the ending as a whole was a blatant ass pull, with special mention to options B and C (Control/Synthesize).

If you're gonna pull the curtain back and "unmask" the villains, you had best have a damn good explanation handy.

ME3 didn't. Unless you honestly think a deus ex machina counts as good storytelling in which case fuck you you tasteless cunt.

It's silly, trite, stupid, and I hope Bioware learns something from it and does a better job of storytelling in the future.

I didn't much care for the game in general, it felt sort of like Knights of the Old Republic 2- I got the feeling that a ton of intended content for the game was cut out due to time constraints or something.

Overall: It's mediocre. I couldn't ignore all the chatter on the webs before finally playing it, so mediocrity was pretty much what I expected.

/shrug

 

Eh, it wasn't that hard. I played though my first time pre-dlc and before I played the multiplayer and still got the "good" ending. You just have to talk to everyone, which is how it should be.

 

Just in case any of you still managed to cling to some shred of hope, or were otherwise feeling slightly guilty about hating BioWare, allow me to go ahead and drop this right here.

The cliffnotes:

Bioware has stopped listening to fan feedback, because they've convinced themselves that the dislike and hate is all coming from a vocal minority. They've written off BSN as being a "hive of toxic emotions," in spite of it being probably the last pro-Bioware bastion on the internet, and the developers freely admit that they no longer frequent there or listen to anything the fans have to say, because it makes them "feel bad about themselves."

They do not believe that the hatred of the Mass Effect 3 ending, the general dislike for all of Dragon Age 2, and the heavy criticism leveled at TOR is at all representative of a general opinion, and thus, will be ignoring said opinions, and all similar opinions, from here on out.

And so it came to pass in those days, that the final shit given evaporated, and there was not one left in all the land.

Bioware is going to die, sink, and be forgotten, and at this point, I think they thoroughly deserve it. I no longer feel sad about nature taking it's course. It's done now.

I don't give a damn if Mass Effect 4 has giant robots and Dragon Age 3 gets rave reviews. Unless they announce KotOR 3, I'm never buying from them again on general principle.

 

Eh, I'm not a fan of Gaider by any means but I feel like you're being a bit too critical based on that interview alone.

Normally I'd be right with you in condemning any developer that didn't want to look at their own forums for feedback, and I still think what Gaider is saying is pretty stupid especially considering his reasoning is "it hurts my feelings". However, I am willing to give Bioware devs a little leeway considering how fucking retarded most people on their forums are. An overwhelming amount of discussion there is shit.

To be fair, Gaider also made sure to mention he looked at other places on the internet for feedback, which probably isn't a bad thing considering you'd probably get some much better criticism from any number of places other than BSN.

But yeah, Gaider is still kind of a fuckwit for ignoring feedback from some of Bioware's most ardent (if often stupid) fans because it hurts his feelings. A lot of his comments make it sound like the response to DA2, ME3 and TOR weren't as bad as they actually are, and I'm not sure whether he actually believes what he's saying or he's trying to save face, but I hope he isn't as ignorant as he comes off as.