Since the Mass Effect 3 thread in games is probably not going to handle this, I've decided to link most of the things said there, and continue here.

In summary, there are heaps of crossovers and straight re-imaginings, where Humanity meets Turians on a different ground, having a different First Contact War, usually showcasing the newly introduced human superiority.

Otherwise, there are but a couple of fics where there's either a different war, or a contact handled differently (Maybe someone knows some unmentioned examples?).


My position is that there need to be three vital parts for the alternate First Contact Scenario to work.

1 - Interesting set up.
Humans activating a relay and running into Turians has been done to death. We need more variety.

2 - Involved parties must be somewhat related to our known characters from the game.
Be it Wrex at almost any point in human history, or simply Ashley's father General Williams, the First Contact scenario's usually fail with a huge number of OC's we're supposed to root for instead, where we want to see known names.

3 - Impact on Shepard's timeline.
It needs to be set up or shown. Most stories flop if they don't focus on it, or if they choose to present the period before Shepard in greater detail. It usually is not what we want to see.

Thoughts?

 

My thoughts are that you keep ignoring the fact that I was talking about contained stories that start and end with the first contact. That's what started this in the first place.

Not every story told in Mass Effect needs to be about Commander Shepard.

 

Hmm.

I'd say, Not every story told in Mass Effect needs to be about Commander Shepard, but it needs to be about Mass Effect.

There's that moment of recognition that requires either Shepard, or well, whoever damn well you want that was established. I keep mentioning Wrex. Have Wrex involved in some sort of crash landing/chase after some bounty or other (if set years in the past to fuck things up ever more, you could even have Aria). I would read the shit out of Wrex chasing Aria over some minor earth colony/or even on mars/closest ones, while first dismissing the locals as stupid primitives, but learning of humans and how they work. I'd even promote the angle of human determination, and while most would prove doormats, I'm sure some could prove Wrex they are even worth respect.


Hah, how long ago was their encounter anyway?


You could throw them to the age of sail to have an entirely different first contact from most. (Like that Quarian Nazi story that I keep seeing mentioned but will probably skip on reading.)




I've just realized that while I jumped to examples I never did provide justification for the opinion. I believe that if you take the personalities out of the Mass Effect universe, it becomes something else. It becomes a stock sci-fi with a slight twist.

Otherwise, if you focus just on the first contact scenario, you forget one other thing that made Mass Effect into Mass Effect. The Reapers.

And without the Reapers and lacking recognizable, established names*, leading the narrative we get a stock sci-fi first contact story. And while these can be either good or bad, I don't think it qualifies as a Mass Effect fic. We would venture into simple First Contact story discussion.



*Leaving but cliche sci-fi race archetypes for major organizations. Also, via Geth unity one could argue that having any Geth is akin to having an established name on board of the story (Legion), so I'd kinda give them that.

p.s. (edit)
Talking aliens, I'd say Rachni would be an interesting choice. Finding an apparently sentient, very much alien race could be an interesting, if potentially very dangerous path for humanity in it's fledgling state.

 

What I would like to see in a First Contact scenario, is humanity meeting an alien race that is actually alien. With aliens that have (at least somewhat) different values and goals than we do. With both sides having trouble understanding each other (I'm not talking about communicating, but about understanding.) For them to have some trouble cooperating, even though they want to in principle, because of those differing values.

Most of the races in Mass Effect are still just different looking humans. (Although they went to more effort than Star Trek did.) I'd guess that most meetings of different cultures in real life (in history) involved people who were more alien to each other, than the usual parties in a First Contact story are to each other.
That's kind of lame.

Rachni would indeed be interesting, although you'd have to be careful to not just reuse the plot of Ender's Game or Starship Troopers.

 

If you want to get a grasp of first contact with truly alien species have a read through the Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier series. I'll spoiler because it's a sequel series (also pretty major spoilers):

Spoiler

The protagonists make first contact (kinda) with a species they call the Enigma race, which are ugly, aquatic creatures that value privacy to the point where they destroy any ships, colonies or cities that look like they're about to be visited by an alien race in order to keep their secrets. This even extends to the knowledge of what they look like; the only reason the humans know what they look like is from a composite sketch of a dead Enigma that tried to escape before his ship blew up.

Another race they meet evolved from herd animals and one of the first things they did upon gaining sentience was to kill every single predator on their home planet. They don't communicate with humans or any other creature; their first action upon seeing the human fleet enter their sector was to launch a barrage of missiles as big as battleships (piloted by the Kicks, as they're called) from an orbital fortress akin to the Death Star in size.

The final race, and the only one to actually attempt peaceful communication, are described as 'spider-wolves'. They're hideous to our eyes and their perspective seems to be based on the idea of patterns. They also put great store in respecting the dead. Long before the series started one of the first experiments in FTL travel went wrong and the pilot/ship was lost to 'jump space'. It eventually came back to reality in spider-wolf territory and they treated the body with respect.

When the spider-wolves meet the human fleet they insist on sending a delegation to Earth in order to bring the body back to Kansas, his home.

I'd recommend reading the Lost Fleet and its sequel anyway. They're decent time wasters and one of the better attempts at envisioning space battle with ships that can move at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.

 

Let me be perfectly clear, then.

I don't want to re-write the entire plot of Mass Effect. I don't even want to rewrite the entire plot of the first game.

What I'm talking about are first contact scenarios, and that's it.

You don't need Commander Shepard for that. You don't need a timeskip forwards. You don't need anything of the sort. As long as the story maintains the thematic premise and aesthetic of Mass Effect, it's a Mass Effect story.

You can't argue that anyone who writes a first contact fic should be required to drag shit out until Shepard can poke their ass into it. No one should ever feel obligated to force a story to stretch beyond the point where it was intended to end. Again, I would much rather have a fic that spends ten chapters on detailing an interesting first contact and then ends than I would see a fic where the first contact is meh and then the whole story shits itself as it tries to fill in ten years worth of information by dragging on for two hundred pages and talking about things nobody gives a fuck about.

If you want to write about Shepard, then write about Shepard, and leave the First Contact Timeframe out of it. If your world is sufficiently AU that it deserves an explanation, then you can do so through end of chapter Codex entries, if it's even necessary to do so.

You do not, and should not, have to write a first contact story with the assumption that you will continue to expound upon it until Shepard can come into it.


Also, I don't know who linked The First War, but holy shit don't read this. It sounds like it was written by a twelve year old. "Humans are tougher than Vorcha, stronger than Krogans, have a better military than the Turians, are more advanced than the Salarians, and are more clever and cultured than the Asari."

No. Just, no.

 

1)Batarians.

2)Jack Harper.

3)Write the impact this has on Shepard's timeline in a sequel if you want to, but first contact stories can be standalones imho.


A batarian first contact would probably make humanity as a whole less accepting of aliens (Cmdr Shepard a Cerberus Agent? As in, a Shepard who actually believes in the whole 'Humanity First' thing), and setting up for a nice Free For All when the Reapers come back after 50k years in dark space.

 

First contact with Batarians could be awesome, but brings back too many Renegade Reinterpretations flashbacks for my taste.

 

To be fair, if you want an adversarial relationship between humanity and the Council and Citadel space, there aren't a whole lot of options to work with. The Turians and the Batarians are basically the only two major species where you could easily see shit realistically going completely sideways.

It would take a hell of a lot of finagling and effort to make a first contact go sour with the Salarians, or the Elcor, or the Asari. Most possible scenarios involving them having a bad first contact involve outliers from Council society, like Dr. Saleon, and those kinds of situations would easily be resolved just by the Council saying "those were pirates/renegades/criminals, and not representative of the rest of us. Thank you for bringing them to justice, and we apologize for any damages or lives that may have been lost. Here are reparations, we are sorry. Please come over to the Citadel and we can talk peace and trade."

If you want a non-peaceful first contact scenario, then the Turians and the Batarians are by far the path of least resistance to take. Even without any modifications to the canon, the Turians did start a war with the Alliance during first contact, though it only lasted a few days and the Turians didn't really take it seriously. There are factions in canon that used that to argue that humanity should be independent.

It wouldn't take too much of a push to make it escalate. But it does need a push.

 

I was going to post this in the other thread:

Renegade Reinterpretations fucking sucked pretty much right from the start. Really poor execution even before it started going all faux-historical documentary, and Batarian-First-Contact is actually kind of a dumb idea unless you have a slavery fetish.

Also, gonna agree with Raine about First War. It's dire. Much as I love playing X-Com, any intelligent species that is sufficiently advanced to traverse the stars as the ME races do would richly fuck up a ME-less humanity unless you give us tons of implausible future toys (which the aliens in X-Com explicitly set out to do, it bears mentioning)...and the author unfortunately did. Also, the author made all the Council races fucking retards. So there's that, too.

e: Also, Quarians. Freaking quarians. Really. Why not just go whole hog and have Geth first contact? Or Elcor/Volus? Those would at least be amusing.

 

Well, I started once with a kind of first contact ME story.

The idea was this: humans still haven't colonized worlds or even reached Mars, for that matter, but they developed advanced enough tech to pick up transmissions from the Citadel races (news report, TV shows, etc.). This naturally had an impact on Earth.

Let me see if I can find the snippet I wrote on my hard drive...ah, found it!


___________________________________

Excerpt from “History of the 21st Century - A Time of Change”

“Since the first time humans looked up into the sky, the question of whether we were alone in the universe was asked, contemplated and theorized upon. Dreamers and scientists both tried to find an answer - without success. Over the years, many science-fiction authors wrote about how First Contact would take place. These visions ranged from a peaceful meeting with aliens that looked upon humans as friends, to malicious fiends from outer space, come to conquer and subjugate humanity.

In the early, first half of the twenty-first century, Earth was developing along lines that had not much to do with space or aliens, for that matter, at all. Most of the world was recovering from a huge economic recession, during which space projects, especially, were either given up on or their budgets cut massively. With dwindling reserves of fossil fuels, increased numbers of natural disasters and growing tensions in Africa and the Middle East, the nations of Earth concentrated on finding better energy sources and attempting to keep the peace, such as it was.

Companies, trying to make profit and escape the last problems of the recession, turned towards the only market that was steadily growing in spite of everything: computers and communication. In a computerized, net-worked world, where fast data transfer was essential for the success of a business and was in high demand by the billions of people surfing the ever expanding internet, it was perhaps the irony of Fate that humanity stumbled upon the answer to a question that had been asked for so long, completely on accident...”

________________________________________

Jack lit another cigarette and inhaled the burning smoke of that damn thing. He didn’t even like smoking, nor did his wife - she always urged him to quit - but the damn things were unfortunately the only method for him to control his frayed nerves. In several moments, he and his team would know whether Project Hermes was the great breakthrough in communication technology or just another dud.

“Three...two...one...systems online,” the operator calmly commented, his fingers dancing over the keyboard. “Accessing sub-space, sending data...data received, twenty percent faster than we thought!”

The room spontaneously erupted into loud cheers. Jack sighed with relief, a smile beginning to form on his face. His job was safe, the gamble worked. Hermes was operational!

“I’m picking up interference!” And everyone suddenly fell silent, the tension from before returning.

“What interference?”

Jack moved next to the operator, bending down to look at the screen.

“It’s on a lower frequency. Give me a minute.”

The cigarette was almost burned down, so Jack put it out in the ashtray, licking his dry lips.

“Ok, I have it. Transferring it onto main screen.”

It wasn’t much at all. There were flashes of color, but, mostly, whatever it was was too distorted to make out.

“Right, people: I want to know what that is and where it’s coming from!”

Jack clapped his hands, gave those few who looked reluctant an icy glare and went to get some coffee. Several hours later, the ashtray on his desk was full of cigarette butts, his coffee cup was empty and he was desperately trying to apologize to his wife for not being home yet.

“...you should just find another job! Do you know what this does to our family?”

His wife’s voice began to grow shriller. Jack lifted the phone away from his ear and exhaled another puff of tobacco smoke. The headache that had been growing all day wasn’t getting better.

“Are you listening to me?!”

“Yes, dear.”

“Don’t `yes, dear` me, Jack! And put away that cigarette!”

How did she always know when he was smoking? Fortunately, before he had time to think of a reply that wouldn’t put him even further in the doghouse, the door to his office banged open and a disheveled Timothy ran in, his eyes wide and his expression reminding Jack of the carp he had caught on his last fishing trip. Which probably wasn’t a good thing for a human.

“Jack! You have to see this! Come on!”

“Something urgent came up, dear. I’ll call you back later.” Jack put down the phone and rose, following Timothy out of the door.

“You have results then?”

Timothy nodded, his carp expression still on his face.

“It’s...I...you have to see it for yourself.”

Once more, the team stood in front of the big screen and waited. After several seconds, some kind of movie began to play. Science-fiction, from the look of it. Blue alien chicks in entirely too form-fitting jumpsuits were fighting together with anorexic E.T.s against some monster lizard things. In the background, some kind of futuristic shuttles were flying around and things were exploding. The camera was constantly jerking from side to side and people were yelling in a strange language. Chinese, probably, thought Jack and turned to Timothy with a frown.

“You have dragged me here to show me some Chinese sci-fi B-movie?”

Timothy shook his head.

“No! No! This is our interference!”

“So you mean that the Chinese are bombarding us with bad sci-fi? I’ve heard that the Chinese Flying Dagger Project was coming along nicely, but not this well!”

“No! You,” Timothy pushed a hand through his hair; his other was waving in the air, “you don’t understand. I traced this signal. It’s not coming from Earth. It’s coming from outside the solar system. It’s extraterrestrial!”

As Jack sank down into a seat, his eyes locked on the screen, there were other reactions around him. Some people gasped, others denied the possibility. A few exclaimed their enthusiasm or fear, while a dull thud probably meant that Jennifer had fainted. She was like that.

Jack lit another cigarette, then tilted his head. The blue alien babes were kinda hot. Huh.

 

Well, I'm writing a Halo/ME AU fic, where the ME-verse is split in to multiple factions and undergoing several galactic wars. Human task force slips in during a Quarian Principality-Turian Imperium firefight and draws attention from Quarian cleanup forces after the Turians made a tactical retreat.

 

>Atri - I'd read it

Here are two communities on FF.net that deal with first contact -

Alternate First Contact War

Mass Effect: First Contact Alternate Universes

This is one of my favorite settings, it'd be fuckin sweet if this thread spawned some good stories.

Edit - I find it funny that was your 314th post Mutton.

 

Man, a Geth first contact story would be a really interesting change of events, if not only because it sets the newly spacefaring human race up against the Council races (and thus requires them to really rely on the Geth), but the amount of change you'd see when you have humanity really adapting to AI tech.

 

Volus First Contact. Bow to your Volus Overlords!

 

It's been a few days since I commented.

I rethought most of the things I said, and I should say that I agree in a sense that I over-focused on the Shepard. So yes, there is definitely a story possible without any links with Shepard whatsoever. You won. Or something.



Still, as a personal thing, I would keep looking for those changes. I don't need Shepard mentioned by name, nor seen in action, but I need to have that small bit that lets me imagine how different her story would be. It's why I think I read most fan-fiction. Change form cannon and how it happens.



On distant "first contant" via extranet - it would be an interesting concept. Especially if Humanity has the means to get the feed, but cannot get past a couple of half-active relays. It would have them fishing for information on activation, debating whether activating them would be a crime against the citadel space, of whom they know only what extranet tells them. Meaning everything and nothing.


As for Volus, I figure a new race isn't as financially beneficial to Volus as old ones, although they could see a benefit of outfitting humans as an additional safety measure next to turians. Although that is debatable, since human and turian fighting capabilities are not yet measured.


Returning to Geth or Rachni, both of these first contact have a potential to make Humanity an enemy of the citadel space by association. And where alliance with Geth would prove very interesting, it would be the Rachni that would call for blood faster. After all, Geth never threatened the whole Citadel Space, only Quarians.

Hah, I don't even know which choice is better.

With Geth, you could have a something of an interesting question for humans down the line. "Nazara offers to spare Geth if we join his eradication of all organic life. All viewpoints must be considered. You have perspective we lack. Consensus will be achieved as data is disseminated. "

With Rachni, the period until the test subject becomes a living, sentient race. The whole transition would be exciting. And then, meeting the Citadel races would be a topping on the cake.


Both Rachni and Geth have means to kick-start human infrastructure into high gear. The question is, would it be enough to make an impact, and how little would it prove against the Reapers.


Following a popular theory, both these races fall outside the great Cycle of the Reapers, as they developed not fully along the lines of the imagined theoretical progress, although this point could be refuted - We both have no information on Rachni spaceships or ftl capabilities outside mass relays, and the Geth have basically Quarian tech with upgrades.

 

You forgot his Mary Sue Self Insert McGraw. Why the Alliance even condones to let that clownshit dumbass go on galactic television and make humanity as a species a laughingstock, I have no idea. Any reasonable organization would have chained him to a desk in an underground laboratory and never allowed him to speak to anyone who wasn't explicitly hired to be his handler or babysitter.

It doesn't help with how he's described. Messy and dirty and unwashed but still incredibly handsome and attractive? Tall and athletic even though he sits on his ass all day doing fuck-all? A tattered lab coat he wears everywhere that he made sleeveless by tearing them off himself?

Son, that's a fucking Capcom character, straight up. That's somebody you would pick to be on your team in an arcade fighter. Why is this in a Mass Effect story. Why is this in a Mass Effect story. Why is your tourettes syndrome infallible genius Capcom vs SNK character in SHITTING MASS EFFECT.

I read that fic all the way to the end. McGraw could do no wrong. Ever. Motherfucking Benezia wanted to jump his bones after having a single conversation with him that couldn't have lasted more than six minutes. The only character who ever hated on him appeared in the very last chapter, and listening to her internal monologue for five seconds makes it clear that she'd bare his children at the drop of a hat if he ever asked.

This is a person, singular, that is guilty of what Halo's Office of Naval Intelligence collectively were. And ONI are fucking assholes.

Fartburger doesn't know what the hell he's doing. His characters are terrible, and his writing completely falls apart the instant it stops being a quasi-documentary and starts being something that actually requires individual characters talk to each other in a somewhat natural or organic fashion. If First Contact War was supposed to make me want to read his sequel fics to find out what happens next, it has miserably failed in every possible manner.

I choose to not read his surely halfassed interpretation of Commander Shepard for the same reason I choose to leave Ashley on Virmire.

Because I like Ashley and Commander Shepard, and I know what's going to come next. I know that only terrible things await in the future. You had thick power armor, wore your hair in a purely practical style, used a shotgun, and had a surprisingly deep conservative worldview that made several good points about the benefits vs drawbacks of human independence in the face of mass integration with aliens who cared little for our culture and cared even less for our well-being in comparison to their own.

But I know what lies in your future. Screaming hissy fits, unreasonable emotional outbursts, long flowing hair that goes down past your shoulders, breast implants, and a skintight catsuit that looks so thin that couldn't possibly offer a soldier any sort of protection even as a makeshift condom.

A well written female character was reduced to a sex toy blowup doll. Ashley from the first Mass Effect would have ruthlessly mocked the person she had become by the time 3 came around. An impractical slutty 'elite operative' that doesn't understand the value of high-impact ceramic plates and obviously got their position by virtue of what passed under a commander's desk, and not what passed over it.

And so she dies. As a mercy, she dies.

Commander Shepard died too, at the end of First Contact War. I like to imagine the driver that came to pick him up for the SPARTAN program that Fartburger cleverly disguised by scrubbing all the original names off (because it's not like loads of people have played Halo and recognize what the fuck he's doing, or anything) took Shepard in their car and then promptly drove off a cliff, killing them both in a sudden spectacular fireball. The end.

Humanity having a Geth first contact, the real Geth, not the heretics, would be extremely interesting. The Geth destroy all ships that enter their space as a matter of course, but if an unknown contact were to appear from an angle that isn't known to have anything on the other side, the Geth might hold their fire.

Organic species don't have the same wants and needs that synthetics would. A mutually beneficial relationship would have a lot to offer both of them, because humanity and the Geth wouldn't occupy the same niches or be interested in the same types of resources. They could freely share notes without compromising themselves. The Geth don't care if humanity takes the garden worlds, because the Geth are perfectly happy living in a computer floating in the vacuum of space. Humanity wouldn't care if the Geth were interested in harvesting extremely rare and niche minerals and chemicals to help build and maintain themselves, because humanity doesn't have to worry about keeping a bunch of synthetic bodies running, and doesn't have a use for those materials. The Geth don't care about volunteering for hazardous or awkward manual labor because they're machines. They'd happily mine out Sol's asteroid belt for free if they got to keep a percentage of any specific mineral they prize above everything else in there, and since they don't have anything like an economy, they'd happily hand the rest over to humanity, netting us hundreds of billions in raw resources.

Humanity and the Geth could just putter away for decades in their own little shared corner of the galaxy, growing wealthier and more powerful without anyone being the wiser.

Then the inevitable Second Contact happens, and the Citadel races are thrilled to find a wealthy, culturally affluent, scientifically advanced species just hanging around a stone's throw away. . . and then they find out that we're best friends with the Geth. They find out we've been co-existing peacefully with them for almost a century. Working together with them. Helping each other grow stronger.

What would they do? Would they denounce us? Declare war against us? Reconsider their position about the Geth? Try to sever ties with us and pretend to the rest of the galaxy that they'd never heard of us before?

It could be a really interesting take on the Mass Effect universe, because it would directly challenge the highest seat of political, cultural, and military power by rubbing it in their faces that they were wrong about something, re; their stance on Artificial Intelligence.

Wouldn't it be interesting if, in a political move to make us look bad for befriending the Geth, they offer the Quarians a homeworld and a place in the Citadel, to the tune of "it wasn't your fault the evil machines rebelled, and it's long time we corrected an ancient wrong?"

I kind of want to see this, now. Or write it.