The Reapers Mass Effect
Click to expand.I'm actually perfectly happy with Shepard's story ending in three if it were to happen, by death or otherwise. But there's just not a whole lot of motivation to replay the series when the end reward is always going to be failure and a fate worse than death for the galaxy we know and love.When facing down something like the Reapers that's a perfectly reasonable outcome compared to magic though I'll give you that. While I'm not certain whether or not I'd prefer your scenario over what we got I'd sure as hell have a lot less bones to pick with it.It'd also make Andromeda a truly massive ray of hope and optimism as opposed to the kind of plot abandonment it felt like at times.
The ending is using the Citadel and Relay network to collapse the entire Milky Way into a black hole. Shepard gains the needed knowledge to manipulate the network via her experiences over the three games, and one of the main parts of ME3 is preparing an exodus to Andromeda to save as much as they can as literally the entire Milky Way is going to be sacrificed to destroy the Reaper fleet.Then have Andromeda be about the species trying to rebuild and establish themselves in a new galaxy.Have Shep die at the end of ME3 as she makes the sacrifice play. Click to expand.shrugs.I have read (and re-read) stories where the main character fails.Beyond that, the second idea did contain the option for success - it's just that success isn't defined as your Shepard and the current universe inhabitants surviving and directly defeating the reapers. Click to expand.There is no way to allow one to 'beat' the Reapers without huge alterations or stuff that feels equally as much of a Deus Ex Machina / Ass Pull.The ending of the ME Trilogy should have tied everything up, but really there's only one way it ends without extermination by the Reapers, and that's if the Reapers themselves decide not to do it.There was an old theory thing while ago that, if I remember correctly, speculated that the original story was actually supposed to reveal that the Reapers show up because when you use Element Zero you create dark energy. Which entails that only slowly killing the universe by making it expand faster and faster, but that the concentration can actually have extremely deleterious effects on your local galaxy at least. See the star of the planet you go to to rescue Tali in ME2. The Reapers show up to harvest everyone to try to stop / slow this down because they don't have a good answer to the problem.
The theory was that if you did everything correctly, then the correct ending would unlock where the Reapers realize that there is a new option and they stop doing what they're doing.But people like to come up with any theory they can latch onto to try to make things make more sense, especially since this whole theory came to my attention in the wake of ME3 when many fans were basically a flaming tornado or white hot incandescent rage. More likely Bioware didn't have a god damn clue and were just stumbling along from game to game.Personally, I think the game should have ended with you dying, and the best outcome being what eventually became the Reject / Fight ending. Liara makes an archive and stores it for the next cycle, yours goes down swinging and trying to take as many Reapers with you as possible while working to stop them from making more (depending on if you keep them as giant thermos ships full of liquid species goodness). Then, your 'post credits stinger' as it were is a bunch of military chatter near a combat zone, or maybe even the last big battle, and then you pull out slowly at first before picking up speed until you're outside the galaxy and show the shadow of several ships floating through space with the milky way galaxy in the background (you just show one, then zoom forward to show each one in the line). Then you pan and point where they're going and show another galaxy.
Cut to black and 'Mass Effect will return'. If you want to add even more emotional resonance, have the player's choices see key characters moved off the board before the end, assigned to a special project but leave it all vague. Then when you're showing the ships have lines from those characters echo.Boom.
Now you've tied this to potential future stuff, you've established that that future stuff will probably be in another galaxy, so you're not nearly as constrained story wise. You've tied old characters that people like into future games.
You've built continued narrative which was part of the core of the ME experience up to that point with the whole thing of having save data carry over from game to game and what not. Some fans will be sad or disappointing, but overall you've made a clear statement that this fight was doomed from the start, and the only way you could hope to win was to escape, and that the best outcome from fighting is just giving future civilizations better odds.Quick Edit: And note. This is what they fucking did anyway. They literally built an entire galaxy based around 'you can't win. Figure out how to anyway!' , had 3 endings where you DO win.
Then fucked off to another galaxy for the next thing anyway. Which is kind of like if Dragon Age 2 had fucked off to another whole continent where no one had ever heard of the Dark Spawn or Dragons or Mages before, but now here comes this random fleet of ships from across the ocean that arrive just as the Dark Spawn are suddenly crawling up out of the earth!
What fortuitous timing that this happened AND we brought some Gray Wardens too! What luck!:v. Click to expand.Personally I prefer the clean break from familiar characters after 3. My issue was that they left the original trilogy as a mess of dangling plot threads via the ending.Totally fine with the premise that the arkships left before the war could kick off. Maybe the Reapers have some sort of dragnet in place to prevent this kind of tactic during their genocide and that's why the Protheans never managed it? The Prothean Empire were a bunch of totalitarian bastards so it's possible they didn't send people before the war because they couldn't bear anyone being beyond the reach of the central authority.Also you just know those jackasses would try to twist the escape into some sort of biblical thing, especially after seeing the extraordinarily clumsy Adam and Eve attempt with the Normandy.
I hate Adam and Eve endings.In the end I'd prefer it if they just straight up killed everyone off as opposed to half-assing it by saying 'See, twelve people you know survived, aren't you happy for them?' Click to expand.The problem is, as noted, the game itself isn't even consistent on this point - prior to the third installment, the implication is that the Reapers primarily won against the Prothean Empire (and by extension, the cycles that preceded them) through shenanigans such as blitzing the Citadel and decapitating their leadership while simultaneously shutting down the relay network so the opposition could be defeated in detail.
Hence Sovereign's desperate gambit to personally activate the Citadel Relay at the end of ME1. Yeah it's nice to have the last laugh and all but we didn't want to defeat the Reapers simply for the sake of killing them. We did it so that we could preserve the setting we care about.I mean I'd be glad that they're finally defeated by the Spoonians of Sereaal Boll III sixteen million years later, but I really don't give a singular damn about them, their species, or their society. It'd feel like a hollow consolation prize.That'd be a pretty hard sell considering the more advanced Protheans tried it only a single cycle back and for the most part couldn't pull it off. Not to mention it's still a rather grim fate.Personally I prefer the clean break from familiar characters after 3. My issue was that they left the original trilogy as a mess of dangling plot threads via the ending.Totally fine with the premise that the arkships left before the war could kick off.
Maybe the Reapers have some sort of dragnet in place to prevent this kind of tactic during their genocide and that's why the Protheans never managed it? The Prothean Empire were a bunch of totalitarian bastards so it's possible they didn't send people before the war because they couldn't bear anyone being beyond the reach of the central authority.Also you just know those pretentious jackasses would try to twist the escape into some sort of biblical thing, especially after seeing the extraordinarily clumsy Adam and Eve attempt with the Normandy. I hate Adam and Eve endings.In the end I'd prefer it if they just straight up killed everyone off as opposed to half-assing it by saying 'See, twelve people you know survived, aren't you happy for them?'
Click to expand.I don't think ME3 being about setting up the next/a future cycle for victory over the Reapers is a hollow victory, especially if tied with Promethean and/or Andromeda style projects. At a certain point, you are fighting for more than just the current inhabitants of the galaxy.Then again (for idea #2), I think the best ending would be an inconclusive one, where you've rushed as much research as you can on the Crucible, scattered your own beacons, built your own bunkers, launched your extra-galactic exploratory fleets, mettled with the genetics and cultures of intelligent planet bound life, etc. and the end scene shows Reapers scouring the face of a planet with Shepard giving a inspiring or pragmatic speech about an uncertain future.I just don't know how that would play with fans. (Though, I don't think appealing to fans leads to the best endings.). Everyone's led to believe the Crucible is a weapon of terrifying power, it's broadcast on the news to up everyone's morale.
Everyone is lead to believe that this is an unfinished Prothean weapon that will end the war, the military believe it, the leaders believe it, Shepard believes it. When people are indoctrinated they tell the Reapers that there's this fantastic weapon that's going to ruin them. The crucible's taken to a system at the arse end of nowhere, because of course you don't want it anywhere near any of the fighting. The vast majority of allied fleets disengage with the Reapers and and head for the Crucible to protect it. The Reapers follow, intent on destroying it.Final mission it's revealed that the Crucible does absolutely nothing, it's all been a massive gamble by the council.
Shepard's mission is to destroy the Mass Relay after the Reaper fleet has arrived. It doesn't kill off the threat permanently but let's say it gives them a couple of hundred years to build up. Click to expand.Again, satisfying fans isn't necessarily the way to make the 'best' ending, even if it may be the most profitable ending. A lot of good works often don't make a lot of money, while many mediocre and/or exploitative works make a lot of money.Even Star Wars dealt with this in Return of the Jedi, and the creative dispute between Kurtz and Lucas over the direction and end of the trilogy lead to Kurtz leaving the project.
Instead of having Han dying, Luke walking off, and Leia left to pick up the shatter pieces of her people; we got a teddy bear luau where all the major characters got their happy ending. Click to expand.ME starts out seeming like a Space Opera, but has more and more Cosmic Horror creeping in as the game progresses. (We find husks, are informed about the Reapers, learn about indoctrination, and discover multiple prior civilizations have tried to stand up to them and failed. Modern civilization failing is established as reasonable outcome.)ME2 gets darker, less hopeful, and more horrific. (Shepard dying in the suicide is a valid 'canon' ending/continuity/timeline.)ME3 is perfectly setup to be a 'fading fire fighting the endless night' and 'passing the torch' type story at its outset - stories where cosmic horrors sweeping in and wiping out all life they can find isn't something that comes out of left field and is consistent with the world building. (If your Shepard died in ME2, that is be the end result for the galaxy anyway.)Meanwhile, the Starchild comes out of left field and presents you with a magic 'choose your ending' button.
Click to expand.Listening to fans is exactly how Sherlock Holmes got 'resurrected' after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was tired of the character to such a degree that he killed him off. Listening to fans may be good for the pocket book, but it isn't necessarily good for a creative vision.I like the saying 'Fuck fans.' When asked to write for them. Doesn't refer to hating fans. The idea is that creating a good work should be the focus - and you can't do that if you are worrying about what the fans think and want.As for ME3 specifically, 'Pick a button' ending systems are bad. This was also a problem in Deus Ex: Human Revolution.That's a whole different kettle of fish than leaving the future bleak or uncertain.Works with a single ending are fine.Works with multiple endings that take into account your cumulative actions/decisions are fine.Works that have multiple endings where the endings all determined by the very last button press/dialogue choice/action are bullshit, especially if it comes out of no where.
Such systems devalue and undermine the rest of their stories and the experience of their storied in ways that even singular nihilistic endings do not (as such endings can reinforce a message or theme presented earlier in the work).Now, fans may not like unhappy endings - but that doesn't necessarily make them bad or even worse than fan preferred endings. I always felt like Mass Effect was aping Star Trek (I mean, it absolutely was, but I focused on it more than other inspirations). The reason Shepard was the hero isn't because they're the greatest supersoldier, but because they knew how to talk to people- whether it was with intimidation or diplomacy.That's why the real enemy, the final boss of the trilogy needed to be The Illusive Man. In true Star Trek fashion, the reapers couldn't be beat, but the technomagic of the Crucible could shunt them off to a lifeless space-between-spaces. Something something element zero, something something dark matter.Get Jacob and Miranda swayed back to his side- make him into Shepard's perfect foil as someone who can handle any situation with a gun or words. Set up the central theme around the people, rather than the Reapers. They're a Cthulhu-esque swarm.
They can't be dealt with with any of the tools Shepard has, so inventing something for Shepard to talk to isn't the solution. The conflict should be over when The Illusive Man dies. Everything past that is resolution. Make Reapers 100% background elementInstead, the series focus on spy drama between the Citadel and the buffed up Terminus Systems under a cold war. The Reapers are now similar to Mythos stuff from Charles Stross's 'A Colder War,' a subject of study by shadow elements in both governments as they unravel ancient eldritch technology to gain an edge over each other.
They're revealed in an ominous questline rather than central part of the plot for the first Mass Effect.Sequels probably deal with conspiracy within the Alliance. And instead of Cerberus being this Cobra-esque super-terrorist organization in Mass Effect 2 and 3, we get it being the official black-ops branch of the Alliance with the nasty stuff sanction by the upper-echelons. Think stuff like CIA and Contra coke trafficking.
Except with sanity-scrambling artifacts research involved. Renegade and paragon choices would see either Shepard taking over the organization for the greater good or exposing the crimes done by the Alliance's higher-ups at the cost of humanity's political progress in the Citadel. Click to expand.ME2 starts out with you dying.You are then resurrected by a xenophobic humanity-first terrorist organization. Cerberus is Evil with a capital ' E'.If she's alive, even Ashley, who is the member of your crew most likely to be sympathetic to Cerberus, thinks you've gone off the deep end.You're not on an uplifting 'get the crew back together again' mission. You are on a suicide mission - which is labeled such by the developers.
ME2 is largely Seven Samurai meets Cosmic Horror in space - and (spoiler for a 60 year old movie) most of the samurai die.Most of your old squad mates aren't interested in you. Kaiden and Ashley are either dead or will have nothing to do with you. Wrex isn't willing to join you either (if he's alive).
Liara is willing to help you a bit if you help her - but she's not rejoining you. Sure, you can recruit Garrus and Tali - but I think the only reason Garrus is available is because he's utterly run his life into the gutter, is an utter failure, and is already on his own suicide path. (He can't hack it in C-Sec or as a Spectre, regardless of how you try to have influenced or assisted him prior to the second game.)Most of the crew are new people you don't know, and are the 'dregs' of society. Many of them are criminals. Mirranda and Jacob are part of an Evil organization.
Zaeed is, at best, an amoral mercenary. Kasumi is a thief.
Thane is an assassin, who is dying, lost his family, and has nothing for which to live. Jack is a highly unstable criminal who has been subject to extensive scientific experimentation and abuse. Mordin is a brilliant scientist and spy who has done horrible things, including experiments on sentient subject and genocide. Grunt is a basically a super soldier created by Krogan first/purity extremists. Sure, Samara is good.
However, Morinth is literally the Asari version of a succubi, and you get to choose between the two of them. Legion is maybe the best out of the bunch.and that's all before you get to the plot itself.
Instead of having just a couple of indoctrinated agents to deal with, you are facing an entire species that has been indoctrinated. You find that, despite your prior efforts, the reapers are still on their way. Even worse, they are building more of themselves - by abducting and liquefying humanity to become one of them.Plus, a legitimate (and conclusive) ending is that Shepard dies on the suicide mission. One of ME's canon timelines for players is one where Shepard doesn't survive the end of ME2. Click to expand.I'm also big about the light just being extinguished, but this cycle could be the big finish. The story could be about building the Crucible and then pressing the button. However, you then have to decide what the button does and make sure it doesn't feel like Deus Ex Machina.Also, if you want multiple endings, you have to make sure that they don't stem out of a last minute decision upon activating the Crucible.
If you want the Crucible to potentially be used in different ways, you are going to make an extensive amount of post-activation game where you are actively using the Crucible to engage in some sort of effect - which may or may not make sense depending upon how you are going to frame the Crucible.I just tossed out two possible option off the top of my head. I also tend to favor the Cosmic Horror over Space Opera, but there are a lot of options you could do. Click to expand.Was the ending actually true to their artistic vision?It is not uncommon for individuals to claim that parts of a work people don't like is setup that way due to the creators' visions. Sometimes this is true, sometimes this is an excuse to deflect criticism. Without being the creators, I can't speak to whether this is true or not.However, to the best of my knowledge, having everything come down to a last minute conversation with a Star Child/the Catalyst/the Intelligence who masterminded all of the reapers activities was not in sync with the original vision, nor is it particularly thematic. It is way to comprehensible, small, and personal for something aiming for a grand/cosmic horror. Click to expand.Michael Bay is an amazing auteur.
Are The Reapers From Mass Effect Real
His work just also happens to be horrible and yet manage to appeal to a large number of people.That said, I stand by my comments about focusing on creating a good work as opposed to pandering for fans. The world has plenty of entertainment options. More works exist today than I could ever possible consume.
In my opinion, it is better to try (and possibly fail) for a better work than to create an adequate (or even good) pandering work.Then again, for reference, I really liked The Last Jedi (which is my second favorite Star Wars film to date) and don't think very highly of Return of the Jedi. The beginning of ME2 always stuck me as a bit of a bizarre method to achieve what it was after.Yes there was also that terrible things but the resolution to most of it ended up with the characters moving past their bad decisions to redeem themselves and become better people, maybe even fixing their past mistakes.Maybe it wasn't the writers intent but the whole theme of 2 felt to me as though it was the easing of burdens. Of coming to terms with the past and moving forward without regrets.As for Morinth anyone who chose her pretty much deserve what's coming to them, and if they die at the end it basically had to be of their own free will because it's just not really that possible to ruin your situation that badly without that being your deliberate intention from the outset. Or being absolutely genre blind I suppose.I won't say it can't be canon but it'd require Shepard to be pretty incompetent the whole time to the point s/he might have just been worthless in ME3 even had they survived. You're absolutely right.
The Crucible as a whole was poorly thought out and needed to do something way more interesting. If it needed to exist at all.We could have been trying to puzzle out the actual purpose of it at some point rather than just 'we don't know what it does but be we'll throw all of our resources into it out of desperation'Throwing in the MacGuffin at the last game without buildup or foreshadowing was a bad idea as well.Also I guess I'm the other way around since I prefer space opera over cosmic horror. If I remember correctly the whole fiasco was as a result of the lead writers going into a locked room, nixing whatever the whole team had planned and writing their own without any outside input. The Starchild, the colored endings, 'Tell me about the Shepard' lines, and attempted Adam and Eve bullshit. If that's true you could basically call it artistic vision run wild without any checks or balances on it. Getting high on their own perceived 'deepness'.But once you're in the last ten minutes of the last game of the trilogy I feel like it's a little late to start trying to make some sort of big artistic statement without screwing up your own plot.
Or changing the primary conflict from galaxy vs reapers to organic vs synthetic. Not to mention it's highly inconsiderate to everyone else working on the project to simply discard their effort.Also I'm not going to begrudge you for your personal taste, that'd just be rude.Edit: Not going to available for about two weeks after this but it was a good talk. Click to expand.Get rid of the Catalyst, as others have mentioned.I would write ME3 as being all about the Crucible. As is, it's just a magical deus ex machina that gets discovered, gets built in the background regardless of what you do in the game, and then goes off with, again, you not really doing much with it.
Instead, I would make the Crucible the centerpiece of the game-not just building it, but learning about who created it, what its purpose is, and how it works.As it turns out, the Crucible was designed by the Reapers. It is the instrument by which the Reapers harvest all life in the galaxy.
When activated it extracts the mental data and genetic information of every sentient being in the galaxy and merges it all into a new being, creating the cores of the next Reapers. Each cycle the people of the galaxy, facing what they perceive as an unstoppable threat, pin all of their hopes onto this one miraculous superweapon that they don't understand and don't know the origins of, only to engineer their own destruction.The worst ending is when you complete the Crucible without discovering this and activate it.The bad ending is when you only find out after completing the Crucible, leaving you no choice except to simply not activate it. But this means you have to fight the Reapers alone with no deus ex machina, and so eventually ends the same way.Then the good endings will be when you make the right choices and have enough success that you discover this earlier, leaving you with time and options to change the Crucible. This leads to a crisis of faith; everyone's been pinning their hopes on this one superweapon, and now they discover it was all planned by the Reapers from the beginning. This is Shepard's time to stand up and show off his charisma, inspiring the entire galaxy to cast off the strings the Reapers have been puppetting them with this whole time.
One ending might you have activate the Crucible to create Reapers with their own will that turn against the others, wiping each other out, thereby sacrificing yourselves but saving all future life in the galaxy. The best ending might go on a questline to find the Leviathans who will teach you to alter the Crucible so that it works as you first thought it would, and destroy the Reapers.The Illusive Man would play a similar role here in that Cerberus would try to present a 'truth'-in this case, that the Crucible is a trap. But because they're indoctrinated and no one trusts them, they do so by attacking the Crucible, and in doing so only serve to convince everyone else that this is truly what they need to save them. Then in some playthroughs where you deal with Cerberus early, TIM can be the one to reveal that the Crucible is a trap, but it'll be up Shepard whether or not they want to believe him.It's better than all the 'lol everyone dies Reapers win' endings in this thread, anyways.
“This isn't war. This is judgment.” — Captain AmbroseThe Galaxy is built on a cycle of extinction. For an undetermined length of time, possibly since the beginning of it all, a struggle has gone on between organisms, and machines. The, apex of evolution and existence, the most powerful beings in the known universe, harvest us for reasons beyond our understanding. Every 50,000 years, a civilization rises to its zenith and is destroyed. Nobody knows why. At first it was believed the Reapers did this so they can harvest our genetic material to substitute for Reaper reproduction, but this is not so.
Reapers leave behind a vanguard, if that vanguard fails, they create a new one, the real reason probably equates to something having to do with metaphysical essences. A theory is believed to exist that says the Reapers are actually metaphysical beings trapped inside metallic shells, literally a spirit inside a machine. Perhaps the Reapers' technology and nature blurred forming a second nature, they became so dependent on technology that they became it, and over many millions of billions of years they became something else, so far along the path of a new evolution, they cheated death, lived for so long they could not remember what they once were, they could not fathom ever once being mortal, or ever having a beginning, so they could not even begin to imagine having an end.
In order for their metaphysical energies to survive and live, they must prey on the energies of others, and this requires the energy of an entire galaxy. This is only theory, however. The battle came to its highest point, when organics had the best chance to defeat the Reapers in 50,000 years. Every 50,000 years, the forces of the Milky Way come closer to defeating the Reapers. Thecame the closest, now, a decade until the 23rd century, the civilizations of the Galaxy have a fighting chance.The Eden Prime WarThe short but bloody conflict known as The Eden Prime War, is a series of battles named after its place of origin, a human colony once known as, where an attack instigated by a rogue council spectre by the name of, led to an intergalactic battle with the arch-nemesis of thepeople known as the. This led to the induction of into the spectres to pursue Saren. The conflict took place over a period of time slightly longer in length to the, only more lives were lost.
Saren and his flagshipwere the two most powerful forces during the conflict. Shepard's search for Saren took him to, and finally a capitol of the ancientempire. Over the course of his investigation, Shepard learned that this wasn't about humanity fighting for survival, but it was about all races of the Galaxy, and that this wasn't Saren trying to destroy humanity, but the fate of all Galactic civilizations was at stake.Shepard learned that thewas in actuality a single massive relay which led to dark space, a location where the sentient machines, known aslie dormant, those responsible for the demise of the Protheans, and all of those before them. Shepard battled against Saren and several of his henchmen, eventually even battling a powerful asari matriarch. However, the most startling discovered he makes, is that Sovereign is actually not a ship at all, but a Reaper vanguard left behind to activate the Citadel relay.
Target The Reaper Mass Effect 3
Shepard and his team then managed to track Saren back to the Citadel through a backdoor known as 'The Conduit'. Saren has now almost been completely indoctrinated, but Saren eventually overcomes the indoctrination, and kills himself. Shepard finally faces off against Sovereign controlling Saren's.
When the Systems Alliance Arcturus Fleet arrives and saves the Council, Shepard destroys The Avatar, momentarily stunning Sovereign, allowing Alliance Ships, including Shepard's ship, the, and 's, the, to deal the killing blow to Sovereign once and for all. The Reaper threat has momentarily been stalled, but not for long, as a few months later, a new threat surfaces, known as.The Collector CrisisTwo years later, 2185, Shepard, who was among the KIA list of the SSV Normandy, is reanimated by the black ops division of the Alliance gone rogue, known as. This does not change Shepard's grudge against Cerberus for the deaths of his unit on Akuze, in fact, it makes him even more angry, the fact that they would not even consider his feelings towards them. It just made them seem all the more soulless. Nevertheless, Shepard reunites a majority of his original crew, with a lot of new faces, and manages to build up the loyalty of his team.
Shepard manages to acquire a Reaper IFF, Geth Technology, and discovers the Collectors, the ones behind the attacks on Human colonies, are in fact re-purposed Protheans for use as husks by the Reapers. They also discover upon entering the Omega 4 relay and boarding the Collector Base, which just so happened to lie at the galactic core, that they were building a new Reaper to replace Sovereign.