(XL) Was the Ending a Hallucination? - Indoctrination Theory Mark IV!

SwobyJ wrote:What the hell are you talking about, Turian? At least on my part, I was addressing the Halo 4 writer being ME4's lead writer, and the possibility of there being a much greater Halo-like tone and even story then before. Maybe even elements of gameplay.

I feel the next Mass Effect may be just as shooter as before, but PLUS a much more open environment and battlefields, and less 'setpiece-y' non-combat areas.

Playing the trilogy again, it looks and feels more and more like a super limited stage of what could instead be presented as a much more 'living' world. The next Mass Effect can move towards that as a goal.

I never considered ME1 to be a huge expansive RPG, just relatively more older-school RPG than the other two games. We're certainly not getting Skyrim in Space, but I do expect much more openness than before - much of it being nearly empty (save for maybe some collection quest items...ew....) but available to zoom past on our 'improved' Mako.



So far, Mass Effect hasn't been VERY Halo. Maybe ME and Halo draw upon some similar (especially religious) artistic inspirations, but the identity of each franchise has so-far kept separate. ME3 at times does give me a semi-Halo feel, but only occasionally. But things like the High Destroy ending and the Omniblade and Glyph roaming around.. all of that rings a bell, to say the least, haha.

So what I meant by my last post was that while I have no problem with there being some similarities between two games of the same or similar gameplay and story genres, I'd be sad if things went 'off balance' and Mass Effect becomes but an extension of what Halo 4 was.
An example would be if the 'new species' in Mass Effect Next end up looking and acting very Covenant/Halo 4 alien-ish, and the so-far prominent species from ME1-ME3 get sidelined. Or if the MP gameplay ends up being as Haloish as possible while still being co-op and third person. There's a lot of things Bioware could theoretically do to make Mass Effect a Halo game in much of its spirit, but I wouldn't support such a thing, and if it goes too far, it may be enough to get me to walk away from the franchise entirely.

I understand your perspective. My money is on level design somewhere between ME1 and ME3, you won't get the corridor only 50 meters or so line of sights you got in ME3, and you won't get the sometimes long range sniping killzones you got in ME1 but somewhere in between. I think actually last gen consoles hindered the game design and level deigns of ME2 and 3, to be more linear and corridorish than ME1. If you remember it was an immense struggle to get ME1 onto 360 at 660p and 30 frames. And even then.... ME1 never held frames on 360, major dips into the low 20s and major screen tearing were incredibly common for ME1 on 360.

Therefore BioWare did what any developer would. They streamlined assets in ME2 and 3 for level design and render capacity to compensate for the 360s tiny 512 MB of RAM and 7800GT power like GPU (PS3 had even less RAM and weaker GPU and derpy cell processor tho, lol) in order to achieve a stable framerate and somewhat playable resolution for ME2 and 3 (which they did). Now tho, the XB1 and PS4 are on par with a lower end gaming pc and have 8 GB ram and 8 core CPU. Therefore, perhaps they will be able to make ME4 a larger and more open game. Hopefully they can. Time will tell.

I hope they do make things more enjoyably open, if only so I can more awesomely biotically Charge :P

Me too. I hope they keep biotic charge and CQB vanguard playstyle. Lets hope they will. Biotic charge is the coolest power in Mass Effect, bar none. It's not even close. Tactical cloak is awesome but... Charge takes the cake.

I couldn't care less about combat gameplay.

Seriously, I was always just shooting my way on medium difficulty to the next conversation as fast as possible.

So I hope the narrative, lore, and sci-fi atmosphere are as good as before. This is what defines ME for me. Plenty of shooter gameplay to go around as it is.

Ah the memories.  The expectations.  The... later realization that there really wasn't much of an Earth left to save at the end.

Say we managed to make every Reaper in the Milky Way drop dead in the ending. How many indoctrinated agents does that leave to try to fix their masters?

ZerebusPrime wrote:

Ah the memories.  The expectations.  The... later realization that there really wasn't much of an Earth left to save at the end.

Say we managed to make every Reaper in the Milky Way drop dead in the ending.  How many indoctrinated agents does that leave to try to fix their masters?

Immediately after beating Mass Effect 3 I was and still am of the opinion that the Shepard Saga needed to be at least 4 games.

Put simply, they rushed the fuck outta it.

Impending console generation shift probably got taken into consideration.

Well, I am sure we all remember BW saying well before ME3, that they had always wanted to finish the trilogy within "this" generation... :7

I am also pretty convinced that not too many weeks before recent-ish survey-oids regarding: "what N7 means to you", or: "what are your favourite elements of Mass Effect games and what would you least miss", I recall reports of tweets where biowaries spoke of playing through feature complete whitebox builds of ME4, and having their story nailed down.
I can't be the only one who believe there may have been a scratch-everything-and-try-again-from-the-beginning, and wondering whether that might be a good or a bad thing... (EDIT: Experience does not exactly warrant an optimistic inclination, though.)

Still, unanswered thought experiment.

Say the Reapers all drop dead. No further indoctrination signals are emitted from their inert corpses. Are their indoctrinated minions still indoctrinated?

ZerebusPrime wrote:Still, unanswered thought experiment.

Say the Reapers all drop dead.  No further indoctrination signals are emitted from their inert corpses.  Are their indoctrinated minions still indoctrinated?

Derelict Reaper mission in ME2 says "Serve us YES".  Even a dead God can dream...

With how literal Destroy works, it would seem that anything that carries Reaper tech in it is destroyed/made defunct. This would include husks, so I don't think Derelict Reaper applies (they're all husks, just following a more 'wild' signal from a dormant/crippled Reaper).

But yeah, I think the story didn't really address those whose organic minds were affected by Reaper indoctrination signals (at least to the point of changing their mind about the Reapers). I can't see how a stopping of that signal really helps things.

At the same time, I don't think so many people would be influenced by the Reapers to the point of being a giant threat... unless Bioware would decide to tell a story where all these people gather up together clandestinely and work to revive the Reapers, creating a future where a form of Reapers (whether they have that title or not) exists in all futures. Or rather, if we take all three endings literally, then all three endings would involve the 'Machines' - not sure about calling them 'Reapers' though, since Shepard Reapers may not be determined to be the same, and Synthesis Reapers are certainly not the same (again, if we follow the literal story and the claims that characters like Catalyst give us).

So in Destroy, 'chaos will come back' = 'there's enough chaotic factors in play that a machine threat will certainly occur, and this time it won't necessarily represent Order over the Synthetic/Organic conflict, through the Harvest Cycles, but be a return of the old problem that the Reapers thought they had the solution over'. What would make the chaos come back in short order? Reconstruction, rebirth of the Reapers, without it being The Exact Reapers (Prothians name to their destruction yadda yadda).

While I prefer forms of IT and unrealness, I can at least see the possibility of all the endings, taken more literally, creating a Mass Effect galaxy where things work well enough for a while (decades? centuries? millennia?), fulfill the words of the Extended Cut slides, but end up still blowing up in our faces.

Destroy? Chaos came back. Now we have to determine whether we can bring order to this chaos ourselves, without the Reaper solution.

Control? It was an illusion. That crumbles, and now we have to determine whether we can find a true solution over this problem.

Synthesis? It was a 'dream' (so to speak). Utter disaster occurs and we have to determine how to actually do this right and clean up the mess, ensuring the greater freedoms of people.

All may create a story that could fulfill a return of 'The Shepard' (in whatever form), 'One More Story', and while it finishes 'Commander Shepard' and 'The Reapers', we'd see a story that call back to the previous experiences whenever appropriate. The idea that ME3 was the end of a lot of things, and the trilogy format, but not of Mass Effect's narrative continuity.

Still prefer IT leaning stuff though. Just testing my imagination here.



EDIT: I think I come from the memory of Shepard saying "Nothing good came from Reaper tech." So a new game that hammers that home, even with post-Destroy in its own way (though a way of retroactively clearly justifying making that choice, even if it makes a less utopian or advanced future for a while), would be nice. It isn't technology that is necessarily evil, but the curse that the Reapers carry on with them 'taints' progress, freedom, and peace, until it is at least 'purified' (and things like a Normandy EDI and Thanx Cannons etc, may be intentional examples of that). The next Mass Effect game could be the big slap in the face to players that 'Yeah, you stopped the cycles/broke the cycle, but you never took notice that it involved the Reapers so much!'.

just finding a link between the mass effect trilogy and starkid and his peado mate at the end would be nice. it's a huge disconnect.

I still hold onto IT as being a part of a much larger gameplan here, and still do not believe a word of what starjar says. if even the best of us can fall to indoctrination, then what hope for the rest of us?

dorktainian wrote:just finding a link between the mass effect trilogy and starkid and his peado mate at the end would be nice.  it's a huge disconnect.

I still hold onto IT as being a part of a much larger gameplan here, and still do not believe a word of what starjar says.  if even the best of us can fall to indoctrination, then what hope for the rest of us?

"But Shepard is to awesome to be Indoctrinated!"



On a serious note it would be so much wasted potential to have a subtle mind control effect established for three whole games and never have it affect the main character or anyone from his inner circle in any way. It is so obvious a development, but if it never happened I can only ask the writers one thing...what the fuck?

Raistlin Majere wrote:

On a serious note it would be so much wasted potential to have a subtle mind control effect established for three whole games and never have it affect the main character or anyone from his inner circle in any way. It is so obvious a development, but if it never happened I can only ask the writers one thing...what the fuck?

^^ So much this. I mean, imagine the potential drama of an indoctrinated Shepard fighting the compulsion to kill his or her LI. Especially if whether they lived or died depended on some prior choices that seemed innocuous at the time. Such a wasted opportunity.

always thought it would be a bit of an amazeballs thing if everything you see at the end of mass effect 3 is a bit off - ie: marauder shields actually being Garrus trying to stop you going to the beam. Your sense of reality maybe altered in a way that what you see as a threat actually isn't...

Legit.

Cerberus 2.0, hehe! ;>

And yes, I took my daily dose of crazy pills...

http://forum.bioware.com/topic/544272-i-still-love-the-indoctrinated-theory-also-leviathanec-ending/

This thread needs some old school, well versed IT expertise.

wonderful.

I see the aggregate enthusiasm tank is still empty.

I just can't be bothered with BS.N dumbasses. Been there, done that, got fucking tired.

I'm just sort of done with ME right now. The other night, my friend brought up the subject of the next game, and all I could do was just spew my frustrations. Expectations are at an all time low.

Mine too. Current vibe seems to be: everything down the drain and start anew. Fuck invested players. Waste brilliant storytelling opportunities.

But... we still have very little to go on. "Have a little faith."

I'm not asking anyone to debate HYR2.0 or rewrite entire term paper treatises.  I'm just noticing that the environment is much calmer than before and that when I post IT-leaning posts in the various Mass Effect forums I end up netting "likes" from posters I don't recognize.  There's support to be found.

Consider it a civic duty to remind the community that we still exist.

.....except for TurianRebel. He's best kept as our dark, dark secret.

Damnit, I hate trying to catch up on this thread when I get lazy and forget about it for a while.

ElSuperGecko wrote:

ZerebusPrime wrote:Still, unanswered thought experiment.

Say the Reapers all drop dead.  No further indoctrination signals are emitted from their inert corpses.  Are their indoctrinated minions still indoctrinated?

Derelict Reaper mission in ME2 says "Serve us YES".  Even a dead God can dream...  

Actually, no. At least I don't believe so. A dead Reaper, a truly dead Reaper, cannot indoctrinate. Indoctrination is an active process that requires a sapient mind directing it. For example in a novel, Grayson was going to kill himself to stop the Reapers from using him. The Reapers, having some access to his brain chemistry, realized this and used that chemistry to make him horny enough to decide to go get laid first. It wasn't an automated reaction. The book was very clear: the Reapers saw what he was trying to do, thought about the proper course of action, and then took it.

But the better example is Sovereign. Countless tons of his wreckage went all over the Citadel and was taken by countless people to be examined and reverse engineered. How many documented cases do we have of people being indoctrinated by Sovereign after his destruction? Not one. There's no evidence for a single person being indoctrinated by countless tons of Reaper debris. You could probably buy pieces of Sovereign's wreckage off Mass Effect's future equivalent of eBay. And we don't have one single case of indoctrination from it. That, to me, screams that a truly dead Reaper can't indoctrinate. If Sovereign's wreckage could indoctrinate, why would it let the turians reverse engineer his main magnetohydrodynamic cannon (better known as the Thanix cannon)? Look what happened when the batarians tried to reverse engineer the Leviathan of Dis. The Leviathan of Dis, like the Derelict Reaper, was likely more of a q quadriplegic than truly dead. We don't know much about the Leviathan of Dis, but we do know that there's cut dialogue from the Derelict Reaper (the infamous "we were all Shepards once" bit you've probably heard about) and that it putting up its kinetic barriers seemed, for all intents and purposes, to be a conscious response to Shepard's presence. After all, the Cerberus science crew never encountered it. Their bodies were damaged beyond repair (or the Reapers refuse to repair their own for reasons unknown) but their minds were in-tact.

TurianRebel212 wrote:Immediately after beating Mass Effect 3 I was and still am of the opinion that the Shepard Saga needed to be at least 4 games.

Put simply, they rushed the fuck outta it.

I don't think they needed 4 games, but I do think they wasted way too much time with irrelevant stuff. Everyone's criticized 3's focus on Cerberus but a less mentioned time waster was the Collectors. ME2 was fun as hell, but honestly, if Shepard never bothered with the Collectors, how would it have really changed things? I love ME2 but the truth is that the story was fluff. The Collectors are meaningless once the Reapers invade and the Reapers will invade regardless. Hell, Shepard didn't even kill all the Collectors. If we believe Cronos to be real, then Shepard didn't even destroy the Proto-Reaper! What was the point of it all? It was fun, but they could have instead made 2 games about the Reaper war. Or even have 2 be half and half, deal with the Collectors in the first half of the game and then the Reaper invasion begins. The Collector storyline took an entire game and didn't really add anything.

I still think 2 could have been a much more interesting story (..."extrapofabulated" from a few elements that may or may not suggest something along the lines was on the cards, earlier in development), had it revolved around the isolated derelict reaper trying to get itself repaired. (No Harbinger - instead more communicative Derelict Reaper and Collectors)

Might have learned something crucial, along the way -- I guess the hard balance would have been to not make it so crucial it left little mystery for ME3.

I also can't stop thinking about Harbinger as the latest addition to reaper population, rather than the first; Made out of Protheans, and now on his proving grounds - Crucible if you will. :P
(...if for no more solid resons than only that he has the eye configuration and that tight connection with the Collectors.)