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

Raistlin Majere wrote:

vlad78 wrote:

Raistlin Majere wrote:

ZerebusPrime wrote:Windsurfing, Valsalon is correct in pointing out that using the mass relays in that way is very similar to the way we use modern telescopes (radio or otherwise) to determine the position of objects in space.  Using three hacked mass relays each in different star systems and their data sync'ed with QEC's isn't a big stretch of the imagination.  I would point out that the Geth looking through dark space to try to determine where the Reapers' were sleeping is entirely in their character.  The Heretics would want to find a replacement for Nazara.  The rest of the Geth would want to be able to at least know if the Reapers are mobilizing or not.

It would be...

if it was ever in any shape or form indicated you could use a Relay like that.

First off you would need to hack a Mass Relay, something which has eluded every race so far for all that we have ever known in the series.

And then you need to be able to use it for something other than its very specific intended purpose.

Actually we know nothing about geth real tech level. Furthermore we kept stumbling upon Geth tech devices which uses were totally foreign to us. Hacking a relay is impossible only for council species. Do I have to remind you the protheans are said to have  managed to replicate one? (even if I think the relay seen in ME1 on the presidium has nothing in common with standard relays.)

They are clearly not any further ahead of everyone else than that the Qurians can come up with a viable tech weapon against them.

And still not solve the problem of using a transport system which requires an identical or similar device at the designated arrival point as a telescope to examine something in another Galaxy.

You mean the quarians who were totally unable to reclaim their lost world for the last centuries ? It's not because the geth were not invincible and could be taken on the back foot before ME3 that they were not enjoying superior technology than the quarians. Furthermore the orthodox geth were not focused on weapon development but rather on leaving the milky way last time i heard.

Besides, this was 2185, exactly the time the reapers chose to return meaning the species of the milky way were on the brink of being able to threaten the cycles.

Eventually it is said ingame the geth 'rebuilt a mass relay and turned the approach corridor into a ftl sensor'. Now comes the interesting question, how does it work? We'll see if they give an explanation or of it is just a writer who did not take into account former lore.

OMG!  They added completely meaningless IT references in hopes that the dumber IT'ers will continue to be happy with utterly pointless and meaningless SPECULATIONS 5 EVER2?  How unexpected!

In other news: water is wet!  Fire is hot!

Rifneno wrote:

crash23 wrote:I have played 5 hours. Definitely need a new GPU in the next year.

Don't make that call based on ME:A.  Among its many, MANY failings is an incredibly poorly optimized PC port.  I've heard some reviewers say it's the worst port they've seen in years.  People with extremely high end gaming rigs can't keep 60 FPS in medium settings despite noting that the game looks like crap.  High?  30-40.  Again, for new, very high end systems.

If there's a way this game is NOT a miserable failure, it hasn't been found yet.

I can get over 30, its just.. well okay:

-DAI on my gaming desktop could go High-Ultra, but MEA is only Medium-High if that.
-DAI on my gaming laptop could go Medium-High, but MEA is only Low-Medium if that (but without the drivers out yet).

If there can be improvements to make it a more reliable High on desktop and more reliable Medium on laptop, at least a smooth 30 FPS, I'll be happy, and then just plan on getting a new GPU for desktop next year, and a new laptop the year after.

vlad78 wrote:
Go to 54:30 and see the black tendrils when SAM is establishing connection with Ryder's brain.

BTW SAM has a geth voice. Or so it seems.

Its more than that.

It can even completely change your perception of reality, up to replaying memories as if you are there. Its only restricted in how much it can and will do to you.

crash23 wrote:

vlad78 wrote:
Go to 54:30 and see the black tendrils when SAM is establishing connection with Ryder's brain.

BTW SAM has a geth voice. Or so it seems.

Its more than that.

It can even completely change your perception of reality, up to replaying memories as if you are there. Its only restricted in how much it can and will do to you.

To sum it up, the protagonist has a Cerberus designed sentient computer in his/her head which can do just that.

......and a Award for the Technical disaster of the year goes to .................................. Mass Effect Andromeda. 
By the way, I have completed the trial, boring, very boring game. Dunno, but as for now it's a disaster.

crash23 wrote:I have played 5 hours. Definitely need a new GPU in the next year.

My GPU is extremely weak. A GTX 950 with 2 GB of VRAM. Need more VRAM and shaders on this card if I want to turn up the settings past low for everything except textures and texture filtering (ultra, or anisotropic 16x). I have 16 GB of RAM, and a Core i7 2600K CPU clocked at 4.5 GHz.

It was a spare card I had bought when my GTX 670 died on me a few months ago. Didn't want to spend full price on a new card with this ancient system of mine from January 2011. It runs, but it's not pretty. Framerate goes down to 26 FPS in some areas and around 40-50 on average with these settings.

Yeah. My trial has ended with me exploring the world of Eos, and I have to turn a lot of settings to Low (on my laptop though). Kinda a hamper on the experience.

EDIT: Also, there's interesting spoilers out there.. ones that make me at least wonder if the MEA main plot structure (new worlds, new galaxy, fight outlaws, uncover ruins, stop new aliens) really is a smokescreen for something that's really up, and in the longer term, more related to the trilogy than most think.

I think a lot of the framerate issues you see are mainly from it loading things. You can see the PCIe bus usage is sitting around 33% when I took that screenshot. Mind you that's PCIe 2.0, which runs at roughly half the speed/bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 (5 GT/s opposed to 8 GT/s, and 500 MBps per lane opposed to 1 GBps).

When it wasn't loading lots of things, it was somewhat stable, but not super high either.

I have similar issues in other games like WoW. Drops down to 25-30 FPS when in BGs or in a big city like Stormwind.

magnetite wrote:

crash23 wrote:I have played 5 hours. Definitely need a new GPU in the next year.

My GPU is extremely weak. A GTX 950 with 2 GB of VRAM. Need more VRAM and shaders on this card if I want to turn up the settings past low for everything except textures and texture filtering (ultra, or anisotropic 16x). I have 16 GB of RAM, and a Core i7 2600K CPU clocked at 4.5 GHz.

It was a spare card I had bought when my GTX 670 died on me a few months ago. Didn't want to spend full price on a new card with this ancient system of mine from January 2011. It runs, but it's not pretty. Framerate goes down to 26 FPS in some areas and around 40-50 on average with these settings.

MEA has proven to be a GPU heavy game for some other questionable reasons (Gimpworks). Beyond 4C/4T the gains are not sizable with higher IPC or even more mores more threads at 1080p. Your system is not ancient, far from it especially at 4.5Ghz OCed.

GTX 950 is EOL, don't waste you money on upgrading any other component except the video card.

PCIE bandwidth usage even on PCIE-2.0 only escalates when your frame buffer size is small, MEA has some rather large sized level textures being loaded up in the VRAM of the GFx. If you have 4GB it uses upto ~3.5-3.7GB, if you have 8GB of VRAM the usage spikes above 4GB to around 5.5GB. All of this space is not used for immediate-use assets, many game developers are now using VRAM as a caching area to store data ahead of time. Actual render path usage data is typically well below 2GB but because the game's engine likes to keep things near by (improve spatial locality of future data) it constantly streams in data from the system when native VRAM buffer space is low. Increase your VRAM space and the streaming traffic frequency goes down by a lot.

If you are on budget get the RX 480 4GB ~159USD and play happily at High settings with that 4.5Ghz OCed CPU at or above 60fps. If you are willing to custom configure the graphics settings, turn down Tessellation factor in radeon settings to x4 or x8 or AMD optimized and you wont even notice a difference. Tessellation in this game is just in place to hamstring mainstream GFx cards to make a marketing push for performance and enthusiast level cards. If you have the budget for a high end you can chose between R9 Fury @ ~259 USD or GTX 1070s for ~USD 379.

Hmm. I probably should have went all out then when buying a replacement card. I guess I was only thinking about the then and now instead of what was to come.

I wasn't aware about all the stuff you mentioned about developers using VRAM as a cache.

magnetite wrote:Hmm. I probably should have went all out then when buying a replacement card. I guess I was only thinking about the then and now instead of what was to come.

I wasn't aware about all the stuff you mentioned about developers using VRAM as a cache.

Yes a lot of game developers are doing that now, what you see interms of VRAM usage is mostly never entirely for rendering immediate scenes even, sometimes never using them in rendering for hours on end. Some engines just like to stream in ahead of time and not use for like 10-15mins. Which is why AMD will introduce HBCC (high bandwidth cache controller) with RX VEGA that uses the HBM2 memory as cache and then use HDD, SSD and system RAM all as sources to stream in data as and when the game engine needs it. This makes VRAM buffer no longer the focus of importance as the HBCC makes even a 2GB HBM2 equipped GFx card perform like 4/8GB traditional card by raising the minimums by upto ~100% and averages by ~50%. However this is interestingly going to place a premium on PCIE bandwidth, it's an interesting change of software design philosophy for most game developers. Deus Ex will support this when VEGA launches, supposedly so will the new Prey game. FB 3.0 technically should get this feature up and running on BF1 due to AMD's great relationship with DICE. That however doesn't translate over to MEA by default.

Bioware have sold themselves out to Nvidia for MEA which is a shame because the so called tessellation does nothing to improve the scene it's just a lowbrow attempt to push their GTX 1080s and GTX 1080Tis to the hardcore markets. MEA according to Sony's engineers has almost double the rendering penalty vs BF1 (15.xx ms VS 36.xx ms) on the same engine. Definitely a sign of sloppy optimization or you can look at it as Gameworks affecting performance.

Spare me your space-age techno-babble, Windsurfing!

LOL sorry got carried away.

On: Gotta say the gameplay bits I've seen give me a pleasant generic sci-fi vibe. Maybe treated as a standalone game I might actually enjoy it. Animation is crappy, sure... but I like the general aesthetic tone of the game.

I'm waiting for my loyal companion Vlad to update me a little more. If the story checks out I'll play the game.

I did all 10 hours. Did not complete all trial content available, but that was somewhat by intent. At least got the prologue, Nexus and Tempest, and first bits of the first planet done.

It really does give a pleasant generic(? somewhat?) sci-fi vibe.

In the bits so far, I'm highly enjoying investigating places (no wonder a dev years ago brought up playing as a 'detective'), crafting, much of the combat, seeing how Bioware actually did take seriously keeping most of the aesthetic of previous games, and I even felt a bit of sympathy and sadness for the initial colonists. We can blame them for the silly trip all we like, but at last within the story, their data was that they were at worst going to face wilderness, some politics with aliens, and mystery, not utterly toxic planets everywhere, completely hostile aliens, and a lot of structures guarded by many powerful synthetics (which besides the geth incident, few had even seen).

There is a facial animation problem. More that it is either stuck in years ago or too close zoom in on some NPCs (like an opposite of DAI's issues for that one), than it exactly being 'bad'. Bigger problem is animation BUGS. Like a bunch at Omega DLC Aria speech level. Over 5-10 hours I should only be seeing 1-2 of these bugs maximum, aka the rare thing that regrettably snuck though ... not at least several.

The normal convos like chatting on the ship with camera rather close up - these are not bad, just underwhelming. Compared to even say ME2 where you'd talk and move around the room and make gestures. Its not abysmal, but like, a 6/10 where I'd want at least a 7-8/10 in my narrative driven games.

I made a thread of datamined spoilers found by BSNers.

So far I give it around a 7-8/10 as a game. I can't and won't compel anyone here to buy it, based on what I've learned (spoilers up to mid-game?) and played (first 5-15 hours one would play, of a 30, 50, 100 hour long game), but I also feel pretty sure that it wasn't a waste of money and that MEA doesn't at least totally waste the series. Beyond that - being better for a sale, or harming the series - that is unknown and may be considered arguably true, I dunno yet.

TLDR I'm having fun.

I remember games a few years back, the only thing that would tax your VRAM would be high levels of anti-aliasing.

Have they made many references to Shepard yet Crash? I'm assuming there would at least be a codex entry since you can pick Shep's gender in the character creator.

Eryri wrote:Have they made many references to Shepard yet Crash? I'm assuming there would at least be a codex entry since you can pick Shep's gender in the character creator.

Not Shepard directly, to my knowledge. (EDIT: Actually yes, its part of the spoilers in my other thread.)

However, there's lots of references to various things.

Its clear they're at least not *ignoring* the past. This is *not* anything like a hard reboot, and as a soft reboot, the emphasis is on *soft*. A sidestep to ME3 and the Milky Way, not totally ignoring it, and so far, looking like it could even matter more in the future (or not).

There's even references to more obscure characters like the ambassador before Udina (who was only mentioned like once in ME1 and part of the earliest of books).

Don't read unless you're really ready for it. Some I know will be totally cool with its info, while others would be enraged if someone told them before they get to play.
https://indoctrinationtheory.forumotion.co.uk/t637-major-mea-spoiler-thread

Thanks. I find that, weirdly, spoilers don't ruin my enjoyment at all if I actively choose to read them, but if someone in the room guesses a plot twist while watching a film and blurts it out I feel like throwing something at them!
I think I'll read up as much as I can about the whole story before I consider buying MEA. Some of the ones in your thread are actually reassuring- it proves that Bioware put at least some thought into continuity.

Eryri wrote:Thanks. I find that, weirdly, spoilers don't actually ruin my enjoyment if I actively choose to read them, but if someone in the room guesses a plot twist while watching a film and blurts it out I feel like throwing something at them!
I think I'll read up as much as I can about the whole story before I consider buying MEA. Some of the ones in your thread are actually reassuring- it proves that Bioware put at least some thought into continuity.

Yeah.

Spoiler:

crash23 wrote:Also, there's interesting spoilers out there.. ones that make me at least wonder if the MEA main plot structure (new worlds, new galaxy, fight outlaws, uncover ruins, stop new aliens) really is a smokescreen for something that's really up, and in the longer term, more related to the trilogy than most think.

I fully expect them to drop hints of that kind of thing.  I figure about a 50/50 chance the game will have a bunch of hints that the whole thing's in a Matrix-esque Reaper simulation.  But it doesn't mean shit unless they pull the trigger.

Of course they're gonna give us hints of some sinister unseen bullshit.  They saw how we ate it up in 3.  But unless they're willing to come out and CONFIRM stuff, then they're just baiting us for our money.  Which they'll be busy counting while they let the rest of the community, sometimes even their own grotesquely fat sociopathic community managers, ostracize us for not being retards.  That's a pretty fucking raw deal from where I'm standing.

Rifneno wrote:I fully expect them to drop hints of that kind of thing.  I figure about a 50/50 chance the game will have a bunch of hints that the whole thing's in a Matrix-esque Reaper simulation.  But it doesn't mean shit unless they pull the trigger.

Actually, the first trilogy was a Matrix-esque Reaper simulation. In my personal Scary Door La La Land, anyway.

Seriously, why do you bring this up here? I'm prepared to be affronted, go ahead.

A comparison between ten years (ME1 vs ME:A). Are they really proud of this game?

Man this game will destroy the whole ME name.

I'm like ;

The original trilogy brought you meme's such as "I should go", "Can it wait i'm in the middle of calibrations" and the infamous "Shepurrrrrrrrrrrrrd".

Enter left, ME:A with meme's such as "My face is tired" & Sara Ryder's facial animations. Bioware right now