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

i think the essay in general makes some very very good points. yes you can argue that some of his points may be a bit over the top or irrelevant to certain things, but if you take the games literally then the game series did fall apart well before mass effect 3 in the writing.

It's an interesting read indeed. Particularly the stuff that shows that everything we did in ME1 and ME2 was just for nothing, because the Reapers could just fly over here.

The longer you read into the posts, the more you start cratching your head. The plotholes in this thing are just insane.

The point is, I don't care about plot holes. I don't notice them because they don't matter to me. I guess I'm a "drama-first" kinda guy to use this guy's own terminology (as opposed to "details-first").

When you have to read something like this after finishing the game, to even start noticing these plot holes, the whole point is already irrelevant, right? It was fun while you played the game, using only your "on-the-fly" analysis, and that's exactly what these games were made for. Not for thorough analysis like this guy's as if you're treating reality. Because you're not.

I agree ME2's opening is the biggest WTF of the entire trilogy... far bigger than ME3's ending. It's so obvious it must've been done on purpose, and ME2's start is also the main reason I ever got myself involved in Scary Door teachings. I won't bother you here with that (but do notice Mordin's quote in my signature).

So there was no reason for ME2 to have happened. So what? It was fun, that's reason enough. The guy is constantly berating BW for introducing new plot elements. Since when was that illegal? I for one am glad ME2 had a shift in tone, same for ME3. Keeps things fresh. He's treating the trilogy like a single story, but it's actually 3 different productions, deal with it.

This is just my 2 cents, of course. I've never been known to have a very general opinion of computer games. But I just don't understand the high regard people hold ME1 in. It's a nice game, but inferior in every possible way to its successors if you ask me. Just because it's the first game doesn't make it any better, which is actually the kind of reasoning this guy is using. He's just hating sequels, not ME2.

I think most people here are details first.

Otherwise we would have missed the details.

I'd say I'm themes first. Most people here are, I believe. Boils down to noticing those details that are needed to make the drama work.

Okay, now I'm talking out of my ass probably.

the more I get into this essay the more i'm liking this dudes approach. some of the questions he asks are bang on the nose.

I'm gonna keep on reading till the end.

smash016 wrote:When you have to read something like this after finishing the game, to even start noticing these plot holes, the whole point is already irrelevant, right? It was fun while you played the game, using only your "on-the-fly" analysis, and that's exactly what these games were made for. Not for thorough analysis like this guy's as if you're treating reality. Because you're not.

I agree with you on this, but the major plotholes were already discovered at the time of playing ME3. We're just bringing them forward again. Most of his points were already noticed here months/years ago.

I remember when playing ME3 and the Reapers touched down on earth I didn't really thought about it. You are in the 'rush' of the first playthrough. You get a bit blurry, just when you're in love and are on the pink cloud and in the end it turns out to be a bitch.

But after that I scratched my head and thought how did they actually get here so fast? We stopped Sovereign right? We stopped the Collectors? So if they could just fly over here, what was all that about? Even if it took them 10 years to fly over here that is nothing to them.

It makes Sovereign look dumb, instead of the mysterious super mind it was in ME1.

And ofcourse it's a videogame, everything has plotholes. But I remember ME1 with the detailed story and the insane codex on everything. The details in the conversations. You really could see the effort and time that they put into the story and lore. Till today I remember the conversation with Sovereign in ME1. Gave me chills. But you see the change from detailed story to mechanics and gameplay within ME2 and completely in ME3. That is where they lost it. Such a waste.

"Supply lines are cut. The military is being consumed by an implacable enemy. Resources are low. Millions have died and entire worlds have gone dark, production-wise.

And yet somehow the galaxy[1] is building the Crucible, which is a massive mystery device of future technology built from ancient Prothean blueprints. This is like Great Britain building the Apollo program during The Blitz."

brilliant.

"The story never says where the Crucible is being built. I’m really curious about that, since there must be a constant influx of people and supplies to the place. It’s the most important thing in the galaxy right now. It should be very hard for the Reapers to overlook. The entire plot turns on this object, and it’s being built entirely off-screen, mostly by people we never meet, in an unknown location.

The the best scientists in the galaxy have gathered to build a device they don’t understand, they don’t know how to use, and don’t know what it will do when they turn it on. Imagine this. They literally have no idea what this does. Is it a weapon? Should we aim it at something? How? Where do we put it? Is it a super-shield to protect a planet, or a super-nuke that will blow up a star system? Do we need to stand way, way back when we turn it on? Does it need a crew? Fuel? A driver-side airbag and parking lights?

Despite that, they do know it’s not complete. They know they need one more part, but they don’t know what it is, what it’s for, or what it will do, but they’re calling it the Catalyst. Really, the list of things they do know and don’t know about this device are oddly specific."

roflmao

"Imagine you’re going to play one of those nerdy tabletop games with your friends. The group has a kind of grounded, low-key approach to worldbuilding. The world is basically “middle-ages Europe”-ish with a very understated dash of magic. Rather than invent new characters for my hypothetical game, let’s just borrow a few. The players around the table have the following characters:

Boromir: A son of nobility but not royalty, he’s a stalwart man who trusts more in arms than in magic. His mind is often on his troubled homeland.

Frodo: A gentle idealist. He hates violence, but understands the necessity of it. He’s reluctant to draw blood, but also curiously wise and forward-thinking for a halfling.

Gimli: Dwarf. Proud. Practical. Loyal. Simple.

And then there’s this guy. Let’s call him Josh[1]. Josh brings in this character:

Xantar Shadowwalker: A reincarnation of an elven god that was slain by an army ten thousand years ago. He’s a half-elf with a clockwork robo-arm. He carries a glowing samurai sword, wears a Zoro mask and a black cape, and has glowing white eyes. Xantar doesn’t have a fixed personality, but seems to jump from being a swaggering sarcastic joker, to a gravel-voiced agent of vengeance, to an unflappable gentleman, depending on whatever will make the biggest scene.

Some people will complain that he clashes “thematically” with the setting. And he does. Others will worry about his character being overpowered. And he probably is. But that’s not really the problem with Xantar. The problem is that Josh is trying to make him the main character. Xantar is so outlandish that he will stand out in every scene. He’s screaming for attention, and the other characters look like extras when they stand next to him.

The other players are here for a cooperative and symbiotic experience. They want to work together to make an interesting story about their adventuring party. Josh is here for a competitive and parasitic experience. He sees the other players as people to play audience to his one-man show of attention-whore badassery.

Josh is fundamentally a problem player in this particular group. Unless his real-life charisma is so astounding that people don’t mind mind playing his sidekicks and passively watching his antics for hours at a time, then he’s a social vampire and he’s going to suck the life out of the game. Good D&D games – and even a few friendships – have been ended because of selfish assholes like Josh, who entertain themselves by magnifying their own glory at the expense of others.

Now imagine Josh isn’t just a player. Imagine Josh is running the game. Everyone still has to play grounded characters like Boromir and Frodo, but Josh designs the villains using the same self-indulgent approach he used to design Xantar.

That’s how you end up with Kai Leng."

I agree Kai Leng is nothing short of a fucking disgrace to the ME universe. No backstory, morally unambiguous / pure evil, at total odds with ME's setting, etc. Just lame all over the place.

But nothing in that lengthy supposedly witty commentary makes any real sense to me, sorry. He sure enjoys himself while writing, which is good, but he gets carried away.

Just got a new cologne today, thought I'd share!




Also, Kai Leng accomplished everything he ever imagined...

"The writer constantly wrote IOUs to the audience: This will all be explained later. It’ll make sense in retrospect. This is building up to a larger payoff. This is a setup for a later reveal. The writer never explicitly promised those things, mind you. We just sort of assumed those promises were being made. When the writer kills and resurrects the main character, re-writes major details of the world, radically changes the focus of the story, and imposes decisions of the player character that seem unreasonable or poorly justified, it’s natural to assume that it’s all in pursuit of some larger goal. Surely all these compromises now are in service of some satisfying payoff later, right? The writer wouldn’t bring us all this way for nothing, would they?"

Once Shepard steps into that beam, all those implied or inferred IOUs came due, and the writer had nothing for us. It’s natural then to say the ending failed us. But I think the story was doomed long before we meet the Star Child. When Mass Effect 2 wasted the second act on a side-plot, it kicked all the duties of a second act into the third. When The Arrival introduced huge ideas that couldn’t feed directly into the main plot because they were DLC, the writer tied their own hands with regards to what they could and couldn’t do in the third game. They couldn’t contradict The Arrival, but neither could they build on it. When the writer made Cerberus such a central element of Mass Effect 3, they created a foe that would devour screen time and clutter up an already-busy story. When the writer built the emotional core of the story around a child we neither knew or cared about, they tied their final confrontation to a character that was fundamentally uninteresting and thematically wrong. When they dropped a contrived and unexplained deus ex machina into the story to solve the Reaper problem, they made it so that Shepard would never be anything more than a witness to the ending, not an active participant in it.

"By the time Shepard reaches the Citadel, the writer has painted themselves into a corner so small, no amount of writing skill or sci-fi savvy could have saved it. Sure, you could come up with a better reason for the Reapers or a less arbitrary final choice, but the story was already hopelessly broken beyond repair. The ending was doomed to come up short, because the rest of the story had destroyed the framework that would have made a satisfying conclusion possible."

my only disagreement here is that if they had gone with some derivative of IT, then everything up to that point would have made sense.

"Human: a viable possibility.  Aggression factor useful if controlled."

- Harbinger



Sigh.

Sooooo now we're spending wasting time nitpicking someone else's over analyzed piece on the well known mess?    There is nothing to over analyze anymore, just prepare to bendover if you still want to play ME:A, deposit your brains in the freezer, sit back and be unimaginative. Or if you insist on logic and all that sort of lame lowbrow stuff (according to Bioderp) you will have to stay away from this new mass effect game that may as well be a new IP for Bioware.

In other news:

https://twitter.com/GambleMike/status/778409397043142656

SJWs have been doing that already for him.

Well it's done. The three IT Threads have been downloaded with most of the old BSN links working. Probably a couple that don't, but that could be due to deleted attachments/uploads and such.

i know it's satire but......

It's satire but they're saying what we've all been thinking.

The stupidity of the plot aside, ME:A's single player main quest is going to be drastically short and they have inadvertently given away all kinds clues as to why that will be exactly the case. They were running behind schedule, which they have admitted to as they themselves couldn't meet their original release time-line. How many side quests will now become day one DLC(s) or a short while after launch? will be fun to watch.

The other big thing that hint is big emphasis on exploration, read that as time wasters or fillers however one likes to spin polish that. How else can you make up for the short main campaign if there wasn't something to artificially bloat the time spent in the game for big fans of RPGs like ME? Before someone tries to point out how Bioware has acknowledged this pitfall and defended claiming MEA will not endure the same fate, look no further than ME3' launch claims of there being no bespoke endings (A,B,C), among other such BS claims.

Let's face it, all this talk about trying capture ME1's awe and exploration experience is just pure PR bullshit. ME1 at the time was a new concept, a new universe, we were completely new to the whole mythos and style of the MEU. Obviously it was going to be a special experience. However by ME2 no matter what new alien race we encountered it was never going to be the same experience as we had in ME1 because we got used to it and anything new was like 'Oh cool another Alien race, sure I'll take that'  but nothing more than that.

ME:A is the same thing all over again post ME1, we know it's ME, we know it's going to have the same feel and vibe for the most part, there is really nothing awe inspiring to be had anymore, sure new aliens will be here but it wont be anything more than what most felt meeting new Aliens post ME1. Unless of course they are now out to target only totally uninitiated players to the franchise.

If anyone here has pre-ordered ME:A then ....

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/176875/20160908/mass-effect-andromeda-is-a-family-affair.htm


So the character we see in the trailer is daddy Ryder and the gender player option is choosing between daughter and son Ryder, with the unchosen sibling still featuring in the game?  Nothing like a little sibling rivalry to spice up taking on the Protheans Remnants.

I wonder if the sibling is a romance option? That seems due as a logical next step in the social justice pantheon of oppressed victim classes.

triggerwarning wrote:
I wonder if the sibling is a romance option? That seems due as a logical next step in the social justice pantheon of oppressed victim classes.

Incest? With Bioware anything is now possible.

windsurfing wrote:

triggerwarning wrote:
I wonder if the sibling is a romance option? That seems due as a logical next step in the social justice pantheon of oppressed victim classes.

Incest? With Bioware anything is now possible.

as daft as this sounds Bioderp would try to appeal to any and all sections of society, so I'm waiting for a subplot involving genital mutilation, beheadings and grooming, as well as incest twincest and catholicism.

Catholicism has to be one of the best euphemisms i have ever seen.

A victim of catholicism

What's wrong with twincest?

Was there any incest type romance in the DA series? I don't play DA so am asking.

windsurfing wrote:Was there any incest type romance in the DA series? I don't play DA so am asking.

Not a romance per se, but.... Dragon Age 2, random scene involving a possessed man, his female elven servant armed with a feather, and suggestions that next time she bring her brother.

Ick.