Mass Effect Megathread: He said "I should go." Do I sound like that? - Games

[QUOTE=Trekintosh;49293469]ME3's writing fucking sucks. Tuchanka's missions(which I just finished) are unbelievably badly written.[/QUOTE] This makes me wonder what you consider good writing. Tuchanka bits in particular were really good.

[QUOTE=Trekintosh;49293469]ME3's writing fucking sucks. Tuchanka's missions(which I just finished) are unbelievably badly written.[/QUOTE] If you have a problem with Tuchanka, you aren't going to enjoy the rest of the game for damn sure.

[QUOTE=EcksDee;49294742]This makes me wonder what you consider good writing. Tuchanka bits in particular were really good.[/QUOTE] I'll just put this entire thing in spoilers since it's basically me raging at the mission the whole way through. [sp]So we're going to take down a Reaper with a dozen Turian fighters and about 10 Tomkahs. that's fine. I don't have any real problem with that. I get that it's probably an engine limitation and the 10 tomkahs are just supposed to represent the entire military might of the Krogan. this is a continuous problem throughout the entire game I've seen, the reapers feel properly huge and mighty but the other races feel 100% ineffectual so how are they supposed to mount any kind of resistance whatsoever? Anyways, not what I'm complaining about at the moment. I've got Wrex, Mordin, and Maelon's cure saved, on a Paragon path Shepard. Now our entire Tomkah convoy gets completely stopped by a tiny bit of rubble on the road, right after we see them jump over a pile of rubble the size of a house. Then there's the utter bullshit contrivance that the Turian fighter that gets shot down happens to crash directly into us and wipe out the entire fucking convoy except for Wrex and Wreav's trucks. After that we find out the trucks are perfectly capable of driving right over the tiny bit of rubble anyways so what was even the fucking point of stopping the convoy other than to force you to summon the thresher maw to kill it? So then Shepard and friends go into the catacombs or whatever, which haven't been entered for a thousand years or so. Fine. What's not fine is that the immediate reaction on Eve and Wrex's part to hearing you've got minor tremors is OH MAH GOD IT'S THE LEGENDARY MYTHICAL THRESHER MAW THAT WAS ONLY JUST A MYTH UNTIL RIGHT THIS MOMENT BUT MAN OH MAN IS IT SUDDENLY ALL TOO REAL! Seriously? SERIOUSLY?? Why wouldn't the rumor be that the thousand year old ruins might be maybe a thousand years old and thus the tiniest bit unstable?? Fine, whatever. So now all of a sudden Reaper troops are there in the ancient ruins that just happen to be right next to the super important Shroud but nobody knew anything about whatsoever despite being right there on the side of the road and really easy to navigate. So the Reaper obviously knows you're rocking up to take it out. The gigantic space crab monster ship that has unbelievably powerful liquid metal beam weapons and mass accelerator cannons. Why doesn't it just level the ruins? Whatever, that would be lame. So you make it to Wrex's Tomkah after fighting the air-dropped or cannon-fired or what-the-fuck-ever Reaper troops that the Reaper is raining down on you. Now the Maw just annihilates Wreav, and Wrex and Eve only have a couple of throwaway lines on it. What an utter waste of a character. Now you arrive at the Shroud and suddenly there's the ultimate laboratory of ultimate convenience there. Why? Why is it still functioning after 300 years? Why is it a full scientific lab? Why would it have the equipment and data necessary for Mordin to synthesize the cure but the Normandy or STG base didn't? It's all artificial pressure and tension for no good reason. Now you're fighting the Reaper itself and man is this guy scary. That's good! He feels properly massive and terrifying. Oh.... he's just going to destroy some cover in scripted events. Because the million year old super hyper advanced machine god can't hit a human target behind a pile of ROCKS! So now you just stroll to the super conveniently still-functioning Maw Hammers (a concept I actually really like, very Dune) and you narrowly 'dodge' the Reaper stomping at you. Or rather, some scripted jump scares happen to try to artificially ratchet up the tension again. Again, the million year old machine god can't quite hit you for some reason. Surely after you activated the first one it would have figured out what happens, especially if what Legion says in ME2 about them being nation-states of independent programs running inside the Reaper body. So why didn't it just shoot the Maw hammer and generally tear up the place, as Reapers seem to be hell-bent on doing anywhere that Shepard isn't currently doing a mission. So then you finally summon the Old Lady of the Desert and she wrecks the Reaper's shit. Good. That's a good way to actually defeat one, really, with some pretty cool, if ugly compressed pre-rendered, sequences of them fighting. I noticed how the Reaper threw the Maw into the Shroud but nothing immediately happened in reaction. So there was no indication why when a minute later it suddenly started fucking exploding because you needed to sacrifice Mordin to save the Krogan. It only exploded because a writer said "hmm, I wonder what can help drive it home that the Reapers are a real threat to you no really honest they are even though they only send about a dozen baddies at you at a time!" All they needed to do was have a single line from Mordin along the lines of "Shroud damaged in fight, must repair manually Shepard!" So great, Mordin dies but his magical miracle cure makes it out and the Krogan are gonna start squirting them out yay.[/sp] The entire thing just reeks of "cinematic" to me. It's one contrivance after another and it's all scripted sequences instead of making the Reaper a real threat to you.

[sp] First paragraph: Hackett and Anderson address this, I'm not gonna spoil anything but just re-read your thesis without the word supposed in it As for the other 1. The road is literally gone further up, as in a straight drop from whatever height you're looking at at the rails, the Scout isn't addressing the crack's he's next to. 1a. PS3 limitations, and game made to support that, it's why there's only 8 enemies in MP at any one time, and the Collectors literally cause the PS3 to crash. 2. That's not the entire force, otherwise there wouldn't be shooting at the battle site still, also not all the tomkahs are destroyed, the rest are cut off, you're over-critical A and B you're Shepard so it's obviously going to be up to you 3. Reaction dialog's actually supplied by you well after the third set of tremors, and secondly I don't think setting off unstable buildings means shit to a krogan, ruins haunted by a fuck off giant ghost beast might, particualrly if no one comes back 4. The codex clearly states Interdiction reapers can drop off troops, the Codex also states Interdiction Reapers are not of the same build and class as Preservation Reapers and they're made specifically to deal with Shepard's jiujutsu bullshit, that's the where the troops come from. 5. Mordin, Wrex and Linron clearly state the Shroud's history and purpose and why it still works, and it dovetails with 2's Tuchanka stuff pretty cleanly, and also Mordin clearly states in both 2 and 3 where and what he's been doing on Tuchanka, so there's no ass pull, you're either deliberately or accidentally ignoring all of that. 6. Krogan adaption is constant and evolving, again clearly stated in 2 and 3, ergo lab. the Shroud's output has been continually adjusted the entire time. 7. Interdiction Reapers are remotely controlled and have all the same limitations/advantages as Husks/Banshees do, again all of this is covered. 8. The Shroud was built to withstand krogans shooting asteroids at it from orbit before they were DMZ'd, and it's armored on the outside not in, you can call it contrivance but it still tracks the sequence motif. [/sp]

[QUOTE=Trekintosh;49297727]I'll just put this entire thing in spoilers since it's basically me raging at the mission the whole way through. [sp]So we're going to take down a Reaper with a dozen Turian fighters and about 10 Tomkahs. that's fine. I don't have any real problem with that. I get that it's probably an engine limitation and the 10 tomkahs are just supposed to represent the entire military might of the Krogan. this is a continuous problem throughout the entire game I've seen, the reapers feel properly huge and mighty but the other races feel 100% ineffectual so how are they supposed to mount any kind of resistance whatsoever? Anyways, not what I'm complaining about at the moment. I've got Wrex, Mordin, and Maelon's cure saved, on a Paragon path Shepard. Now our entire Tomkah convoy gets completely stopped by a tiny bit of rubble on the road, right after we see them jump over a pile of rubble the size of a house. Then there's the utter bullshit contrivance that the Turian fighter that gets shot down happens to crash directly into us and wipe out the entire fucking convoy except for Wrex and Wreav's trucks. After that we find out the trucks are perfectly capable of driving right over the tiny bit of rubble anyways so what was even the fucking point of stopping the convoy other than to force you to summon the thresher maw to kill it? So then Shepard and friends go into the catacombs or whatever, which haven't been entered for a thousand years or so. Fine. What's not fine is that the immediate reaction on Eve and Wrex's part to hearing you've got minor tremors is OH MAH GOD IT'S THE LEGENDARY MYTHICAL THRESHER MAW THAT WAS ONLY JUST A MYTH UNTIL RIGHT THIS MOMENT BUT MAN OH MAN IS IT SUDDENLY ALL TOO REAL! Seriously? SERIOUSLY?? Why wouldn't the rumor be that the thousand year old ruins might be maybe a thousand years old and thus the tiniest bit unstable?? Fine, whatever. So now all of a sudden Reaper troops are there in the ancient ruins that just happen to be right next to the super important Shroud but nobody knew anything about whatsoever despite being right there on the side of the road and really easy to navigate. So the Reaper obviously knows you're rocking up to take it out. The gigantic space crab monster ship that has unbelievably powerful liquid metal beam weapons and mass accelerator cannons. Why doesn't it just level the ruins? Whatever, that would be lame. So you make it to Wrex's Tomkah after fighting the air-dropped or cannon-fired or what-the-fuck-ever Reaper troops that the Reaper is raining down on you. Now the Maw just annihilates Wreav, and Wrex and Eve only have a couple of throwaway lines on it. What an utter waste of a character. Now you arrive at the Shroud and suddenly there's the ultimate laboratory of ultimate convenience there. Why? Why is it still functioning after 300 years? Why is it a full scientific lab? Why would it have the equipment and data necessary for Mordin to synthesize the cure but the Normandy or STG base didn't? It's all artificial pressure and tension for no good reason. Now you're fighting the Reaper itself and man is this guy scary. That's good! He feels properly massive and terrifying. Oh.... he's just going to destroy some cover in scripted events. Because the million year old super hyper advanced machine god can't hit a human target behind a pile of ROCKS! So now you just stroll to the super conveniently still-functioning Maw Hammers (a concept I actually really like, very Dune) and you narrowly 'dodge' the Reaper stomping at you. Or rather, some scripted jump scares happen to try to artificially ratchet up the tension again. Again, the million year old machine god can't quite hit you for some reason. Surely after you activated the first one it would have figured out what happens, especially if what Legion says in ME2 about them being nation-states of independent programs running inside the Reaper body. So why didn't it just shoot the Maw hammer and generally tear up the place, as Reapers seem to be hell-bent on doing anywhere that Shepard isn't currently doing a mission. So then you finally summon the Old Lady of the Desert and she wrecks the Reaper's shit. Good. That's a good way to actually defeat one, really, with some pretty cool, if ugly compressed pre-rendered, sequences of them fighting. I noticed how the Reaper threw the Maw into the Shroud but nothing immediately happened in reaction. So there was no indication why when a minute later it suddenly started fucking exploding because you needed to sacrifice Mordin to save the Krogan. It only exploded because a writer said "hmm, I wonder what can help drive it home that the Reapers are a real threat to you no really honest they are even though they only send about a dozen baddies at you at a time!" All they needed to do was have a single line from Mordin along the lines of "Shroud damaged in fight, must repair manually Shepard!" So great, Mordin dies but his magical miracle cure makes it out and the Krogan are gonna start squirting them out yay.[/sp] The entire thing just reeks of "cinematic" to me. It's one contrivance after another and it's all scripted sequences instead of making the Reaper a real threat to you.[/QUOTE] -They never intended to take down the Reaper, merely distract it long enough for Shepard and the crew to get in and disperse the cure. -The rubble thing is somewhat bullshit. The tomkahs drives right over it in a hurry, but the road immediately collapses afterward, showing that yeah, the road was just about impassable and they were lucky to get across. -I don't recall them ever saying Kalros is mythical. The maw hammers being there to summon her show that her existence is factual. Their reaction wasn't really one of, "Oh wow Kalros is real," moreso, "Oh wow Kalros is super fucking close." -The Reaper probably didn't know you were gunning for the Shroud until the very end. It might not have known you intended to launch the cure from there, but they recognized the Shroud as an important location. Being able to spread things through the atmosphere is a valuable tool, remember they didn't know the Reaper was there until right before the mission started, perhaps the Reaper sent there was sent to lock it down with a number of troops as a foothold. It had no real reason to pay mind to 3 people fucking around in the ruins when ground troops exist for that reason, not after it just got harassed by air units. -Wreav gets killed because he's a throwaway character at that point. He only exists to take Wrex' place if Wrex does not exist in your playthrough. If you didn't have Wrex, Wreav would have been the primary Krogan you interact with, they use the maw as a simple way to eliminate him as a useless character if Wrex is around. -The Reaper is being attacked by Turian fighters, apparently that's enough to fuck with its aim. Also, Shepard is inherently lucky, and if you believe the Indoctrination theory (look it up after you complete the game), the Reaper might have been missing on purpose. -The Reaper knew nothing about Kalros, it had no idea what the hammers did, probably paid no mind to them. "Maybe these huge hammer things summon a megafuckhuge thresher maw," isn't really a logical conclusion a computer would make. The Shroud thing I totally agree with you though. They obviously made it all blowey uppy just because they wanted to kill off Mordin and make you feel the sads. You're also correct in the scale of things, man ME3 really fucks that up. Supposed to be these huge monumental battles, yet there's like 15 troops involved maximum. This will become increasingly annoying later on, especially in the final act. You hit the nail on the head. ME3 doesn't really give the player much control, you never really make big choices. Moreso, the outcomes depend on how many side-missions you do. You never have to choose who to stuff into the vents or lead the second fire team. There's no moments that mimmick the first time you play the suicide mission and think, "Oh my fuck ______ would do good there but what if they die oh my god I don't want them to die." ME3 is more like, "We decided to make the choices from previous games arbitrarily affect things so you literally might have fucked yourself in a completely unforeseen way." And even then, the MOST any of those choices affect you is in your stupid fucking military readyness rating. Some are forgotten completely, pretty sure whether you save or destroy the Collector base, a monumental decision in the context of ME2, means absolutely nothing in ME3. I hate the big story of ME3. I like some of the smaller moments though, they're worth trudging through the bullshit because of how much I love the characters. I fully understand your frustrations, ME3 dropped the ball hard.

speaking of the few good things about me3, i liked the way the illusive man's story arc was concluded

Whoever wrote Kai Leng should never touch a script ever again. That is completely irrelevant to the horrendous gameplay failures which come with every time you encounter him

He was in one of the books, and was an actual character. In the book. But in the game he was just about as edgy as my greatgrandfather's katana

The first fight with him is honestly one of the worst I have ever played, nothing about it makes any sense, openly contradicts gameplay from the previous game and doesn't even make sense in the context of the level you are playing. I mean you are somehow unable to kill him or the gunship... Despite an ANTI TANK RIFLE being on the ground like twenty feet from the entrance to the arena

[QUOTE=Laferio;49299154]He was in one of the books, and was an actual character. In the book. But in the game he was just about as edgy as my greatgrandfather's katana[/QUOTE] He was so edgy in the books he cut himself on breakfast, remember... [quote] ben vereen, [B]martin sheen[/B], turn us into donald trump in charge of russia's military strength jelly bean[/quote] Nothing about Cerberus in 3 makes any sense, especially in the context of a dude from Urf wielding more logistical power than the Gang of Four + Aria, ESPECIALLY if you take Javik and Liara to Thessia [sp] Hackett literally has to divert the ENTIRE Crucible fleet to attack Cerberus... wat [/sp] [quote] end [/quote] [sp] Shepard can't you see, now that I have the control logic I can BE the reapers, they are powerless against me! "These aren't the droids you're looking for" :smug: Think of it shepard, all that access to unlimited omnitool pr0n, for all time! "These aren't the droids you're looking for" :buckteeth: No! I just wanted humanity to takeit's rightful place as the smuggest race in the galaxy, it's our destiny! "These aren't droids you're looking for":glare: *shoots self with mysteriously teleported in gun* [/sp] :why:

The main problem I have with Kai Leng in the gameplay proper is that he's kinda pathetic as boss fight material I think TV Tropes puts it best [QUOTE]Mass Effect 3 has Kai Leng, who was built up as a badass in cutscenes where he: kills [sp]Thane/Kirrahe/the Salarian councilor[/sp], outsmarts Shepard, shows off abilities similar to a Phantom, and seriously wounds and possibly kills [sp]Miranda[/sp]. When he actually confronts you in gameplay, he loses all of the abilities he had in cutscenes, instead favoring just running around and taking potshots at you with his Power Palms, which is weaker than the version used by normal Phantoms. It's almost impossible to lose to him in both fights unless you do absolutely nothing or run into a grenade thrown by one of his flunkies.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Laferio;49299154]He was in one of the books, and was an actual character. In the book.[/QUOTE] The only thing Kai Leng ever terrorized was a box of cereal.

[QUOTE=27X;49299246]He was so edgy in the books he cut himself on breakfast, remember... Nothing about Cerberus in 3 makes any sense, especially in the context of a dude from Urf wielding more logistical power than the Gang of Four + Aria, ESPECIALLY if you take Javik and Liara to Thessia [sp] Hackett literally has to divert the ENTIRE Crucible fleet to attack Cerberus... wat [/sp] [sp] Shepard can't you see, now that I have the control logic I can BE the reapers, they are powerless against me! "These aren't the droids you're looking for" :smug: Think of it shepard, all that access to unlimited omnitool pr0n, for all time! "These aren't the droids you're looking for" :buckteeth: No! I just wanted humanity to takeit's rightful place as the smuggest race in the galaxy, it's our destiny! "These aren't droids you're looking for":glare: *shoots self with mysteriously teleported in gun* [/sp] :why:[/QUOTE] God I hate everything to do with Cerberus. In ME1 they were a rogue black ops group who had like 3 facilities and fucked up every time, it was even implied that they were all but wiped out due to those fuck ups. In ME2 they mysteriously have the ability to revive people from death (granted it took almost a year to do but it's still ridiculous), and have built a new version of the Normandy that's bigger and better in every way, despite the original Normandy being a top secret design that had the best Human and Turian engineers design it. In ME3 they [sp]have a fucking galaxy spanning military force who are constantly on Shepard's tail and are a legitimate threat to Humanity, the second largest military force in the galaxy.[/sp] It doesn't help that literally every person who works for Cerberus is a terrible person who is 'perfect' despite being completely flawed. Miranda only gets better as a person once she leaves.

[QUOTE=Laferio;49299154]He was in one of the books, and was an actual character. In the book. But in the game he was just about as edgy as my greatgrandfather's katana[/QUOTE] Pretty sure Drew Karpyshyn wrote him into one of his books because Bioware had already planned him for ME3 and asked him to give a background or something. I can't really blame him. At least we get to read how he got shot in the kneecaps.

I hated the disconnect between gameplay and Leng as far as Shepard's capabilities. Here's Commander Shepard, slayer of small armies, greatest soldier in the galaxy, pointing a pistol at the guy who just killed a good friend. Instead of attacking Leng with rage, firing madly with extreme prejudice, Shepard just kinda goes, "pew pew" with one or two pistol shots that Leng's barrier easily stops. Then he just stares at Leng as he sabotages the vehicle. I hate that scene so goddamn much.

if they wanted to make kai leng cooler they should have gotten Platinum to animate his cutscenes [editline]12th December[/editline] cos then at least you could kinda enjoy how dumb he is but instead he's just gary oak

I really think that Mass Effect could've done without any Reapers.

I liked the Reapers as they were presented in ME1. The talk with Sovereign was eery as fuck, and watching him tear through the fleets at the Citadel really makes you think these things are unstoppable. ME2 doesn't really develop them much more, besides showing us the dumb as fuck looking proto human Reaper. ME3 makes them too... beatable. Yeah, it's Commander Shepard and he/she is confident as fuck, but it lacks the desperation of ME1 or ME2. The timeline of ME3 is too stretched out, a Reaper force getting to your planet shouldn't involve weeks or months of drawn out fighting. It should be over in just a day or two, how the fuck is anyone mounting any kind of resistance when Sovereign steamrolled an entire fleet without a scratch? There's hundreds of Reapers in the sky over the Turian homeworld, yet weeks later they're still fucking mounting some kind of resistance because Krogan? The Reapers shouldn't have shown up in force until the tail end of ME3. Having them show up in the beginning of the game, implying organics are able to mount some form of resistance against machines that have been wiping out organics for thousands and thousands of years getting it down to a science just makes the Reapers seem weak, not the life-killers they're made out to be.

[QUOTE=MaverickIB;49309206]I liked the Reapers as they were presented in ME1. The talk with Sovereign was eery as fuck, and watching him tear through the fleets at the Citadel really makes you think these things are unstoppable. ME2 doesn't really develop them much more, besides showing us the dumb as fuck looking proto human Reaper. ME3 makes them too... beatable. Yeah, it's Commander Shepard and he/she is confident as fuck, but it lacks the desperation of ME1 or ME2. The timeline of ME3 is too stretched out, a Reaper force getting to your planet shouldn't involve weeks or months of drawn out fighting. It should be over in just a day or two, how the fuck is anyone mounting any kind of resistance when Sovereign steamrolled an entire fleet without a scratch? There's hundreds of Reapers in the sky over the Turian homeworld, yet weeks later they're still fucking mounting some kind of resistance because Krogan? The Reapers shouldn't have shown up in force until the tail end of ME3. Having them show up in the beginning of the game, implying organics are able to mount some form of resistance against machines that have been wiping out organics for thousands and thousands of years getting it down to a science just makes the Reapers seem weak, not the life-killers they're made out to be.[/QUOTE] With the last DLC for ME2 I honestly thought ME3 was going to go full "We can't beat the Reapers, we have to prevent them from arriving here in the first place." Then nope, Reapers in the first 5 minutes.

[QUOTE=MaverickIB;49309206]I liked the Reapers as they were presented in ME1. The talk with Sovereign was eery as fuck, and watching him tear through the fleets at the Citadel really makes you think these things are unstoppable. ME2 doesn't really develop them much more, besides showing us the dumb as fuck looking proto human Reaper. ME3 makes them too... beatable. Yeah, it's Commander Shepard and he/she is confident as fuck, but it lacks the desperation of ME1 or ME2. The timeline of ME3 is too stretched out, a Reaper force getting to your planet shouldn't involve weeks or months of drawn out fighting. It should be over in just a day or two, how the fuck is anyone mounting any kind of resistance when Sovereign steamrolled an entire fleet without a scratch? There's hundreds of Reapers in the sky over the Turian homeworld, yet weeks later they're still fucking mounting some kind of resistance because Krogan? The Reapers shouldn't have shown up in force until the tail end of ME3. Having them show up in the beginning of the game, implying organics are able to mount some form of resistance against machines that have been wiping out organics for thousands and thousands of years getting it down to a science just makes the Reapers seem weak, not the life-killers they're made out to be.[/QUOTE] Part of the reason I don't like the "Dark Energy" ending is it still ruins the Reapers as villains. I think, ideally, the motivation of the Reapers should have never really made sense. They should have kept that somewhat Lovecraftian sense of operating on a level incomprehensible to us.

[QUOTE=Mingebox;49309371]Part of the reason I don't like the "Dark Energy" ending is it still ruins the Reapers as villains. I think, ideally, the motivation of the Reapers should have never really made sense. They should have kept that somewhat Lovecraftian sense of operating on a level incomprehensible to us.[/QUOTE] Exactly. We should have never learned the motivations behind the Reapers or what exactly they are trying to do. It doesn't make sense how Sovereign can pretty much be like, "Fuck you I don't gotta tell you why you need to die, you just need to die," and then later other Reapers are like, "Durr it's chaos vs. order hurr we'll get you Shepard durr." Sovereign is straight to the point, you touch his mind, fumbling in your ignorance, incapable of understanding. They ruined that element of mystery, which in turn ruined the ominous fear they instilled.

the reapers were best when all you had about them was a thirty second long clip of bloodied circuit boards, drills, screaming, and mechanical teeth tearing through something

[QUOTE=MaverickIB;49309687]Exactly. We should have never learned the motivations behind the Reapers or what exactly they are trying to do. It doesn't make sense how Sovereign can pretty much be like, "Fuck you I don't gotta tell you why you need to die, you just need to die," and then later other Reapers are like, "Durr it's chaos vs. order hurr we'll get you Shepard durr." Sovereign is straight to the point, you touch his mind, fumbling in your ignorance, incapable of understanding. They ruined that element of mystery, which in turn ruined the ominous fear they instilled.[/QUOTE] The thing that gets me is Harbinger and the other Reapers (and the fucking Starchild) all seem to want us to feel like they're superior to us. Like they want our attention so they can show off how above us they are. Sovereign didn't give a shit about us knowing he's superior, he says we can't comprehend what they're doing because he considers us so insignificant that he can barely be bothered to acknowledge we can think. "Rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh, you touch my mind, fumbling in ignorance." Not only is he unimpressed with Shepard and crew, he is so advanced that he considers us to be the most basic of creatures that could interact with him. Him taking the time to give the speech to Shepard that the Reapers will destroy everything took no effort on his part, it'd be like spotting an ant in your path and moving your foot half an inch to the side to avoid crushing it. You don't avoid killing it because you care if it lives or dies, you do it because it takes as much effort to crush it as to avoid it and have nothing to gain by crushing it. I think it has a lot to do with a shift in focus after ME1. In the sequels it's all designed to build Shepard and the player up, when a lot of ME1 took efforts to deflate the grandiose elements of space operas. In ME1 you play the first Human Spectre, until you find out that you don't and your mentor was actually the first and it got screwed up so badly his inclusion was kept a secret to avoid embarrassment. You hunt down Fisk, an agent for the Shadow Broker and the leader of a shady strip club, but he's actually a huge pushover. You find Liara, the foremost expert on Prothean bullshit, but she's just an archaeologist and little of what she knows is actually relevant to your mission. Then ME2 rolls around and you play as Jesus H Shepard, the First Human Spectre, Hero of the Citadel, the wo/man who came back from the dead with the most irresistible dick in the galaxy. Everyone either loves you or hates you and the leader of the Eldritch horrors that threaten the galaxy is the leader of you fanclub and constantly tries to arrange meetings though his flunkies. Then we hit ME3 and Shepard becomes even more of a messiah figure, literally solving thousand year conflicts with a few conversations and a couple of optional gut punches. The only character able to talk Shepard down is narrative destruction incarnate.

When spandex wearing peace loving hippies with water guns can defeat an ancient race of genocidal god machines then you know you've messed up somewhere in the story department. If anything it makes every previous cycle look grossly incompetent. But yeah, the Reapers were bigged up in ME1 as being incomprehensible and utterly unstoppable which gave them that Eldritch impending doom edge. By ME3 all it really took to kill them was to shoot them more than you normally would. The way I saw the reapers as being a huge threat is that they would be unleashed on a galaxy with is completely unprepared to face a foe quite like them, mainly because Mass Effect has always been a bit restrained in terms of scale. There's no massive manly battles a la 40k and Starship Troopers or big ol' 9 kilometer ships as per standard. It'd be like introducing Tyranids and Necrons into Star Trek, everybody would fucking [b]die[/b]. That's what makes them scary. Mass Effect shines when it concentrates on smaller stories and keeping the scale of explored and inhabited space small makes the Reaper threat seem all that much larger.

As far as writing is concerned, Mass Effect 3 ruined the Reapers as the evil force driving the plot by pulling out the [sp]"There was an ulterior motive all along" card[/sp], which clashes heavily with their charactertization up to that point and many thing seen on screen, especially their habit to SEW INCOMPATIBLE LIVING ORGANISMS TOGETHER TO CREATE SHOCKTROOPERS

[QUOTE=EliaMoroes;49310149]As far as writing is concerned, Mass Effect 3 ruined the Reapers as the evil force driving the plot by pulling out the [sp]"There was an ulterior motive all along" card[/sp], which clashes heavily with their charactertization up to that point and many thing seen on screen, especially their habit to SEW INCOMPATIBLE LIVING ORGANISMS TOGETHER TO CREATE SHOCKTROOPERS[/QUOTE] i don't mind that they're capable of that but it's a waste of their characterization that their troopers are just straight-up Strogg, no attempt at sneaky underhandedness or even anything particularly unnerving. like a Lovecraft deity, they should mainly operate through extremely shadowy ambiguously-human cults and only show up in force when the battle is too large to sabotage. maybe it would fit better (and be super unsettling) if their advanced husks [I]were[/I] capable of passing for an unmodified person but just don't bother with it in direct combat. sleeper agents in the area get activated as a reaper arrives and suddenly their skulls split open and these fucking things jumps out [thumb]http://pre12.deviantart.net/f11a/th/pre/f/2010/250/3/b/sentinel_by_deino3330-d2y944y.jpg[/thumb]

[QUOTE=Cone;49310574]i don't mind that they're capable of that but it's a waste of their characterization that their troopers are just straight-up Strogg, no attempt at sneaky underhandedness or even anything particularly unnerving. like a Lovecraft deity, they should mainly operate through extremely shadowy ambiguously-human cults and only show up in force when the battle is too large to sabotage. [/QUOTE] That's actually Babylon 5

Mass Effect Loot Crate arrived, [sp]it's mostly shit.[/sp]

[QUOTE=IrishBandit;49311704]Mass Effect Loot Crate arrived, [sp]it's mostly shit.[/sp][/QUOTE] What's in it?

[QUOTE=Cone;49309773]the reapers were best when all you had about them was a thirty second long clip of bloodied circuit boards, drills, screaming, and mechanical teeth tearing through something[/QUOTE] This was never going to happen in a commercial product bankrolled by EA. [quote] Babylon 5 [/quote] This is what the Reapers were supposed to be; only the smartest species would be able to come together to figure out Heat Death, so they put them to a literal crucible to separate the wheat from the chaff.