[PC/PS3/360/WiiU] Mass Effect 3

[Poetic Justice]

The more i think about the ending, The worse it gets.

Spoiler for end:

Everyone's dead because of the relay explosions, Most of the races who came to fight will never get home.

[Who]

Originally Posted by Poetic Justice

The more i think about the ending, The worse it gets.

Spoiler for end:

Everyone's dead because of the relay explosions, Most of the races who came to fight will never get home.

Maybe the asari and krogan since their lifespans are pretty much about a thousand years, give or take a couple of hundred years (more asari cause krogan die mostly of gunshots). Salarians and drell on the other hand...


On an unrelated note:
Marauder Shields, the comic (1-9, more to come):
http://koobismo.deviantart.com/gallery/

[Poetic Justice]

Originally Posted by Who

Maybe the asari and krogan since their lifespans are pretty much about a thousand years, give or take a couple of hundred years (more asari cause krogan die mostly of gunshots). Salarians and drell on the other hand...

http://koobismo.deviantart.com/gallery/

Spoiler for end:

They are a millions of light years away from each other. Without the relays it would still take too long.

[synaesthetic]

Originally Posted by Poetic Justice

The more i think about the ending, The worse it gets.

Spoiler for end:

Everyone's dead because of the relay explosions, Most of the races who came to fight will never get home.

They could get home, since Citadel space is not that far from Earth relatively speaking. Sure, it may take them months to do so, and they may have to make some sacrifices and secure alliances and curry some favor (obviously the turians would have to ride with the quarians in order to avoid starving to death).

The quarians are the worst off, but even then not devastatingly so. With most of their resources available on the Migrant Fleet they can survive the years-long journey back to the Perseus Veil.

This is also assuming that the relays cannot be repaired or recreated. Destroying the relays seemed like a really annoying typical Hollywood TECHNOLOGY IS SATAN move, but the more I consider it the more I realize it's not that big a deal. The Protheans were able to create a mass relay (the Conduit, which flung Shepard and company all the way to the Citadel from Ilos) and we have even more knowledge than they did after finishing the Crucible.

[Poetic Justice]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

They could get home, since Citadel space is not that far from Earth relatively speaking. Sure, it may take them months to do so, and they may have to make some sacrifices and secure alliances and curry some favor (obviously the turians would have to ride with the quarians in order to avoid starving to death).

The quarians are the worst off, but even then not devastatingly so. With most of their resources available on the Migrant Fleet they can survive the years-long journey back to the Perseus Veil.

This is also assuming that the relays cannot be repaired or recreated. Destroying the relays seemed like a really annoying typical Hollywood TECHNOLOGY IS SATAN move, but the more I consider it the more I realize it's not that big a deal. The Protheans were able to create a mass relay (the Conduit, which flung Shepard and company all the way to the Citadel from Ilos) and we have even more knowledge than they did after finishing the Crucible.

Spoiler for end:

Er..no. FTL travel is meaningless at the distances they have to travel. Also where would they get fuel to travel that far.

[MeisterBabylon]

The rebuilding of all technology would free the organics from Reapers eventually. It will be slow at first, and bad QoL, but it will be a real triumph for all Spirals.

This is the end of Shepard's story. It could've ended with better plot pacing. But now its time for the New Testament, and the Church of EA will no doubt want more... Donations.

[synaesthetic]

Originally Posted by Poetic Justice

Spoiler for end:

Er..no. FTL travel is meaningless at the distances they have to travel. Also where would they get fuel to travel that far.

The on-ship FTL drives can cover entire star clusters in an insignificant (under a day) amount of time.

The Reapers arrived in Batarian space from extragalactic space without the benefit of a mass relay in two years. They were so far away from the galaxy at the end of ME2 that you could see the entire galaxy in the frame! That's millions of light-years we're talking about here. And we already know that the Reapers' FTL drives are roughly twice as fast as that of the Citadel nations.

So it should take the asari, turians and krogan a few months to return home--longer since they'd have to periodically stop and discharge their drive cores in the nearest gas giant.

The quarians would probably take years, possibly decades to return to Rannoch, but they're the second-best fleet equipped for a very long journey, since they have made the fleet their home for the past two centuries.

The geth are artificial intelligences. Time has little meaning to a being who can voluntarily place itself into an extreme low-power state and suspend function as long as power holds out. They don't have to worry about air or food.

[Poetic Justice]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

The on-ship FTL drives can cover entire star clusters in an insignificant (under a day) amount of time.

The Reapers arrived in Batarian space from extragalactic space without the benefit of a mass relay in two years. They were so far away from the galaxy at the end of ME2 that you could see the entire galaxy in the frame! That's millions of light-years we're talking about here. And we already know that the Reapers' FTL drives are roughly twice as fast as that of the Citadel nations.

So it should take the asari, turians and krogan a few months to return home--longer since they'd have to periodically stop and discharge their drive cores in the nearest gas giant.

The quarians would probably take years, possibly decades to return to Rannoch, but they're the second-best fleet equipped for a very long journey, since they have made the fleet their home for the past two centuries.

The geth are artificial intelligences. Time has little meaning to a being who can voluntarily place itself into an extreme low-power state and suspend function as long as power holds out. They don't have to worry about air or food.

Ok but what about the fuel issue? Where are they going to get that amount of fuel to travel so far?

[Tyabann]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

The on-ship FTL drives can cover entire star clusters in an insignificant (under a day) amount of time.

The distance that one star cluster covers is... not really comparable to the distance between star clusters. The galaxy is STUPIDLY huge.

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

The Reapers arrived in Batarian space from extragalactic space without the benefit of a mass relay in two years. They were so far away from the galaxy at the end of ME2 that you could see the entire galaxy in the frame! That's millions of light-years we're talking about here.

Frankly I find this extremely offensive to physics, not that ME ever cared about that. They simply should not be able to go that fast. It doesn't make any damn sense.

[Vallen Chaos Valiant]

Originally Posted by Poetic Justice

Ok but what about the fuel issue? Where are they going to get that amount of fuel to travel so far?

Especially consider how ME2 portrayed fuel usage... If how fast Normandy burns fuel is canon, and if the fuel storage capacity is typical, it would be damn difficult to travel long distances. Never-mind the fact that no one had seen the need to build anything that can travel that far, because Mass Relays had always been around.

[synaesthetic]

Originally Posted by Kaisos Erranon

The distance that one star cluster covers is... not really comparable to the distance between star clusters. The galaxy is STUPIDLY huge.



Frankly I find this extremely offensive to physics, not that ME ever cared about that. They simply should not be able to go that fast. It doesn't make any damn sense.

The whole basis of ME's FTL technology is utter nonsense and completely "offensive" to physics. As if running an electric current through Green Rocks could possibly raise and lower the mass of anything near or far away from it.

ME is not hard sci-fi. It's not even soft sci-fi. It's a space opera, "sci-fantasy." It's Star Wars for our generation. It's basically no different from dragons/the Death Star (Reapers) and wizards/Jedi Knights (biotics), just recycledinspace (or in SW's case just plain recycled period). The codex stuff only exists for those nerdy numbers types who loved Star Trek TNG's Treknobabble.

[Tyabann]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

ME is not hard sci-fi. It's not even soft sci-fi. It's a space opera, "sci-fantasy." It's Star Wars for our generation. It's basically no different from dragons/the Death Star (Reapers) and wizards/Jedi Knights (biotics), just recycledinspace (or in SW's case just plain recycled period). The codex stuff only exists for those nerdy numbers types who loved Star Trek TNG's Treknobabble.

I'm aware of this and wish it would stop pretending to be realistic, heh. Which it does, even if it isn't.

You can't change how big the galaxy is and how long it takes to get places via the rules the setting has established, though. It will take hundreds of years for anyone to get anywhere, unless they hijack the Reapers and use their magical cross-millions-of-light-years-in-two-years technology.

[SoldierOfDarkness]

Speaking of which why is it that only the Normandy is the one that crashes? Is it because it's travelling through the relays?

That would mean the entire armada is grounded on Earth. Forgot about travelling to Mars you need to rebuild the fleet

[synaesthetic]

Originally Posted by Kaisos Erranon

I'm aware of this and wish it would stop pretending to be realistic, heh. Which it does, even if it isn't.

You can't change how big the galaxy is and how long it takes to get places via the rules the setting has established, though. It will take hundreds of years for anyone to get anywhere, unless they hijack the Reapers and use their magical cross-millions-of-light-years-in-two-years technology.

Established by ME, the Reapers' FTL drives are only twice as fast as the Citadel races' ships. So the whole thing is BS, but galactic travel is not dead, just slowed from "near instantaneous" to "takes months or years."

These are acceptable breaks from reality for this kind of story. ME would not be served by being "harder" on the sci-fi scale. The technobabble about how all their technology "works" is completely irrelevant to the plot and largely relegated to the Codex entries, which are not needed to play the game at all. ME's technobabble is no better than Star Wars' technobabble, or the technobabble I use to handwave faster-than-light travel and artificial intelligences in my own works of fiction.

[Key Board]

if you read the codex it also states that Reaper are different because they don't need to dump static buildup and no need to refuel

"Reaper power sources seem to violate known physical laws. Reapers usually destroy fuel infrastructure rather than attempting to capture it intact, indicating that Reapers do not require organic species' energy supplies. Consequently, the Reapers attack without regard for maintaining supply lines behind them, except to move husks from one planet to another. Unlike Citadel ships, Reapers do not appear to discharge static buildup from their drive cores, although they sometimes appear wreathed in static discharge when they land on planets."

They don't need to refuel
They don't need to dump static build up
They don't need an infrastructure or supply line
They can make a beeline to one place non stop

Citadel races don't yet have a ship that can do that

[SRanger]

I don't see how people are even defending this game despite how bad the ending is - the whole entire game just felt really cheap.

First of all, on the cover of the game, over half of the characters aren't even companions. Thane, Miranda...I'm just pissed they skimped out on ME2 great characters for new people that are either gimmicks (EDI) or are just flatout boring (Vega).

The dialogue between missions seems really "streamlined" as well, what happened to like in ME1 where everytime we talked to someone it would be a full dialogue tree, rather than cycle through some generic one liners?

There's hardly any innovation from ME2 to ME3. At least try guys! ME2 made the horrendous gameplay mechanics of ME1 actually enjoyable, and reduced the whole stupid inventory system to something more useful (seriously, over 70% of the guns and armor in ME1 were useless). However, Bioware got the "CoD sickness", by not improving squat! Cool...we got a nice omni blade now for combat instead of punching, and we can roll around. That's..that's pretty much it guys.

[synaesthetic]

Originally Posted by Key Board

if you read the codex it also states that Reaper are different because they don't need to dump static buildup and no need to refuel

They can make a beeline to one place non stop

Citadel races don't yet have a ship that can do that

That is factored into the "twice as fast" claim.

Don't get me wrong, I believe that destroying the mass relays was a silly way to break your entire universe, especially for future games (single- or multiplayer). I think Bioware really picked a ham-fisted way of making the Reaper war more of a Pyrrhic victory.

I mean, really Bioware, if you hadn't added the MacGuffin Crucible you'd never have to take such a heavy-handed out...

[Key Board]

well space travel is still possible, but a long galactic spanning civilization is pretty much dead. (unless you chose the a low EMS red ending, in which most technology is also destroyed)

mass relays don't only handle transportation. They are also responsible for long range communication.

With the mass relays gone, everyone is isolated into their own star cluster and it will take very long time to rebuild all that infrastructure and refueling stations.

The Krogans and Asari will probably live long enough to eventually make it home, but the everyone else is out of luck.

Especially the Quarians whose home planet is near the outer galactic rim

[Tyabann]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

Established by ME, the Reapers' FTL drives are only twice as fast as the Citadel races' ships.

Then they simply don't have any sense of scale. Not that I'm shocked.

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

The technobabble about how all their technology "works" is completely irrelevant to the plot and largely relegated to the Codex entries, which are not needed to play the game at all.

Ah, well, no offense, and this is really just a personal thing, but I hate technobabble in the first place. Frankly I'd rather they not have included the Codex at all if they were going to ignore or handwave both their own rules and established physical laws for the sake of a "better" narrative.

[synaesthetic]

Originally Posted by Kaisos Erranon

Ah, well, no offense, and this is really just a personal thing, but I hate technobabble in the first place. Frankly I'd rather they not have included the Codex at all if they were going to ignore or handwave both their own rules and established physical laws for the sake of a "better" narrative.

Don't get me wrong, I share your loathing of technobabble myself. I don't think it has any place in the narrative. Star Wars gets away with physics murder because it never tries to explain the tech, and you don't notice or care because it's just fun.

Bioware included the Codex as a bone to throw to the Treknobabble addicts that love poring over fictional sci-fi tech.

They didn't handwave their own rules regarding FTL travel (but they did handwave earlier canon when the exploding relays did not destroy entire star systems as the Alpha Relay did).

What matters is what we see in-universe. We see the Reapers arrive in the Kite's Nest two years after the end of ME2 where they are shown so far from the galaxy that the entire disc fits within the frame. While this is ludicrous by our understanding of physics, so is the rest of the game. The entire "mass effect" concept is complete silliness--dark energy as a Spiral Power analogue is even more silly. It's just ME's Minovsky Particle--silly, not realistic in the slightest, but internally consistent. Magic A is Magic A.

All I'm saying is based on what the game has shown us, the Citadel races' ships should be able to get around without the relays. Not easily and not quickly, but they can still travel between the stars. It's analogous to if a huge army was marooned on a large island and all the airplanes were blown up, but they still had ships. We don't ever see them do this, but that's only because they have no reason to--the relays are so much faster it'd be pointless not to use them. A trip that might take months, years or decades is completed in a matter of moments.

Edit: Please note that I'm not excusing the ending, but pointing out that the writing in ME regarding the destruction of the mass relays and normal ship-board FTL drives is really shoddy...