@hangedtoaster:

So where did this first reaper come from? Harbinger as he goes by was created by the Star Child harvesting the Leviathans and thus the first Reapers were created. So yeah that's crazy right?

Do they explain how did the star child harvests the Leviathans if he doesn't have a reaper army yet? He needed the army for the ME races which have to be way less advanced than the Leviathans and all of their mind controlled species.

You guys, seriously stop being reactionary and think about it for more than two seconds. This isn't complicated, there are plots and motivations in fiction that are far more complicated than this. The fact that everyone has been harping on this one thing makes me worried that video games will never try to create anything more complicated than "that guy is evil, go get him" because you guys just won't get anything else.

The Intelligence was created by the Leviathans to stop the conflicts between organics and synthetics. Whether through making peace or through annihilation of the synthetics. It just has to make sure organic life continues in whatever form. Now, here's where it has two logic strands that make perfect sense to a machine, but obviously do not to us.

1) It believes being turned into a Reaper to be 'preserving' a civilization. In its eyes, the Prothean civilization is still alive, in Reaper form.

2) Its only goal is keeping organic life as a whole going, not necessarily any one specific race or species. If all the turians are wiped out, it doesn't care... as long as the varren are still around to evolve. Other synthetic life will not have this 'moral compunction', it will wipe out all organic life completely.

Look at this way, the Intelligence is pruning a galactic tree, so that the tree as a whole can live on. It doesn't see the branches as special living entities. It's just a part of the tree as a whole.

And remember, you're not supposed to agree with it. It's the villain, and the killer of a million civilizations. Those pieces of logic that seem perfectly fine for a machine are supposed to make any living, breathing person recoil in horror. Otherwise, you would agree and continue the cycle, Reapers keep on Reapin'.

I agree that it might have been better without this twist, to just have them be amoral killing machines who do it because they can. No one ever questioned Skynet's logic, because Skynet's only logic was "fuck you guys, nuclear bombs". No one questions Cthulhu's logic, because he'll never have a conversation with you, he'll just eat you.

Think about this way. At the end of Persona 4, you meet essentially God. And she says that all humanity wants to be lost in a fog, and empty. And you say "No, we don't!" and God says "what? Of course you do. Now die". You're not meant to agree with God. The villain is supposed to be wrong, usually from some piece of evidence or twisted logic that they've used improperly. But they don't see it that way, and that's why you have to shoot them with your Persona or your M8 Avenger or whatever you got on you.

@Brodehouse said:

You guys, seriously stop being reactionary and think about it for more than two seconds. This isn't complicated, there are plots and motivations in fiction that are far more complicated than this. The fact that everyone has been harping on this one thing makes me worried that video games will never try to create anything more complicated than "that guy is evil, go get him" because you guys just won't get anything else.

The Intelligence was created by the Leviathans to stop the conflicts between organics and synthetics. Whether through making peace or through annihilation of the synthetics. It just has to make sure organic life continues in whatever form. Now, here's where it has two logic strands that make perfect sense to a machine, but obviously do not to us.

1) It believes being turned into a Reaper to be 'preserving' a civilization. In its eyes, the Prothean civilization is still alive, in Reaper form.

2) Its only goal is keeping organic life as a whole going, not necessarily any one specific race or species. If all the turians are wiped out, it doesn't care... as long as the varren are still around to evolve. Other synthetic life will not have this 'moral compunction', it will wipe out all organic life completely.

Look at this way, the Intelligence is pruning a galactic tree, so that the tree as a whole can live on. It doesn't see the branches as special living entities. It's just a part of the tree as a whole.

This. I thought the DLC was great, and since the EC/Leviathan, I haven't had an issue with the ending. They've done enough work that the initial weirdness of it has been smoothed out to something pretty reasonable. I think most of the problem is that people just want something to be sarcastic and cynical about, because hey, the internet. And, man, EA and Bioware are just the worst, right? No one's ever gonna be positive about any of their crap until a new "villain" arises.

The story still sucks

@Brodehouse said:

You guys, seriously stop being reactionary and think about it for more than two seconds. This isn't complicated, there are plots and motivations in fiction that are far more complicated than this. The fact that everyone has been harping on this one thing makes me worried that video games will never try to create anything more complicated than "that guy is evil, go get him" because you guys just won't get anything else.

The Intelligence was created by the Leviathans to stop the conflicts between organics and synthetics. Whether through making peace or through annihilation of the synthetics. It just has to make sure organic life continues in whatever form. Now, here's where it has two logic strands that make perfect sense to a machine, but obviously do not to us.

1) It believes being turned into a Reaper to be 'preserving' a civilization. In its eyes, the Prothean civilization is still alive, in Reaper form.

2) Its only goal is keeping organic life as a whole going, not necessarily any one specific race or species. If all the turians are wiped out, it doesn't care... as long as the varren are still around to evolve. Other synthetic life will not have this 'moral compunction', it will wipe out all organic life completely.

Look at this way, the Intelligence is pruning a galactic tree, so that the tree as a whole can live on. It doesn't see the branches as special living entities. It's just a part of the tree as a whole.

I've thought about it for far longer than two seconds, and I've posted this before:

Which do you think is more logical? :

A: Create an armada of living spaceships and have them hide in the dark space on the edge of the galaxy waiting thousands of years for the day an advanced civilization will create artificial lifeforms.

Then when those lifeforms are created have your armada terrorize all the advanced civilizations of the galaxy by sending wave after wave of indoctrinated creature, and corrupted artificial lifeforms to kill them for no apparent reason. While the advanced civilizations are still reeling from the earlier attacks, the armada arrives and spends a few hundred years wiping out all advanced lifeforms throughout the galaxy.

Killing billions, torturing, terrorizing twisting living creatures into mindless slaves, destroying knowledge, history and culture and turn those civilizations into cream-filling.

Organic goop preserved in Reaper tupperware for all of history for exactly no one to care about or share with.

-

or

-

B: Show up and say: "Don't build any robots or we'll fucking kill you!" (which is essentially what the reject ending is)

civ·i·li·za·tion

[siv-uh-luh-zey-shuhn] Show IPA

noun1.anadvancedstateofhumansociety,inwhichahighlevelofculture, science,industry,andgovernmenthasbeenreached.

2.thosepeopleornationsthathavereachedsuchastate.

3.anytypeofculture,society,etc.,ofaspecificplace,time,orgroup:Greekcivilization.

4.theactorprocessofcivilizingorbeingcivilized:Rome'scivilizationofbarbarictribeswasadmirable.

5.culturalrefinement;refinementofthoughtandculturalappreciation:ThelettersofMadamedeSévignérevealherwitandcivilization.

-

No "civilization" is spared by the Reapers, only organic paste. Every civilization is obliterated from the face of history never to be known again.

If they show up to harvest the organics, they also have to destroy the synthetics.

It would make more sense to save the organics and leave them with a warning, that could be passed on and it wouldn't take hundreds of years.

Talking about the DLC itself, I liked it because it felt like Mass Effect 2 in a lot of places. It felt like Shepard was out there doing her own thing and investigating secrets, rather than just booting down to the battlefield and leading the push. The opening stuff in dude's lab, especially the part in the mines, it felt like you were exploring Omega for the first time, unsure if someone would jump around a corner with a gun and suddenly it's on. The second map, the one on the ridge was impressive from a technical, artistic and map-design standpoint. It's the closest they've come to doing he Uncharted thing right. But just a little too loud and "IT'S ON!" which I would maybe argue about ME3 in general. Last map was pretty cool, because you explored the area a bit before hostilities rose up.

I think that's it. The best Mass Effect missions always mix up cutscenes and dialog, exploring and environmental stuff, and combat. A lot of ME3 didn't do the mix well, it was big chunks of cutscene-cutscene-cutscene, fight-fight-fight, cutscene. The best loyalty missions were ones where you would start with a cutscene, explore around a bit, limited skirmish, more exploration, another cutscene, another skirmish, environmental puzzle, another cutscene, boss fight, cutscene. Which is not realistic in a combat environment, but that kind of room-by-room thing is core to D&D; and other games that feature exploration.

I look at Jack's loyalty mission, Mordin's loyalty mission, Tali's recruitment mission, or the Noveria stuff from ME1 as having the right blend of searching an area for stuff, getting into isolated fights, and having dialogue and cutscenes in the appropriate mix. That's the real ideal level of Mass Effect. ME3 kind of bogged down with too much of one aspect at a time. I guess poorly paced.

The enemy of my enemy if my friend. I personally liked the dlc and i think that since is can bring debate and conversation about the game makes it worth it.

@Brodehouse said:

@Mike76x You can't see the forest for the trees. The Intelligence legitimately believes Reaper form to be saving those races. It doesn't get individuality, creativity, the ability to define your owns direction, it doesn't get _humanity_. Those do not play into its logic whatsoever. Because its machine logic. It fully believes its doing the right thing, and you as Shepard are given a dialogue choice (actually I think Shepard says it on her own) of "You just don't understand organics". It's wrong, and must be stopped before it hurts more. I think you also say "we don't want to be preserved, we want to live... That's not living." and the Intelligence doesn't understand your problem. As for your warning, I'm sure it did that, and I'm sure it didn't work. What is our natural response to hearing an incredibly powerful race waits outside the galaxy ready to kill us if we displease it; find some way to destroy it. The reject ending is literally that. If God Himself stuck his head out of the sky and said "Don't you research the Higgs Boson" we would find some way to destroy God before he destroyed us. And then we would research the Higgs Boson, because that's how our creativity and individuality expresses itself. Once again, using the tree metaphor; what would happen if you told the free "stop growing or you're going to get caught up in this power line and burn yourself down to the ground". The tree will keep growing. We will keep pushing the boundaries of technology. It's what we do. So it cuts the branches, and trillions die. And then the branches grow back, and it cuts them again. That's actually the exciting thing about the ME3 ending, that galactic civilization is going to see past the mass effect technological era. For aeons it's been stone-iron-bronze-steel-steam-information-space flight-mass effect and then restart. Now the galaxy can see what lies beyond.

According to the entire Mass Effect series AI = life.

Life = thoughts, feelings and emotions.

If reaper-kid is using "machine logic" and can't comprehend "individuality, creativity, the ability to define your own direction", then it is NOT an AI as defined by the Mass Effect itself.

It would be a VI and the Leviathans would still be morons.

-

The reject ending specifically states that the next cycle is able to go on without fear of the harvest thanks to the knowledge of the harvest.

Stupidly, the Reapers destroying all knowledge of the harvest is what leads to the next harvest.

The Reapers are making the cycle continue which makes them not the solution, but part of the problem ensuring that it wont ever be properly solved.

That is not machine logic, that's stupidity and they aren't trimming branches, they're burning down the whole damned tree assuring it can never be guided to a better path.

I wish Drew Karpyshyn got to make the intended arc of Mass Effect after 1 and 2 (You know, the whole Dark Energy thing they heavily hinted at) rather than Casey Hudson butting in and turning it into this dreary convoluted mess.

EA better cut his salary or his fingers off for killing a potential goldmine of a franchise with his terrible storytelling.

@Brodehouse: Maybe it would've been a spectacular failure as well, but that was the intended arc of the trilogy. The fact that Casey Hudson butted in in teh final installment and decided to shoehorn in his much maligned plot and ignore and/or undo several details that had been established for years in advance just smacks of arrogance. It feels disingenious to the concept of the trilogy and really just exacerbates how Mass Effect 3 KILLED the entire universe and franchise.

Not since the Matrix have I seen droves of fans straight up wash their hands of something of this magnitude. Star Wars has repeatedly opened it's rectal cavity and sprayed us with rancid diarreah, but we still come back. People still clamor for The Prisoner even though it ended in a (I find rather beautiful) incomprehensible mess. The WWE keeps shoving John Cena down our throats, but we watch every week. DC continues to retcon their universe, but the comics still fly off the shelf. We endured George Clooney as Batman, yet we wanted more Batman movies!

The "hardcore" fans usually stay and continue giving second chances. Mass Effect won't. It died with that ending. And this DLC seems to do nothing to try to ressucitate it.

Wow, this DLC was already out two weeks ago?! I totally missed that. Go go marketing go. And this thread has devolved into another discussion about the ending... Ugh.

I downloaded and played this yesterday. I loved the focus on detective gameplay, that was a lot of fun and a good counterbalance to the combat-focus of most of the rest of the game. The reveals at the end, the ancient murals, the implications for the plot, all pretty great. I like how this DLC makes ME3 even bigger in terms of the scale and time it's story spans. I'd kind of inferred some of it from the Catalyst conversation already, but yeah. To have it linked to the Leviathan of Dis in this way was unexpected.

I agree that this is totally worth the 800 space bucks. I got four hours out of it. All the new locations looked fantastic, and the voice acting for the new characters was great.

@GetEveryone said:

It's absolutely warranted. Your alternate take is, in essence, what I wrote and the ending remains opaque fluff.

There is nothing wrong with mystery. At all. Explaining away your years-in-the-making mythology with a convoluted five-minute wrap-up is very poor story-telling, indeed.

Hyphens.

It's part of the reason the Star Wars prequels sucked so bad. They tried to explain everything, including the biological reason for the Force -- Midochlorians.

Ugh.

@Brodehouse said:

@TeflonBilly I think you be surprised. I think the next big budget Mass Effect game sells as much as 3, if not more. And I think those hardcore fans will buy it, screaming bloody murder the entire way down.

Given what's happened this week at Bioware, I kind of wonder about that.

@Hailinel said:

@Brodehouse said:

@TeflonBilly I think you be surprised. I think the next big budget Mass Effect game sells as much as 3, if not more. And I think those hardcore fans will buy it, screaming bloody murder the entire way down.

Given what's happened this week at Bioware, I kind of wonder about that.

I don't. If anything, the reason the next big Mass Effect game might sell less would be because it's a side story or it doesn't have Shepard in it. Consider all the people who said 2 ruined the series and the marketing for 3 made it look awful and it's the worst thing ever and ruined forever and blah blah blah... it sold more copies in the first week than 1 and 2 did in their entire runs. Gamers rarely ever quit playing long running series, they just hate it, buy it, and hate it more. Look at all the people who have nothing but bad things to say about Resident Evil 6 (I'm one of them, that demo is atrocious)... I'll put dollars to donuts it sells like gangbusters, even to people like me who bitch and complain about it. Every Call of Duty since 2007 has been the worst thing ever, and yet it sells more every single year, to the exact people who go on forum tirades. Not talking about whether or not the next ME game is better than 3, but I bet it sells at least as well as the first two.

(And in a purely qualitative state... the Doctors were business guys, not creative. If Casey Hudson leaves BioWare to make homemade beer, now I'm flustered. I have no real attachment to the BioWare name, like some people. It's the people who make the games I like, it's Casey Hudson and James Ohlen and David Gaider. they lost Drew Karpyshyn and that's a bummer, but he's moving into writing books and I'll check those out)

I really think people are misinterpreting this as failure on Bioware. I think it's really great; it establishes the Reapers and the deus ex machina as fallible. It doesn't contradict anything. And the point about the Leviathans creating an AI to protect themselves before it rebels is an example of a species not learning from history and seeking an easy way out...

Kind of sounds familiar if you read about US foreign policy...

Mass Effect lore hasn't gotten too crazy yet. And I think there are strong storytelling points in this DLC.

@Brodehouse said:

You guys, seriously stop being reactionary and think about it for more than two seconds. This isn't complicated, there are plots and motivations in fiction that are far more complicated than this. The fact that everyone has been harping on this one thing makes me worried that video games will never try to create anything more complicated than "that guy is evil, go get him" because you guys just won't get anything else.

The Intelligence was created by the Leviathans to stop the conflicts between organics and synthetics. Whether through making peace or through annihilation of the synthetics. It just has to make sure organic life continues in whatever form. Now, here's where it has two logic strands that make perfect sense to a machine, but obviously do not to us.

1) It believes being turned into a Reaper to be 'preserving' a civilization. In its eyes, the Prothean civilization is still alive, in Reaper form.

2) Its only goal is keeping organic life as a whole going, not necessarily any one specific race or species. If all the turians are wiped out, it doesn't care... as long as the varren are still around to evolve. Other synthetic life will not have this 'moral compunction', it will wipe out all organic life completely.

Look at this way, the Intelligence is pruning a galactic tree, so that the tree as a whole can live on. It doesn't see the branches as special living entities. It's just a part of the tree as a whole.

You're right, it isn't complicated, and that's the problem. It's supposed to be complicated but it's ridiculously simple and that's embarrassing for what once was a series with so much promise. No one is having trouble wrapping their heads around it. People are upset because they WANTED to have trouble understanding it.

They shouldn't have tried to explain it at all, but if they decided to try, they really needed to do a sanity check against the Sovereign dialogue from ME1, and they obviously didn't:

Also, it sounds now like they only create one reaper from each harvest...? ehh? But they almost made a baby reaper from the colonists on Freedom's Progress and Horizon..?

Yeah, it isn't complicated. It's just stupid.

@onan said:

@Brodehouse said:

You guys, seriously stop being reactionary and think about it for more than two seconds. This isn't complicated, there are plots and motivations in fiction that are far more complicated than this. The fact that everyone has been harping on this one thing makes me worried that video games will never try to create anything more complicated than "that guy is evil, go get him" because you guys just won't get anything else.

The Intelligence was created by the Leviathans to stop the conflicts between organics and synthetics. Whether through making peace or through annihilation of the synthetics. It just has to make sure organic life continues in whatever form. Now, here's where it has two logic strands that make perfect sense to a machine, but obviously do not to us.

1) It believes being turned into a Reaper to be 'preserving' a civilization. In its eyes, the Prothean civilization is still alive, in Reaper form.

2) Its only goal is keeping organic life as a whole going, not necessarily any one specific race or species. If all the turians are wiped out, it doesn't care... as long as the varren are still around to evolve. Other synthetic life will not have this 'moral compunction', it will wipe out all organic life completely.

Look at this way, the Intelligence is pruning a galactic tree, so that the tree as a whole can live on. It doesn't see the branches as special living entities. It's just a part of the tree as a whole.

You're right, it isn't complicated, and that's the problem. It's supposed to be complicated but it's ridiculously simple and that's embarrassing for what once was a series with so much promise. No one is having trouble wrapping their heads around it. People are upset because they WANTED to have trouble understanding it.

They shouldn't have tried to explain it at all, but if they decided to try, they really needed to do a sanity check against the Sovereign dialogue from ME1, and they obviously didn't:

Also, it sounds now like they only create one reaper from each harvest...? ehh? But they almost made a baby reaper from the colonists on Freedom's Progress and Horizon..?

Yeah, it isn't complicated. It's just stupid.

I don't understand why people keep taking everything that Sovereign said as gospel for the entire Mass Effect universe and the Reapers.

@jmood88 said:

I don't understand why people keep taking everything that Sovereign said as gospel for the entire Mass Effect universe and the Reapers.

Are you serious? Because it's a contradiction. It's a changed premise. That happens all the time in fiction, especially long-running fiction, but it's usually not about something critical like this. The closest thing I can think of is when they retconned the Borg in Star Trek: TNG from the original concept of only being interested in acquiring advanced technology to existing to assimilate advanced species. That didn't really matter though, because the Borg weren't initially put forth as the linchpin antagonists of the series. If anything, that was Q, and that didn't matter because it was a SERIES, rambling and wandering and trying to remain entertaining and somewhat consistent year after year. That wasn't the case with Mass Effect, when people wanted to believe it had been a tightly scripted true trilogy only to have it turn out like it did. It's just not a satisfying conclusion when the conclusion ignores the setup. It would be like if the Lord of the Rings started with the mission to destroy the One Ring to defeat Sauron, only to have Frodo meet the spirit of the Ring right at the end of the third book telling him the true nature of the Ring Wraiths and ...offering the same 3 choices the AI kid does. ("Frodo, you made it to Mount Doom. You can either destroy the ring, become the new Sauron, or merge all the Uruk-hai and middle earth species into a happy little family. Choose now.")

They wrote Sovereign intentionally with really broad strokes to keep it all as vague as possible, and still they missed the mark. Harbinger also was talking a ton of mess during ME2. He gets completely ignored in ME3, only showing up (presumably) to be the Reaper on the planet shooting laser beams at the folks in Hammer (Shepard included) only to fly away. There's zero closure with Harbinger, but you rationalize it as "Oh, well that's ok, it wasn't like he was a big deal or anything," until this DLC decides to go ahead and say that Harbinger was the original fucking Reaper. Which, now that I think about it, it makes no sense. Harbingers are never anyone important. They announce the arrival of something or someone important. By choosing the name or role of "harbinger", Harbinger the Reaper is by definition admitting he's not important.

The Leviathans also state the Reapers consider Shepard specifically to be a threat. In which case, why didn't they stomp him down on the planet when they could have, only to fly away? They sent the biggest, baddest, oldest Reaper, Harbinger, to stop him, only to stop short of it and fly away. What happened, Reaper cataracts?

All in all, very disappointing, and your one sentence just made me consider further why I thought it was disappointing and pull up reasons I hadn't even realized I had before. (Thanks for that.) I'd rather they didn't tell us anything about the Reapers. We keep pointing back to Sovereign because it was cryptic and creepy and PERFECT. It's what you don't see, it's what you don't know, that's what gets under your skin. With the Extended Cut and this Leviathan DLC, they missed the point entirely.

@onan: Everything you say is so true and accurate but at this point, after this many months, should I still continue to care or just get over it? It's just a video game. Fuck if I know. But your points don't matter to me any less than when the game came out

@Pinworm45 said:

@onan: Everything you say is so true and accurate but at this point, after this many months, should I still continue to care or just get over it? It's just a video game. Fuck if I know. But your points don't matter to me any less than when the game came out

I'd say you should probably join the "get over it" club with the rest of us. It's a cool club, and no one in it feels the need to spend extra money on Mass Effect 3 DLC like Leviathan, instead they just check it out on youtube and shake their heads.

@csl316: "My only issue was if they can control the Reapers, how did they get nearly wiped out by the Reapers?"

^ This. They can basically indocrinate Reapers instantly, as shown during the DLC mission.

And... Why is it that beings so unfathomably intelligent couldn't create AI that they couldn't compromise with, yet inferior beings like the Quarians created AI that they could eventually compromise with? Why is it that EDI can think like a human and be willing to act like one, but yet AI more advanced than EDI can't develop sentient emotion? For instance, EDI talks about how she'd die for Joker if necessary, which overrides any sort of primary self-preservation programming. Unless the Reapers have sentient emotion and it's just evil.

Why is it that their AI wants to wipe them all out, but yet lets an inferior being like Shepard decide what to do? Basically gave some inferior being the keys to life.

How can any AI surpass the intelligence of beings that god-like? I understand from our perspective that CPUs think faster and are more efficient at braining than people, but the Leviathan's intelligence isn't even in the same category. They created god-like AI because they're god-like themselves, but their intelligence has to be at least on par with their created AI since it seems that they literally know everything the Reapers do, even more-so since their abilities are intrinsic/biological.

If the original Leviathan race survived so long, why didn't they repopulate while hiding? Also, they know how they created the AI, and they know how they operate, what their plans are, etc... Why not just go to the source and destroy it? For instance, they could have built their own crucible in secret, overtook the Citadel after an annihilation cycle when everything restarts, connect their crucible to the idle Citadel and destroy their own creation.

The Leviathan DLC just makes things even worse.