Going to the Milky Way in Sequels

Well, if the emphasis on RPG was valid in the PR release about BioWare's new boss, then it's likely there'll be a sequel, regardless. Because, honestly, none of the games have actually done bad so i feel it's inevitable, especially given what's been shown so far.

Now, back on topic… this might end up being a new set in the series all together as the current set of games is about exploring the various areas within Andromeda. Once this is done, it'll be the linking of the Milky Wayan and Andromedan society's, and (maybe) the consequences of doing so. Because, honestly, if some super-advanced race doesn't have an issue with us linking galaxy's together, i'd be very surprised.

once you achieve a given speed you don't slow down unless you apply the brakes, if a mass relay lobs you in a set direction then you will go in that direction at the start speed until you turn on the brakes... Newtonian law ....

standard physics only apply up to the point of achieving light speed after that your mass will act as a brake until you drop back below light speed, however you can utilise something like the tantalus drive core to project mass cancelling fields around your ship and thus negate the braking effect that mass would cause when travelling faster than light through gravitational pull....

gravitational effect is a reaction of mass x speed if you travel fast enough everything exerts a gravitational field regardless of its mass (cern institute proved this with photons)

so if you negate the mass you negate the gravitational drag  effect leaving you coasting without fuel expenditure at faster speeds, which is rather handy given your talking about traveling in 300 years the distance that would at light speed take you a thousand years and thanks ot time dilation effect caused by supper dense gravitational fields  created by things with mass traveling at or faster than light it would actually take 30 years for the passengers but 1000 years for the MW would of passed....

never mind the fuel requirements to provide the power generation to fuel a positive constant thrust for an active FTL drive travelling that distance (something the size of a planet would probably hold enough to allow for breaking at the far end as well)

however through the effects of space magic they can take something about the size of the Normandy sr2 and lob it out of a mass relay pointed at Andromeda and let it slow down on the far side of the void without needing that gigantic fuel tank and without needing to disrupt the linear time line ......

its a fantasy fiction so they can of course ignore the bits of real world physics they don't like, I'm really just surprised they didn't do away with the whole it took 300 years to cross the void bit, when they could of just said using a reaper drive core they crossed the divide in 67 years (based on it taking 6 months for them to cross the 30 light year gap at the end of arrival) ....

I still dream of a Mass Effect: C sec game that is entirely based on the citadel. You could be one of the first human C sec officers and even have Harkin as one of the squadmates and just go around solving crimes and interacting with the various peoples of the Citadel. But alas. 

Also, I think this is partly why EA and Bioware have been so hesitant about releasing the ME trilogy. Any release of the trilogy between Andromeda and Andromeda 2 will ignite the split between fans that want to stay in Andromeda and those who want to go back to the milky way.

Lore states that the top speed of the regular Citadel space vessels in Mass Effect is about 15 ly per day, with the Reapers being said to be twice as fast. That means that the Reaper ships could have made that 30 light year journey in a day, rather than six months.

I think the explanation from the Arrival is that the Alpha Relay was right on the edge of the galaxy and relatively distant from any other Relays in the network. Once it was destroyed, the Reapers were forced to travel across a few star clusters before they got to the closest available Relay.

The delay might also be explained from having to refuel the entire Reaper Armada, as they have spent several aeons running on low-power mode in Dark Space to conserve their energy. We know they also spent some time harvesting planets within Batarian space, as they have many husks from human slaves and Cannibals made from huskified Humans and Batarians that they deploy during the invasion of Earth.

On topic however, time dilation has never appeared to be an issue or factored into FTL travel within the ME universe. Something that important when it comes to the foundations of how galactic society would operate if they had to factor in relativistic effects would have been made clear long before now, were it an issue?

For instance, even with the Mass Relays creating a zero mass corridor for ships to increase their speed, any relativistic effects would mean that attempting to respond to a colony under attack would be pointless. By the time you'd arrive, the place would be in ruin or have been home to the invading species for possibly decades?

As that clearly doesn't happen and ships can fly all around the galaxy without ending up in the distant future due to the effects of extreme time dilation, that would suggest that Mass Effect technology somehow negates the issue of relativity for the sake of plot convenience.

Storywise, it'd have been easier to admit that Control and Synthesis make no sense for Shepard to take (why would they ever trust the Reaper AI that gives two options that would result in their death?) and have Destroy as the canon ending of ME3.

The next game could have been set a few hundred years down the line when galactic civilisation has largely rebuilt, albeit with new power blocs having formed in the wake of the Reaper invasion.

The Relay Network is only partially functional because of the damage they suffered from the blast at the end of ME3, which has lead people to spread out to find Relays that weren't affected from the pulse, due to being offline at the time. Several previously unknown civilisations have also been discovered in these new areas of the Milky Way, some of whom were lucky to avoid being culled by the Reapers, with others not having reached the right technological level, but may have since been uplifted by (ex) Citadel species seeking to exploit them.

Yeah, I know that a default canon is anathema to the idea of player choice at the end of ME3... but since we hated the choices anyway, at least Destroy would give us an more interesting scenario to revisit a couple hundred years down the line.

aside from the fact one of the devs said the only sensible choice was synthesis, your not wrong about it actually being destroy, sure it meant an end to the geth and possibly edi's sex bot body but otherwise it wasn't really a choice thing, it actually made less sense for the mass relays to be damaged by that choice, all they did was transmit the kill signal to the reapers in much the same way as the various MW species sent data from one relay to another....

as to the opening up side of things, there were large tracts of the MW that were still unexplored by the citadel races and they knew from a database in the citadel of several relays that had been lost, so the likelihood of a missing relay hiding inside a nebula that lead to some reaper harvest evading race (like perhaps some part of the prothiain or one of their predecessors society) that had continued to evolve technologically speaking and represented a serious threat to the rest of the galaxy wouldn't be that far fetched and could be a precursor game to ME:A if say the ark project had to be launched, but that's just scene setting and could likely be achieved through a companion title on mobile /tablet (so long as they make it available for windows devices and not just icrap)

still I wouldn't get to hung up on the whole time dilation stuff within the MW galaxy, you could leave earth at breakfast time hit the relay in sol system shoot to omega have a street fight and get home in time for lunch thanks to the near instantaneous travel speed of the relay system.....


oh and yes I would of preferred if the final bit of the game had been a 10 minute video rather than an annoying listen to the nonskipable glowbrat prattle on about the choices of shep hearing the choices and then running full bore at the destroy option....

Precisely, just because one dev (probably the same one who wrote the terrible ending) liked Synthesis does not make it the "best" scenario.

Thematically, Destroy was the the best as it fit the entire goal of Shepard from the start of the series, which was to eliminate the Reapers once and for all and break the Cycle. It further followed in the same vein as the Paragon speech in ME2 that using the technology from the Collectors base would be wrong even if it advanced humanity, as it would be forever tainted by the deaths of thousands (or tens of thousands) of innocent men, women and children who were pulped to create the core of the proto-Reaper.

While it sucks that Destroy wipes out the Geth and EDI, it further reinforces that the war cannot be won without sacrifice. It does however make sense that they would be affected because the beam was probably designed to wipe out anything carrying Reaper code, something that EDI's program was built upon and which the Geth (stupidly) uploaded into themselves on Rannoch.

Beyond the "space magic" aspect of Synthesis somehow causing everyone hit by the beam to transform into techno-organic life, the major flaw with this ending is that we don't know precisely what this means for the Reapers or the Catalyst going forward, as well as the accidental nightmare fuel that it creates.

For example, now that everyone is at least partially synthetic, shouldn't that make anyone compatible and susceptible to being hacked should a Reaper or the Catalyst wish to start "Assuming Direct Control" over them? Are the Reapers still being controlled or are they now individuals and if so, do they remember their creation?

Are Husks now self-aware and remember their former identities, what they have done and what was done to them? The seemingly horrified reaction of the Husk in the Synthesis ending after the wave hit it made it seem like it might remember something of their former selves, which is frigging terrifying to consider! Now remember the husk head in Shepard's quarters? What about Cannibals or Brute creates from two different species? Or the Scions, who are made from multiple husks?

It's not that Synthesis and post-human existence couldn't happen to the ME universe in the far distant future, but rushing the Singularity before everyone is ready and forcing the change upon them seems antithetical to what Shepard (Renegade or Paragon) has been fighting to protect from the start. Forcing all life in the galaxy to change for the purpose of continued survival was precisely what Saren was advocating in ME1, when you stop and think about it?

But yeah... Synthesis is by far the worst ending, not only because it's badly written, but it's terrifying when you consider the implications.

Having Mac Walters direct a Mass Effect game is kinda like having Zack Snyder directing a Superman movie.

And in practice
Are they? Or do they just want to take a break from the Milky Way to test the waters in another galaxy?
I don't know what's funnier? The green crap ending or the what-the-crap evac scene? I believe the green was added to the game for the comedians to use for their opening act.

We won't know until they try. And they won't try.

Are they? Or do they just want to take a break from the Milky Way to test the waters in another galaxy?[/quote]

How can one want to "take a break" from hundreds of millions of stars when we've visited a few dozen at most? Anything they might want to put in Andromeda they could just as easily put in the Milky Way, if they were willing to ignore the endings.

The Stargate franchise managed it, with SG1 being set in the Milky Way, but the spin off Atlantis took place in the Pegasus Galaxy.

Actually, the basic premise of an expedition to another galaxy, cut off from Earth, trying to find relics of an precursor species, making allies, exploring and dealing with an alien threat... yeah, SGA and MEA do share a lot of similarities when you really stop and think about it.

Although I did think SGA lost some of the danger when communication and travel with Earth became more regular after the first season, even if they didn't go the easy route of having dialing home being less of a problem, forcing them to take three weeks if they wanted to commute on a ship with a souped up hyperdrive.

Having them somehow reestablish contact with Earth in MEA, even 400 years down the line wouldn't probably help MEA stand apart from the original trilogy. I'd much rather us continue to explore a new galaxy in the sequels rather than go back to Earth, since from what we've seen so far, we might only be exploring a single cluster of stars.