Going to the Milky Way in Sequels

Well, from the tone of what was said in the "Become a VA for Mass Effect!" thing, it sounds like it's gonna be the wild west in space. I'm not super thrilled by the idea, but I'll give anything that BioWare puts out a shot.

It takes approximately 100,000 years to cross the Milky Way at the speed of light - which is why the Reapers built the Mass Relays in the first place: to speed up the process of harvesting.  The distance between our galaxy and Andromeda is approximately 2.5 million light years away...  25 times the length of time... Wouldn't it take another Relay to make the crossing?  And if so, why didn't the Reaper use it to go harvest Andromeda?

It would certainly be an interesting twist if the species in Andromeda were actually from the Milky Way due to the Wait Calculation but it would also be pretty cheap too. Not to mention the Wait Calculation is one of those "actual science things" that games usually ignore. I mean look at the Mass Relays for example. Scientifically those make absolutely no sense. Traveling that fast in that incredibly short amount of time would have catastrophic effects on the place you would be arriving at. Not to mention at those speeds time would be impossible to keep track of since traveling even a relatively short distance through those things would mean you'd arrive years in the past from when you set off.

I don't have to "get over" anything. Bioware screwed the pooch with ME3 on many levels. And instead of owning up to it, they're charging full speed ahead into yet more stupidity, hoping that "out of sight, out of mind"

And no, One fictionalized world is not as good as any other. For good fiction, you need consistency. Otherwise, while the hell are they putting "Mass Effect" on this game?

Sorry, I don't do bandwagons.  I will wait until Bioware actually says or does something to give me confidence in this game.  So far I haven't seen anything that tells me they have learned from their mistakes.

I am doing what makes sense. I'm calling them on their BS and reminding people that Bioware likes to overhype and underdeliver. I wan to remind people that most of the geniuses who thought ME3's ending was "Art" are still in charge. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"

Mass Effect before you can only reach very close star systems without either a relay or, you know the ship slagging itself and the crew getting microwaved. Now we can cross millions of light years! This is not consistent.

I don't want that final choice to stand. I don't want it to even exist.

I want the Secret IP to be a Crisis Crossover where Solas is an Anti Monitor like being threatening multiple Bioware IPs, with characters from Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Jade Empire coming together to stop him, and the resulting chaos resets the ME universe so the Reaper War never happened, the groundwork laid for DA4, and a resurgence of the Jade Empire franchise.

But I'll settle for the ending simply being disavowed.

Fine line between remembering and obsessing.

I will not forget, nor let them forget. I will also ignore those that try to tell others how to think or what to do.

If someone wants to forget, fine. If others don't, that's fine too.

well Andromeda does get Bioware as far away from the ending of ME3 as i suppose they could get.

Here's a pertinent question.

Why Andromeda? As you all probably know, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way are on a collision course so what could be gained from going to Andromeda? Also the fact it is moving towards us would surely make it tricky if mass accelerators were involved (remember that little detail in mass effect one in regards to 'drift'?)

Honestly, they'd get shit for that decision as well. I don't think it's even worth arguing whether or not a lot of people just wouldn't mind it, because it's just as likely that a lot of people wouldn't mind the decision to just move out of the entire setting either. As for Deus Ex, I'm not convinced that this is the best example, mainly because I just don't believe that people really care all that much about the game's story, characters or setting enough to really invest themselves in whichever ending there was. But maybe that's just me, because I found the game to feel like a cold, emotionless wasteland, what with everyone's drab let's-get-this-over-with voice acting, especially Jensen. 

That only means that they think they can make a lot more money off of it. Time will tell if their decision actually pays off. 


We'll just have to see whether or not people care once the game is actually out. As much as some might have some sort of emotional attachment to quadrants of the Milky Way, they may just form attachments to various new places set in this new galaxy and our new ship. In the end, that it's in Andromeda or the Milky Way may not make the slightest difference except to the most obsessive of the bunch. 

Come on. In all likelihood. the only place fans in general will ever truly miss is the Citadel. It's the only location that actually mattered. Palaven was a scorched battleground before we even got to see it (from orbit), Sur'Kesh was just a secret facility deep in a jungle that we visited for maybe an hour, and Rannoch was a desert swarming with geth. I suppose an argument can be made for Tuchanka, since it actually does provide a hub location at some point in the series, and multiple quests take place there across ME2 and 3 and gives us the most in terms of the culture of the people that live on it, but the rest are temporary battlegrounds, leaving only the Citadel as the one and only place that serves as the focal point of the MEU's world, and I suspect that it will be outright replaced entirely by a likely superior hub, thanks in part to the new consoles permitting greater technical detail. 


It's been my observation that people don't care where we live IRL. With ME3, people consistently ragged on Shepard's attachment to Earth, especially if they were a colonist or spacer, saying that various fictional worlds we barely visited were more meaningful to them, even though they never even got to see most of these places until they were bumrushed by the reapers or Cerberus. Earth, Mars and the moon are literally the only places that actually exist in the entire setting, yet people didn't even care. 


If it means anything, the premise of the original trilogy didn't make much sense either. In its defense, it at least got by by leaving much of its senselessness a mystery, until ME2 and 3 totally let it out of the bag. 

Of course there's no emotional attachment to Andromeda; no one's had a chance to even develop that yet. As for the Milky Way's situation, that was only true before the Extended Cut. Any claims that its left unresolved after that are simply false. It basically just comes down to whether or not people like the various resolutions. 

This feels like the elephant was one of those tortured circus elephants that escapes, runs rampant in the streets and then gets shot and killed as a result. 

I'd say that this is debatable. I could argue that original trilogy was just about Shepard, since Shepard was the focus of every single major conflict in the setting, determining the outcomes of all of them. So with that, this character has been resolved, and it would be time to move on to the next protagonist's story, wherever it may actually take place. As for the Fermi Paradox, I doubt that was ever even on anyone's minds when they were writing each game. 

Well, DA did make this simpler by leaving most outcomes fixed, so the world state never has any drastic differences that would permeate throughout the entire setting. 


I'm not sure what you're looking at to even make this comparison. Does No Man's Sky even have characters to speak of? 

Provided humanity survives long enough to see that event, the sheer vastness of the space between bodies ensures that the chances of an actual collision with any particular system's star are fairly remote.  

true, but gravity will make it a very interesting place to be come collision day with whole star systems flung around like rag dolls, some getting totally thrown out the milky way altogether.

good job humanity won't be around then I suppose (unless we've built a dyson sphere around proxima centauri that is).

I think it is not bad to be artistically ambitious. Videogames, at least those that tell stories, are an art form from the ground up, and the question is rather if one is good art or bad art. My favorite ME3 review put it like this:



I'd like to call ME3 "failed art". In order to be successful with an artistically ambitious project, you need to be up to it. Most videogame writers aren't (recent example: the failed racism allegory in Deus Ex:Mankind Divided), and the ME3 lead writers were a classic example. On the other hand, we have the graphics designers. If you can make fictional landscapes so beautiful that they make people cry, or so realistic that you can almost feel their effects (example: DAI's Emerald Greaves and Storm Coast), you are a good artist.

I would like everyone who works in a relevant position at the MEA team to be as artistically ambitious as their skill can deliver. Unfortunately, we have Mac Walters as the project lead. It's probably better for him to stick to the simple. And in any case, I prefer applicability to allegory, as in Tolkien's famous statement. Just tell the story. People will find applicability on their own, and your art is probably better for it.

I think the ending conception was Casey Hudson's. I don't think Mac Walters would be able to come up with something like that. The danger is that he might want to "do it right this time".

Doing it right, that's just telling the story and not forcing in any themes that don't come naturally into it. One hopes that enough influential people at Bioware agree with that to do that.