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Post by Deleted on Dec 8, 2019 13:16:58 GMT
Is this the part where I list the issues, and you pretend that they don't matter? By all means go ahead. There some minor plot holes/contrivances to keep it moving. I stress, MINOR. Mainly that the Council accepts a voice recording of Saren as proof of his treason and whether or not Saren/Sovereign understood what the Conduit was, since if they did finding it was really not necessary considering before Eden Prime Saren could have walked the Citadel freely. The first is explainable as being the best fit for visual and auditory experience as it made for a concise scene to move the plot forward even if it wasn't realistic. The latter could be explained away with a little bit of logic and/or dialogue, but it wasn't so it remains. Neither of these compares to TIM's very specific list of recruits despite having zero knowledge of what lies beyond the Omega-4 Relay. How are we supposed to realistically build the right team if we don't know what we're up against? Related to this is the fact that no mention is ever made in the main game of any probes being sent through the Omega-4 Relay. Again, nothing is known about it so it is impractical to be able to prepare for it. A minor plot-hole is Mordin having a Seeker Swarm thing to test on despite the fact we were told that no evidence of the Collectors was ever available much less any examples of their technology. So how did Mordin get one and make a cure? This not a big deal though. What IS a big deal is Shepard never bringing up Akuze or the events of ME1 with TIM, especially if Shepard was a Sole Survivor. The main game never explains why Wilson turned traitor. It just makes no logical sense. How Shepard's body survived in any capacity to be recovered is never explained. Finally, though these aren't plot-holes per se, they are examples of ME2's plot being poorly conceived and executed. First is the "twist" aboard the Collector Ship about the Collector's being Protheans. The narrative presents this as a shocking revelation but it falls flat because it doesn't MEAN anything and doesn't CHANGE anything. Whether the Reapers turn us into new servants or just wipe us out utterly makes no real difference to humanity or our fight against the Reapers. Thus it was a pointless addition to the plot. Lastly, the whole Collector conflict and its resolution doesn't have any particular relevance to the overall struggle against the Reapers. By the end of the game we have not learned anything useful and this is compounded by the fact that Shepard has the option to blow up the Collector base. At the very least if saving it was mandatory you'd be able to speculate that Cerberus could reverse-engineer Reaper tech to counter it. Instead nothing has really been gained or learned and thus ME2 ends at exactly the same place ME1 did: the Reapers are coming and we need to stop them. That's not getting into the DLC, which adds new problems. Makes them worse, in fact. So by all means list ME1's plot-holes and issues. I'm going to remind you here that we are talking plot and writing. If you want to talk about ME1's gameplay flaws that is a different discussion. Edit: I'm actually leaving out some other flaws in ME2, as a matter of fact. Sounds to me that, literary speaking, the holes in ME1 are as big as the ones in ME2; and you're just dismissing the ME1 as minor while making a big deal out of the ME2 ones.
I have no problem with TIM sending Shepard to recruit specific individuals even though he doesn't really know what they'll be up against beyond the Omega 4 relay. The team he compiles is a mixed bag of talents (some biotics, some tech, a couple a snipers and others who work in up close). It's what I would consider a team designed to be varied enough to cover almost any situation... precisely because he doesn't know what Shepard will be up against.
I've previously listed several issues with ME1's plot... the most glaring being the concept of the galaxy as having a tangible divide from dark space such that the Reapers could not enter the galaxy except through the Citadel Relay and the concept that rendering the keepers unresponsive to Sovereign somehow managed to cut Sovereign off from communicating with his fellow Reapers when they are synthetics/machines. The concept of the mini-relay "backdoor" sitting out in the public plaza being the Conduit (the thing Saren spends the whole game searching for) is also absurd. It's also absurd that Sovereign arrives from Ilos via regular relay moments after Shepard arrives via the Conduit... when the journey from Eden Prime to the Citadel is more than 15 hours, the duration Shepard is said to be unconscious at the beginning of the game. The whole set up of the Relay network is, quite frankly, illogical.
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Post by alanc9 on Dec 8, 2019 13:45:57 GMT
The existence of that voice recording is a bigger problem than the Council believing it. A geth unit overheard the conversation, left Sovereign and travelled to wherever Tall was for God knows what reason, where she blows up the platform, extracts its memory, reads it, books passage to the Citadel... and somehow arrives before the Normandy?
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Post by gothpunkboy89 on Dec 8, 2019 13:45:57 GMT
Is this the part where I list the issues, and you pretend that they don't matter? Neither of these compares to TIM's very specific list of recruits despite having zero knowledge of what lies beyond the Omega-4 Relay. How are we supposed to realistically build the right team if we don't know what we're up against? Isn't that why you gather a pretty mix bag of characters? Thanos/Kasumi the assassin/theif who is use to sneaking though unknown areas undetected, Tali/Legion the tech wiz to deal with any unknown tech they might run into, Mordin the former STG who is able to think several steps ahead in new and unexpected situations, Garus/Zaeed the master of asymetrical warfare and experienced leader, Grunt/Jacob/Jack/Samara the muscle needed to fight off any direct confrontations. Not really sure were to put Miranda in all of this as she mostly sits around telling you what to do and apologizing for Cerberus. I'd say sex appeal but technically Tali already have that covered. A lot of rule 34 of Tali out there.
You get a pretty mixed bag to potentially deal with all issues that could arise.
Sovereign being disabled because a glorified Husk was destroyed is far from minor plot hole. As would the concept of a Prothean computer program being able to block a Reaper from controlling the very technology they designed. Sovereign not being able to activate the mass relay in the realistic 30-40 minutes (being generous) it would take for Sheppard to fight their way to the Council Chamber. Or even override the Keeper Signal back to it's original frequency causing them to activate the Relay system anyways.
These are kind of major points the plot relies on.
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Post by alanc9 on Dec 8, 2019 13:58:31 GMT
My favorite part is Saren blowing his cover by searching for the Conduit, which lets him go someplace he could already go before he started searching for the Conduit. OK, irony is fun, but what on Earth was Sovereign thinking when it cooked up this plan?
And protip: once you've used a console to set the Citadel's arms where you want them, blow it up. Then you don't have to worry about anyone else using it.
Edit: Benezia's people killing each other on Noveria is fun too. Maybe Indoctrination is supposed to have fried her brain already?
And why is one of Saren's krogan trying to get information on the Thorian out of the VI at ExoGeni? Saren already knew exactly what the Thorian was and where to find it.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 8, 2019 15:17:28 GMT
Neither of these compares to TIM's very specific list of recruits despite having zero knowledge of what lies beyond the Omega-4 Relay. How are we supposed to realistically build the right team if we don't know what we're up against? Isn't that why you gather a pretty mix bag of characters? Thanos/Kasumi the assassin/theif who is use to sneaking though unknown areas undetected, Tali/Legion the tech wiz to deal with any unknown tech they might run into, Mordin the former STG who is able to think several steps ahead in new and unexpected situations, Garus/Zaeed the master of asymetrical warfare and experienced leader, Grunt/Jacob/Jack/Samara the muscle needed to fight off any direct confrontations. Not really sure were to put Miranda in all of this as she mostly sits around telling you what to do and apologizing for Cerberus. I'd say sex appeal but technically Tali already have that covered. A lot of rule 34 of Tali out there.
You get a pretty mixed bag to potentially deal with all issues that could arise.
Sovereign being disabled because a glorified Husk was destroyed is far from minor plot hole. As would the concept of a Prothean computer program being able to block a Reaper from controlling the very technology they designed. Sovereign not being able to activate the mass relay in the realistic 30-40 minutes (being generous) it would take for Sheppard to fight their way to the Council Chamber. Or even override the Keeper Signal back to it's original frequency causing them to activate the Relay system anyways.
These are kind of major points the plot relies on.
Miranda and Jacob are already Cerberus and Shepard wakes up to them, so TIM puts keeps them on Shepard's team. I head canon that Jacob is there to illustrate the lack of specific talents in TIM's regular forces, which is why he has to resort to recruiting a capable team elsewhere anyways... so he lets Shepard do it so Shepard feels somewhat comfortable with the people he recruits. Miranda, as you say, is there to keep an eye on everyone and report back to TIM. She's the only one TIM trusts.
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Post by sassafrassa on Dec 8, 2019 18:30:23 GMT
Isn't that why you gather a pretty mix bag of characters? It's not what I'd do. What if instead of one Collector ship there was a fleet of them? What if there were a dozen massive space stations in the galactic core, each with its own accompanying Collector ship? What is your little frigate and dozen commandos going to do then? What if there was an entire planet on the other side? What if there WASN'T some convenient space station with access to its core that you could blow up? What if you couldn't shoot down the Collector ship because it had lots of support craft? Point is, I have no idea what is on the other side so I can't prepare very well. The plot rides on contrivance. In light of that, why should I recruit an assassin or a justiciar or a psychotic lunatic who could tear the ship apart if she gets too emotional? Why do I need Archangel? Sure, he sounds like a good team leader but I already have good team leaders. To me the only sensible recruits are Mordin and Okeer (failed) because they are SCIENTISTS and what I need is to STUDY my enemy. Mind you, all of this could be excused if it were just lampshaded by the plot at first and then explained later. It would have been no problem at all if Shepard and co picked up on TIM providing a very specific list and set of equipment, almost as if TIM already knows what we'll be up against and is already planning the mission down to the last detail. We could have questioned TIM about it and learned that he actually does know, mostly, what is beyond the Omega-4 Relay. There are any number of ways he could have learned and all it would require is some extra dialog from him. My favorite part is Saren blowing his cover by searching for the Conduit, which lets him go someplace he could already go before he started searching for the Conduit. OK, irony is fun, but what on Earth was Sovereign thinking when it cooked up this plan? And protip: once you've used a console to set the Citadel's arms where you want them, blow it up. Then you don't have to worry about anyone else using it. And why is one of Saren's krogan trying to get information on the Thorian out of the VI at ExoGeni? Saren already knew exactly what the Thorian was and where to find it. I already addressed this. You are talking minor shit and making assumptions anyway. Sorry, but your logic is just incorrect here. We don't need to know why Sovereign died and in fact, we don't actually know that killing the Saren husk had anything to do with it. The scene is cinematic and Sovereign dies after the last boss is killed because the game needs to end. Does it matter? It is not a big issue at all. Regarding the Conduit, it is a plot hole, but one that could be explained. It is not big plot-hole because by the time it comes up the game is already ending and the pieces are all in place. Sovereign and Saren most likely just didn't know what the Conduit was and once they did realized that ultimately they never needed it. A good writer could have actually re-used the Conduit in follow-up games to increase its thematic value; as it actually has a lot. You don't understand what a big plot-hole is or how it affects the plot. Pretty trivial since the important thing we learn at this point in the story is how the Reapers wiped out the Protheans and how we can stop them, with the Conduit just being a tool to help us do that. The Conduit is at this point not the focus of the plot; Sovereign and the Citadel are. I'm not sure what you are talking about with Noveria. The only instance of Benezia's troops killing "her own people" is when a commando executes a security guard to get at Shepard under a very specific set of circumstances. This is not a plot hole at all. The Commandos are indoctrinated followers of Benezia but the Peak 15 security team are just employees of Exo-Geni. When they attack Shepard it is because they are following orders, not because they are indoctrinated. As such, they are not 100% aligned with Benezia, as is shown by the prior incident of the commando killing a security guard who gets in her way. The security team and researchers are just pawns. RE: Krogan on Feros. I don't know, I suppose that is a plot-hole but again, it's a trivial one. You could cut that krogan and his little scene out of the game entirely and nothing would change. In fact, that scene probably should have been cut. The existence of that voice recording is a bigger problem than the Council believing it. A geth unit overheard the conversation, left Sovereign and travelled to wherever Tall was for God knows what reason, where she blows up the platform, extracts its memory, reads it, books passage to the Citadel... and somehow arrives before the Normandy? It's minor in the grand scheme of things. How long after the Normandy arrived on the Citadel did the Council meeting start? Was it minutes later? Hours? Was it days? Weeks? There is no indication of the timespan. Mind you, the games do not happen in real-time. It takes hours or days to travel between solar systems and star clusters in some cases. It can take a few hours just to properly prepare for landing on a planet. The characters have to eat and sleep but we rarely ever see it. Does the precise history of this geth actually affect the plot if we know or don't know? The answer is no, so it is a very minor plot-hole. You want to compare it to any of ME2's plot holes or contrivances? You are nitpicking to defend ME2. This kind of mentality is how this series got ruined in the first place; fanboys defending something they love and trying to ignore its flaws, to their own detriment in the end. I like ME2 as well, and thus it pains me that it has so many glaring flaws. Especially because in many cases they could have easily been corrected.
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Post by alanc9 on Dec 8, 2019 18:57:29 GMT
That doesn't work unless you figure that Udina didn't meet with Anderson until days after Normandy docked. I don't think that passes the laugh test. But hey, if you can buy the sequence here, good for you.
And knowing or not knowing is not the question. We know the geth's history, and it's silly.
We also have to charge the silly Reaper M.O and goals to ME1. The bill didn't come due until ME3, but ME1 ran it up.
As for who's fanboying harder, stop trying to handwave away ME1's problems and I might take you seriously there. If you were making a case that ME2 was perhaps slightly worse than ME1, that'd be another matter. But you're not.
Concerning the question of the Conduit and what counts as a plot hole, you can't seriously be saying that it's determined by whether or not we're past it before we find out about it, but that's how it reads. What definition are you using?
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Post by Deleted on Dec 8, 2019 19:46:44 GMT
The existence of that voice recording is a bigger problem than the Council believing it. A geth unit overheard the conversation, left Sovereign and travelled to wherever Tall was for God knows what reason, where she blows up the platform, extracts its memory, reads it, books passage to the Citadel... and somehow arrives before the Normandy? I agree... and then there's the further "discrepancy." Shouldn't Tali be collecting said memory banks from the geth outposts we take out in the Armstrong Cluster. In the conversation that follows with her, shouldn't she be able to share/trade information she obtained with Shepard rather than it being a request to give here the data Shepard downloaded from a terminal just because she wants it and it would take ages to decrypt it anyways.
It's illogical that the only geth memory core she collects during the game is the one that just happens to have exactly what Shepard needed to connect Saren to the attack on Eden Prime. A minor point, but I'm also at a lostt as to why it would be recovered from the geth's "audio banks"... since the geth never says anything. It is never explain how exactly a geth on an uncharted world happens to have a private conversation recorded in its "audio banks" as though it was standing right next to Saren when he made those statements after he left Eden Prime.
If any geth literally hears everything that any other geth hears, then any memory core should give Tali information about all geth, including those operating on their own outside the veil. If not, then that geth had all of 15 hours maximum to leave Sovereign, travel to an uncharted world in such a way that Tali tracks it... and then become separated from the others so that Tali can obtain its memory core. Then Tali has to analyze it and determine its worth something to the Shadow Broker (rather than her own people) get to the Citadel, get treated by Dr. Michel, and try to contact the Shadow Broker. That she opts to go to the Citadel to sell the info to the Shadow Broker seems to go against the intent of her Pilgrimage... i.e. finding some information about the geth operating on their own outside the Veil and bringing it back to her own people.
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Post by sassafrassa on Dec 8, 2019 20:10:51 GMT
It's illogical that the only geth memory core she collects during the game is the one that just happens to have exactly what Shepard needed to connect Saren to the attack on Eden Prime. A minor point, but I'm also at a lostt as to why it would be recovered from the geth's "audio banks"... since the geth never says anything
Look up the word "audio". It will blow your mind.
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Post by sassafrassa on Dec 8, 2019 20:16:51 GMT
That doesn't work unless you figure that Udina didn't meet with Anderson until days after Normandy docked. Entirely possible. Probable, even. Or do you think the Council investigation into Saren only took literal minutes? Now find a major plot hole in ME1, or give it up. You haven't found any because there aren't any. I don't care if you take me seriously or not and in the end I don't care what you think about ME1 or ME2. I find your judgement very suspect. Misguided at best, dishonest at worst. Concerning the question of the Conduit and what counts as a plot hole, you can't seriously be saying that it's determined by whether or not we're past it before we find out about it, but that's how it reads. What definition are you using? In fiction, a plot hole, plothole or plot error is a gap or inconsistency in a storyline that goes against the flow of logic established by the story's plot.[1] Such inconsistencies include such things as illogical, unlikely or impossible or events,[2] and statements or events that contradict earlier events in the storyline. The term is more loosely also applied to "loose ends" in a plot – side-lined story elements that remain unresolved by the end of the plot. -- From Wikipedia. The question of the Conduit doesn't work here. You could even argue that it's not a plot hole at all, just a lapse in information making for a contrivance. We are never told what the Conduit is or given the impression that Saren or Sovereign know; only that they think it is key to the return of the Reapers. Keep in mind that if not for happenstance Saren would not have been exposed for his treason after Eden Prime. It's a gap in knowledge and information, it is even a contrivance, but it's not a plot hole.
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Post by gothpunkboy89 on Dec 8, 2019 20:57:55 GMT
Isn't that why you gather a pretty mix bag of characters? It's not what I'd do. What if instead of one Collector ship there was a fleet of them? What if there were a dozen massive space stations in the galactic core, each with its own accompanying Collector ship? What is your little frigate and dozen commandos going to do then? What if there was an entire planet on the other side? What if there WASN'T some convenient space station with access to its core that you could blow up? What if you couldn't shoot down the Collector ship because it had lots of support craft? Point is, I have no idea what is on the other side so I can't prepare very well. The plot rides on contrivance. In light of that, why should I recruit an assassin or a justiciar or a psychotic lunatic who could tear the ship apart if she gets too emotional? Why do I need Archangel? Sure, he sounds like a good team leader but I already have good team leaders. To me the only sensible recruits are Mordin and Okeer (failed) because they are SCIENTISTS and what I need is to STUDY my enemy. Mind you, all of this could be excused if it were just lampshaded by the plot at first and then explained later. It would have been no problem at all if Shepard and co picked up on TIM providing a very specific list and set of equipment, almost as if TIM already knows what we'll be up against and is already planning the mission down to the last detail. We could have questioned TIM about it and learned that he actually does know, mostly, what is beyond the Omega-4 Relay. There are any number of ways he could have learned and all it would require is some extra dialog from him. My favorite part is Saren blowing his cover by searching for the Conduit, which lets him go someplace he could already go before he started searching for the Conduit. OK, irony is fun, but what on Earth was Sovereign thinking when it cooked up this plan? And protip: once you've used a console to set the Citadel's arms where you want them, blow it up. Then you don't have to worry about anyone else using it. And why is one of Saren's krogan trying to get information on the Thorian out of the VI at ExoGeni? Saren already knew exactly what the Thorian was and where to find it. I already addressed this. You are talking minor shit and making assumptions anyway. Sorry, but your logic is just incorrect here. We don't need to know why Sovereign died and in fact, we don't actually know that killing the Saren husk had anything to do with it. The scene is cinematic and Sovereign dies after the last boss is killed because the game needs to end. Does it matter? It is not a big issue at all. Regarding the Conduit, it is a plot hole, but one that could be explained. It is not big plot-hole because by the time it comes up the game is already ending and the pieces are all in place. Sovereign and Saren most likely just didn't know what the Conduit was and once they did realized that ultimately they never needed it. A good writer could have actually re-used the Conduit in follow-up games to increase its thematic value; as it actually has a lot. You don't understand what a big plot-hole is or how it affects the plot. Pretty trivial since the important thing we learn at this point in the story is how the Reapers wiped out the Protheans and how we can stop them, with the Conduit just being a tool to help us do that. The Conduit is at this point not the focus of the plot; Sovereign and the Citadel are. I'm not sure what you are talking about with Noveria. The only instance of Benezia's troops killing "her own people" is when a commando executes a security guard to get at Shepard under a very specific set of circumstances. This is not a plot hole at all. The Commandos are indoctrinated followers of Benezia but the Peak 15 security team are just employees of Exo-Geni. When they attack Shepard it is because they are following orders, not because they are indoctrinated. As such, they are not 100% aligned with Benezia, as is shown by the prior incident of the commando killing a security guard who gets in her way. The security team and researchers are just pawns. RE: Krogan on Feros. I don't know, I suppose that is a plot-hole but again, it's a trivial one. You could cut that krogan and his little scene out of the game entirely and nothing would change. In fact, that scene probably should have been cut. The existence of that voice recording is a bigger problem than the Council believing it. A geth unit overheard the conversation, left Sovereign and travelled to wherever Tall was for God knows what reason, where she blows up the platform, extracts its memory, reads it, books passage to the Citadel... and somehow arrives before the Normandy? It's minor in the grand scheme of things. How long after the Normandy arrived on the Citadel did the Council meeting start? Was it minutes later? Hours? Was it days? Weeks? There is no indication of the timespan. Mind you, the games do not happen in real-time. It takes hours or days to travel between solar systems and star clusters in some cases. It can take a few hours just to properly prepare for landing on a planet. The characters have to eat and sleep but we rarely ever see it. Does the precise history of this geth actually affect the plot if we know or don't know? The answer is no, so it is a very minor plot-hole. You want to compare it to any of ME2's plot holes or contrivances? You are nitpicking to defend ME2. This kind of mentality is how this series got ruined in the first place; fanboys defending something they love and trying to ignore its flaws, to their own detriment in the end. I like ME2 as well, and thus it pains me that it has so many glaring flaws. Especially because in many cases they could have easily been corrected. Yea that is kind of the point. There is no knowing what is going to be there. So they were outfitted for the broadest possible set up with multiple people that have specialized roles to address any problems they have. Why they used a heavy frigate with stealth capabilities and fully realized it most likely was a one way trip.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 8, 2019 21:25:16 GMT
It's illogical that the only geth memory core she collects during the game is the one that just happens to have exactly what Shepard needed to connect Saren to the attack on Eden Prime. A minor point, but I'm also at a lostt as to why it would be recovered from the geth's "audio banks"... since the geth never says anything
Look up the word "audio". It will blow your mind. I know what audio is. It's sound... meaning it was overheard or otherwise transmitted as sound. The lines recorded by that geth appear more to be part of a private conversation, something overheard, rather than, say, a speech being broadcast to all geth as sound... and due to the timing factors involved, it seems unlikely that Tali accessed the same geth who actually overheard the conversation itself. Clearly, the conversation we do actually see between Saren and Benezia is a private one. There are no geth shown to be present at that time.
Moreover and what I was referring to really is that she first talks about "memory core" so I would think the more natural term to have been used in that line dialogue would have been "memory banks" rather than "audio banks" since the timing appears to indicate this was not from the specific geth who overheard the conversation itself.
Furthermore, I did clearly say it was a minor point.
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Post by sassafrassa on Dec 8, 2019 21:40:20 GMT
Furthermore, I did clearly say it was a minor point.
Then why waste so much effort on it? Why make all these logical leaps? What point are you trying to prove? We never see the conversation that is recorded, FYI. The scene with Saren and Benezia doesn't have that line. Yea that is kind of the point. There is no knowing what is going to be there. So they were outfitted for the broadest possible set up with multiple people that have specialized roles to address any problems they have. Why they used a heavy frigate with stealth capabilities and fully realized it most likely was a one way trip. [/div] [/quote] How convenient and not remotely contrived that this random assortment of commandos was useful. It's bad writing precisely because it is so blatantly contrived. I gave an example how it could have been painted over, but ME2 doesn't do this. Given the situations I outlined, what would Shepard have done if those had been what was waiting for him? Also, I don't recall the game ever saying about Shepard recruiting a diverse team to deal with this great unknown. We are just told "get X" and we do so. The only squadmates given an explicit reason to be there are Mordin and Okeer. We are told what their skills are, but given that we don't know what we'll need we can't possibly judge whose skills will be useful for not. How about if instead of Thane I get a cargo hold full of nukes or some kind of relativistic war heads of some kind? I might need to glass a planet. How about giving me a small fleet of ships? How about SEVERAL heavy ground vehicles? Like I said, it's contrived. Could have been avoided if TIM revealed he had prior dealings with the Collectors and used those dealings to scan their vessels, checking images and trace material for historical matches, proving that the Collector Ship is one of a kind? Then he uses EDI's scanning of its navigation computer to determine that the ship docks with a singular space station? As well maybe the bodies of dead Collectors on Horizon could be used to somehow probe their minds/memories to determine that a singular Collector General exists and that their population is small? Maybe TIM should have sent some probes back like the Shadow Broker or stolen the Shadow Broker's data? All this could trivially done with just additional dialog but it would go a long way to fill in the gaps in the main plot's logic. We still have the issue at the very end that we don't know why the Collectors were doing any of this. I mean, why build a human Reaper now when the main Reaper force is just around the corner? It's surely a lot easier to do once the Reapers have invaded, after all. Why is it important? We are given specific reasons for what Sovereign did and how the whole situation in ME1 was set up, but we are given nothing for ME2.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 8, 2019 23:06:23 GMT
Furthermore, I did clearly say it was a minor point.
Then why waste so much effort on it? Why make all these logical leaps? What point are you trying to prove? We never see the conversation that is recorded, FYI. The scene with Saren and Benezia doesn't have that line. You're making my point. You dismiss a number of issues people here have mentioned about ME1 as being "minor points." "Audio" vs. "memory" is a minor point. What you suggest are minor points are not. There are major plot holes in ME1, just as there are in ME2. The foundational premise of Mass Effect was poorly executed from the start. The Mass Relay network could have been much better designed so that it supported the plot rather than created these unnecessary time problems throughout that game without "trapping" the Reapers out in dark space. It was an unnecessary and rather idiotic contrivance that did nothing really to advance the plot...
In ME1, we got primary relays that only connected two points, regular relays that apparently didn't connect directly into the primary relays or even right close to them, mini-Citadel relay that, for some unexplained reason was only for one-way traffic), lost relays that connect to dozens of systems but that could not apparently be found by entering from the other end, blocked relays because the Council didn't want to open up new space even though all the races were complaining about not having enough space and fighting each other over taking pieces of another race's space, the Citadel as a relay even though it was never used as a relay, Reapers unable to get to a relay to access anywhere in the network so they could use any old relay to get to the Citadel (which was allegedly the center of the network... but wasn't really)... Then ME2 added a relay that used a special IFF and the Alpha Relay.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 9, 2019 1:21:40 GMT
My favorite part is Saren blowing his cover by searching for the Conduit, which lets him go someplace he could already go before he started searching for the Conduit. OK, irony is fun, but what on Earth was Sovereign thinking when it cooked up this plan? And protip: once you've used a console to set the Citadel's arms where you want them, blow it up. Then you don't have to worry about anyone else using it. Edit: Benezia's people killing each other on Noveria is fun too. Maybe Indoctrination is supposed to have fried her brain already? And why is one of Saren's krogan trying to get information on the Thorian out of the VI at ExoGeni? Saren already knew exactly what the Thorian was and where to find it. Yeah, I never understood why Saren just didn't use a regular ship ir even just a geth ship to fly around the galaxy looking for the Conduit instead of flying about inside an actual Reaper.
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Post by gothpunkboy89 on Dec 9, 2019 2:32:04 GMT
Yes an assortment of commandos with diverse talents that can be utilized to cover shortcomings or unexpected situations to ensure they have the best possible chance on the mission. I am honestly surprised at your inability to grasp this simple concept given it is literally the entire concept of the Boy Scouts. Be Prepared.
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Post by sassafrassa on Dec 9, 2019 4:04:22 GMT
Yes an assortment of commandos with diverse talents that can be utilized to cover shortcomings or unexpected situations to ensure they have the best possible chance on the mission. I am honestly surprised at your inability to grasp this simple concept given it is literally the entire concept of the Boy Scouts. Be Prepared. My point is, Shepard is not well prepared in general. For a Commando mission? Yes, but what if a commando team was not enough? What if a fleet or ground army was necessary? It's contrived.
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Post by sassafrassa on Dec 9, 2019 5:30:13 GMT
Then why waste so much effort on it? Why make all these logical leaps? What point are you trying to prove? We never see the conversation that is recorded, FYI. The scene with Saren and Benezia doesn't have that line. You're making my point. You dismiss a number of issues people here have mentioned about ME1 as being "minor points." "Audio" vs. "memory" is a minor point. What you suggest are minor points are not. Yeah they are. None of them are necessary for the story to move forward, be understood, or make sense. No real logical leaps are necessary. This is nothing like building a team when we have no idea what our actual mission is. This is nothing like Mordin studying Collector tech we never actually obtained. This is nothing like the Collector's whole goal having no apparent relation to the main conflict of the series and not appearing to really serve the Reaper's agenda in a substantial way. This is nothing like the mystery mission where the crew decides to fly away on the shuttle randomly to go nowhere just to avoid being there when the Collector's attack. This is nothing like all the crap with Cerberus. You are picking minor holes in the plot. You might as well question why we never see anyone go to the bathroom or sleep. It's that trivial and nonsensical. Here is how ME1's plot works. We land on Eden Prime to get a Prothean Beacon. We want the Beacon because they tend to contain important information or technology that is very valuable to the galaxy. Thus we go there in the Normandy, a stealth ship, to quietly retrieve it. Shepard is on this mission, along with a Council Spectre, to assess Shepard's potential to become the first human Spectre. When the Normandy arrives the planet is under attack by geth, lead by a mysterious space ship. The Spectre is killed and we learn from a witness he was murdered by another Spectre named Saren who appears to be working with the geth. Shepard accidentally uses the Beacon and it is destroyed due to Saren's sabotage. Next Shepard and co visit the Citadel to meet with the Council, requesting that they label Saren a traitor. They refuse due to a lack of evidence though it is pointed out that all the red tape prevented a real investigation so we conduct our own. Garrus can join us because he has quit his job and wants to go after Saren to redeem the image of his people. Wrex can join us because his boss, the Shadow Broker, has some vendetta against a local criminal who betrayed him, along with Saren. Wrex wants both dead. After learning that a quarian attempted to sell evidence to the Shadow Broker but was betrayed we track her down and save her life. On the way it is pointed out that Saren's apparent hostility to the Shadow Broker is very strange because the Broker is a useful ally for anyone to have. As she has proven herself a capable geth killer and hacker we wind up taking Tali onto our crew. We then present our evidence to the Council and Saren is declared a traitor. We learn he is after something called "The Conduit" but we don't know where he is so we are given command of the Normandy to go and find him. As we leave Anderson gives Shepard some tips on possible sightings of Saren or his followers. These are: Feros: a former Prothean world with a small human colony on it in a remote area of space that has recently dropped out of contact after reporting sightings of geth. Noveria: a shady planet outside Council space used to conduct business and research that might cross the line into illegality. There are reports of geth there. Therum: the daughter of Saren's key ally, who is also a Prothean expert, is in the Artemis Tau cluster and as we are after a mysterious Prothean artifact we should find her and talk to her. It turns out on Feros that Saren is after something called the Cipher, which allows a person to think like a Prothean and better understand their Beacons. However when we obtain it we realize it is not enough because part of the Beacon vision is missing and/or because Shepard just isn't knowledgable enough about the Protheans to use the information. On Noveria we discover that Saren funded the cloning of the Rachni, using his second in command, Benezia, to probe a Rachni queen's mind for the coordinates of a conduit into a mysterious region of space. However without the full beacon vision and better understanding of the Protheans we still don't know where to go from there. At Therum we meet Liara, who is under assault by Saren's troops, who want to capture her. Bonding with her she reveals that we need another Beacon to complete the vision. During this time we've been told about Virmire, another remote world where a Council STG team dropped after contact after running into geth. We go there and discover they are assaulting Saren's headquarters where he is cloning krogan for his army and hiding another Beacon. We venture into the base and learn that the massive space ship Saren uses can mind control people. This is called indoctrination and we now understand precisely how Benezia fell under Saren's sway despite her original goal being to pacify them. Past events now make MORE sense. We destroy the base and use the Beacon, and discover the truth about Sovereign; that it is a Reaper and that its kin still live, somewhere, and will soon destroy us. This is why Saren has turned traitor; believing it is better to live as a slave than die free. He tells us that the geth follow him because they worship Sovereign as a superior synthetic lifeform. Once the mission is done we have all the info we need; the Conduit is on Ilos, which is accessed through the relay we got from the rachni queen. The Council wants a word with us first as they are amassing a fleet to protect the Citadel. We request to pursue Saren to Ilos but the Council refuses, with Udina's help. We have become a problem for them and they are putting us on lockdown. We use Anderson's advice/help to steal away from the station and reach Ilos. It is under blockade by Saren's fleet of geth but our convenient stealth ship lets us slip down to the bottom, zeroing in on strange energy readings that are likely the Conduit. As we chase him down we meet a Protehan VI that reveals the true nature of the Citadel and mass relays; a gigantic trap placed by the Reapers for organics to use. As a central location it because the seat of galactic government but it is also a massive mass relay and when the Reapers come through they capture the galactic capital, turn off the Mass Relay network, and slowly hunt down their prey. Sovereign is likely a sentinel that stays behind in the galaxy to monitor the progress of organic life and then sends a signal to the Citadel, which controls the Keepers, to open up the mass relay and begin the harvest. However the last time this happened the Protheans had already begun to reverse engineer the mass relays, even building their own prototype; the Conduit. After hibernating until after the Reapers returned to dark space through the Citadel Mass Relay they Prothean scientists then used the Conduit ti travel to the Citadel and upload a program into the Citadel induces it or the Keepers to ignore signals from Sovereign. As such it turns out Sovereign has been locked out, unable to summon its brethren or let them into the galaxy, and it has now hatched a plan to hijack the Citadel directly. Whether it is desperate or overconfident isn't quite clear but if we don't stop it right now the Reapers will enter through the relay and life as we know it will end. So, we use the Conduit and reach the Citadel, fight our way to the master control unit, and then defeat Saren and via' proxy, Sovereign. The cost is high but Sovereign is destroyed and humanity ascends to power one way or another. The new human Councilor joins with the alien Council and vows to find some way to defeat the Reapers, which are still coming... Now, notice a few things here. The story flows organically and logically. As well, Shepard is key to this plot because Shepard used the beacon on Eden Prime. Shepard was there to use it because Shepard is established as an elite human soldier. However had Shepard never used the beacon it would be impossible for him to stop Saren. He'd never get enough information even if he still exposed him as a traitor and fought him on Feros, Noveria, Therum, and Virmire. He wouldn't be able to reach Ilos. It is true we are never told the details of the geth that Tali got the evidence from. Nor are we told explicitly how long after Eden Prime our meeting with the Council is. We aren't told any of this because none of it is important to the plot. It is needless details that would drag down the pacing and story telling if they were shoved in there. The story lines of Feros, Noveria, and Virmire, also touch upon an overarching theme of control and slavery, something brought up elsewhere in the game too and in the ultimate confrontation with Saren. It all fits together. Now let's try ME2. -- The game opens with the Normandy somewhere in space after a mysterious foe. The vessel is ambushed by a new enemy and destroyed and Shepard is apparently killed. Our last vision of Shepard is the commander suffocating in space, in free fall, alone, appearing to enter the atmosphere of a planet at high speed, lighting up with heat as they do so. It is implied they'd burn up in the atmosphere of whatever planet they are over, at least to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of astrophysics and space travel. The narrative shifts abruptly however to Shepard waking up on an operating table in an unfamiliar military base that is under attack by mechs. A voice directs us to safety but an doctor, whom we recognize as someone involved in our resurrection, is revealed as a traitor who works for the Shadow Broker. Why this person betrayed us and their comrades is not given. Why the Shadow Broker opposed this is not given. We learn we have been dead for two years but Cerberus, a potential enemy from the first game, brought us back. We are never told how Cerberus did this and are given only shallow explanation of why. Apparently Shepard is an icon of humanity. What does this mean? Why does this make Shepard the only person who can save the galaxy? Remember, in ME1 Shepard had the vision from the beacon. Everything else was supplemental to that, fundamentally. Our meeting with the Illusive Man reveals that human colonists are vanishing in the Terminus Systems. Nobody knows why or how but the Illusive Man believes the Reapers are involved. He sends us to Freedom's Progress, which has just gone dark, and there we ultimately confirm our suspicions; the colonists are being abducted by a mysterious race known as the Collectors. Shepard promises to stop them and the game proper begins. We are shocked to meet Joker, who has apparently joined Cerberus, despite their past deeds, and we learn that Cerberus has built a new and improved version of the Normandy. Shepard is given a list of possible recruits for his team and two stand out: Mordin Solus is an former STG agent and a renown scientist. It is apparent that we will need his expertise if we are to counter the seeker swarms that the Collectors use to paralyze people. Dr. Okeer is a krogan scientist and warlord who has actually had dealings with the Collectors, so we want to pick his brain to learn about them. Then we have the mercenaries who Cerberus paid for, fair enough, and then Archangel and Subject Zero. Archangel is a skilled team leader who is running a vigilante campaign on Omega. Subject Zero is a criminal biotic, unstable, and an inmate in a prison. The game does not advance until we pick these two up as well as Mordin and Okeer, who dies but leaves behind Grunt; the perfect krogan warrior. TIM pings us and tells us that the human colony on Horizon will soon be under assault by the Collectors. We can request to notify the Council but TIM refuses until we've assessed the situation on the ground. There we discover the Collectors are using husks, like the geth did in the previous game, and we managed to drive off the Collector ship and save part of the colony. We meet Kaiden or Ashley from the previous game and they reveal they were on Horizon to investigate the abductions; believing that Cerberus was behind it. Why this is we aren't told in the game. TIM reveals he knew the Virmire Survivor was there and intentionally leaked this information to... the Collectors somehow or just generally? Whatever the case he used this to bait the Collectors into the attack so we could fight them there. It seems the Collectors are interested in Shepard or people connected to Shepard. Why? The game will never answer this and the big bad we just ran into contradicts this. He literally says that preserving Shepard's body is not important. So is Shepard important or not? If Shepard was important why wasn't Shepard abducted when the first Normandy was destroyed? Another question is why are the Collector's interested in Shepard or his former team and why does TIM need to send Shepard there to confirm this? What has really gained? What have we gained? What has been achieved? This doesn't stop more Collector attacks and doesn't help us later. Next we are told to recruit Tali'Zorah from the first game, who is a skilled engineer, Samara, an asari Justicar and powerful biotic, and Thane, an assassin. As we go about this TIM contacts us and tells us that a turian fleet ran into a Collector vessel and disabled it, though they were destroyed in the process. Boarding the vessel we realize it is the same ship we saw on Horizon and the same one that destroyed the Normandy SR1. Onboard we discover the Collectors are former Protheans the musical cue here and Shepard's reaction tell us this is supposed to be a shocking revelation. It falls flat however because it doesn't change anything. It is pointless. A failed twist. We attempt to data-mine it with EDI but this triggers a trap and the ship begins to power up to escape while we are right in the middle of it. It appears that TIM has betrayed us but after our miraculous escape he claims that he was confident in our abilities. We cannot really challenge him on this and so is train of thought is rather vague. We agree to keep working with him and he tells us about a derelict Reaper Cerberus found and an IFF device aboard it. We have determined from the datamine of the Collector Ship that they use an IFF when going through the Omega-4 Relay. We speculate that without it ships trying to use it are destroyed. We need this device but are cautioned to be careful because the team who recovered it have gone silent. We never ask why TIM didn't use this Reaper derelict to prove to the Council that Sovereign was no geth ship. Boarding the ship we find the crew have been turned into husks via' indoctrination. Even though the ship appeared to be dead down to the microscopic level, it appears its innate nature causes indoctrination. The IFF is still intact and along the way we are saved by a mysterious geth that we can then recruit or sell for cash. Time passes and we do stuff. Shepard at some point decides that while the IFF is integrated to the Normandy that the ground team should all board the shuttle and go somewhere. We do so and the Collectors somehow use the IFF to jump right to the Normandy's location and assault it. They board and carry away the crew. Why they don't just blow up the Normandy is not asked or questioned. From there we can do more stuff or go through the Omega-IV relay. Going through the relay we duel with some eye-looking Collector drone thingies and then duel with the Collector ship, destroying it. Whether due to bad luck or Shepard's incompetence the battle ends with us crashing on a massive space station that seems to be the Collector's base of operations. We determine that by dividing our team of commandos we can reach the station core and set it it to blow up. Whether the Normandy can fly again or not is never brought up. Leaving the ship behind we never wonder if the Collectors won't attack it again. Anyway, we reach the core of the station and discover a big robo-human terminator thing that is apparently a human Reaper. The Collectors build this by melting down humans. Somehow. Why? We don't know. What does it mean? We don't know. After destroying it we begin to set the station to blow but TIM interrupts and requests that we keep it intact. Most players tell him to sod off and blow it up and we escape in a dramatic fashion. We know the Reapers are still out there. We know we need to stop them. The game ends. Nothing new, that is actually relevant, has been learned about the Reapers. We still don't know how they are coming back or when. We have not gained some new or important insight into their nature or construction that could help us. Perhaps this would be possible if we had saved the Collector Base, but most people did not and that was a last minute decision anyway. Our only goal in the game was to stop the Collectors to preserve human life. Admirable, but how this helped us stop the Reapers was always rather vague. Surely it was necessary for someone to do this to, again, preserve human life, but what grand strategic importance this holds for our struggle against the Reapers is never offered. In fact, we carry out plenty of side missions that seem a lot MORE important, mostly for the benefit of characters who have no connection or interest in the Collectors. In contrast in ME1 the small team we had were all linked in some way to Saren. ME1's plost followed form one section to the next in a concise way but in ME2 we have large gaps of nothing between TIM dolling out some convenient information. This is a structural issue as well as a plot issue. A lot of this could be resolved with some simple dialog, but it isn't. I also haven't touched no the issue of Cerberus and TIM as a whole. In the first game we were told they were rogue Alliance Black Ops, but this is never mentioned in ME2. We witnessed them conducting immoral experiments in ME1 and they murdered an Alliance admiral who went after them. This isn't ever addressed by TIM in ME2 and Miranda only offers us up some quick explanations that we can't actually challenge her own. We may even have learned in ME1 that our squad on Akuze was destroyed at Cerberus' command and for the benefit of their experiments. Yet we can never bring this up with TIM or Miranda. It is never even mentioned, not even when Miranda and Jacob, Cerberus officers, grill us on our personal history. It just isn't there until some throwaway line in a later DLC. We also have the question of Cerberus' infamy. In ME1 it was an entire quest line just to determine that they even exist, much less who they are and we never find out what they want. In ME2 we are still told they are a shadowy group but everyone seems to recognize them on sight and everyone hates them. How can they be both so instantly recognizable and also mysterious? Why does everyone hate them? We understand why the quarians do, though they're still willing to work with them, and we may understand why the Alliance does. Everyone else though is a mystery. Why does the Council in particular hate them? Both Anderson and Hackett seem willing to tolerate or even encourage our working with them, so what gives? One piece of good writing, that will be contradicted in the next game, is the explanation we are given for how the Normandy SR2 was built. Though I do still find Joker's explanation for having joined quite weak. However this does touch on another issue; if Cerberus is small and secretive then how can they have these massive operations we find at Lazarus Station, the derelict Reaper, and in Project Overlord? If they are secretive, why is their logo everywhere, even on the goddamn glass windows? Another DLC will also reintroduce the Reaper plot, revealing that apparently they are mere MONTHS away from invading the galaxy. We can deduce that the Reapers have just flown here from dark space but they'll soon reach a particular mass relay that will let them quickly disperse throughout the galaxy to conduct their war of annihilation. We stop them, we wait for ME3. Once more, we are never given a concrete explanation for why TIM had Shepard brought back from the dead and Shepard never becomes important to the plot. He's the protagonist but there is no particular reasons he needs to be. He isn't central to anything and doesn't grow or change as a character or person. How did we manage to get to Freedom's Progress faster than anyone else? Why the Collectors so sloppy as to leave behind Veetor? This is much more contrived than Shepard accidentally using the beacon on Eden Prime. Where did the seeker swarm specimen that Mordin studies come from? All we got from Freedom's Progress was visual recordings. Considering the Normandy eventually, even without upgrades, shoots down the Collector Ship, why can't anybody stop the damn thing? Why not shoot it down at Horizon? Or when we find it derelict? I can think of explanations, but the plot doesn't offer them. Strangely, it seems the Council and Alliance aren't all that interested in the colony abductions. They blame Cerberus (why?) or pirates (how?). This in spite of Ilos having been around for two years to be explored and Shepard's success in the first game. Tens of thousands of people disappear without a trace and apparently the ruling bodies of the galaxy don't give a whit. Neither does anyone else. There aren't protests going on and colonist enlistment rates aren't plummeting. You'd think that since expanding colonization is the core to human power and influence that the Alliance would be EXTREMELY interested in human colonies going missing, even if they aren't within their legal jurisdiction. This strains suspension of disbelief. Most especially since we learn the Collectors have advanced tech that they often trade for; so surely the governments know that the Collectors are real. The Shadow Broker does, after all. He even knows about the Reapers. While not a plot hole, it should also be brought up that the technology that resurrected is never explained or mentioned again either. One would think this would be important to Cerberus and useful in expanding their wealth and influence, but no. Nor does Shepard ever offer any introspection on his death and resurrection, the two years he skipped over, and nobody ever asks, not even Ashley who is religious. We see glowing bits inside Shepard that make him look like the Terminator if renegade, and rather Saren like, but if this has any significance nobody ever brings it up. Shepard never even asks about it. A lot of people back in the day speculated that it was all done with Reaper tech. Understandable since it LOOKS like Reaper tech and would thus be a pretty shocking revelation that could have a huge impact on Shepard... but... no. Nothing. Another questionable bit of writing is how Liara's character is handled. She is a Reaper expert and at the end of ME1 she has access to an untouched Prothean world. She knows the truth about their extinction and thus it seems logical her talents would be put to use learning more. Instead we are told that after Shepard died she was contacted by Cerberus to steal his body from the Shadow Broker. How Shepard even had a body to steal is unexplained. It should be burnt to ash. Rather than devote her time to understanding and stopping the Reaper threat, Liara sets aside her university degree and research and decides to become an information broker to "get back" at the Shadow Broker who killed her double-crossing comrade. She is obsessed with this comrade and with Shepard, despite in the first game being able to rationalize away most of her grief over her mother's death. Even explaining that asari are rather good at dealing with grief and don't dwell on it most of the time because they are long lived in galaxy filled with friends, acquaintances, and lovers who don't live nearly so long. She never knew Shepard or this other comrade for very long, after all. Her character shift thus feels forced and contrived and suffers for it. Back to the Reapers and Arrival DLC. If the Reapers only ever needed to fly to galaxy then why did Sovereign go to all the trouble of trying to capture the Citadel in the first game? If it had just laid low for two and a half more years its entire Reaper armada would have been there to help it. It would not have been destroyed and the organic militaries never would have been able to use its remains to reverse engineer any new tech. It seems like a huge blunder. Why was this blunder made? Apparently the Alliance has been aware of the Reaper artifact in batarian space, that is conveniently near the important mass relay, for some time. They have a secret base there and everything. So why didn't Anderson or Hackett tell us about it? What IS that Reaper device? What does it do? Why is it there? How can the Reapers fly so far through dark space and when did they begin their journey? What are we going to do when they get here? How are we going to stop them? So, can you see the difference? ME1 doesn't raise all these questions about its plot or how things fit together. It doesn't contradict itself. There are some details glossed over for the sake of pacing, but they aren't important details. The plot stands on its own. It offers genuine twists that totally alter the tone and meaning of the narrative.
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Post by Hanako Ikezawa on Dec 9, 2019 8:10:03 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Dec 9, 2019 10:33:06 GMT
You're making my point. You dismiss a number of issues people here have mentioned about ME1 as being "minor points." "Audio" vs. "memory" is a minor point. What you suggest are minor points are not. Yeah they are. None of them are necessary for the story to move forward, be understood, or make sense. No real logical leaps are necessary. This is nothing like building a team when we have no idea what our actual mission is. This is nothing like Mordin studying Collector tech we never actually obtained. This is nothing like the Collector's whole goal having no apparent relation to the main conflict of the series and not appearing to really serve the Reaper's agenda in a substantial way. This is nothing like the mystery mission where the crew decides to fly away on the shuttle randomly to go nowhere just to avoid being there when the Collector's attack. This is nothing like all the crap with Cerberus. You are picking minor holes in the plot. You might as well question why we never see anyone go to the bathroom or sleep. It's that trivial and nonsensical. Here is how ME1's plot works. We land on Eden Prime to get a Prothean Beacon. We want the Beacon because they tend to contain important information or technology that is very valuable to the galaxy. Thus we go there in the Normandy, a stealth ship, to quietly retrieve it. Shepard is on this mission, along with a Council Spectre, to assess Shepard's potential to become the first human Spectre. When the Normandy arrives the planet is under attack by geth, lead by a mysterious space ship. The Spectre is killed and we learn from a witness he was murdered by another Spectre named Saren who appears to be working with the geth. Shepard accidentally uses the Beacon and it is destroyed due to Saren's sabotage. Next Shepard and co visit the Citadel to meet with the Council, requesting that they label Saren a traitor. They refuse due to a lack of evidence though it is pointed out that all the red tape prevented a real investigation so we conduct our own. Garrus can join us because he has quit his job and wants to go after Saren to redeem the image of his people. Wrex can join us because his boss, the Shadow Broker, has some vendetta against a local criminal who betrayed him, along with Saren. Wrex wants both dead. After learning that a quarian attempted to sell evidence to the Shadow Broker but was betrayed we track her down and save her life. On the way it is pointed out that Saren's apparent hostility to the Shadow Broker is very strange because the Broker is a useful ally for anyone to have. As she has proven herself a capable geth killer and hacker we wind up taking Tali onto our crew. We then present our evidence to the Council and Saren is declared a traitor. We learn he is after something called "The Conduit" but we don't know where he is so we are given command of the Normandy to go and find him. As we leave Anderson gives Shepard some tips on possible sightings of Saren or his followers. These are: Feros: a former Prothean world with a small human colony on it in a remote area of space that has recently dropped out of contact after reporting sightings of geth. Noveria: a shady planet outside Council space used to conduct business and research that might cross the line into illegality. There are reports of geth there. Therum: the daughter of Saren's key ally, who is also a Prothean expert, is in the Artemis Tau cluster and as we are after a mysterious Prothean artifact we should find her and talk to her. It turns out on Feros that Saren is after something called the Cipher, which allows a person to think like a Prothean and better understand their Beacons. However when we obtain it we realize it is not enough because part of the Beacon vision is missing and/or because Shepard just isn't knowledgable enough about the Protheans to use the information. On Noveria we discover that Saren funded the cloning of the Rachni, using his second in command, Benezia, to probe a Rachni queen's mind for the coordinates of a conduit into a mysterious region of space. However without the full beacon vision and better understanding of the Protheans we still don't know where to go from there. At Therum we meet Liara, who is under assault by Saren's troops, who want to capture her. Bonding with her she reveals that we need another Beacon to complete the vision. During this time we've been told about Virmire, another remote world where a Council STG team dropped after contact after running into geth. We go there and discover they are assaulting Saren's headquarters where he is cloning krogan for his army and hiding another Beacon. We venture into the base and learn that the massive space ship Saren uses can mind control people. This is called indoctrination and we now understand precisely how Benezia fell under Saren's sway despite her original goal being to pacify them. Past events now make MORE sense. We destroy the base and use the Beacon, and discover the truth about Sovereign; that it is a Reaper and that its kin still live, somewhere, and will soon destroy us. This is why Saren has turned traitor; believing it is better to live as a slave than die free. He tells us that the geth follow him because they worship Sovereign as a superior synthetic lifeform. Once the mission is done we have all the info we need; the Conduit is on Ilos, which is accessed through the relay we got from the rachni queen. The Council wants a word with us first as they are amassing a fleet to protect the Citadel. We request to pursue Saren to Ilos but the Council refuses, with Udina's help. We have become a problem for them and they are putting us on lockdown. We use Anderson's advice/help to steal away from the station and reach Ilos. It is under blockade by Saren's fleet of geth but our convenient stealth ship lets us slip down to the bottom, zeroing in on strange energy readings that are likely the Conduit. As we chase him down we meet a Protehan VI that reveals the true nature of the Citadel and mass relays; a gigantic trap placed by the Reapers for organics to use. As a central location it because the seat of galactic government but it is also a massive mass relay and when the Reapers come through they capture the galactic capital, turn off the Mass Relay network, and slowly hunt down their prey. Sovereign is likely a sentinel that stays behind in the galaxy to monitor the progress of organic life and then sends a signal to the Citadel, which controls the Keepers, to open up the mass relay and begin the harvest. However the last time this happened the Protheans had already begun to reverse engineer the mass relays, even building their own prototype; the Conduit. After hibernating until after the Reapers returned to dark space through the Citadel Mass Relay they Prothean scientists then used the Conduit ti travel to the Citadel and upload a program into the Citadel induces it or the Keepers to ignore signals from Sovereign. As such it turns out Sovereign has been locked out, unable to summon its brethren or let them into the galaxy, and it has now hatched a plan to hijack the Citadel directly. Whether it is desperate or overconfident isn't quite clear but if we don't stop it right now the Reapers will enter through the relay and life as we know it will end. So, we use the Conduit and reach the Citadel, fight our way to the master control unit, and then defeat Saren and via' proxy, Sovereign. The cost is high but Sovereign is destroyed and humanity ascends to power one way or another. The new human Councilor joins with the alien Council and vows to find some way to defeat the Reapers, which are still coming... Now, notice a few things here. The story flows organically and logically. As well, Shepard is key to this plot because Shepard used the beacon on Eden Prime. Shepard was there to use it because Shepard is established as an elite human soldier. However had Shepard never used the beacon it would be impossible for him to stop Saren. He'd never get enough information even if he still exposed him as a traitor and fought him on Feros, Noveria, Therum, and Virmire. He wouldn't be able to reach Ilos. It is true we are never told the details of the geth that Tali got the evidence from. Nor are we told explicitly how long after Eden Prime our meeting with the Council is. We aren't told any of this because none of it is important to the plot. It is needless details that would drag down the pacing and story telling if they were shoved in there. The story lines of Feros, Noveria, and Virmire, also touch upon an overarching theme of control and slavery, something brought up elsewhere in the game too and in the ultimate confrontation with Saren. It all fits together. Now let's try ME2. -- The game opens with the Normandy somewhere in space after a mysterious foe. The vessel is ambushed by a new enemy and destroyed and Shepard is apparently killed. Our last vision of Shepard is the commander suffocating in space, in free fall, alone, appearing to enter the atmosphere of a planet at high speed, lighting up with heat as they do so. It is implied they'd burn up in the atmosphere of whatever planet they are over, at least to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of astrophysics and space travel. The narrative shifts abruptly however to Shepard waking up on an operating table in an unfamiliar military base that is under attack by mechs. A voice directs us to safety but an doctor, whom we recognize as someone involved in our resurrection, is revealed as a traitor who works for the Shadow Broker. Why this person betrayed us and their comrades is not given. Why the Shadow Broker opposed this is not given. We learn we have been dead for two years but Cerberus, a potential enemy from the first game, brought us back. We are never told how Cerberus did this and are given only shallow explanation of why. Apparently Shepard is an icon of humanity. What does this mean? Why does this make Shepard the only person who can save the galaxy? Remember, in ME1 Shepard had the vision from the beacon. Everything else was supplemental to that, fundamentally. Our meeting with the Illusive Man reveals that human colonists are vanishing in the Terminus Systems. Nobody knows why or how but the Illusive Man believes the Reapers are involved. He sends us to Freedom's Progress, which has just gone dark, and there we ultimately confirm our suspicions; the colonists are being abducted by a mysterious race known as the Collectors. Shepard promises to stop them and the game proper begins. We are shocked to meet Joker, who has apparently joined Cerberus, despite their past deeds, and we learn that Cerberus has built a new and improved version of the Normandy. Shepard is given a list of possible recruits for his team and two stand out: Mordin Solus is an former STG agent and a renown scientist. It is apparent that we will need his expertise if we are to counter the seeker swarms that the Collectors use to paralyze people. Dr. Okeer is a krogan scientist and warlord who has actually had dealings with the Collectors, so we want to pick his brain to learn about them. Then we have the mercenaries who Cerberus paid for, fair enough, and then Archangel and Subject Zero. Archangel is a skilled team leader who is running a vigilante campaign on Omega. Subject Zero is a criminal biotic, unstable, and an inmate in a prison. The game does not advance until we pick these two up as well as Mordin and Okeer, who dies but leaves behind Grunt; the perfect krogan warrior. TIM pings us and tells us that the human colony on Horizon will soon be under assault by the Collectors. We can request to notify the Council but TIM refuses until we've assessed the situation on the ground. There we discover the Collectors are using husks, like the geth did in the previous game, and we managed to drive off the Collector ship and save part of the colony. We meet Kaiden or Ashley from the previous game and they reveal they were on Horizon to investigate the abductions; believing that Cerberus was behind it. Why this is we aren't told in the game. TIM reveals he knew the Virmire Survivor was there and intentionally leaked this information to... the Collectors somehow or just generally? Whatever the case he used this to bait the Collectors into the attack so we could fight them there. It seems the Collectors are interested in Shepard or people connected to Shepard. Why? The game will never answer this and the big bad we just ran into contradicts this. He literally says that preserving Shepard's body is not important. So is Shepard important or not? If Shepard was important why wasn't Shepard abducted when the first Normandy was destroyed? Another question is why are the Collector's interested in Shepard or his former team and why does TIM need to send Shepard there to confirm this? What has really gained? What have we gained? What has been achieved? This doesn't stop more Collector attacks and doesn't help us later. Next we are told to recruit Tali'Zorah from the first game, who is a skilled engineer, Samara, an asari Justicar and powerful biotic, and Thane, an assassin. As we go about this TIM contacts us and tells us that a turian fleet ran into a Collector vessel and disabled it, though they were destroyed in the process. Boarding the vessel we realize it is the same ship we saw on Horizon and the same one that destroyed the Normandy SR1. Onboard we discover the Collectors are former Protheans the musical cue here and Shepard's reaction tell us this is supposed to be a shocking revelation. It falls flat however because it doesn't change anything. It is pointless. A failed twist. We attempt to data-mine it with EDI but this triggers a trap and the ship begins to power up to escape while we are right in the middle of it. It appears that TIM has betrayed us but after our miraculous escape he claims that he was confident in our abilities. We cannot really challenge him on this and so is train of thought is rather vague. We agree to keep working with him and he tells us about a derelict Reaper Cerberus found and an IFF device aboard it. We have determined from the datamine of the Collector Ship that they use an IFF when going through the Omega-4 Relay. We speculate that without it ships trying to use it are destroyed. We need this device but are cautioned to be careful because the team who recovered it have gone silent. We never ask why TIM didn't use this Reaper derelict to prove to the Council that Sovereign was no geth ship. Boarding the ship we find the crew have been turned into husks via' indoctrination. Even though the ship appeared to be dead down to the microscopic level, it appears its innate nature causes indoctrination. The IFF is still intact and along the way we are saved by a mysterious geth that we can then recruit or sell for cash. Time passes and we do stuff. Shepard at some point decides that while the IFF is integrated to the Normandy that the ground team should all board the shuttle and go somewhere. We do so and the Collectors somehow use the IFF to jump right to the Normandy's location and assault it. They board and carry away the crew. Why they don't just blow up the Normandy is not asked or questioned. From there we can do more stuff or go through the Omega-IV relay. Going through the relay we duel with some eye-looking Collector drone thingies and then duel with the Collector ship, destroying it. Whether due to bad luck or Shepard's incompetence the battle ends with us crashing on a massive space station that seems to be the Collector's base of operations. We determine that by dividing our team of commandos we can reach the station core and set it it to blow up. Whether the Normandy can fly again or not is never brought up. Leaving the ship behind we never wonder if the Collectors won't attack it again. Anyway, we reach the core of the station and discover a big robo-human terminator thing that is apparently a human Reaper. The Collectors build this by melting down humans. Somehow. Why? We don't know. What does it mean? We don't know. After destroying it we begin to set the station to blow but TIM interrupts and requests that we keep it intact. Most players tell him to sod off and blow it up and we escape in a dramatic fashion. We know the Reapers are still out there. We know we need to stop them. The game ends. Nothing new, that is actually relevant, has been learned about the Reapers. We still don't know how they are coming back or when. We have not gained some new or important insight into their nature or construction that could help us. Perhaps this would be possible if we had saved the Collector Base, but most people did not and that was a last minute decision anyway. Our only goal in the game was to stop the Collectors to preserve human life. Admirable, but how this helped us stop the Reapers was always rather vague. Surely it was necessary for someone to do this to, again, preserve human life, but what grand strategic importance this holds for our struggle against the Reapers is never offered. In fact, we carry out plenty of side missions that seem a lot MORE important, mostly for the benefit of characters who have no connection or interest in the Collectors. In contrast in ME1 the small team we had were all linked in some way to Saren. ME1's plost followed form one section to the next in a concise way but in ME2 we have large gaps of nothing between TIM dolling out some convenient information. This is a structural issue as well as a plot issue. A lot of this could be resolved with some simple dialog, but it isn't. I also haven't touched no the issue of Cerberus and TIM as a whole. In the first game we were told they were rogue Alliance Black Ops, but this is never mentioned in ME2. We witnessed them conducting immoral experiments in ME1 and they murdered an Alliance admiral who went after them. This isn't ever addressed by TIM in ME2 and Miranda only offers us up some quick explanations that we can't actually challenge her own. We may even have learned in ME1 that our squad on Akuze was destroyed at Cerberus' command and for the benefit of their experiments. Yet we can never bring this up with TIM or Miranda. It is never even mentioned, not even when Miranda and Jacob, Cerberus officers, grill us on our personal history. It just isn't there until some throwaway line in a later DLC. We also have the question of Cerberus' infamy. In ME1 it was an entire quest line just to determine that they even exist, much less who they are and we never find out what they want. In ME2 we are still told they are a shadowy group but everyone seems to recognize them on sight and everyone hates them. How can they be both so instantly recognizable and also mysterious? Why does everyone hate them? We understand why the quarians do, though they're still willing to work with them, and we may understand why the Alliance does. Everyone else though is a mystery. Why does the Council in particular hate them? Both Anderson and Hackett seem willing to tolerate or even encourage our working with them, so what gives? One piece of good writing, that will be contradicted in the next game, is the explanation we are given for how the Normandy SR2 was built. Though I do still find Joker's explanation for having joined quite weak. However this does touch on another issue; if Cerberus is small and secretive then how can they have these massive operations we find at Lazarus Station, the derelict Reaper, and in Project Overlord? If they are secretive, why is their logo everywhere, even on the goddamn glass windows? Another DLC will also reintroduce the Reaper plot, revealing that apparently they are mere MONTHS away from invading the galaxy. We can deduce that the Reapers have just flown here from dark space but they'll soon reach a particular mass relay that will let them quickly disperse throughout the galaxy to conduct their war of annihilation. We stop them, we wait for ME3. Once more, we are never given a concrete explanation for why TIM had Shepard brought back from the dead and Shepard never becomes important to the plot. He's the protagonist but there is no particular reasons he needs to be. He isn't central to anything and doesn't grow or change as a character or person. How did we manage to get to Freedom's Progress faster than anyone else? Why the Collectors so sloppy as to leave behind Veetor? This is much more contrived than Shepard accidentally using the beacon on Eden Prime. Where did the seeker swarm specimen that Mordin studies come from? All we got from Freedom's Progress was visual recordings. Considering the Normandy eventually, even without upgrades, shoots down the Collector Ship, why can't anybody stop the damn thing? Why not shoot it down at Horizon? Or when we find it derelict? I can think of explanations, but the plot doesn't offer them. Strangely, it seems the Council and Alliance aren't all that interested in the colony abductions. They blame Cerberus (why?) or pirates (how?). This in spite of Ilos having been around for two years to be explored and Shepard's success in the first game. Tens of thousands of people disappear without a trace and apparently the ruling bodies of the galaxy don't give a whit. Neither does anyone else. There aren't protests going on and colonist enlistment rates aren't plummeting. You'd think that since expanding colonization is the core to human power and influence that the Alliance would be EXTREMELY interested in human colonies going missing, even if they aren't within their legal jurisdiction. This strains suspension of disbelief. Most especially since we learn the Collectors have advanced tech that they often trade for; so surely the governments know that the Collectors are real. The Shadow Broker does, after all. He even knows about the Reapers. While not a plot hole, it should also be brought up that the technology that resurrected is never explained or mentioned again either. One would think this would be important to Cerberus and useful in expanding their wealth and influence, but no. Nor does Shepard ever offer any introspection on his death and resurrection, the two years he skipped over, and nobody ever asks, not even Ashley who is religious. We see glowing bits inside Shepard that make him look like the Terminator if renegade, and rather Saren like, but if this has any significance nobody ever brings it up. Shepard never even asks about it. A lot of people back in the day speculated that it was all done with Reaper tech. Understandable since it LOOKS like Reaper tech and would thus be a pretty shocking revelation that could have a huge impact on Shepard... but... no. Nothing. Another questionable bit of writing is how Liara's character is handled. She is a Reaper expert and at the end of ME1 she has access to an untouched Prothean world. She knows the truth about their extinction and thus it seems logical her talents would be put to use learning more. Instead we are told that after Shepard died she was contacted by Cerberus to steal his body from the Shadow Broker. How Shepard even had a body to steal is unexplained. It should be burnt to ash. Rather than devote her time to understanding and stopping the Reaper threat, Liara sets aside her university degree and research and decides to become an information broker to "get back" at the Shadow Broker who killed her double-crossing comrade. She is obsessed with this comrade and with Shepard, despite in the first game being able to rationalize away most of her grief over her mother's death. Even explaining that asari are rather good at dealing with grief and don't dwell on it most of the time because they are long lived in galaxy filled with friends, acquaintances, and lovers who don't live nearly so long. She never knew Shepard or this other comrade for very long, after all. Her character shift thus feels forced and contrived and suffers for it. Back to the Reapers and Arrival DLC. If the Reapers only ever needed to fly to galaxy then why did Sovereign go to all the trouble of trying to capture the Citadel in the first game? If it had just laid low for two and a half more years its entire Reaper armada would have been there to help it. It would not have been destroyed and the organic militaries never would have been able to use its remains to reverse engineer any new tech. It seems like a huge blunder. Why was this blunder made? Apparently the Alliance has been aware of the Reaper artifact in batarian space, that is conveniently near the important mass relay, for some time. They have a secret base there and everything. So why didn't Anderson or Hackett tell us about it? What IS that Reaper device? What does it do? Why is it there? How can the Reapers fly so far through dark space and when did they begin their journey? What are we going to do when they get here? How are we going to stop them? So, can you see the difference? ME1 doesn't raise all these questions about its plot or how things fit together. It doesn't contradict itself. There are some details glossed over for the sake of pacing, but they aren't important details. The plot stands on its own. It offers genuine twists that totally alter the tone and meaning of the narrative. So, can you see the difference?... ME2's squad mix doesn't raise any questions about how the plot moves forward or how it fits together. As multiple people have been telling you here... it is a mixed squad able to handle a wide variety of situations.
Conversely, the constantly changing aspects about the Relay network and how it works does raise questions about how the plot of ME1 advances. The conveniently changing "travel times" not related to distance in the galaxy does raise questions. The one-way mini-relay is one way just because... There is no logical reason for it to be one-way, just as there is no logical reason for there to be Primary and Secondary Relays since they serve no real functional difference in the game. The game is founded on a "castle defense" model when there are no walls between regular space and dark space... and this is a mega-major plot problem.
I'm not defending Liara's SB change or Shepard's death as being anything good. But they are not any more major than the Relay mess we get in ME1. ME1, as alan said, has its share of problems as well. You just are more willing to dismiss them. In general in Mass Effect... the romances are crap. There is no way the Commander, in ME1, should have been able to leave his/her LI on Virmire... and NOT say a thing about it afterwards except a couple of trite one-liners - "it was a tough decision."; "They did their duty"'; and "We will remember." - with no difference at all if the Commander disliked the squad mate he/she chose to leave behind. Yet that is precisely what could happen in ME1. If the commander did romance Liara in ME1, then her fixation and personality changes in response to her grief make perfect sense. At least she feels something; whereas the Commander reacts to the death of a beloved squad mate who he/she professed a romantic interest in like an absolute uncaring post.
The foundation of Mass Effect is that Relay Network... and it was never well designed to support the advancement of the plot. Its concept kept changing as new ideas for how the plot would go were introduced. The mini-relay being one-way is that way just because they said it was. Why? Probably for the feels of having those poor brave Protheans die on the Citadel rather than have them return to Ilos only to die there in cryo pods after telling Vigil they were successful... Which, BTW, would have made much more sense than what we got. It would have made more sense if it connected to someplace unique... not a public plaza.. It should have been a back door into the secret area where all the keepers go, instead we land in a public place because someone thought it would be "kewl" to fight up the side of an elevator shaft. The master control should have been in a place that only the keepers could access... not in the middle of the Council chamber. It would have been so much better for Shepard to have seen at the end of ME1, the keepers processing people into their protein vats... ... and that been the reason the Prothean scientists didn't make it back rather than a conveniently one-way mini-relay that led no where Saren could not have gone before. At least that would have foreshadowed the "harvesting" idea and the area where we did end up at the end of ME3.
ETA: Let me try to explain it another way. The Reapers harvest every 50,000 years or so. They also are machines and don't need to rest or "hibernate" in dark space. They could have spent the time in dark space moving to a position near any of the relays in the galaxy... so that when the time was right, they could just enter the network and proceed to the Citadel en masse to attack it. They are also able to communicate with each other across vast distances of space. Sovereign did not need to access the Citadel itself to "wake them up" and tell them the time was right to start harvesting. Also, there was no reason for them to leave a single sentinel behind since they could have monitored the entire galaxy from dark space (via a telescope) and determined for themselves when the time was right to begin the harvest. Simple electronic bugs planted in places on the Citadel itself would have also done the trick.
In the scale of a time frame of 50,000 years, it also matters not whether the Reapers begin the harvest a couple of hundred years late or a few decades early. They have eternity and a harvest can take centuries, so there is no urgency. When the normal communication method didn't work, Sovereign (instead of hunting up allies inside the galaxy to figure out what was wrong with the keepers), could have just traveled himself into dark space using any of the relays that would have brought him close to the galaxy's edge closest to wherever in dark space the Reapers were located, FTL'd from there and delivered the message in person (within a couple of years or within a few months... as the latter games tell us). Dark space is simply space that isn't lit up enough for us to see what is there with our current telescopes. It is the absence of mass that limits the refraction and reflection of light from stars that makes it dark. There are no walls dividing our space from dark space. The premise behind ME1 is a house of cards' and it's not surprising then that ME2 and ME3 were unable to build on it.
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Post by skekSil on Dec 9, 2019 17:45:05 GMT
They have eternity and a harvest can take centuries, so there is no urgency. When the normal communication method didn't work, Sovereign (instead of hunting up allies inside the galaxy to figure out what was wrong with the keepers), could have just traveled himself into dark space using any of the relays that would have brought him close to the galaxy's edge closest to wherever in dark space the Reapers were located, FTL'd from there and delivered the message in person (within a couple of years or within a few months... as the latter games tell us). Dark space is simply space that isn't lit up enough for us to see what is there with our current telescopes. It is the absence of mass that limits the refraction and reflection of light from stars that makes it dark. There are no walls dividing our space from dark space. The premise behind ME1 is a house of cards' and it's not surprising then that ME2 and ME3 were unable to build on it. Don't forget it is believed that Richni were indoctrinated by Reapers to start a war with council races. Which means Sovereign tried to access Citadel more than 2000 years ago. This means that either Reapers where willing to sit in darkspace for thousand of years, waiting for Citadel to be activated, when they only needed 2 years to reach MW on their own, or they where very far away and , if they started flying towards MW immediatly, have been traveling for 2000 years and when they where just outside of our Galaxy they got fed up and sent Sovereign to attack Citadel, screwing up spectacularly in the process. Oh, and if we take Reaper FTL speed from ME3, which is 30 ly/day, it would mean that they where more than 20 million light years away from MW. Thats the distance to Whirlpool Galaxy where Homeworld series take place btw.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 9, 2019 18:08:44 GMT
They have eternity and a harvest can take centuries, so there is no urgency. When the normal communication method didn't work, Sovereign (instead of hunting up allies inside the galaxy to figure out what was wrong with the keepers), could have just traveled himself into dark space using any of the relays that would have brought him close to the galaxy's edge closest to wherever in dark space the Reapers were located, FTL'd from there and delivered the message in person (within a couple of years or within a few months... as the latter games tell us). Dark space is simply space that isn't lit up enough for us to see what is there with our current telescopes. It is the absence of mass that limits the refraction and reflection of light from stars that makes it dark. There are no walls dividing our space from dark space. The premise behind ME1 is a house of cards' and it's not surprising then that ME2 and ME3 were unable to build on it. Don't forget it is believed that Richni were indoctrinated by Reapers to start a war with council races. Which means Sovereign tried to access Citadel more than 2000 years ago. This means that either Reapers where willing to sit in darkspace for thousand of years, waiting for Citadel to be activated, when they only needed 2 years to reach MW on their own, or they where very far away and , if they started flying towards MW immediatly, have been traveling for 2000 years and when they where just outside of our Galaxy they got fed up and sent Sovereign to attack Citadel, screwing up spectacularly in the process. Oh, and if we take Reaper FTL speed from ME3, which is 30 ly/day, it would mean that they where more than 20 million light years away from MW. Thats the distance to Whirlpool Galaxy where Homeworld series take place btw. It makes no sense to "send Sovereign in alon"e if the rest off the Reapers were just outside the galaxy (regardless of how far they had travelled prior to that time). All of them could travel as fast as Sovereign at FTL to reach the nearest relay to wherever they entered the galaxy and then use the relay to have all of them arrive en masse to attack the Citadel with an overwhelming force AND likely the element of surprise in their favor. There is no wall trapping any of them in dark space nor does it trap Sovereign inside galactic space. Space is just space.
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Post by skekSil on Dec 9, 2019 18:11:38 GMT
[It makes no sense to "send Sovereign in alon"e if the rest off the Reapers were just outside the galaxy (regardless of how far they had travelled prior to that time). All of them could travel as fast as Sovereign at FTL to reach the nearest relay to wherever they entered the galaxy and then use the relay to have all of them arrive en masse to attack the Citadel with an overwhelming force AND likely the element of surprise in their favor. There is no wall trapping any of them in dark space nor does it trap Sovereign inside galactic space. Space is just space. Lets be frank here, it makes no sense for Citadel to exist, or atleast, for Citadel to be the central hub of Relay Network.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 9, 2019 18:24:21 GMT
[It makes no sense to "send Sovereign in alon"e if the rest off the Reapers were just outside the galaxy (regardless of how far they had travelled prior to that time). All of them could travel as fast as Sovereign at FTL to reach the nearest relay to wherever they entered the galaxy and then use the relay to have all of them arrive en masse to attack the Citadel with an overwhelming force AND likely the element of surprise in their favor. There is no wall trapping any of them in dark space nor does it trap Sovereign inside galactic space. Space is just space. Lets be frank here, it makes no sense for Citadel to exist, or atleast, for Citadel to be the central hub of Relay Network. I agree. Here's another "plot hole" from ME1. Given the shear number of mass relays in the Milky Way galaxy all claimed to have been built by the Reapers and the galaxy is 13.51 billion years old in total, They could have probably built a mass relay from wherever they were at in dark space that connected to any of the existing mass relays in the Milky Way faster than the 2,000 years they had since their attempt to indoctrinate the Rachni and faster than whatever time before then it took Sovereign to realize there was a problem and try to gain the help of whatever and however many other species that Vigil alluded to in his talk with Shepard. Once they access any part of the Relay network, they are able to travel throughout the galaxy as fast as any of the other species. I would also assume that they know how to open any of the relays that the Council decided to not open because of not knowing where they lead.
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Post by sassafrassa on Dec 9, 2019 18:34:32 GMT
So, can you see the difference?... ME2's squad mix doesn't raise any questions about how the plot moves forward or how it fits together. As multiple people have been telling you here... it is a mixed squad able to handle a wide variety of situations. [/div][/quote] Are you not able to follow the conversation here? I said that the selection of the team is contrived because no information is ever given that we'll even need a team. That's an awful lot of risk for Shepard to take recruiting these people, and settling their daddy issues, when he doesn't even know what needs them for. That's the issue as far as the team selection goes, as I stated in previous points. Had the plot been better written the squadmates WOULD all naturally fit into the story and the anti-Collector operation. Conversely, the constantly changing aspects about the Relay network and how it works does raise questions about how the plot of ME1 advances. The conveniently changing "travel times" not related to distance in the galaxy does raise questions. The one-way mini-relay is one way just because... There is no logical reason for it to be one-way... Why do you assume it is one way? What the hell are you even talking about? Stop making leaps of logic if you are going to keep making bad leaps of logic. I'm not going to bother with the rest. [/div] Lets be frank here, it makes no sense for Citadel to exist, or at least, for Citadel to be the central hub of Relay Network. What is your reasoning here? Why doesn't it make sense? It's the center of the relay network of the Reapers design that way.
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