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Post by gothpunkboy89 on Dec 10, 2019 21:14:15 GMT
The same plot conveniences happen to them as happens to them in ME1 and ME3 because this is a video game and you are controlling the protagonist with a god level power ability. No they don't. Shepard has a small army of support on Virmire. He is not alone on Feros or Eden Prime. The Normandy is well established as an infiltration vessel; that is it's purpose. The mission Shepard has is to find and kill or apprehend Saren. Ilos is a Prothean world as of yet uncovered. That's a much clearer goal at the end than the Suicide Mission is. Shepard has 4 or 5 Salarians and the squad mate you assign to them drawing the attention of a heavily fortified base as 3 man squad sneaks in from behind in a base literally filled to over flowing with Geth and Krogans. The idea that 4 or 5 of them could hold off an entire building full of them is absolutely absurd.
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Post by Phantom on Dec 10, 2019 21:39:55 GMT
Mass Effect is absurd and a power fantasy.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 10, 2019 22:00:05 GMT
Vigil's conversation is the only source Shepard has... so, yeah, the timing of it and it's originally intended purpose is fuzzy. I would say though that he is implying that they worked on it after the invasion since Ilos was spared and then somehow used the one on Ilos to transport themselves and the mini-relay that sits on the Citadel to that location... explaining why Vigil would assume they wouldn't find food or water on the Citadel to keep themselves alive. I dunno -- if a relay can work one-way with nothing at the terminus, then why is there anything on the Citadel in Shepard's time? What's the point of bringing the thing if you can get there without it? I think we have to keep paired relays as a real constraint. The FTL telescope was bad enough. My take is that the Conduit terminus was on the Citadel because the Protheans were going to stage some sort of propaganda event. Can't have actually gotten around to staging it or the Reapers would have known about it, although how they missed a functioning relay on the Presidum is something it's best not to think about. However, Vigil does say that Ilos is a top secret facility and their work was highly classified. It seems illogical that they would be prepping to hold a media event showing off a prototype and only half works (in one direction). It's even less clear why they would want to publicly link Ilos directly to the Citadel (the hub of the relay network) with it... particularly if their goal was to keep the Ilos facility top secret. I"m also not sure how Vigil would know that all the records of the Ilos facility were destroyed when the Reapers attacked the Citadel, since he wasn't there when that happened.
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Post by alanc9 on Dec 10, 2019 22:03:19 GMT
What are our other options, though? I suppose the Citadel terminus could have been anywhere on the Citadel, and they just moved it next to the control tower. But I can't see why they'd do that.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 10, 2019 22:08:21 GMT
What are our other options, though? I suppose the Citadel terminus could have been anywhere on the Citadel, and they just moved it next to the control tower. But I can't see why they'd do that. Why the Citadel at all. Bring the powers that be to Ilos or another facility to show off how the prototype works. Put one on a moon or someplace close to Ilos to demonstrate it, if "top-secret" was the Prothean intention. I just don't think it was put there with the purpose of holding a propaganda event. If it was the case, then it would have made more sense to also move the Ilos terminus to some other less secret facility, so that in revealing it to the Prothean Public, you wouldn't be revealing the location of your top-secret research facility... much less risk someone figuring out how to hack/reverse the flow of your one-way relay and wind up transporting themselves right into the heart of your top-secret research base.
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Post by KaiserShep on Dec 10, 2019 22:25:44 GMT
No they don't. Shepard has a small army of support on Virmire. He is not alone on Feros or Eden Prime. The Normandy is well established as an infiltration vessel; that is it's purpose. The mission Shepard has is to find and kill or apprehend Saren. Ilos is a Prothean world as of yet uncovered. That's a much clearer goal at the end than the Suicide Mission is. Shepard has 4 or 5 Salarians and the squad mate you assign to them drawing the attention of a heavily fortified base as 3 man squad sneaks in from behind in a base literally filled to over flowing with Geth and Krogans. The idea that 4 or 5 of them could hold off an entire building full of them is absolutely absurd. I try to ignore these things because of asset restraints and gameplay/story segregation. Can you imagine ME1 cramming in dozens of salarian NPC's in a huge frontal assault on Virmire? My PS3 gets heart palpitations just thinking about it. But then I go solo and defeat high dragons in Dragon Age: Origins.
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Post by cloud9 on Dec 10, 2019 22:29:51 GMT
I generally agree. (I think that DA's save imports were a mistake, for instance.) But I'd be willing to extend choices a bit further, as long as the first game's PC is still the PC in the sequel. The trilogy worked well enough for me in this aspect. ME1's human-led council and councilor choices were nerfed into irrelevance, yeah, but the human-led council was stupid anyway. Ideally you structure the choices so big stuff comes later. Having the SM at the 2/3 mark was a resource sink, as you point out. They handled it OK, but it was a self-inflicted crisis. Nerfing councilor choices is exactly the situation to avoid. Saying "Your choices matter" then going "Screw you, that was a stupid choice anyway" Doesn't exactly build fan confidence. And I don't think the ME trilogy handled extending choices well at all. Killing off SHepard and having just about everyone, including former allies who should know better, turn their back on Shep was a ham-fisted way of hitting the reset button. Like MEA, it seemed to say they didn't really want to make a sequel but felt obligated to do so. That's exactly how I feel.
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Post by alanc9 on Dec 11, 2019 1:07:46 GMT
What are our other options, though? I suppose the Citadel terminus could have been anywhere on the Citadel, and they just moved it next to the control tower. But I can't see why they'd do that. Why the Citadel at all. Bring the powers that be to Ilos or another facility to show off how the prototype works. Put one on a moon or someplace close to Ilos to demonstrate it, if "top-secret" was the Prothean intention. I just don't think it was put there with the purpose of holding a propaganda event. If it was the case, then it would have made more sense to also move the Ilos terminus to some other less secret facility, so that in revealing it to the Prothean Public, you wouldn't be revealing the location of your top-secret research facility... much less risk someone figuring out how to hack/reverse the flow of your one-way relay and wind up transporting themselves right into the heart of your top-secret research base. Sure, but the relay terminus was where it was. Gotta have some in-universe explanation for it. What, are was saying that the Conduit can beam stuff anywhere in the galaxy, but the first thing it beams to a location has to be the relay monument because that's how the space magic tech works?
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Post by Deleted on Dec 11, 2019 3:36:08 GMT
Why the Citadel at all. Bring the powers that be to Ilos or another facility to show off how the prototype works. Put one on a moon or someplace close to Ilos to demonstrate it, if "top-secret" was the Prothean intention. I just don't think it was put there with the purpose of holding a propaganda event. If it was the case, then it would have made more sense to also move the Ilos terminus to some other less secret facility, so that in revealing it to the Prothean Public, you wouldn't be revealing the location of your top-secret research facility... much less risk someone figuring out how to hack/reverse the flow of your one-way relay and wind up transporting themselves right into the heart of your top-secret research base. Sure, but the relay terminus was where it was. Gotta have some in-universe explanation for it. What, are was saying that the Conduit can beam stuff anywhere in the galaxy, but the first thing it beams to a location has to be the relay monument because that's how the space magic tech works? The only "in-universe" explanation we are given for it at all is that it was a prototype and that it is what it is because the Protheans were only "on the cusp" of unlocking Mass Relay technology.
Despite it being a mere prototype built by noobs in that science and only able to work in one direction, it is the singular most powerful relay in the galaxy... sending objects and living beings (not ships that are able to navigate on their own) to a pinpoint landing across the entire galaxy in a single jump (one of the longest jumps, if not the longest, for any Relay in the galaxy and going right through the galactic core) without the need for those inordinately long arms; whereas the big ones made by the Reapers are considered "good" if they operate within a 1500 km variance while having both terminus points fully functional. If the Prothean scientists or Shepard had more that a few meters of drift, he/she would have missed the landing zone on the Citadel entirely, if not missed the entire Citadel (which is only 44.7 km long and 12.8 km wide).
Again, it seems an odd place to put a "top-secret" prototype in order to give the powers that be a public test of it. It seems odd that the Prothean scientists would opt to use their untested Prototype Relay at all IF the Reapers had already left and returned to dark space because the Reapers assumed they had already exterminated everyone. Why didn't they just take a ship from Ilos through the regular relay network and dock with the now empty Citadel (just as the Salarians would have had to arrived at it centuries later in order to "discover" it for the current cycle? That way, the Protheans could have at least left when their job was done and returned to Ilos or found a planet with some food and water on which to live out the remainder of their lives.
As was mentioned, how did the Reapers and/or keepers miss the fact that they had such a powerful little Relay sitting in the middle of their Citadel... one that, if hacked and reversed, would lead them directly to the Prothean research facility on Ilos that created it? If an explanation is that they couldn't detect it unless it was used, why didn't they detect it when it was used by the Prothean scientists to access the Citadel?
In short, Bioware set up their space-magic to work one way at the start of the game... and then totally changed most of how it works by the end of even that first game for "plot convenience."
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Post by gothpunkboy89 on Dec 11, 2019 16:57:29 GMT
Shepard has 4 or 5 Salarians and the squad mate you assign to them drawing the attention of a heavily fortified base as 3 man squad sneaks in from behind in a base literally filled to over flowing with Geth and Krogans. The idea that 4 or 5 of them could hold off an entire building full of them is absolutely absurd. I try to ignore these things because of asset restraints and gameplay/story segregation. Can you imagine ME1 cramming in dozens of salarian NPC's in a huge frontal assault on Virmire? My PS3 gets heart palpitations just thinking about it. But then I go solo and defeat high dragons in Dragon Age: Origins. I would ignore it as well if they were more consistent with it. I understand that due to limitations you couldn't take your entire squad with you. But just enough casual dialogue seems to conflict between taking everyone with you and literally just 3 people do the entire mission.
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Post by Polka Dot on Dec 13, 2019 17:26:07 GMT
Here's a possible theory: what if...
-- The conduit terminus located on the Citadel was fully functional all along? Prevailing theory in Shepard's time was that it may have simply been a sculpture, but then they also thought the relays themselves were prothean in origin. -- The reapers may have built it there as a convenient method of transporting shock troops to harvest Citadel inhabitants. They may have had "transmitters" aboard reaper troop transports, installed in the labs that convert populations to reaper creatures, or built them as needed.
-- We don't really know whether the prothean base on Ilos existed prior to their cycle. That war went on for centuries, and the protheans may have established it during the war, possibly for the specific purpose of trying to build the conduit.
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Post by themikefest on Dec 13, 2019 18:22:59 GMT
It's too bad that Shepard and Javik couldn't meet where the mini-me relay is for him to touch it, then give some details about it.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 13, 2019 19:26:41 GMT
It's too bad that Shepard and Javik couldn't meet where the mini-me relay is for him to touch it, then give some details about it. That would have been cool, alright.
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Post by ahglock on Dec 13, 2019 22:33:56 GMT
Sure, but the relay terminus was where it was. Gotta have some in-universe explanation for it. What, are was saying that the Conduit can beam stuff anywhere in the galaxy, but the first thing it beams to a location has to be the relay monument because that's how the space magic tech works? The only "in-universe" explanation we are given for it at all is that it was a prototype and that it is what it is because the Protheans were only "on the cusp" of unlocking Mass Relay technology.
Despite it being a mere prototype built by noobs in that science and only able to work in one direction, it is the singular most powerful relay in the galaxy... sending objects and living beings (not ships that are able to navigate on their own) to a pinpoint landing across the entire galaxy in a single jump (one of the longest jumps, if not the longest, for any Relay in the galaxy and going right through the galactic core) without the need for those inordinately long arms; whereas the big ones made by the Reapers are considered "good" if they operate within a 1500 km variance while having both terminus points fully functional. If the Prothean scientists or Shepard had more that a few meters of drift, he/she would have missed the landing zone on the Citadel entirely, if not missed the entire Citadel (which is only 44.7 km long and 12.8 km wide).
Again, it seems an odd place to put a "top-secret" prototype in order to give the powers that be a public test of it. It seems odd that the Prothean scientists would opt to use their untested Prototype Relay at all IF the Reapers had already left and returned to dark space because the Reapers assumed they had already exterminated everyone. Why didn't they just take a ship from Ilos through the regular relay network and dock with the now empty Citadel (just as the Salarians would have had to arrived at it centuries later in order to "discover" it for the current cycle? That way, the Protheans could have at least left when their job was done and returned to Ilos or found a planet with some food and water on which to live out the remainder of their lives.
As was mentioned, how did the Reapers and/or keepers miss the fact that they had such a powerful little Relay sitting in the middle of their Citadel... one that, if hacked and reversed, would lead them directly to the Prothean research facility on Ilos that created it? If an explanation is that they couldn't detect it unless it was used, why didn't they detect it when it was used by the Prothean scientists to access the Citadel?
In short, Bioware set up their space-magic to work one way at the start of the game... and then totally changed most of how it works by the end of even that first game for "plot convenience."
I have 0 problem with this stuff. There are issues with mass effect 1, but for me this stuff ain’t it. the one thing they emphasize over and over throughout the series is the Milky Way races know nothing about the relays. That they actively try not to learn it. So anything they say about it is subject to being wrong. It’s like a intentional narrative set up. If a story explains how the protagonist knows nothing about lights. They just know when you flip the switch they turn off and on. When a light burns out, the story didn’t lie to you about how lights worked. They set up the ignorance so they could do something with the story outside of just flipping the switch on and off as a surprise twist. The protheans studied it though and they figured it out so they were the surprise twist. The limits of the existing relays could be intentional limits not scientific ones in order to limit the MW races. As for going through solid objects that was always my assumption until MEA. There was no solid statement one way or the other about it but it’s the only thing that would make sense to me from the getgo. Too many potential objects in space would have moved in and out of the path over billions of years. The one way thing. Again I don’t understand why this doesn’t make sense. It was a hack into the existing system. Why would the existing system have its location to send to, it wasn’t aware of it. But once the hack established the link still works. Hence it’s one way. You maybe could program the relay on the citadel to do this but it would have to know it’s there to try. And easily could have been a bigger task than the handful of protheans left could manage on their own. Why does it exist in the citadel, this special version that let you zap people in. Again it makes sense to me. The reapers use ground troops and youd need them to take over the citadel quickly. Part of the standard reaper package is bring their army. And gating in their ground troops into the down town citadel would help It probably only had one location it could go to and from before the ilos relay and that was a dark space space station or something. It didn’t happen this time thanks to the protheans. Why is it hidden and not wide spread. It doesn’t help the reapers it helps the mw races more to be able to zap troops around at will. Why didn’t they detect it. It wasn’t used until they left and they hacked the keepers to stop them from activating the cycle process why wouldn’t their hacking of the keepers include dont try and track down our new thing. Though by the time it happened it was over anyways. Maybe they did, though it’s just keepers so who knows what they would do. If they did they went to a dead facility and came back.
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Post by KaiserShep on Dec 13, 2019 23:22:43 GMT
It's too bad that Shepard and Javik couldn't meet where the mini-me relay is for him to touch it, then give some details about it. Oh man, a trip to Ilos with Javik would've been amazing, especially if he got to go through the massive corridors where the defunct sleeper pods were. He'd probably have tons of exposition about life there just touching the walls.
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Post by sjsharp2010 on Dec 14, 2019 0:42:37 GMT
It's too bad that Shepard and Javik couldn't meet where the mini-me relay is for him to touch it, then give some details about it. Oh man, a trip to Ilos with Javik would've been amazing, especially if he got to go through the massive corridors where the defunct sleeper pods were. He'd probably have tons of exposition about life there just touching the walls. Mayb ehe'd find i tto traumatic especiall yif you take into account what happens if he touches his memory shard. I will admi tthough his abilitty to read things though was quite fascinating
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Post by Iakus on Dec 14, 2019 2:23:36 GMT
What are our other options, though? I suppose the Citadel terminus could have been anywhere on the Citadel, and they just moved it next to the control tower. But I can't see why they'd do that. It was on the Presidium because everyone assumed it was just a piece of art.
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Post by Iakus on Dec 14, 2019 2:27:13 GMT
Here's a possible theory: what if... -- The conduit terminus located on the Citadel was fully functional all along? Prevailing theory in Shepard's time was that it may have simply been a sculpture, but then they also thought the relays themselves were prothean in origin. -- The reapers may have built it there as a convenient method of transporting shock troops to harvest Citadel inhabitants. They may have had "transmitters" aboard reaper troop transports, installed in the labs that convert populations to reaper creatures, or built them as needed. -- We don't really know whether the prothean base on Ilos existed prior to their cycle. That war went on for centuries, and the protheans may have established it during the war, possibly for the specific purpose of trying to build the conduit. #1 I am certain is the case #3 is entirely possible. Ilos was once inhabited by a race of pre-Prothean aliens called inusannon, after all.
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Post by Iakus on Dec 14, 2019 2:30:09 GMT
The only "in-universe" explanation we are given for it at all is that it was a prototype and that it is what it is because the Protheans were only "on the cusp" of unlocking Mass Relay technology.
Despite it being a mere prototype built by noobs in that science and only able to work in one direction, it is the singular most powerful relay in the galaxy... sending objects and living beings (not ships that are able to navigate on their own) to a pinpoint landing across the entire galaxy in a single jump (one of the longest jumps, if not the longest, for any Relay in the galaxy and going right through the galactic core) without the need for those inordinately long arms; whereas the big ones made by the Reapers are considered "good" if they operate within a 1500 km variance while having both terminus points fully functional. If the Prothean scientists or Shepard had more that a few meters of drift, he/she would have missed the landing zone on the Citadel entirely, if not missed the entire Citadel (which is only 44.7 km long and 12.8 km wide).
Again, it seems an odd place to put a "top-secret" prototype in order to give the powers that be a public test of it. It seems odd that the Prothean scientists would opt to use their untested Prototype Relay at all IF the Reapers had already left and returned to dark space because the Reapers assumed they had already exterminated everyone. Why didn't they just take a ship from Ilos through the regular relay network and dock with the now empty Citadel (just as the Salarians would have had to arrived at it centuries later in order to "discover" it for the current cycle? That way, the Protheans could have at least left when their job was done and returned to Ilos or found a planet with some food and water on which to live out the remainder of their lives.
As was mentioned, how did the Reapers and/or keepers miss the fact that they had such a powerful little Relay sitting in the middle of their Citadel... one that, if hacked and reversed, would lead them directly to the Prothean research facility on Ilos that created it? If an explanation is that they couldn't detect it unless it was used, why didn't they detect it when it was used by the Prothean scientists to access the Citadel?
In short, Bioware set up their space-magic to work one way at the start of the game... and then totally changed most of how it works by the end of even that first game for "plot convenience."
I have 0 problem with this stuff. There are issues with mass effect 1, but for me this stuff ain’t it. the one thing they emphasize over and over throughout the series is the Milky Way races know nothing about the relays. That they actively try not to learn it. So anything they say about it is subject to being wrong. It’s like a intentional narrative set up. If a story explains how the protagonist knows nothing about lights. They just know when you flip the switch they turn off and on. When a light burns out, the story didn’t lie to you about how lights worked. They set up the ignorance so they could do something with the story outside of just flipping the switch on and off as a surprise twist. The protheans studied it though and they figured it out so they were the surprise twist. The limits of the existing relays could be intentional limits not scientific ones in order to limit the MW races. As for going through solid objects that was always my assumption until MEA. There was no solid statement one way or the other about it but it’s the only thing that would make sense to me from the getgo. Too many potential objects in space would have moved in and out of the path over billions of years. The one way thing. Again I don’t understand why this doesn’t make sense. It was a hack into the existing system. Why would the existing system have its location to send to, it wasn’t aware of it. But once the hack established the link still works. Hence it’s one way. You maybe could program the relay on the citadel to do this but it would have to know it’s there to try. And easily could have been a bigger task than the handful of protheans left could manage on their own. Why does it exist in the citadel, this special version that let you zap people in. Again it makes sense to me. The reapers use ground troops and youd need them to take over the citadel quickly. Part of the standard reaper package is bring their army. And gating in their ground troops into the down town citadel would help It probably only had one location it could go to and from before the ilos relay and that was a dark space space station or something. It didn’t happen this time thanks to the protheans. Why is it hidden and not wide spread. It doesn’t help the reapers it helps the mw races more to be able to zap troops around at will. Why didn’t they detect it. It wasn’t used until they left and they hacked the keepers to stop them from activating the cycle process why wouldn’t their hacking of the keepers include dont try and track down our new thing. Though by the time it happened it was over anyways. Maybe they did, though it’s just keepers so who knows what they would do. If they did they went to a dead facility and came back. Not to mention the Conduit was almost certainly a primary relay. Those have massive range, but are only point to point. Secondary relays can go to lots of points, but have limited range.
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Post by alanc9 on Dec 14, 2019 3:09:18 GMT
What are our other options, though? I suppose the Citadel terminus could have been anywhere on the Citadel, and they just moved it next to the control tower. But I can't see why they'd do that. It was on the Presidium because everyone assumed it was just a piece of art. In the current cycle, sure. But why did the Protheans put it there? It wasn't an artwork to them. Unless the current cycle moved it there from somewhere else on the Citadel, which is conceivable.
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Post by Polka Dot on Dec 14, 2019 3:14:18 GMT
It's too bad that Shepard and Javik couldn't meet where the mini-me relay is for him to touch it, then give some details about it. Does Javik read inanimate objects? He can read energy signatures left by people, but I'd think they would fade over time. He didn't seem to know (or read) much about the wrecked ship on 2181 Despoina except that the corpses are old enough not to stink. He read the prior presence of the fluid from Grunt's tank, but that was kind of a special case. It was recent, and highly charged with... uh, residual life force energy from having gestated a life.
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Post by Polka Dot on Dec 14, 2019 3:20:59 GMT
It was on the Presidium because everyone assumed it was just a piece of art. In the current cycle, sure. But why did the Protheans put it there? It wasn't an artwork to them. Unless the current cycel moved it there from somewhere else on the Citadel, which is conceivable. Why are we assuming anyone moved it? The reapers may have built it there as a permanently attached fixture.
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Post by Iakus on Dec 14, 2019 3:26:52 GMT
It was on the Presidium because everyone assumed it was just a piece of art. In the current cycle, sure. But why did the Protheans put it there? It wasn't an artwork to them. Unless the current cycel moved it there from somewhere else on the Citadel, which is conceivable. I'd say it's more than conceivable, it's likely.
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Post by sassafrassa on Dec 14, 2019 3:46:01 GMT
I try to ignore these things because of asset restraints and gameplay/story segregation. Can you imagine ME1 cramming in dozens of salarian NPC's in a huge frontal assault on Virmire? My PS3 gets heart palpitations just thinking about it. But then I go solo and defeat high dragons in Dragon Age: Origins. A word for this could be "Common Sense". Mass Effect isn't REAL. It's a 100% fake universe even in just how it is written, much less how it is presented in a VIDEO GAME. I don't know how big the STG unit is supposed to be but the judging by the sound of the battle at least a few dozen? To hold out and advance against the main geth force there they must have some heavy firepower. Vehicles and such. The inside of the Normandy doesn't quite make sense. You examine any fictional setting too closely and you will start to notice all the little ways the illusion is put together and it falls apart. You know those metal walls inside the Death Star? I believe most of them are actually made of wood. I didn't miss your point, I was making a different one. I was proposing a slight rewrite where the mission isn't to "cut off the head of the snake " until after reaching the Collector Base, since until that point there's no reason to know that cutting off the head of the snake is even feasible. So a commando raid like you propose, but a different goal. Honestly, I thought that was pretty clear. But I guess not. Okay, fair enough. Sure, rewrite the mission if you want. That's another possibility. I was just attempting to demonstrate that Mass Effect 2, as it is written, could have its flaws ironed out with just a bit MORE writing.
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Post by alanc9 on Dec 14, 2019 6:39:42 GMT
In the current cycle, sure. But why did the Protheans put it there? It wasn't an artwork to them. Unless the current cycel moved it there from somewhere else on the Citadel, which is conceivable. Why are we assuming anyone moved it? The reapers may have built it there as a permanently attached fixture. I'm coming around to this idea. It actually meshes OK with Vigil's dialogue, which states that the Ilos base was working on a small-scale relay that linked "to the Citadel, the hub of the relay network." We can fanwank that the Citadel relay (including the small terminal) is somehow different in a way which made the project easier to accomplish. (Vigil's pretty clear that the Citadel was the target before the Reapers showed up.)
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