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Post by Shinobu on Jan 2, 2021 22:08:59 GMT
How about built by an army of Leviathan drones...maybe over hundreds of thousands of years...since we're thinking outside the box here. Oh, cool idea. It does seem like that disc would take even the geth thousands of years to build since it is more massive than hundreds of thousands of planets. Since the geth have only been around a few hundred years, maybe it was built by something more ancient.
The Leviathans would also pose a big threat in a post ME3 galaxy where they didn't have to hide from Reapers any more. The one we met seemed pretty keen on dominating everyone again.
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Post by Little Bengel on Jan 2, 2021 22:25:52 GMT
How about built by an army of Leviathan drones...maybe over hundreds of thousands of years...since we're thinking outside the box here. Oh, cool idea. It does seem like that disc would take even the geth thousands of years to build since it is more massive than hundreds of thousands of planets. Since the geth have only been around a few hundred years, maybe it was built by something more ancient.
The Leviathans would also pose a big threat in a post ME3 galaxy where they didn't have to hide from Reapers any more. The one we met seemed pretty keen on dominating everyone again. Leviathans have been often ignored in favor of some level of Jardaan fuckery in all the theorycraft I've seen about the next game. BioWare'd do good to remind everyone they're a thing, and this game seems like the perfect opportunity to do so.
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Post by Blast Processor on Jan 2, 2021 22:35:29 GMT
After re-watching this, my gut instinct believes that the Geth are going to be used heavily to make this all work. Basically how Cerberus was in the ME Trilogy, especially ME3. Needs some goons to fight, here fight some Cerberus Geth. Need to connect Andromeda to the Milky Way, just have those crazy Geth do it. The Geth all died in the Destroy ending, doesn't matter, turns out there was a previous schism within the Geth, and Geth have been travelling around intergalactic space for hundreds of years. Need some faction to abduct Mr. Space Hamster, you guessed it, it was the Geth! Not enough eye candy, here the Geth have created a collection of sexbots for your crew.
So jokes aside, regarding the poll. My belief is that the Geth built the Disc and the your end game choice doesn't much matter.
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Post by Shinobu on Jan 2, 2021 22:35:37 GMT
I am inclined to believe that the Liara we see in the video is indeed much older than the Liara we knew in the original trilogy. It's not just the wrinkles, it's something about the way she carries herself. It might be otherwise, of course, and it's just a fluke in the animation. What is a little weird about the trailer: We see a small vessel approach a planet, as if it was about to land. Then we see Liara climbing up a mountain. But then we see the presumably same ship in the background. It's hard to make out the silhouettes, but I suppose there is a Salarian. Turian and Krogan, left to right. (The OP saw a human in the middle figure - that is also possible, but the siluette seemed kind of ducked to me and the stance seemed weird for a human.) So Liara did not come with that ship? Did Liara do the Yoda after the ending of Mass Effect 3? Anyway, I am not sure how the N7 helmet piece got there either. If it had been lying there for several hundred years, it should have corroded and be in a far worse state, not to mention that it should have been burried under ice and rock. Is for the planet on which the scene takes place: My guess would be that it's not a planet that was previously mention. While the detective work by th OP is remarkable, we need to keep in mind that the game designers can and will make up a ton of new things - everything else would be kinda boring. As for the ending of ME3 - if they do pick a different set the game in the distant future, I would presume that they leave the ending open or only build small variations into the game. To my best knowledge the mass relays were destroyed in all three endings, even though the patch for the ending added a scene where they were re-assemble in the blue ending, I don't know about the others. If they do set the campaign in the distant future, they will likely make it so that any ending of Mass Effect 3 will work. The galaxy could have fallen into a dark age either way and galactic civilization collapsed either way. There is no guarantee that the mass relays ever actually worked again, even if it was attempted to fix them. Earth had taken a severe toll during the Reaper war and there was a gigantic army in stranded in the Solr system after the war, so that it might not have mattered as much whether or not Earth was destroyed.
If the geth still existed, that would be a clear indication that it can't be the red ending. Then again, the geth could have been restored by the remote Quarian sympathizer after the war. The hardware still existed and while the geth, per se, are rather the processes, not the hardware, once you have fixed a platform, it should be possible to invoke new geth. I am not actually particularly keen on another conflict of organics vs. machine and more pseudo-phylosophic rambling that ends in circular logic. Given current games, at the moment I'd actually appreciate if they went with the green ending, even though I never played it. It has the most potential for serious cyberpunk.
There is something about the tone of the trailer that makes me think that there might be more mysticism. A galactic dark age would explain why technology has not seriously evolved over the centuries and even though a very long time has passed, the ship looked not so very different from what we've already seen.
Interesting ideas. I hadn't considered that Liara didn't arrive on the Mudskipper, but that's certainly possible. Good point.
I think ME armor is made of ceramics as well as metal alloys, so it may not corrode so quickly. Maybe this planet has close to zero precipitation, or maybe the wind keeps this particular part of the Reaper swept off. Or maybe like all the frozen mastodons being uncovered by global warming the piece was buried under a lot more ice but came to the surface because of thawing. Or maybe Bioware saw an opportunity to throw in an N7 armor piece to generate excitement and didn't consider how long it had been there. I guess it could also be from some other N7's armor.
You make another good point about the planet. It could be a new one dreamed up by the devs. Their use of the Witch's Broom may not mean anything location-wise. Maybe they liked the way it looks because it resembles a Reaper and threw it in for aesthetics. I did some more research and found Bioware uses images of other real-life nebulae like the Engraved hourglass Nebula which is only 8000 light years from Earth, but they place it clear on the other side of the galactic core in the Terminus systems. So their galactic map isn't true to life and they may place the Witch's broom anywhere. That makes sense now that I think about it, since the Hubble telescope can't really see that far, so all the beautiful pictures of nebulae it took must be somewhere in our neighborhood.
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Post by Shinobu on Jan 2, 2021 23:05:53 GMT
In what way do you think analysis lead to toxicity?
Certainly things in the trailer may not end up in the game -- we are early days yet. And people can get too attached to their ideas of what the trailer means and get bent out of shape if their ideas aren't real. I think people will be toxic if they are toxic; analysis may give them a subject, but it doesn't create toxicity in itself IMO.
Analysis like this tend to create fan theories that some people will think are right and will be in the final product, and when those are proven wrong then they get upset and are not in the final product about their fan theory. They get they mad because the media in question isn't going to have their theory or maybe go in the opposite direction then they lash out at the creators, other fans who aren't concerned about it or like the new direction, critics, and so on. It's already happened to Mass Effect, Star Wars, Star Trek, Transformers, Dr. Who, professional wrestling, the DCEU, and the MCU and that is the short list.
Also when you have some people acting in bad faith, (AND FOR THE RECORD Shinobu IS NOT ACTING IN BAD FAITH), for clicks, views, and subscribers/followers doesn't help. This is why I'm distancing myself form a lot fandoms that I used to be a part of, I'm sick of people thinking that theories are right even when the people who make it and/or own it say otherwise. Ah, like people collected under the banner of IT (which is an idea I actually like)? I guess to me the toxicity starts when people harm others, and I don't think the theory they subscribe to necessarily causes the bad behavior. I suppose a popular theory could end up uniting a toxic group and the knowledge of their numbers could embolden them to act out. For example if Bioware canonizes the Synthesis ending and fans start raging that "Destroy is most popular, so all of us should harass Mike Gamble on Twitter until he changes the game!" Is that the fault of Destroy being popular, or is that the fault of people who believe the "customer is always right" and online harassment is okay? (I'm guilty of some of this myself, although I haven't harassed anyone to my knowledge.)
I do see a lot of negativity on Youtube and people prophesying the end of Bioware for clicks with the comments section filled with "If Bioware does this or doesn't do that they should go out of business." I try to stay away from that because it just isn't worth making myself miserable over. Distancing yourself from that seems like the healthiest option.
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Post by SirSourpuss on Jan 2, 2021 23:15:31 GMT
I do see a lot of negativity on Youtube and people prophesying the end of Bioware That's not just youtube. I assure you. They don't do it for clicks. That's dissatisfaction.
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Post by Shinobu on Jan 2, 2021 23:28:09 GMT
Well, playing Sara again would be an enjoyable choice as far as I am concerned, if not my favourite choice. What I was really afraid of is that they might come up with a game that is set before the events of the Mass Effect 3, possibly during the First Contact War, but seems to be off the table. What I wish most is to give us a little more choice during character creation, namely allowing me to play an asari (and other players might like to play krogan or so). I believe that would be a feasible choice if the player character comes of a multi-species group of people, possibly agents of the Shadow Broker, or whatever Liara is in those days. In that case the middle figure could be difficult to recognise because it's a stand in for anything other than Salarian or Krogan. Any of the three characters in the background might be the player character. Yes, you are correct, the helmet might well be an initiative/pathfinder helmet, which would make most sense if the Andromeda Initiative manages to create a Mass Relay to the Milky Way right in the beginning of the game, or manages to use Meridian to create a portal. That would also give us the opportunity to investigate at least some of the open story threads in ME:A.
The thread's original question was the Alderson disk, of course. Honestly, I have no idea. It might be the Geth, it might be otherwise. Sara/Scott would be interesting in this context, because Ryder has an AI symbiont, which is kinda what you would get if you picked a green ending. It would not be an us vs. them thing in this context. I suppose in an electronic environment Ryder's and Sam's roles would flip, Sam would be the one who interacts with the environment, and Ryder the one who adds perspective and complements Sam with emotion and intuition.
After playing ME3 MP for years, the possibility of being another race is appealing. I don't think it will happen soon because of the cost of hiring multiple voice actors to be the protagonist (male and female). They did it in DAI with two male and two female voices, but in Mass Effect they'd probably need six or eight (Male and female Krogan, male and female Turian, male and female Salarian, female asari/human, male human). Also DAI may have scared them off as the implementation was not entirely smooth due to time constraints. It adds a lot of complexity to the game if the developers want to give each race/species their due. People were pretty disappointed that the Elvish Inquisitor didn't know who the Elven god Mythal was and had no reaction if her entire clan got wiped out, for example.
Cool idea about SAM and Ryder trying to navigate a virtual world like Shepard did on Rannoch.
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Post by feuerrabe on Jan 3, 2021 8:08:04 GMT
If you wanted to implement anything of the sort in a game like mass effect, you'd have to make sure that, regardless of the players species, they have more or less the same cultural background. Unlike Dragon Age, Mass Effect has always been tailored to one particular player character, which decreases the wiggle room for the player to define their own character, but increases the involvement of the character in the world and thus makes the story telling more intense. If you were to allow for different species it seems inevitable that there will be moments when things seem off and it will not always reflect the species of the player character to the degree that would be desirably. You would not get a different voice over for every little species, only a bit of voice modulation, if at all. The asari would sound just like the human, the salarian talk 20% faster, the krogan have a darker timbre. In the effect, it would be mostly a cosmetic choice with relatively little impact on the game. In a game like Mass Effect, that is a difficult trade of. An NPC would react to a character that looks like Wrex just like they react like they react to a character that looks like Tali, for example, which does take away something from the game.
On top of that, the races would also be problematic when it comes to animation. You need a way to translate facial animation from one species to another, which obviously doesn't work for Krogan on if you take human as a default. Additionally, their very different physique would require to make every scripted animation where the character interacts in some way with the environment if you allow for something as extreme as krogan. Turian and quarians have very different legs then humasn and you can't just translate a scripted animation one to one either. Asari would not be a problem. Aside from scripted animations, it's also default animations. How does a turian hold a gun when the walk, run, sprint without creating clipping issues? You can't just use NPC animations, the player character is considerably more visible and the animations need to be more refined. Things like that. In Cyberpunk 2077 it often occured to me that they did not actually have separate male / female animations, but only tweaked the male animations to get the female ones. There were like like 3 billion occasions when I though "You just can't sit like this wearing a mini skirt!" ME3 had similar issues, but not that pronounced.
Finally there is equipment. Every piece of wearable equipment must adjust to the player character. In scripted animations, Shepard often used a weapon that he doesn't even have, such as an Avenger assault rifle, even though they are not carrying one. If you allow for different races you'd have to make a separate version of of every wearable item for every race / sex combination that exists and that is assuming that you cannot tweak the physique. In SW:TOR all permissible character have the same eight body models (four male, four female), regardless of their species, so there are eight versions of every wearable item. In Mass Effect that would work only between the female human and the asari, everything else would need their own stuff and the only mitigating factor is that in Mass Effect, customisations are limited to the face. At the moment there are only two versions, male and female. And by wearable items, I don't mean just clothes, I also mean guns, for example. I would be surprised if the gun that a female Shepard holds was slightly smaller than that which the male Shepard holds. In Mass Effect it would be relatively easy to get around this: Provide a relatively limited number of options in the appearance editor, but give the player ultimate freedom to customize those limited options in the appearance editor / loadout screen in a system that is more like ME3 than ME:A. I generally prefer that anyway.
Other games allow for greater variety by using more dynamic systems to adjust items dynamically to the character, but that only works within a certain range, the most popular of which is the breast size for the female characters of course. It gets along with tweaking the breast size of female characters, but not with having two fingers and a thumb at each hand, each of which are much larger a human finger or thumb, would not be possible. It also comes with a bit of a trade off, as it looses quality, performance and creates more clipping issues than a static system.
Ss far as I am concerned, that would be an acceptable trade off, but I can see the issues.
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Post by helios969 on Jan 3, 2021 9:28:54 GMT
How about built by an army of Leviathan drones...maybe over hundreds of thousands of years...since we're thinking outside the box here. Oh, cool idea. It does seem like that disc would take even the geth thousands of years to build since it is more massive than hundreds of thousands of planets. Since the geth have only been around a few hundred years, maybe it was built by something more ancient.
The Leviathans would also pose a big threat in a post ME3 galaxy where they didn't have to hide from Reapers any more. The one we met seemed pretty keen on dominating everyone again. Going a bit further you could incorporate the Geth into the process since they would be more efficient than organics...given how easy it was for Shep to "rewrite" the Geth during Legion's loyalty mission. I would think the Leviathan could manage something similar...rewriting enough code to have the Geth continue with work started previously. Time is a big consideration on such a superstructure...it's not something that could be managed over hundreds of years...no matter the resources thrown at it. I also think if you're correct that it's an Alderson disc that only a species such as Leviathan could manage to keep something like this a secret from the Reapers...else as soon as a species was indoctrinated it would become known.
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Post by feuerrabe on Jan 4, 2021 13:38:02 GMT
Hmmm... From what I read, I don't quite see how a civilisation that can build an Alderson disk would want to. It would have to be a civilisation on the upper end of type II and it would need to be able to do star lifting and then I don't see why they would want to. To me it seems like something that has more to do with fantasy than science fiction: I can see how a ring world or a Dyson swarm might make sense, but this? Why build it around a star in the first place if you're not going to use the star's radiation efficiently?
The only thing I could think of: They need the surface area to radiate away heat. The disk has to radiate away all the energy it picks up from the sun. The geth will most likely use the energy they pick up for computer processes, but that cannot be done with a 100% efficiency according to the second law of thermodynamics, even if their computers use considerably more efficient gates than modern computers. Even picking up energy and converting it to other forms, such as creating anti-matter, can categorically not be done perfectly, some heat will inevitably created in the process. Therefore they have to radiate every high energy photon they pick up as hundreds of low energy photons.
However, I would recommend asking anybody who actually knows anything about physics on the topic.
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Post by SirSourpuss on Jan 4, 2021 14:29:47 GMT
On top of that, the races would also be problematic when it comes to animation That's the part where my friend Sebastian Stark comes in, currently working for EA.
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Post by N7Pathfinder on Jan 4, 2021 19:07:05 GMT
On top of that, the races would also be problematic when it comes to animation That's the part where my friend Sebastian Stark comes in, currently working for EA. He's working for the nme? Do you know if they have more to show/say soon or not?
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Post by SirSourpuss on Jan 4, 2021 20:04:43 GMT
He's working for the nme? Do you know if they have more to show/say soon or not? He is working on a far higher level and they do have him working on implementing that tech from the top down. If it is ready to be implemented in NME, it will be and it will be across all EA games going forward. It's not ready yet, but I am hopeful that we will be getting it in games around 2022. The next time a NBA Live title is made, this tech will be implemented in it and NBA Live will return when that tech is ready. I think, so far, plans are for a 2022 return, but that's probably a Q3 2022 return, meaning NBA Live 2023. We'll see how that model works for Frostbite.
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Post by biggydx on Jan 4, 2021 20:57:04 GMT
He's working for the nme? Do you know if they have more to show/say soon or not? He is working on a far higher level and they do have him working on implementing that tech from the top down. If it is ready to be implemented in NME, it will be and it will be across all EA games going forward. It's not ready yet, but I am hopeful that we will be getting it in games around 2022. The next time a NBA Live title is made, this tech will be implemented in it and NBA Live will return when that tech is ready. I think, so far, plans are for a 2022 return, but that's probably a Q3 2022 return, meaning NBA Live 2023. We'll see how that model works for Frostbite. NME?
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Post by Little Bengel on Jan 4, 2021 21:11:57 GMT
He is working on a far higher level and they do have him working on implementing that tech from the top down. If it is ready to be implemented in NME, it will be and it will be across all EA games going forward. It's not ready yet, but I am hopeful that we will be getting it in games around 2022. The next time a NBA Live title is made, this tech will be implemented in it and NBA Live will return when that tech is ready. I think, so far, plans are for a 2022 return, but that's probably a Q3 2022 return, meaning NBA Live 2023. We'll see how that model works for Frostbite. NME? Next Mass Effect.
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Post by biggydx on Jan 4, 2021 21:22:01 GMT
Ok, that's what I assumed, but wasnt too sure since NME was also mentioned. I'd still think multiple races (that are playable) might still be problematic.
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Post by Shinobu on Jan 7, 2021 0:39:02 GMT
Yes, I'd prefer the crappy state of the galaxy (if that's what we have) to be due to something else and not Shepard's fault.
Also, I just watched a "kill everyone" playthrough and found out that a low EMS (<1750) Destroy ending can kill Joker and Traynor as well, so there are NO members of the Normandy crew that are definitely alive no matter what happens in the trilogy. Some of them have only one opportunity to die, but it is possible to kill everyone.
I guess we will find out about Reaper remains in the next game. It would be pretty terrible if they continued driving people insane even though the Reapers aren't alive.
Just guessing here but I believe those remains were put there since dead Reapers can indoctrinate so they cleaned up the MW by putting them on a uninhabited planet going by how old Liara looks they had plenty of time to do so and made the planet off limit. I saw an article once on how to make a place that no one would go to. The idea was that nuclear waste sites may be forgotten about even though they are very hazardous and we need to build a long-lasting environment that would warn people (even post apocalypse) that the place is dangerous and unwholesome. IIRC it had these giant spiky black things. So your idea, though tongue in cheek, isn't outside the realm of possibility.
Oh, I found the article:
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Post by Shinobu on Jan 7, 2021 1:05:23 GMT
If you wanted to implement anything of the sort in a game like mass effect, you'd have to make sure that, regardless of the players species, they have more or less the same cultural background. Unlike Dragon Age, Mass Effect has always been tailored to one particular player character, which decreases the wiggle room for the player to define their own character, but increases the involvement of the character in the world and thus makes the story telling more intense. If you were to allow for different species it seems inevitable that there will be moments when things seem off and it will not always reflect the species of the player character to the degree that would be desirably. You would not get a different voice over for every little species, only a bit of voice modulation, if at all. The asari would sound just like the human, the salarian talk 20% faster, the krogan have a darker timbre. In the effect, it would be mostly a cosmetic choice with relatively little impact on the game. In a game like Mass Effect, that is a difficult trade of. An NPC would react to a character that looks like Wrex just like they react like they react to a character that looks like Tali, for example, which does take away something from the game.
On top of that, the races would also be problematic when it comes to animation. You need a way to translate facial animation from one species to another, which obviously doesn't work for Krogan on if you take human as a default. Additionally, their very different physique would require to make every scripted animation where the character interacts in some way with the environment if you allow for something as extreme as krogan. Turian and quarians have very different legs then humasn and you can't just translate a scripted animation one to one either. Asari would not be a problem. Aside from scripted animations, it's also default animations. How does a turian hold a gun when the walk, run, sprint without creating clipping issues? You can't just use NPC animations, the player character is considerably more visible and the animations need to be more refined. Things like that. In Cyberpunk 2077 it often occured to me that they did not actually have separate male / female animations, but only tweaked the male animations to get the female ones. There were like like 3 billion occasions when I though "You just can't sit like this wearing a mini skirt!" ME3 had similar issues, but not that pronounced.
Finally there is equipment. Every piece of wearable equipment must adjust to the player character. In scripted animations, Shepard often used a weapon that he doesn't even have, such as an Avenger assault rifle, even though they are not carrying one. If you allow for different races you'd have to make a separate version of of every wearable item for every race / sex combination that exists and that is assuming that you cannot tweak the physique. In SW:TOR all permissible character have the same eight body models (four male, four female), regardless of their species, so there are eight versions of every wearable item. In Mass Effect that would work only between the female human and the asari, everything else would need their own stuff and the only mitigating factor is that in Mass Effect, customisations are limited to the face. At the moment there are only two versions, male and female. And by wearable items, I don't mean just clothes, I also mean guns, for example. I would be surprised if the gun that a female Shepard holds was slightly smaller than that which the male Shepard holds. In Mass Effect it would be relatively easy to get around this: Provide a relatively limited number of options in the appearance editor, but give the player ultimate freedom to customize those limited options in the appearance editor / loadout screen in a system that is more like ME3 than ME:A. I generally prefer that anyway.
Other games allow for greater variety by using more dynamic systems to adjust items dynamically to the character, but that only works within a certain range, the most popular of which is the breast size for the female characters of course. It gets along with tweaking the breast size of female characters, but not with having two fingers and a thumb at each hand, each of which are much larger a human finger or thumb, would not be possible. It also comes with a bit of a trade off, as it looses quality, performance and creates more clipping issues than a static system.
Ss far as I am concerned, that would be an acceptable trade off, but I can see the issues.
All excellent points, especially about the body models and clipping. Mass Effect has always struggled with this even just with male and female Shepard. I was a bit surprised Bioware voluntarily added the complexity of making Turians even taller in Andromeda and don't know how they would cope with all of these body models, especially since we ME players like to bang anything that can do calculus. The resources needed to have all of the various make-out scenes with all species combinations would probably break the bank. (Well, I guess the Salarians could be excused since they don't have sex drives and lay eggs like salamanders. )
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Post by Shinobu on Jan 7, 2021 1:17:37 GMT
Oh, cool idea. It does seem like that disc would take even the geth thousands of years to build since it is more massive than hundreds of thousands of planets. Since the geth have only been around a few hundred years, maybe it was built by something more ancient.
The Leviathans would also pose a big threat in a post ME3 galaxy where they didn't have to hide from Reapers any more. The one we met seemed pretty keen on dominating everyone again. Going a bit further you could incorporate the Geth into the process since they would be more efficient than organics...given how easy it was for Shep to "rewrite" the Geth during Legion's loyalty mission. I would think the Leviathan could manage something similar...rewriting enough code to have the Geth continue with work started previously. Time is a big consideration on such a superstructure...it's not something that could be managed over hundreds of years...no matter the resources thrown at it. I also think if you're correct that it's an Alderson disc that only a species such as Leviathan could manage to keep something like this a secret from the Reapers...else as soon as a species was indoctrinated it would become known. I was just looking at the concept art again and wonder if this picture with the prothean-like pillars could actually be the INSIDE of the Alderson disc. It might even have seas inside of it that Leviathans could live in. Perhaps organics could survive on the interior or in the "Goldilocks zone" of the disc.
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Post by N7Pathfinder on Jan 7, 2021 8:21:04 GMT
Going a bit further you could incorporate the Geth into the process since they would be more efficient than organics...given how easy it was for Shep to "rewrite" the Geth during Legion's loyalty mission. I would think the Leviathan could manage something similar...rewriting enough code to have the Geth continue with work started previously. Time is a big consideration on such a superstructure...it's not something that could be managed over hundreds of years...no matter the resources thrown at it. I also think if you're correct that it's an Alderson disc that only a species such as Leviathan could manage to keep something like this a secret from the Reapers...else as soon as a species was indoctrinated it would become known. I was just looking at the concept art again and wonder if this picture with the prothean-like pillars could actually be the INSIDE of the Alderson disc. It might even have seas inside of it that Leviathans could live in. Perhaps organics could survive on the interior or in the "Goldilocks zone" of the disc.
Someone said that it's remnant but then he changed his mind to prothean, and then gamble said or maybe it's meaning it could be something else or both. It looks like prothean though.
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Post by feuerrabe on Jan 7, 2021 9:05:36 GMT
All excellent points, especially about the body models and clipping. Mass Effect has always struggled with this even just with male and female Shepard. I was a bit surprised Bioware voluntarily added the complexity of making Turians even taller in Andromeda and don't know how they would cope with all of these body models, especially since we ME players like to bang anything that can do calculus. The resources needed to have all of the various make-out scenes with all species combinations would probably break the bank. (Well, I guess the Salarians could be excused since they don't have sex drives and lay eggs like salamanders. ) Well the sex scenes are an issue, but if that was all the problem that would be doable, but problems can arise from much simpler things: The player character stands at a railing overlooking a vista while talking to an NPC. Then the player character turns around, crossing their arms to talk straight to the NPC, possible even leans to the railing. A simple scene such as that may force the animator to reposition the NPC, the lights and what exactly the player character does. A turian would not always be able to sit or cross their legs like a human would. A krogan needs more space. Even if the character is just searching an office, walks around a desk and touches it in passing, you have to make sure that it works, that the player character does not block sight on something else that may be important in the scene, that it looks reasonably like they are actually maintaining balance...
I am not an animator and I don't know how bad it really is. I guess the simple shot / reverse shot dialogues, using a set of predefined gestures, could be done on autopilot without too much effort, but any actually sophisticated animations may have to be done separately for all species and may even have to rearrange NPCs, lights and cameras in the scene. However, smart people always come up with smart ideas and I don't really know that much about animation, what I said is just what I can infer. It is possible there are techniques and tools to get around all this and streamline the process.
When the designers SW:TOR were asked why you can't play a wookie, they never mentioned the technical aspects, other than the face animations, they mostly argued from a story perspective, but I am inclined to believe that there was a reason why they game has exactly four male and four female body models, which are the same, regardless what species you are and is feels like they are also a lot more careful where they put the player character in a scene - preferably in a wide open space, not too close to anybody.
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Post by helios969 on Jan 7, 2021 10:34:05 GMT
I was just looking at the concept art again and wonder if this picture with the prothean-like pillars could actually be the INSIDE of the Alderson disc. It might even have seas inside of it that Leviathans could live in. Perhaps organics could survive on the interior or in the "Goldilocks zone" of the disc.
Huh, good catch...it does look like a superstructure stretching around a star. It's a narrow FOV so hard to say with certainty but it looks like it could be...
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Post by helios969 on Jan 7, 2021 10:43:27 GMT
Also, I'm beginning to think everything in MET and MEA can be tied to Leviathan... Jardaan (with some escaping to Andromeda and the apparent ease at which they can manipulate organics) and the Benefactor (a deeper understanding of the inevitable Reaper threat).
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Post by N7Pathfinder on Jan 7, 2021 10:48:38 GMT
Also, I'm beginning to think everything in MET and MEA can be tied to Leviathan... Jardaan (with some escaping to Andromeda and the apparent ease at which they can manipulate organics) and the Benefactor (a deeper understanding of the inevitable Reaper threat).
Interesting...
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Post by helios969 on Jan 7, 2021 10:58:21 GMT
Also, I'm beginning to think everything in MET and MEA can be tied to Leviathan... Jardaan (with some escaping to Andromeda and the apparent ease at which they can manipulate organics) and the Benefactor (a deeper understanding of the inevitable Reaper threat).
Interesting... Kind of makes sense, right?
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