Anybody remember writer Chris L'Etoile?

If a golden throne was what it took to get him writing for Mass Effect again, my only question would be "with or without gem crusting?"

And that is why people roll their eyes. Anyone thinking a single person would some how correct all the mistakes that you see in hindsight or prevent issues like ME:A has is pure fantasy.  To many people have say in what happens for any one person to magically make a game go from bad to good.

Not that it matters to players like you because they can do no wrong.  Lets use OP's list as example

Noveria was a mission with potential but ultimately never lived up to it. When you land it is nothing but fetch quests to start with before you are even allowed to continue.  For a planet build on people doing private and dangerous experiments and technological development the security there is a joke of a joke. Some how the Geth are allowed to set up turrets and heavy machinery without anyone noticing or caring. Even though to all the galaxy the Geth are genocidal AI's who want to kill all organics. As well as exist in Peak 15 without anyone else working on the Rachni project even being aware of their existence even though  the Asari Scientists brings a few to bare against Sheapard when curing the Biotoxin side quest and again against Benezia.

Rachni are suppose to be mindless because of the lack of connection to the Queen yet show the ability to rationalize and attack in strategic manner. It might not be the most intelligent set up they use but it is still showing the ability to think rationally at least on par with what an animal like a wolf when hunting would be capable of doing.  Then there is Benezia her self who after the fight manages to magically fight off the indoctrination effect by isolating a part of her mind and walling it off. Apparently her mind is stronger then a Reaper's indoctrination effect even after prolonged and extended contact with it. Lasting oh so conveniently just long enough to provide the much needed plot device info before dying.

The Rachni are such a boring race existing only to provide a face to previously mentioned War which played a large role in the set up of the Krogan. They are nothing more then gun fodder for the entire level. And the few minutes with the Queen offers no reason to see the Rachnni as anything but threats expect a very vague hint that the Reapers might have had an effect on the Rachni War. Not to mention the sheer way she was introduced is such a ridiculous ass pull to start with. A single egg floating on a derelict ship in space for hundreds of years. And then out pops a healthy queen that some how has memories of it's mother talking to it from hundreds of years ago that is instantly able to reproduce because insects.

Ashley is a boring badly done character. She comes across as xenophobic as hell at first. Playing the role of the small town girl meeting a black person I mean Turian for the first time and instantly thinking they are enemies because they are different from her. Who then learns that just because someone is Middle Eastern I mean an Asari doesn't mean they are automatically self centered ass holes who will happily let everyone else burn as long as their own race is safe. All done with the subtle and nuance of a napalm enema.  Then you have her obsessing over her and her family's perceived slights because her Grand Father rather then fight a losing battle surrendered to the Turians during the First Contact War thus why her family was never able to move up in the military. A set up and complaint that never seems to bare any fruit on how true it actually is.

Compare her to Kaidan who deals with the problems associated with older biotic implants, the inherent social stigma associated with being a biotic and going though the early biotic training being roughed up and treated like shit by a Turian before accidentally killing him when he finally lost his temper at him.  And while Kaidan has more then enough reason to hate other races then  Ashely ever has he still accepts there are good ones and bad ones like any quicker then Ash is capable of. Making him an over all more interesting and better developed character in the first game.

Legion's introduction is the poorest example of writing ever done. To do the 180 on the Geth he pulls the old evil twin card. No the Geth really aren't all that aggressive that was just our evil twins the Heretics that aren't a part of us. And while it does add more complexity to the Geth Quarian conflict it never finds the needed balance. In ME 1 the Geth are the clear bad guys and in ME 2 Legion paints the Quarians as the real bad guys due to the massive shift in tone.  A massively better way to introduce Legion even if slightly over used would be to make him and a small portion of the Geth the break away Heretics.  That would improve his recruitment and loyalty mission vastly. Instead of just trying to find a way to stop a virus the Heretics intent to use. He is trying to find a way to break the Reaper corruption of his race.  Hence why he went to the dead Reaper to try and figure it out from the source.

It also improves his loyalty mission which is pretty stupid. Can't seem to make up it's minds about killing Heretics simply because they are not true Geth or using the very same program it didn't want the Heretics to use against it but against them.  Setting it more up as the option to destroy the base and all Heretics to prevent further conflict with organic life or use the beta program it developed to free them but with the high chance it might scramble their brains into the AI equivalent of a vegetative state.  So it becomes a much more moral choice then previous set up. Sacrifice a few to save the many by preventing anymore hostility towards their race while under Reaper control. Or torture them with an unsure and untested program that will end with them becoming AI vegetables.  Particularly for Shepard if not Legion who balances the cost of permanently damaging a large portion of his race or risk increased hostility against them because of the Reaper's hold.

I could go on but just kind of trying to make the point that while L'Etoile is talented he doesn't really deserve the golden throne people put him on.

Would have been interesting to see how Ashley would have been in ME3 if he had stayed on.

With regard to Chris L'Etoile, I think in these debates he's a stand-in for a specific kind of SF writer, one who delights in exploring the ramifications of a story's themes in detail, including non-human mindsets, rather than leaving everything to be explained only at the shallowest level, if at all, and making all minds human-like for "relatability".

In fact, I think writers who don't delight in these things have no business calling themselves SF writers, and consequently, I think BW Montreal doesn't have any SF writers on its roster. MEA has many trappings of SF, but almost none of the substance. The only mystery worth exploring - the Remnant - even where we should understand one of its aspects because otherwise what we do wouldn't be possible, is never explored in detail. It's just another kind of space magic: Ryder raises her hand and things happen, no matter exactly how she could interface with it, no matter what she would or would not, reasonably, have to understand in order to do what she did. Nothing is *ever* really explored, speculated about, thought about in any depth whatsoever. It only isn't as huge of a disappointment as it could've been because I expected no better from a team led by Mac Walters.

MEA is not a game about exploring the unknown. It's as if you go out to the stars only to find your own kind mirrored in everything, the universe mapped along pathways familiar to a human mind, no mental adjustment necessary, to say nothing of true learning, with even the vast distances and timescales reduced to fake comprehensibility.

Isn't it the ultimate hubris: a story where you go out to explore the universe, and find it is like you in everything? It is the death of a true explorer's mind. If I had to believe this was true in RL, I would kill myself, for all sense of wonder would be gone from the world. In RL, the universe tickles my mind and triggers my imagination, and because of that I delight in stories that imagine what might be there, how we might get there one day, but as much as I delight in the accomplishments of the human mind, even to find nothing out there would be better than finding only the familiar.

There is no reason to exalt being human so far as to make it the measure of a universe. Even were it not hubris (and those who know me know humility isn't a trait I value), it would be soul-crushingly boring. Like 90% of MEA, if you consider it as a work of SF.

So no, Chris L'Etoile isn't an SF god. But he's an example for a kind of writer for whom the ME franchise has a desperate need.

The ME1 Codex was far from perfect - just thinking the effects of eezo through with the information given in the Codex results in a half dozen contradictions. Examples: Biotics: why doesn't a biotic's singularity perturb the orbit of a planet? In order to lift a human against the planet's gravity, it would have to have a similar mass. Tidal effects of a singularity? Nope. Also, it follows from the lore that artificial gravity can't work while in FTL. Yet, things got worse with ME2. For instance, ME1 gave us plausible population numbers for human colonies - mostly in the low millions. In ME2, someone appeared to have thrown dice with the upper limit in the billions. For a colony less than 20 years old. And it gave us the krogan "1 in thousand" number. To think that anyone sane would cure the genophage with those numbers defies comprehension. It would be a galaxy-wide locust plague.

And then, the timeline of course. This implausibly compressed timeline, made that way so that important events could be experienced within a human lifetime, with no regard to plausibility. A prime example of making being human the measure of a universe, with actually no benefit at all to the story coming from it. I have no idea why the ME team thought his was important. 


People tend to personalize, so I excuse it to some extent, and I'm not immune to it. For instance, I'm sure the picture is much more complex than "Mac Walters was responsible for everything bad in MEA", yet you could say my previous post comes across that way. I agree, however, that we should focus more on the issues and personalize only for emphasis, unless we can really pinpoint personal merit or responsibility.

And yet the ending got hate for that very set up of trying to explore non human nature. To the point a new person can't post on this forum about the ending without people suggesting on the PC ending mods that basically turn the whole Reaper story from something at least mildly complex into an extremely simplistic blow them up and everyone goes home happy even less complex ending then Frozen offers.

Shift seems based less on they can't write anything like that and people can't wrap their heads around the concept of different.  Hell we as a species struggle to understand the racial and geographical differences of each other.

Your final line is something I've never understood. EDI was an AI created by organics who's entire life was spent in the company of organics.  Are you saying AI's are incapable of adapting and learning from those around them? If you were to go to lets say Japan from USA the cultural customs are different there. Would you simply ignore them and tell everyone to metaphorically sit and spin as you walk around people's houses with your shoes on? Or any of the other dozen social taboos that developed in their culture and society? Or would you adapt to them and alter your personality and habits to conform to your new surroundings? The same applies to Legion and the Geth. The Reaper upgrade turned them into full fledged AI's compared to the super advanced VI's they were before.

Combine that with Legion's time with organics and Legions time with EDI who has spent her entire life literally surrounded by them would very easily allow them to create a program (for lack of better word) that would allow them to act in the method that would be familiar to Organic life to create a sense of understanding. Because if you are trying to make an ally in a war if not long term piece and that ally doesn't eat pig for social or religious reasons. You don't offer them ham sandwiches. You reach out to a middle ground and offer them turkey or roast beef.

EDI and the Geth don't give up squat about themselves.

A sci-fi setting can deal with encountering the truly alien while at the same time still having a human viewpoint upon which to ground the audience. As much as I would like to see 'alien' elements be given 50/50 screen time with human ones I know that is not feasible; but expecting BioWare to at least demonstrate the same variety they had at the beginning of the series when it comes to non-human concepts is not some unrealistic demand. I was aware that the setting was going to be human centric when I loaded up a new game in ME 1, but I was hoping that the same level of nuance from that first game would be maintained throughout the continuing story.

In regards to characters like EDI and the Geth, I had no problem with the question of whether they were alive or not being asked. Rather my main point of contention was how the narrative shifted from two unique and sentient beings; whom I would have called "living" already; and determining that in fact no, they weren't truly alive until they became more like us. That somehow, their existence prior to becoming more humanized they weren't valid; that only by measuring up to the golden standard of human-like could they actually be considered worth anything. 

And people weren't piling on the whole "my face is tired" because it was some 'alien' form of speech, it was because of the whole facial animation hissy fit everyone was collectively throwing and that said line only brought direct attention to the object of their dissatisfaction. Like-wise, all the "un-relatable" companion complaints I have seen has been more about "why isn't X this sexual orientation?"  than anything else. If we had gotten a squad mate that was as actually 'alien' as opposed to a human in a rubber mask, I highly doubt anyone would be complaining about it. After all there wasn't some massive uproar around Legion and how "un-relatable" it was. Indeed, maybe if we could get more companions and aliens more designed around exploring a science fiction concept rather than being a dating/romance bot, then people wouldn't be all over the place calling for stuff like #makeJaalBi 

Would ME3 be different is Chris was still working at Bioware? Don't know. If he was there, would the ending be different? Probably not.

How different would the trilogy be if all writers remained for all 3 games? Don't know.

Even so, I feel that BioWare could use more of that non-human approach with their narratives and companions; and just writing in general. Legion may have been "retreading old ground", but at least it was a nice breath of fresh air compared to the rest of the 'SS Daddy Issues' crew. Plus it was nice to see a robotic intelligence that didn't have any desire to become just like us, nor was it some "destroy all humans" murderbot; which, prior trope or not, is practically nonexistent in mainstream science fiction. 

Or maybe BioWare could have gone with something similar to the Rachni, in terms of writing. Humanoid animation constraints aside, it was rather… lazy that the Angarans in Andromeda are more or less identical to us outside of appearances. There's what, ten to fifteen seconds of confusion at encountering an alien species, and then all that is cleared up via translators and we are left with a species of British/Aussie accented humans in rubber suits; who are instantly identifiable and relatable. Again, something like the Rachni might have not been the most original idea out there, but at least it made you think. It directly presented the player with the notion that no, not everything in the universe revolves around what we are familiar with, and it took us out of our comfort zones to try and understand and communicate with it.

Sorry if there was any confusion in my previous post, but I wasn't talking about the Angarans' appearance, nor was I asking for them to be more insectoid like the Rachni. I was speaking about their writing.

Even if we excluding the outward appearance of the Rachni Queen, she still has to be one of the more 'alien' aliens we encounter based solely on her manner of speech, and how the writing portrayed the Rachni's perspective on things. The Angarans are humans in rubber suits. Their writing doesn't go out of it's way in order to cast them as a distinctly alien species; we could literally replace Jaal and the Angarans with humans and nothing about their narrative, or the structure of their culture would change. It's a flat and lazy mirror to us and our culture, and while the game is based on the notion of human centricity, it still feels like a copout to have an alien species, one that evolved over 2.5 million light years away from us, be practically identical in all ways except appearance.

Which goes back to what I mentioned earlier in this thread. 

Maybe if BioWare wasn't so concerned with #PrettyGoodBaning and appealing to every small, abstract niche of humanity we could actually get some 'alien' aliens out of their games. And it's true, the Rachni wasn't completely divorced from human comprehension, but they were certainly different enough to warrant the non-human descriptor; same with the Hanar and Elcor (ME 1).