Aerecura
Commander
Calliope Queen
Posts: 244
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Post by Aerecura on Jul 1, 2012 7:58:08 GMT 1
So I finally managed to get this up and running, cruise around the galaxy and get enough reinforcements to obtain the synthesis ending, and replay the Cerberus base and battle for Earth missions...and lo and behold, every time I try to charge the beam, my game crashes.
OH MY SWEET LORD, Bioware.
I want to see the little krogan sproglets just like everyone else...
edit: this makes me a VERY sad panda. If anyone else has heard of PC crashing issues and how to fix them, I'd love to find out...
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Post by Clint Johnston on Jul 1, 2012 9:24:10 GMT 1
What I want to know is precisely what 100% readiness does, if anything. I got home at 2 in the morning today and wanted to play the last chunk of the Control Renegade I was finishing. I play 1 match, and my rating (which was 98) went to .... 99. That is just fucking ridiculous. I went ahead and finished without the 100%. If you lose percentage points that goddamn fast, there is no point in obtaining them.
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Post by Mr. Glow on Jul 1, 2012 9:27:11 GMT 1
What I want to know is precisely what 100% readiness does, if anything. I got home at 2 in the morning today and wanted to play the last chunk of the Control Renegade I was finishing. I play 1 match, and my rating (which was 98) went to .... 99. That is just fucking ridiculous. I went ahead and finished without the 100%. If you lose percentage points that goddamn fast, there is no point in obtaining them. Nothing.
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Post by lieden on Jul 1, 2012 12:40:49 GMT 1
Here's an article from Joystiq where the author argues that the ending is flawed from a storytelling perspective. Basically, he thinks the Extended Cut can't fix the ending, because it still draws attention to things that were, what he thinks, were never a strong or detailed part of the games. It's interesting, and I'm not sure I completely agree, but still! www.joystiq.com/2012/06/29/its-all-too-much-why-mass-effect-3s-extended-cut-ending-cant/It's interesting and he has a point. Explains pretty much accurately why I loved the Tuchanka part of ME3. But personally, I was also interested in the Reapers. I was looking forward to some kind of revelation about them. Just... something that was better handled.
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Post by jklinders on Jul 1, 2012 14:02:22 GMT 1
Singularity is not really as bad plot point, it could have been done a lot better.
I would rather have had Starbrat be the singular AI that won a long ago war between organics and synthetics. He uses the cycle to allow organics to develop tech along different paths than the AI mindset would think of. Harvest that tech every 50000 years.
Instead we get a hackneyed HAL 3000 or whatever. That really should have been left to Kubrick.
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Post by jklinders on Jul 1, 2012 14:18:53 GMT 1
I'm sticking to my opinon about children and voodoo. Higher standards, deeper plots, more of what we like. Good is good but better is better than good. The new endings are an improvement over the old but they dont fix ME3 for me. Im sure most of you saw this, but those who didn't, do check it out. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZOyeFvnhiIBioware should have saved ME3 by adopting indoctrination theory, but maybe they were afraid somone would want some royalties for it... Indoctrination theory never held any water. Way too many inconsistencies to count. I really don't feel like doing a point by point rebuttal but IMHO there are far more holes in indoc theory than in the original ending. It is mostly a wishful thinking fantasy invoked by putting too much faith in coincidences brought about by reusing assets and low textures to save time and money. I watched a lot of those videos and there would be a point brought up and I would be like "that's not right, where did they get that from?" Everyone who had one of these ideas would say something that was essentially made up to justify their version and if that was invalidated the whole thing would tumble apart. The kid was not a hallucination. He was a poorly drawn story device designed quite frankly to assert narrative control of Shepard from the player to Bioware's writers. No amount of wishful thinking can turn him into reaper indoctrination without re-writing the game. Most damning evidence possible is... the boy on Earth is real. Scroll down a morsel to see the pic.
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Post by Mister Buch on Jul 1, 2012 23:45:32 GMT 1
The idea of the boy not being real was the one part of the Indoctrination 'theory' I liked.
But regardless, I don't think that poster proves that the kid is real at all. Shepard sees that poster. Why would we assume that just because we see an object on camera, it exists outside of Shepard's perspective? During the endgame we see black wavy lines all over the place. Those are surely Shepard's perception and not actually there.
PLUS - that poster is on the Citadel - where the Catalyst lives. The most likely place for Shep to suffer a waking halluicnation.
--
I'm not saying that the Vancouver kid is definitely not real - I think it's impossible to say for sure. I'm 50/50. I'm not even sure if the game intends to be unclear about it, or just messed up... if it's a deliberate duality, it's brilliant.
But - that poster does not prove that the kid is real. If Shep hallucinated a kid, she can hallucinate a poster.
--- Also a bonus bitchy rant about the Indoctrination Theory. It drives me insane when people tell me they 'believe' in the IT. Theories do not require 'belief'. In fact they require the opposite: evidence. The Indoctrination 'theory' is more a hypothesis than a theory.
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Post by jklinders on Jul 2, 2012 0:00:34 GMT 1
We can't have it both ways.
We are either driving Shepard through narrative given us by Bioware from an outside perspective (Bioware's official position) or seeing the world through Shepard's eyes. Any mixture of both results in the very feelings of being betrayed that the fanbase went through. Bioware was always clear that Shepard was their character. We were just borrowing him.
---
In complete agreement with the misnomer of the "theory" though. Theories need evidence. Indoc is wishful thinking and no small measure of fan wank.
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Post by Mister Buch on Jul 2, 2012 0:09:27 GMT 1
Disagree. Buffoonery. There's no reason to assume that everything we see exists, in a game where at one point the player character's mind is controlled by a character known to cause hallucination in victims. And we see wavy black lines at the end, and burned trees from the dream sequences in London's city centre. Those lines and trees (almost certainly) aren't real. I don't understand what you're saying about the fanbase or this official position though. Plus - how can it be Bioware's position that we are looking at events outside of Shep's perception, when they include dream sequences? In short: why can't we have it both ways? Lots of stories surprise us by revealing that an object was imagined or only seen by the protagonist the whole time. The Sixth Sense had it both ways, so why can't Mass Effect 3? --- EDIT EDIT EDITThis set me off rambling about the Catalyst in general. I've deleted it, but if anyone's curious, here is the blog I ended up writing about it.
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Post by jklinders on Jul 2, 2012 2:34:55 GMT 1
*sigh*
the official position is that IT is bollocks. The dream sequences...well, they have been inconsistent about enough other things that this could be justified. The very structured way that Shepard behaves. Always fighting against the Reapers. Always not necessarily trusting Cerberus. TIM fans were incensed that Shepard essentially tells TIM off in both ME 2 endings. They wanted to have an option to wholeheartedly side with him. These things are Bioware taking ownership of Shepard. This is beyond argument.
The picture being a hallucination is a stretch. Especially since IT is according to Bioware never part of the equation.
It is nothing more or less than I always said and you blasted me for. PTSD. Why can't it be that simple?
As for why can't we have it both ways? It's a game not a novel. You cannot apply the same rules of writing to both. Doing so gives a crappy game, or book. See DA 2 for more details. I know you liked it Buch, but you are the minority there. That was an example of a story that would have been excellent as a book, but was piss poor as a game.
Besides. the Sixth Sense:
A) was overrated just like everything else that hack director came out with.
B) followed a consistent logic that made sense after the fact without applying wishful thinking.
Neither of these apply here.
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Post by jklinders on Jul 2, 2012 2:45:58 GMT 1
OK, I read your essay.
I get what you are driving at. But no. Just no. If the only way to stop the cycle of destruction is to implant every living thing in the galaxy at once, that is disgusting. It was probably what Bioware is driving at especially when you consider the name of the super weapon. A crucible is essentially a melting pot used in chemistry to combine elements or create new new alloys. It was always a symbolic name, now we know why. But it is a wholly unethical thing to change all life in the galaxy in this manner. Also there is nothing saying that new life could not evolve separate from this and continue the cycle again. So not only is it a horrible thing to do, but also ultimately impotent.
I'll say it again, synthesis= unintentional shudder.
Control=Shreaper taking the Catalyst's path at some distant future.
Destroy, for all it's betrayal of the geth and EDI seems to be the least morally troubling.
Edit For both our sakes let's just drop this before we risk pissing each other off. I know you like what they did, and there is no reason not to, but I cannot abide with any thought that forcibly changing all life into an abomination like what we saw in the synthesis ending as the best outcome. To me that is the true buffoonery.
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Post by Mister Buch on Jul 2, 2012 2:48:02 GMT 1
We may just be at crossed paths here: I'm not pushing the indoctrination theory here. Indoctrination or control still exists in the game - Shep wasn't shooting Anderson for the good of his health. The IT has been rubbished, but not everything associated with it. I don't see the lack of logic you talk about: I figure that the mind-controlling antagonist may have been controlling the protagonist's mind at the start as well as climax.
This idea that games cannot have clever POV techniques or twists - that's just not true. Whatever the medium, a good story is a good story. Games are fully capable of providing clever stories and using the player's POV as a tool. Look at Braid, for one. Unless I'm misunderstanding you Linders, you're doing videogames a disservice.
And I don't like Dragon Age 2. Not really. I just don't hate it, is all. It didn't have to be a novel to be good, Linders. It had to be a good game.
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Post by Mister Buch on Jul 2, 2012 2:49:44 GMT 1
About the essay, thanks for reading. But I don't disagree with you about the synthesis concept being creepy and a mis-fire for its invasiveness. It is. Absolutely.
The blog was meant to be about the character of the Catalyst and his purpose, not about the Synthesis ending. That was meant to be a small part of it. I will edit.
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Post by jklinders on Jul 2, 2012 2:55:28 GMT 1
Never played Braid.
But it sounds like Braid was set up with that logic in mind.
ME does not seem to have launched with that same premise. So farting around with POV in this way is not kosher to me. That is a perfectly relevant view especially in conjunction with the massive fan backlash that resulted from believing the fans having all the same cliff's notes the writers had. It's not that they can't do it, it's just that if you do it, the premise has to be very clearly spelled out. Then you kind of kill the surprise.
Bah!
I'm still arguing.
I'm done now I swear.
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Post by Mister Buch on Jul 2, 2012 2:57:30 GMT 1
I don't agree with that at all, but yeah we should stop. Wasn't trying to be annoying.
And I really do agree about Synthesis.
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