Mass Effect 3
- Thread starter PsychoPere
- Start date
As I understand it, it's generally not down to governments to deal directly with disciplining military officers, it's down to the military and it's courts.
Plus, as we saw in the game, Vancouver wasn't necessarily *the* headquarters for the Alliance military, but one of several important facilities as there's also mention made of the UK based headquarters. The facility in Vancouver could just have been where Hackett sent the Normandy for refit and intentionally made sure Shepard was imprisoned nearby.
As for Arcturus Station; for starters, in ME3 you can actually go to the system for the first time in the series and even scan the wreckage left over after the reapers blew the station to pieces. You can even talk to Udina about the loss of the Alliance Parliament (including the Prime Minister) as a result of Arcturus's destruction. I'd hardly call that being swept under the carpet.
Sure, it may have made a little more sense if the prologue took place on Arcturus...but they started ME2 with you escaping from a burning ship and waking up in a space station. Starting ME3 with you escaping a burning space station might have been a little too similar.
Plus of course you needed to establish *some* connection with Earth, get a sense of the scale of the invasion, see the plight of the civilians (through the kid) and the comrades you leave behind (Anderson.) It also allows for the mission to Mars which is something I'd wanted to see since reading the codex entry in the first game.
There were many things wrong with Mass Effect 3 - the biggest one of them being that the writers chose to abandon the storyline set out by the lead architect of this series. Another thing wrong - and which ties into an issue raised above - the writers chose to have the Reapers focus their attack on a single planet, when I, the player, know from playing ME and having been told the tragedy of the fall of the Prothean Empire from several sources that the capture of the Citadel was a cornerstone of Reaper strategy and tactics.
Indeed. And yet when we went to Thessia - and spent more time there than on Earth - we didn't see a single non-asari except the Reaper and Cerberus attackers. But I don't see anybody calling Thessia an "asari-only" planet.
Courts martial don't have to meet in Washington, DC or London or Paris. Presumably the Alliance base in Vancouver was a good facility to meet the needs of Shepard's trial; we know that the Alliance conducts training in Rio de Janeiro so there's precedent for operating on (but not ruling) Earth. And hey, it could even be Hackett playing it safe and explicitly not wanting Shepard at Arcturus Station in case of the decapitation strike we saw from the Reapers - not putting all the eggs in one basket, as it were.
Was Shepard's commission ever reactivated after her death? I know you could regain SpecTRe status, but I don't recall being given your rank back in ME2.
If it wasn't, arguably she should have been tried in civilian courts for any post-Lazarus actions, not military.
As I understand it, it's generally not down to governments to deal directly with disciplining military officers, it's down to the military and it's courts.
Plus, as we saw in the game, Vancouver wasn't necessarily *the* headquarters for the Alliance military, but one of several important facilities as there's also mention made of the UK based headquarters. The facility in Vancouver could just have been where Hackett sent the Normandy for refit and intentionally made sure Shepard was imprisoned nearby.
[/quote]
Plus Sol is where the Mars Archive is, so it makes sense for the Alliance to have bases next door to probably one of the few remaining (if not the only remaining) intact Prothean installations in existence.
Plus its easier to get to the archive which starts the search for building the Crucible from Earth, and seeing as Lair of the Shadow Broker hinted at the Protheans having one last ace in the hole to use against the Reapers it makes sense that they would have information on it at the one Prothean place mentioned in the game series.
Yeah I'm not to broken up about the Reapers are really the good guys who heroically slaughter organic civilizations to solve the dark matter problem which they have been contributing to by having civilizations make use of the technology that causes the problem storyline, or that the big choice at the end is let billions die in the hope the Reapers will suddenly figure out a problem thats eluded them for eons or try to figure it out after only just becoming aware of the problem with a definite solution and salvation of the galaxy and all life in it being left unresolved.
They have to actually GET to the Citadel and its probably not a good idea to tie up all of their forces attacking one point since they don't exactly have to element of surprise anymore. Besides they didn't just attack one planet, they started in Batarian space then moved on to the Alliance, then hit Palaven, and latter hit Thesia, before taking the Citadel when they found out it was part of a super weapons that could kill them and thus important again.
The Asari also have Illium, a world recognized as an Asari world that features a boat load of other species who are shown to be alongside their Asari family. Not much on the human side since the only alien we ever see on a human colony is Veetor who was only there to help.
...You're giving ME3 way too much credit. Admiral Hackett, while voiced by the awesome Lance Henrickson, doesn't know his a%# from a dry ice mine. He says he stakes his life on Shepard's warnings that the Reapers are coming and his idea of getting ready for it.... is to leave a sizable fleet, Anderson and Shepard at Earth and hope for the best. And when the Crucible comes into play, he continually states that he doesn't know what it does or what the catalyst is, yet he also openly states the Crucible is the only means of defeating the Reapers and somehow knows when it's "ready". His reasoning for using a weapon which he has no idea what it will do?
Hackett: Two centuries ago, scientists faced the same problem in the Second World War. They weren't sure what the atomic bomb might do. Some thought it could even ignite Earth's atmosphere, but they did it anyway.
That is wrong. The scientists did know that the Atomic Bomb would not ignite the atmosphere because they found a glaring error when it came to the actual research. The man who came up with the atmosphere stuff, Edward Teller, forgot to factor in HEAT LOSS in his original report. If you were to not factor in heat loss when researching a simple match, you would conclude that the match would never lose it's flame. So once they factored in heat loss, they concluded that there was in fact no danger to the planet's atmosphere and even went on saying that they would rather allow the Nazis to conquer the world even if there was a low chance of the Earth being destroyed when using an atomic bomb. Well, there wasn't a chance at all of that happening which is why it went ahead.
Yeah, Admiral Hackett is a real thinker.
Why didn't they just attack the Citadel from the start? Their entire cycle by cycle plan has always been to arrive at the Citadel, kill everyone on it, extract all the data on the whereabouts of all the species who have used it and control the Mass Relays. Everything from leaders of multiple species to the information regarding their strengths and weaknesses are all still there in Mass Effect 3. Heck, it's the place where everyone is going, yet they don't attack it 'until' they figure out that the Crucible is part of a larger weapon.... which they should have known all along.
Shep is consistently referred to - including by Admiral Hackett - as Commander Shepard throughout ME2, not Mr/Ms Shepard. Plus there's that email with some Alliance brass wanting to arrest Shep as a possible traitor to the Alliance (something along those lines, or maybe for questioning) and Hackett responds with a flat "Request Denied." Obviously the Alliance military still considered Shep to be under their authority.
So are you saying Thessia is really an asari-only world, but its okay because Ilium is shown to be more diverse? Or bemoaning the fact that the only human colonies we see aren't as diverse as Ilium - despite the fact that all the human colonies we spend time on are nowhere near Ilium's riches and influence (akin to comparing New York City with Fargo, North Dakota)? The point remains that what we see of Earth and what we see of Thessia are equally non-diverse, so you can either draw conclusions, or assume that the particular settings we saw were the reason for it.
What else would you have Hackett - a military admiral, not a scientist - do than command the fleets and encourage the research into the Prothean Archive on Mars (remember - it was his idea to divert Shepard there and Hackett who was pushing Liara to help out)?
The Crucible is obviously a desperation weapon - notice that Liara and Shepard and Anderson and... well, everybody else never does more than speculate about whether this is a good idea. The comparison to nuclear bombs was obviously a metaphor; so it's not a perfect metaphor, maybe he just doesn't know the exact details of the Manhattan Project. Not the biggest deal, I'm sure there's high-ranking military commanders that couldn't tell you the exact details of it even today - and might even have that same mistaken story. The point is, the metaphor works - Hackett will risk a weapon with unknown consequences to stop the Reapers. I don't see how this makes "Don't put Shepard in the same place as the nerve center of the Alliance" any more unlikely of a thought process.
I must admit I know naff-all about military law, but I'm pretty sure if a soldier turns up alive after being declared missing, presumed KIA, they're not magically considered to be civilians. Even if that weren't the case, why would Parliament be a good place to hold a civil trial? Most likely they'd be sent to a civil court, which tend to be where a lot of people are. So it's either Earth, or one of the major colonies.
Yeah, if the really was the original plan (though to be fair I've yet so see a credible source for it) then they were right to ditch it. It's way too esoteric and makes no sense. In that scenario, all the reapers had to do was mine out all the eezo every few hundred million years so the younger races couldn't get to it and not build the relay network. You don't need to juice a whole species just to do that.
While the execution of the ending leaves a lot to be desired, and the function of the crucible is hilariously nonsensical, I've never had a problem with the basic premise.
Yeah, I don't know what game throwback was playing but I was running into the reapers all over the sodding galaxy. If they'd all have been sitting on chomping on human paste, then the game would have been much shorter!
As for why they waited to long to hit the Citadel, I think it's pretty obvious, no? Usually what they do is use it's function as a giant mass relay to jump their entire fleet in at once. With the element of surprise and the benefit of being at the hub of the network they're able to decapitate any galactic leadership and deploy their ships quickly to almost anywhere in the galaxy. Even so, it took them *centuries* to finally finish off the Prothean Empire.
This time around things are different. The Protheans from Ilos sabotaged the keepers so the relay function could no longer be activated remotely, forcing Sovereign to eventually make a desperate move and try to switch it on manually. When it failed, any chance of a surprise attack was lost and the citadel lost most of it's tactical value.
Remember, that no matter what, the Reapers know that on mass, they can steam-roll anything the younger races throw at them. They're less concerned with defeat than they are with efficiency. Also remember that in this cycle, at the 11th hour they switched their focus from the council races to humanity as their favourite choice for reaper dreadnought-hood (one assumes the Asari or Turians had previously been the prime candidates.) So going pretty much straight for the largest concentration of humans in the galaxy makes perfect sense, since that's really all they're after. As they see it, eliminating the rest of the galaxy's population is just a clean-up exercise. The work of a few mere centuries. They always planned to get around to the citadel eventually, and fix whatever the Protheans broke so the next cycle goes more smoothly, but it's not an immediate priority.
Also keep in mind that the collective reaper intelligence is not omniscient. It didn't know the crucible plans had survived into this cycle, nor did it know that the citadel itself were a part of them. At least not until TIM cracked the security of that Prothean VI and then they knew everything he did and acted accordingly.
IIRC there was an Salarian trader on Feros too. More pertinently, I think the planet descriptions of some of the Asari mention dominant populations of bond-mate species.
Ah, yes. It's the "Humanity is special" trope completely made up just to put even more emphasis on Earth and humanity that still doesn't make any sense. If humanity is so uber special that Reapers can create a super incredible reaper (which can be destroyed by three people in it's early stages), why do humans make the worst Husks?
Also, if the Reapers want to use us for making more Reapers, why are they killing us by the millions instead of developing methods to incapacitate us like they did with the Collectors? Are you honestly implying that just because Mordin developed a counter measure against the seeker swarms that the Reapers decided to give up on the whole thing entirely instead of making more powerful seeker swarms? Why do the Reapers use dead corpses? Don't our bodies rot and decompose after we die? At least the collectors thought of that when they took us unconscious.
TBF, Drew himself has said on many occasions that they never had the dark energy storyline nailed down. It was one of a number of endings that they were considering. It was dropped late in the development cycle for ME2, only it was too late to take out the references to it.
Even had they gone down the DE route then you'd still likely have had similar problems. You would have faced the moral quandary, and you'd have had someone like Starbrat giving you the choice.
Unfortunately the DE plot was never fully fleshed out, hence we'll never know whether or not it would actually have been any better than what we got.
At least it would have tied in with the previous games rather than rely on elements created solely for Mass Effect 3.
You can argue about tropes all you like, but in fairness, it was a human fleet that took down Sovereign and a human leading a mixed race crew that hounded Saren at every turn. This didn't come out of nowhere. Plus, it wasn't that humans were "special", it's that they're the most adaptable and suited to reaper needs in this cycle. Hell, we don't even know for a fact that the Protheans were the ones turned into a dreadnought at the end of the last cycle. For all we know they ended up as a destroyer or just what we saw of the collectors while one of their former subject races were singled out.
As for the processing: I don't think it's the bodies so much as the raw genetic bio-mass. The recently dead a probably just as viable a resource as the soon to be dead. As for their methods; they're in it to process BILLIONS. What's a few million killed or converted to husks here and there? Seeker swarms are probably OK for taking colonies and small settlements, but a planet of 11+ billion is probably way too much to handle all at once. They'd have to isolate large groups and swarm them one settlement at a time. Very inefficient.
Keep in mind that it's said that the once on Earth, reapers didn't spend the whole time walking about shooting at the ground. They quickly went about indoctrinating world leaders, rounding up as many civilians as possible into prison camps and started feeding them into the processor ships.
Also, as I said they plan on this lasting centuries. Javik was born long after the extermination of his people began. Doubtless had things proceeded as expected, there would be more humans born as time went on, though of course with decreasing returns.
Nonsense. Shepard wasn't the only person leading a force of aliens to fight against Saren. What about Captain Kirrahe? He lead the assault on Saren's base of operations on Virmire and WON. If it wasn't for Kirrahe and his leadership skills, Saren would still have his base of operations on Virmire.
And you can't really discount the Asari and Turian fleets that played a part in the Citadel battle either. The human fleet didn't have a "special" ability that the other species lacked that caused them to win the battle. All they did was just bring in a good number of ships and destroy sovereign. The Turians and the Quarians have a much bigger fleet than the humans.
And Shepard isn't a hero because she is human. She's just a human who just happened to be the hero. Any member of any race could have made contact with the Prothean Beacon and work towards the same conclusions that Shepard made. We know for a fact that the Beacon also works on Turians and Asari and both are very capable and intelligent races. Heck, it took an Asari just to make heads or tails on what the darn Beacon actually meant.
Kirrahe only wins with Shepard's assistance. Indeed, he only survives at all based on whether or not Shepard intervenes during the mission. That's a fact. If he and his men could have gone and done it themselves, they would have. STG aren't known for being a timid bunch. As it turned out, the Salarians acted as a distraction so Shepard could lead shadow team in the back door, knock out the AA guns and secure the bomb for detonation. Plus of course Shepard was the one that found the Virmire beacon and spoke directly with Sovereign. I doubt it was even aware of Kirrahe's existence.
As for the Asari and Turians, all they did at the battle of the Citadel was get their superior arses kicked up one side and down the other. It was the arrival of the human fleet that turned the tide and engage Sovereign directly after Shepard and her squad either Saren into breaking free of their control and committing suicide/beat him in a stand up fight then opened the arms to let the fleet in. Then of course Shepard and her team took down Sovereign's avatar, causing some weird feedback (still not sure that that works) that disabled the reaper long enough for Normandy and the fleet to deliver the killing blow.
Of course it's all irrelevant since these military victories aren't what proved or disproved humanity's "worthiness" to be turned into meat paste (a dubious honour at best), it was merely what caught the reapers' attention. The next two years spend abducting humans and testing the human genome's potential for mutation is what made them a "viable possibility." Indeed, based on what Harbinger says, if the Krogan had not been sterilized, they might have been their prime candidates. Likewise, had the Quarians not had their immune system trashed, they might have been selected.
Again I say though, humans aren't "special", they're just well suited to the reapers' purposes. We can't even be sure exactly what the catalyst's criteria for preservation is. Either way, it's a subjective thing, it dose not confer some inherent worth above and beyond all others. If you need to put a nail inside a piece of wood, the best tool for the job is a hammer. That doesn't make the screwdriver a fundamentally inferior tool, yes?
Last edited:
So why didn't the Reapers develop a cure for the Krogan? I mean, they had the ability to mutate the Protheans into the Collectors and turn human paste into a Reaper, why not cure the genophage and resort to the Krogans? Of Mordin and his one time assistant could work up a cure for it, why can't the Reapers?
So you're writing off Kirrahe's role as unimportant because Sovereign probably wasn't even aware of his presence? That's like saying stealth tactics are useless because the enemy can't see you coming. For a Reaper not to be aware of what is attacking him is a pretty big freaking deal.
I figured it was that humans were still genetically diverse where as the rest of the galaxy was homogeneous by this point, so they had enough necessary diversity to make Soverign grade meat paste.
No he's writing off Kirrahe's role as unimportant becuase without Shepard he and his team would have either been smoking piles of ash, indoctrinated minions, or rotting corpses.
They probably could have if they cared to. They did not. They look at what's there, and pick out the "best." They don't go around "fixing" races, as that rather defeats the purpose.
As Hartzilla2007 points out, as usual, you've totally missed the point.
Pretty much my view, yeah. Still I think there's more to it than just genetics. Reapers would have been aware of humanity in general since at least the Prothean cycle, and as a space faring race since the First Contact war. It took their rise to galactic prominence in the wake of the attack on Eden Prime to really catch their interest.
You have to wonder though, who they were planning on liquidising before they settled on humanity. I mean, Sovereign wouldn't have tried to open the citadel relay to dark space unless they had a prime candidate. Yet from what Harbinger says the council races were all discarded as unsuitable. The Vorcha certainly had an adaptive genome, but I can't see their intelligence being sufficient for heir needs. The Batarians maybe?
Is intelligence even a factor anymore, now that the dark matter plotline has been dropped? I thought the Starchild just needed someone to make the choice between the three fates, regardless of their genetics...