[Firesteel]

The main difference is that the Shivans and Reapers are the primary antagonists as a whole and the amount of interaction with the Reapers is fairly minimal for such an important antagonists. In ME1 it was alright since Sovereign was the only Reaper, though the battle against it was pretty anticlimactic. Once ME2 rolls around, you have nearly no interaction with the Reapers and even the derelict Reaper is a missed opportunity to show off how powerful and unknowable a Reaper could be. It was just a bunch of mobs in hallways at the end of the day, all of which we'd seen before. I'd have loved at least some moving geometry in the Reaper to make it feel more alive. The problem with ME3 is that it's supposed to be a war against the Reapers, but their presence isn't maximized as it should have been.

In both FS games, our interactions with the flagship(s) isn't huge either, we are fighting and losing to the Shivans for about 2/3 of the campaigns and the effect they had on the world is felt even when they aren't directly involved. The main point is, the Shivans, even when their flagship isn't around are still treated as important while up until the Reaper capital ships are landing on planets, no one in the ME world except a few, take it at all seriously, which a major part of the story, though I never felt it was handled gracefully.

[Luis Dias]

All those points are absolutely true, I was just pointing out that Mass Effect did indeed try to engage with the main antagonists gameplay-wise, and that further ideas that were never implemented could absolutely be designed. So Battuta's sentence "superantagonists who couldn't be represented in gameplay" isn't really true.

[General Battuta]

It is, though. ME is a game about fighting bipedal animation rigs in basically two dimensional cover mazes. Anything else that occurs is special-cased, not a system. They could've made Shadow of the Reaper but they didn't.

The Harbinger/reaper infantry solutions in 2 and 3 were solid, though.

[General Battuta]

Though I guess I agree that there are hypothetical Mass Effects in which Reapers could be gameplay entities.

[Luis Dias]

I wish they do that in 4. Ah. I was about to say retcon the hell out of the reapers but it would be funnier to have a Rogue reaper that followed this expedition to Andromeda and started his own agenda on his own.

That game will have so many answers to give it's not funny. They will be absolutely ignored.

[Kestrellius]

I just want to see a ME space sim. Of course, that would bring up questions of its own, like why the engagements portrayed in cutscenes are somewhat different from how things are described in the Codex. Although I have my own theories on that; all the battles we see are battles over something. There's a stationary object involved -- a planet, a station... As such, the ships aren't just going to leave, so the battles get a lot denser and you actually have things in visual range.

[General Battuta]

The codex was written by Chris L'etoile and he probably didn't have the political influence required to get any animators or designers to listen to him (especially after he left the company).

[Valrog]

I get that the feeling the writers didn't have the whole high-level story planned out and were making it up as they went along, one game at a time. So, we cannot infer what the Shivans were supposed to be, or what their motivations were, from the information in the games since the creators would not be able to answer these questions.

As a player, though, I felt that in the Freespace Universe there would probably be a very large number of species much more powerful than the Shivans controlling different galaxies. If the Shivans were only just a bit more advanced technologically than the Terrans or Vasudans, then it would not be likely that they controlled all the galaxies in the universe. They're more likely just the dominant species in our galaxy and a few others.

As for their nature, I get the feeling that the Shivan beings were creations, either by another race or they evolved/engineered themselves into 2 subspecies - one fully sentient and the other semi-sentient. The Shivans we interact with would be the semi-sentient ones, as they display some characteristics of machines and some characteristics of lower animals.

Regarding their motivations, I feel that the Shivan fully-sentient higher-order beings were not reacting to us at all, but were going about their own business. Their blowing up the Capella star was to create a jump node for their own expansion. The semi-sentient lower-order Shivans were probably reacting to us territorially, like animals or insects defending their space. They considered our stars to be their territory and did not consider it occupied, as we were not causing enough space-time disturbance to get noticed.

[Vrets]

I get that the feeling the writers didn't have the whole high-level story planned out and were making it up as they went along, one game at a time. So, we cannot infer what the Shivans were supposed to be, or what their motivations were, from the information in the games since the creators would not be able to answer these questions.

This is almost certainly the case, but nonetheless I summarily invite "authorial intent" to go take a walk in a minefield. I really don't care.

There was a recent (unsatisfying but well-intended) interview with the head writer of Fs2, whose responses are a representative example of why interpretation and speculation should not be bound by authorial intent.

Regarding their motivations, I feel that the Shivan fully-sentient higher-order beings were not reacting to us at all, but were going about their own business. Their blowing up the Capella star was to create a jump node for their own expansion. The semi-sentient lower-order Shivans were probably reacting to us territorially, like animals or insects defending their space. They considered our stars to be their territory and did not consider it occupied, as we were not causing enough space-time disturbance to get noticed.

Wow, I really like this theory. The lower-order Shivans (strikecraft, cruisers, corvettes, destroyers) attacked convoys and fought the GTVA for the Vega and Epsilon Pegasi jump nodes. Meanwhile, the higher-order Shivans (juggernauts) quietly went about their mysterious star-killing business for the most part. Remember that one Juggernaut did take a five-minute break to help out the lower-order Shivans at the Gamma Draconis node.

[Valrog]

Wow, I really like this theory. The lower-order Shivans (strikecraft, cruisers, corvettes, destroyers) attacked convoys and fought the GTVA for the Vega and Epsilon Pegasi jump nodes. Meanwhile, the higher-order Shivans (juggernauts) quietly went about their mysterious star-killing business for the most part. Remember that one Juggernaut did take a five-minute break to help out the lower-order Shivans at the Gamma Draconis node.

That's also a good way to look at it, but my thought was that even the Shivans in the Sathanas were semi-sentient and we never got to interact with the fully sentient high-order Shivans who were controlling them. Examples of instinctive semi-sentient behavior from the Sathanas included attacking the Colossus after its beam cannons were destroyed, sacrificing themselves to destroy the Capella star and not attempting to communicate.

We only see the fully sentient higher-order Shivans indirectly. For e.g., they receive the transmission from the captured Shivan cruiser and send the lower-order Shivans in the Lucifer. They receive the transmission from Bosch and send lower-order beings to pick him up, who then instinctively slaughter all the other humans on board, as they didn't have instructions on what to do with the others. Finally, they send instructions to the Shivan Juggernaught fleet to blow up the Capella star, sacrificing some juggernaughts in the process. All these communications were relayed through the Shivan comm nodes that we see at the end of Freespace 2. Perhaps the Lucifer and the Sathanas classes also acted as comm nodes on a smaller scale.

[General Battuta]

There's nothing about the Shivan tech levels we see that necessarily rules out them being the dominant form of life in the universe. But it'd be cool to see their competition too.

[Kestrellius]

The fact that they can be killed at all kind of does. This is sort of a weird thing with the Shivans; they seem to be thought of as somehow godlike, but...they're kind of just not. I mean, I recall in the Shivan Manifesto (which I don't think is all that popular around here, and I can understand why, but nonetheless) it talks about how the Shivans are already so powerful that the idea of another species even more powerful is unthinkable from a story perspective, and that's nonsense. The Shivans aren't much more advanced than the GTVA. There are just a lot of them.

Then again, numbers without advancement can work for dominance. I mean, for all our technology, bacteria are still the dominant lifeform here on Earth.

[Vrets]

The Shivans aren't much more advanced than the GTVA.

Let's not get too carried away, though. The Shivans, and only the Shivans, possess shielded super-destroyers and star destroying super weapons.

They blew up a solar system. When you're on the receiving end of something like that, it just makes you want to throw up your hands and get out of the intergalactic community game.

[Mongoose]

Also, just because the Shivan tech we interact with on the per-mission level is (relatively) comparable to Terrans/Vasudans doesn't mean that it represents the highest level of Shivan advancement.  A few campaigns (including BP I think?) have explored the concept of the Shivans tailoring their response to the tech level of their opponents.

[General Battuta]

The fact that they can be killed at all kind of does.

It doesn't in any way. Your conception of godlike is too narrow. (As always, I'm advocating a range of possible choices, not one over others.)

A cell in a person doesn't have much advantage over a cell in a fish, for instance.

[Valrog]

The Shivans aren't much more advanced than the GTVA.

Let's not get too carried away, though. The Shivans, and only the Shivans, possess shielded super-destroyers and star destroying super weapons.
They blew up a solar system. When you're on the receiving end of something like that, it just makes you want to throw up your hands and get out of the intergalactic community game.

The rogue GTI were working on a Shielded Super-Destroyer just a few years after it was seen. Not a few billion years later, but a few years. The player stops them before it is completed.

And, from the video cutscene, turning a star supernova seemed to be just a bit more advanced than warping into subspace... it seemed like a way to allow the fusion explosions at the center of the star to escape the gravitational force, resulting in the supernova, using the same warp tech.

The real might of the Shivans was in their enormous economy, established over thousands of years, evidenced by their possession of a fleet of Juggernaughts (the Colossus, in comparison took the Terrans and the Vasudans 20 years to build).

We didn't see any technology so advanced as to suggest that the Shivans were millions/billions of years more advanced than we were, which would be the case if their empire spanned billions of light years across the universe.

[Luis Dias]

You're assuming we did get more than just a tiny glimpse of their magnitude. The second incursion could have been merely a second-rate shivan contractor building a highway with some 80 space excavators that apparently got some small trouble with local wildlife.

[Mongoose]

Ah, the Vogon Theory!

[Luis Dias]

No one survives shivan poetry.

[Vrets]

We didn't see any technology so advanced as to suggest that the Shivans were millions/billions of years more advanced than we were, which would be the case if their empire spanned billions of light years across the universe.

Not necessarily. If the universe is full of little GTVAs, then the Shivans could expand and expand like a gas filling an infinitely expanding container.