[General Battuta]

All I mean with my john luke packard is that I don't want this thread degenerating into a dumb quotestack argument about a cheesy space opera universe.

[Luis Dias]

Hell forbid people having fun debating cheesy space opera lore...

Ok ok I get it, you don't like this stuff. I'll just sulk here in the corner arguing with myself here.

[The E]

The problem, Luis, is that this thread has generated enough vitriol already. Adding to it does not make it better. I am just a tiny bit twitchy when discussions between people known for their, ahem, enthusiastic debating style flare up in here.

[TrashMan]

Overacting a bit E?
I've seen a LOT of heated discussions, many of those ME related, and this doesn't even register on my radar.

[T-LoW]

I know I'm maybe late to the party but here is some additional neat information http://www.geekosystem.com/mass-effect-3-ending-changes/

[phatosealpha]

Does a reaper ever actually acknowledge that we killed a reaper?

Thing is, the suckers clearly have essentially infinite distance instant communication (harbinger assuming control from deep space), and they're software (legion says there were 37 processes on Sovereign.)  The ships all look very similar, and nothing like the proto-reaper from ME2.  It seems possible that the ships are just hardware - expensive maybe, but something they can jump off of if they get eaten by a giant worm.

If the loses are a couple of servers, and not a couple of civilizations, then our successes don't necessarily mean the cycle is self defeating - they just need to build new hardware.

[Meneldil]

The reapers were always designed as having an ulterior "good" goal. Drew's first idea was to have it somewhat related with dark energy. And they are not incoherent at all.

Were they? I heard about that dark energy idea, but I've no idea whether it was necessarily a "good goal" or purely a matter of self-preservation.
If their purpose was good from the beggining, then they simply ****ed it up from the beginning, because throughout the game they are constantly portrayed as malevolent pricks.

We had to kill organic life to save it.

Nope, not incoherent.

"We kill some organics to prevent the possible extermination of all organics" is less catchy, but more true. And in fact, it wouldn't be incoherent at all if it weren't for the simple fact that it's stupid, while the creators of the Reapers should supposedly be smart.

But whatever. I understand how irritating can beating the dead horse be to all the been-there-done-that people here, and admittedly it doesn't serve a purpose other than to vent one's frustration so perhaps it is better not to pursue it further.

So, on a brighter note, I did enjoy the game, and although I was never a big fan of Mass Effect, I must say that it felt nice to play ME3 (and ME2 before it, because I lost the saves, and the default profile was horrible). Those characters do grow on you. Especially since Mordin, Legion and Wrex had important roles in the sequel, while, say, Miranda, Jacob or Ashley did not
Also, I played the Adept, and what they've done with that class in ME3 is a vast improvement over ME2.

[Luis Dias]

Sorry not going to reply to you Meneldil. Seems I have a "history" of being too "enthusiastic" for the mods taste. Whatever.

[MatthTheGeek]

He see The E moderatin', he hatin'

[Mongoose]

As yet another in my series of why-am-I-posting-about-a-game-I-haven't-played posts, here's a fun blog entry that supposes what this whole ending would have looked like if it was transported into Lord of the Rings.

[Beskargam]

So I am listening to the ost and the music is much different than mass effect 2. and mass effect 1. what do you guys think about it?

I get that it changed and that reflects the mood change between 2 and 3. it slower and sadder

[TrashMan]

Don't forget ppl, "reaping" isn't killing. At least not to repaers. They don't see it as a bad thing.

Being reborn in reaper form is the continuation of existance, not death (as they see it). So it's not stupid in that regard.

[Meneldil]

It's a (perverted) continuation of the species' existence, its member are still very much dead.

The Reapers would work great as a race of superior beings whose primary in-game purpose is to procreate through xenocide. As someone's solution however, they fail miserably, because there's no way to see them as an intelligent and coherent solution.
Unfortunately, it seems the developers felt that having yet another plot centered around a xenocidal race wouldn't be deep and innovative, so they tried to make them into something more profound. A terrible mistake. Because yes, it'd be neither deep, nor particularly innovative, but it would be good enough. And I don't want to sound defeatistic, but sticking to "good enough" often is the right choice when you can't do better.

[newman]

I'm just wondering for who are the reaped civilizations "stored"? Who will ever access that data? It's like cut-pasting someone's vital data on an external drive, sending to to the North Pole never to be found again, and saying "don't worry it's been stored".

What is a civilization after reaping? A giant space crab sitting in dark space for 50,000 years waiting to one-up someone else one day.

Also, if the star child was so dedicated to preserving all those civilizations, why give Shepard a chance to destroy all reapers? By doing so he presumably did worse genocide than allowing the cycle to continue normally. It's just a bunch of hogwash trying to be deep and failing.

[General Battuta]

In my head civilizations live on inside a Reaper in a simulated state.

[LordPomposity]

Shades of grey is rapidly surpassing black and white as the hallmark of ****ty, lazy, hack writing these days.

[MatthTheGeek]

In my head civilizations live on inside a Reaper in a simulated state.

Basically, each Reaper would be a Matrix ?

[General Battuta]

In my head civilizations live on inside a Reaper in a simulated state.

Basically, each Reaper would be a Matrix ?

Yeah pretty much.

Shades of grey is rapidly surpassing black and white as the hallmark of ****ty, lazy, hack writing these days.

I hope not D:

[NGTM-1R]

It seems hard to argue, though, that they weren't actually killed because we saw Kelly get rendered down at one point; presumably there's at least a few moments of discontinuity between that and her being simulated. (The fact people were being pumped into the Reaper in ME2 suggests it might be longer.)

Assuming that everyone killed is directly rendered unto their new life in Reaperhood, which also does not have to be the case. The Reapers could simply build a library from people, not preserve them directly in any particular form. Preserving the whole by destroying all the pieces isn't the soundest of approaches and is entirely possible.

[Herra Tohtori]

In my head civilizations live on inside a Reaper in a simulated state.

Well, there is at least one known example of that sort of thing in Mass Effect universe, but it's not a Reaper.