Mass Effect 2 *spoilers around pg 29/30*

[Stormwaltz]

I still don't get why Quarians have to wear suits on their own damn ships.  It makes zero sense to me.

It was purely for out-of-game reasons - ease of racial identification and art budget.

[Ironwood]

Does it bother you when we criticise your game ?

[HaemishM]

I think Ironwood's hoping for some form of Spergslosion. 

[Merusk]

I still don't get why Quarians have to wear suits on their own damn ships.  It makes zero sense to me.

It was purely for out-of-game reasons - ease of racial identification and art budget.

Which doesn't matter because now it's lore.

Just like the N-7 Legion armor decision.  Which, as you pointed out before, is rather hard to explain in a sensible fashion.

It's a good game, don't get me wrong,  but if we're playing "poke holes in the lore" there's a lot of damn holes.

[Stormwaltz]

Does it bother you when we criticise your game ?

By and large no. I do still find myself getting teeth grindy over the "Ashley's a Bible-thumping space Nazi!" nonsense.

Sometimes I get the mood to offer enlightenment, when I have some to offer.

[Ingmar]

Ha ha, nuance, we don't get that here.

[Koyasha]

I still don't get why Quarians have to wear suits on their own damn ships.  It makes zero sense to me.

It was purely for out-of-game reasons - ease of racial identification and art budget.

Which doesn't matter because now it's lore.

Just like the N-7 Legion armor decision.  Which, as you pointed out before, is rather hard to explain in a sensible fashion.

It's a good game, don't get me wrong,  but if we're playing "poke holes in the lore" there's a lot of damn holes.

I don't get it given that explanation, honestly.  Shepard is visiting the ship, it makes complete sense that they would wear their suits while an alien is on board, and then disinfect the areas the alien(s) were allowed to visit.  So there was no need to change the appearance since we would never actually get to see them out of their suits, for entirely logical reasons.

And as to the not settling, the other thing that seems like a really big issue with that is the whole population control thing.  Quarians have had their population almost completely wiped out, and instead of trying to repopulate and increase their numbers, which they can only do if they obtain more space to live in, they float around, happy to have less population as a species than most races have in a single city.

[lamaros]

Does it bother you when we criticise your game ?

By and large no. I do still find myself getting teeth grindy over the "Ashley's a Bible-thumping space Nazi!" nonsense.

Sometimes I get the mood to offer enlightenment, when I have some to offer.

The game is pretty good, and most of us realise that a lot of the stuff that is really silly comes from 'gaming' choices that have a certain logic to them, so it's not like there's a lot to get bothered by. I mean, when I first saw the migrant fleet my response was "cool". I just wish the reasoning was a bit more solid, the game world takes itself pretty seriously so I feel like I can do so as well.

There are lot of positive comments to make you happy even if you do get annoyed.  

On that point:

I am having a bit of trouble. I played ME2 first, with male Shep, and I found the voice acting fit incredibly well with the look I choose and how I played the character. Then I played ME1, but decided to play a female Shep. She then became the hero of the universe etc and I felt linked to the choices that were made there (Wrex living, Council surviving, etc). So I decided to play her through ME2.

But she doesn't fit. I don't know if it's just the voice acting (which I find very inconsistent for the female, especially when you swap back and forth frequently between paragon and renegade frequently, like I do), the face (maybe she needs to look different to fit the voice?), or that I had already formed a bond with my other play-through, but I find myself unable to relate to the story in the same way.

So now I feel that I need to go and play through ME1 with the male Shep, then play through ME2 again with his backstory fixed. But that's a big time commitment, and I'm not that OCD (I hope, I probably am...).

Which is a testament to the game, I would have to say. Despite all the silly bits it's pretty well put together.

[Ingmar]

The only problem I run into like that is on the 2nd playthrough with the same gender - my 2nd ManShep didn't look like the first, and I just found it incredibly jarring that he sounded the same.

[Sky]

The only problem I run into like that is on the 2nd playthrough with the same gender - my 2nd ManShep didn't look like the first, and I just found it incredibly jarring that he sounded the same.

Yeah, I've mentioned that one a few times. I really wanted my renegade playthrough to be a mutton-chopped black dude with attitude. Then his voice not only didn't even come from the same genre as my intention; he sounded just like my blond/blue sappy nice guy. Just couldn't do it.

If I do manage a renegade playthrough of ME2, it'll be as a femshep, out of necessity. Maybe I can go for Foxxy Shepard.

[caladein]

The only problem I run into like that is on the 2nd playthrough with the same gender - my 2nd ManShep didn't look like the first, and I just found it incredibly jarring that he sounded the same.

Yeah, I just gave up on having different faces for my characters and just move one around with the save editor.

[Ironwood]

Does it bother you when we criticise your game ?

By and large no. I do still find myself getting teeth grindy over the "Ashley's a Bible-thumping space Nazi!" nonsense.

Sometimes I get the mood to offer enlightenment, when I have some to offer.

Thus far, whenever you get talking about the game, it's mostly due to someone else not understanding the intent and offering criticism.  The insight I've got from your replies has always been most informative.

But it's interesting how the conversation comes about.

[UnSub]

How does floating around aimlessly with a (small) limited population, (almost) no friends, and (few) limited resources help them return to their homeworld any more than almost anything else they could be doing?

The alternative is to hang up their dreams, give up on something massively important to them and go cap-in-hand to someone for a world to live on.

A rough analogy would be that a bunch of squatters trick you out of your home and all you and your family have is a car to live in. If you can't find someone to help you get your home back, your best option might be to spend all your effort rebuilding your resources so that you can get a new place to live, but good luck in just letting go of your old house that you were kicked out of.

[lamaros]

Except they aren't in any position to rebuild their resources or population whilst in the fleet.

Your analogy would be accurate if instead of finding another place to live or rent whilst they made a plan to regain their home they just lived on the street and moved suburb every week, scavenging out of bins and building homes from discarded cardboard boxes. And I'm not a social worker, but I'm pretty sure that being a vagrant is not the recommended step to achieving your goals.

The fleet would make sense if they were being actively hunted and needed to be able to move at a moments notice, but not making a colony (even a temporary one) in around 300 years makes no sense otherwise.

And the Geth never left their own space before, and showed no indications of hunting them to my knowledge. So I'm still stuck with: really stupid and massive persecution complex.

[Ingmar]

People aren't always perfectly logical, neither are societies. There is an element of quarian society that thinks they SHOULD do what you think they should, you can see that in Tali's loyalty mission. They just don't have enough control to make it happen.

[UnSub]

And the Geth never left their own space before,

But is isn't the Geth's space: it's the Quarian's space that was stolen from them.

Do you apply the same strict logic tests to the Krogan or Asari? 

[lamaros]

And the Geth never left their own space before,

But is isn't the Geth's space: it's the Quarian's space that was stolen from them.

Do you apply the same strict logic tests to the Krogan or Asari?  

Sure, but 300 years is a decent stretch of time in my book. Humans can worry other species they're taking over the galaxy in only a generation or so, after all.

And across an entire species, yeah. Across individual groups, not so much. Of course, the logic test is one applied given the known elements of the species in question. I find the Krogan believable as Krogan. If their story was copied to humans or quarians I might start going, 'huh?', but it's not. Meanwhile the Quarians are a highly competent and intelligent space-fearing race which formerly numbered in the billions (iirc), who had other colonies, who now send every youth out to explore the galaxy on their own as an individual, but who otherwise all subscribe to an irrational collective policy at odds with all their stated goals.

[Koyasha]

The krogans are idiots.  Which means it makes more sense for them in the context of the story.  The quarians are supposed to be smart enough to know better.  I'm not sure what the Asari are supposed to have done to draw questioning, as far as I know they behave pretty reasonably and such.

But again, the presence of smaller groups of between a thousand to a hundred thousand on other worlds would be sufficiently reasonable to make it not wholly bizarre, and in a way it would even explain why those quarians who do want to settle don't have enough support, if many of those who want to settle left rather than sticking around to further weight it in their direction.

[Ingmar]

If they were really smart enough to know better, they probably wouldn't have created an AI servitor race in the first place.

[UnSub]

I was referring to the Asari maturity cycle of slut -> mother -> wise woman, which seems more nerd fantasy / cliche to me than viable sentient race lifestyle.

However, it's a video game, so I recognise that short cuts are made because the details really don't count.

Thinking about Stormwaltz's comment that the Quarian are like Israel, I find them more like Palestine. They've lost their home to a group they can't evict militarily, and while it might make sense for them to accept that and move on, it actually becomes more of a focus because of their inability to deal with it. Note: it isn't a perfect analogy.

Also, I don't believe it has been indicated how long Quarians live for, so 300 years may actually only be a generation or so.

[Fordel]

If they were really smart enough to know better, they probably wouldn't have created an AI servitor race in the first place.

Their mistake was trying to commit genocide against the Geth, not making the Geth.

[Lantyssa]

The krogans are idiots.  Which means it makes more sense for them in the context of the story.  The quarians are supposed to be smart enough to know better.  I'm not sure what the Asari are supposed to have done to draw questioning, as far as I know they behave pretty reasonably and such.

Quarians have grown up in the migrant fleet for many generations.  While they have the dream of resettling their homeworld, most find the fleet is what they know.

[calapine]

If they were really smart enough to know better, they probably wouldn't have created an AI servitor race in the first place.

Their mistake was trying to commit genocide against the Geth, not making the Geth.

No, the fault was creating them, or rather making them something you can't control.

It's not like they could have said "Oh...so you are sentient now? Hmm, well, you don't have to mop the floor anymore. No hard feelings, right? But pack up and leave all our planets now.... I COMMAND YOU.....please?!"

[tmp]

No, the fault was creating them, or rather making them something you can't control.

They're hardly the only ones to make such mistake. See: the krogan "uplifting" to make them tools in war with sentient bugs and then desperate attempt to put them down after they set half of galaxy on fire.

[Fordel]

No, once you realize you are dealing with a new sentient race, you treat them as equals. Actually treat them like the people they are, talk to them and shit.


Maybe the Geth like washing floors, no one knows because no one bothered to fucking ask them.

[Ingmar]

I think once they're created, something bad is inevitable. Never making them in the first place would have been far safer.

[UnSub]

It's a sci-fi trope that any AI that thinks for itself and doesn't wish to serve its organic masters unconditionally is Totally Evil And Must Be Destroyed.

[Koyasha]

They didn't intentionally create an AI servitor race.  They created what they thought were non-sentient machines, which learned on their own.  As my own supposition on the matter - any collection of programs capable of learning, once given sufficient input, will inevitably gain self-awareness.  The quarians simply thought the geth programs were too limited to be capable of doing that, but they were mistaken.

Once they realized the geth were beginning to achieve sentience, they still thought they were heading off the point where the geth as a whole would become truly sentient.  They thought it was a relatively isolated case and that the majority of them weren't near that state.  They did not realize just how many of them already were self-aware.  Given their information at the moment, I can't really fault their decision.  If they had been right, they would have stopped the problem before it began.  It would have been the optimal solution - shut them all down, wipe the software, write new, more limited programs and get the physical frames working again.

[Ironwood]

All I know is that when we met the Geth they were impaling colonists on fucking spikes.

I tend to shoot that kind of thing.

[rk47]

ah but those were retconned to be 'other geths' y'know the one who worship sovereign?

the true geths, who only appeared in mass effect 2 to justify 'legion' isn't that bloodthirsty.

[TripleDES]

I would have been playing ME3 next month, wasn't it for that fucking stupid coop multiplayer.

[Fordel]

It's a sci-fi trope that any AI that thinks for itself and doesn't wish to serve its organic masters unconditionally is Totally Evil And Must Be Destroyed.

Yes, a shitty one!

Robots are people too!

[Shrike]

Maybe the Geth like washing floors, no one knows because no one bothered to fucking ask them.

This.

That's what I took away from what was presented in the games. Hell, the first time a geth and a quarian actually sit down (figuratively) and actually talk to each other happens in ME2 on the Normandy--and that only after a browbeating from Shepard.

[tmp]

That's what I took away from what was presented in the games. Hell, the first time a geth and a quarian actually sit down (figuratively) and actually talk to each other happens in ME2 on the Normandy--and that only after a browbeating from Shepard.

I imagine the geth shooting down every ship to cross the veil into "their" territory without asking any questions might have something to do with it.

[lamaros]

I have put difficulty on easy in order to try and work out how to play ME1 and enjoy it. Impossible though. Too much blue. Too much shit combat. Too much useless inventory and equipment.

So I guess I have to figure out how these save game editors work so I can get my ME2 character fixed up right. I feel like such a sucker for giving a shit about this sort of stuff.