The BioWare and Mass Effect Thread!

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I'd say that it can't be Lovecraftian simply because the most important element of a proper Lovecraft horror story is missing: The Lovecraftian protagonist. The moment you stick in a character like Commander Shepard in front of a supposed Lovecraftian villain it ceases to be such and becomes a monster/kaiju instead. You have Cthulhu verbatim facing Aquaman, but Aquaman's presence turns it into a giant monster that's about to get its own balls punched down its throat. Generally it's quite annoying when people think Lovecraftian horror = Powerful inscrutable monsters (with tentacles).

Scale and out-of-this-world are two aspects that the misguided segment of the fandom seems obsessed with in terms of Lovecraft (hence post-nuke upgrading of the mythos), when Lovecraft's stories were often very local and sometimes even mundane compared to his more fantastical stuff. A Lovecraftian villain can perfectly be just a pack of literal manboons haunting the slopes of a backwards mountain village in the Catskills, or even just an old dude with a knife. More important elements are alienation and solitude as well as the meager limits of the protagonist. The Lovecraftian hero is simply not equipped to deal with the breach in normality, and he has nowhere and no one to turn to for help. And of course, that is a cathartic aspect directly related to the author himself, which is often very permeating in Lovecraft's stories, as those stories are just much about he himself and his own phobias and anxieties as they are about fantastical monsters.

To rework the Reapers as a Lovecraftian villain, the entire Mass Effect story would have to be rewritten around the fact. Hell, the entire game would need to be redesigned around that concept. Pretty much the only thing that wouldn't require major reworking would be the Reapers themselves, as they can get the job done when everything else is set up correctly for a Lovecraftian story.

I'm getting tired of this one. Lovecraft didn't write aliens there were actually aliens, he wrote fantasy monsters (probably involved a phobia towards deep sea organisms) and often just flat out didn't give them much detail beyond the graphic ways they want you dead. Lovecraft never set out to create actual aliens or alien cultures, just Scary Stuff (tm), and those two things wouldn't have served the stories either (considering how important the unknown factor often was). In fact, a reason why they can remain inscrutable and unknown is precisely because the Lovecraftian protagonist is not in a position to even pose questions, much less fight back, like Commander Shepard obviously is. I guess you can see the entire bullshit going on in ME3 as a desperate and misguided attempt at being Lovecraftian in all the wrong ways.

Don't even tell me things like: Project Lazarus, giant terminator filled with corpse liquid or Synthesis Ending TM aren't grimdark and hard (to comprehend) .
EDIT: Oh gawd, irony is teh hard for some users. Whatever.

So 'In the mountains of madness' and 'Whisperer in darkness' never happened? Partially also 'Shadow over Innsmouth' and 'Horror in Dunwich. When it comes to extraterrestrial things in Lovecraft's prose, hurrr durrr killing was rarely a primary goal, if even.

i was asking about that "hard sci-fi" thing you wrote, dear.

Can't be sarcasm or mistype. It... can't... be.

Well i dont like it that much too, but i must admit thay, bioware at least tried here, it havent looked like a rush job, but gosh planet exploration was bad with its copy pasted content

Still i like ME2 most, despite its retardness, it was about shepard beating the crap (in prefered renegade way) from anything that stood in his way, with less reapers and more criminal scum (yea the collectors where with the reapers but it still felt to detached, from main reapers comming theme), with not that bad characters like mordin, they resigned from ME1 environment recycling, and finally stoped pretending this game is a rpg

The game gameplay wise was ME2 on steroids, but the rest was garbage, stupid forced attempts at making things dramatic and epic in pathetic way, stupid kid dying in intro, pedo dreams, stupid piano music that was a big pointer LOOK DUDE IT WILL BE A DRAMA HERE, godawfull ending, shitty explanation of reapers, derpy music, only the closure of genophage was good

I don't think you even understood what I meant.

Bro, I'm talking about ME1, when the Reapers were just unfathomable creatures hellbent on our destruction. The retarded motivations and explanations were added in 2&3.

we have yet to see it dear esquilax

here on meltdown internet gaming drama metrics we use the full 1-10 rating scale with 1 being titles like Frozen Synapse, Divinity 2 and the old shareware title castle of the winds

No. The problem with "Lovecraftian" is that it has been used in a sense that has nothing to do with Lovecraft since forever now, including by most of the fanfic writers of the so-called "Cthulhu mythos". The most important factor of a Lovecraft story is that the villain is unfathomable - Angthoron got it right. They're not being that come up to you and tell you that you cannot comprehend them - hell they're so alien to life (and vice-versa) that they CANNOT communicate directly with humanity (and when YOU try to communicate with them, you end up insane - another essential element of Lovecraftian horror that is frequently missed), they don't even NOTICE that humanity is there. You don't stop by an anthill and tell the ants that they cannot comprehend you - you just shovel away the anthill without a second thought to clear space for your vegetable patch.

The Reapers stopped being Lovecraftian before they were even introduced - because they're introduced AS chatting with a human. I think the only game (other than Shadow of the Comet, which actually did a pretty good job) that got its Lovecraftian horror right is funnily enough QFG4, mainly because you don't really know anything about the Dark One by the end of the game - you know tons about his cult, about his worship, about the people trying to bring him back, but NOT about Avoozl itself - and this is exactly how Lovecraft stories work.

This. Lovecraftian threat is something that steps on humanity without caring or even noticing while going about its horribly alien business in an universe that is something completely and very unpleasantly different than you think it is.

You don't know and can't, even in principle, know motivations of advanced Lovecraftian aliens any more than an ant can know the motivations of humans who unwittingly did a complete exterminatus to its known universe by building a road there - at best you can get glimpses of a much bigger whole and doing convincing glimpses of something bigger than human mind can encompass is actually *hard*.

Reapers fail as a lovecraftian 'villain', and ME as lovecraftian story, because humanity is important, worse, exceptional in the universe. Their motives are also not unknowable, just derp.

The entire acapit from your post I quoted seems pretty clear and it's not like I got it outside context. So I'm intrigued what this was about.

Let's look.
'Mountains of madness': race of Great Old Ones, presented from outside and inside (literally) and stuff their left. Architecture, culture, history, technology, the look, anathomy.
'The nameless city': a short scetch of some reptilian fuckers before humanity. Architecture, religion, history, the look of corpses.
'Shadow over Innsmouth': Deep Ones and their crossbreeds. Not detailed, but it's still more than just Scary Stuff That Wants You Dead. Or maybe I'm going little too far with this one.
And so on.

Of course there was also a lot of stories including Scary Stuff and Fantasy Monsters as the main point.

It's the least thing the most of Lovecraft's stories is about. Moreover, usually it's one of those unsaid things.

So, what's the point. That he introduced more or less detailed alien races but just as shocker in one- shot novels?
(that's not true either, since some of them got an episodic roles in other stories and Lovecraft's world in general, but whatever).

yeah, obviously. so why dont you explain that hard sci-fi thing to me.

oh... you edited your post and removed it? was it because it was too ironic?
geee.... youre so smart now!

hiver seriously thinks a codexer seriously thinks ME is hard sci fi. A codexer who was dissing the game in the same post the typo/sarcasm came up. Just keep your fucking mouth shut when you can't contribute, you monkey

Neither of your examples are true aliens, much less detailed. AMoM presents a HISTORY, it doesn't present a society or culture, the Elder Things aren't presented as anything beyond a series of events that occurred ages ago. It also bears mention that (like always with Lovecraft), the anatomy is just fantastical bullshit and not truly alien (this is important, as it means they're fantasy monsters through and through).

The reptile race of the Nameless City is largely the same. They merely exist and are given a physical description (somewhat more plausible scientifically, btw, than his usual aliens) and enough backstory for the big revelation of the story: That they're still alive in the cavernous labyrinth beneath their city. None of these things can be described as true aliens precisely because they are shock n awe creations that deal purely in the superficial, which is their purpose. The history related to them is in Lovecraft's fiction a part of the horror in how it relates to us.

SOI is not detailed either, but I guess it deserves more elaboration on what I meant with Scary Stuff That Wants You Dead In Scary Ways: That the monsters of Lovecraft were not particularly complex entities in their modus operandi or motivations, the CANNOT BE UNDERSTOOD is simply slapped on top of a simpler structure. And of course, a lot of them like the Deep Ones are perfectly understandable. In fact, his more complex monsters are often human and understandable (ie, Joseph Curwen and Ephraim Waite), even if they don't have very complex motives either. And again, it's not a BAD thing to have simple motives, as the ones Lovecraft's monsters have work.

Cameo roles, to be exact, and name-dropping for connections (he also loved doing this with his friends). As far as I can remember offhand, none of his monsters appeared as a major player in more than one story. The only recurring major character I can recall is Randolph Carter.

The point is that Lovecraft's Lovecraftian monsters and aliens weren't terribly complex entities with terribly complex motives.

It bears mention that the only Lovecraft 'villain' who can claim being incomprehensible is the entity from Colour Out Of Space, which is because it was the only one of Lovecraft's monsters that was passive, absolutely non-communicating and more like an event than a being. Cthulhu, Mi-Go, Elder Things, they're all very, very comprehendable and their only claim to CANNOT BE UNDERSTOOD is because the author said so (despite making them perfectly understandable otherwise). They're very physical, action-oriented things with very comprehendable actions and motivations, and ability to communicate with, they're not inscrutable mysteries. They're inhuman, but they're not incomprehendable in any fashion. The unfathomable is the result of not having anything to go by, not the fact you wouldn't understand it or that it being so alien. None of this obviously has anything to do with the monsters' perception of us, which on the other hand does warrant the anthill metaphor, at least to a degree.

It's the same thing with claiming it's about beyond-human scale being relevant, as it's merely beyond the scale of humanity of 1920's, but more importantly the scale of the individual (the individual often being the self-insert of not a particularly strong-willed man). Post-Little Boy, Lovecraft's monsters became small fries (not many people notice the constant upgrading the Mythos goes through in order to stay "relevant"). Not to mention many of Lovecraft's stories, as I pointed out, are very localized and deal with things from the perspective of solitary individual. Innsmouth was an isolated incident that really only concerned the town and people related to it, the Deep One colony close to the surface itself was in for a nasty surprise when attention was drawn to it (blown up by a submarine). They're about the wider implications, not about the scale of threat, the challenge to perceived normalcy and man's special nature is what it's about. Similarly, the insanity aspect is highly overblown by the fandom and subsequent writers without taking at once into consideration that all the characters that do end up insane in Lovecraft are people you'd never use the description pillar of mental fortitude for (and often not equipped to deal with this shit anyway). Low Will saving throw and so on.

And of course, the majority of Lovecraft's stories didn't deal with spacegods or even giant sea monsters.

Of course, Reapers are even worse offenders in the "can totally be understood, author just says no" category because they tell you this themselves (and of course, they're introduced from the left corner). But beyond this there isn't really anything about the Reapers as a concept that couldn't be worked as a Lovecraftian story element, it's just that nothing else in ME conforms to that (as a Lovecraftian story involves a lot more than just the monster, as I've rambled on about). The Lovecraftian story requires a large set of correct ingredients, importantly a safe distance from Conan.

EDIT: tl;dr: The difference between a giant monster and a Lovecraftian monster is the presence of Conan the Barbarian.

Where are my lulz you god damn whores?

I'm a new fag/long-time lurker and a fellow Lovecraft fan. While I agree with most of your points, I'd like to point out that Lovecraft did write about some truely incomprehensible alien creatures outside his more "mainstream" works such as AtMoM and SOI etc. He described Azathoth as creating cosmic laws when randomly and aimlessly manipulating a flute. There is probably nothing more "incomprehensible" than such an entity/alien.

As for your point of the elder things, Mi-Go etc. not incomprehensible enough, Lovecraft made the point that these aliens, abeit far more advanced than humans, are only very minor creatures in the cosmic scale. The elder things feared some unknown deity beyond the mountain. Mi-Go worshipped other outerspace gods. And so on.

I guess what I'm saying is, while some creatures in Lovecraft's works are comprehensible (let's face it, any monster becomes comprehensible once one starts describing it with words), as a whole his works depict a completely incomprehensible, completely chaotic and nihilistic universe. That is what Lovecraftian horror is about. ME1 contains such theme, and is therefore a homage (abeit a shitty homage) to Lovecraft.

Nihilistic and chaotic, yes. Incomprehensible, no. Azathoth is as comprehendable just the same as any of his other spacegods, since like you said, if it can be detailed it can be understood.

In terms of nihilism and insignificance of human life, it again ties to the type of protagonist and the individual nature of Lovecraft's horror: It's more about the individual's perceived normalcy being shattered than about the larger picture.

Also, I think you misremembered/mistyped a bit about Azathoth, as he is pacified and kept dormant by flutes, not manipulating a flute. (EDIT: I guess it bears mention that Azathoth is also a subversion of godlike figures, as despite being powerful Azathoth is ignorant and imbecillic)

We need less wall of text and more lulz about ME3/Bioware!

In the poem "Fungi from Yuggoth," Lovecraft gave a description of Azathoth that seemingly contradicts his other works. There he says Azathoth clutches a flute in its paw, from which "flow the aimless waves whose chance combining gives each frail cosmos its eternal law." I guess this can be explained away by the fact that the narrator is almost always a mad man or under heavy drug-induced hallucination.

And for Azathoth being idiotic, I've always understood it as implying that the universe is ruled by chaotic/idiotic forces, and order/intelligence is merely human illusion.

Sorry for hijacking this thread. Didn't mean to spoil the fun. I came here for the lulz myself.

Doesn't look so bad really

I think ME3 might be lulzed out.

Another thing I'd want to mention about "Lovecraftian evil" is that there isn't just one brand of it. Sure, I suppose when it's referenced, it's probably meant to depict things like Cthulhu, Colour, Azathoth and other such, but as was already mentioned, there are quite a few types out there: the flat-out aliens, the lizardfolk, the Deep Ones, and, most striking to me personally, the creatures from Pickman's Model. I recall the concept of such creatures feeling quite unnerving at the time, and even now, if I re-read the story, I do feel a bit uncomfortable. And they're not giant, mythical beings, or aliens, or whatever, they just are and they just live in your caves and your sewers and your metro, and might steal your kid and replace it with theirs so their degenerate blood line continues to spread around on the surface as well.

Again, a very simple evil, it has similar motivations to something a human can understand, but it is never explicitly explained, the creatures are just observed through the paintings for the most part, with the narrator to guess at what it was he saw. It's this thing with there never being explicit information about the creatures that makes them more than just another monster - you really do not know what's in their heads, and so your reaction to them would be much more vivid as it forces your brain to fill in the gaps and think more about a story you'd have otherwise forgotten.

Contrast with Reapers, which, as Sceptic said, are introduced chatting with a human. Boom! There goes the threat right out of the window. And later on they're explained even more, and while at it, we focus not on their horrible magnificence but on a love interest's ass, or on someone's daddy issues. So you just had direct contact with an alien that's going to kill all life in the universe, and you had a psi beacon beam images of death and destruction into your head. What's more important, Reapers or your companion's memories? You know the answer to this one!

If we're to talk "Lovecraftian" concepts, then I suppose Dead Space, of recent-ish games, does actually work decently with it. You know where it came from, and what it eventually does, you know the cult around it and various theories, but you don't actually know what the hell it is the thing wants, why, who made it, etc. It just does its shit and fucks everyone over and makes zombies. Sure, it's not really anywhere near the actual Lovecraftian stuff, but certainly closer than ME series ever were.

That's the thing bro.

Anyway, if we were to rework Mass Effect as a Lovecraftian story, probably the only element we can leave untouched is Reapers as a concept and what they're planning to do. But they certainly wouldn't be introduced in the first game, hell I think a good twist would be that in the final game you learn it was all just bullshit and there never were any Reapers (or it can be left ambiguous, my personal favourite Lovecraft-based game is Sherlock Holmes: The Awakening because it masterfully works both mythologies and leaves everything uncertain, maybe there were horrifying eldritch monsters, or it might just the same have been a bunch of lunatics with delusions). Basically, here's how I'd approach the Lovecraftication of ME in five basic steps:

1) Shepard is no longer a commander, preferably not even a soldier. Both of these have too much concept-load that would take time to deconstruct Shepard as someone who is just boots on the ground instead of a heroic individual. Instead I'd suggest Shepard The Space Accountant, who ends up going on a wild goose chase all on his own and can't risk telling anyone (both out of the chance that there are actually cultists infiltrated in society, or that he'd be thrown in a loony bin before he finishes his quest). No party members, maybe a few recurring characters. If there is a waifu, Shepard's quest will slowly wreck the relationship over the course of the first and second game.

2) The story either follows only on Shepard's level, or there's a second level about the larger picture in the galaxy that exists to fuel Shepard's (and the player's) suspicions and paranoia. The story is very un-epic, next to no combat (maybe a fistfight), generally works like an adventure game with Shepard tracking down clue after another and making cross-connections between different ancient planetary cultures and artifacts through, for example, recurring symbols. From the very start, it must be made clear that this is a story about an individual's horror, and that there is no fighting back or no chance for a happy ending.

3) Suspicious news broadcasts. Things must be happening that would seem perfectly normal, but with Shepard's knowledge (or "knowledge", depending on viewpoint in this intentionally ambiguous story) take on a far more sinister aspect, ie cybernetics and nanotechnology advances become signs of an imminent wave of indoctrination. It needs to be about signs and portents, not facts. Shepard will never enter those cybernetics labs.

4) Reapers must never appear in large-scope picture or be communicated with. They must be completely absent in the first game, the second game's culmination could be Shepard, all alone and flying through deep space far from any sun's light and running out of power, moves past something so massive he cannot measure how large it is. The Reaper that floats here must not react to anything, it must just slowly move past as Shepard's meager light source illuminates sections of it and casts shadows across its vast metal surface. This is also a good spot to go for some visual horror, which I think the classical giant eye could work perfectly. The eye in question wouldn't be mechanical at all, but a massive, almost like an asteroid or a small moon, organic eye crudely punctured with pipelines of cybernetics and covered with ice. The whole thing seems dead at first, but after a few seconds of staring at this grotesque eye, the light from Shepard's ship causes the pupil to contract in reaction, breaking the ice. End game. Cue ME3. Alternatively this can be the end of ME3.

5) Shepard must never obtain solid evidence. Everything he experiences that would be direct evidence, is highly deniable and can just be a figment of his strained mind. But it must also present the possibility of a cover-up against him. A good example is the hypothetical start of ME3, Shepard recovering in a mental ward, in a Sarah Connor-like state. His ship was never found, and no one wants to venture out into deep space like that. It was through sheer luck (or was it?!) that Shepard's escape pod was discovered at the edge of Citadel Space, but all the backups of the records of his actual ship have become corrupted by cosmic radiation, leaving everything (again) on a "take my word for it" level.

PS: I agree, Bioware is absolutely horrendous at writing character flaws or romances. I always point to Valkyria Chronicles as a good example of "doing this shit right" when subject crops up.

EDIT:

Though the fact the protagonist is a bad motherfucker who has had with these motherfucking space monsters on this motherfucking space ship kinda works against the Lovecraftian aspect. (I haven't actually played Dead Space, this is an assumption)

Resuming, making a action-game and then painting-yourself-into-a-narrative-corner by calling that shit 'lovecraftian' is just dumb, dumb, dumb.

Fuck you bioware PR moron, focus group, publisher, designer and bordel of writers.


Human-reaper whoooooooooo

Usually I try to not give a fuck about crappy provocarion, but I don't like false accusations. The only thing I edited in my both prev posts was adding 'EDIT: Oh gawd, irony is teh hard for some users. Whatever.', after I saw your next derp post.

However, I will defend the joke. It's the same thing as 'great game' or 'favorite company' here. Not like it's pulled from ass. There was an atmosphere twist in the two sequels. BW was propably convinced they're doing a scientific thing, by showing things like resurrecting frozen meat. Also, their mumbling about some real science guy in their basement. Not to mention this lulzarticle from march, claiming MEx to be the hardest SF in history.

TL;DR:
Hiver, be so kind and go read again your 'Dance with Dragons'.