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Mass Effect Mass Effect Series Retrospective by Shamus Young

Drax

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mass effect sci-fi is harder than star trek's. no teleports, no hybrids, no free energy for all, no free ftl for all, it usually tries to give an explanation for stuff which goes farther than "space magic" or "technobabble", people who die without wearing red shirts...
still nowhere near any kind of true "hard sci-fi".
The federation didn't have free energy, they had abundant enery by today's standards but every other episode they were talking about refueling, scouting asteroids for dilithium and shiet.
 

Vaarna_Aarne

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mass effect sci-fi is harder than star trek's. no teleports, no hybrids, no free energy for all, no free ftl for all, it usually tries to give an explanation for stuff which goes farther than "space magic" or "technobabble", people who die without wearing red shirts...
still nowhere near any kind of true "hard sci-fi".
The federation didn't have free energy, they had abundant enery by today's standards but every other episode they were talking about refueling, scouting asteroids for dilithium and shiet.
A good way of looking at it is that any individual's consumption wouldn't even be a blip on the radar of an antimatter reactor. Heck, ALL the individual consumption wouldn't be. Similarly, the Federation has machines that can assemble at a sub-atomic level.

The effectively free energy and free FTL are consequences of advanced technology removing scarcity because the resources they make available vastly outstrip all need.
 

Theldaran

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...But hybrids are hot. Even though, it's hotter to have sex with asaris without getting them pregnant. Another advantage of Liara's over Asshole-y.
 

GarfunkeL

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Star Trek is not hard sci-fi. Technobabble does not turn space opera into hard sci-fi. Arguing whether ME is harder or softer than B5 or ST is completely pointless - they are all as soft as a string of wet pasta. The only hard sci-fi games that I can think of off the top of my head are Buzz Aldrin's Race to Space (in the final segment where you go to Mars goes from science fact to science fiction) and Rendezvous with Rama (based as it is on the acclaimed Arthur C Clarke books).
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
:necro:

There will be an updated ebook version of this retrospective in time for the Legendary Edition:

Good News, Everyone!

splash800_masseffect1.jpg


Over the years, I’ve gotten quite a few requests from people for a book version of my Mass Effect Retrospective. That sounds strange to me. Haven’t you already read it? And can’t you read it anytime you like? But I don’t know. The heart wants what the heart wants.

I got an email this week suggesting that now might be a good time to do this, since Mass Effect Remastered is coming out in a couple of months. This could essentially be a “remastered” version of the retrospective. You could get it as an e-book, or you could even murder a tree for one if that’s more your style.

So what “improvements” would this new version have?
  • The new “no comments” design of books allows you to enjoy the work without the endless pestering of people who are wittier and better informed than the author. Corrections? Typo police? Not in this version! Read the book and pretend it’s 1994 again!
  • Speaking of typos, there will will be allot fewer of thems! Google Docs is a lot better at find incorrect graham are these days and otto-correct is seven smarter about choosing the right worms.
  • While we’re correcting things, we thought we’d correct some actual mistakes. Like that one post about orbital bombardment where I messed up my Wolfram Alpha inputs and was off by two orders of magnitude, which everyone thought was inexcusable except my one astrophysicist buddy who said it was “close enough”. Or the very next post where I muddled my point because I didn’t have a firm grip on the Asari religions before I started ranting. It’s like a retcon where I get to pretend I don’t make mistakes!
  • The print version of the book exists as a physical object that can be foisted on other people! Yes, you can cause them to have a copy of the book… even if you don’t know their email! Haha. Now you’re holding a small object full of complaining! Take that, Mac Walters!
  • More freedom! In the old boring blog version, you couldn’t give me money. This time you’ll have the option to pay for the book if you want.
  • No DRM. BECAUSE WHY WOULD ANYONE PUT DRM ON A BOOK THAT WAS A BLOG THAT WAS AND IS STILL FREE? THIS IS NOT A RHETORICAL QUESTION, UBISOFT. I WANT YOU TO THINK ABOUT THE MECHANICS OF THIS PROBLEM BECAUSE YOU’VE CLEARLY NEVER EXAMINED THE IMPLICATIONS OF THIS TECHNOLOGY BEFORE DESPITE YOUR FREQUENT RELIANCE ON IT. THERE ARE REAL ECONOMIC SYSTEMS INVOLVED IN THESE TRANSACTIONS AND YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND THEIR IMPACT ON THE COST / BENEFIT CURVE. By the way, did you know that Watch Dogs Legion is already on the torrents? Just sayin’.
  • Internet-free! Are you tired of needing an internet connection to read my wild-eyed rants? No? Oh, internet is pretty much a solved problem for you these days? You’ve pretty much got wifi everywhere you need it? Okay then. Good for you, I guess. Well, if that problem… somehow… becomes a problem again, then you can buy my book and enjoy it without the hassle of also listening to Spotify at the same time.
  • New material! While proofing and formatting the posts into book chapters, I sometimes re-read the original text and got angry all over again and added a few more unhinged paragraphs of pointless assault on dead horses.
  • Andromeda! Will be included. For some reason.
The planned release date is either just before or just after the remaster comes out.

I was very sick of Mass Effect by the time I finished with Andromeda. I didn’t think I’d ever want to come back to this material. But as I was painstakingly translating the book to the new format, I had to proof the stuff I was editing. And that means I had to read it. For the millionth time. But after taking a break from the franchise, I found some passages I thought were fun, interesting, or funny. As of this writing, I’m currently working on Chapter #45, and I’m not quite sick of the process yet.

For the last few days, I thought the remaster came out on MARCH 14. So I’ve been doing super-crunch all-day shifts trying to get this done. Needless to say, the working conditions here are deplorable. I tried to unionize, but I could only get one signature in support. Besides, the last thing I need is a stupid Union telling me how to run my business.

Anyway, this morning I finally double-checked the release day and saw it was MAY 14. Not March. May. What can I say? They both start with M and remembering things is hard.

Anyway, I’m out of crunch mode now and I’m allowed to spend time with my family again. But there’s good news, too. I also have time to play more Prodeus. Have you tried it? It’s pretty awesome.

So that’s the state of… whatever it is we do here. If you have suggestions for the ME Retrospective, then it’s best to make them sooner rather than later.

Have a good weekend.

EDIT: Some people are confused and think this is a joke. This is not a joke. This is a real thing. If it’s a bad idea, then it’s a bad idea I’m doing on purpose.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Notes About Assembling the Book

splash800_masseffect2.jpg


Like I said before, I’m compiling my Mass Effect series into a book. I’ve finally finished the ugly brute-force work of getting the chapters into a single document and re-creating the original bold, italics, section markers, chapter headings, and so on. Yes, you’d think that such a thing would be automatic. Look, there are like three dozen ways of building an .epub from existing material and they all have some glaring fault. Maybe I’ll write about this later, but for now let’s just move on.

The final word count is 186,000 words. For rough comparison:
  1. The Fellowship of the Ring – 187,790 words.
  2. The Two Towers – 156,198 words.
  3. The Return of the King – 137,115 words.
There are 265 footnotes. On the e-reader I’m using for testing, they work more or less like they do on the blog: you click on a footnote and the text pops up in a little box. That’s nice, but I’ll bet these footnotes are going to be a pain in the ass on in print. I turned many of them into parenthetical statements, but most of them needed to be footnotes because they were too large and complex to work as an aside in the middle of an unrelated paragraph.

I still have to add a preface and make numerous adjustments to remove useless previews / recaps to each post. It’s usually only a sentence or two like, “Next week I’m going to talk about Kai Leng’s stupid cowboy hat” and “Last week we talked about Kai Leng’s stupid cowboy hat”. On the blog these are a natural part of the format, but for someone reading straight through in book form they feel very strange. Also, explicitly referencing “weeks” is a bit goofy. The audience will probably assume I think they’re really slow readers.

I’m not sure what to do about the images. They’re an integral part of the work, but 186,000 word books don’t usually have this many pictures in them!

I discovered that the printed version can’t be printed in color with my current on-demand press. Even if it could, I’ll bet the cost would be prohibitive. Also, BioWare’s abuse of the color filter means that a lot of these screenshots will turn into a smear of blurry grey ink in black & white. Also, lots of shots are seriously underlit, which will result in a big puddle of black ink rather than a useful screenshot. I don’t know what I’m going to do about this. This book is already going to be a real doorstopper, and making it even longer for a bunch of messy unreadable images seems like a bad choice. I don’t know.

I do think I need to cut the “Everything is fine” joke from Andromeda. Images are cheap on the web, but having half a page wasted on a repeated image is probably not going to amuse someone holding the physical copy.

Yes, I could go though and manually fix the contrast in all of these muddy images, but…
  1. The game designer ruined these images. I’m not going to spend days of my life hiding their sins.
  2. It would undercut a lot of my criticism to fix the thing I’m trying to criticize, wouldn’t it?
Of course, none of this will be a problem for the electronic version. I’m actually really looking forward to seeing the e-book version of this thing.
 

fantadomat

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Hmmm i had an interesting dream. So mates,anyone else thinks that krogans are the most retarded scifi race and their plot is filled with stupid plotholes????
 
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Hmmm i had an interesting dream. So mates,anyone else thinks that krogans are the most retarded scifi race and their plot is filled with stupid plotholes????
I liked Krogans. Uplifted warrior race that ended up being a threat to the race that uplifted them, had to be near-sterilized to prevent them from burning everything to the ground.
 

fantadomat

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Hmmm i had an interesting dream. So mates,anyone else thinks that krogans are the most retarded scifi race and their plot is filled with stupid plotholes????
I liked Krogans. Uplifted warrior race that ended up being a threat to the race that uplifted them, had to be near-sterilized to prevent them from burning everything to the ground.
As a core idea it is nice,but the lore is a mess. They had a bunch of planets that colonized,but they didn't have space ships and had the turrians cargo carry them to the battle lines. Then they win and become a thread....when they still don't have space ships lol. It is idiotic,they could just bomb them from orbit and move on,the whole genophage shit was useless. Also the population birth lore was mega retarded,lol 1000 kids per woman per year. It is seems like most retarded shit i have seen. If they had such population capacity they would have destroyed their habitat long time before turrians came.

Also they didn't look intimidating.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
Hmmm i had an interesting dream. So mates,anyone else thinks that krogans are the most retarded scifi race and their plot is filled with stupid plotholes????
I liked Krogans. Uplifted warrior race that ended up being a threat to the race that uplifted them, had to be near-sterilized to prevent them from burning everything to the ground.
As a core idea it is nice,but the lore is a mess. They had a bunch of planets that colonized,but they didn't have space ships and had the turrians cargo carry them to the battle lines. Then they win and become a thread....when they still don't have space ships lol. It is idiotic,they could just bomb them from orbit and move on,the whole genophage shit was useless. Also the population birth lore was mega retarded,lol 1000 kids per woman per year. It is seems like most retarded shit i have seen. If they had such population capacity they would have destroyed their habitat long time before turrians came.

Also they didn't look intimidating.
Salarians gave them ships and taught them how to use them.
They have no ships and must be ferried in ME3 because they've been demilitarized for centuries by that point.
Also the population birth lore was mega retarded,lol 1000 kids per woman per year. It is seems like most retarded shit i have seen. If they had such population capacity they would have destroyed their habitat long time before turrians came.
There are plenty of species on earth that have similar reproduction methods. Krogans (to me, at least) seemed to be very similar in design to certain turtles. A leatherback sea turtle has a clutch size of 100-150, many of them never making it to adulthood and are easy prey from eggs until they're adults. About 1 in 1,000 leatherback sea turtles survive from egg to adulthood.
OTOH, adult leatherback sea turtles are capable of killing sharks in self-defense.

Krogan population became a problem specifically because they were now capable of defending their young. The way they evolved meant that they would now reproduce rapidly, at a rate much faster than nearly any other sophont species.
The genophage, while likely too much, was in fact just putting their reproduction back to where it belongs. The genophage wasn't a curse, it was the only thing stopping the other species from simply deciding to wipe krogans out of the universe before they do it to them.
 

Nutria

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Strap Yourselves In
I find it plausible that there could be a species that isn't capable of building spaceships but knows how to use them. Do you know how to build a car? I sure fucking don't. The skills to make something and the skills to operate it are different.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
I find it plausible that there could be a species that isn't capable of building spaceships but knows how to use them. Do you know how to build a car? I sure fucking don't. The skills to make something and the skills to operate it are different.
Krogans definitely knew how to build the tech required after being uplifted and being taught how, they simply weren't allowed to.
One of the main characters in Andromeda is a Krogan scientist.

IIRC, krogans advanced to a suitable technology level to bomb their world back to the stoneage with nuclear bombs. They had a high fertility rate because Tuchanka isn't a very nice place to live and most of them died before they reached adulthood -- again, IIRC.
 

fantadomat

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Salarians gave them ships and taught them how to use them.
That is not true.
They have no ships and must be ferried in ME3 because they've been demilitarized for centuries by that point.
They were ferried in the rachnid war too.

There are plenty of species on earth that have similar reproduction methods. Krogans (to me, at least) seemed to be very similar in design to certain turtles. A leatherback sea turtle has a clutch size of 100-150, many of them never making it to adulthood and are easy prey from eggs until they're adults. About 1 in 1,000 leatherback sea turtles survive from egg to adulthood.
OTOH, adult leatherback sea turtles are capable of killing sharks in self-defense.
They are not a ton heavy turtle. If a specie evolved with such reproduction and lived for 1000 years,it would have self destroyed long ago. It would either had adapted a new way of reproduction or run out of resources. Imagine every cunt on earth was giving a birth to 1000 retards every year,we would have been fucked fast. Also gene shit was bad,they should have left every woman and man reproductive but decreased the number of legs they could lay,to just a few. They just sterilised the most of the population,which is mega retarded. That way most people just get angry and nasty.
 

Nano

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
There are plenty of species on earth that have similar reproduction methods. Krogans (to me, at least) seemed to be very similar in design to certain turtles. A leatherback sea turtle has a clutch size of 100-150, many of them never making it to adulthood and are easy prey from eggs until they're adults. About 1 in 1,000 leatherback sea turtles survive from egg to adulthood.
OTOH, adult leatherback sea turtles are capable of killing sharks in self-defense.
Evolution on Earth is already often weird, imagine how much weirder it might get on other planets.
 

fantadomat

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I find it plausible that there could be a species that isn't capable of building spaceships but knows how to use them. Do you know how to build a car? I sure fucking don't. The skills to make something and the skills to operate it are different.
Sure,but they won't be galactic thread. Production of new ships is important,or they could just shoot them down and win the war. A bunch of stranded colonies are easy target to a space fleet.
 

fantadomat

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There are plenty of species on earth that have similar reproduction methods. Krogans (to me, at least) seemed to be very similar in design to certain turtles. A leatherback sea turtle has a clutch size of 100-150, many of them never making it to adulthood and are easy prey from eggs until they're adults. About 1 in 1,000 leatherback sea turtles survive from egg to adulthood.
OTOH, adult leatherback sea turtles are capable of killing sharks in self-defense.
Evolution on Earth is already often weird, imagine how much weirder it might get on other planets.
It isn't because there is no life on other planets.:smug:
 

fantadomat

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Nah Nano ,you argue that there is life out there. I am just putting out the facts. Either post a proof of existing live in the universe or fuck off!
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
That is not true.
Yes, it is. See the next part.

They were ferried in the rachnid war too.
Krogan rebellion happened after the rachni wars.
They were heralded as heroes and given whatever they wanted after the rachni wars were won.

it would have self destroyed long ago
They did. They blew Tuchunka up with nuclear weapons during wars caused by Krogan overpopulation due to their birthrate exploding.
From the game's codex on Krogans:
Prior to the genophage, krogan population growth was limited by predation, disease, and war. Even so, the birth rate exploded once the krogan achieved industrialization, leading to wars over resources and living space. Other species on Tuchanka suffered greatly as the krogan expanded. When the krogan ran out of land, they settled into an arms race that ended in nuclear devastation. Tuchanka's relatively short Golden Age was at an end.

They just sterilised the most of the population,which is mega retarded. That way most people just get angry and nasty.
They didn't completely sterilize them, they just made the eggs far less fertile.

Also lending credit to the theory that they're based on leatherback sea turtles, the genophage was designed to limit the viability of krogan eggs to 1 in 1000.
About 1 in 1,000 leatherback sea turtles survive from egg to adulthood.
 
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Nah Nano ,you argue that there is life out there. I am just putting out the facts. Either post a proof of existing live in the universe or fuck off!
Universe? Try galaxy.
The Milky Way contains between 100 and 400 billion planets. The odds that we're on the only rock in the galaxy with life is really, really low.
 

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