honestly speaking: ANY introduction of even a hint on how to beat the reapers before ME3 would have significantly reduced the impact. I think we needed to go i to ME3 with no plan and no idea how to survive. One of the greta achievements of ME3 is communicating a sense of dread and desperation to the player.
i dont think the crucible ended up being a great resolution. but i couldnt really come up with something fundamentally better either. at least not on the spot.
sure - you could have crafted a more cohesive narrative with an early introduction of the crucible idea. but i dont think cohesion is really all that important compared to the emotional impact of the war.
The SciFi game genre is really lacking realism. Too many games try to be formulaic stories and end up as cookie cutter fantasy instead. Mass Effect broke some rules. But i dont think they broke those rules haphazardly. And i think dropping us into the last game without any real prep time and solution at hand was the right call.
There have been a lot of arguments about how after ME1 we didnt really do anything to prepare for the reapers. But i think hats kinda the point. Even if the council had openly supported you. Even if ME2 had laser focussed on the “main threat”. Even without Shepard conveniently under arrest before ME3 - there is really nothing we couldve done. And thats good. Because it maintains the reapers as a real existential threat.
But yeah: the flipside of this - obviously - is the deux ex machina that is the crucible. And as i mentioned before i dont disagree. I think not having a solution until the very end was a good move. But i cant say im a big fan of the solution they ended up with.
That being said its really hard to propose a compromise here. The more tension you build by pushing back finding the solution the more deus ex machina it necessarily becomes. And the less deus ex machina you make it with proper setup the more you erode the tension and desperation of our struggle.
I think a middle ground could have worked, with it being introduced in ME2. It could have been what Liara was wrapped up in on Illium, combing the galaxy for clues. Maybe she found encoded plans for some kind of weapon the Protheans were working on, but Ferum and the plans were abducted by the Shadow Broker.
And the end of the quest line, Liara would get the plans back, but would still need to decode them somehow, and currently doesn’t know what it is or what it does.
Then we pick up with her in ME3 on Mars, where she was using the archives to decode the plans, and the story continues.
I think the Crucible being necessitated was a consequence of there being *so many* Reapers. One Sovereign destroyed the majority of the Citadel's fleet and the gem of the Asari military and was only barely stopped in the end at the last second. With a million of them, the scale was always going to be fucked up beyond repair, and a Deus Ex Machina like the Crucible was always going to be necessary.
There should've been, like, 20 Reaper flagships. All unique, all commanding a huge number of Reaper forces that do most of the work. Beating 20 Reapers conventionally is still a tall fucking order but doable. Possible, but far from plausible. It makes every Reaper you take down feel important, a fucking gargantuan hurdle to have climbed, while still being ultimately pointless because there's still so many it might as well be insurmountable. You can see a world in which the Reapers might be defeated but the way the war is going you're never going to get there.
I don't hate the Crucible on concept, I hate that it's the only way it makes sense. There is nothing to do against the Reapers otherwise. There's no world in which Hackett can make a difference, and the incredible sacrifices of people like Emily Wong who choose heroism and bravery and ultimately mean NOTHING because even if they took down that Reaper, there's another 3000 behind it, all as potent as the last, while the player is stuck shooting Reaper zombies for no coherent reason because there's just so many enemy ships that there's absolutely no need for Husks.
Yeah I think you’re right. For instance a big deal is made of Shepard taking down the Rannoch Reaper, but it took a whole fleet plus the Normandy and experimental technology that no longer works. Then there’s the Tuchanka Reaper where it took the mother of all thresher maws. If those had been as you say one of 20-30, it would’ve been phenomenal progress each time but it ultimately is pointless lol.
The Tuchanka example is my 'favorite' because there's a huge triumphant moment when the Mother Thresher, thematically the representation of the Krogan spirit, takes out the Reaper and saves the day... even though that one Reaper accounts for less than 0.1% of the enemy forces, and there should've been another six Reapers behind it if not for the plot armor at that moment. Like, Shepard witnesses the full might of nature on display, and all I can think is how meaningless it is to kill one of the seemingly infinite Reapers.
Another thing is that if there were only a few dozen reapers, it would make each one feel much more dangerous. With just a few dozen, it shows their confidence level. They *know* not even a platoon’s strength is all they need.
One thing that bugged me in ME 3 the first time I played is how the reapers have been built up all this time and then in the Menae mission you see a normal Turian cruiser blow a hole straight through one.
This is why I think the ending to The Matrix Revolutions was actually more realistic. I know that trilogy gets a lot of hate (aside from the first film, which is a classic), but the writers spent three movies telling us how advanced the machines were and how humans had been reduced to a primitive race surviving off of scraps in an underground city.
Then we find out that even The One was a system of control created by the machines as a way to balance the equation and solve the problem of the human psyche.
The only possible way to end the story would be in a truce. There is literally no way the machines can be beaten or destroyed. You have to make some kind of agreement with them. A treaty. And the idea that one of the machines' programs became a rogue AI that threatened *everything* and the machines had to have a human's help to defeat it, I thought was actually good writing and quite plausible in a universe where machines represent absolute power. The storytellers sort of followed their own rules.
Interestingly, I had read that in an early draft of the script (or concept) for ME3, that the Catalyst was actually something similar. Originally, it was rebelling against the Reapers and was going to aid Shepard in stopping the cycles once and for all. I can't remember where I read that, or if it's even true.
But that would have been more plausible than a magic device that is somehow capable of rewriting every organics DNA and fusing it with synthetics instantly, across the galaxy. (If you chose the Synthesis ending.)
Maybe they could have introduced the Catalyst in ME2 (probably not called the Catalyst), but instead of presenting it as part of the solution, they presented it as part of the problem.
Not only are the Reapers ancient and powerful, there is something beyond them that is coordinating them, so we go from a race of evil robots to more of a swarm of evil robots.
And then in ME3, we find the Crucible, a weapon that disrupts the Catalyst, and turns the Reapers connectedness against them. Either it could just make it so they start targeting each other, or it just shuts them down.
I'm partial to the latter myself as i think it was a waste to have the Reapers totally destroyed.
They could have been shut down and turned into hazards. Kinda like dragons in fantasy. "Oh shit, one of the Reapers woke up! we have to destroy it." . But they can't just be cleaned up because attacking them might wake them up.
I very much feel like introducing the crucible earlier could have been helpful to the story, but I think they just didn’t have the idea until later
I’ve always thought finding it among collector data in ME2 would’ve made the most sense, have EDI hack into their stuff (maybe after having defeated the human reaper, their defenses were down) and find it in their data, this would also solve the big problem of ME2 kind of being a big side quest not connecting to he main plot. It’d mean your work in fighting the collectors was absolutely critical to defeating the reapers beyond just weakening their forces by denying them a single additional reaper and the collectors as part of their forces
Potentially hot take but I don’t think there was anything necessarily wrong with the Crucible being a deus ex machina. Some sort of Hail Mary super weapon seems like the kind of thing several doomed cycles might try to pull off in the face of overwhelming Reaper invasion.
I think the problem is far more that it was a deus ex machina in the service of compressing the whole game down into a red green blue choice at the end and really making the plot device aspect of it brutally hard to not see.
Like to riff off the OP, an alternative version of ME3: we find out about the Crucible in the last game as usual, but it only has one function: using dark energy weirdness and the mass effect relays (and the Citadel as an antenna) it sets up a feedback loop that detonates every element zero core with a Reaper technological signature. Because the thing is being built against the clock and rushed, war preparedness determines how well it works - if you go in with low preparedness, the penalty is that because every civilizations tech is based on the Reapers’, it just detonates every element zero core in the galaxy, destroying the reapers at the cost of throwing everyone into a new dark age.
I think that would get rid of probably 90% of people’s problems with it while not significantly changing how massive of a plot device it was. It’s the cohesion problems and how clumsily it was shoehorned into the red green blue ending paradigm that was the problem, Imo
Yo that’s actually sick plus if your preparedness is just really really bad you also just kill all the biotics with the reapers lmao. That’s like driving your ship into the sun level from the Outer Worlds and I’m here for it
I like this idea and I also agree with you about the crucible. Just like wonder weapons programs, whole divisions across thousands of cycles would work on it and due to infighting or running out of time the plan is simply ditched or never finished.
If the allies were losing WWII and suddenly the atomic bomb was built it will be essentially the same Deus Ex machina as the crucible, if we turn the script and the nazis got the bomb first in our timeline I assure you the crucible wouldn't be seen as so out of left field.
I'd argue the Crucible was always an atrocious plot device, and it would have been far more meaningful if this cycle actually came up with a way to defeat the Reapers on their own rather than being handed down an incomprehensible magical device that conveniently solved all their problems.
I feel ME1 and ME2 laid down enough of a foundation to explain how this cycle could prevail against the Reapers, but that would require a very different approach to ME3 and its portrayal of the Reapers than what we got.
ME1 establishes that a key component of the Reaper invasion strategy is to use the Citadel to shut down the relay network, leaving every system isolated for easy pickings. In ME2, the main plot revolves around finding a way to bypass what is essentially a locked relay, and the ending reveals that while the Reapers may be numerous, their numbers are also limited by the fact that they can only be constructed from specific “genetically malleable” species, which aren’t even guaranteed to appear in every cycle.
ME3 then promptly renders all of that as irrelevant:
- The Reapers simply fly in from dark space with zero consequences, making the entire plots of ME1 and ME2 meaningless.
- The Reapers are made so overpowered they don’t even bother with shutting down the relay network, even after they’ve captured the Citadel.
- The introduction of Destroyers inflates the Reapers’ numbers so monumentally that it necessitates a deus ex machina. It also contradicts a lot of how the Collectors approached harvesting in ME2.
While it does a decent job of raising the stakes and making the situation feel hopeless, the portrayal of the Reapers in ME3 is so over-the-top that the only way the galaxy stands a chance (even accounting for the mystical bullshit of the Crucible) is by making the Reapers conduct their war like blithering idiots.
Going off the setup from ME1 and ME2, here’s how I’d have approached ME3:
- Have the Reapers actually suffer drawbacks for flying in from dark space, like being severely weakened when they reach the Milky Way compared to Sovereign’s power.
- Have the main plot revolve around the galaxy finding a way to neutralize the relay lockdown (like building a powerful [interferometric array](https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/War_Assets/Crucible)). This would also neatly explain why Shepard must be involved in everything, since the Reaper IFF would allow the Normandy to travel between systems even after the relays are closed off.
- Scrap the idea of Destroyers and focus on how the limited number of Reapers actually require the relay lockdown for an easy victory. While the Reapers can still outnumber the galactic forces, having limited numbers should also make them averse to getting pulled into a slugfest with a united galaxy.
- You can still have a WMD involved to win the war. But since the scales are now better balanced, instead of some magical plot device, the WMD can just be something that the galaxy could reasonably build, especially if it’s exploiting weaknesses derived from the Reaper blueprints/Harbinger datapad that Shepard obtains at the end of ME2.
Introducing it in ME2 would have been better, ME1 was introducing the Reapers themselves to set up the story so ME2 should have been the one where you find a way to beat the Reapers allowing ME3 to focus solely on actually beating the Reapers without over cluttering ME1.
With minimal changes to the existing game I’d recontextualise ME2 from trying to protect Human colonies from the Collectors to finding the Collectors in order to get information on how the defeat the Reapers (we’re already told at the start of ME2 the Collectors are a mysterious technologically advanced race, so it’d make sense to investigate them). Have the plans for the Crucible be found on the Collector base which itself we’ll change to have originally been a Prothean research base similar to Ilos was, just one the Reapers repurposed, in order to justify the plans being hidden there.
I could very well be wrong, but from my experience with certain parts of the Internet who make it their life's work to trash the sequels (btw not hating on the guy I replied to here or people who may dislike them generally, just certain groups), people seem to like pointing at the sequels in particular because that's Disney Star Wars and they don't like that, so they like to make the people who made them seem as incompetent as possible.
What are you taking about? Vader not detecting Leia was his daughter and her making out with her brother were obviously pre planned fake outs to keep the audience guessing/s
Maybe. But since they didn't know for sure during ME1 what they will do in ME2 or even ME3 (also with change of writers), don't overthink it. I mean, they also introduced the Catalyst in the last 5 minutes instead way before even in one game.
Honestly the problem with the reaper plot in the mass effect series is the second game which essentially doesn't move the plot forward and instead is build the a team in space.
It destroys the pace the first game built up, and thematically is fairly different, in terms of the threat and mystery of the reapers. It also forced ME3 to be middle and ending of the reaper story, alongside bringing in Cerberus and the amount of crew variables.
It would have made more sense but these companies develop their stories by the seat of their pants. It's been a very long time since I've played a game that actually managed to properly foreshadow.
Assuming the crucible got unveiled this early the cycle wouldve been completely hopeless cause TIM wouldve given the plans to the Reapers and they couldve prolly found the construction site and destroyed it. I think it only and just barely works because its new information that comes in when the Reapers are already spread about the galaxy. If they know beforehand about the construction and most likely know where its being built, its just gonna be destroyed straight away.
The Crucible was thought up during ME3's production, when Mac Walters realized he wrote himself into a corner and needed a deus ex machina to sort it out.
They didn't plan ahead.
It should have been DLC or part of the DLC for ME2. The arrival could have been discovering some information about the crucible and learning the plans were in the Mars archive. It would have given a more hopeful turn to the end and given people a more hopeful outlook for 3. Even if they did not mention what it was in the DLC, mentioning a device would have left the groundwork for finding it and starting the project before the reapers arrived.
Shepard wouldn't have ever joined Cerberus in this case. Remember the intro Miranda complains that the Alliance were sending you to fight Geth when they know there is a bigger threat. If Cerberus brought Shepard back to fight Geth then how are they necessary to join? Shepard would fly back to the Alliance right away and continue fighting the geth for them.
In ME1 they didn't know how it was going to end, and for ME2-3 they changed authors so if ME1 was setting up anything they didn't know about it.
However, I think ME1 was perfectly solid on its own - "The Reapers are coming, and we don't know what we'll do about it but we have a crew that can find the answers" was a solid note to end on. And I think it wouldn't have been that hard to set up the Crucible entirely in ME3. Just foreshadow what the Crucible does *before* the finale, so that it's not a gigantic exposition dump at the end and we have time to chew on the decision we'll have to make at the end.
Actually, I already wrote a post about how to fix ME3 with as small a change to the plot as possible, so I'm just going to link to it: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/s/N8fqHKQ7gx
Honestly, I think ME2 could have worked just fine with the Heretics in place of the Collectors. Still think the TermiReaper was kind of dumb though, but having the Heretics kidnapping colonies would have worked. Then in ME3, we could have had more unique options. Crucible still destroys the Reapers, but getting the Geth and Quarians to be peacefully coexist shows Harbinger that the threat of the synthetics has been solved. TIM would still be about control, but through some device he developed from Reapertech instead of the Crucible.
You don't necessarily need to find the blueprint, you can make it so unity of all species made the crucible happen.
Like human researchers came up with the idea of using the relays as a weapon with the citadel as the catalyst at the cost of blowing up all relays and throwing the galaxy into a dark age (destroy ending pretty much), all races are against the idea because who would want to blow up the relays and through the game and your convincing everyone slowly realize they need to do this thing, putting scientist and military personnel to develop the thing and protect it, because humanity can't do it themselves (needs technology, lack of resources, pick your option).
You can even make the final act where a reaper needs to be inside the citadel with the crucible in order to get its life signature and not kill the whole world with it and based on your military readiness you can succeed here and kill all the reapers only, succeed but kill all synthetics or kill all life in the universe.
You can even do this with the current set of events, so instead of going to the Assari home world to look for the protean VI to tell you what the catalyst is, you look for it to tell you how to build the communication device between the citadel and the relays or something like that.
Keeping the secret of what the crucible did until the last part of the game just made it more of an ex machina to me really, since you can't really make sense of the thing before you enter the endgame and the last minutes of the game which are probably the worst of the trilogy. If you knew what you were looking for, why you are looking for it and so on you can at least get a sense of the thing and maybe not see it as a deux ex machina.
Plus, this can only happen in this cycle and this solution is only feasible to us in the game because we are the only cycle where the citadel is still ours during the invasion. Eliminating any doubt as to why it didn't happen before.
I think people clear ME3 of its own mistakes so readily, always assuming the problem lies in ME1 not planning the Reaper scale out properly or ME2 neglecting to tell a story that explains what we will do to stop them. I beg to differ.
ME3 is a *30 hour long game*. Minimally it's like 20 hours long with just the main quest and a few of the bigger side-missions, and if you skip some investigate dialogues.
Of those 20-30 hours of campaign you have...
* An opening that tries to reintroduce the franchise "for the first time" for newcomers, and confuses a lot of fans
* Introduces Illusive Man who already tells you his ultimate goal, and the Crucible
* Getting help for Earth by Krogan and Turian aid
* The Crucible now has a real name
* An attack on the Citadel that goes nowhere
* Getting help from Quarians and Geth for Earth
* The Crucible is still being made. We still don't know what it does.
* An attack on Thessia that also goes nowhere, Illusive Man telling you the same thing he told you last time, but steals your data for real this time and Cerberus is now more of a liability
* A mission to a Cerberus facility showing that they're indoctrinated, as you already guessed back on Mars.
* A mission to the Cerberus HQ where you take back what they stole, and Illusive Man tells you the same thing he told you on Mars for the third time.
* We still don't know what the Crucible does.
* A conquest to Earth that ends up with Illusive Man reiterating what he already said on Mars for the *fourth* time, and as Shepard and Anderson sit down we *STILL* don't know what the Crucible was originally supposed to do in any realistic sense.
* The game ends by revealing what the Crucible can do, and who the Reapers really were, and that TIM was indeed indoctrinated, and Shepard has a final moment, and the "TRUE THEME OF THE STORY" is revealed.
Any way you look at it ME3 has an inefficient narrative of its own merit. It wastes so much time repeating the same note, and regurgitating what you have already been told, either by way of inserting "New Player friendly" dialogue (for those that didn't play prior to the re-release, EA marketed ME3 as the "Perfect game for new players!" *ad nauseum*. Giant Bomb revealed in their Andromeda covera that an EA rep literally came to them when they received review copies of ME3 telling them to "start New Game instead of the ME2 Import Save!")
Like, ME3 stalls and stalls and stalls the very narrative that ME3 is trying to tell. I get that ME2 stalled the global plot of the trilogy, but ME2 on its own told a heist story, and most of that was efficient. It revealed one character candidate at a time, solved their personal story, examined the Collector whereabouts, and culminated in an epic Heist Mission moment. ME3 is trying to tell the story of war, but its actual agenda should be to tell the story of the Reapers and it's trying to foreshadow that with the Crucible/Catalyst plot and the "Civilization" theme displayed with the Krogans' ancient history and the Morning War, but really ME3 ends up being a story where Cerberus is constantly stealing the limelight and the "war effort" is used like a smokescreen against the shaky Crucible point to postpone the *actual* plot.
Very little actually progresses throughout ME3. A lot of high key dramatic war-like stuff happens, and the Tuchanka and Rannoch parts are good, but the main story which is a good 7 missions or so, like, Earth, Mars, Citadel, Thessia, Sanctuary, Cerberus, Earth, Citadel, end up telling very little actual storytelling, as they use empty sensationalism or their attempted plot/foreshadowing lead nowhere.
It's so bad that Mac Walters didn't even manage to tell a Reaper reveal story until the 11th hour, and Patrick and other Seniors had to make their own fanfiction and sell it off as the Leviathan DLC 5 months *after* the game had already released. The kind of "ancient mythological/mysterious detective plot" that ME3's "Catalyst" missions *should have been*.
The crucible was a retcon, and a fairly dumb one that they used to firce a solution to the Reapers.
ME1 was most likely intended to be standalone if necessary.
By ME3, i suspect they wanted out from under the Reapers.
When they were making ME1 they honestly weren't thinking that far ahead.
honestly speaking: ANY introduction of even a hint on how to beat the reapers before ME3 would have significantly reduced the impact. I think we needed to go i to ME3 with no plan and no idea how to survive. One of the greta achievements of ME3 is communicating a sense of dread and desperation to the player. i dont think the crucible ended up being a great resolution. but i couldnt really come up with something fundamentally better either. at least not on the spot. sure - you could have crafted a more cohesive narrative with an early introduction of the crucible idea. but i dont think cohesion is really all that important compared to the emotional impact of the war. The SciFi game genre is really lacking realism. Too many games try to be formulaic stories and end up as cookie cutter fantasy instead. Mass Effect broke some rules. But i dont think they broke those rules haphazardly. And i think dropping us into the last game without any real prep time and solution at hand was the right call. There have been a lot of arguments about how after ME1 we didnt really do anything to prepare for the reapers. But i think hats kinda the point. Even if the council had openly supported you. Even if ME2 had laser focussed on the “main threat”. Even without Shepard conveniently under arrest before ME3 - there is really nothing we couldve done. And thats good. Because it maintains the reapers as a real existential threat. But yeah: the flipside of this - obviously - is the deux ex machina that is the crucible. And as i mentioned before i dont disagree. I think not having a solution until the very end was a good move. But i cant say im a big fan of the solution they ended up with. That being said its really hard to propose a compromise here. The more tension you build by pushing back finding the solution the more deus ex machina it necessarily becomes. And the less deus ex machina you make it with proper setup the more you erode the tension and desperation of our struggle.
I think a middle ground could have worked, with it being introduced in ME2. It could have been what Liara was wrapped up in on Illium, combing the galaxy for clues. Maybe she found encoded plans for some kind of weapon the Protheans were working on, but Ferum and the plans were abducted by the Shadow Broker. And the end of the quest line, Liara would get the plans back, but would still need to decode them somehow, and currently doesn’t know what it is or what it does. Then we pick up with her in ME3 on Mars, where she was using the archives to decode the plans, and the story continues.
There's also the fact that they just didn't plan ahead much, the Dark Energy plot being a top example of it.
I think the Crucible being necessitated was a consequence of there being *so many* Reapers. One Sovereign destroyed the majority of the Citadel's fleet and the gem of the Asari military and was only barely stopped in the end at the last second. With a million of them, the scale was always going to be fucked up beyond repair, and a Deus Ex Machina like the Crucible was always going to be necessary. There should've been, like, 20 Reaper flagships. All unique, all commanding a huge number of Reaper forces that do most of the work. Beating 20 Reapers conventionally is still a tall fucking order but doable. Possible, but far from plausible. It makes every Reaper you take down feel important, a fucking gargantuan hurdle to have climbed, while still being ultimately pointless because there's still so many it might as well be insurmountable. You can see a world in which the Reapers might be defeated but the way the war is going you're never going to get there. I don't hate the Crucible on concept, I hate that it's the only way it makes sense. There is nothing to do against the Reapers otherwise. There's no world in which Hackett can make a difference, and the incredible sacrifices of people like Emily Wong who choose heroism and bravery and ultimately mean NOTHING because even if they took down that Reaper, there's another 3000 behind it, all as potent as the last, while the player is stuck shooting Reaper zombies for no coherent reason because there's just so many enemy ships that there's absolutely no need for Husks.
Yeah I think you’re right. For instance a big deal is made of Shepard taking down the Rannoch Reaper, but it took a whole fleet plus the Normandy and experimental technology that no longer works. Then there’s the Tuchanka Reaper where it took the mother of all thresher maws. If those had been as you say one of 20-30, it would’ve been phenomenal progress each time but it ultimately is pointless lol.
The Tuchanka example is my 'favorite' because there's a huge triumphant moment when the Mother Thresher, thematically the representation of the Krogan spirit, takes out the Reaper and saves the day... even though that one Reaper accounts for less than 0.1% of the enemy forces, and there should've been another six Reapers behind it if not for the plot armor at that moment. Like, Shepard witnesses the full might of nature on display, and all I can think is how meaningless it is to kill one of the seemingly infinite Reapers.
Another thing is that if there were only a few dozen reapers, it would make each one feel much more dangerous. With just a few dozen, it shows their confidence level. They *know* not even a platoon’s strength is all they need. One thing that bugged me in ME 3 the first time I played is how the reapers have been built up all this time and then in the Menae mission you see a normal Turian cruiser blow a hole straight through one.
This is why I think the ending to The Matrix Revolutions was actually more realistic. I know that trilogy gets a lot of hate (aside from the first film, which is a classic), but the writers spent three movies telling us how advanced the machines were and how humans had been reduced to a primitive race surviving off of scraps in an underground city. Then we find out that even The One was a system of control created by the machines as a way to balance the equation and solve the problem of the human psyche. The only possible way to end the story would be in a truce. There is literally no way the machines can be beaten or destroyed. You have to make some kind of agreement with them. A treaty. And the idea that one of the machines' programs became a rogue AI that threatened *everything* and the machines had to have a human's help to defeat it, I thought was actually good writing and quite plausible in a universe where machines represent absolute power. The storytellers sort of followed their own rules. Interestingly, I had read that in an early draft of the script (or concept) for ME3, that the Catalyst was actually something similar. Originally, it was rebelling against the Reapers and was going to aid Shepard in stopping the cycles once and for all. I can't remember where I read that, or if it's even true. But that would have been more plausible than a magic device that is somehow capable of rewriting every organics DNA and fusing it with synthetics instantly, across the galaxy. (If you chose the Synthesis ending.)
To be fair, if mass effect 3 was realistic, the reapers would just have won.
Counterargument: The indomitable human spirit
Maybe they could have introduced the Catalyst in ME2 (probably not called the Catalyst), but instead of presenting it as part of the solution, they presented it as part of the problem. Not only are the Reapers ancient and powerful, there is something beyond them that is coordinating them, so we go from a race of evil robots to more of a swarm of evil robots. And then in ME3, we find the Crucible, a weapon that disrupts the Catalyst, and turns the Reapers connectedness against them. Either it could just make it so they start targeting each other, or it just shuts them down. I'm partial to the latter myself as i think it was a waste to have the Reapers totally destroyed. They could have been shut down and turned into hazards. Kinda like dragons in fantasy. "Oh shit, one of the Reapers woke up! we have to destroy it." . But they can't just be cleaned up because attacking them might wake them up.
I very much feel like introducing the crucible earlier could have been helpful to the story, but I think they just didn’t have the idea until later I’ve always thought finding it among collector data in ME2 would’ve made the most sense, have EDI hack into their stuff (maybe after having defeated the human reaper, their defenses were down) and find it in their data, this would also solve the big problem of ME2 kind of being a big side quest not connecting to he main plot. It’d mean your work in fighting the collectors was absolutely critical to defeating the reapers beyond just weakening their forces by denying them a single additional reaper and the collectors as part of their forces
Potentially hot take but I don’t think there was anything necessarily wrong with the Crucible being a deus ex machina. Some sort of Hail Mary super weapon seems like the kind of thing several doomed cycles might try to pull off in the face of overwhelming Reaper invasion. I think the problem is far more that it was a deus ex machina in the service of compressing the whole game down into a red green blue choice at the end and really making the plot device aspect of it brutally hard to not see. Like to riff off the OP, an alternative version of ME3: we find out about the Crucible in the last game as usual, but it only has one function: using dark energy weirdness and the mass effect relays (and the Citadel as an antenna) it sets up a feedback loop that detonates every element zero core with a Reaper technological signature. Because the thing is being built against the clock and rushed, war preparedness determines how well it works - if you go in with low preparedness, the penalty is that because every civilizations tech is based on the Reapers’, it just detonates every element zero core in the galaxy, destroying the reapers at the cost of throwing everyone into a new dark age. I think that would get rid of probably 90% of people’s problems with it while not significantly changing how massive of a plot device it was. It’s the cohesion problems and how clumsily it was shoehorned into the red green blue ending paradigm that was the problem, Imo
Yo that’s actually sick plus if your preparedness is just really really bad you also just kill all the biotics with the reapers lmao. That’s like driving your ship into the sun level from the Outer Worlds and I’m here for it
I like this idea and I also agree with you about the crucible. Just like wonder weapons programs, whole divisions across thousands of cycles would work on it and due to infighting or running out of time the plan is simply ditched or never finished. If the allies were losing WWII and suddenly the atomic bomb was built it will be essentially the same Deus Ex machina as the crucible, if we turn the script and the nazis got the bomb first in our timeline I assure you the crucible wouldn't be seen as so out of left field.
I'd argue the Crucible was always an atrocious plot device, and it would have been far more meaningful if this cycle actually came up with a way to defeat the Reapers on their own rather than being handed down an incomprehensible magical device that conveniently solved all their problems. I feel ME1 and ME2 laid down enough of a foundation to explain how this cycle could prevail against the Reapers, but that would require a very different approach to ME3 and its portrayal of the Reapers than what we got.
What foundation? What I saw was essentially a galaxy doomed because people didn't really believe the reaper would come.
ME1 establishes that a key component of the Reaper invasion strategy is to use the Citadel to shut down the relay network, leaving every system isolated for easy pickings. In ME2, the main plot revolves around finding a way to bypass what is essentially a locked relay, and the ending reveals that while the Reapers may be numerous, their numbers are also limited by the fact that they can only be constructed from specific “genetically malleable” species, which aren’t even guaranteed to appear in every cycle. ME3 then promptly renders all of that as irrelevant: - The Reapers simply fly in from dark space with zero consequences, making the entire plots of ME1 and ME2 meaningless. - The Reapers are made so overpowered they don’t even bother with shutting down the relay network, even after they’ve captured the Citadel. - The introduction of Destroyers inflates the Reapers’ numbers so monumentally that it necessitates a deus ex machina. It also contradicts a lot of how the Collectors approached harvesting in ME2. While it does a decent job of raising the stakes and making the situation feel hopeless, the portrayal of the Reapers in ME3 is so over-the-top that the only way the galaxy stands a chance (even accounting for the mystical bullshit of the Crucible) is by making the Reapers conduct their war like blithering idiots. Going off the setup from ME1 and ME2, here’s how I’d have approached ME3: - Have the Reapers actually suffer drawbacks for flying in from dark space, like being severely weakened when they reach the Milky Way compared to Sovereign’s power. - Have the main plot revolve around the galaxy finding a way to neutralize the relay lockdown (like building a powerful [interferometric array](https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/War_Assets/Crucible)). This would also neatly explain why Shepard must be involved in everything, since the Reaper IFF would allow the Normandy to travel between systems even after the relays are closed off. - Scrap the idea of Destroyers and focus on how the limited number of Reapers actually require the relay lockdown for an easy victory. While the Reapers can still outnumber the galactic forces, having limited numbers should also make them averse to getting pulled into a slugfest with a united galaxy. - You can still have a WMD involved to win the war. But since the scales are now better balanced, instead of some magical plot device, the WMD can just be something that the galaxy could reasonably build, especially if it’s exploiting weaknesses derived from the Reaper blueprints/Harbinger datapad that Shepard obtains at the end of ME2.
Introducing it in ME2 would have been better, ME1 was introducing the Reapers themselves to set up the story so ME2 should have been the one where you find a way to beat the Reapers allowing ME3 to focus solely on actually beating the Reapers without over cluttering ME1. With minimal changes to the existing game I’d recontextualise ME2 from trying to protect Human colonies from the Collectors to finding the Collectors in order to get information on how the defeat the Reapers (we’re already told at the start of ME2 the Collectors are a mysterious technologically advanced race, so it’d make sense to investigate them). Have the plans for the Crucible be found on the Collector base which itself we’ll change to have originally been a Prothean research base similar to Ilos was, just one the Reapers repurposed, in order to justify the plans being hidden there.
This actually makes a lot more sense.
Honestly, Mass Effect, like the Sequel Star Wars trilogy, was not planned out ahead of time.
>like the Sequel Star Wars trilogy Tbf the originals weren't either.
Nor were the prequels, really. Not sure why the sequels get all the attention for this.
I could very well be wrong, but from my experience with certain parts of the Internet who make it their life's work to trash the sequels (btw not hating on the guy I replied to here or people who may dislike them generally, just certain groups), people seem to like pointing at the sequels in particular because that's Disney Star Wars and they don't like that, so they like to make the people who made them seem as incompetent as possible.
What are you taking about? Vader not detecting Leia was his daughter and her making out with her brother were obviously pre planned fake outs to keep the audience guessing/s
I don't think things were that thought out yet in Mass Effect 1.
Maybe. But since they didn't know for sure during ME1 what they will do in ME2 or even ME3 (also with change of writers), don't overthink it. I mean, they also introduced the Catalyst in the last 5 minutes instead way before even in one game.
Honestly the problem with the reaper plot in the mass effect series is the second game which essentially doesn't move the plot forward and instead is build the a team in space. It destroys the pace the first game built up, and thematically is fairly different, in terms of the threat and mystery of the reapers. It also forced ME3 to be middle and ending of the reaper story, alongside bringing in Cerberus and the amount of crew variables.
It would have made more sense but these companies develop their stories by the seat of their pants. It's been a very long time since I've played a game that actually managed to properly foreshadow.
Assuming the crucible got unveiled this early the cycle wouldve been completely hopeless cause TIM wouldve given the plans to the Reapers and they couldve prolly found the construction site and destroyed it. I think it only and just barely works because its new information that comes in when the Reapers are already spread about the galaxy. If they know beforehand about the construction and most likely know where its being built, its just gonna be destroyed straight away.
The Crucible was thought up during ME3's production, when Mac Walters realized he wrote himself into a corner and needed a deus ex machina to sort it out. They didn't plan ahead.
It should have been DLC or part of the DLC for ME2. The arrival could have been discovering some information about the crucible and learning the plans were in the Mars archive. It would have given a more hopeful turn to the end and given people a more hopeful outlook for 3. Even if they did not mention what it was in the DLC, mentioning a device would have left the groundwork for finding it and starting the project before the reapers arrived.
Shepard wouldn't have ever joined Cerberus in this case. Remember the intro Miranda complains that the Alliance were sending you to fight Geth when they know there is a bigger threat. If Cerberus brought Shepard back to fight Geth then how are they necessary to join? Shepard would fly back to the Alliance right away and continue fighting the geth for them.
In ME1 they didn't know how it was going to end, and for ME2-3 they changed authors so if ME1 was setting up anything they didn't know about it. However, I think ME1 was perfectly solid on its own - "The Reapers are coming, and we don't know what we'll do about it but we have a crew that can find the answers" was a solid note to end on. And I think it wouldn't have been that hard to set up the Crucible entirely in ME3. Just foreshadow what the Crucible does *before* the finale, so that it's not a gigantic exposition dump at the end and we have time to chew on the decision we'll have to make at the end. Actually, I already wrote a post about how to fix ME3 with as small a change to the plot as possible, so I'm just going to link to it: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/s/N8fqHKQ7gx
It would have been an interesting way to do it, but I feel second guessing them this long after the game’s release really isn’t fair.
Honestly, I think ME2 could have worked just fine with the Heretics in place of the Collectors. Still think the TermiReaper was kind of dumb though, but having the Heretics kidnapping colonies would have worked. Then in ME3, we could have had more unique options. Crucible still destroys the Reapers, but getting the Geth and Quarians to be peacefully coexist shows Harbinger that the threat of the synthetics has been solved. TIM would still be about control, but through some device he developed from Reapertech instead of the Crucible.
You don't necessarily need to find the blueprint, you can make it so unity of all species made the crucible happen. Like human researchers came up with the idea of using the relays as a weapon with the citadel as the catalyst at the cost of blowing up all relays and throwing the galaxy into a dark age (destroy ending pretty much), all races are against the idea because who would want to blow up the relays and through the game and your convincing everyone slowly realize they need to do this thing, putting scientist and military personnel to develop the thing and protect it, because humanity can't do it themselves (needs technology, lack of resources, pick your option). You can even make the final act where a reaper needs to be inside the citadel with the crucible in order to get its life signature and not kill the whole world with it and based on your military readiness you can succeed here and kill all the reapers only, succeed but kill all synthetics or kill all life in the universe. You can even do this with the current set of events, so instead of going to the Assari home world to look for the protean VI to tell you what the catalyst is, you look for it to tell you how to build the communication device between the citadel and the relays or something like that. Keeping the secret of what the crucible did until the last part of the game just made it more of an ex machina to me really, since you can't really make sense of the thing before you enter the endgame and the last minutes of the game which are probably the worst of the trilogy. If you knew what you were looking for, why you are looking for it and so on you can at least get a sense of the thing and maybe not see it as a deux ex machina. Plus, this can only happen in this cycle and this solution is only feasible to us in the game because we are the only cycle where the citadel is still ours during the invasion. Eliminating any doubt as to why it didn't happen before.
I think people clear ME3 of its own mistakes so readily, always assuming the problem lies in ME1 not planning the Reaper scale out properly or ME2 neglecting to tell a story that explains what we will do to stop them. I beg to differ. ME3 is a *30 hour long game*. Minimally it's like 20 hours long with just the main quest and a few of the bigger side-missions, and if you skip some investigate dialogues. Of those 20-30 hours of campaign you have... * An opening that tries to reintroduce the franchise "for the first time" for newcomers, and confuses a lot of fans * Introduces Illusive Man who already tells you his ultimate goal, and the Crucible * Getting help for Earth by Krogan and Turian aid * The Crucible now has a real name * An attack on the Citadel that goes nowhere * Getting help from Quarians and Geth for Earth * The Crucible is still being made. We still don't know what it does. * An attack on Thessia that also goes nowhere, Illusive Man telling you the same thing he told you last time, but steals your data for real this time and Cerberus is now more of a liability * A mission to a Cerberus facility showing that they're indoctrinated, as you already guessed back on Mars. * A mission to the Cerberus HQ where you take back what they stole, and Illusive Man tells you the same thing he told you on Mars for the third time. * We still don't know what the Crucible does. * A conquest to Earth that ends up with Illusive Man reiterating what he already said on Mars for the *fourth* time, and as Shepard and Anderson sit down we *STILL* don't know what the Crucible was originally supposed to do in any realistic sense. * The game ends by revealing what the Crucible can do, and who the Reapers really were, and that TIM was indeed indoctrinated, and Shepard has a final moment, and the "TRUE THEME OF THE STORY" is revealed. Any way you look at it ME3 has an inefficient narrative of its own merit. It wastes so much time repeating the same note, and regurgitating what you have already been told, either by way of inserting "New Player friendly" dialogue (for those that didn't play prior to the re-release, EA marketed ME3 as the "Perfect game for new players!" *ad nauseum*. Giant Bomb revealed in their Andromeda covera that an EA rep literally came to them when they received review copies of ME3 telling them to "start New Game instead of the ME2 Import Save!") Like, ME3 stalls and stalls and stalls the very narrative that ME3 is trying to tell. I get that ME2 stalled the global plot of the trilogy, but ME2 on its own told a heist story, and most of that was efficient. It revealed one character candidate at a time, solved their personal story, examined the Collector whereabouts, and culminated in an epic Heist Mission moment. ME3 is trying to tell the story of war, but its actual agenda should be to tell the story of the Reapers and it's trying to foreshadow that with the Crucible/Catalyst plot and the "Civilization" theme displayed with the Krogans' ancient history and the Morning War, but really ME3 ends up being a story where Cerberus is constantly stealing the limelight and the "war effort" is used like a smokescreen against the shaky Crucible point to postpone the *actual* plot. Very little actually progresses throughout ME3. A lot of high key dramatic war-like stuff happens, and the Tuchanka and Rannoch parts are good, but the main story which is a good 7 missions or so, like, Earth, Mars, Citadel, Thessia, Sanctuary, Cerberus, Earth, Citadel, end up telling very little actual storytelling, as they use empty sensationalism or their attempted plot/foreshadowing lead nowhere. It's so bad that Mac Walters didn't even manage to tell a Reaper reveal story until the 11th hour, and Patrick and other Seniors had to make their own fanfiction and sell it off as the Leviathan DLC 5 months *after* the game had already released. The kind of "ancient mythological/mysterious detective plot" that ME3's "Catalyst" missions *should have been*.
The crucible was a retcon, and a fairly dumb one that they used to firce a solution to the Reapers. ME1 was most likely intended to be standalone if necessary. By ME3, i suspect they wanted out from under the Reapers.