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    Mass Effect 3

    Game » consists of 19 releases. Released Mar 06, 2012

    When Earth begins to fall in an ancient cycle of destruction, Commander Shepard must unite the forces of the galaxy to stop the Reapers in the final chapter of the original Mass Effect trilogy.

    Could someone give me a Leviathan summary? [Spoilers]

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    deactivated-5e49e9175da37

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    @RenegadeDoppelganger

    Maybe I totally missed the logic here but

    Why was The Catalyst's solution to the task preserve all life to have the reapers wipe a good chunk of it out every cycle?

    He was built with an order, a compunction, to ensure the continuation of organic life in the galaxy; not any specific race or species. His logic says that another AI created by these organics may not share his orders. Some may be peaceful (the geth), but some may not (every other killer AI). Even if there's a 1% probability a killer AI grows powerful enough to overtake the galaxy, that's a meaningful enough probability to act first (especially to a being that can live forever).

    Consider it this way, a tree growing near power lines. If you let it grow, it might hit the power lines and burn the entire thing down, never to grow again. If you prune the tallest leaves and branches, it can regrow. This is what the Intelligence is thinking. There's also the aspect that he feels he's 'preserving' those species 'in Reaper form'. Tantamount to building a house or furniture out of lumber cut from that tree.
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    mostman

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    #52  Edited By mostman

    This probably would have made all those dream sequences suck a little less as well. I mean, sure, at the end you get to say "Ohhh - hes the catalyst - he was in my dreams" - but this sort of background detail would have made the reveal SO much better. I mean the whole catalyst thing was basically what pissed me off about the game. 3 whole games and toward the end of the third you are told there is this all powerful thing (is it the Citadel!?) that is the solution to all problems. Then you meet a personification of it. Then game over. The whole thing felt tacked on. Add in Leviathan about three quarters of the way through 3, and now you have something special.

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    RenegadeDoppelganger

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    @Brodehouse said:

    @RenegadeDoppelganger

    Maybe I totally missed the logic here but

    Why was The Catalyst's solution to the task preserve all life to have the reapers wipe a good chunk of it out every cycle?

    He was built with an order, a compunction, to ensure the continuation of organic life in the galaxy; not any specific race or species. His logic says that another AI created by these organics may not share his orders. Some may be peaceful (the geth), but some may not (every other killer AI). Even if there's a 1% probability a killer AI grows powerful enough to overtake the galaxy, that's a meaningful enough probability to act first (especially to a being that can live forever). Consider it this way, a tree growing near power lines. If you let it grow, it might hit the power lines and burn the entire thing down, never to grow again. If you prune the tallest leaves and branches, it can regrow. This is what the Intelligence is thinking. There's also the aspect that he feels he's 'preserving' those species 'in Reaper form'. Tantamount to building a house or furniture out of lumber cut from that tree.

    Thanks, that makes it a little clearer. My initial thought was closer to your second point; that it was trying to preserve life by converting it to a more resilient, more evolved form (a reaper) although this brings up the debate of whether the reapers are technically a form of life and how broad one's definition of "alive" is. It also brings up the possibility of a slight misinterpretation or extrapolation of the order to "preserve".

    I guess it's just weird (or perhaps really convenient) that The Leviathan -a practically omni-potent super species- thought it prudent to give an AI with limitless resources a one line mission without even the slightest catch (like, say, don't do anything that would jeopardize the universe). At the very least you'd think they could have foreseen seen the potential conflict of interest their admittedly disruptive way of going about things in the universe poses to The Catalyst's directive.

    Also why was the "synthesis" option provided to the player in the ending never considered by the AI as a preferable option to clear- cut all of civilization every couple thousand years? If The Catalyst had control of the reapers this whole time, surely one would think it would have had ample resources and time research and construct The Crucible (or a device like it).

    I know the answer to most of the above (because videogames) but it's fun to think about.

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    Subjugation

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    #54  Edited By Subjugation

    Wow, it's kind of crazy this wasn't included in the retail game. This is a pretty important piece of lore. So first Javik and then the Leviathan story are kept from the main game? Not cool man.

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    veektarius

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    #55  Edited By veektarius

    I'm all for arguing that the EC shouldn't have been in the game, but if you ask me, something that expands on the lore in interesting but nonessential ways is the perfect kind of DLC for ME3. Something that actually makes you want to play through again to see how it changes things instead of just starting the game up to play through the dlc and then throwing the disc back in the pile.

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    Rasmoss

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    #56  Edited By Rasmoss

    I played through Leviathan this weekend and it made everything a lot clearer. Should have been in the main game.

    But let's be completely honest here:

    So there is this all powerful race who notices that lesser species tend to build AI that eventually completely destroy their masters.

    To solve this conundrum the powerful race builds an advanced AI. And in a massive twist of irony what the AI comes up with is to wipe out all life, including the powerful race itself, to prevent the races from destroying themselves.

    Doesn't this seem a bit Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? I mean isn't this a spectacularly silly plot?

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    deactivated-5e49e9175da37

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    @RenegadeDoppelganger said:

    @Brodehouse said:

    @RenegadeDoppelganger

    Maybe I totally missed the logic here but

    Why was The Catalyst's solution to the task preserve all life to have the reapers wipe a good chunk of it out every cycle?

    He was built with an order, a compunction, to ensure the continuation of organic life in the galaxy; not any specific race or species. His logic says that another AI created by these organics may not share his orders. Some may be peaceful (the geth), but some may not (every other killer AI). Even if there's a 1% probability a killer AI grows powerful enough to overtake the galaxy, that's a meaningful enough probability to act first (especially to a being that can live forever). Consider it this way, a tree growing near power lines. If you let it grow, it might hit the power lines and burn the entire thing down, never to grow again. If you prune the tallest leaves and branches, it can regrow. This is what the Intelligence is thinking. There's also the aspect that he feels he's 'preserving' those species 'in Reaper form'. Tantamount to building a house or furniture out of lumber cut from that tree.

    Thanks, that makes it a little clearer. My initial thought was closer to your second point; that it was trying to preserve life by converting it to a more resilient, more evolved form (a reaper) although this brings up the debate of whether the reapers are technically a form of life and how broad one's definition of "alive" is. It also brings up the possibility of a slight misinterpretation or extrapolation of the order to "preserve".

    I guess it's just weird (or perhaps really convenient) that The Leviathan -a practically omni-potent super species- thought it prudent to give an AI with limitless resources a one line mission without even the slightest catch (like, say, don't do anything that would jeopardize the universe). At the very least you'd think they could have foreseen seen the potential conflict of interest their admittedly disruptive way of going about things in the universe poses to The Catalyst's directive.

    Also why was the "synthesis" option provided to the player in the ending never considered by the AI as a preferable option to clear- cut all of civilization every couple thousand years? If The Catalyst had control of the reapers this whole time, surely one would think it would have had ample resources and time research and construct The Crucible (or a device like it).

    I know the answer to most of the above (because videogames) but it's fun to think about.

    Yeah, the whole thing with the Intelligence is the thing any synthetic villain does; take the thing you told it and misinterpret it in the most horrifying way possible. Fulfill its orders to the most horrifying degree possible. I think a big problem people had with the Intelligence is that, for some reason, they expected to meet up with the mother brain of the Reapers and thought it would have a perfectly cromulent reason for the most massive, million year spanning genocidal campaign.

    The Leviathans thought it was a good idea for the same reason that all the species they watched destroy themselves did; 'if we build this we will be even more powerful, and it could never harm us'. Hubris. The same reason why we built Skynet, or the Large Hadron Collider, or any other wonderfully dangerous and hubristic thing; our own perceived invincibility. The Leviathans rightly saw themselves as the living gods of the galaxy; what could ever destroy them?

    Don't ask me anything about synthesis though... I will defend the Control and Destroy endings, I will defend the entire modus operandi of the Intelligence, but... the Synthesis option is the most baffling thing about anything that happens in the Mass Effect fiction.

    The reason why I think it even gives Shepard the option is because it realizes that this could easily happen again. "My solution won't work anymore." It's technically still fighting for its life, it's actively destroying the Crucible and the Alliance Fleet while talking to Shepard, but it's also realized that if this could happen once, it could happen twice, a million more times. This time is no more special than next time, it might as well inform Shepard of the ramifications of his/her actions. If not Shepard, it will be someone else in 50 thousand years, or maybe 50 million years. What's the difference to an ancient being?

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    SkullcrusherMountain

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    @smcn said:

    Leviathan is the species that created the Reapers Catalyst.

    http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Leviathan

    EDIT: My mistake

    Oh, hello there. Thank you, good sir. Like everyone else said, that seems SUPER CRAZY to not include in the main storyline. Sigh. Oh well.

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    SkullcrusherMountain

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    @pyrodactyl said:

    @FLStyle: @Colourful_Hippie: I Thought when he said he was shocked because of what was added in the extended cut, it was because he play the vanilla endings. You can interpret it both ways. I guess we'll find out for sure tomorow.

    Side note: MAN is Jeff still a downer about this game. Always looking trough his rose tinted mass effect 2 branded glasses. Hope Brad and Vinny can fight for ME3 on the top ten this year, it still deserves it even with the bad ending.

    I agree with Jeff, man. The whole tone, storyline and events of ME3 were quite inferior to 2. Everything in 2 was a build up to an end that was on the horizon, but not an imminent threat. ME3 starts off the game with the entire galaxy pretty much fucked, and you are traipsing around the citadel being Creepy McEavesdropper and dancing in that stupid club. The structure of the game was just simply a let down and felt rushed (which is SUPER ironic, since they pushed out the release date from the original one to apparently add multiplayer rather than deal with singleplayer issues). It had so much potential, one of the best, if not THE best fictions in all of video game history, but went out with a whisper rather than a bang.

    Just like your dad says, "I'm not mad, I'm just really disappointed."

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    SethMode

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    I'm not really one to do this, but with the remaster out I Googled this shit after finishing the DLC and HOLY FUCKING SHIT IT IS NUTS THIS WASN'T IN THE GAME.

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    ll_Exile_ll

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    @sethmode said:

    I'm not really one to do this, but with the remaster out I Googled this shit after finishing the DLC and HOLY FUCKING SHIT IT IS NUTS THIS WASN'T IN THE GAME.

    ME3 came out a time when EA was being very controlling. They had Bioware under insane deadlines. ME3 was originally scheduled for a 22 month development cycle, and even though they were able to get a delay to the end of that fiscal year, it was still made in just over 2 years. The year prior to ME3, they put out Dragon Age 2 on a 16 month development cycle because EA wanted a Bioware game every year.

    The point I'm getting to is ME3 was coming in super hot. The ending was what it was originally because it was basically cobbled together last minute. Stuff we've learned about the development in the years since paints a picture of insane crunch for most of the project. The game certainly would have been better if Leviathan was part of the core game, but there's no way it would have been possible.

    Between the crunch, rushed ending, day 1 DLC, and general feeling across some parts of the game that corners were cut just to get the game done (the Citadel side missions spring to mind), EA's negative influence can really be felt in the game. I still think ME3 is very good, the Genophage and Geth/Quarian storylines might be peak Mass Effect, but it definitely wasn't all it could have been as a complete offering.

    I think in the time since, people have attributed the missteps and mismanagement of Anthem and Andromeda to EA when Bioware was really at fault, but I definitely feel the issues with DA2 and ME3 were clearly the result of EA's overbearing time constraints.

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    bigsocrates

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    #62 bigsocrates  Online

    @ll_exile_ll: Timelines may have been part of it, but I think the real story is that EA intentionally carved up essential parts of the game to sell as DLC. You can make a timeline argument for Leviathan but not one for From Ashes, which was Day 1 DLC and is in many ways just as essential to the story. They could have cut out some other less essential part to sell as DLC (even something like the genophage missions, as great as they are, is less core to the experience than Leviathan was) and worked on Leviathan first.

    Or, of course, they could have launched the multiplayer later, and used those resources to make Leviathan part of the core game.

    So yes, EA is to blame here, but not just because of time demands and crunch but the pure, unrestrained, greed of the game design. They prioritized DLC money and multiplayer microtransactions over providing a good product. Which, of course, is consistent with EA's current core value system.

    This was during the era when online passes and other BS like that were things, so in some ways it was even worse in terms of intentionally carving core components out of a game to sell as DLC (though not as bad in terms of microtransactions.)

    I also would argue that Bioware's subsequent continued decline was, in fact, due to EA. They may not have directly meddled as much as they did during MA3's development but their core values and the people they probably promoted into management in the studio charted the studio's course into the shell of itself that it currently is. When you work for a company like EA you either adopt its values or you leave. Bioware didn't need to be microamanged by EA after MA3 because as an institution it became EAified.

    I think Mass Effect 3 with all its DLC included is a really good game, and I think most of the complaints about it are overblown outside the complaints about the fact that 2 core components were sold as DLC, but I think it really did paint the direction Bioware would go under EA. Mass Effect 3 was a really good game riddled and somewhat hampered by a focus on DLC and microtransactions. Future Bioware products would shed the "really good game" part and focus on the second part. The only reason Andromeda didn't get a bunch of DLC is that it was such a trainwreck that management understood nobody was going to buy any of it.

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    infantpipoc

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    #63  Edited By infantpipoc

    @sethmode said:

    I'm not really one to do this, but with the remaster out I Googled this shit after finishing the DLC and HOLY FUCKING SHIT IT IS NUTS THIS WASN'T IN THE GAME.

    Yeah, by late 2011, Bioware 's media output had been cagey about whether Mass Effect 3 would contain origin story for Reapers or not. Then the whole thing got under the rag of "terrible ending" in March, 2012... Then came August, 2012, I was almost glad that they are even putting the damn thing out as DLC...

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    infantpipoc

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    @bigsocrates: Starting Mass Effect 2 without connecting to the so-called Cerberus Network is the biggest improvement they made to 2.

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    SethMode

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    @ll_exile_ll: I mean sure I guess? Who cares, it still sucks.

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    ll_Exile_ll

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    @ll_exile_ll: Timelines may have been part of it, but I think the real story is that EA intentionally carved up essential parts of the game to sell as DLC. You can make a timeline argument for Leviathan but not one for From Ashes, which was Day 1 DLC and is in many ways just as essential to the story. They could have cut out some other less essential part to sell as DLC (even something like the genophage missions, as great as they are, is less core to the experience than Leviathan was) and worked on Leviathan first.

    Or, of course, they could have launched the multiplayer later, and used those resources to make Leviathan part of the core game.

    So yes, EA is to blame here, but not just because of time demands and crunch but the pure, unrestrained, greed of the game design. They prioritized DLC money and multiplayer microtransactions over providing a good product. Which, of course, is consistent with EA's current core value system.

    To start, I never said anything about From Ashes. It was 100% a transparently greedy money grab with no logistical reason for it to be DLC. I never have and never would assert otherwise.

    However, Leviathan was not cut out of the game to be DLC. We know this based on information that has come out in the time since. It was never intended to be part of the game and was in some ways a response to criticisms regarding the ending. It wasn't present at all in the script leaks prior to the game's launch and didn't release for many months after the game and extended cut patches were out. It's easy to look back almost 10 years later and say it should have been in the main game, but that ignores the context around the development of the game. It never could have been in the game.

    I also take major issue with the assertion that Leviathan is more important to the overall game than the Genophage storyline and that somehow the game would have been better if the Genophage plot were removed in favor of Leviathan. I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. The Genophage storyline is the conclusion of plot elements that have been building since the first game involving multiple major characters and resolving their series long character arcs. Leviathan provides interesting yet ultimately inconsequentially backstory on the Reapers. Genophage deals with major themes present since the series' inception framed around an emotional core of beloved characters. It is embodiment of everything Mass Effect does well, Leviathan is an exposition dump.

    Finally, the multiplayer was developed by Bioware Montreal and its development had no impact on the core single player development.

    I want to be clear, I am not defending any corporate decisions made regarding ME3's development. The game was worse than it could or should have been due in large part to decisions made by executives for financial reasons. However, I think it's important to understand context to avoid making criticisms in bad faith. Leviathan could never have been part of the main game, it only existed in the form it did because of the criticisms around the ending. It was a response to issues with ME3s release, not a reason for them.

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    SethMode

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    @ll_exile_ll: You really think they came up with and created a several hour long DLC with new assets in just 5 months in response to the ending? That seems.....unlikely.

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    ll_Exile_ll

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    #68  Edited By ll_Exile_ll

    @sethmode said:

    @ll_exile_ll: You really think they came up with and created a several hour long DLC with new assets in just 5 months in response to the ending? That seems.....unlikely.

    They may have started work on some elements of the DLC prior to the release of the game, but it certainly changed as the DLC was developed based on what happened with the response to original ending. The Leviathan of Dis, which originated as a curiosity in a planet description in ME1, was referenced in the base ME3 and referred to as a Reaper corpse, not as a separate species, so clearly they didn't have all that figured out yet.

    And like I said, Leviathans are mentioned nowhere in the leaked script. They may have been kicking ideas around early on, but Leviathans were never envisioned as part of the core story. It was added after the fact.

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    SethMode

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    @ll_exile_ll: Short of working on the game I don't see how you could know that the Leviathan concept came in response to the ending, regardless of what was in the game at release. It's a huge part of the overall plot included via DLC and that is shitty, regardless of what led them to handle it that way. I find it incredibly unlikely that this was a HUGE plot point that they came up with after the fact, but honestly I don't know because I wasn't there. It just seems doubtful, all things considered.

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    Junkerman

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    The Omega DLC was clearly meant to be part of the game as well - on launch you could do a Quest chain for Aria on the citadel explaining how she was kicked out of Omega and you help her get poised for her return.

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