Don't explain the unknowable | Castle Super Beast Clips

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@A_D_Art

[@tychoazrephet3794]

The real problem with the Reapers to me is that conceptually they're kneecapped even before the over explanation. I think Pat mentioned it once but like, the threat of your incomprehensible ancient robot space squid is kinda undercut by the fact their only real gameplay interaction is sending waves of goons at you that you can defeat with 7th generation cover shooter mechanics.

[@Kriss_ch.]

They probably shouldn't have made evil spaceships the villains in a game with no spaceship combat.

[@lemeres2478]

The goons only works if they are UNINTENTIONAL goons. Like cloverfield, where the monster's fleas are slaughtering people. The goons need to just be people breaking by breathing its foot stink. The incomprehensible needs to not care at all about the goons- even as a cannon fodder.

[@davidstinger1134]

@@Kriss_ch. More like they should have included way more sections where you are actually attacked by the big Reapers. They could have also made them way more dynamic if they had kept land vehicles. Just imagine having to escape from a Reaper destroyer in the Mako.

[@Trynt33]

While it might be true with the Husks, what sold me on the Reapers as a threat was the fact it took the combined efforts of civilized space just to bring down ONE, and he was basically a average grunt in terms of the rest. Mass Effect 3 should've been way more about trying to make the most out of a losing battle if even Sovereign took everyone working together to just BARELY get one down, like planets that get visited by the Reapers should be written off as "Yeah they're going to get glassed, don't even bother sending reinforcements". 2 had some good setup with what the Reapers were capable of while 3 boiled them down into just being a more advanced enemy faction with even dumb tank variants of Reapers. At least Leviathan posited an interesting question with the implication that anyone that gets as advanced as them might just end up being the Reapers again. The road to hell being paved with good intentions and all that

[@TheSlammurai]

The reapers (and the trilogy in general) would have been better if they were easily destroyed, yet absurdly powerful and seemingly infinite. That way they could feasibly be defeated with everyone working together yet still an insane threat. The fact that they're so impenetrable on top of everything makes it totally unbelievable that you could ever win.

[@raccoonofmotivation20]

It's like meeting cthulu and he tells you the lovecraftian universe is just an extended quadratic equation.

[@FurnaxIkki]

Funny you mention that. In the Lovecraftian mythos, the Kruschtya Equation is an extremely complicated mathematical equation that causes Nyarlathotep to possess anyone who solves it.

[@SoaringLettuce]

you say that, but lovecraft was notoriously bad at maths it's why non euclidian shit spooked him

[@DGrayEX]

@@FurnaxIkkiThere's also the story about the math student who could teleport across the universe through calculations and ended up getting to Azatoth.

[@josh-oo]

​@@DGrayEX There's also that one comic villain who can walk through walls by reciting a mathematical equation as if it's a fucking magic spell.

[@blackdragoncyrus]

You mean Cthulhu.

[@GnosticDemiurge]

So, here's the thing. Mass Effect 1 just directly takes large amounts from a novel called Revelation Space, by the author Alistair Reynolds. The ME1 Reapers are essentially, and fundamentally, the Inhibitors - a machine race that wakes up when an organic species gets past a certain level of development and wipes them out. But the Inhibitors are not something you can really fight. In Revelation Space, they pull out forbidden, banned weapons that treat space-time like playdough. They work for a bit, then the Inhibitors remember the last time a species used them against them, bring their countermeasures online, and they stop working. The only reason that the people in Revelation Space stand any chance at all is that the Inhibitors have been doing their thing so long that their sentinel machines have started to succumb to entropy and their systems have developed flaws. And Mass Effect can't, and doesn't want to actually write the Reapers as the Inhibitors, because it's high budget Hollywood sci-fi not bleak cybergoth literary sci-fi, and "oh yeah your shootbang man is basically a rounding error who has to run, hide, and rely on the defects of ancient post-sapient breaking down machines to survive" isn't the power fantasy Mass Effect sold. But this is what Woolie is detecting - the Reapers have the cold, cosmic outer layers of the Inhibitors, but what's underneath the shell (that turns out to just be a cosplay costume) is just squid made out of gummy worms.

[@jproductions1739]

The worst part? How are the Inhibitors defeated in Revelation Space? By asking another race of machine gods to join the war against them. What were the Geth doing in 2 again?

[@z-mac664]

And if you want to have squids made out of gummy worms in metal costumes as your sci-fi villains, the Daleks prove it can be done!

[@TheSergio1021]

But those squid have mind control though!

[@datonkallandor8687]

Mass Effect 1 clearly says the Reapers are defeat for a time frame long enough that nobody in the story will have to worry about it. They have to slow-boat it at regular Mass Effect FTL speed from the edge of the galaxy. But hey gotta get that FRANCHISE and those SEQUELS. So throw all that away. What do you mean now our story makes no sense anymore?

[@SeruraRenge11]

@@datonkallandor8687 Mass Effect was always written with the intent that there would be 3 games, it was not something the studio forced on them, that was the plan from day 1. You're thinking of Dragon Age Origins which was actually written as a single contained game and then EA told them to make more. That's why in DAO you can kill or get killed every member of your party (including yourself) except for Morrigan and Ohgren.

[@Chaerea_Carmin-Slaanesh_Chosen]

The answer lies in Lovecraft: What is Unknowable must be Infinite. You can learn about it, but it must create more and larger questions, until everything is unknowable.

[@SeruraRenge11]

Or it drives you insane from the revelation

[@Lazypackmule]

Really, all you need to do is make something that lies outside of human experience, something that can easily be logically explained, but not as easily understood- things like 4th dimensions, non-euclidean shit, and beings that lie outside of the concept of individuality Horror movie and fantasy monsters are an extrapolation of ancient caveman fears of shit that could lie in the darkness beyond your campfire, sci-fi aliens are an extension of that to the entire rest of the universe, and lovecraftian horror needs to go around that paradigm entirely and not make us question where our place in the universe is, but rather whether our place in the universe even really existed in the first place

[@Shiirow]

@@SeruraRenge11 pretty much yeah, the human mind cannot contain the amount of information required to know the unknowable because it has limitations in its comprehension of the world around them. the more you learn, the more questions grow in your mind, driving you further into the void until the sheer amount of knowledge you accumulate causes sensory overload driving you into the pits of madness.

[@nowhereman6019]

​@@SeruraRenge11not that many of Lovecraft's protagonists actually go insane. What usually happens is they learn about something that completely shatters their conception of the world from the perspective of a white dude living in 1920's New England, and they just become really scared and paranoid about what might be out there. It's not so much that gaining forbidden knowledge drives you crazy, it just makes you wish you never learned about it. It's like if you discovered that Hell is real, but Heaven isn't, and that we all go there when we die. You'd wish that you had never learned that and feel utterly powerless to do anything about it.

[@SeruraRenge11]

@@nowhereman6019 You want to know another EA franchise that didn't fuck it up? Dead Space. Yes, for all the issues Dead Space 3 has, the reveal that everything behind the necromorphs is the generation of a food source for the universe's apex predator, is fucking horrific and fits perfectly with the universe DS created. That's how you do a Lovecraftian horror, we're little more than its meal.

[@jacobsedlack1173]

I never trust an "unknowable" villain motive because it usually boils down to "we're assholes who want everyone to be us".

[@Trynt33]

I prefer it in Lovecraft where you have Azathoth not even being aware of their existence and basically being a shrieking drain plug of reality acting out like someone permanently in a coma thrashing about, or how the Great Old Ones/Elder Gods generally see humanity the same way we see ants or amoeba, the Reapers should've been able to easily purge the galaxy by just sending stars supernova or fucking up the orbit of moons and causing them to crash into heavily defended civilized planets in the same way humans can bug bomb a house or pour molten metal down an anthill

[@markm5927]

It's funny watching Woolie go through the disappointment I did over a decade ago.

[@Brandon_Brando]

Its really validating

[@iller3]

i think most Valve fans went through that 2 decades ago...

[@benlunaris]

My favorite bit of the Leviathan DLC is the implication that the "shot" that killed the derelict reaper from ME2 came from the planet they're hiding out on. It's almost a straight line from there to the planet with the massive trench and towards the reaper. It's more about the creators of the reapers not being immune to the indoctrination despite being the most powerful thing they could be, which should honestly make the reapers more of a threat. The problem is that Leviathan doesn't establish the idea that what happened to Sovereign in ME1 was a freak accident and the rest of the leviathan size reapers are actually almost indestructible.

[@iceblocks8771]

One issue I have with Woolie's framing of Sovereign is that Sovereign is 100% responsible for the Reapers not winning in ME1. Sovereign was so excited to flex, so desperate for validation from someone he inists is nothing but an ant, that he told Shepard the entire plan and ensured his defeat in ME1 and let the Galaxy keep the relay network in ME3. Had he just hung up the phone when he noticed it wasn't Saren on the other end, he would have won even if nothing else changed. Heck, had he changed course immediately instead of stopping to chat Shepard and crew might not even had time to use the nuke, letting them keep the Krogan clone army.

[@Uzarran]

Or just blasted the site from orbit, Krogan army be damned. Because without the Krogan they would still take the Citadel. But with Shepard out of the picture, the Alliance wouldn't have been able to intervene and tip the scales of that fight.

[@MattManDX1]

Yeah, a true Eldtrich Horror would make a big pompous self-aggrandizing speech to a mere mortal. That'd be like seeing a fly buzzing around the room and giving a villainous monologue to it before fetching a fly-swatter. Sovereign's speech was cool but it's existence removes any Eldritch Horror status the Reapers might have otherwise had. To me they're more like an ancient alien version of Skynet, with Saren and other thralls acting as T-800 units.

[@vyxxer]

@@MattManDX1 reapers are just eldritch horror larpers. They are cosmic mall ninjas.

[@Blagno4]

This kind of comments shows exactly why people don't understand story: let the confident bad guy have his plan and be lazy once in a while or it's fucking boring. Sovereign ruled.

[@Spookdookin]

This. Sovereign’s arrogance is how I knew they weren’t shit. “We are the pinnacle of evolution and existence, before us you are nothing, your extinction is inevitable” felt like sovereign was talking trash before his next big ufc fight.

[@ForestGrantGaming]

Hearing Pat talk about the Borg sums up how I felt about the Sentients from Warframe. They were really cool and threatening at first since you knew so little about what they were, only that they were so powerful the Orokin were desperate to defeat them. The Sentients coming back and their leader Hunhow appearing was really cool, and Sentient enemies seemed appropriately strong when you fought them in-game. Then the Sentients kept sticking around for events, you fought more of them so they lost a lot of their punch, and then in the New War we see that even a simple Grineer soldier can take on basic Sentients by himself.

[@benfawefwaeffwaefawfdekk2080]

I dont mind the sentients since they were always incredibly personable, hunhow and natah were very explicitly more "human" in personality than other characters in the setting on purpose. But the sentient threat really got dragged out by the delays of the new war. In a way, the pyramid ships from destiny are similar. Live service stories seem to really struggle with a single, sweeping, devistating apocalypse so they have to stretch it out in micro skirmishes and battles. Not unrealistic, but it does make it incredibly hard to make the big bad threat threatening when you're taking them on an constantly winning without any real notable losses or stakes.

[@nuclearhardt]

There's kind of an excuse in-universe that the Sentients are not as strong as they used to be, or that what you're fighting are tiny fragments of a much more powerful entity, but yeah. Sentients lost their mojo

[@user-gk6gf1lq9x]

Sentients became uncool to me the moment I heard that they'll be adapting to players attacks in a cool way. I was watching a devstream and I thought to myself "please don't let it be some stupid crap like elemental immunities". And when I was proven right, I just couldn't help but be reminded of that moment whenever I encountered them.

[@SeruraRenge11]

Pat seems to forget that the Borg were already re-examined as a species in TNG with the Hugh episode and that fucking TERRIBLE Descent 2-parter with Lore, long before First Contact introduced the Queen.

[@MB-sq7yn]

The thing is that the whole reason the Grineer exist as they do today is because slabs of augmented muscle are pretty hard to hack/cyber possess, hence why the Orokin clone slave labour force became a slave clone army. But even that can only really mean you aren't immediately thrashed by Sentient fragments 1v1, and your ships are still fair game. That's why when the Tenno all vanished in the New War, a drawn out, hellish slog of a conflict on both sides became trivial for the Sentients to steamroll everyone left. And this was all from the power of what, a single Sentient, and maybe not even that since Erra seems to have been using Praghasa like a parasite (much like how Pazuul is using him now, and I guess through using him Pazuul is then using her).

[@caffeinefreak2274]

I think part of the reason reapers worked in ME1is that they weren't the primary threat so their motivations weren't really important. When your primary threat has an unknowable motivation, it's no more satisfying than if they were mindless monsters or a natural disaster.

[@posteriorpepperoni]

The thing is,we're coming off of not only a game with the plot of a final war against the space Old Ones,with many moments of triumph over not just the ground troops but the ships who are the Reapers themselves, but also off the first game in the series where we straight up killed one of them. So i can't help but feel like any pretense of them being all powerful and shit has gone out the window a while ago

[@Zulszaek]

I don't think we were ever led to believe that they were indestructible or anything, just that they're extremely powerful, extremely hard to kill, and there are a shitload of them

[@leithaziz2716]

@@Zulszaek Well yeah...we killed Soverign in the first game. Were we led to believe otherwise? I thought it was about the numbers.

[@kevingriffith6011]

@@Zulszaek Exactly this. The point wasn't that Sovereign was indestructible, it was "Look at the untold devastation this one reaper caused by itself, almost annihilating the fleets of every major power you've met so far. A million of them are on the way. Good luck." Just because you could kill one of them didn't make them any less impressive.

[@Blurredborderlines]

Are you forgetting the fact that it took basically the entire galaxy coming together just to kill one of them?

[@MoostachedSaiyanPrince]

For me, it was the revelation that Harbinger was a Reaper at the end of ME2 that killed my perception of them as a threat. Yeah, we killed Sovereign in ME1, but it took a LOT to just kill that one Reaper, to the point where fighting even 10 of those felt insurmountable. So the idea that there were thousands more on their way felt absolutely terrifying. Then Harbinger came along and felt like a Saturday morning cartoon villain, and the implication that Harbinger was their leader made me laugh at how much if a try-hard loser it was. Harbinger, Aria, and Kai Leng all have the same tiny dick try-hard energy that I genuinely can't take them seriously.

[@Noxshade]

I do agree with Pat: as an author saving throw to explain the ending, I actually quite like the end of Leviathan. The idea that the biggest, baddest civilization engineered their own downfall through shear arrogance has a nice ring to it, but the twist of "we're doing to to protect you, you don't understand" for the Reapers always feels very weak when the Reapers can communicate clearly with 'lesser' races. Also, playing Leviathan for the first time in the Legendary Edition is so weird, because it's transparently written in an attempt to explain the ending... the ending many first-time players haven't seen... I want to say more but I can't really remember what is a spoiler about the ending and what isn't after Leviathan.

[@natzo89]

You can explain it and still be terrifying. Dead Space's Necromorphs do it for reproduction of the Moons and you are just material to them. The Flood do it in the books with the whole life and dead is how the universe experience itself and they are part of it. The Reapers were designed by leviathans to stop organics from dying to AIs. I would've have prefered the AI come to the conclusion that organics can only shine for some time and then they must be preserved. Harvest them so new races can thrive. Like, The protheans must die so the council races have their chance to live on their own terms.

[@leithaziz2716]

I think something which should be brought up is that having fleshed out answers show a degree of skill when it comes to the mystery itself. As in, it wasn't built soley on the intrigue of wanting answers. Understanding what you're witnessing can be just as impactfull or horrific in a compelling manner when done right.

[@tpeack]

it is funny how the necros/brethren are basically what i thought the reapers would be like i though ndoctrination was the reapers, like they were psychic formless beings who eventually took artificial forms, which turned out to be the necros, the signal the markers receive/emit compelling people to form it a body then it reproduces until theres nothing left. we know how necros are made, and we know the life cycle but they're still unknowable. like iirc one of the devs made it sound like, like a lot of eldritch stories, that the brethren weren't even the worst things out there, sort of like how cthulu is a small fry compared to azathoth. in the end the moons to me start to sound like they're space suits for whatever the brethren are, letting them occupy a physical form in "Our" universe, leaving wherever they came from.

[@stevelopez6957]

@@tpeackou hit the nail on the head, the Moons are basically just the reapers done right, the way they kept it good was simply by explaining everything they do and giving the most simple answer to why they do it, that simple answer of “reproduction” is vague enough for your mind to just race around many ideas and beyond that the moons still are not characters, they are as eldritch as it gets with no emotions or thoughts just a simple purpose, Even if they did have some higher form or were of a different advanced species it’s not for us to know, I’m pretty glad that most agreed that DS3 failed in almost every way but excelled with the origins of the Marker, In many ways the moons are what I would always imagine Lovecraftian Old ones to actually be, they’re just animals from a different world, there is no higher mind or purpose but their methods of living are just so horrifying to use that we perceive them to be that way

[@skieth9999]

There's a difference between a mystery (knowledge that exists that you simply don't know) and a character outright telling you that you can't understand them. It's a bit like a boss telling you "Im invincible" before you kill them. It makes the boss seem less threatening when they can die, just like how it makes the self-proclaimed "incomprehensible" machine gods less cool when you can comprehend them

[@Uzarran]

I feel the same regarding the harvesting motivation, and it fits in with the "Grabby Alien" model where as time goes on fewer species will develop because everything has been claimed by already existing civilizations. Plus, it wouldn't be a motivation that is directly contradicted by the game itself previously.

[@The5lacker]

I hate to say it, but I gotta say it: The Reapers were ruined the instant you *could* have a conversation with them. The instant Sovereign spoke english, the drive shaft of "Unknowable, alien, machine-god" was broken, even if momentum kept it going forwards for a while. The only communication with the Reapers should've been through their disciples. Minds maddened by their contact with a malignant intelligence that outstrips their own by orders of magnitude. Desires twisted to always align with their own. But, instead we get an admittedly hardcore line of "You will end because we demand it" by people who don't seem to grasp that a god-like being wouldn't have to *demand* anything: It simply *happens. * In short, the Reapers were a mistake and Mass Effect was suffocated to death underneath them.

[@SeruraRenge11]

I can't take seriously anyone says that Sovereign's speech is so "powerful" because it's literally just a saturday morning cartoon villain talking to you. What he effectively says is "HUMANS YOU SO STUPID YOU DONT KNOW ME AND YOU DON'T KNOW MY PEOPLE WE HAVE THE BEST INTELECT [unnecessary exposition about mass relay technology]. OH YEAH WE DID THAT SHIT TOO LOL! YOU CAN'T BREAK THE CYCLE AND YOU CAN'T UNDERSTAND IT WE SMART YOU ARE NOT CUZ ORGANIC" If anyone thinks that's an exaggeration, I can post the entire dialog between him and Shepard, that's exactly what he says to him but with big fancy words. Would've been better if he had never talked honestly, when I was a teenager I almost shat my pants but I see it now and it's just so fucking stupid.

[@Lazypackmule]

You can easily have the eldritch horror talk, you just can't have it be all like "my motivations are complex, the inner machinations of my mind are an enigma, your puny mortal brain cannot possibly comprehend the dark depths of my soul, and neither could my parents, muahahaha" It's Halo 2 vs. Halo 3

[@SoaringLettuce]

Chrono Trigger pulled it off. Lavos doesn't speak, but Zeal is a crazed zealot who won't stop talking and won't stop taunting you.

[@andrei11dr]

It really made me appreciate the fact that in KOTOR 2 Nihilus doesn't say shit to you, he sees you, he instantly tries to eat you, no conversation, no nothing, he's just a black hole

[@Trynt33]

It would've been cool if the conversation was still happening but on the outside, Shepherd becomes catatonic and more or less brain dead, maybe it forces the cloning to happen in 2 for more morally questionable reasons, or they have someone else try to communicate with Sovereign and he just turns them instantly with Indoctrination. They probably should've done some Dune-esque stuff where in order to even hear a Reaper speaking, you have to do some consciousness and awareness expanding, otherwise it's just that inception bwaaaah because of it being a flat frequency sapient life can't pick up on, it would've made them feel like something truly next level rather than "How the hell do you know English Human language already?" At least with the KOTOR games, the tech left behind in that was by similarly sapient creatures that descended back into barbarism, the Reapers literally have nothing but time

[@shawnhollern]

i remember reading somewhere that the original script was that the Reapers motivation to purge the galaxy every 50k years was because Mass Effect technology consumed dark energy, and that this effected everything within the galaxy, including the fast tracking of stars age. part of it was left in the game, in ME2, that mission with Tali investigating a prematuring star, that was concluded in ME3 with Conrad Verners story in a small side note. This story would have made everything else fit so much better into place. it would explain why the reapers built the mass relays to guide organics technology, so they wouldn't be so wasteful with their Mass Effect technology, etc. And how AI could hit the singularity and fast track Mass Effect tech and basically doom the galaxy. Supposedly this story arc was cut because the writers in ME3 thought it would have been to complicated of an explanation. Im not 100% where I saw this, but if I'm wrong about that, please correct me. Also, side note on the Leviathan, post ME3, the Leviathan is still around, and now has all its controlling artifacts spread around the galaxy. The Orbs used before to control humans, now used to control Reaper forces. Whats to stop the Leviathan from doing it again after the war is over?

[@davidstinger1134]

I think the main problem with the original Dark Energy plot is that in the end it would have still reduced everything to a choice. It's just instead of picking colors, you would have had to pick between the gamble of letting the Reapers harvest humanity and hope that leads to solving the entropy issue, or wiping out the Reapers and hope you find a solution before the now uncontrolled galaxy ends up imploding.

[@Trynt33]

Really makes me wish that ME3 wasn't written by two dudes who put themselves into seclusion and went "This is going to be our plot!". ME1 and 2 being cooperatively written is really telling compared to 3's quality. The scenario you mention at the end there would've been a way more interesting sequel series concept than "Let's just go to the next neighboring galaxy!"

[@admcleo]

The fatal flaw in 'the unknowable' in writing is when you inevitably have to explain more about it, the motivations tend to be insultingly simple. Good writers understand that and will make every effort to smooth it out, bad ones will slam right into that wall.

[@TheSergio1021]

You don't actually have to explain more about it. Look at Signalis for a good recent example

[@zachhaas1075]

Actually some of the best writers of the unknown never do, at best they have characters in universe attempting to understand it but they never have all the information.

[@theotherjared9824]

I say it's the opposite. Good writers know when something is beyond their scope and use a sense of mystery to fill the void of information. Trying to explain the unexplainable will inevitably lead to plot holes and leaps in logic that break the rules of the universe.

[@SeruraRenge11]

Or you can just....never explain it. Some of the greatest movies in history end on a final unexplained part that makes you go "wait no go back, what does THAT mean?!?!"

[@MeAuntieNora]

My favorite is the convention in some horror that the writer *WOULD* convey it to you further, but is taking one for the team by being the only one who has to bear the burden of going insane with the impossible knowledge. I often feel like it's a cop-out but sometimes it can be fascinating.

[@burglarcat5406]

Oh god Pat referred to an email as a Letter, his transformation into a dad is rapidly worsening...

[@Trynt33]

I wonder what the E in email stands for 👌

[@KAPTAINmORGANnWo4eva]

I said on a different video that Mass Effect was in part sabotaged by being tethered to Shepard instead of an Elder Scrolls-esque series where the star is the world, not the character you play as. And another aspect of what makes that a good thing is how they can treat their gods. Daedra are the most mundane gods who can slot into any role. They're the narrative workhorses that TES can use effectively without harming their mystique since it's normal in the setting for them to interact with people. But then beyond the Daedra there's the other deities like the Aedra, Sithis, whatever the Skaal believe in, etc. that remain mostly unknown, barring the obvious from the end of Oblivion. TES can have its cake and eat it too when it comes to deity-level beings because they have multiple kinds of deities doing different narrative jobs. Mass Effect would have benefited immensely from them taking a similar approach regarding the Reapers vs other galactic threats. Keep the Reapers as basically unkillable, unknowable abominations and establish that they use proxies like the Collectors in lieu of manually fighting their targets. Make the point of the setting not fighting the Reapers like Texas-sized space Nazis in a weird Normandy Landing/Stalingrad finale that feels like Gears of War, but holding them at bay and sabotaging their ability to influence the galaxy. That way you can have mundane villains like Collectors and the Indoctrinated do the legwork while the Reapers stay, for lack of a better term, "magical"

[@archest_archie6085]

Long story short: if the supposedly unknowable entity tells a character in their native language "you can't begin to understand me" then they are very much knowable and understandable. Sovereign was never scary to me in a 'cosmic horror' way, he was scary because he was an incredibly tough threat who represented just one member of an encroaching armada that were all just like him. ME2 is really where things shit the bed imo, the amount of times Harbinger comes off as a Dr. Claw, "I'll get you next time" type of Saturday-morning cartoon villain really killed the Reaper's presence for me

[@chstens]

As cool as Sovereign is, it always takes me out of it when the unknowable eldritch horror starts talking to you and says "You can't possibly understand our motivations". That has never happened, human writers can't write something that's impossible for humans to understand. Edit: I really thought the context of alien motivations would be enough for people to understand I was talking about alien motivations, and not straight up gibberish or how magnets work. I'm well aware of that there's plenty of things in the universe we don't understand, and it's totally possible for a writer to write about something we don't understand. What's impossible is for a human writer to come up with motivations for a sentient being that's impossible to understand. They can choose to not explain it, which is the smart move, but the moment the line "you couldn't possibly understand" is introduced, the illusion is shattered, because I know the human writer is incapable of delivering on that promise. It's a dumb line, it's not cool, it's just a bunch of hot air. Even worse if they actually decide to explain it, and it boils down to the same old moronic misconceptions about survival that 90% of these "unknowable motivations" end up as.

[@billvolk4236]

And it would have been so easy to avoid. Sovereign could have said "Consider the genocides in your own history. Is it really that much of a comfort for a people to know why they're being exterminated? It's going to happen either way. In the meantime, tell yourself any stories about it that you want."

[@peterwhite6415]

It honeslty could have been both explained and kept somewhat vague. Hell, the boss fight could have taken a Kotor2 aproach, where you talk and then fight or viceversa or talk betwen boss phases.

[@Celt420]

"humans can't write something that's impossible for humans to understand" You get me about eighty bucks of drugs and a weekend and I'll show you how it's done

[@kingdedede933]

@@Celt420 So the IT book from Steven King? That’s literally how he wrote that..

[@SeruraRenge11]

@@kingdedede933 That DOES go a long way to explain the orgy.

[@starwars90001]

Here's the thing, Lovecraft does explain his horror, hell he yog-sothoth talks to one of his characters. What Lovecraft's horror cosmic was that they were so beyond humanity nothing we were like characters in a story to them, cosmic's point is to make you feel small and pointless, the mintue the characters can beat or drive the cosmic force it fails. This why most "cosmic horrro" creatures in media fail.

[@aftertone3146]

This is the exact reason I've never been super impressed by the Cosmic Horror of Bloodborne. Because it presents basically gods but my + 10 axe can kill them so whatever

[@leithaziz2716]

@@aftertone3146 At the end of the day, you still want your cool bosses to fight. I think what the game does well is make the process of understanding the cosmic elements both unsettling and empowering if that makes sense. Gaining more and more insight makes you realise all the stuff that was hidden in the background all along, you just weren't aware of it and it makes for a creepy journey of discovery. That's what makes the Amygdala reveals memorable. The empowering phase is what comes afterwards due to you now having a better understanding of what you're dealing with to an extent, which feels gratifying.

[@Densoro]

@@leithaziz2716 Came here to say exactly this. It's about how the player's reality has to _flip_ to make room for this new shit. It also does a great job charting relatively mundane mutations like lycanthropy as an early symptom of total eldritch apotheosis. World of Horror does something similar.

[@Chaerea_Carmin-Slaanesh_Chosen]

Bloodborne does it right:what you view as victory and loss are not the same as what the final things you fight view as victory and loss. Beating The Moon Presence appears to be how it reproduces in some bizzare murder copulation that turns you into its child.

[@kilbert666]

It's not that you can't understand it. It's that understanding makes it worse. The ultimate super power in a Mythos story is being an absolute fucking moron. "Oh fuck! That monster's horrible! Good thing I shot and killed it and saved the day!" And that's where the story ends for the idiot. The scientist with him understands that the monster represents some utterly insane shit and loses his mind.

[@carvotheboss]

The thing that stops me from seeing the Reapers as an Eldritch thing is that, to me, they're still bound by physical laws. Granted, they have an understanding of them that could almost be seen as magic,, but ultimately they are just things, operating on other things, in a reality bound by the laws of things. They still have to physically haul ass to reach you, they kill you with giant lasers, they speak your tongue in ways you can see or hear. They are ultimately, just advanced, and while sufficient technology can seem magical, once a member of your scientific society is verbally having a back and forth with them, they are magic no more. I dont see this as necessarily a failure in a writing sense, that narrative is still very strong handled well, but for as much posturing ME does to make Reapers seem eldritch in design and flavor they always felt to me that's just how they wanted to be seen.

[@dwelfking8050]

Thank you for putting it so comprehensively. The Reapers stop being "unknowable" when you have a conversation with Sovereign.

[@WarPenguinDude]

And the fact that they are still bound by physical laws makes me all the more sad that they dropped the Dark Energy plot line. Since they are synthetic, they have the benefit of living "forever." They have the luxury of never having to worry about death. At least, that's what they think, until suns start dying much faster than they should at random and making a mess of the galaxy. That's when they are no longer gods. They too are terrified of death. So much so that they'll sacrifice every other single living being in order for them to live JUST that much longer. Anything for preservation. Which I feel """humanizes""" the Reapers a bit, which I have mixed feelings on but whatever. That having been said, I do find the idea that the universe is decaying much faster than it should, and even the most advanced and intelligent entities in the galaxy don't know what to do, far more existentially dreadful than the Reapers themselves, who are still a great existential threat.

[@DoofusSupreme]

Well said 🤘

[@AdrianArmbruster]

I mean they have magical brainwashing powers that just naturally emanate from each any any object associated with them. That's about as eldritch as you can get while still nominally gesturing towards the science half of science-fiction.

[@Trynt33]

Should've handled it like the Xeelee Sequence does where it takes highly dangerous singularity generators just to take down one of their ships, and their regular ships, Nightfighters are all equipped with something called a *Starbreaker Beam*. It's not even anything special to them, it's standard equipment! They can even come in pistol form. And the Xeelee in question basically use their ships like a mecha pilot would, being one with it as it forms an outer shell. And the combined galaxy-spanning militaristic humanity had to corner them at Sagittarius A because inside of the supermassive black hole is their natural environment. The Xeelee would've whopped the Reapers and not even give them the piece of mind, probably would be nice enough to let them escape through Ring when the heat death of the universe is happening

[@Dragonsmana]

Woolie is upset the "Darkness was breached."

[@JageshemashFTW]

See, even as far back as the first game, I always thought that the Reapers presenting themselves as these unknowable, god-like entities was just that, the Reapers _presenting_ an image of eldritch horror as a scare tactic. Even Shepard, during the initial conversation with Sovereign, can still shoot down all of his boasting and reduce him to ‘just a machine’. In my opinion, the Leviathan DLC probably has one of my favorite lines involving the Reapers. “We know now that they had a beginning. Now, maybe we can write their ending.” I don’t know, maybe I’m just missing the point, but even as far back as that first conversation with Sovereign, I always assumed we’d be getting something like Leviathan eventually. Pulling back the curtain on the wizard, y’know? The Reapers are very old and very powerful, certainly, but I never got the sense that we were supposed to take their ‘godhood’ at literal face-value.

[@Trynt33]

Especially when they don't do much that'd imply that they are at that god-like level of control beyond control of the Mass Relays and the whole Indoctrination scheme. I think the fact the Protheans even had a chance showed that they weren't as godly as they claimed, especially since you find that one world perfectly intact, it's just they were one cycle away from finally ending it. They should've been casually causing stars to go supernova to weaken the new batch of sapient races for extraction or causing singularities to destroy entire fleets, something that shows their tech is actually beyond our understanding. It felt really dumb that they were touching down on planets in 3 while the entire combined Citadel fleet just barely managing to take down Sovereign felt more earned

[@leithaziz2716]

I wonder what's Woolie's perspective on games like Dark Souls or Hollow Knight. In those scenarios you delve into a fully fleshed out setting where it's the player who doesn't have the context behind any of it and has to learn about it on their own. In those example it's the player who chooses how much they want to engage with the mystery. In Dark Souls' case you get characters like Velka or the Furtive Pygmy who are shrouded in mystery, or in Hollow Knight's case a character like the Pale King who you only know through his actions or how other individuals describe him, which leaves it in the player's hand to judge what sort of person he is (either a monster or someone who regrets his actions but tried to protect his kingdom at any cost).

[@roozbehdehgahi937]

The Shadows in Babylon 5 are a great example of an omnipresent threat from the past being done well. I highly recommend watching that series to anybody who likes space opera. Babylon 5 is what you would get if Shephard was on the Council instead of a Spectre.

[@bicksbernd1640]

THAT'S the face that I waited two and a half games to see, Woolie is beginning to understand the pain.

[@TonyGeban]

The stuff about the reapers never bother me. Since the begining they were machines. Machines come from somewhere. Somebody made them. Powerful? Absolutely, but they never were an "unknowable threat" to me. Now if it was something organic or supernatural. Yes, I would agree with woolie here.

[@joedatius]

Regardless is they "need" to come from somewhere, there is no reason to have to explain where that somewhere was. They are millions of years old creations from the empty reaches of space

[@Lazypackmule]

They could've still been built by some cosmic entity far beyond our understanding of reality, and not just easily understandable sea monsters with psychic mind control

[@MeAuntieNora]

I remember one of those "I died and saw hell but came back to life and now I'm selling you a book about it" con artists said something about how utterly indescribably horrible and otherworldly the demons he saw were. Man, that sounds so insanely scary! I'm about ready to become faithful myself just hearing about it! Then he was further pressed to describe what he saw... and against all odds he managed to endure the rigors of conjuring the memory to essentially describe like, the stereotypical red-40 colored horned men with pitchforks who want to poke your bum lmao

[@SeruraRenge11]

You want to know another EA franchise that didn't fuck it up? Dead Space. Yes, for all the issues Dead Space 3 has, the reveal that everything behind the necromorphs is the generation of a food source for the universe's apex predator, is fucking horrific and fits perfectly with the universe DS created. That's how you do a Lovecraftian horror, we're little more than its meal.

[@damonsghost9235]

The story of mass effect was actually told better in another game on a smaller scale. This massive alien invasion. A powerful psychic race come to earth with several other aliens under thier control. Those lesser aliens were actually genetically engineered for specific tasks by the psychic race. It turns out those races are failures. The race behind the invasion are trying to elevate races to solve an galatic problem. Humanity is being tested to evolve psychic powers so they can join in trying to solve the end of all existence. That game was xcom enemy unknown. With less drama and basic acting the story is similar to and better than the mass effect trilogy.

[@Lazypackmule]

Now I'm imagining a game like xcom but with Mass Effect's party members and convos, and I'm sad

[@Trynt33]

@@Lazypackmule That's what the latest XCOM game should've been... (Though it was still fine, it just could've been more like that, since imagining that turns Chimera Squad from a 7 to a 9 out of 10)

[@Lazypackmule]

@@Trynt33 Bro I'm sorry but Chimera Squad was cringe incarnate

[@TCRP117]

Oh Kai Leng. He's a competent if bland Cerberus agent when written by Drew Karpyshyn in 'Retribution'. William C Dietz's absolute trainwreck of a novel 'Deception' is the version Pat is referencing, his characterization in that is just part of the dogshit mess that was that book, written by an auther that obviously gave less than zero shits about the IP he was working on. Then in ME3 he's some Bioware emplyee's anime OC that the slapped the name Kai Leng on to because it was available. What I hope we get at the end of the run is Woolie and Reggie watching the OG ending, prior to the Extended Cut. Get a sense of what the original conclusion we were left with actually looked and felt like. And then also factor in there was no Leviathan for 'context' and no Citadel DLC for fun, closure and fan moments, and to remember that unless you had the From Ashes DLC there would have been no Javik throughout the entirety of the game. I would be fascinated to see their response to that juxtaposed against theri feeling of the ending they experience in th run itself.

[@masterxl97]

My problem with Woolie’s take on this whole thing is that even after so much discussion, I’m still left with one question: what, specifically, did he want? He’s discussed a dozen times over how the very first conversation with Sovereign set up some kind of expectation for him, and clearly it hasn’t been met, but his explanations as to HOW it hasn’t been met have been very vague and difficult for me to parse. Did he want no explanation for the Reapers at all? Because that’s an unfair expectation in a story-driven sci-fi trilogy. Did he want a better explanation than what we got? Then he needs to offer up some examples of what he might have done differently. Where is it exactly that he wanted this story to go?

[@joedatius]

How is it an unfair expectation for a sci-fi story to not explain the faction who's entire existence was about how unknowable and mysterious their intentions are. You could of literally not have explained what they were doing and the plot wouldn't change in the slightest. Also no you dont have to make up your own examples for something in order to be disappointed in how something is handled. That's what the writer is supposed to be fucking doing.

[@mello6311]

​@@joedatius You are coping so hard it's unreal, if there was NO explanation for the Reapers and why they do what they do, and how it is even possible to fight them, it would have been an even bigger shit storm of a story than what we got. As for your second point, if you are going to fucking complain about how a story is presented without offering solutions like a bitch baby, how are any aspiring writers supposed to know what people want? If someone right now is watching Woolie and really enjoys his stuff and is also working on a sci-fi project that tackles this sort of subject matter, how in the HELL are they supposed to know what Woolie and people like Woolie want if they don't *e l a b o r a t e* you scum-sucking brainlet?

[@SuperBrutalCabbage]

Woolie wants the reapers to be incomprehensible beyond human understanding, but at the same time loves sovereign who literally has multiple conversations with our main character even though in the grand scheme of things shepherd is completely insignificant.

[@stenzel27]

​@@joedatius This is Sci-fi, not fantasy. If you leave things unexplained you're basically saying it's magic. That is extremely unsatisfying because you are changing the rules. Sci Fi isn't supposed to have gods and magic, it's supposed to be based on reality. The best Sci Fi writers know which parts to explain and which to leave up to the imagination.

[@SeruraRenge11]

I can't take seriously anyone says that Sovereign's speech is so "powerful" because it's literally just a saturday morning cartoon villain talking to you. What he effectively says is "HUMANS YOU SO STUPID YOU DONT KNOW ME AND YOU DON'T KNOW MY PEOPLE WE HAVE THE BEST INTELECT [unnecessary exposition about mass relay technology]. OH YEAH WE DID THAT SHIT TOO LOL! YOU CAN'T BREAK THE CYCLE AND YOU CAN'T UNDERSTAND IT WE SMART YOU ARE NOT CUZ ORGANIC" If you think that's an exaggeration, I can post the entire dialog between him and Shepard, that's exactly what he says to him but with big fancy words. Would've been better if he had never talked honestly, when I was a teenager I almost shat my pants but I see it now and it's just so fucking stupid.

[@HalozillaEX]

Aria lives rent free in woolie’s head, istg

[@xsoultillerx]

shoutout the the forerunners from halo who were originally a vague ancient galactic civilization wiped out by the flood that might have been ancient humans in the bungie games only for the books and 343 to turn them into ancient aliens (which makes alot of the first 3 games not make any sense) and demolishing any mystique they might of had by over explaining their origins.

[@adams3627]

Mass Effect 3 was a big departure from prior Bioware games. It was the first time I can remember (other than the dlc characters in ME2) when I clicked on a PARTY MEMBER and didn't even get a dialogue wheel to pop up. I suspect the switch to Walters/Hudson is why there are suddenly a bunch of dialogue trees with no branches at all. They fundamentally don't seem to like writing branching dialogue paths, which is NOT GREAT FOR AN RPG

[@Hegataro]

A dialogue stick if you will

[@fillosof66689]

I think that some amount of random crew interaction lines being distributed that way was a good thing, actually. They could have easily left all of it and added a couple more dedicated branching conversations to get to what I would personally consider a near perfect RPG experience.

[@andy12345678912]

@@fillosof66689 even without a dialogue wheel with squad mates, the conversations with them were still really nice, and I think it's a good trade for having the party interact with other more in depth, where in 1 the most you got were the elevator conversations, and in 2 you barely had the second party member respond to an environmental line in the different hub areas.

[@JillLulamoon]

The horrific work crunch of having to make Mass effect 3 in half a year are why dialogue choices are so slimmed down. It likely saved a lot of time and money.

[@davidstinger1134]

That's because Mass Effect 3 was meant to come out in late 2011, while ME2 came out in early 2010. They just didn't have time to do anything.

[@kattastic9999]

There's a LOT that sucks, but Harbinger's reaction to you ruining basically everything being nothing more or less than "You have become an annoyance" FUCKS SO HARD

[@Trynt33]

THAT. THAT right there is part of the essence of cosmic horror. Like Cthulhu shouldn't see any human as more of a threat than we see fire ants getting on our food or a spider biting us in the night, and even then those spiders would probably be Mi-Go or Elder Things or anything well beyond human development, humans would probably be more like germs in terms of relative scale

[@jacksonboyd8630]

Idk, every time I hear “incomprehensible” I just roll my eyes. It just feels like a cop out to make something “mysterious”. I’d rather understand my enemy than have their motivations be unexplained. Because at that point you might as well be playing a zombie game

[@Trynt33]

"It is kind of a catch 22 with writing that even leaving something unknowable and ambiguous has chuds complaining about laziness or being a cop out even if usually writing an explanation just kneecaps the effect of it. It would be nice to write something truly alien without the concern of "What about the human main character and their potential love interests?" What ABOUT them? Like Lovecraft couldn't care!" Case in point and why we can't have these kind of stories told well, because people just haaave to know everything. At least Lovecraft passed before many big questions could get answered

[@jacksonboyd8630]

@@Trynt33 you’re really going to reply to a month old comment and act all pretentious? I’m not saying things have to be explained, it’s only when the “incomprehensible” part comes into play is where my problem stems from

[@hail2theprince93]

The fact that these kind of conversations are still being had about the decisions made regarding the story and ending of ME3 over a decade later really goes to show just how troubled, flawed, and at worst, downright terrible the writing could be. As Woolie said, it's kind of incredible how some of the highest highs of the entire trilogy are right there alongside the absolute lowest lows.

[@legoman7041]

Woolie continues his path of cowardice of refusing to accept that everything, even things that are seemingly unknowable, actually have a functional basis.

[@Lazypackmule]

You can logically parse how something works without being able to easily understand and relate to it as a normal ass human The Purge but robots is incredibly straightforward and understandable, the only notable aspect of it is that it's actually just weirdly illogical and inefficient for a group of hyper-intelligent robots to have come up with

[@unversedhero6028]

​@@Lazypackmule Having to create a head canon to explain what the writers don't isn't always a good idea.

[@Lazypackmule]

@@unversedhero6028 And the writers coming up with bad ideas because they don't want players to headcanon it is always a bad idea

[@unversedhero6028]

@@Lazypackmule And players thinking their head canon are better ideas than what the writers make/made is even worse.

[@Lazypackmule]

@@unversedhero6028 not when it's true, which in this case it is. Sorry they didn't like your favorite game, buddy

[@Hirochicken]

Thank you Pat for putting the context of the time into the conversation. It is very important to keep in mind with ME3.

[@zaneseibert]

I hope people don't convince Woolie to finish Attack on Titan. He was so happy pointing at it as an example of doing the big reveal right, but he doesn't know that it goes on to have the exact same problems he's talking about here.

[@ledzeppelinfan1001]

The big reveals in AoT work though? The only one that doesnt really work (spoilers) is when Eren "talks" to his dad and being the reason half the events happen. It didn't really work cause of the mechanics of paths and all that

[@7U57HTJRYGHG]

Nah man he has to know about the stupid ass worm and the bird

[@ultraspinalki11]

​@@ledzeppelinfan1001 Adding Time travel shenanigans into any story often results in absolute, sheer nonsense.

[@neloverg3774]

I laughed the moment he pointed to AOT. Because thate exact moment is when it really atarted to fall down hill, the story fell off hard imo.

[@zaneseibert]

​@@ledzeppelinfan1001 I've been chuckling at the phrase "They created the zombie apocalypse to steal the oil from the Jews" for like 3 solid years now and that was before I found out Eren was a Kingdom Hearts villain with motivations similar to bad sci-fi AI. It pretty much disintigrates as soon as the time skip happens.

[@Azaro_64]

Man how I wish Woolie had played Dead Space 2 and 3 by now so that The Markers are also dragged into this conversation lol

[@AwkwardLoser]

XFiles worked because in the 90s and before no one really asked questions with SciFi. Lost fans had the internet and wanted answers and either didn’t get them or hated the answers and “answers” have in many wheys ruined modern SciFi.

[@RipOffProductionsLLC]

The fact the writers didn't have answers to mysteries they presented as mysteries that folks in-universe want answered, is the hight of bad decision making...

[@psykomancer4420]

The Lost creators leaned so hard on there being answers to the bs they were writing, I can't blame fans for expecting something.

[@jimbob1862]

​@@chaospudding As someone who saw Lost like a decade after it ended, it feels like a much more cohesive show than I was led to believe. I feel like a ton of Losts issues in terms of reception is specifically tied to it being an annual series with breaks where fans had nothing to do BUT theorize. It still has a lot of issues near its end, but at the same time the ending itself I felt was very easy to digest because I hadn't spent years guessing answers to questions with generally simple but interesting answers.

[@XShrike0]

This video has me excited to the one where we get to see Woolie's reaction to the ending of ME3.

[@xsoultillerx]

the story about troy baker reminds me so much of the story of how ray chase ended up on fallout: the frontier. according to the team they approached him for a role in the game and he only agreed to do on the condition that he was the main villain and his character wore sunglasses. on the topic of rival characters i feel like they don't really work in RPGs because in most RPGs the PC is a blank slate for the player to make their own character from and a rival character has to parallel the main character in some way via abilities or background which leads to mixed results like kai leng, scarlet, J'Ula and ulysses.

[@Kriss_ch.]

Basically. You can do it in a JRPG(like FF7), or whatever game where you're playing a more set character(Geralt has a guy that's definitely that), but I don't think Kai Leng works. I think the villain of Citadel certainly does, though. Although it's very silly.

[@lordkrauser]

Then there's Zenos, who manages to be the rival character for the PC and also reflects the kind of player who cares about strength above all else and cares not for the story/cares of the world.

[@TYGERthaGOD]

This entire idea is so true, and its what ruined the backrooms. The backrooms just being a creepy liminal space thing that you could just fall into was a great concept on its own, but the moment people started making rules and monsters and other bullshit ruined that concept.

[@Trynt33]

Children ruin everything

[@NapalmJustice]

I worry this conversation will lead to Woolie having less fun than he would have otherwise. I really hope he continues to have a great time all the way past the credits rolling.

[@joedatius]

Why? There is nothing fun to have around this point. Woolies hitting the point of a massive quality drop

[@RookieBalboa]

@@joedatius The game is still fun and has plenty of great character moments even up until the credits, such as the last charge with your romance on the team, Garrus' talk before the charge, etc

[@Lazypackmule]

@@RookieBalboa I don't think there's any fun to be had with Reggie's romance lmao

[@Trynt33]

I hope he gets to Andromeda to see the Ugandan Knuckles race

[@SeruraRenge11]

Pat acts like First Contact was some big new change to the Borg but before that we already got both the Hugh episode and that fucking terrible Descent 2-parter with Lore.

[@unboundsky9999]

The Reapers being a lovecraftian horror was a mistake. You can’t have your main antagonistic force that you are supposed to kill be completely unexplained by the end of the story. It would make the victory over them feel unsatisfying. However, when you explain what they are, you ruin the Lovecraftian mystery. It’s a catch 22 and there was no great way to handle them without upsetting a bunch of people.

[@THExMRxLOKKI]

Yea, ending of BirdBox had a similar problem. Wanted a horrible spooky unstoppable monster, AND a happy hopeful ending? But to get your happy hopeful ending, you have to disregard how dangerous the monster is, sooo…?

[@AdrianArmbruster]

I feel the compromise here is to imply a greater, unknowable motive to the human-reaper instrumentality stuff (and at least seeing the end results, even if the why is only speculation) without delving into a long preachyt lecture of, for example, the Very Important Sci Fi Theme of meatbags versus toasters.

[@Yal_Rathol]

the example i go to of explaining the unexplainable is xenoblade 1. everything just clicks into place with the line "i am the administrative computer of a phase-transition experiment facility, but that will mean little to you". it works, i think, because the characters still view the world as an unknowable place, but the people playing it have the dramatic irony to know what all of those words mean.

[@cruherrx]

Here’s the thing: no answer anyone gives you will be as good as the one you made up in your head. I played the mass effect trilogy back to back to back for the first time in like 2014. I didn’t give myself a decade to build up what the Reapers were in my head, so I wasn’t disappointed when I got the answer. The answer they give you ties into a recurring motif in all the games-people create things to make their lives easier and then those things betray them. It’s a cycle that repeats over and over in the Mass Effect universe. Javik even reasserts this to you about civilizations from his era that went to war with their machines. One of the big story missions is the Quarians vs the geth. Are the reapers the unknowable cosmic deities you wanted them to be? No, and for the story Mass Effect is telling they can’t be that. They are, however, thematically consistent with what the universe has established and work for the story the writers are trying to tell.

[@sonicboomers122]

Geths vs quarians contradicts that so hard as to make the theme nonsense. Even then that does not square with the logic of human reapers. Or how selective reapers are with choosing races to make into reapers. It is circle of stupid.

[@cruherrx]

@@sonicboomers122 the point of a motif in a story is to show different permutations of the same idea. You use the same reoccurring elements to tell different versions of the story. As an example, when Naruto does it with the team of “aloof cool kid who is better than everyone”, “energetic happy kid who tries hard and is kinda mid” and “cute girl who the first kid doesn’t notice, but the second kid likes”, it sucks because Kishimoto just told the same exact story each time. In Mass Effect, when they do the “AI turns against its creators” thing, it plays out differently each time, and with enough differences such that they’re notable and distinct. The Reapers are preserving life. What does that mean? How are they going about it? Etc. If the geth really wanted to, in their bid to help the Quarians they could slaughter them all and then reengineer them genetically since that’s an option in this universe. Would that be okay? Is going to such extremes correct? Or would it be better to slowly help them over centuries to recover? These are the nuances that make the recurring motif notable.

[@TheTrueRandomGamer]

"How can the highs be so high, but the lows be so low?" I ask myself that every time I reread Dark Tower 7. Never seen another story with such a gulf between perfectly executed moments and horrible garbage fires.

[@TheTrueRandomGamer]

@chaospudding It's frustrating because when he talks about story decisions not being "good or bad but RIGHT" that's only selectively true.

[@kricku]

Gotta get back on that Dark Tower. Haven't read since I was a kid. Sounds like trash, thx 👍

[@TheMilhouseExperience]

He changed after he got hit by that van.

[@TheTrueRandomGamer]

@@kricku Only a section of it in one book. You can have fun with a lot of amazing stuff beforehand.

[@IShadowStrykerI]

I genuinely dislike how writers often don't care about how the story went before they appeared it reminds me of the Flash show where they set up a mystery surrounding the flash's disappearance during crisis in episode 1 and kept mentioning it for 5-6 season and then when they did crisis they just threw it all away because they didn't want to to be "beholden" to the plotlin

[@alsaiduq4363]

29:00 The marketing for stranger of paradise had to be changed because people got Jack's big reveal to fast. So it went from Who is Jack to Why Jack did it.

[@beerasaurus]

Great discussion

[@FourLetterLWord]

Its not even about being "unknowable," just of sufficiently insurmountable scale. And the problem is a matter of gamification. The reality is extremely simple: intelligent life is a crop that the Reapers planted, fertilized, and let grow and they have come to harvest their crop. But how then does a grain of wheat stop a combine thresher? How does something the size of a grain even begin to conceive of an action it can take that can hurt, not just the machines or tools used to harvest, not even the farmhands using those tool, but the Farmer that owns the land --who employs the farmhands, who supplies the tools, whose very existence incentivizes the creation and design of those tools, who sets the countless dominoes in motion that ends with the reaping of billions of grains.... And then how can you ever boil that singular grain's experience down into a series of user inputs that resemble anything you'd call a "game?" The Reapers were never going to be as cool in actual narrative as they were just as a general concept.

[@Crouza]

The unknowable eldritch threat cam be done, but it just takes a lot of note keeping to deliver good payoffs later. FFXIV had this with Ascians, where you go from knowing nothing to knowing a lot, and it's some of the best writing in video games period.

[@lordkrauser]

Plus they managed to make a sympathetic Cosmic Horror Entity which is crazy to say the least.

[@Fluttersniper]

To me, keeping the original motivation of “trying to stop the early death of the universe due to the mass effect” would have solved everything about the Reapers. As far as motivations go, “stopping the end of everything” might not be unknowable, but it is of such grand scale that human minds have trouble comprehending it.

[@MattManDX1]

There's a Japanese series called Getter Robo that delves into something along those lines in an interesting way.

[@SeruraRenge11]

@@MattManDX1 except the conclusion to that is the end of the universe is AWESOME because humanity will evolve to the point that we'll be the sole survivors of it, led by the power of the Getter Rays. And that all other life should stop trying to stand in the way of our ascent to the apex of lifeforms.

[@charlestonobryant807]

@@SeruraRenge11onestly that’s just as bad because if that’s the case why didn’t they just disable the Mass Relays? We even learn in ME1 they partially helped make the creation of them and cultivated their use.

[@SeruraRenge11]

@@charlestonobryant807 Did you mean to reply to someone else?

[@Muninnnr]

One series that handles the unknowable surprisingly well is, funnily enough, Fallout. The Fallout universe has a lot of mysteries: from aliens to magical ancient cults to more mundane questions like "why did Vault Tec do their experiments" and "what caused the apocalypse". A lot of the mysteries in Fallout can be explained away as lazy writing, with the writers just wanting to put something cool in the game without spending too much time to explain it, but these occasional weird unexplained bits really help to elevate Fallout from being a generic drop post-apocalypse so being a fascinating world where you want to explore everything just to see what you'll run into next. A world which people can make hour-long lore analysis videos on KZbin where they link together seemingly inconsequential stuff like statues on buildings to ancient cults and speculating about how the pre-apocalypse world was run by Illuminati-members. With that said, I haven't played 76 so that might have changed. For all I know, there might be a story line in that game where you meet Cthulu and learn that he was the CEO of Vault Tec and caused the nuclear apocalypse for shits and giggles.

[@TheMilhouseExperience]

*cough* The wave existence in Xenogears *cough*

[@thelaughingrouge]

Exactly! Thank you.

[@PMTriox]

The thing is there WAS a motivation behind all of it, it was changed at the last minute, presumably because a script got leaked and the egos of Matt Walters and Casey Hudson couldn't abide their story being spoiled so threw it all together without input or editing.

[@WantSomeWhiskey818]

Ive never been this excited to see someone get disappointed by something. Mass Effect 3 I think in the big picture is just fine but watching people go through the train wreck is absolutely fascinating to watch.

[@CameronAB122]

Babylon 5 and the Freespace series of games does the unknowable and powerful alien enemy a lot better than what mass effect ended up doing.

[@aarojpoll]

I'm surprised none of them mentioned blood-borne something that goes into these unknowable things but then explain to them just enough to do not ruin the backdrop of the world

[@Kriss_ch.]

I'm glad none of the old ones ever got up and said "WE ARE BEYOND YOUR UNDERSTANDING HUNTER"

[@aarojpoll]

@@Kriss_ch. I kind of would like to see Reggie playthrough bloodborne and to get Woolie's opinion on it now since Mass effect with such a let down

[@darthekul1]

Its hilarious woolies brain shut down immideatly because he learned anything about the reapers cause it ruined the mystery but came so hard in his pants in halo when learning about the flood and mendicant bias and the forerunners , when it is basically the exact same story

[@LookADistarction]

It’s all about execution and presentation. One still feels grandiose and the other becomes banal.

[@darthekul1]

​@@LookADistarction the difference is the ending of mass effect without leviathan still makes the reapers lame and they get taken out by a vague mguffin , acting like the ending without the dlc and the context for the dumb ai death cycle harvest thing is better is dumb(not saying u are) if the reapers are just squids who run around killing the galaxy every 50k years , they are less interesting than a power ranger or Saturday cartoon morning villain and far more 2 dimensional , like except for the most recent picard appearance, the borg should have gone away , but if they were just a damn murder cube the entire series , no one would care , I know where daleks came from and why and when , but there's still so much story potential about things u don't know . Fighting an enemy that is basically just an embodied natural disaster either means u can only use it for a limited time or u have to give them reasons to exist , and them being dumb robots who think they are God's killing everyone so everyone doesn't die , Is amazing cause they go on long philosophical tirades about inevitability, but they are totally like every other race , full of shit , woolie is literally just mad they told us anything , he didn't even criticize the actual answer just the fact they dared give us one

[@SeruraRenge11]

@@darthekul1 Except Sovereign IS a saturday morning cartoon villain. His entire speech in ME1 that everyone creams themselves to is him effectively saying "HUMANS YOU SO STUPID YOU DONT KNOW ME AND YOU DON'T KNOW MY PEOPLE WE HAVE THE BEST INTELECT [unnecessary exposition about mass relay technology]. OH YEAH WE DID THAT SHIT TOO LOL! YOU CAN'T BREAK THE CYCLE AND YOU CAN'T UNDERSTAND IT WE SMART YOU ARE NOT CUZ ORGANIC" If you think I'm exaggerating I can post his conversation with Shepard in its entirety and you'll see that's what he's saying, just with big fancy words. And I disagree completely, having the Reapers just be the universe's apex predator that show up once every 50,000 years because their hibernation is over and it's time to eat, is infinitely more lovecraftian than what we got. The problem is you're trying to make them a "villain" but in that scenario they aren't a villain, they are just hungry. THAT is what cosmic horor as Lovecraft wrote it is about, the idea that we are just insignificant specks in the universe that the higher lifeforms that are out there barely even acknowledge our presence, we're as worth consideration of to them as an ant was when you accidentally stepped on it. You don't need to give them characterization, you just need to say "they're coming, they're hungry, and we can't stop them." Of course if I wrote ME I would've made the player lose, because ultimately we'd be as powerless to them as the ants are to us, to show how powerless we are in the grand scheme of things. And everyone would hate it on release but 10 years later people would praise it as a nihilistic masterpiece and say everyone who didn't like it was "filtered"

[@HavenKhaos]

I have a great example for Pat in the "Explaining doesn't always ruin the magic." The Ancients in FFXIV are MORE interesting the more we learned about them, than they were when we had bits and pieces, and 1000% more than when we didn't know what the Ascians were up to. There is argument that the explanation for what caused the Final Days is less interesting than if it were... Jenova or Lavos, but that's only because those references would have been cool.

[@aftertone3146]

I think the Final Days make sense given what you are let to know about Creation Magicks and its like "yeah it seems like a natural end if you were to go off that end" (to not talk with spoilers)

[@onimaxblade8988]

Luckily JENOVA and Lavos never imply to have explanations or reasons. And Jenova especially is practically conveyed as a parasite or virus.

[@altosforteaquax5083]

Perfect thumbnail image for this topic. In me1 "you cant possible understand us." Me2 : you learn how they are made Me3 : you learn why they were made and that you can just kill them like anything else albeit with a few extra really hard steps.

[@unversedhero6028]

ME1: You kill him after he talks a big game, also it's his third time being thwarted in this cycle and it was do bad that he basically paved the road for his entire races defeat.

[@altosforteaquax5083]

@@unversedhero6028 ME1: The Normandy strikes the final blow after Shepard weakens him with no small help from the Citadel and, if I remember correct, Arcturus fleets. If you're going to , um actually me, do it right.

[@ZdkDzk]

My go to example of giving the alien an explanation is Rigour from the DnD podcast Counter/Weight. Rigour isn't an eldritch entity. it's just a complex employee time keeping machine that got out of control. But it's still alien in how it's presented and what it does. Rigour's sole purpose is to optimize efficiency. It can talk but it rarely speaks. It can move but it rarely moves. It can think, but not like a person. It's a weight in the back of your mind that pressures you into working. And every second you're near it that pressure grows, compelling you to give all of your self to your work, to the exclusion of everything else, until the moment you drop dead. It's the feeling of obligation that pushes you to your limit work; the exhaustion and despair of a never ending grind. The concept of rigour given form and forced onto you.

[@psykomancer4420]

You can give an unknowable horror an origin and make it still work. You know the Many in System Shock 2 are made by Shodan, but how they think is alien to you, keeping an element of the mystery, and their idea of "helping" humanity is pretty horrific. They also rarely talk to you, you mostly hear from people who are already infected and how it feels to be connected to the Many. But I think the setup for the Reapers was too good for this to work. The conversation with Sovereign would make any origin story feel like a letdown. But still, it could not have hurt to keep the Reapers more distant. Bioware wasn't even trying in ME3. Like maybe they only show up on a planet once resistance is completely crushed? Maybe they sit outside the Milky Way, controlling the war from afar? Or maybe they just don't chase you around the galaxy map?

[@archduke0000]

Oh no, not Avatar Wan. C'mon Woolie, you're better than that.

[@jled787]

KL in the 2nd book (his first appearance) was like a relentless Bounty Hunter for TIM. He fully believes in human supremacy and acts like everything about the alien races are nothing or meaningless. KL in the 3rd book is just a massive shift in character where he has nightly blussy, does red sand and people to order around to do the dirty work for him. Gone was the elite agent of Cerberus where he's the antithesis of a young Anderson in his prime to barely a shadow of his former self in the next book. Anderson and Sanders were both responsible for why KL's limbs got cut so he would become a cyborg in ME3. All this is attributed to the change of writers from Drew Karpyshyn to William C. Dietz.

[@TheJadedJames]

From the very start of Mass Effect, I’d always seen “why are the Reapers doing this” a core mystery of the universe and not something that could be written off as “they are just space Cthulhu. Don’t overthink it.” ME1 starts with the whole premise that the Reapers have been deliberately engineering human and alien life for them to be easier to kill and all the mass effect technology they left behind was essentially a trap. The fact that they are operating so specifically and not just random robots that you happened to come across and now want to kill you begs the question of why. For me personally, the fact that they are the result of a broken attempt to fix organic vs machine conflicts isn’t the worst explanation. The issues with the execution of ME3’s ending go beyond that. (The biggest issue with the ending is that your choices through the series don’t feel like they impacted the final battle enough). “Who created the Reapers” is kind of a dumb question because the obvious answer is “an alien race too ancient to be relevant to the present day.” It’s fine that they put this background in for people who felt they needed to have it. But I didn’t feel like the story was incomplete without it due to the very obvious blank you can fill.

[@sirlenemodesto2665]

I wonder if Troy wanted to be some weirdo alien that was a pain for Shepherd to deal with instead of just the "cool" nemesis. Like a crogan with a few voice lines istead of shit vergil.

[@imageispower20]

If you want Unknowable space aliens in scifi that can be combated, Shivans from Freespace are what you want.

[@gvirusqueen3559]

Look into the original Reaper “Dark Energy” plot. What could’ve been…

[@legoman7041]

I think the writers came out and explicitly said they didn't think of that

[@JillLulamoon]

Still would've sucked ass.

[@charlestonobryant807]

That was scrapped during ME2’s development and Drew Karpryshan himself said it was only conceptual, and it still doesn’t solve the problem

[@unversedhero6028]

Look into Andromeda, that's where that plot went.

[@The_Devil_Breaker_]

This reminds me of The Three Body Problem

[@SeruraRenge11]

There's not really such a thing as "the unknowable", there can just be motivations that you can't understand how they logically reached that conclusion. When Lovecraft made something "unknowable", he wasn't saying we CAN'T understanding it, but rather we SHOULDN'T because it's so horrific that to understand such a truth brings one to madness.

[@FutaSnek]

Gotta love it

[@contardation]

Sovereign giving you this incredible monologue about how vast and unknowable the reapers are. A scene that is easily the highlight of the entire series. Turns out not only are they knowable but Mass Effect 3 is going to go into excruciating detail about how knowable they are. Always made me sad they ditched the original ideas for ME3 foreshadowed in ME2 with Tali and dark energy.

[@juultoo]

The Dark Energy plot was itself full of holes and would have made for just as unsatisfying an ending.

[@vulpinepanther2001]

Honestly, that conversation isn't a highlight, it's what TURNS the Reapers into a knowable threat with motive and personality. If Cthulhu chatted you up about how he's going to eat your soul and you can't comprehend how smart and scary he is, he'd be a lot less scary and unknowable.

[@PaladinGuy]

I think Babylon 5 had great examples of doing eldritch beings as the big bad with The Shadows and (no spoilers) another race that we are lead to believe are benevolent but are far less so.

[@sunkeyavad6528]

2:05 The highs can be so high, because of some leftover still set up by ME1&2 and the lows are so low because they're written by the B-movie gaggle of incompetents of ME3. I hope for them that ME3 doesn't also ruin ME1&2 for them, like it did for me. (The great setups & lore of 1&2 turning into what happens in 3 killed off my joy of 1&2 because those feel hollow now, knowing they either amount to nothing or get straight up contradicted and curb stomped by 3.)

[@leithaziz2716]

Dude, we get it, but if the LP is anything to go by they've been having a great time. No one blames you for being justifiably frustrated, but when you act spitefull it's hard to take you seriously. If the game was absolutely garbage they wouldn't have trekked through it this far, previous writers's influence or not. At the end of the day, this was a project with a short development time and several writers leaving mid-project. I don't think anyone wanted it to turn out the way it was. (which obviously doesn't excuse the result, but it makes the "why" pretty obvious with the context behind the scenes in development)

[@megamike15]

the thing with me is when dragon age does it it feels more natural but when mass effect does it it feels like retconning.

[@azurewraith2585]

a good parallel to the reapers is the Tyranids from Warhammer. They get set up as this unknowable alien threat yet because we are given so little actual mystery that they boil down to their base actions which is just to eat everything. Mystery is created by showing depth not obscuring it

[@MattManDX1]

Quick reminder that Sovereign was a chump who got killed by a soldier with a rifle and his small stealth frigate backup

[@joedatius]

What are you talking about it literally took the entire fleet and the Normandy combined

[@Jgt612]

Pat: “I disagree with that comment.” Also Pat: lays out exhaustive context for why the comment is correct. Patrick, disagree means you think the opposite, not the same but louder.

[@KleinerKokiri]

I was waiting and waiting, and I am glad pat mentioned it. HOWEVER. Its not as much as a band-aid, as it is... "how do we sell this dlc? What will get peoples attention?". Thats how I see it anyways. People were angry. How do you sell post-game dlc to angry people.

[@CielBlanche]

I don't think over-explanation is the problem as much as bad explanations are. Even in "unknowable" scenarios, you can have a really good explanation that exists on in subtexts and inference. The characters never find out in a big villain monologue, but thoughtful viewers can piece it together with some investigation. That's a good way to do it.

[@ledzeppelinfan1001]

10:50 you chose the worst example though

[@nahnah390]

Just once I'd like to have these "Super advanced unknowable entities" just go "Actually our motivations are a mix of economic interests, religious zealotry, eugenics, paranoia, pride and apathy towards your lives." just have an absurd complex mix of motivations that humans have a hard time comprehending all at once even about themselves, because despite being much more complex organisms than us, they still found a way to communicate in our language. Thus they very likely CAN explain why they're doing what they're doing, but doing so would take a few hours to get into all the details since it's actually a mix of various different motivations for different individuals all involved in the discovery of tiny sapient life.

[@darthekul1]

Its honestly better for the space gods to be full of shit , there are so many stories with entities who basically just want to do stupid shit like enslave and kill everyone but they tell themselves its a deep philosophical problem, like the problem with amalie in death stranding is the story doesnt treat her like an out of touch evil dumbass , it acts like her whole final extinction thing makes any sense , refusing to put any detail or meaning or explanation in a story to avoid losing "mystique " is honestly pointless af . Woolie literally just hates it cause it gave us an answer, when he doesnt know how bad the story is wituhout it lmao

[@SeruraRenge11]

Making them space gods is in itself the problem, because then you attribute it all to a grand plan. They could've just been the universe's apex predators who come out of hibernation every 50,000 years and consume all advanced sentient life because we're their food. That's actual lovecraftian horror, the idea that we're so small and insignificant that everything we've acommplished in all of our history is little more than a higher life form's food. The entire point of cosmic horror is to show out pointless our existence is in the grand scheme of the universe and we could all be consumed by a giant space squid tomorrow with it just viewing us as another mouthful on his fork. Everything went downhill once Sovereign was allowed to talk.

[@onimaxblade8988]

Amelie isn't that confusing all in all. She wanted to study mass extinctions and prevent them cause she had nightmares about them (probably the one she herself causes, in her case) and was a psychopath doing so. She killed Sam as a baby felt really guilty about it, gave him a second chance at life Didn't know that that would cause the Death Stranding but it did. Basically she was fated to end the world, and she did and she will. Concludes that Humanity is Doomed Also is... Painfully lonely because of how Time Moves on the Beach. (While Bridget's side lived a normal life, Amelie's side lived a life that felt like an eternity of nothingness. And then Bridget kickes the bucket eventually, obviously.) So decides to just accelerate the Last Stranding using Higgs and the Network. In the end she calls it off and cuts off all the beaches to herself. Which means that she'll be permanently alone for eternity but Humanity lives.

[@darthekul1]

@@onimaxblade8988 I get and agree with most of that my point is that the whole thing around the extinctions makes no sense the way she describes how the survivors and next generation evolve after the last dies in a social dawrinist sense applying it to actual evolution makes no sense at all . Amelie deciding to do the last stranding cause she is "bored" or done with suffering and just wants everyone to rest and stop the wheel , sure , but she's acting as both a god who is apparently saying this is how the universe works but also making decisions that affect the outcome and being affected by them , she can't be in the system and above it so she seems like a crazy god/woman , like if a spirit of vengeance in a comic book started killing everyone who sins at all cause their family was murdered but the original vengeance mandate was punish just bad people . Amalie decided to make it the last stranding cause she became a nihilist , and left the fate of the world up to a single guy she shared a personal connection to , as his mommy sister , her whole life as bridgette was bad decisions , even if she meant well .

[@darthekul1]

@@onimaxblade8988 by confusing I meant cause it's a kojima game and a grain of sand I missed could explain everything , and I really liked death stranding and even the ending part with Amalie/bridgette . Amalie is a person who says the universe bestowed a purpose on her , as if it's "natural law" or the "will of god" but allows her human emotions to both make her start the death stranding by creating the chiral network , keep sam alive and raise him and who knows how long he was the failsafe for , and then decide to end everything and even if the next stranding was gonna be the final one no matter what and she didn't make it the final stranding , she still sped up the date out of human pain , basically she can't be both a un knowable extention of the universe who is just following cosmic orders , and a woman who just wants suffering to end and has multiple changing and conflicting opinions , I don't mean she's a bad charachter I mean she's internally logically inconsistent and crazy and her points about the universe are all informed by living as a human but she says it with the authority of a God

[@onimaxblade8988]

@@darthekul1 I feel like there's more than one character out there that ends up falling in similar traps. It's a problem with Prophecy maybe, to some extent. Like how GoW Ragnarok I guess talks about how the problem is people are predictable and will always make similar decisions that lead to events. Amalie is a particularly shizophrenic character though, yeah. You really can't get a good handle on how much she is human or how much she is an emotionally distanced harbinger of doom and whatnot. And that kind of confliction can be interesting, but it can also be very messy, and it's prob more the latter in Amalie's case

[@fallenangelzelos2807]

I feel like my opinion about whether they should have kept the Reaper's background a secret or not is a bit skewed because the explanation we got in itself was...not great. I feel like this conversation could have been a lot more interesting if it had been better written.

[@attackofthecopyrightbots]

Amazing that woolie hasn’t talked about me3 since the first time

[@scarletpsychowolf3578]

I just got back from Reggie's anti-harem meltdown from getting locked out of his romance options because of Steve XD

[@williampounds5191]

Reapers were never unknowable eldritch beings though, it's so weird Woolie gets hung up on this idea of Sovereign being interesting and unknowable. Sovereign was always a very knowable giant robot who made stupid saturday morning cartoon villain speeches about murdering everyone. Just because you don't know the motivations of a creature YET and they seem massively powerful does not by default mean they are UNKNOWABLE motivations that you CANNOT UNDERSTAND EVER. Woolie just totally went off on his assumptions apropos of NOTHING and I STILL don't know what "the promise of Sovereign" was that he keeps repeating.

[@7fatrats]

Man who said lovecraftian horrors cant exist in a long-term format should really learn a little warhammer lore. 30 years, the tyranids are still completely unknowable.

[@MB-sq7yn]

I think Eldritch Horror works best when the horror and the goals of said horror are knowable, but the process/work of logic to get to those points is confounding/confrontational. The Thing and the Brethren Moons are 'easy' to understand what they do and why they're doing it, that's not really the scary part. The scary is seeing what they have done/can do/will do to get to their goals.

[@Doingdis]

This is like when hitchhikers guide explained 42.

[@SeruraRenge11]

But that once's a farce on purpose, not really the same thing.

[@Zeikier]

This helps explain why ME3 has so many beats in its main plot that just feel like carbon copies of ME1's.

[@angrybrony]

i think the flood are a good example of an unknowable monster being explained.