Papa Rodin Reviews - Mass Effect 3' ending
Greetings, Steemians and Steemettes!
After yesterdays post, I found myself thinking about bots quite a while. Whether you love it or hate it, you can't deny that it is a fascinating topic in one way or the other. Of course, bots on steemit come in quite a few different shapes and sizes and can even serve different purposes. Which reminded me about a game that I played a few years ago. If you are into gaming, chances are that you probably heard about it.
It is called Mass Effect 3.
Oh yeah, spoilers ahead. Consider yourself warned.
50 Greyshades of Rodin
What is a Mass Effect?
Mass Effect is a series of video games developed by BioWare. Set in a science fiction setting. earth managed to salvage some relics of ancient alien races that allowed them to advance their own technology. Being able to advance further into the galaxy made them get in contact with several other alien races that are part of a council to which the human race will eventually belong to as well. The main character of the first three games is a human named "Shepard". The gender is up for the player to decide.
"Decide" being the big word here. Look forward to seeing that word a lot because it is going to be the theme of this post.
The thing that makes Mass Effect a great series is the way your decisions will have impact on the way your story develops and how NPCs will interact with you. You can be a Paragon, a real hero always looking for the right path and inspire everyone you come across. If you dislike being a goody two shoes, you can be a renegade who solves problems with brutality and violence. Most of the time, there are also paths in between that you can take as well.
And what is the big bad evil here?
Machines, son. Not nano machines, but that may be a topic for another day. At the end of the first Mass Effect, it is revealed that an army of ginormous machines exist. They are called reapers and have existed for a ridiculously long time. Explaining their agenda will give you a solid idea for how long they have been around and kicking.
Picture found on smashpad.com.
That's a reaper. Looks nice, doesn't it? There are quite many of them. They have been created by an ancient alien race millions of years ago. That alien race called "Leviathans", was remarkably smart and strong. And quite stupid as well. See, in their time, they saw organic lifeforms being killed by synthetic lifeforms of their own creation. If you are thinking about Terminator or Detroid: Become Human now, you are thinking in the right direction. These smart not so smart Leviathans came up with the only logical solution.
They created a synthetic lifeform in their own image themselves!
And when they did, they tasked it with eradicating every living race that has advanced in a way that allows them to create synthetics themselves or may be on the verge of doing so. The Leviathans shot themselves in the knees by doing that because the Reapers, their own creations, started by going after their creators first. After that, they crossed the entire galaxy, slaughtered every race that was technologically advanced enough to qualify for a good old slaughtering and after that, they just chilled somewhere in dark space for some 50.000 years.
This has happened countless of times already by the time the Mass Effect trilogy takes place. Now make a wild guess what time is approaching over the course of these three games?
Rage against the machine!
The human race as well as the other council races of course all qualify for a good ol' slaughtering, but aside from the humans, nobody takes that threat seriously because the Reapers were actually somewhat subtle about themselves. Also, the other alien races were remarkably dense about the topic, but let us put that to the side.
As you may have guessed, there are other machines of different kinds in the game as well. AIs exist and one of them is actually a great aid for your course starting the second game and ends up becoming a playable character in the third game.
There is also a machine race called "Geth" which has been created by one of the other races of the Universe, the Quarians. Their history is fairly straight forward as well. They created the Geth, shit went down and now the Quarians have no planet anymore. The Geth are still around, kicking and are considered to be a plague by everyone.
Over the courses of the game, we start to see the different kinds of machines and races in a different light. Especially the aforementioned AI and one of the Geth who joins you temporarily put things into weird perspectives that aren't immediately clear for everyone.
Now you know everything you need to know about Mass Effect, so let us get to the actual point of interest.
The Ending!
Everyone who played the trilogy will tell you how disappointed the ending of Mass Effect 3 was. The game was supposed to be the great finale, the culmination of every choice, every decision you have made and people were looking forward to have their minds blowing away.
Instead, the game offered you one last choice:
"What color do you want to see your ending in?"
It sounds stupid, but that is what it really came down to. The actual results for us as a player felt hardly different in the grand scheme of things, mostly because of poor representation. Basically, everything explodes and depending on the decision you made, everything explodes in a blue, green or red color.
Of course, these do have some deeper meaning and as you read on, you will find out that these possibilities may end up being somewhat relevant for us as we use steemit as well.
The "Control" ending - presented to you by the color blue!
In this ending, Shepard basically puts in his intellect and character into the reaper network, thus controlling it, causing them to seize their assault on the civilized worlds. He dies in the process. Better get used to this, there are no happy ends for Shepard.
This ending has some good sides to it as well as some bad sides. The good is pretty obvious. The killing stops, the war is over. The bad news is that the big bad reapers are still around and active and, while controlled by the new Shepard Reaper AI, nobody can say for sure whether this AI will remain sentient and friendly towards organics in the long run. On the other hand, the Reapers, these huge weaponized machine life forms, are still of some service. They helped repair a lot of the technology that has been destroyed during the war, re-establishing communications and intergalactic transport.
The "Destroy" ending - presented to you by the color red!
Following this ending, Shepard just destroys the reapers. Doing so also causes everything else that is remotely synthetic or robotic to also be destroyed. There is also a very slight chance that Shepard might survive if he chose to do this, but let us ignore him/her for now.
This ending is good because it puts an immediate end to the reaper threat. Which is good. They have been murdering and killing for an amount of times we humans couldn't even dream to comprehend. On the other hand, frying the reapers also get's rid of a lot of other machine lifeforms that you learned to love and care for. Choosing this end will also destroy the technology that enables intergalactic travel, so keeping in touch with others will become a bit harder than before!
The "Synthesis" ending - presented to you by the color green!
I have no idea how anyone came up with this particular idea, but yeah, sure, let's talk about it. By using some cyberspace magic that I don't even want to try to understand, Shepard sets something in motion that causes organic lifeforms and synthetic lifeforms to develop treats of the opposite. No more organics, no more synthetics, everyone is now.....both. Which is indicated by them having some green....things on their models.
The good thing about this is that now everyone has a mutual understanding for each other. Also, Reapers aren't killing anyone anymore and everyone lives in piece and unity. Except Shepard. S/He's dead for good. He doesn't even get the AI treatment from the blue ending.
In summary, this is what we are looking at:
Picture found on Eurokeks.com.
What, you thought I was kidding? I told you that the games ending was terrible from a narrative point of view. That doesn't mean that we as a community can't learn from it.
Taste the rainbow!
While not being a threat to every lifeform now, in the past or the future (yet), bots are a problem here on steemit. People either hate it or profit from it, but I don't think that anyone is particularly enjoying them existing. What I want to do now is applying the different colors of the Mass Effect Ending to our situation of Steemit.
Destroying bots - brought to you by the color red!
The thing that get's asked for the most around here and arguably, understandably so. I am not a big fan of bit bots myself, but if we get rid of bots all together, we may end up hitting a couple bystanders that we actually do like. As much as I wouldn't mind getting rid of bid bots, I do not want @steembasicincome to be hit in that purge. Nor do I want to miss out on @dustsweeper giving value to votes where there hasn't been any.
Suddenly, the whole affair doesn't seem so black and white anymore and we are in need to compromise in some way, shape or form.
Control bots - brought to you by the color blue!
One could argue that this ending has already been chosen. Bots are controlled by those that created them and make them a nice profit. People wealthy or influential enough to make common use of their services leave the rest of steemits civilization wanting.
Of course, control could change. Creating that "No-Bots" tab could create a huge power shift against these bots, forcing their controllers and users to lose their grasp on this platform. There are many more ways a shift like this could happen and some of them haven't been discussed about, either because it is impossible or would end up even worse than what we are already dealing with.
Synergise with bots - brought to you by the color green!
As terrible as the Synthesis ending was ingame, I think that for the moment, this is probably the best course of action for us. Bots exist, as do people who abuse them and that is a reality that, at least for the moment, we can't change. Leaving any kind of moral implications aside, bots are useful.
Be it the ones I mentioned, @dustsweeper and @steembasicincome or the dreaded bid bots, whether you like them or not, they are useful and can help a great deal in making your performance around here better. The same can be said for services like steem auto or curation trails and whatever else you can think of.
So what is the big take away here?
The rainbow may have more colors and possibilities to it, but for the moment, I want to stick to the three colors I presented to you. And I, personally, think that for the moment, the green color is the best way to go. I have been around the blog for only four and a half weeks. Observing comment sections and posts have shown me that development on this platform has been rather slow over the last couple of weeks and months. There also seems no way for telling if and when that will change.
With that being said, I am not the one for telling you what you should do or think. If you want to become rich by creating a bidding bot or found some way to automize steemit in a way that makes your pockets full, don't let me be the one to stop you. I am out here because I want to fully gorge myself in the joy of being a blogger and part of that is wanting to reach as many people as possible, which becomes easier by being highly influencial.
And you can see that by seeing some of the big players on the platform who are able to basically do whatever they want the way they want while still making a fortune. I want to get to that same position and be better than them by not giving in to such antics. For that, I use everything that I consider to be good, useful and morally sound. And this includes the usage of bots.
On the other hand, I do not let these bots dictate the way I operate on this webpage. In previous posts, I told about how I dislike the notion of bots killing communication among users by just making it irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. I not only made the concious decision to not only not follow that example but to go against it.
I engage as much as I possibly can with the community, both people that I follow, people that follow me and people that never heard about me or the other way around. And I do intend to keep on working like that.
I also said plenty of times that I do not want to become big and come far all by myself. I want people to follow me on this journey. When we look back a couple years into the future, I want us to look back at this moment and muse about how steemit ended up being a big life changer for all of us. Or just a nice addition to an already pleasant life. For that to happen, all I am asking you to do is this:
Stay true to your opinions and feelings, but do not let them cloud your judgement. Even if you do not like it, sometimes, you have to play the game until you are good enough at it to the point where you can change its course.
Yeah, that is in a sense true, but the thing is that once you play the game, the whole trilogy you would see just one ending and unless you do it again - that is the only thing you would know. As far as I can see the emphasis was made on this. But of course there would have always been room for improvement and understandable having only a single ending to the whole long series is somewhat disappointing.
I've actually been doing some "historical" gaming posts lately, covering noteworthy games released in certain years, the most recent ones are about older games of 98 and 2000 and coming from the games that I've played myself, the Mass Effect trilogy (only the trilogy) has one of the best running stories that a series can have.
Absolutely. The Mass Effect Trilogy is a marvel of the gaming industry and did so many things right in a way hardly anyone expected.
That being said, nothing beats Mass Effect 2 for me. On the other hand, I haven't played or watched Andromeda and as far as people are telling me, that seems to be a good thing.
I had mixed feelings about Andromeda and generally I did not really like it, however I can't say it's bad or anything like that. Most probably I approached it from a perspective of seeing something similar to the previous ones, which I sadly didn't. But anyone else approaching the game from without any specific expectations might as well enjoy it quite a lot
Not having played it, I don't have an opinion.
What I did observe though is that a lot of people disliked the nature of facial graphics and the depth of some characters. Don't spoil me, please, I want to get to that game one day myself.