Reply With QuoteWhy?Originally Posted by zemo
I'd put the Geth on a level ABOVE the Borg or Cylons (or Daleks, for that matter) in regards of sci-fi antagonists. The design and principle are brilliant.
Why?
I have to agree, as much as I like the ME universe, it has a lot tropes that quite frankly Bioware recycles over and over again. Not to mention all the conflicting parts within the series, sometimes in the same game.
"You really can't ignore Bendis, especially when he shoots you in the face with a sniper rifle in Call of Duty." ~Brubaker
Bioware are not really known for not having a lot of plotholes and consistancy when it comes to a storyline.
Just take the Quarians. In Mass Effect Tali talk about like on a quarian ship and how they didn't need suits onboard.
Cut to Mass Effect 2 and nope.. everyone is in a suit, and they only show themself out of a suit while being intimate.
then there is the Prothians who we saw several statues of in Mass Effect and come Mass Effect 3 ...... ok I won't spoil it..
Long story short
The Mass Effect Universe is awesome. but that awesome? no fucking way.
The backstory. Geth aren't conquerors. The Quarians attempted to commit genocide against them. They're the villains, and you can't do anything to stop that, but they're not actually evil, just forced by circumstance to oppose the free people.
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Except that it's pretty much the same story that was lifted from Battlestar Galactica.
"You really can't ignore Bendis, especially when he shoots you in the face with a sniper rifle in Call of Duty." ~Brubaker
The design is unique and believable. Inhuman enough to pass for realistic aliens, yet familiar enough to present a behaviour that moves within expectable borders, getting rid of the need to explain every aspect of their culture in order to make sense out of behaviour. Especially the decision to make the face into a simple flashlight was an excellent decision. On the one hand it is plausible enough not to have a face, those robots were created to be machines that work, they wouldn't need faces. On the other, the flaps around the flashlight, together with alterations in brightness and sound still manages to convey feelings such as confusion and puzzlement, as Legion shows.
The principle itself is a variation on the contemporary theme of artificial intelligence, though taken further than almost all examples that come to mind, except perhaps for Asimov's I, Robot, or "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long", though those simply didn't have the scope of a whole race of created sentient beings and the results of their replacing their creators. Especially Mass Effect 2 shows a great coming of age arc of a whole people, with the special representative of Legion, and the fact of robotic people actually developing a religion is especially interesting. The only account of robots showing a development into sentient beings that I can think of that is more realistic and gritty than the Geth would be in Naoki Urasawa's manga "Pluto". Which, funnily enough, is a continuation of Astro Boy, which in itself is a strong story of militarisation of robots vs the life-like qualities of AI, the conflict at the core of the Geth.
Yes but
..
Not what one would call original.
I believe they also did that story in Star Trek a few times
I don't think it is necessary to re-invent the wheel for every story you want to do. The best stories ever told are predominantly variations of a an already existing theme. The reason being that the audience knows what they can expect of the events, in principle, while there is still space for surprising twists and turns.
This.
Mass Effect clearly takes ideas and concepts from the best of Sci Fi and puts their own little spin on them to create a unique experience.
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