Mazder wrote:Liara didn't need to become the Shadowroker, it's true. But we did need some form of ally controlling things.
I honestly feel like a better way to accomplish this would to have the Shadow Broker being the one who rescues, heals, and supplies Shepard after the Collector attack (I'm operating under the idea that the Collector attack is a must-have-can't-change-plot-point for this thought experiment; and in this scenario, TIM and Cerberus would be the ones making deals with the Collectors, and the Broker would be a much more trustworthy figure) and have him recruit Liara as his Prothean advisor, and after she proves surprisingly adept working for him, she kind of becomes an unofficial apprentice of sorts to the Shadow Broker, and a liaison between him and Shep. That way, she can be on the Normandy to assist on missions while still being connected to a vast network of information and resources, depending on how the story developed and what choices you'd make. And part of her character arc would be about becoming more ruthless and cold in her new duties, and reflecting on if that's the type of person she wants to become, and can she do this job without sacrificing who she is and should she walk away from this before she no longer recognizes herself, or just keep steady and ignore the risks because its for the greater good of the galaxy when weighed against the trillions of lives in danger from the Reapers.
TTTX wrote:A coma could have done better than death, even than Shepard's death (I mean being spaced, than burn in a atmosphere and crashing into a Planet really) and revival (that's never explained other than they threw a lot of money at the problem) was over the top and Michael Bay's level of stupid.
Agreed. Never understood why they felt the need to go all-in on that. A injury resulting in a coma would more than suffice for their narrative and gameplay needs, without the mental gymnastics you have to perform to hand wave how you can resurrect someone who's been dead via suffocation from exposure to space and planetary re-entry with the setting's current level of technology. That they say it took billions of credits and 2 years of hard work from the Lazarus cell does very little to explain it.
Even more so since they did so little with the concept. A few lines of dialogue in the beginning of 2 and then that one 30 second scene in 3 when you storm TIM's base and watch the recordings resulting in one moment of doubt and existential crisis and then BOOM, Shepard's over it and its no longer a big deal and never mentioned again. Sure, the supportive dialogue you get from your LI if you brought them along in that scene is nice, but its absolutely nothing from a storytelling perspective. Having Shep compartmentalize and suppress his feelings on the matter in the moment is understandable since you're a military professional still on mission, but something major like that, if its going to be a thing, needs to be explored in larger detail in other parts of the story or it just feels like wasted, undeveloped, trivial, superficial fluff. Just having it be a coma eliminates the need for all that. Plus, since one of the big themes of 3 is all about the pressures and burdens of war and leadership wearing Shep down, throwing in some death trauma on top of that without doing anything with it just feels messy, cumbersome, and unnecessary. You can achieve the same ends while being more efficient.
Someone With Mass wrote:
Well, they less fought the Reapers and more resisted them, since the Citadel trap was activated.
I think it was a mistake to introduce a solution from the past, since then they have to flimsily explain why the people in the past didn't use it or how they even came up with it, despite having very little knowledge about their enemy.
It would have been much better to establish a team of researchers, scavenge technology from the Reaper and then find a way to defeat them that way. A little like XCOM in a way. It would rely less on a McGuffin and let you actually work towards a solution rather than being given one from day one, which kills pretty much all the tension in the story, because anyone who's experienced any piece of fiction knows that the Crucible will work in the end.
This.
