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PeZook wrote:Yes, but none of that showed up in ME2 - or, more precisely, it did show up, but the writers didn't seem to realize what the implications should have been, and so Shep just shrugged and went along with it. Which, come to think of it, is nearly as bad as ME3's ending.

Multiple counts of genocide is considerably higher on the list of crimes against of humanity than terrorism I'd say :p.

But yeah the deception is pretty clear once you hit ME3, and pretty sickening in retrospect. TIM really did use you.

You see,in ME2 you were constantly told how the Alliance does nothing and Cerberus is the only thing that can protect human colonists from being abducted etc. Jacob even said outright that he was sick of the Alliance doing nothing.

Then it turned out the Alliance WAS doing something. Entire batteries of somethings, in fact. So...it's all a giant lie. Shep doesn't care.

I'm not entirely sure about this part though. Jacob may have seen the installation of additional weapons batteries as "nothing" as I don't think they were shown to be all that effective. Again, it may be a doctrinal issue - the Alliance wants colonies lightly garrisoned and protected, so that they can concentrate their best forces in rapid reaction units. Unfortunately, most colonies simply don't survive long enough for the reinforcements to arrive - and we do know that colonies are continuously abducted right up the moment of the Collector Base assault.

Vega's comments are much more damning. He says straight out that the intel would have allowed them to take out the Collectors (indicating they may have gotten the Reaper IFF too - mirroring Shep's efforts), which definitely counts as "something". Whether Jacob and co were aware of this is not certain; although TIM probably did know about it, the bastard.

Zinegata wrote: Multiple counts of genocide is considerably higher on the list of crimes against of humanity than terrorism I'd say :p.

But yeah the deception is pretty clear once you hit ME3, and pretty sickening in retrospect. TIM really did use you.

I meant from a literary standpoint, not that Cerberus is anywhere near the same league as the Reapers and their little ruler. From a plot standpoint, it looks almost exactly the same: Shep gets told something and goes alongwith it because writers want him to and are too stupid to make it believable and natural.

And it was such a great opportunity to have a conflict with the crew and examine people's motivations...

Zinegata wrote:I'm not entirely sure about this part though. Jacob may have seen the installation of additional weapons batteries as "nothing" as I don't think they were shown to be all that effective. Again, it may be a doctrinal issue - the Alliance wants colonies lightly garrisoned and protected, so that they can concentrate their best forces in rapid reaction units. Unfortunately, most colonies simply don't survive long enough for the reinforcements to arrive - and we do know that colonies are continuously abducted right up the moment of the Collector Base assault.

Yes, Jacob might've seen it like this. Just like Little Hitler could see the organic/syntethic divide as inevitably leading to exctinction of all organic life in the galaxy

And the lazor guns did damage the Collector ship ; So it was in fact a very concrete move to improve colony security.

Although if the Alliance had Reaper IFF and thus the ability to safely go through the Omega 4 relay, then I doubt the Illusive Man would be able to actually keep the Collector base to himself

PeZook wrote:I meant from a literary standpoint, not that Cerberus is anywhere near the same league as the Reapers and their little ruler. From a plot standpoint, it looks almost exactly the same: Shep gets told something and goes alongwith it because writers want him to and are too stupid to make it believable and natural.

Yeah, I think somebody in Bioware is getting addicted to awkward premises and not being able to handle them. DA2 has this too.

And it was such a great opportunity to have a conflict with the crew and examine people's motivations...

Funnily, I also felt this way after ME2, but I gave it a pass because I was thinking it'd be resolved in ME3.

Which it kinda did. In the form of fucking Cerberus constantly sending endless waves of troops at you out of thin air. Idiots. -_-

Yes, Jacob might've seen it like this. Just like Little Hitler could see the organic/syntethic divide as inevitably leading to exctinction of all organic life in the galaxy

And the lazor guns did damage the Collector ship ; So it was in fact a very concrete move to improve colony security.

I meant that in spite of the Alliance efforts, colonies were still being abducted anyway so Jacob felt the Alliance wasn't exerting enough effort. Jacob is not literally saying that the Alliance isn't doing anything; what he may have meant is that what they're doing is insufficient.

Then again, Jacob does cheat on FemShep so maybe his guilty conscience bothered him .

Although if the Alliance had Reaper IFF and thus the ability to safely go through the Omega 4 relay, then I doubt the Illusive Man would be able to actually keep the Collector base to himself

Oh definitely. It would have been nice to see Vega's "Hero of another story" moment to make him less of a complete stranger (another problem I had with ME3. We're changing the team AGAIN?).

Shepard does attempt to go back to the Alliance in a token effort at best but the plot demands that he effectively be shunned. Anderson effectively tells you to go at it and Hackett looks the other way when it suits him. Arrival demonstrated this rather well with him boarding the Normandy and saying he will play with Cerberus if it gets what they want. The Alliance had no jurisdiction in the Terminus systems and couldnt go there without causing a fuss so SUPPOSEDLY that meant Shepard could unoffically go there working with Cerberus. The Council endorses you as well in this plan by re-instating you as a sign they trust you but not Cerberus.

Dosent really make it any less stupid how the Shepard blindly follows Cerberus but he did not do so alone or without promoting via script to literally railroad him into it.

That reminds me... wasn't it possible for Shep to go visit the Solar System? And yet somehow the entire Earth Alliance navy doesn't simply blow him out of the sky for being in a Ceberus ship?

Zinegata wrote:That reminds me... wasn't it possible for Shep to go visit the Solar System? And yet somehow the entire Earth Alliance navy doesn't simply blow him out of the sky for being in a Ceberus ship?

The Codex, man! THE CODEX!

The Codex actually explains that Cerberus used an aerospace company as a front to build the SR-2.

Of course, this is also ridiculous, because it looks IDENTICAL to the super-secret prototype stealth ship build by the Alliance, and people know Shep is working for Cerberus anyways

PeZook wrote:

Zinegata wrote:That reminds me... wasn't it possible for Shep to go visit the Solar System? And yet somehow the entire Earth Alliance navy doesn't simply blow him out of the sky for being in a Ceberus ship?

The Codex, man! THE CODEX!

The Codex actually explains that Cerberus used an aerospace company as a front to build the SR-2.

*facepalm*

Of course, this is also ridiculous, because it looks IDENTICAL to the super-secret prototype stealth ship build by the Alliance, and people know Shep is working for Cerberus anyways

Oh great, thanks for reminding me that everyone and their mom apparently knew Shep was working for Cerberus. Seriously - when people see him their reaction is very rarely "You're already dead!" and instead "You're working for Cerberus now?!"

Also, funny how they forgot the Normandy was a half-Turian ship, and yet Cerberus apparently also had access to Turian military secrets.

Zinegata wrote:

PeZook wrote:Of course, this is also ridiculous, because it looks IDENTICAL to the super-secret prototype stealth ship build by the Alliance, and people know Shep is working for Cerberus anyways

Oh great, thanks for reminding me that everyone and their mom apparently knew Shep was working for Cerberus. Seriously - when people see him their reaction is very rarely "You're already dead!" and instead "You're working for Cerberus now?!"

Also, funny how they forgot the Normandy was a half-Turian ship, and yet Cerberus apparently also had access to Turian military secrets.

NPC's only ask about your Jesus powers for the first like 4 missions, then only talk about Cerberus. The Normandy technology was not top secret by the second game though so Cerberus could have acquired the plans with out having to be super-hackers.

Well, I suppose it could all be explained away: people would know Shep was working for Cerberus since it would be impossible to hide the fact he now runs the new Normandy, and the new Normandy was built by a Cerberus-owned aerospace company which could be said to do fleet work for the Alliance. Of course, the Alliance would logically still want to interrogate Shepard and see how the fuck did he survive (not to mention what he knows about Cerberus operations...), and the fact some company rebuilt an awesome prototype stealthship for its own use would raise inconvenient questions from the Turians and Alliance planners themselves etc.

But all that was left totally unexplored and the controversy of Shepples being a terrorist was reduced to what, five lines od dialogue and an email?

Shepard being railroaded into working with Cerberus bothers me a little, but not as much as other stuff really. I rationalise it as my Shepard going along with them for the moment, because the Collectors are a demonstrably proven threat. But never trusting them for a moment, and only pretending to go along with it all. Also I get a real good kick out of getting everybody's loyalty throughout the game, and then blowing up the Collector Base with someone like Miranda in the squad who basically tells TIM to go fuck himself. And the Alliance really isn't doing much to fix the problem. Installing a few lazor pewpews on colonies isn't the same thing as 'finding the Collector base and nuking the shit out of it'. IIRC you can flat out ask Admiral Hackett what the Alliance is doing, during Arrival if you play before the final mission, and it's essentially 'we've evacuated most of the outlying colonies and holding our own, but we don't really have a plan in place'.

The biggest problem really is Cerberus going from 'rogue black ops organisation' from ME to 'all-powerful super terrorist group with effectively unlimited resources and untold power and influence (which includes shit like stealing plans for the most advanced warship in the Alliance and rebuilding it in a BETTER WAY in like a couple of years)'. Let alone shit like resurrecting Shepard. And yet every mission or project Cerberus is ever involved in turns to shit, with like the sole exception being the Lazarus project (which itself turned to shit right at the end when Wilson betrays it all for something so pedestrian as 'wasn't paid enough money' and 'man Miranda is a bitch'). Every other project is a goddamn failure. YET THEY STILL HAVE UNLIMITED RESOURCES. And somehow they're a threat to galactic peace and security. It's frankly bizarre.

Infinity resources and hordes of expendable dudes are pretty par for the course for videogame terrorists though, so Cerberus might be silly but they're not out of the blue.

The troops are handwaved away by EDI at the end of the game (Cerberus apparently can convert random assholes into fully capable combat troops via Reaper tech). The worse part are random Cerberus fleet assets which can somehow gallavant around the galaxy unmolested, dropping troops and heavy mechs on Council-held worlds.

The game did at least try to explain it, with that concentration camp disguised as a safe haven for refugees where they indoctrinated people.

Edit: damn you pezook

If video game developers in general were to ever come up with a reasonable explanation for why organizations like Cerberus employ and use massive armies of unwaveringly loyal soldiers that no one in the universe knows about except the player, I would expect hell to have frozen over.

Stofsk wrote:Every other project is a goddamn failure. YET THEY STILL HAVE UNLIMITED RESOURCES. And somehow they're a threat to galactic peace and security. It's frankly bizarre.

I call it the "Umbrella Effect" in writing. IE: We're a super powerful multi national organization and yet every plan we've ever had has either failed or damaged us heavily. Yet somehow people still work for us.

CaptHawkeye wrote: I call it the "Umbrella Effect" in writing. IE: We're a super powerful multi national organization and yet every plan we've ever had has either failed or damaged us heavily. Yet somehow people still work for us.

Umbrella is a public corporation though. Would TIM's corporate fronts know they're his fronts?

Being a corporation or not doesn't matter. There's no way word doesn't get around in this group about what Sheppard did to those poor bastards on Planet X. Also that Cerberus is going to cover the whole thing up and next of kin don't get notified or pick up any benefits, etc.

I'm not saying organizations like Cerberus are impossible, I mean, look at how long Al Qaeada was around. I'm just saying there's a disconnect between the power the organization claims and shows, and what supplies that power.

Emphasis on the fact that Umbrella knows damn well what it's doing, and I'm trying to figure out if the corporate fronts for Cerberus even know they're fronts, much less fronts for Cerberus and just how much damage can be done to TIM's funding by his Cerberus failures. Every Cerberus group we run into doing crazy shit knows its a Cerberus group, there's a difference.

Compartmentalizing Cerberus (IE: Keeping fronts in the dark) isn't a bad idea, especially if your full intention is basically to have the organization at war sooner or later. It does make it difficult to believe how tightly knit and organized they are. You'd think it would occur to Cerberus grunt #3434884 that being at war with everyone AND the robot invaders is a bad idea. Plus all their failed projects, experiments, etc.

Compartmentalize all you want in that case, flood enough sections and the ship should still be sinking.

Except their grunts are cybered up to their eyeballs (literally) and are nothing but barely sentient soldier-automatons, made from converted abductees.

Yeah TIM was losing science types rather heavily, so its no shock that he indoctrinating his troops and was probably doing it to keep them. By ME3 everyone obviously knows he's gone shithouse crazy.

PeZook wrote:Except their grunts are cybered up to their eyeballs (literally) and are nothing but barely sentient soldier-automatons, made from converted abductees.

Yes and no. I read that Cerberus troops actually change as the game goes on, with the ones you fight on Mars having a lot of banter and acting generally like people, whereas by the time you get to TIM's base they barely say anything. I didn't really notice during first runthrough. Will have to test myself on my next.

The massive amount of funding through front companies I can buy. They probably don't realize that they work for Cerberus. Also given the population of the galaxy and the colossal number of people that go to Sanctuary, Cerberus doesn't really have that many troops. For all of their tactical prowess they couldn't hold the Citadel for more than a few hours, and that was a major operation. Once they lost the element of surprise and their enemy got their command and control back online, they were quickly destroyed by C-Sec.

It's the existence of Cerberus cruisers in such numbers that whole Alliance fleets have to be diverted to assist that pushes my suspension of disbelief.

Then it's a good thing the only time that happens is when you attack their main base of operations. Outside of that instance they never seem to have a presence of more than one or two cruisers at a time.

How man did we actually see?

One at Tuchanka
One at Grissom

And how many at his base? Lots of fighters though.

I remember Tuchanka, but all I remember from Grissom was a squadron of fighters. Was the cruiser referenced in dialogue?

The fighters didn't get there on their own, after all. A cruiser's presence was explicitly mentioned. Of course I really question why the Normandy didn't tear it in half and shit all over its strike wing, but the writers seem to have forgotten that the Normandy is essentially a pocket battleship after ME2's upgrades.