Mass Effect Lore: Andromeda Initiative
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- Опубликовано: 6 окт 2024
- Hello, everyone! Today, we're talking about the story behind the Andromeda Initiative! Any other Mass Effect concepts you'd like to see videos about? Be sure to let me know in the comments section!
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I absolutely love this and wish if you could make more as Andromeda as a lot of cool lore that can be explored.
Keep up what your doing.
I always thought that the fact why people didn't like andromeda is not because it was just "simply bad", but because people actually expected another "episode" of the original triolgy. Yeah there are several parts of the game that I didn't like, and I can't argue with most of the problems about the game bugs and facial expressions when the game came out (most of these are fixed btw in case people didn't know). Still if people would have been a little bit more open-minded I think the game would have been more successful as well. If you can pay attention to the story and the characters just for a single moment, you would realise how fascinating the story and how exciting the gameplay and how inetersting the things are you discover in the game.
Great video, keep up the good work :).
Seems like not many fans of Mass Effect wanted a spin-off touch to the series but it’s a pretty good spin-off nonetheless
@@SteezyRedStarsI don’t know…as it stood, the Milky Way had been beaten to death so I’m not surprised the developers wanted to open the doors to Andromeda. I can’t imagine how the next game is going to go, but the fact that it’s hinted we’ll have the Milky Way & Andromeda in one game will definitely provide a lot of freedom for the writers to connect them through missions.
TLDR: I enjoyed playing the game, please hire scientists as freelance continuity consultants.
So picking planets that already support life, these "Golden Worlds" is a terrible idea. For an easy example of why, look up "wild pigs" in Australia, and then note that the ecosystem was upset by introducing a species native to this planet only separated by an ocean. If we did not assume we could eat whatever animal/insect/fish life on new world, and brought our own there could be so many unintended consequences. It is entirely likely that all of our flora would need to be genetically modified to grow on the new Golden World so we could eat (we might not be able to eat any of the native plants), and hydroponics will be necessary while adjustments are made (at a minimum). I can suspend my scientific disbelief for much of this because, while I think accounting for adaptations to a new ecosystem would make and interesting game, it would not be very Mass Effect thematically speaking...
However, how humans interact with Alien life is a very Mass Effect Theme which brings me to another issue: what do our sensors recognize as sentient/sapient life? The search criteria is precluding intelligent life beneath the ocean (I will cite the Leviathan DLC, where a very obviously intelligent lifeforms hid from much closer scans), and silicon based life that we do not have parameters for, and life evolving in the 600 years it takes to arrive, and plant based intelligent life forms (such as the Thorian), and the mere fact that sentient life *could* develop without outside interference regardless of how long it takes if there is already flora and fauna present.
I realize that this is not Star Trek and there is no Prime Directive to contend with, but I argue that the reasons the Prime Directive exists in that universe also exist in the Mass Effect universe. In addition, since this initiative was started by humans who still have *living memory* of the First Contact wars with the Turians, there should have been more detailed protocol on first contact, just in general... maybe a crash course on overcoming language barriers at the very least.
That brings me to Terra-forming, and the Remnant (I really hate using that name, it's like referring to Ancient Egyptian engineers as pyramid-heads). The Initiative *should have* been doing is exactly (with our own tech) what the Remnant did i.e. MAKE OUR OWN Golden Worlds on rocks no one could conceivably use! It removes so many negative variables, and skeezy invader vibes if we just create the conditions each species needs for life and scale up as we go. Suvi licking rocks is the least of our worries when the bacteria in the air might well be toxic, or not the right composition of "air" for us or our plants, or how slightly different gravity effects muscle growth etc.
Sorry about the rant.
I think Anita Goyle will turn out to be the Benefactor
The problem with the pathfinders as a concept in Andromeda was primarily that there wasn't one (ideally several teams) on the nexus. That is genuinely stupid. By all means send back-ups on the arks, but not having a pathfinder team means that IF (and as it happens when) things go wrong, there isn't a team specifically dedicated to making landfall.
I have massive issues with the storyline of Andromeda - it is so clearly thrown together without serious thought. They tried to flesh this out with extra-media material, like the books. THIS IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH. The story needs to work without them. Additionally, there are a lot of MacGuffins to make the story "work" (it still doesn't).
In theory a 'better' story would have been something like, the pathfinder team (including your PC) arrive in Andromeda on the Nexus, stuff goes wrong, waking up some of the wrong people, killing some of the vital people (so not that different from what we got) and destroying the QE comms (probably the arks will have them but they won't appear until the end of the game or even into the second installment). Then you run the insurrection story, but in this case the pathfinder is more instrumental in the formation of the Nexus leadership (mimic the choice between Udina and Anderson in ME1).
You have a limited number of nearby worlds you can explore because the nexus is damaged and you need materials and resources to fix it as well as keep everyone fed. Get rid of the remnant stuff, it is too like the cauldrons in Horizon: Zero Dawn, only worse. Populate the worlds you can get to with stuff. Pre-space flight aliens - do you uplift them/leave them/annihilate them/make them think you are god etc. You can keep the Angara as a space faring race, but flesh them out more, maybe have them be early space-flight only so they only have a single solar system and limited terraforming. Keep the Kett (if you must) and make them staunchly aggressive to anyone who lands on the world (but maybe have some individuals who are open to trade or information from the newcomers). Have a war-torn environment where two sentient races are battling it out, you can choose which side to support. Have a world which is predominantly water (NOT exclusively) and when you try settling there the sentient creatures there (who don't have space flight but are technologically advanced in other ways perhaps) are horrified, and you have to try to arrange some kind of deal. There are hundreds of stories of pioneers interacting with the original inhabitants which could be used for inspiration. Don't have lazy population of Milky Way inhabitants - the Nexus is supposed to be the best and brightest but the rebels in Andromeda are doing better? That's not ok. At the end of the rebellion, once you have supported one side over the other (ideally make each team have one or two great people, and one or two terrible ones - so you can choose based on your priorities and character preference rather than it being a "paragon/renegade" style choice) then the opposing side could be put back in cryo or killed (would likely need to be referenced in a later game).
Honestly, I'd get rid of the scourge too. You don't have the resources to leave the cluster anyway because you don't have the fuel to go wasting on getting between systems (also it massively undermines the mass relay system in the originals) and it adds to the Macguffinry. I'd personally go with have SAM be the cause, maybe have him be the big bad, but you don't know that until *much* later in the trilogy, but there need to be tiny hints throughout. It allows for "bad" reasons to be without SAM at specific moments in the games. He's actually been trying to undermine the project from the start. I'm not sure what his motivation would have to be, but it would be an interesting irony that the people who stayed in the Milky Way and fought the reapers (who were trying to prevent AIs destroying all life) were safe from the AI that the andromeda initiative (AI.... geddit) brought with them. Maybe that's where the developers wanted to go eventually, maybe that's why they made SAM *so* annoying. Blowing him up would have been a pleasure.
Sorry, this was meant to be a quick explanation about why *I* think the pathfinders as a concept are stupid. The idea of a team of pioneers isn't - heck it's what humanity has done every time we have colonised somewhere. The implementation in game however was very poor.
If you would, please refer to my "What Makes Andromeda Great" video. That's my opinion on the subject.
I also made a video with Jackdaw on the subject. He and I had vastly different opinions of Andromeda.