User blog comment:Ygrain/Leviathan: Do you know what you are doing, Bioware?/@comment-24174486-20120906181610/@comment-2228120-20120907110024

_Proper_ foreshadowing, as was done in ME1 and 2. 1)see Sovereign – 2) learn that it’s Saren’ a mysterious ship – 3)learn from Benezia that it affects minds of those onboard – 4) learn that it’s a Reaper ship – 5) learn that it’s a Reaper itself. Gradual reveal. Take out part 2-4, does it really work? Like in, 1a) you need the Catalyst to connect to the Crucible, 1b) Reapers are controlled by something, 2) I’m the Catalyst AND I control the Reapers? Is this anywhere on the same scale, story-telling-wise? Note please that even if you reveal the history of the Reapers, you STILL get the big twist when you find out that the AI and the Catalyst is one and the same thing.

Finding out who or what controls your invincible enemies is pretty vital information; the fact that the game fails to reflect that is, well, sad. And, it doesn’t really matter what Shepard would or wouldn’t be able to do with the information, the failure is that the issue is not addressed in any way at all, not letting him even enquire about it.

As for the Catalyst’s credibility: there is a considerable effort to make the synthetics-organics conflict based more soundly. The Leviathans saw it times and again among the races they enslaved. The Catalyst took quite some time to study the patterns of development before it created the cycles, as well – in other words, here we can see nullified one of the objections against the Catalyst: that it didn’t see much of unaffected evolution. It did. Plus, there is this problem of the ME gameplay philosophy: be a dutiful player, do your quests, scan your systems, talk to everyone, you get rewarded. Extra equipment, special quests, romances, loyalty, whatever. Be a dutiful player in ME3, and what you get? Synthesis. – Remember our conversation about perceptions in a context? Synthesis feels like the supposedly best solution, because it occupies the positions of rewards. Which is one of the reasons why I am asking if Bioware are able to analyse their own work and realise what it is they are doing.