#mass effect overlord

[gemsbokk]

"At about three o'clock Jesus cried out, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?”. This means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”"

note: i am not, in any way, religious. i only drew inspiration from this interpretation of pieta, and it's because i can't help but think about the religious symbolism in project overlord. not because of actual faith.

[winntir]

Let’s talk about Overlord.

If you’re not familiar with it, Mass Effect 2’s Overlord DLC is about Cerberus scientist Gavin Archer plugging his autistic brother, David, into a machine designed to allow David to control the geth. That goes about as well as you’d expect, if not a little worse. Naturally, Shepard rocks up to clean up the mess and prevent things from getting worse, because the melding of man and machine always has world-ending consequences if it all goes wrong. It’s a mostly combat focused DLC, but once all is revealed, it’s worse than you think.

Now, why do you think Gavin decides his brother is the best candidate for this quack science experiment? Is it because someone like Gavin has a warped view of autism and believed David's unique neurology would make him best suited for the interface? After all, he said "His autistic mind is as alien to me as an actual alien." Well, no, it’s because he can speak geth.

Notice how the voice clip for David speaking geth is just regular geth chatter with maybe some slight modifications. That’s probably because the sound engineers had no fucking idea how that works. Geth chatter is an inherently artificial sound, like a radio frequency. They can speak something that can be understood by a universal translator, but not to each other. Gavin attributes this impossible feat to David being a mathematical savant, which will only be topped by me fulfilling my lifelong goal of learning the language of sharks.

I believe this is to do BioWare's usual tactic to cast credence to the villain's actions so that your option to later support them will seem more reasonable; you are given the option to either take David away or leave him to continue the experiment. However, by lending credence, they do one of the worst things you can do with representation: inventing shit. It’s bad enough that media parrots that autistic people are all savants; they don’t need to invent things about us. Unfortunately, they did, and we all have to deal with it because David dies off-screen if you ignore the mission.

Said mission perpetuates the narrative of a transactional relationship between autistic people and the neurotypical. It’s always "We should learn to live with them because it would be a shame to lose their genius," not "Maybe we could just treat them like people without expecting something in return?" This is in the vein of a caretaker taking advantage of their ward, of the autistic person's "gift" for their own ends. And they had to give credence to it.

Shame upon whoever came up with this.

[clericofshadows]

REGIS SHEPARD MASS EFFECT 1 - BRING DOWN THE SKY "Leave the fighting to me from now on. Commander Shepard, Systems Alliance."

[masseffectholidaycheer]

Greetings vermin!

Harbinger is rousing from their slumber in deep space and preparing to judge this years offerings. Minion Keeper is dusting off their tiny backpack of power and preparing their bookkeeping for the season.

The season of reaping is nigh!

The sign up spreadsheet will close tomorrow.

[lith-myathar]

.

[kaidanalenkosprmanager]

THE BEST OF GRISSOM ACADEMY

Featuring: Cmdr. Sophie Shepard, EDI, and Jack With: Flight Lt. Jeff "Joker" Moreau, Lt. James Vega, Ens. Jason Prangley, Ens. Rodriguez, David Archer, and Kahlee Sanders I never had a family- and these guys... Anyone screws with my students and I will tear them apart. Mass Effect 3: Legendary Edition (2021)

[miidnight98]

finally finished playing mass effect trilogy again after months (oopsies)

i was playing it for my partner and then i would stop playing for months bc umm old pc went to shit

priority earth good final mission until you get to the fucking STARCHI-

[nellasbookplanet]

I just finished my playthrough of me2, and as I put off the overlord and arrival dlcs until the end of it my thoughts on them are very fresh and Must be aired.

The frustrating thing is, they didn’t have to suck. The gameplay, like the shadowbroker dlc, is fun and stands out from the rest of the game! The story and themes of 'how far will you go in sacrificing individual lives in the name of winning a war/stopping extinction' fits well with the overall narrative and emphasis on hard choices! I mostly enjoy them! Only, overlord is completely undone by gross ableism, and arrival doesn’t actually let you engage with the choice it sets up; it fully forces your hand, and then makes the whole thing feel pointless by just having the reapers show up for a surprise attack in the next game anyway. It’s a trolley problem that doesn’t actually let you control the lever and then derails the entire train to hit both tracks no matter what you do.

So, how do you fix arrival? Personally, I would probably keep in the loss of the batarian colony as inevitable, but change the focus. As it is, barely a moment is spared to let it sink in that you're about to end 300 000 lives, and the only 'choice' you get is whether you attempt to (futilely) warn them in a blink and you'll miss it scene. I would've at a minimum added dialogue options where Shepard/the player could’ve expressed anger at how this work could’ve gone on for as long as it did without a warning being sent long before. For a bigger change, that could’ve led into a major conflict: a paragon Shepard trying to warn the colony, while her opponents argue that doing so would jeopordize the project/the hidden base and tries to stop her as part of the final fight of the dlc. If you choose to warn and do it in time, perhaps some small amount of people make it out, with the majority of the colony still being destroyed to keep the tone of sacrifice. If you want to keep it real dark, everyone dies no matter how hard you try to save them, but you should at least have been given the option to seriously try even if it’s hopeless.

But there isn’t really a workaround for how part of the problem with arrival is a problem with the batarians: had the colony been human, turian, or asari, most players would likely have been more upset because those are our allies. The batarians, however, are a one-note species never portrayed as anything other than slavers, criminals, and terrorists. While other species are allowed horrific acts while still being portrayed as complex people capable of both good and bad (need I remind you of the first contact war, the krogan rebellion, the genophage, the quarian's attempted genocide of the geth, the geth's war against biological life, and so on), the player is given little to no reason to sympathize with batarians. Had they been made to feel like actual people while still our enemies from the start of the game, arrival would've felt more like the gut punch of sacrifice it was and less like it was off-handedly writing off a people everyone hates, anyway. There could’ve been a discussion of 'are you more willing to sacrifice those you don’t know/don’t like and what does it say about you; is this a sacrifice or is it selfish revenge with the greater good as cover (a discussion especially brought up if you take the renegade choice)' but instead it feels almost vindictive.

[sewermageboy]

Nothing in any Mass Effect game will ever be as disturbing to me as Project Overlord.

[vincentvandough]

Jesus fucking christ, I just completed Project Overlord. Read more for spoilers

Shit left me bawling and hitting myself in frustration lmao.

There should be a [beat Archer into a bloody pulp] prompt.

Secondly I'm a little upset to have found out that the Paragon interrupt in the finale was a pistol whip adter the fact. I've been conditioned into thinking I'd fucking hug him and tell him that he did what he could for the good of humanity or whatever the fuck.

[faerieboyfixations]

Most importantly:

Let me pull the ✨trigger✨

[sweatandwoe]

who would u rather go on a date with, Garrus or Silco? :3c

Putting two scarred bad bitches, with revenge plots who live in a criminal underworld (for a time at least) against eachother smh. How can we even decide this, we'll need to get top people on this, we need to-

It's Garrus. It's Garrus everytime. Blorbo of over ten years. That's my husband, he's my wife. I've been re-playing the series and initiated his romance last night and I was STILL laying in bed, kicking my feet as I watched him go from smart-ass sniper to nervous about making his best friend comfortable with himself.

Also that like one second scene before he starts beating on Harkin where he grabs him around his waist like that to pin him. Full sweep and pin to the wall before he's starting to beat the crap out of him. I gotta find a gif of that.

Love a rat man but bird dino man is winning every time

[tealenko]

And here we are... *sighs* Project Overlord

I finished the final ME2 mission at 3am and I had all the dlcs left to do... Because I do not enjoy them that much (except for Kasumi and Zaeed, which shouldn't be a dlcs at all, but that's a rant for another time lol) so I decided to do one before going to bed and my stupid mind chose to do Project Overlord because, and I quote my own stupid inner monologue, it'll be fast and then I'll go to sleep.

So... Spoiler, it wasn't fast. Because I'm playin in insanity and the stupid hammerhead part of the mission doesn't let you save, so there I was, doing the same 5 objectives in a row for 49390202 times just to be killed on the sixth and starting the whole thing again.

And then, to make it all even better, once you made it, it's "depression time"!!! And the game throws at you the sadest and most disturbing mission and plot ever... And no matter how many times I've played this game it's always heartbreaking because FUCK THAT STUPID MORON, FUCK CERBERUS, FUCK TIM AND FASHDFHASOHFAHHFAO!!!!!! I know it's fiction but how on Earth can someone do that to his brother and then JUSTIFY IT!!!!!!???? Poor thing... I feel like crying just thinking about it.

Anyways, after finishing it I needed a good hour to recover from the trauma... and then I went to bed, still depressed af... At 6:30 am....

So yeah...

Fuck this freaking mission.

[douglasbradburyverne]

Having played moments like this is the reason why I don't trust Elon Musk when he says the "Neuralink has been SUCCESSFULLY tested on Humans"

[one-little-nerd-stayed-home]

I hate Gavin Archer with every fiber of my being btw second time through does absolutely not make project overlord less horrifying what the everloving fuck was that.