Do you think indoctrination theory is real?
>>747575208No.
>>747575208Yes.
>>747575208Yesn't
I believe that Casey Hudson and Mac had no subtext beyond what's precisely stated out loud by the child intended.You're literally meant to believe that Organic Life will always end up in genocidal conflicts with Synthetic Life, and then they go on to surmise that this has been a trilogy that was all about that one subject at large, and you're "finally" getting to resolve the metaphysical tension between the two.That's how the ending is meant to be read.
>>747575208Yeah. There are a lot of clues throughout and it's possible this theory would have been a side quest or mystery in the original dark energy plot. IDK.
>>747575208No, it was cope. People didn't want to believe Mac Walters was such a terrible writer, but it was true.
Shepard died in mass effect 1.Everything after that was their astral dream and or afterlife. They died. You don't come back from death no matter what cerberus does.Everything after Mass Effect 1 is just a long dream of a soul accepting its passing into the other world through the "Catalyst"Shephard died, and the dream was beautiful. Now we can cry together.
>>747581158Forgot the thematic song with my shitty posthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQEcDRUVr8Y
>>747575208No, but it's better than what we got.
>>747575208first time playing I thought the non destroy endings sounded like tricks.the self proclaimed reaper hive mind is telling you to kill yourself and everything will work out, please trust me bro!I interpreted it as the reapers trying one last desperate attempt at their self preservation.
>>747575208Confirmed not to be real, which in hindsight is hilarious.
>>747575208I am still mad
>>747578358Interestingly there are scenes in the OT that were supposed to have the same screen-indoctrination effect as the TIM standdown near the end, but it was broken in the game files. They re-added it in Legendary Edition while you're talking to the Reaper on Rannoch. It was also supposed to be introduced on "MIRANDA'S LEVEL" according to the 2011 story leak, which is the Sanctuary level before Cerberus HQ. Shepard was supposed to encounter the Adjutant enemy from Omega DLC (it had a different design then) and this type of enemy would trigger indoctrination.I feel like Mac Walters definitely had a concept of an indoctrination ending before they wrote the ending but it was more of a crutch in case they couldn't square the proper ending and they had many questions about how to live up to the full year of DLC releases after the game. They've also admitted since then that in some ways the original release of the game didn't really feel culminative to the dev team because everybody knew they were basically only in the middle of the project, and had a full year of DLC production ahead of them. That's one of the biggest issues with DLCs. It's also very possible they did actually have the Leviathan backstory at launch but just took any mention of it out of the ending. Mac said the earlier drafts of the Catalyst was way more explanatory where you got investigate options to ask "How long has Reapers been working" etc. but Casey felt like the less detail you had the more it became possible for fans to fill in their own thoughts which is better than answering directly.But they totally didn't know what they were doing with the endings.
>>747575208>Do you think indoctrination theory is real?Ofcourse not
>>747578547>No, it was cope. People didn't want to believe Mac Walters was such a terrible writer, but it was true.It was frustrating to see people jump to his defense when all you have to do is watch a couple of interviews to get his vibe and he's this superficial, pretentious hack guy, like it's so fucking obvious. Even calling him "Drew Karpyshyn's understudy" is glorifying him. he was literally a hitchiker who alienated Drew and other writers. I read through the entire 2009-2011 posts by Patrick Weekes and Chris L'Etoile before Penny Arcade sealed their old forums, and the only time Mac comes up, they either made a sarcastic remark about him or said nobody talked to him on the writing team because he was avoidant as fuck and always "too busy" to meet with them and setting up fake meetings with the "important people" at the studio.He also asked Patrick Weekes to kill Mordin with the renegade interrupt because of how cool it would be. And tbf it's a cool renegade moment, but considering all he did for the Genophage was pass a note to John Dombrow that said "You're gonna resolve the Genophage topic! Go!" and then came in after it was made to be like "Let's make a REALLY COOL BETRAYAL WITH MORDIN" it says a lot about Mac's tenure as Lead Writer in general. They actually ended up over-committing to the Renegade version and had to go back late in the project to make the Paragon part as good, because when Mac pulled rank on them, the whole team ended up neglecting the Paragon ending for Mordin until someone said "it isn't good" months later.
>>747585267Also look at Drew Karpyshyn's new project as Lead Writer, Exodus. It's starting to look actually real fucking good and only superficially evoke "Not-mass-effect" vibes, while Mac Walters's cancelled project with his cancelled studio had 1 image that leaked and it was literally just "Sci-fi Last of Us" where there were no RPG elements, and you played as a Better-man dad character with a backpack in some type of technobabble cybergrid laid over a big grassy field. It looks fucking lame, and that's Mac Walters's instinct once you let him loose. Same as Anthem, which was his IP pet project until he got dragooned into directing Andromeda instead, right after he shitted out the ME3 endings in 2012 and until mid 2014, he made the general pitch for Anthem about the jungle environment and the dumbass suits, and "imagine a world where nothing has been made, but the gods left behind instruments to make it" as if that's any good. It's literally just an unwritten IP at that point that you're asking players to project onto instead of making an IP.
