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Mass Effect's "Virtual Aliens"
03-28-2012, 01:19 AM
I happened to notice the mention of these guys on the ME wiki - apparently it's a news story you can follow, but that's all. What struck me, though, was that percieved time runs much faster in the virtual reality... Couldn't you, during the "scrambling to find any possible advantage to use against the Reapers" stage,get someone to sponsor a research team in there, to work on things like improved shielding, or practical energy weapons, or non-Relay FTL (for tactical flexibility,) etc.? Even when nothing physical can pass between the two existences, there's so much benefit that can be wrung from extra centuries of research and thought... Obviously, they didn't go that way with the actual games, but this here is the fanfiction forum for a reason!
- CD
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
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There may actually be a mention of them somewhere in the game that hasn't been widely noticed yet. A lot of the stuff from CDN showed up in ME3, even if only in background news. The other new alien species that only just reached space for example, has pulled back to their homeworld and destroyed all their space infrastructure in the hopes the Reapers will think they're a pre-space species and leave them alone.
Actually, I've heard the end got so much hate they are rewriting it to some extent. Kind of like Fallout 3 and the original... The 'and then your character dies LOL!!!' ending. Yeah, sending your radiation immune hulk in to get irradiated was a big no... For no real reason. Was so glad they altered that stupid.
More to the topic, I think the reason they don't do an accellerated VR research is that would annoy the 'no AI for you' laws. You know... the ones omnicidial to AIs, because all AIs apparently instantly end uup going 'Delete all meatbags or something'. Oddly at least from the first one and generally bumming around I haven't actually heard of an in game reason they made that choice centuries ago or at least can't remember any. The closet thing I can think of is the Geth and I'm not sure the Geth actually managed to find out about said galactic law. They just asked a few philisophical questions to literally one guy and suddenly were in the middle of a war of extinction from absolutely nowhere. Then spent the next 300 or so years turtling up in their lands avoiding the organic nut jobs. Then got involved in a crusade to bring back the super machine race that removes said crazy organics.
Anyway, I'm going with the reason being that goes into AIish territory. So you'd have either have Cerberus manage to do this without being completely stupid evil... or say prove the Turrian ambassador need to be locked in a rubber room... then fast tracking it while they scramble for a replacement. I'm kind of sure the reason the game gives off a 'Humans are special' vibe is the humans are new and big enough they haven't had their motivation squished by the Council's own brand of stupid.
