How Will Shepard Beat the Reapers? (Minor Mass Effect Spoilers)

[Avatar Roku]

She will find a big red button that says don't push and she will push it and all the reapers will become subservient and work at mcdonalds for the next 50k years.

Really I dont see anyway this is going to end other then finding a magic mcguffen and it somehow beating all the reapers, with the setup the 3rd game has. Really the game should be about organizing the races into a fleet and finding a way into deep space to kill most of them while they are still sleeping, have a few wake up before they are wiped out and have that be the epic final battle, where it takes most of the fleets to deal with a few reapers and one of those reapers is infiltrated and taken down by Shepard's team, while the others are either taken down by similar infiltration teams or blown to hell by dreadnoughts.

I think that is exactly what the game WILL be about. Think about the allies we have (possibly) been recruiting. The Krogan, the Quarians, the Geth, the Rachni. All of those but the Quarians are renowned for terrestrial combat prowess (good for boarding reapers, for example), and all of them but the Krogans are renowned for strong fleets (hell, the Quarians have the largest one in the known galaxy, and the Geth fleet that followed Saren was only about 5% of the total Geth strength). And that's to say nothing of what a you could do with the Citadel and Alliance Fleets when they fight the Reapers at full strength and while not surprised.

I bet Mass Effect 3 will mostly be spent making sure that those allies are at full strength. Convincing the Quarians and Geth to make peace (or choosing between them, which Keelah knows I don't want to do), convincing the Salarians to lift the Genophage, scouting the Reapers so that the big fleets are not taken by surprise, etc.

Few things to keep in mind.

1. We've come to find out, more or less, that not all reapers are the BIG, capital ships Sovereign was. Granted, there are prolly alot of them big ships, but in general, it's not a fleet of "Sovereigns" like it's been made out to be.

2. Sovereign was taken down, more or less, but one wing, or fleet of earth ships, not the whole earth navy, and what was left of a suprise attack on the citidal that started with them knocking out communations so they couldn't call for help. There were alot more reinforcments to be had, if they'd known they were under attack in the first place.

3. The reapers are burning ALOT of resorces and fuel to make the trip to the cidital. Not only did they have to come back from dark space, but once the alpha relay was blown, that added possible up to a years worth more FTL travel, which has to be taxing.

So i think there's a SLIGHT misconception as to how powerful the reaper fleet really is, IE, they aren't all Sovereigns, and are buring ALOT of resorces right now, and we aren't as WEAK as we seemed. It was a suprise attack, and a fraction of the galaxies full milatery might. A head on fight, with the WHOLE galaxie, as in, EVERYONE, might be more then the reapers can handle.

After all, all reapers invasions START with a sneak attack that cripples interstaller travel. where they can pick apart picemeal resistince one system at a time. That won't be the case this time. It's going to be a head on fight, after a long exidos, with a unitifed galaxie (once i'm done with them). Something they may well have NEVER faced before.

And of course, there may be a magic Maguffin. That can always happen to if the writers get lazy... >.>

On that subject, we've been told that there is one set piece in ME3 wherein a Thresher Maw fights a Reaper, so they really all better NOT be Sovereign's size, or else Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense OF Scale.

No, unfortinatly according to everything I have seen about the game so far, it starts out with the reapers invading and attacking earth and Shepard is able to escape and tries to round up allies to counter attack but each race is involved with its own stupid shit, like the quarians have decided to retake the homeworld.
This is the trailer.
If it wasn't for the space ships you would think it was a cod clone.
So ME3 has the reapers already here and that should be bad ending, I mean unless they retcon the reapers to suck, I don't see how they are saving earth.

According to the Game Informer article on ME3 from a few months ago, part of the game involves solving a conflict between the Salarians and the Krogan (that was just one example given), which to me smacks of gathering allies in the sense of entire armies and fleets, not just his squad. Also keep in mind, if the events of ME2 are any indication, the Reapers will want live humans, so they'll probably be on Earth for a while after actually winning the battle there. That extends the time frame immensely.

As I see it, Shep is at Earth answering for the events of Arrival, and then the Reapers invade. Act 1 will be fighting to get off Earth. Act 2 (i.e, the Act in every Bioware game where you choose where to go) will be gathering Armies and Fleets of allies (by, for example, convincing the Salarians to lift the Genophage, or making peace between the Geth and Quarians [or helping one side win]), that sort of thing. Then Act 3 will be taking all of your allies and either trying to take back Earth or else attacking wherever the Reapers are at that point.

Which is why the plot will be bad or the reapers will have to be retconned to hell since so far its been established that we are using tech that they control, mainly the gates which are the key to intergalactic travel, the only one they don't control is that lil one that links the promethium world to the citadel, all they need to do is either shut down the gate to sol, station a fleet outside the gate so they can nuke anything that comes though or just blow or just blow up the gate and then nothing is getting though. Not to mention that the reapers have been doing this awhile so they know pretty much how the tech of the races will work and where species will be and since they have spies they will even know fleet size and such, really the only reason this invasion is different is because they weren't woken up by the keepers since the promethians managed to stop them from being able to send a message this time.
The only plot that really would make sense is to attack them in deep space, any other way of fighting them seems doomed, without the plot going wacky.

I think you misunderstood. Talk to Vigil on Ilos again. They only controlled all the Relays in the other invasions because they took over the Citadel first thing, and the Citadel gave them that control (along with census records and such). Since you stopped them from using the Citadel Relay, they are at a MASSIVE disadvantage, since they cannot control our fleet movements anymore. Add to that the fact that, for the first time ever, there will be an entire galaxy already aware of them and amassed to fight them and it won't even take a retcon.

Since they shut down the relays in the past, they only ever had to fight small forces at once (i.e, whatever forces would have been stationed at individual systems). Moreover, they had records of which fleets were where, so they could always attack in overwhelming strength. Their control of the Citadel was always their single largest advantage, and without that, they're just a fleet (possibly an enormous one, but we don't really know) of very tough ships; a hard target, to be sure, but we have giant fleets too.

 

[Avatar Roku]

Your Pitch(Black) on Dark Matter is certainly interesting but I still think there'll be some heavy galactic combat involved. And if you got the right allies (such as our dear buggy friends the Rachni and rebellious lil robot pals the Geth) on board then there's bound to be some serious Reaper beat-downs in the works.

Plus there's probably been study on Reapers by now but certain factions *hackcoughcerberuscough* meaning weapons may or may not have been developed to try combating them.

Either way I can see a wide web of possibilities that could be all or nothing.

It's cool to have the Krogans on my side too because Wrex is their head honcho and he's my best buddy xD

In an epic Rock-Paper-Scissors battle that decides the fate of the galaxy.

More seriously I really don't have a clue, but I have a hunch those bugs things from the first game(raka something) might play a role if you spared them. Same might go for those geth in Legion's mission.

Yeah, I pretty much trusted everyone to help in the final hour. That meant converting the Geth, saving the Rachni, handing over the collector ship... pretty much everything.

But it will probably be a 'gaining favours from all races and factions to help in the final fight' kind of deal.

As far as Cerberus goes, the reason that they're fighting you in ME3 is apparently one of two things:
1. You handed the Station over to them and they got Indoctrinated
2. They're pissed at you for blowing up the station (which is retarded, but whatever)

So don't count on Cerberus' help.

Yeah, I played the demo a couple of weeks back and I kinda got the whole 'I probably shouldn't have given them all that tech' thing XD

I really hope they don't turn out to be 2D bad guys in ME3.

You mean like an E3 demo, or is there an actual demo out that I've yet to play?

 

[Mikkel421427]

With fisticuffs!

 

[AndyFromMonday]

The Reapers have been killing of advanced civilizations for millions if not billions of years. The Protheans, a civilization way more advanced than the current batch, managed to replicate Reaper technology and they were STILL "killed off" with little to no effort by the Reapers. Plus, it took an entire fucking fleet to destroy just ONE Reaper and the only reason that happened was because Sovereign was stupid enough to pour all of its energy into Saren, losing its shields in the process. It's also been made clear that the technology used by Council races is extensively based on Reaper technology which means the Reapers would have at least SOME form of protection against it.

tl;dr: It would be fucking stupid if the Galaxy survived the Reaper onslaught.

Mass Effect 2 sort of ruined the overarching plot. The Reapers were willing to sacrifice both the Collectors and Sovereign in order to return when they could have just as easily reached the galaxy by using their goddamn fucking engines, in less than two fucking months? That's just ridiculous and stupid. At the very least Mass Effect 2 made sense but the shit they pulled in ME2 was just plain silly. It's sad seeing such a detailed and interesting world go to waste.

 

[Dastardly]

How do you think the Reapers will be defeated, considering one of them managed to demolish half a fleet before going down?

Here is my theory: Dark Matter. I've been playing through both games over the past few weeks, and I've noticed quite a few references to dark matter that have no other context in the story. Namely on Tali's recruitment mission and a few galactic newscasts. I feel that somehow, dark matter is going to be weaponized in the game as a means of combating the Reapers with superpowerful weapons.

So that's my pitch, what do you guys think is going to happen?

The poetic way would be to trick them into destroying themselves. But more than likely, here's my theory:

A central theme of the whole series has been the factionalization of the races. This division has been causing wars and problems all along. The Reapers seem to "reproduce" by taking the best traits of the current living races and integrating them into their whole. They represent the greatest strengths of the greatest races ever to exist.

In order to defeat them, all races will have to band together in some way and create their own "best of." It will no longer be about humans asserting dominance or krogans taking over or whatever. Everyone will band together or die. Probably the best way to do this would be the construction of a superweapon or super-ship (with superweapons) that represents the best contributions of each race.

Perhaps Shepard will have to undertake missions for each race to secure their support, provide them resources, and ultimately collect their contribution to the superweapon:

Asari: Some major biotic offensive/defensive widget
Turians: long-range firepower
Krogans: some type of super-armor (that can probably also be used to ram things)
Salarians: some type of major tech weapon (or something similar to the genophage)
Quarians: likely a super-engine of some kind (or perhaps a shield based on their suit tech)
Drell: Maybe an even-more-advanced cloaking tech?
Elcor, Hanar, and Volus: Probably donating resources, or something -- dark matter, maybe?
Batarians / Vorcha: No clue. Maybe just manpower.

And I suspect the possibility of a contribution from the Rachni (provided they are still alive) that involves tactical planning via collective intelligence.

Other prediction: EDI will occupy the body of a Reaper at some point, and will continue to exist beyond the ending of the game.

 

[Spitfire]

I think it will be a mix of several things.

The Geth will probably play a big role, since they have many similarities with the Reapers. The Asari and the Turians will no doubt lend some major firepower to the fight. The Krogans will temporarily put their differences aside, and take it out on the common foe instead.
As for Humanity's sorry ass, we'll be wiped off the face of the Earth for having pissed off the Reapers, and the game will end with Shephard and one other Human character having to repopulate the planet together - that's my prediction anyway.

 

[Dr Pussymagnet]

Shepard's probably going to end up going to the Reaper homeworld/headquarters and press a button that somehow causes every Reaper to self destruct.

 

[userwhoquitthesite]

It will be something weak like the computer virus in Independance day. You and your squad will infiltrate a reaper and stick a memory card in its USB slot and then the credits will role. But as long as its better than dragon age 2 I will be very happy.

Something like this. Shepard and Co. will find their way onto a big badass Dreadnought and use some magical hacking to take control of it.
Or, if they arent that lazy, they will find a "dead" reaper on a planet and manage to start it up without its brain and use it.
Or, they will find a renegade Reaper who thinks killing the galaxy is wrong, and fights with the citadel races. He will die in the final battle, leaving shepard sad/angry at the loss of a resource depending on how the player runs his Shep.
Or, some magical device/gimmick will render the Reapers unable to fight with their full strength, believing in themselves instead of the me that believes in them.
Or, the Geth will suddenly ride in to the rescue, becoming admitted to the citadel and possibly burying the hatchet with the Quarians due to shenanigans.
Or, that one badass-looking Turian from the tutorial will come back as Space Jesus and destroy the Reapers with his might laser nipples.
Or, the Grey Wardens will come to your aid after having been discovered on a nearby planet, their swords and magic taking the enemy entirely by surprise.
Or, there will just be a straight-up fleet to fleet battle, and we will win because the plot says so.
Or, there will be one GIANT FUCKING MEGA Reaper who is the boss of them all. A peculiar weakness to human-sized aliens will cause him to be destroyed, which will in turn somehow diable the other Reapers.
Or, Shepard will bypass the fight entirely, leaving the citadel fleets to stage the battle, and going to some sort of home base for the Reapers, where he will either find a massive shutoff code or learn that the Reapers are actually Men Behind the Curtain, and destroy the much more killable aliens controlling the magic spaceships.
Or, everyone dies, and we are left with rule 34 as the only new adventures for Shep and Co.

 

[jipperman]

Shepard will defeat the Reapers with his own self in conjunction with guns. Just a theory.

 

[RastaBadger]

She (cannon for me) isn't going to beat them. The reapers will destroy all life in the galaxy just as they did before though the entire thing will end with a massive fight between her and an infinite number of reapers that doesn't end until she dies.

 

[SaunaKalja]

Shepard's probably going to end up going to the Reaper homeworld/headquarters and press a button that somehow causes every Reaper to self destruct.

Or better yet, it's going to be a Paragon/Renegade option. The Renegade option is going to be to not destroy them so you can harvest some of their techonlogy! And somehow in the Bioware development headquarters the designers go "That's brilliant!".

 

[PurePareidolia]

Why does everybody keep saying Dark matter? It's Dark Energy they keep going on about.

Both answers are equally vague though because it's between a hard to detect form of matter and a hard to detect form of energy neither of which we understand properly.

I figure it'll come down to a shootout though. That or a deus ex machina.

Or it'll turn out that the bad reapers are a rogue cell and we'll have to team up with the good reapers and learn a valuable lesson about tolerance.

 

[Kingsnake661]

She will find a big red button that says don't push and she will push it and all the reapers will become subservient and work at mcdonalds for the next 50k years.

Really I dont see anyway this is going to end other then finding a magic mcguffen and it somehow beating all the reapers, with the setup the 3rd game has. Really the game should be about organizing the races into a fleet and finding a way into deep space to kill most of them while they are still sleeping, have a few wake up before they are wiped out and have that be the epic final battle, where it takes most of the fleets to deal with a few reapers and one of those reapers is infiltrated and taken down by Shepard's team, while the others are either taken down by similar infiltration teams or blown to hell by dreadnoughts.

I think that is exactly what the game WILL be about. Think about the allies we have (possibly) been recruiting. The Krogan, the Quarians, the Geth, the Rachni. All of those but the Quarians are renowned for terrestrial combat prowess (good for boarding reapers, for example), and all of them but the Krogans are renowned for strong fleets (hell, the Quarians have the largest one in the known galaxy, and the Geth fleet that followed Saren was only about 5% of the total Geth strength). And that's to say nothing of what a you could do with the Citadel and Alliance Fleets when they fight the Reapers at full strength and while not surprised.

I bet Mass Effect 3 will mostly be spent making sure that those allies are at full strength. Convincing the Quarians and Geth to make peace (or choosing between them, which Keelah knows I don't want to do), convincing the Salarians to lift the Genophage, scouting the Reapers so that the big fleets are not taken by surprise, etc.

Few things to keep in mind.

1. We've come to find out, more or less, that not all reapers are the BIG, capital ships Sovereign was. Granted, there are prolly alot of them big ships, but in general, it's not a fleet of "Sovereigns" like it's been made out to be.

2. Sovereign was taken down, more or less, but one wing, or fleet of earth ships, not the whole earth navy, and what was left of a suprise attack on the citidal that started with them knocking out communations so they couldn't call for help. There were alot more reinforcments to be had, if they'd known they were under attack in the first place.

3. The reapers are burning ALOT of resorces and fuel to make the trip to the cidital. Not only did they have to come back from dark space, but once the alpha relay was blown, that added possible up to a years worth more FTL travel, which has to be taxing.

So i think there's a SLIGHT misconception as to how powerful the reaper fleet really is, IE, they aren't all Sovereigns, and are buring ALOT of resorces right now, and we aren't as WEAK as we seemed. It was a suprise attack, and a fraction of the galaxies full milatery might. A head on fight, with the WHOLE galaxie, as in, EVERYONE, might be more then the reapers can handle.

After all, all reapers invasions START with a sneak attack that cripples interstaller travel. where they can pick apart picemeal resistince one system at a time. That won't be the case this time. It's going to be a head on fight, after a long exidos, with a unitifed galaxie (once i'm done with them). Something they may well have NEVER faced before.

And of course, there may be a magic Maguffin. That can always happen to if the writers get lazy... >.>

On that subject, we've been told that there is one set piece in ME3 wherein a Thresher Maw fights a Reaper, so they really all better NOT be Sovereign's size, or else Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense OF Scale.

No, unfortinatly according to everything I have seen about the game so far, it starts out with the reapers invading and attacking earth and Shepard is able to escape and tries to round up allies to counter attack but each race is involved with its own stupid shit, like the quarians have decided to retake the homeworld.
This is the trailer.
If it wasn't for the space ships you would think it was a cod clone.
So ME3 has the reapers already here and that should be bad ending, I mean unless they retcon the reapers to suck, I don't see how they are saving earth.

According to the Game Informer article on ME3 from a few months ago, part of the game involves solving a conflict between the Salarians and the Krogan (that was just one example given), which to me smacks of gathering allies in the sense of entire armies and fleets, not just his squad. Also keep in mind, if the events of ME2 are any indication, the Reapers will want live humans, so they'll probably be on Earth for a while after actually winning the battle there. That extends the time frame immensely.

As I see it, Shep is at Earth answering for the events of Arrival, and then the Reapers invade. Act 1 will be fighting to get off Earth. Act 2 (i.e, the Act in every Bioware game where you choose where to go) will be gathering Armies and Fleets of allies (by, for example, convincing the Salarians to lift the Genophage, or making peace between the Geth and Quarians [or helping one side win]), that sort of thing. Then Act 3 will be taking all of your allies and either trying to take back Earth or else attacking wherever the Reapers are at that point.

Which is why the plot will be bad or the reapers will have to be retconned to hell since so far its been established that we are using tech that they control, mainly the gates which are the key to intergalactic travel, the only one they don't control is that lil one that links the promethium world to the citadel, all they need to do is either shut down the gate to sol, station a fleet outside the gate so they can nuke anything that comes though or just blow or just blow up the gate and then nothing is getting though. Not to mention that the reapers have been doing this awhile so they know pretty much how the tech of the races will work and where species will be and since they have spies they will even know fleet size and such, really the only reason this invasion is different is because they weren't woken up by the keepers since the promethians managed to stop them from being able to send a message this time.
The only plot that really would make sense is to attack them in deep space, any other way of fighting them seems doomed, without the plot going wacky.

I think you misunderstood. Talk to Vigil on Ilos again. They only controlled all the Relays in the other invasions because they took over the Citadel first thing, and the Citadel gave them that control (along with census records and such). Since you stopped them from using the Citadel Relay, they are at a MASSIVE disadvantage, since they cannot control our fleet movements anymore. Add to that the fact that, for the first time ever, there will be an entire galaxy already aware of them and amassed to fight them and it won't even take a retcon.

Since they shut down the relays in the past, they only ever had to fight small forces at once (i.e, whatever forces would have been stationed at individual systems). Moreover, they had records of which fleets were where, so they could always attack in overwhelming strength. Their control of the Citadel was always their single largest advantage, and without that, they're just a fleet (possibly an enormous one, but we don't really know) of very tough ships; a hard target, to be sure, but we have giant fleets too.

Right, the reapers don't just automaticly control our tech, or tech is based on there's and that's to our disadvantage, but it isn't a matter of them just willing our stuff to stop working. I also think that's a reason the geth will or could be a key allie...

The gates, the cidial controls that. Not the reapers, and that's the linchpin to there plan. Catch EVERYONE with their pants down and take over. If you'll notice, in the first game, the reaper didn't just automaticlly get control. He was hacking in.

They attack earth first for ONE simple reason. No, not story convience, but because earth, as far as i can tell for the two games galixie maps, is the closest relay to the aplha relay, which was the way they were coming. It's the closet gate, it's the first target, and it's a gate we won't BLOW on them... it makes since. Honestly, if we can shut the gate down soon enough in the game, we can make earth the frount line, more or less, for the battle...

While the reapers still have a siginifent advantage, and this is going to be a BRUTEL war, they are most differently not unbeatable, and have been hit with some substantiual setbacks. It's a winable fight... at GREAT cost. I get the feeling there's going to be LOTS of death, and even the "good" ending will be bitter sweet. I'm really looking forward to see if Bioware can pull it off as well as i hope they can.

 

[M920CAIN]

with fire. & gunz. BiG GuNZ!

 

[userwhoquitthesite]

The Krogan, the Quarians, the Geth, the Rachni... all of them but the Krogans are renowned for strong fleets (hell, the Quarians have the largest one in the known galaxy

The Quarians have a large-ish fleet, but its a bunch of ramshackle ships that barely function and have virtually no fighting capabilities... Did you mean the Turians?

 

[Jay D Gee]

When paying ME2 I originally though the dark matter thing was going to be a reapers doomsday weapon but apparently there just going to turn up on mass and go on a killing spree.

As for defeating them, short of using there own strength to beat them or some painful deus ex machina. I'm not sure.

 

[Veritasiness]

Ah yes, Reapers. An immortal race of sentient starships allegedly waiting in dark space.

We have dismissed that claim.

Spoiler: serious answer

I'm not sure - this is precisely my worry about Mass Effect 3, that it might be too big of a challenge to be sensical... but I think if any hero can do it, it'll be Shepard, and if any game company can bring it together, Bioware.

 

[Infernai]

Find that one Prothean Railgun that crippled that one Reaper and made a new asshole on a planet, make an entire system of them, then put everything we have there, and effing DARE them to go ahead and try it. Also, Cain shot and Widow rifles to the face.

Or alternatively: Find a rail-gun and just have Garrus calibrate the freaking hell out of it.

 

[geezah91]

Lure the Reapers to Earth, and singularity á la Star Trek _>

...Or Shepard lands inside a reaper on some Reaper mini-ship, and uploads a virus using a Macbook

 

[Zack Alklazaris]

Shepard and "Shepard's Army" is on its way to Earth. When EDI brings up a wonderous discovery that was previously classified by Cerberus up until now. Its talks of a secret "deus ex machina" er I mean weapon of untold destruction that the Protheans were working on before their destruction. So Shepard takes a nostalgic journey to Ilos where he finds this weapon and uses it against the Repears. Thus winning the game. You can lose your life, if you don't train your main team the proper skills to activate the weapon or lose earth if you don't gain enough alien species to fight for your cause. But in the end, the game is over.

I take the game, throw it in the microwave, and never speak of Bioware in the same god like light ever again.


I have much faith in Bioware that this synopsis I just created WONT be the outcome, still games have done it in the past.