How do you make Arrival fit into the plot?

[The Dude]

I've had some difficulty with the storyline of this DLC and how to properly fit it into ME2's plot. The reasons are due to a few things that I don't think are properly cleared up:

1) Kenson says "the Reapers will arrive in the system regardless, but without the relay it will take months or even years for them to travel anywhere else". So the countdown is, I assume, a countdown to their arrival via their own basic FTL travelling means, just like any starship is capable of FTL travel outside of Mass Relays, right? But with the slamming of the asteroid into the relay it is still heavily implied that they will arrive -via- the relay and that by destroying it we gave ourselves a few months more. So which is it? It seems fairly ambiguous to me.

2) If the Reapers were planning to invade via a secondary invasion point, what does that say about the attempts of Sovereign in ME1 to open up the Citadel as a central relay? Even if they only started moving to the Alpha Relay -after- the failure of Sovereign at the Citadel, you have to wonder why they didn't just default to the Alpha Relay invasion as their standard plan? Because it apparently takes them only two years to get there from dark space, and they can do so in complete secrecy because even though Object Rho may still have been found, noone would've had a clue as to what it would've signified if it wasn't for Sovereign earlier.

3) When is the correct time to play the content of Arrival with the earlier two points in mind? Before or after the suicide mission? At which point in time does it make more sense? If you play it before then you can justify the collector plot (which I expand on below) as being a failsafe plan for backup Reaping should their alpha relay invasion also be foiled, but then the final shot of the game fails because it clearly shows the Reapers still approaching the galaxy, whereas, judging by Kenson's words earlier, they should already be in it even if not anywhere near the core. If you play it after the suicide mission, then the significance of what you accomplished with the collectors gets sort of devalued.

These are basically my three main challenges with the plot here. The thing is that I love Mass Effect, and while you guys may know that I tend to rag on the Conduit plot, I've come to accept it as Saren and Sovereign just wanting to find a way to ambush the Citadel forces as well as they possibly could, even though it may not have been necessary to risk what they did. The problem I see with Arrival is that it in part invalidates the entire plotline of ME1, when the Conduit plot could've been stronger from the outset, and it invalidates what the Collectors were doing in ME2, since why would Harbinger have the collectors scrounge up bits of human DNA at a time (a colony every few weeks isn't exactly efficient reaping by murderous AI standards) when he knew full well the Reapers were about to invade anyway?

Now I grant that the latter invalidation may still be rectified in ME3 and that there are very justifiable reasons for the Reapers to plan things as they did, but I'm left to work with what I have.

All in all I just find Arrival a very annoying piece of additional story and it bothers me because I love Mass Effect as a series and I want to keep loving it and not be annoyed by these stupid inconsistencies. What have you guys made of all this? Is there stuff I'm just not seeing?

[Razvus]

I guess I won't play Arrival at all then.

also, it's not hard to invalidate anything in this game as long as you take a moment to think it through. The collectors are useless on their own, they don't need anything else:
They're the guys going around the block with 1 ship that has 1 big cannon with no support (TIE fighters) at all, stealing colonies of a few hundreds every week or so when the moon's full. they have plans to "MY GOD, they're going to harvest EARTH!" by sneakishly traveling through the heart of Citadel Space in that 1 ship, go to Earth and spend probably... 40 years to harvest 12 billion people without being bothered by any dreadnought. I see no problem here.

[Lt.Bradford]

I act like arrival has happened several weeks after the suicide mission, basically leading right up to the opening scenes of ME3.

[General Brittanicus]

I've had some difficulty with the storyline of this DLC and how to properly fit it into ME2's plot. The reasons are due to a few things that I don't think are properly cleared up:

1) Kenson says "the Reapers will arrive in the system regardless, but without the relay it will take months or even years for them to travel anywhere else". So the countdown is, I assume, a countdown to their arrival via their own basic FTL travelling means, just like any starship is capable of FTL travel outside of Mass Relays, right? But with the slamming of the asteroid into the relay it is still heavily implied that they will arrive -via- the relay and that by destroying it we gave ourselves a few months more. So which is it? It seems fairly ambiguous to me.

I haven't played it for a while and i dont know if i'm reading your question right, but i'm almost certain that the countdown is counting down to them coming through the relay and that destroying it means you it will just take the reapers longer to get to the galaxy as they will have to use their FTL drives. Also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JLRAX-RbHY

[The Dude]

I guess I won't play Arrival at all then.

also, it's not hard to invalidate anything in this game as long as you take a moment to think it through. The collectors are useless on their own, they don't need anything else:
They're the guys going around the block with 1 ship that has 1 big cannon with no support (TIE fighters) at all, stealing colonies of a few hundreds every week or so when the moon's full. they have plans to "MY GOD, they're going to harvest EARTH!" by sneakishly traveling through the heart of Citadel Space in that 1 ship, go to Earth and spend probably... 40 years to harvest 12 billion people without being bothered by any dreadnought. I see no problem here.

Well the thing is that it's forced into the canon because you'll stand on trial for the events of Arrival at the beginning of ME3.

[Razvus]

At least I can pretend the trial is for some of those illegal sites EDI said I was browsing, and not for some w/e story destroyer.

[Kanaric]

I wish they would sell a complete game rather than me having to load it up to play the newest DLC that i MUST play before the new game.

[Kamos]

Arrival is hardly a must play. No decision you do makes any difference on how things play out. Just read about it on a wiki.

All it seriously has is one really tough fight.

[HunterKYA]

Arrival is hardly a must play. No decision you do makes any difference on how things play out.

Quite true. It appears that Bioware thought it best to take away the biggest aspect in ME: choice. They seem to have taken it away, because players who've gotten through the first 2 games essentially know that the Reapers would find a way to invade, somewhere and somehow, but taking away decision-making altogether from Arrival heavily weakened its dark, if less-than-immersive, plot. I've played through the DLC twice, it's hard to imagine how naive Shepard was if he/she didn't believe that Kenson hadn't been indoctrinated in some way after being in the vicinity of a Reaper artifact for extended periods. Additionally, it would all be explained at the beginning of ME3 why Shepard is on trial to begin with, so why put out a DLC with a weak plot? Bioware wanted that "Wow" factor to connect ME2 and ME3. They achieved it with the visuals, but not the story.

The problem I see with Arrival is that it in part invalidates the entire plotline of ME1, when the Conduit plot could've been stronger from the outset, and it invalidates what the Collectors were doing in ME2, since why would Harbinger have the collectors scrounge up bits of human DNA at a time (a colony every few weeks isn't exactly efficient reaping by murderous AI standards) when he knew full well the Reapers were about to invade anyway?

The Reapers likely suspected that, despite generations of genetic alterations and cybernetic replacements, they knew that the Collectors were flawed in the sense that they remained partly organic. Collectors could gather colonists from worlds that were lightly defended, though they would run into difficulties on worlds with heavier defenses, which could've happened on Horizon if the GARDIAN turrets had been working properly. For all the strength the Collectors had, they were simply pawns, and there's no telling whether the Reapers would have kept them around if the next extinction cycle succeeded, in lieu of another race supplanting them to continue the Reapers' work later on.

[Musthavename]

At least I can pretend the trial is for some of those illegal sites EDI said I was browsing, and not for some w/e story destroyer.

I'm pretty sure those bookmarks are inferred to be Joker's.

[The Dude]

Quite true. It appears that Bioware thought it best to take away the biggest aspect in ME: choice. They seem to have taken it away, because players who've gotten through the first 2 games essentially know that the Reapers would find a way to invade, somewhere and somehow, but taking away decision-making altogether from Arrival heavily weakened its dark, if less-than-immersive, plot. I've played through the DLC twice, it's hard to imagine how naive Shepard was if he/she didn't believe that Kenson hadn't been indoctrinated in some way after being in the vicinity of a Reaper artifact for extended periods. Additionally, it would all be explained at the beginning of ME3 why Shepard is on trial to begin with, so why put out a DLC with a weak plot? Bioware wanted that "Wow" factor to connect ME2 and ME3. They achieved it with the visuals, but not the story.

Well in their defense, the DLC was supposed to be a bridging DLC and since they already had in mind what the start of ME3 would be like, there wasn't exactly a lot of choice left to work with. Basically if you'd start ME3 and you'd be standing trial with the court going "ok so about that mass relay you blew up", you'd just be left wondering wtf they meant if you hadn't played Arrival.

The Reapers likely suspected that, despite generations of genetic alterations and cybernetic replacements, they knew that the Collectors were flawed in the sense that they remained partly organic. Collectors could gather colonists from worlds that were lightly defended, though they would run into difficulties on worlds with heavier defenses, which could've happened on Horizon if the GARDIAN turrets had been working properly. For all the strength the Collectors had, they were simply pawns, and there's no telling whether the Reapers would have kept them around if the next extinction cycle succeeded, in lieu of another race supplanting them to continue the Reapers' work later on.

Right so with this in mind the massive storage space inside the collector ship that made your teammates conclude the collectors were going to target earth, would've only been used in conjunction with the Reaper's attack that was imminent. That makes sense. And then whether or not the collectors survived after their collecting, when the Reapers were finished reaping, is a matter of speculation.

[Tankfriend]

1) Kenson says "the Reapers will arrive in the system regardless, but without the relay it will take months or even years for them to travel anywhere else". So the countdown is, I assume, a countdown to their arrival via their own basic FTL travelling means, just like any starship is capable of FTL travel outside of Mass Relays, right? But with the slamming of the asteroid into the relay it is still heavily implied that they will arrive -via- the relay and that by destroying it we gave ourselves a few months more. So which is it? It seems fairly ambiguous to me.

Destroying the Relay would force the Reapers to resort to their own FTL drives, yes. Unless they can use another Alpha Relay or something, they will take a lot longer to reach their destination. The way I interpret this is that the Reapers might still be "aiming" for the position of the Relay before it was taken out by Shepard. Even for the Reapers, the galaxy probably is a vast space that they cannot navigate easily without outside input, like, for example, a positional beacon emitted by a Mass Relay. One could also assume that the points that the Reapers enter the galaxy at (Alpha Relay, Citadel Relay...) would require a much more powerful beacon to reach the Reapers anywhere, so that would also justify why the Reapers would stay on their course with both powerful Relays taken out - there would be no other beacons to orient themselves at.

2) If the Reapers were planning to invade via a secondary invasion point, what does that say about the attempts of Sovereign in ME1 to open up the Citadel as a central relay? Even if they only started moving to the Alpha Relay -after- the failure of Sovereign at the Citadel, you have to wonder why they didn't just default to the Alpha Relay invasion as their standard plan? Because it apparently takes them only two years to get there from dark space, and they can do so in complete secrecy because even though Object Rho may still have been found, noone would've had a clue as to what it would've signified if it wasn't for Sovereign earlier.

Striking via the Citadel Relay would have had the benefit for the Reapers to directly appear at the focal point of the entire civilized galactic community (minus the Terminus Systems, of course, but they are not unified and, thus, weaker and less problematic to deal with overall). As Vigil, the Prothean VI from ME1, put it: Directly striking at the Citadel enabled the Reapers to gain complete control over the Mass Relay network and all of the collected databanks of the Citadel. That not only made it possible for the Reapers to isolate every system and "casually" take them one at a time (because no single system would have any hope to stand against them), but it also provided them with information about every more or less important sentient species around the galaxy, making it easier for them to actually find worthwhile targets.
Now that the Citadel has been denied to the Reapers, the matter has turned out a little more favourable for the galactic species, though probably not by much. The Reapers could just try to attack the Citadel again, after all. But at least people would have a bit more time to try and prepare against the Reapers in whatever measure.

So this might be why the Reapers have not used the Alpha Relay before - it is strategically less sound in the end, because it does not offer as many benefits as an assault on the Citadel Relay offers. Also remember that the entire story behind ME1 and the Protheans forced Sovereign into the assault, because the usual plan was no longer working. Had the Protheans not interfered with the Citadel and the Keepers, the cycle of extinction would have happened years before ME1 with the Citadel Council races being completely incapable of resistance to it.

The question would remain, of course, how to fit in the logical conclusion for the Reapers to use the Alpha Relay immediately after Sovereign's defeat, rather than after the plot of ME2 (as the cutscene implies, at least). I somehow doubt that the Reapers really counted on the Collectors finishing their Human Reaper and using that one to open the Citadel Relay again...

3) If you play it after the suicide mission, then the significance of what you accomplished with the collectors gets sort of devalued.

Which would actually fit in pretty well with the general theme of the story, mind you. The Collectors were only a tool to an end, so by taking them out, you have merely delayed the Reapers' plans a little, but at no moment did that defeat matter anything in the long-run at all. You did not take out the Reapers' way of entering the galaxy, and considering the power and expertise of the Reapers in genetical manipulation etc., you probably have not even put an end to them "gooifying" people, because they could just very well take another species and turn them into a new batch of Collectors to continue the cycle. Devalueing your success in ME2 is exactly a thing one wants to happen if you want to keep up the Reapers' reputation of the immeasurably powerful grand nemesis of the galaxy's organic population. An enemy at that position does not have to bother with losing tools - it just creates new ones.

[HunterKYA]

Well in their defense, the DLC was supposed to be a bridging DLC and since they already had in mind what the start of ME3 would be like, there wasn't exactly a lot of choice left to work with. Basically if you'd start ME3 and you'd be standing trial with the court going "ok so about that mass relay you blew up", you'd just be left wondering wtf they meant if you hadn't played Arrival..

From what I've heard, Bioware's going to include an interactive comic at the beginning of ME3 to explain why Shepard was on trial, similar to what they did when porting ME2 over to the PS3. Bioware figures, if they do it that way, there wouldn't be as much of a "WTF" factor for the people who play ME3 who didn't download Arrival.

[Justinian]

So this might be why the Reapers have not used the Alpha Relay before - it is strategically less sound in the end, because it does not offer as many benefits as an assault on the Citadel Relay offers. Also remember that the entire story behind ME1 and the Protheans forced Sovereign into the assault, because the usual plan was no longer working. Had the Protheans not interfered with the Citadel and the Keepers, the cycle of extinction would have happened years before ME1 with the Citadel Council races being completely incapable of resistance to it.

I'm pretty sure the Citadel is very different from the other Relays -- the Mass Relays in the Milky Way are a closed system only accessible amongst eachother, but it seems like the Citadel allows the instantaneous transportation of the entire Reaper fleet from any location in dark space right to the Citadel. The Protheans deactivation of the Citadel's relay (or at least messing it and the Keepers up enough prevent it from happening) led the Reapers to Plan B, that is, Saren has to go regain control of the station so that Sovereign can re-open the Citadel Relay so that the Reapers can come.

When that fails, Plan C is continuing their regular FTL travel through dark space towards the Alpha Relay. I think the Collectors were supposed to be doing their thing regardless of what the Reapers do; the Collectors are only a small part of the Reaper plan and were probably going to help them collect the sapient populations of the Galaxy after the Reaper invasion starts. Remember that the Collectors have been around for a long time in their current state, and obviously a lot longer before as the Protheans; the Codex says that there have been stories of them going around making weirdly specific requests for genetic material in exchange for tech for a long time, so their mission is long-term and only meant to roughly coincide with the Reaper invasion.

I think the Reapers had to approach the Alpha Relay by regular FTL travel no matter what because it doesn't work like the Citadel relay. But this doesn't explain the countdown -- if this is the case it suggests the Reapers would get there during the events of Arrival, likely immediately after the huge explosion. In which case the only explanation for no one knowing they're there yet is that the entire system is destroyed so there are no witnesses or equipment, and even if they were detected, there would be no way for anyone to tell the rest of the Galaxy because there's no Mass Relay in the system anymore.

I think the Reapers getting to the Viper Nebula right after the explosion is the only plausible scenario because, once there, they have no choice but to continue to the next Mass Relay; and it explains everyone's apparent lack of concern at the end of Arrival because there's no way you could know if they're there, or do anything about it.

Arrival did bring up a huge thing though: we have learned that the destruction of a Mass Relay unleashes an enormous amount of energy, almost certainly the most energetic causable event in the known universe. If it can destroy an entire SYSTEM, it must be able to destroy or at least severely damage the Reaper fleet. It's essentially the same as a supernova happening in the middle of the fleet. So the only defense against the Reapers is waiting for them to arrive at the next Mass Relay and then trying to destroy it, sacrificing the system but destroying or crippling a huge amount of the Reaper fleet -- and then you do that each time the Reapers advance until there are no more Reapers. It's the only weapon the Council races have that has any chance of destroying Reapers en masse.

Of course the consequences are huge -- destroying entire systems and more importantly damaging the Mass Relay infrastructure and cutting off parts of the Galaxy from eachother. And once you destroy a Mass Relay there's no going back because no one knows how to make another one. But I think that's preferable to mass extinction of every sapient race in the Galaxy.

I think using the Mass Relays as a weapon against the Reapers is the logical conclusion to the Reaper destruction cycle. It probably deserves it's own thread, too. I really hope BioWare utilizes this or gives you the choice between doing it and destroying parts of the Galaxy and potentially billions of people, or trying to find more conventional means of fighting them.

[HunterKYA]

Arrival did bring up a huge thing though: we have learned that the destruction of a Mass Relay unleashes an enormous amount of energy, almost certainly the most energetic causable event in the known universe. If it can destroy an entire SYSTEM, it must be able to destroy or at least severely damage the Reaper fleet. It's essentially the same as a supernova happening in the middle of the fleet. So the only defense against the Reapers is waiting for them to arrive at the next Mass Relay and then trying to destroy it, sacrificing the system but destroying or crippling a huge amount of the Reaper fleet -- and then you do that each time the Reapers advance until there are no more Reapers. It's the only weapon the Council races have that has any chance of destroying Reapers en masse.

Of course the consequences are huge -- destroying entire systems and more importantly damaging the Mass Relay infrastructure and cutting off parts of the Galaxy from eachother. And once you destroy a Mass Relay there's no going back because no one knows how to make another one. But I think that's preferable to mass extinction of every sapient race in the Galaxy.

I think using the Mass Relays as a weapon against the Reapers is the logical conclusion to the Reaper destruction cycle. It probably deserves it's own thread, too. I really hope BioWare utilizes this or gives you the choice between doing it and destroying parts of the Galaxy and potentially billions of people, or trying to find more conventional means of fighting them.

If it could be pulled off once, it'd be a sound strategy to throw something at the Reapers that they weren't expecting. However, it'd be flawed in the sense that:

• The Reapers would likely be intelligent enough not to send their entirely fleet at once.
• If destroying a relay were successfully done once, the Reapers would anticipate it again.
• Destroying relays wouldn't only cripple the Reapers, it would hinder the efforts of the Council races to combat them.
• Regardless if relays were destroyed, the Reapers could still use FTL travel to find and devastate colonized systems until they found another relay, although it would take them considerably longer.
• If it were revealed as a method to destroy Reapers in ME3, it should only be used as one of the last possible options for the Council races to defeat them, albeit at the cost of billions of lives and isolating potential allies.

[Musthavename]

Arrival did bring up a huge thing though: we have learned that the destruction of a Mass Relay unleashes an enormous amount of energy, almost certainly the most energetic causable event in the known universe. If it can destroy an entire SYSTEM, it must be able to destroy or at least severely damage the Reaper fleet. It's essentially the same as a supernova happening in the middle of the fleet. So the only defense against the Reapers is waiting for them to arrive at the next Mass Relay and then trying to destroy it, sacrificing the system but destroying or crippling a huge amount of the Reaper fleet -- and then you do that each time the Reapers advance until there are no more Reapers. It's the only weapon the Council races have that has any chance of destroying Reapers en masse.

Actually, that's a very strong thought. Quite how Shepard would be able to draw the Reaper's to one system (given that the Protheans essentially said that the Reapers split up everywhere) is a bit of an unknown - but as you said, there's a method to kill them.

Of course the consequences are huge -- destroying entire systems and more importantly damaging the Mass Relay infrastructure and cutting off parts of the Galaxy from eachother. And once you destroy a Mass Relay there's no going back because no one knows how to make another one. But I think that's preferable to mass extinction of every sapient race in the Galaxy.

I wouldn't say the consequences are that dire. The Protheans showed that Relay technology is within grasping distance of various races. The Asari at the bar on Illium also mentions that she wanted to work on developing relay technology, but this idea was shunned by most Asari since there was a perfectly working infrastructure to use, of which a lot of it was unexplored.

The Citadel races could no doubt come up with Mass Relay technology if they put their minds to it. Wether they could do it if say 90% of them were annihilated fighting the Reapers is another matter. It does however paint a possible future scenario of a post-Shepard Mass Effect game in a universe where most Mass Relays do not exist.

[Beregond]

Arrival did bring up a huge thing though: we have learned that the destruction of a Mass Relay unleashes an enormous amount of energy, almost certainly the most energetic causable event in the known universe. If it can destroy an entire SYSTEM, it must be able to destroy or at least severely damage the Reaper fleet. It's essentially the same as a supernova happening in the middle of the fleet. So the only defense against the Reapers is waiting for them to arrive at the next Mass Relay and then trying to destroy it, sacrificing the system but destroying or crippling a huge amount of the Reaper fleet -- and then you do that each time the Reapers advance until there are no more Reapers. It's the only weapon the Council races have that has any chance of destroying Reapers en masse.

Of course the consequences are huge -- destroying entire systems and more importantly damaging the Mass Relay infrastructure and cutting off parts of the Galaxy from eachother. And once you destroy a Mass Relay there's no going back because no one knows how to make another one. But I think that's preferable to mass extinction of every sapient race in the Galaxy.

I think using the Mass Relays as a weapon against the Reapers is the logical conclusion to the Reaper destruction cycle. It probably deserves it's own thread, too. I really hope BioWare utilizes this or gives you the choice between doing it and destroying parts of the Galaxy and potentially billions of people, or trying to find more conventional means of fighting them.

I still think this is a huge plothole, or at least a very weak explanation.

we were told previously several times that Relays are almost undestructable. They can't be even scratched, as they are protected by some sort of field, which prevents ice etc accumulating on them; and Pluto Relay had its field damaged, therefore it became encaged in ice.
Now we have not very large asteroid slammed into the Relay...you might say that such collisions with comets for example could happen fairly often and the Reapers would allow for such situations and make Relays impossible to 'kill' with rocks their own size (especially their da big and important 'backdoor').

But suddenly Shepard succeeds? It would be more logical to land on the Relay, disable its protection field and then riddle it with nuclear devises.

[Justinian]

Yeah I did think they made it a bit too easy to destroy the Relay. You'd think the Reapers would cover their asses a little bit more.

[HIC SVNT LEONES]

Or they're going for the standard Greek story involving the hybris, attae, and nemesis.

[Lt.Bradford]

If anything, the Reapers are pretty arrogant...

But I'll also point out that the Reapers are hedging the bets that no one will try to destroy the relays since they plan on the galaxy becoming dependent on them. After all, the Asari Bartender flat out states you can be ostracized for suggesting to finding a different way to move about the galaxy. All they had to do was make sure they were natural proof (the asteroid does have engines strapped to it) and somehow be able to push away objects just moving via gravity. In short, protected from Natural destruction, but if someone really wanted to break it they could. Kinda like a Nalgene bottle.