T w e n t y S i d e d
Over the past few entries I’ve brought up the fact that Cerberus has, somehow, become a galactic superpower with armies armies and fleets.
Shamus, according to the Codex Cerberus has trillions of credits. And TIM has stolen the plans to all of the Alliance warships. So it’s totally explained and you can’t complain about it.
Okay. The hand-wave for money and intelligence are massively improbable and stretch my credulity to the limit. The codex mentioned Cerberus has corporations and “shell companies”, which makes them sound big and impressive, but it doesn’t actually justify their wealth or power. “Shell companies” is just financial technobabbleFinancialbabble? in this case and doesn’t begin to explain things.
Humans are still a small power on a galactic scale. (Or were, according to the earlier games.) Yes, Humans were doing well… for a newcomer. Humans were promising. They had potential. They weren’t gods.
The other races have multiple worlds with dense populations, while humans are mostly on Earth, with a few scattered colonies. On a galactic scale, the other races are the United States, China, and Germany, while Humans are (say) Iceland. Awesome, skilled, and empowered by good home resources, sure. But there’s no scenario where, over a single generation, Iceland becomes so powerful that a single fringe group within Iceland can become a standalone superpower capable of conquering the capital city of one of the major nations.
In any case, trillions of dollars of income are hard enough to conceal on their own. If you’re a ten-year-old you might imagine that companies just have all their money in a big vault like Scrooge McDuck. But the truth is that a great deal of time and effort goes into making sure the money is accounted for. Imagine if Apple and Google tried to team up and funnel billions of income into some extremely illicit and clandestine activity. Yes, they have billions of income, but they also have billions in expenses. Without that money to run your company, your business will suffer. Without that money to pay your shareholders, people will dump your stock. Also, governments like to collect taxes, which means they’re pretty damn good at figuring out where the money goes, because the people who PAY you money file taxes. And even if you can somehow hide all that income, it doesn’t do you any good unless you spend it. And I have no idea how you can secretly spend trillions of dollars.
But fine. Cerberus has limitless money and intel. I’ll humor the writer. Throughout this series, I’ve been talking about why the first game was so good at world building, why that was important, and how these latter games failed at it. As a way of illustrating the point, let’s take a break from talking about Mass Effect and do a little worldbuilding ourselves with this thought experiment:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 40: TIM Island”
