3 Years Later: Mass Effect 3 Ending Revisited [spoilers!]

[Auron225]

I was actually happy that there was no "perfect" ending where its sunshine and flowers for everyone - it would have seemed so very out of place given everything that had happened until then.

The thing is even if people had got a Shepard lives and reunites with love interest and crew, it would have been a happy moment in a galaxy of suffering.

We would have disease and famine on a scale never seen before, not just country or worldwide but known galaxy wide. Think of the amount of trauma that survivors would be suffering. The happy ending that people wanted would not have been as happy as people think.

Wait, why disease and famine everywhere?

Also, Shepard does survive the Destroy ending in the Extended Cut. It seems reasonable to assume that his crew would find out sooner rather than later and go get him, but I'm perfectly fine with Sheperd surviving an ending. What I meant was that if there had been an ending, in which all Reapers are gone and all squadmates survive with no large scale destruction to even dampen the mood, then surely it would be the superior ending which everyone would aim for. Any other ending would be deemed a failure. I think they did a good job and creating different endings which had their own pros and cons (Reapers all die but so do synthetics, Organics and Synthetics come to a mutual understanding but that's creepy, weird and surely very dangerous, etc). The only one that seems outright worse than the others is Refusal - I'm still not sure why Bioware thought it was a necessary addition.

 

[Diablo2000]

Says who? It's just a matter of, say, putting Samara in-game and providing a voice, and then discussing how the "Reapers were defeated" in broad, general terms without directly referencing decisions made or actions taken. So, yeah, they could do it. They would, of course, be canonizing certain things, though. And Bioware promising things doesn't mean they will keep their promises. They've been known to overpromise and underdeliver before.

They did say they wanted ME4 to be a fresh slate. Putting it in a different galaxy with an all new cast is about as fresh as you can get. It'd be nice if they canonised certain events, but the second they put events in stone, people who didn't play the game that way would complain that "history" did not reflect how they finished the games. Bioware got, and still is getting, flak over forcing Paragons to join a terrorist organisation in ME2, and Renegades being forced to quit working for a terrorist organisation. Their intent to start fresh is a means to bypass all the possible What-If combinations. I think the closest they have come to actual canonisation, is them saying that Liara is supposed to be the intended Love Interest.

However in order to bypass the biggest; ME3's ending, ME4 will have to technically start during ME3, them going to another galaxy could be explained as Continuity of Civilisation.

Does anyone wanna bet that ME4 will end with the only way in or out of Andromeda being destroyed in a way Bioware won't have to deal with ME3 ending ever again? I can see that being the case.
Even if they did, Bioware gonna do what Bioware does and handwave the entire thing with some sort of "Doesn't matter what you choose because of X or Y".

The likely handwave: "Oh, yeah, you know that Reaper thing that went on in Mass Effect 3? Yeah, it doesn't matter here because this is an alternate reality where the Reapers never existed because the Prothean wiped them out."

Or most likely "Synthesis happens... Doesn't matter what you choose or if makes sense or not. If Reapers are destroyed then they use reapers remains to make it happen, if they are controled they still use reaper tech to make it happen. Oh... And only the high military point things are canon because fuck you, you lazy fuck."

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Reading this thread, I'm seeing a lot of people talk about how the endings weren't that bad, but the lack of effect your in-game actions had. I feel people are taking it a bit over the top, which is understandable since ME2's ending could vary hugely per playthrough. But ME3 was in a different situation. There were two main outcomes possible: either the Reapers won, or Shepard won. The survival of individual characters could still be dependent on choices if Shep won, but if the Reapers won everybody died anyway. Plus, your ingame choices DO have a big effect. You can kill off the Krogan, the Rachni (again), the Quarians, the Geth, and the Hanar and Drell. You can also completely ignore the pleas for help from the Volus and Elcor, indirectly killing them off. I completely agree with the people saying that the individual CHOICES were hilariously bad, but the way the endings were selected weren't as awful as people enjoy thinking they are.

The problem with the choices in ME3 become the most apparent when contrasted against the choices in ME2:
In Mass Effect 2 your choice on whatever to do loyalty missions or not, whatever to go through the Omega 4 relay directly or not, whatever to talk with your crew members about upgrades and who had to do what during the final mission all had a direct effect on the ending. Didn't do all the loyalty missions? Someone was likely to die. Picked the wrong team leader? Someone's dead. Waited around before going through the relay? That's your crew dead. Etc. Mass Effect 2 made it feel like all the choices you made in the main story missions were important and made them affect the ending. In many ways, the end game of Mass Effect 2 is a text book example on how to do player choice/consequence.

In Mass Effect 3 you can amass a bunch of war assets by doing all kinds of stuff, from side missions to story missions to random scans. Your choices on who to aid in the Priority missions slightly affect some of the cutscenes in the end game and some voiced lines (ie. Wrex speech at the FOB). But once the final scene triggers none of that matters anymore. All your choices are moot once Star Child rears his ugly uncanny valley face. The only thing that matters is how high your EMS was prior to starting Priority: Earth as that will dictate how many of the three endings unlocks and whatever or not you can get the stinger for the Destroy ending. In a series all about choices and their consequences and which, up to that point, has gone to great lengths to make your choices seem special (ie. getting War Assets from Zhu's Hope if you saved the colonists in ME1) and have called back to them the final scene and epilogue are all stuck to a set track. Doesn't matter if you sided with the Geth or Quarians, doesn't matter if you tricked Wreav and helped the Dalatrass, none of it will be addressed. This is especially egregious in the case of the player saving the Geth and choosing the destroy ending, as the game doesn't even mention or show that you destroy them too. Simply put the choices of ME3 are all red herrings, as they just doesn't mean anything in the end apart from their numerical value in determining EMS.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

The only one that seems outright worse than the others is Refusal - I'm still not sure why Bioware thought it was a necessary addition.

Because some of us get a smug satisfaction from shooting Star Child in the face as a way of spiting both him and the writers. =P

 

[Megalodon]

Plus, your ingame choices DO have a big effect. You can kill off the Krogan, the Rachni (again), the Quarians, the Geth, and the Hanar and Drell. You can also completely ignore the pleas for help from the Volus and Elcor, indirectly killing them off. I completely agree with the people saying that the individual CHOICES were hilariously bad, but the way the endings were selected weren't as awful as people enjoy thinking they are.

No, they don't. As has already been said, all the choices boil down to off screen numbers: 'If X condition is met, gain 200 EMS'. You can indeed ignore the pleas of the Elcor, but beyond not getting some EMS (which, at least post EC, there's more than enough of to go around), there's no consequence. You never see the Elcor helping in the final fight (and come on, who didn't want to see those 'walking tanks' in action?). You're never confronted an insane, Grief stricken Quarian on the Citadel if you side with the Geth. The only times you get any follow up is when it comes to squad mates (Tali's suicide, Wrex discovering your treachery), otherwise, it's just those magical, undefined EMS numbers. It leaves the final feeling rushed, and kinda empty, for all the 'you've united the galaxy' talk, we primarily see humans fighting, see precious little of the fight itself, and the glacial speed of everything after the beam charge completely torpedoes the rising tension of a good finale.

 

[Redd the Sock]

Understanding my thoughts on ME3's ending requires a bit of context of the game to me, and no doubt others. Mass Effect was never a perfect work, but it sure had style, and it was refreshing to see new IPs go over well. ME3 moved things a bit forward though. Video game story telling has always been very limited, mostly due to a lack of effort. Assuming they even try to have a story beyond a framing device, it's almost always self contained. There's no buildup between Zelda or GTA games from the last in terms of story as it always restarts. Of the ones that try, you either see them drop off the face of the earth like Half Life, or drive themselves into the ground trying to keep it going like Resident Evil. Unless it's planned like .hack, serialized stories in video games would always disappoint in one way or another (with MGS4 being the one exception I can think of).

So ME3 starts getting hyped up, and it looks like they're going to tell the finale of the story they've been telling. It comes and it's cheesy, a bit flawed, but no more than any other sci-fi story, and it was doing a decent job of playing to all the fanservice we wanted. It was grand, it was epic, and it fumbled at the one yard line. Suddenly the conflict of 3 games, 4 novels, and a dozen comics, that had been summed up as "can we beat the reapers" shifted to ""SHOULD we beat the reapers." Now they had a purpose to the universe. A flawed, but well intended one, and in 10 minutes we're expected to dissect their motives, the actions of the galaxy and decide the fate of the universe. It was like if Return of the Jedi had Luke ponder joining the Empire, or Frodo had been sane and still thought about keeping the ring. It might have gone over better, but most of us could see the flaws in the reaper logic, especially if you united the Quarians and Geth earlier in the game. Most of us wanted to shout down how their principle premise was proven wrong, and how there's more to a species than their genetic makeup, but common sense was lost in 3 forced choices. A cheap "Marooned" finale for the rest of the cast added salt to the wound.

I wasn't angry, just disappointed. All they really had to do was have a big battle, and they thought they could be deep and thought provoking. Anger generated in the weeks to follow as the fight become rooted not in ME3 but idealistic views on content creation, which cemented into bitterness over time as if I'm unhappy and make my voice known, I'm an entitled fanboy for daring to tell a creator what to do, but slap the word feminist on something and you can rip and created content apart without concern for the creator's whims and desires.

 

[Mausthemighty]

I'm still done with ME3. I don't feel the urge to ever play that game again.
Fortunately there are a gazillion other games waiting to be played by me.

 

[Auron225]

The only one that seems outright worse than the others is Refusal - I'm still not sure why Bioware thought it was a necessary addition.

Because some of us get a smug satisfaction from shooting Star Child in the face as a way of spiting both him and the writers. =P

And your own Shepard? Fair enough I guess!

Actually, to be honest, I was very moved in the Refusal ending to see Liara's info pod which spoke of their failure. Still would never choose it but it's a shame that info pod had no place in the other endings.

 

[DrownedAmmet]

Reading this thread, I'm seeing a lot of people talk about how the endings weren't that bad, but the lack of effect your in-game actions had. I feel people are taking it a bit over the top, which is understandable since ME2's ending could vary hugely per playthrough. But ME3 was in a different situation. There were two main outcomes possible: either the Reapers won, or Shepard won. The survival of individual characters could still be dependent on choices if Shep won, but if the Reapers won everybody died anyway. Plus, your ingame choices DO have a big effect. You can kill off the Krogan, the Rachni (again), the Quarians, the Geth, and the Hanar and Drell. You can also completely ignore the pleas for help from the Volus and Elcor, indirectly killing them off. I completely agree with the people saying that the individual CHOICES were hilariously bad, but the way the endings were selected weren't as awful as people enjoy thinking they are.

The problem with the choices in ME3 become the most apparent when contrasted against the choices in ME2:

Yeah, it was really tough to live up to that. The main difference I saw between 2 and 3 is that in 2 you felt like every piece of tech you gathered was used. If you upgraded your shields, there would be a cutscene where the Normandy would take a hit and Joker would say "Good thing we upgraded those shields!" That is really all that is missing that makes ME3 so much worse.
ME3 set up a lot of things real well. I chose to save the Rachni, and all they had to do was throw in a scene near the end where a Rachni swarm helps Shepard in the final battle or something.
But all we got was a little meter to fill

 

[AgedGrunt]

There was simply too much content for one game to close it out. DLC is dessert, not meat, and EC doesn't "fix" an ending like that; was either writing without coherence or a breakdown in development, in terms of people disagreeing on what to do with the finish.

 

[Arkliem]

The only one that seems outright worse than the others is Refusal - I'm still not sure why Bioware thought it was a necessary addition.

Because some of us get a smug satisfaction from shooting Star Child in the face as a way of spiting both him and the writers. =P

And your own Shepard? Fair enough I guess!

Actually, to be honest, I was very moved in the Refusal ending to see Liara's info pod which spoke of their failure. Still would never choose it but it's a shame that info pod had no place in the other endings.

I usually pick refusal because the other endings completely conflict with Shepard's choices or don't make sense.

Spend the entirety of ME2 and ME3 getting synthetics and organics to cooperate and show that it can be done? Changed my mind, gonna kill all the synthetics.

TIM you can't use the reapers, they're going to indoctrinate you, and that's way too much power in one person's hand. I can totally do it though.

We're going to use space magic to solve this problem once and for all. No trust me, we have space magic. This isn't a ruse to get you to kill yourself.

The alliance I formed IS my crucible. If it doesn't work, then it doesn't work. But the reapers are going to take heavy losses from this and aren't going to have an easy time with the next cycle.

 

[Kingjackl]

I miss the days when the Mass Effect 3 ending was the biggest controversy in gaming. Aside from being nowhere near as unpleasant as certain other controversies (if anything, it was good for a laugh), I actually had a stake in that fight. And that stake was "Control ending solves every problem, but even the other two are better than the current course of extermination, so suck it up nerd".

It was presented very poorly and suffers from being a last minute swerve, but I wouldn't throw the entirety of Mass Effect 3 out with the ending bathwater. I would argue that ME2 and the direction it took is more to blame for taking a complete left turn which didn't make any progress toward a conclusion, leaving ME3 to pull double duty tidying up the stories introduced in 2 and the overarching Reaper plot.

 

[CaitSeith]

Spend the entirety of ME2 and ME3 getting synthetics and organics to cooperate and show that it can be done? Changed my mind, gonna kill all the synthetics.

That in reality was the player's choice. Still, it was lazy to not have Shepard to object at that part if the player chose to make the Geth and Quarians to cooperate.

 

[Patrick Buck]

I really liked the ending. However, I know exactly why people would get mad at it, the lack of payoff for so many choices throughout the game was bad, but I just loved how depressing it was, you can't always win, the story build up so much...

But I freely admit, they could have done much better.

 

[Arkliem]

That in reality was the player's choice. Still, it was lazy to not have Shepard to object at that part if the player chose to make the Geth and Quarians to cooperate.

Yeah that's my main issue with that ending. Shepard can get the geth and quarians to cooperate, and a couple days later starchild tells him synthetics can't get along with organics, and Shepard's just like "Oh, ok."

A simple rewrite could've changed that to "The reapers are a shackled AI. Their programming bars them from coexistance with synthetics" Whereas the Geth, being unshackled, were able to change their view. Though that could've brought up the question of "Can we unshackle the Reapers?" and the subsequent questions "Do we want to?" and "Is that a good idea?"

 

[Cidward]

I played the game a couple years late, after all the DLC and Extended stuff were out and a part of it. I suspect my reaction would be very different without all that. It strikes me as a game that was released before it was really done and filled in through ancillary content, and I have a hard time imagining how it played at all coherently in its release-day form.

That said, overall, I found it to be one of the most effecting gaming experiences I've ever had. This is all about the cumulative impact of the first two games, and seeing how so much of that was brought back around. The whole game felt like a series of endings to me and, taken as a whole, I loved it as a closer for the trilogy.

The actual ending with the Star Child and the epilogue was a little trite, but it's 5 or 10 minutes in the grand scheme of things. I did not, after playing it, get the massive firestorm of hate. People feel what they feel, though.

 

[Auron225]

I usually pick refusal because the other endings completely conflict with Shepard's choices or don't make sense.

Spend the entirety of ME2 and ME3 getting synthetics and organics to cooperate and show that it can be done? Changed my mind, gonna kill all the synthetics.

TIM you can't use the reapers, they're going to indoctrinate you, and that's way too much power in one person's hand. I can totally do it though.

We're going to use space magic to solve this problem once and for all. No trust me, we have space magic. This isn't a ruse to get you to kill yourself.

The alliance I formed IS my crucible. If it doesn't work, then it doesn't work. But the reapers are going to take heavy losses from this and aren't going to have an easy time with the next cycle.

I get what you're saying. At the same time though; Destroy means the death of all synthetics, but Refusal means the death of everything. If the synthetics die either way then the organics may as well survive. I just saw it as the heavy price to pay for destroying the Reapers. In addition, what's stopping the survivors from recreating synthetics? Yes they were destroyed but that doesn't mean they cannot be built again. Maybe you can't make EDI exactly as she was but you could recreate the geth (in general) if you so wished to.

Also, who's to say the next cycle will be any more successful? If the defeated races become new Reapers, then doesn't your own defeat just results in a powerful new addition to the Reapers? If your cycle got as close as they did, wouldn't that result in an especially powerful one?

I do agree though that Control and Synthesis were nonsense endings. Half the appeal of Destroy for me though was that Star Brat didn't want you to pick it. I could totally see Shepard meeting the same end as the Illusive Man through Control. As for Synthesis - awesome, the Reapers can just kill everything with a big EMP and all cycles from now on will be a cakewalk. They could wipe out the races with the push of a button. How much Star Brat was pushing for you to choose Synthesis was just far too suspicious for me to even consider it a legitimately good decision. It felt like the Reapers end-game.

I enjoyed Destroy as an ending when I decided that Star Brat was talking out of his ass, trying to trick Shepard into NOT destroying them by offering seemingly good yet disastrous options. Just think of Star Brat as the final obstacle between Shepard and the end-goal. We even get evidence that he's full of it since Shepard survives the Destroy ending, when Star Brat claimed that it would kill him. I accept that EDI and the geth are gone but Star Brat was definitely trying to paint a picture of utter destruction when the races could survive the loss of synthetics.

As for his claim that organics and synthetics are always going to be at war - I united the f*cking Quarians and Geth, who had been at war for centuries. I call BS on that claim entirely. So yeah - Star Brat is full of it and is trying to trick you into leaving the Reapers alone. Maybe the next cycle will manage to kill the Reapers without losing their synthetics as well, but that's a big gamble.

Didn't realise I just wrote an essay here, sorry about that :S I only played this game last year so I missed all the threads on this at the time of release.

 

[Asita]

It was presented very poorly and suffers from being a last minute swerve, but I wouldn't throw the entirety of Mass Effect 3 out with the ending bathwater. I would argue that ME2 and the direction it took is more to blame for taking a complete left turn which didn't make any progress toward a conclusion, leaving ME3 to pull double duty tidying up the stories introduced in 2 and the overarching Reaper plot.

Mmm...not really fair. Sources indicate that ME3 was going to have a plotline regarding Dark Energy until sometime mid-development for that title. In that context ME2 would have been "the Empire Strikes Back" of the series, in that while not a lot of progress is made towards the main goal it sets the stage for the final act. Off the top of my head, for instance, Veetor mentions dark energy amongst his ramblings about the Collectors at Freedom's Progress at the start of the game, Gianna Parsini offhandedly mentions a general increase of coroporate interest in dark energy when you meet her at Nos Astra and whether nor not her superiors should be concerned about it, Haestrom's sun is stated to have aged far more rapidly than it should have due to the influence of dark energy, and Object Rho and the Alpha Relay in Arrival both exploit a vast amount of dark energy to incredible effect. Factor in Harbinger's dialogue which describes the various races' expected utility and its surprisingly high opinion of humans, its intent to add the latter to the Reaper collective, and some ominous suggestions about the Reaper motivations...and what ME2 ultimately does is put all the pieces on the field for ME3 to finish sorting out. That, of course, went out the window with the Dark Energy script, however.

 

[Roboshi]

Personally I enjoyed it, I understand that the ending itself was rather lacking in the effects of your choices but then the entire game of ME3 was littered with them as you went along. I don't think I can think of a major choice that didn't get some effect on a mission in 3 (I mean just check out the wikis on the equations used to work out just how well you do with the krogans or Quarians).

I feel that the Extended ending fixed many of the problems the original had (ie that it was about 10 seconds long) but I feel that if ME3 hadn't taken the route of turning your previous game progress into stat boosts and military strength the game itself would still be being made today.

There is also the issue that some people (NOTE; Not ALL, SOME) have mostly been complaining because they couldn't get a super happy ending, either you died (control/merge) , or you wiped out one of the most interesting race in the lore AND another crew member (destroy)

And lets not forget the old EA problem, EA has a habit of fucking with everything they do, esspecially when it becomes a moneymaker. Considering EA was involved I believe we're lucky ME3 was as good as it was.

 

[Arkliem]

I get what you're saying. At the same time though; Destroy means the death of all synthetics, but Refusal means the death of everything.

Good post, just to touch on this point though. The last part is an uncertainty that we only know because the game tells us that's what happens. It is not a certainty in the game, and Shepard even says as much while also saying that if they die, they die having done everything in their power to stop them.