Suncatcher said:
See, that's just not true. The ending itself is dependent on two factors: your color choice and how much grinding you did in multiplayer.
cute, but both of those things are contained in ME3
Events up until that moment are influenced by hundreds of factors from the previous games; right off the top of my head there's treatment of Conrad Verner,
Who is only present in one scene of the game.
And simply doesn't appear if you didn't treat him well enough.
D-
conversations with Tali and Legion,
All very questionable, the only time I failed to get peace was the one time I gave Legion to Cerberus AND let Tali die on the Suicide mission.
But hardly any of the plot points changed for that run of missions. The Legion VI was the most frustrating part of that game.
saving or abandoning the original Council
Absolutely incorrect.
And I'm ashamed of you for even trying to defend this one.
The new Council was a literal Carbon Copy of the first Council.
Except the Turian and the Asari switched motivations and the Salarian was a girl now
But it didn't effect any of their interactions with themselves or Udina or Shepard. It doesn't effect the Content of the missions they send you on, It doesn't effect the FUCKING ORDER of the missions they send you on.
The Old Council doesn't seem to remember you saved their lives 3 years ago until you save them again.
The New Council doesn't divert to Udina's opinion because he's the most senior councilor.
It's always the Turian who comes to you first
It's always the Salarian who Cerberus tries to assassinate
and it's always the Asari who asks for your help after it's too late
The old Council's Truian should never have come to you first because he hated humanity (As evidenced by every comm chat you had with him in ME1)
and the old Asari would have never withheld support for so long because she's more supportive of humanity and understands that the Asari aren't a militaristic people.
protecting Kirrahe on Virmire
Fair enough. That only comes up if Thane died, but fair enough.
dealing with Wrex's tantrum at the cloning facility
I suppose, but ultimately it only effects your likeliness of convincing Mordin not to kill himself.
And even if you do convince Mordin not to die on Tuchanka you never speak to him again so... there's that.
But true enough.
sparing the Rachni queen,
Ha...Ha hahahahaha.
You think that mattered?! HAHAHA
Oh, great.
I spared the Rachnai Queen. Oh no they got indoctrinated again!
I killed the Rachnai Queen. Oh no! They magically came back to life (Cloned...Cloned from what? Magic!) and the Reapers Indoctrinated them again!
That makes SUCH a big difference to the plot.
And yes I know that if you killed her in ME1 and saved her in ME3 your numbers go down instead of up. But the only thing the numbers effect are a 3 second breath scene. (Which is another plot hole if the Citadel blew up and crashed back to Earth Shepard's corpse would have dissolved on reentry. But that's not important)
how many of the Asari Matriarch's writings you gathered while chasing Saren...
Huh, Explain this one to me.
Granted, many of these things have outcomes that seem roughly equivalent on the face, since it's just not feasible to make an entirely different game for every possible combination of factors
Really? Because After I finished Mass Effect 3 I sat down in a fit of rage and wrote one.
I'm not programing gameplay or designing levels or anything but I wrote a script that takes into account every combination of choices you can make in the first 2 games.
When it comes right down to it there aren't that many factors you have to take into account.
As far as broad strokes go there's
Did you save the Rachnai Queen
Did you save Wrex
Did you save Kerrhie
Kaiden/Ashley
Did you give Tali the Data
Did you let Garrus kill Hart
Did you find Wrex's armor
Did you save Shiala on Ferros/or destroy the colony
Did Anderson punch Udina/ or hack the terminal
Save/kill the Council
Anderson/Udina
Were you Paragon or Renegade with the Illusive Man
Did you keep or destroy the Collector base
Did you promote or undermine Aria on Omega
How did you deal with Malen and his data
Did you get Tali Exiled
Did you take Legion on the Flotilla
Did you out Tali's father's experiments
Did you let Garrus shoot Sodonis
Did you save Samara or Morinth
Did you give Legion to Cerberus
Did you rewrite or destroy the Heretics
Did you cheat on your love interest
DLC: Did you destroy Kasumi's data. (That is unbelievably important considering what it turned out to be.)
Did you shut down Overlord
Who survived the suicide mission.
Tier 1: Tali, Legion, Mordin, Garrus
Tier 2: Miranda, Samara/Morinth, Kasumi, Thane, Jack
Tier 3: Everyone else.
Outside of who died on the suicide mission there are only 50 possible outcomes you have to consider.
Bioware has a team of writers who do nothing but write. You'd think they could handle taking into account 50 plot points.
you get husk'd rachni as enemies whether or not you spared the queen because that's a big part of the game design that they can't work around in every single encounter, and so the mission looks awfully similar whether you're revisiting the queen you let loose earlier or meeting the clone of her that the Reapers whipped up. But when you look at the actual results? A genuine queen that you free twice and introduce to the Council races becomes a valuable part of the war effort, and is well on her way to reestablishing her once-extinct race in the galaxy but on peaceful terms. The clone, if allowed to live, just fucks shit up and murders people.
That would be the case if any of the scenes you mentioned existed. You save the queen, your numbers go up.
You save the clone, your numbers go down and you get a strongly worded letter from Hackett.
The Queen never meets with the Council, and the Council never acknowledges the existence of the Queen
And that's the problem. They shifted focus from emotions and morals to numbers. So believe it or not there is a proper way to play the game and that's all about which path gets your numbers higher
"As much as I complain I have an important job to do here."
That's not something you say before you quit.
And running away from obligation doesn't suit Anderson's character.
No. It's something that you say before you get down to your important business and get shit done, rather than something you say before you sit on your ass trading empty pleasantries with politicals and watch the world burn around you. He didn't quit being a Councilor because it was hard, or because he hated it, he quit so he could actually do his damn job as an Admiral.
Important job to do HERE
HERE
As in on the Citadel.
In ME2 Anderson gave no inclination that he was gearing up to quit his position.
Bioware thought their story about the Cerberus coup was SO FUCKING COOL that they sooner retcon the most important decision you made in the series than allow some people the possibility to miss it.
Throughout Mass Effect 2 you were allowed to decide whether you agreed with Cerberus or not.
If as you think is, was, and forever will be "evil" that effectively makes anyone who played Renegade in ME2 canonically incorrect. Basically rewriting the Renegade personality into the "Stupid Shepard"
Not stupid. Cynical. Pragmatic. Willing to accept collateral damage as long as the greater good is served. And willing to work with people who are clearly evil because he can't accomplish what he needs alone and the proper authorities are ignoring the problem. In short, how Renegade Shepard always has been. A good man can work with an evil one without being an idiot so long as their goals align, but it doesn't make the evil man good.
Think about what you just said.
If Shepard knew that TIM and by extension Cerberus is was and forever will be evil, why in the hell did s/he give TIM the Collector base?
At that point there's no reason to keep up the fecad of partnership. You're literally one button push away from ending the conflict there and now, EVERYONE of your squad is urging you not to give the base to Cerberus. But Shepard does it anyway.
If, as you suggest, Shepard knew Cerberus was evil the whole time and was just going to turn around and stab him/her in the back it's pretty god damn stupid to give the most advanced technology humans have ever seen to that guy.
If, as I suggest, during the writing process of Mass Effect 2 Cerberus was intended to be a morally grey organization, the morally grey Renegade Shepard could trust the Illusive Man with out being stupid. Then during the writing process of ME3 Bioware decides to shit all over that idea because they ran out of ink in their printers or what ever.
One of the games is poorly written, I choose to believe it's the one with more plot holes than actual plot, and the narrative that revolves around the mother of all Dues Ex Machnias.
everything they're doing in ME3 disagrees with their MO (Which is to help humanity)
Setting up a fake refugee camp so they can experiment on the very humans they're trying to protect is off...
Attacking Alliance bases for... reasons?
They must be indoctrinated... but they aren't because they were investing all their resources into trying to figure out how indoctrination works so they could use it against the Reapers. And if the Reapers were controlling their brains why would they let them do that? So one of those things is a plot hole
When the Reapers want an intelligent, creative minion instead of a mindless pawn they can't just take direct control of his brain. Sovereign never puppetted Saren until he was already dead. Until then he made subtler changes, whispering and tweaking until Saren was just as brilliant as he always was, but unable to conceive of the Reapers being unsuccessful and totally convinced that by serving the Reapers he was saving his race, allowing the Turians to live as slaves instead of being wiped out. And all along, Saren was doing his own research into Indoctrination and convincing himself that he was safe, himself, in control. It would be the same with TIM; Harbinger wouldn't just yell 'kill all humans' when he could whisper about gaining the power to make humanity the rulers of the galaxy, as long as he was willing to take a few acceptable losses along the way. It's not much of a stretch, Cerberus was already killing humans by the dozens if not hundreds in their experiments you interrupted in the first game, because they believed that the gains from those experiments would save millions or give them power over aliens.
Another thing that always bugged me about TIM's indoctrination is how it happened. It would make sense if you gave him the collector base, but if you didn't? He came across as smart in ME2. I doubt he would give himself the opportunity to get indoctrinated. (Don't talk about the terminal on Cronos Station) What you said has merit, but TIM getting indoctrinated doesn't float on principle for me.
Suncatcher said:
What doesn't really make sense is using Earth for the ending, or trying to rally the galaxy to take back your planet specifically instead of generally beating back Reaper forces, but nothing in the ending and little in the core plot makes sense.
Respectfully, I would like to disagree. It's been established that Harbinger seems to be the one whom is pulling the strings in the battle, so to then have the catalyst moved to Earth to be watched under his supervision makes sense when Shepard had done the unimaginable and truly rallied the majority of the galaxy. While the initial 'lets rally the galaxy to save Earth' definately doesn't make sense, as there are the same amount of Reaper's on other planets (That is until the ending), so I agree with you there. There is a spectacular line in the mission where you go to the Asari homeworld and fight with the comandos. During the battle, when you convince the commanding officer to hold the line she yells out "Let the galaxy know that the war was won on *insert Asari homeworld name here*". This shows how each species feels as though the attack is very personal, and that because Shepard, the guy who has been kicking ass before they realised there really was an ass that needed kicking, told them that their planet may hold the key to the destruction of the Reapers, it is clear that that just bolstered their belief that something about them made them more important than other species. I feel that it shows that during an intense moment of impossible odds, people can become closed minded and believe that the problem is only effecting them and no one else. Then, when Shepard reveals the key to winning, and that it's on Earth, everyone whom pledged their alliance (after being saved from the impossible odds) are fully prepared to go to this one planet.
Valid point.
Wouldn't that make more of a case against why the whole war came down to the battle for Earth?
If every species is operating on closed minded nationalism why would any of them give a toss and a half about what happens to Earth?
If your planet is dying wouldn't you pull all foreign support before pulling domestic support? Even if you weren't a nationalist.
It all just seems like a bad plot device to me. The whole galaxy is rallying behind Earth! You should feel inspired because you live on Earth!
Which brings to mind another plot hole (For me anyway) Shepard's never been to Earth before.
(My Shepard) She was born on a colony that got attacked by Batarians, then she joined the navy and almost got eaten by a Thresher Maw. Nowhere in her back story has she ever been on Earth. Every time she referred to Earth as "Home" I got more and more turned off by the fact that Bioware refused to take into account one of 3 possible backgrounds.
Even If you're an Earth-born Shepard, your parents abandoned you and you joined a gang, why do you want to save Earth so bad? I understand needing to stop the Reapers but all the "Earth" stuff got on my nerves.