Mass Effect 3 ending SPOILERS!

[Deremix]

And still, we have to remember that this is an amazing game. The ending actually didn't destroy all of your decisions: those decisions still happened, and they're still largely in flux. It's just the fact that Shepard almost always dies and we don't see epilogues for that characters that bothers all of us.

Of course. The people saying that the ending ruined the series or even the game are raging for raging's sake. I have problems with the concept, execution, and implications of the endings, but at worst this takes the game from greatest game I've ever played to just above Mass Effect 2. How AMAZING were the Geth-Quarian missions?

The only thing I like about the endings (and also the epilogue) is that it is basically a chance for the galaxy to start over. At the very end you correct the Reaper mistake. Not without cost, but now the galaxy can evolve naturally. Eventually the Mass Relays can be understood and built again. Perhaps the events of ME3 are part of a cycle as well? Imagine that there's the 50,000 year cycle with the Reapers, but every X million years there's a Commander Shepard to break the cycle. Of course, there's no background to support this in the game, it's just an idea.

Exactly.

Also, yes, loved the Geth-Quarian missions. Especially because my first playthrough was with Tali as a romance. I'm replaying it now with different stuff.

 

[SajuukKhar]

1. The sacking of Rome did not involve every person who could possibly fight actually fighting.

Beyond that The Spartans didn't put all their people into battle either, despite what the movie 300 might have led you to believe there were plenty of men and women who stayed at home to farm food for soldiers.

2. Read the definition again
"Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting, or through a process of structured decision-making or character development"

the word OR means it doesn't necessarily need to have that quality.

3. Tell that to Bioware , a ocmpany who has had glitches in the endings of BG1, BG2, NWN1, DAO.

 

[SajuukKhar]

The galaxy is better off without the relays, how? whatever influence the Reapers might have possessed is gone with them. All I see here in an excuse to set the next game some hundred years in a future that will look exactly like it did in the last game, only with some differences here and there.

The Reapers built to relays to impose technological and social limits and force civilization down the path that they chose.

The Reapers being gone doesn't negate the fact that civilization as is, and any future civilizations are essentially slaves to the Reaper's path, which is a dead end one.

Destroying the relays frees all civilization from the chains the Reapers put on them and gives them a chance to re-build down their own path instead of the Reapers one.


In short killing the slave master doesn't mean you are not still wearing their chains.

 

[jason27131]

1. The sacking of Rome did not involve every person who could possibly fight actually fighting.

Beyond that The Spartans didn't put all their people into battle either, despite what the movie 300 might have led you to believe there were plenty of men and women who stayed at home to farm food for soldiers.

2. Read the definition again
"Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting, or through a process of structured decision-making or character development"

the word OR means it doesn't necessarily need to have that quality.

3. Tell that to Bioware , a ocmpany who has had glitches in the endings of BG1, BG2, NWN1, DAO.

Sacking of Rome indeed did, and the spartan war indeed did commit all men to the war. Not from 300 btw, never saw that movie and never will. Not into the who "lets fuck up history" thing.

2. Literal acting? You're not acting anything. You're following a pre-determined speech.

3. Never played NWN1, but at far as I'm concerned, I never saw a glitch in the final ending of DAO, and I played that game 4 times.

The galaxy is better off without the relays, how? whatever influence the Reapers might have possessed is gone with them. All I see here in an excuse to set the next game some hundred years in a future that will look exactly like it did in the last game, only with some differences here and there.

The Reapers built to relays to impose technological and social limits and force civilization down the path that they chose.

The Reapers being gone doesn't negate the fact that civilization as is, and any future civilizations are essentially slaves to the Reaper's path, which is a dead end one.

Destroying the relays frees all civilization from the chains the Reapers put on them and gives them a chance to re-build down their own path instead of the Reapers one.


In short killing the slave master doesn't mean you are not still wearing their chains.

WAIT. WAIT. Galactic Travel, and the ability to talk to other species across the galaxy is a technological and social limit? Dah fuck? That's like saying Globalization is an impediment upon society and economy on earth.

How about we just kill the reapers and leave the mass relays where they are? Free from the chains and still have the opportunity of galactic relations.

 

[Fapmaster5000]

And still, we have to remember that this is an amazing game. The ending actually didn't destroy all of your decisions: those decisions still happened, and they're still largely in flux. It's just the fact that Shepard almost always dies and we don't see epilogues for that characters that bothers all of us.

EDIT: It takes a lot of deep thought, but if you REALLY look at it, you can realize that even though Shepard is gone, even though we haven't seen what happened to the characters, the Galaxy really is better off without the relays. This effectively ends the wars and conflicts that the races are having with everyone else up in their business, and allows them to rebuild, evolve, and eventually all find their way back to making their own forms of Mass Relays. This would eventually lead to some more conflict, of course, but at least it's conflict they can handle themselves without worrying about Reapers breathing down their necks.

Unfortunately, I must disagree with you.

First major choice: In my play through, I cured the genophage, and put trust in Wrex's leadership (and Eve's) to prevent a recurrence of the Krogan Rebellions. The game made a big deal of this. Would the Krogan earn redemption? Would the galaxy accept them?

First major failure: Doesn't matter. Mass relays are busted, the Krogan won't be able to get anywhere important, even if they wanted to. (Oh, and Wrex is stuck on Earth, anyway.) There won't be a Krogan rebellion, no matter what I chose, because they're all stuck in their cluster.

Second major choice: I ended the Geth/Quarian war by uniting them to fight the Reapers, overcoming all odds and hatreds in probably one of the most badass scenes in video gaming, and one of the best story payoffs I've ever read/seen/played. I almost shed man-tears, and that's not something I've ever done from a video game. Major props on this.

Second ENORMOUS failure: Doesn't matter. Mass relays are busted, and the Quarians committed their entire fleet to the war. This means their entire race goes extinct in the near future, unable to find dextro-amino food. Oops. Well, I guess that entire epic conclusion was damn well pointless. Oh, and in one of the the three endings, you get a two-fer, DIRECTLY exterminating the Geth you just worked so hard to free, in addition to an "oops I a species" in about two weeks.

Third major choice(s): Over the course of the series, you got to set how humanity was viewed in the galaxy, going from newcomers to ground zero of the Reaper War. Your decisions carried from game to game (like on the citadel, where saving or destroying the council changed human diplomatic relations).

Third oops: Doesn't matter. Mass relays are busted, so everyone is stuck in their local clusters (except for all those starving Turians and Quarians on Earth).

Mind you, all of this assumes the GIANT ASPLOSIONS that we see tearing up the Normandy (why was it in transit, anyway?) didn't up and blow the drive cores all around Earth, killing everyone, OR "oops I the galaxy" from all the relays blowing up like the one in Arrival from ME2.

The more I dwell on this, the more pissed I get. Not because it's a bad game, but because it might have been the best game I've played in years, only with a bait and switch bit of snuff-film shoved in at the end.

 

[SajuukKhar]

If you really believe that the sacking of Rome involved EVERYONE possible and that the Spartans put EVERY man possible into their battles then you are seriously mistaken about History.

Read the definition again they use the words EIATHER and OR meaning one does not need to do literal acting as long as they do one of the other things. Learn what the words either and or mean.

The ending if you cured the werewolfs is glithced, there is supposed to be a slide that tells how the former werewolf became the best beast tamers in all of Thadas.
.
.
.
.
.
The Mass Relays forced civilizations to develop technology based on those system, instead of making their own systems leaving them ignorant and depentant on technology that they can nevr fully understand, as they didnt make it, and thus making them slaves.

 

[SajuukKhar]

You are forgetting that for those chains to work, the reapers have to eliminate almost everybody once they decide it's time to do so. The circle of -discovering mass relays / citadel / extermination- only works when the Reapers are there to put us all back to square one. Without them, civilization is left to evolve beyond the mass relays they built.

And you are forgetting that eliminating The Reapers still leaves civilizations stuck and dependent on technology that
-Isn't their own
-That they will never fully understand, because they didn't make it
-and ignorant to possible other, and better path of technology and societal development

 

[eventhorizon525]

Actually, a major plot point of me3 was getting a bunch of formerly hostile races to work together to face the big bad doom machines. After getting all of these species to work together and actually start to build trust, why the hell would the relays remaining mean war? Unless you just ignored some of the races for the war (or just couldn't pull off the peace option), the races would be on the best terms they ever have. Also, how would it be problematic for the galaxy? The reapers are dead or out of commission, the entire negative reason for the relays and that tech (that it encouraged a certain line of research so the races were easier to conquer) is gone.

However, this is all just words on the internet, and I highly doubt Bioware will change anything about the ending(at best maybe clarify a bit).

This does raise some questions about how they plan to do anything else with this universe, which iirc they have stated they are looking into. Unless they just plan on making even more tie-ins for me3 that boost readiness, I don't see where they are going with this. Unless, god forbid, they are thinking prequels....

 

[Fapmaster5000]

The Reapers built to relays to impose technological and social limits and force civilization down the path that they chose.

The Reapers being gone doesn't negate the fact that civilization as is, and any future civilizations are essentially slaves to the Reaper's path, which is a dead end one.

Destroying the relays frees all civilization from the chains the Reapers put on them and gives them a chance to re-build down their own path instead of the Reapers one.


In short killing the slave master doesn't mean you are not still wearing their chains.

Rome made awesome roads. We didn't blow up all the knowledge of how to make roads when the Roman Empire fell. (Well, some did, hence "Dark Age" and all that.) Hell, the Nazi's had jet fighters. We didn't stick to prop planes out of spite. Technology isn't evil, it is a tool, one that can be used for good or evil. (Now, maybe I'd make an exception for Indoctrination or the Reaper-Blend-O-Matic machines, but simply knowing how they work isn't wrong... using them to lolCerberus everyone is.)

I mean, the series even went out of its way to argue against this mindset, what with all the "Maelon's research was terrible (genophage cure), but we can't turn away from the cure now that it exists" in Mordin's Last Dance.

 

[jason27131]

And still, we have to remember that this is an amazing game. The ending actually didn't destroy all of your decisions: those decisions still happened, and they're still largely in flux. It's just the fact that Shepard almost always dies and we don't see epilogues for that characters that bothers all of us.

EDIT: It takes a lot of deep thought, but if you REALLY look at it, you can realize that even though Shepard is gone, even though we haven't seen what happened to the characters, the Galaxy really is better off without the relays. This effectively ends the wars and conflicts that the races are having with everyone else up in their business, and allows them to rebuild, evolve, and eventually all find their way back to making their own forms of Mass Relays. This would eventually lead to some more conflict, of course, but at least it's conflict they can handle themselves without worrying about Reapers breathing down their necks.

Unfortunately, I must disagree with you.

First major choice: In my play through, I cured the genophage, and put trust in Wrex's leadership (and Eve's) to prevent a recurrence of the Krogan Rebellions. The game made a big deal of this. Would the Krogan earn redemption? Would the galaxy accept them?

First major failure: Doesn't matter. Mass relays are busted, the Krogan won't be able to get anywhere important, even if they wanted to. (Oh, and Wrex is stuck on Earth, anyway.) There won't be a Krogan rebellion, no matter what I chose, because they're all stuck in their cluster.

Second major choice: I ended the Geth/Quarian war by uniting them to fight the Reapers, overcoming all odds and hatreds in probably one of the most badass scenes in video gaming, and one of the best story payoffs I've ever read/seen/played. I almost shed man-tears, and that's not something I've ever done from a video game. Major props on this.

Second ENORMOUS failure: Doesn't matter. Mass relays are busted, and the Quarians committed their entire fleet to the war. This means their entire race goes extinct in the near future, unable to find dextro-amino food. Oops. Well, I guess that entire epic conclusion was damn well pointless. Oh, and in one of the the three endings, you get a two-fer, DIRECTLY exterminating the Geth you just worked so hard to free, in addition to an "oops I a species" in about two weeks.

Third major choice(s): Over the course of the series, you got to set how humanity was viewed in the galaxy, going from newcomers to ground zero of the Reaper War. Your decisions carried from game to game (like on the citadel, where saving or destroying the council changed human diplomatic relations).

Third oops: Doesn't matter. Mass relays are busted, so everyone is stuck in their local clusters (except for all those starving Turians and Quarians on Earth).

Mind you, all of this assumes the GIANT ASPLOSIONS that we see tearing up the Normandy (why was it in transit, anyway?) didn't up and blow the drive cores all around Earth, killing everyone, OR "oops I the galaxy" from all the relays blowing up like the one in Arrival from ME2.

The more I dwell on this, the more pissed I get. Not because it's a bad game, but because it might have been the best game I've played in years, only with a bait and switch bit of snuff-film shoved in at the end.

This.

I didn't say EVERYONE. I said everyone who was able to fight. There's a difference. Sure in skirmishes and minor battles I wouldn't expect everyone. But if it comes down to a final battle where if you lose, you lose everything, hell yes you would commit everyone who can fight to fight. Thats why it's called a FINAL STAND.

literal acting OR decision making OR character development. There is none of those in COD. I picked Literal acting because that was the only who you can remotely even connect to a COD game.

 

[SajuukKhar]

Rome made awesome roads. We didn't blow up all the knowledge of how to make roads when the Roman Empire fell. (Well, some did, hence "Dark Age" and all that.) Hell, the Nazi's had jet fighters. We didn't stick to prop planes out of spite. Technology isn't evil, it is a tool, one that can be used for good or evil. (Now, maybe I'd make an exception for Indoctrination or the Reaper-Blend-O-Matic machines, but simply knowing how they work isn't wrong... using them to lolCerberus everyone is.)

I mean, the series even went out of its way to argue against this mindset, what with all the "Maelon's research was terrible (genophage cure), but we can't turn away from the cure now that it exists" in Mordin's Last Dance.

The difference is that roads were built by man, using our own technology and smarts. Maelon's genophage cure was also made due to the efforts of galactic civilization with their own power.

The Mass relays were built by The Reapers, not by galactic civilization, not using own own technology and smarts, not under our own steam. It's the same reason why Leigon and the normal geth turned down the reapers offer of a dyson sphere body.

there is a large difference.

 

[Fapmaster5000]

And you are forgetting that eliminating The Reapers still leaves civilizations stuck and dependent on technology that isn't their own, that they will never fully understand, because they didn't make it, and ignorant to possible other, and better path of technology and societal development.

SCIENCE DOES NOT HAVE TECH TREES.

Also... it's not "never understood" mystical crap. I mean, Cerberus was figuring it out in a matter of a year, enough to integrate it. Now, they got hosed down by this with indoctrination, but they DID start to figure it out.

Plus, we've used drive cores (Reaper tech) in the series, making them, modifying them (count every conversation on the Normandy about drive core modifications), and playing with them. If we understand them enough to alter their base functions, we sure as heck aren't dealing with "never fully understand".

I'd put it more in the line of "give us a minute and some funding, and we'll give you one that sings opera".

 

[Fapmaster5000]

By the way guys, Mike Gamble tweeted this today: Hardest. Day. Ever. Seriously, if you people knew all the stuff we are planning...you'd, we'll - hold onto your copy of me3 forever.

Could this mean better endings? Hope so.

If it turns out you action at the end was a simulation by glowy fuckwit to judge your actions I'm seriously considering going up to Canada with a pair of golf clubs.

Still better than what we have now.

If it ended by scrubbing my hard drive and replacing it with two terabytes of goatse, it might be better than what we have now.

 

[SajuukKhar]

And you are forgetting that eliminating The Reapers still leaves civilizations stuck and dependent on technology that isn't their own, that they will never fully understand, because they didn't make it, and ignorant to possible other, and better path of technology and societal development.

SCIENCE DOES NOT HAVE TECH TREES.

Also... it's not "never understood" mystical crap. I mean, Cerberus was figuring it out in a matter of a year, enough to integrate it. Now, they got hosed down by this with indoctrination, but they DID start to figure it out.

Plus, we've used drive cores (Reaper tech) in the series, making them, modifying them (count every conversation on the Normandy about drive core modifications), and playing with them. If we understand them enough to alter their base functions, we sure as heck aren't dealing with "never fully understand".

I'd put it more in the line of "give us a minute and some funding, and we'll give you one that sings opera".

I never said science had tech trees.

Secondly the Normandys Mass Effect core was still far below The Reapers tech, it fell within their path as it was based off of their systems, and relied on their methods.

Also by the time of ME3 the Mass Relay system was still FAR from being completly understood.

 

[jason27131]

By the way guys, Mike Gamble tweeted this today: Hardest. Day. Ever. Seriously, if you people knew all the stuff we are planning...you'd, we'll - hold onto your copy of me3 forever.

Could this mean better endings? Hope so.

If it turns out you action at the end was a simulation by glowy fuckwit to judge your actions I'm seriously considering going up to Canada with a pair of golf clubs.

Still better than what we have now.

If it ended by scrubbing my hard drive and replacing it with two terabytes of goatse, it might be better than what we have now.

Well, You can't really compare shit with shit. In the end, they're the same :S

 

[guitarsniper]

Ending that I sorta wanted: Shepard, Shepard's squad, and a bunch of random alliance marines on final push to finish final battle and all that. Shepard dies incredibly close to the goal and you have to finish off the game as some nameless alliance grunt soldier or whatever.

Ending that I got: Cliche wrapped in sadness and baked in the fires of disappointment

 

[feeqmatic]

Quick clarification. In the destroy ending. Is all synthetic life destroyed, or all technology? What is too keep organic life from just restarting the synthetic life cycle. How does the the chaos/destruction thing make sense. Its like a joke that spoony made about Final fantasy villains. All of them have the bright idea of destroying all people so they can save them from pain and suffering. Its just silly and makes no sense. If the reapers were just a galactic force that needed organic material to live i would be much happier, but...

 

[Fapmaster5000]

The difference is that roads were built by man, using our own technology and smarts. Maelon's genophage cure was also made due to the efforts of galactic civilization with their own power.

The Mass relays were built by The Reapers, not by galactic civilization, not using own own technology and smarts, not under our own steam. It's the same reason why Leigon and the normal geth turned down the reapers offer of a dyson sphere body.

there is a large difference.

Legion and the geth turned away for philosophical reasons (reasons I can TOTALLY understand, and even sympathize with). There can be real risk of wrecking your society through external contact with vastly superior technology (or even just alien cultures/tech). For an example, look at what happened in the Americas when stone age met renaissance tech. The Native Americans took about four centuries of fisting from which they never truly recovered.

HOWEVER! In Mass Effect, the older races have adapted to the Reaper tech, having spaceflight for thousands of years. Any damage is long done and forgotten (barring, you know, active Reapers), societal speaking. Even the young races have been in interstellar mode for a few generations. This ball can't be rolled back. Everyone knows about eezo, about the relays, and about the Reapers. There is no CAPABILITY based reason that the societies here couldn't replicate the tech, given the time, funding, and reasons. I mean, why build new roads when the old ones still work? Math is math, science is science, and all the mumbo-jumbo about THOU SHALT NOT is philosophy/theology, not capability.

 

[lacktheknack]

Whoa.

I finally found a game with blacker endings than Geneforge 2. A game which I profess great love for, especially for the endings.

This actually makes me WANT to play the game. Hmmmmmmm.

 

[jason27131]

Imagine the universe of star wars. Now re-imagine it without warp drives. Congrats, now you have the new world of mass effect.

force = biotics