Hammeroj said:
And yes, "leaving it to the players' imaginations" is a cop-out.
Cause fuck you Stanley Kubrick, the ending to 2001: A Space Odyssey was shit! Leaving shit to the viewer's imagination, what a cop-out!
2001 doesn't let too much for the viewers imagination. it's a visual illustration of the actual plot - it's not actually symbolic either(just read the book).
in me3 it's a visual interpretation of an ending to the story which doesn't fit with the rest of the story at all.
Now, here's the "best"(synthetic) ending as written by bioware on their flap board for mass effect:
synthetics/organics get merged through magic, normandy crash lands and joker and edi have babies on some garden planet. which is the reason for synthetics and the justification to have it in the plot even if it makes no technical sense at all.
but really the whole engulf galaxy in a magic wave really pisses on the few parts of hard scifi there was in the series. It's like they used a different writer for that. Because it's even more kid-scifi crap than Star Wars.
the war assets was a big letdown - why bother with the war assets having names if they have no meaning? acquiring them through scanning missions is boring, easy and repetitive, there should be some reward from them, like having some pseudo rts phase to the game in the last fight where they're your resources - but no.. no. I had geth on my side, what good did that do? nothing. the war assets are a tacked on element to justify multiplayer to cut down piracy(and 2nd hand sales).
It's not really that people couldn't take a "sad" ending, the endings aren't tragedy endings anyways. It's just that you're presented with play video buttons at the end - in even more let down version than even in deus ex1&hr, here you don't even have people telling you their opinions based on if they're dead or alive. it's as if the story forks right there, in the last 30 seconds of your game - and not in the first 30 minutes of your game as promised, that's harder to pull off though - the ending and storylines as they are now are just lazy, nothing dynamic there.
what's the use of citadel defense forces, if they can make no difference for citadel?
I mean, it's not as bad as KOTOR2, technically it's not unfinished, but it's nearly there as far as writing goes and seems like they didn't really have that much time to do the ending animations.
and for what's it worth,
the mass effect universe still has faster than light travel after the mass relays get blown up.
it's just slower than using the jump gates(the jump gates.. sry mass relays are for long range quick jumps) for example normandy and all the spacefaring races in me can travel between local stars at speeds much faster than light, which while being a flaw in the scifi of the me universe does imply that you could still travel to the far reaches of the galaxy, you'd just need fuel depots built on the way and it would take a month instead of hours. the entire galaxy would still be more connected and accessible to the advanced races than what 13th century earth was to humans.
if I would have had a pre-final copy of the game and could have dictated changes, I would have told them to add a 3rd "war" phase to the game - that is, after beating cerberus you would do missions and fight the reapers, you would need to use your war assets to organize protection for citadel and for transporting citadel and crucible to the same place - in this 3rd phase all the assets and alliances you had forged would make the difference.
as far as choice and rpg went, the whole series didn't sprawl from me1 - the opposite happened, it became more like an interactive story where you have to just literally press the mouse button at pre-determined places(I actually let illusive man shoot me once, to see if there was any choice there, there weren't so the player character shooting illusive man could just as well have happened automatically).
as it is, even star control 2 has more epic choices to affect end battle than me's do. and this is not just about understanding the endings, those who say that it is don't seem to understand several points about the me universe themself(because several things pull the rug from under those presented endings - only way they can even work like they do is by "magic" which if it existed would ruin several other plot points, and that wouldn't be too bad if the endings were more distinct and the story better told).
