watched the vid, and while i didn't 'really' have a problem with the original endings (its a hero's journey, they either die or everyone else does~) i have to say i DEFINITELY like the bit with a bloody-still-healing-and-in-need-of-a-hug-Shepard putting Anderson's name on the wall more then the crew putting Shepard's name up there... its both solemn and happy, happy in that Shepard's alive, woo, solemn/not-happy in that the 'BIG DAMN HEROES!!' name plate goes to Anderson, whom honestly i feel deserves it more cause without him there would'a never been a Shepard to begin with, nice full-circle kinda deal...
WHY WASN'T THIS ORIGINALLY AN OPTION?! o.o
but yea, everything before that was kinda bs... i was giggling because its all rehashed vids from previous games XD couldn't help thinking of old school mecha anime where they reused the same two scenes and looped them calling it a 'dog fight' XD eh, not bad i suppose~
The Reapers (and the Catalyst) don't understand individual consciousness.
This is missing link in the whole "solution" proposed by the catalyst in the first place. How do we save people from being destroyed by synthetics? Well, we liquidize them and preserve their genetic material in order to reconstruct their racial memories and personality (because genetics works like that in the mass effect universe). So yeah, we've totally saved them right? Nothing of value has been lost..
..except, of course, that we actually killed the person when we liquidized them in step one.
So yeah, I'm pretty certain Shepard (the person) is dead. What lives on is shepard's memories and personality, but they're copies of the original. The catalyst actually kind of explains this in its own way, as does "Shepard" in the cutscene. Of course, for the catalyst this isn't a problem (just as it wouldn't be a problem for the Geth, who understand themselves to be purely data) but for a human being it's actually a pretty frightening concept.
Nice, argue against something by using a meaningless term to invalidate a position without discussion. Maybe I'm a SJW hipster? Twofer FTW!
Altering art by mob committee doesn't seem like a good precedent to set. Mass Effect wasn't some grand collective project, and they didn't owe any gamer any kind of ending. I'd say most people agree it was flawed. But was it really worth a venomous hissyfit (just to get the Extended Ending, no less)? Not likely.
I got the Happy Ending mod. I absolutely think it's worth installing. Anything to get rid of Glowbrat is gold in my book. It's sad that it takes a fan group to correct the mistakes of a "professional" and his team.
...eh. You can have "mistakes" in art, now? Could you really justify that claim - that what BioWare did was a mistake, as opposed to just something you didn't really like?
Its just the fact it forced people to make MODS to the ending should give someone a clue of how sloppy and badly handled it was ---
At least they tried to fix it, its more than what Casey and the gang did when the fans asked them --- instead they claimed " Art!" and then the wonderful pundits began to ridicule and bad mouth those whom protested.
So yeah, I'm pretty certain Shepard (the person) is dead. What lives on is shepard's memories and personality, but they're copies of the original. The catalyst actually kind of explains this in its own way, as does "Shepard" in the cutscene. Of course, for the catalyst this isn't a problem (just as it wouldn't be a problem for the Geth, who understand themselves to be purely data) but for a human being it's actually a pretty frightening concept.
That opens up an interesting philosophical can of worms, but the short version is unlike the people getting dissolved, Shepard retains her free will and individuality. Sure, her original body got taken apart, but the same thing happened at the start of Mass Effect 2, and we still consider her to still be alive throughout that game. Hell, it happens whenever someone from Star Trek uses a teleporter, and we can all agree that most of the non-redshirt characters survived that. In fact, fun fact: if you're more than seven years old, every cell in your body has been replaced at least once.
...eh. You can have "mistakes" in art, now? Could you really justify that claim - that what BioWare did was a mistake, as opposed to just something you didn't really like?
Uhhh, Mass Effect 3 is art now? Since when, perhaps you could define why it is art? Help us out here.
As for Bioware's mistake, alright. Hudson promised that the ending would reflect our choices made in all three games, and that we would not get a choice system to determine the ending. Well we know how that turned out. Another mistake you ask? Ok, scrapping the buildup of the previous two games, and DLC, in favour of a generic 'alien invasion'. What's this? You want another mistake? That's cool, the method used to kill Shepard (not Shepard's death), the Reaper commander says to Shepard "I will tell you of three ways to stop the Reapers, but you must die first." To Shepard's reply "Seems legit." I think that's about... nope, got another mistake for you. Giving the players the impression the game would change based on our actions, observe the following examples; The Rachni Queen, save her and she spawns troops for the enemy anyway. Kill her and they make a clone to spawn troops. The Geth/Quarrian war, help or hurt Legion, help or hurt the Quarrians and the war still happens. All up; They made the mistake thinking we would see "A multi branching epic to decide the course of the galaxy" and what we got was "Events are set in stone, just go with the flow."
...eh. You can have "mistakes" in art, now? Could you really justify that claim - that what BioWare did was a mistake, as opposed to just something you didn't really like?
My idea for as to why people are still "shouting from the rooftops" about how much ME3's ending supposedly sucked is because they are still trying to convince themselves(methinks you doth protest too much). Even though they know the EC ending worked quite well and actually made sense, when actually thought about, it completely conflicted with their expectations, and This. Must. Not. Be. accepted, in their opinions. That and Bioware being acquired by Electronic Art, the all-powerful, all-evil super corpornation, give them all the excuses needed to keep railing against...whatever.
Discounting anyone's " Happy Ending" by pointing them towards the Fan Fic section doesn't cut it in my view, the same thing can be said about anyone wanting a horribly terrible ending... I guess they can go to the same Fan Fic section and get their existentialist on as well if we go that route.
My point is - there shouldn't have been one way or the other, and that however you played the series, just as Mass Effect 2 did, could give you at least 5 different results from Great to very bad depending upon what you wanted to do.
As for the Art route, BioWare shot themselves in the foot on that stance when they finally made the extended cut, smugly telling players that since its free they should be happy. If they were willing to stand so concretely about their art, why did they not just keep the ending they supported in the first place instead of back-tracking? Perhaps because they ended up knowing they botched ME3?
While I could argue about the endings for a while I still think the biggest flaw was not in the idea but in the execution.
The Star-Kid told people that each choice was going to be vastly different but then they showed us nigh on identical cut-scenes for each.
If the Extended Cut had been the version that had shipped with the game then I doubt the fuss would have reached anywhere near the level it did.
Personally I like version 3 of the Mass Effect Happy Ending Mod the best, and with the Extended Anderson conversation, it makes the game something I want to replay. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmofIH7rN9U
I don't think modding takes away from the artists vision, the original still exists so nothing has been lost.
That opens up an interesting philosophical can of worms, but the short version is unlike the people getting dissolved, Shepard retains her free will and individuality. Sure, her original body got taken apart, but the same thing happened at the start of Mass Effect 2, and we still consider her to still be alive throughout that game.
Well, that's just the thing.. great pains are taken to point out that Shepard is the original Shepard, not a clone or a reconstruction. Copying the contents of someone's mind onto another medium is pretty similar to cloning them.
DataSnake said:
Hell, it happens whenever someone from Star Trek uses a teleporter, and we can all agree that most of the non-redshirt characters survived that.
I mean, the counterpart would be The 6th Day, which I'm going to spoiler tag this in case anyone is desperately eager not to have 14 year old Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle spoiled for them.
The 6th day has a device which takes a scan of a person's brain at the time its used, allowing that person's consciousness to later be downloaded into a cloned body with all their memories and perceptual traits intact. The bad guys spend most of the movie believing that this grants them immortality, because when they die the last available copy of their memories is implanted into a clone. They come out no different to the way they were before, there is no visible indication that it's not a continuity.
Until, at the end of the film, the lead villain uses the cloning machine on himself while mortally injured but before he has died, producing a clone of himself who has his memories and perception, but who is not him.. because he's still there and still dying.
To put in non-spoilerific terms, we cannot assume that because Shepard's body disintegrated and because a consciousness which seems a lot like Shepard now exists inside the machine, that they're the same person, because we can also imagine a hypothetical scenario in which the Shepard-consciousness exists inside the machine but in which the original Shepard was not destroyed.
I'm not a Star Trek fan, so you'll have to forgive me if I'm wrong on details, but I'm pretty sure the details of how the transporter is meant to work are deliberately confusing. There are two possibilities.
1) The transporter actually transmits the original atoms of the person and reassembles them exactly as they were. This solves the problem of conservation of mass (what is the transporter assembling these people from) but it also moves the transporter away from what is happening to Shepard, because Shepard isn't being moved around in pieces and reassembled, he or she is actually destroyed and the contents of their mind being transferred to a completely different format.
2) The transporter destroys the person and then literally builds an entirely new person at the other end using some unknown method. This is supported by a couple of episodes having the transporter produce two copies of the person being transported, which wouldn't be possible if they had to be built from the same atoms.
Again, if the transporter can produce copies which one was the original person? What happened to the original person?
DataSnake said:
In fact, fun fact: if you're more than seven years old, every cell in your body has been replaced at least once.
Neurons are (with a few exceptions) never replaced or produced during the life cycle. The ones you're born with are, barring scientific intervention, the only ones you'll ever have. That's why people don't ever "recover" from diseases like Alzheimers.
My idea for as to why people are still "shouting from the rooftops" about how much ME3's ending supposedly sucked is because they are still trying to convince themselves(methinks you doth protest too much). Even though they know the EC ending worked quite well and actually made sense, when actually thought about, it completely conflicted with their expectations, and This. Must. Not. Be. accepted, in their opinions. That and Bioware being acquired by Electronic Art, the all-powerful, all-evil super corpornation, give them all the excuses needed to keep railing against...whatever.
Well you want to know what I think? ( too bad) I think your using self justifying rhetoric to convince yourself that that you're better then these people, and have accepted reality. Because it's far easier to assume everyone else is wrong, in denial,purposely lying, ect. Rather to consider they may have a legitimate point. I think you're marginalizing people, and I think that's something I really hate.
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