Mass Effect 3's Ending Was Intended To Polarize

[higgs20]

Its just a bunch of people who have a sad that Shepard actually fucking dies at the end of her trilogy.

Sorry not everything is shit rainbows and vomit skittles in magic fairy wonderland, but sometimes shit just doesn't end that way.

That said; they ought to at least put something in to detail the outcome of the player's choices throughout the game. Other than that the endings were good; leave them alone.

it's not even about him dying, that I could deal with. it's more about the fact that all of the endings fuck up the galaxy anyway and the fact that there is no real closure on any of the characters or smaller story lines that most of us have spent 5 years getting invested in.

it just feels out of place for a series that put so much investment into bringing together so many details about so many characters and story threads to end that way.

 

[Seatownstriker]

Well Pay attention more to the ending, and you may be slightly less dissapointed. From the point of the laser hitting to the point of the relays being destroyed. ITS A DREAM. Cause if you pick destroy there is what looks like Shepard laying in some rubble. No way he survived that fall, he didn't in ME2, and he won't again. He was in a dream. And Complaining about choices, well you were set on a course from the very beginning of ME3, you had no choice but to use the Crucible. As far as your Shepard was concerned that was the only way to destroy the reaper threat. And there is no boss fight, so its not the real ending. There was a boss fight in ME1 and ME2.

 

[walrusaurus]

What would have made the ending so much better is if they had just cut out the whole conversation with the AI thing entirely. No choice just Shepherd staggers up to the console hits the button, crucible fires, reapers go boom, mass relays go boom, credits. Its ends the story, resolves your mission, shocks you with unintended consequences, and allows for reasonable closure of all the characters. You could easily have a few shots of your surviving crew watching the crucible fire. Honestly i think in half assing giving the player choices they did more damage than not having any choice at all.

I think the most frustrating part of the whole thing, is that we all know they know how to make a good ending. Mass Effect 2 had a spectacular ending. So much so, in fact, that i;d say it was one of the best video game endings of all time. The choices you made over the entire game had massive, and meaningful impact on the success or even failure of your final mission. That ME3 just cops out and goes with the standard boiler plate shitty video game ending, feels not only monumentally disappointing but frankly insulting to the fans who invested so much time and money in the series. Between this and how disappointing The Old Republic was, I think I'm done with Bioware for a while.

 

[N3vans]

We all knew that the Mass Effect trilogy wasn't going to end like this (as much as it would have been a nice, albeit massively cliched):


That said, it would have been nice for there to be a difficult to obtain, balls-out excellent ending if you did everything right. If you had a readiness rating of 100%, full paragon/renegade, all the members of ME2 loyal, all the factions in ME3 working together etc, etc.

Something like Shepard finding a way to just kill the reapers and not blow up the entire galaxy through the destruction of the relays, followed by a cutscene of the entire haggard galaxy slowly beginning to rebuild, followed by (wait for it, more cliches inbound) an '80 years later' and Shepard on his deathbed surrounded by Liara/nearest & dearest. Fairly soppy yes, but a decent reward for emotionally investing in the characters for at-least 100+ hours over the course of the games.

HOWEVER, that's not to say that Shepard dying at the end of the trilogy is a terrible idea. Regardless of how you view the endings, there's still a massive amount of poignancy in Shepard sacrificing himself to attempt to save what's left of the galaxy/Earth. That and the final assault to the beam with your entire force getting decimated, Shepard nearly included, was excellently written and executed. By the time I got to the citadel, surrounded by the corpses of it's former residence, with my beloved N7 armour in ruins and with my Shepard half dead, the game had made me lose hope. Any game that can make you genuinely feel like you've been punched in the gut, saddened by what's happening to your character is fantastic.

My problem is that despite how well you do, the ending choices presented in ME3 all seem like the bad ending you'd get in ME2 if no one was loyal and you made bad decisions in the suicide mission. It was never going to end particularly well for Shepard and the crew, given the task they faced but it would have been good not to get such a relentlessly depressing ending.

 

[Raesvelg]

Uhm, this is not correct. Sorry. Let me break it down:


Effective range cannot be determined from these data points.

It can be inferred. Ash states that a dozen light years is a day's cruise; ergo, we know that a ship of no particular speed or endurance can accomplish a day's cruise at 12 ly/day.

We can assume that this is cruising speed, since Ash did not consider the run to be of any particular significance, and that a ship can sustain cruising speed, since that's the intended operating speed of functionally any vehicle, for the stated fifty hours.

Or, in short, you're really trying very hard to support the "Galaxy fucked" conclusion even when the lore is against you.

 

[PingoBlack]

We can assume that this is cruising speed, since Ash did not consider the run to be of any particular significance, and that a ship can sustain cruising speed, since that's the intended operating speed of functionally any vehicle, for the stated fifty hours.

Or, in short, you're really trying very hard to support the "Galaxy fucked" conclusion even when the lore is against you.

Not really no, since that info was not in ME 1 or 2 Codex. So ME3 is very inconsistent compared to rules they themselves set up in ME1.

It's not about what I want to conclude, but about what info is available. As you can clearly see, dialog in ME3 clashes a lot with Codex from ME1 and ME2. Did Ashley mean relay assisted travel?

Milky Way diameter is 100k ly roughly and thickness 1k according to Wikipedia.

 

[Seatownstriker]

Woah woah people. Pay close attention to the ending, no hud, unlimited ammo, tendrils around the screen. What does this resemble, oh yeah your earlier dream sequences. In conclusion it was all just a....

 

[Pinky's Brain]

DEEP endings are a crutch for bad writers.

 

[dystopiaINC]

well they could have been better, but i'm ok with them, i just wish my shepard didn't have to die.

 

[Atmos Duality]

DEEP endings are a crutch for bad writers.

So are cliche endings.

 

[Jaeke]

I was one of the people disappointed with the ending. Not because of the lack of options because after everything the game boils down to 3 very similar choices, Synthesis is the best. I'm disappointed that they had to effectively end any future for the current mass effect universe. It was a good ending, but I still want the mass effect franchise to come back later. A prequel though would be pointless, we already now so much about the universes past already, and a sequel would be so different that there would be few links between what we know and have come to love and what the universe would be.

Idk, a First Contact War or maybe the Skylian (spelling error) Blitz would be cool. Halo: Reach was succesful even though everyone knew what would happen. The only problem with a prequel though would be the lack of being able to explore since its already set in stone in the past so it would probably be just action/3rd person shooter rather than rpg

 

[Jaeke]

All I'm hearing is "I have no idea what's going on or why, I'm completely ignorant to the matter but I'll be damned if I'm not going to judge EVERYONE and be totally high horsed about this whole thing!"

Followed by a bunch of sounds that can only be described as a succession of "herpderpherpderp"

Really, this thread already explains a whole bunch of reasons WHY people are petitioning what they're petitioning. If a company promises one thing, which is ideally the main factor that many people buy the product, and then they blatantly lie and do not deliver on that product, the consumers have every. single. right to protest on this.

Had DaVinci said that the Mona Lisa would feature an epic battle scene, or the most realistic depiction of a country side ever and then delivered a picture of a constipated woman - you bet your ass that the people paying good money for it would have freaked.c

I know what's going on...game with disappointing ending, people are raising money to protest to change it. It's not high horsed

I was unaware you could get sounds out of a typed message post.

I know WHY people are petitioning and WHAT they are petitioning. My point was the FACT that they are petitioning is ridiculous.

I've played Mass Effect 1. I played a little of Mass Effect 2. I don't have to play Mass Effect 3 to know what the gameplay is going to be like. I remember having a cutscene in Mass Effect 1 where the council was telling me I had to go somewhere with haste to save the world because it was urgent etc etc but when I walked out of the meeting I opted to help some lady find her dead husband on another planet on the opposite side of the galaxy. My point is the game never had any sense of epicness and if you believe that some major gameplay change is going to come out of a series 3 games deep than your an idiot.

That's beside the point. My point is anyone getting in a tizzy over the ending is a self entitled little fuckshit who has no idea how the real world works: You don't deserve shit. If someone promises you something, it means shit. Throwing a hissy fit and crying about it just makes you a fuckshit.

Now I remember why I avoid message boards.

I look forward to my banned account, but whatever. GO FUCK YOURSELF SELF ENTITLED FANBOY SHITS

Wow, well, goodluck getting over this "amazing" new thing called opinion. I guess you just solved everyone who ever had a problem with this game's endings problems.

Yeah you're probably going to ignore this message but I look forward to not having to scroll past this kind of incoherent rage.

 

[Shiftygiant]

How odd. An ending to the series would be an ending to Shepard, which they delivered, and whist yes, the little boy at the end was weird, all in all it was good. Yeah, you should be angry, but not at what it represents but that the series has come to an end, but not this angry. If the fans are willing to, for the better lack of words, piss money to force the developers to change and ending, why don't they give this to child's play? Also, if you paid attention at the ending and saw what happened (Depending how good you where) you know. The real tragic ending to all this is that that Bioware make good games with carefully crafted stories that the endings and neatly optimized for, but instead of say, funding the capture of Dokka Umarov, they want to waste time changing the ending of a good game. Reading back through this i feel slightly depressed, however I think I got my point out. Anyone else think that forcing Bioware to change the ending a waste of time?

 

[Agayek]

How odd. An ending to the series would be an ending to Shepard, which they delivered, and whist yes, the little boy at the end was weird, all in all it was good. Yeah, you should be angry, but not at what it represents but that the series has come to an end, but not this angry. If the fans are willing to, for the better lack of words, piss money to force the developers to change and ending, why don't they give this to child's play? Also, if you paid attention at the ending and saw what happened (Depending how good you where) you know. The real tragic ending to all this is that that Bioware make good games with carefully crafted stories that the endings and neatly optimized for, but instead of say, funding the capture of Dokka Umarov, they want to waste time changing the ending of a good game. Reading back through this i feel slightly depressed, however I think I got my point out. Anyone else think that forcing Bioware to change the ending a waste of time?

It's probably a waste of time to try to get Bioware to change it, but that doesn't change the fact that there are a number of basic flaws with the endings as delivered.

I made mention of the primary issues in a previous post:

No. Just no.

The problem with the ME3 endings is not that Shepard dies. The problem is threefold:

Spoiler

1) It makes absolutely no fucking sense. They finally give a reason for the creation of the cycle, and it's self-defeating logic, invalidated by the goals and motivations of the one who says it. In essence, it boils down to "In order to stop organics from making robots that kill them, I made robots that kill them first". If you can't see the glaring flaw in that logic, I'm not sure anything can help you.

2) Your choices up to that point, in a game centered around choices and consequences, are utterly dismissed, or at the very least it feels that way. They could easily solve this problem by having a proper epilogue where they touch on things like the Geth/Quarian future and if the peace (if it happened) holds, what the Krogan do if you cured the Genophage, how the Turians rebuild, what happens with the fleet now that all the Relays are gone, and what happens with your crew.

If they had a proper epilogue, it would be pretty solid in this regard, but as it is, all of your choices ultimately come down to what color space-magic you get in the final cutscene. And that is not acceptable for a series that has always been about choice.

3) The endings as they stand now go directly counter to the themes and tone of the entire series. Mass Effect has always been about the importance of self-determination, defiance of the inevitable and optimism in the face of Armageddon, even throughout the vast majority of ME3. The end of ME3 throws all of that out the window. Shepard suddenly believes that free will goes flying out the window, that synthetics will always inevitably rebel against their creators. It's presented as a fact, and Shepard behaves that way as well, despite the fact that you've spent three games fighting against the inevitability of Reaper victory.

Furthermore, all three options are incredibly pessimistic. There is no "make a better future". That's "Kill everything", "Mind rape everything", and "Forcibly transhumanize everything". None of the optimism that's been so prevalent throughout the series (and the pulp sci-fi it takes so much inspiration from) is even visible in the endings.

I've seen a number of arguments proporting that the endings are in fact good, but none of them have addressed these issues. I'd be okay with that, but all of these points are literary fact, not a matter of opinion. It's not that I like or don't like it, there's very basic literary/narrative flaws with the canon endings. No amount of opinion is going to change that.

The end of ME3 as provided has glaring problems from a literary/narrative standpoint, and it's not at all unreasonable to be angry that a company that has proven themselves capable of so much more utterly fails to reach the level of "acceptable storytelling", let alone the extremely high level of quality the majority of the remainder of the series (ie, everything except the Collectors) has led the playerbase to expect.

 

[Seatownstriker]

People still don't get it. The end isn't "THE END". If you destroy, there is a little cutscene of someone in an N7 Uniform taking in a breath amongst some rubble. So my only conclusion was. It was all in his head, in a dream. Which explains the infinite ammo, Tendrils around the screen, Shepard surviving massive bleeding, and the Mass relays were not destroyed. Thats if you choose, the destroy Ending.

 

[Raesvelg]

Not really no, since that info was not in ME 1 or 2 Codex. So ME3 is very inconsistent compared to rules they themselves set up in ME1.

The dialogue is from ME1, and the 50 hour average time until charge dump bit is from the ME1 codex.

Did Ashley mean relay assisted travel?

Unlikely, since that would put relay density at vastly higher than is indicated by the established lore. A relay every 10-12 ly means... well... that there are a LOT of freaking relays. In the billions.

12 ly/day would fit with the sort of time scales established with the games rather neatly. It would mean exploring a given cluster would take weeks, not years or decades as it would with the substantially slower speeds that the majority of the "Universe is screwed!" crowd keep throwing out.

Even at the 200x light speed figure that is the highest reference I've found specifically mentioned in the Codex, just tooling around in the Horsehead Nebula (which, oddly enough, is a real place, and we have a rough idea how large) would consume something like four months out of the single year within which the events of Mass Effect take place.

 

[Starke]

We can assume that this is cruising speed, since Ash did not consider the run to be of any particular significance, and that a ship can sustain cruising speed, since that's the intended operating speed of functionally any vehicle, for the stated fifty hours.

Or, in short, you're really trying very hard to support the "Galaxy fucked" conclusion even when the lore is against you.

Not really no, since that info was not in ME 1 or 2 Codex. So ME3 is very inconsistent compared to rules they themselves set up in ME1.

It's not about what I want to conclude, but about what info is available. As you can clearly see, dialog in ME3 clashes a lot with Codex from ME1 and ME2. Did Ashley mean relay assisted travel?

Milky Way diameter is 100k ly roughly and thickness 1k according to Wikipedia.

At that point, even if we go by the 12 ly day, you're only looking at around 23 years to get from one edge of the galaxy to the other. Meaning that even without the Mass Relays, FTL in Mass Effect is still substantially faster than FTL in say, Star Trek. And we know what a post apocalyptic wasteland the UFP is.

Great, the captcha is "change yourself"... now I'm going to take that as some kind of zen message for the rest of the day. :\