I should preface this right now by saying that I get aggressive and sarcastic in this response. Please know that I am addressing the
arguments you are presenting and not you yourself.
I mean no offence, is what I am saying.
Also to other readers:
[HEADING=1]SPOILERS[/HEADING]
YodaUnleashed said:
I don't understand, isn't that what you get? I mean, at the very end, the game throws a deus ex machina at you and gives you three choices, two of those choices being prior ideas beforehand. The third is really the only new choice that you'd probably never considered and or imagined and is obviously the middle ground, the compromise as it were between destruction and domination. Despite what you might think, all your herculean efforts to bring the galaxy together did in a way result in you having these choices in the first place. The Catalyst itself says something along the lines of 'but you are here, my priorities have changed'. The very fact you reached it after all your struggles and are now presented with the three different ways to save the galaxy tells you that what you did was not in vain, that those who sacrificed themselves did so ultimately that you could reach here at the eleventh hour. Sure, you were always going to reach here because it's the end of the game, but if you look at it from a story perspective rather than purely a gaming experience, you realise that everything you achieved has led you here.
That whole thing with the three choices comes out of
nowhere and doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's also contrived and silly that the relays blow up no matter which choice you make and it plays out the same way no matter what that choice is. It also spits in the face of quite a few philosophical themes of the franchise in the process.
Plus the Reapers motivation is just
dumb.
As for the more specific choices you made in the game, such decisions are ultimately too far-reaching into the future for the ending of Mass Effect 3 to wrap them up in a satisfying way. Better to leave them hanging for possible future explanation then try and shoe-horn them in at the end in a very half-assed and rushed way.
You don't need to give hugely detailed showings of everything to give a sense of the future, just give some kind of indication that these choices are at least acknowledged and have some kind of impact.
Case in point:
Besides, how would you convincingly convey either the Quarians and Geth getting along or reverting to war or the Krogan peacefully breeding or aggressively expanding?
A brief scene where we see a Krogan (like Wrex) shaking hands with a Turian Councilor and maybe a brief clip of Geth and Quarians working together to rebuild Rannoch.
I'm not asking for a massively huge scene, just a little scene that acknowledges that these events happened at all.
That's 'leaving it up to interpretation' because it actually gives us a scene to interpret. Cutting to black and never explaining or alluding to it again is NOT the same thing.
These large events need a more thorough and detailed telling and don't really belong in the conclusion of Mass Effect 3; they seem to be issues best left up to the imagination, for now.
Like I said, a simple scene showing how things are currently allows the player to interpret and imagine how it might turn out is favorable to never even acknowledging it happened. I'm going to say it right now, if an author cuts down on content and demands audiences
imagine what might have happened without any clues or indications, it is a BAD ENDING.
Somehow I doubt Lord of the Rings would have been very memorable if right after Mt Doom it essentially cut off save for one confusing epilogue and demanded that people 'imagine' what happened next.
Who knows, even with the Mass Relay's kaput, whose to say the races who have been using them for centuries or more wouldn't perhaps have some chance of recreating them and thus allowing a future game in the series (set considerably far in the future of the Mass Effect universe) to show the far-reaching ramifications of Commander Shephards choices in the first three games, through new eyes of course.
Unless this means that they are ready to make a million different versions of this hypothetical new game to account for all the possible changes to the galaxy depending on player choice, then we've run into the big problem here.
They would
have to make choices 'canon' in order to make a new Mass Effect game with this model in mind. Which means that the illusion that this is 'our game and our story' falls flat on its face and dies.
All the more reason to, again, give everyone an ending that is at least satisfying.
As for your hope for the future, the shining ray of light, doesn't that final cutscene satisfy?
NO. It bloody does NOT.
Millions upon millions dead, the relays destroyed, galactic society crippled, entire colonies depended on relays destined to starve to death, entire planets unable to ever truly repair themselves and an entire multi-species fleet now stranded in the Sol system with no way to ever leave. Over population, starvation and mass extinction will follow as the Turians can't eat human food, the Salarians don't have enough females to breed, the Quarians can't adapt and the human race has no way to accomodate all these aliens AND repair the damage to Earth.
Best case scenario, only Krogan, Human, Asari and Rachni still survive in the Sol system. And they are all forced to feed on each other to survive.
Galaxy saved!
Also while I'm here let's go ahead and mention how for reasons impossible to understand the Normandy happens to be far away from where Shepard is, near a relay and somehow the whole crew, including whoever you brought with you on the final mission,
teleported back on board and get caught in a relay explosion, stranded forever on a distant alien world.
A colony of thirty or so people set to recreate a population based on inbreeding and cannibalism. No closure, no resolution for character arcs, nothing.
Character closure!
It infers to us that life did survive at least in some way
After plagues of famine, inbreeding, disease and technology being pushed back to medieval times. Sure.
and that Commander Sheperd's sacrifice was not in vain,
Not just
Shepard's though. How about Legion? Giving its own life so that the Geth may be free and fully sentient and that the Quarians and Geth may be able to coexist in harmony at long last.
Rendered moot by the destroy ending when all the Geth die and the Quarians are stranded millions of lightyears away from the planet that they fought to retake. Or the fact that despite this whole moment of 'peace is possible between machines and organics' the ending told us 'nah, they will always go to war so they must die'.
even if some of the details have been lost to history. That's actually inferring more than just hope for the future, it is the future.
What a lovely future this is...
Regardless of whether you liked the ending or not and were pleased with it or not, these fans making online petitions demanding the ending be changed are acting ridiculously, and here's why...
Look I agree that lashing out with petitions and hostility is immature and pointless (as you can see, all I care about are those action figures) but all the same I really think fans have a right to be pissed off because....
'Hey Bioware, we don't like the creative decision you made, and have the right to make, as authors with an artistic vision, and we, self-entitled thinking fans, believe we deserve a better ending, what with all the time we've invested in this franchise, and so we are petitioning you to give us one, disregarding or ignoring how you guys (the games creators), feel the story should end. Disliking it is not enough, we demand you change and alter you're vision to suit our needs.'
'Hey Bioware we don't like the poor decision you made, while you have a right to make it, as developers who
promised that the ending would actually acknowledge our choices and be satisfying. As paying customers who bought the game based on the promise YOU made, we believe you owe us a better ending and so are petitioning that you make a new one that actually delivers on what you promised and more importantly
makes sense.
Understand Bioware that you have told us from day one that this is OUR story, which means we have the right to be angry when the ending is just bad.'
That's the thing you are missing here, Bioware
promised us more then this. It's not being 'entitled' to demand a developer follow through with a promise that they made. As far as the argument 'Bioware can do whatever they want in the ending of their story', Joe Dirt said it best:
"That's the thing, it's not what
you like, it's what the
consumer likes."
You make a game like this for the fans and for the people who will play it. Fans who have followed the game for over five years, fans who have bought DLC, comics, novels, toys, posters from the franchise who were all waiting to see how it ends.
This is NOT a story for Bioware's sake, it is supposed to be for OUR sake, as Bioware consistantly said throughout the marketting for
five years. We paid for the games, we fell in love with the characters, we immersed ourselves in the game world. These games touched us and impacted us on an emotional level.
Bioware may have the right to do whatever they want but they should also have responsibility to the fans to not dissapoint.
Now let me argue in greater depth, why I think ME3's ending, far from being a terrible dissapointment, is actually a stroke of brilliance.
We must disagree on that. 'Normandy disappears into relay and your team have magically teleported onto it in the last five minutes and vanishes into the ether and finds itself having to being a whole colony on an unknown planet' does not wow me.
That's the thing, it's not just depressing, it's idiotic as well.
Moral ambiguity has been a central part of the Mass Effect series without being plainly obvious. Most people think the actions and decisions we as players make via the paragon and renegade system is a good vs evil like mantra: a moral dualism that is very black and white. This is most certainly true but with ME3 we are now seeing that many of the decisions we might have made in ME2 or even ME1 such as saving the Rachni, re-writing the Geth heretics or retaining the Genophage data, can have seemingly unforeseeable and negative consequences.
By which you mean, can be rendered totally pointless. Yeah?
Save or kill heretic geth?
Who cares, galaxy is fucked and the Geth all die.
Cure Genophage or not?
Doesn't matter, Krogan leadership is still doomed to be in ruin and it won't have any large scale effects anytime soon.
Save Rachni or kill Rachni?
Galaxy doomed, no point.
Stay faithful to Ashley or move on?
Given that you will unavoidably be seperated by the void of time and space, who cares?
Save the Collector base or destroy it?
Cerberus is evil no matter what and it doesn't stop the galaxy from being fucked in the end.
Thus, whilst the actions we make might seem black and white, the outcomes and consequences of many of those far-reaching decisions are anything but. The ending to Mass Effect 3 takes this idea to the extreme, giving us three choices to choose from, none of them being either simply right or wrong.
They. Are. All. The. Same.
Seriously it comes down to what color explosion you want for the ending. We get no indication as to what the future of the galaxy is other then the old man and the kid on the distant planet that, again, plays no differently depending on what you chose.
Ideally, we're meant to as players really struggle with the choice because there is seemingly no easy or 'right' answer (or for that matter any wrong answer). It is this moral ambiguity which I think makes Mass Effect 3's ending really stand out in a good way from most other long-spanning series' of any genre, because it is ambiguous,
Yes the eternal question of what color you want the ending explosion to be keeps me up at night, let me tell you.
it isn't just Commander Shepherd defeating the Reapers and saving the day.
Frankly I think you did more damage to the galaxy then the Reapers could ever dream of doing. At least with the Reapers it's relatively quick, now the galaxy gets to die much slower as, again, entire planets reliant on intersteller resources that needed the relays are doomed to slowly starve.
Instead, it's unpredictable, unexpected, and seems to intentionally challenge how we might have perceived all the events leading up to the final moment. Sure, you might validly criticise it for being tonally inconsistent or lacking a greater sense of closure or being poorly executed with the copy and paste cut-scenes
I'm glad you acknowledge that it comes out of nowhere with no explanation whatsoever. That's one of the reasons I hate it so much.
but personally I think you'd be overlooking what it does achieve very effectively, arguably even profoundly; that of suggesting that sometimes there is no easy, straightforward answer, and sometimes events do occur beyond our control, but we must choose nonetheless.
Yeah, okay that's an interesting point. But frustratingly, Shepard never addresses that and we aren't given a reason that makes sense for why these are our only three options. Part of me almost thinks that one of the reasons that the endings are all the same and don't involve player choice up until that point was as a way to accomodate the Action Mode playrs.
And if that's the case then I bloody want to kill everyone on Earth.
My main complaint with the ending is that they didn't give you a choice not to choose any of those presented, if for instance, you felt like you were being manipulated or if you felt that all of the choices were terrible and that refusing to accept any of them was actually the right choice, even if it did mean the destruction of all life and the continuation of the reaper cycle.
I'm just annoyed I couldn't make Shepard say this:
"So, you are a race of synthetics designed to destroy all advanced organic life so that advanced organic life can't be destroyed by synthetics. Please say that to yourselves out loud a few times and see if you can spot the glaring flaw here."
I mean, how earth-shattering (quite literally) would that have been, if after all you've been through, all you've committed to stopping the Reapers, that you're commander Shephard sees each choice as being as detestable as the other and would rather let the cycle continue, realising it is actually the 'right' choice. Of course, this could not be a canonical ending (unlike the other three which have the potential) because this would effectively re-write the Mass Effect universe meaning any future games could not include any of the races we already know. It would also be incredibly dark and bleak, even nihlistic and highly unsatisfying, but at least then you would still have the choice, which is what Mass Effect is all about right? Still, I understand why they didn't include it, assuming they considered it in the first place, probably because of its lack of canonicty viability and the fact you actually lose the fight as opposed to sort of win by changing the circumstances. Plus, it would probably grate for many people as being 'out of character' beyond mere divergence, but then characters are hardly fixed and can change given the right circumstances.
This is all very interesting stuff and I'm not really inclined to argue. Look understand that I'm not going to harrass Bioware or their staff or hammer on their door or protest or sign petitions. I'm in the 'acceptance' stage of my Mass Effect grief (with a bit of bargaining with the Play Arts Kai line) but I both understand and feel is justifed, people's reasons for being pissed about this.
(that is what everyone is going to pay for the next DLC ending, of course)
