Poll: Was the Mass effect 3 ending that bad?

Worgen

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Whatever, just wash your hands.
So I didn't hate the ending of ME3, I actually thought the ending itself was pretty good, granted I did play it awhile after release when they had expanded the ending. The neding itself that I got was good, the everyone joining the singularity ending, the problem I had wasn't the ending, it was how you got to the ending. Just letting you choose what ending you wanted from like 4 different ones was super lazy.
 

Samtemdo8_v1legacy

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No, I played all the games, all the DLC included. It was not the utter dissapointment people made it out to be imo, especially with the Extended Cut. And heck Mass Effect 3 is my favorite game in general of the franchsie because of all the gameplay improvements.

I blame the fact that people bought the whole interviews and quotes from developers saying that "EVERYTHING YOU DO IN THE ENTIRE TRILOGY WILL AFFECT THE ENDING AND OUTCOME!!!"

Yeah I called Bullshit on that the moment I heard that because are you telling me that resolving a families despuit with a baby being a biotic will have an impact on Shephard defeating the Reapers, or helping a guy in Omega with his store? Yeah at best those things would be War Assets to Mass Effect 3, at worst, completely irrelevent.

Everything about that statement screamed over ambition that people should know better. I mean Halo 2's E3 demo and Peter Molyneux in general should have made people realized don't take everything a dev says a gospal.

And it also made me lost faith with the gaming community because I kinda get where the devs were coming from when they said gamer's are over entitled. And yes I do believe gamers are the most over entitled bastards ever. I am sorry but we are not entitled to shit. Either buy the game you like or withold your wallet.
 

Erttheking

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Yes. Yes it was.

http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/df/df9afbb6fa5bac72969bdc47bbd6afd3d73406c93d501aca34a5bba6658cb0d9.jpg

It was utter dogshit logic that took one of the many plot threads of Mass Effect (the Quarian/Geth conflict) and said "hey, guess what? The ENTIRE SERIES was ALL about this? What's that? The Krogan Genophage? Tension between Humanity and the Council? Whether or not the Rachni have a right to exist? Whether or not Cerberus is justified? Yeah, none of those things matter anymore, it was all about synthetics and organics," before asking what color you wanted to blow up the galaxy with space magic. Remind me, exactly how the shit are you supposed to turn literally every intelligent life form in the galaxy into a cyborg with the Crucible? Also how is that not exactly what the Reapers have been doing the entire series with Husks?

It's telling that Stellaris is a thousand times lighter on story, yet their version of a rampant A.I. that's going on a rampage because people build synthetics has a much simpler logic to it. It thinks too many synthetic life forms will cause the destruction of the universe and it's old and bugged (it's been forced to stay underground until synthetic life was rampant enough to respond to it, and it's implied that it jumped the gun a little just to escape that prison.) It's not Shakespeare, but at least I can understand where it's coming from. Not so much with kill organics with synthetics to keep organics from being killed by synthetics. Ironically it also lines up more with an older draft of the Reaper's motives, where the stars in the galaxy were decaying (like Haestrom, which was supposed to be foreshadowing) and the Reapers were trying to gather the knowledge of countless races for a solutions.

Also, Bioware wrote a check its ass couldn't cash.

http://s9.postimg.org/mhn71nknj/abc.png
 

votemarvel

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The ideas in the ending were okay but the execution was terrible.

First they tried to build on the feelings the player had for the boy at the beginning of the game by making the Hologram Kid resemble him. Except almost no-one gave a damn about that kid, so there was no emotional link to play off.

We get told, by the being that created and controls the Reapers, that we can stop them by picking electrocution, disintegration, and explosion. And Shepard meekly excepts everything that is being said? Shepard is told that killing himself will stop the Reapers and believes it? Doesn't even question it.

Okay now I don't like those pieces but I can kind of understand why some people do like them. However I refuse to believe that ANYONE could look at the three sets of colour swapped ending cinematics and call them an acceptable send off. Could look at them and think "yeah, Bioware put in real effort with these."

Though to be honest I don't think the game as a whole was "95% great apart from the ending" that so many claim. There's about 25% good stuff and the rest is boring pap.

Edit: Oh and a small rant about the ending of the Rannoch arc. No matter what we pick the Geth as a race are destroyed.

Remember why Legion was called Legion in the first place? It was because there were thousands of individual Geth in that hardware platform. Yet even in the good ending those beings are killed! They are merged into a new singular being. We do the digital version of what the Reapers do to organic races.
 

Erttheking

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votemarvel said:
Edit: Oh and a small rant about the ending of the Rannoch arc. No matter what we pick the Geth as a race are destroyed.

Remember why Legion was called Legion in the first place? It was because there were thousands of individual Geth in that hardware platform. Yet even in the good ending those beings are killed! They are merged into a new singular being. We do the digital version of what the Reapers do to organic races.
YES! THANK YOU! The Geth are a hive mind, countless programs working together as a whole. The Geth's dream is a Dyson Sphere where they Geth can truly be one. Individuality SCARES them. And Renegade Shepard makes a damn good point in Legion's loyalty mission (or at least makes an opening for Legion to make a good point)


Humans value individuality, and as a result, we're supposed to view the Geth becoming individuals as a good ending because individuality is good. But it's good to us. Not to them. It shits on who the Geth are, it's ignoring their own set of values and imposing our own on them.
 

Casual Shinji

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Yes it was.

It was one long in the making -- Mass Effect 2's ending already showing the first signs. It wrestled control away from the player, and made the conclusion about something this series was never about. Mass Effect is a straight forward wishfullfillment space adventure, it's NOT frikking Evangelion. It's not about "philosophical" ponderings. The whole organics vs. synthetics BS was at best a sideplot from the Quarians/Geth storyline, but ME3 suddenly makes that the main focus at the very end... out of nowhere!

That's already bad enough, but it then resorts to taking away the personal involvement we'd been building up for over two games -- making choices, deciding fates, forming allies and relationships -- by reducing all of that to some sort of gameshow 'choose which door' final contest.
Samtemdo8 said:
I blame the fact that people bought the whole interviews and quotes from developers saying that "EVERYTHING YOU DO IN THE ENTIRE TRILOGY WILL AFFECT THE ENDING AND OUTCOME!!!"
People's expectations weren't based on interviews, they were based the previous two games, which granted a lot of freedom in choice. Remember how the ending of Mass Effect 2 made it possible for you to get everyone killed or to save them, depended on the choices you made throughout the entire game, and every possible variation in between? People were expecting a similar amount of choice in ME3, were based on your choices you could either get a colossal fuck-up or a mega happy ending, with a proper handful of different outcomes in between.

People weren't asking for the Moon here, they simply wanted more of the same, and Bioware couldn't even deliver that.
 

Here Comes Tomorrow

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Yes. It was awful.
Thinking about it I think it could be salvaged if this had been the old days when text was the primary method if communication with the game.

Holokid stops time or whatever and you and him go over all the major descisions you made over the course of the adventure and you get to argue wether or not the decision was justified then holokid makes a choice of ending for you based on the outcome of your debate.

But of course that would require a lot more dialogue than their stupid Yes/Maybe/No/Sarcasm wheel can deal with and more than the black/white morality that Bioware subscribes to. It would also have a lot less whizzbang ratatatat rooty tooty point and shooty dramatic wubs music explosions pew pew that EA thinks modern games want.
 

Gethsemani_v1legacy

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I concede the floor to Shamus Young [http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27792] because his (extremely) long form dissection of the Mass Effect games is what I consider essential reading if you really want to understand why so many of us felt the ending in ME3 was bad.

Yes, I felt the ending was that bad, not because of the three choices but because it introduced a problem that had not even been foreshadowed earlier in ME3 (in fact, the golden ending for Rannoch contradicts the star child's problem), then arbitrarily decided that Shepard was the best person to solve this problem... but only by deciding which of the star child's pre-determined solutions Shepard liked best. I've said it before and I'll say it again: ME3 for most of the game feels like the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica (2004). You are desperately trying to figure out a way to beat an unbeatable enemy, it is gritty and focused on military solutions to the problem of not getting killed. Then the ending happens and suddenly the player is not in BSG, they are taken to the ending sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The entire plot up to that point gets thrown out the window, the tone changes and instead of a discussion on the merit of resistance in the face of overwhelming odds (ie. what ME3 to that point had been about) we get a faux-philosophical meditation on the cyclical nature of AI development, something that has, literally, never been mentioned in any of the prior 3 games.

It makes no sense, it comes out of the left field and the entire ending is the writer smugly delivering this pseudo-philosophical pile of dung via their chosen avatar (a child that no player ever cared about). The player can't argue with the wri- Star Child, because all of Shepard dialogue makes Shepard inept and ineffectual. The player is allowed to "resist" in the Extended Cut, but doing so has the Writer dropping all their fury on the player for not going along with their plan. So not only is the "twist" stupid and in violation of the basics of storytelling (foreshadow your plot points), the previous gameplay aspect of "choices matter" gets thrown out the window because it doesn't matter what choices you've made, now you're with the Writer and they want you to use their end-o-tron to pick an ending which the player has not shaped or earned in any way.

The ending of ME3 represents the worst that can happen when a hack writer gets too much responsibility and forgets all the basics of storytelling and gameplay-story integration in favor of wanking off in the audience face (the fact that an entire DLC was spent just justifying the ending is atrocious in itself) instead of providing an actual conclusion to the narrative they've spent some 20 hours building up.
 
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It was a bit...strange, but I didn't feel outraged by it or anything. I can see how big fans might have been disappointed, but the reaction was completely nuts.
 

Gordon_4_v1legacy

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Yeah the endings are pretty piss poor. However, for PC players at least, some courageous souls took up the flag and created the Mass Effect 3 Happy Ending Mod (yes, I'm aware that sounds like a shill post) which gives me a more enjoyable ending.

Mind, it's pretty fairytale so mileage will vary but Shep gets to jet off into the sunset with love interest, the Geth aren't sacrificed needlessly, we don't force a horrifying change upon a whole galaxy of sentient beings or risk becoming what we have beheld and destroyed for three games.


That said, I seem to recall that there was a massive leak of the planned ME3 scripts that built on the Dark Energy thing you start getting hints about during Tali's recruitment in ME2 and the writers made a decision to scrap it and do something else because of it. That said, I'd also heard that the the reason most of the other big setpeices come across better is that they were written by different people, but peer reviewed by the whole team aside from the stuff post-London.
 

Catfood220

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The best thing the Mass Effect 3 ending did was create all the backlash, it was genuinely funny to watch supposed adults losing their shit over a video game ending like nothing else in the world mattered. Seriously, the amount of threads that appeared on this site alone was ridiculous.

As for myself, it was ok, it wasn't great but it was an ending.
 

Erttheking

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Samtemdo8 said:
No, I played all the games, all the DLC included. It was not the utter dissapointment people made it out to be imo, especially with the Extended Cut. And heck Mass Effect 3 is my favorite game in general of the franchsie because of all the gameplay improvements.

I blame the fact that people bought the whole interviews and quotes from developers saying that "EVERYTHING YOU DO IN THE ENTIRE TRILOGY WILL AFFECT THE ENDING AND OUTCOME!!!"

Yeah I called Bullshit on that the moment I heard that because are you telling me that resolving a families despuit with a baby being a biotic will have an impact on Shephard defeating the Reapers, or helping a guy in Omega with his store? Yeah at best those things would be War Assets to Mass Effect 3, at worst, completely irrelevent.

Everything about that statement screamed over ambition that people should know better. I mean Halo 2's E3 demo and Peter Molyneux in general should have made people realized don't take everything a dev says a gospal.

And it also made me lost faith with the gaming community because I kinda get where the devs were coming from when they said gamer's are over entitled. And yes I do believe gamers are the most over entitled bastards ever. I am sorry but we are not entitled to shit. Either buy the game you like or withold your wallet.
Oh, how dare gamers actually believe what the developers said. How enititled. We should just do what you say and shut our mouths because it makes things easier for you. It?s not like being quiet benefits the gamer in ANY way, but we?ll do it because of your inappropriate use of the word entitled.

Also I find this rich considering that Overwatch post you made recently.
 

Worgen

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Whatever, just wash your hands.
I'm still seeing what sounds like most of you are pissed at how you got to the ending rather then the ending itself. That the ending was only bad since ultimately none of your game choices mattered at all and you just chose one of 3 different things right at the end.
 

The Great JT

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The ending was nowhere near as people make it out to be. Plus, their pissing and moaning is so loud about it, they basically have ignored every other part of the game. I never hear anyone talk about Mordin's death, Rannoch or the curing of the Genophage, all because they just go on and on about how the endings sucked.
 

Adam Jensen_v1legacy

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Yes. In fact, I'm still boycotting EA because of it. Well, not because of the ending so much as because of what the ending represents and what it tells me about EA as a company. Unless someone buys one of their games for me I simply won't play an EA title.

The ending of ME3 can't be justified. It wasn't just the fact that the ending was nonsensical and that it didn't honor any of the choices previously made in the entire trilogy. It was also the fact that Bioware lied about it. Casey Hudson literally said that it won't be an ABC ending. And it literally was. They also said that DLC won't contain any important story elements. It literally did. First they cut out a prothean character to sell him as Day 1 DLC. And Javik was a huge, and I'd say integral part of the story and then they even had that Leviathan DLC. EA doesn't have any respect for their customers or for their studios or for their IP's. I'm still amazed that millions of people continue to give money to this company.
 

Silentpony_v1legacy

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Wasn't the whole problem that it was rewritten on the fly? I was on the Bioware forums, HOLDING THE LINE!, when the game first dropped and the ending shat the bed. I remember seeing a Dev post on one of the threads that the original ending had been leaked, so it was scrapped, and only one of the writers had time to write the new ending, and it wasn't given to the other writers too proof-read, edit and keep in tone, and was rushed into animation and voice acting.

Its no excuse for sloppy writing, but I think it was less a bad script and more a rough draft over a burger at lunchtime patch-job.
 

CaitSeith

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Mass Effect 3 has some of the most fun gameplay in the series (specifically the Vangard class) and the Citadel DLC is one of the best love letters towards the NPCs (specially Wrex).

That being said, SCREW the original ending!

EDIT:
votemarvel said:
The ideas in the ending were okay but the execution was terrible.
Also this.