Poll: Was the Mass effect 3 ending that bad?

Tsun Tzu

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Yes.

We went over this, again and again, 5-6 years ago.

Time hasn't somehow polished that particular turd.
 

American Tanker

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Even after the "Extended Cut", it's still so bad as to be able to make cancer develop cancer. No, it's not chemotherapy; because even as bad as chemo is, it at least has some positive effects. ME3's ending is just shit.
 

Hawki

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Ravenbom said:
I'd actually like to know why people chose the ending that they chose.
Bear in mind that I've never played ME3, only watched it, but if I did have to choose, it would be Control, the reasons being:

-Destroy: What about EDI and the geth? :( Also, the whole destroy ending feels off in the context of what's come before, if you've played your cards right (forging peace between the geth and quarians, curing the genophage, saving the rachni, etc.) It feels off for Shepard to choose such a 'brute force' option when he/she has been able to do better in the past. I feel that Destroy is meant to be the 'bad' option from the writer's point of view. Also, it's the only ending where Shepard can survive, but it feels like you're being rewarded for being selfish.

-Synthesis: I have the feeling that this is the 'best' ending, but I'm very uneasy about it, as it feels at odds with what's come before. At least in ME1 (the one game I did play to completion), I got a sense that one of the game's themes was "strength through diversity" or "unity, not uniformity," that it was ultimately better to cooperate with intergalactic life rather than remaining in competition and standing alone. Synthesis feels at odds with that, not to mention the ethical questions it brings up. Yes, I'm sure that Joker and EDI are happy they're now of the same species now, but did everyone else want this? If you didn't, well, tough, you're getting green eyes anyway. Again, it also feels at odds from Shepard being able to forge peace between groups rather than forcing it on them.

-Defy: I sort of like this ending in terms of presentation and in implication, but it doesn't quite get there. Thing is, as iffy as the other options are, they're at least preferable to extinction, which is the alternative that Shepard is choosing. We know that the races of the next cycle defeat the Reapers because of his (and Liara's efforts), but that's kind of cold comfort. Thing is, Defy would be a good ending if the other endings were worse, but they're not bad enough to make this decision feel justified.

-Control: There's a big issue with Control and that's that Shepard's effectively doing what the Illusive Man tried and failed to do. In a sense, you're justifying TIM's actions (when I don't think the game wanted that), and Shepard can succeed where TIM failed because...reasons? That said, I do feel it's the best option, because that aside, Control does feel like it can leave the galaxy intact. You don't force synthesis on everyone, you don't arbitrarily destroy all synthetics, and the only group that's suffering is the Reapers, but, well, not really feeling that sympathetic towards them. There's arguably some poetic irony in that the role of the Reapers is now reversed.

Again, only as an observer, but while I'm not as scathing of the ME3 ending as others (at least with the Extended Cut), it does represent a significant thematic shift in my eyes.
 

Kerg3927

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The choose a color thing and the star brat hologram were kind of cheesy.

The synthesis ending was really dumb and made no remotely plausible scientific sense.

So I ignore the synthesis ending. I headcanon that it's probably a trick by the reapers. It's not really a choice.

All evidence leading up to this point says the Crucible is a weapon, so use it as a fricken weapon to end the war and save the galaxy. Do exactly what you set out to do in the first place. Pick Destroy. It's what Admiral Hackett wants you to do. It's what he's counting on you to do. It's what he ordered you to do. The Destroy ending is solid. Or, pick the Illusive Man's choice, Control, which I think is the renegade/evil choice, and take all the power for yourself and become a god. Both work.

Otherwise, it wasn't that bad. (I didn't play it upon release. I played it a year later with Extended Cut and all the DLC.) The confrontation with TIM was solid, and the death of Captain Anderson was poignant. The final cinematic where Joker is forced to leave Shepard and is trying to outrun the energy wave in the Normandy was pretty cool.

Acknowledge that it has flaws and accept it. And then appreciate and enjoy the Mass Effect trilogy for what it is, the best story/character-driven RPG game series ever fucking made.

The people who let the ending ruin the entire series... I just don't get it... to me it's like guys pointing out flaws in a super model. Yes, she's not perfect... but holy fuck... she's a goddamn super model, and she's way, way hotter than 99% of the chicks out there. Get some perspective.

I hope one day a new RPG comes out and it's as good as the original Mass Effect series. But I'm not holding my breath.
 
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Yeah, it was pretty bad.

When all the ending choices make me go "...What. Fuck your BS holo-kid" and get the bad ending, and were I only walk away not hating everything because the Control Ending does make sense for my Shepherd to make given that he was a death-seeking lunatic by the end...Yeah, that's a sign you've seriously messed up.

I do sympathize though. Some spoiler theory stuff got leaked and there was pressure from on high to change things in a really short time frame to replace it, and EA supposedly pulled the funding right near the end, and it IS remakably hard to write a decent coherent "wrap up the loose ends" conclusion when you're making a story with a shitton of branching, but still...

With the extended cut, the ending was just "meh". Without it...hooo boy I understand the outrage. I mean...You can't just end a AAA type game that caps off a trilogy all about player decisions like that where you have the same damn ending ith just a different colored explosion. I mean, Dragon Age Origins did it right with the slides showing us how our decisions impacted the world and all that.

Honestly, the writing in ME3 was all over the place. On one hand, the Geth-Quarian resolution was freakin' brilliant and loved it (aside from how freakin' weird the "Geth seem to act a lot more individual now" thing was) and I genuinely elt accomplished having gotten the best result there. On the other hand, between Longsword mc-douche coming out of nowhere and just wrecking all the shit, plot threads that went nowhere like the Asari having gotten an unfair head start, and various other bits like the rachni plot resolution being really freakin' wonky, I feel like the writing team had a tremendous disparity of talent, or that they were under an insane amount of time crunch.
 

fix-the-spade

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Worgen said:
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.
Compare it the Battle of the Citadel and to the Suicide Mission. Even the expanded ending is not finished, both from a gameplay and story perspective.

For gameplay there is no final boss, something the previous games had. There is also no gameplay structure to speak of, the real gameplay ends with you defending the missile launchers, which can be achieved by running round and round the launchers in a circle while the timer runs out. Then the rest of the game is some dialogue boxes and a colour picking excersize.

From a story perspective it's horrendously lazy too. You always win, but in slightly different ways. Since this was the end of Shepard's story they could have gone for wildly different endings and degrees of victory. Instead you either completely lose (by doing nothing) or win with the machines all dying, nobody dying or nobody dying again.

Even the expanded endings just give you a few little vignettes and a monologue from Hackett, there was so much to explore but the game's ending amounts to it going 'Lolno' at the player. Also the pre-patch ending literally concluded the game with a dialogue box telling you go to the multiplayer and buy loot boxes.

So yes, it was that bad and since EA has apparently killed the Mass Effect series entirely it will never be expanded upon now.
 

fix-the-spade

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aegix drakan said:
I feel like the writing team had a tremendous disparity of talent, or that they were under an insane amount of time crunch.
With the way EA finances and publishes games it was defiitely the latter.
 

sXeth

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Meiam said:
On the whole "95% of the game is great aside from the ending" did they already forget Kai Leng? That character alone is enough to destroy a game, I didn't like the ending but I couldn't muster any real anger because by that point I just didn't give a shit anymore, Kai Leng killed all the shit I had to give.

His first boss fight is textbook definition of a bad boss fight.

I'd second reading Shamus Young mass effect retrospective (can't link it cause his website is down atm) for a lengthy analysis of what went wrong. He's more negative about ME2 than I'd be (although ME2 need to be played on insanity to be appreciated), but overall I mostly agree with him and he's a far better writer than me.
That was the cyborg ninja dude who felt like a fanfic insert character, wasn't he? Yeah, kind of atrocious.

Though Bioware's always had a thing for silly fanfic type characters, which got weird when they started doing it in their own IPs somehow (The ME2 crew were all these weird abnormal concepts, with the DLC pair being the straight plays other then Generic McSoldierGuy) and not in D&D games.
 

StatusNil

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Where is the "No, it was worse" option?

And to think that last decade Bioware bestrode the world like colossi.
 

CaitSeith

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Asita said:
I can also go into the thematic resonance of each point. Synthesis represents adopting Saren's ideology during the climax of ME1, Control represents adopting TIM's ideology which you literally just rejected not five minutes prior, and Destroy is what you've been aiming for since ME1, but with all other synthetics thrown in for the simple reasons that the writer doesn't want you to choose that option because he prefers Synthesis.
Oh, that explains why the secret "is Shepard alive?" segment appears only in the Destroy ending! Jeez, these could had been so much better endings if they hadn't been delivered and executed in such clumsy way.
 

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Casual Shinji said:
I'd argue the Earth should never have functioned as the centre of the whole conflict to begin with. This makes it fall into the typical scenario with these space tales that humans are "the special", and it clashes tonally knowing the Reapers are vaporizing the Earth while you're off goofing around on the Citidal. But then the same could be said about the other planets getting fried, which calls into question having the backdrop of ME3 be the Reaper war.
Earth being so important was especially irritating when playing as a Shepard with a Colonist background.

Can't shut up about Earth but doesn't give a damn about their own homeworld of Mindoir expect a throwaway line in an optional DLC.
 

Zeraki

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I'd say I'm getting some 2012 nostalgia, but 2012 was one of the worst years of my life so I'd rather not think of it.

And yeah, the ending was that bad.

Pretty much just gonna leave it at that because, there's nothing I can really say about it that hasn't already been said 37 million times.
 

Gordon_4_v1legacy

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Seth Carter said:
Meiam said:
On the whole "95% of the game is great aside from the ending" did they already forget Kai Leng? That character alone is enough to destroy a game, I didn't like the ending but I couldn't muster any real anger because by that point I just didn't give a shit anymore, Kai Leng killed all the shit I had to give.

His first boss fight is textbook definition of a bad boss fight.

I'd second reading Shamus Young mass effect retrospective (can't link it cause his website is down atm) for a lengthy analysis of what went wrong. He's more negative about ME2 than I'd be (although ME2 need to be played on insanity to be appreciated), but overall I mostly agree with him and he's a far better writer than me.
That was the cyborg ninja dude who felt like a fanfic insert character, wasn't he? Yeah, kind of atrocious.

Though Bioware's always had a thing for silly fanfic type characters, which got weird when they started doing it in their own IPs somehow (The ME2 crew were all these weird abnormal concepts, with the DLC pair being the straight plays other then Generic McSoldierGuy) and not in D&D games.
Yeah, Kai Leng is awful but we also got to stab him in the heart so I?m cool with it. And I?ll hear nothing bad said about Zaeed Massani; Robin Sachs took a generic role and made it fun to the point where I wish he?d been a full squadmate and not DLC.
 

mrdude2010

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It wouldn't have been too bad completely out of context, but it ran so directly counter to the entire series, its worldbuilding, its choices, etc. that it felt terrible.
 

sXeth

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Gordon_4 said:
Yeah, Kai Leng is awful but we also got to stab him in the heart so I?m cool with it. And I?ll hear nothing bad said about Zaeed Massani; Robin Sachs took a generic role and made it fun to the point where I wish he?d been a full squadmate and not DLC.
Nah, he felt fairly organic. Genetically engineered perfect human, suddenly individual minded Geth-bro, Asari super-monk, another genetically engineered perfect Krogan, random biotic with unexplained superpowers, etc would be the ones I was more referencing.

Its like they ran out of writing ideas for actual characters with personalities, and just started spitballing a series of outlandish gimmicks instead. One character with the " empowered outsider becomes savior of society that shuns them" kind of works (and Legion was probably the best one to go with, in the general sense, besides not following that trope to a T). but it was half the cast.
 
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Samtemdo8 said:
I am just extremely worried that Game of Thrones will suffer the same fate as Mass Effect 3.
There's no ending they could give it that would satisfy everyone. Given that there are very few main characters left *and* we know GRRM has said the ending will be bittersweet *and* that he likes killing off his characters, the chances are that a lot of them won't be standing at the end. The thing is, at this point it's built up to a good vs evil showdown since all the political intrigue and games of thrones died (literally and symbolically) with Baelish.

It will end better than ME3 did, ME3 was so tone deaf it took mods and fan rewrites to fix. It probably won't be a happy ending and it may not be one you like, but it will end with A Dream of Spring.
 

Trunkage

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mrdude2010 said:
It wouldn't have been too bad completely out of context, but it ran so directly counter to the entire series, its worldbuilding, its choices, etc. that it felt terrible.
Unfortunately, it was exactly like the other games. All that choices was pointless from the start
 

Wrex Brogan

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It was a bad, terribly written, hastily-slapped-together ending, but given how people are still pissed off about it 6 years down the track, I'm tempted to say it's the greatest ending of all time, just to raise some blood pressures.

I mean, holy fuck guys, it's just a shitty ending, Bioware didn't murder your parents, calm the fuck down already.
 

Jamcie Kerbizz

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Wrex Brogan said:
It was a bad, terribly written, hastily-slapped-together ending, but given how people are still pissed off about it 6 years down the track, I'm tempted to say it's the greatest ending of all time, just to raise some blood pressures.

I mean, holy fuck guys, it's just a shitty ending, Bioware didn't murder your parents, calm the fuck down already.
Poll with its 'unbiased answers' set the tone but honestly, people voicing their negative opinion about the ending were rather calm and collected. Does it bother you it didn't get wishy-washy but remains stark after 6 years? If yes, hold onto your bottom because once Anthem flops and Bioware goes the way of the dodo it's then, when festival of blame and shame the fans begins. Save your ammo.

As per Jason Schreier's report, Bioware's expected lifespan = single year. EA already sharpened the axe and dug the hole right next to Visceral's and other prominent studios carcases' graves..