What if the original ME 3 ending had been the true one?

[Orks da best]

first new tread by me in awhile, and its opening up old wounds, not sure if wise or not wise...

Anyway, for those who were unaware ME 3 had a different ending before it was leaked, and shortly afterwards scrapped and the ending that made the interent turn into a crybaby infested cesspool was made.

But what if the original ending had been release and not leaked. What would have happened yall think?

Also any have any info on how come the ending eas leaked, I am rather curious as how that came to be.

Now to hide in my flame shielded bunker, with repeating pulse laser cannons, and fire missles, and lighting cannons.

 

[Tom Waits' hat]

I'm more disgusted at BioWare's decision to change the ME3 ending to make internet cry babies happy. I mean, how about show some self-respect and grow some backbones for your product. Just thinking about it making me sick.

Also, I don't know anything about the leaked ending.

 

[Dryk]

The original choice was a lot more interesting to me and it would've had more time to be fleshed out. I think the game would've been better for it.

I'm more disgusted at BioWare's decision to change the ME3 ending to make internet cry babies happy. I mean, how about show some self-respect and grow some backbones for your product. Just thinking about it making me sick.

They changed the ending already at that point, what backbone?

 

[Euryalus]

I don't actually know anything about the leaked ending. I heard it had something to do with dark energy?

Anyone know the exact details of it? Or is it all hearsay...

The reapers were building more of them to stop dark energy from causing the universe to expand more and more rapidly (like it probably is IRL XD). Supposedly a human reaper could be used to solve the problem once and for all... For some reason. The final decision at the end was supposed to be choosing to sacrifice humanity to save the others, or destroying the reapers and finding your own way to solve the problem.

That's what I've heard anyway.

 

[Epic Fail 1977]

I'm more disgusted at BioWare's decision to change the ME3 ending to make internet cry babies happy. I mean, how about show some self-respect and grow some backbones for your product. Just thinking about it making me sick.

They changed the ending already at that point, what backbone?

Exactly. A backbone would have resulted in them keeping the original ending.

On topic:
IMO the original ending was way better, but I have to say that's a relative statement. For me the writing went off the rails at the Lazarus Project and just got worse after that, and by the time I was at the end of ME3 I'd long since stopped caring.

 

[Dryk]

I don't actually know anything about the leaked ending. I heard it had something to do with dark energy?

Anyone know the exact details of it? Or is it all hearsay...

The reapers were building more of them to stop dark energy from causing the universe to expand more and more rapidly (like it probably is IRL XD). Supposedly a human reaper could be used to solve the problem once and for all... For some reason. The final decision at the end was supposed to be choosing to sacrifice humanity to save the others, or destroying the reapers and finding your own way to solve the problem.

That's what I've heard anyway.

Here's the story as I understand it.

- The existence and subsequent use of Element Zero generates dark energy, increasing the rate of expansion of the universe leading to its early demise
- The Reapers are giant supercomputers created from entire species to find a way of reversing the spread of dark energy increasing the life-span of the universe . Each Reaper is able to view the problem from the perspective of that species, and it's ability to think of solutions within that perspective is tied to the genetic diversity of that species.
- The Reapers periodically harvest life in order to add to their work on the problem, and allow new unique species to develop.
- The Reapers believe that even though forcing life to develop Element Zero based civilisations will accelerate the death of the universe it is necessary in order to collect enough build a Reaper capable of determining a solution before it is too late.
- Humans are the most genetically diverse species in any cycle, and the Reapers believe that a Human Reaper is their best chance of solving the problem.

The final choice was: Do you defy the Reapers and rally together to attempt to solve the problem yourself. Or do you hand humanity to the Reapers to ensure the greatest chance of the universe's survival.

Note that this isn't inherently better explained, nor does it necessarily fix the lack of previous actions making a difference.

 

[AD-Stu]

If we're talking about the Drew Karpyshyn / dark energy ending then it's pretty much impossible to say because all we've got is the bare bones of it.

Spoiler: Said bare bones, as I remember them...

IIRC instead of having the Reapers killing off advanced organics so that they wouldn't be killed off by their own synthetics, the Reapers were killing off advanced organics because their genetic code could somehow be used to halt the spread of destructive dark energy throughout the galaxy. The soon-to-explode sun on Haestrom in ME2 was one example of the problems this dark energy apparently posed.

They'd been testing out the genetics of loads of species in the current cycle (that's what the Collectors were up to) and had apparently come to the conclusion that human genes were juuuuuust right for whatever they had in mind - hence the go-nowhere discussions with Mordin at various points in ME2 (including his loyalty mission) about how human genes are a lot more diverse and substantially different to every other species in the galaxy. This ending is what all of that stuff was foreshadowing. It's also the reason the Collectors were specifically targeting human colonies throughout the game.

According to the leaked material, the ending (again, IIRC) would have been Shepard discovering all of this and having to make the decision to either sacrifice the entire human race so all the other species could live on, or to take our chances with the dark energy.

Personally I found the whole dark energy / human genetics thing was pretty damned confusing, so they would've needed to do an exceptional job of explaining it all. Even just the basic foreshadowing for it in ME2 went largely over my head, and I'd like to think I'm a reasonably smart guy...

As for how it was leaked, IIRC it was data-mined out of an incomplete beta copy of the game.

 

[Doom972]

I don't actually know anything about the leaked ending. I heard it had something to do with dark energy?

Anyone know the exact details of it? Or is it all hearsay...

The reapers were building more of them to stop dark energy from causing the universe to expand more and more rapidly (like it probably is IRL XD). Supposedly a human reaper could be used to solve the problem once and for all... For some reason. The final decision at the end was supposed to be choosing to sacrifice humanity to save the others, or destroying the reapers and finding your own way to solve the problem.

That's what I've heard anyway.

That's pretty much it.

I think it would've gotten a similar reaction, but it's hard to say unless we know exactly how it would've played out.
I can't really imagine any of my Shepards (even the asshole renegade one) choosing to let the reapers have humanity - especially after seeing how it's done in ME2.

 

[ThePuzzldPirate]

I love the fact the ending was so bad that people still haven't realized the game in it entirety is a rushed mess.

 

[skywolfblue]

Ah the mystery of "that which never was".

I don't have it on hand but I saw a rather excellent thesis a while back on "Why we don't dwell too much on features that didn't make the final product" from a Blizzard employee (I think...).

Basically, people hear a tiny snippet, then imagine this grand old thing in their heads, when the reality is that it was pretty terrible and scrapped for a good reason.

The same applies here. The dark matter ending was probably scrapped for very good reasons.

Personally the "dark matter" thing reminds me a lot of the plot to "Firstborn" by Arthur C Clarke. (Where an advanced alien race decides to wipe out past-humanity so that they won't become spacefaring and thus "increase the entropy of the universe"... Whilst completely forgetting the fact that trillions upon trillions of stars are giant entropy machines that have wasted more heat then humanity could ever hope to in their worst overgrown nightmare.)

So the reapers use up a whole bundle of element zero in their wars, trying to prevent lesser races from using element zero... Oops. Granted the current ending has that same logic flaw.

 

[w9496]

The dark energy stuff seemed to be foreshadowed in ME2 with the Quarian on Freedoms Progress and Talis recruitment/loyalty missions. I was kinda surprised when it wasn't mentioned in ME3.

I would love the opportunity to see what it would be like for this ending to have been used, but unfortunately, my time machine recently broke down.

 

[Arctodus_Simus]

I didn't even know this existed - it sounds pretty interesting, and would made a damned difficult choice at the end of one hell of a game. As for better? I can't really say.

 

[Kingjackl]

The dark energy thing was just like the proper ending except worse. In the actual endings, the final choice always ends the Reaper threat with it just being a matter of how you go about it. With dark energy, the choice is apparantly "win" or "don't win".

As for the problem itself, it makes less sense as well. If you ignore the factually incorrect "yo dawg" memes, the organic/synthetic business is a suitable motive for the Reapers that has more grounding in the story than a few one-off mentions. But the idea that blending humans to stop stars from dying on the grounds that humans are "genetically diverse" (not true by the way) is ludicrous. If the Reapers are all meant to be massive hive-mind supercomputers, how come they haven't worked out that a better idea would be to stop leaving all this mass effect technology lying around for people to find, and let nature take it's course.

 

[erykweb]

Maybe this is what the sequel will be; the galaxy has realized that this is a problem, and they need to change their ways to fix it! It will be called "Mass Effect: The Space Lorax."

But all kidding aside, this is the only way in which I can see there being a larger threat to the galaxy than the reapers. It doesn't matter what color you chose- if you did control, the reapers cannot be that much help, and may actually be making the issue worse. If you chose destroy, then it will be just the alien races (and maybe a slightly easier time solving the issue) working on it. And Synthesis will be just like control, only slightly green and shiny. That is a pretty easy way to get around the endings, whilst actually having a reason for conflict.

 

[bug_of_war]

I didn't know about the supposed 'original Dark Matter' ending until I finished ME3 (And I really liked ME3 in whole), so when I heard about it I had so many questions that only ever got answered with, "Oh but you see they would have explained it and it would have been so much better". So I personally think that the Dark Matter ending would have been terrible just because it relied too heavily on people remembering some off hand comments that could easily be missed. Also, Soverign and Harbinger just came off as such antagonist and evil that to find out they were trying to save the universe seems less in character than a bunch of machines preserving life. They have to be detatched, and it makes sense why they wont tell the organic races why they're doing what they're doing.

So to wrap up, I think the original ending would be worse than the ending we got (which I actually really enjoyed).

 

[Thommo]

If we're talking about the Drew Karpyshyn / dark energy ending then it's pretty much impossible to say because all we've got is the bare bones of it.

Spoiler: Said bare bones, as I remember them...

IIRC instead of having the Reapers killing off advanced organics so that they wouldn't be killed off by their own synthetics, the Reapers were killing off advanced organics because their genetic code could somehow be used to halt the spread of destructive dark energy throughout the galaxy. The soon-to-explode sun on Haestrom in ME2 was one example of the problems this dark energy apparently posed.

They'd been testing out the genetics of loads of species in the current cycle (that's what the Collectors were up to) and had apparently come to the conclusion that human genes were juuuuuust right for whatever they had in mind - hence the go-nowhere discussions with Mordin at various points in ME2 (including his loyalty mission) about how human genes are a lot more diverse and substantially different to every other species in the galaxy. This ending is what all of that stuff was foreshadowing. It's also the reason the Collectors were specifically targeting human colonies throughout the game.

According to the leaked material, the ending (again, IIRC) would have been Shepard discovering all of this and having to make the decision to either sacrifice the entire human race so all the other species could live on, or to take our chances with the dark energy.

Personally I found the whole dark energy / human genetics thing was pretty damned confusing, so they would've needed to do an exceptional job of explaining it all. Even just the basic foreshadowing for it in ME2 went largely over my head, and I'd like to think I'm a reasonably smart guy...

Yeah I thought all that human genetic superiority was just a bit stupid and egotistical mumbo jumbo used in order to keep audiences interested and i had no idea that related to further plot development

 

[Dryk]

So the reapers use up a whole bundle of element zero in their wars, trying to prevent lesser races from using element zero... Oops. Granted the current ending has that same logic flaw.

They're not trying to prevent them from using it though, they were trying to prevent or reverse its effects. It'd be like giving a whole bunch of people who have contracted a fatal disease drugs to accelerate its advancement to the late stages in the hopes that it helps you discover the cure.

 

[I Max95]

the old ending was even more far fetched than the new new one in my opinion

basically it said that Dark Energy was going to destroy the universe, it didn't say why or how, just that it was and that the Reapers were trying to stop it, you could let the Reapers win, but stop Dark Energy, or destroy the Reapers and wing it on your own

so basically it's the choice between ending the story there or teasing a sequal

i, for one actually thought the endings, although horrible, made sense, so i actually prefer how things turned out

 

[King Aragorn]

None of them would be really better than the other, honestly. If we're talking about original, not extended cut. Both of them feature a Deus Ex Machina, except Dark Energy seems to be a bit of sequel bait.