Mass Effect Thread
WARNING SPOILERS FOR MASS EFFECT 3
Just finished Mass Effect 3 and was having a great time until the last 5 minutes of the game.
The ending you get is probably the most depressing ending and since this is mass effect that´s probably the bad ending right ?
Nope all the endings are almost identical no matter what you do and the outrage on biowares forums are huge.
I would not mind a sad ending but there is no explanation to what happened this is the gaming equivalent to the sopranos ending.
Nothing is really resolved and there is not even an epilogue.
Oh well just look at biowares forums then you know
http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/category/355/index
Just finished Mass Effect 3 and was having a great time until the last 5 minutes of the game.
The ending you get is probably the most depressing ending and since this is mass effect that´s probably the bad ending right ?
Nope all the endings are almost identical no matter what you do and the outrage on biowares forums are huge.
I would not mind a sad ending but there is no explanation to what happened this is the gaming equivalent to the sopranos ending.
Nothing is really resolved and there is not even an epilogue.
Oh well just look at biowares forums then you know
http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/category/355/index
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Comments
I heard the ending is bad. I have not seen it or know what it is but if it is The Whispered World bad then that's just bullshit.
That is not an excuse. Great writing is always the exception rather than the rule, but that doesn't mean a half-baked narrative should be acceptable just because it's a video game. Especially not with this whole 'cinematic experience' BS that is pervasive in the games industry right now.
[hopeful look]
Nah.
Alright so I'm not going to spoil anything for anyone. But, the ending to the game mirrors events that happen in science fiction like the Foundation series (which was amazing) and historically mirrors events in the Roman Empire (which the Foundation series was modeled after in terms of imperial decline). I don't see it as a bad ending in that regard.
Although you get to "choose" between two three endings, the choice comes through a stupid deus ex machina (quite literally, actually) at the very end of the game.
Also, they employ a reality which was completely absent in the three games to shoehorn this "choice" in. This is not about a "sad" or a "happy" ending, this is about an ending that has zero to do with the series. There can not be a feeling of accomplishment for the players. Bioware is now taking a beating because fans demand a "happier" ending. I think what they REALLY want is one that actually makes sense.
Lastly, who survives and who doesn't depends on a certain score which seems to be massively raised through the stupid Origin multiplayer mode. I did whatever I could to raise this without the multiplayer, and I thought I did things pretty perfectly. To no avail.
A failure for the ages, unfortunately. :mad:
While I still stand by my original statements in general, the deus ex element is heavy handed, and some of the characters are heavily out of character. The 'who survives' thing is ridiculous.
My reaction was indeed to all the whining about 'oh no the Galaxy' but a lot of the rest of the complaints I can see are quite valid.
I went through some threads, never playing this game before. I understood the story, I understood the direction they wanted to go with it... But the ending is absolutely stupid.
Did someone accidentally sat on the script and crushed the last pages? What kind of an ending is that?!
Bad...bad...BAD writing indeed.
BioWare's concept of 'take a character from ME1 to ME3 with all the choices you've done, influencing the ending of the final chapter' that they were going with ever since ME1 was the most advertised thing. It's something that fans loved about the series. And they really wanted to see how their choices would influence the ending, sad or not. And the endings that BioWare has presented in ME3 render that concept totally pointless.
There is absolutely no reason now to go through ME1 to ME3 with different choices, because they don't matter in the end. And that's why fans are so pissed, because this is precisely the thing that BioWare has hyped up - that your choices in this and previous games WILL matter. And they don't.
...or maybe it's just bad writing.
This is the summary of life.
Well, I could point and laugh at those who spent money on it, despite having seen the spoilers but I won't. People can hope. I waited to see what the actual endings were. he endings were exactly what it said in the script. Taking away choice at the end.
On the other hand a lot was done right.
Legions "death". He dies straight out in one of the endings, and in the other two it's not strictly death, but Legion does cease as an individual.
Now if Me3 had been a standalone game the endings would stil have been lazy, but there wouldn't bee the same ire, but it isn't...
EDIT: Oh wait, the box art does look like it's "cubed". How did no one see it coming?
Yup.
Although someone listed their reasons in a longer way.
1. The endings are extremely sad. This is a much-maligned criticism by individuals who associate depth with the perceived darkness of the endings, and that may or may not be a fair point. Regardless, it stands as obvious that many people were hoping for an ending which proffered some hope beyond that available in even the 'happiest' of endings.
2. The endings contain plotholes. The escape of the Normandy and the teleportation of her crew (including the formerly deceased) are the most obvious, but the lack of sufficient explanation regarding the Catalyst's efforts and origin also makes many of his/its motivations bizarre and unsatisfying.
3. The endings fail to fit in with the broadest themes of the series. Slightly different from 1, this criticism notes that the story of Commander Shepherd has always been a story of achieving the impossible with the help of a close crew and rigorous preparation. The endings as offered do not incorporate the crew, do not change significantly in response to your preparation, and while perhaps technically constitute doing the impossible, fail to meet even that low bar which is a solution that does not have an inevitable cross-racial holocaust and galactic dark age as its result.
4. The endings lack variety. This criticism can be directed at both the artistic and story aspects of the ending – the results of the ending decision not only vary little (at least, and this is important, on a scale which is important to our experiences in the game), but the resulting cinematics have only minor differences, and the various sub-endings result in changes so small as to be entirely unnoticeable. Consider that some way could've been contrived to make the Synthetic option differ from the Control option in a fashion greater than a change in the color of the 'light' and a different Texture for Joker in the games final seconds.
5. The mechanics of the ending are not appropriate. Without repeating the various criticisms as regards the ending closely mirroring Deus Ex's, the culmination of the story with a game-show-esque approach to saving the world very much fails to be satisfactory, especially when Mass Effect has otherwise been about the integration of choice into the experience
6. The endings lack dependency on the player's choices prior to the last five minutes. This is important, because the entire rest of Mass Effect 3 was about reacting to previous decisions; consider that, provided one is able to fill the 'war asset' bar in a satisfactory manner via some other means, the decisions in the third game serve no purpose to explain, shape, or enhance the endings. This seems contrary to the spirit of the other 95% of the experience.
7. The endings do not make sense given the character of Shepherd. As has been state elsewhere, we are playing some heroic badass who has otherwise talked down to, shrugged off, and inevitably defeated everyone who threatened, cajoled, or otherwise tried to force him to do something he didn't wish to do. In the ending to ME3, this character offers no rigorous questioning, no protests, no counter-arguments, no discussion of any kind save a resigned sort of death-march which could not be more contrary to his character. This is distressing.
8. The endings have implications, perhaps unintended, which seem to ruin the ME Universe. Admittedly, many of these implications could be avoided, but the lack of contrary evidence fosters a suspicion that these matters were either otherwise not considered, or supposed to be generally acceptable. Indeed, they might even be, but only with proper elaboration, of which there is none.
9. The endings fail to provide closure. There is, as a diagram that is floating around illustrates, no falling action. No conclusion. I do not know what happened to my squadmates – I do not, for reasons that may be bug related, even know which of them is alive. I do not know what happens to the universe, or to the people I've saved. I do not know how I'm remembered, or if any of the terrible things mentioned above actually happens. There almost could not possibly have been less information provided regarding the ending of the game, and that is incredibly distressing when the intention was to wrap up a series that had otherwise displayed all the signs of excellency and had a fond place in our hearts.
All the same, everything about the ending itself up to the actual choice makes sense and is actually really good and solid. The ending cutscene itself is problematic in that you choose a color of light and affect a couple other very small cosmetic changes, even with the "middle road" option which should look far more drastically different than it does, but the idea behind the ending is something I wholly support. I wonder how many people are stumbling around saying "THE ENDING SUCKS IT'S SO OBVIOUS" and agreeing with each other when their reasoning itself is drastically different from that of the next fellow over.
So what Shepard was always fighting for - peace and co-existence - is negated after 100+ hours of the game by a suddenly appearing, god-like creature, the literal deus ex machina. Regardless of your impressive efforts to unite the galaxy's forces in light of the threat, the creature does not want to understand that co-existence is possible. Instead, for ludicrous reasons, it pressures three choices on you to decide the galaxy's fate. The creature obviously has the power to execute every single one of these choices with a snap of its fingers, but seems unable or unwilling to take the responsibility for these choices itself. One is genocide, one is about complete enslavement and one is about a forced amalgamation of races. Your "choice" hardly matters, changes a short sequence before the credits and seems to result in the destruction of space travel either way.
So it's one ending. Hell if these had been a part of a true set of endings no-one would complain.
My hopes were
Hope for the future - Earth and civilisation is saved,and the reapers have retreated for now. Shepard has moved from annoyance to massive problem. But Reapers are beatable, and believed in in
Sacrifice - Civilization saved, but at least humanity fallen and Shepard dead. Reapers also retreated.
Shot in the Dark- Loss but more knowledge added to the beacons
Cycle Unbroken The Reapers win.
These are all better than-
complete destruction of civilisation, if the ending isn't in truth the last one above.
So basically letting the reapers win is a better ending than the canon one.
Stay shitty, video games.
If you wanted a dark ending don't give us a Deus ex-machina. let the reapers win. Much easier, and more valid.
You didn't need the Deus ex-machina for a depressing ending. It was not necessary. You only need that for a more positive ending.
What does the God Child do to solve all problems that isn't explained by the previous moments? This "God Child" doesn't come out of nowhere, it is an expression of the Crucible. The Crucible is something that has existed for thousands of cycles, so Reaper Builders being at its core makes sense. You finish it by getting a fleet together, attacking the Reapers, and opening the Citadel. Everything the Illusive man has said has come down to you being able to chose between destroying the Reapers and controlling them. A Deus Ex Machina has to come out of essentially nowhere, but the VI child is the culmination of all of your efforts in the game up to this point.
Dark endings are OK, of course. You have to be careful what you're throwing in here, though, and that's a basic problem in writing video game endings. The complete and miraculous victory is a stereotype, but one that renders satisfaction to the gamer who has worked more than a hundred hours towards finding a solution to the problem. In this case, the complete victory wasn't possible any more. They could have left the player with the satisfaction to have saved the universe, although at massive costs. Not the best ending from the storyteller's view, but definitely one the protagonist tried to achieve.
Civilisation utterly destroyed never to rise again?
Reapers beaten at great cost is a valid ending. But what we got was fracture fairy tale at best.
The hero attempts to save the universe, the attempt fails, a god-like creature appears that hasn't said a word before and essentially solves the situation for the hero. That's Deus Ex Machina without a doubt.
It was of course clear from the beginning of ME3 that they were building a machine with an unknown purpose. They weren't building the god from the machine though. That one's always been there and has been orchestrating all these cycles of almost-genocide as his "solution" to preventing complete genocide (?!?).
SECONDED. With a vengeance. It forces those mechanics into a strictly single-player game, and I hate them for it.
That doesn't veil the shittyness of the endings though.