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[BloodBird]

That was pretty much my reaction too - throughout ME1 and ME2 it was clear that your actions had meaning and effects, everything was set up in a way that made choices have consequences and the world moved according to how you did things. Some things were minor and some major, but the effects were very nicely made and I got the impression they really though it all out from ME1 all the way to ME3 how things would play out if you did X instead of Y etc.

Then we hit the end of ME3, its painfully obvious something happened that was not planned, and I'm convinced EA somehow is to blame. There was no proper epilogue, there was no change to whatever the hell you did, there was no choices to be made towards the end, there was nothing. A swiftly thrown together mix of 'endings' that were practically identical.

They ran out of time, or were forced to make and end entirely different from what they envisioned. There is no way the ending we got with it's identical outcomes and horrible plot-holes was planned from the start, unless Bioware planned to fuck over all their PAYING FUCKING CUSTOMERS and FANS with this horrible joke of and end.

The only real questions is what the fuck happened? And what will be done to remedy this joke.

If anything. I'll do Bioware a HUGE favor, and not bitch on them for their behavior. Yet. I'll give them a few months or so to fix this, and only if they never get to solving their crap will I consider them to have failed as badly as most others think they have.

My problem is especially the fact that ME3 is for the most part brilliant - I find myself playing the campaign a little every now and then because X Y Z parts, mostly all of it, was freaking epic. However it never lasts more than and hour or two or a mission at a time as such, because it all leads to that ending...

[Caellach Marellus]

I don't honestly think EA's to blame for this one. This is squarely on the shoulders of Hudson and Walters, they wrote the ending and pushed it through without external review, they're also the ones standing square behind it now like a Captain on a sinking ship (no Bioware isn't a sinking ship, I just wanted to use a metaphor that explains pointless stubbornness for the sake of "honour")


I'm fine to accept that the game might have no "perfect" endings, infact it's hinted multiple times throughout 3 that there will be losses, casualties and that you can't save everyone. What I don't accept is the actions I chose are non consequential and the end is railroaded into a generic ending, which is irrelevant to how I played the game.

Bad enough that the ending felt empty and left me with more questions than it answered, but it's more empty by the fact that playing through three games, crafting saves and carefully picking my choices the entire time was meaningless when I could have just picked up the third game, played it through quickly and gotten the same result.

This extra bunch of cutscenes best have some pretty epic polyfilla to cover up all the holes in the last 10 minutes of the game. How Anderson got there, why my crew are on the ship, what the hell happened to all life, and why I couldn't just tell the little kid to piss off. My Shepard had spent three games making his own decisions and going through people who said he "can't" do stuff. For him to kowtow to a hologram is just ugh.


I don't want the perfect ending, I just want one that makes sense. I don't want Hudson's "Artistic vision" Soft piano music and confusing dialogue does not make it art, it makes it confusing bollocks.

[Lyn Farel]

For me ME3 was 10 times above the two others put together. And the end, bleh... well, I hope they will do something really good to keep the depth and artistic side of that end and turn it into something coherent and solid.

One can dream...

[Caellach Marellus]

For me ME3 was 10 times above the two others put together. And the end, bleh... well, I hope they will do something really good to keep the depth and artistic side of that end and turn it into something coherent and solid.

One can dream...

The rest of the game is absolutely phenominal. I just feel robbed at the end, I felt the same way about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, so much potential just gone.

[Mister Screwball]

For me ME3 was 10 times above the two others put together. And the end, bleh... well, I hope they will do something really good to keep the depth and artistic side of that end and turn it into something coherent and solid.

One can dream...

The rest of the game is absolutely phenominal. I just feel robbed at the end, I felt the same way about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, so much potential just gone.

If you watch the video I linked on the last page it does prety much explain the ME3 ending to the point where it actualy makes sence

[Lyn Farel]

For me ME3 was 10 times above the two others put together. And the end, bleh... well, I hope they will do something really good to keep the depth and artistic side of that end and turn it into something coherent and solid.

One can dream...

The rest of the game is absolutely phenominal. I just feel robbed at the end, I felt the same way about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, so much potential just gone.

I am not sure that DE3 is comparable. The game is not about choices, but about the story before anything else. It just offers you to choose what ending you would prefer, maybe according to your personnal (and/or political) beliefs. It was already the case in DE1 and nobody said anything, even if it was a little more camouflaged.

[Morwen Lagann]

In DXHR they also had the limitation that the game was a prequel to the first one that already had a premise set up - they couldn't let the ending of DXHR be loose enough that you couldn't plausibly get back to that starting point - which is why I ended up going "fuck you guys" and took Eliza's suggestion.

[BloodBird]

For me ME3 was 10 times above the two others put together. And the end, bleh... well, I hope they will do something really good to keep the depth and artistic side of that end and turn it into something coherent and solid.

One can dream...

The rest of the game is absolutely phenominal. I just feel robbed at the end, I felt the same way about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, so much potential just gone.

This. As I explained ME1 and ME2 was great, and so was ME3, better than the other two indeed.

But we all know how it ends. That's pretty much the only issue that's in any way major, but it's such a crucial part to mess up. It creates a large draw-back on an otherwise excellent product, ergo my opinion that someone somewhere fucked up.

[Louella Dougans]

something that struck me today was this:

[spoiler]At the point where the Salarian Dalatrass is arguing with Shepard and Wrex about the genophage, and Shepard and Wrex storm out, the Dalatress says something about how "this will have consequences". Which would hint at there being an effect on the Human-Salarian diplomatic relations.
[/spoiler]
Except, given the endings, it doesn't.

Another thing that struck me, was the Prothean's dialogue.

[spoiler]In some of the random on-board ship chit chats, He pretty much says that paragon/renegade doesn't matter, only what strength the allies bring. I forget the exact words, but.. it kind of sets you up for only caring if the magic number is +1X or +2X, and paragon/renegade and consequences for the future, don't matter.[/spoiler]

[BloodBird]

And both of those build up on an ending that don't exist. They are examples that the final outcome was different from what the game, and those before, had built up to.

Javik is Javik - he's very renegade-like in that he ultimately don't seem to care how the work is done, so long as it does. He wants to kill reapers and knows first-hand what's needed, and how such a task will play out (casualties galore) but he still pushes to get as many folks in on the fight as is possible simply because the more people help out the greater are the odds that anyone at all survives.

Basically, the idea of critical mass, ergo "Fewer than X will just die, more than Y will grant the greatest chance of Victory. Most are going to die anyhow." He's a scarred, pragmatic realist and despite that he will berate you for siding with the Geth if you do. Synthetics can't be trusted, etc.

The Dalatrass makes it clear that curing the genophage is unacceptable due to the Krogan nature and the fact that, if they are cured, it's only a question of time before the Krogan becomes a serious problem that everyone else is not guaranteed to be able to handle. Ergo, though they are needed, she would favor keeping them down. [spoiler]This is the reason she later calls you and offer the alternative to stealthily sabotage the genophage, and ask if you really think a long-time peace with a cured Krogan will last. Shepard can even tell her that "Yeah, I know the Krogan will be an issue after the Reapers, but the Reapers are an issue now." She will agree, and if you do sabotage it, she will commend you for thinking ahead and grant you Salarian support and a cover-story for the coming genophage cure failure.

It's likely that going along with the cure as planned would have long-term consequences and issues between Humanity (represented by Shepard's actions) and the Salarians, but we never get to see that, because of no epilogue or anything [/spoiler]

[Lyn Farel]

Somtimes all this makes me think that developpers should sometimes just choose not to offer any choices at all considering how whiny and unhappy it makes the players. xD

( yeah i know im unfair )

[Silas Vitalia]

Somtimes all this makes me think that developpers should sometimes just choose not to offer any choices at all considering how whiny and unhappy it makes the players. xD

( yeah i know im unfair )

It's about delivering a consistant product.  Don't raise the bar if you can't maintain it, etc.  Don't raise expectations for years and then not stick the landing, etc.

Part 2 was worse than part 1, and part three was worse than part 2, so I suppose this does keep the trend up in some ways

[Lyn Farel]

For me ME3 was 10 times above the two others put together. And the end, bleh... well, I hope they will do something really good to keep the depth and artistic side of that end and turn it into something coherent and solid.

One can dream...

The rest of the game is absolutely phenominal. I just feel robbed at the end, I felt the same way about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, so much potential just gone.

If you watch the video I linked on the last page it does prety much explain the ME3 ending to the point where it actualy makes sence

I watched your video link. I already watched the old ones. They made a little bit of sense, but they were still clumsy and blurred somehow to me. This one is more extensive and better done. It makes sense and I really like it. It proves to me that this ending is awesome in its own way, and is able to cover all the stretched and unconsistant things that were really annoying me. Except of course that we still do not see what happens of the final galaxy afterwise (depending on the final choice done ofc), which is still frustrating I guess. And of course, the fact remains that they kept doing a very pop-culture accessible franchise filled up with clichés and the likes, to give us that at the end. This is just weird, and where they fucked up to me is really there : what did they expect ? The target to understand everything ? I find it really surprising that they needed all this outrage to ensure that they will deliver a free complementary DLC, which should have been there since the beginning ! Of course, this assumes that this theory is correct.


Also, there is one thing that this theory assumes about the SYNERGY choice that makes sense : fusion between flesh and machine, citing husks and reprocessed beings as examples, and thus concluding this is the 2nd of the wrong choices. It is only possible to me, but not mandatory. The theory assumes that SYNERGY is about husks. It could also be about geths. It could be an alternative to the destruction choice. It can also lead to another "theory" of my own that I developped unconsciously myself while watching that end (while I was totally unaware of any indoctrination theory of any sort, but they are not mutually exclusive). Instead of questionning myself about the obvious indoctrination that Shepard went through (even if I was wondering at the end that it was probably some sort of imagination trick/trip), I asked myself a lot of questions about the true motives and essence of the reapers. They say they are here to "prevent organics to create synthetics and be eradicated by their creations" or something like that, which is totally stretched and absurd. I was like wtf, and at the same time it made me think that the reapers are something more than what they seemed to be : reapers.

What if the true purpose and existence of the reapers was actually to bring organics and synthetics to a fusion of a sort ? To push them in a new layer of evolution ? This is how I felt the SYNERGY part. Maybe the CONTROL choice is the trick choice that makes Shepard lose to indoctrination, and DESTROY the choice that makes him resist, but actually LEARNING NOTHING ? What if SYNERGY is a new comprehension ?

Dunno. Must be opening a lot of plot holes that I havent seen. This is mostly how I felt it. Sansha Kuvakei got into me ?

Also, does Shepard only re-breath at the end with the DESTROY option ? I dont think I got this one with SYNERGY... Or is it tied to something else ?

[Morwen Lagann]

Only with destroy, and a very high effective military rating.

[Yoshito Sanders]

I too found the Mass Effect 3 ending to be pretty fail. And though I enjoy the Indoctrination theory from a writing standpoint, from a gameplay standpoint and the core of the ME setting, it suffers from many of the same problems a straight reading of the ending has. I wrote about it on my blog, here.