61 replies to this topic

[Bri]

I don't intend to give out any specific spoilers on the endings, though others can do so if they wish.

Well, I finished ME 3 recently, and while I didn't mind the whole of the game (thought it felt like even less effort was put into it than ME 2)...but let's just say how BioWare did the endings left me pissed.

I believe I got the whole panoply of choices, but it was so lackluster, so lazy...hell, I would have preferred even DA 1/Fallout-ish endings of just text describing what happened...

Mind you, there were many aspects of the game I did like, and I didn't even mind some of the choices BioWare did in regards to various characters, and whatnot...but the ending *bleah*

Edited by Bri, 14 March 2012 - 03:44 AM.

[Kulyok]

As for the game itself, haven't reached this far yet, but I was very impressed with whatever I saw on youtube. Better than anything I saw in Dragon Age series, romance-wise.

As for the endings, I'm a sucker for the traditional sunset one with one's romance interest and friends/squadmates, so, yes, I wish they gave us a short cutscene like that: Normandy, sunset, commander Shepard with her paramour, Joker and friends all together, and so on. They came pretty close, though. Maybe we'd still get it as a DLC, I don't know.

[Kaeloree]

Count me as another one disappointed with how they handled the endings. Will make a more detailed post when I have some time!

[Eleima]

I'm interested in your reactions, guys, but haven't received my CE yet (it's still sitting on my parents' kitchen table, *sigh*), so for my sake and the sake of my fellow SHS forumites who haven't reached the end yet, please use the spoiler tags where appropriate. And if anyone clicks on the tags then, that's on their own head.
Incidentally, everything I'm hearing on the ending is really starting to scare me, and I'm really afraid I'll be disappointed too. Did the ending just not live up to the hype? Or was it really that bad?

Edited by Eleima, 13 March 2012 - 10:57 PM.

[Kaeloree]

It was kind of bad, yeah.

Perhaps this whole thread should just be marked [SPOILERS] in the title? It's difficult to discuss the problems with the ending without... you know, enormous and plentiful spoilers. What do you guys/gals think?

[Kulyok]

Spoilers in the title sounds good.

Eleima: without giving everything away, "the best" ending may *imply* that everything's all right, sunsets and rainbows and roses and everybody's together forever, but it does not *show* that. I mean, in Dragon Age 2 you saw Hawke walking away together with Anders/Varric/Carver and Varric saying that Anders stayed with Hawke, right? Here, it may be implied but it isn't shown, which is kind of the point in the videogame.


SPOILER NOW.

Okay, Reapers are destroyed, Shep is alive, romantic interest is alive, party members are alive, Joker's waving happily. Mass relays? Can be restored in a few months. Normandy? Can be repaired or built anew. => Happy end.

[Choo Choo]

I'm not happy with the endings, either. It's just not that they were bleak, even though I do prefer happy ones. It's that they were so... empty. They didn't offer any conclusion, just left a lot of answers. It all felt rushed, too.

The rest of the game, though? AMAZING. The Garrus romance is the sweetest thing!

And the endings, well... I've resolved to simply not play the last five minutes of the game, replacing them with headcanon. Yay, headcanon!

[Bri]

Perhaps this whole thread should just be marked [SPOILERS] in the title? It's difficult to discuss the problems with the ending without... you know, enormous and plentiful spoilers. What do you guys/gals think

Very well, the title has been put with the spoilers tag. Although, I figure when speaking of endings it would imply that a person had finished it (I did withhold on putting down spoilers first thing in case someone did click on the topic).

Incidentally, everything I'm hearing on the ending is really starting to scare me, and I'm really afraid I'll be disappointed too. Did the ending just not live up to the hype? Or was it really that bad?

I don't expect the greatest ending of all time, but for the longest time now BioWare hasn't really done well with endings. ME 3, though, really sucked at it.

I mean, in Dragon Age 2 you saw Hawke walking away together with Anders/Varric/Carver and Varric saying that Anders stayed with Hawke, right? Here, it may be implied but it isn't shown, which is kind of the point in the videogame.

*nods* And hence my comment that even the DA 1/2 or Fallout games even gave a better ending (for what its worth).

Spoiler ahead:

Speaking of romances...

The rest of the game, though? AMAZING. The Garrus romance is the sweetest thing!

And hence my comment about the rest of the game doing somethings really well. I liked the Tali interactions. Hell, even the ones who weren't there full time (like Miranda and Jack) at least reconnected with Shepard.

And Thane's scene was especially poignant.

About the only one I had a problem with was the Diana Allers...not enough meat there. I even liked how Kelly Chambers was resolved.

[Kwiat_W]

SPOILERS

Okay, Reapers are destroyed, Shep is alive, romantic interest is alive, party members are alive, Joker's waving happily. Mass relays? Can be restored in a few months. Normandy? Can be repaired or built anew. => Happy end.

This is not how the game ended.
Making Shepard live requires 8k of war assets, which I think is impossible to achieve without playing mp and Shep can live only if you choose to destroy ALL synthetics, including EDI and the Geth. If you choose control or synthesis options he always dies. Unless your LI is on Normandy with Joker you don't know if he/she survived, the same with your friends. Mass relays were build by the Reaprers and the in-game codex says that this technology is far beyond any of the living races. Without relays the galactic civilization is gone, as it can take hundreds of years to travel between inhabited planets with standard FTL drives.
Kill (your friends) or be killed, I wouldn't call that a happy anding.

The ending is wrong for many reasons....

1. As I see it there are two types of sci-fi: Star Wars and Star Trek
The SW type is about adventure, action, shredding your enemies and looking cool with your lightsaber or laserpistol.
The ST type asks the reader/viewer/gamer philosophical questions or tries to solve moral dilemmas.
ME is like SW, but in the end, instead of fighting with Darth Vader, we are making a chit-chat with him. This doesn't feel right to me. There is no final boss that we can defeat, instead we get this pseudointellectual ending that just doesn't fit with the rest of the game.

2. This is a character driven game, but this aspect is almost completely ignored in the end. You just get quick flashes of Liara, Joker, Anderson and Ashley or Kaidan. Unless you romanced one them you don't even get to see your LI for the last time and unless your LI is with Joker on the Normandy in the last scene, you don't know if he/she survived. I need to know what happened to my beloved Miranda! I don't need an epilogue for each of my squat mates, I don't need to know if Garrus and Tali got married, but I need to know if they are alive. If my war assets were low show me their bodies floating in the vacuum of space or lying on the Earths ground. If my war assets were high show me them watching Citadel blowing up, or cheer that the war is over.

3. The final confrontation with the Illusive Man and the Catalyst is a long (almost) non-interactive dialog. We are not playing, we are just watching. We don't get a chance to ask questions, to try to convince the Catalyst that he is wrong. Since the moment of teleporting to the Citadel I'm no longer Shepard, I'm watching someone else playing my game.

4. When I was playing I didn't get the feeling that the game is about "synthetics vs organics", the conflict was always somewhere there, but making the ending focus on this was surprising. To me it always was just another story about invasion of demons or undead dressed in a sci-fi suit.

5. In the entire trilogy we were led to believe that our actions will shape the galaxy for the millennia to come, that we are deciding the fate of entire civilizations, but all that we have accomplished pails in comparison to the destruction of the mass relay network (and that is beyond your control). Did you saved the Rachni? Did you cure the genophage? Were you supporter of the Council and the current galactic order? It doesn't matter, now everybody is stuck on their own planets, so the Rachni and the Krogans won't be a threat to anybody. Well, everybody is stuck on their home planets or Earth so the galactic civilization is over and there won't be any galactic council anymore. What did you do about the Geth? Unless you choose the synthesis option it doesn't really matter cause you have to destroy them anyway. And so on...

6. (this is a minor one) What are my squat mates from the final mission doing on the Normandy? How did they get there? What is Joker doing traveling through the mass relay network? Did he escape the battlefield???

I could forgive any of those mistakes, but all of them together make a really bad ending.

What good I can say about the ending is that the final cutscenes are well done, very sad, very touching and the music is great, but it just doesn't fit the rest. And the rest of the game is really very good (as an action game with rich storyline, not an RPG).

Edited by Kwiat_W, 14 March 2012 - 09:43 AM.

[Tempest]

On their own merits, judged in isolation, I like the endings. They're all rather haunting, and I like that there's no clear "good" or "bad" ending - controlling the Reapers seems to be as good as anything, and indeed is the ending with the blue highlights.

That said, my biggest complaint is that there's no closure, conclusion, or epilogue. You don't see the consequences of anything you've done, or what becomes of anyone.

[Bri]

I think it is fair to say that if I manage to get back to writing Fanfic, I'm not going to have this as 'my' ending

I am heartened to know that I wasn't the only one to have the same problems with the endings (though to what extent certainly can vary).

Without relays the galactic civilization is gone, as it can take hundreds of years to travel between inhabited planets with standard FTL drives.

Although it should be possible for the new civilization to make new Mass Relays (eventually)...after all, the Protheans did that on Ilos in ME 1

Oh, and Kwiat, most of that list you made was many of the same problems I had with it as well.

Edited by Bri, 14 March 2012 - 08:42 AM.

[the bigg]

My money says they will retcon (most of) the ending away. They sure aren't going to stop making games in the franchise, most likely aren't going to set all of them in the past and/or on a single planet, and did explicitly tell people to keep their ME3 saves.

[Kulyok]

Could you give a link on where they tell people to keep their ME3 saves? I mean, can we be sure it's not just for ME3 DLCs?

[Gorzag]

Yeah, I was disappointed with the endings as well. It felt like it just came out of nowhere, our choices troughout the game didn't really seem to matter, it didn't really provide any amount of closure, and all the other reasons stated here made me feel unhappy about it. The rest of the game was damn great though, the best game to come out in many years.

However, there's an interesting theory going on over the Bioware Social Network about the ending, and the more I think about it the more sense it makes. Basically the idea is that Shepard never made in into the cidatel, and everything you see after you get hit by the Reaper gun when running into the beam is simply the Reapers trying to indoctrinate Shepard, and that choosing anything but destroying the Reapers in the end means the indoctrination being succesful, while destroying them means Shepard resisted the indoctrination (and because of that we might see him/her alive).

There are plenty of things that could be hinting at this. For one, you hear a radio transmition that nobody made it to the beam, but somehow both Shepard and Anderson still get there? Also, the whole sequence after you get hit by the Reaper guns is very dreamlike, and we don't seem to be properly in control of Shepard, who for some reason also simply accepts the Catalyst's reasoning, instead of arguing and questioning like Shepard has always done before. Also where did Shepard's armour dissappear, and how else could have survived the Cidatel's destruction?

There are more points supporting this theory and I'm not going to list them all here, but it seems at least plausible, and would IMO make more sense than the endings simply being true as they were. Of course, the question is that if it's true, what happened afterwards?

[the bigg]

Could you give a link on where they tell people to keep their ME3 saves? I mean, can we be sure it's not just for ME3 DLCs?

http://bit.ly/xzf8cS

[Kulyok]

Well, that's why I asked for the link - I could only find Gamble's non-specific "It wouldn’t be a bad idea (to keep your ME3 saves)", and I thought you might have more.

I like indoctrination version(given how the bioware sforum thread about it has got about 600 pages). Of course, there's a certain suspension of disbelief either way:
- it's either Earth logic, and then a fully human-comparable AI, and hence, Reapers, simply can't exist, sorry.
- or it's game logic, which says Proteans were close to discovering how mass relays worked before they were wiped out, which means humanity must be close, too, which means the relays *would* be built anew soon to let Shep and the others come together - but it means that the cycles would begin anew and eventually Reapers would be created again = bad;
- or it's stock Bioware/Battlestar Galactica logic, which says it's good that technology got destroyed, that mass relays possibly would never be created again, yadda-yadda - but, again, civilizations are *built* on technology, so there *will* be Cylons, I mean, Reapers again, only it'll take longer - and in this case, isn't it awful and evil to trap Joker/Kaidan/Garrus/Tali/etc so many lights away from Shepard for some idiotic reason?

Anyway, again, my suspension of disbelief says that if the current epilogue is true, then mass relays got fixed very soon, so Shep and friends got together, but Reapers didn't come back. Oh, and EDI lives. Just because.

But I'd really like to hear Bioware's take on the indoctrination version. After all, Syntesis ending is almost certainly an indoctrination thing, given Saren's speech and actions at the end of the first Mass Effect.

Edited by Kulyok, 15 March 2012 - 09:49 PM.

[Bri]

that mass relays possibly would never be created again, yadda-yadda - but, again, civilizations are *built* on technology, so there *will* be Cylons, I mean, Reapers again, only it'll take longer - and in this case, isn't it awful and evil to trap Joker/Kaidan/Garrus/Tali/etc so many lights away from Shepard for some idiotic reason?

And it doesn't help if one remembers to many small details...such as in ME 2, the matriarch barmaid (Liara's father) Aethyta actually tried to convince the Asari to build *new* Mass Effect Relays...which one could assume the species did know how to build such relays.

And of course, I mentioned how Protheans had built a small one on Ilos...

[Bartimaeus]

I don't feel as though there's anything intrinsically wrong with the endings...or rather, the idea of the endings...but I felt as though they were a bit...lacking. [spoilers]I chose synthesis, and...as a result, I die, the Mass Relays are destroyed, and of my friends all I get to see is Liara, Joker and EDI, (the two former of which now sport synthetic features), walk out of a crashed Normandy on some planet that doesn't make any sense to be anything but Earth but doesn't look like it at all? Never mind that Liara and EDI are my two best buds, (ie, the squad members I took on the mission to get to the beam and thus they should probably either be dead or on Earth but most certainly not on the Normandy - also, I think a crash landing would've probably killed Joker with his bone disease - actually, it probably would've killed everyone so never mind), so it doesn't really make a lot of sense that they're there. I just don't feel like I got to see anything of worth. Never mind that everything I did previously didn't affect the actual endings...but more the endings I could choose.

Also, I played through on Insanity all the way through all three games and some of the battles were really gosh darned hard, (especially in this latest chapter!), and it was just a bit unsatisfying to have it conclude like that. Me being fried in the Crucible was bad enough, along with the Mass Relays being destroyed, but to not even wrap up what happened to my friends? Rather depressing.

(edit) One last thing - EDI walking out confused me a little, as the Normandy looks to be destroyed and thus her puppet shouldn't really be functioning - as her processors are presumably fried - ...but she is anyway. Does that mean that she became somewhat organic as the organics were becoming somewhat synthetic? And that the Geth, and presumably any other AIs, became organic as well? Or did I misunderstand her taking control of Eva, (or whatever its name was), and she has a separate core in the body?[/spoilers]

Edited by Bartimaeus, 16 March 2012 - 11:16 PM.

[Kulyok]

I kind of thought some more about which ending I'd choose, and the choice seems to be between
1) red = genocide, all geth die, EDI is supposed to die, and so on;
2) green = an even worse genocide, because it destroys humanity(asari, turians) as we know it, making every human a cyborg of sorts;
3) blue = no mass relays seem to be destroyed, Citadel is whole, humans are humans, geth live, everything seems to be good, but won't Reapers return in a year or 50000 years?

[Vicen]

Ugh is all I can say to the ending of this game...Like a few others I choose the "synthesis" ending and I must say I am quite disappointed...I won't go into major details as most of my issues have been discussed earlier in this thread but man...what a total let down from building up from the other 2 games and this one as well...Not once did I ever get the feeling the reason the reapers wanted to destroy the galaxy was because they might make synthetics that would eventually rebel against their masters and in turn destroy the galaxy...

I honestly thought it was because either...

1. They are just evil bastards who get their jollies destroying civilizations, who before they reach their peak or get very close to it...

2. Or because they have to destroy them because eventually their tech might rival their own and they cannot trust them to use it wisely or what not...

All I have to say is the ending left me feeling very hollow...I was contemplating a female Shepard renegade play through on all 3 games...but now I am not so sure I wish too...

Seriously...the game should of ended by a boss battle and not some willy nilly bs that they gave us at the end...I really wanted to stick to Harbinger...Ah well...Anyways rant over!

Edited by Vicen, 23 April 2012 - 04:39 AM.