Open Discussion: Mass Effect 3 – Ending (Spoilers)

• http://3godkings.com/ Greg Dragon

  Okay there are 3 paths and they all show the same bullshit ending… Shepard gone, Joker jumps into a Mass Relay (WTF FOR!?) and is stranded on a lost planet with either cyber EDI, human/cyber EDI, and random crew member (it was Ash and James for me since I run with 3 Marines). They all get the old man and little boy story-time ending.  So why the hell did I do all that crap on the random Reaper occupied zones to build War Assets if it wasn’t going to change the outcome anyway? I don’t mind the lame ending, I just mind the fact that I wasted my time helping people on the Citadel! AArrrghh! This is the Rocky V of the Mass Effect series… mark my words.

  • http://awsmblog.com Rob Heath

    I am gonna post my thoughts into 2 parts.

    5 minutes after beating the game:

    A few hours after beating the game:

    5 Mins: Mass Effect came to a thrilling conclusion for me in a way that I thought it would. Ultimately I believed the end choice I, the player, would have to make would lead to a harsh impact across the various galaxies. I expected the only way to kill the reapers would be to spread a mass EMP (electronic pulse) of sorts across all of space which would ultimately lead to the a colossal rewind in advancements in technology. Altho advancements would be made a lot faster, it could still take many centuries to ultimately get back to the way things were before the reaper invasion.  I was close! I choose to shoot the crap out of that non descrip shaft on the right. It’s what anderson would do. I know BECAUSE THEY SHOWED ME. As if Anderson was now the image of a true paragon (ok, that felt a little forced. I knew he was a good guy, but the farther figure thing was feeling a bit new and a little to late to be pushed on me).

    So the mass relays started to blow up, reapers fell down, joker was trying to outrun a mass relay explosion (I am with everyone thinking “wait, why is he jumping a mass rely and not orbiting earth waiting for shepard to … idk… tell him to pick him up”), the galaxy as we knew it was safe, but now with every galaxy sector out of reach and the future seems some what unknown. A blank slate. A chance to prove ourselves against all that the reapers and the creator told us we were ultimately meant to become. 
    Excellent. It felt right. It felt like it wasn’t a safe ending. Sure they could continue the franchise from here but they’d have to be really creative about how they would pick up from this ending. For my shepard, this would truly be his last mission. He didn’t make it. And from what I saw online, the ending where shepard survives, it still looks grim for our legendary hero. The emotional payoff was sufficient for me. I would have like shepard to have lived. But then again, if cerberus can bring him back, I am sure the alliance could scrounge up some money and revive the commander if bioware deemed in necessary. So I won’t write shepard off for in future mass effect games. I expect to see a cameo of shepard in a wheel chair or something. Sitting in the newly appointed citadel counselors. Now for my thoughts few hours after beating the game: Ok, some things are not adding up. I have a few issues. First and foremost, yes, it did seem like kind of a waste to go around collecting resources only to have them ultimately extended the final battle pre-rendered cut scene. Oh look! The quarians made it! Sweet! They will deff give the edge over this battle. Oh wait. Nothing changes. I am not really mad at this fact, but I understand how other gamers might be. For me it’s about the story and I don’t think that the overall arc would really change that much by having a few extra races on my side. Ultimately shepard would always get to the citadel and have to choose between 2 options. But yea, this null pay off for those who spent the game trying to collect every war asset is a pretty big issue. How could bioware do something like that. I can’t imagine if this was an over sight or just rushed game dev? Either way, it’s a pretty big issue for so many creative hands involved to have passed over.

    Second, and this is MY biggest issue. With the “kill the reapers” ending, you essentially KILL all synthetic life. This is from what I understand to be the Paragon ending? So why is the paragon ending amount to shepard killing a whole hell of a lot more people, and ALL synthetic life? Lets break this down.If you send out that massive EMP, here is the kill list.

    1. Almost everyone on a ship – now stranded without life support, and no rescue… CAUSE NO ONE ELSE CAN GET TO THEM!

    2. Anyone who relies on tech to live, or has tech heavily embedded into their body, like shepard.

    3. ALL THE GETH, which was a big fuck you to the players who struggled to keep them alive in the quarian conflict. This one really struck a nerve. I replayed that mission twice in order to keep the geth and quarians alive, but ultimately I really wanted the geth to live, because the story was written to make the player feel for the geth’s plight. They weren’t violent, but were forced to violence in order to protect themselves against their creators war against them, which came from blind fear.So you make me ultra sympathetic to the geth, I work hard to save their asses, I finally give them a chance to live peacefully in the Galaxy with the quarains, I give them individuality!!!!!, and then you give me a PARAGON ending that results in the termination of ALL GETH. WTF!? No OTHER OPTION! You want the paragon ending, you gotta kill all those geth you worked so hard to save.That is some bullshit.

    I am gonna play devil’s advocate with this for a second. In the real world, the decisions made at war are often morally gray. A lot of innocent people die because they were simply born in the wrong place at the wrong time. We bomb cities because a few bad eggs occupy a carton filled with a lot of good eggs. It’s fucked up, but that’s the real world. So I can sit back and say, yes, the good ending could ultimately fucked over the geth. It’s a hard choice and the writers at bioware did something bold. 

    Out of devil’s advocate mode: Altho that above is true, the conflict of shepard vs the illusive man always came down to their desire to save the galaxy, but the Illusive Man was always willing to sacrifice TOO much in order to obtain his goals, and shepard was always there to tell him he was going too far. The end doesn’t justify the means when so much has to be sacrificed. And yet, the paragon ending ultimately makes shepard no better than the illusive man by killing probably millions of people and the entire newly individualized geth. If the illusive man was alive when my shepard shot the large tubey thing, he probably would have called him on his hypocrisy. 

    The true paragon ending would have been shepard controlling the geth and figuring out a way to take them out in the near future without wiping so many people. 

    Third, I am a disappointed in the entirety of the playable content. While ME3 certainly packed a hefty punch in terms of immersive gameplay, it felt like a lot of the missions were significantly shorter in time to complete, and there seemed to a be a whole lot less of them. I think I spent a lot more time traversing the various floors of the citadel and engaging in convos with various familiar and unfamiliar faces, trying to gather war assets via doing favors for everyone, rather than winning war fronts  throughout the galaxy. Perhaps it is as the saying goes. The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long. Looking at the  mass effect mission wiki it certainly looks like when you add up the core misisons with the side and optional missions, ME2 beats ME3 in terms of the length of playable in combat missions, hands down. That really sucks. http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Missions#Plot_Missions_2

    I have a bunch of other thoughts about the game. But I’ve written a whole lot at this point so I am gonna take a breather.

    • http://3godkings.com/ Greg Dragon

      Nerds are speculating that the 3 endings are Shepard’s blood soaked hallucinations as he dies slowly from Harbinger’s ray of death. The reapers win… game over. If this is true then it IS the greatest ending ever (albeit sad as hell), but I think people are grasping at straws here.

  • http://awsmblog.com Rob Heath

    Also, I really do hate on disc DLC. Nothing to make you hate a game dev company more than to know they are cheating you and covering up as “we didn’t have time to put it on the disc”. Bitch, then release the game later. Don’t cover up your greedyness with some bullshit story that ultimately leads to you looking like you rushed the game out. You know we can wait. Duke Nukem took 12 years and we still bought that pile of crap.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRRpGlmtws8&feature=player_embedded

    • http://3godkings.com/ Greg Dragon

       I couldn’t kill the synthetics… if there’s anything I give props to Bioware’s team on it’s the way they are able to decipher the difference between a renegade mind state and a paragon. You chose Paragon while I played the middle… heavily on the renegade side so inevitably I took the middle choice. Death of Shepard to allow Synthetics and Organics to fuse into one being… Joker and EDI become the Adam and Eve of the new planet. I was happy with Shepard’s sacrifice starting that but it pissed me off all the same… here’s why.

      I romanced Jack, and while this is selfish of me, I wanted more progress from the bad girl turned good with her and Shepard reuniting and starting some punk rocker, military, brat babies on earth and Shepard ascending to a legendary Admiral in the Alliance. While I am not naive enough to believe that military power was enough to stop a scourge that decimated the Asari home planet (the most advanced race in the galaxy)… I still wished upon it. We got close to a lot of characters only for them to be cameos in this game or mere mentions…

      The last conversation my Shepard had with Jack was with her as a hologram and her saying “get out alive I want to get laid after this”, and him saying “I love you too”. It wasn’t a goodbye and for him to go out like that shocked me being that he had gone up against death twice before and escaped.

      Earth is fucked, Joker and EDI ended up on a new planet in a new universe… you saw earth… all of the friends you made are stuck there unless they were lucky enough to be on the Normandy. That’s a real kick in the balls for me.

      Bioware fucked us Rob… lets be real here… I bought Dragon Age 2 and SWTOR so my booty is sore enough by now to know that I’m being violated. The game is super short (I am on my 2nd play through to romance Ash and I am flying through it), they will release DLC to “answer our questions” and we will buy it -__-… fanbois will defend the shit out of this game and the cookie-cutter endings and nothing will change.

      I would have rather Mass Effect 3 ended with a “fade to black” like The Sopranos than to sit here wondering as to why every ending involved the various races in the galaxies being hung out to dry.

    • http://awsmblog.com Rob Heath

       I don’t even get how the 2 endings are different are looking at it again. The only difference is that the reapers don’t fall down dead in one. But all the mass relays explode leaving everyone to disconnected from other galaxies. It is crazy!

• reaper

  ok my problem is that for 3 games and i dont know how many years i have been building and molding my Shepperd so that i could have the best ending i could get, will take a minute away from that and let me ask you what this game was based on if you said making YOUR own dissensions to effect your particular world then you would be correct, but the end of mass effect 3 takes that away from you yes i get to choose from 1 of 3 ends and yes i figured that most would end with Shepperd’s death but i assumed that they would at least tell you what happens to every one depending on the choices i made though out all 3 games like if i saved the rakinie i would expect a slightly different end than someone who didn’t or if i killed the geth or didn’t cure the genophage i would expect a different end, and i don’t mean completely different that would just be rediculus, i guess i figured something like the end of fallout 3 were it goes through all the crap you did throughout the game only make it 3 games. i just wanted something that took every thing i did throughout 3 great games and give me an end were i can put my controller down and say i am done, but what i got was something that i feel was directed so that if people who just started playing wouldn’t suffer because of it, but instead there hurting the long time fan who has been with them since the beginning. now i did expect 1 good end were, even if it was a pain in the you know what to get, i could have my Shepperd live say i am done with this sh t and leave and go live with tali, and i would have done that sh t to get that end with at least one of my characters. well what i am trying to say is in a game were every thing is up to you i felt i was forced into this end this was not my ending it was there’s, and i thought this game was about making it my story because we the player are Shepperd and i don’t know about you but there is no way some wimpy a$$ reaper invasion is going to kill me or keep me from my love interest. one last thing i feel that all the other games had a high replay value cause i thought that if i played it different made different choices it would change my ending for each play through but the way it ends now its just so well that’s it theirs nothing i can do to change the way it ends there’s no difference except what color beam i get well i think i am done theirs no point in finishing the other 6 characters i have, and yes each one did different things. my final vote fro change or don’t change the end is change it even if no matter what you do Shepperd still dies at least tell me what happens throughout the galaxy with the other races and my crew members even the ones that weren’t with me on my ship like Samara or Miranda tell me what happened to them and every one else. long sigh glade i got that out of my system.

  • http://3godkings.com/ Greg Dragon

    Reaper(nice name), I think what would make you, myself and all Mass Effect fans happy is to have an epilogue based on our ingame friends and love interest. The end we got basically said “they all died, peace out” or “Joker and 2 others made it but the rest are screwed”. That won’t sit well with people who have beaten 1-3 and spent 120+ hours building relationships, caring for characters and playing galactic hero. So if they owe us anything it’s a patch with some closure to show some respect for us die-hards. I can give a shit if the majority of kids skip dialogue and plow their way through choices  just to beat it quickly, there are a ton of us out here who love the lore and cannot accept the magical ending of 3 to be real.

• Dhubert1111

  all the endings suck because either way you go either die or just disappear and the synthesis one says your alive but it sure doesn’t look like it. it looks like a bunch of people you know with green eyes, that’s it.