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Mass Effect 3
- Thread starter TsukasaSIGN
- Start date
Having only watched the ending on YouTube, is Haestrom, the weird star during the Quarian mission in ME2, mentioned ever again? Cuz that could have been a really cool direction to go in.
I've also read that Shepard may have been indoctrinated the entire time, as some have pointed out, which is the only way the ending could be salvaged.
Finally, the ending was ultimately terrible because the explanation behind the reapers was that without them, synthetics would destroy all organics.
SYNTHETICS. WOULD DESTROY ALL ORGANICS.
UNLIKE WHAT IS LITERALLY HAPPENING ALL AROUND YOU.
I've also read that Shepard may have been indoctrinated the entire time, as some have pointed out, which is the only way the ending could be salvaged.
Finally, the ending was ultimately terrible because the explanation behind the reapers was that without them, synthetics would destroy all organics.
SYNTHETICS. WOULD DESTROY ALL ORGANICS.
UNLIKE WHAT IS LITERALLY HAPPENING ALL AROUND YOU.
so I found out that I do really really really really miss grunt from ME2, I've actually somewhat enjoyed the smaller party size, I just wish one of them was grunt. But it has given me a huge appreciation for the characters that are there. I must have tried every combo there was.
And having finished the game, I loved it. That does include the ending yes, I actually found it very poetic. Not that I don't totally get why others hate it so much, but I personally found it very moving. I could elaborate as to why if anyone cares.
spoilers...
And having finished the game, I loved it. That does include the ending yes, I actually found it very poetic. Not that I don't totally get why others hate it so much, but I personally found it very moving. I could elaborate as to why if anyone cares.
spoilers...
I chose the control option personally, because I did have the necessary GR to achieve the life ending but knowing that the LI Miranda had died already I thought the story would be more complete
I am almost entirely in agreement with those who believe the indoctrination theory (from the point where he is shot with the Harbinger laser.) It makes so much sense with how much inconsistency there is in the last ~10 minutes of the game and entirely salvages the ending (it also most sets up for continuation by picking the "destroy" option, hinting that the theory was Bioware's intention and that option was the most canon.)
Non-committal, but posted on facebook:
Mass Effect 2
We appreciate everyone’s feedback about Mass Effect 3 and want you to know that we are listening. Please note, we want to give people time to experience the game so while we can’t get into specifics right now, we will be able to address some of your questions once more people have had time to complete the game.
Mass Effect 2
We appreciate everyone’s feedback about Mass Effect 3 and want you to know that we are listening. Please note, we want to give people time to experience the game so while we can’t get into specifics right now, we will be able to address some of your questions once more people have had time to complete the game.
Man, you know things are fucked when people are defending the ending on the grounds that it was just a dream. You know, like the cliche?
In trying times like this I'm just glad I can go back and play games that make me happy. Like Heavy Rain or Silent Hill 2.
In trying times like this I'm just glad I can go back and play games that make me happy. Like Heavy Rain or Silent Hill 2.
I'm not defending it, but a cliche is much more bearable than the steaming pile of plot holes, animation-based laziness and apathy-inducing player nullification that the ending is if taken at face value.
EDIT: You know what game had a great ending? Professor Layton and the Curious Village. That was some combination of the saddest and happiest I've ever felt on beating a game. :,)
EDIT: You know what game had a great ending? Professor Layton and the Curious Village. That was some combination of the saddest and happiest I've ever felt on beating a game. :,)
Heavy Rain is pretty depressing but you know what is does have? Like dozens of endings complete with about five different epilogues per character. Kind of like what we were promised with ME3.
I was going to write something coherent about how unintelligent both the general condescension in your posts and the use of a comparison to an unrelated game because you can't actually think of a relevant, seamless argument to defend your perspective makes you sound, but I think this is probably more in line with your post: shut the fuck up and stop posting on Smogon by choice before I make it happen by force, Accent.
Also to add something constructive to this post anyway:
Ignoring anything else about the game, I thought Heavy Rain did a decent job conceptually of what it set out to do with the endings, as far as having multiple, varying results for each of the major characters, but it was pretty easy for them to do that well given the smaller scope of the game and how few variables were involved with each ending. There were really only the four playable characters, Lauren, Blake, and the police chief guy who's name I forget who were named characters who actually have a chance of surviving the game's events, so it was easy for them to wrap things up. The only real variables were whether the character survived to the end or not, if the character made it to Old Warehouse, if the kid was saved, and if you clicked the forgive button, which obviously is a lot simpler than even resolving one of the races would have been in ME3's ending. For what it's worth, I'm partial to the endings you get from A Perfect Crime's trophy and A Mother's Revenge, seems like better writing to me somehow.
I think if ME3 were to have done something like that they'd have had to do the Fallout/Dragon Age thing where they kind of go through by major factions and explain what happened in the aftermath of the game, with a narration of one of several results for each faction/major character based on your action, but I think that'd have done the writers a disservice moving forward since players expect that to at least become mostly canon and that really wrote Dragon Age's writers into a wall, for instance. Though I do wish they'd done a little more to tie things up, even if they were staying intentionally ambiguous. I haven't typically been very impressed by that sort of ending, anyway: most of those solutions fall flat and it feels a little cheap to get suckerpunched at the end when you made a decision with results that weren't reasonably foreseeable.
I do enjoy the common retort to the ending criticism that people were just upset it wasn't a happy ending... I think rather than Heavy Rain the point of comparison I'd use is Red Dead Redemption, which in spite of only having one ending and being completely linear had an ending that was both sad and very well received by fans. It was similarly not what the player had worked for and artistic but it fit the themes of the game and made sense. It's not like Mass Effect had to make the reapers explode into cupcakes or whatever, fans just expected finality and something that makes sense given the rest of the body of work.
If nothing else, though, this situation has been pretty insightful to me from a professional perspective. I have been enjoying following this thread a lot to see what I can get out of how BioWare is playing the situation: http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/355/index/10084349/1
Also to add something constructive to this post anyway:
Ignoring anything else about the game, I thought Heavy Rain did a decent job conceptually of what it set out to do with the endings, as far as having multiple, varying results for each of the major characters, but it was pretty easy for them to do that well given the smaller scope of the game and how few variables were involved with each ending. There were really only the four playable characters, Lauren, Blake, and the police chief guy who's name I forget who were named characters who actually have a chance of surviving the game's events, so it was easy for them to wrap things up. The only real variables were whether the character survived to the end or not, if the character made it to Old Warehouse, if the kid was saved, and if you clicked the forgive button, which obviously is a lot simpler than even resolving one of the races would have been in ME3's ending. For what it's worth, I'm partial to the endings you get from A Perfect Crime's trophy and A Mother's Revenge, seems like better writing to me somehow.
I think if ME3 were to have done something like that they'd have had to do the Fallout/Dragon Age thing where they kind of go through by major factions and explain what happened in the aftermath of the game, with a narration of one of several results for each faction/major character based on your action, but I think that'd have done the writers a disservice moving forward since players expect that to at least become mostly canon and that really wrote Dragon Age's writers into a wall, for instance. Though I do wish they'd done a little more to tie things up, even if they were staying intentionally ambiguous. I haven't typically been very impressed by that sort of ending, anyway: most of those solutions fall flat and it feels a little cheap to get suckerpunched at the end when you made a decision with results that weren't reasonably foreseeable.
I do enjoy the common retort to the ending criticism that people were just upset it wasn't a happy ending... I think rather than Heavy Rain the point of comparison I'd use is Red Dead Redemption, which in spite of only having one ending and being completely linear had an ending that was both sad and very well received by fans. It was similarly not what the player had worked for and artistic but it fit the themes of the game and made sense. It's not like Mass Effect had to make the reapers explode into cupcakes or whatever, fans just expected finality and something that makes sense given the rest of the body of work.
Reflecting on it some more a few days later the lead-in is pretty obvious -- they spent most of the rest of the game resolving most of the game's major conflicts and then at the last moment let the cast curtain call to keep them in the back of your mind while you made a decision that all those people and groups were big stakeholders in to make the end-game choice feel meaningful, so the concept was pretty sound, I just think the execution fell too flat. They set it up really well and then didn't really sell the end game choice with any sort of variety or substance. Obviously, the problem of introducing an entity at the last minute to deliver it hurts pretty badly too; it's pretty lazy writing to have to introduce a god entity in the final hour to clean up the plot. I think with how they wrote it they kind of just meant for the variety of endings to be implied (ie, you determine the Geth and Quarian ending during Priority: Rannoch and how that changes based on the ending is kind of left to be up to you to imagine), which is lazier than it is artistic.
If nothing else, though, this situation has been pretty insightful to me from a professional perspective. I have been enjoying following this thread a lot to see what I can get out of how BioWare is playing the situation: http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/355/index/10084349/1
I agree with Hip. I'm startled by the passion of so many people about the story of this series. Especially when I read von's posts, it was impressed upon me how much this story has made people care about it. It's fascinating and beautiful, and I feel sad that that was stomped on. I enjoy Synre's posts as well: they're insightful (at least as much as I am able to comprehend them, not having played ME1/ME2) and address it from the angle of the game industry and other games, another interesting component of this whole situation.
I've intended to play this series for some time, but now understanding what's awaiting me, I feel like it would be masochistic to become emotionally invested in it, and after this I feel uncomfortable about the idea of paying money for the older games... like I'd rather not play them than give them my money to be fucked with.
I've intended to play this series for some time, but now understanding what's awaiting me, I feel like it would be masochistic to become emotionally invested in it, and after this I feel uncomfortable about the idea of paying money for the older games... like I'd rather not play them than give them my money to be fucked with.
I've thought of buying Mass Effect 3, but reading up on the last few pages, the game appears full of holes and a terrible ending. I have not played any prior ME games and have not opened any spoiler-tags in case it might spoil something, but could someone tell me why the ending is so terrible (with as few spoilers as possible)? And is the rest of the game worth it?
On Metacritic, ME3 gets a critic score of 92/100, and a user score of 37/100. Ouch.
On Metacritic, ME3 gets a critic score of 92/100, and a user score of 37/100. Ouch.
The ending ultimately negates all choices the player has made throughout the series. In addition, several instances of plot holes/just plain lazy writing leave even less observant people questioning the events of the ending.
I can't elaborate on much, because you don't want spoilers, but some examples are:
-They introduce an important "character" immediately before the ending takes place.
-Several things that happen are nonsensical or badly conflict with the rest of the game.
-The decision of what ending you get is determined only by what choice you make at the end of the game. It is a matter of A, B or C, that's it.
Yet I feel like refusing to play the game, or worse, the series, solely because of the ending would be a shame... I mean, like Hip said, and like you can see by looking at BioWare's forum (which Synre linked, but here's a more relevant thread I guess: http://social.bioware.com/forum/Mas...3-endings-Yes-we-are-listening-9992961-1.html (full of spoilers!)), most players (myself included) still are amazed by how powerful some of the moments in the game are, and how moving some exchanges with the characters can be.
Now, between this and my earlier "defense" of the endings (or rather, of the endings' properness), I'm starting to worry that some may think that I'm some sort of agent from BioWare, haha, but I'd say the best course of action right is to find a way to play the games without paying for them, if you see what I mean, because I really think it would be a waste to avoid ME3 purely because of this outcry which concerns only 5% of the game, if you were kinda interested in playing it in the first place.
Oh, also, here is Ryan Kuo's review of the game on Kill Screen, it's super insightful and offers a new perspective.
Now, between this and my earlier "defense" of the endings (or rather, of the endings' properness), I'm starting to worry that some may think that I'm some sort of agent from BioWare, haha, but I'd say the best course of action right is to find a way to play the games without paying for them, if you see what I mean, because I really think it would be a waste to avoid ME3 purely because of this outcry which concerns only 5% of the game, if you were kinda interested in playing it in the first place.
Oh, also, here is Ryan Kuo's review of the game on Kill Screen, it's super insightful and offers a new perspective.
I treat Final Fantasy Tactics Advance as the slow and brutal death of the childhood dream and even I think this guy is just an asshole.
Also Accent I don't think anyone really feels that ALL of Mass Effect 3 was bad. Just that like Lost it is now a franchise that I had good years with, but ultimately cannot recommend to anyone.
So, basically, ME3 is a a game that revolves around making choices, but in the end all these choices are nullified by one final decision? Sounds disappointing. Thanks for answering.
I think that, like most articles written in response to the outcry about the ending, that article suffers from a fundamental lack of understanding about what the people complaining about the ending are upset about, which I at least tried to explain a bit in my last post.
I'm kind of torn on that, just because of what how vehement the reaction is says about the rest of the series. To use a really hyperbolic example, you didn't seen internet campaigns to change the endings of games like Superman 64 -- it's because of how worthwhile the Mass Effect series is in general that there's so much outcry about the ending of the series. I would wager that, short of what I would imagine would be a non-majority chunk of Mass Effect's playerbase who are/were MMO players, the ME series is probably the longest investment most of the people who played it have ever put into a single video game character and story. It takes a lot to get people who don't normally do so to invest that much time into a franchise, and I don't think it's just luck that led to Mass Effect pulling it off. Last fifteen minutes aside, it had some of the best characters (Shepard him/herself, Wrex, Joker, Garrus, Tali, Liara) this generation of video games(maybe video games as a whole) has seen, some of the best missions and scenarios (Virmire and Ilos in ME1, Collector Base and Shadow Broker DLC in ME2, Rannoch and Tuchanka in ME3 stand out), some fun plottwists I won't mention and antagonists (Harbinger isn't exactly deep but is probably one of the most enjoyable villains ever), but I think the little stuff is what made ME so good. The ambient dialogue when you're in cities and such, which got a lot better as the series progressed in spite of starting pretty good, the interaction between Shepard and the crew, the impact of choices for most of the series... in many ways the storytelling was the best evolution of a lot of mechanics I remember seeing way back when I first started playing RPGs sixteen or seventeen years ago.
I'm noticing that I'm having a really difficult time getting myself to replay ME3, unlike the previous two games in the series, so there's certainly some accuracy in not wanting to set yourself up for the sucker punch at the end and in what vonFielder said about not wanting to continue to recommend it to people, but I still feel like I have to. To me, it's worth it to get immersed in the journey and enjoy it for what it is for so long even knowing that probably the end isn't going to feel so good. The rest of the body of work is still fantastic. This might have devolved into more a philosophical thing than a game opinion but sometimes I think in life it's worth it to suffer a little pain to enjoy the good times that come with it and to me this is one of those times. I'd still play again if I could go back, regardless of how disappointing the end ended up being. My video game experience is still a little better for having "known" Shepard and his crew.
The line the devs are giving now is more that they intended to wrap up the choices earlier in the game so the unrelated end-game choice was more intended to be made with the knowledge of how it would impact those situations in mind, to be a little more precise, but that's the general idea... it doesn't really seem like a fitting end to the build-up. The final entry lacks a real climax.
jumpluff said:
I'm kind of torn on that, just because of what how vehement the reaction is says about the rest of the series. To use a really hyperbolic example, you didn't seen internet campaigns to change the endings of games like Superman 64 -- it's because of how worthwhile the Mass Effect series is in general that there's so much outcry about the ending of the series. I would wager that, short of what I would imagine would be a non-majority chunk of Mass Effect's playerbase who are/were MMO players, the ME series is probably the longest investment most of the people who played it have ever put into a single video game character and story. It takes a lot to get people who don't normally do so to invest that much time into a franchise, and I don't think it's just luck that led to Mass Effect pulling it off. Last fifteen minutes aside, it had some of the best characters (Shepard him/herself, Wrex, Joker, Garrus, Tali, Liara) this generation of video games(maybe video games as a whole) has seen, some of the best missions and scenarios (Virmire and Ilos in ME1, Collector Base and Shadow Broker DLC in ME2, Rannoch and Tuchanka in ME3 stand out), some fun plottwists I won't mention and antagonists (Harbinger isn't exactly deep but is probably one of the most enjoyable villains ever), but I think the little stuff is what made ME so good. The ambient dialogue when you're in cities and such, which got a lot better as the series progressed in spite of starting pretty good, the interaction between Shepard and the crew, the impact of choices for most of the series... in many ways the storytelling was the best evolution of a lot of mechanics I remember seeing way back when I first started playing RPGs sixteen or seventeen years ago.
I'm noticing that I'm having a really difficult time getting myself to replay ME3, unlike the previous two games in the series, so there's certainly some accuracy in not wanting to set yourself up for the sucker punch at the end and in what vonFielder said about not wanting to continue to recommend it to people, but I still feel like I have to. To me, it's worth it to get immersed in the journey and enjoy it for what it is for so long even knowing that probably the end isn't going to feel so good. The rest of the body of work is still fantastic. This might have devolved into more a philosophical thing than a game opinion but sometimes I think in life it's worth it to suffer a little pain to enjoy the good times that come with it and to me this is one of those times. I'd still play again if I could go back, regardless of how disappointing the end ended up being. My video game experience is still a little better for having "known" Shepard and his crew.
More Cowbell said:
The line the devs are giving now is more that they intended to wrap up the choices earlier in the game so the unrelated end-game choice was more intended to be made with the knowledge of how it would impact those situations in mind, to be a little more precise, but that's the general idea... it doesn't really seem like a fitting end to the build-up. The final entry lacks a real climax.
(edit: in reply to More Cowbell, ninja'd by Synre)
It's more like "you make many choices during the game, you make one final choice in the end which isn't linked to your previous choices in any way, and you don't see how your previous choices turn out". They aren't "nullified", but there isn't any explicit closure regarding a lot of things you're confronted to during the game(s).
It's more like "you make many choices during the game, you make one final choice in the end which isn't linked to your previous choices in any way, and you don't see how your previous choices turn out". They aren't "nullified", but there isn't any explicit closure regarding a lot of things you're confronted to during the game(s).
Except for the ones that are nullified because of the galaxy being fucked. Good thing Tali has a homeworld her people will now never live on. Too bad I allowed the Krogan to mate, as they are probably going to end up eating everyone else before starving on Earth.
