Current Events > It's a shame about the Mass Effect 3 ending *spoilers*

(+) Yeah! (+)

Like, idk. It should have built up to a single definitive ending. Throttling you down to a static decision at the end was a bad idea.

Import a save through all three games, complete the most stuff and hit a hidden list of prerequisites, and you get a Golden Ending. Complete - at minimum - as much of Mass Effect 3 as you can, and you get a bittersweet ending that's a bit more sweet than bitter. Don't do anything except the story, make garbage decisions and overall just fuck everything up? Bad ending. I respect the idea behind the endings that we got, but Destroy, Control and Synthesis is just weirdly gross. The Catalyst is dogshit, and not even retconning it into "it is well-meaning but inherently flawed" does much to fix just how fucking stupid the Catalyst's process is.

I did the Refusal ending the first time I played ME3 through, and the game had the gall to lock me out of the "Legend" and "Long Service Medal" trophies - that ending doesn't count as finishing the game.

Mass Effect 3 is an incredible game, and I really love the Mass Effect universe. But it's genuinely such a bummer that the game ended on the note that it did.

I ended up picking Synthesis because of EDI and Keiji's graybox.
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Yeah, I just don't know what they were thinking. I loved the game right up until that point.

The farewell to your friends, the final talk with Anderson, convincing the Illusive man, uniting the Geth and Quarians...

All to be met with "lol, can't work together. Not looking, don't show me proof, gotta do this!" It just took a massive nosedive after everything

I wasn't asking for some happy ending, heck I would have loved a bittersweet ending or even a "you lose" if you fuck up. But what we got? Just nah. I'd rather imagine it ended at the talk with Anderson.
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It annoys me that ME3 is so weak in so many areas compared to 1 and 2 but the ending clusterfuck has relegated all of those criticisms to afterthoughts. Even worse is when people say stuff about how "you only don't like it because of the ending!" when that's...not the case
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I loved mass effect 3 and enjoyed the ending I got.. I thought it was epic as shit at the time.

In retrospect there should have been more to it, but I had no bad feelings toward it when I first saw it. And this was before the extended ending.

Funkydog posted...

Yeah, I just don't know what they were thinking. I loved the game right up until that point.

The farewell to your friends, the final talk with Anderson, convincing the Illusive man, uniting the Geth and Quarians...

All to be met with "lol, can't work together. Not looking, don't show me proof, gotta do this!" It just took a massive nosedive after everything

I wasn't asking for some happy ending, heck I would have loved a bittersweet ending or even a "you lose" if you fuck up. But what we got? Just nah. I'd rather imagine it ended at the talk with Anderson.

The real bullshit is them saying more or less "It won't be an ABC ending!" followed by an ABC ending.

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The last moment when you're with Anderson is good. I don't even care if it's less than inspired, just have the Crucible go off and win the war tbh. It's not groundbreaking, but it's the ending you've been fighting for over the span of 100+ hours over three games.

Or at least provide a best ending that doesn't hinge on changing the DNA of everything in the fucking galaxy. Something that emphasises that humans and organics can co-exist, be different beings, and get along. Shepard brought different species together in every single game, and even forged peace between warring civilisations. So to be able to self-determine without the Reapers breathing down their necks, to be able to either work together with synthetics or wipe out the misguided asshole synthetics, would be somewhat fitting.

Shepard is a unifier. Everyone can get up to their own shit without someone else fucking them over, as is proven time and time again over the course of the game. Sometimes, assholes need to die - a destruction ending can still have a united galaxy. Maybe control can be exerted in order to fly the Reapers into the sun, or tell them to leave everyone alone at a cost.

But it all got broken up into "Shepard is God", "Shepard is a unifier" and "Shepard makes the hard decisions for peace", instead of blending any of them into a cohesive ending based in your decisions. "Shepard is a unifier" translates into "nope sorry you're all robot people now lmao". Such a fucking bummer.
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NinjaBreakfast posted...

It annoys me that ME3 is so weak in so many areas compared to 1 and 2 but the ending clusterfuck has relegated all of those criticisms to afterthoughts. Even worse is when people say stuff about how "you only don't like it because of the ending!" when that's...not the case

There's a tonal shift in ME3 that I don't really dig, it's all very jingoistic and kind of generic at times. ME1 was a pretty optimistic game with darker moments, ME2 took a darker turn to great effect, and ME3 is... a space army recruitment tool.

Regardless, I think Mass Effect 3 is a masterpiece of game design, flaws and all - the engineering that must have been required to track the series' moving pieces into this last game, including voice-acting for redundancy, is incredible. It's genuinely a marvel of video games that it works as well as it does at all. But it has rough spots. Not as bad as Game of Thrones, at least.

MICHALECOLE posted...

I loved mass effect 3 and enjoyed the ending I got.. I thought it was epic as shit at the time.

In retrospect there should have been more to it, but I had no bad feelings toward it when I first saw it. And this was before the extended ending.

No hate, if folks like the ending that's cool too. I just thought it was kinda static, the Catalyst is written like dogshit and the "solution" they added in with the extended cut is patronising in the way that the game doesn't register it as an ending at all. Just finished it for the second time ever, with my first "legitimate" ending, and I felt like talking about it.

The real bullshit is them saying more or less "It won't be an ABC ending!" followed by an ABC ending.

I heard about this. For what it's worth, they were still working on the game at the time and that shit was liable to change - didn't a bunch of staff leave during ME3's development? I would love a GVMERS documentary on the Mass Effect series to see what went wrong.

But they shouldn't have even mentioned the ending before it got finalised. Or at least prefaced everything with "we're still working on it, but we've had ideas like..." just to cover their asses. If people assign any sort of objectivity to your statements, then you're screwed - a fact that came back to haunt Hello Games when they launched No Man's Sky 3 years later.

idk. It's all a dampener on what is otherwise a fantastic series and an excellent video game.

Also fuck the new citing system
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Games with endings like that in general annoy me. Like Deus Ex: Human Revolution (which I get they kind of had to do since it was a prequel). You go through a pretty rough level especially if you're trying to do stealth and then you just press a button and the game ends.
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RIP Marauder Shields
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Man, I thought I was over that ending but then after reading this topic all awful memories of the ending come flooding back!

As fun as the multiplayer was, it should not have been mandatory to get the best ending. I know that with the extended ending DLC it made it so that it was not required but the Devs stated that you would not miss out on anything if you skipped it. Kinda like the no ABC ending :P
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The fan made mod; Mass Effect Happy Ending goes like this;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK0R2bs3qEU" data-time="
It's 42 minutes. So, you can install the mod and experience it for yourself, or watch it.
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The three main choices were dumb and really fucked up their sequel potential. I'm honestly amazed EA let them do that.

The variation in the endings probably should have just boiled down to who survived at the end and maybe what they did with their lives.

It was also really dumb to have the genocide of two races be a choice at the end.
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Shotgunnova posted...

RIP Marauder Shields

He was never truly evil. He just wanted to protect us from that ending.

One thing they should have run with:

When you get on your ship after the second-to-last mission, Liara says "Welcome back, Shepard." Which, after the ending when the game spits you back out at that point, was surreal af.

Like, I know returning you just before the PonR after the credits is standard video game stuff and all but that one line really threw me off. It's relevant af but way off-tone. She's all like "oh, hi" like you didn't just die or turn into a reaper or something.

So I'm thinking what they should have done was make all the talk aboard the Normandy at that point take on a surreal af new meaning after the ending. Like, maybe somebody dies just before that so they're discussing funeral arrangements for "our fallen ally" but then when you approach, they're like "Oh hi Commander" lmao.
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