Dragon Age Origins Lead Designer speaks out against ME3 Ending

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SajuukKhar

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Smiley Face said:
I don't care what the devs said - playing through all three of the games, paying attention to the tone, at no point does it look like things are going to get THAT dark - it is jarringly incongruous with the rest of the game. Yeah, you suffer losses and close calls through the series, but you also have victories that you care about along the way. The ending was pretty much all loss and no victory, or bittersweet at most - and Mass Effect was never bittersweet before that point. Defeating the Reapers is a means to an end, getting the galaxy back on its feet, which as it so happens, you care about because you've helped to shape it. The options at the end don't really do that - they kill the Reapers and screw over the galaxy at the same time, with barely any personal or character-related victories to mitigate that whatsoever.
You don't care about what the people who made the game said?
.
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Beyond that how is a constant and never ending series of reassurances that The Reapers have purged life in the galaxy countless times and that everything you have done has only momentarily delayed them not a sense of supreme darkness?

I don't know what game you played but it does seem like it was Mass Effect.
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Also how is freeing the galaxy from technological enslavement by the Reapers so they could build on their own path screwing them over?
 

GiantRaven

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Starke said:
Strictly speaking the same EMS states are available, they just trigger at different thresholds.
On the topic of EMS, I find it quite dissatisfying that roaming around the galaxy looking for allies counts for nothing save for the Crucible killing everyone or not (or being provided with the synthesis option). How exactly does that work? How do my extra Taurian fleets stop the Crucible from destroying Earth? From an in-game perspective, why is the Synthesis option only unlocked at a certain amount, whilst the other two are not? What was the point in gathering all of your allies, when all that mattered in the end was the Crucible? It completely undermines the entire point of the game, and the main gameplay mechanic associated with it.

The more I think about how the ending works, the more I fail to comprehend how Bioware could mess up something so fundamentally simple to envision.
 

Smiley Face

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SajuukKhar said:
Smiley Face said:
I don't care what the devs said - playing through all three of the games, paying attention to the tone, at no point does it look like things are going to get THAT dark - it is jarringly incongruous with the rest of the game. Yeah, you suffer losses and close calls through the series, but you also have victories that you care about along the way. The ending was pretty much all loss and no victory, or bittersweet at most - and Mass Effect was never bittersweet before that point. Defeating the Reapers is a means to an end, getting the galaxy back on its feet, which as it so happens, you care about because you've helped to shape it. The options at the end don't really do that - they kill the Reapers and screw over the galaxy at the same time, with barely any personal or character-related victories to mitigate that whatsoever.
You don't care about what the people who made the game said?
.
.
Beyond that how is a constant and never ending series of reassurances that The Reapers have purged life in the galaxy countless times and that everything you have done has only momentarily delayed them not a sense of supreme darkness?

I don't know what game you played but it does seem like it was Mass Effect.
.
.
Also how is freeing the galaxy from technological enslavement by the Reapers so they could build on their own path screwing them over?
Bah, don't get on that 'Mass Relays are evil' horse again, it's a dead one - I'd get into details, but I already have in other threads.

And I don't care that they keep SAYING the Reapers are indestructible, yadda yadda - you spend the 3 games fighting the Reapers, who just spout that they can't be stopped - and then you beat them - locally, yes, but you ALWAYS do it, and you do it IN SPITE of the fact that you're doing this without the galaxy behind you. When I talk about how things look, I'm not talking about the in-world perspective, I'm talking about from the player's perspective. The kind of experience that gets thrown at you throughout the series is you and your allies against impossible odds, and in the rare case you don't beat the odds, there's always the opportunity for someone to push on and make it right. But at the end, you get slapped with an 'everybody loses' gamechanger and then get cliffhangered. How is that in any way consistent with the series as a whole, where that series was going, heck even where the game on its own was going?
 

Kahunaburger

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GiantRaven said:
Starke said:
Strictly speaking the same EMS states are available, they just trigger at different thresholds.
On the topic of EMS, I find it quite dissatisfying that roaming around the galaxy looking for allies counts for nothing save for the Crucible killing everyone or not (or being provided with the synthesis option). How exactly does that work? How do my extra Taurian fleets stop the Crucible from destroying Earth? From an in-game perspective, why is the Synthesis option only unlocked at a certain amount, whilst the other two are not? What was the point in gathering all of your allies, when all that mattered in the end was the Crucible? It completely undermines the entire point of the game, and the main gameplay mechanic associated with it.


That, or mass effect fields.

GiantRaven said:
The more I think about how the ending works, the more I fail to comprehend how Bioware could mess up something so fundamentally simple to envision.
Bioware never ceases to amaze.
 

Slaanax

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SajuukKhar said:
You don't care about what the people who made the game said?
.
.
Beyond that how is a constant and never ending series of reassurances that The Reapers have purged life in the galaxy countless times and that everything you have done has only momentarily delayed them not a sense of supreme darkness?

I don't know what game you played but it does seem like it was Mass Effect.
.
.
Also how is freeing the galaxy from technological enslavement by the Reapers so they could build on their own path screwing them over?
You must unbelievable tired of explaining this to people not having them pay any attention. Seems people wanted every little bit of their actions explained at the end of the game and shown just how they affected the galaxy afterwards and what happened to each of your crew members and the space hamster and your pet fish.
 

Starke

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RagTagBand said:
Starke said:
Or, you know, the time and budget that was given to Mass Effect 3 without the Kinnect bullshit, or pulling people off to go help rearrange deck chairs on TOR. You know, what people who actually had a grasp of the situation have been saying.
AHAHAHA No. A few extra months and the, what, few tens of thousands of dollars that would have been required to add kinect? That's what you think would have been the difference between what we have and, essentially, a game that's 1000 times more complex? You're either trolling or I'm amazed you managed to bang your head on your keyboard to write out that response and still remain conscious enough to hit post.
Then you obviously don't understand even the fundamental basics of how the game functions under the hood. Go play around with the save game editor, that might give you some insight into exactly what data the game does and does not store.

Making a game that was 1000 times more complex would require presenting the player with roughly 10 more choices, given the way the game already generates aggregate change. Now, if you're going into an office and saying you can do ten things but it will take you years and a tens of thousands of dollars to do it, I can certainly see how that would have left you with few avenues of employment.

I already explained the binary nature of the endings elsewhere, if you can pretend to write professionally, then you can pretend to do a lit-review here.

RagTagBand said:
To make every possible decision culminate into completely noticeably different endings and experiences over the course of a 90 hour trilogy would have taken an absurdly large amount of additional resources and time. Not a little, but a lot, A LOT. I don't suppose you would understand what I mean by "Exponential" or "Butterfly effect" so I guess this would all go over your head anyway.
Hardly, the underlying system is actually quite simple and elegant, and readily capable of accepting additional variables. Only a fool would try to program a branching narrative by individually programing each possible result individually and in isolation. The system itself, as you're fully aware is modular, dropping in chunks of dialog and extracting others to fit a series of Boolean states. Because, you know, this was programed by programmers, who only continue to get paid if they produce what's asked for.

As to programing a system to accept an entirely new control interface, especially when said request occurs after a project has already been budgeted and initiated is what programers call, feature creep.

RagTagBand said:
Starke said:
By which you mean, he/she/it was not successfully bamboozled by an unconvincing starchild and never railroaded into one of three prerendered cutscenes that had absolutely nothing to do with any decisions you'd made in any game in the franchise up to that point? Because, that sir, is truly the impossible. And by getting an actual ending you have achieved the impossible.
Why do you insist on forgetting the first 30 hours of the game and judging it by its final minute?
I don't, I judge it by the final two hours, the last fifteen fundamentally sabotage every element of Shepard's character, and trivialize every act the player has taken up to this point. I'm sure that I don't need to explain why to you, as you undoubtedly understand this.
RagTagBand said:
MY effect on the game was seen throughout, Right up until the final 5 minutes I was constantly seeing how I had affected the story and its characters. My teeny tiny decisions of "Did I sign Conrad Verners Autograph?" may have slipped by in the ending scene, And lo I will weep tonight not knowing if he did hang it on his wall, but the BIG decision didn't slip by.
It happened earlier, in a train wreck of poorly written exposition and increasingly arbitrary save state data from the original game.

RagTagBand said:
And honestly, what could have been shown? Most worlds are burned and destroyed, Billions upon Billions of people are dead, the entire galaxy, effectively, has been changed by the end of the War. Nearly every decision you made would have been trumped by the fact that everywhere you've been having been destroyed and (probably) everyone you've ever met being dead.
To produce a satisfying ending? Less. No Starchild bullshit. No pick your explosion color false ending bullshit. Blow the fuck out of the citadel and the reapers when Shepard collapses and call it a day. It's a better ending, a more satisfying ending. And even if it was an incredibly bleak ending, it wouldn't have come with the insulting idiocy of the Starchild.

RagTagBand said:
I would have liked more time spent on what happened to my crew but as I said the people I gave a shit survived and that's what I really cared about. I wanted Liara to Survive and I wanted Garrus to survive, everything else is a bonus to me.

Starke said:
Then, as a fellow professional, I can only say to you, best of luck on that, as your lit-rev skills need some serious work, and probably a dash of impartiality.
Ha, how quaint, I'm being lectured by a nobody on writing because I don't agree with his spoilt-brat opinions on a game ending, and being lectured on impartiality by someone who doesn't seem to understand what impartial means. Nobody here is impartial; Impartial people wouldn't give a fuck about the ending of this game enough to come froth at the mouth on an internet forum about it.
I'm sorry, I forgot for a moment, I was talking to an ex-spec ops guy who lead fifty three operations in Iraq before being sent home, having all records of his existence expunged, including discharge papers, and went on to become a best selling novelist of edgy and dark novels.

It's the internet. Don't bother linking to some poor schmuck's Amazon author page. You're a writer in the same sense that I'm the King of goddamn Norway.

For future reference, here's a quick scratch-and-sniff test for identifying a real, professional, qualified writer. They're not going to stand there and defend a train wreck like the Mass Effect franchise.

RagTagBand said:
2/10, it's the best I can give you.
Given that you see deus ex machina as a sign of a solid ending, I think that's a pretty fair self evaluation of your skills.
 

Texas Joker 52

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The problem with the ending isn't that its not happy, though for some of us that would be rather nice. The problem with it is that it does not make you feel anything that a good ending, not necessarily a happy one, should make you feel.

Satisfied. Triumphant. And sad to see it go.

We got one out of three, at least a fair amount of us did, and one out of three in this case is not enough. For me, personally, there was no satisfaction, and there was no triumph. I was sad to see it go, but even that was drowned out by a feeling of disappointment, confusion, and eventually outrage. Though, now that outrage has dimmed to minor annoyance, which can almost be as bad.

And I also think the problem that some people have, especially those that find quotes like, "Mass Effect 3 is fine, until the ending!", is poor wording. Instead of the word fine we should use the word fun. Mass Effect 3 was fun, until the ending. The ending was not fun, and in a video game, a medium that pretty much exists for having fun, that should be considered a negative in and of itself, though not the absolute cardinal sin that some want to believe.

Don't get me wrong though, the ending did suck, in my personal opinion. And some do agree wholeheartedly.

Really, all we want is an ending that fits, is fun, and gives us the emotional release that makes us feel satisfied, triumphant, and sorrowful to see the end of a damn good game series. I won't pretend that Mass Effect, either as a whole, or as individual games were perfect or without their faults, but for the most part, they were fun, and they passed the time. And really, as gamers, isn't that all we want? To have some fun, and pass the time with something we enjoy?
 

Smiley Face

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SajuukKhar said:
Abandon4093 said:
SajuukKhar said:
GiantRaven said:
Urgh. There was so much potential here. I guess I'll just have to go back to ranting about how awesome Alpha Protocol's morphing ending was.
You managed to finish AP?

With all the bugs and broken game mechanics I am surprised anyone could get to the end.
There were 2 things that were good about that game. The character interactions/conversations and the choice system. Everything else was a buggy pile a turd.

The only game I've ever played through inspite of the gameplay.

That's both a testament to how well the story was told and how utterly dire it was trying to progress it.
Frankly I got bored with the game 3-4 hours in because the story and characters seemed terribly bland and unoriginal.
That's your reason? You can say that about 90%+ of all videogames, ever. Heck, you can apply it to most RPGs - you're not going to meet non-boring characters 3-4 hours into a game, they save that until your comfortable with the environment. As for 'bland and unoriginal'... well, everything is unoriginal from some point of view, what matters is whether it is in fact bland; and I didn't think it was. AP has plenty in the way of interesting story and characters. Not that you'll know who I'm talking about, but I felt the character of Steven Heck was both damn interesting and pretty original.
 

Sagacious Zhu

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I would say that ensuring that the player feels that his or her actions have affected the story is a more important goal than ensuring the ending is happy. Ultimately, if the player walks away feeling like the time and energy spent playing the game was for nothing, then the narrative failed.
 

GiantRaven

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Kahunaburger said:
Heh, I think I can live with that for the sake of humour.

PercyBoleyn said:
The Crucible isn't a deus ex machina. A deus ex machina appears out of nowhere at the end when the situation is most dire. In Mass Effect 3 you learn about it in the first hour.
I think the Catalyst could be described pretty aptly as deus ex machina.
 

Starke

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Kahunaburger said:
GiantRaven said:
Starke said:
Strictly speaking the same EMS states are available, they just trigger at different thresholds.
On the topic of EMS, I find it quite dissatisfying that roaming around the galaxy looking for allies counts for nothing save for the Crucible killing everyone or not (or being provided with the synthesis option). How exactly does that work? How do my extra Taurian fleets stop the Crucible from destroying Earth? From an in-game perspective, why is the Synthesis option only unlocked at a certain amount, whilst the other two are not? What was the point in gathering all of your allies, when all that mattered in the end was the Crucible? It completely undermines the entire point of the game, and the main gameplay mechanic associated with it.


That, or mass effect fields.
Goddamn man, I find that far funnier than I should.

But, in fairness to Raven, I kinda suspect that the EMS rating came out of an "oh shit" realization, during production.

Narratively, Mass Effect 3 isn't actually that different from Dragon Age Origins, but the EMS seems to have been a way to condense down as many possible states from the previous games, without actually having to do any work on them.

Ironically that probably would have been a pretty slick way of saying "all your decisions mattered" without creating an unwieldy back end. The problem kicks in though, when they actually start to use that number. If the EMS was counting towards crucible progress, and nothing else, meaning it was either ready to go or not, that would have worked, unfortunately... we end up with the problem you mentioned. How exactly does a Geth Prime platoon help save the Earth from the Crucible's detonation? Search me, I've got nothing.

Ironically I think this system could have been adapted into an actual game mechanic that could have been pretty compelling, an RTS side game akin to Empire at War or something. But as it stands it's an abstract that doesn't really work when scrutinized.

It gets even worse when you ask, how exactly does killing a bunch of Geth on Tuchanka (in multiplayer) help Jack with training biotics for the final push?

Kahunaburger said:
GiantRaven said:
The more I think about how the ending works, the more I fail to comprehend how Bioware could mess up something so fundamentally simple to envision.
Bioware never ceases to amaze.
Supposedly, and I haven't actually fact checked it, but the endings we got weren't the original plan. Originally the ending was supposed to be more complex, and it was gutted, in part so that more programers could be put on getting Kinnect support operational for the 360.

What we got was cannibalized off the original ending, so the starchild bullshit was Harbinger trying to mess with Shepard and convince them to commit suicide, among other things. Though, barring some massive rework of the endings we probably will never actually see, I doubt we'll know for sure until ex-Bioware employees start talking about it.
 

nightwolf667

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PercyBoleyn said:
Starke said:
Given that you see deus ex machina as a sign of a solid ending, I think that's a pretty fair self evaluation of your skills.
The Crucible isn't a deus ex machina. A deus ex machina appears out of nowhere at the end when the situation is most dire. In Mass Effect 3 you learn about it in the first hour.
The Starchild is the Deus Ex Machina, along with the ABC choice. If the Crucible had just blown up and the Reapers got blown away, then it wouldn't have been a Deus Ex Machina. It's the Starchild that makes it so.

Drop the kid and get a better ending.
 

Starke

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PercyBoleyn said:
Starke said:
Given that you see deus ex machina as a sign of a solid ending, I think that's a pretty fair self evaluation of your skills.
The Crucible isn't a deus ex machina. A deus ex machina appears out of nowhere at the end when the situation is most dire. In Mass Effect 3 you learn about it in the first hour.
As Raven said, the Crucible isn't... well, it is, but, because it is introduced in the first act of the game, it actually becomes a forgivable implementation of one.

The Starchild is an unusually literal deus ex machina (a god...thing from a machine).
 

Rylian

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RagTagBand said:
Can't say I agree with this guy at all, though i've been unable to comment until 10 minutes ago when I actually finished ME3

Point 1. The entire game demonstrated my unique impact on the universe, the game was FULL of repercussions from what I'd done. To a Real-life-accurate or Wildly different degree? No. But lets not get ahead of ourselves here, for a *truly* reactive game, with today's technology and game development, each game would have been on increasing numbers of discs, each game would have take much, much longer to develop than its predecessor (I'm thinking 10+ Years for ME3 from ME2) and the game would have cost an order of magnitude more to develop. The Modern game industry, in every respect, is not ready or able to make a truly reactive RPG trilogy...Not yet.

Point 2. I don't know what game he played (oh wait, that's right, he hasn't played it) but my ending was hopeful, it was a victory, it was a positive note. In my ending my two favourite characters, to whom I was the closest, survived (Liara, my love interest, and Garrus, my best friend), the reapers were defeated AND my Shepard drew breath after the fact. My Shepard accomplished the impossible.

Sure it wasn't an "Everyone lives, we can finally go get that drink you owe me, one moment though I just need to fuck my girlfriend" ending but, as i've said elsewhere, what kind of pathetic, child-like, spoon fed, shallow people NEED that lovey dovey ending for it to count as "Good"? It was bittersweet, and I respect Bioware for not treating me like a child.


Would I rather get the lovey dovey ending? Sure, of course. But I don't need it to feel satisfied. Do I wish there was more? Without question, I could play this game for the rest of my life.

All in all, I am happy with the ending and not only that but Mass effect 3 is the best game I've ever experienced and I say that from a position of someone who has been gaming for 20 years (yes, During Bioware's supposed "Golden age" too), who is a writer and someone who would have not hesitated to demand bioware's head if they'd ruined the final game of my favourite sci-fi trilogy.

But they didn't and I can't wait to see what's next.

*GASP* I got the EXACT same ending... as did about 1/3 of everyone else who played the game.

But humour me just this little bit then on these points:

1. Who was the 'star child', where the HELL did he come from, and why are you required to take what he says at face value as if it's gospel?

2. How was Shepard able to talk on top of the Citadel in open space without a helmet?

3. Why was the Normandy flying away through a relay gate in the middle of a battle, and where the bugger all was Joker going with her?

4. Why did Garrus and Liara step out of the crashed Normandy without a scratch when just moments ago they'd been right beside me in London getting blasted in the face and killed with Harbinger's laser?

5. Do you remember what happens when a relay gets destroyed? It wipes out the entire star system it's a part of. Yes, the reapers are dead, but you see all those bright colourful flashes in the galaxy? That's every single known inhabited world and entire star clusters being vaporized in a choose-your-colour burst of space magic. Please explain how this qualifies in any manner as a "victory".

6. After all of these plot-holes big enough to drive a Turian dreadnaught through, why is Shepard's body suddenly taking a breath amongst the rubble, apparently back down in London again, after just a moment ago destroying something in outer space? Are we supposed to believe that he/she somehow not only survived falling from an exploding space station in orbit (still without a helmet), but miraculously also landed back in the exact same city? Are you even sure that's Shep at all, for that matter?
 

Starke

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Rylian said:
4. Why did Garrus and Liara step out of the crashed Normandy without a scratch when just moments ago they'd been right beside me in London getting blasted in the face and killed with Harbinger's laser?
They actually said "fuck this shit" and buggered off. :p

I'd actually made the reasonable assumption that they were behind me, but if you use the tactical pause, you'll see they vanish for that sequence.

...captcha: gee whiz

Okay, now this thing's getting downright creepy.
 

Von Strimmer

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AD-Stu said:
Von Strimmer said:
FFHAuthor said:
I was reading another post, and the guy posted an image of the Zorya skybox background, and it was identical to the ending scene skybox everyone was looking up at, same dual planets same sizes and everything, even the fauna represented on the planet is identical to Zorya. They don't say it but...either its another of the MASSIVE botches that the ending has (along with disappearing crew, teleportation, general desertion and abandonment, bad voice acting) or they INTENDED for the Normandy to be crash landed on an industrial mining world dominated by the Blue Suns.
Sounds more like a rushed stock photo than anything else. I'm going to hold out until Bioware gives us some answers (god help them if they try to make you pay for an ending), and hopefully then some things will become clear. For now its just one bit WTF?!?! Gears 3 had a better ending than this!
I tend to agree - I think it's dangerous to read too much into this stuff, because it's impossible to tell when something has been included as a deliberate visual cue, and when assets are just being recycled for convenience.

Much the same goes for the "Shepard must be on Earth in the final surviving scene, because concrete" discussion. Which is more likely - Shepard surviving a fall from orbit (without even a functioning suit, let alone a helmet) or artists getting lazy/taking licence? It's possible these decisions were made deliberately and they do have some meaning, but it's impossible to tell which is which with the current information.
I agree, in fact I am starting to think I am indoctrinated into the indoctrination theory. I am going to give Bioware the benefit of the doubt, as of ME1 and ME2 they always explained their endinging. That and Stargazer dude said there was one more Shepard story. Too many inconsistencies in that ending, even for an RPG company.
 

Chronologist

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Rylian said:
RagTagBand said:
Can't say I agree with this guy at all, though i've been unable to comment until 10 minutes ago when I actually finished ME3

Point 1. The entire game demonstrated my unique impact on the universe, the game was FULL of repercussions from what I'd done. To a Real-life-accurate or Wildly different degree? No. But lets not get ahead of ourselves here, for a *truly* reactive game, with today's technology and game development, each game would have been on increasing numbers of discs, each game would have take much, much longer to develop than its predecessor (I'm thinking 10+ Years for ME3 from ME2) and the game would have cost an order of magnitude more to develop. The Modern game industry, in every respect, is not ready or able to make a truly reactive RPG trilogy...Not yet.

Point 2. I don't know what game he played (oh wait, that's right, he hasn't played it) but my ending was hopeful, it was a victory, it was a positive note. In my ending my two favourite characters, to whom I was the closest, survived (Liara, my love interest, and Garrus, my best friend), the reapers were defeated AND my Shepard drew breath after the fact. My Shepard accomplished the impossible.

Sure it wasn't an "Everyone lives, we can finally go get that drink you owe me, one moment though I just need to fuck my girlfriend" ending but, as i've said elsewhere, what kind of pathetic, child-like, spoon fed, shallow people NEED that lovey dovey ending for it to count as "Good"? It was bittersweet, and I respect Bioware for not treating me like a child.


Would I rather get the lovey dovey ending? Sure, of course. But I don't need it to feel satisfied. Do I wish there was more? Without question, I could play this game for the rest of my life.

All in all, I am happy with the ending and not only that but Mass effect 3 is the best game I've ever experienced and I say that from a position of someone who has been gaming for 20 years (yes, During Bioware's supposed "Golden age" too), who is a writer and someone who would have not hesitated to demand bioware's head if they'd ruined the final game of my favourite sci-fi trilogy.

But they didn't and I can't wait to see what's next.

*GASP* I got the EXACT same ending... as did about 1/3 of everyone else who played the game.

But humour me just this little bit then on these points:

1. Who was the 'star child', where the HELL did he come from, and why are you required to take what he says at face value as if it's gospel?

2. How was Shepard able to talk on top of the Citadel in open space without a helmet?

3. Why was the Normandy flying away through a relay gate in the middle of a battle, and where the bugger all was Joker going with her?

4. Why did Garrus and Liara step out of the crashed Normandy without a scratch when just moments ago they'd been right beside me in London getting blasted in the face and killed with Harbinger's laser?

5. Do you remember what happens when a relay gets destroyed? It wipes out the entire star system it's a part of. Yes, the reapers are dead, but you see all those bright colourful flashes in the galaxy? That's every single known inhabited world in the galaxy being vaporized in a choose-your-colour burst of space magic. Please explain how this is a "victory"?

6. After all of these plot-holes big enough to drive a Turian dreadnaught through, why is Shepard's body suddenly taking a breath amongst the rubble, apparently back down in London again, after just a moment ago destroying something in outer space? Are we supposed to believe that he/she somehow not only survived falling from an exploding space station in orbit (still without a helmet), but miraculously also landed back in the exact same city?
Well, I can answer all of those questions... in Choose You Own Adventure Format!

If you want the less satisfying, but logical and thoughtful explanation, see 1 below

If you want the more likely but ultimately just as disappointing explanation, see 2 below





1) The entire sequence is Shepard being indoctrinated. Everything after seeing the Conduit is a hallucination. The Normandy was rigged with reaper tech since the second game, and it's been slowly trying to force Shepard to submit ever since. Only when the Reapers finally show up in force does the signal get strong enough to really make her see things. The Star-Child is Harbinger trying to force Shepard to either waste the Crucible trying and failing to control the Reapers (blue explosion), or to Indoctrinate the galaxy (green explosion). Both choices do nothing, they instead represent Shepard's willingness to submit to her own ultimate failure. Her choosing to destroy the Reapers at all cost would defy their control, hence the "breath" scene afterwards as she wakes up near the Conduit having successfully shaken off Reaper control. The DLC will hopefully pick up from this point.



2) Bioware didn't think the ending through and royally screwed it up.




I hope you've enjoyed this adventure