Lily Venus said:
Depending on your choices in the previous games and your choices in ME3 that are impacted by previous choices. If you can't get peace between the geth and the quarians or if you sabotage the genophage cure while Wrex is leading the krogan, for example, that causes you to miss out on a significant chunk of War Assets.
I've done calculations, and the minimum amount of Effective Military Strength (at 50% Galatic Readiness) you can obtain from the main missions alone is about three-fifths of the EMS you need to get a second option in the end.
True, but it's still difficult to get that low. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I am saying that you reach a point where you actually have to try to do more poorly than normal to get such a low score. I've found that that number rests somewhere between about 2000-2800 EMS, so while it's possible to get less than 2800 EMS it's right at that border where it becomes easier to just go through the missions and make logical choices than to actively try and sabotage yourself.
Right from Priority: Mars, you learn that the Catalyst has to be combined with the Crucible in order for it to be used. You're told from very early in the game what role the Catalyst will play in stopping the Reapers, and ultimately it plays the exact role you were told it would. Simply because there's more to it than what you may have initially expected does not make it a deus ex machina when you were told exactly what role it would play in the plot.
The concept of a Deus Ex Machina first appeared in Greek theater, where the Gods would literally come down and fix things for characters. From the very beginning these Gods may be referenced, and the Greeks knew very well that the Gods existed in the worlds that the plays were set in, but having one of the Gods come down at the end of the play and fix all the problems was still considered poor writing/performance at best. In the case of ME3 the Deus Ex Machina is that much worse because the references to it are so vague as to be meaningless. If I'm writing a piece I can mention a word all I want, but if that word turns out to be a major, plot-influencing (or in this case plot-ending) character it needs more foreshadowing, referencing, and so on than simply "Combine part A and B and we have no idea what'll happen but it might be our solution to destroying the Reapers!", which is essentially what we got repeatedly over the course of the game. We were told in the most nebulous of terms what role it would play in the plot, and while that may work in some cases - specifically those where you're trying to play up a great-yet-foreshadowed-reveal - in this one it most certainly didn't. A good reveal would involve multiple references, foreshadowing, and the ability to look back at the narrative and go "holy crap, how did I not see this coming?" or at the very least "Yup, I can see where this, this, and this related to the reveal." A simple mention that the Crucible
might solve our problems, and that the Catalyst, whatever that is, needs to be there too is not enough to constitute that, thereby making the God-Child specifically a Deus Ex Machina. He's literally God from the Machine, and in terms of the story device he shows up at the end and solves all our problems for us. There was a bit of work to get there, but nothing is really solved by the character, all the work is done by the Catalyst and his neon lights.
Yes, it doesn't have to. As the Catalyst tells you in the ending, Shepard's presence and the Crucible caused it to reconsider the Reapers as solutions to its problem, and it ultimately decided that they were no longer an acceptable option. The Catalyst chooses to bring Shepard before it, chooses to let Shepard decide on whatever option they desire, whether or not the Catalyst sees their choice as a good option.
Exactly! The Catalyst
lets Shepard do whatever he wants, but he doesn't have to. And based on his ability to control the Reapers anyway he didn't have any reason to let Shepard kill himself for any of the options except Synthesis. He could just as easily have said "Alright, I'll stop the Reapers. There we go, they're flying back into space now." It makes Shep's sacrifice nearly meaningless.
EMS = More resources to ensure the Crucible's proper construction and more soldiers to ensure that the Crucible is protected from damage that would hinder its functionality. If you don't have at least 2800 EMS, then the Crucible simply isn't in a good enough shape to be used for Synthesis - the same reasoning explains why lower EMS values result in more damage to the galaxy.
Eh, fair enough, but if I remember correctly the cutscene where the Crucible jumps in and then flies towards the Citadel doesn't change much whether you have all of the ship-resources or only half of them. That's mostly what I was basing that off of.
And the Catalyst explicitly explains why Shepard would be able to control the Reapers - because they are not controlled by the Reapers themselves. It's not as if the concept of using the Crucible to take control of the Reapers comes out of nowhere...
No one knows what the Crucible is going to do until Shep gets brought up to the Catalyst, so yes, using the Crucible to control the Reapers does kindof come out of nowhere. The concept of controlling them isn't anything new, but again, it's been shown time and time again that trying to control Reapers, or even the derelicts of Reaper technology, with few exceptions leads to catastrophe. It's a departure from that specific theme, as well as the themes of the "synthetics always rebel blah blah blah" rhetoric that the Catalyst spits at you, that controlling both the Reapers and Synthetics as a whole simply will not work. There's a more interesting implication to be read into here, if we look at that second part, that says the Reapers are not true AIs, and are in fact just remote-controlled machines not unlike a Predator drone. But we can get into that, and the implications of it, later if you want to.
ME2's ending is based on the choices you've made in ME2. As the ending of the series, ME3 bases the final choice on the choices you've made throughout the entire series, whether or not you've made good choices or bad choices. All throughout ME3, numerous plot threads are resolved based on the specific choices you've made throughout the series.
Let me put it this way: how should your choice for the genophage cure affect the functionality of the Crucible? How should the resolution of the Rannoch arc affect the functionality of the Crucible? How should any specific choice determine how an ancient, unknown superweapon functions?
ME2 is about gathering an elite team and earning their trust for a suicide mission; your success is based on how well you built your team and earned their trust. ME3 is about uniting the galaxy to overcome the Reapers; your success is based on how well you unite the forces of the galaxy.
That's the thing though; those choices should be visible in how it functions, and except as text and "points" on a screen they're not. They could have done something very similar to the ME2 ending where you assign different squads and teams to do different things as you're assaulting the Reapers, or they could have made the choices more accurately reflect who you saved and how you saved them, but instead all of those factors are compiled into an arbitrary system of points that tells you if your machine worked or not. The writers, up until that point, were very good at determining how specific choices affected things you might not think they would affect, and when everything in all three games is building up to this one point that should be where they put the most focus on how your choices will affect not only the outcome but how you get to the outcome. Instead they spent almost no time on it and you end up getting, as I said, points. Yes, your success is based on what you did, but it doesn't really matter how well you united the galaxy. The 2800 required points to get all of the endings can come from literally thousands of different combinations of points. It doesn't matter if you destroyed the Krogan and the Geth or if you made peace between everyone as long as you get those 2800 points.
In that sense it's not dissimilar from the mining mini-game in ME2. In both cases, you're going towards a specific number of "points", and it doesn't really matter if you get those "points" through strip mining a planet or through doing side-quests, the end result is the same; you get to upgrade your armor. In this case the stakes are slightly higher, but it doesn't matter if you get your points through the random fetch-quests or if you get them through uniting the galaxy, in both cases the end result is the same; you get to pick the green ending (or the blue ending, as it may be).
