Oh boy, more apologists...I'm going to need a drink before I tackle this wall of silliness.
viranimus said:
What caused the backlash, is a healthy mixture of misinterpreting quotes from forums as promises
"There won't be an 'A,B,C' ending." I'm slightly paraphrasing, but that was a quote from Casey Hudson, the project director. He said variations of that in multiple interviews. How is that a misinterpretation? You've already started off on the wrong foot, and I'm not even 1/20th through your rambling diatribe.
Misunderstanding the means that promises were delivered and the biggest factor is the approach from which most players chose to approach the game and series as a whole.
A game that is tailored to player choice dispenses with it (and renders it irrelevant) in the last installment of its series.
A game that is tailored to letting players pick the morality of their character tosses it out the door and makes characters of any alignment look like a drooling moron to further the plot, fueled primarily by deus ex machina devices.
A game which is about choice locks you into three nonsensical ending scenarios, fueled by a situation/character never seen before in the series and with no foreshadowing whatsoever.
What is there to misunderstand? This isn't like me playing through a Metroid gam and fanwanking that Samus Aran is a terrorist who's killing the poor little Metroids who are just defending their turf. It's a highly linear game with little to no variation, no respect for the player and no respect for the narrative.
When a game is all about choice, people become invested in choice, So being invested in choice it makes it nigh on impossible to play the game without your own personal choice being the end resulting goal. The ending does little to service individual choice as a goal. That is in actuality satisfied over the course of the last hour or so of content in the game, specifically ramping up at the Cerberus HQ all the way to the end, like the glory walk in London to meet with Anderson.
...
This issue is by and large eliminated when you play the game not to further your personal stake and investment in "Your Shepard" but instead play the games devoid of importing consequences from prior installments with the goal of trying to first understand what the canon ending is supposed to be.
Sorry, you're heavily reaching at this point, for several reasons:
1) If the intent is to play the games (not just one, but apparently all three, as you claim) without importing any of them, then the whole "choice/import" system never should have been developed in the first place. That flies in the face of BW repeatedly claiming over the years (even in ME3 interviews) that all your actions would have consequences, and they would play a vital part in the game.
2) Aside from some flavour text and a truly irrelevant change in War Asset values, there is no difference between a person who's metagamed all three installments with the purpose of getting the best/most opportune decisions and completion value, and someone who walks into the third game never having played any of the prior installments. That shows that any system set up to value choice (as BW claimed) failed from the beginning, not just in the third installment.
3) You're telling people not to look at the game from the perspective of the character they possibly built up over the course of three games, and more as a generic grunt who's finishing a fight in the most nonsensical way possible. That's a slap to the face of the fanbase and everything Bioware set out to do in the first two games.
4) "Nigh on impossible to play the game without your own personal choice being the end resulting goal" - what in the blue hell are you even talking about? Games like DA:O (Bioware) showed that you could create a "personalized" ending based off of the sum amount of the individual choices throughout the game. There's no reason why they couldn't have pulled off the same thing here.
Well, we all know the answer to that - they were rushed and had EA breathing down their necks, and chopped out an obscene amount of content to make the deadline. All that garbage you just spewed was rendered irrelevant when you find out that they actually had a system that would make your choices throughout the game pay off in the final battle, which was cut due to deadlines.
The problem people have with (Starchild), is again, they want to control the ending, and Bioware NEEDED to take control in order to properly close the trilogy.
No, they introduced a character in the last fifteen minutes of the game who:
a) literally comes out of left field, having never been hinted at in the narrative prior to this
b) explains that, after two games of telling us that the Reapers are all independent entities who are comprised of the transmogrified remains of entire races, are now mindless beings controlled by a computer
c) spews backwards and circular logic that the main character (after two-and-a-half games of either acquiescing to or outright refusing the logic of various people in the galaxy) rolls over and accepts without arguing or defending the value of the accomplishments s/he made throughout the trilogy.
Honestly, did you even bother to research any of this stuff? I doubt you even watched the video you posted.
The biggest thing about all this is that lack of control...so Shepard not automatically questioning the choices can easily be understood as a dying individual facing what will in essence accomplish the goal he was fighting for, despite not being the way he wanted it, because they know the way they want it is not within their power to accomplish and as such to accept a simplified action is better than to do nothing at all with no other hope to complete it. How many times have we seen that exact same thing in film? Just off the top of my head it puts me in mind of the ending of Terminator 2 where the ruined terminator has to martyr all its strives in humanity, to save the future for John Conner, and when you think of it in that context you can easily come up with many more similar examples.
Okay, for one thing, you misinterpreted the ending of T2. The T-800 didn't "martyr" himself - he committed what amounts to assisted suicide to prevent the chip/technology from falling into the wrong hands and starting this whole Skynet issue all over again. It was intended to be the end of the series (until T3 came along). It also has nothing to do with ME3.
In the Extended Cut (and even in various pre-release cut material), it's indicated that Shepard
would have been able to get more information out of the Catalyst, and get it to try and justify its position. As the player avatar, it makes no sense to have the character give up and roll over in the face of nonsensical actions:
a) destroy the Reapers and, somehow, condemn at least one synthetic race to death, even if you did something (end the synthetic/organic conflict) that no one else ever did in recorded memory
b) sacrifice yourself to control the Reapers (via connecting an electrical current?), instead of telling the Catalyst to take his toys and just go home
c) using glorified space magic to turn everyone against their will into half-synthetic creatures, with no guarantee (besides the Catalyst's word) that this "peace" will hold
Again, Bioware had the capability to write more dialogue where Shepard could refuse (which is, ironically, what the Refuse ending in the EC comes closest to in terms of making a decision that respected player choice), and simply chose not to.
Then there is the issue about the Star Child being completely out of the blue. Uhm, really? Because all those annoying slow motion dream sequences were really all about nothing but Shepard being dismayed over the kid getting blasted out of the sky in the opening? Seriously, if Shepard got that bent over by guilt over the death of a single child Shepard would not have been able to function to become humanities and the galaxies savior. The Child, is and always has been the catalyst communicating with Shepard and this is not unreasonable given that the catalyst is the thing that created the reapers and the cycle in the first place.
...what?
There was nothing whatsoever in the narrative that hinted that the Catalyst had psychic or clairvoyant abilities at any point in the narrative, and the plot (such as it is) says that the Catalyst wasn't even able to make its form (or do anything that it does in the ending, for that matter) without the Crucible docking with the Citadel. You are seriously fanwanking to try and justify nonsensical writing.
Shepard's dreams were him/her getting stressed out over a single child's death, even if:
a) you had a Sole Survivor origin (which meant you watched scores of people get massacred)
b) the Akuze origin (you let your whole team die)
c) you let the Council (the galaxy's best leaders, supposedly) die
d) you let almost the entirety of your squadmates die during the Suicide Mission
e) you left Ashley/Kaidan on Virmire
I could go on all day. The point is, there were far more suitable candidates for Shepard to have recurring nightmares over instead of a kid they met for, quite literally, all of 30 seconds on Earth.
I have heard so much about how earth is going to be devoured with all the galaxies races stuck in one solar system like people have no imagination whatsoever.
Imagination = Fanwanking
Digging yourself deeper, I see. If you need to 'headcanon' your own ending to make things better, you've failed as a writer.
You spent a large chunk of ME2 and 3 Scanning planets, you likely read some of the planetary descriptions. You know that this universe is capable of building fortification on inhospitable planets.
That has to do with anything, and even if these races somehow had the ability to go make fortifications on other planets, it would take decades (see below).
Even if all the species were forced to stay in the Sol system, it could be spread out to accommodate. However, they arent. With all the minds available that built the crucible, there is nothing specifically stating that the mass relays could not be rebuilt.
Uh...have you actually played the games? I mean,
actually played the games? I'm gobsmacked. Seriously.
The first lines of the first game clearly state that no one knows how the Relays work. That's the entire premise the series is based on - the galaxy left these artifacts behind, and the galaxy has built around in a limited capacity. No one wants to touch them, and no one knows how to operate or repair them.
It's said that the Asari
might be able to understand them, but they don't want to, and the chances of that happening are a needle in a haystack.
Are you trolling? Is this actually happening?
I find it completely vapid to think that these races could develop weapons based on Mass effect tech and Ezzo, but would not be able to conceptualize how to rebuild a network of mass relays.
Plug an element into your space engine and see how it interacts with the relays. Not rocket science. Rebuilding a network of relays is something entirely different.
We understand that travel while definitely easier thanks to the mass relays, is completely possible without them. It would just force them to take longer periods to get where they were going.
Longer periods = the lore states it takes years (if not decades) to get between systems. Add to that the conundrum of the exploding relays (which was retconned in the EC) seemingly destroying the entire galaxy as seen in the Arrival DLC, so there's hardly anything left anyway.
You're even forgetting that a ship can barely go through a planet cluster without needing fuel, and that the ships have to periodically stop at planets to discharge their drive,
and that most of the dextro-based lifeforms are going to starve to death without their native food supply (which, as the lore states, isn't available on Earth). Basically, most of the races will die before they get anywhere near their planets.
Again, I have to assume you've never played the games before.
The question of "How did Anderson get there first?" Its like people have absolutely NO imagination whatsoever.
You keep using that word. It doesn't mean what you think it means.
PROTIP: Justifying bad writing is not "imagination".
Who said he DID get their first? The battlefield run scene shows Anderson heading out with Shepard, perhaps behind him. Shepard clearly took a massive hit from the reaper, Its completely possible Anderson took less damage, and kept moving on with the objective... you know, sort of like how military personnel would actually do in that type of maneuver when its a suicide run and it doesnt make sense to leave yourself prone looking back for everyone who might get hit while the clock is ticking.
Why does it not make sense that he followed you up? Because you
look behind you after you get blasted by Harbinger and see that there is no one on the battlefield whatsoever. No one.
I am sorry, but the simple fact that the trilogy was being brought to a close should have made it abundantly clear well in advance that thematically the endings would need to be similar.
Uh..."thematically", the prior games were setting up that all your choices would have an impact. Bioware's previous games all allowed you to get personalized endings based on your choices...why not this one?
You already know the answer, but you just want to admit it.
] (Joker) This one dumbfounds me simply because it is based purely on assumptions. It assumes that Joker is running away from the Sword fleet, when there is absolutely NO evidence to support that. ANY good pilot, when they detect a massive wave coming toward them would absolutely logically try to get out of its way. That does nothing to suggest abandonment.
He's in mid-transit when he first sees the shockwave. This is a character who, after being the only guy laying down cover fire for Shepard as s/he runs to the ship during the Suicide Mission, and after repeatedly stating that he has Shepard's back, somehow turns and is already on his way out of the battle when he sees the shockwave first come through the relay.
With the absence of information, the only logical explanation is that he ran. Common sense shouldn't dumbfound you - it's the script's fault for not explaining it. The EC even makes it worse - he gives up after someone tells him its time to go, and the time between the implosion and the Normandy entering transit is lengthened considerably.
The funniest part is that (in both the original and EC endings), the ship barely shakes because of it, and the EC makes the "crash" scene even more nonsensical because it shows the ship wasn't even that damaged.
More assumption. It simply is not addressed.
The funny part with that statement is that, by trying to address it in the EC, BW made it even worse. The ship somehow flies down through the entire Sword battle, enters the atmosphere and lands solely to pick up the Shepard's squadmates? That's a waste of the Normandy's firepower and capabilities.
The best part? In the EC, the Normandy does this
5 seconds after Shepard calls them. It doesn't even bother to explain why the squadmate(s) (if they weren't injured) don't bother to accompany you into the beam. It's a stupid scene either way, and it shouldn't be justified by fanwanking.
An evac call might have been made to try to stage for a second run up just in case Shepard failed that might have put the rest of the crew back onto the normady.
Aside from the garbage syntax, Coats says (in both the original and EC) that the Hammer forces were "decimated", yet he's still alive and never comments on trying to take another team through or waiting until the Reapers left. Again, stupid writing being justified by fanwanking.
Now if we can accept that it is an energy wave to rewrite existence instead of a general wave of blanket destruction (which you have to anyway to even consider the endings at all) why is it so much of a leap to think that part of the shockwave altered the location of Shepards surviving crew? Weve already excepted that the explosion of the mass relays would destroy landed reapers on earth, but not vaporize ground troops, or the fleet as a whole. So really. Why not?
Because it's a strawman argument. A terrible one, at that.
a) The whereabouts of Shepard's squadmates has nothing to do with the capabilities of the Crucible.
b) the intent of the "Synthesis" beam was never explained in the codex or lore, and is never elaborated on by the Catalyst or Shepard.
c) The Synthesis concept comes out of thin air, and is categorized (in the absence of a better term) as 'space magic'. The same way that a wave of destruction can simultaneously pass across the galaxy in a magnitude never before witnessed in the series, with no build-up whatsoever.
This is getting long in the tooth, I have yet to see a reason that without a little bit of applying critical thinking and or simple imagination, cannot be seen to be possible on some level.
I'm not even going to justify the rest of your post with a response. It was garbage reasoning based on pure speculation and fanwank, and you should feel ashamed of yourself for posting such dribble.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say you exemplify everything that's wrong with the ME hardcore fanbase - you actually made up your own ending and accepted complete nonsense (to the point that you'd go so far as to consider it a dream) instead of admitting that it was bad writing.
Unbelievable.
