My thought process during the end of ME3. (SPOILERS)
- Thread starter Karathos
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His logic is still pure circular bullshit. And the game proves this.RJ 17 said:
The Geth, a synthetic race, rose up in self-defense when the Quarians, their organic creators tried to genocide them. In spite of this, the vast majority of the Geth collective still wishes to live in peace with the Quarians, and the hostile Geth you meet are ironically inspired to do so by the Reapers who just wants to protect organic life. And you can actually create peace between the two races, thereby proving that synthetics and organic can co-exist peacefully without the former driving the latter to extinction.
Too bad you can't bring that fact up to that little mass-murdering abomination at the end, because that would just point out how stupid and forced that whole sequence was.
You are 100% correct, the Geth break the pattern as far as what is expected of synthetic life. But there's a couple things to consider:Blachman201 said:
1) Little Space Timmy Doesn't Give A Damn: just because the synthetics in this cycle have agreed to live peacefully with organics doesn't change Timmy from being what he is: the collective consciousness of the Reapers...whos sole mission is to kill all organics so that future generations of organics can grow.
2) Little Timmy DOES Give A Damn (and the more likely of the two): He specifically tells you something along the lines of "With the Crucible here, there are now other....options." It's quite possible that when the Crucible arrived, little Timmy learned about the history of this cycle, perhaps learned that the Geth can live peacefully with organics. And that's why he gives you any options in the first place. He already KNOWS that the Cycle is no longer needed since its been proven that synthetics and organics can live in harmony...that's why he brings Shepard up to the final room and makes sure that he/she wakes up to make the decision on how the Cycle should end.
Edit: Holy shit...think I just stumbled upon something there with my "Little Timmy DOES Give A Damn" paragraph...
The Game is full of awesome little tidbits, Every conversation with the Main cast is awesome, even better is when they start moving around the ship interacting with each other. When I walked into Joker and Garrus telling Racist jokes to each other I almost laughed a lung out.
The entirety of the game is payoff to everything you did in ME1 and ME2, and up until the very end when Shep confronts the AI it was Great, those moments with Anderson were fuckign Heartwrenching...... but then the Deus EX HR ending gets in the way.
Instead of Confronting Harbinger, you get this shitty kid AI, and all it does is shoe horn you into a decision that kills off any choices you made and leaves you with a myriad of questions, the next 15 minutes of the game from this point, no matter what choice you make completely alter the Galaxy and you are not shown any of it.
In the end my disappointment with the game stems in 3 major areas.
Thematically, it clashes with the overall aspect of the Game, instead of it being a struggle for survival it turns into a philosophical play.
Interactively, your choices are all the same, Reapers are no longer a threat and Galactic Civilization gets boned, no matter what you choose.
From a story telling perspective the ending lacks an Epilogue that explains what happens after the final decision you make completely fucks up the entirety of the Galaxy.
This final decision makes everything you have done completely moot, since it doesnt give you a payoff, and possibly invalidates anything you might have done.
Krogan genophage? Yeah good luck sustaining those fuckers if you cant find suitable worlds for them to colonize.
Quarians and Geth? Well I hope you guys didnt fuck up all those Live Ships cause its going to take a fuckton of time to get back to Ranoch.
Rachni Alive or Dead? Space Spiders dont give a shit either way, they can settle in Venus since they thrive in toxic enviroments.
Asari? these bitches are now the de facto salve whores of the Galaxy because not only did they keep their Protean info a secret and used it to lord it over the rest of the species, but they also FAILED to do anything good with it for more than 1k Years, while their little sluts went off to whore themselves around the Galaxy, so if they like being little whores, then they will have no problem being the fuck toys of every other species.
The Salarians would surprisingly come out of this shit pretty ok, since they only sent their fleet to fight, and Surkesh didnt get fucked over by reapers.
But anything I say now is just wild speculation because we have no Epilogue to tell us what the fuck happens after I make Sheppard use the Mcguffin.
That is why I dislike the ending so much.
The entirety of the game is payoff to everything you did in ME1 and ME2, and up until the very end when Shep confronts the AI it was Great, those moments with Anderson were fuckign Heartwrenching...... but then the Deus EX HR ending gets in the way.
Instead of Confronting Harbinger, you get this shitty kid AI, and all it does is shoe horn you into a decision that kills off any choices you made and leaves you with a myriad of questions, the next 15 minutes of the game from this point, no matter what choice you make completely alter the Galaxy and you are not shown any of it.
In the end my disappointment with the game stems in 3 major areas.
Thematically, it clashes with the overall aspect of the Game, instead of it being a struggle for survival it turns into a philosophical play.
Interactively, your choices are all the same, Reapers are no longer a threat and Galactic Civilization gets boned, no matter what you choose.
From a story telling perspective the ending lacks an Epilogue that explains what happens after the final decision you make completely fucks up the entirety of the Galaxy.
This final decision makes everything you have done completely moot, since it doesnt give you a payoff, and possibly invalidates anything you might have done.
Krogan genophage? Yeah good luck sustaining those fuckers if you cant find suitable worlds for them to colonize.
Quarians and Geth? Well I hope you guys didnt fuck up all those Live Ships cause its going to take a fuckton of time to get back to Ranoch.
Rachni Alive or Dead? Space Spiders dont give a shit either way, they can settle in Venus since they thrive in toxic enviroments.
Asari? these bitches are now the de facto salve whores of the Galaxy because not only did they keep their Protean info a secret and used it to lord it over the rest of the species, but they also FAILED to do anything good with it for more than 1k Years, while their little sluts went off to whore themselves around the Galaxy, so if they like being little whores, then they will have no problem being the fuck toys of every other species.
The Salarians would surprisingly come out of this shit pretty ok, since they only sent their fleet to fight, and Surkesh didnt get fucked over by reapers.
But anything I say now is just wild speculation because we have no Epilogue to tell us what the fuck happens after I make Sheppard use the Mcguffin.
That is why I dislike the ending so much.
Finally formulated a big post that I put up on the Bioware forum aswell as other discussions.
--
It's not about entitlement, rage or frustration at things not ending "the way people wanted them to". It's about the ending not making any sense, and being riddled with plotholes. Please observe the text below:
End of the day the Catalyst's explanation for the Reaper's existence is the most obvious dumbass circular logic I've seen in quite a while. Organics will be wiped out by synthetics, so I've created synthetics that wipe out advanced organic life every 50k years in order to stop them from being wiped out by synthetics...? Anyone with half a brain has to look at that sentence and just marvel at the stupidity.
Plus, no matter which ending you choose the Relays and the Citadel are destroyed. In ME2 Arrival DLC, we see first-hand what the result is from a Relay being destroyed. Basically a huge part of the Batarian Hegemony (The guys with four eyes and wrinkly heads) is wiped out because of the destroyed relay basically going supernova when it's disrupted. In the ending you can see the shockwave from the Crucible spreading to the first relay and destroying it. Then you see the galaxy-wide spread of said shockwave, and massive detonations spreading to every relay. Now, knowing that a relay going boom has the destructive power to destroy an entire starsystem: Until Bioware says differently it's fair to assume pretty much the entire galaxy is bombed back to the stone age no matter which ending you choose. Continuing down this train of thought: You can liberate the Quarian homeworld, cure the genophage, give the Geth free will amongst many other choices. Yet at the end, every single fleet in the galaxy is gathered in the Sol system (aka. in the vicinity of Earth), and with the relays' destruction they have no way to get back to their homeworlds. The Quarians' homeworld, for example, is across the ENTIRE galaxy. On top of that, Turians and Quarians can't eat human food either due to their different biology, and Krogans (now that the Genophage is cured) will pretty much breed like wildfire. What was the point of giving all these different species their collective lives back in one form or another, if the ending is just going to piss all over everything you've done?
ON TOP OF THAT (Yes, as a longtime fan I've given this way too much thought) the three choices are completely pointless.
1. Kill Shepard, control Reapers, destroy relays.
2. Kill Shepard, create new DNA in form of symbiosis, destroy relays, Reapers leave
3. Kill Reapers, destroy relays.
I'm just going to ignore the second option, because the notion of the entire galaxy somehow becoming synth-bio hybrids feels like such a departure from the rest of the games so far, like Baker said "from Star Trek to Star Wars". Suddenly there's this magical force capable of metamorphing the entire galaxy. Yeah no. On the other choices: basically this AI-God-Child-Thing is completely willing to give up control of the Reapers, or indeed have Shepard kill him/it and all the Reapers - because Shepard showing up is proof that the current solution doesn't work anymore? Why doesn't it simply call off the Reapers then? How about the Geth and the Quarians making peace? The Catalyst says the solution is there because synthetics will always turn on their masters and kill them. In this extinction cycle those synthetics are the Geth. Before ME1, the Geth attack in self-defence and drive the Quarians away - but allow them to retreat as soon as they're no longer a threat. A splinter group of Geth then attack Eden Prime and other organic-settled worlds UNDER ORDERS FROM THE REAPERS. In the second game the Collectors (half organic-half synthetic) attack human settlements UNDER ORDERS FROM THE REAPERS. By ME3, the Geth are fighting a war with the Quarians simply to DEFEND THEMSELVES, and then get CONTROLLED BY THE REAPERS ONCE AGAIN. When they are freed from the Reaper signal, they simply want to make peace and live their own "lives". If Reapers are here to somehow protect organic life from being wiped out by synthetics - why are they the only synthetic race that continuously attacks organics? Circular logic. We don't want you getting wiped out by synthetics, so we made an army of synthetics to wipe you out.
And heck, in the first game it's said that Sovereign was left behind to ensure the Reapers could come back through the Citadel and kickstart the extinction. If the Catalyst - the thing that controls all the Reapers, has always lived on the Citadel, what was Sovereign's function? Why didn't the Catalyst just activate the Citadel when he wanted the Reapers to show up? Sovereign, the primary antagonist of the first game, becomes completely irrelevant. It's simply a dumb plothole that can't be plugged with any information we currently have.
As a final note, the original ending written by Drew Karpyshyn (the original lead writer during ME1 and ME2) is foreshadowed through the entire series. But Drew has left Bioware, and apparently his ending wasn't good enough or something - even though, as mentioned, the foreshadowing and the work up toward his ending is still very much there. This is basically why the ending feels like such a mess. The Catalyst-AI has never been mentioned before, and only exists in the story for those last five minutes. Hell, the old better ending possibilities are still readable in the .xml files that were leaked pre-release!
And even if I was to accept all this plothole-riddled bullshit as the ending; it's still not a fitting ending to a series that has prided itself on player choice and character building. There is no closure, no catharsis. In short the player doesn't have a fucking clue what happens after the ending, or if any of Shepard's choices during the three games matter at all.
--
I ask you to read through that, and explain the ending to me again. It just does not make sense. "Deception" was riddled with inaccurate bullcrap and Bioware responded by saying future editions would get changed. As it stands, their biggest game release ever ends with massive plotholes and inaccuracies.
Why is it acceptable? As I said at the start - it's not about entitlement or wanting some Disney-esque ending. It's not about the ending the fans deserve; it's about the ending MASS EFFECT DESERVES.
Tell me I'm wrong.
--
It's not about entitlement, rage or frustration at things not ending "the way people wanted them to". It's about the ending not making any sense, and being riddled with plotholes. Please observe the text below:
End of the day the Catalyst's explanation for the Reaper's existence is the most obvious dumbass circular logic I've seen in quite a while. Organics will be wiped out by synthetics, so I've created synthetics that wipe out advanced organic life every 50k years in order to stop them from being wiped out by synthetics...? Anyone with half a brain has to look at that sentence and just marvel at the stupidity.
Plus, no matter which ending you choose the Relays and the Citadel are destroyed. In ME2 Arrival DLC, we see first-hand what the result is from a Relay being destroyed. Basically a huge part of the Batarian Hegemony (The guys with four eyes and wrinkly heads) is wiped out because of the destroyed relay basically going supernova when it's disrupted. In the ending you can see the shockwave from the Crucible spreading to the first relay and destroying it. Then you see the galaxy-wide spread of said shockwave, and massive detonations spreading to every relay. Now, knowing that a relay going boom has the destructive power to destroy an entire starsystem: Until Bioware says differently it's fair to assume pretty much the entire galaxy is bombed back to the stone age no matter which ending you choose. Continuing down this train of thought: You can liberate the Quarian homeworld, cure the genophage, give the Geth free will amongst many other choices. Yet at the end, every single fleet in the galaxy is gathered in the Sol system (aka. in the vicinity of Earth), and with the relays' destruction they have no way to get back to their homeworlds. The Quarians' homeworld, for example, is across the ENTIRE galaxy. On top of that, Turians and Quarians can't eat human food either due to their different biology, and Krogans (now that the Genophage is cured) will pretty much breed like wildfire. What was the point of giving all these different species their collective lives back in one form or another, if the ending is just going to piss all over everything you've done?
ON TOP OF THAT (Yes, as a longtime fan I've given this way too much thought) the three choices are completely pointless.
1. Kill Shepard, control Reapers, destroy relays.
2. Kill Shepard, create new DNA in form of symbiosis, destroy relays, Reapers leave
3. Kill Reapers, destroy relays.
I'm just going to ignore the second option, because the notion of the entire galaxy somehow becoming synth-bio hybrids feels like such a departure from the rest of the games so far, like Baker said "from Star Trek to Star Wars". Suddenly there's this magical force capable of metamorphing the entire galaxy. Yeah no. On the other choices: basically this AI-God-Child-Thing is completely willing to give up control of the Reapers, or indeed have Shepard kill him/it and all the Reapers - because Shepard showing up is proof that the current solution doesn't work anymore? Why doesn't it simply call off the Reapers then? How about the Geth and the Quarians making peace? The Catalyst says the solution is there because synthetics will always turn on their masters and kill them. In this extinction cycle those synthetics are the Geth. Before ME1, the Geth attack in self-defence and drive the Quarians away - but allow them to retreat as soon as they're no longer a threat. A splinter group of Geth then attack Eden Prime and other organic-settled worlds UNDER ORDERS FROM THE REAPERS. In the second game the Collectors (half organic-half synthetic) attack human settlements UNDER ORDERS FROM THE REAPERS. By ME3, the Geth are fighting a war with the Quarians simply to DEFEND THEMSELVES, and then get CONTROLLED BY THE REAPERS ONCE AGAIN. When they are freed from the Reaper signal, they simply want to make peace and live their own "lives". If Reapers are here to somehow protect organic life from being wiped out by synthetics - why are they the only synthetic race that continuously attacks organics? Circular logic. We don't want you getting wiped out by synthetics, so we made an army of synthetics to wipe you out.
And heck, in the first game it's said that Sovereign was left behind to ensure the Reapers could come back through the Citadel and kickstart the extinction. If the Catalyst - the thing that controls all the Reapers, has always lived on the Citadel, what was Sovereign's function? Why didn't the Catalyst just activate the Citadel when he wanted the Reapers to show up? Sovereign, the primary antagonist of the first game, becomes completely irrelevant. It's simply a dumb plothole that can't be plugged with any information we currently have.
As a final note, the original ending written by Drew Karpyshyn (the original lead writer during ME1 and ME2) is foreshadowed through the entire series. But Drew has left Bioware, and apparently his ending wasn't good enough or something - even though, as mentioned, the foreshadowing and the work up toward his ending is still very much there. This is basically why the ending feels like such a mess. The Catalyst-AI has never been mentioned before, and only exists in the story for those last five minutes. Hell, the old better ending possibilities are still readable in the .xml files that were leaked pre-release!
And even if I was to accept all this plothole-riddled bullshit as the ending; it's still not a fitting ending to a series that has prided itself on player choice and character building. There is no closure, no catharsis. In short the player doesn't have a fucking clue what happens after the ending, or if any of Shepard's choices during the three games matter at all.
--
I ask you to read through that, and explain the ending to me again. It just does not make sense. "Deception" was riddled with inaccurate bullcrap and Bioware responded by saying future editions would get changed. As it stands, their biggest game release ever ends with massive plotholes and inaccuracies.
Why is it acceptable? As I said at the start - it's not about entitlement or wanting some Disney-esque ending. It's not about the ending the fans deserve; it's about the ending MASS EFFECT DESERVES.
Tell me I'm wrong.
The Dark Energy endings would have presented a new thematic problem to the player, instead of rehashing the synthetics vs organics the game had already resolved in the Geth Quarian war, continue to use Eezo and damn the entire Galaxy to destruction or stop immediately until a solution can be found, im not saying its a better but at least it would have been something to ponder about, and with an epilogue it would have been fairly satisfying.Karathos said:
I wonder if all the leaks didnt force Biowares hand to change everything in the last minute and the AI kid was the best they could come up with in such short notice.
This is almost exactly how I felt the first time I saw the ending. I couldn't believe it. Why would BioWare do this? The Deus-Ex ending was lame. Extremely lame. Destroying the relays was completely counter-intuitive and sending the entire galaxy back to the dark ages of pre-relay space travel was just... just... I can't even describe my disappointment.Karathos said: