Poll: If the 3 endings of ME3 are the only ones we're going to get, which will be your final choice?

[Macgyvercas]

Would someone mind telling me what the hell is the big deal with the endings? I honestly don't get it (then again, I've never played ME before).

The big deal is that you had a big story from the first 2 games, growing from a mere soldier to a force to be reckoned with, to the beacon of hope that unites the galaxy against a common enemy. And at the last moment, a being that supposedly controls your enemy sequesters you and says alright, you win, but now you have to decide what we're going to do next. No matter what you choose, you are going to die, and your crewmates, friends and loved ones are going to be stranded in an isolated planet, whereabouts unknown.

The options are:

Become one of us and control us,
Make everybody else in the galaxy like us against their will,
or Destroy us, but you really don't want that because what we do is for your own good.

And this hero, who has stood up to politicians, leaders, criminals, and wannabe gods just gives up and takes one the options presented. Then the game basically ends, you get lights and whistles but no substance, nothing to tell you what happened after you made a deal with the devil.

How is this in any sensible way a proper ending to a trilogy?

Okay. Absolutely one hundred percent valid point. NOW I understand the rage.

 

[Al-Bundy-da-G]

Just finished the last mission, and I have to apologize and say "I was wrong". I denied that the endings were bullshit that seemed to be pulled out of the "creative director"'s ass.

Makes the entire story of the game pointless seeing how that either the paragon or renegade endings ensure that the destruction of the reapers is pointless. Seeing how both endings mean death all the species alive at the time. They pretty much stuck every species onto Earth in one big free for all, while all the other species that rely on the galactic community to survive, i.e. volus, krogan, elcor, are now stranded on smoking ruined planets that can't support life or don't have enough population for the current dominant life forms to continue existing.

Seems like a lazy ending thrown together with no real thought behind it to get the game out within the first yearly quarter.

 

[Daystar Clarion]

Just finished the last mission, and I have to apologize and say "I was wrong". I denied that the endings were bullshit that seemed to be pulled out of the "creative director"'s ass.

Makes the entire story of the game pointless seeing how that either the paragon or renegade endings ensure that the destruction of the reapers is pointless. Seeing how both endings mean death all the species alive at the time. They pretty much stuck every species onto Earth in one big free for all, while all the other species that rely on the galactic community to survive, i.e. volus, krogan, elcor, are now stranded on smoking ruined planets that can't support life or don't have enough population for the current dominant life forms to continue existing.

Seems like a lazy ending thrown together with no real thought behind it to get the game out within the first yearly quarter.

No worries man. I thought the same thing

'People are just overreacting, they were never going to be satisfied.'

I was so wrong.

 

[Al-Bundy-da-G]

Just finished the last mission, and I have to apologize and say "I was wrong". I denied that the endings were bullshit that seemed to be pulled out of the "creative director"'s ass.

Makes the entire story of the game pointless seeing how that either the paragon or renegade endings ensure that the destruction of the reapers is pointless. Seeing how both endings mean death all the species alive at the time. They pretty much stuck every species onto Earth in one big free for all, while all the other species that rely on the galactic community to survive, i.e. volus, krogan, elcor, are now stranded on smoking ruined planets that can't support life or don't have enough population for the current dominant life forms to continue existing.

Seems like a lazy ending thrown together with no real thought behind it to get the game out within the first yearly quarter.

No worries man. I thought the same thing

'People are just overreacting, they were never going to be satisfied.'

I was so wrong.

Yea and I'm not even that easy to please when it comes to endings. Hell I was satisfied with MW3 ending and the ending to pokemon white.

 

[Bravo 21]

Control the Reapers: Saren said much the same. He also ended up shooting himself in the head.
Synthesis: The reapers are ancient killing machines, binding ourselves to them seems just to similar to what the happended with the collectors and the Human-reaper hybrid.
Destruction: to paraphrase splinter cell conviction: When a man is pushed to his limits, he will stand by his conviction.

So destruction it is. As for EDI and the Geth, "the needs of the many out way the needs of the few" -Spock

 

[Smeggs]

He dies in each one, so I made my decision. I killed every syntehtic. Even the Geth and EDI. Sorry, but making sure the Reapers are gone kind of outclasses potentially rogue AI that have more or less developed their own souls.

Some people have claimed they got some sort of little cutscene where Shepard survived the destruction of the Reapers, but I sure as hell didn't. Can anyone back up that person's claim?

Ooooo... a secret ending? Does it involve less confusion and anger?

No. It's literally the same as the other endings, except the flash of light that comes from the Crucible is green, and when Joker comes out of the ship he now has glowing eyes and some glowing shit in his arms.

It's called synthesis because you fuse the machines and organics together.

 

[Athinira]

He dies in each one, so I made my decision. I killed every syntehtic. Even the Geth and EDI. Sorry, but making sure the Reapers are gone kind of outclasses potentially rogue AI that have more or less developed their own souls.

Some people have claimed they got some sort of little cutscene where Shepard survived the destruction of the Reapers, but I sure as hell didn't. Can anyone back up that person's claim?

Fast forward to just before the 8 minute mark.

This is achieved by choosing the Destruction Option and having 5000+ effective military rating (I'm surprised BioWare didn't go for the joke and made it over 9000).

 

[goose4291]

Destroyed the buggers.

Be damned if I'm going to become all liveal with the damn things at the end.

 

[Elfgore]

For me i chose neutral (synthesis) for no real reason but at the time destroy was not the option i wanted, since i united the geth and the quarians (but i lost Legion, which sucked)on rannoch thus for the moment disproving the catalyst AI statement of synthetics will turn on organics. Might do the destroy with the secret extra ending thing that or stick with neutral at least then Joker and EDI can stay together.
Although what has annoyed me is Bioware said to keep the ME3 saves so I expect another ME game to come out. And judging from the endings Shepard is likely dead or at least that particular story arc is over and it takes place sometime in the future and all the choices frame the new story-arc.

I must admit though the way the ending is framed feels like the Deus Ex: HR way of picking a button.

The new Mass Effect games (if they make them) Have nothing to do with Shepard. It would be a whole new game with characters and a new enemy. Thats what I read from some article somewhere.

 

[M-E-D The Poet]

Synthesis. It fits with how my Shepard does things. I already united one group of synthetics and organics. Why not do the same with the Reapers? And whining about the endings is not going to change anything. It's weird, but not bad. I don't see where all the hate is coming from, seriously.

Yes it's bad.

1) It's full of plotholes. In the variant where Shephard survives (yes it's possible to get that one), he or she wakes up in a bunch of rubble on earth. Now last time i saw Shephard, he was on a giant space station several hundred kilometers above earth, without and airtight suit. How does someone survive a fall from space?

2) It brings "supernatural" into a "sci-fi" universe. Mass Effect fields, as the game have established, are energy fields created by running electricity through Element Zero, and they have the properties of creating kinetic (or in the case of biotics, telekinetic) fields, as well as modifying the space-time mass of objects allowing faster than light travel. When Mass Effect jumped from that to "galaxy expanding energy-novas that can rewrite the DNA/structure of synthetics and organics", the game essentially went from being Mass Effect to being Magic Effect, aka. all-purpose-plot-insulation syndrome.

3) It tries to explain things that are better left unexplained. To quote Yahtzee: "This isn't rocket science. Mysteries lose all their appeal the instant you explain them."

It is beyond me why BioWare didn't just stick to the Mass Effect 1 explanation of Reapers from Sovereign ("We simply are."), leaving the fantasy of the gamer some mystique to play around with while fighting an enemy they don't entirely understand. The Reapers didn't need to be explained, and giving a bad (or if we go by your definition, 'wierd') explanation certainly isn't an improvement.

4) There is no real "happy" ending.

Now, you might argue that games doesn't need happy endings, which is true. However, Mass Effect 3 sets itself up for a potential happy ending by giving us the "military rating" and "galaxy at war" system, which effectively sets up the expectation that if you, as a player, do everything right, max out your military rating and get help from everywhere you can (by playing the Galaxy at War multiplayer or the iPhone/iPad Mass Effect which can also contribute), then you will be able to get a happy, or at the very least a semi-happy, ending.
Mass Effect 2 did the same thing by actively encouraging you through dialogue to max out your team (loyalty missions) and your ship (upgrades) to make sure as many as possible survived the suicide mission. And unlike ME3, ME2 has a happy ending (everyone survives), rewarding the player if he went all out. In ME3, you are out of luck, no matter how hard you busted your ass to win.

Then there is the love interests. You see, the problem with having romances in a game sets up the expectation that those romances will somehow lead to something, or - in the case of Mass Effect 3 - that Shephard and his or hers love interest are fighting for a future together. Back in Baldur's Gate 2 + Throne of Bhaal, completing the game with a love interest gave you an epilogue explaining how you and your love interest made it to a new life, meaning that your struggles weren't in vain. In Mass Effect 3, why bother? The galaxy will end up isolated from each other and your team will end up stranded no matter what you do. What's the point?

When you then construct an ending in an RPG where the things you do (love interest, military rating etc.) are entirely or mostly irrelevant even though you give the player a close way to track/monitor them, then you are counteracting the expectations you are setting up, and are therefore inevitably gonna disappoint people, and potentially leave them frustrated.

So yes, the ending is unarguably bad. I'm not saying you're not allowed to like it or personally disregard the faults, but it has bad storytelling and plotholes all over it.

I find the only person the romance is finished with properly is with Samantha traynor, it's not an amazingly happy ending but you know basically what should have happened had you not sacrificed yourself making the ending that tidbit more dramatic.

Can someone explain to me how to get the "survival" ending?
Cause as you explained I didn't quite get some of the stuff I was forced into for having to open up a new playthrough due to corrupted save files. and I picked blue simply because I didn't quite understand they represented the choices as I was too intently tiredly listening to the explanations and not really watching my screen acutely..

 

[razerdoh]

Destroy, whit over 5000 EMR... so Shepard survives...

Synthesis. It fits with how my Shepard does things. I already united one group of synthetics and organics. Why not do the same with the Reapers? And whining about the endings is not going to change anything. It's weird, but not bad. I don't see where all the hate is coming from, seriously.

Yes it's bad.

1) It's full of plotholes. In the variant where Shephard survives (yes it's possible to get that one), he or she wakes up in a bunch of rubble on earth. Now last time i saw Shephard, he was on a giant space station several hundred kilometers above earth, without and airtight suit. How does someone survive a fall from space?

2) It brings "supernatural" into a "sci-fi" universe. Mass Effect fields, as the game have established, are energy fields created by running electricity through Element Zero, and they have the properties of creating kinetic (or in the case of biotics, telekinetic) fields, as well as modifying the space-time mass of objects allowing faster than light travel. When Mass Effect jumped from that to "galaxy expanding energy-novas that can rewrite the DNA/structure of synthetics and organics", the game essentially went from being Mass Effect to being Magic Effect, aka. all-purpose-plot-insulation syndrome.

"any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - Arthur C. Clarke

 

[Athinira]

Can someone explain to me how to get the "survival" ending?
Cause as you explained I didn't quite get some of the stuff I was forced into for having to open up a new playthrough due to corrupted save files. and I picked blue simply because I didn't quite understand they represented the choices as I was too intently tiredly listening to the explanations and not really watching my screen acutely..

By getting over 5000 effective military strength and choosing the "Destroy the Reapers" option.

To get over 5k effective military strength, in addition to doing the single-player, you need to either play the iOS version of ME3 (called Mass Effect Infiltrator, play the Galaxy at War multiplayer, or use a file-editing cheat to edit how much military strength a particular asset is worth.

To do the last option:
1) Grab version 1.2 of the Mass Effect 3 Coalesced Editor (Required NET Framework 4.0) from here [http://wenchy.net/me3-coalesced-utility/].

2) Find and backup your "Coalesced.bin" file. It resides in the "Mass Effect 3\BIOGame\CookedPCConsole" folder. After you backed up the original file (you likely need it to play the multiplayer without risking a ban), open the file in the editor.

3) Navigate the file like this:
bioui.ini -> sfxgame -> sfxgawassetshandler -> allassets = (multiple)

4) Find an asset you haven't yet required in your current savegame (the names typically gives away what a particular asset is). If you scroll a bit to the right on its line, it has a value called "StartingStrength". Just increase that by twice the amount of effective military strength you need (if you need 2000 to reach the 5k mark, increase it by 4000 since the 50% cut for not playing the Galaxy at War multiplayer). Then save the file, go into the game and aquire it.

After you've aquired it, you can replace the Coalesced.bin-file with the original file if you like.

 

[Athinira]

"any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - Arthur C. Clarke

...unless the technology is explained properly, in which case people go "Ah, now i understand" rather than believing it's magic.

Mass Effect, being the expansive RPG-series that it is, went out of it's way explaining how all the technology works (not only through dialogue, but also through the extensive Codex-entries you pick up in all three games), and it did so particularly to avoid this issue (things seems like magic) and create context for the universe.

In fact it did this a lot better than Star Wars did. It is never explained exactly how light speed works in Star Wars. Mass Effect explains it, and even Star Trek also explains how Warp Speed works. And even then, there is the problem that ships in Star Wars go a lot faster than they're mentioned going.
The Millennium Falcon, for example, is mentioned having one of the fastest light speed engines in the galaxy by being able to go 5 times the speed of light. Now i don't know about the Star Wars galaxy, but the closest star to our solar system here in the Milky Way is 4 light years away, which would mean it would take 9½ month for the Falcon to travel that distance. So either the stars in Star Wars are a lot closer to each other than our stars, or the universe is full of plot holes.

Fortunately for Star Wars, the focus of the series was on the conflict between the Empire and the Rebels (and light side versus dark side), which meant most people didn't care much about how light speed worked. Mass Effect on the other hand, has a much larger focus on technology for several reasons (the most important being that you need a big piece of technology to wipe the reapers out, but also the fact that it's a game with 60-80 hours of gameplay versus the 6 hours of the original Star Wars movies, as well as you - unlike in a movie - get to interact with the technology yourself).

But anyway, the point is that once you establish the fiction of a universe, you either have to stick to what's believable or introduce new concepts in a convincing way. Anything else is bad storytelling.
The Reapers, despite their age, numbers and power, are at the very least a CONVINCING enemy. They are incredibly strong, but not indestructable. They use advanced, but still explainable, technology. The Catalyst being the mastermind behind everything in ME3, and it's apparent superpowers, were not convincing, and introducing them in any convincing way would have been a serious challenge. And even assuming they could pull it off, there would still be other things that made the ending bad storytelling.

 

[Aisaku]

Even if the Catalyst-Crucible 'magical powers' could be easily explained away, there's the issue of the flawed logic the god child uses. Why does Shepard take this at face value? This is not unlike a toaster who burns the toast because someone set the timer wrong.

If their intentions are supposedly noble, why can't the reapers safeguard the galaxy, standing watch for the moment when synthethics become a threat, and protect organic life from them? For instance, in ME1? But wait, it was a Reaper who mobilized the exiled Geth into war so... what gives?

So... many... plotholes.

 

[Fappy]

As others have said: make my own ending. In fact I already have for my first two Sheps.

 

[M-E-D The Poet]

Can someone explain to me how to get the "survival" ending?
Cause as you explained I didn't quite get some of the stuff I was forced into for having to open up a new playthrough due to corrupted save files. and I picked blue simply because I didn't quite understand they represented the choices as I was too intently tiredly listening to the explanations and not really watching my screen acutely..

By getting over 5000 effective military strength and choosing the "Destroy the Reapers" option.

To get over 5k effective military strength, in addition to doing the single-player, you need to either play the iOS version of ME3 (called Mass Effect Infiltrator, play the Galaxy at War multiplayer, or use a file-editing cheat to edit how much military strength a particular asset is worth.

To do the last option:
1) Grab version 1.2 of the Mass Effect 3 Coalesced Editor (Required NET Framework 4.0) from here [http://wenchy.net/me3-coalesced-utility/].

2) Find and backup your "Coalesced.bin" file. It resides in the "Mass Effect 3\BIOGame\CookedPCConsole" folder. After you backed up the original file (you likely need it to play the multiplayer without risking a ban), open the file in the editor.

3) Navigate the file like this:
bioui.ini -> sfxgame -> sfxgawassetshandler -> allassets = (multiple)

4) Find an asset you haven't yet required in your current savegame (the names typically gives away what a particular asset is). If you scroll a bit to the right on its line, it has a value called "StartingStrength". Just increase that by twice the amount of effective military strength you need (if you need 2000 to reach the 5k mark, increase it by 4000 since the 50% cut for not playing the Galaxy at War multiplayer). Then save the file, go into the game and aquire it.

After you've aquired it, you can replace the Coalesced.bin-file with the original file if you like.

Ah then I sadly just walked to the wrong terminal haha xD
I had 5.5 k war assets.

Was seriously bummed out all my work with the terminus assets didn't even get named once in the end, neither did the salarians sadly.

 

[Aisaku]

As others have said: make my own ending. In fact I already have for my first two Sheps.

It's what I do....

 

[M-E-D The Poet]

He dies in each one, so I made my decision. I killed every syntehtic. Even the Geth and EDI. Sorry, but making sure the Reapers are gone kind of outclasses potentially rogue AI that have more or less developed their own souls.

Some people have claimed they got some sort of little cutscene where Shepard survived the destruction of the Reapers, but I sure as hell didn't. Can anyone back up that person's claim?

Ooooo... a secret ending? Does it involve less confusion and anger?

No. It's literally the same as the other endings, except the flash of light that comes from the Crucible is green, and when Joker comes out of the ship he now has glowing eyes and some glowing shit in his arms.

It's called synthesis because you fuse the machines and organics together.

wait I didn't get this damn ending either.
I don't get this bit anymore :S

 

[M-E-D The Poet]

As others have said: make my own ending. In fact I already have for my first two Sheps.

but that makes my ending even more gruesome and depressive :O
lets just say in my version, the cycle ends..
I thought they were going for that kind of gritty with the ending before you meet the ilusive man

I mean seriously I expected that

also something I did like was this : They finally tied up why shepherd's name is shepherd.

 

[Fappy]

As others have said: make my own ending. In fact I already have for my first two Sheps.

but that makes my ending even more gruesome and depressive :O
lets just say in my version, the cycle ends..
I thought they were going for that kind of gritty with the ending before you meet the ilusive man

I mean seriously I expected that

also something I did like was this : They finally tied up why shepherd's name is shepherd.

I didn't really mean to imply that making up your own ending justifies how horrible the actual ending is. Its just my way for coping with the pain D:

*Sniffle*