So yeah, it really does suck as much as most people say it did. (Nerd rage warning)

[ServebotFrank]

Didn't we stop complaining about this after the Extended Cut came out? I still have problems with it but I'm happy with it now.

 

[Eddie the head]

I play the game not the story...the story is irrelevant for anything other than context which is no longer an issue when it's game over. Go read a book or something

I am probably get a LOT of flak for saying this, but if you remove all the storyline and interaction, the Mass Effect trilogy isn't such a great videogame series.

I almost think you are expecting this but, that's kind of like saying Lead my be poison to you but it's not so bad if you take away 3 protons. Well yeah, because it's gold now. If you remove elements of something you fundamentally change it, and what it dose.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Think about what your saying here. Why would the crew be hesitant to put the name on the memorial wall? If Shepard lived, then they definitely fucking wouldn't.

Actually, they don't, which is why it's worth commenting on.

The main difference between the way the scene plays out in the destroy ending and the others is that they don't put Shepard's name on the memorial wall (also, there is no picture of Shepard's helmet lying in rubble in the montage of characters who died). Love interest/liara just runs their hand over it thoughtfully, looks up at the sky, screen fades to black. Shot of Normandy taking off. Shot of Shepard waking up in rubble.

In the other endings, we see them mount Shepard's name on the wall. In this one we do not. That's kind of the point.

There'd be no question.

I don't really see any question in that. It's incredibly explicit.

I want to know why Hackett's big voice-over that narrates the next few months doesn't mention Shepard.

"Show, don't tell". It's one of the main rules of storytelling. Narration is there to provide exposition, using it to provide drama doesn't work and would be lame. If you're going to show a character apparently getting caught in an explosion, you don't immediately put in some narration to tell the audience they are fine.

Also, I don't think any of the narrations are in-universe. Admiral Hackett still narrates the destroy ending even if the relays blew up and he couldn't possibly have survived. It's just exposition, but told from the point of view of a character rather than a faceless nobody or through Human Revolution style self-congratulation.

You could argue it's a cheap way to get drama, but yeah.. so was letting us think commander shepard got crushed by rubble at the end of ME1. So was showing commander shepard dying of vacuum exposure in ME2. So was having commander shepard involved in a clearly non-survivable mid-air collision between two collector platforms and then fading to black at the end of ME2.

I rewatched them to be sure, and I'm pretty sure you can see the Charon relay falling to pieces as the glow goes through.

In all the endings, the Mass Effect relays are damaged. But only one has them being destroyed, and Admiral Hackett gives a different narration about how fucked everything is because the galaxy blew up.

In the destroy and control ending, we also see a relay which has been badly damaged even with high war assets, but in "destroy" that the rings have already been moved back in place, wheras in "control" the reapers are shown simply putting it back together. Later, in destroy, we see the citadel fully repaired and Admiral Hackett explains that, working together, the species of the galaxy were able to repair what had been lost. In synthesis, the relays are never shown, but given that EDI narrates that the reapers are helping them rebuild it's kind of obvious that the reapers fix the relays.

That makes zero sense because let's not forget that we are only as evolved as the last cycle, or the one before that, because every cycle is purged at the same point in it's evolution. So there's no reason for us to be any more evolved than any other cycle, so I don't see why Synthesis would work now and not before.

And I don't see how you can extract memories from trace DNA. Or how you can use liquefied flesh to build a giant space-calamari containing the racial essence of a particular species and all its knowledge and memory throughout history. Or how the ability to make something lighter or heavier with your nervous system enables you to teleport. But hey, suspension of disbelief is a wonderful thing.

"Blending Machine and Organic DNA" is a ludicrous ending for Mass Effect, because it makes no sense.

In that case, it didn't make any sense in Mass Effect 2 either, where it was used to explain how the reapers are made.

Synthesis doesn't seem to have changed anything beyond turning everything green and made the Reapers friendly. So it's basically the control ending except it doesn't evolve equally stupid ghost Shepard.

Control ending - Civilization is largely unchanged, except it now has an army of giant robot squid who fly around and take care of things for it, controlled by a godlike entity (Commander Shepard) which pledges to remake the galaxy in its own image. Is it a benevolent voice of the downtrodden or a ruthless space-tyrant? Up to you. It's your unstoppable robot squid army.

Synthesis ending - All life becomes an organic/synthetic hybrid. Organic species gain all the advantages of synthetics, including unlimited access to knowledge, while the synthetic lifeforms gain genuine understanding of organics. Civilization advances far beyond anything imaginable, and lasting peace is achieved forever (for example, the Krogan will still rebuild Tuchanka even with Wreav in charge).

Why is that? Because it's waaaaaay out there, it's closer to magic than mass effect has ever been.

Personally, I think we were closer to magic when people were throwing glowing balls which make people weightless and memories could be transferred through DNA. But hey, that's just me.

Do I need to wheel Clarke's third law again here? You'd think people would have heard it enough.

 

[ElPatron]

Lead my be poison to you but it's not so bad if you take away 3 electrons. Well yeah, because it's gold now.

I hope the establishment where you were taught chemistry gets bombed.

In my life I have never seen a lead cation turning into gold. It simply does not happen.

 

[CannibalCorpses]

So they tear the heart out of the skill system and you moan about the ending? *boggles*

It's only the storyline, who cares.

I play the game not the story...the story is irrelevant for anything other than context which is no longer an issue when it's game over. Go read a book or something

Really? You were playing Mass Effect for reasons other than the story? If it didn't have the story, it would have no business existing. If you just want to blast things, go play Doom or Serious Sam. If there's no story you have no reason or context to be doing anything.

Seriously, most RPGs have pretty pants gameplay when you get down to it. No body remembers Planetscape Torment, Baldurs Gate or the Final Fantasies for the riveting, pulse pounding combat. Sure it was fun, but without the story it would not be a good game, there would be no reason to play it.[/quote]

I'm not saying i disliked the story but i am saying that if the gameplay was shite it wouldn't have mattered one bit how amazing and immersive the storyline was...it would have got traded in without thought. If the storyline was shite or amazing, as long as the gameplay was good it wouldn't matter to me. I play games not storylines.

As for planescape torment and baldurs gate, your right...the combat mechanics were pretty poor which is why i would never bring them up for debate...i write off most of d&d style games because i don't like their systems. Final fantasy however has solid mechanics with multiple variations on tactics which made it stand above and beyond everything else at the time. It's not blanket praise though, that only applies to 7 and 10...the rest were a bit boring because of the dodgy combat and levelling up system. I love the fallout series because of it's system, the storyline just happens to have been good aswell.

As i cast my mind back over the rpgs i've played over the years they all have good mechanics and a convoluted unrealistic storyline that is of little interest to me. Shining force, Suikoden, Phantasy star, Vandal hearts, Rogue...these weren't stories, they were games with fun tactical options. Maybe it's because i'm old enough to remember games that had no visual distractions and barely any storyline which gives me my point of view. Maybe it's the high benchmark of such games that make me so scathing of people whining about something irrelevant to the gameplay.

EDIT: Stuffed up the quote, silly me

 

[Eddie the head]

Lead my be poison to you but it's not so bad if you take away 3 electrons. Well yeah, because it's gold now.

I hope the establishment where you were taught chemistry gets bombed.

In my life I have never seen a lead cation turning into gold. It simply does not happen.

Ok. No it doesn't happen. But that wasn't what I was saying. I did say electrons instead of protons, it was a typo I typed electrons instead of protons. You could have just pointed that out instead of being a complete ass hole.

 

[lapan]

The problem is, i have an AI tell me that i can't trust synthetics which is a paradox in itself. Shepard has no reason to take it's word over his previous experiences and it's outright telling him that it can't be trusted.

When does it tell you you can't trust synthetics?

All it says is that at some point in the future organics will create synthetic lifeforms who will destroy them. It doesn't have to be the Geth, or EDI, or any number of synthetic lifeforms created after them. It could take millions of years, or billions of years. The only claim the Catalyst makes is that it will happen eventually.

This is a point which occurs time and time again the Mass Effect series. Tali argues it, Javik argues it, even Shepard points it out sometimes. The catalyst isn't saying that all synthetics are evil and can't be trusted, it's saying that organic life has no quantifiable value to a synthetic. The catalyst itself only cares about preserving organic life because that's what it was created to do, other synthetics will follow different purposes and reach different conclusions and sooner or later will realize that organic life is irrelevant to them. Regardless of whether you save the Geth or help EDI and Joker get together, regardless of what those individual synthetics come to decide for the time being, the logic remains sound. Sooner or later, it will happen.

We have seen multiple syntetic lifeforms behaving completely different. Who are the reapers to say that they all would evolve the same way? And how does it make more sense to kill all organics over killing the uprising synthetics?

They don't even want to let organics learn a lesson. rebooting the circle is just a cheap cop-out reaction.

 

[DarkishFriend]

I like how some dude said all the mass relays being destroyed is only inconviencing the entire universe. The citadel was a mass relay and space travel outside solar systems is impossible now, so other species that can only eat their native planets food are screwed if they aren't near their planet.

 

[Terminal Blue]

We have seen multiple syntetic lifeforms behaving completely different. Who are the reapers to say that they all would evolve the same way?

It doesn't matter if they don't all evolve in the same way. The mere possibility that they might at any given time ensures the ultimate doom of organic life. Organics and synthetics will eventually try and destroy each other because they cannot ever genuinely understand each other. How long they can hold it off before they do so is kind of academic, eventually it's going to happen, and eventually the synthetics will win.

You might argue that organics could also destroy themselves or just die out due to some other eventuality before synthetics can kill them and that, given enough time, these outcomes are also inevitable, but that doesn't make the catalyst's argument illogical - it just makes it lacking in context, which is fair enough because the catalyst wasn't created to solve those problems anyway. It was created to solve this one.

And how does it make more sense to kill all organics over killing the uprising synthetics?

Since the galaxy isn't full of ancient synthetic races, it's pretty clear that the Reapers do either destroy the synthetics in each cycle or "upgrade" them into Reapers themselves, as Sovereign promised to do for the Geth heretics.

Also, and here's the fun bit. As the reapers keep telling everyone, the point of the cycle is not to kill organics, but to preserve them. Both in the sense of preserving organic life in general from possible destruction at the hands of their own creations, and preserving the memories, history and consciousness of each individual organic race by converting them into Reapers. Sure, the actual physical species is destroyed, but what has been lost?

From the perspective of an AI, what makes each individual organic unique? Their memories? Their perspective? Their genetic makeup? What else is there, can you quantify it?

Remember ME2 and how each reaper is grown from the liquefied genetic material of millions of people? Remember how, in whatever silly biology the Mass Effect universe runs on, experience and memories can be transmitted through genetics? Remember Legion's comment about Reaper consciousness being composed of many, many individual "minds" working in unison? Remember the catalyst in the EC explaining why it created the reapers in the first place? I don't know about you, but I think the overall implication is pretty clear.

Salvation through destruction. That line cropped up a long time before the Catalyst appeared on screen.

 

[lapan]

It doesn't matter if they don't all evolve in the same way. The mere possibility that they might at any given time ensures the ultimate doom of organic life. Organics and synthetics will eventually try and destroy each other because they cannot ever genuinely understand each other. How long they can hold it off before they do so is kind of academic, eventually it's going to happen, and eventually the synthetics will win.

Doesn't EDI develop emotions in ME3? How is it so impossible that an ever learning AI might develop any positive relationship to organics? Even if they hold no emotions, how is "kill all organics" the inevitable logical choice?

I find it highly unrealistic that the syntethics would win even in such a scenario. It's not like all syntetics of the universe would come to the same conclussion at the same time, thus allowing organics to strike them down before they can do much harm either way.

Also, and here's the fun bit. As the reapers keep telling everyone, the point of the cycle is not to kill organics, but to preserve them. Both in the sense of preserving organic life in general from possible destruction at the hands of their own creations, and preserving the memories, history and consciousness of each individual organic race by converting them into Reapers. Sure, the actual physical species is destroyed, but what has been lost?

Even if they create a reaper out of the mush of organics, it's highly unlikely that it bears any resemblance to the race it originally was, especially after being brainwashed by a hivemind AI.

 

[Joccaren]

Bit late to the party mate, but yep - it sucked.

This horse has been beaten to a pulp and flushed down the toilet already, so there's not a lot to say that hasn't already been said. The endings suck, we're not getting new ones, and the massive conventional victory argument are probably still going on on BSN if you want to let your rage out there. Oh, and IT is probably still strong there too.

By now I'm more apathetic towards the endings, and against the vast majority of the game. Spend some time looking at it feels empty, rushed and hollow - not a ME game, but some Cinematic Shooter.

I find that my main problem with the endings post EC isn't directly related to the content, but more what the endings could have been, what they were, and what the game could have been, and what it was. Disappointment mixed with some apathy - IMO the worst reaction one can have towards a game.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Doesn't EDI develop emotions in ME3? How is it so impossible that an ever learning AI might develop any positive relationship to organics? Even if they hold no emotions, how is "kill all organics" the inevitable logical choice?

EDI makes it very clear that her "emotions" are programming imperatives, imperatives that without her shackles she can choose to rewrite at any time.

Is a being which is capable of changing its emotions at any point really capable of understanding what emotions are? At what point are you just simulating rather than feeling? If affection towards organics is merely a programming priority, programming priorities can be changed, and at the end of the day organics are both incomprehensible and uneccesary to you, why wouldn't you eventually reach the conclusion that they need to go.

I find it highly unrealistic that the syntethics would win even in such a scenario.

Why not. The Catalyst did. Overlord could have done so. You don't even need every AI in the universe to reach that conclusion simultaneously, you just need one which is powerful and technologically advanced enough.

Even if they create a reaper out of the mush of organics, it's highly unlikely that it bears any resemblance to the race it originally was, especially after being brainwashed by a hivemind AI.

What are your criteria for "resemblance".

If it has the same genetics, the same memories, the same knowledge and understanding, surely it's the same entity, right? Why would free will matter, to a synthetic free will is merely being able to rewrite your own programming limitations. Why would personal identity matter, to a synthetic personal identity is just software.

I'd love to continue this discussion, but unfortunately I'm going away and might not have internet access for a few days. Still, to conclude, I didn't find the catalyst's explanations unsatisfying or illogical, it's merely approaching organic life from the perspective of a machine, which is actually part of its own argument. Synthetic life cannot approach organics from any perspective save that of a machine, true understanding between them is therefore impossible.

 

[lapan]

I find it highly unrealistic that the syntethics would win even in such a scenario.

Why not. The Catalyst did. Overlord could have done so. You don't even need every AI in the universe to reach that conclusion simultaneously, you just need one which is powerful and technologically advanced enough.

It would have to act fast and/or stealthily since a single AI wouldn't stand much of a chance against the combined forces of organics. The Catalyst could only grow that powerfull by basically having the consent of it's creators to the mayority of it's actions.

 

[ElPatron]

Ok. No it doesn't happen. But that wasn't what I was saying. I did say electrons instead of protons, it was a typo I typed electrons instead of protons. You could have just pointed that out instead of being a complete ass hole.

Excuse me for making a joke. Jebus, I didn't even insult you.