Mass Effect 3 - SPOILERS!

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

I find it hypocritical of Shepard to have nightmares about a kid that got incinerated by a Reaper. Shepard can let Morinth die and shoot her Orphaned daughter. Shepard can do a lot of terrible things, and yet all he is guilty about is some pathetic child that refused to come with him?

I really don't care the fictional child died in Mass Effect 3. He refused to come with Shepard, so I don't see why Shepard would get guilty feelings. I do believe that the child is manifestation of indoctrination and they are trying to destroy Shepards' morale. If that's true, it's awfully interesting why the Catalyst would present itself as the form of the child. Terrifying about the implications.

[Geoff_B]

The dreams closely resemble the effects of indoctrination as described by the datalogs.

So do most dreams come to think of it. Images that we can't define, faces we can't see, people who we know are dead coming back to us.

We've never seen Shepard have to cope with the stress of the war in this way before.

This is a different situation. It's one thing to know a war is coming and to prepare for it. It's another to actually be in that war. The fate of the entire galaxy is on him. Why wouldn't he be stressed?

There's no indication that the Catalyst has read Shep's mind, or that it has assumed it's particular form on purpose.

Fair point about not reading his mind, but it's obviously taken that form for a purpose, unless it's original creators gave it the form of a human boy wearing a hoodie just for the fun of it.

The elements are, however, visually connnected. Bioware wants us to know that these elements are connected to eachother and have some meaning. What that meaning is is unclear.

-m

Yep, that I agree with you 100% on.

I find it hypocritical of Shepard to have nightmares about a kid that got incinerated by a Reaper. Shepard can let Morinth die and shoot her Orphaned daughter. Shepard can do a lot of terrible things, and yet all he is guilty about is some pathetic child that refused to come with him?

Shepard makes the decision himself to let Morinth die because she's a serial killer. The boy was innocent and Shepard would very understandably be left feeling guilty that he didn't do more to help him.

I really don't care the fictional child died in Mass Effect 3. He refused to come with Shepard, so I don't see why Shepard would get guilty feelings. I do believe that the child is manifestation of indoctrination and they are trying to destroy Shepards' morale. If that's true, it's awfully interesting why the Catalyst would present itself as the form of the child. Terrifying about the implications.

This is part of the problem with the indoctrination theory for me. It's almost as if people are saying "Oooh Shepard is feeling guilty over the people he couldn't save. He has emotions. Therefore he's being indoctrinated." As far as I can see, indoctrination leads to worship/admiration of the Reapers as a superior power or even the saviours of the galaxy, and Shepard never sees them like that.

Until/unless Bioware releases DLC to answer these questions, we'll be going round and round in circles with this. Sorry, but I'm perfectly happy to take the whole thing at face value.

[Matt]

Yep, that I agree with you 100% on.

except that you're looking to find reasons to excuse this visual conection, rathe rthan loking to understand the narrative purpose for the connection.

This is pretty clearly a sub-plot. And it is almost certainly hinting at Shepard being influenced in some way - it's just not obvious to what end.

-m

[Geoff_B]

I'd be more than happy to go along with this if it were anything other than the end of the game. If it was the prelude to the final boss or whatever then fine. Shepard's indoctrinated. It's the fact that it is the ending that makes me so resistant to it. It leaves the entire story unfinished.

Maybe we're not supposed to have all the answers. There are other things that haven't been explained, such as the deal with the star that changes colour along with Shepard's alignment at the end of 2, or the fact that Shepard is able to withstand the Prothean beacons with no form of training.

So yeah there is something bigger at work, it just might not be the Reapers.

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

The Reapers don't need to make Shepard admire them. The Reapers have had two/three indoctrination attempts that weren't fully successful. Liara's Mother, EvilTurian and Eventually the Illusive Man. So maybe they know they can't make Shepard admire them.
What they can do is demoralize him. Play psychological warfare. Shepard is the Reaper's biggest threat. They will go all-out to try and stop him.

We also don't know when the Illusive man started getting Indoctrinated. The Reapers could have controlled how Shepard gets resurrected. It would seem stupid to resurrect the only threat to the Reapers, but maybe the Reapers couldn't stop the illusive man. But what they could do was influence how he could be brought back. Maybe they wanted to create a Shepard to manipulate.

At the end of the 3rd game Shepard has immense political power. If the Reapers had this foresight, they could have tried to mould the perfect puppet.

This is starting the delve into the realms of wild speculation.

One thing I never understood was why was the Illusive man so interested in bringing back Shepard from death. Could he see that Shepard was more than just a human. He probably could as he had a space station overlooking a star that changed colour based on Shepard's actions.

[Matt]

So yeah there is something bigger at work, it just might not be the Reapers.

... yeah, exactly. The point is that a face-value reading of the events doesn't make sense. There must be -something- going on. The connections are too deliberate, too obviously allusional to be anything other than an intentional nod by the developers to the fact that something is acting in these events unseen.

I'm not specifying -what- that thing is, or -how- it's interacting with Shepard. Only that it is.

You're right, in that maybe we aren't supposed to have all the answers, but the idea of looking at all this and going "nope, I'm just going to excuse this and this and this as being all completely disconnected, non-narratively important events" seems utterly foriegn to me.

We've been left a lead to think about - the fun is in thinking about it.

-m

[Geoff_B]

We also don't know when the Illusive man started getting Indoctrinated.

Mass Effect: Evolution. Jack Harper finds an ancient artefact which messes his eyes up. At the end he becomes the Illusive Man. So that's as far back as the first contact war.

Also I think IM's purpose in bringing Shepard back was gaining control of the Collector base.

But yeah this is getting speculative now. Should we shelve this until appropriate DLC comes out?

And I don't think they're all disconnected events. Some plan is being worked out here. When I said face-value I meant the ending, that Shepard is really on the Citadel and really talking to the Catalyst etc. rather than some idea that it's all happening in his head.

[Matt]

Oh, alright, yes - I agree with that. I think the ending DOES happen.

-m

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

If it doesn't then it's:
a) sly
b) definitely not good.

[Geoff_B]

Woo we agree on something

BTW if you're interested I wrote a few scattered thoughts about the ending.

[JackSlack]

I don't think it's fair to say the ending was thematically out of left field. It wasn't. All three games have had major central themes about the interactions between synthetic and organic life, and the final choice was an obvious culmination of that thematic thread.

OK, that's fair. The problem is that, as you point out below, it can be narratively demolished prior to this scene. This ends up tying into the basic problem I have with the ending (Your comments here and some discussion with Duckay, who also loved the ending, helped me refine my understanding of my issues.)

Now you can argue that it was narratively poor for the exact reason you've noted (though I disagree with that argument, obviously) but thematically? I'm not sure how that claim holds up. The final choice takes the conflict central to the last three games and puts it's resolution in your hands.

That's it, though! It was not central at all. Arguably, it was central in Mass Effect 1, but it's not really been central ever since. What's been central, in fact, has been a theme that runs counter to that theme: The idea of overcoming, either by overpowering or by co-opting, the many tensions and divergences of numerous species and types of life in the face of a greater existential threat, affirming the idea that the current state of existence is desirable.

That's Mass Effect's central theme. In Mass Effect 1, you forge a team from a wide variety of council and non-council races to stop the Reapers from returning, including a climax wherein you face down a main antagonist motivated by his belief that the Reapers ultimate victory is inevitable and therefore the universe must change to avoid destruction. Shepard fights against him to show that this result is not inevitable. Shepard saves the day, allowing the universe to continue.

In Mass Effect 2, you again forge a wide-spread, diverse team, and accomplish your goals either by brute force overpowering, or by finding common ground and uniting your opposition. The minor themes of this game also adhere to this basic logic; Legion is a case in point, showing how the Geth (previously understood as Always Chaotic Evil antagonists) were capable of being reasoned with, united, and working with organic life*.

And Mass Effect 3 plays this writ large: With you finding ways to unite the Krogan under reformist banners (or dooming them to extinction as a threat to the galaxy); with you finally ending the war between the Quarians and Geth (one way or another). Again and again, you resolve. You find the existential threats to the galaxy and show that they can be fixed with hard work and determination.

With every victory, you affirm a simple truth: The galaxy is good. It doesn't need to change at some fundamental level.

Then comes the ending. And you are given three choices of how to change the universe on some fundamental level.

What was needed was one final option: Tell the Reapers to just go home. Seriously. Tell them: We don't buy it. Even if it WAS true way back when that you had to destroy the galaxy over and over again (and I'm doubtful of that too) it sure as hell isn't now. So piss off back to dark space. We don't want to control you. We'd take destroying you, but not at the expense of all synthetic life. And this synthesis nonsense? We're already doing it. And we'll get there bit by bit. We don't need your help to push us on the way.

The problem is that the final choice is a total false dilemma; it's predicated on a catastrophe that is utterly absent from the game's storyline. You defeat Sovereign. You defeat the Collectors. You save the Krogan (or end the Krogan threat) and make peace between the Geth and Quarians (or end the Geth Threat, or restore justice for the victimized Geth). You get shit done.

For the Catalyst's premise to make sense, for it to be believable, the game needed far more chaos, far more failures, far more cost. It needed to shake the player again and again, and make the player believe: "This universe is unsustainable."

And it didn't. The Mass Effect universe was incredibly, amazingly sustainable. And thus its offer was a false choice.

* OK, OK. You can argue that the Heretics in fact were not arguable with; they needed to be brainwashed or destroyed. But even there, it's only true because of Reaper involvement. Hardly argues strongly for the Catalyst's position.

[Geoff_B]

The Catalyst is however many millions of years old and the process has been repeated however many millions of times. I don't see him stopping just because Shepard "tells the Reapers to go home". The Catalyst would have just ignored him as seen by the "We'd rather keep our own forms/You can't" exchange. The Catalyst just tells Shepard bluntly that nope this is how it is because I say so.

I suppose the comparison here is Babylon 5 (apologies to those who haven't seen it yet) but the whole series is shown in season 4 to be due to the conflict between the forces of Order (as shown in the Vorlons) and Chaos (as shown in the Shadows) and they try to get the races of the galaxy on their side, with no middle ground allowed. In that case Captain Sheridan outright tells them to "get the hell out of our galaxy" and it works because, even though the Vorlons and the Shadows have been doing this for thousands/millions of years, they are still organic beings who are able to recognise when the situation has changed and alter their way of thinking.

Here, the Catalyst is a computer who can only think in terms of 1s and 0s and really needs new direct input in order to change its mind. An option to tell the Reapers to get lost would have been nice but I really don't think it would have worked because the Catalyst "knows what's best for us".

[JackSlack]

OK, and y'know what? If it had said, "That's not going to happen", then I'd be happy to push the Destruction button. Why? Because that would have then proven that the Catalyst was not being honest: It didn't care about the situation, that (charitable interpretation) it was so locked into its way of thinking that the Reapers had to go, or (more likely interpretation) that actually it was seeing the Control/Synthesis options as basically feints, ways of trying to stop Shepard from killing them.

But I took the Catalyst at face value, and that it was reasonable. Therefore, I needed an option to reason with it. I did not get one.

[Geoff_B]

Well when I get to the end next time what I'm going to do is have EDI in my final squad (along with the love interest) and hit destruction. If EDI comes out of the Normandy at the end then, rather than seeing it as a bit of inconsistency on the developers' part, I will see it as proof that the Catalyst is in fact talking a load of horse droppings and that the doom-and-gloom scenario of all synthetic life being destroyed is just him tying to make you not press it.

If EDI doesn't come out of the Normandy then nope I'm sticking with Synthesis.

[Duckay]

I am puzzled because I did not see anyone come out of the Normandy at the end. At first I assumed this is how it was meant to be, that it cut away after the door started to shift but before you saw what happened, but I've since been told by many puzzled people that someone* ought to come out. I feel confused and cheated.

All that being said, I loved the ending. I really did. It was the first time throughout all of Mass Effect 3 that I felt emotionally invested; through the rest, I was feeling oddly detached, which was bothering me because I usually really love these games.

I accept that I'm a weirdo, though.

*I've been told by different people that it was EDI, or Kaidan, or Garrus.

[JackSlack]

It is:

Joker, and...

1. If you picked Synthesis, EDI. Both Joker and EDI now look partially synthetic/organic.
2. If you picked either of the the other two options, your love interest and (I think) a member of your squad at the end.

[Geoff_B]

It depends on your final scores. If your effective readiness is too low no one comes out, then as you get higher scores more people come out - up to 3. I can't remember what the actual numbers are.

For control and destruction it's Joker, your love interest and someone from your final squad.

For synthesis it's Joker and EDI (being very sweet towards each other) and your love interest.

[Duckay]

That would explain it. My readiness was awful - I think I got it to the point where things wouldn't be disastrous, and not one bit higher.

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

For synthesis it's Joker and EDI (being very sweet towards each other) and your love interest.

For the many flaws of the ending, that scene did genuinely melt my heart.


I think a full on sex scene between the two would have made for a more convincing ending cinematic.

[Kapol]

Alright, this will likely (read: hopefully) be the last time I post this much, because I really just want to ignore all of this now. But there are some points that are nagging me.

And Mass Effect 3 plays this writ large: With you finding ways to unite the Krogan under reformist banners (or dooming them to extinction as a threat to the galaxy); with you finally ending the war between the Quarians and Geth (one way or another). Again and again, you resolve. You find the existential threats to the galaxy and show that they can be fixed with hard work and determination.

With every victory, you affirm a simple truth: The galaxy is good. It doesn't need to change at some fundamental level.

Except that all of those were influences by Shephard directly. Had he not gotten involved, or didn't exist, they would have all ended badly. And the fact they CAN end very badly, wiping out entire species in the process, shows that the galexy isn't fundamentally good. If not for Shephard, all of those things would have ended badly for at least one involved party with heavy losses for the other side at best. Shephard won't be around forever, nor will his influence. Hell, you could argue that the only reason he was so driven to get involved with any of it in the first place was because of the reapers. Had he not interacted with the beacon, and had their been no threat, I find it highly doubtful he would have stepped up as he had.

Then comes the ending. And you are given three choices of how to change the universe on some fundamental level.

What was needed was one final option: Tell the Reapers to just go home. Seriously. Tell them: We don't buy it. Even if it WAS true way back when that you had to destroy the galaxy over and over again (and I'm doubtful of that too) it sure as hell isn't now. So piss off back to dark space. We don't want to control you. We'd take destroying you, but not at the expense of all synthetic life. And this synthesis nonsense? We're already doing it. And we'll get there bit by bit. We don't need your help to push us on the way.

This is something that I hear people say should have been included. And you know what? It makes no sense at all. Why should the reapers stop? They would win. It's made quite clear that the final assult isn't an attempt to defeat the reapers. It's an attempt to get the Cruicble set up to wipe them out. And, since the only funtions of the Cruicble were presented to Shephard, that makes them the only real options available for getting rid of the reaper threat. The only real alternative is fighting and dying. The game drives in the message that all of the work and all of their chips are on the Cruicble during pretty much the entire game.

As for the logic in the 'synthetics will kill all organic life' being countered with 'well, we made peace/destroyed the Geth, so that makes no sense,' there's one aspect that skips over entirely. Time. It's important to remember that the Geth weren't actually AI ME3 (if they survived). As well, a peace during the events of the third hardly means that there will always be that peace. Even Javik mirrors this thought process over and over. He talks quite a bit about horrific events against synthetics committed during his 'cycle.' In terms of progress, the ME's 'cycle' it takes place in was relatively underdeveloped compared to others judging by the evidence given. So it's impossible to say if synthetics would destroy all organic life given time.

The problem is that the final choice is a total false dilemma; it's predicated on a catastrophe that is utterly absent from the game's storyline. You defeat Sovereign. You defeat the Collectors. You save the Krogan (or end the Krogan threat) and make peace between the Geth and Quarians (or end the Geth Threat, or restore justice for the victimized Geth). You get shit done.

Soverign was a single reaper and it took all of the ships in the Citadel airspace to take it out. And it still inflicted a lot of damage. Now, multiply that by the number you saw in the end credits of 2 and imagine how much pure power they have in numbers.

The collectors were pretty much unopposed by anyone other then Shephard. They really only seemed to have a few ships they could send out. The main defensive strategy they had was hiding beyong the Omega relay. Had they been more of a threat, I doubt it would have taken incredibly long to stop them anyways.

And I'm going to put emphasis on the 'YOU' in "You get shit done." Pretty much all the progress that's made is guided by Shephard, AKA The Player. Shephard isn't immortal. Nor is that type of person normal (hence why the invasion had never been really opposed well before). So how long until something happens that Shephard can't stop because he gone? Or a force comes, be it Krogan, Geth, or whatever, that manages to overpower everyone without Shephard? The fact is that things only could have worked out in any good way with Shephard's help. And even those results aren't guarenteed to last.

For the Catalyst's premise to make sense, for it to be believable, the game needed far more chaos, far more failures, far more cost. It needed to shake the player again and again, and make the player believe: "This universe is unsustainable."

And it didn't. The Mass Effect universe was incredibly, amazingly sustainable. And thus its offer was a false choice.

We only saw roughly 5 years of the Mass Effect world, and as I said before their cycle seemed relatively young (or at least underdeveloped) compared to those before it. It was sustainable for the relatively small number of races that could fly and lack of any real AI (most AIs were destroyed as soon as they were made, though many 'bad' ones ended up causing a good amount of chaos and destruction before being destroyed).

But there are a lot more species that were growing and developing. The old shadowbroker's race was one example of a powerful, intelligent, and dangerously violent race that could have easily caused problems later. Not to mention when available space finally did become limited for some species. It was sustainable from what we saw because there wasn't much to sustain. But populations would continue to grow, technology would continue to develop, and bad things would continue to happen. Just because the small section we saw was at peace at the end (a peace heavily influenced by the reapers to begin with) doesn't mean it always will be.

[JackSlack]

Alright, this will likely (read: hopefully) be the last time I post this much, because I really just want to ignore all of this now. But there are some points that are nagging me.

I'm going to go through your points in general, rather than respond to each one in turn.

--
But without Shepard, the galaxy is screwed!

If not for Shephard, all of those things would have ended badly for at least one involved party with heavy losses for the other side at best. Shephard won't be around forever, nor will his influence.

Except that the game goes out of its way to suggest that no, y'know what? Even when Shepard goes, others will pick up the mantle. Ashley Williams/Kaiden Alenko was clearly becoming an equal of Shepard's. James was taking his first steps down the past. Garrus had been there for a while now. (Seriously, c'mon. Garrus is a badass who shows every sign of, if he weren't in Shepard's shadow, being absolutely able to match him/her.)

Fine, you might say, but all of them died as well. But y'know what? There will be others. Shepard is not a unique snowflake, and I think that's a huge part of the reason for having so many characters become spectres/show themselves to be badasses in this final story. We see how much good the many people we've met are doing across the story, whether it's Jack becoming the surprising teacher, or James becoming a Moses like figure for Cerberus defectors. The last two games could get by on Shepard as uniquely awesome figure. (Indeed, the second game played heavily on it.) But this was the galaxy uniting. It had to show how many people were fighting like hell for it, and would never stop doing so.

Heck, even go into the history of it. Sure, the Rachni aren't synthetic. But it's the same deal. Rachni went nuts (probably Reapers, so their case here wouldn't be strong anyway) and they got the Krogan on them. Krogan became problem, Genophage.

Our galaxy works. Maybe not well. Maybe badly. Maybe with a lot of pain. But we don't get wiped out by anything, synthetic or otherwise. Solutions are found. There is no reason we ever see to imagine that another one would not be found for a hypothetical synthetic challenge.

--
But why would the Reapers leave? They could win in a second.

This is something that I hear people say should have been included. And you know what? It makes no sense at all. Why should the reapers stop? They would win.

Because it's not about stopping the Reapers at that point. Seriously. The moment you step onto the Crucible, the Reapers have lost. Control, Synthesise, or Destroy, they've lost the game. The Catalyst says as much. At this point it's simply this question:

How do we stop the synthetics from wiping out all organic life, now that the Reaper solution is no longer viable?

My problem is that they're not a solution. It's not a problem. This is something we see incredibly clearly throughout the game, as the many threats to the galaxy are resolved. That we are capable of solving our problems.

In many ways, in fact, this is one of the key problems with the ending. At the last moment, it swaps out the dramatic question of 'How do we stop the Reapers?' with 'How do we stop the inevitable extinction of all organic life at the hands of hypothetical synthetics?'; a question which wasn't really on the cards at all for at least 1 and a half games. (Ever since you picked up Legion, it stopped being on the cards.)

--
But there could be problems later on we've not yet foreseen!

But populations would continue to grow, technology would continue to develop, and bad things would continue to happen. Just because the small section we saw was at peace at the end (a peace heavily influenced by the reapers to begin with) doesn't mean it always will be.

And?

The galactic core could become unstable. That dark energy thing on Haestrom could turn out to be a matter obliterator. We could wind up creating a weaponized version of Thresher Maws that infects our nostils and provides gruesome wormy death en masse.

Life is uncertain, no questions there. But that's not unique to any grand equation, especially not the synthetics/organics conundrum. And it doesn't require a Reaper solution.

I stand my ground: It's a false dilemma.

Oh, and on another issue? I'm with Geoff B regarding the dreams. They're just stress. That's it. No, I can't explain why the Catalyst takes the child's form, but has anyone ELSE come up with a good explanation for it? I think we're all assuming there has to be a reason Bioware did it, and it might not be true.

[Geoff_B]

Woo! Someone agrees with me!

I do actually agree with a lot of what you say. Yes the Reapers are wrong, yes the galaxy is doing a great job of sorting itself out without their intervention. And yes their war against organics (for whatever reason) is actually bringing about the galaxy sorting itself out.

But they're still machines. They don't see it that way. Their programming is to wipe out life because they can't envisage the fact that organics and synthetics can co-exist peacefully, even though it happens right in front of them. The Reapers see it as preventing synthetic life from wiping out organic life (by wiping out organic life themselves - even for an AI that's dumb!) but in reality it's stopping the Reapers because what they're doing is no longer necessary.

Which is pretty much what you've already said. Except I don't see that the dilemma has changed - it's still about stopping the Reapers because they're making a mistake in executing an unnecessary plan.

Oh and the business about people taking up Shepard's mission should Shepard fall? If that was the case then why is it not possible to import a save from ME2 if Shepard dies? You could still import a save from that and have another named character take on the role building on what Shepard has already done (lot more work involved but it could still happen story-wise). Instead what you can say here is that Shepard dies and his long-lost brother/cousin/whatever takes on the role and fails horribly at it due to a lot of the stuff that can go wrong if you haven't played the previous games). Yes Shepard is just one person, but so were a lot of great people in history.

[JackSlack]

Which is pretty much what you've already said. Except I don't see that the dilemma has changed - it's still about stopping the Reapers because they're making a mistake in executing an unnecessary plan.

This is a tricky one to me: I find myself having to turn to artistic intent to argue the point. So I'm going to argue this twice, once the way I feel (which relies on artistic intent, flawed as it is) and on its own reading.

1. I don't believe Bioware meant it to be still about stopping the Reapers at that point. Because if they did, then frankly, synthesis is a terrible choice, and control is arguable at best. Destruction is the only worthwhile option, the only one that truly, for certain, stops the Reapers. Your position mirrors that of Duckay, for what it's worth, and I know this was more or less her logic for choosing destruction.

But I can't believe that was Bioware's intent: The scenario is presented to make all three options appear reasonable (indeed, the only reason that the 'oh, but it'll also kill all synthetic life' addition to the Destroy option is there, in my opinion, is to stop it from being the grand total winner, to make it seem less appealing) rather than to make it seem to be a calculation. It's clearly aimed at being a moral choice rather than a tactical one.

2. From a ludic perspective, it makes more thematic sense for it to have shifted rather than shell-gamed (that is, it may appear to have shifted but it's still truly about the Reapers). As noted above, if you assume it to have genuinely shifted to the new dilemma, this puts it squarely as a moral choice rather than a tactical one. This kind of moral dilemma has been at the heart of Mass Effect from word go, and it makes sense to end on one.

Oh and the business about people taking up Shepard's mission should Shepard fall? If that was the case then why is it not possible to import a save from ME2 if Shepard dies?

Because it's Shepard's story. Yes, someone else might have picked up the torch and run, but that's not the story Mass Effect is choosing to tell.

Edit: I like this piece on the controversy, BTW.

[Geoff_B]

Just spotted this on PCGamer

So it looks like it'll be something more than epilogue text.

[Lemegeton]

finally finished mass effect 3, and on insanity no less. thats me2 and me3 beaten on insanity. pretty proud of myself. as for the ending dont know where to start, i still believe that the shitstorm was overboard and i didnt hate the ending. however some complaints make sense.

a mega-happy ending with reapers beaten and everyone goes home would have been boring. i applaud bioware for going high concept and going above the fates of the normany crew. but the execution of their ending sucked and was downright lazy. the whole 3 choices bit was ripped straight from deus ex. and then there was no effort to make each ending distinct. i still loved the series and the story was great along the way. i agonized over some of the moral choices and any game that achieves that level of investment is a winner.

i still dont "hate" the ending, i think bioware had the right idea but executed it very poorly. it stinks of the ending being changed late in the dev cycle and then it was rushed.


*** OK i have watched the indoctrination theory stuff and it makes perfect sense and while this would be a win for biowares writers it would also piss me off even more than if they had just made a sloppy ending. Why? 2 reasons.

1. Mass Effect 3 is an incomplete game and story if IT is true. by all means hold back maps,characters, modes...etc for DLC but the minute a dev starts holding back STORY for DLC then thats a bad fucking road for this industry to go down.

2. There is just no way that as a ps3 gamer i would have picked up on a lot of the clues and hints that support IT having only played ME2 and ME3. A good portion of the IT ties into events from ME1 so for me the only way i would have noticed these was to buy an xbox. Fuck You bioware. If IT is confirmed then PS3 gamers were given a raw deal.

so i'm conflicted now. as a fan of the series and of great stories i want IT to be confirmed but as a consumer i will extremely pissed off.