Avocados posted:

Spikeguy posted:

The way I look at it is this. This is a game. I play games to have fun. I am having fun playing this game again after beating it. Function fulfilled. Even if I think the endings could have been better, it doesn't matter. This is how they wanted to end their series and I think they have their right to that. Fans can decide if they hate it enough not to buy anymore Bioware games. But I hope they do, because I love Bioware games.

Dolphin Fetus posted:

is it possible to romance Diana Allers too if you're a fem-sheep?

ilifin posted:

I do want to be proven wrong here though, can you get variations?

Dan Didio posted:

That would be a bhhhhaaaaaa-d idea.

Pladdicus posted:

It was prolly canned because that sounds really dumb.

Shepard: Hey you Reapers get out of here
Reapers: Oh poo poo, lets go, he looks mad.

(I dunno why, but there are better endings)

Internet Kraken posted:

If you raise your preparedness score above 5000 and pick the destroy ending, you get a brief clip of Shepard gasping for breath implying that he survives. That's it.

Quality!

HappyKittens posted:

I remember reading from the leaked script that there was originally supposed to a ending where Shepard simply sends reapers back to the dark space where they will wait another 50K years and return presumbly to a much more prepared galaxy. What happened to that?

HappyKittens posted:

I would prefer that to what we have now.

Psyker posted:

But Shep doesn't die doing that. Shep basically does what the Reapers do - adds his/her consciousness to Catalyst/Crucible and assumes direct control. Shepard, in turn, becomes a heavily-armed intergalactic peacekeeper.

At least, that's one way to write it off?

Crappy Jack posted:

The sheer amount of people coming up with better ideas off the top of their heads means that Bioware had to actively work to make an ending this disappointing.

ilifin posted:

Is that the only variation of all the three endings? Amazing. Why did I even bother doing sidequests?

Actually, do you end up in the chat alone with Anderson and TIM, your squad surviving and you not dragging yourself half-dead to the beam, if you are above 5000 readiness?

MadRhetoric posted:

Content: What sniper rifle do people who've run through the game think is the best? I've got my eye on the Black Widow, but it's mad expensive. I'm running a gimmicky Adept built for Zero-G sniping.

Pladdicus posted:

Toned down because I don't want to super spoil it for you. Ending poo poo:
There are three endings. Red, Blue, and Green. In Red the Reapers explode, in Blue humans get glowy lines. In Red ending with 5k EMS, Shepard breaths at the end.

MadRhetoric posted:

Or Bioware didn't fully think through the repercussions of everything that happens in their endings and Mass Effect fans have always been through the looking glass no matter where. It's like watching weird anime fans, only nobody's started outing themselves as pedophiles yet.

For gently caress's sake people are writing fanfiction about this. A distressing amount of people are talking about being mad because they don't get to have blue space babies (when back during ME1 and 2, Liara's ~uguu~ness and the Asari were the Dumb Mass Effect Thing du jour). It's getting to be that the only difference between Goons and BSN about this is the BSN people are funny stupid.

Content: What sniper rifle do people who've run through the game think is the best? I've got my eye on the Black Widow, but it's mad expensive. I'm running a gimmicky Adept built for Zero-G sniping.

ilifin posted:

No, give me the super spoiler. I want to know how it ends out just so I can justify playing my planned Tali romance male Shepard 100% paragon.

Crappy Jack posted:

I mean, that could work as a "bad" ending, like if you didn't have enough preparedness the best Shepard can do is to make the Reapers run away, but nothing's actually solved and maybe the galaxy is majorly hosed up in the meantime; do better and you blow up the whole fleet with the power of friendship or something, I don't care. At least it fits the universe somewhat and doesn't start throwing themes at you five minutes from the end.

Pladdicus posted:

It was prolly canned because that sounds really dumb.

Shepard: Hey you Reapers get out of here
Reapers: Oh poo poo, lets go, he looks mad.

(I dunno why, but there are better endings)

Merry Magpie posted:

Ah! Dan Didio do you mind asking a couple questions?

quote:

I looked at the war asset files and saw something concerning Quarian Admiral "I cannot recall her name but the mad scientist" and a decision that can give you a war asset. Is that still in the game?

quote:

Also, does a certain doctor only grant a war asset if I pick the renegade option for Overlord?

ImpAtom posted:

You either
A) Control the Reapers, Shepard dies
B) Kill the Reapers and all AI life, Shepard lives or dies.
C) Turn everyone into a ~half robot~

ilifin posted:

Okay so this means I just don't need to do anything then. I'm done with this game. It's amazing how I went from merrily mixing up some food before starting the final mission and thinking "man, this was so fun to play" to now wishing I never did play.

MadRhetoric posted:

Content: What sniper rifle do people who've run through the game think is the best? I've got my eye on the Black Widow, but it's mad expensive. I'm running a gimmicky Adept built for Zero-G sniping.

Pladdicus posted:

No, seriously. Play it. It's really good, and the last bit of the game, in my opinion, was frickin' great. The ending is not bad enough to make the rest of the game unfun, it's just a terrible ending. Stop before the end, watch the alternate ending someone cut on youtube and call it a day. Or stop before the end and call it a day.

Pladdicus posted:

No, seriously. Play it. It's really good, and the last bit of the game, in my opinion, was frickin' great. The ending is not bad enough to make the rest of the game unfun, it's just a terrible ending. Stop before the end, watch the alternate ending someone cut on youtube and call it a day. Or stop before the end and call it a day.

thepopstalinist posted:

Has it been explained how and why the Normandy fled Earth, made it to the Mass Relay, and entered interstellar transit while the siege of the Citadel was underway? Did they have someplace better to be while the final fight for the fate of the galaxy was being fought? Also, what happened to all the sapient species in the Citadel on the way from where its nebula to the Sol system?

There are some real KOTOR2-caliber "wait what?" gems in this finale

Dolash posted:

At risk of firing up arguments we went through already, it might be worth reiterating about the Reaper motivation that the Reapers are the solution to the problem that organic life sooner or later makes synthetic life strong enough to overcome it, meaning they'll sooner or later cause all organic life to be destroyed by it - the only way they could think of to stop it long-term (as in billions of years) was to cull any civilization advanced enough to make synthetic intelligence.

You see, much as our challenge with nuclear weapons today, synthetic intelligence is an ever-present doomsday scenario for organic life. It doesn't matter if you settle peace with the Geth or teach EDI to respect life, because organic life itself has to persist over billions of years. There will be countless civilizations that rise and fall, wax and wane in that time and it only takes one to make an out-of-control AI obsessed with wiping out organics and then lose that war to extinguish organic life permanently. This is the chaos, and the Reapers are a check on this chaos.

4000 Dollar Suit posted:

I'd be down, that was basically the ending to Babylon 5, barring all that pesky resistance crap in s5.

ilifin posted:

Wait, what? I just finished playing the game with a 32 hour playthrough. I'm just not going to play it again as male Shepard since I won't be able to experience it any differently just because of trying to be completist or not.

Jimbot posted:

You can't reward sacrifice with more sacrifice, especially when the core theme of all the Mass Effect games is hope. Shepard does the impossible in the previous two games and you, the players, aren't allowed to do the impossible in the end. If Shepard destroyed the Reapers without destroying civilization and came out alive, it would have been a huge payoff. Ultimiately, wheather Shepard lived or died should have been the sum of all your decisions in the game up to that point instead of those three arbitrary, out-of-nowhere crap ones you get at the end. It was contrary to the themes of the game.

etjester posted:

What's the over/under on the amount of time until everyone stops talking about how bad the ending is? How long are those stages of grief supposed to take?

Pladdicus posted:

God no. Oh man, no. Quarian/Geth good ending is as follows(arguably)

If you fought for peace in 2 and did both missions in 3 before the last one AND have max rep, or near max, you tell him to upload the code and at the point where you can cancel the upload you instead pick Para/Rene option and convince the fleet to GTFO. Saving the day. The Geth get upgraded, and return the planet to the Quarians, helping them resettle, helping fix their immune system and everything. Oh! And you need to rescue the peace captain instead of his men

Defiance Industries posted:

So, here's a thought that's been running around in my mind:

(Spoilers up to Thessia)

The Protheans started laying plans to stop the Reapers in the next cycle, right? I mean, they left the Crucible plans, modified the Keepers, and placed beacons with warnings. Seems to me, the asari were part of that plan. We know the Protheans observed them from Javik's comments. Well, I think they left that beacon there to run the asari up the technological ladder faster. They didn't leave beacons on most of the races' homeworlds, but one nearby, like Mars. But the asari were different in that the Protheans not only left them a beacon on their planet but directly intervened in their development by educating them. Their reason is pretty straight-foward: Thessia has latent element zero that the asari and other native life have adapted to, so they're all biotics. The husks that Reapers used as their standard shock troop are really ineffective against them because of it, which is why the Reapers started making Marauders and Cannibals and such.

Of course, that didn't really work out for them, but I think that was the Protheans' plan for them.

Casimir Radon posted:

Oh, and Cerberus:
Having TIM's motivations due in large part to being indoctrinated was kind of cheap. Keeping Cerberus as a selfish, immoral, human-supremacist organization works much better. It's not to say they shouldn't have been loving around with Reaper-tech, it's just that having them be a foil to Shepard trying to unite everyone works so much better.