Extra Smooth Balls posted:

Plus it makes Joker look like a bit of a dick.
They could have easily added a couple of lines of shep telling him to bug out if things look bad and let the rest of the galaxy prepare for the worst.

hobbesmaster posted:

Yeah, except we saw galaxy wide shockwaves and the Normandy being being wrecked by one of those shockwaves.

Spikeguy posted:

I played a couple of mp matches so I was able to get my score up to 6k. So I'm playing the ending again and I noticed something that was mentioned here. Some wondered how your squad mates got back to the Normandy if they were zapped by the laser with me. They weren't with me. In fact, they stayed all the way at the beginning and didn't run. I ran backwards the whole time to see if they ever moved. They do not. And here is what I take from that. When you warp up to space, Anderson says he came in behind you. I think your squad mates were back there with him, ready to go in another wave along with Major Coats. Just something I noticed.

Jarmel posted:

Jarmel posted:

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Having watched all the endings, I think the big beam of death that shoots through the galaxy is supposed to be the effect of Shepard's choice, which might suggest that only the Earth's relay actually exploded. Not that it makes the ending much better.

None of this fixes the problem that there's no sense of closure for anything else that happened in the game. Or that it's a lovely ending no matter what.

Slim Killington posted:

Maybe this is a different type of "explosion" as far as relays are concerned since it's triggered by the crucible, and the event doesn't impact planets. Hell it's possible, the magic crucible blastwave doesn't effect anything planetside at all.

Slim Killington posted:

The catalyst tells you flat-out that either of the side choices will destroy all the relays, and there's a cinematic in the middle of either ending that shows them daisy-chain exploding.

ImpAtom posted:

The crucible waves at least do influence things planetside since the plants in the Synthesis ending are part-robot too.

Seriously, *every living thing in existence* is part-robot. How does that poo poo even work?

CrushedB posted:

3Romeo posted:

I gimped my Shepard's broken rear end all the way to the right and thought, "You know, I think I'd rather control the Reapers, since this is red and the other one's blue, and Paragon is blue, even though it was the Illusive Man's choice, but whatever," and started hobbling the loving Green Mile over there and halfway across the platform I got a message that said The Crucible has been destroyed, (lol?). Of course I was pissed off, because that slow motion movement got old really fast, so I said gently caress it and went with my initial choice the second time and was trolled again by the actual ending, which was pretty witty, I thought; shoulda know I'd've had a lovely ending going with the red tube. So! Intrepid, undaunted, I thought I'd load up my last saved game and do the Paragon ending, which I should have done in the first place except, you know, I was kinda pissed off and all, and to my surprise(!) my last system-saved game (because you never have the option to manually save anywhere in the last twenty minutes) was before I did the mad dash at the end of London, which meant I'd again have to go through every loving slow motion scene a second time, which involved everything up to (and including) the Illusive Man having a bullet for free.

So I alt-tabbed and watched the other ending on Youtube and was trolled a record four times in the space of fifteen minutes. It was a rewarding experience all around, I dare say, A++, would download Origin again.

Ambiguatron posted:

The one consistent rule is that awesome poo poo happens. All three games were filled with awesome poo poo. In this game, I all but surfed a thresher maw into a reaper and blew it up. At the beginning of the game. The sheer amount of went up and up through the entire game, until I arrived at the end. A blue kid walked out and said "lol you lose, pick the color you want for the explosion that kills everyone and fucks your poo poo".

A happy ending needn't have been the only ending, but it should have been available. Maybe even hard to get, all but requiring a second playthrough. Some closure would be nice, too, beyond "these three apparently random characters survived, have a good time not knowing what happened to the hundreds of others you interacted with".

The biggest objections to the endings is that while they claim there's 17 variations there are in fact three, and they all resemble non-standard game over screens.

As it stands, every ending is a loss, and that is equally as stupid as if every ending was a win.

Ash1138 posted:

Compared to what we got, I'd be cool with going up the beam, the screen turning white, then in bold, black letters:

A WINNAR IS YOU!!!

Ash1138 posted:

Compared to what we got, I'd be cool with going up the beam, the screen turning white, then in bold, black letters:

A WINNAR IS YOU!!!

Ash1138 posted:

Compared to what we got, I'd be cool with going up the beam, the screen turning white, then in bold, black letters:

A WINNAR IS YOU!!!

thumb posted:

Aristobulus,

All the points you've made about the logical effects of blowing up the relays are well-taken and I had the same reaction when I saw that. But in terms of sheet bullshit, it's nothing compared to "Mass Effect was just grandpa telling a tall tale." That's equivalent to saying that absolutely nothing matters and all of it may be false. It's right up there with "it was all a dream". I couldn't believe that scene, and I think it suggests that the "hallucination" theory is false. At the very least, it would be weird to call in Buzz Aldren to be the voice of a reaper hallucination about grandpa story time.

Chomposaur posted:

They could have totally rocked an NES Ghostbusters style ending:

Stolpmeister posted:

I haven't played ME3 (and probably won't), but do they ever explain what the Reapers were really up to in ME2?

Plan A: Tried and true sneak attack through the mass relay.
Plan B: Build a human Reaper!
Plan C: Frontal assault.

B just doesn't seem to fit.

Stolpmeister posted:

Plan A: Tried and true sneak attack through the mass relay.
Plan B: Build a human Reaper!
Plan C: Frontal assault.

B just doesn't seem to fit.

Slim Killington posted:

Reapers are a storage unit for whatever species are consumed during the cycle, a galaxy-wide organic purge put into place eons ago as a result of the first organic-synthetic war when sentient synthetics figured out that this eventuality would continue forever if a "solution" weren't created. The reapers are the solution. The "existence" of harvested species are "stored" in reaper form and they take the shape of the purged lifeforms from that cycle.

Slim Killington posted:

Reapers are a storage unit for whatever species are consumed during the cycle, a galaxy-wide organic purge put into place eons ago as a result of the first organic-synthetic war when sentient synthetics figured out that this eventuality would continue forever if a "solution" weren't created. The reapers are the solution. The "existence" of harvested species are "stored" in reaper form and they take the shape of the purged lifeforms from that cycle.

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

I just want the Reapers to explode, be reunited with the Normandy, hug my love interest and make a wiseass report to the Council. Then the credits roll and they end with those words from the Bond film credits: COMMANDER SHEPARD WILL RETURN

fivegears4reverse posted:

You seriously don't see the problem with this mindset?

"THE SHOCKWAVES DESTROYED EVERYTHING!...EXCEPT FOR THE NORMANDY which kinda only got hurt and collapsed somewhere on the set for Lost."

Psyker posted:

And even further, they established prior that the individuals stored within the Reaper maintain their individual consciousness. With that said, the strictures would probably force them towards a common goal.

hobbesmaster posted:

Well, I take that back, TIM being indoctrinated could been seen from the second the character was introduced.

hobbesmaster posted:

Well depending on how many troops you rallied to your side that shockwave could also have just destroyed Earth.

Nothing related to the ending makes any sense whatsoever.

Well, I take that back, TIM being indoctrinated could been seen from the second the character was introduced.

Extra Smooth Balls posted:

I feel kind of sorry for the individuals forced to become reapers, imagine being forced to participate in the slaughter of billions over and over again, and then having to sit in dark space and dwell on it for the next 50k years.

Slim Killington posted:

Was TIM meant to be indoctrinated that long ago? I didn't get that he was and it was a very slow, building process, I got it more that he underwent his own indoctrination procedure after all else failed down there on Sanctuary as the final step needed to be the control for the reapers.

Slim Killington posted:

Was TIM meant to be indoctrinated that long ago? I didn't get that he was and it was a very slow, building process, I got it more that he underwent his own indoctrination procedure after all else failed down there on Sanctuary as the final step needed to be the control for the reapers.

Slim Killington posted:

I can't understand the public outcry for a straightforward happy ending. To me at least, that would cheapen the effort so much. To go through all that hard work, and no sacrifice was necessary at all? Everything's great, let's all go back to how it was?