Palleon posted:

The only rationale I could think of is that if we accept the logic of "anything created will eventually turn on its creators", and then decide "everything is the same so there are no creators or createes any more", then everything is fine. And then we ignore the fact that cyborgs can still create things, because he said the issue was with creations, not the fact that one was synthetic and one was organic.

So no, it doesn't make any sense.

RedneckwithGuns posted:

No matter how god awful the endings are, if I forget they ever happened nothing can take away the fact that I made peace between the Quarians and Geth. That whole sequence of Legion sacrificing himself to give the Geth individuality and then peace with the Quarians was the high point of the entire game to me.

I'll miss you bro-bot

Slim Killington posted:

So you want an ending that holds your hand like a Hollywood movie being written down so a 10-year-old can understand, I get it now.

Slim Killington posted:

This is not an ending at all. The same cycle of creating synthetics and the eventual purge of chaos will continue. You're saying it's okay because this "ending" shows you the immediate results instead of the big picture? You stop the Reapers, everything's back to normal, the end, yay? That's satisfying? Sure, to a child maybe.

Slim Killington posted:

^^^ Says the illiterate.


Something's only as deep as you make it. I enjoyed my experience with the series, so I feel bad for you. Stick to shallower games.

randombattle posted:

Man Gurren Lagann is absolutely 100% Mass Effect the anime. The whole point of the bad guy's story is "We are more advanced then you and if you advance too far you put the galaxy in danger so we will stomp you out before that happens." To which the heroes go "gently caress you we are strong enough to decide life for ourselves! As long as we work towards the future with each step we can protect the galaxy!"

It is absolutely the ending Mass Effect should have had. Shepard should have punched Harbinger in the face to end the battle.

Slim Killington posted:

If it's easier for people to call me a troll, then call me a troll. I just know there's a difference between "THIS ENDING IS BAD THEY CANT WRITE LOL" and "I don't like it." The ending is fine, whether you can appreciate it for what it is or not. It's not a great ending, I said that. But no ending was going to be.

My first statement was that what really mattered lied in appreciating the journey. I didn't say BioWare intended that, I said that it mattered and that it's what you should've been doing. If you failed to do so, then again, I feel bad for you.

TheJoker138 posted:

Technogeek posted:

Personally, I'd be satisfied with Shepard getting into an argument with the Reaper hologram kid that ended with the Reapers choosing to self-destruct because of how badly they lost the debate. Aside from the obvious parallels to Saren/TIM, you could have the very last line of dialogue be "I guess I owe you an apology, Admiral. I really did end up talking the Reapers to death."

randombattle posted:

My way!

Don't care if it is unrealistic and not logical and isn't grimdark! I will play some Warhammer if I want grimdark sadness.

TheJoker138 posted:

But you quickly, quickly descended into it without making any actual points. The only point you even attempted to make is the old "it's the journey, not the destination" one, which was quickly rebutted by the fact that if the ending makes the journey not matter at all, then yes, the ending does matter. If Lord of the Rings had ended with them getting to the mountain, about to throw the ring in, but then God came down and was like "yo, I know you wanted to throw that ring in there, but I'm just going to destroy the entire planet, including Sauron and his forces, and all of you, ok c'ya" that would not be a good ending. That would be a bad ending that is completely divorced of anything that had come before it in the series, thematically, plot wise, or in any other way. That is almost exactly what they did with this.

Amateur Saboteur posted:

That's cute how you singled that ending out like it somehow makes significantly less sense than the other 2.

MisterBibs posted:

I don't like the ending(s), but I sincerely think a minor tweak would have rendered a lot of the complaints null and void.

All you had to do was reveal that there have been previous Cycles where the Reapers were persuaded to not do their 'duty', and that all of those Cycles met the end the Reapers warned them about.

This and the other thread are filled with people citing the Quarian/Geth peace, or the Krogan/Turian peace. Instead of ignoring that, as Bioware did, this minor twist would build off that. Shep could argue that these examples of peace show that the Reapers are wrong, but Catalyst could respond with a list of Cycles in which said peace didn't last.

Instead of portraying the Reapers as doing an ill-thought out action on the behest of one race's assumption (namely, that Synthetics and Organics can't live together), this change would portray the Reapers as doing something to prevent things that have happened thousands of times. It'd make players wonder if breaking the Reaper Cycle is the right thing to do. After all, aside from a line in Catalyst's files, the AI/Creator races in Cycle 524543 don't exist. If they had been Reaperized, they would have survived in some form.

It would have made the choices presented not ones you want to pick, but ones you have to pick. They all break the Reaper Cycle, but at a horrible cost. Hell, add in a "Just Destroy The Reapers" ending, and end it on a note that nobody is sure that the peace created will survive in the next five minutes.


I completely agree. The cliche of the Long Dead Distant Loving Precursor happens a lot in science fiction, and bringing that concept down a peg was brilliant.

Flatscan posted:

Sounds just as bent to me, to be honest.

ImpAtom posted:

The problem really is that introducing the conflict in the last 10 minutes makes no sense.

If you want the game to built up to "synthetics will inevitably replace humans, this must be stopped," you have to introduce this beforehand, have to make it feel inevitable, and have to make it feel like a bad thing. Bioware fails at all three.

They do introduce the Geth. However, the entire point of the Geth is that they had no interest in replacing anyone. They wanted to leave in peace as a sentient species and the Quarians had a inexplicable freakout and tried to murder them all.

They failed at maxing it inevitable. The Geth were superior to the Quarians (and could have wiped them out), but there is little reason to believe the Geth could have defeated all the forces of the galaxy. Even if you make the argument that some FUTURE robot could have done that, the player has no reason to believe it.

Third, they failed to push it as a bad enough thing to be concerned about. One of the repeated things that comes up with EDI and Geth is that they are effectively sentient beings for every way that matters. Even Tali, who has effectively a religious hatred of the Geth, admits Legion is right to claim a soul. So "synthetics may destroy the organics" is a threat in the same way "Krogans may wipe out all other life" is. It would suck for other species but maybe not enough to justify 50,000 year cycles of endless culling.

To make the player want to utterly destroy galactic civilization to save it, they have to believe it is necessary. You can't introduce a plotline where, if the player tries REALLY HARD, they can make peace between organics and synthetics and then later on go "FYI, that's impossible."

Dominic White posted:

A lot of the ending anger I'm seeing here seems to stem from this bizarre assumption that everyone dies, the galaxy is hosed and the game is actually a grand tragedy.

I'm reminded of the people that are convinced that the original Star Wars trilogy actually ended with Endor burning and everyone on the planet dying a horrible, slow (or fast, depending on how much Death Star landed) death.

While not lollipops and rainbows, the best ending shows the Reapers leaving peacefully, troops cheering in the streets (completely unharmed by the energy wave, too), and the Geth fleet just chilling there in space, undamaged. The entire visual tone set there is 'You win, everyone is saved, pat on the back'.

You didn't just nuke the galaxy and throw it into a new dark age. That's retarded.

Flatscan posted:

He's controlling Anderson too, who has no Reaper implants.

MadJackMcJack posted:

That was because a wormhole opened up and sucked all the debris away. I WISH I was kidding.

Kainser posted:

There was an ogre statue in Kasumis loyality mission in ME2 as well. But yeah, it's just a bad injoke.

ImpAtom posted:

The problem comes from the fact that is the Catalyst shockwave. People are discussing the Relay shockwave, which is never shown because the last shot is the Relays exploding.

As I said, I don't agree that is what was intended and not what anyone at Bioware is going to say actually happened. Bioware just should have meshed better with their Arrival DLC so players didn't get that impression.


You saved some false Rachni. That happens if you killed the original in ME1.

Galewolf posted:

I, on a whim, quit the game a spoiled the endings in couple of minutes. Now i can't make myself to play it because "it is about the journey" statement is bullshit when the journey ends up in the shitter. Also, why bother with scanning planets or even doing missions when i can just edit the .ini file (as suggested on the game thread) for a single asset having million billion rating since i was going for Destroy ending.

Come to think of it, Mass Effect -technically- is a semi-clunky Gears of War style cover shooter with space magic which something i don't even like much. Without a story to follow or care, i don't feel the urge to play it.

Galewolf posted:

Yeah the fluff is nice but i can't get over the fact that they ultimately mean jack poo poo. From what i understand assets don't even come up in specific places like Marines helping you to hold some chokpoint or Alliance Exploration Flotilla doing something heroic. It boils down to, as it seems, people biting it by the million in a cutscene while you and couple of nerds talk it out and push a button at the end.

Nitrousoxide posted:

They can't continue the universe without either making 2 skins or having a filter to apply for every single race in a next game thanks to the synthesis vs. other two endings.

Which likely means that at least one of the endings won't be cannon.

Which is even better since it'll make your "choice" even less meaningful.

Man-Thing posted:

I'm still absolutely gobsmacked that I told a reporter that she couldn't come along on my stealth ship and in doing so locked myself out of a squad member (and the only romanceable member for me) about two hours into the game.

Doflamingo posted:

Anyone post this yet? http://browse.deviantart.com/?q=mas...set=24#/d4sg5y0

We may get an epilogue after all..

Man-Thing posted:

Apparently not, but my point about romance stands. And what the gently caress, ME2 introduced all these great characters, and then the entire ME3 squad is just ME1's crew, minus Wrex? Tali died in my ME2, so she was out, and I loving hate Kaiden, so I sent him to Alliance high command.
I learned my lesson from Battlestar Galactica about allowing reporters on my ships.

Jarmel posted:

I mean all of this is not assuming the obvious issues such as an Arrival style explosion wiping out all major population centers mainly because everybody would be dead.

fivegears4reverse posted:

Which explicitly did not happen if you had your EMS high enough.

Until Bioware comes out and actually says 'Oh yeah, the relays blowing up destroyed the galaxy, good job hero!', there is NO VISUAL EVIDENCE TO SUGGEST THIS HAPPENS IN ALL OF THE ENDINGS.

CaptainCarrot posted:

Female Shepard can romance Traynor, Male Shepard can romance Cortez, both of them can romance Liara. I'm pretty sure your entire point about romance is incorrect.

NmareBfly posted:

I didn't want to go back and check but at one point I noticed that EDI's white outfit had a REALLY OBVIOUS cameltoe. Like, I'm pretty sure I could see her whole robovagina. Might have been a graphical glitch or something to do with the lighting, pretty sure I was on an elevator when I noticed.

Besides that, she was handled a bit better than I thought she'd be. I still want to know why the gently caress the Normandy crew always puts dead robots on the bench in the AI core, because it seems to me you'd want them in a sealed room with no network jacks. Maybe they know more about space cybersecurity than I.

CaptainCarrot posted:

Yes, but Crucible destruction!=asteroid destruction, and it makes a very limited amount of sense for the energy that destroyed the system in Arrival to be converted into the colored light and beamed to the other relays in the end. The only risk to the systems with relays should be the debris, not the explosion itself.

The Grimace posted:

Everyone who was on the Citadel probably got escorted by a Keeper into one of those lovely little blood piles you see in the corridors at the end of the game, rounding them up to be processed by the Reapers. And those that still lived during all this, they all would die when the Citadel would explode with the Mass Relays and poo poo. Pretty much everyone on the Citadel is hosed.

Man-Thing posted:

Actually, I kinda didn't like the "ME2 Greatest Hits" style side missions. While it was neat to recruit some of them, it always felt a little... fanservicey?

fivegears4reverse posted:

I was talking about the supposed death shockwave that people keep saying is supposed to kill the galaxy/solar systems when the game itself A) doesn't show this (but people keep insisting this is a possibility), B) We see the galaxy covered by these shockwaves, yet we still get space grandpa, and C) if you have the EMS high enough and chose a certain ending, Earth, basically next door to a relay, is fine.

I agree that the endings are incredibly vague and poorly handled, but what's happening now is people are arguing whether or not their interpretation is correct, based on incredibly flimsy evidence coupled with pure imagination.

There's a lot we don't know, and it sucks. It doesn't get better if you think about it and start trying to consider things the games barely acknowledge for themselves.

CrushedB posted:

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.

Malrauxs Place posted:

I may be misremembering, but I'm fairly sure he was shown coming into contact with a reaper artifact and walking away with his eyes all glowy in one of those terrible comics books that came out shortly after ME2.

Malrauxs Place posted:

Yeah, what makes people mad isn't the lack of a happy ending, it's that all agency was taken away from them during the last moments of a trilogy for which 'choice' was a major selling point.