Mass Effect 3 SPOILER THREAD: LOTS OF SPECULATION FROM EVERYONE

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I got a question for those who read the leaked script last year: Did you ever imagine the shitstorm (at least from fans) would be this big?

No, partly because from what I saw, it wasn't nearly as bad as the final product.


My biggest problem was that it seemed too Earth-centric.
 
So, stepping off the "fuck that ending" wagon for a moment: what's up with the Normandy in the Mass Relay? Weren't they supposed to be fighting above Earth, or something?
 
It is not a plot hole if it isn't in the game, which it isn't. Cut content is cut content. It is no longer canon and should not be treated as such.

It still kinda is a plot hole though. I mean why and how they got to the Normandy and crash landed there and come out 100% fine isn't explained at all. If they were hit like Shepard and the rest of Hammer then they'd be dead or dying yet Tali (in my game) walked out 100% fine.
 
ME1 really had the best final boss of the series.

Every moment in the game was building up to a confrontation with Saren and Saren + Reaper Tech was just strong enough to really force Shepard on to his heels.

Saren and Sovereign were awesome antagonists, Bioware never really replicated that in the sequels. Dare say they hoped Kai Leng would be held in the same light, but we all know how that turned out. Illusive man didn't turn out too badly in the end, glad they didn't turn him into the reaper monster seen in the art book.

If anybody is going to the panel in a group of three, could you please dress up as red, blue, and green?

I'm hoping this guy turns up with the exact same expression.

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I like how every single video ive seen, people roll into the final mission with Liara and Garrus.

Lol, I did the same.
Except when I first got to earth, I used vega because he was always whining about how much he wanted to take back earth - what a mistake that was, such a boring character.
Luckily I had a chance to rectify my mistake.
 
So, stepping off the "fuck that ending" wagon for a moment: what's up with the Normandy in the Mass Relay? Weren't they supposed to be fighting above Earth, or something?

They were supposed to yes.


And since the pulse happened almost instantly, Joker would have had to be running before he saw the pulse.
 
So, stepping off the "fuck that ending" wagon for a moment: what's up with the Normandy in the Mass Relay? Weren't they supposed to be fighting above Earth, or something?

Joker lost his nerve and ran away after picking up your squadmate on battle-torn Earth in time for him to get on a relay and crash land on some verdant jungle planet.
 
It still kinda is a plot hole though. I mean why and how they got to the Normandy and crash landed there and come out 100% fine isn't explained at all. If they were hit like Shepard and the rest of Hammer then they'd be dead or dying yet Tali (in my game) walked out 100% fine.

That is indeed the plot hole. But the cut content is not.
 
So, stepping off the "fuck that ending" wagon for a moment: what's up with the Normandy in the Mass Relay? Weren't they supposed to be fighting above Earth, or something?

I guess you could argue that you don't really know how much time Shepard really spent on the Citadel so they could have gone and picked your squad up and then saw that *insert color here* beam and then got the fuck out of there
 
There are other squadmates?

I liked most of the squad mates thoughout the series, but there is no doubt that Garrus/Liara was my A team throughout. They worked brilliantly with my Engineer and they were my two favourite characters story-wise to boot.

In ME3 I had to force myself to use the others every now and then. It was awesome when I went to the squad select screen and realized I had used James (ugh) and Ashley (snore) or something last mission so I felt OK rolling into the next one with my favs.
 
Joker lost his nerve and ran away after picking up your squadmate on battle-torn Earth in time for him to get on a relay and crash land on some verdant jungle planet.

Which seems pretty odd that that would happen when Joker has been a real trooper in the past on various dangerous missions and even risked his life to save the ship when everyone else was dead or evacuated.
 
So, stepping off the "fuck that ending" wagon for a moment: what's up with the Normandy in the Mass Relay? Weren't they supposed to be fighting above Earth, or something?

No one really knows what happens there. Sometimes your ground squad is magically on the Normandy and apparently Joker catches a small dose of bitch mode and tries to flee the area for some reason (where the fuck was he trying to go?).

It's another huge gap in the ending that needed to be filled.
 
Shep dying is not the issue. I think the issues are the following.

-The whole not knowing anything that happened. (Relays? Civilizations?)

-My teammates on the ground assault (Garrus Liara) ended up on the normandy.

-Garrus is gonna starve to death on that planet.

-The three choices are completely goofed.

The real issue for me has become that bioware did it on purpose. They deserve everything they get.
 
As a writer, I can understand the desire to not do something expected. If everyone sees the ending coming a mile away (in this case, Reapers get destroyed and everything is awesome), then your instinct as a creator of artistic content is to take a left turn from the expectations and do something surprising.

While this is fine (there are plenty of video games that I love that have twist endings), you have to make sure you do it well. You can't create surprise by conflicting with the established fiction. You can't do it by making characters act contrary to how they normally do (or in the case of Shepard, simply not giving you a choice to act at all).

Basically, at every possible turn that Walters could have made a surprise ending good, he fumbled. And he doesn't even know he fumbled.

The sad thing is, doing the assumed ending in stuff like this is fine. Whereas a standard "Reapers are dead, let's all look at the galaxy" Empire Strikes Back-style ending would have emphasized how much the Mass Effect series was about the journey, Mass Effect 3's actual ending went back and denigrated the journey itself in addition to not providing a good close to it.

Currently it seems to me that the EXPECTED ending would be death as well as the UNEXPECTED ending. Media right now is filled with sacrifice stories, and awesome we won stories. Makes far more sense, to me, to have many endings with both kinds. Even if it was 2 with Shep dying, 1 with him living, 1 Scooby doo ending:) But neither sacrifice nor success is surprising anymore. The surprise is that writers don't seem to understand that. No ending was going to be happy anyway(billions died).
 
Which seems pretty odd that that would happen when Joker has been a real trooper in the past on various dangerous missions and even risked his life to save the ship when everyone else was dead or evacuated.

In the cut dialogue that's still in the PC version's sound files, you can hear Joker swooping in to rescue the teammates.
 
So, stepping off the "fuck that ending" wagon for a moment: what's up with the Normandy in the Mass Relay? Weren't they supposed to be fighting above Earth, or something?

It's all part of the "fuck that ending" wagon. It makes absolutely no sense why Joker and company (all loyal compatriots of Shepard for more than three years) turn around and run from the only place to fight.
 
SPECULATING AGENT DETECTED

ENDING SUCCESSFUL
It's like indoctrination is now out and calling out the speculation is in. I love it.

It's all part of the "fuck that ending" wagon. It makes absolutely no sense why Joker and company (all loyal compatriots of Shepard for more than three years) turn around and run from the only place to fight.
Seriously, it also makes it seem that Earth is fucked so they bail.
 
It's all part of the "fuck that ending" wagon. It makes absolutely no sense why Joker and company (all loyal compatriots of Shepard for more than three years) turn around and run from the only place to fight.

Unless it's all in Shepard's head...
 
As a writer, I can understand the desire to not do something expected. If everyone sees the ending coming a mile away (in this case, Reapers get destroyed and everything is awesome), then your instinct as a creator of artistic content is to take a left turn from the expectations and do something surprising.

While this is fine (there are plenty of video games that I love that have twist endings), you have to make sure you do it well. You can't create surprise by conflicting with the established fiction. You can't do it by making characters act contrary to how they normally do (or in the case of Shepard, simply not giving you a choice to act at all).

Basically, at every possible turn that Walters could have made a surprise ending good, he fumbled. And he doesn't even know he fumbled.

The sad thing is, doing the assumed ending in stuff like this is fine. Whereas a standard "Reapers are dead, let's all look at the galaxy" Empire Strikes Back-style ending would have emphasized how much the Mass Effect series was about the journey, Mass Effect 3's actual ending went back and denigrated the journey itself in addition to not providing a good close to it.
As another writer, I strongly disagree. Speculative endings are terrible and they are lazy. They're a last ditch effort by less than talented writers who could not or did not plan out a proper trajectory or ending to their stories. It's a cop-out, pure and simple.

When you make people invested in something, you have to make sure they get paid off. It's like putting money into an investment at a bank and 5 years later, when you come back to collect, the bank tells you they have no idea what's happening with your money. It's just bad writing.

I can't respect a writer that drags people along for a 100 hour ride only to tell them at the end "well tell me what you think happened to everyone?" That doesn't play, that is one of the worst moves a writer can pull and the team at Bioware pulled it.
 
Rolled with Javik and Garrus nearly all the game. Javik if a partner was forced on me.

Sad that Javik was DLC cause he was the most interesting companion in ME3.
 
Anderson also died for me, and I shot Illusive Man. I don't know. Seemed to wrap things up pretty well.

Important people die but Earth is saved, the Mass Relay system is kept intact to keep communication with other species in the galaxy, and the Reapers are controlled to advance humanity and the other races far ahead of what they were. Everyone wins. And Shep and Anderson are now sharing a toast in the afterlife ;)

I like the theme of sacrifice. It felt very appropriate.

Even the kid made sense (despite the stupid dreams). He's an A.I. and what he was basically saying at the end about the chaos of organic vs. synthetic and the cycle needed to put a stop to it was an extension of what the Reapers have always said - which makes sense, since they are an extension of him.

Then there's stuff like Joker at the end. He's running away, otherwise he wouldn't be in the middle of a jump like that. Why? It's out of his character. Then he lands on that planet and I saw Tali. I brought Tali with me. How did she teleport up there?

That was goofy, definitely. :P

There's that and the total goofiness with Harbinger. Not only to have a basic Destroyer guarding something so staggeringly important to the war, but for Harbinger to simply run off somewhere else and never be seen or heard from again when he should have posted himself right there and ensured nobody could open up the Citadel.

The biggest issue I have with it was that you spend a good chunk of the game quelling an organic/synthetic war, and are unable to bring it up at the end when the 'inevitable' cycle will happen. The kid says that you being there already shows the plan failed, but you as a player were unable to hammer in any kind of argument or defense, which sucks even more when this is in a game built upon your choices.

What do you mean? The final choices you get hinge on whether or not you care about the synthetics at all. You can choose to have them and the Reapers all destroyed. The kid warns you that your descendants will inevitably create synthetics and the cycle will continue, and that plays into the choice you have to make.
 
I used EDI(in her camel toe suit, ofcourse) and Javik for the most part, though in retrospect I think should have brought Liara along alot more - might have been more suitable for barrier mobs.
 
No one really knows what happens there. Sometimes your ground squad is magically on the Normandy and apparently Joker catches a small dose of bitch mode and tries to flee the area for some reason (where the fuck was he trying to go?).

It's another huge gap in the ending that needed to be filled.

Yeah it's not indoctrination or some secret plot hole that you missed its just really bad writing, and its intentionally trying to be baffling.
 
That's from the ME3 reveal trailer and yes that guy is Major Coats (spelling?) from the end of ME3.
wut


I thought the guy from the trailer was just a random face?
There's a piece of dialogue from him where he says he was stuck sniping in Big Ben for a while-I thought that was pretty cool of them to stick him in.

Any thoughts (plot hole?):
The plothole is them appearing on that jungle planet, not them dying. We don't know if that scene would always happen or if it's like it is now, where you see them dead on the ground of your EMS is too low. They're nowhere to be found if you had a high enough amount.
 
At least I'm glad that the ending is completely terrible and does not have any redeeming qualities, so there is actually a consensus on something on the internet.

It's actually pretty admirable of Bioware to do: They created something that the Internet universally agrees upon. That the ending is pure shit pulled from Walters' ass.
 
We don't give a shit about that...

WATCH THIS

Thx. That cleared a bit up.
Although my assumption was still somewhat correct. The ME3 ending(s) just sucked, all of them were bad, nothing good/happy and also seem to be unlogical (made no sense), if I understood correctly. Or is the problem that all the endings are quite the same and people mainly just got a problem not having a good ending as well?

Anyway my point would still be correct. MGS4 had a good, everyone is happy ending. Snake
still lives
. And ME3 is the opposite of that.

Or did I misunderstand it again?
 
I don't think the Crucible beam was harmful to other ships other than the Reapers, depending on the ending. So, the Normandy fleeing was really confusing.
 
All they needed was to have multiple endings, you can have you happy ending, you can have you tragic sacrifice ending, you can have you bittersweet ending, you can have you reapers win and destroy everything ending. You can have even a twist ending like synthesis.

Then everyone is happy. And if you want to do something with the universe later just pick one as the canon.

Seriously it's not that hard to keep the ME fanbase happy.
 
Saren and Sovereign were awesome antagonists, Bioware never really replicated that in the sequels. Dare say they hoped Kai Leng would be held in the same light, but we all know how that turned out. Illusive man didn't turn out too badly in the end, glad they didn't turn him into the reaper monster seen in the art book.

This might seem sort of fanfiction-y, but I kind of hoped Kai Ling could have been replaced by the Illusive Man rebuilding Saren or the Virmire Death somehow. It would have made the fight personal.
 
Anderson also died for me, and I shot Illusive Man. I don't know. Seemed to wrap things up pretty well.

Important people die but Earth is saved, the Mass Relay system is kept intact to keep communication with other species in the galaxy, and the Reapers are controlled to advance humanity and the other races far ahead of what they were. Everyone wins. And Shep and Anderson are now sharing a toast in the afterlife ;)

I like the theme of sacrifice. It felt very appropriate.

Even the kid made sense (despite the stupid dreams). He's an A.I. and what he was basically saying at the end about the chaos of organic vs. synthetic and the cycle needed to put a stop to it was an extension of what the Reapers have always said - which makes sense, since they are an extension of him.



That was goofy, definitely. :P

There's that and the total goofiness with Harbinger. Not only to have a basic Destroyer guarding something so staggeringly important to the war, but for Harbinger to simply run off somewhere else and never be seen or heard from again when he should have posted himself right there and ensured nobody could open up the Citadel.



What do you mean? The final choices you get hinge on whether or not you care about the synthetics at all. You can choose to have them and the Reapers all destroyed. The kid warns you that your descendants will inevitably create synthetics and the cycle will continue, and that plays into the choice you have to make.

Did you go through these:

 
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