Mass Effect 3 SPOILER THREAD: LOTS OF SPECULATION FROM EVERYONE

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What just pisses me off the most, is that neither of the endings fit the series overall tone.

The best ending is that everyone become cyborgs part of a hive-mind standing around smiling stupidly despite the galaxy being fucked to the point of unreasonable return.

"Oh wow, we're stranded on a planet, the relays are gone, and it looks like I'm starting to evolve into a husk. This is truly the day of salvation".
 
Jibbajabbawockky said:
BioWare putting out any DLC that adds to the endings would basically be them admitting that they fucked up. Certainly right now when they need the game to sell in the first couple weeks after launch they won't say anything to damage the image of ME they're trying to prop up in the ads saying how its the best story driven game EVAR.

But as people start to finish the game, more people seem to be realizing just how shitty the ending is on multiple different levels. And I have to imagine that BioWare will have a hard time selling any story based single player DLC that takes place before the ending once people know they'll be stuck with the same old crappy ending no matter what.

BioWare also released Dragon Age 2, saying that it would be like Dragon Age Origins but better. BioWare/EA marketing will say anything. The endings were more than likely slapped together at the last minute to get the game out before EA's financial quarter ended at the end of this month. It seems that at some point they made fairly significant changes to the story at least, considering the lack of anything regarding the whole Dark Energy subplot so heavily foreshadowed in ME2.
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You're very correct. I didn't think of it like that. Even if right now BW is thinking, "Shit, we need to fix this." -- they wouldn't be able to say anything for a long time, probably months.

Now that the rest of the countries are playing through it now and will be beating it this weekend I assume BSN and various other sources will be ignited even more. I really hope so at least. BioWare needs to fix this somehow.

Ice King said:
Probably nothing. Damage done, rubble setting, smoke clearing, all that jazz. Plus DLC can't really help at all. If they make a "continued ending" dlc, well it can go one of two ways. If it's free, then people will ask why bioware didn't have the foresight to include something like it in the first place. If it costs something well...if a character that's important to the lore didn't go over well as being paid dlc, I really doubt a fixed ending would be met with open arms.

Then it's like in the video posted a page or so ago (very funny by the way). Bioware can't really do any dlc that would take place before the game's ending, because what would be the point? If they release something with a new character, what do I care, they're just going to die anyway. No bonus mission for more war readiness will matter, because everyone will know that in the end it won't make a difference.

Bioware has really shot themselves in the foot here. I'm actually looking forward to how they handle this in the near future, because it will either fail horribly and be hilarious to watch, or they will somehow pull a victory out their ass that will appease the vast majority of people (unlikely).
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100% agree.

They'll likely just release mostly MP DLC now to circumvent that.
 
How the hell does the Normandy ends up on a jungle planet anyway. Pretty sure the Normandy was in the Sol system for the final battle and no planets in our system has a jungle like that.
 
Vamphuntr said:
How the hell does the Normandy ends up on a jungle planet anyway. Pretty sure the Normandy was in the Sol system for the final battle and no planets in our system has a jungle like that.
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More importantly... how did my squadmates get on the Normandy? They were right next to me when assaulting the beam thing.. iirc
 
Vamphuntr said:
How the hell does the Normandy ends up on a jungle planet anyway. Pretty sure the Normandy was in the Sol system for the final battle and no planets in our system has a jungle like that.
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It makes total sense that Joker would swoop down to earth and pick random people up just as they started to celebrate victory, head to the nearest mass effect relay and take a victory lap of the universe.. yeah....
 
Rebel Leader said:
More importantly... how did my squadmates get on the Normandy? They were right next to me when assaulting the beam thing.. iirc
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Exactly what I fucking thought! Tali was on my squad, and I would think she would have died in the blast before entering the beam?

Yet Joker is cruising around the Relays? WTF?
 
golem said:
It makes total sense that Joker would swoop down to earth and pick random people up just as they started to celebrate victory, head to the nearest mass effect relay and take a victory lap of the universe.. yeah....
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Especially while not trying to find Shepard. By the time the crucible fires the combat is not even over. So during the big battle he went back to earth, grabbed the team, didn't look for Shepard and ran from the battlefield into a random relay which the pulse from the Crucibel reached??
 
Vamphuntr said:
Especially while not trying to find Shepard. By the time the crucible fires the combat is not even over. So during the big battle he went back to earth, grabbed the team, didn't look for Shepard and ran from the battlefield into a random relay which the pulse from the Crucibel reached??
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He's crazy enough to take on the reapers... but rescuing Shepard? No thank you
 
Please tell me the same people who are making a fuss over Joker's odd activity also noticed how the entire sequence of events around the Collector kidnapping in ME2 made similar amounts of "fuck all" sense.
 
When he salutes Shepard, should've had Shepard tell him that if anything goes wrong he gets everyone out and gets the hell out of dodge. That way it makes sense, since the call goes out that the plan failed. Of course it still doesn't make sense that the 2 people with you didn't die. I planned on them dying which is why I took Garrus and Javik as both were more than willing to die for the cause.
 
The_Technomancer said:
Please tell me the same people who are making a fuss over Joker's odd activity also noticed how the entire sequence of events around the Collector kidnapping in ME2 made similar amounts of "fuck all" sense.
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The entire plot of ME2 makes no sense because the collector wouldn't even finish building the reaper before the events of ME3. The entire game was just Shepard getting jerked around by the illusive man. So you only need one explanation and it applies to everything. Shepard is a moron.


Edit:

Miranda: Shepard lets all get on the shuttle and leave the ship entirely undefended with dangerous alien technology inside it.

Shepard: Great idea, lets go.

Edit 2


Lostconfused
I can make you pick a fight
With someone twice your size
(01-29-2010, 07:48 PM)

Lostconfused said:
Actually thinking about it. It was pretty dumb how every single person who could have actually put up a fight when the ship got boarded got crammed onto the shuttle.
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The_Technomancer said:
Please tell me the same people who are making a fuss over Joker's odd activity also noticed how the entire sequence of events around the Collector kidnapping in ME2 made similar amounts of "fuck all" sense.
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I still maintain they were preparing a surprise birthday party for Shepard in ME2. It's the only logical excuse I can think of for all of Shepard's squadmates to stuff him in a short distance shuttle in the middle of nowhere to bomb around for a few hours before returning to the Normandy having accomplished dick all.
 
BeesEight said:
I still maintain they were preparing a surprise birthday party for Shepard in ME2. It's the only logical excuse I can think of for all of Shepard's squadmates to stuff him in a short distance shuttle in the middle of nowhere to bomb around for a few hours before returning to the Normandy having accomplished dick all.
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I literally said "what" out loud when Shepard was like "okay, lets all head off on this last mission". What mission?
 
Yeah, the collectors kidnapping in ME2 was another example of "we want this to happen, but have no idea how to write it". If in the case of these endings was Bioware trying to set up something for their future plans, they did in the worst possible way... by making you feel that all your actions in RPG game (where by definition you are roleplaying the hero) mean nothing.

As for what these future plans? Who knows. Obviously there is some "big" plan (like EA would ever let go of a popular franchise), but outside MP DLC, I have no idea. As other have said, singleplayer DLC pre-ending would feel empty.

About a new ending DLC, or as the Hitler video called, "Closure DLC", well, Bethesda did get away with it on Fallout 3. For better or worst (and usually a lot worse) Bioware fans are a lot more vocal, so who knows if it would work here.
 
Fudgepuppy said:
What just pisses me off the most, is that neither of the endings fit the series overall tone.
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Yeah. The previous 2 games' endings basically made you feel like a badass with a sense of accomplishment. I'm not opposed to depressing or sad endings either, but at least with ME3, it would have been nice if the depressing or sad endings were possible endings, not the only endings. Thats saying nothing of the stupid Space Magic and creating new questions and cliffhangers that will never be resolved satisfactorily.


I go to Mass Effect games for a sense of heroic accomplishment against the odds. Like the ending to Mass Effect! You can't help but stand up and fist pump when the music hits and the Normandy blows up Sovereign followed by Shep emerging from the rubble. That might be action movie cliche, but it was well executed. ME3 tries to do some unnecessarily convoluted philosophical mumbo jumbo grimdark ending that comes out of nowhere in the context of the prior games.
 
Rebel Leader said:
More importantly... how did my squadmates get on the Normandy? They were right next to me when assaulting the beam thing.. iirc
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And what were they doing in the middle of a jump through a relay? They were at the battle for Earth. This detail is probably the most absurd of all; the ending, in addition to being terrible, makes no fucking sense; as I move past the rage phase, and get a little distance from the whole thing, I'm increasingly finding this disjointed, disconnected mess to be just completely goddamn bizarre. This can't have been planned; it would be one thing if it was just bad; but it's so completely incoherent, what you see on the screen has literally nothing to do with what happened in the past 35 hours (or 100+ if you count all three games). It almost feels like something else was there, then they just chopped it off and put a random collection of images on the top of it.

I guess what I really want to know is what those ladies and gents at Bioware thought people would think of this conclusion; it reeks of either idiocy if they expected us to like it, contempt if they realized we wouldn't, or just a desperate and tragic fuck-up if they knew better and for whatever reason couldn't get it right in time. I sure would like to know which.

The real tragedy of it is the way it has just killed any enthusiasm I had for the series; I played through the first two again in the 6 weeks leading up to release just to have a Kaiden lives playthrough available for a second run on 3, but now I just never want to touch these games again; that's the worst feeling; that this existence space, this fiction I've spent so much time enjoying, just feels like a worthless waste of time now. Uh oh, I'm working my way back to rage mode again.
 
Just finishing off the game... all that multiplayer just to see a 1 second clip of Shepard maybe being alive was rather pointless. I don't get why BioWare can't do a satisfying epilogue/denoument to the games.

As for the series as a whole - the problem is that they had no idea what they were going to do, so they went to back to the well that was all so familiar - The Matrix. I mean, Babylon 5 had pretty much the same story in its first three seasons and even though it ended with what amounted to a yelling match, it still came off better than this weird half-ending/cop-out measure.

Perhaps it's unrealistic, but what they should have done was have each game be a self contained "movie" or "episode" with a complete arc. There's no reason this storyline needed 100+ hours to tell (the equivalent of 5 TV seasons!) and ultimately, the running thread of the Reapers added nothing to the game. All they had to do was keep inventing new threats - ME1 the Reapers, ME2 a human civil war with Cerberus, ME3... something else. And if they did it that way, they could make new games indefinitely.

Ah well. I'm glad to be done with the franchise and with BioWare. I find it funny that I was so in love with the franchise and its ideas the first time around and slowly but surely, they killed it for me.
I hate that I am OCD enough to want to get 1000 points in the game, which amounts to grinding MP forever to get that 5000 kills achievement, but I guess they put that in there just to fuck with people like me.

Also, the music was bad. I didn't like ME2's soundtrack, but at least it was memorable. Here, it didn't even exist and the only things I remember are remixes of ME1 themes.
 
firehawk12 said:
Also, the music was bad. I didn't like ME2's soundtrack, but at least it was memorable. Here, it didn't even exist and the only things I remember are remixes of ME1 themes.
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Gotta agree. As much as I adore Clint Mansell, the only thing that even sounded like something he would produce is the music during the dream sequences.
 
Lostconfused said:
Mass Effect had a good one. Freak accident of course but still.
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I had a lot of hate for Mass Effect 2's ending, in particular the giant terminator baby, but it did at least end with you doing that thing you spent the whole game preparing to do, which, it turns out, makes it pretty solid in relative terms.

LumpOfCole said:
That's the point. The collectors story was just bad, but as a thread to connect infinitely better character and species stories, it was serviceable.

ME3's end effectively undoes everything that happened prior to the ending and effectively alters the Mass Effect IP into something literally unrecognizable. This makes ME3's ending much more insulting than ME2's collectors story or even the human reaper shit.
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I think I've said it already, but my favorite example of this has to be the Quarians; like a couple weeks maybe before the end the Quarians get their world back after 300 years; now they're stranded on the other side of the galaxy! It's like it wasn't the same people that made the last few minutes of that game. So weird!
 
Rebel Leader said:
This did... it's universe RELIED on the mass effect relays :lol
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That's the point. The collectors story was just bad, but as a thread to connect infinitely better character and species stories, it was serviceable.

ME3's end effectively undoes everything that happened prior to the ending and effectively alters the Mass Effect IP into something literally unrecognizable. This makes ME3's ending much more insulting than ME2's collectors story or even the human reaper shit.
 
Such a shame about the endings, because the ride was really awesome. Next time im just going to alt+F4 out of the game after Shepard and Anderson sit down and pretend thats the end. And afterwards i oretend see some shots of Shepard and Liara with lots of little blue biotic children on a beach, Tali and Garrus calibrating things together and Joker breaking his penis on Eve.
 
Lostconfused said:
Mass Effect had a good one. Freak accident of course but still.
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Hah, yeah, because it took the time to end the game with a slow-burn dialog scene that set up the next game and gave the player a chance to think about what they had just done. ME2 and ME3 just dumps you back to the galaxy map like nothing happened.

vitaminwateryum said:
Gotta agree. As much as I adore Clint Mansell, the only thing that even sounded like something he would produce is the music during the dream sequences.
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Yeah, the way people got hyped, I thought this soundtrack was going to justify Jack Wall leaving (or being fired?). Too bad.
 
HarryHengst said:
Such a shame about the endings, because the ride was really awesome. Next time im just going to alt+F4 out of the game after Shepard and Anderson sit down and pretend thats the end. And afterwards i oretend see some shots of Shepard and Liara with lots of little blue biotic children on a beach, Tali and Garrus calibrating things together and Joker breaking his penis on Eve.
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Joker and the krogan? EDI is not gonna like that...neither is wrex
 
LumpOfCole said:
The collectors shit was bad and made no sense, but it didn't destroy the game's universe.
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Of course. It was the same kind of problem, but these endings make the that plot hole seems so insignificant (who would have thought?).

firehawk12 said:
...
Babylon 5 had pretty much the same story in its first three seasons and even though it ended with what amounted to a yelling match, it still came off better than this weird half-ending/cop-out measure.
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Funny you should mention Babylon 5 (where the Chaos/Order theme actually made some sense) because I would reaaaaaly loved the option to say "Screw you and your solutions. We will handle ourselves, so get out of our galaxy!" to the child hologram....
 
My god the ending in this game is atrocious. It's like Bioware took all the desicions we were making in the trilogy and thrown them out the window. Why give us a clear choice in the end if the end is supposed to be a result of all the choices we were doing during the whole trilogy? I mean, seriously, Bioware, what the fuck was that? And don't even get me started on the huge difference in the color of final explosions.

I didn't have anything even remotely close to high expectations for ME3's story after ME2 but that really is a new low. Most of stuff doesn't make any sense at all. Reapers are saving organics from the synthetics? Well damn they sure kill plenty of organics in the process just for the fun of it. I think that the original idea about dark energy could've been much more interesting. And I'd go with some unexplained stuff in the end (much better than fuck awful explanations Bioware's writers came up with) because currently the endings don't really leave a lot of room to continue the franchise. Which considering all the press releases about how fast ME3 is selling is bad because eventually we'll get even worse story in ME4 (which will happen, no doubt about that).

I think the main problem with the story in ME trilogy was that they've lost Drew K. somewhere during ME2 development cycle. It really shows that the trilogy doesn't have a one lead author who could've kept all the loose ends in check.

Also I didn't really like the gameplay that much. It just felt like ME2 (that's bad in my opinion) with less scanning (what scanning was left still felt like a borefest) and thus -- more shooting. RPG elements hasn't improved at all. And I've got that feeling that dialogs generally had less branches and options to explore.

Oh well. ME has gone from my favourite new IP of current generation (ME1) to dissapointing but enjoyable shooter spin off (ME2) to something that I probably won't be playing again any time soon. This is probably a good moment to stop buying any new (A)RPGs from Bioware.
 
By the way, what happened with Harbinger? All this buildup about his evilness and all he does in this game is drop down, fuck shit up with lasers and fly away? No doomsday speeches? How we are the inferior race and can never beat them? No epic fistfight between Shepard and him? At least could have let me shoot 1-bullet at him and make him a little annoyed.
 
Keasar said:
By the way, what happened with Harbinger? All this buildup about his evilness and all he does in this game is drop down, fuck shit up with lasers and fly away? No doomsday speeches? How we are the inferior race and can never beat them? No epic fistfight between Shepard and him? At least could have let me shoot 1-bullet at him.
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I think he shot that beam which h injured you and transportex your squad mates to the Normandy

We are ripping this appart
 
Rebel Leader said:
I think he shot that beam which h injured you and transportex your squad mates to the Normandy
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Mentioned that, that was it? He drops down, fucks shit up and flies away? If I could at least have shot 1-bullet at him, he would turn at me and tell me I have lost or some else of his 1000 monologues about the futility in fighting the reapers, I would have at least been a little satisfied.

I had some serious personal problems with that exhaust pipe after all the trouble I had to go through with him.
 
Keasar said:
By the way, what happened with Harbinger? All this buildup about his evilness and all he does in this game is drop down, fuck shit up with lasers and fly away? No doomsday speeches? How we are the inferior race and can never beat them? No epic fistfight between Shepard and him? At least could have let me shoot 1-bullet at him and make him a little annoyed.
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Yeah, when you spoke to the reaper on Rannoch I just thought to myself "This is so fucking cool, I hope talking to Harbinger later on will be even more epic and mindblowing", but no.
 
Something else I was just wondering, apparently they weren't building reapers in the citadel (or maybe they were? This isn't really answered either as far as I know), what were they doing with transporting all those bodies onto the citadel?
 
Digoman said:
Funny you should mention Babylon 5 (where the Chaos/Order theme actually made some sense) because I would reaaaaaly loved the option to say "Screw you and your solutions. We will handle ourselves, so get out of our galaxy!" to the child hologram....
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Haha, yeah. I mean, it's still hokey, but at least it would have been some kind of choice.

dr_rus said:
I think the main problem with the story in ME trilogy was that they've lost Drew K. somewhere during ME2 development cycle. It really shows that the trilogy doesn't have a one lead author who could've kept all the loose ends in check.
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There's a total lack of direction in the story, yeah. As bad as Star Wars is, at least they have a team of guys making sure all the comic books and video games and shit fit into some unified continuity.
 
Keasar said:
Something else I was just wondering, apparently they weren't building reapers in the citadel (or maybe they were? This is really answered either as far as I know), what were they doing with transporting all those bodies onto the citadel?
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And Anderson said both dead and alive were shipped to it so....
What happened?
 
Disappointed in bioware. They can still redeem themselves just take the kick on your writers ego and rewrite the end.

But more importantly the fucking gaming press. How the fuck can you with a straight face say this was a good conclusive ending.No wonder game story telling doesn't evolve to something better then Saturday morning cartoon.
 
Somebody stop me, I'm reinstalling my Dragon Age 2 copy to wash down the bad aftertaste. Of all games, DA2.

Dire problems, dire solutions.
 
dragonelite said:
Disappointed in bioware. They can still redeem themselves just take the kick on your writers ego and rewrite the end.

But more importantly the fucking gaming press. How the fuck can you with a straight face say this was a good conclusive ending.No wonder game story telling doesn't evolve to something better then Saturday morning cartoon.
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For once.. I agree with the metacritic user score
 
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