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Mass Effect 3 Spoiler Thread |OT2| Taste the Rainbow
- Thread starter Patryn
- Start date
You just described what's so objectionable about the ending in the first line of your post. The space-god was clearly, profoundly, and demonstrably wrong; but the player is forced to ruin the status quo in one of three similar ways as if he has been thoroughly convinced that the kid is right. This is contrary to every lesson the events of the Mass Effect trilogy has taught him. Geth and Quarians live in peace. EDI is just as human as Joker. Shepard is neither organic nor synthetic, and it doesn't matter. The theme of the game up until that moment is that synthetic or organic 'meat' is irrelevant; only the mind or 'soul' of a sentient life form matters.
Since organics will fight organics (rachni, krogan; turian, human) and synthetics will fight synthetics (true geth, geth heretics, reapers); and plenty of species will engage in civil wars amongst themselves; the special wonderful green ending of unification-through-biology means absolutely nothing. Congratulations, Shepard just gave everyone glowing blue eyes and vaginas made of skin. He hasn't changed their culture or philosophical motivations, so future wars remain inevitable. They're still disparate societies of people; the only difference is that they now all bleed the same colour. So all he's done is make a cosmetic physical change and ruined the mass relays. And he fucking knows this, because of the three games we just played. So the ending makes no sense.
Shepard has proven the geth - and synthetics in general - deserve life just as much as anyone, so the red ending is just as bad. It only makes sense if we get a big reveal at the end that it is necessary to cut off a finger to save a hand, or that it was a test to see if he could make the choice to save the galaxy by sacrificing himself and all other synthetic life. Which is why it would be really nice if the test was all in his mind, and killing the reapers simply meant he'd broken their control so he could fuck them up for real without sacrificing EDI and the geth.
The blue ending is the only ethical choice which jives with the logic of the rest of the game. Control the reapers and save everyone. But since we're constantly told that this is impossible, and since there's no real confirmation that this is the best call, it seems like a weird thing for Shepard to do, because - as we already know - he has no reason to choose any of the three paths, since all his experience up to that point disproves what he's being told. Control the reapers, hope it works, and destroy the mass relays. It's the best of a bad bunch, with only the words of an illogical, genocidal space-god to suggest it will even prove successful.
It's unforgivable that players can't argue with the space-god - success dependent on war assets - and persuade him that he can just call off the reapers; because Shepard's influence over galactic politics and culture has successfully demonstrated that there is no further need for culling. There is peace between synthetics and organics and strength in galactic diversity; and I'm not racist but my pilot is actually hooking up with a synthetic, so there you go...so seriously dude, just stop murdering everybody and see what happens. You can harvest organics in a horrifically violent and traumatic way in a few thousand years if I'm wrong. But right now, everything is pretty sweet, and I'd like to go home and party with my crew without wiping out a species or destroying the means by which this diverse armada you see before you found each other, and united in the hopes of being able to live to enjoy their newfound peace.
...You know, the galactic peace that I worked for something like 200 hours to achieve; that you just ripped away in a lobotomized ending penned by your Battlestar Galactica-obsessed offspring on Bring Your Least Talanted Child To Work And Have Them Fuck Up The Ending To A Trilogy That Spanned a Generation Day, Bioware.
That's exactly the problem. This thing, whatever the strachild is, is presumably the creator/overlord of the Reapers. The reapers and the starchild, who are godlike and supposedly posses cognitive capacities far beyond anything in the galaxy (A bit of info all the ME games make sure to beat us over the head with)...can't get it through their immeasurable, supposedly omniscient, OVER NINE-THOUSAND!!!!, collective nano processors that this cycle has not only totally lacked an Organic apocalypse at the hands of synthetics; but was actually showing signs of being on its way to organic/synthetic harmony. How could any sentient life arise to the level of the reapers and be riddled with such utter crap for brains?
Bioware must be huge fans. Haha!
Agreed. that bring your failure child to work day joke should be the title to this thread.
I've come to the conclusion that they just stopped caring.
PinkCrayon
Member
slow clap
Metroidvania
People called Romanes they go the house?
Disclaimer: Opinion, etc.
The sad thing is the main counterargument to the Shep has disproven the catalyst's argument is that the catalyst has been around for much longer than Shepard and therefore should be taken at face value, given his/its relative all-knowing status over hundreds/thousands of cycles, while we as the player have only experienced one.
It's the ultimate example of "show, not tell" that Bioware (if that was indeed what they intended by not allowing the argument) got wrong. They either give solutions that aren't given any real level of thought into their consequences or feasibility beyond the "end the reaper threat" such as synthesis, give solutions that we have fought against all i.e. control, or are forced, arbitrarily in my opinion, to destroy a potential race of friends the geth to prevent a lot of people from saying those all suck except for destroy.
And either way, no matter what, Shepard dies and the relays blow up, and your ship mysteriously gets damaged and then stranded on a jungle world.
And if Shepard doesn't die in the destroy ending, as is hinted with a high enough EMS to somehow make the crucible 'better able to distinguish reaper tech' (that's the main theory I've seen), it invalidates the other two options as valued choices, since you can do the same thing, save the galaxy and the characters you care about, but have the added bonus of having Shepard live.
It's like the ME2 suicide mission. Once the best option becomes available, a lot of people will strive for that perfect ending. That ceases to become choice-based role-playing to a lot of people. Why strive for a shitty choice/ending when a better one is available, especially when it's available from both a Paragon and Renegade perspective.
Synthesis is given to us as a solve-everything magically scenario, and Control, what we've been fighting TIM on, provides no tangible benefit over Destroy, at least in terms of the universe other then MAYBE rebuilding the relays faster using reaper tech and the geth not dying, though Bioware has hinted that with a high EMS, the geth won't necessarily be destroyed either, further invalidating control as a serious choice.
Unless Synthesis or Control are given tangible differentiated rewards from destroy (which I doubt we'll really see, since Bioware is holding to their "your ending is based on how you imagine it") I can't see many people picking things other than destroy at the end of the Extended Cut from a role-playing perspective. To see what happens maybe, but with a choice-based RPG system, the player generally wants to be the hero who saves the day, rides into the sunset, etc.
edit: tried to clear up some majority/everyone generalizations. It's late and I need sleep.
PinkCrayon
Member
Control is just a better version of destroy, but Shepard has to die. The citadel is not destroyed, and all those reapers running away, guess where they're going? Right into the nearest sun. I also think it is implied that Shepard takes the catalysts place as resident citadel ghost.
I think control is a stupid option because as someone here said, there's no guarantee it'll work. You've been told otherwise through the entire game.
Destroy is stupid because I tried to get Joker and EDI together and that'd be a gigantic dick move to just kill his girlfriend after spending hours trying to help them.
Synthesis is the least stupid of the 3, but still stupid. Well now humans have ..chips and synthetics have...something ,I dunno
One thing that pissed me off is that the only way my Shepard will survive is by picking an option that doesn't fit my Shepard's personality at all
Is there a word on bioware about the official ending? Like, which one is canon?
And don't give me and of that "the ending is what you choose" crap, Bioware!
Destroy is stupid because I tried to get Joker and EDI together and that'd be a gigantic dick move to just kill his girlfriend after spending hours trying to help them.
Synthesis is the least stupid of the 3, but still stupid. Well now humans have ..chips and synthetics have...something ,I dunno
One thing that pissed me off is that the only way my Shepard will survive is by picking an option that doesn't fit my Shepard's personality at all
Is there a word on bioware about the official ending? Like, which one is canon?
And don't give me and of that "the ending is what you choose" crap, Bioware!
That's only one of three possible outcomes of choosing between the Quarians and the Geth, and the one I daresay that's least likely to occur. My Shepard thought the Geth deserved life, but not as much as the organics. So the choice for the Quarians was a relatively easy one, as was the choice for the red ending.
riceandbeans
Member
They all should be canon. It'd be adding more fuel to the fire if they weren't.
I found synthesis the stupidest out of the three. How are you going to fuse synthetics and organics? What happens to reproduction and wouldn't that make everyone immortals since synthetics like the Geth technically are?
I really want to see how Bioware is going to come up with an answer to all three endings when their EA overlords force them to make some sort of sequel eventually unless they pull a prequel or MMO.
The ending only taking one of three options on Rannoch as true is not in favour of it.
I think the ending shouldn't have tried to explain the Reapers' motives further because that was adequately explained earlier, and there was no need to treat ALL organics and ALL synthetics like they are perfectly homogeneous groups. Why should the Destroy option kill all synthetics? Why should the green option even exist? The whole organics/synthetics issue wasn't related to the Reapers until the very last part of the game, and for no good reason.
We know that the Reapers, as their name suggests, allow organic civilizations to develop along predetermined trajectories using the technology they themselves have created (Citadel, Mass Relays) so that at some appropriate point they can come, kill them and harvest them to incorporate whatever good things they had going on in the Reapers themselves.
The reasoning behind this is never explained because the games make it very clear that the Reapers operate on a whole different plane of intelligence than the other species.
What IS clear is that whatever their motivation, what the Reapers are doing is in no way compatible with Shepard's worldview, whatever that is. There is no way Shepard (or any other member of any other race) would somehow agree to go along with the Reapers if they just explained themselves better.
Creating the Starchild to explain why this is happening was ultimately useless and completely backfired because the reasoning he supplied was completely retarded, and as was said here before, you can't even counter his reasoning with your own.
Because the Reapers and Shepard's agendas are completely incompatible, there are three reasonable outcomes to this conflict:
- Reapers win, Shepard and everyone else dies
- Shepard wins, Reapers are destroyed
- Shepard wins, but decides to take a chance and keep the Reapers under his control. This is ultimately a "defeat" ending, because (as the games have established before), controlling the Reapers is likely to corrupt the controller and ultimately serve the goals of the Reapers themselves.
Replace the word Reapers with 'Sauron/Ring' and the word Shepard with 'Frodo' and you get the final outcomes of LOTR. Bioware decided to make it more "interesting" but ended up making it stupid, inconsistent, unsatisfying and boring.
We know that the Reapers, as their name suggests, allow organic civilizations to develop along predetermined trajectories using the technology they themselves have created (Citadel, Mass Relays) so that at some appropriate point they can come, kill them and harvest them to incorporate whatever good things they had going on in the Reapers themselves.
The reasoning behind this is never explained because the games make it very clear that the Reapers operate on a whole different plane of intelligence than the other species.
What IS clear is that whatever their motivation, what the Reapers are doing is in no way compatible with Shepard's worldview, whatever that is. There is no way Shepard (or any other member of any other race) would somehow agree to go along with the Reapers if they just explained themselves better.
Creating the Starchild to explain why this is happening was ultimately useless and completely backfired because the reasoning he supplied was completely retarded, and as was said here before, you can't even counter his reasoning with your own.
Because the Reapers and Shepard's agendas are completely incompatible, there are three reasonable outcomes to this conflict:
- Reapers win, Shepard and everyone else dies
- Shepard wins, Reapers are destroyed
- Shepard wins, but decides to take a chance and keep the Reapers under his control. This is ultimately a "defeat" ending, because (as the games have established before), controlling the Reapers is likely to corrupt the controller and ultimately serve the goals of the Reapers themselves.
Replace the word Reapers with 'Sauron/Ring' and the word Shepard with 'Frodo' and you get the final outcomes of LOTR. Bioware decided to make it more "interesting" but ended up making it stupid, inconsistent, unsatisfying and boring.
John Harker
Definitely doesn't make things up as he goes along.
Thanks Aske, great post. Adds a lot to why the ending itself has serious issues - I was just arguing how it thematically fits the overall arch of the game, I didn't feel it "came out of left field" in terms of the nature of what it was trying to accomplish... It just did a really bad job at it.
Cracked under the pressure.
Creating the Starchild also has the other side effect of adding infinite regression. The reapers are its' solution, so it is implied that it created them. Yet if the origin of the reapers is the starchild, what is the origin of the star child? Some might say that the reapers were fine without an origin before, so the starchild does not need one now either. But why bother introducing the star child as a "reaper source" in the first place? If something needs to be mired in mystey, just let it be the Reapers. Starchild was an unnecessary extra step that contradicts the use of mystery and yet adds more mystery at the same time.
Again it's like Bioware not being able to make up their minds.
John Harker
Definitely doesn't make things up as he goes along.
I don't really see it that way... star child was the Shepard of the synthetics. We just got to see Shepard's story. I simply see Star Child as the maximum evolution of AI "life," and in an effort to protect organic life - in it's misguided, computer-logic artificial intelligence - it created this system of control we know as the Reapers. Step back a few thousand cycles, and now we have an organic lifeform whose evolved to the point of questioning this AI's belief system.
In hindsight, when considering that EDI can still show up alive in the Destroy ending (which was most likely horrendous quality and continuity control on BioWare's part), its sad that all of the endings are thrown into question even further in a story perspective because it shows that the Star Child is just flat out lying to Shepard and apparently doesn't know how the Crucible actually works.
But if it's the maximum evolution of AI life, why isn't it trying to kill off all organic life.
It should have realized at some point that it's not killing all organic life, and that it's an AI, and that it's just killing organics for its own strange superstition.
Seems the actors are back in the recording studio.
Raphael Sbarge (Kaiden I think) tweeted this
https://twitter.com/#!/RaphaelSbarge/status/198479598638469121/photo/1
Raphael Sbarge (Kaiden I think) tweeted this
https://twitter.com/#!/RaphaelSbarge/status/198479598638469121/photo/1
Metroidvania
People called Romanes they go the house?
Mike Gamble has said that there's a lot they can do to change the endings without actually changing them, but who knows at this point. It could just be Kaiden responding to Joker's pull out and leave shepard to die on Earth.
riceandbeans
Member
Certain love interests glitch and don't show up in the ending flashbacks either. The game didn't get the extra bit of polish it still needed.
I wonder if were gonna see cut content from the ending put into the post-DLC. There's a whole conversation between Anderson and Shepard that was cut out at the end.
I stopped reading your post there
No additional cutscenes but more voice-works? How does that work?
Good to hear. Kaidan can be dead at the end of ME3 (in two different ways!), so it looks like they might be recording additional stuff for all squaddies, not just ones guaranteed to survive long enough to infodump.
Still, they've been so quiet about what exactly the EC is that I'm not exactly getting my hopes up. My guess is something like that fan-made epilogue generator, only with voiceovers.
Just a sepia J-PEG with the voice-over.
Really now? I know GAF have lost all faith in Bioware after ME3 ending, but it's ridiculous to think all of their ending DLC is going to a bunch of jpgs with voices. They're trying to win back some of their fans with it, not lose what's left.
Complistic
Member
John Harker
Definitely doesn't make things up as he goes along.
Read a few posts back of mine; its intention was to preserve organic life, not destroy it completely. Though its 'solution' was to pretty much kill all the advances ones before their own synthetics killed everyone.
Bornstellar
Member
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Just got to the end. There doesn't seem to be a choice that's compatible with paragon shep. What do I choose?
Just got to the end. There doesn't seem to be a choice that's compatible with paragon shep. What do I choose?
No decision is the wrong decision. No decision is the right decision.
Typographenia
Member
Doesn't matter, they all play out the same.
I know its solution.
However, my point is that the Catalyst's being that it doesn't destroy all organic life disproves its claims that all synthetic life will kill organic life. It's contradicting itself.
If all synthetic life will destroy organic life, why hasn't it done this already? What is it really fearing.
Okay well, you can choose to impose whatever non-canonical twist that makes you feel better about it. Fact of the matter is that he said so in the game that the Reapers were its' solution to chaos. Speculation beyond that is just non-productive embellishment if we want to determine exactly what it was, because it simply can't be done with any reasonable level of certainty.
Bornstellar
Member
This is the problem -
1. Can't control reapers - just shot TIM because that was the wrong choice
2. Can't convert everyone to hybrids and destroy their choice - I've been arguing for free will and self-determination the whole game
3. Can't destroy reapers without blowing up the Geth and EDI (WTH!? Clearly the EDI and the Geth have developed to a point that coexistence should be a possibility!).
Typographenia
Member
Welcome to Mass Effect 3's ending, Bornstellar!
Bornstellar
Member
*cries*
I think I'll just not finish the game until they've released the DLC - hoping that it fixes this issue.
I think I'll just not finish the game until they've released the DLC - hoping that it fixes this issue.
Where are you exactly?
Complistic
Member
EDI and Shepard with a high enough score can live
Bornstellar
Member
Last choice in the game.
Bornstellar
Member
Yes.
Bornstellar
Member
Complistic
Member
the stupid kid either
doesn't fully know what the crucible is going to do or is lying to you.