Mass Effect 3 (Seriously, Use Spoilers People!)

[Ghostbear]

It's not even that it invalidates prior choices. It's that it invalidates Shepard. Like...my Shepard was quick to point out to anyone who started the whole "The Synthetics are out to get us!!!" nonsense that synthetic life is just like organic life, just from a different source. That if we fail to get along with the geth, it's not substantially different from that time we failed to get along with the Batarians (also known as: all conceivable times). Shepard hit that note at every opportunity.

This is very true, but it also really does invalidate most prior decisions. Firstly, because none of them factor into the ending in the slightest. Got the geth and quarian fleets together? Doesn't matter. Brought the krogan and Wrex with you? Doesn't matter. Got the salarian fleet, or didn't? Doesn't matter. Gathered every single war asset available? Does. Not. Matter. Considering that those decisions were based around, at least partially, the question of "how will this help me against the reapers?" it invalidates any weight that that decision thinking has on the game. It doesn't matter what help you do or don't get against the reapers, because it has no real effect on how the ending plays out. Hell, all of those assets or quests you did relating to the citadel are completely pointless, because everything that happens with it is off screen. You could have made it an ultra fortress or left it a vulnerable, chaotic hell hole; it didn't matter.

Secondly, because the ending outcome basically overrides a lot of the impact of your decisions on future society. If you decided to cure the genophage because you trusted Wrex to lead the krogan and setup future leadership, well, he's trapped on Earth, so, forget that. Gave a positive interview about the role of the geth's future in galactic society? Yeah, there isn't a galactic society anymore for them to be part of (if they even still exist anymore). Gathered the mercs for Aria to retake Omega? Well, everyone on Omega will probably starve to death now, so that was pointless. It might not completely undo your decisions, but it has a hefty component of making them matter a lot less.

I honestly don't like the "We're here to save you from the dark energy" explanation much more than "we're here to save you from the synthetics"

I vastly prefer "You exist because we allow it, you will end because we demand it"

This, a thousand times this. Sometimes, the best thing you can do to a villain is keep them simple and mysterious. Not everything needs to get explained, nor does every enemy need to be "deep".

[Belial]

Oh yeah, no, I agree, it also makes most of your decisions utterly pointless and masturbatory, I was just way more bothered by the complete failure to characterize Shepard properly.

[VectorZero]

Seeing the incongruity? She doesn't even question the premise. Much less tell him to go fuck himself (which is the really in-character action there). She just swallows it as given and leaps into choosing from the options spoonfed to her. That's not Shepard. That's not how shepard has acted at any point previous in the series.

Incongruous, yes, but not incompatible. I think Bioware showed their working enough to score a pass here. The soul-crushingly brutal physical and emotional beatdowns preceding that moment, shown agonisingly clearly (Thessia, much as I hate the gameplay elements, had a fine narrative component; the nightmares, despite my apathy to the kid; the conversation with the love interest; the fatalistically morbid conversations with squadmates, Garrus especially; the physical injury from Harbinger) led to a Shepard on the brink of death (couldn't even reach the console when Hackett called) having a real Sophie's choice: take an option or let the reapers win. I agree, though, that some more/better/any conversation options, especially about, y'know, the geth/quarian thing, would've helped a lot.

Oh, BTW, Fridge Horror? Seeing the Citadel detonate as the war ends ... with the 12million or so residents still on board.

I'm still of the opinion that the payoff for the questlines is the mission end cutscenes and the followup discussions. Bakara is pregnant with Wrex's children. The geth and the quarians are rebuilding Rannoch. Palaven, Thessia and Earth are nearly destroyed. It's not a perfect way to wrap up a story this broad in scope. Far from it. A clip show or scrolling text or something to summarise the plotlines post mass relay destruction (and clarify what happened to earth) would've probably assuaged a lot of the anger. But those decisions still mean something to me, having experienced them.

Got the geth and quarian fleets together? Doesn't matter. Brought the krogan and Wrex with you? Doesn't matter. Got the salarian fleet, or didn't? Doesn't matter.

I believe the fleet arrival cinematic does change to show which fleets you have. A cosmetic difference only, sure, but in combination with the (sum total) GaW system impact on the outcome, I think what you do does matter, in a limited scope which was always predicted to have a bleak outcome.

P.S. I'm (obviously) of the opinion that the mass relay destruction doesn't wipe out the system (and I've played Arrival.) If it does, then, well. Fuck that shit.

[ArgonV]

I don't get most of those 'everyone is stuck on Earth' responses to be honest. FTL is possible for every ship with an eezo core, it's just not as fast as using a relay. I'm doing this from memory, but I believe ships can do 10 ly/day, Reapers were quick with 25 ly/day. So Wrex can get back to Tuchanka, it's just going to take time. 30 years at maximum to cross the galaxy. Who knows, maybe humans and their allies will build their own relays, find an alternative way of FTL or will just be very patient, the end seems to imply space travel is still possible.
Also, why would the turians die? The quarians are there and they've got dextro-amino acids as well. And I would suppose the quarians would keep their liveships out of harms way as much as possible, sending smaller/military ships in to do all the fighting. So that might lead to a quarian food surplus.
You can't be sure that relay exploding = star system death, either. The only relay we've seen exploding was in Arrival, and that was done by flying an asteroid into the damn thing! Not by a (presumably) controlled, deliberate explosion sending out a modifying pulse, achieving the stated effects. You never see planets explode and people dying horribly.
I'm not trying to defend the ending, I believe it could have been done better. But some of the things people argue are just dumb.

I agree with the ending is something my Shepard would've never done. He cut the Council off, told the Saren/Sovereign/Harbinger/The Collectors/Illusive man to go to hell. Where is the ending where you can say 'Screw you Astroboy, we've gotten so far already, we'll just blow the damn Reapers up manually'. If you've got enough war assets, you succeed. 'Cause that's what my Shepard would've done, given these three choices. Created a fourth one.

[Belial]

Incongruous, yes, but not incompatible. I think Bioware showed their working enough to score a pass here. The soul-crushingly brutal physical and emotional beatdowns preceding that moment, shown agonisingly clearly (Thessia, much as I hate the gameplay elements, had a fine narrative component; the nightmares, despite my apathy to the kid; the conversation with the love interest; the fatalistically morbid conversations with squadmates, Garrus especially; the physical injury from Harbinger) led to a Shepard on the brink of death (couldn't even reach the console when Hackett called) having a real Sophie's choice: take an option or let the reapers win.

So the conclusion is that your hero gets hit some and utterly forgets who they are and what they're about? Because bullets hurt? Yeah, that doesn't really hold with the themes of the series.

So Wrex can get back to Tuchanka, it's just going to take time. 30 years at maximum to cross the galaxy.

Incorrect. You're forgetting the other limitations. Starships in the mass effect universe aren't outfitted for long journeys. They're not Rev-Space style lighthuggers designed for multidecade relativistic jaunts, they're built for a universe where most voyages take a month at most. They are mostly living space and weapons. Food, life support, fuel storage...all based around the idea that you're not going to be away from some form of civilization for long enough to have more than one birthday.

Further, there's how those drives work: they build up static charge constantly and need to be discharged into planets. This is fine if you're motoring around a cluster near a mass relay: unless you plan extremely poorly, you're always going to be near a planet when the drive charge builds up. If you're trying to road-trip across the galaxy, however, much of that journey being through uncharted space, then at best you're going to have to take a long, winding route to make sure you're never out of of range of a planet when you build charge, and hope to whatever gods you believe in that nothing unforseen happens. At worst, you just fail, and your entire crew dies in a static discharge when the drive potential exceeds the deck's resistance.

[Dauric]

I honestly don't like the "We're here to save you from the dark energy" explanation much more than "we're here to save you from the synthetics"

I vastly prefer "You exist because we allow it, you will end because we demand it"

As long as it's done right sure. The problem with this is that if it's not done well you end up with uninteresting assholes like Kai Leng (I'm going to kill you because I like to kill people to prove my combat prowess. Those that I don't kill aren't enough of a challenge to my skills to bother with.)

The other thing being that the Reapers solving some greater conundrum doesn't have to be "We're doing this to save you", it could very well be that they're doing what they do to for their own benefit. Reapers need Brains!

Even if the reasons Reapers do what they do remains in production notes and the writers leave it to the fans to hash out their speculations in forums, they still need to act as though they have a purpose behind the scenes and having those production notes means the writers can keep the Reapers actions consistent and avoid them becoming Kai Lengs.

[Ghostbear]

Oh yeah, no, I agree, it also makes most of your decisions utterly pointless and masturbatory, I was just way more bothered by the complete failure to characterize Shepard properly.

I found them about equally irritating, because the prior decisions and my definition of Shepard were fairly intertwined for me. I knew he told people to fuck off and start working together, because that's exactly what he did to the quarian admirals or to the salarian dalatross. I could point to my prior actions as proof that, when given "A or B", my Shepard would choose headbutt.

I believe the fleet arrival cinematic does change to show which fleets you have. A cosmetic difference only, sure, but in combination with the (sum total) GaW system impact on the outcome, I think what you do does matter, in a limited scope which was always predicted to have a bleak outcome.

Less than 30 seconds of a cinematic that has the same overall form no matter what is not impact from prior decisions. If you did the genophage cure in the best manner for the krogan, you should have seen and heard krogan fighting in London. If the geth and quarian fleet was there, you should have heard radio chatter from the the fleet detailing such. If you rescued the elcor military, you should have seen some artillery wielding death machines in some of those fights. You should have seen the volus dreadnought, decked out entirely in thanix weaponry, start wrecking some shit up. There should have been geth primes deployed in London. Rachni soldiers and ships entering battle. The destiny ascension should have gone down in a blaze of glory if it was rescued in the first game. Jack's biotic team should have been there, tearing things apart of shielding your allies. Spectre and STG teams weaving in and out of battle. Instead, all the ground combat I saw was 100% humans + my two alien squadmates.

The mission should have played out differently depending on your war assets and allies; it you didn't have enough war assets, someone should have died. If you had even less, multiple people should have died. If you had a bunch and helped get the citadel ready for war, you should have been able to fight your way through it with active resistance, if not, the reapers would have been entrenched, and you'd have to fight grueling battles, room to room. The ending should have been completely different based off of your war assets and allies. If your war assets were too low, you should have failed. If you had enough war assets, you should have gotten a relatively good though still tinged with heavy losses ending. If you cured the genophage but had Wreav in charge of the krogan, you should have been told about them needing to be put down all over again, a few decades later. If you saved just the quarians or just the geth, you should be told about their (re)integration into galactic society. If you got both to work together, you should hear about them becoming a new force in the galaxy. You should hear about the humans and batarians getting along for once, or going straight back to conflict based on prior decisions.

In short, the game doesn't actually give a shit what your war assets were, beyond some very minor differences. It doesn't care who your allies were, beyond some cosmetics. The ending is supposed to be the culmination of your prior efforts, it's supposed to say "this is what all of your work amounts to, this is why it mattered". Look at DA:O, your allies did change the final chapter, not hugely, but they factored into more than just a pre-rendered cinematic; they factored into the epilogue, and could even help shape the landsmeet some. You could go through the whole trilogy, making all the "wrong" decisions for one character and all the "right" decisions for another, and get 99.9% identical ending sequences. That's poor design.

Also, why would the turians die? The quarians are there and they've got dextro-amino acids as well. And I would suppose the quarians would keep their liveships out of harms way as much as possible, sending smaller/military ships in to do all the fighting. So that might lead to a quarian food surplus.

Do you expect that the turians would have brought enough food for 10+ years for their entire crew with them? The liveships were converted into dreadnoughts, so they would have seen just as much conflict as everything else. And, with the liveships at earth, the quarians on Rannoch would have no food instead (since the planet wouldn't have any massive agriculture systems setup to support millions of people). If instead, the liveships were split, then there very likely won't be enough of a food surplus, and it would also require the quarians to travel with the turians, instead of straight back to their home. Also, the krogan have no ships of their own.

EDIT:

So Wrex can get back to Tuchanka, it's just going to take time. 30 years at maximum to cross the galaxy.

And by the time Wrex makes it back to Tuchanka, he won't have a power base. He won't be in charge. The krogan will have had 10-30 years to revert back to petty squabbles in their home that now lacks anti-radiation cover, and spent years without the only leader who showed himself capable of keeping everyone together, during a giant population boom on a planet barely able to support life. Yeah, that's not a recipe for disaster.

[maybeagnostic]

Also, the krogan have no ships of their own.

I feel sorry for the poor souls who draw the short stick and have to spent 30 years ferrying the krogan back home. The codex said some pretty harsh things about krogan violent tendencies after more than a few weeks in confined space. On the other hand there were no more than 20 krogan on Earth at the end so maybe the Alliance can pack them off on the galaxy's most crowded shuttle and send them on their way.

[An Enraged Platypus]

I honestly don't like the "We're here to save you from the dark energy" explanation much more than "we're here to save you from the synthetics"

I vastly prefer "You exist because we allow it, you will end because we demand it"

I agree that "you exist because we allow it, you will end because we demand it" is the best course to chart, but if we must have some de-shrouding (and the evidence points to the writers always intending to reveal the Reapers' motives) then I much prefer the Dark Energy version to the holographic child who strips Shepard of his agency, personality, and past. The final confrontation with TIM or Harbinger could be much more of an "oh shit, every choice is bad, what have I done" conversation, which actually fits Shepard, as opposed to "so these are my options? Seems legit, I'll take green".

[Belial]

The codex said some pretty harsh things about krogan violent tendencies after more than a few weeks in confined space.

Yeeeah, I think they also made reference to needing to sedate them for the journey to earth. Hope you've got enough sedative for however long...

[ArgonV]

WOULD YOU STOP HITTING THE GUARDIANS WITH YOUR USELESS POWERS WHEN I AM TRYING TO LINE UP MY PISTOL SHOTS?! Thank you.

[maybeagnostic]

I honestly don't like the "We're here to save you from the dark energy" explanation much more than "we're here to save you from the synthetics"

I vastly prefer "You exist because we allow it, you will end because we demand it"

I agree that "you exist because we allow it, you will end because we demand it" is the best course to chart...

I am clearly a minority on this but I never found Lovecraft's stories particularly scary or interesting. The idea of unfathomable intelligent entities is fascinating but not in a horrifying way.

At any rate "You exist because we allow it, you will end because we demand it" fell apart at the end of ME1. The organics killed a Reaper and the enemies became really big bullies. Damn hard to kill but you can fight them and winning is more a matter of quantity than quality. Indoctrination could have created the constant fear and suspicion to make them scary again but it was used to create techno-zombies instead and as creepy as Reaper forces are they are not nearly as scary as wondering whether Anderson is actually leading you into a trap or why Liara and Hackett are so adamant about building a device which no one can explain. For the record, yes, I spent most of the game suspecting the Crucible is a useless device that an indoctrinated Hackett is making us build to waste our time.

[Okita]

You can put a krogan on a ship and not have it go beserk. It's just that you have to have a pretty big ship.

After all, the krogan built their own ships during the krogan rebellions and didn't have any issues. Or at least, less issues. Still, the krogan's strength is as infantry which makes me wonder how the Turians got their butt kicked so thoroughly in ship to ship combat.

[Dauric]

You can put a krogan on a ship and not have it go beserk. It's just that you have to have a pretty big ship.

After all, the krogan built their own ships during the krogan rebellions and didn't have any issues. Or at least, less issues. Still, the krogan's strength is as infantry which makes me wonder how the Turians got their butt kicked so thoroughly in ship to ship combat.

I'd doubt the Krogans would engage in conventional ship-to-ship mass drivers, but rather massive volleys of breacher-pods filled with Krogan shock troops. Hit a Council ship and fill it with Krogan. It would make use of the Krogan's inherent qualities as infantry as well as their pre-genophage reproductive abilities.

It would also be why the genophage would put an end to he Krogan Rebellions, the inability to reproduce at peak numbers would have effectively starved the Krogan of their ammunition.

Edit:

I honestly don't like the "We're here to save you from the dark energy" explanation much more than "we're here to save you from the synthetics"

I vastly prefer "You exist because we allow it, you will end because we demand it"

I agree that "you exist because we allow it, you will end because we demand it" is the best course to chart...

I am clearly a minority on this but I never found Lovecraft's stories particularly scary or interesting. The idea of unfathomable intelligent entities is fascinating but not in a horrifying way.

Lovecraft's horror probably translates better in the times he wrote it in. Everyone who was respectable was Christian, any other beliefs came from places where the people were, to those being generous, just above animals. Lovecraft's stories use terribly racist language and imagery, but the horror for readers at the time was the idea that the tribal religions and voodoo and evil black magics were actually -right-. That for majority Christian readers the horror in there being no Judeao-Christian 'God' but rather beings so much older and vastly more incomprehensible than "works in mysterious ways" such that the revelation of their existence would literally shatter the minds of those in 'proper society', shortly before their brain was sucked out their ear.

These days most of the developed world is comfortable with societies built on multiple religions and the idea that religion isn't an infallible predictor of great cosmic questions like String Theory or the existence of parallel universes. Most of the fans of Lovecraft horror buy plush dolls of elder things and make jokes about facial tentacles while managing to not actually carve a bloody trail of human sacrifices to summon the Great Old One.

So the idea that things are out there that we cannot understand has through a change in culture gone from actually horrifying to, well as maybeagnostic put it "fascinating", and things we find fascinating we tend to try to investigate because that's what humans do.

Ultimately this is why I think leaving it at "You exist because we allow it, you will end because we demand it" is a... tricky way to write the Reapers at the conclusion. As an audience we're not afraid of the cosmological unknowns the way that Lovecraft's audience would have been, more so given that fans of the Sci-Fi genre tend to be fascinated with exploring the unknowns in the first place. If the Reapers motivations are not explored -at all- then they come across as cosmic assholes in the vein of Kai Leng. They have to be written in such a way that a modern SF audience's inclination to explore is satisfied yet it results in nothing comprehensible to the human mind (and it has to be written that way by the human mind which makes it trickier).

[Dark567]

Mass Effect's ending redone with Lord of the Rings characters and stories.

It's an analogy to show how ridiculous bad the ending is to people who haven't played ME.

[Okita]

The mental image of a krogan filled missile barrage (in both sense of the phrase) versus your typical point defense is...kind of ridiculous.

[mosc]

Well clearly they have the birthrate for such a type of attack. Krogans also live a long time and grow to full size fairly quickly. I find it pretty plausible. Might also explain why no counsel race ship seems to have a decent forward canon. They're used to fending off lots of little pods of krogans or little rachni buggies. I suppose they fought the geth somewhat but even the geth seem more focused on fighter based strategies.

I find myself wondering about Krogan females. Are they like queen bees or are they like dwarf females? Meaning, are the vast majority of krogans male or do we see females all the time and just not know it (because of the beards). If it's the dwarf thing and there's a single female on earth for Wrex, then you might have a very nice labor force for rebuilding galactic society

[Ghostbear]

Might also explain why no counsel race ship seems to have a decent forward canon.

Umm... what? All council race ships at cruiser or dreadnought size are built around cannons that go the whole length of the ship, which can only fire forwards. We don't see it in game combat because the cinematic team apparently don't read the codex at all (I read that all the ships in the battle for the citadel at the end of ME1 were meant to be dreadnoughts, but the team that created the scene had no idea how anything worked, so the writers had to retconn them all into cruisers for it to make any sense).

[maybeagnostic]

It's harder to make an interesting cinematic of two groups of ships in empty space shooting at each other from 300km away. It's definitely possible but you can't encompass the whole battle in one view and all ME cinematics try to do that. It's a weird decision because it makes all battles seem small and cramped but whoever is responsible for creating them obviously doesn't agree with me.

[Ghostbear]

It's harder to make an interesting cinematic of two groups of ships in empty space shooting at each other from 300km away. It's definitely possible but you can't encompass the whole battle in one view and all ME cinematics try to do that. It's a weird decision because it makes all battles seem small and cramped but whoever is responsible for creating them obviously doesn't agree with me.

That's only if you're unwilling to think outside the box. By what I read, they didn't even try or think about doing the space battles right, because they didn't even know they were doing it wrong in the first place. I'm willing to bet that someone who was creative enough would be able to make the space battles consistent and interesting, if they actually wanted and tried to.

[Okita]

It could have been like Metal Gear Solid 4 where while you're fighting there's interspersed cutscenes of ships vainly shooting at each other, fighter jocks attempting to support each other, and the forging of trust between enemies in the fires of battle.

[Belial]

I suspect that the Krogan were a threat because, before they lost their numbers and misplaced their collective racial give-a-shit-face, they probably had enough shipyards to turn out a shit-ton of middle-of-the-road quality ships, possibly cribbed from someone else's designs. I'm led to believe that the main limiting factor in ship building is manpower, both on the manufacturing and the mining side, and the Krogan had tons of it.

Yeah, the Turians' were probably better, but there's something to be said for quantity over quality.

[Obby]

Yeah, the Turians' were probably better, but there's something to be said for quantity over quality.

Especially when "quantity" is made up of 1 ton wrecking balls with shotguns and free will.

[Ghostbear]

Also, do we even know how big the turian fleet was at the time? They were first contacted by the other races during the krogan rebellions after all. Actually, that brings into point another fact: if the krogan were already established on several worlds at the time, the turian fleet wouldn't have been enough to win the war for them on it's own, as they'd need to dedicate to ground offensives no matter what.

[Azrael001]

The Krogan were using meteors as weapons. The way that they mentioned this, sounded like that was a no no. Ignoring this rule would deal with any entrenched Krogans on a planet.

[Weeks]

Mass Effect's ending redone with Lord of the Rings characters and stories.

It's an analogy to show how ridiculous bad the ending is to people who haven't played ME.

Pretty nice read.

[mosc]

Yeah, I hate the ending more after reading that. I'm converted. I didn't realize they just changed the color GLOW for the other two endings. COMPLETELY LAME! HATRED AT MAXIMUM!

[Dark567]

Yeah, I hate the ending more after reading that. I'm converted. I didn't realize they just changed the color GLOW for the other two endings. COMPLETELY LAME! HATRED AT MAXIMUM!

Someone also did one with Star Wars, but I don't want to touch that. Star Wars kinda got mangled enough as it is.

[Xeio]

Yeah, I hate the ending more after reading that. I'm converted. I didn't realize they just changed the color GLOW for the other two endings. COMPLETELY LAME! HATRED AT MAXIMUM!

Also, EDI won't walk off the ship under anything but synthesis from what I understand.

Granted, there are other changes if you have a low readiness, but most people have aimed for 4k minimum, and unless Anderson dies the ending cinematic is nearly identical beyond 4k.

[VectorZero]

So the conclusion is that your hero gets hit some and utterly forgets who they are and what they're about? Because bullets hurt? Yeah, that doesn't really hold with the themes of the series.

Not really. More "shot in the face by Harbinger, is critically wounded with shields offline (check the squad screen: 0 max shield/barrier) and is the only living person in a position to avert a pangalactic mass extinction with no option left."

Shepard is still only human. She can't kill a reaper with her bare hands. She can't access the citadel AI to manipulate it. What she can do is take the third option offered; instead of a converaation check, it's been unlocked by actions and guts and (thematically) sheer willpower in the face of overwhelming odds.

It's not a perfect ending; far from it. It's short and incomplete, and I would've liked to see more. But I think it's acceptable; the experience prior is what counted. For me, at least.

One plot point I had expected to see followed up was the heat pipe side mission. I was expecting the core to blow out and the engineers survive if you'd bought the heat pipe on the citadel. But, nope, not to be.

Oh. Someone mentioned the BSG ending. Christ, that made me angry; a solution looking for a problem if ever there was one.

[Belial]

it's been unlocked by actions and guts and (thematically) sheer willpower in the face of overwhelming odds.

Actually, it's been unlocked by apparently goddamn nothing.

Seriously, unless you go by indoc theory (wherein the dream offers you different options because the invasive mental force of the reapers is weaker and more desperate due to your fleet having them on the rails), the correlation of military strength to citadel options makes no goddamn sense whatsoever.

[Lucrece]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MlatxLP ... r_embedded

Perfect video, 37 minutes long, but out of all I seen the most cogent one in explaining what is wrong with how the ending was handled.

[SecondTalon]

Ending Comparison Video. 2:20 of cutscene. Apparently a lot of the endings really are the exact same sequence of events, with just a color switch. Which .. frankly, is okay. If everything else up to that point's been highlighting how Your Shepard is not My Shepard, because you got the Annoying Fan to be a Hero and I Gave Him Bad Advice and he died on a battlefield somewhere, and so on. But apparently this is not the case.

[Dark567]

Which .. frankly, is okay. If everything else up to that point's been highlighting how Your Shepard is not My Shepard, because you got the Annoying Fan to be a Hero and I Gave Him Bad Advice and he died on a battlefield somewhere, and so on. But apparently this is not the case.

I don't understand what you are saying here at all....

[SecondTalon]

I'm saying that in a game in which From ME1 to ME2 there were all these little callbacks and references to the most inconsequential choices you made along with the major ones, keeping that alive in 3, particularly at the end, would be the expected thing. Making the endings .. well, like Fallout 3 or New Vegas or something, where if you never met a character there's nothing said about them in the end, but if you did you get a snippet talking about them for a couple of minutes, with the snippet changing based on what you did for them. Given that this spans over three games, it would make my ending slightly different from your ending even if we both, say, played "Mostly Paragon with some Renegade when it was funny", because your Renegade Moments wouldn't be the same as mine, perhaps you were less Renegade than I, and perhaps you didn't even do some side missions that I did, or vice versa, making a ending sequence that keeps bringing in different elements based on choices made throughout all three games.

Apparently this isn't what happened at all.

[Dauric]

I'm saying that in a game in which From ME1 to ME2 there were all these little callbacks and references to the most inconsequential choices you made along with the major ones, keeping that alive in 3, particularly at the end, would be the expected thing. Making the endings .. well, like Fallout 3 or New Vegas or something, where if you never met a character there's nothing said about them in the end, but if you did you get a snippet talking about them for a couple of minutes, with the snippet changing based on what you did for them. Given that this spans over three games, it would make my ending slightly different from your ending even if we both, say, played "Mostly Paragon with some Renegade when it was funny", because your Renegade Moments wouldn't be the same as mine, perhaps you were less Renegade than I, and perhaps you didn't even do some side missions that I did, or vice versa, making a ending sequence that keeps bringing in different elements based on choices made throughout all three games.

Apparently this isn't what happened at all.

To a certain extent though you wouldn't have to do this for -every- character. Sure, wrap them up somehow, but for example Kelly Chambers buys the farm on the Citadel during the Cerberus incursion, there's not a lot of need to wrap up what happens to her body after the citadel explodes, the wrap up has already been presented long before that.

There are certain practical limits to branching storylines, and including variations for every secondary character like Werner the Fan/Wannabe/Cerberus Recruiter who turns out to have been working on a dark energy thesis that is helpful for building the Anti-Reaper-Cannon... is probably above and beyond the expenses that modelling, texturing, rigging and animating a cutscene would be worth.

That said, the video Lucrece linked:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MlatxLP-xs&feature=player_embedded

Perfect video, 37 minutes long, but out of all I seen the most cogent one in explaining what is wrong with how the ending was handled.

...points out that one of ME2 DLC "Lair of the Shadowbroker"'s features that received the most praise was essentially nothing more than a text file that included various tidbits from all the characters in ME2, like what software Tali had been downloading. Secondary characters like Werner could easily be handled in a text file, say an article intercepted by Liara's Shadow Broker terminals from some college somewhere about his Dark Energy dissertation. This would be easy enough to insert in to the Clear Game without having to spend thousands of dollars lighting and animating a scene and would have a lot more story options without having to model and rig a scene in front of a prestigious university where's her's getting the Nobel Prize or something.

Now of your actual crew cinematics definitely. At the very least Garrus and Tali (Liara since Shadow-Broker expansion), they've been your crew in all three games. Kaidan/Ashley also since one of those two has at the very least made an appearance in all three games, Wrex for the same reason. Kill a few other ME2-ME3 characters in the assault if they didnt' have the budget to cinematic everything (Hell, Miranda could be shown in a shattered fighter cockpit since she formed her own band of aerospace mercs (at least in my game). Simple scene, just put the models in place and fly the camera past the wreckage with some appropriately somber music).

But, yeah the TL;DR of it is that there's only so much you could expect to get in cinematics because those can be frightfully expensive to produce, but some characters don't need special endgame treatment ('cause they're dead) or they could use a simple text dossier to wrap up some of the minor characters.

[SecondTalon]

But, yeah the TL;DR of it is that there's only so much you could expect to get in cinematics because those can be frightfully expensive to produce, but some characters don't need special endgame treatment ('cause they're dead) or they could use a simple text dossier to wrap up some of the minor characters.

Sure, but those didn't even make it.


(Also, apparently Kelly doesn't have to die if you make the right choices, so there's that)

[Dauric]

But, yeah the TL;DR of it is that there's only so much you could expect to get in cinematics because those can be frightfully expensive to produce, but some characters don't need special endgame treatment ('cause they're dead) or they could use a simple text dossier to wrap up some of the minor characters.

Sure, but those didn't even make it.


(Also, apparently Kelly doesn't have to die if you make the right choices, so there's that)

Pshht. My Kelly got eaten by the collectors.

No, I completely agree that Bioware didn't even make a decent minimum attempt and the whole thing stinks of a budget crunch at the last minute, but to expect the kinds of full-spectrum endings that some people are saying Bioware should have ended with would have been impossible without the game costing a few hundred buckazoids on the shelves.

[Dark567]

No, I completely agree that Bioware didn't even make a decent minimum attempt and the whole thing stinks of a budget crunch at the last minute, but to expect the kinds of full-spectrum endings that some people are saying Bioware should have ended with would have been impossible without the game costing a few hundred buckazoids on the shelves.

Yeah, that's at least kinda why I am willing to let the variety of endings go... a little bit(there still should be more than just different colors). It's the inconsistent character, deus ex machnia, and "doesn't make fucking sense" Normandy stuff that bothers me the most.

[Belial]

Also, the fact that the ending was, thematically, addressing a totally different game. And badly. If I'd actually been playing a game about the struggles of synthetics versus organics (rather than one in which that is one subplot), I'd still be pissy about that ending, even though i would at least acknowledge that it was in the correct game.