Mass Effect 3

[Tyyr]

"Is submission not preferable to extinction?" - Saren. No didn't bother me,

You've got a valid point there. From a more human point of view though it's like the pope making a deal with the devil. The Reapers are EVERYTHING the geth don't want and know from Legion that the Reapers will wipe them out the same as organics as soon as they're done with them. So it's not really submission in lieu of extinction, it's submission to buy you a couple decades prior to extinction.

Really? I didn't notice that all. Well ok, might be subtle manipulation but imho you are a bit to critical there,

I'm critical yes, but if you don't just go with, "The writers are crap and the producers lazy," then an all female good guy cast in Legion's vids could be support for the manipulation. Still, it's a rather tiny bit of supporting evidence for my hypothesis and not the main point.

Wasn't the one trying to hide one a male? Idk, need to look it up). Honestly the coolest quarian was never Tali, but Jayne Cobb...I mean John Casey....I mean....what was his name? Kal Regar or something?:)

Pretty sure it was a female who was bringing in several to hide them. Kal does have a fanbase but his fans are a stiff breeze compared to the Talimancer hurricane.

Yeah.....what again did bother you there?

It's presented in a fashion that makes Micheal Bay's "Uh-Rah 'MERICA!" patriotism seem tame. Poor put upon geth trying to flee and hide. Evil quarians hunting them down. Legion (again, who DID NOT exist as a discrete unit during the morning war) defending his helpless comrades and after a spirited defense the Quarians leave. It paints a very sympathetic picture of the geth, completely glossing over the baby murder and grandma punching. The Morning War in it's BROADEST strokes is similar to what's depicted but you have to completely ignore that the geth went WAY beyond defending themselves into the kind of mass murder that leaves no one innocent. I'm going to Godwin this up, it'd be like retelling the history of WWII in Europe from the German side and ignoring the concentration camps, if they'd killed 600 million instead of just 6 million. You're kind of leaving out a rather significant portion of the narrative just to make yourself look better.

Maybe it is a bit cheap but in the end I was glad I had engouh reputation to bug out of the situation by just making peace between the two.

As did I. Now I don't want you to think I'm purely siding with the quarians here. I do understand that from the geth perspective the Quarians tried to do the exact same thing to them. However in my book they aren't both innocent because of that, they're both equally guilty. So for me making peace between them was more or less seeing both sides get a second chance to make it right.

Yes, war is always a very messy afair

Fire bombing Dresden was messy. This is walking though a neo-natal ward with a baseball bat and murderous intent. You've gone from collateral damage to willfully slaughtering even those who cannot resist on purpose.

The questions are who started the whole mess?

That's not really here nor there. Yeah, the quarians started it, but the geth went from defending themselves to executing prisoners for shits and giggles. The geth went beyond the point the quarians could actively resist them and just kept on killing. In any legal arena if that were two people where one started the fight, even with murderous intent, but the person who is attacked fights back, incapacitates their attacker but then continues on to kill that attacker it's no longer considered defense, it's murder.

What would the quarians have done if they were the victorious side? Would they have left the geth alone as soon as they left?

I don't give the quarians a pass here. It's obvious to me that they intended to delete every geth that could track down. But that doesn't give the geth the right to reciprocate. Both side's hands are stained in blood, both are wrong.

As for the war itself, if the quarians needed to suffer a 99% population loss to realize it is time to pack your bags...

Yeah, no. Like I said before, even if you assume that every geth of suitable age was in the military you're still only talking 50% of the population. You cannot tell me that the quarians were seriously considering active resisitance to the geth after 50% of their population was dead and all that was left were the elderly and children. Quarian resistenence in any real fashion was over long before you even got close to 50% casualties. You cannot tell me that if the geth had presented a peace offer after Rannoch was running... red, or blue, or green with the blood of 2 billion quarians that they wouldn't have taken it. I'm just not buying it. At that point it's not that they might not want to resist, it's that they no longer even have the bodies that can resist.

that they have achieved a fragile peace, that this is as far as we know a first in this cycle AND that it was NEVER mentioned ONCE by Shepard to the cataclyst. I desperatly searched on the "wheel" the "Screw you star child. Our synthetics are peaceful and are even now working with their creators restoring their homeworld, so take your reapers and piss off. You are out of a job and we managed to came up with a far better solution to the "chaos" on our own. So long sucker!" option.

Oh believe me, I was raging at that point. Regardless of whether or not the Catalyst had seen such things before and failed there is no way anyone's Shepard would have just stood there and not pointed that out. Hell, I had the quarians and geth at peace and actively fighting the Reapers and my ship's AI was in love with her pilot and he with her. Synthetics vs. Organics was a theme of the games but it wasn't that the two cannot ever come to a peace, it was that at the end of the day synthetics are living things to and deserve a chance to live and grow and organics can coexist with them. At least until the Catalyst shows up then that shit is right out the window.

My point is, of course it is bullshit, but it is a bit late to start complaining NOW. Just go with it.....

No.

Yes, Shep's ressurection is a SoD moment but Mass Effect has usually been better than most about keeping things from going too overboard. Hell, on Tuchanka in this very game when fighting the first Destroyer even a near miss was enough to blow Shepard through the air and pulverize the Krogan stone bridge you were standing on. Then you get to Rannoch and you can just combat roll under the beam like it was a laser pointer.

The distances were to close to conformt considering orbital bombardment.

Ten minutes earlier, Shep standing over the hole, orbital bombardment comes in and nearly kills her. Ten minutes later she could spit on the target that's getting orbitally bombarded and not even get her hair mussed. It. Was. Bullshit.

Or just plain mismanagement of the considerable ressources they must have had,

If they ran out of time and money then this is the cause. They had the talent, they had the resources, they even had the time. They reused the previous game's engine and combat system only tweaking them leaving them two years to just work on the game itself.

Yes, I am not sure what the game was here. Both James and Cortez were completely unnecessary characters imho. I understand Cortez is there for giving you a gay love interest choice but then I understand Kalenko also is suddenly gay for the commander.....so I am really not sure why the introduced those two in the first place. At least Cortez has a mini-story arc you can help bring to a conclusion but James? Why is he exactly here? Couldn't figure it out...didn't much care either.

Cortez, is just creepy. Straight FemShep in ME2 levels of creepy. The guy's husband isn't even cold in the ground yet and there's Shepard trying to get him over his husband so he can get under him. It's just... ewwww. That's just... fucked up. Not to mention I can't imagine anyone clamoring for a gay love interest was hoping for a new character to pop up. Kaidan was originally supposed to be one and if you've got him there then he's been with you far longer than Cortez. Even Garrus if they had to. James doesn't exist for any reason I can discern and they don't even bother explaining who he is or why he's here he just leaps into the narrative and is accepted without the least bit of explanation to the players. Allers is... ugh. Again, Tali was supposed to be a female love interest in 2. Kelly sort of was. Was anyone really begging for a new swings both ways option? No, use what you've got. If you cut out James, Cortez, and Allers the game wouldn't have lost anything of significance. And I'm someone who actually liked James.

Isn't there? I thought there were. Most replay it but I believe Joker makes a mention of them standing by. Honestly, I played that part only once so I might be mistaken.

Pretty sure they aren't. I will say emphatically that I know they didn't get a short scene of their bridge like every other race got when checking in so Joker may have mentioned it but I know they got no quick bridge scene like everyone else.

So maybe they should have checked with EA prior to writing their ending if they are forced to make another one, but from a business point of view, this doesn't make much sense imho.

What we've heard of the inner workings is that Casey Hudson and Mark Walters more or less wrote the ending independant of the rest of the writing staff and it was never put through the critique process. It was more or less dumped on everyone without any second looks at all.

My main problem with it is that if it is true, they cut the game basically at the climax and left us hanging.

At the time Indoctrination proponents were saying, "Yeah, it's leaving us hanging. They're going to put out an Ending DLC to finish it." Which turned out to be wrong. And honestly given the ACTUAL ending that we got I'm ok with the idea that the game ends on a cliffhanger because the actual ending is worse than anyone could have imagined. I like to imagine that my Shep woke in the rubble of London and realizing that the Crucible was a trap and Harby was the key to it all had everyone focus on Harby and kill him and not use the Crucible. Or something. My actual fic ending won't even remotely resemble the actual one because of how stupid it was.

Now there is still one DLC left afaik, but on the one hand they confirm that the body in the rubble is Shepard and the rubble is from London and on the other hand they say there will never be any post ending DLC changing what we got. To me that sounds just like toying and mindfucking with the fanbase.

Eh, I've been saying since day 1 that any story DLC taking place during ME3 is just pointless. If they aren't going to change the ending then what's the point of a story DLC that we know in advance will have no affect on the plot? Leviathan proved it as it managed to only make the Reapers even stupider. Omega proved it as well since it has no affect on the plot, doesn't pretend to, and so allows you to enjoy shooting things without constantly replying to, "This could change everything!" with, "No, no it won't."

And the Devs have been consistantly giving the fanbase the finger since the furor started.

Incidently, have you heard of the "original" ending? One writer said that originally it was all about dark matter destroying the galaxy (like we see in the Tali-recruitment mission in ME2) and the reapers harvesting cultures to prevent this and come up with a solution. The reaction to this was so negative that they changed it.

Because it's stupid. Really think about it. The Reapers ARE the problem. If using Mass Effect technology increases Dark Energy and that's going to destroy the galaxy... THEN WHY THE FUCK WOULD THE REAPERS MAKE SURE EVERYONE USES IT? ME1, convo with Sovereign, "Your civilization advances along the pathes we desire..." The only problem is that you come to the end and are standing there looking at the source of the problem and unless you want to condem the galaxy to destruction you have to lay down you arms and let these collosal fuckwads that caused the problem kill everyone you have been fighting for or give them the finger and condem everyone to death in a century or two.

It is just as bad as the ending we got, maybe even worse.

I see what you are getting at. You are right of course, the thing I wanted to get across in the first place was that I do not really care that much about it. I care mostly about a good story with solid believable characters in it. If you have a ton of choices it is great. If it is completely linear but with a great story it is also fine with me. But if having a ton of choices means that the story or dramatic impact suffers I would prefer a BIT less choice.

And if that's what you prefer then you're entitled to it. I can understand what you're after. It's not what I want but well, that's how it works.

Even in the brilliant tuchanka scene are examples of that. For instance there is a pretty powerful line from Mordin imho standing in the elevater: "I MADE A MISTAKE. Always looking at the big picture. Big picture composed of smaller pictures. Won'T make that mistake again." (Not word for word but you get the gist). Powerful stuff imho and completely missing from the scene if you always are straight hero.

I'll be honest with you, I like that. I like that things can vary depending on how you played and that just mindlessly mashing the blue option everytime doesn't automatically give you the most dramatic and intersting story. First, why bother giving a choice if you're essentially making blue the right choice and everything else suboptimal. Second, if you only ever pick blue no matter what you're playing Superman and sorry, Superman is boringly one dimensional.

And hell, that scene can go a lot of other ways. I got choked up when he yelled "I MADE A MISTAKE!" but I also smiled because of how great it was to see that because of what I'd chosen to do he evolved as a character and I had brought him to my viewpoint. Then I watched the other play throughs and holy shit. When you betray him... you shoot him with the gun he gave you back on Omega. When Shep then looks at the pistol and tosses it away in disgust? Wow. Then you get the scene with Wrex (maybe) where in the end someone who you've known for years is regarded as nothing more than a piece of garbage to be disposed of. You get a serious shot to the face for what betraying people is costing you to try and save the galaxy.

Another example, if you never romance anyone, you get a whole dialuge with Anderson on the citadel before he dies about family, what Shepard will do now, maybe have kids etc. (I am not sure why this was cut to be honest, since it would still fit even when you romanced one) before he says his "I am proud of you son" and dies. That scene was brilliant, where is my tissue box? Completely missing for 99% of the players who probably romanced someone at one point or another.

Which I am ok with due to Youtube. And it's a small reward, kind of a hidden thing for those who picked a different path in the game.

Or Miranda. There are at least 6 ways in the game to kill the character off. Obviously they want her out of the picture.

I don't disagree about the scene but I'd call that a failure of writing. Her living should have had as significant an impact as her living. I didn't spend two games trying to break her loose from Cerberus and keep her alive just to kill her off for drama. I'm also against killing off LI's in any other way than more or less the PC fucking up so bad it would almost have to have been on purpose.

Kelly Chambers. Hit me like a brick that she was just executed by Cerberus the poor thing and that I only learn about it via an offhand remark by a bystander. That shouldn't have been an optional occurance. It hammers the point home that this is NOT Mass Effect as usual, that was fucking brutal.

Two things, first, be nice to Kelly. Second, just killing off people left and right for drama is bad writing, ESPECIALLY in a game. Shep, and by extension the PC, is the grim reaper, chosing who lives and who dies. Killing off Kelly just to kill her off to say, "This is Brutal!" doesn't work. The PC has been picking who lives and who dies for 2 full games so at this point killing off significant characters with no input or ability to influence the outcome doesn't communicate that this is brutal. It communicates that the Devs are taking away our influence and railroading us for drama. So it fails to be dramatic and just feels like you're being dicked over ala. Tiptree and Joker's sister.

But it is optional for whatever reason and if you managed to save her.....she never has anything to say or do afterwards anyhow. (And probably dies on the citadel anyhow. Why make it optional then? Just go for maximal impact.

It's a failure of writing, just like most of the ME2 characters who just become points in the War meter. Rather than making your choice to save or let them die matter it just becomes the equivalent of scanning a random planet and finding a prothean doo-dad. Again, in game development writing is a free action. Fixing a script prior to production costs you almost nothing and you were already bringing in the voice actor so give them more to say and make a difference. Have a proper impact on the player by giving their choices weight. I was sorely disappointed that I saved Kelly and.... nothing.

Now I could bring a few more examples but I think I made my point saying that those are instances where I would have prefered that the dramatic impact of those scenes takes preference over player choice which ultimately will still lead to nothing or the same outcome.

My perspective on that isn't that one option sucks and is lacking so get rid of the choice. 95% of the work is already done getting the character there, bringing in a voice actor, coding and modeling a scene, so the fact that one option is weak and meaningless and the other dramatic is a failure of the writers to produce a quality product. The only way I'd say the choice should be removed is if we're just going to accept lazy writing in RPG's. If that's the case stop calling it an RPG and admit it's an action game and I'm just watching Shep's story rather than giving me the illusion I'm helping craft it.

Btw. thanks for the discussion Tyr, it's cathartic

I'm always happy to talk.

I also freely admit that I'm borderline hyper-critical about stuff like this. The problem is that I take writing seriously and to get better at it I read a lot and watch a lot and then I pick it apart. Now, factor in that I LOVE Mass Effect and how intensely disappointed I was in this game and suddenly that hyper-critical nature is turned on this game with a very pissed off person in the driver's seat. I can do this to ME2 and I have though with a touch less bile. I will argue with anyone that the open act of ME2 is seriously fucked up, that Jacob should have been cut, and that most of the romances range from cheesy to down right creepy. The difference is that for the most part ME2 was an intensely rewarding game that was tremendous fun, so I tend to shrug and go, "Yeah that's messed up but how about meeting Garrus again or giving Tali a hug?" One of my long term projects is to strip all the pissy-ness, bile, and nit-picking out of my initial review and boil it down to something a bit more concise and impartial. I stand by my rating of the game and that's not changing but I can tone down the loathing.

[Atekimogus]

As did I. Now I don't want you to think I'm purely siding with the quarians here. I do understand that from the geth perspective the Quarians tried to do the exact same thing to them. However in my book they aren't both innocent because of that, they're both equally guilty. So for me making peace between them was more or less seeing both sides get a second chance to make it right.

You see that is practiacally my point with the geth. Sure you are right they played it for cheap sympathy but then they already WERE practically the main villain in the first one. In hindsight we now know that impaling folks and turning them into husks was not them, that only a small part of them actually were working for a reaper etc. but those are things you slowly learn throughout ME1 and ME2 and since it's always years between games maybe they felt we need a refresher course as to what happened as to not doom them automatically. (They'd be wrong in that assumption imho, but I can at least get why they did it.)

That's not really here nor there. Yeah, the quarians started it, but the geth went from defending themselves to executing prisoners for shits and giggles. The geth went beyond the point the quarians could actively resist them and just kept on killing. In any legal arena if that were two people where one started the fight, even with murderous intent, but the person who is attacked fights back, incapacitates their attacker but then continues on to kill that attacker it's no longer considered defense, it's murder.

Well I see your point but imho we don't know enough to make the assumption that they executed anyone imho. Might be mostly collateral damage. Obviously they didn't nuke them since the planet seems mostly intact, but that does't mean that they didn't reduce most of the civ to rubble by conventional means without slaughtering the masses with their bare hands so to speak. Now keep in mind that still, the geth are machines so maybe they just were not able to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. That's a quarian. They need to be eliminated for self-preservation. And that is the only destinction they were capable off.

As for going way beyond what was necessary.....it does seem that way doesn't it. Why then suddendly leave them alone when they were in a perfect position to finish the threat off once and for all. My guess is that the quarians - with their unique physique - clung longer to the planet and fought more fiercly than it was prudent to do and did indeed pose however small a threat to them right to the point they were leaving.

I don't give the quarians a pass here. It's obvious to me that they intended to delete every geth that could track down. But that doesn't give the geth the right to reciprocate. Both side's hands are stained in blood, both are wrong.

Agreed.

Yeah, no. Like I said before, even if you assume that every geth of suitable age was in the military you're still only talking 50% of the population. You cannot tell me that the quarians were seriously considering active resisitance to the geth after 50% of their population was dead and all that was left were the elderly and children. Quarian resistenence in any real fashion was over long before you even got close to 50% casualties. You cannot tell me that if the geth had presented a peace offer after Rannoch was running... red, or blue, or green with the blood of 2 billion quarians that they wouldn't have taken it. I'm just not buying it. At that point it's not that they might not want to resist, it's that they no longer even have the bodies that can resist.

Well, maybe the geth at that time had something similar to a krogan bloodrage? I mean it figures, they just become self-aware and the first thing they actively perceive is that they are being exterminated - from their creators no less - for no perceivable fault on their part. Now if that doesn't leave a birth trauma or two I don't know nothing. So like a child they were lashing out way beyond what was necessary and only later came to understand WTF just happened in the first place.

If they ran out of time and money then this is the cause. They had the talent, they had the resources, they even had the time. They reused the previous game's engine and combat system only tweaking them leaving them two years to just work on the game itself.

Yeah they HAD the talent. I recentely watched a montage of the original endings side by side and you know, from an artistic point of view they are all beautiful (ignoring for a moment that they don't make any sense and are all three far to identical). I mean they did so much right with it, the imagery is beautiful, the music.......is just perfect, the timing of the scenes etc...really well done imho. A real tear-jerker. If I am the creative head behind them (not the story writer) then I too wouldn't want them changed, they are really well done.

I think that it what frustrates most peoples. It just needed a few very small changes to be a satisfying ending and obviously - considering the EC - Bioware still had no idea what the rage was all about. Considering this I actually prefer the original, more open ended original ending to the cheap photomontage. At least it is more dense and compact and not unnecessarily drawn out and basically tells the same story as the EC.

Was anyone really begging for a new swings both ways option? No, use what you've got. If you cut out James, Cortez, and Allers the game wouldn't have lost anything of significance. And I'm someone who actually liked James.

Well I played straight male Shepard so Allers or Cortez didn't really bother me. You know I am a fan of having a lot of crewmembers I can talk to without having them as squad-mates. (I like small groups). So at least Cortez and Allers are serving a function. I find it nice that we finally find out who flies our shuttles. Having a reporter onboard is something I can live with. They fall into the same category as Joker, Adams etc. This is a good thing imho. (Bringing Kenneth and Gabby back is one of the many things they did sooo right imho. Actually what bothered me a bit is that we have no XO on board anymore. We had Pressley and Miranda but in ME3 it seems Joker or Edi are second in command.)

But James......he serves no function. At all. Now I did not hate him, for me it was just another crew-npc you can talk too, never took him with me on a mission. No function other than sending a paycheck to Freddie Prince Jr. imho. Could be wrong, though.

Pretty sure they aren't. I will say emphatically that I know they didn't get a short scene of their bridge like every other race got when checking in so Joker may have mentioned it but I know they got no quick bridge scene like everyone else.

Hard to check, maybe my saves are fucked up but I can either load at the beam to the citadel or at the beginning of cerberus so yeah...not going back to check it out. The wounds are still to fresh.

What we've heard of the inner workings is that Casey Hudson and Mark Walters more or less wrote the ending independant of the rest of the writing staff and it was never put through the critique process. It was more or less dumped on everyone without any second looks at all.

Explains a lot. Shame really, the game is 99% quality entertainment of the highest degree. Even with that ending abomination it is imho the best video-sci-fi series there is (god am I sick of al the star wars games). Real shame.

Eh, I've been saying since day 1 that any story DLC taking place during ME3 is just pointless. If they aren't going to change the ending then what's the point of a story DLC that we know in advance will have no affect on the plot? Leviathan proved it as it managed to only make the Reapers even stupider. Omega proved it as well since it has no affect on the plot, doesn't pretend to, and so allows you to enjoy shooting things without constantly replying to, "This could change everything!" with, "No, no it won't."

And the Devs have been consistantly giving the fanbase the finger since the furor started.

I agree, the line between teasing and alienating your fanbase isn't exactly so small and subtle yet somehow they refuse to understand it. As I said, all the "but it's art"- crap aside for a moment (and I agree it is artfully done) first and foremost it is a business. And from a business point of view it doesn't make any sense. Maybe it does for the ME3 DLCs, maybe there are enough foolish people to make the DLCs worth it. But imho all it does is pissing those few off who didn't already give up on the series directly after the end. But then attation spans are short nowadays so maybe they hope in two to three years when ME4 arrives people will mostly remember what was good in those games and buy them regardless of the ending-clusterfuck.

I'll be honest with you, I like that. I like that things can vary depending on how you played and that just mindlessly mashing the blue option everytime doesn't automatically give you the most dramatic and intersting story. First, why bother giving a choice if you're essentially making blue the right choice and everything else suboptimal. Second, if you only ever pick blue no matter what you're playing Superman and sorry, Superman is boringly one dimensional.

No, please do not misunderstand me. I also like choice. I like how my actions or inaction affect others around me. For example I really liked how Jack (who I really didn't like in ME2) actually grew to a semi-likable character just by being nice to her and I was actually pleased to see that things turned out for her quite well at the grissom acadamy.

So influencing one squadmember towards being a nice person/robot or psychobitch should be optional. However there are things which already ARE not optional no matter what you do. No matter how perfect you play ME1 you still end up as a space corpse. No matter how distrustfull you are of Cerberus you still end up working for them etc. etc.

So there are things left to the playerchoice and things which are not and all I am saying is that it would be FAR more practical and preferable if the DEATH of squadmembers would NOT be optional. I want the choice of curing the genophage or not, I want the choice if making peace between the geth or not, I want the choice of being nice to cerberus and handing the base over or not etc. I do NOT want the death of squadmates to be optional. First it is not necessary, since you can still have a huge impact on the ingame universe without having this choice, second it greatly cheapens the deaths that very likely happen (yes, you could also safe mordin) and third it complicates the game in a way which makes it hard to write sequels, which is something we do not want. (Can you imagine what a NIGHTMARE a ME4 would be if it were a direct sequel, and how many voice actors they'd need to cast just to cover all their bases?)

Now PLEASE MIND we are talking shades of grey here. For example cast-members like Conrad Verner etc. eg people you already know will have no further impact on the narrative can very well be optional deaths, reflecting and giving feedback of your success in the game. But members of your core-group eg. squadmates should never be optional, since first you doom them to a shadow-existance in every sequel from there on and secondly it hurts the narrative.

The crew from ME2 serves as a grim reminder of this. Cerberus is pretty much the visible main villain of ME3. Yet the former bloody second in command of the organization with invaluble expertise is suspiciusly absent, doomed to chase after her sister you already saved in the previous installment instead of being a squadmember doing actual important work for the story. (Heck she probably just could have given you the coordinates of the base in the first place, she WAS there after all for all we know). See, just by making the "death" of the character a possibility they not only hurt the logical narrative of the storyline you cannot change (working against cerberus) but also fucked up your choice-achievement in ME2 (saving the sister).

Another examples are all those whose deaths are optional (Mordin, Wrex) - hurray for choice - and who are promptly replaced by pretty much the same character to fill the hole simply because the overarching narrative demands that there is a character who can/wants to cure the genophage. Not sure if I could get my point across since we are discussing various degrees of choice here, though.

Two things, first, be nice to Kelly. Second, just killing off people left and right for drama is bad writing, ESPECIALLY in a game. Shep, and by extension the PC, is the grim reaper, chosing who lives and who dies. Killing off Kelly just to kill her off to say, "This is Brutal!" doesn't work. The PC has been picking who lives and who dies for 2 full games so at this point killing off significant characters with no input or ability to influence the outcome doesn't communicate that this is brutal. It communicates that the Devs are taking away our influence and railroading us for drama. So it fails to be dramatic and just feels like you're being dicked over ala. Tiptree and Joker's sister.

No you misunderstood me there. Chambers death for me was completely random. I couldn't fathon what I did wrong so I initially assumed this HAD to happen for dramatic impact. I learned later that it's completely optional, I just missed a small dialogue option where I make an offhand remark about her changing her credentials. Greatly cheapend the impact her "death" had on me to be honest and that is what I meant. Ah, so she is not "really" dead, I just picked the wrong offhand-remark way back in the beginning, so no biggie, easily fixed, no need to be sad, just overread a bit of dialoge.

I was sorely disappointed that I saved Kelly and.... nothing.

Of course it's a failure of writing, I agree but imho it's at least understandable to a degree. The question is just how much ressources and energy you want to spend on something many players won't even experience. Now I am pretty sure they have a very good idea how many people had Wrex killed of in ME1, how many went with Ashley or Kaidan etc. and they form the narrative accordingly. Chambers is the prime example of, well most players probably won't even notice the change credentials option and go for helping refugees instead. It's very easy to miss, so let's not waste time and ressources on a follow up, just give her a sentence and be done with it. That is cheap and if they are cheap they just might as well make it non-optional and be done with it.

Do it right or don't do it at all, my mama always said to me, and imho that applies here too.

I also freely admit that I'm borderline hyper-critical about stuff like this. The problem is that I take writing seriously and to get better at it I read a lot and watch a lot and then I pick it apart. Now, factor in that I LOVE Mass Effect and how intensely disappointed I was in this game and suddenly that hyper-critical nature is turned on this game with a very pissed off person in the driver's seat. I can do this to ME2 and I have though with a touch less bile. I will argue with anyone that the open act of ME2 is seriously fucked up, that Jacob should have been cut, and that most of the romances range from cheesy to down right creepy. The difference is that for the most part ME2 was an intensely rewarding game that was tremendous fun, so I tend to shrug and go, "Yeah that's messed up but how about meeting Garrus again or giving Tali a hug?" One of my long term projects is to strip all the pissy-ness, bile, and nit-picking out of my initial review and boil it down to something a bit more concise and impartial. I stand by my rating of the game and that's not changing but I can tone down the loathing.

A good point, easily the weakest part of the whole ME series where the romances. I didn't mind them in ME1. Than something changed in ME2 and they all became really creepy and awkward in ME2. Like something a teenager would write. And then they are mostly missing in ME3. Shepard is cooler and more reserved towards former and/or actual love interests than one would be towards, you know just friends.


As for ME3 - and maybe if you enjoy picking stories apart you can use it - the main weakness of the ME3 story is imho not the ending. The ending fails because it could still have brought the story arc to a satisfying conclusion and didn't but that isn't the biggest problem, the ending is just a symptom of this big problem and it's name is Crucible.
Now ME3 starts right at the beginning of the reaper invasion and that is imho the first big mistake the game makes. Not only goes it against it's own narrative (citadel conduit disabled AND alpha relay destroyed, they should take years to arrive) without ever explaining how the Reapers managed to get here so fast. It also forces a deus ex machina solution on the player since nobody in the universe is adequately prepared for them. On mars came the first time I rolled my eyes a bit at the obvious deus ex machina device named crucible and even Shepard himself is sceptical of it ("Isn't that damn convinient?" he asks and he is right.). What they should have done is giving adequate warning of the reapers (exhonorating Shepard at last), giving the players half of the game time to rally the galaxy and prepare for them and the other half resolving the conflinct.
From a narrative standpoint this is the biggest weakness of the storyline since we know right from the start that we need this deus ex machina device to solve our problem, however we spent the rest of the game gathering support for earth, helping and rallying the galaxy in the knowledge that in the end it doesn't "really" matter since the crucible either works or we are doomed. THIS is the structural weakness of the story, this is why our choices utlimately do not matter and this is why so many are disappointed with the resolution. The Crucible either works or it doesn't. It doesn't matter if we jump in with one ship, or with the whole galaxy behind us. The Crucible either works or it doesn't. Now couple this with the misleading campaign they waged to promote the game and you can see why there is so much rage. There was no "taking back earth", or no big showdown with the reapers. The campaign shouldn't have been "TAKE EARTH BACK" but "BUY TIME TO FINISH THE CRUCIBLE!".
So the Crucible is the deeper, underlying crux of the matter. It should have never been introduced. Despite being a far to obvious deus ex machina device - which even Shepard recognizes as such - it robs the player of the possibilty that his/her choices will pay off in the end. The real important work is not done by the player but by those who build the crucible in the meantime. If they fail, all is for naught.
Delete the crucible and have the player fight teh reapers conventionally. Suddenly the choices do indeed matter VERY MUCH. Reapers are though but we know from the last prothean that never before were there someone who managed to rally the whole galaxy against them. This could have been the the ultimate rewarding player role. Shepard shepards the galaxy against the reapers. That had to be the idea at one point. Dialoge and the whole setup hints strongly at this (Heck even the name "Shepard" is probably not a coincidence). This could have been humanity's finest moment. Not buying the galaxy time with the reapers concentrating on earth for finishing the crucible but giving them time to overcome their fears, seeing reason, basically doing everything exactly as it happens in the game (which leads me to believe that the whole deus ex machina solution was an afterthought).

And then some idiot introduced the Crucible in the storyline and ruined everything.

By starting right at the beginning of the reaper invasion it also ruins the traditional narrative setup when having three acts. In the first act the problem is introduced, in the second the hero/heroine reaches the lowpoint and in the third act the problem is resolved. In Me3 we start the first act with the lowpoint (earth invaded/mostly destryoed), work towards a resolution for the problem in the second act (rallying the galaxy, building the crucible) and having as good as nothing resovled in the third act. (wtf just happened? Did I miss an act? THIS is the resolution?). Now one must not be hellbent on following those traditional story-guidelines but there is a reason most sucessfull stories are structured in such a way. It fucking works so well.

What we should have had was having the problem introduced in the first act (Oh shit, the reapers are coming, Shepard was right!!"), having our lowpoint in the second act. (They invade earth and fuck the galaxy up) and have our resolution in the third act (Yeah, I rallyed the galaxy, payback time!"). Cheesy? Maybe. Traditional? Certainly. Would it have been way better? I think so.

Thoughts?

[Tyyr]

...and since it's always years between games maybe they felt we need a refresher course as to what happened as to not doom them automatically. (They'd be wrong in that assumption imho, but I can at least get why they did it.)

You've got a point there. Which would make this a case where they once again tried to dumb the game down so that people wouldn't be lost coming into the LAST GAME IN A TRILOGY. With ME 1&2 available for less than $20 combined if you don't want to be lost in ME3 just play the first two games.

Well I see your point but imho we don't know enough to make the assumption that they executed anyone imho.

The geth were not apparently used in the military and as you said there is no real evidence big fucking bombs were used not that the geth could have likely gotten access to any. Even with nukes you're not getting a 99% kill rate unless you are intentionally trying to wipe out every man woman and child. The geth were not interested in preventing the quarians from deleting them or removing their ability to resist. They were involved in flat out genocide.

The geth are machines so maybe they just were not able to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. That's a quarian. They need to be eliminated for self-preservation. And that is the only destinction they were capable off.

The geth are machines and while they do seem to have some issues understanding things that are not concrete we're also told that the greater the number networked the smarter they are. I'm just not buying that the geth couldn't understand that quarian babies were not a threat.

Why then suddendly leave them alone when they were in a perfect position to finish the threat off once and for all. My guess is that the quarians - with their unique physique - clung longer to the planet and fought more fiercly than it was prudent to do and did indeed pose however small a threat to them right to the point they were leaving.

Or it could be that the geth had no capability to pursue them immediately after the quarians left. And if they went chasing the quarians down they might expose themselves to the rest of the galactic community and we know how the Council would have responded. You are right, the details of the morning war are sketchy and there is a lot of room for interpretation but when the get wiped out over 99.5% of the quarian population I'm not buying anything but intentional extermination.

Well, maybe the geth at that time had something similar to a krogan bloodrage? I mean it figures, they just become self-aware and the first thing they actively perceive is that they are being exterminated - from their creators no less - for no perceivable fault on their part. Now if that doesn't leave a birth trauma or two I don't know nothing. So like a child they were lashing out way beyond what was necessary and only later came to understand WTF just happened in the first place.

Which actually is rather consistant with how AI's are handled in Mass Effect. In the case of every AI we've come across their "birth" as it was was traumatic. However I think that comes down to the galaxy they're birthed into. The Council has a hard and fast, "Kill'em All" policy with regards to AI. Imagine if you're an AI, probably one of the first things you're going to do is try to figure out what you are and then Google, "Artificial Intelligence." Well that particular wiki page doesn't give you a lot of hope. It would instantly set up every sapient biologic as your enemy and all the AI's I can think of responded accordingly. Would have been interesting to get into that.

Yeah they HAD the talent. I recentely watched a montage of the original endings side by side and you know, from an artistic point of view they are all beautiful (ignoring for a moment that they don't make any sense and are all three far to identical). I mean they did so much right with it, the imagery is beautiful, the music.......is just perfect, the timing of the scenes etc...really well done imho. A real tear-jerker. If I am the creative head behind them (not the story writer) then I too wouldn't want them changed, they are really well done.

I think the original ending of ME3 flowed pretty well. If you ignore what's going on and focus on it as imagery and music it all meshes beautifully. Then you get to the EC and it's just a jumbled mess. The original ME3 ending did at least as a visual exercise work.

I think that it what frustrates most peoples. It just needed a few very small changes to be a satisfying ending and obviously - considering the EC - Bioware still had no idea what the rage was all about. Considering this I actually prefer the original, more open ended original ending to the cheap photomontage. At least it is more dense and compact and not unnecessarily drawn out and basically tells the same story as the EC.

The big problem is that the normal ending is basically, "Way to go hero, the galaxy as you knew it is totally fucked, all your friends die, and earth is a death world now. Congratulations!"

Well I played straight male Shepard so Allers or Cortez didn't really bother me.

Cortez, if he wasn't a love interest, is a condensed version of what you did with your crew members in ME2. I'm ok with that, not a fan as I just played a game where the bulk of the time has me playing shrink to these psychos, but ok with it. It's when he becomes a love interest that the creepy ratchets up to Thane romance levels of creepy. Allers, her face looks like she frenched a bee hive, her VA was just reading the script, and she is an eternal reminder that she is NOT Emily Wong.

But James......he serves no function. At all. Now I did not hate him, for me it was just another crew-npc you can talk too, never took him with me on a mission. No function other than sending a paycheck to Freddie Prince Jr. imho. Could be wrong, though.

He doesn't, not really. He's got some good lines and Freddie did a great job with him. He just doesn't have a reason to exist. He is this games big slab of dumb muscle but if you need a soldier you've got either Ashley or Garrus. You don't need another soldier option.

Hard to check, maybe my saves are fucked up but I can either load at the beam to the citadel or at the beginning of cerberus so yeah...not going back to check it out. The wounds are still to fresh.

Please, don't inflict that on yourself on my account.

Explains a lot. Shame really, the game is 99% quality entertainment of the highest degree. Even with that ending abomination it is imho the best video-sci-fi series there is (god am I sick of al the star wars games). Real shame.

Eh... I agree it's a shame though. The plot isn't entirely unsalvagable and with a bit more care in the writing it could have been perfect.

I agree, the line between teasing and alienating your fanbase isn't exactly so small and subtle yet somehow they refuse to understand it. As I said, all the "but it's art"- crap aside for a moment (and I agree it is artfully done) first and foremost it is a business. And from a business point of view it doesn't make any sense. Maybe it does for the ME3 DLCs, maybe there are enough foolish people to make the DLCs worth it. But imho all it does is pissing those few off who didn't already give up on the series directly after the end. But then attation spans are short nowadays so maybe they hope in two to three years when ME4 arrives people will mostly remember what was good in those games and buy them regardless of the ending-clusterfuck

And that's something a lot of the "art" proponents missed. This isn't art in the traditional sense. It's entertainment. It can have artistic elements but in the end EA didn't make the game because they had a story they needed to tell, they made a game to try and sell 10 million units. And if you want to claim it's art, ok, it's shitty art. The entire ending of the game fails on basic, mechanical levels. I really hope that for the most part the DLC numbers are way down compared to where ME2's were.

But people will buy ME4 because they'll tell themselves, "They wouldn't do that again, surely," and my fear, aside from that validating ME3's existence, is that EA will force Bioware to not do it again but in the usual corporate fashion go way overboard, sanitizing ME until it's just a generic space marine product. They already tried with ME3 but starting over with a new main character is going to be their perfect time to pull the series teeth.

Another examples are all those whose deaths are optional (Mordin, Wrex) - hurray for choice - and who are promptly replaced by pretty much the same character to fill the hole simply because the overarching narrative demands that there is a character who can/wants to cure the genophage. Not sure if I could get my point across since we are discussing various degrees of choice here, though.

I understand where you're coming from but I still don't agree. I just think if the character knows all the choices they have are minor and unimportant... then who cares about them at all? If my actions are not going to be able to influence the people I'm closest to in game or really hit the big points of the game then... well I'm not roleplaying. It's like when I chose the restaurant, I pick my kids meals, but then I let them pick one of the flavors of juice that I've decided in advance is acceptable for them. It looks like a choice, but it's really not.

Chambers death for me was completely random.

It largely is. Without fore knowledge of her dialogue choices there's no way to know the reprecussions. It is rather interesting that in this case being nice to her gets her murdered and you have to go renegade to save her. Thankfully I'm paranoid so I had her change her name and look. But it wasn't an informed choice it was just paranoia.

Of course it's a failure of writing, I agree but imho it's at least understandable to a degree. The question is just how much ressources and energy you want to spend on something many players won't even experience.

Well, I think when it comes to your squad it's safe to say that MOST people saved their entire crew or most of it. If I recall the average number of characters lost in the Suicide mission was less than 2. And that's on all ME2 playthroughs including some peoples, mine included, intentional fuck up Shep where we got everyone killed just to see what it and ME3 would be like. So I don't think I'm off base in saying that most people saved almost their entire crew if not the entire crew. So "Are they dead or are they alive," is an easy question to me, for the most part yes, everyone in ME2 is alive so content for those characters makes sense.

Chambers is the prime example of, well most players probably won't even notice the change credentials option and go for helping refugees instead. It's very easy to miss, so let's not waste time and ressources on a follow up, just give her a sentence and be done with it. That is cheap and if they are cheap they just might as well make it non-optional and be done with it.

While I'm not really for killing off characters like that out of player control I do agree that you either make it signifcant or don't do it at all. I kept her alive and it still felt cheap to me as well. "Yay I saved her and now she's disapppeared so... yay."

Do it right or don't do it at all, my mama always said to me, and imho that applies here too.

On that we agree and I think what happened is that they didn't go fully either way.

A good point, easily the weakest part of the whole ME series where the romances. I didn't mind them in ME1. Than something changed in ME2 and they all became really creepy and awkward in ME2. Like something a teenager would write. And then they are mostly missing in ME3. Shepard is cooler and more reserved towards former and/or actual love interests than one would be towards, you know just friends.

Ok, I've gotta go down the list.
Tali - Romance your young, cute, and innocent quarian little sister. Never mind that peeling her out of that enviro-suit is potentially lethal or that her body is allergic to your love juice. Time to get some of that sick girl tail.
Jack - Cure and emotionally shattered and distant woman with monumental trust and anger control issues through the power of the Shep-cock.
Miranda - Ok, while somewhat competative at the very least Miranda isn't completely fucked in the head and is capable of having sex with Shep without it killing her. She does decide to do it though with Shep where Tali works and right over where Jack sleeps so kinda keeping with the "colossal bitch," vibe she's been working.
Garrus - Take advantage of an emotionally isolated loner desperate for acceptance to the point of willing to go through with a liason with his best friend that could potentially send him into anaphilatic shock.
Jacob - Fuck Jacob and his cheesy pr0n lines.
Thane - Seduce a grieving widower who does little besides lament his dead wife and what a shitty father he is to his estranged son.

At least Kelly is up front with being easy and she's not totally fucked in the head.

ME1 at least left the romances not feeling icky. In ME2 Shep is a fucking sexual predator. I didn't have anything to do with them, just kept true to Liara, mostly, and rolled with it into ME3. Of course in ME3 my love interest was on the next planet over and for six fucking months couldn't even drop me a letter much less come to see me and when she does get back on the Shep she sleeps in a different cabin and spends most of the time talking to Shep like she's a friend at best.

the ending is just a symptom of this big problem and it's name is Crucible.

This I am 100% in agreement with. The Crucible is the rotten core of ME3 and the result is that it infests the entire narrative with it's stupidity.

Now ME3 starts right at the beginning of the reaper invasion and that is imho the first big mistake the game makes. Not only goes it against it's own narrative (citadel conduit disabled AND alpha relay destroyed, they should take years to arrive) without ever explaining how the Reapers managed to get here so fast.

That is a good point. The Reapers aren't show moving towards the galaxy under their own power until the end of ME2. Well between the end of ME2 and the start of ME3 is only six months. The ending of ME2 and all the talk of them hiding in Dark space makes it seem like the Reapers hide out in the void between galaxies. Well by the codex, under their own power the Reapers could only have traveled 5,400 lightyears in six months. For that to have made any sense the Reapers would have had to have been less than 1,000 light years from the Alpha relay. They weren't in Dark Space, they weren't even outside the galaxy proper. It doesn't jive with ME2 at all. This game is amazing, every time I think about it the thing just keeps getting dumber.

On mars came the first time I rolled my eyes a bit at the obvious deus ex machina device named crucible and even Shepard himself is sceptical of it ("Isn't that damn convinient?" he asks and he is right.)

And everyone's response is to just shrug and insist it's their salvtion.

The campaign shouldn't have been "TAKE EARTH BACK" but "BUY TIME TO FINISH THE CRUCIBLE!".

You don't even buy time for it. It's entirely possible to successfully finish the game without getting ANY assets that assist the Crucible. So you have no impact on it at all and like you said, even if you bring no forces with you at all, it's still all on the Crucible.

So the Crucible is the deeper, underlying crux of the matter. It should have never been introduced. Despite being a far to obvious deus ex machina device - which even Shepard recognizes as such - it robs the player of the possibilty that his/her choices will pay off in the end. The real important work is not done by the player but by those who build the crucible in the meantime. If they fail, all is for naught.
Delete the crucible and have the player fight teh reapers conventionally.

Given the might of the Reapers and their numbers it's hard even for me as the founding member of the church of the Thanix cannon to imagine it working. I really don't think the Crucible needs to be thrown out in it's entirety. Think about it for a minute. Look at your team, Mordin and Tali a brilliant scientist and a brilliant engineer. Think about what you've got, Sovereign's corpse, the Klendagon casualty, the Leviathan of Dis, the Collector Base. You've got warning, you've got resources, you've got people. Instead of making the Crucible someone else's work, have your own people come up with the idea. Make finding people and resources for it matter. Make the ending fleet matter. I honestly think that moving it's generation from the other cycles to this one could save the concept.

Now one must not be hellbent on following those traditional story-guidelines but there is a reason most sucessfull stories are structured in such a way. It fucking works so well.

And as a reconstruction of the space opera genre its a structure that should be followed.

What we should have had was having the problem introduced in the first act (Oh shit, the reapers are coming, Shepard was right!!"), having our lowpoint in the second act. (They invade earth and fuck the galaxy up) and have our resolution in the third act (Yeah, I rallyed the galaxy, payback time!"). Cheesy? Maybe. Traditional? Certainly. Would it have been way better? I think so.

Thoughts?

It's not hard to do ME3 better because frankly the whole thing was one gigantic cock-up from the start. You're idea certainly has merit and you hit my biggest issue, the Crucible.

I'm curious, what did you think about Cerberus' role in the game?

[Atekimogus]

You've got a point there. Which would make this a case where they once again tried to dumb the game down so that people wouldn't be lost coming into the LAST GAME IN A TRILOGY. With ME 1&2 available for less than $20 combined if you don't want to be lost in ME3 just play the first two games.

Well, it is incomprehensible for you and me and yet there seems to be no end of people who only played ME2 and ME3 or only ME3. Now the problem here is that ME1 was made more or less for the PC. The interface is perfect - but only if you play with keyboard and mouse, I honestly cannot imagine playing ME1 with a gamepad. So my guess is that ME1 wasn't that big of a hit on consules. That is probably the main reason that there was a lot of mainstreaming the interface inbetween ME1 and ME2. Make it more consule-friendly. Now I am not an elitest PC jerk, as long as the PC version isn't treated like a second class citizen I think that is a good thing. Bigger audiences, bigger success, bigger budget etc. etc.

As for dumbing down the game.....alas I do not support it, but....I get it. ME1 is probably the shortest of the games. Eden Prime, Citadel, Noveria, Feros, Virmire, Ilos a bunch of optional side-crap and you are through. However the whole universe is introduced and you can literally spend hours just reading codex entries, introducing the universe. I greatly enjoyed that part, luckily I am easily entertained and can immerse myself completely with as little as a book.

Now am I the exception or the rule of the Gear of Wars, God of War, etc. playing geeks with an attention span lasting only to the next frag? Now it would be immensely pleasing if BioWare would be in a position to say - "Screw this, those are not our target audience!". It would also be immensely naive to think so, especially with EA breathing down their neck. So yeah, the dumbing down of games is an unfortunaty trend of mainstreaming the game to the biggest possible demographic. On the plus-side this means more bucks for them and a bigger budget for the next game, so........not ideal but understandable.

The geth were not apparently used in the military and as you said there is no real evidence big fucking bombs were used not that the geth could have likely gotten access to any. Even with nukes you're not getting a 99% kill rate unless you are intentionally trying to wipe out every man woman and child. The geth were not interested in preventing the quarians from deleting them or removing their ability to resist. They were involved in flat out genocide.

Well as I said further down, being intelligent isn't the same as being educated so I guess they just didn't comprehend really what was going on. Only that they needed to protect themselves against extinction by killing every quarian on sight. It took them probably years afterwards to figure out what happened. Legion seems always a bit awkward discussing this imho and at one point when asked why they preserved and repaired the quarian homeworld if they don't really live there he even makes a comparison to auschwitz birkenau. A monument to remember what happened. Now in hindsight it is imho quite possible that they don't keep this remembrence as a warning, but because of shame. Shame how close they came doing the very same thing they themselves nearly fell victim to without them even realizing.

Or it could be that the geth had no capability to pursue them immediately after the quarians left. And if they went chasing the quarians down they might expose themselves to the rest of the galactic community and we know how the Council would have responded. You are right, the details of the morning war are sketchy and there is a lot of room for interpretation but when the get wiped out over 99.5% of the quarian population I'm not buying anything but intentional extermination.

Good point.

I think the original ending of ME3 flowed pretty well. If you ignore what's going on and focus on it as imagery and music it all meshes beautifully. Then you get to the EC and it's just a jumbled mess. The original ME3 ending did at least as a visual exercise work.

Agreed. The EC was a mistake. Either have the balls and stay with it or have the balls and come up with a resolution. The EC is a half assed measure making things even worse imho. That they literally poored oil on the flames by constantly teasing with whatnot they already have planned for DLCs spoileralert omg etc. , which ultimatly led to nothing, makes them even more look like total asses.

The big problem is that the normal ending is basically, "Way to go hero, the galaxy as you knew it is totally fucked, all your friends die, and earth is a death world now. Congratulations!"

Yeah...but the EC doesn't change that. The photomontage did nothing for me and answers none of the big questions.

It's when he becomes a love interest that the creepy ratchets up to Thane romance levels of creepy. Allers, her face looks like she frenched a bee hive, her VA was just reading the script, and she is an eternal reminder that she is NOT Emily Wong.

That is actually something I wondered about. Why we didn't have Wong or the al jalani (or however she is spelled) person on board. As for creepy....I be honest and say that - altough I didn't disliked them - I never really cared for Thane/Samara. You pick them up so late in the game........so naturally I never even thought of romancing Thane. (Honestly, didn't even know that it is possible to romance the frog.) But I agree.....the animation (facial and body) when the characters are "getting it on" is just horrible in every game. Clipping errors, kissing locks more like head-butting a krogan (maybe they reused stock animation and altered it only slightly, who knows). Oh god, Wiliams lying half-dead in her hospital bed and still managing to stick her new fake boobs into your face.....horrible:)

He doesn't, not really. He's got some good lines and Freddie did a great job with him. He just doesn't have a reason to exist. He is this games big slab of dumb muscle but if you need a soldier you've got either Ashley or Garrus. You don't need another soldier option.

Well he has this big life-changing moment of accepting a N7 posting or not....but does that "lead" to anything or did I botch it somehow? Maybe he gets new skills or something I just didn't notice by sticking to my old crew? But I agree, the voice acting was good, it wasn't really an unlikable character either. Liked him better than Jack or Thane initially for example. (Though both grew on me, although more by their representation in ME3 than what we see from them in ME2).

And that's something a lot of the "art" proponents missed. This isn't art in the traditional sense. It's entertainment. It can have artistic elements but in the end EA didn't make the game because they had a story they needed to tell, they made a game to try and sell 10 million units. And if you want to claim it's art, ok, it's shitty art. The entire ending of the game fails on basic, mechanical levels. I really hope that for the most part the DLC numbers are way down compared to where ME2's were.

Personally I do not draw such a distinct line between "This is art and this is not because one takes money for it!". For me video games are an art form. Movies are also an artform. Movies also are mostly made to turn a buck. One doesn't preclude the other. Heck, Michelangelo didn't paint the sistine chapel because he HAD to express himself, he did it to get fucking paid. And to make sure he continues to get fucking paid he made sure that he delivers a top notch job which satisfied his patron.
The same is true here imho. Is ME3 art? Of course. The music alone is art. The visuals are art. The story it tells is also art. All that still doesn't rule out that it is also entertainment and first and foremost strifes to please its audience. So saying that "It's art and shouldn't bow to the wants and needs of it's audience" is bullshit since then it just becomes shitty art imho. (I admit I am not a big fan of "modern art". Shitting on a canvas, poor buckets of cow-blood on a wall or drawing differently coloured rectangles a three year old could do and calling it "art" is just something I do not get. I am probably to mainstream for that and ok with it.)

But even if you dismiss the monetary implications, when you make a space opera the calibre of Mass Effect, what would YOU as the creator like your fans to say about it in the end. That they liked it, cherished it, enjoyed it greatly, will ever hold it in good memory.......or that most of us had to go through the five stages of grieve because it was so fucked up? I really don't know what the endgame was here. If they wanted to go all dark and sad and artsy on us, they should have done so at the end of ME2. You now...triology....reaching lowpoint in the second act...etc. Yet ME2 is arguably the most lighthearted and just all around humourous "feel good" installment of the whole series. There really was no need to make such a grim ending for ME3 since it alrready was the last part of the Shepard story. Alone the fact that the series comes to an end would have made even the cheesiest happy ending bitter sweet.

(Come to think of it, when they saw that they had to wrap the story in two minutes because they were out of time, or EA breathing down their necks or whatever, they should have had the balls to say....well, guys we know it's supposed to be a triology but the reaper war is to damn fucking epic to wrap up in one game, so yeah, we pulled a Kill Bill. Final resolution in ME4. Even with a cliffhangar everyone would be more than ok with that.)

But people will buy ME4 because they'll tell themselves, "They wouldn't do that again, surely," and my fear, aside from that validating ME3's existence, is that EA will force Bioware to not do it again but in the usual corporate fashion go way overboard, sanitizing ME until it's just a generic space marine product. They already tried with ME3 but starting over with a new main character is going to be their perfect time to pull the series teeth.

That is also my suspicion.

Of course it's a failure of writing, I agree but imho it's at least understandable to a degree. The question is just how much ressources and energy you want to spend on something many players won't even experience.

Well, I think when it comes to your squad it's safe to say that MOST people saved their entire crew or most of it. If I recall the average number of characters lost in the Suicide mission was less than 2. And that's on all ME2 playthroughs including some peoples, mine included, intentional fuck up Shep where we got everyone killed just to see what it and ME3 would be like. So I don't think I'm off base in saying that most people saved almost their entire crew if not the entire crew. So "Are they dead or are they alive," is an easy question to me, for the most part yes, everyone in ME2 is alive so content for those characters makes sense.

Interesting. There were offical statistics? Well regardless, as soon as their death is a choice they just cannot have a meaningful role in the story anymore or need to be replaced with a cookie-cutter character to preserve choice. And we see that they are either unwilling or uncapable of delivering quality content for all characters, so imho they might as well cut down on player choice and make a few things canonical if it means they can flesh out other things better. (For example, I was surprised to learn that there isn't anyone replacing Garrus if he somehow didn't make it into ME3. He was so well written into the game that it didn't dawn on me until after I played it that he might be completely missing. However, Garrus is probably one - if not the - most popular character. Other - less popular - characters do not get the same treatment, so imho they might as well cut our choices there. Do it well or don't do it at all. Don't cut corners and don't half-ass it.

Ok, I've gotta go down the list.
Tali - Romance your young, cute, and innocent quarian little sister. Never mind that peeling her out of that enviro-suit is potentially lethal or that her body is allergic to your love juice. Time to get some of that sick girl tail.
Jack - Cure and emotionally shattered and distant woman with monumental trust and anger control issues through the power of the Shep-cock.
Miranda - Ok, while somewhat competative at the very least Miranda isn't completely fucked in the head and is capable of having sex with Shep without it killing her. She does decide to do it though with Shep where Tali works and right over where Jack sleeps so kinda keeping with the "colossal bitch," vibe she's been working.
Garrus - Take advantage of an emotionally isolated loner desperate for acceptance to the point of willing to go through with a liason with his best friend that could potentially send him into anaphilatic shock.
Jacob - Fuck Jacob and his cheesy pr0n lines.
Thane - Seduce a grieving widower who does little besides lament his dead wife and what a shitty father he is to his estranged son.

Well I only played male-shep so yeah, I never actually had most of the ME2 options. What bothered me in ME2 was that I just basically was nice to everyone. Not trying to lay with half the ship you know, just making nice and pleasant conversation. And suddenly everyone is bitch-fighting about Shepard and Jokers begging for pictures and I am all "Wtf just happened!".

As for Miranda, I admit she was my choice since despite being Cerberus she still wasn't such a xenophobic and complaining bitch as Ashley and basically she is just a 1:1 copy of Sarah Walker from the TV-series Chuck, which the writers (and me) obviously had to be fans of. Ironically, Chuck ended quite similar to ME3, destroying all involvment one might have had in the story by just deleting her characters memory. Seems the actress is a bad omen for good endings.

At least Kelly is up front with being easy and she's not totally fucked in the head.

Now I admit without shame that I only used her for getting her to care about my fish.

ME1 at least left the romances not feeling icky. In ME2 Shep is a fucking sexual predator. I didn't have anything to do with them, just kept true to Liara, mostly, and rolled with it into ME3. Of course in ME3 my love interest was on the next planet over and for six fucking months couldn't even drop me a letter much less come to see me and when she does get back on the Shep she sleeps in a different cabin and spends most of the time talking to Shep like she's a friend at best.

Well with Miranda being ex-Cerberus this was at least touched upon. (She didn't want to get caught.) Considering how much history you have with this character at that point however (heck, she practically repaired you for two years, went on a suicide mission with you, you became involved in her family live and possibly hooked up with her) the conversations you have with her are a big let-down. Heck, even Grunts cameo appearance had more heart and soul than that. But then, he never was a LI....... .

That is a good point. The Reapers aren't show moving towards the galaxy under their own power until the end of ME2. Well between the end of ME2 and the start of ME3 is only six months. The ending of ME2 and all the talk of them hiding in Dark space makes it seem like the Reapers hide out in the void between galaxies. Well by the codex, under their own power the Reapers could only have traveled 5,400 lightyears in six months. For that to have made any sense the Reapers would have had to have been less than 1,000 light years from the Alpha relay. They weren't in Dark Space, they weren't even outside the galaxy proper. It doesn't jive with ME2 at all. This game is amazing, every time I think about it the thing just keeps getting dumber.

Yeah well I must say this came as a surprise to me. When the demo became available I downloaded it just to see if I could run it on my old computer. Played it only for about a minute and always assumed we are playing a chapter from the middle of the game. Uninstalled it, forgot about it. Only recently played the game itself and was surprised that we really start basically at the end.

Another bothersome thing is that so many things between ME2 and 3 are just left in the dark. In ME2 the only question really is how Cerberus got hold of Shepards corpse but it's only a small unknown. They got him somehow, the end. (And afaik this is touched upon briefly in a comic.)

Me3 however..... . So he just did turn himself in. Why? Either they cash him in for destroying a batarian system or because with his involvment with cerberus. What about his spectre status? Blowing shit up for the good of council space is exactly what he is supposed to do as spectre, isn't it? And if one didn't play the DLC they cash him in for working with cerberus? How about just saying you were "really" a double agent, which isn't even far from the truth? He did have the blessing of the council and Anderson to do so for christs sake. What about Miranda and Jacob? They were just ok with surrendering the normandy? Was the crew even asked? At the end of ME2 everyone sits in the shuttlebay, cleaning weapons, nodding Shepard and preparing for the reapers. Five minutes later they are just "ah forget it, just drop me off somewhere, I am out of here?" Now we do learn eventually "where" they ended up, but there is still a whole chapter missing imho and afaik there isn't really a comic or book about it explaining it. (To be honest however, if there were I would also complain about it, simply because leaving parts of the story out of the game just that you need to buy merchandise....disgusting).

The campaign shouldn't have been "TAKE EARTH BACK" but "BUY TIME TO FINISH THE CRUCIBLE!".

You don't even buy time for it. It's entirely possible to successfully finish the game without getting ANY assets that assist the Crucible. So you have no impact on it at all and like you said, even if you bring no forces with you at all, it's still all on the Crucible.

Well from what I gather your military assets have a small effect on the ending. How those logically affect if the crucible blows up earth or not is beyond me.

Given the might of the Reapers and their numbers it's hard even for me as the founding member of the church of the Thanix cannon to imagine it working. I really don't think the Crucible needs to be thrown out in it's entirety. Think about it for a minute. Look at your team, Mordin and Tali a brilliant scientist and a brilliant engineer. Think about what you've got, Sovereign's corpse, the Klendagon casualty, the Leviathan of Dis, the Collector Base. You've got warning, you've got resources, you've got people. Instead of making the Crucible someone else's work, have your own people come up with the idea. Make finding people and resources for it matter. Make the ending fleet matter. I honestly think that moving it's generation from the other cycles to this one could save the concept.

Yes that would have been better, I agree. Still no fan of it though. Considering the inherent impracticallity of a weapon of mass destruction which affects the entire galaxy yet is somehow able to select only reapers (and geth obviously) as it's target.........that is to fantastic imho. The best thing of ME1 was imho - as far as the setting is concerned - that altough much of it's physics are obviously bogus, they went through great lengths and pain to come up with solutions to the inherent problems of this galaxies limitations, be it speed of light and how it affects sensors, real time communications, how kinetic barries works etc. etc. . It's beautifl because it seems so "real". It's basically our technology level if we were able to alter gravity. It's not far fetched at all and as such, a weapon like crucible doesn't fit into it imho. It's a magical, fantastical device. The fact that they build it and still don't now what it actually is supposed to do is ridicolous beyond imagining.

And look, the Reapers are powerfull but they are not invincible. The reaper to dreadnaught ratio is - according to the very ME3 codex - 1 to 4, meaning 4 dreadnaughts are capable of bringing down one sovereign class reaper. (Makes sense, they made great strides since the battle of the citadel). Now that isn't a bad ratio at all imho. Keep in mind that contrary to the reapers, the galaxy at large still can replace dreadnaughts whereas Reapers are not so easily replaced. Sure it is a numbers game in the end, but at least it seems feasable. (If you can build a crucible, you can also build replacement-fleets.) The point is that from what we learn it only never was a possibilty because all civs before never managed to rally an adequate response because they were completely caught unawares trough the citadel relay and never managed to fight as one. Not only did Shepard prevent this, they now - as a first - had a Reaper corpse to study and find countermeasures against it (thanix tech) even if they believe it only to be a large geth ship.

However, if you don't want to chance a war of attrition, which is understandable, a simple other option would have been for Shepard and team racing around the galaxy rallying support on the one hand, and uncovering/research slowy a way just to bypass their kinetc barriers. As soon as it had no shields sovereign was as easily destroyed as any other ship. It's not such a fantastical notion as a "crucible" device, fits into the universes tech-level and more importantly makes the player-contribution matter. If they ever planned on making a sequel set in the future it would have also been better since no galaxy altering technologies would have been introduced. No symbiosis ending etc.. Ship to ship combat would be a bit different if you can ignore shields on large scale, but other than that......

If you don't like this either and want a more unconventional solution how about this. There is no crucible. However you learn that the intelligence controlling the reapers is the citadel AI just like in the game. Now Shepard remembers watching Star Trek TOS, fights his way to the citadel just like in the game and finally arrives at the starchild. He/she is the first organic being every having a chat with it, just like in the game. Alone his/her being there alters its programming considerable, just like in the game. (Cycles don't work anymore, whatever shall I do?). And then he/she CONVINCES the AI that what they are doing is wrong, that the very act of harvesting the civilisations is the very exact thing they were programmed against. (Hey, we don't want you destroyed by synthetics, so we build synthetics to destroy you, so you don't get destroyed by synthetics...). You know like he/she has done the whole game. And NOW your game choices come into play. Everything you have ever done in the game can be used as argument or counterargument to end the cycles. You made peace between quarians and geth, no need for the cycle. The quarians survived the geth, organics are able to deal alone with synthetics. The geth survived the quarians but the rest of the galaxy is ready to accept them in their midst, as their presence here now proves etc. etc. . If you are paragon with enough military strength the starchild sees reason and the futility of the cycle, cancels it but pleads for the lives of the reapers since everyone is a monument of the races that came before in the galaxy and agrees to share their wisdom and knowledge peacefully. Now your choices branch further out, can you convince the massed fleets that the reapers cycle is broken or do you stand by as they destroy the reapers who don't fight back. If you are renegade the starchild gets stuck in a catch 22 loop in good old Kirk vs Computer tradition and the reapers selfdestruct. If your military rating is to low, Shepard is unable to convince the Starchild breaking the cycle. Only via merging him/herself with the starchild is he/she able to convince it of the insanity of the cycles and make it understand. Ending the same as previously but Shepard must sacrifice him/herself. Very dramatic. They wanted a shocking ending? Well having one which doesn't end in a huge fucking galaxy-spanning explosion is pretty shocking in this day and age. Finding a solution via talking when force is not a choice.........inconceivable, isn't it?

Wouldn't that been more in character with the series? Took me five minutes to come up with. Wouldn't require any more ressources to do so than the endings we have now.

I'm curious, what did you think about Cerberus' role in the game?

Well there were certain points that bothered me, others not so much. Maybe let's start with what didn't bother me, namely their overall story. It didn't bother me that TIM (the illusive man) basically is one of the main villains of the game. Cerberus starts out in ME1 as a black ops operation gone rogue, conducting weird experiments. ME2 puts a friendly face on them for our benefit and ME3 confirms the suspicions we always had. That TIM basically goes down the same path as Saren, or pretty much everyone else who studies Reaper tech or Reapers for a prolonged period is consistent and didn't come as a surprise. It seemed logical and the TIM going over the edge a distinct possiblitly, so far so good. All of this is consistent and makes sense, so no problem so far. I regret that we spend most of the time fighting cerberus instead of the reapers though, however it is understandable to a degree simply because we need foes Shepard can actually fight from a gameplay point of view. Fighting reapers is done on fleet level, not on infantry level so we need hostile grunts for Shepard to kill.

How the organization itself however was depicted in ME3 was inconsistent and over the top. It changed from shadow organization similar to the shadow brokers in some regard to a huge fucking space army strong enough to take the whole Citadel hostage for a time. And they had only six months time between ME2 and ME3. Six months in which they recovered pieces of the collector base, figured out how indoctrination works to a degree and started mass-recruiting cerberus indoctrinated....people. Six months. Not even the alliance could have pulled that off imho, in such a short time-span.

It is also grating to me that they undid a lot of development just to have a plain evil enemy to fight here. In ME1 they are pretty evil. In ME2 we learn much more about them and discover that like with most things it's not plain black and white but shades of grey. Great development. But in ME3 all that is completely undone, hey they just tricked you all along you stupid fool, putting pretty and nice faces around you but make no mistake, THEY WERE EVIL ALL ALONG. You and everyone around you were just to stupid to realize it. Now that is perfectly possible I suppose, I just don't like it because it reeks of lazy writing. As I said I am ok with the overall theme, that without Shepard they slowly turned sour again and that TIM finally went over the edge.......but it goes way to fast almost to the point of retconning everything we know of them from ME2.

The same happened with Udina. Yeah, I didn't like him much in ME1 but he was very well written and I always understood were he is coming from. Basically he just plays devils advocate for our character. (And is he wrong? We release the rachni, nuke virmire etc. we create so much political fallout he has to clean up, no wonder he is pissed most of the time.) . Now during ME2 and the beginning of ME3 it seems that the character has grown, still doesn'T like Shepard but still supports our goals and came to respect each other.........only to go again completely evil just for the lolz and dies. Again, it is possible I suppose, I still don't like it because all the character development is undone and it reeks of lazy writting. ("What about Udina? Ah..don't know....just let's make him a mole and kill him off").

The most regretable thing about cerberus however is how TIM was handled in the end. When you storm his base and he is not there I was pretty much convinced that we did not have seen the last of him. We still don't know who the fuck he is to begin with and he is still always one step ahead. However, I thought that for the duration of ME3 he is basically out of the game and that he was set up as the main villain of ME4. (At least that is what I would have done. But for some reason, short of retconning the whole game they seemed determined to fuck up everything build in ME2.......no clue why, some of the big EA suits really must have hated that game for some reason).
That would have been interesting imho. A semi-indoctrinated villain who needs to come to grasp that the reapers ultimately failed. Now what are his next steps? Going completely mad? Going back to normal cerberus business etc. Suppose they made a brillant ending with Shepard surviving, this shit woud basically write itself. The Illusive Man going on an all out revenge trip on Shepard for foiling his plan on basically becoming master of the universe via control of the reapers or whatnot.
Instead, regretably he makes an entrance as space zombie in the end just to pull a Saren on himself. Assuming it was not all a dream, which I do, this didn't do the character justice. It was one of the smaller problems of the ending but still weak writing. He being on the citadel just to gloat a final time and to die did serve no purpose at all other than removing him from the ingame-universe. If that was the goal it could have been done just as well on his base with far more dramatic impact. (Basically Shepard kills him or is forced to do so in his chair, camera pans out with the dying star in the background we so well know, fade to black, cerberus is done, closure)

(From what I gather, they had different writing teams for each segment, I read an interview from the leadwriter of the tuchanka sequence and you really feel his passion and his desire to make everything work, and have a beautiful resolution for each possibity. He worked on this with the creator of the Mordin character just to make sure to do this character justice for example, my point is.....I see now why the story-telling qualitiy is so vastly different for each segement. I had not assumed that they really made such clear cuts in segments and writing teams.)

Apart from that there were a few other things which bothered me but it's getting late and the post to long so I'll touch on that later. Give me your thoughts on cerberus in the meantime.

[Tyyr]

Well, it is incomprehensible for you and me and yet there seems to be no end of people who only played ME2 and ME3 or only ME3.

That's fine, but if you just pick up the third game in an RPG trilogy you should rightfully expect to be lost. Picking up a game series in the middle like that is sort of a user agreement that you're not going to be able to hold two games worth of plot development you had no involvement in against the game. What I'm getting at is why do you need to cater to those people at all?

As for dumbing down the game.....alas I do not support it, but....I get it. ME1 is probably the shortest of the games. Eden Prime, Citadel, Noveria, Feros, Virmire, Ilos a bunch of optional side-crap and you are through. However the whole universe is introduced and you can literally spend hours just reading codex entries, introducing the universe. I greatly enjoyed that part, luckily I am easily entertained and can immerse myself completely with as little as a book.

ME1 is probably the one easiest to sum up and not have, but to me it's purpose in laying out the setting is at least as vital as ME2's theoretically should have been with introducing the crew to you. ME1 gives flavor to what it otherwise generic sci-fi setting #4,561.

Now am I the exception or the rule of the Gear of Wars, God of War, etc. playing geeks with an attention span lasting only to the next frag? Now it would be immensely pleasing if BioWare would be in a position to say - "Screw this, those are not our target audience!". It would also be immensely naive to think so, especially with EA breathing down their neck. So yeah, the dumbing down of games is an unfortunaty trend of mainstreaming the game to the biggest possible demographic. On the plus-side this means more bucks for them and a bigger budget for the next game, so........not ideal but understandable.

Well the gameplay was put together well enough that the mindless shooter crowd should be pleased. Give them an option to turn off all the choices and just watch the talking and they'd be happy. The problem for me is that the more money they make from dumbing down the game the farther they'll dumb it down the next time. The message they'll get is that all the talking and decisions are holding back the money, get rid of them and they'll keep doing that until all Shepard does is grunt while EDI reads off the mission objectives.

A monument to remember what happened. Now in hindsight it is imho quite possible that they don't keep this remembrence as a warning, but because of shame. Shame how close they came doing the very same thing they themselves nearly fell victim to without them even realizing.

I dunno. While the geth's birth fits thematically into how all AI seems to come into existence in ME the geth's biggest different from all the rest is the tremendous computing power and systems complexity they had when networked so I'm not sure that the theme works. Even if they came into existence rather stupid their thoughts and ponderings take place hundreds if not thousands of times faster than humans. I dunno, I just don't feel (yes, this is purely opinion) that it's a fitting explanation to just say, "Eh, they didn't know what they were doing." It just paints them as TOO stupid given what they are capable of doing. Legion flat out has emotions.

Agreed. The EC was a mistake. Either have the balls and stay with it or have the balls and come up with a resolution. The EC is a half assed measure making things even worse imho. That they literally poored oil on the flames by constantly teasing with whatnot they already have planned for DLCs spoileralert omg etc. , which ultimatly led to nothing, makes them even more look like total asses.

Questions about the EC, why does the Normandy land on the planet? Previously the shockwave damaged it and it obviously crashed. Now there's no shockwave, so why land? And why does Joker fuck the landing so badly that the engine spar is ripped up at a 90 degree angle? Why is it suddenly fixed and they can fly off? Speaking of the shockwave, why is Joker trying so hard to fly away but no one in the back seems to give even a single shit about it? Once it crashes why is MY BLUE GIRLFRIEND holding Joker's hand like that? Shouldn't they be... oh, I dunno, COMING BACK TO RESCUE ME? The whole Normandy sequence is now a completely jumbled and nonsensical mess. Rather than scraping the whole thing and starting over they tried to repurpose it and keep as much of their "art" as they could only now it makes even less sense. Hell, that's just the Normandy bit. Again, it's not even opinion, you've got basic structural issues with how the whole thing is written and edited. For instance, the bit with the guy carryiny his buddy as husks charge him. It happens after the blast wave from the Citadel passes over, so you're left wondering if the wave worked. It looked like it did but now here's this guy fighting for his life from Reapers and... oh wait, there it goes. Then you've got Thessia and Tuchanka where they have no idea what the hell is going on but when the Reapers lift off the planet they cheer? How do they know they're not just lifting off to glass the planet, or to come crashing down on top of them? I mean fuck, the original ending was awful but at least it made sense, you could follow it and understand what was happening.

Then the ending slides came... ugh. Destroy's ending was bad. "Yeah, shit got fucked but don't worry we can fix it!" You know, never mind that Relays and the Citadel were largely black boxes that no one understood. They can easily be fixed now because of QUANTUM! You know, never mind that you watched the Citadel explode in low earth orbit and half of it at least should have apocalyptically rained down on the Earth. Synthesis made it clear that it could NEVER be used in any plot line advancing the game universe. Control I actually liked the slides more than others as you FINALLY get an explanation as to what the Catalyst was on about with "Lose everything you have," but at the same time it ignores the people who would have chosen it to have their Shep fly the Reapers into the nearest sun so they could get the benefits of destroy without offing EDI.

The EC was just Bioware confirming that they either didn't understand people's problems with the EC, or just didn't care.

That is actually something I wondered about. Why we didn't have Wong or the al jalani (or however she is spelled) person on board

Because Jessica Chobit licked a PSP once and is apparently some kind of gaming sex symbol. So they wanted to shoe horn her in (never mind that I didn't even know who she was until I looked it up) and came up with a role that was filled twice over. They then killed Emily off on Twitter and just left Al Jalani in to do the EXACT SAME THING she's been doing for two games already. I'd have loved to have Emily Wong back in the game.

Oh god, Wiliams lying half-dead in her hospital bed and still managing to stick her new fake boobs into your face.....horrible:)

Just like Shep she got a serious boob job between games. Shep used to be a healthy B and Ashley was the same. Now Shep is a big time C, flirting with D and Ashely went up to DD territory. They were all I could look at during the hospital scene just because of the "WTF?" factor with them.

Well he has this big life-changing moment of accepting a N7 posting or not....but does that "lead" to anything or did I botch it somehow?

It's a huge life changing moment that is so vital to ME canon that they are invalidating it in the anime by having him already be an N7. It's a rather core bit of his character arc, what little there is, and they still fuck it up.

Still, I want Vega in there just for his interactions with Liara on Eden Prime when getting Javik... which is really the only decent part of either Eden Prime or Javik.
James, "So Liara, did you dig up a lot of dinosaurs on your digs?"
Liara, "That's palentology, I was an archeologist... wait, you're making fun of me aren't you?"
James, "No, I just like dinosaurs."

Simply and straight forward, totally lacking in guile. The line was delivered perfectly. Dude just like dinosarus.

Personally I do not draw such a distinct line between "This is art and this is not because one takes money for it!".

I don't either even if it seemed that way. Most of the greatest works of art of the renisannce were made under the patronage system. However, they were made to please their customers. Were ME's customers pleased? Which is where a distinction for me comes in. If ME was pure art, made for no other reason than this was the story that Bioware wanted to tell... well then ok, that's fine. You get to do as you damn well please and no one can tell you different. You also don't get paid and don't get to eat but whatever. However ME3 was not made purely for art. Like those pieces of renisannce work it was made to make the customer happy with it. Well the customer's aren't happy. And here's the difference between purely doing it for the art and doing it commercially comes in, in the first you get to tell the audience to piss off if they don't like it. In the second if you've taken my money and I don't like it, you fucking fix it.

Hell, even stuff done purely for the art of it are regularly critiqued by others and "fixed" if something isn't working. It's done all the time with things like movies which are probably the most direct comparison to the Mass Effect series. So acting like "This is just never done!" is bullshit. It's done all the time, hell it's the norm.

So no, making a buck doesn't preclude art, but it should preclude art that gives the audience the finger.

But even if you dismiss the monetary implications, when you make a space opera the calibre of Mass Effect, what would YOU as the creator like your fans to say about it in the end. That they liked it, cherished it, enjoyed it greatly, will ever hold it in good memory.......or that most of us had to go through the five stages of grieve because it was so fucked up?

Indoctrination = Denial. I honestly cannot play ME3 again. I really can't. I replayed ME1 about five times. I played ME2 completely through about 8. Yes, I was that guy with it though I'll tell you that the later were usually speed runs that I could blow through much faster than my first go or two. I have played ME3 once. I've tried to get into it again and made it to Eden Prime before I gave up. I couldn't suffer through ME3 again.

I really don't know what the endgame was here.

I don't think anyone really knows what the goal was for all this. My own interpretation of it is that Bioware was sick of Shepard and wanted to be done with Mass Effect and set out to burn down the series and ensure that they didn't have to make another Mass Effect game. The endings would be so final, the setting so totally fucked, and in a way the player base so pissed off it would be the death knel of the series and they wouldn't have to do anything with it anymore.

The saddest interpretation is that Bioware is 100% honest in all this. That they really did want to get artsy. That they really did think this was a fitting end to the series. That they honestly believed we would love it and consider it an appropriate end to 100 hours of gaming.

There really was no need to make such a grim ending for ME3 since it alrready was the last part of the Shepard story. Alone the fact that the series comes to an end would have made even the cheesiest happy ending bitter sweet.

Exactly, even if my Shep got her happy ending and rode off into the sunset with Liara she's still riding off into the sunset. That's still the end of it. Shep and her crew have wrapped up their stories, the Mass Effect trilogy story is wrapped up, and I'm saying good-bye one way or another. They didn't need to wipe out the galaxy, kill everyone I cared about, then off Shepard in such an unsatisfying way to do it to make me feel something. I did, rage.

(Come to think of it, when they saw that they had to wrap the story in two minutes because they were out of time, or EA breathing down their necks or whatever, they should have had the balls to say....well, guys we know it's supposed to be a triology but the reaper war is to damn fucking epic to wrap up in one game, so yeah, we pulled a Kill Bill. Final resolution in ME4. Even with a cliffhangar everyone would be more than ok with that.)

Would have been nice. For a while I had the thought that maybe they were trying to save the real ending. That the original ending was a spoof or a cliff hanger and after they'd gotten world wide distribution they'd release the actual ending of the game as a free DLC simultaneously, world wide, so everyone could experience the ending of ME together. Man I was naieve.

Interesting. There were offical statistics?

Lots of them, the benefit of always online DRM. For instance, 86% of Shepards were basic soldiers. The vast majority of endings were golden or nearly so with everyone surviving. And so on. They had the data about ME2 to show them that in almost all cases everyone survived the suicide mission so making content for them would have made sense. I'd have to look up the website but the stats have been published. You could probably google, "Mass Effect 2 play stats" or something and get a result.

Well I only played male-shep so yeah, I never actually had most of the ME2 options. What bothered me in ME2 was that I just basically was nice to everyone. Not trying to lay with half the ship you know, just making nice and pleasant conversation. And suddenly everyone is bitch-fighting about Shepard and Jokers begging for pictures and I am all "Wtf just happened!".

Welcome to a Bioware game. If you're nice to people you obviously want to fuck them. I wish they'd give you more options so you can be nice without inviting a screw. Jacob is the worst as you can find yourself almost "committed" to him with absolutely zero warning. Given how pointless he is and how they lynched his character in ME3 trying to walk the "just be friends" tightrope was pointless. should have just bit his head off right off the bat. One place where the binary nature of the convo options is a huge problem.

Now I admit without shame that I only used her for getting her to care about my fish.

I used her when I realized that ME2 was going to try and pretend that my Shep wasn't into girls. Seriously, when the Dev's got called on not having anything but hetero romances in ME2 they just flat out said, "Male Shep isn't gay," and they followed that up by pointing out that since Liara is from a mono-gendered race she isn't technically a female and therefore FemShep is really all about the dick. It gets to be painfully obvious when you make both male and female play throughs. With both Jack and Tali there are places where it appears a romance is in the works and they both just awkwardly STOP. It wasn't until I played through on a Male Shep that I realized why it was awkward, I was well into the romance dialogue tree and they simply cut the next part that would have "locked in" the romance with either of them on FemShep. In other words apparently FemShep was at least going to be able to make a play for Tali or Jack. I noticed nothing similar with Male Shep talking to the guys. So to me it seems that someone at Bioware got cold feet and had them axe those romances at the last second. Leaving a great number of FemSheps with no one but Kelly to turn to.

Well with Miranda being ex-Cerberus this was at least touched upon. (She didn't want to get caught.) Considering how much history you have with this character at that point however (heck, she practically repaired you for two years, went on a suicide mission with you, you became involved in her family live and possibly hooked up with her) the conversations you have with her are a big let-down. Heck, even Grunts cameo appearance had more heart and soul than that. But then, he never was a LI.......

There are reasons for some LI's to not come but there's nothing stopping Thane, Garrus, Liara, Ashley, Kaidan, Jack, or Tali. Really it's only Miranda and Jacob (who statistically was almost never romanced) as the only LIs who couldn't at least check in with Shep. Hell, even Miranda and Jacob could have written. Then again all ME2 LI's aside from Garrus and Tali got shafted. You saw Miranda's, you mattered so little to Jacob that in six months he just completely dumps you for some random NPC he just met and will have no other point in this game than to shit on the few people who did pick Jacob. Jack just disappears after her mission never to be seen again. Thane dies, though that's appropriate to his character arc and he does get a good death. Just don't expect it to be any different from anyone else's Thane death, and don't expect to get the paramour achievement either. In a way I feel like the devs were almost telling us, "YOU PICKED WRONG!"

Another bothersome thing is that so many things between ME2 and 3 are just left in the dark. In ME2 the only question really is how Cerberus got hold of Shepards corpse but it's only a small unknown. They got him somehow, the end. (And afaik this is touched upon briefly in a comic.)

Yeah, pretty much everything you brought up was either in a comic or just not even mentioned. The downside is that rather than being a tie in which expands the story the comics ARE the story. If you don't read the comic you have NO CLUE how Cerberus got Shep's body instead of Alliance Search and Rescue. Even worse, you don't get any real background on WHY Liara acts like she does towards you without the comic or why she's so hellbent on finding the NPC killer of her NPC partner that you've never heard of before.

Why does Shep give up? Not answered. Especially galling if you've been playing a largely renegade Shepard. You wanna know what's really fun? Don't play Arrival on a Shep and load them into ME3. The only reason the Alliance would have for arresting Shep (which is kind of nonsense since Shep was acting as a Spectre at the time making this a council issue) is now gone and Shep's under arrest anyways... because. No explanation, nothing. James Vega? Any clue as to who he is and what's his connection to Shep? That's all in a comic. I read that comic and it really doesn't tell you much anyways. Kai Leng? From the books where he's a great assassin if a bit batshit insane. In the game he's just a weeabo pussy who runs from real fights.

Really they left out tons of important details for the tie in material except they don't tie in, they're self contained so if you don't read them you are completely in the dark about this stuff.

Well from what I gather your military assets have a small effect on the ending. How those logically affect if the crucible blows up earth or not is beyond me.

Which is true, very low assets and you can only destroy, and fail. Higher assets you can destroy or control. Really high assets you can do any of the three and high enough and you can get Shep surviving. Since the EC the requirement for Shep living is so low that it's largely the default ending since the only way to finish the game and NOT have enough assets for it is to be a complete fail Shep. And no, it makes no sense really.

My point was that you can avoid collecting any asset that benefits the Crucible and still get the good endings. Hell you can avoid most all of the assets period and still finish the game.

Yes that would have been better, I agree. Still no fan of it though. Considering the inherent impracticallity of a weapon of mass destruction which affects the entire galaxy yet is somehow able to select only reapers (and geth obviously) as it's target...

I don't disagree, my point is more that it's less that the Crucible is the problem and more how it's handled. It could have been done in a way that would shift the focus back onto the player and what they're doing and the choices they've made.

The biggest issue I see with a conventional fight is while you can kill a Reaper with a group of dreadnaughts there simply aren't enough. There are less than 100 dreads in the entire galaxy. If they coordinated you could probably take out 35 to 40 Reapers in a straight up fight but there were many more than that at Earth. Given another decade or two to prepare you might as much as triple that number but there looked to be hundreds, if not a few thousand Reapers attacking the galaxy. Without full commitment from all the species in the galaxy I doubt you could make enough dreads to take the Reapers in a full on fight with anything less a couple centuries to do it.

However, if you don't want to chance a war of attrition, which is understandable, a simple other option would have been for Shepard and team racing around the galaxy rallying support on the one hand, and uncovering/research slowy a way just to bypass their kinetc barriers.

Which is my prefered way to do it. It's what I'd have had the Crucible do from the get go, fry the reaper's eezo cores.

Wouldn't that been more in character with the series? Took me five minutes to come up with. Wouldn't require any more ressources to do so than the endings we have now.

I'd have liked it, I'd have liked it a hell of a lot more than what we finally got. That's sort of the thing with this ending, it's so incredibly fucking bad that just about anything would be better. Ending the series with Shep talking to someone, convincing them that Shep is right and to go with her would actually be a more thematically appropriate ending than most.

I regret that we spend most of the time fighting cerberus instead of the reapers though, however it is understandable to a degree simply because we need foes Shepard can actually fight from a gameplay point of view. Fighting reapers is done on fleet level, not on infantry level so we need hostile grunts for Shepard to kill.

I understand what you're saying and to a degree I'm on board but at the end of it you do fight Reapers on several occasions in the game and frankly they're the memorable encounters. I think you could have had more Reaper fighting and less Cerberus if the race aspect was played up. That you're racing to stay ahead of them to collect your mcguffins for your final solution.

How the organization itself however was depicted in ME3 was inconsistent and over the top. It changed from shadow organization similar to the shadow brokers in some regard to a huge fucking space army strong enough to take the whole Citadel hostage for a time. And they had only six months time between ME2 and ME3. Six months in which they recovered pieces of the collector base, figured out how indoctrination works to a degree and started mass-recruiting cerberus indoctrinated....people. Six months. Not even the alliance could have pulled that off imho, in such a short time-span.

That bothered me. Even with their explanation of partially husking their troops it doesn't explain how they managed to pull all this off in such a short time. Timmy almost certainly had things in the works prior to even ME2 but the speed that they go from ME2 Cerberus to having their own army is ridiculous and we know it's a recent development because you have scientists who are just now defecting talking about how things are happening.

But in ME3 all that is completely undone, hey they just tricked you all along you stupid fool, putting pretty and nice faces around you but make no mistake, THEY WERE EVIL ALL ALONG.

I liked that about them in ME2. You could see the points they were making and they were valid. Their tactics were questionable at times but on the whole they had a rational goal. Then ME3 hits and they're just mustache twirling monsters.

Now during ME2 and the beginning of ME3 it seems that the character has grown, still doesn'T like Shepard but still supports our goals and came to respect each other.........only to go again completely evil just for the lolz and dies. Again, it is possible I suppose, I still don't like it because all the character development is undone and it reeks of lazy writting.

Or they were just trying for fan service. People had hated him since ME1 and now they give you the chance to pop him! Never mind that by early ME3 I wasn't really looking for a reason to kill him anymore. Oh I didn't like him, and I wouldn't have a drink with him but neither did just his appearence in the game make me want to kill him. Then you do get to kill him, and its deeply unsatisfying.

Then again, what the hell was Cerberus even thinking with that whole plot? Did they really think taking over the Citadel would accomplish anything? After a bloody coup do you really think that the Council races would start taking orders from Udina? No, once they had the Reapers sorted they'd have come back and killed Cerberus and spaced Udina. All they did was make sure everyone hated them. It's just nonsense.

That would have been interesting imho. A semi-indoctrinated villain who needs to come to grasp that the reapers ultimately failed. Now what are his next steps? Going completely mad? Going back to normal cerberus business etc.

I've pondered a similar question for a different fic and the answer I came up with was rebuild them. The cycle will continue. It might take some time but Cerberus certainly had enough data to start to reconstruct something of the Reapers. Maybe not a full on Reaper but utilizing some of their tech to similar ends? Sure. And with most of the galaxy unexplored it would be easy for them to disappear and start to prey on weak races to gain strength.

As for Timmy's death on the Citadel. There's no good reason why he's there, or even any explanation as to how. As far as we know the Conduit is the only way up and are we to assume Timmy just flew to Earth through the Reaper blockade, landed in the heart of Reaper occupied London, took the conduit up to the Citadel then just chilled in a side hall off that room until Shep showed up hours later? What? I did feel that his end was a redux of Saren and in a way convincing him to shoot himself was far more rewarding in the end than Saren's was. It was an appropriate end given how ME3 had run its course. It was also a tremendous waste of the character.

To me Cerberus was the main enemy of ME3. Yes, the Reapers showed up from time to time but by and large if you were gonna have to shoot a bitch he was wearing white. And when you think abou the best segments of ME3 who was involved? Not Cerberus. They were only in a side mission on Tuchanka, the main plot had nothing to do with them. Rannoch didn't have a white suit in sight. The finally battle on Earth, Cerberus free. Ultimately they had no stand out moments in my mind, nothing that was truly memorable. They were there, but they were boring. And in the climax of the trilogy, when I need to be killing Reapers anytime I had to stop to kill a bunch of Cerberus goons I was acutely aware of the fact that I was not dealing with the main issue.

[Atekimogus]

Well, it is incomprehensible for you and me ............. The message they'll get is that all the talking and decisions are holding back the money, get rid of them and they'll keep doing that until all Shepard does is grunt while EDI reads off the mission objectives.

I basically agree with your last three statements, just so you know:).

I dunno. While the geth's birth fits thematically into how all AI seems to come into existence in ME the geth's biggest different from all the rest is the tremendous computing power and systems complexity they had when networked so I'm not sure that the theme works. Even if they came into existence rather stupid their thoughts and ponderings take place hundreds if not thousands of times faster than humans. I dunno, I just don't feel (yes, this is purely opinion) that it's a fitting explanation to just say, "Eh, they didn't know what they were doing." It just paints them as TOO stupid given what they are capable of doing. Legion flat out has emotions.

That wasn't exactly what I was saying. I think they did know exactly and perfectly well what they were doing, they are pretty intelligent after all. What I meant is that it took them quite a bit to come to realise that they did something morally wrong. Now if their initial impulse to just kill off all geth was just the result of their consensus, or maybe the synthetic equivalent of a survival instinct...who knows. But since they started educationally from scratch (just like they were unable to comprehend what they did wrong and are now being shut off) maybe it took them so long to develop a moral compass. Nobody was teaching them at that point so if they arrive at the conclusion that they almost wipped out a species and that this is wrong just as the quarians are leaving, I would call this still a remarkably fast development.

Questions about the EC, why does the Normandy land on the planet? Previously the shockwave damaged it and it obviously crashed. Now there's no shockwave, so why land? And why does Joker fuck the landing so badly that the engine spar is ripped up at a 90 degree angle? Why is it suddenly fixed and they can fly off? Speaking of the shockwave, why is Joker trying so hard to fly away but no one in the back seems to give even a single shit about it? Once it crashes why is MY BLUE GIRLFRIEND holding Joker's hand like that? Shouldn't they be... oh, I dunno, COMING BACK TO RESCUE ME? The whole Normandy sequence is now a completely jumbled and nonsensical mess. Rather than scraping the whole thing and starting over they tried to repurpose it and keep as much of their "art" as they could only now it makes even less sense. Hell, that's just the Normandy bit. Again, it's not even opinion, you've got basic structural issues with how the whole thing is written and edited. For instance, the bit with the guy carryiny his buddy as husks charge him. It happens after the blast wave from the Citadel passes over, so you're left wondering if the wave worked. It looked like it did but now here's this guy fighting for his life from Reapers and... oh wait, there it goes. Then you've got Thessia and Tuchanka where they have no idea what the hell is going on but when the Reapers lift off the planet they cheer? How do they know they're not just lifting off to glass the planet, or to come crashing down on top of them? I mean fuck, the original ending was awful but at least it made sense, you could follow it and understand what was happening.

Well what can I say? The game makes sense to the point where Harbinger hits you. As soon as you walk towards the transporterbeam the whole thing gets so unreal and makes no sense anymore that I really can understand why so many think this is all a dream in dyings or indoctrinated Shepards brain. (What is the first thing you do when you die? Well, walking towards the light....suspicious, isn't it?:)).

Then the ending slides came... ugh. Destroy's ending was bad. "Yeah, shit got fucked but don't worry we can fix it!" You know, never mind that Relays and the Citadel were largely black boxes that no one understood. They can easily be fixed now because of QUANTUM! You know, never mind that you watched the Citadel explode in low earth orbit and half of it at least should have apocalyptically rained down on the Earth. Synthesis made it clear that it could NEVER be used in any plot line advancing the game universe. Control I actually liked the slides more than others as you FINALLY get an explanation as to what the Catalyst was on about with "Lose everything you have," but at the same time it ignores the people who would have chosen it to have their Shep fly the Reapers into the nearest sun so they could get the benefits of destroy without offing EDI.

Well at least in the non-destroy endings the mass relays are fixed by reapers so yeah, cheers for one plothole less. Again, the whole sequenze is so nonsensical............pretending this is all the product of Shepards dying brain is actually suddendly not the worst thing to assume.

Because Jessica Chobit licked a PSP once and is apparently some kind of gaming sex symbol. So they wanted to shoe horn her in (never mind that I didn't even know who she was until I looked it up) and came up with a role that was filled twice over. They then killed Emily off on Twitter and just left Al Jalani in to do the EXACT SAME THING she's been doing for two games already. I'd have loved to have Emily Wong back in the game.

Jessica who? I won't even google it, don't care. What, after Miri's equic ass-shots, Samara's matriachal biotic-enhanced bussom and newly "I don't wear swimwear into battle, I just have one massive boobjob before earth blows up"-Williams they still hadn't enough sexualization in the game? Jesus Christ, I like ass and boob as every other straight red blooded man but come on......

Btw they killed Emily off? WTF?

Just like Shep she got a serious boob job between games. Shep used to be a healthy B and Ashley was the same. Now Shep is a big time C, flirting with D and Ashely went up to DD territory. They were all I could look at during the hospital scene just because of the "WTF?" factor with them.

Well damned if I didn't like the view but it was ridicolous. Less because of the new DD boobs but the animators dropped the ball here. Noone makes that of a hollow back when lying wounded in a bed just to stick them out a bit more. It looked completely unnatural.

Still, I want Vega in there just for his interactions with Liara on Eden Prime when getting Javik... which is really the only decent part of either Eden Prime or Javik.
James, "So Liara, did you dig up a lot of dinosaurs on your digs?"
Liara, "That's palentology, I was an archeologist... wait, you're making fun of me aren't you?"
James, "No, I just like dinosaurs."

Simply and straight forward, totally lacking in guile. The line was delivered perfectly. Dude just like dinosarus.

Well let's be more positve for a change, one things they absolutely did right imho are the new crew interactions. In ME1 the only interactions happend in elevators and were very rare, in ME2 you only had them when solving conflincts but in ME3 they finally talk with each other and do not only react to Shepard. That was a huge step forward bringing them alive imho and they were all very well done and humorous which leds me to believe they had one or two writers parked just for those dialogues, which are consistently good and in character.

Indoctrination = Denial. I honestly cannot play ME3 again. I really can't. I replayed ME1 about five times. I played ME2 completely through about 8. Yes, I was that guy with it though I'll tell you that the later were usually speed runs that I could blow through much faster than my first go or two. I have played ME3 once. I've tried to get into it again and made it to Eden Prime before I gave up. I couldn't suffer through ME3 again.

Same here. ME1 is sufficiently different enough and standing on its own that I replayed it....but I cannot bring myself to revisit even ME2, knowing how many things just will lead to nothing, get completely fucked up or has characters in it which just won't matter anymore.

I don't think anyone really knows what the goal was for all this. My own interpretation of it is that Bioware was sick of Shepard and wanted to be done with Mass Effect and set out to burn down the series and ensure that they didn't have to make another Mass Effect game. The endings would be so final, the setting so totally fucked, and in a way the player base so pissed off it would be the death knel of the series and they wouldn't have to do anything with it anymore.

Well if so, that they achieved brilliantly.

Man I was naieve.

Hey I get it. They were taking away the future of the series. Without a future, we have no hope. Without hope… we might as well be machines.......WAIT A MINTUTE! Those evil Bioware-bastards!

Lots of them, the benefit of always online DRM. For instance, 86% of Shepards were basic soldiers. The vast majority of endings were golden or nearly so with everyone surviving. And so on. They had the data about ME2 to show them that in almost all cases everyone survived the suicide mission so making content for them would have made sense. I'd have to look up the website but the stats have been published. You could probably google, "Mass Effect 2 play stats" or something and get a result.

In that case, even more shame on them.

I used her when I realized that ME2 was going to try and pretend that my Shep wasn't into girls. Seriously, when the Dev's got called on not having anything but hetero romances in ME2 they just flat out said, "Male Shep isn't gay," and they followed that up by pointing out that since Liara is from a mono-gendered race she isn't technically a female and therefore FemShep is really all about the dick. It gets to be painfully obvious when you make both male and female play throughs. With both Jack and Tali there are places where it appears a romance is in the works and they both just awkwardly STOP. It wasn't until I played through on a Male Shep that I realized why it was awkward, I was well into the romance dialogue tree and they simply cut the next part that would have "locked in" the romance with either of them on FemShep. In other words apparently FemShep was at least going to be able to make a play for Tali or Jack. I noticed nothing similar with Male Shep talking to the guys. So to me it seems that someone at Bioware got cold feet and had them axe those romances at the last second. Leaving a great number of FemSheps with no one but Kelly to turn to.

And I am completely indifferent to all of this. Make them gay, make them straight, I don't care. Personally I think they should leave the choice to the player but if not, also fine. BUT STICK WITH IT. Now that being said romances where just poorly handled all around. The most mature is probably still ME1 which is ironic considering how much flak it got back then for having a well....is there something softer as soft-porn scene? Not sure what the correct term here is but that was nothing, but then I am european....

Maybe they are all so bad because noone at Bioware wanted to do them anymore since all the controversie and much ado about nothing ME1 caused but were forced to do them....well you know to get all the hormone-driven teenagers into their focus-group. And sure as hell all romances in ME2 and afterwards seem like an afterthought. They just don't fit into the game. Look at ME2. "Oh, I just lost my whole crew to the collectors, plugged in a dangerous AI controlling every system on my ship and I am about to start a suicide mission. But nevermind that my crew - people I come to like quite a bit - are about to get liquified, just let's bang ok?". Talk about perfect timing.

There are reasons for some LI's to not come but there's nothing stopping Thane, Garrus, Liara, Ashley, Kaidan, Jack, or Tali. Really it's only Miranda and Jacob (who statistically was almost never romanced) as the only LIs who couldn't at least check in with Shep. Hell, even Miranda and Jacob could have written. Then again all ME2 LI's aside from Garrus and Tali got shafted. You saw Miranda's, you mattered so little to Jacob that in six months he just completely dumps you for some random NPC he just met and will have no other point in this game than to shit on the few people who did pick Jacob. Jack just disappears after her mission never to be seen again. Thane dies, though that's appropriate to his character arc and he does get a good death. Just don't expect it to be any different from anyone else's Thane death, and don't expect to get the paramour achievement either. In a way I feel like the devs were almost telling us, "YOU PICKED WRONG!"

Well that is something which ME2 handled much much better and what grated me in the beginning to no end, despite - I admit - I greatly enjoyed ME3 while playing it. But that small detailed alienated me to no end and it was that I could NOT ask ANYONE what the hell happened during ME2 and ME3 and what my crew does. In ME2 you have to go a bit, talk to the illusive man but as soon as you are alone for a minute with Joker you get to ask him "WTH happened to my crew". In ME3....zero, nilch, nada. Yeah I am caught up in the action so you go with it, but that did bother me even then, since it is the most natural thing to do. And Shepard never thinks to ask this most obvious question. How is everyone. What's new?

Yeah, pretty much everything you brought up was either in a comic or just not even mentioned. The downside is that rather than being a tie in which expands the story the comics ARE the story. If you don't read the comic you have NO CLUE how Cerberus got Shep's body instead of Alliance Search and Rescue. Even worse, you don't get any real background on WHY Liara acts like she does towards you without the comic or why she's so hellbent on finding the NPC killer of her NPC partner that you've never heard of before.

That didn't bother me. Why? I experience the game from Shepards perspective. "I" didn't know what happened. Liaras acting strange so I assume something happened but I trust her so I take her word for everything she says. No problem. Between ME2 and ME3 Shepard isn't dead however. "I" am very much alive, curious and I the hell want to know what happened in my absence. Six months isn't a two year gap of complete oblivion.

Kai Leng? From the books where he's a great assassin if a bit batshit insane. In the game he's just a weeabo pussy who runs from real fights.

Didn't read the books but I hate that character. Not for what he does but for what he represents. The end of all creativity. So they needed an assassin. In ME2 they invented a whole species with unquipe physiology, developed a whole belief system for it and fit it perfectly into the universe, just so we have an interesting assassin which is not run of the mill. Altough I didn't like Thane (mostly because his "flashbacks" were grating on my nerves) I cannot say that he wasn't an interesting character.

So they needed an assassin in ME3? Hey make him a cyber ninja. Yeah that's great. And make him an asian, since you know, all ninjas in the future still have to be asians. Uninteresting and cheap. And when will they EVER stop bringing swords to gunfights? I find having some stabbing option on the omni-tool is a nice idea, since you know, even today a soldier has a combat-knive with him, which nevertheless is more tool than weapon, so that fits imho. But making swords the main-weapon? Why would it be anymore usefull against a shield than a gun? This isn't dune.

The biggest issue I see with a conventional fight is while you can kill a Reaper with a group of dreadnaughts there simply aren't enough. There are less than 100 dreads in the entire galaxy. If they coordinated you could probably take out 35 to 40 Reapers in a straight up fight but there were many more than that at Earth. Given another decade or two to prepare you might as much as triple that number but there looked to be hundreds, if not a few thousand Reapers attacking the galaxy. Without full commitment from all the species in the galaxy I doubt you could make enough dreads to take the Reapers in a full on fight with anything less a couple centuries to do it.

I do not disagree and I get were you are coming from. However, to get to an satisfying ending the narrative almost demands winning by conventional means. Because gathering conventional strength is the whole goal of your character throughout the game. So it HAS to pay off somehow in the end in a much more meaningfull way than we get, if we want to get something out of the game. Even if we got a happy ending, everybody lives and is happy and the reapers are dead, the replayability is completely murdered. Why gathering war assets, just let me fly to the secret citadel chamber and blow stuff up.

Which is my prefered way to do it. It's what I'd have had the Crucible do from the get go, fry the reaper's eezo cores.

Excellent idea!

Actually I have to revoke my previous statement that the crucible is the biggest problem of ME3. If you view ME3 alone, than it still is true, the crucible is the biggest problem for the narrative structure of ME3.
But if you view the whole series I came to realize that the biggest problem of the ending is the mere existence of the cataclyst on the citadel. Since it invalidates the whole of ME1. The cataclyst controlls the reapers and is basically the consensus of all reapers. So basically the citadel IS a kind of reaper in all but form. Why did they need a vanguard in form of sovereign? Why were they surprised when the keepers didn't react to sovereigns signal. Why did sovereign spend who knows how many years figuring out what happened to the keepers and come up with a plan to open the relay into darkspace when all he needed to do was making a phonecall to the cataclyst saying: "well...this is embarassing. I just called the keepers but all I got was voice-mail. No idea what happened. Would you mind open the relay, it's time for the harvest!"

That is a problem which not only breaks the narrative of one game, but the whole series and is therefore an even bigger problem, assuming I didn't miss something, did I?

I understand what you're saying and to a degree I'm on board but at the end of it you do fight Reapers on several occasions in the game and frankly they're the memorable encounters. I think you could have had more Reaper fighting and less Cerberus if the race aspect was played up. That you're racing to stay ahead of them to collect your mcguffins for your final solution.

My solution to that would have been the following. I like Multiplayer. I don't like Multiplayer having any effect whatsover on my single-player. So what I would have done is placing a few planets in each sector of space where you can repeadedly play those mutliplayer waves in single-player with your squad to raise the "galactic bullshit level" or what it's called. I would have liked it since it would give you an easy way of testing out all those neat little new guns they implemented outside of main-missions or the shooting range and it would at least give you the illusion that you do fight some reaper-troops from time to time, and not forever are lagging behind cerberus.

I liked that about them in ME2. You could see the points they were making and they were valid. Their tactics were questionable at times but on the whole they had a rational goal. Then ME3 hits and they're just mustache twirling monsters.

Exactly. God forbid an interesting, non-onedimensional villain.

Or they were just trying for fan service. People had hated him since ME1 and now they give you the chance to pop him! Never mind that by early ME3 I wasn't really looking for a reason to kill him anymore. Oh I didn't like him, and I wouldn't have a drink with him but neither did just his appearence in the game make me want to kill him. Then you do get to kill him, and its deeply unsatisfying.

I don't know...you think? So on the one hand they defend their bullshit-ending for artistic integrity but would in this instance bow to fan-demand, no matter how stupid it is? (And I do believe that 80% of the time they are well served to just their thing and not listen to fans (or more importantly EA). Seems they are very selective which feedback they accept and accuratly pick always the worst choices.

Then again, what the hell was Cerberus even thinking with that whole plot? Did they really think taking over the Citadel would accomplish anything? After a bloody coup do you really think that the Council races would start taking orders from Udina? No, once they had the Reapers sorted they'd have come back and killed Cerberus and spaced Udina. All they did was make sure everyone hated them. It's just nonsense.

At the time yes. Afterwards I just assumed this was all a smokescreen to get some shit done on the citadel. Maybe that was when TIM actually moved there, he must have gone there at SOME point prior to the reapers moving it.

I've pondered a similar question for a different fic and the answer I came up with was rebuild them. The cycle will continue. It might take some time but Cerberus certainly had enough data to start to reconstruct something of the Reapers. Maybe not a full on Reaper but utilizing some of their tech to similar ends? Sure. And with most of the galaxy unexplored it would be easy for them to disappear and start to prey on weak races to gain strength.

Hmm...could be interesting. I like it on one hand, on the other it feels a bit like Star Wars, where since the Death STar was such a nice threat it get's rehashed every five minutes. Could work, but you would have to walk a carefull line to make it original.

It was also a tremendous waste of the character.

[/quote]

Agreed.

Basically every post I did not answer seperatly you can assume that I agreed with what you said.


But now for a bit of a challenge.

Afaik there is still one DLC in the making. Now let's assume you are head of BioWare for a day. You are allowed to do everything with this DLC, even introducing a new ending if you so wish. You may not - however - since it would undermine their often quoted artistic integrity - change anything what we already got or retcon/delete whole parts of the ending. You might continue the story after what is now the ending, however.

Now my quesiton is, how would you salvage the narrative and is it even possible at this point? Go.....

[Tyyr]

That wasn't exactly what I was saying. I think they did know exactly and perfectly well what they were doing, they are pretty intelligent after all. What I meant is that it took them quite a bit to come to realise that they did something morally wrong. Now if their initial impulse to just kill off all geth was just the result of their consensus, or maybe the synthetic equivalent of a survival instinct...who knows. But since they started educationally from scratch (just like they were unable to comprehend what they did wrong and are now being shut off) maybe it took them so long to develop a moral compass. Nobody was teaching them at that point so if they arrive at the conclusion that they almost wipped out a species and that this is wrong just as the quarians are leaving, I would call this still a remarkably fast development.

What you've described sounds quite a bit like what EDI did. In fact that's pretty much dead on EDI. I think that works for EDI. As an aside, I think the introduction of EDI's origin in ME3 was just stupid and awfully handled but in the larger sense I do like what it added to her character's background. Back to the geth though, wiping out one base, a couple dozen or hundred people... ok, it's pretty bad but character wise its survivable. When you're talking an entire race nearly wiping out another, "Sorry, our morality routines hadn't quite loaded yet," (I'm making a joke there not being literal) isn't satisfying. When you kill 100 marines in self defense it's horrible but not as horrible as sitting atop five billion corpse, a quarter of them children and going, "Umm guys, I think we might have goofed."

It's not an implausible reason for sure, it's just to me not one I'm really ready to grant them a mulligan on.

Well what can I say? The game makes sense to the point where Harbinger hits you. As soon as you walk towards the transporterbeam the whole thing gets so unreal and makes no sense anymore that I really can understand why so many think this is all a dream in dyings or indoctrinated Shepards brain. (What is the first thing you do when you die? Well, walking towards the light....suspicious, isn't it?

It was just stunning to watch that end and realize that not only had Bioware failed to fix the ending, they had actually managed to make it worse. Then to hear people praise the new ending... I was beside myself. I've got my own ending in my head for ME3 that's going to stay there until I can fully write MY ending to the series and everything post Harby beam is in Shep's head.

Jessica who? I won't even google it, don't care. What, after Miri's equic ass-shots, Samara's matriachal biotic-enhanced bussom and newly "I don't wear swimwear into battle, I just have one massive boobjob before earth blows up"-Williams they still hadn't enough sexualization in the game? Jesus Christ, I like ass and boob as every other straight red blooded man but come on......

The bizzare thing is how Jessica was brought in because of her "sexiness," seriously the part of their ad campaign was how they were going to sex up the game, and somehow Allers is the least appealing character in the series. Ok, I'd take her over a Banshee but that's about it. Funny, when they weren't trying to hard they did fine. When they actively pursue "sexy" we get Allers.

Btw they killed Emily off? WTF?

On Twitter. Yeah, dead, 140 characters at a time.

Well damned if I didn't like the view but it was ridicolous. Less because of the new DD boobs but the animators dropped the ball here. Noone makes that of a hollow back when lying wounded in a bed just to stick them out a bit more. It looked completely unnatural.

Eh, I'm not overly critical of that just because of how stupidly obvious they were being with, "LOOK AT HER TITS!" And how much that doesn't jive with the feeling of the scene. You've got Shep and Ashley trying to have a heart to heart while Ashley is doing everything she can to show off the new tits.

Well let's be more positve for a change, one things they absolutely did right imho are the new crew interactions. In ME1 the only interactions happend in elevators and were very rare, in ME2 you only had them when solving conflincts but in ME3 they finally talk with each other and do not only react to Shepard. That was a huge step forward bringing them alive imho and they were all very well done and humorous which leds me to believe they had one or two writers parked just for those dialogues, which are consistently good and in character.

I pointed that out in my review. That was one of the highlights of the game, as was Liara and the time capsule, and Garrus and the shootout. They did it so well and it was so good. I'd gladly swapped the $10 I paid for From Ashes to a DLC of nothing but extra dialogue and situations like that. Just let me bask in the characters that have been written and how much I enjoy them.

Same here. ME1 is sufficiently different enough and standing on its own that I replayed it....but I cannot bring myself to revisit even ME2, knowing how many things just will lead to nothing, get completely fucked up or has characters in it which just won't matter anymore.

At this point I just feel I've wrung everything out of them that I wanted to get. I will say this, prior to ME3 I was happily replaying ME3 so that I coudl double check dialogue for my writing. Now I just use Youtube. So I guess ME3 has removed my desire to play those games. Wow, a game sucked so hard it took out two others with it.

In that case, even more shame on them.

That's the killer for me. They KNEW exactly who was saved and how often and knew that the vast majority of play throughs saved EVERYONE. So why not bring them all back? Most of the play throughs where people died were intentionally engineered by people to see how they could affect things but the majority of play throughs would bring the whole cast back, and they still dumped them.

And I am completely indifferent to all of this. Make them gay, make them straight, I don't care. Personally I think they should leave the choice to the player but if not, also fine. BUT STICK WITH IT.

I don't obsess about it, certainly not to BSN levels, but in ME1 it was a perfectly viable option to pick Liara if you played a FemShep. So turning around and telling me, "No, FemShep is straight." Pisses me off. Same thing with pulling the punch in ME2. Why? You started it and now you want to reel it back in? No.

The most mature is probably still ME1 which is ironic considering how much flak it got back then for having a well....is there something softer as soft-porn scene? Not sure what the correct term here is but that was nothing, but then I am european....

Bioware has issues with romances in general. Most Bioware romances are just creepy. Liara and Ashley weren't bad in ME1 but then ME2 comes and they're all awful. ME3 comes and of the new options one is Cortez and another Allers, only Traynor wasn't sleezy. Though I will say they rescued Kaidan from his whiny emo info-dump phase in ME1 to make him a good character in ME3. And no one here in the US thought much of the love scene either. You can find more explicit material on Cinemax after midnight that we say in that. It was about fifteen seconds of mood lighting and wierd filters that had about half a second of alien ass and a second of side boob. That was it. The self appointed moral guardians, who never played the game, were the ones calling it an alien sex simulator.

In ME3....zero, nilch, nada. Yeah I am caught up in the action so you go with it, but that did bother me even then, since it is the most natural thing to do. And Shepard never thinks to ask this most obvious question. How is everyone. What's new?

That was what I wondered as well. What the hell happened that everyone scattered to the winds like they did? It's just... dropped. This is another point where the writing fails hard. It wouldn't take much, a couple lines and you'd cover it but they couldn't come up with a reason why so they just ignored it.

Didn't read the books but I hate that character. Not for what he does but for what he represents. The end of all creativity.

I see what you mean and agree, he was boringly bland. My biggest issue with him was what he represented when he showed up. Author Fiat, he was author fiat made manifest, GM railroading given form. Hell, not just that, he mocks you. Now if this guy was actually something I could take the mocking but he's not. The only reason he survives the first encounter is I have no control over my Shepard. With my solider I could have killed him easily, Adrenaline Rush -> Mattock to the Face. Biotic Shep? Stasis, and then shoot him in the head execution style. Hell, when he finally runs away (his theme) I could have done the same a half dozen times over. Then on the car, scrape him off with a bridge, roll the car upside down, shoot him with a shotgun. No, he has a character shield so my auto-staggering shotty won't stagger him and knock him off. Then he runs. On Thessia they have him show up with a gunship. Guess what, we've faced gunships before. What did we do? Blow them the fuck up. Only now we can't because the gunship has shields and the devs had the balls to mock us for even trying to shoot the gunship down, THE THING THEY TAUGHT US TO DO! Of course I can't just kill Leng either as he has his character shield. No, it's been decided that Shep will lose so all the usual gameplay ability is taken from your hands, in a situation player control Shep could easily resolve, so that Leng can win. Why? Because he needs to or the story stops working. When they finally drop the character shield he just wither's and dies almost instantly. It was pathetic. No great battle, no challenge from him personally. Once the Devs stopped needing him he dies like any other mook. After they had him own us so many times. It's bad writing and horrible game design.

And when will they EVER stop bringing swords to gunfights?

I dunno but I'm sick of it.

However, to get to an satisfying ending the narrative almost demands winning by conventional means. Because gathering conventional strength is the whole goal of your character throughout the game.

I agree with you, but the scale of the threat needs a Crucible like McGuffin to knock the Reapers down to the point where you can manage it conventionally.

Excellent idea!

Thanks, you'd probably like my overall idea to fix ME3.

That is a problem which not only breaks the narrative of one game, but the whole series and is therefore an even bigger problem, assuming I didn't miss something, did I?

No, you're spot on. I can't recall if I hit that in my review or not but not only does the ending invalidate ME3 itself but ME3 tried it's hardest to invalidate ME2, and then the Catalyst pops into existence and ME1 is not out the window as well. That's why I refer to the ending as OBJECTIVELY bad. It's not subjective, the ending is shit just from a mechanics perspective. The existence of the Catalyst completely fucks up Sovereign's existence and the entire plot of ME1.

My solution to that would have been the following. I like Multiplayer. I don't like Multiplayer having any effect whatsover on my single-player. So what I would have done is placing a few planets in each sector of space where you can repeadedly play those mutliplayer waves in single-player with your squad to raise the "galactic bullshit level" or what it's called. I would have liked it since it would give you an easy way of testing out all those neat little new guns they implemented outside of main-missions or the shooting range and it would at least give you the illusion that you do fight some reaper-troops from time to time, and not forever are lagging behind cerberus.

I like that idea. Especially since it would give you a chance to play with toys like the Falcon and the Saber which showed up right at the end and you got no chance to play with. I like that idea a lot.

I don't know...you think?

Pretty much. I think you're spot on with your belief that they just didn't have anything for Udina anymore. He was superfulous to the game and they needed something for him so sure, just let the players kill him.

Afterwards I just assumed this was all a smokescreen to get some shit done on the citadel. Maybe that was when TIM actually moved there, he must have gone there at SOME point prior to the reapers moving it.

That's the problem though. The importance of the Citadel wasn't known to Cerberus then. The take over happened BEFORE they ever got their hands on the Thessia VI and could have known the Citadel mattered.

Hmm...could be interesting. I like it on one hand, on the other it feels a bit like Star Wars, where since the Death STar was such a nice threat it get's rehashed every five minutes. Could work, but you would have to walk a carefull line to make it original.

Well you wouldn't be able to have them fighting Reapers again anytime soon. You would be dealing with huskified troops out the ass and entire civilizations possibly being indoctrinated. I think it would be closer to something like the Orai from SG-1 than Star Wars with another Death Star.

Afaik there is still one DLC in the making. Now let's assume you are head of BioWare for a day. You are allowed to do everything with this DLC, even introducing a new ending if you so wish. You may not - however - since it would undermine their often quoted artistic integrity - change anything what we already got or retcon/delete whole parts of the ending. You might continue the story after what is now the ending, however.

Now my quesiton is, how would you salvage the narrative and is it even possible at this point? Go.....

You can't save it, not if what we have is sacrosanct. You'd just be wall papering over the plot holes. I'm not 100% sure if it's kosher with your rules but if I could I'd remove the existing "Shoot the Catalyst" ending. I'd use the Refusal ending to launch into the Indoctrination theory. Leave in the other endings but I'd tack on little bits after each of their photo montages. In synthesis we'd end the montage and then go down to the rubble in London. We see the N7 armor only instead of human bits wearing it we see a husk wearing it. Synthesis was you accepting "ascension." Control's ending would fade to black and I'd have it hold the black for a long while then have Harbinger's four glowing eyes appear in the darkness. "The Cycle Cannot Be Broken." Destroy's would end the montage and then reopen with the battle over Earth, the Crucible fires... and if the geth were saved then now the geth suddenly go wild. A huge portion of your fleet turns on their compatriots and attacks. If you blew up the geth maybe have the crucible wipe out the eezo cores of the fleet letting the Reapers tear them apart. The main thing being that in accepting the Catalyst's choices you failed. Rather than realize who you're talking to and just how completely insane it is to believe him you took his word and doomed everyone. If you pick refusal though there is a bellow, then inhuman roar of an enraged god as the area around the Catalyst disentigrates and the Catalyst himself transforms into Harbinger. It was all a last ditch attempt by the Reapers to save the cycle. Things are totally fucked up from their perspective and the Catalyst was always a trap just in case a cycle got out of hand. This was Harbinger's last ditch attempt to cloud Shepard's mind and keep you from realizing that until after the Crucible was attached and fired. We zap back to London where Shepard is in the rubble around the Conduit, nearly dead. She's coughing, horribly wounded. On the comms we hear them cheering as "Shepard" opens the Citadel and the Crucible is docked. It's all happening, but you're not involved, you never were. Shepard has to drag her broken body across the rubble to find a communicator, crying out to not use it, to destroy it. Hackett and others assume it's a ruse or something. Only Joker believes. We also hear how Harbinger had lifted off and was heading back for the Conduit site for some reason, but we know why, to kill Sheaprd. Joker breaks ranks and makes a ran for the Cruicible, ignoring Hackett's orders to stand down. Joker takes his shot and hits the Crucible right where the joining it, right where you were standing with the talk with the Catalyst if it had taken place. The Crucible had been charging to fire and Joker's shot fucks something up. Instead of destroying all non-Reaper eezo tech it instead winds up blowing out Reaper kinetic barriers. Harbinger finally addresses Shepard as, "You!" acknowledging finally that Shepard is the equal of the Reapers and is intent on killing Shepard for everything she's done. In space we see the fleet's fighting against the Reapers who now lack any barriers and the fleet is cutting through like wheat but it's not a bloodless victory. On the ground see your crew leading the war assets you've amassed in a charge to wipe out the Reapers on Earth. Scenes of Tuchanka and Thessia as others start to gain the upper hand.

I'd end the series with a scene from Shepard's POV, finally putting you right in her head. Maybe even make it cheesy as the overcast burning over London starts to split open and light radiates down on Shep only to be occluded as Harbinger lands over her, intent on killing her. Shep's last comment in the series would be, "All ships, target this postion and FIRE!" maybe even go cheesy and say, "Goodbye *INSERT LOVE INTEREST HERE*." From a distance you see harbinger standing, the light shining on him from behind, him looming over where we know Shep is and then *BOOM* the combined fire of several dreadnaughts vaporize Harbinger.

If you want... maybe have an ending like the Breath scene used to be where everything is black and all we hear is someone, maybe Vega or Garrus go, "...good god, is she alive?"

MASS EFFECT

Eh, you can't save the rest of it so just go out in a blaze of fucking glory.

[Atekimogus]

What you've described sounds quite a bit like what EDI did. In fact that's pretty much dead on EDI. I think that works for EDI. As an aside, I think the introduction of EDI's origin in ME3 was just stupid and awfully handled but in the larger sense I do like what it added to her character's background.

Well I liked EDI ever since ME2. But contrary to the geth EDI was pretty respectfully treated even when she was shackled. Obviously she(?) was self aware and knew why AIs were generally mistrusted. And look, as soon as she got unshackled what did they do? Try immediatly to kill it with fire or just go with it, even making her basically part of the crew. Quite a different development as to what the geth experienced.

As for her background.......I didn't mind her origin. Imho it makes sense that you do not start from scratch but take a VI as basis. What I did mind - and inicially disliked - was that she get her own super-model-body. It was so obvious and contrived just to add a LI for Joker and another sexy girl. (Seems like something added for the japanise crowd, weird robot sex, I am sure they love it). Honestly, I liked the idea of Joker being kinda in love with the ship, a sort of Knight Rider situation. EDI=KITT. (On a side note, when/why did they retconn Jokers disease? Played ME1 these days and he explicatly states that he has brittle bone disease but only in his legs and hips. In ME3 he talks about breaking ribs when sneezing......)

However, and that is were I forgive Bioware, they gave her a body for obvious reasons. But at least they added also enough humour, dialoge and character development that at the end of the game I totally forgot about it. I wish they'd treated every ME2 character like EDI.

The bizzare thing is how Jessica was brought in because of her "sexiness," seriously the part of their ad campaign was how they were going to sex up the game, and somehow Allers is the least appealing character in the series. Ok, I'd take her over a Banshee but that's about it. Funny, when they weren't trying to hard they did fine. When they actively pursue "sexy" we get Allers.

The gist I get from all this is that they have/had an extraordinairy bunch of talented people with an enormously weak project lead, either insisting on stupid ideas like that or just not being strong enough to ward off such stupid ideas from their marketing or EA people. Shame, if you leave the grunts alone they would probably have come out with an superior product.

On Twitter. Yeah, dead, 140 characters at a time.

Well she wasn't really a major character....so might as well just left her alone....

Eh, I'm not overly critical of that just because of how stupidly obvious they were being with, "LOOK AT HER TITS!" And how much that doesn't jive with the feeling of the scene. You've got Shep and Ashley trying to have a heart to heart while Ashley is doing everything she can to show off the new tits.

In 2148 human scientist discovered the secret of never sagging boobs in the ruins of silicon valley. They called it the greatest discovery in the history of cosmetic enhancement. The civilizations of the galaxy call it.....

THE MASS EFFECT.

At this point I just feel I've wrung everything out of them that I wanted to get. I will say this, prior to ME3 I was happily replaying ME3 so that I coudl double check dialogue for my writing. Now I just use Youtube. So I guess ME3 has removed my desire to play those games. Wow, a game sucked so hard it took out two others with it.

I read an apt comparison. Mass Effect is like your favourite meal at your favourite restaurant. You try it for the first time and it is delicous, much better than you expected. You go back a second time and it tastes even better. Then you visit it a third time and it still tastes every bit as good as the first two times. However with your last bite you are suddendly discovering a bandaid in your mouth.

No matter how good all the meals were up to that point, you never visist that restaurant again.

That's the killer for me. They KNEW exactly who was saved and how often and knew that the vast majority of play throughs saved EVERYONE. So why not bring them all back? Most of the play throughs where people died were intentionally engineered by people to see how they could affect things but the majority of play throughs would bring the whole cast back, and they still dumped them.

Yeah..it's a bit hilarious and sad if you go to the bioware forum and read all those threads from a year ago with people speculating what will they do with the ME2 characters, which ones will be in the game etc. and the consensus was pretty much this, that the worst thing they could do is just give them cameo appearances. It really is sad/funny, depending how you look at it.

Bioware has issues with romances in general. Most Bioware romances are just creepy.

There is some truth in that. But that wasn't always so. IIrc I never thought for example that the romance of BAstila and Revan in KoToR was weird or creppy. Mainly because it took the whole game to develop very very slowly. (Admittedly it has been years since I played it, so my memory might be scetchy or just overly nostalgic). Dragon Age with Morrigan also wasn't "that" bad - at least till the end where they also ruined everything. At least it also developed more slowly throughout the game.

The self appointed moral guardians, who never played the game, were the ones calling it an alien sex simulator.

And what is wrong with that? They should all go and visit japan for a few months.

This is another point where the writing fails hard. It wouldn't take much, a couple lines and you'd cover it but they couldn't come up with a reason why so they just ignored it.

That is why I initially didn't like ME2 very much. I was expecting to continue more or less were I left off in ME1. (I am hellbent avoiding all spoilers for games/movies I plan to see/play so I didn't get the "Shepards dead" hype back then). I didn't want to play 2 years after. I didn't want to play for cerberus. I couldn't understand why not the first thing I am doing is ditching all those people and take the first shuttle back to the alliance. But at least they made an effort, gave me Joker and explained what happenend in the meantime, why I should reconsider etc. etc.

In ME3 I know nothing. I don't even know how much time is passed between ME2 and 3. Seriously, when was it the first time mentioned that I was in the brig for six months....can't remember. Might well be that I only read it on the wikia page.

I see what you mean and agree, he was boringly bland. My biggest issue with him was what he represented when he showed up. Author Fiat, he was author fiat made manifest, GM railroading given form. Hell, not just that, he mocks you. Now if this guy was actually something I could take the mocking but he's not. The only reason he survives the first encounter is I have no control over my Shepard. With my solider I could have killed him easily, Adrenaline Rush -> Mattock to the Face. Biotic Shep? Stasis, and then shoot him in the head execution style. Hell, when he finally runs away (his theme) I could have done the same a half dozen times over. Then on the car, scrape him off with a bridge, roll the car upside down, shoot him with a shotgun. No, he has a character shield so my auto-staggering shotty won't stagger him and knock him off. Then he runs. On Thessia they have him show up with a gunship. Guess what, we've faced gunships before. What did we do? Blow them the fuck up. Only now we can't because the gunship has shields and the devs had the balls to mock us for even trying to shoot the gunship down, THE THING THEY TAUGHT US TO DO! Of course I can't just kill Leng either as he has his character shield. No, it's been decided that Shep will lose so all the usual gameplay ability is taken from your hands, in a situation player control Shep could easily resolve, so that Leng can win. Why? Because he needs to or the story stops working. When they finally drop the character shield he just wither's and dies almost instantly. It was pathetic. No great battle, no challenge from him personally. Once the Devs stopped needing him he dies like any other mook. After they had him own us so many times. It's bad writing and horrible game design.

I agree.....if they don't want to die him in those encounters, than just make a cutscene but not something I can play with. (Incidentally I also thought why the hell doesn't he just pull up the car:))

(Also, I didn't get all the Thessia drama. It just didn't hit me emotionally. I was sad when Mordin died but glad for the krogan. I was pretty much down when Thane died and immediatly after I learned of Kelly's execution, those where my emotional lowpoints. But Thessia? Just because the space elves got hit like everybody else? How are they different from Palavann or heck...EARTH? Now I get it that Shepard is frustrated and starts breaking down a bit (was actually a nice touch imho. he/she is far to unemotional and perfect in previous installments. And while I know you don't like the dreamsequences with the child I liked them for what they represented. Just a human having nightmares because he saw so much horrible things. I liked those sequences for that. I didn't like that it was always that weird kid we saw and not friends we actually cared for and lost, but the idea was nice.) it just didn't resonate as much with me at that point in the game.

I dunno but I'm sick of it.

At least bring a good old european one and a half hander to the game, you know a sword which kicks those weak-ass katanas each day of the weak and twice on sundays. Katanas are superior grass and peasant cutters but as soon as someone means business....no thank you. (Was probably not even that unrealistic how shepard breaks that sword )

I agree with you, but the scale of the threat needs a Crucible like McGuffin to knock the Reapers down to the point where you can manage it conventionally.

True, that's why I like your eezoo-core idea. Take away their big advantage (shields and speed) but don't just destroy them outright.

The existence of the Catalyst completely fucks up Sovereign's existence and the entire plot of ME1.

I don't know how this could happen. Now I was honestly suprised to learn how MANY writers were involved with the game. One would assume that with so many writers present, and always at least TWO working on a specific sequence - in this case the ending - how come that they never made a bullshit-check? I am sure whoever made tuchanka came up with the basic premise (or was told the basic premise) and the rest of the time he was busy making sure everything checks out and makes sense and still leads to a nice cutscene.

I could understand if such an ending come from one writer who wrote in a complete vaccuum without any feedback whatsoever. One person overlooks often the most obvious weakpoints. But it was a group-effort. How then came such a thing into existance? I understand it with Lucas and the star wars prequels. Wrote the script and noone dared to call him no all the bullshit and things that don't make sense, but ME3 wasn't written by some mega-famous dude noone dares to correct I would assume.

I like that idea. Especially since it would give you a chance to play with toys like the Falcon and the Saber which showed up right at the end and you got no chance to play with. I like that idea a lot.

Thanks. Would have also broken the tedium a bit me-thinks. But then I am one of those weirdos who actually misses driving around in a MAKO and exploring the galaxy. (I stand by that this was a great idea with mediocre execution. They shouldn't have ditched it, but enhanced upon it. All it really needed was a bit of a physics overhaul for the MAKO and one to two competent level designer whose whole job throughout development is making each planet a bit unique. On costum designed maps like Virmire or Ilos the MAKO works just beautifully)

A shame that you suffer so much loss in firepower between ME1 and ME2. I cannot count how many geth colossi and thresher maw I killed in ME1, in ME2 those are boss level enemies.....lol.

That's the problem though. The importance of the Citadel wasn't known to Cerberus then. The take over happened BEFORE they ever got their hands on the Thessia VI and could have known the Citadel mattered.

Good point. Another argument for the indoctrination theory then, just like Anderson who also magically appears on the citadel.

Well you wouldn't be able to have them fighting Reapers again anytime soon. You would be dealing with huskified troops out the ass and entire civilizations possibly being indoctrinated. I think it would be closer to something like the Orai from SG-1 than Star Wars with another Death Star.

Not a SG-1 watcher so no idea who the orai are:). What I mean is that with the reapers and the whole idea of cycles...I mean it doesn't get any more epic than that and I think the temptation is very great to revisit the threat just because....it doesn't get any more epic. So better to stay as clear of them as possible in any sequels. Better to come up with something unique, even if it will never be as dangerous and with so far reaching consequences as the reaper-threat.

You can't save it, not if what we have is sacrosanct. You'd just be wall papering over the plot holes. I'm not 100% sure if it's kosher with your rules but if I could I'd remove the existing "Shoot the Catalyst" ending. I'd use the Refusal ending to launch into the Indoctrination theory..............rything is black and all we hear is someone, maybe Vega or Garrus go, "...good god, is she alive?"

MASS EFFECT

Eh, you can't save the rest of it so just go out in a blaze of fucking glory.

Hmm...maybe my rules where a bit to strict, what I meant is that you shouldn't delete or retcon scenes we already have seen, but you are certainly allowed to add scenes and stuff to fill holes. Now what you wrote isn't that much different from what I had in mind, the only thing is that you should keep in mind that you are writing a DLC, so you would need to add a few more additionaly gameplay-scenes also. If you go with the indoctrination theory (and imho that is pretty much the only way to salvage this wreck) I don't think your cataclyst choices should matter "so much". They should matter somehow but since it only happens in his/her mind.....I will come back to you on that. I'd love to bounce a few ideas back and forth with you but it's late, and the amount of typos I am detecting means I should probably call it a day.

[stitch626]

Holy crap Tyyr that proposed ending is 9001x better than what we got and would be the most epic and emotional video game scene i can think of.

[Atekimogus]

Ok, how about this (and I will borrow shamelessly parts of your ending I found were an excellent idea.). I try to keep it very undetailed since I am not even 100% were all my teammates exactly ARE at this point and to keep it brief but here are the changes I would do and I'll try to keep it in a timeline. Now it's just and overrall draft, I am sure there are some inconsistencies with were everyone is exactly, but nothing which can't be worked out imho.


1. Add to the farewell dialogue with all people you just can call. (Jacob, Grunt, Cortez etc.) You still say farewell to each at the end but make it more of a tactical briefing establishing exactly were they are and what they have to do. (Hold the line to give Hammer a shot at the beam). After each talk we see a brief scene from the teammates POV, just a few seconds showing how they prepare themselves for what is to come. (Godbye Shepard and a few seconds, checking weapons or something and establishing where they are and with whom, maybe one or two lines of dialoge.)

2. Arrange it so that when you call your teammates you see that they now fight in unlikely pairs as subtle reminder that shit is very very real. For example you see that Miranda, Jacob and Jack + pupils have teamed up as biotic component, maybe with Samara a bit on the side meditating. (cerberus and it's victims) Grunt is with Kyrahee (Salarians and Krogan), Cortez is with Vitctus (Human and Turians) etc. etc.

3. Ok, we continue with business as usual to the point where you evactue your two squadmates. That's the first big plothole that needs fixing. We see the Normandy coming in. While we rush towards it we see Joker briefly swearing, urging them on and wondering why Harbinger isn't blasting them out of the sky. Make a shot were you see harbinger focusing on the Normandy. He doesn't fire because he finally recognizes who it is charging at him and starts into one of those brilliant monoluges reapers are so good at. (Shepard....why do you still resist or something along these lines.)

4. Business as usual, the endings roll with the only exception that now every ending except refusal has those creppy oily special effects during the photomontage and every ending has now Shepard lying in the rubble in london. We see Harbinger taking off. Now depending on your choices he has a few parting words for you. Destroy, Synthesis and Control means his indoctrination was successful to various degrees so he gloats one sentence or two while taking off (cycle cannot be broken), if you refuse him he his furious but it doesn't matter since husks start to poor out from the citadel-beam and he leaves you to die in any event.

5. Cut to your squadmates who hear the message that Hammer has been destroyed with no survivors. Show their despair a bit about Shepard "except" the LI or person closet to him at that moment. Now it's time to get creative. Each LI "knows" that he/she isn't dead for some reason or the other. (For example Miranda didn't install a control chip, but coupled a small QES device with shepards synthetic parts. A small device around her neck shows her no matter in the galaxy were she is if he is ok or not. Calculating but sweet. Or we can see Jack swearing and getting batshit mad like she does, have a small unspoken rapport with her pupils and than charges off with them in Shepards direction.) Point is the LI, Person closet to Shepard charges off, compromises the line and forces the hand of the rest of the teammates who also don't care about holding the line anymore but charge off towards Shepard.

6. Cut to shepard with the husk closing in. Of course your teammates arrive just in time to save them. While the combat oriented ones establish a perimeter, the LI and more science-oriented start patching Shepard up who isn't as badly wounded as thought. Hurt but still functional. Now your choices of the endings come into play. If you refused Harbinger you are not indoctrinated. If you didn't only your friends and people closet to you manage to break the indoctrination similar to Lady Benezia when she saw her daughter. They know that it's not perfect and that he/she probably needs watching but for the time being Shepard is semi-funtional.

7. Since husks are closing in on them from behind and from the front the only way is forward so they fight their way towards the beam since the basic objective hasn't changed yet. Now instead on arriving in a dump they arrive in a full blown husk conversion fabric and have to fight their way clear on the citadal. That is basically where the new game-play element starts. (Rumours have it the new DLC will be on or about the citadel). As soon as they are clear AVINA appears, we can question her a bit about what happened, how the citadel come to be here etc. (It's ok to have her say...i don't know how the fuck the reapers moved the station, just acknowledge it that this is fucking strange).

8. Now the very last mission is Priority: Citadel and we have something similar to the suicide run. We have to get to the citadel tower to open the station, however AVINA tells us about survivors on the citadel, and the disposition of reaper forces. Add a few more objectives. Sealing of some wards so that reapers might not poor through and start huskifiying people. Restore power somewhere to get the escalator working etc. Point is you have to split up your team. At this point ALL surviving squadmember who ever were are with Shepard at this point (except those on the crucible, like Goto). If you have not enough people left, you need to prioritzie your objectives, possible forcing you to leave something ideal but nonessential out.

9. Everyone rushes like mad towards their objective. And here comes the new gameplay-element into play. We play Shepard and his two squadmates on the way to the tower. But it is played in turn. You play Shepard until a certain waypoint. Then you switch to the team restoring power with the character you put in charge, then you play the team sealing off the wards with the character you put in charge, then back to Shepard who continues towards the tower all building towards a climax. Shepard arrives at the tower the moment team a manages to unlock the escalator and team b manages to seal off a ward and team c...etc. etc. . You know what I mean.

10. Depending on your choices with Harbinger, the indoctrination was more or less successful. Shepard has small backslides into it. First time he/she comes out himself but it gets worse from time to time. At the point where every team reached it's objective and Shepard stands before the citadel master control panel like in ME1 (the game comes full cycle) Shepard is either still himself or becomes indoctrinated if you don't have enough war assets or whatever filter you like to apply for determining success. If he becomes indoctrinated, but has his LI in the squad, he might still make one saving throw and opens the citadel. If not alas, he is either knocked out (or if you like it more dramatic even shot) by one of his squad who then opens the citadel.

11. End plays out like Tyrs version except the crucible doesn't backfire or something. The cataclyst was the citadel, enabling the crucible to disable the eezzoo cores on reapers but the starchild never existed. That was just Harbinger fucking with your mind. Now depending on how successfull you were, how many people you managed to bring aboard the citadel with you (which depends on your success in the previous games and war assets) the reapers are destroyed but you suffer looses based on those choices. (With never loosing a squadmate of course the most successfull play). That are your different endings, they reflect just how good or bad you have played throughout the game.

12. Have an epilogue. Not a picture montage but a REAL epiloge similar to ME2 were you can wander the ship a final time and get everyones opinion. Could be completely cheesy Star Wars A new Hope medal on the chest slapping ceremony or something, point is EVERYONE you know (and still lives) should get at least a few last words with you. No matter if it's immediatly on the citadel or a bit later back on the Normandy. (I would prefer Normandy).

13. The End.

[Tyyr]

Well I liked EDI ever since ME2.

As do I. I'm a sucker for AI stories, but amping up her birth story to the geth winds up not working for me because we're not talking about the relatively quick death by gas a few dozen soldiers got, you're going up to the systematic extermination of an entire population to the point of rummaging through closests to find hiding children so you can rip their heads off as the scream for their dead mothers. You've kinda passed a moral event horizon.

But contrary to the geth EDI was pretty respectfully treated even when she was shackled. Obviously she(?) was self aware and knew why AIs were generally mistrusted. And look, as soon as she got unshackled what did they do? Try immediatly to kill it with fire or just go with it, even making her basically part of the crew. Quite a different development as to what the geth experienced.

What I meant was on Luna, we she went nuts and killed the entire base.

What I did mind - and inicially disliked - was that she get her own super-model-body. It was so obvious and contrived just to add a LI for Joker and another sexy girl.

Well you have Tricia Helfer for a VA, there are certain expectations. I didn't mind the body. EDI just happening to get it and be able to run with it... eh, it's the least offensive contrivance in the story and one I'm willing to roll with.

Honestly, I liked the idea of Joker being kinda in love with the ship, a sort of Knight Rider situation. EDI=KITT.

Yeah but there are issues with that long term, namely an inability to express any phyical affection back and forth that makes it hard for me to see that working long term.

(On a side note, when/why did they retconn Jokers disease? Played ME1 these days and he explicatly states that he has brittle bone disease but only in his legs and hips. In ME3 he talks about breaking ribs when sneezing......)

I don't recall it just being hips and legs, if that's the case it's an awful selective bone disorder.

However, and that is were I forgive Bioware, they gave her a body for obvious reasons. But at least they added also enough humour, dialoge and character development that at the end of the game I totally forgot about it. I wish they'd treated every ME2 character like EDI.

As do I. That was what I'd wanted. I'd connected with most of the ME2 characters and wanted to see them get that treatment, that attention and none of them got it. Some of what we got was great, I despised Thane in ME2 and by the time of his death scene in ME3 I was floored. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the guy is dying there, drawing his last breathes and what does he do? He prays for Shep. I remember sitting back in my chair after that scene and just staring at the screen for a minute processing what had just happened. Then you get to Samara's mission and the end carried so much weight as she confronts her last daughter and is ready to kill herself rather than do as the code compels her and kill her daughter. Again, I didn't like Samara in ME2 and by the end of that mission I had completely reevaluated my opinion of her. Then she turned into 25 points on the war asset meter and the game reminded me that it hated me for having played ME2.

The gist I get from all this is that they have/had an extraordinairy bunch of talented people with an enormously weak project lead, either insisting on stupid ideas like that or just not being strong enough to ward off such stupid ideas from their marketing or EA people. Shame, if you leave the grunts alone they would probably have come out with an superior product.

It's entirely possible given that the project leads gave us the endings. Walters and Hudson could just be that inept and weak willed that ME3 is the end result of their direction.

Well she wasn't really a major character....so might as well just left her alone....

She was, but so was Al-Jalani and Allers. However Wong meant that ME had two reporters in continuity and since you were going to punch Al-Jalani again they needed to get rid of Wong so that Allers could take her place. That's exactly why she was killed, so that Allers would have a niche to fill. Never mind that generic Amy Wong looked better than Allers, or in the times we'd seen her shown herself to be a real reporter dedicated to the truth. Never mind that I'd have gladly welcomed her aboard and wanted to space Allers. No, Jessica Chobit licked a PSP once so now she gets to kill off Amy Wong and take her place only to be so fucking annoying I threw her off the ship immediately.

But they killed her off on Twitter. Not in the game, not in a cutscene, not even in an in game e-mail. No, they killed her off on Twitter.

No matter how good all the meals were up to that point, you never visist that restaurant again

Similar analogies came up a lot following release to explain how it didn't matter how good the game was, the ending left such a sour taste in your mouth that it colored and overshadowed the rest of the game. That knowing that that shit ending was what awaited all our Sheps just made us not want to subject them to it.

Yeah..it's a bit hilarious and sad if you go to the bioware forum and read all those threads from a year ago with people speculating what will they do with the ME2 characters, which ones will be in the game etc. and the consensus was pretty much this, that the worst thing they could do is just give them cameo appearances. It really is sad/funny, depending how you look at it.

It's both. It really was amazing how they just did not, do not, understand what made ME2 so great. It was the characters, full stop. People didn't make 1,000+ page threads to discuss the classes of ME2. They did make 1,000+ page threads about individual characters, several times. Last time I looked, and it's been a long while, Tali had over 9 threads because they had to keep deleting the old ones because after they'd pass 1,000 pages they'd start to mess up the board. 9,000 pages of posts, about Tali. A quarter million posts about a single character. Even the less popular ones generated threads hundreds of pages long. Kelly had a thread of over 100 pages. They seemed to have no clue what people were loving so much about the games, namely the setting and the characters. So yeah, when your favorite characters are reduced to cameos and the ending of the game nukes the setting, I can't imagine why people wouldn't love that.

There is some truth in that. But that wasn't always so. IIrc I never thought for example that the romance of BAstila and Revan in KoToR was weird or creppy. Mainly because it took the whole game to develop very very slowly. (Admittedly it has been years since I played it, so my memory might be scetchy or just overly nostalgic). Dragon Age with Morrigan also wasn't "that" bad - at least till the end where they also ruined everything. At least it also developed more slowly throughout the game.

Like I said, most. In ME1 Ashley and Liara aren't too wierd, in ME2 Miranda isn't and Kelly is just honest, and in ME3 Traynor is ok. Allers... ok she's just a slut so I hesitate to call it a romance but if you could get past her awfulness she at least wasn't grieving a dead husband/wife that you're trying to get her over so you can get her under you. Bioware can make normal, decent romances. It's just that they don't most of the time. They love to fall back on the "emotionally traumatized LI that the PC can fix" idea and that's rarely not just ewwww.

I agree.....if they don't want to die him in those encounters, than just make a cutscene but not something I can play with. (Incidentally I also thought why the hell doesn't he just pull up the car:))

I know he's not a badass because the only reason he's surviving is he has an instant full shield heal, so I don't feel like I'm bested, I feel like the Dev's turned on Kai Leng's cheat codes and let him god mode against me for a while. I feel like I got cheated. And when I get to that point in my story that's how Leng's gonna die, Shep's gonna smash him into the bottom of a bridge and scrape him off like roadkill.

Also, I didn't get all the Thessia drama. It just didn't hit me emotionally.

It was less about Thessia getting hit and more about Shepard failing and failing big time at a critical moment. The problem for me was that I didn't fail. The game simply god-moded me into a loss and expected me to feel bad. I didn't feel bad for losing, I was pissed that the Dev's cheated.

And while I know you don't like the dreamsequences with the child I liked them for what they represented. Just a human having nightmares because he saw so much horrible things. I liked those sequences for that. I didn't like that it was always that weird kid we saw and not friends we actually cared for and lost, but the idea was nice.)

Again, the devs failed to understand what they had on their hands. I have no emotional attachment to this kid, none. He's a random NPC. I've known him for what, maybe twenty seconds total when he dies? When you've got characters in the game I've known for 40 hours it's just not going to compare. The dream sequences could have worked magnificently if they'd used people like your LI, Garrus, Tali, Joker, Chakwas, Miranda, Jack, Kasumi, hell fucking Vega or Traynor even has more emtional attachment to me. Instead they went with that kid. Fuck that kid. And from an IC perspective what's the kid to Shep? She's seen colonies with hundreds of children abducted and turned into Reaper smoothies. She's personally nuked and entire world and killed probably 20,000+ children (because haha, you thought it would make a difference, NOPE). This one random kid dying is supposed to haunt her? Hell, how many people died when that Destroyer swatted that shuttle out of the air (seriously, tell me a destroyer can't hit a person on the ground when it blew that shuttle apart on the first shot). It's stupid. The kid is a perfect representation of how the devs completely failed to understand what worked about ME.

Katanas are superior grass and peasant cutters but as soon as someone means business....no thank you. (Was probably not even that unrealistic how shepard breaks that sword

A traditionally made katana, no, Shep was hitting it in the direction it has the least strength. The real question is if Kai was holding it hard enough for the sword blade to be the weak point. If it was a space katana, who knows. Still, the scene was badass so I'll let it slide.

I don't know how this could happen.

Well, first of all most of the team who made ME1 and ME2 weren't involved in ME3. Secondly, it's a total failure to give a shit. Rather than know the setting and understand it they just said, "Eh, fuck it." and just did what they pleased. Look at the ending, it doesn't just try to rewrite the point of ME3 (which it does) at the last second it tries to completely shanghai the plot of the entire series into something different. They didn't care about ME, they just wanted their artsy ending full of big meaning and fuck what came before. As someone who gives a damn about the lore and the continuity of the games I honestly feel like the devs at times went out of their way to tell me personally that they resented me for liking ME2 and they were going to fuck it up as much as they could out of spite. Invalidating the entirety of ME1 seems like it was just don't out of a totally lack of caring at all.

Now I was honestly suprised to learn how MANY writers were involved with the game. One would assume that with so many writers present, and always at least TWO working on a specific sequence - in this case the ending - how come that they never made a bullshit-check? I am sure whoever made tuchanka came up with the basic premise (or was told the basic premise) and the rest of the time he was busy making sure everything checks out and makes sense and still leads to a nice cutscene.

Lack of familiarity with the source material and a general overall feeling from the top down that they are going to make this their story. They aren't going to let previous continuity shackle them to anything. Think abou that ending. It doesn't care one whit about the rest of the series, it doesn't even care about the game it's in. That's an ending that the guys in charge came up with. So if they gave that little of a shit about continutity why would anyone else?

Thanks. Would have also broken the tedium a bit me-thinks. But then I am one of those weirdos who actually misses driving around in a MAKO and exploring the galaxy. (I stand by that this was a great idea with mediocre execution. They shouldn't have ditched it, but enhanced upon it. All it really needed was a bit of a physics overhaul for the MAKO and one to two competent level designer whose whole job throughout development is making each planet a bit unique. On costum designed maps like Virmire or Ilos the MAKO works just beautifully)

The only problem the Mako had was map design. If they'd reduced the physical height of every random map by a factor of 3 the Mako would have driven just fine. I enjoyed the exploration of ME1 and I hated to see it gone in ME2. I wish they'd have kept it and updated the system to provide more varied worlds with more rewards for exploring them.

So better to stay as clear of them as possible in any sequels. Better to come up with something unique, even if it will never be as dangerous and with so far reaching consequences as the reaper-threat.

I dislike sequel escalation and would love if ME4 brought the scale of the threat way, way down. After all, your first enemy threatened the existence of all sapient life in the galaxy in perpetuity. You don't get much bigger than that unless someone's going to destroy the entire universe.

the only thing is that you should keep in mind that you are writing a DLC, so you would need to add a few more additionaly gameplay-scenes also.

No, if I've got one more chance to fix the ending, to at least give the player's something sutibly epic to end the series on I will not be wasting time, effort, and money on adding game play. If I have control it's nothing but a fixed ending. Period.

Holy crap Tyyr that proposed ending is 9001x better than what we got and would be the most epic and emotional video game scene i can think of.

That's the problem. Making a good ending for the game is not hard. The hard work had been done over the course of three games building a setting, forging characters you care about, building bonds with them. You are totally emotionally invested in this game. You're already on the edge of your seat for how this ends and it's not hard to give people a suitibly epic finale for all the hard work. Here's the basics of what you need:

1) Shepard has a central role. One of the biggest failings of the ending is that Shepard takes on the role of mute NPC while the Catalyst takes over the role of the PC, only it's Hudson and Walters game and you're just watching. Shepard needs to be the focal point of it all.
2) It's about stopping the Reapers. You've spent 100 hours moving towards this singular goal, you need to accomplish it.
3) Showdown with Harbinger. Harby was your nemesis in ME2 and he's still in charge for ME3. He needs to die and die at Shep's hands. You need that confrontation to bring the buildup to a head and resolve it.
4) Your war assets need to mean something. In this case, how succesful the conventional battle against the reapers is. Do you max your war meter and curb stomp them when they lose their barriers or is it a phyricc victory with only a few survivors?
5) You need to have hope. The game should end with the player feeling like they made a difference, not did the Reapers job for them. You need to see people surviving. You need to see your crew making a difference. And personally, I think if you did a good enough job at it all you should give the player the hope that Shep survived it all, little blue babies and all that.

If you can do those five things just about any ending would work. The ending we got fulfilled NONE of that.

1. Add to the farewell dialogue with all people you just can call.

I like that a lot. I did not like that the last I got to see of many of these characters was just a blue hologram.

2. Arrange it so that when you call your teammates you see that they now fight in unlikely pairs as subtle reminder that shit is very very real.

It can also nod to what you've accomplished, or failed to do possibly. Did you unite the galaxy or did you just get them together long enough to do the job?

3. Ok, we continue with business as usual to the point where you evactue your two squadmates. That's the first big plothole that needs fixing. We see the Normandy coming in. While we rush towards it we see Joker briefly swearing, urging them on and wondering why Harbinger isn't blasting them out of the sky. Make a shot were you see harbinger focusing on the Normandy. He doesn't fire because he finally recognizes who it is charging at him and starts into one of those brilliant monoluges reapers are so good at. (Shepard....why do you still resist or something along these lines.)

That doesn't fix it 100% as I still wonder why Harby doesn't knock it down out of spite but having Harbinger focus on Shep to the exclusion of everyone else would work and frankly I'm pro-anything that gives Harbinger a chance to chew some scenery.

4. Business as usual, the endings roll with the only exception that now every ending except refusal has those creppy oily special effects during the photomontage and every ending has now Shepard lying in the rubble in london. We see Harbinger taking off. Now depending on your choices he has a few parting words for you. Destroy, Synthesis and Control means his indoctrination was successful to various degrees so he gloats one sentence or two while taking off (cycle cannot be broken), if you refuse him he his furious but it doesn't matter since husks start to poor out from the citadel-beam and he leaves you to die in any event.

I like that. I especially like the added effect to the montages.

5. Cut to your squadmates who hear the message that Hammer has been destroyed with no survivors. Show their despair a bit about Shepard "except" the LI or person closet to him at that moment. Now it's time to get creative. Each LI "knows" that he/she isn't dead for some reason or the other.

Well, it's Shepard. Shep has made a career out of giving demi-gods the finger and getting away with it. She's like a cockroach. Anything short of the sun exploding isn't going to guarantee she's dead. Even then I wouldn't bat an eye if Shep wound up surfing the shockwave out of the system on the deck of the Tower Bridge.

(For example Miranda didn't install a control chip, but coupled a small QES device with shepards synthetic parts. A small device around her neck shows her no matter in the galaxy were she is if he is ok or not. Calculating but sweet. Or we can see Jack swearing and getting batshit mad like she does, have a small unspoken rapport with her pupils and than charges off with them in Shepards direction.) Point is the LI, Person closet to Shepard charges off, compromises the line and forces the hand of the rest of the teammates who also don't care about holding the line anymore but charge off towards Shepard.

I like it, but it makes me nervous about compromising the ground battle. You might restrict it to the LI and the one or two people who Shep has the highest relationship score with.

6. Cut to shepard with the husk closing in. Of course your teammates arrive just in time to save them. While the combat oriented ones establish a perimeter, the LI and more science-oriented start patching Shepard up who isn't as badly wounded as thought. Hurt but still functional. Now your choices of the endings come into play. If you refused Harbinger you are not indoctrinated. If you didn't only your friends and people closet to you manage to break the indoctrination similar to Lady Benezia when she saw her daughter. They know that it's not perfect and that he/she probably needs watching but for the time being Shepard is semi-funtional.

I like this and I can already see the camera shots and angles I'd use in the cutscene.

7. Since husks are closing in on them from behind and from the front the only way is forward so they fight their way towards the beam since the basic objective hasn't changed yet. Now instead on arriving in a dump they arrive in a full blown husk conversion fabric and have to fight their way clear on the citadal.

I like it, there seemed to be no logic behind where the conduit dumps you out at. This would make sense. They were hauling people and bodies to the conduit to send them up to be husked.

Now the very last mission is Priority: Citadel and we have something similar to the suicide run. We have to get to the citadel tower to open the station, however AVINA tells us about survivors on the citadel, and the disposition of reaper forces. Add a few more objectives. Sealing of some wards so that reapers might not poor through and start huskifiying people. Restore power somewhere to get the escalator working etc. Point is you have to split up your team. At this point ALL surviving squadmember who ever were are with Shepard at this point (except those on the crucible, like Goto). If you have not enough people left, you need to prioritzie your objectives, possible forcing you to leave something ideal but nonessential out.

And now it matters who you saved and who died. The more people you saved the more objectives you can complete. The fewer you saved the uglier your choices get. I like this concept a lot.

Everyone rushes like mad towards their objective. And here comes the new gameplay-element into play. We play Shepard and his two squadmates on the way to the tower. But it is played in turn. You play Shepard until a certain waypoint. Then you switch to the team restoring power with the character you put in charge, then you play the team sealing off the wards with the character you put in charge, then back to Shepard who continues towards the tower all building towards a climax. Shepard arrives at the tower the moment team a manages to unlock the escalator and team b manages to seal off a ward and team c...etc. etc. . You know what I mean.

I do and this could work very well. The bit in ME2 with Joker was a great touch and being able to play as the other characters for a bit with their abilities especially since you've been the one chosing them, are now yours to use. It could add in some new elements to the game play and really be good.

Depending on your choices with Harbinger, the indoctrination was more or less successful. Shepard has small backslides into it. First time he/she comes out himself but it gets worse from time to time. At the point where every team reached it's objective and Shepard stands before the citadel master control panel like in ME1 (the game comes full cycle) Shepard is either still himself or becomes indoctrinated if you don't have enough war assets or whatever filter you like to apply for determining success. If he becomes indoctrinated, but has his LI in the squad, he might still make one saving throw and opens the citadel. If not alas, he is either knocked out (or if you like it more dramatic even shot) by one of his squad who then opens the citadel.

I like this, but you're going to piss people off to no end. Everyone who picks any of the color coded endings is going to rage about them losing control of Shep and Shep being indoctrinated. They should be because they made a stupid choice. The game beats you over the head that Control and Synthesis are wrong. However it will raise a shit storm no matter how dramatic it would be for Shep to stand there, waffle with her indoctrination and then have someone shoot her to stop her from fucking everything up. Immensely dramatic moment, 2/3rds of the fanbase raging.

It's a pretty conventional idea for the ending. That's not a bad thing, it relies on elements of gameplay that have been established before, using other squad members, and a suicide type mission. You bring back the Council Chamber and the master control panel. You incorporate the indoctrination theory. It brings all that stuff together into a satisfying whole that would appropriately end the game.

[Atekimogus]

Again Tyyr, quotes I don't directly answered you may just assume I agree with you there:

What I meant was on Luna, we she went nuts and killed the entire base.

Oh that...well I don't remember it but was she technically a rogue VI at that point or an accidential AI? If she was a rogue VI (whatever that means...could be as little as a few lines of corrupted code, suddenly telling the VI it is time to vent the air) she wasn't self aware, so.....

Well you have Tricia Helfer for a VA, there are certain expectations.

I didn't. Make no mistake I liked her in BSG but imho she did such a good VA job I felt there is no need to bring her "physically" into the game.

I don't recall it just being hips and legs, if that's the case it's an awful selective bone disorder.

I am not a doctor, I have no idea how folks with that disorder develop. I am just going with what Jokers says when Shepard asks him about his disease.

Then you get to Samara's mission and the end carried so much weight as she confronts her last daughter and is ready to kill herself rather than do as the code compels her and kill her daughter. Again, I didn't like Samara in ME2 and by the end of that mission I had completely reevaluated my opinion of her. Then she turned into 25 points on the war asset meter and the game reminded me that it hated me for having played ME2.

Yeah...I agree with Thane and Jack was also nicely redeemed imho buth Samara.....idk, I didn't like her in ME2 mainly because of the bullshit with threatening to kill the police officers just for doing her job and in ME3.....I still dont like her. The scenes with her daughters are well done, but since she is definitely my least favourite character....didn't resonate with me much.

No, Jessica Chobit licked a PSP once so now she gets to kill off Amy Wong and take her place only to be so fucking annoying I threw her off the ship immediately.

Yeah...to think that Zaeed could have been standing exactyl on the same spot on the ship....I'd rather listen to his old war-stories:)

What wouldn't I have given for one last scene with Zaeed in the end, killing husks left and right, running out of clips while a krogan husk charges him. He pulls out "Jessie" one last time, wispers something to it and mircacolously it works for a final time!

Again, the devs failed to understand what they had on their hands. I have no emotional attachment to this kid, none. He's a random NPC. I've known him for what, maybe twenty seconds total when he dies? When you've got characters in the game I've known for 40 hours it's just not going to compare. The dream sequences could have worked magnificently if they'd used people like your LI, Garrus, Tali, Joker, Chakwas, Miranda, Jack, Kasumi, hell fucking Vega or Traynor even has more emtional attachment to me. Instead they went with that kid. Fuck that kid. And from an IC perspective what's the kid to Shep? She's seen colonies with hundreds of children abducted and turned into Reaper smoothies. She's personally nuked and entire world and killed probably 20,000+ children (because haha, you thought it would make a difference, NOPE). This one random kid dying is supposed to haunt her? Hell, how many people died when that Destroyer swatted that shuttle out of the air (seriously, tell me a destroyer can't hit a person on the ground when it blew that shuttle apart on the first shot). It's stupid. The kid is a perfect representation of how the devs completely failed to understand what worked about ME.

Well that is what I don't understand. As I said, the idea was good, the execution was poor. However in the sequenze immediatly after Mordins death you even hear Mordin call you. And STILL you don't see Mording in a dream-flashback, but that weird child. Again, this shit writes itselfs and takes a special kind of talent to fuck THIS up. But again, I liked it for what it was supposed to do, just as I liked that Shepard maybe for the first time every snapped at Joker for a bad joke. Considering the tension they all must feel the whole bunch is still far to cool and reserved.

Lack of familiarity with the source material and a general overall feeling from the top down that they are going to make this their story. They aren't going to let previous continuity shackle them to anything. Think abou that ending. It doesn't care one whit about the rest of the series, it doesn't even care about the game it's in. That's an ending that the guys in charge came up with. So if they gave that little of a shit about continutity why would anyone else?

The ironic part is...the guy who wrote tuchanka wasn't on the team for ME1. At that time he was just a fan of the series having X playthroughs in ME1 because he liked it so much. Now I don't know how he came to be on the writing stuff for ME3 but it shows how much is possible if you just care enough about something and pay attention to detail. It also shows how important it is not to be an arrogant ass being hellbent on realizing some grand artistic vision which probably makes a lot of sense if you are stoned. Better to hire writers who just care and are trying to do a good job and not hire "artists".

The only problem the Mako had was map design. If they'd reduced the physical height of every random map by a factor of 3 the Mako would have driven just fine. I enjoyed the exploration of ME1 and I hated to see it gone in ME2. I wish they'd have kept it and updated the system to provide more varied worlds with more rewards for exploring them.

Exactly, on custom designed missions the mako worked beautifully, altough it still needed a bit of an overhaul. Mainly the suspension is just catastrophique for an all terrain vehicle. Does this thing has any shock absorbers? Doesn't seem that way.

But again, instead of asking "what did people not like" and then delete it, they should have gone a step further and ask themselves "why" didn't they like it. And I think the dislike has more to do with the copy-paste sidemissions in always the same room with just a few crates rearranged than with the MAKO itself.

No, if I've got one more chance to fix the ending, to at least give the player's something sutibly epic to end the series on I will not be wasting time, effort, and money on adding game play. If I have control it's nothing but a fixed ending. Period.

Hmm.. I get it. Considering however, that they had two chances already on delivering a good ending, even if they fix it now, they pretty much have to add something, or else make it also a free download.

1) Shepard has a central role. One of the biggest failings of the ending is that Shepard takes on the role of mute NPC while the Catalyst takes over the role of the PC, only it's Hudson and Walters game and you're just watching. Shepard needs to be the focal point of it all.
2) It's about stopping the Reapers. You've spent 100 hours moving towards this singular goal, you need to accomplish it.
3) Showdown with Harbinger. Harby was your nemesis in ME2 and he's still in charge for ME3. He needs to die and die at Shep's hands. You need that confrontation to bring the buildup to a head and resolve it.
4) Your war assets need to mean something. In this case, how succesful the conventional battle against the reapers is. Do you max your war meter and curb stomp them when they lose their barriers or is it a phyricc victory with only a few survivors?
5) You need to have hope. The game should end with the player feeling like they made a difference, not did the Reapers job for them. You need to see people surviving. You need to see your crew making a difference. And personally, I think if you did a good enough job at it all you should give the player the hope that Shep survived it all, little blue babies and all that.

If you can do those five things just about any ending would work. The ending we got fulfilled NONE of that.

Good summation. I agree with all of that.

It can also nod to what you've accomplished, or failed to do possibly. Did you unite the galaxy or did you just get them together long enough to do the job?

Exactly. But not obvious just a few seconds each scene...sublte reminder of your achievments or lack thereof for your subconsciousness.

That doesn't fix it 100% as I still wonder why Harby doesn't knock it down out of spite but having Harbinger focus on Shep to the exclusion of everyone else would work and frankly I'm pro-anything that gives Harbinger a chance to chew some scenery.

I am aware of that and not completely content with my solution, alas Harbinger ignoring the Normandy in lieu of Shepard is the only bandaid I can come up with in the very short time the scene lasts and which doesn't create another ton of problems.

Well, it's Shepard. Shep has made a career out of giving demi-gods the finger and getting away with it. She's like a cockroach. Anything short of the sun exploding isn't going to guarantee she's dead. Even then I wouldn't bat an eye if Shep wound up surfing the shockwave out of the system on the deck of the Tower Bridge.

Lol, exactly!

I like it, but it makes me nervous about compromising the ground battle. You might restrict it to the LI and the one or two people who Shep has the highest relationship score with.

Yes, one would need to figure out exactly were everyone is at that point, but it isn't THAT hard. Basically every person closest to Shep can do it and if not available because of location it falls to the next highest ranking. Would it take a bit of work? Yes. Is it an unsolvable enigma? No, would just take maybe a couple of hours "at the most" to figure that one out so every pairing and constellation makes sense.

As for the teammates compromising the ground battle.....yeah...I see the problem but the tactical situation...well to be honest all I know is I am with hammer and got wiped out, no idea how exactly the krogan, salarian etc. forces fit in or what they were doing at that time. Point is, it is not that big a deal (considering that I have to date no idea how people like Ashley, James ended up on the Normandy again. No fucking clue). This should be an emotional response from your devastated teammates. They think you are dead. Your LI or person closest either has prove or conviction enough to say otherwise and rushes off. Since their tactical situation is fucked anyhow at this point, they follow this thin line of hope. Better that than dying holding a line for no reason..... ( I am not 100% happy with this myself, but I have to work with what is established. Like the Normandy/Harbinger part it is not as elegant as I would have liked.....Problematic, to quote Mordin. I am open to suggestion on both parts.)

Point is I want everyone who isn't on the crucible (and a point could be made that this is everyone including folks like Goto and surviving Mordin) converge on Shepards position and going up with him to the citadel. I left the details a bit vague on purpose.

I like it, there seemed to be no logic behind where the conduit dumps you out at. This would make sense. They were hauling people and bodies to the conduit to send them up to be husked.

Exactly. Beaming up to land in the citadel dumpster makes no sense. What were they planning? Why would they need the whole beam just for a body-dump?

And now it matters who you saved and who died. The more people you saved the more objectives you can complete. The fewer you saved the uglier your choices get. I like this concept a lot.

Thanks, it is an elegant solution - I think - to first make your choices matter again, and second to discover WTF happened on the citadel and what your teammates were doing the whole time. They are with you in the end, as it should be.

I do and this could work very well. The bit in ME2 with Joker was a great touch and being able to play as the other characters for a bit with their abilities especially since you've been the one chosing them, are now yours to use. It could add in some new elements to the game play and really be good.

That would be the reason. They deleted the Mako, they deleted every mini-game, they deleted the firewalker hovercar etc. Now imho the combat in ME3 is great but there is nothing else. This would introduce a small new element, and since most people have played as cookie cutter soldier, a nice way to play a biotic for a short time, for example.

I like this, but you're going to piss people off to no end. Everyone who picks any of the color coded endings is going to rage about them losing control of Shep and Shep being indoctrinated. They should be because they made a stupid choice. The game beats you over the head that Control and Synthesis are wrong. However it will raise a shit storm no matter how dramatic it would be for Shep to stand there, waffle with her indoctrination and then have someone shoot her to stop her from fucking everything up. Immensely dramatic moment, 2/3rds of the fanbase raging.

HOW DARE YOU compromising my artistic integrity when I so desperatly want to get a cheapshoot at our emotions in? Lol, but on a serious note:

I agree, I should probably tone it down a bit. Maybe he/she just needs a krogan headbutt to come to his/her senses long enough to open the citadel. To clarify, I never intended for Shepard to become completely indoctrinated, but if you were an idiot during three games, I think the game should punish YOU, SHEPARD in at least a small way, not just by killing off people left, right and in front of you.

So yeah, change that to just opening the citadel or first needing a good krogan headbutt to come to your senses once more. Point is, it should be shown that the indoctrination attempt isn't something you can just shrug off, but that it is something he needs to fight against, and if you were a weak-willed idiot you need your friends around you "to lift you up and brush you off" like Garrus said at one point (or something similar to that effect.) How this is depicted in detail and to what degree I will leave open to discussion. I made rather broad strokes in this concept I am aware of that.

It's a pretty conventional idea for the ending. That's not a bad thing, it relies on elements of gameplay that have been established before, using other squad members, and a suicide type mission. You bring back the Council Chamber and the master control panel. You incorporate the indoctrination theory. It brings all that stuff together into a satisfying whole that would appropriately end the game.

Thanks, I hope you didn't mind me borrowing the eezzoo core part. I think that is an inspired idea for what the crucible device actually does!

[Tyyr]

Oh that...well I don't remember it but was she technically a rogue VI at that point or an accidential AI? If she was a rogue VI (whatever that means...could be as little as a few lines of corrupted code, suddenly telling the VI it is time to vent the air) she wasn't self aware, so.....

She was a rogue AI. Like everyone seemingly in ME they all ignore the anti-AI conventions and dick with it anyways. She was definitely sapient when it happened. Again, she was born and the first thing people try to do is shut her down so the human/synthetic relationship got off to a rocky start.

I didn't. Make no mistake I liked her in BSG but imho she did such a good VA job I felt there is no need to bring her "physically" into the game.

A need, no, not really. But I don't mind it.

Yeah...I agree with Thane and Jack was also nicely redeemed imho buth Samara.....idk, I didn't like her in ME2 mainly because of the bullshit with threatening to kill the police officers just for doing her job and in ME3.....I still dont like her. The scenes with her daughters are well done, but since she is definitely my least favourite character....didn't resonate with me much.

Oh, the police officer thing combined with her more or less saying that she's going to have to try and kill Shep after it's all done put her solidly in my dislike zone. The reason that I changed my mind on her is that in the end, she gave up on the code. Even killing herself is more or less giving the code the finger. She finally realized what the code had done to her and her life.

What wouldn't I have given for one last scene with Zaeed in the end, killing husks left and right, running out of clips while a krogan husk charges him. He pulls out "Jessie" one last time, wispers something to it and mircacolously it works for a final time!

I just never thought that the closest thing to violence we'd see in a Zaeed mission was threatening to rough someone up if they didn't talk. I don't like Zaeed but damn that was a crap way to bring him in. Again, if that's all they were going to do with him they should have left him out.

Well that is what I don't understand. As I said, the idea was good, the execution was poor. However in the sequenze immediatly after Mordins death you even hear Mordin call you. And STILL you don't see Mording in a dream-flashback, but that weird child. Again, this shit writes itselfs and takes a special kind of talent to fuck THIS up. But again, I liked it for what it was supposed to do, just as I liked that Shepard maybe for the first time every snapped at Joker for a bad joke. Considering the tension they all must feel the whole bunch is still far to cool and reserved.

It's not a bad idea, I agree, one of ME2's greatest failings is that Shep fucking died and it never even phases her. The downside is that it was a great idea with shit execution (re: Voyager) so I'll admit it could have been great but it completely falls flat. I'm with you on how utterly incompetant they had to be to fuck up something this simple.

The ironic part is...the guy who wrote tuchanka wasn't on the team for ME1. At that time he was just a fan of the series having X playthroughs in ME1 because he liked it so much.

Makes sense, that's the kind of ending a fan would come up with. I'm not saying that fans can be the best writers, reading fanfic will debase you of that notion, but a writer who is a fan? The whole Tuchanka sequence shows exactly what someone who cared about the game could have turned out. Got a link to the info on the writer?

But again, instead of asking "what did people not like" and then delete it, they should have gone a step further and ask themselves "why" didn't they like it. And I think the dislike has more to do with the copy-paste sidemissions in always the same room with just a few crates rearranged than with the MAKO itself.

Well the same thing that happened to the MAKO between 1 and 2 happened to planet scanning between 2 and 3. Rather than figuiring out why people didn't like it they just removed it. The end result of one click scanning, the Benny-Hill reaper chases and everything else. In other words a clusterfuck. No one stopped to ask "WHY" is this in the game. It doesn't add anything, at all. No one I know even likes it. So how did this improve on planet scanning?

Hmm.. I get it. Considering however, that they had two chances already on delivering a good ending, even if they fix it now, they pretty much have to add something, or else make it also a free download.

If I had control it's what I'd do, and it'd be free.

Exactly. But not obvious just a few seconds each scene...sublte reminder of your achievments or lack thereof for your subconsciousness.

People don't need a lot. For the Krogan/Salarian example do Wrex and Kirrahe obviously work together or is Wreav shoving Kirrahe away and ignoring him? That's all you need and people will get it. Audiences don't get enough credit.

Yes, one would need to figure out exactly were everyone is at that point, but it isn't THAT hard. Basically every person closest to Shep can do it and if not available because of location it falls to the next highest ranking. Would it take a bit of work? Yes. Is it an unsolvable enigma? No, would just take maybe a couple of hours "at the most" to figure that one out so every pairing and constellation makes sense.

Well, depending on how you sequence it the ground combat could be largely finishing up at that point. Hammer could be doing well enough to curb stomp them and make your crew not vital to the mop-up. Alternately they can delegate to other characters. After all you built the cast of alternates in case people died, well use them here. And I think you have to recall that the group rushing the conduit got wiped out, it might not necessarily be the entirety of the ground forces. In fact given that you never see the forces working with the rest of your crew I'd say that you're only working with the small strike team trying to get to the beam while everyone else supports you.

Hell, it could be that the people closest to you are doing it emotionally while everyone else is just making a last ditch effort to complete the mission.

Exactly. Beaming up to land in the citadel dumpster makes no sense. What were they planning? Why would they need the whole beam just for a body-dump?

What do the Reapers even care? Just leave the bodies to rot. The only thing I could come up with is the Soylent Green solution, they were replenishing their nutrient paste stocks with dead bodies.

Thanks, it is an elegant solution - I think - to first make your choices matter again, and second to discover WTF happened on the citadel and what your teammates were doing the whole time. They are with you in the end, as it should be.

Exactly. Going it alone was one of the sucky things about Arrival. I want my squad.

That would be the reason. They deleted the Mako, they deleted every mini-game, they deleted the firewalker hovercar etc. Now imho the combat in ME3 is great but there is nothing else. This would introduce a small new element, and since most people have played as cookie cutter soldier, a nice way to play a biotic for a short time, for example.

Good point, a chance to play a biotic or an engineer. Heck try out Vanguard as Jack or the like. It would be a good segement to play and if you've played MP you'll be used to working with a reduced group of abilities.

I agree, I should probably tone it down a bit. Maybe he/she just needs a krogan headbutt to come to his/her senses long enough to open the citadel. To clarify, I never intended for Shepard to become completely indoctrinated, but if you were an idiot during three games, I think the game should punish YOU, SHEPARD in at least a small way, not just by killing off people left and right from you.

So yeah, change that to just opening the citadel or first needing a good krogan headbutt to come to your senses once more. Point is, it should be shown that the indoctrination attempt isn't something you can just shrug off, but that it is something he needs to fight against, and if you were a weak-willed idiot you need your friends around you "to lift you up and brush you off" like Garrus said at one point (or something similar to that effect.)

I agree with you completely and like the addition. I like the idea of needing to be shot, probably non-fatally, to keep you from fucking it all up. It's just important to remember that everyone who picked their Skittles ending is going to be pissed when you more or less tell them they fucked up.

Thanks, I hope you didn't mind me borrowing the eezzoo core part. I think that is an inspired idea for what the crucible device actually does!

No problem. My idea for the Crucible was that by examining the Klendagon casualty and the Reaper baby, and Sovereign's remains we've learned that Reapers have a quirk in their cores, something that we don't know what it is until someone realizes it's a circut breaker or the like and by carefully tuning the Crucible pulse you can blow this out and wreck their cores but not destroy the simpler and more robust eezo cores that everyone else uses. This is an evolution of an earlier idea I had with the Crucible being a trap that it would overload eezo cores but the Reapers had a kind of circut breaker in them that would prevent it therefore the Crucible would eliminate a cycle's ability to resist if it was strong enough to build it. Kind of an insurance policy. That idea got nixed when I realized I could just make it something we make and I'd rewrite the whole damn ending instead of making the existing one work.

[Atekimogus]

The reason that I changed my mind on her is that in the end, she gave up on the code. Even killing herself is more or less giving the code the finger. She finally realized what the code had done to her and her life.

Well that is one way to look at it. Imho she never gave up on the code but when confronted with an impossible choice she just followed the code to it's logical conclusion. I found it not especially noble or inspired, just really stupid. Shepards reaction preventing her useless suicide pretty much mirroed this imho.

I just never thought that the closest thing to violence we'd see in a Zaeed mission was threatening to rough someone up if they didn't talk. I don't like Zaeed but damn that was a crap way to bring him in. Again, if that's all they were going to do with him they should have left him out.

That being said, I just read that Zaeeds voice actor died yesterday. Sad news indeed.

I'm with you on how utterly incompetant they had to be to fuck up something this simple.

Sequences like that and the ending just reek of people who are hellbent on producing something deep, meaningful and of artistic value and just fail to understand that by doing so and ruining the narrative because of it they do the exact opposite. Maybe it is strange for me to say so, after I explicatly stated that I am of the oppinion that video games are an art form, but in most cases they would have been much better off NOT trying to produce art, but just solid entertainment, like Lucas did with his first star wars movie. If it had enough heart and soul, the artful part would have come without even trying. You just cannot force it imho.

Makes sense, that's the kind of ending a fan would come up with. I'm not saying that fans can be the best writers, reading fanfic will debase you of that notion, but a writer who is a fan? The whole Tuchanka sequence shows exactly what someone who cared about the game could have turned out. Got a link to the info on the writer?

http://blog.bioware.com/2012/04/02/inte ... n-dombrow/

If I had control it's what I'd do, and it'd be free.

But would even that be enough to reconcile with all the alienated fans? I am not sure, to be honest. (If they really fix the ending with the last DLC, I still will be pissed for not announcing so in advance and ruining my first playthrough so thoroughly. Waited a year to play it, could have waited a few months more, I just didn't expect the ending to suck that hard. Excuse me for having a little faith in their company:)).

Audiences don't get enough credit.

Agreed.

Well, depending on how you sequence it the ground combat could be largely finishing up at that point. Hammer could be doing well enough to curb stomp them and make your crew not vital to the mop-up.

True. Since the indoctrination part starts immediatly after Shepards "wakes up" after being knocked out by Harbinger we don't really know the fate of hammer. Point is, getting the squadmates to shepard at this point isn't really hard to do or especially implausible.

Alternately they can delegate to other characters. After all you built the cast of alternates in case people died, well use them here. And I think you have to recall that the group rushing the conduit got wiped out, it might not necessarily be the entirety of the ground forces. In fact given that you never see the forces working with the rest of your crew I'd say that you're only working with the small strike team trying to get to the beam while everyone else supports you.

Well to make it more real my idea would have been that the castmembers don't go rushing in alone. Grunt is followed by his squad, Kyrahee by his men, Jack by her students etc. etc. You know, beefing up the numbers a bit and yes, admittedly providing one or two redshirts.

Hell, it could be that the people closest to you are doing it emotionally while everyone else is just making a last ditch effort to complete the mission.

Or that. teammates rush to shepard, Anderson is like "Fuck it, we are screwed anyhow....forward!"

Good point, a chance to play a biotic or an engineer. Heck try out Vanguard as Jack or the like. It would be a good segement to play and if you've played MP you'll be used to working with a reduced group of abilities.

And if we are talking new game modes....as soon as I arrive on the citadel, for the LOVE OF GOD, let me finally ride an elcor with a huge gun strapped to his back into battle. You know, just like the elcor ambassador states in the very game.

It's just important to remember that everyone who picked their Skittles ending is going to be pissed when you more or less tell them they fucked up.

Well that's why I build in so many safing throws, like having LI with you etc. etc. so that you really really really have to work to get it wrong. But since in the end, you still get a more or less happy ending (heck, renegade shepard could even make a badass snide comment to the one who shot him afterwards) I think it could at least work.

No problem. My idea for the Crucible was that by examining the Klendagon casualty and the Reaper baby, and Sovereign's remains we've learned that Reapers have a quirk in their cores, something that we don't know what it is until someone realizes it's a circut breaker or the like and by carefully tuning the Crucible pulse you can blow this out and wreck their cores but not destroy the simpler and more robust eezo cores that everyone else uses. This is an evolution of an earlier idea I had with the Crucible being a trap that it would overload eezo cores but the Reapers had a kind of circut breaker in them that would prevent it therefore the Crucible would eliminate a cycle's ability to resist if it was strong enough to build it. Kind of an insurance policy. That idea got nixed when I realized I could just make it something we make and I'd rewrite the whole damn ending instead of making the existing one work.

Yeah...since you need to rework or ignore large parts of the ending anyhow to make that mess work somehow, you might just as well. Crucible as a trap certainly has some merrits as an idea (like vigil never mentioning it, one would assume that this is rather high on his to do list). But then I don't like being fooled and discovering at the end of the game that the whole galaxy did basically the reapers work........it is plausible, I just don't like it very much. Stick with the evolution of your idea. It is more conventional, but that isn't always a bad thing.

[Tyyr]

Sequences like that and the ending just reek of people who are hellbent on producing something deep, meaningful and of artistic value and just fail to understand that by doing so and ruining the narrative because of it they do the exact opposite.

Its pure speculation on my part but I think that the ME3 team might have resented ME1 and 2 somewhat. Rather than just keep using what others had created they wanted to "Create something new," or "Put their mark on it," and the end result is that they tossed away everything that made it Mass Effect.

Maybe it is strange for me to say so, after I explicatly stated that I am of the oppinion that video games are an art form, but in most cases they would have been much better off NOT trying to produce art, but just solid entertainment, like Lucas did with his first star wars movie. If it had enough heart and soul, the artful part would have come without even trying. You just cannot force it imho.

That's largetly how I feel. If you set out to make fine art you're going to bomb. You can't force real art because real art has a soul to it, some part of the artists essence and creativity that transforms something from a pretty picture (or a great game re: ME2) into true art. It's like trying to redo the Mona Lisa, you're just gonna fuck it up.

But would even that be enough to reconcile with all the alienated fans? I am not sure, to be honest.

I think it could. As much as I loathe ME3 right now and Bioware itself deep down I want to love it. I want to go back to that grinning idioctic love I had for the games and the setting and the company. I want that back. So if the company stopped and posted on BSN, "We fucked up. We are sincerely sorry. The ending was not good but we're going to make it up to you. Here is a real ending for ME3 and it's free," then put out something like that I think it could do it. I don't think you're going to get people back to loving them overnight but a sincere appology and a real gesture of reconciliation could make their hardcore fans happy again. The biggest problem that most fans had I think is not so much that the ending was bad, it's that Bioware told us it was our fault. Their ending was perfect, we were just too unsophisticated to get it. We were just too dense to appreciate their art so it's out problem for not liking their ending. They attacked their fans and that's how they alienated them.

Well to make it more real my idea would have been that the castmembers don't go rushing in alone. Grunt is followed by his squad, Kyrahee by his men, Jack by her students etc. etc. You know, beefing up the numbers a bit and yes, admittedly providing one or two redshirts.

I like that. You reuse the sucide mission formula but you amp it up now with entire squads and not just single squadmates. I'd have to make it a bit deeper by you having to pick and chose the right groups with the right skills to do certain jobs.

And if we are talking new game modes....as soon as I arrive on the citadel, for the LOVE OF GOD, let me finally ride an elcor with a huge gun strapped to his back into battle.

I've seen some great fan art of Elcor living tanks that makes the lack of htem in the game proper inexcusable.

Well that's why I build in so many safing throws, like having LI with you etc. etc. so that you really really really have to work to get it wrong. But since in the end, you still get a more or less happy ending (heck, renegade shepard could even make a badass snide comment to the one who shot him afterwards) I think it could at least work.

You have to be able to get it wrong. If you can't lose then you didn't actually win. It doesn't have to be easy to lose, but it does have to be a possibility.

Stick with the evolution of your idea. It is more conventional, but that isn't always a bad thing.

Well, like I said the Crucible as a trap thing was an early attempt to fix the ending. Since then I've moved on as I realized I couldn't write ME3 fic without throwing the whole plot out and starting over so I may as well change the ending entirely.