Mass Effect 3 Spoiler Thread [Spoiler tag free, beware]

[Ironwood]

It begins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuNTa3Psqz4

Well, that's the first one of those that's made me crack a smile.

[Kail]

I read a new take on the ME 3 ending today.  I am actually not sure it changes much but is interesting nonetheless to me.

A Possibly new take on the End:

The problem with this kind of ending is that unless it's explicitly spelled out, it's no different than any one of a million other "maybe Shepard is really in an asylum and hallucinated the whole thing" kinds of theoretically possible endings.  Is it possible?  Sure, I guess, but so what?  Everything after that point is basically a "metaphor" or something, which means nothing narratively (since the game doesn't go anywhere with it, can't go anywhere with it since it's all one character's final delusion).  The game doesn't improve or suddenly reveal some deep hidden message if you believe the ending to be true.  Ultimately, you're stuck with the problem that the real, canonical ending of Mass Effect is basically the same ending that you would have gotten if you'd died ten minutes into the first game, except with some additional meaningless hallucinatory babble tacked on.

And you still have the "Grandpa's Story" problem where the stuff you're doing in game isn't "real" even within the scope of the game fiction.  A lot of people can handle imagining a story, not as many are interested in a story about a story.

[kildorn]

Since I finally beat it, random thoughts:

[Riggswolfe]

And you still have the "Grandpa's Story" problem where the stuff you're doing in game isn't "real" even within the scope of the game fiction.  A lot of people can handle imagining a story, not as many are interested in a story about a story.

Except it is. That was clearly not being told on Earth so right off you know it's in a sci-fi setting. All that ending is really saying is that you have become a legend, a story that is passed down throughout the galaxy which is actually hinted at pretty hardcore throughout the whole game.

Anyway, my biggest gripe with the end

[Simond]

Has this been posted here yet?

http://social.bioware.com/633606/polls/28989

[Reg]

We're just posting links to bitch threads on the Bioware forums now?  Nice.

[eldaec]

EA are going to interpret that poll, and the whole associated hullaballoo, as "gamers insist on happy endings".

Just saying.

[Velorath]

EA are going to interpret that poll, and the whole associated hullaballoo, as "gamers insist on happy endings".

Just saying.

They're going to interpret it like that because that's what a lot of people on Bioware's forum are actually saying.

Edit:  Which in a way I somewhat blame ME2 for.  In ME1, regardless of what choices you made, one of your teammates had to die.  ME2 was the game that conditioned people to think that if you make all the right choices, everybody will survive what was deemed a suicide mission, and I'd bet that's what most people did.  A lot of people seem to be asking for the same with ME3, and while I agree with a lot of criticisms about the ending, the desire for a way to get a happy ending isn't one of them.

[Fabricated]

I always kinda liked the "You busted your ever-loving ass and made all of the right decisions across all the games? Happy ending." idea myself. I mean, that kinda makes the reward proportional to the "work" you put into kicking ass and thought you put into your choices.

Also normally I don't link to the 2000 different retards doing YouTube video reviews of games thinking they'll be the next ZeroPunctuation/Yogscast/whatever but this one made me laugh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVgwvj8N8ew

[Simond]

Also, it's not like there aren't any sacrifices anyway during the course of the story.


e: Interesting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=booBmcFw_Lk
Looks like this is the original version of the "Anderson & Shepard" scene, which sounds like it was supposed to be placed after the climax. Wonder what the original ending was going to be?

[Sjofn]

Anyway, my biggest gripe with the end

[Merusk]

Also normally I don't link to the 2000 different retards doing YouTube video reviews of games thinking they'll be the next ZeroPunctuation/Yogscast/whatever but this one made me laugh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVgwvj8N8ew

Ok that one did make me chuckle.

[Merusk]

Stay classy, EA.

You do know that the chance of that player's story being bullshit is 99%, right? At least I hope that's what Triple's is for.

Possibly not, though.  Before the game was released there was a thread on the Bioware site where someone mentioned modding their MP-host machine to do this.  I had wondered why at the time and now I see..whoops.

It's possible to mod the client to do this. I'm pretty sure the host has nothing to do with it, but it's possible the payout system uses the host to determine the data. Would be even dumber than trusting the client though, just from a "that's a lot of useless data to send across the wire that the client already has" standpoint.

As for banning someone from their DLC stuff for multiplayer bullshit: Doesn't steam fuck your account pretty royally if you get VAC banned? I think you can still play single player, but every multiplayer aspect gets locked from you hacking in one of them.

I'm okay with the idea of "hacking in multi? gtfo of our service", but you need to be DAMNED sure they were doing so. And ME3's mutli code is so riddled with poor security that I don't think you could ever prove it.

No, it's the host, and it isn't a new problem.   The same thing happened with Battlefield 3 and hacked servers, resulting in banning from Origin -and all your single-player games - entirely.  But thanks for handing-over all that cash to EA, they appreciate it!

So the rule is: only play on official servers for all EA games.

[Ratman_tf]

[Velorath]

I always kinda liked the "You busted your ever-loving ass and made all of the right decisions across all the games? Happy ending." idea myself. I mean, that kinda makes the reward proportional to the "work" you put into kicking ass and thought you put into your choices.

Given the scale of the conflict and the stakes I guess to me a happy ending just wouldn't have made sense.  Like I said before my biggest complaint is a lack of closure.  I can only assume that part of the reason for that is maybe ME4 will reveal the aftermath to you as you're playing.

[Fabricated]

"Happy" is an operative word. I mean, you could end it where everyone in the squad lives, and all the ancillary characters people like live (anderson for example), but the reapers managed to give the universe a pretty good shit-kicking all things aside. Also everyone who died from ME1 onward.

[Riggswolfe]

I always kinda liked the "You busted your ever-loving ass and made all of the right decisions across all the games? Happy ending." idea myself. I mean, that kinda makes the reward proportional to the "work" you put into kicking ass and thought you put into your choices.

Given the scale of the conflict and the stakes I guess to me a happy ending just wouldn't have made sense.  Like I said before my biggest complaint is a lack of closure.  I can only assume that part of the reason for that is maybe ME4 will reveal the aftermath to you as you're playing.

[Jeff Kelly]

I never really got the praise the Mass Effect series got by fans and critics alike. The games have always been a collection of bits and pieces that sometimes worked out well and sometimes didn't but always felt half-finished and not entirely well thought out.

Bioware has a knack for writing episodes that are in and of itself brilliant but they never quite managed to put all of the different bits and pieces together so that they formed a coherent and well thought out game or even story.

They simply didn't care enough about any part of their games to make at least one of the bits truly brilliant.

They sometimes excel at the small stuff (like the Overlord and Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC) but they also always fail at the overall arcs and stories

They were also always exceptionally lazy when game design was concerned.

I knew that the third installment wasn't going to be great when they released "The Arrival" as the final ME 2 DLC. The story they told there was so hackneyed and stupid that it's better to simply pretend that it doesn't exist at all.

Even the pointlessness of everything you do as Shepard isn't new or just a feature of ME 3. The games never give you a real choice, they give you lots of superficial ones but no real ones. Choosing between the options only changes who says something or how something happens but never keeps it from happening or changes the outcome. (I consider the death of NPCs inconsequential as long as the story still unfolds in exactly the same way just with a different substitute)

Shepard is never in control of his destiny or situation. In ME 1 he wouldn't even know that the Reapers exists if Saren hadn't led him to them yet he is always a step ahead. Shepard only really saves the day because an extinct race of space hippies "genetically modified" the sentient handymen on the citadel so that they wouldn't obey their former masters. Because if they didn't then the game would have been over years before ME 1 actually takes place.

You could have made the game so much better just by hinting that the absolutely useless council wouldn't help Shepard because they live on the mother of all reaper artifacts and are likely indoctrinated to ignore the Reaper threat. (One of the bigger plot holes in 1 apart from the question why the Reapers spare all of the non spacefaring races that already lived 50.000 years ago)

In ME 2 you no longer even have the choice of where you'd like to go first, in order to "win" the game you even have to play it in a certain way. In most levels you don't even have a choice of going left or right because there is just the way forward and parts of the game only get unlocked after you have gotten to certain checkpoints. There is also the issue of why I should work for people that are so obviously evil as Cerberus, a fact that is hammered in in ME1 and carries over into 2. Half of the missions is cleaning up messes the Illusive Man made instead of preparing for the Collector base.

Oh then there's the issue of destroying the mu relay and nuking a whole batarian colony that has no effect at all, where you are conveniently knocked unconscious for the exact amount of time the reapers need to invade so that your only "choice" is to nuke the relay. Which as we've seen with ME 3 doesn't matter at all, they didn't even have the decency to prosecute Shepard after he proved to be a genocidal maniac. They just shrug it off.

In 3 you don't even finish missions yourself you get "help" by crew members and NPCs that always reveal themselves right at the exact moment Shepard fucks up another mission by staring blankly while holding a gun.

Saving the Council on the Citadel after the Cerberus invasion was  probably the second most ridiculous piece of storytelling after the ending itself, you chase "ripped from Final fantasy sword guy" through half of the citadel and instead of a decent boss fight you get a cutscene of Thane failing to beat him up before he escapes. Literally every time you are on the brink of catching him the game gives you another cut scene to tell you exactly why you aren't allowed to catch him yet.

Hell even confronting Udina only boils down to who shoots him you or Ashley/Kaidan but he ends up dead either way.

Instead of a challenging fight against lots of modified rachnii you get a cutscene of Grunt beating the shit out of them and that after a decent Alien-esque buildup.

Instead of a great storytelling moment you get a cut scene of Mordin using an elevator and being blown up.

When you can actually fight for yourself then the biggest threat is usually an Atlas dropped from orbit that get's blown to pieces as soon as it lands by my awesome "so much damage it's basically cheating" Widow rifle on my infiltrator.

The "twists" get telegraphed miles away and even if you wanted, the game takes control away from you in the exact moments that you actually could change something. If all else fails by breaking your powers. Don't expect stasis to work on assassin girl in the first mission for example. You are expected to run after her,
hell you'll even fail the mission of you don't keep up but actually catching her before she reaches the shuttle is impossible, because the designers want it that way.

I mean I had my whole squad with me and all the game made me do is watch a scene of robot girl beating Ashley to near death while I was thinking "Give me the controls and I would have killed her five minutes before she even laid a hand on my squadmate"

So in a twisted way the ending is somewhat coherent when it drives home the point that nothing you ever did over the last 3 games had any meaning whatsoever. That it is inane, ignores the major story arcs of the previous two games, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and is also basically a giant "fuck you but thanks for your money" to the fans, while at the same time being lazy as hell (Seriously: "Shepard is now a legend". Why not: "Sorry but your catalyst is in another castle") is just the icing on the cake.

Every time Bioware would have needed resources or just time and a little bit of thought to flesh out story or levels they always went for convenience, bending stories, creating plot holes, removing control from the player, creating superficial conflict or letting bridges collapse conveniently at the exact moment you'd want to get over them. (On Tuchanka they even collapse the exact same bridge model in the exact same way a few minutes apart).

[jakonovski]

Just finished the game, it kinda fell apart at the end.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Dragonball Z storytelling.  Once you've got a character so powerful they start blowing up planets, you need to start finding excuses of WHY they aren't blowing up planets.

[Velorath]

I always kinda liked the "You busted your ever-loving ass and made all of the right decisions across all the games? Happy ending." idea myself. I mean, that kinda makes the reward proportional to the "work" you put into kicking ass and thought you put into your choices.

Given the scale of the conflict and the stakes I guess to me a happy ending just wouldn't have made sense.  Like I said before my biggest complaint is a lack of closure.  I can only assume that part of the reason for that is maybe ME4 will reveal the aftermath to you as you're playing.

[Riggswolfe]

I always kinda liked the "You busted your ever-loving ass and made all of the right decisions across all the games? Happy ending." idea myself. I mean, that kinda makes the reward proportional to the "work" you put into kicking ass and thought you put into your choices.

Given the scale of the conflict and the stakes I guess to me a happy ending just wouldn't have made sense.  Like I said before my biggest complaint is a lack of closure.  I can only assume that part of the reason for that is maybe ME4 will reveal the aftermath to you as you're playing.

[Ratman_tf]

The mass relays aren't the only way to travel FTL. They're merely the best, fastest way. Otherwise it would take months or years to go from relays to neighboring star systems, and this clearly isn't the case.

No, the Turians didn't starve. They just headed home by slow FTL.

Y'know what I think? I think Bioware flinched. It's hard to build up this big, huge story, and not be tempted to make the ending some transcendental experience. They think "God, no ending will be good enough! How can we top it? Jesus... jesus... JESUS! We'll put in some metaphysical imagery and a Christ metaphor! "



Meanwhile, alls the audience wanted was a satisfying wrap up to all the plot threads that had been laid out.
Maybe a comment on human nature a-la Star Trek. That's all. No need to go herpty derpty on us.

[Velorath]

I always kinda liked the "You busted your ever-loving ass and made all of the right decisions across all the games? Happy ending." idea myself. I mean, that kinda makes the reward proportional to the "work" you put into kicking ass and thought you put into your choices.

Given the scale of the conflict and the stakes I guess to me a happy ending just wouldn't have made sense.  Like I said before my biggest complaint is a lack of closure.  I can only assume that part of the reason for that is maybe ME4 will reveal the aftermath to you as you're playing.

[Simond]

3D chemistry is a Real Thing, by the way.  

Biology A-Level time: Okay, the more complex organic structures can take one of two actual shapes (chiralities). On Earth, that means the overwhelming majority of amino acids (building blocks of proteins) are dextro-chirality and the overwhelming majority of sugars are laevo-chirality.  What this means is that if you had, say, a chunk of protein based on laevo-chirality amino acids (essentially non-existent outside of laboratories), the enzymes in your body would not physically be able to process it. You could eat three square meals of L-protein and D-carbohydrate food a day, and you'd still starve to death. This isn't something (relatively) easily fixable like, for example, a mineral deficiency.

[kildorn]

We were heading for a Christ metaphor since ME2 anyways. There really wasn't any way around it.

As for the reapers not doing much: I'm also a bit surprised that every time you kill one.. they don't seem all that badass. Like, it turns out the humans have missiles that will just flatten the smaller ones? WHY HAVEN'T YOU BEEN USING THEM?

[Miasma]

I haven't read this thread because I'm not done but I just wanted to say that I am extremely annoyed that

[kildorn]

I haven't read this thread because I'm not done but I just wanted to say that I am extremely annoyed that

Is that tied to a save? It should just be a paragon/renegade choice unless the default new character assumes tali and legion fucking hate each other still.

[Ratman_tf]

We were heading for a Christ metaphor since ME2 anyways. There really wasn't any way around it.

Sure, but they leaned on it really heavily to float them through the ending, instead of taking a chance on a definitive ending. Having Shepard sacrifice him/herself was inevitable. Making us guess what that meant for the galaxy was lazy.

[Riggswolfe]

We were heading for a Christ metaphor since ME2 anyways. There really wasn't any way around it.

Sure, but they leaned on it really heavily to float them through the ending, instead of taking a chance on a definitive ending. Having Shepard sacrifice him/herself was inevitable. Making us guess what that meant for the galaxy was lazy.

Yes. I wanted to know what happened to the galaxy after I was done. Even just a series of 'slides' with a voice over by Admiral Hackett saying what happened to the alien races and of course humanity. Preferably finished off with a shot of the surviving squad members on the Nornandy telling stories about shepard with Garrus saying "So, there we were, 20 banshees charging us and the Commander goes 'What do you want to live forever?' and charged into them. It was glorious. Of course, he didn't know I was blowing their heads off to keep him safe..."

[Sjofn]

Yep.


EDIT: And no, turians and quarians can't eat what we can, they say multiple times it is basically like eating poison (we can't eat their food for the same reason).

EDIT EDIT: And I should probably stress we never had any fucking idea how the mass relays worked. They're not getting rebuilt any time soon.

[Miasma]

I haven't read this thread because I'm not done but I just wanted to say that I am extremely annoyed that

Is that tied to a save? It should just be a paragon/renegade choice unless the default new character assumes tali and legion fucking hate each other still.

Everything I've read says you need to do x, y and z from me2 and then do the paragon/renegade choice to unite them.

Edit: Oh plus the usual high reputation and having done the side missions.

[Sjofn]

Hm, is Tali's default state exiled if you're not loading a save? Because one of the things I did in ME2 did NOT give points towards peace, but I managed it anyway.

EDIT: My extremely brief looking around has a bunch of people saying you had to have destroyed the heretic geth in ME2, but I know I didn't in Sally Shepard's save, and she got the geth/quarian peace option.

[Rokal]

I liked the resolutions of the side-plots, and the interaction with previous characters once the game wasn't throwing one at me every 30 seconds. Most of the races you met through the three games had their main conflicts resolved in satisfying ways. The ending, and in general the progress of the plot with the Reapers in ME3, was pretty disappointing. Overall, I'm still pretty happy with what the game did manage to do.

I actually thought the ending was going to be worse than it was.

[Nightblade]

The flirting between Tali and Shepard... The pain... Noo... god.... ....

YOU HAVE NO REASON FOR THIS.

WHY GOD, TELL ME WHY.