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

[Sjofn]

I gave up at book six, best decision I ever made. 

[MournelitheCalix]

BBB just stated that ME3 was falsely advertised by Bioware.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/116735-BioWare-Falsely-Advertised-Mass-Effect-3



Little late to the show but I guess better late than never.



Edited:  Original BBB Link:

http://www.bbb.org/blog/2012/04/mass-effect-3-is-having-a-mass-effect-on-its-consumers-for-better-or-worse/

[Phildo]

The author dying after stringing fans along for nearly two decades is a pretty great ending.

[Paelos]

The author dying after stringing fans along for nearly two decades is a pretty great ending.

I always just assumed he finished the series in the first book.

[Ingmar]

The author dying after stringing fans along for nearly two decades is a pretty great ending.

I always just assumed he finished the series in the first book.

That was Dune.

[Abelian75]

The author dying after stringing fans along for nearly two decades is a pretty great ending.

Indeed, and it was pretty heavily foreshadowed as early as book five or so.  A sign of good writing.

[rk47]

Not sure if i missed something. Or does Rannoch boil down to who do I want to save?
I've not finished the game but I don't feel the build up here. Just Legion and Tali going back and forth about no - no don't do it Shepard.

So geth is defenseless after Reaper is killed. Legion wants to activate the Old Machine code upgrade to make Geth smarter. - This leads to quarian dying - errr...why?
And if I don't let Legion do that, Admiral Gerrel's fleet will destroy the geth utterly - till nothing is left. Ok, so they're dicks.

And..that's it. I had to choose between the two. I had a long pause at midnight before deciding to Alt-F4. I had nothing against both sides, but meh. It felt so forced. I didn't even need either's help. Fleet Rating at 4K+

[Ceryse]

You can actually save (and thus recruit) both, but yeah.. a lot of it does boil down to which of the two you want to keep around, especially between Legion/Tali.

The whole Quarian/Geth thing annoyed me from ME2 on as its pretty clear which of the two deserves a kick between the legs prior to the bullet to the head.

Personally, I just finished the game (borrowed a friend's laptop as he'd bought it and is away on vacation). And yeah, found the game as a whole disappointing, not just the ending. Most of the game was good, but not as good as I'd hoped. Ending was a mix of better and worse than I'd figured it would of been given what I'd spoiled myself with. A lot of the game just felt badly paced and 'off' to me before it jumped off the cliff at the end.

[Ingmar]

Not sure if i missed something. Or does Rannoch boil down to who do I want to save?
I've not finished the game but I don't feel the build up here. Just Legion and Tali going back and forth about no - no don't do it Shepard.

So geth is defenseless after Reaper is killed. Legion wants to activate the Old Machine code upgrade to make Geth smarter. - This leads to quarian dying - errr...why?
And if I don't let Legion do that, Admiral Gerrel's fleet will destroy the geth utterly - till nothing is left. Ok, so they're dicks.

And..that's it. I had to choose between the two. I had a long pause at midnight before deciding to Alt-F4. I had nothing against both sides, but meh. It felt so forced. I didn't even need either's help. Fleet Rating at 4K+

You can avoid this but it requires certain outcomes in ME2 and specific choices in ME3.

[Nightblade]

You can actually save (and thus recruit) both, but yeah.. a lot of it does boil down to which of the two you want to keep around, especially between Legion/Tali.

The whole Quarian/Geth thing annoyed me from ME2 on as its pretty clear which of the two deserves a kick between the legs prior to the bullet to the head.

Personally, I just finished the game (borrowed a friend's laptop as he'd bought it and is away on vacation). And yeah, found the game as a whole disappointing, not just the ending. Most of the game was good, but not as good as I'd hoped. Ending was a mix of better and worse than I'd figured it would of been given what I'd spoiled myself with. A lot of the game just felt badly paced and 'off' to me before it jumped off the cliff at the end.

My thoughts exactly.

[Sjofn]

So geth is defenseless after Reaper is killed. Legion wants to activate the Old Machine code upgrade to make Geth smarter. - This leads to quarian dying - errr...why?

Smarter geth leads to the quarians dying because the quarians are not backing the fuck off, and the geth aren't going to just sit there and get blown up. With the better code, they're smart enough to kick the quarian fleet's ass (as they had been doing prior to you going in and fussing with shit).

I dunno, didn't really feel forced to me. It's something that's come up in every Mass Effect, it seemed clear this sort of shit was going to go down in ME3. I managed to save both, though.

[rk47]

Four bars of reputation. Oh, I see they still stuck to their retarded way of measuring Shepard's persuasion effective. How long is your bar, Commander?
I was like 3.75 full.
Same shit happened in Virmire. That's why Wrex died.
Too bad, Legion. Prepare for deactivation.

[Ceryse]

Four bars of reputation. Oh, I see they still stuck to their retarded way of measuring Shepard's persuasion effective. How long is your bar, Commander?
I was like 3.75 full.
Same shit happened in Virmire. That's why Wrex died.
Too bad, Legion. Prepare for deactivation.

Never been a fan of the reputation system either, even though I almost always have enough rep for either paragon/renegade choices whether I want them or not. The one notable exception was the very last paragon check on TIM at the end. This despite just a shade shy of all rep bars filled and 85-90% of that Paragon, if I remember correctly. Annoyed me for a second until, well, y'know, I shot him.

Legion gets hosed regardless, unless you pick with just the Geth, I think. I know he 'dies' if you save both. Seemed like one of several choices in the series to force a death on Shepard, which I'm fine with if its handled well (I liked choosing one in Virmine.. Mordin's death was a good one as well. Legion's.. not so much). I think the only people that die in mine are.. Ashley, Legion, Mordin and, of course, Thane. A lot more in my renegade Shep play through, but I won't be replaying ME3 for that character. Doing a second play through to the bleed-out scene on my FemShep since Hale's voice acting is good enough to warrant it.. and making me kind of wish I'd done that play though first.

[Ingmar]

Mordin can actually live as well given the exact right circumstances, but I think it might require Wrex to die? Not sure.

[rk47]

Yes. Mordin stood down in my game with Wrex's death and Eve's death. Shep told him Wreav is an asshole and he was like 'Okay. You're right, Shep. Glad you're here. Too eager to atone.'
It felt right. The Geth Quarian conflict in the other hand - nothing. It's just choose X or Y - Shep. We're not gonna bother explaining why you cannot reconcile our two races. Just choose one. Top or Bottom? Don't kill my people, Shep. We did not shoot first, Shepard-Commander.

Does this game have a soul?

[Sjofn]

I guess I don't get just how much more spelling out you need them to do. Why can't you reconcile them? Because the quarian admirals want their homeworld back and the majority are convinced the only way to do it is to kill the shit out of the geth. And the geth are tired of the quarians being genocidal asshats, so fuck it, if the quarians are going to keep starting it, the geth are finally going to finish it. This is completely consistent with two games worth of geth/quarian shit.

They didn't explain it further because there's literally nothing left to explain at that point. It should be obvious.

[caladein]

It's not only the earlier titles, but one of them missions that directly precedes it, Rannoch: Geth Fighter Squadrons, lays it all out.  The video recordings there tell you of the pro-peace Quarians that were killed off during the War (and/or abandoned in the retreat and eventually died out I'd assume).

Shepard's actions throughout the series can reinforce or hamper that pro-peace faction.  If you've done enough fostering the pro-peace faction and the Geth have any reason to trust you, you can work something out.  Otherwise, the hawks lead their species to their doom or Shepard has to deny the Geth a great leap forward and let them be killed.

Mordin is the same thing.  If there's any chance that the Krogan can be a productive species going foward, he'll do an about-face on the genophage.  If there isn't (both Wrex and Eve are dead) then he can be talked out of curing it right then and there.

[tmp]

Smarter geth leads to the quarians dying because the quarians are not backing the fuck off, and the geth aren't going to just sit there and get blown up. With the better code, they're smart enough to kick the quarian fleet's ass (as they had been doing prior to you going in and fussing with shit).

I dunno, didn't really feel forced to me. It's something that's come up in every Mass Effect, it seemed clear this sort of shit was going to go down in ME3. I managed to save both, though.

The part which pretty much ruined it for me was complete lack of middle ground option which could be, say, actually telling the quarians you're upgrading the geth and so if they attack it's nothing but their own funeral. Which just might make them back the fuck off because they've already found out the painful way they couldn't match the upgraded geth. Instead the game is forcing your hand to be complete cockbag about it by denying you perfectly logical behaviour for i dunno, the sake of being edgy?

If the quarians still attacked despite the warning i wouldn't really mind it, but the fact you aren't even given the option to try just makes me impotently rage at their stupid design decisions.

[rk47]

Apparently that's what shepard would says if his Reputation Bar is over 9000, tmp. 
I'm kinda over the game post-Tuchanka. It was awesome pulling off a massive scale deception on Tuchanka. But after that? Udina went derp, and now this.

[Shrike]

The whole Quarian/Geth thing annoyed me from ME2 on as its pretty clear which of the two deserves a kick between the legs prior to the bullet to the head.

Yeah, the geth get theirs regardless in the red ending--well, assuming you believe the starpunk's bullshit.

As referenced several times above, if you paid any attention to the first two games, this particular bit of diplomacy is easy to reconcile. My fall-back position (I was still holding a bit of a grudge over Eden Prim) was to throw the geth under the Migrant Fleet bus, but it was never an issue.

[caladein]

The part which pretty much ruined it for me was complete lack of middle ground option which could be, say, actually telling the quarians you're upgrading the geth and so if they attack it's nothing but their own funeral.

That doesn't sound too different from the Renegade check actually.

[tmp]

Yeah and the blue magic option isn't too different either, which is part of why it's so irritating -- having the common sense and ability to drop the idiot ball tied to reputation bar and past choices which, apparently, mysteriously affect Shepard's brain functions... just

[Ceryse]

Yeah, which is why I disliked the reputation system. Its too all or nothing. I'm perfectly fine with requiring past decisions to affect later ones (genophage is a good example of this, imo, as seen with the Wrex decision, Maelon's data decisions, Mordin and Dalatrass decisions all tying together what can or cannot happen as options). I wish some of those earlier decisions were themselves not so tied to reputation, but I never had a game where I couldn't pick what to do with Wrex, for example. I talked him down in every game except my renegade path simply because that Shep was tired of it and just decided to off the mouthy Krogan (who dies pathetically.. I had expected Wrex to put up a fight).

But in my paragon run when it came to the genophage.. I was fine with letting Mordin die to cure the genophage. It felt like a solid way for a character to go. Legion's death just made little sense to me, given how much they had talked up the data transfer aspect of the Geth previously. And the fact that only one ending didn't out-right screw people you'd helped previously pissed me off (if Destroy 'supposedly' destroys all synthetics.. then helping the Geth earlier is un-done as you destroy them. If you go for control, wouldn't you also technically be controlling all the Geth, EDI, etc., if the machine isn't just Reaper specific, as shown in the Control/Destroy endings? thus enslaving them once again. The synthesis option just struck me as horrific writing/plot ending as it makes no sense to me at all how that would work, or be a good idea).

So between the pacing of the game, some issues with the reputation system and some of the plot writing being fat too black/white (fuck the Quarians.. if I hadn't wanted to keep Tali and both the fleets I'd have let them die), some of the raw gameplay changes and the utter disregard for almost everything in the series with the ending.. the game is a decent, to good experience one-off playthrough that's a lot worse than it could of been otherwise if there'd been more coherency and common sense put into it. And time/money of course, I guess.

Only a few weeks late to the rant, I guess. Just glad I didn't have to pay for it or pirate it.

[Ratman_tf]

I guess I don't get just how much more spelling out you need them to do. Why can't you reconcile them? Because the quarian admirals want their homeworld back and the majority are convinced the only way to do it is to kill the shit out of the geth. And the geth are tired of the quarians being genocidal asshats, so fuck it, if the quarians are going to keep starting it, the geth are finally going to finish it. This is completely consistent with two games worth of geth/quarian shit.

They didn't explain it further because there's literally nothing left to explain at that point. It should be obvious.

So they brought their whole fleet full of their children and families to throw at the Geth. 

[Tebonas]

In my recollection there was only one troublemaker, the douche from the heavy fleet. Everybody else just went along with him grudgingly. I miss the renegade interrupt to blow his command ship into the next galaxy and tell the rest of them to behave now. I would do a renegade play through just for that.

[Ingmar]

Yeah and the blue magic option isn't too different either, which is part of why it's so irritating -- having the common sense and ability to drop the idiot ball tied to reputation bar and past choices which, apparently, mysteriously affect Shepard's brain functions... just

Look at it more as if without a certain reputation, Shepard won't be able to convince anyone of those ideas. The game is just stopping you from picking options that can't succeed under the circumstances, rather than telling you Shepard is too dumb to think of them.

Now you can definitely argue that they should let you try and fail on those checks, but probably that will just lead people to reload over and over again. (See: Fallout 3)

[Koyasha]

I guess I don't get just how much more spelling out you need them to do. Why can't you reconcile them? Because the quarian admirals want their homeworld back and the majority are convinced the only way to do it is to kill the shit out of the geth. And the geth are tired of the quarians being genocidal asshats, so fuck it, if the quarians are going to keep starting it, the geth are finally going to finish it. This is completely consistent with two games worth of geth/quarian shit.

They didn't explain it further because there's literally nothing left to explain at that point. It should be obvious.

So they brought their whole fleet full of their children and families to throw at the Geth. 

While at first this seems like a really stupid idea, on further reflection I'm not convinced it was.  At least, not any stupider than the entire attack in the first place, which yes, was pretty stupid.  Sure, you can say leave the civilians out of the war, but if the military fleet doesn't make it, the civilians are screwed anyway (because the now-defenseless civilian fleet will then be destroyed by slow attrition from pirates, slavers, etc, etc - just imagine what a haul it would be for slavers to capture pretty much the entire surviving quarian population).  Since they decided not to establish even a foothold on any other world, ever, thus giving their civilians a place to shelter that would potentially allow them to survive even if the military fleet fails to defeat the Geth, the entire operation was an all-or-nothing prospect for the entire species.  If they lose the military fleets, the quarians are gone, therefore it actually makes a certain degree of sense to strap guns onto everything that can fly and send it along, because those extra ships just might make the difference between winning and losing.

[Sjofn]

The part which pretty much ruined it for me was complete lack of middle ground option which could be, say, actually telling the quarians you're upgrading the geth and so if they attack it's nothing but their own funeral. Which just might make them back the fuck off because they've already found out the painful way they couldn't match the upgraded geth. Instead the game is forcing your hand to be complete cockbag about it by denying you perfectly logical behaviour for i dunno, the sake of being edgy?

If the quarians still attacked despite the warning i wouldn't really mind it, but the fact you aren't even given the option to try just makes me impotently rage at their stupid design decisions.

It probably felt OK to me because I did have that option (without even being aware you could NOT get that option). Clearly I am a better Commander Shepard than you. 

I tend to agree with Ingmar, that they don't offer you that option because you don't have the rep to have it work, not because it didn't occur to Shepard. They should've let you try and fail anyway, and although it's possible people would reload over and over ... they let you paragon interrupt to try and save Tali and fail, so I'm not sure if that's the reason why they didn't for the conversation options.

So they brought their whole fleet full of their children and families to throw at the Geth. 

Why yes, yes they did. The civilian ships are also able to blow shit up, and the quarians were certain they'd need every scrap of firepower they had for this war, and it's not like they had anywhere to dump off thousands of refugees without an issue.

[caladein]

I tend to agree with Ingmar, that they don't offer you that option because you don't have the rep to have it work, not because it didn't occur to Shepard. They should've let you try and fail anyway, and although it's possible people would reload over and over ... they let you paragon interrupt to try and save Tali and fail, so I'm not sure if that's the reason why they didn't for the conversation options.

I think there's value to being told there's a check that you can't make, what with multiple playthroughs and the possibility of loading an earlier save and maybe going off to do some side quests before giving it another go.  If the system is fair, it's an acceptable level of frustration, just like having to reload because you channeled Rambo for too long.

The DA2 approach was just to not show them at all, which might be the best option all around if people aren't going to rage when they spoil themselves down the line.  Which they probably would.

[Sjofn]

It kinda sounds like they don't show you that the option is there (but greyed out) in this case, though. I don't know for sure, though, as I've had the option in both of my playthroughs.

[tmp]

It probably felt OK to me because I did have that option (without even being aware you could NOT get that option). Clearly I am a better Commander Shepard than you.  

I tend to agree with Ingmar, that they don't offer you that option because you don't have the rep to have it work, not because it didn't occur to Shepard. They should've let you try and fail anyway, and although it's possible people would reload over and over ... they let you paragon interrupt to try and save Tali and fail, so I'm not sure if that's the reason why they didn't for the conversation options.

Well, my Shepard saved Mordin so your argument is invalid

But yeah, i could see that as likely reasoning they'd use to justify to themselves why such option should be skipped... except like you say, the fact they do allow you to fail in number of other situations (like failing to convince Mordin through regular rather the "i win" reputation lines, and a number of other situations like that in both earlier games) makes that line of thinking rather weak. So that in the end makes lack of such option especially disappointing.

Ah, well.

edit: if you don't meet the conditions then the reputation-based routes aren't shown at all. For the geth/quarian showdown at least.

[Tannhauser]

I got sick and tired of trying to cat-herd the Quarians. Meanwhile, the Geth were defending themselves and asking for my support.  I felt the Quarians were blinded by their long torment and the backstory even shows them wiping out Geth.  So I said 'fuck you' to the Quarians and sided with Legion.

I had no idea that Tali would commit suicide.  I tried to reach her with my paragon interrupt but I failed.  That was an upsetting in a good way.  Can you save Tali, was I too late with the interrupt? 

Anyway, best part of the game.

[Ratman_tf]

I got sick and tired of trying to cat-herd the Quarians. Meanwhile, the Geth were defending themselves and asking for my support.  I felt the Quarians were blinded by their long torment and the backstory even shows them wiping out Geth.  So I said 'fuck you' to the Quarians and sided with Legion.

I had no idea that Tali would commit suicide.  I tried to reach her with my paragon interrupt but I failed.  That was an upsetting in a good way.  Can you save Tali, was I too late with the interrupt? 

Anyway, best part of the game.

That's how it went down in my playthrough. AFAIK you can't save her at that point. The paragon interrupt is a dick tease.

[rk47]

 After Udina and Space Ninja? And now this? Yeah, I guess it can't get any better.

[calapine]

I am suprised about all the geth love in here. A bunch of toaster rebels and kills their makers, then allies with other, more advanced toasters that wish to eridcate all life in the galaxy. Apparently that just means they are misunderstood or something.

Am really curious, who did you root for when watching Terminator?