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

[Ratman_tf]

I don't know how anyone can take the relationship writing in the ME series that seriously in the first place. 

[Nayr]

I don't know how anyone can take the relationship writing in the ME series that seriously in the first place.  

Your opinion.

I actually think there are some pretty tender moments in the ME romances.

Okay, new subject. It's time to get to the face of the problem. Or is it the problem with the face?

Tali'Zorah vas Neemah/Normandy nar Rayya. Fans all around were looking forward to seeing her face. But were greatly disappointed when all they got was a photoshop of a stock photo.

My opinion. Having this. . .


. .is a lot better than having this. . .

[Maledict]

I don't know how anyone can take the relationship writing in the ME series that seriously in the first place. 

Some of it is actually decent. The Samara 'romance' in ME2 is probably the best relationship writing I've seen in a game, and Kaiden in ME3 was decent as well. Some are pretty terrible, some are down right creepy, but some are nicely done.

For all the mockery it gets, and for all I hate what the ending of ME3 did to me, it's still hands down the most emotional series of games I've played and easily my favourite RPG series ever - and a lot of that is down to the writing over the 3 games.

[Reg]

Careful Maledict.  That kind of talk brings out the Bioware trolls.

[Sjofn]

They should never have revealed Tali's face to anyone. The end.

[Ingmar]

Yeah. There are some deeply, deeply creepy people at the center of the Tali face drama blowup.

[Nayr]

Yeah. There are some deeply, deeply creepy people at the center of the Tali face drama blowup.

It seems the biggest complaints are that Tali's face is shown in a photo and not on her game-sprite. And some I suspect were hoping that Tali was some Xenophile's fantasy.

That said, I think the girl in the photo is cute, certainly. But if I were the one editing, I would have given her a greyish purple skin tone, kinda like the Dunmer in Elder Scrolls, and given her shorter hair(considering the quarians have to keep their helmets on like ALL THE TIME, having long lustrous hair would be kinda annoying.)

[Venkman]

Wait, what? They showed Tali's face? When? DLC? Comic? I don't want to look, I just didn't realize there was some reveal.

Outcry is totally expected of course.

[Maledict]

To be fair the outcry was justified. They literally copy and pasted a nameless model from google into the game. People found the photo within a day of the game going live - was one of the laziest things I've seen in gaming.

There were a number of weird shortcuts taken in ME3 that I honestly don't get - even with the extended development time, there's things like Tali's face, the background sprites in areas, etc. that just scream 'absurdly rushed'.

[Maledict]

Careful Maledict.  That kind of talk brings out the Bioware trolls.

My opinions on ME get me into trouble elsewhere, I'm used to it.

Fact of the matter is I consider it a better 'role playing' game than almost all RPGss simply because it is closer to tabletop roleplaying than most games. It's supremely good at letting you create a particular character and play out that character - I can think think of no other RPG where you hear people tell stories about 'my shepherd' and replay a game so much just to have 'different shepherds'.

Skyrim comes close but that's more about the wider choices you make (imperial versus storm born etc) and the type of character you play rather than the character development choices you make in ME.

It's why Dragonage was a let down for me - despite Biowares best efforts it didn't recapture MEs feelings about the main character. They then tried to make Dragonage more Mass Effect like in the sequel but it was so rushed and poorly done it fell apart under its own weight.

[Tannhauser]

Hey, I'm a big ME fan too.  It did resonate with me emotionally.  It's just the ending throws cold water on that and pisses me off to this day.  Not going to  go back over that but look at Red Dead Redemption.  THAT'S how you have a bittersweet ending in a game Bioware.

[Jeff Kelly]

The best about the Red Dead Redemption End is that even if you know how it ends it still kicks you right in the feels.

[slyborg]

 Just my 2 cents here. I recently played the entire series,enjoyed the whole thing right to the end...which was horrible. I NEVER have felt more disappointed or let down by a ending. If I had known Bioware was going to do that,I think I would rather not have played the games in the first place.

[Maledict]

You aren't alone there. God honestly knows what they were thinking with the ending. I've certainly heard a number of people say the entire series is ruined for them - I'd be very hesitant about the next mass effect simply because they fucked up ME3 so much at the very end.

You really couldn't have written a more insulting, stupid ending if you had tried. Never seen something burn away all affection and enjoyment from a game as that last 10 minute sequence.

[Fabricated]

I still haven't bought ME3. I don't have any plans to unless they release some ultimate "Game + All the DLC" edition for a reasonable price.

[Nayr]

We'll have to agree to disagree on the endings. I liked it. I admittedly think the dark energy ending both Karpyshyn and Stormwaltz talked about would have been cooler(and more fitting to the whole mass effect thing which is centered around dark energy,) but making the story's focus around the conflict between organic and synthetic life was a good alternative.

As for the ending itself. It's pretty esoteric, you need to be well brushed up on lore and details to make sense of it before the Extended Cut. Not a bad thing, but that may explain why some people didn't like it.

Destroy/Renegade - The conventional choice, what every player has been desiring for ages. But the flip side is that you have to sacrifice the Geth and EDI, which pisses a lot of people off. But Mass Effect has always had potential consequences for choices. And I don't see why the Crucible would discriminate between the Reapers, other synthetics, and technology, especially considering all the technology of the galaxy is derived from the Reaper's tech. Like Sovereign said, they ensure that organics develop down the path they want them to.

Control/Paragon - The best option for my preferences. Even if the Illusive Man wanted to control the Reapers and make them into his personal army to conquer the galaxy with and put humans on top, taking the Reapers and using them to protect the galaxy is a worthy goal. Unless you're a renegade, then Shepard decides to "lead the many" and not "save the many."

Synthesis - The controversial choice. But presented as providing the best future for the galaxy(rebuilt Tuchanka, maskless Quarians coexisting peacefully with the Geth, and EDI's alive, and the Reapers now live among the galactic community, helping to rebuild and sharing all the knowledge of the past cycles.) The choice is also subject to an enormous amount of debate. Some people don't like forcing the change, some people it's an abomination, some people think you're brainwashing the whole galaxy, and some people see it as a good thing, or at least a "greater good" type twist. And some people just don't like the idea of giving the Reapers what they want.

Refuse - The desired choice. People wanted the option to say "no" to the Catalyst. But they quickly find out that defeating the Reapers conventionally actually is impossible. And the next cycle gets the Crucible's blueprints from Liara's beacon and succeed where you failed(That's the hilarious part.)

Indoctrination Theory - Denial taken to the brink of complete delusion. If I had to compare the theory to anything, it'd be Legion's "experiment" with the constellation of the Salarian goddess you could see from the Batarian homeworld, at least in the way people believe it and treat those who deny it.

Puzzle Theory - While I would be open to this, it's doubtful to ever happen. Having all DLC is not going to magically make a conventional victory via refuse possible.

[Shrike]

God honestly knows what they were thinking with the ending. I've certainly heard a number of people say the entire series is ruined for them...

Some people are inclined to melodrama and overreaction.

I wasn't totally thrilled with the ending (it seemed a bit rushed and not completely thought out), but I didn't have any real issues conceptually with the high EMS destroy. Even less so with the EC. Still, I've done a number of playthroughs by now and the experience certainly hasn't been ruined. I still enjoy it quite a bit--just wish they'd put more effort into a couple of things, not least of which is the end.

I've seen a few folks comment on the similarities between Mass Effect and Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space series. I've read several of these books and I have to say they are very similar in some ways (Stormwaltz might want to comment on this--it would be illuminating). The parallels between the Inhibitors and the Reapers are striking, as is Clavain's decsion at the end of Redemption Ark as opposed to Shepard's when he encounters the Catalyst. Seeing that, it made the decision to blow it all up even easier on subsequent playthroughs.

[Ingmar]

Ugh, not this again. Yes the original ending was awful, no, it didn't travel through time and retroactively invalidate your experiences before you played through it.

[Abelian75]

As for the ending itself. It's pretty esoteric, you need to be well brushed up on lore and details to make sense of it before the Extended Cut. Not a bad thing, but that may explain why some people didn't like it.

No.

[Ingmar]

As for the ending itself. It's pretty esoteric, you need to be well brushed up on lore and details to make sense of it before the Extended Cut. Not a bad thing, but that may explain why some people didn't like it.

No.

Yeah knowing the lore doesn't change the fact that they forgot what their game was about at the end.

[Sjofn]

It's why Dragonage was a let down for me - despite Biowares best efforts it didn't recapture MEs feelings about the main character. They then tried to make Dragonage more Mass Effect like in the sequel but it was so rushed and poorly done it fell apart under its own weight.

I'm the opposite of you, I feel far more attachment to my Wardens (and they are legion!) than my Shepards, although I suppose some people have a hard time going "back" to a silent protagonist (it never bothered me, since you can have a lot more nuance in your lines when your person is silent. Hell, you can have a lot more lines in general. It's a trade-off I'm okay with.). They are much more "mine" than any Shepard I've played. And I feel way, way, way more attached to my Warden's companions (and even my Hawke's companions) than I did to Mass Effect's (especially ME1, it wasn't until ME2 that I started to actually give a shit about any of them).



As for ME3's shitty ending, the original ending's "this doesn't make sense" had nothing to do with knowing or not knowing the lore. It had everything to do with not fitting with the rest of the series and going "whoops, forgot to provide any closure. Well, whatever."

[Venkman]

I don't think it's esoteric in the least. I say that's problem. It pulls a deus ex machina after scores of hours and personalized choices. You discover the threat, go renegade to fight the good fight and then finally are on the right side to really fight to good fight, organize the galaxy, mend centuries-old Hatfeild vs McCoy and worse internecine interacial conflicts, pull together the best and the brightess and bring the fight right to the Reapers.

And then starchild shows up and gives you a single choice that is neither based on any decision made prior and, more damning, mitigates all choices prior to it. Everything anyone cared about was relegated to which clip was included in your personlized QT movie event.

The only rationale would be if this game was set in a multiverse, played with time travel, and they called it a psychohistory decision point.

Hence, 2/3 of this thread 

[Ingmar]

It's simpler than that. They took a game that was primarily about the characters and then forgot about them at the end, strapping on a HURR WONKY SCI-FI PHILOSOPHY ending instead.

[Nayr]

I don't think it's esoteric in the least. I say that's problem. It pulls a deus ex machina after scores of hours and personalized choices. You discover the threat, go renegade to fight the good fight and then finally are on the right side to really fight to good fight, organize the galaxy, mend centuries-old Hatfeild vs McCoy and worse internecine interacial conflicts, pull together the best and the brightess and bring the fight right to the Reapers.

And then starchild shows up and gives you a single choice that is neither based on any decision made prior and, more damning, mitigates all choices prior to it. Everything anyone cared about was relegated to which clip was included in your personlized QT movie event.

The only rationale would be if this game was set in a multiverse, played with time travel, and they called it a psychohistory decision point.

Hence, 2/3 of this thread  

1. Nobody ever said the game's actual ending would be affected at all by your choices during the game. Otherwise they'd need 100 different endings. The choices do, however, affect how prepared you are for the final mission, which determines the level of damage to the galaxy after the final choice is made. Poor decisions = poor assets = bad ending(total galactic destruction or a dark age)

2. A Deus Ex Machina plot device is when something appears out of thin air to solve your problems for you. The Catalyst doesn't do a damn thing except run it's mouth. Shepard does everything, and could have done everything(except Synthesis) without it even appearing. So that's not a real deus ex machina. In fact, if your EMS is low enough, it outright refuses to help you in any way. "The Crucible changed me. Created new. . . possibilities. But I cant make them happen. And I wont."

3. The devs said they intended for the whole of Mass Effect 3 to be an ending, a "goodbye". The reason your choices didn't figure into the final mission that much is because they already played out earlier. The important choices from Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 came into play during the rest of the game. When they said the game had many endings, they meant that all the storylines combined could spin off in various ways. One of the lead devs(Mike Gamble I think,) even said "Someone finally gets it" in response to this article. http://kotaku.com/5908224/my-mass-effect-3-ending-lasted-34-hours-it-was-wonderful

4. The battle with Sovereign hammered in the fact that a conventional victory was impossible. It took a combined fleet of the Citadel races and the Alliance to bring one Reaper, and that was after Shepard killed SovSaren and made it a sitting duck with no shields and no counterattacking. Taking down a million other giant dreadnoughts just like it, even by gathering every warship in the galaxy, is not enough to match their firepower and defenses.

[MournelitheCalix]

3. The devs said they intended for the whole of Mass Effect 3 to be an ending, a "goodbye". The reason your choices didn't figure into the final mission that much is because they already played out earlier. The important choices from Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 came into play during the rest of the game. When they said the game had many endings, they meant that all the storylines combined could spin off in various ways. One of the lead devs(Mike Gamble I think,) even said "Someone finally gets it" in response to this article. http://kotaku.com/5908224/my-mass-effect-3-ending-lasted-34-hours-it-was-wonderful

Yeah some people thought Pools of Radiance 2: The Return to Myth Drannor was a fantastic game to.  You might remember that this was the game that crashed more than it stayed up and the very same game that helped you get rid of it by uninstalling your OS.  The point is that with millions of people playing a game your going to get millions of opinions.  The vast majority of opinions on the "ending" is that the actual ending sucked.  No amount of fanboi cool aid drinking crap will cover the fact that the actual ending will now live in infamy and its a damn shame to that Casey decided to blatantly rip off Deus Ex's endings.  Its a sad ending chapter to what might have been the very best gaming trilogy since Baldur's Gate.

4. The battle with Sovereign hammered in the fact that a conventional victory was impossible. It took a combined fleet of the Citadel races and the Alliance to bring one Reaper, and that was after Shepard killed SovSaren and made it a sitting duck with no shields and no counterattacking. Taking down a million other giant dreadnoughts just like it, even by gathering every warship in the galaxy, is not enough to match their firepower and defenses.

That is your opinion.  We can advance many just as valid ones.  I guess that ignores the fact that technology had really advanced after Sovereign's destruction and in many cases that technology was based off of reaper tech.  I guess were supposed to ignore the fact that Thanix cannons were being installed in entire fleets (See the Turian Fleet).  The fact is this argument makes no sense if you consider just how many reapers were destroyed by animals, by the ramshakle Quarian armada, and it was just intellectual lazyness that they didn't come up with a better answer than they did.  I thought the entire conversation with Vigil in the first game was to indicate that a victory was possible, but you had to have leaders, and you had to have everyone on the same page.

[Sjofn]

3. The devs said they intended for the whole of Mass Effect 3 to be an ending, a "goodbye". The reason your choices didn't figure into the final mission that much is because they already played out earlier. The important choices from Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 came into play during the rest of the game. When they said the game had many endings, they meant that all the storylines combined could spin off in various ways. One of the lead devs(Mike Gamble I think,) even said "Someone finally gets it" in response to this article. http://kotaku.com/5908224/my-mass-effect-3-ending-lasted-34-hours-it-was-wonderful

And until the complete clusterfuck of a final 10 minutes, I would've bought that. Going into the final London push, I essentially had closure on the people I cared about. All that was left was beating the Reapers. I had a good sense of what my friends would go on to do afterwards. And then the fucking ending happened and threw all of that out the window, because you destroyed the relays, ROLL CREDITS, HOPE YOU DIDN'T CARE WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR FRIENDS LOL. The "extended cut" totally backpedaled from that for a fucking reason. But the original way they did it? The only people I actually had closure on were the people who died before the end.

[Jeff Kelly]

Every discussion about intentions and actual implementation of the end is moot because it's ex post facto. I also will not accept DLC post release because it just supports a narrative Bioware presented after the fact.

Bioware's narrative was 'we always intended it to end this way' and so they presented lore and tidbits from the previous game that they  thought supported that argument. They also build new DLC to further flesh out that story.

It might be true or it might just be their version of the classic 'I wanted to do that' defense. What I've learned from Stormwaltz and from leaked info let's me to believe that they didn't intend it to end it this way though.

What I think happened is that the ME 3 team got drained to shift the talent to making the old republic game, that the schedule was moved forward to make a christmas shipping date and that the existing resources were busy implementing kinect and multiplayer features as late add ons and that they simply ran out of time and couldn't lean on the input of the lead writers who got shifted to the mmo.

Be that as it may. Even if they intended the game to end exactly the way we saw this doesn't change the fact that many if not the majority of people thought it was a bad ending that was badly written and was badly implemented.

No amount of lore can justify shitty writing and shitty execution. No amount of 'it's a hard sci fi metaphysical end and if you don't like it you probably just don't get it' hand wringing will change the fact that none of their lead writers is an 'Isaac Asimov' incarnate.

You don't win awards for intent only for execution.

[Ingmar]

No amount of 'it's a hard sci fi metaphysical end and if you don't like it you probably just don't get it' hand wringing will change the fact that none of their lead writers is an 'Isaac Asimov' incarnate.

Even if it had been well written and executed it would have been the wrong choice. The game was never about that shit.

[Nayr]

3. The devs said they intended for the whole of Mass Effect 3 to be an ending, a "goodbye". The reason your choices didn't figure into the final mission that much is because they already played out earlier. The important choices from Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 came into play during the rest of the game. When they said the game had many endings, they meant that all the storylines combined could spin off in various ways. One of the lead devs(Mike Gamble I think,) even said "Someone finally gets it" in response to this article. http://kotaku.com/5908224/my-mass-effect-3-ending-lasted-34-hours-it-was-wonderful

Yeah some people thought Pools of Radiance 2: The Return to Myth Drannor was a fantastic game to.  You might remember that this was the game that crashed more than it stayed up and the very same game that helped you get rid of it by uninstalling your OS.  The point is that with millions of people playing a game your going to get millions of opinions.  The vast majority of opinions on the "ending" is that the actual ending sucked.  No amount of fanboi cool aid drinking crap will cover the fact that the actual ending will now live in infamy and its a damn shame to that Casey decided to blatantly rip off Deus Ex's endings.  Its a sad ending chapter to what might have been the very best gaming trilogy since Baldur's Gate.

4. The battle with Sovereign hammered in the fact that a conventional victory was impossible. It took a combined fleet of the Citadel races and the Alliance to bring one Reaper, and that was after Shepard killed SovSaren and made it a sitting duck with no shields and no counterattacking. Taking down a million other giant dreadnoughts just like it, even by gathering every warship in the galaxy, is not enough to match their firepower and defenses.

That is your opinion.  We can advance many just as valid ones.  I guess that ignores the fact that technology had really advanced after Sovereign's destruction and in many cases that technology was based off of reaper tech.  I guess were supposed to ignore the fact that Thanix cannons were being installed in entire fleets (See the Turian Fleet).  The fact is this argument makes no sense if you consider just how many reapers were destroyed by animals, by the ramshakle Quarian armada, and it was just intellectual lazyness that they didn't come up with a better answer than they did.  I thought the entire conversation with Vigil in the first game was to indicate that a victory was possible, but you had to have leaders, and you had to have everyone on the same page.

1. What's the big deal if ME3's choices are similar to Deus Ex's? Everything else in the ENTIRE series was copied from some other sci-fi media.

The Normandy = The Enterprise
Shepard = Captain Kirk/John or Sarah Connor/etc
Biotics = The Force
Mass Relays = Stargates
FTL travel = Hyperspace
Justicars = The Jedi
The Reapers = The Terminators, The Executioners(Star Ocean: Till the End of Time,) Cthulhu
The Geth = The Terminators
Asari = The green alien girls from Star Trek
Salarians = ET stereotype
The Reapers "Ascension" of Organic beings = The Human Instrumentality Project from Neon Genesis Evangelion
The Catalyst = Skynet, V.I.K.I from the iRobot movie with Will Smith
The Illusive Man = Been done a million times.

Not to mention that the galactic community copies several real world people/cultures.

The Alliance = Imperial Germany(I believe Stormwaltz even said this once.)
The Turians = Spartans and Romans
The Protheans = The Roman Empire right to the letter.
The Quarians = Gypsies
etc

It's all tropes.

2. Incorrect. The Thanix Cannon was a small scale replication of Sovereign's gun. It's not equivalent. That's evidenced by the beginning of Priority Earth when you see about a dozen Thanix blasts hit the Reapers and not even scratch them. Also that's only a part of the equation. Even if they can match the power of their guns, they cant match the strength of the shields or their hulls. Cyclonic barriers are a nice step up, but a Reaper's shields can withstand concentrated fire from up to three dreadnoughts(codex.) And then there's numbers. There are thousands, potentially millions of Reapers, all of which are larger and more powerful than any single dreadnought in the galaxy. And because of the Treaty of Farixen(codex) the production of dreadnoughts by the galactic community is controlled and limited. So the Reapers have us outclassed and outnumbered. Not to mention the Reapers spent months laying waste to the Galaxy and bringing everyone to the breaking point before the final battle. You pull everything you can muster into one battle, and if you don't use the Crucible, you lose.

[Sjofn]

By the way!

Despite all my "moar gay" protests, I've been involved with Kelly twice, and Liara once on an abandoned play through.  (Kaiden also got some love, but then he heroically died.  Oops.)  Traynor I never got involved with because the set-up was terrible and that apparently meant I missed my chance.

So just to see I actually took the option on my latest playthrough (although I did reload afterwards, because I am terrible and really do prefer there be a penis somewhere in the romance, be it mine or someone else's!), and holy shit it is so hilariously awful and awkward it set a new standard for "Awkward Bioware Sex Scene" for me. The rest of the scenes (I went and watched them on youtube afterwards) are fine and sweet but oh my god that set-up.

[MournelitheCalix]

1. What's the big deal if ME3's choices are similar to Deus Ex's? Everything else in the ENTIRE series was copied from some other sci-fi media.

Deus Ex was a damn fine game.   Its endings fit with the story.  If Mass Effect had built up to that type of ending I would have said nothing was wrong with it.  The fact is it hadn't .  Not only did it not build up to that type of ending, but Casey Hudson in interviews directly indicated the story's end would be different and would be unique according to your choices.  It wasn't, the story didn't fit, and it was soundly rejected.  The big deal is that consumers were lied to, Bioware's sterling reputation was severely tarnished, and as far as the artistic integrity arguement is concerned the endings to me aren't so much an influence as they are a plagarism.  I will stress that this is my opinion and my evaluation of it.  This company has prided itself on the RPG elements and rightly so after their history.  That ending was a disgrace and it as slipshod work out of a studio that supposedly prided itself on delivering a good RPG. 

2. Incorrect. The Thanix Cannon was a small scale replication of Sovereign's gun. It's not equivalent. That's evidenced by the beginning of Priority Earth when you see about a dozen Thanix blasts hit the Reapers and not even scratch them. Also that's only a part of the equation. Even if they can match the power of their guns, they cant match the strength of the shields or their hulls. Cyclonic barriers are a nice step up, but a Reaper's shields can withstand concentrated fire from up to three dreadnoughts(codex.) And then there's numbers. There are thousands, potentially millions of Reapers, all of which are larger and more powerful than any single dreadnought in the galaxy. And because of the Treaty of Farixen(codex) the production of dreadnoughts by the galactic community is controlled and limited. So the Reapers have us outclassed and outnumbered. Not to mention the Reapers spent months laying waste to the Galaxy and bringing everyone to the breaking point before the final battle. You pull everything you can muster into one battle, and if you don't use the Crucible, you lose.

Of course because of the terrible writing and even worse execution we will never know the truth of this for in even the space battles WE NEVER SAW THE THANIX cannons despite the great lengths they went to show the turians aiding the fight to retake earth.  You can point to codexes all you want but if the studio itself doesn't actually support or respect their own lore then you have nothing to stand upon.  Again I will stress this, it was lousy writing compared to the gem that Mass Effect 1 was and it totally ignored, and made insignificant a very important event when Shepard confronts the Vigil AI.  On the whole the execution of the whole Priority Mission: Earth was terrible.  The whole idea of assembling an armada was stupid if the reapers need only ignore you and destroy the crucible and that in effect was all that they needed to do if your weapons were that ineffectual.  Terrible writing, terrible execution, and down right shameful effort on behalf of Bioware. 

[Segoris]

I am terrible and really do prefer there be a penis somewhere in the romance, be it mine or someone else's!

 

[Sjofn]

 

[Nayr]

Deus Ex was a damn fine game.   Its endings fit with the story.  If Mass Effect had built up to that type of ending I would have said nothing was wrong with it.  The fact is it hadn't .  Not only did it not build up to that type of ending, but Casey Hudson in interviews directly indicated the story's end would be different and would be unique according to your choices.  It wasn't, the story didn't fit, and it was soundly rejected.  The big deal is that consumers were lied to, Bioware's sterling reputation was severely tarnished, and as far as the artistic integrity arguement is concerned the endings to me aren't so much an influence as they are a plagarism.  I will stress that this is my opinion and my evaluation of it.  This company has prided itself on the RPG elements and rightly so after their history.  That ending was a disgrace and it as slipshod work out of a studio that supposedly prided itself on delivering a good RPG.

Of course because of the terrible writing and even worse execution we will never know the truth of this for in even the space battles WE NEVER SAW THE THANIX cannons despite the great lengths they went to show the turians aiding the fight to retake earth.  You can point to codexes all you want but if the studio itself doesn't actually support or respect their own lore then you have nothing to stand upon.  Again I will stress this, it was lousy writing compared to the gem that Mass Effect 1 was and it totally ignored, and made insignificant a very important event when Shepard confronts the Vigil AI.  On the whole the execution of the whole Priority Mission: Earth was terrible.  The whole idea of assembling an armada was stupid if the reapers need only ignore you and destroy the crucible and that in effect was all that they needed to do if your weapons were that ineffectual.  Terrible writing, terrible execution, and down right shameful effort on behalf of Bioware. 

1. The Crucible's activation hardly constitutes the results of the choice. It's just the device that brings about the choice. The themes behind what you're doing, Destroying the Reapers, dominating them, or creating synthesis are very different thematically. And there were seven variants total before Extended Cut. And the wide range of choices caters to different types of players. The people who want the ending you speak of can choose destroy. Which has the largest amount of variables.

Also to be fair, destroying the Reapers is completely different than taking down global communications and plunging the world into a dark age(The damage is only that extensive in the worst variables. Otherwise the galaxy is completely fine afterwards) And Control is the only thing that is similar; similar to merging with Helios and becoming as a peaceful dictator. The last option, killing Page and using Area 51 to take over the world in secret is not comparable to synthesis at all.

2. Uh, yeah, you did see the Thanix Cannons being used. Or did you miss the blue energy streams quite a few of those ships were firing at the Reapers in the beginning of the battle? It's consistent with the thanix blast the Normandy used to take down the Collector ship in Mass Effect 2.

Also ME1 had it's flaws as well. Examples. . .

Why would Saren and Sovereign bother to concoct this elaborate plan to use the Conduit and attack the Citadel just so Saren can sneak into the Citadel tower and get to the Master Control? Would have been much simpler and more successful if they had just indoctrinated the Council and had them do the work themselves, just take a piece of Reaper tech to an in-person debriefing. He also could have passed Sovereign off as a discovery and made them believe it was a Prothean dreadnought. They'd probably want to go aboard and see it for themselves, then get a direct blast from the signal.

Why did Sovereign risk transferring the bulk of his thought processes into Saren's dead husk when he could have ordered the Geth to take Shepard out? Sovereign brought it's end on itself. A few hundred Geth swarming the area would have taken Shepard out and succeeded where Saren failed.

Also everything Vigil told you in ME1 was inference. Things the Protheans presumed about the Reapers. The only thing they knew for sure is that the Cycle was repeated. And Vigil didn't even care what the Reapers' motives were. He's pretty wrong when he said there's no point in understanding them, because the more you know about your enemy, the better you can prepare against them.

Plus, the Reapers focusing on the Crucible was the entire point of the Shield fleet's existence They literally play human shield to protect it from the Reapers. And if you have insufficient war assets, the docking scene is different and you do see the Reapers attacking it. Each fleet has a purpose.

Sword Fleet - Punches a hole through the enemy lines to get Hammer down to Earth and clear a path to the Citadel.
Hammer Fleet - Initiates a ground war to fight to the Reapers' conduit and get up to the Citadel and activate the arm controls to get it open.
Shield Fleet - Escorts the Crucible and keeps it covered while it docks.

And when Harbinger went down to the planet's surface, he took quite a few other Reapers with him, giving the Alliance a better chance to the Crucible in place.

[Ratman_tf]

3. The devs said they intended for the whole of Mass Effect 3 to be an ending, a "goodbye". The reason your choices didn't figure into the final mission that much is because they already played out earlier. The important choices from Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 came into play during the rest of the game. When they said the game had many endings, they meant that all the storylines combined could spin off in various ways. One of the lead devs(Mike Gamble I think,) even said "Someone finally gets it" in response to this article. http://kotaku.com/5908224/my-mass-effect-3-ending-lasted-34-hours-it-was-wonderful

Sure, and it was a good one. But I imagine most people are upset at the 'ending' being the resolution of the Reaper conflict. This is set up in the first moments of the first game, and is the thing that drives the story through all three games. People's expectactions were set up that the Reaper resolution would be more developed than lol pick a color lol, and whether that's realistic or not, that's what the vast majority of fans came to expect from the franchise.