I honestly don't know how people weren't expecting a Deus ex machina moment when it came to the reapers.
It was pretty throughly established that this has happened a jillion times before, you are completely technologically outmatched, and there is nothing very special about this particular iteration.
By ME2 I could only see the series ending with a conversation in which I had little influence over
Tasteticle on
Uh-oh I accidentally deleted my signature. Uh-oh!!
I ain't even give that many fucks about the ending, I thought it was fine. Not great but fine, whatever, it was always going to be something stupid because there's no other way to resolve a galactic apocalypse threat, go ahead and turn the magic key and make it go away. But what I didn't get and did hate one million percent was what they did with the Normandy, how was that ok?
Disclaimer: I only played the original one, I've been meaning to go back to it and play the Extended cut and the DLC but eh.
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Theodore Flooseveltproud parent of eight beautiful girls and shalmelodorne (which is currently being ruled by a woman (awesome role model for my daughters)) #dornedadRegistered Userregular
There have been a lot of cool write-ups about the ending, and the one I liked most pointed out that after the elevator,
the game not only replaces the main enemy of all three games, it arguably replaces the protagonist (because the only one with real agency in that scene is Star Kid, not Shepard). The last 10 minute scene of the game is not enough time to establish and replace any main character, let alone the protagonist.
i don't quite see how it replaces either
the reapers are still the main enemy regardless of their purpose. the intent of a bunch of genocidal machines is fairly irrelevant at the scale which every other character in the galaxy is engaging with them
and shepherd has as much agency as at any other choice in the series, even if you feel constrained by the options presented to you or just dislike them
+1
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Quoththe RavenMiami, FL FOR REALRegistered Userregular
edited March 2016
It's like when I give my kid a choice between eating cereal or oatmeal for breakfast: he gets to choose, but I control the choices.
In the case of ME3, the choices are basically shit or flaming shit. Why would I want to invest so much time in a game that does that to me?
E: Because the rest of the game is good, yes, but damn if it isn't like having a really good meal with a flaming shit dessert.
KwoaruConfident SmirkFlawless Golden PecsRegistered Userregular
Oh dang I had forgotten that ME3 came out 4 years ago, it feels a lot more recent than 2012
Anyway here is some dumb fanfic alternate ending shit I thought of while driving around today
I should note at the top that I only ever saw the vanilla ending, I never went back and replayed or looked up what happens in the new ending
First I think that destroy should have been the paragon option. I would have it be mostly the same as the vanilla destroy option but I would including making it clear that knowing that destroying the reapers will destroy the relays and that suddenly having no relays will have a huge impact on life on a galactic scale
This change is partly because I think the vanilla blue choice was way too pie-in-the-sky happy ending and also partly because destroying the reapers was your goal this entire time and choosing to destroy them shouldn't be put on the same moral axis as shooting Mordin in the back. The cycle is ended permanently but not without consequence.
For the renegade option I think a better fit would be preventing the reapers from destroying humanity. Through some means (I'll work backwards to the how later) you make it so the reapers do not target human controlled planets (and possibly human vessels that aren't attacking reapers?) so the reapers complete their work cycle but humanity, as well as any aliens that are on/evacuated to human planets, would survive and have the entire next fifty thousand year cycle to reach a point where they can truly match and eliminate the reaper threat forever
I think this fits the Humans First narrative that underlies a lot of renegade choices and even though it is a monstrous choice on its face I think it is also one that could be justifiable to that sort of character. I also think it's interesting to consider how a species/culture would deal with having been saved at the cost of trillions of lives, especially with a relative handful of aliens surviving who would exist as a reminder of that. Plus it kinda mirrors Javik's plan, and that dude is renegade as fuck.
I haven't really puzzled out a green/third option that I like even as much those other silly ideas, I'm stuck on wanting to do something cute like turning changing their directive from being Reapers to being Sowers or something. Like, I think the third option should be something that demonstrates to the reapers that they/the cycle are no longer necessary in order for life to continually find a way. Their whole deal is basically that they were created to reap the fully matured species of the galaxy because if they didn't then future species that would have emerged will never get the chance because those existing species will destroy themselves/each other completely and essentially salt the galaxy while doing it, right?
I don't want to have the reapers just go "wow you kids are truly enlightened" and fly off, I'd like it to be some kind of unification but without the whole fundamentally altering every living creature thing that you get with synthesis. What if they stay around and they return to the galaxy all those species that they reaped before? Like they grow clones of the harvested species, settle them on planets, and then place their own consciousnesses within some of those species and act as their leaders, eschewing their mechanical immortality to become the mortal shepherds of the fledgling species.
The reaper ship bodies, no longer having AI consciousness, become cultural libraries/databanks where the histories of those species is preserved or something. Then all the mass effect races who were fighting a war of extinction suddenly have to deal with these new species that not only were sourced from the reapers but each one is literally lead by a being which was formerly a giant laser shooting space cuddlefish.
Or something, that one is way more rushed and rambling than the paragon and renegade changes because coming up with a third option I thought was even a little satisfying was hard.
Oh right I also thought of how you would be able to do those things, which I worked backwards to after coming up with the silly paragon and renegade ideas. I'd have the crucible function as a sort of limited override system, it can't issue complex orders or allow you to assume direct control but it basically alters parameters of the Reaper objective, and the reason it works (as well as the reason you have to climb inside to activate it) is that the system recognizes Shepard as the reaper sovereign due to some bullshit about that time you touched a crystal and sovereign was in sheps head or whatever.
So you issue the commands as sovereign, either saying "mission aborted lets all blow the fuck up" or marking human planets as uninhabited and not worth scanning and ignore those ships flying to those planets or going "oh hey it looks like everything is gonna be alright in the galaxy lets unreap all these peoples" or whatever
Man all of that is really pretty dumb but writing a bunch of silly crap is really quite fun sometimes
There have been a lot of cool write-ups about the ending, and the one I liked most pointed out that after the elevator,
the game not only replaces the main enemy of all three games, it arguably replaces the protagonist (because the only one with real agency in that scene is Star Kid, not Shepard). The last 10 minute scene of the game is not enough time to establish and replace any main character, let alone the protagonist.
i don't quite see how it replaces either
the reapers are still the main enemy regardless of their purpose. the intent of a bunch of genocidal machines is fairly irrelevant at the scale which every other character in the galaxy is engaging with them
and shepherd has as much agency as at any other choice in the series, even if you feel constrained by the options presented to you or just dislike them
Well that's why I said "arguably" about the protagonist part (though I think it does replace the protagonist).
But even if you disagree with that part, Star Kid is absolutely a surprise last-minute villain. If the one who was talking in that scene had been Harbinger, or the voices of a bunch of different actors modulated to Reaper level, something that actually made that character a call back to reapers, then it might have worked on a superficial level at least. But the reapers in the game, the enemies you've had for three games, act as if they aren't even aware of the Catalyst or what he's there for. The Catalyst specifically says that the enemies of all three games are his "solution", so he's actually a completely brand-new villain that you didn't know existed until the last 10 min of the game.
Like I said, that's way too short a time period to introduce a character of that magnitude. If they were going to go that way (and I'm one of those that say they shouldn't have, but I don't control their choices), then this is a character that you at least need to foreshadow earlier than the end of the game.
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
The biggest bummer of replaying the ME trilogy is remembering that getting the best ending means playing a fucking mobile game
Wait what?
I mean...I haven't replayed three at all because I'd rather not do the multi in order to get more resources. Is there now/or has there always been a mobile game too?
Mind you, I don't want to do it either...I'd rather just be able to get my resources from the game and call it good.
You could definitely get the best ending in vanilla by being a completionist and playing some multi, but definitely DLC required for getting the final bit without
I honestly don't know how people weren't expecting a Deus ex machina moment when it came to the reapers.
It was pretty throughly established that this has happened a jillion times before, you are completely technologically outmatched, and there is nothing very special about this particular iteration.
By ME2 I could only see the series ending with a conversation in which I had little influence over
I actually thought they really sold the crucible with the reveal that every previous cycle worked on it, slowly improving the design each time
my main problem with the me3 ending is that it should be how you end the franchise.
The way it ended, everything is so vastly different depending on your ending that they can literally never put a game in the milky way after the events of 3 and have it use your ending. That's how you end a franchise. "well, no more stories to tell here so let's end it with a galaxy altering decision." And i wouldn't have been okay with that, but because it of course wasn't going to be the last one, was even being marketed as not the last one, the only way we'll see things from the milky way is before the reapers are dealt with. Unless they pick a canon ending, which i would actually be okay with.
A game that confronts and interrogates colonialist impulses, a tack that BioWare is likely to take given their track record, could be really interesting and good.
Using terms like "deadly indigenous race" and "savage untamed lands" is really dumb and bad
This marketing department can go get fucked, but the game could still turn out well
i don't disagree that bioware could do a fine job with this, but i'm also kinda tired of mass media stories about colonialism being bad being told from the perspective of the colonials
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Clint EastwoodMy baby's in there someplaceShe crawled right inRegistered Userregular
That alleged leak is honestly exactly what I want from this game, the closer to ME1's sense of exploration and freedom the better.
Honestly even the choices presented in the end of ME3 would have been more meaningful if given different context. The darkmatter buildup story that got abandoned wholesale is a really interesting moral quandry - armed with the clear scientific knowledge that advanced civilization is on the verge of destroying itself because of the use of technology, do you allow that course to continue by destroying the reapers, or let the reapers do their job and ensure that the next 50,000 years of civilization has a chance to flourish on its own in your absence? Does your answer change if you know that doing this requires destroying your means of FTL travel?
It draws some parallels to a lot of real world concepts and makes you think a LOT harder about the implications of your choice, much like the Geth/Quarian resolution. You're given a lot of history on the subject, discover that there are no clearly right answers, and you have to make a choice that determines the fate of an entire civilization; what matters most to you in that moment, given all you know?
The endings as they exist don't actually present this sort of option, because the outcome is the same in all of them - the only interesting tweak about it is whether or not you merge biological and synthetic, which is only touched on as a topic of interest to the larger galactic community in very particular contexts, and in the moment just sounds like 'DO U WANNA BE A REAPER?', which lacks any remarkable nuance given the entire game frames against the reapers as nothing but a force of destruction. It is otherwise a non-choice, as the vast remainder of the impacts your decision has are either functionally or practically identical.
Also as far as ME3's ending goes, I think it just makes a few small missteps that it'd be fine without.
Talking with the Starchild is pretty much the key reason everything feels weird. The fact that it's kind of an abstract ghost from your dreams pulls everything more into the realm of science fantasy instead of the hard science fiction Mass Effect had been running. Making him a representative of the enemy also makes things frustrating: it forces you to doubt every ending because it's one that the enemy is leading you towards, instead of because of its own merits and faults. Also the logic of the Reapers is hugely faulty and hypocritical from a human standpoint, but when you learn about it at the end of the game you don't really have the option to argue against it or challenge it. It makes the Reapers seem dumb instead of terrifying, especially because you can work for 3 games in a row to solve distrust between organic and synthetic life.
If you just change the Starchild to be say, an AI for the Crucible - which I think they planned to do for a long time, because whenever he talks about the Reapers being his solution it actually doesn't make a ton of sense, since it's been deactivated for so long - it smooths a lot of rough edges out. It can state the Reapers' goal without implicitly believing in it, which preserves some of their mystery ("But why do they think that works, AI?" "I do not know. I only know the facts of what they do."). Presenting the Crucible's options without appearing to have a side also strengthens them. When it sounds like "i know these are not the options you hoped for, human, but these are the options this station is equipped to execute. future cycles could have had better ones, but this is what's here right now." the standard "there's some good things about an ending and some bad things" is more tolerable. It doesn't sound like you're picking things carefully curated by the enemy that they're okay with, it sounds like you're executing on the cumulative works of everyone who's worked on the Crucible.
But I mean we know that the ending was written under a time crunch towards the end of the production, so it makes sense that it's a bit flawed compared to other storytelling in the game. It's just unfortunate that the ending was the casualty of the crunch instead of say a random little bit in the middle. A bit more time to edit and iterate would have probably shored up the weak parts a lot.
The only thing I'd have changed about the ME ending is
The catalyst's body and voice. Get rid of the random kid's body, even a floating ball of light would be better.
As it is, the catalyst's voice is part femshep, part maleshep, and a much more prominent random kids voice. Just get rid of the random kid's voice and have the catalyst's voice be the jennifer hale/mark meer mix up, I think it'd sound much better so that you don't feel you're being talked down to by a child, and would be a bit of a nice mix?
I also never played the mobile game but I end ME3 with like 8200 war assets, usually I'll do the multiplayer enough to get up to 100% readiness.
I did say it was abandoned wholesale. The point is that it was supposed to be a significant detail, and had it remained so it would have made those same Crucible choices more meaningful.
I thought we were gonna make Sol explode at the end of ME3, with all that dark matter talk
which would have wiped out a significant chunk of the reaper fleet!
Or blow up the Sol relay as the Paragon option, wipe out the Reapers. Renegade option being blocking off Earth from the Reapers and letting the rest of the galaxy rot.
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By ME2 I could only see the series ending with a conversation in which I had little influence over
Uh-oh I accidentally deleted my signature. Uh-oh!!
Disclaimer: I only played the original one, I've been meaning to go back to it and play the Extended cut and the DLC but eh.
i don't quite see how it replaces either
the reapers are still the main enemy regardless of their purpose. the intent of a bunch of genocidal machines is fairly irrelevant at the scale which every other character in the galaxy is engaging with them
and shepherd has as much agency as at any other choice in the series, even if you feel constrained by the options presented to you or just dislike them
In the case of ME3, the choices are basically shit or flaming shit. Why would I want to invest so much time in a game that does that to me?
E: Because the rest of the game is good, yes, but damn if it isn't like having a really good meal with a flaming shit dessert.
Anyway here is some dumb fanfic alternate ending shit I thought of while driving around today
First I think that destroy should have been the paragon option. I would have it be mostly the same as the vanilla destroy option but I would including making it clear that knowing that destroying the reapers will destroy the relays and that suddenly having no relays will have a huge impact on life on a galactic scale
This change is partly because I think the vanilla blue choice was way too pie-in-the-sky happy ending and also partly because destroying the reapers was your goal this entire time and choosing to destroy them shouldn't be put on the same moral axis as shooting Mordin in the back. The cycle is ended permanently but not without consequence.
For the renegade option I think a better fit would be preventing the reapers from destroying humanity. Through some means (I'll work backwards to the how later) you make it so the reapers do not target human controlled planets (and possibly human vessels that aren't attacking reapers?) so the reapers complete their work cycle but humanity, as well as any aliens that are on/evacuated to human planets, would survive and have the entire next fifty thousand year cycle to reach a point where they can truly match and eliminate the reaper threat forever
I think this fits the Humans First narrative that underlies a lot of renegade choices and even though it is a monstrous choice on its face I think it is also one that could be justifiable to that sort of character. I also think it's interesting to consider how a species/culture would deal with having been saved at the cost of trillions of lives, especially with a relative handful of aliens surviving who would exist as a reminder of that. Plus it kinda mirrors Javik's plan, and that dude is renegade as fuck.
I haven't really puzzled out a green/third option that I like even as much those other silly ideas, I'm stuck on wanting to do something cute like turning changing their directive from being Reapers to being Sowers or something. Like, I think the third option should be something that demonstrates to the reapers that they/the cycle are no longer necessary in order for life to continually find a way. Their whole deal is basically that they were created to reap the fully matured species of the galaxy because if they didn't then future species that would have emerged will never get the chance because those existing species will destroy themselves/each other completely and essentially salt the galaxy while doing it, right?
I don't want to have the reapers just go "wow you kids are truly enlightened" and fly off, I'd like it to be some kind of unification but without the whole fundamentally altering every living creature thing that you get with synthesis. What if they stay around and they return to the galaxy all those species that they reaped before? Like they grow clones of the harvested species, settle them on planets, and then place their own consciousnesses within some of those species and act as their leaders, eschewing their mechanical immortality to become the mortal shepherds of the fledgling species.
The reaper ship bodies, no longer having AI consciousness, become cultural libraries/databanks where the histories of those species is preserved or something. Then all the mass effect races who were fighting a war of extinction suddenly have to deal with these new species that not only were sourced from the reapers but each one is literally lead by a being which was formerly a giant laser shooting space cuddlefish.
Or something, that one is way more rushed and rambling than the paragon and renegade changes because coming up with a third option I thought was even a little satisfying was hard.
Oh right I also thought of how you would be able to do those things, which I worked backwards to after coming up with the silly paragon and renegade ideas. I'd have the crucible function as a sort of limited override system, it can't issue complex orders or allow you to assume direct control but it basically alters parameters of the Reaper objective, and the reason it works (as well as the reason you have to climb inside to activate it) is that the system recognizes Shepard as the reaper sovereign due to some bullshit about that time you touched a crystal and sovereign was in sheps head or whatever.
So you issue the commands as sovereign, either saying "mission aborted lets all blow the fuck up" or marking human planets as uninhabited and not worth scanning and ignore those ships flying to those planets or going "oh hey it looks like everything is gonna be alright in the galaxy lets unreap all these peoples" or whatever
Man all of that is really pretty dumb but writing a bunch of silly crap is really quite fun sometimes
*hastily revising my new restaurant's prix fixe menu*
Well that's why I said "arguably" about the protagonist part (though I think it does replace the protagonist).
But even if you disagree with that part, Star Kid is absolutely a surprise last-minute villain. If the one who was talking in that scene had been Harbinger, or the voices of a bunch of different actors modulated to Reaper level, something that actually made that character a call back to reapers, then it might have worked on a superficial level at least. But the reapers in the game, the enemies you've had for three games, act as if they aren't even aware of the Catalyst or what he's there for. The Catalyst specifically says that the enemies of all three games are his "solution", so he's actually a completely brand-new villain that you didn't know existed until the last 10 min of the game.
Like I said, that's way too short a time period to introduce a character of that magnitude. If they were going to go that way (and I'm one of those that say they shouldn't have, but I don't control their choices), then this is a character that you at least need to foreshadow earlier than the end of the game.
Wait what?
I mean...I haven't replayed three at all because I'd rather not do the multi in order to get more resources. Is there now/or has there always been a mobile game too?
Mind you, I don't want to do it either...I'd rather just be able to get my resources from the game and call it good.
I thought you could just do all the sidequests, etc.?
I didn't do any external tasks (multi or mobile), but I still netted the best ending. I'm an obsessive completionist though
I think this only works if you have the DLC installed, because then it doubles (?) the resources you get from regular missions.
There are 7500 War Assets available in the base game, which without playing multiplayer is cut down to 3750 EMS
That's if you do everything in the base game
Leviathan adds 620 War Assets, and Omega adds 450, making it way easier
So yeah you don't have to play the mobile game or multiplayer, you just will have to do the majority of the stuff in the game
Extended Cut lowered it to 3,100
That's what it was, I knew it was something
What a weird goddamned time
The most exciting thing about the Andromeda leak is honestly
Tremendous
The Vorcha classes in ME3 multi almost, almost made up for the fact we never got a Vorcha team mate in the game proper
I'm in the middle of Omega right now and if Turian ladies are like this kickass one I am on board
i don't disagree that bioware could do a fine job with this, but i'm also kinda tired of mass media stories about colonialism being bad being told from the perspective of the colonials
It draws some parallels to a lot of real world concepts and makes you think a LOT harder about the implications of your choice, much like the Geth/Quarian resolution. You're given a lot of history on the subject, discover that there are no clearly right answers, and you have to make a choice that determines the fate of an entire civilization; what matters most to you in that moment, given all you know?
The endings as they exist don't actually present this sort of option, because the outcome is the same in all of them - the only interesting tweak about it is whether or not you merge biological and synthetic, which is only touched on as a topic of interest to the larger galactic community in very particular contexts, and in the moment just sounds like 'DO U WANNA BE A REAPER?', which lacks any remarkable nuance given the entire game frames against the reapers as nothing but a force of destruction. It is otherwise a non-choice, as the vast remainder of the impacts your decision has are either functionally or practically identical.
A list of things, should you be of the gifting persuasion
Talking with the Starchild is pretty much the key reason everything feels weird. The fact that it's kind of an abstract ghost from your dreams pulls everything more into the realm of science fantasy instead of the hard science fiction Mass Effect had been running. Making him a representative of the enemy also makes things frustrating: it forces you to doubt every ending because it's one that the enemy is leading you towards, instead of because of its own merits and faults. Also the logic of the Reapers is hugely faulty and hypocritical from a human standpoint, but when you learn about it at the end of the game you don't really have the option to argue against it or challenge it. It makes the Reapers seem dumb instead of terrifying, especially because you can work for 3 games in a row to solve distrust between organic and synthetic life.
If you just change the Starchild to be say, an AI for the Crucible - which I think they planned to do for a long time, because whenever he talks about the Reapers being his solution it actually doesn't make a ton of sense, since it's been deactivated for so long - it smooths a lot of rough edges out. It can state the Reapers' goal without implicitly believing in it, which preserves some of their mystery ("But why do they think that works, AI?" "I do not know. I only know the facts of what they do."). Presenting the Crucible's options without appearing to have a side also strengthens them. When it sounds like "i know these are not the options you hoped for, human, but these are the options this station is equipped to execute. future cycles could have had better ones, but this is what's here right now." the standard "there's some good things about an ending and some bad things" is more tolerable. It doesn't sound like you're picking things carefully curated by the enemy that they're okay with, it sounds like you're executing on the cumulative works of everyone who's worked on the Crucible.
But I mean we know that the ending was written under a time crunch towards the end of the production, so it makes sense that it's a bit flawed compared to other storytelling in the game. It's just unfortunate that the ending was the casualty of the crunch instead of say a random little bit in the middle. A bit more time to edit and iterate would have probably shored up the weak parts a lot.
As it is, the catalyst's voice is part femshep, part maleshep, and a much more prominent random kids voice. Just get rid of the random kid's voice and have the catalyst's voice be the jennifer hale/mark meer mix up, I think it'd sound much better so that you don't feel you're being talked down to by a child, and would be a bit of a nice mix?
I also never played the mobile game but I end ME3 with like 8200 war assets, usually I'll do the multiplayer enough to get up to 100% readiness.
It was like the entirety of what Tali was up to in 2 and it was also in the Illusive Man's office every single time you saw him
A list of things, should you be of the gifting persuasion
It is a bad sign that all I can think about in any part of your game is Deadly Premonition
which would have wiped out a significant chunk of the reaper fleet!
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Or blow up the Sol relay as the Paragon option, wipe out the Reapers. Renegade option being blocking off Earth from the Reapers and letting the rest of the galaxy rot.