Biotic Sage wrote...
mickeymacattack wrote...
Biotic Sage wrote...
In the context of when I made those decisions. You make the best decisions you can based on the information you have at the time.
And yes people are mad at the destruction of the Mass Effect universe, i.e. the Mass Relays. But don't say it's not appropriate to the story. It was completely appropriate because they are the legacy of the Reapers and the Cycle. The status quo needed to be disrupted. That's what the entire trilogy was about: Shepard trying to break the Cycle. People have a hard time with letting go of things they have become familiar with and have come to love. It was a good choice storywise and for the franchise; the franchise needed to move forward and so do the fans. Look back fondly on Shepard's story, but understand that it's over. All of it mattered though. Saying that it didn't is like saying no life matters just because all life ends.
What happened to the other races? What happened to earth? The choices you made, curing the genophage, uniting the geth and quarians, your love interest (if you had one). I'm not even concerned with plot holes at this point but I think its rather weak to simply kill off the main character and leave no explaination of his legacy other than a crashed ship on an unknown world and later implying that "life goes on".
What you're asking about is the future of the franchise. The Reaper/Shepard story was resolved. His legacy was that he was a legend who broke the Cycle and destroyed the Reapers. That's called wrapping it up. As for the questions of what happened to everyone else and society afterwards...that is for the future of the Mass Effect franchise to answer. We will see what has become of the descendants of these civilizations. There will be new mystery and intrigue in rediscovering the Mass Effect universe in light of the Mass Relays being destroyed. We will get to see what time has brought and how we have rebuilt from the bottom up.
See, the thing is, there shouldn't be this big mystery about what happens in the Mass Effect universe until the new game. Especially since Shepard's actions directly affect just about everyone (literally) in the galaxy.
There's two levels of closure that need to be achieved here, considering it is a trilogy, and we have been following this trilogy for years.
You have the closure on the personal level, with the characters, who you've been actively engaged with over three games - You don't know what they think about what happened to Shepard, or what happened in general. All you know is that they're alive and probably stranded (My only guess to have them stranded is to have add more Bitter to the sweet ending. Bioware knew if they killed off your entire squad regardless of action would ****** off fans more, so they decided to maroon them on some planet ), and that's it.
You're especially unclear about how your LI feels, or even how some of your better friends feel (Joker, Garrus).
Then you have the Galaxy wide closure needed, especially in this game. Remember at the end of Lord of The Rings, after three movies, they gave huge explanations on what happened after the Ring was thrown into the volcano? Or at the end of Jedi, we're shown planets celebrating the fall of the empire? That's giving closure to the world in general.
That's not acheived in ME3 either. All you know is that the reapers are controled/destroyed, and you break the cycle. You have no idea what the affect of your "ultimate" choice was, nor do you know how much weight you carried with the people of the Milky Way.
It's simply sloppy story telling, especially when you consider that, again, this is a trilogy. That alone makes it far different from most games out there. If this were just a game that had just came out (assume that Mass Effect 3 was the first Mass Effect), people wouldn't have cared as much, because we didn't spend as much time with the characters or the world. Sure, people might have still hated the endings, but not to the scale of what you see now.
When you engage people in a long term relationship with a story, people expect more to wrap up the story. Look at TV shows like Firefly, or Farscape. Both of those were canceled before an appropriate ending was thought up, and it left a sour note with fans until movies were released to wrap things up. (Though, the terms were different regarding these shows, as it wasn't due to the people making the shows.)
In short, you can end a single tale with an ending like Mass Effect 3 and for the most part, get away with it. You can't end a story that's been told for 3 games, many books and comics, and a few Ipod games like this, though.
There's also the gameplay perspective of it being a bad idea to have no other option than to just kill off a character in a series. That was experienced in Fallout 3, and Bethesda had to go back and change it. Now, I'm not saying that they should allow Shepard to live, but to have the chances restricted to a "secret" ending is kind of a slap in the face to some of the fans as well.
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