7052 réponses à ce sujet

[refuse81]

So predictable and useless that people are posting walls of text about the ending as if it's all that they need to fix with this game. Some things would require too much dev time. Endings for example. More Hubs and combat missions as well. War Assets and the Mission Journal are complete garbage and shouldn't be hard to fix.

[bboynexus]

There certianly should not be any more hubs.

[Mbednar]

bwFex wrote...

Let's get started, shall we?


Turn the Star-Child scene from absurd to awesome by using the Indoctrination Theory we've made for you.

The biggest complaint your fans have is that the final five minutes of the game is absurd. It's disjointed, it doesn't fit within the ME universe, and it simply feels like a non-sequitor tacked on at the last minute because you didn't have enough time to finish the ending you really wanted to do.

Fortunately, your wonderful fans have solved this problem for you, because you already did most of the hard work for us. You have hints and clues of Shepard's subtle indoctrination all throughout the game, finally culminating in what many of your gamers assumed to be the obvious truth: the final fifteen minutes of the game were a hallucination sparked by Harbinger trying to indoctrinate Shepard.

If you're not familiar with the theory, you should be. It's all over the internet. Green option means you were indoctrinated (with the same lie used on Saren). Blue option means you were indoctrinated (with the same lie used on TIM). Red option with low EMS means you rejected the indoctrination, but were killed out in the real world because your ground forces were too weak to protect the Conduit while they looked for you. Red option with high EMS means you rejected the indoctrination attempt, and your ground military found you and rescued you after you woke up.

After that, you just have to give us the real ending.

Make our War Assets really matter.

I love the war assets concept. I think it's brilliant. I think it's an elegant way to handle a massive amount of tiny little things all adding up into a giant force. The problem is that right now, there is absolutely zero indication to the user what their war assets were actually good for. Even if they go online and look it up, it still makes zero sense. Why does my army strength change the effects of the non-sequitor space magic? Isn't red space magic going to destroy earth whether I have ten ships in orbit or fifty? It just doesn't make sense.

Instead, you need to use the War Assets in a way that makes sense. Obviously, the "perfect world" solution would be to actually show each individual asset in action, or to even let us decide where each asset is assigned (this was awesome, in the final battle of Dragon Age: Origins). But obviously, there is way, way more content in ME3 than in DA:O. And that's fine. We're not expecting that much out of you.

We just need to know that that cumulative number really makes a difference. Personally, I liked my idea of using the War Asset rating to establish time limits and difficulty levels for the final boss - but you'll see that in a little bit when I post my fanfic.

Give us an epilogue slideshow, exactly how you did it in Dragon Age: Origins.

We already saw the conclusions of a lot of story arcs throughout the course of the game. You don't have to give us a lot more closure in terms of content: it's just a psychological thing. We need to have that catharsis at the very end of the game, as credits are rolling, so that we can see that all of our choices had a real impact.

"Show, don't tell" is a great rule, but only if you show us everything. That's obviously impractical here. A slideshow will be fine. One slide for each race/species, one for each surviving squadmate and major NPC, and maybe a couple for any of the more prominent minor NPCs (Aria, Kelly Chambers, Conrad Verner).

Give us a funeral scene, so we can see exactly who lived and who died.

This was one of the most frustrating things for a lot of people, besides the ridiculous ending. Not knowing everyone's fate was very difficult to deal with. Sure, you want to leave a little bit of mystery, but there's a point where you're giving out so little information it's ridiculous. You can't possibly have expected people to be satisfied with what you gave us.

Leave our galaxy in a state where it can be reasonably repaired.

Sacrifice is one thing. Cities can be rebuilt. Heroes can be remembered. Cultures can regrow.

I'm even okay with the destruction of the Citadel. Sure, it was one of the coolest structures in the franchise, but it's not the defining element of the Mass Effect universe. Personally, I'd rather spend my time on Omega.

The destruction of the Mass Relays - even if you ignore the fact that their energy release should have wiped out the entire star system - is not something we can rebuild. It took the Protheans, at the peak of their evolution and technological prowess, an exorberant amount of time, money, and research to build a *single* uni-directional relay. Given the state of our galaxy in the current ending, there's a good chance we'd slip into a technological and industrial dark age for so long that we'd forget the relays ever existed - let alone start rebuilding them.

Success should be an option, even if we have to work our asses off for it.

In my opinion, Mass Effect 2 did this wonderfully. Failure was a very real option, but so was success. If you had a perfect gameplan, and you put a massive amount of work into it, you could walk off of that Collector ship with minimal losses to the people you cared about most: yourself and your squadmates.

I know sacrifice is an important theme, and if people need to die for meaningful reasons (Mordin for the genophage, Thane to protect the Council), that's fine. But don't go around killing people just for the sake of killing them. Every single one of the endings currently in ME3, if interpreted literally, feels like a forced failure. There's a difference between giving the player a hard choice (do I want to sacrifice the Sol system to save the rest of the galaxy?) and making every choice feel like an abysmal defeat.

Forced failure is not fun.

It's one thing to fail because I messed up. But when I am doomed to fail, it makes it very hard to really care about what I'm doing.

Shepard should die in almost all situations. His story was built for sacrifice. But it should not be impossible for him to live, with a near-perfectly-played game, even if it requires us to go back and play every single side-quest of ME1/ME2.





Example

Earlier this week, I wrote up an example of what I'd like to see in a fanfic/prediction. It was well-received on Reddit, so I figure I'll share it here. Enjoy.

---------------------------

First, the current "endings" are canon, and remain in the game. They simply aren't what they seem to be. The only change to them is we ditch the Normandy crash and the jungle scene, because those simply don't make any sense, even in the context of a hallucination.


If you pick blue/green, or if your EMS is low, everything stays the same. That's how the game ends for you, and you're left scratching your head.


If you pick red and your EMS is high, these events happen after the "rubble" scene.


Part 1 - London: Wake Up

Anderson sees you struggling to get up and runs over to help you. He tells you that you've been out for about an hour, and that Hammer team has set up a perimeter around the beam while search parties looked for you. He says that after the laser knocked you out, Harbinger's lights turned bright green and blue, and he stopped attacking. Shortly before you woke up, Harbinger's lights turned red and he started shaking violently, then flew away.

You meet up with your squadmates, and fight off reaper ground forces to get to the medbay, during which time you will explain that you had a vision after the blast, and you think it was indoctrination. You have a tense conversation with your squad, and ask them if they have what it takes to kill you, if it comes down to that.

Before they can answer, you're interrupted by Hackett over the radio.

"Good job with the Citadel, Hammer Team - the arms are opening."

Shepard replies, "We aren't in the Citadel, Hackett. Something's not right."

Hackett barks, "Well then you'd better get in there and figure out what's going on, Commander, because the Crucible is almost in position and we can't hold off the Reapers for long."

Harbinger swoops back down to Earth. The horn blares, and you can feel him raping your mind. The dark tendrils you had during the TIM vision reappear. You yell at Joker for some sort of backup. The Normandy swoops in and lays down heavy fire just as Harbinger is starting to shoop-da-woop, causing Harbinger to retreat. You, your squad, and Anderson use the opportunity to run into the portal. "Time to find out what's really on the other side," you say.

Part 2 - Inside the Keepers' Lair

Inside, you find yourself in a Keeper tunnel, just like in the vision, but there are no human bodies. Instead, you find dead Keepers, a couple of dead husks, and a single dead Cerberus soldier, who appears to be mutated or partially husked. Your squadmates point out the disfiguration. "Something's not right."

You proceed to the end of the tunnel, and open the door. It opens up to a massive room similar to the circular chasm from the indoctrination vision, but filled with Cerberus lab equipment, Cerberus soldiers, and holding cells containing Reaper units - very similar to the lab equipment on Sanctuary. At the far end of the room, TIM appears to be fiddling with a console.

"Shepard, good. I'm glad you could finally join us."

"When you blew up my lab on Sanctuary, we lost a lot of valuable data. Fortunately, the Reapers have been kind enough to provide us with a new base of operations. You see, they want to see humanity succeed as much as I do."

"Unfortunately, it appears that we were wrong about the Citadel. It may be part of the Catalyst, but it is not the only missing piece. We should be able to activate the Crucible from here, but it simply isn't responding. I'm beginning to think we might need you for that."

Shepard enters dialogue with TIM, and begins to suspect that the reason he can't activate the Crucible is because he is indoctrinated. Why else would the reapers bring him here? They don't want to be controlled - they're using TIM to stop Shepard from reaching the Crucible controls.

A renegade conversation leads to a fight. The paragon conversation seems to have an effect on TIM, and he slowly starts to admit he's indoctrinated and pulls his pistol to his own head, but he snaps out of it and orders his men to attack. As the fight begins, he retreats to a glass safe room overlooking the lab, dodging a few shots from Shepard along the way.

You, Anderson, and your squad start wiping out the Cerberus forces in the room. As the fight progresses, TIM begins opening up the containment cells, releasing Reaper forces who begin attacking you alongside the Cerberus troops, including a new type of unit: the mutated Cerberus soldier, like you saw out in the Keeper hallway.

While you are fighting, TIM tries to argue with you, rationalizing his experiments here, claiming that he was too close to controlling the Reapers to give up now. You try to explain that the Reapers are just using him, but he stutters and stammers, refusing to accept it.

Part 3 - The Final Battle

As the last few containment cells open up and you're down to just a few remaining enemy forces, a short cutscene begins. TIM seems to finally crack. He admits indoctrination, just like Matriarch Benezia on Noveria.
He tells you that the Crucible is a failsafe designed with a unique trigger: a test of will against indoctrination. The Catalyst is someone who can resist that indoctrination.

The Reapers are mindbanks of one of the very first spacefaring species in our galaxy, their solution to overpopulation. When the ancient species was building the reapers, some of their scientists felt that their plan to farm/harvest new life to sustain their own race was wrong, and designed a weapon that exploited the Reapers' indoctrination code, so that once a race had evolved with the readiness to face the Reapers and a will strong enough to resist indoctrination, they would be able to fight for their place in the galaxy.
TIM starts to spasm, choking and distorting in unnatural shapes. When he finally stops, he stands up slowly, his eyes glowing red, and speaks to you in Harbinger's voice.

"You have resisted us, but this one is ours. We will direct your demise *personally*."
In an explosion of flesh and steel, the illusive man bursts into a mechanical monstrosity. The final battle commences.

You are given a time limit based on your effective military score. If time runs out, you see a cutscene showing the reapers overwhelming your allied space forces, killing a race/fleet. One of the reapers fires a beam towards the crucible that kills one of the squadmates you have with you. The timer restarts, but is much shorter this time. If you fail again, another race/fleet is overwhelmed, and Anderson and your other squadmate are beamed. The timer restarts one last time, faster still. If that one fails, the reapers completely overwhelm the crucible. Game over.
As the fight starts, radio chatter from Hammer Team tells you that some Reaper forces are breaking through and jumping into the warp beam. The final battle alternates between fighting the mutated IM and fighting waves of reaper forces coming in from the hallway behind you. The better your EMS, the less often you get Reaper waves behind you.

Part 4 - The Crucible

After you defeat the Harbinger-controlled Illusive Man, you get more radio orders from Hackett.
"Shepard, whatever you're doing in there, you need to hurry up. We can't hold these Reapers back much longer!"
Shepard races up to the terminal. It appears similar to the Prothean beacon from ME1, but is definitely not Prothean technology. He touches it.

A bright flash of light. Time appears to stop. You look around, in awe of the sight before you: ships and reapers frozen in space, lasers and torpedoes hanging motionless between them. Your squadmates tending to an injured Anderson behind you.

At this point in time, the "indoctrination trial" begins.

A voice similar to a reapers, but more patient and eloquent, perhaps female-sounding, will start to question the major decisions you've made over the course of the trilogy: from the Virmire incident to the Collector Base, to how you handled the Genophage and Quarian/Geth situation. It will try to convince you that you chose incorrectly, that you are a failure, that your race doesn't deserve to live because of the weakness you've shown.

If too many of the decisions you made are indefensible, or if your reputation is too low to select enough confident answers, you fail the indoctrination trial, and the Crucible misfires, killing you, Anderson, and your squad, blowing up the citadel, and only leaving some of the reapers alive. Two fleets/races are killed trying to finish off the remaining reapers, and you don't get the satisfaction of the Harbinger interrupt for beating the trial, seen below.

The hologram of the child from your vision appears. He speaks to you using Harbinger's voice.

"You... it cannot be you. We are superior. We are infinite. You are an accident. We are the epitome of evolution. We are eternal. How did you resist us? We-"

Renegade and Paragon interrupts both show up on screen. Shepard interrupts Harbinger with a kickass catchphrase, then presses a button on the console device. A subtle ripple bursts out from the console, like a gust of wind.

Cutscene. With time still frozen, as if in a dream, an explosion of white light pulses out from the Crucible. The explosion moves slowly, beautifully, and as it hits each reaper, you hear the sound of metal wrenching and twisting in near-silent agony. A shot of London shows the white light slowly washing over Reaper ground forces. As it hits each husk, its lights change to white, and they spark and fizzle.

The wave of light reaches the Relay. Its lights turn white, and it beams the energy out, just like in the previous visions. Pull out to the galaxy, we see the wave spreading through the mass relays, just like in each of the previous cutscenes, covering the entire galaxy. The camera cuts back to the room with Shepard, either looking out the window at the battle, still frozen in time (if he survived the Crucible), or unconscious on the ground (if he failed the Crucible).

Part 5 - Conclusion

And suddenly, everything comes back to life. The reapers explode in glorious unison. The Reaper ground forces vaporize all at once, soldiers begin cheering. We see cutscenes inside various ships that you've gathered for your armada, and Hackett calls over the radio - "You did it! Whatever you just did in there worked, Shepard. You're... you're a god damned hero."

If Shepard is still alive, he gives a speech over the radio. "We all did it. Together."

A memorial/funeral service for those who died is shown, with face placards for any of Shepard's teammates or significant NPCs who died. Thane, Mordin, Ashley/Kaidan. Many of the rest are shown in the crowd, to let the player know they're still alive.

Cut to black, credits. As the credits roll, we get a Dragon Age style epilogue slideshow, showing how each race/character still alive spends the next couple of years rebuilding or causing trouble, based on the bigger decisions you made.

After the credits roll, if Shepard has a LI, we see them standing side by side in an appropriate location (Rannoch for Tali, Thessia for Liara, etc.). If not, we see Shepard looking out over the ruins of Vancouver. Either way, Anderson walks over. "It's a hell of a thing you've done, son. What will you do now?"

Cut to black. Title menu.

I apologize for both posting three times in a matter of hours, and using a quote that has been used within the last 30 or so posts but I feel that this person knows what they are saying.  It makes war assets matter and gives everyone suitable closure.  (And makes the game replayable.)

Obviously I'm not expecting you to take this word for word, but these are very good blueprints for satisfying a disenchanted fan base.

I also know that many of you have seen this, but it should be reposted on every page.

http://www.gamefront...fans-are-right/

Sorry for the huge post.  Goodnight.

Modifié par Mbednar, 18 mars 2012 - 07:06 .

[ZuluPilot]

Apart from the ending the only thing I would like to see changed is how the people who died during the suicide mission are handled in ME3. They´re on the wall on the Normandy but they don´t even get mentioned. I actually restarted my last ME2 suicide mission because everyone survived. I wanted some drama in there, because it didn´t make sense to me that everyone would survive a suicide mission. But then in ME3: Nothing, except for a short mention of samara by her daughter. I love all these characters and it actually hurt emotionally to see Jacob and Samara die, but I went with it anyway, because they died because of me and (as I thought) not in vain. Just mention them once or twice and not just because the mission I´m playing would´ve included them if they were alive. Just so that they have a legacy.

And concerning the ending: I don´t think the stuff that happened with the guardian needs to be "deleted" per se but you will have to find a way to make what he said untrue somehow. I got suggestions but you guys are much better writers than I am and apart from those last fifteen minutes you always knew precisely what you were doing and wrote some of the most amazing stuff I´ve ever heard in a videogame. You can fix this and I sincerely believe that you will. I´m a proud Bioware fanboy through and through and as long as I can believe you will come through for us fans, I will trust you.
You owe a new ending not only to the people who played and bought your games, but to yourselves as well. You are smart people and while we certainly love the games I don´t think we can even imagine what this story means to you: the people who wrote it, who put their all their heart and soul into it over two years. You must have known or at least know now, that this wonderful story deserves a more meaningful ending without all the flaws it is stuck with right now. So I believe you will be smart enough to realize that the ending you gave this amazing story is not even close to the one it deserves. It feels disconnected from the rest of it.

You guys are the stargazer right now and we´re the child and you just told us a beautiful, heartwarming story, but you just somehow got some of the details wrong. Just take a breath and get it right. If you don´t you simply won´t be the Bioware we have grown to love: this beacon of good writing and storytelling in the sometimes bleak landscape of videogames.

And I wanted to keep this post brief and without any drama.
It´s just impossible.

Modifié par AtomBrain236, 18 mars 2012 - 07:17 .

[MisterP146]

jreezy wrote...

Did anybody suggest to BioWare to change up Tali's face reveal? I haven't seen the actual picture but what I've heard makes me think it's a cheap cop out.

Oh yeah.

Tali's face reveal has definitely been brought to Bioware's attention. It has been suggested along with the endings that it should be fixed somehow.

[Shepard needs a Vacation]

The Rachni having any impact on the game at all besides one mission?

[jimbo32]

jreezy wrote...

Did anybody suggest to BioWare to change up Tali's face reveal? I haven't seen the actual picture but what I've heard makes me think it's a cheap cop out.

Honestly, I think the in-game photo is fine. If nobody had bothered to dig through online stock images, we'd've never known the difference. Where I think the cop-out lies is in the Tali romance. Shepard should've gotten to see her actual face, and not just a photo.

[LittleDinamit]

I would be happy with any of the major proposed changes. I would prefer a DLC continuing the story and tied into the indoctrination theory.

[Nephilym83]

Reveal Tali's face in-game, whether it's added to the scene where she unmasks on Rannoch, during a romance scene, or during an epilogue where her and her people are enjoying life unmasked on their homeworld. I don't care where you put it. Just do it. Please. Many of us have been dying to see such a moment since we first met her 5 years ago.

[jupitertronic]

I just want to re-state that Thane's death and preceding scenes only make sense if you did NOT romance him. If you DID romance him, the scenes completely throw out all of Thane's character progression from ME2.

I see a lot of people complimenting his death scene as a strength of the game, and while that's true if he was just your squad-mate... if you romanced Thane, the death scene and earlier reunion scenes were massively "what-the-hell"-inducing.

FemShep would care that her lover was dying, and Thane would care that he's leaving his siha alone forever. The "romance version" of the death scene didn't show me that they cared about each other as more than just friends, and that's just patently false.

If you didn't want me to have hope that Thane would live, I don't get why you dropped all those hints in Lair of the Shadow Broker, because those were what got my hopes up. I understand having it be an option - that would be awesome. But there should also be an option to save him. Just like there's technically an option to save Mordin.

I don't care if I have to go Renegade to save Thane. It should still be an option.

Modifié par jupitertronic, 18 mars 2012 - 07:19 .

[bboynexus]

No, I don't think saving Thane should be an option at all.

[Agduk]

[Warning: Wall of Text to Follow -- please forgive any incohernece, I tried to get this out as quickly as possible]


First off:

Thanks for letting us know people at Bioware are listening. Your company has built up an enormous stockpile of goodwill with consumers over the years, and a lot of us *want* to assume the best about you.

Next:

ME3 had the potential to be one of my favorite rpgs of all time. There was a moment when Mordin got in that elevator at the Shroud, and I *knew* his next line was going to be ‘Had to be me...’, and I shivered. “Wow”, this is it, “This is the game that rubs Roger Ebert’s nose in the fact that games really *are* art”.

I had that feeling again and again through this game: When I laughed with Thane Krios on his death bed over how incompetent Kai Leng was, when I said what I thought was a prayer for him and gasped when I realized it was for me; again when I saw Legion’s story, and watched him pick up that rifle for the first time -- and when I knew what he would have to give up. Again and again, the game is full of these moments. Keep that firmly in your mind, because those moments are precisely why the ending is so jarring.

Diagnosis:

If you’re reading this, you’ve read all the criticism of the ending. I don’t need to repeat that here, except to second that the “Mass Effect 3 Ending-Hatred: 5 Reasons the Fans Are Right” article is more or less spot on.

Unlike a lot of people though, I think the ending problems are a bit more deeply rooted than they may realize. I feel like there was probably a few plot & story decisions that were made that weren’t really carried through the way they should have been, culminating in a weaker-than-expected third act of the game (of which the ending is the capstone).

First off, where would I set the act breaks for ME3?

(i) The first act is clearly all about Palaven, finding a sleeping Prothean (sorry, this DLC was integral!), and then ends with the cure of the genophage.
(ii) The second is about Udina's coup, and uniting (or not) the Geth & Quarian forces you'll need in order to retake earth. It ends with Legion standing on that cliff, and Tali taking off her mask there.
(iii) And that takes us to the third act: dealing with Cerberus, and then retaking the earth.

Ok, so what are the problems?

- ME is really about dealing with the menace posed by the Reapers.

In the first game, we had the twist as you have your conversation with Sovereign on Virmire, which is the big reveal that your real enemy is a post-singularity cosmic horror, who views the organic races of the galaxy a little the way we view ants.

In the second game, we get two encounters with Reapers. One is constant: Harbinger using the collectors as its cat's paw, and it's only revealed at the end of the game that the enemy jeering at you is in fact a Reaper. The other is the mission to a dead Reaper, which hammers home just how deadly and alien these monsters are. "Even a dead god can dream" is the key phrase, and it hammers home the point that the Reapers are the closest thing the galaxy has ever seen to an actual god. I mean the ancient sort of god people used to set children on fire as a sacrifice to [1], or put the city next door to the sword for. I’d say the scariest thing about Reapers is that even without indoctrination most people would probably eventually fall under their sway -- because when confronted with something that powerful, a lot of people’s first instinct is just to kneel in terrible awe at it.

The third game, which is rightly the conclusion, had a hard problem to face. If the Reapers are these alien, godlike things, how do you make their motivations comprehensible? People complained a bit in ME2 that Harbinger was less scary than Sovereign -- because familiarity breeds contempt, and this is a little bit true. Me, I was less scared of Harbinger than that dead reaper I got the IDF from.

The ME3 solution to this is to punt on the problem, and have basically no dialogue with the Reapers -- instead, you decided to give you a more human formto the enemy, in the form of Cerberus and with the face of the Illusive Man. It's not a bad idea idea per se -- the story of Cerberus is a good vehicle for exploring what happens when extremism goes too far, or idealism is warped into doing terrible things in the name of survival.

The problem is that Cerberus’ motivations stay inscrutable for too long, and too many questions about them go unanswered until the end. It’s also a pretty big leap from the evil that Cerberus did before (which was a sort of ‘Just Practical’ approach to solving the galaxy’s problems), and the sort of soulless killing machine that we see on Sanctuary. There’s an attempt to retcon this in the videos from the Chronos Station, but there is still a bit of a discontinuity there that I found jarring.

We’re also missing a piece about their relationship to the Reapers, and how the Illusive Man came to the day where he decided to indoctrinate himself (much less begin a program of slaughtering refugees wholesale for his army). My understanding is that there are books and so forth with background about Cerberus, or answer questions about why we should be afraid of people like Kai Leng (as far as I can tell, he’s some B string guy with a sword and a costume the IM hired when Shepard quit).

Just as a general note: this tactic of telling a story in books or another medium, and then leaving things flat in the medium which is your strength... well, it just never helps your narrative. Probably a bit beyond our scope here, but I’ve basically never seen this work as a device.

Back to Cerberus.

As an organization, Cerberus shows up as a pain, but even during the middle of a coup on the citadel, these guys don't seem scary. Thane Krios says it best: "That assassin must feel really bad, being foiled by a terminally ill Drell". Cerberus doesn't seem scary really until we get to Sanctuary, and by that point the game is nearly over. And when we do see Sanctuary, it's kind of a ‘whoa’ moment (which may be intended). Cerberus goes from being opportunists to butchers with alarming rapidity. Given that our real Adversaries in the game are the Reapers, there is a kind of moment where Cerberus is sort of stealing their oxygen by bigger nastier and scarier.

Because of this, we really feel it when we don’t get very much Reaper interaction. What we get on Rannoch is super weak -- a characterless, smaller Reaper than Harbinger, telling us what we basically already know (particularly if we have Javik). Making them so implacable and their forces so tough is good -- it really did make me feel hopeless and powerless, but it goes a bit too far. It’s a little like going to war with a natural disaster. It’s terrible that one happens, and it’s awful what you might have to do to survive one, but the fact that we *know* there’s some sort of intelligence animating their efforts to harvest the galaxy left me wondering when my (seemingly foreshadowed) battle with the herald of the Reapers -- their oldest and largest, Harbinger, was going to happen.

That mission never came though.

That leaves the narrative with a need for a ‘voice for the Reapers’ -- stand ins for them to give us some insight into what they’re really after. The game tries really hard to do this, with two different characters:

(i) The Illusive Man
(ii) The Starchild

The Illusive Man is most promising, but by the time we get to the Illusive Man, he is nearly a puppet of the Reapers. And what we get out of that encounter is basically exactly what we got out of the encounter with Saren. We even get have the option to talk him into suicide... just like we did with Saren. Ultimately, we get someone who is on the same moral trajectory as Sarin, and who doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know.

As for the Starchild... well, this has kind of been beaten to death. The best comments were made by that scriptwriter, who pointed out that you don’t get to a conclusion and then introduce *more* mysteries, at least without doing it with a considerably defter hand.

The Remedy:

What could Bioware do?

Let’s rule out the things that are probably impossible -- or at least in this Cycle.

You could make a Mass Effect 3 game where you change the premise. Rather than the Crucible, you might have the given the players one of N choices on how to stop the Reapers -- and had a fairly non-linear set of stories (with overlap for things in common, like saving Palaven, etc.). That’s certainly not going to happen now, and maybe couldn’t have happened for budget reasons -- safe that sort of thing for the distant future, when our cold and alien synthetic children do a remake.

So, we want a solution that Bioware could do today -- that basically restricts it to DLC, or very limited rewrites of the end. The good news is we’re already set up for a rewrite of the end, thanks to the far-future ending snippet (where they talk about Shepard as a legend) -- you just have to say that all they know of Shepard they learned from Liara’s time capsules, and it makes What Really Happened quite malleable -- something you could easily make up a story to a child about.

So, let’s just assuming that everything that happened on the Citadel didn’t (though we may use parts of it), be prepared to surgically alter the earth levels (and maybe add material), and add a few DLC levels beforehand.

Before proceeding, here are some what I see as the ‘themes’ of the Mass Effect franchise. A good ending (good as in well-written) ought to incorporate most or all of these into the ending:

- Uniy/Cooperation: Bringing together the galaxy/the galaxy's races
- Heroism and the relationship between a hero and his or her team
- The price of victory/the consequences of our actions
- The synthetic/organic dichotomy and what it means to be alive
- Expediency vs. Idealism
- Free will vs. determinism (e.g., the Reapers see this as just another Cycle)


Problems:
Now, let’s call out some specific problems that are present in the ending today:

#1: The Illusive Man is a big villain for the whole game, and he goes down like a chump.

The Illusive Man has been with us in a direct way for two games, and he has a vision of humanity which is at odds with Shepard’s. The final conflict with him should give more insight into his character, why he’s done what he has, and make him seem like an evil & terrifying opponent. If you turn him into a slightly more potent Saren (like we did on the Citadel), we’re just repeating the lesson of ME1, which is, ‘Even great men can be corrupted by the Reapers’.

#2: We have no real resolution of our conflict with the Reapers on a personal level. Harbinger is foreshadowed, but we barely encountered him (it).

Given the constraints of the rest of the game, ME3 ends in a place where we never see Harbinger getting its comeuppance (or its final, dark victory). The reason for their existence we’re given is wholly unsatisfying, and basically at odds with EDI’s story, Legion’s story, and the Geth/Quarian reconciliation. If you’re going to give them a reason at all, it needs to grander. While we’re at it, it probably would be worth it to make them even more horrible than they already are.

#3: We have no real resolution of the efforts we’ve put together in fighting the war, and the cause and effect relationship between readiness and success is strained at best.

This one is a no brainer. We get this glorious shot of our fleet warping into the mass relay, and nothing else. Think of all the cool things you did to get war assets. You _cloned dinosaurs for Krogans to ride_, and we didn’t even see a lick of this in the game, or even a cutscene. This critical number -- your readiness -- only matters in a way that is nonsensical. Why does having a bigger fleet get me the synthesis option? Why does it result in Shepard drawing one tortured breath? Those things are just weirdly out of place.

#4: There’s no real diversity in ending. Moreover, what diversity there is is largely uncorrelated with our actions.

Don’t need to say too much more about this, as it’s been beaten to death, and well understood as a problem.

#5: A pronounced lack of closure

I understood the desire to do a high concept sci-fi think piece with an enigmatic ending; I love 2001. But that’s not what Mass Effect is. It is a series about big ideas, but it also presents itself as a rational universe, using conventional tropes and tools like character arcs, etc. Look at the epilogues in DA:O, and you see this done well. Look at ME3, and you can feel this gap.

Part of this is the decision to change the nature of the galaxy after the game (destroying the Relays). This is not an a priori bad thing, but if you change the galaxy so much that by its own rule entire races would starve, you can see how not explaining things in an epilogue can get dicey.

Solutions:

#1: The Illusive Man

We really get an incomplete picture of the Illusive Man, because we miss seeing on camera the place where he went from “guy who steps over the line in the name of saving the world” to “genocidal maniac”. I kind of feel like we either need another Cerberus mission, a more detailed Chronos Station setup, or we just need more time with the guy on the Citadel.

I think we should toss out the idea that he is simply indoctrinated. It made him a lot less scary to me as a villain, rehashed the Saren arc, and in general was kind of the ‘expected’ thing to happen. You want the IM to be a worthy villain, so he’s got to be doing something scary.

The first and most obvious thought is that the human experimentation on Sanctuary was not just to “control indoctrination” -- so that you can have perfectly loyal shock troops. It was also to *beat* indoctrination. This is hinted at, when TIM asks Miranda’s father ‘How would you use this to control a Reaper?’ The key here is that on the Citadel, we realize TIM has just been fooling himself with this -- you want to make it at a real (and terrifying) possibility.

How might this work?

Well, first, you do have to start transforming yourself to be more like a Reaper. Nanites, gene treatments, whatever. Then, you need some sort of technology to counteract the indoctrination of *yourself* from doing this (but that makes sense, given the experiments on Sanctuary). Then, you have to learn to control the horrors that a Reaper produces -- which might be linking through the eyes of a husk, a grunt, a marauder, etc. There’s a great line from the Lord of the Rings, when they talk about using the Ring, and Frodo wonders why he can’t use it to control the Ringwraiths.

“You would first have to train your will to the domination of others”

To control a Reaper, you might have to become one.

That suggestions one end game for TIM, where he arrives at the Citadel (with the Reapers believing he was one of theirs), but instead preparing to upload himself into the shell of the human Reaper being constructed there. TIM is preparing to make himself into a dark and terrible god -- all in the service of humanity, but of course he may end up making the very same decisions the Reapers have made (see below in the Reaper section).

Other alternative plans for him might be using the Crucible to control all the Reapers. Doing this still necessitates giving up his humanity though -- maybe not as a Reaper, but as something terrible and abhuman.

You also want to tie this to Shepard. All that foreshadowing about Shepard’s implants? It’s not that TIM put in some sort of control mechanism. He built them so that Shepard could *join* him in his plan -- whatever that is.

#2: The Reapers

Honestly, I think the Indoctrination theory for the endgame is actually a great intro to your final conflict with an entity like Harbinger. I know I’ve been afraid Shepard was slightly indoctrinated after spending nearly two days near artifact Rho.

Have Shepard have to choose destruction as her ‘out’ for Indoctrination, then have her wake up inside the belly of the beast. Harbinger has scooped her up from the surface of earth, and it’s been sitting there trying to flash indoctrinate her (you could even have a matrix-esque scene, where she comes too connected to all these geiger-esque biomechanical tubes, for the crushing realization she’s trapped inside the largest Reaper!).

Have a mission about her getting out of Harbinger, who’s docked at the Citadel. If you want to don’t give her her squad in Harbinger (maybe it’s appropriate to have a one on one mind screwing mission if you’re inside a Reaper), just have them make the beam up to the Citadel successfully, and they’re waiting for her. The Harbinger mission is superficially about sabotaging, hacking, destroying, or just escaping Harbinger from within, but in reality it is our Reaper reveal.

What *is* that reveal though?

Well, I’ve put an embarrassing amount of thought into this, and here are a few alternatives:

==

(1) Some time in the distant past, organic (or synthetic) life approached a technological singularity, and nearly destroyed the universe, or at least all life in the universe. This has actually happened several times, and each time everything was saved in the nick of time.

Thus the answer to the Fermi Paradox: Life only expands to fill the galaxy until it destroys itself (probably because we get a high enough level of technology that a lone madman can make nanobots formulate anti-matter weapons, or cause a vacuum metastability event (http://en.wikipedia....i/False_vacuum) or something.

The Reapers are the answer to this problem.

(2) At some point in the past, organic (or synthetic) life faced some terrible threat. That threat necessarily involved preventing organic life from progressing beyond a certain point. The Reapers are the answer to this threat -- they either preserve life (albeit in a terrifying way), or are gathering their strength on a cosmic timescale to oppose this threat (maybe something to do with the dark energy affecting that sun the geth were analyzing in ME2?).

The threat should be something vague, and intangible. Maybe it’s dark matter monsters from the id or whatever, maybe it’s a threat from a parallel universe, who knows -- you can make it vague and something even the Reapers fear.

(3) At some point in the past, a race came close to some sort of technological singularity. Somewhere along the way, it went Horribly Wrong. Either through treachery or glitch (presumably a result of a security hole), they ended up turning themselves into transcendent monsters.

Every Cycle, the Reapers are after more organic life to digest and upload, so that they can perfect themselves, and fix what they regard as the 'flaws' that prevent them from achieving true transcendence. Their tragedy is that will never succeed, since they are true monsters, but that doesn’t stop them from trying, again and again...

(4) In the distant past, there was a race that preyed on the mental energy of other sapients -- sort of like psychic vampires. They basically had a success catastrophe, and ended up with a galaxy devoid of prey for them. Rather than starve, they became the Reapers, who emerge Magrathea-like when the mental economy of the galaxy is ripe for another culling. For bonus points, they actually upload sapient consciousness into the Reaper infrastructure so that they can torture/drain them indefinitely. That the Reapers look like the races that are consumed is a kind of macabre performance art.

(5) At some point in the past, there was a cylon-style holocaust, where artificial life nearly wiped out a race of people. These people feared and hated AI, and grew to have an irrational hatred of them. They became the thing they hated the most to defeat their synthetic enemies , but ended up becoming the very things that they hated. The metaphor here is that of the abused child -- where the child becomes the abuser, except with incredibly advanced technology. Stopping them is an attempt to break this cycle of abuse.

(6) There is no reason you will ever be able to understand. This is much harder to pull off, and echoes themes from novels like Childhood’s End. Ask yourself: Could a single, solitary bacteria ever understand the mind of a human being? The answer is: It never could. Likewise, the journey into the Reaper here leads us to the conclusion that they are simply too big for any one human, or even any group of humans to understand. They just are, and that’s terrifying its own right, since they will keep on doing what they do, and you will never know why.

The only way you might ever find out is to become one yourself -- which TIM might be doing.

==

I’m sure people can come up with other theories (and I’d rather be spoiled if you ever fix the game), but there are a few more things to make the Reapers more terrifying.

- Time and again we’ve heard the idea that Reapers are ‘harvesting’ life, and have some synthetic component themselves (even if not a literal component, like organic goop in the walls). One common theory is that the Reapers are actually ‘uploading’ humans (it’s just a more destructive scan than we might like), and even storing their consciousness as a way of letting organic life survive.

If you want to do this, one immediate way to make the Reapers terrifying is to have these uploading lives be excruciating for the organics. They haven’t been uploaded to some sort of virtual heaven -- they’re living out their virtual lives in hell. They revisit their worst nightmares, are tortured, etc.  The Reapers may do this for a variety of reasons -- maybe they’re using organic minds for computation (and this is a byproduct), for creativity (creating art requires pain), they tried to create paradise but they have no empathy (yikes), they were actually created by an abused synthetic race to punish organics forever, or it’s just performance art for them.

- The interior of a live reaper should be a charnal house, a la the Collector base but on a grander scale. Maybe the Reapers take their time with the humans they digest and upload -- for any of the reasons above.

- The Reapers should really have godlike technology. They can alter the structure of reality inside themselves, and one day hope to alter the structure of space time for their kind of life to flourish. Can you imagine what that universe would look like?

- Adult humans are the ones converted into husks and superstructure, but it is only *children* the Reaper’s “save”. Only young minds can be properly uploaded to become part of a Reaper consciousness.

Back to this Mission:

Design it any way you like, but you should construct it so that you make whatever you decide as the Reaper’s story a series of reveals, culminating in a terrifying encounter with Harbinger. Imagine if killing or scaping Harbinger requires you to snuff out living organics it has taken on board to upload -- imagine if they’re organics who you know personally, or have at least encountered in the game world.

Other ways to do this, but it ends after you’ve gotten your big reveals, and taken some sort of revenge on Harbinger and made your escape onto the Citadel. (more on this in my last section).

#3: The effect of War Assets

This one is easy: We want to see at least cut scenes of all our troops in action. Whether we see them on earth, or as part of a final battle montage as we watch our allies kick ass. Some people might live, some people might die, presumably as a result of whether we brought them at all, who’s with them etc. Make these tough, dramatic scenes, and people will love them. This is worth any budget you’re willing to spend on it.  

War Assets should also have some sort of real affect on the ending -- and well get to that.

#4: Diversity of Ending/Player Choice

This one is obvious too: BIoware is going to have to cough up some dough and animate and write some real endings. I’d be happy with at least five fundamentally different endings, but the more the better. These endings need to involve the decisions you’ve made, your war assets, and final choices you make.

#5: Closure

Your squad needs to be with you on the Citadel. You need to hear their agony as they go through the tough decisions you have to make. After it’s all over, we want to see epilogues for all the characters on your crew, the people we’ve come to care about, and the places in the galaxy.


The Denoument:

Let’s put it all together. What does it look like compared to where we are today?

- The idea of the Citadel being the final step in using the Crucible is a useful device (and it doesn’t necessitate any big changes to the ending sequence)
- The idea of the Starchild is best left to Indoctrination fantasy if used.
- If we wanted to require a special component for the Crucible other than the Citadel, a Prothean-themed mission would make a lot of sense for this. We’d get to learn things like how the Crucible is really the result of many cycles working on this problem, some dark foreshadowing about the Crucible, and also get more backstory about Javik (just because I love Javik)
- Optimally, the mission to earth should vary based on the types of ground forces we’ve obtained. Have some mini missions with krogans on dinosaur back, help a salarian task force take out a strategic asset, etc. Bad things probably start happening to your team (or your former ME2 team) depending on how your asset readiness stands. This is also a place where you start getting forced to make Hard Decisions -- maybe a choice between colleagues, maybe sacrificing your own decisions later in return for saving lives now (and vice versa), and so on. Some of this depends on how successful you are at the mission (maybe it’d be neat to let the people playing tougher difficulties have a few less Hard Decisions). It culminates in your run on that beam.
- Next you end up in Harbinger (see above), have your reveal about the Reaper, and then escape to the Citadel. The escape’s success might also depend on your assets. If you wanted to be grim, you could require the Normandy to suicidally ram into Harbinger in order for you to escape. Or you can start have crewmates left on the ship die, etc. etc.

- The (real) Citadel is overrun by Reapers. Improbably, Captain Bailey is holding out. This is helped if you did all those Citadel war effort quests, and he’s basically sealed the rest of the Citadel’s people into one last redoubt. He’s also managed to sabotage the Relay controls so that the Reapers couldn’t shut off access to Sol to the fleet.
- TIM appears to be siding with the Reapers, and is showing up on monitors everywhere, promising people an end to the conflict if they surrender. Naturally, they’ll just be harvested and/or converted into more troops, but TIM gets to be sinister and ominous about what he’s up to. Notably, he’s still a hologram -- we don’t see him in person.
- One thing I liked from the original ending was that there’s more to the Citadel than we know -- a place where the Keepers come from, the command center for the mass effect relays, etc. This is also a staging area for growing new Reapers, and (now) TIM and the remaining Cerberus forces have set up shop there for their own nefarious ends. It’s also where the backup controls for the Citadel are. TIM is racing to get full control from the Reapers (or some Reaper virus) because he wants to call the shots on what happens next.
- As the battle rages outside, you have to make your way into this area, find out some more history of the citadel, and then deal with whatever TIM has planned and the leadup to the end.

Endings

“Stand in the ashes of a trillion dead souls, and ask the ghosts if honor matters. The silence is your answer.” - Javik

And here we come to the end. I’d be happy with a few well-written endings, but I believe there’s a great opportunity here to take some radically different courses with what happens on the Citadel, both as a result of your decisions there and (of course) your war decisions.

Rather than getting bogged down on specifics -- I’d like instead to outline some vignettes of what I consider to be endings that are awesome.

Bad endings:

- (Very low readiness)

The fleet tries to get the Crucible to dock with the citadel after Shepard sacrifices her life to get those arms open. Shepard looks up, sees her dead squad, sees the Crucible approaching and looks hopeful.

Pan to Hackett on his flagship (the Destiny ascension?) taking fire. All around him, ships are exploding. A swarm of fighters collides with his bridge. The Crucible is alone, undefended -- swarmed by Reapers, who literally take the thing apart with lasers cutting at the hull and tentacles disassembling it. Reaper voice in the background: “You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it.” Pan out to show the earth, as the reapers are now unopposed in culling it -- faded to white.

Fade into to an alien world, and we hear Liara’s voice.

“How would you like history to remember you?”
“She was a soldier and a leader.. one who made peace where she could.”
.. “And it was a privilege to know him”

Pan in to a dig site, as some alien creature -- preferably one very dissimilar to one we know -- holds up Liara’s beacon. It looks at it curiously, and it flickers to life -- with pictures of the Reapers, the crucible, and Shepard. It holds it up to examine it, with a glint of curiosity in its eyes.

- (Moderately bad ending)

Shepard stands inside the birthing chamber where TIM’s Reaper form has been defeated. Its horrible silver eyes have winked out. The entire chamber is a ruin -- pan across a scene of falling scaffolding, fires, spewing plasma. Pause on squadmates, both of whom died to stop blasts from TIM which would have killed Shepard.

Shepard is battered, but still holding on, and works the console. Her fingers fly furiously over the keys, as she opens the arms of the Citadel. The Crucible slides into place -- shades of the docking scene from 2001. As it clicks into place, the a Prothean VI flicks into life on the console.

“Commander Shepard, Crucible docking complete. I am Vindication.”
“Commence Program Omega.”
“Activating dark energy field. Propagation will commence in.. [ERROR]”
“What’s wrong?”
“Damage to Citadel control security systems is too extensive. The program must be entered manually. Calculations indicate that this will leave insufficient time to evacuate the Citadel before it detonates. Transmitting activation codes to your omnitool.”

Shepard stares out over the sweep of the battle, and sees the galactic fleet slowing being pushed back by the Reapers. She mutters, “Had to be me....” and smiles quietly to herself.

Vindication perks up, “Say again, Commander?”
Shepard speaks with more authority, “Contact Admiral Hackett. Tell him it was an honor to serve. Tell him to try to keep the peace, and get our allies home when this is all done. Tell <Love Interest>... well, she/he already knows.
Shepard taps the last few characters into the console with iron resolve.
Vindication speaks again, “Thank you Commander. You have fulfilled the wishes of my creators. The Cycle ends today.”

Shepard is quiet, and we pan out through the panoramic window through which she views the battle. First we hear the ‘audio simulator’ version of the battle, and then we hear Vendetta counting down. Then only silent, as the Citadel explodes outward with a wave of numinous energy. Ships near it (friend and foe) are destroyed, but as it expands outward, only the Reapers are affected. Everywhere it goes, the Reapers are reduced to ash. It propagates throughout the galaxy, destroying all reapers. Every relay it touches has its central core turn wild and chaotic.

Epilogue: Given by Liara.

“Shepard brought an end to the Cycle. The Reapers were gone, and their armies with them. We lost so many good souls that day... and we lost the Citadel. Without it, the mass relays still functioned, but knowing where one would take you became a matter of timing and precise calculation. A few grams too much mass, and you could end up in one of the billions of relays dotting the Milky Way. Somehow, I think Shepard would have liked that -- space travel returning to something like a voyage into the unknown. Something you could still build a civilization on, but one that would require brave crews and braver captains.

[Insert epilogue about still living character].


Variations: Shepard is dying as she pressed the button. | Your squadmates survive (and you get the option to ask one of them to sacrifice themselves. Or even flip a coin to decide!). | You have time to warn the remaining organics on the Citadel to evacuate.. or don’t. | Or a dying Anderson/Captain Bailey pushes the button.

- Renegade Ending

(After siding with the Illusive Man)

The Illusive Man turns to you, eyes glistening.

“This is it, Shepard. Our first stepping stone to true transcendence!”

He gestures dramatically, and lights turn on in a cavernous chamber in the Citadel, revealing a human Reaper, glistening and newly constructed.

“I made a Reaper hull without any Reaper AI, booby traps, or even control programs. It’s min.. ours, and we’ll use it to make sure nothing ever threatens humanity again.”

TIM is exultant at this point, almost in the fervor of religious ecstasy.

“Without a control program, how will the thing even work?”, asks Shepard.

“I will be the control program, Shepard.” Behind him, ominous and disturbing tubes rise from the floor, filled with what seem to be saws, sinister surgical equipment, and Reapertech tubes.

“I’m going to upload myself into that human Reaper. Every cell of my being, every thought, every feeling -- eternity is waiting for me in there. And you can be in there with me -- I can use your tactics and your leadership when we lead my fleet of tame reapers against anyone who’ll stand against us.”

“You know, I’ve often thought humankind lost something when we went to the stars and most of us left our old gods behind. Religion brought us together as a unit. It drove forward art, architecture, the tools of war -- a fire for those who did not have one. It was what the masses needed”

“Like an opiate?”, quips cynical Shepard.

“No, like a vision of our own transcendence. Reaper tech is going to give that back to us, and who knows what lies ahead.”

TIM looks around the room -- at his dead men, your dead squadmates (who refused to accept you siding with TIM), and a squad of C-sec agents gunned down earlier.

“These men and women were the sacrifice, and their blood paid for this. I know you appreciate this more than anyone else Shepard -- and today of all days I’m glad I brought you back from the dead so that I could have you at my back.

[Renegade action: Shoot TIM in the back of the head]

“You’re damn straight. But if anyone around here is going to play god, it’s going to be me.”

Shepard steps over TIM’s twisted body, and steps into the conversion chamber.

Before our eyes, he is liquefied and screams in agony. The last thing we see are his eyes -- which dissolve, and we immediately cut to the Reaper’s eyes, which wink open.

It speaks with Shepard’s voice, magnified and terrible.

“Assuming Control.”

Epilogue: (Liara’s voice)

“No one could stop the Reapers except another Reaper. I guess Shepard knew that in the end, and she was right. With the Illusive Man’s research, the Citadel, and the humaniform Reaper, Shepard put an end to their threat, though at a terrible cost in organic life.

When she was done, she offered us peace. Peace for anyone who would join her in her terrible transformation into a new army of Reapers. The people who resisted met with grim fates (scenes of humaniform Reapers winking into existence over Paleven, ‘nuking it from orbit’), and those who joined Shepard were granted immortality as a Reaper.

We fled in the Normandy, and I’m adding this to my time capsule before one of Shepard’s fleet catches up with us. The Cycle will continue.....

Variations:

Letting TIM assume control of the human reaper (probably with even darker results). Loyal squad mates who will join you in ‘embracing eternity’ as part of a Reaper. Or a final battle with your squad rather than TIM or his reaper when they realize you’re not going to turn back from this plan.

Good Ending(s):

Part of this is cribbed from an idea I read a few days ago -- it was too good not to use at least part of it.

Take most of the scene in the Moderately Bad ending, except that the Crucible/the Citadel hasn’t taken enough damage (because of war readiness or other action), and you’re given time to evac from the Citadel.

Vindication intones, “The Citadel will be destroyed in fifteen minutes, Commander.”
Shepard: “Get me the comms back online. General Evacuation Order 15!”
Captain Bailey: “Shepard, what the hell is going on up there? Those Cerberus troops just dropped their weapons like wind-up toys.”
Shepard: “I’m disabling the locks on the escape sytem. Take C-sec and get as many people as you can into the life pods. Now that the arms are open, you just might make it out of here.”
Captain Bailey: “But we’ll get slices to pieces by that Reaper fleet.”
Shepard: “Admiral Hackett will be there to stop them” (well, assuming your war readiness is high enough he will be - Ed.)

Then follows a race to life pods, accompanied by your squad (if they lived). Everywhere you go is Vindication’s countdown following you, with a realtime deadline as you fight your way through Reaper troops and your way out. Generally speaking, you make it out just as the counter reaches 0....

(Faded to white, explosion -- did Shepard live?)

(Fade in to the sounds of a beach and gulls. Blue skies, and the camera pans down -- till we see the tops of a haphazard array of Reaper juggernauts, jutting up out of the sand -- a bit like the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes. We hear more sounds -- waves crashing, and then the loud sounds of friends cutting up.

Garrus: “3...2...1”
Shepard and Garrus are sitting on the broken remains of a citadel bench from the Presidium. In front of them is an Alliance-issue crate, somewhat the worse for wear. On top of it are a bottle of alcohol and in their hands are shot glasses, which they enthusiastically down.
Garrus: “You know, I never knew the Citadel had a beach” (He points to all the broken pieces of the citadel strewn about -- visible are tracks leading from an escape pod to where they’re sitting)
Shepard: “I should know. I’m Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite place on the Citadel!”
Garrus: (Laughing) “I’m just glad your implants let you process Turian whisky, commander -- I was worried this might be the last bottle of alcohol on the planet.”
Shepard: “We’ll pull through, Garrus. It won’t be pretty, and we’ve got a hard road ahead of us with the Relays on the fritz, but with every friendly race in the galaxy left standing in orbit, we’ve got a fighting chance.”
Garrus: “To old friends and new, then.” (They clink glasses, and it fades out).

Epilogue: (Liara’s voice) (Similar to moderately bad ending, except scenes across the galaxy as civilizations are being rebuilt, and we got updates on all surviving squadmates).

Variations:
Not all squadmates may survive | the Normandy may be destroyed saving lifepods | Hackett may live or die | More of earth may be a ruin or less | In versions where you screwed over an ally, you may see the Krogan arming for war, etc.

Mixed and Other Endings:

Variants of the above, but have a single Reaper survive by leaping through an alpha relay into dark space, away from the effects of the Crucible. Last scene can be of the Reaper’s eyes as it goes to ‘sleep’ out in the depths of intergalactic space, chanting, “The Cycle cannot be broken.”

You might also have an ending where the Citadel *and* the Relays can be saved, but controlling the energy of the blast from the Crucible will result in the Earth being destroyed (though I’m not sure who would pick this?).

You could also have a ‘pure control’ ending, where Shepard doesn’t upload herself into a Reaper (this may take Shepard’s life?) Instead, they’re left with the big Reaper fleet, and whoever controls the Citadel controls that fleet. A certain recipe for galactic instability and tyranny for whoever holds the Citadel (which happens to be the fleet on Sol right now, but...).

*   *   *   *

Coda:

This is one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played, right up until the ending. Bioware, if you read anything else I’ve said, please give this game the ending it deserves. [/b]

RaenImrahl wrote...

Bioware's Jessica Merizan has made a request of the community...

Jessica Merizan wrote...

I think I need to clarify myself. For the past few weeks, I've been collecting feedback. I have excel sheets, word documents, quotes, graphs, you name it.

In order for a collaboration between the devs and the fans to work, I need you guys to CONTINUE being constructive, and organizing your thoughts. I know where to look, but I need you to help me by contributing to the dialogue.

Saying "this blows" helps no one. Saying, "I enjoyed X but I found Z _____ because of A,B,C" is what I'm looking for. Channel your frustration into something positive (such as the RetakeME3 movement - constructive, organized thoughts).

Chris and I are both collecting your feedback. We're listening. Make yourself heard.

Please use this thread to post your constructive feedback, which may include spoilers. Spam images will not be allowed, per the forum rules.

(The original, now defunct thread on the topic in this forum is located here: http://social.biowar...ndex/10093191/1)

[jarrettwold]

One more thing I can add to the like category, as much as people dislike it and angry about it. Is Tali's face reveal. Even if it was stock imagery, I was happy XD It didn't shove it in your face so to speak, and was a nice subtle option if you romanced Tali.

[bboynexus]

I can't believe people here are actually trying to shove specific ending scenarios down BioWare's throats as opposed to simply suggesting a framework for them to consider.

[Spanky Magoo]

Watched this Video



and I have to say the indoctrination angle seems particularly interesting.

[jarrettwold]

I'm glad they are explaining in explicit detail what they liked, didn't like and how they would have liked it to turn out.  It's constructive, Bioware isn't bound by it, but they're willing to listen.  Without casting aspersions many, many companies wouldn't even have allowed this, and I'm heartened that Bioware are.  It's also therapeutic to be honest.  It's transformed a lot of very negative energy into something positive even if it is critical.  

It's also in many other threads, in chat rooms and in real life stimulating discussion on the philisophy and role of art, in a new medium.  Which has been really, really stimulating discussion.  

bboynexus wrote...

I can't believe people here are actually trying to shove specific ending scenarios down BioWare's throats as opposed to simply suggesting a framework for them to consider.

[Cyansomnia]

bboynexus wrote...

No, I don't think saving Thane should be an option at all.

Who's your love interest?  I think we should not have an option to save them either.  Let them continue hanging out on 'mysterious jungle planet A'.

Yeah, I know, that's a low blow.  Still, people lack the perspective of how terribly they handled Thane's romance.  And in this galaxy full of space magic, genophage cures and organic/synthetic DNA melding (which makes absolutely NO SENSE whatsoever)... how is this an unreasonable option?

You don't wanna take that option, don't take it.  It's not gonna spoil your game experience.

[tskviper]

Personally it wont really matter what BW do now. This is what was released and BW know that it was a mess.

BW have in my opinion three options:

1: DLC that explains what happened and how my allies goes on afterwards. Unfortunately not everyone can get it. BW get loads of crap for releasing a game without a suitable end on the disk.

2: DLC a good ending. Unfortunately not everyone can get that and it's not what they intended and we know it. BW get loads of crap for releasing a game without a suitable end on the disk.

3: Ignore it and continue with their lives. BW get loads of crap for releasing a game without a suitable end on the disk.

[refuse81]

Agduk wrote...

[Warning: Wall of Text to Follow -- please forgive any incohernece, I tried to get this out as quickly as possible]

*WALL OF TEXT*

This is an internet message board, not a library. All of your brilliant views get buried in minutes. Just sayin'

[GSS115]

What those guys /\\ said. Couldn't have said it better myself.
Something that patches the plot-holes or retcons the moment with space magic kid onwards. Something that provides closure. I wish I was a better storyteller that way I could headcannon my own ending. Minus the endings nothing else needs change. You guys did a good job......for the most part.

[Taldek]

Mbednar wrote...

bwFex wrote...

Let's get started, shall we?


Turn the Star-Child scene from absurd to awesome by using the Indoctrination Theory we've made for you.

The biggest complaint your fans have is that the final five minutes of the game is absurd. It's disjointed, it doesn't fit within the ME universe, and it simply feels like a non-sequitor tacked on at the last minute because you didn't have enough time to finish the ending you really wanted to do.

Fortunately, your wonderful fans have solved this problem for you, because you already did most of the hard work for us. You have hints and clues of Shepard's subtle indoctrination all throughout the game, finally culminating in what many of your gamers assumed to be the obvious truth: the final fifteen minutes of the game were a hallucination sparked by Harbinger trying to indoctrinate Shepard.

If you're not familiar with the theory, you should be. It's all over the internet. Green option means you were indoctrinated (with the same lie used on Saren). Blue option means you were indoctrinated (with the same lie used on TIM). Red option with low EMS means you rejected the indoctrination, but were killed out in the real world because your ground forces were too weak to protect the Conduit while they looked for you. Red option with high EMS means you rejected the indoctrination attempt, and your ground military found you and rescued you after you woke up.

After that, you just have to give us the real ending.

Make our War Assets really matter.

I love the war assets concept. I think it's brilliant. I think it's an elegant way to handle a massive amount of tiny little things all adding up into a giant force. The problem is that right now, there is absolutely zero indication to the user what their war assets were actually good for. Even if they go online and look it up, it still makes zero sense. Why does my army strength change the effects of the non-sequitor space magic? Isn't red space magic going to destroy earth whether I have ten ships in orbit or fifty? It just doesn't make sense.

Instead, you need to use the War Assets in a way that makes sense. Obviously, the "perfect world" solution would be to actually show each individual asset in action, or to even let us decide where each asset is assigned (this was awesome, in the final battle of Dragon Age: Origins). But obviously, there is way, way more content in ME3 than in DA:O. And that's fine. We're not expecting that much out of you.

We just need to know that that cumulative number really makes a difference. Personally, I liked my idea of using the War Asset rating to establish time limits and difficulty levels for the final boss - but you'll see that in a little bit when I post my fanfic.

Give us an epilogue slideshow, exactly how you did it in Dragon Age: Origins.

We already saw the conclusions of a lot of story arcs throughout the course of the game. You don't have to give us a lot more closure in terms of content: it's just a psychological thing. We need to have that catharsis at the very end of the game, as credits are rolling, so that we can see that all of our choices had a real impact.

"Show, don't tell" is a great rule, but only if you show us everything. That's obviously impractical here. A slideshow will be fine. One slide for each race/species, one for each surviving squadmate and major NPC, and maybe a couple for any of the more prominent minor NPCs (Aria, Kelly Chambers, Conrad Verner).

Give us a funeral scene, so we can see exactly who lived and who died.

This was one of the most frustrating things for a lot of people, besides the ridiculous ending. Not knowing everyone's fate was very difficult to deal with. Sure, you want to leave a little bit of mystery, but there's a point where you're giving out so little information it's ridiculous. You can't possibly have expected people to be satisfied with what you gave us.

Leave our galaxy in a state where it can be reasonably repaired.

Sacrifice is one thing. Cities can be rebuilt. Heroes can be remembered. Cultures can regrow.

I'm even okay with the destruction of the Citadel. Sure, it was one of the coolest structures in the franchise, but it's not the defining element of the Mass Effect universe. Personally, I'd rather spend my time on Omega.

The destruction of the Mass Relays - even if you ignore the fact that their energy release should have wiped out the entire star system - is not something we can rebuild. It took the Protheans, at the peak of their evolution and technological prowess, an exorberant amount of time, money, and research to build a *single* uni-directional relay. Given the state of our galaxy in the current ending, there's a good chance we'd slip into a technological and industrial dark age for so long that we'd forget the relays ever existed - let alone start rebuilding them.

Success should be an option, even if we have to work our asses off for it.

In my opinion, Mass Effect 2 did this wonderfully. Failure was a very real option, but so was success. If you had a perfect gameplan, and you put a massive amount of work into it, you could walk off of that Collector ship with minimal losses to the people you cared about most: yourself and your squadmates.

I know sacrifice is an important theme, and if people need to die for meaningful reasons (Mordin for the genophage, Thane to protect the Council), that's fine. But don't go around killing people just for the sake of killing them. Every single one of the endings currently in ME3, if interpreted literally, feels like a forced failure. There's a difference between giving the player a hard choice (do I want to sacrifice the Sol system to save the rest of the galaxy?) and making every choice feel like an abysmal defeat.

Forced failure is not fun.

It's one thing to fail because I messed up. But when I am doomed to fail, it makes it very hard to really care about what I'm doing.

Shepard should die in almost all situations. His story was built for sacrifice. But it should not be impossible for him to live, with a near-perfectly-played game, even if it requires us to go back and play every single side-quest of ME1/ME2.





Example

Earlier this week, I wrote up an example of what I'd like to see in a fanfic/prediction. It was well-received on Reddit, so I figure I'll share it here. Enjoy.

---------------------------

First, the current "endings" are canon, and remain in the game. They simply aren't what they seem to be. The only change to them is we ditch the Normandy crash and the jungle scene, because those simply don't make any sense, even in the context of a hallucination.


If you pick blue/green, or if your EMS is low, everything stays the same. That's how the game ends for you, and you're left scratching your head.


If you pick red and your EMS is high, these events happen after the "rubble" scene.


Part 1 - London: Wake Up

Anderson sees you struggling to get up and runs over to help you. He tells you that you've been out for about an hour, and that Hammer team has set up a perimeter around the beam while search parties looked for you. He says that after the laser knocked you out, Harbinger's lights turned bright green and blue, and he stopped attacking. Shortly before you woke up, Harbinger's lights turned red and he started shaking violently, then flew away.

You meet up with your squadmates, and fight off reaper ground forces to get to the medbay, during which time you will explain that you had a vision after the blast, and you think it was indoctrination. You have a tense conversation with your squad, and ask them if they have what it takes to kill you, if it comes down to that.

Before they can answer, you're interrupted by Hackett over the radio.

"Good job with the Citadel, Hammer Team - the arms are opening."

Shepard replies, "We aren't in the Citadel, Hackett. Something's not right."

Hackett barks, "Well then you'd better get in there and figure out what's going on, Commander, because the Crucible is almost in position and we can't hold off the Reapers for long."

Harbinger swoops back down to Earth. The horn blares, and you can feel him raping your mind. The dark tendrils you had during the TIM vision reappear. You yell at Joker for some sort of backup. The Normandy swoops in and lays down heavy fire just as Harbinger is starting to shoop-da-woop, causing Harbinger to retreat. You, your squad, and Anderson use the opportunity to run into the portal. "Time to find out what's really on the other side," you say.

Part 2 - Inside the Keepers' Lair

Inside, you find yourself in a Keeper tunnel, just like in the vision, but there are no human bodies. Instead, you find dead Keepers, a couple of dead husks, and a single dead Cerberus soldier, who appears to be mutated or partially husked. Your squadmates point out the disfiguration. "Something's not right."

You proceed to the end of the tunnel, and open the door. It opens up to a massive room similar to the circular chasm from the indoctrination vision, but filled with Cerberus lab equipment, Cerberus soldiers, and holding cells containing Reaper units - very similar to the lab equipment on Sanctuary. At the far end of the room, TIM appears to be fiddling with a console.

"Shepard, good. I'm glad you could finally join us."

"When you blew up my lab on Sanctuary, we lost a lot of valuable data. Fortunately, the Reapers have been kind enough to provide us with a new base of operations. You see, they want to see humanity succeed as much as I do."

"Unfortunately, it appears that we were wrong about the Citadel. It may be part of the Catalyst, but it is not the only missing piece. We should be able to activate the Crucible from here, but it simply isn't responding. I'm beginning to think we might need you for that."

Shepard enters dialogue with TIM, and begins to suspect that the reason he can't activate the Crucible is because he is indoctrinated. Why else would the reapers bring him here? They don't want to be controlled - they're using TIM to stop Shepard from reaching the Crucible controls.

A renegade conversation leads to a fight. The paragon conversation seems to have an effect on TIM, and he slowly starts to admit he's indoctrinated and pulls his pistol to his own head, but he snaps out of it and orders his men to attack. As the fight begins, he retreats to a glass safe room overlooking the lab, dodging a few shots from Shepard along the way.

You, Anderson, and your squad start wiping out the Cerberus forces in the room. As the fight progresses, TIM begins opening up the containment cells, releasing Reaper forces who begin attacking you alongside the Cerberus troops, including a new type of unit: the mutated Cerberus soldier, like you saw out in the Keeper hallway.

While you are fighting, TIM tries to argue with you, rationalizing his experiments here, claiming that he was too close to controlling the Reapers to give up now. You try to explain that the Reapers are just using him, but he stutters and stammers, refusing to accept it.

Part 3 - The Final Battle

As the last few containment cells open up and you're down to just a few remaining enemy forces, a short cutscene begins. TIM seems to finally crack. He admits indoctrination, just like Matriarch Benezia on Noveria.
He tells you that the Crucible is a failsafe designed with a unique trigger: a test of will against indoctrination. The Catalyst is someone who can resist that indoctrination.

The Reapers are mindbanks of one of the very first spacefaring species in our galaxy, their solution to overpopulation. When the ancient species was building the reapers, some of their scientists felt that their plan to farm/harvest new life to sustain their own race was wrong, and designed a weapon that exploited the Reapers' indoctrination code, so that once a race had evolved with the readiness to face the Reapers and a will strong enough to resist indoctrination, they would be able to fight for their place in the galaxy.
TIM starts to spasm, choking and distorting in unnatural shapes. When he finally stops, he stands up slowly, his eyes glowing red, and speaks to you in Harbinger's voice.

"You have resisted us, but this one is ours. We will direct your demise *personally*."
In an explosion of flesh and steel, the illusive man bursts into a mechanical monstrosity. The final battle commences.

You are given a time limit based on your effective military score. If time runs out, you see a cutscene showing the reapers overwhelming your allied space forces, killing a race/fleet. One of the reapers fires a beam towards the crucible that kills one of the squadmates you have with you. The timer restarts, but is much shorter this time. If you fail again, another race/fleet is overwhelmed, and Anderson and your other squadmate are beamed. The timer restarts one last time, faster still. If that one fails, the reapers completely overwhelm the crucible. Game over.
As the fight starts, radio chatter from Hammer Team tells you that some Reaper forces are breaking through and jumping into the warp beam. The final battle alternates between fighting the mutated IM and fighting waves of reaper forces coming in from the hallway behind you. The better your EMS, the less often you get Reaper waves behind you.

Part 4 - The Crucible

After you defeat the Harbinger-controlled Illusive Man, you get more radio orders from Hackett.
"Shepard, whatever you're doing in there, you need to hurry up. We can't hold these Reapers back much longer!"
Shepard races up to the terminal. It appears similar to the Prothean beacon from ME1, but is definitely not Prothean technology. He touches it.

A bright flash of light. Time appears to stop. You look around, in awe of the sight before you: ships and reapers frozen in space, lasers and torpedoes hanging motionless between them. Your squadmates tending to an injured Anderson behind you.

At this point in time, the "indoctrination trial" begins.

A voice similar to a reapers, but more patient and eloquent, perhaps female-sounding, will start to question the major decisions you've made over the course of the trilogy: from the Virmire incident to the Collector Base, to how you handled the Genophage and Quarian/Geth situation. It will try to convince you that you chose incorrectly, that you are a failure, that your race doesn't deserve to live because of the weakness you've shown.

If too many of the decisions you made are indefensible, or if your reputation is too low to select enough confident answers, you fail the indoctrination trial, and the Crucible misfires, killing you, Anderson, and your squad, blowing up the citadel, and only leaving some of the reapers alive. Two fleets/races are killed trying to finish off the remaining reapers, and you don't get the satisfaction of the Harbinger interrupt for beating the trial, seen below.

The hologram of the child from your vision appears. He speaks to you using Harbinger's voice.

"You... it cannot be you. We are superior. We are infinite. You are an accident. We are the epitome of evolution. We are eternal. How did you resist us? We-"

Renegade and Paragon interrupts both show up on screen. Shepard interrupts Harbinger with a kickass catchphrase, then presses a button on the console device. A subtle ripple bursts out from the console, like a gust of wind.

Cutscene. With time still frozen, as if in a dream, an explosion of white light pulses out from the Crucible. The explosion moves slowly, beautifully, and as it hits each reaper, you hear the sound of metal wrenching and twisting in near-silent agony. A shot of London shows the white light slowly washing over Reaper ground forces. As it hits each husk, its lights change to white, and they spark and fizzle.

The wave of light reaches the Relay. Its lights turn white, and it beams the energy out, just like in the previous visions. Pull out to the galaxy, we see the wave spreading through the mass relays, just like in each of the previous cutscenes, covering the entire galaxy. The camera cuts back to the room with Shepard, either looking out the window at the battle, still frozen in time (if he survived the Crucible), or unconscious on the ground (if he failed the Crucible).

Part 5 - Conclusion

And suddenly, everything comes back to life. The reapers explode in glorious unison. The Reaper ground forces vaporize all at once, soldiers begin cheering. We see cutscenes inside various ships that you've gathered for your armada, and Hackett calls over the radio - "You did it! Whatever you just did in there worked, Shepard. You're... you're a god damned hero."

If Shepard is still alive, he gives a speech over the radio. "We all did it. Together."

A memorial/funeral service for those who died is shown, with face placards for any of Shepard's teammates or significant NPCs who died. Thane, Mordin, Ashley/Kaidan. Many of the rest are shown in the crowd, to let the player know they're still alive.

Cut to black, credits. As the credits roll, we get a Dragon Age style epilogue slideshow, showing how each race/character still alive spends the next couple of years rebuilding or causing trouble, based on the bigger decisions you made.

After the credits roll, if Shepard has a LI, we see them standing side by side in an appropriate location (Rannoch for Tali, Thessia for Liara, etc.). If not, we see Shepard looking out over the ruins of Vancouver. Either way, Anderson walks over. "It's a hell of a thing you've done, son. What will you do now?"

Cut to black. Title menu.

I apologize for both posting three times in a matter of hours, and using a quote that has been used within the last 30 or so posts but I feel that this person knows what they are saying.  It makes war assets matter and gives everyone suitable closure.  (And makes the game replayable.)

Obviously I'm not expecting you to take this word for word, but these are very good blueprints for satisfying a disenchanted fan base.

I also know that many of you have seen this, but it should be reposted on every page.

http://www.gamefront...fans-are-right/

Sorry for the huge post.  Goodnight.

1 word.... WOW!

This is what i wanted for the end of ME3, Putting massive presure on the the player to save the galaxy at all costs, the timer for the boss battle would be an awsome idea, i would also like my blue babies in there with shep and LI. Either way Bioware do this!

Props to bwFex for such an awsome ending!

[Agduk]

I assume Bioware has people to read the thread -- they asked for it, after all.  

It's nice if other fans see it, and I imagine I'll post it in a few other more visible places once all my friends are done with the game, but for right now, Bioware is my audience. 

refuse81 wrote...

Agduk wrote...

[Warning: Wall of Text to Follow -- please forgive any incohernece, I tried to get this out as quickly as possible]

*WALL OF TEXT*

This is an internet message board, not a library. All of your brilliant views get buried in minutes. Just sayin'

[Jeitiiea]

Keep the game as it is, right up until the final trip to the Citadel. It's been clearly expressed by everyone that this is where it all falls apart - I think we can all cope with any other problems in the game if this is dealt with.

There have been some absolutely amazing suggestions made on this forum for alternate endings which all cater to one concept: scale of success.

Build into any new endings the potential to succeed at the highest level (galactic civilization endures, the LI survives, Shepard survives, all crew survive), all the way down the scale to absolute failure (everyone dies, the Reapers harvest every living being and vanish into the dark again). Give a series of options for endings, with clear differences.

Not everyone will want the same degree of 'happy' in their ending, so scale them accordingly to provide choice.

But if I get one request, it would be let Shepard get the Clan Vakarian tattoo markings in a happy ending when she romanced Garrus. (And raise baby krogans and study seashells in honor of Mordin).

[Sir Fluffykins]

Everything bwFex has written. Bioware you don't have to look any further than bwFex, he's voiced our concerns perfectly in another thread and put forward a decent well thought out alternative that I agree with. I'll add one last thing to what I already suggested.

I went into ME3 with my ME2 character, who was also from ME1. I didn't read anything online about this game when I played, I didn't know about the uproar until I myself encountered the endings and felt burnt.

When I entered the end-game, I believed Harbinger Indoctrinated Shepard, before entering the beam, I looked at the bodies of the dead for Tali and Javik and noticed the strange dream like landscape. Without any outside influence, based off the dreams, Shepard looking worn down, Illusive Man "fight" and seeing that landscape, I thought I uncovered a genuis move by Bioware. If you look at online theories, there are many more "clues" I missed completely.

This is why, as I've said many times I tried to shoot the Starchild, when I found I couldn't and only had a choice of 3 doors, I felt horrified and let down, not so much because I was wrong, but because everything I'd done seem to be made pointless. I still had hope though, for me it was a choice between Hybrid or Destroy, but after spending so long getting the Geth and Quarians to be friends, I chose Hybrid and got punched in the gut. Apparenlty Destroy is the only one Shepard survives, but I don't feel like replaying Cerbarus Base and Earth all over again just to see a 20 second clip and no real change in endings.

Here's what I thought at the time, I thought -because shooting the kid wasn't possible, that if I pick the right door, I'll have overcome indoctrination, Harbinger will roar and attack and I'd have to make a choice, similar to how ME1 ended. I don't know what, I'm not a writer, but I assumed it would be something like, using the Crucible to blow up the Citadel and Harbinger and I'd have to chose between letting the civilians escape or blowing it up there and then. Where the best ending would be saving the Civilians, but having a high enough Galactic Readniess to hold off the Reapers while that happens, where you see Joker take on Harbinger or something.

Even if Bioware does release the rumored "True Ending" DLC and even if it's for free, I won't understand what this move was about.

Modifié par Sir Fluffykins, 18 mars 2012 - 07:45 .