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I'm ready to accept clarification rather than fixes. I think, though, that there are some common needs that it should meet in order to satisfy both those who liked the ending, and those who did not.
There's a short preamble here explaining my reasoning; the suggestions are a bit further down. If you have any suggestions for improvement, please leave a comment. This is not an unchangeable single-person manifesto!
Also, if you like these ideas or think they merit discussion, please add at least a “+1” or “I liked it!” comment…otherwise the post will slip down to the limbo in the turmoil that the FTL forums are, and won't be seen.
Permission is hereby granted to BioWare, free of charge, to do whatever they please with the ideas presented in this post. Attribution to ME fans on BSN would be nice, but not required.
Rationale and Background
Sacrifice should be meaningful. The hero dying just to kill off the hero is as much a cliché as happily ever after. Dead hero does not art make. That's one of the problems with the ending: psychologically speaking, the player has won when TIM falls, which makes the (apparent) death after victory seem…gratuitous. I'd use the word “insulting”, but that implies intent that wasn't present. It just comes across like that.
The second need is much more obvious: your loved ones, your comrades, and the galaxy. While there's something to be said for an “unknown future”, for many of us the glimpses we got were so disconnected from the present that they don't provide closure. The Normandy crash: I personally did not understand it (like so many others), and psychologically this means that it's not ‘real’. And if it's not real, how can I be sure that all those people were OK? Same with the galaxy's fate: we have so little unambiguous information that it's impossible to make any satisfying conclusions. Some soil is necessary for planting the seed for the players to grow their own future from.
There's also one note I'd like to make about the desire for ‘bittersweet’. If the near-complete decimation of Earth, with billions dead – not to mention the losses all the other species have suffered – isn't bitter enough, the problem isn't that you've not killed enough people. It's that you've failed to show that properly to the player. The forced emotion – RPG no-no – from the kid in the beginning doesn't work for many/most players. Obviously more personal losses are easier to evoke feelings with…but there're quite a few of those too. All this is to further reinforce the point that killing off Shepard or the LI (or even comrades) without proper justification is – and is seen as – the easy way out.
There's a lot more rationale and background in the comments. Optional, but definitely worth reading. I'll try to add links to interesting ones in the format [1, 2, …] in the relevant parts of the text.
So, with that, addressing the first:
Sacrifice
I don't necessarily mean that this exact template should be used – although obviously I like it – but I think it illustrates the needs that should be met.
Shepard has won when TIM dies. This means that the sacrifice thereafter must be the player's to choose, and for some justified reason. A tradeoff approach works fine. The two factors of balance are the futures of 1. Shepard, loved ones and friends (axis of life and death), and 2. the galaxy as a whole (axis of safety and uncertainty). From these, we can carve out 3 options – what a coincidence! Maybe this is what you were going for…?
- Sacrifice yourself to grant everyone else a safe, even utopic future.
- Sacrifice something essential to grant a longer respite, with a significant gain in power.
- Save yourself at the expense of only gaining a breather, with an uncertain (if hopeful) future.
Each does defeat the main enemy.
How can we translate these into the existing ending? I think you can already see it…
- Synthesis: Shepard dies so that the loved ones and the entire galaxy can live free from fear. Relay destruction TBDetermined, but even if destroyed, presumably combined with reaper knowledge, it'll be reasonably easy to get things running again.
- Control: Shepard relinquishes material existence in a consciousness transfer or copy, becoming an AI (it does not seem sufficient to just create some subroutines to upload). Citadel situation needs to be resolved. Relay situation TBDetermined, but presumably they stay operational.
- Destroy: Shepard hopes to live, and save his/her loved ones, and destroy the threat as was intended but the immediate future may be harder (war cleanup, vying for power, the salarian/krogan situation maybe escalating…), and the more distant future is uncertain – the synthetic war will yet come, if the krogans don't rebel first. But there's hope, and there's the now. Relays may be destroyed, or out of order (see below).
It must be noted that in order for these to be realistic options, the character must be given some reason to believe the Catalyst (it is the enemy, after all). Somehow Shepard needs to be able to believe that the given options are genuinely the things that the Crucible can do, and only those things. Here's a proposal I made downthread for a possibly workable option:
An Investigate option is added to ask why Shepard should believe the Catalyst. It replies that it's going to upload some schematic data to the fleet; a moment later, it lowers the communication shield (which has been preventing you from getting comms earlier), and among the cacophony of the fleet in battle, you hear Hackett/EDI/Dr. Lok/someone suitable try to hail: “Commander Shepard? Commander? We received schematics and analysis, are you transmitting this? They show that the Crucible plans were correct, but there's something preventing it from firing. You can release the destructive ray by disabling the thingamajic somewhere <nearby the place it is>, it looks like; EDI also says that there's some kind of a code repository there with Reaper command structure modifications that could be used if they could be beamed to the Reapers, but she can't get access to it. There's also some really weird schematics for nanotech that seem something like the ones in the husks but not quite. We're marking them in the schematics, view with your omnitool. Commander, we can only hold off for a few minutes before the Reapers get to the Crucible, what is going on?! What's the situ-” at which point the Catalyst closes the comms shield, just after Shepard gets an omnitool hologram pointing out the same locations as the Catalyst did.
Something like that. It both gives a reasonable clarity that the situation is as described, and gives additional impetus to make the decision. It also avoids the problems with a continuously open comm line, although the alternative might be to have Hackett speak longer before going up to the Catalyst. In this case, the ability to scan the Citadel parts would need to be explained, and it'd be likely that Shepard would only learn of the Destroy option – so (s)he might still not trust the Catalyst with the other options.
As a small note, because of the visceral hate of the child hologram the Catalyst uses, it might be good to offer an option for Shepard to say it's not working, and the Catalyst can shift to a glowing orb, with the speech dropped a couple octaves and made more mechanical. [ 1 ]
Anyway, with that solved somehow, let's flesh out our options and their aftermath a bit more.
Fleshing out Ending Options
For all options, EMS will affect how many squadmates and other important characters survive the battle. Other effects detailed for each option.
Synthesis
Synthesis pretty much needs the “Normandy crash as hallucination” scene to be plausible (details further down). Synthesis cannot be an immediate transformation, and it can't create an actual ‘new DNA’. I get that maybe there’s a philosophical statement there, but that doesn’t excuse it from plausibility. Both details are preposterously implausible, and will be torn to shreds.
The simplest plausible explanation is to just explain the Catalyst’s statement about a new DNA as a metaphor for the dumb human, and make the actual synthesis be nanotech-based for organics, programmatic or maybe even nanotech for synthetics. The timeframe is days and weeks, not seconds.
Synthesis also has the property of causing significant emotional distress (suicides, civil unrest…). These are the milder the more gradual the transformation is. On the upside, it provides almost utopic conditions for some time to come, when/if unrest settles. [Placeholder, will try to add more info. Synthesis is very hard to define reasonably. Comments have some discussion].
Control
There should probably be an indication that ShepardAI is able to communicate with or manifest to people by some means. Whether (s)he does can be left open, although maybe it would be good to show that it does happen. Whether ShepardAI is the real thing or just a carbon copy or worse could be left for EMS. How Shepard handles the reapers – send them all into a sun, retreat somewhere to guard the galaxy, … – can be left open, but I think there's a strong implication that (s)he must retain active control to keep them in check, and that the Reapers probably wouldn't allow themselves to be harmed. To set the stage for Stargazer, ShepardAI should slowly fade away from day-to-day activities, either because everyone (s)he knew has since died, or for some other mysterious reason. This detachment explains the mythical nature of “The Shepherd” (unless you want to go all the way and just make Shepherd a reaper craft to preserve all the dead people…) Also, don't forget about the Citadel. It probably shouldn't just ride off to the sunset as it seems to be doing in the original cinematic, at least before the people still alive on board can disembark. [ 1, 2 ]
Destroy
Could definitely benefit from EMS considerations, balancing out the ‘penalty’. The better the crucible is (high EMS), the better the chances that it works in an optimal manner. Note that I'm using the rumoured “relays not destroyed” plan here for mid- and high EMS. Adjust accordingly if the relays should be destroyed rather than disabled – I personally don't find it necessary. (Similarly, I don't think much of “relays are destroyed but we can use reaper tech to just recreate them right away” as a dramatic device, but it's a valid approach.)
- Low EMS signal is unmodulated and too powerful: it indiscriminately destroys anything resembling the reaper ‘lifeforms’ by targeting reaper software signatures, including the geth if Reaper code was uploaded, EDI(?), the suits of quarians who had geth tech (causing not death, but suit failure, which can be problematic), and the destruction is violent (the reapers can explode etc. due to improper shutdown). It would also significantly – perhaps unrecoverably – damage the relay network. It can be bad enough to kill Shepard – although the Catalyst would probably warn about this in strong terms.
- Medium EMS signal is better-modulated, and while causing the Charon relay to shut down, the farther relays would fare better. Would still do damage to all reaper code-affected persons and things, possibly killing geth if reaper code was uploaded. Shepard lives. Perhaps at close range the pulse is enough to damage Shepard's cyborg parts enough that they can't be rebuilt to 100%, even if it doesn't affect all synthetics.
- High EMS signal is extremely well modulated. The Charon relay is shut down by the energy spike, but the rest of the network is largely unaffected, including the Citadel. Science teams could estimate it'll take <12 months to reactivate Charon (the scientists working on Crucible traveled with the fleet and survived in sufficient numbers if you were good enough). The geth are mostly fine…and if desired for balance, the signal could have been so cautious that so are some of the farthest, scattered reapers who hadn't made it to Sol (cleaning them up is quite doable, but they will cause some destruction before going down). Shepard lives. Loses a leg/arm, taking him/her out of active duty? Or perhaps at close range the pulse is enough to damage Shepard's cyborg parts enough that they can't be rebuilt to 100%, even if it doesn't affect all synthetics.
Not too unbalanced, is it? In all cases, Sol is stranded for some time with all the fleets, and it's some distance to the nearest relay via FTL. There's a ton of rebuilding done, tons of wounded, dead, shortage of food, morale after initial cheers, krogan/salarian, everyone/geth…
Even if the relays aren't destroyed, Charon is reactivateable only in the highest EMS and in the others, everyone would have to FTL out of the system instead (let's call it a trip of 6-12 months to get to the nearest relay). There are a few of the quantum comms outside Sol, so that the survivors outside Sol could confirm that the other relays are in fact functional (or not, as applicable), and thus prevent the fleets from falling into despair – it'd be a daunting prospect to spend all that time to find out if the other relays still work – even though it still takes time to get out of or into Sol.
If the option is taken that even with a high EMS the relays or significant portion of them have been completely destroyed – I feel this is not necessary – then the Normandy must be reachable from Sol (see below for suggestions).
The Citadel should be, dependent on EMS, either completely busted or at best significantly damaged, e.g. with one ward completely detached and the others damaged, the tower mayhaps afloat by itself (explaining why Shepard didn't get blown up?)
There should also be that option to fail that was promised. No, not CRITICAL MISSION FAILURE. If you fail at the end – any time on Earth, even? – you should get a cinematic showing the destruction of the various planets (including yahg!), and the Reapers retreating after fixing up the Citadel and so on. With low EMS, we'd also see the Reapers find Liara's time capsules. Then, cut to 50 000 years later, and again depending on EMS, some different cinematics. Low EMS shows reapers taking everyone by surprise, whereas mid- and high EMS show some aliens finding Liara's time capsules. Maybe they could be playing it in the Citadel, with some people speaking in a funny language explaining the meaning of the thing while the Reaper hologram, Shepard, and so on flicker in the air. With high EMS, we should also see the reaper forces significantly depleted.
This brings us to the second item:
Closure
I think it's mostly obvious how the closure should play out otherwise: show more of the fleets you assembled (rachni, geth, etc.) both in space and on the ground, show their final moments in the fight, show the deaths or survivals of your current and former squadmates (use EMS), plus Hackett, Anderson, Kahlee, and so on. Where Shepard dies, show how (s)he is honoured, if an AI, show making contact. If surviving…well, more on that below. Show more about the future of the survivors – especially any blue and/or scaly babies (Liara and Shepard spoke of having kids, and Garrus and Shepard of adoption, Shepard and Traynor did, Wrex will have some). Show the rebuild efforts on Earth and the other worlds.
Some of the cinematics, like the various fleets fighting and your squadmates' fates, can be interspersed into the final sections in London – or even the Citadel – without impacting the flow.
I have a couple more specific ideas that I think might be worth exploring. First and foremost, the Normandy. It's absolutely imperative that if Shepard survives, the Normandy is reachable.
The Normandy seems the biggest problem for most people. I think it should be scrapped as a real event because it will take such huge effort to explain the crew, and how they got to a planet that would take at LEAST 6 hours to get to – time that just can't be accounted for. (Although I do have a suggestion for a real crash below). The hidden payoff here is that you can also rewrite the frankly ludicrous instant DNA rewrite from Synthesis and change it to something sensible (or even something that is not fully explained, we just see glimpses of some nanotech starting or whatever). There's two ways this could work:
- The Normandy's crash is actually a dream/hallucination/final thoughts
- Joker's: before death or unconsciousness, having gotten too close to the Crucible in an effort to get Shepard out and trying, in desperation, to get into FTL to escape the explosion. Joker gets knocked out (or dies :/), and dreams that the explosion shipwrecked them on a planet and everyone is OK, even those who weren't actually on board. In the case of Synthesis, despite being knocked out, Joker's body is aware of the transformation and fills in the blanks with composite imagery from the indoctrinated hybrids and so on. This sidesteps the question of how he ‘knew’ about Synthesis and also removes the necessity for a green glow.
- Shepard's dream in unconsciousness or final thought before death/transformation. So worried about their fate that (s)he dreams them surviving, fleeing what from inside the citadel seems like a giant inferno of destruction. The actual fate of the squad TBDetermined. This ties in nicely because the world they land on looks like it could easily be a composite of the various worlds Shepard's been to, but overall using Joker as the dreamer is the much better option.
- (If the Normandy crash must be a real event, you'll need to explain satisfactorily how the team got on board, and why they're in good health. It MUST be explained how they had time to get to the place where that planet is. This is really important: if it's an FTL ride, the planet is at least 10 LY away from Earth (refer to your cosmological charts for nearest terrestrial worlds) which means at least 10-12 HOURS of travel. Conversely, if it's the result of a mass relay jump: it takes SEVERAL HOURS (5, I think?) to get to Charon from Earth. That time must be accounted for – and it's really hard to explain away hours because of the whole explosion thing. It's also absolutely imperative that the Normandy crew be rescued eventually, preferrably by the tireless efforts of Shepard – or alternately if the Sol relay is destroyed, someone else could rescue the Normandy, and they then head to help Sol.) On what I think is a highly implausible note, it must be said that the escape could be explained by 1. the Normandy making an FTL jump from Earth to Charon inside the solar system (very dangerous), 2. starting a relay jump where the relay gets disrupted somehow in the middle of the sequence (timeframe is minuscule), and 3. this interrupted jump depositing the Normandy safely on a habitable planet (incredibly unlikely). All in all, I give it odds on the order of 1:10^20, and the fans will absolutely destroy it, but you can use it.
Then there's the Stargazer. I think that in the Synthesis and Control endings, it could be a ‘real’ event.
- Synthesis: “The Shepherd”, the genetic progenitor, could be a quasi-religious mythical character, prominent in their teachings. (Should be left as the last scene, after the other closure stuff.)
- Control: Shepard is an actual Shepherd – kind of like Sovereign. An entity that guards the flock that is the galaxy. Has become less and less involved in affairs – without forgetting the core function – as time goes by, after everyone we know is gone. (Should be left as last scene.)
In Destruction, though, there's a twist if Shepard lives: think this sequence of events - happening before the other closure scenes:
- Stargazer does the first part of the speech.
- Camera cuts to a hospital room, with an unconscious Shepard peacefully in bed. One of Shepard's squadmates (or maybe Hannah Shepard if a Spacer, facing away from the camera) is sitting next to the bed, talking about how everyone's going to be talking about Shepard for centuries to come…but to please come back now anyway, there's still adventures to be had.
- Cut to Stargazer and kid doing the second part of the scene.
- Cut to hospital room. LI in room, looking out the window. Monitor alerts, LI turns around. Shepard opens eyes.
…And then segue into the rest of the closure scenes, rebuilding society and so on. It's very important that we also see rebuilding of Thessia, Palaven, Tuchanka, the settling of Rannoch….
To be honest, I'd love to see the equivalent of blue babies, too, or real estate construction on a cliffside on Rannoch but… well. Let's just leave it at that. I, and a lot of others, would very much like to see that. Note that the only LIs to broach kids that I can think of are Liara (blue) and Garrus (orphans), so that part only applies to them.
Does anyone have more specific scenes that they'd like to see for the other characters?
TL;DR: Mass Effect deserves better, but it can't be explained any shorter than this. So go back and read it!
:wub:
Modifié par lillitheris, 23 juin 2012 - 03:53 .
Retour en haut
) on the Normandy being essentially a dream sequence, as well as the Stargazer as an echo of what's going on around Shep's hospital bed…
