[quote]
This is kind of an inherent problem with picking the Destroy ending, because even if it doesn't actually genocide the geth Shepard is still deciding that genociding the geth is an acceptable sacrifice to make.
You are still deciding that genocide is acceptable, even if it doesn't
necessarily result from your action. I'm kind of hoping that in the
Extended Cut they clarify one way or the other in the conversation prior
to the decision.[/quote]
It's a tough call, but I think it's fair that Shepard should have to make it blind. Would it be worth killing the Geth to save every other species? There have been hard choices before, and this is one of them. If you insist that you can't possibly kill the Geth, you have two other choices. They both have their consequences too, none of them are easy ochoose, which is why it works. If one of them were easy, then that really would be "easy mode" gameplay, it would be no different than playing the game with one-shot kills. You certainly shouldn't get a "Hard mode completion" achievement for doing it that way.
Anyways, yes, they are all hard choices, but there's always choice D waiting there for you, "do none of the above," and the Reapers win. They wipe out all organic life in the galaxy and with the Crucible off the table there's nothing you can do about it.
[quote]
Sheesh. The endings do not make perfect sense to anyone who
cares to reason them out. This is... this is the worst kind of argument.[/quote]
And yet they do, which is why I consider it a good argument.
[quote]
Most of the people I know personally who are satisfied with the
ending are more "casual" players of mass effect with less deep
investment in the lore. I'm not saying this is a direct correlation,
it's just what I've noticed in speaking to a few dozen
non-forum-using-gamers.[/quote]
I've played through each of the games with Paragon completion, starting with the original version on Xbox, and I got everyone out of ME2 alive. I've been playing MP almost daily since I beat SP, and those days that I don't play MP I'm working through my second SP campaign. By certain standards I might be considered "casual" as I haven't played through them on insanity, or played through the first two games multiple times, but I think I'm dialed in well enough.
[quote]
I will ask you a question though: as someone who thinks the endings
make sense, do you believe everything the starchild says? If not, what
do you choose to disbelieve?[/quote]
That's something I view from two angles, 1. What do I believe now, as a player who knows a lot of outside of the game stuff, and 2. What did my Shepard believe at the time I was making the choice.
As to the former, I tend to believe that he believed what he was saying, just as I believe that Sovereign believed everything he was saying at the time. He may have been wrong, but I don't believe he was being deliberately deceptive. Each of the Crucible options did what it said it did, although in some EMS cases was more wild or more controlled than the Catalyst predicted. As for his motivations, maybe that's why the Reapers exist, maybe not, but we do know that the Synthesis ending called them off, so presumably that had something to do with it. Basically, the Catalyst's story works within the narative, if you accept that some of the previously "known" backstory was hearsay, just as the ME1 info about the Protheans being the alpha civilization turned out to be untrue.
As to the latter case, what did I think when choosing an ending, I was extremely skeptical. I mean, we have no reason to absolutely trust this guy, and every reason not to. At the same time, we really have little choice but to trust him. I mean, we're at the controls of the ONLY device capable of stopping the Reapers in any way. The Catalyst, who we can at least safely assume knows what the device is capable of (even if he's not telling the truth about it), delineates three known functions, and tells you what they are.
Maybe he's telling the truth, if he is, then they do what he says they do, and you have to weigh your options and pick the least-bad choice. Maybe he's lying, in which case you have no idea what any of the options do, for all you know touching the "Controls" could cause it to fire a blast that wipes out every ship in the galaxy, while blowing up the "destroy" console could destroy the Crucible without harming the Reapers at all. Basically, if you assume he's lying then anything could happen.
The important thing that you have to accept at that point is that if the Catalyst isn't telling you the truth then NOBODY knows what else to do (as noted in prior conversations with Hackett and Liara about how they have no clue what the thing is for), so you have to choose one of the options without necessarilly knowing that it's the best choice. What you do know is that if you don't choose any of the options, and fast, then all sentients in the Galaxy is doomed, because the Reapers will destroy the Crucible and then be invincible, at least for the current cycle. So you have to choose. If I'm going to have to choose between making a measured choice, a deliberate choice based on weighing the options (even if that intel is potentially flawed), OR randomly choosing an option without any regard to what the consequences might be, and I MUST make some choice, then I would choose the deliberate choice.
If the Catalyst is being honest, then it does what I think it does, and I get the outcome that I can most live with. If the Catalyst is lying, then whatever happens, happens, but chances are it wouldn't be any worse than doing nothing, and there would have been no real way to avoid it anyway.
It wasn't really a "fair" choice, but it was a dignified and meaningful choice.
[quote]
I don't understand why adding an additional ending would ruin the existing endings for anyone, if they were left unchanged.
[/quote]
It really depends on how they changed them. If they gave players an "out" a really clear "press this button and you get the perfecthappyending!" then I think that would just cheapen the drama of the original ending. It'd be like slogging through one of those super challenging games like Demon Souls or whatever, and then they release a patch that lets drunk children just roll through the entire thing blind-folded.
I don't know what sort of changes people are expecting, but I imagine that many of the ways that would appease some of the Enders would annoy me for their existence. Now, I AM looking forwards to the ending DLC as described, because I think elements of the ending FMVs were unclear and could be expanded on, as well as elements of the Sword battle itself, I just don't want to see the ending choices cheapened.
[quote]The whole 'control the Reapers and send them into a supernova'
seems kinda like a cop-out, but it's equally plausible with the endings
we have, since the level of control is an unknown factor.[/quote]
At the time I was making that choice, I did not believe that sort of thing would be possible. The Catalyst's description of your level of control was as more of an "influence" than a dominating will. I had the impression that you could basically convince the Reappers to chill out, but not that you could compell them to behave in a self-destructive manner.
[quote] But the Normandy flying away from the battle for no reason and my crew
MAGICALLY teleporting there and abondoning me when they would never
abondon Shepard under any cricumstance and then getting stranded on a
random planet?![/quote]
That is something I'd like to see clarified. I can think up several possibilities as to wh that happened, but it's definitely unclear as to the actual reason for it. This is not something that I feel they'd need to change, but I do feel like they skipped a few scenes in there to explain how it happened. It's like a magic trick, You have a coin in your hand, it vanishes, you pull it from behind someone's ear, that doesn't mean that you actually broke the laws of physics and teleported the coin into their ear, but for people to understand why you didn't break the laws of physics, you need to know the intermediate stages of the trick.
[quote]It's almost funny how they're backtracking from their initial position
in response to the fans' wrath. The galaxy was supposed to be a waste
land after Mass Effect 3 because you know, dark is deep.[/qute]
Where did you hear that? There is no officially sourced reason to believe that the galaxy was meant to be a wasteland following the original endings.
[quote]Then, everyone plot-important on the citadel is alive (never mind the
non-important people, apparently Shepard wasn't fighting for them).[/quote]
I'd assumed there were at least some survivors from the start. What, they've never heard of evacuating before?
[quote]
From ME2 and Miranda's audiologs, we know that synthetic bits were
added to Shepard to speed his/her recovery - not because s/he would die
without them. So no, I still see no reason why Destroy = 100% chance of
death for Shepard.[/quote]
Well, I hadn't considered it until the Catalyst pointed it out, but once he did I assumed that at least some of the synthetic elements were biologically vital, replacing vital organs. If that doesn't work for you, there are two other possibilities, one, Shep is 90% dead anyways in that scene. The asumption could be that a normal human would be dead, and therefore without her synthetics to heal her rapidly she'd die anyway. The second option involves the fact that "destroyed" synthetics tend to explode in the red ending, so if those bits of Shep were to spontaneously combust, they'd probably take a lot of other bits with them.
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His spine is refused with a bridging implant.
