5087 réponses à ce sujet

[delta_vee]

Addendum, @CGG

If your Shepard is genociding the Geth because he believes it is the only way the Reapers will stop reaping, he is merely an idiot who is wrong. A monster who became a monster due solely to his own idiocy and hubris, but not one who was malicious. A commander who stupidly and needlessly sacrificed his troops.

Part of the argument of the Red Doom is not just about stopping the Reapers now, but in the future as well. If the Blue Hubris is so untrustworthy, the expectation is thus created that they could return, and thus the war is merely postponed instead of won. To condemn the Red faction for idiocy seems...needlessly inflammatory.

Edit: aw, hell, twice in a row. I'm sorry, guys.

Modifié par delta_vee, 16 juin 2012 - 11:32 .

[CulturalGeekGirl]

delta_vee wrote...

Addendum, @CGG

If your Shepard is genociding the Geth because he believes it is the only way the Reapers will stop reaping, he is merely an idiot who is wrong. A monster who became a monster due solely to his own idiocy and hubris, but not one who was malicious. A commander who stupidly and needlessly sacrificed his troops.

Part of the argument of the Red Doom is not just about stopping the Reapers now, but in the future as well. If the Blue Hubris is so untrustworthy, the expectation is thus created that they could return, and thus the war is merely postponed instead of won. To condemn the Red faction for idiocy seems...needlessly inflammatory.

Edit: aw, hell, twice in a row. I'm sorry, guys.

I think a lot of the confusion here come from the fact that that when a smaller part of one of my intricate statements is taken out of context, it takes on different meanings. Thus the "actively trying to kill you no really right this second" part of my one argument kept getting lost, no matter how many times I restated it.

I'm saying Shepard is wrong if he sincerely believes that only Red will stop the Reapers from doing exactly what they're doing right now - if he sincerely believes that, upon choosing Green or Blue, the Reapers will just keep trying to kill everyone.

The Geth agreed to fight with Shepard to try to stop the reapers from killing everyone.

I agree that they would likely willingly sacrifice themselves IF Red were the only way to stop the reapers from killing everyone.

However, that is NOT actually the case. I don't think that it's fair for Shepard to assume that his alliance with the geth gives him explicit permission to commit genocide against them if there are other ways to stop the Reapers.

Which there are. So either Shepard is wrong (because he thinks Red is the only way to win) or he's betraying the geth by sacrificing them when there are other ways to win the war (because I don't think they'd agree to die if they knew there were not one but TWO other ways to end the conflict).

I have a lot more sympathy for a Shepard who is merely wrong, by the way. Saying that he was an idiot was a aftershock of my own ire, though. I do think that it's understandable to make that incorrect assesment and follow through with it, based on the information available. That still does mean he unnecessarily sacrificed his troops, however.

Modifié par CulturalGeekGirl, 17 juin 2012 - 02:21 .

[Hawk227]

CulturalGeekGirl wrote...

I agree that they would likely willingly sacrifice themselves IF Red were the only way to stop the reapers from killing everyone.

However, that is NOT actually the case. I don't think that it's fair for Shepard to assume that his alliance with the geth gives him explicit permission to commit genocide against them if there are other ways to stop the Reapers.

Which there are. So either Shepard is wrong (because he thinks Red is the only way to win) or he's betraying the geth by sacrificing them when there are other ways to win the war (because I don't think they'd agree to die if they knew there were not one but TWO other ways to end the conflict).

The thing is, we're not sure that the other options will stop the Reapers. The problem with Control* isn't that it's evil, but that it is hubristic to think it'll work. The entire issue with Control is that we don't think it'll work. When the Red Faction chooses destroy, the believe that its the only way to stop the Reapers. I still don't see any reason to think that's not true, or I'd be an the hubristic control faction. The cutscenes are irrelevant for 2 reasons: 1) They aren't available when making the decision. If we could predict the future everyone would pick control. 2) They show us only what happens in the following few minutes. What if Control is doomed to failure and the Reapers return an hour later?

*I'll ignore synthesis, because we've been over that enough. TL/DR: We don't know the cost, it could be worse than genocide.

Modifié par Hawk227, 17 juin 2012 - 02:46 .

[delta_vee]

@CGG

Now it's my turn to wonder if I'm making myself sufficiently clear (the answer: probably not).

You asked us, earlier, if we expected to kill all Reapers everywhere. You also said before that the game will teach you how it's meant to be played.

ME1 showed us, with Sovereign, that they will not stop. ME2 showed us, with Reaperduction, that they likely cannot stop, and that they will "find another way". ME3 showed us, with that Destroyer we killed on Rannoch, that even as they lay dying they will treat us with contempt - and it also told us repeatedly that nothing else but dead Reapers would suffice.

So yes, I think the games themselves taught us that the only victory was a complete one, that to win the Reapers must be utterly defeated if not destroyed outright. The means to win any other way were only presented in the last minutes, from a source we have no reason to listen to much less believe. And if you fear the hubris of Control beyond all reason - if you fear that someday Shepard's grip will fail - then how can you limit the definition of "winning" the Reaper war to the scant few minutes of cutscene we get?

Modifié par delta_vee, 17 juin 2012 - 02:52 .

[CulturalGeekGirl]

This is where the most egregious failure of the ending comes from: there is no way of knowing what any of the options do. There's no way of knowing if Red destroys the Reapers or if it just turns off the circuit breaker in the Presidium cafeteria.

There's no logical reason to believe that Red destroys the Reapers when shooting the tube, but not believe that Green or Blue also stops the reapers. The only reason anyone has to believe that the tube kills Reapers is that Starkid says so - so you can't be any more certain that Red will actually kill reapers than you can that Green will stop them in a different way.

Unless you consider the final cutscenes, you can't argue that any of the options stop the reapers. If you don't consider the final cutscenes as evidence, as far as you know absolutely nothing happened after hitting any of the buttons.

That's what I can't comprehend: why would you believe a red button destroys the reapers but not believe that a green button does a different thing or a blue button does a third thing, if the only reason you have to believe any of these things is one guy. If you don't believe the light or the zapper do what the starkid says they do, you have no reason to believe that the red tube destroys the reapers.

There's no rational justification for any degree of certainty as to what anything does, from complete "that red tube could just be a light switch" befuddlement to "I fully believe you" agreement.

It just bothers me when someone says they are certain that  the red tube destroys the reapers, but randomly disbelieves select other aspects of the starkid's explanation, while giving no explanation as to why they believe that one fact and disbelieve the rest.

Modifié par CulturalGeekGirl, 17 juin 2012 - 03:19 .

[bc525]

Warning - this goofy comment wandered off into some odd realm of character development.

The discussion about the destruction of the mass relays a number of pages back was awesome stuff. It amazes me how casually such tremendous concepts get tossed about in this thread, and it's a bit intimidating. Oh and FopMaster5000 is now a legend in my book, such wonderful creativity. Once upon a time I played the sci-fi equivalent to D&D, called "Star Frontiers". Whew, a more beautiful sci-fi experience I have not encountered since then.

The tremendous descriptions of the various Shepards people have been creating and developing are providing an interesting eye-opener for me. I've become genuinely aware of my limitations when creating characters. Creating multiple characters for the same story is not an easy thing. I have exactly three Shepards that encompass ME1 + ME2 + ME3, and really they're only slightly different variations of the same basic character model. To some extent they represent slight experimentation, but they don't really wander too far from some central band of my spectrum. There's no extreme renegade or paragon alignment, each of my Shepards is a slightly modified blend of the renegon/paragrade mixture.There's no femshep, each of my Shepards is male. To be honest they're just three shades of the same Shepard with variations only in character class, love interests, and do they punch that annoying reporter or not.

Now we're getting into the delicate mix of what's my character and what's personally "me". And now it gets really touchy. Because of such consistency in my playthroughs, those versions of Shepard start to represent me (the person), not Shepard. When he gets labeled as a sociopathic murderer or a genocidal maniac, it cuts right through to me. Shepard can only be as heroic or evil as I will allow him to be, and the emotional investment can cross a line there.

If Shepard chooses to commit genocide, am I personally condoning genocide?

My combat experience is zero. There's no way that I can personally speak to how or what I'd be thinking if a horde of husks were bearing down on me. But I wondered (I'm actually good at wondering), what if Shepard hit a breaking point? As though there's some sort of limit to what Shepard could actually endure, and if that point was breached, it's unclear if I would even be sympathetic to him. More importantly, what if I wasn't even aware of that breaking point. What if Shepard literally broke and I kept expecting more and more from him.

After all, he's not me. Or are we saying he's exactly me, and he should do everything that I bid and do it exactly how I envision it? If my character breaks from my control, then that break might just shatter my world and I just give up. Let's be honest, Malcolm Shepard is much tougher than bc525, and I'm not sure that I shoud be criticizing him for the actions he's taken.

Ultimately I can't control everything about this character, some of his fate is just simply out of my hands. I am not God.

[edisnooM]

@bc525

I have a slightly embarrassing, and to some Mass Effect players probably heretical, confession: I have only one Shepard.

[Long sidenote]

Well it's actually a bit muddier than that, one Shepard two universes.

In my first playthrough, my Prime universe, my canon universe, I absolutely loved the world I had created to the point that I couldn't imagine playing it any other way.

Except when I got to ME2.

See my Shepard had romanced Liara in ME1, and I went into ME2 without any doubt that my Shepard would be loyal. But then I discovered how Tali felt about Shepard, and it hit me pretty strongly, to the extent that I decided then and there that I would create a parralel universe for her. This is also a bit embarrassing, I cared enough for a fictional character that I forged an entirely new universe for the sake of her happiness.

And so I did, I played through, made the same choices except I did not romance anyone in ME1, and then romanced Tali in that universe.

Now that was a long winded expose that I trust you will all keep secret, and probably more information than anyone cared to know, but believe it or not the real point of this post begins here.

[/Long sidenote]

My sole Shepard is a Paragon's Paragon, an exemplar, an ideal, a gold standard like Superman or Gandalf, something to which I might aspire but will most likely never achieve.

Which makes the ending all the more horrifying, because in the end my exemplar, my ideal, my "King of the Boyscouts" was torn apart and laid bare before me as a twisted shadow of his former self. No matter what I do, what choice I make, my Shepard is cast down in front of me. Watching it was like watching Superman kill, or watching Gandalf take the Ring.

Worse yet, to finish the story I am forced to actively control his participation in this travesty of choice. I am forced to destroy my avatar in this universe, as well as the piece of myself that I had invested in him and entrusted to BioWare and their creation.

And that didn't feel very good.

[M0keys]

What I dont understand is that everyone's so quick to say the blue ending is a lie, but they go ahead and deem red and/or green totally true, like the king of the reapers wouldn't lie about the option that genocides his entire race?

I think people are just trying to see what they want to see. they personally support a not blue ending, and deny the possibility in their minds that the others are false too.

and I dont support any of course, but... just sayin

[KitaSaturnyne]

I was going to explore why I chose Synthesis first, my illusion being that at the time, I believed it "cost" the least in collateral damage, but upon exploring my reasons for not picking Control, I found that I probably just picked Synthesis because it was the "new thing" presented to the Catalyst via the Crucible. I think I saw it as a final gift from me to the galaxy, and while the scenes certainly tried to paint it that way, there was so little indication of the consequences of my actions, I was unsatisfied with my choice.

So basically, it was pointless of me to explore that because I'm a damned stupid sheep.

What I really wanted to touch on though, was the idea that the Catalyst "liked" or "disliked" any particular choice.

I never once, during the many times I've viewed the ending scenes, thought that the Catalyst preferred any particular choice, either through its dialogue or actions. It just stands there like a holographic instruction manual:

"You can destroy the Reapers. This is what will happen if you choose that. You can control the Reapers. Here's what will happen if you choose that. Here's something I haven't been capable of before, Synthesis. Here's what will happen."

It then sets you free to do your thing, and that's it. I've never once gotten the impression that it liked or disliked any of the particular choices.

EDIT: I'm also having a real problem with people associating Saren with Synthesis. AGAIN, he wanted to barter all organic races into subjugation, to be slaves to the Reapers. His little speech at the end about himself being the "ultimate evolution" is him bragging about his new upgrades, not him vying for all organic races to be conjoined the same way.

Modifié par KitaSaturnyne, 17 juin 2012 - 06:07 .

[CulturalGeekGirl]

M0keys wrote...

What I dont understand is that everyone's so quick to say the blue ending is a lie, but they go ahead and deem red and/or green totally true, like the king of the reapers wouldn't lie about the option that genocides his entire race?

I think people are just trying to see what they want to see. they personally support a not blue ending, and deny the possibility in their minds that the others are false too.

and I dont support any of course, but... just sayin

The more I think about blue with distance from the ending, the more it doesn't seem that bad or untenable. In the moment, though, you just told TIM that controlling the Reapers is really dumb like two minutes ago, so believing that you can control the reapers seems more ridiculous because the game just reinforced that idea.

Heck, control is the only ending where have any pre-ending in-game expository information from which to draw a conclusion, and all that data leads to the conclusion "no, that won't work and trying will probably make you into a monster/traitor." 

The problem is, control working isn't any more unlikely than either of the other two things doing anything remotely resembling what the starchild claims, but because control is something the game has unerringly reinforced as foolhardy, most people's minds instinctively reject it.

For me, there's also the fact that the Starkid tells you that you will lose all that you are. To me, that doesn't seem to indicate that you'd necessarily retain enough "sense of self" to continue being... not evil.

[drayfish]

Precisely as people have been saying, one of the most aggravating things about the ending is that is fails on every level to provide the information necessary for us to respond rationally (or even coherently) in any way.
 
I almost literally think of the ending that we have now as a series of three doors with the words 'Kill Everyfink', 'Mind Controlz', and 'Make Hybridz' hastily scrawled on them in marker. (You can guess which colour each of those doors is.) There's no escape from the room except through one of these three – oh, and if we just stand there and do nothing then we, and everyone we love, dies anyway. The doorman, who appears beside us, describes to us that what will happen when we choose to step through the doors, but his explanations prove to be as thin and immaterial as his skin. ...And he might not even work here!
 
It's ludicrous. The whole situation is a nonsense that cannot be resolved.
 
To put my own experience in context I chose Destroy – and as far as I recall I chose it not because it was the lesser of any evils (certainly not because if I was already in for one mass murder then I may as well go for another), but rather because I had already completely checked out of the whole fatuous scenario. The hypothetical exercise Reaper-Lad had set before me was so limited, so ridiculous, and so without any redeeming merit, that I just selected the one that would blow it all to hell. Game over. This is not my Shepard; this is not a real choice; I reject the premise of the 'problem'; I reject it's vile solutions; I just want everything to explode and purge me of the memory of my journey being entirely violated (no such luck there).
 
I wept when I saw the impact of that choice erupt out into the universe, but I don't feel that it was on me. I had been sucker-punched by a fundamental narrative lie, and it pissed me the hell off. The Geth and EDI had died, sure, but everything else was dead too. That's the only way I can explain it. The moments after I had thrashed about realising that there was no way out except to play one of those three options, the fiction ended and all I saw was a cheap metatextual snare: we got you. You got all the way here thinking you could ride it according to your rules, and now you get to realise this was never your world to control. The universe that my Shepard had existed in ceased to be. And again, maybe that was the artistic message that the creators ultimately wanted to communicate; but if they did then screw them. That was a cruel trick to play.
 
Ultimately, I agree, delta_vee: the ending is so inexcusably vague that it has no merit. At present it is a trap of moral vagaries, with no way out toward understanding. We can thus no more understand one another's choice than we can rationalise what the hell this little freak is on about, or who he even is. We're shadowboxing – and I hope to several mythical and conflicting gods, that this kind of impenetrable, hypothetic wasteland is not what the developers were trying for in their attempts to evoke 'speculations'.
 
I wholeheartedly agree with this analysis:
 

CulturalGeekGirl wrote...
 
I don't want anyone to think about Destroy without thinking about the horrors of genocide, just as I don't want anyone to think about Synthesis without considering the utterly insane risk they took, or to think about Control without recognizing the incredible hubris that that choice entailed. I don't want anyone to forget the horrors implicit in the selection process of any of the three endings, ever.

But again I want to stress: the horror of those realisations are not on us. We are the victims of these false 'solutions'.

We get to the ending of a narrative that we have invested hundreds of hours into, invited to project ourselves and our values into in the wonderfully personal way that bc525 so eloquently described (or to playfully free ourselves into the imaginative excess of a personality quite different from our own), and no matter what, in the final moments we get screwed. Royally, irreparably screwed.
 
This would be a different situation if these games were designed, from their very first moments of decision making, to present impossible scenarios with no happy outcomes – but that's not the game we were playing. Until that ending there was always a way through that didn't end with the complete violation of your moral code – you may not have chosen those win-win options, or prepared enough in order to access them, but they were always there.  (And people will no doubt cite the Geth repurposing or destruction in ME2, but again, this was a decision seen through the prism of Legion's advice, not a decision made in a vacuum on your own. Similarly, a Virmire survivor has to die, but it is a choice that they as a soldier make to sacrifice themself for the greater good; not you needlessly shooting them in the leg and leaving them to rot.)
 
But we get to the ending of ME3 and suddenly, for reasons wholly arbitrary (and I suspect a mistaken attempt to be 'artistic'), the endings get all muddied and compromised. Any hope you had is mixed with regret or existential terror. You cannot 'win' without losing what defined you on the entire journey toward that moment of 'victory'. You're not a hero anymore, you're a chump.
 
And I think that's why people can get so protective of their choices at the ending. This is why you failed if you didn't pick Destroy... Why Control is the only answer... I saw Bicentennial Man, so I know Synthesis is right... We want to believe that we weren't tricked.  We did the right thing, even if other people didn't...
 
But the truth is, ultimately, we all got screwed. They all suck. And there's no sliding scale because they are all as equally nonspecific and awful.
 
I honestly feel that the game may as well have ended like this:
 
'Hey, Shepard: I might have a cat in this box. You can't open it, so you'll never ultimately know. So it's both in the box and not in the box. Get it? Well too bad, because it's going to starve unless you give it ice cream. But ice cream might kill cats. Also, it's probably a dog. Hard to say. And this might not be a box. Probably it's a safe. With no breather holes. But I never said the cat wasn't a robot... I mean dog. And it's got a gun. The ice cream. The ice cream has a gun. You can control the gun, but probably not the dog. I mean cat. ...Aw, f**k it. I'm a Reaper. Just switch the game off.'
 
 
@ Hawk227: fantastic qualification about the impact of definition and context: 'homicide' and the 'negative' inference we bring to it. 
 
 
and @ edisnooM: That was beautiful. I can't think of anything more elegant than someone creating a whole new universe for a character they care about. 

Modifié par drayfish, 17 juin 2012 - 06:53 .

[KitaSaturnyne]

@drayfish

You make me wonder if the ending was the developers' failed attempt at The Pitt. I'll explain what I mean for non-Fallout 3-phytes.

In the expansion entitled The Pitt, the developers were aiming to create an experience based on moral ambiguities, where no choice was particularly right, nor particularly wrong. The central choice to the expansion's little side story is a pretty big dilemma: You can kidnap a baby for a group of slaves to barter for their freedom, or you can leave the baby be with her father, who is the leader of the slavers, and let the slaves continue on as they are. There's also the added wrinkle of the baby's biology containing the cure to the radiation poisoning that is deforming, killing and mutating the slaves.

So, you can steal a child from her parents so poisoned and dying slaves can cure and free themselves. You can also choose to leave the child with her loving parents, one of whom is a strangely benevolent leader of the slavers. I'm leaving a huge amount of detail out for the sake of simplicity.

What I'm getting at is that I'm wondering now if the final three choices in ME3 were meant to be morally ambiguous on some level, and failed in that regard. If so, how did they fail? How might that failure be rectified? Would the results of the choices have to be changed, or the very options themselves?

@delta_vee

I forgot to mention that I was delighted to see Canon finally get its due in this thread. Thank you.

[Sable Phoenix]

edisnooM wrote...

@bc525

I have a slightly embarrassing, and to some Mass Effect players probably heretical, confession: I have only one Shepard.

[Long sidenote]

Well it's actually a bit muddier than that, one Shepard two universes.

In my first playthrough, my Prime universe, my canon universe, I absolutely loved the world I had created to the point that I couldn't imagine playing it any other way.

Except when I got to ME2.

See my Shepard had romanced Liara in ME1, and I went into ME2 without any doubt that my Shepard would be loyal. But then I discovered how Tali felt about Shepard, and it hit me pretty strongly, to the extent that I decided then and there that I would create a parralel universe for her. This is also a bit embarrassing, I cared enough for a fictional character that I forged an entirely new universe for the sake of her happiness.

And so I did, I played through, made the same choices except I did not romance anyone in ME1, and then romanced Tali in that universe.

Now that was a long winded expose that I trust you will all keep secret, and probably more information than anyone cared to know, but believe it or not the real point of this post begins here.

[/Long sidenote]

My sole Shepard is a Paragon's Paragon, an exemplar, an ideal, a gold standard like Superman or Gandalf, something to which I might aspire but will most likely never achieve.

Which makes the ending all the more horrifying, because in the end my exemplar, my ideal, my "King of the Boyscouts" was torn apart and laid bare before me as a twisted shadow of his former self. No matter what I do, what choice I make, my Shepard is cast down in front of me. Watching it was like watching Superman kill, or watching Gandalf take the Ring.

Worse yet, to finish the story I am forced to actively control his participation in this travesty of choice. I am forced to destroy my avatar in this universe, as well as the piece of myself that I had invested in him and entrusted to BioWare and their creation.

And that didn't feel very good.

I know exactly how you feel.  I have one Shepard, as well, and while she had plenty of Renegade-red moments, she generally treated people in a Paragon manner and definitely went blue with almost all of the really big decisions.  She vanished on that elevator ride and I saw something wearing her face come stumbling to its feet in the final room, spouting moronic dialogue without my input at a glowing ghostieboy.  And then I get control back only to be forced to waddle into one of three doorways that... well, we've already discussed what they are ad nauseum.

I have two words for that.  They start with F and end with U.

Modifié par Sable Phoenix, 17 juin 2012 - 07:09 .

[edisnooM]

@drayfish

Thanks, it's one of those touchy feely emotional things I don't tend to discuss much (I'm Scottish you see, we don't tend to do touchy feely :-) ) but I figure we're all friends here, having passed through the fire together. :-)


@KitaSaturnyne

That was a good DLC and a tough choice.


@Sable Phoenix

Frankincense Zulu? :-)

[KitaSaturnyne]

@Mani Mani

Indeed. Also, your feelings regarding Tali are beautiful. It breaks my heart into tiny little pieces every time I turn her down for Liara.

@Sable Phoenix

Fleshy Zebu?

[dorktainian]

it's all biowares fault.

right ....... back to reality then.

[edisnooM]

@KitaSaturnyne

Aye, it felt like kicking a puppy (well, what I imagine that would be like), hence the parallel universe. Science to the rescue. :-)

[BigglesFlysAgain]

@Drayfish

It would actually be cleverer if it there were two "doors" and one doorman always lied and the other always told the truth...

You can probably see where that's going....

I also realise that our earlier debate was almost bordering on giving bioware credit for making endings worth arguing over, what they originally probably intended for them, though I was mostly trying to argue a case rather than my own case. instead I now will not even bother to think about it, I have not replayed the game so I don't even need a placeholder ending just to complete my playthrough, and If I did I probably would roll a dice or do some other random method, because my immersion in the universe has been broken so much the idea of any choice you make actually hurting any real person is absurd, perhaps I will go back to me1 and do the most ridiculous renegade who shoots first, and shoots later as well, see what the maximum amount of kills you can get, after all it really does not matter lol

Modifié par BigglesFlysAgain, 17 juin 2012 - 11:29 .

[drayfish]

@ BigglesFlysAgain: What do you mean? If I see those those guys on the door, I'd ask the one with the theatrically curly moustache who is rubbing his hands together with glee and chuckling maniacally to himself. He seems like a happy fellow.
 
And I know what you mean about that jolt that breaks you out of the immersion. I think on some level that's why I'm afraid to head back into the game again – I don't want to play it knowing that it's all become a falsehood in my mind.  I love those characters; that universe; that ship, and I'm afraid that if I load up again I'll see all those structural cracks in the narrative that I used to happily dance across before. I don't want to talk to EDI and hear about her burgeoning romance with Jeff and think: This is all just narrative manipulation – inviting me to warm up too her so she can be used as a pawn in some idiotic either/or scenario... I don't want to head up into my captain's quarters, look over at my space fish and think: well they are the first things to get eaten once the Normandy becomes Gilligan's Island.
 

Also, importantly, to everyone:
 
I hope it didn't come across like I was trying to shut down debate or discussion earlier; that was just my personal periodic emotional fumigation. I actually think the whole discussion that has been going on throughout this thread has been intensely interesting, and despite the occasional frustrations in communication that understandably surface, I believe the offered analysis has been both revealing and therapeutic. Many of the broached topics were helping me (at least) to see the perspectives of others who likewise found themselves bewildered and eager to better comprehend what everyone else was feeling on those concluding moments of the narrative. 
 
Again, I don't think I've heard anyone ever say: 'I one hundred percent endorse the ending that I chose and all that it represents without even the slightest reservation...'  If I had heard that I would probably be happy for them, but it's never happened. Everyone has so far sought out some kind of further explanation, or longed for some extra detail on what the ramifications of their choice actually was. 

We were all forced into the same witless Choose Your Own Thing-You'll-Be-Crying-About-In-The-Shower-Later, and until we know definitively what any of it actually means, I have appreciated the chance to see where others have approached them from, no matter how divergent the opinion.
 
My only frustration (and it's sadness not anger) comes when I see great, intellectually stimulating people, all who have entirely valid viewpoints, getting tangled up in the inanities of the void left in the ending by its creators. It seems like each time fans speak to a position on those choices they have to work excruciatingly hard to even verbalise what the ending might be saying (because it's such a mess), that it can lead to others getting lost in semantics that only complicate matters further, risking breeding misunderstanding and hostility.
 
And again, despite what that last paragraph may have sounded like, I do not think that's what has happened anywhere here. This thread has remained kind, respectful, and most importantly, eager to seek further clarification throughout – never to shut down anyone else's opinion, but rather to long to better understand it. And that makes me exceptionally happy. Indeed, I cannot express how honoured I feel to be able to be involved in such an attentive, emotionally intelligent conversation with people of such wit and generosity.

Modifié par drayfish, 17 juin 2012 - 12:45 .

[deliphicovenant42]

drayfish wrote...

Again, I don't think I've heard anyone ever say: 'I one hundred percent endorse the ending that I chose and all that it represents without even the slightest reservation...'  If I had heard that I would probably be happy for them, but it's never happened. Everyone has so far sought out some kind of further explanation, or longed for some extra detail on what the ramifications of their choice actually was. 

While I haven't heard anyone really say this either, I did want to return to something CGG mentioned far back in the thread that adds a lot of heat to the many problems with the ending for me.  Namely this: If your Shepherd chose the Quarians over the Geth and doesn't see EDI as alive or all that important, there is NOTHING lost in the Destroy ending.  There is NOTHING reprehensible about at least one of the choices and I hate that fact because that particular path seems so antithetical to the main "point" Bioware seems to be making throughout the series.  Why are the Shepherds who deny value in "others" rewarded with an easy choice in the end particularly if Bioware was going for a such a no easy choice, so-called artistic ending? 

While they've always given the player room to color the story with their own xenophobia, or anti-AI bias, the meat of the story was pushing for the value of tolerance, cooperation and mutual respect.  The player could ignore those threads, but given the lack of "rewards" given to renegades throughout the series, Bioware was giving tacit approval to the neutral-through-Paragon end of the spectrum, until the infamous last ten minutes. 

If the endings were uniformly horrible for all possible Shepherds, in someways it would be easier for me to swallow.  But the very fact that the people who took a path so contrary to the core themes of the story were the only ones who get to slip out untarnished by the ending choice makes me furious.  I get punished for agreeing with the writers basic philosophy where the people who disagree get to have their happy ending?  WTF is that?

Modifié par deliphicovenant42, 17 juin 2012 - 01:09 .

[drayfish]

@ delphicovenant42: Damn. You are absolutely right. While I'm happy to say I've never met the person who would gladly dance on EDI's grave (or rather not even think she deserves one), you make a painfully good point. There does exist (in theory) a nihilistic Shepard who gets to blast through the ending untarnished.

That -

That makes me quite displeased also.


...Displeased like a &%#%^#&*@#*&@@#?&*

Modifié par drayfish, 17 juin 2012 - 01:19 .

[deliphicovenant42]

I wanted to add that I realize Shepherd is asked to die in Destroy (ignoring the breath scene since that is past the choice point) so something may count as "lost" even to the anti-AI renegades, but the whole point is that Shepherd's death is so low on the list of things I didn't like about the ending that it doesn't even enter into the equation in my mind.

I was ready for Shepherd to be sacrificed, his/her survival was not a prerequisite of the ending being satisfying. And since that sacrifice is there for all three choices, only the anti-AI Shepherd has nothing added to the cost of their ideal ending. They get their moment of sacrificial-glory, the universe is safe and everything is restored to their twisted vision of a righteous order again.

And yet pretty much everyone else is being asked to sacrifice not only their lives but some core principle to end the game.

Edit: I keep having additional thoughts every time I walk away from the computer.

Returning to the Destroy ending and the "breath" scene-that little clip makes the whole thing even more infuriating.   While even the anti-AI Shepherds are being asked to sacrifice themselves in all three they are the only ones who get their ideal final choice without any added penalties beyond death.  Yet even that one "cost", self-sacrifce, can be removed with high enough EMS.

Modifié par deliphicovenant42, 17 juin 2012 - 01:49 .

[BigglesFlysAgain]

@Drayfish its a logic puzzle, I'll explain it better

2 doors, behind one is a "good ending" and the other door is on par with the current endings. (the original is a tiger behind one door, and treasure in the other)
Each door has a doorman, both of them say they have the good ending behind their door, one of them always lies, the other always tells the truth. The way to pick the best door is to ask either of them what the other doorman would say is the best door, and do the opposite.

I.e you ask the doorman that is the fibber (you don't know that though) what doorway the other doorman would recommend, and because he always lies he would say that his door would be the one the other doorman would recommend, so you pick the other door.

If you end up asking the honest doorman what his associate would would pick, he honestly knows that he would always pick his own door so he says that.


So the way to win is to pick the door opposite to what each doorman says his associate would choose, I hope I was not too confusing there.

Edits.

I know no one here seriously favours any of the endings, though some of us might get more annoyed by people choosing one particular ending over the others... If that makes sense, though I think our theoretical person who goes "this is not as bad as the others" does not exist on this particular thread, so we are just wasting our breath.


Edit again...


It is personaly troubling to me though that if they expand on the outcome of the choices, but not the way they are advertised, a shepard who chooses destroy was for a second willing to destroy the geth to get the outcome he thought was the best for the galaxy, it could turn out... "hey we're not dead after all!"  or "shame about the geth... The geth? oh they're fine! why would they not be fine shepard?" but that shepard will have to deal with that choice, while the player who probably heard that destroy was a good outcome never had that worry.... you could argue he knew the catalyst was being dishonest, yes but its a bit of a gamble really.


There have been scenarios before where a choice may have have seemed risky for shepard, but the player knew it turns out ok, but I don't think there has been a situation where shepard is told there will be a major negative outcome, which later turns out not to be true, which the player picks with forknowledge of it working out OK.


I.E sending somone down the thermal tube on the suicide mission, shepard knows there is a risk of death to the person going down the tube, but not 100%, while the player knows with the right loyal person they will come out fine. However if shepard is told the person going down the tube will die, (but they later turn out not to) they player picks the choice they are most comfortable rather than a realistc shepard might.

Modifié par BigglesFlysAgain, 17 juin 2012 - 02:47 .

[drayfish]

@ BiggleFlysAgain: Sorry I shouldn't have pretended to be obtuse. Thank you. And I must say, you actually gave the best description of that puzzle I've ever seen.

(If you've heard the Ricky Gervais podcast at all, there is an hilarious account of Ricky and Steve trying to get Karl Pilkington to understand that scenario, one door leading to Heaven the other to Hell, and he just cannot put it together. At one point he even tries to scheme his way past by pretending to be a mailman needing God to sign for a letter. Well worth a listen...)

[BigglesFlysAgain]

drayfish wrote...

@ BiggleFlysAgain: Sorry I shouldn't have pretended to be obtuse. Thank you. And I must say, you actually gave the best description of that puzzle I've ever seen.

(If you've heard the Ricky Gervais podcast at all, there is an hilarious account of Ricky and Steve trying to get Karl Pilkington to understand that scenario, one door leading to Heaven the other to Hell, and he just cannot put it together. At one point he even tries to scheme his way past by pretending to be a mailman needing God to sign for a letter. Well worth a listen...)

Ye I thought you might have got it, I was just not 100% sure, it was either you not understanding it at all, or getting it so much you felt comfortable enough to create an in joke about it. I suppose I decided to explain for other peoples benefit as well.

I have not  heard that podcast, though I was introduced to the puzzle by a radio comedy show taking the ****** out of it slightly, so probably very similar to what happend with Gervais.

I sometimes think Mr. G can be very annoying, but he can be funny, in fact I would rather he had chobots role as the war reporter, he pops up everywhere else, why not mass effect? lol

Modifié par BigglesFlysAgain, 17 juin 2012 - 03:06 .