472 réponses à ce sujet

[Esquin]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

Eain wrote...

Does anyone else have the same problem I'm having? Even beyond the other problems with the ending, I just do not want to do anything the Catalyst offers me. As a result, I never choose and just turn the game off.

I prefer to let the choice remain unmade, because no matter what I do I end up having to betray something about my Shepard or the people in the galaxy. I don't want to do that, at all.

My impression was that this was probably the idea, so in that sense the goal was probably achieved.  And in JMO, this is probably what was meant when it was stated at PAX that "we weren't expecting [the response]."

What I personally enjoyed about the endings was that every choice had a difficult cost associated with it.  It reminded me of Legion's loyalty mission in ME2, which is one of my favourite missions in the entire trilogy.

I never choose an ending because no matter what I choose it's horrible. None of the endings have any redeeming factors. I always play up to the end of Rannoch because up until that point the game still makes sense. Sort of. Beyond that I prefer to just leave it up to the imagination.

Shepard gathered the fleets and kicked Reaper ass.

The end. 

I don't know if we can say that there is nothing redeeming about them.  You've made it clear that you feel the cost with each choice outweighs any potential benefits though, which is maybe what was unexpected as well.

Whether or not the choices have any redeeming value is inconclusive given the current state of the ending, and it is something that I feel can be remedied with the ending DLC since it'll provide an aftermath of the choices made during the final scene.  Or at least it sounds like it will.


Cheers.

Allan


EDIT:  Posts like yours make me think that had the ending offered a 4th solution of rejecting the Catalyst's different solutions, might have helped mitigate some of the outrage.  Though I should reiterate from past posts that I personally would have had this result in the cycle being fulfilled and the Reapers winning.  JMO and probably why people want me as far away from the design pit as possible 

Allan I'd like you to promise me something.

If there is ever a position of some kind of quality checker or story quality checker for the mass effect franchise please apply for it. You've presented a better face for this whole discussion than anyone else at bioware. You really should have some kind of story checking role.

[incinerator950]

Get fired up wrote...

The best option is to just let the reapers destroy the crucible, it happens if you wait for ten minutes. CRITICAL MISSION FAILURE is still a better ending tbh...

So inaction is better than victory?  Blinding yourself and ending your life prematurely doesn't do anything but null the pain because you're reluctant to make a difficult choice.  If you do nothing, everyone you hold dear will die, and the Cycle will continue regardless if your forces can somehow pull off a Conventional victory over Earth.

I don't see why people complain the ending is forced.  The entire story is linear.  People complain that their Shepard wouldn't be Pro-Alliance or Pro-Earth, but Shepard is.  The ending is given to you because of a rush job, and so you get what they present. 

The only worse falicy then poor writing is people's assumption that they really control how a one point story with slight variations of the outcome is truly unique and open. 

[Kilshrek]

Yes Allan, I fear that I dislike your way of running game stories. Haha.. I'd argue for a spectrum of outcomes, nothing fancy, but certainly not running from grimdark to grimdark, and then jumping tracks with Shepard's character at the last.

In achieving their goal of 'shocking' the player, they had to force Shepard into a certain character, one who meekly surrenders all options to the Catalyst (regardless of a 4th option to refuse, simply nodding along to genocide, genetic desecration, or sheer stupidity is to me, not worth nothing) and that forcing of Shepard's character is what really annoyed me.

And then that brings me to the state of the ending, and how was allowed to leave the door in that state. It is rather confusing, and provided very little closure to the personal story, which is what makes it so very disappointing. And like many have been saying, the damage is already done, you cannot undo the first experience, but hopefully the EC will do more than it says on the tin.

Gotta run though, sorry that this is rather brief.

[Allan Schumacher]

Eain wrote...

Hi Allan. And well, rejecting the Catalyst would've gone a long way. But here's what I really feel: destroy is the only legitimate ending and they included an arbitrary drawback to it so that it wouldn't be as easy to pick. There's no doubt that if Destroy simply killed Reapers and nothing else, everybody would pick it.

That probably is the case in that I agree it'd be a no brainer choice if only the Reapers died, though I disagree that it's truly arbitrary.  If it was, then you could put any species in place of the Geth and it'd still make just as much sense.  That the Geth are the most similar to the Reapers (synthetic life), and coupled with things that the Catalyst says regarding the destroy ending, I felt they were more "collateral damage."  Though I've had this conversation with another on the board and he did say it really felt like the Catalyst was saying "Synthetics are bad, so you can destroy them all to save yourself from being destroyed by them later!"  So in that sense the level of openness is probably detrimental.

Control and Synthesis really exist only as solutions for people who don't want to kill the Geth. It's as Shepard said: if you reduce war to math it becomes murder. Am I gonna kill off an entire sentient species simply because that stops cycles? From a utilitarian POV that may make sense, but utilitarianism is a deeply flawed moral system.

Perhaps for many people it is, but at the same time in a different ending thread a poster asked me if I felt that controlling the Reapers might actually be the most ideal solution.  I asked him to elaborate and he essentially said that controlling the Reapers allows Shepard to utilize the Reapers to help rebuild after the war, and maintains a lot of the core technology resulting in significantly less galactic upheaval.  It was so well thought out that I really couldn't tell him no.  And it's situations like these that I think was the goal by leaving the end the way it was, because I HAVE been finding the discussions fun and entertaining.

What I think is really bothersome about the whole thing is the fact that the lead writer seems to have a certain idea about the future of synthetic life that the fanbase simply does not agree with. When I hear the Catalyst talk, I feel like I'm listening to Mac Walters. I have strong suspicions that either he or Casey Hudson remain convinced that organic and synthetic life are inherently irreconcilable. And while they're free to believe that, I am someone staunchly convinced of the opposite and so the ending feels forced to me. When the Catalyst (wrote Geth here, edited) starts talking about how the conflict is inevitable, I really feel that he's just talking out of his ass, because the fact alone that I don't agree with what it's saying means that it is NOT inevitable at all.

It just bothers me that there's this vicious anti-synthetic streak underscoring the series at the last possible moment. It just seems like covert racism to me, and it really killed some of the glory of the Mass Effect series. Rejecting the Catalyst would at least help me say no to that vision, but if saying no to a philosophical premise equates to dooming trillions to extinction then again we're talking about a price that's too high to pay.

I think it's a bit tricky to start reading toooo much into the writer's motivations.  I don't usually comment on them but I will go to bat for my colleagues and say that I do not believe that the endings were intended to come across as statements of condoning racism or genocide or anything like that.  I do think that the goal was to kind of make players think about the consequences of their actions though, and will also say that I think it reflects really well on the fanbase that does feel that killing the Geth is too high of a cost, or that forcing evolution doesn't seem right, and all those things.

Now I'm probabl just being all dramatic here, but I sort of saw the choices provided at the end as striking me very similiarly to Legion's loyalty mission where it made me think about what I, Allan, really feel about the ramifications of those choices.  Very, very few games have ever made me reflect on the person I am like that.  Though this does open up the ending to critique because the idea of it being a roleplaying game is to allow the character to take on a role while allowing the player to distance himself from it somewhat.

[Verit]

Eain wrote...
I prefer to let the choice remain unmade, because no matter what I do I end up having to betray something about my Shepard or the people in the galaxy. I don't want to do that, at all.

I totally agree, this is exactly my opinion as well. Here's what the choices come down to: I either betray the geth and EDI, betray what my Shepard stood for or I betray the entire galaxy. Destroy should have been "my" ending, had Bioware not decided that it needed to be made worse just to make it on par with the other options, which I obviously didn't want to pick in the first place. The end result is that all endings mean a defeat for my Shepard, so I might as well ALT-F4.

[Allan Schumacher]

Allan I'd like you to promise me something.

If there is ever a position of some kind of quality checker or story quality checker for the mass effect franchise please apply for it. You've presented a better face for this whole discussion than anyone else at bioware. You really should have some kind of story checking role.

Haha you flatter me. I'm not entirely convinced I'm wholly qualified. I think it's a bit easier for me to come up with some ideas for how the ending would have worked better because it's impossible for me to remove the influence of reading up on what fans have said. I am trying to be more proactive in seeing the bigger picture of the DA franchise though, as it can be easy to forget that I'm making a game as I spend the vast majority of my time working on the tools, pipelines, and whatnot to help content creators work their magic.

Yes Allan, I fear that I dislike your way of running game stories. Haha.. I'd argue for a spectrum of outcomes, nothing fancy, but certainly not running from grimdark to grimdark, and then jumping tracks with Shepard's character at the last.

Hahaha. I like a spectrum of available endings as well, although while I like the idea of "choice and consequence" I think I have different ideals for choices and consequences.

I like the ability to make choices, but I also don't mind that somethings are outside of my influence and will always happen (especially since it often requires meta knowledge that the player wouldn't have). I love consequences, which is basically the game reflecting on my choices, but I tend to prefer that they are distanced from the choice itself.

For example, take Virmire. Shepard is provided with making a choice to have to save Kaiden or Ashley. I like that I don't have perfect control of the narrative and cannot save both, even if that means I have "less choice." What I would have loved to have happen, though, is for the game to allow any two party members to take those positions, because for the first playthrough it would ultimately lead to the majority of players having to choose between their two favourite squadmates. Which I think makes the scene more powerful!

And then the designer troll in me considers distancing the choice, so the player doesn't make the choice of who goes with them on Virmire (because metagamers will just pick a party member they hate), but the game determines it by keeping track of the choices the player makes on which party members they have with them the most. Players will still game the system, although ironically some would likely be mad at me for "forcing" them to play with an NPC they don't like just so they can kill them off. But to me, I think it's a real and reasonably fair consequence. It might be too heavy handed because Shepard should probably have the opportunity to choose his squad while on Virmire, but I like the idea of the game providing a heavy consequence for the choices they were making earlier.

That's just me though. :]

[Verit]

Allan Schumacher wrote...
Now I'm probabl just being all dramatic here, but I sort of saw the choices provided at the end as striking me very similiarly to Legion's loyalty mission where it made me think about what I, Allan, really feel about the ramifications of those choices.

You see, that decision was about the geth and the geth only. It wasn't like this:

- Destroy the heretics. EDI dies. You live.
- Rewrite the heretics. You "die" and assume control over all the geth.

There, the choice now becomes more difficult. But is that better? Would you be making the choice for the right reasons? No, I don't think so. Destroying and Controlling the Reapers should have been equivalent decisions, and the decision you make should be based on how you want to solve the Reaper problem.  The ME3 ending totally ruins that choice, by presenting solutions to the wrong problem and even worse, by making you "reconsider" about making the choice you wanted to make. The end result? This thread shows what the end result is.

[Shajar]

For sake of Tali's house on Rannoch i need more options

[a.m.p]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

My impression was that this was probably the idea, so in that sense the goal was probably achieved.  And in JMO, this is probably what was meant when it was stated at PAX that "we weren't expecting [the response]."

What I personally enjoyed about the endings was that every choice had a difficult cost associated with it.  It reminded me of Legion's loyalty mission in ME2, which is one of my favourite missions in the entire trilogy.

First of all, let me experss my personal gratitude for coming here and talking about all this. Seriously.

Second of all. People do bring up Legion's loyalty mission a lot in defense of the endings in this type of threads and that always mystifies me. Because Legion and Legion's loyalty mission are an example of how this kind of decisions can be done right.

I've already posted this elsewhere, but I don't have anything to add to this, so I will just repost here:

Let's look at Legion's 'recruitment'. I have an inactive geth aboard that behaved strangely and did not instantly try to kill me like every single other geth I've run into. I get the choice to activate him or not. Yes, we all know it's a videogame and Legion is a squadmate, so everyone activates him, but the perfectly reasonable choice that any human with a brain would consider - to not risk this, is still there. The presence of that option on the dialogue wheel gives meaning to my choice to activate him. It makes it a choice.

Now that I've activated him I learn of the heretic situation. He is a geth and I have no reason to trust him and believe what he tells me. I can just talk to him and leave him there and never go to the heretic station and never use him as a squadmate.

Or I can take the risk and go see what's at the heretic station. Fight my way alongside him to that console and be given a choice - to rewrite them or to blow the station up. Again, at this point I have very little experience communicating with Legion, I can not know his motives, I have no certainty what would happen if I take either choice. I can assume it probably would not instantly kill me because dragging me here just to kill me would be terribly ineffective - he could have killed me a dozen times prior to now if he wanted.

So I can let him do something with their program, I can not be sure what but I can choose to trust him, or if I don't trust him (or think that rewriting them is as bad an idea as synthesis) I can tell him to blow up the station. In which case I see the results within five minutes. It blows up.

Compare that to the catalyst, where I never get to act upon my perfectly reasonable mistrust, thus the choice of trusting him is not a choice at all, and Shepard has no reason to believe they'd live to see the consequences of whatever they pick.

Allan Schumacher wrote...

EDIT:  Posts like yours make me think that had the ending offered a 4th solution of rejecting the Catalyst's different solutions, might have helped mitigate some of the outrage.  Though I should reiterate from past posts that I personally would have had this result in the cycle being fulfilled and the Reapers winning.  JMO and probably why people want me as far away from the design pit as possible 

Fourth solution would definitely fix up to half fo the really big problems.
Now whether it should end in defeat is an interesting question. We here on the forum can debate lore and reaper numbers all we want, but in the end whatever the writers decide will be truth.

So instead I'd like to ask a completely different question. What was that vision that a no-crucible victory would damage? What is the message here, what did the writing team try to express by limiting the options to what they are?

That the only way to solve the problem of a big powerful enemy who wants to kill all your people is to make a deal with that enemy and agree to his other plan for you that destroys your civilization and may kill a specific part of your people?

Because that would be a very odd sort of message for a series primarily about overcoming impossible odds through unity and diversity.

Also. I'd like to point out one last thing. The pro-conventional victory crowd, that I'm part of, does not want this fourth option to be any less pricely or in any way objectively better than the existing ones. It would require to continue the war and suffer countless more casulaties. If we're talking great personal costs to the player, I personally would be willing to sacrifice the whole team+the Normandy for it, if that's what it took.

The only big difference is it would be Shepard's option and not the reaper boss' option.

Modifié par a.m.p, 27 avril 2012 - 08:33 .

[Shajar]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

 is for the game to allow any two party members to take those positions, because for the first playthrough it would ultimately lead to the majority of players having to choose between their two favourite squadmates. Which I think makes the scene more powerful!

This would have been so strong scene, or could have been in ME2, but anyway. I can already imagine myself thinking 1h who to sacrefice 

[incinerator950]

You need more ships and arms for a Conventional Victory. Only Ships remaining outside the Salarians (not enough) would be the Reapers themselves.

Which I'm all in favor for Rogue Reapers.

[Direwolf0294]

My biggest problem with the endings was that I didn't want a morally grey 'make you think' ending for the Mass Effect series. There was enough of that during the series and after spending so much time getting to know the universe and its character, so much time fighting against the Reapers and seeing Shepard go to hell and back numerous times, I just wanted a happy ending. If they'd just had the Reapers get destroyed, everyone lives happily ever after and Shepard's hailed as a hero and goes on to have many more adventures I'd have been happy. Never mind any plot holes or narrative inconsistency, I'd have been happy.

What's really getting me down is that even with the extended cut I just can't see how a happy ending is possible because they're sticking with the three current endings. No matter how much they expand on those endings Shepard's either dead or is a mass murderer. There's nothing happy about either of those. I mean I guess they can give a happy ending to the other characters in the series but to be honest, as much as I love those characters, it's Commander Shepard who I care most about in the series and who I want a happy ending for the most.

[Dendio1]

Allan Schumacher wrote...




EDIT:  Posts like yours make me think that had the ending offered a 4th solution of rejecting the Catalyst's different solutions, might have helped mitigate some of the outrage.  Though I should reiterate from past posts that I personally would have had this result in the cycle being fulfilled and the Reapers winning.  JMO and probably why people want me as far away from the design pit as possible 

Listen to yourself....You're....Indoctrinated!

[Pride Demon]

I always wondered how much does the Catalyst control the Reapers...
He says he created them and controls them, so, if he controls them in a literal sense... wouldn't just destroying the catalyst stop the Reapers? If I crush my motherboard, my PC sure as he*l isn't going to keep working...
In the best case scenario the Reapers should have a massive case of "mind stun", like it happened with Sovereign...
Worst case, they'll just stand there doing nothing...

[EsterCloat]

Having a "We'll fight without it" fourth option would have made me immensely more accepting of the ending, even if it ended in defeat. Sure, I'd want to have an ending where I could fight them conventionally and win but if I couldn't have that then at least give me the option to at least try. Hackett seemed willing to do it, seeing as when Shepard asks him what they would do if they went to the Cerberus Base and they didn't have the Crucible info he responds with, "Then we'll just take what we have and take our chances"(more or less).

Really, my mindset is this: even if we can't win, this is the biggest armada in the history of the galaxy. As far as we know, something like this has never happened before. Even if we were to be totally defeated, we'd take out huge numbers of Reapers in the fight. Just impossible amounts of Reapers in this final fight. If the Reapers want to win this cycle, they would have to pay for every last inch of space to get it. Get as close to a pyrrhic victory for them as possible. And maybe their numbers would be so reduced that the next cycle would finally be able to defeat the Reapers without burning everything that they are to the ground.

Pull a Prothean beacon but with destroying a whole ton of Reapers instead of only a warning (which we give with Liara's time capsules).

Modifié par EsterCloat, 27 avril 2012 - 09:52 .

[Noelemahc]

And then the designer troll in me considers distancing the choice, so the player doesn't make the choice of who goes with them on Virmire (because metagamers will just pick a party member they hate), but the game determines it by keeping track of the choices the player makes on which party members they have with them the most. Players will still game the system, although ironically some would likely be mad at me for "forcing" them to play with an NPC they don't like just so they can kill them off. But to me, I think it's a real and reasonably fair consequence.

I could actually get behind that design logic. It's one of the reasons I liked Alpha Protocol, and Dragon Age 2, and most of the Shin Megami Tensei series -- even the smallest decisions you make over the course of the game snowball into one large, far removed consequence, which, if you think about it, CAN be traced back to those decisions. Although if ME3 was an SMT game, Shepard would auto-pick a colour in the end based on whether you were Para, Rene, in between, saved the geth or the quarians or both, ever called anyone a toaster, helped EDI and Joker hook up, etc, etc.

{Something I learned the hard way - reached the epilogue of Devil Survivor yesterday, got railroaded into a choice between the local equivalent of a "Control" ending where demons are eliminated, God takes over, but humans will be judged with disintegration the moment they even consider sinning FOREVER; and the "Worst Possible" option, where the protagonist and his crew just skedaddle from the final boss fights and Tokyo gets nuked in a "final solution" by the government... That said, I know precisely where I went wrong, so my NG+ is going to probably end in a nice atheistic way}

Now I'm probabl just being all dramatic here, but I sort of saw the choices provided at the end as striking me very similiarly to Legion's loyalty mission where it made me think about what I, Allan, really feel about the ramifications of those choices. Very, very few games have ever made me reflect on the person I am like that.

As KotOR2 clearly demonstrated, players react a lot better when they're SHOWN the consequences of their actions rather than told them in advance, or weakly hinted at. To the point where it probably destroyed any faith whatsoever the players may have had in the light-vs-dark karma meters FOR ALL ETERNITY. It was about the only game that punished "do-gooder" players more viciously than "evildoers", and it did all that via dialogue. Mass Effect was supposed to give us something similar, but somewhere halfway from ME1 to ME2, the design team promptly forgot that -- if you notice, in ME2 and ME3, the Para/Rene system is more-or-less back to Good-and-Evil.

Also. I'd like to point out one last thing. The pro-conventional victory crowd, that I'm part of, does not want this fourth option to be any less pricely or in any way objectively better than the existing ones. It would require to continue the war and suffer countless more casulaties. If we're talking great personal costs to the player, I personally would be willing to sacrifice the whole team+the Normandy for it, if that's what it took.

This, so much this. When any one who is "pro-conventional" brings up the matter in any thread, pro-enders quickly pelt us with "butterflies and bunnies" arguments. We do not want the grimdark gone. We want the grimdark incurred specifically by the Crucible gone. The MEverse is grimdark enough with the common horrors of war, and even if it would have lead to 100% failure, there'd still be a lot of people that would pick a "non-Crucible" option in the ending, if one was available. Of that I am certain.

What's more important, SHOW us that fight. SHOW the consequences of our choice beyond some flashy multi-coloured flashes. SHOW us that we are eliminated and 50K years from now, super-advanced Yahg, having been instructed by Liara's time capsule tear the Reapers a new one and become supreme rulers of the galaxy. Irrelevant how, actually, but SHOW us. Do not leave us groping in the dark, going meekly "What? That's it? We just destroyed interstellar travel capability and we don't learn how anyone reacts? We just erased several races from existance and nobody batted an eye? We just turned everyone against their will into a new lifeform and all we get is an Adam and Eve reference of the cheapest type?"

This is great material for a "My friend just destroyed the Reapers and all I got was a lousy green glow in my eyes" T-shirt.

{Back on the horse: the average SMT game has at least three endings which wildly diverge at about 80% mark of the plot, complete with separate levels, bosses, dialogues and storylines, which may or may not partially overlap where it is feasible. Generally, they go along the lines of "side with the angels, but humanity will be forever forced to be good at the cost of elimination of any resisters", "side with the demons, but humanity will probably end up knee-deep in blood and sin" and "tell everyone to frell off, we'll sort it out ourselves, regardless of how crappily we will do it, because our lives are ours to ruin". There ARE some variations -- Devil Survivor presents also "banish the angels, enslave the demons, usher in a true Utopia based on slave labour" and "become ruler of Hell, mwahaha, haha, ha!".

For comparison, all of ME3's endings would have been firmly in the Hell/Demons/Chaos camp if it was an SMT game}

Modifié par Noelemahc, 27 avril 2012 - 10:04 .

[Eain]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

Eain wrote...

Hi Allan. And well, rejecting the Catalyst would've gone a long way. But here's what I really feel: destroy is the only legitimate ending and they included an arbitrary drawback to it so that it wouldn't be as easy to pick. There's no doubt that if Destroy simply killed Reapers and nothing else, everybody would pick it.

That probably is the case in that I agree it'd be a no brainer choice if only the Reapers died, though I disagree that it's truly arbitrary.  If it was, then you could put any species in place of the Geth and it'd still make just as much sense.  That the Geth are the most similar to the Reapers (synthetic life), and coupled with things that the Catalyst says regarding the destroy ending, I felt they were more "collateral damage."  Though I've had this conversation with another on the board and he did say it really felt like the Catalyst was saying "Synthetics are bad, so you can destroy them all to save yourself from being destroyed by them later!"  So in that sense the level of openness is probably detrimental.

Alright well then riddle me this: why does Control not also allow control of the Geth? Accepting the fact that neither the red nor blue endings are in fact space magic (I think that the only true qualifier for space magic is synthesis, as blue is just a visualisation of a control signal and red is just an explosion if you will), we have to ask ourselves why it is that the signal emitted by control is advanced enough to claim the fused-together minds of the species in Reaper hulls, and thus the Reaper code, but ignores the comparatively simple 1's and 0's of Geth programming.

If the red option is somehow harmful to anything that could be classified an AI, then why is the blue option not? Nevermind the fact that we're never given elaboration on how the energy waves work exactly, even if we focus just on the Geth being a victim of the red choice but not of the blue one, we're seeing a lack of consistency. That makes me feel the Geth's inclusion in red is arbitrary, and therefore yes, it could've just aswell been the Turians or Salarians or any other race.

Control and Synthesis really exist only as solutions for people who don't want to kill the Geth. It's as Shepard said: if you reduce war to math it becomes murder. Am I gonna kill off an entire sentient species simply because that stops cycles? From a utilitarian POV that may make sense, but utilitarianism is a deeply flawed moral system.

Perhaps for many people it is, but at the same time in a different ending thread a poster asked me if I felt that controlling the Reapers might actually be the most ideal solution.  I asked him to elaborate and he essentially said that controlling the Reapers allows Shepard to utilize the Reapers to help rebuild after the war, and maintains a lot of the core technology resulting in significantly less galactic upheaval.  It was so well thought out that I really couldn't tell him no.  And it's situations like these that I think was the goal by leaving the end the way it was, because I HAVE been finding the discussions fun and entertaining.

I agree with that person. Sure, there's advantages to controlling the Reapers. I just never got where it came from, really. ME3 introduced too many new elements at once for me. Now I'm okay with the introduction of new elements, but as someone who has quite a passion for writing sci-fi I always try to make sure that everything that happens in my story has a basis in it. Even now I'm writing a book that I am hoping to publish somewhere this year, and I am constantly going over early chapters where exposition is key to ensure to reference or foreshadow notions that I intend to be of significance later on. I don't want things to come out of left field for my audience.

Suddenly TIM wants to control the Reapers, suddenly there's an anti-Reaper superweapon, suddenly the Reapers care so much about humanity that they ignore the Citadel entirely, etc. These things are never explained in the backstory. They just happen. All things considered, Control isn't a bad choice. I just don't get why it's there. Like the Geth's inclusion in Destroy, Control feels arbitrary. Throughout the whole trilogy we were given a simple objective: prevent the Reapers from returning as long as you can, but when they do, destroy them. And now suddenly if we want to be the good guys destroying them is bad? Since when was killing a galactic holocaust machine a bad thing? Oh, wait. The Geth. Right.

What I think is really bothersome about the whole thing is the fact that the lead writer seems to have a certain idea about the future of synthetic life that the fanbase simply does not agree with. When I hear the Catalyst talk, I feel like I'm listening to Mac Walters. I have strong suspicions that either he or Casey Hudson remain convinced that organic and synthetic life are inherently irreconcilable. And while they're free to believe that, I am someone staunchly convinced of the opposite and so the ending feels forced to me. When the Catalyst (wrote Geth here, edited) starts talking about how the conflict is inevitable, I really feel that he's just talking out of his ass, because the fact alone that I don't agree with what it's saying means that it is NOT inevitable at all.

It just bothers me that there's this vicious anti-synthetic streak underscoring the series at the last possible moment. It just seems like covert racism to me, and it really killed some of the glory of the Mass Effect series. Rejecting the Catalyst would at least help me say no to that vision, but if saying no to a philosophical premise equates to dooming trillions to extinction then again we're talking about a price that's too high to pay.

I think it's a bit tricky to start reading toooo much into the writer's motivations.  I don't usually comment on them but I will go to bat for my colleagues and say that I do not believe that the endings were intended to come across as statements of condoning racism or genocide or anything like that.  I do think that the goal was to kind of make players think about the consequences of their actions though, and will also say that I think it reflects really well on the fanbase that does feel that killing the Geth is too high of a cost, or that forcing evolution doesn't seem right, and all those things.

Now I'm probabl just being all dramatic here, but I sort of saw the choices provided at the end as striking me very similiarly to Legion's loyalty mission where it made me think about what I, Allan, really feel about the ramifications of those choices.  Very, very few games have ever made me reflect on the person I am like that.  Though this does open up the ending to critique because the idea of it being a roleplaying game is to allow the character to take on a role while allowing the player to distance himself from it somewhat.

Alright, two points about this particular bit.

1) I think that you're probably right about the writer's motivations, but only insofar as that I do not think that they regard themselves as casual racists. Now before anyone takes offense, I want to say the following: I do not mean that to be as bad an insult as it appears to be. I think that 99% of humanity is casually racist. It's not really so much of an evil or malicious thing as it is a survival mechanism: alien things are potentially dangerous, so we do not like alien things. So I regard it more as a sort of design flaw in humans rather than it being a negative trait that's actively someone's fault.

But even Mike Gamble's statement on twitter that synthesis is beautiful because it means there is no longer any diversity, just life, means that within the ME3 dev team there's some sort of agreement on the fact that conflict is best resolved by making everything the same. Except we know that this is blatantly not true. It's like saying that the best way to resolve racial tensions is by having everyone interbreed. Sure, that may remove the difference between black, white and asian people, but that doesn't change anything about the fact that human beings are inclined to blow each other's brains out when the stakes are high enough.

I know that this is a very politically sensitive subject so I don't want to go too far in accusing Bioware of promoting anything that could be regarded as undesirable. But the thing is the entire game is structured around synthesis being the best ending. You need the most EMS to get it, devs have stated they think it's a beautiful ending, or that destroy is the worst one in comparison to the alternatives, etc. I sort of get this eerie vibe that this whole message of strength through diversity is underscored by the idea that diversity is only worth it if it's organic diversity.

Humour me here: imagine if we do create self aware AI some day, and they look back at this trilogy. What do you think that they will take away from it? That there were progressive minds in human society who really championed the synthetic cause before it even existed, or that we always harboured some sort of crazy fear for them?

As for the second bit:

2) I've always been very philosophically inclined. I study philosophy, I spend most of my free time thinking and reading, and my preferred entertainment is sci-fi that touches on transhuman and futurist themes. I enjoy all of that immensely. So for me it was never so much about discovering what my position was about anything. I already knew. I knew even before I embarked on the Rannoch arc that I found Geth life inherently more beautiful than those bigoted Quarians and their warped perception of what synthetics are. Every time Xen talks about them as if they are machines I cringe.

Likewise, for every person of my conviction there is someone who has spent an equal amount of time coming to radically different conclusion. For those people it would've been obvious from the outset that the Geth would perish and that the Quarians would be sided with. Those people don't think twice about the Destroy option because really who cares about a bunch of machines?

So the ending is really only strong if it's the first time you encounter these philosophical themes. But if that's the case I would propose reading Heidegger or playing the Deus Ex games. Mass Effect to me was always about saving the galaxy from Space Cthulhu. Not about resolving a metaphysical conflict.

Modifié par Eain, 27 avril 2012 - 10:14 .

[Noelemahc]

But even Mike Gamble's statement on twitter that synthesis is beautiful because it means there is no longer any diversity, just life, means that within the ME3 dev team there's some sort of agreement on the fact that conflict is best resolve by making everything the same. Except we know that this is blatantly not true. It's like saying that the best way to resolve racial tensions is by having everyone interbreed. Sure, that may remove the difference between black, white and asian people, but that doesn't change anything about the fact that human beings are inclined to blow each other's brains out when the stakes are high enough.

I am reminded of the premiere issue of the Cable and Deadpool comic, way back. Genetic terrorists used some sort of fancy DNA bomb to make everyone in the world identical, and the involvement of Cable, the time-travelling messiah son of Cyclops, hijacked it to make them blue-skinned. Didn't work out. You might make everyone LOOK the same, but you will NOT fix their opinions this way -- people quickly took note that skull shapes, and other distinct racial traits were still noticeable, and it certainly did not fix social differences.

In fact, whenever you think up any race-fixing solution, chances are, it's already been covered in some way in the X-Men comics. For obvious reasons. There's been a story where everyone on Urth got superpowers. A story where every mutant was turned human (which was significantly better done than the subsequent M-Day story fifteen years later - except that the one where it was Mr. Sinister hijacking the High Evolutionary's space station ended in the X-Men restoring everything back to normal (in the meantime showing us a very cathartic side-story about how those who could not have a social life - like Rogue and Marrow - actually minded the restoring) - and it took Necrosha, which was atrocious in its own special way, to start undoing the damage done to the setting by M-Day). A story where every superpowered individual was declared as mutant and hunted. A story where being a mutant became a good thing (alas, within the run-up to M-Day, and we all know how THAT ended). Ecksetra, ecksetra.

Mass Effect to me was always about saving the galaxy from Space Cthulhu. Not about resolving a metaphysical conflict.

This should be a sigpic banner. The moment where arguing whether synthetics are better than organics (or maybe not) took over the plot instead of stopping an invasion of cybernetic Eldritch Abominations was the moment that something broke in the storytelling process. And there's a very clean delineation of when that happened. As many have pointed out, the Snicket Warning Label should go on Anderson's death.

Modifié par Noelemahc, 27 avril 2012 - 10:25 .

[Wulfram]

The things about destroying the Geth is it comes out of absolutely nowhere, and is barely addressed even when it's brought up. There's no reason to think it might be the cost of destroying the Reapers beforehand, and there's no option to question it's necessity or express anger or regret or anything.

While Control, Control could actually be an OK ending. The problem is that the way the story has been written, it really doesn't seem like it's supposed to be. Whenever Control has been mentioned before, it's in the context of Indoctrinated TIM justifying horrific war crimes. So having Shepard at the very last minute - with, again, no real opportunity for us to develop their reasoning or feelings about this - embrace TIM's plans and give us a happy ending just seems totally wrong.

It's like if at the end of Lord of the Rings, when getting to Mount Doom it suddenly turned out that destroying the Ring and Sauron will also kill all the Elves. The alternative is to put on the Ring and rule Middle Earth. Now you could just assume that Frodo's a good guy and he'll do good things with his power, but does that really fit with the story we've seen so far?

Or you've got the "Control the Reapers to fly into the sun" interpretation. I favour this personally, but the big problem with this is that it really seems like it's going against the intent of the developers - if they wanted you to be able to Destroy the Reapers without the Geth, then they'd just put that option on the Destroy option.

While Synthesis is just a mash of stuff I find totally abhorrent and plain gobbledygook, so I can't even consider that.

[a.m.p]

Noelemahc wrote...

Mass Effect to me was always about saving the galaxy from Space Cthulhu. Not about resolving a metaphysical conflict.

This should be a sigpic banner. The moment where arguing whether synthetics are better than organics (or maybe not) took over the plot instead of stopping an invasion of cybernetic Eldritch Abominations was the moment that something broke in the storytelling process. And there's a very clean delineation of when that happened. As many have pointed out, the Snicket Warning Label should go on Anderson's death.

"Dammit Anderson! The Mass Effect series didn't last 5 minutes without you!" © here.

It's true. It baffles me why anyone thought that the end of the biggest war the galaxy ever knew, whichever way it would end, needed some kind of extra symbolism and philosophy added to it to be profound and meaningful.

[Noelemahc]

It's like if at the end of Lord of the Rings, when getting to Mount Doom it suddenly turned out that destroying the Ring and Sauron will also kill all the Elves. The alternative is to put on the Ring and rule Middle Earth. Now you could just assume that Frodo's a good guy and he'll do good things with his power, but does that really fit with the story we've seen so far?

Don't forget the bit where you CAN also toss the ring into Mt. Doom, but it will turn everybody in the world into orcs and Nazguls will be out of a job.

[incinerator950]

Wait, I don't remember Kotor 2 punishing me for anything.  I remember being betrayed a few times by people I was supposed to help, and they died.  Then I remember a few major segments of the game that got cut.  It was another case of I mindlessly could do a Good Jedi run and not realize anything bad happened, because I walked away without scratches regardless.  Anyone who didn't like what I was doing could be left on the ship, and the character alignment paths were rediculously easy to navigate out of.

a.m.p wrote...

Noelemahc wrote...

Mass Effect to me was always about saving the galaxy from Space Cthulhu. Not about resolving a metaphysical conflict.

This should be a sigpic banner. The moment where arguing whether synthetics are better than organics (or maybe not) took over the plot instead of stopping an invasion of cybernetic Eldritch Abominations was the moment that something broke in the storytelling process. And there's a very clean delineation of when that happened. As many have pointed out, the Snicket Warning Label should go on Anderson's death.

"Dammit Anderson! The Mass Effect series didn't last 5 minutes without you!" © here.

It's true. It baffles me why anyone thought that the end of the biggest war the galaxy ever knew, whichever way it would end, needed some kind of extra symbolism and philosophy added to it to be profound and meaningful.

Not hard, they needed to make an ending that stood out but accomplished something.  They ran out of time and were rushing, hence why the entire final hour of the game is weaker than the Earth Intro. 

[Spanky Magoo]

I went in going to destroy the reapers from the start so thats what I did. As for the options presented The very fact it appears as the kid leads me to think that its actively interacting with sheps cybernetics and tring to corrupt him. So choosing any of his options seems wrong in some way or another because we as the player are given so little context and no opportunity to challenge its logic.

I think it all boils down to lack of time and resources coupled with some bad writing to create a perfect storm of an immersion breaking and nonsense ending. The IT seems like its giving to much credit to the same people that came up with the current ending in the first place imo.

[Noelemahc]

Not hard, they needed to make an ending that stood out but accomplished something. They ran out of time and were rushing, hence why the entire final hour of the game is weaker than the Earth Intro.

...which, in turn, was already obscenely weak and unengaging except for the bit where Shepard and Anderson argue about Anderson staying. And even that could've been made better, IMHO. Admit it, when we all saw the vids/played the demo, we thought it was a demo rendition of a much larger, more enticing segment. Hah. Fat chance.

The IT seems like its giving to much credit to the same people that came up with the current ending in the first place imo.

No truer words were spoken. Of all the conspiwacy thewyes floating around, the Manipulation Theory holds water better, because it stems from ME1. (In short: "What if Hackett was indoctrinated/evil/Cerberus and was leading Shepard around by the nose since day one?" Most of the things we know about Hackett and his activities, we know FROM Hackett, etc, etc.)

Wait, I don't remember Kotor 2 punishing me for anything. I remember being betrayed a few times by people I was supposed to help, and they died. Then I remember a few major segments of the game that got cut. It was another case of I mindlessly could do a Good Jedi run and not realize anything bad happened, because I walked away without scratches regardless. Anyone who didn't like what I was doing could be left on the ship, and the character alignment paths were rediculously easy to navigate out of.

I guess I'm more gullible and/or impressionable? Maybe so. I still have the impression that, rush job that it was, KotOR2 did a better job with the bits of it that were complete than ME3. Sadly, the engine of ME3 is a lot harder to make a Restoration Mod for =(