Starkid, that's been done enough. But there were some smaller points about the
ending that I thought had simple solutions and will hopefully get fixed in the
EC. These are mostly with Destroy chosen, since I'm not sure Control or
Synthesis were really thought through as valid choices (ex. the silliness of
Synthesis hybrid DNA, IT, etcetera).
1.) Shepard escaping the Citadel blast. I'm not discounting
IT here, only suspending the part of IT that says Shepard never even got to the
Citadel. Assuming he did, his survival is a bit hard to believe. Well, we know from the Synthesis
ending that he still has enough fight left in him to sprint. It wasn't that far from the
conduit beam to the control room, and there's a noticeable delay between the
Citadel firing and the blast. He's run more implausible distances in less time
before. So the simplest solution is to say that Shepard ran back to the
beam and shot back to London just before everything came crashing down on top of him.
Alternate solution: Rather than Joker running away with the Normandy (seriously, that makes no
sense), Joker heads up to the Citadel. Shepard makes one last zero-G leap to
the Normandy's hatch to close out the series. I would *love* this, just because the zero-G leap into a hatch is like Shepard's "thing."
2.) Dextros starving to death post-battle. This one is easy.
Assuming you brought the largest fleet and they didn't get decimated, the
Quarians have their gun-fitted civilian liveships which produce food for the
entire Migrant Fleet. So they're fine either way. Now, since their civilians
are all now on Rannoch, that means that they've got enough potential surplus
production to take care of the Turians. In addition, any self-respecting military
vessel operating during wartime in space (where getting cut off or stranded is
always an option) would have long term stores of supplies. So even if the Quarian
liveships aren't a permanent solution (and they should be; they worked fine for
the Migrant Fleet), that gives the Turians time to find one.
3.) Eezo cores in the atmosphere. Again, assuming you
brought the largest fleet, and they aren't completely destroyed by the Citadel
blast (with the best endings, it seems to be minimally damaging to non-Reaper structures with the weird exception of the Normandy), with some quick retrofitting you've now got an unprecedentedly large clean-up
operation.
4.) Decimation of Earth. This one doesn't get an easy fix,
and it shouldn't be. But, if anything, the total decimation of the population
actually serves as a boon here. With few survivors, they can be relocated to
less ravaged countrysides. Maybe even shipped to colonies on other planets or
moons in the Sol system (see the codex for colonized worlds), assuming the Mass
Relays are destroyed and they can't be distributed further out. Again, the whole unprecedentedly large fleet business makes for a useful plot device here.
Maybe another opportunity to have a sliding scale in terms of how good your ending is?
5.) Destruction of the Citadel and Mass Relays. This is a
big one. But, and I may be a minority opinion here, I kind of liked it. The
only reasons I didn't like it were the above problems: Dextros starving, Earth
population decimated and cut off, Normandy running away and weirdly taking Shepard's grew with them, etcetera. But if those are addressed, then I
actually really like that the Mass Relays are gone.
Here's my reasoning: In ME1, Sovereign talks about
civilization using Reaper technology, advancing along the paths they desire.
Here, we get to see civilization break free. The future becomes wide open—they will decide their own
technological solutions, free of influence. From that point on, with this IP,
really, anything can happen.
Comm Buoys go through the Mass Relays, so those are down.
But they still have quantum entanglement technology, and apparently a whole lot of it, so while they may be cut
off from the rest of the Galaxy in terms of travel, they are not cut off in
terms of high-level communication and coordination. And we know that comm buoys are
basically miniature mass relays, created by people instead of Reapers. So the foundation
for the technology is there. They've got a whole fleet and dead Reapers to
salvage. It may mean that the Fleet is stuck in the Sol system for a while, but
this is Mass Effect—they'll
find a way. In the meantime, if there's another game in the ME universe, Earth might become a very interesting place with all the species gathered there rebuilding their lives under the shadows of dead Reapers.
Things that I don't see having simple, straightforward
solutions (e.g. the type you can solve in post-Final Battle dialogue or Dragon Age-esque epilogue cards): The starkid, of course. What a non-sequitur. Don't want to talk
about him. Joker abandoning the fight and running away with the Normandy
(seriously, why?). How the squad gets back on the Normandy when we talked to
them just before the final battle. Those are the big ones, I think. Smaller plot holes in the series tend to get overlooked--you can forgive a lot when you care about the characters.
Just want to say that the ME series has gotten me more
emotionally invested in its characters than any other series. I'm a bit
disappointed that it turned out to just be a Very Good Game (with a bad ending)
instead of the paradigm shifter I wanted it to be. I really wanted it to be
Bioware's magnum opus; the one that showed how videogames could engage people
on an emotional level the way a good movie or book does, where you keep coming
back to it months or even years later. The ME series, taken together, came as close as I've seen a
game come to really capitalizing on the potential of games as a narrative
medium.
Instead of that paradigm shifter, though, we've got another Very
Good Game that wanted to be more. That's where I think a lot of the disappointment
is really coming from—that
ME3 could've been so much more. Too easy for forget all the great moments in
the ME series (and, shoot, almost every Bioware game) that got us so invested
in the first place. But I'm glad that Bioware has kept trying through the years,
and the ME series is an accomplishment in a lot of ways for coming this close.
Fixing the ending isn't going to take this series over that plateau, but if
they do it right, it'll be a welcome and meaningful gift to the fans. I'm a fan, and I hope that their acquisition by EA
doesn't go on to change their—yes,
I'm going to use that word—artistic
aspirations. I'm still waiting for one of their games to finally break through
to the next plateau.
Modifié par BooPi, 11 mai 2012 - 03:08 .
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