342 réponses à ce sujet

[daecath]

Sajuro wrote...

You're right, Bioware should never try anything new
just clones of Baldur's Gate, KOTOR, and Mass Effect
clones forever

The last game of a trilogy, especially the last 10 minutes of the last game of a trilogy, is not the time to be experimenting with something new. By that point, the train is barrelling down the tracks downhill at 100mph. You do not try and make a 90 degree turn under those conditions. You shut off the engine, apply the brakes gently, and coast into the station. You've established your story, you've established what is and is not possible in your universe, you've set expectations for basically how things will go. Now just draw to its natural conclusion. If you've got a cool idea, save it for the next one.

[CmdrStJean]

Now that I've had some time to think about all this, I'm not at all certain why conventional victory was impossible - other than because everybody said it was.  The only real information we have regarding fighting the Reapers comes from the Prothean experience, which was a war fought under a very particular set of circumstances.  If I remember correctly, the Protheans never fought a pitched battle against the Reapers.  As the Relays were shut down, the entire affair took place on, at best, a cluster to cluster basis; at no time were the full forces of the Protheans available to take on the Reaper threat in a single consolidated effort.  This is a far cry from what's going on in ME3; in which there is a concerted effort to pool all available resources into one final make or break engagement.  It seems to me that the whole "no conventional victory" thing was an asumption based upon a misunderstanding of the available facts.  We just don't know if the Reapers could be defeated by the full might of existing galactic civilization, as such a battle has never taken place (that we know of).

All that said, and again in hindsight, I really wish there had been a "vanilla" conventional victory option and I can say, with some certainty, that I would have been okay with something like that.  I didn't need a fancy, innovative or "cutting edge" conclusion to the Mass Effect trilogy.  I just wanted to win and to save the galaxy, as it is.  That's all I was looking for; and prior to the various retcons inserted into the EC, such an ending was not possible.  I agree that at times it's a good thing to try something different, I simply don't think the last ten minutes of a multi-million dollar game franchise is the right time for that sort of thing.  There's no reason at all, that I can see, why Bioware couldn't have played it safe here and decided to change course later on.  Other than of course the confluence of massive egos, time constraints, and EA's meddling.  Of course none of this matters now, what's done is done, but I'll always wonder about what might have been.  I actually had something invested in the outcome of this trilogy; that's a mistake I intend to never make again.

[CitizenThom]

The Greeks had no chance against the Persians... until they acheived a miraculous naval victory...which they had no chance of winning...until Greece discovered new silver deposits, with which to finance the construction of more triremes that were deployed for that naval victory.

If the Reapers are bound by the same physics as the rest of the universe, there's no reason that they could not be defeated by the non-Reaper forces if the circumstances happened to line up correctly. The majority of ME3 is about Sheppard and the rest of the galaxy doing everything in their power to make circumstances lineup. So there's at least one chance in one hundred that the Reapers would get beaten in a conventional battle.

Modifié par CitizenThom, 25 août 2012 - 02:56 .

[dreman9999]

Stornskar wrote...

dreman9999 wrote...

Stornskar wrote...

dreman9999 wrote...
No...They fixed it. You just don't like how they fixed it. Before it was unclear to what was going on. They made it clear what going on now.  It can be better but it is fixed.

You are arguing about something that's subjective as if it's a point of fact. It's fixed in your opinion, not in mine. Before, the endings were stupid; now the endings have been retconned somewhat and explained in more detail, but they're still stupid - I would argue even moreso. That's my opinion

But you yet to say why the endings are stupid.  If it because of the choice in hand, then you miss the point that the choice are made to induce persanal conflict.
If it because you don't know why it work this way with te choices, then your missing the fact that control is a rewrite and destory effects alltech.
If it because of the catalyst, you missing the fact that he has no control over the choice given outside of synthesis.He only presents the choice, is primary job is to be the voice box of the reapers.
If it's because of the motives of the reapers , then you're missing the point that the issues is of defination with the catalyst is different from organics and that the catalyst is doing what the is programed to do, he is just going to the extremes to do so.

Right ... so what you're saying is that it's my fault that I hated the endings. Got it, thanks ...

No, I'm saying the fact that you hate the ending is you opinion. That does not mean the endings are bad.

[dreman9999]

iakus wrote...

dreman9999 wrote...

iakus wrote...

dreman9999 wrote...
This is a war story. You would be seen as Naive to think nothing negavite will happen in a war story.
Heck, the negative emotion have been in the series since the first game. So your excuse is baseless.
Heck, If you want to go farther with it, let's look at the ending they orignally planned to do. Both choice in that ending would still end with hopelessness even more then what we have.

I'm not talking about negative events in a war story, I'm talking about the ending.

The first two games ended with hope.  Though ME2 could end on a dark not if you got most of your crew killed.  ME3 ended with no matter what you do, you're screwing the galaxy before committing suicide.  And there's no way to avoid it.  No amount of EMS, no choice, nothing can alter that. 

 Hopelessness, futility. sadness

And Bioware, in all it's artistic vision, decided that was more important than actually providing ending chcoie people would like.

ME1 ended with idialistic hope. But that was basedon naivity.

ME2 ended less in hope but more on a willingness of facing on coming doom.

ME3 slapped us with the reality of the situation. One way or the other it would end with dread. Look up the origianal concept of the ending and you'll see my point. Drew was going to end ME3 in dreed.

Also, ems was never strated to over come the reapers. In game and by the devs, it was stated just to hold the reaper at bay for a while and protect the crucible. Conventional victory is not possible.

So it's smart to slap people with "reality" in the last en minutes of a 100 hour long trilogy?  I don't care what the "original concept" was since it's pretty clear they were just making the game up as they went along and were on a "dark and gritty" kick when they came up with the ending.

  It's like the trilogy started out as the Justice Leage and ended as Watchmen.

And I'm not talking about EMS or conventional victory.  I'm talking about outcomes players can live with.  So much focus was placed on making each ending "imperfect" that the end result left all of them pretty horrific to me.  Not at all like DAO where no ending was perfect, but the possible outcomes could be more or less acceptable to different players depending on who you're role playing.

Reality was slapped on you when you saw one reaper take on a fleet in ME1. The quetion of the extreme of how to beat them were there from the first game the moment you had to decide between saving trhe council or saving human ships. And BW kept adding on the concept through out ME2.
Is a suprise when the based question asked by the series what extreme your willing to go to stop an unstopable force that they asked that very quetion in the very extremes?
Also, DA is a bit differnt becuae the negative results of one ending would not be felt of a long time. If you don't know how you doomed your self you can say it's better then the doom that you know.

[dreman9999]

daecath wrote...

Sajuro wrote...

You're right, Bioware should never try anything new
just clones of Baldur's Gate, KOTOR, and Mass Effect
clones forever

The last game of a trilogy, especially the last 10 minutes of the last game of a trilogy, is not the time to be experimenting with something new. By that point, the train is barrelling down the tracks downhill at 100mph. You do not try and make a 90 degree turn under those conditions. You shut off the engine, apply the brakes gently, and coast into the station. You've established your story, you've established what is and is not possible in your universe, you've set expectations for basically how things will go. Now just draw to its natural conclusion. If you've got a cool idea, save it for the next one.

BS.People have dicridit other last games of the series for doing the opposite. Added, know form the ending we originaly going to get, doom humanity or doom the galexy, it clear we were always going to get a moritly conflicting ending. The irocic thing is the new choices are less difficult to make then the old choices.

[dreman9999]

IanPolaris wrote...

dreman9999 wrote...

IanPolaris wrote...

Blueprotoss wrote...

J. Reezy wrote...

Blueprotoss wrote...

knightnblu wrote... 
 
There was never any pay off for the player. A lot of us spent a lot of time and money on the trilogy and we were rewarded with crap. No matter which ending you pick, you had to take a bite off of the crap sandwich and enjoy the taste because BioWare wasn't going to let you get away with a clean taste in your mouth. Pick control you die and never see anybody you care about ever again and your friends are all Reapers. Pick synthesis and you rape the galaxy. Pick destroy and you kill the Geth and EDI. The message? Victory always blows.

If there was no payoff for the player then there would be no ending...

There's more to a payoff than a denouement. Satisfaction is a big part of that.

Thats a straw-mann just like how ME1 and ME2 had a small amount of rage just like ME3.  There's no such thing as a 100% satifactory rating and shortening the quote won't help you.

That's not true.  The rage agaist ME3's ending far overshadowed any amount of dissastisfaction against ME or ME2.  This wasn't a small group of people.  The loathing expressed towards ME3's ending was both deep and broad, and in a recent podcast Bioware even (grudgingly) admitted this and admitted this was obvious early.  You don't "rework" your ending to satisfy a few complainers.

-Polaris

Since they did rework there ending...Why are people still complaining?

Simple.  It amounts to the fact that de-Nial isn't just a river in Egypt.  For whatever reason Bioware either won't accept or can't accept why people genuininely hated the ending, and as such they nibbled and improved things along the edges but weren't actually able or willing to fix what was really wrong (starting with catalyst kid).

-Polaris

The problem with the ending was that it was not clear. Anyone hating it because of the catalyst is just looking at the new ending like the old endings. Pre-ec we were not clear who was in control of the chaoices and assumed the catalyst was. Post-ec, it's clear that that catalyst is not in control of the choices at all. The catalyst is just the voice box of the reapers, an as long as you don't get that you'll never get the endings.

[dreman9999]

CitizenThom wrote...

The Greeks had no chance against the Persians... until they acheived a miraculous naval victory...which they had no chance of winning...until Greece discovered new silver deposits, with which to finance the construction of more triremes that were deployed for that naval victory.

If the Reapers are bound by the same physics as the rest of the universe, there's no reason that they could not be defeated by the non-Reaper forces if the circumstances happened to line up correctly. The majority of ME3 is about Sheppard and the rest of the galaxy doing everything in their power to make circumstances lineup. So there's at least one chance in one hundred that the Reapers would get beaten in a conventional battle.

The fact that you compearin gthe persian to the reapers makes it clear your missing the point.
The persian have a limit of tech, recourses, man power, and need to rest. The reapers have none of these limits. The reapers have endless husk and oculus drones, way more reaper ships, need no resourses, are extremely had to kill and it take suicide runs to even harm them.

The only ships that can harm a reaper from the distance are drednoughts and we only have 85 of them in the galexy.
A reaper ship can one shot any of our ship at any range and have a massive ammount of ships...
 
That can'tbe beat unconventionally.

[JasonDaPsycho]

Shepard didn't flinch when she killed all those Batarian children and she's getting all worked up over a human kid? I know the natures are kind of different but still...

[IanPolaris]

dreman9999 wrote...

The problem with the ending was that it was not clear. Anyone hating it because of the catalyst is just looking at the new ending like the old endings. Pre-ec we were not clear who was in control of the chaoices and assumed the catalyst was. Post-ec, it's clear that that catalyst is not in control of the choices at all. The catalyst is just the voice box of the reapers, an as long as you don't get that you'll never get the endings.

Wrong.  That was not the problem with the original ending.  That is the Spin the Bioware/EA would like you to believe.  Yes the original endings weren't clear, but that was the least of their problems.  The primary problem with the ending that Bioware either can't or won't fix is that the ending is completely contrary to the nature of the entire rest of the franchise.

Bioware needed to at minimum rewrite the entire ending from scratch starting with the beginning of Priority Earth.

See Understated Nerdrage.  He explains the literary failings of ME3's ending very well (and the EC fixes almost none of them).

-Polaris

[ZeCollectorDestroya]

And this is a reason why SW:TOR failed. It was a singleplayer RPG turned into a MMORPG last minute.

[txgoldrush]

IanPolaris wrote...

dreman9999 wrote...

The problem with the ending was that it was not clear. Anyone hating it because of the catalyst is just looking at the new ending like the old endings. Pre-ec we were not clear who was in control of the chaoices and assumed the catalyst was. Post-ec, it's clear that that catalyst is not in control of the choices at all. The catalyst is just the voice box of the reapers, an as long as you don't get that you'll never get the endings.

Wrong.  That was not the problem with the original ending.  That is the Spin the Bioware/EA would like you to believe.  Yes the original endings weren't clear, but that was the least of their problems.  The primary problem with the ending that Bioware either can't or won't fix is that the ending is completely contrary to the nature of the entire rest of the franchise.

Bioware needed to at minimum rewrite the entire ending from scratch starting with the beginning of Priority Earth.

See Understated Nerdrage.  He explains the literary failings of ME3's ending very well (and the EC fixes almost none of them).

-Polaris

Wrong.

The ending fits the franchise perfectly.

How?

Because mostly the galaxy is built on the conflict between the created and the creators. Much of the ME1 and ME2 storylines come from the conflicts between created and creators. It makes sense than that the Catalyst is defined by this conflict and the whole Reaper cycle.

Nevermind the main theme of ME3 is CLEARLY about sacrifice, and sacrifice played a huge role in the series before ME3.

[Mathias]

txgoldrush wrote...

IanPolaris wrote...

dreman9999 wrote...

The problem with the ending was that it was not clear. Anyone hating it because of the catalyst is just looking at the new ending like the old endings. Pre-ec we were not clear who was in control of the chaoices and assumed the catalyst was. Post-ec, it's clear that that catalyst is not in control of the choices at all. The catalyst is just the voice box of the reapers, an as long as you don't get that you'll never get the endings.

Wrong.  That was not the problem with the original ending.  That is the Spin the Bioware/EA would like you to believe.  Yes the original endings weren't clear, but that was the least of their problems.  The primary problem with the ending that Bioware either can't or won't fix is that the ending is completely contrary to the nature of the entire rest of the franchise.

Bioware needed to at minimum rewrite the entire ending from scratch starting with the beginning of Priority Earth.

See Understated Nerdrage.  He explains the literary failings of ME3's ending very well (and the EC fixes almost none of them).

-Polaris

Wrong.

The ending fits the franchise perfectly.

How?

Because mostly the galaxy is built on the conflict between the created and the creators. Much of the ME1 and ME2 storylines come from the conflicts between created and creators. It makes sense than that the Catalyst is defined by this conflict and the whole Reaper cycle.

Nevermind the main theme of ME3 is CLEARLY about sacrifice, and sacrifice played a huge role in the series before ME3.

You know just cause you say "Wrong." doesn't make it so.

[Pheonix57]

liggy002 wrote...

They just tried too hard with the ending and it simply didn't work.

That's what I suspect. I wonder if they think that a conventional victory wouldn't have made us happy? Look at the endings from the first two games.

[Pheonix57]

You know, I think the other problem is that they tried to make our enemy "nicer" at the end.
"We aren't killing you! We're harvesting you so we can preserve you eternally in synthetic form!"

I liked my bad guys when they were actually bad.

[txgoldrush]

Mdoggy1214 wrote...

txgoldrush wrote...

IanPolaris wrote...

dreman9999 wrote...

The problem with the ending was that it was not clear. Anyone hating it because of the catalyst is just looking at the new ending like the old endings. Pre-ec we were not clear who was in control of the chaoices and assumed the catalyst was. Post-ec, it's clear that that catalyst is not in control of the choices at all. The catalyst is just the voice box of the reapers, an as long as you don't get that you'll never get the endings.

Wrong.  That was not the problem with the original ending.  That is the Spin the Bioware/EA would like you to believe.  Yes the original endings weren't clear, but that was the least of their problems.  The primary problem with the ending that Bioware either can't or won't fix is that the ending is completely contrary to the nature of the entire rest of the franchise.

Bioware needed to at minimum rewrite the entire ending from scratch starting with the beginning of Priority Earth.

See Understated Nerdrage.  He explains the literary failings of ME3's ending very well (and the EC fixes almost none of them).

-Polaris

Wrong.

The ending fits the franchise perfectly.

How?

Because mostly the galaxy is built on the conflict between the created and the creators. Much of the ME1 and ME2 storylines come from the conflicts between created and creators. It makes sense than that the Catalyst is defined by this conflict and the whole Reaper cycle.

Nevermind the main theme of ME3 is CLEARLY about sacrifice, and sacrifice played a huge role in the series before ME3.

You know just cause you say "Wrong." doesn't make it so.

Like him?

Please....face it, you don't get it.

Sorry, but Bioware doesn't have to listen to the whiney fanboys and they shouldn't.

[AlanC9]

CitizenThom wrote...

The Greeks had no chance against the Persians... until they acheived a miraculous naval victory...which they had no chance of winning...until Greece discovered new silver deposits, with which to finance the construction of more triremes that were deployed for that naval victory.

If the Reapers are bound by the same physics as the rest of the universe, there's no reason that they could not be defeated by the non-Reaper forces if the circumstances happened to line up correctly. The majority of ME3 is about Sheppard and the rest of the galaxy doing everything in their power to make circumstances lineup. So there's at least one chance in one hundred that the Reapers would get beaten in a conventional battle.

That math doesn't follow. You've got no reason to think that 1% is the correct figure there. I don't think even Bayesian analysis will help.

[Fnork]

Binary_Helix 1 wrote...

By failed I mean the fan backlash at a time when the  trilogy was suppose to be at it's apex it hit it's low point instead.

ME3 didn't need PTSD sequences, nihilism, an unbeatable foe, or transhuman nonsense, it just needed a conventional victory with a few varying end choices based on player morality. Nothing fancy but who cares? Stick with what works.

Hell yes. I never wanted this wannabe videogaming Pulitzer baloney. I can understand wanting to try new things but it might be a better idea doing that in a new series and not in the ending of a trilogy.

[dreman9999]

Fnork wrote...

Binary_Helix 1 wrote...

By failed I mean the fan backlash at a time when the  trilogy was suppose to be at it's apex it hit it's low point instead.

ME3 didn't need PTSD sequences, nihilism, an unbeatable foe, or transhuman nonsense, it just needed a conventional victory with a few varying end choices based on player morality. Nothing fancy but who cares? Stick with what works.

Hell yes. I never wanted this wannabe videogaming Pulitzer baloney. I can understand wanting to try new things but it might be a better idea doing that in a new series and not in the ending of a trilogy.

Please, the old ending choices they originaly planned was just as moraliy conflicting as the current choices. They always planned to have an ending with the player being moraly conflicted.

[dreman9999]

Pheonix57 wrote...

You know, I think the other problem is that they tried to make our enemy "nicer" at the end.
"We aren't killing you! We're harvesting you so we can preserve you eternally in synthetic form!"

I liked my bad guys when they were actually bad.

When in ME have the bad guys been inheritly evil? Saren was a puppet who thought helping the reapers was the right thing to do, the collectors were puppets, TIM beleive he was logically and ethicly right. Having the reapers be antagonist that beleive they are do ing right is hard persed in the rest of the series.

[3DandBeyond]

LanceSolous13 wrote...

I would say its an issue of how the PTSD was handeled. They could have had some really great nightmares of friends and characters the player cares for dying in Shepard's dreams and had the player freaking out. But, with this random child that there's no emotional connection to, They're painfully bad.

Like, replace the child with your LI and they'd be so much better. Don't have an LI? Person with the highest relationship score.

Exactly.  The kid was inserted as a generic character to care about, clearly directed at new players.  They showed the kid at the beginning, then in the dreams.  If it was Kaidan or Liara or Mordin, franchise fans would "get it", but new ones wouldn't.  It's part of the huge mistake of the whole game.  They catered to new players and just didn't care if they dropped current fans.  They needed to create a decision tree "comic" like they did for PS3 players and Genesis.  That worked fairly well.  Only now are they doing that with the WiiU version.  Too late because it won't fix the game for ME1 and 2 players.  It would have been easy enough to do-offer the Genesis one that exists along with the new pre-ME3 one.  They could have made a better, bigger ME3 that took into account previous content.  And dreams with characters in them that we had cared about would have just worked, even if they had flashbacks that were like the beacon visions in ME1, along with the oily shadows.

[dreman9999]

3DandBeyond wrote...

LanceSolous13 wrote...

I would say its an issue of how the PTSD was handeled. They could have had some really great nightmares of friends and characters the player cares for dying in Shepard's dreams and had the player freaking out. But, with this random child that there's no emotional connection to, They're painfully bad.

Like, replace the child with your LI and they'd be so much better. Don't have an LI? Person with the highest relationship score.

Exactly.  The kid was inserted as a generic character to care about, clearly directed at new players.  They showed the kid at the beginning, then in the dreams.  If it was Kaidan or Liara or Mordin, franchise fans would "get it", but new ones wouldn't.  It's part of the huge mistake of the whole game.  They catered to new players and just didn't care if they dropped current fans.  They needed to create a decision tree "comic" like they did for PS3 players and Genesis.  That worked fairly well.  Only now are they doing that with the WiiU version.  Too late because it won't fix the game for ME1 and 2 players.  It would have been easy enough to do-offer the Genesis one that exists along with the new pre-ME3 one.  They could have made a better, bigger ME3 that took into account previous content.  And dreams with characters in them that we had cared about would have just worked, even if they had flashbacks that were like the beacon visions in ME1, along with the oily shadows.

The kid was there to question the intent of the dreams. Was it ptsd or indoctriantion? We will never know.

[3DandBeyond]

dreman9999 wrote...

Pheonix57 wrote...

You know, I think the other problem is that they tried to make our enemy "nicer" at the end.
"We aren't killing you! We're harvesting you so we can preserve you eternally in synthetic form!"

I liked my bad guys when they were actually bad.

When in ME have the bad guys been inheritly evil? Saren was a puppet who thought helping the reapers was the right thing to do, the collectors were puppets, TIM beleive he was logically and ethicly right. Having the reapers be antagonist that beleive they are do ing right is hard persed in the rest of the series.

Go back and see what Anderson says about Saren in ME1.  He wasn't Mr. Sunshine.  And TIM may have believed he was right, so doe the kid.  So what?  People are judged and labeled often by the things they do, not just what they say.  A lot of despots don't see themselves as evil, but ask the people they killed if they were or not.  Right, you can't because some nice despot killed them. 

The reapers were inherently evil until the kid came along.  Sovereign and Harbinger enjoyed killing.  They were evil from the only point of view that mattered: people they were turning into goo.  The Protheans were not very nice at all.  Part of their problem.  They forced people to join their empire or they killed them.

[3DandBeyond]

dreman9999 wrote...

Fnork wrote...

Binary_Helix 1 wrote...

By failed I mean the fan backlash at a time when the  trilogy was suppose to be at it's apex it hit it's low point instead.

ME3 didn't need PTSD sequences, nihilism, an unbeatable foe, or transhuman nonsense, it just needed a conventional victory with a few varying end choices based on player morality. Nothing fancy but who cares? Stick with what works.

Hell yes. I never wanted this wannabe videogaming Pulitzer baloney. I can understand wanting to try new things but it might be a better idea doing that in a new series and not in the ending of a trilogy.

Please, the old ending choices they originaly planned was just as moraliy conflicting as the current choices. They always planned to have an ending with the player being moraly conflicted.

That's what's wrong with it.  Why the need to have it turn into some internal moral battle.  Save the freaking galaxy, destroy the reapers or not.  That's what mattered, not creating an ending to some story ME wasn't about.

[Putok]

CmdrStJean wrote...

Now that I've had some time to think about all this, I'm not at all certain why conventional victory was impossible - other than because everybody said it was.  The only real information we have regarding fighting the Reapers comes from the Prothean experience, which was a war fought under a very particular set of circumstances.  If I remember correctly, the Protheans never fought a pitched battle against the Reapers.  As the Relays were shut down, the entire affair took place on, at best, a cluster to cluster basis; at no time were the full forces of the Protheans available to take on the Reaper threat in a single consolidated effort.  This is a far cry from what's going on in ME3; in which there is a concerted effort to pool all available resources into one final make or break engagement.  It seems to me that the whole "no conventional victory" thing was an asumption based upon a misunderstanding of the available facts.  We just don't know if the Reapers could be defeated by the full might of existing galactic civilization, as such a battle has never taken place (that we know of).

All that said, and again in hindsight, I really wish there had been a "vanilla" conventional victory option and I can say, with some certainty, that I would have been okay with something like that.  I didn't need a fancy, innovative or "cutting edge" conclusion to the Mass Effect trilogy.  I just wanted to win and to save the galaxy, as it is.  That's all I was looking for; and prior to the various retcons inserted into the EC, such an ending was not possible.  I agree that at times it's a good thing to try something different, I simply don't think the last ten minutes of a multi-million dollar game franchise is the right time for that sort of thing.  There's no reason at all, that I can see, why Bioware couldn't have played it safe here and decided to change course later on.  Other than of course the confluence of massive egos, time constraints, and EA's meddling.  Of course none of this matters now, what's done is done, but I'll always wonder about what might have been.  I actually had something invested in the outcome of this trilogy; that's a mistake I intend to never make again.

IMHO, rather than the silly Crucible deus ex machina, we should have been devoting resources and scientists to retrofitting the entire fleet with the Normandy's tech. Those Thanix Cannons cut a Collector ship in half, effortlessly. A Cain can drop a reaper with a giant cannon on its back. Thanix missiles can apparently kill a reaper too.

The war effort should have beeen about upgrading everyone with the technology needed to beat the Reapers, not a poorly implemented "I Win" button whose instruction manual is delivered by a Reaper that's been fishing in our heads for the most sympathetic avatar possible. Most of the missions in the middle of the game are great. Gathering allies is fun, there are some intersting choices, and it's really very well done. Final mission could have been about disabling some sort of Reaper command and control center, or breaking in to a reaper to plant a virus, something along those lines. Maybe uploading EDI into a Reaper so that she could sacrifice herself to destroy their collective AI. If they really want to kill Shepard, he/she can die in a blaze of glory Virmire style while holding off the badguys long enough that EDI can finish the job.

One of the biggest problems is that the climactic final battle turned out to be less than climactic. It involved us limping through some sort of weird dream-like sequence on the Citadel, and having the boss Reaper try to convince us that the indoctrinated Illusive Man was right, not every sane person you've spoken too and not your gut instinct.