506 réponses à ce sujet

[David7204]

Well, I did make sure and say most people...

I think I'll make a thread about this later today. See if I can get any answers. Who knows.

[Yestare7]

SilJeff wrote...

Yestare7 posted...

Agree with a lot of your post, and especially the above. Reaper's mystery was just chucked in the bin when they became the catalyst drones.

I am surprised that you do not mention MEHEM. MEHEM's creator has said on several occassions that his main goal was to cut the Catalyst out of the game, and he did that. And now it has come to the point where a fanmade ending is the second most favorite choice, clearly beating Control and Synthesis.

social.bioware.com/4323819/polls/44634/

(...aaand keep in mind that console owners CANNOT install MEHEM, otherwise I believe the number would be well above the 20% mark)

mehem is not canon, its a mod. No amount of advertising, and no matter how popular it may be, a mod is not canon.

it isn't surprising it isn't mentioned

I do not care it is not Canon.
What i care about is that we (the players) have an enjoyable games experience.B) 

MEHEM helps quite a bit for a large group of people.
....and it pleases me personally that it is the second most popular option.:happy::happy:



Y

[Bizinha]

Glad I've been through the depression stage of the Kübler-Ross model ...
Now, I accept that the end of ME3 was poorly written it, I better create the end in my mind.

[Wayning_Star]

Bizinha wrote...

Glad I've been through the depression stage of the Kübler-Ross model ...
Now, I accept that the end of ME3 was poorly written it, I better create the end in my mind.

I'm more bummed having to look up another model..lol

[RinoTheBouncer]

I sort of agree with you about keeping some ambiguity even though the Leviathan DLC pretty much explains who and what the Reapers are.

On the other hand, I would've loved the endings (even though I loved them all, especially the breath Shepard takes in the Extended Cut which made me extremely satisfied) to see some more difference in the outcomes.

We had 3 major differences: Reapers Destroyed, Reapers Tamed, Reapers Leaving.

But I still think it would've been better if the changes in the final cutscenes would have been more obvious unlike only changing the color of the beam coming out of the crucible or whether or not people/Normandy get attacked/explode.

I bought the game as a trilogy as I didn't play them when they came out, only on Shepard's birthday in 2013, I got the Trilogy pack for PS3. I've heard so many negative rumors about the game and then when I played it I was like "What disappointment is everyone talking about? the game + DLC and Extended Cut pretty much offered everything one can imagine.

[JasonShepard]

Yestare7 wrote...

MEHEM helps quite a bit for a large group of people.
....and it pleases me personally that it is the second most popular option.:happy::happy:

...Why? (At the risk of going off topic)

I understand wanting an ending that you can enjoy. But I don't understand enjoying the fact that your prefered ending is beating out other endings in popularity. What difference does it make to you what other people happen to enjoy? I am genuinely curious here.
(I'll also note that I am in the position of having long accepted that Control usually polls last. People will often list it as their second or third choice out of the four/five, not their first.)

@OP: All I'll say is: I agree that the reveal of the Catalyst is rather jarring compared to everything that went before. And I'll agree that it doesn't fit very well thematically (Like everyone else, I dislike that the Big Reaper Boss is the one explaining my options to me). However, I'll note that logically  I have been able to fit it narrative, albeit using a mixture of speculation and headcanon.

[DecCylonus]

matchboxmatt wrote...
...That's because it never fixed the biggest problem with the ending, and perhaps all of the Mass Effect series:That the star child existed at all.

I know I'm totally preaching to the choir here. No one is ever going to say / has ever said that the star child was a good idea. What I think is interesting, though, is figuring out why he doesn't fit in the Mass Effect universe in the first place, because if you give it enough thought, he is the sole reason why the ending didn't work.

False. Bioware could have used Harbinger in place of the Catalyst, as the leader and voice of the Reapers, and kept the rest of the ending the same. People still would have hated the ending for all the same reasons.

matchboxmatt wrote...
Second is that every single decision results in a sacrifice. Even though Mark Walters and Casey Hudson stated that this was the theme of the series, I'm inclined to disagree. If ME2's "suicide mission" was any indicator, it's actually about survival. Every challenge has always afforded some leeway to be victorious. It's only in the last choice that you can't get everything that you want. It sounds spoiled, but it's an expectation they built up through the whole trilogy and only broke in the last five minutes. Every other sacrifice was either imposed (Anderson), by characterization (Mordin), or a result of negligence / poor choice (Miranda / Suicide Mission). Never was there a decision that you made that didn't have an entirely or reasonably positive outcome. Even in Tuchanka, the loss of Salarian support can be gained by other means.

When you created your Shepard, you picked a history for him / her that involved his / her entire squad dying so that he / she could achieve the objective. In ME1 you were forced to sacrifice somebody on Virmire, and then you were forced to sacrifice either the Council or a large part of an Alliance fleet. In ME2, most players got something wrong on their initial playthrough and lost people on the suicide mission. I still remember all the posts here and on other forums asking how to get a perfect run. If you played Arrival, you sacrificed an entire planet of Bataarians because you had no choice.  In ME3, if you listen to the dialogue and read the codex entries about war, sacrifices are being made everywhere just to stall the Reapers. Shepard has conversations with squad mates about potential sacrifices needed to win the war, which foreshadows the final sacrifice. The sacrifice theme is very clearly present, throughout all three games of the series.

matchboxmatt wrote...
The biggest reason that the star child doesn't work, though, is that he downplays the main antagonists of the series - the reapers. The primary reason why they were so intimidating was because they were enigmatic. You had no idea where they came from or what their goals were, and even if you were to find out, it would be beyond your comprehension. They were gods. No matter what the writers chose to do, the fact that they tried to answer the question of their existence at all undermined their purpose. Like all great story telling, some elements are more effective if left to the imagination (Inception's ending comes to mind). This is especially true for the reapers.

People make way too much of the Reapers being "space Cthulhus." It was a humorous epithet when all we knew about them was that they were giant AI starships shaped like squids. Unfortunately people started to take it literally. I don't think it was ever Bioware's intention to leave them unexplained. The existence of the Dark Energy plot proves that they had the inention to explain them as early as the development period of ME2.

Mysterious and unknowable worked well for Lovecraft, and it works fine for the horror genre. Mass Effect is science fiction. A completely unknowable evil that is never explained is the stuff of B rate sci fi or childrens' television. Nearly every respected sci fi franchise, from books to TV to movies, explains its villains. It's expected in the genre. Leaving the Reapers unexplained would have been gauranteed to leave a swath of fans unsatisfied.

matchboxmatt wrote...
So let's apply it. Imagine a Mass Effect without the star child. Imagine if you concluded your confrontation with The Illusive Man only to confront a recognizeable foe - the voice of the reapers, Harbinger. Imagine if you had one final discussion where he was as hostile, intimidating, unforgiving, and mysterious as ever. Imagine if emotions were high, and instead of giving you an explanation, the only thing he afforded you was an argument like every other time you spoke with the reapers. Perhaps he gives a vague warning - "Without us, you will suffer a fate than the one we offered you". After that, he gave you a high-stakes choice with only two or three outcomes that are large in scale, but not meta-physical in application. Like every other decision, however, there is some moral ambiguity, but a potential victory either in the short-term or long-term.

Other than your removal of the metaphysical from the application, this is pretty much the ending we have. I fail to see a meaningful difference. If Harbinger offered us three choices, and every one required a huge sacrifice, the reaction would be the same. The crux of the matter is that some people wanted a happy ending, period. That is why MEHEM is so popular among the ending haters. Every other argument about why the canon endings are bad is just window dressing around their real issue.

Modifié par DecCylonus, 06 mai 2013 - 01:55 .

[Yestare7]

JasonShepard wrote...

Yestare7 wrote...

MEHEM helps quite a bit for a large group of people.
....and it pleases me personally that it is the second most popular option.:happy::happy:

...Why? (At the risk of going off topic)

I understand wanting an ending that you can enjoy. But I don't understand enjoying the fact that your prefered ending is beating out other endings in popularity. What difference does it make to you what other people happen to enjoy? I am genuinely curious here.

slight misunderstanding. let me re-write that. It pleases me personally that MEHEM ( a fan made happy ending device) is more popular than a couple of Bioware's official endings.  Because I believe Bioware should have made a happy ending a possibility. 

(turning the tables, what does it say about ME ending if such a large group of people turn to headcanon
or alternative endings?)

[DDK]

Wayning_Star wrote...

I never spout nonsense..

I once spouted a whole bunch of nonsense.

Then I stopped posting to Reddit.

[JasonShepard]

Yestare7 wrote...

slight misunderstanding. let me re-write that. It pleases me personally that MEHEM ( a fan made happy ending device) is more popular than a couple of Bioware's official endings.  Because I believe Bioware should have made a happy ending a possibility. 

Okay, I can follow that. I don't exactly agree with you, but I wouldn't say I disagree either.

(turning the tables, what does it say about ME ending if such a large group of people turn to headcanon
or alternative endings?)

On the most basic level? That the ending was unpopular. Presumably because of the sharp thematic shift and the amount of stuff left unexplained. I do have to remind myself from time to time just how much speculation I use to cover certain gaps in the narrative. (Why doesn't  the Catalyst call off the Reaper assault if it is willing to let you make a choice?! I have an explanation for that, but the game doesn't.)
I'll agree that the lack of a happy ending plays a part, but I believe if they'd stayed 'in-theme' and left less gaps in the narrative, the reaction wouldn't still be this bad 14 months later...

[Eryri]

 

Ieldra2 wrote...
There's one thing wrong with the Catalyst:
The fact that the ending leaves many players with the feeling that "the evil god wins". We can't argue, we can't set our own conditions, we can't fight it. We are forced to go along with it unless we Refuse. We don't have real agency, we are the instrument of its designs. And this is the entity whose designs we'd been fighting all along. 

I can understand how many people think that, but I would describe it as something even more unsatisfying; the feeling that "the idiot god defeats itself". 
To explain what I mean, lets look for a moment at the Reaper's recent track record.
The Reapers fail to hunt down and destroy all the Protheans. Consequently a small team of scientists survives and infiltrates the dormant Citadel and sabotages the Keepers under the Catalyst's nose. It fails to stops this, or to repair its control of them.

Cut to just under 50,000 years later. The Geth become sentient, and turn on their creators. Precisely the eventuality the Catalyst was created to prevent. It fails to stop this, perhaps because it cannot bring in the Reapers from Darkspace, but even so, it still has Sovereign on hand who could have intervened at that point, but did not. Thank heavens that the Geth were a relatively benign form of AI, because if they had wanted to go on a crusade against organic life, they could have some some serious damage before the Reapers even got out of bed. When Sovereign finally does intervene in the Geth/Quarian conflice, he seduces the Heretic Geth, and caused them to go on their unproductive little rampage.

As the harvest becomes more and more overdue, Sovereign begins to panic, and uses his minion Saren to find a Prothean beacon so as to discover the back door into the Citadel, despite Saren being a Spectre who would have had the authority to quietly go almost anywhere he wished if he hadn't behaved like a raving psychopath. Unfortunately Sovereign fails to remind Saren to destroy the beacon after he takes the information he needs, enabling Shepard to get the same information (although to be fair it was very unlikely that anyone else would have survived the process).

Later, Sovereign loses patience entirely, and launches an all out assault on the Citadel to activate the Master Relay that the Catalyst is apparently powerless to use himself. He does this despite the fact that the Reapers do in fact possess the ability to fly in from darkspace under their own steam in a matter of a few short years (as evidenced by ME3) and tipping his hand by revealing the Reaper's existence would allow the Council to prepare (or would have done if they weren't idiots themselves). Needless to say, it does not go well.

We'll skip ME2, as that's the installment I have the most affection for, and head to ME3. The Reapers arrive from Darkspace, but instead of using a little tactical nous and quietly heading to capture the Citadel, the most strategically important location in the galaxy, they announce their presence with a fanfare by attacking assorted home worlds, thereby allowing the Alliance to regroup.

Over the course of the game, despite being aware of the Crucible's existance through their indoctrinated agents in both Cerberus and the Alliance, the Reapers fail to find or destroy it. Eventually they start to get a little worried and finally get around to capturing the Citadel. This should have been game over for the Alliance as the Citadel functions as the master control node for the entire relay network. Fortunately for us the Reapers seem to have forgotten this, and fail to use it to shut them all down. This would have stranded the Alliance and the Crucible, and allowed the Reapers to pick them off at their leisure. Instead they leak the fact that they are taking it to Earth via TIM and essentially invite Shepard to "come and have a go, if he thinks he's hard enough!" 

Once over Earth, the Reapers helpfully install a new back door into the lynchpin of their empire. Instead of simply switching off the transporter beam when Shepard arrives, they send old Harbinger to guard it, despite his eyesight apparently not being what it was, as he fails to notice the hovering Normandy (in the EC) and fails to hit a stationary Shepard after he stumbles to the ground. After neglecting to check if Shepard is actually dead, Harbinger flies off, allowing Shepard to use the beam. Even though the Citadel is 10 miles long, the beam conveniently deposits him a short stroll from the ward arm control panel. With not so much as a husk to guard it, only a deranged Illusive Man. After Shepard passes out, the Catalyst lends another helping hand, and raises him up to the decision chamber. The catalyst then allows us to pick from one of his 3 pre-approved methods of defeating him. He seems quite eager to get the whole sorry business over and done with as quickly as possible. That, at least, I can understand.

All in all, it's quite amazing that the Reapers have survived as long as they have. They are apparently living on borrowed time. This is made even more obvious by the Refuse ending, wherein even if you fail to make a decision at all, the next cycle finishes the Reapers off a mere 50,000 years later, a tiny period of time considering their vast age. It appears that it is just the Reapers time to die. Fate, if you will. 

That is (one of) my problems with the ending, and the game as a whole. Shepard does not truly win the war. The Reapers and the Catalyst lose it, through their sheer incompetence. We simply "win" by default. 

[Xamufam]

Ieldra2 wrote...

There's one thing wrong with the Catalyst:

The fact that the ending leaves many players with the feeling that "the evil god wins". We can't argue, we can't set our own conditions, we can't fight it. We are forced to go along with it unless we Refuse. We don't have real agency, we are the instrument of its designs. And this is the entity whose designs we'd been fighting all along.

I am not saying a story can't end this way. But to end this way and not leave players unsatisified, it needs to be convincing. The ending must connect naturally with the story that came before, and it absolutely must mitigate the entity's image as the "bigger bad" of the story. As I said in my of my first posts about the ending a long way back, if the ending has the potential to make people feel bad, it must convince the players of its merit. It must make them go "Hmm...I really don't like this, but it makes a great deal of sense" or if it's really good, go "Now it all makes sense!" Instead, when presented with the Catalyst's conundrum, we look back over the story we have played in three games, shake our heads and say "My experience does not support this assertion". The story fails to support the merit of the Catalyst's scenario and thus fails to mitigate its image as the bad guy. Thus, we feel that "the evil god wins".

That we can use our imagination to make things make sense does not nullify this flaw. Whatever the merits of the ending scenario are on its own - and as a pro-ender I think it does have significant merits - it fails to intuitively connect to the story that came before.

The planned ending was supposed to be different & in another structure, There was no catalyst plannned
social.bioware.com/forums/forum/1/topic/355/index/16621390/3#16624681

Synthesis, Destroy, Control was there but in another structure

Modifié par Troxa, 06 mai 2013 - 03:37 .

[AlanC9]

Ieldra2 wrote...

David7204 wrote...
Do you want the leader of the Reapers to be right or not?

Yep, exactly that's the problem. Players might be willing to be convinced that the Catalyst has a point, but it needs to be really good at convincing to achieve that, and most notably, the story must support its points. Assertions players don't like which also fail to be conveyed by the story in a reasonably convincing manner will be rejected by the players.

Do I reject the Catalyst's scenario? Well, no, but that's only because I can imagine how it could make sense and assume that this is what the writers were going for. I'm using unpublished information and the axiom that all high-EMS endings aren't meant to be bad in any objective sense. While personally I don't mind the extra effort, as a rule players should not have to do that in order to get a satisfying ending.

I don't quite see the issue here, though. If you figure the Catalyst is just plain wrong, then you can pick Destroy or Control on the merits (hard to see a case for Synthesis). How is this a problem?

[Iakus]

AlanC9 wrote...

Ieldra2 wrote...

David7204 wrote...
Do you want the leader of the Reapers to be right or not?

Yep, exactly that's the problem. Players might be willing to be convinced that the Catalyst has a point, but it needs to be really good at convincing to achieve that, and most notably, the story must support its points. Assertions players don't like which also fail to be conveyed by the story in a reasonably convincing manner will be rejected by the players.

Do I reject the Catalyst's scenario? Well, no, but that's only because I can imagine how it could make sense and assume that this is what the writers were going for. I'm using unpublished information and the axiom that all high-EMS endings aren't meant to be bad in any objective sense. While personally I don't mind the extra effort, as a rule players should not have to do that in order to get a satisfying ending.

I don't quite see the issue here, though. If you figure the Catalyst is just plain wrong, then you can pick Destroy or Control on the merits (hard to see a case for Synthesis). How is this a problem?

Because even if you believe the Catalyst's claims of the other two functions (and that shooting the pipe doesn't simply release toxic fumes that overcome Shepard and Control isn't just grasping live wires

1) Destroying the Reapers means slaughtering allies and friends who are fighting alongside you.

2) Control is trying to do exactly what the Leviathans tried to do, thinking "this time it will be different" which is pretty much the same logic they used too.  This is aside from the general badness of using the Reapers to control teh destinies of others.

[Eryri]

iakus wrote...

Because even if you believe the Catalyst's claims of the other two functions (and that shooting the pipe doesn't simply release toxic fumes that overcome Shepard and Control isn't just grasping live wires

1) Destroying the Reapers means slaughtering allies and friends who are fighting alongside you.

2) Control is trying to do exactly what the Leviathans tried to do, thinking "this time it will be different" which is pretty much the same logic they used too.  This is aside from the general badness of using the Reapers to control teh destinies of others.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Attributed to Albert Einstein.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" George Santayana

[Yestare7]

d

Modifié par Yestare7, 06 mai 2013 - 04:54 .

[spockjedi]

The CatalyStalin isn't a Deus ex Machina, but it's something far worse: A Diabolus ex Machina.
When TIM is dead and the Crucible is docked, it was very hard to imagine that this thing would appear and either 1) force you to die or 2) force you to exterminate your allies, not mention to the destruction of the Mass Relays. The crucible could've simply fired and fried the Reapers alone, but the natural course of events was interrupted by the Diabolus Child.

[KingZayd]

David7204 wrote...

All the Catalyst is is a character. That's it.

He isn't the Reaper motive.

He isn't the three choices.

He isn't the ending. He's a character. That's it.

He could have been easily replaced with Harbinger and the endings would be exactly the same as they are now.

Actually the endings would be far better if he was replaced. The Starchild ruins things because we are supposed to accept that such a poweful entity was around all this time, and yet has done absolutely nothing. It didn't do anything when the Protheans infiltrated the Citadel, or when they hacked  into Citadel systems. This poweful entity did nothing when Sovereign sent a signal that failed to activate the Citadel Relay, nor did it help Sovereign in the resulting struggle.

Why?

[Clayless]

matchboxmatt wrote...

Beyond the fact that he's a deus ex machina,

Stopped reading here.

The reason why people who don't like the Catalyst, and who push the DEM side of things, don't refer to him as the Catalyst is because it's kinda hard to say something is a DEM when there's 5 priority missions based around it. It's easier to say nicknames, that way it looks like they're talking about something different, an actual DEM, rather than the Catalyst.

Modifié par Robosexual, 06 mai 2013 - 05:23 .

[Linkenski]

The first time i felt that ME was broken was right when i started the demo of Mass Effect 3. Shepard didn't just have a ton of auto-dialogue but it was really, really bad in terms of writing and then came the Child. I think the Child in every scene broke the game, and not just the StarChild. The writers were accepting a child as their pathos-appeal which has been done oh so many times before in both litterary fiction, movies and other videogame stories, such as Heavy Rain and The Walking Dead. Most of the time, people dislike it or turn down the story's offer of emotional investment because it simply feels cheap and pointless to have the torment, or death of a child being the means to make you feel something.

In Heavy Rain the game constantly wants you to sympathise with the lead character, his guilt and the loss of his child who died in a car accident. This is good, but then the rest of the game revolves around the father trying to rescue his other survived child who has been kidnapped by a serial killer. Between spans of time the main character gets video clips from the killer showing him his child nearly drowning in the room he's locked up in. At this point the story wants you to feel sad about the seeing a child in pain. Again... it's cheap.

In Mass Effect 3 it's even worse. Everyone, yes, EVERYONE is being killed right at the very beginning. The game doesn't give you the time to properly get invested or re-invested in the world before you see everyone dying, and then at the top of it, you have to see this forced scene of a child amidst of the chaos who is also killed. That's okay and it did make a lot of people think "****... i forgot how many children must be suffering in this slaughter" but the problem is that the writers wanted Shepard to care about this even more than when some of his very close friends die. He keeps mentioning Earth and "the child" in some dialogues when everyone knows that the entire galaxy might be gone tomorrow, and to me it just felt like Shepard was being emo and nationalistic about his own people.

[Kel Riever]

The Glowjob is a massive failure of what anyone with even an iota of common sense would call writing. It is the second biggest failure of the ending, but the most glaring. The first being that you have no choice of merit to make.

Since you are autodialogued into no choice of merit, however, you would assume that the autodialogue would have the proper amount of attention paid to it. It does not, and the spew that comes out of Glowjobs mouth is something a high school literary magazine editor would have thrown on the pile of discarded submissions.

Arguements abound as to why, but really, sum it up as a job not done.

[HiddenInWar]

I've never really gotten into a discussion about the catalyst, probably because i don't even know how it took the form of that kid at all.

[Muhkida]

David7204 wrote...

Well, I did make sure and say most people...

I think I'll make a thread about this later today. See if I can get any answers. Who knows.

Do yourself a favor, don't waste your time.

You're better off maxing out your multiplayer manifest.