165 réponses à ce sujet

[TwevOWNED]

There always seems to be that excuse of "Well they wrote themselves in a corner, the only thing left for them to do is a Deus Ex ending" to which I say, sure, but it's the execution of the Deus Ex that counts.

 

Having finished a playthrough of easily my favorite rpg series on the xbox 360, I came to that part of the games again which I always dread. The ending. A younger me would have been heartbroken. Disappointed. Sad, to see such a wonderful trilogy of sci fi bliss end in such a bland, unartistic way. But I have since grown, studied the ways of writing, and even have had plays produced in a one act festival at my place of schooling. So today, for the price of absolutely free, I bestow upon you not one but nine glorious endings all from the same scenario, not changing a thing from the previous parts of the game but perhaps a few menial pieces of dialogue, and in these ending a multitude of poignant, artful moments that express the creative range of writing cliches such as

 

-The Defiant Hero

-The Tragic Loss

-The Big Baddie Boss Battle

-The Happy Ending

-The Bittersweet Ending

-The Everyone Dies Ending

-The Enemy Is Now My Friend

-The Immoral Technology

-Forgiving The Unforgivable

-The Slow Walk Towards the Camera While Stuff Explodes

-The Stylized Finisher

-Maximum Edginess

-Pointless Destruction

-Freaking Lasers

-I Am Your Father

and last but not least

-Shepard Dies

 

So strap in, buckle whatever needs be buckled, and get ready to read stuff.

 

 

Right off the bat we can nix starchild by giving the Crucible a practical use. We know that dark matter disrupts shields because of that sun over Haestrom, and since Sovereign died so much faster once his shields went down, let's make the Crucible a bigass cannon that projects dark matter energy waves in an area, depleting the reapers shields and giving the fleet a fighting chance. This leads us to Moral Choice 1: 

 

-Use the Crucible to its full effect, allowing Shepard's fleet to get the best chance at victory, but microwaving earth in the process so that billions die.

 

-Or, focus the Crucible's dark matter beam so that it doesn't affect earth, but makes it harder for the fleet to win.

 

Now that alone blows the "red blue green" ending out of the water, but let's continue.

 

Hackett: "Uh-Oh, it looks like the reapers build some kind of structure that is protecting their fleet from the Crucible"

Shepard: "I'm going down there to stop them"

Anderson: "No my boy, it is too dangerous"

Shepard: "After all this time, you're my father?"

<static>

Shepard: "Cortez we going down there"

Cortez: "Aight"

 

So Shepard and crew go down to a planet either overrun with reaper forces or getting blasted by so much space magic that it's breaking apart, where they see reapers mass harvesting bodies of humans or seeing people be ripped apart by the dark matter and melting. (this covers maximum edginess) With the help of Anderson, they reach the reaper structure which Harbinger has fused himself into to make earth the new reaper HQ. They fight through the superstructure reaching a courtyard where Harbinger assumes control of a super brute to crush Shepard once and for all. The Illusive Man swoops in with Cerberus in an attempt to kill both Shepard and Harbinger and take control of the reapers. The Illusive Man's ship goes down, pinning Anderson in rubble, and Shepard finishes of Harbinger in an epic battle. The battle ends with the damaged Harbinger charging Shepard, prompting "Hold B to Heavy Melee" to appear on the bottom of the screen. Depending on the class, Shepard does a finisher on Harbinger, disabling the reaper and temporarily powering down the facility. Shepard turns to the Illusive Man, who has almost climbed out of the rubble. With Harbinger dead, the indoctrinating implants have been disabled, and the Illusive Man offers to get the Cerberus fleet, hidden on the other side of the Solar System, to flank the reapers and assist in the battle. Anderson says to not trust him, and attempts to shoot the Illusive Man, hitting the dropship's fuel canister. This leads to Moral Choice 2:

 

There is only enough time to save one from the rubble of the ship before it explodes

.

-Save the Illusive Man and gain the assets of the Cerberus Fleet, but leave Anderson to die.

 

-Pull Anderson from the rubble, saving Shepard's mentor and killing the bastard in charge of Cerberus.

 

But we're not done yet. Harbinger's body still sits in the arena, and the power to the facility is about to come back online. Some reapers still networked to Harbinger could be used against the others, and container that fell from the Illusive Man's dropship has a device that would allow such an action if installed before the shutdown ends. Moral Choice 3 presents itself:

 

-Use the device on Harbinger's body to turn the reapers against eachother.

 

-Destroy Harbinger, ending any chance of using reaper technology and shutting down the field protecting the reapers in space permanently.

 

Either action starts a facility purge, and evac is needed. The squad runs out in an attempt to escape the blast, but they will need a shuttle to escape. Suddenly, Cortez flies over the horizon, but is under fire. The final situation appears:

 

-If Cortez has been ignored or Shepard has treated him poorly, he cracks under pressure, and goes down. Shepard and company die in the blast from the facility

 

-If Cortez has been talked to and has been given support from Shepard, he manages to pick up the crew and flies them out of the area. 

 

The result of the battle above earth is based on war assets collected, and off the three moral choices in the final mission. The battle will be a victory if enough assets have been gathered, and selecting all three "bad" options (Earth Destroyed, Illusive Man Saved, Reapers Controlled) will always result in a victory. To get the "best" ending, almost all war assets will need to be collected for (Save Earth, Save Anderson, Kill Reapers) to be a victory.

 

List of Possible endings

Key:

Earth Saved/Destroyed (ES/ED) 

Anderson/Illusive Man Saved (AS/IS)

Reapers Destroyed/Controlled (RD/RC)

 

-ED, IS, RC

-ED, IS, RD

-ED, AS, RC

-ED, AS, RD

-ES, IS, RC

-ES, IS, RD

-ES, AS, RC

-ES, AS, RD

Fleet Destroyed

 

Also tack on Shepard Lives/Dies on those endings, but we all know you will be buddy buddy with Cortez knowing Shepard dies otherwise.

 

Final monologue has Shepard/Joker on Earth (if saved) or the Citadel (if Earth is destroyed) presenting a monument one year after the battle for earth. Details of the choices that have been made (ie: Curing Genophage ect.) are presented, and if Shepard has a romance at the end of ME3, and if said person survived, they are shown together. The end. 

 

"What about the reaper's motives and origins?" you may ask. They are never found. Never mentioned. Never explored. The and most terrifying villains in Sci Fi are the ones with no foreseeable motives other than they kill everything. The Borg in Star Trek, the Xenomorphs in Aliens, the Cylons in BSG (before their origins were explained at least). All we need to know is the Reapers make more of themselves out of lesser species. The cycle could very well be how they keep their species going, and nothing more than that.

 

There ya go. Not hard. Took me all of an afternoon to think it up. Not the best of writing, with some obvious jokes (anderson wouldn't be shep's dad) but I'm betting a team of writers could take that idea and run alot further with it than with starchild.

[Kabooooom]

The dark energy disrupting shields thing is actually an interesting/plausible idea that would definitely have worked better with the story.

Here's what it comes down to and what the ending SHOULD have embodied:

A sacrifice of Shepard was heavily foreshadowed throughout the entire trilogy, along with the obvious religious themes surrounding his character. Everyone with half a brain was expecting him to die at the end. But here's the crux: You ARE Shepard. You should have had the opportunity to willfully sacrifice yourself, and without metagaming, in the endings Shepard truly doesn't know. In Destroy, there's no reason for him to assume he will die. In Control, the nature of death is ambiguous due to living on as an AI (depending on your perspective of death and consciousness). The only choice where he can really be sure of death is Synthesis.

It's needlessly contrived, needlessly muddied, needlessly complicated. It should have just been:

Sacrifice yourself, ensure victory and destruction of the reapers once and for all, or don't sacrifice yourself and do not ensure victory (EMS assets may allow victory if high enough).

Such a choice brings MEANING back to the sacrifice. I dare say that without metagaming, most Shepards would have chosen the sacrifice choice to absolutely ensure victory - thus underscoring the nature of Shep's character, the sacrifice that the entire trilogy had been building up to, and that most players would willfully choose it.

[CrutchCricket]

Having the Crucible strip shields then moving to a conventional battle was my initial idea as well.

 

The issue with that is that the Reaper's goals are a) to harvest and to clear the cycle before AI overcomes organics (never mind whether this is nonsensical or not).

 

If they start losing they can and probably will abandon a) and just focus on the latter. Which means Reapers move from mostly shrugging us off while they reap to Reapers glassing our planets from orbit. And there is precisely dick we can do to stop them. They can also escape in space and hang out indefinitely, hitting us at will. We on the other hand are planet-bound one way or another, and can't all go the quarian Migrant Fleet route (and look how well it worked out for them- i.e. it nearly didn't).

 

The reason we can't win conventionally isn't that the Reapers are too strong. We're just too weak, or more accurately we can't cover our planet-sized weaknesses worth ****.

 

So sadly, we do have to go back to space-magic oneshotting the Reapers. Though we certainly don't need the holokid and his bullshit to do it.  The red and blue waves can be explained without him. Green is tougher to justify.

[ImaginaryMatter]

So sadly, we do have to go back to space-magic oneshotting the Reapers. Though we certainly don't need the holokid and his bullshit to do it.  The red and blue waves can be explained without him. Green is tougher to justify.

 

Ya, a lot of the problems with the ending stem from everything being explained by the star child. The ending would be stronger on the sense making front if you just replaced it with something like Vendetta.

[AlanC9]

Hard to avoid the starchild isn't really the right criterion here, you know. It's not like the starchild was the only option Bio thought they had. It accomplished certain goals they had, but nobody sensible ever thought the kid was the only way to present that material. What you're doing is setting yourself different goals than Bio set for themselves in the first place, since you want to leave the Reapers mysterious and Bio apparently never even considered that approach, judging from Drew K.'s statements.

We know that dark matter disrupts shields because of that sun over Haestrom, and since Sovereign died so much faster once his shields went down, let's make the Crucible a bigass cannon that projects dark matter energy waves in an area, depleting the reapers shields and giving the fleet a fighting chance.

Why wouldn't the Reapers just FTL out when they notice their shields aren't working? Even if you can take a bunch of them out before they do, you've still got an enemy force that's faster than your fleet and the Crucible. They can just fly around an blow up your worlds before you can intervene. Organics need supplies and fuel, Reapers don't, so eventually the organic fleets collapse. You'd have to rewrite those aspects of the game too, though I don't think that's a huge problem -- most of that's only conveyed in Codex entries anyway.

With the help of Anderson, they reach the reaper structure which Harbinger has fused himself into to make earth the new reaper HQ.

This isn't really plausible. Why would Harbinger do that? Why build it on the planet rather than in space? If it needs to be on the planet, why not run it via telepresence the way he ran the Collectors? Also, Harbinger's death is a rerun of Sovereign's, but I presume that's deliberate.

[CrutchCricket]

What you're doing is setting yourself different goals than Bio set for themselves in the first place, since you want to leave the Reapers mysterious and Bio apparently never even considered that approach, judging from Drew K.'s statements.

Which statements are these?

[Vazgen]

Which statements are these?

I know of this quote:

We knew we wanted to focus on some key themes and bring in certain key elements: organics vs synthetics; the Reapers; the Mass Relays.

 

Link

[TotalWurzel]

To the OP, I personally think the problem stemmed from both a technical and financial basis.  It's easy to have all those component pieces you mentioned and be able to log them within the game as well as dynamically adjust the campaign to account for previous outcomes during gameplay, but the problem comes when you try to tie it all together on-screen into a coherent narrative - the complexity of the software, the amount of VA and graphical work would be substantial to say the least, unless you went down the Fallout route of slideshows, one VA and stripped down the possible outcomes to the bare bones (which kinda kills the idea of a unique player driven narrative ending).

[AlanC9]

@ CrutchCricket: Also, in the series of interviews where Drew talks about the various ending concepts - dark energy, etc. - the thing they're trying to do is come up with a motive for the Reapers. That's what the dark energy plot was for; it explains why the Reapers were doing the cycles. How Shepard blows up the Reapers is a technicality. It isn't really discussed except that it involves some sort of superweapon under Shepard's control, because the hypothetical final choice was going to be whether or not Shepard would do that.

[CrutchCricket]

Hmm. A mistake any way you cut it in my opinion. You already had the roots of a good reason for the cycles- simple Reaper reproduction. You just needed to throw in some babble about why it needs to be advanced races.

 

The ultimate purpose could've been alluded to but should never have been defined.

[JasonShepard]

Right off the bat we can nix starchild by giving the Crucible a practical use. We know that dark matter disrupts shields because of that sun over Haestrom, and since Sovereign died so much faster once his shields went down, let's make the Crucible a bigass cannon that projects dark matter energy waves in an area, depleting the reapers shields and giving the fleet a fighting chance.

 

Somewhat off-topic, but just so you know - Dark Matter and Dark Energy are two distinct concepts. Dark Matter is a proposed explanation for how galaxies hold together, whereas Dark Energy is a proposed explanation for why the expansion of the universe is accelerating. They're both called 'dark' because we haven't actually seen either of them, we've just seen what their doing (and the word 'dark' is shorter than the word 'invisible' ).

 

Dark Energy gets referenced a lot in Mass Effect, especially in ME2, and is apparently related to how eezo works. Dark Matter barely gets mentioned.

 

Right, science lesson over, now onto the topic itself

 

***

 

OP: I like your idea of having Earth's survival be part of a moral choice. I would have really liked to have seen something like that in-game. And I *really* wanted to kill Harbinger at some point in ME3...

 

Any Reaper-solution was going to require turning the Reapers into a keystone army. (Warning - TV Tropes link. The short explanation - a keystone army is any army that can be wiped out with a single blow.)

 

If the Reapers ever actually considered us a threat capable of taking them out, they'd just start nuking entire star systems. After all, the Mass Relays can do that, and the Reapers built the mass relays. So we need to take them out in one blow. Conveniently, that allows Shepard to be the pivot on which everything turns. ME3 Destroy and MEHEM both have elements of this, with the Crucible being the keystone. However, that makes the Crucible far too convenient in my mind. The Reapers still don't have a weak spot, we just happen to have an anti-Reaper weapon, which we found at just the right time. (That criticism very much stands for the main game.)

 

I keep coming back to Indoctrination when I try to think of Reaper weakspots. (Note - I don't mean Indoctrination Theory.) Sovereign demonstrated a weakspot when killing Saren disabled him. Harbinger probably 'Assumed Direct Control' of individual drones via the Collector General to avoid that weakspot. The implication is that there's a Reaper weakness associated with indoctrination.

 

Personally, I'd have a reveal that all the Reapers are themselves indoctrinated. Turn off the indoctrination, and the Reapers would turn on each other. Shepard and company discover this partway through the game, and the remainder of the game is spent buying time to figure out how to make use of this detail. Maybe it's achieved via a Crucible-like device, maybe it's achieved by going through the Citadel Relay into dark space and blowing something up, or maybe it's achieved by killing Harbinger (who would presumably be pulling the strings in this scenario).

 

The point is that it's a weakness that makes sense, doesn't conveniently come out of thin air, and is consistent with what we've seen before. We beat the Reapers by freeing them. That's the ending I would have wanted to see.

[angol fear]

"to see such a wonderful trilogy of sci fi bliss end in such a bland, unartistic way."

"...artful moments that express the creative range of writing cliches such as..."

"But I have since grown, studied the ways of writing, and even have had plays produced in a one act festival at my place of schooling."

 

OP, you may know that people who write (that should be called writer, but I don't use that word for anyone who writes) are not always artists, they don't always create art. You talk about artful moments, you should know that art isn't about "artful moments", it's not that easy and that small. And how could the ending be an unartistic ending when it is an ending that creates a retrospective reading, an ending that makes most themes relevant, an ending that is based on philosophy and poetry, an ending that make the content and the form consistent? I don't want to sound rude, I work in art for about 15 years and I think you should be more humble when you talk about art. You didn't like it, it doesn't mean it's not artistic. You should consider again the way you've read the entire trilogy, if you really like art and want to work in art, you have to understand why the ending was made this way. If the answer is "Well they wrote themselves in a corner, the only thing left for them to do is a Deus Ex ending" then you failed understanding it.

[AlanC9]

Hmm. A mistake any way you cut it in my opinion. You already had the roots of a good reason for the cycles- simple Reaper reproduction. You just needed to throw in some babble about why it needs to be advanced races.
 
The ultimate purpose could've been alluded to but should never have been defined.

The advanced races thing isn't all that hard, I think. It's sensible for the Reapers to harvest before their cows figure out how to get out of the pen, but right up to that point the size of the harvest is growing. The conceptual problem is the terrible inefficiency of the 50,000 year cycles. At the time of the last harvest there were behaviorally modern humans kicking around. If Sovereign had dropped by and taught those cavemen agriculture he could have shaved almost 40,000 years off of the cycle. Caveasari and caveturians too.

I guess you could work around this by saying that the Reapers prefer free-range organics, or have some weird religious reason for letting things develop completely naturally.

[CrutchCricket]

-wtfpost-

[Insert Billy Madison "what you just said" quote]

 

The advanced races thing isn't all that hard, I think. It's sensible for the Reapers to harvest before their cows figure out how to get out of the pen, but right up to that point the size of the harvest is growing. The conceptual problem is the terrible inefficiency of the 50,000 year cycles. At the time of the last harvest there were behaviorally modern humans kicking around. If Sovereign had dropped by and taught those cavemen agriculture he could have shaved almost 40,000 years off of the cycle. Caveasari and caveturians too.

I guess you could work around this by saying that the Reapers prefer free-range organics, or have some weird religious reason for letting things develop completely naturally.

I meant why take sentient species at all? If the key to building reapers is organic paste, why not harvest any species of sufficient numbers and mass? Ignoring the holokid and his nonsense all the Reapers encountered pretty much say the same thing- which means the species they contain do not influence their outlook much, if at all. So why not harvest pyjacs for example?

 

Man, just stopping at reproduction makes the Reapers more interesting than the current product. Without a stated purpose they're massive mechanical parasites. Who built them this way and why? Or if they simply emerged, what series of factors could lead to their current operation. That's the kind of "speculation for everyone" I wouldn't mind engaging in.

[sveners]

Not bothering

 

[AlanC9]

I meant why take sentient species at all? If the key to building reapers is organic paste, why not harvest any species of sufficient numbers and mass? Ignoring the holokid and his nonsense all the Reapers encountered pretty much say the same thing- which means the species they contain do not influence their outlook much, if at all. So why not harvest pyjacs for example?

Well, yeah, but if the process doesn't require sentients the whole thing falls apart. So we gotta play some of that mumbo-jumbo like "the essence of a species" or some such. Good thing that's already baked into the setting.


It's not even clear why the Reapers don't just run plantations -- get a planet up to a few billion and keep skimming off the surplus forever.

Personally, I cut ME3 a lot of slack because it's ME1 that dug the hole here.

[CrutchCricket]

ME1 didn't dig the whole. It had nothing to do with reproduction back then. The Reapers just killed everything once it got to a certain stage of advancement.

 

ME2 brought the reproduction angle.

 

You can still have both if you say that every cycle gets destroyed but not every cycle gets harvested. As to why there are cycles at all, that would have to go to the grander purpose. Which could be alluded to but not spelled out.

[Iakus]

The only hole ME1 dug was not having a motive for the Reapers at least percolating in the back.  Can't blame it for "essence of a species" or human smoothies because those didn't exist yet.

[Winterking]

The only hole ME1 dug was not having a motive for the Reapers at least percolating in the back.  Can't blame it for "essence of a species" or human smoothies because those didn't exist yet.

 

Technically the whole "essence of a species" was introduced in ME1 with the Cypher being the very essence of being a Prothean. 

[Iakus]

Eh, I chalk that up to the cipher being in information dump on sensory information and basic knowledge of Prothean communication.  It didn't rewrite Shepard's DNA or give Shep any abilities outside of being able to (sort of) understand their language.

[CrutchCricket]

I don't think that was a mistake at all. First off, at the time ME1 was a standalone game. They weren't sure it was going to take off how it did. So what they did have was engaging enough. Going for the galactic threat right away meant worldbuilding was going to be tougher once it was confirmed they would be making a series, but it wasn't impossible.

 

ME2 is really where they got careless. There still wasn't much of a plan and it clearly shows.

 

But that aside, the Reapers don't need a stated purpose, or more emphatically said purpose doesn't have to tie in to their defeat one bit.

[Winterking]

I would be fine with the Reapers harvesting civilizations for the same reason people harvest wheat or corn. The whole  "we are your salvation through destruction" was a huge mistake.

[Abelas Forever!]

Op your ending raises quite many questions.

 

Does crucible need catalyst? What is it?

 

If Shepard shoots with a crucible and then notices that reapers have build a structure which will protect them agains crucible then when does he shoot again with a crucible and can they shoot with it multiple times?

 

Why bring crucible so near the earth? I mean why would anybody do that if they have a possiblity to use it from the distance where it doesn't harm the earth. If crucible can't be used from the distance then what happens to reapers who are not near the earth? I mean do they still have shields?

 

Why doesn't Harbinger stop the Illusive man if he is indoctrinated? How has Illusive Man created a device which allows him to control reapers?

[themikefest]

Before the game was released I thought Shepard and other would find a way to weaken the shields of the reapers that would lead to victory. When the plans for the device/Crucible were mentioned, I thought it was something that would weaken the shields of the reapers

 

An ending without the catalyst could've been done. Once the Crucible is attached to the Citadel and the arms are fully opened, the Crucible charges up and releases the energy that destroys the reapers. The same epilogue appears just like now depending on ems