Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Darkmere]

Don't get me wrong, EA has shitty practices, and I could see this happening, but I tend not to take any random idiot on youtube at his word either. Didn't mean to sound accusatory, if I came off that way.

[Kilroy the Grand]

Darkmere, don't worry I ain't even mad.

[Sensei]

Like I said I'm not sure if it's totally legitimate. Video was still kinda funny though, albeit obviously no kind of valid review. I will forever think of Mass Effect as a sequel to Super Star Wars.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Heliman]

AKA the entire channel it was posted by is geared to be a collection of sarcastic game reviews. One of them even reviewed a game using only clips from other games and calling it the same game.

[Sergius]

I love how somebody would basically says "yeah, if you buy our game, we might find a reason to ban you from playing it even on single player. have fun pirating it!"

"What's happening? Piracy is going up? We clearly need to ban more paying customers, that'll teach em!"

[Darkmere]

After getting a bit more info, I rescind my defense of the ending.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

After the first play-through I only saw the "green" ending. I didn't realize that all 3 are virtually the same, or that all 3 pretty much destroy everything in the galaxy. All the things you worked for are meaningless, as is your alignment. It makes the original Fallout 3 ending look charitable. There is no excuse.

What I'm (*sigh*) hoping for is there's a DLC for the "real" endings. It had better be free. And it had better come with an apology, signed by the whole company. The story and especially the fans deserve better than this.

I'm not holding out for it though. I'm sure the "keep your save" rhetoric from Bioware means there's more coming, but damn, it better be one HELL of a saving throw.

[Rakonas]

What's that? You want to go the extra mile and make all your choices geared towards having the best possible military strength for the fight against the reapers? Too bad, it doesn't matter at all. Also 50% galactic readiness forever.

[Digital Hellhound]

Finished the game.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Reaper-creator and choice of endings came totally out of nowhere, and I didn't actually get a chance to choose anything. I just ran into the beam and got the Synthesis ending. While it wasn't that eyegougingly horrible, I absolutely hate how it didn't provide any closure at all to the present of the game, to the current world. The fuck I care about the distant future, I wanted to see the effects of the synthesis on this galaxy, more than just the Normandy randomly crashing in a jungle.

I also hate how Shepard seems to die in every single ending. I've convinced myself he survives/remakes himself with his newfound synthesis magic for this ending because like hell my Shepard would abandon his buddies and loved ones like that.

So yeah. All my good, fuzzy feelings from seeing Jack again/uniting the geth and quarians/curing the krogan/and everything else just went crashing down.

[Domenique]

Finished the game.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Reaper-creator and choice of endings came totally out of nowhere, and I didn't actually get a chance to choose anything. I just ran into the beam and got the Synthesis ending. While it wasn't that eyegougingly horrible, I absolutely hate how it didn't provide any closure at all to the present of the game, to the current world. The fuck I care about the distant future, I wanted to see the effects of the synthesis on this galaxy, more than just the Normandy randomly crashing in a jungle.

I also hate how Shepard seems to die in every single ending. I've convinced myself he survives/remakes himself with his newfound synthesis magic for this ending because like hell my Shepard would abandon his buddies and loved ones like that.

So yeah. All my good, fuzzy feelings from seeing Jack again/uniting the geth and quarians/curing the krogan/and everything else just went crashing down.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The arguments why the ending is bad are usually logical, except when people argue that their shepard would chose something that is not in the choices, well sometimes you don't have other choices, you can't argue against that. It's like you all people are living in a world without compromises. There's never a perfect choice in life, and if there would be in the ending, that would be the breaker, for me atleast, not the fact that the ending video was a meaningless copy/paste action. I was actualy really really hoping the ending was much darker.

The copy/paste and galactic readiness arguments are fair enough, I guess the game was rushed, something that we will have to come to expect from Bioware from now on, I can't say if this has to do with them being a part of EA (remember that under EA they've got more money, more staff, more resources, it's really hard to tell).

And when the people talk about closure, what comes to mind is NWN1's ending,  (spoilers) the chick you romanced got hanged in the end, oh the fun. KOTOR? Congrats congrats, that's all. No closure. The real situation was displayed in the sequel though. But the point is nobody was unhappy with such endings. What the endings tried to say was that everybody is safe, happy ending, ME3 did the same, just in an somewhat awkward way.

[Digital Hellhound]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I would've liked to actually get to make a choice. I'm really tired of games where your character has to sacrifice himself.

Honestly, if this was Mass Effect, the paragon choice in the conversation wheel right now would be something akin to 'We always have a choice'. I can hear Mark Meer saying the line right now, but maybe I've just been playing too much.

I was actually pretty annoyed by this in the game, you only pretty much have choices in conversations now when you're deciding the fate of an entire species. It fits the grimdark theme, but it was kinda surprising to see.

I've actually liked the first game best out of the three, whatwith them getting darker and darker every game.

Also it was unbelievably distracting to play with a retarded-looking big-eared no-jaw Shepard after I messed up character creation when the game failed to recognize my old character's face.

EDIT: But enough raging; I loved the game up to that point, even with all its darky-darkness. I somehow ended up with a save where Miranda was dead, so I don't know what she'd have done in the game, but everyone else was alive and meeting them again was immensely satisfying, especially rekindling the romance with Jack (and no doubt with other companions as well), though understandably there wasn't THAT much of it, the new characters and crew were interesting (hell, I wish Vega had been introduced earlier), gathering War Assets wasn't as tiresome as I first thought even though it had zero effect on the ending, all-around a great conclusion all the way up to the end.

[SeriousConcentrate]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The arguments why the ending is bad are usually logical, except when people argue that their shepard would chose something that is not in the choices, well sometimes you don't have other choices, you can't argue against that. It's like you all people are living in a world without compromises. There's never a perfect choice in life, and if there would be in the ending, that would be the breaker, for me atleast, not the fact that the ending video was a meaningless copy/paste action. I was actualy really really hoping the ending was much darker.

The copy/paste and galactic readiness arguments are fair enough, I guess the game was rushed, something that we will have to come to expect from Bioware from now on, I can't say if this has to do with them being a part of EA (remember that under EA they've got more money, more staff, more resources, it's really hard to tell).

And when the people talk about closure, what comes to mind is NWN1's ending,  (spoilers) the chick you romanced got hanged in the end, oh the fun. KOTOR? Congrats congrats, that's all. No closure. The real situation was displayed in the sequel though. But the point is nobody was unhappy with such endings. What the endings tried to say was that everybody is safe, happy ending, ME3 did the same, just in an somewhat awkward way.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Ah, yes, 'Reapers' but we got a definite conclusion to the story. Aribeth swung from the gallows, that wasn't happy times, but the story was wrapped up in the end. The main complaint with the ending for me isn't the lack of choices (although I didn't like any of the three, that's neither here nor there) but that the consequences of Shepard's previous choices are never touched upon, and in fact don't matter with the destruction of the mass relays. Consider what would have happened were they not destroyed: would the krogan become a threat again, or would Wrex reform them? If we didn't cure the gneophage, do they die out completely? What about the Quarian and the Geth? I united them; does that union last? Do the Quarians ever get to exist without their suits? Or let's say I sided with the Geth. Do they stay content with their current holdings, or do they eventually try to take over the galaxy?

The whole ad campaign for the series was that YOUR CHOICES MATTER. That in the end, the sum total of what you've done from when you first create Shepard to when you defeat the Reapers will make the conclusion of the series that much more satisfying. Instead, at the end of the third game, you get a curveball, a disappointing motivation for the Reapers (I honestly wish they'd went the Alan Wake route and just never explained what the Reaper's true motive was), and a total lack of follow-up on ANY of the choices you made. I shipped with Liara across all three games; will there be a little Asari Shepard running around after the conclusion? WHAT FUCKING HAPPENED TO EVERYTHING? The only thing you get to see is that Joker survives, which is cool I guess because I like him, but I want to know if the Asari were able to rebuild, for example.

No, I'm just going to choose to believe that my F!Shep was killed by the Reaper beam and that Ashley made it, fired the Crucible, and everything turned out all right, and that this ending sequence is just a hallucination as she lays dying.

EDIT IN RESPONSE TO DH'S EDIT: With you there. I, too, loved the game up to the last bit. Until then it was extremely well-written and very much improved in every way over the previous entries. While I hate the ending, I'm not going to criticize everything else they did right too harshly for one (extremely glaring >.>) mistake. (And I would have preferred Vega in ME2 over Mr. Boring Taylor, or over Kaiden in ME1, too, DH. )

[Virtz]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There's actually a "perfect" ending, though the only difference is that Shepard ends up alive among the rubble somehow. Like there's a little sequence where you see his torso with the N7 armour and hear him gasp among the rubble, right after the part where the Normandy crash lands. In order to get it, you need like over 4000 or 5000 EMS (TMS x Readiness) and choose the Anderson ending. The mass relays and the geth are still fucked, though.


Still, the ending sequence kinda sucks. The way the Citadel works makes no sense (so much for just being a superior power source). The Normandy being in mid-jump doesn't really make sense (what, where they running away from the final battle? How did they get back on the Normandy?).

And you know what it reminds me of? The latter two Matrix movies.
"Welcome to the room of exposition, I am your host, a <stupid kid/senile old man>. Here's a crappy reason why your struggle sucks. Choose one of these ending options where each fucks you over. Now sacrifice yourself."

And I think it would've been much better if the whole expository room didn't exist. Like end it once Anderson and TMI are dead. Have the Crucible work normally and destroy the reapers and maybe the mass relays. And once it's over, have the Normandy go in the Citadel and get Shepard out of there. Leave the stupid kid and meaningless exposition out of this.

[Darkmere]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

SeriousConcentrate got it. The point of the games, up until the last 3 minutes, was that all the choices you had to make meant something. And then they don't mean anything. I can easily see that, with no mass relays, everyone in the Sword fleet gets wiped out. Earth is mostly a wreck, but some arable land is intact somewhere, sure. Will that be enough to feed the humans, salarians, asari, drell, hanar, volus? Turians and quarians can't eat our food. Did they bring enough to sustain all of them indefinitely? They can't synthesize it; quarians needed liveships for that. There was no reason for liveships to be at the fight, if anything they should be trying to reintegrate crops on Rannoch.

I could go on, but there's no point. Without the mass relays there's every reason to believe this conflict ended in trillions of deaths, if not extinction of multiple civilizations. No matter the justification, 3 copy and paste endings that ignore all the choices you made in a franchise BASED on choices and consequences is a failure on the writers' part. Poor setup, poor foreshadowing, poor deus ex machina implementation, poor execution. It's such a resounding failure because pretty much everything else in the game was done so well. It's like dropping a dog turd on an 7-layer-cake and hoping no one will care.

[Sensei]

I haven't played Mass Effect 3. If I do at all, it won't be for quite a while. So I've been reading all these arguments about the ending. I have to say, for how terrible it apparently is, I'd have to guess that it was a schedule/budget issue. Maybe that somewhat explains (but not excuses) the overpriced DLC, and certainly isn't quite as bad if you consider that they evidently want to tack on more later. Remember, it really could have been a lot worse.

Oh yeah. You remember THAT crap, don't you?

[Darkmere]

Image doesn't ring a bell. KOTOR 2? I didn't play that one, can someone explain?