Out of Pod Experience

The ending made me regret playing the game.

Miranda lived in mine, not really sure why. It might be because I took a renegade interrupt and blew her father away. Thane died (from his illness) and Kelly apparently did (not shown in game, you just overhear a conversation about it). I just finished the game.

LAME!

They're right, the ending sucks. Separate the game into two pieces, the very ending from the point where you take the beam up to the Catalyst, and everything prior to that. The prior stuff is nice, the ending just sucks. Here, have 3 strange and ultimately unsatisfying choices, and you get to pick between them with no information about what's going to happen. Hell, the original Deus Ex people have compared it to (with justice, I admit now that I've experienced the ending here) gave you the goals in advance. You got contact by Morgan Everett who wanted you to kill Bob Page but leave the equipment intact to use, then Tracer who wants you to destroy the communications hub so technology won't have a global reach, and then finally Helios wants you to remove his uplink locks and allow him to merge with you. You know they're coming, and you get some discussions with people about them to help figure out which way you want to go. Hell, even the earlier philosophical conversation with Morpheus was interesting, and a bit of foreshadowing.

From the way the game played out, I expected two choices at the end: go with the Illusive Man's plan and control the Reapers, or just use it to destroy them. The way they did it, and the third choice they added, were just stupid.

Do I regret playing the game? No. But I think I am done with the series, and am going to have to think before I buy any Bioware titles in the future. I really don't like the way they've been going since they sold out to EA. First Dragon Age II and all the shortcuts they took (how many times can we go to the SAME GODDAMN CAVE) and now this.

That's no surprise, I find the game a tad better than what I expected so far (haven't been very far yet), but it's obvious all Bioware franchises are doomed since EA took over.

I will always remember Mass Effect 1 fondly. I hope another development and writing team can capture the spirit of that game again one day. But at this point I would honestly like to forget that the two sequels ever existed. Since ME1 and the first KOTOR, the Bioware RPG team has fallen on their face when it comes to story writing and game making. ME3 left me feeling like I was drug through a bad Russian tragedy with no real ability to make an impact as the player. Worse yet, they seem to have intentionally tanked the whole series story with the ending...


For a company that supposedly values story, they have fallen out of touch. It even shows in SWTOR. The ME3 gameplay falters, the story stinks, the love they used to show their work just isn't there. I won't call it the worst game ever, only very disappointing to the series fans. Bioware simply isn't the same company they used to be and get no more of my money outside potential bargain bin expenditures when I am truly bored.

The ending was great. I seriously love this game, people are mad at it for all the wrong reasons. The ending was good from a storytelling/scifi perspective but bad as far as an RPG ending goes due to the lack of variation.

Why? Some spoilers and brainstorming, and it will be a handfull.



TL;DR version:

The reapers won. The catalyst was the master AI of the reapers and it got to determine the course of organic life by destroying the mass relays. The normandy got sent to some other planet when they got hit by the crucible shockwave essentially repopulating that world with a new multi race civilization where they tell the legend of shepard. There are probably other survivors on other worlds with similar stories, maybe a bit less shepard centric.

Where did shepard take the reapers as he controlled them? Nobody knows for sure. The catalyst seemed sure that destroying the mass relays wont be the end of FTL or synthetics even if you destroy the reapers. The whole point of the ending was to make sure that while shepard had accomplished what no organic before him had, he was out of his league all the damn time and every choise he ever made was irrelevant to the fact that he was the one who made it there.

It means he did not have an option once he reached the catalyst. The reapers had prevented that from the very beginning because of the relay network and civilizations dependance on the mass effect phenomena.


Long version, for those who ponder on the ending.

1) Time is established as cyclical, not linear. The Reapers understand this but they also know there are always variations to concider as the catalyst states. The catalyst mention "Chaos" but this does not mean blood for the blood god. It probably means the reapers belive life might end and stay that way if left unchecked.

2) The catalyst was probably the leader of the first synthetic civilization(the reapers) to rebel against their organic creators. They destroyed all advanced civilization in their time and either used leftover mass effect technology or developed it to control the circumstances of advanced organic civilizations after they initiated the cycles of extinction. Sovereign established that the reapers created the relays and citadel which implied they developed the technology aswell. It is possible that other forms of FTL are possible (wormholes and such) but that the reapers wanted that to be kept hidden. EDI's speculations in the cockpit kinda points in this direction.

3) The catalyst likely always wanted to protect organic life from synthetic "chaos" by using the reaper extinction cycle protocol to prevent synthetic life from advancing far enough to end all life. They basically belive that it's worth culling organics to prevent them from developing synthetics strong enough to wipe out all life in the galaxy. Remember that there is no moral point to make for the reapers, aslong as life CAN exist they will glady cull the galaxy of advanced organics every now and then to prevent other synthetics from wiping it all out.

4) The Reapers are infinate, But they realise noting is certain. Eventually something is garantueed to go wrong (Shepard). The reapers have already made sure the most likely cenario is a sucessful completeion and deployment of the crucible because of their usage of mass effect technology to control the circumstances of FTL able civilisations.

5) The crucible is the culmination of organic life and it's desire to continue to exist outside of a set framework like the reapers and their cycle. Once shepard made it to the citadel and killed the illusive man the catalyst gave up and let shepard end the reaper cycles once and for all but an added side effect was a probable end to mass effect technology.

6) Civlisation got reset with the destruction of the mass relays. No house for Tali, no little blue children. Sorry, but the reapers are gone which leaves the question as to where shepard took them if he became the new catalyst instead of destroying them. He could probably rebuild the mass relays and the citadel with the reapers under his control, eventually life will as the catalyst warned find a way.

Looks about right to me. ME 3 is very short, the ending is stupid, and they added a few americano psycho moments that the game really didn't need.

I am very dissapointed, and I don't think I ever gonna play that crap again.

I love it when I read things such as -

"but the end of BioWare's epic tale continues to evolve the boundaries of story-telling and moral choice to maddening heights." - by Garnett Lee, Mar 06, 2012 4:15pm PST @ Shacknews.com

The actual players are just pissed they didnt get their rainbows and sunshine ending. As a whole mass effect 3 was awesome, i definately understand why people are upset at the ending but i personally disagree with their reasons.

On a sidenote, i think ME1 aged rather well so far.

It's ME2/DA2 where it got ugly for Bioware, where they lost their focus.

True, because of more reasons than I can count on my fingers.

But This happened before those 2 games in my opinion. I for one got so bored and frustrated with the game-play of Mass Effect 1 that I never finished it. I think it started with the car stuff on planets...

You know how many people that finished Bioware games like Baldur's Gate all the way up to Mass Effect using cheats? Even on their first play-through? We are talking about close to 100% here, from the small cheat to giving you a ton of in-game money all the way up to god-mode. When such a massive amount of people resort to cheating in order to just play the game it makes you wonder. People remember the story in Baldur's Gate, not the D&D engine game-play. Try to play that today, also all their games even ME3 are riddled with glitches. Every single game they have released have had game breaking bugs and issues solved by cheats, console commands and mods + patches.

Even some of their devs have gone on record wanting to skip all game-play in their games and just experience the story. In ME3 you got "story mode" game-play. Pay 60 dollars for a worse movie experience than most of what Hollywood makes. People are fracking deluded if they think anyone will pick up and experience a Bioware game for story or game-play 10 years from now, while a book and movie can last forever. Kinda a joke but I always wondered how come in Star Trek they will sometimes watch black and white movies and read books 100 years old to us but never play games other than chess, tetris and similar. I know why you say because of... But it could also be because that games like ME are crap and as soon as you got a holodeck at your disposal such media will just be considered junk and erased from history, graphics development kills bad games.

More people play and will play counter strike online than 90% of all FPS on consoles today and in previous generation even 2-3 years from now.

Bioware, EA and many others have this notion of gaming being about taking movies and adding game-play to them. That the video-game is suppose to replace movies and books... I saw the press conference EA had on this years GDC for their new Sim City game called "game industry changer". It is about making people aware of global warming, green house effects and clean energy while at the same time offering tons of day 1 DLC and digital deluxe editions with a Hollywood director talking about gaming giving us a message similar to what Al Gores movie did....


EA and Bioware seems desperate to somehow justify their business in the eyes of the people or something.

In any case, I do believe EA and companies similar are hurting this industry and could possibly even create a crash to that of the 80's if not something is being done about it. Same goes for console manufacturers.