Let's make our own ending to Mass Effect 3 (open spoilers)

The Game Room
1

I’ll let Calculon sum up my feelings of the ending.

Surely we can come up with something better?

Did we really need to know where the Reapers came from? No, we really didn’t. Their motivations a clear enough; They’re a homicidal arrogant species that think they’re doing you a favour by killing you, nuff said.

Harbringer should have a stronger presence throughout the game. He/it was a great villain and was totally wasted in the game. Maybe have him assume direct control over the Illusive man in the end for a cool last boss battle. Maybe after he’s defeated, have Harbringer (in Illusive man’s dying body) explain their motivations to Shepard. Salvation through destruction and all that. Basically what the starchild tells you, but instead of it being treated as gospel, it would be further proof how evil and corrupt the Reapers are. Shepard would dismiss them as being fucked up.

Lose the starchild. Instead have a VI appear in the crucible. It would explain how it’s a combination of all the species that came before that tried to build the crucible. It’s been waiting for aeons, hidden in the Citadel, for someone to be successful. The Citadel is merely the last component of the Crucible and Shepard, an organic being, is the Catalyst. The game would come down to two choices: kill the Reapers or control them. Killing them would cause lots of collateral damage, but not blow up the relays (that’s just stupid). Controlling them would result in less deaths and the Reapers would be a powerful tool in rebuilding, but that control might not last.

If we really need to know where the Reapers came from, have the VI tell they where made by the ones who built the Citadel and the mass relays. If the Reapers went rouge or they’re doing what they were designed to do is unknown. This would explain why they aren’t attacking the Citadel in the end. They can’t destroy their former master’s creation.

Shepard dies in the end. I didn’t have anything against Shepard dying. A heroic sacrifice is a powerful ending to a story where you’re so invested in the character.

Show scenes of your crew mate’s final stand as the Crucible gets ready to do it’s thing. Joker desperately trying to keep the Normandy in one piece while fighting the Reapers. Joker doesn’t run dag nabbit! Show your squad mates fighting against ever increasing hordes of Reaper soldiers. How well you played the game determines how many of them live or die. In the end they cheer as the Reapers leave/are destroyed.

Keep the montage of people you cared about that ended with your love interest as Shepard makes her/his choice. I thought that was well done.

I don’t need a epilogue telling me what happens afterwards. The talks you had with your team before the last battle was all I really needed. As long as the galaxy isn’t as fucked up as in the real ending, I’m happy.

Anybody got any other ideas?

EDIT: I liked Anderson’s death scene. It was poignant and well done. It’s after that the end goes stupid.

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:smack: I meant Mass Effect 3. Can a moderator change the title please?

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I disagree. They’ve used it three times in this series (the fake out at the end of ME1, the DM fiat death at the start of ME2 and the death at the end of ME3), and all of them sucked. There can certainly be endings where you die, including Pyrrhic victories, but there needs to be at least indisputably one good ending where Shepard lives.

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I reported it for a title change, in case you hadn’t.

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I thought Shephard dying at the end (and staying dead this time) was in keeping with the Christ imagery throughout the series, he sacrifices himself for the living,he is resurrected and depending on your ending he pretty much ascends to heaven.

I also didn’t hate the star child, it was a little woo woo, but no more so than the ending of 2001.

I think it would be lame for there to be a scenario by which Shepard lives, I thought this was supposed to be the game that ends the trilogy, I think it is fitting that Shephard dies.

6

Fuck that. If I wanted Christ imagery, I’d read a Bible. Mass Effect should be about Shepard, not Jesus.

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I’ll post roughly the same thing I did in the other ME3 thread.

The idea that Prothean technology was as close as anyone’s come to beating the Reapers is viable. Hell, even having Prothean tech that was intended to interface with the Citadel (and its apparent extragalactic-range mass relay and communications array to the Reapers) is perfectly sensible too.

The ending falls down when they decided that the Crucible ISN’T a superweapon, but a cosmic MacGuffin. For example, having it be some kind of ultra-advanced Prothean supercomputer VI that can, for just a moment if it can reach every Reaper at once, disrupt their operations just long enough for a prepared opponent to smash them–that would have been perfectly acceptable and properly foreshadowed.

That way your EMS score and the number of people you recruited in the game MATTERS. The bad ending is that your score was too low to do much, Reapers win. Increasingly better endings have too few Reapers alive to win, and the more EMS score you have the less damage they do in their death throes/last gasp over the next decade or several–perhaps even a middle ending where enough survive that they retreat and act like the geth did, licking their wounds and trying to build up enough, but not acting offensively.

Also, frankly screw the Christ metaphor. I want my Shepard to live, and I want him to have a nice beach house on Rannoch with Tali with a memorial to Legion nearby. I want an epilogue at LEAST as good as DA:O wherein there is knowing about what my surviving squaddies are doing–those people have been my friends for three games in many cases, and knowing their fates and how I affected them is what I came to the finale to see.

IMHO, the imagery of the series is “against all odds, you can win–but it takes dedication and attention to teamwork to even have a shot at it.” The game’s about unity in the face of Armageddon, ultimately, with Shepard as the face of that unity.

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Maybe you don’t like it, but there is some pretty heavy handed Christ imagery in Mass Effect: Shephard’s name for one, later he is referred to as The Shephard (Shepherd); also, at the end, he is wounded in his side, much like Jesus’ spearwound.

Like I said, it’s not subtle, but it seems to be there, it’s pretty much Comparative Lit. 101 stuff.

9

Bloody hell. Give a character a Jesus-related surname, and you people want to keep piling on the imagery until you’re drowning in it. No wonder I hated English Lit.

And in case you hadn’t noticed, except for her surname every single example you gave came from the parts of the series that sucked.

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Waitagoddamnedsecond – I thought Shepard was Lazarus. Which…

would make…

the Illusive Man…
Son of a bitch.