I don’t think this is correct. Granted, you must play 100% perfectly and miss no pickups and miss no missions (and get both geth and quarian, etc.), but I got the good ending and I haven’t touched multi.
You are a rare one who got it! Everything I read said it was not possible to get the 4000 ems needed to see that last scene without multi. However, after reading this it appears to be tied to completing everything from all the games and a certain decision near the end:
To get the “Perfect” Ending in Mass Effect 3, play the game with the New Game+ option or with an imported character from ME2, with an achieved 4000+ EMS rating and choose the Red, or Renegade Option. With 4000+ EMS you must rescue Anderson from the Illusive Man’s execution. With 5000+ EMS, you can rescue Anderson or let him die. This ending comes after a short post-credits conversation between a man and child.
During NG+ or with an imported character from ME2, the Prejak Paddle Fish will counts as a War Asset, which in turn increases your EMS (Effective Military Strength) score. That means you’ll want to invest in a Fish-Feeding VI. Learn how to find the fish on our Prejak Paddle Fish Easter Egg page.
Shepard seemingly is killed, but the ending will be extended slightly with a shot of Shepard’s charred armor as it takes a deep breathe after the short “Stargazer” segment. According to fan theory, maybe that stuff on the Citadel was a hallucination!
So maybe all I’m missing is a fish? :smack:
Sadly, that sounds about right–I didn’t even notice the damnable fish on my War Assets screen but I went back and there it was.
This page discusses some of the points in favor of the theory that what we see at the end is Shepard’s struggling with indoctrination. Here’s one point that I find persuasive:
[spoiler]I hadn’t noticed, but apparently the different ‘choice’ stations are color-coded, not just the resulting explosion. But the color coding is the reverse of what you would expect from the by-now ingrained blue-for-paragon and red-for-renegade scheme – Illusive Man is shown going for blue, but Anderson is shown going for red.
Now that this has been pointed out to me, I just can’t believe it’s possibly a coincidence that the stations in which you chose are physically arranged like the choices on the dialogue wheel, only again the relation between ‘red’ and ‘blue’ is flipped. Those colors don’t appear on the side of the wheel where the paragon choice is counter-clockwise of the renegade choice. Of course, neither does green. But otherwise it looks like a strange bit of meta-game symbolism.
And apparently only the ‘red’ choice has the possibility of resulting in the ‘Shepard lives’ cut scene. Whether or not it was well executed, I now doubt that Bioware didn’t have something like this in mind.
But, given that Dragon Age II proved that Bioware was oblivious to how angry it would make players to have everything they cared about in the story made irrelevant, there’s ample evidence that it’s just sloppy, stupid writing even if the dialogue wheel was elevated into a visual symbol of a mental state struggling against indoctrination.[/spoiler]
You can still save him. Just wait until he’s on his way to the Crucible, walk over to the TV, and unplug it. It’s for his own good.
Even John Sheridan does it better than Shephard. “Get the Hell out of our galaxy” indeed.
I admit I haven’t played the game, but I’ve been following this ‘controversy’ with some interest, and I really really like this theory.
That’s silly.
He an always turn the TV back on.
Smash the disc.
As do I. But really that just shows how awful the actual ending is, that “but it was all a dream, and then Shepard woke up and had an ending that didn’t suck” is considered superior.
As an aside, does anyone else think the use of that kid throughout the game was a misstep? If you want me to care about a representation of all the lives lost in the war to stop the Reapers, some idiot civilian who indirectly committed Suicide By Reaper is not a good choice. Far better would be the squadmate who died at Virmire during the first game: someone Shepard knew, trusted and made a deliberate decision not to save.
It’s also a misstep to use whether or not Shepard lives as having any sort of weight: it’s irrelevant. The question has already been dealt with: the whole point of ME II is that Shepard and her whole team are 100% ready to die to stop the Reapers. No hesitation, no doubt. I mean, giving up your life to save organic life isn’t more dramatic than giving up your life to save an individual, or for a more complex cause: it’s less dramatic, because it would be a more obvious Right Thing To Do. Shepard was willing to die–did die–to save Joker at the start of ME II. It’s no new revelation to her character if she’s willing to die to save everyone and everything.
The strength of Mass Effect is that by the end, you believe in the epic–that the individual can only be free to be an individual if, paradoxically, they are willing to sacrifice their lives for the whole.
The issue, for me, isn’t Shephard living or dying. It’s that no one is saved despite everything I have done, and everything is reset.
[ul]
[li]The Citadel? Gone, and what happened to everyone there? I built up the Citadel Defense Force - if it’s gone, why would it EMS matter? [/li][li]I brought peace to the Geth and Quarians. Does that make any different now that all the Mass Relay is gone? The Quarians cannot return home, and neither can the Geth[/li][li]The same with the Krogan. So what now that the Genohage is cured? Their fighting men, perhaps the bulk of their population is stranded at Sol.[/li][li]The colonies and outposts that depends on supply runs are doomed, because that Relays are offline.[/li][li]There are slower FTL available, it’s a good point that the Relays have to go because they are the relics of the Reapers. However, the slower FTL won’t get the fleet anywhere at all unless star-kid suddenly gives everyone a new form of fast FTL that allow the fleets to reach home in hours time[/li][li]Also, with the fleets accustomed to hours travel times instead of decades/centuries, their cargo hold is unlikely to have much supply.[/li][/ul]
What Crowbar said.
[spoiler]A heroic sacrifice is worth jack shit if it doesn’t really help. Oh boy, we all get to die slowly instead of being turned into Reapers. Great.
Besides, I’m fine with heroic sacrifices in games. I also know that Bioware tends to do this and/or a “not really happily ever after” ending… Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic are examples.
This just isn’t that good of an ending, IMO.[/spoiler]
No, no, you can download it off Origin. Tell him that the ending is actually Hannar porn.
Just to add on some thoughts - some defended the ending saying that we don’t explicitly need to see the aftermaths at all, such as:
such as Quarians re-building on Rannoch, little Krogan-Mordin, Jacob and his Shephard-boy, Anderson reuniting with Sandy etc. We can all infer that from what happens throughout the game. That’s fair.
But with the ending destroying all Mass Relays, and without further information, all that is left of the galaxy is a husk (heh) of its former self. It’s as good as extinction. And with all the relays gone, without the Reapers or the other races to uplift any lower-evolved species, will there even be meaningful intelligence life for the next cycle?
The ending, as it is, is just an epic proportions of rock falls, everyone dies.
I think you guys misunderstood me. I am not saying that she should or shouldn’t have died. I am saying that by the end of MEIII, I didn’t care any more: not because I am not invested in her–I am–but because I buy into the story, and in the story whether or not any one person–even Shepard–makes it is really beside the point. I don’t need a crisis where we see whether or not she’s willing to give her life for humanity. OF COURSE SHE IS. So is everyone else. So is EDI, so was Legion, which I think are the ones that matter, as it shows that synthetics won’t inevitably wipe out humanity. The fact that the Bioware writers apparently thought that Shepard’s fate was a meaningful distinction between the endings shows that they don’t understand their own story. I don’t need my Shepard to live, I need her to matter.
Agreed wholeheartedly. Sorry I misunderstood you.
Same here. It’s quite tone-deaf of them. I accepted the “meh” ending of DA2 because I know they’re setting up for the next game, and there are only a certain number of outcomes they can allow for. But this is apparently the end of the/a Major Arc in this game universe, and… yeah.
It’s true that the kid’s story wasn’t nearly as touching as just listening to the civilian over the radio as the soldier tried to talk her through applying a tourniquette, and then the Reapers came…
The kid was heavy-handed symbolism, which common wisdom in writers’ workshops says that audiences will reject and even resent. Of course, in the ‘it was all a dream’ reading:
…at least the kid could serve a more-than-symbolic function. As Flannery O’Connor wrote, before a wooden leg can be a symbol, it first has to be a wooden leg. It has to have a role in the story, that is, other than being symbolic. In the ‘struggle against indoctrination’ theory, the kid is an actual nightmare Shepard is having, which is then being used against her, to cause confusion.
Also common lore in writers’ workshops is that audiences hate ‘it was all a dream’ bullshit, especially for endings. It’s cheap, dishonest, and often serves as cover for the writer’s inability to write out of a corner. Now, Bioware probably also noticed that in truth audiences are actually often energized by this hatred and fascinated to discuss the controversy.
If we don’t assume what happens is true, or that it’s merely some dream-state analogy of what’s really happening, then what we have is a combination of the ‘it was all a dream’ ending with the ‘lady or the tiger?’ ending. The aggregate, however, feels to me like the ‘no ending’ ending. As bitter as that is, however, at least it’s not the:
[spoiler]Three apocalypse ending. Because accepting the ‘dream’ excuse, I feel licensed to assume that the consequences of the choices aren’t what they are presented as being. The mass relays don’t all blow up for no reason.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that they can buy themselves out of all the other stupidity with the ‘dream’ excuse, unless they want to drag that excuse all the way back to Mass Effect 2’s ending where apparently making a new human-form reaper required juicing thousands of humans and using them as hydraulic fluid. “What are they doing with our genetic material?” Shepard asks. Actually, genetic material can be stored quite compactly for whatever purpose it was needed. The question should rather have been “Why the hell would they need megaliters of our meaty pulp?” Now, if everything from arriving at the Collector’s base to the end of Mass Effect 3 was all a dream, even that glaring stupidity is explained away.
And this is precisely why people hate dream endings. It becomes a game of seeing what bad writing can be excused.[/spoiler]
I have started to skim the thread because there seems to be some non spoiler boxed talk about the ending but I wanted to mention, if anyone should have the issue with the volume during conversations being low that I reported several pages back, right clicking and running the game as administrator seems to fix that. At least it did for me.
The reason “it was all a dream” is detested is because it’s a deus ex machina that can be invoked when the writers have written themselves into a corner. If everything up until the sudden awakening is presented as ‘real’, then that’s just poor writing.
[spoiler]However, if seeds are laid in the story to provide hints, then it’s more forgivable. And while the seeds aren’t laid very early, the video embedded in the Indoctrination Theory page does a very good job of pointing out how everything gets really freaking weird right before the end. I don’t think all of Mass Effect 3 turns out to be a dream, I think it’s just that part in the Citadel. A short dream doesn’t need a lot of advance planning, nor is it necessarily a copout. It can and has been used to great effect in certain movies, after all.
I think Bioware planned for a Real Ending DLC. While DLC is a dirty word right now, it has its uses, and I can see them holding off on the ending to give people a chance to play up to that point, get outraged, start talking about it, and for better or worse get themselves hyped up to see the real ending. Used that way, I think the delayed release of the ending probably will have vastly more dramatic punch than otherwise.
Of course, that only applies if the Real Ending DLC is free. If they expect you to pay, fuck them hard. And I suspect there’s going to be a lot of people who’ll still see it as a copout reaction to the outrage no matter what.[/spoiler]