I always said that losing the war should have been one of the end game options. I am glad they added it and it was a nice surprise to get the hopeful epilogue.
I applaud the effort to improve the endings, but I still really resent the whole starchild/ bottleneck ending.
They really are clueless, aren’t they? Did anyone except these mouth-breathers play the first game and think the genocidal machines from beyond the galactic rim needed to be humanised?
Deep storytelling man, you need those for a thoughtful, insightful piece of artistic narrative and having soulless bad guys just echo of simplicity and doesn’t scream sophiscation. Doesn’t matter Lord of the Rings get by with Sauron or the Cthulhu mythos get by with Azatholth.
So, just played the EC, and got a few thoughts:
[spoiler] The scene where they evac your two teammates (due to being badly wounded) was a nice touch, though it could have been done a lot better. Or really, in any way that didn’t stick a wrench in the pacing for that whole sequence. I would have had Shepard call for an evac, made sure his team-mates were alright, and said a quick goodbye without spending a couple of minutes having a heartfelt conversation in the middle of the battle. I would have had the Normandy (or one of her shuttles) picking them up after Shepard went through the Conduit, since there was already a transition cut there.
I did like that they at least showed other wounded soldiers being brought aboard, instead of the implication that Shepard’s two friends were the only ones worth landing to save.
ETA: Did anybody else wonder why Harbinger didn’t bother to at least try to blow up the Normandy while she was parked in front of him like a giant middle finger? Another problem that would be sidestepped by waiting until after Shepard went into the Conduit before the evac arrived.
The Refusal ending was interesting, though I was hoping to see the Shepard VI. That was easily one of my three favorite things about ME3 just for pure comedy value.
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Few more thoughts, after viewing various endings on the You Tubes:
[spoiler]In the Destroy ending, you never actually see the Love Interest put Shepard’s placard on the memorial. In both the Synthesis and Control endings, she places it on the memorial and then steps back.
In the Synthesis and Control endings, EDI is standing noticeably apart from the rest of the gathered crew, presumably to make it easier to compose the shot with and without her. In the Destroy ending, she is absent from the crowd, and is listed on the memorial as one of the fallen crewmates.
The Control ending also makes it pretty clear that Shepard is dead. The Shepard that now controls the Reapers possesses all of Shepard’s memories, and acts based on that (Paragon or Renegade), but is a separate entity. Not entirely unlike Legion and the Geth Primes.
[/spoiler]
I disagree on your control theory. I think it is actually Shepard and the reason that the dialogue changes per your Renagade/Paragon is simply because that is the attitude you’ve given him
On a separate note, I am simultaneously replaying it with my first Shepard, and I am also replaying it from scratch with a female Shep since I’ve never played it as a female. It is VERY interesting to see how vastly different the game is. The people from the second game are all but absent (which doesn’t completely surprise me) but what did surprise me is how VASTLY different the dialogue is. Parts that have nothing to do with the previous two games have the language changed ever so slightly, and it’s like this for virtually every conversation. It’s interesting.
Just got around to playing the new endings. I’d hated the original endings at first and came to be lukewarm towards them after some thought. Now that I’ve played the ending sequence again with the extended cut loaded I can say that I actually like the ending (I picked destroy and had a maxed readiness). It provided a lot of closure that I felt was missing from the first one:
Particularly regarding the destruction of the relays. I’d had a problem with that with the original ending: “I destroyed the reapers but now every single system is cut off from all the others. That’s fucking great.” But this time around the Starchild told me that everything that would be destroyed could be rebuilt and Hackett’s speech shows that the relays were merely damaged and that the galaxy is still united and all that jazz.So I’m now square with Bioware and all is right in the world. Of course it would have been better if this had all just been in the original game but it’s better than nothing. I am content.
Well,
[spoiler]I was keying in more on the fact that Commander Shepard was being referred to by Shepard in the past tense and in the third person, unless we’re looking at a “That man is dead” identity issue thing.
Another random observation: Going off of the memorial plaque, Shepard’s first name might actually be “Commander”.[/spoiler]
They also lowered the EMS requirement needed to see the “breathe” scene from 4000 EMS (impossible to achieve without multiplayer or some app for ipads or savegame hacking) to 3100 EMS (actually possible to achieve in single player).
Or at least that’s what a post on the bioware forums claims.
I got the breath scene and I hadn’t played any mutiplayer.
[SPOILER]I thought that scene came at a bad time, as well. I was sitting there thinking “Why the hell are they stopping to talk right now, get out of there, this is a damn war zone!” It pushed my suspension of disbelief a bit, and I agree that showing it at the same time as the Hackett scene would have been better. Still, probably my least favorite part of the EC.
A decent fanwank for why Harbinger didn’t blow up the Normandy could be that the Reapers’ priority was to ensure that not a single person made it to the beam, and so an evac ship, juicy target of opportunity that it was, wasn’t worth wasting time on. However, that still doesn’t explain why Harbinger stupidly flies off once everyone’s down without first raking the area with lasers until everything is turned to ash.[/SPOILER]
I can’t recall my source, but I read elsewhere the max readiness you need to get the ‘best’ ending has been reduced to 3200
Finished playing the game for the first time last night. I put off buying it at first after hearing the trash talk about the ending, and the release of the new DLC is what finally motivated me to pick it up.
The good:
The Bad:
The Ending:
All in all, i’d call it a satisfactory conclusion to the series. It’s not perfect, and even the “best” ending is more bittersweet than happy - i’d have preferred to take the Capt. Sheridan in Babylon 5 approach and tell the Reapers to “Get the hell out of our galaxy!”, but I get the impression that the writers wanted to end the story in a way where they wouldn’t get roped into making another sequel every year until the year when the games are actually set comes around. Assuming that EA doesn’t ultimately screw up and close Bioware down because the suits who run the company demonstrably have no clue what the RPG-playing audience wants, I look forward to seeing what’s next from them.
As satisfying as it is to deck the reporter, it is a mistake. She is a war asset, even higher value than Allers.
You now only need an EMS of 3100 to get the “best ending”, which is easily doable in single player if you do all the side quests, scan every planet, and run all the fedex quests. So SHEPARD PAWNCH it is. 
True, but she is a very sympathetic character if you decide not to take a swing at her. Hilariously, if you take a swing at her, she ducks, showing that she’s learned something in the past two or three years, and if you miss the next renegade interrupt, she’ll slug Commander Shepard, the Reapersbane, right in the face and make him-or-her go down like a house of cards on a windy day.
If you skip the renegade interrupt, you instead get the option to stab the hug button and reassure the reporter that you understand that she’s afraid, but that the Alliance is doing what it can to help. She gets an asset bonus if you never slugged her before. Also, I missed this when I played through, but when you arrive at the Citadel during the Cerberus raid, you can hear her on the TVs reporting on the attack and trying to get a hold of C-Sec.
As far as the pilot dying (was that who you were talking about? His name was Cortez), that didn’t happen in my playthrough. Evidently he will survive if Shepard takes the time to talk to him and help him past his grief issues. It’s hard to tell, but he’s supposed to be a bit of a death-seeker, not entirely unlike Vega (who was this close to being an interesting and deep character except they never actually spent any time doing character development on him after you leave the Sol system).
Vega was mostly entertaining because of the shit he tended to be involved in. Playing poker with the refugees (and losing his money), getting a tattoo from a Batarian, being responsible for Ash passing out drunk and waking up with a terrible hangover, and the various back-and-forth with Cortez. That, and sending him to disable the Geth Jamming Tower is comedy gold.
I’m not sure how much it played out in the game, but I was getting the impression that at least a few of the Renegade interrupts were there to bait you into putting yourself in a worse position, i.e. punching somebody in the face and costing you their support. No clue how often that actually plays out in the game.
Regarding whether or not we should have a spanish-speaking hispanic character by the time ME3 takes place (one of two hispanic characters, actually, with him hanging out with Cortez and all), why should hispanics no longer exist (and that’s a cultural group, not an ethnic group anyways; I’m hispanic and I’m also as white as I can possibly get) when so many other ethnic groups are shown to still exist? Ken is Scottish and waxes poetic about how Haggis tastes like “mighty fine ass”, Amy Wang is an asian reporter, Khalisa Bint Sinan al-Jilani is dark-skinned like you’d expect a person of Arabic descent to be. It’s not exactly easy to tell until the third game though. She does have blue eyes, and I’m not sure if that’s very common or not in real life.
Keep in mind that this is only a couple of hundred years in the future at most, so there’s no reason to expect all of humanity to turn into a uniform monotan skintone.
Cortez, yes. (Where did I get Gomez?) I thought I did all his conversations, but I must have missed one.
I wouldn’t say that Hispanics don’t exist anymore per se, but there’s been so much race-mixing in the 175 years between now and when the game takes place that I wouldn’t expect someone to exist who looks, acts, and talks exactly like a Latino musclehead circa 2012. You’ve got Udina (swarthy, with an American accent, an Irish first name, and an African last name), Zaaed (White with an Arab name and a Cockney accent), Anderson (black Englishman with an American accent), Dr. Chakwas (white Englishwoman with an Indian name) Kaidan (swarthy with an American accent, a Russian name, and born in Singapore)… and James. Vido Santiago, the only other character with an obviously Hispanic name, is black. I definitely get the impression that his character was inserted as the result of an executive mandate from someone at EA. “Let’s see, more and more Latinos are playing video games these days, so we want you to put a badass Mexican hero in so Hispanics will relate to him and that Angry Joe guy will give us a good review.” (Which he did.)
Amy Wang? No, no no. Emily Wong. I was sad to see that she wasn’t in ME3.
As for al-Jillani, she’s little more than a Fox News paparazzi to me, and I’ve never seen any reason to trust her or give her a chance. In all three games, she more or less ambushes Shepard and attacks him/her with loaded questions (“Why did you abandon the Council to die?” “Why did you sacrifice so many human lives just to save aliens that refused to help us?” “What are you doing luxuriating on the Citadel instead of fighting back on Earth?”) and so on. She’s not a responsible journalist and I wouldn’t want her on my side lest she decide that she can get better ratings with candid photos of James working out bare-chested, or Tali getting drunk in the lounge.
:smack:
Sorry.:eek:
But yeah, just because she’s a potentially sympathetic character doesn’t mean that you have to open that line up. ME3 has a lot of interesting scenarios basically as easter eggs to encourage alternate playthroughs Evidently some of the funniest lines in the game only happen if you had some debatably non-ideal results in the first two games.