Requiescat in pace, Legion. Does this unit have…a…soul? Still, couldn’t betray the quarians. Wonder if there’s a way to get them both to help you? My main Shep stayed silent on the issue of taking back Rannoch. My do-gooder ultraparagon told them to forget it. Wonder what her playthrough will be like…
There is. Did you save the admiral?
Yep?
From the Bioware forums:
Hmm, I did all of those except [spoiler]shutting down the geth fighters, went for the Reaper base first then couldn’t do it. My paragon bar is pretty close to the top; haven’t had any convo options blocked out at least. Didn’t see any interrupts either - only renegade ones, one of which I assumed would be smacking Han Gerrel and the other a bullet for Legion, neither of which I did.
I allowed Legion to upload his improvement, but then Tali begged him to stop and it became apparent that it was the geth or quarians. I told Legion to stop, whereupon he choked a brotha leading to Tali burying an omni-blade in his back. After getting my mack on with Liara (who looks a lot more…er…leathery, it has to be said, compared to her equivalent scene in ME1.) my Shep had a nightmare about Legion’s fate. He now rests in Valhalla with Mordin and Thane! Assaulting the Cerberus Base now. My military forces thing in the war room is all green and as far along as it goes, so here’s hoping for a good ending.[/spoiler]
As I remember the scene, I allowed Legion to upload his improvement, Tali begged him to stop, I allowed him to continue, and then there was a Paragon option.
Damn. Oh well…
The ending…
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. I’ve no idea if the ending I got was good, bad or what. Was expecting a Deus Ex: Human Revolution style choice between destruction, control or synthesis(?). Instead, after popping a cap in TIM’s ass and chatting to a creepy light boy my Shep runs and jumps into a light column and disolves; the Reapers retreat from Earth, the Mass Relays across the galaxy blow up and the Normandy crashes on some planet. Joker and EDI hug with Liara in the background, roll credits. WHAT THE ACTUAL WHAT.
I got the same ending as you and I was rather underwhelmed. It was a pretty poor ending to an epic trilogy of games.
Apparently you can choose which ending you get, [spoiler]but they’re all pretty much the same. I should have listened to Johnny ghost kid; going straight ahead into the light gets the ending where you merge organics and synthetics, going to the left is control, shooting the red thing on your right gets the destroy ending.
I was also gobsmacked by the kid’s explanation for the Reapers…you use synthetics to kill and harvest organics so that synthetics won’t kill and harvest organics? Come again? That’s not beyond human comprehension, that’s just bloody stupid![/spoiler]
wrt to the ending (BIG MAJOR SPOILERS)
I can’t believe I stay up late to play till the ending, playing every day. The ending is a let down, after all the build up. There is no need to explain why the reapers came. There is no for the game go philosophical all of a sudden. I guess the writers need a “Oh, we need a twist! Right at the end of the game moment” but the explanation makes zero sense/ We harvest you…so that your DNA are preserved!
Bioware has also delivered a good ending for the Mass Effect games - ME2 was fantastic, but the end-game segment of ME3 stumbles. Most games tend to suck towards the end , and I was so happy that Mass Effect 2 don’t, (except for the lame excuse of a boss). The Collector’s Base is finely paced and executed.
In Mass Effect 3, it looks like they were rushing through the production. Bleak, uninspiring building. Just waves after waves of enemies rushing at you. And no big final boss fight, just a boring speech by TIM. It’s like the ending in the Matrix 2. “Oh we forgot to talk about deep and thinky stuff!”.
It seems that they want the player to make 'difficult’c choice towards the end of the game, but what the heck is it with the ending? Depending on what you choose, it’s more or less the same ending - just the beams are differently coloured (red, green and blue) and whether the Reapers died or flee.
And the entire mechanism for the Crucible doesn’t make sense. It’s feels like arbitrary hand-waving (oh it works because it’s advanced technology. Doesn’t explain how the scientists of all the previous cycles figured out how it work). Destroying the Mass Relays also have unfortunate implications. What about all the alien race stuck at Sol? All the Quarians will never see Rannoch again! Will they have to figure out their own FTL?
And how did the Reaper steal the Citadel? (In fact the whole thing jumps the shark when TIM told me that). Didn’t I setup a Citadel Defense Force? Wouldn’t Reapers arriving trip off alarm? Wouldn’t Reaper leaving the battle lines Palaven be reported?
I think they just want the last bits of the game to take place on Earth, so they just wrote it that way. Though for the life of me I can’t understand why they have to destroy the only means of FTL. Its like a “by the way, up yours just because I feel like it” (how does the Reaper get ‘home’ without the Mass Relay anyway?)
I don’t mind a sad ending, or a bitter-sweet ending; but the way the writers arrive at it is so contrived that my suspension of disbelief just snapped like barrier collapsing under a Krogran charge. All the major turning points in the game have a big build-up, for example such as choosing between the Geth or the Quarian. You know one day you have to make the choice. But the Crucible destroying the Mass Relay. WTF? Synthesize with them? Was there any build up to this?
If there’s a Mass Effect 4 (or a new trilogy), I would like to see how Bioware writes their way out of this one.
Lord, the ending sucks.
[spoiler]Look, if you’re going to have a lame resolution, just go ahead and make it a happy lame resolution. We’d all acknowledge that the storytelling could have been more complex, challenging, and unpredictable, perhaps, but we’d probably be satisfied to see Shepard go the traditional victorious hero route, willing to die, seeming to die, and thereby saving the galaxy, but then miraculously saved and having a nice little coda where he/she is drinking with Garrus, Liara, and Paramour of choice. Cliche, sure, but cliche well done can be good.
Or, go for the pure tear-jerker ending, where Shepard needs to die to fuel the Crucible, and everyone is sad, but goes about building their lives in the knowledge that they are safe forever. (Except perhaps for Kaidan/Ash, who will never be sure that Shepard’s really dead, poor things!)
But WTF is this shit? Suddenly three options are introduced that have no narrative lead-in, and as noted above, an explanation of the Reapers that makes no goddamn sense. And while the choice is “hard” in a contrived way, when you actually chose, there isn’t any difference in what you see afterwards. No one bothered to include any cut scenes showing why your choice matters (unless you really have a thing about blue, yellow, or green). Not even Joker mourning EDI or Tali being like “WTF now” when the relays get destroyed or something. Just random scenes that don’t make sense, of your crew looking inexplicably delighted to be seeing the rainforest, and a grandpa on the moon (?) telling this kid stories of Shepard, without, once again, any variation or detail depending on what choices you made.
I also agree that the gameplay at the end was anticlimactic, and the glacial limping really got on my nerves.
So yes, can we pretend this is a fever dream as Shepard lies unconscious from the beam up to the Citadel, and start again from there with something resembling competent storytelling?
[/spoiler]
Good Og, those endings were terrible.
The only minutely redeeming feature in them was the fact that:
The Stargazer, the grandpa telling Shepard stories at the end, is voiced by Buzz Aldrin.
Was he? Thought he sounded kind of familiar. What bugged me most was that they missed the chance to play BOC’s Don’t Fear the Reaper over the credits…well, that and [spoiler]all the other nonsense that makes no sense. Why was the Normandy in a relay jump when it should have been fighting? What’s Liara doing on the random alien planet when I took her to London? Also, the galaxy’s screwed no matter what ending you get - with no mass relays that massive fleet you’ve just assembled is now stuck in the sol system, nobody can go home again and the Citadel is destroyed.
This is why the idea that Harbinger (who was also wasted - built up as the villain in 2, appears for all of a minute in 3!) blasting Shepard unconscious and him hallucinating the last bit makes more sense. In the ‘best’ ending you hear Shepard take a breath under some concrete rubble…well, he was on the Citadel that blew up, and the Citadel ain’t made of concrete.[/spoiler]
I managed to get the quarians and geth to make nice - did some missions in the wrong order. Although it looks like Legion is doomed no matter what you do.
Has anyone else had problems ME3 correctly importing the choices made in ME2? I have three different Sheps, all three of them saved Wrex on Virmire yet when I import them in ME3 it says that Wrex died in all three. WTF?
I miss Wrex.
Me too.
The ending…
[spoiler]I agree with everyone that the ending is terrible. How can that be the resolution when we’ve already demonstrated that there can be peace between organics and synthetics, like with the geth and EDI? There should at least be an option to be able to persuade the catalyst.
But I do sort of, almost see the idea behind the reapers. If organics creating synthetics that ending destroying their creators is inevitable, then it does makes a weird sort of sense that creating synthetics that culls all the organic capable of creating synthetics before they are able to do so and destroy all life in the galaxy. Of course, why they leave all this advanced tech around to help boost the technology of the races they spare is beyond me. [/spoiler]
FWIW, I’m still working on my first playthrough, but I did save Wrex and he does show up. This was an import from a character who I played all the way through both ME 1 and 2.
For what it’s worth I can confirm a live Wrex is possible. I have him in my game because I was able to keep him alive in ME1.
ETA: oops, had my window open so long before responding I didn’t see FH’s confirmation, sorry for being redundant.
If you hated the ending enough to want to take action, check out the Demand a Better Ending FB group, as well as the online petition. There’s also a lot of high quality wishful thinking on the Bioware social boards - people have come up with alternatives and also just a different interpretation of the events shown that are much better storytelling than Bioware dumped at the end of this game.
I’d like to believe that BW/EA really is having us on, but the economics indicate that no, they’re not being clever and daring, but rather they bowed to pressure to release a huge moneymaker quickly, and hastily rewrote the ending because it had been leaked. I’m still writing them a letter though. I know many people would go ballistic if this happened, but I would actually pay some cash money for a DLC with a revamped ending. Like Shepard, I won’t give up, even though it seems hopeless!
I haven’t gotten to the ending (I have to negotiate with my kids for XBox time) but as long as I get to hand Kai Leng his own ass at some point, I’ll be happy (until the ending).
The BioWare forums motivation thread has some corkers. Xzibit weighs in on Reaper motivations. The motivations of an even more evil bunch, EA.
Also; Tali’s face. That one, sadly, isn’t a joke.
The problem is that when the trilogy is as good as it is the crap moments stick out even more. Kevin Smith sums up the game.