Mass Effect 3

J. Marston

fergalr wrote: »

I thought that the new endings were much better than the old ones.
The suddenness with which the original endings concluded, and the unanswered questions about the consequences of the final choice the player made were really bad writing, the first time around.


One thing in the extended cut really made no sense to me, though, and kind of annoys me.

The scene with the normandy medivac made no sense, and was bad writing.

The entire assault of London is just to get people to the beam.
100s of ships have been sacrificed, and countless ground troops killed, all trying to reach the beam.
Trillions of lives hinge on someone getting through, etc; nothing else matters.

Our heroes are ~200m from the beam. Someone gets hurt on the suicide run.

Shepard stops. To arrange a medevac.
The normandy magically arrives out of nowhere, and does a pickup, while everyone waits. Its like an old kit-kat ad.

Four armed normandy marines stand on the normandy ramp.
They do not run to the beam.
These marines get back on the normandy and fly away.


If the normandy can just come in, and land, beside the beam, why didn't it do that when the reaper destroyer, earlier, was advancing on Shepard, and drop someone off? Even leaving that aside:

Shepard wouldn't have stopped.
If the Normandy could get there at all, it should have been deploying more troops.

Really, EDI should have just crashed the Normandy into harbinger.

That scene made no sense to me, and the ending would have been much stronger without it.

They painted themselves into a corner with the original ending where your squadmates magically find themselves back on the Normandy after Shepard gets hit by the beam. Plus it was one of the biggest questions from people regarding the ending: ''I brought X and X as my squadmates, how did they end up back on the Normandy?''. So I suppose Bioware had to cobble something together to explain that and the result isn't exactly airtight. Like why didn't Harbinger just fire his laser at the Normandy while it was hovering around 100ft away from the beam? But I suppose it's just part of the ending that Bioware probably hope you don't look into too much. Doesn't bother me, I prefer some kind of explanation rather than none even if it seems a little implausible.

Potential-Monke

ZeitgeistGlee wrote: »

Potential-Monke wrote: »

But that synthesis ending

leaves Edi and (in my playthrough) Legion

alive. The two characters i liked the most!!

I was under the impression

Legion dies/uploads and disseminates himself no matter what decisions you make on Rannoch.

How did you manage that?

Alas, you're right. Still liked Edi though.

ZeitgeistGlee

Potential-Monke wrote: »

Alas, you're right. Still liked Edi though.

Ah right, I'd have been raging if it was possible seeing as I

managed to get the Geth and the Quarian to actually make peace with one another

which I thought was the best ending there. Who survived for you other than EDI then if it wasn't

Legion

? You have me kinda curious.

Browning2010

Having now played through all the possible endings I still think the destroy ending is the best.

The mission was to get rid of the reapers and that is what the destroy option delivers.

I appreciated the synthesis ending but I was all ways wary of any of the AIs in the game so didn't mind them been wiped out when I chose the destroy option.

The control ending was wrong, anything Cerbrus taught was right was wrong imo besides bringing Shep back obviously.

Kiith

Spoilers from Bioware about the Destroy ending...

So, apparently Bioware have confirmed that Shepard is indeed alive at the end of the Destroy ending. Only happens with Destroy, and it's not confirmed as canon but will probably be.

http://kotaku.com/5922726/bioware-confirms-what-you-want-to-know-about-the-red-ending-of-mass-effect-3

ZeitgeistGlee

Not surprised it's been confirmed and as much as I'd like

to take up the reins as Shepard again in another game, I'm not sure I'd like the Destroy ending being the canon one. Fought hard to make peace between the Geth and the Quarian, and Legion was one of my favourite characters. That said Control's Reaper Jesus and Synthesis's Magic Space DNA have their own flaws too.

Potential-Monke

ZeitgeistGlee wrote: »

Ah right, I'd have been raging if it was possible seeing as I

managed to get the Geth and the Quarian to actually make peace with one another

which I thought was the best ending there. Who survived for you other than EDI then if it wasn't

Legion

? You have me kinda curious.

Correct me if I accidently say someone else lived when they definitely died, but,

Kaiden died in ME1, no-one died in ME2, and Legion, Morden and Thanos(?) all sacrificed themselves in 3, along with a few other non-important secondary characters, such as the Turians who died so I could save the boss!

Browning2010

Potential-Monke wrote: »

ZeitgeistGlee wrote: »

Correct me if I accidently say someone else lived when they definitely died, but,

Kaiden died in ME1, no-one died in ME2, and Legion, Morden and Thanos(?) all sacrificed themselves in 3, along with a few other non-important secondary characters, such as the Turians who died so I could save the boss!

+1... That's exactly what happened in mine..

ZeitgeistGlee

Potential-Monke wrote: »

Correct me if I accidently say someone else lived when they definitely died, but,

Kaiden died in ME1, no-one died in ME2, and Legion, Morden and Thanos(?) all sacrificed themselves in 3, along with a few other non-important secondary characters, such as the Turians who died so I could save the boss!

Same for me, I sort of feel bad about leaving Kaiden in ME1 because Ashley really annoyed me in ME3, but I was not listening to Raphael Sbarge whine his way through another game like he did with Carth in KOTOR.

Blazer

I'm wondering if I will even bother replaying it to be honest.
I loved ME1, was dissapointed with ME2 till I replayed it and it was awesome in fairness, ME3 was also brilliant upto to the last 5 minutes..for me that just turned me off it completely.

FutureGuy

As much as I would love another game with the same characters and crew, any new ME game needs to move to a brand new set of characters or to a new time period.

Each person here has had a ME playthrough where different characters have lived and died, and where different choices have been made at the very end.

If they made a sequel to ME3, they would need to have a generic beginning which rewrites most our personal experiences.

I would rather a new protagonist and a new set of circumstances unrelated to the characters of the first trilogy. Best way to do this is just to skip 50 years ahead.

DeSelby83

Or possibly skip back to when the mass relays were discovered and then go from there about discovering new races and the lead up to how they got to the citadel or something. Personally I loved all 3 games and would have no objections no more mass edfect

J. Marston

FutureGuy wrote: »

As much as I would love another game with the same characters and crew, any new ME game needs to move to a brand new set of characters or to a new time period.

Each person here has had a ME playthrough where different characters have lived and died, and where different choices have been made at the very end.

If they made a sequel to ME3, they would need to have a generic beginning which rewrites most our personal experiences.

I would rather a new protagonist and a new set of circumstances unrelated to the characters of the first trilogy. Best way to do this is just to skip 50 years ahead.

Don't Asari live for something like 1000 years? So even if they skipped 50 years ahead, Liara would probably still squirm her way into the plot.

ZeitgeistGlee

Krogan are fairly long-lived too, even if Wrex was gone isn't Grunt still only an adolescent by their physiological standards?

I think Grunt is technically adolescent by anyone's standards - isn't he really less than 3?

Gbear

I think a cool angle would be something like the Rachni wars.
You could be an Asari or something.
It could have the undercurrent of the Reapers controlling the Rachni.

Perhaps the protagonist discovers it, saves the galaxy but dies and their knowledge of the Reapers would die with them.

Slightly in the future would seem a bit strange. Without the Reapers I'm not sure the story would be satisfying, especially seeing as they were wound up in metaphysical bollox at the end of ME3.
I'd rather that they were unreasonable space machines of death existing only to assimilate and kill rather than being an "answer to chaos" or whatever ****e they were supposed to be.
Mysterious origins would've been better than nonsense ones.

They could throw a curve ball and take the refusal ending as canon.
The start could be some random alien discovering one of Liara's capsules.

To be honest though, I think I'd prefer if they just let the franchise die.

ShiverinEskimo

Folks, can we all be careful about spoiler tags for the current ending when discussing where it could go?

I've not seen the extended cut ending but I'm sure there will be folk who haven't seen any ending yet.

Potential-Monke

I thought we were past the spoiler tags about 20 odd pages back? Granted, the new endings have some new stuff in them, but at 154 pages in i don't think anyone could be chastised for not using them.

As for the next game in the series, i think they should go back to when humans were just starting proper space exploration and meeting other races, going through the different wars, and fighting for a place on the council! Or even back to before the Reapers last done their job, the lead up to that.

noodler

Potential-Monke wrote: »

I thought we were past the spoiler tags about 20 odd pages back? Granted, the new endings have some new stuff in them, but at 154 pages in i don't think anyone could be chastised for not using them.

As for the next game in the series, i think they should go back to when humans were just starting proper space exploration and meeting other races, going through the different wars, and fighting for a place on the council! Or even back to before the Reapers last done their job, the lead up to that.

Have to agree.

What one arth are you reading this for if you are worried about not knowing the extended endings.

ZeitgeistGlee

Thread could still do with a spoiler warning at least if people aren't going to tag major stuff.

ShiverinEskimo

Takes a few seconds to put spoiler tags in to save from ruining years of build-up.

Don't see the problem.

Kirby

I have never been spoiled even once for games, movies, tv shows or books and i frequent the internet every day. You know why? Because I stay away from threads that discuss them until after I've seen them. A discussion thread this old will have spoilers because people will want to compare their opinions with other peoples.

If somebody unfamiliar with the game is spoiled at this point it's their own fault for coming in here. This isn't pre launch or even post launch by a few weeks. The game has been out about six months at this stage. We shouldn't have to spoiler tag every single post. We will just end up with pages of grey and thats totally needless.

LuckyFinigan

Anyone find out if the download off the us playstation store works?

ShiverinEskimo

Kirby wrote: »

The game has been out about six months at this stage.

The updated ending is barely out 6 days though. And people come in here for the multiplayer chat too.

I was just saying. Costs nothing to put spoiler tags in.

Varik

Had the bright idea to start the whole thing from the start the weekend before 3 came out, just got Samara in 2 now.

Been doing other stuff.

Put 0 hours in to 3 sp at this stage but completed every mp challenge.

mrkiscool2

Varik wrote: »

Had the bright idea to start the whole thing from the start the weekend before 3 came out, just got Samara in 2 now.

Been doing other stuff.

Put 0 hours in to 3 sp at this stage but completed every mp challenge.

Did that myself, although it was two months in advance, got it done too! Really made the game (up until the end) fantastic

noodler

Okay so I just finished it (again).

Thanks to the person who suggested putting the difficulty on narrative - made the whole thing much easier from the Cereberus bbase onwards.

I chose destroy (as I did the first time).

I couldn't really see where the 2GB worth of data went even allowing for the other choices I can't imagine there are many cinematics etc I didn't see.

Anyway...spoiler

It is undoubtedly better. It really highlights how crap the original ending was though - at least if the Indocrination Theory was true you could make an excuse for the vagueness.

Nice cinematics but the main points were the extra talk scenes with the Star Child. The extra clarification there was important.

One thing that felt awfully done was the evacuation of your two squadmates - the original scene hardly gave you time to breath when you approach the beam yet in this one you have time to call in the bleeding Normandy!

I'll google the Control, Synthesis (which the EC really seems to push as the true ending in my opinion) and the refuse ending.

Is there a 5th if you shoot the boy or is it the same as refuse?

I didn't notice any additional dialogue from teammates in London like some online reviews said though.

I also didn't notice any extra scenes with the Illusive Man on the Citadel - as much as I was disappointed with where the IM story went I have to say that Martin Sheen did a great job in those scenes at the end.

EDIT: BTW I left Galactic Readiness at 67% but am told only EMS counts for the Extended Cut so hope I didn't miss anything by doing this.

noodler

One final point on Shepard after Destroy ending:

Do people think he actually lives?

I reckon now that its simply a slower death as the Destroy ending kills his synthetic parts.

I mean why would they be sticking his plaque up on the Normandy if he lived? And if he lived, but they didn't find him, then he'd very quickly die anyway!

Excited for the new DLC now. Completing the game on narrative difficulty last night (comapred to Hardcore in my first playthrough) really hammers home to me how little the grinding combat adds to the single-player experience and how much better the game seems to be on on more standard difficulty levels.

Basically, I really hope the DLC is heavily story, setting and dialogue-based rather than a big emphasis on combat.

degrassinoel

Techniclly, she.. i just dislike the male shepard's voice..

survives all three endings

control - she becomes a reaper
destroy - last gasp before the credits
synthesis - her essence lives in everything

Could be on the destroy ending that the crew of the normandy just assumed that she was dead, they were fecked off to some jungle planet at the time and probably had only gotten news from the admiral about her demise without actually knowing for certain.

noodler

I have to say the idea of Shepard joyriding around the Sol system in a Reaper I found hilarious.

A little diappointed we didn't hear more about Harbinger etc though. I mean, were Harbinger etc aware they were being controlled? Did they have any problem with their mission being stopped? Did they ever converse with the StarChild?

Do Harbginer and Shephard look back and laugh at the good old days? "Assuming Control" -LULZ!