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Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut is coming next week [Up: Out now, my sweet]

How did you play your Shepard in a way that is even remotely close to synthesis?

The previous two games never even hinted that this was a solution. It was always "destroy" the Reapers on Shepard's side, and "control" them from Illusive Man/Saren's side.

Well I did end the war between geth and quarians, claming they all have the right to live. I convinced joker to get it on with EDI so destroying her would be a dick move.
Besides, with destroy, even the catalyst warns you the cycle won't stop. Why would I have sacrificed all those lives just to delay the cycle once?
Hey guys, thanks for all your ships and people and planets going down the shitter, but I won't choose the option that ends this war for good.

The whole game tries to convince me nothing good can come from controling the reapers.

So synthesis makes sense. Shepard believes in equality. Make everyone equal, everyone understand eachother. The cycle actualy ENDS and the galaxy is a better place. It doesn't bother me that it sounds like space magic. So many things in that game sound like space magic. Mind control, biotic powers...

Synthesis is my babeh
 
That's all well and good, but I just think merging synthetics and organics is hilariously creepy. Like something a villain would pull in any other series.
 
How did you play your Shepard in a way that is even remotely close to synthesis?

The previous two games never even hinted that this was a solution. It was always "destroy" the Reapers on Shepard's side, and "control" them from Illusive Man/Saren's side.

If he supported the geth then neither choosing a destroy ending (destroying all synthetics) or a control ending (taking their free will away) makes sense
 
That's all well and good, but I just think merging synthetics and organics is hilariously creepy. Like something a villain would pull in any other series.

It just doesn't bother me. I don't over analyze it like "oh my god does edi have a vag now and joker gonna make babies with her?"

I just think: "hey, they all evolved. Sweet"

I understand though that if you find it creepy, it's a crappy ending
 
Well, going to go redo the Cerberus HQ, want to see if the rumor that a cleared file has any effect on the ending is true. I'll compare it to another save I have at the HQ, only with a Shepard who just got there. later.

Time to dust off the Widow, it's Infiltrator time! That's going to feel a bit weird after playing Vanguard...
 
That's all well and good, but I just think merging synthetics and organics is hilariously creepy. Like something a villain would pull in any other series.

Isnt this exactly what TIM wants to do? The next step in evolution? He only got the method wrong, Control on the other hands allows Shepard to become the guardian / shepherd of the galaxy.
 
If he supported the geth then neither choosing a destroy ending (destroying all synthetics) or a control ending (taking their free will away) makes sense

That's true but supporting the geth doesn't logically extend to changing everybody's DNA and forcing them to become something else entirely. It's still a stupid resolution and not the overall point of the series thus far.
 
Well I did end the war between geth and quarians, claming they all have the right to live. I convinced joker to get it on with EDI so destroying her would be a dick move.
Besides, with destroy, even the catalyst warns you the cycle won't stop. Why would I have sacrificed all those lives just to delay the cycle once?
Hey guys, thanks for all your ships and people and planets going down the shitter, but I won't choose the option that ends this war for good.

The whole game tries to convince me nothing good can come from controling the reapers.

So synthesis makes sense. Shepard believes in equality. Make everyone equal, everyone understand eachother. The cycle actualy ENDS and the galaxy is a better place. It doesn't bother me that it sounds like space magic. So many things in that game sound like space magic. Mind control, biotic powers...

Synthesis is my babeh

The cycle he is warning us about is the whole "organics creating synthetics and synthetics rebelling"? Right? But from what we've seen, peace between synthetics and organics is completely attainable. Look at the Geth and Quarian. Why is that cycle doomed to repeat itself? Because the Catalyst believes so? Correct me if I'm missing something.
 
Isnt this exactly what TIM wants to do? The next step in evolution? He only got the method wrong, Control on the other hands allows Shepard to become the guardian / shepherd of the galaxy.

I don't agree that's what he wants to do.

And as I said, everything about the game tells you control is a really bad option and nothing good come from it. I mean.. you spend over have the game trying to stop Martin Sheen from doing it, convincing him that it's bad. And then 5 minutes from the end you change your mind?

Point is, none of these endings is very well written


The cycle he is warning us about is the whole "organics creating synthetics and synthetics rebelling"? Right? But from what we've seen, peace between synthetics and organics is completely attainable. Look at the Geth and Quarian. Why is that cycle doomed to repeat itself? Because the Catalyst believes so? Correct me if I'm missing something.


Another problem with the writing. It's not really that clear. The catalyst has been around from hundreds of thousands of years, who knows what he's seen. Maybe this geth quarian scenario happened and the cycle was just delayed. The writing's just all over the place, really.
 
Does anyone else think that Buzz Aldrin still should have voiced the new dialogue? Having an Asari now as the Stargazer has a real corny "Poochie has gone to Mars and died" feel.

Probably didn't want to pay him the amount of money it would've required to get him back in the recording studio. If they had the DLC might've been 10 bucks.
 
Well, the best I can say about this ending is they tried to put out a fire with gasoline. Still terribly written, still doesn't make sense and they throw in a bunch of scenes that contradict their original ones. Shepard and everyone die on the way to the beam, no its ok because Hackett got a report guys. Normandy ship crashes on a random planet, no its ok because the ship didn't actually crash. Fuck Mac, dude is a fucking hack.
 
Well it's a SciFigame. Heavily based on 80's scifi movies which almost never made sense. That's part of the fun of it imo, not every single detail has to be extensively detailed to make perfect sense.

It's the future, magic and science live happily together with blue alien boobs. I like synthesis.

There really is a huge difference between the Spielberg dominated fantasy movies with elements that might appear like sci-fi and the actual sci-fi.

Even if magic did make its way into something like Star Trek on every episode, the technobabble isn't just there to justify its presence. It's also there to demonstrate that as far as the fictional universe is concerned, it's science and specifically NOT to be understood as magic.

Meaning that the fictional universe abhors a straight up "it's magic, motherfucker" explanation. Despite the reapers and the Mass Effect clearly being magical entities (which the 'technobabble' aka Codex even acknowledges), the impression that I and most people got from the first game, was that it was playing by "Sci-fi" rules, not fantasy's "it's magic, motherfucker" rules.

Fact is that most Bioware writers know all this, except for the one or two that wrote the actual ending and with did a FULL genre reversal, making the whole series moot.

"closure", the most awfully misunderstood concept in the world, really had nothing to do with it. BUT: Bioware gave the people what it wanted, so there should be cake. to eat.
 
Synthesis was always the 'best' ending in the context of BioWare's shitty writing. It's only a bad ending when you start applying reason and logic, the same reason and logic that refutes most of Walters' dreadful climax. The same reason and logic that identifies why the Catalyst's reasoning is a logical fallacy.

But in the context of BioWare's shitty ending, it is the 'best' one. Because BioWare wanted the entire series to be suddenly about an inevitable war with synthetics. One that cannot be stopped. It will happen forever and ever and ever for dumb reasons that don't make sense. Synthesis is the peace and harmony to oppose this ideology: robots and humans finally together as one.

As said, and like all the other endings, it is stupid. But only because you apply the same reasoning you use to dismantle the awful, thematically inconsistent and unbearably stupid climax. Because BioWare obviously doesn't think their ending is stupid, Synthesis is their best case scenario. Nobody dies. Everybody lives, and are better off for it.

Right. I'm just trying to do the best I can do based on what they gave me. For me the writing was bad, not because of it being over the top or ridiculous; I'm playing a science fiction videogame here and I can definitely shape my expectations around that in order to have a good time. No, I thought it was bad because it feels like every ending event is completely segregated from the existential narrative. A separate entity, lacking fluidity, cohesion. It literally feels like one group of writers tackled the majority of the story, and another group of people completely unaware and oblivious with the prior group's thematics and tone wrote the ending.

And you know, I probably wouldn't even hate the current endings if they were presented better. The dialogue sucks. People keep making fun of "my sweet" because it's legitimately and unintentionally hilarious. Just awkward. The pacing is uneven. And perhaps worst of all, there isn't a scene that helps give it a sense of finality. In other great stories, at least ones that I personally find great, there's always this climactic moment at the end that feels great and is always wonderful to revisit, regardless of victory, failure, or consequence.

Mass Effect 3 lacks this moment. There are a few things that you could argue against me with, like Shepard slumbering over to one of the billion "choices" complete with this dramatic percussion, but I was too busy thinking "hurry up and get the fuck over to one of them, I don't even know what they do but get over to ONE of them, we only have 50,000 years before the next invasion."

So yeah, all the endings are kind of crap, but at the very least I can salvage some ideas that helps make aspects of them bearable.
 
I think we can all agree the main problem is the writing. It's just all over the place, full of holes and contradictions.

Your brain fills in the gaps of some of those problems which makes some endings sound better than others so the best ending is really subjective.
 
That's all well and good, but I just think merging synthetics and organics is hilariously creepy. Like something a villain would pull in any other series.

It also makes no sense.
 
I don't agree that's what he wants to do.

And as I said, everything about the game tells you control is a really bad option and nothing good come from it. I mean.. you spend over have the game trying to stop Martin Sheen from doing it, convincing him that it's bad. And then 5 minutes from the end you change your mind?

Point is, none of these endings is very well written

I know what the game tells you but the end result looks pretty good to me. I liked both the Control and the Synthesis ending. The Edi speech makes me like the Synth-Ending probably a little bit more. I'm just glad they provided some closure (Miranda!).

Well i think that these ending arent any better or worse than the rest of the Mass Effect story. Overall it's still one of the better videogame stories / endings. I actually cant think of another game that handled a decision-based story better than this series (Dragon Age is close but the whole narrative is handled differently imo, Heavy Rain's endings were just lol-worthy).
 
Right. I'm just trying to do the best I can do based on what they gave me. For me the writing was bad, not because of it being over the top or ridiculous; I'm playing a science fiction videogame here and I can definitely shape my expectations around that in order to have a good time. No, I thought it was bad because it feels like every ending event is completely segregated from the existential narrative. A separate entity, lacking fluidity, cohesion. It literally feels like one group of writers tackled the majority of the story, and another group of people completely unaware and oblivious with the prior group's thematics and tone wrote the ending.

While I agree with this, I think the real problem stems from the fact that - while these endings are INCREDIBLY poorly written - "choose your own endings" are more difficult to pull off than one successful ending. You have to have 3/4 different lines of thought/themes/ideologies that play off successfully for different endings to make any logical sense. And they all have to be built up since the beginning of a series, not in the last game or hours.

ME never really presented more than one or two ways of looking at this conflict (destroy the reapers... and uh... not all robots are bad), and it couldn't even pull off the endings related to those correctly.
 
They should have just kept it as Destroy and Control as possible overall outcomes, which was basically what had been preached upon you since the 2nd game.

Illusive man wanted to control the reapers, everyone else wanted to destroy them; or you fail and you all die (rejection end).

The synthesis ending is just... weird.

At least Destroy and Control are somewhat thematically consistent with the overall series, unlike the organic/synthetic conflict that somehow took center-stage in ME3.
 
Given this is the more frequented thread...

So I played through the ending once, selecting the "get the fuck outta here with that bullshit" ending, and lo and behold, it's a bunker in the future with Dr. Liara T'Soni's archives set up, warning the future cycles about what transpired.

Am I supposed to be pleased that this glaringly obvious yet awesome brainstormed-by-the-community ending was included, or roll my eyes at the laziness that that entails? I'm currently undecided.
 
The first thing I noticed was that they called in the Normandy and how quickly it arrived and why would shepard ever call for pickup in front of a goddamn super reaper and why would shepard slow down during the final push and why didn't shepard call in new healthy squadmates while he had the chance and wait what the fuck is happening?

Other than that it was a good addition.
The first thing I did when I got to the final choice was shoot the kid. I laughed when something happened, but then I realized I really like that ending.

Control is still my favorite and it got even better as it made the spoiler comic come true.

Overall it was an improvement. It went from godawful shit to crap. From Old Man's War to Forever Free.
 
I wasn't sure how to get the new ending so instead of telling off the starchild right away I ended up awkwardly shooting him which then started up the new ending. Except it felt super abrupt since Shepard say's nothing if you do it that way and the game kicks right into the Liara cutscene. So ya, that was a waste of an hour.
 
The cycle he is warning us about is the whole "organics creating synthetics and synthetics rebelling"? Right? But from what we've seen, peace between synthetics and organics is completely attainable. Look at the Geth and Quarian. Why is that cycle doomed to repeat itself? Because the Catalyst believes so? Correct me if I'm missing something.
If think peace was attained because of sheppard and the reaper threat..otherwise it would have failed.
 
I wasn't sure how to get the new ending so instead of telling off the starchild right away I ended up awkwardly shooting him which then started up the new ending. Except it felt super abrupt since Shepard say's nothing if you do it that way and the game kicks right into the Liara cutscene. So ya, that was a waste of an hour.

Disable autosave before you make your final choice, this way your save game wont be overwritten after the ending and you can easily check out the other endings.
 
Thinking about it, what I would have done is make the final choice, non-selectable. What I mean is that you would automatically get a certain choice depending on your playstyle. If you've agreed with the Illusive Man for most of the past couple of games then you get Control. You get Synthesis automatically if you got Geth/Quarian to work together or Destroy if you targeted one or the other. A more complex selecting method based from these three. You also could get a fourth, reject or automatic lose, if you were an idiot for the past two games.


That would have been too much work though for Bioware.
 
Disable autosave before you make your final choice, this way your save game wont be overwritten after the ending and you can easily check out the other endings.

Good to know, guess I'll restart the citadel mission and check out the other endings.
 
None of these endings make me think any better of this game.

Hell, I didn't even boot it up to patch it, I just watched them on the internet.

I booted up to patch, but by the time it finished downloading I had lost all interest in playing ME3 again so soon. Came to the thread to find youtube links.

As others have said in this thread, destroy ending is still exactly what I set out to do from hour 1 of ME1. Control is only acceptable to me if it ends with Shep driving the reapers straight into Sagittarius A* and never being heard from again.
 
Thinking about it, what I would have done is make the final choice, non-selectable. What I mean is that you would automatically get a certain choice depending on your playstyle. If you've agreed with the Illusive Man for most of the past couple of games then you get Control. You get Synthesis automatically if you got Geth/Quarian to work together or Destroy if you targeted one or the other. A more complex selecting method based from these three. You also could get a fourth, reject or automatic lose, if you were an idiot for the past two games.


That would have been too much work though for Bioware.

You mean make your actions over the past 3 games decide what ending you'd get?

Madness.

Destroy, Control, and Reject are all alright; not a fan of Synthesis.
 
Thinking about it, what I would have done is make the final choice, non-selectable. What I mean is that you would automatically get a certain choice depending on your playstyle. If you've agreed with the Illusive Man for most of the past couple of games then you get Control. You get Synthesis automatically if you got Geth/Quarian to work together or Destroy if you targeted one or the other. A more complex selecting method based from these three. You also could get a fourth, reject or automatic lose, if you were an idiot for the past two games.


That would have been too much work though for Bioware.

I guarantee people would bitch about having that sort of decision-making taken away from them, especially since all 3 endings seem to be of varying quality.
 
It just doesn't bother me. I don't over analyze it like "oh my god does edi have a vag now and joker gonna make babies with her?"
She had a vag all along

2148761-2145413-1331231487295_super.jpg

I just think: "hey, they all evolved. Sweet"
Who does Robo-Hat get to mate with?
 
I guarantee people would bitch about having that sort of decision-making taken away from them, especially since all 3 endings seem to be of varying quality.

Welp, that's almost always the case with games of multiple endings. Some are almost always shit. This way there is actual feedback from regular playtime and it resonates with your Shepard as a character. That way a Shepard who has been Renegade all the way through and eliminating the Geth, can't just pick Synthesis.
 
While I agree with this, I think the real problem stems from the fact that - while these endings are INCREDIBLY poorly written - "choose your own endings" are more difficult to pull off than one successful ending. You have to have 3/4 different lines of thought/themes/ideologies that play off successfully for different endings to make any logical sense. And they all have to be built up since the beginning of a series, not in the last game or hours.

And, you know, I'll admit-- this is why I'm not a fan of "choose your own narrative" crap. It's seldom that we get good writing in a videogame period, let alone good enough writing that can sustain multiple ideologies and yet still feel coherent. I'd rather have a strong, single narrative structure that plays out well and ends well, instead of a story that doesn't rise to its full potential due to ambition.

I fully endorse ambition, but as I said, videogame developers have so many other things to worry about and this is why we hardly ever get decent writing in games. And yet the Mass Effect team felt like they could write hefty scripts for three entire games while having hundreds upon hundreds of narrative branches but yet still comes together in a cohesive way. It backfired and I knew it would.
 
btw i only saw the extended endings on youtube, so did the old man and boy under a blue moon scene happen or did that get deleted?
 
Welp, that's almost always the case with games of multiple endings. Some are almost always shit. This way there is actual feedback from regular playtime and it resonates with your Shepard as a character. That way a Shepard who has been Renegade all the way through and eliminating the Geth, can't just pick Synthesis.

I agree in principle with you, especially if these endings logically flowed better from your choices (they're not quite there), but I'm just saying it wouldn't resolve the majority of the complaints, and would likely create some more.
 
And, you know, I'll admit-- this is why I'm not a fan of "choose your own narrative" crap. It's seldom that we get good writing in a videogame period, let alone good enough writing that can sustain multiple ideologies and yet still feel coherent. I'd rather have a strong, single narrative structure that plays out well and ends well, instead of a story that doesn't rise to its full potential due to ambition.

I fully endorse ambition, but as I said, videogame developers have so many other things to worry about and this is why we hardly ever get decent writing in games. And yet the Mass Effect team felt like they could write hefty scripts for three entire games while having hundreds upon hundreds of narrative branches but yet still comes together in a cohesive way. It backfired and I knew it would.

Well said. Completely nailed my ambivalence about branching narratives.
 
btw i only saw the extended endings on youtube, so did the old man and boy under a blue moon scene happen or did that get deleted?


still there, plus a new version of it for the rejection ending.

Are there any differences during the actual Earth mission or is it all just the stuff on the Citadel and after?

changes begin on the run down to the beam...didnt notice anything different prior.
 
I booted up to patch, but by the time it finished downloading I had lost all interest in playing ME3 again so soon. Came to the thread to find youtube links.

As others have said in this thread, destroy ending is still exactly what I set out to do from hour 1 of ME1. Control is only acceptable to me if it ends with Shep driving the reapers straight into Sagittarius A* and never being heard from again.
In ME1 Shepard thought they were just big scary robots. Shepard did not know they were the living tombstones for thousands of civilizations.

*Refuse would be the best ending if Zaeed woke up in that bunker.
 
I see the Destroy extra bit is still on there at the end, to be perfectly honest that is the only bit I actually wanted them to expand upon.
 
Just watched all the endings on YouTube, and they're still pretty much the same. Too little, too late. I disliked greatly how Refusal seemed like a mockery towards the fans who complained about the endings, which just goes to show how out of touch they're nowadays with their fanbase, or ex-fanbase more precisely.

Now I'm going to play the game tomorrow and choose Refusal, just because they're probably going to look into what the players choose, and from my part I want to show Bioware that was the ending I and many others wanted; to show a middle finger to their beloved "star child" and tell him to go f**k himself.
 
I just got home from work and downloaded it. Which save do you have to use to be able to get it? I have one "Citidel: The Return" which is where I walk up to the teleporter to go to the Citadel.
 
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