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[Flipyap]

Synthesis is a leap too far even for Mass Effect. How is such a process even possible? If it's such a logical resolution to the conflict between organics and synthetics, why didn't the Reapers just perform it immediately? Why would it resolve conflict anyway? Why did it work on Joker's hat? Why would Shepard (who was very big on uniting diverse races) ever consider it as an option?

Synthesis is just an arbitrary "happy" ending that was slapped together without thinking, it's nonsense.

The idea that forcibly changing everyone's genetic makeup (and possibly turning every computer into meat) would stop prejudice is so fantastically stupid, it deserves some kind of an award.

Perfect destory ending all day every day. Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (sorry EDI and Geth).

How does that even apply here when the other two endings are about meeting everyone's needs?

 

[JackelZXA]

The problems with mass effect 3 fall into two main areas:

1) Most of the DLC should have been in the main game because they give us what we were missing and felt like important main story stuff. (From Ashes, Extended Cut, Leviathan, and Citadel's Party DLC's all should have been part of the base package, with a full dlc suite expanding from there that delves into NEW things, not patching mistakes.)

2) Weird Decisions that, from ME3 the Final Hours, could be laid at Casey Hudson's feet. This is the stuff like a big emphasis on the kid, making the ending what it was, and cutting out the final boss fight with The Illusive Man. It seems like originally the ending would have been at Cerberus HQ, according to the art book, and the battle on Earth would have been possibly been a multiple mission planet like Rannoch and Tuchunka (with dlc map Rio serving as an example of content that was built for a different assault on earth.)

3) The Script Leak likely lead to the team scrapping large pieces of content and making something to replace it with that didn't really end up working out in the end. (I think Mac Walters goes into this in the Final Hours and how much it damaged the team and the momentum of the project. If this leak hadn't occurred, I feel confident in saying we would have had a much different final product. I think Tuchunka and Rannoch were least effected, but everything else in the game would have been very different)

The kid just annoyed people and early on it was something Jeff Gerstmann called out as being "fucking lame". Brad Shoemaker of Giant Bomb ended up having a much better experience than the rest of the crew because he had as far as Leviathan when he beat it (So he had from ashes, extended cut, and leviathan. The 3, minus citadel's party, that I said would have benefited the game as being in the base experience) He loved the game and argued for it being on the GotY list and put it at his number 1 slot that year I believe.

These things were missing form the base game and are half of why people got so mad. They didn't find out the ultimate secret of the reapers, the prothean was paid dlc, and the ending was way too short and covered almost nothing, least of all your choices. Adding to that, the kid dreams were sappy and annoying for most people, and you had a mix of art book comments and things Casey Hudson and Mac Walters said in the Final Hours that lead people to believe Casey Hudson had pushed some awkward idealistic thing into the main game that didn't belong and sabotaged the ending.

It didn't suit the themes of the games prior and felt like they came from a guy who didn't eat sleep and breath his product like Hideo Kojima would. Delving into comments he made on the bombcast and in other places, as well as the way he left, he felt like someone who didn't really like the games he was making, and was more concerned with other things that were important to him, but not important to the userbase he had a hand in developing.

It ended up with a final mission that felt thrown together at the last minute and focusing on things that weren't important to the fans but could be seen as important to someone who is looking at the project at a surface level. It was something that looked like "the boss swept in and demanded we change everything" and it's kind of a shame we didnt get a project

(My personal no 1 annoyance was that if any of your squad are missing at the end, such as if tali dies, a random human soldier replaces them in their exact spot despite this being an intimate moment between shepard and his squad. Tali dying is the only one that could be seen as common, as if you didn't get the tali/legion compromise scene in me2 and kept them both alive it's impossible to get both the geth and quarians to survive rannoch, and I personally find the ending where Shepard tries to stop legion short of blowing him away, and then apologizes to tali for not being able to stop things from going this far, ends up in the best emotional story for that part of the game)

But yeah. If we hadn't had the kid, if we had a badass final boss fight, if we had the prothean, improved ending, reaper backstory mission, and additional me2 characters' content (from citadel's party half, including the scenes on the strip, in your appartment, and the party you can throw up to "the night before the final mission", which gives you much more closure with the me2 squadmates and makes their places in the story feel more meaningful) the game would have been much better recieved.

But these things are what I feel dragged it down and their absense lead to one of the biggest cases of blue balls a game has ever left people with. They didn't find out about the reapers, they may have not seen javik (in jeff gerstman's case), they had to deal with a sappy and saccrine plot thread with some dead kid that outstayed it's welcome as soon as the first mission ending, they didn't get a cool boss that put their combat skills and abilities to an ultimate test (let alone the way sovereign amounts to a bucket of nothing after coming face to face with shepard in the final run), and an ending that felt surreal, out of place, and empty. Their choices didn't factor in and it felt like we were just hurried through the experience to make a statement that unfortunately threw the series promise under the bus that we'd believed in for about half a decade.

It was a shame and could have been better. People coming to the game late had a better time than the people who loved the game most, and this game is part of why I started to question dlc practices and the harm they can have on a game, pushing it out when it's not ready with the idea that they can fix problems it has after the fact.

This game was a case where the product we were giving was lacking and the prospect of dlc wasn't exciting new adventures, it was a bandaid for people that cared about the series most. Oh and the original final message about continuing the adventure through dlc was the worst. (Let alone the crappy buzz aldrin thing. Bringing in that guy to do a voice should have been the coolest thing for this specific series, but the way it was used was just the cherry on top of everything people disliked about the game)

 

[Tony Redgrave]

I thought Destroy and Control weren't bad endings, in fact the latter is the only true "happy" ending of the trilogy. Synthesis was nuts. I remember the whole debacle and LOTS of people were just angry because they didn't get a medal ceremony/ride into the sunset/happily ever after ending which I think is unfair.

For me, the ending was never flawed because of its thematic implications, it was the subpar last mission and the lack of any tangible consequence to your actions through the three games that felt dissapointing. I mean, yeah, I understand living up to the hype in the first place was really hard but after the suicide mission it felt really bare-bones, they really should have focused in giving their all to that one last mission. Alas, rushed develpment got the best of the game though it's IMO pretty good overall.

 

[Random17]

Synthesis was so completely out of the blue I barely consider it any ending, more like speculative fan fiction.

Control vs Destroy made more sense thematically, more in line with TIM vs Anderson, and Shepard making the final choice on whether he was paragon or renegade.

 

[waveuponwave]

I'd argue that the ending became so notorious because right until that point the game can be really, really good

Like, I have my issues with it, the auto-dialogue, the lack of role-playing, the side-lining of the reapers in favor of Cerberus as the main enemy, the focus on Earth when the whole trilogy was about working together as a galaxy...

But what the game really excels at is concluding the story arcs from previous games while taking your prior choices into account.
Tuchanka and Rannoch are pretty much perfect in the way they pull all the threads from the Rachni/Geth and genophage storylines together, making your choices up to that point feel meaningful, while still giving you enough options in how to deal with the conflicts
(Let's not talk about the Rachni now, that's another story...)

The ending feels like a slap in the face, because Tuchanka and Rannoch created the expectation that Bioware mean business, they won't just handwave the choices you made away, the ending will really be yours... and then we get to Earth and the opposite happens, it doesn't matter one bit if you managed to unite the galaxy or not and suddenly you can choose between three endings that will lead to a completely different galaxy without taking into account anything you did before

And than as icing on the cake all three endings are either completely nonsensical or thematically incongruent with the whole story
-1. esoteric gibberish that doesn't make any sense. Oh, and forget that the whole story was about uniting a diverse galaxy for a common purpose, there can only be peace if everyone is the same
-2. do exactly what your main nemesis in the game wanted, only this time it will totally work because space magic
-3. pretty much what you expected as an ending, but with added HIGH EMOTIONAL STAKES, because all synthetics will die, too. Why? Space Magic

Up until that point Mass Effect was always relatively hard sci-fi. Tons of codex entries explaing everything, dark energy... the endings just seems to come from a completely different story

 

[Nielm]

If only the game ended this way:

The Reapers are destroyed. Anderson and Shepard reminisce about their accomplishments.
Citadel DLC. A final goodbye to the characters you know and love, and the series.

I chose the Destroy ending because it made the most sense to me at the time. The whole goal all along has been to destroy the Reapers - it makes no sense for Shepard to suddenly change his mind after the Catalyst comes out of nowhere.

 

[sobaka770]

I will say time and time again, amended versions of Destroy or Refuse should've been the only two endings.

Mass effect plays out over the course of trilogy as Dragon Age: Origins (but better and in space). The reapers (darkspawn), play a role of the catalyst and looming threat but their actual origin and purpose are not important. They should never have been explained. What matters in Mass effect is the universe, relationship between races, squadmates, choosing your way. Reapers serve to give more pressure to these choices.

The end of Dragon Age Origins is perfect, because it wraps up all the storylines and kills off the big bad, no matter what you do. Now you may die, or live, or kill off party members but those were all in game choices you made. Mass effect should have learned from that, and the fact that it didn't is perplexing.

After you resolve the geth conflict, the krogan conflict and unite (or not) the Galaxy, just let us win (or lose). Give us a validation of our choices, not the stupid choice between fairy tale BS endings (which do not fit with the lore of the series) which overshadow EVERYTHING ELSE in the game and don't tie in with previous decisions.

The fact that Bioware stuck to their "vision" is the main issue, as it clearly shows that the writing team didn't understand what made Mass effect so special. Explaining more the reapers and putting more cinematics into the ending is like polishing the turd.

To the topic: control doesn't make sense for paragon Shepard. I don't see what you see OP, it's clearly what illusive man wanted and the tyranny of a single man is clearly what renegade Shepard would do (save the council much?).

 

[Camp Freddie]

My brief thoughts on the endings:

Destroy: Good idea but ham-fisted implementation. Why do I suddenly have the godlike power to kill all synthetics? I feel that this should have been the bad ending, tied to you fucking up and not uniting the galaxy. i.e. the nuclear last resort option.

Control: Bullshit. It seems like an obvious trap, given the illusive man conversation, and the fact that the reapers are blatantly using starchild to psychologically manipulate you. It should have been a trick/bad ending, with Shepherd becoming the human reaper, technically allowing 'humanity' to 'survive' the cycle at the cost of submitting to the reapers.

Synthesise: Utter bullshit. The level of "space magic" required in this ending is just ridiculous. The Mass Effect universe does a really good job of providing coherent explanations for its sci-fi. It's not quite 'hard' sci-fi, but it's not soft science fantasy either. This ending seems like it's from a Disney fairy tale, "and they all lived happily ever after". And it's also a really creepy ending if you think about it, essentially transferring everyone in the galaxy into new cyborg bodies and partially-synthetic brains. WTF?

Reject: The best ending IMO, since it stays true to the setting. The star child is such an obvious trap thaty it makes no sense to surrender to him and plug yourself into the technicolor ending-o-matic machine
I'd have liked an ending where this is combined with the Andromeda Ark story and various edits depending on your galactic readiness and paragon/renegade. Liara's video would be a distorted barely-coherent message if you did badly, a "we know their weaknesses, it's up to you to finish the fight" for renegades and a "we united too late to stop them but it's not too late for you" for paragons. If you have a good galactic readiness, Liara would hint that some humans and aliens escaped to find new homes amongst the distant stars.

Indoctrination theory: obviously not canon, but this idea really should have been explored more. Why is Shepherd the only person in the galaxy who is apparently immune to this effect? I'd have liked 'control' to incorporate the idea that Shepherd has succumbed to indoctrination.

 

[Fowler]

I didn't know the writer of the first and second game talked about his planned ending:

http://www.pcgamer.com/mass-effect-3-series-former-lead-writer-reveals-original-ending-ideas/

Basically the reapers would destroy advanced civilizations because their use of dark energy would accelerate the end of the universe.

I always really liked this, because it... makes sense.

In ME1, forgive me if I get the details of this wrong, but Sovereign dismisses Shepard by talking about how a mortal organic can't possibly see things as a near-immortal machine does. He never explains the Reapers motivation, because he claims Shepard cannot understand it.

In hindsight, this conversation is ridiculous: A galaxy where AI is banned because an AI race rose up and kicked their organic creators off their home planet would ABSOLUTELY understand the Reaper motivation of "organics and artificial life will never get along."

But if the threat was the acceleration of the end of the universe by using dark energy... well... that makes sense, right? Beings with lifespans measured in decades (or even centuries) wouldn't worry about the universe ending in a couple of million years from now... but for a near-immortal machine like the Reapers? That's a threat to them.

 

[What did he mean by this?]

I dont believe that synthetics have the right to "life" so I "killed" them all.

I'll kill Data too