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Mass Effect 3's Ending Sucks, Sign Petition To Change It
Posted on Monday, March 12 @ 13:14:05 Eastern by Nicholas Tan
I have not been soft-spoken about how I feel about Mass Effect 3's ending. In my review, I criticize the abruptness of the choices you're given for the ending and how it completely ignores all of the Paragon and Renegade choices you've made up to that critical point.
If that wasn't enough, the differences between all three endings is minute, though the consequences of each decision would dramatically change the outcome of the Mass Effect universe. An open-ended philosophical conclusion doesn't fit a series that is entrenched in intense racial conflicts, military warfare, and tangible social issues. In fact, the ending feels more appropriate for Final Fantasy than Mass Effect.
The lack of an epilogue for the characters only exacerbate the problem and don't match the investment players have made in the Mass Effect 3 series over the last five years. It's an odd decision, especially when BioWare's own Dragon Age: Origins has an epilogue that wraps up its story rather well.
In response, a petition entitled "Mass Effect 3 ending DLC!: We want a DLC that changes the last minutes of the game." has appeared on change.org with, at the time of this writing, 2,753 signatures:
We want a Dlc that changes the last minutes of the game.
Mass effect 3 is a great game until the last few minutes , they destroy everything fans have been playing for in the past 5 years.
We want a DLC that offers a wide variety of endings from everyone dies and the cycle continues to lots of little bunnies !
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Sincerely, The Fans of Mass effect
[Your name]
One comment by Tom Maltais, which has received the most likes, details the reasons for the petition best:
All the hours, all the effort in developing the relationships with the characters and in bringing peace to the galaxy and I am essentially left with three hollow options that allow the Reapers to win anyway. Destroying the relays effectively kills most space civilizations in the galaxy. I read the descriptions of the planets when I scanned them - I am well aware that most food and fuel for FTL drives is mined/farmed in places that require the relays to access, so no access means no galactic economy and mass starvation. Add to that the fact that pretty much all the important people from all the major races are stuck orbiting a dead planet like Earth (how long until they start fighting each other for the meager resources of the Sol system? So much for humanity - hope they like Turian food) and you can see that the galaxy is as doomed as if the Reapers had won.
Who cares if the Reapers are destroyed, controlled or merged with (Really? Merged with? WTF??? That's insulting...) at that point. They win. All of my paragon choices and actions through 150 hours of gameplay are useless at that point. I might as well have sat down ontop of one of the bombs I was supposed to disarm on Eden Prime at the beginning of ME:1 and just opened a beer and let the damn thing go off. Because the end result would have been the same.
I've had this account for a few years, I think I created it to buy DLC for an earlier Bioware game. In all that time I have never posted to a forum. I'm not that guy who talks on the internet and vents about everything. But this pissed me off. That ending was a disgrace and the people that wrote it and approved it should be ashamed. Why would I ever play through Mass Effect again? Or try out the multiplayer? When I know how horribly it ends?
Fix it. Now.
Let's forget the fact that the ending should have been better without DLC. While this petition may not change anything that BioWare will do in the future, the precedent has been set in the past with Bethesda, who changed the ending for Fallout 3 by allowing the player to continue past it with the Broken Steel DLC. With EA's emphasis on DLC and multiplayer, the insinuation would be that they were forced to keep the single-player short and that the ending suffered in the process.
Whatever the underlying truth may be, do you think BioWare should fix the ending for Mass Effect 3?
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Before Microsoft and Sony do something regarding their future in the video game business, I wanted to write, and I've wanted it for a long time now, but other things kept getting in my way, and fearing that tomorrow might be too late, today will have to do.
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Jonathan_Leack
Joined: Jan 2012
My biggest gripe with Mass Effect 3 is that it feels like it has retained almost none of the RPG qualities we saw in the first game. Sure, there is lots of dialogue but Call of Duty has a lot as well - does that make it an RPG? The ship upgrades, squad customization, leveling, and more are all way too cut and dry. Worst of all the endings are terrible and offer no sense of closure.
The game needs a LOT more than just an "ending fix", but I suppose that's a good start.
LinksOcarina
Joined: Nov 2005
Because other than the major choices in Mass Effect 1, some nonsensical bits, and the paragon/renegade options unlocked, thats what we had. And it was just as annoying.
Chunibrow
Joined: Mar 2010
Chunibrow
Joined: Mar 2010
cyclekarl
Joined: Mar 2012
Sourdeez
Joined: Feb 2012
Whats funny is how Mass Effect 3 felt way more whimsical like a final fantasy game to me. I think it actually made the game better to me.
LinksOcarina
Joined: Nov 2005
I just beat the game, I just went through those 150 hours and made choices that affected life and the perception of my Shepard in the end. The ending from a philosophical standpoint makes sense, but also a more grounded standpoint upon a second glance.
Basically, the choice is to end the cycle, or not. Destroying the synthetic life is basically creating a new cycle in reverse; where every 50,000 years organics would destroy synthetics or something like that based on the implications of what was said. Taking control of them would basically be indoctrination in reverse as well; once again changing nothing. You become the reapers then, the destroyers of machines. Both make you no better than the reapers.
The synthesis ending I guess is the perfect ending then; the merger of the two, the ending that actually breaks the cycle. We saw hints of it in the past three games, and it was full on out just for the fact of EDI as a character, to name an example.
LinksOcarina
Joined: Nov 2005
In the end, the ending is reflective of the journey as a whole. Does it bring closure? No, it could have done that better I feel. An epilogue with characters would be nice to see, (although your final talk with all of the characters reflects this more I felt) but in the end, the choices given are choices made for Shepard, not the player.
That seems to be the point of contention. Its not that they don't matter, its that they mattered to Shepard at that moment only, and they are not in the control of the players as much as they hoped to be. But in the end, the choices made on the journey do matter; because they would shape the decision you have to make to begin with. So it works both ways.
Longo_2_guns
Joined: Jun 2003
The fact that people are willing to PAY MONEY to get a real ending is just sad on so many levels. The fact that there's a DLC prompt at the end of the game hints that they planned that from the beginning.
tinymhg
Joined: Jun 2011
OdiousLupous
Joined: Jul 2011
Bras
Joined: Jul 2008
Let's say you played ME2 a certain way and you got a certain ending, how would you transfer your story and your decisions and the effect they had on the universe to ME3? What I hear is that you can play ME3 with the universe you left in ME2, and could you do this in ME2 after playing ME1?
Or am I talking nonsense?
Nick_Tan
Joined: Jul 2006
napsterxxl
Joined: Mar 2006
Nick_Tan
Joined: Jul 2006
The fact that these paragon/renegade options only mattered to Shepard within that moment goes counter to the reputation system built into the system. If indeed the paragon and renegade options are only meant to resolve conflicts right on the spot, then why bother having a reputation bar in the first place? There seems to be little purpose for building Paragon points or Renegade points.
LinksOcarina
Joined: Nov 2005
The paragon and renegade system was broken from the start of the trilogy. the problem is it's a gameplay mechanic that was designed to reward players who used it with something more akin to what they think the character would do.
But the real answer in the end is to do both. In my first playthrough of Mass Effect I did a full on Paragon, and it was boring as hell. So I changed it up and in my second playthrough, I did full on Renegade, and it was again, too predictable. So I decided that from now on, I would do what I think is right, what Shepard would do in a given situation. So I did both.
Both, a balance between Paragon and Renegade, made more sense to me in the end. It broke the cycle of boredom.
As for the reputation system, i'm not sure why it was there. My guess it was to gague how the galaxy saw you int he end, although that was never explained fully.
Nick_Tan
Joined: Jul 2006
I also want to add that the "destroy" ending could also be seen as the perfect ending, as Shepard is seen alive at the end if the galactic strength meter is above 5,000. Of course, that's open to interpretation as well.
LinksOcarina
Joined: Nov 2005
C_nate
Joined: Apr 2009
P.S. Get off my lawn!
213EDD
Joined: Sep 2007
Mobius_Sean
Joined: Sep 2006
Lenin17301
Joined: Jan 2007
213EDD
Joined: Sep 2007
Odbarc
Joined: Apr 2007
Icepick
Joined: Dec 2002
They were all with me when **** got tits up from the reaper, but ok, maybe they magically teleported back to the normandy somehow.... seeing as joker was in space fighting so rules out a pick up and Cortez had his fabulous ass shot down,lets ignore that either Garrus and Tali die a slow death of starvation or infection, or the humans die of starvation seeing as the two Alien species can't survive off human nourishment, lets ignore any idea of continuity and focus brass tacks on the ending
None of the god damn choices I made matter, I could have easily gotten the same ending if I did a speed run in every game of the trilogy. What the **** was the point of saving the Rachni Queen, curing the genophage or anything else, it has zero, no effect on the ending. And a holographic kid as god? or something like god? does that mean the **** you seen on earth with the kid dying was a hallucination? coincidence? second coming of jesus?
Its more than just a lackluster ending, its a sucker punch in the face to be told "your decisions have impact and will matter", causing me to invest time and thought into all this, than to essentially get a middle finger at the end.
sandineyes
Joined: May 2008
What really got me was that the previous games had played their sci-fi cards pretty well, although not as much in ME2 with the whole melting down people for their life force or whatever, but the third game pretty much foregoes all pretentions of fake science and went right into magic technology. I imagine that one of the reasons there is nothing after decision is that explaining the implications of merging all synthetic and organic life would have been impossible. How exactly do the characters become part synthetic? How would the geth or EDI become part organic?
Personally I'd say the "best" decision would be the destroy the Reapers ending, but with the whole geth and EDI, as well as the mass relays, getting caught in the destruction, it hardly is a perfect ending. I felt that beyond some eternal struggle between synthetics and organics, that a theme among these games would be fighting against what seems unavoidable fate. The synthesis ending implies surrendering to the idea that synthetics and organics cannot coexist, and forcing some bizarre coexistance on everything in the galaxy seems in the same train of thought as forcing everyone to continue existance as Reapers.
Still, the game is over, and asking for another ending is too much. Also, I was not a fan of the fact that they copy/pasted the cyborg ninja from the Metal Gear Solid series.
Ananymous
Joined: Apr 2011
Gamefreak4512
Joined: Mar 2012
J03
Joined: Aug 2011
Making a new ending wont make me want to play it again. A good fan made alt. ending on Youtube seems more likely than BioWare admitting their endings were s*** anyway.
Chunibrow
Joined: Mar 2010
J03
Joined: Aug 2011
Ashalar
Joined: Jan 2008
Whether playing Paragon or Renegade, or any shade of gray in between, if this all boils down to it not having any meaning in the end, you have every right to feel cheated.
But how to fix this? Remove options when having played as a genocidal racist? Or perhaps we are just thinking too meta. If you have been playing that paragon of virtue, perhaps it is expected of you to carefully consider the ramifications of your choice. After all, even a 100% renegade Shepard was able to go for the paragon option given the situation. All you have to ask yourself is: Who is Shepard? What motivates him? What actions have defined him up until this point? Answer those, and you'll know which ending to pick. It might not have been as glorious as you have wanted it, but it is what Shepard, what you, would do.
All in all, I'm not happy with the situation as it is either. I expected something more epic, more grand. That said, I could not envision an ending where all Reapers would be removed from the galactic equation. In the end, I guess the writers didn't know it either. Perhaps they painted themself into a corner on this one, it was too big to make a truly worthy epic ending that would satisfy all expectations, and they decided to do what they could.
SirTannen
Joined: Mar 2012
Really there is alot better endings than the annoying child that stalked Shepard throughout the entire game, also ME3 felt alot more like a action than an RPG than the previous games, which kind of disappointed me, but it still was a great game and they shouldn't end the saga yet.
I kind of agree with the people whom said it was possibly indoctrination, it certainly seemed like a hallucination, the part with the child and saving the universe. Or perhaps Shepard just died at the console and the world ended, or the machine fired off.
SirTannen
Joined: Mar 2012
Armarna
Joined: Mar 2012
But if they don’t fix it or have a plan, what a tragedy for the whole story. What a letdown to their fans.
Armarna
Joined: Mar 2012
SKX
Joined: Oct 2008
Chunibrow
Joined: Mar 2010
redcadaver
Joined: Mar 2012
redcadaver
Joined: Mar 2012
cyclekarl
Joined: Mar 2012
Gamefreak4512
Joined: Mar 2012
Gamefreak4512
Joined: Mar 2012
cyclekarl
Joined: Mar 2012
Gamefreak4512
Joined: Mar 2012
shonocuff
Joined: Mar 2012
shonocuff
Joined: Mar 2012
cougar69
Joined: May 2012
TheRocker
Joined: Jun 2012