Posted on: Sunday, March 18th, 2012
Posted in: Featured
Comments: 849
Top 10 Reasons We Hate Mass Effect 3′s Ending
Angry Joe lists the Top 10 Reasons Why He Hates Mass Effect 3′s Ending and shares with you fan reaction and discussion on how the amazing sci-fi franchise from Bioware failed to deliver promises made.
What are your Top Reasons You Hated or even Liked the Ending? Grab a beer with Shepard and Garrus and leave your thoughts below!
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849 thoughts on “Top 10 Reasons We Hate Mass Effect 3′s Ending”
Just finished ME3 for the first time and was expecting a bad ending because of all the rage on the internet. I didnt get my hopes up… then when I played it the ending was actually not as bad as i expected. the child and the coloured explosions were still utter shite though. but a couple of the reasons on this list are lame.
1 – Joker and the normandy leave AFTER shepard has done his thing. They dont leave in the middle of the battle. the mission is completed since they delivered shepard to the citadel. theres no reason to hang around and get blown up. killing a few more reapers in the time it takes shepard to make a decision wont change anything.
2 – you DO see the squad mates return to the normandy. when you are running to the beam to get to the citadel the normandy LANDS and picks up your squad. Lol how did you miss that? And the thing about your love interest going off with joker is just conjecture. in the cut scenes you witness none of this, you are just making assumptions and drawing your own conclusions. show me the scene where joker sleeps with your love interest. show me. however, this scene to me is completely pointless and not needed. why do we need to see a crashed normandy on a jungle planet?
3 – conjecture again. the writers have free reign to decide what laws of physics govern the ME universe. if they say: “relay explosions kill everything, but the shepard explosion is different” then thats the gospel. doesnt matter if you disagree with it, doesnt matter if the excuse is lame like gravity nets or something, the fact is its all science fiction. Why dont you pick holes in thermal clips which werent present in ME1? Why not discuss the sheer absurdity of a sentient machine race harvesting life every 50000 years or FTL travel or “mass effect” fields. may as well be gravity nets. pointless argument.
4 – conjecture. the fleets converged on earth and knew it was the “final battle” they had no idea how it would end so how would they know they would get stranded? and why is this a problem. it was an unforseen circumstance. the fleet HAD to go to earth, but it got stranded. sherpard HAD to go to virmire, yet a crew member was killed. so why not moan about that? the quarian fleet is self sufficient, so you are wrong. also, you assume the fleet is stranded which is a doomsday scenario. what about the billions of organics left on their homeworlds and colonies throughout the galaxy? the organics have just defeated the reapers and they were prepared to sacrifice ALL their lives to do it. who cares about losing the fleets? the fleets purpose was to get the crucible to earth, now they have done this they arent needed (in the short term). also you ASSUME the fleets are stranded, im going to ASSUME that the reapers can repair the relays in 24 hours using gravity nets, or that the synthesised organics/synthetics can repair them in 24 hours using space hamsters, or that the surviving organics can repair them in 24 hours by cannibalising the destroyed reapers. see? still works if i assume like you have done. meaningless argument.
5 – completely agree. all the endings are the same and you never see half the assets you collected. you never see the rachni or the geth or elcor or the dead squadmate from virmire. total bullshit ending no matter what you pick. I was dissapointed with this part. every action in the game seemed to have big impacts, even missing a dialogue option affects how you speak to the Illusive Man at the end on the citadel, with options being greyed out if you havent picked all thr right choices. very very lame. it literally is this : choose the colour of your explosions. pathetic.
6 – completely agree. even a star wars style ending with a ceremony on the citadel with the council, or scenes of shep’s funeral would be better than the no closure ending we are left with. the few scenes of homeworlds you do see dont even include palaven or surkesh, you just get earth, thessia and tuchunka. very lame.
7 – agreed. same as above really. the ending only gives you the illusion of choice when in reality all the choices are the same and then you dont get closure. so much for wrapping everything up.
8 – completely agree dude, hated this part. circular logic and a lame character right at the end. YOU DONT EVEN GET TO FIGHT/SEE HARBINGER. you meet harbinger in ME1 on virmire i think and you come across its intelligence constantly in ME2… but in ME3 they give us.. THIS? this is why i can understand some people hate the ending. this part was SO cheap.
9 – completely agree. they claim to give you choice but then are given no other options in the face of this absurd logic. i doubt there are many players out there who felt their shepard would act in this way. why give us a character we can mould so carefully along our own paths only to converge on one particular point and remove all choice? its like the game is saying “no im driving now, you just sit and watch the cut scenes, oh btw whats your favourite colour? red, blue or green?
10 – agreed. worst part of the game. makes no sense. i hav replayed ME1 and 2 about three times each but i will never replay ME3. mostly down to this.
this list is accurate about the important things but i think the first few were thrown in to make it up to Ten which is a nice round number for a list. by far the worst parts of this game are the last three things which ruin it. the two before that are also annoying. the first four though i feel are splitting hairs.
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This is the most perfect explanation of why I hate the ending. F**k just watching that video caused so many negative feelings to surface. I was so deeply invested in that game that when the ending hit me like a dump truck I went emotionally dead for three days (yes I got THAT emotionally invested hate me if you want) and the first thing I remember feeling afterwards was pure and unadultrated hatred for EA and the story writers at bioware. That was the greatest kick in the balls I have ever received in gaming in my honest opinon.
This is the most perfect explanation of why I hate the ending. F**k just watching that video caused so many negative feelings to surface. I was so deeply invested in that game that when the ending hit me like a dump truck I went emotionally dead for three days (yes I got THAT emotionally invested hate me if you want) and the first thing I remember feeling afterwards was pure and unadultrated hatred for EA and the story writers at bioware. That was the greatest kick in the balls I have ever received in gaming in my honest opinon.
it’s okay i feel you i think they should pause the mass effect 4 and redo the mass effect 3 ending…..”no little blue children
“
The difference between ME2 and ME3′s ending was that the prior ending was supposed to be resolved in ME3. So basically, the game goofed on two endings, not one. Not only did it not give the player a choice as to whether Cerberus got the Collector base, but it didn’t let the player actually fight the Reapers without bowing to Star Child’s will for no reason.
The ending wasn’t a smart bit of subversion where you had to go back to understand it, it was a rush job. Even if you agree with Star Child, the fact that the Mass Relays literally exploded and the Normandy crash proved that there was no time or attention put into the story. Even if it was a “different explosion”, the relay is still useless, and everyone will probably die anyway, rendering the game pointless.
A bad ending is a bad ending, true fan or otherwise. But apparently they didn’t read the writer’s handbook, because no one should have to go back and sift through plot minutiae when the story was rather straightforward up to that point.
“any true fan who loved the series would know and understand everything I just went over” Ahh the “No true Scotsman” fallacy strikes again.
“By the end of Mass Effect 3 they just wanted to see a big epic space battle and have Shepard live happily ever after, standing on a grand stage and getting medals, just like fucking Star Wars.”
What’s wrong with that?
be|will probably be|can be|will likely be} {much
The ME3 endings weren’t as bad as everyone says. The ending of ME2 was the same case, Shepard either keeps the Collector Base intact or destroys it, but either way you still get the same ending with a slightly different explosion. Just the same, depending on whether Shepard was Paragon or Renegade, the star Chronos Station was orbiting would be blue or red, but in ME3 that very same star was back to normal. The color is symbolic of the consequenses of Shepard’s actions, visually the endings are the same, but the long-running consequences behind them are what truely matter.
I also find it hypocritical of the fanbase to demand Bioware explain everything to them and explain every detail about everything, when they go on so much about player choice and freedom. The fans want Bioware to tell them want they want to hear, rather than use their imaginations and come to their own conclusions based on facts? I don’t think so. They have the ability to think for themselves, if they REALLY loved this series as they claim they do, they would have used information, facts and clues from all three games to draw thier own conclusions, like I did.
Everything everyone else had trouble with understading I had no trouble with, because a lot of it was not only explained in the games prior, but most of it is just common sense. For example, many people were confused as to how the Illusive Man was on the Citadel, when the Prothean VI, Vendetta, blatantly told us he’d fled there before the initial attack on Chronos station. Another big concern was the Normany retreating once the Crucible was fired, which after talking with Hackett and Liara many would know that they don’t know exactly what the Crucible does, so it would have made sense for Hackett to order a retreat, rather than stay and fight the Reapers with useless conventional weapons. This is even touched upon in the Extended Cut.
Fans claimed the Crucible was ‘space magic,’ but this is as incorrect as clearly summized by Clarke’s three laws:
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
If one obtained Dr. Conrad Verner’s dark energy dissertation and read it, it theorized that Dark Energy could be manipulated to affect space and time, which is what Tali was studying on Haestrom, a plotline many thought to have been dropped. But no, this theory backs the Synthesis ending as the Crucible’s energy naturally speeds up evolution in all races on a subatomic level, including Organic and Synthetic races, and allowing them to become intimate and produce offspring, furthering genetic diversity.
Fans claimed the ‘destruction’ of the Mass Relays was a logical fallacy, but they were not destroyed, just badly damaged. The Alpha Relay violently exploded when an asteroid struck it in a head-on collision and shattered it, disrupting it systems and destablizing its core. The replays at the end of ME3 never actually exploded, the core was imbued with the Crucible’s energy and dispersed to the next relay to spread the Crucible’s energy to every cluster in the galaxy. The relays never shattered, and there was no core to destablize once the Crucible dispersed it to the next relay. The ‘explosions’ were actually the Crucible’s energy radiating out from the relay to envelope the systems and clusters. If Shepard chose not to destroy the Reapers, but control them by becoming the Catalyst or free them by sacrificing his/her physical energy to use the Crucible’s energy to speed up evolution and give synthetics true sapience including morals, SHEPARD’s morals, then they would logically repair the damages and help rebuild.
The labeling of the Catalyst AI as ‘the Star/God-Child’ is just purely ignorant. It is not a god, or made of starlight, it is an AI hologram, a computer. It thinks like a computer, therefore its logic in the preservation of organic species made sense. As a way to preserve both organics and synthetics, it treats the galaxy like a crop. It monitors their progress, then when they’re ‘ripe’ it harvests the organic and synthetic races who are sapient, and forces evolution upon them by combining their process masses into reaper form, which we saw first hand at the end of ME2, and EDI explained. The Catalyst also very clearly explains this itself, and in ME1 Sovereign implied that each Reaper was more than one conciousness thinking as one, where he claims that ‘We are each a Nation’. One of our squadmates also exclaims that they’re harvesting us, though Shepard in a bit of fearful misunderstanding constantly misinterprets the Reaper harvest as total galactic genecide, which it isn’t. To us it’s genocide, but to a computer, something that does not have emotions or morals, the Catalyst was doing what it thought was right.
The fanbase claiming Shepard as ‘their’ character was also ignorant. The character is Bioware’s property, they wrote and created Shepard and the entire ME universe. This story was always going along a singular path, which was that Shepard was going to stop the Reapers at any cost and bring peace to the galaxy by uniting all races under a banner of peace. The most we as fans ever got to do was choose Shepard’s gender appearance, and morals. Either way it’s still Shepard, the character created by Bioware. Yes, as Shepard we get to make tough choices, but those choices usually never affect the overall story, but rather have dire consequeces for friends and gameplay in the other games. Our choices always mattered, and for as much as the fans thought about the negative implications of the endings, they never thought of other overall consequences. For example, potentially killing EDI and the Geth along with the Reapers in the Destroy Ending, which after fighting to unify Organics and Synthetics, and give the Geth a true semblence of sentience as well as emotions and morals, a Paragon Shepard would not choose that.
Throughout all games Paragon Shepard has been fighting for unity and equality. and has always been open-minded and willing to trust A.I. Therefore upon being offered to achieve true peace and equality through Synthesis, it would make sense that Shepard, who at this point is on the brink of death, wouldn’t stop to have tea with the Catalyst and try to explain to a computer why it’s logic is morally wrong, but rather sacrifice him or herself to stop the Reaper harvest and bring peace and equality to the entirety of the galaxy, even sparing the Reapers and offering them the chance to help rebuild and co-exist with galactic society. To say that one’s Shepard’s morals is selfish and ignorant, Shepard as a character only has two true moral standpoints, peace and equality for all, or humanity first and xenophobia/racism.
Fans also paint Shepard as an OP god who is awesome, and yet while being an exceptional solider and leader, that’s all Shep was or ever will be, a good human oldier and leader. Shepard never directly killed a Reaper. Shep killed Saren, who Sovereign was controlling, which destabilized its sheilds and allowed JOKER to deliver the killing blow with the Normandy. Kalross killed the Reaper on Tuchanka, and the Quarian fleet killed the Reaper on Rannoch, Shepard just painted the targeting vector. Without his or her allies, Shepard would never have been able to do half of what he/she is credited for.
The fan reaction to ME3′s original endings was entitled childish garbage, any true fan who loved the series would know and understand everything I just went over, and I’ve only scratched the surface of all the ridiculous complaints. The fans of this series are suffering from Michael Bay syndrome, they don’t focus on story or character development, or actually read into the universe they’re ‘becoming a part of.’ By the end of Mass Effect 3 they just wanted to see a big epic space battle and have Shepard live happily ever after, standing on a grand stage and getting medals, just like fucking Star Wars.
God forbid Bioware tries to give us a heroic ending of sacrifice that branches off into three ideally different variants represented by certain colors, that in the long run could have wildly various consequences and/or conclusions, and allow us the creative freedom to make these conclusions for ourselves, rather than sitting down and explaining to us every single detail of what happens over a cutscene that could pass off as a movie from length alone, like we’re unintelligent enough to make said conclusions. Which judging by the reaction, we apparently are. Way to represent gamers, ME fans. People look at us like childish, entitled brats.
The indoctrination theory is an even bigger logical fallacy, since indoctrination requires the afflicted victim to have been withing the vicinity of Reaper tech for a week or more at one time to be effective and ensure slow neural decay to allow the thrall a longer lifespan of usefulness. The longest period of time Shepard was ever in direct contact with Reaper tech was during Arrival, when Dr. Kenson sedated him/her for two days. And even then, the Reapers wanted to harvest Shepard alive and unaltered, to show how weak humanity really was compared to them. They would have succeded on multiple occasions were Shepard to not have had his/her allies at his/her back.
you forgot one ending, the one where you simply tell the kid ‘no’ and you loose the battle to the reapers, than instead of the explosion of the mass relays it shows a projection of Liara telling the species of the next cycle how to kill the reapers. Than after the credits you see a boy and a woman instead of a man telling the little boy the story about the ‘Shepard’.
The simple fact is, the game was unjustly rushed. The first Mass Effect was in development for what seemed like forever. Years of planning, conceptualization, design and programming. The result was a well balanced, slower paced sci-fi adventure (which sci-fi fans enjoy). Mass Effect 2 was finished in 2+ years. By this time, Bioware had a larger staff and a higher budget, so the shorter development time could be offset by higher productivity. Mass Effect 3… 1 YEAR! (Actually the development team had to beg EA to postpone the release date until March to give them time to finish the game.) While Bioware was blessed with an ample staff and a generous budget for the 3rd Mass Effect, 1 year+ of development on a game with such elevated expectations is insane.
I understand that it can be difficult to write a conclusion that wraps-up a great trilogy in a way that is both interesting and logical; not to mention programing several different (and unique) outcomes that take into account all of the player’s the choices (even if is just that major ones). It is possible to do this, but for God sakes, you need longer that 1 year of development to pull it off. If the game developers had as much time on Mass Effect 3 as they did on Mass Effect 2, we wouldn’t be having these conversations.
Final note, in the “extended ending” DLC, a narrator does recap the conclusion super-imposed over still images of your squad and other relations. But as Mark Twain put it, “Don’t say it, show it.” I can only hope the the franchise can bounce back after this blunder.
P.S. I still loved Mass Effect 3.
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Ye joe i agree with the wrongness of the ending when i recentley played trough the whole game serie! I was told by a friend to get 100% readiness and full strength. When i did that, i fcking sat there wat hing these 3 a b c endings finish…… I sat there with open mouth and tought: i just wasted all of my time on getting all of these fleets and supplies and help to see an ending where nothing of that was shown… Well the story was very strong and i loved, realy loved the game!!!!! But then this ending….. Well i hope they make it good with the special mass effect (4)
The game got even more plot holes then before with the DLCs and stuff. You download the shitty DLCs for MONEY (I say MONEY) and it ffreaking doesn’t change anything. Your Shepard breaths 1 last time, but how the fuck? da@
im hopeing for a mass effect 4!
i dont know what type of game your me is but in my things are very difrent joker pics up my tem mates on hearth becouse one of them gets hurt and it is the one crue that forces joker to run awy and yes i have 3 chises control the repers destroy the repers or shoot the boy and then he says:
the cycle will continue and in the end shows other race talking about sheperd instead of the old guy and the ends are very difrent in 2 of them the normandy crashes but in difrent ways and in the 3rd choise de normandy is destoride “the cycle will continue”
[...] otherwise, STOP. Although the endings of ME garnered much outrage online (see also here, here, here, and here), to the point that fans actually argued that the whole thing was an hallucination. [...]
i think im gonna completely re-do the game in my head starting……… NOW
Share my reasons? OOOOOH BOY! Where do I start. – A *godchild* concept is already something that doesnt belong in ME serie and more in one of those cheezy Final Fantasy game. – The complete game got TONES over TONES of contrevarsy and shitty out of nowhere bullshit spamming all over the game. – Cerberus, (wich was supposed to be dealth with in ME1 but had come back simply saying *hi, we’re not dead* as a reason to give people their shitty puppeteer scenario EA ALWAYS use in their games with the illusive man crap) they themselfs stoof against the idea of modifying someone and alter their brains with cybernetics, next thing, illusive man’s virtualy an organic computer with his implants. -Shepard, master strategist and dude who always find a way to do the impossible… charge like cannon fodder on a reaper beam for a target that aint moving anywhere, right after he got 1 reaper, and another spawned litteraly at the same spot, and left that spot like he was just troling shepard. -Those reaper beams pass right trough capital ships like the ascension in ME1, you see it still hapenning over your head, you get hit on foot you should be ATOMIZED. but no, cheezy EA scenario happen. and I could go on and on for hours if we go on the shit they fed us since EA signed in. One last thing, ME1, sovereing says himself : I AM NOT A GODDAMN FUCKING AI! I am the sum of a whole civilisation in 1 beeing. Wich clearly explain why they need organic to build machine to begin with instead of just metal like any other machine that have ever existed. He also call the reapers: Independant individuals with 1 goal. ME3 : We’re dumbfuck AI who were created and controled by a cyber kid. Woopy-do-yeay. And am not even going over the disapointment of the ending yet, just stuff that aint making sens, if you want ALL the reasons including mid-game that makes me shun and boycot EA/bioware for it, I dont thing a comment page wil be enough so it’d have to be an e-mail. Say if you want it. (btw I know those company never cared about what people think so I’m holding my breath for no reason expecting it to change. I dont even wanna see ME4 I heard may be coming, I’ve been insulted enough with the last ones. First one was the best one, second was ok storywise, even good disrigarding it became cheezy, third one is a parody)
no boss battle I wanted to fight a harbinger possed illusive man or something like saren or the protoreaper not take 5 Fu@$$ng hours to limp down a hallway to talk to a stupid child not to mention all this harbinger talk the ultimate god machine but he only shows up with a mass effect 2 save game to replace the sovren class reaper that sooots you and what the hell the epic end war takes a WEEK the prothans fought for centurays a year would have been plasable at least
I agree, its like spending a god-knows how long time making different games for diversity and then on all of em end up with a lethal *I.W.I.N.* button that actualy fuck evereything up.