Comments on: Really liked the Mass Effect 3 Ending

By: The Ludologist » Why You should Never Ask for a New Ending

The Ludologist » Why You should Never Ask for a New Ending — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 18:29:23 +0000

[…] for a New Ending With the extending Mass Effect 3 ending now out, we can take stock of whether it was a good idea to complain about the original ending. Here is some of what the download gives […]

By: Jesper

Jesper — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 15:13:29 +0000

@Justin Right, there are many details to how exactly each ending plays out.

Reading through your post, I think it again comes down to your motivation for playing the game.

I just didn’t feel that I was being a coherent character with an unwavering set of universal ethics … and I especially don’t except such ethics to beautifully play themselves out when faced with galactic destruction… I rather expect things to get quite ugly. That’s why the issues of “negation of choice” and “thematic incoherence” that you bring up just didn’t work that way for me.

I also think there is a change of scale … it could be that you have fostered all these nice relationships to other characters, but it seems reasonable to me that this would be lost in general galactic destruction. I think the story motivates the loss of choice.

The only thing that I think _is_ objective is that there is something odd about the Normandy in the ending.

Another issue where ME3 clearly rubs _me_ the right way concerns the fate of all the characters and races that we have interacted with. Apparently many people feel that they should be told what happens to every single character based on the player’s choices. But I personally abhor the kind of bullet point storytelling where you have to go through an interminable “where are they now” debriefing at the end. I am grateful for being spared from that, but others apparently miss it.

By: Fotis

Fotis — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 12:18:46 +0000

Sorry Justin, just now followed the link to your article which expresses many problems I have with the ending very clearly. Maybe one could describe the problem we are talking about using the notion of ‘norm of the game’ which is just a relabeling of Booths ‘implied author’. The game follows different norms which are even in conflict.

By: Fotis

Fotis — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 12:08:36 +0000

I think Justin has better described my experience of the game.
From the very beginning it was a problem how to motivate the actions of the reapers and in the first two parts you have enough traces of a bad feeling by the writers themselves when they let the reapers say: humans cannot understand our thoughts thus making this black box to the unmoved mover of the whole plot. But as someone pointed out in the end actually a small child can say those unfathomable thoughts in a few sentences.
Other problems result from discrepancies between game lore and things said and done at the end, or between the interest of the player carefully created for some aspects of the game world, especially the characters, and the way this interest is treated at the end.
But the biggest conflict between the game and the end of the game is hidden in point 2 and 3 of your list of typical complaints – they really converge into one: up to the end the whole game is centered around choice and repercussions of choices made and the end doesn’t show any respect toward this theme to put it mildly (well, on the other hand the destruction of the mass relays is shown in different colors depending on your choice, this has to count for something).
The whole logic of we have to destroy, really to wipe out all advanced civilizations of organics because otherwise synthetics will destroy all organics isn’t really convincing – on a general level because there is some lack of necessity not to mention ethics to the argument and on an ingame level because the existing conflicts between organics and synthetics can be resolved by your actions explicitly disproving the point. The assumed inevitability of the historical cycle stands in a stark contrast to the topic of freedom of choice found in most other parts of the game. But in the end your avatar suddenly succumbs to this unconvincing argument made by the deus ex infans (which resides in the Citadel making the whole point of me1 rather moot) and you as the player of Shephard are forced to accept this ‘logic’ as the norm of the game contradicting all you have done in the last 150 hours (all 3 games together).
At the moment I cannot see a point of view from which this contradiction can be resolved but I am looking forward to summer and to the explanatory parts filling in the gaps.

By: Justin Alexander

Justin Alexander — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 21:08:53 +0000

“Destruction: Destroy the Reapers and most of Earth too. Mass Relays are destroyed as well.”

The devastation of Earth is almost entirely dependent on your EMS. It can happen with both the Destruction and Control options.

Furthermore, you’re over-simplifying the complaints people have about the ending by focusing on the symptoms they’re complaining about instead of the fundamental problems with the ending:

(1) Negation of choice
(2) Thematic incoherence
(3) Continuity errors
(4) Blatant lies in marketing leading to false expectations (which compound 1 thru 3)

The ending of ME3 is fundamentally flawed on a structural level. It would not be terribly inaccurate to describe it as literally being the exact opposite of everything that made the games successful and popular up to that point.

Mass Effect 3: The Structure of a Failed Ending

By: Jesper

Jesper — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 14:30:29 +0000

@Ava OK – but doesn’t Sci-Fi closure involving ending on some philosophical meta level, rather than hearing what happened to all the individual characters?

By: Ava

Ava — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 19:28:09 +0000

I definitely consider myself as belong to the third camp, and in part the second camp, and almost against the third camp (as in I’m really tired of all that “save the universe, make a choice” crap thrown at gamers all the time). Yet narrative closure? No, not really. Suddenly, something completely new appears, and then more stuff happens, and then we get a simple little movie which didn’t inspire me or tell me much. I do not consider that narrative closure at all, rather, it felt like they just opened a wound and then had to finish up (while incidentally leaving some of the instruments behind).