Yeah, gotta say, the ending to 3 really broke my heart. I took an entire week off work just to play it the first week it came out and I cleared the entire game in one week. By the time I got to the end, I was legitimately depressed. What a fucking letdown.
@@chthulu27 The only thing that gave me hope was the max difficulty destroy ending easter egg and that was like a drop of water for a person dying of thirst.
@@spartan1010101 , yeah, I saw it. But i was just too discouraged by the pre-patch ending to play more than once. I loved ME2 so much! Epic final boss, great characters and I actually enjoyed the reload system.
@@chthulu27 Let down? It was perfect. Some of you whiny bitches wanted a sunshine and rainbows ending. Fighting a race of civilization enders should never have never ended any way but hard.
And we all know what happened to Chester after he played ME3 and saw the endings... Naah just kidding. He killed hisself in 2017 and ME3 came out in 2012. He actually killed himself after playing ME: Andromeda, which did come out in 2017. Can't blaim him.
That'd exactly how it should have gone. Any victory should have been as much a loss. We were fighting a race that had been destroying all civilization for millions of years.
Strangely I actually prefer this to what i thought was the ending cause i couldve sworn the endings were kill the reapers and everything else in the universe kill the reapers but also all your friends and just kill the reapers but it requires mass amounts of reputation and correct choices and everything must be perfected in a certain way just to get the good ending.
The best and most badass and epic boss battle ever! Marauder shields! In ME2 we had a huge human-reaper thing, and now, a marauder and two husks that die with three pistol shots! Isn't it so awesome you want to cut off your balls and scream like a madman to add to the awesomeness, epicness and badassery?
Christopher Dews "I NEED TO RECHARGE!" Destroyed it for me Especially the shit screenwriting, Shepard and company would've bent over Kai Leng three ways from Sunday But no he must have magical force powers that stop bullets whilst somehow just autisming
Kai Leng’s boss fight was laughably easy, even in Hardcore difficulty. The dude just spawns some low class enemies that you can instruct your squadmates to kill while you focus on Leng himself and just continually attack him.
@@labradude what you just asked me in attempt to be clever was a dumb question. The ending has been fixed for a long time. The DLC to fix it was not only free 10 years ago but is installed by default in the modern remaster. Chances are most playing mass effect now who didn’t play the original day 1 version won’t have seen the original endings and will just have to look them up for comparison correct? Correct.
nope it was bioware they already had a different ending planned and it got leaked instead of realeasing that ending they changed it to this peace of shit so wierdly it wasnt ea fault this time
Justaguy1253- Pretty bad gaming videos :D "then dont even though in the guide book it shows that ending" Having trouble understanding this statement from you.
Still amazed at how lazy they were with this ending. Even if you wanted to go with three basic overall choices, they shouldn't have used the exact same shot progression, and they should have shuffled in different variations of outcomes on subplots that were basically just left dangling.
"[The presence of the Rachni] has huge consequences in Mass Effect 3. Even just in the final battle with the Reapers." "You'll get answers to everything. That was one of the key things. Regardless of how we did everything, we had to say, yes, we're going to provide some answers to these people." "Fans want to make sure that they see things resolved, they want to get some closure, a great ending. I think they're going to get that."
to their credit, I saw at least 3 different scenes where people looked in the opposite direction than the others. Really diverse and interesting ending.
The biggest problem people had with the original endings I think is just a general lack of closure, which is something I agree with. I can accept that given the circumstances of the reaper war, the endings would be mostly similar because they do, and logically should, all revolve around using the crucible. It makes sense. There just isn't enough there and there is almost zero closere to anything that actually happened in the game as previously mentioned excluding the reapers on earth.
Who knows, maybe eventually we'll get a new Mass Effect set 100+ years ahead of 3 & the developers will finally give us the closure on how everything came to pass.
@@nothanks5220 I mean the Extended Cut more or less did a fine job providing that closure for the endings. I can understand why the original endings were confusing as fuck though, since they did fuck all to explain what it actually entailed afterwards.
That music when they step out of the ship has brought back a flood of terrible memories. I remember sitting there after playing through 3 games to end on that. Horrific. Only the GoT ending is worse.
I had a friend just pick these games up after the announcement for the new one. He had played Andromeda but never any of the original trilogy. He caught up with me partway through one and asked me about the series. I said "The games themselves are great, but its a lot like GoT. They just couldn't pull off an ending. The good news is though, unlike game of thrones that sucked for the last 2-3 seasons, Mass Effect is good right up to the last 10 minutes or so." I'm looking forward to showing him through the Indoctrination Theory after he finishes 3, which as far as I 'm concerned is the cannon ending. I"m really hoping the new game picks up after the Destroy Ending where Shepherd takes a breath and is still alive.
Which Prothean genius said ''Hey guys; y'know that weapon which is supposed to save all of us? We should really make it destroy all the Mass Relays too!''?
@@DolusVulpes Not the Leviathans and Reapers. It was only thought of several cycles ago apparently according to the "Catalyst." And no, the Protheans had about the same amount of information our character's cycle did about what it would do.
I remember being nearly in tears as this ending progressed. The music was peaceful and soft but oh so haunting. When I realized that Bioware had just given us the finger, I really did cry...
I discovered it by accident, because I didn't like the current options (they simply don't make sense) I shoot at him and he was like "so be it" and everyone died
Well, I choose the Destroy ending because I wanted the Reapers gone, no matter what, but that 4th ending makes the most sense, give a message to future generations so they can prepare themselves better against the Reapers, of all the options is the one that does make sense, why would you trust anything the child says.
Imagine playing the game blind, finishing a couple of days after release without spoiling yourself, and _this_ is the climax you end up with. No epilogues, nothing, just this disjointed mess. When I played and finished the game, I was convinced I must have hit a game-breaking bug and somehow skipped the actual ending. I loaded my game, picked another option, and saw pretty much an identical cinematic so I was certain my game was bugged and skipping the entire ending sequence for some reason. So I went to google to try and figure out how to fix the bug so I could get the actual ending. Then to my dawning horror I discovered that there was no bug, and that this was the actual "ending" BioWare had released the game with. The crushing despair and sense of betrayal still haunts me to this day.
@Beese Churger @Beese Churger I never played it with the extended cut. I will never play this game again. However I have seen the Extended Cut videos on TH-cam. Technically the flavour text epilogues are better than no epilogue, but it doesn't mean anything because the flaws with the ending are fundamental. The fact that they try to fix plotholes by using other plotholes is kind of funny (ground crew teleport to the Normandy? Nah, Harbinger just lets the Normandy fly down and hover right in front of him so Shepard can go out of character and send his entire ground crew away for no reason). The EC does nothing to address the fundamental flaws with the ending. For starters the Catalyst is a complete deus ex machina asspull that makes no sense and makes claims that are demonstrably _wrong_ - but Shephard just goes along with its bullshit. Most egregiously however is that at the end of a trilogy which was all about the choices you made - that's why from the very first game they advertised the fact that your choices could be imported from one game to the next - _nothing_ you did affected how the game ends. Red, blue, , green or the "fuck you" ending added in the EC as a final middle finger to the community who wanted more choice. Pick one. No choice you made ever mattered. Whether you were Paragon, Renegade, or somewhere in the middle never mattered. An arbitrary "war asset" number decided which colour endings you got to choose from, but doesn't actually change the story in any way. The Extended Cut didn't fix anything. The ending is a turd, and all the EC did was add a thin coat of silver paint to make it look superficially better to the casual observer. It doesn't change the fact that the ending is an insulting mess of human excrement.
@Beese Churger I've had a browse of the mods you listed. Good on the fan community for making what looks like some really good efforts which improve the game immensely. Unfortunately I don't think it's enough. At the end of the day, it's still the case that nothing you did really mattered. I might feel up to going back to the original Mass Effect one day if I've got nothing better to do. Who knows, maybe I will even enjoy ME2 enough to give ME3 another shot. I doubt it will be any time soon though. The scars of betrayal for the blatant lies and incompetence of BioWare's corporate officers and project leaders still cut deep. Even after 8 years my disgust has barely faded. As for EA forcing BioWare to finish the game within 2 years, there is a situation that we can directly compare this to. Let's compare this to Knights of the Old Republic II. The ending of that game was an absolutely atrocious, nonsensical mess of disjointed scenes. But in that case I don't blame the producers. Here's the difference: - The KotOR2 developers, Obsidian, acknowledged the ending was broken. - They apologised that they ran out of time to finish the game properly. - They offered to keep working to fix the ending and restore all the content they hadn't managed to finish. (Unfortunately LucasArts refused to allow it.) - Obsidian made it clear that the ending that was initially shipped up with was *not* intended to be the actual ending. - The devs intentionally included all the unfinished content on the game disc so that it could be finished and restored with a patch. Compare to BioWare: - No acknowledgement that the ending was fundamentally flawed. - No apology, just an attempt to claim "artistic integrity". - No offer to fix the ending itself, just provide "additional clarity and closure". - The ending that was shipped with the game was the ending that Casey Hudson and Mac Walters *intended* it to be. (Against the better judgement of the rest of the writing/dev team.) - No attempt to restore cut content to the game to give customers an actual finished product; just sell it as DLC. - In the very _days_ before release the project leads blatantly *lied* about the ending. They promised that choices would matter, that nobody would get the same identical ending as somebody else. I believe it was Casey Hudson who said outright there wasn't going to be an "A, B, or C" ending choice. BioWare's betrayal of the fanbase - paying customers who had supported them for years - was absolute. It's very hard for me to get over that and go back to product which caused so much pain.
@@Anonymous551656 The Ending is bad with or without the Extended Cut. Sliding pictures and voice over isn't a significant improvement. I remember all the theories about this game.
@@saquist I remember the first few weeks. Many of us literally couldn't comprehend how a studio of BioWare's pedigree could _possibly_ have screwed up so badly. At one point I was so desperate to rationalise that I entertained the idea that maybe Indoctrination Theory was the intended ending, and BioWare's master plan was to blow away the community when they unlocked the _real_ ending and revealed the truth. The ludicrous idea that a major studio would release a AAA game without the actual ending seemed more believable than coming to terms with the concept that BioWare was even capable of a failure of that magnitude. But alas.
okay looking at this without the extended cut, man am I glad I played the trilogy after the dust settled. extended cut helped me like the endings a little
Omg what were they thinking! This still baffles me after all these years. 😐 Original endings were a traumatic experience... Thank god for the extended ending and ending mods!
Okey i can understand Control and Destroy endings they seem to be atleast somewhat logical but HOW DO YOU FUCKING CHANGE DNA OF EVERY SINGLE ONE ORGANIC BEING IN THE GALAXY AND MAKE SYNTHETICS "ALIVE"?!!!
Imagine that shock wave sen't instructions to every living dna to produce and replicate small nanites :) Edit: Same for machines, it sen't them instructions to make certain neuron connections and made them think like living things in artificial bodies. You do know that our thoughts are just a bunch of chemistry with complicated neuron connections - it can be replicated.
another easy example would be viruses. They attack your cells, change your dna (programm it) to produce more viruses - an actual alien object inside your body. We can program viruses too, and plant then inside us to do what we wanted.
Even though I know it's not true, I believe in indoctrination theory. (well there are some hints that can make us thing that bioware might have actually planned to have such ending but didn't fully establish it)
the best part about the ending is that it decides whether Shepard himself lives or dies. and only in one choice does he live. the one that Shepard, paragon or renegade, would of made all along.
Dat so sad ending music. Every time I hear it, I remember the saddest ending in every video game I played. I would have liked shepard to not die at the end. That's why I choose the destroy ending because it you have enough power shepard can "survive". They should have put after just an image of shepard being saved by his crew and with them.
Cannon established in the mass effect arrival DLC, when a relay is destroyed its destruction creates a shockkwave equal to a star going nova. It destroys the star system the relay is located in. Consider all advanced galactic civilizations developed with a primary or secondary realy in their system or in a neighboring system. In any ending you destroy all the mass relays. FOLLOWING THEIR OWN ESTABLISHED CANON you destroy more then 90% of galactic civilization including the victory fleet.
Here's the confusing/bad part; the way the Reapers put it, Synthesis is almost unquestionably the best option. Everyone lives, the war ends, everybody's happy. But what about everything you've heard about mergers like that over the past 3 games? Mordin: "No glands, replaced by tech. No digestive system, replaced by tech. No soul, replaced by tech." See the problem? Not to mention, the Reapers come down to wipe out organics every 50000 years.Guess what, you just finished their job for them. You've wiped out every single organic in the entire GALAXY. And what about free will? Sure, people are slowly moving towards being more and more tech-filled. But even Shepard is still predominantly human, even after being completely rebuilt by cerberus! None of the people in the galaxy get the choice of whether they want to become synthetic or not, they're just forced, no other option. When you think about it that way, NONE of the final options are viable choices. Synthesis removes your soul and basically just lets the reapers win instantly; destroy kills EDI and the geth, as well as supposedly destroying all reaper-RELATED tech in the galaxy, which means suddenly a whole lot of people will have implants and objects in their bodies that have stopped working, probably leading to their deaths. Not to mention all the starship systems that are related to reaper tech, or the loss of the Mass Effect Relays, without which the entire fleet is now a hundred year journey away from any planet that can feed and house them. And as for control...well, the REAPERS tell you that you're not indoctrinated, and that you can control them, and that you totally won't be controlled by them. Because you can totally believe the reapers. They totally wont lie to you. Not to mention to idea that a single human mind can somehow replace the omnimind that's controlled the reapers for millions of years and not be overwhelmed by the billions of minds contained within each individual reaper. There's just too many bloody places things could go wrong, and then you're right back where you started, or worse, because now they've got everything that Shepard knows about fleet positions, codes, hell they've even got the ability to pretend to be Shepard flawlessly. None of the final options are reasonable, which is why I have always thought that the entire Catalyst plan is just one massive decoy. If a species has the tech ability and resources to build the Catalyst, they are nearing the point where they can defeat the Reapers in a stand-up fight. Not to mention the fact that the Catalyst was designed BY THE REAPERS, with no indication of what it actually does when used! So a species can almost survive, but instead dedicates all its resources to building the bloody catalyst, which proceeds to either instantly make the reapers win, or destroy all the mass effect relays as a fallback plan that will wipe out the vast majority of the enemy fleet without any effort on the Reapers behalf.
demiserofd Soooo, what would you choose when you're faced with the ending. I looked at this, and I can't decide. Destroy makes sense to me because I never really liked the Geth. Also, with the release of the extended cut endings, has your opinion changed?
Destroy is the only morally feasible option. Synthesis results in instantly letting the Reapers win. Control gives them Shepard's mind and everyone still loses and dies. Destroy kills everyone who has any implants and cripples galactic transportation, but at least some people are still alive and the reapers are gone, at least for the moment(assuming they didn't leave any reinforcements behind outside the galaxy and the range of the mass effect shockwave). Still, at least people will have a chance.
"No glands, replaced by tech. No digestive system, replaced by tech. No soul, replaced by tech." The problem is that the game had already shown beings made entirely with tech that clearly had a soul as much as any organic being. The Extended Cut also makes it very clear that everyone still has a soul and is not under Reaper control. Indeed, it hints even the husks may no longer be under their control. anymore The problem with the Collectors and husks was never that they were partially synthetic, it is that the Reapers took away their freewill and transformed their bodies into murderous monsters. The Synthesis ending, however leaves people with their freewill and looking pretty much the same. As for no one getting a choice of becoming partially synthetic, that is a legitimate concern, but it is by far the least horrible downside of any of the endings since the alternatives are to either commit a much worse act by killing a lot of people, having Shepard basically become a galactic dictator, or doing nothing and letting everyone die. Also, the Control ending is not as bad as you portray either. The Extended Cut makes it clear that Shepard truly is the one controlling the Reapers, not the other way around and, if Paragon, is using them for good. As for how Shepard can control them, it is clarified that the Shepard controlling the Reapers is not the original Shepard, but an AI that was created from Shepard's personality. As for the idea that the Crucible was a trap created by the Reapers, while it would have been an ingenious ploy, the Extended Cut once again makes it clear that is not the case. All three uses of the Crucible break the cycle and either destroy the Reapers or neutralize them as a threat. Furthermore, it it was a trap, it would make more sense to just make capable of one of the result most pleasing to them rather than making it possible for it to destroy them. Finally, the cycle that did build the crucible was clearly incapable of defeating the Reapers otherwise. It takes three to four dreadnoughts to have a reasonable chance of defeating a Reaper. At the time of the war there were only 200 dreadnoughts but a lot more Reapers. That said, while the Catalyst was telling the truth about the Crucible, Shepard still has no reason to trust it in either the original version or Extended Cut. The Leviathan DLC gives Shepard some reason to trust the Catalyst since they now know its origins and motivations, and therefore that each of the endings creates a result it may actually want, but they should still have been a lot more suspicious than they were.
I think synthesis is actually the worst outcome. It says individuals will still have free will but also that all their knowldege, including the Reapers', is now shared by everyone. That is just another way of brainwashing and control. People won't have different opinions if they alredy know everything the other does and have the same point of view. And if that wasn't the case, the peace that Spacebrat promises if you choose this ending is just a lie, because there still will be conflict. Organics killed each other before the synthetics existed and still do, nothing says that the new synthetised people won't just do the same. Not to mention what immortality implies. New individuals being born without the old ones dying will definetly go very very wrong. One way or another it is just crap and you fucked up. Control on the other hand, has a lot of ways to go wrong, because it doesen't put Shepard in control of the Reapers but an AI based on him, it just translates Shepard's DNA and all the information he has on his brain to code, and nothing says that this new AI won't get to the same conclusion as the previous one(Spacebrat) over time and decide to continue the cycles, initiating other war, but is also could not reach that conclussion and be good. There is a chance for things to go right.And if it was really Shepard's mind and not code because of space magic and bad writing, he just couldn't handle the information of hundreds of thousands of different species and their technology the Reapers collected over millions of years, so I prefer to think it isn't. Destruction has no bad outcome. Yes, you have to sacrifice an entire species and all the existent AIs, but you have to make sacrifices if you want to save the galaxy, and at that point you have alredy made a LOT of sacrifices, this is just the final one to end everything, to achieve what has been your goal since the first game.And if you see it as something good (which I don't because I like the idea of the ultimate sacrifice), Shepard gets to live.
The thing about sharing knowledge was meant to meant to mean the sharing of data stores and archives, not something like a hive mind with literally connected minds. It is also likely that people will have less children over time, assuming they do find a way to achieve immortality. The Shepard AI outright states it is not the original Shepard, but it is more than "just code". The games make it clear the true AI does exist in the Mass Effect universe. The version of the Control Ending show it is, at the very least, similar enough to the original, for good or ill depending on what the player's Shepard was like. The Shepard AI is fully capable of handling the information. While their personality is copy of Shepard's, they also have the ability to process all the information As for your views on Destroy, sacrificing an entire species is a very bad outcome. The fact is all of the endings have some kind of sacrifice. The question is which is the smallest one. Of course, I am talking about which ending is the best for the galaxy. If you are referring to which has the best writing, that is an entirely different matter. Even then, the Synthesis Ending does have Shepard make the ultimate sacrifice without having a copy made of them like in the Control Ending.
When they show tte reapers on earth, side by side shots being completely similar, I accidentally started viewing this in 3d with my eyes :D and seeing four images..but whatever - 3D!! ;D
***** Yeah they did. I consider the happy ending mod to be the canon, out of spite. Bioware had a great opportunity to fix it with the extending cut, but they fucked that up too. UGH. I actually just wrote about a paragraph more, but I think I made my point. They piss me off so much.
All those choices... all those hours... to change... the colour of the energy wave in the end movie. Having avoided spoilers, and having just finished the game, I now understand why people were pissed off.
Yeah, I know. I mean that Bioware should just realise that people love their game so much that they can't screw their fans over with endings as bland and repetitive as this.
Ion Gamer WRONG WRONG WRONG. If you get the Destroy Ending whit High War Assets, at the end of it, you will see Shepard's Chest, and then after a few seconds, he breaths, like hes waking up. Go check it out, its amazing, when i first saw it i was like "OMG OMG SHEPARD IS ALIVE!!!" just like a 8 year old. :l
elmarcus300 I have gotten that ending. The chance of people just getting it are very minimal though. What about the people who chose Control? Synthesis? Destroy with too low EMS? I know Bioware wouldn't screw their fans over like that *again* just by default saying they chose Destroy when they didn't. I know that there's the smallest possibility that Shepard will be in it, but I really doubt it's plausible (besides, Bioware have said that they are likely doing it in a completely different universe)
elmarcus300 You're right. That is supposed to be the "right" ending, considering the blue one was always Illusive Man's option and the green one was Saren's choice in ME1.
I honestly would have preffered that after these scenes, it would cut back to Shepard lying on the ground before the teleporter to the relay, slowly dying as its being shown to the player that the bits before this were indoctrenation fake visions. With Harbinger saying: “And the cycle goes on”
To people that don't understand why people hate this let me explain. Up to this point you've made hundreds of decisions. Each one leading to a different outcome for the rest of the series. Every decision you've made has had an impact and you're taught this since the beginning of the first game. Yet after all of that, after being taught that your decisions matter since the beginning of the series, after making hundreds of important choices through the course of each game, after forging your own adventure, it all leads to one of three options. No matter what you've done before this, the ending are the same. Every choice you've made up to this point doesn't matter. And to make things even worse, not only are there only three endings no matter what you've done, but the endings are all practically the same. Meaning that essentially, every choice you've made up to this point doesn't matter since no matter what path you've taken out of the hundreds that were possible, they all end in the same exact spot. This is why people think that Mass Effect 3 ending is terrible.
also they add an entirely new concept that synthetics and organics will always inevitably come into conflict right at the end of the game, while you're shown multiple instances of synthetics and organics helping eachother throughout the same game.
I'm not even an ME player and this whole thing just slays me. They moved the camera and/or changed the hue of the explosion and called it an ending. Oh, and "The Shepherd"? Seriously?
so, since the destruction of a mass relay releases enough energy to destroy the system it occupies (as evidenced by Shepard destroying one in ME2), Shepard caused galaxy wide mass extinctions over what appears to be close to 75% of the galaxy, Earth is gone too BTW, thanks Shep
The good news is that ME4 is confirmed and he lives which means that the cannon ending is the one where everyone lives and the reapers die and shepard ain't dead
Years later, and seeing this is what our promising finale was still gets me angry. So glad I didn't pick up 3 on release. ...And still haven't actually.
Aussieduderivs1 A bad ending can ruin a good movie, book, or show. It can and does turn excellent projects mediocre. A good ending can save things, but a bad ending ruins them. The ending to ME3 made the entire trilogy's efforts _pointless_ . Still, I'll give you that it had some great interactions and such.
Worth noting is that the Extended Cut did a lot to repair the damage. The endings still aren't fantastic, but they added a fair bit to turn a total loss into salvageable futures for the Galaxy, and while you can dismiss the slideshow as "it's just a fucking slideshow", it's still one slideshow BETTER than what we had before. It gives us some kind of idea what some of the races and characters get up to once it's all over. It also adds some narration to the endings, and they even sorta scale, producing better results if you have a higher readiness rating. At lower scores, you're stuck with the old Destroy ending, and the relays still get destroyed, but at higher scores, the other endings are available, and the relays are merely damaged, with ending narrations talking about their repair. The refusal/shoot the kid ending is absolutely nothing special, and really is just a slightly fancier non-standard Game Over.
Blazieth It helps some, I'll give you that but it's still insulting, especially after the promises they'd given us before the blasted game came out. But, what can you expect? It's EA. They're trash lol.The extended does make it a chunk better, but in the end, the game still makes all your struggles almost completely meaningless.
Like I said, the endings are still bad... but at least the endings actually offer a narrative now. There is narration talking about what happens next, and you are shown what some of the characters are races are doing after the fact. Hell, if the Krogan are cured and are led by Wreave and Eve, one of the slides shows the two of them going to war with each other - implying Eve is trying to prevent another Krogan Rebellion. They're not great, but they're acceptable now, at least in my opinion. It was the fact that they offered no narrative and told us nothing about what happens afterward that I didn't like, destruction of the Mass Relays aside.
Five and a half years later...Unacceptable EA/Bioware. We wanted our choices to mean something, but they don't. And the Extended Cut DLC reinforces that; your choices don't matter. If that was the moral of game 3, where was that message previously?
I am very glad i got my ME 3 Digital Deluxe Version with the Extended Cut already implemented. But even without that, the only thing to do is the Destroy option, regardless if it kills the Geth and EDI off. For Shepard would never consider neither Control nor Synthesis. Both of these options not only go against his / her morals (playing 100% Paragon here :D), but they are quite feeble attempts to shroud the true reason why the Starchild suggests them - Survival. Because if Destroy option is chosen, ALL Synthetics "die" / cease to exist, including himself. Knowingly or not, he tries to coax Shephard to choose "right" so he can continue to exist. Or at least that's how i interpret things. And regarding ME4 - i frankly be surprised if they didn't start something completely new. I mean, it would be lovely if you could not use a savegame but most of the Intel and whatnot you gathered through ME 1-3 in the new game. Heck, maybe even create a Character / Background based on if you had a successful (and long lasting) relationship with a love interest. Carrying on the legacy of your father / mother Shepard etc. etc. Let's see with what they come up with - hopefully not James from ME 3 as Main Character >
KubaxKristallmond I think the fact that shepard accept to listen the starchild (his ennemy) and say "yeah ok I make a choice " it's more against the shepard we knew, he/she never surrender so easily before ans I was like WTF
sai35400 Yeah that's why in the extended cut they put a fourth option in which Shepard refuses and it's a one big fuck you in your face by bioware team.
+KubaxKristallmond I personally believe that the best ending is the 4th option. Decline all options and fight. My favorite way to enact it is to shoot the starchild in the face. With this ending we have no clue what happens. Except that the reapers eventually lose in the end thanks to the efforts of the current cycle.
Yo, I know this this vid is supposed to be a joke but This Is Seriously Some of the Finest Editing I've Ever Seen! Forreal, this is Gorgeous! What software did you use to 3 together?
In a game like this I don’t see how you can end it without a “slideshow” style ending like in the Fallout games, mainly F1, F2, and FNV. Regardless of what you do to the Reapers, if this game had multiple endings for each race beyond “they lived” or “they died” it might have been the CATALYST to put this trilogy into the stuff of gaming legends.
The best part is about that ending is that it branches off into "end task" and "end process", though the latter option takes a bit more work. There's also the hidden alt-tab and "close window" ending, but it pretty much the same as the Ctrl, Alt, Del ending.
and people wondered why we preferred the the indoctrination theory. technically speaking, even here in 2021 with the LE, I still think/hope the Indoctrination theory might be true
Aah... I remember having used my free weekend to plow through this when this got out. I was a militaryman myself at the time and literally sacrificed my weekend off instead of visiting my girl at the time... I admit, I was shocked.
I blame he person who leaked the initial ending for this it was gonna be badass with a boss fight with the elusive man as a reaper husk thing but due to the leak they changed it to this shit
Plus they were rushed, only had a little over two years to make the game, it needed at least another year, you can tell while playing it it is very unfinished, still a amazing game though
Endings too me is... Destroy = Renegade (No. Not because of the color, if you wish for an explanation just ask) Control = That inbetween/mostly Renegade Merge = Paragon.
+Sarah Tilgner Except Sarin was just a tool and the reapers had no intention of actually sparing anybody. The merge option spares everybody and stops the reapers
+Sarah Tilgner. I just don't see how the destruction ending is the best in terms of story. Specially if you ended the Geth-Quarian war. Shepard befriended a Geth, understood their motivations, was the first organic ever to participate in a Geth consensus, and ended a centuries long war between them and the Quarian, achieving one of galaxy's most wanted peaces. And then you just kill them all like if all that long narrative arc (and one of the major themes behind the Mass Effect universe, that lasted for all three games) meant literally nothing. Not to mention that the destruction of all synthetic life means that you kill EDI as well, which was a loyal and useful companion since ME 2, and whose death will surely devastate Joker, a person so important for Shepard that he/she sacrified his/her life in order to put him on safety (the fact that Joker walks off the Normandy at the end like if nothing has happened, without any worries about EDI's death is just a sign of Bioware don't giving a single fuck about the credibility of their own characters). Also, the destruction of synthetic life is useless in the long term, because although the reconstruction could easily last for centuries, eventually some species will start to experiment with AI again. The Crucible may well have destroyed all current synthetic life in the galaxy, but it can't do anything against scientific curiosity.
That's the price of war though, Synthesis seems too happy happy. If you play a perfect playthrough destroy is a fitting end, that no matter what Shepard can't escape the fact they can't save everyone. Better than brainwashing everyone ever and rewriting their genetic code
Gabriel Gallardo that just shows how bad the ending was even with EC dlc Because i bet my life that the crucible could be accurate enough to erase from existence ONLY the reapers but well, bioware and EA decided to "fuck you" their audience Long story short MERGE=Saren ME CONTROL=Ilusive man ME2 DESTROY=Mission complete I agree that killing the geth and EDI sucks, hell thats why i say the thing about the crucible capability of being accurate, but in the end they're all synthetics, machines that can be build once again and nobody is saying that it wont happen, i want to believe that if you achieve geth and quarian peace the quarian will build the geth again because they dont hate them anymore, even EDI can be made again Also i want to believe in the indoctrination theory, it makes destroy the one and only option where you survive and dont become an indoctrinated monster
It's nothing to do with whether it's a happy ending or not. It's the fact that people expected their decisions throughout the game to have a greater impact on the finale. As it currently stands, you could have basically done whatever the fuck you wanted and got one of these endings regardless of past actions.
This game gives me Stockholm Syndrome bad, but it's still one of my favorites and I still play it all the time. Makes me sad the ending was so.... Unfulfilling.
I don't understand the complaint, of course the initial ending is the same, it's the crucible going off, the difference is in what you set it to do, the galaxy changes afterward. The Catalyst told you what would happen with each choice, you didn't need to be explicitly shown since you already knew. Fucking whiney spoiled gamers.
After three games and five years of being told your choices matter, everything you did to that point means nothing because all the endings are open no matter how you played, all the options are essentially the same and you only choose a color that represents some slight variation of the same resolution. Who lives and who dies and what happens to Earth, the relays, your love interest, etc. is all completely out of the player's hands and doesn't change based on previous decisions. And of those colored variations we see less than ten seconds worth of difference afterwards meaning the difference may as well not exist. It's a terrible ending to the best franchise of the generation. It was a bad ending. Get over it and quit crying about justified criticism.
***** Your choices all affected how much of the galaxy you could unite as well as how bright or terrible the situation will after the Reapers are dealt with. That's all the endings are, you deciding how to end the threat of the Reapers. Either you kill them, along with EDI and the Geth, you reprogram them leaving everything else the same, or you merge organic and synthetic leaving the entire galaxy in a new and elevated state. Everything else depends on which choices you made. Did you turn the krogan into the heroes of the galaxy or leave them to extinction? Did you make peace with the gEth leading the quarians to a new era of peace and prosperity or did you kill them off leaving the quarians either just with a homeworld or dead as well? How well did you set up the Citadel's defenses? Did you make them strong enough to fight last loing enough for Shepard to stop the Reapers or were most of them slaughtered before you even got there? All the choices you made were there they you just had to imagine the outcomes yourself. I don't know why you expected them to affect the final battle, your choices didn't affect the fight with Sovereign in the first game.
timemonkey No, not really. None of your choices really mattered. To what miniscule variation of success you had is not choice and none of it hardly mattered, especially after they patched the requirements down. About the only thing that actually impacted success aside from Mass Effect 3's side missions was playing the multiplayer enough to keep your war readiness up. And the differences in success is mostly theoretical as you get less than five seconds worth of difference from worst to best endings. "That's all the endings are, you deciding how to end the threat of the Reapers. Either you kill them, along with EDI and the Geth, you reprogram them leaving everything else the same, or you merge organic and synthetic leaving the entire galaxy in a new and elevated state. Everything else depends on which choices you made. Did you turn the krogan into the heroes of the galaxy or leave them to extinction? Did you make peace with the gEth leading the quarians to a new era of peace and prosperity or did you kill them off leaving the quarians either just with a homeworld or dead as well? How well did you set up the Citadel's defenses? Did you make them strong enough to fight last loing enough for Shepard to stop the Reapers or were most of them slaughtered before you even got there? " None of that was ever shown in the ending. There was no feedback from the game regarding any of those. "All the choices you made were there they you just had to imagine the outcomes yourself." That alone is an admission that it was not a satisfying conclusion and was lacking resolution. That proves my point. I mean hell, if we can take that copout, why even have the last couple minutes of ending that largely only changes the color of beams and explosions? Why not just say The End? Or "now you get to use your imagination! C YA!" ? That might as well have considering it half-assed it already. Also, the shortcomings with the original game have the benefit of knowing it had two full games to make up for it. That ending wasn't the ending of 5 years and three games worth of story. And further, that ending is much better and how you played did affect how it went down. There were options available in how Saren died that were only available depending on your paragon or renegade status. Where's your direct analogy for that in the ME3 ending? There isn't one. Simply playing enough multiplayer for war readiness to accrue a theoretical better ending is not a valid rebuttal.
***** Except those choices were shallow and irrelevant. It didn't matter if you talked Saren down or not, he still ended up only sorta dead and you still had to fight his Husk form. You were given choices that made superficial differences. Nothing important ever changed based on what you did until the third game. The choice between Ashley and Kaidan? Pointless, they both fill the exact same role in the story afterward. Killed Wrex? He gets replaced with a more dickish krogan who still will work with you, let Grunt join up, help out the turians and help take back Earth, Decided to run Renagade and took actions that should not only land you in jail but alienate your entire squad and all your allies? All three games just ignore them, paying little more than lip service to actions that should have had major consequences. The entire trilogy gave you the illusion of choice, you were always ona singular path, all you got to choose was who to fuck and how much complaining Shepard did along the way.
timemonkey At least the original's ending suited the character based on the way you played and the outcomes was how he died. Nothing important ever changed based on what you did in the third game either. Nor did anything change based on how you played. From a story perspective, the ending of the third sucked. The first game's ending was satisfying from a story point of view because my Shepard handled it his/her way. In the third game it makes no difference because everything's the same. The choice between what color light plays at the end may as well not exist. You see no differences to the outcome of the game. You can say this this and this could have happened, but it didn't play out on screen. We get less than ten seconds combined of different footage that all has vague interpretations at best. That is as disappointing an ending as possible. At least the indoctrination fan theory is more satisfying in that it tries to explain away the terrible actual ending of the game. There is a reason it is collectively considered a terrible ending by the masses. It's bad.
Thousands of coments of people sayin what a shit ending. You now what? Almost every fan of the mass effect trilogy i have talked to loved the ending ( the dlc extended cutscenes, obviously ) So please, stop saying bullshit about it, it only had one fail, they fixed it, and even with that fail it still the best trilogy ever made, so please no more hate.
It took too long for them to fix the ending that should have never even needed that fix in the first place. I never wanted to go back to ME just for some ending, I moved on.
(Facepalm) "Almost every fan of the mass effect trilogy i have talked to loved the ending"... So...all those "thousands of comments of people sayin' what a shit ending" are usually posted on Mass Effect related videos, articles and forums, I'm I right?. So I have to believe that all this people are actually Super Mario Galaxy fans that don't know shit about Mass Effect, and that started to randomly rant against ME ending on ME related content for no reason at all. Is that correct?
I'm a HUGE fan of the Mass Effect universe, but I rant against this lazy ending sequence because of how much I loved the overall experience. The ending is an insult against all the good things that the Mass Effect universe offered since 2007.
I turned around ahd shot the kid! I didn't know it, but I accidentally got a completely differente ending where The Crucible is never activated and the cicle continues. Liara left an archive to warn the guys from the next cycle about everything. And even the epilogue with the child is diferent, it's a female asari-looking adult instead.
Beautiful. You die, the relays explode, and the Normandy crashes. Such genius. I was always wondering... How did the crucible fire the beam in the Control ending with the Citadel closed? Space Magic!!! This had to be the most stupid soul sucking ending ever.
Who cares if they are the same, i love these endings. I don't care if i get tons of abuse for typing this, you guys and girls need to calm down it's just an ending. It's perfect, it ties up all the loose ends, now you can play ME4 without worrying about the reapers and just look back and think it was pretty cool.
"It ties all of the loose ends"? What the fuck, one never knows what happens to your friends, did they prosper or do they die in the new planet?, your decisions, the time and everything didn't matter; what happened to jack? Did they rachni queen help? Did krogans finally managed to reproduce? Cereberus got away with their shit or were they destroyed along the illusive man? Jacob's people made it? Tali's people's immune system got better in their more home world? Did the geth lived in peace with the quarian? Did joker fucked EDI's brain out? Does she has a vagina at least? Can synth and organics breed? What happened at the citadel? What happened to tuchanka? They didn't explain anything, they just went "and then the threat ceased to exist and technological development was reset. The end" this was an insult, they could have left this ending but with the inclusion of a little explaining at least
Greendragon H What? the elder and the kid thing? Thats not wraping this up, that's just washing their hands. After buying 3 games, dlc's, spending around 90 hours of gameplay you expect a closure. In my first comment there were plenty of questions unresolved in the game (excluding the DLC's ending, because fuck them, nobody should have to pay even more to have a fucking ending to a franchaise you've given that much cash already), and those were just the tip of the icberg, there were even more. They can't shield themselves with that petty ending
Greendragon H I assume with "the little slide show" you are referring to the advanced endings, that are featured in the Extended Cut DLC for the game. While those slide shows improve the ending a bit, they were originally NOT in the game. So everyone who played it at release got just the ending you saw in the video here and nothing more. And you can't really deny that those 6 minute endings are essentially all the same and tie up nothing at all ;)
Note how Joker has to tap faster for the ship to move faster and with the destroy ending, he taps the controls a lot faster than with the other endings.
Child: Tell me another story about the shepard!
Old Man: Did you buy the DLC?
Child: no...
Old Man: Then no, got to bed.
GOTTA BED
Or wait 9 years to play it the right way lol
At least the colors are different
+Random Gamer lmfao
balazs909 LOL YEAH
you win
because *_CHOISES CLEARLY MATTER_* in this game
unless you are color blind
You know what sucks? In the merge ending Joker is merged with cybernetics and shit but he still limps cuz he still got that bone disease.
Maybe now all he needs is a software update?
Yeah, gotta say, the ending to 3 really broke my heart. I took an entire week off work just to play it the first week it came out and I cleared the entire game in one week. By the time I got to the end, I was legitimately depressed. What a fucking letdown.
@@chthulu27 The only thing that gave me hope was the max difficulty destroy ending easter egg and that was like a drop of water for a person dying of thirst.
@@spartan1010101 , yeah, I saw it. But i was just too discouraged by the pre-patch ending to play more than once. I loved ME2 so much! Epic final boss, great characters and I actually enjoyed the reload system.
@@chthulu27 Let down? It was perfect. Some of you whiny bitches wanted a sunshine and rainbows ending. Fighting a race of civilization enders should never have never ended any way but hard.
Ah yes, the "endings". I've dismissed that claim.
It's funny because your avatar comes from a game that did Red, Blue, and Green ending choices much, much better. In 2000.
We meet again, Good sir.
JXZX1 What's the game
@@user-qp5yu1zq1m deus ex
"I've tried so hard .. and got so far .. in the end .. it doesn't even matter".
Linkin Park was morbidly correct.
And we all know what happened to Chester after he played ME3 and saw the endings...
Naah just kidding. He killed hisself in 2017 and ME3 came out in 2012.
He actually killed himself after playing ME: Andromeda, which did come out in 2017. Can't blaim him.
That'd exactly how it should have gone. Any victory should have been as much a loss. We were fighting a race that had been destroying all civilization for millions of years.
The most important question when choosing the ending for Mass Effect 3..
WHAT IS YOU FAVORITE COLOR!!!?!?!?!
"Blue. No!---aaaiiiiiiiiiii!!!"
Me: **thinks hard on my favorite color**
Catalyst: "SO BE IT."
Me: "Wait, what?"
My fav color in cyan .-.
WHAT is your name?
Commander Shephard
WHAT is your quest?
To save the galaxy
WHAT is your favorite color?
"Okay. One moorre story."
*_[BAM!] MASS EFFECT ANDROMEDA!_*
One more story i felt was suppose to be the outcome of the reaper war for mass effect 4
He asked for one more shepherd story...and he said one more : P
NO GRANDDAD NO
Fear not for Mass effect 4 is confirmed and he lives
The kid after hearing the Andromeda story: wtf was that shit?
I love the bit when they do fuck all but change the colour, it really adds to the whole "actions have consequences" feeling.
best ending in my onion.
Strangely I actually prefer this to what i thought was the ending cause i couldve sworn the endings were kill the reapers and everything else in the universe kill the reapers but also all your friends and just kill the reapers but it requires mass amounts of reputation and correct choices and everything must be perfected in a certain way just to get the good ending.
The best and most badass and epic boss battle ever! Marauder shields! In ME2 we had a huge human-reaper thing, and now, a marauder and two husks that die with three pistol shots! Isn't it so awesome you want to cut off your balls and scream like a madman to add to the awesomeness, epicness and badassery?
+EmotionGamer Umm....Kai Leng? Not Epic enough for You?
But the Marauder shields are more epic.
+EmotionGamer Nowadays, video games think having a final boss battle is too video-gamey
Christopher Dews "I NEED TO RECHARGE!" Destroyed it for me
Especially the shit screenwriting, Shepard and company would've bent over Kai Leng three ways from Sunday
But no he must have magical force powers that stop bullets whilst somehow just autisming
Kai Leng’s boss fight was laughably easy, even in Hardcore difficulty. The dude just spawns some low class enemies that you can instruct your squadmates to kill while you focus on Leng himself and just continually attack him.
I love it how the last scene shows that everything you did was just told by an old man and could be made up.
I had to see this for myself because for years I thought people were just throwing tantrums.
Turns out it actually WAS that bad.
Sheesh
You had to see an outdated ending to a game you have no context for nearly a decade after it was fixed?
@@labradude what you just asked me in attempt to be clever was a dumb question. The ending has been fixed for a long time. The DLC to fix it was not only free 10 years ago but is installed by default in the modern remaster. Chances are most playing mass effect now who didn’t play the original day 1 version won’t have seen the original endings and will just have to look them up for comparison correct? Correct.
@@TeryonTheHuman lol labradude wrecked
Don't blame Bioware. Blame EA for making their artist rush the game out.
nope it was bioware they already had a different ending planned and it got leaked instead of realeasing that ending they changed it to this peace of shit so wierdly it wasnt ea fault this time
I don't believe you.
then dont even though in the guide book it shows that ending
Justaguy1253- Pretty bad gaming videos :D "then dont even though in the guide book it shows that ending"
Having trouble understanding this statement from you.
sorry i meant it is mentioned in the guidebook about this last boss which never happened
Still amazed at how lazy they were with this ending. Even if you wanted to go with three basic overall choices, they shouldn't have used the exact same shot progression, and they should have shuffled in different variations of outcomes on subplots that were basically just left dangling.
Nah was a find ending
+gothpunkboy89 yeah, I quite liked the ending, though I played 3 first then went to 2 and I'm gonna try to do 1.
1,2 AND 3 bests games ever ( You can download betther grafics Hd mod to Mass effect 1)
i think its because the real original ending was leaked so a month before the game was released this was thrown together
umm they did show the different vatiations and outcomes of subplots. This isn't the full ending.
"[The presence of the Rachni] has huge consequences in Mass
Effect 3. Even just in the final battle with the Reapers."
"You'll get answers to everything. That was one of the key things. Regardless
of how we did everything, we had to say, yes, we're going to provide
some answers to these people."
"Fans want to make sure that they see things resolved, they want to get
some closure, a great ending. I think they're going to get that."
lol
>closure
Ah, those pre-release promises. After all this time I still remember that shitshow after release. Atleast we got Extended Cut
🎶Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies🎶
Tell you lies
I tell you wicked lies
Tell you lies
Tell you wicked lies
oh god, is this the legendary "multiple endings" that they promised ?
to their credit, I saw at least 3 different scenes where people looked in the opposite direction than the others. Really diverse and interesting ending.
Well, Mass Effect Trilogy is a game that reminded me that the journey matters, but not the goal. Sad but true.
The biggest problem people had with the original endings I think is just a general lack of closure, which is something I agree with.
I can accept that given the circumstances of the reaper war, the endings would be mostly similar because they do, and logically should, all revolve around using the crucible. It makes sense. There just isn't enough there and there is almost zero closere to anything that actually happened in the game as previously mentioned excluding the reapers on earth.
Who knows, maybe eventually we'll get a new Mass Effect set 100+ years ahead of 3 & the developers will finally give us the closure on how everything came to pass.
@@nothanks5220 I mean the Extended Cut more or less did a fine job providing that closure for the endings. I can understand why the original endings were confusing as fuck though, since they did fuck all to explain what it actually entailed afterwards.
The mostly similar endings, however, is exactly the opposite what Bioware promised.
That music when they step out of the ship has brought back a flood of terrible memories. I remember sitting there after playing through 3 games to end on that. Horrific. Only the GoT ending is worse.
I had a friend just pick these games up after the announcement for the new one. He had played Andromeda but never any of the original trilogy. He caught up with me partway through one and asked me about the series. I said "The games themselves are great, but its a lot like GoT. They just couldn't pull off an ending. The good news is though, unlike game of thrones that sucked for the last 2-3 seasons, Mass Effect is good right up to the last 10 minutes or so."
I'm looking forward to showing him through the Indoctrination Theory after he finishes 3, which as far as I 'm concerned is the cannon ending. I"m really hoping the new game picks up after the Destroy Ending where Shepherd takes a breath and is still alive.
@@Loln02345 Lmao. The devs have said the indoctrination conspiracy fanfic is not true (and it's also patently false according to in-game lore).
@@labradude cool story bro.
IMO getting over _this_ ending helps you make it through Thrones. Seen one devastatingly stupid finale, seen 'em all.
Which Prothean genius said ''Hey guys; y'know that weapon which is supposed to save all of us? We should really make it destroy all the Mass Relays too!''?
RaxuRangerking Protheans didn't make it, Leviathans/Reapers did.
The Crucible is a culminiation of many cycles to stop the Reapers.
The Protheans where just the last ones working on it.
@@DolusVulpes Not the Leviathans and Reapers. It was only thought of several cycles ago apparently according to the "Catalyst."
And no, the Protheans had about the same amount of information our character's cycle did about what it would do.
@@stormshadow7116 I made that comment 2 years ago.
Well, it's pretty much about overloading, "infecting" the energy of the relay and using them to spread the energy.
Not ideal, but it did kill them.
I remember being nearly in tears as this ending progressed. The music was peaceful and soft but oh so haunting. When I realized that Bioware had just given us the finger, I really did cry...
There is a 4th ending btw, if you shoot the IA the cycles continue, and the ending it's basically Liara's message to future civilizations.
That was the better ending in my opinion.
I discovered it by accident, because I didn't like the current options (they simply don't make sense) I shoot at him and he was like "so be it" and everyone died
Well, I choose the Destroy ending because I wanted the Reapers gone, no matter what, but that 4th ending makes the most sense, give a message to future generations so they can prepare themselves better against the Reapers, of all the options is the one that does make sense, why would you trust anything the child says.
Ernesto Nunez Only with the extended ending DLC. The original one doesn't have it (I tried it).
yes at first attempt I made it. The Liara's message was in a underground bunker
Omg I've never seen this without the extended cut. This is horrible lol
Imagine playing the game blind, finishing a couple of days after release without spoiling yourself, and _this_ is the climax you end up with. No epilogues, nothing, just this disjointed mess.
When I played and finished the game, I was convinced I must have hit a game-breaking bug and somehow skipped the actual ending. I loaded my game, picked another option, and saw pretty much an identical cinematic so I was certain my game was bugged and skipping the entire ending sequence for some reason. So I went to google to try and figure out how to fix the bug so I could get the actual ending.
Then to my dawning horror I discovered that there was no bug, and that this was the actual "ending" BioWare had released the game with. The crushing despair and sense of betrayal still haunts me to this day.
@Beese Churger @Beese Churger I never played it with the extended cut. I will never play this game again. However I have seen the Extended Cut videos on TH-cam.
Technically the flavour text epilogues are better than no epilogue, but it doesn't mean anything because the flaws with the ending are fundamental.
The fact that they try to fix plotholes by using other plotholes is kind of funny (ground crew teleport to the Normandy? Nah, Harbinger just lets the Normandy fly down and hover right in front of him so Shepard can go out of character and send his entire ground crew away for no reason).
The EC does nothing to address the fundamental flaws with the ending.
For starters the Catalyst is a complete deus ex machina asspull that makes no sense and makes claims that are demonstrably _wrong_ - but Shephard just goes along with its bullshit.
Most egregiously however is that at the end of a trilogy which was all about the choices you made - that's why from the very first game they advertised the fact that your choices could be imported from one game to the next - _nothing_ you did affected how the game ends.
Red, blue, , green or the "fuck you" ending added in the EC as a final middle finger to the community who wanted more choice. Pick one.
No choice you made ever mattered. Whether you were Paragon, Renegade, or somewhere in the middle never mattered. An arbitrary "war asset" number decided which colour endings you got to choose from, but doesn't actually change the story in any way.
The Extended Cut didn't fix anything. The ending is a turd, and all the EC did was add a thin coat of silver paint to make it look superficially better to the casual observer. It doesn't change the fact that the ending is an insulting mess of human excrement.
@Beese Churger I've had a browse of the mods you listed. Good on the fan community for making what looks like some really good efforts which improve the game immensely. Unfortunately I don't think it's enough.
At the end of the day, it's still the case that nothing you did really mattered.
I might feel up to going back to the original Mass Effect one day if I've got nothing better to do. Who knows, maybe I will even enjoy ME2 enough to give ME3 another shot. I doubt it will be any time soon though.
The scars of betrayal for the blatant lies and incompetence of BioWare's corporate officers and project leaders still cut deep. Even after 8 years my disgust has barely faded.
As for EA forcing BioWare to finish the game within 2 years, there is a situation that we can directly compare this to.
Let's compare this to Knights of the Old Republic II. The ending of that game was an absolutely atrocious, nonsensical mess of disjointed scenes. But in that case I don't blame the producers.
Here's the difference:
- The KotOR2 developers, Obsidian, acknowledged the ending was broken.
- They apologised that they ran out of time to finish the game properly.
- They offered to keep working to fix the ending and restore all the content they hadn't managed to finish. (Unfortunately LucasArts refused to allow it.)
- Obsidian made it clear that the ending that was initially shipped up with was *not* intended to be the actual ending.
- The devs intentionally included all the unfinished content on the game disc so that it could be finished and restored with a patch.
Compare to BioWare:
- No acknowledgement that the ending was fundamentally flawed.
- No apology, just an attempt to claim "artistic integrity".
- No offer to fix the ending itself, just provide "additional clarity and closure".
- The ending that was shipped with the game was the ending that Casey Hudson and Mac Walters *intended* it to be. (Against the better judgement of the rest of the writing/dev team.)
- No attempt to restore cut content to the game to give customers an actual finished product; just sell it as DLC.
- In the very _days_ before release the project leads blatantly *lied* about the ending. They promised that choices would matter, that nobody would get the same identical ending as somebody else. I believe it was Casey Hudson who said outright there wasn't going to be an "A, B, or C" ending choice.
BioWare's betrayal of the fanbase - paying customers who had supported them for years - was absolute. It's very hard for me to get over that and go back to product which caused so much pain.
@@Anonymous551656 The Ending is bad with or without the Extended Cut. Sliding pictures and voice over isn't a significant improvement. I remember all the theories about this game.
@@saquist I remember the first few weeks. Many of us literally couldn't comprehend how a studio of BioWare's pedigree could _possibly_ have screwed up so badly. At one point I was so desperate to rationalise that I entertained the idea that maybe Indoctrination Theory was the intended ending, and BioWare's master plan was to blow away the community when they unlocked the _real_ ending and revealed the truth.
The ludicrous idea that a major studio would release a AAA game without the actual ending seemed more believable than coming to terms with the concept that BioWare was even capable of a failure of that magnitude.
But alas.
okay looking at this without the extended cut, man am I glad I played the trilogy after the dust settled. extended cut helped me like the endings a little
I'm Commander Shepard and this is my biggest disappointment on the Citadel
Omg what were they thinking! This still baffles me after all these years. 😐 Original endings were a traumatic experience... Thank god for the extended ending and ending mods!
Last two words seen in the game:
"DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT"
Sounds like EA GAME$ alright.
Find the difference!
Blue Green Red :D
EDI
I need to call my Optometrist; I'm seeing triple.
I cry every time
Okey i can understand Control and Destroy endings they seem to be atleast somewhat logical but HOW DO YOU FUCKING CHANGE DNA OF EVERY SINGLE ONE ORGANIC BEING IN THE GALAXY AND MAKE SYNTHETICS "ALIVE"?!!!
Imagine that shock wave sen't instructions to every living dna to produce and replicate small nanites :)
Edit: Same for machines, it sen't them instructions to make certain neuron connections and made them think like living things in artificial bodies. You do know that our thoughts are just a bunch of chemistry with complicated neuron connections - it can be replicated.
Gregor Kovačič you can't program life, dude
another easy example would be viruses. They attack your cells, change your dna (programm it) to produce more viruses - an actual alien object inside your body. We can program viruses too, and plant then inside us to do what we wanted.
Gregor Kovačič nah it's just bullshit that Bioware come up with because they needed some ultra paragon 100% every one is happy ending
well, I didn't say I'm totally satisfied with endings, but it has some degree of scientific background
The 1st time I thought "WTF is this sht!!!" and noww... well it's pretty much the same xD
My first play through I somehow managed to kill every one, when the Normandy hatch starts to crack open it stops and no one come out!
The bit that pissed me off the most was the little data-pad part at the end trying to sell me DLC.
YAY!!!!!! Pretty colors :)
Ahem......Prothy the Prothean......
I like how we were promised sixteen endings but instead got like one and a half.
I was soo disappointed, and still are -_-
*i had **_#FORGOT_** joker, **_"looking back" _**_3:21_** like he's driving a car. **_#MEMORIES_*
Lmao 😂
Best pilot
Even though I know it's not true, I believe in indoctrination theory. (well there are some hints that can make us thing that bioware might have actually planned to have such ending but didn't fully establish it)
the best part about the ending is that it decides whether Shepard himself lives or dies. and only in one choice does he live. the one that Shepard, paragon or renegade, would of made all along.
Dat so sad ending music. Every time I hear it, I remember the saddest ending in every video game I played. I would have liked shepard to not die at the end. That's why I choose the destroy ending because it you have enough power shepard can "survive". They should have put after just an image of shepard being saved by his crew and with them.
Writers had a difficult time making the different choices result in three different endings.
So they just changed the color palette.
I will say this, hearing that music again made me feel really nostalgic.
Cannon established in the mass effect arrival DLC, when a relay is destroyed its destruction creates a shockkwave equal to a star going nova. It destroys the star system the relay is located in. Consider all advanced galactic civilizations developed with a primary or secondary realy in their system or in a neighboring system. In any ending you destroy all the mass relays. FOLLOWING THEIR OWN ESTABLISHED CANON you destroy more then 90% of galactic civilization including the victory fleet.
Here's the confusing/bad part; the way the Reapers put it, Synthesis is almost unquestionably the best option. Everyone lives, the war ends, everybody's happy. But what about everything you've heard about mergers like that over the past 3 games?
Mordin: "No glands, replaced by tech. No digestive system, replaced by tech. No soul, replaced by tech."
See the problem?
Not to mention, the Reapers come down to wipe out organics every 50000 years.Guess what, you just finished their job for them. You've wiped out every single organic in the entire GALAXY.
And what about free will? Sure, people are slowly moving towards being more and more tech-filled. But even Shepard is still predominantly human, even after being completely rebuilt by cerberus! None of the people in the galaxy get the choice of whether they want to become synthetic or not, they're just forced, no other option.
When you think about it that way, NONE of the final options are viable choices. Synthesis removes your soul and basically just lets the reapers win instantly; destroy kills EDI and the geth, as well as supposedly destroying all reaper-RELATED tech in the galaxy, which means suddenly a whole lot of people will have implants and objects in their bodies that have stopped working, probably leading to their deaths. Not to mention all the starship systems that are related to reaper tech, or the loss of the Mass Effect Relays, without which the entire fleet is now a hundred year journey away from any planet that can feed and house them. And as for control...well, the REAPERS tell you that you're not indoctrinated, and that you can control them, and that you totally won't be controlled by them.
Because you can totally believe the reapers. They totally wont lie to you. Not to mention to idea that a single human mind can somehow replace the omnimind that's controlled the reapers for millions of years and not be overwhelmed by the billions of minds contained within each individual reaper. There's just too many bloody places things could go wrong, and then you're right back where you started, or worse, because now they've got everything that Shepard knows about fleet positions, codes, hell they've even got the ability to pretend to be Shepard flawlessly.
None of the final options are reasonable, which is why I have always thought that the entire Catalyst plan is just one massive decoy. If a species has the tech ability and resources to build the Catalyst, they are nearing the point where they can defeat the Reapers in a stand-up fight. Not to mention the fact that the Catalyst was designed BY THE REAPERS, with no indication of what it actually does when used!
So a species can almost survive, but instead dedicates all its resources to building the bloody catalyst, which proceeds to either instantly make the reapers win, or destroy all the mass effect relays as a fallback plan that will wipe out the vast majority of the enemy fleet without any effort on the Reapers behalf.
demiserofd Soooo, what would you choose when you're faced with the ending. I looked at this, and I can't decide. Destroy makes sense to me because I never really liked the Geth. Also, with the release of the extended cut endings, has your opinion changed?
Destroy is the only morally feasible option. Synthesis results in instantly letting the Reapers win. Control gives them Shepard's mind and everyone still loses and dies. Destroy kills everyone who has any implants and cripples galactic transportation, but at least some people are still alive and the reapers are gone, at least for the moment(assuming they didn't leave any reinforcements behind outside the galaxy and the range of the mass effect shockwave).
Still, at least people will have a chance.
"No glands, replaced by tech. No digestive system, replaced by tech. No soul, replaced by tech."
The problem is that the game had already shown beings made entirely with tech that clearly had a soul as much as any organic being. The Extended Cut also makes it very clear that everyone still has a soul and is not under Reaper control. Indeed, it hints even the husks may no longer be under their control. anymore The problem with the Collectors and husks was never that they were partially synthetic, it is that the Reapers took away their freewill and transformed their bodies into murderous monsters. The Synthesis ending, however leaves people with their freewill and looking pretty much the same. As for no one getting a choice of becoming partially synthetic, that is a legitimate concern, but it is by far the least horrible downside of any of the endings since the alternatives are to either commit a much worse act by killing a lot of people, having Shepard basically become a galactic dictator, or doing nothing and letting everyone die.
Also, the Control ending is not as bad as you portray either. The Extended Cut makes it clear that Shepard truly is the one controlling the Reapers, not the other way around and, if Paragon, is using them for good. As for how Shepard can control them, it is clarified that the Shepard controlling the Reapers is not the original Shepard, but an AI that was created from Shepard's personality.
As for the idea that the Crucible was a trap created by the Reapers, while it would have been an ingenious ploy, the Extended Cut once again makes it clear that is not the case. All three uses of the Crucible break the cycle and either destroy the Reapers or neutralize them as a threat. Furthermore, it it was a trap, it would make more sense to just make capable of one of the result most pleasing to them rather than making it possible for it to destroy them. Finally, the cycle that did build the crucible was clearly incapable of defeating the Reapers otherwise. It takes three to four dreadnoughts to have a reasonable chance of defeating a Reaper. At the time of the war there were only 200 dreadnoughts but a lot more Reapers.
That said, while the Catalyst was telling the truth about the Crucible, Shepard still has no reason to trust it in either the original version or Extended Cut. The Leviathan DLC gives Shepard some reason to trust the Catalyst since they now know its origins and motivations, and therefore that each of the endings creates a result it may actually want, but they should still have been a lot more suspicious than they were.
I think synthesis is actually the worst outcome.
It says individuals will still have free will but also that all their knowldege, including the Reapers', is now shared by everyone. That is just another way of brainwashing and control. People won't have different opinions if they alredy know everything the other does and have the same point of view. And if that wasn't the case, the peace that Spacebrat promises if you choose this ending is just a lie, because there still will be conflict. Organics killed each other before the synthetics existed and still do, nothing says that the new synthetised people won't just do the same. Not to mention what immortality implies. New individuals being born without the old ones dying will definetly go very very wrong.
One way or another it is just crap and you fucked up.
Control on the other hand, has a lot of ways to go wrong, because it doesen't put Shepard in control of the Reapers but an AI based on him, it just translates Shepard's DNA and all the information he has on his brain to code, and nothing says that this new AI won't get to the same conclusion as the previous one(Spacebrat) over time and decide to continue the cycles, initiating other war, but is also could not reach that conclussion and be good. There is a chance for things to go right.And if it was really Shepard's mind and not code because of space magic and bad writing, he just couldn't handle the information of hundreds of thousands of different species and their technology the Reapers collected over millions of years, so I prefer to think it isn't.
Destruction has no bad outcome. Yes, you have to sacrifice an entire species and all the existent AIs, but you have to make sacrifices if you want to save the galaxy, and at that point you have alredy made a LOT of sacrifices, this is just the final one to end everything, to achieve what has been your goal since the first game.And if you see it as something good (which I don't because I like the idea of the ultimate sacrifice), Shepard gets to live.
The thing about sharing knowledge was meant to meant to mean the sharing of data stores and archives, not something like a hive mind with literally connected minds. It is also likely that people will have less children over time, assuming they do find a way to achieve immortality.
The Shepard AI outright states it is not the original Shepard, but it is more than "just code". The games make it clear the true AI does exist in the Mass Effect universe. The version of the Control Ending show it is, at the very least, similar enough to the original, for good or ill depending on what the player's Shepard was like. The Shepard AI is fully capable of handling the information. While their personality is copy of Shepard's, they also have the ability to process all the information
As for your views on Destroy, sacrificing an entire species is a very bad outcome. The fact is all of the endings have some kind of sacrifice. The question is which is the smallest one. Of course, I am talking about which ending is the best for the galaxy. If you are referring to which has the best writing, that is an entirely different matter. Even then, the Synthesis Ending does have Shepard make the ultimate sacrifice without having a copy made of them like in the Control Ending.
When they show tte reapers on earth, side by side shots being completely similar, I accidentally started viewing this in 3d with my eyes :D and seeing four images..but whatever - 3D!! ;D
i hope mass effect andromeda isnt just another ending dlc with a custom color set
priv1leged rip
When Andromeda failed harder than this ending
@@skullmaister yeah all the attention for andromeda went fully into Peebee if you know what im talking about
No TH-cam, why do you recommend this too me. I don't need to be reminded of how my heart was broken.
Old man at the end: it happened so long ago I don’t remember and it doesn’t matter what happened. We’re here now
I cant belive they thought that this was good enough :S Worst ending to my favorite game series!
3 games, one choice.
"What's your favourite colour?"
this vid is why chronotrigger is still to this day the best rpg of all time
you know there is something wrong when a snes game does a better job of handling multiple endings than a next gen AAA game
***** I know right? The worst part is... I LOVE Mass Effect. I love everything about it except those last ten fucking minutes of Mass Effect 3!
ISuperGenXI
it was a shit ending any hack could have come up with a decent happy or bittersweet ending but they messed up bad
*****
Yeah they did. I consider the happy ending mod to be the canon, out of spite. Bioware had a great opportunity to fix it with the extending cut, but they fucked that up too.
UGH. I actually just wrote about a paragraph more, but I think I made my point. They piss me off so much.
ISuperGenXI
happy ending mod now im curious
All those choices... all those hours... to change... the colour of the energy wave in the end movie. Having avoided spoilers, and having just finished the game, I now understand why people were pissed off.
notice that the exact same amount of time passes between his flashbacks to his friends . . . .
"all the endings"? There's only one as far as I can tell...
Watching this is actually making me angry.
I never actually realised how identical they were. Bloody hell. ME4 had better step its game up.
Mass Effect 4 will start with other character, not the same shepard from ME1-3 because the shepard in those 3 games are dead in the 3rd game. :(
Yeah, I know. I mean that Bioware should just realise that people love their game so much that they can't screw their fans over with endings as bland and repetitive as this.
Ion Gamer WRONG WRONG WRONG.
If you get the Destroy Ending whit High War Assets, at the end of it, you will see Shepard's Chest, and then after a few seconds, he breaths, like hes waking up.
Go check it out, its amazing, when i first saw it i was like "OMG OMG SHEPARD IS ALIVE!!!" just like a 8 year old. :l
elmarcus300 I have gotten that ending. The chance of people just getting it are very minimal though. What about the people who chose Control? Synthesis? Destroy with too low EMS?
I know Bioware wouldn't screw their fans over like that *again* just by default saying they chose Destroy when they didn't.
I know that there's the smallest possibility that Shepard will be in it, but I really doubt it's plausible (besides, Bioware have said that they are likely doing it in a completely different universe)
elmarcus300 You're right. That is supposed to be the "right" ending, considering the blue one was always Illusive Man's option and the green one was Saren's choice in ME1.
I honestly would have preffered that after these scenes, it would cut back to Shepard lying on the ground before the teleporter to the relay, slowly dying as its being shown to the player that the bits before this were indoctrenation fake visions.
With Harbinger saying: “And the cycle goes on”
The one good thing I can say about the ending is that somehow they got Buzz Aldrin as one of the voice actors.
What made me appreciate theses endings was the Indoctrination Theory after you hear it it makes you feel so stupid for not noticing.
That theory has more plot holes than the original ending.
@@ArchangelTyrael which one?
To people that don't understand why people hate this let me explain. Up to this point you've made hundreds of decisions. Each one leading to a different outcome for the rest of the series. Every decision you've made has had an impact and you're taught this since the beginning of the first game. Yet after all of that, after being taught that your decisions matter since the beginning of the series, after making hundreds of important choices through the course of each game, after forging your own adventure, it all leads to one of three options. No matter what you've done before this, the ending are the same. Every choice you've made up to this point doesn't matter. And to make things even worse, not only are there only three endings no matter what you've done, but the endings are all practically the same. Meaning that essentially, every choice you've made up to this point doesn't matter since no matter what path you've taken out of the hundreds that were possible, they all end in the same exact spot. This is why people think that Mass Effect 3 ending is terrible.
I'd also like to add that developers explicitly promised multiple times that the choices at the end of Mass Ending 3 matter the most.
@@artman40 quote players will get a different ending to their story than others based on their own personal journey
also they add an entirely new concept that synthetics and organics will always inevitably come into conflict right at the end of the game, while you're shown multiple instances of synthetics and organics helping eachother throughout the same game.
WTF How could the blast start from the Viper Nebula if the same was destroyed on Arrival dlc of Mass Effect 2?
remember as a kid you had to choose between pokemon red and blue and the radically different storylines these two games had? its kinda like that
I'm not even an ME player and this whole thing just slays me. They moved the camera and/or changed the hue of the explosion and called it an ending.
Oh, and "The Shepherd"? Seriously?
so, since the destruction of a mass relay releases enough energy to destroy the system it occupies (as evidenced by Shepard destroying one in ME2), Shepard caused galaxy wide mass extinctions over what appears to be close to 75% of the galaxy, Earth is gone too BTW, thanks Shep
none of these are real, it's all in Shepards mind.
ytou realize that theory was debunked by EA themselves right?
The good news is that ME4 is confirmed and he lives which means that the cannon ending is the one where everyone lives and the reapers die and shepard ain't dead
Years later, and seeing this is what our promising finale was still gets me angry. So glad I didn't pick up 3 on release. ...And still haven't actually.
The rest of the game is great though?
Aussieduderivs1
A bad ending can ruin a good movie, book, or show. It can and does turn excellent projects mediocre. A good ending can save things, but a bad ending ruins them. The ending to ME3 made the entire trilogy's efforts _pointless_ .
Still, I'll give you that it had some great interactions and such.
Worth noting is that the Extended Cut did a lot to repair the damage. The endings still aren't fantastic, but they added a fair bit to turn a total loss into salvageable futures for the Galaxy, and while you can dismiss the slideshow as "it's just a fucking slideshow", it's still one slideshow BETTER than what we had before. It gives us some kind of idea what some of the races and characters get up to once it's all over.
It also adds some narration to the endings, and they even sorta scale, producing better results if you have a higher readiness rating. At lower scores, you're stuck with the old Destroy ending, and the relays still get destroyed, but at higher scores, the other endings are available, and the relays are merely damaged, with ending narrations talking about their repair.
The refusal/shoot the kid ending is absolutely nothing special, and really is just a slightly fancier non-standard Game Over.
Blazieth
It helps some, I'll give you that but it's still insulting, especially after the promises they'd given us before the blasted game came out. But, what can you expect? It's EA. They're trash lol.The extended does make it a chunk better, but in the end, the game still makes all your struggles almost completely meaningless.
Like I said, the endings are still bad... but at least the endings actually offer a narrative now. There is narration talking about what happens next, and you are shown what some of the characters are races are doing after the fact. Hell, if the Krogan are cured and are led by Wreave and Eve, one of the slides shows the two of them going to war with each other - implying Eve is trying to prevent another Krogan Rebellion.
They're not great, but they're acceptable now, at least in my opinion. It was the fact that they offered no narrative and told us nothing about what happens afterward that I didn't like, destruction of the Mass Relays aside.
Can't wait for the purple and yellow explosions in the extended cut :D
Five and a half years later...Unacceptable EA/Bioware. We wanted our choices to mean something, but they don't. And the Extended Cut DLC reinforces that; your choices don't matter. If that was the moral of game 3, where was that message previously?
I am very glad i got my ME 3 Digital Deluxe Version with the Extended Cut already implemented. But even without that, the only thing to do is the Destroy option, regardless if it kills the Geth and EDI off. For Shepard would never consider neither Control nor Synthesis. Both of these options not only go against his / her morals (playing 100% Paragon here :D), but they are quite feeble attempts to shroud the true reason why the Starchild suggests them - Survival. Because if Destroy option is chosen, ALL Synthetics "die" / cease to exist, including himself. Knowingly or not, he tries to coax Shephard to choose "right" so he can continue to exist. Or at least that's how i interpret things.
And regarding ME4 - i frankly be surprised if they didn't start something completely new. I mean, it would be lovely if you could not use a savegame but most of the Intel and whatnot you gathered through ME 1-3 in the new game. Heck, maybe even create a Character / Background based on if you had a successful (and long lasting) relationship with a love interest. Carrying on the legacy of your father / mother Shepard etc. etc. Let's see with what they come up with - hopefully not James from ME 3 as Main Character >
KubaxKristallmond I think the fact that shepard accept to listen the starchild (his ennemy) and say "yeah ok I make a choice " it's more against the shepard we knew, he/she never surrender so easily before ans I was like WTF
sai35400 Yeah that's why in the extended cut they put a fourth option in which Shepard refuses and it's a one big fuck you in your face by bioware team.
+KubaxKristallmond I personally believe that the best ending is the 4th option. Decline all options and fight. My favorite way to enact it is to shoot the starchild in the face. With this ending we have no clue what happens. Except that the reapers eventually lose in the end thanks to the efforts of the current cycle.
+israel henderson but Liara's hologram says they failed.
Any Name Will Do they did, but the next cycle was able to prepare
Yo, I know this this vid is supposed to be a joke but This Is Seriously Some of the Finest Editing I've Ever Seen!
Forreal, this is Gorgeous! What software did you use to 3 together?
Wow thanks for the compliment! I used Corel VideoStudio. It was a bit of a pain, but at least I could get the frames to match up perfectly.
Gotta agree this was some great software editing but my eyes kinda get crossed in it
Christopher Dews
Only the Destroy end keeps you alove watch the end
Wish there were purple, yellow, and orange endings too.
That's the buety (I can't spell) of having an unexplained ending now it's what ever you want the ending to be NO ONE can tell you otherwise
Why didn't I get to see who opens the damn door?
They died in yours then
CookieDeGallo Actually, I bought the dlc pack and now I saw them survive.
In a game like this I don’t see how you can end it without a “slideshow” style ending like in the Fallout games, mainly F1, F2, and FNV. Regardless of what you do to the Reapers, if this game had multiple endings for each race beyond “they lived” or “they died” it might have been the CATALYST to put this trilogy into the stuff of gaming legends.
merge end is the best shepard dies but he make an peace and all robots survives
The best part is about that ending is that it branches off into "end task" and "end process", though the latter option takes a bit more work. There's also the hidden alt-tab and "close window" ending, but it pretty much the same as the Ctrl, Alt, Del ending.
and people wondered why we preferred the the indoctrination theory. technically speaking, even here in 2021 with the LE, I still think/hope the Indoctrination theory might be true
Aah... I remember having used my free weekend to plow through this when this got out. I was a militaryman myself at the time and literally sacrificed my weekend off instead of visiting my girl at the time... I admit, I was shocked.
Worst endings ever, I still have not recovered after playing through once. I can hardly pick up my Xbox controller anymore because of it.
I blame he person who leaked the initial ending for this it was gonna be badass with a boss fight with the elusive man as a reaper husk thing but due to the leak they changed it to this shit
Justaguy1253- Pretty bad gaming videos :D That would have been awesome.
Plus they were rushed, only had a little over two years to make the game, it needed at least another year, you can tell while playing it it is very unfinished, still a amazing game though
your forgetting one thing. if people managed to get over 7800 effective military readiness. shepard lives if you chose to destroy the reapers.
Look at Shepard's eyes before dying in Control and Merge ending, they're just as Ilusive man's :O
Endings too me is...
Destroy = Renegade (No. Not because of the color, if you wish for an explanation just ask)
Control = That inbetween/mostly Renegade
Merge = Paragon.
respect mah authoritah.
-Commander Eric Cartmen.
+Sarah Tilgner Except Sarin was just a tool and the reapers had no intention of actually sparing anybody. The merge option spares everybody and stops the reapers
+Sarah Tilgner. I just don't see how the destruction ending is the best in terms of story. Specially if you ended the Geth-Quarian war. Shepard befriended a Geth, understood their motivations, was the first organic ever to participate in a Geth consensus, and ended a centuries long war between them and the Quarian, achieving one of galaxy's most wanted peaces. And then you just kill them all like if all that long narrative arc (and one of the major themes behind the Mass Effect universe, that lasted for all three games) meant literally nothing. Not to mention that the destruction of all synthetic life means that you kill EDI as well, which was a loyal and useful companion since ME 2, and whose death will surely devastate Joker, a person so important for Shepard that he/she sacrified his/her life in order to put him on safety (the fact that Joker walks off the Normandy at the end like if nothing has happened, without any worries about EDI's death is just a sign of Bioware don't giving a single fuck about the credibility of their own characters). Also, the destruction of synthetic life is useless in the long term, because although the reconstruction could easily last for centuries, eventually some species will start to experiment with AI again. The Crucible may well have destroyed all current synthetic life in the galaxy, but it can't do anything against scientific curiosity.
That's the price of war though, Synthesis seems too happy happy. If you play a perfect playthrough destroy is a fitting end, that no matter what Shepard can't escape the fact they can't save everyone. Better than brainwashing everyone ever and rewriting their genetic code
Gabriel Gallardo that just shows how bad the ending was even with EC dlc
Because i bet my life that the crucible could be accurate enough to erase from existence ONLY the reapers but well, bioware and EA decided to "fuck you" their audience
Long story short
MERGE=Saren ME
CONTROL=Ilusive man ME2
DESTROY=Mission complete
I agree that killing the geth and EDI sucks, hell thats why i say the thing about the crucible capability of being accurate, but in the end they're all synthetics, machines that can be build once again and nobody is saying that it wont happen, i want to believe that if you achieve geth and quarian peace the quarian will build the geth again because they dont hate them anymore, even EDI can be made again
Also i want to believe in the indoctrination theory, it makes destroy the one and only option where you survive and dont become an indoctrinated monster
I LOVE this series with all my heart and I loved the ending.
shit when ou comapre them its the shitist endings in game history! its all pretty much the same
It's nothing to do with whether it's a happy ending or not. It's the fact that people expected their decisions throughout the game to have a greater impact on the finale. As it currently stands, you could have basically done whatever the fuck you wanted and got one of these endings regardless of past actions.
This game gives me Stockholm Syndrome bad, but it's still one of my favorites and I still play it all the time. Makes me sad the ending was so.... Unfulfilling.
I question why people hate these endings :/
Because they suck ass, obviously.
No... they don't :/
Yes they are. They were one of the worst video game endins in history.
They still are in my opinion.
I had no problem with them...
But the rest of the players had.
The endings suck. Deal with t.
I don't understand the complaint, of course the initial ending is the same, it's the crucible going off, the difference is in what you set it to do, the galaxy changes afterward. The Catalyst told you what would happen with each choice, you didn't need to be explicitly shown since you already knew.
Fucking whiney spoiled gamers.
After three games and five years of being told your choices matter, everything you did to that point means nothing because all the endings are open no matter how you played, all the options are essentially the same and you only choose a color that represents some slight variation of the same resolution. Who lives and who dies and what happens to Earth, the relays, your love interest, etc. is all completely out of the player's hands and doesn't change based on previous decisions. And of those colored variations we see less than ten seconds worth of difference afterwards meaning the difference may as well not exist.
It's a terrible ending to the best franchise of the generation. It was a bad ending. Get over it and quit crying about justified criticism.
***** Your choices all affected how much of the galaxy you could unite as well as how bright or terrible the situation will after the Reapers are dealt with. That's all the endings are, you deciding how to end the threat of the Reapers. Either you kill them, along with EDI and the Geth, you reprogram them leaving everything else the same, or you merge organic and synthetic leaving the entire galaxy in a new and elevated state. Everything else depends on which choices you made. Did you turn the krogan into the heroes of the galaxy or leave them to extinction? Did you make peace with the gEth leading the quarians to a new era of peace and prosperity or did you kill them off leaving the quarians either just with a homeworld or dead as well? How well did you set up the Citadel's defenses? Did you make them strong enough to fight last loing enough for Shepard to stop the Reapers or were most of them slaughtered before you even got there? All the choices you made were there they you just had to imagine the outcomes yourself.
I don't know why you expected them to affect the final battle, your choices didn't affect the fight with Sovereign in the first game.
timemonkey No, not really. None of your choices really mattered. To what miniscule variation of success you had is not choice and none of it hardly mattered, especially after they patched the requirements down. About the only thing that actually impacted success aside from Mass Effect 3's side missions was playing the multiplayer enough to keep your war readiness up. And the differences in success is mostly theoretical as you get less than five seconds worth of difference from worst to best endings.
"That's all the endings are, you deciding how to end the threat of the Reapers. Either you kill them, along with EDI and the Geth, you reprogram them leaving everything else the same, or you merge organic and synthetic leaving the entire galaxy in a new and elevated state. Everything else depends on which choices you made. Did you turn the krogan into the heroes of the galaxy or leave them to extinction? Did you make peace with the gEth leading the quarians to a new era of peace and prosperity or did you kill them off leaving the quarians either just with a homeworld or dead as well? How well did you set up the Citadel's defenses? Did you make them strong enough to fight last loing enough for Shepard to stop the Reapers or were most of them slaughtered before you even got there? " None of that was ever shown in the ending. There was no feedback from the game regarding any of those.
"All the choices you made were there they you just had to imagine the outcomes yourself." That alone is an admission that it was not a satisfying conclusion and was lacking resolution. That proves my point. I mean hell, if we can take that copout, why even have the last couple minutes of ending that largely only changes the color of beams and explosions? Why not just say The End? Or "now you get to use your imagination! C YA!" ? That might as well have considering it half-assed it already.
Also, the shortcomings with the original game have the benefit of knowing it had two full games to make up for it. That ending wasn't the ending of 5 years and three games worth of story. And further, that ending is much better and how you played did affect how it went down. There were options available in how Saren died that were only available depending on your paragon or renegade status. Where's your direct analogy for that in the ME3 ending? There isn't one. Simply playing enough multiplayer for war readiness to accrue a theoretical better ending is not a valid rebuttal.
***** Except those choices were shallow and irrelevant. It didn't matter if you talked Saren down or not, he still ended up only sorta dead and you still had to fight his Husk form. You were given choices that made superficial differences. Nothing important ever changed based on what you did until the third game. The choice between Ashley and Kaidan? Pointless, they both fill the exact same role in the story afterward. Killed Wrex? He gets replaced with a more dickish krogan who still will work with you, let Grunt join up, help out the turians and help take back Earth, Decided to run Renagade and took actions that should not only land you in jail but alienate your entire squad and all your allies? All three games just ignore them, paying little more than lip service to actions that should have had major consequences. The entire trilogy gave you the illusion of choice, you were always ona singular path, all you got to choose was who to fuck and how much complaining Shepard did along the way.
timemonkey At least the original's ending suited the character based on the way you played and the outcomes was how he died. Nothing important ever changed based on what you did in the third game either. Nor did anything change based on how you played. From a story perspective, the ending of the third sucked. The first game's ending was satisfying from a story point of view because my Shepard handled it his/her way. In the third game it makes no difference because everything's the same. The choice between what color light plays at the end may as well not exist. You see no differences to the outcome of the game. You can say this this and this could have happened, but it didn't play out on screen. We get less than ten seconds combined of different footage that all has vague interpretations at best. That is as disappointing an ending as possible.
At least the indoctrination fan theory is more satisfying in that it tries to explain away the terrible actual ending of the game.
There is a reason it is collectively considered a terrible ending by the masses. It's bad.
Thousands of coments of people sayin what a shit ending. You now what? Almost every fan of the mass effect trilogy i have talked to loved the ending ( the dlc extended cutscenes, obviously ) So please, stop saying bullshit about it, it only had one fail, they fixed it, and even with that fail it still the best trilogy ever made, so please no more hate.
Really? Everyone I talked to either disliked the ending, or was so unattached that any ending would have satisfied them.
It took too long for them to fix the ending that should have never even needed that fix in the first place. I never wanted to go back to ME just for some ending, I moved on.
(Facepalm) "Almost every fan of the mass effect trilogy i have talked to loved the ending"... So...all those "thousands of comments of people sayin' what a shit ending" are usually posted on Mass Effect related videos, articles and forums, I'm I right?. So I have to believe that all this people are actually Super Mario Galaxy fans that don't know shit about Mass Effect, and that started to randomly rant against ME ending on ME related content for no reason at all. Is that correct?
I'm a HUGE fan of the Mass Effect universe, but I rant against this lazy ending sequence because of how much I loved the overall experience. The ending is an insult against all the good things that the Mass Effect universe offered since 2007.
I turned around ahd shot the kid! I didn't know it, but I accidentally got a completely differente ending where The Crucible is never activated and the cicle continues. Liara left an archive to warn the guys from the next cycle about everything. And even the epilogue with the child is diferent, it's a female asari-looking adult instead.
Beautiful. You die, the relays explode, and the Normandy crashes. Such genius. I was always wondering... How did the crucible fire the beam in the Control ending with the Citadel closed? Space Magic!!! This had to be the most stupid soul sucking ending ever.
Who cares if they are the same, i love these endings. I don't care if i get tons of abuse for typing this, you guys and girls need to calm down it's just an ending. It's perfect, it ties up all the loose ends, now you can play ME4 without worrying about the reapers and just look back and think it was pretty cool.
"It ties all of the loose ends"? What the fuck, one never knows what happens to your friends, did they prosper or do they die in the new planet?, your decisions, the time and everything didn't matter; what happened to jack? Did they rachni queen help? Did krogans finally managed to reproduce? Cereberus got away with their shit or were they destroyed along the illusive man? Jacob's people made it? Tali's people's immune system got better in their more home world? Did the geth lived in peace with the quarian? Did joker fucked EDI's brain out? Does she has a vagina at least? Can synth and organics breed? What happened at the citadel? What happened to tuchanka? They didn't explain anything, they just went "and then the threat ceased to exist and technological development was reset. The end" this was an insult, they could have left this ending but with the inclusion of a little explaining at least
***** That's what the little slide show at the end tells you. Or did you miss that bit.
Greendragon H
What? the elder and the kid thing? Thats not wraping this up, that's just washing their hands. After buying 3 games, dlc's, spending around 90 hours of gameplay you expect a closure. In my first comment there were plenty of questions unresolved in the game (excluding the DLC's ending, because fuck them, nobody should have to pay even more to have a fucking ending to a franchaise you've given that much cash already), and those were just the tip of the icberg, there were even more. They can't shield themselves with that petty ending
***** Look i'm sorry if the ending upset you, i thought it was great.
Greendragon H I assume with "the little slide show" you are referring to the advanced endings, that are featured in the Extended Cut DLC for the game. While those slide shows improve the ending a bit, they were originally NOT in the game. So everyone who played it at release got just the ending you saw in the video here and nothing more. And you can't really deny that those 6 minute endings are essentially all the same and tie up nothing at all ;)
I'm shocked that there was no final boss fight
I think of this more as the Brown Note.
I don't see a problem here.
Note how Joker has to tap faster for the ship to move faster and with the destroy ending, he taps the controls a lot faster than with the other endings.