Once upon a time I heard a quote that went something like this: It is better to be presumed a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. I’m paraphrasing for certain, but the idea remains. I desperately wish that idea had been transmitted to the makers of Mass Effect 3. By caving to criticism and expanding the ending, the makers of ME3 removed all doubt that they are indeed human and capable of failure on a, well, massive scale.
The original ending to ME3 sucked.
It was horrible in many ways, but the worst aspect was the failure to determine your own path. Many have pointed out that none of the endings of the 3 games permitted you to chose your own path, but those endings, while representing a narrowing of choices, did so in a way that left you feeling that the choices you made up to that point impacted the ending moreso than impacting the cut scenes you saw. ME2 provided an opportunity to save a Reaper base or destroy it, and the battles leading up to that climax spiraled off in a dozen different directions, each of your choices leading to the life or death of a close companion. I played that ending six different ways, finally reaching one I was comfortable with and carrying it forward into ME3. Imagine my surprise to learn my choices in the ME3 ending we’re meaningless.
The choices in the series finale were limited at best.
You got to chose who came with you, but unlike in 2, this has no bearing on the life and death of anyone. In fact, no matter what I chose to do throughout the game, it ends in one of three ways. These choices were predetermined and unrelated to player action–the antithesis of the games message and sometimes tag line.
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Spoilers ahead!
The lack of choice could be forgiven, if the Internet meme could be believed.
Many of us felt that the entire ending was a hoax. We realized early on that ME3 felt like a form of indoctrination. Many Internet authors blogged on the subject, and events in the game seemed to suggest that this weak ending might actually be the greatest ending since Metroid. The belief goes like this: Shepard is being indoctrinated; bent to the will of the machine army. Everything you see on screen suggests this. If your go through past games to read and listen what is said about indoctrination, the entire ending sequence and the dreams that lead up to it reek of indoctrination. They are identical to the existing evidence. We few proud Internet believers felt we had defeated indoctrination by resisting the will of the machine at the end, this boy AI who tries to convince us to synthesize with the machines. I held my head high and marched proudly into the forums claiming those who thought the ending sucked actually sucked themselves for not ‘getting it’.
Then Bioware promised an upgrade.
That upgrade was crap. What they did instead of proving the meme was to refute it, hammering home the point that this was not indoctrination but a crappy ending that presented limited choices and few real ways to ‘win’. They added extra cutscenes to close loopholes and loose ends. They improved upon the epilogue to show us what happened to the Mass Effect Gates. They even added fourth choice–the choice to walk away and let the machines win.
Guess what, everybody loses now. Now we know the original ending was actually poorly constructed. All they did was patch it up, and by patching it removed the meme, removed the idea that there could be something more, something worthwhile, to this. Now we are left with a crappy and unexplained ending about a game that made terrible sense up until the end.
now.