Mass Effect: Thread

[Arby]

Hmmmmmmmmmmm, now to decide if I want to go with green again just to see how that insanity plays out, or do the smart thing and go with red. Green's existence really puts them in a tough spot for writing outcomes. I'm really torn here becuase this is my only file where I took green, but I really want boyscout to live.

 

 

For anyone wondering, the reason that my first playthrough ended with synthesis was that I was deathly opposed to wiping out the geth and EDI after spending the whole game developing and preserving them, and I could tell that starkid was definitely trying to lead me towards taking it. It was sort of the game's "take a 3rd option" and I was hoping for a crazy cop out beam that fixed everything and spat me out on the other side. No joke. My literal thought process was, "I hope this beam makes armor" due to how stupefied I was at the 5 minutes I had just witnessed.

 

[Pinkie Pie]

I saved the Geth by being forced to sacrifice the Quarians, no way in hell was I gonna screw all that by killing 'em.

[Arby]

Now I've come to the conclusion that either they wouldn't mind, being willing to do anything to stop old machine, or that somehow my EMS can protect them.

 

edit to not double post:

 

D0A8hvvLJSU

 

dear god my sides!

[Arby]

OK Bioware, I can now love you again.

 

 

my red ending became pink and it did exactly what it should, we won the war at the cost of EDI, but we rebuilt and the galaxy and everyone I love in it lived, including Commander Boyscout.

 

Edited June 26, 2012 by Guest (see edit history)

[Alyxx Thorne]

OK Bioware, I can now love you again.

 

 

my red ending became pink and it did exactly what it should, we won the war at the cost of EDI, but w erebuilt and the galaxy and everyone I love in it lived, including Commander Boyscout.

I actually giggled a bit at that.

[Arby]

yeah I think it was EMS related, considering red has a couple of options without the Extended Cut.

[Pinkie Pie]

I am at the part where you fight Kai Leng in the Illusive Man's office on Insanity. I'm trying to have my first time with Extended Cut be on my Insanity playthrough, but it's so friggin' hard to beat him because of those goddamn Phantoms.

[Arby]

what class?

[Pinkie Pie]

Well I ended up beating him, but it was Soldier. Right now I'm on Earth making my way towards the beam of light. I figured I'd see some new scenes by now, but it's playing out like it does originally. Maybe all the extra scenes are in the very end, I dunno.

[Arby]

I loaded the "restart mission: Earth The Return" and it worked fine from Marauder Shields on. I know form youtube there are a few minor things slightly before that though.

[Pinkie Pie]

If you load it from there, you miss a scene or two. What I got to see was my squad mates get hurt, and Shepard gets the Normandy to come down for an evac. If you have a romance in your party (like me) you have a heartfelt goodbye as the ship takes off. From there you watch Shepard continue to run to the beam (with no weapons for some reason) and get hurt. That's when you do the 'restart mission' thing afterwards. So, you missed a scene there, yeah.

 

What I really enjoyed was being able to ask the Catalyst questions in detail. It made no sense for my Shepard to just go, "Weelll...okay!" Hell, there's even an option to reject him altogether! Granted, the Reapers win if you choose that, but still. The funniest thing about that is, if you shoot him now, it gets mad and you get that 'reject' ending. Well, I didn't know that was gonna happen so I shot him for the lols and then it happened and I got scared for a minute.

 

Anyway, I chose Control this time around. I know Destroy lets you live as a human, but I can't bring myself to kill EDI, plus I don't want to REALLY die with Synthesis.

[The Scoutman]

Synthesis still put us under the control of the Godchild

 

They shouldnt mess with the "Universal Mind" idea, Universal Mind does not mean being controlled by a single mind, as I picture it, we should all have been connected in a single network, where one does not have power over the thoughts of the others, it just puts everything in perspective, we would abandon our selfishness, we would realize all harm we do against one another comes back at us, as an universal society. Instead, we are just connected to the reapers, who were controlled by the Godchild, who is probably the most ancient existing A.I and that probably exterminated his own creators, so yeah; fuck.

 

Its unfair to compare any of the Deus Ex games with any of the Mass Effect games, but I will do it anyway, what I really liked of Helios as the master A.I, is that it inspired confidence, at least it seemed to know what it was supposed to do, the Godchild on the other hand just seems to be playing...well, God. I just felt like being used in the Synthesis ending, you gain no power over the Godchild, he can still control the reapers AND now all organic and synthetic life, and he never did anything to really gain my trust. I dont love the DX:IW Helios/JC ending because they still would be able to supervise all humanity, so Im a little afraid of dictatorship, like what is most likely to happen with the Godchild, but at least, since the developers actually develop the JC/Helios character, I know they have humanity best interests in mind.

[Arby]

Also synthesis gives that awesome wtf face on the husks now. Imagine waking up as an arm for a cannibal or the crazy sitcom antics sure to result from the turian and krogan halves of brutes bickering about their toaster squirrel not wanting to cook bread anymore!

 

Morinth romance gets a happy ending, ya know, where she reconstructs Shepard from green beam particles scattered throughout every living thing and kills him/her again via snusnu.

 

 

 

also, is The Normandy itself alive too separately from EDI?

[Pinkie Pie]

Alright, so, after analyzing all the endings, I have to say I'm content. Sure, there's some bits and pieces I wish they put in, which I'll detail in a second, but overall, I think it greatly improved the ending.

 

Destroy

 

On the Destroy ending, and in all the endings, I thought the fact that it's more of a, or at least, LOOKS like a more contained shot, and the fact that it only destroys that little circular thing on the mass relays instead of the whole goddamn thing is good. It means it'll be even easier to fix them. But, anyway, in my Destroy ending, I ended up living, and my love interest (Liara, oh yeah) hesitated to put my name up on the wall. Then, it showed that breathing scene from the original ending. Alright, cool! I'm alive! My only problem is, that's not closure, because it raises a couple other questions, for me at least. And they're not plothole type questions but it's more like questions about what I want to see continued. What I wanted to see was, after that breathing scene, it shows a scene of Shepard, maybe in that slideshow, meeting up with all his friends. Just something to show that my crew doesn't think I'm still dead, or at least that they know I'm alive. But, that's never addressed. And honestly, I would like to know if they go on any more adventures after ME3, but as I've been told, there won't be any DLC that takes place after the game, as far as I know.

 

 

Control

 

I really liked the Control ending, I don't actually have very many complaints with this one, or even the Synthesis one for that matter. Shepards a friggin Reaper and he's helping rebuild the galaxy. Would I have liked to have seen a scene where Shepard and the crew, or at least a love interest look at each other from a distance before parting ways, or something like that? Sure, maybe. But that's not as necessary as in the Destroy ending. There'd be no hope of any rekindling friendship because he's a Reaper, he's not the same person anymore. In the Destroy ending, he survived as a human being, and I would've anticipated he gets to meet up with his friends again, but we never see that. So, that's left to the imagination. At least in the original ending, it was near impossible to get the breathing scene unless you played a ton of multiplayer so there was no hope he would survive and be able to meet up with them. But, oh well, Control was pretty cool, though I keep wondering how they'll address these varying different situations for a potential sequel.

 

 

Synthesis

 

Synthesis. Nothing really new here. I liked this ending though I prefer the Control one, myself. What I really love about this ending is EDI. She seems so happy to be 'alive', and holds Joker in a happy romantic way when they look up at the sky on that jungle planet. The other cool thing was with Kasumi. In the slideshow. In ME2 her whole mission is about getting her greybox back so she could relive memories of being with her boyfriend. If you kept the data, he friggin lives as a hologram being she can talk to as if he never died. I think that's a really cool concept, albeit, a wierd relationship to have. Good luck relieving that sexual stress now, Kasumi.

 

 

Refusal

 

And of course, Refusal. I really like this one even if it has the worst consequences. To me, it shows that Renegade Shepards that 'don't play by the rules', are still fallible. In previous games, when you wanted to be an asshole, you might get looks of disapproval, but overall you got the job done. Hell, you probably got it done better. But in this ending, it shows that always doing whatever the hell you want has consequences. Especially when you try arguing with the being that's completely demolishing your entire species. Granted, you can still be a dick and choose one of the main endings, anyway, but this one really reflects that type of Renegade that just does not give a fuck.

 

 

And that about sums up my feelings with the Extended Cut.

[The Scoutman]

@Arby: I said rational minds-network, not flesh-machinery connection, and if I were to implant a toaster on something, it would probably be on a pet turtle. Just imagine how hard it would be to get the squirrel to stand still for my breakfast.

 

@Pinkie: I found a little stupid the entire "I'm now alive" speech for EDI, what did we learn from the Geth storyline? As soon as a machine becomes rational and capable of formulating his own thoughts, it is no longer a piece of metal that can be used as you seen fit, it is now a new race of sentient beings that should be treated as equals by the living beings. So by my standards, EDI was already alive for a long time since Rational + Sentient = Alive, I guess that now, the only difference is that there will be no more prejudice by the organic beings towards the machines.

[Pinkie Pie]

 

She wasn't technically alive though, not in the way we see it. She may have adopted human behaviors and attributes, but she was still a synthetic being. Same for the Geth. Granted, I respected both the Geth and EDI enough as friends and people not to completely destroy them with the red ending. ('canonically' for my Shepard, anyway. I tried all the endings) But she was still a robot. Like, take it from the view of Star Wars. I would argue that organics have basically enslaved synthetics to lives of servitude even though a lot of them are quite capable of sentience. In fact, most of the droids in Star Wars are AI, if not all! And pretty much the only times the droids 'rebel', are when an organic tampered with a specific group, or they all malfunctioned. But most people never saw them as equal. They were just tools for the organics' convenience. Because, technically, they were. The droids may have been as intelligent as organica, may have even acted like organics, but they were still machines. Star Wars is a completely different universe, though, so the same rules don't apply, but it's something to think about.

 

But yeah, back to EDI. With the Synthesis ending, she merged with organics, actually gaining biological organic components to her, effectively making her 'alive'. You can argue she was basically the same before synthesis, but she was still a machine. Even the geth, who gained sentience as a legitimate race of people are still technically just machines before the change.

 

 

TL;DR I both agree and disagree with your viewpoint.

[Arby]

The more and more I think about it, I really hope Bioware and anyone who wants to make a "choice-based" RPG takes a good look at The Witcher 2 and sees how well it handled consequences for your actions, even within just a single game.

[J.C.]

Just in case you are wondering about the additional scenes when charging the Reaper Transport Beam, here's a video I made of that.

 

 

cMTxR92Oudg

Makes you wonder why Harbinger does not shoot down the Normandy... I think a quick shuttle extraction would have worked just fine.

 

 

And while we're at it, the 4 endings.

 

"Refusal" ending

This is a dark ending, but I like it. You tell the Catalys to shove it, and everyone dies, but the reapers are defeated in the next cycle, thanks to the information Liara hid across the galaxy.

wAa6_oRTUxs

 

"Control" ending

Shepard becomes something of a god in this one. Pretty cool also. The reapers being used to rebuild and protect the galaxy.

wOKCYIj48sk

 

"Synthesis" ending

I can't seem to like this ending. It's the one the game portraits as the ideal one, but to me it's just too damn weird. I have to admit that floating city/ship in the final sideshow looks awesome though.

70PCBKkH83k

 

"Destroy" ending

I still like this one best. You kick the Reapers' ass, no compromises, and Shepard in the end is shown alive.

VKzueyXR92w

 

[Geneaux486]

Loved the EC.

[The Scoutman]

After seeing this:

tkatnxvzvZU

 

 

I guess that, in the ME universe, synthesis MIGHT not be the best choice. The only part that actually hit me was Legion dialogue and, as we all know, the fact that the GodChild was liying about the Destruction ending since boyscout survives.

This still boggles my mind since now I have no idea what were the Reapers' goal, I refuse to believe an advanced being, made of all the minds of an entire race, would just be a bunch of condescending jerks that only want to reproduce every fifty thousand years, and what was the point of the catalyst? the crucible?

The only thing I can think of is that maybe, this entire war was some sort of test, like, the creators of the Reapers (that are probably the first reaper) wanted to find a generation on the galaxy that was able to have enough technological advancement to build the crucible, and choose the destruction ending, so they wouldnt try to merge themselves with AI and advance socially in the state of something like a Reaper, at least in the near future. But that sound like a load of crap.

 

I still prefer the idea of coexistence with everyone and Universal Mind, if Bioware writers really dont like it, what a shame.