Sorry for not seeing and responding to you comment sooner. I haven’t checked the blog in ages and for some reason I didn’t get the comment notification.

I agree with you 100%, and I would have loved an ending for Mass Effect similar to the one you described for DA:O. Something that fits with the feel of the story and that you can customize based on the Shepard in your mind.

I’m ok with the DLC ending because I had resigned myself to SpaceKid not going away, but of course, it’s far from the ending I would have written for the game. What saddens me the most, is that this whole fiasco happened in the first place. Mass Effect came so close, so so so close to being a near perfect game, and it all got thrown away in a matter in minutes. I can how Bioware would like to experiment with an unconventional conclusion, but they should have done so with a short game, or a game that has already has a surreal storyline. Not Mass Effect.

In Dragon Age: Origins you had so much more choice. Your character could decide on who would rule and with whom – you could (depending on gender) shack up with the queen or king or make queen and wannabe-king marry each other. You could either become king/queen or just a secret lover or nothing at all. Or you could remain a Grey Warden. You could decide if your character was going to sacrifice themselves for the greater good or one of a small selection of followers. Or you could keep everybody alive and rely on some dark magical ritual instead.

In a perfect ending – according to me – Shepard would have survived and be reunited with her loved ones. Maybe a bit beaten up with a leg in plaster or something but alive.

A bad ending would have been Shepard and the galaxy being wiped out.

Then, there’s a whole bunch of better and worse endings in between with varying amounts of death and destruction.

THAT I would have called choice and vastly different endings. I would have chosen the ending that I could have been happy with.

Now I’ve chosen the ending where I get the ominous breath and slapped a fanfic I wrote onto DeviantArt right after that so I can somewhat ignore the bitter taste it left in my mouth.

I find they did kind of slack on the female characters in general. FemShep and Eve are excellent, and the others are written as good characters, but their visual design… Between Chobot’s teeny tiny dress, Liara’s catsuit and Miranda’s camel toe, I was a little discouraged. Don’t want to design proper female characters? Just slap on boobs and a form fitting outfit and no one will notice!

I like it.

I like it a lot.

Deliberate destroy for a reunion? Yeah, ok… I don’t like it much but I can see that for a romance you’ve carried for two/three games. People have done a lot of crazy things for love… genocide of some AIs? (Or like my friend who wasn’t able to save the Geth in her playthrough, only killing one AI…) I can see it.

For me, I chose destroy because that’s what I came to do. The possibility of a reunion with Liara and the little blue children I promised her wasn’t a factor since I didn’t know about it. And I would have picked Destroy anyway (see: what Shep came to do. ‘Cuz that’s how that Shep rolls). But now that my Shep “survived” (maybe) there are little blue Shepards running about somewhere in the galaxy (in my mind…). I just don’t think I can bring myself to play through with my Garrus romance…

Starkid-MacGuffin-poorly-explained-(why do I see him in the first place? why does he say he can’t be saved, when he’s fully planning to continue running the Reapers roughshod all over the galaxy? why do I have dreams about him again? Oh right, no idea… )-kid may have seen endless Cycles, but he’s already wrong about ours because I’m standing on his #&*! bridge about to blow up all his toys, so I don’t buy that he can know the future of the Geth and Quarians. I have no problem with a sacrificial Shep, but I certainly agree that other “retirement” options would have been much more satisfying.

I like the rescue idea, but to me the EC makes it very clear that Shep, as we know her (him?) dies. A new Reaper is created with Shep’s memories, but it is not Shep. I occasionally imagine Shep jumping into the light and then waking up on Earth, having survived the DNA – er – [ SCIENCE! ] process and going on to have ( blue / half-Turian / half-Quarian / zero ) children on some tiny planet on the edge of the galaxy…

I get that they wanted a twist. I just think – as you say – this was not the right place for what they did.

I also spend way too much time in the Garrus thread on the official forums where most of the posters go on about how they chose Destroy deliberately so they could imagine a reunion between Shepard and her love interest. I’ve come to view Destroy as the “cop out” decision because of that.

I really enjoyed the War Assets screen and the mini-codex entries it unlocked as I did things. It felt like progress. It’s part of what made the ending worse, having that progress be rendered meaningless. Even when it helped, it was not seen in action.

I think more time could have been spent on this, and less time bribing IGN. Chobot’s a tool, but they give her dialog and mini quests and a fully rendered and animated voice… while Tali’s big face reveal is a badly photoshopped stock photo.

Argh argh argh argh.

I had a whole rant typed out but the internets ate it. But I totally agree with this. The “good” endings are everything we fought against as Shep for 3 games. Wholesale Reaper slaughter =\= Deux-Ex-Machina-ghost-child’s explanation of “preservation”. I was ready for my Shep to die in a fiery explosion destroying the Reapers. And then she took a breath. Which I think is terrible. You present me with three terrible, terrible choices, all of which – apparently – mean I sacrifice myself for the galaxy, and then because I picked the one most in keeping with what we have been trying to do for 5 years and 3 games, and did allllllll the quests, and played MP…. I don’t actually sacrifice myself. Then they release the EC where they try even harder to ram down my throat their preferred ending…

Now I’ve gotten all rant-y again! LOL. Sorry.

I think this is an improvement in that there’s better explanation of the endings, but it’s still broken.

Starkid says the peace between the Geth and the Quarians is just temporary, which I guess is possible, but not something you want to hear after spending so many hours working on that alliance. I’ve gotten over the fact that you can’t really save Shepard, even when you sacrifice the Geth and EDI to keep her alive, you’re not rewarded with a reunion scene between her and her crew, but I do think there would have been more satisfying ways to retire her other than invariable death (or an eternity of controlling the galaxy).

With the Synthesis ending, I felt like they were trying to force a typical science fiction twist into the story, but a twist like that would have fit better in a shock plot based short story than an emotionally investing long story (I’m actually considering a blog post about the differences between short and long story ending needs). It’s the ending I prefer, though, the more I think about it, the more I’d love to see a future story based on the Control ending where Shepard’s crew pulls a Phèdre nó Delauny to set her free.

There is no redeeming feature to this catastrophic, brain-dead ending. It’s not even like “a slightly new direction by the new writing team,” it’s a direct contradiction of everything the games have been built around. And I can rant for hours… wait, I HAVE ranted for hours… on how badly the ending is plagiarized from other works. Ugh, i have to stop typing now before I start slamming my head on the keyboard .