I just beat Mass Effect 3 for the first time. I did this after playing through 1 and 2, straight to 3. I now have no idea what the fuss over the ending is about. The ending makes perfect sense. The indoctrination theory does not fit as well as the actual ending does. I'll toss out a few things that apparently most of the millions who played it missed, and will field any and all questions. Most of my answers will be pointing to ingame lore and content. A few will be simply deduction. 1. Shepard isn't wearing "under-armor." Some have claimed his armor had been ripped off showing what is underneath. It is obviously his armor and it is just melted and ruined by the beam from the reaper. 2. Shepard's vision is blurred by blood just like when one is really badly injured in the game. 3. There is nothing mysterious about Anderson getting to the console before you. He clearly says he followed you, but arrived at a different point on the station. This is plausible since we're talking about a damn space beam zapping you from the surface to a rotating space station. And we're talking about a video game set in a fantasy world. 4. The whole scene with the Illusive Man is so poorly understood by people it is actually kind of sad. The Illusive Man had been experimenting with Reaper tech of mind control, and in the vids you watch at the Cerberus base you see him prepare to get implanted with that control tech. The black wisps you see in the corner of your vision and the strange behavior of Anderson is due to that control in IM's presence. Unfortunately, that reaper tech has actually made him indoctrinated although he doesn't quite realize it yet. 5. The "star child" is an AI (not VI) from a distant (early?) civilization in galactic history. This is a riff off of the old Battlestar Galactica story. Organic life eventually creates synthetic life, which eventually surpasses organic life. The AI did not like this (probably after warring/destroying his creators) and created the reaper system to direct organic galactic civilization and cull races before they became capable of creating very advanced synthetic life that would wipe out organic life in the galaxy. Essentially, through the reapers, he is allowing organic life a chance to exist. To continue allowing that chance, he has to prevent organic life from developing to that point of creating artificial life capable of sentience and overwhelming organic life. Thus, the three new alternative options are presented given that Shepard has managed to show a capacity for unity and overcoming adversity that previous civilizations had lacked. Rather than the start child "ignoring what Shepard accomplished," the child is offering three new options PRECISELY because of what Shepard had accomplished. The control option is okay, although it technically enslaves synthetic life like EDI and the Geth, denying them of the very freedom that Shepard has been fighting for life to have. It's a hypocritical option but likely will be the Canon one. The Synthesis is the ultimate paragon option, essentially doing the same thing that Legion did for the Geth, but for all life everywhere. The Destroy option is really a short-sighted solution, as new artificial life will eventually be created by someone and wars between synthetics and organics, with synthetics ultimately winning, will happen again in some new form. Questions? Bioware needs to hire me to defend this ending. I think it was actually pretty inspired, and a strong finish to a wonderful trilogy.
After reading this, I am thoroughly confused. However, i have yet to finish the game, so that might explain my confusion. I'll get back to this in a couple of weeks when I beat it.
Which ending did you happen get IP? Just curious. I'm not as upset as I was with the ending after I first played through the game, but I still think it could have been handled better. A couple things that still dissapoint me: 1. After all this time of Bioware playing the "choices matter" card, no matter what you did in the previous 3 games you still get the 2 paths (or 3 depending on if you got your galactic readiness up high enough) to choose from at the end of the game. I don't know.....it just rubbed me the wrong way. I would have rathar have had to choose from options that stemmed from the culmination of the decisions you had made throughout the series. I may be just nit-picking, though. I still realize it's still a game has limitations on how in depth it can actually be. Although I have seen others criticize Bioware for this exact thing as well. 2. The endings, although technically different in one way or another, still share way too many similarities. Regardless of the ending, all the mass relays are destroyed and Joker and various crew members crash land on some distant planet somewhere at the end of the game. I understand that there can only be so much information that's held on a disc and that there couldn't be 16 completely different cutscenes for 16 different endings.....but a little more variation between player A's ending and player B's would have still been nice. Initially, the Mass Relays being destroyed bothered me too since it seemed almost pointless to save the galaxy when all the civilizations you fought to save are going to be separated from each other anyway now.......but i've since come to terms that there were going to have to be some sacrifices like that when defeating a force like the Reapers. I think a large part of my dissapointment just lies with the fact that I analyze things way, way, too much. I got the synthesis ending so I felt like alot of things were left unanwered since it felt so rushed at the end. Plus the "star child" at the end came almost completely out of the blue and was a relatively new character so I didn't exactly trust it.......so I felt like I was almost being duped when I made my "synthesis" choice and Shephard jumped into the big shiny light near the end of the game. Regardless it will be interesting to see what route Bioware goes with the "new ending" DLC. Honestly, if the indoctriination theory was true (which it's not) I could have completely lived with the "destroy" ending and been completely fine with it.
1. I see that complaint a lot. I don't get it. All the decisions made in ME1 and ME2 DID manifest in some way in how ME3 played played out. Seriously. Play the game without importing a save, and see how different things turn out. I don't need every RPG to have a Fallout style of ending. For me, having and hearing from old team members, having the Rachni alive and fighting for me, the various ways the Krogan genophage stuff can play out-- all of that was due to choices made. Expecting all of a sudden for there to be wildly divergent possibilities when there never has been before is not only silly, it is physically impossible production cost-wise. 2. Because that is what the crucible does- it uses the relays as a way to deliver a huge energy signal throughout the galaxy, and the relays are destroyed in the process. You choose what kind of energy you are going to send. Again, I don't understand this complaint. It is like saying no matter what pistol you choose, they all are just semi-automatic pistols... Well, ya. No matter what energy you choose, Joker sees a wave coming from the crucible and takes off, not knowing what kind of effect it may have. I don't see why that would be different based on any of the decisions you made. Ultimately, the beam catches up to them in some not-too-distant solar system and they crash land on a habitable planet. How far/long did they run? Who knows? Doesn't matter. They're alive and are outside of the Sol system. If you want to know their life story, you just aren't going to get the life story of over a dozen characters and half a dozen civilizations in the ending. I don't have a problem with that. People weren't pissed at the end of Skyrim, wondering what is going to happen with the Empire or the Aldmeri. Same thing. It's beyond the scope of the game. ME is about stopping the reapers. You did. Congrats. 3. Those relays were reaper tech and essentially instruments of reaper control. They were holding technology back as much as they pushed it forward. Reapers don't need relays, and now there are dead/disabled ones littering most of the galaxy and all the major homeworlds. According to dialog in ME2 and ME3, the Asari can practically build their own relays anyway. Given some time, galactic civilization will come back. Within a human generation even. When airships were decommissioned after the Hindenburg, some thought Europe would be cut off except for long Atlantic ship trips. Instead, passenger airplanes flourished. And again, the relays were the essential delivery mechanism for the crucible/catalyst. There was no other way. How many times did someone say "we can't beat the reapers conventionally"? Well, this is what unconventional victories look like. They hurt. I don't know what you are expecting to be answered that bothers so much that is within the scope of THIS game. If you chose synthesis, all organic life now has a synthetic aspect to it, making it no longer hopelessly disadvantaged and obsolete to synthetics. It's a "Ghost in the Shell" type of world now.
Good point on 2 and 3. I agree with 1 in that I realize it's still just a game and in turn I realize that the logic involved to create a countless number of different endings wasn't exactly feasible. I just thought it would have ended in a somewhat different fashion since the series has always been really diverse in it's scenarios. Like I said, I think a big part of my dissapointment comes from me mistrusting the Star Child at the end. As a result something felt amiss with the whole synthesis process. Seeing as how the whole Indoctrination Theory stemmed from that very thing, apparantly I wasn't alone in feeling that way.
I went with synthesis, but had intended to go with destroy from what I had heard before. A big difference between us is that I had been set up for massive disappointment, hearing about how "awful" the ending was. Your expectations were probably very, very high given the way the game had been pumped at release. I don't know why people automatically distrusted the child. I expected to, but given the context leading up to it and what he actually said, it all made sense to me. Synthetic beings are inevitably made by organic beings, and end up being so far superior as to render organic civilization impossible. The only way to allow for organic civilizations is to prevent them from advancing to the point of creating superior synthetics. hence the cycle. If the cycle is not satisfactory, please choose your alternative. Think hard, and tell me what choice you would have preferred to have had. To me, just flipping an off-switch on all the reapers would have been cheap and meaningless. Fundamentally transforming galactic civilization and sacrificing one's self to end the threat actually means something. The obsession with Shepard "surviving" is silly (which is why the destroy option is popular to people-because they know he lives). How does one survive falling from orbit when he was already critically injured and had no way of safely surviving re-entry? To me, that is the only plot hole that really sticks out.
