Mass Effect 3

[Kozmos]

Nope. Bioware just lazy.

 

[Maniacal]

Spoiler :

Those cylindrical objects look nothing like the Mako's wheels.

 

[Azale]

Meh, Bioware probably wasn't expecting the poopstorm they got from the endings. A DLC that added some additional "after the final scene" content (like Arrival in ME2) was probably planned all along, and honestly I don't see the big deal. There is enough content in this game to warrant the money I laid down for it (80 dolla collector's edition). I don't think Bioware's intention was to rush out a horrible ending that everyone hates then release a "better ending" DLC.

Just doesn't make much sense to me.

 

[thomas.berubeg]

The indoctrination Theory

 

[Maniacal]

Yeah and it still doesn't make the ending good.

 

[kramerfan86]

Nope. Bioware just lazy.

Agreed, there was no masterplan here. They legitimately thought their lazy shoehorned ending was clever. Im sure they had plans for DLC, but it was all likely multiplayer and pre-ending missions to add to the readiness that really doesnt matter anyways.

 

[Dachs]

Agreed, there was no masterplan here. They legitimately thought their lazy shoehorned ending was clever. Im sure they had plans for DLC, but it was all likely multiplayer and pre-ending missions to add to the readiness that really doesnt matter anyways.

The thing is that it wasn't even lazy. They spent a lot of time on that ending as it was, and according to the Final Hours interviews released recently, most of the conversation at the end was actually cut. (This is backed up by the November leaked script, which contains quite a few unused lines. Part of the reason I was unhappy with the final conversation when I played it was not that it didn't make sense - I already knew it was fairly questionable - but that it made even less sense than it had in November.) So it's not like making the ending this way involved less work.

But yes, everything points to the part of the team responsible for the endings having legitimately believed that these were decent endings and that they wrapped up the story well. Indoctrination theory is a bunch of bogus headcanon to make people feel better.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Some people are also unhappy that the ending is not an incredibly happy Return of the
Jedi ending, but those complaints can be safely dismissed.

What would an incredibly happy ending involve ? Time travel to prevent the invasion in the first place ? Or maybe the last three games turn out o have been a vision of the future given to Shepard from the Prothean beacon back on Eden Prime, and for some reason the council will beleive him this time ?
The transformation of the Reapers into nanomachines that immediately start to repair everything they have destroyed ?
I wanted a happy ending. A happy ending that can only be reached by doing almost every side mission and getting almost every war asset. And happy in this context means 'Reapers are defeated with no civilization-ending additional cost'. It would still leave us with a death toll in the billions and the devastation of a lot of homeworlds

Ray Muzyka, one of the two founders of BioWare, has already stated (earlier today) that there will be content added to the ending. We don't know what it will entail.

I assumed as much. I refuse to believe this was supposed to be the real ending and that

Spoiler :

the indoctrination clues are just coincidence and completely unintended by Bioware.

Yeah and it still doesn't make the ending good.

It makes it better. At least it makes more sense and leaves a possibility for improvement.

 

[Dachs]

I wanted a happy ending. A happy ending that can only be reached by doing almost every side mission and getting almost every war asset. And happy in this context means 'Reapers are defeated with no civilization-ending additional cost'. It would still leave us with a death toll in the billions and the devastation of a lot of homeworlds

Come on. This is the same fanbase that claimed that Mass Effect 2 wasn't a darker game than the first one, despite the unpreventable genocide of hundreds of thousands of humans (and then the mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of batarians at Shepard's own hands in Arrival), purely because every Normandy crew member could come back from the Suicide Mission alive. You know very well that many of these people don't give a damn about what happens in the wider galaxy, so long as they can build their space waifu a house on the homeworld or grow old and have a bunch of little blue children in the epilogue. These people want to be assured that everything turns out well for "their" Shepard and his or her chosen friends, and little else.

Spoiler Spoilers :

The destruction of the mass relays does not "end" civilization. There is conventional FTL - much slower, but eminently viable - to fill the gap before other mass relays can be built - and since the Protheans built one and the asari were able to contemplate building them, that's a viable option. The Reaper-child's claims that the geth [and EDI?] will be destroyed by the Destroy ending are probably false, because EDI can be seen emerging from the Normandy in some circumstances. Also, because it's a freaking Reaper-child.

More to the point, BioWare isn't under any obligation to make a game with an ending that makes you feel good about how things went down. They are, however, under an obligation to make a game with an ending that makes some freaking sense. This is why the "artistic license" people don't have a leg to stand on. (Well, one of the many reasons.) The ending sucks because it does not jive with pretty much the entire rest of the series, not in terms of tone or how happy or sad it is, but in terms of internal and logical coherence.

I assumed as much. I refuse to believe this was supposed to be the real ending and that

Spoiler :

the indoctrination clues are just coincidence and completely unintended by Bioware.

Indoc theorists are set on this notion that indoctrination works like Matthew 4:1-11 or some nonsense, when every single thing we've been told about indoctrination in the games before that contradicts it. On that basis alone, the whole theoretical edifice should be rejected - even ignoring the grasping at straws at other "evidence" as though the game was a Dan Brown novel. It's prima facie idiotic, and a lot of indoc theorists are going to be very disappointed come April when the new ending content is supposedly going to be released.

I mean, I have a pet "favorite version of the revised ending" too - Arcian's fixed ending (not me, despite the avatar similarities) - but I'm not shoving it in everybody's face, claiming that there's sketchy evidence in favor of it throughout the game that CLEARLY INVALIDATES everything that happens in the "so-called 'real' ending" as a sneaky hint that the whole thing is a fraud and that the 'real' ending will be released later, probably as paid DLC for profiteering.

 

[Akka]

But yes, everything points to the part of the team responsible for the endings having legitimately believed that these were decent endings and that they wrapped up the story well. Indoctrination theory is a bunch of bogus headcanon to make people feel better.

Honestly, I can't wrap my mind around such a ridiculous notion. Even if it was true, I would just be unable to process the idea that idiotic nonsense like this, going completely contrary to everything the game was about and everything that was promised for years, was actually considered good not only by one person, but by a whole team.

That's just too far out of the realm of believability...
About anything else makes more sense and is more believable than that.

This is just mindf*cking.

Indoc theorists are set on this notion that indoctrination works like Matthew 4:1-11 or some nonsense, when every single thing we've been told about indoctrination in the games before that contradicts it.

Actually, one of the strongest point of the Indoc theory is that it just fills near-perfectly in everything that was told before.
It just seems you don't like the idea, so you claim it makes no sense - when actually it would be about the only thing sensical in this ending fiasco.

 

[Maniacal]

Spoiler :

The destruction of the mass relays does not "end" civilization. There is conventional FTL - much slower, but eminently viable -

Hardly viable over the distances the relays covered. The Reapers destroyed many fuel stations and operations, only the Quarrians have (three) ships designed to feed lots of people for a very long time.

It doesn't end civilization on specific planets and maybe some systems (depending on how badly damaged they were by the Reapers), but it does end the galactic civilization until better long range FTL travel is set up again.

to fill the gap before other mass relays can be built - and since the Protheans built one and the asari were able to contemplate building them, that's a viable option.

Considering that most major worlds were attacked and devastated by the Reapers the Asari would have a hard time building new relays, especially since the data from their beacon was stolen. It took the Protheans their best scientists a very long time to build a working Mass Relay and it was a rather small one. Rebuilding and reorganizing from the war is going to have significant priority if they even have many people left who could work on such a project (and who knows how many top scientists were working on the Crucible in whatever secretive system they built it in).

 

[Kozmos]

Link to video.

Explains it pretty well.

 

[Dachs]

Honestly, I can't wrap my mind around such a ridiculous notion. Even if it was true, I would just be unable to process the idea that idiotic nonsense like this, going completely contrary to everything the game was about and everything that was promised for years, was actually considered good not only by one person, but by a whole team.

That's just too far out of the realm of believability...
About anything else makes more sense and is more believable than that.

This is just mindf*cking.

You don't have to presume that it was considered good by the whole team. Apparently the ending itself - at least, the one that they eventually went with, as opposed to earlier versions of the ending - did not receive major input from most of the writers, and the final product was chiefly a Walters/Hudson thing. Again, this comes from the Final Hours material.

By comparison, indoctrination theory requires that we believe that BioWare was both a) extremely subtle in providing hints that the ending was not, in fact, the actual ending and b) extremely stupid in failing to predict the colossal [poop]storm that this ending would produce. It also doesn't explain why a large portion of the gaming media sympathetic to BioWare and/or reliant on EA for a great deal of advertising money is defending the ending as-is.

Actually, one of the strongest point of the Indoc theory is that it just fills near-perfectly in everything that was told before.
It just seems you don't like the idea, so you claim it makes no sense - when actually it would be about the only thing sensical in this ending fiasco.

I don't like the endings as they are, either, but I can accept that they were, in fact, intended to be the actual endings.

The ostensible ability to explain everything that happens is hardly unique to indoc theory; anything that solipsistic can explain everything. It is not an advantage.

Indoc theory violates the explanation of indoctrination and is directly contradicted by The Final Hours of Mass Effect 3. There is no response to the former by indoc theorists, most of whom attempt to skate on some sort of "umm well it's vague how it works" to the former, and who claim that the latter is simply a) lying or b) a PR stunt.

Spoiler Scampi conversation :

Sure, restoring galactic civilization to the way it was before the Reaper War - or even a shadow of that - will take a long time. It won't happen overnight. It'll take decades, maybe even centuries. I completely agree. Incidentally, it's also hinted that this was the point in the game docs that Gibbed has been unearthing.

So what?

 

[TheLastOne36]

I don't believe the indoctrination theory are just fortunate accidents(The reaper-kid nobody sees, the lucid dreaming, Anderson making it on the Citadel before Shepard despite the British guy claiming nobody made it through, etc.). If this was the intended ending, Bioware must have anticipated the potential [poop]storm and put in those subtle hints beforehand so they could somehow make an ending that worked and make more money off of it.


Anyway, you guys have probably seen this but:

Rumored content for the DLC. Apparently a Prothean Adept and Vanguard is included as well but not visible in the image.

 

[Akka]

Indoc theory violates the explanation of indoctrination and is directly contradicted by The Final Hours of Mass Effect 3. There is no response to the former by indoc theorists, most of whom attempt to skate on some sort of "umm well it's vague how it works" to the former, and who claim that the latter is simply a) lying or b) a PR stunt.

Let me repeat : actually, the Indoc theory fits perfectly with how indoctrination is described (it's even one of its most convincing point), so if you're going to say it's contradicted, please provides actual evidences.

 

[Dachs]

I don't believe the indoctrination theory are just fortunate accidents(The reaper-kid nobody sees, the lucid dreaming, Anderson making it on the Citadel before Shepard despite the British guy claiming nobody made it through, etc.).

None of those is an "accident", or particularly "fortunate", and none of them lead anything in a general direction. It is just as plausible to see Shepard haunted by the millions of lives s/he cannot save and focusing on a single one of those lives as an avatar of the rest of the dead. That's a fairly predictable psychological response to all this.

It's debatable that the version of the child seen on Earth is, in fact, not seen by anyone else; you can come away from the evacuation cutscene with either impression, and even if he isn't really noticed by anyone else, so what?

Spoiler Major Coats :

The major's statement, that nobody actually made it to the beam, was true at the time. Obviously not everybody was slaughtered on the way there - you can pass living soldiers, crawling around in agony. Besides, is there any reason to take the interpretation of the major's statement implied by indoctrination theory - that Shepard and Anderson never got there and that this is all a Reaper dream - when Shepard's own eyes don't show the same thing? I mean, why assume that the voice-over is correct and the visuals wrong?

Let me repeat : actually, the Indoc theory fits perfectly with how indoctrination is described (it's even one of its most convincing point), so if you're going to say it's contradicted, please provides actual evidences.

Spoiler Spoilers :

I already alluded to this stuff earlier, but if it helps to make these things explicit, what the hell.

Because indoctrination never is presented as a 'trial'. According to indoc theory, the ending is effectively a test to pass: pick the 'right' option - claimed to be 'Destroy', because it is supposedly the only choice that does not serve the Reapers' actual purposes, and demonstrates that you are not susceptible to their lies - and you overpower the Reapers and win back control of your mind, to wake up in a pile of rubble in London, ready to resume the fight and get the 'real' ending. But all other descriptions of indoctrination, going back to Benezia and Rana Thanoptis, leave no room for this 'trial' nonsense. Anybody who manages to throw off the Reapers' control, like Saren or Benezia, can only do so for a very short time, an act that by itself requires immense amounts of mental fortitude. You cannot defeat the Reapers in the battle for your own mind; you can only delay them long enough to commit suicide. This is precisely how the confrontation with the Illusive Man works out in the ostensibly fake ending.

So if Shepard were really being indoctrinated and attempting to throw off the Reapers' control, 'succeeding' by picking Destroy and waking up in London would simply mean that s/he has delayed the inevitable by a few moments. All that would be left would be to commit suicide before the Reapers managed to reestablish their control. Not exactly great fodder for a supposedly masterful ending DLC, unless Shepard passes the reins to Dr. Conrad Verner, who has to do the 'real' work of defeating the Reapers.

Furthermore, there's the issue of how Shepard is actually indoctrinated. It cannot have been done by Object Rho, because the Prothean VI states that Shepard is not indoctrinated twice during the course of ME3 itself, the second time happening immediately before the assault on Earth. (This also invalidates the claim that Shepard's dreams are the dreams mentioned in the Indoctrination Codex entry. You could reject the Prothean VI's claims, I suppose, but that's pretty blatantly trying to get the game to fit the theory instead of the other way around. Hence my derisive "solipsism" remarks. And then you have to question why the Reapers are having Shepard do something that brings galactic civilization closer to defeating them than at any point in the history of organic life, which makes even less sense than the ending as currently constructed.) There is no point during the battle for Earth before reaching the beam in which Shepard is in close contact with a Reaper or Reaper artifact for any appreciable time during which the indoctrination can take place. So, uh, how does this work, again?

 

[kramerfan86]

I would just like to point out that if an ending is so bad that it makes more sense as a hallucination than an actual event you know you've taken a misstep.

Also the cofounder said they are announcing their "plan" in April, but I feel fairly certain its just going to be some explanation of the ending, not a fix, because I think bioware is so full of themselves that they are convinced the uproar is just because people dont "get" it. That is simple untrue arrogance, people "got" the endings just fine, they simply didnt want them once they got them.

 

[Benefactor]

You know what I expected, a mission at some point to find the MacGuffin that makes fighting Repears possible and a bunch of various endings consisting of some rather long cutscenes showing the various fleets and troops I'd recruited fighting the Reapers and a nice long epilogue to let me know how everything played out afterwards.

I would have been very happy with that.

Edit: It would also have been cool with me if it was possible to lose if you messed absolutely everything up.

Edit 2: I also like the modified ending Dachs linked to.

 

[kramerfan86]

That is another thing that bugged me, not as much as the ending itself, but it bugged me. They didnt bother to really show the battle going on other than the introductory cutscene to it, and on the ground I dont really think who you recruited made enough of a difference. To me it would have been cool to program the amount of enemies you saw based on assests, go through areas with NPCs of the races you recruited righting, things like that.

I dont know, I guess after Mass Effect 2 where your pre-battle decisions effect who lives and your in battle decisions destirmine who lives I would expecting a lot more variety than the exact same final level with the exact same ending as everyone else.

 

[Dachs]

That is another thing that bugged me, not as much as the ending itself, but it bugged me. They didnt bother to really show the battle going on other than the introductory cutscene to it, and on the ground I dont really think who you recruited made enough of a difference. To me it would have been cool to program the amount of enemies you saw based on assests, go through areas with NPCs of the races you recruited righting, things like that.

I dont know, I guess after Mass Effect 2 where your pre-battle decisions effect who lives and your in battle decisions destirmine who lives I would expecting a lot more variety than the exact same final level with the exact same ending as everyone else.

Yeah, you would at least expect something at least sort of as involved, in terms of decision-making and impacts from past decisions, as the Suicide Mission.

It was nice that they at least amped up the difficulty over the Suicide Mission - the only two remotely difficult parts were the sixth heat vent (had to cross a field of fire to get to it, was surrounded by high ground) and That One Scion during the Long Walk. Everything else was pretty trivial, even on Insanity. During the London attack, there was nothing that was incredibly easy, but the two point defense segments (the Cain launch spot and the Thanix missile tank), That One Alleyway with two Brutes, and, of course, Marauder Shields himself were all noteworthily challenging.