Mass Effect 3

[Reston]

To clarify a few things:

Spoiler:

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In order to get the Shepard waking up scene you need to do: A.) Get either 4,000 EMS and higher with a full paragon/full renegade and ALSO make all the top left choices each time you see TIM (so Paragon choices whenever they pop up). If you pick Paragon, you must choose Paragon every time you see TIM otherwise it will not work. It does not work with Renegade. If you use Renegade you can forget this option. It mirrors that of the encounters with Saren from ME1.

B.) Otherwise you can just get 5,000 EMS. Either option will work.

In any event from either of these options, doing so will give you the chance to delay Anderson's death and to mirror TIM scene like that of Saren. Afterwards, during the star child scene, you must pick the 'destroy' option in order for it to work.

If you want the added scene at the end of the game credits, you need to either import a ME2 game save or play a new game +.

As for the ending of the game, at first I was pissed. Then I went back and replayed it again. And then I sort of liked it. Let me say this I still feel it was a total cop out how Bioware ended the series and it was not what I expected to happen at all but it does make sense.

The indoctrination theory seems to be the most logical choice for many reasons. But we all know they're gonna have some sort of DLC but yeah... the entire ending was indoctrination.

There is evidence to support this theory. Here is what I came up with.

1. After Harbinger uses his death ray and hits you with it, everything goes black. When you come to the first thing you should notice is a pitch shriek, sorta like the asari reapers, except slightly different and you can see Harbinger flying away. The shriek is a sign of indoctrination taking place. The farmers on Eden Prime talk about this as one of the symptoms they felt when they encountered Sovereign. It's also in the codex I believe for either ME1/ME2.

2. Shepard survives a death ray blast? Come on, even Chris Redfield couldn't pull that off. You witnessed it first hand when you ran towards that beacon. The damn ray destroys ships the second that beam hits it. There is no way Shepard should be able to stand up, even if he is all bloody and beaten, and continue further.

3. When you get control of the character you'll notice you have infinite bullets, you lost all your armor, and if you turn around, you don't see anyone else or anything for that matter. If you listen carefully or turn on the text subs during the very beginning you can hear something that sounds far off in the distance, chatter over a radio between Alliance operatives. They say that NO ONE SURVIVED the charge towards the beacon and ordered a full retreat.

4. Upon entering the beacon beam and transporting to the Citadel you hear Anderson speak to you. He says he followed in behind you, yet if you were outside and turned around, there is no one behind you. When you enter he says he got transported to a different tunnel.

5. After passing through the keeper tunnel with the human bodies on both side and entering the next room you can make out "1M1" on the left side before the bridge crossing and on the opposite side it has "1M1" EXCEPT IT IS BACKWARDS. Dreams are usually interpretation to be mirrored at times.

6. When you see Anderson at the controls, he's being controlled yet he has not even gone through indoctrination, and if he was indoctrinated he is the quickest to be turned in the MEverse.

7. TIM magically pops up behind Shepard. And he's been indoctrinated. The entire scene MIRRORS almost directly that of Saren from ME1. If you do what I said above, TIM even puts the gun to his own head and pulls the trigger just like Saren. Also take note of the black mist swirls around the border of the screen..... more signs of indoctrination.

8. After Anderson dies and Shepard goes to the top of the Citadel where there is no protection or gravity, he can breathe perfectly. Yes, he can breathe and speak without a helmet or anything to the star child.

9. The star child is a reaper A.I. The child you saw in the beginning of the game was never there. Don't believe me? Go back and play the first mission again. No one else sees the kid. You need further proof? Right before Anderson tells you to shoot the husks when you first see them, before that scene, look out to the right and you can see the child running into the building and the husks never touch him. When you see the child in the vent, only Shepard sees him. When Anderson snaps him out of it, the child is gone, and if you listen carefully, you can hear a growl. The growl from the vent is another sign of indoctrination. I forgot what character said it but they specifically said they could sometimes hear growling. And then you see the child get on the transport and yet no one even looks at the kid except Shepard.

10. The dream sequences was Shepard attempting to cope with finding the child because he feels guilty and responsible for his 'death'. Notice whenever you get close to the kid, the reaper alarm goes off. And when you see Shepard holding the boy in the last sequence, they both burn in flames. It was a foreshadowing that accepting the kid would bring humanity to doom.

11. If you do everything right in the game you'll get three options and the full scene will play out. The full scene goes that the boy is what controls the reapers. The truth is that the boy is the illusion of a reaper A.I. signal for Shepard to understand. The child is not to be trusted. No child in a sci-fi series is ever to be trusted, especially when it's machine.

12. The star child gives you three choices with the first being the default and the most obvious; destroy. It is what you, the gamer and your character, set out to do. Destroy the Reapers and save the galaxy. The star child obviously is going to get this choice out of the way so that when he tells you the other choices, the first choice in your human head becomes more distant and seems worse. Whenever someone gives you a choice of more then two, the first is usually the crappiest. So the destroy option is given and the star child tells you that it will destroy all synthetic life including the geth and most likely kill you. Shepard DOUBTS him about it. You see a weird flash of Anderson shooting the device to give you the destroy option. Anderson, a well developed embodiment of paragon, is doing something to destroy which is adapted as bad. Red is renegade as we've grown custom to throughout the series.

13. The next choice is CONTROL. You see a flash and TIM is controlling the reapers. The star child tells you that you will die but you will be able to control the reapers. The color associated with this is blue for paragon. Paragon is always the virtue one. However you saw TIM and you know he is anything but Paragon. Controlling the reapers is not possible and you will be indoctrinated.

14. The final choice is SYNTHESIS. The star child says this option was not available in previous cycles and recommends this one. If you notice, you'll catch the child in lies especially when he says control is better but then says this is now the best choice. Synthesis will merge both organic and synthetic life together. This is exactly what the Reapers wanted to do with the humans. This choice is the human being ascended to a higher form and becoming a nation in the reapers.

15. You see Joker escaping through a mass relay and somehow he magically picked up your love interest who was down on Earth. So magically he flew down to Earth somehow, collected your buddies, and managed to fly away from the Reapers before the Crucible went off. Doesn't make sense but then again it's not real.

16. The name crucible can be defined as being tested.

The entire ending, from the moment you wake up and enter the citadel, was a test. You fought all species of the galaxy and managed to take on the reapers. You have reaper technology in your body from the Lazarus Project and you came across them before. Anything that stays too long within reaper technology will eventually feel the signal and strength of them. Shepard is no different. It eventually happened. The entire sequence was the struggle from Harbinger attempting to indoctrinate both the character, and you, as the gamer. It's why the choices and the colors didn't add up. The reapers would not associate destroy with blue but with red to trick you. You were being indoctrinated. If you chose Destroy which is the destruction of synthetic life, you and Shepard break free of indoctrination, hence the scene after the Joker crashing on a planet plays out. You find Shepard back in London in the rubble and he takes a deep breath. This is him waking up after the death beam hitting him. He never encountered TIM, he never made it to the Citadel, and he did not yet destroy the Reapers.

The scene after the credits suggests that humans somehow found a way and won the war against the Reapers. It's never specified what happened to Shepard or who survived but the overall point was that humanity won and the Reapers were gone forever and that whenever that scene takes place, the cycle has not yet repeated itself.

I hope that helps some of you who felt screwed by the ending. Trust me, I am alongside with you. I didn't like the ending and still feel like I was robbed of something that should've been more but hopefully this theory helps some of your anger into the inevitable DLC extended ending...

[Mr. Spencer]

Why so cereal?

[Inferno04]

Spoiler:

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I'd take this theory over the ending itself anyway, especially since I picked Destroy. I can't even say I'm enraged at the endings. Confused and feeling empty though, definately. I knew the endings before the game came out but it is so different to actually play it...Feels like a waste now, almost. What am I supposed to do now, go back and play the series knowing what will happen? XD

[Beanovsky Durst]

Spoiler:

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I'd take this theory over the ending itself anyway, especially since I picked Destroy. I can't even say I'm enraged at the endings. Confused and feeling empty though, definately. I knew the endings before the game came out but it is so different to actually play it...Feels like a waste now, almost. What am I supposed to do now, go back and play the series knowing what will happen? XD

Spoiler:

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Or we can keep pushing one Bioware/EA to give us "Mass Effect 3: Broken Steel". I joined that group on March 8th. We were 50 people then. Today it's almost 20,000. There's something really wrong with that, and if they don't see an opportunity there, then Bioware and EA are fools. We should eat them. ;)

[Smiley]

[Vector]

Spoiler:

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I really think the 'it was all a dream' ending might be worse than what I originally thought. But it does explain the significance of the 'Catalyst,' and a lot of it DOES make sense...

[Enetirnel]

I saw this comic earlier, pretty much sums up my relationship with Smiley.



Except after that, upon beating it if I had a controller (or was on a console) I probably wouldn't have a monitor or a television due to said controller being thrown.

Wall o' text incoming regarding my thoughts on the end of the game are all in the spoiler tag.

Spoiler:

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What a waste of bloody time, effort and money. Not only was there barely anything in the game, the endings were absolute cop-out indoctrination ones at that.

As I said to Spencer the other night, it only felt like 15% of an actual game and that's the start of the game and a couple of the barely there character conversations. The game was buggy as fuck, there was barely any decent content to be done aside from essentially two things - Go here. Kill that, screen fades out. Go here. Grab that item, run past enemies to shuttle, screen fades out. for the most part due to the priority missions not being that long either or to a large amount. The one that took the longest to sort out was the Krogan stuff and the Quarian/Geth conflict, both of which I found to be the most interesting sections in the game but on the overall, I feel that there just isn't enough in it to warrant it being an entirely new game with a $130 or so dollar price tag for the CE edition.

Overall, it puts off old fans AND new fans. Inferno04 just got into the series recently (after much nagging from me as well) and I got Smiley to play ME2 and he just started ME3 the other day. He may have started with ME2, but he's actually gone back to play through ME1 via PC and I just had to tell him - I feel he'll be disappointed with the ending.

Endings are a disgrace, a disappointment and also make me feel fairly offended that I've essentially wasted money on all three games for a shitty, cop-out endings that requires multiplayer which on PC can be sometimes impossible due to EA shitty server bugs that have been happening non-stop.

The endings all essentially being very minor variants of the exact same thing, it's like say.... Biohazard/Resident Evil 3's ending differences with or without Barry Burton in the helicopter.

Though to be quite honest, the endings particularly the Synergy one is screaming Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within, and I have to say even as a Final Fantasy fan that enjoyed the movie by itself - I know the fan reaction on the whole fucking thing, so with that in mind the shitty writing, lack of dialogue, constant excuses and the lack of anything really new (it felt like I had to drag myself through everything like the sidequests in ME1 being limited to a set of FOUR ROOMS that were on the occasion, horizontally flipped or had new item positions).

The on-disc squadmate DLC, the Omega DLC that is going to be coming soon was ALSO removed from the game as well.

Overall, as a fan I do have to admit - I feel a bit offended with the "game" overall, to the point the things I did like were minimal and felt like they would have been more suitable for DLC for Mass Effect 2 to go through after completing the game itself and while I'm not exactly a positive person I would personally prefer a purely positive ending variant line for the third game instead of indoctrination, destruction and death as we've seen enough of it throughout the series and after the time and effort I've put into it - considering Shepard was brought back to life and in my case, Annette realized how much she wanted to cling to it and how a realization happened regarding an old friend from ME1.

There's always an alternative, the Crucible was stupidly simple to the point as soon as I heard about it on Mars I was screaming at the screen "You've got to be fucking kidding me!", I mean... It's not like say, we get the Galaxy to essentially work together and pool all knowledge regarding Prothean research and development, we couldn't revisit Ilos and uncover more information in the ruins from the previous civilization that the Protheans were hiding in to understand and work on a new Mass Relay network as a backup in case of usage of the Crucible destroyed or damaged the network due to the sheer amount of power required.

Or that with the Geth containing Reaper code, that the Quarians couldn't study the Reaper Code to help use the Geth against them and also help prevent the Geth from being hacked or further infected by the Reapers OR that with the Reaper Code, that we couldn't come up with something to interrupt their Element Zero cores to take the shields down, or that despite the fact that it's also said REPEATEDLY WITHIN THE GAMES that Reapers' can't maintain their shields forever or properly when taking fire from multiple sources and they also already have a weak point of when they're priming a beam attack.

So there's multiple ways the Reapers could be taken down without relying on the shoehorned in fucking Crucible to give us shitty cop out endings. This is just me going off the top of my head, to the point if I got the codex details up from all of the games, the novels, comics and the additional games and the like - I can still point out numerous ways that the entire galaxy could play their part in actually taking down Reapers quite quickly - even with their updated designs in contrast to Sovereigns old design.

Not only that, but the Crucible idea about synthetic life killing organic life is also countered by what we see within the Geth Consensus and the factor that yes, you actually can get the Quarians and the Geth to work together. EDI was the homicidal Luna AI combined with the AI from the Citadel and eventually became herself over time - she changed from being homicidal after the Reaper code that brought a closer to organic existence about was brought under control.

Within the Arrival cutscene, we see close to 300 or so Reapers. Now, we have a single fleet made out of combined forces that managed to damage Sovereign, however Sovereign's design was essentially outdated when taking direct control of Saren. We do not know how old or new the designs are of the current Reapers, aside from now having weapons based on Reaper technology that was scavenged, discovering multiple weak-spots and having nearly all fleets in the Galaxy combined.

There's also ground defenses on various planets, a few of the races and groups are know to use weapons of mass destruction, hurtle asteroids or suicidal explosions.

So it is in fact, entirely plausible to wipeout the Reapers by teamwork and by recovering the data from the Prothean research, the original Mass Relay system could be replaced with a new set of Mass Relays that are lacking the Reaper activation (in that EDI's Reaper IFF could be reversed to prevent the Reapers from coming into space outside of general transport), but it could also be theoretically possible to set up multiple defense systems or say, outposts with Geth technology or even hand made "Reapers" based on the remnants of the the Human Reaper that do not respond to the actual Reapers themselves and would attack them by using an AI network similar to what the Geth or EDI have achieved.

So, I call bullshit REPEATEDLY on Mass Effect 3 personally.

[Mr. Spencer]

I'm going to break into your homes and eat your cereals.

[Beanovsky Durst]

I'm going to break into your homes and eat your cereals.
Spoiler:

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OH NOES! YOU EVIL CEREBRUS NINJA LEAVE MY FROOT LOOPS,

I can't believe that is actually featured on Deception.

[Mr. Spencer]

Kai Leng is a pretty cool guy, eh eats the cereals and doesn't afraid of anything.

[Darkmoon]

I must admit, I'm stunned at the hate for the ending. I haven't got there yet, but I absolutely cannot imagine what could have invoked such ire. Shephard is God/controlled by God/an agent of God/the little kid is God? He's a Reaper? He eats a Reaper? And no, I don't want an actual answer. I'm just stunned.

[Enetirnel]

You'll find out once you get to the ending Darkmoon. I can't say anything on it until you've done so, because I'd break into a rant (which once you've finished the game, read Reston's and my own wall of text spoiler posts) in regard to it.

[Vector]

I really don't think it's as bad as everyone's making it out to be, what with some saying that the endings 'ruined the entire series.' That just seems like a gross overreaction to me. Was it ideal? No, not at all. It was a cop-out and it was vague but it doesn't change all the fun over all the hours I had while playing the three games in the series, and it doesn't change the fact that I still absolutely loved all three games.

[Enetirnel]

I just don't understand what's so good about the third game, it barely felt like there was much content to it at all and even just digging through the game files is already showing other shit has been cut out too.

Like oh, say Omega. From Ashes as well, despite the excuse given was "bug fixing phase"... when the game is barely playable on the PS3 for some people, the game is extremely buggy on PC and even people have had issues on the 360. The dialogue levels are all off in that there's usually a set level, say I go and walk up to hear Joker and EDI on the Normandy - their dialogue is quiet until I click on Joker and it's suddenly loud with "COMMANDER.", I know Ginny McSwain is a perfectionist in regard to voice acting and recording so it all sounds and looks quite off to me (having previously spoken to her about Biohazard 4, Demento and her work on the Mass Effect series).

The only part of the game I didn't do was the Academy because I got stuck on the Citadel. Despite that, I've gone over the music with Smiley and Spencer and I found tracks that weren't used in the game and are clearly labeled as OMEGA.

The whole fucking thing seems to feel rushed, shoehorned in despite already missing the previous release dates, delays and yet - still feeling like there's barely any content to the game despite say, the VAs for the Shepards' recorded over 40,000 lines of dialogue and yet, there's not even anything close to that within the files. I've gone over far too many SFX, music, voice over sections, cutscene sections over the last four or five hours. I'm tempted to dig through the models and see if there's any other crap floating around.

Spoiler:

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But overall, it just reeks of being rushed and having a forced set of endings that a large amount of the fanbase are vocally disagreeing on because there are multiple things that could have been used as alternatives (and these ones are also supported with the Codex information) and yet, you are essentially forced to have shitty variants of the one shitty thing.

More-so when it essentially also means - it was pointless to have spent the time, money and effort on the games or any additional material like the novels or comics, because you've been railroaded into a SINGLE choice within a series that at the very least gives you a few variables, like crew dying due to their loyalty and the like.

So, you've just wasted your entire time gathering troops... for what reason? We see the fleets doing well when we get to Earth and then we rely on this stupid Crucible? Despite that we can take down Reapers, it just requires cooperation between each other and coordination... Which we saw with the Quarians and the like.

I love the first two games, but this just feels like it would have been better off as DLC because it doesn't feel complete and there were very few parts that had differences. I happened to particularly like the Rannoch missions and the Citadel stuff, but other than that and the Krogan, Salarians and the other priority missions were interesting but only a couple of them actually were different as opposed to essentially doing the same shit on side missions.

[Mr. Spencer]

At some point, Mass Effect went through a devolution. There were warning signs cropping up all over the place and we didn't take any notice, the most prominent of which being the fourth novel, Deception. Now the first three novels (Revelation, Ascension and Retribution) weren't by any means masterpieces but they were enjoyable reads and gave us more insight into this wonderful universe. The fourth novel was a poorly written effort. It wasn't even an effort. Kai Leng, for example. In Retribution he's portrayed as this professional badass, I go in to ME3 expecting some kind of grizzled super soldier and what do I get? A bishounen cyborg ninja.

Deception didn't help his case any better, though it did make him hilarious and quite possibly the best character in the series - for the wrong reasons.

Somewhere along the lines, something changed. I'm trying to figure out when and how.

[Vector]

Drew Karpyshyn left BioWare.

EDIT: Just watched the other two endings on YouTube. I can see why people are pissed. They were basically just palette swaps. I am glad, however, that I got the 'perfect' ending, and the more and more I read about this 'indoctrination theory,' the more I believe it to be true. It just screams DLC to me.

[DarkMemories]

Spoiler:

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What was your favorite color pulse? That's what Mass Effect 3 left us with, no closure, no chance for a well-earned happy ending (or hell, even one that makes much sense) or any sort of sense that the journey meant anything.

I mean fuck, even RE knows that an ending needs to be satisfying (even if they've repeated basically the same thing for every game).

[Mr. Spencer]

Drew Karpyshyn left BioWare.

Makes the most sense to both me and Enetirnel. We were discussing this on Skype. This is what happens when you let COMIC BOOK WRITERS do the writing for something like Mass Effect, totally different medium. I think all this hogwash with the Crucible wasn't part of the original plan, all along they were going to have the galaxy work together to fight the Reapers. This is even supported in the codex entries regarding the Reapers. More I think about it, the more I realise that it was shoehorned in for a plethora of different reasons that I can't be bothered to go into at this point.

Everything about the game feels rushed. Also, the Crucible effectively renders the whole "Galaxy at War" routine completely obsolete and pointless. There's no coordinating a war, just building the plot device that'll force-fuck you into one of three different coloured endings. For a series that's been about choice, they've dropped the ball. I'm more than willing to give BioWare an opportunity to defend their decision. Time will tell, that is...IF we ever see them again. Pretty much every BioWare staff member has dropped off the BioWare forums.

That's right, I'm not even putting this in spoiler tags. I don't think any of us should use spoiler tags in this topic, we must send out a warning to those who have yet to play the game. Let this be our "prothean beacon", our "warning" to future players.

[Archelon]

...and I thought people on this forum took Resident Evil too seriously.

I'm not the type to say "it's just a video game," by any means, but I think some of you are going just a little overboard here.

[Alexia_Ashford]

MASS EFFECT 3'S ENDING DESERVES TO DIE IN A BLAZING INFERNO OF SHIT