From what I've heard they didn't decide on an ending until the last possible moment. Seems like they just threw something together in the end because they ran out of time or just because they wrote themselves into a corner.
Martin Sheen's last voice session was apparently moved two months back to give them more time, but the ending doesn't really show that.

Rewriting a script while producing a game (or a movie) isn't that unusual, but they should have had a rough outline of the plot of the 3 games from the start.
You can't create a trilogy in which events depend upon previous choices and just make it up as you go along with every additional title.

 

Yeah but didn't we basically see it fuck up the Normandy when it was hit by the wave? I mean if I remember correctly there was an explosion and then Joker had to crash land on a planet. So it has to be at least somewhat destructive.

Also, this is reportedly a post on the Penny arcade forums by an account that was well known as Bioware writer Patrick Weekes. The post has since been deleted and posts that quote it edited, and EA/Bioware are denying it is real. So take it with a grain of salt, but there are apparently screenshots and the account was (as I said) well known around that forum. The fact that Casey Hudson denied it and the post was so quickly deleted only adds credence to it in my mind, plus the fact that the poster seemed to have a fairly detailed understanding of the Bioware inner workings.

Just realised I accidently put this in spoiler tags, not quote tags. Needless to say though, there are spoilers below but I think if you're reading this thread you've probably already had the end spoiled or have completed it yourself...

 

That quote pretty much says it all. That they didn't even get to check Casey's writing at all and never even saw the finished scripts until recording was already done is cuntish of him.


:/

 

If it's true, that explains a lot. Really. And Tuchanka was one of my favorite missions of the game (despite Moridin dying) - now I know why.

As for why they didn't have an outline from the start, that's what happens when you change writers. It sounds like the original ME writer (Drew Karpashyn) had an ending planned from the beginning, but then he got fired/quit/reassigned/whatever and Casey Hudson took over.

 

Bioware's also clarified that they're not making a new ending, just adding to what we got. Frankly, that's like applying one of those little round Band-Aids onto a massive gushing wound. The only real fix would be to replace everything that happened after the Cerberus base, and that's infeasible for a mere DLC.

There's no hope.

 

On one hand, I can sympathize slightly - trying to write unique endings that took into account every choice you'd made in the previous games as well as those from ME3 would have taken years. There were a couple dozen different ME2 endings, so each of those would have to be taken into account, plus the four or five different major ME1 decisions, plus the I have no idea how many ME3 decisions. Multiply all those numbers by each other and you have the number of ending possibilities. It's enormous.

HOWEVER, they worked themselves into that corner by promising so many things in ME3. Bioware should have known better.

Edit: My biggest disappointments with the ending were twofold.

1. I felt like none of the assets I picked up along the way mattered. Sure, the big ones did (Quarians/Geth, Salarians/Krogan), but not in any significant way, and all the little things, like commando teams or individual ships meant nothing. Even a little cutscene showing a squad of Asari commandos tearing shit up, or someone radioing one of the Alliance cruisers you found would have been enough to show that it made a difference in the end besides giving you more "points" towards a good ending.

2. This has already been mentioned a billion times, but the lack of closure - you see your crew land on some random world, and then nothing. It basically invalidates everything you've done in all three games.

 

To be honest, what I read about what he had planned wasn't much better. The problem is that the writers tried to explain the Reapers motivations and when you have an enemy like the Reapers it's usually best left unexplained to a large extent.

I was thinking about how the fix the ending, and it's kind of simple. Of course this only works if they throw in the towel and accept the Indoctrination theory as basically canon bad better than what they wrote. Following the Best Destroy ending your Shepard wakes up near the beam, plenty of dead soldiers around you; and depending on your choices some of them will be Krogan, or Geth, or what have you each with one of the heavy weapons that match their race (Krogan have flamethrowers, Geth ahev those machine gun things, etc) and then you have to fight At least Harbinger just like you did Sovereign in ME1, perhaps occupying TIM, and maybe a couple of other Reapers like this. Basically the Crucible is a lie, useless for defeating the reapers but they want you dead enough that they give you the opportunity to weaken them. And then the fleet takes them out with heavy losses, etc.

 

Looking back, there's something else that bothers me about the game as a whole. Overall, it was engaging, fun, dramatic and fairly well put together (minus the ending). But what it wasn't was thematically consistent with the previous two games when it comes to choosing between the Paragon and Renegade paths.

One of the things that made the first two games awesome was the idea that you could achieve the end goal (victory over Sovereign, and later the Collectors) either way, the differences being in whether you did it as the embodiment of virtue, a ruthless sociopathic anti-hero, or something in between. ME3 seems to depart from that quite dramatically in some cases.

Take the Tuchanka mission for example. If you stop the cure, you get full Salarian support, but lose the majority of Krogan Support. What this amounts to in war asset points is +150 from the Salarians, but -350 from the Krogan. If you do support the Krogan and cure the genophage, the Salarians will still back you later on, giving you almost as many points as you lose by rejecting the Dalatrass' offer.

There are other examples of this throughout the game, where renegade choices from all three games cost you dearly, while playing as a complete paragon all the way through has almost no negative consequences. They essentially made it so that playing as a renegade is suddenly the wrong way to play, whereas before it was different, but pretty much just as effective as playing a paragon, which was a big part of the systems charm, for me at least.

 

I dunno, I always viewed the Paragon and Renegade divide as being between long-term and short-term. Renegade options made the msot sense when you made a cold-calculated decision in the immediate sense but fell apart when you thought about longer term effects and Paragon choices were always kind of dumb in terms of what was best for the situation at the time but if you thought about them they would likely have the best long term outcomes. I always thought of them as more personality types; the Renegade options were for when Shepard wanted results now and Paragon was for when Shepard thought about what would be best in the long term (and I mean best here in a very abstract, everyone gets along sort of way). Mayhaps that's just my bias though.

 

I just thought of something, was your choice to either destroy or preserve the Collector base in ME2 have any impact in 3?

 

It's a difference of about ten war asset points.

Not even joking.

 

Most of the indoctrination theory people seem to be pretty ridiculous.

But this video... Isn't too bad.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still pissed... But... Eh.

 

Wait what?
I made the Paragon choice, but assumed that this would cost me more than the alternative.
The choice to not cure it should have been the 'better' one because you gain Salarian and Krogan (who don't yet know that it didn't work) support.
Over the long term (if you defeated the reapers) the Krogan would have realized what you did and maybe really gone crazy and declared war on the galaxy to go out in a blaze of glory.
But to get maximum war-assets this should have been the correct decision.

EDIT: Over the very long term curing the genophage is probably a bad idea unless you can get the Krogan to agree to limit their population growth to that of the other species, similar to the treaties that limits the number of warships that each faction is allowed.
Or modify the cure so that Krogan females can't get more than a couple of children each.
The longer I think about it the more it seems to me that just curing it is the more shortsighted decision to ensure their support now and think about the consequences later.

 

Not only that, but even if you destroy it, there are still references to Cerberus scientists studying tech from the Collector base. I was really disappointed at the lack of impact.

Edit: This is a similar theme for several of the big decisions you made in the past. Saving the Rachni queen in ME1 just gives you a sane queen on the rachni mission, rather than an insane construct - both offer to help you fight. Reprogramming or destroying the Geth heretics in ME2 does basically nothing apart from changing a few dialog lines with Legion.

I have yet to save the Council in ME1, so I don't know what difference that makes, though Maelon's research and killing/talking down Wrex on Virmire do have important effects (see below). So far, these are the only two major decisions that have the potential for significant change in ME3, and they both effect the same event.

A lot of this depends on previous choices. The only way to get full Krogan and Salarian support is to kill Wrex on Virmire in ME1 (he figures out it was sabotaged), and unless you destroyed Maelon's research on Tuchanka in ME2, Mordin will catch that the Shroud was sabotaged, so you'll have to kill him as well (which Wrex will also catch if he's alive).

If Wrex is alive, then curing the genophage is probably the better option - he seems like he really wants to change the Krogan image, and Krogan live long lives, so you don't have to worry about him dying before his plans are put into motion. Wreav wants to take over the galaxy though.

 

The Alliance fleets start off a bit weaker to account for the extra damage they took, but you eventually get the Destiny Ascension as a War Asset to make up the difference.

 

Destroying the Geth in ME2 makes it a fair bit easier to negotiate a peace between the Geth and the Quarians in ME3, so its hardly a decision that means nothing.

 

Agreed, IIRC, in a convo with EDI after Sur'kesh, she mentioned that there were around 1 billion krogan female on Tunchanka and that each female could have around 1 thousand babies per year, so that's a huge amount of krogans that will be born if the genophage is cured.

 

I'm pretty sure it also effects the balance of Geth/Quarian strength. Not an issue if you make peace and get both, but if you destroy the heretics the Quarians are stronger, and if you re-write them the Geth are stronger.

 

Alright, I finally got tired of fucking around in Mass Effect 2 and just downloaded a save file that matched my same picks from ME1 and 2 and changed my face and imported it to 3. Right off the gate, face import bug. I got around it by opening ME2 and copy/pasting the face code right into 3, so it didn't do more then annoy me, but it's a bug that shouldn't have been there in the first fucking place, considering having the same guy is supposed to be THE selling point of the series.

Bioware needs to learn how to make their cutscenes or intro levels skippable. I played the first bit in the demo already and was getting annoyed at how long it too to actually get to the ship. The combat is annoying the piss out of me. In previous games I didn't have to stick to cover like a leech, I quickly balanced power use, headshots and dodging to get the job done, now it seems like every enemy encounter there are a small army of fucktards to be dealt with, but luckily this universe is overflowing with chest high walls.

I'm not far in, I got to Citadel and spoke with the council, then turned it off because I was getting annoyed with the game. Camera still isn't fixed, it's glued to his shoulder blades, the spacebar doing everything was just stupid, instead of sprinting forward it keeps thinking I want to hide behind that wall, the textures are better then the demo for me but they seem really dated, etc, etc Same complaints as most of you have.

Cerberus makes zero sense. It made no sense for any of their behavior in 2 after showing them to be mad scientists in 1, but then 3 swings it back way too hard in the other direction. Now TIM is a fucking lunatic. He's smart enough to realize the threat in 2, but in 3 suddenly he thinks he can control the Reapers ? His personality shift doesn't make any sense. The cyborg thing on Mars was just strange as well, if he had those, why the hell bother with normal troopers? And them bastards with the shields... man I hate those guys.

This is the first game I actually feel bad for downloading, considering I've got most of Bioware's good games in collector's edition form 3 feet away from my monitor, and I've been looking forward to 3 forever now. It just doesn't feel like Mass Effect, it feels like Gears of War with even shittier shooting.

Will continue playing, knowing the ending is going to make me rage =(

So did the Alliance just not care when some of their people, like Joker, commited treason by working for Cerberus, then they just took them back and gave them piloting duties of the most important alliance ship ??

Spoiler

Lmao, the Protheans were giant slaving dicks, not what I expected.

 

TIM's behavior does get an explanation, fwiw, and the dependence on cover really varies from class to class. Sentinels and Vanguards can get away with running around biotic-charging (for Vanguards) and shotgunning people in the face. but pretty much everyone else is forced to stick to cover. You might be able to do it with an adept as well - I can't remember if they have Barrier.

Talking to EDI and Joker later on gives you an explanation for why he was on the ship (the Alliance didn't actually reinstate him technically), and Doctor Chakwas (if she survives and you get her back on the crew) gives a pretty good explanation for herself.

I agree with everything else though.