The Mass Effect ending support group

Amen to that.

And while originally in the 2012 BSN days I was sceptical of the indoctrination theory (especially to the extent it was taken). The more I've thought about it over the years the more it makes sense. I just can't shake the feeling of supernatural ideas when you see that kid at the start. After Anderson speaks to you and you turn back to the kid, he disappears with no noise whatsoever. And then at the shuttle, no one even helps him into the shuttle. At no point during that kid's brief existence is he ever acknowledged by another person except Shepard. And then this is the image that the catalyst chooses to use? It's just odd.

Not to mention how Casey Hudson trolled the fanbase before launch saying we wont get A, B, C endings and that's exactly what we got. I believe the writers were intending for Indoctrination and there's proof they were toying with the idea while in development. Meaning when Casey said that comment he meant there was only one real ending. But when the fanbase flipped out and didn't "understand" the endings, then they had to clarify and retcon it. Whether Leviathan DLC was always intended I don't know how it would fit into the indoctrination idea, but right now it makes it seem like the endings were more face value. Which is a lot less palatable to me.

And up until now the consensus has been, "that ending is just a valid as the other endings." However now with the next ME being in the Milky Way, I feel there's going to be a LOT of endings that aren't as valid anymore.

Deadpool, in some incarnations, is a walking God. A crazy one, at that, and as mentioned cursed with immortality. It just isn't a fair fight, so you get no tears here.

Deadpool as temporary squadmate? Take my money.

Firstly, the old "I'd like to see you do better" argument wont work with me. If the validity of our criticisms were based on our intellectual capacity to create the same piece of work that we are critiquing. The entire world would be a very different place.

Secondly,

And lastly, since we've got stuck into it before on here, for future reference you might need this too.

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

You asked, and have received. It is hard to take you seriously sometimes because of nonsense like this.

That list was interesting to read. I played MET late, so I never played without Extended Cut, and all this ranting about the endings had been happening for years already. I like ME3 overall (fight me ), but given all the hate for the endings, I expected them to be so much worse than they actually were.** That said, I wonder whether the devs honestly thought the original endings fulfilled all these promises (and were completely out of touch with what fans thought they would get), or if they intended to do more but ran out of time or resources to do so.


**Don't get me wrong, I still installed Extended Anderson Conversation and John P's Alternative Happy Ending Mod once I'd played the vanilla game, but even without having those mods in MELE I'm still going to play and enjoy ME3.

You say that but you don't actually address my context.

Still not addressing my context.

So many people will never understand the utter devastation those felt when playing the game on release, before the Extended Cut. It was actually such a different game. No explanations from the Catalyst as to why, no idea what even happened to your crew members that ran to the beam with you. It was just such shotty work. But I don't blame BioWare for it, they were denied an extension by their corporate overlords and it's obvious the game needed more time.

It's not even just the ending you can tell was rushed, it was all other random parts through out the game. Not just design choices, but the writing and overall pacing of the game. "This isn't a time for strategy or tactics, we fight or we die" comes to mind. Mass Effect 3 was the first time my Shepard said shit I never wanted her to say. Like how I never let Vega call me Lola, coz raisins, but then being nice to him after that brings about a line where Shepard says "Vega you're such a tease. You ever gonna make good on all this flirting?" like WTF!? Just for being nice to him when talking about the N7 tattoo!? Or if you're playing as BroShep and you're "too nice" to Kaidan, yea that's awkward AF! It's just so obvious the game wasn't fleshed out anywhere even close to the extent that ME2 was. 

Then you have all that strange ambient dialogue during important moments that should have had cutscenes for it. But then some random Elcor ambassador on the Citadel asks you to save his people on Dekunna and you get a cutscene for that? Then there's the N7 missions where some were just holo MP tasks, then others you had a random cutscene like with Cpt Riley, then even an email saying she's being recommended for a medal. It's clear that those missions were meant to be a bit more than what we got. Again, they just didn't have time to flesh things out. And despite it being a different studio that worked on the MP. I blame the extra resources they devoted to that as being the reason the SP got left behind.

However, Rannoch and Tuchanka were probably some of my favourite story arc's from the whole trilogy. But I don't think it's because of the missions themselves, I think it's because of the build up those missions had through out the trilogy, hours and hours of dialogue, codex and overall exposition to bring about a dramatic or fruitful resolution depending on your choices. 

That's where the Reapers arc went wrong. For 99% of the story they were these badass sentient enemies that were menacing and downright evil. Then in the last 1% of the story they were big dumb robots and slaves to a broken AI. The catalyst saying "does fire want to burn or does it just do what it is designed to do" does not align with ANY Reaper practices we'd seen up to that point.

What happened to Jack was build up to the ending, not the ending itself. Also refuse doesn't count as an ending outcome here because his statement was made before it existed. You found the part where he said you wont get A, B or C ending, I'm not even going to pretend you're that stupid. But instead of defending it by saying stuff before the ending counts as the ending, you should have said that the endings change depending on your EMS.

However, I could be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure Pre-Extended Cut it didn't even matter. Everything exploded (including the Mass Relays) anyway.

Well if that is the case then it could be argued that ME3, in it's entirety, is just one big ending. Almost everything you do is capping off story arcs from the previous two games. However, the biggest central conflict to the entire story is "stop the Reapers", and when it comes down to that central conflict alone, there were only 3 different endings Pre-EC. With everything else you did in the story beforehand (regarding the Reapers) irrelevant.