Five Ex-Bioware Devs Talk About Mass Effect 3's Ending

I have nothing against space magic in a universe that is dependent on it. I just said, that explaining what the crucible is designed for and giving it one purpose, one clear function build up throughout the game - as suggested by Hepler - would be a way better starting point for the ending. As I laid out, once you have build the gun that threatens the Reapers, you can build different options from there.

So, sorry, but I'm not interested in discussing whether one space magic is more feasible than another.

Maybe the life there is dextro, so Garrus and Tali will be the only two not having to resort to cannibalism.
Then again with the amount of cybernetics in both of them they both are already dead from the beam.

It's not *bad* per se, but it's inconsistent and poorly executed story. Especially on ME2 and 3.

In fairness, this could be fixed fairly easily. Niobium's a dumb pick, but just make up that all Reaper tech uses trace quantities of wonky synthetic transuranic elements that organics don't use. (Maybe part of the "island of stability"?) Except in low-EMS conditions, where the Crucible targets niobium by accident.

Niobium's pick was because it is used in surgery like hip replacements because people don't have reactions to it like some do to titanium. They were literally trying to find a mid point so they aren't simply genocide anyone with an artificial knee. But the concept is flawed from the start.

As someone who quite likes the destroy ending post EC, my take on the worst part of the ending was having the catalyst take the appearance of some goofy ass kid. This was pre leviathan and should have been our first look at the creators of the reapers. But nope! Here’s Tommy Twinkletoes trying his damn best to make you submit to his will.  

Would a different avatar for the Guardian/Catalyst have worked for you? Or is it the content rather than the presentation.

I've always suspected that Bio went with the kid for no better reason than that they already had the model.

If ME3 just had a "simple" epilogue like DA:I's Trespasser we wouldn't be having this conversation, and I think most of the general audience would be content. The problem with the MET is that I never really felt closure to any of the characters at the end.

While I agree, the endings to Mass Effect 3 I think were the standard BioWare problem of trying to give people what they want while it not fitting in with everything else they are doing.  Its the whole "they need to learn to say no" while in development.

I saw plenty of people wanting multiple endings to the game based on what their choices were when they played the game.  So yes people were asking for multiple endings to the game.  If BioWare stuck to one endings I believe it could have been better.  I remember all the input about how people wanted to see the Rachni in all that CGI if they saved them.

That is exactly what my point BioWare said no to nothing, they tried to put something into the game where it recognized all the choices players made.  At the same time they couldn't pull it off for there were so many choices and it seems they didn't want to have the endings based on binary choices alone, but also all the choices that were made in the three games with including the EMS Score.  If they stuck with something like Mass Effect 2 it would have been much better, but instead they tried to give the complainers what they were asking for just like they have all along.

You just wanted a happy ending with rainbows and unicorns. You're too dumb to understand the symbolism. But how did it make you feel?

Did I get it? Did I do it right? Did I nail all the defense points? Yeah?

You know, I often get the point that "this worked for Deus Ex or game X or game Y" and I didn't have a problem. Well, in those settings, society is at the edge of uprising and an imminent socio-political collapse. In Mass Effect, everyone had it pretty sweet, not ideal, but pretty sweet, with the societal situation and the tech itself made collaboration between races easier, by virtually eliminating transportation over ludicrously large distances as a problem. And while corruption and crime had not been eliminated, enough was being done to combat it to make the setting viable for the majority of the population. Or at least it was portrayed as such.

The endings put an end to that, across the board, galaxy wide. They sank the setting into chaos and anarchy, to an unworkable degree. Even the EC greatly exaggerates what is done to restore that, compared to what we know is possible, in universe. We have an ending that is at odds with itself. No matter the symbolism, no matter the feelings it evokes, it is contradicting with knowledge of the setting and lore. And, of course, Bioware is free to do and treat the franchise as they want, it is their property, after all, but doesn't it need to make sense? Doesn't it need to make an ending that feels like an actual payoff? If we beat the Reapers, only to condemn everyone alive into a hellish existence for the rest of their lives, as we did in the original endings, with the promise that "maybe" in, I don't know when the Stargazer scene is supposed to take place, ~5k years later, the population and the isolated alien societies will recover, that is not a good outcome. And I get it, the outcome was never supposed to be "good" good, but holy shit, that is just depressing to think about. Might as well choose refuse and invalidate all your efforts of playing these three games. Which begs the question why did we play them, in the first place?

And even so, I could get behind it, if we had at some point established that Mass Effect technology was bad and needed to be destroyed, for all galactic society to need to start from scratch and find a better way, but we never even touched upon that. I mean, imagine if in WW2, Nazi Germany had discovered the cure for all cancer, right? And when the allies beat the Nazis, they found the cure and said "this is Nazi science, we can't use it". When in fact, IRL, the inverse happened with the NASA space program, directly hiring nazi scientists to get us to space and the moon.