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

Arguably, this is a better solution. At least, it eliminates the "only consequences" part of the choices.

For me personally, the whole idea of there being an "Avatar" is the biggest problem. Why can't we just have it be how Sovereign said? "We are each a nation, independent". Harbinger was the First, therefor he is the leader. Why does it have to be all this Master Computer crap? The kid model makes it worse, 100%, then having Shepards voice make up 2/3rds of it's voice makes it worse another 100%. Then him being totally unwilling to address your concerns in a rational, logical way just makes it comical. The whole sequence is just like some dumb fever dream that feels so out of place. 

To steal a quote from Tropic Thunder: "Never go Full Artsy, it's too pretentious"

More to allow them to focus on actions better.  If the Rachni Queen always survives ME1 then they could have written her in more in ME2 and ME3.   Some instance like Thane were done well because Thane was dying anyways. But other examples like Jacob due to the suicide mission can have him taken out of the mission he shows up in without effecting anything.  All that character focus to the determent of the plot in ME2 is undone by the suicide mission.

one space station, its a freaking massive hub that quickly becomes the seat of galactic civilization. Its not just one space station. So, yeah not wanting to break that is a pretty solid motivator especially given how little of the tech you understand after dissecting protean artifacts. So you're probably pretty shaky on whether or not you will be able to recreate it. And the keepers fix shit, but i am not sure they really want to put that to the test.

And I'm sorry you are just wrong, Sovereign wasn't dead he was stunned. Shields going down and a few seconds being limp isn't dead. As for the firewall, the protheans were setting that up until the day they died of old age, I'm okay giving them a strong firewall since they knew enough to build a mini super relay . And harbringer getting better at dealing with dumpshock through experience isn't a big knock.

If your narrative going along with a story is to interpret everything in the worst possible light no story will ever stand up.

I have a few issues with ME2’s ending, namely the ridiculousness of the human reaper, the ease of the suicide mission, and the massively bothersome contrivance of the mechanism that allows us to choose to save or destroy the Collector base, but I think what really puts it over the edge for me is the scene with the fleet at the end. For me, the view of the reapers just happily chugging along into the galaxy made everything up until that point feel utterly pointless. 

The idea that we’re saving colonies from the Collectors sounds nice, but all this really established is that the reapers are dumb and impatient, showing their hand well before they had any need to. They could have just bided their time and let the fleet arrive, take everyone by surprise and do all the work themselves with ease. The Illusive Man wouldn’t have known jack about any of it, and the story would be over, since the writers saw to it that the reapers take no time at all to just arrive if things don’t go their way. 

I'm not sure it's fair to assign this failing to ME2. IF ME2 didn't exist at all we'd still have the problem, since in the end you have to go with either the Reapers showing up or with the Reapers not showing up, and Bio went with the former. I suppose if they'd gone with the latter they could have milked the series forever.

Underdeveloped, perhaps, but by not means bad. For what the game needed, he was great. The problem is that we couldn't get too much of him, due to the nature of the game. We learn about him mainly through interacting with him as Koveras. And if we take into account his resurrected self in ToB, it just adds to his character, but of course that doesn't happen in BG1.


I have no larger problem with the Human Reaper than Metal Cooler, I mean, Husk Saren in ME1. Neither one is a very good boss fight and Bioware's idea of fixing the boss fight problem in ME3 is removing it entirely, which just doesn't work, at all. So I'll take either over ME3's solution. The SM is actually not that easy. It is perfectly verifiable by the high mortality rate of squadmates. I don't know what's wrong with keeping or destroying the base. It's a simple choice. You do or you don't. As for the fleet at the end, you can cite unreliable narrator, as the perspective puts the Reapers at an impossible distance to be traversed in the amount of time it is being shown. Basically, it is better to take it metaphorically than realistically. In spite of all that, the fact that they show up in ME3 is something that makes basically all efforts pointless. And since they were always going to show up in ME3, there wasn't anything that you could do in ME1-2 to change a Crucible style Reaper wipe button across the galaxy. At least to fight on equal ground against the hundreds of thousands of Reapers, there's no realistic military power jump that could feasibly happen to even the playfield. In ME1, Sovereign cruises through the combined human, turian and asari fleets, like a knife through warm butter. Sovereign had 0 fucks to give, against multiple fleets trying to stop him from his objective and the implication about his shields falling, is when Metal Cooler gets downed.


Well, that is another problem with ME3. I really don't understand the mentality a lot of people have, to try and retroactively change the past games, to have ME3 make sense, instead of making an ME3 that makes sense in itself. That is a very ass backward way of trying to fix the franchise, by keeping what's broken and breaking what worked. I don't understand that reasoning.

It literally rendered it's entire point as meaningless. There is no reason given to the Collector's plan. There is no reason given to how it helps the Reapers. And at the end of the day once you nuke the base the Reapers simply wake up and start advancing towards the galaxy.  Meaning everything the Collectors did was a pointless waste of time. Literally if the Reapers had started up on the day Sovereign was destroyed they would already be invading the galaxy before Shepard was revived by Cerberus.

There wouldn’t be a retroactive change here. Arrival is where the timetable is set, establishing that the reapers will either arrive immediately after the events of the ME2 campaign, or we get a six month extension after destroying the Alpha relay. I think ME2 should have taken the Empire Strikes Back approach and actually be the trilogy’s low point for our characters, with the third being where it picks back up. Structurally, I think the overarching narrative from the second chapter onward just doesn’t really work all that well.