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

I'm not pretending it's perfect by any means, perhaps as bad as what we got. But we'll never know. Though I prefer Chris Hepler's ideas, however under developed. At least there was a nugget of something interesting in there. 

My god.

God help BioWare if ME5 has Shepard get beaten to death by a female krogan. 

If we get to kick Liara's arse then I'm down with it. 👍

Man, imagine all those "bold masterpiece, 10/10" reviews... one week before release.

I know. It's sounds so lame.

Especially considering the existence of the mass relay network itself. The entire premise of the galactic entropy plot is fundamentally broken, I’d say even more so than the killing organics to save them from themselves. It’s just too bad they only figured it out after dropping some useless hints in ME2. 

Would you call it a plot contrivance that Saren manages to pull all that off? If Saren lands with a large enough force of Geth, each squad that you stop to deal with, slows you down a little. So what is a 20 minute head start, could be 30 minutes, or an hour, by the time you actually reach the relay. Is it timed? Maybe the timer is there for you to reach relay, before the power source that Saren supplied is depleted. The power source doesn't have to be impossibly huge. It may just be an eezo canister. We're not told the size of the fuel or power source of the mini-relay. Maybe it didn't even need a new power source. Maybe it just needed to be activated. Maybe Saren's implants or the Geth could interface with it faster than we could. Kinda like SAM does in Andromeda. A lot of maybes. Maybe they're excuses. Saren manages to do a lot of things in the game that we don't understand. Like where did he get all those Krogan? How did he cure the Genophage? Probably these are answers that don't really matter to the game. Would be more technical than practical.


No, not unacceptable. Unlikely. And yes, we don't need to know the details for everything. But we do for some things. And I think this is a reasonable question. Why wouldn't Kirrahe be there? I find it highly unlikely that the Salarian delegation trusted a dying, out of shape, terminal stage of lung cancer equivalent Drell, over their veteran, highly decorated and proven capable STG member. An equally good question would be "why is Thane there?" to which we have an answer. We know Thane is on the Citadel and we haven't seen him at all during the coup. But we know he has to be somewhere. Convenient, sure, but not impossible. Kirrahe, on the other hand, only shows up, if Thane is dead. We don't even know he is on the Citadel otherwise. It is unlikely that he would be there, in the event of Thane's passing, to pick up a role that he wouldn't even normally be substituting for. Thane has not been shown to have any relation to the Salarians. So why would he, in the event of him surviving ME2, have any part in a Salarian delegation's security escort. Thane's presence comes off as chance, rather than intentional, while Kirrahe's comes off as intentional, like he is part of a security escort, which makes sense.

You're right, again, in saying that I don't need to know everything. I don't need to know previously that, in the event of Thane's demise, Kirrahe is on the Citadel. Maybe he is and I missed him. I'm not surprised to see that Kirrahe is protecting the Salarian delegation. Just as I am not surprised, as I said before, that Thane shows up to confront Kai Leng. But out of two seemingly unrelated things, one taking priority over the other, without any explanation.

For example, let's say today I wrote a surprise Algebra test. Today, Chicago was ... cloudy and I passed the test. But if it had been sunny, I would have failed. Chicago's weather today should have no bearing on how well I would do in my algebra test. Similarly, because Thane was alive, Kirrahe ... slept in? Turned right in Albuquerque? I don't know.

Similarly, in the example you set with Saren above, I can't imagine a scenario where Saren goes all the way up to the mini-relay and says "oh shit, I forgot the gas" or "how does this thing work, lol?" There is a difference between easily inferred/implied and, at least seemingly, unrelated events. Maybe you can provide a plausible explanation.


But I fail to see the relation between Thane being alive and the Salarian security escort. These two should be unrelated to each other. I understand the "world state" argument, but what is the crossover point? Maybe you can answer that. If it's implied, or somehow inferred, then I completely missed it. I am, after all, too dumb for Bioware. They told me so.


It does. But even as a meta argument, in this case, shouldn't there be an in-universe answer? I get that Thane surviving changes the timeline, but I don't see how it could pertain to this specific event. If Kirrahe is on the Citadel, like Thane, where did he go? Thane's survival should, logically, have no bearing on Kirrahe's duty to protect the Salarian delegate. There is no way that the Salarians would know beforehand that on this day, a coup would occur that either a surviving Kirrahe or a surviving Thane could protect the delegate from Kai Leng's assassination attempt. The logical series of event would be

• Both, in the case of both surviving
• Only Thane, in the event of Kirrahe's death
• Only Kirrahe, in the event of Thane's death
• Neither, in case of both dying

Instead it's like this

• Thane only, in case of Thane surviving, regardless of Kirrahe's state
• Kirrahe, in case of Thane dying
• Neither, in case of both dying.

One would infer the former, rather than the later. Don't you think?

That's the great thing about an unwritten plot... we can always imagine that it would have been great if only it had actually existed.