I chose Destroy because I think the other two were morally wrong for all the reasons already stated, and because Destroy was barely a sacrifice. Seriously dude, fuck the Geth, those guys have proven time and again what assholes they are, and I guarantee they would have done the same thing if the shoe was on the other foot. Sucks for Edi, but oh well.

Yeah but now your bro Joker doesn't have a robot wife.

Bros before destruction of robot cuttlefish, man.

I need to go replay all three games. And this time make different choices. I always was the good guy in the game. Always making the paragon choice. I think maybe I should start over with the first and just be a dick all the way through.

This actually brings up a second issue: Bioware's promise that "every choice matters" is bogus. You can go back and play all three games differently but you end up in the same room talking to same star kid telling you need to pick one of these options where it doesn't matter one iota what choices were made before the elevator.

What he doesn't know won't hurt him. "Sorry Joker... I had no choice. I didn't know this would happen..."

Yeah, aside from the fact that various people are dead that wouldn't be otherwise, but sure. No difference.

Does 'matter' only refer to the ending? If you take a plane to New York City and I drive there, did our choice of transport 'matter' because we arrived in the same destination? It certainly changed things on the way there.

I ended up choosing Synthesis, and I don't regret one second of it.

Everyone had their own idea of who Shepard was in their eyes. For me, I just didn't give a damn anymore at that point. I could sit there and wrestle with ethics and morality while the entire universe destroyed itself, or I could simply say 'the hell with you all' and force them into equal footing and new found potential. So that's what I did. Tough titties if you don't like it. Cope. Serves you right for dumping all your problems onto my shoulders in the first place! <flips everyone off, leaves>

I chose the destroy ending because that was the only one that meant you weren't giving into the reapers trying to indoctrinate you through out the game. (while I understand the indoctrination theory has been widely discarded by many and maybe debunked by the DLC, it made extreme sense to me at the time.) I am now taking off my tin foil conspiracy theory hat.

The fact that we all still feel the ending was weak is unfortunate.

Actually in some weird, fucked up way, I always thought this sums up how I feel about the ending.

I can totally see picking synthesis, it creates an interesting new world for the ME mythos, but as much as I don't love the idea of Shep becoming a god (damn that's so dumb when I think about it) it's still the better of the two because they trusted me to take care of this Reaper issue and that's what I did without killing anyone and without forcing people to change. So I guess that's the best decision for my Shep. ;-/ I can appreciate the fact that no answer is right but damn this was really hard to make. 24 hours later and I'm still thinking and hoping that was the right choice.

If an ending was unlocked or locked out because of various events like how you dealt with Saren or Illusive man or favoring this race over that race, then choices would have mattered. If an ending was unlocked or locked out because of your performance in any of the three games, then choices would have mattered. But we know that doesn't happen. None of that happened where it doesn't matter how crazy or logical any choices made, including meta ones like "difficulty" or "speed" or whatever, the player still end up at the same illogical place talking to star kid and forced to make a impossible choice.

I make the same argument about The Walking Dead where the player is offered a bunch of things to twiddle but it does nothing but "window dressing". To be clear, I don't think this is important or a problem but it also isn't "giving players a choice". Hell, Stanley Parable offers more choice that effects the end than Mass Effect 3.

@extomar: One of the endings explicitly is locked out, but that's not really what I want to argue. I want to get back to my argument about the two different paths to New York City. We both have a job interview in New York City, you fly and I drive. The choices we made in fact did lock out several 'outcomes'; I didn't meet the flight attendant you met, you didn't see the gas station attendant in Ithaca I talked to. We may have both seen Lake Michigan, but from vastly different perspectives. When we arrive in New York, the outcome of the job interview is not (at least not objectively) affected by the method you took to reach the city.

Did we experience different things based on our choices? Yes.

Did the choice of how we got there matter to the outcome of the job interview? No.

Did the choice of how we got there matter to us?

edit: I'm a jerk so I came up with another example. The ending of Deus Ex is entirely determined by what you choose to do at the end-game. However, throughout that game there are various choices you can make. For example, you can escape while your brother fights to the death, or aid him and get him out alive. These drastically change the player's experience, the player receives vastly different feedback which might influence them to act differently when they are given the three-way ending choice. Your choice on whether to protect Paul or save yourself does not matter to the ending; it made an incredible difference in my game experience.

To argue in annoying game terms; Mass Effect is a diamond that concludes in a fork. You can take the left or right hallway, and wind up in the same atrium with three doors. Which hallway you take does not change what rooms are behind those doors, but the hallways are demonstrably different. Does the choice of which hallway to take matter to us?

I don't remember which side I picked. I only remember that it was absolutely terrible. I beat it when it came out, so I didn't play any of the DLC.

I don't have much interest in playing Mass Effect 3 again (I might in the future with all the DLC, but I doubt it), but I will say that it had some cool moments and it improved on ME2's mechanics. It's just too bad that significant chunks of the game were simply boring. It's certainly not a bad game, it just pales in comparison to its predecessors.

As someone who likes the series a lot, I've actually come to think ME3 with the Extended Cut ends up being a pretty good set of endings. -Even though it's not perfect, by any stretch. It still could have been handled better.

(For example, if the little ghost boy had called Synthesis "a new evolution of life" instead of "the final evolution of all life," I think it would have sounded more like the Ultimate Best Ending it's supposed to be - after all, it is the hardest to get - instead of a creepy techno-rapture brochure from some kind of space cult.)

As far as making a viable world for future games though, Destroy is clearly the one they would use, because it leaves things blown up and scattered in interesting new ways, but still fundamentally intact-- and, if they use Destroy, they could still just as easily integrate elements from the other two endings as well, in the form of rumors and nutjob conspiracy theories.

"My uncle says Shepard is still alive, but he became an AI" or "I hear the Geth master server survived because they were hiding it inside a wormhole" or "I hear Biotics can read people's minds now because the Reaper pulse changed all of our DNA and we're secretly full of nanomachines and the GOVERNMENT is hiding it from us, WAKE UP SPACE-SHEEPLE" or whatever.

So Destroy seems like the best choice for Mass Effect, as a franchise.

(And really, I don't understand why anyone would pick Control. Trusting a single man to control the formerly genocidal all-powerful machines forever, and just hope he doesn't go crazy himself after 1,000 years of floating in space? Good luck with that.)

I'm alright with the ending, it's not very good but it isn't terrible either (an end once and for all gets me every time). I picked destroy because that's what I set out to do and I stuck with it. I also think that Mass Effect 3 is pretty much on par with the other two Mass Effect games.

so yeah, lavinthan was suppose to help you decide the ending? But then the ending has a fake visual of Keith David doing the wrong thing? and then it's labeled red, and the right one is suppose to be Reaper?

But then the ending is pretty poor, when really in retrospect just the scene before all of this and Garrus talks about the bar I'm like "No wait? this means something more" and then horrible controls walking didn't do as much of an impact then "wait I don't want to not be with my friends." blah those horrible turret sequences before really did suck ass.

The ending was terrible before all the DLC, now it's just bad. Picking anything other than Destroy requires putting a degree of trust into the Catalyst (you know, the thing that's been controlling the Reapers - the things that are murdering everyone) that I just CANNOT fathom. The whole series had been about STOPPING the Reapers, not making deals or compromising with them. I think the ending would have been a lot better if they just cut all that crap out and just ended it with Shepard and Anderson bleeding out in the control room, with the Crucible defeating the Reapers.

Agree with this, and what @brodehouse said earlier in the thread. Destroy just seemed to be the right conclusion after that whole journey, even if it was labelled weirdly by that game as if it was the "bad choice." I liked the Geth,and made sure that peace was worked out, didn't mind EDI at all, but still figured that their sacrifice was necessary in the greater struggle. The Reapers were the enemy throughout the series and I wasn't going to let the Catalyst talk me into doing something that would keep the reapers around. Took a bit to think about all of that before deciding, and then was ultimately disappointed when that original cut-scene followed afterwards.

Well during the series the reapers have always talked about how things are beyond our comprehension/level of understanding. The catalyst created the first reaper, so technically it may also have intelligence beyond our comprehension. What the star child says should really make you go "What the fuck." We were never meant to understand unless its explained to us by these higher powers.

btw @extomar I found it funny when you spoke of sloppy writing as your first paragraph has a bit of that itself (grammatically). I'm not taking the piss, its easy to do when madly typing away/editing on a post (I've done that heaps). I just want you to know I had a chuckle at the irony. :)

The worst part about ME3 was that fucking kid.

Correct me if I'm wrong, its been a full year since I took philosophy, but Egalitarianism from a governing perspective means a forced equality among all people yes? I don't really see how Synthesis automatically dictates that. It may very well be the philosophy they arrive at after they are all turned into robot peeps of comparable levels of societal worth, but it's still their prerogative.

I mean it's still wrong for the other reasons already stated, but still.

I liked it. Even in its original form.

@hunter5024: It is forced equality among all beings; a complete equality in physiology. I mentioned it as 'toxic egalitarianism' with some emphasis on toxic. Without any one of those beings consent, Shepard decided that the best way to deal with all the issues that come along with different people living together is to make them all the same. There's also two schools of thought regarding egalitarianism, the 'equality of opportunities' and the 'equality of outcomes'. An equality of opportunities is what progressive Western countries aim for, an attempt to be meritocratic. An equality of outcomes or conditions guarantees there will be no inequities, by whatever means. I generally lean to the opportunities side than the outcomes side, because the methods by which an equality of outcomes is guaranteed seem restraining, discriminatory and non-consensual (a la Shepard's choice).

Here's a smidge from Wikipedia;

Both equality of outcome and equality of opportunity have been contrasted to a great extent. When evaluated in a simple context, the more preferred term in contemporary political discourse is equality of opportunity (or, meaning the same thing, the common variant "equal opportunities") which the public, as well as individual commentators, see as the nicer or more "well-mannered"^[16] of the two terms.^[26] And the term equality of outcome is seen as more controversial and is viewed skeptically. A mainstream political view is that the comparison of the two terms is valid, but that they are somewhat mutually exclusive in the sense that striving for either type of equality would require sacrificing the other to an extent, and that achieving equality of opportunity necessarily brings about "certain inequalities of outcome."^[10][27] For example, striving for equal outcomes might require discriminating between groups to achieve these outcomes; or striving for equal opportunities in some types of treatment might lead to unequal results.^[27] Policies that seek an equality of outcome often require a deviation from the strict application of concepts such as meritocracy, and legal notions of equality before the law for all citizens.^{[citation needed]} 'Equality seeking' policies may also have a redistributive focus.

The two concepts, however, are not always cleanly contrasted, since the notion of equality is complex. Some analysts see the two concepts not as polar opposites but as highly related such that they can not be understood without considering the other term. One writer suggested it was unrealistic to think about equality of opportunity in isolation, without considering inequalities of income and wealth.^[19] Another agreed that it is impossible to understand equalitywithout some assessment of outcomes.^[16] A third writer suggested that trying to pretend that the two concepts were "fundamentally different" was an error along the lines of a conceit.^[22]

@brodehouse

I tried to impart that I don't automatically think it is a problem that games lack player agency. I only object to the old promise "every choice matters" especially in the context of the post I was responding too where playing ME3 again won't appreciable flow of the story let alone the end.

I was being glib using Stanley Parable but a better example would be Witcher 2. Your choices lock and unlock and reconfigure entire blocks of the game which makes it worth replaying and making different choices. That never happens in Mass Effect and that is a shame. Making the choice to save Wrex should have been important. Making the choice to save the council should have been big. Making choices between the Salarians and Krogran should have changed how some missions went. Making decisions between Geth and Quarian should have changed how some missions went. Except for interstitial moments where you get different lines of dialog, there is nothing I can think of that is different in through any particular run of Mass Effect while there is an entire chapter that is opened or missed depending because of a choice you are forced to make in Witcher 2. You still end up fighting the same final fight at the end but even then the player is deciding who lives and who dies where the end is played out differently depending on the choices.

In this specific aspect, what would have helped the ending of Mass Effect is that instead of the star kid going "Shepard, you made it here so pick one of these choices", the star kid goes "Shepard, you made it here and this is what I am going to do because I know what decisions you had to made to get here". That would mean that player's choices over many chapters of the game matter instead of the last one the player makes which is "go left, go right, go straight".

ps. bleh the editor loves to eat the text. :/

Is "Control" still the only ending where you see an N7 chestplate (presumably Shepard) take a breath in a bunch of rubble at the end? because If you use the Indoctrination theory then.....

That's the destroy ending.

Also that theory is dumb pants.

destroy is the only valid option

become a super-space-tyrant - so funny that so many "paragon" people here consider that first.

Mutate all livings beings - oh it must be fine though because once I make everyone the same AGAINST THEIR WILL we can all live together. yeah. Everyone will be fine with that.

and really it was all a bunch of BS. Why argue over it? It's just terrible writing and the dumbest, weakest plot device I've seen in years.

Can you rifle-butt the starchild in the face in the extended endings? That could be a potentially valid option too. That's actually the first thing I tried in vanilla.

What makes destroy any more valid than control? Then reject? Or synthesis?

control and synthesis only sound good if you assume you are better than everyone else, more capable, and can be trusted to make those types of decisions for every other living being. Much like a Nazi, an Illusive man, or Saren. Sure, YOU would be benevolent and make all of the best decisions, unlike every other human ever.

Destroying the Reapers is the only real choice.

How is being an A.I. like being who vows to protect the galaxy a bad thing? With control you're instilling Shepard's whole person into the computer program that controls the Reapers and in doing so ensure a lasting galactic peace for cycles to come. With destroy you're doing the same thing, but at the cost of an entire race and technology, setting the galaxy into a dark age for an extended period of time. Controlling the Reapers isn't the same as being a dictator, you're not being all "HEY DON'T DO THAT OR ELSE REAPER ATTACK", with control essentially you have the Reapers fix the broken galaxy and they fuck off back to their home ready to intervene in case of outside threats. The Reapers are no longer a threat to the galaxy or galactic peace, much the same as with destroy and synthesis. Except with control it's kinda like the Starchild in 2001. Shepard is the Starchild watching over the galaxy after being transformed into an all knowing being. It's a space odyssey.

The best ending was to shoot the damn kid and let the next generation kill the Reapers.

No it isn't you genocidal monster. I would much rather trust my shepard to control the reapers and just stay out of the way except to prevent the whole synthetics wiping organics out BS than commit massive genocide and ensuring all organics will eventually be wiped out or forcing that stupid synthesis on everyone.

But yes, even with all the DLC it's still a bad ending (although it's not just ABYSMAL now) and we shouldn't bother arguing over it

The entirety of Mass Effect 3 was leading to Shepard becoming indoctrinated, fighting it then on to the big boss fight with a Reaperized Illusive man.

They ran out of time, were unable to create a satisfactory "indoctrination mechanic", Mac Walters is a terrible writer, and Casey Hudson stopped giving a shit about the series. That's why the game comes to such an abrupt illogical end, even with the backtracked ending, and DLC showing us the most powerful beings that ever existed were morons.

Control is the only ending that doesn't completely break the fiction (post Reaper-kid), so to me that's probably the best of the worst available choices.

Synthesis was the ending I picked because it was the only way to save the lives of all the people I've been fighting for. I think my favorite ending, only available with the DLC, is to walk away. Don't play moon child's stupid game, and let the reapers do their thing and let the next cycle deal with it armed with Liara's warning beacon.

I thought the ending was about as good as the rest of the story since the first Mass Effect. This series was always about the characters, the world, and the side stories. The main story was always kinda shitty, so I wasn't outraged that they "ruined" it at the end.

It's not the greatest ending of all time, but I really feel as though people massively over-exaggerate about how bad it is. I was late to actually finishing it, but of course I heard the backlash. When I actually got there I just thought "This is what the massive outrage and death threats to writers are from? ...." I didn't feel like it was any better or worse than Mass Effect 2s ending. But the journey towards that ending was by far the best Mass Effect game.

You're right, total garbage

That would be an intelligent argument for a series that didn't have you constantly making decisions on your own that shape the lives of millions of people. Pretending that's only a problem at the very end of the series makes it obvious that you're grasping at straws.

I probably don't need to point this out (because anyone who isn't bashing the ending in this thread knows that this isn't true and those that are...don't care), but this is complete and utter bullshit.

Actually, "The Catalyst/Reapers were created by morons that were trying to solve a problem that didn't exist" would have been a great story. :/

http://www.me3finalhours.com/

It's completely true.

The stated that they couldn't get the "indoctrination mechanic" where you were controlling an indoctrinated Shepard to work so they changed the ending.

Taken from the Mass Effect 3 art book. The boss battle with the Reaperized Illusive Man was cut because Casey Hudson said it would've been to "videogamey".

@tourgen: In the extended cut, shooting the Catalyst triggers an ending where Shepard is "Fuck this," Catalyst is "Fuck you, I'm out," Reapers win, but somehow are defeated in the following cycle. It's honestly the best and most relatable ending, even though Bioware insisted they wouldn't add any endings in the extended cut.

I can understand how ending-bashers would find Refusal 'relatable' given that it's of the same "I don't like any of these options, so fuck everyone else!" mindset that motivated the 'Retake' movement.

What are you even talking about? I don't see how changing that original ending hurt anyone. I don't even see how changing the current ending would hurt anyone if they just added more options. That's not what I want but I don't see how people are saying "fuck everyone else".

Dude has made several accounts all with the express purpose of shouting angrily at "Retakers" and calling people idiots for not liking the ME 3 endings.

I mean, I assume it's the same person since they're a new account and their two posts, while a lot less hostile this time, still relate to the same stuff.

Yeah i realized that after I posted, one of his accounts left a nice message on my wall a few days ago. At least I think it's him i didn't think anyone cared about the whole retake thing still until he showed up.

Forgive my ignorance, but what are "Retakers"?

Those who supported the Retake Mass Effect 3 campaign. People that, back when the game first came out, took to the virtual streets and set about various campaigns to get the ending changed. They 'demanded' a better ending to the series and were extremely vocal about it and posted rants and essays on how the ending ruined the game, the series, and other such brouhaha; going so far as to set up websites, petitions, and mailing cupcakes to Bioware. I believe they also raised money for Child's Play in the process. It was kind of just a case of extremely vocal fans voicing their negative opinions and it kind of worked, though of course no one was really truly pleased outside. Scrounging around the Bioware Social Forums (don't ever do this) you can still see people rocking little "X character deserves a better ending" banners but for the most part they kind of stopped caring right around the time everyone else did. They moved on, because Dragon Age 3 is right around the corner and that'll be a far better use of their time probably.

Mass Effect 3 had by far the best gameplay of the series, it was a really fun game to play honestly. But I didn't like MOST of the story stuff, which was kind of a bummer after Mass Effect 2 had me so hooked I beat it three times in a very short amount of time just before ME3 released thanks to some PS+ sale or something. I have this itch to download the original Mass Effect now that it's available for PS3 and finally have a full series experience with it for once, but the memory of Mass Effect 3's lamer story sequences really scares me off. The ending didn't make me as angry as other people, though it did bother me, in part because I think unlike most folks I was starting to tap out on where ME3 was going during the Turian moon sequence. Something about the game just lacked gravitas, from the restricted Citadel to all the dumb fan service-y things that didn't feel as in service of the story as they did the player's short-term nostalgia for the series.

You...haven't played it?

Thats it drop everything your downloading and playing that now.