Nothing against Bioware, but let's be real, very few people play Mass Effect for the gameplay. I've always kind of found the gameplay to be passable, but nothing special or deserving of long winded sessions. (ME2 did make amazing strides in the gun play though, I was honestly bored to tears by ME1's shooting). I play Mass Effect for the story, the characters, the unique story telling device that casts the player into the role of the main character with choices and all that. So I was a bit confused when I kept hearing that to receive the "best" ending a certain amount of multiplayer must be played. I kind of moaned an took one swing at it earlier, honestly it's pretty garbage IMO, wave based survival? Again not one of Mass Effects finer points. So really what I'm asking is how much of this stupid ass multiplayer do I have to suffer through so that I (a person who has played this series since ME1 launched) can get myself the "best" ending?

None.

Jeff said 0.

Zero

From what i have read, you need atleast 5k EFFECTIVE military strength, NOT total

You don't need to play any of the multiplayer to get the best ending.

None. Also the multiplayer plays fine and can be pretty fun.

But Jeff said that he doesn't think he maybe got the "best" ending after all.

to unlock a special cutscene for 1 of the endings you need at least 4000 effective. From what I can gather, 3500(7000 total) is the max without multiplayer or social game. I did just about everything and was at 3300.

It's a special cut scene for the bad ending though so you probably wont see it unless you're an asshole.

Don't listen to these people who say you don't need to play mp. If you want the best ending you need 5K EMS, which cannot be gotten in single player alone. If you are around 3.5k EMS I'd gueess maybe an hour and a half to 2 hrs to get it. but your points decrease as time goes on so you'll want to play right before the ending missions

@WVUEers: @weirdo said:

From what i have read, you need atleast 5k EFFECTIVE military strength, NOT total

This is what I've seen as well. Make sure that you have enough total to get 5k when only counting that %, which is only 50% by default. That means If you were still at 50%, your total would have to be 10k and I don't know if that's even possible.

@Zithe said:

@WVUEers:

@weirdo said:

From what i have read, you need atleast 5k EFFECTIVE military strength, NOT total

This is what I've seen as well. Make sure that you have enough total to get 5k when only counting that %, which is only 50% by default. That means If you were still at 50%, your total would have to be 10k.

you only need 4000 if you don't fail the speech check at the end. Also, has I already said, you wont choose the ending with the 4k bonus cutscene unless you like genocide...

From what I have seen you need around 2800 EMS(the figure after the readiness percentage is applied) to fill up the bar. That'll let you finish the game properly for sure and is perfectly achievable without playing multiplayer which leaves the percentage at 50% as a result.

There is however a snippet of cut scene in one of the endings that doesn't occur unless your EMS is above 5000 which I think is impossible to get without playing the multiplayer as you would need 10000 TMS (the figure before the percentage) and that doesn't seem feasible even if you do everything perfectly throughout the game when trying to attain war assets.

I'm going to try and play some MP. Last time I played I found myself bored pretty quickly and the game went on for a lengthy period of time for what is an online MP match.

@WVUEers said:

I'm going to try and play some MP. Last time I played I found myself bored pretty quickly and the game went on for a lengthy period of time for what is an online MP match.

It takes around 20 minutes to finish one.

multiplayer is alright, but yeah completely unnecessary. Just do all the quests, which you will want to; cause there aren't a ton of them.

I got the green bar totally full and more than enough score to get the best ending without touching the multiplayer. HOWEVER - in order to get this, you need to have made the "right" decisions during ME1 and ME2 and have all the characters from ME2 alive (I think). I do believe that in some cases you will have to play the multiplayer if you made some renegade choices in ME2 and ME1.

But even so, just play a few Bronze Medal Challenges (which take about 16~20mins) and you'll be set. It's not that hard.

Kinda fascinated by the general interest in the "Best" ending to ME. For all the talk of how choice makes such a huge difference in the experience of the series, and how the ending makes those decisions feel ultimately hollow, people seem eager to alter their play style and decisions to get a theoreticaly optimal ending. Similar to the end of ME2; so much emphasis was put on keeping your whole team alive (down to having a related achievement!) that it made people feel like they had played incorrectly if anyone died. In my main ME2 campaign, almost half of my team died but I never felt like I had done something wrong, simply that is how my Shepard's story turned out. Mistakes were made, for sure, but that didn't make it feel like I had 'lost' out on something, simply had a very specific experience.

All that to say, yes, you can get the "Best" ending to ME3 without touching multiplayer, but as only if you have certain conditions from even past games as part of your Shepard (this I think can be covered if you just create a new Shep with everyone alive). It is a major effort, and as others have said a handful of MP sessions should make up for a load of obnoxious fetch quests.

From what I've heard, the "best" ending isn't much different than the others.

Anyway, you have two options. The first is to suck it up and play the actually-fun (believe it or not!) multiplayer. The second is to go around, scanning planets and gathering artifacts for the stupidass, tedious "side missions". It's entirely up to you. Trust me when I tell you that the multiplayer is the better option - find three friends or three duders who want to play it with you and have at it! It doesn't take forever to get enough military strength.

Shame that the side missions suck, though, I would've liked to have had my options.

You need 5000 EMS which you can't get without multiplayer unless you are playing on PC. If you are using a PC just use a trainer or save editor to give yourself as much Readiness as you want.

Youtube it. The extra scene you get is not worth the headache inducing ending.

Playing through the game the first time, i didnt really need to play through the mp in order to fill up the green bar(ems). Really though u dont need to spend a significant amount of time with mp. The endings are shitty enough as it is believe me even if your readiness was up to a hundred. The only other reason to max out the rating to 100 in all sectors is to get the achievement.

You don't need to play any at all, but that didn't stop me from getting my 'galactic readiness' up to 100%.

To everyone saying 'None', you're wrong.

@James_Giant_Peach said:

To everyone saying 'None', you're wrong.

SPOILER WARNING: Click here to reveal hidden content.

It has been proven that unless you make very specific Paragon choices in the first two games, and do everything perfectly in 3, you won't get the best ending without playing some MP. The absolute 'best' ending involves an extra scene showing Shep possibly alive.

This is only if you chose the option to blow the reapers and end all synthetic life. I played through all three ending in a row and only got that scene for that end.

@Nux said:

You don't need to play any of the multiplayer to get the best ending.

best ending.... does not compute LOL

I finished the game with a military rating or whatever of about 12k. Didn't touch the multiplayer.

It doesn't really matter since there isn't a "good" ending.

I played bronze for a couple of hours last night and got my GR up to 73%. After doing everything in the single player my new GR put me just over 5000 EMS.

I finished the game with a military rating or whatever of about 12k. Didn't touch the multiplayer.

It doesn't really matter since there isn't a "good" ending.

@Tennmuerti: This is right before the final mission.

Also, holy crap I just encountered some kind of awesome bug when alt-tabbing to turn Fraps on to get that screenshot. The guns wont shoot, though. :(

@HubrisRanger said:

Kinda fascinated by the general interest in the "Best" ending to ME. For all the talk of how choice makes such a huge difference in the experience of the series, and how the ending makes those decisions feel ultimately hollow, people seem eager to alter their play style and decisions to get a theoreticaly optimal ending. Similar to the end of ME2; so much emphasis was put on keeping your whole team alive (down to having a related achievement!) that it made people feel like they had played incorrectly if anyone died. In my main ME2 campaign, almost half of my team died but I never felt like I had done something wrong, simply that is how my Shepard's story turned out. Mistakes were made, for sure, but that didn't make it feel like I had 'lost' out on something, simply had a very specific experience.

All that to say, yes, you can get the "Best" ending to ME3 without touching multiplayer, but as only if you have certain conditions from even past games as part of your Shepard (this I think can be covered if you just create a new Shep with everyone alive). It is a major effort, and as others have said a handful of MP sessions should make up for a load of obnoxious fetch quests.

I agree with this sentiment. If I were to play ME3, I'd rather have "my" ending than the "best" ending.

@Tennmuerti: This is right before the final mission.

Also, holy crap I just encountered some kind of awesome bug when alt-tabbing to turn Fraps on to get that screenshot. The guns wont shoot, though. :(

If you don't play the multiplayer, you would need above 10k War Assets for the final encounter. War Assets are modified by the % of the Galaxy Awareness. So with a 50% (Base value) you would have 5k war assets. I had 8k for the final battle, and I did not get the perfect ending.

Just play a few matches, raise it to 80% and that should be it. If not you can use the iOS app Datapad, which is free and gives you % for the GaW thing. And it also contains extra stuff, like emails from the ME crew and contacts across the game, and a full Codex with audio as well.

The MP is not really good, its entertaining but not that much. It needs a lot of work to build a respectable character, which can be quite tiresome, specially when you play along high level gamers that will kill around 70% of the enemies themselves, making it harder for starters to lvl up.

@Tennmuerti: I didn't install any mods, the game is vanilla. My save was imported from ME1>ME2>ME3 with a 100% completionist Paragon run. In ME3 I believe the only mistakes I made was not getting the paragon dialog choice for the Illusive Man at the very beginning of the game (accidentally clicked my mouse) and letting Kelly Chambers die/not show up. I don't think I got her to feed my fish because I didn't want to risk cheating on blueberry space muffin.

The only Spectre console thing I messed up was letting that engineer fight Reapers instead of her brother in Cerberus, which I guess cost me something like 6 points from a lack of engineers in some battle.

@Tennmuerti: I didn't install any mods, the game is vanilla. My save was imported from ME1>ME2>ME3 with a 100% completionist Paragon run. In ME3 I believe the only mistakes I made was not getting the paragon dialog choice for the Illusive Man at the very beginning of the game (accidentally clicked my mouse) and letting Kelly Chambers die/not show up. I don't think I got her to feed my fish because I didn't want to risk cheating on blueberry space muffin.

The only Spectre console thing I messed up was letting that engineer fight Reapers instead of her brother in Cerberus, which I guess cost me something like 6 points from a lack of engineers in some battle.

@Tennmuerti: Oh, I guess you're right. Miranda and the rest of them are all worth 50 points rather than 25.

@WVUEers: You don't have to play any multiplayer for the best ending if you got the best endings from the previous games but you can use it too improve your chances.

@PARKSLang said:

Don't listen to these people who say you don't need to play mp. If you want the best ending you need 5K EMS, which cannot be gotten in single player alone. If you are around 3.5k EMS I'd gueess maybe an hour and a half to 2 hrs to get it. but your points decrease as time goes on so you'll want to play right before the ending missions

I hit over 7000 before I completed any of the last few missons.