Brad Thinks He Knows the Ending to Mass Effect 3

The ending is not the problem with ME3. The rest of that game feeling kind of lazy and rushed is the problem with ME3.

@TatsurouXIII: I am spoiler free of ME 3. I have no idea what happened, Hell I don't even know the ending of 1 or 2 (got about 1/2 way through 1 when it came out and got bored).

So yup, it is totally possible to be spoiler free :).

Please film Brad's reaction to the ending!

@patrickklepek@Ryan@Vinny@Jeff

I have a feeling he's guessing the indoctrination theory over the actual ending.

Because that is still a really shit, hokey ending.

...but it's a lot better than the nonsense Bioware came up with.

@Razputin said:

I like the ending and thought Mass Effect 3 was awesome. You can stop it with the constant "OH TH ENDING WAS SO BAD HAHAHA", people.

Before or after the patch? I'm just curious... I was alright with the ending before the patch. I'm still okay with it after...

Brad has no idea.

@Kohlstream: This! This is a great, nay an amazing idea.

@Residentrevil2: Oh, forgot to add that. I liked it before the patch. I'm not even really talking about the thing that happens - more the way it happens. The whole thing with Shepard and Anderson getting completely beat up? Amazing.

I, actually, haven't seen the Extended Cut. One day I'll probably do that, when I do a second playthrough of the game.

@Graham_Nix:

I'm actually curious myself. If Brad sees the original and not the EC version, he'll have a better idea why people were so upset.

I hope that he doesn't subscribe to the Indoctrination Theory.... honestly, that's even worse than the original endings.

I don't think it's possible to "guess" the ending to ME3, since the things which made everyone so upset come right out of nowhere, with no foreshadowing.

That said, I haven't played Leviathan, so maybe that has something in it that foreshadows the ending. I dunno.

Brad you don't know shit. You probably wrote something really general and then will brag about pointing out something super obvious.

EDIT: Please don't consider filming Brad's reaction. His experience should be his own. Filming him in a studio with bright lights and a viewership of hundreds would make his reaction feel forced and unnatural. I'd rather he have his own personal experience and save his insight for the GOTY podcast. Just make one of the awards "most disappointing ending" because we got more of those this year than good ones. It's sure to be one interesting year.

@Mezmero said:

Brad you don't know shit. You probably wrote something really general and then will brag about pointing out something super obvious.

This, a thousand times this.

He probably wrote "It's all a dream" or something

Is he going to do the original, extended cut, or both?

Unfortunately, it turns out you were on the Enterprise the entire time.

IMO Mass Effect 3 story was a bad ending to the trilogy as a whole. I think the low opinion on the actual final sequence is due to the whole wrapping up being weak. The game feels a bit rushed also, definitely not up par with the masterpiece that was ME2.

Mass Effect strong points were the character interactions and development as well as the scenery (you really don't need a good story if you have good characters and scenario writing). The extended cut, while not changing the bad storyline, did address to that by giving a couple of extra character scenes and showing the universe in the aftermath of [the event]. That actually made me enjoy the ending a bit more.

Also, Brad totally wrote "wake up in the Animus" there, right? Either that or "Shepard is Master Chief"!

i think he thinks the Asari are the Reapers or some shit, he's obviously wrong either way

@ck1nd said:

After playing ME3, what was so wrong with the ending? I thought it felt well and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Yeah I don't get the hate for ME3 at all, it's not as good as ME2, but really only ME2 and DA:O are the only really great Bioware games I can think of since KotOR, and those even trump that game.

I think he wrote Deus ex machina.

It was all Riker and Troi's holodeck simulation.

He could have saved himself the trouble and watched all the endings on YouTube. -.-

@Kohlstream: Yes, yes they should definitely do that.

LATEST: Brad tweets "Um."

EDIT: UPDATE: "UM."

I love videos like this

verdict is IN 
 
https://twitter.com/bradshoemaker

@deano546 said:

LATEST: Brad tweets "Um."

EDIT: UPDATE: "UM."

He seems to like it more than the rest of the crew, recommends Leviathan. I really think he had the optimal experience with the game. He was surprised when I told him that the extra expository dialogue (the stuff on the left side of the wheel) with the Catalyst was not in the original ending.

Tuesday can't come soon enough.

@Spaceyoghurt said:

I think he wrote Deus ex machina.

Probably, and he will debate to the death that he's right, but that's just not why people were mad.

@masonexcell said:

Unfortunately, it turns out you were on the Enterprise the entire time.

I think that would be pretty amazing - the entire franchise was secretly a Star Trek license tie-in. Suddenly the Paramount title thing, late title card and Courage's Star Trek fanfare and the revelation that the games never really were published by EA or Microsoft, but Namco/Paramount were behind them all the time.

Judging by those twitter reactions, I'm sure he was far off. Can't wait for the letter opening.

I just finished Mass Effect 3 tonight and I really don't understand what people thought was hokey about the ending. I guess the way the catalyst chose to manifest itself could be considered kind of silly but it was such an insignificant detail in the grand scheme of things. I could see why people might be upset if they didn't get the "good" endings but I found the one I chose to be a satisfying conclusion to a series I love dearly.

i guess leviathan sets up the ending a little better according to brad's tweets? when/if i get around to me3 i'll make sure to play it w/ that.

@ConduitFourSale said:

I just finished Mass Effect 3 tonight and I really don't understand what people thought was hokey about the ending. I guess the way the catalyst chose to manifest itself could be considered kind of silly but it was such an insignificant detail in the grand scheme of things. I could see why people might be upset if they didn't get the "good" endings but I found the one I chose to be a satisfying conclusion to a series I love dearly.

Here we go again...

- A really bad case of Deus Ex Machina

- A rehash of the final scenes from ME1 (just replace Saren with TIM)

- Introduces major plot holes (what was the star child doing during ME1 and 2? What happened to damaged relays destroying entire planetary systems? That was the whole reason Shep was disgraced at the beginning of the game)

- Leaves you with an out-of-context scene that only works if joker and EDI emerge from the wreckage and you chose the synthesis ending and even then is a really on-the-nose allusion to Adam and Eve.

- Goes down this tonal thematic path totally unprecedented in the series. Might have been appropriate had ME been a JRPG series but ME was not a JRPG series. ME was a pretty straight-forward hard sci-fi, action and character drama, with a fair bit of homage to the last 100 years of sci-fi cinema and literature. Going down a vaguely mystical route in the last 10 minutes just doesn't work. Kubrick may have pulled it off effectively in 2001 but no one else has, ever, despite many trying and failing.

- The synthesis ending is the most god-damned stupid thing ever. Exploding cybernetic Shepard results in viable cyborgs? Hell, viable cybernetic aliens and PLANTS?

- The synthesis ending makes you responsible for the greatest violation of sapient rights since the reapers fucked everyone's shit up. No one gets a say in whether they want to be implanted with cybernetics and made telepathic? Doctors can be imprisoned for operating on one patient without their consent; Shep just did it to an entire galaxy.

- The reapers/star child's motivations and reasoning are really, really god damn arse-fucked expletive expletive stupid. For an explanation, I defer to the wisdom of our good friend Xzibit: http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/16391006.jpg

- The do a really half-arsed job with the presentation of the ending. I wouldn't usually say this but the last couple of hours of this game needed a lot more pre-rendered cut-scenes. You shouldn't have to remind yourself that there's a big clusterfuck of a space battle going on above your head and the ending is really abrupt and unceremonious and totally ill-befitting the grand conclusion to what is quite possibly the most important videogame property in existence.

- Likewise, they don't do justice to the central premise of the series. They'd dicked us around on the whole promise of your actions having meaningful consequences throughout 2 and 3 but one would have hoped that they'd pull out all the stops at the end of the trilogy. After all, what did they have to lose? They could have given us wildly differing endings, drawn from myriad decisions made through the earlier games. They didn't have to worry about continuity going forward. The cost of doing it right was at an all-time low and they still cheaped-out.

- They strip-mine the mythology. It would have worked far better if they hadn't attempted to rationalise the central villains at all. Between the star child, the Leviathan DLC and shit like Lair of the Shadow Broker in ME2, there's not much left in this universe. I have seen and heard a lot of people saying that they are 'done with this series' and I totally understand those sentiments. Even if you don't allow the ending to ruin everything that had come before, we're probably not going to see many of these characters again and there's nothing much else left in this galaxy, either. We know the broker's secrets, we know the reapers' secrets, we know the secrets of the creatures who created the reapers, we know the protheans' secrets, the Krogan have been fleshed-out, the origins of the Asari has been laid bare. Too many questions have been answered. Aside from 'what do Quarians looks like?' and 'are Turians supposed to be reptilian, avian or arthropod?', there's not a single thing left to think about.

For the record, I didn't like the ending but it didn't ruin the whole series for me, either. I don't even care that much: the characters were the most important thing in ME to me and, thankfully, they didn't rape them in any major way.

That said, I still get moderately angry when someone tries to defend the ending, or claims to have liked it. Not entirely sure why.

Oh the ending. I adored everything about ME3 right up until the last 10 minutes. Things were great right until that final elevator ride. I still feel guilty about Legion, I don't know how many times his parting words have gone through my mind since that game came out. A game that has that kind of emotional impact on me does not deserve the black spot caused by that final reveal. I spent 5 years and hundreds of hours with my character, made friends, explored new worlds, saved civilizations, left friends to die alone, romanced characters, honored fallen comrades, broke the rules with Garrus, and damned my character to hell. Why of all the games released this year did ME3 have to have a disappointing ending?

@Icaria said:

[A bunch of excellent points]

Also, they seem to go against the entire message of the third game in the last few minutes. The game seemed to be about working together and embracing diversity. The geth / quarian struggle, the cure for the krogans, and especially Javik's side story all seemed to be showing you how you should accept each other's differences and become stronger by fighting together. Javik literally says that he thinks the big mistake of the Prothean race was that they didn't accept the other species differences.

And then in the end you get to choose whether you want to kill half of the species you've been fighting for, or magically merge them with synthesis so you're a single race. Guess being different or being a robot was bad after all..

the answer in the envelope:

someone dies and the ending is shit. roll credits

@GnolTac: Totally forgot about that. There was also some starchild line about synthesis being 'the end of evolution' or 'the ultimate evolution', which itself was pretty fatalistic (never mind the misapprehension over what evolution is). It's weird to think the synthesis ending was the reward for completionists.

@courage_wolf: I'm not sure how you resolved the Quarian/Geth conflict but that was one of the most poignant moments in any medium for me. Likewise losing Mordin. It was because ME3 included moments like those that it's impossible to hate it all just because of the ill-conceived ending. In the end, the greater tragedy is that I'll probably never get to have any new adventures with those characters. Real-life elevator rides just don't compare.

Brad won't probably guess the ending cause it's a fucking

Given Brad's reaction to the ending on Twitter, I can't wait for the follow-up video.

@RedCream said:

Brad won't probably guess the ending cause it's a fucking

SPOILER WARNING: Click here to reveal hidden content.

deus ex machina

I kinda think that's what he wrote, but not in the way he thought it would happen.

That office is messy. Do they believe in garbage cans or are they going for that  
post-apoc Fallout feel?
 
My office typically looks like shit, but not half as bad as some of my co-workers. 
I generally take all the stray paper & bullshit after a week or two & chuck it. Just 
get tired of seeing it lying there shitting up the place.

Shame it sounds like he got it close to right.

Can't wait till the Bombcast so I can laugh my ass off at how wrong Brad probably is and the others will give him shit for it.

@Cold_Wolven said:

Can't wait till the Bombcast so I can laugh my ass off at how wrong Brad probably is and the others will give him shit for it.

sucks for you!

@Brad said:

@Cold_Wolven said:

Can't wait till the Bombcast so I can laugh my ass off at how wrong Brad probably is and the others will give him shit for it.

sucks for you!

Nice

hope someone else records the next vid!

Yep, I told my brother that Brad probably wrote "Shepard is the Catalyst."