With all the recent talk of Brad finishing the game late and having it be such a different experience, and the discussions of "most disappointing" living alongside discussions of "top ten best" during the Game of the Year discussions, I figure now was as good a time as any to finally put this question out there one more time.

Conclusively.

Once and for all.

For science!

So with all the hooplah made over "original vs extended," "good vs bad," "Bioware vs EA," and "EA vs everyone" faded into the background of our minds, now's the time to finally figure out where the pieces actually fell. Did everybody really hate it? Or did it just seem that way? You're just one simple click away from knowing the true answer, at long last!

And I'm pretty curious too, having just finished it for myself two days ago.

Didn't see my answer up there.

Ambivalent about original ending, thought the extended endings were stupid.

I thought it was pretty silly that the ending came to define the game for so many to begin with. However bad you thought that ending was, there was a whole game leading up to it which should have been judged on its own merits. I think what happened was too many people took for granted the positive qualities of Mass Effect, and it made the negative stand out all the more for them. Still, that ending was really bad, there were so many things wrong with it on so many levels. I respect Bioware for putting out the Extended Cut for free, but that could only go so far towards fixing it.

I've gone into more detail about it before, but my basic thoughts on the Extended Cut are that while it gave the ending the emotional weight it felt like it should have had, and it helped fixed a number of other problems, there are still a serious number of issues with that ending even with it included. I know there are people out there who had no problems with that ending, even to begin with, but I'm still not one of them. It feels okay, and in another game series might have been seen as something breathtaking, but I don't think it lived up to what Mass Effect was.

There should be options in between loved and hated.

I didn't play until the EC was released and certainly didn't love the ending but hate may be a strong word. I certainly hated the mission that lead up to the ending though so my vote goes to F i guess.

I picked Synthesis first by the way before watching the others.

@Gamer_152 said:

I thought it was pretty silly that the ending came to define the game for so many to begin with. However bad you thought that ending was, there was a whole game leading up to it which should have been judged on its own merits. I think what happened was too many people took for granted the positive qualities of Mass Effect, and it made the negative stand out all the more for them. Still, that ending was really bad, there were so many things wrong with it on so many levels. I respect Bioware for putting out the Extended Cut for free, but that could only go so far towards fixing it.

I've gone into more detail about it before, but my basic thoughts on the Extended Cut are that while it gave the ending the emotional weight it felt like it should have had, and it helped fixed a number of other problems, there are still a serious number of issues with that ending even with it included. I know there are people out there who had no problems with that ending, even to begin with, but I'm still not one of them. It feels okay, and in another game series might have been seen as something breathtaking, but I don't think it lived up to what Mass Effect was.

The game is the final chapter in a trilogy. Of course the ending was a defining moment; that's not silly at all.

Aside from the fact that the ending itself is silly with its deus ex machina space child ridiculousness.

what about

I thought the original endings were hilarious and the EC endings were stupid? I mean the original ones were way stupid too but at least it was a fun stupid

My answer is not there, I finished it before the extended cut, didn't love or hate the original ending, still haven't seen the new endings and don't feel like looking them up on youtube.

None of the options really cover my answer, While I thought the original ending wasn't great, I didn't hate it. The starchild never really bothered me too much (other than telling the origins and purpose of the Reapers, that should have remained a mystery), it was more the oddities like the crew being back on the Normandy and the Normandy leaving Earth for no reason. The EC was an improvement but still had a few problems.

My overall thoughts on the game are that it is great and the ending thing got blown way out of proportion.

For me the problem with the ending was always way more about the state of the galaxy than the space mystic mumbo jumbo with the Catalyst. Sure I thought that part in particular was pretty "whatever" but I could live with it. Even if it was weird as hell that Shepard didn't refute any of the AI's bullshit logic.

I mean, when you really come down to it, why couldn't have the ending been the "best seats in the house" scene with Anderson and Shepard? You already had your epic battle of ideals with the Illusive Man moments prior, and the game felt over at that point. Just have Shepard hit the big red button that nukes the Reapers and bam, trilogy finished with nobody feeling shitty about investing so much time and love for this trilogy.

Also I dug the Extended Cut endings. Well, DESTROY and REJECT at least. Control and Synthesis are fucking retarded.

Hated the original, but after letting it sit and getting some clarification from the EC, I...thought it was alright? I wouldn't say "loved" (though I voted that way for simplicity's sake), but I think the implications behind the ending are interesting, if not executed extremely poorly. It's a cool idea that was just kinda tossed in there at the very last second with little to no warning, and delivered through a complete Deus Ex Machina; and kinda a rehash of an already solved problem at that point. Before the ending, it was never mentioned that that was a real thing to be concerned about. The EC filled in some gaps that were already implied, but I think it was mostly time that calmed me down on the ending. It was better, but still not good.
 
The rest of the game was pretty fantastic though. The only big thing that bothered me was the inability to side with the Illusive Man, since I was agreeing with him for the most part, up until the very end. Yeah, Jacob in the hospital, along with some other minor things, sucked, but  it was my favorite Mass Effect (though I admittedly didn't play the original). The Krogan part was...impactful.

Hated the original ending, but I was more... content after the EC ending. Though if we're going to talk about the game overall, my list of pros/cons are still:

Pros

• Great shooting and controls.

• Porting over your character from ME2 meant that you could start straight from where you left off, complete with all of your abilities and what level you're at. Better and more diverse set of abilities to learn as well.

• The entire Tuchanka mission was fantastic.

• The Quarian/Geth conflict was pretty good as well.

• I actually grew to really like Kaiden in this, especially because of how 'self aware' he became concerning how a lot of people didn't much care for him in the original game.

• I'm Garrus Vakarian and this is my favourite spot on the Citadel!

• I also liked how you'd see your party members dotted all over the ship, even talking with one another, and weren't simply delegated to their appointed cabins waiting there for Master Shepard's arrival.

• Lot of great moments with Liara, like when you're talking about that box containing all of your history.

• Soundtrack was a solid mix of tracks from across the entire series.

• Charging towards the Citadel while all of the soldiers and makos are being torn apart was incredibly thrilling.

• Multiplayer was pretty fun from what I played of it.

Cons

• I hated how Shepard's dialogue options were skimmed down to two, and not to mention how often Shepard was running on auto-pilot during so many cutscenes and conversations with your crew.

• For as much as I enjoyed the shooting, there was a bit too much of it overall. Not nearly enough diplomatic scenarios.

• James Vega, while not offensive/bad or anything, was still just such an incredibly boring character.

• Every new squad member introduced from ME2 couldn't join you. I could understand with certain characters like Thane and Mordin, but other such characters like Grunt, Jacob and Samara were all lazily pushed aside. And while I actually think EDI was an alright character, concerning how she tried to further understand and emphasise with humanity, she could have still very easily just been left on the ship and I would have much preferred one of the ME2 characters in her stead.

• The doling out of what few party members you have was too broad. For like the first half of the game you only have four, and Tali only joins in the third act.

• So many of your large-scale decisions didn't matter. Obviously they couldn't have accounted for all of your decisions, but stuff like whether the Council died or deciding on whether to destroy or keep the collector base -- didn't make a single iota of a difference. Plus anyone who died in prior games conveniently had a backup on the bench, except Garrus and Tali, which annoyed the Hell out of me because if they died in ME2, that's it, your squad of party members was then made to be even smaller.

• Sticking Javik behind DLC is horse shit.

• The original ending was of course a farcical bunch of nonsense, but what I disliked even more was how the actual Take Back Earth mission was made up of more rote arena combat. What is supposed to be the greatest battle in the history of ever was almost impressively made to feel like ''just another mission''. There was no sense of scale or anything like that.

• Those Gotta Fetch 'Em All quests they ported from DA2 were a damn travesty.

• Playing that silly cat and mouse game with the Reapers on the Galaxy Map was poorly implemented as well. Even the planet scanning in ME2 wasn't that bad.

Didn't hate it to the level everybody else did, played the game twice this year and I haven't even seen the extended cut.

How about indifferent, since the crew talked about the game, they reminded me of cool moments and the DLC which I now want to experience. I'm actually going to play through the trilogy again and try and enjoy it as a "fresh" take. I probably was hard on it the first and only time I beat it (it is pretty bad) but not as bad as I look back on it. Definitely the lowest of 3 games but not the worst thing ever.

Fuck em for charging for day 1 DLC, I bought that shit brand new and still get a incomplete game. Then EC was shit. Never again will I buy a EA game or bioware game new

A bad game regardless of the ending.

and fuck that DLC policy.

I never bothered with the EC because I didn't care that much. Mass Effect 3 is a decent game with a handful of great moments and a couple of bad ones. But above all, I felt like the dialogue and writing were especially cheesy in a bad way

The original ending is great, it immediately throws a huge new thing at your face and asks you to make the connections yourself, but figuring our the Reaper story was still kinda fun. But the thing I liked about Mass Effect was hearing others tell me about the galaxy, learning about it that way rather than being kept in the dark with the implication being 'figure it out yourself'. Especially for the big finish to a trilogy. Explain and wrap things up with the Reapers like they did with everything else. The entire ending was obviously rushed. Still, the story beats taken from it and moments like talking down The Illusive Man and sitting next to Anderson were great.

The Extended Cut fleshed out the ending a bit and showed scenes that really should have been there from the start (especially since the before and after are shown), but retconning things like the destruction of the Mass Relays is laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame.

The revelations from Leviathan were great, and confirmed some aspects of the ending that you had to work through yourself while clarifying others.

The way BioWare handled all of it; the rushed ending, the retconning, the actual Reaper plot being relegated to DLC, fucking terrible.

As for the rest of the game though, I loved it.

The poll seems biased. I thought the original ending was fine and I loved the extended cut ending. That's it.

I hated the original ending, but I didn't hate the DLC endings. I also didn't really like the DLC endings. The DLC endings fixed some of the big problems for me, but to be honest, the entire last section of ME3 felt lackluster. It needed about 2 to 3 hours more content, in which you battle up the citadel once you arrive.

Original ending was garbage, EC wasn't much better.

i love the game (the combat, the universe), but i've always hated the story (after setting up a web of racial tensions, introducing one uber-enemy is nullifying to any thematic potential with regards to humanity's role, basically we get to be heroes, it's cartoonish rather than classic sci-fi, but whatever, i just want to kill stuff), so having two crappy endings to choose from makes no difference to me. sucks that i had to die for no real reason, sucks that the universe is now gimped, sucks that the relationship elements were sidelined instead of brought to the fore, a lot of it sucks.

Nothing I heard about this game leading up to the release made me excited to play it at all. I played through the first Mass Effect twice and the Mass Effect 2 three times on the PC and had a great time. I started to play Mass Effect 3 out of a sense of obligation and made it is far as the Normandy, and every moment with the game was a huge bummer, and hearing everyone talk about their experience with the game was a huge bummer too. As it is now though I have fond memories of playing Mass Effect and it will stay that way as long as I continue to pretend this game doesn't exist... how's that??

You left out the real problem with the game, too much bland shooting. The ending was just the cherry on top of the shit pile.

Where's the choice for "Liked the original ending, but haven't had a chance to play the extended cut... also waiting for all DLC before second play through to make a complete game of it".

Great game, terrible ending, never felt the need to replay it even with the EC DLC. Multiplayer is super though.

Its a pretty average game overall but I expected so much better from Bioware. Some high notes, but mostly just bad writing and endless shooting. I hate what mass effect has become.

I have pretty much zero faith in Bioware these days.

Don't see my answer: I didn't like the ending but I did really enjoy the game overall despite that bad ending.

My answer wasn't up there, game was a big letdown for reasons other than the ending, nothing has changed.

My answer is not there. Liked the original ending, liked it even more after EC.

Mildly disappointed by the original ending, couldn't be bothered with Bioware papering over the cracks with EC.

Overall I think it was a good game. It was clearly rushed in terms of the much smaller towns and just lazy side missions. But the gameplay was the best its been and the high points of solving the big conflicts of the universe were cool, even if Shepard becoming the grand arbiter of all things seemed goofy and contrived. I liked how the levels showed greater variety than ME2, which strayed into generic urban/warehouse environments a little too often. The DLC holding back critical plot points and characters is horrible though. In the end its the worst Mass Effect game, having neither the atmosphere or well written plot of the first game, or characters and size of the world of the second.

This poll judges Mass Effect 3 purely by the ending and is there for a skewed poll. I still don't like the ending, but I do really like the game and most of the things in it.

My answer is not there, the original endings were boring and anti-climactic, just kind of being like "YOU GOT TO THE SPOT IT'S OVER NOW" and the extended cut, while fixing that problem, added a whole ton of other problems. Like how in the middle of the final charge to the beam, with a goddamn reaper shooting shit all over the place and people dying left and right, your squadmates get injured and Shepard's all "Time out! Time out from final galactic fight! Main characters slightly wounded! Normandy, I know you're doing really important work up there fighting the Reapers and every ship counts, but you should disengage from the fight, and fly down right next to a fucking goddamn Reaper so you can extract 2 soldiers from the battlefield. Oh, and hang around a bit so I can tell Tali that I love her. Again."

Both endings are kind of bad, for different reasons, but neither offensively so. Also, the ending doesn't invalidate all the good stuff that is in that game. The genophage and geth/quarian conflict questlines are both great, and honestly, considering the scope of trying to pull together 3 games of choices into a coherent story where those choices felt meaningful, they didn't do an awful job up until the very end of the last game.

So in short, Mass Effect 3 is the worst of the Mass Effect games, but still a good game.

EDIT: Honestly, the one thing I HATED was all the stupid dream sequences with that fucking kid. What a shitty thing to force on the player. Depending on your choices, you could have caused MULTIPLE alien races to go extinct, killed an Asari Matriarch just because you think her daughter is kinda hot even though having sex with her will kill you, and all other sorts of bad shit, and one stupid kid in a vent that is too dumb to go with the soldiers to safety is enough to give that kind person nightmares? Hell, my Shepard had the sole survivor background. Where were the nightmares of his whole squad being ripped apart by thresher maws?

Hated the ending is a little strong. Though I did think it was a complete and total failure of an ending it didn't inspire hatred.

The rest of the game was mostly really good, occasionally great, occasionally fucking amazing, and at times really really really not good.

I haven't bothered to play the EC or any dlc yet. I will at some point play through the game a second time with all that stuff, but unlike with Mass Effect's past, I'm in no rush.

Own ME 1 & 2, don't intend on owning ME 3. More because they turned it into what is effectively just a shooter with mild player-choice mechanics. Oh, yeah, and the ending is kind of crap, from what I hear.

I didn't play it.

Suckers.

@Sticky_Pennies said:

they turned it into what is effectively just a shooter with mild player-choice mechanics

That's not really true. But I guess you wouldn't know because you made up your mind before playing it, and that's too bad.

@Maajin said:

@Sticky_Pennies said:

they turned it into what is effectively just a shooter with mild player-choice mechanics

That's not really true. But I guess you wouldn't know because you made up your mind before playing it, and that's too bad.

Oh, I've played it, but I haven't owned it. I played the first few hours at a friend's place. I probably should have worded my post a bit differently. It feels far removed from what I want in a Mass Effect game.

Done with it. Kinda disappointed that what I felt should have been magnum opus-ish just sort of fizzled out but meh. Moved on.

I didn't really like the original ending, but I didn't mind it either. Hate is too strong a word. My main problem is about the rest of the game which didn't grab me at all.

Sure, the ending sucks, but that's not the only reason I don't care for ME3. I thought the game itself was pretty meh the whole way through.

I. The game sucks and doesn't deserve to be called a video game. After 10 hours I decapitated myself in boredom.

Why does it always have to be about the goddamn ending? That´s maybe the last 20 Minutes of a 20 hour game (well, maybe a little less for ME3)

Anyway, there are plenty of things wrong about this game- Didn´t like the character redesigns, didn´t like the structure, didn´t like the even more increased emphasis on shooting, the character replacements for dudes you lost in the suicide mission- that stuff fucking SUCKS. There were a few really great moments in the game, some breathtaking shots that could have been straight out of a movie. But the bad parts weigh this game down. A LOT.

As for the ending: It kinda sucked and the extended cut didn´t make it suck any less. Felt like poorly constructed fan fiction at times. But the ending didn´t ruin the game for me. The game itself kinda did that. I liked parts of it, but this game has no business being called Mass Effect.

I loved the game and played through it twice in four days, but didnt like the ending at all.

@Hailinel said:

@Gamer_152 said:

I thought it was pretty silly that the ending came to define the game for so many to begin with. However bad you thought that ending was, there was a whole game leading up to it which should have been judged on its own merits. I think what happened was too many people took for granted the positive qualities of Mass Effect, and it made the negative stand out all the more for them. Still, that ending was really bad, there were so many things wrong with it on so many levels. I respect Bioware for putting out the Extended Cut for free, but that could only go so far towards fixing it.

I've gone into more detail about it before, but my basic thoughts on the Extended Cut are that while it gave the ending the emotional weight it felt like it should have had, and it helped fixed a number of other problems, there are still a serious number of issues with that ending even with it included. I know there are people out there who had no problems with that ending, even to begin with, but I'm still not one of them. It feels okay, and in another game series might have been seen as something breathtaking, but I don't think it lived up to what Mass Effect was.

The game is the final chapter in a trilogy. Of course the ending was a defining moment; that's not silly at all.

Aside from the fact that the ending itself is silly with its deus ex machina space child ridiculousness.

A defining moment I entirely agree with, not silly at all. But there were players who treated the ending as the defining part of that game without any regards to the rest of the quality of that game. I get how important that ending was, it was very important to me, but there were people who took that roughly 35 hour game and just discarded the first 34 hours when it came to analysing it.

I had a generally very positive experience with the game. Most problems I had with the game I felt applied doubly to the other games in the series, the only gripes I have with Mass Effect 3 specifically are that I felt there should be more party members, and more interaction with those party members, there should have been a larger third act, the DLC is the slimiest shit I've ever seen in gaming, and the star child shouldn't have been a child- no one likes children.

As for the ending I chose E. My investment in the Mass Effect universe is actually pretty low so I didn't really give a shit about the decisions I made in the previous games honestly. It would have been nice to have a Dragon Age: Origins/Animal House style scene where they explain what effect your decisions had on the universe, but I think there were simply too many options for that to even be remotely feasible, and if they had gone that route I don't think there could have been a decision with any weight at the end of the game because it wouldn't have been possible to juggle all of that. Honestly, I just think the ending everyone wanted would have been kind of boring.

Haven't finished it yet. From what I've played, though, it's decent enough.

Original ending was fine.

From Ashes, Leviathan, and the EC ending tell you NOTHING important that wasn't either explicitly stated or implicitly obvious in the original ending.

Regardless of the ending..worst game in the series...not terrible...but still the worse

Mass Effect 3 is a great game. My game of the year.

edit: (I payed for From Ashes.. wasn't happy about it but glad I did)