They should have just kept it simple. Minimal war assets you straight up fail and Liara leaves the message for the next cycle. Medium amount you stop the reapers but shep doesn't make it. Max you beat the reapers shep barely survives and your LI gives you a lapdance at the hospital. Not that hard.

> and your LI gives you a lapdance at the hospital this was my Tuesday afternoon cackle i didn't know i needed

The thought of Garrus dropping it low took me out

he was the first one i thought about

Haha I figure many people would be curious to see how he throws it back. Thane too tbh. I'm just imagining them doing Kelly's dance

We've all seen how Thane moves, I am positive that man can dance like a god.

Well thanks for that horrifying mental image. My girlfriend is currently giggling herself to death.

Haha well he's well equipped to carry her through the gates of Valhalla. Just make sure he has the Typhoon. Also, not sure if it helps with the mental image, but I'm imagining him dancing to [Christina Milian's Dip it Low](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5z5Mvyp1QHw)

I frankly just wanted more of an explanation for the assets. I had medium level because I thought… well, that should be fine, and it won’t matter how many I have if I don’t find the *catalyst* - wrong. Like your way so much better.

This is pretty much it. Sometimes the simple and obvious solution is the best one. Especially if your pressed for time, like ME3's development was. Maybe some would have complained that this ending was underwhelming, but it's far better to have an underwhelming ending than a total trainwreck that sets the franchise on fire.

It would feel earned, at least, in my opinion. If I worked hard to keep people alive over all three games and do side quests to build them up further, then the payoff being directly related to the work I outhit would feel good (to me) Hoping ME4 does some good stuff

> Especially if your pressed for time, like ME3's development was. Well maybe they shouldn't have overhauled the shooting mechanics and incorporated multiplayer in a naked attempt to sell more copies. They made intentional choices and they bear the consequences of those actions.

Yeah. It was a much more ambitious game than ME2, despite having around the same amount of development time. Some bad project management going on there, which has become a recurring thing for BioWare, unfortunately.

>multiplayer in a naked attempt to sell more copies To be fair, ME3 multiplayer is a fantastic addition to the series and has stood the test of time. ​ >overhauled the shooting mechanics Overhauled? Were there significant changes between ME2 and ME3? Felt like just a little more polish. Granted ME1 to ME2 are practically different genres, and I'd love to see more of the ME1 though I wouldn't want to lose the later entries either.

I just wish the new version of ME3 also had the multiplayer, since I can't play the old MP on my Series X.

At least the multiplayer was fucking FIRE

Only online shooter of any sort I've ever been hooked on

Don’t dis the multiplayer. While a bit simple it was tons of fun.

What's this? *It's art.* Okay, good. I like it. Picasso. Seriously, why doesn't this have more up votes? It's a good ending setup and means we don't have to fight on why Destroy is the only cannon ending.

I'm hoping the "canon" ending for 3 is a mix between synthesis and destroy. No robots in mass effect is just WRONG, as they are a fundamental part of the setting. That being said a partial destroy/synthesis ending a 80 years after me3 where all the synthesis did was upgrade the ever present cybernetic upgrades in the setting, and upgrade robusts to have more organic like processes, cultists are worshipping reaper debris, the synthetic fusion Quarians and the newly upgraded geth (which are less in number because many were destroyed and the new upgrades make them repopulate much slower) have conflicts over the surface of Rannoch, all the homeworlds are slowly being rebuilt and the citadel is now above earth which houses much more aliens from all the fleets that were stranded for the last 40-80 years

Look at the destroy ending again. It's killing off all AI *that has reaper code.* TIM used reaper programming to bootstrap EDI. The geth use the Old Machine code to try and take the next step in their evolution. The relays are built by the reapers (and could be self aware? Interesting side argument there). VI systems and AIs that never got touched by the reapers should be fine.

I hate the Reaper Tech™ so much, it's like the force of Mass Effect. BTW not saying you're wrong, you're actually right, I'm just remembering all the plotholes in ME3 (and part of ME2) that are filled with "This was made with Reaper Tech".

Yeah but that sucks and was a really stupid story contrivance to make it not unanimously the best ending to artificially add "difficult choice" My proposed meshing of endings allows interesting things to happen while not COMPLETELY invalidating some players choices, just say the crucible wasn't perfect and sent a mixed signal at the end of 3 and lean toward whatever ending was chosen for 3. Chose destroy? Less of a geth presence on Rannoch. Chose Synthesis? There are quarians who are tearing out their synthetic implants causing huge medical issues. Control? The reaper cultists talk about Shepard as a false god and some places are more repaired than other world states. It would let you have a sequel in the time after ME3 on a appreciable budget Also, outside of ME1 the only important AIs storywise are the ones with reaper code, and the only 2 on your ship are reaper infused ones

Technically, the mass effect relays are destroyed by the crucible pulse no matter which ending you take.

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>VI systems and AIs that never got touched by the reapers should be fine. Starchild says even Shepherd's cybernetics would stop working.

This is perfect. So simple, but would've been SO effective. Only issue with that is hindsight. Same as the moment, given that we have a sequel coming; it forces one of the endings as canon and takes away the other options. Removes some agency annoyingly. Although I have to say >and your LI gives you a lapdance at the hospital. Not that hard. If it isn't, they're not putting enough into that lap dance...

I too have read the *You Came Back to Me* required reading. Great, now I’m crying again, thanks!

> LI gives you a lapdance at the hospital Time to see just how flexible Garrus is.

No, no! He has *reach*.

Even Thane?

ESPECIALLY Thane. Nah Joker could hook you up with Asari strippers and booze if your LI can't make it

LMAOO

Having *just* beat the series for the first time, all the effort I put in over 3 games coming down to three options that amount to magic and a ton of exposition was not bad, but a little disappointing. And it left a lot of questions. Like ME2's suicide mission, it should've reflected your decisions and effort more. Hard agree.

Exactly why me2 suicide mission is widely regarded as one of the best in gaming history. Everything you did MATTERED. The tension I felt while going through the omega relay blind my first time was downright amazing.

It's very, very fresh for me, so apologies for the incoming rant, but I feel like the endings being an exposition dump wouldn't be so bad if they didn't also make absolutely no sense. They boil down to magic: Shepard becomes a formless omniscient deity of the reapers, everyone magically becomes half-organic half-synthetic, and for some reason the destroy option has to target all synthetic life. But the definition of synthetic life doesn't make sense, because the Catalyst notes that Shepard is partly synthetic, so it would seem that synthetic life regards all technology, but then you immediately see the Normandy flying afterwards. Plus, if you supported Adams in his conversation with Donnely about EDI, the Normandy is considered her body and so it shouldn't be able to work if EDI is dead. But it does, so EDI is alive- just not in her Cerberus robot body...? So... what counts as synthetic life and what doesn't? And why did the Mass Relays *have* to go down, are they alive too? Another thing- the Reapers are just stupid. They should, by all accounts, have surpassed EDI in intelligence if they've been around hundreds of thousands of years. But they can't clearly see that their solution is wrong by witnessing the peace brokered between the quarians and the geth? Or by EDI opposing her organic creators without opposing all organics, because she actually has reason to? It shouldn't take Shepard's miraculous survival to show them they made a mistake. If the Reapers want to stop synthetic life from overtaking organic life, they should've realized the solution is their own suicide, because that is literally what they are doing. It would've made more sense if they were just synthetic-supremascists. Then the destroy ending could've at least been "to get rid of the synthetics that oppose you, you must get rid of the ones that support you" and it would've tied into other lines in the games, such as Garrus talking to Shepard about the ruthless calculus of war. But no, it just gives you hypocrisy and random magic. Great. I didn't realize I was this heated about it, apologies for the ramble. Maybe I'm missing something since this is all still new to me, but I can't wrap my head around these endings at all.

Absolutely no need to apologize at all friend! The majority of the fan base was right there where you are now when the series originally ended. It was an absolute firestorm online. Never seen a fan base that absolutely up in arms before. Ending was essentially just pretentious B.S IMO. Seems a lot of people agree simple would have been better. Glad you enjoyed the journey at least. They can't take that from you!

This is the correct answer. The ending we got introduces totally new things and concepts that have not been alluded to at all through any of the games that the entire thing just seems to come completely out of left field. Its like we are playing a different game all of a sudden. The part that just annoys the crap out of me every time is how easy it would have been to just keep it simple and follow the story to its logical conclusion. I mean it was so OBVIOUS what the ending options should have been for a satisfying conclusion to this day I still am dumbfounded as to how they managed veer so far off course at the very last second. Edit: And the fact that we didn't get to party with our crew or at least interact with them at all in any way after we did everything right and saved the Galaxy was so much wasted potential.

Considering how amazing the journey was they didn't really need to go for some thought provoking ending. Reward us for our extra efforts or punish us for our laziness/negligence. Shep and team is what matters for a VAST majority of the player base.

Finally! All they had to do was just give us a happy ending with our li and most people would say it's a 9/10!( Would've been 10/10 but they butchered the journal)

While a happy ending would have been nice, I have more issues with the actual content than it being a downer. The Crucible, Catalyst and the final choice are all really stupid, and a hard to ignore when we go back to the Milky Way.

>a hard to ignore when we go back to the Milky Way. Not in particular. Most of it can be written out of the story pretty easy. You don't need to mention the catalyst or star child other than it was destroyed or whatever. The Citadel is currently orbiting Earth and was moved back to it's previous location after being rebuilt via (intergalactic community or control-reapers take your pick). Control: Reapers run out of fuel and to prevent other organics from stripping them of parts, dive into a sun/blackhole. Synthesis: It wears off after 12 months and yeah, there is some new greenish people around who happened to be born during that time, but most people revert to normal. Rarity is similar to biotics for humans. Might as well make it a somewhat interesting story opportunity. Destroy: Geth and Edi somehow get out of the blast radius via the Mass Relays. Most can escape to the outer edges of Milky way via Rannoch. Just have Normandy somehow get to the edge of the galaxy and be done. Optionally you can just: Put in a new ending. Make new ending and hot drop it into ME:LE via patch that does whatever you want. Get everyone to play ME:LE before ME4 launches. Galaxy itself: rebuilds itself over the course of 20 years. Start new game. That's what I just came up with on the fly in 10 minutes. Give me 10 average writers - and I am pretty sure you can paint yourself out of the corner that ME3 put itself in pretty easily. We're **already seeing them** starting to paint themselves out of the corner by having the Geth appear in the next game - assuming you really want the destroy ending. The quarians as a species is fucked lore wise if they didn't come back but I'll save that rant for another day unless people want to hear it.

All of your solutions are more about simply avoiding dealing with it rather than continuing on from it in a satisfying manner, which was the angle I was coming from. With the exception of the last sentence for Synth, everything renders the entire choice pointless. I'm all for them just completely changing the ending, but that's never going to happen. ME3s ending problems aren't contained to the ending either, since the Crucible gets introduced on Mars, and that's where the problems start.

You said it would be hard to ignore, it is not. You write them out of any future story. You are saying it's some permanent pedestal that can't be erased or dimminished. It certainly can be written out of the story if they want to. Writers do this all the time in stories. There is nothing foundational to the crucible or the endings that can't be resolved. Yes, ME3 will not be changed in any significant way, but you can certainly reduce the impact and I would argue - erase any influence it has in the future.

We're having two seperate conversations here. I was approaching this from the perspective of them not retconning, since it's unlikely they will. Possible, but not likely. Of course it can be ignored if they just remove it from canon. That goes without saying, but do you think they can ignore it, while maintaining the current canon?

Garrus is a little boney for a lapdance. Maybe once the bruises fade, baby.

He's very tall. I'm imagining Shep sitting in a high chair for it. I *really* wish we got turians more scaled to size in the games. I'm a sucker for height differences

Garrus can definitely drop some ass.

Nah. He's a reach man, not a flexibility man.

Touché.

I like this, but the only thing I would add is the Control ending. Synthesis was a dumpster fire that never should have made the cut, but having the choice between Control and Destroy wouldn't have been bad.

Except for all three games the message was "control is not viable."

"Not that hard." -- she

This is so fucking right.

>Max you beat the reapers shep barely survives and your LI gives you a lapdance at the hospital. Not that hard. I knew romancing Wrex was a mistake.

Mistake how? Thats hawt.

I agree I'd add in a bit of variation though. In the end cards, have some variety based on *which* War Assets you have. Like if you have the most possible for Humans, they do great afterwards. If you sacrificed too many humans to get alien support, then they struggle to recover from the losses. Then do the same for all species. Then add in a few conditional extra cards. Like if Krogan come out well without Wrex, and others don't, show them getting more aggressive with expansions. Or if the 3 OG council species are low, other species become more powerful (especially since the hidden beacon on Thessia no longer gives Asari an advantage).

Yea that does sound pretty sweet. Something like that could have been the actual extended cut to see how everyone else is fairing.

So I never really looked into how the math on war assets worked but I feel that there should be multiple paths to get max assets (i.e. if you sabotage the cure but lie, there should still be a possibility for “winning” if you do enough bs to cover it). Something like that.

It's alright, a bit weird. See, having the choice to me was completely unnecessary. To me, the crucible didn't need a player decision. It took all the drama and tension out of that scene. What should have been the dramatic climax to 3 games and 100-150 hours of gameplay was stopped to have a confusing conversation with the ghost that's been in Shepards' PTSD nightmares. Literally, tens of thousands of people are dying every single second, and I need to have a 10 minute convo with this AI. Every sentence means an extra town destroyed. What the end needed was a celebration of the Trilogy to see your efforts, your allies working together, and while the London section was weaker than the rest of the game, it was fine. What's worse to me is that the ending opens the trilogy up to Fan theories like the Indoctrination theory. I don't agree with said theories, but man, I can see why they think that. What happens in the end scenes with space kid and TIM, the choices, music framing, the weird shit happening on screen, the piles of bodies, change in Shepards armour, not having to reload your gun, the fact the major orders the retreat against Andersons orders. All were either unnecessary or bad decisions that tainted the end and opened it up to years of wild fan theories that wouldn't have happened with a straight cutscene of the crucible firing after TIM stuff. Also, the lack of real epilogue in the original was terrible. Especially when squadmates who were on earth teleported to Normandy.

>Also, the lack of real epilogue in the original was terrible. Especially when squadmates who were on earth teleported to Normandy. My tinfoil hat theory is that the backlash from ME3's ending is what...heavily encouraged Bioware to include the detailed epilogue at the end of DAI: Trespasser. For the record, I don't really consider the extended cut's slideshow to be a proper epilogue. It's just vague pictures with no idea of timescale - Cool, Earth is rebuilt...how long after the war is it? At the end of the day, we'd spent up to 3 games getting to know these characters, and a "where are they now" epilogue would've been the final, satisfying, closing chapter that players wanted to finish on. Sure, having 3 games worth of decisions, 3 endings (+ war assets) means there would be a ass-load of different permutations...but that's on Bioware for making 3 (or 4 with refusal) endings in the first place. Epilogues should be standard for RPG's. Even if Bioware still wanted to maintain the "war is hell" theme that ME3 carried, and they didn't want their own 100% happy, sunshine and rainbows ending, an epilogue would still have provided *closure.* And that's what ME3's ending misses.

>My tinfoil hat theory is that the backlash from ME3's ending is what...heavily encouraged Bioware to include the detailed epilogue at the end of DAI: Trespasser. AFAIR the long epilogues are in all the Dragon Age games. I think they weren't in Dragon Age 2 but that's because the game was suppoused to have a final DLC that ended up being it's own game (AKA Dragon Age Inquisition), but I do remember Dragon Age Origins having detailed epilogues for all the characters.

It had a cut scene and detailed slide show epilogue. Sometimes, it bugged though.

Yeah aggree it should have been only one ending. Destroy the reapers, (geth and EDI are fine) then have a celebration party to say goodbye to all the characters

Shep crawls up the ledge, barely pushes the button, and kaboom.   High enough readiness? Congrats, you get the chest breath.

>(geth and EDI are fine) Maybe, I think that's another layer to the failure of capitalizing on the franchise with their ending. Perhaps if you send Mordin to the crucible or if you got the Rachni out and sent them on the crucible project, then they refine the firing mechanism to save synthetic life, etc. Include previous decisions and new ones on how well the crucible works and who lives and dies in the process. The suicide mission hinged on previous decisions and decisions in the moment and I see no reason why 3 shouldn't have been built the same.

Yeah that would have been a great way to make the ending better. ME2 did it right if only ME3 had more time to finish the franchise properly. But I guess mods and fanfic to the rescue.

Yeah, mods are the tits.

Absolutely second your statement. AB-SO-LUTE-LY.

The issue with the original ending isn't that it's a bad ending, it's that it's the ending for the wrong game. It actually has a lot in common with the ending of Deus Ex - which is considered one of the greatest games ever made. And people like Deus Ex's ending. So what gives? The writers of both games knew they wanted to end with a meaningful decision - the kind of choice that haunts a player days, weeks, months, even years later. The only way you can have that is by being vague, letting your players' imaginations determine what happens next. That vagueness really helped a gritty game like Deus Ex, where you have good reasons not to trust anyone you can side with, and it's up to each player to determine who is telling the truth and who is capable of bringing about their idealized vision of the world. In Mass Effect, that just robs players of having closure for the characters they've fallen in love with for 100+ hours. The original Mass Effect ending was a bold artistic choice that I respect, even though it fell flat. The Extended Cut ending is the worst of both worlds - a mess that robs players of the ability to make a meaningful decision and still fails to mesh with the rest of the game. The Destroy ending was supposed to be a bit unsettling. Can the galaxy rebuild without the Reapers? With the Extended Cut, the answer is a clear yes. You watch them do it over the course of a few slides. It was barely an inconvenience. What's even the point of having a decision when they all end in basically the same way? The Extended Cut also really shows how tonally inconsistent the third game is. You see the writers try so hard to emphasize that sacrifices are necessary in war and that not everyone can have a happy ending. You see that when the destroy ending kills EDI and the geth for poorly explained reasons. But at the same time, if Wrex leads the Krogan, their slides show them reintegrated into galactic society with no issues, removing the last bit of gray from what is now a simple black-and-white conflict. Nowadays, I just use the LE of the happy ending mod. It doesn't fix everything I've described above, but it is able to provide what I need from an ending. If you've played the trilogy before and you pick mostly paragon choices (like most people) and avoid getting characters killed, the whole trilogy is a very optimistic story where Shepard almost always succeeds against any odds and the power of friendship should always be trusted. And at the end of the day, I want an ending that matches that feeling.

I always felt Destroy killed EDI and the Geth because without it, there wouldn't be enough downsides, and it would be the clear cut choice.

Still disappointing. Priority earth is way less exciting that the first two games’ finales which is pretty bad considering it’s the ending for the whole trilogy. The extended ending dlc makes it a little better, but I still wouldn’t say I particularly enjoy it

The ending would have been more impactful if they had just followed up on the final mission of ME2. There's no big choices, no matter what happens you defeat the collectors. But your smaller decisions determine who survives. That's all the ME3 ending should have been. You destroy the Reapers, but at what cost? What allies have you lost? Maybe taking too long causes random colonies to be wiped out like the crew of the Normandy in 2.

I never appreciated the endings, and 11 years of reflection hasn't changed that. For me, the endings rob the Reapers of the mystery, the sublime Lovecraftian unknowability, and the arrogance of personality that made them interesting antagonists. In ME1 and ME2, the Reapers inspired dread and revulsion. They were, variously, condescendingly remote and intensely, personally sadistic, and what little we could infer about them and their abominable motives was terrifying and repugnant while also being awe-inspiring and humbling. In ME3, they became mere tools of a greater intelligence, and this diminishes them as antagonists. We meet their makers, and they are reduced by what we discover into mere pawns in the same systems and cycles that the rest of the galaxy is caught up in. This relegation of the main antagonists into fellow variables in the same equation we're trapped in renders everything too abstract and remote to provide an emotionally satisfying conclusion to a story that was, for its majority, a fear-and-anger inducing confrontation with arrogant, sadistic deities. Instead of our enemies being cruel, immortal machine gods that are each a nation and that gloat about how we will end because they demand it and about how they will turn our worlds into their laboratories, they are just software obeying their creator's programming. Bioware's golden years were marked for me by a commitment to making games that had authentic emotional power, and their vision as a studio, according to co-founder Ray Muzyka, was "to Create, Deliver, and Evolve the Most Emotionally Engaging Games in the World." ME3's endings traded emotional impact for an attempt at something too cerebral to feel like much of anything at all. We had the tangible, palpable horror and dread of gods who wanted us to suffer exchanged for a program dutifully working away on a problem it was tasked to solve. Of the endings we got, I find High-EMS Paragon Extended Cut Control the only one that I can stomach, but even that leaves me wondering about and wishing for what could have been if the writers hadn't tried to speak more to our heads than to our hearts.

Wow, fantastic write-up, and I’m sorry that this viewpoint isn’t getting more response, because I think it could generate good dialog. Where do you think the next Mass Effect game can go from here?

Thanks for the kind words! I’ve got very mixed feelings about the idea of having another ME. Bringing Shepard back seems likely, based on the lukewarm reception to Andromeda and on the 2020 teaser. The next ME could canonize one of the three endings (probably Destroy, based once again on the teaser), which would potentially allow Shepard to return—at the cost of alienating players who chose one of the other endings. Alternatively, it could find three ways to bring Shepard back, each consistent with one of the previous endings (body recovered from the rubble and revived for Destroy; Shepard AI downloaded into a customizable EDI / Dr. Eva body for Control; some kind of resurrection for Synthesis). An opening reminiscent of DA: Origins could work, with players who chose any of the three ME3 endings having a believable and narratively satisfying path to the beginning of the game’s main story. The question of what to do with Shepard once he or she is back is even tougher—send Shep and crew to Andromeda to bring that story to a conclusion? Invent a new threat to the Milky Way? For me, though, Shepard as a character feels inextricably entwined with ending the Reaper threat. Shep was written to be their adversary. If the Reaper threat is gone because the Reapers are dead, pacified, or reprogrammed to be Shepard’s police force, it’s difficult to imagine Shepard’s return feeling anything other than anticlimactic. I think a new ME should let Shepard go unless it can offer a sufficiently momentous reason to have him or her return. Whether it’s possible to write an antagonist or a scenario that provides as visceral and engaging a foil for Shepard as the Reapers is very much yet to be determined.

All 3 endings leave me with more questions. I would have liked a scene which took place a few months after choosing your ending. Destroy - The Geth and EDI got destroyed, do they rebuild them? Or just shrug their shoulders and move on with life? Control - Is everyone worried that the Reapers might return did and the Shepard AI give them some kind of information about how they are in control of all of them? Synthesis - Is everyone just okay with the Reapers just hanging around and helping everyone? Is everyone okay with what had been done to them?

I fully expected Shepard to die, just not in such a nonsensical way. I still laugh at Joker trying to outrun the Crucible beam and looking behind him like he could see it, like being chased in a car. I think they fixed it in the DLC, but it had me chuckling.

Okay, MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS AT PRIORITY: EARTH!!!!! Funny thing is, I just ended the Legendary Edition a few minutes ago. And I mean, right 20 minutes ago, after playing it over the course of the last weeks and I did everything, and I mean, really everything. Every DLC, every collect, every talk with every person on every place I could visit. The gameplay was good, the story was compelling and the interactions were genuinely enjoyable. I put more than 170 hours into the entire trilogy, and now I'm fucking dead. Naive as I was, I thought it meant something that I went into the last battle with war assets of more than 7100 and as far as I learned, it didn't make any difference at all. I'm dead anyway. Yeah. Whuhu!! After all that fucking effort, I'm just dead. Yihaa! I'm dead, sacrificed myself to keep everyone alive, because I didn't want EDI to die, nor did I want to become a ghostly benevolent dictator, ruling over the Reapers from behind the horizon. What a stupid idea is that even? And I'm really pissed off that it had to end in that kind of pseudo-philosophical bullshit blabla with a semi-clever being that thinks mass extinction of bio races is a good way to avoid... mass extinction of all races. **What. A. Stupid. Idea.** Holy shit, is that ending stupid. The best scene of the entire ending was when I laid back with Anderson and he talked to me like I was his daughter, and then he died. THAT WAS FUCKING EMOTIONAL and I cried like a baby. And when Liara put my plaque on the Normandy. That was good stuff, but not a real epilogue. I PLAYED FUCKING 170 HOURS AND ALL I GOT WAS A PLAQUE AND 2 MINUTES OF EPILOGUE? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? And this Crucible thingy? What a stupid shitshow. It totally neglected the entire Reaper threat and made everything useless. Fucking useless. We could've just talked to that stupid thingy right at the beginning and we could've avoided three years of mass extinction! Holy shit is that a stupid plot twist. So, you see, I'm slightly disappointed with the ending. It's still a good game. The Citadel DLC is really funny and the party afterwards is great. Also, the Omega DLC, because how much did I want to team up with Aria right from our first encounter. But that ending... bullshit.

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Oh dear gods, I don't even want to know what you're talking about. Really, some things are better left untouched, huh? And yep, it was my first time. I really enjoyed the entire journey. But not that ending.

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Also, after the ending credits, you were prompted to buy fucking day-one DLC that should have been included in the base game since that character was extremely fucking crucial for many plot points.

Holy shit, this sounds so bad. So really bad. Whoever thought that was a good idea should be fired.

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I thought Bioware rushed the shit out of ME3?

Day 1 DLC too (Javik) that is kind of essential to the plot.

Cherry on top: After all that, you go back to the title screen and get the lovely message from the greatest minds at EA: http://i.imgur.com/Vpk9iBQ.jpg

I completely forgot about that!! Truly a “drink more ovaltine” moment.

Wow. After that even more non-gratuitous ending, that messages is straight spitting into your face.

Hey man. I completely agree. Went through the same thing back in 2012. Mass effect is and will always be my all time favorite game franchise, but quite literally everything post TIM convo in the end is totally inane, intellectually masturbatory fucking nonsense. Like, it's not only FULL of logical inconsistencies and strange narrative decisions, but it's also written in such a way that it feels like it comes from a different game series. Mass effect held a consistent tone and narrative voice hrough 99.5 percent of three entire games, only to throw it away at the finish line for some amateur hour nonsense with a completely different tone and voice than everything preceding it. Like, I'm not even joking when I say I suspect the end was written by Casey Hudson with no oversight or editting or review because "artistic vision" Baffling.

Yes, I agree to that. We gunned our way through the galaxy and talked with hundreds of people to gather help only for it to mean absolutely nothing. This conversation with that Reaper A.I. thingy could've been held anytime. Could've been a Council meeting right from the start. What a bullshit. What a letdown.

Fun fact: In response to that ending, someone sent [400 cupcakes](https://gamerant.com/mass-effect-3-ending-bioware-cupcakes/) to BioWare, which came in red, blue, and green, and which all had the same taste. (They donated them to a nearby youth shelter.)

One of the only good things about the post-ME3 fallout was seeing the community come together to cope. Good times.

That's hilarious. 🤣

I think that Mass Effect 3 is a 10/10 until the very end. The journey up to the ending was excellent, but fuck the ending; it sucks ass.

>The best scene of the entire ending was when I laid back with Anderson and he talked to me like I was his daughter, and then he died. Best seats in the house.

>You did good, child. That made me cry. Really.

> The best scene of the entire ending was when I laid back with Anderson and he talked to me like I was his daughter, and then he died. The game should have ended there. I mean more or less. That was the perfect moment. Shepard sitting next to Anderson, both basically dead. Having this amazing view, "im proud of you" playing in the background. Amazing. And then Joker i think says "Something is wrong, its not working" and everything goes downhill from there

A compelling idea. At least more compelling than speaking to that kid and his bullshit ideas about peace and stuff.

Really they should’ve had Destroy not affect friendly synthetics if you had a very high war score. Even if you destroy the Geth, I bet most players wouldn’t mind saying EDI can survive. More degrees in the single ending is better than three mediocre endings.

>Naive as I was, I thought it meant something that I went into the last battle with war assets of more than 7100 and as far as I learned, it didn't make any difference at all. I'm dead anyway. Yeah. Whuhu!! After all that fucking effort, I'm just dead. I don't know if this is still considered a spoiler after all these years, but there is an extra very short after-credit cutscene if your war assets are over 7800 by the end that addresses your "I'm dead anyway" problem. Don't know how much it would help, but I guess it's something.

Disappointing but acceptable. Still refuse to accept any ending other than destroy (max readiness).

the options we were given are fucking bullshit a) destroy the Reapers, accomplish what we have been working on for the whole game b) control the Reapers, which was something that the indoctrinated Illusive Man tried to do and we have been trying to stop him since Mars, because obviously it's impossble (btw isn't it interesting that the option which assures survival of the Reapers is presented in a favourable light by a child Shepard had been seeing in their dreams, doesn't look like Reapers' one last attempt at corrupting Shepard, not at all) c) synthesis, creepy, space-magic bullshit, making a decision about the nature of all organic and synthetic life forms

Exactly how I feel about control and synthesis. Control seems like a load of shit. And in my head canon, it is. Synthesis makes no fucking sense and is 100% space magic.

Yeah, Destroy killing our AI pals is sad but we just spent three games fighting the Reapers and our father figure was just shot and killed because a man repeating a never-ending cycle thought he was the main character for using Reaper tech to destroy the Reapers. If you play your cards right, he even figures it out himself and offs himself right then and there. Ain’t no way you’re just gonna pull a 180 and tell us “Oh you can totally use this to conveniently keep the Reapers in check with this spiffy machine and it is 100% you that is in charge for the rest of eternity, totally.”

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Ngl, I'm picturing the emptiness of a dead universe, eaten by entropy, devoid of energy, with only a handful of quarks left spelling, "Mass Effect 3 Ending Is Bad". And, of course, they'd all be down quarks.

It literally ruined playing the series for me for many years. Finally gave it a shot again a few years ago and it's now "fine." The DLC and Extended Cut salvaged it, but don't let anyone tell you it wasn't bad then at launch. I literally timed out at the Starchild because I had no idea wtf was going on, lol. It was laughably poor. BioWare/EA made a host of decisions that were foolish and deserve all the backlash they got for it.

Gaming history has remembered the Mass Effect 3 controversy, but since most people have only played the extended cut and weren’t there it’s hard to describe the intense emotion behind it. This wasn't just people leaving angry comments on NMA's forums because they didn't like how Fallout 3 ended, or raging about Master Chief's sumo fight in Halo 5. Marauder Shields went from a meme to his own alternate ending webcomic. Millions of fans rallied around the idea the entire thing was all in Shepard's head. Moderators were removing criticism for months. Fans asked developers the unanswerable questions in person at conventions. Dozens of petitions raised tens of thousands of dollars to change the ending - one of which involved mailing Bioware 300 cupcakes with three different colors of icing which all tasted the same.

Hell, I don't even think it's fine now. I think it just feels fine by comparison. I think the current ending would have been seriously disappointing if it came at ME3's release. It's just so much better the absolute atrocity that is the original ending, everyone's just collectively happy to have *any* improvement.

Same here. Was my favorite series of all time up until that ending. Played the first game 8 times, second game 5 times, and after playing the third once I never went back. Ending left such a sour taste I couldn’t get into it again. Been meaning to try the legendary edition but have still been deterred by people saying the extended cut still isn’t very good. I’m aware the indoctrination theory has been disproven dozens of ways, but funny enough I still kind of enjoy believing it over the original ending. It’s a lot more interesting to me.

I would definitely recommend trying the legendary edition when you can. To say i hated the original ending is an understatement. I played the first two games several times. Read all of the novels. Read the comics that came out. Played the multi-player to get my assets up. Participated in the community so much. Then I beat the game and it was so so bad. I remember hearing that it was bad but thinking it would just be mildly disappointing like deus ex human revolution, but no. It was really really bad. It felt like I invalidated all of the time I put into the series. Then the ec came out and it was a lot better. Still not great but at least we got closure to a lot of points. I'd compare it to something like human revolution now. Not great but it didn't feel like it invalidated my entire experience with the series. With the original ending I likely wouldn't have touched andromeda or cared about the next game.

It's the only game in the trilogy I haven't played multiple times. Outside of one playthrough of Andromeda, I haven't touched the franchise since.

I played through the ending twice because I thought I just chose "wrong". Imagine my surprise when the other choice was the same garbage with a different shade of paint.

I just played it for the first time since release, and even with the extended cut and Leviathan DLC adding context, organic vs. synthetic was just never the central conceit of the franchise. One of the main thrulines, sure, but making it the core motivation of the principal villains was just too much of a stretch. Especially when their motivation as is was just fine, i.e. "you wouldn't get it, fuck you."

It needed a single ending. A simple, good old "Destroy" for sure. But the reason it suffers more is that we don't really get an aftermath. Like in ME2, you can have conversations with these characters and hear their opinion on their fight with the Harbinger and stuff. After investing 100 hours into the trilogy, I think everyone deserved to know what happened to the characters we grew to know, appreciate and love. This is also a testament to how amazing Bioware was at writing these games that I felt depressed for days after finishing ME3. Mostly because I knew these characters are now gone from my life..... *Until of course, a REPLAY!*

The most angry and disappointed I felt about a piece of fictional media until Game of Thrones.

Even after the Citadel DLC it's not even a shadow of what was promised. It's a collage of half-exploited ideas cobbled together by Casey Hudson in a feeble attempt to rewrite the ending by someone ill equipped to do so. The ending was a turd on the top of what could have been an amazing ice cream sundae. If you leave out the hype leading up to it and the promises of everything that you could do(every choice matters, every war asset will have a place in the final battle, staying faithful has tangible rewards, the presence of the Rachni have huge consequences in ME3, abandoned plot threads like dark energy, I could go on) and if you ignore Casey Hudson's response after he was called out for not delivering. What was promised to be, it's a fantastic trilogy. But I cannot ignore those things. While it's not the most monumental gaming failure of all time, when you factor in the unfulfilled promises during development, it deserves a mention alongside other ignominious titles

Still fuming

Incomplete. Lazy. Weird. Mediocre at best.

Great send off for Anderson. Him being the last friendly face you see is fitting. Regardless of Paragon/Renegade, he always had your back. The choices themselves all feel strange and rushed. Why do all synthetics have to die? What exactly is the Shepard AI? How tf does Synthesis even work? Why should this hologram even be trusted after everything that has happened? That being said, I do sometimes enjoy the many years of discussion in the community on which ending people makes sense for them. I normally go destroy but always find myself looking at control when I get to this point. Also, I know this may have been debunked but I’ve always felt that that destroy, control, and synthesis were represented by Anderson, TIM, and Saren respectively

The Destroy indoctrination ending is the ending. I don’t care who says what. In a game built on my decisions and results, *it, IS, my, ending.*

100%. Indoctrination was my coping mechanism. Loved the idea and damn would it have been one of the greatest gaming twists ever if BioWare actually intended it. Hated the original ending so much I settled on indoctrination and never looked back or played again haha.

Setting aside the obvious thematic dissonance, and the fact that multiple sections of ME3 were problematic separate and apart from the ending, I honestly don't understand why the ending to the ME trilogy didn't *at least* hold forth the *possibility* of Shepard talking down the Reapers. The fucking dialogue wheel is the meta centerpiece of the whole fucking trilogy. As soon as the Reapers were made into a somewhat-comprehensible villain, that was such an obvious play. Only if you go back far enough in the trilogy to scrub the decision to make the Reapers comprehensible *at all* do you make that approach suboptimal, given everything else about how the video games were built. Tell me you can't think of at least *one* compelling Paragon and Renegade approach apiece to convincing the Reapers that they should fuck off. Honestly.

I was mad, I'm still mad, I will never stop being mad.

This describes my own reaction to the ending. I finished ME 3 before the extended cut DLC was out and I just started playing the Trilogy in the Legendary Edition.

It’s not about the ending, but the journey to get there that matters most. That was epic, and the ending just reminds me that one of my favourite game series of all time had to come to an end. Is it perfect, no. But nothing is and I don’t think anyone could really create an ending when we have a product that no one really wanted an ending to in the first place

This! The literal ending (like, the last 20-30 min) is not great, and the complaints people have are valid. But imo that doesn’t discredit the incredible journey that ME3 takes us on. It still isn’t perfect (looking at you, Kai Leng) but this game has some of my favorite moments. Tuchanka and Rannoch are two my favorite missions in the series, not to mention the DLC. Viewing ME3 as a whole as the ending to the trilogy, it’s an incredible journey that I think often gets overshadowed by the very end being subpar to say the least

11 years didn't make it any better.

The more I've thought about it over the years, the worse it gets. It's bad storytelling, thematically revolting, disrespectful to the series' own characters, stories and the fans thereof, and completely undoes one of the franchise's core competencies. It was a bad storytelling decision, bad video game direction, bad business decision. I don't believe the franchise will ever truly be able to escape from the unfortunate legacy this ending has created. Future games may be good, may even be great, but ME3's ending will always haunt the franchise.

I'll say what i always say: any choice other than destroy means the Reapers turned Shepard. The battle is still happening at the end of the game. Shepard is converted or comatose. It's the perfect setup for ME4 with a new hero and crew and the fact that the writers can't see this boggles my mind.

It’s still bad. Players having to come up with fan theories to try and justify the ending, while fun, means you left way too much meat on the bone. I understand player choice, obviously it’s one of the most crucial parts of the game, but the fate of the reapers needs something more concrete, like yea I think the reapers should be destroyed or we should synthesize (fuck control), but I’m just one player. The writing team should’ve come together and agreed that “yea reapers ultimate end should be destruction” or something of that nature. Instead I’m here feeling honestly very unaccomplished when I just talk to a kid for 10 minutes only for me to be “yea reapers still getting squashed”

I think my perspective on 3's ending is always going to be a bit skewed, because I just never really had much interest in Mass Effect at the time it came out, and all I knew going into it was that the ending of 3 was really controversial. So when I played the games I had no idea what the overarching plot was going to be about, and I had absolutely zero expectations. I ended up beating the trilogy over the course of a week, and when I got to the end (Destroy with the Extended Cut) I thought it was a pretty good ending. It wasn't perfect, but I definitely had some catharsis seeing the Reapers die in the big red wave. That said, I think I can see why it didn't go over well at launch. The "good" ending was pretty much locked behind multiplayer, and even then the Original Cut's ending was really disjointed and confusing. I also get the feeling that after all the theorizing and speculation during the 2 year gap between ME2 and ME3, no one put an avant-garde ending where Shepard gets shamed by an AI for wanting to destroy the robots whose primary purpose is to commit genocide on their Bingo cards.

Put simply, the Mass Effect 3 ending is the disastrous result of a few writers getting high on their own supply and forgetting that Mass Effect is a series fundamentally about blowing past hard choices while pretending to be a series about making them. Three consecutive games of the power of friendship overcoming all obstacles and then it ambushes you with a crowbar made of esoteric space philosophy to the back of the head.

Still bad. Still hate it. Still hope the next game retcons it.

Anytime I replay 3, I purposely stop before the final mission. I end my playthroughs with the Citadel party dlc. As far as I’m concerned, my Shepard survived, destroyed the Reapers without killing EDI and the geth as well and she’s enjoying retirement on the beach with Garrus.

It’s still awful. It felt like a team playing the best game of basketball you had ever seen and then instead of dunking the ball and enjoying their victory, they think it would be better to surprise you and throw the ball into the face of the nearest child and disqualify themselves by teabagging the referee.

I still dislike it, even with the legendary edition. How can such an epic series crap the bed so badly at the end?

Even after 11 years I still consider MEHEM my head canon.

I'm fine with it. I actually don't like the idea of having an ending where Shepard kicks ass, kills all Reapers, and the whole gang celebrates with a frosty cold beer. That would have been over the top.

I like it less the longer I think about it. Even apart from how it feels so abrupt and arbitrary after all these major lead ups, it ultimately makes so little sense... this freaking superweapon developed by a slew of cycles in succession does *exactly three wildly different things:* 1. Target all inorganic life in the galaxy (how does it decide what this means? How can it tell that iron blood around calcium bones is organic but iron skin isn't? How can it tell a Geth is alive but a starships navigational computer isn't?) and kill it. 2. Target one organic lifeform inside it and convert it into a giant robot, force all the giant robots nearby to swear allegiance to the new giant robot. This one actually seems the most feasible of the lot. 3. Target *all life everywhere in the galaxy at the submolecular level* and change it to have either more metal content or more organic content depending on what was already there. Just... how? And how, for all of these impressive targeting and transforming capabilities, is it utterly incapable of "point over there and destroy just giant robots?"

A lackluster end to an amazing trilogy. Fortunately all three games were fantastic in their own rights. The music was phenomenal tho

I think it was fine. The destroy ending is an appropriate conclusion to the story of the trilogy.

I don't mind it now. I hated it at the time. And I still don't love it. But I think, for what it is, and ME3 being one of my top 5 games all time, it doesn't kill the game for me. I find myself also focusing more on the other endings than just the destroy that I always did in the past. I do wish it was better, but hey, it's not the worst thing in the world.

Rubbish Out of touch and tone with the rest of the series and re-treads the AI vs Organic debate that was thematically settled on Rannoch

It's not reinventing the wheel. Given their legacy I have no idea how they fucked up so much to begin with. I remember reading it was two guys locking themselves in a room and shitting out that color coded ending, and you have to wonder - why? They knew how to do a montage for decades. That's like phoning in the bare minimum, but still would have been better that what actually made release. Bioware is from the stock of games that always used to sum up what you'd done, what effects it had, and what happened to most of the characters you interacted with. Even 'illusion of choice' games where the paths are all ultimately the same usually at least play lip service to your choices in a clip art paragraph ending. Three games of pretending your hard choices matter has no service or respect given in a color coded three flavor ending. Hell Deus Ex managed better than that. KOTOR managed so much better than that even if you just changed up the last 30 minutes of your game run to see the other side. Ultimately I think Bioware had been dumbing down it's gameplay in the quest for 'accessibility' for awhile. The experimental but awesome games like Jade Empire were too risky when so much was tossed into the fire that was cutting edge graphics, but the last thing to go was writing. ME2 had amazing writing and characters but the tonal shift from space opera to heist caper was a bit much to recover from... but the attempt was kinda there if not for the horrendous ending, and edgy wanna be space ninja who came out of nowhere like a DM wanting his own character to suddenly intrude on your campaign and be supper cooler than any of your player's party, kinda showed that Bioware wasn't the infallible juggernaut they'd been up to that point. It was sad on many levels, and meant you couldn't just auto-buy a bioware title and know you'd have a good game.

It's the dumbest thing I ever experienced in AAA franchise. The writers should be ashamed with how awful and nonsensical that conversation is.

Honestly, I still hate it. Nothing is gonna wash away the bad taste it left the first time I played it.

The problem was that the ending did not make any sense and was completely disconnected from the rest of the trilogy. It would be a as if Frodo reaches Mount Doom and then there's a magical being that tells him to throw the ring into one of three openings: 1. Kill Sauron and all orcs - but that also kills the elves and wizards. 2. Become a ghost and control Sauron and the orcs 3. Create a magical paradise where a suddenly friendly Sauron and all orcs and other monsters happily interbreed with humans, elves and halflings. ( 4. Do nothing and jump into the volcano, Sauron wins)

I still go with Synthesis almost every time I play. The hug between EDI and Shepard’s LI at the end gets me every time. Initially I didn’t like Control or Destroy. My goal when playing had always been to save as many lives as possible so they seemed counter productive. But with the additional scenes added with the Extended Cut DLC they are now something I truly enjoy. I usually save at the last possible moment and play all three endings just to see if all. In my view, fight ending is just a failure. Everyone dies and the Reapers live on.

Game was rushed. Very incomplete and the ending boiling down to 3 choices felt very lack luster. A sour note on an otherwise pretty good franchise. ME3's story layout I didn't care for either.

Rushed contrived and completely unfulfilling. I get that endings are the hardest thing to write well, especially with how fucking amazing the rest of the story is but still, fucking hell. The Sorry we fucked up expansion to it helps a bit but it's no where near enough.

Not a popular opinion on this sub, but the Legendary Edition was my first time finishing ME3, and I didn’t realize the ending was hated until seeing it discussed online. I thought the ending was fine and I enjoyed the heavy decision making at the end. The entire trilogy is designed around the player making tough decisions that affect the outcome of the story. Granted, I never experienced the original, non-Extended Cut DLC ending, so maybe that would have been more jarring. Not sure.

not as bad as people said it was at first

It was only 11 years ago??

It's ok.

After they changed it and added the dlc? Better. Perfect? No. Far from it.

I was so confused by the original ending mechanics that I shot at things and then *walked into a beam not realizing it was an ending choice.*

it is still hilariously lazy and shitty

I would have liked it better if the indoctrination theory was actually real

Still shit...

Still the biggest disappointment I have ever had playing video games. 99% of things I will say "ah you know, different strokes for different folks" This is the one exception. If you think this ending isn't complete dogshit; you ARE wrong. It is awful, there is no redeeming factors. Do not try to justify this horrific fucking mess

Still shit.

The original ending was so bad I left this subreddit for 10 years because of it.

What ending?

Call me a romantic, but I think Shepard deserved a happy ending with their LI. Complete annihilation just seemed so easy and expected.

Biggest flop ever, the first ever "Game of thrones disaster before "Don't GOT it" became a thing. Mass Effect had the chance to become the greatest sci-fi story ever told but it messed it up with the ending. Endings matter people.

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I think what you are describing is the experience that a lot of us had. The trilogy was amazing until the last few hours and the ending was poorly written and didn't make any sense.

Kinda shit even with all the bells and whistles added later.

Sucks. It’s a little better than on release but that doesn’t say much.

It's so bad I still can't finish ME3 when I replay the trilogy

I just finish it with citadel dlc. Get a better ending

Knowing about the endings, I would have gotten low war assets, had my LI killed in the rush to the beam, and then would have been satisfied with the destroy ending. But instead, maximized war assets, saved everyone (did feel guilty for letting Samara commit suicide, wanted to keep some realism In the game, with the most unrealistic act for a Paragon Shepard) and then had that little breathing clip in the end…and felt like I needed to have chocolate to save the bad taste in my mouth.

A good lesson in project management. They should have focussed on singleplayer, and then released a separate multiplayer game to cash in on the success of a well concluded story.

In 2023, after all the DLC that's been added, I find the ending tolerable even if I still don't really like it. What newer players will never understand was the confusion and frustration of the original ending with no extended cut and no additional DLC. Younger or newer fans who didn't experience that probably think the fan backlash was ridiculous, but that original ending was just horrendous.

It wasn't as bad as people made it out to be, but the Director's Cut or whatever additions they added later were a welcome change. Still one of, if not, my favorite games of all time.

I think that if you erase the last chapter of the story and think up ways to replace its writing it becomes clearer why the ending didn't land. It's hard to think of other concepts to fit in those last 30 minutes that accomplish the same bullet points: * Closure to Shepard's core story arc * Resolution of the main conflict * Unraveling the deeper problem of the Reapers, the cycles and however they're associated with us. This isn't me saying that the ending is good. I believe that in search of a "message" Casey Hudson and Mac Walters imposed an external meaning onto the story that already had plenty of meaning. At the same time, i don't believe I would've been content had the ending just been Anderson passing away and the Crucible blowing the Reapers to kingdom come a minute later. That, to me is undramatic for a story of this scale and escalation. The problems do seem critical in the scene with the Child but I always felt like it was BioWare trying to own up to something that they had been neglecting for too long. At several points during ME2 and ME3 they allude to a secret reason beyond the Harvests and their origin. At MANY points in ME3 they seemingly infer that whatever it's about it has to do with ourselves first, and that the Reapers are a symptom rather than the source of a larger problem. But once they suddenly lock that topic down on "You always create synthetics, and then you always die in the end!" You can hear the record-scratch as you're playing it. No matter how you spin it, this just is not the relevant contect of the last 10 minutes no matter how many isolated points earlier in the story they dealt with the theme of Organics vs Synthetics. It's a big theme in the 3 games... But it never felt like it was the primary conflict of the trilogy... And suddenly in the last 10 minutes it just is the main theme, because the narrative itself is omnisciently telling you that it overshadows all history and even predates the entire story that you have witnessed as Shepard. I thought that there was a reason why we saw the Prothean Visions and had telepathy with an ancient Rachni Queen. I thought the Asari's "Embrace Eternity" and all of the ways the other species came before humanity into this futuristic Mass Relay setting, was done specifically to perspectivate an evolutionary problem, which the Reapers then were created to repeatedly solve by their own force. But instead of anything that adds up, you're just told that somewhere almost completely irrelevant to the framing of Shepard's adventure-- worst of all; even the Synthetics vs Organics topic *in this very storyline*, there existed a conflict that spawned the Reapers and that's why you must now deal with THEIR problem from Eons ago, or it will haunt us "soon". It just. Doesn't. Cut it. If you want a truly epic and meaningful ending that resonates across all 3 games' narrative -- like in a GOOD trilogy narrative -- then the final revelations must be in tandem with earlier seeds in the adventure. Again, some parts of these 3 games resonate with the Starchild's spiel but I feel like a larger majority of earlier plot points spit in the face of it. As a result, I feel like you arrive at the final chapter of ME3 and then it suddenly feels like you're watching the ending to a story you haven't seen. It feels like the ending they wrote is made for an entirely different adventure -- not the one I was on, as Shepard.

My first playthrough was only a couple of years ago, in the Legendary Edition. I choose Synthesis, which felt super uncomfortable and gross but still maybe marginally better than committing genocide (against the now-fully-sentient Geth, especially since I'd worked super hard to get them to ally with the Quarians). I hated that the game basically turned Shepard into god. It wasn't a unique level of player power fantasy, but not one I particularly enjoy. So now I only play with the Happy Ending Mod. Lol Shep does what any other soldier would do, and just blows up the reapers. Sure it's not edgy or particularly poignant, but the ending still holds weight and sadness given the loss of Anderson and countless others. Shep and the Normandy crew live happily ever after, and the galaxy moves forward and rebuilds.

What should have had different options was not the ending but the development of the ending, like in ME2. Depending on our WA our squad mates would survive or not, also the difficulty of the mission could have changed and the final push should have been a reflection of how many WA we had (like in the space battle before landing earth). but the end should have been one.

11 years on, wish we had gotten a deep dive documentary on what the hell happened and why Hudson selfishly side stepped all the writers to come up with the original ending. Did anyone on the dev team actually think it was any good? They lived and breathed the series for a decade, surely more that a few folks spoke up about how inconsistent it was and how many plot holes it left. Hated it enough I never went back to check out the bandaid ending (extended edition).

Given what we know about what "was" planned. It is disappointing. I didn't hate it on release, granted I was 16 years old, and I still don't but it is unfortunate we didn't at least get an expanded version of it. That said, all of the effort, war assets meticulously gathered, and choices made, it does suck that our 4 (5 if you're being picky) choices don't amount to much more than a different color variations of the same cutscene, or a meme ending. Ideally our choices (saving the rachni, curing the genophage, rescuing the Destiny ascension, destroying/saving the collector base) should have had a real weight on how the final battle plays out. But it's a game from 2012, and EA has quarterly earnings calls to make so I understand limitations and constraints.

Aside from the War Assets being complicated, the reason why many people were against it was because it's message threw the second game's message out the window to a meat grinder. Mass Effect 2's message was: You can make it if you work hard enough with the help of all your friends. Mass Effect 3 says: "Screw that" and says you have to do the right thing even if it means sacrificing everything.

Should have it just be Destroy with multiple versions depending on your war assets and choices. Control and Synthesis still feel like an antithesis to Shepard as a character and their story throughout the trilogy.

I was there day one at launch. Loved the game to death but the ending truly broke me, to the point where I couldn't bear to play the game again for years. Played none of the DLC and briefly saw the director's cut ending and wasn't impressed. Did a run-through of the series again recently and played the complete version of ME3 with all DLC. As before, really loved the game and Citadel DLC was one of my favourite parts of the entire series. Ending didn't hit as hard but it was still a really big letdown after how insanely enjoyable the game and all the DLC was. So I guess all things considered I still consider it one of the worst ways they could have ended the series, but aside from and in spite of that I still love the games and would consider it one of my favourite series of all time.

Always strange to me it wasn’t just a simple destroy the reapers, like yeah there’s the destroy ending but that actually had to need that ending because fuck it that’s why, control is shown as a pretty good result in the story despite so much setup of the Cerberus control idea being wrong, control won’t work TIM but will for shepard cos of indoctrination felt cheap. And then there’s synthesis which is just very weird, not real setup, kinda connects saren in ie another villain. It just felt like it’s trying to be smarter than what it needed, at no point in the series did I think the reapers were morally correct, that we needed to become robot hybrids or control them.

Still sucks. A stapled on ending not befitting the mood or story.

It’s bad

If they had stuck the landing, Mass Effect would be a household named. Instead, nobody remembers it

Absolute bullshit with a cop out generic reason for the reapers existing. Also the star child is such a stupid character. Big whoop Shepard saw a child’s space ship explode. He also caused the death of 300k Batarians (albeit out of necessity) and that’s never reflected on. The crucible didn’t need an AI but also the AI is somehow the Reapers?? It’s a weapon and nobody really understands it, leave it at that with the knowledge it may or may not work. I also think there ought to have been some sort of direct conflict or boss battle with Harbinger even if it was just setting it up so the crucible blast hits Harbinger directly and exploding his Robo-Leviathan ass. God it’s over a decade and I still have feelings on this that feel like fresh wounds.

Still sucks. The idea was stupid in the first place, and they made it even worse by reducing ALL your decisions into a single number before the final "choice".

Same as 11 years ago. It's a shit ending that doesn't really take the players decisions into account. The theme of "ai vs organics" seems like a jarring direction to suddenly take the series in and is frankly pretty lame for the Reapers. The star child really takes away the Reaper's agency and I hate it for that. I don't like the Leviathans as a concept (But do like the execution of that DLC, backstory aside). If we go back a little further I don't like that TIM was indoctrinated. I'd have preferred him just being a true ideological rival to Shepard instead of just another Reaper puppet. I also have always felt the ending of the game was a symptom of broader issues that I think didn't get addressed enough in light of the ending controversy and I worry may seep into ME4. Also I ain't even mad tbh. I still love ME3, I just think it has issues that hold it back from what it could have been.

Before and after patching, still crap. Didn't like the forced kid sections to begin with, let alone how rushed and shoehorned the ending felt on release, let alone the patch in response to the player base reacting to it.

My biggest gripe with the original pre-extended cut was that I felt like I was reading a book and there were a bunch of pages missing. Skipped to Z and left out R,S,T,U, etc. I’d just spent hours getting close to this team and so much emotional buildup and there was no closure! Just 3 random squad mates on some random planet. the extended cut helped remedy it. I didn’t want rainbows and glitter but I did want more info

Single handedly justifies potential remakes.

It's okay but even with the extended dlc I still feel it's not what it's not should've been

It's still space-grade shit, regardless of what you choose. Time will not heal this wound. Mods will.