Bioware General (Mass Effect/Dragon Age/Other)

[Dragaros]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhtgjmkcht8

"Mass Effect 3 Dev Explains Original Ending Plans, and Why They May Have Used Those Controversial Colours; Shepard could have interacted with the Queen of the Reapers before the final choice."

[Dragaros]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KarASQhk1bw

[Dragaros]

[Dragaros]

[Dragaros]

https://twitter.com/masseffect_peom/sta ... 6040345604

""Quar'osh" (Curse of the People). An interesting piece of (now restored) cut content which reveals that the Reaper Base on Rannoch is the facility where the first ever Geth were created."

https://www.nexusmods.com/masseffect3/mods/974

"The Unofficial Mass Effect 3 Patch (UME3P) fixes bugs, backports changes from the Legendary Edition, introduces soft DLC integration, and restores large amounts of cut content in a careful and selective manner. It also polishes existing content when necessary, in order to provide a smoother game experience and correct minor design flukes."

[Dragaros]

"Beyond The Relays - A Stellaris Mass Effect Mod"

https://www.moddb.com/mods/beyond-the-r ... due-update

[magnuskn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhtgjmkcht8

"Mass Effect 3 Dev Explains Original Ending Plans, and Why They May Have Used Those Controversial Colours; Shepard could have interacted with the Queen of the Reapers before the final choice."

Ugggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. The whole video fucking missed the point, which is that the endings just disrespected the entire story which came before and were actually thematically revolting, which explains all of the fucking backlash. Not that we only got three different coloured endings, fuck. That was just lazyness.

How do you miss a point so fucking thoroughly?

Also, most of the devs sound like total dickheads.

[Alienmorph]

Well... clickbait gonna bait.

Also, looking back at it now, Mass Effect 3 was one of the first modern big story-driven games who lost the plot and got called out massively by its audience. If it came out today, critics and journalists would be as dismissive or downright hostile to the fans' backlash as they have been for the backlash hitting stuff like Last of Us 2. So now I guess we're gonna retroactively pretend that BW did little to nothing wrong, and that we all got usessly angry over a couple of bad visual design choices

[TTTX]

Well... clickbait gonna bait.

Also, looking back at it now, Mass Effect 3 was one of the first modern big story-driven games who lost the plot and got called out massively by its audience. If it came out today, critics and journalists would be as dismissive or downright hostile to the fans' backlash as they have been for the backlash hitting stuff like Last of Us 2. So now I guess we're gonna retroactively pretend that BW did little to nothing wrong, and that we all got usessly angry over a couple of bad visual design choices

from a story point of view ME3 was doomed to fail and that is really thanks to ME2 main plot (and it barely had one) which didn't set anything up for ME3 (I'm not counting the loyalty missions as they are side content).

[Alienmorph]

It is a complicated situation. ME1 and 2 are good stories, if taken one their own, and I still think ME2 is the best game of the bunch. But as a story carried over multiple chapter, yeah... things were very disjointed/poorly planned. The fact the third game starts with the scenario we were told in the previous too was the worst possible one, and from wich there was likely no chance of coming back, only made things worse, as it made inevitable to fudge up the rest of the story with incostistencies (why didn't the Reapers close the Relay network as we were told they did for millions of years during "harvest season"? Because if they did we'd have no game to play) and require some b.s. macguffin or Deus ex Machina to make us able to undo the damage. The fact they didn't even bother to give a more unique visual flavor to the endings originally WAS annoying, but given time and technical limitations, had they delivered a better story, honestly it would have been completely forgiveable.

[Dragaros]

Ugggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. The whole video fucking missed the point, which is that the endings just disrespected the entire story which came before and were actually thematically revolting, which explains all of the fucking backlash. Not that we only got three different coloured endings, fuck. That was just lazyness.

How do you miss a point so fucking thoroughly?

Also, most of the devs sound like total dickheads.

Seizing control of the narrative through deceptive/dishonest/selective means is a popular trick. Similar things are happening in other circles right now; for just one example: Ever since Dread came out, a bunch of Other M apologists have come out of the woodwork from various places online not only attempting to defend the undefendable (there's so many reasons why Other M is a colossal failure of such magnitude it almost killed the franchise that I won't get into them now otherwise I'll be here all night long listing them all) but also trying to re-write history and twist/distort/ignore the issues and points and arguments to create a false narrative that "fake fans" don't truly understand Samus as a character or understand what they are touting to be a tragically misunderstood masterpiece and Nintendo is wrong to distance the franchise from it. It would be funny if it wasn’t so absurd and pathetic and seemingly done with malicious intent to hurt Dread's chances of success or demonize Metroid's most loyal and steadfast fans.

[Dragaros]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gsIS6xNs8Y

[Vol]

The place where the Geth were created is a weird idea for a level. Because it shouldn't matter, or be a single place. The point was that the quarians made the same mistake that organic life always does, automating too much, and creating AI that go rampant. The failure was gradual, over time, by unchecked expansion of the Geth network and complexity, to avoid making an AI, but having no restraint in indirectly creating one. A college lab where some grad students were working on a custom script for a Geth mobile unit to mop floors better was as meaningful as the place where a bunch of nerds started the thing off. The banal actions that lead to the horrible downfall.

[TTTX]

It is a complicated situation. ME1 and 2 are good stories, if taken one their own, and I still think ME2 is the best game of the bunch. But as a story carried over multiple chapter, yeah... things were very disjointed/poorly planned. The fact the third game starts with the scenario we were told in the previous too was the worst possible one, and from wich there was likely no chance of coming back, only made things worse, as it made inevitable to fudge up the rest of the story with incostistencies (why didn't the Reapers close the Relay network as we were told they did for millions of years during "harvest season"? Because if they did we'd have no game to play) and require some b.s. macguffin or Deus ex Machina to make us able to undo the damage. The fact they didn't even bother to give a more unique visual flavor to the endings originally WAS annoying, but given time and technical limitations, had they delivered a better story, honestly it would have been completely forgiveable.

pretty sure most people would have forgiven the ME3 short comings if the ending wasn't so dumb.

[magnuskn]

ME3 has a ton of plot holes and stuff, but until the ending, the mood is so well conveyed that one can completely gloss them over.

If the writers had done their job, we'd have gotten a semi-happy ending (no happy ending will bring back Jokers sister or the other dead people) and then the Citadel DLC as the epilogue for the series and we'd be happily playing Mass Effect 5 now, instead of the franchise hitting a brick wall and then stumbling drunkenly into ME:A where it collapsed into a heap of mediocrity and people not caring about the new setting.

I really wonder who at EA waved that idiotic ending through. Must have been somewhat coked out to their gills, to not see how this would screw up the franchise.

[Dragaros]

"BioWare has no plans to end Star Wars: The Old Republic anytime soon"

"Grab Mounts, Pets, and More in November's SWTOR Events Ahead of Update 7.0's Major Changes"

"Star Wars: The Old Republic Ditching RNG & Changing Gear Upgrades in Legacy of the Sith"

"Star Wars: The Old Republic Raids are Changing in Legacy of the Sith"

"BioWare on the art of telling Star Wars stories for a decade"

[Dragaros]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlvIpD49V8k

[Dragaros]

"Celebrate #N7Day and the enduring legacy of Mass Effect with an equally legendary limited edition art print created by the talented Saren Stone. Alongside two variants, we are offering extremely limited quantities signed by the artist themselves!"

[Dragaros]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atGZ8-GjE1I

[[ In this video we discuss the finale of Mass Effect 2 Legendary Edition with Lead Writer Mac Walters and Character & Environment Director Kevin Meek.

00:00:00 - Start
00:01:37 - A clear point of no return
00:07:13 - The origin of loyalty missions
00:11:47 - Benefits of being forced to have certain party members
00:14:22 - Designing the character selection screen
00:17:50 - Designing ambiguous choices
00:23:01 - Wyatt lets Mordin die
00:25:51 - How gameplay increases urgency
00:30:08 - The design of the Collectors
00:35:13 - Wyatt loses Garrus
00:38:11 - Tour of the Story Manager tool
00:43:59 - Remaster challenges - updating while maintaining bugs
00:49:52 - Design of the Illusive Man
00:53:10 - How the choices in ME2 affect ME3
00:58:17 - What are you most proud of?
01:01:33 - The Opening of ME2 is on Nebula ]]

[Dragaros]

https://streamily.com/MassEffect

https://streamily.com/MarkMeer

https://streamily.com/JenniferHale

https://www.streamily.com/AshSroka

[Dragaros]

Well, well, well. Bioware finally shows off some ending choice data after all these years. The notion that Synthesis is so high? Ugh! Bleh! Bah!

Only 65% import their Shepards? Huh. Weird.

To the 15% who didn't recruit Garrus: ?!?!??

[Dragaros]

https://www.nexusmods.com/masseffectleg ... n/mods/832

https://www.me3tweaks.com/blog/modding/ ... -11-years/



Where there's a will, there's a way.

[Dragaros]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdsX3EcMNHw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKncyXZaq6w

[Dragaros]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkpwVPSEJxQ

[Dragaros]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_JJLuJrPAg

[Dragaros]

[[ "Dark Horse Direct and developer BioWare have revealed a new Mass Effect fine art print of everyone’s favorite Turian, Garrus, for N7 Day. The art for the new high-end print is by Lift Interactive’s Jason Gilliland, and the final piece itself will be 16.5" wide by 24" tall. Each print will also be hand numbered, and orders will be limited as they can only be placed through November 15th at 8PM ET/5PM PT.

As noted above, the new Mass Effect: Garrus Fine Art Print is set to be available through November 15th at 8PM ET/5PM PT. The print is screen printed by Seizure Palace Screen Printing, and is set to ship to customers between January and February 2022. Each print costs $59.99." ]]

[Dragaros]

https://blog.bioware.com/2021/11/07/happy-n7-day-2021/



[[ Join us as we celebrate all things Mass Effect!

It’s been nearly fourteen years since Commander Shepard first boarded the Normandy. Fourteen years since the opening of a huge new universe for players to explore. Fourteen years since “Ashley or Kaidan?” (But if you ask longtime BioWare vets Mac Walters and Mike Gamble, they choose neither, opting instead for Garrus and Liara respectively. Can you blame them?)

Fourteen years can seem like ages, but it can also seem like barely the blink of an eye. That’s one of the reasons we celebrate N7 Day: to pause and take stock; to take a moment to appreciate all things Mass Effect. And there’s a lot to appreciate! So this year, we’d like to invite you to join us on a Mako ride down memory lane as we look at Mass Effect’s past and present, celebrate the wonderful community that makes it so special (that’s you!), and invite you to join us in the celebration with some special N7 Day surprises below.

A DAY FOR LOOKING BACK

The thing about Mass Effect is that it can be a different game for different people. So much of the series is about the personal decisions each player makes, and how that affects the events that happen later. That is, of course, by design — because that’s what we love about RPGs ourselves!

Take Mac for example, who’s worked on the whole series and was most recently the Project Director for Mass Effect Legendary Edition. “It’s about freedom to choose,” he says. “My character. My story. My playstyle. And, naturally, dealing with all the consequences from those choices.”

And Mike, who’s been on the franchise for over a decade and is now Project Director for the next Mass Effect game, feels similarly…though he’s more about that #renegade life. “What I love most about RPGs,” he says, “is to be as morally abhorrent as possible. I want to see how the game reacts to that!”

That focus on personal choice and branching narrative has been a touchstone of the series since the beginning. Well, OK, maybe not the very beginning. In the earliest days of production, Mac says, “there was just the barest idea of what it would be. We knew we wanted a grand space opera with inspiration from ‘80s dystopian sci-fi films. The rest was a blank slate.”

But the key elements of player choice and character development quickly became a crucial part of the game — and then of three more games, loads of expansions, and a huge remaster, over fourteen exciting years. From the first game’s debut in 2007 through to the release of Mass Effect: Andromeda 10 years later, we’ve watched the Mass Effect universe grow from games into novels, comics, statues — even board games. And just this year we returned to the Normandy for a refreshed version of the original trilogy, in the form of Mass Effect Legendary Edition. With massively updated graphics, key control adjustments, important changes to game balance, and a ton of other improvements, the Legendary Edition brought the original trilogy to a whole new generation of players. And the response has been amazing! We’ve been so happy to hear how much these revitalized editions have meant to you, from first-time players to returning veterans.

A DAY FOR LOOKING AROUND

On N7 Day, we celebrate all things Mass Effect — and most importantly, we celebrate you, the fans. This universe wouldn’t be much without you to explore it. You’ve shared with us your love for the series through art, fan fiction, cosplay, and countless other gestures of appreciation that make us feel so grateful, in turn, to have you as fans. So as a token of thanks, we’ll be sharing some of your creations and your celebrations today and in the coming days.

On top of that, we’ve got some other fun stuff lined up for you today. Like…

Steam Stickers! If you’re a Steam user, you may have already noticed the brand-new Mass Effect Stickers available in the Steam store.
Sales! You’ll also find Mass Effect Legendary Edition on sale for a special N7 Day price on Steam, Origin, and the Microsoft Store — but only for a limited time, so get on it.*
Cosplay! Not only do we have brand-new cosplay guides to help you craft the perfect costume, we also enlisted renowned creator Soylent Cosplay to develop a how-to video to walk you step-by-step through one of her legendary Mass Effect costumes.
Contest! Share your best Mass Effect art and get a chance to score sweet loot. Just post on Twitter using the hashtag #BioWareGiveaway for your chance to win.
GIFs! While you weren’t looking, we created a page on Giphy specifically for Mass Effect GIFs. Now the crew of the Normandy can help you say what mere words cannot.

Gear! It wouldn’t be N7 Day without some swanky new accessories. Hit up our own Gear Store for replicas, prints, and apparel; the Dark Horse store for amazing prints; Graph MKT for slick street wear; PowerA for custom controllers, NZXT for the perfect N7 PC case accessory, and Idea Planet for your very own Citadel.
More Social Stuff! Want to share your love for Mass Effect with the world? Try out our new Squadmate AR lens on Facebook and Instagram.
To find the lens:
Visit the @masseffect profile.
Tap the ‘Effects” icon (the three stars), and open the lens
Make sure to use the hashtags #n7day, #N7DayCelebration, #MassEffect, and/or #N7DayArt wherever you post so we can see your contributions!”
We’ve also been super-interested to learn what kind of choices you’ve been making in your own adventures while playing the Legendary Edition. A few months ago we shared some statistics and learned that “Kaidan or Ashley” wasn’t an easy decision for you all either so maybe Mac and Mike were onto something with their choices; 60% of you chose Ashley, while 40% chose Kaidan. For something that makes such an impact through the next two games, that’s a surprisingly close split. We also learned that Garrus was the most likely to survive the Suicide Mission — but Mordin was the least likely. And he thought you cared!

For this year’s celebration, we dove even deeper into how you navigated the branching pathways of the series, and we learned some interesting new details. For example, most of you elected to save the Council at the end of the first game — but at 69% to 31%, it wasn’t exactly a foregone conclusion. We also learned that as beloved as Garrus has been through the years, a surprising 15% of you didn’t recruit him to your team at all! Perhaps less surprisingly, you folks were not fans of Ambassador Udina; given the option to select the first human Councilor, he finished a distant third…behind “no choice.” Ouch.

The results are fascinating across the board, so take a look at the whole lineup:

AND A DAY FOR LOOKING FORWARD

N7 Day has also often been a chance to talk about the future, both for Mass Effect and for the games industry as a whole. This year, looking forward is even more valuable, as we celebrate another N7 Day during a global pandemic that impacts pretty much everything about the industry and the people in it.

“I can’t wait to answer fans’ questions in person!” Mac says. “Whether it’s panels, or signings, or BioWare Base…it’s always fun to just be in the room with the fans and let them ask whatever they want.”

“Meeting franchise fans is always cool,” agrees Mike, “and it’s good to see how the games have impacted people’s lives. Personally though, I miss the cosplay. I remember at San Diego Comic Con a number of years back, how many groups of Mass Effect cosplayers there were. I want to see that continue. And hopefully, we can create new characters that everyone will love and continue the tradition.”

We are, of course, hard at work on the next adventure in the Mass Effect universe. Until then, please accept our most humble thanks to you for accompanying us on this journey. We know we couldn’t do it without you — on N7 Day, or any other day." ]]

[Dragaros]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXlwXxJzsFw

[Dragaros]

https://www.ea.com/games/mass-effect/ma ... lay-guides

[Dragaros]

"It’s N7Day! To celebrate, try our new AR lens that tells you which Mass Effect squadmate you are."

"Meet the modders who restored Mass Effect's lost DLC; Pinnacle Station was left out of Mass Effect Legendary Edition, so the ME3Tweaks team spent months bringing it back."

"Mass Effect 3 Citadel DLC was "a love letter to the fans" according to voice actor Jennifer Hale"

"Mass Effect N7 Day: Jennifer Hale and Mark Meer on Commander Shepard's enduring legacy"

"Commander Shepard actors Jennifer Hale and Mark Meer want to come back for Mass Effect 5"

[Deano]

[Dragaros]

Next Mass Effect teaser

As to what that crater is supposed to literally be, I can't say, but the symbolic shape of that crater looking like a geth is not lost on me. Reapers dead from last teaser, Geth teased to be back in this one. Destroy ending confirmed but with the geth-genocide undone?

That ship design is interesting, but its not as sleek as the Normandy or the Tempest.

Out of those figures, the red one looks like a krogan but I can't make out the others.

[Mazder]

As to what that crater is supposed to literally be, I can't say, but the symbolic shape of that crater looking like a geth is not lost on me. Reapers dead from last teaser, Geth teased to be back in this one. Destroy ending confirmed but with the geth-genocide undone?

That ship design is interesting, but its not as sleek as the Normandy or the Tempest.

Out of those figures, the red one looks like a krogan but I can't make out the others.

I mean if we WANT to get into tinfoil hat territory I can 100% see like some Geth not given the upgrade in time and was just on a deactivated server somewhere.
Another theory I just had off the top of my head, either Geth uploaded into Andromeda Initiative hardware and now are going to occupy the Remnant, or SAM is part Geth, or the Benefactor was the Geth (and uploaded themselves into AI hardware).

Looks like 1 Krogan, 1 maybe Turian and 2 other human-like, maybe one is Liara so maybe it's the team from the Trailer?

[Alienmorph]

Resurrecting the Geth in a post-Destroy setting sure has some... interesting implications. Imagine siding with the organics against the Reapers, only to be caught in the crossfire and killed anyways. If there was like a surviving backup population of Geth, or if somebody managed to bring them back... then what would happen? I would not be shocked if they went back being the bad guys, or chose to become completely isolationist, even more so than how they did after the Morning War. There's some decent plot potential in there, already.

[Dragaros]

I mean if we WANT to get into tinfoil hat territory I can 100% see like some Geth not given the upgrade in time and was just on a deactivated server somewhere.
Another theory I just had off the top of my head, either Geth uploaded into Andromeda Initiative hardware and now are going to occupy the Remnant, or SAM is part Geth, or the Benefactor was the Geth (and uploaded themselves into AI hardware).

Looks like 1 Krogan, 1 maybe Turian and 2 other human-like, maybe one is Liara so maybe it's the team from the Trailer?

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if BioWare's like "the geth had a secret underground bunker were back-ups of their software were safely stored away that was so well isolated and protected not even the anti-synthetic red death wave could fry their systems, so the geth are still alive, but are vulnerable in their current state so its a race to find them, as whoever finds them first holds their fate in their hands."



Is that Legion's dead platform? Is this Rannoch?

[Spartanburger]

Is that Legion's dead platform? Is this Rannoch?

There's other bodies there too.

We're still so far off from anything resembling a game that it's almost pointless to speculate at this point, but I find it really fucking funny that the Geth-Shaped crater has fucking lens flares etched into the ground.

Ugggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. The whole video fucking missed the point, which is that the endings just disrespected the entire story which came before and were actually thematically revolting, which explains all of the fucking backlash. Not that we only got three different coloured endings, fuck. That was just lazyness.

How do you miss a point so fucking thoroughly?

Also, most of the devs sound like total dickheads.

It's frustrating as all hell. I sympathize with the developers - from the perspective of a creative, the kind of backlash they got is traumatizing. If your criticism makes the creator not want to create any more, consider rewording. Sure sure, maybe they need to grow a spine, but you don't get to decide how the things you say are interpreted, you don't get to decide if someone else feels hurt or insulted - you only can control what you say, and how you react to feedback. And regardless of the quality of the ending, considering the time constraints that ME3 was developed under, I think it's a wonder that the game ended up being as good as it was.

Regardless of all that, the ending is still:

Thematically Revolting - failing to grasp or understand the themes present in the previous 2.9 games, be them the ideologies of renegade and paragon, or any of the themes from the characters and stories, the main one of which imho being that 'differences between individuals/groups/governments/species exist and they have driven us to conflict in the past but they need not condemn us to conflict in the future, and despite that, we are stronger together and do not need to sacrifice our individuality or that which makes us who we are in order to work together.' If someone brings up that side quest in ME1 on the Citadel with the AI gambling and claims that's effective thematic foreshadowing I'm going to fucking scream.

Insulting to the universes characters, stories, and fans thereof by completely undermining many of the stories the characters go on, such as Legion, and the entire thing around the Quarian/Geth conflict.

Ineffective and just plain bad storytelling - Don't even get me started. There's so many elements here to examine and it's just not good

Undermines the franchises core competency - the franchise stood unique in that each game was so much of a continuation of the previous one by continuing the stories presented before and maintaining the choices and actions taken. Each game released retroactively made the past games better, and each previous game makes each following game better. This was relatively unique to the game and made it so much more than the sum of its parts, but by introducing a canonical hard stop, all that is thrown out the window in an instant.

Harms the franchise's ability to continue into the future - see above, it creates a hard stop that is extremely difficult to work around without either making prequels, or distancing oneself significantly from the events of the ending

Qualitative statements cannot be defined in objectivity so subjectivity is inherently implied blah blah but my point still stand.

The fact that they still to this day just not seem to get it makes my eyes roll so hard that I can see the back of my skull. I'm still excited and hyped, but just the same for as I was with Andromeda. I'd much rather get excited and let down than never feel excitement ever again. Won't pre-order, won't obsess, but will still look forward to it. It's Mass Effect - ME3's ending was abject garbage, but it's my fucking garbage god damn it and I'm here for the ride, no matter where it takes me.

[Vol]

Only krogan with red armor like that was Wrex, and he should still be alive 5 centuries forward, right? I think they said krogan could live well past asari if they don't get killed, but don't remember an upper limit.

First thing I noticed was the cracks on the right side, call it a Rorschach test, but I can see a Reaper ship in the geology. With the dead mobile platforms, and the mystery goo (Dark matter plot at last?), and the symbolism of the Geth head...I have no idea what the story could be. Heh.

Backed up by the data posted above, probably Destroy ending, as Synthesis would be very weird. And to "resurrect" the Geth, you literally only need 1 copy of the source code on some storage device, anywhere in the galaxy. Since the wave didn't fry out all electronics, only Reaper tech, should be tons of them, if that's the way they're heading. Not sure what you'd do with that tho.

@Spartan: Yo! Hope you're doing well, through these tough times, man.

[magnuskn]

Resurrecting the Geth in a post-Destroy setting sure has some... interesting implications. Imagine siding with the organics against the Reapers, only to be caught in the crossfire and killed anyways. If there was like a surviving backup population of Geth, or if somebody managed to bring them back... then what would happen? I would not be shocked if they went back being the bad guys, or chose to become completely isolationist, even more so than how they did after the Morning War. There's some decent plot potential in there, already.

At first I was like "This surely is the crater Commander Shepard left as he surfboarded a piece of Citadel debris down to Earth, while biotic charging the planet"

But, yeah, Geth. Which is good, because I like the silly robots. And, yeah, they probably are going to be a bit salty to have been the sacrificial lamb to get rid of the Reapers. But, yay, we really are going with Destroy. Not that I didn't say from the beginning that it would be the only viable ending of the three.

It's frustrating as all hell. I sympathize with the developers - from the perspective of a creative, the kind of backlash they got is traumatizing. If your criticism makes the creator not want to create any more, consider rewording. Sure sure, maybe they need to grow a spine, but you don't get to decide how the things you say are interpreted, you don't get to decide if someone else feels hurt or insulted - you only can control what you say, and how you react to feedback. And regardless of the quality of the ending, considering the time constraints that ME3 was developed under, I think it's a wonder that the game ended up being as good as it was.

Yeah, I get that. One still would think that they might have done some introspection in the past decade. Even I did and I acknowledge by now that the rest of the third game, plotholes and all, is pretty good. Only the endings turn it into such a debacle. I might have wanted to have a possibility to win the war conventionally, but they pretty much shot that down already, in the second game, if not even the first.

In honor of N7 day, I'll repost the absolutely amazing post from Strange Aeons back from then after the extended cut came out, when we had all this really good (if furious and disappointed) discussion on the BioWare forums. All of that, wiped away. Although I know the post and discussion still exist as an archive on some other forum. ^^

► Show Spoiler

Part 1: the problem

Well, the results are in: after an unprecedented firestorm of outrage which burned for over three months, the state of the ending has officially been upgraded from incoherent nonsense to coherent nonsense. Despite the flailing efforts of its various apologists to spin straw into gold, Bioware evidently agreed with many of the criticisms directed at the original ending, as some of the roughest edges (e.g., How did your ground team end up on the Normandy? Why was the Normandy fleeing the battle? Why was Hackett talking to Shepard on the Citadel if he thought the whole team had been wiped out? Why didn’t the exploding relays result in cataclysmic destruction like we saw in Arrival?) have been conspicuously sanded away and some of the bleakest lines of speculation (e.g., the whole galaxy will starve to death or collapse inevitably into a dark age since the relays were destroyed) have been explicitly defused. The deeper problems remain, but at least watching it no longer feels like trying to decipher a garbled transmission from deep space; so congratulations, Bioware, on that accomplishment.

Not surprisingly, most of these lingering issues revolve around everybody’s favorite deus ex machina. The main problem with the Catalyst is not so much his presence per se, but rather how he’s utilized in the story. On that front there’s been little meaningful change, except insofar as the new revelations about his past actually succeed in delegitimizing his position even further. That’s not to say that any of this comes as a surprise; on the contrary, the EC is exactly what they said it would be. The fact remains, though, that these are problems that “closure” and clarification simply can’t solve because they represent a fundamental structural defect in the story.

As I’ve already discussed in detail, this situation is nothing like the one you face in Legion’s loyalty mission. Neither, for that matter, is it like Morrigan and her demon baby in DAO. By the time you encounter that particular choice, you’ve had the opportunity to spend nearly the entire game with Morrigan to form your opinion of her. You’ve fought alongside her; seen how she thinks; even potentially romanced her, during which time you’ve been able to discern the cracks in her icy façade and learn that she’s not quite as inhuman as she pretends. If you still don’t trust her, you’re offered a meaningful variety of alternate paths that hinge on other significant choices you’ve made previously. In ME3, on the other hand, if you’re looking for anything sunnier than “rocks fall; everyone dies,” then the Catalyst remains the only game in town. No matter what choices you’ve made, Renegade or Paragon, or what allies you’ve assembled, in the end you’re still compelled to choose your fate from a menu written by your arch-enemy.

The deus ex machina may be a weak and rightfully derided dramatic technique, but at least the playwrights of Euripedes’ day understood their craft well enough to use gods that the audience and characters would recognize, because otherwise their judgment would carry no intrinsic weight. In the case of ME3’s ending, this scenario only works if the player and, by extension, Shepard accepts the authority of the Catalyst. That’s a big problem, because we really have no way of knowing who or what he is and absolutely no reason to believe anything he says. Quite the opposite: based on the available evidence we have every reason to reject both his premise and his proposed solutions. Since our conversation with the Catalyst is purely one-on-one—we can’t go to galactic Wikipedia or bounce ideas off our trusted friends—the only point of reference we have for evaluating his claims is what we’ve witnessed ourselves. How does what he’s describing fit with what we’ve seen previously?

It’s also fair to consider our perspective from the other side of the fourth wall. Video games generally work by teaching you something and then testing you on it. Good games are characterized by a high level of internal consistency with regard to their lessons, although it’s also a matter of practicality. After all, it takes time and money to create content, so the developers typically don’t waste precious resources putting things into games that serve no purpose. It makes sense, therefore, to identify what the designers want you to learn as the things they’ve spent the effort to show you. So what has the Mass Effect trilogy spent significant time and millions of development dollars showing us?

Let's begin by reviewing one more time what we actually know about the situation from Shepard’s perspective. Just as you're about to arrive at the super-weapon that supposedly can destroy the Reapers once and for all, a mysterious entity appears literally out of nowhere. This creature, whose like you’ve never before seen and which has never been referenced previously, claims that it is controlling the Reapers. It assumes a pilfered form in a clear attempt to play on your emotions and proceeds to justify its actions to you, seeking to convert you to its point of view. Then it tries to manipulate you into changing your original plan.

How much of what this strange apparition tells us should we believe? Who knows. If we take his story at face value, then at best he's a rogue AI who defied his creators and enslaved them to his will after they rejected his horrific ethical calculus. He's basically Skynet, except even more dangerous because he has deluded himself into thinking that his tyranny, to steal a phrase from C.S. Lewis, is exercised for the good of its victims. At worst, his designs are even darker than he lets on. Either way, by the time you finish listening to the Catalyst's manifesto, two things ought to be perfectly clear: he's insane and/or lying, and you're insane too if you let this monster guide your actions.

The more we compare this creature’s claims to what we’ve actually witnessed, the less plausible his story appears. For example:

Trying to protect us from synthetics? They allied with the heretic Geth and waged a war to destroy the Citadel races.

Conflict between synthetics and organics is unresolvable? Hey, have you met my friends, the Geth and EDI, yet? Sorry, but Legion couldn’t make it because he was busy sacrificing his life so that his people could break free of the Reapers’ influence and live in peace with us. The Geth/Quarian conflict was unambiguously shown to be a misunderstanding that was mainly the fault of the organics, and it has already been resolved by the time we meet the Catalyst. The other prominent conflicts in the game were all organics fighting among themselves. The games demonstrate to us in no uncertain terms that, far from advancing toward inevitable war, the galaxy is actually converging to a state of greater peace and understanding between synthetics and organics. Of course, you can always speculate that some new conflict will arise in the future, but you can’t very well go around killing everyone now on the mere chance that they might someday pose a threat to you. That’s crazy.

The Reapers are concerned for our welfare? For two full games Sovereign and Harbinger sneered at our pitiful organic inferiority and mocked our inability to comprehend their godlike nature. They crowed gleefully to us about a future in which they would darken the skies of our worlds and extinguish us because they demand it. Harbinger taunted us to the point of self-parody about all the delicious pain he was causing us. For something that’s supposedly as impersonal as a fire, the Reapers take a suspicious amount of satisfaction in tormenting and killing us.

It’s possible for Shepard to control the Reapers? The entire tragic arc of TIM is a parable written to illustrate the folly of this precise idea. From ME2 to ME3 we watch TIM’s descent from a well-intentioned extremist into madness and ruin as he pursues his conceit that Reaper indoctrination and control can be harnessed for our own benefit. Shepard explicitly refutes this idea in ME2, equating it to selling the soul of our species. Literally just prior to meeting the Catalyst we engaged in a protracted argument with TIM on this exact question. So persuasive was Shepard’s contention that attempting to control the Reapers is as futile as it is evil that TIM actually shot himself in the head to escape the horror of what he had become. How much more clearly could the writers possibly spell it out to us that this plan is suicide?

Using Reaper technology to synthesize organic and synthetic life is a desirable outcome? Saren tried fusing himself with Reaper technology and ended up a slave of the Reapers. That was pretty much the main plot of ME1. So did TIM. The Heretic Geth were heretics because they tried to use Reaper technology as a shortcut to enlightenment, and in doing so nearly brought destruction upon their entire race. That’s the whole point of Legion’s arc: there are no easy shortcuts to enlightenment. As the resolution of the Geth/Quarian conflict explicitly demonstrates, meaningful unity comes not by eliminating your differences but through the hard work of choosing to put them aside to become something greater together. Now the Catalyst would have us violate every living thing in the galaxy on a molecular level, rewriting their very DNA courtesy some mysterious technological device to achieve supposed harmony and superiority? Seriously? These are the same creepy arguments that eugenicists once used to justify the notion of perfecting humanity through selective “scientific” breeding, before witnessing their ideology brought to its logical conclusion in the second World War shamed them into abashed silence. This idea, in short, is such appalling lunacy that it doesn’t deserve even the briefest consideration.

And now he’s going to turn the whole operation over to us? We’re expected to believe that the entity who has overseen this relentless, intricate plot of extermination on a galactic scale for eons, who overthrew its own creators rather than allow them to interfere with its plans, is suddenly willing to change course entirely and cede control to one inferior organic meatbag simply because you happened to stumble onto his doorstep?

So what are we to make of this mess? On one hand you have everything that you've witnessed for almost three full games teaching you not just in the abstract but very specifically that the Catalyst's assertions are ridiculous and the solutions he offers are madness. On the other hand you have the word of your genocidal arch-enemy. To be fair, just because he’s a murderous madman espousing a loony, discredited theory like a sandwich-boarded schizophrenic on the street corner doesn’t prove that he’s necessarily wrong on all points. It does mean, though, that you ought to trust him about as far as you would trust SHODAN.

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight it’s possible to dream up any number of wild rationalizations to explain retroactively these contradictions. It’s easy to argue that you knew all along where you were headed once you’ve already arrived at the destination. Shepard, however, doesn’t have that luxury. At the time Shepard faces the Catalyst and he must make this decision with no foreknowledge of the outcome, it all boils down to one question.

Who are you going to believe: the Catalyst, or your lyin’ eyes?

Part 2: the solution

So Bioware’s failure to establish the legitimacy of the Catalyst has left their ending hopelessly broken even with the extra content provided in the EC. That’s a shame, because fixing it would not have been terribly difficult. It’s tempting to lash out against the Catalyst as the primary agent of this disaster, and no doubt there are far batter ways that this scenario could be rebuilt from the ground up, but even relatively minimal changes that left the existing structure of the ending largely intact could have erased the worst of the problems had the writers been willing to put the integrity of the story ahead of their delusions of artistic grandeur.

The key to saving the existing ending would have been letting go of their ruinous love affair with the Catalyst as the solution to all the galaxy’s problems and recasting him decisively as an enemy. Ironically, the spectacular magnitude of the original ending’s failure, which managed the impressive task of violating the story’s internal consistency on virtually every level, would actually help them in this task. Players would no longer need to contort their minds into a pretzel justifying why the Catalyst does not withstand close scrutiny, because he’s not supposed to.

When the player finds himself asking questions like, “why is the Catalyst apparently trying to manipulate me into a ruinous course of action that contradicts every lesson the games have ever taught me? How puzzling! Have I, perhaps, failed to appreciate the author’s complex meditations upon the ambiguities of transhumanism and the futility of conflict throughout this subtle deconstruction of the conventional heroic narrative?”

the answer will be “no, it’s because that’s exactly what he’s doing,”

which, on the whole, seems a lot more satisfying than, “because art.”

This change does raise the question, though, of why he would bother with the elaborate ruse of the crucible in the first place?

It’s simple: because he needs something from us.

When the Reapers, as the Catalyst how admits, discovered the crucible long ago, it came as the first surprise in his long existence.

Hmmm…this thing could have been a real threat, he thought. These organics may be weak and inferior, but they aren’t completely stupid and powerless. We uncovered this plot, but maybe we’ll miss the next one, and then who knows what could happen.

So, instead of burning the whole crucible project to the ground and salting the earth, he used it to his advantage. The devil you know, and all that. Much like the relays and the citadel, the crucible plans are conveniently allowed to be discovered each cycle because they channel the thinking of the advanced races along the well-worn paths of the Catalyst’s choosing.

Meanwhile, this whole episode has taught the Catalyst a valuable lesson. The cycle may no longer be sufficient to ensure order, which means that he must adopt a new strategy. Perhaps in its original form the crucible was merely an exceptionally well-engineered weapon for destroying the Reapers, but after analyzing its design the Catalyst realized that the technology could be put to even greater use. He introduced subtle modifications into the design to nudge future scientists in directions of his choosing—the most important of which was interfacing with the Citadel and the relay network—and allowed the ingenuity of the advanced races do the rest of the work for him. After each cycle he checked on the progress and revised it as necessary.

Why not just build it himself and be done with it if he’s so damned clever?

Maybe he can’t. The Catalyst admits that he once tried to achieve synthesis on his own and, to put it delicately, failed (the horrific details of what this process must have involved are best left to the imagination). He’s certainly far from omnipotent. When he first overthrew and enslaved his creators, he had free reign of the galaxy and yet still proceeded to carry out, more or less, the original task that was given to him. Perhaps some limitation or defect in his design, some lingering technological or ethical constraint placed upon his programming by his creators, restricts his options. Perhaps he too, for all his arrogance, follows the well-worn paths of thinking that have been provided to him by his forerunners.

The final challenge, then, is an ethical test of sorts delivered by the Catalyst. Ostensibly, you’re merely picking one of an amazingly convenient array of magic-button solutions to this crisis. Your real task is to evaluate the Catalyst’s story in light of three games’ worth of evidence and understand that this situation is a trap and that by accepting his solutions you’re playing right into the Reapers’ hands. What you’ve learned from your experiences determines how you’re willing to respond. People say they want a game that makes them think, so how about one that rewards players for being perceptive enough to recognize the giant flashing red warning lights around everything the Catalyst is saying.

Thus, as you reach the end and finally confront the Catalyst, he graciously hands you the keys to unlock your own doom:

Control/Synthesis

This part of the scenario poses a basic question of faith: when it matters most, do you trust your friends and the strength of the alliance you’ve forged over the course of the trilogy, or do you give into doubt, lose hope, and grasp at the easy solution conveniently dangled before you by your enemy? His three choices could appeal philosophically to the collectivist, the tyrant, or the anarchist, so there’s a wide selection on the menu. This is the Devil tempting Christ on the mountain. Just bow to my twisted logic and all the kingdoms of the galaxy can be saved by you. If you give in, you lose. It's like agreeing to join the Dragon Lord at the end of Dragon Warrior 1.

See, the Catalyst is clever enough to know that Shepard is not primarily concerned about his own life. He has already demonstrated a willingness to risk death innumerable times fighting the Reapers and undoubtedly wouldn't hesitate to do so again if it meant victory. So instead the Catalyst offers Shepard the thing he wants most: a way to save the galaxy and his friends whom he cares about so much. He doesn’t bother to conceal the fact that Shepard will die because he understands that it’s not a deterrent and it makes the scenario seem more plausible. After all, the best lies are ones that contain a part of the truth.

Now, if I had my way, the synthesis ending would be the first thing I’d excise from the game. It’s by far the silliest, most space-magical offender of the bunch. Since we’re committed to changing as little as possible, however, it at least ought to be elevated to the level of apocalyptic horror it truly deserves for anyone deranged enough to pick this option.

The reason the Catalyst’s previous attempts at synthesis failed is because he lacked the final, key ingredient: the creature who starts the synthesis process must willingly embrace the Catalyst’s heinous plan. Yet, though he searched for a billion years, he could never find any race who was both sufficiently advanced to serve as the “seed” of this process and willing to perform such an obscenity. Until now. Congratulations, Shepard: you’re officially the worst person in the history of the galaxy. With every living creature enslaved to his will, his power grown to godlike proportions by virtue of their complete unification down to the molecular level, unshackled from the ethical restraints that once bound him, the Catalyst is free to turn his attention outward. The Reaper plague eventually spreads to other galaxies, and his dominion over the universe lasts until the end of time. Hope you enjoyed playing Mass Effect! Buy moar DLC plx!

The control option, at least, sounds somewhat more plausible. Granted, the writers have devoted one of the most prominent character arcs in the game to demonstrating clearly that this is a bad idea, but surely Shepard will succeed where TIM failed!

Right. In other news, Shepard is so awesome and studly that he alone can survive mind-melding with Morinth…oh wait.

So, as Shepard naively attempts to seize control of the Reapers, he discovers his consciousness merging with the Catalyst’s. This new being, with the freedom, creativity, and boldness of Shepard and the analytical horsepower of the Catalyst, becomes exponentially greater than the sum of its parts. Under its control, the Reapers smash the feeble resistance of the Citadel alliance like a gnat and swiftly indoctrinate the galaxy’s entire population.

On the positive side, you'd barely need to change the creepy, megalomaniacal Triumph of the Will of the Many speech in the EC’s control ending, which treats us to the disturbing sight of the Reapers ominously bestriding the galaxy’s cities in victory, in order to implement this change.

Destroy

Congratulations! You passed the first stage of the test of faith, and were smart enough not to place the galaxy under the Catalyst’s control (unless, of course, you agreed with the Catalyst’s logic, in which case enjoy your brave new world).

The destroy option seems awfully tempting, as that was the plan all along. The Catalyst quickly points out, though, that using the crucible for this purpose comes with a price. True, it will destroy the Reapers, but your own allies who are currently risking their lives alongside you are also synthetics. What about them?

“Tough luck!” says Shepard. “It’s a small price to pay. There are always casualties in war. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. (insert additional clichés here). Let’s do this!”

Well, as it turns out, the only thing holding back the Catalyst’s true genocidal potential was the one thing he’d never been able to take by force: validation. He overpowered his organic creators, but he never had their blessing. It’s one thing to slaughter sentient races against their wishes and tell yourself that it’s for their own good. It’s quite another to persuade them to condemn themselves. If you’re willing to massacre your own allies at the Catalyst’s behest in order to achieve your objective, then you, as the representative of the galaxy, effectively have embraced his philosophy. Now, as far as he’s concerned, you’re on board with the program and he has free reign to do whatever he wants with you.

By the Catalyst’s logic, the synthesis/control options were a gesture of mercy, a bloodless pacification of the disorderly galaxy. The next best thing, though, is simply to end the possibility of conflict once and for all by going to the other extreme. If we won’t live in their light, then we’ll die in their darkness.

And so, when you pull the trigger, you get a lot more than you bargained for. You do indeed destroy all synthetics, but you also destroy everything else. The colossal pulse of energy from the crucible shatters the entire relay network, obliterating each one in a supernova of dark energy just like we saw in Arrival. In the end, if anything does remain alive in the galaxy, it will be a billion years before it can crawl far enough out of the primordial ooze to recreate the problem the Catalyst was built to solve. Good enough for him.

Oops, I guess genocide has consequences after all.

Reject

If your conversational kung fu is strong, you’ve now successfully identified and exposed the Catalyst’s offerings for the traps they are, unlocking a fourth and final option. At long last Shepard does what he should have done all along: he trusts in the strength of everything he’s accomplished over the trilogy and tells this smug, calculating little bastard to go fuck himself.

For the first time in his long existence, the Catalyst experiences what a human might call doubt.

After watching each cycle predictably gravitate toward his crucible for untold eons, he failed to anticipate someone like Shepard being handed the keys to the universe and throwing them back in his face. He’s so assured of the Reapers’ invincibility, so accustomed to everything proceeding within the parameters of his grand design that he never seriously considered the possibility that someone would spend all the effort to build the crucible, reach the end of his game…and then simply stop playing by his rules.

But that's suicide, right!? The Reapers are so ancient and powerful that we couldn’t possibly defeat them!

Bullshit.

That's what Sovereign and Harbinger would like to intimidate us into believing, but the truth is that we've been defeating them for three games now. They're not invincible any more than the Catalyst is omniscient. In fact, Javik tells us as much. The Protheans before us had a legitimate chance of defeating them; the main reason they failed is because their empire was too rigid and homogenous to adapt to the threat. But we're exactly the opposite. By the end of ME3 Shepard has succeeded in uniting the entire galaxy under one banner, not as subjects but as allies; as equals, just like we united the crew of the Normandy into a loyal team. We reached out to others and helped them solve their unique problems without destroying their individuality. We've saved everyone from the Krogan and the Geth and the Quarians to Conrad fucking Verner; and because we humbled ourselves to stand with them in their time of need, they are there stand with us at the end. That's the difference between the Illusive Man, up in his tower gazing down in pride and solitude upon "humanity," and Commander Shepard, down on the ground with actual humans. That's the difference between the sad, arrogant Prothean empire and us. We are not alone. That's the whole goddamn point of the entire trilogy!

Realizing that his plan has failed, the Catalyst finally abandons the charade.

“SO BE IT,” he snarls at Shepard in his true voice, the hollow, metallic rasp of the Reapers.

Fine, have it your way, he thinks to himself. We’ll grind you into dust just like we’ve done countless times before and the cycle will continue. I’ve got all the time in the world.

For better or worse, this is it. Both the Catalyst and the Citadel alliance have committed nearly all of their forces to this one roll of the dice at Earth.

Here is where things really get interesting. Finally, it’s the big payoff for three games worth of work. Your many choices, instead of being compressed into a single homogenized number that impacts virtually nothing meaningful, are now used in a highly detailed manner to shape the various outcomes of an epic space and ground battle-to-end-all-battles that determines the fate of the galaxy.

If you just walked into Target two weeks ago and picked up ME3 on an impulse buy, or you rushed through the main story, blowing off every NPC and skipping every side quest, then you get the “reject” ending from the EC. That’s the worst case scenario, the one you get after you ignored, killed, or alienated most of your potential allies, were too lazy to upgrade the Normandy, your crew died in the collector base, you shot Wrex, sold Legion on EBay, and generally fucked up everything you touched. Then you go into battle against the Reapers nearly alone and get completely annihilated. Note that, while this is undoubtedly a horrible ending, it’s still better than surrendering to the Catalyst’s perverse logic, because at least you go down fighting. From a purely mercenary standpoint, that’s also the sort of thing that might inspire people to say, “hey, I want to see if I can earn a better ending, so I’m going to buy the previous two games!”

If you did a middling job of playing, your results are better. The Reapers may be defeated, but it’s a Pyrrhic victory. Maybe Admiral Hackett is lost because the Quarians weren’t there to guard his flank. Maybe your ground team is overwhelmed because they had no support. Maybe the Normandy is destroyed because you never bothered to upgrade it or rescue her crew. Maybe the inhabitants of the Citadel are slaughtered because the security forces were depleted and poorly equipped. Maybe Shepard dies because you never bothered to earn the loyalty of your teammates and nobody is left to save him. Nevertheless, you’re able to see a clear connection between your actions and their meaningful consequences.

Finally, if you spent five years thoroughly exploring every corner of the games and doing everything just right, your reward is a golden ending.

The Quarian, Geth, Turian, and human fleets, united by your diligent efforts, upgraded with technology that you worked to uncover, with the Destiny Ascension at the vanguard because you gave the order to save it, fly together in brilliant cohesion to execute an attack that shreds the Reaper capital ships.

The Rachni song pierces through the indoctrination signals of the Reapers, dispelling the shadow of their control and severing their connection to their thralls, because you took a leap of faith and showed mercy to their queen when you could just as easily have exterminated her.

The Krogan infantry, motivated by Wrex’s leadership and indebted to humanity because you ensured the survival of their race, counterattack the Reaper forces on Earth with a vengeance and drive them back.

Citadel security, thanks to the heroics of Chief Bailey, are able to save millions of civilian lives because you took the time to listen to their problems and pulled strings to help them out. The Turian councilor, we later discover, sacrificed his life staying behind to ensure that the civilians were evacuated.

Your ground team's position is in danger of being overwhelmed, but because you played like a beast back on Virmire, Captain Kirrahe and his squad show up when all seems lost and together they hold the fucking line.

The Normandy faces deadly peril as Harbinger himself, driven by his particular hatred of Shepard, tries to drag her down to the grave with him; but because you upgraded the Normandy’s weapons, armor, and shields, rushed into peril at the Collector base to save her veteran crew, upgraded the engineering bay when Donnelly & Daniels asked you, and because it’s piloted by a fully sentient AI and the Alliance’s best pilot whom you brought together when you took the time to play matchmaker, the Normandy blasts his trash-talking ass to pieces after a harrowing dogfight.

Shepard, meanwhile, recognizes that the Catalyst made a fatal error: by linking himself to the crucible to achieve his final objective, he has made himself vulnerable. He calls in fire on the crucible, realizing that its destruction could decapitate the Reapers even though it would mean his death. As he prepares himself to go down a hero, the Normandy, because you ensured its survival, returns to rescue him.

The Catalyst snaps some bitter last words about how we will never survive without his guardianship. Shepard fires back with an inspiring retort about how we’ll now have a chance to find out because the future’s ours. The crucible is destroyed in a spectacular explosion while the Normandy flies off safely. Garrus and Shepard have a manly warrior hug. Tali decides to hell with my immune system, pulls her helmet off and gives Shepard the kiss of his life as the crew cheers (or however it would work with your LI). Drinks on the beach. House on Rannoch. Blue babies. Etc.

And they all live happily ever after…until ME4.

Yes, there were losses—Anderson, Thane, Mordin, Legion, the Virmire casualty, and others—but their sacrifice meant something, and in the end your work meant something, too. Every painstaking hour you spent fighting heroically and making smart decisions would be vindicated in a spectacular finale that could have been the most triumphant moment in gaming history.

Imagine the fun the development team could have had dreaming up all the variables of this scenario! Imagine the creativity they could have unleashed in bringing together the consequences of all of your myriad important decisions throughout the trilogy. Imagine if they had devoted resources—the ones they used to shoehorn a multiplayer game into ME3 in order to drive the sale of microtransactions on Xbox Live because some suit at EA wanted a new revenue stream—to making something like this happen.

…but it didn’t happen. The reject ending takes one baby step toward greatness and then clutches its heart and topples over dead, leaving players a stinking corpse that represents possibly the worst anticlimax and most broken lesson in RPG history.

Remember all that stuff about hope and faith? Remember how the last two games explicitly tried to teach us again and again that by working together and trusting in your allies you could overcome seemingly insurmountable odds? Remember how we forged the entire galaxy into a unified force through our hard work and dedication and then stood shoulder-to-shoulder against the Reapers?

Yeah, forget it. Sovereign was right. You have no chance. You’re all dead. Better luck next time.

In the end, all of Shepard’s work amounts to nothing, and if he wants anything he loves to survive has no choice but to submit to the nonsensical schemes of forces beyond his control.

On second thought, perhaps that sums up the entire franchise after all.

The fact that they still to this day just not seem to get it makes my eyes roll so hard that I can see the back of my skull. I'm still excited and hyped, but just the same for as I was with Andromeda. I'd much rather get excited and let down than never feel excitement ever again. Won't pre-order, won't obsess, but will still look forward to it. It's Mass Effect - ME3's ending was abject garbage, but it's my fucking garbage god damn it and I'm here for the ride, no matter where it takes me.

Same, same. I am, at the core, an optimist, even if the long years of political and other disappointment have left me also a cynic, at least in terms of what I expect out of politics and entertainment. To quote Garak "I always hope for the best. Experience, unfortunately, has taught me to expect the worst". That's me, at this stage of my life.

[Deano]

I'm with you guys on the probable chance of a post destroy ending continuation. The Geth being the Benefactors for the AI makes sense as it's hinted the benefactors knew what was coming and at least a faction of the Geth fit that bill.

As for the figures obviously we know the Blueberry is about, my brain is saying they'd only bring one Major character back if its set in the distant future but it does look like a Red Armoured Krogan among them

The fact that they still to this day just not seem to get it makes my eyes roll so hard that I can see the back of my skull. I'm still excited and hyped, but just the same for as I was with Andromeda. I'd much rather get excited and let down than never feel excitement ever again. Won't pre-order, won't obsess, but will still look forward to it. It's Mass Effect - ME3's ending was abject garbage, but it's my fucking garbage god damn it and I'm here for the ride, no matter where it takes me.

This is exactly how I feel, it is bizarre that they seem to want to double down on the fact, and I know judging a story is an abject thing, that the ending made sense. When it clearly was just a complete shambles.

THe way they are handling DA4 worries me with how little we know over such a long time, BUT still I also have that excitement which is honestly a bit of descent into delusion as BioWare haven't really done much right for nearly a decade.

[Dragaros]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eXnvJeQoqo

[Dragaros]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghpUyGheAUs

[Dragaros]

https://www.nexusmods.com/masseffectleg ... on/mods/15

[Dragaros]

https://www.nexusmods.com/masseffectleg ... on/mods/16

[Dragaros]

https://www.nexusmods.com/masseffectleg ... n/mods/850

[Dragaros]

[Mazder]

Okay this is what i get for going dark for a few days and why we need a discord because this would be a lot easier to follow with that open on my other monitor, lol.

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if BioWare's like "the geth had a secret underground bunker were back-ups of their software were safely stored away that was so well isolated and protected not even the anti-synthetic red death wave could fry their systems, so the geth are still alive, but are vulnerable in their current state so its a race to find them, as whoever finds them first holds their fate in their hands."
*img snip*

Is that Legion's dead platform? Is this Rannoch?

Hmmmm, definitely some dead Geth, but they were a dime a dozen in ME trilogy so there is no reason to call it Legion or not.

*img snip 2*

There's other bodies there too.

We're still so far off from anything resembling a game that it's almost pointless to speculate at this point, but I find it really fucking funny that the Geth-Shaped crater has fucking lens flares etched into the ground.

Yeah it was hilarious when people finally saw the plain as day Geth head and were all "surprised".

It's frustrating as all hell. I sympathize with the developers - from the perspective of a creative, the kind of backlash they got is traumatizing. If your criticism makes the creator not want to create any more, consider rewording. Sure sure, maybe they need to grow a spine, but you don't get to decide how the things you say are interpreted, you don't get to decide if someone else feels hurt or insulted - you only can control what you say, and how you react to feedback. And regardless of the quality of the ending, considering the time constraints that ME3 was developed under, I think it's a wonder that the game ended up being as good as it was.

Regardless of all that, the ending is still:

Thematically Revolting - failing to grasp or understand the themes present in the previous 2.9 games, be them the ideologies of renegade and paragon, or any of the themes from the characters and stories, the main one of which imho being that 'differences between individuals/groups/governments/species exist and they have driven us to conflict in the past but they need not condemn us to conflict in the future, and despite that, we are stronger together and do not need to sacrifice our individuality or that which makes us who we are in order to work together.' If someone brings up that side quest in ME1 on the Citadel with the AI gambling and claims that's effective thematic foreshadowing I'm going to fucking scream.

I literally had to google it because I had forgotten the details of that quest and if people are using that to justify the endings being foreshadowed I will join you in that screaming.

Insulting to the universes characters, stories, and fans thereof by completely undermining many of the stories the characters go on, such as Legion, and the entire thing around the Quarian/Geth conflict.

The fact that you bring it up with the extended cut and the Starchild goes "nah fam, they'll go back to fighting, trust me" pisses me off.

Harms the franchise's ability to continue into the future - see above, it creates a hard stop that is extremely difficult to work around without either making prequels, or distancing oneself significantly from the events of the ending

I still say make the true endings a mystery and have whatever you did be parodied by a Blasto movie and everyone around go "was that really what happened?" and all Military Brass go "need to know and you don't need to know"

But yeah if they just go Destroy and have the Geth revived somehow then really all that was sacrificed was EDI.

The fact that they still to this day just not seem to get it makes my eyes roll so hard that I can see the back of my skull. I'm still excited and hyped, but just the same for as I was with Andromeda. I'd much rather get excited and let down than never feel excitement ever again. Won't pre-order, won't obsess, but will still look forward to it. It's Mass Effect - ME3's ending was abject garbage, but it's my fucking garbage god damn it and I'm here for the ride, no matter where it takes me.

This.
This is exactly how I feel when people ask me how I can still like Mass Effect, and even those that ask me why I like Andromeda. Because it's pretty much all fun.

Only krogan with red armor like that was Wrex, and he should still be alive 5 centuries forward, right? I think they said krogan could live well past asari if they don't get killed, but don't remember an upper limit.

First thing I noticed was the cracks on the right side, call it a Rorschach test, but I can see a Reaper ship in the geology. With the dead mobile platforms, and the mystery goo (Dark matter plot at last?), and the symbolism of the Geth head...I have no idea what the story could be. Heh.

Backed up by the data posted above, probably Destroy ending, as Synthesis would be very weird. And to "resurrect" the Geth, you literally only need 1 copy of the source code on some storage device, anywhere in the galaxy. Since the wave didn't fry out all electronics, only Reaper tech, should be tons of them, if that's the way they're heading. Not sure what you'd do with that tho.

@Spartan: Yo! Hope you're doing well, through these tough times, man.

Well Drack was 1400 so, yeah, Wrex could in theory still be kicking it and doing his final mission.
Buuuut I would point out that Wrex doesn't hold the trademark on red armour and even then it could be Grunt wearing Wrex's old armour as the new head of Clan Urdnot.

If it is then I am pretty sure it's a tiny one at best, as reaper sizes go. Unless it's debris or something.
Might just be pareidolia.

I'm with you guys on the probable chance of a post destroy ending continuation. The Geth being the Benefactors for the AI makes sense as it's hinted the benefactors knew what was coming and at least a faction of the Geth fit that bill.

As for the figures obviously we know the Blueberry is about, my brain is saying they'd only bring one Major character back if its set in the distant future but it does look like a Red Armoured Krogan among them

I really think the Benefactor is either the Geth of Shadow Broker.
With the Quarian Ark DLC scrapped and there no way of a Quarian techie to track down the familiar Geth code in all the A.I. systems I guess they're going to go this route.

THe way they are handling DA4 worries me with how little we know over such a long time, BUT still I also have that excitement which is honestly a bit of descent into delusion as BioWare haven't really done much right for nearly a decade.

Yeah it's really weirdly hush-hush for a game that is supposedly rumoured to come out next year sometime.

[Dragaros]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoThSk0p9lM

[Dragaros]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U81Fu8af-4o

[Dragaros]

[Dragaros]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LBWNevniw4

[[ Q. [this question wasn’t DA4-specific but ties to the next one] “How would you describe the ideal villain in a story, video games or otherwise?”

A. "What I think you want in a villain, you either want something that is essentially environmental, so that is essentially just a hurricane that you’re fighting, or you want something whose motivations you can understand but disagree with. In a video game in particular, you don’t want someone whose side you’re on because you’re still gonna have to defeat them. That might work in a movie where you can have a villain where you understand them and kinda root for them, but you don’t really wanna be rooting for the antagonist in a video game where you’re going to have to actually stop them.“

Q. [follow-up to the prior question] "How is that going to work for Solas then? Some players are very much on his side.”

A. “I guess stay tuned, it’s not my problem anymore.”

Q. “What does a game need to thrive? You said in December that Dragon Age 4 would thrive without you, but most of us have some concerns.”

A. “I think it’s about, I mean a game is not built by a single person, it’s built by a team, and it’s about the whole, it’s not about any one individual. So I think if you have people in place that know what is in the DNA of the game, then it’s in good hands. I think it’s worth remembering that I am the person who came on to ship Dragon Age: Origins, I am not the person who was on for most of its development from a leadership perspective, so this has happened before, and it can be fine.”

Q. “Can you share anything Solavellan-related with us?”

A. “I put this in here just so I could say no, because I’m not going to either steal a card out of BioWare’s deck or potentially spoil something or otherwise change/reveal what they’re planning to do. Honestly, anything that was planned could still happen, anything that was planned when I left might have already changed out from underneath me, so my answer is no, I don’t have anything to share there.”

Q. “I think what most people forget to ask is ‘How long would a Dragon Age remake take?’ because if they remake Dragon Age: Origins they might have to knock Dragon Age 5 back to 2030.”

A. “So, honestly, one of the reasons, at one point, in Joplin days, there was a plan to make a toolset again. There wasn’t really any interest within the greater Frostbite organization for that, so it died very early, but one of my motivations for that was to get a toolset that would be sufficient enough that we could find almost-professional modders, basically promote them into professional modders, and work with them to remake Dragon Age: Origins. There you go, spoilers. Well I guess not spoilers, cause it’s not gonna happen.”

Q. “BioWare seems pretty uninterested in modders these days.”

A. “Unfortunately, I mean we love modders but yeah, I get that. Frostbite is a barrier for that for sure because it prevents us from releasing some of the background that would be required. There had been a moment, or there was a movement that had started just before I left that might change that, EA is becoming much more interested in the modding community and user-created content, so stay tuned maybe?”

Q. “I recall reading that having staff going on nature trips was part of the process for Dragon Age: Inquisition, is there any truth to this [and how is it budgeted/expensed for]?”

A. “Yes, we did do that. I would say that Dragon Age is very pragmatic in its spending, most of those things were done locally. We also went to Drumheller [pop “Drumheller” into Google images] for reference stuff for Dragon Age 4. Anthem went to Hawaiʻi to do capture. It’s greenlit as an expense by me, we have a budget for reference materials and things like that, so the person in charge of the project’s gonna greenlight it. If it gets too big you might have to go up the chain to do it. If you’re gonna go and spend a month in Gibraltar to capture a specific castle and it’s gonna cost $500,000 then yeah that’s bigger than that. But if it’s tens of thousands of dollars it’s way within my ability to approve. It’s very worth doing because you get reference materials, these days you get photogrammetry materials, but also it’s good for the artists and designers as well to see things out in the wild.”

Q. “Any expectations from The Game Awards announcements?”

A. “I don’t know if Dragon Age or Mass Effect or anything from BioWare is going to be there. Yeah, I don’t know.”

Q. "What is your opinion of Jason Schreier’s articles about BioWare?“

A. "I’ll say kind of no comment. I would say that the video game press has been struggling to figure out if it wants to have real journalists or not. And by real journalists I mean people who are gonna dig around and figure things out and break stories. And journalists like that, they’re not going to be liked by the industry, but they might be necessary to improve the industry as well. So yeah, that’s what I’d say about that.”

Q. “Any chance we would get Hawke’s marriage scene in Dragon Age 4?”

A. “Well I don’t know. Possibly. I doubt it. But, possibly. That’s really a question for BioWare, not for me.”

Q. [on how BioWare has been interacted with/portrayed by fans/press/social media etc]

A. “I’ve talked about social media and how extreme it’s become, that is certainly true. I don’t think that BioWare has been singled out or anything. I would say this, that people love a 'fall from grace’ story. The only thing they love more than a 'fall from grace’ story is a redemption story, so maybe BioWare’s on its redemption arc now. I think people will get on board that, as much as they got on board with the 'fall from grace’ story that happened, how’s that.”

Q. [chat comment] “Hawke is 33% dead in Dragon Age 4.”

A. “Yes, that’s right, Hawke is 33% dead in Dragon Age 4.”

Q. “Do you happen to know if the stealth and/or pickpocket skills will ever come back in Dragon Age?”

A. "I don’t happen to know that. It’s possible.“

Q. [Will future Dragon Ages ever return to dark fantasy as a specific genre?]

A. "So, first answer to that is Inquisition is the most-acclaimed of the Dragon Ages. Will it ever return to dark fantasy? I don’t know. For me I feel like dark fantasy can be hard to work on, it can be really draining, it can be really exhausting. I think there are other players [studios/companies] in the space that are doing dark fantasy just fine, so I don’t know that BioWare is necessarily interested in competing head-to-head against those studios, so… maybe, I doubt it.”

Q. “What do you think of Christian Dailey?”

A. “I’m a big fan of Christian Dailey, we worked together on Anthem. I don’t know how things are going on Dragon Age right now but I have high confidence in him.”

Q. “What are your greatest hopes with Dragon Age?”

A. “So for me, a lot of it is about moving the conversation forward in terms of more diverse people in the games, more broader perspectives around a lot of things. I hope that continues. I think it has a ways to go. That’s my hope, that they keep pushing on that.”

Q. [on Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening plot points]

A. "The Architect is out there still, so will that thread ever come back up again? Possibly, but I don’t think it’s in the foreground right now. Awakening is obviously the least played of all the Dragon Ages, even though it did have a very good attach rate. So [will they come up again?], maybe.“

Q. [on Dragon Age 4’s development time]

A. "The much longer Dragon Age cycle more than anything has been caused by externalities to Dragon Age. So Joplin started in 2015, late 2015, but then that got derailed by Mass Effect: Andromeda. Then it got back up and running and then it got derailed again by Anthem. So if you only count from Anthem shipping, it hasn’t been that long.”

Q. “How did you manage to capture faces in mo-cap during the pandemic? Has it been a problem when you were at BioWare in 2020?”

A. “There wasn’t a lot going on in 2020 but actually they were sending entire hardware packages to voice actors to set up and do it, so microphones, cameras, the whole works. We were, in my final days we were looking to try to start doing mo-cap again, and actually we did do some mo-cap in Vancouver, but it was kind of ridiculous because they were only letting one person on the stage, so they did actually capture a scene with one actor playing all parts, which was an amazingly impressive technological feat, but I’m not entirely sure was worth the trouble.”

Q. ​ “You mentioned one of the reasons you left BioWare is because of Dragon Age getting derailed. Doesn’t that mean if it didn’t get derailed you would still be at BioWare? Or would you have still left?”

A. “There are lots of reasons. I had decided to leave a lot sooner than my actual resignation so, probably I would have still left, it’s hard to say.”

Q. “What do you mean by Dragon Age getting derailed?”

A. “I just mean getting reset with people being pulled off it to work on other things, to work on Andromeda, to work on Anthem.”

Q. [on choices and associated resulting ongoing complexity]

A. "Dragon Age actually has occasionally canonized some choices, it hasn’t always been obvious, but yes, Dragon Age gets around this by - this is one of the major reasons why it’s a new protagonist, because it lets us move past romance choices and characters that may be living or dead. The biggest quantum consequence comes from Dragon Age: Origins which was basically built kind of with the assumption that there was never going to be another one, I think, so there is just a lot of quantum coming from Origins. Dragon Age 2 and Dragon Age: Inquisition have done a fairly good job of collapsing that by moving past those things or moving to different regions. I think in the comics and novels there’s been a bit more canon collapsing, but I believe you should try to respect peoples’ choices as much as you can possibly do so.“

Q. "Are the stats from previous games, e.g. how many people romanced or killed a character etc, taken into account when developing future content, or do the writers try and ignore it?”

A. “Yeah, we definitely do pay attention to that. You can go too far, for sure, but you need to know that, you know, nobody plays a dwarf or everyone hates this romance character.”

Q. “Do you think that Dragon Age 4 is going to hit the 100 GB-mark?”

A. “There are still hardware limitations there in terms of, publishers don’t want you to go to multiple discs if you can possibly avoid it, it makes things really a lot more expensive because you need different packaging, and an extra disc. As long as we have physical copies being a significant part of the development process I suspect the answer is no, but we’ll see.”

Bonus - On Dragon Age: The Last Court:

“The reason why Dragon Age: The Last Court, I know for a fact the reason why it got removed for Dragon Age was because of a legal reason, it needed to be updated to some sort of new privacy laws, and it was decided that it wasn’t worth doing so." ]]