Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut - A Final Insult


Now a few months back I did a recap of the controversy around the Mass Effect 3 ending. And as you can see there were a lot of valid reasons as to why so many people were pissed. In the beginning they called it an over reaction and that it was nothing more than a "vocal minority" that were having the problems. Well as time moved on they then decided that to appease this minority they would halt development of all other single player DLC in order to create something that would explain their endings better to those that just didn't 'give it'. Did it's work?

They explain why Joker took off into a relay jump and that they do get off of the planet they crash land on. They did however explain how your teammates are on the ship. Even though it makes not sense as to why they did it, or how. Or the fact that all of the stuff that Anderson says at the end is still incorrect. They even keep in the ill conceived logic of the Starchild and that the Reapers were made to kill people so that other robots don't kill people.

Blue Ending: Shepard's memories become god-like and uses the reapers to police the galaxy. He also uses their knowledge to help rebuild the relays and civilization.
Red Ending: All robots die. Everything will take generations to rebuild. This means that they have no knowledge of how the Reaper tech works and would take decades for them to reverse engineer it. Meaning that the new games will either take place during this dead zone time where nothing is as advance as it once was or it takes place hundreds of years later where almost everyone is dead and the alliances made during the three game might not even matter anymore.
Green Ending: Everyone becomes the same and all knowing. This destroys the idea that the diversity in races is whats important and that we are all stronger when we pull together to make up for the shortcomings of others. Also now that everyone is part of a collective hive mind no one might be motivated to do anything and that the pursuit of knowledge may become unfulfilling.
Rejected Ending: You can also now choose to do none of the above, but doing so will result in the whole galaxy being harvested by the Reapers.

You can see all the endings here.

Well if this is what we get then it's better then what we had before and if there was going to be any real endings then I would much rather have one of these. That said it still undoes any of the dark energy foreshadowing that has happen. So HOPFULLY they will get to that in another game. But to cap this all off I think it's kind of weird that they released this to explain the endings to us. As if the answers were there and that we were just too stupid to see them. But with the new information it basically make different endings altogether. So without the "complaining" from the "vocal minority" we would have never gotten a "better" ending.

Now Bioware and others think that the minority are just being entitled and that there was no need for this DLC. I think the biggest problem here is that Bioware got indignant and decided that the current ending was their true vision. And as we all know we never truly understand anything from the inside looking out. Just go to the site and you'll see and hear interviews and text of how passive-aggressive they can be. And they are so gracious to help use understanding how deep their story really is. All for free.

Comments

Popular Posts