Oh my god he is so cute.
I just beat Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut! Here are my thoughts on it. This post contains ME3 spoilers, but it does not contain Extended Cut spoilers.
Don’t start before the Cerberus Base. I listened to the Extended Cut podcast last night and the developers wasted 30 minutes of my time by telling me to load a pre-Cerberus Base save! There are no changes to the Cerberus Base part of the game. Extended Cut begins from the moment you run towards the Beam, and it ends when the credits begin. Fortunately, BioWare has saved us all a lot of time by adding the ability to Restart Mission directly after the beam run. This means that you won’t have to do the entire ending sequence over and over again to see all the endings.
The gist of the ending remains the same, with one exception: the Mass Relays don’t explode for no reason anymore. Yep, a retcon. Those who have some strange vendetta against the Catalyst shouldn’t bother with Extended Cut. In an attempt to help stupid people understand ME3’s relatively simple story, Shepard’s encounter with the Catalyst now features a more complex conversation wheel. You can ask the Catalyst to explain everything in excruciating detail to you, and he will do so. These conversations don’t reveal anything that couldn’t have been gleaned from the original ending, though.
Your choicez are reflected throughout the ending via top-grade cutscenes and corner-cutting drawings accompanied by narration. They are interspersed between scenes that were in the original ending and, for the most part, they flow very well.
Some fans may be disappointed. As far as I know—note that I’ve only experienced the Green Ending—you don’t get a special series of cutscenes that shows you what happened to each main character, a supposed RPG tradition that was last practiced in Super Mario RPG. To those people, may I suggest fanfiction?
Nothing needs to be said about Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut; this editorial won’t change anyone’s mind. It’s too little, too late for those who disliked ME3’s ending. Those who did like ME3’s ending, however, will definitely be inspired to see all of the endings now. Now that they’re actually different, they’re worth it.
Check this out. They changed the post-credits message box. No mention of DLC at all. The sneaky bastards. Here’s to hoping they’ve learned a little tact for next time.
I have to say that it was a good move to change the ending message. “Thank you so much for playing our game!” is a lot better than “You beat the game, Awesome! Now you can buy some DLC!”
Destroy is always the correct ending.
I agree though, in general the extended cut does make the endings better. They didn’t remove the key problem with the ending though (and that was never in the cards, so I wasn’t expecting them to or anything), so as a whole the ending is still bad.
It’s just not godawful like it was before the extended cut.
I wish they had added something genuinely interesting to Extended Cut, like a boss battle, or a new dungeon. I had this unlikely hope that they’d actually let me fight the Illusive Man or something like that, but–nope. Had they added just an hour or so of real new playable content to ME3, I think Extended Cut would be a lot more popular right now.
Oh, shit, some minor changes that did nothing to improve the ending whatsoever?
ALL PRAISE BIOWARE. WE WERE TOTALLY HOMOPHOBES ALL ALONG. WE ARE SO ENTITLED.
Yay Mass Effect is now totally art again, right? Right?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NNUImNL9Ok&feature=plcp
Put a little more effort in, you lazy hack.
Ha… sorry, Stirling. The dig was meant for Ricky.
It’s still horrendous bullshit and you’re a faggot for even tangentially supporting it, Ricky. OH MY YOU MEAN NOW THE ENDING IS JUST BULLSHIT AS OPPOSED TO LEGITIMATELY CRIMINAL!? BIOWARE YOU ADONIS, TAKE ALL MY MONEY!
And please, don’t pretend that people didn’t like the first version because they were too dumb to understand, you fucking dope. They didn’t like it because IT was dumb and there was barely anything to understand. When I think about the fact that they ditched Karpyshyn’s real script in favor of THIS bullshit, ugh…Here’s a hint, the real motivation for the Reapers had nothing to do with sup dawg herd you like making synthetics so us synthetics is gonna kill you so synthetics don’t kill you.
Call me Rick.
I don’t “support” the original ending. The original ending–and much of the game–cut as many corners as possible. But I enjoyed the game and I enjoyed the ending, in the same way I enjoyed Final Fantasy 2 NES despite it being one of the worst games ever made. Don’t put words in my mouth; just because I like something doesn’t mean I think it’s good.
I think you (and many other [ex?] BioWare fans) need to calm down, though. Look at how you’re… appearing. I’ve been heartbroken over series before too, like Dragon Age and Final Fantasy, but going apeshit doesn’t help. If you don’t like something, the best thing to do is ignore it; stop buying it and move on.
Yeah, see, I’m not doing that. Christ, do you really have such a lack of self-awareness that you can tell me to ignore something and move on if I don’t like it when the VERY POINT OF THIS FUCKING WEBSITE is to not ever do that? If you didn’t like the shitty state of bought-and-sold games journalism, why didn’t YOU just move on? Goodness, don’t you have any care of how you APPEAR?
No. I don’t give a flying fuck how I appear or whether tumblrwhales won’t think I’m internet-cool for being loud and abrasive. Guess what: if you want to be heard, you need to be LOUD. The lukewarm middle-of-the-road bullshit of purportedly ‘independent’ and ‘free-thinking’ websites like this one, straddling the fucking fence for dear life so you won’t ever be entirely wrong, you do almost as much damage as legitimately sad bastards like Kotaku or IGN because you won’t fucking TAKE A STAND, even with something that so dearly calls for it like the…REPREHENSIBLE outing that was Mass Effect 3. You don’t have any balls, you won’t just come out and SAY anything, you just go ‘oh well both sides have their good and bad sides’ so no one’s ever fucking offended.
Also, what the fuck was up with this:
>Don’t put words in my mouth; just because I like something doesn’t mean I think it’s good.
How bad is your autism that you think stating you like something without any qualifiers isn’t inviting people to assume just that? Are you some sort of strange space alien visiting planet earth for the first time that hasn’t quite gotten the grasp of how language and unspoken implications work yet? Because if so: WELCOME TO EARTH, SPACEMAN! ENJOY YOUR STAY! WE DON’T LIKE INEXCUSABLY SHITTY ENDINGS TO MULTI-HUNDRED HOUR/DOLLAR TRILOGIES HERE!
And while the ending sucked, AT LEAST WE COULD FUCK A MAN’S ASSHOLE ON THE WAY THERE.
Oh yeah, and Mac Walters is still a huge piece of shit and a raging, metastasized symptom of everything wrong with Bioware. Fuck that goddamn company.
Last I checked, a handwave at one of the most important questions doesn’t qualify as “excruciating detail”.
At some point the questions need to stop. Where did Jenova come from, and why? Where did God come from? Where did Lavos come from? What is Dormin? What are the Occuria? Who created Anu and Padomay?
An infinite amount of games, books, and movies get away with never answering these questions because it’s okay to leave some elements to the imagination. Mass Effect 3 doesn’t get a pass, because some unobservant fans are desperate for ammunition–which is really weird, considering the enormous amount of REAL problems that the game and its plot has. Why not go after those?
Instead, they attack something that literally isn’t there: unanswered questions to answers that don’t pertain to the immediate plot. If you’re going to attack the story, attack Kai Leng, or the fact that every event in ME3 is an uninspired go-down-the-checklist wrap-up of the subplots of ME1 and ME2. Stop expecting the Catalyst to tell you about his 900000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 millennia (for all we know) history.
No, see, that’s bullshit. This question DOES need to be answered because it flies in the face of everything we know about the ME universe. It mangles several things introduced in earlier entries in the trilogy. This isn’t like the series STARTED at the Catalyst and we just went forward from there for three games, so we could just take for granted it’s existence. This is a BIG honking fucking handwave introduced at the eleventh hour of the eleventh hour and it DOES demand an explanation. That’s the difference between a plot twist and a Deus Ex Machina.
You misunderstand – the reason I picked out that question is because it sums up the Catalyst. With that question, your only options are to hand-wave or to spew plot details at an alarming rate. When you have an overcomplicated device like this in the very final scene in the game, it’s not a question of how you handle it – the problem is there because of what the Catalyst *is*.
He’s a Total Deus Ex Machina which is hardly explained in the narrative that the ME franchise spends hundreds of hours going through. If you replay previous games, you see great attention to detail – in the first game alone, the first Citadel visit was packed with information both used to foreshadow events and simply there to characterise the universe, little mostly irrelevant tidbits that added flair and colour.
Hell, just look at the codex entries. You get the hard science-y background of everything from Element Zero to Salarian metabolism and how Medigel violates council laws but they let it slide because the stuff’s just too damn handy. Now go to the ending, where the Catalyst is sorely lacking in information. A hand-wave isn’t what Mass Effect does when it comes to the important plot points. He’s so dissonant with the rest of the story. As regards to Anu and Padomay (as that’s the only series I’ve played that you mentioned), absolutely no Elder Scrolls games have them usurping the main character as a (literal, in their case) deus ex machina.
Yes, I know Kai Leng is an absolutely terrible character. Yes, I know the opening raises many many questions and is inconsistent with itself even seconds apart (the most ridiculous example being Shepard saying fighting is pointless, and then shortly after saying “we fight or we die”). Yes, I know about bloody screen so real. Yes, I know the non-treatment of homophobia in Cortez’s character arc is problematic for some. But these aren’t the things that we were made to look forward to. When the ending comes, we’re focusing for details and expect it to be consistent with in-universe logic. And BOOM Catalyst out of nowhere. People complain vocally about the Catalyst because he’s the most major annoyance.
Knowing about the Super Space Magic MacGuffin isn’t irrelevant detail. Irrelevant detail is “Why the colours?” “Why the layout?” “Why are you a boy?” “Why do you speak with my voices superimposed?” “How can you move if you might be a VI?” We’re talking about THE VERY PURPOSE OF THE ITEM WE SPENT THE GAME HELPING TO BUILD.
After all that you probably think I hate the Extended Cut. I don’t. Everything it could rectify while removing nothing, it did. We now understand how the crew left. What happens to the galaxy after the ending isn’t left up to headcanon which can go in the direction of ‘everyone dies’. Some of our choices are reflected. We’re given some degree of closure from the characters we’ve made this journey with. The only reason it’s so damn easy to be mad at the Catalyst is because he’s a turd that you can’t even polish. He’s a problem because he *exists.*
All of your questions, irrelevant and non, could be gleaned in the original ending (and more so with Extended Cut). I may be incorrect, and these may only be implications and assumptions, but they’re how the understood the story when the game ended:
>> And BOOM Catalyst out of nowhere.
The Catalyst is the intelligence that enables the Mass Relay System, which is ultimately an organization device, to operate smoothly. It’s definitely a deus ex machina, spawned by the
>>“Why the layout?”
The Crucible is a virus that is being physically attached to the Catalyst in order to control and change it. The Crucible creates the walkways and the possibilities because that’s what it’s meant to do.
>>“Why the colours?” “Why are you a boy?” “Why do you speak with my voices superimposed?”
The Catalyst has been crippled by the Crucible. It can no longer make its own decisions–but it can still attempt to manipulate Shepard into making a decision that isn’t going to destroy the Reapers. It does so by 1) taking on the guise of an innocent boy, and 2) illuminating the options that the Reapers would prefer in “good” lights (blue/green; anything but total destruction). Note that it is possible that any of these machinations are being executed via the synthetic portion of Shepard’s body. Maybe the multi-colored lights aren’t actually there–maybe it’s just the Catalyst manipulating Shepard’s vision. (The Catalyst is unable to manipulate Shepard’s brain, which is not synthetic.)
I could argue that the Catalyst has Male and Female Shepard’s voices because it learned his language, and therefore his voice, by proximity–but I won’t, because I don’t believe this is the case. I believe that that the Catalyst has Male and Female Shepard’s voices because the writers and/or the sound guys thought it would be “freaking rad dude”.
Despite these defenses, I genuinely believe that the Crucible is a giant deus ex machina–but I’ve seen much, much worse (Final Fantasy XIII, to start). At the end of the day, the original writer left (or got fired, or whatever; I don’t know the story), and so the new staff had to come up with a resolution in one game. The abrupt appearance of the Crucible at the beginning of ME3–a single, never-before-mentioned object that can resolve the core problem that has plagued the series since ME1–is jarring, but I think made it work.
… and the reason I’ve never done a meaty editorial piece on Mass Effect is because most people don’t understand physics, but are more than willing to pretend they do in the comments. I’ve had the whole ending debate a thousand times before on various forums, and I was trying to avoid it here because it never gets anywhere, but considering how lightweight this piece was (compared to some of the videos that have been linked in these comments), I’ll at least indulge you guys with my viewpoint.
Thank you for taking up some of these points. The “debate” may be done to death at this point and you may be weary of it if you’ve been actively wading through the forum wars. For those of us looking for more intelligent, considered, and less vitriolic writing about all of this, a little bit of retreading is more than fine.
Thanks Doctor Ynot for reminding us all that gamers are homophobic manchildren.
No problem, faggot.
Although I SHOULD probably mention that I voted no on Prop 8, just to take the wind out of your sails entirely.
Didn’t South Park redefine faggot? I also thought it was already redefined on Internet forums. I never used it to refer to a person who was homosexual, anyway. Then it suddenly became one of the forbidden words in most joints.
I agree that these new endings are much improved, probably as much as they could be without changing them completely. But still, there still remains the most important problem at all, that is, they introduced this all-important new character and plot point in the last five minutes of the trilogy.
Also, these endings should have been in the game to begin with. This is palatable, I suppose. But for too many the damage has already been done. This will plaster over some of that damage, but between ME3′s original ending and the trainwrecks that were DA2 and SWTOR, I don’t think that they’ll ever repair it completely.
Hysterics aside, I think the issue is more interesting than such a cursory response. One of your own contributors has already explored the problems underlying the whole ending debacle in fantastic depth. I understand saying “this is it, and all its going to be, so just stop letting it bother you,” but your response is tinged with the same kind of sneering contempt that every other outlet has had towards the legitimate responses of fans to this bullshit. Go read fanfiction. Heh. Well, telling your readers to go read something else is kind of a daring move for a site with such a small readership, don’t you think? Maybe your fledgling readership will go read something else that had more thought and effort put into it than this lame effort. MrBTongue on youtube has done a great series of videos on Mass Effect and beyond. Cameron’s InstigativeJournalism series of videos are thought-provoking and engaging. What do you have to offer to people tired of getting the company line from every other outlet and authority figure?
They actually did change the dialogue with the catalyst, and he makes slightly more sense now. (He’s still terrible.)
Rather than an omnipotent and unknowable AI that you have to take his word on everything, now he’s a rogue AI that turned on his masters and forcibly turned them into the first Reaper against their will. You’re also able to ask him more direct questions about what exactly will happen in your options, and then they gave you a way to tell him to shove it and not pick any of them. That the reject ending seems like a bit of a “You wanted a bad ending? Well here you go, fuck you!” from Bioware, but after seeing the epilogue for it and the Buzz Aldrin replacement it’s actually kind of neat.
I think that if this had been the ending that was in the game from the start, people would be a lot less pissed about it.
Oh god, that horrible feeling when you realize that Extended Cut copied TRON: Legacy.
I think the new 4th ending is a blatant and tremendous “fuck you” to the fans for not accepting their vision.
The AUDACITY of those paying customers!
You’ll never hear me defending BioWare as a corporate appendage of EA. Everything about the culture of that company has changed in the past few years. It shows in the kind of douchey people they put up to represent them to the public (Casey, Helfer), in their DLC strategies… a gesture like this is only offensive because we care. Its the kind of petty vindictiveness we should come to expect from them and the rest of the EA family in the future.
I like that they made it impossible to shoot the star child – I think that must have been an extra-special “fuck off” to MrBTongue.
Impossible without triggering the fuck-off “ending,” I mean.
The new endings are better but they are still bullshit endings through and through. I echo most of the criticisms levied at it, but I have another one I haven’t seen much.
I love games with multiple endings, but I have never seen the choice of ending more in-your-face than in Mass Effect 3. They literally ask you, “So which ending do you want?” I thought the outcome would be much more transparent in that your past choices dictate how everything is going to go down. I also figured that instead of reloading your last save and seeing a new ending, you would have to play through the entire series to get a significantly different ending. That’s what I thought they meant by claiming that choices matter.
After the Dragon Age II and Mass Effect 3 debacles, I’m looking at Bioware very skeptically in the future.
>you don’t get a special series of cutscenes that shows you what happened to each main character, a supposed RPG tradition that was last practiced in Super Mario RPG
What about New Vegas, and to a lesser extent, Fallout 3?