Yeah, but that just starts the arguments (not that I'm opposed to a good argument, how else am I supposed to amuse myself on the internet!) about where the ending actually starts.

EDIT: Omg, Dan stole my thread!

I think it would have been a better ending if there actually was no explanation for why the Reapers are doing what they're doing. They're incredibly ancient, incredibly advanced synthetic lifeforms that just f*****g organics and want to wipe them all out. They were scarier imo when their motives were unknown and unknowable. Its like movies like the first Alien, the monster is much scarier when you don't know what it is or what it looks like or what its going to do, once you know all that, it takes some of the sting out of it.

No new endings, just some tweaks and more dialog and cut scenes

fyi khel, it's ok to hate on a game.

Synth one does not.....how...does...it work. Do Geth and reapers magically fuse with all organic life? How will reproduction of organic things work? Will all living cells have biomechanical parts?

As for what is happening, the way I understood it, its rewriting the base genetic code of everything and creating a new type of lifeform that is synthetic and organic all in one.

As for what is happening, the way I understood it, its rewriting the base genetic code of everything and creating a new type of lifeform that is synthetic and organic all in one. So not synthetics with organic parts or organics with synthetic parts, just a new type of life that all shares the same base genetic makeup which is an amalgamation of the two. Essentially the same theme they played out in BSG with the baby that Helo had with the Cylon chick, its just the Mass Effect version involved a magical starchild and a "Change the galaxy" button instead of organics and synthetics f*****g to make babies.

But the Synthesis ending still showed Joker and your crew getting off the Normandy and EDI in her synthetic body, all seemingly unchanged.

I only did the whole merge ending but I assumed EDI was going to die if you destroy all Reapers as they implied that all synthetic stuff would stop working, was that not the case?

You mean apart from all the circuitry shown in the plants and Joker looking all Illusive Man?

Actually I don't hate the endings, I hate the "I made synthetics to kill you all every 50K years so you won't be killed by synthetics" and how it was pulled out of their arse 10ish minutes before the end.

"I made synthetics to kill you all every 50K years so you won't be killed by synthetics" and how it was pulled out of their arse 10ish minutes before the end

Yeah, it was pretty rushed, it was like they went "Oh s***, we only have 10 minutes left and still haven't explained everything. Quick! Introduce an all-knowing god type character that can explain everything to the player."

I still think it would have been better without that explanation jammed in, but as I understood it its more like "Well if we just let organics and synthetics run rampant, synthetics are going to completely wipe out organics, so every so often we'll come and prune back the organics so they pose less of a threat and the synthetics don't feel the need to go and wipe out all organics everywhere." Cos the reapers only harvest the advanced races, not all the races, they leave the other less advanced races to evolve (like the race of dudes the old Shadow Broker comes from).

Its pretty flimsy though and theres too many holes in it that bug me, so I wish they'd just left the explanation out altogether and left the reapers as big, evil, ancient f*****s with unknowable motives. I mean, every 50,000 years the Reapers prune the organics right? They don't prune synthetics though, so what happened to all the synthetic races from the previous cycles? I mean, the Prothean dude says there was a race of synthetics like the Geth in his cycle, and that each cycle essentially repeats the same pattern so its safe to assume there would be a similar synthetic race in every cycle. Reapers harvest the advanced organic races to stop them wiping out the synthetics (or to stop the synthetics saying "F*** this s***" and wiping out all the oganics), but wheres all the synthetic races from previous cycles? Or even signs they ever existed?

Yeah, it was Keith David.

Actually I don't hate the endings, I hate the "I made synthetics to kill you all every 50K years so you won't be killed by synthetics" and how it was pulled out of their arse 10ish minutes before the end.

Okay, here is what I asked Patrick Weekes, and his answers as best as I can remember them. I've paraphrased but I'm doing my best to stick to what he said rather than introduce any interpretation.

THESE ARE NOT DIRECT QUOTES.

-Is there still a setting to explore after the ending? Is everything ruined?

The setting is definitely not ruined. We still have a big, lively galaxy.

-Will long-distance superluminal travel still be possible post-Ending? (will Tali or Wrex or Garrus see their homeworlds again? Will everyone starve?)

Galactic civilization will rebuild. The mass relays were not necessary for interstellar flight. Remember, what does it say in the Codex about the speed of ships? That's right, 12 lightyears per (day? hour? minute?). And that's only the cruising speed, not the maximum speed.

People have never needed to research basic FTL improvements before because they have mass relays. With the relays gone, new technology will increase that speed. Additionally, the element zero cores of the dead/controlled Reapers can be used to improve FTL drives. Starflight will continue using conventional FTL.

-Why did Joker leave Shep behind?

Joker would never abandon Shep without a good reason. Hopefully this will be clear in the Expanded Cut.

-Why can EDI survive the Destroy ending?

We argued a lot about this, I said that she was made of Reapertech and should therefore be destroyed, but (unclear, don't remember - wish I'd been able to ask a followup as his response doesn't make much sense)

-Did anyone on the Citadel survive?

Yes. We would never, ever do anything that made the player feel, on replay, that it would be better for everyone on the Citadel if they just died. The Citadel has emergency shelters and kinetic barriers - even if it blows up, millions might survive. You should assume that everyone plot-important on the Citadel survived.

-Is it better for Kelly Chambers if we talk her into suicide?

No, see above.

-Who wrote the death of Joker's sister?

I did! We intentionally did not connect the dots. We were very interested to see how fast gamers figured it out.

-Whose idea was it to make the Rayya fall out of the sky if you destroy the Quarian fleet?

Someone in the audio department, it was brilliant.

-Did the mass relays pull an Arrival and go supernova?

No, they didn't. (i'm paraphrasing here, please don't interpret this too hard) They overloaded, they didn't rupture. We really didn't mean to imply that the whole galaxy had been destroyed. People interpreted the ending in ways we really didn't expect.

(Mr. Weekes dropped a lot of hints that he really didn't like the ending. He also said something that was almost 100% verbatim from the Penny Arcade Forum post often attributed to him)

-Why did Legion pull a 180 from his Mass Effect 2 philosophy?

He and the Geth were backed into a corner. They'd been made a lot dumber by the attack on the Dyson swarm. There was no other choice for Geth survival.

-What was up with the Rachni story? Why did we get railroaded?

Welcome to game development. In some games (Alpha Protocol) they make a bold choice where some decisions can knock entire missions out of the story. At BioWare, we never want people to be locked out of content due to a decision several games ago. We just didn't have the resources to do an alternate for the Rachni mission, so we decided that the Rachni mission could occur whether or not players saved the Queen.

-Why didn't (X squadmate from ME2) return?

There was a very ugly month of development where we fought out who would return. We knew we had to have a smaller cast so we could fit in more squad banter. Eventually we decided to bring Garrus and Tali back, so they could be squadmates in all three games. We also knew we'd have Vega in order for new players to have someone dumber than they were.

I was very resentful of Vega at first because I thought he was taking a slot that could've gone to a ME2 character, but he grew on me.

-Why did EDI have cameltoe?

We don't get a lot of feedback from the art department but (unclear, wish I remembered this better )

Lots of discussion about how he was uncomfortable doing Pinocchio stories for both Legion and EDI because 'EDI was fine, she was an AI, she was cool - do we really need her to turn into Commander Data? We had seven seasons of Data, that was enough.'

-Why did you write Pinocchio stories for all the synthetic characters?

See above

-What was up with the Human Reaper in ME2? Why did it look so dumb?

We wanted to use the Suicide Mission to show several steps of the Reaper development process, from human reaper embryo all the way to cuttlefish. But the mission grew too complicated so it was cut for time.

-Do the Reapers really only generate one capital ship per cycle? How do they ever break even?

Well, we never totally pinned that down. But this cycle was really anomalous. They don't normally take any capital-size Reaper losses at all.

-What was up with Kai Leng? How do you feel about him?

We really wanted to have a recurring antagonist for Shep, a 'Darth Maul' (his words). But I feel like there was some definite conflict between cutscene and gameplay there, and I think it's something we have to work on.

'He was a great antagonist in the books'

-Why did we only get top and bottom dialogue choices, no middle?

Part of it was resources. Part of it is that Mass Effect 3 is a war story and it's really hard for Shep to feel middling about the Reapers.

-How did YOU feel about the ending?

(I didn't ask this, but he seems to have gone to GREAT lengths to think ways around a lot of stuff the ending implied.)

Why no female (alien X?)

Resource limitations. They have a very strict budget for how many different characters they can use in a given area. Some are basically free - if you have human males you have Batarians because they're humans with funny heads, if you have human females you have asari, etc.

Where was Harbinger? Can we ASSUME DIRECT CONTROL of him?

I definitely want more closure on Harbinger. That'd be hilarious. Stop punching yourself, Harbinger.

How did the Reapers storm the Citadel? Why didn't they shut down the relays as per their original plan once they had control?

Originally we planned to have a cutscene of Reapers taking over, Reaper monsters punching buttons, et cetera. But we cut it, partially for resource reasons and partly because it disrupted the pacing.

The Reapers didn't shut down the mass relays because the Keepers interfered with that. (I wish I could've asked a follow-up here, it doesn't make much sense.)

Why don't Ken and Gabby have more dialogue?

They actually have a bunch more on disk, but we somehow introduced a bug where their dialogue is tied to your approval level with Ash. If Ash has low approval, or isn't present, most of Ken and Gabby's dialogue won't play.

Who the hell are Ken and Gabby?

You probably met them in ME2 though.

Mass Effect 3: Garrus Shoots First

It's just a star wars reference regarding unnecessary edits but I haven't finished ME3 either so who knows.

From what I've been able to piece together of the ME3 ending though, is that even though the entree and main were delicious, in the last 10 minutes Shepard eats a cupcake for the dessert but the fanboys didn't get to pick whether the icing was Paragon or Renegade flavour and that made them upset.

I planned on replaying ME1/2/3 again as a Renegade Female as opposed to a Paragon Male, but I don't think I will now mainly because the ending will be the same.

I don't get that mentality though, soooooooooo much of the games will change, and you'll see so much new content, and new choices, and events will go in different ways, but you don't want to do that because the last 10 minutes of the last game will be the same?

Heres another spoiler, no matter what you do, the start of ME2 is the same as well, Shepherd dies and the Normandy is destroyed.