The Discord Ending · 9:32pm Mar 10th, 2017
I know a lot of people want a fairy-tale, all’s well that ends well ending to Mass Effect 3. I know, back when I first played through I sure did. That being said, it wasn’t destined to be, no matter how much the fans wanted it to be so. And I can really sympathize with Bioware here- because I feel they wrote themselves into a massive corner with the plots.
Think about it- a massive fleet of artificial intelligence starships so advanced that they can tank just about anything you throw at them who are determined to wipe out all life in the universe, and somehow we’re able to stand up to them? Please. This would be a re-enactment of the European settlers coming to America, and we’re the Native Americans. Actually, that’s a bad analogy. This is the Spanish Conquistadores versus the Incas- Guns, gunpowder and Toledo steel armor versus stone knives and war paint. I mean, it’s a great plot motivator, having a huge overarching enemy to overcome, but they made the villain in ME1 too powerful, then gave them too many ships in ME2, so much so that they knew that there was no chance that any sort of conventional warfare would be able to win. They literally had to throw a huge deus ex in there, the Crucible, just to justify some way that we just might be able to win. Seriously. The fighting against the Reaper ships is so lop-sided that they literally had to do an ass-pull so that the ending wouldn’t be ‘rocks fall everyone dies’.
But, what’s done is done, and when they did manage to contrive a way for the central character of the series to have a significant impact on the outcome of the battle, they did present us all with some fairly interesting choices. Control, Synthesis, Destruction, and after the controversy and shouting, the secret Death ending.
I’ll get to them more in a moment, but the fans really should have seen it coming. As much as the series is about hope and striving to do the impossible against impossible odds, there has always been an undertone of sacrifice. ME1 had the Virmire choice: one of two of your teammates has to die, there is no way to save them, and you get to pick which one. That’s one hell of a decision to make. ME2 softballed it by making it about loyalty- and by not making them mutually exclusive if you did it all just right. It was by definition a suicide mission, but get your teammates loyalty and they wouldn’t die when they really, really should have. With the right speech checks and choices and timing, EVERYONE survived, except some colonists that we as the player kind of don’t care about. And then, throughout ME3, there are still hints of ME1- reconciling the Geth and the Quarians takes some high speech checks, or else one race of sentients is exterminated- but for the most part, everyone thought they were going the ME2 route- do it right, make the right choices, get high enough speech checks and your happy ending is assured. But then the real ME3 ending turned out to have an ME1 twist to it after all- you can have your happy ending, but at best it will be bittersweet.
Control is the ‘Happy’ ending here. Shepard gets disintegrated and becomes an overriding AI in control of the Reapers. There is some damage done, but it can be repaired, and Shepard ushers in a new Golden age at the head of a Reaper fleet turned Good. Of course, this means sacrificing the character you just spent 3 games and a hundred hours or more on for them to become the equivalent of HAL or Skynet and hope that it all turns out alright. Not very satisfying for someone who wanted their character to walk off into the sunset at the end of the game, nor does it really make much sense for the Catalyst to offer this as a potential path forward- why is it advocating for it’s own demise? Why is it even telling you this?
Synthesis is honestly my personal favorite, if for no other reason than the astounding possibilities it presents to fanfic authors like us. Shepard walks into the massive Crucible beam and adds her own essence to it, dying and turning the pulse into a massive wave that actually transforms organics and synthetics alike into synthetic hybrids. People are now born with circuitry and other synthetics in their very cells, allowing them to create networks between people or share data and memories with a simple touch. Sythetics begin to know the wonders of emotions, of feeling, of pleasure and pain and happiness. And the Reapers stop their extermination effort now that the mere organics have become the pinnacle of evolution- man and machine combined, greater than all. Which, of course, is part of the problem. Beyond the point of sacrificing Shepard again, this ending seems too… perfect. Why are the Reapers stopping their rampage now? Why should they care? The whole purpose of the Reapers was that they were there to ascend everyone into more Reapers and destroy all synthetics, why would they stop now that everyone is suddenly both? More disturbing and suspicious, this was the ending the Catalyst advocated for- and honestly, it felt more like it was lying. That it wanted you to do that, because by doing so you wouldn’t be stopping the Reapers but instead accelerating their takeover in some way. I liked this ending, because to me this was an interesting idea, but I feel the presentation and the logic behind it were flawed.
And then there is the Destruction ending. This option, at best, will destroy all synthetic life in the galaxy- the Reapers, sure, but also your best buddies the Geth who sacrificed for you (if you so chose), and one of your own personal squad mates, an AI by the name of EDI. And severely damaging all the mass relays, so there goes galactic civilization as well for the next few centuries until that gets up and running again, assuming you can get them up and running at all. Worse, if you didn’t get a good score, that ‘destroy just synthetics’ slides down and down, until at the very worst you destroy all life on Earth and throughout most of the galaxy as well- humanity and all the other aliens you fought to save may just go extinct because of your choice. This, to me, this is the ultimate example of ‘broke your arm punching out Cthulu’- sure, you killed all the Reapers, but you killed a hell of a lot of other people too and possibly doomed galactic civilization.
And then, last but not least: the Death ending. Added by Bioware after the fact as a retort to all those who whined and complained that they didn’t get their perfect fairytale ending like they wanted. Shepard chooses none of the above and instead shoots the Catalyst in the head (for all the good that does, it is a hologram after all). This act of defiance is Shepard’s choice, dooming the galaxy to continue the cycle; the Reapers go on to mop up the last resistance with the Crucible never activated, then over the course of the next few centuries enslave the rest of the galaxy and turn them into more Reapers. The 50,000 year cycle of reaping begins anew, and Shepard, who had this one chance to destroy evil… doesn’t. Bioware stuck to their guns; you don’t like them, tough. This is their story, they are the Game Master, not you. Angered a lot of people even further, but I can respect this ending; it is the logical conclusion to refusing to pick any of the options given to us.
Now, I’ve seen a lot of comments asking for this series to ‘fix’ the ME3 ending. And, to an extent, Discord’s ending does. Shepard survives, the Reapers are killed but not other AIs, you don’t scour the Earth clean of life, there are no potential ‘gotchas’. But, I’m not here to sugarcoat things. I wanted to keep things in the spirit of the Mass Effect series, or at least, ME1 and 3: there is no perfect choice. Someone has to die. Everything has a downside. Following that logic, Discord is quite definitely the perfect choice of demi-god or whatever you want to call him here. Chaos is defined as ‘behavior so unpredictable as to be random’; well, with Discord and magic involved, strange things happen. Drink an energy drink and become a bunny. Turn on your car only to see that the engine has been replaced by a hamster on a wheel… who’s on strike. Discord brought pony civilization to a new dark age once upon a time, and now we are asking him to skirt that line intentionally.
Just like in the game, the more war resources you have, the better the ending. In this case, think of it as a higher score gets you a better quality Crucible; the more energy it is able to dump into the Citadel prior to Discord interfering, the less energy he affects, and the sooner things will go back to normal.
High scores get the happy ending- the chaos lasts for no more than 3 years, harming no one and not doing any significant damage to the universe. Civilization is going to take a few years to recover, especially on Earth and the other war-torn homeworlds and colonies, but the anarchy is relatively minor and control is re-asserted quickly. Equestrian civilization in particular is not only able to survive but to advance during this time, and when the chaos finally lifts it is Equestria that is best equipped (though the smallest in terms of resources and still the least advanced) to begin helping everyone get on their feet.
Moderate scores slide it down a little ways. The chaos lasts for a decade, and by the end of it civilization across the galaxy is on the brink of collapse. Many of the colonies are in anarchy, and the homeworlds aren’t much better. Technology is lost, it takes years to re-establish control of the homeworlds and decades to kill the warlords and re-assert control over the colonies. New and interesting life forms, mostly benign, are created and thrive enough to create small but stable populations. Equestria is slightly better off but not much, and it takes several years for Equestria to stabilize their civilization and manage to claw their way back to the stars.
Low scores are pretty bad. The chaos lasts for a quarter of a century. Civilization across the galaxy completely collapses, sending every space-age civilization back to the stone age with the only exception being Equestria, which is sent back to a state somewhere between the medieval age and the Renaissance (mostly because they have Discord helping to contain the chaos and because Celestia and Luna have had experience with this kind of thing before). Earth is particularly bad, as soldiers from every alien race are stranded on its surface and takes to warlord infighting (at least, those that can survive. Turians and Quarians, with their dextro biology, are forcibly transformed to a man into creatures of levo-amino acids as the only way to ‘save’ them). It takes centuries to get back into space and to the level everyone is now familiar with, creating a whole new galactic civilization. Chaos creates new, numerous, and chaotic wildlife and sentient species out of both existing species and existing sentients, both benign and hostile. The galaxy will never be the same again.
I like this ending.
Honestly, the only reason I was unhappy about ME3's ending was that I thought that Shepard was actually going to pull off a flawless victory. I don't find the reapers overpowered to be honest, especially since the game keeps emphasizing that they're synthetics. I always assumed that they had a central mind somewhere and ME3's final battle would be storming it and that legion's mission to correct the reaper-worshiping geth in ME2 was a foreshadowing of the method that would be used to win the war since the geth were similarly synthetic.
That being said, you are right. Their game, their rules.
4451174 Honestly, I was more upset by the "Fire Crucible, Roll Credits" aspect of the original ending. I managed to cap out my war-assets with everything short of the stupid BS multiplayer region-control mechanics (I didn't have in-home internet at the time) and got the Synthases ending (Barely, seeing as I didn't have any of the DLCs yet to pad the numbers out), though I still probably sat there for maybe five minutes deciding if I should go for the giant energy pillar or just Kill everything (because I never really trusted the control ending to be anything but delaying the galaxy's destruction via giant metal space cuttlefish).
So yeah. I jump in the giant energy pillar, see a few flashes of my crew... and it's over. Confused the Hell out of me before I got on my phone's browser to see if I'd missed something; didn't find the right war-assets or whatever. That's pretty much how I stumbled onto the Retake Mass Effect movement.
In hindsight, now, with having had more time to think both objectively and philosophically about the endings in turn, I don't really like any of them, but I can live with a "Least of Evils" ending for the series, and hey, the way it's set up gives authors the opportunity to more easily shoehorn their own "Fifth Options" into the mix to get the ending they wished for.
4450882
as befits your namesake
The ending of Mass Effect 3 did not suck because it was, in essence, a downer ending; it sucked because it was a random Deus Ex Machina leading into a downer ending. And I do, for that matter, consider it to be a downer ending. The Catalyst literally has no reason to offer you these choices, except maybe an inbuilt imperative for organic approval. It also has no reason to tell you the truth about... anything really. We know Reapers can lie, Sovereign spent the entirety of Mass Effect 1 lying up a storm, whatever the Catalyst tells you, I doubt it's the truth.
And that's why I really hate the ending. It just doesn't make any sense to me. It would have pissed me off even more if it turned out the Catalyst was just using you at the end to work around it's programming, but at least that would have felt more realistic. It would have been a terrible ending, but at least it would have felt like an ending. In any case, you're right, Bioware wrote themselves into a corner with Mass Effect 2 by making the number of Reapers absolutely fucking ridiculous, thus making any kind of military victory effectively impossible. The worst part though, the part that really grinds my gears, is that it made all your efforts feel meaningless.
The only difference between the endings is the Cliff's Notes epilogue you get in each one, but they all feel so plastic and fake that you can't relate to them, you can't enjoy them. A true downer ending would have left you feeling bad, but at least it would have made a satisfying conclusion to the series, at least it would have given people closure. Instead we're stuck in this weird limbo where we can't really accept the ending as closure, and Bioware knows this, so we're just gonna set things in the future a little and move everything over to Andromeda so we can try and start over.
I almost wish there had been a bad end, that the Reapers had 'won,' and that the Citadel civilization had sacrificed itself to end the cycle. Meanwhile, countless colony ships are sent out to the Andromeda galaxy in the hopes of beginning galactic civilization anew... a sad ending, yes, but ultimately a hopeful one. Where the reward for your choices is the ending of a incalculable travesty, and the fragile hope that things may begin anew. Maybe it's not the best ending, but I ultimately think I would have liked it better. And it certainly would have set up the next series in the franchise nicely.
One of my biggest gripes is that they undersold the Geth. Either the Reapers can hack the Geth and having them should hurt your chances of a good ending, or the Reapers can't and the Death ending should be the Geth soloing the Reapers with superior production rate and lolnoping the notion of Reaper perfection. Because the Reapers take months and billions of collected sapients to make, while a Geth dreadnought takes any raw material that works to make one of varying quality based on materials.
The Reapers have a far better tech base. But one lost Reaper is extremely hard to replace. Geth? They can salvage battlefields for materials, melting down any Reaper hulls to extract the metal and reuse it. You think the Reapers are hard to stop? They have largely finite numbers. Geth have most of the matter in the galaxy to work with and can basically endlessly recycle it. And the Geth are improving. A 10,000 year war of hit and run leads to the Geth getting closer and closer to the Reapers until the Reapers suddenly can't keep up and are wiped out.
Seriously, the Reapers don't even out mass a single star system. Meanwhile, the Geth have been strip mining potentially dozens of entire star systems for centuries, meaning they are probably at the multiple solar masses level of material use.
Mass Effect is a war of attrition. The Reapers suck at attrition. They are utterly reliant on the tech advantage, and AI like the Geth can make that advantage shrink while outdoing the Reapers at attrition so much that a dozen Geth dreadnaughts being lost for one Reaper dreadnaught is still sustainable. Because the Geth can recycle, while the Reapers can't. A dead Reaper stays dead, the corpse useful only for scrap to make more drones. A destroyed Geth platform likely has sent off all of it's data to be archived and used for a reboot and the material is salvaged to make a new platform.
I haven't played Mass Effect 3 yet. I have the game and I will play it eventually, if only for the gameplay itself. I think the story of Mass Effect crashed and burned in Mass Effect 2. And it fails at the first hurdle at the start of the game, see I thought Shepard died in space and his body was recovered in the planet's orbit. But no, Shepard's body 'literally' survived intact enough to resurrect him. An impact with a PLANET! The atmosphere alone should have burned up his/her body, this was the kind of idiocy that I hadn't seen since the Matrix was rewritten to have humanity as human batteries.
Now we're assembling a fairly large team of badasses to take on these Collectors. Aliens who weren't hinted at or seen aiding their Reaper masters in Mass Effect. I'm pretty sure that Collector vessel would have come in handy, during the first Citadel Assault. Why wouldn't Sovereign have gone and picked those guys up, rather than relying on other tools, like the Geth? Have the Reapers used the Collectors before? If they have an army of loyal insect aliens, why didn't Sovereign go get those guys and have them activate the Crucible? Instead of Saren?
Also how did we know we're only dealing with one Collector ship, what if there was an entire planet of these things? Or they had multiple space stations? We never actually learn all that much about the Collectors in Mass Effect 2. I'm guessing The Illusive Man (TIM) read the script or just has perfect foresight... Oh and then we find a Derelict Reaper..Wait WHAT! You've found a Reaper! Actual proof of a reaper, that can be carbon-dated and compared to Sovereign's remains to verify that they're the same type of ship and that the Reaper threat is real? I know it sounds like I hate Mass Effect 2 and I don't, I'm just frustrated by it. It could have been so, so, so much better.
My gripe with ME3 ending was not the Deus ex Machina existing itself, but how poorly executed it was.
But beyond that, it was the blatant lie. They said that since it was the end of the trilogy they dint need to set up another game. The story would vary dramatically with your choices, no one was guaranteed to live, there wouldn't be color coded endings. They instead have us a story that played the same no matter what you chose in previous games. Wrex died? There's another krogan that guides you the same. Legion? Same thing. Your choices through the course of two games didn't change shit. Hell, the ones in this one don't, either! You get to choose between those 3 no matter what. All that your effort nets you in the end is a different text of "and then this happened".
It wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't promised the opposite of that.
All in all, I won't buy Andromeda. I'll pirate it, because fuck BioWare. They lied to us, the have better be absolutely epic for then to try start making up for it.
But I did like the Discord ending. It fits him and his power. The Mon Capitan parts sold it
4451429
Yeah, that was why when I didn't do the second-to-last mission with the Quarians and Geth before choosing a side (I didn't know! Oops!) I picked the Geth over the Quarians. The Quarians were already at their max-strength, and they were losing to the Geth in their stupid war. The Geth were only getting stronger as time wore on, AND the Quarians had thrown me under the bus on more than one occasion in the past.
Personally I liked how M3 ended, but then, I subscribe to the Indoctrination Theory for the storyline, which makes M3 out to be a lot deeper than when first looked at. The theory might be wrong, but even if it is, I'm still holding onto that idea. Makes it more fun that way.
ME3 was certainly an interesting end to an interesting series. Mass Effect is as its title suggests, Massive Effects, usually through small changes. This is a game about choices, and the consequences of those choices. Perhaps some of the choices were stupid, and realistically could have been avoided, but that wasn't the point of the game.
Every single choice you make, every single resource you scrape together, and every single method you use to prepare, it all leads to that finale where you have to choose one final time. Do good and make sound choices, and you get to make the best choices at the end. There are still prices, catches, and consequences, but on the grand scale of things they are minor and relatively easy to recover from. Life survives, and in time thrives.
Do mediocre and choose somewhat poorly, and you are left with choices that are equally bad and good. Good things will happen, but bad things will happen as well. Recovery is uncertain, but not bleak. There will be struggle and there will likely be suffering, but it's not hopeless. Life can survive if it's tenacious enough.
Do bad, and generally make some really bad calls, and you are left with last resort choices. The ultimate failure is the Reaper Cycle continuing, but you don't have the means to stop it fully, not without severe backlash. You have to do the only thing you can do, and that's take the path of Sacrifice. Sacrifice one, save ten. Sacrifice ten, save a hundred. Sacrifice a hundred, save a thousand. The lives of the relative few are less important than the lives of the many. So you must Sacrifice all synthetic life to save the galaxy. Even then, turmoil wracks the galaxy as life is set back massively. It is unlikely the current generation of life will survive. But at least future generations of life will not be forced to endure the Reaper Cycle.
Mass Effect was ingenious in that way. It was really a social experiment in the consequences of the choices we make, and honestly I can see this game series being a very good method of teaching future generation that there will always be consequences to our choices.
In terms of your Discord options, their roughly the same. Do great, and very little bad happens. Things get shook up, yeah, but honestly it's mostly harmless. Do mediocre, and the shaking up becomes a violent shaking, causing a lot of pain and suffering, but in the end you can recover from it. Do bad, and life as you know it is over. But hey, at least future life won't face the same thing that you did, so there's that.
It was never about the lack of a happy ending. The problem with the "endings" was that their "artistic" vision for the series end was a blatant rip off of another game that didn't and still doesn't fit with the story Mass Effect was telling from the start.
Control, Synthesis, and Destroy worked well in Deus Ex's Augmented Humans vs Humans storyline. But had no bearing or point in Mass Effect.
There was never a point where Synthesis was your goal, cooperation yes, but the story of the Paragon was about bringing different races together to work for the common good using their differences not melding them into a single race.
Control almost works because it's using the Reaper's tactic against them but the effect is lessened from a lack of Shepard's lost humanity being shown due to the rushed ending.
Destroy worked best out of all of them and even then it wasn't perfect because the impact on the Geth, Volus, and Quarians was also glossed over with the short original ending.
Everyone says they wrote themselves into a corner, well that was the point, it was supposed to be the end of the trilogy. A definite cut off line, a few different endings, have one of them be a cannon one for any future spin off series, have the complete loss end, maybe a mutually assured destruction end with all the relays going off, maybe even an end where Shepherd convinces them to hold off the reaping (always thought it was stupid the child spouting that organics and synthetics could never coexist and that's why everything needed to be reaped when I had the Quarians and the Geth working together to kick Reaper ass).
Really though the endings didn't matter, as much as the stupid cookie cutter ending cinematics that glossed over everything in general.
Also as an aside I'd have been whole lot more forgiving to Bioware if that hadn't been the third time they rushed something out and ruined it at the time.
I cannot applaud this trilogy enough. The three biggest characters got to shine, and the Discord ending inherently makes sense as a way that Discord would solve the problem of the Reapers, as well and the side effects of using him for that end being plausible.
My feeling on Mass Effect 3, its ending, and the DLC and patches that tried to soften the blow is that with the first two games, BioWare essentially promised its player base the most deluxe of all ham and cheese sandwiches (I love making elaborate sammiches, so work with me here): thick slices of ham, multiple kinds of cheese, toasted whole-wheat bread, pickles, red onions, mustard, ketchup, bacon mayonnaise, the best damn sammich man or woman can hold in their hands and consume for the ultimate meal experience. Then they gave us a couple slices of Wonderbread, funny-tasting ham just on the edge of turning, and a hunk of dry generic-branch cheese and acted confused when we got a little upset and demanded to know where the ultimate sammich was. After a lot of yelling and arm-waving, they forked over a good solid ham-and-cheese sandwich that was a pleasant meal experience and was a pretty damn good sammich---but was still not the ultimate sammich experience. After getting the solid and perfectly respectable sammich, the players were expected to be happy that BioWare deigned to exert bare minimum effort, and just accept that we'd never get the promised reward.
To bring this weird analogy out of the realm of food (and make me stop weeping for my lack of ultimate sammich materials), ME1 and ME2 created a scenario where the universe turned on the choices you made. You were told by every element that the game gave you, that you had the power to overcome an existential crisis, uniting the whole and entire of the galaxy in a single great cause and thereafter forge a galactic community that had stared an ancient-beyond-measure evil in the face and crushed it. And as Mass Effect 3 rolled on, it was made clear to you that this cycle of extermination was the culmination of all others, each cycle advancing one great project that would eliminate the flawed control method that the Leviathan civilization had devised for the problem of synthetics. This device would be the Crucible in which the Leviathans' great error would be crushed and reforged into a chance to do what they could not: reconcile synthetics with organics. And you did just that: once master and servant, and then enemies, and then eventual partners came of the Quarian and the Geth. All that remained was to put a cap on the achievement, eliminate the last barrier to a way forward in which organics and synthetics would walk together with varying degrees of success.
Except, this option was denied you.
Having established as canon that the Reapers existed as a distinct code, a distinctive consciousness, an independent program with a single AI at its core directing the entire affair and carrying out the mission that the Leviathans gave to it, flipping the killswitch on this wholly independent program is not an option. You can't overload the AI and corrupt the base code. You can't demand that the AI alter the parameters of its mission. You can't have it hit a reset button and force the Reapers to treat their purpose for this cycle as fulfilled and withdraw back into the intergalactic void to wait for another 50,000 years at which point a fully aware galaxy would be ready to receive them. Instead, you are given two options to fulfill the Reapers' mission (eliminating synthetics by merging them with organics, or by destroying all synthetics including the Reapers) or become a more benevolent Illusive Man. You are denied the option to even sacrifice yourself to achieve an actual victory: you either settle for giving yourself ultimate power over the galaxy, removing your achievement entirely by simply killing all Geth along with the Reapers, forcibly convert all life to ultra-refined husks (which are effectively an organic body with synthetic components spliced into it), or choose to just fail completely. BioWare wrote two games in which decisions have consequences and achievements mean something, then finished the series by tossing both into a rubbish bin and shooting for whatever they the writers felt like. You can choose among three story endings that made the writers feel like they'd been artistic and special, but nothing written for the players. To grab the game analogy, they chose to be the game master who pulls the ultimate dick move and says "OK players, all the ways where you did something unexpected and created new options... those go away and the party dies to fulfill their mission. Pick how I fuck you over."
ME3 was ultimately an unacceptable example of the same kind of powermongering elitist attitude among game devs and publishing companies that would get us to a place where a game company command that you fork over real cash to them it you want a spare save slot in their game. BioWare proved that players could be fucked over and then placated with some shiny objects... and the industry paid attention. That is ultimately why I hated the end of ME3.
Shouldn't the "best" ending also mention incorporating technology from the Enterprise-D?
You know, that last one, with the worst score... It somehow reminds me of the Warhammer. 40k, I mean.