Mass Effect Legendary Edition remaster trilogy

[oldmanpaco]

All this modding talk and not a single nude mod on the nexus.

Pathetic.

 

[Average Manatee]

Copyright is well defined as applying to any work of art and has mountains of precedent to back that up.

Mods are content created by modifying copyrighted content, though. It's difficult to predict whether a modder wouldn't lose in court; not because they've breached the eula, but because their content is similar enough to the original. Happens with art too.

It does generally depend on the level of work and creativity involved. If you just tweak some miranda_butt_size variable somewhere, or do bug fixes, or run textures through some kind of filter/upscaler, that'd not really be enough of your own creative action or effort to qualify. But anything involving creating of new or significant manual alteration of vanilla textures/models/sounds/levels/characters/etc would qualify.

I'll admit I have no idea to what extent the mentioned ME mods go in terms of changing the game or creating new content. Community created content for a game like ME sounds like some of the worst stuff to try and wade through.

 

[TheImplodingVoice]

So the creator wants to retain exclusive bragging rights basically saying "I made it first and how dare you replicate my mod and make it better. Fuck Nexus for not giving me power over others."

I you read her post, you'd know she wants the right to be the one to convert her mods or grant permission to others to do so. She's angry because Skyrim modders have that right, but not ME modders, for technical reasons.

It's not about bragging rights, it's about owning your work and the effort you put in, and being able to continue that work if you desire to do so without anyone taking it away from you.

Seems reasonable to me.

This is the same modder that has specifically blocked compatibility patches for other mods previously.

They are a prima donna of the highest order.

Family of Lilura perhaps

 

[Gregz]

Is anyone playing this?

 

[mkultra]

Copyright is well defined as applying to any work of art and has mountains of precedent to back that up.

Mods are content created by modifying copyrighted content, though. It's difficult to predict whether a modder wouldn't lose in court; not because they've breached the eula, but because their content is similar enough to the original. Happens with art too.

I doubt there's a single case of anyone losing in court due to a mod, unless it's some absolute idiot doing something very stupid... i mean use common sense, e.g don't do shitty "upscale" mods of their art for example, it's not yours to alter and perhaps earn money from. When i make mods i always create my own models and textures, so it's 100% my content i'm sharing. Yes it alters someone elses game, it's not against any copyright law..

 

[antimeridian]

https://www.polygon.com/22436615/mass-effect-legendary-edition-police-ea-bioware-brooklyn-99

Mass Effect’s revival reminds us it’s time to abolish the space police
What would it mean to defund the Normandy?

After the wave of protests last summer following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor (among others), the topic of defunding the police began to see more frequent and serious public discussion. Several city councils even introduced measures to reallocate police funds to social programs with vastly inferior budgets. Police corruption, which had previously been glossed over by reformist appeals to root out the few bad apples, was finally cracked wide open, revealing the racist structural rot underlying the entire institution. Maybe policing, as a concept, was bad? Maybe it couldn’t be reformed, but should be abolished instead.

The far-reaching fallout from these traumatic events and revelations wound up affecting the world of entertainment, notably including NBC’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine. A show in the creative lineage of other workplace sitcoms like The Office and Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine is about a fictional police precinct in Brooklyn, staffed by a young and diverse crew of wisecracking cops. Despite being a far cry from Oakley-stunting, tactical vest-wearing, thick-necked white male depictions of police, the characters on the show could not escape the reckoning sweeping through the media landscape. It became the subject of viral tweets and a Collider article asking the question of whether subsequent seasons of the show might not see the beloved cast transferred to an entirely different and depoliticized line of work, like becoming firefighters, post office workers, or even public school teachers.

Spoiler

The Collider piece paints a compelling picture of the show’s root problem: What happens when we love a story’s characters but hate the ideological foundation of their jobs? Can the two even be separated?

Legendary Edition and released on modern consoles — arguably suffers from a similar problem. These games experienced runaway popularity at their height and retain a dedicated fan base to this day. The Legendary Edition is proof enough that there remains a lasting sense of goodwill toward the franchise, enough to invest the time and energy needed to update and re-release it.

But when most fans reminisce about what they truly love about the games, it’s the memorable relationships between the young, diverse cast of characters that they tend to bring up. Less warm recollection is spent on the jobs these characters hold, which exist (in various forms) in the military arms of the galaxy’s major political players. Whether it’s as Earth Alliance Military, Cerberus Commandos, or reinstated Alliance Navy Officers, Shepard and their crew are always some version of glorified space cops. They travel the galaxy, maintain security, and enforce order, while largely being unaccountable to any power beyond their own.

How, then, might an abolitionist perspective impact a series like Mass Effect? What new jobs might Shepard and their crewmates be assigned that would still allow them their camaraderie, their heart-wrenching moments of dramatic tension? How do we take these rich instances of sci-fi melodrama and extract them from the unseemly and violent drudgery of enforcing order across a vast and chaotic frontier? How do we move away from a premise that simplifies the Lovecraftian mystery of the Reapers into interchangeable robo-zombies to be shot at from behind chest-high barriers? A premise that neatly classifies a vast plethora of alien races into categories of the law-abiding and the lawless — one group to romance, another to gun down within the dimly lit corridors of space stations?

As a package, Mass Effect doesn’t immediately resemble modern American policing. Rather than a neighborhood beat, Shepard patrols light-years of space. Their crew is made up of aliens, robots, and humans of many different races and genders (though, it is worth noting, Black women are absent). Their remit is truly limitless, ranging from noir-inspired detective cases to terrorist attacks to full-blown military skirmishes.

Yet like most science fiction, Mass Effect models its far-flung fantasies on the structures of our own society. The form of government that rules over the game’s setting is a familiar, seemingly liberal one. An alliance of Earth nations cooperates with a more powerful council that represents the other dominant alien societies (Space-NATO, if you will). Unlike the apparently authoritarian bent of the ancient Prothean empire that came before, Mass Effect’s contemporary universe resembles our own, both in structure and in messaging. Freedom of choice, as a concept, is cherished (or at least, the illusion of it is). Individual freedoms and representative democracy are apparently the standard.

But these supposedly enlightened modes of rule come with the heavy arm of law and order firmly attached. In his book A Critical Theory of Police Power, Mark Neocleous argues that “the genius of liberalism was to make the police appear as an independent, non-partisan agency simply enforcing the law and protecting all citizens equally from crime.” He adds later that “the existence of discretion allows the state [...] to appear as standing at arms-length from the processes of administration and thus the policing of civil society.”

Standing in stark contrast to the Citadel Council’s seemingly measured and cautious form of governance, Shepard’s driven and hegemonic power hogs the spotlight. They are given free rein to do what the Council is unwilling to be seen as doing: keep everyone in line. Regardless of their various official titles, Shepard acts with the approval of the galaxy’s ruling powers, who give them total discretion. How else would you describe the events of Mass Effect 2, in which Shepard comes back from the dead, now working for Cerberus — a violent pro-human organization labeled as terrorists by the Council — and is allowed to continue operating pretty much the same as before? And when they return to the fold in the third game, they’re never taken to task or made to account for their previous decisions. This is because Shepard’s power is a police power. It is a form of power, as Neocleous puts it, that “persistently manages to break through any parameters imposed on it.”

This being the case, it seems pretty appropriate to view Mass Effect through an abolitionist lens. Like the police forces of the liberal West that so often cross the line and tragically resort to violence, Shepard explains away their own brash and violent behavior as a regretful necessity. In fact, like cops in real life, whose “special status as the sole legitimate users of force has contributed to a mindset of ‘them against us,’” as Alex S. Vitale describes it in his book The End of Policing, Shepard tends to aggressively defend the need for their reckless and hyperviolent approach. In one scene, they rail against a news reporter who tries to challenge their narrative. They’re also endlessly impatient with the Council’s caution and its natural distrust of the upstart human race. Despite the later games’ increased focus on maintaining relationships and navigating ethical quagmires, Shepard will always remain a burning point of white-hot light, unable and unwilling to slow down and reflect on the consequences of their behavior.

In discussing the hypothetical career changes of Jake Peralta, Charles Boyle, Amy Santiago, and the rest of the characters from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the Collider piece suggests that there is little thematic connection between the characters’ lives and their status as police officers. But this rings false, considering how much of the show is committed to the “copaganda” of valorizing police work. When they’re not up to zany hijinks at the precinct, the officers of Brooklyn Nine-Nine are out solving crimes and catching criminals. This is pure fantasy, a fabricated depiction of what police actually do, which falls more along the lines of harassing the homeless and mentally ill, and profiling and frisking young Black men. At its root, the show’s purpose is to defend and uphold the myth that police are our guardians. It’s a myth that contributes to the “self-serving and convenient obfuscation,” as Neocleous puts it, citing historian V.A.C. Gatrell, that “the police are concerned first and foremost with crime.”

Even when Brooklyn Nine-Nine tries to address police wrongdoing, such as in an episode where Terry Crews’ character is accosted by a racist fellow cop, it reduces the problem to one bad apple who needs to be reported, leaving the system itself intact and reified.

Mass Effect is equally invested in defending Shepard’s role as galactic super cop, as the man or woman upon whose shoulders all of galactic security rests. From the earliest moments of the first game, you are told that the galaxy is on the verge of violent chaos, even if you are rarely actually shown it. Rest assured that, outside the boundaries of “civilized” space, there are pirates, slavers, and other bogeymen, which unaccountable figures like the Spectres must fight against.

Once the Reaper threat is established in Mass Effect, it takes over the remainder of the games’ plot as the ur-concern. Here, in convenient all caps, is a challenge not just to the Council’s political hegemony, but to the very fabric of civilization. It’s hard to argue against Shepard needing to discard the rules and considerations of the status quo, against them needing to utilize every tool in their violent arsenal in order to face this massive threat. Unquestioned is why only Shepard can fill this role, why only they can be the one to ultimately decide what is to be done with trillions of souls. “Part of the illusion of security is that we are meant to bow down before it without even asking what it is or how it came to be granted such a status, just as we are expected to bow down before the police power that claims to secure us,” Neocleous says.

This dynamic plays out in the ways in which Shepard relates to the rest of their crewmates as well. When not serving as appendages to Shepard’s will, Shepard’s comrades will often bring their own personal dilemmas and problems to the table. Yet they usually rely on Shepard to make the final decisions about how to handle their issues. It is Shepard who has ultimate agency over how they live out their lives. They play defense attorney for a helpless Tali facing the accusations of her own people. They decide what happens to Thane’s criminal son, Samara’s criminal daughter, and Jacob’s criminal dad, to stay on theme.

IT’S DIFFICULT TO PICTURE MASS EFFECT WITHOUT A CENTERED AND PATERNALISTIC SHEPARD
Policing is about power, the power to maintain order using one’s maximum discretion. In providing police with such a free mandate, we make the trusting assumption that they will always make the correct decision. When they make a mistake, as they inevitably and often do, there are very few mechanisms with which to punish them. This makes the police — like the government it represents — a fundamentally paternalistic organization, one in which we are to place all our faith so that it may secure our lives (though only in the ways that it sees fit).

Knowing all this, it’s difficult to picture a version of Mass Effect without a centered and paternalistic Shepard. What is Mass Effect if you remove this figure who is established to police both political and personal boundaries?

The themes of order and hierarchy thread their way through every layer of the narrative, determining who is cherished and who is vilified. Even though the games go to great lengths to establish the diversity and rich variety of the galaxy, it remains a divided and unequal place. The Citadel and the main worlds you visit tend to be populated by select, respectable civilizations. Rarely do you visit the “lesser” worlds populated by alien races like the Batarians, who only tend to show up in combat zones as interchangeable cannon fodder, or in background stories as cartoonish villains threatening innocent colonists. They lash out from beyond the borders of settled space at the elites living in the center, a permanent criminal underclass. An underclass that arguably encompasses any alien who isn’t lucky enough to be a part of Shepard’s crew on the Normandy.

Just as Brooklyn Nine-Nine would not be the same show if it didn’t use its plotlines to valorize cops, Mass Effect would not be the same game if it stripped away its militaristic aesthetics and was led by someone other than its quasi-fascistic super soldier.

The intractability of this format comes down to a limit of imagination. Just as it is difficult to imagine a world like ours free from state violence, savage individualism, and insurmountable hierarchies, it is equally difficult to envision a game like Mass Effect where you are not playing as the ultimate securing force, the one who gets to put everything back in its place.

“The ideological work that the prison performs,” Angela Davis writes in Are Prisons Obsolete?, is that it “relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society.” Games often perform a similar function. Shooting everything into place is the path of least resistance, and the one so often taken. But that doesn’t mean other paths are impossible.

You can explore a vibrant and colorful galaxy without serving as its enforcing power. You can experience these complex narrative systems in satisfying ways without requiring all final decisions to be subject to your own approval. It’s all possible, but it requires courageous vision, as well as hope and trust in others. Mass Effect lends rhetorical support to this cause, particularly in its endings, which aim for “peace across the galaxy” while also arguing that a lone, unaccountable hero is the one to deliver it to us. In reality, it is only we, as players and as people, who must find our own way toward a better world.

How would social workers handle the Reaper crisis?

Someone actually gets paid to write this dogshit. Not much, but still.

Maybe Bioware will hire him after this.

This is genuinely one of the funniest thinkpieces I've ever read. I had skimmed it a few days ago and I still can't stop thinking about it. Feels like the ultimate summation of gaming journalism (or maybe journalism in general) today.

It almost makes me want to revisit the games and try to make the most "problematic" decisions possible. Everyone knows the Paragon/Renegade system was a clusterfuck, a poorly thought-out port of a KOTOR mechanic - but I swear I used to only see writers complain about some of the Renegade choices making Shep come across as a jackbooted fascist enforcer. Of course now that the entire concept of policing is invalid to many people, any decision Shep makes will be the wrong one and "paternalistic". I would love to see modern writers argue about some of ME's dumbest choices, like Legion's loyalty mission in ME2 (the choice between brainwashing or murdering a splinter group of free-thinker Geth - brainwashing being the Paragon choice).

The loose-cannon-space-cop-power-fantasy of these games was one of the only things I actually still liked, last time I tried revisiting these titles. Still couldn't make it through ME2 due to the crewmate writing, though. BioWare companions make my skin crawl, the way they all just serve to worship the PC. Played them originally when younger and it was a rude awakening revisiting them. They're not great games, but god damn writers like this Polygon clown who make me instinctively want to defend ME anyway.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

Finished ME1. I always forget how epic the ending is and it makes up for all the tediousness of the copy-pasta planets and lame, buggy, Feros. Also, I'm seeing some evidence for the "everyone got indoctrinated at their first exposure to reaper tech" theory as I replay, the most prominent being not just the fact that the Reapers themselves state outright that the Mass Effect relays are their way of controlling organic life to ensure that it develops the way they want it to, but also the fact that after first being exposed to Reaper tech and linking minds with Sovereign, Sheperd (in the cut scene after his first fight with Saren) has a chance to shoot Saren, but oddly doesn't take it. It shows Sheperd stop, aim his gun at Saren, then inexplicably drop it to let Saren fly away. It's a weird moment that the game never references or explains again. Also, being indoctrinated without knowing it is a HUGE theme in ME1. Characters have whole conversations about it, so it's definitely something that was on the writers' minds, although I agree that the theory as a whole is still probably far fetched.

Also started ME2. The graphics in ME2 LE are largely better than they were in the original ME2. Unlike ME1 LE, ME2 LE looks great, probably because they didn't have to changed as much for it. The shadows are all still there and it's still a really dark game, they are just blended way better, and there's way more bouncing of colored light on surfaces and skin.

 

[antimeridian]

...Shepard (in the cut scene after his first fight with Saren) has a chance to shoot Saren, but oddly doesn't take it. It shows Sheperd stop, aim his gun at Saren, then inexplicably drop it to let Saren fly away. It's a weird moment that the game never references or explains again.

Forgot about that moment, shows that there was at least something going on in the writers' minds with ME1. Despite my endless problems with this franchise as a whole, the first game is easily the best.

Saren was a fantastic baddie. Very disappointing when when ME2 ended up lacking any central villain at all (let alone one as charismatic and fun as Saren). But then Kai Leng and TIM were even worse

 

[J1M]

Extending the reaper threat beyond the first game was a mistake.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

...Shepard (in the cut scene after his first fight with Saren) has a chance to shoot Saren, but oddly doesn't take it. It shows Sheperd stop, aim his gun at Saren, then inexplicably drop it to let Saren fly away. It's a weird moment that the game never references or explains again.

Forgot about that moment, shows that there was at least something going on in the writers' minds with ME1. Despite my endless problems with this franchise as a whole, the first game is easily the best.

Saren was a fantastic baddie. Very disappointing when when ME2 ended up lacking any central villain at all (let alone one as charismatic and fun as Saren). But then Kai Leng and TIM were even worse

Saren is only good in as much as the game involves him in the discussion around whether or not he's being indoctrinated, but honestly, that only comes up in his very brief confrontations with Sheperd at the start and the end (it's kind of cool, for example, that you can get him to kill himself from regret over his actions if your charm skill is high enough at the end). Beyond that, I don't think he's an especially well written or developed villain.

Personally, I don't think ME2 needed a villain on the side of the reapers or collectors. The mysteriousness of the Collector threat works better (even if the big reveal as to what they are doing is a bit silly). If Bioware had created a single villain for ME2 I have zero doubt it would have been some lame forgettable villain like all their other games, so I think it's better they didn't.

The Illusive Man is really more the main villain in ME2 and ME3, and he's a great villain as he has clear motives, but he's properly conflicted and working in an area of grey morality most of the time. Kai Lin is just an assassin working on the Illusive Man's behalf, so I've never really seen him as a full villain. It's been a while since I played ME3, but I don't recall the game attempting to develop him much at all beyond just being an assassin.

 

[J1M]

ME2 would work better if the collectors were their own entity and the final boss was a giant bug queen.

 

[Yosharian]

Nah here's what would've worked: from the end of ME2 the team discovers how to make reapers. Me3: the races band together to make an army of reapers to fight the incoming enemy reaper fleet. Finale is a massive showdown of reaper vs reaper. Depending on the choices made during the series, the end result is either

• You lose because you didn't build enough reapers
• You lose because the Geth build some reapers and side with the enemy
• You win but Shepard dies because one of the races backstabs him with their reaper
• You win but all the races start fighting each other afterwards with their reapers
• You win and there's peace

Or something like that

Or another way of doing it is Shepard finds some way of corrupting the reapers maybe with a virus or maybe just convincing them to fight on his side I dunno how. So there's a reaper civil war if you like

Either way the most important thing about the ending is that it must find some way to incorporate all the decisions Shepard has made during the series and reflect them in the ending result somehow.

One example could be, if you never gave the Krogans their fertility back, they're the ones who backstab Shepard.

Another thing that could have happened is Illusive Man ends up controlling the galaxy because he has all the new reapers under his control using some backdoor that he built into the design. If you don't discover it and stop him in me3 of course. Cerberus enslaves all races basically.

 

[Reinhardt]

lolcodex

 

[Correct_Carlo]

Either way the most important thing about the ending is that it must find some way to incorporate all the decisions Shepard has made during the series and reflect them in the ending result somehow.

The current ending does that, though. The only problem is that people see this game's "ending" as being only the last 10 minutes when Sheperd makes his choices, whereas the ending is actually the entirety of Mass Effect 3, where he goes around visiting every single person he's ever met, wrapping up each of their story arcs. These games have more C&C than any games that Codex typically reveres for C&C, but people still complain. Random sidequests such as whether or not you got the data for that random NPC on Feros in ME1, will have pay off in ME3. In most cases, it's done so seemless that you don't notice, though (I had no idea that Feros quest affected anything in ME3 until I read the wiki).

If I have a problem with ME3's ending, it's more that they already did a perfect ending in ME2, so it's weird that they didn't use the same formula for ME3. Personally, I would have liked the ending of ME3 to be done more like ME2's suicide mission, where you actively have to make choices about what your teammates and various armies you've gathered will do, and depending on your choices, some will die and some will live. There's a tiny amount of that in ME3's current ending, but it's not as elaborate as it was in ME2.

 

[Zeriel]

That's the thing about ME3 though--the game would literally be better if they just entirely removed the ending. That's a failure of the production staff and managers overall. You can't just handwave it. It's like if you're served a decent but not amazing meal in a restaurant, then the staff come in and make you vomit it up forcibly before they let you leave, and then they say, "Come on, give us a good review, the food tasted okay before we made you vomit it up, right?!"

That being said, I do think the rot is there the whole time. The "starchild" visions are there from the beginning of the game. And while there are payoffs from previous games, there's also a ton of "stub" content, like the whole invasion/strategic layer stuff being literally pointless. ME3 definitely could have been a decent game, but it needed a totally different team managing it, to curate the parts that work and cut the parts that don't.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

I don't know. I've only played Mass Effect 3 twice, and the first time without the DLC, so I can't remember everything about it. However, I've always seen it as my favorite game in the series. I think this is because, unlike 95% of the people who played it, I saw the entirety of the game as its ending. I was so amazed by how many threads the game tied together and payed off, that by the time I got to the ending, I honestly didn't give a fuck about the Reapers. That said, the first time I played it, I loved the ending. Why? Because (1) it suprised me, (2) it was really, really fucking dark, and (3) it left a massive amount to interpretation. The reapers were such an ominous and inhuman enemy, that their motives always need to be left a bit vague. I liked the original ME3 ending, because it didn't over explain anything.

When I played ME3 a second time, the redone ending had been released and I recall hating it. They made it very difficult for anyone to die (When I played the first time, the original release had a bug where your entire team dies rushing the teleporter, regardless of what you do, which I loved because it was a massive gut punch and fit with the suicide mission tone the game was building), and they overexplained everything, which collapsed it all into absurdity. In the original, the synthesis ending worked for me because they kept it vague. Is synthesis a metaphysical idea? A shift in perspective? A sort of Hegelian dialectical process that's ongoing? You could interpret it in multiple ways. I interpreted the final shot of EDI and Joker emerging from the wreck on the planet to be the "synthesis," with their union restarting a new race, almost Adam & Eve like.

However, in the redone ending, synthesis is shown to be a massive wave of energy that gives organics, synthetic bits, and synthetics, organic bits. Which is just fucking retarded. It smacks of some suit panicking and saying, "Oh shit, they completely hated our vague and abstract ending, we need to make it as literal as possible ASAP." I think I'm the only person in existence who liked ME3's ending better than the redone ending. I know some people dislike both, but the original genuinely was objectively better in many ways.

All that said, I'm excited to replay ME3 because I genuinely cannot remember huge chunks of it, especially the stuff from the DLC, so my opinions may change entirely once I replay it.

 

[Seusin]

reminder mass effect was never good and everyone praising it is a composite of

 

[J1M]

Either way the most important thing about the ending is that it must find some way to incorporate all the decisions Shepard has made during the series and reflect them in the ending result somehow.

The current ending does that, though. The only problem is that people see this game's "ending" as being only the last 10 minutes when Sheperd makes his choices, whereas the ending is actually the entirety of Mass Effect 3, where he goes around visiting every single person he's ever met, wrapping up each of their story arcs. These games have more C&C than any games that Codex typically reveres for C&C, but people still complain. Random sidequests such as whether or not you got the data for that random NPC on Feros in ME1, will have pay off in ME3. In most cases, it's done so seemless that you don't notice, though (I had no idea that Feros quest affected anything in ME3 until I read the wiki).

If I have a problem with ME3's ending, it's more that they already did a perfect ending in ME2, so it's weird that they didn't use the same formula for ME3. Personally, I would have liked the ending of ME3 to be done more like ME2's suicide mission, where you actively have to make choices about what your teammates and various armies you've gathered will do, and depending on your choices, some will die and some will live. There's a tiny amount of that in ME3's current ending, but it's not as elaborate as it was in ME2.

Basically everything in this post is wrong, including that you mistakenly attributed that quote to me instead of yosharian.

 

[CaffeineConquistador]

Modders should do forced labor alongside vegans and cyclists, bunch of whiny little bitches.

 

[Reinhardt]

Лол, хрустика нашли.

 

[Mark.L.Joy]

Yeah that fits, same reaction on the road too, they don't seem to understand what 1 ton of steel on top of a diesel engine does to a human body.

 

[TemplarGR]

Problem is, the indoctrination theory, which was possible and they could have pulled it off with DLC/sequels, would have been a great way to salvage the ME3 fiasco. I found it really cool, and it would have been awesome if EA was like "hey guys, you know what, during the trilogy Shepard was being slowly indoctrinated to the reaper tech he got close to, and if you chose the red ending, you snapped out of it (thus the hidden footage at the end of Shepard breathing) and you are going to finish the fight in a DLC/sequel.

 

[wyes gull]

Problem is, with the clusterfuck that was the game release, if EA had told people they needed to pay 15$ to get the REAL ENDING DLC, everyone would've lost their fucking minds. And for good reason too.
Today, that sort of skeezy shit would probably fly.

I liked the original ME3 ending, because it didn't over explain anything.

As did I. The one where you shoot the kid in the face and then have Liara leave a message for 50000 years in the future, mind you. People would've hated it but winning should've never been an option to begin with. Could've set up a sequel trilogy taking place thousands of years later as well, instead of leaving you with only the Andromeda horseshit the "only" option. "But muh choices!" -Eh, you could've ended up picking who lives or dies or whatever.
The RGB endings blew ass tho.

 

[Lacrymas]

Why would you make your setting unusable with a shitty plot and dumb ending, though? This is essentially what Bioware did. They probably spent an inordinate amount of time creating the universe for ME, only to destroy it with a galaxy-spanning event. Playing a neo-noir story with Garrus as the MC would've been better.

 

[Trojan_generic]

Why would you make your setting unusable with a shitty plot and dumb ending, though? This is essentially what Bioware did. They probably spent an inordinate amount of time creating the universe for ME, only to destroy it with a galaxy-spanning events. Playing a neo-noir story with Garrus as the MC would've been better.

This. This I don't understand either. Nothing that people try to add to the story after the ending feels like it belongs there. Like said, it would have been the same if the wonderkid out of another story would have all of a sudden jumped in between Luke and Darth lightsabering, saying that you both lost. The End, gentlemen, please choose your colour.