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Damn, I need to rant about this with company, so thanks in advance for reading. Spoilers ahead.

I have a (bad) habit of replaying these games on a yearly basis. There's mutiple reasons, the most prominent perhaps is the fact that up until the end of the third game, they are so engaging and fun, the stakes are always incredibly high and ultimately, your decisions really shape the world around you. Curing the genophage, saving the geth, destroying the collectors, defeating Sovereign - it's slop, but it's fun slop.

Then you get to Earth by the end of the games and everything starts falling apart. The "beam" between Citadel and Earth is suddenly called "the conduit" by everyone and there is no explanation for it, and it's not like there wasn't the conduit in the first game. At the very end, once the crucible is activated, nobody apart from Shepard knows what the thing does. Still, the fleets are all fleeing, including the Normandy, but nobody knows what's going on. That probably includes the players by that point.

There is so much more in between these examples, but I don't have the beans to go over all of it. It's just a fucking mess.

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[-] Carl@hexbear.net 20 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Not OP but pretty much everything goes to shit when to meet the hologram kid. If it were up to me I would have like a a couple dozen short ending scenes where some of them get picked and some of them don't depending on your save file content (think fallout ending cards but expanded to entire scenes), and just play hype videos for all of the characters Shepherd is allied with while Shepherd aims the Crucible (which should just be a big orbiting super gun) and blows up Reapers with it.

That ending is pretty straightforward but I think that's all you need to pay off the series and give people a satisfying conclusion - you can have alternate versions of scenes like where characters live or die and then choose what happens based on your total war prep score, then you could have like a big set of conclusion scenes based on who was alive and who was dead and what their relationship to Shepherd was etc. Think of the structure like a visual novel scene web.

You don't need anything super complicated, as long as you gesture at the decisions made in Mass effect 1 and Mass effect 2 like by having a couple different end cards that could play depending on the fate of the Racni Queen and stuff like that, then I think it could have been a benchmark ending for game series with multiple entries.

[-] EmmaGoldman@hexbear.net 15 points 1 day ago

I feel like it had already fallen off the rails by that point, but that's a solid enough ending that I would have been fine with it.

[-] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 2 points 1 day ago

I'd just not write myself into a corner that can only be resolved with deus ex machina. Beginner's move really.

this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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