Mass Effect 3 Message Board  

IMHO
I'm not sure how you feel the "Green Ending" was super-saint Shepard. Turning every living thing - sentient beings, animals, grass and leaves... everything - into a synthetic lifeform does not make you a saint. It gives galactic peace, but at the cost of free-will. The Reapers are there to restore Order from Chaos. Chaos is free-will. Taking the Green option is doing the bidding of the Reapers. WTG, you put the galaxy in a blender and made everything homogeneous.

I chose the "renegade" option on first play through, defeating the Reapers and restoring humanity (and alien "humanity" to what it needed, free-will. Chaos ensues, but it's the choice of every living being to become what they want. On my second play through with NG+ I sat at that bridge for about 10 minutes, promised myself I would try the Synth or Control ending just to see what they were like, but after five years of decisions I made with My Shepard, I could not bring myself to take away individual freedom. I mourned the loss of the Geth who I just freed from reaper control, and felt heartbroken about the fact I just killed Joker's new found love interest, but I could not find the malice in my Shepard to doom ALL life to become castrated from choice and freedom. If one life form had to die to save the galaxy, a life form WE created once and could recreate, then so be it. But, making everyone, everything, into something it did not wish to become is someone's idea of "perfect" then someone needs to check their eyes for an indication of indoctrination.

A main theme in the ME series is about the evils of using another's technology to escalate your own growth or advancement without fully understanding that tech and it's repercussions. The Reapers uplifted sentient life in the galaxy as a test to see if we were worthy of learning from it, or abusing it. We abused it by relying on it and not learning on our own. The "renegade" ending of destroying the relays and synthetic life in order to put everyone back to square-one, to learn for themselves was the only "saint" choice. Progression through Perseverance.

yeah the big thing is how you honestly see the story and how you think of sheperd doing it.

in my play through i always went the moral high ground super paragon to the extent that people no longer saw comander sheperd the person but cmdr sheperd the ideal. when i went into ME2 it was a little harder to keep this ideal but by pushing it and moving into me3 i showed everyone i would do what was best for all races no matter what.

and to be truthful when i got the endings my first thought was to just end the dam war so i went the red ending but then as i was doing it i realised this is not what MY sheperd would do. true earth and all organics are saved (for a few decades atleast) but the cost of EDI, the Geth and any synthetic body part was to high. i considerd using mind control but it just wasn't me. so when i went back to my save and looked at the options i realised that symbiotic evolution was the correct way (btw not sure how peace and a new race of symbosis is no free will. this option does nto state it rewrites the mind only the base dna bringing us closer to a pure energy based life form). when my sheperd was at the decision and i looked at how i would play the last 6 years i realised there was no question and i jumped in willingly to save not only my race or my friends but to save all races and all forms of life over the galaxy.

i call this type of sacrafice the picard method in that it reminds me of NTG where everyone becomes a friend no matter how evil they start the episode and jean luc never lets anyone die if he can save it. as for calling it the saint thats 2 fold first a little joke at garrus saying you cured the genophage, brokered peace between krogans and tuarians and ended a 300 year old war, now you just need to placify the reapers and we will make you a saint. its also my refrence to the ending with the stargazer that the other endings are sort of ok war over but not something worth history telling centuries later where as the green ending of "the sheperd" felt more natural to me.

but again its all poitn of view i guess. like i honestly always saw renegade as looking out for himself and his death was him being greedy and backfiring but at least the galaxy is saved. never thought of it from your point of view. still seeing joker and edi embrace in the last few seconds of my ending showed that life will start again free of the racial contrants of the previous cycles. i guess at the end of day the ending really nails down to how do you view technology though. is it a tool, a curse or just another part of us.

Rather than my usual long rambles, which I'm pretty sue most people don't read, I'll just say this:

My opinion is that I don't think any ending ends in favour of the Reapers. Their purpose may be to bring order to chaos, but they do that by wiping out intelligent life over a certain level of advancement, not by controlling or merging themselves with organics. In every ending, the Reapers may as well have been destroyed. Merging all synthetic life with organic life doesn't necessarily mean synthetic life gains any kind of control over organic, or vice versa.

Also, chaos may be free will, but there's nothing that says there can't be any order to free will. We enjoy free will now, but there's also a certain order to it - laws for example. Chaos and Order aren't always mutually exclusive. The problem is that the Reapers have been programmed with the "perfect" definition or Order, which can never exist, not even by merging.

@the1396: I'd say it would depend on exactly how they did a new ending, or extended ending. DAB has hinted that, if there were to be some kind of extended ending, then the ending you picked would have an effect on what that extra ending would be. So more like an extended ending, rather than a new one.

[Edited by Skyheart, 3/21/2012 1:39:45 AM]

I would have to say that idea of the ending being part of the ending does not make sense you can not have 2 endings as such 1 ending and then you continue on from that ending to the actual ending?, but then again this ending is also the prelude to the actual ending so in a sense you can have a continued ending rather then 2 endings.

The thing i could imagine if they did make the game longer from the current ending we have is just a Dream or halucination.

hypothetical idea:

The so called ending we have atm is a dream or halucination due to being knocked out by the reaper ray, and you are indoctrinated(keep going back to that one i know) or under the influence and they try to indoctrinate you, and if you choose either of the shepard endings where he is being made into particles endings, you have a more symbiotic ending with the reapers, and the one where you destroy the reapers you get some more permanent destruction endings, 1 where you kill the reapers and destroy the citadel and mass relays, and another option where you destroy the reapers or send them into the sun what ever it will be solution to finally end the reaper threat.

[Edited by Alias117, 3/21/2012 5:33:14 AM]

I just hope that if this "ending" was just a transition to the next games, they should say so.

well they did state in advance ME3 was the end of sheperd no matter what. hence why he dies in all 3 endings (i like to think that the breath from red ending was his death as synthetics shut down as opposed to him still being alive).

they did say though that there may be more games in series so who knows this may be a prequal to a new series based onb another shepered or someone else entirely.

BRING ON THE KROGAN OCCUPATION STORY!!!

They stated that it was the end of his story, not the end of him.

My Tag partner speaks the truth. Now there is many things they could do.

1. Take back Omaga,
2. The Raccnahi Wars,
3. Genophage story.

Thats three I can think of right now.