What I would have written (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Friday, February 12, 2016, 10:40 (2997 days ago) @ narcogen

Yup. You wanted it to be something different than its creators intended.

Indeed. Because sometimes the creators get it wrong. I firmly believe that Mass Effect is one of those cases because the ending completely and utterly failed to live up to the rest of the series.

ME2's mission could end up costing the lives of part of your crew, depending on how you play it. You spend most of the game working for a human supremacist group that you either hate or probably SHOULD hate. If you do a certain DLC mission, you end up causing the deaths of 300,000 aliens, supposedly justified by saving millions or billions more. Necessary, perhaps yes. True victory of a hero? Very debatable.

I played Mass Effect 2 taking command of Cerberus' resources, turning its people to my side, and ultimately defying its leader and stealing its most advanced starship. I never, ever, worked for them. And those 300,000 Batarians? I seem to recall a Codex entry in Mass Effect 3 that states that an Alliance team undertakes the same mission if you don't but does not warn the nearby colony and results in millions of additional deaths and the complete loss of that commando team. So yeah, I was a hero.

I'll refresh my memory when we reach the last game in our LP series, but if I recall, achieving that was not one of the easier things in the game, on a par with saving Wrex in the first one, and I seem to remember it being underscored at the time that the peace was not a permanent solution.

I'm working my way there myself so I'll have exact quotes in a few days, but from what I recall, you are absolutely wrong. The Geth were extremely conciliatory. They didn't just end their blockade of the Quarian homeworld, they actively suggested the best places for the Quarians to resettle, they helped build infrastructure for the Quarians, and had already begun to play an active role in helping to repair the Quarian's atrophied immune systems with the result that the Quarians alive at that moment would have a chance to live without their suits instead of the acclamation process taking generations.

Saving both the Geth and Quarians is the hardest thing in the game. I believe it requires having taken the correct actions in Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3, and holding out when hope of ending the conflict between the two fleets seems lost, and finally using a reputation interrupt in the final seconds of the upload countdown. It is the best example of the player's choices mattering and an example of organics and synthetics coexisting which is why it is such a travesty that your actions get completely wiped out roughly an hour later by the ending.

How does static buildup explore the theme of race relations? You're dealing with this on the level of plot devices, and I don't care about that because I'm discussing the themes.

Wrong. My example solutions are only viable if you spent the three games of the series confronting those themes. A victory wouldn't be achieved is spite of or by ignoring those themes, it would be the reward for interacting with them and addressing them over and over and over again.

Throughout Mass Effect you are constantly dealing with races who at a minimum don't like each other (Humans vs Turians), who are locked in an eternal stalemate (Quarians vs Geth), and at worst who, if given the chance, would commit xenocide on a galaxy wide scale (Krogran vs everyone). Ultimately, any victory vs the Reapers in my examples requires three games worth of caring about and dealing with those themes. If you don't save every race and have the correct leadership in charge of every race then my solutions result in either a total fail or a devastating partial fail.

Rewarding the player with a partial or total victory based on them interacting with the theme of race relations and coexistance seems a lot better to me than wiping all the player's choices out at the very very very end of the series. Remember, the four potential endings were: Destroy (Reapers & Geth & EDI all die), Synthesis (Geth no longer exist as a distinct race after the player spent three games working to save them), Everyone dies (all the player's work is undone) or Control (a solution that was extremely heavily implied to be both morally wrong and not actually possible).

Sorry, I don't think I'm required to meet your arbitrary standard for reductionism. All of the above reads to me like "have a different McGuffin that lets me win the battle" and that, to me, sounds cheap and silly.

Your idea that Bioware always intended the series to end badly ignores that the player spent the series interacting with and potentially resolving several major race relation based conflicts, could save several races from extinction, and can prove the Reapers' entire grand idea about synthetics always destroying organics wrong. If all you see is a McGuffin in suggested solutions that reward the player for engaging with the philosophical and technological themes present in the games then you clearly aren't putting effort into looking. I think you're far too busy reducing others' ideas into insultingly simple statements like "have a different McGuffin that lets me win the battle."

And you know what? You do have to meet my standards if you want to talk to me. You haven't, so this is the last time I engage you on anything. Worse, you have now shown repeatedly that you are incapable of having a discussion without reducing other's arguments until they are completely unrecognizable and completely different from their intent. This thread is just one of the milder examples of you doing so and I see now that I should have never responded to you based on your past history alone, much less on your conduct in this thread.

In the immortal words of Willy Wonka:

"You lose! Good day, sir!"