How to end Mass Effect 3 properly
8 April 2012 01:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fridgepunk
I know I know, jumping on a sucky ass bandwagon that's gotten totally out of control, so let me caveat this:
The "outrage" and "controversy" over the mass effect 3 endings is bullshit - it's a reasonably decent game to be honest, yes the endings suck, especially as they're chosen in a "you beat the last boss, and then you have three buttons, each of which starts a particular end game sequence" move that is bad game design...but this is bioware, who's endings always suck (Hell, System Shock 2 had a sucky ending.
You see, bioware made its name as a gaming company who basically created the best villain in computer game history, SHODAN, who was a precursor to GlAdOS, who starred in two games before bioware abandoned that property forever because it was good. And that's pretty much what Bioware can generally do well; Characters.
And Mass Effect 3 provides that and pretty much nothing else but that, honestly, so though the endings suck the game leading up to those? Not bad, 3 provides those wonderful character moments and that's basically what Mass Effect games are all about, because it's otherwise a rather boring game where you spend most of the thing hiding behind walls, occasionally shooting at things until you can move to another wall and start shooting things again. And the endings to the previous 2 games was also linear as fuck.
So I was thinking aimlessly, if I had to come up with a good ending, or several good endings, for Mass Effect 3, one(s) that would not only work and provide players the sense of choosing the ending in a non-bullshit fashion, but also be able to achieve the seemingly impossible: Satisfy the whiney, entitled manchildren that started all the wank over the mass effect 3 endings, what would those endings be?
But to answer that question, one has to think about writing and endings to stories in general a bit more than Bioware bothers to. (maybe there is also spoilers)
The thing that Bioware doesn't get, and to be honest, a lot of writers don't get, about endings is that basically, you can't just stick any ending onto any story, nor is an ending there purely to tie off the story like it's knitting. Writing can be like knitting but whereas in knitting you build an elaborate structure, which can exist regardless of whether you tie it off in the end, but for which you need to tie the final threads off to stop the whole thing from later unravelling, in writing the ending of a story what you're doing is producing a crucial aspect of the structure proper. An ending is the foundations of a castle you are building in the air, it is kind of important.
What that means is that the entire structure of the story should be in alignment with the ending organically and smoothly. As you may be able to tell, deus ex machina or nihilistic "and then random stuff happens and the story ends because in real life there are no happy or satisfying endings" endings are not my favorite. I feel an ending should always be emotionally satisfying to the reader. Now that doesn't mean that it has to be a good ending for the characters, but it has to be satisfying and fit the plot.
So applying that concept to Mass Effect leads to one inexorable conclusion that provides a Good Ending that would satisfy even the whiney entitled fans. In Mass Effect 3 you basically have two options for playing the game, either 1, you start the route towards the final mission immediately, or 2, you do a bunch of side quests each of whch increases a "Galactic Readiness" meter, and after doing some of those you can then start ending the game with more support from the other alien races, so achieving two whole slightly different endings. So starting with that, you have the obvious Good Ending:
It's an RPG where you spend most of the game shooting things to death - obviously the Good Ending is the one where you get galactic readiness to nearly 100%, and then you get an awesome and just hard enough final mission that leads to an Independence Day style "you blow up the Reapers to death because you're so badass, all the mass relays (the FTL macguffins) explode... but amongst the wreckage of the reapers there's information that will allow earth and her allies to rebuild the mass effect relays themselves. Galactic Civilisation will return to what it was before the reapers became a threat, and you saved the day. A WINNER IS YOU!"
That honestly is what you almost got, but Bioware tried to make it bleak and slightly sad (because those words are totally synonyms for "mature" and a game story has to be mature...for some reason), which doesn't really work with an RPG about hiding behind shoulder high walls and shooting things, where you really need at least one ending that is just a generic "you kick all the ass, win all the days, and live happily ever after", especially when the game the player has just chosen to play is building up to an epic climactic fight that they win if they don't lose. And that's where the whining began.
Now things get a bit more complicated however by the additional problem that the endings that Bioware produced were arriaved at via a linear game pathway - no matter how you play, you get the same basic endings. So let's deal with that with a Good Ending+:
This functions much the same as the Good Ending, only to get this one you have to make specific choices. You see, in one of the galactic readiness missions you help an alien race that long ago built AIs, but those AIs went cylon and drove the aliens off their homeworld, to take back said homeworld. Mostly how you help them is because you have the option of helping the AIs defend the world they've won from their builders, at the cost of wiping out all the alien builders (who've been you allies in the past 2 games, while the AIs have been the main enemies) or you can choose not to, and thus lead to the AIs being wiped out forever.
To get a Good Ending+ you have to choose to wipe out the AIs, at which point a bunch of side quests open up in which you can do various jobs for Anti-AI groups across the galaxy. If you do all of these, and get your galactic readiness up high enough, when you start to turn the tide in the final mission and your side starts to win, the reapers will give up, and the reaper overlord thingie will mentally contact you and explain; "I'm a several million year old superintelligence designed for the sole and singular purpose of preventing AIs from existing, and yet somehow, you seem to hate AIs more than I do. What's more, you're badass enough to beat me in a straight fight. SO let's do it like this; I'll kill myself in such a way as to leave the mass relays and everything intact, and in return you and your allies can get on with protecting biological intelligences from here on out, because anything that can defeat things like you, would be able to do the same to me. Good luck, and good night."
I like that as a good double edged ending, because it fits the themes of the game, it's achieved as a result of the player going out of their way to play more of the game and only happens if they make specific choices along the way. Also it's got a barb in it; The ancient, civilisation destroying monsters that was about to wipe out all life in the galaxy, thinks that you're better at its job than it is. And you kind of are - you've wiped out at least two sentient cvilisations just because they're not made of meat. And the monsters had no real choice in doing what they were doing–the reapers were just following their programming to the best of their ability–while you made those choices on purpose. You are the superior monster, and now the galaxy has to deal with all the problems it had before, including what to do about future AIs, and possibly what to do about you. The future it bright, but it's not going to be easy.
Then we have to throw in some downer endings for balance, but let's not just give them a few extra buttons - say you do no side quests, well you end up with the Bad Ending after doing the final mission then, because here you can't really win, but in the midst of the battle a chance opening in the reaper overlord presents itself (the standard Star War style "the evil super weapon moons you and you shoot it in the anus" bullshit), and the tiny, unprepared fleet defending earth has to act as a distraction to allow you and your cool space ship full of side characters you've grown to know and love, to slowly, person by person, sacrifice themselves to exploit a bullshit deus ex machina weakness that allows you to destroy the reapers, but at the cost of all their knowledge, all the mass relays, and the earth itself, but other races now have a chance to grow up and develop.
Though still, you done fucked up.
But let's add a Bad Ending+ to that, one that's slightly better. So let's say that you still don't get galactic readiness up high enough, but let's say that as long as your galactic readiness is below a certain threshold, you can find and take a special side quest, that starts you off on a linear set of missions that see you doing a lot of SG-1/indiana jones style combat archeology. Ultimately you find a secret precursor weapon that, if you can just distract the reapers enough, you might be able to use and destroy the reapers once and for all, and once you do these missions you cut yourself off from doing all of the galactic readiness missions. In fact, after doing the combat archeology, it's now impossible to get galactic readiness up high enough to get any of the good endings.
So you go through the final mission, which goes slightly better because your allies are now intentionally just fighting to distract the reapers from the get go, and you ultimately get to use the precursor McGuffin on the reapers, wiping out all of them, destroying all their knowledge, all the mass relays... But Earth survives, as do some of your side characters.
And here we have the one time we can reasonably and sensibly add a "push button B for a different ending" set up, because let's say you do the combat archeology, and then do the galactic readiness mission where you choose to kill all of the AIs and then do all the anti-AI side quests, what then? Well when you're in the final enemy boss, and about to use the McGuffin, the Reaper Overlord will stop you and point out that, clearly, you hate AIs more than it does, but you aren't strong enough to prevent later AIs from arising that could wipe out all biological life (the problem that the reapers themselves were designed to solve)... so why not join the reapers? Help them, guide them in their eternal quest to wipe out all AIs and preserve the biological races that arise?
Here you can choose the Bad Ending-, where you become the new reapers, and make the galaxy quiet for yet another cycle, and the one after that, and the one after that...
Of course, some of you may notice that the naming scheme for these is the one for the endings in the Silent Hill games, and that's largely because when thinking about good endings to games that are detirmined not by "push button b for ending" nonsense, but by character actions, Silent Hill 1 and 2 are pretty much as good as it gets.
Which raises an obvious question; Where's the Mass Effect 3 UFO Ending?
For those not familiar with the silent hill games, if you completed the game once and started a New Game+, you could over the course of the game pick up magical stones. If you then used all of the stones in a particular bit near the end of the game you'd get a premature jokey ending, where aliens would swoop down and steal your character (or in Silent Hill 2, it would turn out that the entire game was being engineered by a small dog pulling some levers in a hidden control room).
So how to do that in Mass Effect 3? Well simple really, what you do is, on a New Game+, you unlock a bunch of secret NPCs in one of the game's hubs, where you can take dancing lessons. If you get enough dancing lessons from all of these NPCs, and you then meet the conditions for any of the other endings, the moment you start the final set of missions a cut scene will start.
Awesome music will blare, spaceships will woosh and explosions will explode. An epic battle will be visibly going on in space and down on earth, people are dying. It's pointient.
Then the camera sweeps down to where you are... dancing lightly through the rubble with all your side characters behind you, all snapping their fingers in time to the music. Opposite you, across the battle field, the Evil Alien Zombie Robots drop their guns and start to advance towards you, doing the same finger snapping motion and dance.
Suddenly a cut back to you and your entourage, where you suddenly strike a ridiculous disco move and your entourage strikes various poses behind you.
The scene then cuts to the Evil Alien Overlord, who is staring at scenes from all across Earth, where everyone is acting out scenes from the Thriller music video.
"I've seen things you wouldn't believe; I've existed for a million million years, wiped out cycle after cycle of life, absorbing each race's pure essence and incorporated that into my very being. But what, what is this thing you humans call... Rhythm?" The Evil Alien Overlord would ask himself, as he begins to snap his appendages to the beat of the music...
Back outside, you and all the main characters from the game (regardless of if it makes sense for them to be there, or if they've died in the game by this point), and some of the troops (from both sides) are doing the thriller zombie dance, and behind them are some giantish robots try to keep up, while even further in the background, the several kilometers tall giant space ships are using their tentacle appendages to try to keep up with the dancing in the foreground. The credits roll over this dance sequence, with occasional close ups of various characters as it goes on, until a dark shadows drops over them, they all stop, look up in shock, and suddenly one of the kilometre long spaceships drop on them all, obscuring the view.
Fin.
The "outrage" and "controversy" over the mass effect 3 endings is bullshit - it's a reasonably decent game to be honest, yes the endings suck, especially as they're chosen in a "you beat the last boss, and then you have three buttons, each of which starts a particular end game sequence" move that is bad game design...but this is bioware, who's endings always suck (Hell, System Shock 2 had a sucky ending.
You see, bioware made its name as a gaming company who basically created the best villain in computer game history, SHODAN, who was a precursor to GlAdOS, who starred in two games before bioware abandoned that property forever because it was good. And that's pretty much what Bioware can generally do well; Characters.
And Mass Effect 3 provides that and pretty much nothing else but that, honestly, so though the endings suck the game leading up to those? Not bad, 3 provides those wonderful character moments and that's basically what Mass Effect games are all about, because it's otherwise a rather boring game where you spend most of the thing hiding behind walls, occasionally shooting at things until you can move to another wall and start shooting things again. And the endings to the previous 2 games was also linear as fuck.
So I was thinking aimlessly, if I had to come up with a good ending, or several good endings, for Mass Effect 3, one(s) that would not only work and provide players the sense of choosing the ending in a non-bullshit fashion, but also be able to achieve the seemingly impossible: Satisfy the whiney, entitled manchildren that started all the wank over the mass effect 3 endings, what would those endings be?
But to answer that question, one has to think about writing and endings to stories in general a bit more than Bioware bothers to. (maybe there is also spoilers)
The thing that Bioware doesn't get, and to be honest, a lot of writers don't get, about endings is that basically, you can't just stick any ending onto any story, nor is an ending there purely to tie off the story like it's knitting. Writing can be like knitting but whereas in knitting you build an elaborate structure, which can exist regardless of whether you tie it off in the end, but for which you need to tie the final threads off to stop the whole thing from later unravelling, in writing the ending of a story what you're doing is producing a crucial aspect of the structure proper. An ending is the foundations of a castle you are building in the air, it is kind of important.
What that means is that the entire structure of the story should be in alignment with the ending organically and smoothly. As you may be able to tell, deus ex machina or nihilistic "and then random stuff happens and the story ends because in real life there are no happy or satisfying endings" endings are not my favorite. I feel an ending should always be emotionally satisfying to the reader. Now that doesn't mean that it has to be a good ending for the characters, but it has to be satisfying and fit the plot.
So applying that concept to Mass Effect leads to one inexorable conclusion that provides a Good Ending that would satisfy even the whiney entitled fans. In Mass Effect 3 you basically have two options for playing the game, either 1, you start the route towards the final mission immediately, or 2, you do a bunch of side quests each of whch increases a "Galactic Readiness" meter, and after doing some of those you can then start ending the game with more support from the other alien races, so achieving two whole slightly different endings. So starting with that, you have the obvious Good Ending:
It's an RPG where you spend most of the game shooting things to death - obviously the Good Ending is the one where you get galactic readiness to nearly 100%, and then you get an awesome and just hard enough final mission that leads to an Independence Day style "you blow up the Reapers to death because you're so badass, all the mass relays (the FTL macguffins) explode... but amongst the wreckage of the reapers there's information that will allow earth and her allies to rebuild the mass effect relays themselves. Galactic Civilisation will return to what it was before the reapers became a threat, and you saved the day. A WINNER IS YOU!"
That honestly is what you almost got, but Bioware tried to make it bleak and slightly sad (because those words are totally synonyms for "mature" and a game story has to be mature...for some reason), which doesn't really work with an RPG about hiding behind shoulder high walls and shooting things, where you really need at least one ending that is just a generic "you kick all the ass, win all the days, and live happily ever after", especially when the game the player has just chosen to play is building up to an epic climactic fight that they win if they don't lose. And that's where the whining began.
Now things get a bit more complicated however by the additional problem that the endings that Bioware produced were arriaved at via a linear game pathway - no matter how you play, you get the same basic endings. So let's deal with that with a Good Ending+:
This functions much the same as the Good Ending, only to get this one you have to make specific choices. You see, in one of the galactic readiness missions you help an alien race that long ago built AIs, but those AIs went cylon and drove the aliens off their homeworld, to take back said homeworld. Mostly how you help them is because you have the option of helping the AIs defend the world they've won from their builders, at the cost of wiping out all the alien builders (who've been you allies in the past 2 games, while the AIs have been the main enemies) or you can choose not to, and thus lead to the AIs being wiped out forever.
To get a Good Ending+ you have to choose to wipe out the AIs, at which point a bunch of side quests open up in which you can do various jobs for Anti-AI groups across the galaxy. If you do all of these, and get your galactic readiness up high enough, when you start to turn the tide in the final mission and your side starts to win, the reapers will give up, and the reaper overlord thingie will mentally contact you and explain; "I'm a several million year old superintelligence designed for the sole and singular purpose of preventing AIs from existing, and yet somehow, you seem to hate AIs more than I do. What's more, you're badass enough to beat me in a straight fight. SO let's do it like this; I'll kill myself in such a way as to leave the mass relays and everything intact, and in return you and your allies can get on with protecting biological intelligences from here on out, because anything that can defeat things like you, would be able to do the same to me. Good luck, and good night."
I like that as a good double edged ending, because it fits the themes of the game, it's achieved as a result of the player going out of their way to play more of the game and only happens if they make specific choices along the way. Also it's got a barb in it; The ancient, civilisation destroying monsters that was about to wipe out all life in the galaxy, thinks that you're better at its job than it is. And you kind of are - you've wiped out at least two sentient cvilisations just because they're not made of meat. And the monsters had no real choice in doing what they were doing–the reapers were just following their programming to the best of their ability–while you made those choices on purpose. You are the superior monster, and now the galaxy has to deal with all the problems it had before, including what to do about future AIs, and possibly what to do about you. The future it bright, but it's not going to be easy.
Then we have to throw in some downer endings for balance, but let's not just give them a few extra buttons - say you do no side quests, well you end up with the Bad Ending after doing the final mission then, because here you can't really win, but in the midst of the battle a chance opening in the reaper overlord presents itself (the standard Star War style "the evil super weapon moons you and you shoot it in the anus" bullshit), and the tiny, unprepared fleet defending earth has to act as a distraction to allow you and your cool space ship full of side characters you've grown to know and love, to slowly, person by person, sacrifice themselves to exploit a bullshit deus ex machina weakness that allows you to destroy the reapers, but at the cost of all their knowledge, all the mass relays, and the earth itself, but other races now have a chance to grow up and develop.
Though still, you done fucked up.
But let's add a Bad Ending+ to that, one that's slightly better. So let's say that you still don't get galactic readiness up high enough, but let's say that as long as your galactic readiness is below a certain threshold, you can find and take a special side quest, that starts you off on a linear set of missions that see you doing a lot of SG-1/indiana jones style combat archeology. Ultimately you find a secret precursor weapon that, if you can just distract the reapers enough, you might be able to use and destroy the reapers once and for all, and once you do these missions you cut yourself off from doing all of the galactic readiness missions. In fact, after doing the combat archeology, it's now impossible to get galactic readiness up high enough to get any of the good endings.
So you go through the final mission, which goes slightly better because your allies are now intentionally just fighting to distract the reapers from the get go, and you ultimately get to use the precursor McGuffin on the reapers, wiping out all of them, destroying all their knowledge, all the mass relays... But Earth survives, as do some of your side characters.
And here we have the one time we can reasonably and sensibly add a "push button B for a different ending" set up, because let's say you do the combat archeology, and then do the galactic readiness mission where you choose to kill all of the AIs and then do all the anti-AI side quests, what then? Well when you're in the final enemy boss, and about to use the McGuffin, the Reaper Overlord will stop you and point out that, clearly, you hate AIs more than it does, but you aren't strong enough to prevent later AIs from arising that could wipe out all biological life (the problem that the reapers themselves were designed to solve)... so why not join the reapers? Help them, guide them in their eternal quest to wipe out all AIs and preserve the biological races that arise?
Here you can choose the Bad Ending-, where you become the new reapers, and make the galaxy quiet for yet another cycle, and the one after that, and the one after that...
Of course, some of you may notice that the naming scheme for these is the one for the endings in the Silent Hill games, and that's largely because when thinking about good endings to games that are detirmined not by "push button b for ending" nonsense, but by character actions, Silent Hill 1 and 2 are pretty much as good as it gets.
Which raises an obvious question; Where's the Mass Effect 3 UFO Ending?
For those not familiar with the silent hill games, if you completed the game once and started a New Game+, you could over the course of the game pick up magical stones. If you then used all of the stones in a particular bit near the end of the game you'd get a premature jokey ending, where aliens would swoop down and steal your character (or in Silent Hill 2, it would turn out that the entire game was being engineered by a small dog pulling some levers in a hidden control room).
So how to do that in Mass Effect 3? Well simple really, what you do is, on a New Game+, you unlock a bunch of secret NPCs in one of the game's hubs, where you can take dancing lessons. If you get enough dancing lessons from all of these NPCs, and you then meet the conditions for any of the other endings, the moment you start the final set of missions a cut scene will start.
Awesome music will blare, spaceships will woosh and explosions will explode. An epic battle will be visibly going on in space and down on earth, people are dying. It's pointient.
Then the camera sweeps down to where you are... dancing lightly through the rubble with all your side characters behind you, all snapping their fingers in time to the music. Opposite you, across the battle field, the Evil Alien Zombie Robots drop their guns and start to advance towards you, doing the same finger snapping motion and dance.
Suddenly a cut back to you and your entourage, where you suddenly strike a ridiculous disco move and your entourage strikes various poses behind you.
The scene then cuts to the Evil Alien Overlord, who is staring at scenes from all across Earth, where everyone is acting out scenes from the Thriller music video.
"I've seen things you wouldn't believe; I've existed for a million million years, wiped out cycle after cycle of life, absorbing each race's pure essence and incorporated that into my very being. But what, what is this thing you humans call... Rhythm?" The Evil Alien Overlord would ask himself, as he begins to snap his appendages to the beat of the music...
Back outside, you and all the main characters from the game (regardless of if it makes sense for them to be there, or if they've died in the game by this point), and some of the troops (from both sides) are doing the thriller zombie dance, and behind them are some giantish robots try to keep up, while even further in the background, the several kilometers tall giant space ships are using their tentacle appendages to try to keep up with the dancing in the foreground. The credits roll over this dance sequence, with occasional close ups of various characters as it goes on, until a dark shadows drops over them, they all stop, look up in shock, and suddenly one of the kilometre long spaceships drop on them all, obscuring the view.
Fin.
