Games

it seems pretty obvious that they didn't know what the fuck the plot of ME3 was going to be until it was way too late

My understanding was they actually did have the whole thing planned out years in advance, but then because the original ending got "spoiled" online, EA foolishly decided that having the ending be a surprise was more important than having it be good, so they made them change it.

I guess it didn't bother me much because the outcomes were sort of wish fulfilment and the fact that the endings didn't really matter much to me because the game was over after the ending. Imagine if they had to continue the story after that, oh boy.

I spent that entire game being like "I hate all of you and you suck", and even though it helped some, it still was not good overall.

koeitecmo sure is trying

Worst game easily. Including Andromeda

Really resented having to work for the illusive man. And honestly none of the later games managed to make me care about new crew members.

And to add insult to injury my wife Liara divorced me to become the shadow broker.

I liked it less the second time, the shift from Epic Space Opera Trilogy to Space Heist Movie just killed momentum.

You learn... that the death machines want to kill humanity by melting them and pumping them into a Terminator. That's about it.

Barely even moves the needle on actually figuring out what to do about the Reapers, so of course it's a mad rush in the third.

Let's take a cool roleplay game with a baffling morality system that's about talking and make it a coverbased shooter. Also lets lean into the baffling morality system.

I never played 3 because teenage me was so frustrated at 2.

Refusal (shoot the child) is the best ending imo. If sheps indoctrinated, i dont think we should be trusting the child when it says the red button will destroy the reapers tbh. Plus thematically I like the idea of this cycle failing and passing the torch on (as the protheans did) until eventually the reapers are defeated through countless cycles combined efforts

How did they remove indoctrination theory? Last time I played it, they still had hallucination(?)-TIM insisting that Control is the best ending and you should do it because it will totally work this time, which seems like strong evidence that either Shepard has been indoctrinated or the writers think we're dumb. And although there were some other baffling writing decisions in 3, the rest of the game overall didn't give me the impression that the writers think we're dumb, so it must be the indoctrination thing.

Easiest thing to do would have been to have an option where Shepard can convince the Reapers to cooperate with organic life without forcibly converting them into cyborgs or whatever they were supposed to be

Just allow an actual fucking argument to be made and won

Oh, and get rid of the hologram kid, you don't need that

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 with 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.

Honestly, I think there would have to be a very extensive rewrite for the games in general. Starting with the first one, I think indoctrination should be handled consistently. I don't mind the party not knowning how it works, but the writing itself isn't consistent enough. They strung a lot of the story together in the second and third game in the most half-assed way, like the dreams about burnt forests as a marker of indoctrination which is bs, but some of that stuff was great (like the Cerberus team who try to get the reaper IFF and, once indoctrination sets in, can't tell their memories apart anymore).

For the second one the most important change would be that Shepard doesn't die and has to be brought back. It makes no sense to handwave that much of human biology to justify that you can restore a deep frozen human brain to its original state. Having the Normandy be destroyed in the beginning is impactful enough, and having a lot of the crew survive but shipless would have been acceptable too. It would make a lot of sense to me if the beginning of the second game was just the crew stranded, getting saved and then there's a two year jump to the present with the abducted colonies. Maybe Shepard was injured and had to retrain to get back to form (explains the character creator popping up), only to be sent out to one of the colonies where you could meet both Tali and maybe also Miranda and Jacob. Re-introducing Shepard from an "I am an Alliance soldier" perspective makes the most sense, and I'm pretty sure its possible to not kill Miranda and Jacob on the first meeting. Shepard might also be able to join the Virmire surivor's mission to find out if Cerberus is behind the abductions.

That amount of changes alone would rewrite the majority of the second game, and that would lead to a shitton of changes in the third one. If we were to keep the games as they were up until the ending, I think I would've appreciated if the ending really turned out to be that Shepard is indoctrinated. I honestly thought indoctrination was a fun plot point that makes everything a lot more risky and once it's too late, there is nothing you can do about it. I would even appreciate if Shepard would realize they're indoctrinated as they're talking to the Illusive Man, and after taking him out, also taking themselves out in a similar manner to Saren. There's a bunch of supposedly very smart people working on the crucible (as bad as it is as a story point), somebody would figure out how to use the thing, they've been winging it up until then anyway.

That's just off the top of my head, and I think I would still be salty that the original games went the way they did.

Mass effect two and three are good but they diverge from Mass effect 1 in that they're much more like third person cover shooters and much less like RPGs, so that gameplay balance doesn't sound interesting to you take that in mind. If you like the world in the writing and don't mind the gameplay then I would say definitely check them out, even with the disappointing ending Mass effect 3 is still like 90% good Sci-Fi action slop.

I think they're worth a playthrough. There are some eyerolling moments in both for sure tho

No but seriously, I'm only complaining because the original two endings didn't cost me extra money