I have not been soft-spoken about how I feel about Mass Effect 3's ending. In my review, I criticize the abruptness of the choices you're given for the ending and how it completely ignores all of the Paragon and Renegade choices you've made up to that critical point.
If that wasn't enough, the differences between all three endings is minute, though the consequences of each decision would dramatically change the outcome of the Mass Effect universe. An open-ended philosophical conclusion doesn't fit a series that is entrenched in intense racial conflicts, military warfare, and tangible social issues. In fact, the ending feels more appropriate for Final Fantasy than Mass Effect.
The lack of an epilogue for the characters only exacerbate the problem and don't match the investment players have made in the Mass Effect 3 series over the last five years. It's an odd decision, especially when BioWare's own Dragon Age: Origins has an epilogue that wraps up its story rather well.
In response, a petition entitled "Mass Effect 3 ending DLC!: We want a DLC that changes the last minutes of the game." has appeared on change.org with, at the time of this writing, 2,753 signatures:
We want a Dlc that changes the last minutes of the game.Mass effect 3 is a great game until the last few minutes , they destroy everything fans have been playing for in the past 5 years.
We want a DLC that offers a wide variety of endings from everyone dies and the cycle continues to lots of little bunnies !
—————-Sincerely, The Fans of Mass effect
[Your name]
One comment by Tom Maltais, which has received the most likes, details the reasons for the petition best:
All the hours, all the effort in developing the relationships with the characters and in bringing peace to the galaxy and I am essentially left with three hollow options that allow the Reapers to win anyway. Destroying the relays effectively kills most space civilizations in the galaxy. I read the descriptions of the planets when I scanned them – I am well aware that most food and fuel for FTL drives is mined/farmed in places that require the relays to access, so no access means no galactic economy and mass starvation. Add to that the fact that pretty much all the important people from all the major races are stuck orbiting a dead planet like Earth (how long until they start fighting each other for the meager resources of the Sol system? So much for humanity – hope they like Turian food) and you can see that the galaxy is as doomed as if the Reapers had won.Who cares if the Reapers are destroyed, controlled or merged with (Really? Merged with? WTF??? That's insulting…) at that point. They win. All of my paragon choices and actions through 150 hours of gameplay are useless at that point. I might as well have sat down ontop of one of the bombs I was supposed to disarm on Eden Prime at the beginning of ME:1 and just opened a beer and let the damn thing go off. Because the end result would have been the same.
I've had this account for a few years, I think I created it to buy DLC for an earlier Bioware game. In all that time I have never posted to a forum. I'm not that guy who talks on the internet and vents about everything. But this pissed me off. That ending was a disgrace and the people that wrote it and approved it should be ashamed. Why would I ever play through Mass Effect again? Or try out the multiplayer? When I know how horribly it ends?
Fix it. Now.
Let's forget the fact that the ending should have been better without DLC. While this petition may not change anything that BioWare will do in the future, the precedent has been set in the past with Bethesda, who changed the ending for Fallout 3 by allowing the player to continue past it with the Broken Steel DLC. With EA's emphasis on DLC and multiplayer, the insinuation would be that they were forced to keep the single-player short and that the ending suffered in the process.
Whatever the underlying truth may be, do you think BioWare should fix the ending for Mass Effect 3?
