(XL) Was the Ending a Hallucination? - Indoctrination Theory Mark IV!

Okay Terramine. My point stands. I believe there is foreshadowing throughout ME 3, and yes possibly through the DLC. I think everything that happens up to the beam is actually real, actually happening. But after that, the whole ending I believe is where the Theory kicks in. Sure, maybe you're right that BioWare doesn't do fan service, but on the surface Citadel IS a campy fan servicey romp. That's what I enjoy about it. I could care less of it points to IT, I already believe in it , I don't need anymore evidence. Not trying to persuade you from your opinion, I just responding to OneWithAssassin, who was trying to figure out why the girl wanted to take the Normandy, her end goal. I felt that that DLC doesn't warrant any in depth thought.

Terramine wrote:Saying shit like "wanted to give fans a better goodbye to the characters, which was sorely lacking in the vanilla game" is literally just parroting bioware's EXCUSE. And when you're an ITer you know this is demonstrably FALSE because the only narrative where they need to do that is when you're supposed to take the endings literally. An ITer knows, the "ending" is not a real ending. It is not a goodbye. Because it's not fucking real and Shepard is just being indoctrinated.

You really didn't read what I wrote:

DoomsdayDevice wrote:Even if/when they do something with IT, we might not see most of those characters again.

And no, I don't believe Jessica fucking Merizan.

You can twist my words all you want, but it's a fact that the lack of closure with squadmates was one of the biggest complaints about the ending. Not for me, but I've seen the threads, I was there. You betcha Bioware was in damage control mode and doing fan service.

But go ahead and be all 'Bioware doesn't do fan service ERGO it's all a dream', you really don't need to school me on the fact that IT means the story doesn't end. You must be thinking everyone but you is utterly retarded.

JFC.

You still fail at conveying your opinion without being a condescending, belligerent asshole.

smash016 wrote:What about that scene?

Only thing I can think of is "CNTR BRDG WRNG."

*Digging up my old BSN post*

The reactor scene is really foreshadowing the end:

Petrovsky: *appears as a hologram* I commend you. Your plan of attack was impeccable.
Shepard: Looks like we were expected.
Nyreen: More like "lured".
Petrovsky: I knew the reactor would be the hard target. I gave you no choice but this route.
Shepard: Why don't you do this in person, Petrovsky? Get your own hands dirty?

This first part seems to foreshadow the run to the beam. The beam was the obvious target. The Reapers lured us there, as it would be our only way onto the Citadel. We had no choice but to go through there. The last bit seems to foreshadow Harbinger not handling things directly, just sending a 'hologram' to deal with Shepard.

Petrovsky: I take no pleasure in any of this, Commander. You're the ones trying to start a war... for the glory of Aria. But now it's over.
Aria: This isn't over until your next of kin can't identify you.
Petrovsky: I love your bravado, but have the sense to know when you're beaten. You've been neutralized, and I can leave you there to rot. You might as well give up.

This part begins with a moment that is reminiscent of the catalyst denying there's a war going on. The rest seems to foreshadow Harbinger having taken out Shepard. He could just leave her/him to rot, but now he's convincing Shepard to give up, basically. At the same time, Aria saying that it isn't over until you're dead beyond identification (N7 dog tag!), seems to directly foreshadow things not being over with the breath scene. Shepard is still alive. This war isn't over.

Aria: Never! *starts to tear a hole in the Forcefield*
Shepard: Aria, what are you thinking?
Aria: I'm not going out like this!
Nyreen: Aria, don't!
Petrovsky: What the hell is she trying to do?
Aria: *continues to tear open the forcefield*
Petrovsky: Damn it, Aria, you're forcing my hand! We'll do it your way, then. *hologram disappears*
Shepard: *Dives through the hole and escapes*
Nyreen: Spirits, Aria! How did you know you could do that?
Aria: I didn't.

In this part, Aria really seems to foreshadow Shepard in the destroy ending. She will not go down without a fight, and literally starts to tear apart the fabric of what is imprisoning her. Just like Shepard attacks the illusion when shooting the tube. Then the catalyst being frustrated that his trap didn't work, and acknowledging that he is going to have to face Shepard on Shepard's terms.

Shepard made an escape without knowing the escape was possible.

DoomsdayDevice wrote:You can twist my words all you want, but it's a fact that the lack of closure with squadmates was one of the biggest complaints about the ending. Not for me, but I've seen the threads, I was there. You betcha Bioware was in damage control mode and doing fan service.

But go ahead and be all 'Bioware doesn't do fan service ERGO it's all a dream', you really don't need to school me on the fact that IT means the story doesn't end. You must be thinking everyone but you is utterly retarded.

JFC.

You still fail at conveying your opinion without being a condescending, belligerent asshole.

The only problem is, it didn't fix anything at all. But trust, if a company WANTS and INTENDS to fix something, they will succeed. Yet, Citadel did nothing for the damage in the slightest. Therefor it could not have possibly been damage control.

Passion =/= Anger
Just sayin.

I don't know if that's true Terramine. Not saying they don't try, but the largest "we screwed up we need good will" comes from Ubisoft, basically canceling the season pass and offering thier first DLC for Unity free of charge...yet I don't know if it'll work since it seems a lot of people abandoned that game.

In recent memory I mean

ViolentSound wrote:I don't know if that's true Terramine. Not saying they don't try, but the largest "we screwed up we need good will" comes from Ubisoft, basically canceling the season pass and offering thier first DLC for Unity free of charge...yet I don't know if it'll work since it seems a lot of people abandoned that game.

So what, you're saying even if they try that can fail? Well yeah but in this case, their "attempt" doesn't even actually make sense. The problem people had wasn't at all that the characters didn't get a proper send off. People found that to be A problem.. but it's not THE problem with the ending, it's not why everyone holds a grudge.

I also doubt how much it was on anybody's mind. Most people are not like us, most people forgot about Mass Effect and went to play other shit. Especially by time the Citadel DLC came out. The rest accepted the ending for what it was at face value in the first place. People whom never actually had a problem with the ending because herpderp.

I see your point, though again..this discussion is purely academic at this point. I can agree that it is off, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But to your point I will say that Extended Cut was Thier good will, but even after that people still wanted the ending changed, which they replied, that's as good as you're going to get. So it's possible thar Citadel DLC, could still be a Bridge out, an olive branch, to Thier hardcore fans, that still were buying the DLC and still doing multiple play throughs. Or of could've been something planned from the beginning to further the IT angle , though again..why would they need to do that? It's like, putting the carrot in front of the mule, I'm not a mule.

extended cut was bioderp trying to save their own fucking asses. the game was not finished so they shut up the fanbase by releasing some half assed fucking slideshow showing what the fuck just happened.

then it's dlc time with it's IT loaded themes. Citadel dlc, as much as I do like it, is like a slap in the face in as far as it really emphasises something just ain't right when sheploo can take time off in the middle of an interstellar war to end all wars, just to fucking party with some of his crew.

they milked mass effect 3 for all the money it was (or wasn't) worth. in the end tho it still all boils down to that 'breath' scene. the real ending to mass effect 3.

next....

dorktainian wrote: is like a slap in the face in as far as it really emphasises something just ain't right when sheploo can take time off in the middle of an interstellar war to end all wars, just to fucking party with some of his crew.

Yup pretty much. Bioware thinks if they show the fans some lovey dovey mixed in with cheesy fan service and self mocking jokes people will forgive or even forget the poor endings. Unfortunately they have been proven right, a good number of people seem to have found "closure". Whether it's majority or not am not so sure, perhaps not the majority but maybe like 40-45% of the people who were upset with original endings? The big data analytics dept will know the answer to that.

More reason to be underwhelmed by anything they have released so far in terms info for the next game.

I am currently reading through the ME3 script that leaked way back in 2011, it is quite revealing in terms of how much they played around with various plots for all the key henchmen/squadmates and the game as a whole. This is all well after dark energy plot was discarded which makes it even more telling as what one can expect from the next game.

You mean they have no clue where they're taking the story?

smash016 wrote:You mean they have no clue where they're taking the story?

I wonder if that's why Casey got the bullet?

If you look at DAI compared to ME3 (hindsight is a wonderful thing) DAI is just so much better than ME3. Why? they took their time with it and clearly has people testing it and writing for it that gave a shit.

If it was rushed EA should probably fire some of their own.

smash016 wrote:If it was rushed EA should probably fire some of their own.

like that's going to happen.....

smash016 wrote:You mean they have no clue where they're taking the story?

I wouldn't call it that but it's clear they couldn't decide on a straight up direction how to resolve the various character story arcs. They went way high extremes of Ashley or Kaiden actually teaming up with Kai leng to confront Shepard when they reached Thessia to look for the special relic or the other extreme of Shepard actually getting nearly mortally wounded (a re-bar stuck through the back!) at Thessia and then he had to crawl in his own blood trying to save one of the henchmen while the other dies as the floor underneath gives way. The one who dies was the entirely player's choice. But in the end we pretty much got mostly situations where you can either let them die an honorable death or you selfishly spare them somehow like in Mordin's case. It was not really a case of picking between 2 to 3 henchmen.

These are just a few of the examples plus there are vastly different takes on how you head to Mars right after earth gets hit, one plot involved Shepard meeting up with Liara actually being Shepard's own backup plan while he was being kept captive to stand trial. If things went to hell Shepard planned on getting out anyway with Liara's help. Not to mention several versions of how Shepard and Anderson get to the rendezvous point to get picked up by the Normandy. Javik for example was supposed to have a far more important role, infact he was the catalyst in some versions.

The leaked script is very interesting read to get insight into how they went about sorting it out and distilling into what we finally got.

Nothing is decided before hand they just went with the flow and refined it after long deliberations. The ending scene, I haven't gotten to it yet, but I am expecting less versions as that was the one that was modified at the last moment by the looks of things.

don't forget mac the hack wrote ME3.

Sure, Citadel did nothing to fix some of the endings' bigger problems, but it did appease a certain portion of fans who wanted more squadmate closure and romance stuff. Thing is, Bioware didn't want to change the endings (not any more than they already did with EC), but they could still give people that 'romance DLC' and 'one more big fight with aaaaaalllllll our old teammates', so they did.

IMO you can't look at Citadel and say it's not fanservice, it clearly is.

Yes, there's unreal stuff and nonsense going on, but that doesn't mean it can't be both: fanservice and food for thought.

The funny thing about Citadel is, Bioware must have known that what they were doing was surreal, because Citadel DLC lets you do alllll those things that Joker is complaining about in the main game, when he makes fun of the advertisements on the Presidium.

Banshee's video explains it brilliantly:

Yeah at the very least, Bioware has to be internally aware of how ridiculous the whole premise of Citadel DLC is. It is very blatant.

Whether that matters at all for Mass Effect's series plot, we still don't know. But damn, for a DLC with such cheezy pandering fanservice, they sure did stick in a ton of lines and other details with double meanings, right?

dorktainian wrote:...
I wonder if that's why Casey got the bullet?
...

Bullet, huh...

From the Wild Speculations Department; Between Casey's subsequent Oculus-related twit and Jade Raymond's leaving Ubisoft at about the same time, I am wondering whether the departure was part of somebody assembling a new Canadian studio. (Possibly with a focus on spectacle games, given the sort of titles those two have under their respective producer belts, in VR)

I love DA:I but I wouldn't say it's better then ME 3..I haven't finished the game, but the story is still pretty generic. The side quests just mean nothing at all, it's just gotta do this to level up. The only thing really compelling about it was the whole Tsmplars V Mages and that gets taken care of pretty early on. ME3 's story had more weight to it, it was darker and it felt like it was apocalyptic . DA:I is too padded out, to make it artificially long, there's no sense of urgency. That brings me to the next ME..I'm fine with it being 60-90 hours long but they better have more unique side plots and richer choices.

Also, they can get around save import for the mass effect trilogy by doing something similar to dragon age's keep. I read somewhere that the Frostbite engine doesn't support save imports. I'm fine with them doing that with the next ME if they need too. As long as they get Varric to narrate it. ;D

DoomsdayDevice wrote:The funny thing about Citadel is, Bioware must have known that what they were doing was surreal, because Citadel DLC lets you do alllll those things that Joker is complaining about in the main game, when he makes fun of the advertisements on the Presidium.

Banshee's video explains it brilliantly:

So... BioWare might've been aware of how ridiculous some elements of Citadel DLC were... I was starting to doubt that and as such doubt BioWare's... "artistic integrity."

But it actually interlocks with the whole theme of the Citadel granting a false sense of security and people burying their heads in the sand, as is clearly told in the main game.

I mean, I was aware of the possible allusions, but not these very explicit ones.

ViolentSound wrote:Also, they can get around save import for the mass effect trilogy by doing something similar to dragon age's keep. I read somewhere that the Frostbite engine doesn't support save imports. I'm fine with them doing that with the next ME if they need too. As long as they get Varric to narrate it. ;D

Frostbite is just the 3D engine, it's the framework that puts the 3D engine and various game assets like save profiles and configuration files together.

New gen consoles have the luxury to expand on the 3D render-capabilities but the framework for games wouldn't need any change. I am not aware of any change on that front.

It's really upto them Studio/Publisher/platform rights holder if they want to make the parser or a cloud based solution to have your save files imported to the new gen consoles. It's completely a policy thing. There is nothing technically inhibiting (coding wising) the process of using old save files. Just don't expect saved files from PS3 to XBONE or Xbox 360 to PS4, again nothing to do with technical impediments but for more obvious reasons: locking you down to the particular platform.

Don't be surprised if EA does dick moves like charging for this "ability" while making a flag based menu option before your start the new game to sort of carry over "some" of your choices if at all they are going down the saved games import route for the next game.

jos hendriks just tweeted sommat in regards to a mass effect trailer....


Jos Hendriks @Sjosz
· 2h 2 hours ago
Now that DA:I is out, what do we gotta do to get a ME trailer... — Wait! :) http://ask.fm/a/blo25cn8

as for saves? I expect a genesis 3 or something of the like.

Wow that tweet is so informative! Like as informative as telling us a boiling cup of water is going to be hot to touch.

They should cut the crap and tell people when they plan on releasing it or don't say anything at all.