It only makes sense if as the Indoctrination Theory fans says it is a mindfuck….or a trip in a hyperspacial “Matrix” perhaps? So to the Reapers Shepard is a Neo?

I’m not anymore. I’ve learned that no videogame story is good enough to waste a hundred hours punching buttons for. Game combat and buying stuff has zero interest for me. I’m giving up video games for good, until some game developer gives me a “no combat” or “minimal combat” skill level.

Combat is used to pad a game that has 3 hours of story into a 100 hour experience to justify the game’s price. Guess what, 3 hours of story reached through 3 hours of combat is worth a lot more money to me than 3 hours of story and 97 hours of combat.

“What I do know is the there was a different ending written out for the Mass Effect series, the short version of which is that the Big Reveal in ME3 is that the Mass Effect itself — the magical black-box technology that allows interstellar travel and powers a ton of other things from weapons to expensive toothbrushes — is causing a constant increase in dark energy in the galaxy, and that’s causing all kinds of bad things (like the accelerated death of stars).

The Mass Effect — you know, the thing from which the name of the series is derived — is the secret behind the Big Reveal. Who would have thought?

So, in the end of the game-as-envisioned, you’re given a choice of saving the galaxy by sacrificing the human race (making humanity into a biomechanical, synthetic-life, communal-intelligence “Reaper” that can stop the Dark Energy decay), or telling the Reapers to screw themselves and trying to fix the problem on your own (with a handful of centuries left before the Dark Energy thing snowballs and grows out of control on its own).”

This is a very long article that I’m about to link to, be warned. It uses a LOTR analogy to show just why the endings were so terrible: http://doycetesterman.com/index.php/2012/03/mass-effect-tolkein-and-your-bullshit-artistic-process/

And that’s the thing, Shepard didn’t. Shepard had already given up his/her life to save the galaxy ages ago. The ending was just finally giving him rest.

That’s why I don’t mind the ending – the *entire game* is the dramatic over the top ending. You literally go around and solve every “big” problem in the galaxy. So no, you don’t get to see what happens – but what you did the entire game was basically ensure that it will be good, whatever it is.

It has struck me that, far more than most games, the Mass Effect series has been emphasizing the importance of its conclusion. Seriously, that’s explicitly part of the advertising for all three games, in large print, right underneath the name of the game. I was actually astonished that we see the Reapers clearly less than a minute after the game starts in Mass Effect I, and it’s established immediately that the basic structure of the story is that you are preparing for the ultimate confrontation with the Reapers. I’ve never seen any creative work with such a strong emphasis on the importance of its ending.

Just before I’d started Mass Effect I, I was playing Borderlands, which was good fun, and nominally has a story, but it’s not really something you play for the story.

More of an interesting contrast is Skyrim. The Elder Scrolls series has a pretty deep backstory, but in the foreground, there’s only one character, which is the PC. The NPCs are completely wooden and uninteresting. The PC can go where she wants, do what she wants, and it’s amazing. But you know that you’re the only thing that’s really alive in the entire world. You’re a lonely Nietzchean superman.

ME is quite dramatically different. There isn’t the sense of freedom of space, or the feeling of control over your environment, that you have in Skyrim. Most of the time, it’s clear that you’re on a linear map, and you start at one end and work your way to the other. However, the NPCs have stories, the quests are stories, and you actually keep going because you’re wrapped up in stories about these characters that you quickly care about. You’re motivated by the desire to help them.

I do notice that, much as in other Bioware games I’ve played, the “moral choices” are very clear-cut and obvious.

One thing that I found pleasantly surprising: I usually really like the idea of “support” characters in roleplaying, narrative terms, but I’ve almost always found them tedious and unsatisfying to play. I’m finding, though, that I’m having a lot of fun playing a Sentinel — the list of possible actions is comprehensible, the effects are tangible, and I can do them at a reasonable frequency, so I feel like I’m actually leading my team and controlling the battlespace, and it’s fun.